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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.)
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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
Brett Cannon0096e262004-06-05 01:12:51 +0000325- refactored site.py into functions. Also wrote regression tests for the
326 module.
327
Martin v. Löwiseac324b2004-06-03 09:18:35 +0000328- asyncore.loop now has repeat count parameter that defaults to infinity.
329
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +0000330- The distutils sdist command now ignores all .svn directories, in
331 addition to CVS and RCS directories. .svn directories hold
332 administrative files for the Subversion source control system.
333
Martin v. Löwis2a6ba902004-05-31 18:22:40 +0000334- Added a new module: cookielib. Automatic cookie handling for HTTP
335 clients. Also, support for cookielib has been added to urllib2, so
336 urllib2.urlopen() can transparently handle cookies.
337
Raymond Hettinger059e1702004-05-19 19:56:44 +0000338- stringprep.py now uses built-in set() instead of sets.Set().
339
Thomas Heller2e7c8322004-05-11 15:10:59 +0000340- Bug #876278: Unbounded recursion in modulefinder
341
Martin v. Löwis456ab1d2004-05-06 01:54:36 +0000342- Bug #780300: Swap public and system ID in LexicalHandler.startDTD.
343 Applications relying on the wrong order need to be corrected.
344
Hye-Shik Chang0f5bf1e2004-04-20 21:11:11 +0000345- Bug #926075: Fixed a bug that returns a wrong pattern object
346 for a string or unicode object in sre.compile() when a different
347 type pattern with the same value exists.
348
Skip Montanarod0c0c412004-04-07 16:03:02 +0000349- Added countcallers arg to trace.Trace class (--trackcalls command line arg
350 when run from the command prompt).
351
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +0000352- Fixed a caching bug in platform.platform() where the argument of 'terse' was
353 not taken into consideration when caching value.
354
Nicholas Bastin824b1b22004-03-23 18:44:39 +0000355- Added two new command-line arguments for profile (output file and
356 default sort).
357
Nicholas Bastin1eb4bfc2004-03-22 20:12:56 +0000358- Added global runctx function to profile module
359
Martin v. Löwis347c30d2004-03-21 15:29:41 +0000360- Add hlist missing entryconfigure and entrycget methods.
361
Hye-Shik Chang4a7ad1a2004-03-19 08:11:56 +0000362- The ptcp154 codec was added for Kazakh character set support.
363
Martin v. Löwisa79449e2004-02-15 21:19:18 +0000364- Support non-anonymous ftp URLs in urllib2.
365
Marc-André Lemburg57cb68f2004-01-20 18:24:34 +0000366- The encodings package will now applies codec name aliases
367 first before starting to try the import of the codec module.
368 This simplifies overriding built-in codecs with external
369 packages, e.g. the included CJK codecs with the JapaneseCodecs
370 package, by adjusting the aliases dictionary in encodings.aliases
371 accordingly.
372
Barry Warsaw30ff12f2004-01-04 01:13:43 +0000373- base64 now supports RFC 3548 Base16, Base32, and Base64 encoding and
374 decoding standards.
375
Jeremy Hylton37c5f2a2003-12-14 05:29:45 +0000376- urllib2 now supports processors. A processor is a handler that
377 implements an xxx_request or xxx_response method. These methods are
378 called for all requests.
379
Thomas Hellerc7501d52003-12-05 20:28:07 +0000380- distutils compilers now compile source files in the same order as
381 they are passed to the compiler.
382
Walter Dörwaldc8de4582003-12-03 20:26:05 +0000383- pprint.pprint() and pprint.pformat() now have additional parameters
384 indent, width and depth.
385
Walter Dörwald7a7ede52003-12-03 20:15:28 +0000386- Patch #750542: pprint now will pretty print subclasses of list, tuple
387 and dict too, as long as they don't overwrite __repr__().
388
Thomas Hellerb3105912003-11-28 19:42:56 +0000389- Bug #848614: distutils' msvccompiler fails to find the MSVC6
390 compiler because of incomplete registry entries.
391
Martin v. Löwisaf7dc8d2003-11-19 19:51:55 +0000392- httplib.HTTP.putrequest now offers to omit the implicit Accept-Encoding.
393
Thomas Hellercf0005b2003-11-14 10:33:20 +0000394- Patch #841977: modulefinder didn't find extension modules in packages
395
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +0000396- imaplib.IMAP4.thread was added.
397
Guido van Rossum967b0632003-11-10 02:27:19 +0000398- Plugged a minor hole in tempfile.mktemp() due to the use of
399 os.path.exists(), switched to using os.lstat() directly if possible.
400
Raymond Hettinger0c410272004-01-05 10:13:35 +0000401- bisect.py and heapq.py now have underlying C implementations
402 for better performance
Raymond Hettingerb3af1812003-11-08 10:24:38 +0000403
Neil Schemenauerf607fc52003-11-05 23:03:00 +0000404- traceback.format_exc has been added (similar to print_exc but it returns
405 a string).
406
Martin v. Löwis45394c22003-10-31 13:49:36 +0000407- xmlrpclib.MultiCall has been added.
408
Martin v. Löwis48440b72003-10-31 12:52:35 +0000409- poplib.POP3_SSL has been added.
410
Martin v. Löwisd6625482003-10-12 17:37:01 +0000411- tmpfile.mkstemp now returns an absolute path even if dir is relative.
412
Brett Cannon5d9ca4e2003-10-12 04:38:48 +0000413- urlparse is RFC 2396 compliant.
414
Skip Montanarodef99342003-10-03 14:07:07 +0000415- The fieldnames argument to the csv module's DictReader constructor is now
416 optional. If omitted, the first row of the file will be used as the
417 list of fieldnames.
418
Raymond Hettinger9a80c5d2003-09-23 20:21:01 +0000419- encodings.bz2_codec was added for access to bz2 compression
420 using "a long string".encode('bz2')
421
Guido van Rossum0e5a51d2003-09-22 15:03:11 +0000422- Various improvements to unittest.py, realigned with PyUnit CVS.
423
Martin v. Löwisc6bb6c02003-09-20 15:52:21 +0000424- dircache now passes exceptions to the caller, instead of returning
425 empty lists.
426
Raymond Hettingerdeadbf52003-09-12 06:33:37 +0000427- The bsddb module and dbhash module now support the iterator and
428 mapping protocols which make them more substitutable for dictionaries
429 and shelves.
430
Skip Montanaro3f7a9482003-09-06 19:52:12 +0000431- The csv module's DictReader and DictWriter classes now accept keyword
432 arguments. This was an omission in the initial implementation.
433
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +0000434- The email package handles some RFC 2231 parameters with missing
Barry Warsaw2f5bf172003-09-03 04:09:49 +0000435 CHARSET fields better. It also includes a patch to parameter
436 parsing when semicolons appear inside quotes.
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +0000437
Raymond Hettinger6a180122003-08-17 08:34:09 +0000438- sets.py now runs under Py2.2. In addition, the argument restrictions
439 for most set methods (but not the operators) have been relaxed to
Raymond Hettinger70b9f492003-11-19 15:52:14 +0000440 allow any iterable.
Raymond Hettingeree562fc2003-08-15 21:17:04 +0000441
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +0000442- _strptime.py now has a behind-the-scenes caching mechanism for the most
Brett Cannonb7150a22003-08-05 06:27:04 +0000443 recent TimeRE instance used along with the last five unique directive
444 patterns. The overall module was also made more thread-safe.
445
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +0000446- random.cunifvariate() and random.stdgamma() were deprecated in Py2.3
447 and removed in Py2.4.
448
Anthony Baxter92bee362003-11-04 14:35:49 +0000449- Bug #823328: urllib2.py's HTTP Digest Auth support works again.
450
Hye-Shik Chang84a99312004-01-17 14:59:36 +0000451- Patch #873597: CJK codecs are imported into rank of default codecs.
452
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000453Tools/Demos
454-----------
455
Skip Montanarod5a21fd2004-01-27 14:49:04 +0000456- A hotshotmain script was added to the Tools/scripts directory that
457 makes it easy to run a script under control of the hotshot profiler.
458
Skip Montanaro030f68a2003-10-28 16:24:00 +0000459- The db2pickle and pickle2db scripts can now dump/load gdbm files.
460
Skip Montanaroe2b61e02004-03-03 17:42:08 +0000461- The file order on the command line of the pickle2db script was reversed.
462 It is now [ picklefile ] dbfile. This provides better symmetry with
463 db2pickle. The file arguments to both scripts are now source followed by
464 destination in situations where both files are given.
465
Skip Montanarofd4fa882003-09-10 19:04:13 +0000466- The pydoc script will display a link to the module documentation for
467 modules determined to be part of the core distribution. The documentation
468 base directory defaults to http://www.python.org/doc/current/lib/ but can
469 be changed by setting the PYTHONDOCS environment variable.
470
Raymond Hettingere41d4c82003-08-25 04:39:55 +0000471- texcheck.py now detects double word errors.
472
Tim Peters1a3abcb2003-08-18 23:52:09 +0000473- md5sum.py mistakenly opened input files in text mode by default, a
474 silent and dangerous change from previous releases. It once again
475 opens input files in binary mode by default. The -t and -b flags
476 remain for compatibility with the 2.3 release, but -b is the default
477 now.
478
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000479- py-electric-colon now works when pending-delete/delete-selection mode is
480 in effect
481
482- py-help-at-point is no longer bound to the F1 key - it's still bound to
483 C-c C-h
484
Barry Warsaw6ec58ca2003-09-03 03:20:37 +0000485- Pynche was fixed to not crash when there is no ~/.pynche file and no
486 -d option was given.
487
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000488Build
489-----
490
Martin v. Löwis642c8a12004-06-04 13:55:13 +0000491- In order to find libraries, setup.py now also looks in /lib64, for use
492 on AMD64.
493
Hye-Shik Chang54f94392004-04-14 07:55:31 +0000494- Bug #934635: Fixed a bug where the configure script couldn't detect
495 getaddrinfo() properly if the KAME stack had SCTP support.
496
Skip Montanaro7befb992004-02-10 16:50:21 +0000497- Support for missing ANSI C header files (limits.h, stddef.h, etc) was
498 removed.
499
Skip Montanarodb608052004-02-07 13:53:46 +0000500- Systems requiring the D4, D6 or D7 variants of pthreads are no longer
501 supported (see PEP 11).
502
503- Universal newline support can no longer be disabled (see PEP 11).
504
Skip Montanarocd1f7432004-01-17 14:22:44 +0000505- Support for DGUX, SunOS 4, IRIX 4 and Minix was removed (see PEP 11).
506
507- Support for systems requiring --with-dl-dld or --with-sgi-dl was removed
508 (see PEP 11).
509
510- Tests for sizeof(char) were removed since ANSI C mandates that
511 sizeof(char) must be 1.
512
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000513C API
514-----
515
Martin v. Löwise440e472004-06-01 15:22:42 +0000516- New public functions PyEval_EvaluateFrame and PyGen_New to expose
517 generator objects.
518
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +0000519- New public functions Py_IncRef() and Py_DecRef(), exposing the
520 functionality of the Py_XINCREF() and Py_XDECREF macros. Useful for
Thomas Hellercc10a852004-04-22 17:28:25 +0000521 runtime dynamic embedding of Python. See patch #938302, by Bob
522 Ippolito.
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +0000523
Raymond Hettingerc1e4f9d2004-03-12 08:04:00 +0000524- Added a new macro, PySequence_Fast_ITEMS, which retrieves a fast sequence's
525 underlying array of PyObject pointers. Useful for high speed looping.
526
Raymond Hettinger8f5cdaa2003-12-13 11:26:12 +0000527- Created a new method flag, METH_COEXIST, which causes a method to be loaded
528 even if already defined by a slot wrapper. This allows a __contains__
529 method, for example, to co-exist with a defined sq_contains slot. This
530 is helpful because the PyCFunction can take advantage of optimized calls
531 whenever METH_O or METH_NOARGS flags are defined.
532
Raymond Hettingerbc0f2ab2003-11-25 21:12:14 +0000533- Added a new function, PyDict_Contains(d, k) which is like
534 PySequence_Contains() but is specific to dictionaries and executes
535 about 10% faster.
536
Brett Cannon26b3a7b2003-10-19 21:31:43 +0000537- Added three new macros: Py_RETURN_NONE, Py_RETURN_TRUE, and Py_RETURN_FALSE.
538 Each return the singleton they mention after Py_INCREF()ing them.
539
Raymond Hettingercb2da432003-10-12 18:24:34 +0000540- Added a new function, PyTuple_Pack(n, ...) for constructing tuples from a
541 variable length argument list of Python objects without having to invoke
542 the more complex machinery of Py_BuildValue(). PyTuple_Pack(3, a, b, c)
543 is equivalent to Py_BuildValue("(OOO)", a, b, c).
544
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000545New platforms
546-------------
547
548Tests
549-----
550
551Windows
552-------
553
Guido van Rossumfd25aca2003-11-30 22:10:15 +0000554- The _winreg module could segfault when reading very large registry
555 values, due to unchecked alloca() calls (SF bug 851056). The fix is
556 uses either PyMem_Malloc(n) or PyString_FromStringAndSize(NULL, n),
557 as appropriate, followed by a size check.
558
Tim Petersf1827cf2003-09-07 03:30:18 +0000559- file.truncate() could misbehave if the file was open for update
560 (modes r+, rb+, w+, wb+), and the most recent file operation before
561 the truncate() call was an input operation. SF bug 801631.
562
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000563Mac
564----
565
566
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +0000567What's New in Python 2.3 final?
568===============================
569
570*Release date: 29-Jul-2003*
571
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +0000572IDLE
573----
574
Tim Peters36c1afc2003-07-29 17:22:57 +0000575- Bug 778400: IDLE hangs when selecting "Edit with IDLE" from explorer.
576 This was unique to Windows, and was fixed by adding an -n switch to
577 the command the Windows installer creates to execute "Edit with IDLE"
578 context-menu actions.
579
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +0000580- IDLE displays a new message upon startup: some "personal firewall"
581 kinds of programs (for example, ZoneAlarm) open a dialog of their
582 own when any program opens a socket. IDLE does use sockets, talking
583 on the computer's internal loopback interface. This connection is not
584 visible on any external interface and no data is sent to or received
585 from the Internet. So, if you get such a dialog when opening IDLE,
586 asking whether to let pythonw.exe talk to address 127.0.0.1, say yes,
587 and rest assured no communication external to your machine is taking
588 place. If you don't allow it, IDLE won't be able to start.
589
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +0000590
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000591What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 2?
592=============================================
593
Tim Peters6560a252003-07-24 00:15:46 +0000594*Release date: 24-Jul-2003*
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000595
596Core and builtins
597-----------------
598
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +0000599- It is now possible to import from zipfiles containing additional
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000600 data bytes before the zip compatible archive. Zipfiles containing a
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +0000601 comment at the end are still unsupported.
602
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000603Extension modules
604-----------------
605
606- A longstanding bug in the parser module's initialization could cause
607 fatal internal refcount confusion when the module got initialized more
608 than once. This has been fixed.
609
Fred Drake01a43122003-07-21 17:17:10 +0000610- Fixed memory leak in pyexpat; using the parser's ParseFile() method
611 with open files that aren't instances of the standard file type
612 caused an instance of the bound .read() method to be leaked on every
613 call.
614
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000615- Fixed some leaks in the locale module.
616
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000617Library
618-------
619
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000620- Lib/encodings/rot_13.py when used as a script, now more properly
621 uses the first Python interpreter on your path.
622
623- Removed caching of TimeRE (and thus LocaleTime) in _strptime.py to
624 fix a locale related bug in the test suite. Although another patch
625 was needed to actually fix the problem, the cache code was not
626 restored.
627
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +0000628IDLE
629----
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000630
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +0000631- Calltips patches.
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000632
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000633Build
634-----
635
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000636- For MacOSX, added -mno-fused-madd to BASECFLAGS to fix test_coercion
637 on Panther (OSX 10.3).
638
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000639C API
640-----
641
642Windows
643-------
644
Tim Peters291f14e2003-07-22 02:50:01 +0000645- The tempfile module could do insane imports on Windows if PYTHONCASEOK
646 was set, making temp file creation impossible. Repaired.
647
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000648- Add a patch to workaround pthread_sigmask() bugs in Cygwin.
649
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000650Mac
651---
652
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000653- Various fixes to pimp.
654
655- Scripts runs with pythonw no longer had full window manager access.
656
657- Don't force boot-disk-only install, for reasons unknown it causes
658 more problems than it solves.
659
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000660
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000661What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 1?
662=============================================
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000663
Jeremy Hylton0ed18c22003-07-18 20:10:02 +0000664*Release date: 18-Jul-2003*
665
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000666Core and builtins
667-----------------
668
Tim Peterse5e065b2003-07-06 18:36:54 +0000669- The new function sys.getcheckinterval() returns the last value set
670 by sys.setcheckinterval().
671
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000672- Several bugs in the symbol table phase of the compiler have been
673 fixed. Errors could be lost and compilation could fail without
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000674 reporting an error. SF patch 763201.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000675
676- The interpreter is now more robust about importing the warnings
677 module. In an executable generated by freeze or similar programs,
678 earlier versions of 2.3 would fail if the warnings module could
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000679 not be found on the file system. Fixes SF bug 771097.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000680
681- A warning about assignments to module attributes that shadow
682 builtins, present in earlier releases of 2.3, has been removed.
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000683
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000684- It is not possible to create subclasses of builtin types like str
685 and tuple that define an itemsize. Earlier releases of Python 2.3
686 allowed this by mistake, leading to crashes and other problems.
687
688- The thread_id is now initialized to 0 in a non-thread build. SF bug
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000689 770247.
690
691- SF bug 762891: "del p[key]" on proxy object no longer raises SystemError.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000692
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000693Extension modules
694-----------------
695
696- weakref.proxy() can now handle "del obj[i]" for proxy objects
697 defining __delitem__. Formerly, it generated a SystemError.
698
699- SSL no longer crashes the interpreter when the remote side disconnects.
700
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +0000701- On Unix the mmap module can again be used to map device files.
702
Brett Cannon20def8b2003-07-01 05:16:08 +0000703- time.strptime now exclusively uses the Python implementation
704 contained within the _strptime module.
705
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000706- The print slot of weakref proxy objects was removed, because it was
707 not consistent with the object's repr slot.
708
709- The mmap module only checks file size for regular files, not
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000710 character or block devices. SF patch 708374.
711
712- The cPickle Pickler garbage collection support was fixed to traverse
713 the find_class attribute, if present.
714
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000715- There are several fixes for the bsddb3 wrapper module.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000716
717 bsddb3 no longer crashes if an environment is closed before a cursor
718 (SF bug 763298).
719
720 The DB and DBEnv set_get_returns_none function was extended to take
Barry Warsawd71a5512003-07-20 18:00:54 +0000721 a level instead of a boolean flag. The new level 2 means that in
722 addition, cursor.set()/.get() methods return None instead of raising
723 an exception.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000724
725 A typo was fixed in DBCursor.join_item(), preventing a crash.
726
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000727Library
728-------
729
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000730- distutils now supports MSVC 7.1
731
Raymond Hettinger71adf7e2003-07-16 19:25:22 +0000732- doctest now examines all docstrings by default. Previously, it would
733 skip over functions with private names (as indicated by the underscore
734 naming convention). The old default created too much of a risk that
735 user tests were being skipped inadvertently. Note, this change could
736 break code in the unlikely case that someone had intentionally put
737 failing tests in the docstrings of private functions. The breakage
738 is easily fixable by specifying the old behavior when calling testmod()
739 or Tester().
740
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000741- There were several fixes to the way dumbdbms are closed. It's vital
742 that a dumbdbm database be closed properly, else the on-disk data
743 and directory files can be left in mutually inconsistent states.
744 dumbdbm.py's _Database.__del__() method attempted to close the
745 database properly, but a shutdown race in _Database._commit() could
746 prevent this from working, so that a program trusting __del__() to
747 get the on-disk files in synch could be badly surprised. The race
748 has been repaired. A sync() method was also added so that shelve
749 can guarantee data is written to disk.
Tim Peters7a6c7332003-07-13 17:21:10 +0000750
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000751 The close() method can now be called more than once without complaint.
Tim Petersd7472ec2003-07-13 02:22:03 +0000752
Tim Peters59aba122003-07-01 20:01:55 +0000753- The classes in threading.py are now new-style classes. That they
754 weren't before was an oversight.
755
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000756- The urllib2 digest authentication handlers now define the correct
757 auth_header. The earlier versions would fail at runtime.
758
Neal Norwitze7dfe212003-07-01 14:59:46 +0000759- SF bug 763023: fix uncaught ZeroDivisionError in difflib ratio methods
760 when there are no lines.
761
Neal Norwitz3c0f2c92003-07-01 21:12:47 +0000762- SF bug 763637: fix exception in Tkinter with after_cancel
763 which could occur with Tk 8.4
764
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000765- SF bug 770601: CGIHTTPServer.py now passes the entire environment
766 to child processes.
767
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000768- SF bug 765238: add filter to fnmatch's __all__.
769
770- SF bug 748201: make time.strptime() error messages more helpful.
771
772- SF patch 764470: Do not dump the args attribute of a Fault object in
773 xmlrpclib.
774
775- SF patch 549151: urllib and urllib2 now redirect POSTs on 301
776 responses.
777
778- SF patch 766650: The whichdb module was fixed to recognize dbm files
779 generated by gdbm on OS/2 EMX.
780
781- SF bugs 763047 and 763052: fixes bug of timezone value being left as
782 -1 when ``time.tzname[0] == time.tzname[1] and not time.daylight``
783 is true when it should only when time.daylight is true.
784
785- SF bug 764548: re now allows subclasses of str and unicode to be
786 used as patterns.
787
788- SF bug 763637: In Tkinter, change after_cancel() to handle tuples
789 of varying sizes. Tk 8.4 returns a different number of values
790 than Tk 8.3.
791
792- SF bug 763023: difflib.ratio() did not catch zero division.
793
794- The Queue module now has an __all__ attribute.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000795
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000796Tools/Demos
797-----------
798
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000799- See Lib/idlelib/NEWS.txt for IDLE news.
800
Neal Norwitz592c4cc2003-07-01 04:14:28 +0000801- SF bug 753592: webchecker/wsgui now handles user supplied directories.
802
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000803- The trace.py script has been removed. It is now in the standard library.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000804
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000805Build
806-----
807
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000808- Python now compiles with -fno-strict-aliasing if possible (SF bug 766696).
809
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000810- The socket module compiles on IRIX 6.5.10.
811
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000812- An irix64 system is treated the same way as an irix6 system (SF
813 patch 764560).
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000814
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000815- Several definitions were missing on FreeBSD 5.x unless the
816 __BSD_VISIBLE symbol was defined. configure now defines it as
817 needed.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000818
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000819C API
820-----
821
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000822- Unicode objects now support mbcs as a built-in encoding, so the C
823 API can use it without deferring to the encodings package.
824
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000825Windows
826-------
827
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000828- The Windows implementation of PyThread_start_new_thread() never
829 checked error returns from Windows functions correctly. As a result,
830 it could claim to start a new thread even when the Microsoft
831 _beginthread() function failed (due to "too many threads" -- this is
832 on the order of thousands when it happens). In these cases, the
833 Python exception ::
834
835 thread.error: can't start new thread
836
837 is raised now.
838
839- SF bug 766669: Prevent a GPF on interpreter exit when sockets are in
840 use. The interpreter now calls WSACleanup() from Py_Finalize()
841 instead of from DLL teardown.
842
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000843Mac
844---
845
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000846- Bundlebuilder now inherits default values in the right way. It was
Walter Dörwald73a8a4b2003-07-30 12:14:02 +0000847 previously possible for app bundles to get a type of "BNDL" instead
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000848 of "APPL." Other improvements include, a --build-id option to
849 specify the CFBundleIdentifier and using the --python option to set
850 the executable in the bundle.
851
852- Fixed two bugs in MacOSX framework handling.
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000853
Jack Jansene0040412003-07-23 22:17:28 +0000854- pythonw did not allow user interaction in 2.3rc1, this has been fixed.
855
856- Python is now compiled with -mno-fused-madd, making all tests pass
857 on Panther.
858
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000859What's New in Python 2.3 beta 2?
860================================
861
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +0000862*Release date: 29-Jun-2003*
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000863
864Core and builtins
865-----------------
866
Barry Warsaw883f2232003-06-29 17:10:11 +0000867- A program can now set the environment variable PYTHONINSPECT to some
868 string value in Python, and cause the interpreter to enter the
869 interactive prompt at program exit, as if Python had been invoked
870 with the -i option.
871
Raymond Hettingerd05abde2003-06-17 05:05:49 +0000872- list.index() now accepts optional start and stop arguments. Similar
873 changes were made to UserList.index(). SF feature request 754014.
874
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +0000875- SF patch 751998 fixes an unwanted side effect of the previous fix
876 for SF bug 742860 (the next item).
877
Tim Peters50d8b8b2003-05-25 17:44:31 +0000878- SF bug 742860: "WeakKeyDictionary __delitem__ uses iterkeys". This
879 wasn't threadsafe, was very inefficient (expected time O(len(dict))
880 instead of O(1)), and could raise a spurious RuntimeError if another
881 thread mutated the dict during __delitem__, or if a comparison function
882 mutated it. It also neglected to raise KeyError when the key wasn't
883 present; didn't raise TypeError when the key wasn't of a weakly
884 referencable type; and broke various more-or-less obscure dict
885 invariants by using a sequence of equality comparisons over the whole
886 set of dict keys instead of computing the key's hash code to narrow
887 the search to those keys with the same hash code. All of these are
888 considered to be bugs. A new implementation of __delitem__ repairs all
889 that, but note that fixing these bugs may change visible behavior in
890 code relying (whether intentionally or accidentally) on old behavior.
Tim Peters886128f2003-05-25 01:45:11 +0000891
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000892- SF bug 734869: Fixed a compiler bug that caused a fatal error when
893 compiling a list comprehension that contained another list comprehension
894 embedded in a lambda expression.
895
Tim Peterse87568d2003-05-24 20:18:24 +0000896- SF bug 705231: builtin pow() no longer lets the platform C pow()
897 raise -1.0 to integer powers, because (at least) glibc gets it wrong
898 in some cases. The result should be -1.0 if the power is odd and 1.0
899 if the power is even, and any float with a sufficiently large exponent
900 is (mathematically) an exact even integer.
901
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000902- SF bug 759227: A new-style class that implements __nonzero__() must
903 return a bool or int (but not an int subclass) from that method. This
904 matches the restriction on classic classes.
905
Martin v. Löwis5467d4c2003-05-10 07:10:12 +0000906- The encoding attribute has been added for file objects, and set to
907 the terminal encoding on Unix and Windows.
908
Tim Peters015dd822003-05-04 04:16:52 +0000909- The softspace attribute of file objects became read-only by oversight.
910 It's writable again.
911
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +0000912- Reverted a 2.3 beta 1 change to iterators for subclasses of list and
913 tuple. By default, the iterators now access data elements directly
914 instead of going through __getitem__. If __getitem__ access is
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +0000915 preferred, then __iter__ can be overridden.
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +0000916
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000917- SF bug 735247: The staticmethod and super types participate in
918 garbage collection. Before this change, it was possible for leaks to
919 occur in functions with non-global free variables that used these types.
920
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000921Extension modules
922-----------------
923
Raymond Hettinger643bcec2003-06-29 03:29:42 +0000924- the socket module has a new exception, socket.timeout, to allow
925 timeouts to be handled separately from other socket errors.
926
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000927- SF bug 751276: cPickle has fixed to propagate exceptions raised in
928 user code. In earlier versions, cPickle caught and ignored any
929 exception when it performed operations that it expected to raise
930 specific exceptions like AttributeError.
931
932- cPickle Pickler and Unpickler objects now participate in garbage
933 collection.
934
Tim Peterscda32b72003-06-15 23:13:35 +0000935- mimetools.choose_boundary() could return duplicate strings at times,
936 especially likely on Windows. The strings returned are now guaranteed
937 unique within a single program run.
938
Brett Cannon4e64d782003-06-13 23:44:35 +0000939- thread.interrupt_main() raises KeyboardInterrupt in the main thread.
940 dummy_thread has also been modified to try to simulate the behavior.
941
Walter Dörwald9e46abe2003-05-18 03:15:10 +0000942- array.array.insert() now treats negative indices as being relative
943 to the end of the array, just like list.insert() does. (SF bug #739313)
944
Tim Petersb0c854d2003-05-17 15:57:00 +0000945- The datetime module classes datetime, time, and timedelta are now
946 properly subclassable.
Tim Petersa98924a2003-05-17 05:55:19 +0000947
Martin v. Löwis28e9ce92003-05-09 08:19:48 +0000948- _tkinter.{get|set}busywaitinterval was added.
949
Raymond Hettinger834f4632003-05-02 20:24:56 +0000950- itertools.islice() now accepts stop=None as documented.
951 Fixes SF bug #730685.
952
Skip Montanaro8c044d82003-05-06 20:42:37 +0000953- the bsddb185 module is built in one restricted instance -
954 /usr/include/db.h exists and defines HASHVERSION to be 2. This is true
955 for many BSD-derived systems.
956
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000957
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000958Library
959-------
960
Tim Petersdb3756d2003-06-29 05:30:48 +0000961- Some happy doctest extensions from Jim Fulton have been added to
962 doctest.py. These are already being used in Zope3. The two
963 primary ones:
964
965 doctest.debug(module, name) extracts the doctests from the named object
966 in the given module, puts them in a temp file, and starts pdb running
967 on that file. This is great when a doctest fails.
968
969 doctest.DocTestSuite(module=None) returns a synthesized unittest
970 TestSuite instance, to be run by the unittest framework, which
971 runs all the doctests in the module. This allows writing tests in
972 doctest style (which can be clearer and shorter than writing tests
973 in unittest style), without losing unittest's powerful testing
974 framework features (which doctest lacks).
975
Tim Peters6ebe61f2003-06-27 20:48:05 +0000976- For compatibility with doctests created before 2.3, if an expected
977 output block consists solely of "1" and the actual output block
978 consists solely of "True", it's accepted as a match; similarly
979 for "0" and "False". This is quite un-doctest-like, but is practical.
980 The behavior can be disabled by passing the new doctest module
981 constant DONT_ACCEPT_TRUE_FOR_1 to the new optionflags optional
982 argument.
983
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000984- ZipFile.testzip() now only traps BadZipfile exceptions. Previously,
985 a bare except caught to much and reported all errors as a problem
986 in the archive.
987
988- The logging module now has a new function, makeLogRecord() making
989 LogHandler easier to interact with DatagramHandler and SocketHandler.
990
Skip Montanaro364ca402003-06-17 12:58:31 +0000991- The cgitb module has been extended to support plain text display (SF patch
992 569574).
993
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +0000994- A brand new version of IDLE (from the IDLEfork project at
995 SourceForge) is now included as Lib/idlelib. The old Tools/idle is
996 no more.
997
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000998- Added a new module: trace (documentation missing). This module used
999 to be distributed in Tools/scripts. It uses sys.settrace() to trace
1000 code execution -- either function calls or individual lines. It can
1001 generate tracing output during execution or a post-mortem report of
1002 code coverage.
1003
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00001004- The threading module has new functions settrace() and setprofile()
1005 that cooperate with the functions of the same name in the sys
1006 module. A function registered with the threading module will
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001007 be used for all threads it creates. The new trace module uses this
1008 to provide tracing for code running in threads.
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00001009
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00001010- copy.py: applied SF patch 707900, fixing bug 702858, by Steven
1011 Taschuk. Copying a new-style class that had a reference to itself
1012 didn't work. (The same thing worked fine for old-style classes.)
Martin v. Löwisba8f5ff2003-06-14 07:10:06 +00001013 Builtin functions are now treated as atomic, fixing bug #746304.
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00001014
Raymond Hettingerc24d7672003-06-08 19:42:33 +00001015- difflib.py has two new functions: context_diff() and unified_diff().
1016
Guido van Rossumfa19f7c2003-05-16 01:46:51 +00001017- More fixes to urllib (SF 549151): (a) When redirecting, always use
1018 GET. This is common practice and more-or-less sanctioned by the
1019 HTTP standard. (b) Add a handler for 307 redirection, which becomes
1020 an error for POST, but a regular redirect for GET and HEAD
1021
Guido van Rossumbf1bef82003-05-13 18:01:19 +00001022- Added optional 'onerror' argument to os.walk(), to control error
1023 handling.
1024
Martin v. Löwise59e2ba2003-05-03 09:09:02 +00001025- inspect.is{method|data}descriptor was added, to allow pydoc display
1026 __doc__ of data descriptors.
1027
Skip Montanaro4a7751c2003-04-29 21:07:16 +00001028- Fixed socket speed loss caused by use of the _socketobject wrapper class
1029 in socket.py.
1030
Raymond Hettinger22952a32003-05-20 04:59:56 +00001031- timeit.py now checks the current directory for imports.
1032
Gustavo Niemeyer9556fba2003-06-07 17:53:08 +00001033- urllib2.py now knows how to order proxy classes, so the user doesn't
1034 have to insert it in front of other classes, nor do dirty tricks like
1035 inserting a "dummy" HTTPHandler after a ProxyHandler when building an
1036 opener with proxy support.
1037
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00001038- Iterators have been added for dbm keys.
1039
1040- random.Random objects can now be pickled.
1041
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001042Tools/Demos
1043-----------
1044
Martin v. Löwisb8c084e2003-06-14 09:03:46 +00001045- pydoc now offers help on keywords and topics.
1046
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00001047- Tools/idle is gone; long live Lib/idlelib.
1048
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00001049- diff.py prints file diffs in context, unified, or ndiff formats,
1050 providing a command line interface to difflib.py.
Raymond Hettinger2f3c74a2003-06-08 23:10:15 +00001051
Raymond Hettinger71e00332003-05-10 03:30:13 +00001052- texcheck.py is a new script for making a rough validation of Python LaTeX
1053 files.
1054
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001055Build
1056-----
1057
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001058- Setting DESTDIR during 'make install' now allows specifying a
Martin v. Löwis3b8ee082003-05-11 20:25:35 +00001059 different root directory.
1060
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001061C API
1062-----
1063
Tim Peters3cfe7542003-05-21 21:29:48 +00001064- PyType_Ready(): If a type declares that it participates in gc
1065 (Py_TPFLAGS_HAVE_GC), and its base class does not, and its base class's
1066 tp_free slot is the default _PyObject_Del, and type does not define
1067 a tp_free slot itself, _PyObject_GC_Del is assigned to type->tp_free.
1068 Previously _PyObject_Del was inherited, which could at best lead to a
1069 segfault. In addition, if even after this magic the type's tp_free
1070 slot is _PyObject_Del or NULL, and the type is a base type
1071 (Py_TPFLAGS_BASETYPE), TypeError is raised: since the type is a base
1072 type, its dealloc function must call type->tp_free, and since the type
1073 is gc'able, tp_free must not be NULL or _PyObject_Del.
1074
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00001075- PyThreadState_SetAsyncExc(): A new API (deliberately accessible only
1076 from C) to interrupt a thread by sending it an exception. It is
1077 intentional that you have to write your own C extension to call it
1078 from Python.
1079
1080
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001081New platforms
1082-------------
1083
1084None this time.
1085
1086Tests
1087-----
1088
1089- test_imp rewritten so that it doesn't raise RuntimeError if run as a
1090 side effect of being imported ("import test.autotest").
1091
1092Windows
1093-------
1094
Tim Petersfaa697a2003-06-22 01:42:20 +00001095- The Windows installer ships with Tcl/Tk 8.4.3 (upgraded from 8.4.1).
1096
Tim Petersc4607da2003-05-08 18:13:59 +00001097- The installer always suggested that Python be installed on the C:
1098 drive, due to a hardcoded "C:" generated by the Wise installation
1099 wizard. People with machines where C: is not the system drive
1100 usually want Python installed on whichever drive is their system drive
1101 instead. We removed the hardcoded "C:", and two testers on machines
1102 where C: is not the system drive report that the installer now
1103 suggests their system drive. Note that you can always select the
1104 directory you want in the "Select Destination Directory" dialog --
1105 that's what it's for.
1106
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001107Mac
1108---
1109
Just van Rossum99bc1fc2003-05-09 15:01:25 +00001110- There's a new module called "autoGIL", which offers a mechanism to
1111 automatically release the Global Interpreter Lock when an event loop
1112 goes to sleep, allowing other threads to run. It's currently only
1113 supported on OSX, in the Mach-O version.
Jack Jansenf5e23ff2003-06-16 13:53:40 +00001114- The OSA modules now allow direct access to properties of the
1115 toplevel application class (in AppleScript terminology).
1116- The Package Manager can now update itself.
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001117
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00001118SourceForge Bugs and Patches Applied
1119------------------------------------
1120
1121430160, 471893, 501716, 542562, 549151, 569574, 595837, 596434,
1122598163, 604210, 604716, 610332, 612627, 614770, 620190, 621891,
1123622042, 639139, 640236, 644345, 649742, 649742, 658233, 660022,
1124661318, 661676, 662807, 662923, 666219, 672855, 678325, 682347,
1125683486, 684981, 685773, 686254, 692776, 692959, 693094, 696777,
1126697989, 700827, 703666, 708495, 708604, 708901, 710733, 711902,
1127713722, 715782, 718286, 719359, 719367, 723136, 723831, 723962,
1128724588, 724767, 724767, 725942, 726150, 726446, 726869, 727051,
1129727719, 727719, 727805, 728277, 728563, 728656, 729096, 729103,
1130729293, 729297, 729300, 729317, 729395, 729622, 729817, 730170,
1131730296, 730594, 730685, 730826, 730963, 731209, 731403, 731504,
1132731514, 731626, 731635, 731643, 731644, 731644, 731689, 732124,
1133732143, 732234, 732284, 732284, 732479, 732761, 732783, 732951,
1134733667, 733781, 734118, 734231, 734869, 735051, 735293, 735527,
1135735613, 735694, 736962, 736962, 737970, 738066, 739313, 740055,
1136740234, 740301, 741806, 742126, 742741, 742860, 742860, 742911,
1137744041, 744104, 744238, 744687, 744877, 745055, 745478, 745525,
1138745620, 746012, 746304, 746366, 746801, 746953, 747348, 747667,
1139747954, 748846, 748849, 748973, 748975, 749191, 749210, 749759,
1140749831, 749911, 750008, 750092, 750542, 750595, 751038, 751107,
1141751276, 751451, 751916, 751941, 751956, 751998, 752671, 753451,
1142753602, 753617, 753845, 753925, 754014, 754340, 754447, 755031,
1143755087, 755147, 755245, 755683, 755987, 756032, 756996, 757058,
1144757229, 757818, 757821, 757822, 758112, 758910, 759227, 759889,
1145760257, 760703, 760792, 761104, 761337, 761519, 761830, 762455
1146
1147
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001148What's New in Python 2.3 beta 1?
1149================================
1150
Guido van Rossumfa1eddf2003-04-25 19:19:52 +00001151*Release date: 25-Apr-2003*
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001152
1153Core and builtins
1154-----------------
1155
Thomas Heller5eccabc2003-04-23 19:35:25 +00001156- New format codes B, H, I, k and K have been implemented for
1157 PyArg_ParseTuple and PyBuild_Value.
1158
Alex Martellia70b1912003-04-22 08:12:33 +00001159- New builtin function sum(seq, start=0) returns the sum of all the
1160 items in iterable object seq, plus start (items are normally numbers,
1161 and cannot be strings).
1162
Guido van Rossumaa86e352003-04-19 18:15:10 +00001163- bool() called without arguments now returns False rather than
1164 raising an exception. This is consistent with calling the
1165 constructors for the other builtin types -- called without argument
1166 they all return the false value of that type. (SF patch #724135)
1167
Guido van Rossumcf8d2852003-04-17 16:53:26 +00001168- In support of PEP 269 (making the pgen parser generator accessible
1169 from Python), some changes to the pgen code structure were made; a
1170 few files that used to be linked only with pgen are now linked with
1171 Python itself.
1172
Guido van Rossumc1f6e8c2003-04-16 21:13:23 +00001173- The repr() of a weakref object now shows the __name__ attribute of
1174 the referenced object, if it has one.
1175
Guido van Rossum76ba09f2003-04-16 19:40:58 +00001176- super() no longer ignores data descriptors, except __class__. See
1177 the thread started at
1178 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2003-April/034338.html
1179
Guido van Rossum3a3cca52003-04-14 20:58:14 +00001180- list.insert(i, x) now interprets negative i as it would be
1181 interpreted by slicing, so negative values count from the end of the
1182 list. This was the only place where such an interpretation was not
1183 placed on a list index.
1184
Guido van Rossumefbbb1c2003-04-11 18:43:06 +00001185- range() now works even if the arguments are longs with magnitude
1186 larger than sys.maxint, as long as the total length of the sequence
1187 fits. E.g., range(2**100, 2**101, 2**100) is the following list:
1188 [1267650600228229401496703205376L]. (SF patch #707427.)
1189
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001190- Some horridly obscure problems were fixed involving interaction
1191 between garbage collection and old-style classes with "ambitious"
1192 getattr hooks. If an old-style instance didn't have a __del__ method,
1193 but did have a __getattr__ hook, and the instance became reachable
1194 only from an unreachable cycle, and the hook resurrected or deleted
1195 unreachable objects when asked to resolve "__del__", anything up to
1196 a segfault could happen. That's been repaired.
1197
Raymond Hettingera3e1e4c2003-03-06 23:54:28 +00001198- dict.pop now takes an optional argument specifying a default
1199 value to return if the key is not in the dict. If a default is not
1200 given and the key is not found, a KeyError will still be raised.
1201 Parallel changes were made to UserDict.UserDict and UserDict.DictMixin.
1202 [SF patch #693753] (contributed by Michael Stone.)
1203
Martin v. Löwis73d538b2003-03-05 15:13:47 +00001204- sys.getfilesystemencoding() was added to expose
1205 Py_FileSystemDefaultEncoding.
Guido van Rossum46d3dc32003-03-01 03:20:41 +00001206
1207- New function sys.exc_clear() clears the current exception. This is
1208 rarely needed, but can sometimes be useful to release objects
1209 referenced by the traceback held in sys.exc_info()[2]. (SF patch
1210 #693195.)
1211
Neal Norwitzd5a65a72003-02-23 23:11:41 +00001212- On 64-bit systems, a dictionary could contain duplicate long/int keys
1213 if the key value was larger than 2**32. See SF bug #689659.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001214
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00001215- Fixed SF bug #663074. The codec system was using global static
Walter Dörwaldfa86bf52003-03-31 16:15:13 +00001216 variables to store internal data. As a result, any attempts to use the
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00001217 unicode system with multiple active interpreters, or successive
1218 interpreter executions, would fail.
1219
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00001220- "%c" % u"a" now returns a unicode string instead of raising a
Walter Dörwald44f527f2003-04-02 16:37:24 +00001221 TypeError. u"%c" % 0xffffffff now raises a OverflowError instead
Walter Dörwald1e469c52003-04-02 16:57:59 +00001222 of a ValueError to be consistent with "%c" % 256. See SF patch #710127.
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00001223
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001224Extension modules
1225-----------------
1226
Guido van Rossume7adda92003-04-25 05:52:37 +00001227- The socket module now provides the functions inet_pton and inet_ntop
1228 for converting between string and packed representation of IP
1229 addresses. There is also a new module variable, has_ipv6, which is
1230 True iff the current Python has IPv6 support. See SF patch #658327.
1231
Martin v. Löwisbfe175c2003-04-16 19:42:51 +00001232- Tkinter wrappers around Tcl variables now pass objects directly
1233 to Tcl, instead of first converting them to strings.
1234
Guido van Rossum41c99e72003-04-14 17:59:34 +00001235- The .*? pattern in the re module is now special-cased to avoid the
1236 recursion limit. (SF patch #720991 -- many thanks to Gary Herron
1237 and Greg Chapman.)
1238
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00001239- New function sys.call_tracing() allows pdb to debug code
1240 recursively.
1241
Tim Peters730f5532003-04-08 17:17:17 +00001242- New function gc.get_referents(obj) returns a list of objects
Tim Peters0f81ab62003-04-08 16:39:48 +00001243 directly referenced by obj. In effect, it exposes what the object's
1244 tp_traverse slot does, and can be helpful when debugging memory
1245 leaks.
1246
Martin v. Löwis7fb697b2003-04-03 04:49:12 +00001247- The iconv module has been removed from this release.
1248
Tim Petersd50ade62003-03-20 18:32:13 +00001249- The platform-independent routines for packing floats in IEEE formats
1250 (struct.pack's <f, >f, <d, and >d codes; pickle and cPickle's protocol 1
1251 pickling of floats) ignored that rounding can cause a carry to
1252 propagate. The worst consequence was that, in rare cases, <f and >f
1253 could produce strings that, when unpacked again, were a factor of 2
1254 away from the original float. This has been fixed. See SF bug
1255 #705836.
1256
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001257- New function time.tzset() provides access to the C library tzset()
Guido van Rossumd11b62e2003-03-14 21:51:36 +00001258 function, if supported. (SF patch #675422.)
1259
Neal Norwitz12e22172003-03-03 21:16:39 +00001260- Using createfilehandler, deletefilehandler, createtimerhandler functions
1261 on Tkinter.tkinter (_tkinter module) no longer crashes the interpreter.
1262 See SF bug #692416.
1263
Michael W. Hudsonf0089982003-03-03 12:29:42 +00001264- Modified the fcntl.ioctl() function to allow modification of a passed
1265 mutable buffer (for details see the reference documentation).
1266
Raymond Hettinger61fe64d2003-02-23 04:40:07 +00001267- Made user requested changes to the itertools module.
1268 Subsumed the times() function into repeat().
1269 Added chain() and cycle().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001270
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00001271- The rotor module is now deprecated; the encryption algorithm it uses
Andrew M. Kuchlingfb5f4852003-04-24 13:19:56 +00001272 is not believed to be secure, and including crypto code with Python
1273 has implications for exporting and importing it in various countries.
1274
Skip Montanaro89feabc2003-03-30 04:54:24 +00001275- The socket module now always uses the _socketobject wrapper class, even on
1276 platforms which have dup(2). The makefile() method is built directly
1277 on top of the socket without duplicating the file descriptor, allowing
1278 timeouts to work properly.
1279
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001280Library
1281-------
1282
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00001283- New generator function os.walk() is an easy-to-use alternative to
1284 os.path.walk(). See os module docs for details. os.path.walk()
1285 isn't deprecated at this time, but may become deprecated in a
1286 future release.
1287
Marc-André Lemburg246d8472003-04-24 11:36:11 +00001288- Added new module "platform" which provides a wide range of tools
1289 for querying platform dependent features.
1290
Andrew M. Kuchling4e42b312003-04-24 16:45:05 +00001291- netrc now allows ASCII punctuation characters in passwords.
Raymond Hettinger1d877862003-04-23 19:06:08 +00001292
Martin v. Löwis153c9e42003-04-19 20:59:03 +00001293- shelve now supports the optional writeback argument, and exposes
1294 pickle protocol versions.
1295
Guido van Rossuma2685402003-04-19 18:04:57 +00001296- Several methods of nntplib.NNTP have grown an optional file argument
1297 which specifies a file where to divert the command's output
1298 (already supported by the body() method). (SF patch #720468)
1299
Martin v. Löwis281b2c62003-04-18 21:04:39 +00001300- The self-documenting XML server library DocXMLRPCServer was added.
1301
Martin v. Löwis2548c732003-04-18 10:39:54 +00001302- Support for internationalized domain names has been added through
1303 the 'idna' and 'punycode' encodings, the 'stringprep' module, the
1304 'mkstringprep' tool, and enhancements to the socket and httplib
1305 modules.
1306
Walter Dörwald5688b7a2003-04-16 09:46:13 +00001307- htmlentitydefs has two new dictionaries: name2codepoint maps
1308 HTML entity names to Unicode codepoints (as integers).
1309 codepoint2name is the reverse mapping. See SF patch #722017.
1310
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00001311- pdb has a new command, "debug", which lets you step through
1312 arbitrary code from the debugger's (pdb) prompt.
1313
Raymond Hettingerc377cbf2003-04-04 22:56:42 +00001314- unittest.failUnlessEqual and its equivalent unittest.assertEqual now
1315 return 'not a == b' rather than 'a != b'. This gives the desired
1316 result for classes that define __eq__ without defining __ne__.
1317
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001318- sgmllib now supports SGML marked sections, in particular the
Martin v. Löwis3163a3b2003-03-30 14:25:40 +00001319 MS Office extensions.
1320
Raymond Hettinger42182eb2003-03-09 05:33:33 +00001321- The urllib module now offers support for the iterator protocol.
1322 SF patch 698520 contributed by Brett Cannon.
1323
Guido van Rossum9589a252003-03-06 01:56:12 +00001324- New module timeit provides a simple framework for timing the
1325 execution speed of expressions and statements.
1326
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001327- sets.Set objects now support mixed-type __eq__ and __ne__, instead
1328 of raising TypeError. If x is a Set object and y is a non-Set object,
1329 x == y is False, and x != y is True. This is akin to the change made
1330 for mixed-type comparisons of datetime objects in 2.3a2; more info
1331 about the rationale is in the NEWS entry for that. See also SF bug
1332 report <http://www.python.org/sf/693121>.
1333
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00001334- On Unix platforms, if os.listdir() is called with a Unicode argument,
1335 it now returns Unicode strings. (This behavior was added earlier
1336 to the Windows NT/2k/XP version of os.listdir().)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001337
Andrew M. Kuchling6f177d42003-02-28 22:09:33 +00001338- Distutils: both 'py_modules' and 'packages' keywords can now be specified
1339 in core.setup(). Previously you could supply one or the other, but
1340 not both of them. (SF patch #695090 from Bernhard Herzog)
1341
Skip Montanaro64a839e2003-03-20 23:36:55 +00001342- New csv package makes it easy to read/write CSV files.
1343
Gustavo Niemeyer68d8cef2003-04-17 21:31:33 +00001344- Module shlex has been extended to allow posix-like shell parsings,
1345 including a split() function for easy spliting of quoted strings and
1346 commands. An iterator interface was also implemented.
1347
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001348Tools/Demos
1349-----------
1350
Tim Peters21d7d4d2003-04-18 00:45:59 +00001351- New script combinerefs.py helps analyze new PYTHONDUMPREFS output.
1352 See the module docstring for details.
1353
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001354Build
1355-----
1356
Neal Norwitz35892b92003-02-23 23:45:35 +00001357- Fix problem building on OSF1 because the compiler only accepted
1358 preprocessor directives that start in column 1. (SF bug #691793.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001359
1360C API
1361-----
1362
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00001363- Added PyGC_Collect(), equivalent to calling gc.collect().
1364
Guido van Rossum0fc8f002003-04-15 15:12:39 +00001365- PyThreadState_GetDict() was changed not to raise an exception or
1366 issue a fatal error when no current thread state is available. This
1367 makes it possible to print dictionaries when no thread is active.
1368
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00001369- LONG_LONG was renamed to PY_LONG_LONG. Extensions that use this and
1370 need compatibility with previous versions can use this:
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00001371
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00001372 #ifndef PY_LONG_LONG
1373 #define PY_LONG_LONG LONG_LONG
1374 #endif
Martin v. Löwisb9a0f912003-03-29 10:06:18 +00001375
Raymond Hettinger1da1dbf2003-03-17 19:46:11 +00001376- Added PyObject_SelfIter() to fill the tp_iter slot for the
Raymond Hettinger01538262003-03-17 08:24:35 +00001377 typical case where the method returns its self argument.
1378
Guido van Rossume5c691a2003-03-07 15:13:17 +00001379- The extended type structure used for heap types (new-style
1380 classes defined by Python code using a class statement) is now
1381 exported from object.h as PyHeapTypeObject. (SF patch #696193.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001382
1383New platforms
1384-------------
1385
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00001386None this time.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001387
1388Tests
1389-----
1390
Neal Norwitz55b61d22003-02-28 19:57:03 +00001391- test_timeout now requires -u network to be passed to regrtest to run.
1392 See SF bug #692988.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001393
1394Windows
1395-------
1396
Tim Peters11b23062003-04-23 02:39:17 +00001397- os.fsync() now exists on Windows, and calls the Microsoft _commit()
1398 function.
1399
Guido van Rossumf4050642003-04-09 19:39:06 +00001400- New function winsound.MessageBeep() wraps the Win32 API
1401 MessageBeep().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001402
1403Mac
1404---
1405
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00001406- os.listdir() now returns Unicode strings on MacOS X when called with
1407 a Unicode argument. See the general news item under "Library".
Just van Rossum46c97842003-02-25 21:42:15 +00001408
Jack Jansendeac2ac2003-02-24 11:04:17 +00001409- A new method MacOS.WMAvailable() returns true if it is safe to access
1410 the window manager, false otherwise.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001411
Jack Jansencf76be02003-03-24 12:13:54 +00001412- EasyDialogs dialogs are now movable-modal, and if the application is
1413 currently in the background they will ask to be moved to the foreground
1414 before displaying.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001415
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00001416- OSA Scripting support has improved a lot, and gensuitemodule.py can now
Jack Jansende354b72003-04-11 15:37:20 +00001417 be used by mere mortals. The documentation is now also more or less
1418 complete.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001419
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00001420- The IDE (in a framework build) now includes introductory documentation
1421 in Apple Help Viewer format.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001422
1423
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001424What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 2?
1425=================================
1426
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00001427*Release date: 19-Feb-2003*
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001428
1429Core and builtins
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00001430-----------------
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001431
Walter Dörwald2ffec022003-02-19 16:34:11 +00001432- Negative positions returned from PEP 293 error callbacks are now
1433 treated as being relative to the end of the input string. Positions
1434 that are out of bounds raise an IndexError.
1435
Guido van Rossum162e38c2003-02-19 15:25:10 +00001436- sys.path[0] (the directory from which the script is loaded) is now
1437 turned into an absolute pathname, unless it is the empty string.
1438 (SF patch #664376.)
1439
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00001440- Finally fixed the bug in compile() and exec where a string ending
1441 with an indented code block but no newline would raise SyntaxError.
1442 This would have been a four-line change in parsetok.c... Except
1443 codeop.py depends on this behavior, so a compilation flag had to be
1444 invented that causes the tokenizer to revert to the old behavior;
1445 this required extra changes to 2 .h files, 2 .c files, and 2 .py
Guido van Rossum1442dc12003-02-13 22:19:20 +00001446 files. (Fixes SF bug #501622.)
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00001447
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00001448- If a new-style class defines neither __new__ nor __init__, its
1449 constructor would ignore all arguments. This is changed now: the
1450 constructor refuses arguments in this case. This might break code
1451 that worked under Python 2.2. The simplest fix is to add a no-op
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001452 __init__: ``def __init__(self, *args, **kw): pass``.
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00001453
Guido van Rossum48035eb2003-02-12 17:05:26 +00001454- Through a bytecode optimizer bug (and I bet you didn't even know
1455 Python *had* a bytecode optimizer :-), "unsigned" hex/oct constants
1456 with a leading minus sign would come out with the wrong sign.
1457 ("Unsigned" hex/oct constants are those with a face value in the
1458 range sys.maxint+1 through sys.maxint*2+1, inclusive; these have
1459 always been interpreted as negative numbers through sign folding.)
1460 E.g. 0xffffffff is -1, and -(0xffffffff) is 1, but -0xffffffff would
1461 come out as -4294967295. This was the case in Python 2.2 through
1462 2.2.2 and 2.3a1, and in Python 2.4 it will once again have that
1463 value, but according to PEP 237 it really needs to be 1 now. This
1464 will be backported to Python 2.2.3 a well. (SF #660455)
1465
Guido van Rossum47710652003-02-12 20:48:22 +00001466- int(s, base) sometimes sign-folds hex and oct constants; it only
1467 does this when base is 0 and s.strip() starts with a '0'. When the
1468 sign is actually folded, as in int("0xffffffff", 0) on a 32-bit
1469 machine, which returns -1, a FutureWarning is now issued; in Python
1470 2.4, this will return 4294967295L, as do int("+0xffffffff", 0) and
1471 int("0xffffffff", 16) right now. (PEP 347)
1472
Guido van Rossuma89d10e2003-02-12 03:58:38 +00001473- super(X, x): x may now be a proxy for an X instance, i.e.
1474 issubclass(x.__class__, X) but not issubclass(type(x), X).
1475
Guido van Rossum03bc7d32003-02-12 03:32:58 +00001476- isinstance(x, X): if X is a new-style class, this is now equivalent
1477 to issubclass(type(x), X) or issubclass(x.__class__, X). Previously
1478 only type(x) was tested. (For classic classes this was already the
1479 case.)
1480
Just van Rossum73ffb4a2003-02-10 09:57:08 +00001481- compile(), eval() and the exec statement now fully support source code
1482 passed as unicode strings.
1483
Neal Norwitzde8b94c2003-02-10 02:12:43 +00001484- int subclasses can be initialized with longs if the value fits in an int.
1485 See SF bug #683467.
1486
Tim Petersbf2674b2003-02-02 07:51:32 +00001487- long(string, base) takes time linear in len(string) when base is a power
1488 of 2 now. It used to take time quadratic in len(string).
1489
Martin v. Löwis8afd7572003-01-25 22:46:11 +00001490- filter returns now Unicode results for Unicode arguments.
1491
Martin v. Löwisaf6a27a2003-01-03 19:16:14 +00001492- raw_input can now return Unicode objects.
1493
Skip Montanaro4abd5f02003-01-02 20:51:08 +00001494- List objects' sort() method now accepts None as the comparison function.
1495 Passing None is semantically identical to calling sort() with no
1496 arguments.
1497
Neal Norwitz1a997502003-01-13 20:13:12 +00001498- Fixed crash when printing a subclass of str and __str__ returned self.
1499 See SF bug #667147.
1500
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00001501- Fixed an invalid RuntimeWarning and an undetected error when trying
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00001502 to convert a long integer into a float which couldn't fit.
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00001503 See SF bug #676155.
1504
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00001505- Function objects now have a __module__ attribute that is bound to
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00001506 the name of the module in which the function was defined. This
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00001507 applies for C functions and methods as well as functions and methods
1508 defined in Python. This attribute is used by pickle.whichmodule(),
1509 which changes the behavior of whichmodule slightly. In Python 2.2
1510 whichmodule() returns "__main__" for functions that are not defined
1511 at the top-level of a module (examples: methods, nested functions).
1512 Now whichmodule() will return the proper module name.
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00001513
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001514Extension modules
1515-----------------
1516
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00001517- operator.isNumberType() now checks that the object has a nb_int or
1518 nb_float slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
1519 tp_as_number pointer.
1520
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00001521- The imp module now has ways to acquire and release the "import
1522 lock": imp.acquire_lock() and imp.release_lock(). Note: this is a
1523 reentrant lock, so releasing the lock only truly releases it when
1524 this is the last release_lock() call. You can check with
1525 imp.lock_held(). (SF bug #580952 and patch #683257.)
1526
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001527- Change to cPickle to match pickle.py (see below and PEP 307).
1528
Neal Norwitz9caf9c02003-02-10 01:54:06 +00001529- Fix some bugs in the parser module. SF bug #678518.
1530
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00001531- Thanks to Scott David Daniels, a subtle bug in how the zlib
Walter Dörwald28d81962003-02-03 20:53:14 +00001532 extension implemented flush() was fixed. Scott also rewrote the
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00001533 zlib test suite using the unittest module. (SF bug #640230 and
1534 patch #678531.)
1535
Raymond Hettinger96ef8112003-02-01 00:10:11 +00001536- Added an itertools module containing high speed, memory efficient
1537 looping constructs inspired by tools from Haskell and SML.
1538
Guido van Rossum99d4abf2003-01-27 22:22:50 +00001539- The SSL module now handles sockets with a timeout set correctly (SF
1540 patch #675750, fixing SF bug #675552).
1541
Barry Warsawf8ba39c2003-01-07 20:55:26 +00001542- os/posixmodule has grown the sysexits.h constants (EX_OK and friends).
1543
Guido van Rossum6d0d3652003-01-07 20:34:19 +00001544- Fixed broken threadstate swap in readline that could cause fatal
1545 errors when a readline hook was being invoked while a background
1546 thread was active. (SF bugs #660476 and #513033.)
1547
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001548- fcntl now exposes the strops.h I_* constants.
1549
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00001550- Fix a crash on Solaris that occurred when calling close() on
1551 an mmap'ed file which was already closed. (SF patch #665913)
1552
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001553- Fixed several serious bugs in the zipimport implementation.
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001554
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00001555- datetime changes:
1556
Guido van Rossum8b7a9a32003-04-14 22:01:58 +00001557 The date class is now properly subclassable. (SF bug #720908)
1558
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00001559 The datetime and datetimetz classes have been collapsed into a single
1560 datetime class, and likewise the time and timetz classes into a single
1561 time class. Previously, a datetimetz object with tzinfo=None acted
1562 exactly like a datetime object, and similarly for timetz. This wasn't
1563 enough of a difference to justify distinct classes, and life is simpler
1564 now.
1565
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00001566 today() and now() now round system timestamps to the closest
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00001567 microsecond <http://www.python.org/sf/661086>. This repairs an
1568 irritation most likely seen on Windows systems.
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00001569
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00001570 In dt.astimezone(tz), if tz.utcoffset(dt) returns a duration,
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00001571 ValueError is raised if tz.dst(dt) returns None (2.3a1 treated it
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00001572 as 0 instead, but a tzinfo subclass wishing to participate in
1573 time zone conversion has to take a stand on whether it supports
1574 DST; if you don't care about DST, then code dst() to return 0 minutes,
1575 meaning that DST is never in effect).
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00001576
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00001577 The tzinfo methods utcoffset() and dst() must return a timedelta object
1578 (or None) now. In 2.3a1 they could also return an int or long, but that
1579 was an unhelpfully redundant leftover from an earlier version wherein
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00001580 they couldn't return a timedelta. TOOWTDI.
1581
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00001582 The example tzinfo class for local time had a bug. It was replaced
1583 by a later example coded by Guido.
1584
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00001585 datetime.astimezone(tz) no longer raises an exception when the
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00001586 input datetime has no UTC equivalent in tz. For typical "hybrid" time
1587 zones (a single tzinfo subclass modeling both standard and daylight
1588 time), this case can arise one hour per year, at the hour daylight time
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00001589 ends. See new docs for details. In short, the new behavior mimics
1590 the local wall clock's behavior of repeating an hour in local time.
1591
1592 dt.astimezone() can no longer be used to convert between naive and aware
1593 datetime objects. If you merely want to attach, or remove, a tzinfo
1594 object, without any conversion of date and time members, use
1595 dt.replace(tzinfo=whatever) instead, where "whatever" is None or a
1596 tzinfo subclass instance.
1597
1598 A new method tzinfo.fromutc(dt) can be overridden in tzinfo subclasses
1599 to give complete control over how a UTC time is to be converted to
1600 a local time. The default astimezone() implementation calls fromutc()
1601 as its last step, so a tzinfo subclass can affect that too by overriding
1602 fromutc(). It's expected that the default fromutc() implementation will
1603 be suitable as-is for "almost all" time zone subclasses, but the
1604 creativity of political time zone fiddling appears unbounded -- fromutc()
1605 allows the highly motivated to emulate any scheme expressible in Python.
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00001606
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00001607 datetime.now(): The optional tzinfo argument was undocumented (that's
1608 repaired), and its name was changed to tz ("tzinfo" is overloaded enough
1609 already). With a tz argument, now(tz) used to return the local date
1610 and time, and attach tz to it, without any conversion of date and time
1611 members. This was less than useful. Now now(tz) returns the current
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001612 date and time as local time in tz's time zone, akin to ::
1613
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00001614 tz.fromutc(datetime.utcnow().replace(tzinfo=utc))
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001615
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00001616 where "utc" is an instance of a tzinfo subclass modeling UTC. Without
1617 a tz argument, now() continues to return the current local date and time,
1618 as a naive datetime object.
1619
Tim Peters2a44a8d2003-01-23 20:53:10 +00001620 datetime.fromtimestamp(): Like datetime.now() above, this had less than
1621 useful behavior when the optional tinzo argument was specified. See
1622 also SF bug report <http://www.python.org/sf/660872>.
1623
Tim Peters8d81a012003-01-24 22:36:34 +00001624 date and datetime comparison: In order to prevent comparison from
1625 falling back to the default compare-object-addresses strategy, these
1626 raised TypeError whenever they didn't understand the other object type.
1627 They still do, except when the other object has a "timetuple" attribute,
1628 in which case they return NotImplemented now. This gives other
1629 datetime objects (e.g., mxDateTime) a chance to intercept the
1630 comparison.
1631
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00001632 date, time, datetime and timedelta comparison: When the exception
1633 for mixed-type comparisons in the last paragraph doesn't apply, if
1634 the comparison is == then False is returned, and if the comparison is
1635 != then True is returned. Because dict lookup and the "in" operator
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001636 only invoke __eq__, this allows, for example, ::
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00001637
1638 if some_datetime in some_sequence:
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001639
1640 and ::
1641
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00001642 some_dict[some_timedelta] = whatever
1643
1644 to work as expected, without raising TypeError just because the
1645 sequence is heterogeneous, or the dict has mixed-type keys. [This
1646 seems like a good idea to implement for all mixed-type comparisons
1647 that don't want to allow falling back to address comparison.]
1648
Tim Peters75a6e3b2003-01-04 18:17:36 +00001649 The constructors building a datetime from a timestamp could raise
1650 ValueError if the platform C localtime()/gmtime() inserted "leap
1651 seconds". Leap seconds are ignored now. On such platforms, it's
1652 possible to have timestamps that differ by a second, yet where
1653 datetimes constructed from them are equal.
1654
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00001655 The pickle format of date, time and datetime objects has changed
1656 completely. The undocumented pickler and unpickler functions no
Tim Petersb57f8f02003-02-01 02:54:15 +00001657 longer exist. The undocumented __setstate__() and __getstate__()
1658 methods no longer exist either.
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00001659
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001660Library
1661-------
1662
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001663- The logging module was updated slightly; the WARN level was renamed
1664 to WARNING, and the matching function/method warn() to warning().
1665
1666- The pickle and cPickle modules were updated with a new pickling
1667 protocol (documented by pickletools.py, see below) and several
1668 extensions to the pickle customization API (__reduce__, __setstate__
1669 etc.). The copy module now uses more of the pickle customization
1670 API to copy objects that don't implement __copy__ or __deepcopy__.
1671 See PEP 307 for details.
1672
1673- The distutils "register" command now uses http://www.python.org/pypi
1674 as the default repository. (See PEP 301.)
1675
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00001676- the platform dependent path related variables sep, altsep, extsep,
1677 pathsep, curdir, pardir and defpath are now defined in the platform
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00001678 dependent path modules (e.g. ntpath.py) rather than os.py, so these
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001679 variables are now available via os.path. They continue to be
1680 available from the os module.
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00001681 (see <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00001682
Tim Peters6ee04802003-02-05 18:29:34 +00001683- array.array was added to the types repr.py knows about (see
1684 <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
1685
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00001686- The new pickletools.py contains lots of documentation about pickle
1687 internals, and supplies some helpers for working with pickles, such as
1688 a symbolic pickle disassembler.
1689
Skip Montanaro9a7c96a2003-01-22 18:17:25 +00001690- Xmlrpclib.py now supports the builtin boolean type.
1691
Martin v. Löwis0c6774d2003-01-15 11:51:06 +00001692- py_compile has a new 'doraise' flag and a new PyCompileError
1693 exception.
1694
Martin v. Löwisd69663d2003-01-15 11:37:23 +00001695- SimpleXMLRPCServer now supports CGI through the CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler
1696 class.
1697
Guido van Rossum50e92232003-01-14 16:45:04 +00001698- The sets module now raises TypeError in __cmp__, to clarify that
1699 sets are not intended to be three-way-compared; the comparison
1700 operators are overloaded as subset/superset tests.
1701
Guido van Rossumcd0c0472003-01-07 23:03:05 +00001702- Bastion.py and rexec.py are disabled. These modules are not safe in
1703 Python 2.2. or 2.3.
1704
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001705- realpath is now exported when doing ``from poxixpath import *``.
Neal Norwitzbb0246a2003-01-03 18:12:28 +00001706 It is also exported for ntpath, macpath, and os2emxpath.
1707 See SF bug #659228.
1708
Neal Norwitzb9ef4ae2003-01-05 23:19:43 +00001709- New module tarfile from Lars Gustäbel provides a comprehensive interface
1710 to tar archive files with transparent gzip and bzip2 compression.
1711 See SF patch #651082.
1712
Neal Norwitz4f442372003-01-06 06:51:36 +00001713- urlparse can now parse imap:// URLs. See SF feature request #618024.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001714
Neal Norwitze931ed52003-01-10 23:24:32 +00001715- Tkinter.Canvas.scan_dragto() provides an optional parameter to support
1716 the gain value which is passed to Tk. SF bug# 602259.
1717
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00001718- Fix logging.handlers.SysLogHandler protocol when using UNIX domain sockets.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00001719 See SF patch #642974.
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00001720
Skip Montanaro12fe72e2003-02-25 17:46:20 +00001721- The dospath module was deleted. Use the ntpath module when manipulating
1722 DOS paths from other platforms.
1723
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001724Tools/Demos
1725-----------
1726
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00001727- Two new scripts (db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py) were added to the
1728 Tools/scripts directory to facilitate conversion from the old bsddb module
1729 to the new one. While the user-visible API of the new module is
1730 compatible with the old one, it's likely that the version of the
1731 underlying database library has changed. To convert from the old library,
1732 run the db2pickle.py script using the old version of Python to convert it
1733 to a pickle file. After upgrading Python, run the pickle2db.py script
1734 using the new version of Python to reconstitute your database. For
1735 example:
1736
Skip Montanaro621f0552003-02-03 15:48:10 +00001737 % python2.2 db2pickle.py -h some.db > some.pickle
1738 % python2.3 pickle2db.py -h some.db.new < some.pickle
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00001739
1740 Run the scripts without any args to get a usage message.
1741
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001742
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001743Build
1744-----
1745
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00001746- The audio driver tests (test_ossaudiodev.py and
1747 test_linuxaudiodev.py) are no longer run by default. This is
1748 because they don't always work, depending on your hardware and
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001749 software. To run these tests, you must use an invocation like ::
1750
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00001751 ./python Lib/test/regrtest.py -u audio test_ossaudiodev
1752
Skip Montanarodecc6a42003-01-01 20:07:49 +00001753- On systems which build using the configure script, compiler flags which
1754 used to be lumped together using the OPT flag have been split into two
1755 groups, OPT and BASECFLAGS. OPT is meant to carry just optimization- and
1756 debug-related flags like "-g" and "-O3". BASECFLAGS is meant to carry
1757 compiler flags that are required to get a clean compile. On some
1758 platforms (many Linux flavors in particular) BASECFLAGS will be empty by
1759 default. On others, such as Mac OS X and SCO, it will contain required
1760 flags. This change allows people building Python to override OPT without
1761 fear of clobbering compiler flags which are required to get a clean build.
1762
1763- On Darwin/Mac OS X platforms, /sw/lib and /sw/include are added to the
1764 relevant search lists in setup.py. This allows users building Python to
1765 take advantage of the many packages available from the fink project
1766 <http://fink.sf.net/>.
1767
1768- A new Makefile target, scriptsinstall, installs a number of useful scripts
1769 from the Tools/scripts directory.
1770
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001771C API
1772-----
1773
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001774- PyEval_GetFrame() is now declared to return a ``PyFrameObject *``
1775 instead of a plain ``PyObject *``. (SF patch #686601.)
Guido van Rossum6297a7a2003-02-19 15:53:17 +00001776
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00001777- PyNumber_Check() now checks that the object has a nb_int or nb_float
1778 slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
1779 tp_as_number pointer.
1780
Guido van Rossumeea47182003-02-11 20:39:59 +00001781- A C type that inherits from a base type that defines tp_as_buffer
1782 will now inherit the tp_as_buffer pointer if it doesn't define one.
1783 (SF #681367)
1784
Neil Schemenauer5042da62003-02-04 20:59:40 +00001785- The PyArg_Parse functions now issue a DeprecationWarning if a float
1786 argument is provided when an integer is specified (this affects the 'b',
1787 'B', 'h', 'H', 'i', and 'l' codes). Future versions of Python will
1788 raise a TypeError.
Neil Schemenauercd63e612003-01-24 22:15:53 +00001789
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001790Tests
1791-----
1792
Walter Dörwald11cfbd62003-03-26 16:03:16 +00001793- Several tests weren't being run from regrtest.py (test_timeout.py,
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001794 test_tarfile.py, test_netrc.py, test_multifile.py,
1795 test_importhooks.py and test_imp.py). Now they are. (Note to
1796 developers: please read Lib/test/README when creating a new test, to
1797 make sure to do it right! All tests need to use either unittest or
1798 pydoc.)
1799
1800- Added test_posix.py, a test suite for the posix module.
1801
1802- Added test_hexoct.py, a test suite for hex/oct constant folding.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001803
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001804Windows
1805-------
1806
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00001807- The timeout code for socket connect() didn't work right; this has
1808 now been fixed. test_timeout.py should pass (at least most of the
1809 time).
1810
Thomas Hellerdda583d2003-01-31 20:45:41 +00001811- distutils' msvccompiler class now passes the preprocessor options to
1812 the resource compiler. See SF patch #669198.
1813
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00001814- The bsddb module now ships with Sleepycat's 4.1.25.NC, the latest
1815 release without strong cryptography.
1816
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00001817- sys.path[0], if it contains a directory name, is now always an
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001818 absolute pathname. (SF patch #664376.)
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00001819
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00001820- The new logging package is now installed by the Windows installer. It
1821 wasn't in 2.3a1 due to oversight.
1822
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001823Mac
1824---
1825
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00001826- There are new dialogs EasyDialogs.AskFileForOpen, AskFileForSave
1827 and AskFolder. The old macfs.StandardGetFile and friends are deprecated.
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00001828
Jack Jansenc9296362003-02-06 23:10:45 +00001829- Most of the standard library now uses pathnames or FSRefs in preference
1830 of FSSpecs, and use the underlying Carbon.File and Carbon.Folder modules
1831 in stead of macfs. macfs will probably be deprecated in the future.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00001832
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00001833- Type Carbon.File.FSCatalogInfo and supporting methods have been implemented.
1834 This also makes macfs.FSSpec.SetDates() work again.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001835
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00001836- There is a new module pimp, the package install manager for Python, and
1837 accompanying applet PackageManager. These allow you to easily download
1838 and install pretested extension packages either in source or binary
1839 form. Only in MacPython-OSX.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001840
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00001841- Applets are now built with bundlebuilder in MacPython-OSX, which should make
Jack Jansen5d44b342003-02-18 23:32:47 +00001842 them more robust and also provides a path towards BuildApplication. The
1843 downside of this change is that applets can no longer be run from the
1844 Terminal window, this will hopefully be fixed in the 2.3b1.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001845
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001846
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001847What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 1?
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001848=================================
1849
Guido van Rossumae548862002-12-31 15:47:36 +00001850*Release date: 31-Dec-2002*
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001851
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001852Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001853--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00001854
Michael W. Hudson96bc3b42002-11-26 14:48:23 +00001855- One can now assign to __bases__ and __name__ of new-style classes.
1856
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00001857- dict() now accepts keyword arguments so that dict(one=1, two=2)
1858 is the equivalent of {"one": 1, "two": 2}. Accordingly,
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00001859 the existing (but undocumented) 'items' keyword argument has
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00001860 been eliminated. This means that dict(items=someMapping) now has
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00001861 a different meaning than before.
1862
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00001863- int() now returns a long object if the argument is outside the
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001864 integer range, so int("4" * 1000), int(1e200) and int(1L<<1000) will
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00001865 all return long objects instead of raising an OverflowError.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001866
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00001867- Assignment to __class__ is disallowed if either the old or the new
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00001868 class is a statically allocated type object (such as defined by an
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00001869 extension module). This prevents anomalies like 2.__class__ = bool.
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00001870
1871- New-style object creation and deallocation have been sped up
1872 significantly; they are now faster than classic instance creation
1873 and deallocation.
1874
1875- The __slots__ variable can now mention "private" names, and the
1876 right thing will happen (e.g. __slots__ = ["__foo"]).
1877
1878- The built-ins slice() and buffer() are now callable types. The
1879 types classobj (formerly class), code, function, instance, and
1880 instancemethod (formerly instance-method), which have no built-in
1881 names but are accessible through the types module, are now also
1882 callable. The type dict-proxy is renamed to dictproxy.
1883
1884- Cycles going through the __class__ link of a new-style instance are
1885 now detected by the garbage collector.
1886
1887- Classes using __slots__ are now properly garbage collected.
1888 [SF bug 519621]
1889
1890- Tightened the __slots__ rules: a slot name must be a valid Python
1891 identifier.
1892
1893- The constructor for the module type now requires a name argument and
1894 takes an optional docstring argument. Previously, this constructor
1895 ignored its arguments. As a consequence, deriving a class from a
1896 module (not from the module type) is now illegal; previously this
1897 created an unnamed module, just like invoking the module type did.
1898 [SF bug 563060]
1899
1900- A new type object, 'basestring', is added. This is a common base type
1901 for 'str' and 'unicode', and can be used instead of
1902 types.StringTypes, e.g. to test whether something is "a string":
1903 isinstance(x, basestring) is True for Unicode and 8-bit strings. This
1904 is an abstract base class and cannot be instantiated directly.
1905
1906- Changed new-style class instantiation so that when C's __new__
1907 method returns something that's not a C instance, its __init__ is
1908 not called. [SF bug #537450]
1909
1910- Fixed super() to work correctly with class methods. [SF bug #535444]
1911
1912- If you try to pickle an instance of a class that has __slots__ but
1913 doesn't define or override __getstate__, a TypeError is now raised.
1914 This is done by adding a bozo __getstate__ to the class that always
1915 raises TypeError. (Before, this would appear to be pickled, but the
1916 state of the slots would be lost.)
1917
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001918Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001919-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001920
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00001921- Import from zipfiles is now supported. The name of a zipfile placed
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00001922 on sys.path causes the import statement to look for importable Python
1923 modules (with .py, pyc and .pyo extensions) and packages inside the
1924 zipfile. The zipfile import follows the specification (though not
1925 the sample implementation) of PEP 273. The semantics of __path__ are
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00001926 compatible with those that have been implemented in Jython since
1927 Jython 2.1.
1928
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001929- PEP 302 has been accepted. Although it was initially developed to
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00001930 support zipimport, it offers a new, general import hook mechanism.
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00001931 Several new variables have been added to the sys module:
1932 sys.meta_path, sys.path_hooks, and sys.path_importer_cache; these
1933 make extending the import statement much more convenient than
1934 overriding the __import__ built-in function. For a description of
1935 these, see PEP 302.
1936
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00001937- A frame object's f_lineno attribute can now be written to from a
1938 trace function to change which line will execute next. A command to
1939 exploit this from pdb has been added. [SF patch #643835]
1940
Marc-André Lemburg20b91352002-12-12 18:01:43 +00001941- The _codecs support module for codecs.py was turned into a builtin
1942 module to assure that at least the builtin codecs are available
1943 to the Python parser for source code decoding according to PEP 263.
1944
Walter Dörwaldd9a6ad32002-12-12 16:41:44 +00001945- issubclass now supports a tuple as the second argument, just like
1946 isinstance does. ``issubclass(X, (A, B))`` is equivalent to
1947 ``issubclass(X, A) or issubclass(X, B)``.
1948
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00001949- Thanks to Armin Rigo, the last known way to provoke a system crash
1950 by cleverly arranging for a comparison function to mutate a list
1951 during a list.sort() operation has been fixed. The effect of
1952 attempting to mutate a list, or even to inspect its contents or
1953 length, while a sort is in progress, is not defined by the language.
1954 The C implementation of Python 2.3 attempts to detect mutations,
1955 and raise ValueError if one occurs, but there's no guarantee that
1956 all mutations will be caught, or that any will be caught across
1957 releases or implementations.
1958
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00001959- Unicode file name processing for Windows (PEP 277) is implemented.
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00001960 All platforms now have an os.path.supports_unicode_filenames attribute,
1961 which is set to True on Windows NT/2000/XP, and False elsewhere.
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00001962
Walter Dörwald3aeb6322002-09-02 13:14:32 +00001963- Codec error handling callbacks (PEP 293) are implemented.
1964 Error handling in unicode.encode or str.decode can now be customized.
1965
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00001966- A subtle change to the semantics of the built-in function intern():
1967 interned strings are no longer immortal. You must keep a reference
1968 to the return value intern() around to get the benefit.
1969
Guido van Rossumf808b892002-08-16 03:38:10 +00001970- Use of 'None' as a variable, argument or attribute name now
1971 issues a SyntaxWarning. In the future, None may become a keyword.
1972
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00001973- SET_LINENO is gone. co_lnotab is now consulted to determine when to
1974 call the trace function. C code that accessed f_lineno should call
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00001975 PyCode_Addr2Line instead (f_lineno is still there, but only kept up
1976 to date when there is a trace function set).
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00001977
Guido van Rossum9be89462002-08-14 16:11:30 +00001978- There's a new warning category, FutureWarning. This is used to warn
1979 about a number of situations where the value or sign of an integer
1980 result will change in Python 2.4 as a result of PEP 237 (integer
1981 unification). The warnings implement stage B0 mentioned in that
1982 PEP. The warnings are about the following situations:
1983
1984 - Octal and hex literals without 'L' prefix in the inclusive range
1985 [0x80000000..0xffffffff]; these are currently negative ints, but
1986 in Python 2.4 they will be positive longs with the same bit
1987 pattern.
1988
1989 - Left shifts on integer values that cause the outcome to lose
1990 bits or have a different sign than the left operand. To be
1991 precise: x<<n where this currently doesn't yield the same value
1992 as long(x)<<n; in Python 2.4, the outcome will be long(x)<<n.
1993
1994 - Conversions from ints to string that show negative values as
1995 unsigned ints in the inclusive range [0x80000000..0xffffffff];
1996 this affects the functions hex() and oct(), and the string
1997 formatting codes %u, %o, %x, and %X. In Python 2.4, these will
1998 show signed values (e.g. hex(-1) currently returns "0xffffffff";
1999 in Python 2.4 it will return "-0x1").
2000
Guido van Rossum9a2eda52002-12-31 02:12:42 +00002001- The bits manipulated under the cover by sys.setcheckinterval() have
2002 been changed. Both the check interval and the ticker used to be
2003 per-thread values. They are now just a pair of global variables.
2004 In addition, the default check interval was boosted from 10 to 100
2005 bytecode instructions. This may have some effect on systems that
2006 relied on the old default value. In particular, in multi-threaded
2007 applications which try to be highly responsive, response time will
2008 increase by some (perhaps imperceptible) amount.
Skip Montanaro979c74b2002-09-03 21:25:14 +00002009
Tim Petersd64c1de2002-08-12 17:36:03 +00002010- When multiplying very large integers, a version of the so-called
2011 Karatsuba algorithm is now used. This is most effective if the
2012 inputs have roughly the same size. If they both have about N digits,
2013 Karatsuba multiplication has O(N**1.58) runtime (the exponent is
2014 log_base_2(3)) instead of the previous O(N**2). Measured results may
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00002015 be better or worse than that, depending on platform quirks. Besides
2016 the O() improvement in raw instruction count, the Karatsuba algorithm
2017 appears to have much better cache behavior on extremely large integers
2018 (starting in the ballpark of a million bits). Note that this is a
2019 simple implementation, and there's no intent here to compete with,
2020 e.g., GMP. It gives a very nice speedup when it applies, but a package
2021 devoted to fast large-integer arithmetic should run circles around it.
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00002022
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00002023- u'%c' will now raise a ValueError in case the argument is an
2024 integer outside the valid range of Unicode code point ordinals.
2025
Guido van Rossumdeb09362002-08-09 17:16:30 +00002026- The tempfile module has been overhauled for enhanced security. The
2027 mktemp() function is now deprecated; new, safe replacements are
2028 mkstemp() (for files) and mkdtemp() (for directories), and the
2029 higher-level functions NamedTemporaryFile() and TemporaryFile().
2030 Use of some global variables in this module is also deprecated; the
2031 new functions have keyword arguments to provide the same
2032 functionality. All Lib, Tools and Demo modules that used the unsafe
2033 interfaces have been updated to use the safe replacements. Thanks
2034 to Zack Weinberg!
2035
Guido van Rossumd81a9832002-08-09 15:57:34 +00002036- When x is an object whose class implements __mul__ and __rmul__,
2037 1.0*x would correctly invoke __rmul__, but 1*x would erroneously
2038 invoke __mul__. This was due to the sequence-repeat code in the int
2039 type. This has been fixed now.
2040
Barry Warsawd79f6832002-08-06 17:01:51 +00002041- Previously, "str1 in str2" required str1 to be a string of length 1.
2042 This restriction has been relaxed to allow str1 to be a string of
2043 any length. Thus "'el' in 'hello world'" returns True now.
2044
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00002045- File objects are now their own iterators. For a file f, iter(f) now
2046 returns f (unless f is closed), and f.next() is similar to
2047 f.readline() when EOF is not reached; however, f.next() uses a
2048 readahead buffer that messes up the file position, so mixing
2049 f.next() and f.readline() (or other methods) doesn't work right.
2050 Calling f.seek() drops the readahead buffer, but other operations
2051 don't. It so happens that this gives a nice additional speed boost
2052 to "for line in file:"; the xreadlines method and corresponding
Guido van Rossumbffb2ef2002-08-09 17:17:07 +00002053 module are now obsolete. Thanks to Oren Tirosh!
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00002054
Guido van Rossumde392d32002-08-05 14:17:20 +00002055- Encoding declarations (PEP 263, phase 1) have been implemented. A
2056 comment of the form "# -*- coding: <encodingname> -*-" in the first
2057 or second line of a Python source file indicates the encoding.
Martin v. Löwis00f1e3f2002-08-04 17:29:52 +00002058
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00002059- list.sort() has a new implementation. While cross-platform results
2060 may vary, and in data-dependent ways, this is much faster on many
2061 kinds of partially ordered lists than the previous implementation,
2062 and reported to be just as fast on randomly ordered lists on
2063 several major platforms. This sort is also stable (if A==B and A
2064 precedes B in the list at the start, A precedes B after the sort too),
2065 although the language definition does not guarantee stability. A
2066 potential drawback is that list.sort() may require temp space of
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00002067 len(list)*2 bytes (``*4`` on a 64-bit machine). It's therefore possible
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00002068 for list.sort() to raise MemoryError now, even if a comparison function
2069 does not. See <http://www.python.org/sf/587076> for full details.
2070
Guido van Rossum2d5389c2002-07-23 03:44:35 +00002071- All standard iterators now ensure that, once StopIteration has been
2072 raised, all future calls to next() on the same iterator will also
2073 raise StopIteration. There used to be various counterexamples to
2074 this behavior, which could caused confusion or subtle program
2075 breakage, without any benefits. (Note that this is still an
2076 iterator's responsibility; the iterator framework does not enforce
2077 this.)
2078
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00002079- Ctrl+C handling on Windows has been made more consistent with
2080 other platforms. KeyboardInterrupt can now reliably be caught,
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00002081 and Ctrl+C at an interactive prompt no longer terminates the
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00002082 process under NT/2k/XP (it never did under Win9x). Ctrl+C will
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00002083 interrupt time.sleep() in the main thread, and any child processes
2084 created via the popen family (on win2k; we can't make win9x work
Mark Hammond8f3afc72002-08-10 06:26:31 +00002085 reliably) are also interrupted (as generally happens on for Linux/Unix.)
2086 [SF bugs 231273, 439992 and 581232]
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00002087
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00002088- sys.getwindowsversion() has been added on Windows. This
2089 returns a tuple with information about the version of Windows
2090 currently running.
2091
Raymond Hettinger5a04aec2002-06-25 00:25:30 +00002092- Slices and repetitions of buffer objects now consistently return
2093 a string. Formerly, strings would be returned most of the time,
2094 but a buffer object would be returned when the repetition count
2095 was one or when the slice range was all inclusive.
2096
Walter Dörwald3430d702002-06-17 10:43:59 +00002097- Unicode objects in sys.path are no longer ignored but treated
2098 as directory names.
2099
Neal Norwitz1f68fc72002-06-14 00:50:42 +00002100- Fixed string.startswith and string.endswith builtin methods
2101 so they accept negative indices. [SF bug 493951]
2102
Guido van Rossumc5fe5eb2002-06-12 03:45:21 +00002103- Fixed a bug with a continue inside a try block and a yield in the
2104 finally clause. [SF bug 567538]
2105
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00002106- Most builtin sequences now support "extended slices", i.e. slices
Guido van Rossum2e82e712002-06-13 11:41:07 +00002107 with a third "stride" parameter. For example, "hello world"[::-1]
2108 gives "dlrow olleh".
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00002109
Neal Norwitzd68f5172002-05-29 15:54:55 +00002110- A new warning PendingDeprecationWarning was added to provide
2111 direction on features which are in the process of being deprecated.
2112 The warning will not be printed by default. To see the pending
2113 deprecations, use -Walways::PendingDeprecationWarning::
2114 as a command line option or warnings.filterwarnings() in code.
2115
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00002116- Deprecated features of xrange objects have been removed as
2117 promised. The start, stop, and step attributes and the tolist()
2118 method no longer exist. xrange repetition and slicing have been
2119 removed.
2120
Guido van Rossum7dab2422002-04-26 19:40:56 +00002121- New builtin function enumerate(x), from PEP 279. Example:
2122 enumerate("abc") is an iterator returning (0,"a"), (1,"b"), (2,"c").
2123 The argument can be an arbitrary iterable object.
2124
Neil Schemenauer89e3ee02002-04-26 01:58:53 +00002125- The assert statement no longer tests __debug__ at runtime. This means
2126 that assert statements cannot be disabled by assigning a false value
2127 to __debug__.
2128
Walter Dörwald068325e2002-04-15 13:36:47 +00002129- A method zfill() was added to str and unicode, that fills a numeric
2130 string to the left with zeros. For example,
2131 "+123".zfill(6) -> "+00123".
2132
Guido van Rossum862fe3c2002-04-15 12:36:47 +00002133- Complex numbers supported divmod() and the // and % operators, but
2134 these make no sense. Since this was documented, they're being
2135 deprecated now.
2136
Guido van Rossum26dd8302002-04-26 20:11:29 +00002137- String and unicode methods lstrip(), rstrip() and strip() now take
2138 an optional argument that specifies the characters to strip. For
2139 example, "Foo!!!?!?!?".rstrip("?!") -> "Foo".
Guido van Rossum49042042002-04-13 00:59:05 +00002140
Guido van Rossumc0d3f4e2002-11-27 13:10:40 +00002141- There's a new dictionary constructor (a class method of the dict
2142 class), dict.fromkeys(iterable, value=None). It constructs a
2143 dictionary with keys taken from the iterable and all values set to a
2144 single value. It can be used for building sets and for removing
2145 duplicates from sequences.
Raymond Hettingere33d3df2002-11-27 07:29:33 +00002146
Guido van Rossumc69343b2002-04-12 19:22:48 +00002147- Added a new dict method pop(key). This removes and returns the
2148 value corresponding to key. [SF patch #539949]
2149
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00002150- A new built-in type, bool, has been added, as well as built-in
2151 names for its two values, True and False. Comparisons and sundry
2152 other operations that return a truth value have been changed to
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002153 return a bool instead. Read PEP 285 for an explanation of why this
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00002154 is backward compatible.
2155
Guido van Rossum95b62a62002-03-29 01:07:24 +00002156- Fixed two bugs reported as SF #535905: under certain conditions,
2157 deallocating a deeply nested structure could cause a segfault in the
2158 garbage collector, due to interaction with the "trashcan" code;
2159 access to the current frame during destruction of a local variable
2160 could access a pointer to freed memory.
2161
Guido van Rossumfe0ca4a2002-06-18 21:20:13 +00002162- The optional object allocator ("pymalloc") has been enabled by
2163 default. The recommended practice for memory allocation and
2164 deallocation has been streamlined. A header file is included,
2165 Misc/pymemcompat.h, which can be bundled with 3rd party extensions
2166 and lets them use the same API with Python versions from 1.5.2
2167 onwards.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00002168
Martin v. Löwiscfeb3b62002-03-03 21:30:27 +00002169- PyErr_Display will provide file and line information for all exceptions
2170 that have an attribute print_file_and_line, not just SyntaxErrors.
2171
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00002172- The UTF-8 codec will now encode and decode Unicode surrogates
2173 correctly and without raising exceptions for unpaired ones.
2174
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00002175- Universal newlines (PEP 278) is implemented. Briefly, using 'U'
2176 instead of 'r' when opening a text file for reading changes the line
2177 ending convention so that any of '\r', '\r\n', and '\n' is
2178 recognized (even mixed in one file); all three are converted to
2179 '\n', the standard Python line end character.
2180
Neal Norwitz649b7592002-01-01 19:07:13 +00002181- file.xreadlines() now raises a ValueError if the file is closed:
2182 Previously, an xreadlines object was returned which would raise
2183 a ValueError when the xreadlines.next() method was called.
2184
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002185- sys.exit() inadvertently allowed more than one argument.
Neal Norwitz0c766a02002-03-27 13:03:09 +00002186 An exception will now be raised if more than one argument is used.
2187
Gustavo Niemeyer17c5a332002-12-16 14:09:22 +00002188- Changed evaluation order of dictionary literals to conform to the
2189 general left to right evaluation order rule. Now {f1(): f2()} will
2190 evaluate f1 first.
Gustavo Niemeyer78429a62002-12-16 13:54:02 +00002191
Gustavo Niemeyer786ddb22002-12-16 18:12:53 +00002192- Fixed bug #521782: when a file was in non-blocking mode, file.read()
2193 could silently lose data or wrongly throw an unknown error.
2194
Neil Schemenauerb983aa02002-12-30 20:22:23 +00002195- The sq_repeat, sq_inplace_repeat, sq_concat and sq_inplace_concat
2196 slots are now always tried after trying the corresponding nb_* slots.
2197 This fixes a number of minor bugs (see bug #624807).
2198
Neal Norwitz74a032e2003-01-10 23:29:48 +00002199- Fix problem with dynamic loading on 64-bit AIX (see bug #639945).
2200
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002201Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002202-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002203
Raymond Hettinger9543b342003-01-18 23:22:20 +00002204- Added three operators to the operator module:
2205 operator.pow(a,b) which is equivalent to: a**b.
2206 operator.is_(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is b.
2207 operator.is_not(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is not b.
2208
Martin v. Löwis24a880b2002-12-31 12:55:15 +00002209- posix.openpty now works on all systems that have /dev/ptmx.
2210
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00002211- A module zipimport exists to support importing code from zip
2212 archives.
2213
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00002214- The new datetime module supplies classes for manipulating dates and
2215 times. The basic design came from the Zope "fishbowl process", and
2216 favors practical commercial applications over calendar esoterica. See
2217
2218 http://www.zope.org/Members/fdrake/DateTimeWiki/FrontPage
2219
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00002220- _tkinter now returns Tcl objects, instead of strings. Objects which
2221 have Python equivalents are converted to Python objects, other objects
2222 are wrapped. This can be configured through the wantobjects method,
Martin v. Löwis8c8aa5d2002-11-26 21:39:48 +00002223 or Tkinter.wantobjects.
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00002224
Barry Warsawc27f4bd2002-12-30 21:03:26 +00002225- The PyBSDDB wrapper around the Sleepycat Berkeley DB library has
2226 been added as the package bsddb. The traditional bsddb module is
2227 still available in source code, but not built automatically anymore,
2228 and is now named bsddb185. This supports Berkeley DB versions from
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00002229 3.0 to 4.1. For help converting your databases from the old module (which
2230 probably used an obsolete version of Berkeley DB) to the new module, see
2231 the db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py scripts described in the Tools/Demos
2232 section above.
Martin v. Löwisef546b32002-11-19 08:12:57 +00002233
Martin v. Löwis677bde22002-11-23 22:08:15 +00002234- unicodedata was updated to Unicode 3.2. It supports normalization
2235 and names for Hangul syllables and CJK unified ideographs.
Martin v. Löwis7d41e292002-11-23 12:22:32 +00002236
Neal Norwitz94a83fd2002-11-02 17:46:24 +00002237- resource.getrlimit() now returns longs instead of ints.
2238
Martin v. Löwis080689c2002-10-26 14:42:02 +00002239- readline now dynamically adjusts its input/output stream if
2240 sys.stdin/stdout changes.
2241
Guido van Rossumba602972002-10-01 18:18:58 +00002242- The _tkinter module (and hence Tkinter) has dropped support for
2243 Tcl/Tk 8.0 and 8.1. Only Tcl/Tk versions 8.2, 8.3 and 8.4 are
2244 supported.
2245
Martin v. Löwis658009a2002-09-16 17:26:24 +00002246- cPickle.BadPickleGet is now a class.
2247
Martin v. Löwisa19bfe02002-10-16 18:28:36 +00002248- The time stamps in os.stat_result are floating point numbers
2249 after stat_float_times has been called.
Martin v. Löwis94717ed2002-09-09 14:24:16 +00002250
Neal Norwitzb5673922002-09-05 21:48:07 +00002251- If the size passed to mmap.mmap() is larger than the length of the
2252 file on non-Windows platforms, a ValueError is raised. [SF bug 585792]
2253
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00002254- The xreadlines module is slated for obsolescence.
2255
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00002256- The strptime function in the time module is now always available (a
2257 Python implementation is used when the C library doesn't define it).
2258
Guido van Rossum9562bcf2002-06-14 21:31:18 +00002259- The 'new' module is no longer an extension, but a Python module that
2260 only exists for backwards compatibility. Its contents are no longer
2261 functions but callable type objects.
2262
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00002263- The bsddb.*open functions can now take 'None' as a filename.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00002264 This will create a temporary in-memory bsddb that won't be
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00002265 written to disk.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00002266
Martin v. Löwisb96152c2002-12-31 13:20:15 +00002267- posix.getloadavg, posix.lchown, posix.killpg, posix.mknod, and
2268 posix.getpgid have been added where available.
Martin v. Löwis06a83e92002-04-14 10:19:44 +00002269
Martin v. Löwisf0a46682002-11-03 17:20:12 +00002270- The locale module now exposes the C library's gettext interface. It
2271 also has a new function getpreferredencoding.
Martin v. Löwis2e64c342002-03-27 18:49:02 +00002272
Tim Petersfbf74f22002-03-14 19:06:01 +00002273- A security hole ("double free") was found in zlib-1.1.3, a popular
2274 third party compression library used by some Python modules. The
2275 hole was quickly plugged in zlib-1.1.4, and the Windows build of
2276 Python now ships with zlib-1.1.4.
2277
Martin v. Löwis688357e2002-04-08 21:28:20 +00002278- pwd, grp, and resource return enhanced tuples now, with symbolic
2279 field names.
Martin v. Löwis29001ff2002-03-01 10:47:37 +00002280
Martin v. Löwis99866332002-03-01 10:27:01 +00002281- array.array is now a type object. A new format character
2282 'u' indicates Py_UNICODE arrays. For those, .tounicode and
2283 .fromunicode methods are available. Arrays now support __iadd__
2284 and __imul__.
2285
Neal Norwitze790eae2002-01-01 21:14:12 +00002286- dl now builds on every system that has dlfcn.h. Failure in case
Martin v. Löwis93227272002-01-01 20:18:30 +00002287 of sizeof(int)!=sizeof(long)!=sizeof(void*) is delayed until dl.open
2288 is called.
2289
Skip Montanaro8e790e72002-09-03 13:25:17 +00002290- The sys module acquired a new attribute, api_version, which evaluates
2291 to the value of the PYTHON_API_VERSION macro with which the
2292 interpreter was compiled.
2293
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00002294- Fixed bug #470582: sre module would return a tuple (None, 'a', 'ab')
2295 when applying the regular expression '^((a)c)?(ab)$' on 'ab'. It now
2296 returns (None, None, 'ab'), as expected. Also fixed handling of
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00002297 lastindex/lastgroup match attributes in similar cases. For example,
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00002298 when running the expression r'(a)(b)?b' over 'ab', lastindex must be
2299 1, not 2.
2300
Gustavo Niemeyerc523b042002-11-07 03:28:56 +00002301- Fixed bug #581080: sre scanner was not checking the buffer limit
2302 before increasing the current pointer. This was creating an infinite
2303 loop in the search function, once the pointer exceeded the buffer
2304 limit.
2305
Thomas Heller95cb7e42002-11-07 16:23:55 +00002306- The os.fdopen function now enforces a file mode starting with the
2307 letter 'r', 'w' or 'a', otherwise a ValueError is raised. This fixes
2308 bug #623464.
2309
Greg Ward6c58d462003-01-03 18:02:15 +00002310- The linuxaudiodev module is now deprecated; it is being replaced by
2311 ossaudiodev. The interface has been extended to cover a lot more of
2312 OSS (see www.opensound.com), including most DSP ioctls and the
2313 OSS mixer API. Documentation forthcoming in 2.3a2.
2314
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002315Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002316-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002317
Guido van Rossum747f8062003-01-03 16:33:49 +00002318- imaplib.py now supports SSL (Tino Lange and Piers Lauder).
2319
Just van Rossum5e156ad2002-12-31 16:38:01 +00002320- Freeze's modulefinder.py has been moved to the standard library;
2321 slightly improved so it will issue less false missing submodule
2322 reports (see sf path #643711 for details). Documentation will follow
2323 with Python 2.3a2.
2324
Martin v. Löwis96a60e42002-12-31 13:11:54 +00002325- os.path exposes getctime.
2326
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002327- unittest.py now has two additional methods called assertAlmostEqual()
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002328 and failIfAlmostEqual(). They implement an approximate comparison
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002329 by rounding the difference between the two arguments and comparing
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002330 the result to zero. Approximate comparison is essential for
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002331 unit tests of floating point results.
2332
Raymond Hettingere11b5102002-12-25 16:37:19 +00002333- calendar.py now depends on the new datetime module rather than
2334 the time module. As a result, the range of allowable dates
2335 has been increased.
2336
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00002337- pdb has a new 'j(ump)' command to select the next line to be
2338 executed.
2339
Thomas Heller1b3b49d2002-12-12 19:13:44 +00002340- The distutils created windows installers now can run a
2341 postinstallation script.
2342
Martin v. Löwis4581cfa2002-11-22 08:23:09 +00002343- doctest.testmod can now be called without argument, which means to
2344 test the current module.
2345
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002346- When canceling a server that implemented threading with a keyboard
Martin v. Löwisf86e8ef2002-11-22 08:08:44 +00002347 interrupt, the server would shut down but not terminate (waiting on
2348 client threads). A new member variable, daemon_threads, was added to
2349 the ThreadingMixIn class in SocketServer.py to make it explicit that
2350 this behavior needs to be controlled.
2351
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00002352- A new module, optparse, provides a fancy alternative to getopt for
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00002353 command line parsing. It is a slightly modified version of Greg
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00002354 Ward's Optik package.
2355
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00002356- UserDict.py now defines a DictMixin class which defines all dictionary
2357 methods for classes that already have a minimum mapping interface.
2358 This greatly simplifies writing classes that need to be substitutable
2359 for dictionaries (such as the shelve module).
2360
2361- shelve.py now subclasses from UserDict.DictMixin. Now shelve supports
2362 all dictionary methods. This eases the transition to persistent
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00002363 storage for scripts originally written with dictionaries in mind.
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00002364
Skip Montanaro3bf99e32002-12-08 18:36:24 +00002365- shelve.open and the various classes in shelve.py now accept an optional
2366 binary flag, which defaults to False. If True, the values stored in the
2367 shelf are binary pickles.
2368
Guido van Rossumfda06742002-11-13 16:29:18 +00002369- A new package, logging, implements the logging API defined by PEP
2370 282. The code is written by Vinay Sajip.
2371
Walter Dörwald4dbf1922002-11-06 16:53:44 +00002372- StreamReader, StreamReaderWriter and StreamRecoder in the codecs
2373 modules are iterators now.
2374
Tim Peters9288f952002-11-05 20:38:55 +00002375- gzip.py now handles files exceeding 2GB. Files over 4GB also work
2376 now (provided the OS supports it, and Python is configured with large
2377 file support), but in that case the underlying gzip file format can
2378 record only the least-significant 32 bits of the file size, so that
2379 some tools working with gzipped files may report an incorrect file
2380 size.
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00002381
Martin v. Löwis74b51ac2002-10-26 14:50:45 +00002382- xml.sax.saxutils.unescape has been added, to replace entity references
2383 with their entity value.
2384
Martin v. Löwis77ac4292002-10-15 15:11:13 +00002385- Queue.Queue.{put,get} now support an optional timeout argument.
2386
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00002387- Various features of Tk 8.4 are exposed in Tkinter.py. The multiple
2388 option of tkFileDialog is exposed as function askopenfile{,name}s.
Martin v. Löwis2ec36272002-10-13 10:22:08 +00002389
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00002390- Various configure methods of Tkinter have been stream-lined, so that
2391 tag_configure, image_configure, window_configure now return a
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00002392 dictionary when invoked with no argument.
Martin v. Löwis6ce13152002-10-10 14:36:13 +00002393
Guido van Rossum2b492b62002-10-09 21:40:48 +00002394- Importing the readline module now no longer has the side effect of
2395 calling setlocale(LC_CTYPE, ""). The initial "C" locale, or
2396 whatever locale is explicitly set by the user, is preserved. If you
2397 want repr() of 8-bit strings in your preferred encoding to preserve
2398 all printable characters of that encoding, you have to add the
2399 following code to your $PYTHONSTARTUP file or to your application's
2400 main():
2401
2402 import locale
2403 locale.setlocale(locale.LC_CTYPE, "")
2404
Martin v. Löwise9ce0b02002-10-07 13:23:24 +00002405- shutil.move was added. shutil.copytree now reports errors as an
2406 exception at the end, instead of printing error messages.
2407
Marc-André Lemburg97047e22002-10-04 11:55:21 +00002408- Encoding name normalization was generalized to not only
2409 replace hyphens with underscores, but also all other non-alphanumeric
2410 characters (with the exception of the dot which is used for Python
2411 package names during lookup). The aliases.py mapping was updated
2412 to the new standard.
2413
Walter Dörwald5ccaf8f2002-09-06 16:15:58 +00002414- mimetypes has two new functions: guess_all_extensions() which
2415 returns a list of all known extensions for a mime type, and
2416 add_type() which adds one mapping between a mime type and
2417 an extension to the database.
2418
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00002419- New module: sets, defines the class Set that implements a mutable
2420 set type using the keys of a dict to represent the set. There's
2421 also a class ImmutableSet which is useful when you need sets of sets
2422 or when you need to use sets as dict keys, and a class BaseSet which
Raymond Hettingeref8b9c62002-12-09 08:56:06 +00002423 is the base class of the two.
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00002424
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00002425- Added random.sample(population,k) for random sampling without replacement.
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00002426 Returns a k length list of unique elements chosen from the population.
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00002427
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00002428- random.randrange(-sys.maxint-1, sys.maxint) no longer raises
2429 OverflowError. That is, it now accepts any combination of 'start'
2430 and 'stop' arguments so long as each is in the range of Python's
2431 bounded integers.
2432
Raymond Hettinger40f62172002-12-29 23:03:38 +00002433- Thanks to Raymond Hettinger, random.random() now uses a new core
2434 generator. The Mersenne Twister algorithm is implemented in C,
2435 threadsafe, faster than the previous generator, has an astronomically
2436 large period (2**19937-1), creates random floats to full 53-bit
2437 precision, and may be the most widely tested random number generator
2438 in existence.
2439
2440 The random.jumpahead(n) method has different semantics for the new
2441 generator. Instead of jumping n steps ahead, it uses n and the
2442 existing state to create a new state. This means that jumpahead()
2443 continues to support multi-threaded code needing generators of
2444 non-overlapping sequences. However, it will break code which relies
2445 on jumpahead moving a specific number of steps forward.
2446
2447 The attributes random.whseed and random.__whseed have no meaning for
2448 the new generator. Code using these attributes should switch to a
2449 new class, random.WichmannHill which is provided for backward
2450 compatibility and to make an alternate generator available.
2451
Guido van Rossum4a57c332002-08-02 18:05:20 +00002452- New "algorithms" module: heapq, implements a heap queue. Thanks to
2453 Kevin O'Connor for the code and François Pinard for an entertaining
2454 write-up explaining the theory and practical uses of heaps.
2455
Marc-André Lemburg58e2ff22002-07-12 14:40:04 +00002456- New encoding for the Palm OS character set: palmos.
2457
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00002458- binascii.crc32() and the zipfile module had problems on some 64-bit
2459 platforms. These have been fixed. On a platform with 8-byte C longs,
2460 crc32() now returns a signed-extended 4-byte result, so that its value
2461 as a Python int is equal to the value computed a 32-bit platform.
2462
Martin v. Löwis7d650ca2002-06-30 15:05:00 +00002463- xml.dom.minidom.toxml and toprettyxml now take an optional encoding
2464 argument.
2465
Guido van Rossum9f7549b2002-06-10 21:39:42 +00002466- Some fixes in the copy module: when an object is copied through its
2467 __reduce__ method, there was no check for a __setstate__ method on
2468 the result [SF patch 565085]; deepcopy should treat instances of
2469 custom metaclasses the same way it treats instances of type 'type'
2470 [SF patch 560794].
2471
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00002472- Sockets now support timeout mode. After s.settimeout(T), where T is
2473 a float expressing seconds, subsequent operations raise an exception
2474 if they cannot be completed within T seconds. To disable timeout
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00002475 mode, use s.settimeout(None). There's also a module function,
2476 socket.setdefaulttimeout(T), which sets the default for all sockets
2477 created henceforth.
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00002478
2479- getopt.gnu_getopt was added. This supports GNU-style option
2480 processing, where options can be mixed with non-option arguments.
Martin v. Löwis446a25f2002-06-06 10:58:36 +00002481
Michael W. Hudsonb0dc1a32002-06-04 18:27:35 +00002482- Stop using strings for exceptions. String objects used for
2483 exceptions are now classes deriving from Exception. The objects
2484 changed were: Tkinter.TclError, bdb.BdbQuit, macpath.norm_error,
2485 tabnanny.NannyNag, and xdrlib.Error.
Neal Norwitzb5b5a262002-06-04 17:14:07 +00002486
Walter Dörwald474458d2002-06-04 15:16:29 +00002487- Constants BOM_UTF8, BOM_UTF16, BOM_UTF16_LE, BOM_UTF16_BE,
2488 BOM_UTF32, BOM_UTF32_LE and BOM_UTF32_BE that represent the Byte
2489 Order Mark in UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 encodings for little and
2490 big endian systems were added to the codecs module. The old names
2491 BOM32_* and BOM64_* were off by a factor of 2.
2492
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00002493- Added conversion functions math.degrees() and math.radians().
Raymond Hettinger87f59ee2002-05-13 04:17:32 +00002494
Raymond Hettinger866964c2002-12-14 19:51:34 +00002495- math.log() now takes an optional argument: math.log(x[, base]).
2496
Raymond Hettinger9b1df1d2002-05-12 06:07:21 +00002497- ftplib.retrlines() now tests for callback is None rather than testing
2498 for False. Was causing an error when given a callback object which
2499 was callable but also returned len() as zero. The change may
2500 create new breakage if the caller relied on the undocumented behavior
2501 and called with callback set to [] or some other False value not
2502 identical to None.
2503
Tim Peters46c04e12002-05-05 20:40:00 +00002504- random.gauss() uses a piece of hidden state used by nothing else,
2505 and the .seed() and .whseed() methods failed to reset it. In other
2506 words, setting the seed didn't completely determine the sequence of
2507 results produced by random.gauss(). It does now. Programs repeatedly
2508 mixing calls to a seed method with calls to gauss() may see different
2509 results now.
2510
Fred Drake7f781c92002-05-01 20:33:53 +00002511- The pickle.Pickler class grew a clear_memo() method to mimic that
2512 provided by cPickle.Pickler.
2513
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00002514- difflib's SequenceMatcher class now does a dynamic analysis of
2515 which elements are so frequent as to constitute noise. For
2516 comparing files as sequences of lines, this generally works better
2517 than the IS_LINE_JUNK function, and function ndiff's linejunk
2518 argument defaults to None now as a result. A happy benefit is
2519 that SequenceMatcher may run much faster now when applied
2520 to large files with many duplicate lines (for example, C program
2521 text with lots of repeated "}" and "return NULL;" lines).
2522
Guido van Rossum256705b2002-04-23 13:29:43 +00002523- New Text.dump() method in Tkinter module.
2524
Marc-André Lemburg1ec71ea2002-04-17 20:33:40 +00002525- New distutils commands for building packagers were added to
2526 support pkgtool on Solaris and swinstall on HP-UX.
2527
2528- distutils now has a new abstract binary packager base class
2529 command/bdist_packager, which simplifies writing packagers.
2530 This will hopefully provide the missing bits to encourage
2531 people to submit more packagers, e.g. for Debian, FreeBSD
2532 and other systems.
2533
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00002534- The UTF-16, -LE and -BE stream readers now raise a
2535 NotImplementedError for all calls to .readline(). Previously, they
2536 used to just produce garbage or fail with an encoding error --
2537 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 +00002538 work well with these.
2539
Martin v. Löwis5c137c22002-03-18 12:44:08 +00002540- compileall now supports quiet operation.
2541
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002542- The BaseHTTPServer now implements optional HTTP/1.1 persistent
Martin v. Löwis587c98c2002-03-17 18:37:22 +00002543 connections.
2544
Marc-André Lemburga5d2b4c2002-02-16 18:23:30 +00002545- socket module: the SSL support was broken out of the main
2546 _socket module C helper and placed into a new _ssl helper
2547 which now gets imported by socket.py if available and working.
2548
Marc-André Lemburg37aa5802002-02-10 21:42:47 +00002549- encodings package: added aliases for all supported IANA character
2550 sets
2551
Guido van Rossum606fe4e2001-12-28 20:57:14 +00002552- ftplib: to safeguard the user's privacy, anonymous login will use
2553 "anonymous@" as default password, rather than the real user and host
2554 name.
2555
Fred Drake36736122002-01-10 13:50:31 +00002556- webbrowser: tightened up the command passed to os.system() so that
2557 arbitrary shell code can't be executed because a bogus URL was
2558 passed in.
2559
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00002560- gettext.translation has an optional fallback argument, and
Martin v. Löwisa55ffae2002-01-11 06:58:49 +00002561 gettext.find an optional all argument. Translations will now fallback
Martin v. Löwisd8996052002-11-21 21:45:32 +00002562 on a per-message basis. The module supports plural forms, by means
2563 of gettext.[d]ngettext and Translation.[u]ngettext.
Martin v. Löwis1be64192002-01-11 06:33:28 +00002564
Martin v. Löwis9668b932002-01-12 11:27:42 +00002565- distutils bdist commands now offer a --skip-build option.
2566
Walter Dörwaldb25c2b02002-03-21 10:38:40 +00002567- warnings.warn now accepts a Warning instance as first argument.
2568
Fred Drakefed7e852002-04-04 19:36:15 +00002569- The xml.sax.expatreader.ExpatParser class will no longer create
2570 circular references by using itself as the locator that gets passed
2571 to the content handler implementation. [SF bug #535474]
2572
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00002573- The email.Parser.Parser class now properly parses strings regardless
2574 of their line endings, which can be any of \r, \n, or \r\n (CR, LF,
2575 or CRLF). Also, the Header class's constructor default arguments
2576 has changed slightly so that an explicit maxlinelen value is always
Barry Warsaw497e5c42002-12-30 19:27:08 +00002577 honored, and so unicode conversion error handling can be specified.
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00002578
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002579- distutils' build_ext command now links C++ extensions with the C++
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00002580 compiler available in the Makefile or CXX environment variable, if
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002581 running under \*nix.
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00002582
2583- New module bz2: provides a comprehensive interface for the bz2 compression
2584 library. It implements a complete file interface, one-shot (de)compression
2585 functions, and types for sequential (de)compression.
2586
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002587- New pdb command 'pp' which is like 'p' except that it pretty-prints
Barry Warsaw5d8d6182002-11-05 22:41:33 +00002588 the value of its expression argument.
2589
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00002590- Now bdist_rpm distutils command understands a verify_script option in
2591 the config file, including the contents of the referred filename in
2592 the "%verifyscript" section of the rpm spec file.
2593
Gustavo Niemeyer1456fde2002-11-25 17:25:04 +00002594- Fixed bug #495695: webbrowser module would run graphic browsers in a
2595 unix environment even if DISPLAY was not set. Also, support for
2596 skipstone browser was included.
2597
Gustavo Niemeyerd5ae01a2002-12-16 13:11:57 +00002598- Fixed bug #636769: rexec would run unallowed code if subclasses of
2599 strings were used as parameters for certain functions.
2600
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002601Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002602-----------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002603
Martin v. Löwis0d1fdea2002-11-22 08:36:54 +00002604- pygettext.py now supports globbing on Windows, and accepts module
2605 names in addition to accepting file names.
2606
Guido van Rossum923e4ef2002-09-17 20:58:59 +00002607- The SGI demos (Demo/sgi) have been removed. Nobody thought they
2608 were interesting any more. (The SGI library modules and extensions
2609 are still there; it is believed that at least some of these are
2610 still used and useful.)
2611
Fred Drake40813b12002-08-05 15:24:19 +00002612- IDLE supports the new encoding declarations (PEP 263); it can also
2613 deal with legacy 8-bit files if they use the locale's encoding. It
2614 allows non-ASCII strings in the interactive shell and executes them
2615 in the locale's encoding.
Martin v. Löwis98ce7b72002-08-05 15:11:26 +00002616
Marc-André Lemburg46260092002-04-04 16:17:11 +00002617- freeze.py now produces binaries which can import shared modules,
2618 unlike before when this failed due to missing symbol exports in
2619 the generated binary.
2620
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002621Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002622-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002623
Martin v. Löwisdc461752002-11-06 21:59:33 +00002624- On Unix, IDLE is now installed automatically.
2625
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00002626- The fpectl module is not built by default; it's dangerous or useless
2627 except in the hands of experts.
2628
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00002629- The public Python C API will generally be declared using PyAPI_FUNC
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00002630 and PyAPI_DATA macros, while Python extension module init functions
2631 will be declared with PyMODINIT_FUNC. DL_EXPORT/DL_IMPORT macros
2632 are deprecated.
Neal Norwitz1389f3e2002-07-22 13:21:10 +00002633
Tim Petersc6a3ff62002-07-08 22:11:52 +00002634- A bug was fixed that could cause COUNT_ALLOCS builds to segfault, or
2635 get into infinite loops, when a new-style class got garbage-collected.
2636 Unfortunately, to avoid this, the way COUNT_ALLOCS works requires
2637 that new-style classes be immortal in COUNT_ALLOCS builds. Note that
2638 COUNT_ALLOCS is not enabled by default, in either release or debug
2639 builds, and that new-style classes are immortal only in COUNT_ALLOCS
2640 builds.
2641
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00002642- Compiling out the cyclic garbage collector is no longer an option.
2643 The old symbol WITH_CYCLE_GC is now ignored, and Python.h arranges
2644 that it's always defined (for the benefit of any extension modules
2645 that may be conditionalizing on it). A bonus is that any extension
2646 type participating in cyclic gc can choose to participate in the
2647 Py_TRASHCAN mechanism now too; in the absence of cyclic gc, this used
2648 to require editing the core to teach the trashcan mechanism about the
2649 new type.
2650
Martin v. Löwis0cec0ff2002-07-28 16:33:45 +00002651- According to Annex F of the current C standard,
Tim Peters1de41bf2002-07-03 03:31:20 +00002652
2653 The Standard C macro HUGE_VAL and its float and long double analogs,
2654 HUGE_VALF and HUGE_VALL, expand to expressions whose values are
2655 positive infinities.
2656
2657 Python only uses the double HUGE_VAL, and only to #define its own symbol
2658 Py_HUGE_VAL. Some platforms have incorrect definitions for HUGE_VAL.
2659 pyport.h used to try to worm around that, but the workarounds triggered
2660 other bugs on other platforms, so we gave up. If your platform defines
2661 HUGE_VAL incorrectly, you'll need to #define Py_HUGE_VAL to something
2662 that works on your platform. The only instance of this I'm sure about
2663 is on an unknown subset of Cray systems, described here:
2664
2665 http://www.cray.com/swpubs/manuals/SN-2194_2.0/html-SN-2194_2.0/x3138.htm
2666
2667 Presumably 2.3a1 breaks such systems. If anyone uses such a system, help!
2668
Martin v. Löwisa3fb4f72002-06-09 13:33:54 +00002669- The configure option --without-doc-strings can be used to remove the
2670 doc strings from the builtin functions and modules; this reduces the
2671 size of the executable.
2672
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00002673- The universal newlines option (PEP 278) is on by default. On Unix
2674 it can be disabled by passing --without-universal-newlines to the
2675 configure script. On other platforms, remove
2676 WITH_UNIVERSAL_NEWLINES from pyconfig.h.
Tim Peters639295f2002-04-21 07:30:30 +00002677
Martin v. Löwis1142de32002-03-29 16:28:31 +00002678- On Unix, a shared libpython2.3.so can be created with --enable-shared.
2679
Tim Peters8deda702002-03-30 10:06:07 +00002680- All uses of the CACHE_HASH, INTERN_STRINGS, and DONT_SHARE_SHORT_STRINGS
2681 preprocessor symbols were eliminated. The internal decisions they
2682 controlled stopped being experimental long ago.
Tim Peters1f7df352002-03-29 03:29:08 +00002683
Fred Drake7d28b732002-05-02 21:17:00 +00002684- The tools used to build the documentation now work under Cygwin as
2685 well as Unix.
2686
Skip Montanaro57454e52002-06-14 20:30:31 +00002687- The bsddb and dbm module builds have been changed to try and avoid version
2688 skew problems and disable linkage with Berkeley DB 1.85 unless the
2689 installer knows what s/he's doing. See the section on building these
2690 modules in the README file for details.
2691
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002692C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002693-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002694
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00002695- PyNumber_Check() now returns true for string and unicode objects.
2696 This is a result of these types having a partially defined
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00002697 tp_as_number slot. (This is not a feature, but an indication that
Walter Dörwalda1a61f92002-11-19 21:20:25 +00002698 PyNumber_Check() is not very useful to determine numeric behavior.
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00002699 It may be deprecated.)
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00002700
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00002701- The string object's layout has changed: the pointer member
2702 ob_sinterned has been replaced by an int member ob_sstate. On some
2703 platforms (e.g. most 64-bit systems) this may change the offset of
2704 the ob_sval member, so as a precaution the API_VERSION has been
2705 incremented. The apparently unused feature of "indirect interned
2706 strings", supported by the ob_sinterned member, is gone. Interned
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002707 strings are now usually mortal; there is a new API,
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00002708 PyString_InternImmortal() that creates immortal interned strings.
2709 (The ob_sstate member can only take three values; however, while
2710 making it a char saves a few bytes per string object on average, in
2711 it also slowed things down a bit because ob_sval was no longer
2712 aligned.)
2713
Guido van Rossumfdb86482002-08-14 21:20:32 +00002714- The Py_InitModule*() functions now accept NULL for the 'methods'
2715 argument. Modules without global functions are becoming more common
2716 now that factories can be types rather than functions.
2717
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00002718- New C API PyUnicode_FromOrdinal() which exposes unichr() at C
2719 level.
2720
Thomas Heller085358a2002-07-29 14:27:41 +00002721- New functions PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErr() and
2722 PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErrWithFilename(). Similar to
2723 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErrWithFilename() and
2724 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErr(), but they allow to specify
2725 the exception type to raise. Available on Windows.
2726
Tim Peters7c321a82002-07-09 02:57:01 +00002727- Py_FatalError() is now declared as taking a const char* argument. It
2728 was previously declared without const. This should not affect working
2729 code.
2730
Martin v. Löwis01f94bd2002-05-08 08:44:21 +00002731- Added new macro PySequence_ITEM(o, i) that directly calls
2732 sq_item without rechecking that o is a sequence and without
2733 adjusting for negative indices.
2734
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00002735- PyRange_New() now raises ValueError if the fourth argument is not 1.
2736 This is part of the removal of deprecated features of the xrange
2737 object.
2738
Guido van Rossum517c7d42002-04-26 02:49:14 +00002739- PyNumber_Coerce() and PyNumber_CoerceEx() now also invoke the type's
2740 coercion if both arguments have the same type but this type has the
2741 CHECKTYPES flag set. This is to better support proxies.
2742
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00002743- The type of tp_free has been changed from "``void (*)(PyObject *)``" to
2744 "``void (*)(void *)``".
Neil Schemenauer9344b142002-04-12 23:00:08 +00002745
2746- PyObject_Del, PyObject_GC_Del are now functions instead of macros.
2747
Guido van Rossum0986d822002-04-08 01:38:42 +00002748- A type can now inherit its metatype from its base type. Previously,
2749 when PyType_Ready() was called, if ob_type was found to be NULL, it
2750 was always set to &PyType_Type; now it is set to base->ob_type,
2751 where base is tp_base, defaulting to &PyObject_Type.
2752
2753- PyType_Ready() accidentally did not inherit tp_is_gc; now it does.
2754
Neil Schemenauerc9abc1d2002-05-08 14:14:41 +00002755- The PyCore_* family of APIs have been removed.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00002756
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002757- The "u#" parser marker will now pass through Unicode objects as-is
Marc-André Lemburg3e3eacb2002-01-09 16:21:27 +00002758 without going through the buffer API.
2759
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002760- The enumerators of cmp_op have been renamed to use the prefix ``PyCmp_``.
Martin v. Löwis7198a522002-01-01 19:59:11 +00002761
Tim Peters10a3bb52001-12-25 19:07:38 +00002762- An old #define of ANY as void has been removed from pyport.h. This
2763 hasn't been used since Python's pre-ANSI days, and the #define has
2764 been marked as obsolete since then. SF bug 495548 says it created
2765 conflicts with other packages, so keeping it around wasn't harmless.
2766
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002767- Because Python's magic number scheme broke on January 1st, we decided
2768 to stop Python development. Thanks for all the fish!
2769
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00002770- Some of us don't like fish, so we changed Python's magic number
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00002771 scheme to a new one. See Python/import.c for details.
2772
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002773New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002774-------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002775
Martin v. Löwis79acb9e2002-12-06 12:48:53 +00002776- OpenVMS is now supported.
2777
Martin v. Löwisf90ae202002-06-11 06:22:31 +00002778- AtheOS is now supported.
2779
Andrew MacIntyre161ad0e2002-08-04 07:25:58 +00002780- the EMX runtime environment on OS/2 is now supported.
2781
Martin v. Löwisa6e97582002-01-01 18:41:33 +00002782- GNU/Hurd is now supported.
2783
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002784Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002785-----
2786
Fred Drake4dd0f7e2002-11-26 21:44:56 +00002787- The regrtest.py script's -u option now provides a way to say "allow
2788 all resources except this one." For example, to allow everything
2789 except bsddb, give the option '-uall,-bsddb'.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002790
2791Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002792-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002793
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00002794- The Windows distribution now ships with version 4.0.14 of the
2795 Sleepycat Berkeley database library. This should be a huge
2796 improvement over the previous Berkeley DB 1.85, which had many
2797 bugs.
2798 XXX What are the licensing issues here?
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002799 XXX If a user has a database created with a previous version of
Tim Peters84c7a3f2002-11-23 18:48:06 +00002800 XXX Python, what must they do to convert it?
2801 XXX I'm still not sure how to link this thing (see PCbuild/readme.txt).
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00002802 XXX The version # is likely to change before 2.3a1.
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00002803
2804- The Windows distribution now ships with a Secure Sockets Library (SLL)
Mark Hammondc3de0082002-12-03 06:16:08 +00002805 module (_ssl.pyd)
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00002806
Tim Peters857fb4c2002-11-14 23:31:58 +00002807- The Windows distribution now ships with Tcl/Tk version 8.4.1 (it
2808 previously shipped with Tcl/Tk 8.3.2).
2809
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00002810- When Python is built under a Microsoft compiler, sys.version now
2811 includes the compiler version number (_MSC_VER). For example, under
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002812 MSVC 6, sys.version contains the substring "MSC v.1200 ". 1200 is
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00002813 the value of _MSC_VER under MSVC 6.
2814
Tim Peters08e72952002-04-16 20:48:01 +00002815- Sometimes the uninstall executable (UNWISE.EXE) vanishes. One cause
2816 of that has been fixed in the installer (disabled Wise's "delete in-
2817 use files" uninstall option).
2818
Guido van Rossum181e41a2002-04-06 00:23:25 +00002819- Fixed a bug in urllib's proxy handling in Windows. [SF bug #503031]
2820
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00002821- The installer now installs Start menu shortcuts under (the local
2822 equivalent of) "All Users" when doing an Admin install.
2823
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00002824- file.truncate([newsize]) now works on Windows for all newsize values.
2825 It used to fail if newsize didn't fit in 32 bits, reflecting a
2826 limitation of MS _chsize (which is no longer used).
2827
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00002828- os.waitpid() is now implemented for Windows, and can be used to block
2829 until a specified process exits. This is similar to, but not exactly
2830 the same as, os.waitpid() on POSIX systems. If you're waiting for
2831 a specific process whose pid was obtained from one of the spawn()
2832 functions, the same Python os.waitpid() code works across platforms.
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00002833 See the docs for details. The docs were changed to clarify that
2834 spawn functions return, and waitpid requires, a process handle on
2835 Windows (not the same thing as a Windows process id).
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00002836
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00002837- New tempfile.TemporaryFile implementation for Windows: this doesn't
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002838 need a TemporaryFileWrapper wrapper anymore, and should be immune
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00002839 to a nasty problem: before 2.3, if you got a temp file on Windows, it
2840 got wrapped in an object whose close() method first closed the
2841 underlying file, then deleted the file. This usually worked fine.
2842 However, the spawn family of functions on Windows create (at a low C
2843 level) the same set of open files in the spawned process Q as were
2844 open in the spawning process P. If a temp file f was among them, then
2845 doing f.close() in P first closed P's C-level file handle on f, but Q's
2846 C-level file handle on f remained open, so the attempt in P to delete f
2847 blew up with a "Permission denied" error (Windows doesn't allow
2848 deleting open files). This was surprising, subtle, and difficult to
2849 work around.
2850
2851- The os module now exports all the symbolic constants usable with the
2852 low-level os.open() on Windows: the new constants in 2.3 are
2853 O_NOINHERIT, O_SHORT_LIVED, O_TEMPORARY, O_RANDOM and O_SEQUENTIAL.
2854 The others were also available in 2.2: O_APPEND, O_BINARY, O_CREAT,
2855 O_EXCL, O_RDONLY, O_RDWR, O_TEXT, O_TRUNC and O_WRONLY. Contrary
2856 to Microsoft docs, O_SHORT_LIVED does not seem to imply O_TEMPORARY
2857 (so specify both if you want both; note that neither is useful unless
2858 specified with O_CREAT too).
2859
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002860Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002861----
2862
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002863- Mac/Relnotes is gone, the release notes are now here.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002864
Just van Rossume1ebd802003-02-10 10:06:18 +00002865- Python (the OSX-only, unix-based version, not the OS9-compatible CFM
2866 version) now fully supports unicode strings as arguments to various file
2867 system calls, eg. open(), file(), os.stat() and os.listdir().
2868
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002869- The current naming convention for Python on the Macintosh is that MacPython
2870 refers to the unix-based OSX-only version, and MacPython-OS9 refers to the
2871 CFM-based version that runs on both OS9 and OSX.
2872
2873- All MacPython-OS9 functionality is now available in an OSX unix build,
2874 including the Carbon modules, the IDE, OSA support, etc. A lot of this
2875 will only work correctly in a framework build, though, because you cannot
2876 talk to the window manager unless your application is run from a .app
2877 bundle. There is a command line tool "pythonw" that runs your script
2878 with an interpreter living in such a .app bundle, this interpreter should
2879 be used to run any Python script using the window manager (including
2880 Tkinter or wxPython scripts).
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00002881
Jack Jansen8bb80db2002-12-30 22:42:43 +00002882- Most of Mac/Lib has moved to Lib/plat-mac, which is again used both in
2883 MacPython-OSX and MacPython-OS9. The only modules remaining in Mac/Lib
2884 are specifically for MacPython-OS9 (CFM support, preference resources, etc).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002885
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002886- A new utility PythonLauncher will start a Python interpreter when a .py or
2887 .pyw script is double-clicked in the Finder. By default .py scripts are
2888 run with a normal Python interpreter in a Terminal window and .pyw
2889 files are run with a window-aware pythonw interpreter without a Terminal
2890 window, but all this can be customized.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002891
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002892- MacPython-OS9 is now Carbon-only, so it runs on Mac OS 9 or Mac OS X and
2893 possibly on Mac OS 8.6 with the right CarbonLib installed, but not on earlier
2894 releases.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002895
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002896- Many tools such as BuildApplet.py and gensuitemodule.py now support a command
2897 line interface too.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002898
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002899- All the Carbon classes are now PEP253 compliant, meaning that you can
2900 subclass them from Python. Most of the attributes have gone, you should
2901 now use the accessor function call API, which is also what Apple's
2902 documentation uses. Some attributes such as grafport.visRgn are still
2903 available for convenience.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002904
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002905- New Carbon modules File (implementing the APIs in Files.h and Aliases.h)
2906 and Folder (APIs from Folders.h). The old macfs builtin module is
2907 gone, and replaced by a Python wrapper around the new modules.
2908
2909- Pathname handling should now be fully consistent: MacPython-OSX always uses
2910 unix pathnames and MacPython-OS9 always uses colon-separated Mac pathnames
2911 (also when running on Mac OS X).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002912
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002913- New Carbon modules Help and AH give access to the Carbon Help Manager.
2914 There are hooks in the IDE to allow accessing the Python documentation
2915 (and Apple's Carbon and Cocoa documentation) through the Help Viewer.
2916 See Mac/OSX/README for converting the Python documentation to a
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002917 Help Viewer compatible form and installing it.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002918
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002919- OSA support has been redesigned and the generated Python classes now
2920 mirror the inheritance defined by the underlying OSA classes.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002921
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002922- MacPython no longer maps both \r and \n to \n on input for any text file.
2923 This feature has been replaced by universal newline support (PEP278).
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00002924
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00002925- The default encoding for Python sourcefiles in MacPython-OS9 is no longer
Guido van Rossum16c85172003-02-20 01:52:48 +00002926 mac-roman (or whatever your local Mac encoding was) but "ascii", like on
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00002927 other platforms. If you really need sourcefiles with Mac characters in them
2928 you can change this in site.py.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002929
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002930
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002931What's New in Python 2.2 final?
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002932===============================
2933
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002934*Release date: 21-Dec-2001*
2935
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002936Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002937--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002938
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002939- pickle.py, cPickle: allow pickling instances of new-style classes
2940 with a custom metaclass.
2941
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002942Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002943-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002944
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002945- weakref proxy object: when comparing, unwrap both arguments if both
2946 are proxies.
2947
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002948Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002949-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002950
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002951- binascii.b2a_base64(): fix a potential buffer overrun when encoding
2952 very short strings.
2953
2954- cPickle: the obscure "fast" mode was suspected of causing stack
2955 overflows on the Mac. Hopefully fixed this by setting the recursion
2956 limit much smaller. If the limit is too low (it only affects
2957 performance), you can change it by defining PY_CPICKLE_FAST_LIMIT
2958 when compiling cPickle.c (or in pyconfig.h).
2959
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002960Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002961-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002962
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002963- dumbdbm.py: fixed a dumb old bug (the file didn't get synched at
2964 close or delete time).
2965
2966- rfc822.py: fixed a bug where the address '<>' was converted to None
2967 instead of an empty string (also fixes the email.Utils module).
2968
2969- xmlrpclib.py: version 1.0.0; uses precision for doubles.
2970
2971- test suite: the pickle and cPickle tests were not executing any code
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002972 when run from the standard regression test.
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002973
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002974Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002975-----------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002976
2977Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002978-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002979
2980C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002981-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002982
2983New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002984-------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002985
2986Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002987-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002988
2989Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002990-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002991
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002992- distutils package: fixed broken Windows installers (bdist_wininst).
2993
2994- tempfile.py: prevent mysterious warnings when TemporaryFileWrapper
2995 instances are deleted at process exit time.
2996
2997- socket.py: prevent mysterious warnings when socket instances are
2998 deleted at process exit time.
2999
3000- posixmodule.c: fix a Windows crash with stat() of a filename ending
3001 in backslash.
3002
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003003Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003004----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003005
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003006- The Carbon toolbox modules have been upgraded to Universal Headers
3007 3.4, and experimental CoreGraphics and CarbonEvents modules have
3008 been added. All only for framework-enabled MacOSX.
3009
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003010
Tim Peters6272dfd2001-12-13 19:34:00 +00003011What's New in Python 2.2c1?
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003012===========================
3013
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003014*Release date: 14-Dec-2001*
3015
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003016Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003017--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003018
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003019- Guido's tutorial introduction to the new type/class features has
3020 been extensively updated. See
3021
3022 http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html
3023
3024 That remains the primary documentation in this area.
3025
Guido van Rossum33bab012001-12-05 22:45:48 +00003026- Fixed a leak: instance variables declared with __slots__ were never
3027 deleted!
3028
Guido van Rossum4b800852001-12-03 00:54:52 +00003029- The "delete attribute" method of descriptor objects is called
3030 __delete__, not __del__. In previous releases, it was mistakenly
3031 called __del__, which created an unfortunate overloading condition
3032 with finalizers. (The "get attribute" and "set attribute" methods
3033 are still called __get__ and __set__, respectively.)
3034
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00003035- Some subtle issues with the super built-in were fixed:
3036
3037 (a) When super itself is subclassed, its __get__ method would still
3038 return an instance of the base class (i.e., of super).
3039
3040 (b) super(C, C()).__class__ would return C rather than super. This
3041 is confusing. To fix this, I decided to change the semantics of
3042 super so that it only applies to code attributes, not to data
3043 attributes. After all, overriding data attributes is not
3044 supported anyway.
3045
3046 (c) The __get__ method didn't check whether the argument was an
3047 instance of the type used in creation of the super instance.
3048
Guido van Rossumcd7b7d62001-12-04 21:02:07 +00003049- Previously, hash() of an instance of a subclass of a mutable type
3050 (list or dictionary) would return some value, rather than raising
3051 TypeError. This has been fixed. Also, directly calling
3052 dict.__hash__ and list.__hash__ now raises the same TypeError
3053 (previously, these were the same as object.__hash__).
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00003054
Guido van Rossumd331cb52001-12-05 19:46:42 +00003055- New-style objects now support deleting their __dict__. This is for
3056 all intents and purposes equivalent to assigning a brand new empty
3057 dictionary, but saves space if the object is not used further.
3058
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003059Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003060-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003061
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00003062- -Qnew now works as documented in PEP 238: when -Qnew is passed on
3063 the command line, all occurrences of "/" use true division instead
3064 of classic division. See the PEP for details. Note that "all"
3065 means all instances in library and 3rd-party modules, as well as in
3066 your own code. As the PEP says, -Qnew is intended for use only in
3067 educational environments with control over the libraries in use.
Tim Petersbf72fe22001-12-11 21:43:14 +00003068 Note that test_coercion.py in the standard Python test suite fails
3069 under -Qnew; this is expected, and won't be repaired until true
3070 division becomes the default (in the meantime, test_coercion is
3071 testing the current rules).
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00003072
Fred Drake6c01e252001-12-14 17:08:12 +00003073- complex() now only allows the first argument to be a string
3074 argument, and raises TypeError if either the second arg is a string
3075 or if the second arg is specified when the first is a string.
3076
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003077Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003078-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003079
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00003080- gc.get_referents was renamed to gc.get_referrers.
3081
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003082Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003083-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003084
Tim Peters25059d32001-12-07 20:35:43 +00003085- Functions in the os.spawn() family now release the global interpreter
3086 lock around calling the platform spawn. They should always have done
3087 this, but did not before 2.2c1. Multithreaded programs calling
3088 an os.spawn function with P_WAIT will no longer block all Python threads
3089 until the spawned program completes. It's possible that some programs
3090 relies on blocking, although more likely by accident than by design.
3091
Martin v. Löwis3a89b2b2001-11-25 14:35:58 +00003092- webbrowser defaults to netscape.exe on OS/2 now.
3093
Martin v. Löwis652e1912001-11-25 14:50:56 +00003094- Tix.ResizeHandle exposes detach_widget, hide, and show.
3095
Martin v. Löwis714d2e22001-12-02 12:26:03 +00003096- The charset alias windows_1252 has been added.
3097
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003098- types.StringTypes is a tuple containing the defined string types;
3099 usually this will be (str, unicode), but if Python was compiled
3100 without Unicode support it will be just (str,).
3101
3102- The pulldom and minidom modules were synchronized to PyXML.
3103
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003104Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003105-----------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003106
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003107- A new script called Tools/scripts/google.py was added, which fires
3108 off a search on Google.
3109
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003110Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003111-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003112
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003113- Note that release builds of Python should arrange to define the
3114 preprocessor symbol NDEBUG on the command line (or equivalent).
3115 In the 2.2 pre-release series we tried to define this by magic in
3116 Python.h instead, but it proved to cause problems for extension
3117 authors. The Unix, Windows and Mac builds now all define NDEBUG in
3118 release builds via cmdline (or equivalent) instead. Ports to
3119 other platforms should do likewise.
3120
Jack Jansen1999ef42001-12-06 21:47:20 +00003121- It is no longer necessary to use --with-suffix when building on a
3122 case-insensitive file system (such as Mac OS X HFS+). In the build
3123 directory an extension is used, but not in the installed python.
3124
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003125C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003126-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003127
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00003128- New function PyDict_MergeFromSeq2() exposes the builtin dict
3129 constructor's logic for updating a dictionary from an iterable object
3130 producing key-value pairs.
3131
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00003132- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() requires that the number of entries in
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00003133 the keyword list equal the number of argument specifiers. This
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00003134 wasn't checked correctly, and PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords could even
3135 dump core in some bad cases. This has been repaired. As a result,
3136 PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords may raise RuntimeError in bad cases that
3137 previously went unchallenged.
3138
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003139New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003140-------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003141
3142Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003143-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003144
3145Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003146-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003147
3148Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003149----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003150
Jack Jansenffa260f2001-12-06 21:14:00 +00003151- In unix-Python on Mac OS X (and darwin) sys.platform is now "darwin",
3152 without any trailing digits.
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003153
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003154- Changed logic for finding python home in Mac OS X framework Pythons.
3155 Now sys.executable points to the executable again, in stead of to
3156 the shared library. The latter is used only for locating the python
3157 home.
3158
3159
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003160What's New in Python 2.2b2?
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003161===========================
3162
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003163*Release date: 16-Nov-2001*
3164
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003165Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003166--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003167
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00003168- Multiple inheritance mixing new-style and classic classes in the
3169 list of base classes is now allowed, so this works now:
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00003170
3171 class Classic: pass
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00003172 class Mixed(Classic, object): pass
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00003173
3174 The MRO (method resolution order) for each base class is respected
3175 according to its kind, but the MRO for the derived class is computed
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003176 using new-style MRO rules if any base class is a new-style class.
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00003177 This needs to be documented.
3178
Tim Petersa427a2b2001-10-29 22:25:45 +00003179- The new builtin dictionary() constructor, and dictionary type, have
3180 been renamed to dict. This reflects a decade of common usage.
3181
Guido van Rossum3fc08d22001-11-15 20:33:10 +00003182- dict() now accepts an iterable object producing 2-sequences. For
3183 example, dict(d.items()) == d for any dictionary d. The argument,
3184 and the elements of the argument, can be any iterable objects.
3185
Guido van Rossum7ad2d1e2001-10-29 22:11:00 +00003186- New-style classes can now have a __del__ method, which is called
3187 when the instance is deleted (just like for classic classes).
3188
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003189- Assignment to object.__dict__ is now possible, for objects that are
3190 instances of new-style classes that have a __dict__ (unless the base
3191 class forbids it).
3192
Guido van Rossumc8e56452001-10-22 00:43:43 +00003193- Methods of built-in types now properly check for keyword arguments
3194 (formerly these were silently ignored). The only built-in methods
3195 that take keyword arguments are __call__, __init__ and __new__.
3196
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00003197- The socket function has been converted to a type; see below.
3198
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003199Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003200-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003201
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00003202- Assignment to __debug__ raises SyntaxError at compile-time. This
3203 was promised when 2.1c1 was released as "What's New in Python 2.1c1"
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003204 (see below) says.
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00003205
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003206- Clarified the error messages for unsupported operands to an operator
3207 (like 1 + '').
3208
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003209Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003210-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003211
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00003212- mmap has a new keyword argument, "access", allowing a uniform way for
3213 both Windows and Unix users to create read-only, write-through and
3214 copy-on-write memory mappings. This was previously possible only on
3215 Unix. A new keyword argument was required to support this in a
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003216 uniform way because the mmap() signatures had diverged across
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00003217 platforms. Thanks to Jay T Miller for repairing this!
3218
Tim Peters169ded02001-11-03 19:57:21 +00003219- By default, the gc.garbage list now contains only those instances in
3220 unreachable cycles that have __del__ methods; in 2.1 it contained all
3221 instances in unreachable cycles. "Instances" here has been generalized
3222 to include instances of both new-style and old-style classes.
3223
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003224- The socket module defines a new method for socket objects,
3225 sendall(). This is like send() but may make multiple calls to
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00003226 send() until all data has been sent. Also, the socket function has
3227 been converted to a subclassable type, like list and tuple (etc.)
3228 before it; socket and SocketType are now the same thing.
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003229
3230- Various bugfixes to the curses module. There is now a test suite
3231 for the curses module (you have to run it manually).
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00003232
Guido van Rossum692adf12001-10-30 03:03:03 +00003233- binascii.b2a_base64 no longer places an arbitrary restriction of 57
3234 bytes on its input.
3235
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003236Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003237-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003238
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00003239- tkFileDialog exposes a Directory class and askdirectory
Martin v. Löwis25ee87c2001-11-07 22:38:08 +00003240 convenience function.
3241
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00003242- Symbolic group names in regular expressions must be unique. For
3243 example, the regexp r'(?P<abc>)(?P<abc>)' is not allowed, because a
3244 single name can't mean both "group 1" and "group 2" simultaneously.
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003245 Python 2.2 detects this error at regexp compilation time;
3246 previously, the error went undetected, and results were
3247 unpredictable. Also in sre, the pattern.split(), pattern.sub(), and
3248 pattern.subn() methods have been rewritten in C. Also, an
3249 experimental function/method finditer() has been added, which works
3250 like findall() but returns an iterator.
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00003251
Martin v. Löwisb7b32602001-11-02 23:48:20 +00003252- Tix exposes more commands through the classes DirSelectBox,
3253 DirSelectDialog, ListNoteBook, Meter, CheckList, and the
3254 methods tix_addbitmapdir, tix_cget, tix_configure, tix_filedialog,
3255 tix_getbitmap, tix_getimage, tix_option_get, and tix_resetoptions.
3256
Tim Peters98791af2001-10-23 01:59:54 +00003257- Traceback objects are now scanned by cyclic garbage collection, so
3258 cycles created by casual use of sys.exc_info() no longer cause
3259 permanent memory leaks (provided garbage collection is enabled).
3260
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00003261- os.extsep -- a new variable needed by the RISCOS support. It is the
3262 separator used by extensions, and is '.' on all platforms except
3263 RISCOS, where it is '/'. There is no need to use this variable
3264 unless you have a masochistic desire to port your code to RISCOS.
3265
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003266- mimetypes.py has optional support for non-standard, but commonly
3267 found types. guess_type() and guess_extension() now accept an
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003268 optional 'strict' flag, defaulting to true, which controls whether
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003269 recognize non-standard types or not. A few non-standard types we
3270 know about have been added. Also, when run as a script, there are
3271 new -l and -e options.
3272
3273- statcache is now deprecated.
3274
3275- email.Utils.formatdate() now produces the preferred RFC 2822 style
3276 dates with numeric timezones (it used to produce obsolete dates
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003277 hard coded to "GMT" timezone). An optional 'localtime' flag is
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003278 added to produce dates in the local timezone, with daylight savings
3279 time properly taken into account.
3280
3281- In pickle and cPickle, instead of masking errors in load() by
3282 transforming them into SystemError, we let the original exception
3283 propagate out. Also, implement support for __safe_for_unpickling__
3284 in pickle, as it already was supported in cPickle.
3285
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003286Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003287-----------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003288
3289Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003290-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003291
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003292- The dbm module is built using libdb1 if available. The bsddb module
3293 is built with libdb3 if available.
3294
3295- Misc/Makefile.pre.in has been removed by BDFL pronouncement.
3296
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003297C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003298-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003299
Tim Peters1fc240e2001-10-26 05:06:50 +00003300- New function PySequence_Fast_GET_SIZE() returns the size of a non-
3301 NULL result from PySequence_Fast(), more quickly than calling
3302 PySequence_Size().
3303
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003304- New argument unpacking function PyArg_UnpackTuple() added.
3305
3306- New functions PyObject_CallFunctionObjArgs() and
3307 PyObject_CallMethodObjArgs() have been added to make it more
3308 convenient and efficient to call functions and methods from C.
3309
3310- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() no longer masks errors, so it's
3311 possible that this will propagate errors it didn't before.
3312
3313- New function PyObject_CheckReadBuffer(), which returns true if its
3314 argument supports the single-segment readable buffer interface.
3315
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003316New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003317-------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003318
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00003319- We've finally confirmed that this release builds on HP-UX 11.00,
3320 *with* threads, and passes the test suite.
3321
Tim Peters7a33d8b2001-11-05 02:51:07 +00003322- Thanks to a series of patches from Michael Muller, Python may build
3323 again under OS/2 Visual Age C++.
3324
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00003325- Updated RISCOS port by Dietmar Schwertberger.
3326
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003327Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003328-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003329
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00003330- Added a test script for the curses module. It isn't run automatically;
3331 regrtest.py must be run with '-u curses' to enable it.
3332
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003333Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003334-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003335
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003336Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003337----
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003338
3339- PythonScript has been moved to unsupported and is slated to be
3340 removed completely in the next release.
3341
3342- It should now be possible to build applets that work on both OS9 and
3343 OSX.
3344
3345- The core is now linked with CoreServices not Carbon; as a side
3346 result, default 8bit encoding on OSX is now ASCII.
3347
3348- Python should now build on OSX 10.1.1
3349
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003350
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003351What's New in Python 2.2b1?
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003352===========================
3353
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003354*Release date: 19-Oct-2001*
3355
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003356Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003357--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003358
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00003359- New-style classes are now always dynamic (except for built-in and
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00003360 extension types). There is no longer a performance penalty, and I
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00003361 no longer see another reason to keep this baggage around. One relic
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00003362 remains: the __dict__ of a new-style class is a read-only proxy; you
3363 must set the class's attribute to modify it. As a consequence, the
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00003364 __defined__ attribute of new-style types no longer exists, for lack
3365 of need: there is once again only one __dict__ (although in the
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00003366 future a __cache__ may be resurrected with a similar function, if I
3367 can prove that it actually speeds things up).
Guido van Rossum50fda3b2001-10-04 19:46:06 +00003368
Tim Peters1c9ca872001-10-04 06:43:12 +00003369- C.__doc__ now works as expected for new-style classes (in 2.2a4 it
3370 always returned None, even when there was a class docstring).
3371
3372- doctest now finds and runs docstrings attached to new-style classes,
3373 class methods, static methods, and properties.
3374
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003375Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003376-----------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003377
Guido van Rossuma8bcf802001-10-15 15:53:58 +00003378- A very subtle syntactical pitfall in list comprehensions was fixed.
3379 For example: [a+b for a in 'abc', for b in 'def']. The comma in
3380 this example is a mistake. Previously, this would silently let 'a'
3381 iterate over the singleton tuple ('abc',), yielding ['abcd', 'abce',
3382 'abcf'] rather than the intended ['ad', 'ae', 'af', 'bd', 'be',
3383 'bf', 'cd', 'ce', 'cf']. Now, this is flagged as a syntax error.
3384 Note that [a for a in <singleton>] is a convoluted way to say
3385 [<singleton>] anyway, so it's not like any expressiveness is lost.
3386
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003387- getattr(obj, name, default) now only catches AttributeError, as
3388 documented, rather than returning the default value for all
3389 exceptions (which could mask bugs in a __getattr__ hook, for
3390 example).
3391
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00003392- Weak reference objects are now part of the core and offer a C API.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00003393 A bug which could allow a core dump when binary operations involved
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00003394 proxy reference has been fixed. weakref.ReferenceError is now a
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003395 built-in exception.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00003396
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00003397- unicode(obj) now behaves more like str(obj), accepting arbitrary
3398 objects, and calling a __unicode__ method if it exists.
3399 unicode(obj, encoding) and unicode(obj, encoding, errors) still
Marc-André Lemburgb5507ec2001-10-19 12:02:29 +00003400 require an 8-bit string or character buffer argument.
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00003401
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003402- isinstance() now allows any object as the first argument and a
3403 class, a type or something with a __bases__ tuple attribute for the
3404 second argument. The second argument may also be a tuple of a
3405 class, type, or something with __bases__, in which case isinstance()
3406 will return true if the first argument is an instance of any of the
3407 things contained in the second argument tuple. E.g.
3408
3409 isinstance(x, (A, B))
3410
3411 returns true if x is an instance of A or B.
3412
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003413Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003414-----------------
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003415
3416- thread.start_new_thread() now returns the thread ID (previously None).
3417
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00003418- binascii has now two quopri support functions, a2b_qp and b2a_qp.
3419
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00003420- readline now supports setting the startup_hook and the
3421 pre_event_hook, and adds the add_history() function.
Martin v. Löwis0daad592001-09-30 21:09:59 +00003422
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00003423- os and posix supports chroot(), setgroups() and unsetenv() where
3424 available. The stat(), fstat(), statvfs() and fstatvfs() functions
3425 now return "pseudo-sequences" -- the various fields can now be
3426 accessed as attributes (e.g. os.stat("/").st_mtime) but for
3427 backwards compatibility they also behave as a fixed-length sequence.
3428 Some platform-specific fields (e.g. st_rdev) are only accessible as
Guido van Rossum98bf58f2001-10-18 20:34:25 +00003429 attributes.
3430
3431- time: localtime(), gmtime() and strptime() now return a
3432 pseudo-sequence similar to the os.stat() return value, with
3433 attributes like tm_year etc.
Martin v. Löwis16628c92001-10-04 22:46:41 +00003434
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003435- Decompression objects in the zlib module now accept an optional
3436 second parameter to decompress() that specifies the maximum amount
3437 of memory to use for the uncompressed data.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003438
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00003439- optional SSL support in the socket module now exports OpenSSL
3440 functions RAND_add(), RAND_egd(), and RAND_status(). These calls
3441 are useful on platforms like Solaris where OpenSSL does not
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003442 automatically seed its PRNG. Also, the keyfile and certfile
3443 arguments to socket.ssl() are now optional.
3444
3445- posixmodule (and by extension, the os module on POSIX platforms) now
3446 exports O_LARGEFILE, O_DIRECT, O_DIRECTORY, and O_NOFOLLOW.
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00003447
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003448Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003449-------
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00003450
Tim Peters7402f792001-10-02 03:53:41 +00003451- doctest now excludes functions and classes not defined by the module
3452 being tested, thanks to Tim Hochberg.
3453
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00003454- HotShot, a new profiler implemented using a C-based callback, has
3455 been added. This substantially reduces the overhead of profiling,
3456 but it is still quite preliminary. Support modules and
3457 documentation will be added in upcoming releases (before 2.2 final).
3458
Guido van Rossumc4b09b42001-10-04 10:19:00 +00003459- profile now produces correct output in situations where an exception
3460 raised in Python is cleared by C code (e.g. hasattr()). This used
3461 to cause wrong output, including spurious claims of recursive
3462 functions and attribution of time spent to the wrong function.
3463
Tim Peters0a1fc4e2001-10-07 03:12:08 +00003464 The code and documentation for the derived OldProfile and HotProfile
3465 profiling classes was removed. The code hasn't worked for years (if
3466 you tried to use them, they raised exceptions). OldProfile
3467 intended to reproduce the behavior of the profiler Python used more
3468 than 7 years ago, and isn't interesting anymore. HotProfile intended
3469 to provide a faster profiler (but producing less information), and
3470 that's a worthy goal we intend to meet via a different approach (but
3471 without losing information).
3472
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00003473- Profile.calibrate() has a new implementation that should deliver
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00003474 a much better system-specific calibration constant. The constant can
3475 now be specified in an instance constructor, or as a Profile class or
3476 instance variable, instead of by editing profile.py's source code.
3477 Calibration must still be done manually (see the docs for the profile
3478 module).
3479
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003480 Note that Profile.calibrate() must be overridden by subclasses.
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00003481 Improving the accuracy required exploiting detailed knowledge of
3482 profiler internals; the earlier method abstracted away the details
3483 and measured a simplified model instead, but consequently computed
3484 a constant too small by a factor of 2 on some modern machines.
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00003485
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00003486- quopri's encode and decode methods take an optional header parameter,
Jeremy Hylton6f543b62001-10-16 20:42:52 +00003487 which indicates whether output is intended for the header 'Q'
3488 encoding.
3489
Guido van Rossuma5343cc2001-10-18 18:02:07 +00003490- The SocketServer.ThreadingMixIn class now closes the request after
3491 finish_request() returns. (Not when it errors out though.)
3492
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003493- The nntplib module's NNTP.body() method has grown a 'file' argument
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003494 to allow saving the message body to a file.
3495
3496- The email package has added a class email.Parser.HeaderParser which
3497 only parses headers and does not recurse into the message's body.
3498 Also, the module/class MIMEAudio has been added for representing
3499 audio data (contributed by Anthony Baxter).
3500
3501- ftplib should be able to handle files > 2GB.
3502
3503- ConfigParser.getboolean() now also interprets TRUE, FALSE, YES, NO,
3504 ON, and OFF.
3505
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00003506- xml.dom.minidom NodeList objects now support the length attribute
3507 and item() method as required by the DOM specifications.
3508
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00003509Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003510-----------
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00003511
3512- Demo/dns was removed. It no longer serves any purpose; a package
3513 derived from it is now maintained by Anthony Baxter, see
3514 http://PyDNS.SourceForge.net.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003515
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003516- The freeze tool has been made more robust, and two new options have
3517 been added: -X and -E.
3518
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003519Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003520-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003521
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003522- configure will use CXX in LINKCC if CXX is used to build main() and
3523 the system requires to link a C++ main using the C++ compiler.
3524
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003525C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003526-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003527
Guido van Rossum6c4bce32001-10-18 19:20:25 +00003528- The documentation for the tp_compare slot is updated to require that
3529 the return value must be -1, 0, 1; an arbitrary number <0 or >0 is
3530 not correct. This is not yet enforced but will be enforced in
3531 Python 2.3; even later, we may use -2 to indicate errors and +2 for
3532 "NotImplemented". Right now, -1 should be used for an error return.
3533
Tim Petersd38b1c72001-09-30 05:09:37 +00003534- PyLong_AsLongLong() now accepts int (as well as long) arguments.
3535 Consequently, PyArg_ParseTuple's 'L' code also accepts int (as well
3536 as long) arguments.
3537
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00003538- PyThread_start_new_thread() now returns a long int giving the thread
3539 ID, if one can be calculated; it returns -1 for error, 0 if no
3540 thread ID is calculated (this is an incompatible change, but only
3541 the thread module used this API). This code has only really been
3542 tested on Linux and Windows; other platforms please beware (and
3543 report any bugs or strange behavior).
3544
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00003545- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() no longer accepts Unicode objects as
3546 input.
3547
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003548New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003549-------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003550
3551Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003552-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003553
3554Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003555-------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003556
Tim Peters04cf1d32001-10-09 22:39:40 +00003557- Installer: If you install IDLE, and don't disable file-extension
3558 registration, a new "Edit with IDLE" context (right-click) menu entry
3559 is created for .py and .pyw files.
3560
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003561- The signal module now supports SIGBREAK on Windows, thanks to Steven
3562 Scott. Note that SIGBREAK is unique to Windows. The default SIGBREAK
3563 action remains to call Win32 ExitProcess(). This can be changed via
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003564 signal.signal(). For example::
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003565
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003566 # Make Ctrl+Break raise KeyboardInterrupt, like Python's default Ctrl+C
3567 # (SIGINT) behavior.
3568 import signal
3569 signal.signal(signal.SIGBREAK, signal.default_int_handler)
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003570
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003571 try:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003572 while 1:
3573 pass
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003574 except KeyboardInterrupt:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003575 # We get here on Ctrl+C or Ctrl+Break now; if we had not changed
3576 # SIGBREAK, only on Ctrl+C (and Ctrl+Break would terminate the
3577 # program without the possibility for any Python-level cleanup).
3578 print "Clean exit"
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003579
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003580
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003581What's New in Python 2.2a4?
3582===========================
3583
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003584*Release date: 28-Sep-2001*
3585
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003586Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003587--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003588
3589- pydoc and inspect are now aware of new-style classes;
3590 e.g. help(list) at the interactive prompt now shows proper
3591 documentation for all operations on list objects.
3592
3593- Applications using Jim Fulton's ExtensionClass module can now safely
3594 be used with Python 2.2. In particular, Zope 2.4.1 now works with
3595 Python 2.2 (as well as with Python 2.1.1). The Demo/metaclass
3596 examples also work again. It is hoped that Gtk and Boost also work
3597 with 2.2a4 and beyond. (If you can confirm this, please write
3598 webmaster@python.org; if there are still problems, please open a bug
3599 report on SourceForge.)
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003600
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00003601- property() now takes 4 keyword arguments: fget, fset, fdel and doc.
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003602 These map to read-only attributes 'fget', 'fset', 'fdel', and '__doc__'
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00003603 in the constructed property object. fget, fset and fdel weren't
3604 discoverable from Python in 2.2a3. __doc__ is new, and allows to
3605 associate a docstring with a property.
3606
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003607- Comparison overloading is now more completely implemented. For
3608 example, a str subclass instance can properly be compared to a str
3609 instance, and it can properly overload comparison. Ditto for most
3610 other built-in object types.
3611
3612- The repr() of new-style classes has changed; instead of <type
3613 'M.Foo'> a new-style class is now rendered as <class 'M.Foo'>,
3614 *except* for built-in types, which are still rendered as <type
3615 'Foo'> (to avoid upsetting existing code that might parse or
3616 otherwise rely on repr() of certain type objects).
3617
3618- The repr() of new-style objects is now always <Foo object at XXX>;
3619 previously, it was sometimes <Foo instance at XXX>.
3620
3621- For new-style classes, what was previously called __getattr__ is now
3622 called __getattribute__. This method, if defined, is called for
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00003623 *every* attribute access. A new __getattr__ hook more similar to the
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003624 one in classic classes is defined which is called only if regular
3625 attribute access raises AttributeError; to catch *all* attribute
3626 access, you can use __getattribute__ (for new-style classes). If
3627 both are defined, __getattribute__ is called first, and if it raises
3628 AttributeError, __getattr__ is called.
3629
3630- The __class__ attribute of new-style objects can be assigned to.
3631 The new class must have the same C-level object layout as the old
3632 class.
3633
3634- The builtin file type can be subclassed now. In the usual pattern,
3635 "file" is the name of the builtin type, and file() is a new builtin
3636 constructor, with the same signature as the builtin open() function.
3637 file() is now the preferred way to open a file.
3638
3639- Previously, __new__ would only see sequential arguments passed to
3640 the type in a constructor call; __init__ would see both sequential
3641 and keyword arguments. This made no sense whatsoever any more, so
3642 now both __new__ and __init__ see all arguments.
3643
3644- Previously, hash() applied to an instance of a subclass of str or
3645 unicode always returned 0. This has been repaired.
3646
3647- Previously, an operation on an instance of a subclass of an
3648 immutable type (int, long, float, complex, tuple, str, unicode),
3649 where the subtype didn't override the operation (and so the
3650 operation was handled by the builtin type), could return that
3651 instance instead a value of the base type. For example, if s was of
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003652 a str subclass type, s[:] returned s as-is. Now it returns a str
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003653 with the same value as s.
3654
Barry Warsaw86fbaf82001-09-28 15:26:12 +00003655- Provisional support for pickling new-style objects has been added.
3656
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003657Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003658----
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003659
Tim Peters2c9aa5e2001-09-23 04:06:05 +00003660- file.writelines() now accepts any iterable object producing strings.
3661
Marc-André Lemburgaefd7662001-09-20 12:59:37 +00003662- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() now works very much like
3663 PyObject_Str(obj) in that it tries to use __str__/tp_str
3664 on the object if the object is not a string or buffer. This
3665 makes unicode() behave like str() when applied to non-string/buffer
3666 objects.
3667
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00003668- PyFile_WriteObject now passes Unicode objects to the file's write
3669 method. As a result, all file-like objects which may be the target
Martin v. Löwis2777c022001-09-19 13:47:32 +00003670 of a print statement must support Unicode objects, i.e. they must
3671 at least convert them into ASCII strings.
3672
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003673- Thread scheduling on Solaris should be improved; it is no longer
3674 necessary to insert a small sleep at the start of a thread in order
3675 to let other runnable threads be scheduled.
3676
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003677Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003678-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003679
Marc-André Lemburgbf990172001-09-27 14:17:33 +00003680- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
3681 read character buffer compatible objects for their .write() methods.
3682 These objects are converted to strings and then handled as such
3683 by the instances.
3684
Barry Warsaw2f600732001-09-24 04:28:10 +00003685- The "email" package has been added. This is basically a port of the
3686 mimelib package <http://sf.net/projects/mimelib> with API changes
3687 and some implementations updated to use iterators and generators.
3688
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00003689- difflib.ndiff() and difflib.Differ.compare() are generators now. This
3690 restores the ability of Tools/scripts/ndiff.py to start producing output
3691 before the entire comparison is complete.
3692
Barry Warsaw58b072d2001-09-22 04:44:21 +00003693- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
3694 iteration just like file objects (i.e. their .readline() method is
3695 called for each iteration until it returns an empty string).
3696
Marc-André Lemburg494f2ae2001-09-19 11:33:31 +00003697- The codecs module has grown four new helper APIs to access
3698 builtin codecs: getencoder(), getdecoder(), getreader(),
3699 getwriter().
3700
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003701- SimpleXMLRPCServer: a new module (based upon SimpleHTMLServer)
3702 simplifies writing XML RPC servers.
3703
Barry Warsaw647d5e82001-09-28 17:01:02 +00003704- os.path.realpath(): a new function that returns the absolute pathname
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003705 after interpretation of symbolic links. On non-Unix systems, this
3706 is an alias for os.path.abspath().
3707
Tim Peters16a77ad2001-09-08 04:00:12 +00003708- operator.indexOf() (PySequence_Index() in the C API) now works with any
3709 iterable object.
3710
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003711- smtplib now supports various authentication and security features of
3712 the SMTP protocol through the new login() and starttls() methods.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00003713
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003714- hmac: a new module implementing keyed hashing for message
3715 authentication.
3716
3717- mimetypes now recognizes more extensions and file types. At the
3718 same time, some mappings not sanctioned by IANA were removed.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00003719
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003720- The "compiler" package has been brought up to date to the state of
Guido van Rossumc9ed5dc2001-09-20 05:30:24 +00003721 Python 2.2 bytecode generation. It has also been promoted from a
3722 Tool to a standard library package. (Tools/compiler still exists as
3723 a sample driver.)
3724
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003725Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003726-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003727
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003728- Large file support (LFS) is now automatic when the platform supports
3729 it; no more manual configuration tweaks are needed. On Linux, at
3730 least, it's possible to have a system whose C library supports large
3731 files but whose kernel doesn't; in this case, large file support is
3732 still enabled but doesn't do you any good unless you upgrade your
3733 kernel or share your Python executable with another system whose
3734 kernel has large file support.
3735
3736- The configure script now supplies plausible defaults in a
3737 cross-compilation environment. This doesn't mean that the supplied
3738 values are always correct, or that cross-compilation now works
3739 flawlessly -- but it's a first step (and it shuts up most of
3740 autoconf's warnings about AC_TRY_RUN).
3741
3742- The Unix build is now a bit less chatty, courtesy of the parser
3743 generator. The build is completely silent (except for errors) when
3744 using "make -s", thanks to a -q option to setup.py.
3745
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003746C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003747-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003748
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003749- The "structmember" API now supports some new flag bits to deny read
3750 and/or write access to attributes in restricted execution mode.
3751
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003752New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003753-------------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003754
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003755- Compaq's iPAQ handheld, running the "familiar" Linux distribution
3756 (http://familiar.handhelds.org).
3757
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003758Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003759-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003760
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00003761- The "classic" standard tests, which work by comparing stdout to
3762 an expected-output file under Lib/test/output/, no longer stop at
3763 the first mismatch. Instead the test is run to completion, and a
3764 variant of ndiff-style comparison is used to report all differences.
3765 This is much easier to understand than the previous style of reporting.
3766
3767- The unittest-based standard tests now use regrtest's test_main()
3768 convention, instead of running as a side-effect of merely being
3769 imported. This allows these tests to be run in more natural and
3770 flexible ways as unittests, outside the regrtest framework.
3771
3772- regrtest.py is much better integrated with unittest and doctest now,
3773 especially in regard to reporting errors.
3774
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003775Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003776-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003777
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003778- Large file support now also works for files > 4GB, on filesystems
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00003779 that support it (NTFS under Windows 2000). See "What's New in
3780 Python 2.2a3" for more detail.
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003781
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003782
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003783What's New in Python 2.2a3?
3784===========================
3785
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003786*Release Date: 07-Sep-2001*
3787
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003788Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003789----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003790
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00003791- Conversion of long to float now raises OverflowError if the long is too
3792 big to represent as a C double.
3793
Tim Peters32f453e2001-09-03 08:35:41 +00003794- The 3-argument builtin pow() no longer allows a third non-None argument
3795 if either of the first two arguments is a float, or if both are of
3796 integer types and the second argument is negative (in which latter case
3797 the arguments are converted to float, so this is really the same
3798 restriction).
3799
Tim Peters5d2b77c2001-09-03 05:47:38 +00003800- The builtin dir() now returns more information, and sometimes much
3801 more, generally naming all attributes of an object, and all attributes
3802 reachable from the object via its class, and from its class's base
3803 classes, and so on from them too. Example: in 2.2a2, dir([]) returned
3804 an empty list. In 2.2a3,
3805
3806 >>> dir([])
3807 ['__add__', '__class__', '__contains__', '__delattr__', '__delitem__',
3808 '__eq__', '__ge__', '__getattr__', '__getitem__', '__getslice__',
3809 '__gt__', '__hash__', '__iadd__', '__imul__', '__init__', '__le__',
3810 '__len__', '__lt__', '__mul__', '__ne__', '__new__', '__repr__',
3811 '__rmul__', '__setattr__', '__setitem__', '__setslice__', '__str__',
3812 'append', 'count', 'extend', 'index', 'insert', 'pop', 'remove',
3813 'reverse', 'sort']
3814
3815 dir(module) continues to return only the module's attributes, though.
3816
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003817- Overflowing operations on plain ints now return a long int rather
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003818 than raising OverflowError. This is a partial implementation of PEP
3819 237. You can use -Wdefault::OverflowWarning to enable a warning for
3820 this situation, and -Werror::OverflowWarning to revert to the old
3821 OverflowError exception.
3822
Guido van Rossum61c345f2001-09-04 03:26:15 +00003823- A new command line option, -Q<arg>, is added to control run-time
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003824 warnings for the use of classic division. (See PEP 238.) Possible
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00003825 values are -Qold, -Qwarn, -Qwarnall, and -Qnew. The default is
3826 -Qold, meaning the / operator has its classic meaning and no
3827 warnings are issued. Using -Qwarn issues a run-time warning about
3828 all uses of classic division for int and long arguments; -Qwarnall
3829 also warns about classic division for float and complex arguments
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00003830 (for use with fixdiv.py).
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003831 [Note: the remainder of this item (preserved below) became
3832 obsolete in 2.2c1 -- -Qnew has global effect in 2.2] ::
3833
3834 Using -Qnew is questionable; it turns on new division by default, but
3835 only in the __main__ module. You can usefully combine -Qwarn or
3836 -Qwarnall and -Qnew: this gives the __main__ module new division, and
3837 warns about classic division everywhere else.
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003838
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003839- Many built-in types can now be subclassed. This applies to int,
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003840 long, float, str, unicode, and tuple. (The types complex, list and
3841 dictionary can also be subclassed; this was introduced earlier.)
3842 Note that restrictions apply when subclassing immutable built-in
3843 types: you can only affect the value of the instance by overloading
3844 __new__. You can add mutable attributes, and the subclass instances
3845 will have a __dict__ attribute, but you cannot change the "value"
3846 (as implemented by the base class) of an immutable subclass instance
3847 once it is created.
3848
Guido van Rossumaaf80c82001-09-02 13:44:35 +00003849- The dictionary constructor now takes an optional argument, a
3850 mapping-like object, and initializes the dictionary from its
3851 (key, value) pairs.
3852
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003853- A new built-in type, super, has been added. This facilitates making
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003854 "cooperative super calls" in a multiple inheritance setting. For an
3855 explanation, see http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#cooperation
3856
Guido van Rossum8d7234d2001-09-06 22:02:58 +00003857- A new built-in type, property, has been added. This enables the
3858 creation of "properties". These are attributes implemented by
3859 getter and setter functions (or only one of these for read-only or
3860 write-only attributes), without the need to override __getattr__.
3861 See http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#property
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003862
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003863- The syntax of floating-point and imaginary literals has been
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00003864 liberalized, to allow leading zeroes. Examples of literals now
3865 legal that were SyntaxErrors before:
3866
3867 00.0 0e3 0100j 07.5 00000000000000000008.
3868
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003869- An old tokenizer bug allowed floating point literals with an incomplete
Tim Petersc6d95812001-08-28 20:56:27 +00003870 exponent, such as 1e and 3.1e-. Such literals now raise SyntaxError.
3871
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003872Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003873-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003874
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00003875- telnetlib includes symbolic names for the options, and support for
Martin v. Löwis1da9c572002-11-04 09:56:00 +00003876 setting an option negotiation callback. It also supports processing
3877 of suboptions.
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00003878
Tim Petersa40c7932001-09-05 22:36:56 +00003879- The new C standard no longer requires that math libraries set errno to
3880 ERANGE on overflow. For platform libraries that exploit this new
3881 freedom, Python's overflow-checking was wholly broken. A new overflow-
3882 checking scheme attempts to repair that, but may not be reliable on all
3883 platforms (C doesn't seem to provide anything both useful and portable
3884 in this area anymore).
3885
Martin v. Löwis44f86962001-09-05 13:44:54 +00003886- Asynchronous timeout actions are available through the new class
3887 threading.Timer.
3888
Tim Peters78526162001-09-05 00:53:45 +00003889- math.log and math.log10 now return sensible results for even huge
3890 long arguments. For example, math.log10(10 ** 10000) ~= 10000.0.
3891
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003892- A new function, imp.lock_held(), returns 1 when the import lock is
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00003893 currently held. See the docs for the imp module.
3894
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003895- pickle, cPickle and marshal on 32-bit platforms can now correctly read
Tim Peters82112372001-08-29 02:28:42 +00003896 dumps containing ints written on platforms where Python ints are 8 bytes.
3897 When read on a box where Python ints are 4 bytes, such values are
3898 converted to Python longs.
3899
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003900- In restricted execution mode (using the rexec module), unmarshalling
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003901 code objects is no longer allowed. This plugs a security hole.
3902
Steve Purcell6091cd62001-09-06 16:05:17 +00003903- unittest.TestResult instances no longer store references to tracebacks
3904 generated by test failures. This prevents unexpected dangling references
3905 to objects that should be garbage collected between tests.
3906
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003907Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003908-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003909
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00003910- Tools/scripts/fixdiv.py has been added which can be used to fix
3911 division operators as per PEP 238.
3912
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003913Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003914-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003915
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00003916- If you are an adventurous person using Mac OS X you may want to look at
3917 Mac/OSX. There is a Makefile there that will build Python as a real Mac
3918 application, which can be used for experimenting with Carbon or Cocoa.
3919 Discussion of this on pythonmac-sig, please.
3920
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00003921C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003922-----
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00003923
3924- New function PyObject_Dir(obj), like Python __builtin__.dir(obj).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00003925
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00003926- Note that PyLong_AsDouble can fail! This has always been true, but no
3927 callers checked for it. It's more likely to fail now, because overflow
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003928 errors are properly detected now. The proper way to check::
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00003929
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003930 double x = PyLong_AsDouble(some_long_object);
3931 if (x == -1.0 && PyErr_Occurred()) {
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003932 /* The conversion failed. */
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003933 }
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00003934
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003935- The GC API has been changed. Extensions that use the old API will still
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00003936 compile but will not participate in GC. To upgrade an extension
3937 module:
3938
3939 - rename Py_TPFLAGS_GC to PyTPFLAGS_HAVE_GC
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00003940
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00003941 - use PyObject_GC_New or PyObject_GC_NewVar to allocate objects and
3942 PyObject_GC_Del to deallocate them
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00003943
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00003944 - rename PyObject_GC_Init to PyObject_GC_Track and PyObject_GC_Fini
3945 to PyObject_GC_UnTrack
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00003946
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00003947 - remove PyGC_HEAD_SIZE from object size calculations
3948
3949 - remove calls to PyObject_AS_GC and PyObject_FROM_GC
3950
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003951- Two new functions: PyString_FromFormat() and PyString_FromFormatV().
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003952 These can be used safely to construct string objects from a
3953 sprintf-style format string (similar to the format string supported
3954 by PyErr_Format()).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00003955
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003956New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003957-------------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003958
Tim Petersb7da0902001-09-02 23:01:43 +00003959- Stephen Hansen contributed patches sufficient to get a clean compile
3960 under Borland C (Windows), but he reports problems running it and ran
3961 out of time to complete the port. Volunteers? Expect a MemoryError
3962 when importing the types module; this is probably shallow, and
3963 causing later failures too.
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003964
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003965Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003966-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003967
3968Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003969-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003970
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00003971- Large file support is now enabled on Win32 platforms as well as on
3972 Win64. This means that, for example, you can use f.tell() and f.seek()
3973 to manipulate files larger than 2 gigabytes (provided you have enough
3974 disk space, and are using a Windows filesystem that supports large
Tim Peters9a9471c2001-09-11 23:18:51 +00003975 partitions). Windows filesystem limits: FAT has a 2GB (gigabyte)
3976 filesize limit, and large file support makes no difference there.
3977 FAT32's limit is 4GB, and files >= 2GB are easier to use from Python now.
3978 NTFS has no practical limit on file size, and files of any size can be
3979 used from Python now.
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00003980
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003981- The w9xpopen hack is now used on Windows NT and 2000 too when COMPSPEC
Tim Peters402d5982001-08-27 06:37:48 +00003982 points to command.com (patch from Brian Quinlan).
3983
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003984
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00003985What's New in Python 2.2a2?
3986===========================
3987
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003988*Release Date: 22-Aug-2001*
3989
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00003990Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003991-----
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00003992
Barry Warsaw18b2ecf2001-08-22 20:26:56 +00003993- Tim Peters developed a brand new Windows installer using Wise 8.1,
3994 generously donated to us by Wise Solutions.
3995
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00003996- configure supports a new option --enable-unicode, with the values
3997 ucs2 and ucs4 (new in 2.2a1). With --disable-unicode, the Unicode
3998 type and supporting code is completely removed from the interpreter.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00003999
Jack Jansen32ce0cd2001-08-21 19:28:20 +00004000- A new configure option --enable-framework builds a Mac OS X framework,
4001 which "make frameworkinstall" will install. This provides a starting
4002 point for more mac-like functionality, join pythonmac-sig@python.org
4003 if you are interested in helping.
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004004
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004005- The NeXT platform is no longer supported.
4006
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004007- The 'new' module is now statically linked.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004008
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004009Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004010-----
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004011
4012- The new Tools/scripts/cleanfuture.py can be used to automatically
Andrew M. Kuchlingb0532092001-08-15 15:54:56 +00004013 edit out obsolete future statements from Python source code. See
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004014 the module docstring for details.
4015
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004016Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004017-----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004018
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004019- regrtest.py now knows which tests are expected to be skipped on some
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004020 platforms, allowing to give clearer test result output. regrtest
4021 also has optional --use/-u switch to run normally disabled tests
4022 which require network access or consume significant disk resources.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004023
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004024- Several new tests in the standard test suite, with special thanks to
4025 Nick Mathewson.
4026
4027Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004028----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004029
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004030- The floor division operator // has been added as outlined in PEP
4031 238. The / operator still provides classic division (and will until
4032 Python 3.0) unless "from __future__ import division" is included, in
4033 which case the / operator will provide true division. The operator
4034 module provides truediv() and floordiv() functions. Augmented
4035 assignment variants are included, as are the equivalent overloadable
4036 methods and C API methods. See the PEP for a full discussion:
4037 <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0238.html>
4038
Tim Peters6cd6a822001-08-17 22:11:27 +00004039- Future statements are now effective in simulated interactive shells
4040 (like IDLE). This should "just work" by magic, but read Michael
4041 Hudson's "Future statements in simulated shells" PEP 264 for full
4042 details: <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0264.html>.
4043
Guido van Rossumf86ddd22001-08-17 21:21:04 +00004044- The type/class unification (PEP 252-253) was integrated into the
4045 trunk and is not so tentative any more (the exact specification of
4046 some features is still tentative). A lot of work has done on fixing
4047 bugs and adding robustness and features (performance still has to
4048 come a long way).
4049
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00004050- Warnings about a mismatch in the Python API during extension import
4051 now use the Python warning framework (which makes it possible to
4052 write filters for these warnings).
4053
Barry Warsaw9b3be7f2001-08-14 18:35:02 +00004054- A function's __dict__ (aka func_dict) will now always be a
4055 dictionary. It used to be possible to delete it or set it to None,
4056 but now both actions raise TypeErrors. It is still legal to set it
4057 to a dictionary object. Getting func.__dict__ before any attributes
4058 have been assigned now returns an empty dictionary instead of None.
4059
Guido van Rossum32aa5d22001-09-05 18:43:35 +00004060- A new command line option, -E, was added which disables the use of
4061 all environment variables, or at least those that are specifically
4062 significant to Python. Usually those have a name starting with
4063 "PYTHON". This was used to fix a problem where the tests fail if
4064 the user happens to have PYTHONHOME or PYTHONPATH pointing to an
4065 older distribution.
4066
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004067Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004068-------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004069
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004070- New class Differ and new functions ndiff() and restore() in difflib.py.
4071 These package the algorithms used by the popular Tools/scripts/ndiff.py,
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004072 for programmatic reuse.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004073
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004074- New function xml.sax.saxutils.quoteattr(): Quote an XML attribute
4075 value using the minimal quoting required for the value; more
4076 reliable than using xml.sax.saxutils.escape() for attribute values.
4077
4078- Readline completion support for cmd.Cmd was added.
4079
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004080- Calling os.tempnam() or os.tmpnam() generate RuntimeWarnings.
4081
4082- Added function threading.BoundedSemaphore()
4083
4084- Added Ka-Ping Yee's cgitb.py module.
4085
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004086- The 'new' module now exposes the CO_xxx flags.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004087
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00004088- The gc module offers the get_referents function.
4089
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004090New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004091-------------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004092
4093C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004094-----
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004095
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00004096- Two new APIs PyOS_snprintf() and PyOS_vsnprintf() were added
4097 which provide a cross-platform implementations for the
4098 relatively new snprintf()/vsnprintf() C lib APIs. In contrast to
4099 the standard sprintf() and vsprintf() C lib APIs, these versions
4100 apply bounds checking on the used buffer which enhances protection
4101 against buffer overruns.
4102
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00004103- Unicode APIs now use name mangling to assure that mixing interpreters
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00004104 and extensions using different Unicode widths is rendered next to
4105 impossible. Trying to import an incompatible Unicode-aware extension
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00004106 will result in an ImportError. Unicode extensions writers must make
4107 sure to check the Unicode width compatibility in their extensions by
4108 using at least one of the mangled Unicode APIs in the extension.
4109
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004110- Two new flags METH_NOARGS and METH_O are available in method definition
4111 tables to simplify implementation of methods with no arguments and a
4112 single untyped argument. Calling such methods is more efficient than
4113 calling corresponding METH_VARARGS methods. METH_OLDARGS is now
4114 deprecated.
4115
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00004116Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004117-------
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00004118
4119- "import module" now compiles module.pyw if it exists and nothing else
4120 relevant is found.
4121
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004122
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00004123What's New in Python 2.2a1?
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004124===========================
4125
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004126*Release date: 18-Jul-2001*
4127
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004128Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004129----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004130
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00004131- TENTATIVELY, a large amount of code implementing much of what's
4132 described in PEP 252 (Making Types Look More Like Classes) and PEP
4133 253 (Subtyping Built-in Types) was added. This will be released
4134 with Python 2.2a1. Documentation will be provided separately
4135 through http://www.python.org/2.2/. The purpose of releasing this
4136 with Python 2.2a1 is to test backwards compatibility. It is
4137 possible, though not likely, that a decision is made not to release
4138 this code as part of 2.2 final, if any serious backwards
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004139 incompatibilities are found during alpha testing that cannot be
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00004140 repaired.
4141
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00004142- Generators were added; this is a new way to create an iterator (see
Tim Peters11a0d102001-07-17 18:48:00 +00004143 below) using what looks like a simple function containing one or
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00004144 more 'yield' statements. See PEP 255. Since this adds a new
4145 keyword to the language, this feature must be enabled by including a
4146 future statement: "from __future__ import generators" (see PEP 236).
4147 Generators will become a standard feature in a future release
4148 (probably 2.3). Without this future statement, 'yield' remains an
4149 ordinary identifier, but a warning is issued each time it is used.
4150 (These warnings currently don't conform to the warnings framework of
4151 PEP 230; we intend to fix this in 2.2a2.)
4152
Marc-André Lemburg12e74b32001-05-22 08:58:23 +00004153- The UTF-16 codec was modified to be more RFC compliant. It will now
4154 only remove BOM characters at the start of the string and then
4155 only if running in native mode (UTF-16-LE and -BE won't remove a
4156 leading BMO character).
4157
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00004158- Strings now have a new method .decode() to complement the already
4159 existing .encode() method. These two methods provide direct access
4160 to the corresponding decoders and encoders of the registered codecs.
4161
4162 To enhance the usability of the .encode() method, the special
4163 casing of Unicode object return values was dropped (Unicode objects
4164 were auto-magically converted to string using the default encoding).
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00004165
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00004166 Both methods will now return whatever the codec in charge of the
4167 requested encoding returns as object, e.g. Unicode codecs will
4168 return Unicode objects when decoding is requested ("äöü".decode("latin-1")
4169 will return u"äöü"). This enables codec writer to create codecs
4170 for various simple to use conversions.
4171
4172 New codecs were added to demonstrate these new features (the .encode()
4173 and .decode() columns indicate the type of the returned objects):
4174
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004175 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4176 |Name | .encode() | .decode() | Description |
4177 +=========+===========+===========+=============================+
4178 |uu | string | string | UU codec (e.g. for email) |
4179 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4180 |base64 | string | string | base64 codec |
4181 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4182 |quopri | string | string | quoted-printable codec |
4183 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4184 |zlib | string | string | zlib compression |
4185 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4186 |hex | string | string | 2-byte hex codec |
4187 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4188 |rot-13 | string | Unicode | ROT-13 Unicode charmap codec|
4189 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00004190
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004191- Some operating systems now support the concept of a default Unicode
4192 encoding for file system operations. Notably, Windows supports 'mbcs'
4193 as the default. The Macintosh will also adopt this concept in the medium
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00004194 term, although the default encoding for that platform will be other than
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004195 'mbcs'.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00004196
4197 On operating system that support non-ASCII filenames, it is common for
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004198 functions that return filenames (such as os.listdir()) to return Python
4199 string objects pre-encoded using the default file system encoding for
4200 the platform. As this encoding is likely to be different from Python's
4201 default encoding, converting this name to a Unicode object before passing
4202 it back to the Operating System would result in a Unicode error, as Python
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004203 would attempt to use its default encoding (generally ASCII) rather than
4204 the default encoding for the file system.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00004205
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004206 In general, this change simply removes surprises when working with
4207 Unicode and the file system, making these operations work as you expect,
4208 increasing the transparency of Unicode objects in this context.
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004209 See [????] for more details, including examples.
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004210
Tim Peters61dff2b2001-05-08 15:43:37 +00004211- Float (and complex) literals in source code were evaluated to full
4212 precision only when running from a .py file; the same code loaded from a
4213 .pyc (or .pyo) file could suffer numeric differences starting at about the
4214 12th significant decimal digit. For example, on a machine with IEEE-754
4215 floating arithmetic,
4216
4217 x = 9007199254740992.0
4218 print long(x)
4219
4220 printed 9007199254740992 if run directly from .py, but 9007199254740000
4221 if from a compiled (.pyc or .pyo) file. This was due to marshal using
4222 str(float) instead of repr(float) when building code objects. marshal
4223 now uses repr(float) instead, which should reproduce floats to full
4224 machine precision (assuming the platform C float<->string I/O conversion
4225 functions are of good quality).
4226
4227 This may cause floating-point results to change in some cases, and
4228 usually for the better, but may also cause numerically unstable
4229 algorithms to break.
4230
Tim Peters2f228e72001-05-13 00:19:31 +00004231- The implementation of dicts suffers fewer collisions, which has speed
4232 benefits. However, the order in which dict entries appear in dict.keys(),
4233 dict.values() and dict.items() may differ from previous releases for a
4234 given dict. Nothing is defined about this order, so no program should
4235 rely on it. Nevertheless, it's easy to write test cases that rely on the
4236 order by accident, typically because of printing the str() or repr() of a
4237 dict to an "expected results" file. See Lib/test/test_support.py's new
4238 sortdict(dict) function for a simple way to display a dict in sorted
4239 order.
4240
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00004241- Many other small changes to dicts were made, resulting in faster
4242 operation along the most common code paths.
4243
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00004244- Dictionary objects now support the "in" operator: "x in dict" means
4245 the same as dict.has_key(x).
4246
Barry Warsaw51acc8d2001-06-26 20:12:50 +00004247- The update() method of dictionaries now accepts generic mapping
4248 objects. Specifically the argument object must support the .keys()
4249 and __getitem__() methods. This allows you to say, for example,
4250 {}.update(UserDict())
4251
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00004252- Iterators were added; this is a generalized way of providing values
4253 to a for loop. See PEP 234. There's a new built-in function iter()
4254 to return an iterator. There's a new protocol to get the next value
4255 from an iterator using the next() method (in Python) or the
4256 tp_iternext slot (in C). There's a new protocol to get iterators
4257 using the __iter__() method (in Python) or the tp_iter slot (in C).
4258 Iterating (i.e. a for loop) over a dictionary generates its keys.
4259 Iterating over a file generates its lines.
4260
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004261- The following functions were generalized to work nicely with iterator
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004262 arguments::
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004263
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00004264 map(), filter(), reduce(), zip()
Tim Peters8572b4f2001-05-06 01:05:02 +00004265 list(), tuple() (PySequence_Tuple() and PySequence_Fast() in C API)
4266 max(), min()
Tim Peters1af03e92001-05-26 19:37:54 +00004267 join() method of strings
4268 extend() method of lists
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00004269 'x in y' and 'x not in y' (PySequence_Contains() in C API)
4270 operator.countOf() (PySequence_Count() in C API)
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004271 right-hand side of assignment statements with multiple targets, such as ::
Tim Petersd6d010b2001-06-21 02:49:55 +00004272 x, y, z = some_iterable_object_returning_exactly_3_values
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00004273
Tim Petersd85e1022001-05-11 21:51:48 +00004274- Accessing module attributes is significantly faster (for example,
4275 random.random or os.path or yourPythonModule.yourAttribute).
4276
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00004277- Comparing dictionary objects via == and != is faster, and now works even
4278 if the keys and values don't support comparisons other than ==.
4279
Tim Peters95bf9392001-05-10 08:32:44 +00004280- Comparing dictionaries in ways other than == and != is slower: there were
4281 insecurities in the dict comparison implementation that could cause Python
4282 to crash if the element comparison routines for the dict keys and/or
4283 values mutated the dicts. Making the code bulletproof slowed it down.
4284
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00004285- Collisions in dicts are resolved via a new approach, which can help
4286 dramatically in bad cases. For example, looking up every key in a dict
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00004287 d with d.keys() == [i << 16 for i in range(20000)] is approximately 500x
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00004288 faster now. Thanks to Christian Tismer for pointing out the cause and
4289 the nature of an effective cure (last December! better late than never).
Tim Peters15d49292001-05-27 07:39:22 +00004290
Tim Peters52e155e2001-06-16 05:42:57 +00004291- repr() is much faster for large containers (dict, list, tuple).
4292
4293
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004294Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004295-------
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004296
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00004297- The constants ascii_letters, ascii_lowercase. and ascii_uppercase
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004298 were added to the string module. These a locale-independent
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00004299 constants, unlike letters, lowercase, and uppercase. These are now
4300 use in appropriate locations in the standard library.
4301
Martin v. Löwisf0473d52001-07-18 16:17:16 +00004302- The flags used in dlopen calls can now be configured using
4303 sys.setdlopenflags and queried using sys.getdlopenflags.
4304
Guido van Rossumc7e4aca2001-07-12 11:54:37 +00004305- Fredrik Lundh's xmlrpclib is now a standard library module. This
4306 provides full client-side XML-RPC support. In addition,
4307 Demo/xmlrpc/ contains two server frameworks (one SocketServer-based,
4308 one asyncore-based). Thanks to Eric Raymond for the documentation.
4309
Guido van Rossum643d3912001-07-05 14:46:25 +00004310- The xrange() object is simplified: it no longer supports slicing,
4311 repetition, comparisons, efficient 'in' checking, the tolist()
4312 method, or the start, stop and step attributes. See PEP 260.
4313
Martin v. Löwisebf94db2001-06-06 06:25:40 +00004314- A new function fnmatch.filter to filter lists of file names was added.
4315
Barry Warsawffd674d2001-05-22 16:00:10 +00004316- calendar.py uses month and day names based on the current locale.
4317
Guido van Rossum2e0a6542001-05-15 02:14:44 +00004318- strop is now *really* obsolete (this was announced before with 1.6),
4319 and issues DeprecationWarning when used (except for the four items
4320 that are still imported into string.py).
4321
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004322- Cookie.py now sorts key+value pairs by key in output strings.
4323
4324- pprint.isrecursive(object) didn't correctly identify recursive objects.
4325 Now it does.
4326
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00004327- pprint functions now much faster for large containers (tuple, list, dict).
4328
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00004329- New 'q' and 'Q' format codes in the struct module, corresponding to C
4330 types "long long" and "unsigned long long" (on Windows, __int64). In
4331 native mode, these can be used only when the platform C compiler supports
4332 these types (when HAVE_LONG_LONG is #define'd by the Python config
4333 process), and then they inherit the sizes and alignments of the C types.
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00004334 In standard mode, 'q' and 'Q' are supported on all platforms, and are
4335 8-byte integral types.
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00004336
Guido van Rossum83213cc2001-06-12 16:48:52 +00004337- The site module installs a new built-in function 'help' that invokes
4338 pydoc.help. It must be invoked as 'help()'; when invoked as 'help',
4339 it displays a message reminding the user to use 'help()' or
4340 'help(object)'.
4341
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004342Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004343-----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004344
4345- New test_mutants.py runs dict comparisons where the key and value
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004346 comparison operators mutate the dicts randomly during comparison. This
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004347 rapidly causes Python to crash under earlier releases (not for the faint
4348 of heart: it can also cause Win9x to freeze or reboot!).
4349
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004350- New test_pprint.py verifies that pprint.isrecursive() and
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00004351 pprint.isreadable() return sensible results. Also verifies that simple
4352 cases produce correct output.
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004353
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00004354C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004355-----
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00004356
4357- Removed the unused last_is_sticky argument from the internal
4358 _PyTuple_Resize(). If this affects you, you were cheating.
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004359
4360----
4361
4362**(For information about older versions, consult the HISTORY file.)**