blob: ffc21d0f4df48be4b92730c3c43be64cd5785400 [file] [log] [blame]
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001+++++++++++
2Python News
3+++++++++++
4
Skip Montanaro4a385832002-09-20 17:08:52 +00005(editors: check NEWS.help for information about editing NEWS using ReST.)
6
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00007What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 1?
8=================================
9
10*Release date: DD-MMM-YYYY*
11
12Core and builtins
13-----------------
14
Hye-Shik Changbc555e32004-06-03 11:10:58 +000015- Unicode objects received two new methods: iswide() and width().
16 These query East Asian width information, as specified in Unicode
17 TR11.
Hye-Shik Chang974ed7c2004-06-02 16:49:17 +000018
Raymond Hettinger41bd0222004-06-01 06:36:24 +000019- Improved the tuple hashing algorithm to give fewer collisions in
20 common cases. Fixes bug #942952.
21
Raymond Hettinger354433a2004-05-19 08:20:33 +000022- Implemented generator expressions (PEP 289). Coded by Jiwon Seo.
23
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +000024- Enabled the profiling of C extension functions (and builtins) - check
25 new documentation and modified profiler and bdb modules for more details
26
Nicholas Bastinabce8a62004-03-21 20:24:07 +000027- Set file.name to the object passed to open (instead of a new string)
28
Nicholas Bastina7604bf2004-03-21 18:37:23 +000029- Moved tracebackobject into traceback.h and renamed to PyTracebackObject
30
Raymond Hettingerff5bc502004-03-21 15:12:00 +000031- Optimized the byte coding for multiple assignments like "a,b=b,a" and
32 "a,b,c=1,2,3". Improves their speed by 25% to 30%.
33
Brett Cannon4f653312004-03-20 22:52:14 +000034- Limit the nested depth of a tuple for the second argument to isinstance()
35 and issubclass() to the recursion limit of the interpreter.
36 Fixes bug #858016 .
37
Raymond Hettingerade08ea2004-03-18 09:48:12 +000038- Optimized dict iterators, creating separate types for each
39 and having them reveal their length. Also optimized the
40 methods: keys(), values(), and items().
41
Raymond Hettingerdd80f762004-03-07 07:31:06 +000042- Implemented a newcode opcode, LIST_APPEND, that simplifies
43 the generated bytecode for list comprehensions and further
44 improves their performance (about 35%).
45
Michael W. Hudsond3b33b52004-02-19 19:35:22 +000046- Implemented rich comparisons for floats, which seems to make
47 comparisons involving NaNs somewhat less surprising when the
48 underlying C compiler actually implements C99 semantics.
49
Raymond Hettingerfa7b9d82004-02-15 04:06:39 +000050- Optimized list.extend() to save memory and no longer create
51 intermediate sequences. Also, extend() now pre-allocates the
52 needed memory whenever the length of the iterable is known in
53 advance -- this halves the time to extend the list.
54
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +000055- Optimized list resize operations to make fewer calls to the system
56 realloc(). Significantly speeds up list appends, list pops,
57 list comprehensions, and the list contructor (when the input iterable
58 length is not known).
59
60- Changed the internal list over-allocation scheme. For larger lists,
61 overallocation ranged between 3% and 25%. Now, it is a constant 12%.
Raymond Hettingerab517d22004-02-14 18:34:46 +000062 For smaller lists (n<8), overallocation was upto eight elements. Now,
63 the overallocation is no more than three elements -- this improves space
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +000064 utilization for applications that have large numbers of small lists.
65
Raymond Hettinger0468e412004-05-05 05:37:53 +000066- Most list bodies now get re-used rather than freed. Speeds up list
67 instantiation and deletion by saving calls to malloc() and free().
68
Raymond Hettinger31017ae2004-03-04 08:25:44 +000069- The dict.update() method now accepts all the same argument forms
70 as the dict() constructor. This now includes item lists and/or
71 keyword arguments.
72
Michael W. Hudsonecfeb7f2004-02-12 15:28:27 +000073- Support for arbitrary objects supporting the read-only buffer
74 interface as the co_code field of code objects (something that was
75 only possible to create from C code) has been removed.
76
Fred Drake228765b2004-02-06 04:15:22 +000077- Made omitted callback and None equivalent for weakref.ref() and
78 weakref.proxy(); the None case wasn't handled correctly in all
79 cases.
80
81- Fixed problem where PyWeakref_NewRef() and PyWeakref_NewProxy()
82 assumed that initial existing entries in an object's weakref list
83 would not be removed while allocating a new weakref object. Since
84 GC could be invoked at that time, however, that assumption was
85 invalid. In a truly obscure case of GC being triggered during
86 creation for a new weakref object for an referent which already
87 has a weakref without a callback which is only referenced from
88 cyclic trash, a memory error can occur. This consistently created a
89 segfault in a debug build, but provided less predictable behavior in
90 a release build.
91
Hye-Shik Changff83c2b2004-02-02 13:39:01 +000092- input() builtin function now respects compiler flags such as
93 __future__ statements. SF patch 876178.
94
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +000095- Removed PendingDeprecationWarning from apply(). apply() remains
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +000096 deprecated, but the nuisance warning will not be issued.
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +000097
Tim Peters1d7323e2003-12-01 21:35:27 +000098- At Python shutdown time (Py_Finalize()), 2.3 called cyclic garbage
99 collection twice, both before and after tearing down modules. The
100 call after tearing down modules has been disabled, because too much
101 of Python has been torn down then for __del__ methods and weakref
102 callbacks to execute sanely. The most common symptom was a sequence
103 of uninformative messages on stderr when Python shut down, produced
104 by threads trying to raise exceptions, but unable to report the nature
105 of their problems because too much of the sys module had already been
106 destroyed.
107
Guido van Rossum6c9e1302003-11-29 23:52:13 +0000108- Removed FutureWarnings related to hex/oct literals and conversions
109 and left shifts. (Thanks to Kalle Svensson for SF patch 849227.)
110 This addresses most of the remaining semantic changes promised by
111 PEP 237, except for repr() of a long, which still shows the trailing
112 'L'. The PEP appears to promise warnings for operations that
113 changed semantics compared to Python 2.3, but this is not
114 implemented; we've suffered through enough warnings related to
115 hex/oct literals and I think it's best to be silent now.
116
Raymond Hettinger4f8f9762003-11-26 08:21:35 +0000117- For str and unicode objects, the ljust(), center(), and rjust()
118 methods now accept an optional argument specifying a fill
119 character other than a space.
120
Guido van Rossumbaf0f8f2003-11-22 23:55:50 +0000121- When method objects have an attribute that can be satisfied either
122 by the function object or by the method object, the function
123 object's attribute usually wins. Christian Tismer pointed out that
124 that this is really a mistake, because this only happens for special
125 methods (like __reduce__) where the method object's version is
126 really more appropriate than the function's attribute. So from now
127 on, all method attributes will have precedence over function
128 attributes with the same name.
129
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +0000130- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 839548: if a weakref with a callback,
131 its callback, and its weakly referenced object, all became part of
132 cyclic garbage during a single run of garbage collection, the order
133 in which they were torn down was unpredictable. It was possible for
134 the callback to see partially-torn-down objects, leading to immediate
135 segfaults, or, if the callback resurrected garbage objects, to
136 resurrect insane objects that caused segfaults (or other surprises)
137 later. In one sense this wasn't surprising, because Python's cyclic gc
138 had no knowledge of Python's weakref objects. It does now. When
139 weakrefs with callbacks become part of cyclic garbage now, those
140 weakrefs are cleared first. The callbacks don't trigger then,
141 preventing the problems. If you need callbacks to trigger, then just
142 as when cyclic gc is not involved, you need to write your code so
143 that weakref objects outlive the objects they weakly reference.
Raymond Hettingera690a992003-11-16 16:17:49 +0000144
Tim Petersadd09b42003-11-12 20:43:28 +0000145- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 840829: if cyclic garbage collection
146 happened to occur during a weakref callback for a new-style class
147 instance, subtle memory corruption was the result (in a release build;
148 in a debug build, a segfault occurred reliably very soon after).
149 This has been repaired.
150
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +0000151- Compiler flags set in PYTHONSTARTUP are now active in __main__.
152
153- Added two builtin types, set() and frozenset().
154
Raymond Hettinger85c20a42003-11-06 14:06:48 +0000155- Added a reversed() builtin function that returns a reverse iterator
156 over a sequence.
157
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +0000158- Added a sorted() builtin function that returns a new sorted list
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +0000159 from any iterable.
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +0000160
Martin v. Löwis01a74b22003-10-19 18:30:01 +0000161- CObjects are now mutable (on the C level) through PyCObject_SetVoidPtr.
162
Raymond Hettinger42b1ba32003-10-16 03:41:09 +0000163- list.sort() now supports three keyword arguments: cmp, key, and reverse.
164 The key argument can be a function of one argument that extracts a
165 comparison key from the original record: mylist.sort(key=str.lower).
166 The reverse argument is a boolean value and if True will change the
167 sort order as if the comparison arguments were reversed. In addition,
168 the documentation has been amended to provide a guarantee that all sorts
169 starting with Py2.3 are guaranteed to be stable (the relative order of
170 records with equal keys is unchanged).
171
Marc-André Lemburgd7160f82003-09-22 11:14:40 +0000172- Added test whether wchar_t is signed or not. A signed wchar_t is not
173 usable as internal unicode type base for Py_UNICODE since the
174 unicode implementation assumes an unsigned type.
175
Jeremy Hyltond8082792003-09-16 19:41:39 +0000176- Fixed a bug in the cache of length-one Unicode strings that could
177 lead to a seg fault. The specific problem occurred when an earlier,
178 non-fatal error left an uninitialized Unicode object in the
179 freelist.
180
Raymond Hettinger9bfe5332003-08-27 04:55:52 +0000181- The % formatting operator now supports '%F' which is equivalent to
182 '%f'. This has always been documented but never implemented.
183
Tim Peters465fa3d2003-08-15 01:16:37 +0000184- complex(obj) could leak a little memory if obj wasn't a string or
185 number.
186
Raymond Hettingereaef6152003-08-02 07:42:57 +0000187- zip() with no arguments now returns an empty list instead of raising
188 a TypeError exception.
189
Guido van Rossum02c58f82003-10-08 21:08:29 +0000190- obj.__contains__() now returns True/False instead of 1/0. SF patch
191 820195.
192
Armin Rigo2b3eb402003-10-28 12:05:48 +0000193- Python no longer tries to be smart about recursive comparisons.
194 When comparing containers with cyclic references to themselves it
195 will now just hit the recursion limit. See SF patch 825639.
196
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +0000197- str and unicode builtin types now have rsplit() method that is
198 same as split() except that it scans the string from the end
199 working towards the beginning. See SF feature request 801847.
Hye-Shik Chang060ebed2003-12-15 18:51:19 +0000200
Jim Fulton8a1a5942004-02-08 04:21:26 +0000201- Fixed a bug in object.__reduce_ex__ when using protocol 2. Failure
202 to clear the error when attempts to get the __getstate__ attribute
203 fail caused intermittent errors and odd behavior.
204
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +0000205- buffer objects based on other objects no longer cache a pointer to
206 the data and the data length. Instead, the appropriate tp_as_buffer
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +0000207 method is called as necessary.
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +0000208
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +0000209- fixed: if a file is opened with an explicit buffer size >= 1, repeated
Andrew MacIntyre4e10ed32004-04-04 07:01:35 +0000210 close() calls would attempt to free() the buffer already free()ed on
211 the first call.
212
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +0000213
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000214Extension modules
215-----------------
216
Martin v. Löwis77ca6c42004-06-03 12:47:26 +0000217- fcntl.ioctl now warns if the mutate flag is not specified.
218
Martin v. Löwisd8948722004-06-02 09:57:56 +0000219- nt now properly allows to refer to UNC roots, e.g. in nt.stat().
220
Raymond Hettinger027bb632004-05-31 03:09:25 +0000221- the weakref module now supports additional objects: array.array,
222 sre.pattern_objects, file objects, and sockets.
223
Raymond Hettingere2eda602004-04-04 08:51:41 +0000224- operator.isMappingType() and operator.isSequenceType() now give
225 fewer false positives.
226
Brett Cannon06c34792004-03-23 23:16:54 +0000227- socket.sslerror is now a subclass of socket.error . Also added
228 socket.error to the socket module's C API.
229
Hye-Shik Changc3a87b82004-03-21 19:34:30 +0000230- Bug #920575: A problem that _locale module segfaults on
231 nl_langinfo(ERA) caused by GNU libc's illegal NULL return is fixed.
232
Raymond Hettinger6e2ee862004-03-14 04:37:50 +0000233- array objects now support the copy module. Also, their resizing
234 scheme has been updated the same as for list objects. The improves
Raymond Hettinger49f9bd12004-03-14 05:43:59 +0000235 the performance (speed and memory usage) of append() operations.
236 Also, array.extend() now accepts any iterable argument for repeated
237 appends without needing to create another temporary array.
Raymond Hettinger3aa82c02004-03-13 18:18:51 +0000238
Raymond Hettinger3e47f652004-03-08 18:22:35 +0000239- cStringIO.writelines() now accepts any iterable argument and writes
240 the lines one at a time rather than joining them and writing once.
241 Made a parallel change to StringIO.writelines(). Saves memory and
242 makes suitable for use with generator expressions.
243
Brett Cannond1080a32004-03-02 04:38:10 +0000244- time.strftime() now checks that the values in its time tuple argument
245 are within the proper boundaries to prevent possible crashes from the
246 platform's C library implementation of strftime(). Can possibly
247 break code that uses values outside the range that didn't cause
248 problems previously (such as sitting day of year to 0). Fixes bug
249 #897625.
250
Martin v. Löwis12af0482004-01-31 12:34:17 +0000251- The socket module now supports Bluetooth sockets, if the
252 system has <bluetooth/bluetooth.h>
253
Raymond Hettinger756b3f32004-01-29 06:37:52 +0000254- Added a collections module containing a new datatype, deque(),
255 offering high-performance, thread-safe, memory friendly appends
256 and pops on either side of the deque.
257
258- Several modules now take advantage of collections.deque() for
259 improved performance: Queue, mutex, shlex, threading, and pydoc.
260
Raymond Hettinger166958b2003-12-01 13:18:39 +0000261- The operator module has two new functions, attrgetter() and
262 itemgetter() which are useful for creating fast data extractor
263 functions for map(), list.sort(), itertools.groupby(), and
264 other functions that expect a function argument.
265
Martin v. Löwis94681fc2003-11-27 19:40:22 +0000266- socket.SHUT_{RD,WR,RDWR} was added.
267
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +0000268- os.getsid was added.
269
Guido van Rossum16b9fa82003-10-23 23:54:57 +0000270- The pwd module incorrectly advertised its struct type as
271 struct_pwent; this has been renamed to struct_passwd. (The old name
272 is still supported for backwards compatibility.)
273
Fred Drakede050322003-10-21 15:41:59 +0000274- The xml.parsers.expat module now provides Expat 1.95.7.
275
Martin v. Löwis3bbd6542003-10-03 13:57:37 +0000276- socket.IPPROTO_IPV6 was added.
277
Martin v. Löwise7a97962003-09-20 16:08:33 +0000278- readline.clear_history was added.
279
Brett Cannon62dba4c2003-09-10 19:37:42 +0000280- select.select() now accepts sequences for its first three arguments.
281
Raymond Hettinger5475f232003-08-08 12:20:03 +0000282- cStringIO now supports the f.closed attribute.
283
Anthony Baxter83f52912003-08-05 06:33:56 +0000284- The signal module now exposes SIGRTMIN and SIGRTMAX (if available).
285
Andrew M. Kuchling69f31eb2003-08-13 23:11:04 +0000286- curses module now supports use_default_colors(). [patch #739124]
287
Anthony Baxter5c68ef02003-10-04 08:04:04 +0000288- Bug #811028: ncurses.h breakage on FreeBSD/MacOS X
289
290- Bug #814613: INET_ADDRSTRLEN fix needed for all compilers on SGI
291
Gustavo Niemeyerad3fc442003-10-17 22:13:16 +0000292- Implemented non-recursive SRE matching scheme (#757624).
293
294- Implemented (?(id/name)yes|no) support in SRE (#572936).
295
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +0000296- random.seed() with no arguments or None uses time.time() as a default
297 seed. Modified to match Py2.2 behavior and use fractional seconds so
298 that successive runs are more likely to produce different sequences.
299
300- random.Random has a new method, getrandbits(k), which returns an int
301 with k random bits. This method is now an optional part of the API
302 for user defined generators. Any generator that defines genrandbits()
303 can now use randrange() for ranges with a length >= 2**53. Formerly,
304 randrange would return only even numbers for ranges that large (see
305 SF bug #812202). Generators that do not define genrandbits() now
306 issue a warning when randrange() is called with a range that large.
307
Raymond Hettingerd25c1c62003-12-06 16:23:06 +0000308- itertools has a new function, groupby() for aggregating iterables
309 into groups sharing the same key (as determined by a key function).
310 It offers some of functionality of SQL's groupby keyword and of
311 the Unix uniq filter.
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +0000312
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +0000313- itertools now has a new function, tee() which produces two independent
314 iterators from a single iterable.
315
316- itertools.izip() with no arguments now returns an empty iterator instead
317 of raising a TypeError exception.
318
Gustavo Niemeyera6e436e2004-02-14 00:02:45 +0000319- Fixed #853061: allow BZ2Compressor.compress() to receive an empty string
320 as parameter.
321
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000322Library
323-------
324
Martin v. Löwiseac324b2004-06-03 09:18:35 +0000325- asyncore.loop now has repeat count parameter that defaults to infinity.
326
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +0000327- The distutils sdist command now ignores all .svn directories, in
328 addition to CVS and RCS directories. .svn directories hold
329 administrative files for the Subversion source control system.
330
Martin v. Löwis2a6ba902004-05-31 18:22:40 +0000331- Added a new module: cookielib. Automatic cookie handling for HTTP
332 clients. Also, support for cookielib has been added to urllib2, so
333 urllib2.urlopen() can transparently handle cookies.
334
Raymond Hettinger059e1702004-05-19 19:56:44 +0000335- stringprep.py now uses built-in set() instead of sets.Set().
336
Thomas Heller2e7c8322004-05-11 15:10:59 +0000337- Bug #876278: Unbounded recursion in modulefinder
338
Martin v. Löwis456ab1d2004-05-06 01:54:36 +0000339- Bug #780300: Swap public and system ID in LexicalHandler.startDTD.
340 Applications relying on the wrong order need to be corrected.
341
Hye-Shik Chang0f5bf1e2004-04-20 21:11:11 +0000342- Bug #926075: Fixed a bug that returns a wrong pattern object
343 for a string or unicode object in sre.compile() when a different
344 type pattern with the same value exists.
345
Skip Montanarod0c0c412004-04-07 16:03:02 +0000346- Added countcallers arg to trace.Trace class (--trackcalls command line arg
347 when run from the command prompt).
348
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +0000349- Fixed a caching bug in platform.platform() where the argument of 'terse' was
350 not taken into consideration when caching value.
351
Nicholas Bastin824b1b22004-03-23 18:44:39 +0000352- Added two new command-line arguments for profile (output file and
353 default sort).
354
Nicholas Bastin1eb4bfc2004-03-22 20:12:56 +0000355- Added global runctx function to profile module
356
Martin v. Löwis347c30d2004-03-21 15:29:41 +0000357- Add hlist missing entryconfigure and entrycget methods.
358
Hye-Shik Chang4a7ad1a2004-03-19 08:11:56 +0000359- The ptcp154 codec was added for Kazakh character set support.
360
Martin v. Löwisa79449e2004-02-15 21:19:18 +0000361- Support non-anonymous ftp URLs in urllib2.
362
Marc-André Lemburg57cb68f2004-01-20 18:24:34 +0000363- The encodings package will now applies codec name aliases
364 first before starting to try the import of the codec module.
365 This simplifies overriding built-in codecs with external
366 packages, e.g. the included CJK codecs with the JapaneseCodecs
367 package, by adjusting the aliases dictionary in encodings.aliases
368 accordingly.
369
Barry Warsaw30ff12f2004-01-04 01:13:43 +0000370- base64 now supports RFC 3548 Base16, Base32, and Base64 encoding and
371 decoding standards.
372
Jeremy Hylton37c5f2a2003-12-14 05:29:45 +0000373- urllib2 now supports processors. A processor is a handler that
374 implements an xxx_request or xxx_response method. These methods are
375 called for all requests.
376
Thomas Hellerc7501d52003-12-05 20:28:07 +0000377- distutils compilers now compile source files in the same order as
378 they are passed to the compiler.
379
Walter Dörwaldc8de4582003-12-03 20:26:05 +0000380- pprint.pprint() and pprint.pformat() now have additional parameters
381 indent, width and depth.
382
Walter Dörwald7a7ede52003-12-03 20:15:28 +0000383- Patch #750542: pprint now will pretty print subclasses of list, tuple
384 and dict too, as long as they don't overwrite __repr__().
385
Thomas Hellerb3105912003-11-28 19:42:56 +0000386- Bug #848614: distutils' msvccompiler fails to find the MSVC6
387 compiler because of incomplete registry entries.
388
Martin v. Löwisaf7dc8d2003-11-19 19:51:55 +0000389- httplib.HTTP.putrequest now offers to omit the implicit Accept-Encoding.
390
Thomas Hellercf0005b2003-11-14 10:33:20 +0000391- Patch #841977: modulefinder didn't find extension modules in packages
392
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +0000393- imaplib.IMAP4.thread was added.
394
Guido van Rossum967b0632003-11-10 02:27:19 +0000395- Plugged a minor hole in tempfile.mktemp() due to the use of
396 os.path.exists(), switched to using os.lstat() directly if possible.
397
Raymond Hettinger0c410272004-01-05 10:13:35 +0000398- bisect.py and heapq.py now have underlying C implementations
399 for better performance
Raymond Hettingerb3af1812003-11-08 10:24:38 +0000400
Neil Schemenauerf607fc52003-11-05 23:03:00 +0000401- traceback.format_exc has been added (similar to print_exc but it returns
402 a string).
403
Martin v. Löwis45394c22003-10-31 13:49:36 +0000404- xmlrpclib.MultiCall has been added.
405
Martin v. Löwis48440b72003-10-31 12:52:35 +0000406- poplib.POP3_SSL has been added.
407
Martin v. Löwisd6625482003-10-12 17:37:01 +0000408- tmpfile.mkstemp now returns an absolute path even if dir is relative.
409
Brett Cannon5d9ca4e2003-10-12 04:38:48 +0000410- urlparse is RFC 2396 compliant.
411
Skip Montanarodef99342003-10-03 14:07:07 +0000412- The fieldnames argument to the csv module's DictReader constructor is now
413 optional. If omitted, the first row of the file will be used as the
414 list of fieldnames.
415
Raymond Hettinger9a80c5d2003-09-23 20:21:01 +0000416- encodings.bz2_codec was added for access to bz2 compression
417 using "a long string".encode('bz2')
418
Guido van Rossum0e5a51d2003-09-22 15:03:11 +0000419- Various improvements to unittest.py, realigned with PyUnit CVS.
420
Martin v. Löwisc6bb6c02003-09-20 15:52:21 +0000421- dircache now passes exceptions to the caller, instead of returning
422 empty lists.
423
Raymond Hettingerdeadbf52003-09-12 06:33:37 +0000424- The bsddb module and dbhash module now support the iterator and
425 mapping protocols which make them more substitutable for dictionaries
426 and shelves.
427
Skip Montanaro3f7a9482003-09-06 19:52:12 +0000428- The csv module's DictReader and DictWriter classes now accept keyword
429 arguments. This was an omission in the initial implementation.
430
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +0000431- The email package handles some RFC 2231 parameters with missing
Barry Warsaw2f5bf172003-09-03 04:09:49 +0000432 CHARSET fields better. It also includes a patch to parameter
433 parsing when semicolons appear inside quotes.
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +0000434
Raymond Hettinger6a180122003-08-17 08:34:09 +0000435- sets.py now runs under Py2.2. In addition, the argument restrictions
436 for most set methods (but not the operators) have been relaxed to
Raymond Hettinger70b9f492003-11-19 15:52:14 +0000437 allow any iterable.
Raymond Hettingeree562fc2003-08-15 21:17:04 +0000438
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +0000439- _strptime.py now has a behind-the-scenes caching mechanism for the most
Brett Cannonb7150a22003-08-05 06:27:04 +0000440 recent TimeRE instance used along with the last five unique directive
441 patterns. The overall module was also made more thread-safe.
442
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +0000443- random.cunifvariate() and random.stdgamma() were deprecated in Py2.3
444 and removed in Py2.4.
445
Anthony Baxter92bee362003-11-04 14:35:49 +0000446- Bug #823328: urllib2.py's HTTP Digest Auth support works again.
447
Hye-Shik Chang84a99312004-01-17 14:59:36 +0000448- Patch #873597: CJK codecs are imported into rank of default codecs.
449
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000450Tools/Demos
451-----------
452
Skip Montanarod5a21fd2004-01-27 14:49:04 +0000453- A hotshotmain script was added to the Tools/scripts directory that
454 makes it easy to run a script under control of the hotshot profiler.
455
Skip Montanaro030f68a2003-10-28 16:24:00 +0000456- The db2pickle and pickle2db scripts can now dump/load gdbm files.
457
Skip Montanaroe2b61e02004-03-03 17:42:08 +0000458- The file order on the command line of the pickle2db script was reversed.
459 It is now [ picklefile ] dbfile. This provides better symmetry with
460 db2pickle. The file arguments to both scripts are now source followed by
461 destination in situations where both files are given.
462
Skip Montanarofd4fa882003-09-10 19:04:13 +0000463- The pydoc script will display a link to the module documentation for
464 modules determined to be part of the core distribution. The documentation
465 base directory defaults to http://www.python.org/doc/current/lib/ but can
466 be changed by setting the PYTHONDOCS environment variable.
467
Raymond Hettingere41d4c82003-08-25 04:39:55 +0000468- texcheck.py now detects double word errors.
469
Tim Peters1a3abcb2003-08-18 23:52:09 +0000470- md5sum.py mistakenly opened input files in text mode by default, a
471 silent and dangerous change from previous releases. It once again
472 opens input files in binary mode by default. The -t and -b flags
473 remain for compatibility with the 2.3 release, but -b is the default
474 now.
475
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000476- py-electric-colon now works when pending-delete/delete-selection mode is
477 in effect
478
479- py-help-at-point is no longer bound to the F1 key - it's still bound to
480 C-c C-h
481
Barry Warsaw6ec58ca2003-09-03 03:20:37 +0000482- Pynche was fixed to not crash when there is no ~/.pynche file and no
483 -d option was given.
484
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000485Build
486-----
487
Martin v. Löwis642c8a12004-06-04 13:55:13 +0000488- In order to find libraries, setup.py now also looks in /lib64, for use
489 on AMD64.
490
Hye-Shik Chang54f94392004-04-14 07:55:31 +0000491- Bug #934635: Fixed a bug where the configure script couldn't detect
492 getaddrinfo() properly if the KAME stack had SCTP support.
493
Skip Montanaro7befb992004-02-10 16:50:21 +0000494- Support for missing ANSI C header files (limits.h, stddef.h, etc) was
495 removed.
496
Skip Montanarodb608052004-02-07 13:53:46 +0000497- Systems requiring the D4, D6 or D7 variants of pthreads are no longer
498 supported (see PEP 11).
499
500- Universal newline support can no longer be disabled (see PEP 11).
501
Skip Montanarocd1f7432004-01-17 14:22:44 +0000502- Support for DGUX, SunOS 4, IRIX 4 and Minix was removed (see PEP 11).
503
504- Support for systems requiring --with-dl-dld or --with-sgi-dl was removed
505 (see PEP 11).
506
507- Tests for sizeof(char) were removed since ANSI C mandates that
508 sizeof(char) must be 1.
509
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000510C API
511-----
512
Martin v. Löwise440e472004-06-01 15:22:42 +0000513- New public functions PyEval_EvaluateFrame and PyGen_New to expose
514 generator objects.
515
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +0000516- New public functions Py_IncRef() and Py_DecRef(), exposing the
517 functionality of the Py_XINCREF() and Py_XDECREF macros. Useful for
Thomas Hellercc10a852004-04-22 17:28:25 +0000518 runtime dynamic embedding of Python. See patch #938302, by Bob
519 Ippolito.
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +0000520
Raymond Hettingerc1e4f9d2004-03-12 08:04:00 +0000521- Added a new macro, PySequence_Fast_ITEMS, which retrieves a fast sequence's
522 underlying array of PyObject pointers. Useful for high speed looping.
523
Raymond Hettinger8f5cdaa2003-12-13 11:26:12 +0000524- Created a new method flag, METH_COEXIST, which causes a method to be loaded
525 even if already defined by a slot wrapper. This allows a __contains__
526 method, for example, to co-exist with a defined sq_contains slot. This
527 is helpful because the PyCFunction can take advantage of optimized calls
528 whenever METH_O or METH_NOARGS flags are defined.
529
Raymond Hettingerbc0f2ab2003-11-25 21:12:14 +0000530- Added a new function, PyDict_Contains(d, k) which is like
531 PySequence_Contains() but is specific to dictionaries and executes
532 about 10% faster.
533
Brett Cannon26b3a7b2003-10-19 21:31:43 +0000534- Added three new macros: Py_RETURN_NONE, Py_RETURN_TRUE, and Py_RETURN_FALSE.
535 Each return the singleton they mention after Py_INCREF()ing them.
536
Raymond Hettingercb2da432003-10-12 18:24:34 +0000537- Added a new function, PyTuple_Pack(n, ...) for constructing tuples from a
538 variable length argument list of Python objects without having to invoke
539 the more complex machinery of Py_BuildValue(). PyTuple_Pack(3, a, b, c)
540 is equivalent to Py_BuildValue("(OOO)", a, b, c).
541
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000542New platforms
543-------------
544
545Tests
546-----
547
548Windows
549-------
550
Guido van Rossumfd25aca2003-11-30 22:10:15 +0000551- The _winreg module could segfault when reading very large registry
552 values, due to unchecked alloca() calls (SF bug 851056). The fix is
553 uses either PyMem_Malloc(n) or PyString_FromStringAndSize(NULL, n),
554 as appropriate, followed by a size check.
555
Tim Petersf1827cf2003-09-07 03:30:18 +0000556- file.truncate() could misbehave if the file was open for update
557 (modes r+, rb+, w+, wb+), and the most recent file operation before
558 the truncate() call was an input operation. SF bug 801631.
559
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000560Mac
561----
562
563
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +0000564What's New in Python 2.3 final?
565===============================
566
567*Release date: 29-Jul-2003*
568
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +0000569IDLE
570----
571
Tim Peters36c1afc2003-07-29 17:22:57 +0000572- Bug 778400: IDLE hangs when selecting "Edit with IDLE" from explorer.
573 This was unique to Windows, and was fixed by adding an -n switch to
574 the command the Windows installer creates to execute "Edit with IDLE"
575 context-menu actions.
576
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +0000577- IDLE displays a new message upon startup: some "personal firewall"
578 kinds of programs (for example, ZoneAlarm) open a dialog of their
579 own when any program opens a socket. IDLE does use sockets, talking
580 on the computer's internal loopback interface. This connection is not
581 visible on any external interface and no data is sent to or received
582 from the Internet. So, if you get such a dialog when opening IDLE,
583 asking whether to let pythonw.exe talk to address 127.0.0.1, say yes,
584 and rest assured no communication external to your machine is taking
585 place. If you don't allow it, IDLE won't be able to start.
586
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +0000587
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000588What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 2?
589=============================================
590
Tim Peters6560a252003-07-24 00:15:46 +0000591*Release date: 24-Jul-2003*
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000592
593Core and builtins
594-----------------
595
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +0000596- It is now possible to import from zipfiles containing additional
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000597 data bytes before the zip compatible archive. Zipfiles containing a
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +0000598 comment at the end are still unsupported.
599
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000600Extension modules
601-----------------
602
603- A longstanding bug in the parser module's initialization could cause
604 fatal internal refcount confusion when the module got initialized more
605 than once. This has been fixed.
606
Fred Drake01a43122003-07-21 17:17:10 +0000607- Fixed memory leak in pyexpat; using the parser's ParseFile() method
608 with open files that aren't instances of the standard file type
609 caused an instance of the bound .read() method to be leaked on every
610 call.
611
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000612- Fixed some leaks in the locale module.
613
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000614Library
615-------
616
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000617- Lib/encodings/rot_13.py when used as a script, now more properly
618 uses the first Python interpreter on your path.
619
620- Removed caching of TimeRE (and thus LocaleTime) in _strptime.py to
621 fix a locale related bug in the test suite. Although another patch
622 was needed to actually fix the problem, the cache code was not
623 restored.
624
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +0000625IDLE
626----
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000627
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +0000628- Calltips patches.
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000629
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000630Build
631-----
632
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000633- For MacOSX, added -mno-fused-madd to BASECFLAGS to fix test_coercion
634 on Panther (OSX 10.3).
635
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000636C API
637-----
638
639Windows
640-------
641
Tim Peters291f14e2003-07-22 02:50:01 +0000642- The tempfile module could do insane imports on Windows if PYTHONCASEOK
643 was set, making temp file creation impossible. Repaired.
644
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000645- Add a patch to workaround pthread_sigmask() bugs in Cygwin.
646
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000647Mac
648---
649
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000650- Various fixes to pimp.
651
652- Scripts runs with pythonw no longer had full window manager access.
653
654- Don't force boot-disk-only install, for reasons unknown it causes
655 more problems than it solves.
656
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000657
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000658What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 1?
659=============================================
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000660
Jeremy Hylton0ed18c22003-07-18 20:10:02 +0000661*Release date: 18-Jul-2003*
662
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000663Core and builtins
664-----------------
665
Tim Peterse5e065b2003-07-06 18:36:54 +0000666- The new function sys.getcheckinterval() returns the last value set
667 by sys.setcheckinterval().
668
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000669- Several bugs in the symbol table phase of the compiler have been
670 fixed. Errors could be lost and compilation could fail without
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000671 reporting an error. SF patch 763201.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000672
673- The interpreter is now more robust about importing the warnings
674 module. In an executable generated by freeze or similar programs,
675 earlier versions of 2.3 would fail if the warnings module could
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000676 not be found on the file system. Fixes SF bug 771097.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000677
678- A warning about assignments to module attributes that shadow
679 builtins, present in earlier releases of 2.3, has been removed.
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000680
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000681- It is not possible to create subclasses of builtin types like str
682 and tuple that define an itemsize. Earlier releases of Python 2.3
683 allowed this by mistake, leading to crashes and other problems.
684
685- The thread_id is now initialized to 0 in a non-thread build. SF bug
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000686 770247.
687
688- SF bug 762891: "del p[key]" on proxy object no longer raises SystemError.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000689
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000690Extension modules
691-----------------
692
693- weakref.proxy() can now handle "del obj[i]" for proxy objects
694 defining __delitem__. Formerly, it generated a SystemError.
695
696- SSL no longer crashes the interpreter when the remote side disconnects.
697
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +0000698- On Unix the mmap module can again be used to map device files.
699
Brett Cannon20def8b2003-07-01 05:16:08 +0000700- time.strptime now exclusively uses the Python implementation
701 contained within the _strptime module.
702
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000703- The print slot of weakref proxy objects was removed, because it was
704 not consistent with the object's repr slot.
705
706- The mmap module only checks file size for regular files, not
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000707 character or block devices. SF patch 708374.
708
709- The cPickle Pickler garbage collection support was fixed to traverse
710 the find_class attribute, if present.
711
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000712- There are several fixes for the bsddb3 wrapper module.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000713
714 bsddb3 no longer crashes if an environment is closed before a cursor
715 (SF bug 763298).
716
717 The DB and DBEnv set_get_returns_none function was extended to take
Barry Warsawd71a5512003-07-20 18:00:54 +0000718 a level instead of a boolean flag. The new level 2 means that in
719 addition, cursor.set()/.get() methods return None instead of raising
720 an exception.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000721
722 A typo was fixed in DBCursor.join_item(), preventing a crash.
723
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000724Library
725-------
726
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000727- distutils now supports MSVC 7.1
728
Raymond Hettinger71adf7e2003-07-16 19:25:22 +0000729- doctest now examines all docstrings by default. Previously, it would
730 skip over functions with private names (as indicated by the underscore
731 naming convention). The old default created too much of a risk that
732 user tests were being skipped inadvertently. Note, this change could
733 break code in the unlikely case that someone had intentionally put
734 failing tests in the docstrings of private functions. The breakage
735 is easily fixable by specifying the old behavior when calling testmod()
736 or Tester().
737
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000738- There were several fixes to the way dumbdbms are closed. It's vital
739 that a dumbdbm database be closed properly, else the on-disk data
740 and directory files can be left in mutually inconsistent states.
741 dumbdbm.py's _Database.__del__() method attempted to close the
742 database properly, but a shutdown race in _Database._commit() could
743 prevent this from working, so that a program trusting __del__() to
744 get the on-disk files in synch could be badly surprised. The race
745 has been repaired. A sync() method was also added so that shelve
746 can guarantee data is written to disk.
Tim Peters7a6c7332003-07-13 17:21:10 +0000747
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000748 The close() method can now be called more than once without complaint.
Tim Petersd7472ec2003-07-13 02:22:03 +0000749
Tim Peters59aba122003-07-01 20:01:55 +0000750- The classes in threading.py are now new-style classes. That they
751 weren't before was an oversight.
752
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000753- The urllib2 digest authentication handlers now define the correct
754 auth_header. The earlier versions would fail at runtime.
755
Neal Norwitze7dfe212003-07-01 14:59:46 +0000756- SF bug 763023: fix uncaught ZeroDivisionError in difflib ratio methods
757 when there are no lines.
758
Neal Norwitz3c0f2c92003-07-01 21:12:47 +0000759- SF bug 763637: fix exception in Tkinter with after_cancel
760 which could occur with Tk 8.4
761
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000762- SF bug 770601: CGIHTTPServer.py now passes the entire environment
763 to child processes.
764
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000765- SF bug 765238: add filter to fnmatch's __all__.
766
767- SF bug 748201: make time.strptime() error messages more helpful.
768
769- SF patch 764470: Do not dump the args attribute of a Fault object in
770 xmlrpclib.
771
772- SF patch 549151: urllib and urllib2 now redirect POSTs on 301
773 responses.
774
775- SF patch 766650: The whichdb module was fixed to recognize dbm files
776 generated by gdbm on OS/2 EMX.
777
778- SF bugs 763047 and 763052: fixes bug of timezone value being left as
779 -1 when ``time.tzname[0] == time.tzname[1] and not time.daylight``
780 is true when it should only when time.daylight is true.
781
782- SF bug 764548: re now allows subclasses of str and unicode to be
783 used as patterns.
784
785- SF bug 763637: In Tkinter, change after_cancel() to handle tuples
786 of varying sizes. Tk 8.4 returns a different number of values
787 than Tk 8.3.
788
789- SF bug 763023: difflib.ratio() did not catch zero division.
790
791- The Queue module now has an __all__ attribute.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000792
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000793Tools/Demos
794-----------
795
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000796- See Lib/idlelib/NEWS.txt for IDLE news.
797
Neal Norwitz592c4cc2003-07-01 04:14:28 +0000798- SF bug 753592: webchecker/wsgui now handles user supplied directories.
799
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000800- The trace.py script has been removed. It is now in the standard library.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000801
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000802Build
803-----
804
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000805- Python now compiles with -fno-strict-aliasing if possible (SF bug 766696).
806
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000807- The socket module compiles on IRIX 6.5.10.
808
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000809- An irix64 system is treated the same way as an irix6 system (SF
810 patch 764560).
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000811
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000812- Several definitions were missing on FreeBSD 5.x unless the
813 __BSD_VISIBLE symbol was defined. configure now defines it as
814 needed.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000815
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000816C API
817-----
818
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000819- Unicode objects now support mbcs as a built-in encoding, so the C
820 API can use it without deferring to the encodings package.
821
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000822Windows
823-------
824
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000825- The Windows implementation of PyThread_start_new_thread() never
826 checked error returns from Windows functions correctly. As a result,
827 it could claim to start a new thread even when the Microsoft
828 _beginthread() function failed (due to "too many threads" -- this is
829 on the order of thousands when it happens). In these cases, the
830 Python exception ::
831
832 thread.error: can't start new thread
833
834 is raised now.
835
836- SF bug 766669: Prevent a GPF on interpreter exit when sockets are in
837 use. The interpreter now calls WSACleanup() from Py_Finalize()
838 instead of from DLL teardown.
839
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000840Mac
841---
842
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000843- Bundlebuilder now inherits default values in the right way. It was
Walter Dörwald73a8a4b2003-07-30 12:14:02 +0000844 previously possible for app bundles to get a type of "BNDL" instead
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000845 of "APPL." Other improvements include, a --build-id option to
846 specify the CFBundleIdentifier and using the --python option to set
847 the executable in the bundle.
848
849- Fixed two bugs in MacOSX framework handling.
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000850
Jack Jansene0040412003-07-23 22:17:28 +0000851- pythonw did not allow user interaction in 2.3rc1, this has been fixed.
852
853- Python is now compiled with -mno-fused-madd, making all tests pass
854 on Panther.
855
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000856What's New in Python 2.3 beta 2?
857================================
858
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +0000859*Release date: 29-Jun-2003*
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000860
861Core and builtins
862-----------------
863
Barry Warsaw883f2232003-06-29 17:10:11 +0000864- A program can now set the environment variable PYTHONINSPECT to some
865 string value in Python, and cause the interpreter to enter the
866 interactive prompt at program exit, as if Python had been invoked
867 with the -i option.
868
Raymond Hettingerd05abde2003-06-17 05:05:49 +0000869- list.index() now accepts optional start and stop arguments. Similar
870 changes were made to UserList.index(). SF feature request 754014.
871
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +0000872- SF patch 751998 fixes an unwanted side effect of the previous fix
873 for SF bug 742860 (the next item).
874
Tim Peters50d8b8b2003-05-25 17:44:31 +0000875- SF bug 742860: "WeakKeyDictionary __delitem__ uses iterkeys". This
876 wasn't threadsafe, was very inefficient (expected time O(len(dict))
877 instead of O(1)), and could raise a spurious RuntimeError if another
878 thread mutated the dict during __delitem__, or if a comparison function
879 mutated it. It also neglected to raise KeyError when the key wasn't
880 present; didn't raise TypeError when the key wasn't of a weakly
881 referencable type; and broke various more-or-less obscure dict
882 invariants by using a sequence of equality comparisons over the whole
883 set of dict keys instead of computing the key's hash code to narrow
884 the search to those keys with the same hash code. All of these are
885 considered to be bugs. A new implementation of __delitem__ repairs all
886 that, but note that fixing these bugs may change visible behavior in
887 code relying (whether intentionally or accidentally) on old behavior.
Tim Peters886128f2003-05-25 01:45:11 +0000888
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000889- SF bug 734869: Fixed a compiler bug that caused a fatal error when
890 compiling a list comprehension that contained another list comprehension
891 embedded in a lambda expression.
892
Tim Peterse87568d2003-05-24 20:18:24 +0000893- SF bug 705231: builtin pow() no longer lets the platform C pow()
894 raise -1.0 to integer powers, because (at least) glibc gets it wrong
895 in some cases. The result should be -1.0 if the power is odd and 1.0
896 if the power is even, and any float with a sufficiently large exponent
897 is (mathematically) an exact even integer.
898
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000899- SF bug 759227: A new-style class that implements __nonzero__() must
900 return a bool or int (but not an int subclass) from that method. This
901 matches the restriction on classic classes.
902
Martin v. Löwis5467d4c2003-05-10 07:10:12 +0000903- The encoding attribute has been added for file objects, and set to
904 the terminal encoding on Unix and Windows.
905
Tim Peters015dd822003-05-04 04:16:52 +0000906- The softspace attribute of file objects became read-only by oversight.
907 It's writable again.
908
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +0000909- Reverted a 2.3 beta 1 change to iterators for subclasses of list and
910 tuple. By default, the iterators now access data elements directly
911 instead of going through __getitem__. If __getitem__ access is
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +0000912 preferred, then __iter__ can be overridden.
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +0000913
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000914- SF bug 735247: The staticmethod and super types participate in
915 garbage collection. Before this change, it was possible for leaks to
916 occur in functions with non-global free variables that used these types.
917
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000918Extension modules
919-----------------
920
Raymond Hettinger643bcec2003-06-29 03:29:42 +0000921- the socket module has a new exception, socket.timeout, to allow
922 timeouts to be handled separately from other socket errors.
923
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000924- SF bug 751276: cPickle has fixed to propagate exceptions raised in
925 user code. In earlier versions, cPickle caught and ignored any
926 exception when it performed operations that it expected to raise
927 specific exceptions like AttributeError.
928
929- cPickle Pickler and Unpickler objects now participate in garbage
930 collection.
931
Tim Peterscda32b72003-06-15 23:13:35 +0000932- mimetools.choose_boundary() could return duplicate strings at times,
933 especially likely on Windows. The strings returned are now guaranteed
934 unique within a single program run.
935
Brett Cannon4e64d782003-06-13 23:44:35 +0000936- thread.interrupt_main() raises KeyboardInterrupt in the main thread.
937 dummy_thread has also been modified to try to simulate the behavior.
938
Walter Dörwald9e46abe2003-05-18 03:15:10 +0000939- array.array.insert() now treats negative indices as being relative
940 to the end of the array, just like list.insert() does. (SF bug #739313)
941
Tim Petersb0c854d2003-05-17 15:57:00 +0000942- The datetime module classes datetime, time, and timedelta are now
943 properly subclassable.
Tim Petersa98924a2003-05-17 05:55:19 +0000944
Martin v. Löwis28e9ce92003-05-09 08:19:48 +0000945- _tkinter.{get|set}busywaitinterval was added.
946
Raymond Hettinger834f4632003-05-02 20:24:56 +0000947- itertools.islice() now accepts stop=None as documented.
948 Fixes SF bug #730685.
949
Skip Montanaro8c044d82003-05-06 20:42:37 +0000950- the bsddb185 module is built in one restricted instance -
951 /usr/include/db.h exists and defines HASHVERSION to be 2. This is true
952 for many BSD-derived systems.
953
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000954
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000955Library
956-------
957
Tim Petersdb3756d2003-06-29 05:30:48 +0000958- Some happy doctest extensions from Jim Fulton have been added to
959 doctest.py. These are already being used in Zope3. The two
960 primary ones:
961
962 doctest.debug(module, name) extracts the doctests from the named object
963 in the given module, puts them in a temp file, and starts pdb running
964 on that file. This is great when a doctest fails.
965
966 doctest.DocTestSuite(module=None) returns a synthesized unittest
967 TestSuite instance, to be run by the unittest framework, which
968 runs all the doctests in the module. This allows writing tests in
969 doctest style (which can be clearer and shorter than writing tests
970 in unittest style), without losing unittest's powerful testing
971 framework features (which doctest lacks).
972
Tim Peters6ebe61f2003-06-27 20:48:05 +0000973- For compatibility with doctests created before 2.3, if an expected
974 output block consists solely of "1" and the actual output block
975 consists solely of "True", it's accepted as a match; similarly
976 for "0" and "False". This is quite un-doctest-like, but is practical.
977 The behavior can be disabled by passing the new doctest module
978 constant DONT_ACCEPT_TRUE_FOR_1 to the new optionflags optional
979 argument.
980
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000981- ZipFile.testzip() now only traps BadZipfile exceptions. Previously,
982 a bare except caught to much and reported all errors as a problem
983 in the archive.
984
985- The logging module now has a new function, makeLogRecord() making
986 LogHandler easier to interact with DatagramHandler and SocketHandler.
987
Skip Montanaro364ca402003-06-17 12:58:31 +0000988- The cgitb module has been extended to support plain text display (SF patch
989 569574).
990
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +0000991- A brand new version of IDLE (from the IDLEfork project at
992 SourceForge) is now included as Lib/idlelib. The old Tools/idle is
993 no more.
994
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000995- Added a new module: trace (documentation missing). This module used
996 to be distributed in Tools/scripts. It uses sys.settrace() to trace
997 code execution -- either function calls or individual lines. It can
998 generate tracing output during execution or a post-mortem report of
999 code coverage.
1000
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00001001- The threading module has new functions settrace() and setprofile()
1002 that cooperate with the functions of the same name in the sys
1003 module. A function registered with the threading module will
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001004 be used for all threads it creates. The new trace module uses this
1005 to provide tracing for code running in threads.
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00001006
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00001007- copy.py: applied SF patch 707900, fixing bug 702858, by Steven
1008 Taschuk. Copying a new-style class that had a reference to itself
1009 didn't work. (The same thing worked fine for old-style classes.)
Martin v. Löwisba8f5ff2003-06-14 07:10:06 +00001010 Builtin functions are now treated as atomic, fixing bug #746304.
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00001011
Raymond Hettingerc24d7672003-06-08 19:42:33 +00001012- difflib.py has two new functions: context_diff() and unified_diff().
1013
Guido van Rossumfa19f7c2003-05-16 01:46:51 +00001014- More fixes to urllib (SF 549151): (a) When redirecting, always use
1015 GET. This is common practice and more-or-less sanctioned by the
1016 HTTP standard. (b) Add a handler for 307 redirection, which becomes
1017 an error for POST, but a regular redirect for GET and HEAD
1018
Guido van Rossumbf1bef82003-05-13 18:01:19 +00001019- Added optional 'onerror' argument to os.walk(), to control error
1020 handling.
1021
Martin v. Löwise59e2ba2003-05-03 09:09:02 +00001022- inspect.is{method|data}descriptor was added, to allow pydoc display
1023 __doc__ of data descriptors.
1024
Skip Montanaro4a7751c2003-04-29 21:07:16 +00001025- Fixed socket speed loss caused by use of the _socketobject wrapper class
1026 in socket.py.
1027
Raymond Hettinger22952a32003-05-20 04:59:56 +00001028- timeit.py now checks the current directory for imports.
1029
Gustavo Niemeyer9556fba2003-06-07 17:53:08 +00001030- urllib2.py now knows how to order proxy classes, so the user doesn't
1031 have to insert it in front of other classes, nor do dirty tricks like
1032 inserting a "dummy" HTTPHandler after a ProxyHandler when building an
1033 opener with proxy support.
1034
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00001035- Iterators have been added for dbm keys.
1036
1037- random.Random objects can now be pickled.
1038
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001039Tools/Demos
1040-----------
1041
Martin v. Löwisb8c084e2003-06-14 09:03:46 +00001042- pydoc now offers help on keywords and topics.
1043
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00001044- Tools/idle is gone; long live Lib/idlelib.
1045
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00001046- diff.py prints file diffs in context, unified, or ndiff formats,
1047 providing a command line interface to difflib.py.
Raymond Hettinger2f3c74a2003-06-08 23:10:15 +00001048
Raymond Hettinger71e00332003-05-10 03:30:13 +00001049- texcheck.py is a new script for making a rough validation of Python LaTeX
1050 files.
1051
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001052Build
1053-----
1054
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001055- Setting DESTDIR during 'make install' now allows specifying a
Martin v. Löwis3b8ee082003-05-11 20:25:35 +00001056 different root directory.
1057
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001058C API
1059-----
1060
Tim Peters3cfe7542003-05-21 21:29:48 +00001061- PyType_Ready(): If a type declares that it participates in gc
1062 (Py_TPFLAGS_HAVE_GC), and its base class does not, and its base class's
1063 tp_free slot is the default _PyObject_Del, and type does not define
1064 a tp_free slot itself, _PyObject_GC_Del is assigned to type->tp_free.
1065 Previously _PyObject_Del was inherited, which could at best lead to a
1066 segfault. In addition, if even after this magic the type's tp_free
1067 slot is _PyObject_Del or NULL, and the type is a base type
1068 (Py_TPFLAGS_BASETYPE), TypeError is raised: since the type is a base
1069 type, its dealloc function must call type->tp_free, and since the type
1070 is gc'able, tp_free must not be NULL or _PyObject_Del.
1071
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00001072- PyThreadState_SetAsyncExc(): A new API (deliberately accessible only
1073 from C) to interrupt a thread by sending it an exception. It is
1074 intentional that you have to write your own C extension to call it
1075 from Python.
1076
1077
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001078New platforms
1079-------------
1080
1081None this time.
1082
1083Tests
1084-----
1085
1086- test_imp rewritten so that it doesn't raise RuntimeError if run as a
1087 side effect of being imported ("import test.autotest").
1088
1089Windows
1090-------
1091
Tim Petersfaa697a2003-06-22 01:42:20 +00001092- The Windows installer ships with Tcl/Tk 8.4.3 (upgraded from 8.4.1).
1093
Tim Petersc4607da2003-05-08 18:13:59 +00001094- The installer always suggested that Python be installed on the C:
1095 drive, due to a hardcoded "C:" generated by the Wise installation
1096 wizard. People with machines where C: is not the system drive
1097 usually want Python installed on whichever drive is their system drive
1098 instead. We removed the hardcoded "C:", and two testers on machines
1099 where C: is not the system drive report that the installer now
1100 suggests their system drive. Note that you can always select the
1101 directory you want in the "Select Destination Directory" dialog --
1102 that's what it's for.
1103
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001104Mac
1105---
1106
Just van Rossum99bc1fc2003-05-09 15:01:25 +00001107- There's a new module called "autoGIL", which offers a mechanism to
1108 automatically release the Global Interpreter Lock when an event loop
1109 goes to sleep, allowing other threads to run. It's currently only
1110 supported on OSX, in the Mach-O version.
Jack Jansenf5e23ff2003-06-16 13:53:40 +00001111- The OSA modules now allow direct access to properties of the
1112 toplevel application class (in AppleScript terminology).
1113- The Package Manager can now update itself.
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001114
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00001115SourceForge Bugs and Patches Applied
1116------------------------------------
1117
1118430160, 471893, 501716, 542562, 549151, 569574, 595837, 596434,
1119598163, 604210, 604716, 610332, 612627, 614770, 620190, 621891,
1120622042, 639139, 640236, 644345, 649742, 649742, 658233, 660022,
1121661318, 661676, 662807, 662923, 666219, 672855, 678325, 682347,
1122683486, 684981, 685773, 686254, 692776, 692959, 693094, 696777,
1123697989, 700827, 703666, 708495, 708604, 708901, 710733, 711902,
1124713722, 715782, 718286, 719359, 719367, 723136, 723831, 723962,
1125724588, 724767, 724767, 725942, 726150, 726446, 726869, 727051,
1126727719, 727719, 727805, 728277, 728563, 728656, 729096, 729103,
1127729293, 729297, 729300, 729317, 729395, 729622, 729817, 730170,
1128730296, 730594, 730685, 730826, 730963, 731209, 731403, 731504,
1129731514, 731626, 731635, 731643, 731644, 731644, 731689, 732124,
1130732143, 732234, 732284, 732284, 732479, 732761, 732783, 732951,
1131733667, 733781, 734118, 734231, 734869, 735051, 735293, 735527,
1132735613, 735694, 736962, 736962, 737970, 738066, 739313, 740055,
1133740234, 740301, 741806, 742126, 742741, 742860, 742860, 742911,
1134744041, 744104, 744238, 744687, 744877, 745055, 745478, 745525,
1135745620, 746012, 746304, 746366, 746801, 746953, 747348, 747667,
1136747954, 748846, 748849, 748973, 748975, 749191, 749210, 749759,
1137749831, 749911, 750008, 750092, 750542, 750595, 751038, 751107,
1138751276, 751451, 751916, 751941, 751956, 751998, 752671, 753451,
1139753602, 753617, 753845, 753925, 754014, 754340, 754447, 755031,
1140755087, 755147, 755245, 755683, 755987, 756032, 756996, 757058,
1141757229, 757818, 757821, 757822, 758112, 758910, 759227, 759889,
1142760257, 760703, 760792, 761104, 761337, 761519, 761830, 762455
1143
1144
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001145What's New in Python 2.3 beta 1?
1146================================
1147
Guido van Rossumfa1eddf2003-04-25 19:19:52 +00001148*Release date: 25-Apr-2003*
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001149
1150Core and builtins
1151-----------------
1152
Thomas Heller5eccabc2003-04-23 19:35:25 +00001153- New format codes B, H, I, k and K have been implemented for
1154 PyArg_ParseTuple and PyBuild_Value.
1155
Alex Martellia70b1912003-04-22 08:12:33 +00001156- New builtin function sum(seq, start=0) returns the sum of all the
1157 items in iterable object seq, plus start (items are normally numbers,
1158 and cannot be strings).
1159
Guido van Rossumaa86e352003-04-19 18:15:10 +00001160- bool() called without arguments now returns False rather than
1161 raising an exception. This is consistent with calling the
1162 constructors for the other builtin types -- called without argument
1163 they all return the false value of that type. (SF patch #724135)
1164
Guido van Rossumcf8d2852003-04-17 16:53:26 +00001165- In support of PEP 269 (making the pgen parser generator accessible
1166 from Python), some changes to the pgen code structure were made; a
1167 few files that used to be linked only with pgen are now linked with
1168 Python itself.
1169
Guido van Rossumc1f6e8c2003-04-16 21:13:23 +00001170- The repr() of a weakref object now shows the __name__ attribute of
1171 the referenced object, if it has one.
1172
Guido van Rossum76ba09f2003-04-16 19:40:58 +00001173- super() no longer ignores data descriptors, except __class__. See
1174 the thread started at
1175 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2003-April/034338.html
1176
Guido van Rossum3a3cca52003-04-14 20:58:14 +00001177- list.insert(i, x) now interprets negative i as it would be
1178 interpreted by slicing, so negative values count from the end of the
1179 list. This was the only place where such an interpretation was not
1180 placed on a list index.
1181
Guido van Rossumefbbb1c2003-04-11 18:43:06 +00001182- range() now works even if the arguments are longs with magnitude
1183 larger than sys.maxint, as long as the total length of the sequence
1184 fits. E.g., range(2**100, 2**101, 2**100) is the following list:
1185 [1267650600228229401496703205376L]. (SF patch #707427.)
1186
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001187- Some horridly obscure problems were fixed involving interaction
1188 between garbage collection and old-style classes with "ambitious"
1189 getattr hooks. If an old-style instance didn't have a __del__ method,
1190 but did have a __getattr__ hook, and the instance became reachable
1191 only from an unreachable cycle, and the hook resurrected or deleted
1192 unreachable objects when asked to resolve "__del__", anything up to
1193 a segfault could happen. That's been repaired.
1194
Raymond Hettingera3e1e4c2003-03-06 23:54:28 +00001195- dict.pop now takes an optional argument specifying a default
1196 value to return if the key is not in the dict. If a default is not
1197 given and the key is not found, a KeyError will still be raised.
1198 Parallel changes were made to UserDict.UserDict and UserDict.DictMixin.
1199 [SF patch #693753] (contributed by Michael Stone.)
1200
Martin v. Löwis73d538b2003-03-05 15:13:47 +00001201- sys.getfilesystemencoding() was added to expose
1202 Py_FileSystemDefaultEncoding.
Guido van Rossum46d3dc32003-03-01 03:20:41 +00001203
1204- New function sys.exc_clear() clears the current exception. This is
1205 rarely needed, but can sometimes be useful to release objects
1206 referenced by the traceback held in sys.exc_info()[2]. (SF patch
1207 #693195.)
1208
Neal Norwitzd5a65a72003-02-23 23:11:41 +00001209- On 64-bit systems, a dictionary could contain duplicate long/int keys
1210 if the key value was larger than 2**32. See SF bug #689659.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001211
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00001212- Fixed SF bug #663074. The codec system was using global static
Walter Dörwaldfa86bf52003-03-31 16:15:13 +00001213 variables to store internal data. As a result, any attempts to use the
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00001214 unicode system with multiple active interpreters, or successive
1215 interpreter executions, would fail.
1216
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00001217- "%c" % u"a" now returns a unicode string instead of raising a
Walter Dörwald44f527f2003-04-02 16:37:24 +00001218 TypeError. u"%c" % 0xffffffff now raises a OverflowError instead
Walter Dörwald1e469c52003-04-02 16:57:59 +00001219 of a ValueError to be consistent with "%c" % 256. See SF patch #710127.
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00001220
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001221Extension modules
1222-----------------
1223
Guido van Rossume7adda92003-04-25 05:52:37 +00001224- The socket module now provides the functions inet_pton and inet_ntop
1225 for converting between string and packed representation of IP
1226 addresses. There is also a new module variable, has_ipv6, which is
1227 True iff the current Python has IPv6 support. See SF patch #658327.
1228
Martin v. Löwisbfe175c2003-04-16 19:42:51 +00001229- Tkinter wrappers around Tcl variables now pass objects directly
1230 to Tcl, instead of first converting them to strings.
1231
Guido van Rossum41c99e72003-04-14 17:59:34 +00001232- The .*? pattern in the re module is now special-cased to avoid the
1233 recursion limit. (SF patch #720991 -- many thanks to Gary Herron
1234 and Greg Chapman.)
1235
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00001236- New function sys.call_tracing() allows pdb to debug code
1237 recursively.
1238
Tim Peters730f5532003-04-08 17:17:17 +00001239- New function gc.get_referents(obj) returns a list of objects
Tim Peters0f81ab62003-04-08 16:39:48 +00001240 directly referenced by obj. In effect, it exposes what the object's
1241 tp_traverse slot does, and can be helpful when debugging memory
1242 leaks.
1243
Martin v. Löwis7fb697b2003-04-03 04:49:12 +00001244- The iconv module has been removed from this release.
1245
Tim Petersd50ade62003-03-20 18:32:13 +00001246- The platform-independent routines for packing floats in IEEE formats
1247 (struct.pack's <f, >f, <d, and >d codes; pickle and cPickle's protocol 1
1248 pickling of floats) ignored that rounding can cause a carry to
1249 propagate. The worst consequence was that, in rare cases, <f and >f
1250 could produce strings that, when unpacked again, were a factor of 2
1251 away from the original float. This has been fixed. See SF bug
1252 #705836.
1253
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001254- New function time.tzset() provides access to the C library tzset()
Guido van Rossumd11b62e2003-03-14 21:51:36 +00001255 function, if supported. (SF patch #675422.)
1256
Neal Norwitz12e22172003-03-03 21:16:39 +00001257- Using createfilehandler, deletefilehandler, createtimerhandler functions
1258 on Tkinter.tkinter (_tkinter module) no longer crashes the interpreter.
1259 See SF bug #692416.
1260
Michael W. Hudsonf0089982003-03-03 12:29:42 +00001261- Modified the fcntl.ioctl() function to allow modification of a passed
1262 mutable buffer (for details see the reference documentation).
1263
Raymond Hettinger61fe64d2003-02-23 04:40:07 +00001264- Made user requested changes to the itertools module.
1265 Subsumed the times() function into repeat().
1266 Added chain() and cycle().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001267
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00001268- The rotor module is now deprecated; the encryption algorithm it uses
Andrew M. Kuchlingfb5f4852003-04-24 13:19:56 +00001269 is not believed to be secure, and including crypto code with Python
1270 has implications for exporting and importing it in various countries.
1271
Skip Montanaro89feabc2003-03-30 04:54:24 +00001272- The socket module now always uses the _socketobject wrapper class, even on
1273 platforms which have dup(2). The makefile() method is built directly
1274 on top of the socket without duplicating the file descriptor, allowing
1275 timeouts to work properly.
1276
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001277Library
1278-------
1279
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00001280- New generator function os.walk() is an easy-to-use alternative to
1281 os.path.walk(). See os module docs for details. os.path.walk()
1282 isn't deprecated at this time, but may become deprecated in a
1283 future release.
1284
Marc-André Lemburg246d8472003-04-24 11:36:11 +00001285- Added new module "platform" which provides a wide range of tools
1286 for querying platform dependent features.
1287
Andrew M. Kuchling4e42b312003-04-24 16:45:05 +00001288- netrc now allows ASCII punctuation characters in passwords.
Raymond Hettinger1d877862003-04-23 19:06:08 +00001289
Martin v. Löwis153c9e42003-04-19 20:59:03 +00001290- shelve now supports the optional writeback argument, and exposes
1291 pickle protocol versions.
1292
Guido van Rossuma2685402003-04-19 18:04:57 +00001293- Several methods of nntplib.NNTP have grown an optional file argument
1294 which specifies a file where to divert the command's output
1295 (already supported by the body() method). (SF patch #720468)
1296
Martin v. Löwis281b2c62003-04-18 21:04:39 +00001297- The self-documenting XML server library DocXMLRPCServer was added.
1298
Martin v. Löwis2548c732003-04-18 10:39:54 +00001299- Support for internationalized domain names has been added through
1300 the 'idna' and 'punycode' encodings, the 'stringprep' module, the
1301 'mkstringprep' tool, and enhancements to the socket and httplib
1302 modules.
1303
Walter Dörwald5688b7a2003-04-16 09:46:13 +00001304- htmlentitydefs has two new dictionaries: name2codepoint maps
1305 HTML entity names to Unicode codepoints (as integers).
1306 codepoint2name is the reverse mapping. See SF patch #722017.
1307
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00001308- pdb has a new command, "debug", which lets you step through
1309 arbitrary code from the debugger's (pdb) prompt.
1310
Raymond Hettingerc377cbf2003-04-04 22:56:42 +00001311- unittest.failUnlessEqual and its equivalent unittest.assertEqual now
1312 return 'not a == b' rather than 'a != b'. This gives the desired
1313 result for classes that define __eq__ without defining __ne__.
1314
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001315- sgmllib now supports SGML marked sections, in particular the
Martin v. Löwis3163a3b2003-03-30 14:25:40 +00001316 MS Office extensions.
1317
Raymond Hettinger42182eb2003-03-09 05:33:33 +00001318- The urllib module now offers support for the iterator protocol.
1319 SF patch 698520 contributed by Brett Cannon.
1320
Guido van Rossum9589a252003-03-06 01:56:12 +00001321- New module timeit provides a simple framework for timing the
1322 execution speed of expressions and statements.
1323
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001324- sets.Set objects now support mixed-type __eq__ and __ne__, instead
1325 of raising TypeError. If x is a Set object and y is a non-Set object,
1326 x == y is False, and x != y is True. This is akin to the change made
1327 for mixed-type comparisons of datetime objects in 2.3a2; more info
1328 about the rationale is in the NEWS entry for that. See also SF bug
1329 report <http://www.python.org/sf/693121>.
1330
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00001331- On Unix platforms, if os.listdir() is called with a Unicode argument,
1332 it now returns Unicode strings. (This behavior was added earlier
1333 to the Windows NT/2k/XP version of os.listdir().)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001334
Andrew M. Kuchling6f177d42003-02-28 22:09:33 +00001335- Distutils: both 'py_modules' and 'packages' keywords can now be specified
1336 in core.setup(). Previously you could supply one or the other, but
1337 not both of them. (SF patch #695090 from Bernhard Herzog)
1338
Skip Montanaro64a839e2003-03-20 23:36:55 +00001339- New csv package makes it easy to read/write CSV files.
1340
Gustavo Niemeyer68d8cef2003-04-17 21:31:33 +00001341- Module shlex has been extended to allow posix-like shell parsings,
1342 including a split() function for easy spliting of quoted strings and
1343 commands. An iterator interface was also implemented.
1344
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001345Tools/Demos
1346-----------
1347
Tim Peters21d7d4d2003-04-18 00:45:59 +00001348- New script combinerefs.py helps analyze new PYTHONDUMPREFS output.
1349 See the module docstring for details.
1350
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001351Build
1352-----
1353
Neal Norwitz35892b92003-02-23 23:45:35 +00001354- Fix problem building on OSF1 because the compiler only accepted
1355 preprocessor directives that start in column 1. (SF bug #691793.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001356
1357C API
1358-----
1359
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00001360- Added PyGC_Collect(), equivalent to calling gc.collect().
1361
Guido van Rossum0fc8f002003-04-15 15:12:39 +00001362- PyThreadState_GetDict() was changed not to raise an exception or
1363 issue a fatal error when no current thread state is available. This
1364 makes it possible to print dictionaries when no thread is active.
1365
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00001366- LONG_LONG was renamed to PY_LONG_LONG. Extensions that use this and
1367 need compatibility with previous versions can use this:
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00001368
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00001369 #ifndef PY_LONG_LONG
1370 #define PY_LONG_LONG LONG_LONG
1371 #endif
Martin v. Löwisb9a0f912003-03-29 10:06:18 +00001372
Raymond Hettinger1da1dbf2003-03-17 19:46:11 +00001373- Added PyObject_SelfIter() to fill the tp_iter slot for the
Raymond Hettinger01538262003-03-17 08:24:35 +00001374 typical case where the method returns its self argument.
1375
Guido van Rossume5c691a2003-03-07 15:13:17 +00001376- The extended type structure used for heap types (new-style
1377 classes defined by Python code using a class statement) is now
1378 exported from object.h as PyHeapTypeObject. (SF patch #696193.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001379
1380New platforms
1381-------------
1382
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00001383None this time.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001384
1385Tests
1386-----
1387
Neal Norwitz55b61d22003-02-28 19:57:03 +00001388- test_timeout now requires -u network to be passed to regrtest to run.
1389 See SF bug #692988.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001390
1391Windows
1392-------
1393
Tim Peters11b23062003-04-23 02:39:17 +00001394- os.fsync() now exists on Windows, and calls the Microsoft _commit()
1395 function.
1396
Guido van Rossumf4050642003-04-09 19:39:06 +00001397- New function winsound.MessageBeep() wraps the Win32 API
1398 MessageBeep().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001399
1400Mac
1401---
1402
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00001403- os.listdir() now returns Unicode strings on MacOS X when called with
1404 a Unicode argument. See the general news item under "Library".
Just van Rossum46c97842003-02-25 21:42:15 +00001405
Jack Jansendeac2ac2003-02-24 11:04:17 +00001406- A new method MacOS.WMAvailable() returns true if it is safe to access
1407 the window manager, false otherwise.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001408
Jack Jansencf76be02003-03-24 12:13:54 +00001409- EasyDialogs dialogs are now movable-modal, and if the application is
1410 currently in the background they will ask to be moved to the foreground
1411 before displaying.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001412
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00001413- OSA Scripting support has improved a lot, and gensuitemodule.py can now
Jack Jansende354b72003-04-11 15:37:20 +00001414 be used by mere mortals. The documentation is now also more or less
1415 complete.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001416
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00001417- The IDE (in a framework build) now includes introductory documentation
1418 in Apple Help Viewer format.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001419
1420
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001421What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 2?
1422=================================
1423
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00001424*Release date: 19-Feb-2003*
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001425
1426Core and builtins
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00001427-----------------
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001428
Walter Dörwald2ffec022003-02-19 16:34:11 +00001429- Negative positions returned from PEP 293 error callbacks are now
1430 treated as being relative to the end of the input string. Positions
1431 that are out of bounds raise an IndexError.
1432
Guido van Rossum162e38c2003-02-19 15:25:10 +00001433- sys.path[0] (the directory from which the script is loaded) is now
1434 turned into an absolute pathname, unless it is the empty string.
1435 (SF patch #664376.)
1436
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00001437- Finally fixed the bug in compile() and exec where a string ending
1438 with an indented code block but no newline would raise SyntaxError.
1439 This would have been a four-line change in parsetok.c... Except
1440 codeop.py depends on this behavior, so a compilation flag had to be
1441 invented that causes the tokenizer to revert to the old behavior;
1442 this required extra changes to 2 .h files, 2 .c files, and 2 .py
Guido van Rossum1442dc12003-02-13 22:19:20 +00001443 files. (Fixes SF bug #501622.)
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00001444
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00001445- If a new-style class defines neither __new__ nor __init__, its
1446 constructor would ignore all arguments. This is changed now: the
1447 constructor refuses arguments in this case. This might break code
1448 that worked under Python 2.2. The simplest fix is to add a no-op
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001449 __init__: ``def __init__(self, *args, **kw): pass``.
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00001450
Guido van Rossum48035eb2003-02-12 17:05:26 +00001451- Through a bytecode optimizer bug (and I bet you didn't even know
1452 Python *had* a bytecode optimizer :-), "unsigned" hex/oct constants
1453 with a leading minus sign would come out with the wrong sign.
1454 ("Unsigned" hex/oct constants are those with a face value in the
1455 range sys.maxint+1 through sys.maxint*2+1, inclusive; these have
1456 always been interpreted as negative numbers through sign folding.)
1457 E.g. 0xffffffff is -1, and -(0xffffffff) is 1, but -0xffffffff would
1458 come out as -4294967295. This was the case in Python 2.2 through
1459 2.2.2 and 2.3a1, and in Python 2.4 it will once again have that
1460 value, but according to PEP 237 it really needs to be 1 now. This
1461 will be backported to Python 2.2.3 a well. (SF #660455)
1462
Guido van Rossum47710652003-02-12 20:48:22 +00001463- int(s, base) sometimes sign-folds hex and oct constants; it only
1464 does this when base is 0 and s.strip() starts with a '0'. When the
1465 sign is actually folded, as in int("0xffffffff", 0) on a 32-bit
1466 machine, which returns -1, a FutureWarning is now issued; in Python
1467 2.4, this will return 4294967295L, as do int("+0xffffffff", 0) and
1468 int("0xffffffff", 16) right now. (PEP 347)
1469
Guido van Rossuma89d10e2003-02-12 03:58:38 +00001470- super(X, x): x may now be a proxy for an X instance, i.e.
1471 issubclass(x.__class__, X) but not issubclass(type(x), X).
1472
Guido van Rossum03bc7d32003-02-12 03:32:58 +00001473- isinstance(x, X): if X is a new-style class, this is now equivalent
1474 to issubclass(type(x), X) or issubclass(x.__class__, X). Previously
1475 only type(x) was tested. (For classic classes this was already the
1476 case.)
1477
Just van Rossum73ffb4a2003-02-10 09:57:08 +00001478- compile(), eval() and the exec statement now fully support source code
1479 passed as unicode strings.
1480
Neal Norwitzde8b94c2003-02-10 02:12:43 +00001481- int subclasses can be initialized with longs if the value fits in an int.
1482 See SF bug #683467.
1483
Tim Petersbf2674b2003-02-02 07:51:32 +00001484- long(string, base) takes time linear in len(string) when base is a power
1485 of 2 now. It used to take time quadratic in len(string).
1486
Martin v. Löwis8afd7572003-01-25 22:46:11 +00001487- filter returns now Unicode results for Unicode arguments.
1488
Martin v. Löwisaf6a27a2003-01-03 19:16:14 +00001489- raw_input can now return Unicode objects.
1490
Skip Montanaro4abd5f02003-01-02 20:51:08 +00001491- List objects' sort() method now accepts None as the comparison function.
1492 Passing None is semantically identical to calling sort() with no
1493 arguments.
1494
Neal Norwitz1a997502003-01-13 20:13:12 +00001495- Fixed crash when printing a subclass of str and __str__ returned self.
1496 See SF bug #667147.
1497
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00001498- Fixed an invalid RuntimeWarning and an undetected error when trying
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00001499 to convert a long integer into a float which couldn't fit.
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00001500 See SF bug #676155.
1501
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00001502- Function objects now have a __module__ attribute that is bound to
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00001503 the name of the module in which the function was defined. This
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00001504 applies for C functions and methods as well as functions and methods
1505 defined in Python. This attribute is used by pickle.whichmodule(),
1506 which changes the behavior of whichmodule slightly. In Python 2.2
1507 whichmodule() returns "__main__" for functions that are not defined
1508 at the top-level of a module (examples: methods, nested functions).
1509 Now whichmodule() will return the proper module name.
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00001510
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001511Extension modules
1512-----------------
1513
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00001514- operator.isNumberType() now checks that the object has a nb_int or
1515 nb_float slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
1516 tp_as_number pointer.
1517
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00001518- The imp module now has ways to acquire and release the "import
1519 lock": imp.acquire_lock() and imp.release_lock(). Note: this is a
1520 reentrant lock, so releasing the lock only truly releases it when
1521 this is the last release_lock() call. You can check with
1522 imp.lock_held(). (SF bug #580952 and patch #683257.)
1523
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001524- Change to cPickle to match pickle.py (see below and PEP 307).
1525
Neal Norwitz9caf9c02003-02-10 01:54:06 +00001526- Fix some bugs in the parser module. SF bug #678518.
1527
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00001528- Thanks to Scott David Daniels, a subtle bug in how the zlib
Walter Dörwald28d81962003-02-03 20:53:14 +00001529 extension implemented flush() was fixed. Scott also rewrote the
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00001530 zlib test suite using the unittest module. (SF bug #640230 and
1531 patch #678531.)
1532
Raymond Hettinger96ef8112003-02-01 00:10:11 +00001533- Added an itertools module containing high speed, memory efficient
1534 looping constructs inspired by tools from Haskell and SML.
1535
Guido van Rossum99d4abf2003-01-27 22:22:50 +00001536- The SSL module now handles sockets with a timeout set correctly (SF
1537 patch #675750, fixing SF bug #675552).
1538
Barry Warsawf8ba39c2003-01-07 20:55:26 +00001539- os/posixmodule has grown the sysexits.h constants (EX_OK and friends).
1540
Guido van Rossum6d0d3652003-01-07 20:34:19 +00001541- Fixed broken threadstate swap in readline that could cause fatal
1542 errors when a readline hook was being invoked while a background
1543 thread was active. (SF bugs #660476 and #513033.)
1544
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001545- fcntl now exposes the strops.h I_* constants.
1546
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00001547- Fix a crash on Solaris that occurred when calling close() on
1548 an mmap'ed file which was already closed. (SF patch #665913)
1549
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001550- Fixed several serious bugs in the zipimport implementation.
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001551
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00001552- datetime changes:
1553
Guido van Rossum8b7a9a32003-04-14 22:01:58 +00001554 The date class is now properly subclassable. (SF bug #720908)
1555
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00001556 The datetime and datetimetz classes have been collapsed into a single
1557 datetime class, and likewise the time and timetz classes into a single
1558 time class. Previously, a datetimetz object with tzinfo=None acted
1559 exactly like a datetime object, and similarly for timetz. This wasn't
1560 enough of a difference to justify distinct classes, and life is simpler
1561 now.
1562
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00001563 today() and now() now round system timestamps to the closest
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00001564 microsecond <http://www.python.org/sf/661086>. This repairs an
1565 irritation most likely seen on Windows systems.
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00001566
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00001567 In dt.astimezone(tz), if tz.utcoffset(dt) returns a duration,
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00001568 ValueError is raised if tz.dst(dt) returns None (2.3a1 treated it
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00001569 as 0 instead, but a tzinfo subclass wishing to participate in
1570 time zone conversion has to take a stand on whether it supports
1571 DST; if you don't care about DST, then code dst() to return 0 minutes,
1572 meaning that DST is never in effect).
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00001573
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00001574 The tzinfo methods utcoffset() and dst() must return a timedelta object
1575 (or None) now. In 2.3a1 they could also return an int or long, but that
1576 was an unhelpfully redundant leftover from an earlier version wherein
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00001577 they couldn't return a timedelta. TOOWTDI.
1578
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00001579 The example tzinfo class for local time had a bug. It was replaced
1580 by a later example coded by Guido.
1581
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00001582 datetime.astimezone(tz) no longer raises an exception when the
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00001583 input datetime has no UTC equivalent in tz. For typical "hybrid" time
1584 zones (a single tzinfo subclass modeling both standard and daylight
1585 time), this case can arise one hour per year, at the hour daylight time
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00001586 ends. See new docs for details. In short, the new behavior mimics
1587 the local wall clock's behavior of repeating an hour in local time.
1588
1589 dt.astimezone() can no longer be used to convert between naive and aware
1590 datetime objects. If you merely want to attach, or remove, a tzinfo
1591 object, without any conversion of date and time members, use
1592 dt.replace(tzinfo=whatever) instead, where "whatever" is None or a
1593 tzinfo subclass instance.
1594
1595 A new method tzinfo.fromutc(dt) can be overridden in tzinfo subclasses
1596 to give complete control over how a UTC time is to be converted to
1597 a local time. The default astimezone() implementation calls fromutc()
1598 as its last step, so a tzinfo subclass can affect that too by overriding
1599 fromutc(). It's expected that the default fromutc() implementation will
1600 be suitable as-is for "almost all" time zone subclasses, but the
1601 creativity of political time zone fiddling appears unbounded -- fromutc()
1602 allows the highly motivated to emulate any scheme expressible in Python.
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00001603
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00001604 datetime.now(): The optional tzinfo argument was undocumented (that's
1605 repaired), and its name was changed to tz ("tzinfo" is overloaded enough
1606 already). With a tz argument, now(tz) used to return the local date
1607 and time, and attach tz to it, without any conversion of date and time
1608 members. This was less than useful. Now now(tz) returns the current
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001609 date and time as local time in tz's time zone, akin to ::
1610
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00001611 tz.fromutc(datetime.utcnow().replace(tzinfo=utc))
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001612
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00001613 where "utc" is an instance of a tzinfo subclass modeling UTC. Without
1614 a tz argument, now() continues to return the current local date and time,
1615 as a naive datetime object.
1616
Tim Peters2a44a8d2003-01-23 20:53:10 +00001617 datetime.fromtimestamp(): Like datetime.now() above, this had less than
1618 useful behavior when the optional tinzo argument was specified. See
1619 also SF bug report <http://www.python.org/sf/660872>.
1620
Tim Peters8d81a012003-01-24 22:36:34 +00001621 date and datetime comparison: In order to prevent comparison from
1622 falling back to the default compare-object-addresses strategy, these
1623 raised TypeError whenever they didn't understand the other object type.
1624 They still do, except when the other object has a "timetuple" attribute,
1625 in which case they return NotImplemented now. This gives other
1626 datetime objects (e.g., mxDateTime) a chance to intercept the
1627 comparison.
1628
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00001629 date, time, datetime and timedelta comparison: When the exception
1630 for mixed-type comparisons in the last paragraph doesn't apply, if
1631 the comparison is == then False is returned, and if the comparison is
1632 != then True is returned. Because dict lookup and the "in" operator
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001633 only invoke __eq__, this allows, for example, ::
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00001634
1635 if some_datetime in some_sequence:
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001636
1637 and ::
1638
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00001639 some_dict[some_timedelta] = whatever
1640
1641 to work as expected, without raising TypeError just because the
1642 sequence is heterogeneous, or the dict has mixed-type keys. [This
1643 seems like a good idea to implement for all mixed-type comparisons
1644 that don't want to allow falling back to address comparison.]
1645
Tim Peters75a6e3b2003-01-04 18:17:36 +00001646 The constructors building a datetime from a timestamp could raise
1647 ValueError if the platform C localtime()/gmtime() inserted "leap
1648 seconds". Leap seconds are ignored now. On such platforms, it's
1649 possible to have timestamps that differ by a second, yet where
1650 datetimes constructed from them are equal.
1651
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00001652 The pickle format of date, time and datetime objects has changed
1653 completely. The undocumented pickler and unpickler functions no
Tim Petersb57f8f02003-02-01 02:54:15 +00001654 longer exist. The undocumented __setstate__() and __getstate__()
1655 methods no longer exist either.
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00001656
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001657Library
1658-------
1659
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001660- The logging module was updated slightly; the WARN level was renamed
1661 to WARNING, and the matching function/method warn() to warning().
1662
1663- The pickle and cPickle modules were updated with a new pickling
1664 protocol (documented by pickletools.py, see below) and several
1665 extensions to the pickle customization API (__reduce__, __setstate__
1666 etc.). The copy module now uses more of the pickle customization
1667 API to copy objects that don't implement __copy__ or __deepcopy__.
1668 See PEP 307 for details.
1669
1670- The distutils "register" command now uses http://www.python.org/pypi
1671 as the default repository. (See PEP 301.)
1672
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00001673- the platform dependent path related variables sep, altsep, extsep,
1674 pathsep, curdir, pardir and defpath are now defined in the platform
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00001675 dependent path modules (e.g. ntpath.py) rather than os.py, so these
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001676 variables are now available via os.path. They continue to be
1677 available from the os module.
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00001678 (see <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00001679
Tim Peters6ee04802003-02-05 18:29:34 +00001680- array.array was added to the types repr.py knows about (see
1681 <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
1682
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00001683- The new pickletools.py contains lots of documentation about pickle
1684 internals, and supplies some helpers for working with pickles, such as
1685 a symbolic pickle disassembler.
1686
Skip Montanaro9a7c96a2003-01-22 18:17:25 +00001687- Xmlrpclib.py now supports the builtin boolean type.
1688
Martin v. Löwis0c6774d2003-01-15 11:51:06 +00001689- py_compile has a new 'doraise' flag and a new PyCompileError
1690 exception.
1691
Martin v. Löwisd69663d2003-01-15 11:37:23 +00001692- SimpleXMLRPCServer now supports CGI through the CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler
1693 class.
1694
Guido van Rossum50e92232003-01-14 16:45:04 +00001695- The sets module now raises TypeError in __cmp__, to clarify that
1696 sets are not intended to be three-way-compared; the comparison
1697 operators are overloaded as subset/superset tests.
1698
Guido van Rossumcd0c0472003-01-07 23:03:05 +00001699- Bastion.py and rexec.py are disabled. These modules are not safe in
1700 Python 2.2. or 2.3.
1701
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001702- realpath is now exported when doing ``from poxixpath import *``.
Neal Norwitzbb0246a2003-01-03 18:12:28 +00001703 It is also exported for ntpath, macpath, and os2emxpath.
1704 See SF bug #659228.
1705
Neal Norwitzb9ef4ae2003-01-05 23:19:43 +00001706- New module tarfile from Lars Gustäbel provides a comprehensive interface
1707 to tar archive files with transparent gzip and bzip2 compression.
1708 See SF patch #651082.
1709
Neal Norwitz4f442372003-01-06 06:51:36 +00001710- urlparse can now parse imap:// URLs. See SF feature request #618024.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001711
Neal Norwitze931ed52003-01-10 23:24:32 +00001712- Tkinter.Canvas.scan_dragto() provides an optional parameter to support
1713 the gain value which is passed to Tk. SF bug# 602259.
1714
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00001715- Fix logging.handlers.SysLogHandler protocol when using UNIX domain sockets.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00001716 See SF patch #642974.
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00001717
Skip Montanaro12fe72e2003-02-25 17:46:20 +00001718- The dospath module was deleted. Use the ntpath module when manipulating
1719 DOS paths from other platforms.
1720
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001721Tools/Demos
1722-----------
1723
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00001724- Two new scripts (db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py) were added to the
1725 Tools/scripts directory to facilitate conversion from the old bsddb module
1726 to the new one. While the user-visible API of the new module is
1727 compatible with the old one, it's likely that the version of the
1728 underlying database library has changed. To convert from the old library,
1729 run the db2pickle.py script using the old version of Python to convert it
1730 to a pickle file. After upgrading Python, run the pickle2db.py script
1731 using the new version of Python to reconstitute your database. For
1732 example:
1733
Skip Montanaro621f0552003-02-03 15:48:10 +00001734 % python2.2 db2pickle.py -h some.db > some.pickle
1735 % python2.3 pickle2db.py -h some.db.new < some.pickle
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00001736
1737 Run the scripts without any args to get a usage message.
1738
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001739
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001740Build
1741-----
1742
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00001743- The audio driver tests (test_ossaudiodev.py and
1744 test_linuxaudiodev.py) are no longer run by default. This is
1745 because they don't always work, depending on your hardware and
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001746 software. To run these tests, you must use an invocation like ::
1747
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00001748 ./python Lib/test/regrtest.py -u audio test_ossaudiodev
1749
Skip Montanarodecc6a42003-01-01 20:07:49 +00001750- On systems which build using the configure script, compiler flags which
1751 used to be lumped together using the OPT flag have been split into two
1752 groups, OPT and BASECFLAGS. OPT is meant to carry just optimization- and
1753 debug-related flags like "-g" and "-O3". BASECFLAGS is meant to carry
1754 compiler flags that are required to get a clean compile. On some
1755 platforms (many Linux flavors in particular) BASECFLAGS will be empty by
1756 default. On others, such as Mac OS X and SCO, it will contain required
1757 flags. This change allows people building Python to override OPT without
1758 fear of clobbering compiler flags which are required to get a clean build.
1759
1760- On Darwin/Mac OS X platforms, /sw/lib and /sw/include are added to the
1761 relevant search lists in setup.py. This allows users building Python to
1762 take advantage of the many packages available from the fink project
1763 <http://fink.sf.net/>.
1764
1765- A new Makefile target, scriptsinstall, installs a number of useful scripts
1766 from the Tools/scripts directory.
1767
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001768C API
1769-----
1770
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001771- PyEval_GetFrame() is now declared to return a ``PyFrameObject *``
1772 instead of a plain ``PyObject *``. (SF patch #686601.)
Guido van Rossum6297a7a2003-02-19 15:53:17 +00001773
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00001774- PyNumber_Check() now checks that the object has a nb_int or nb_float
1775 slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
1776 tp_as_number pointer.
1777
Guido van Rossumeea47182003-02-11 20:39:59 +00001778- A C type that inherits from a base type that defines tp_as_buffer
1779 will now inherit the tp_as_buffer pointer if it doesn't define one.
1780 (SF #681367)
1781
Neil Schemenauer5042da62003-02-04 20:59:40 +00001782- The PyArg_Parse functions now issue a DeprecationWarning if a float
1783 argument is provided when an integer is specified (this affects the 'b',
1784 'B', 'h', 'H', 'i', and 'l' codes). Future versions of Python will
1785 raise a TypeError.
Neil Schemenauercd63e612003-01-24 22:15:53 +00001786
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001787Tests
1788-----
1789
Walter Dörwald11cfbd62003-03-26 16:03:16 +00001790- Several tests weren't being run from regrtest.py (test_timeout.py,
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001791 test_tarfile.py, test_netrc.py, test_multifile.py,
1792 test_importhooks.py and test_imp.py). Now they are. (Note to
1793 developers: please read Lib/test/README when creating a new test, to
1794 make sure to do it right! All tests need to use either unittest or
1795 pydoc.)
1796
1797- Added test_posix.py, a test suite for the posix module.
1798
1799- Added test_hexoct.py, a test suite for hex/oct constant folding.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001800
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001801Windows
1802-------
1803
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00001804- The timeout code for socket connect() didn't work right; this has
1805 now been fixed. test_timeout.py should pass (at least most of the
1806 time).
1807
Thomas Hellerdda583d2003-01-31 20:45:41 +00001808- distutils' msvccompiler class now passes the preprocessor options to
1809 the resource compiler. See SF patch #669198.
1810
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00001811- The bsddb module now ships with Sleepycat's 4.1.25.NC, the latest
1812 release without strong cryptography.
1813
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00001814- sys.path[0], if it contains a directory name, is now always an
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001815 absolute pathname. (SF patch #664376.)
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00001816
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00001817- The new logging package is now installed by the Windows installer. It
1818 wasn't in 2.3a1 due to oversight.
1819
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001820Mac
1821---
1822
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00001823- There are new dialogs EasyDialogs.AskFileForOpen, AskFileForSave
1824 and AskFolder. The old macfs.StandardGetFile and friends are deprecated.
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00001825
Jack Jansenc9296362003-02-06 23:10:45 +00001826- Most of the standard library now uses pathnames or FSRefs in preference
1827 of FSSpecs, and use the underlying Carbon.File and Carbon.Folder modules
1828 in stead of macfs. macfs will probably be deprecated in the future.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00001829
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00001830- Type Carbon.File.FSCatalogInfo and supporting methods have been implemented.
1831 This also makes macfs.FSSpec.SetDates() work again.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001832
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00001833- There is a new module pimp, the package install manager for Python, and
1834 accompanying applet PackageManager. These allow you to easily download
1835 and install pretested extension packages either in source or binary
1836 form. Only in MacPython-OSX.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001837
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00001838- Applets are now built with bundlebuilder in MacPython-OSX, which should make
Jack Jansen5d44b342003-02-18 23:32:47 +00001839 them more robust and also provides a path towards BuildApplication. The
1840 downside of this change is that applets can no longer be run from the
1841 Terminal window, this will hopefully be fixed in the 2.3b1.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001842
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001843
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001844What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 1?
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001845=================================
1846
Guido van Rossumae548862002-12-31 15:47:36 +00001847*Release date: 31-Dec-2002*
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001848
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001849Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001850--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00001851
Michael W. Hudson96bc3b42002-11-26 14:48:23 +00001852- One can now assign to __bases__ and __name__ of new-style classes.
1853
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00001854- dict() now accepts keyword arguments so that dict(one=1, two=2)
1855 is the equivalent of {"one": 1, "two": 2}. Accordingly,
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00001856 the existing (but undocumented) 'items' keyword argument has
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00001857 been eliminated. This means that dict(items=someMapping) now has
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00001858 a different meaning than before.
1859
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00001860- int() now returns a long object if the argument is outside the
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001861 integer range, so int("4" * 1000), int(1e200) and int(1L<<1000) will
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00001862 all return long objects instead of raising an OverflowError.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001863
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00001864- Assignment to __class__ is disallowed if either the old or the new
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00001865 class is a statically allocated type object (such as defined by an
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00001866 extension module). This prevents anomalies like 2.__class__ = bool.
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00001867
1868- New-style object creation and deallocation have been sped up
1869 significantly; they are now faster than classic instance creation
1870 and deallocation.
1871
1872- The __slots__ variable can now mention "private" names, and the
1873 right thing will happen (e.g. __slots__ = ["__foo"]).
1874
1875- The built-ins slice() and buffer() are now callable types. The
1876 types classobj (formerly class), code, function, instance, and
1877 instancemethod (formerly instance-method), which have no built-in
1878 names but are accessible through the types module, are now also
1879 callable. The type dict-proxy is renamed to dictproxy.
1880
1881- Cycles going through the __class__ link of a new-style instance are
1882 now detected by the garbage collector.
1883
1884- Classes using __slots__ are now properly garbage collected.
1885 [SF bug 519621]
1886
1887- Tightened the __slots__ rules: a slot name must be a valid Python
1888 identifier.
1889
1890- The constructor for the module type now requires a name argument and
1891 takes an optional docstring argument. Previously, this constructor
1892 ignored its arguments. As a consequence, deriving a class from a
1893 module (not from the module type) is now illegal; previously this
1894 created an unnamed module, just like invoking the module type did.
1895 [SF bug 563060]
1896
1897- A new type object, 'basestring', is added. This is a common base type
1898 for 'str' and 'unicode', and can be used instead of
1899 types.StringTypes, e.g. to test whether something is "a string":
1900 isinstance(x, basestring) is True for Unicode and 8-bit strings. This
1901 is an abstract base class and cannot be instantiated directly.
1902
1903- Changed new-style class instantiation so that when C's __new__
1904 method returns something that's not a C instance, its __init__ is
1905 not called. [SF bug #537450]
1906
1907- Fixed super() to work correctly with class methods. [SF bug #535444]
1908
1909- If you try to pickle an instance of a class that has __slots__ but
1910 doesn't define or override __getstate__, a TypeError is now raised.
1911 This is done by adding a bozo __getstate__ to the class that always
1912 raises TypeError. (Before, this would appear to be pickled, but the
1913 state of the slots would be lost.)
1914
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001915Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001916-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001917
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00001918- Import from zipfiles is now supported. The name of a zipfile placed
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00001919 on sys.path causes the import statement to look for importable Python
1920 modules (with .py, pyc and .pyo extensions) and packages inside the
1921 zipfile. The zipfile import follows the specification (though not
1922 the sample implementation) of PEP 273. The semantics of __path__ are
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00001923 compatible with those that have been implemented in Jython since
1924 Jython 2.1.
1925
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001926- PEP 302 has been accepted. Although it was initially developed to
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00001927 support zipimport, it offers a new, general import hook mechanism.
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00001928 Several new variables have been added to the sys module:
1929 sys.meta_path, sys.path_hooks, and sys.path_importer_cache; these
1930 make extending the import statement much more convenient than
1931 overriding the __import__ built-in function. For a description of
1932 these, see PEP 302.
1933
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00001934- A frame object's f_lineno attribute can now be written to from a
1935 trace function to change which line will execute next. A command to
1936 exploit this from pdb has been added. [SF patch #643835]
1937
Marc-André Lemburg20b91352002-12-12 18:01:43 +00001938- The _codecs support module for codecs.py was turned into a builtin
1939 module to assure that at least the builtin codecs are available
1940 to the Python parser for source code decoding according to PEP 263.
1941
Walter Dörwaldd9a6ad32002-12-12 16:41:44 +00001942- issubclass now supports a tuple as the second argument, just like
1943 isinstance does. ``issubclass(X, (A, B))`` is equivalent to
1944 ``issubclass(X, A) or issubclass(X, B)``.
1945
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00001946- Thanks to Armin Rigo, the last known way to provoke a system crash
1947 by cleverly arranging for a comparison function to mutate a list
1948 during a list.sort() operation has been fixed. The effect of
1949 attempting to mutate a list, or even to inspect its contents or
1950 length, while a sort is in progress, is not defined by the language.
1951 The C implementation of Python 2.3 attempts to detect mutations,
1952 and raise ValueError if one occurs, but there's no guarantee that
1953 all mutations will be caught, or that any will be caught across
1954 releases or implementations.
1955
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00001956- Unicode file name processing for Windows (PEP 277) is implemented.
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00001957 All platforms now have an os.path.supports_unicode_filenames attribute,
1958 which is set to True on Windows NT/2000/XP, and False elsewhere.
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00001959
Walter Dörwald3aeb6322002-09-02 13:14:32 +00001960- Codec error handling callbacks (PEP 293) are implemented.
1961 Error handling in unicode.encode or str.decode can now be customized.
1962
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00001963- A subtle change to the semantics of the built-in function intern():
1964 interned strings are no longer immortal. You must keep a reference
1965 to the return value intern() around to get the benefit.
1966
Guido van Rossumf808b892002-08-16 03:38:10 +00001967- Use of 'None' as a variable, argument or attribute name now
1968 issues a SyntaxWarning. In the future, None may become a keyword.
1969
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00001970- SET_LINENO is gone. co_lnotab is now consulted to determine when to
1971 call the trace function. C code that accessed f_lineno should call
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00001972 PyCode_Addr2Line instead (f_lineno is still there, but only kept up
1973 to date when there is a trace function set).
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00001974
Guido van Rossum9be89462002-08-14 16:11:30 +00001975- There's a new warning category, FutureWarning. This is used to warn
1976 about a number of situations where the value or sign of an integer
1977 result will change in Python 2.4 as a result of PEP 237 (integer
1978 unification). The warnings implement stage B0 mentioned in that
1979 PEP. The warnings are about the following situations:
1980
1981 - Octal and hex literals without 'L' prefix in the inclusive range
1982 [0x80000000..0xffffffff]; these are currently negative ints, but
1983 in Python 2.4 they will be positive longs with the same bit
1984 pattern.
1985
1986 - Left shifts on integer values that cause the outcome to lose
1987 bits or have a different sign than the left operand. To be
1988 precise: x<<n where this currently doesn't yield the same value
1989 as long(x)<<n; in Python 2.4, the outcome will be long(x)<<n.
1990
1991 - Conversions from ints to string that show negative values as
1992 unsigned ints in the inclusive range [0x80000000..0xffffffff];
1993 this affects the functions hex() and oct(), and the string
1994 formatting codes %u, %o, %x, and %X. In Python 2.4, these will
1995 show signed values (e.g. hex(-1) currently returns "0xffffffff";
1996 in Python 2.4 it will return "-0x1").
1997
Guido van Rossum9a2eda52002-12-31 02:12:42 +00001998- The bits manipulated under the cover by sys.setcheckinterval() have
1999 been changed. Both the check interval and the ticker used to be
2000 per-thread values. They are now just a pair of global variables.
2001 In addition, the default check interval was boosted from 10 to 100
2002 bytecode instructions. This may have some effect on systems that
2003 relied on the old default value. In particular, in multi-threaded
2004 applications which try to be highly responsive, response time will
2005 increase by some (perhaps imperceptible) amount.
Skip Montanaro979c74b2002-09-03 21:25:14 +00002006
Tim Petersd64c1de2002-08-12 17:36:03 +00002007- When multiplying very large integers, a version of the so-called
2008 Karatsuba algorithm is now used. This is most effective if the
2009 inputs have roughly the same size. If they both have about N digits,
2010 Karatsuba multiplication has O(N**1.58) runtime (the exponent is
2011 log_base_2(3)) instead of the previous O(N**2). Measured results may
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00002012 be better or worse than that, depending on platform quirks. Besides
2013 the O() improvement in raw instruction count, the Karatsuba algorithm
2014 appears to have much better cache behavior on extremely large integers
2015 (starting in the ballpark of a million bits). Note that this is a
2016 simple implementation, and there's no intent here to compete with,
2017 e.g., GMP. It gives a very nice speedup when it applies, but a package
2018 devoted to fast large-integer arithmetic should run circles around it.
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00002019
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00002020- u'%c' will now raise a ValueError in case the argument is an
2021 integer outside the valid range of Unicode code point ordinals.
2022
Guido van Rossumdeb09362002-08-09 17:16:30 +00002023- The tempfile module has been overhauled for enhanced security. The
2024 mktemp() function is now deprecated; new, safe replacements are
2025 mkstemp() (for files) and mkdtemp() (for directories), and the
2026 higher-level functions NamedTemporaryFile() and TemporaryFile().
2027 Use of some global variables in this module is also deprecated; the
2028 new functions have keyword arguments to provide the same
2029 functionality. All Lib, Tools and Demo modules that used the unsafe
2030 interfaces have been updated to use the safe replacements. Thanks
2031 to Zack Weinberg!
2032
Guido van Rossumd81a9832002-08-09 15:57:34 +00002033- When x is an object whose class implements __mul__ and __rmul__,
2034 1.0*x would correctly invoke __rmul__, but 1*x would erroneously
2035 invoke __mul__. This was due to the sequence-repeat code in the int
2036 type. This has been fixed now.
2037
Barry Warsawd79f6832002-08-06 17:01:51 +00002038- Previously, "str1 in str2" required str1 to be a string of length 1.
2039 This restriction has been relaxed to allow str1 to be a string of
2040 any length. Thus "'el' in 'hello world'" returns True now.
2041
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00002042- File objects are now their own iterators. For a file f, iter(f) now
2043 returns f (unless f is closed), and f.next() is similar to
2044 f.readline() when EOF is not reached; however, f.next() uses a
2045 readahead buffer that messes up the file position, so mixing
2046 f.next() and f.readline() (or other methods) doesn't work right.
2047 Calling f.seek() drops the readahead buffer, but other operations
2048 don't. It so happens that this gives a nice additional speed boost
2049 to "for line in file:"; the xreadlines method and corresponding
Guido van Rossumbffb2ef2002-08-09 17:17:07 +00002050 module are now obsolete. Thanks to Oren Tirosh!
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00002051
Guido van Rossumde392d32002-08-05 14:17:20 +00002052- Encoding declarations (PEP 263, phase 1) have been implemented. A
2053 comment of the form "# -*- coding: <encodingname> -*-" in the first
2054 or second line of a Python source file indicates the encoding.
Martin v. Löwis00f1e3f2002-08-04 17:29:52 +00002055
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00002056- list.sort() has a new implementation. While cross-platform results
2057 may vary, and in data-dependent ways, this is much faster on many
2058 kinds of partially ordered lists than the previous implementation,
2059 and reported to be just as fast on randomly ordered lists on
2060 several major platforms. This sort is also stable (if A==B and A
2061 precedes B in the list at the start, A precedes B after the sort too),
2062 although the language definition does not guarantee stability. A
2063 potential drawback is that list.sort() may require temp space of
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00002064 len(list)*2 bytes (``*4`` on a 64-bit machine). It's therefore possible
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00002065 for list.sort() to raise MemoryError now, even if a comparison function
2066 does not. See <http://www.python.org/sf/587076> for full details.
2067
Guido van Rossum2d5389c2002-07-23 03:44:35 +00002068- All standard iterators now ensure that, once StopIteration has been
2069 raised, all future calls to next() on the same iterator will also
2070 raise StopIteration. There used to be various counterexamples to
2071 this behavior, which could caused confusion or subtle program
2072 breakage, without any benefits. (Note that this is still an
2073 iterator's responsibility; the iterator framework does not enforce
2074 this.)
2075
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00002076- Ctrl+C handling on Windows has been made more consistent with
2077 other platforms. KeyboardInterrupt can now reliably be caught,
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00002078 and Ctrl+C at an interactive prompt no longer terminates the
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00002079 process under NT/2k/XP (it never did under Win9x). Ctrl+C will
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00002080 interrupt time.sleep() in the main thread, and any child processes
2081 created via the popen family (on win2k; we can't make win9x work
Mark Hammond8f3afc72002-08-10 06:26:31 +00002082 reliably) are also interrupted (as generally happens on for Linux/Unix.)
2083 [SF bugs 231273, 439992 and 581232]
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00002084
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00002085- sys.getwindowsversion() has been added on Windows. This
2086 returns a tuple with information about the version of Windows
2087 currently running.
2088
Raymond Hettinger5a04aec2002-06-25 00:25:30 +00002089- Slices and repetitions of buffer objects now consistently return
2090 a string. Formerly, strings would be returned most of the time,
2091 but a buffer object would be returned when the repetition count
2092 was one or when the slice range was all inclusive.
2093
Walter Dörwald3430d702002-06-17 10:43:59 +00002094- Unicode objects in sys.path are no longer ignored but treated
2095 as directory names.
2096
Neal Norwitz1f68fc72002-06-14 00:50:42 +00002097- Fixed string.startswith and string.endswith builtin methods
2098 so they accept negative indices. [SF bug 493951]
2099
Guido van Rossumc5fe5eb2002-06-12 03:45:21 +00002100- Fixed a bug with a continue inside a try block and a yield in the
2101 finally clause. [SF bug 567538]
2102
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00002103- Most builtin sequences now support "extended slices", i.e. slices
Guido van Rossum2e82e712002-06-13 11:41:07 +00002104 with a third "stride" parameter. For example, "hello world"[::-1]
2105 gives "dlrow olleh".
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00002106
Neal Norwitzd68f5172002-05-29 15:54:55 +00002107- A new warning PendingDeprecationWarning was added to provide
2108 direction on features which are in the process of being deprecated.
2109 The warning will not be printed by default. To see the pending
2110 deprecations, use -Walways::PendingDeprecationWarning::
2111 as a command line option or warnings.filterwarnings() in code.
2112
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00002113- Deprecated features of xrange objects have been removed as
2114 promised. The start, stop, and step attributes and the tolist()
2115 method no longer exist. xrange repetition and slicing have been
2116 removed.
2117
Guido van Rossum7dab2422002-04-26 19:40:56 +00002118- New builtin function enumerate(x), from PEP 279. Example:
2119 enumerate("abc") is an iterator returning (0,"a"), (1,"b"), (2,"c").
2120 The argument can be an arbitrary iterable object.
2121
Neil Schemenauer89e3ee02002-04-26 01:58:53 +00002122- The assert statement no longer tests __debug__ at runtime. This means
2123 that assert statements cannot be disabled by assigning a false value
2124 to __debug__.
2125
Walter Dörwald068325e2002-04-15 13:36:47 +00002126- A method zfill() was added to str and unicode, that fills a numeric
2127 string to the left with zeros. For example,
2128 "+123".zfill(6) -> "+00123".
2129
Guido van Rossum862fe3c2002-04-15 12:36:47 +00002130- Complex numbers supported divmod() and the // and % operators, but
2131 these make no sense. Since this was documented, they're being
2132 deprecated now.
2133
Guido van Rossum26dd8302002-04-26 20:11:29 +00002134- String and unicode methods lstrip(), rstrip() and strip() now take
2135 an optional argument that specifies the characters to strip. For
2136 example, "Foo!!!?!?!?".rstrip("?!") -> "Foo".
Guido van Rossum49042042002-04-13 00:59:05 +00002137
Guido van Rossumc0d3f4e2002-11-27 13:10:40 +00002138- There's a new dictionary constructor (a class method of the dict
2139 class), dict.fromkeys(iterable, value=None). It constructs a
2140 dictionary with keys taken from the iterable and all values set to a
2141 single value. It can be used for building sets and for removing
2142 duplicates from sequences.
Raymond Hettingere33d3df2002-11-27 07:29:33 +00002143
Guido van Rossumc69343b2002-04-12 19:22:48 +00002144- Added a new dict method pop(key). This removes and returns the
2145 value corresponding to key. [SF patch #539949]
2146
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00002147- A new built-in type, bool, has been added, as well as built-in
2148 names for its two values, True and False. Comparisons and sundry
2149 other operations that return a truth value have been changed to
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002150 return a bool instead. Read PEP 285 for an explanation of why this
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00002151 is backward compatible.
2152
Guido van Rossum95b62a62002-03-29 01:07:24 +00002153- Fixed two bugs reported as SF #535905: under certain conditions,
2154 deallocating a deeply nested structure could cause a segfault in the
2155 garbage collector, due to interaction with the "trashcan" code;
2156 access to the current frame during destruction of a local variable
2157 could access a pointer to freed memory.
2158
Guido van Rossumfe0ca4a2002-06-18 21:20:13 +00002159- The optional object allocator ("pymalloc") has been enabled by
2160 default. The recommended practice for memory allocation and
2161 deallocation has been streamlined. A header file is included,
2162 Misc/pymemcompat.h, which can be bundled with 3rd party extensions
2163 and lets them use the same API with Python versions from 1.5.2
2164 onwards.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00002165
Martin v. Löwiscfeb3b62002-03-03 21:30:27 +00002166- PyErr_Display will provide file and line information for all exceptions
2167 that have an attribute print_file_and_line, not just SyntaxErrors.
2168
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00002169- The UTF-8 codec will now encode and decode Unicode surrogates
2170 correctly and without raising exceptions for unpaired ones.
2171
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00002172- Universal newlines (PEP 278) is implemented. Briefly, using 'U'
2173 instead of 'r' when opening a text file for reading changes the line
2174 ending convention so that any of '\r', '\r\n', and '\n' is
2175 recognized (even mixed in one file); all three are converted to
2176 '\n', the standard Python line end character.
2177
Neal Norwitz649b7592002-01-01 19:07:13 +00002178- file.xreadlines() now raises a ValueError if the file is closed:
2179 Previously, an xreadlines object was returned which would raise
2180 a ValueError when the xreadlines.next() method was called.
2181
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002182- sys.exit() inadvertently allowed more than one argument.
Neal Norwitz0c766a02002-03-27 13:03:09 +00002183 An exception will now be raised if more than one argument is used.
2184
Gustavo Niemeyer17c5a332002-12-16 14:09:22 +00002185- Changed evaluation order of dictionary literals to conform to the
2186 general left to right evaluation order rule. Now {f1(): f2()} will
2187 evaluate f1 first.
Gustavo Niemeyer78429a62002-12-16 13:54:02 +00002188
Gustavo Niemeyer786ddb22002-12-16 18:12:53 +00002189- Fixed bug #521782: when a file was in non-blocking mode, file.read()
2190 could silently lose data or wrongly throw an unknown error.
2191
Neil Schemenauerb983aa02002-12-30 20:22:23 +00002192- The sq_repeat, sq_inplace_repeat, sq_concat and sq_inplace_concat
2193 slots are now always tried after trying the corresponding nb_* slots.
2194 This fixes a number of minor bugs (see bug #624807).
2195
Neal Norwitz74a032e2003-01-10 23:29:48 +00002196- Fix problem with dynamic loading on 64-bit AIX (see bug #639945).
2197
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002198Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002199-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002200
Raymond Hettinger9543b342003-01-18 23:22:20 +00002201- Added three operators to the operator module:
2202 operator.pow(a,b) which is equivalent to: a**b.
2203 operator.is_(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is b.
2204 operator.is_not(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is not b.
2205
Martin v. Löwis24a880b2002-12-31 12:55:15 +00002206- posix.openpty now works on all systems that have /dev/ptmx.
2207
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00002208- A module zipimport exists to support importing code from zip
2209 archives.
2210
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00002211- The new datetime module supplies classes for manipulating dates and
2212 times. The basic design came from the Zope "fishbowl process", and
2213 favors practical commercial applications over calendar esoterica. See
2214
2215 http://www.zope.org/Members/fdrake/DateTimeWiki/FrontPage
2216
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00002217- _tkinter now returns Tcl objects, instead of strings. Objects which
2218 have Python equivalents are converted to Python objects, other objects
2219 are wrapped. This can be configured through the wantobjects method,
Martin v. Löwis8c8aa5d2002-11-26 21:39:48 +00002220 or Tkinter.wantobjects.
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00002221
Barry Warsawc27f4bd2002-12-30 21:03:26 +00002222- The PyBSDDB wrapper around the Sleepycat Berkeley DB library has
2223 been added as the package bsddb. The traditional bsddb module is
2224 still available in source code, but not built automatically anymore,
2225 and is now named bsddb185. This supports Berkeley DB versions from
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00002226 3.0 to 4.1. For help converting your databases from the old module (which
2227 probably used an obsolete version of Berkeley DB) to the new module, see
2228 the db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py scripts described in the Tools/Demos
2229 section above.
Martin v. Löwisef546b32002-11-19 08:12:57 +00002230
Martin v. Löwis677bde22002-11-23 22:08:15 +00002231- unicodedata was updated to Unicode 3.2. It supports normalization
2232 and names for Hangul syllables and CJK unified ideographs.
Martin v. Löwis7d41e292002-11-23 12:22:32 +00002233
Neal Norwitz94a83fd2002-11-02 17:46:24 +00002234- resource.getrlimit() now returns longs instead of ints.
2235
Martin v. Löwis080689c2002-10-26 14:42:02 +00002236- readline now dynamically adjusts its input/output stream if
2237 sys.stdin/stdout changes.
2238
Guido van Rossumba602972002-10-01 18:18:58 +00002239- The _tkinter module (and hence Tkinter) has dropped support for
2240 Tcl/Tk 8.0 and 8.1. Only Tcl/Tk versions 8.2, 8.3 and 8.4 are
2241 supported.
2242
Martin v. Löwis658009a2002-09-16 17:26:24 +00002243- cPickle.BadPickleGet is now a class.
2244
Martin v. Löwisa19bfe02002-10-16 18:28:36 +00002245- The time stamps in os.stat_result are floating point numbers
2246 after stat_float_times has been called.
Martin v. Löwis94717ed2002-09-09 14:24:16 +00002247
Neal Norwitzb5673922002-09-05 21:48:07 +00002248- If the size passed to mmap.mmap() is larger than the length of the
2249 file on non-Windows platforms, a ValueError is raised. [SF bug 585792]
2250
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00002251- The xreadlines module is slated for obsolescence.
2252
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00002253- The strptime function in the time module is now always available (a
2254 Python implementation is used when the C library doesn't define it).
2255
Guido van Rossum9562bcf2002-06-14 21:31:18 +00002256- The 'new' module is no longer an extension, but a Python module that
2257 only exists for backwards compatibility. Its contents are no longer
2258 functions but callable type objects.
2259
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00002260- The bsddb.*open functions can now take 'None' as a filename.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00002261 This will create a temporary in-memory bsddb that won't be
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00002262 written to disk.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00002263
Martin v. Löwisb96152c2002-12-31 13:20:15 +00002264- posix.getloadavg, posix.lchown, posix.killpg, posix.mknod, and
2265 posix.getpgid have been added where available.
Martin v. Löwis06a83e92002-04-14 10:19:44 +00002266
Martin v. Löwisf0a46682002-11-03 17:20:12 +00002267- The locale module now exposes the C library's gettext interface. It
2268 also has a new function getpreferredencoding.
Martin v. Löwis2e64c342002-03-27 18:49:02 +00002269
Tim Petersfbf74f22002-03-14 19:06:01 +00002270- A security hole ("double free") was found in zlib-1.1.3, a popular
2271 third party compression library used by some Python modules. The
2272 hole was quickly plugged in zlib-1.1.4, and the Windows build of
2273 Python now ships with zlib-1.1.4.
2274
Martin v. Löwis688357e2002-04-08 21:28:20 +00002275- pwd, grp, and resource return enhanced tuples now, with symbolic
2276 field names.
Martin v. Löwis29001ff2002-03-01 10:47:37 +00002277
Martin v. Löwis99866332002-03-01 10:27:01 +00002278- array.array is now a type object. A new format character
2279 'u' indicates Py_UNICODE arrays. For those, .tounicode and
2280 .fromunicode methods are available. Arrays now support __iadd__
2281 and __imul__.
2282
Neal Norwitze790eae2002-01-01 21:14:12 +00002283- dl now builds on every system that has dlfcn.h. Failure in case
Martin v. Löwis93227272002-01-01 20:18:30 +00002284 of sizeof(int)!=sizeof(long)!=sizeof(void*) is delayed until dl.open
2285 is called.
2286
Skip Montanaro8e790e72002-09-03 13:25:17 +00002287- The sys module acquired a new attribute, api_version, which evaluates
2288 to the value of the PYTHON_API_VERSION macro with which the
2289 interpreter was compiled.
2290
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00002291- Fixed bug #470582: sre module would return a tuple (None, 'a', 'ab')
2292 when applying the regular expression '^((a)c)?(ab)$' on 'ab'. It now
2293 returns (None, None, 'ab'), as expected. Also fixed handling of
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00002294 lastindex/lastgroup match attributes in similar cases. For example,
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00002295 when running the expression r'(a)(b)?b' over 'ab', lastindex must be
2296 1, not 2.
2297
Gustavo Niemeyerc523b042002-11-07 03:28:56 +00002298- Fixed bug #581080: sre scanner was not checking the buffer limit
2299 before increasing the current pointer. This was creating an infinite
2300 loop in the search function, once the pointer exceeded the buffer
2301 limit.
2302
Thomas Heller95cb7e42002-11-07 16:23:55 +00002303- The os.fdopen function now enforces a file mode starting with the
2304 letter 'r', 'w' or 'a', otherwise a ValueError is raised. This fixes
2305 bug #623464.
2306
Greg Ward6c58d462003-01-03 18:02:15 +00002307- The linuxaudiodev module is now deprecated; it is being replaced by
2308 ossaudiodev. The interface has been extended to cover a lot more of
2309 OSS (see www.opensound.com), including most DSP ioctls and the
2310 OSS mixer API. Documentation forthcoming in 2.3a2.
2311
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002312Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002313-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002314
Guido van Rossum747f8062003-01-03 16:33:49 +00002315- imaplib.py now supports SSL (Tino Lange and Piers Lauder).
2316
Just van Rossum5e156ad2002-12-31 16:38:01 +00002317- Freeze's modulefinder.py has been moved to the standard library;
2318 slightly improved so it will issue less false missing submodule
2319 reports (see sf path #643711 for details). Documentation will follow
2320 with Python 2.3a2.
2321
Martin v. Löwis96a60e42002-12-31 13:11:54 +00002322- os.path exposes getctime.
2323
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002324- unittest.py now has two additional methods called assertAlmostEqual()
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002325 and failIfAlmostEqual(). They implement an approximate comparison
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002326 by rounding the difference between the two arguments and comparing
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002327 the result to zero. Approximate comparison is essential for
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002328 unit tests of floating point results.
2329
Raymond Hettingere11b5102002-12-25 16:37:19 +00002330- calendar.py now depends on the new datetime module rather than
2331 the time module. As a result, the range of allowable dates
2332 has been increased.
2333
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00002334- pdb has a new 'j(ump)' command to select the next line to be
2335 executed.
2336
Thomas Heller1b3b49d2002-12-12 19:13:44 +00002337- The distutils created windows installers now can run a
2338 postinstallation script.
2339
Martin v. Löwis4581cfa2002-11-22 08:23:09 +00002340- doctest.testmod can now be called without argument, which means to
2341 test the current module.
2342
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002343- When canceling a server that implemented threading with a keyboard
Martin v. Löwisf86e8ef2002-11-22 08:08:44 +00002344 interrupt, the server would shut down but not terminate (waiting on
2345 client threads). A new member variable, daemon_threads, was added to
2346 the ThreadingMixIn class in SocketServer.py to make it explicit that
2347 this behavior needs to be controlled.
2348
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00002349- A new module, optparse, provides a fancy alternative to getopt for
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00002350 command line parsing. It is a slightly modified version of Greg
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00002351 Ward's Optik package.
2352
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00002353- UserDict.py now defines a DictMixin class which defines all dictionary
2354 methods for classes that already have a minimum mapping interface.
2355 This greatly simplifies writing classes that need to be substitutable
2356 for dictionaries (such as the shelve module).
2357
2358- shelve.py now subclasses from UserDict.DictMixin. Now shelve supports
2359 all dictionary methods. This eases the transition to persistent
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00002360 storage for scripts originally written with dictionaries in mind.
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00002361
Skip Montanaro3bf99e32002-12-08 18:36:24 +00002362- shelve.open and the various classes in shelve.py now accept an optional
2363 binary flag, which defaults to False. If True, the values stored in the
2364 shelf are binary pickles.
2365
Guido van Rossumfda06742002-11-13 16:29:18 +00002366- A new package, logging, implements the logging API defined by PEP
2367 282. The code is written by Vinay Sajip.
2368
Walter Dörwald4dbf1922002-11-06 16:53:44 +00002369- StreamReader, StreamReaderWriter and StreamRecoder in the codecs
2370 modules are iterators now.
2371
Tim Peters9288f952002-11-05 20:38:55 +00002372- gzip.py now handles files exceeding 2GB. Files over 4GB also work
2373 now (provided the OS supports it, and Python is configured with large
2374 file support), but in that case the underlying gzip file format can
2375 record only the least-significant 32 bits of the file size, so that
2376 some tools working with gzipped files may report an incorrect file
2377 size.
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00002378
Martin v. Löwis74b51ac2002-10-26 14:50:45 +00002379- xml.sax.saxutils.unescape has been added, to replace entity references
2380 with their entity value.
2381
Martin v. Löwis77ac4292002-10-15 15:11:13 +00002382- Queue.Queue.{put,get} now support an optional timeout argument.
2383
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00002384- Various features of Tk 8.4 are exposed in Tkinter.py. The multiple
2385 option of tkFileDialog is exposed as function askopenfile{,name}s.
Martin v. Löwis2ec36272002-10-13 10:22:08 +00002386
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00002387- Various configure methods of Tkinter have been stream-lined, so that
2388 tag_configure, image_configure, window_configure now return a
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00002389 dictionary when invoked with no argument.
Martin v. Löwis6ce13152002-10-10 14:36:13 +00002390
Guido van Rossum2b492b62002-10-09 21:40:48 +00002391- Importing the readline module now no longer has the side effect of
2392 calling setlocale(LC_CTYPE, ""). The initial "C" locale, or
2393 whatever locale is explicitly set by the user, is preserved. If you
2394 want repr() of 8-bit strings in your preferred encoding to preserve
2395 all printable characters of that encoding, you have to add the
2396 following code to your $PYTHONSTARTUP file or to your application's
2397 main():
2398
2399 import locale
2400 locale.setlocale(locale.LC_CTYPE, "")
2401
Martin v. Löwise9ce0b02002-10-07 13:23:24 +00002402- shutil.move was added. shutil.copytree now reports errors as an
2403 exception at the end, instead of printing error messages.
2404
Marc-André Lemburg97047e22002-10-04 11:55:21 +00002405- Encoding name normalization was generalized to not only
2406 replace hyphens with underscores, but also all other non-alphanumeric
2407 characters (with the exception of the dot which is used for Python
2408 package names during lookup). The aliases.py mapping was updated
2409 to the new standard.
2410
Walter Dörwald5ccaf8f2002-09-06 16:15:58 +00002411- mimetypes has two new functions: guess_all_extensions() which
2412 returns a list of all known extensions for a mime type, and
2413 add_type() which adds one mapping between a mime type and
2414 an extension to the database.
2415
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00002416- New module: sets, defines the class Set that implements a mutable
2417 set type using the keys of a dict to represent the set. There's
2418 also a class ImmutableSet which is useful when you need sets of sets
2419 or when you need to use sets as dict keys, and a class BaseSet which
Raymond Hettingeref8b9c62002-12-09 08:56:06 +00002420 is the base class of the two.
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00002421
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00002422- Added random.sample(population,k) for random sampling without replacement.
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00002423 Returns a k length list of unique elements chosen from the population.
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00002424
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00002425- random.randrange(-sys.maxint-1, sys.maxint) no longer raises
2426 OverflowError. That is, it now accepts any combination of 'start'
2427 and 'stop' arguments so long as each is in the range of Python's
2428 bounded integers.
2429
Raymond Hettinger40f62172002-12-29 23:03:38 +00002430- Thanks to Raymond Hettinger, random.random() now uses a new core
2431 generator. The Mersenne Twister algorithm is implemented in C,
2432 threadsafe, faster than the previous generator, has an astronomically
2433 large period (2**19937-1), creates random floats to full 53-bit
2434 precision, and may be the most widely tested random number generator
2435 in existence.
2436
2437 The random.jumpahead(n) method has different semantics for the new
2438 generator. Instead of jumping n steps ahead, it uses n and the
2439 existing state to create a new state. This means that jumpahead()
2440 continues to support multi-threaded code needing generators of
2441 non-overlapping sequences. However, it will break code which relies
2442 on jumpahead moving a specific number of steps forward.
2443
2444 The attributes random.whseed and random.__whseed have no meaning for
2445 the new generator. Code using these attributes should switch to a
2446 new class, random.WichmannHill which is provided for backward
2447 compatibility and to make an alternate generator available.
2448
Guido van Rossum4a57c332002-08-02 18:05:20 +00002449- New "algorithms" module: heapq, implements a heap queue. Thanks to
2450 Kevin O'Connor for the code and François Pinard for an entertaining
2451 write-up explaining the theory and practical uses of heaps.
2452
Marc-André Lemburg58e2ff22002-07-12 14:40:04 +00002453- New encoding for the Palm OS character set: palmos.
2454
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00002455- binascii.crc32() and the zipfile module had problems on some 64-bit
2456 platforms. These have been fixed. On a platform with 8-byte C longs,
2457 crc32() now returns a signed-extended 4-byte result, so that its value
2458 as a Python int is equal to the value computed a 32-bit platform.
2459
Martin v. Löwis7d650ca2002-06-30 15:05:00 +00002460- xml.dom.minidom.toxml and toprettyxml now take an optional encoding
2461 argument.
2462
Guido van Rossum9f7549b2002-06-10 21:39:42 +00002463- Some fixes in the copy module: when an object is copied through its
2464 __reduce__ method, there was no check for a __setstate__ method on
2465 the result [SF patch 565085]; deepcopy should treat instances of
2466 custom metaclasses the same way it treats instances of type 'type'
2467 [SF patch 560794].
2468
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00002469- Sockets now support timeout mode. After s.settimeout(T), where T is
2470 a float expressing seconds, subsequent operations raise an exception
2471 if they cannot be completed within T seconds. To disable timeout
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00002472 mode, use s.settimeout(None). There's also a module function,
2473 socket.setdefaulttimeout(T), which sets the default for all sockets
2474 created henceforth.
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00002475
2476- getopt.gnu_getopt was added. This supports GNU-style option
2477 processing, where options can be mixed with non-option arguments.
Martin v. Löwis446a25f2002-06-06 10:58:36 +00002478
Michael W. Hudsonb0dc1a32002-06-04 18:27:35 +00002479- Stop using strings for exceptions. String objects used for
2480 exceptions are now classes deriving from Exception. The objects
2481 changed were: Tkinter.TclError, bdb.BdbQuit, macpath.norm_error,
2482 tabnanny.NannyNag, and xdrlib.Error.
Neal Norwitzb5b5a262002-06-04 17:14:07 +00002483
Walter Dörwald474458d2002-06-04 15:16:29 +00002484- Constants BOM_UTF8, BOM_UTF16, BOM_UTF16_LE, BOM_UTF16_BE,
2485 BOM_UTF32, BOM_UTF32_LE and BOM_UTF32_BE that represent the Byte
2486 Order Mark in UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 encodings for little and
2487 big endian systems were added to the codecs module. The old names
2488 BOM32_* and BOM64_* were off by a factor of 2.
2489
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00002490- Added conversion functions math.degrees() and math.radians().
Raymond Hettinger87f59ee2002-05-13 04:17:32 +00002491
Raymond Hettinger866964c2002-12-14 19:51:34 +00002492- math.log() now takes an optional argument: math.log(x[, base]).
2493
Raymond Hettinger9b1df1d2002-05-12 06:07:21 +00002494- ftplib.retrlines() now tests for callback is None rather than testing
2495 for False. Was causing an error when given a callback object which
2496 was callable but also returned len() as zero. The change may
2497 create new breakage if the caller relied on the undocumented behavior
2498 and called with callback set to [] or some other False value not
2499 identical to None.
2500
Tim Peters46c04e12002-05-05 20:40:00 +00002501- random.gauss() uses a piece of hidden state used by nothing else,
2502 and the .seed() and .whseed() methods failed to reset it. In other
2503 words, setting the seed didn't completely determine the sequence of
2504 results produced by random.gauss(). It does now. Programs repeatedly
2505 mixing calls to a seed method with calls to gauss() may see different
2506 results now.
2507
Fred Drake7f781c92002-05-01 20:33:53 +00002508- The pickle.Pickler class grew a clear_memo() method to mimic that
2509 provided by cPickle.Pickler.
2510
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00002511- difflib's SequenceMatcher class now does a dynamic analysis of
2512 which elements are so frequent as to constitute noise. For
2513 comparing files as sequences of lines, this generally works better
2514 than the IS_LINE_JUNK function, and function ndiff's linejunk
2515 argument defaults to None now as a result. A happy benefit is
2516 that SequenceMatcher may run much faster now when applied
2517 to large files with many duplicate lines (for example, C program
2518 text with lots of repeated "}" and "return NULL;" lines).
2519
Guido van Rossum256705b2002-04-23 13:29:43 +00002520- New Text.dump() method in Tkinter module.
2521
Marc-André Lemburg1ec71ea2002-04-17 20:33:40 +00002522- New distutils commands for building packagers were added to
2523 support pkgtool on Solaris and swinstall on HP-UX.
2524
2525- distutils now has a new abstract binary packager base class
2526 command/bdist_packager, which simplifies writing packagers.
2527 This will hopefully provide the missing bits to encourage
2528 people to submit more packagers, e.g. for Debian, FreeBSD
2529 and other systems.
2530
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00002531- The UTF-16, -LE and -BE stream readers now raise a
2532 NotImplementedError for all calls to .readline(). Previously, they
2533 used to just produce garbage or fail with an encoding error --
2534 UTF-16 is a 2-byte encoding and the C lib's line reading APIs don't
Marc-André Lemburg4179a012002-04-05 12:15:05 +00002535 work well with these.
2536
Martin v. Löwis5c137c22002-03-18 12:44:08 +00002537- compileall now supports quiet operation.
2538
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002539- The BaseHTTPServer now implements optional HTTP/1.1 persistent
Martin v. Löwis587c98c2002-03-17 18:37:22 +00002540 connections.
2541
Marc-André Lemburga5d2b4c2002-02-16 18:23:30 +00002542- socket module: the SSL support was broken out of the main
2543 _socket module C helper and placed into a new _ssl helper
2544 which now gets imported by socket.py if available and working.
2545
Marc-André Lemburg37aa5802002-02-10 21:42:47 +00002546- encodings package: added aliases for all supported IANA character
2547 sets
2548
Guido van Rossum606fe4e2001-12-28 20:57:14 +00002549- ftplib: to safeguard the user's privacy, anonymous login will use
2550 "anonymous@" as default password, rather than the real user and host
2551 name.
2552
Fred Drake36736122002-01-10 13:50:31 +00002553- webbrowser: tightened up the command passed to os.system() so that
2554 arbitrary shell code can't be executed because a bogus URL was
2555 passed in.
2556
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00002557- gettext.translation has an optional fallback argument, and
Martin v. Löwisa55ffae2002-01-11 06:58:49 +00002558 gettext.find an optional all argument. Translations will now fallback
Martin v. Löwisd8996052002-11-21 21:45:32 +00002559 on a per-message basis. The module supports plural forms, by means
2560 of gettext.[d]ngettext and Translation.[u]ngettext.
Martin v. Löwis1be64192002-01-11 06:33:28 +00002561
Martin v. Löwis9668b932002-01-12 11:27:42 +00002562- distutils bdist commands now offer a --skip-build option.
2563
Walter Dörwaldb25c2b02002-03-21 10:38:40 +00002564- warnings.warn now accepts a Warning instance as first argument.
2565
Fred Drakefed7e852002-04-04 19:36:15 +00002566- The xml.sax.expatreader.ExpatParser class will no longer create
2567 circular references by using itself as the locator that gets passed
2568 to the content handler implementation. [SF bug #535474]
2569
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00002570- The email.Parser.Parser class now properly parses strings regardless
2571 of their line endings, which can be any of \r, \n, or \r\n (CR, LF,
2572 or CRLF). Also, the Header class's constructor default arguments
2573 has changed slightly so that an explicit maxlinelen value is always
Barry Warsaw497e5c42002-12-30 19:27:08 +00002574 honored, and so unicode conversion error handling can be specified.
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00002575
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002576- distutils' build_ext command now links C++ extensions with the C++
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00002577 compiler available in the Makefile or CXX environment variable, if
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002578 running under \*nix.
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00002579
2580- New module bz2: provides a comprehensive interface for the bz2 compression
2581 library. It implements a complete file interface, one-shot (de)compression
2582 functions, and types for sequential (de)compression.
2583
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002584- New pdb command 'pp' which is like 'p' except that it pretty-prints
Barry Warsaw5d8d6182002-11-05 22:41:33 +00002585 the value of its expression argument.
2586
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00002587- Now bdist_rpm distutils command understands a verify_script option in
2588 the config file, including the contents of the referred filename in
2589 the "%verifyscript" section of the rpm spec file.
2590
Gustavo Niemeyer1456fde2002-11-25 17:25:04 +00002591- Fixed bug #495695: webbrowser module would run graphic browsers in a
2592 unix environment even if DISPLAY was not set. Also, support for
2593 skipstone browser was included.
2594
Gustavo Niemeyerd5ae01a2002-12-16 13:11:57 +00002595- Fixed bug #636769: rexec would run unallowed code if subclasses of
2596 strings were used as parameters for certain functions.
2597
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002598Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002599-----------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002600
Martin v. Löwis0d1fdea2002-11-22 08:36:54 +00002601- pygettext.py now supports globbing on Windows, and accepts module
2602 names in addition to accepting file names.
2603
Guido van Rossum923e4ef2002-09-17 20:58:59 +00002604- The SGI demos (Demo/sgi) have been removed. Nobody thought they
2605 were interesting any more. (The SGI library modules and extensions
2606 are still there; it is believed that at least some of these are
2607 still used and useful.)
2608
Fred Drake40813b12002-08-05 15:24:19 +00002609- IDLE supports the new encoding declarations (PEP 263); it can also
2610 deal with legacy 8-bit files if they use the locale's encoding. It
2611 allows non-ASCII strings in the interactive shell and executes them
2612 in the locale's encoding.
Martin v. Löwis98ce7b72002-08-05 15:11:26 +00002613
Marc-André Lemburg46260092002-04-04 16:17:11 +00002614- freeze.py now produces binaries which can import shared modules,
2615 unlike before when this failed due to missing symbol exports in
2616 the generated binary.
2617
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002618Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002619-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002620
Martin v. Löwisdc461752002-11-06 21:59:33 +00002621- On Unix, IDLE is now installed automatically.
2622
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00002623- The fpectl module is not built by default; it's dangerous or useless
2624 except in the hands of experts.
2625
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00002626- The public Python C API will generally be declared using PyAPI_FUNC
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00002627 and PyAPI_DATA macros, while Python extension module init functions
2628 will be declared with PyMODINIT_FUNC. DL_EXPORT/DL_IMPORT macros
2629 are deprecated.
Neal Norwitz1389f3e2002-07-22 13:21:10 +00002630
Tim Petersc6a3ff62002-07-08 22:11:52 +00002631- A bug was fixed that could cause COUNT_ALLOCS builds to segfault, or
2632 get into infinite loops, when a new-style class got garbage-collected.
2633 Unfortunately, to avoid this, the way COUNT_ALLOCS works requires
2634 that new-style classes be immortal in COUNT_ALLOCS builds. Note that
2635 COUNT_ALLOCS is not enabled by default, in either release or debug
2636 builds, and that new-style classes are immortal only in COUNT_ALLOCS
2637 builds.
2638
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00002639- Compiling out the cyclic garbage collector is no longer an option.
2640 The old symbol WITH_CYCLE_GC is now ignored, and Python.h arranges
2641 that it's always defined (for the benefit of any extension modules
2642 that may be conditionalizing on it). A bonus is that any extension
2643 type participating in cyclic gc can choose to participate in the
2644 Py_TRASHCAN mechanism now too; in the absence of cyclic gc, this used
2645 to require editing the core to teach the trashcan mechanism about the
2646 new type.
2647
Martin v. Löwis0cec0ff2002-07-28 16:33:45 +00002648- According to Annex F of the current C standard,
Tim Peters1de41bf2002-07-03 03:31:20 +00002649
2650 The Standard C macro HUGE_VAL and its float and long double analogs,
2651 HUGE_VALF and HUGE_VALL, expand to expressions whose values are
2652 positive infinities.
2653
2654 Python only uses the double HUGE_VAL, and only to #define its own symbol
2655 Py_HUGE_VAL. Some platforms have incorrect definitions for HUGE_VAL.
2656 pyport.h used to try to worm around that, but the workarounds triggered
2657 other bugs on other platforms, so we gave up. If your platform defines
2658 HUGE_VAL incorrectly, you'll need to #define Py_HUGE_VAL to something
2659 that works on your platform. The only instance of this I'm sure about
2660 is on an unknown subset of Cray systems, described here:
2661
2662 http://www.cray.com/swpubs/manuals/SN-2194_2.0/html-SN-2194_2.0/x3138.htm
2663
2664 Presumably 2.3a1 breaks such systems. If anyone uses such a system, help!
2665
Martin v. Löwisa3fb4f72002-06-09 13:33:54 +00002666- The configure option --without-doc-strings can be used to remove the
2667 doc strings from the builtin functions and modules; this reduces the
2668 size of the executable.
2669
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00002670- The universal newlines option (PEP 278) is on by default. On Unix
2671 it can be disabled by passing --without-universal-newlines to the
2672 configure script. On other platforms, remove
2673 WITH_UNIVERSAL_NEWLINES from pyconfig.h.
Tim Peters639295f2002-04-21 07:30:30 +00002674
Martin v. Löwis1142de32002-03-29 16:28:31 +00002675- On Unix, a shared libpython2.3.so can be created with --enable-shared.
2676
Tim Peters8deda702002-03-30 10:06:07 +00002677- All uses of the CACHE_HASH, INTERN_STRINGS, and DONT_SHARE_SHORT_STRINGS
2678 preprocessor symbols were eliminated. The internal decisions they
2679 controlled stopped being experimental long ago.
Tim Peters1f7df352002-03-29 03:29:08 +00002680
Fred Drake7d28b732002-05-02 21:17:00 +00002681- The tools used to build the documentation now work under Cygwin as
2682 well as Unix.
2683
Skip Montanaro57454e52002-06-14 20:30:31 +00002684- The bsddb and dbm module builds have been changed to try and avoid version
2685 skew problems and disable linkage with Berkeley DB 1.85 unless the
2686 installer knows what s/he's doing. See the section on building these
2687 modules in the README file for details.
2688
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002689C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002690-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002691
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00002692- PyNumber_Check() now returns true for string and unicode objects.
2693 This is a result of these types having a partially defined
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00002694 tp_as_number slot. (This is not a feature, but an indication that
Walter Dörwalda1a61f92002-11-19 21:20:25 +00002695 PyNumber_Check() is not very useful to determine numeric behavior.
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00002696 It may be deprecated.)
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00002697
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00002698- The string object's layout has changed: the pointer member
2699 ob_sinterned has been replaced by an int member ob_sstate. On some
2700 platforms (e.g. most 64-bit systems) this may change the offset of
2701 the ob_sval member, so as a precaution the API_VERSION has been
2702 incremented. The apparently unused feature of "indirect interned
2703 strings", supported by the ob_sinterned member, is gone. Interned
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002704 strings are now usually mortal; there is a new API,
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00002705 PyString_InternImmortal() that creates immortal interned strings.
2706 (The ob_sstate member can only take three values; however, while
2707 making it a char saves a few bytes per string object on average, in
2708 it also slowed things down a bit because ob_sval was no longer
2709 aligned.)
2710
Guido van Rossumfdb86482002-08-14 21:20:32 +00002711- The Py_InitModule*() functions now accept NULL for the 'methods'
2712 argument. Modules without global functions are becoming more common
2713 now that factories can be types rather than functions.
2714
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00002715- New C API PyUnicode_FromOrdinal() which exposes unichr() at C
2716 level.
2717
Thomas Heller085358a2002-07-29 14:27:41 +00002718- New functions PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErr() and
2719 PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErrWithFilename(). Similar to
2720 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErrWithFilename() and
2721 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErr(), but they allow to specify
2722 the exception type to raise. Available on Windows.
2723
Tim Peters7c321a82002-07-09 02:57:01 +00002724- Py_FatalError() is now declared as taking a const char* argument. It
2725 was previously declared without const. This should not affect working
2726 code.
2727
Martin v. Löwis01f94bd2002-05-08 08:44:21 +00002728- Added new macro PySequence_ITEM(o, i) that directly calls
2729 sq_item without rechecking that o is a sequence and without
2730 adjusting for negative indices.
2731
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00002732- PyRange_New() now raises ValueError if the fourth argument is not 1.
2733 This is part of the removal of deprecated features of the xrange
2734 object.
2735
Guido van Rossum517c7d42002-04-26 02:49:14 +00002736- PyNumber_Coerce() and PyNumber_CoerceEx() now also invoke the type's
2737 coercion if both arguments have the same type but this type has the
2738 CHECKTYPES flag set. This is to better support proxies.
2739
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00002740- The type of tp_free has been changed from "``void (*)(PyObject *)``" to
2741 "``void (*)(void *)``".
Neil Schemenauer9344b142002-04-12 23:00:08 +00002742
2743- PyObject_Del, PyObject_GC_Del are now functions instead of macros.
2744
Guido van Rossum0986d822002-04-08 01:38:42 +00002745- A type can now inherit its metatype from its base type. Previously,
2746 when PyType_Ready() was called, if ob_type was found to be NULL, it
2747 was always set to &PyType_Type; now it is set to base->ob_type,
2748 where base is tp_base, defaulting to &PyObject_Type.
2749
2750- PyType_Ready() accidentally did not inherit tp_is_gc; now it does.
2751
Neil Schemenauerc9abc1d2002-05-08 14:14:41 +00002752- The PyCore_* family of APIs have been removed.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00002753
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002754- The "u#" parser marker will now pass through Unicode objects as-is
Marc-André Lemburg3e3eacb2002-01-09 16:21:27 +00002755 without going through the buffer API.
2756
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002757- The enumerators of cmp_op have been renamed to use the prefix ``PyCmp_``.
Martin v. Löwis7198a522002-01-01 19:59:11 +00002758
Tim Peters10a3bb52001-12-25 19:07:38 +00002759- An old #define of ANY as void has been removed from pyport.h. This
2760 hasn't been used since Python's pre-ANSI days, and the #define has
2761 been marked as obsolete since then. SF bug 495548 says it created
2762 conflicts with other packages, so keeping it around wasn't harmless.
2763
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002764- Because Python's magic number scheme broke on January 1st, we decided
2765 to stop Python development. Thanks for all the fish!
2766
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00002767- Some of us don't like fish, so we changed Python's magic number
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00002768 scheme to a new one. See Python/import.c for details.
2769
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002770New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002771-------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002772
Martin v. Löwis79acb9e2002-12-06 12:48:53 +00002773- OpenVMS is now supported.
2774
Martin v. Löwisf90ae202002-06-11 06:22:31 +00002775- AtheOS is now supported.
2776
Andrew MacIntyre161ad0e2002-08-04 07:25:58 +00002777- the EMX runtime environment on OS/2 is now supported.
2778
Martin v. Löwisa6e97582002-01-01 18:41:33 +00002779- GNU/Hurd is now supported.
2780
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002781Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002782-----
2783
Fred Drake4dd0f7e2002-11-26 21:44:56 +00002784- The regrtest.py script's -u option now provides a way to say "allow
2785 all resources except this one." For example, to allow everything
2786 except bsddb, give the option '-uall,-bsddb'.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002787
2788Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002789-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002790
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00002791- The Windows distribution now ships with version 4.0.14 of the
2792 Sleepycat Berkeley database library. This should be a huge
2793 improvement over the previous Berkeley DB 1.85, which had many
2794 bugs.
2795 XXX What are the licensing issues here?
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002796 XXX If a user has a database created with a previous version of
Tim Peters84c7a3f2002-11-23 18:48:06 +00002797 XXX Python, what must they do to convert it?
2798 XXX I'm still not sure how to link this thing (see PCbuild/readme.txt).
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00002799 XXX The version # is likely to change before 2.3a1.
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00002800
2801- The Windows distribution now ships with a Secure Sockets Library (SLL)
Mark Hammondc3de0082002-12-03 06:16:08 +00002802 module (_ssl.pyd)
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00002803
Tim Peters857fb4c2002-11-14 23:31:58 +00002804- The Windows distribution now ships with Tcl/Tk version 8.4.1 (it
2805 previously shipped with Tcl/Tk 8.3.2).
2806
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00002807- When Python is built under a Microsoft compiler, sys.version now
2808 includes the compiler version number (_MSC_VER). For example, under
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002809 MSVC 6, sys.version contains the substring "MSC v.1200 ". 1200 is
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00002810 the value of _MSC_VER under MSVC 6.
2811
Tim Peters08e72952002-04-16 20:48:01 +00002812- Sometimes the uninstall executable (UNWISE.EXE) vanishes. One cause
2813 of that has been fixed in the installer (disabled Wise's "delete in-
2814 use files" uninstall option).
2815
Guido van Rossum181e41a2002-04-06 00:23:25 +00002816- Fixed a bug in urllib's proxy handling in Windows. [SF bug #503031]
2817
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00002818- The installer now installs Start menu shortcuts under (the local
2819 equivalent of) "All Users" when doing an Admin install.
2820
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00002821- file.truncate([newsize]) now works on Windows for all newsize values.
2822 It used to fail if newsize didn't fit in 32 bits, reflecting a
2823 limitation of MS _chsize (which is no longer used).
2824
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00002825- os.waitpid() is now implemented for Windows, and can be used to block
2826 until a specified process exits. This is similar to, but not exactly
2827 the same as, os.waitpid() on POSIX systems. If you're waiting for
2828 a specific process whose pid was obtained from one of the spawn()
2829 functions, the same Python os.waitpid() code works across platforms.
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00002830 See the docs for details. The docs were changed to clarify that
2831 spawn functions return, and waitpid requires, a process handle on
2832 Windows (not the same thing as a Windows process id).
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00002833
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00002834- New tempfile.TemporaryFile implementation for Windows: this doesn't
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002835 need a TemporaryFileWrapper wrapper anymore, and should be immune
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00002836 to a nasty problem: before 2.3, if you got a temp file on Windows, it
2837 got wrapped in an object whose close() method first closed the
2838 underlying file, then deleted the file. This usually worked fine.
2839 However, the spawn family of functions on Windows create (at a low C
2840 level) the same set of open files in the spawned process Q as were
2841 open in the spawning process P. If a temp file f was among them, then
2842 doing f.close() in P first closed P's C-level file handle on f, but Q's
2843 C-level file handle on f remained open, so the attempt in P to delete f
2844 blew up with a "Permission denied" error (Windows doesn't allow
2845 deleting open files). This was surprising, subtle, and difficult to
2846 work around.
2847
2848- The os module now exports all the symbolic constants usable with the
2849 low-level os.open() on Windows: the new constants in 2.3 are
2850 O_NOINHERIT, O_SHORT_LIVED, O_TEMPORARY, O_RANDOM and O_SEQUENTIAL.
2851 The others were also available in 2.2: O_APPEND, O_BINARY, O_CREAT,
2852 O_EXCL, O_RDONLY, O_RDWR, O_TEXT, O_TRUNC and O_WRONLY. Contrary
2853 to Microsoft docs, O_SHORT_LIVED does not seem to imply O_TEMPORARY
2854 (so specify both if you want both; note that neither is useful unless
2855 specified with O_CREAT too).
2856
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002857Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002858----
2859
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002860- Mac/Relnotes is gone, the release notes are now here.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002861
Just van Rossume1ebd802003-02-10 10:06:18 +00002862- Python (the OSX-only, unix-based version, not the OS9-compatible CFM
2863 version) now fully supports unicode strings as arguments to various file
2864 system calls, eg. open(), file(), os.stat() and os.listdir().
2865
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002866- The current naming convention for Python on the Macintosh is that MacPython
2867 refers to the unix-based OSX-only version, and MacPython-OS9 refers to the
2868 CFM-based version that runs on both OS9 and OSX.
2869
2870- All MacPython-OS9 functionality is now available in an OSX unix build,
2871 including the Carbon modules, the IDE, OSA support, etc. A lot of this
2872 will only work correctly in a framework build, though, because you cannot
2873 talk to the window manager unless your application is run from a .app
2874 bundle. There is a command line tool "pythonw" that runs your script
2875 with an interpreter living in such a .app bundle, this interpreter should
2876 be used to run any Python script using the window manager (including
2877 Tkinter or wxPython scripts).
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00002878
Jack Jansen8bb80db2002-12-30 22:42:43 +00002879- Most of Mac/Lib has moved to Lib/plat-mac, which is again used both in
2880 MacPython-OSX and MacPython-OS9. The only modules remaining in Mac/Lib
2881 are specifically for MacPython-OS9 (CFM support, preference resources, etc).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002882
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002883- A new utility PythonLauncher will start a Python interpreter when a .py or
2884 .pyw script is double-clicked in the Finder. By default .py scripts are
2885 run with a normal Python interpreter in a Terminal window and .pyw
2886 files are run with a window-aware pythonw interpreter without a Terminal
2887 window, but all this can be customized.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002888
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002889- MacPython-OS9 is now Carbon-only, so it runs on Mac OS 9 or Mac OS X and
2890 possibly on Mac OS 8.6 with the right CarbonLib installed, but not on earlier
2891 releases.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002892
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002893- Many tools such as BuildApplet.py and gensuitemodule.py now support a command
2894 line interface too.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002895
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002896- All the Carbon classes are now PEP253 compliant, meaning that you can
2897 subclass them from Python. Most of the attributes have gone, you should
2898 now use the accessor function call API, which is also what Apple's
2899 documentation uses. Some attributes such as grafport.visRgn are still
2900 available for convenience.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002901
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002902- New Carbon modules File (implementing the APIs in Files.h and Aliases.h)
2903 and Folder (APIs from Folders.h). The old macfs builtin module is
2904 gone, and replaced by a Python wrapper around the new modules.
2905
2906- Pathname handling should now be fully consistent: MacPython-OSX always uses
2907 unix pathnames and MacPython-OS9 always uses colon-separated Mac pathnames
2908 (also when running on Mac OS X).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002909
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002910- New Carbon modules Help and AH give access to the Carbon Help Manager.
2911 There are hooks in the IDE to allow accessing the Python documentation
2912 (and Apple's Carbon and Cocoa documentation) through the Help Viewer.
2913 See Mac/OSX/README for converting the Python documentation to a
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002914 Help Viewer compatible form and installing it.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002915
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002916- OSA support has been redesigned and the generated Python classes now
2917 mirror the inheritance defined by the underlying OSA classes.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002918
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002919- MacPython no longer maps both \r and \n to \n on input for any text file.
2920 This feature has been replaced by universal newline support (PEP278).
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00002921
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00002922- The default encoding for Python sourcefiles in MacPython-OS9 is no longer
Guido van Rossum16c85172003-02-20 01:52:48 +00002923 mac-roman (or whatever your local Mac encoding was) but "ascii", like on
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00002924 other platforms. If you really need sourcefiles with Mac characters in them
2925 you can change this in site.py.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002926
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002927
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002928What's New in Python 2.2 final?
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002929===============================
2930
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002931*Release date: 21-Dec-2001*
2932
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002933Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002934--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002935
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002936- pickle.py, cPickle: allow pickling instances of new-style classes
2937 with a custom metaclass.
2938
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002939Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002940-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002941
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002942- weakref proxy object: when comparing, unwrap both arguments if both
2943 are proxies.
2944
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002945Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002946-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002947
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002948- binascii.b2a_base64(): fix a potential buffer overrun when encoding
2949 very short strings.
2950
2951- cPickle: the obscure "fast" mode was suspected of causing stack
2952 overflows on the Mac. Hopefully fixed this by setting the recursion
2953 limit much smaller. If the limit is too low (it only affects
2954 performance), you can change it by defining PY_CPICKLE_FAST_LIMIT
2955 when compiling cPickle.c (or in pyconfig.h).
2956
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002957Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002958-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002959
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002960- dumbdbm.py: fixed a dumb old bug (the file didn't get synched at
2961 close or delete time).
2962
2963- rfc822.py: fixed a bug where the address '<>' was converted to None
2964 instead of an empty string (also fixes the email.Utils module).
2965
2966- xmlrpclib.py: version 1.0.0; uses precision for doubles.
2967
2968- test suite: the pickle and cPickle tests were not executing any code
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002969 when run from the standard regression test.
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002970
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002971Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002972-----------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002973
2974Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002975-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002976
2977C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002978-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002979
2980New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002981-------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002982
2983Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002984-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002985
2986Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002987-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002988
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002989- distutils package: fixed broken Windows installers (bdist_wininst).
2990
2991- tempfile.py: prevent mysterious warnings when TemporaryFileWrapper
2992 instances are deleted at process exit time.
2993
2994- socket.py: prevent mysterious warnings when socket instances are
2995 deleted at process exit time.
2996
2997- posixmodule.c: fix a Windows crash with stat() of a filename ending
2998 in backslash.
2999
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003000Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003001----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003002
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003003- The Carbon toolbox modules have been upgraded to Universal Headers
3004 3.4, and experimental CoreGraphics and CarbonEvents modules have
3005 been added. All only for framework-enabled MacOSX.
3006
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003007
Tim Peters6272dfd2001-12-13 19:34:00 +00003008What's New in Python 2.2c1?
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003009===========================
3010
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003011*Release date: 14-Dec-2001*
3012
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003013Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003014--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003015
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003016- Guido's tutorial introduction to the new type/class features has
3017 been extensively updated. See
3018
3019 http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html
3020
3021 That remains the primary documentation in this area.
3022
Guido van Rossum33bab012001-12-05 22:45:48 +00003023- Fixed a leak: instance variables declared with __slots__ were never
3024 deleted!
3025
Guido van Rossum4b800852001-12-03 00:54:52 +00003026- The "delete attribute" method of descriptor objects is called
3027 __delete__, not __del__. In previous releases, it was mistakenly
3028 called __del__, which created an unfortunate overloading condition
3029 with finalizers. (The "get attribute" and "set attribute" methods
3030 are still called __get__ and __set__, respectively.)
3031
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00003032- Some subtle issues with the super built-in were fixed:
3033
3034 (a) When super itself is subclassed, its __get__ method would still
3035 return an instance of the base class (i.e., of super).
3036
3037 (b) super(C, C()).__class__ would return C rather than super. This
3038 is confusing. To fix this, I decided to change the semantics of
3039 super so that it only applies to code attributes, not to data
3040 attributes. After all, overriding data attributes is not
3041 supported anyway.
3042
3043 (c) The __get__ method didn't check whether the argument was an
3044 instance of the type used in creation of the super instance.
3045
Guido van Rossumcd7b7d62001-12-04 21:02:07 +00003046- Previously, hash() of an instance of a subclass of a mutable type
3047 (list or dictionary) would return some value, rather than raising
3048 TypeError. This has been fixed. Also, directly calling
3049 dict.__hash__ and list.__hash__ now raises the same TypeError
3050 (previously, these were the same as object.__hash__).
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00003051
Guido van Rossumd331cb52001-12-05 19:46:42 +00003052- New-style objects now support deleting their __dict__. This is for
3053 all intents and purposes equivalent to assigning a brand new empty
3054 dictionary, but saves space if the object is not used further.
3055
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003056Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003057-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003058
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00003059- -Qnew now works as documented in PEP 238: when -Qnew is passed on
3060 the command line, all occurrences of "/" use true division instead
3061 of classic division. See the PEP for details. Note that "all"
3062 means all instances in library and 3rd-party modules, as well as in
3063 your own code. As the PEP says, -Qnew is intended for use only in
3064 educational environments with control over the libraries in use.
Tim Petersbf72fe22001-12-11 21:43:14 +00003065 Note that test_coercion.py in the standard Python test suite fails
3066 under -Qnew; this is expected, and won't be repaired until true
3067 division becomes the default (in the meantime, test_coercion is
3068 testing the current rules).
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00003069
Fred Drake6c01e252001-12-14 17:08:12 +00003070- complex() now only allows the first argument to be a string
3071 argument, and raises TypeError if either the second arg is a string
3072 or if the second arg is specified when the first is a string.
3073
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003074Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003075-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003076
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00003077- gc.get_referents was renamed to gc.get_referrers.
3078
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003079Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003080-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003081
Tim Peters25059d32001-12-07 20:35:43 +00003082- Functions in the os.spawn() family now release the global interpreter
3083 lock around calling the platform spawn. They should always have done
3084 this, but did not before 2.2c1. Multithreaded programs calling
3085 an os.spawn function with P_WAIT will no longer block all Python threads
3086 until the spawned program completes. It's possible that some programs
3087 relies on blocking, although more likely by accident than by design.
3088
Martin v. Löwis3a89b2b2001-11-25 14:35:58 +00003089- webbrowser defaults to netscape.exe on OS/2 now.
3090
Martin v. Löwis652e1912001-11-25 14:50:56 +00003091- Tix.ResizeHandle exposes detach_widget, hide, and show.
3092
Martin v. Löwis714d2e22001-12-02 12:26:03 +00003093- The charset alias windows_1252 has been added.
3094
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003095- types.StringTypes is a tuple containing the defined string types;
3096 usually this will be (str, unicode), but if Python was compiled
3097 without Unicode support it will be just (str,).
3098
3099- The pulldom and minidom modules were synchronized to PyXML.
3100
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003101Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003102-----------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003103
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003104- A new script called Tools/scripts/google.py was added, which fires
3105 off a search on Google.
3106
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003107Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003108-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003109
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003110- Note that release builds of Python should arrange to define the
3111 preprocessor symbol NDEBUG on the command line (or equivalent).
3112 In the 2.2 pre-release series we tried to define this by magic in
3113 Python.h instead, but it proved to cause problems for extension
3114 authors. The Unix, Windows and Mac builds now all define NDEBUG in
3115 release builds via cmdline (or equivalent) instead. Ports to
3116 other platforms should do likewise.
3117
Jack Jansen1999ef42001-12-06 21:47:20 +00003118- It is no longer necessary to use --with-suffix when building on a
3119 case-insensitive file system (such as Mac OS X HFS+). In the build
3120 directory an extension is used, but not in the installed python.
3121
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003122C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003123-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003124
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00003125- New function PyDict_MergeFromSeq2() exposes the builtin dict
3126 constructor's logic for updating a dictionary from an iterable object
3127 producing key-value pairs.
3128
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00003129- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() requires that the number of entries in
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00003130 the keyword list equal the number of argument specifiers. This
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00003131 wasn't checked correctly, and PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords could even
3132 dump core in some bad cases. This has been repaired. As a result,
3133 PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords may raise RuntimeError in bad cases that
3134 previously went unchallenged.
3135
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003136New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003137-------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003138
3139Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003140-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003141
3142Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003143-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003144
3145Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003146----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003147
Jack Jansenffa260f2001-12-06 21:14:00 +00003148- In unix-Python on Mac OS X (and darwin) sys.platform is now "darwin",
3149 without any trailing digits.
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003150
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003151- Changed logic for finding python home in Mac OS X framework Pythons.
3152 Now sys.executable points to the executable again, in stead of to
3153 the shared library. The latter is used only for locating the python
3154 home.
3155
3156
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003157What's New in Python 2.2b2?
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003158===========================
3159
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003160*Release date: 16-Nov-2001*
3161
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003162Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003163--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003164
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00003165- Multiple inheritance mixing new-style and classic classes in the
3166 list of base classes is now allowed, so this works now:
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00003167
3168 class Classic: pass
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00003169 class Mixed(Classic, object): pass
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00003170
3171 The MRO (method resolution order) for each base class is respected
3172 according to its kind, but the MRO for the derived class is computed
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003173 using new-style MRO rules if any base class is a new-style class.
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00003174 This needs to be documented.
3175
Tim Petersa427a2b2001-10-29 22:25:45 +00003176- The new builtin dictionary() constructor, and dictionary type, have
3177 been renamed to dict. This reflects a decade of common usage.
3178
Guido van Rossum3fc08d22001-11-15 20:33:10 +00003179- dict() now accepts an iterable object producing 2-sequences. For
3180 example, dict(d.items()) == d for any dictionary d. The argument,
3181 and the elements of the argument, can be any iterable objects.
3182
Guido van Rossum7ad2d1e2001-10-29 22:11:00 +00003183- New-style classes can now have a __del__ method, which is called
3184 when the instance is deleted (just like for classic classes).
3185
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003186- Assignment to object.__dict__ is now possible, for objects that are
3187 instances of new-style classes that have a __dict__ (unless the base
3188 class forbids it).
3189
Guido van Rossumc8e56452001-10-22 00:43:43 +00003190- Methods of built-in types now properly check for keyword arguments
3191 (formerly these were silently ignored). The only built-in methods
3192 that take keyword arguments are __call__, __init__ and __new__.
3193
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00003194- The socket function has been converted to a type; see below.
3195
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003196Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003197-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003198
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00003199- Assignment to __debug__ raises SyntaxError at compile-time. This
3200 was promised when 2.1c1 was released as "What's New in Python 2.1c1"
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003201 (see below) says.
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00003202
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003203- Clarified the error messages for unsupported operands to an operator
3204 (like 1 + '').
3205
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003206Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003207-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003208
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00003209- mmap has a new keyword argument, "access", allowing a uniform way for
3210 both Windows and Unix users to create read-only, write-through and
3211 copy-on-write memory mappings. This was previously possible only on
3212 Unix. A new keyword argument was required to support this in a
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003213 uniform way because the mmap() signatures had diverged across
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00003214 platforms. Thanks to Jay T Miller for repairing this!
3215
Tim Peters169ded02001-11-03 19:57:21 +00003216- By default, the gc.garbage list now contains only those instances in
3217 unreachable cycles that have __del__ methods; in 2.1 it contained all
3218 instances in unreachable cycles. "Instances" here has been generalized
3219 to include instances of both new-style and old-style classes.
3220
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003221- The socket module defines a new method for socket objects,
3222 sendall(). This is like send() but may make multiple calls to
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00003223 send() until all data has been sent. Also, the socket function has
3224 been converted to a subclassable type, like list and tuple (etc.)
3225 before it; socket and SocketType are now the same thing.
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003226
3227- Various bugfixes to the curses module. There is now a test suite
3228 for the curses module (you have to run it manually).
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00003229
Guido van Rossum692adf12001-10-30 03:03:03 +00003230- binascii.b2a_base64 no longer places an arbitrary restriction of 57
3231 bytes on its input.
3232
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003233Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003234-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003235
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00003236- tkFileDialog exposes a Directory class and askdirectory
Martin v. Löwis25ee87c2001-11-07 22:38:08 +00003237 convenience function.
3238
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00003239- Symbolic group names in regular expressions must be unique. For
3240 example, the regexp r'(?P<abc>)(?P<abc>)' is not allowed, because a
3241 single name can't mean both "group 1" and "group 2" simultaneously.
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003242 Python 2.2 detects this error at regexp compilation time;
3243 previously, the error went undetected, and results were
3244 unpredictable. Also in sre, the pattern.split(), pattern.sub(), and
3245 pattern.subn() methods have been rewritten in C. Also, an
3246 experimental function/method finditer() has been added, which works
3247 like findall() but returns an iterator.
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00003248
Martin v. Löwisb7b32602001-11-02 23:48:20 +00003249- Tix exposes more commands through the classes DirSelectBox,
3250 DirSelectDialog, ListNoteBook, Meter, CheckList, and the
3251 methods tix_addbitmapdir, tix_cget, tix_configure, tix_filedialog,
3252 tix_getbitmap, tix_getimage, tix_option_get, and tix_resetoptions.
3253
Tim Peters98791af2001-10-23 01:59:54 +00003254- Traceback objects are now scanned by cyclic garbage collection, so
3255 cycles created by casual use of sys.exc_info() no longer cause
3256 permanent memory leaks (provided garbage collection is enabled).
3257
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00003258- os.extsep -- a new variable needed by the RISCOS support. It is the
3259 separator used by extensions, and is '.' on all platforms except
3260 RISCOS, where it is '/'. There is no need to use this variable
3261 unless you have a masochistic desire to port your code to RISCOS.
3262
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003263- mimetypes.py has optional support for non-standard, but commonly
3264 found types. guess_type() and guess_extension() now accept an
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003265 optional 'strict' flag, defaulting to true, which controls whether
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003266 recognize non-standard types or not. A few non-standard types we
3267 know about have been added. Also, when run as a script, there are
3268 new -l and -e options.
3269
3270- statcache is now deprecated.
3271
3272- email.Utils.formatdate() now produces the preferred RFC 2822 style
3273 dates with numeric timezones (it used to produce obsolete dates
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003274 hard coded to "GMT" timezone). An optional 'localtime' flag is
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003275 added to produce dates in the local timezone, with daylight savings
3276 time properly taken into account.
3277
3278- In pickle and cPickle, instead of masking errors in load() by
3279 transforming them into SystemError, we let the original exception
3280 propagate out. Also, implement support for __safe_for_unpickling__
3281 in pickle, as it already was supported in cPickle.
3282
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003283Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003284-----------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003285
3286Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003287-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003288
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003289- The dbm module is built using libdb1 if available. The bsddb module
3290 is built with libdb3 if available.
3291
3292- Misc/Makefile.pre.in has been removed by BDFL pronouncement.
3293
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003294C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003295-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003296
Tim Peters1fc240e2001-10-26 05:06:50 +00003297- New function PySequence_Fast_GET_SIZE() returns the size of a non-
3298 NULL result from PySequence_Fast(), more quickly than calling
3299 PySequence_Size().
3300
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003301- New argument unpacking function PyArg_UnpackTuple() added.
3302
3303- New functions PyObject_CallFunctionObjArgs() and
3304 PyObject_CallMethodObjArgs() have been added to make it more
3305 convenient and efficient to call functions and methods from C.
3306
3307- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() no longer masks errors, so it's
3308 possible that this will propagate errors it didn't before.
3309
3310- New function PyObject_CheckReadBuffer(), which returns true if its
3311 argument supports the single-segment readable buffer interface.
3312
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003313New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003314-------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003315
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00003316- We've finally confirmed that this release builds on HP-UX 11.00,
3317 *with* threads, and passes the test suite.
3318
Tim Peters7a33d8b2001-11-05 02:51:07 +00003319- Thanks to a series of patches from Michael Muller, Python may build
3320 again under OS/2 Visual Age C++.
3321
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00003322- Updated RISCOS port by Dietmar Schwertberger.
3323
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003324Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003325-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003326
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00003327- Added a test script for the curses module. It isn't run automatically;
3328 regrtest.py must be run with '-u curses' to enable it.
3329
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003330Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003331-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003332
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003333Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003334----
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003335
3336- PythonScript has been moved to unsupported and is slated to be
3337 removed completely in the next release.
3338
3339- It should now be possible to build applets that work on both OS9 and
3340 OSX.
3341
3342- The core is now linked with CoreServices not Carbon; as a side
3343 result, default 8bit encoding on OSX is now ASCII.
3344
3345- Python should now build on OSX 10.1.1
3346
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003347
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003348What's New in Python 2.2b1?
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003349===========================
3350
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003351*Release date: 19-Oct-2001*
3352
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003353Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003354--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003355
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00003356- New-style classes are now always dynamic (except for built-in and
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00003357 extension types). There is no longer a performance penalty, and I
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00003358 no longer see another reason to keep this baggage around. One relic
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00003359 remains: the __dict__ of a new-style class is a read-only proxy; you
3360 must set the class's attribute to modify it. As a consequence, the
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00003361 __defined__ attribute of new-style types no longer exists, for lack
3362 of need: there is once again only one __dict__ (although in the
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00003363 future a __cache__ may be resurrected with a similar function, if I
3364 can prove that it actually speeds things up).
Guido van Rossum50fda3b2001-10-04 19:46:06 +00003365
Tim Peters1c9ca872001-10-04 06:43:12 +00003366- C.__doc__ now works as expected for new-style classes (in 2.2a4 it
3367 always returned None, even when there was a class docstring).
3368
3369- doctest now finds and runs docstrings attached to new-style classes,
3370 class methods, static methods, and properties.
3371
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003372Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003373-----------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003374
Guido van Rossuma8bcf802001-10-15 15:53:58 +00003375- A very subtle syntactical pitfall in list comprehensions was fixed.
3376 For example: [a+b for a in 'abc', for b in 'def']. The comma in
3377 this example is a mistake. Previously, this would silently let 'a'
3378 iterate over the singleton tuple ('abc',), yielding ['abcd', 'abce',
3379 'abcf'] rather than the intended ['ad', 'ae', 'af', 'bd', 'be',
3380 'bf', 'cd', 'ce', 'cf']. Now, this is flagged as a syntax error.
3381 Note that [a for a in <singleton>] is a convoluted way to say
3382 [<singleton>] anyway, so it's not like any expressiveness is lost.
3383
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003384- getattr(obj, name, default) now only catches AttributeError, as
3385 documented, rather than returning the default value for all
3386 exceptions (which could mask bugs in a __getattr__ hook, for
3387 example).
3388
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00003389- Weak reference objects are now part of the core and offer a C API.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00003390 A bug which could allow a core dump when binary operations involved
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00003391 proxy reference has been fixed. weakref.ReferenceError is now a
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003392 built-in exception.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00003393
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00003394- unicode(obj) now behaves more like str(obj), accepting arbitrary
3395 objects, and calling a __unicode__ method if it exists.
3396 unicode(obj, encoding) and unicode(obj, encoding, errors) still
Marc-André Lemburgb5507ec2001-10-19 12:02:29 +00003397 require an 8-bit string or character buffer argument.
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00003398
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003399- isinstance() now allows any object as the first argument and a
3400 class, a type or something with a __bases__ tuple attribute for the
3401 second argument. The second argument may also be a tuple of a
3402 class, type, or something with __bases__, in which case isinstance()
3403 will return true if the first argument is an instance of any of the
3404 things contained in the second argument tuple. E.g.
3405
3406 isinstance(x, (A, B))
3407
3408 returns true if x is an instance of A or B.
3409
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003410Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003411-----------------
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003412
3413- thread.start_new_thread() now returns the thread ID (previously None).
3414
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00003415- binascii has now two quopri support functions, a2b_qp and b2a_qp.
3416
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00003417- readline now supports setting the startup_hook and the
3418 pre_event_hook, and adds the add_history() function.
Martin v. Löwis0daad592001-09-30 21:09:59 +00003419
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00003420- os and posix supports chroot(), setgroups() and unsetenv() where
3421 available. The stat(), fstat(), statvfs() and fstatvfs() functions
3422 now return "pseudo-sequences" -- the various fields can now be
3423 accessed as attributes (e.g. os.stat("/").st_mtime) but for
3424 backwards compatibility they also behave as a fixed-length sequence.
3425 Some platform-specific fields (e.g. st_rdev) are only accessible as
Guido van Rossum98bf58f2001-10-18 20:34:25 +00003426 attributes.
3427
3428- time: localtime(), gmtime() and strptime() now return a
3429 pseudo-sequence similar to the os.stat() return value, with
3430 attributes like tm_year etc.
Martin v. Löwis16628c92001-10-04 22:46:41 +00003431
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003432- Decompression objects in the zlib module now accept an optional
3433 second parameter to decompress() that specifies the maximum amount
3434 of memory to use for the uncompressed data.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003435
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00003436- optional SSL support in the socket module now exports OpenSSL
3437 functions RAND_add(), RAND_egd(), and RAND_status(). These calls
3438 are useful on platforms like Solaris where OpenSSL does not
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003439 automatically seed its PRNG. Also, the keyfile and certfile
3440 arguments to socket.ssl() are now optional.
3441
3442- posixmodule (and by extension, the os module on POSIX platforms) now
3443 exports O_LARGEFILE, O_DIRECT, O_DIRECTORY, and O_NOFOLLOW.
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00003444
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003445Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003446-------
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00003447
Tim Peters7402f792001-10-02 03:53:41 +00003448- doctest now excludes functions and classes not defined by the module
3449 being tested, thanks to Tim Hochberg.
3450
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00003451- HotShot, a new profiler implemented using a C-based callback, has
3452 been added. This substantially reduces the overhead of profiling,
3453 but it is still quite preliminary. Support modules and
3454 documentation will be added in upcoming releases (before 2.2 final).
3455
Guido van Rossumc4b09b42001-10-04 10:19:00 +00003456- profile now produces correct output in situations where an exception
3457 raised in Python is cleared by C code (e.g. hasattr()). This used
3458 to cause wrong output, including spurious claims of recursive
3459 functions and attribution of time spent to the wrong function.
3460
Tim Peters0a1fc4e2001-10-07 03:12:08 +00003461 The code and documentation for the derived OldProfile and HotProfile
3462 profiling classes was removed. The code hasn't worked for years (if
3463 you tried to use them, they raised exceptions). OldProfile
3464 intended to reproduce the behavior of the profiler Python used more
3465 than 7 years ago, and isn't interesting anymore. HotProfile intended
3466 to provide a faster profiler (but producing less information), and
3467 that's a worthy goal we intend to meet via a different approach (but
3468 without losing information).
3469
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00003470- Profile.calibrate() has a new implementation that should deliver
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00003471 a much better system-specific calibration constant. The constant can
3472 now be specified in an instance constructor, or as a Profile class or
3473 instance variable, instead of by editing profile.py's source code.
3474 Calibration must still be done manually (see the docs for the profile
3475 module).
3476
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003477 Note that Profile.calibrate() must be overridden by subclasses.
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00003478 Improving the accuracy required exploiting detailed knowledge of
3479 profiler internals; the earlier method abstracted away the details
3480 and measured a simplified model instead, but consequently computed
3481 a constant too small by a factor of 2 on some modern machines.
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00003482
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00003483- quopri's encode and decode methods take an optional header parameter,
Jeremy Hylton6f543b62001-10-16 20:42:52 +00003484 which indicates whether output is intended for the header 'Q'
3485 encoding.
3486
Guido van Rossuma5343cc2001-10-18 18:02:07 +00003487- The SocketServer.ThreadingMixIn class now closes the request after
3488 finish_request() returns. (Not when it errors out though.)
3489
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003490- The nntplib module's NNTP.body() method has grown a 'file' argument
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003491 to allow saving the message body to a file.
3492
3493- The email package has added a class email.Parser.HeaderParser which
3494 only parses headers and does not recurse into the message's body.
3495 Also, the module/class MIMEAudio has been added for representing
3496 audio data (contributed by Anthony Baxter).
3497
3498- ftplib should be able to handle files > 2GB.
3499
3500- ConfigParser.getboolean() now also interprets TRUE, FALSE, YES, NO,
3501 ON, and OFF.
3502
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00003503- xml.dom.minidom NodeList objects now support the length attribute
3504 and item() method as required by the DOM specifications.
3505
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00003506Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003507-----------
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00003508
3509- Demo/dns was removed. It no longer serves any purpose; a package
3510 derived from it is now maintained by Anthony Baxter, see
3511 http://PyDNS.SourceForge.net.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003512
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003513- The freeze tool has been made more robust, and two new options have
3514 been added: -X and -E.
3515
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003516Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003517-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003518
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003519- configure will use CXX in LINKCC if CXX is used to build main() and
3520 the system requires to link a C++ main using the C++ compiler.
3521
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003522C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003523-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003524
Guido van Rossum6c4bce32001-10-18 19:20:25 +00003525- The documentation for the tp_compare slot is updated to require that
3526 the return value must be -1, 0, 1; an arbitrary number <0 or >0 is
3527 not correct. This is not yet enforced but will be enforced in
3528 Python 2.3; even later, we may use -2 to indicate errors and +2 for
3529 "NotImplemented". Right now, -1 should be used for an error return.
3530
Tim Petersd38b1c72001-09-30 05:09:37 +00003531- PyLong_AsLongLong() now accepts int (as well as long) arguments.
3532 Consequently, PyArg_ParseTuple's 'L' code also accepts int (as well
3533 as long) arguments.
3534
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00003535- PyThread_start_new_thread() now returns a long int giving the thread
3536 ID, if one can be calculated; it returns -1 for error, 0 if no
3537 thread ID is calculated (this is an incompatible change, but only
3538 the thread module used this API). This code has only really been
3539 tested on Linux and Windows; other platforms please beware (and
3540 report any bugs or strange behavior).
3541
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00003542- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() no longer accepts Unicode objects as
3543 input.
3544
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003545New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003546-------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003547
3548Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003549-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003550
3551Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003552-------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003553
Tim Peters04cf1d32001-10-09 22:39:40 +00003554- Installer: If you install IDLE, and don't disable file-extension
3555 registration, a new "Edit with IDLE" context (right-click) menu entry
3556 is created for .py and .pyw files.
3557
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003558- The signal module now supports SIGBREAK on Windows, thanks to Steven
3559 Scott. Note that SIGBREAK is unique to Windows. The default SIGBREAK
3560 action remains to call Win32 ExitProcess(). This can be changed via
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003561 signal.signal(). For example::
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003562
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003563 # Make Ctrl+Break raise KeyboardInterrupt, like Python's default Ctrl+C
3564 # (SIGINT) behavior.
3565 import signal
3566 signal.signal(signal.SIGBREAK, signal.default_int_handler)
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003567
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003568 try:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003569 while 1:
3570 pass
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003571 except KeyboardInterrupt:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003572 # We get here on Ctrl+C or Ctrl+Break now; if we had not changed
3573 # SIGBREAK, only on Ctrl+C (and Ctrl+Break would terminate the
3574 # program without the possibility for any Python-level cleanup).
3575 print "Clean exit"
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003576
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003577
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003578What's New in Python 2.2a4?
3579===========================
3580
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003581*Release date: 28-Sep-2001*
3582
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003583Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003584--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003585
3586- pydoc and inspect are now aware of new-style classes;
3587 e.g. help(list) at the interactive prompt now shows proper
3588 documentation for all operations on list objects.
3589
3590- Applications using Jim Fulton's ExtensionClass module can now safely
3591 be used with Python 2.2. In particular, Zope 2.4.1 now works with
3592 Python 2.2 (as well as with Python 2.1.1). The Demo/metaclass
3593 examples also work again. It is hoped that Gtk and Boost also work
3594 with 2.2a4 and beyond. (If you can confirm this, please write
3595 webmaster@python.org; if there are still problems, please open a bug
3596 report on SourceForge.)
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003597
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00003598- property() now takes 4 keyword arguments: fget, fset, fdel and doc.
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003599 These map to read-only attributes 'fget', 'fset', 'fdel', and '__doc__'
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00003600 in the constructed property object. fget, fset and fdel weren't
3601 discoverable from Python in 2.2a3. __doc__ is new, and allows to
3602 associate a docstring with a property.
3603
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003604- Comparison overloading is now more completely implemented. For
3605 example, a str subclass instance can properly be compared to a str
3606 instance, and it can properly overload comparison. Ditto for most
3607 other built-in object types.
3608
3609- The repr() of new-style classes has changed; instead of <type
3610 'M.Foo'> a new-style class is now rendered as <class 'M.Foo'>,
3611 *except* for built-in types, which are still rendered as <type
3612 'Foo'> (to avoid upsetting existing code that might parse or
3613 otherwise rely on repr() of certain type objects).
3614
3615- The repr() of new-style objects is now always <Foo object at XXX>;
3616 previously, it was sometimes <Foo instance at XXX>.
3617
3618- For new-style classes, what was previously called __getattr__ is now
3619 called __getattribute__. This method, if defined, is called for
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00003620 *every* attribute access. A new __getattr__ hook more similar to the
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003621 one in classic classes is defined which is called only if regular
3622 attribute access raises AttributeError; to catch *all* attribute
3623 access, you can use __getattribute__ (for new-style classes). If
3624 both are defined, __getattribute__ is called first, and if it raises
3625 AttributeError, __getattr__ is called.
3626
3627- The __class__ attribute of new-style objects can be assigned to.
3628 The new class must have the same C-level object layout as the old
3629 class.
3630
3631- The builtin file type can be subclassed now. In the usual pattern,
3632 "file" is the name of the builtin type, and file() is a new builtin
3633 constructor, with the same signature as the builtin open() function.
3634 file() is now the preferred way to open a file.
3635
3636- Previously, __new__ would only see sequential arguments passed to
3637 the type in a constructor call; __init__ would see both sequential
3638 and keyword arguments. This made no sense whatsoever any more, so
3639 now both __new__ and __init__ see all arguments.
3640
3641- Previously, hash() applied to an instance of a subclass of str or
3642 unicode always returned 0. This has been repaired.
3643
3644- Previously, an operation on an instance of a subclass of an
3645 immutable type (int, long, float, complex, tuple, str, unicode),
3646 where the subtype didn't override the operation (and so the
3647 operation was handled by the builtin type), could return that
3648 instance instead a value of the base type. For example, if s was of
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003649 a str subclass type, s[:] returned s as-is. Now it returns a str
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003650 with the same value as s.
3651
Barry Warsaw86fbaf82001-09-28 15:26:12 +00003652- Provisional support for pickling new-style objects has been added.
3653
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003654Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003655----
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003656
Tim Peters2c9aa5e2001-09-23 04:06:05 +00003657- file.writelines() now accepts any iterable object producing strings.
3658
Marc-André Lemburgaefd7662001-09-20 12:59:37 +00003659- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() now works very much like
3660 PyObject_Str(obj) in that it tries to use __str__/tp_str
3661 on the object if the object is not a string or buffer. This
3662 makes unicode() behave like str() when applied to non-string/buffer
3663 objects.
3664
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00003665- PyFile_WriteObject now passes Unicode objects to the file's write
3666 method. As a result, all file-like objects which may be the target
Martin v. Löwis2777c022001-09-19 13:47:32 +00003667 of a print statement must support Unicode objects, i.e. they must
3668 at least convert them into ASCII strings.
3669
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003670- Thread scheduling on Solaris should be improved; it is no longer
3671 necessary to insert a small sleep at the start of a thread in order
3672 to let other runnable threads be scheduled.
3673
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003674Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003675-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003676
Marc-André Lemburgbf990172001-09-27 14:17:33 +00003677- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
3678 read character buffer compatible objects for their .write() methods.
3679 These objects are converted to strings and then handled as such
3680 by the instances.
3681
Barry Warsaw2f600732001-09-24 04:28:10 +00003682- The "email" package has been added. This is basically a port of the
3683 mimelib package <http://sf.net/projects/mimelib> with API changes
3684 and some implementations updated to use iterators and generators.
3685
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00003686- difflib.ndiff() and difflib.Differ.compare() are generators now. This
3687 restores the ability of Tools/scripts/ndiff.py to start producing output
3688 before the entire comparison is complete.
3689
Barry Warsaw58b072d2001-09-22 04:44:21 +00003690- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
3691 iteration just like file objects (i.e. their .readline() method is
3692 called for each iteration until it returns an empty string).
3693
Marc-André Lemburg494f2ae2001-09-19 11:33:31 +00003694- The codecs module has grown four new helper APIs to access
3695 builtin codecs: getencoder(), getdecoder(), getreader(),
3696 getwriter().
3697
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003698- SimpleXMLRPCServer: a new module (based upon SimpleHTMLServer)
3699 simplifies writing XML RPC servers.
3700
Barry Warsaw647d5e82001-09-28 17:01:02 +00003701- os.path.realpath(): a new function that returns the absolute pathname
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003702 after interpretation of symbolic links. On non-Unix systems, this
3703 is an alias for os.path.abspath().
3704
Tim Peters16a77ad2001-09-08 04:00:12 +00003705- operator.indexOf() (PySequence_Index() in the C API) now works with any
3706 iterable object.
3707
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003708- smtplib now supports various authentication and security features of
3709 the SMTP protocol through the new login() and starttls() methods.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00003710
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003711- hmac: a new module implementing keyed hashing for message
3712 authentication.
3713
3714- mimetypes now recognizes more extensions and file types. At the
3715 same time, some mappings not sanctioned by IANA were removed.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00003716
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003717- The "compiler" package has been brought up to date to the state of
Guido van Rossumc9ed5dc2001-09-20 05:30:24 +00003718 Python 2.2 bytecode generation. It has also been promoted from a
3719 Tool to a standard library package. (Tools/compiler still exists as
3720 a sample driver.)
3721
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003722Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003723-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003724
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003725- Large file support (LFS) is now automatic when the platform supports
3726 it; no more manual configuration tweaks are needed. On Linux, at
3727 least, it's possible to have a system whose C library supports large
3728 files but whose kernel doesn't; in this case, large file support is
3729 still enabled but doesn't do you any good unless you upgrade your
3730 kernel or share your Python executable with another system whose
3731 kernel has large file support.
3732
3733- The configure script now supplies plausible defaults in a
3734 cross-compilation environment. This doesn't mean that the supplied
3735 values are always correct, or that cross-compilation now works
3736 flawlessly -- but it's a first step (and it shuts up most of
3737 autoconf's warnings about AC_TRY_RUN).
3738
3739- The Unix build is now a bit less chatty, courtesy of the parser
3740 generator. The build is completely silent (except for errors) when
3741 using "make -s", thanks to a -q option to setup.py.
3742
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003743C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003744-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003745
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003746- The "structmember" API now supports some new flag bits to deny read
3747 and/or write access to attributes in restricted execution mode.
3748
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003749New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003750-------------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003751
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003752- Compaq's iPAQ handheld, running the "familiar" Linux distribution
3753 (http://familiar.handhelds.org).
3754
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003755Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003756-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003757
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00003758- The "classic" standard tests, which work by comparing stdout to
3759 an expected-output file under Lib/test/output/, no longer stop at
3760 the first mismatch. Instead the test is run to completion, and a
3761 variant of ndiff-style comparison is used to report all differences.
3762 This is much easier to understand than the previous style of reporting.
3763
3764- The unittest-based standard tests now use regrtest's test_main()
3765 convention, instead of running as a side-effect of merely being
3766 imported. This allows these tests to be run in more natural and
3767 flexible ways as unittests, outside the regrtest framework.
3768
3769- regrtest.py is much better integrated with unittest and doctest now,
3770 especially in regard to reporting errors.
3771
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003772Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003773-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003774
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003775- Large file support now also works for files > 4GB, on filesystems
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00003776 that support it (NTFS under Windows 2000). See "What's New in
3777 Python 2.2a3" for more detail.
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003778
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003779
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003780What's New in Python 2.2a3?
3781===========================
3782
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003783*Release Date: 07-Sep-2001*
3784
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003785Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003786----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003787
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00003788- Conversion of long to float now raises OverflowError if the long is too
3789 big to represent as a C double.
3790
Tim Peters32f453e2001-09-03 08:35:41 +00003791- The 3-argument builtin pow() no longer allows a third non-None argument
3792 if either of the first two arguments is a float, or if both are of
3793 integer types and the second argument is negative (in which latter case
3794 the arguments are converted to float, so this is really the same
3795 restriction).
3796
Tim Peters5d2b77c2001-09-03 05:47:38 +00003797- The builtin dir() now returns more information, and sometimes much
3798 more, generally naming all attributes of an object, and all attributes
3799 reachable from the object via its class, and from its class's base
3800 classes, and so on from them too. Example: in 2.2a2, dir([]) returned
3801 an empty list. In 2.2a3,
3802
3803 >>> dir([])
3804 ['__add__', '__class__', '__contains__', '__delattr__', '__delitem__',
3805 '__eq__', '__ge__', '__getattr__', '__getitem__', '__getslice__',
3806 '__gt__', '__hash__', '__iadd__', '__imul__', '__init__', '__le__',
3807 '__len__', '__lt__', '__mul__', '__ne__', '__new__', '__repr__',
3808 '__rmul__', '__setattr__', '__setitem__', '__setslice__', '__str__',
3809 'append', 'count', 'extend', 'index', 'insert', 'pop', 'remove',
3810 'reverse', 'sort']
3811
3812 dir(module) continues to return only the module's attributes, though.
3813
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003814- Overflowing operations on plain ints now return a long int rather
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003815 than raising OverflowError. This is a partial implementation of PEP
3816 237. You can use -Wdefault::OverflowWarning to enable a warning for
3817 this situation, and -Werror::OverflowWarning to revert to the old
3818 OverflowError exception.
3819
Guido van Rossum61c345f2001-09-04 03:26:15 +00003820- A new command line option, -Q<arg>, is added to control run-time
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003821 warnings for the use of classic division. (See PEP 238.) Possible
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00003822 values are -Qold, -Qwarn, -Qwarnall, and -Qnew. The default is
3823 -Qold, meaning the / operator has its classic meaning and no
3824 warnings are issued. Using -Qwarn issues a run-time warning about
3825 all uses of classic division for int and long arguments; -Qwarnall
3826 also warns about classic division for float and complex arguments
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00003827 (for use with fixdiv.py).
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003828 [Note: the remainder of this item (preserved below) became
3829 obsolete in 2.2c1 -- -Qnew has global effect in 2.2] ::
3830
3831 Using -Qnew is questionable; it turns on new division by default, but
3832 only in the __main__ module. You can usefully combine -Qwarn or
3833 -Qwarnall and -Qnew: this gives the __main__ module new division, and
3834 warns about classic division everywhere else.
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003835
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003836- Many built-in types can now be subclassed. This applies to int,
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003837 long, float, str, unicode, and tuple. (The types complex, list and
3838 dictionary can also be subclassed; this was introduced earlier.)
3839 Note that restrictions apply when subclassing immutable built-in
3840 types: you can only affect the value of the instance by overloading
3841 __new__. You can add mutable attributes, and the subclass instances
3842 will have a __dict__ attribute, but you cannot change the "value"
3843 (as implemented by the base class) of an immutable subclass instance
3844 once it is created.
3845
Guido van Rossumaaf80c82001-09-02 13:44:35 +00003846- The dictionary constructor now takes an optional argument, a
3847 mapping-like object, and initializes the dictionary from its
3848 (key, value) pairs.
3849
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003850- A new built-in type, super, has been added. This facilitates making
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003851 "cooperative super calls" in a multiple inheritance setting. For an
3852 explanation, see http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#cooperation
3853
Guido van Rossum8d7234d2001-09-06 22:02:58 +00003854- A new built-in type, property, has been added. This enables the
3855 creation of "properties". These are attributes implemented by
3856 getter and setter functions (or only one of these for read-only or
3857 write-only attributes), without the need to override __getattr__.
3858 See http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#property
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003859
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003860- The syntax of floating-point and imaginary literals has been
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00003861 liberalized, to allow leading zeroes. Examples of literals now
3862 legal that were SyntaxErrors before:
3863
3864 00.0 0e3 0100j 07.5 00000000000000000008.
3865
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003866- An old tokenizer bug allowed floating point literals with an incomplete
Tim Petersc6d95812001-08-28 20:56:27 +00003867 exponent, such as 1e and 3.1e-. Such literals now raise SyntaxError.
3868
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003869Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003870-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003871
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00003872- telnetlib includes symbolic names for the options, and support for
Martin v. Löwis1da9c572002-11-04 09:56:00 +00003873 setting an option negotiation callback. It also supports processing
3874 of suboptions.
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00003875
Tim Petersa40c7932001-09-05 22:36:56 +00003876- The new C standard no longer requires that math libraries set errno to
3877 ERANGE on overflow. For platform libraries that exploit this new
3878 freedom, Python's overflow-checking was wholly broken. A new overflow-
3879 checking scheme attempts to repair that, but may not be reliable on all
3880 platforms (C doesn't seem to provide anything both useful and portable
3881 in this area anymore).
3882
Martin v. Löwis44f86962001-09-05 13:44:54 +00003883- Asynchronous timeout actions are available through the new class
3884 threading.Timer.
3885
Tim Peters78526162001-09-05 00:53:45 +00003886- math.log and math.log10 now return sensible results for even huge
3887 long arguments. For example, math.log10(10 ** 10000) ~= 10000.0.
3888
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003889- A new function, imp.lock_held(), returns 1 when the import lock is
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00003890 currently held. See the docs for the imp module.
3891
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003892- pickle, cPickle and marshal on 32-bit platforms can now correctly read
Tim Peters82112372001-08-29 02:28:42 +00003893 dumps containing ints written on platforms where Python ints are 8 bytes.
3894 When read on a box where Python ints are 4 bytes, such values are
3895 converted to Python longs.
3896
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003897- In restricted execution mode (using the rexec module), unmarshalling
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003898 code objects is no longer allowed. This plugs a security hole.
3899
Steve Purcell6091cd62001-09-06 16:05:17 +00003900- unittest.TestResult instances no longer store references to tracebacks
3901 generated by test failures. This prevents unexpected dangling references
3902 to objects that should be garbage collected between tests.
3903
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003904Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003905-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003906
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00003907- Tools/scripts/fixdiv.py has been added which can be used to fix
3908 division operators as per PEP 238.
3909
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003910Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003911-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003912
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00003913- If you are an adventurous person using Mac OS X you may want to look at
3914 Mac/OSX. There is a Makefile there that will build Python as a real Mac
3915 application, which can be used for experimenting with Carbon or Cocoa.
3916 Discussion of this on pythonmac-sig, please.
3917
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00003918C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003919-----
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00003920
3921- New function PyObject_Dir(obj), like Python __builtin__.dir(obj).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00003922
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00003923- Note that PyLong_AsDouble can fail! This has always been true, but no
3924 callers checked for it. It's more likely to fail now, because overflow
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003925 errors are properly detected now. The proper way to check::
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00003926
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003927 double x = PyLong_AsDouble(some_long_object);
3928 if (x == -1.0 && PyErr_Occurred()) {
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003929 /* The conversion failed. */
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003930 }
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00003931
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003932- The GC API has been changed. Extensions that use the old API will still
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00003933 compile but will not participate in GC. To upgrade an extension
3934 module:
3935
3936 - rename Py_TPFLAGS_GC to PyTPFLAGS_HAVE_GC
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00003937
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00003938 - use PyObject_GC_New or PyObject_GC_NewVar to allocate objects and
3939 PyObject_GC_Del to deallocate them
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00003940
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00003941 - rename PyObject_GC_Init to PyObject_GC_Track and PyObject_GC_Fini
3942 to PyObject_GC_UnTrack
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00003943
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00003944 - remove PyGC_HEAD_SIZE from object size calculations
3945
3946 - remove calls to PyObject_AS_GC and PyObject_FROM_GC
3947
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003948- Two new functions: PyString_FromFormat() and PyString_FromFormatV().
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003949 These can be used safely to construct string objects from a
3950 sprintf-style format string (similar to the format string supported
3951 by PyErr_Format()).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00003952
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003953New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003954-------------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003955
Tim Petersb7da0902001-09-02 23:01:43 +00003956- Stephen Hansen contributed patches sufficient to get a clean compile
3957 under Borland C (Windows), but he reports problems running it and ran
3958 out of time to complete the port. Volunteers? Expect a MemoryError
3959 when importing the types module; this is probably shallow, and
3960 causing later failures too.
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003961
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003962Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003963-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003964
3965Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003966-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003967
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00003968- Large file support is now enabled on Win32 platforms as well as on
3969 Win64. This means that, for example, you can use f.tell() and f.seek()
3970 to manipulate files larger than 2 gigabytes (provided you have enough
3971 disk space, and are using a Windows filesystem that supports large
Tim Peters9a9471c2001-09-11 23:18:51 +00003972 partitions). Windows filesystem limits: FAT has a 2GB (gigabyte)
3973 filesize limit, and large file support makes no difference there.
3974 FAT32's limit is 4GB, and files >= 2GB are easier to use from Python now.
3975 NTFS has no practical limit on file size, and files of any size can be
3976 used from Python now.
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00003977
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003978- The w9xpopen hack is now used on Windows NT and 2000 too when COMPSPEC
Tim Peters402d5982001-08-27 06:37:48 +00003979 points to command.com (patch from Brian Quinlan).
3980
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003981
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00003982What's New in Python 2.2a2?
3983===========================
3984
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003985*Release Date: 22-Aug-2001*
3986
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00003987Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003988-----
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00003989
Barry Warsaw18b2ecf2001-08-22 20:26:56 +00003990- Tim Peters developed a brand new Windows installer using Wise 8.1,
3991 generously donated to us by Wise Solutions.
3992
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00003993- configure supports a new option --enable-unicode, with the values
3994 ucs2 and ucs4 (new in 2.2a1). With --disable-unicode, the Unicode
3995 type and supporting code is completely removed from the interpreter.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00003996
Jack Jansen32ce0cd2001-08-21 19:28:20 +00003997- A new configure option --enable-framework builds a Mac OS X framework,
3998 which "make frameworkinstall" will install. This provides a starting
3999 point for more mac-like functionality, join pythonmac-sig@python.org
4000 if you are interested in helping.
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004001
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004002- The NeXT platform is no longer supported.
4003
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004004- The 'new' module is now statically linked.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004005
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004006Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004007-----
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004008
4009- The new Tools/scripts/cleanfuture.py can be used to automatically
Andrew M. Kuchlingb0532092001-08-15 15:54:56 +00004010 edit out obsolete future statements from Python source code. See
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004011 the module docstring for details.
4012
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004013Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004014-----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004015
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004016- regrtest.py now knows which tests are expected to be skipped on some
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004017 platforms, allowing to give clearer test result output. regrtest
4018 also has optional --use/-u switch to run normally disabled tests
4019 which require network access or consume significant disk resources.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004020
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004021- Several new tests in the standard test suite, with special thanks to
4022 Nick Mathewson.
4023
4024Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004025----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004026
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004027- The floor division operator // has been added as outlined in PEP
4028 238. The / operator still provides classic division (and will until
4029 Python 3.0) unless "from __future__ import division" is included, in
4030 which case the / operator will provide true division. The operator
4031 module provides truediv() and floordiv() functions. Augmented
4032 assignment variants are included, as are the equivalent overloadable
4033 methods and C API methods. See the PEP for a full discussion:
4034 <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0238.html>
4035
Tim Peters6cd6a822001-08-17 22:11:27 +00004036- Future statements are now effective in simulated interactive shells
4037 (like IDLE). This should "just work" by magic, but read Michael
4038 Hudson's "Future statements in simulated shells" PEP 264 for full
4039 details: <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0264.html>.
4040
Guido van Rossumf86ddd22001-08-17 21:21:04 +00004041- The type/class unification (PEP 252-253) was integrated into the
4042 trunk and is not so tentative any more (the exact specification of
4043 some features is still tentative). A lot of work has done on fixing
4044 bugs and adding robustness and features (performance still has to
4045 come a long way).
4046
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00004047- Warnings about a mismatch in the Python API during extension import
4048 now use the Python warning framework (which makes it possible to
4049 write filters for these warnings).
4050
Barry Warsaw9b3be7f2001-08-14 18:35:02 +00004051- A function's __dict__ (aka func_dict) will now always be a
4052 dictionary. It used to be possible to delete it or set it to None,
4053 but now both actions raise TypeErrors. It is still legal to set it
4054 to a dictionary object. Getting func.__dict__ before any attributes
4055 have been assigned now returns an empty dictionary instead of None.
4056
Guido van Rossum32aa5d22001-09-05 18:43:35 +00004057- A new command line option, -E, was added which disables the use of
4058 all environment variables, or at least those that are specifically
4059 significant to Python. Usually those have a name starting with
4060 "PYTHON". This was used to fix a problem where the tests fail if
4061 the user happens to have PYTHONHOME or PYTHONPATH pointing to an
4062 older distribution.
4063
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004064Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004065-------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004066
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004067- New class Differ and new functions ndiff() and restore() in difflib.py.
4068 These package the algorithms used by the popular Tools/scripts/ndiff.py,
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004069 for programmatic reuse.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004070
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004071- New function xml.sax.saxutils.quoteattr(): Quote an XML attribute
4072 value using the minimal quoting required for the value; more
4073 reliable than using xml.sax.saxutils.escape() for attribute values.
4074
4075- Readline completion support for cmd.Cmd was added.
4076
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004077- Calling os.tempnam() or os.tmpnam() generate RuntimeWarnings.
4078
4079- Added function threading.BoundedSemaphore()
4080
4081- Added Ka-Ping Yee's cgitb.py module.
4082
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004083- The 'new' module now exposes the CO_xxx flags.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004084
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00004085- The gc module offers the get_referents function.
4086
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004087New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004088-------------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004089
4090C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004091-----
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004092
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00004093- Two new APIs PyOS_snprintf() and PyOS_vsnprintf() were added
4094 which provide a cross-platform implementations for the
4095 relatively new snprintf()/vsnprintf() C lib APIs. In contrast to
4096 the standard sprintf() and vsprintf() C lib APIs, these versions
4097 apply bounds checking on the used buffer which enhances protection
4098 against buffer overruns.
4099
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00004100- Unicode APIs now use name mangling to assure that mixing interpreters
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00004101 and extensions using different Unicode widths is rendered next to
4102 impossible. Trying to import an incompatible Unicode-aware extension
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00004103 will result in an ImportError. Unicode extensions writers must make
4104 sure to check the Unicode width compatibility in their extensions by
4105 using at least one of the mangled Unicode APIs in the extension.
4106
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004107- Two new flags METH_NOARGS and METH_O are available in method definition
4108 tables to simplify implementation of methods with no arguments and a
4109 single untyped argument. Calling such methods is more efficient than
4110 calling corresponding METH_VARARGS methods. METH_OLDARGS is now
4111 deprecated.
4112
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00004113Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004114-------
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00004115
4116- "import module" now compiles module.pyw if it exists and nothing else
4117 relevant is found.
4118
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004119
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00004120What's New in Python 2.2a1?
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004121===========================
4122
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004123*Release date: 18-Jul-2001*
4124
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004125Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004126----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004127
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00004128- TENTATIVELY, a large amount of code implementing much of what's
4129 described in PEP 252 (Making Types Look More Like Classes) and PEP
4130 253 (Subtyping Built-in Types) was added. This will be released
4131 with Python 2.2a1. Documentation will be provided separately
4132 through http://www.python.org/2.2/. The purpose of releasing this
4133 with Python 2.2a1 is to test backwards compatibility. It is
4134 possible, though not likely, that a decision is made not to release
4135 this code as part of 2.2 final, if any serious backwards
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004136 incompatibilities are found during alpha testing that cannot be
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00004137 repaired.
4138
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00004139- Generators were added; this is a new way to create an iterator (see
Tim Peters11a0d102001-07-17 18:48:00 +00004140 below) using what looks like a simple function containing one or
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00004141 more 'yield' statements. See PEP 255. Since this adds a new
4142 keyword to the language, this feature must be enabled by including a
4143 future statement: "from __future__ import generators" (see PEP 236).
4144 Generators will become a standard feature in a future release
4145 (probably 2.3). Without this future statement, 'yield' remains an
4146 ordinary identifier, but a warning is issued each time it is used.
4147 (These warnings currently don't conform to the warnings framework of
4148 PEP 230; we intend to fix this in 2.2a2.)
4149
Marc-André Lemburg12e74b32001-05-22 08:58:23 +00004150- The UTF-16 codec was modified to be more RFC compliant. It will now
4151 only remove BOM characters at the start of the string and then
4152 only if running in native mode (UTF-16-LE and -BE won't remove a
4153 leading BMO character).
4154
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00004155- Strings now have a new method .decode() to complement the already
4156 existing .encode() method. These two methods provide direct access
4157 to the corresponding decoders and encoders of the registered codecs.
4158
4159 To enhance the usability of the .encode() method, the special
4160 casing of Unicode object return values was dropped (Unicode objects
4161 were auto-magically converted to string using the default encoding).
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00004162
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00004163 Both methods will now return whatever the codec in charge of the
4164 requested encoding returns as object, e.g. Unicode codecs will
4165 return Unicode objects when decoding is requested ("äöü".decode("latin-1")
4166 will return u"äöü"). This enables codec writer to create codecs
4167 for various simple to use conversions.
4168
4169 New codecs were added to demonstrate these new features (the .encode()
4170 and .decode() columns indicate the type of the returned objects):
4171
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004172 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4173 |Name | .encode() | .decode() | Description |
4174 +=========+===========+===========+=============================+
4175 |uu | string | string | UU codec (e.g. for email) |
4176 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4177 |base64 | string | string | base64 codec |
4178 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4179 |quopri | string | string | quoted-printable codec |
4180 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4181 |zlib | string | string | zlib compression |
4182 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4183 |hex | string | string | 2-byte hex codec |
4184 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4185 |rot-13 | string | Unicode | ROT-13 Unicode charmap codec|
4186 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00004187
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004188- Some operating systems now support the concept of a default Unicode
4189 encoding for file system operations. Notably, Windows supports 'mbcs'
4190 as the default. The Macintosh will also adopt this concept in the medium
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00004191 term, although the default encoding for that platform will be other than
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004192 'mbcs'.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00004193
4194 On operating system that support non-ASCII filenames, it is common for
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004195 functions that return filenames (such as os.listdir()) to return Python
4196 string objects pre-encoded using the default file system encoding for
4197 the platform. As this encoding is likely to be different from Python's
4198 default encoding, converting this name to a Unicode object before passing
4199 it back to the Operating System would result in a Unicode error, as Python
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004200 would attempt to use its default encoding (generally ASCII) rather than
4201 the default encoding for the file system.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00004202
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004203 In general, this change simply removes surprises when working with
4204 Unicode and the file system, making these operations work as you expect,
4205 increasing the transparency of Unicode objects in this context.
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004206 See [????] for more details, including examples.
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004207
Tim Peters61dff2b2001-05-08 15:43:37 +00004208- Float (and complex) literals in source code were evaluated to full
4209 precision only when running from a .py file; the same code loaded from a
4210 .pyc (or .pyo) file could suffer numeric differences starting at about the
4211 12th significant decimal digit. For example, on a machine with IEEE-754
4212 floating arithmetic,
4213
4214 x = 9007199254740992.0
4215 print long(x)
4216
4217 printed 9007199254740992 if run directly from .py, but 9007199254740000
4218 if from a compiled (.pyc or .pyo) file. This was due to marshal using
4219 str(float) instead of repr(float) when building code objects. marshal
4220 now uses repr(float) instead, which should reproduce floats to full
4221 machine precision (assuming the platform C float<->string I/O conversion
4222 functions are of good quality).
4223
4224 This may cause floating-point results to change in some cases, and
4225 usually for the better, but may also cause numerically unstable
4226 algorithms to break.
4227
Tim Peters2f228e72001-05-13 00:19:31 +00004228- The implementation of dicts suffers fewer collisions, which has speed
4229 benefits. However, the order in which dict entries appear in dict.keys(),
4230 dict.values() and dict.items() may differ from previous releases for a
4231 given dict. Nothing is defined about this order, so no program should
4232 rely on it. Nevertheless, it's easy to write test cases that rely on the
4233 order by accident, typically because of printing the str() or repr() of a
4234 dict to an "expected results" file. See Lib/test/test_support.py's new
4235 sortdict(dict) function for a simple way to display a dict in sorted
4236 order.
4237
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00004238- Many other small changes to dicts were made, resulting in faster
4239 operation along the most common code paths.
4240
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00004241- Dictionary objects now support the "in" operator: "x in dict" means
4242 the same as dict.has_key(x).
4243
Barry Warsaw51acc8d2001-06-26 20:12:50 +00004244- The update() method of dictionaries now accepts generic mapping
4245 objects. Specifically the argument object must support the .keys()
4246 and __getitem__() methods. This allows you to say, for example,
4247 {}.update(UserDict())
4248
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00004249- Iterators were added; this is a generalized way of providing values
4250 to a for loop. See PEP 234. There's a new built-in function iter()
4251 to return an iterator. There's a new protocol to get the next value
4252 from an iterator using the next() method (in Python) or the
4253 tp_iternext slot (in C). There's a new protocol to get iterators
4254 using the __iter__() method (in Python) or the tp_iter slot (in C).
4255 Iterating (i.e. a for loop) over a dictionary generates its keys.
4256 Iterating over a file generates its lines.
4257
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004258- The following functions were generalized to work nicely with iterator
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004259 arguments::
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004260
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00004261 map(), filter(), reduce(), zip()
Tim Peters8572b4f2001-05-06 01:05:02 +00004262 list(), tuple() (PySequence_Tuple() and PySequence_Fast() in C API)
4263 max(), min()
Tim Peters1af03e92001-05-26 19:37:54 +00004264 join() method of strings
4265 extend() method of lists
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00004266 'x in y' and 'x not in y' (PySequence_Contains() in C API)
4267 operator.countOf() (PySequence_Count() in C API)
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004268 right-hand side of assignment statements with multiple targets, such as ::
Tim Petersd6d010b2001-06-21 02:49:55 +00004269 x, y, z = some_iterable_object_returning_exactly_3_values
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00004270
Tim Petersd85e1022001-05-11 21:51:48 +00004271- Accessing module attributes is significantly faster (for example,
4272 random.random or os.path or yourPythonModule.yourAttribute).
4273
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00004274- Comparing dictionary objects via == and != is faster, and now works even
4275 if the keys and values don't support comparisons other than ==.
4276
Tim Peters95bf9392001-05-10 08:32:44 +00004277- Comparing dictionaries in ways other than == and != is slower: there were
4278 insecurities in the dict comparison implementation that could cause Python
4279 to crash if the element comparison routines for the dict keys and/or
4280 values mutated the dicts. Making the code bulletproof slowed it down.
4281
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00004282- Collisions in dicts are resolved via a new approach, which can help
4283 dramatically in bad cases. For example, looking up every key in a dict
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00004284 d with d.keys() == [i << 16 for i in range(20000)] is approximately 500x
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00004285 faster now. Thanks to Christian Tismer for pointing out the cause and
4286 the nature of an effective cure (last December! better late than never).
Tim Peters15d49292001-05-27 07:39:22 +00004287
Tim Peters52e155e2001-06-16 05:42:57 +00004288- repr() is much faster for large containers (dict, list, tuple).
4289
4290
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004291Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004292-------
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004293
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00004294- The constants ascii_letters, ascii_lowercase. and ascii_uppercase
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004295 were added to the string module. These a locale-independent
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00004296 constants, unlike letters, lowercase, and uppercase. These are now
4297 use in appropriate locations in the standard library.
4298
Martin v. Löwisf0473d52001-07-18 16:17:16 +00004299- The flags used in dlopen calls can now be configured using
4300 sys.setdlopenflags and queried using sys.getdlopenflags.
4301
Guido van Rossumc7e4aca2001-07-12 11:54:37 +00004302- Fredrik Lundh's xmlrpclib is now a standard library module. This
4303 provides full client-side XML-RPC support. In addition,
4304 Demo/xmlrpc/ contains two server frameworks (one SocketServer-based,
4305 one asyncore-based). Thanks to Eric Raymond for the documentation.
4306
Guido van Rossum643d3912001-07-05 14:46:25 +00004307- The xrange() object is simplified: it no longer supports slicing,
4308 repetition, comparisons, efficient 'in' checking, the tolist()
4309 method, or the start, stop and step attributes. See PEP 260.
4310
Martin v. Löwisebf94db2001-06-06 06:25:40 +00004311- A new function fnmatch.filter to filter lists of file names was added.
4312
Barry Warsawffd674d2001-05-22 16:00:10 +00004313- calendar.py uses month and day names based on the current locale.
4314
Guido van Rossum2e0a6542001-05-15 02:14:44 +00004315- strop is now *really* obsolete (this was announced before with 1.6),
4316 and issues DeprecationWarning when used (except for the four items
4317 that are still imported into string.py).
4318
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004319- Cookie.py now sorts key+value pairs by key in output strings.
4320
4321- pprint.isrecursive(object) didn't correctly identify recursive objects.
4322 Now it does.
4323
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00004324- pprint functions now much faster for large containers (tuple, list, dict).
4325
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00004326- New 'q' and 'Q' format codes in the struct module, corresponding to C
4327 types "long long" and "unsigned long long" (on Windows, __int64). In
4328 native mode, these can be used only when the platform C compiler supports
4329 these types (when HAVE_LONG_LONG is #define'd by the Python config
4330 process), and then they inherit the sizes and alignments of the C types.
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00004331 In standard mode, 'q' and 'Q' are supported on all platforms, and are
4332 8-byte integral types.
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00004333
Guido van Rossum83213cc2001-06-12 16:48:52 +00004334- The site module installs a new built-in function 'help' that invokes
4335 pydoc.help. It must be invoked as 'help()'; when invoked as 'help',
4336 it displays a message reminding the user to use 'help()' or
4337 'help(object)'.
4338
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004339Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004340-----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004341
4342- New test_mutants.py runs dict comparisons where the key and value
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004343 comparison operators mutate the dicts randomly during comparison. This
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004344 rapidly causes Python to crash under earlier releases (not for the faint
4345 of heart: it can also cause Win9x to freeze or reboot!).
4346
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004347- New test_pprint.py verifies that pprint.isrecursive() and
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00004348 pprint.isreadable() return sensible results. Also verifies that simple
4349 cases produce correct output.
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004350
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00004351C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004352-----
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00004353
4354- Removed the unused last_is_sticky argument from the internal
4355 _PyTuple_Resize(). If this affects you, you were cheating.
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004356
4357----
4358
4359**(For information about older versions, consult the HISTORY file.)**