blob: 0034710484a6f0ec5ab53737e319319503a286ea [file] [log] [blame]
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001+++++++++++
2Python News
3+++++++++++
4
Skip Montanaro4a385832002-09-20 17:08:52 +00005(editors: check NEWS.help for information about editing NEWS using ReST.)
6
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00007What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 2?
8=================================
9
10*Release date: XX-XXX-2003
11
12Core and builtins
13-----------------
14
15Extension modules
16-----------------
17
18- fcntl now exposes the strops.h I_* constants.
19
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +000020- datetime changes:
21
22 today() and now() now round system timestamps to the closest
23 microsecond <http://www.python.org/sf/661086>.
24
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +000025Library
26-------
27
28Tools/Demos
29-----------
30
31Build
32-----
33
Skip Montanarodecc6a42003-01-01 20:07:49 +000034- On systems which build using the configure script, compiler flags which
35 used to be lumped together using the OPT flag have been split into two
36 groups, OPT and BASECFLAGS. OPT is meant to carry just optimization- and
37 debug-related flags like "-g" and "-O3". BASECFLAGS is meant to carry
38 compiler flags that are required to get a clean compile. On some
39 platforms (many Linux flavors in particular) BASECFLAGS will be empty by
40 default. On others, such as Mac OS X and SCO, it will contain required
41 flags. This change allows people building Python to override OPT without
42 fear of clobbering compiler flags which are required to get a clean build.
43
44- On Darwin/Mac OS X platforms, /sw/lib and /sw/include are added to the
45 relevant search lists in setup.py. This allows users building Python to
46 take advantage of the many packages available from the fink project
47 <http://fink.sf.net/>.
48
49- A new Makefile target, scriptsinstall, installs a number of useful scripts
50 from the Tools/scripts directory.
51
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +000052C API
53-----
54
55New platforms
56-------------
57
58Tests
59-----
60
61Windows
62-------
63
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +000064- The new logging package is now installed by the Windows installer. It
65 wasn't in 2.3a1 due to oversight.
66
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +000067Mac
68---
69
70
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +000071What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 1?
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +000072=================================
73
Guido van Rossumae548862002-12-31 15:47:36 +000074*Release date: 31-Dec-2002*
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +000075
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +000076Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +000077--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +000078
Michael W. Hudson96bc3b42002-11-26 14:48:23 +000079- One can now assign to __bases__ and __name__ of new-style classes.
80
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +000081- dict() now accepts keyword arguments so that dict(one=1, two=2)
82 is the equivalent of {"one": 1, "two": 2}. Accordingly,
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +000083 the existing (but undocumented) 'items' keyword argument has
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +000084 been eliminated. This means that dict(items=someMapping) now has
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +000085 a different meaning than before.
86
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +000087- int() now returns a long object if the argument is outside the
88 integer range, so int("4"*1000), int(1e200) and int(1L<<1000) will
89 all return long objects instead of raising an OverflowError.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +000090
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +000091- Assignment to __class__ is disallowed if either the old or the new
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +000092 class is a statically allocated type object (such as defined by an
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +000093 extension module). This prevents anomalies like 2.__class__ = bool.
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +000094
95- New-style object creation and deallocation have been sped up
96 significantly; they are now faster than classic instance creation
97 and deallocation.
98
99- The __slots__ variable can now mention "private" names, and the
100 right thing will happen (e.g. __slots__ = ["__foo"]).
101
102- The built-ins slice() and buffer() are now callable types. The
103 types classobj (formerly class), code, function, instance, and
104 instancemethod (formerly instance-method), which have no built-in
105 names but are accessible through the types module, are now also
106 callable. The type dict-proxy is renamed to dictproxy.
107
108- Cycles going through the __class__ link of a new-style instance are
109 now detected by the garbage collector.
110
111- Classes using __slots__ are now properly garbage collected.
112 [SF bug 519621]
113
114- Tightened the __slots__ rules: a slot name must be a valid Python
115 identifier.
116
117- The constructor for the module type now requires a name argument and
118 takes an optional docstring argument. Previously, this constructor
119 ignored its arguments. As a consequence, deriving a class from a
120 module (not from the module type) is now illegal; previously this
121 created an unnamed module, just like invoking the module type did.
122 [SF bug 563060]
123
124- A new type object, 'basestring', is added. This is a common base type
125 for 'str' and 'unicode', and can be used instead of
126 types.StringTypes, e.g. to test whether something is "a string":
127 isinstance(x, basestring) is True for Unicode and 8-bit strings. This
128 is an abstract base class and cannot be instantiated directly.
129
130- Changed new-style class instantiation so that when C's __new__
131 method returns something that's not a C instance, its __init__ is
132 not called. [SF bug #537450]
133
134- Fixed super() to work correctly with class methods. [SF bug #535444]
135
136- If you try to pickle an instance of a class that has __slots__ but
137 doesn't define or override __getstate__, a TypeError is now raised.
138 This is done by adding a bozo __getstate__ to the class that always
139 raises TypeError. (Before, this would appear to be pickled, but the
140 state of the slots would be lost.)
141
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000142Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000143-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000144
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +0000145- Import from zipfiles is now supported. The name of a zipfile placed
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +0000146 on sys.path causes the import statement to look for importable Python
147 modules (with .py, pyc and .pyo extensions) and packages inside the
148 zipfile. The zipfile import follows the specification (though not
149 the sample implementation) of PEP 273. The semantics of __path__ are
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +0000150 compatible with those that have been implemented in Jython since
151 Jython 2.1.
152
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +0000153- PEP 302 has been accepted. Although it was inititally developed to
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +0000154 support zipimport, it offers a new, general import hook mechanism.
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +0000155 Several new variables have been added to the sys module:
156 sys.meta_path, sys.path_hooks, and sys.path_importer_cache; these
157 make extending the import statement much more convenient than
158 overriding the __import__ built-in function. For a description of
159 these, see PEP 302.
160
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +0000161- A frame object's f_lineno attribute can now be written to from a
162 trace function to change which line will execute next. A command to
163 exploit this from pdb has been added. [SF patch #643835]
164
Marc-André Lemburg20b91352002-12-12 18:01:43 +0000165- The _codecs support module for codecs.py was turned into a builtin
166 module to assure that at least the builtin codecs are available
167 to the Python parser for source code decoding according to PEP 263.
168
Walter Dörwaldd9a6ad32002-12-12 16:41:44 +0000169- issubclass now supports a tuple as the second argument, just like
170 isinstance does. ``issubclass(X, (A, B))`` is equivalent to
171 ``issubclass(X, A) or issubclass(X, B)``.
172
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +0000173- Thanks to Armin Rigo, the last known way to provoke a system crash
174 by cleverly arranging for a comparison function to mutate a list
175 during a list.sort() operation has been fixed. The effect of
176 attempting to mutate a list, or even to inspect its contents or
177 length, while a sort is in progress, is not defined by the language.
178 The C implementation of Python 2.3 attempts to detect mutations,
179 and raise ValueError if one occurs, but there's no guarantee that
180 all mutations will be caught, or that any will be caught across
181 releases or implementations.
182
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +0000183- Unicode file name processing for Windows (PEP 277) is implemented.
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +0000184 All platforms now have an os.path.supports_unicode_filenames attribute,
185 which is set to True on Windows NT/2000/XP, and False elsewhere.
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +0000186
Walter Dörwald3aeb6322002-09-02 13:14:32 +0000187- Codec error handling callbacks (PEP 293) are implemented.
188 Error handling in unicode.encode or str.decode can now be customized.
189
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +0000190- A subtle change to the semantics of the built-in function intern():
191 interned strings are no longer immortal. You must keep a reference
192 to the return value intern() around to get the benefit.
193
Guido van Rossumf808b892002-08-16 03:38:10 +0000194- Use of 'None' as a variable, argument or attribute name now
195 issues a SyntaxWarning. In the future, None may become a keyword.
196
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +0000197- SET_LINENO is gone. co_lnotab is now consulted to determine when to
198 call the trace function. C code that accessed f_lineno should call
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +0000199 PyCode_Addr2Line instead (f_lineno is still there, but only kept up
200 to date when there is a trace function set).
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +0000201
Guido van Rossum9be89462002-08-14 16:11:30 +0000202- There's a new warning category, FutureWarning. This is used to warn
203 about a number of situations where the value or sign of an integer
204 result will change in Python 2.4 as a result of PEP 237 (integer
205 unification). The warnings implement stage B0 mentioned in that
206 PEP. The warnings are about the following situations:
207
208 - Octal and hex literals without 'L' prefix in the inclusive range
209 [0x80000000..0xffffffff]; these are currently negative ints, but
210 in Python 2.4 they will be positive longs with the same bit
211 pattern.
212
213 - Left shifts on integer values that cause the outcome to lose
214 bits or have a different sign than the left operand. To be
215 precise: x<<n where this currently doesn't yield the same value
216 as long(x)<<n; in Python 2.4, the outcome will be long(x)<<n.
217
218 - Conversions from ints to string that show negative values as
219 unsigned ints in the inclusive range [0x80000000..0xffffffff];
220 this affects the functions hex() and oct(), and the string
221 formatting codes %u, %o, %x, and %X. In Python 2.4, these will
222 show signed values (e.g. hex(-1) currently returns "0xffffffff";
223 in Python 2.4 it will return "-0x1").
224
Guido van Rossum9a2eda52002-12-31 02:12:42 +0000225- The bits manipulated under the cover by sys.setcheckinterval() have
226 been changed. Both the check interval and the ticker used to be
227 per-thread values. They are now just a pair of global variables.
228 In addition, the default check interval was boosted from 10 to 100
229 bytecode instructions. This may have some effect on systems that
230 relied on the old default value. In particular, in multi-threaded
231 applications which try to be highly responsive, response time will
232 increase by some (perhaps imperceptible) amount.
Skip Montanaro979c74b2002-09-03 21:25:14 +0000233
Tim Petersd64c1de2002-08-12 17:36:03 +0000234- When multiplying very large integers, a version of the so-called
235 Karatsuba algorithm is now used. This is most effective if the
236 inputs have roughly the same size. If they both have about N digits,
237 Karatsuba multiplication has O(N**1.58) runtime (the exponent is
238 log_base_2(3)) instead of the previous O(N**2). Measured results may
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +0000239 be better or worse than that, depending on platform quirks. Besides
240 the O() improvement in raw instruction count, the Karatsuba algorithm
241 appears to have much better cache behavior on extremely large integers
242 (starting in the ballpark of a million bits). Note that this is a
243 simple implementation, and there's no intent here to compete with,
244 e.g., GMP. It gives a very nice speedup when it applies, but a package
245 devoted to fast large-integer arithmetic should run circles around it.
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +0000246
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +0000247- u'%c' will now raise a ValueError in case the argument is an
248 integer outside the valid range of Unicode code point ordinals.
249
Guido van Rossumdeb09362002-08-09 17:16:30 +0000250- The tempfile module has been overhauled for enhanced security. The
251 mktemp() function is now deprecated; new, safe replacements are
252 mkstemp() (for files) and mkdtemp() (for directories), and the
253 higher-level functions NamedTemporaryFile() and TemporaryFile().
254 Use of some global variables in this module is also deprecated; the
255 new functions have keyword arguments to provide the same
256 functionality. All Lib, Tools and Demo modules that used the unsafe
257 interfaces have been updated to use the safe replacements. Thanks
258 to Zack Weinberg!
259
Guido van Rossumd81a9832002-08-09 15:57:34 +0000260- When x is an object whose class implements __mul__ and __rmul__,
261 1.0*x would correctly invoke __rmul__, but 1*x would erroneously
262 invoke __mul__. This was due to the sequence-repeat code in the int
263 type. This has been fixed now.
264
Barry Warsawd79f6832002-08-06 17:01:51 +0000265- Previously, "str1 in str2" required str1 to be a string of length 1.
266 This restriction has been relaxed to allow str1 to be a string of
267 any length. Thus "'el' in 'hello world'" returns True now.
268
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +0000269- File objects are now their own iterators. For a file f, iter(f) now
270 returns f (unless f is closed), and f.next() is similar to
271 f.readline() when EOF is not reached; however, f.next() uses a
272 readahead buffer that messes up the file position, so mixing
273 f.next() and f.readline() (or other methods) doesn't work right.
274 Calling f.seek() drops the readahead buffer, but other operations
275 don't. It so happens that this gives a nice additional speed boost
276 to "for line in file:"; the xreadlines method and corresponding
Guido van Rossumbffb2ef2002-08-09 17:17:07 +0000277 module are now obsolete. Thanks to Oren Tirosh!
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +0000278
Guido van Rossumde392d32002-08-05 14:17:20 +0000279- Encoding declarations (PEP 263, phase 1) have been implemented. A
280 comment of the form "# -*- coding: <encodingname> -*-" in the first
281 or second line of a Python source file indicates the encoding.
Martin v. Löwis00f1e3f2002-08-04 17:29:52 +0000282
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +0000283- list.sort() has a new implementation. While cross-platform results
284 may vary, and in data-dependent ways, this is much faster on many
285 kinds of partially ordered lists than the previous implementation,
286 and reported to be just as fast on randomly ordered lists on
287 several major platforms. This sort is also stable (if A==B and A
288 precedes B in the list at the start, A precedes B after the sort too),
289 although the language definition does not guarantee stability. A
290 potential drawback is that list.sort() may require temp space of
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +0000291 len(list)*2 bytes (``*4`` on a 64-bit machine). It's therefore possible
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +0000292 for list.sort() to raise MemoryError now, even if a comparison function
293 does not. See <http://www.python.org/sf/587076> for full details.
294
Guido van Rossum2d5389c2002-07-23 03:44:35 +0000295- All standard iterators now ensure that, once StopIteration has been
296 raised, all future calls to next() on the same iterator will also
297 raise StopIteration. There used to be various counterexamples to
298 this behavior, which could caused confusion or subtle program
299 breakage, without any benefits. (Note that this is still an
300 iterator's responsibility; the iterator framework does not enforce
301 this.)
302
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +0000303- Ctrl+C handling on Windows has been made more consistent with
304 other platforms. KeyboardInterrupt can now reliably be caught,
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +0000305 and Ctrl+C at an interactive prompt no longer terminates the
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +0000306 process under NT/2k/XP (it never did under Win9x). Ctrl+C will
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +0000307 interrupt time.sleep() in the main thread, and any child processes
308 created via the popen family (on win2k; we can't make win9x work
Mark Hammond8f3afc72002-08-10 06:26:31 +0000309 reliably) are also interrupted (as generally happens on for Linux/Unix.)
310 [SF bugs 231273, 439992 and 581232]
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +0000311
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +0000312- sys.getwindowsversion() has been added on Windows. This
313 returns a tuple with information about the version of Windows
314 currently running.
315
Raymond Hettinger5a04aec2002-06-25 00:25:30 +0000316- Slices and repetitions of buffer objects now consistently return
317 a string. Formerly, strings would be returned most of the time,
318 but a buffer object would be returned when the repetition count
319 was one or when the slice range was all inclusive.
320
Walter Dörwald3430d702002-06-17 10:43:59 +0000321- Unicode objects in sys.path are no longer ignored but treated
322 as directory names.
323
Neal Norwitz1f68fc72002-06-14 00:50:42 +0000324- Fixed string.startswith and string.endswith builtin methods
325 so they accept negative indices. [SF bug 493951]
326
Guido van Rossumc5fe5eb2002-06-12 03:45:21 +0000327- Fixed a bug with a continue inside a try block and a yield in the
328 finally clause. [SF bug 567538]
329
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +0000330- Most builtin sequences now support "extended slices", i.e. slices
Guido van Rossum2e82e712002-06-13 11:41:07 +0000331 with a third "stride" parameter. For example, "hello world"[::-1]
332 gives "dlrow olleh".
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +0000333
Neal Norwitzd68f5172002-05-29 15:54:55 +0000334- A new warning PendingDeprecationWarning was added to provide
335 direction on features which are in the process of being deprecated.
336 The warning will not be printed by default. To see the pending
337 deprecations, use -Walways::PendingDeprecationWarning::
338 as a command line option or warnings.filterwarnings() in code.
339
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +0000340- Deprecated features of xrange objects have been removed as
341 promised. The start, stop, and step attributes and the tolist()
342 method no longer exist. xrange repetition and slicing have been
343 removed.
344
Guido van Rossum7dab2422002-04-26 19:40:56 +0000345- New builtin function enumerate(x), from PEP 279. Example:
346 enumerate("abc") is an iterator returning (0,"a"), (1,"b"), (2,"c").
347 The argument can be an arbitrary iterable object.
348
Neil Schemenauer89e3ee02002-04-26 01:58:53 +0000349- The assert statement no longer tests __debug__ at runtime. This means
350 that assert statements cannot be disabled by assigning a false value
351 to __debug__.
352
Walter Dörwald068325e2002-04-15 13:36:47 +0000353- A method zfill() was added to str and unicode, that fills a numeric
354 string to the left with zeros. For example,
355 "+123".zfill(6) -> "+00123".
356
Guido van Rossum862fe3c2002-04-15 12:36:47 +0000357- Complex numbers supported divmod() and the // and % operators, but
358 these make no sense. Since this was documented, they're being
359 deprecated now.
360
Guido van Rossum26dd8302002-04-26 20:11:29 +0000361- String and unicode methods lstrip(), rstrip() and strip() now take
362 an optional argument that specifies the characters to strip. For
363 example, "Foo!!!?!?!?".rstrip("?!") -> "Foo".
Guido van Rossum49042042002-04-13 00:59:05 +0000364
Guido van Rossumc0d3f4e2002-11-27 13:10:40 +0000365- There's a new dictionary constructor (a class method of the dict
366 class), dict.fromkeys(iterable, value=None). It constructs a
367 dictionary with keys taken from the iterable and all values set to a
368 single value. It can be used for building sets and for removing
369 duplicates from sequences.
Raymond Hettingere33d3df2002-11-27 07:29:33 +0000370
Guido van Rossumc69343b2002-04-12 19:22:48 +0000371- Added a new dict method pop(key). This removes and returns the
372 value corresponding to key. [SF patch #539949]
373
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +0000374- A new built-in type, bool, has been added, as well as built-in
375 names for its two values, True and False. Comparisons and sundry
376 other operations that return a truth value have been changed to
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +0000377 return a bool instead. Read PEP 285 for an explanation of why this
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +0000378 is backward compatible.
379
Guido van Rossum95b62a62002-03-29 01:07:24 +0000380- Fixed two bugs reported as SF #535905: under certain conditions,
381 deallocating a deeply nested structure could cause a segfault in the
382 garbage collector, due to interaction with the "trashcan" code;
383 access to the current frame during destruction of a local variable
384 could access a pointer to freed memory.
385
Guido van Rossumfe0ca4a2002-06-18 21:20:13 +0000386- The optional object allocator ("pymalloc") has been enabled by
387 default. The recommended practice for memory allocation and
388 deallocation has been streamlined. A header file is included,
389 Misc/pymemcompat.h, which can be bundled with 3rd party extensions
390 and lets them use the same API with Python versions from 1.5.2
391 onwards.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +0000392
Martin v. Löwiscfeb3b62002-03-03 21:30:27 +0000393- PyErr_Display will provide file and line information for all exceptions
394 that have an attribute print_file_and_line, not just SyntaxErrors.
395
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +0000396- The UTF-8 codec will now encode and decode Unicode surrogates
397 correctly and without raising exceptions for unpaired ones.
398
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +0000399- Universal newlines (PEP 278) is implemented. Briefly, using 'U'
400 instead of 'r' when opening a text file for reading changes the line
401 ending convention so that any of '\r', '\r\n', and '\n' is
402 recognized (even mixed in one file); all three are converted to
403 '\n', the standard Python line end character.
404
Neal Norwitz649b7592002-01-01 19:07:13 +0000405- file.xreadlines() now raises a ValueError if the file is closed:
406 Previously, an xreadlines object was returned which would raise
407 a ValueError when the xreadlines.next() method was called.
408
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +0000409- sys.exit() inadvertently allowed more than one argument.
Neal Norwitz0c766a02002-03-27 13:03:09 +0000410 An exception will now be raised if more than one argument is used.
411
Gustavo Niemeyer17c5a332002-12-16 14:09:22 +0000412- Changed evaluation order of dictionary literals to conform to the
413 general left to right evaluation order rule. Now {f1(): f2()} will
414 evaluate f1 first.
Gustavo Niemeyer78429a62002-12-16 13:54:02 +0000415
Gustavo Niemeyer786ddb22002-12-16 18:12:53 +0000416- Fixed bug #521782: when a file was in non-blocking mode, file.read()
417 could silently lose data or wrongly throw an unknown error.
418
Neil Schemenauerb983aa02002-12-30 20:22:23 +0000419- The sq_repeat, sq_inplace_repeat, sq_concat and sq_inplace_concat
420 slots are now always tried after trying the corresponding nb_* slots.
421 This fixes a number of minor bugs (see bug #624807).
422
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000423Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000424-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000425
Martin v. Löwis24a880b2002-12-31 12:55:15 +0000426- posix.openpty now works on all systems that have /dev/ptmx.
427
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +0000428- A module zipimport exists to support importing code from zip
429 archives.
430
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +0000431- The new datetime module supplies classes for manipulating dates and
432 times. The basic design came from the Zope "fishbowl process", and
433 favors practical commercial applications over calendar esoterica. See
434
435 http://www.zope.org/Members/fdrake/DateTimeWiki/FrontPage
436
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +0000437- _tkinter now returns Tcl objects, instead of strings. Objects which
438 have Python equivalents are converted to Python objects, other objects
439 are wrapped. This can be configured through the wantobjects method,
Martin v. Löwis8c8aa5d2002-11-26 21:39:48 +0000440 or Tkinter.wantobjects.
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +0000441
Barry Warsawc27f4bd2002-12-30 21:03:26 +0000442- The PyBSDDB wrapper around the Sleepycat Berkeley DB library has
443 been added as the package bsddb. The traditional bsddb module is
444 still available in source code, but not built automatically anymore,
445 and is now named bsddb185. This supports Berkeley DB versions from
446 3.0 to 4.1.
Martin v. Löwisef546b32002-11-19 08:12:57 +0000447
Martin v. Löwis677bde22002-11-23 22:08:15 +0000448- unicodedata was updated to Unicode 3.2. It supports normalization
449 and names for Hangul syllables and CJK unified ideographs.
Martin v. Löwis7d41e292002-11-23 12:22:32 +0000450
Neal Norwitz94a83fd2002-11-02 17:46:24 +0000451- resource.getrlimit() now returns longs instead of ints.
452
Martin v. Löwis080689c2002-10-26 14:42:02 +0000453- readline now dynamically adjusts its input/output stream if
454 sys.stdin/stdout changes.
455
Guido van Rossumba602972002-10-01 18:18:58 +0000456- The _tkinter module (and hence Tkinter) has dropped support for
457 Tcl/Tk 8.0 and 8.1. Only Tcl/Tk versions 8.2, 8.3 and 8.4 are
458 supported.
459
Martin v. Löwis658009a2002-09-16 17:26:24 +0000460- cPickle.BadPickleGet is now a class.
461
Martin v. Löwisa19bfe02002-10-16 18:28:36 +0000462- The time stamps in os.stat_result are floating point numbers
463 after stat_float_times has been called.
Martin v. Löwis94717ed2002-09-09 14:24:16 +0000464
Neal Norwitzb5673922002-09-05 21:48:07 +0000465- If the size passed to mmap.mmap() is larger than the length of the
466 file on non-Windows platforms, a ValueError is raised. [SF bug 585792]
467
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +0000468- The xreadlines module is slated for obsolescence.
469
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +0000470- The strptime function in the time module is now always available (a
471 Python implementation is used when the C library doesn't define it).
472
Guido van Rossum9562bcf2002-06-14 21:31:18 +0000473- The 'new' module is no longer an extension, but a Python module that
474 only exists for backwards compatibility. Its contents are no longer
475 functions but callable type objects.
476
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +0000477- The bsddb.*open functions can now take 'None' as a filename.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +0000478 This will create a temporary in-memory bsddb that won't be
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +0000479 written to disk.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +0000480
Martin v. Löwisb96152c2002-12-31 13:20:15 +0000481- posix.getloadavg, posix.lchown, posix.killpg, posix.mknod, and
482 posix.getpgid have been added where available.
Martin v. Löwis06a83e92002-04-14 10:19:44 +0000483
Martin v. Löwisf0a46682002-11-03 17:20:12 +0000484- The locale module now exposes the C library's gettext interface. It
485 also has a new function getpreferredencoding.
Martin v. Löwis2e64c342002-03-27 18:49:02 +0000486
Tim Petersfbf74f22002-03-14 19:06:01 +0000487- A security hole ("double free") was found in zlib-1.1.3, a popular
488 third party compression library used by some Python modules. The
489 hole was quickly plugged in zlib-1.1.4, and the Windows build of
490 Python now ships with zlib-1.1.4.
491
Martin v. Löwis688357e2002-04-08 21:28:20 +0000492- pwd, grp, and resource return enhanced tuples now, with symbolic
493 field names.
Martin v. Löwis29001ff2002-03-01 10:47:37 +0000494
Martin v. Löwis99866332002-03-01 10:27:01 +0000495- array.array is now a type object. A new format character
496 'u' indicates Py_UNICODE arrays. For those, .tounicode and
497 .fromunicode methods are available. Arrays now support __iadd__
498 and __imul__.
499
Neal Norwitze790eae2002-01-01 21:14:12 +0000500- dl now builds on every system that has dlfcn.h. Failure in case
Martin v. Löwis93227272002-01-01 20:18:30 +0000501 of sizeof(int)!=sizeof(long)!=sizeof(void*) is delayed until dl.open
502 is called.
503
Michael W. Hudson34f20ea2002-05-27 15:08:24 +0000504- signal.sigpending, signal.sigprocmask and signal.sigsuspend have
505 been added where available.
506
Skip Montanaro8e790e72002-09-03 13:25:17 +0000507- The sys module acquired a new attribute, api_version, which evaluates
508 to the value of the PYTHON_API_VERSION macro with which the
509 interpreter was compiled.
510
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +0000511- Fixed bug #470582: sre module would return a tuple (None, 'a', 'ab')
512 when applying the regular expression '^((a)c)?(ab)$' on 'ab'. It now
513 returns (None, None, 'ab'), as expected. Also fixed handling of
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +0000514 lastindex/lastgroup match attributes in similar cases. For example,
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +0000515 when running the expression r'(a)(b)?b' over 'ab', lastindex must be
516 1, not 2.
517
Gustavo Niemeyerc523b042002-11-07 03:28:56 +0000518- Fixed bug #581080: sre scanner was not checking the buffer limit
519 before increasing the current pointer. This was creating an infinite
520 loop in the search function, once the pointer exceeded the buffer
521 limit.
522
Thomas Heller95cb7e42002-11-07 16:23:55 +0000523- The os.fdopen function now enforces a file mode starting with the
524 letter 'r', 'w' or 'a', otherwise a ValueError is raised. This fixes
525 bug #623464.
526
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000527Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000528-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000529
Just van Rossum5e156ad2002-12-31 16:38:01 +0000530- Freeze's modulefinder.py has been moved to the standard library;
531 slightly improved so it will issue less false missing submodule
532 reports (see sf path #643711 for details). Documentation will follow
533 with Python 2.3a2.
534
Martin v. Löwis96a60e42002-12-31 13:11:54 +0000535- os.path exposes getctime.
536
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +0000537- unittest.py now has two additional methods called assertAlmostEqual()
538 and failIfAlmostEqual(). They implement an approximate comparision
539 by rounding the difference between the two arguments and comparing
540 the result to zero. Approximate comparision is essential for
541 unit tests of floating point results.
542
Raymond Hettingere11b5102002-12-25 16:37:19 +0000543- calendar.py now depends on the new datetime module rather than
544 the time module. As a result, the range of allowable dates
545 has been increased.
546
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +0000547- pdb has a new 'j(ump)' command to select the next line to be
548 executed.
549
Thomas Heller1b3b49d2002-12-12 19:13:44 +0000550- The distutils created windows installers now can run a
551 postinstallation script.
552
Martin v. Löwis4581cfa2002-11-22 08:23:09 +0000553- doctest.testmod can now be called without argument, which means to
554 test the current module.
555
Martin v. Löwisf86e8ef2002-11-22 08:08:44 +0000556- When cancelling a server that implemented threading with a keyboard
557 interrupt, the server would shut down but not terminate (waiting on
558 client threads). A new member variable, daemon_threads, was added to
559 the ThreadingMixIn class in SocketServer.py to make it explicit that
560 this behavior needs to be controlled.
561
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +0000562- A new module, optparse, provides a fancy alternative to getopt for
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +0000563 command line parsing. It is a slightly modified version of Greg
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +0000564 Ward's Optik package.
565
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +0000566- UserDict.py now defines a DictMixin class which defines all dictionary
567 methods for classes that already have a minimum mapping interface.
568 This greatly simplifies writing classes that need to be substitutable
569 for dictionaries (such as the shelve module).
570
571- shelve.py now subclasses from UserDict.DictMixin. Now shelve supports
572 all dictionary methods. This eases the transition to persistent
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +0000573 storage for scripts originally written with dictionaries in mind.
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +0000574
Skip Montanaro3bf99e32002-12-08 18:36:24 +0000575- shelve.open and the various classes in shelve.py now accept an optional
576 binary flag, which defaults to False. If True, the values stored in the
577 shelf are binary pickles.
578
Guido van Rossumfda06742002-11-13 16:29:18 +0000579- A new package, logging, implements the logging API defined by PEP
580 282. The code is written by Vinay Sajip.
581
Walter Dörwald4dbf1922002-11-06 16:53:44 +0000582- StreamReader, StreamReaderWriter and StreamRecoder in the codecs
583 modules are iterators now.
584
Tim Peters9288f952002-11-05 20:38:55 +0000585- gzip.py now handles files exceeding 2GB. Files over 4GB also work
586 now (provided the OS supports it, and Python is configured with large
587 file support), but in that case the underlying gzip file format can
588 record only the least-significant 32 bits of the file size, so that
589 some tools working with gzipped files may report an incorrect file
590 size.
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +0000591
Martin v. Löwis74b51ac2002-10-26 14:50:45 +0000592- xml.sax.saxutils.unescape has been added, to replace entity references
593 with their entity value.
594
Martin v. Löwis77ac4292002-10-15 15:11:13 +0000595- Queue.Queue.{put,get} now support an optional timeout argument.
596
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +0000597- Various features of Tk 8.4 are exposed in Tkinter.py. The multiple
598 option of tkFileDialog is exposed as function askopenfile{,name}s.
Martin v. Löwis2ec36272002-10-13 10:22:08 +0000599
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +0000600- Various configure methods of Tkinter have been stream-lined, so that
601 tag_configure, image_configure, window_configure now return a
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +0000602 dictionary when invoked with no argument.
Martin v. Löwis6ce13152002-10-10 14:36:13 +0000603
Guido van Rossum2b492b62002-10-09 21:40:48 +0000604- Importing the readline module now no longer has the side effect of
605 calling setlocale(LC_CTYPE, ""). The initial "C" locale, or
606 whatever locale is explicitly set by the user, is preserved. If you
607 want repr() of 8-bit strings in your preferred encoding to preserve
608 all printable characters of that encoding, you have to add the
609 following code to your $PYTHONSTARTUP file or to your application's
610 main():
611
612 import locale
613 locale.setlocale(locale.LC_CTYPE, "")
614
Martin v. Löwise9ce0b02002-10-07 13:23:24 +0000615- shutil.move was added. shutil.copytree now reports errors as an
616 exception at the end, instead of printing error messages.
617
Marc-André Lemburg97047e22002-10-04 11:55:21 +0000618- Encoding name normalization was generalized to not only
619 replace hyphens with underscores, but also all other non-alphanumeric
620 characters (with the exception of the dot which is used for Python
621 package names during lookup). The aliases.py mapping was updated
622 to the new standard.
623
Walter Dörwald5ccaf8f2002-09-06 16:15:58 +0000624- mimetypes has two new functions: guess_all_extensions() which
625 returns a list of all known extensions for a mime type, and
626 add_type() which adds one mapping between a mime type and
627 an extension to the database.
628
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +0000629- New module: sets, defines the class Set that implements a mutable
630 set type using the keys of a dict to represent the set. There's
631 also a class ImmutableSet which is useful when you need sets of sets
632 or when you need to use sets as dict keys, and a class BaseSet which
Raymond Hettingeref8b9c62002-12-09 08:56:06 +0000633 is the base class of the two.
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +0000634
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +0000635- Added operator.pow(a,b) which is equivalent to a**b.
636
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +0000637- Added random.sample(population,k) for random sampling without replacement.
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +0000638 Returns a k length list of unique elements chosen from the population.
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +0000639
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +0000640- random.randrange(-sys.maxint-1, sys.maxint) no longer raises
641 OverflowError. That is, it now accepts any combination of 'start'
642 and 'stop' arguments so long as each is in the range of Python's
643 bounded integers.
644
Raymond Hettinger40f62172002-12-29 23:03:38 +0000645- Thanks to Raymond Hettinger, random.random() now uses a new core
646 generator. The Mersenne Twister algorithm is implemented in C,
647 threadsafe, faster than the previous generator, has an astronomically
648 large period (2**19937-1), creates random floats to full 53-bit
649 precision, and may be the most widely tested random number generator
650 in existence.
651
652 The random.jumpahead(n) method has different semantics for the new
653 generator. Instead of jumping n steps ahead, it uses n and the
654 existing state to create a new state. This means that jumpahead()
655 continues to support multi-threaded code needing generators of
656 non-overlapping sequences. However, it will break code which relies
657 on jumpahead moving a specific number of steps forward.
658
659 The attributes random.whseed and random.__whseed have no meaning for
660 the new generator. Code using these attributes should switch to a
661 new class, random.WichmannHill which is provided for backward
662 compatibility and to make an alternate generator available.
663
Guido van Rossum4a57c332002-08-02 18:05:20 +0000664- New "algorithms" module: heapq, implements a heap queue. Thanks to
665 Kevin O'Connor for the code and François Pinard for an entertaining
666 write-up explaining the theory and practical uses of heaps.
667
Marc-André Lemburg58e2ff22002-07-12 14:40:04 +0000668- New encoding for the Palm OS character set: palmos.
669
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +0000670- binascii.crc32() and the zipfile module had problems on some 64-bit
671 platforms. These have been fixed. On a platform with 8-byte C longs,
672 crc32() now returns a signed-extended 4-byte result, so that its value
673 as a Python int is equal to the value computed a 32-bit platform.
674
Martin v. Löwis7d650ca2002-06-30 15:05:00 +0000675- xml.dom.minidom.toxml and toprettyxml now take an optional encoding
676 argument.
677
Guido van Rossum9f7549b2002-06-10 21:39:42 +0000678- Some fixes in the copy module: when an object is copied through its
679 __reduce__ method, there was no check for a __setstate__ method on
680 the result [SF patch 565085]; deepcopy should treat instances of
681 custom metaclasses the same way it treats instances of type 'type'
682 [SF patch 560794].
683
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +0000684- Sockets now support timeout mode. After s.settimeout(T), where T is
685 a float expressing seconds, subsequent operations raise an exception
686 if they cannot be completed within T seconds. To disable timeout
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +0000687 mode, use s.settimeout(None). There's also a module function,
688 socket.setdefaulttimeout(T), which sets the default for all sockets
689 created henceforth.
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +0000690
691- getopt.gnu_getopt was added. This supports GNU-style option
692 processing, where options can be mixed with non-option arguments.
Martin v. Löwis446a25f2002-06-06 10:58:36 +0000693
Michael W. Hudsonb0dc1a32002-06-04 18:27:35 +0000694- Stop using strings for exceptions. String objects used for
695 exceptions are now classes deriving from Exception. The objects
696 changed were: Tkinter.TclError, bdb.BdbQuit, macpath.norm_error,
697 tabnanny.NannyNag, and xdrlib.Error.
Neal Norwitzb5b5a262002-06-04 17:14:07 +0000698
Walter Dörwald474458d2002-06-04 15:16:29 +0000699- Constants BOM_UTF8, BOM_UTF16, BOM_UTF16_LE, BOM_UTF16_BE,
700 BOM_UTF32, BOM_UTF32_LE and BOM_UTF32_BE that represent the Byte
701 Order Mark in UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 encodings for little and
702 big endian systems were added to the codecs module. The old names
703 BOM32_* and BOM64_* were off by a factor of 2.
704
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +0000705- Added conversion functions math.degrees() and math.radians().
Raymond Hettinger87f59ee2002-05-13 04:17:32 +0000706
Raymond Hettinger866964c2002-12-14 19:51:34 +0000707- math.log() now takes an optional argument: math.log(x[, base]).
708
Raymond Hettinger9b1df1d2002-05-12 06:07:21 +0000709- ftplib.retrlines() now tests for callback is None rather than testing
710 for False. Was causing an error when given a callback object which
711 was callable but also returned len() as zero. The change may
712 create new breakage if the caller relied on the undocumented behavior
713 and called with callback set to [] or some other False value not
714 identical to None.
715
Tim Peters46c04e12002-05-05 20:40:00 +0000716- random.gauss() uses a piece of hidden state used by nothing else,
717 and the .seed() and .whseed() methods failed to reset it. In other
718 words, setting the seed didn't completely determine the sequence of
719 results produced by random.gauss(). It does now. Programs repeatedly
720 mixing calls to a seed method with calls to gauss() may see different
721 results now.
722
Fred Drake7f781c92002-05-01 20:33:53 +0000723- The pickle.Pickler class grew a clear_memo() method to mimic that
724 provided by cPickle.Pickler.
725
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +0000726- difflib's SequenceMatcher class now does a dynamic analysis of
727 which elements are so frequent as to constitute noise. For
728 comparing files as sequences of lines, this generally works better
729 than the IS_LINE_JUNK function, and function ndiff's linejunk
730 argument defaults to None now as a result. A happy benefit is
731 that SequenceMatcher may run much faster now when applied
732 to large files with many duplicate lines (for example, C program
733 text with lots of repeated "}" and "return NULL;" lines).
734
Guido van Rossum256705b2002-04-23 13:29:43 +0000735- New Text.dump() method in Tkinter module.
736
Marc-André Lemburg1ec71ea2002-04-17 20:33:40 +0000737- New distutils commands for building packagers were added to
738 support pkgtool on Solaris and swinstall on HP-UX.
739
740- distutils now has a new abstract binary packager base class
741 command/bdist_packager, which simplifies writing packagers.
742 This will hopefully provide the missing bits to encourage
743 people to submit more packagers, e.g. for Debian, FreeBSD
744 and other systems.
745
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +0000746- The UTF-16, -LE and -BE stream readers now raise a
747 NotImplementedError for all calls to .readline(). Previously, they
748 used to just produce garbage or fail with an encoding error --
749 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 +0000750 work well with these.
751
Martin v. Löwis5c137c22002-03-18 12:44:08 +0000752- compileall now supports quiet operation.
753
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +0000754- The BaseHTTPServer now implements optional HTTP/1.1 persistent
Martin v. Löwis587c98c2002-03-17 18:37:22 +0000755 connections.
756
Marc-André Lemburga5d2b4c2002-02-16 18:23:30 +0000757- socket module: the SSL support was broken out of the main
758 _socket module C helper and placed into a new _ssl helper
759 which now gets imported by socket.py if available and working.
760
Marc-André Lemburg37aa5802002-02-10 21:42:47 +0000761- encodings package: added aliases for all supported IANA character
762 sets
763
Guido van Rossum606fe4e2001-12-28 20:57:14 +0000764- ftplib: to safeguard the user's privacy, anonymous login will use
765 "anonymous@" as default password, rather than the real user and host
766 name.
767
Fred Drake36736122002-01-10 13:50:31 +0000768- webbrowser: tightened up the command passed to os.system() so that
769 arbitrary shell code can't be executed because a bogus URL was
770 passed in.
771
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +0000772- gettext.translation has an optional fallback argument, and
Martin v. Löwisa55ffae2002-01-11 06:58:49 +0000773 gettext.find an optional all argument. Translations will now fallback
Martin v. Löwisd8996052002-11-21 21:45:32 +0000774 on a per-message basis. The module supports plural forms, by means
775 of gettext.[d]ngettext and Translation.[u]ngettext.
Martin v. Löwis1be64192002-01-11 06:33:28 +0000776
Martin v. Löwis9668b932002-01-12 11:27:42 +0000777- distutils bdist commands now offer a --skip-build option.
778
Walter Dörwaldb25c2b02002-03-21 10:38:40 +0000779- warnings.warn now accepts a Warning instance as first argument.
780
Fred Drakefed7e852002-04-04 19:36:15 +0000781- The xml.sax.expatreader.ExpatParser class will no longer create
782 circular references by using itself as the locator that gets passed
783 to the content handler implementation. [SF bug #535474]
784
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +0000785- The email.Parser.Parser class now properly parses strings regardless
786 of their line endings, which can be any of \r, \n, or \r\n (CR, LF,
787 or CRLF). Also, the Header class's constructor default arguments
788 has changed slightly so that an explicit maxlinelen value is always
Barry Warsaw497e5c42002-12-30 19:27:08 +0000789 honored, and so unicode conversion error handling can be specified.
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +0000790
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +0000791- distutils' build_ext command now links c++ extensions with the c++
792 compiler available in the Makefile or CXX environment variable, if
793 running under *nix.
794
795- New module bz2: provides a comprehensive interface for the bz2 compression
796 library. It implements a complete file interface, one-shot (de)compression
797 functions, and types for sequential (de)compression.
798
Barry Warsaw5d8d6182002-11-05 22:41:33 +0000799- New pdb command `pp' which is like `p' except that it pretty-prints
800 the value of its expression argument.
801
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +0000802- Now bdist_rpm distutils command understands a verify_script option in
803 the config file, including the contents of the referred filename in
804 the "%verifyscript" section of the rpm spec file.
805
Gustavo Niemeyer1456fde2002-11-25 17:25:04 +0000806- Fixed bug #495695: webbrowser module would run graphic browsers in a
807 unix environment even if DISPLAY was not set. Also, support for
808 skipstone browser was included.
809
Gustavo Niemeyerd5ae01a2002-12-16 13:11:57 +0000810- Fixed bug #636769: rexec would run unallowed code if subclasses of
811 strings were used as parameters for certain functions.
812
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000813Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000814-----------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000815
Martin v. Löwis0d1fdea2002-11-22 08:36:54 +0000816- pygettext.py now supports globbing on Windows, and accepts module
817 names in addition to accepting file names.
818
Guido van Rossum923e4ef2002-09-17 20:58:59 +0000819- The SGI demos (Demo/sgi) have been removed. Nobody thought they
820 were interesting any more. (The SGI library modules and extensions
821 are still there; it is believed that at least some of these are
822 still used and useful.)
823
Fred Drake40813b12002-08-05 15:24:19 +0000824- IDLE supports the new encoding declarations (PEP 263); it can also
825 deal with legacy 8-bit files if they use the locale's encoding. It
826 allows non-ASCII strings in the interactive shell and executes them
827 in the locale's encoding.
Martin v. Löwis98ce7b72002-08-05 15:11:26 +0000828
Marc-André Lemburg46260092002-04-04 16:17:11 +0000829- freeze.py now produces binaries which can import shared modules,
830 unlike before when this failed due to missing symbol exports in
831 the generated binary.
832
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000833Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000834-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000835
Martin v. Löwisdc461752002-11-06 21:59:33 +0000836- On Unix, IDLE is now installed automatically.
837
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +0000838- The fpectl module is not built by default; it's dangerous or useless
839 except in the hands of experts.
840
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +0000841- The public Python C API will generally be declared using PyAPI_FUNC
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +0000842 and PyAPI_DATA macros, while Python extension module init functions
843 will be declared with PyMODINIT_FUNC. DL_EXPORT/DL_IMPORT macros
844 are deprecated.
Neal Norwitz1389f3e2002-07-22 13:21:10 +0000845
Tim Petersc6a3ff62002-07-08 22:11:52 +0000846- A bug was fixed that could cause COUNT_ALLOCS builds to segfault, or
847 get into infinite loops, when a new-style class got garbage-collected.
848 Unfortunately, to avoid this, the way COUNT_ALLOCS works requires
849 that new-style classes be immortal in COUNT_ALLOCS builds. Note that
850 COUNT_ALLOCS is not enabled by default, in either release or debug
851 builds, and that new-style classes are immortal only in COUNT_ALLOCS
852 builds.
853
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +0000854- Compiling out the cyclic garbage collector is no longer an option.
855 The old symbol WITH_CYCLE_GC is now ignored, and Python.h arranges
856 that it's always defined (for the benefit of any extension modules
857 that may be conditionalizing on it). A bonus is that any extension
858 type participating in cyclic gc can choose to participate in the
859 Py_TRASHCAN mechanism now too; in the absence of cyclic gc, this used
860 to require editing the core to teach the trashcan mechanism about the
861 new type.
862
Martin v. Löwis0cec0ff2002-07-28 16:33:45 +0000863- According to Annex F of the current C standard,
Tim Peters1de41bf2002-07-03 03:31:20 +0000864
865 The Standard C macro HUGE_VAL and its float and long double analogs,
866 HUGE_VALF and HUGE_VALL, expand to expressions whose values are
867 positive infinities.
868
869 Python only uses the double HUGE_VAL, and only to #define its own symbol
870 Py_HUGE_VAL. Some platforms have incorrect definitions for HUGE_VAL.
871 pyport.h used to try to worm around that, but the workarounds triggered
872 other bugs on other platforms, so we gave up. If your platform defines
873 HUGE_VAL incorrectly, you'll need to #define Py_HUGE_VAL to something
874 that works on your platform. The only instance of this I'm sure about
875 is on an unknown subset of Cray systems, described here:
876
877 http://www.cray.com/swpubs/manuals/SN-2194_2.0/html-SN-2194_2.0/x3138.htm
878
879 Presumably 2.3a1 breaks such systems. If anyone uses such a system, help!
880
Martin v. Löwisa3fb4f72002-06-09 13:33:54 +0000881- The configure option --without-doc-strings can be used to remove the
882 doc strings from the builtin functions and modules; this reduces the
883 size of the executable.
884
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +0000885- The universal newlines option (PEP 278) is on by default. On Unix
886 it can be disabled by passing --without-universal-newlines to the
887 configure script. On other platforms, remove
888 WITH_UNIVERSAL_NEWLINES from pyconfig.h.
Tim Peters639295f2002-04-21 07:30:30 +0000889
Martin v. Löwis1142de32002-03-29 16:28:31 +0000890- On Unix, a shared libpython2.3.so can be created with --enable-shared.
891
Tim Peters8deda702002-03-30 10:06:07 +0000892- All uses of the CACHE_HASH, INTERN_STRINGS, and DONT_SHARE_SHORT_STRINGS
893 preprocessor symbols were eliminated. The internal decisions they
894 controlled stopped being experimental long ago.
Tim Peters1f7df352002-03-29 03:29:08 +0000895
Fred Drake7d28b732002-05-02 21:17:00 +0000896- The tools used to build the documentation now work under Cygwin as
897 well as Unix.
898
Skip Montanaro57454e52002-06-14 20:30:31 +0000899- The bsddb and dbm module builds have been changed to try and avoid version
900 skew problems and disable linkage with Berkeley DB 1.85 unless the
901 installer knows what s/he's doing. See the section on building these
902 modules in the README file for details.
903
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000904C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000905-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000906
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +0000907- PyNumber_Check() now returns true for string and unicode objects.
908 This is a result of these types having a partially defined
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +0000909 tp_as_number slot. (This is not a feature, but an indication that
Walter Dörwalda1a61f92002-11-19 21:20:25 +0000910 PyNumber_Check() is not very useful to determine numeric behavior.
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +0000911 It may be deprecated.)
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +0000912
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +0000913- The string object's layout has changed: the pointer member
914 ob_sinterned has been replaced by an int member ob_sstate. On some
915 platforms (e.g. most 64-bit systems) this may change the offset of
916 the ob_sval member, so as a precaution the API_VERSION has been
917 incremented. The apparently unused feature of "indirect interned
918 strings", supported by the ob_sinterned member, is gone. Interned
919 strings are now usually mortal; theres a new API,
920 PyString_InternImmortal() that creates immortal interned strings.
921 (The ob_sstate member can only take three values; however, while
922 making it a char saves a few bytes per string object on average, in
923 it also slowed things down a bit because ob_sval was no longer
924 aligned.)
925
Guido van Rossumfdb86482002-08-14 21:20:32 +0000926- The Py_InitModule*() functions now accept NULL for the 'methods'
927 argument. Modules without global functions are becoming more common
928 now that factories can be types rather than functions.
929
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +0000930- New C API PyUnicode_FromOrdinal() which exposes unichr() at C
931 level.
932
Thomas Heller085358a2002-07-29 14:27:41 +0000933- New functions PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErr() and
934 PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErrWithFilename(). Similar to
935 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErrWithFilename() and
936 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErr(), but they allow to specify
937 the exception type to raise. Available on Windows.
938
Tim Peters7c321a82002-07-09 02:57:01 +0000939- Py_FatalError() is now declared as taking a const char* argument. It
940 was previously declared without const. This should not affect working
941 code.
942
Martin v. Löwis01f94bd2002-05-08 08:44:21 +0000943- Added new macro PySequence_ITEM(o, i) that directly calls
944 sq_item without rechecking that o is a sequence and without
945 adjusting for negative indices.
946
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +0000947- PyRange_New() now raises ValueError if the fourth argument is not 1.
948 This is part of the removal of deprecated features of the xrange
949 object.
950
Guido van Rossum517c7d42002-04-26 02:49:14 +0000951- PyNumber_Coerce() and PyNumber_CoerceEx() now also invoke the type's
952 coercion if both arguments have the same type but this type has the
953 CHECKTYPES flag set. This is to better support proxies.
954
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +0000955- The type of tp_free has been changed from "``void (*)(PyObject *)``" to
956 "``void (*)(void *)``".
Neil Schemenauer9344b142002-04-12 23:00:08 +0000957
958- PyObject_Del, PyObject_GC_Del are now functions instead of macros.
959
Guido van Rossum0986d822002-04-08 01:38:42 +0000960- A type can now inherit its metatype from its base type. Previously,
961 when PyType_Ready() was called, if ob_type was found to be NULL, it
962 was always set to &PyType_Type; now it is set to base->ob_type,
963 where base is tp_base, defaulting to &PyObject_Type.
964
965- PyType_Ready() accidentally did not inherit tp_is_gc; now it does.
966
Neil Schemenauerc9abc1d2002-05-08 14:14:41 +0000967- The PyCore_* family of APIs have been removed.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +0000968
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +0000969- The "u#" parser marker will now pass through Unicode objects as-is
Marc-André Lemburg3e3eacb2002-01-09 16:21:27 +0000970 without going through the buffer API.
971
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000972- The enumerators of cmp_op have been renamed to use the prefix ``PyCmp_``.
Martin v. Löwis7198a522002-01-01 19:59:11 +0000973
Tim Peters10a3bb52001-12-25 19:07:38 +0000974- An old #define of ANY as void has been removed from pyport.h. This
975 hasn't been used since Python's pre-ANSI days, and the #define has
976 been marked as obsolete since then. SF bug 495548 says it created
977 conflicts with other packages, so keeping it around wasn't harmless.
978
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000979- Because Python's magic number scheme broke on January 1st, we decided
980 to stop Python development. Thanks for all the fish!
981
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +0000982- Some of us don't like fish, so we changed Python's magic number
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +0000983 scheme to a new one. See Python/import.c for details.
984
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000985New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000986-------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000987
Martin v. Löwis79acb9e2002-12-06 12:48:53 +0000988- OpenVMS is now supported.
989
Martin v. Löwisf90ae202002-06-11 06:22:31 +0000990- AtheOS is now supported.
991
Andrew MacIntyre161ad0e2002-08-04 07:25:58 +0000992- the EMX runtime environment on OS/2 is now supported.
993
Martin v. Löwisa6e97582002-01-01 18:41:33 +0000994- GNU/Hurd is now supported.
995
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000996Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000997-----
998
Fred Drake4dd0f7e2002-11-26 21:44:56 +0000999- The regrtest.py script's -u option now provides a way to say "allow
1000 all resources except this one." For example, to allow everything
1001 except bsddb, give the option '-uall,-bsddb'.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001002
1003Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001004-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001005
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00001006- The Windows distribution now ships with version 4.0.14 of the
1007 Sleepycat Berkeley database library. This should be a huge
1008 improvement over the previous Berkeley DB 1.85, which had many
1009 bugs.
1010 XXX What are the licensing issues here?
Tim Peters84c7a3f2002-11-23 18:48:06 +00001011 XXX If a user has a database created with a previous verion of
1012 XXX Python, what must they do to convert it?
1013 XXX I'm still not sure how to link this thing (see PCbuild/readme.txt).
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00001014 XXX The version # is likely to change before 2.3a1.
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00001015
1016- The Windows distribution now ships with a Secure Sockets Library (SLL)
Mark Hammondc3de0082002-12-03 06:16:08 +00001017 module (_ssl.pyd)
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00001018
Tim Peters857fb4c2002-11-14 23:31:58 +00001019- The Windows distribution now ships with Tcl/Tk version 8.4.1 (it
1020 previously shipped with Tcl/Tk 8.3.2).
1021
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00001022- When Python is built under a Microsoft compiler, sys.version now
1023 includes the compiler version number (_MSC_VER). For example, under
1024 MSVC 6, sys.version constains the substring "MSC v.1200 ". 1200 is
1025 the value of _MSC_VER under MSVC 6.
1026
Tim Peters08e72952002-04-16 20:48:01 +00001027- Sometimes the uninstall executable (UNWISE.EXE) vanishes. One cause
1028 of that has been fixed in the installer (disabled Wise's "delete in-
1029 use files" uninstall option).
1030
Guido van Rossum181e41a2002-04-06 00:23:25 +00001031- Fixed a bug in urllib's proxy handling in Windows. [SF bug #503031]
1032
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00001033- The installer now installs Start menu shortcuts under (the local
1034 equivalent of) "All Users" when doing an Admin install.
1035
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00001036- file.truncate([newsize]) now works on Windows for all newsize values.
1037 It used to fail if newsize didn't fit in 32 bits, reflecting a
1038 limitation of MS _chsize (which is no longer used).
1039
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00001040- os.waitpid() is now implemented for Windows, and can be used to block
1041 until a specified process exits. This is similar to, but not exactly
1042 the same as, os.waitpid() on POSIX systems. If you're waiting for
1043 a specific process whose pid was obtained from one of the spawn()
1044 functions, the same Python os.waitpid() code works across platforms.
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00001045 See the docs for details. The docs were changed to clarify that
1046 spawn functions return, and waitpid requires, a process handle on
1047 Windows (not the same thing as a Windows process id).
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00001048
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00001049- New tempfile.TemporaryFile implementation for Windows: this doesn't
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00001050 need a TemporaryFileWrapper wrapper anymore, and should be immune
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00001051 to a nasty problem: before 2.3, if you got a temp file on Windows, it
1052 got wrapped in an object whose close() method first closed the
1053 underlying file, then deleted the file. This usually worked fine.
1054 However, the spawn family of functions on Windows create (at a low C
1055 level) the same set of open files in the spawned process Q as were
1056 open in the spawning process P. If a temp file f was among them, then
1057 doing f.close() in P first closed P's C-level file handle on f, but Q's
1058 C-level file handle on f remained open, so the attempt in P to delete f
1059 blew up with a "Permission denied" error (Windows doesn't allow
1060 deleting open files). This was surprising, subtle, and difficult to
1061 work around.
1062
1063- The os module now exports all the symbolic constants usable with the
1064 low-level os.open() on Windows: the new constants in 2.3 are
1065 O_NOINHERIT, O_SHORT_LIVED, O_TEMPORARY, O_RANDOM and O_SEQUENTIAL.
1066 The others were also available in 2.2: O_APPEND, O_BINARY, O_CREAT,
1067 O_EXCL, O_RDONLY, O_RDWR, O_TEXT, O_TRUNC and O_WRONLY. Contrary
1068 to Microsoft docs, O_SHORT_LIVED does not seem to imply O_TEMPORARY
1069 (so specify both if you want both; note that neither is useful unless
1070 specified with O_CREAT too).
1071
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001072Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001073----
1074
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001075- Mac/Relnotes is gone, the release notes are now here.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001076
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001077- The current naming convention for Python on the Macintosh is that MacPython
1078 refers to the unix-based OSX-only version, and MacPython-OS9 refers to the
1079 CFM-based version that runs on both OS9 and OSX.
1080
1081- All MacPython-OS9 functionality is now available in an OSX unix build,
1082 including the Carbon modules, the IDE, OSA support, etc. A lot of this
1083 will only work correctly in a framework build, though, because you cannot
1084 talk to the window manager unless your application is run from a .app
1085 bundle. There is a command line tool "pythonw" that runs your script
1086 with an interpreter living in such a .app bundle, this interpreter should
1087 be used to run any Python script using the window manager (including
1088 Tkinter or wxPython scripts).
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00001089
Jack Jansen8bb80db2002-12-30 22:42:43 +00001090- Most of Mac/Lib has moved to Lib/plat-mac, which is again used both in
1091 MacPython-OSX and MacPython-OS9. The only modules remaining in Mac/Lib
1092 are specifically for MacPython-OS9 (CFM support, preference resources, etc).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001093
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001094- A new utility PythonLauncher will start a Python interpreter when a .py or
1095 .pyw script is double-clicked in the Finder. By default .py scripts are
1096 run with a normal Python interpreter in a Terminal window and .pyw
1097 files are run with a window-aware pythonw interpreter without a Terminal
1098 window, but all this can be customized.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001099
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001100- MacPython-OS9 is now Carbon-only, so it runs on Mac OS 9 or Mac OS X and
1101 possibly on Mac OS 8.6 with the right CarbonLib installed, but not on earlier
1102 releases.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001103
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001104- Many tools such as BuildApplet.py and gensuitemodule.py now support a command
1105 line interface too.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001106
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001107- All the Carbon classes are now PEP253 compliant, meaning that you can
1108 subclass them from Python. Most of the attributes have gone, you should
1109 now use the accessor function call API, which is also what Apple's
1110 documentation uses. Some attributes such as grafport.visRgn are still
1111 available for convenience.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001112
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001113- New Carbon modules File (implementing the APIs in Files.h and Aliases.h)
1114 and Folder (APIs from Folders.h). The old macfs builtin module is
1115 gone, and replaced by a Python wrapper around the new modules.
1116
1117- Pathname handling should now be fully consistent: MacPython-OSX always uses
1118 unix pathnames and MacPython-OS9 always uses colon-separated Mac pathnames
1119 (also when running on Mac OS X).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001120
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001121- New Carbon modules Help and AH give access to the Carbon Help Manager.
1122 There are hooks in the IDE to allow accessing the Python documentation
1123 (and Apple's Carbon and Cocoa documentation) through the Help Viewer.
1124 See Mac/OSX/README for converting the Python documentation to a
1125 Help Viewer comaptible form and installing it.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001126
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001127- OSA support has been redesigned and the generated Python classes now
1128 mirror the inheritance defined by the underlying OSA classes.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001129
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001130- MacPython no longer maps both \r and \n to \n on input for any text file.
1131 This feature has been replaced by universal newline support (PEP278).
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001132
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001133What's New in Python 2.2 final?
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001134===============================
1135
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001136*Release date: 21-Dec-2001*
1137
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001138Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001139--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001140
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00001141- pickle.py, cPickle: allow pickling instances of new-style classes
1142 with a custom metaclass.
1143
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001144Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001145-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001146
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00001147- weakref proxy object: when comparing, unwrap both arguments if both
1148 are proxies.
1149
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001150Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001151-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001152
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00001153- binascii.b2a_base64(): fix a potential buffer overrun when encoding
1154 very short strings.
1155
1156- cPickle: the obscure "fast" mode was suspected of causing stack
1157 overflows on the Mac. Hopefully fixed this by setting the recursion
1158 limit much smaller. If the limit is too low (it only affects
1159 performance), you can change it by defining PY_CPICKLE_FAST_LIMIT
1160 when compiling cPickle.c (or in pyconfig.h).
1161
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001162Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001163-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001164
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00001165- dumbdbm.py: fixed a dumb old bug (the file didn't get synched at
1166 close or delete time).
1167
1168- rfc822.py: fixed a bug where the address '<>' was converted to None
1169 instead of an empty string (also fixes the email.Utils module).
1170
1171- xmlrpclib.py: version 1.0.0; uses precision for doubles.
1172
1173- test suite: the pickle and cPickle tests were not executing any code
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00001174 when run from the standard regression test.
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00001175
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001176Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001177-----------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001178
1179Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001180-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001181
1182C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001183-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001184
1185New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001186-------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001187
1188Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001189-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001190
1191Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001192-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001193
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00001194- distutils package: fixed broken Windows installers (bdist_wininst).
1195
1196- tempfile.py: prevent mysterious warnings when TemporaryFileWrapper
1197 instances are deleted at process exit time.
1198
1199- socket.py: prevent mysterious warnings when socket instances are
1200 deleted at process exit time.
1201
1202- posixmodule.c: fix a Windows crash with stat() of a filename ending
1203 in backslash.
1204
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001205Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001206----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001207
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00001208- The Carbon toolbox modules have been upgraded to Universal Headers
1209 3.4, and experimental CoreGraphics and CarbonEvents modules have
1210 been added. All only for framework-enabled MacOSX.
1211
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001212
Tim Peters6272dfd2001-12-13 19:34:00 +00001213What's New in Python 2.2c1?
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001214===========================
1215
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001216*Release date: 14-Dec-2001*
1217
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001218Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001219--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001220
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00001221- Guido's tutorial introduction to the new type/class features has
1222 been extensively updated. See
1223
1224 http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html
1225
1226 That remains the primary documentation in this area.
1227
Guido van Rossum33bab012001-12-05 22:45:48 +00001228- Fixed a leak: instance variables declared with __slots__ were never
1229 deleted!
1230
Guido van Rossum4b800852001-12-03 00:54:52 +00001231- The "delete attribute" method of descriptor objects is called
1232 __delete__, not __del__. In previous releases, it was mistakenly
1233 called __del__, which created an unfortunate overloading condition
1234 with finalizers. (The "get attribute" and "set attribute" methods
1235 are still called __get__ and __set__, respectively.)
1236
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00001237- Some subtle issues with the super built-in were fixed:
1238
1239 (a) When super itself is subclassed, its __get__ method would still
1240 return an instance of the base class (i.e., of super).
1241
1242 (b) super(C, C()).__class__ would return C rather than super. This
1243 is confusing. To fix this, I decided to change the semantics of
1244 super so that it only applies to code attributes, not to data
1245 attributes. After all, overriding data attributes is not
1246 supported anyway.
1247
1248 (c) The __get__ method didn't check whether the argument was an
1249 instance of the type used in creation of the super instance.
1250
Guido van Rossumcd7b7d62001-12-04 21:02:07 +00001251- Previously, hash() of an instance of a subclass of a mutable type
1252 (list or dictionary) would return some value, rather than raising
1253 TypeError. This has been fixed. Also, directly calling
1254 dict.__hash__ and list.__hash__ now raises the same TypeError
1255 (previously, these were the same as object.__hash__).
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00001256
Guido van Rossumd331cb52001-12-05 19:46:42 +00001257- New-style objects now support deleting their __dict__. This is for
1258 all intents and purposes equivalent to assigning a brand new empty
1259 dictionary, but saves space if the object is not used further.
1260
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001261Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001262-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001263
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00001264- -Qnew now works as documented in PEP 238: when -Qnew is passed on
1265 the command line, all occurrences of "/" use true division instead
1266 of classic division. See the PEP for details. Note that "all"
1267 means all instances in library and 3rd-party modules, as well as in
1268 your own code. As the PEP says, -Qnew is intended for use only in
1269 educational environments with control over the libraries in use.
Tim Petersbf72fe22001-12-11 21:43:14 +00001270 Note that test_coercion.py in the standard Python test suite fails
1271 under -Qnew; this is expected, and won't be repaired until true
1272 division becomes the default (in the meantime, test_coercion is
1273 testing the current rules).
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00001274
Fred Drake6c01e252001-12-14 17:08:12 +00001275- complex() now only allows the first argument to be a string
1276 argument, and raises TypeError if either the second arg is a string
1277 or if the second arg is specified when the first is a string.
1278
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001279Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001280-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001281
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00001282- gc.get_referents was renamed to gc.get_referrers.
1283
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001284Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001285-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001286
Tim Peters25059d32001-12-07 20:35:43 +00001287- Functions in the os.spawn() family now release the global interpreter
1288 lock around calling the platform spawn. They should always have done
1289 this, but did not before 2.2c1. Multithreaded programs calling
1290 an os.spawn function with P_WAIT will no longer block all Python threads
1291 until the spawned program completes. It's possible that some programs
1292 relies on blocking, although more likely by accident than by design.
1293
Martin v. Löwis3a89b2b2001-11-25 14:35:58 +00001294- webbrowser defaults to netscape.exe on OS/2 now.
1295
Martin v. Löwis652e1912001-11-25 14:50:56 +00001296- Tix.ResizeHandle exposes detach_widget, hide, and show.
1297
Martin v. Löwis714d2e22001-12-02 12:26:03 +00001298- The charset alias windows_1252 has been added.
1299
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00001300- types.StringTypes is a tuple containing the defined string types;
1301 usually this will be (str, unicode), but if Python was compiled
1302 without Unicode support it will be just (str,).
1303
1304- The pulldom and minidom modules were synchronized to PyXML.
1305
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001306Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001307-----------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001308
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00001309- A new script called Tools/scripts/google.py was added, which fires
1310 off a search on Google.
1311
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001312Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001313-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001314
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00001315- Note that release builds of Python should arrange to define the
1316 preprocessor symbol NDEBUG on the command line (or equivalent).
1317 In the 2.2 pre-release series we tried to define this by magic in
1318 Python.h instead, but it proved to cause problems for extension
1319 authors. The Unix, Windows and Mac builds now all define NDEBUG in
1320 release builds via cmdline (or equivalent) instead. Ports to
1321 other platforms should do likewise.
1322
Jack Jansen1999ef42001-12-06 21:47:20 +00001323- It is no longer necessary to use --with-suffix when building on a
1324 case-insensitive file system (such as Mac OS X HFS+). In the build
1325 directory an extension is used, but not in the installed python.
1326
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001327C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001328-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001329
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00001330- New function PyDict_MergeFromSeq2() exposes the builtin dict
1331 constructor's logic for updating a dictionary from an iterable object
1332 producing key-value pairs.
1333
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00001334- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() requires that the number of entries in
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00001335 the keyword list equal the number of argument specifiers. This
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00001336 wasn't checked correctly, and PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords could even
1337 dump core in some bad cases. This has been repaired. As a result,
1338 PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords may raise RuntimeError in bad cases that
1339 previously went unchallenged.
1340
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001341New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001342-------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001343
1344Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001345-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001346
1347Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001348-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001349
1350Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001351----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001352
Jack Jansenffa260f2001-12-06 21:14:00 +00001353- In unix-Python on Mac OS X (and darwin) sys.platform is now "darwin",
1354 without any trailing digits.
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001355
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00001356- Changed logic for finding python home in Mac OS X framework Pythons.
1357 Now sys.executable points to the executable again, in stead of to
1358 the shared library. The latter is used only for locating the python
1359 home.
1360
1361
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001362What's New in Python 2.2b2?
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001363===========================
1364
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001365*Release date: 16-Nov-2001*
1366
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001367Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001368--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001369
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00001370- Multiple inheritance mixing new-style and classic classes in the
1371 list of base classes is now allowed, so this works now:
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00001372
1373 class Classic: pass
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00001374 class Mixed(Classic, object): pass
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00001375
1376 The MRO (method resolution order) for each base class is respected
1377 according to its kind, but the MRO for the derived class is computed
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00001378 using new-style MRO rules if any base class is a new-style class.
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00001379 This needs to be documented.
1380
Tim Petersa427a2b2001-10-29 22:25:45 +00001381- The new builtin dictionary() constructor, and dictionary type, have
1382 been renamed to dict. This reflects a decade of common usage.
1383
Guido van Rossum3fc08d22001-11-15 20:33:10 +00001384- dict() now accepts an iterable object producing 2-sequences. For
1385 example, dict(d.items()) == d for any dictionary d. The argument,
1386 and the elements of the argument, can be any iterable objects.
1387
Guido van Rossum7ad2d1e2001-10-29 22:11:00 +00001388- New-style classes can now have a __del__ method, which is called
1389 when the instance is deleted (just like for classic classes).
1390
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00001391- Assignment to object.__dict__ is now possible, for objects that are
1392 instances of new-style classes that have a __dict__ (unless the base
1393 class forbids it).
1394
Guido van Rossumc8e56452001-10-22 00:43:43 +00001395- Methods of built-in types now properly check for keyword arguments
1396 (formerly these were silently ignored). The only built-in methods
1397 that take keyword arguments are __call__, __init__ and __new__.
1398
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00001399- The socket function has been converted to a type; see below.
1400
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001401Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001402-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001403
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00001404- Assignment to __debug__ raises SyntaxError at compile-time. This
1405 was promised when 2.1c1 was released as "What's New in Python 2.1c1"
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00001406 (see below) says.
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00001407
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00001408- Clarified the error messages for unsupported operands to an operator
1409 (like 1 + '').
1410
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001411Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001412-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001413
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00001414- mmap has a new keyword argument, "access", allowing a uniform way for
1415 both Windows and Unix users to create read-only, write-through and
1416 copy-on-write memory mappings. This was previously possible only on
1417 Unix. A new keyword argument was required to support this in a
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00001418 uniform way because the mmap() signatures had diverged across
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00001419 platforms. Thanks to Jay T Miller for repairing this!
1420
Tim Peters169ded02001-11-03 19:57:21 +00001421- By default, the gc.garbage list now contains only those instances in
1422 unreachable cycles that have __del__ methods; in 2.1 it contained all
1423 instances in unreachable cycles. "Instances" here has been generalized
1424 to include instances of both new-style and old-style classes.
1425
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00001426- The socket module defines a new method for socket objects,
1427 sendall(). This is like send() but may make multiple calls to
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00001428 send() until all data has been sent. Also, the socket function has
1429 been converted to a subclassable type, like list and tuple (etc.)
1430 before it; socket and SocketType are now the same thing.
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00001431
1432- Various bugfixes to the curses module. There is now a test suite
1433 for the curses module (you have to run it manually).
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00001434
Guido van Rossum692adf12001-10-30 03:03:03 +00001435- binascii.b2a_base64 no longer places an arbitrary restriction of 57
1436 bytes on its input.
1437
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001438Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001439-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001440
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00001441- tkFileDialog exposes a Directory class and askdirectory
Martin v. Löwis25ee87c2001-11-07 22:38:08 +00001442 convenience function.
1443
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00001444- Symbolic group names in regular expressions must be unique. For
1445 example, the regexp r'(?P<abc>)(?P<abc>)' is not allowed, because a
1446 single name can't mean both "group 1" and "group 2" simultaneously.
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00001447 Python 2.2 detects this error at regexp compilation time;
1448 previously, the error went undetected, and results were
1449 unpredictable. Also in sre, the pattern.split(), pattern.sub(), and
1450 pattern.subn() methods have been rewritten in C. Also, an
1451 experimental function/method finditer() has been added, which works
1452 like findall() but returns an iterator.
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00001453
Martin v. Löwisb7b32602001-11-02 23:48:20 +00001454- Tix exposes more commands through the classes DirSelectBox,
1455 DirSelectDialog, ListNoteBook, Meter, CheckList, and the
1456 methods tix_addbitmapdir, tix_cget, tix_configure, tix_filedialog,
1457 tix_getbitmap, tix_getimage, tix_option_get, and tix_resetoptions.
1458
Tim Peters98791af2001-10-23 01:59:54 +00001459- Traceback objects are now scanned by cyclic garbage collection, so
1460 cycles created by casual use of sys.exc_info() no longer cause
1461 permanent memory leaks (provided garbage collection is enabled).
1462
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00001463- os.extsep -- a new variable needed by the RISCOS support. It is the
1464 separator used by extensions, and is '.' on all platforms except
1465 RISCOS, where it is '/'. There is no need to use this variable
1466 unless you have a masochistic desire to port your code to RISCOS.
1467
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00001468- mimetypes.py has optional support for non-standard, but commonly
1469 found types. guess_type() and guess_extension() now accept an
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001470 optional 'strict' flag, defaulting to true, which controls whether
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00001471 recognize non-standard types or not. A few non-standard types we
1472 know about have been added. Also, when run as a script, there are
1473 new -l and -e options.
1474
1475- statcache is now deprecated.
1476
1477- email.Utils.formatdate() now produces the preferred RFC 2822 style
1478 dates with numeric timezones (it used to produce obsolete dates
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001479 hard coded to "GMT" timezone). An optional 'localtime' flag is
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00001480 added to produce dates in the local timezone, with daylight savings
1481 time properly taken into account.
1482
1483- In pickle and cPickle, instead of masking errors in load() by
1484 transforming them into SystemError, we let the original exception
1485 propagate out. Also, implement support for __safe_for_unpickling__
1486 in pickle, as it already was supported in cPickle.
1487
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001488Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001489-----------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001490
1491Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001492-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001493
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00001494- The dbm module is built using libdb1 if available. The bsddb module
1495 is built with libdb3 if available.
1496
1497- Misc/Makefile.pre.in has been removed by BDFL pronouncement.
1498
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001499C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001500-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001501
Tim Peters1fc240e2001-10-26 05:06:50 +00001502- New function PySequence_Fast_GET_SIZE() returns the size of a non-
1503 NULL result from PySequence_Fast(), more quickly than calling
1504 PySequence_Size().
1505
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00001506- New argument unpacking function PyArg_UnpackTuple() added.
1507
1508- New functions PyObject_CallFunctionObjArgs() and
1509 PyObject_CallMethodObjArgs() have been added to make it more
1510 convenient and efficient to call functions and methods from C.
1511
1512- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() no longer masks errors, so it's
1513 possible that this will propagate errors it didn't before.
1514
1515- New function PyObject_CheckReadBuffer(), which returns true if its
1516 argument supports the single-segment readable buffer interface.
1517
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001518New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001519-------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001520
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00001521- We've finally confirmed that this release builds on HP-UX 11.00,
1522 *with* threads, and passes the test suite.
1523
Tim Peters7a33d8b2001-11-05 02:51:07 +00001524- Thanks to a series of patches from Michael Muller, Python may build
1525 again under OS/2 Visual Age C++.
1526
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00001527- Updated RISCOS port by Dietmar Schwertberger.
1528
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001529Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001530-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001531
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00001532- Added a test script for the curses module. It isn't run automatically;
1533 regrtest.py must be run with '-u curses' to enable it.
1534
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001535Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001536-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001537
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00001538Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001539----
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00001540
1541- PythonScript has been moved to unsupported and is slated to be
1542 removed completely in the next release.
1543
1544- It should now be possible to build applets that work on both OS9 and
1545 OSX.
1546
1547- The core is now linked with CoreServices not Carbon; as a side
1548 result, default 8bit encoding on OSX is now ASCII.
1549
1550- Python should now build on OSX 10.1.1
1551
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001552
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00001553What's New in Python 2.2b1?
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00001554===========================
1555
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001556*Release date: 19-Oct-2001*
1557
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00001558Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001559--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00001560
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00001561- New-style classes are now always dynamic (except for built-in and
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00001562 extension types). There is no longer a performance penalty, and I
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00001563 no longer see another reason to keep this baggage around. One relic
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00001564 remains: the __dict__ of a new-style class is a read-only proxy; you
1565 must set the class's attribute to modify it. As a consequence, the
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00001566 __defined__ attribute of new-style types no longer exists, for lack
1567 of need: there is once again only one __dict__ (although in the
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00001568 future a __cache__ may be resurrected with a similar function, if I
1569 can prove that it actually speeds things up).
Guido van Rossum50fda3b2001-10-04 19:46:06 +00001570
Tim Peters1c9ca872001-10-04 06:43:12 +00001571- C.__doc__ now works as expected for new-style classes (in 2.2a4 it
1572 always returned None, even when there was a class docstring).
1573
1574- doctest now finds and runs docstrings attached to new-style classes,
1575 class methods, static methods, and properties.
1576
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00001577Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001578-----------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00001579
Guido van Rossuma8bcf802001-10-15 15:53:58 +00001580- A very subtle syntactical pitfall in list comprehensions was fixed.
1581 For example: [a+b for a in 'abc', for b in 'def']. The comma in
1582 this example is a mistake. Previously, this would silently let 'a'
1583 iterate over the singleton tuple ('abc',), yielding ['abcd', 'abce',
1584 'abcf'] rather than the intended ['ad', 'ae', 'af', 'bd', 'be',
1585 'bf', 'cd', 'ce', 'cf']. Now, this is flagged as a syntax error.
1586 Note that [a for a in <singleton>] is a convoluted way to say
1587 [<singleton>] anyway, so it's not like any expressiveness is lost.
1588
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00001589- getattr(obj, name, default) now only catches AttributeError, as
1590 documented, rather than returning the default value for all
1591 exceptions (which could mask bugs in a __getattr__ hook, for
1592 example).
1593
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00001594- Weak reference objects are now part of the core and offer a C API.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00001595 A bug which could allow a core dump when binary operations involved
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00001596 proxy reference has been fixed. weakref.ReferenceError is now a
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00001597 built-in exception.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00001598
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00001599- unicode(obj) now behaves more like str(obj), accepting arbitrary
1600 objects, and calling a __unicode__ method if it exists.
1601 unicode(obj, encoding) and unicode(obj, encoding, errors) still
Marc-André Lemburgb5507ec2001-10-19 12:02:29 +00001602 require an 8-bit string or character buffer argument.
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00001603
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00001604- isinstance() now allows any object as the first argument and a
1605 class, a type or something with a __bases__ tuple attribute for the
1606 second argument. The second argument may also be a tuple of a
1607 class, type, or something with __bases__, in which case isinstance()
1608 will return true if the first argument is an instance of any of the
1609 things contained in the second argument tuple. E.g.
1610
1611 isinstance(x, (A, B))
1612
1613 returns true if x is an instance of A or B.
1614
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00001615Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001616-----------------
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00001617
1618- thread.start_new_thread() now returns the thread ID (previously None).
1619
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00001620- binascii has now two quopri support functions, a2b_qp and b2a_qp.
1621
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00001622- readline now supports setting the startup_hook and the
1623 pre_event_hook, and adds the add_history() function.
Martin v. Löwis0daad592001-09-30 21:09:59 +00001624
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00001625- os and posix supports chroot(), setgroups() and unsetenv() where
1626 available. The stat(), fstat(), statvfs() and fstatvfs() functions
1627 now return "pseudo-sequences" -- the various fields can now be
1628 accessed as attributes (e.g. os.stat("/").st_mtime) but for
1629 backwards compatibility they also behave as a fixed-length sequence.
1630 Some platform-specific fields (e.g. st_rdev) are only accessible as
Guido van Rossum98bf58f2001-10-18 20:34:25 +00001631 attributes.
1632
1633- time: localtime(), gmtime() and strptime() now return a
1634 pseudo-sequence similar to the os.stat() return value, with
1635 attributes like tm_year etc.
Martin v. Löwis16628c92001-10-04 22:46:41 +00001636
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00001637- Decompression objects in the zlib module now accept an optional
1638 second parameter to decompress() that specifies the maximum amount
1639 of memory to use for the uncompressed data.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00001640
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00001641- optional SSL support in the socket module now exports OpenSSL
1642 functions RAND_add(), RAND_egd(), and RAND_status(). These calls
1643 are useful on platforms like Solaris where OpenSSL does not
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00001644 automatically seed its PRNG. Also, the keyfile and certfile
1645 arguments to socket.ssl() are now optional.
1646
1647- posixmodule (and by extension, the os module on POSIX platforms) now
1648 exports O_LARGEFILE, O_DIRECT, O_DIRECTORY, and O_NOFOLLOW.
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00001649
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00001650Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001651-------
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00001652
Tim Peters7402f792001-10-02 03:53:41 +00001653- doctest now excludes functions and classes not defined by the module
1654 being tested, thanks to Tim Hochberg.
1655
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00001656- HotShot, a new profiler implemented using a C-based callback, has
1657 been added. This substantially reduces the overhead of profiling,
1658 but it is still quite preliminary. Support modules and
1659 documentation will be added in upcoming releases (before 2.2 final).
1660
Guido van Rossumc4b09b42001-10-04 10:19:00 +00001661- profile now produces correct output in situations where an exception
1662 raised in Python is cleared by C code (e.g. hasattr()). This used
1663 to cause wrong output, including spurious claims of recursive
1664 functions and attribution of time spent to the wrong function.
1665
Tim Peters0a1fc4e2001-10-07 03:12:08 +00001666 The code and documentation for the derived OldProfile and HotProfile
1667 profiling classes was removed. The code hasn't worked for years (if
1668 you tried to use them, they raised exceptions). OldProfile
1669 intended to reproduce the behavior of the profiler Python used more
1670 than 7 years ago, and isn't interesting anymore. HotProfile intended
1671 to provide a faster profiler (but producing less information), and
1672 that's a worthy goal we intend to meet via a different approach (but
1673 without losing information).
1674
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00001675- Profile.calibrate() has a new implementation that should deliver
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00001676 a much better system-specific calibration constant. The constant can
1677 now be specified in an instance constructor, or as a Profile class or
1678 instance variable, instead of by editing profile.py's source code.
1679 Calibration must still be done manually (see the docs for the profile
1680 module).
1681
1682 Note that Profile.calibrate() must be overriden by subclasses.
1683 Improving the accuracy required exploiting detailed knowledge of
1684 profiler internals; the earlier method abstracted away the details
1685 and measured a simplified model instead, but consequently computed
1686 a constant too small by a factor of 2 on some modern machines.
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00001687
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00001688- quopri's encode and decode methods take an optional header parameter,
Jeremy Hylton6f543b62001-10-16 20:42:52 +00001689 which indicates whether output is intended for the header 'Q'
1690 encoding.
1691
Guido van Rossuma5343cc2001-10-18 18:02:07 +00001692- The SocketServer.ThreadingMixIn class now closes the request after
1693 finish_request() returns. (Not when it errors out though.)
1694
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001695- The nntplib module's NNTP.body() method has grown a 'file' argument
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00001696 to allow saving the message body to a file.
1697
1698- The email package has added a class email.Parser.HeaderParser which
1699 only parses headers and does not recurse into the message's body.
1700 Also, the module/class MIMEAudio has been added for representing
1701 audio data (contributed by Anthony Baxter).
1702
1703- ftplib should be able to handle files > 2GB.
1704
1705- ConfigParser.getboolean() now also interprets TRUE, FALSE, YES, NO,
1706 ON, and OFF.
1707
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00001708- xml.dom.minidom NodeList objects now support the length attribute
1709 and item() method as required by the DOM specifications.
1710
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00001711Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001712-----------
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00001713
1714- Demo/dns was removed. It no longer serves any purpose; a package
1715 derived from it is now maintained by Anthony Baxter, see
1716 http://PyDNS.SourceForge.net.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00001717
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00001718- The freeze tool has been made more robust, and two new options have
1719 been added: -X and -E.
1720
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00001721Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001722-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00001723
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00001724- configure will use CXX in LINKCC if CXX is used to build main() and
1725 the system requires to link a C++ main using the C++ compiler.
1726
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00001727C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001728-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00001729
Guido van Rossum6c4bce32001-10-18 19:20:25 +00001730- The documentation for the tp_compare slot is updated to require that
1731 the return value must be -1, 0, 1; an arbitrary number <0 or >0 is
1732 not correct. This is not yet enforced but will be enforced in
1733 Python 2.3; even later, we may use -2 to indicate errors and +2 for
1734 "NotImplemented". Right now, -1 should be used for an error return.
1735
Tim Petersd38b1c72001-09-30 05:09:37 +00001736- PyLong_AsLongLong() now accepts int (as well as long) arguments.
1737 Consequently, PyArg_ParseTuple's 'L' code also accepts int (as well
1738 as long) arguments.
1739
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00001740- PyThread_start_new_thread() now returns a long int giving the thread
1741 ID, if one can be calculated; it returns -1 for error, 0 if no
1742 thread ID is calculated (this is an incompatible change, but only
1743 the thread module used this API). This code has only really been
1744 tested on Linux and Windows; other platforms please beware (and
1745 report any bugs or strange behavior).
1746
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00001747- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() no longer accepts Unicode objects as
1748 input.
1749
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00001750New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001751-------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00001752
1753Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001754-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00001755
1756Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001757-------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00001758
Tim Peters04cf1d32001-10-09 22:39:40 +00001759- Installer: If you install IDLE, and don't disable file-extension
1760 registration, a new "Edit with IDLE" context (right-click) menu entry
1761 is created for .py and .pyw files.
1762
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00001763- The signal module now supports SIGBREAK on Windows, thanks to Steven
1764 Scott. Note that SIGBREAK is unique to Windows. The default SIGBREAK
1765 action remains to call Win32 ExitProcess(). This can be changed via
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00001766 signal.signal(). For example::
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00001767
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001768 # Make Ctrl+Break raise KeyboardInterrupt, like Python's default Ctrl+C
1769 # (SIGINT) behavior.
1770 import signal
1771 signal.signal(signal.SIGBREAK, signal.default_int_handler)
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00001772
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001773 try:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001774 while 1:
1775 pass
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001776 except KeyboardInterrupt:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001777 # We get here on Ctrl+C or Ctrl+Break now; if we had not changed
1778 # SIGBREAK, only on Ctrl+C (and Ctrl+Break would terminate the
1779 # program without the possibility for any Python-level cleanup).
1780 print "Clean exit"
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00001781
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00001782
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00001783What's New in Python 2.2a4?
1784===========================
1785
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001786*Release date: 28-Sep-2001*
1787
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00001788Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001789--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00001790
1791- pydoc and inspect are now aware of new-style classes;
1792 e.g. help(list) at the interactive prompt now shows proper
1793 documentation for all operations on list objects.
1794
1795- Applications using Jim Fulton's ExtensionClass module can now safely
1796 be used with Python 2.2. In particular, Zope 2.4.1 now works with
1797 Python 2.2 (as well as with Python 2.1.1). The Demo/metaclass
1798 examples also work again. It is hoped that Gtk and Boost also work
1799 with 2.2a4 and beyond. (If you can confirm this, please write
1800 webmaster@python.org; if there are still problems, please open a bug
1801 report on SourceForge.)
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00001802
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00001803- property() now takes 4 keyword arguments: fget, fset, fdel and doc.
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00001804 These map to read-only attributes 'fget', 'fset', 'fdel', and '__doc__'
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00001805 in the constructed property object. fget, fset and fdel weren't
1806 discoverable from Python in 2.2a3. __doc__ is new, and allows to
1807 associate a docstring with a property.
1808
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00001809- Comparison overloading is now more completely implemented. For
1810 example, a str subclass instance can properly be compared to a str
1811 instance, and it can properly overload comparison. Ditto for most
1812 other built-in object types.
1813
1814- The repr() of new-style classes has changed; instead of <type
1815 'M.Foo'> a new-style class is now rendered as <class 'M.Foo'>,
1816 *except* for built-in types, which are still rendered as <type
1817 'Foo'> (to avoid upsetting existing code that might parse or
1818 otherwise rely on repr() of certain type objects).
1819
1820- The repr() of new-style objects is now always <Foo object at XXX>;
1821 previously, it was sometimes <Foo instance at XXX>.
1822
1823- For new-style classes, what was previously called __getattr__ is now
1824 called __getattribute__. This method, if defined, is called for
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00001825 *every* attribute access. A new __getattr__ hook more similar to the
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00001826 one in classic classes is defined which is called only if regular
1827 attribute access raises AttributeError; to catch *all* attribute
1828 access, you can use __getattribute__ (for new-style classes). If
1829 both are defined, __getattribute__ is called first, and if it raises
1830 AttributeError, __getattr__ is called.
1831
1832- The __class__ attribute of new-style objects can be assigned to.
1833 The new class must have the same C-level object layout as the old
1834 class.
1835
1836- The builtin file type can be subclassed now. In the usual pattern,
1837 "file" is the name of the builtin type, and file() is a new builtin
1838 constructor, with the same signature as the builtin open() function.
1839 file() is now the preferred way to open a file.
1840
1841- Previously, __new__ would only see sequential arguments passed to
1842 the type in a constructor call; __init__ would see both sequential
1843 and keyword arguments. This made no sense whatsoever any more, so
1844 now both __new__ and __init__ see all arguments.
1845
1846- Previously, hash() applied to an instance of a subclass of str or
1847 unicode always returned 0. This has been repaired.
1848
1849- Previously, an operation on an instance of a subclass of an
1850 immutable type (int, long, float, complex, tuple, str, unicode),
1851 where the subtype didn't override the operation (and so the
1852 operation was handled by the builtin type), could return that
1853 instance instead a value of the base type. For example, if s was of
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00001854 a str subclass type, s[:] returned s as-is. Now it returns a str
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00001855 with the same value as s.
1856
Barry Warsaw86fbaf82001-09-28 15:26:12 +00001857- Provisional support for pickling new-style objects has been added.
1858
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00001859Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001860----
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00001861
Tim Peters2c9aa5e2001-09-23 04:06:05 +00001862- file.writelines() now accepts any iterable object producing strings.
1863
Marc-André Lemburgaefd7662001-09-20 12:59:37 +00001864- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() now works very much like
1865 PyObject_Str(obj) in that it tries to use __str__/tp_str
1866 on the object if the object is not a string or buffer. This
1867 makes unicode() behave like str() when applied to non-string/buffer
1868 objects.
1869
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00001870- PyFile_WriteObject now passes Unicode objects to the file's write
1871 method. As a result, all file-like objects which may be the target
Martin v. Löwis2777c022001-09-19 13:47:32 +00001872 of a print statement must support Unicode objects, i.e. they must
1873 at least convert them into ASCII strings.
1874
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00001875- Thread scheduling on Solaris should be improved; it is no longer
1876 necessary to insert a small sleep at the start of a thread in order
1877 to let other runnable threads be scheduled.
1878
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00001879Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001880-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00001881
Marc-André Lemburgbf990172001-09-27 14:17:33 +00001882- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
1883 read character buffer compatible objects for their .write() methods.
1884 These objects are converted to strings and then handled as such
1885 by the instances.
1886
Barry Warsaw2f600732001-09-24 04:28:10 +00001887- The "email" package has been added. This is basically a port of the
1888 mimelib package <http://sf.net/projects/mimelib> with API changes
1889 and some implementations updated to use iterators and generators.
1890
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00001891- difflib.ndiff() and difflib.Differ.compare() are generators now. This
1892 restores the ability of Tools/scripts/ndiff.py to start producing output
1893 before the entire comparison is complete.
1894
Barry Warsaw58b072d2001-09-22 04:44:21 +00001895- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
1896 iteration just like file objects (i.e. their .readline() method is
1897 called for each iteration until it returns an empty string).
1898
Marc-André Lemburg494f2ae2001-09-19 11:33:31 +00001899- The codecs module has grown four new helper APIs to access
1900 builtin codecs: getencoder(), getdecoder(), getreader(),
1901 getwriter().
1902
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00001903- SimpleXMLRPCServer: a new module (based upon SimpleHTMLServer)
1904 simplifies writing XML RPC servers.
1905
Barry Warsaw647d5e82001-09-28 17:01:02 +00001906- os.path.realpath(): a new function that returns the absolute pathname
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00001907 after interpretation of symbolic links. On non-Unix systems, this
1908 is an alias for os.path.abspath().
1909
Tim Peters16a77ad2001-09-08 04:00:12 +00001910- operator.indexOf() (PySequence_Index() in the C API) now works with any
1911 iterable object.
1912
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00001913- smtplib now supports various authentication and security features of
1914 the SMTP protocol through the new login() and starttls() methods.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00001915
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00001916- hmac: a new module implementing keyed hashing for message
1917 authentication.
1918
1919- mimetypes now recognizes more extensions and file types. At the
1920 same time, some mappings not sanctioned by IANA were removed.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00001921
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00001922- The "compiler" package has been brought up to date to the state of
Guido van Rossumc9ed5dc2001-09-20 05:30:24 +00001923 Python 2.2 bytecode generation. It has also been promoted from a
1924 Tool to a standard library package. (Tools/compiler still exists as
1925 a sample driver.)
1926
Guido van Rossumc9ed5dc2001-09-20 05:30:24 +00001927Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001928-----
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00001929
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00001930Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001931-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00001932
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00001933- Large file support (LFS) is now automatic when the platform supports
1934 it; no more manual configuration tweaks are needed. On Linux, at
1935 least, it's possible to have a system whose C library supports large
1936 files but whose kernel doesn't; in this case, large file support is
1937 still enabled but doesn't do you any good unless you upgrade your
1938 kernel or share your Python executable with another system whose
1939 kernel has large file support.
1940
1941- The configure script now supplies plausible defaults in a
1942 cross-compilation environment. This doesn't mean that the supplied
1943 values are always correct, or that cross-compilation now works
1944 flawlessly -- but it's a first step (and it shuts up most of
1945 autoconf's warnings about AC_TRY_RUN).
1946
1947- The Unix build is now a bit less chatty, courtesy of the parser
1948 generator. The build is completely silent (except for errors) when
1949 using "make -s", thanks to a -q option to setup.py.
1950
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00001951C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001952-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00001953
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00001954- The "structmember" API now supports some new flag bits to deny read
1955 and/or write access to attributes in restricted execution mode.
1956
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00001957New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001958-------------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00001959
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00001960- Compaq's iPAQ handheld, running the "familiar" Linux distribution
1961 (http://familiar.handhelds.org).
1962
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00001963Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001964-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00001965
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00001966- The "classic" standard tests, which work by comparing stdout to
1967 an expected-output file under Lib/test/output/, no longer stop at
1968 the first mismatch. Instead the test is run to completion, and a
1969 variant of ndiff-style comparison is used to report all differences.
1970 This is much easier to understand than the previous style of reporting.
1971
1972- The unittest-based standard tests now use regrtest's test_main()
1973 convention, instead of running as a side-effect of merely being
1974 imported. This allows these tests to be run in more natural and
1975 flexible ways as unittests, outside the regrtest framework.
1976
1977- regrtest.py is much better integrated with unittest and doctest now,
1978 especially in regard to reporting errors.
1979
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00001980Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001981-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00001982
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00001983- Large file support now also works for files > 4GB, on filesystems
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00001984 that support it (NTFS under Windows 2000). See "What's New in
1985 Python 2.2a3" for more detail.
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00001986
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00001987
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00001988What's New in Python 2.2a3?
1989===========================
1990
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001991*Release Date: 07-Sep-2001*
1992
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00001993Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001994----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00001995
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00001996- Conversion of long to float now raises OverflowError if the long is too
1997 big to represent as a C double.
1998
Tim Peters32f453e2001-09-03 08:35:41 +00001999- The 3-argument builtin pow() no longer allows a third non-None argument
2000 if either of the first two arguments is a float, or if both are of
2001 integer types and the second argument is negative (in which latter case
2002 the arguments are converted to float, so this is really the same
2003 restriction).
2004
Tim Peters5d2b77c2001-09-03 05:47:38 +00002005- The builtin dir() now returns more information, and sometimes much
2006 more, generally naming all attributes of an object, and all attributes
2007 reachable from the object via its class, and from its class's base
2008 classes, and so on from them too. Example: in 2.2a2, dir([]) returned
2009 an empty list. In 2.2a3,
2010
2011 >>> dir([])
2012 ['__add__', '__class__', '__contains__', '__delattr__', '__delitem__',
2013 '__eq__', '__ge__', '__getattr__', '__getitem__', '__getslice__',
2014 '__gt__', '__hash__', '__iadd__', '__imul__', '__init__', '__le__',
2015 '__len__', '__lt__', '__mul__', '__ne__', '__new__', '__repr__',
2016 '__rmul__', '__setattr__', '__setitem__', '__setslice__', '__str__',
2017 'append', 'count', 'extend', 'index', 'insert', 'pop', 'remove',
2018 'reverse', 'sort']
2019
2020 dir(module) continues to return only the module's attributes, though.
2021
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002022- Overflowing operations on plain ints now return a long int rather
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002023 than raising OverflowError. This is a partial implementation of PEP
2024 237. You can use -Wdefault::OverflowWarning to enable a warning for
2025 this situation, and -Werror::OverflowWarning to revert to the old
2026 OverflowError exception.
2027
Guido van Rossum61c345f2001-09-04 03:26:15 +00002028- A new command line option, -Q<arg>, is added to control run-time
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002029 warnings for the use of classic division. (See PEP 238.) Possible
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00002030 values are -Qold, -Qwarn, -Qwarnall, and -Qnew. The default is
2031 -Qold, meaning the / operator has its classic meaning and no
2032 warnings are issued. Using -Qwarn issues a run-time warning about
2033 all uses of classic division for int and long arguments; -Qwarnall
2034 also warns about classic division for float and complex arguments
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00002035 (for use with fixdiv.py).
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002036 [Note: the remainder of this item (preserved below) became
2037 obsolete in 2.2c1 -- -Qnew has global effect in 2.2] ::
2038
2039 Using -Qnew is questionable; it turns on new division by default, but
2040 only in the __main__ module. You can usefully combine -Qwarn or
2041 -Qwarnall and -Qnew: this gives the __main__ module new division, and
2042 warns about classic division everywhere else.
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002043
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002044- Many built-in types can now be subclassed. This applies to int,
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002045 long, float, str, unicode, and tuple. (The types complex, list and
2046 dictionary can also be subclassed; this was introduced earlier.)
2047 Note that restrictions apply when subclassing immutable built-in
2048 types: you can only affect the value of the instance by overloading
2049 __new__. You can add mutable attributes, and the subclass instances
2050 will have a __dict__ attribute, but you cannot change the "value"
2051 (as implemented by the base class) of an immutable subclass instance
2052 once it is created.
2053
Guido van Rossumaaf80c82001-09-02 13:44:35 +00002054- The dictionary constructor now takes an optional argument, a
2055 mapping-like object, and initializes the dictionary from its
2056 (key, value) pairs.
2057
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002058- A new built-in type, super, has been added. This facilitates making
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002059 "cooperative super calls" in a multiple inheritance setting. For an
2060 explanation, see http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#cooperation
2061
Guido van Rossum8d7234d2001-09-06 22:02:58 +00002062- A new built-in type, property, has been added. This enables the
2063 creation of "properties". These are attributes implemented by
2064 getter and setter functions (or only one of these for read-only or
2065 write-only attributes), without the need to override __getattr__.
2066 See http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#property
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002067
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002068- The syntax of floating-point and imaginary literals has been
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00002069 liberalized, to allow leading zeroes. Examples of literals now
2070 legal that were SyntaxErrors before:
2071
2072 00.0 0e3 0100j 07.5 00000000000000000008.
2073
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002074- An old tokenizer bug allowed floating point literals with an incomplete
Tim Petersc6d95812001-08-28 20:56:27 +00002075 exponent, such as 1e and 3.1e-. Such literals now raise SyntaxError.
2076
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002077Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002078-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002079
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00002080- telnetlib includes symbolic names for the options, and support for
Martin v. Löwis1da9c572002-11-04 09:56:00 +00002081 setting an option negotiation callback. It also supports processing
2082 of suboptions.
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00002083
Tim Petersa40c7932001-09-05 22:36:56 +00002084- The new C standard no longer requires that math libraries set errno to
2085 ERANGE on overflow. For platform libraries that exploit this new
2086 freedom, Python's overflow-checking was wholly broken. A new overflow-
2087 checking scheme attempts to repair that, but may not be reliable on all
2088 platforms (C doesn't seem to provide anything both useful and portable
2089 in this area anymore).
2090
Martin v. Löwis44f86962001-09-05 13:44:54 +00002091- Asynchronous timeout actions are available through the new class
2092 threading.Timer.
2093
Tim Peters78526162001-09-05 00:53:45 +00002094- math.log and math.log10 now return sensible results for even huge
2095 long arguments. For example, math.log10(10 ** 10000) ~= 10000.0.
2096
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002097- A new function, imp.lock_held(), returns 1 when the import lock is
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00002098 currently held. See the docs for the imp module.
2099
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002100- pickle, cPickle and marshal on 32-bit platforms can now correctly read
Tim Peters82112372001-08-29 02:28:42 +00002101 dumps containing ints written on platforms where Python ints are 8 bytes.
2102 When read on a box where Python ints are 4 bytes, such values are
2103 converted to Python longs.
2104
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002105- In restricted execution mode (using the rexec module), unmarshalling
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002106 code objects is no longer allowed. This plugs a security hole.
2107
Steve Purcell6091cd62001-09-06 16:05:17 +00002108- unittest.TestResult instances no longer store references to tracebacks
2109 generated by test failures. This prevents unexpected dangling references
2110 to objects that should be garbage collected between tests.
2111
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002112Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002113-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002114
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00002115- Tools/scripts/fixdiv.py has been added which can be used to fix
2116 division operators as per PEP 238.
2117
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002118Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002119-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002120
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00002121- If you are an adventurous person using Mac OS X you may want to look at
2122 Mac/OSX. There is a Makefile there that will build Python as a real Mac
2123 application, which can be used for experimenting with Carbon or Cocoa.
2124 Discussion of this on pythonmac-sig, please.
2125
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00002126C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002127-----
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00002128
2129- New function PyObject_Dir(obj), like Python __builtin__.dir(obj).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00002130
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00002131- Note that PyLong_AsDouble can fail! This has always been true, but no
2132 callers checked for it. It's more likely to fail now, because overflow
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00002133 errors are properly detected now. The proper way to check::
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00002134
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002135 double x = PyLong_AsDouble(some_long_object);
2136 if (x == -1.0 && PyErr_Occurred()) {
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002137 /* The conversion failed. */
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002138 }
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00002139
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002140- The GC API has been changed. Extensions that use the old API will still
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00002141 compile but will not participate in GC. To upgrade an extension
2142 module:
2143
2144 - rename Py_TPFLAGS_GC to PyTPFLAGS_HAVE_GC
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00002145
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00002146 - use PyObject_GC_New or PyObject_GC_NewVar to allocate objects and
2147 PyObject_GC_Del to deallocate them
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00002148
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00002149 - rename PyObject_GC_Init to PyObject_GC_Track and PyObject_GC_Fini
2150 to PyObject_GC_UnTrack
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00002151
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00002152 - remove PyGC_HEAD_SIZE from object size calculations
2153
2154 - remove calls to PyObject_AS_GC and PyObject_FROM_GC
2155
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002156- Two new functions: PyString_FromFormat() and PyString_FromFormatV().
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002157 These can be used safely to construct string objects from a
2158 sprintf-style format string (similar to the format string supported
2159 by PyErr_Format()).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00002160
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002161New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002162-------------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002163
Tim Petersb7da0902001-09-02 23:01:43 +00002164- Stephen Hansen contributed patches sufficient to get a clean compile
2165 under Borland C (Windows), but he reports problems running it and ran
2166 out of time to complete the port. Volunteers? Expect a MemoryError
2167 when importing the types module; this is probably shallow, and
2168 causing later failures too.
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002169
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002170Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002171-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002172
2173Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002174-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002175
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00002176- Large file support is now enabled on Win32 platforms as well as on
2177 Win64. This means that, for example, you can use f.tell() and f.seek()
2178 to manipulate files larger than 2 gigabytes (provided you have enough
2179 disk space, and are using a Windows filesystem that supports large
Tim Peters9a9471c2001-09-11 23:18:51 +00002180 partitions). Windows filesystem limits: FAT has a 2GB (gigabyte)
2181 filesize limit, and large file support makes no difference there.
2182 FAT32's limit is 4GB, and files >= 2GB are easier to use from Python now.
2183 NTFS has no practical limit on file size, and files of any size can be
2184 used from Python now.
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00002185
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002186- The w9xpopen hack is now used on Windows NT and 2000 too when COMPSPEC
Tim Peters402d5982001-08-27 06:37:48 +00002187 points to command.com (patch from Brian Quinlan).
2188
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002189
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00002190What's New in Python 2.2a2?
2191===========================
2192
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002193*Release Date: 22-Aug-2001*
2194
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00002195Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002196-----
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00002197
Barry Warsaw18b2ecf2001-08-22 20:26:56 +00002198- Tim Peters developed a brand new Windows installer using Wise 8.1,
2199 generously donated to us by Wise Solutions.
2200
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00002201- configure supports a new option --enable-unicode, with the values
2202 ucs2 and ucs4 (new in 2.2a1). With --disable-unicode, the Unicode
2203 type and supporting code is completely removed from the interpreter.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00002204
Jack Jansen32ce0cd2001-08-21 19:28:20 +00002205- A new configure option --enable-framework builds a Mac OS X framework,
2206 which "make frameworkinstall" will install. This provides a starting
2207 point for more mac-like functionality, join pythonmac-sig@python.org
2208 if you are interested in helping.
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00002209
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00002210- The NeXT platform is no longer supported.
2211
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002212- The 'new' module is now statically linked.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00002213
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00002214Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002215-----
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00002216
2217- The new Tools/scripts/cleanfuture.py can be used to automatically
Andrew M. Kuchlingb0532092001-08-15 15:54:56 +00002218 edit out obsolete future statements from Python source code. See
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00002219 the module docstring for details.
2220
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00002221Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002222-----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00002223
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00002224- regrtest.py now knows which tests are expected to be skipped on some
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00002225 platforms, allowing to give clearer test result output. regrtest
2226 also has optional --use/-u switch to run normally disabled tests
2227 which require network access or consume significant disk resources.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00002228
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00002229- Several new tests in the standard test suite, with special thanks to
2230 Nick Mathewson.
2231
2232Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002233----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00002234
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00002235- The floor division operator // has been added as outlined in PEP
2236 238. The / operator still provides classic division (and will until
2237 Python 3.0) unless "from __future__ import division" is included, in
2238 which case the / operator will provide true division. The operator
2239 module provides truediv() and floordiv() functions. Augmented
2240 assignment variants are included, as are the equivalent overloadable
2241 methods and C API methods. See the PEP for a full discussion:
2242 <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0238.html>
2243
Tim Peters6cd6a822001-08-17 22:11:27 +00002244- Future statements are now effective in simulated interactive shells
2245 (like IDLE). This should "just work" by magic, but read Michael
2246 Hudson's "Future statements in simulated shells" PEP 264 for full
2247 details: <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0264.html>.
2248
Guido van Rossumf86ddd22001-08-17 21:21:04 +00002249- The type/class unification (PEP 252-253) was integrated into the
2250 trunk and is not so tentative any more (the exact specification of
2251 some features is still tentative). A lot of work has done on fixing
2252 bugs and adding robustness and features (performance still has to
2253 come a long way).
2254
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00002255- Warnings about a mismatch in the Python API during extension import
2256 now use the Python warning framework (which makes it possible to
2257 write filters for these warnings).
2258
Barry Warsaw9b3be7f2001-08-14 18:35:02 +00002259- A function's __dict__ (aka func_dict) will now always be a
2260 dictionary. It used to be possible to delete it or set it to None,
2261 but now both actions raise TypeErrors. It is still legal to set it
2262 to a dictionary object. Getting func.__dict__ before any attributes
2263 have been assigned now returns an empty dictionary instead of None.
2264
Guido van Rossum32aa5d22001-09-05 18:43:35 +00002265- A new command line option, -E, was added which disables the use of
2266 all environment variables, or at least those that are specifically
2267 significant to Python. Usually those have a name starting with
2268 "PYTHON". This was used to fix a problem where the tests fail if
2269 the user happens to have PYTHONHOME or PYTHONPATH pointing to an
2270 older distribution.
2271
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00002272Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002273-------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00002274
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00002275- New class Differ and new functions ndiff() and restore() in difflib.py.
2276 These package the algorithms used by the popular Tools/scripts/ndiff.py,
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00002277 for programmatic reuse.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00002278
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00002279- New function xml.sax.saxutils.quoteattr(): Quote an XML attribute
2280 value using the minimal quoting required for the value; more
2281 reliable than using xml.sax.saxutils.escape() for attribute values.
2282
2283- Readline completion support for cmd.Cmd was added.
2284
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00002285- Calling os.tempnam() or os.tmpnam() generate RuntimeWarnings.
2286
2287- Added function threading.BoundedSemaphore()
2288
2289- Added Ka-Ping Yee's cgitb.py module.
2290
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002291- The 'new' module now exposes the CO_xxx flags.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00002292
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00002293- The gc module offers the get_referents function.
2294
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00002295New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002296-------------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00002297
2298C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002299-----
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00002300
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00002301- Two new APIs PyOS_snprintf() and PyOS_vsnprintf() were added
2302 which provide a cross-platform implementations for the
2303 relatively new snprintf()/vsnprintf() C lib APIs. In contrast to
2304 the standard sprintf() and vsprintf() C lib APIs, these versions
2305 apply bounds checking on the used buffer which enhances protection
2306 against buffer overruns.
2307
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00002308- Unicode APIs now use name mangling to assure that mixing interpreters
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00002309 and extensions using different Unicode widths is rendered next to
2310 impossible. Trying to import an incompatible Unicode-aware extension
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00002311 will result in an ImportError. Unicode extensions writers must make
2312 sure to check the Unicode width compatibility in their extensions by
2313 using at least one of the mangled Unicode APIs in the extension.
2314
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00002315- Two new flags METH_NOARGS and METH_O are available in method definition
2316 tables to simplify implementation of methods with no arguments and a
2317 single untyped argument. Calling such methods is more efficient than
2318 calling corresponding METH_VARARGS methods. METH_OLDARGS is now
2319 deprecated.
2320
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00002321Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002322-------
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00002323
2324- "import module" now compiles module.pyw if it exists and nothing else
2325 relevant is found.
2326
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00002327
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00002328What's New in Python 2.2a1?
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00002329===========================
2330
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002331*Release date: 18-Jul-2001*
2332
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00002333Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002334----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00002335
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00002336- TENTATIVELY, a large amount of code implementing much of what's
2337 described in PEP 252 (Making Types Look More Like Classes) and PEP
2338 253 (Subtyping Built-in Types) was added. This will be released
2339 with Python 2.2a1. Documentation will be provided separately
2340 through http://www.python.org/2.2/. The purpose of releasing this
2341 with Python 2.2a1 is to test backwards compatibility. It is
2342 possible, though not likely, that a decision is made not to release
2343 this code as part of 2.2 final, if any serious backwards
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00002344 incompatibilities are found during alpha testing that cannot be
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00002345 repaired.
2346
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00002347- Generators were added; this is a new way to create an iterator (see
Tim Peters11a0d102001-07-17 18:48:00 +00002348 below) using what looks like a simple function containing one or
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00002349 more 'yield' statements. See PEP 255. Since this adds a new
2350 keyword to the language, this feature must be enabled by including a
2351 future statement: "from __future__ import generators" (see PEP 236).
2352 Generators will become a standard feature in a future release
2353 (probably 2.3). Without this future statement, 'yield' remains an
2354 ordinary identifier, but a warning is issued each time it is used.
2355 (These warnings currently don't conform to the warnings framework of
2356 PEP 230; we intend to fix this in 2.2a2.)
2357
Marc-André Lemburg12e74b32001-05-22 08:58:23 +00002358- The UTF-16 codec was modified to be more RFC compliant. It will now
2359 only remove BOM characters at the start of the string and then
2360 only if running in native mode (UTF-16-LE and -BE won't remove a
2361 leading BMO character).
2362
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00002363- Strings now have a new method .decode() to complement the already
2364 existing .encode() method. These two methods provide direct access
2365 to the corresponding decoders and encoders of the registered codecs.
2366
2367 To enhance the usability of the .encode() method, the special
2368 casing of Unicode object return values was dropped (Unicode objects
2369 were auto-magically converted to string using the default encoding).
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00002370
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00002371 Both methods will now return whatever the codec in charge of the
2372 requested encoding returns as object, e.g. Unicode codecs will
2373 return Unicode objects when decoding is requested ("äöü".decode("latin-1")
2374 will return u"äöü"). This enables codec writer to create codecs
2375 for various simple to use conversions.
2376
2377 New codecs were added to demonstrate these new features (the .encode()
2378 and .decode() columns indicate the type of the returned objects):
2379
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002380 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
2381 |Name | .encode() | .decode() | Description |
2382 +=========+===========+===========+=============================+
2383 |uu | string | string | UU codec (e.g. for email) |
2384 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
2385 |base64 | string | string | base64 codec |
2386 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
2387 |quopri | string | string | quoted-printable codec |
2388 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
2389 |zlib | string | string | zlib compression |
2390 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
2391 |hex | string | string | 2-byte hex codec |
2392 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
2393 |rot-13 | string | Unicode | ROT-13 Unicode charmap codec|
2394 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00002395
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00002396- Some operating systems now support the concept of a default Unicode
2397 encoding for file system operations. Notably, Windows supports 'mbcs'
2398 as the default. The Macintosh will also adopt this concept in the medium
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00002399 term, although the default encoding for that platform will be other than
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00002400 'mbcs'.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00002401
2402 On operating system that support non-ASCII filenames, it is common for
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00002403 functions that return filenames (such as os.listdir()) to return Python
2404 string objects pre-encoded using the default file system encoding for
2405 the platform. As this encoding is likely to be different from Python's
2406 default encoding, converting this name to a Unicode object before passing
2407 it back to the Operating System would result in a Unicode error, as Python
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00002408 would attempt to use its default encoding (generally ASCII) rather than
2409 the default encoding for the file system.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00002410
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00002411 In general, this change simply removes surprises when working with
2412 Unicode and the file system, making these operations work as you expect,
2413 increasing the transparency of Unicode objects in this context.
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00002414 See [????] for more details, including examples.
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00002415
Tim Peters61dff2b2001-05-08 15:43:37 +00002416- Float (and complex) literals in source code were evaluated to full
2417 precision only when running from a .py file; the same code loaded from a
2418 .pyc (or .pyo) file could suffer numeric differences starting at about the
2419 12th significant decimal digit. For example, on a machine with IEEE-754
2420 floating arithmetic,
2421
2422 x = 9007199254740992.0
2423 print long(x)
2424
2425 printed 9007199254740992 if run directly from .py, but 9007199254740000
2426 if from a compiled (.pyc or .pyo) file. This was due to marshal using
2427 str(float) instead of repr(float) when building code objects. marshal
2428 now uses repr(float) instead, which should reproduce floats to full
2429 machine precision (assuming the platform C float<->string I/O conversion
2430 functions are of good quality).
2431
2432 This may cause floating-point results to change in some cases, and
2433 usually for the better, but may also cause numerically unstable
2434 algorithms to break.
2435
Tim Peters2f228e72001-05-13 00:19:31 +00002436- The implementation of dicts suffers fewer collisions, which has speed
2437 benefits. However, the order in which dict entries appear in dict.keys(),
2438 dict.values() and dict.items() may differ from previous releases for a
2439 given dict. Nothing is defined about this order, so no program should
2440 rely on it. Nevertheless, it's easy to write test cases that rely on the
2441 order by accident, typically because of printing the str() or repr() of a
2442 dict to an "expected results" file. See Lib/test/test_support.py's new
2443 sortdict(dict) function for a simple way to display a dict in sorted
2444 order.
2445
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00002446- Many other small changes to dicts were made, resulting in faster
2447 operation along the most common code paths.
2448
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00002449- Dictionary objects now support the "in" operator: "x in dict" means
2450 the same as dict.has_key(x).
2451
Barry Warsaw51acc8d2001-06-26 20:12:50 +00002452- The update() method of dictionaries now accepts generic mapping
2453 objects. Specifically the argument object must support the .keys()
2454 and __getitem__() methods. This allows you to say, for example,
2455 {}.update(UserDict())
2456
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00002457- Iterators were added; this is a generalized way of providing values
2458 to a for loop. See PEP 234. There's a new built-in function iter()
2459 to return an iterator. There's a new protocol to get the next value
2460 from an iterator using the next() method (in Python) or the
2461 tp_iternext slot (in C). There's a new protocol to get iterators
2462 using the __iter__() method (in Python) or the tp_iter slot (in C).
2463 Iterating (i.e. a for loop) over a dictionary generates its keys.
2464 Iterating over a file generates its lines.
2465
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00002466- The following functions were generalized to work nicely with iterator
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00002467 arguments::
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002468
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00002469 map(), filter(), reduce(), zip()
Tim Peters8572b4f2001-05-06 01:05:02 +00002470 list(), tuple() (PySequence_Tuple() and PySequence_Fast() in C API)
2471 max(), min()
Tim Peters1af03e92001-05-26 19:37:54 +00002472 join() method of strings
2473 extend() method of lists
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00002474 'x in y' and 'x not in y' (PySequence_Contains() in C API)
2475 operator.countOf() (PySequence_Count() in C API)
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002476 right-hand side of assignment statements with multiple targets, such as ::
Tim Petersd6d010b2001-06-21 02:49:55 +00002477 x, y, z = some_iterable_object_returning_exactly_3_values
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00002478
Tim Petersd85e1022001-05-11 21:51:48 +00002479- Accessing module attributes is significantly faster (for example,
2480 random.random or os.path or yourPythonModule.yourAttribute).
2481
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00002482- Comparing dictionary objects via == and != is faster, and now works even
2483 if the keys and values don't support comparisons other than ==.
2484
Tim Peters95bf9392001-05-10 08:32:44 +00002485- Comparing dictionaries in ways other than == and != is slower: there were
2486 insecurities in the dict comparison implementation that could cause Python
2487 to crash if the element comparison routines for the dict keys and/or
2488 values mutated the dicts. Making the code bulletproof slowed it down.
2489
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00002490- Collisions in dicts are resolved via a new approach, which can help
2491 dramatically in bad cases. For example, looking up every key in a dict
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00002492 d with d.keys() == [i << 16 for i in range(20000)] is approximately 500x
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00002493 faster now. Thanks to Christian Tismer for pointing out the cause and
2494 the nature of an effective cure (last December! better late than never).
Tim Peters15d49292001-05-27 07:39:22 +00002495
Tim Peters52e155e2001-06-16 05:42:57 +00002496- repr() is much faster for large containers (dict, list, tuple).
2497
2498
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00002499Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002500-------
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00002501
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00002502- The constants ascii_letters, ascii_lowercase. and ascii_uppercase
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00002503 were added to the string module. These a locale-independent
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00002504 constants, unlike letters, lowercase, and uppercase. These are now
2505 use in appropriate locations in the standard library.
2506
Martin v. Löwisf0473d52001-07-18 16:17:16 +00002507- The flags used in dlopen calls can now be configured using
2508 sys.setdlopenflags and queried using sys.getdlopenflags.
2509
Guido van Rossumc7e4aca2001-07-12 11:54:37 +00002510- Fredrik Lundh's xmlrpclib is now a standard library module. This
2511 provides full client-side XML-RPC support. In addition,
2512 Demo/xmlrpc/ contains two server frameworks (one SocketServer-based,
2513 one asyncore-based). Thanks to Eric Raymond for the documentation.
2514
Guido van Rossum643d3912001-07-05 14:46:25 +00002515- The xrange() object is simplified: it no longer supports slicing,
2516 repetition, comparisons, efficient 'in' checking, the tolist()
2517 method, or the start, stop and step attributes. See PEP 260.
2518
Martin v. Löwisebf94db2001-06-06 06:25:40 +00002519- A new function fnmatch.filter to filter lists of file names was added.
2520
Barry Warsawffd674d2001-05-22 16:00:10 +00002521- calendar.py uses month and day names based on the current locale.
2522
Guido van Rossum2e0a6542001-05-15 02:14:44 +00002523- strop is now *really* obsolete (this was announced before with 1.6),
2524 and issues DeprecationWarning when used (except for the four items
2525 that are still imported into string.py).
2526
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00002527- Cookie.py now sorts key+value pairs by key in output strings.
2528
2529- pprint.isrecursive(object) didn't correctly identify recursive objects.
2530 Now it does.
2531
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00002532- pprint functions now much faster for large containers (tuple, list, dict).
2533
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00002534- New 'q' and 'Q' format codes in the struct module, corresponding to C
2535 types "long long" and "unsigned long long" (on Windows, __int64). In
2536 native mode, these can be used only when the platform C compiler supports
2537 these types (when HAVE_LONG_LONG is #define'd by the Python config
2538 process), and then they inherit the sizes and alignments of the C types.
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00002539 In standard mode, 'q' and 'Q' are supported on all platforms, and are
2540 8-byte integral types.
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00002541
Guido van Rossum83213cc2001-06-12 16:48:52 +00002542- The site module installs a new built-in function 'help' that invokes
2543 pydoc.help. It must be invoked as 'help()'; when invoked as 'help',
2544 it displays a message reminding the user to use 'help()' or
2545 'help(object)'.
2546
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00002547Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002548-----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00002549
2550- New test_mutants.py runs dict comparisons where the key and value
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00002551 comparison operators mutate the dicts randomly during comparison. This
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00002552 rapidly causes Python to crash under earlier releases (not for the faint
2553 of heart: it can also cause Win9x to freeze or reboot!).
2554
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00002555- New test_pprint.py verifies that pprint.isrecursive() and
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00002556 pprint.isreadable() return sensible results. Also verifies that simple
2557 cases produce correct output.
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00002558
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00002559C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002560-----
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00002561
2562- Removed the unused last_is_sticky argument from the internal
2563 _PyTuple_Resize(). If this affects you, you were cheating.
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002564
2565----
2566
2567**(For information about older versions, consult the HISTORY file.)**