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Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001+++++++++++
2Python News
3+++++++++++
4
Skip Montanaro4a385832002-09-20 17:08:52 +00005(editors: check NEWS.help for information about editing NEWS using ReST.)
6
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00007What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 1?
8=================================
9
10*Release date: DD-MMM-YYYY*
11
12Core and builtins
13-----------------
14
Martin v. Löwis01a74b22003-10-19 18:30:01 +000015- CObjects are now mutable (on the C level) through PyCObject_SetVoidPtr.
16
Raymond Hettinger42b1ba32003-10-16 03:41:09 +000017- list.sort() now supports three keyword arguments: cmp, key, and reverse.
18 The key argument can be a function of one argument that extracts a
19 comparison key from the original record: mylist.sort(key=str.lower).
20 The reverse argument is a boolean value and if True will change the
21 sort order as if the comparison arguments were reversed. In addition,
22 the documentation has been amended to provide a guarantee that all sorts
23 starting with Py2.3 are guaranteed to be stable (the relative order of
24 records with equal keys is unchanged).
25
Marc-André Lemburgd7160f82003-09-22 11:14:40 +000026- Added test whether wchar_t is signed or not. A signed wchar_t is not
27 usable as internal unicode type base for Py_UNICODE since the
28 unicode implementation assumes an unsigned type.
29
Jeremy Hyltond8082792003-09-16 19:41:39 +000030- Fixed a bug in the cache of length-one Unicode strings that could
31 lead to a seg fault. The specific problem occurred when an earlier,
32 non-fatal error left an uninitialized Unicode object in the
33 freelist.
34
Raymond Hettinger9bfe5332003-08-27 04:55:52 +000035- The % formatting operator now supports '%F' which is equivalent to
36 '%f'. This has always been documented but never implemented.
37
Tim Peters465fa3d2003-08-15 01:16:37 +000038- complex(obj) could leak a little memory if obj wasn't a string or
39 number.
40
Raymond Hettingereaef6152003-08-02 07:42:57 +000041- zip() with no arguments now returns an empty list instead of raising
42 a TypeError exception.
43
Guido van Rossum02c58f82003-10-08 21:08:29 +000044- obj.__contains__() now returns True/False instead of 1/0. SF patch
45 820195.
46
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +000047Extension modules
48-----------------
49
Martin v. Löwis3bbd6542003-10-03 13:57:37 +000050- socket.IPPROTO_IPV6 was added.
51
Martin v. Löwise7a97962003-09-20 16:08:33 +000052- readline.clear_history was added.
53
Brett Cannon62dba4c2003-09-10 19:37:42 +000054- select.select() now accepts sequences for its first three arguments.
55
Raymond Hettinger5475f232003-08-08 12:20:03 +000056- cStringIO now supports the f.closed attribute.
57
Anthony Baxter83f52912003-08-05 06:33:56 +000058- The signal module now exposes SIGRTMIN and SIGRTMAX (if available).
59
Andrew M. Kuchling69f31eb2003-08-13 23:11:04 +000060- curses module now supports use_default_colors(). [patch #739124]
61
Anthony Baxter5c68ef02003-10-04 08:04:04 +000062- Bug #811028: ncurses.h breakage on FreeBSD/MacOS X
63
64- Bug #814613: INET_ADDRSTRLEN fix needed for all compilers on SGI
65
Gustavo Niemeyerad3fc442003-10-17 22:13:16 +000066- Implemented non-recursive SRE matching scheme (#757624).
67
68- Implemented (?(id/name)yes|no) support in SRE (#572936).
69
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +000070Library
71-------
72
Martin v. Löwisd6625482003-10-12 17:37:01 +000073- tmpfile.mkstemp now returns an absolute path even if dir is relative.
74
Brett Cannon5d9ca4e2003-10-12 04:38:48 +000075- urlparse is RFC 2396 compliant.
76
Skip Montanarodef99342003-10-03 14:07:07 +000077- The fieldnames argument to the csv module's DictReader constructor is now
78 optional. If omitted, the first row of the file will be used as the
79 list of fieldnames.
80
Raymond Hettinger9a80c5d2003-09-23 20:21:01 +000081- encodings.bz2_codec was added for access to bz2 compression
82 using "a long string".encode('bz2')
83
Guido van Rossum0e5a51d2003-09-22 15:03:11 +000084- Various improvements to unittest.py, realigned with PyUnit CVS.
85
Martin v. Löwisc6bb6c02003-09-20 15:52:21 +000086- dircache now passes exceptions to the caller, instead of returning
87 empty lists.
88
Raymond Hettingerdeadbf52003-09-12 06:33:37 +000089- The bsddb module and dbhash module now support the iterator and
90 mapping protocols which make them more substitutable for dictionaries
91 and shelves.
92
Skip Montanaro3f7a9482003-09-06 19:52:12 +000093- The csv module's DictReader and DictWriter classes now accept keyword
94 arguments. This was an omission in the initial implementation.
95
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +000096- The email package handles some RFC 2231 parameters with missing
Barry Warsaw2f5bf172003-09-03 04:09:49 +000097 CHARSET fields better. It also includes a patch to parameter
98 parsing when semicolons appear inside quotes.
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +000099
Raymond Hettinger6a180122003-08-17 08:34:09 +0000100- sets.py now runs under Py2.2. In addition, the argument restrictions
101 for most set methods (but not the operators) have been relaxed to
102 allow any iterable. Also the Set.update() has been deprecated because
103 it duplicates Set.union_update().
Raymond Hettingeree562fc2003-08-15 21:17:04 +0000104
Raymond Hettinger3081d592003-08-09 18:30:57 +0000105- random.seed() with no arguments or None uses time.time() as a default
106 seed. Modified to match Py2.2 behavior and use fractional seconds so
107 that successive runs are more likely to produce different sequences.
108
Raymond Hettinger2f726e92003-10-05 09:09:15 +0000109- random.Random has a new method, getrandbits(k), which returns an int
110 with k random bits. This method is now an optional part of the API
111 for user defined generators. Any generator that defines genrandbits()
112 can now use randrange() for ranges with a length >= 2**53. Formerly,
113 randrange would return only even numbers for ranges that large (see
114 SF bug #812202). Generators that do not define genrandbits() now
115 issue a warning when randrange() is called with a range that large.
116
Raymond Hettingerb5a42082003-08-08 05:10:41 +0000117- itertools.izip() with no arguments now returns an empty iterator instead
118 of raising a TypeError exception.
119
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +0000120- _strptime.py now has a behind-the-scenes caching mechanism for the most
Brett Cannonb7150a22003-08-05 06:27:04 +0000121 recent TimeRE instance used along with the last five unique directive
122 patterns. The overall module was also made more thread-safe.
123
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +0000124- random.cunifvariate() and random.stdgamma() were deprecated in Py2.3
125 and removed in Py2.4.
126
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000127Tools/Demos
128-----------
129
Skip Montanarofd4fa882003-09-10 19:04:13 +0000130- The pydoc script will display a link to the module documentation for
131 modules determined to be part of the core distribution. The documentation
132 base directory defaults to http://www.python.org/doc/current/lib/ but can
133 be changed by setting the PYTHONDOCS environment variable.
134
Raymond Hettingere41d4c82003-08-25 04:39:55 +0000135- texcheck.py now detects double word errors.
136
Tim Peters1a3abcb2003-08-18 23:52:09 +0000137- md5sum.py mistakenly opened input files in text mode by default, a
138 silent and dangerous change from previous releases. It once again
139 opens input files in binary mode by default. The -t and -b flags
140 remain for compatibility with the 2.3 release, but -b is the default
141 now.
142
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000143- py-electric-colon now works when pending-delete/delete-selection mode is
144 in effect
145
146- py-help-at-point is no longer bound to the F1 key - it's still bound to
147 C-c C-h
148
Barry Warsaw6ec58ca2003-09-03 03:20:37 +0000149- Pynche was fixed to not crash when there is no ~/.pynche file and no
150 -d option was given.
151
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000152Build
153-----
154
155C API
156-----
157
Raymond Hettingercb2da432003-10-12 18:24:34 +0000158- Added a new function, PyTuple_Pack(n, ...) for constructing tuples from a
159 variable length argument list of Python objects without having to invoke
160 the more complex machinery of Py_BuildValue(). PyTuple_Pack(3, a, b, c)
161 is equivalent to Py_BuildValue("(OOO)", a, b, c).
162
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000163New platforms
164-------------
165
166Tests
167-----
168
169Windows
170-------
171
Tim Petersf1827cf2003-09-07 03:30:18 +0000172- file.truncate() could misbehave if the file was open for update
173 (modes r+, rb+, w+, wb+), and the most recent file operation before
174 the truncate() call was an input operation. SF bug 801631.
175
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000176Mac
177----
178
179
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +0000180What's New in Python 2.3 final?
181===============================
182
183*Release date: 29-Jul-2003*
184
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +0000185IDLE
186----
187
Tim Peters36c1afc2003-07-29 17:22:57 +0000188- Bug 778400: IDLE hangs when selecting "Edit with IDLE" from explorer.
189 This was unique to Windows, and was fixed by adding an -n switch to
190 the command the Windows installer creates to execute "Edit with IDLE"
191 context-menu actions.
192
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +0000193- IDLE displays a new message upon startup: some "personal firewall"
194 kinds of programs (for example, ZoneAlarm) open a dialog of their
195 own when any program opens a socket. IDLE does use sockets, talking
196 on the computer's internal loopback interface. This connection is not
197 visible on any external interface and no data is sent to or received
198 from the Internet. So, if you get such a dialog when opening IDLE,
199 asking whether to let pythonw.exe talk to address 127.0.0.1, say yes,
200 and rest assured no communication external to your machine is taking
201 place. If you don't allow it, IDLE won't be able to start.
202
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +0000203
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000204What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 2?
205=============================================
206
Tim Peters6560a252003-07-24 00:15:46 +0000207*Release date: 24-Jul-2003*
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000208
209Core and builtins
210-----------------
211
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +0000212- It is now possible to import from zipfiles containing additional
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000213 data bytes before the zip compatible archive. Zipfiles containing a
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +0000214 comment at the end are still unsupported.
215
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000216Extension modules
217-----------------
218
219- A longstanding bug in the parser module's initialization could cause
220 fatal internal refcount confusion when the module got initialized more
221 than once. This has been fixed.
222
Fred Drake01a43122003-07-21 17:17:10 +0000223- Fixed memory leak in pyexpat; using the parser's ParseFile() method
224 with open files that aren't instances of the standard file type
225 caused an instance of the bound .read() method to be leaked on every
226 call.
227
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000228- Fixed some leaks in the locale module.
229
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000230Library
231-------
232
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000233- Lib/encodings/rot_13.py when used as a script, now more properly
234 uses the first Python interpreter on your path.
235
236- Removed caching of TimeRE (and thus LocaleTime) in _strptime.py to
237 fix a locale related bug in the test suite. Although another patch
238 was needed to actually fix the problem, the cache code was not
239 restored.
240
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +0000241IDLE
242----
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000243
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +0000244- Calltips patches.
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000245
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000246Build
247-----
248
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000249- For MacOSX, added -mno-fused-madd to BASECFLAGS to fix test_coercion
250 on Panther (OSX 10.3).
251
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000252C API
253-----
254
255Windows
256-------
257
Tim Peters291f14e2003-07-22 02:50:01 +0000258- The tempfile module could do insane imports on Windows if PYTHONCASEOK
259 was set, making temp file creation impossible. Repaired.
260
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000261- Add a patch to workaround pthread_sigmask() bugs in Cygwin.
262
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000263Mac
264---
265
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000266- Various fixes to pimp.
267
268- Scripts runs with pythonw no longer had full window manager access.
269
270- Don't force boot-disk-only install, for reasons unknown it causes
271 more problems than it solves.
272
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000273
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000274What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 1?
275=============================================
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000276
Jeremy Hylton0ed18c22003-07-18 20:10:02 +0000277*Release date: 18-Jul-2003*
278
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000279Core and builtins
280-----------------
281
Tim Peterse5e065b2003-07-06 18:36:54 +0000282- The new function sys.getcheckinterval() returns the last value set
283 by sys.setcheckinterval().
284
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000285- Several bugs in the symbol table phase of the compiler have been
286 fixed. Errors could be lost and compilation could fail without
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000287 reporting an error. SF patch 763201.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000288
289- The interpreter is now more robust about importing the warnings
290 module. In an executable generated by freeze or similar programs,
291 earlier versions of 2.3 would fail if the warnings module could
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000292 not be found on the file system. Fixes SF bug 771097.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000293
294- A warning about assignments to module attributes that shadow
295 builtins, present in earlier releases of 2.3, has been removed.
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000296
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000297- It is not possible to create subclasses of builtin types like str
298 and tuple that define an itemsize. Earlier releases of Python 2.3
299 allowed this by mistake, leading to crashes and other problems.
300
301- The thread_id is now initialized to 0 in a non-thread build. SF bug
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000302 770247.
303
304- SF bug 762891: "del p[key]" on proxy object no longer raises SystemError.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000305
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000306Extension modules
307-----------------
308
309- weakref.proxy() can now handle "del obj[i]" for proxy objects
310 defining __delitem__. Formerly, it generated a SystemError.
311
312- SSL no longer crashes the interpreter when the remote side disconnects.
313
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +0000314- On Unix the mmap module can again be used to map device files.
315
Brett Cannon20def8b2003-07-01 05:16:08 +0000316- time.strptime now exclusively uses the Python implementation
317 contained within the _strptime module.
318
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000319- The print slot of weakref proxy objects was removed, because it was
320 not consistent with the object's repr slot.
321
322- The mmap module only checks file size for regular files, not
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000323 character or block devices. SF patch 708374.
324
325- The cPickle Pickler garbage collection support was fixed to traverse
326 the find_class attribute, if present.
327
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000328- There are several fixes for the bsddb3 wrapper module.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000329
330 bsddb3 no longer crashes if an environment is closed before a cursor
331 (SF bug 763298).
332
333 The DB and DBEnv set_get_returns_none function was extended to take
Barry Warsawd71a5512003-07-20 18:00:54 +0000334 a level instead of a boolean flag. The new level 2 means that in
335 addition, cursor.set()/.get() methods return None instead of raising
336 an exception.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000337
338 A typo was fixed in DBCursor.join_item(), preventing a crash.
339
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000340Library
341-------
342
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000343- distutils now supports MSVC 7.1
344
Raymond Hettinger71adf7e2003-07-16 19:25:22 +0000345- doctest now examines all docstrings by default. Previously, it would
346 skip over functions with private names (as indicated by the underscore
347 naming convention). The old default created too much of a risk that
348 user tests were being skipped inadvertently. Note, this change could
349 break code in the unlikely case that someone had intentionally put
350 failing tests in the docstrings of private functions. The breakage
351 is easily fixable by specifying the old behavior when calling testmod()
352 or Tester().
353
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000354- There were several fixes to the way dumbdbms are closed. It's vital
355 that a dumbdbm database be closed properly, else the on-disk data
356 and directory files can be left in mutually inconsistent states.
357 dumbdbm.py's _Database.__del__() method attempted to close the
358 database properly, but a shutdown race in _Database._commit() could
359 prevent this from working, so that a program trusting __del__() to
360 get the on-disk files in synch could be badly surprised. The race
361 has been repaired. A sync() method was also added so that shelve
362 can guarantee data is written to disk.
Tim Peters7a6c7332003-07-13 17:21:10 +0000363
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000364 The close() method can now be called more than once without complaint.
Tim Petersd7472ec2003-07-13 02:22:03 +0000365
Tim Peters59aba122003-07-01 20:01:55 +0000366- The classes in threading.py are now new-style classes. That they
367 weren't before was an oversight.
368
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000369- The urllib2 digest authentication handlers now define the correct
370 auth_header. The earlier versions would fail at runtime.
371
Neal Norwitze7dfe212003-07-01 14:59:46 +0000372- SF bug 763023: fix uncaught ZeroDivisionError in difflib ratio methods
373 when there are no lines.
374
Neal Norwitz3c0f2c92003-07-01 21:12:47 +0000375- SF bug 763637: fix exception in Tkinter with after_cancel
376 which could occur with Tk 8.4
377
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000378- SF bug 770601: CGIHTTPServer.py now passes the entire environment
379 to child processes.
380
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000381- SF bug 765238: add filter to fnmatch's __all__.
382
383- SF bug 748201: make time.strptime() error messages more helpful.
384
385- SF patch 764470: Do not dump the args attribute of a Fault object in
386 xmlrpclib.
387
388- SF patch 549151: urllib and urllib2 now redirect POSTs on 301
389 responses.
390
391- SF patch 766650: The whichdb module was fixed to recognize dbm files
392 generated by gdbm on OS/2 EMX.
393
394- SF bugs 763047 and 763052: fixes bug of timezone value being left as
395 -1 when ``time.tzname[0] == time.tzname[1] and not time.daylight``
396 is true when it should only when time.daylight is true.
397
398- SF bug 764548: re now allows subclasses of str and unicode to be
399 used as patterns.
400
401- SF bug 763637: In Tkinter, change after_cancel() to handle tuples
402 of varying sizes. Tk 8.4 returns a different number of values
403 than Tk 8.3.
404
405- SF bug 763023: difflib.ratio() did not catch zero division.
406
407- The Queue module now has an __all__ attribute.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000408
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000409Tools/Demos
410-----------
411
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000412- See Lib/idlelib/NEWS.txt for IDLE news.
413
Neal Norwitz592c4cc2003-07-01 04:14:28 +0000414- SF bug 753592: webchecker/wsgui now handles user supplied directories.
415
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000416- The trace.py script has been removed. It is now in the standard library.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000417
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000418Build
419-----
420
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000421- Python now compiles with -fno-strict-aliasing if possible (SF bug 766696).
422
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000423- The socket module compiles on IRIX 6.5.10.
424
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000425- An irix64 system is treated the same way as an irix6 system (SF
426 patch 764560).
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000427
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000428- Several definitions were missing on FreeBSD 5.x unless the
429 __BSD_VISIBLE symbol was defined. configure now defines it as
430 needed.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000431
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000432C API
433-----
434
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000435- Unicode objects now support mbcs as a built-in encoding, so the C
436 API can use it without deferring to the encodings package.
437
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000438Windows
439-------
440
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000441- The Windows implementation of PyThread_start_new_thread() never
442 checked error returns from Windows functions correctly. As a result,
443 it could claim to start a new thread even when the Microsoft
444 _beginthread() function failed (due to "too many threads" -- this is
445 on the order of thousands when it happens). In these cases, the
446 Python exception ::
447
448 thread.error: can't start new thread
449
450 is raised now.
451
452- SF bug 766669: Prevent a GPF on interpreter exit when sockets are in
453 use. The interpreter now calls WSACleanup() from Py_Finalize()
454 instead of from DLL teardown.
455
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000456Mac
457---
458
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000459- Bundlebuilder now inherits default values in the right way. It was
Walter Dörwald73a8a4b2003-07-30 12:14:02 +0000460 previously possible for app bundles to get a type of "BNDL" instead
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000461 of "APPL." Other improvements include, a --build-id option to
462 specify the CFBundleIdentifier and using the --python option to set
463 the executable in the bundle.
464
465- Fixed two bugs in MacOSX framework handling.
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000466
Jack Jansene0040412003-07-23 22:17:28 +0000467- pythonw did not allow user interaction in 2.3rc1, this has been fixed.
468
469- Python is now compiled with -mno-fused-madd, making all tests pass
470 on Panther.
471
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000472What's New in Python 2.3 beta 2?
473================================
474
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +0000475*Release date: 29-Jun-2003*
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000476
477Core and builtins
478-----------------
479
Barry Warsaw883f2232003-06-29 17:10:11 +0000480- A program can now set the environment variable PYTHONINSPECT to some
481 string value in Python, and cause the interpreter to enter the
482 interactive prompt at program exit, as if Python had been invoked
483 with the -i option.
484
Raymond Hettingerd05abde2003-06-17 05:05:49 +0000485- list.index() now accepts optional start and stop arguments. Similar
486 changes were made to UserList.index(). SF feature request 754014.
487
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +0000488- SF patch 751998 fixes an unwanted side effect of the previous fix
489 for SF bug 742860 (the next item).
490
Tim Peters50d8b8b2003-05-25 17:44:31 +0000491- SF bug 742860: "WeakKeyDictionary __delitem__ uses iterkeys". This
492 wasn't threadsafe, was very inefficient (expected time O(len(dict))
493 instead of O(1)), and could raise a spurious RuntimeError if another
494 thread mutated the dict during __delitem__, or if a comparison function
495 mutated it. It also neglected to raise KeyError when the key wasn't
496 present; didn't raise TypeError when the key wasn't of a weakly
497 referencable type; and broke various more-or-less obscure dict
498 invariants by using a sequence of equality comparisons over the whole
499 set of dict keys instead of computing the key's hash code to narrow
500 the search to those keys with the same hash code. All of these are
501 considered to be bugs. A new implementation of __delitem__ repairs all
502 that, but note that fixing these bugs may change visible behavior in
503 code relying (whether intentionally or accidentally) on old behavior.
Tim Peters886128f2003-05-25 01:45:11 +0000504
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000505- SF bug 734869: Fixed a compiler bug that caused a fatal error when
506 compiling a list comprehension that contained another list comprehension
507 embedded in a lambda expression.
508
Tim Peterse87568d2003-05-24 20:18:24 +0000509- SF bug 705231: builtin pow() no longer lets the platform C pow()
510 raise -1.0 to integer powers, because (at least) glibc gets it wrong
511 in some cases. The result should be -1.0 if the power is odd and 1.0
512 if the power is even, and any float with a sufficiently large exponent
513 is (mathematically) an exact even integer.
514
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000515- SF bug 759227: A new-style class that implements __nonzero__() must
516 return a bool or int (but not an int subclass) from that method. This
517 matches the restriction on classic classes.
518
Martin v. Löwis5467d4c2003-05-10 07:10:12 +0000519- The encoding attribute has been added for file objects, and set to
520 the terminal encoding on Unix and Windows.
521
Tim Peters015dd822003-05-04 04:16:52 +0000522- The softspace attribute of file objects became read-only by oversight.
523 It's writable again.
524
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +0000525- Reverted a 2.3 beta 1 change to iterators for subclasses of list and
526 tuple. By default, the iterators now access data elements directly
527 instead of going through __getitem__. If __getitem__ access is
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +0000528 preferred, then __iter__ can be overridden.
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +0000529
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000530- SF bug 735247: The staticmethod and super types participate in
531 garbage collection. Before this change, it was possible for leaks to
532 occur in functions with non-global free variables that used these types.
533
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000534Extension modules
535-----------------
536
Raymond Hettinger643bcec2003-06-29 03:29:42 +0000537- the socket module has a new exception, socket.timeout, to allow
538 timeouts to be handled separately from other socket errors.
539
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000540- SF bug 751276: cPickle has fixed to propagate exceptions raised in
541 user code. In earlier versions, cPickle caught and ignored any
542 exception when it performed operations that it expected to raise
543 specific exceptions like AttributeError.
544
545- cPickle Pickler and Unpickler objects now participate in garbage
546 collection.
547
Tim Peterscda32b72003-06-15 23:13:35 +0000548- mimetools.choose_boundary() could return duplicate strings at times,
549 especially likely on Windows. The strings returned are now guaranteed
550 unique within a single program run.
551
Brett Cannon4e64d782003-06-13 23:44:35 +0000552- thread.interrupt_main() raises KeyboardInterrupt in the main thread.
553 dummy_thread has also been modified to try to simulate the behavior.
554
Walter Dörwald9e46abe2003-05-18 03:15:10 +0000555- array.array.insert() now treats negative indices as being relative
556 to the end of the array, just like list.insert() does. (SF bug #739313)
557
Tim Petersb0c854d2003-05-17 15:57:00 +0000558- The datetime module classes datetime, time, and timedelta are now
559 properly subclassable.
Tim Petersa98924a2003-05-17 05:55:19 +0000560
Martin v. Löwis28e9ce92003-05-09 08:19:48 +0000561- _tkinter.{get|set}busywaitinterval was added.
562
Raymond Hettinger834f4632003-05-02 20:24:56 +0000563- itertools.islice() now accepts stop=None as documented.
564 Fixes SF bug #730685.
565
Skip Montanaro8c044d82003-05-06 20:42:37 +0000566- the bsddb185 module is built in one restricted instance -
567 /usr/include/db.h exists and defines HASHVERSION to be 2. This is true
568 for many BSD-derived systems.
569
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000570
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000571Library
572-------
573
Tim Petersdb3756d2003-06-29 05:30:48 +0000574- Some happy doctest extensions from Jim Fulton have been added to
575 doctest.py. These are already being used in Zope3. The two
576 primary ones:
577
578 doctest.debug(module, name) extracts the doctests from the named object
579 in the given module, puts them in a temp file, and starts pdb running
580 on that file. This is great when a doctest fails.
581
582 doctest.DocTestSuite(module=None) returns a synthesized unittest
583 TestSuite instance, to be run by the unittest framework, which
584 runs all the doctests in the module. This allows writing tests in
585 doctest style (which can be clearer and shorter than writing tests
586 in unittest style), without losing unittest's powerful testing
587 framework features (which doctest lacks).
588
Tim Peters6ebe61f2003-06-27 20:48:05 +0000589- For compatibility with doctests created before 2.3, if an expected
590 output block consists solely of "1" and the actual output block
591 consists solely of "True", it's accepted as a match; similarly
592 for "0" and "False". This is quite un-doctest-like, but is practical.
593 The behavior can be disabled by passing the new doctest module
594 constant DONT_ACCEPT_TRUE_FOR_1 to the new optionflags optional
595 argument.
596
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000597- ZipFile.testzip() now only traps BadZipfile exceptions. Previously,
598 a bare except caught to much and reported all errors as a problem
599 in the archive.
600
601- The logging module now has a new function, makeLogRecord() making
602 LogHandler easier to interact with DatagramHandler and SocketHandler.
603
Skip Montanaro364ca402003-06-17 12:58:31 +0000604- The cgitb module has been extended to support plain text display (SF patch
605 569574).
606
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +0000607- A brand new version of IDLE (from the IDLEfork project at
608 SourceForge) is now included as Lib/idlelib. The old Tools/idle is
609 no more.
610
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000611- Added a new module: trace (documentation missing). This module used
612 to be distributed in Tools/scripts. It uses sys.settrace() to trace
613 code execution -- either function calls or individual lines. It can
614 generate tracing output during execution or a post-mortem report of
615 code coverage.
616
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +0000617- The threading module has new functions settrace() and setprofile()
618 that cooperate with the functions of the same name in the sys
619 module. A function registered with the threading module will
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000620 be used for all threads it creates. The new trace module uses this
621 to provide tracing for code running in threads.
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +0000622
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +0000623- copy.py: applied SF patch 707900, fixing bug 702858, by Steven
624 Taschuk. Copying a new-style class that had a reference to itself
625 didn't work. (The same thing worked fine for old-style classes.)
Martin v. Löwisba8f5ff2003-06-14 07:10:06 +0000626 Builtin functions are now treated as atomic, fixing bug #746304.
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +0000627
Raymond Hettingerc24d7672003-06-08 19:42:33 +0000628- difflib.py has two new functions: context_diff() and unified_diff().
629
Guido van Rossumfa19f7c2003-05-16 01:46:51 +0000630- More fixes to urllib (SF 549151): (a) When redirecting, always use
631 GET. This is common practice and more-or-less sanctioned by the
632 HTTP standard. (b) Add a handler for 307 redirection, which becomes
633 an error for POST, but a regular redirect for GET and HEAD
634
Guido van Rossumbf1bef82003-05-13 18:01:19 +0000635- Added optional 'onerror' argument to os.walk(), to control error
636 handling.
637
Martin v. Löwise59e2ba2003-05-03 09:09:02 +0000638- inspect.is{method|data}descriptor was added, to allow pydoc display
639 __doc__ of data descriptors.
640
Skip Montanaro4a7751c2003-04-29 21:07:16 +0000641- Fixed socket speed loss caused by use of the _socketobject wrapper class
642 in socket.py.
643
Raymond Hettinger22952a32003-05-20 04:59:56 +0000644- timeit.py now checks the current directory for imports.
645
Gustavo Niemeyer9556fba2003-06-07 17:53:08 +0000646- urllib2.py now knows how to order proxy classes, so the user doesn't
647 have to insert it in front of other classes, nor do dirty tricks like
648 inserting a "dummy" HTTPHandler after a ProxyHandler when building an
649 opener with proxy support.
650
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +0000651- Iterators have been added for dbm keys.
652
653- random.Random objects can now be pickled.
654
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000655Tools/Demos
656-----------
657
Martin v. Löwisb8c084e2003-06-14 09:03:46 +0000658- pydoc now offers help on keywords and topics.
659
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +0000660- Tools/idle is gone; long live Lib/idlelib.
661
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +0000662- diff.py prints file diffs in context, unified, or ndiff formats,
663 providing a command line interface to difflib.py.
Raymond Hettinger2f3c74a2003-06-08 23:10:15 +0000664
Raymond Hettinger71e00332003-05-10 03:30:13 +0000665- texcheck.py is a new script for making a rough validation of Python LaTeX
666 files.
667
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000668Build
669-----
670
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +0000671- Setting DESTDIR during 'make install' now allows specifying a
Martin v. Löwis3b8ee082003-05-11 20:25:35 +0000672 different root directory.
673
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000674C API
675-----
676
Tim Peters3cfe7542003-05-21 21:29:48 +0000677- PyType_Ready(): If a type declares that it participates in gc
678 (Py_TPFLAGS_HAVE_GC), and its base class does not, and its base class's
679 tp_free slot is the default _PyObject_Del, and type does not define
680 a tp_free slot itself, _PyObject_GC_Del is assigned to type->tp_free.
681 Previously _PyObject_Del was inherited, which could at best lead to a
682 segfault. In addition, if even after this magic the type's tp_free
683 slot is _PyObject_Del or NULL, and the type is a base type
684 (Py_TPFLAGS_BASETYPE), TypeError is raised: since the type is a base
685 type, its dealloc function must call type->tp_free, and since the type
686 is gc'able, tp_free must not be NULL or _PyObject_Del.
687
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +0000688- PyThreadState_SetAsyncExc(): A new API (deliberately accessible only
689 from C) to interrupt a thread by sending it an exception. It is
690 intentional that you have to write your own C extension to call it
691 from Python.
692
693
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000694New platforms
695-------------
696
697None this time.
698
699Tests
700-----
701
702- test_imp rewritten so that it doesn't raise RuntimeError if run as a
703 side effect of being imported ("import test.autotest").
704
705Windows
706-------
707
Tim Petersfaa697a2003-06-22 01:42:20 +0000708- The Windows installer ships with Tcl/Tk 8.4.3 (upgraded from 8.4.1).
709
Tim Petersc4607da2003-05-08 18:13:59 +0000710- The installer always suggested that Python be installed on the C:
711 drive, due to a hardcoded "C:" generated by the Wise installation
712 wizard. People with machines where C: is not the system drive
713 usually want Python installed on whichever drive is their system drive
714 instead. We removed the hardcoded "C:", and two testers on machines
715 where C: is not the system drive report that the installer now
716 suggests their system drive. Note that you can always select the
717 directory you want in the "Select Destination Directory" dialog --
718 that's what it's for.
719
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000720Mac
721---
722
Just van Rossum99bc1fc2003-05-09 15:01:25 +0000723- There's a new module called "autoGIL", which offers a mechanism to
724 automatically release the Global Interpreter Lock when an event loop
725 goes to sleep, allowing other threads to run. It's currently only
726 supported on OSX, in the Mach-O version.
Jack Jansenf5e23ff2003-06-16 13:53:40 +0000727- The OSA modules now allow direct access to properties of the
728 toplevel application class (in AppleScript terminology).
729- The Package Manager can now update itself.
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000730
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +0000731SourceForge Bugs and Patches Applied
732------------------------------------
733
734430160, 471893, 501716, 542562, 549151, 569574, 595837, 596434,
735598163, 604210, 604716, 610332, 612627, 614770, 620190, 621891,
736622042, 639139, 640236, 644345, 649742, 649742, 658233, 660022,
737661318, 661676, 662807, 662923, 666219, 672855, 678325, 682347,
738683486, 684981, 685773, 686254, 692776, 692959, 693094, 696777,
739697989, 700827, 703666, 708495, 708604, 708901, 710733, 711902,
740713722, 715782, 718286, 719359, 719367, 723136, 723831, 723962,
741724588, 724767, 724767, 725942, 726150, 726446, 726869, 727051,
742727719, 727719, 727805, 728277, 728563, 728656, 729096, 729103,
743729293, 729297, 729300, 729317, 729395, 729622, 729817, 730170,
744730296, 730594, 730685, 730826, 730963, 731209, 731403, 731504,
745731514, 731626, 731635, 731643, 731644, 731644, 731689, 732124,
746732143, 732234, 732284, 732284, 732479, 732761, 732783, 732951,
747733667, 733781, 734118, 734231, 734869, 735051, 735293, 735527,
748735613, 735694, 736962, 736962, 737970, 738066, 739313, 740055,
749740234, 740301, 741806, 742126, 742741, 742860, 742860, 742911,
750744041, 744104, 744238, 744687, 744877, 745055, 745478, 745525,
751745620, 746012, 746304, 746366, 746801, 746953, 747348, 747667,
752747954, 748846, 748849, 748973, 748975, 749191, 749210, 749759,
753749831, 749911, 750008, 750092, 750542, 750595, 751038, 751107,
754751276, 751451, 751916, 751941, 751956, 751998, 752671, 753451,
755753602, 753617, 753845, 753925, 754014, 754340, 754447, 755031,
756755087, 755147, 755245, 755683, 755987, 756032, 756996, 757058,
757757229, 757818, 757821, 757822, 758112, 758910, 759227, 759889,
758760257, 760703, 760792, 761104, 761337, 761519, 761830, 762455
759
760
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000761What's New in Python 2.3 beta 1?
762================================
763
Guido van Rossumfa1eddf2003-04-25 19:19:52 +0000764*Release date: 25-Apr-2003*
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000765
766Core and builtins
767-----------------
768
Thomas Heller5eccabc2003-04-23 19:35:25 +0000769- New format codes B, H, I, k and K have been implemented for
770 PyArg_ParseTuple and PyBuild_Value.
771
Alex Martellia70b1912003-04-22 08:12:33 +0000772- New builtin function sum(seq, start=0) returns the sum of all the
773 items in iterable object seq, plus start (items are normally numbers,
774 and cannot be strings).
775
Guido van Rossumaa86e352003-04-19 18:15:10 +0000776- bool() called without arguments now returns False rather than
777 raising an exception. This is consistent with calling the
778 constructors for the other builtin types -- called without argument
779 they all return the false value of that type. (SF patch #724135)
780
Guido van Rossumcf8d2852003-04-17 16:53:26 +0000781- In support of PEP 269 (making the pgen parser generator accessible
782 from Python), some changes to the pgen code structure were made; a
783 few files that used to be linked only with pgen are now linked with
784 Python itself.
785
Guido van Rossumc1f6e8c2003-04-16 21:13:23 +0000786- The repr() of a weakref object now shows the __name__ attribute of
787 the referenced object, if it has one.
788
Guido van Rossum76ba09f2003-04-16 19:40:58 +0000789- super() no longer ignores data descriptors, except __class__. See
790 the thread started at
791 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2003-April/034338.html
792
Guido van Rossum3a3cca52003-04-14 20:58:14 +0000793- list.insert(i, x) now interprets negative i as it would be
794 interpreted by slicing, so negative values count from the end of the
795 list. This was the only place where such an interpretation was not
796 placed on a list index.
797
Guido van Rossumefbbb1c2003-04-11 18:43:06 +0000798- range() now works even if the arguments are longs with magnitude
799 larger than sys.maxint, as long as the total length of the sequence
800 fits. E.g., range(2**100, 2**101, 2**100) is the following list:
801 [1267650600228229401496703205376L]. (SF patch #707427.)
802
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +0000803- Some horridly obscure problems were fixed involving interaction
804 between garbage collection and old-style classes with "ambitious"
805 getattr hooks. If an old-style instance didn't have a __del__ method,
806 but did have a __getattr__ hook, and the instance became reachable
807 only from an unreachable cycle, and the hook resurrected or deleted
808 unreachable objects when asked to resolve "__del__", anything up to
809 a segfault could happen. That's been repaired.
810
Raymond Hettingera3e1e4c2003-03-06 23:54:28 +0000811- dict.pop now takes an optional argument specifying a default
812 value to return if the key is not in the dict. If a default is not
813 given and the key is not found, a KeyError will still be raised.
814 Parallel changes were made to UserDict.UserDict and UserDict.DictMixin.
815 [SF patch #693753] (contributed by Michael Stone.)
816
Martin v. Löwis73d538b2003-03-05 15:13:47 +0000817- sys.getfilesystemencoding() was added to expose
818 Py_FileSystemDefaultEncoding.
Guido van Rossum46d3dc32003-03-01 03:20:41 +0000819
820- New function sys.exc_clear() clears the current exception. This is
821 rarely needed, but can sometimes be useful to release objects
822 referenced by the traceback held in sys.exc_info()[2]. (SF patch
823 #693195.)
824
Neal Norwitzd5a65a72003-02-23 23:11:41 +0000825- On 64-bit systems, a dictionary could contain duplicate long/int keys
826 if the key value was larger than 2**32. See SF bug #689659.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000827
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +0000828- Fixed SF bug #663074. The codec system was using global static
Walter Dörwaldfa86bf52003-03-31 16:15:13 +0000829 variables to store internal data. As a result, any attempts to use the
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +0000830 unicode system with multiple active interpreters, or successive
831 interpreter executions, would fail.
832
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +0000833- "%c" % u"a" now returns a unicode string instead of raising a
Walter Dörwald44f527f2003-04-02 16:37:24 +0000834 TypeError. u"%c" % 0xffffffff now raises a OverflowError instead
Walter Dörwald1e469c52003-04-02 16:57:59 +0000835 of a ValueError to be consistent with "%c" % 256. See SF patch #710127.
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +0000836
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000837Extension modules
838-----------------
839
Guido van Rossume7adda92003-04-25 05:52:37 +0000840- The socket module now provides the functions inet_pton and inet_ntop
841 for converting between string and packed representation of IP
842 addresses. There is also a new module variable, has_ipv6, which is
843 True iff the current Python has IPv6 support. See SF patch #658327.
844
Martin v. Löwisbfe175c2003-04-16 19:42:51 +0000845- Tkinter wrappers around Tcl variables now pass objects directly
846 to Tcl, instead of first converting them to strings.
847
Guido van Rossum41c99e72003-04-14 17:59:34 +0000848- The .*? pattern in the re module is now special-cased to avoid the
849 recursion limit. (SF patch #720991 -- many thanks to Gary Herron
850 and Greg Chapman.)
851
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +0000852- New function sys.call_tracing() allows pdb to debug code
853 recursively.
854
Tim Peters730f5532003-04-08 17:17:17 +0000855- New function gc.get_referents(obj) returns a list of objects
Tim Peters0f81ab62003-04-08 16:39:48 +0000856 directly referenced by obj. In effect, it exposes what the object's
857 tp_traverse slot does, and can be helpful when debugging memory
858 leaks.
859
Martin v. Löwis7fb697b2003-04-03 04:49:12 +0000860- The iconv module has been removed from this release.
861
Tim Petersd50ade62003-03-20 18:32:13 +0000862- The platform-independent routines for packing floats in IEEE formats
863 (struct.pack's <f, >f, <d, and >d codes; pickle and cPickle's protocol 1
864 pickling of floats) ignored that rounding can cause a carry to
865 propagate. The worst consequence was that, in rare cases, <f and >f
866 could produce strings that, when unpacked again, were a factor of 2
867 away from the original float. This has been fixed. See SF bug
868 #705836.
869
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +0000870- New function time.tzset() provides access to the C library tzset()
Guido van Rossumd11b62e2003-03-14 21:51:36 +0000871 function, if supported. (SF patch #675422.)
872
Neal Norwitz12e22172003-03-03 21:16:39 +0000873- Using createfilehandler, deletefilehandler, createtimerhandler functions
874 on Tkinter.tkinter (_tkinter module) no longer crashes the interpreter.
875 See SF bug #692416.
876
Michael W. Hudsonf0089982003-03-03 12:29:42 +0000877- Modified the fcntl.ioctl() function to allow modification of a passed
878 mutable buffer (for details see the reference documentation).
879
Raymond Hettinger61fe64d2003-02-23 04:40:07 +0000880- Made user requested changes to the itertools module.
881 Subsumed the times() function into repeat().
882 Added chain() and cycle().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000883
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +0000884- The rotor module is now deprecated; the encryption algorithm it uses
Andrew M. Kuchlingfb5f4852003-04-24 13:19:56 +0000885 is not believed to be secure, and including crypto code with Python
886 has implications for exporting and importing it in various countries.
887
Skip Montanaro89feabc2003-03-30 04:54:24 +0000888- The socket module now always uses the _socketobject wrapper class, even on
889 platforms which have dup(2). The makefile() method is built directly
890 on top of the socket without duplicating the file descriptor, allowing
891 timeouts to work properly.
892
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000893Library
894-------
895
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +0000896- New generator function os.walk() is an easy-to-use alternative to
897 os.path.walk(). See os module docs for details. os.path.walk()
898 isn't deprecated at this time, but may become deprecated in a
899 future release.
900
Marc-André Lemburg246d8472003-04-24 11:36:11 +0000901- Added new module "platform" which provides a wide range of tools
902 for querying platform dependent features.
903
Andrew M. Kuchling4e42b312003-04-24 16:45:05 +0000904- netrc now allows ASCII punctuation characters in passwords.
Raymond Hettinger1d877862003-04-23 19:06:08 +0000905
Martin v. Löwis153c9e42003-04-19 20:59:03 +0000906- shelve now supports the optional writeback argument, and exposes
907 pickle protocol versions.
908
Guido van Rossuma2685402003-04-19 18:04:57 +0000909- Several methods of nntplib.NNTP have grown an optional file argument
910 which specifies a file where to divert the command's output
911 (already supported by the body() method). (SF patch #720468)
912
Martin v. Löwis281b2c62003-04-18 21:04:39 +0000913- The self-documenting XML server library DocXMLRPCServer was added.
914
Martin v. Löwis2548c732003-04-18 10:39:54 +0000915- Support for internationalized domain names has been added through
916 the 'idna' and 'punycode' encodings, the 'stringprep' module, the
917 'mkstringprep' tool, and enhancements to the socket and httplib
918 modules.
919
Walter Dörwald5688b7a2003-04-16 09:46:13 +0000920- htmlentitydefs has two new dictionaries: name2codepoint maps
921 HTML entity names to Unicode codepoints (as integers).
922 codepoint2name is the reverse mapping. See SF patch #722017.
923
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +0000924- pdb has a new command, "debug", which lets you step through
925 arbitrary code from the debugger's (pdb) prompt.
926
Raymond Hettingerc377cbf2003-04-04 22:56:42 +0000927- unittest.failUnlessEqual and its equivalent unittest.assertEqual now
928 return 'not a == b' rather than 'a != b'. This gives the desired
929 result for classes that define __eq__ without defining __ne__.
930
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +0000931- sgmllib now supports SGML marked sections, in particular the
Martin v. Löwis3163a3b2003-03-30 14:25:40 +0000932 MS Office extensions.
933
Raymond Hettinger42182eb2003-03-09 05:33:33 +0000934- The urllib module now offers support for the iterator protocol.
935 SF patch 698520 contributed by Brett Cannon.
936
Guido van Rossum9589a252003-03-06 01:56:12 +0000937- New module timeit provides a simple framework for timing the
938 execution speed of expressions and statements.
939
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +0000940- sets.Set objects now support mixed-type __eq__ and __ne__, instead
941 of raising TypeError. If x is a Set object and y is a non-Set object,
942 x == y is False, and x != y is True. This is akin to the change made
943 for mixed-type comparisons of datetime objects in 2.3a2; more info
944 about the rationale is in the NEWS entry for that. See also SF bug
945 report <http://www.python.org/sf/693121>.
946
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +0000947- On Unix platforms, if os.listdir() is called with a Unicode argument,
948 it now returns Unicode strings. (This behavior was added earlier
949 to the Windows NT/2k/XP version of os.listdir().)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000950
Andrew M. Kuchling6f177d42003-02-28 22:09:33 +0000951- Distutils: both 'py_modules' and 'packages' keywords can now be specified
952 in core.setup(). Previously you could supply one or the other, but
953 not both of them. (SF patch #695090 from Bernhard Herzog)
954
Skip Montanaro64a839e2003-03-20 23:36:55 +0000955- New csv package makes it easy to read/write CSV files.
956
Gustavo Niemeyer68d8cef2003-04-17 21:31:33 +0000957- Module shlex has been extended to allow posix-like shell parsings,
958 including a split() function for easy spliting of quoted strings and
959 commands. An iterator interface was also implemented.
960
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000961Tools/Demos
962-----------
963
Tim Peters21d7d4d2003-04-18 00:45:59 +0000964- New script combinerefs.py helps analyze new PYTHONDUMPREFS output.
965 See the module docstring for details.
966
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000967Build
968-----
969
Neal Norwitz35892b92003-02-23 23:45:35 +0000970- Fix problem building on OSF1 because the compiler only accepted
971 preprocessor directives that start in column 1. (SF bug #691793.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000972
973C API
974-----
975
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +0000976- Added PyGC_Collect(), equivalent to calling gc.collect().
977
Guido van Rossum0fc8f002003-04-15 15:12:39 +0000978- PyThreadState_GetDict() was changed not to raise an exception or
979 issue a fatal error when no current thread state is available. This
980 makes it possible to print dictionaries when no thread is active.
981
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +0000982- LONG_LONG was renamed to PY_LONG_LONG. Extensions that use this and
983 need compatibility with previous versions can use this:
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +0000984
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +0000985 #ifndef PY_LONG_LONG
986 #define PY_LONG_LONG LONG_LONG
987 #endif
Martin v. Löwisb9a0f912003-03-29 10:06:18 +0000988
Raymond Hettinger1da1dbf2003-03-17 19:46:11 +0000989- Added PyObject_SelfIter() to fill the tp_iter slot for the
Raymond Hettinger01538262003-03-17 08:24:35 +0000990 typical case where the method returns its self argument.
991
Guido van Rossume5c691a2003-03-07 15:13:17 +0000992- The extended type structure used for heap types (new-style
993 classes defined by Python code using a class statement) is now
994 exported from object.h as PyHeapTypeObject. (SF patch #696193.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000995
996New platforms
997-------------
998
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +0000999None this time.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001000
1001Tests
1002-----
1003
Neal Norwitz55b61d22003-02-28 19:57:03 +00001004- test_timeout now requires -u network to be passed to regrtest to run.
1005 See SF bug #692988.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001006
1007Windows
1008-------
1009
Tim Peters11b23062003-04-23 02:39:17 +00001010- os.fsync() now exists on Windows, and calls the Microsoft _commit()
1011 function.
1012
Guido van Rossumf4050642003-04-09 19:39:06 +00001013- New function winsound.MessageBeep() wraps the Win32 API
1014 MessageBeep().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001015
1016Mac
1017---
1018
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00001019- os.listdir() now returns Unicode strings on MacOS X when called with
1020 a Unicode argument. See the general news item under "Library".
Just van Rossum46c97842003-02-25 21:42:15 +00001021
Jack Jansendeac2ac2003-02-24 11:04:17 +00001022- A new method MacOS.WMAvailable() returns true if it is safe to access
1023 the window manager, false otherwise.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001024
Jack Jansencf76be02003-03-24 12:13:54 +00001025- EasyDialogs dialogs are now movable-modal, and if the application is
1026 currently in the background they will ask to be moved to the foreground
1027 before displaying.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001028
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00001029- OSA Scripting support has improved a lot, and gensuitemodule.py can now
Jack Jansende354b72003-04-11 15:37:20 +00001030 be used by mere mortals. The documentation is now also more or less
1031 complete.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001032
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00001033- The IDE (in a framework build) now includes introductory documentation
1034 in Apple Help Viewer format.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001035
1036
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001037What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 2?
1038=================================
1039
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00001040*Release date: 19-Feb-2003*
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001041
1042Core and builtins
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00001043-----------------
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001044
Walter Dörwald2ffec022003-02-19 16:34:11 +00001045- Negative positions returned from PEP 293 error callbacks are now
1046 treated as being relative to the end of the input string. Positions
1047 that are out of bounds raise an IndexError.
1048
Guido van Rossum162e38c2003-02-19 15:25:10 +00001049- sys.path[0] (the directory from which the script is loaded) is now
1050 turned into an absolute pathname, unless it is the empty string.
1051 (SF patch #664376.)
1052
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00001053- Finally fixed the bug in compile() and exec where a string ending
1054 with an indented code block but no newline would raise SyntaxError.
1055 This would have been a four-line change in parsetok.c... Except
1056 codeop.py depends on this behavior, so a compilation flag had to be
1057 invented that causes the tokenizer to revert to the old behavior;
1058 this required extra changes to 2 .h files, 2 .c files, and 2 .py
Guido van Rossum1442dc12003-02-13 22:19:20 +00001059 files. (Fixes SF bug #501622.)
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00001060
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00001061- If a new-style class defines neither __new__ nor __init__, its
1062 constructor would ignore all arguments. This is changed now: the
1063 constructor refuses arguments in this case. This might break code
1064 that worked under Python 2.2. The simplest fix is to add a no-op
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001065 __init__: ``def __init__(self, *args, **kw): pass``.
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00001066
Guido van Rossum48035eb2003-02-12 17:05:26 +00001067- Through a bytecode optimizer bug (and I bet you didn't even know
1068 Python *had* a bytecode optimizer :-), "unsigned" hex/oct constants
1069 with a leading minus sign would come out with the wrong sign.
1070 ("Unsigned" hex/oct constants are those with a face value in the
1071 range sys.maxint+1 through sys.maxint*2+1, inclusive; these have
1072 always been interpreted as negative numbers through sign folding.)
1073 E.g. 0xffffffff is -1, and -(0xffffffff) is 1, but -0xffffffff would
1074 come out as -4294967295. This was the case in Python 2.2 through
1075 2.2.2 and 2.3a1, and in Python 2.4 it will once again have that
1076 value, but according to PEP 237 it really needs to be 1 now. This
1077 will be backported to Python 2.2.3 a well. (SF #660455)
1078
Guido van Rossum47710652003-02-12 20:48:22 +00001079- int(s, base) sometimes sign-folds hex and oct constants; it only
1080 does this when base is 0 and s.strip() starts with a '0'. When the
1081 sign is actually folded, as in int("0xffffffff", 0) on a 32-bit
1082 machine, which returns -1, a FutureWarning is now issued; in Python
1083 2.4, this will return 4294967295L, as do int("+0xffffffff", 0) and
1084 int("0xffffffff", 16) right now. (PEP 347)
1085
Guido van Rossuma89d10e2003-02-12 03:58:38 +00001086- super(X, x): x may now be a proxy for an X instance, i.e.
1087 issubclass(x.__class__, X) but not issubclass(type(x), X).
1088
Guido van Rossum03bc7d32003-02-12 03:32:58 +00001089- isinstance(x, X): if X is a new-style class, this is now equivalent
1090 to issubclass(type(x), X) or issubclass(x.__class__, X). Previously
1091 only type(x) was tested. (For classic classes this was already the
1092 case.)
1093
Just van Rossum73ffb4a2003-02-10 09:57:08 +00001094- compile(), eval() and the exec statement now fully support source code
1095 passed as unicode strings.
1096
Neal Norwitzde8b94c2003-02-10 02:12:43 +00001097- int subclasses can be initialized with longs if the value fits in an int.
1098 See SF bug #683467.
1099
Tim Petersbf2674b2003-02-02 07:51:32 +00001100- long(string, base) takes time linear in len(string) when base is a power
1101 of 2 now. It used to take time quadratic in len(string).
1102
Martin v. Löwis8afd7572003-01-25 22:46:11 +00001103- filter returns now Unicode results for Unicode arguments.
1104
Martin v. Löwisaf6a27a2003-01-03 19:16:14 +00001105- raw_input can now return Unicode objects.
1106
Skip Montanaro4abd5f02003-01-02 20:51:08 +00001107- List objects' sort() method now accepts None as the comparison function.
1108 Passing None is semantically identical to calling sort() with no
1109 arguments.
1110
Neal Norwitz1a997502003-01-13 20:13:12 +00001111- Fixed crash when printing a subclass of str and __str__ returned self.
1112 See SF bug #667147.
1113
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00001114- Fixed an invalid RuntimeWarning and an undetected error when trying
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00001115 to convert a long integer into a float which couldn't fit.
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00001116 See SF bug #676155.
1117
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00001118- Function objects now have a __module__ attribute that is bound to
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00001119 the name of the module in which the function was defined. This
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00001120 applies for C functions and methods as well as functions and methods
1121 defined in Python. This attribute is used by pickle.whichmodule(),
1122 which changes the behavior of whichmodule slightly. In Python 2.2
1123 whichmodule() returns "__main__" for functions that are not defined
1124 at the top-level of a module (examples: methods, nested functions).
1125 Now whichmodule() will return the proper module name.
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00001126
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001127Extension modules
1128-----------------
1129
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00001130- operator.isNumberType() now checks that the object has a nb_int or
1131 nb_float slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
1132 tp_as_number pointer.
1133
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00001134- The imp module now has ways to acquire and release the "import
1135 lock": imp.acquire_lock() and imp.release_lock(). Note: this is a
1136 reentrant lock, so releasing the lock only truly releases it when
1137 this is the last release_lock() call. You can check with
1138 imp.lock_held(). (SF bug #580952 and patch #683257.)
1139
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001140- Change to cPickle to match pickle.py (see below and PEP 307).
1141
Neal Norwitz9caf9c02003-02-10 01:54:06 +00001142- Fix some bugs in the parser module. SF bug #678518.
1143
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00001144- Thanks to Scott David Daniels, a subtle bug in how the zlib
Walter Dörwald28d81962003-02-03 20:53:14 +00001145 extension implemented flush() was fixed. Scott also rewrote the
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00001146 zlib test suite using the unittest module. (SF bug #640230 and
1147 patch #678531.)
1148
Raymond Hettinger96ef8112003-02-01 00:10:11 +00001149- Added an itertools module containing high speed, memory efficient
1150 looping constructs inspired by tools from Haskell and SML.
1151
Guido van Rossum99d4abf2003-01-27 22:22:50 +00001152- The SSL module now handles sockets with a timeout set correctly (SF
1153 patch #675750, fixing SF bug #675552).
1154
Barry Warsawf8ba39c2003-01-07 20:55:26 +00001155- os/posixmodule has grown the sysexits.h constants (EX_OK and friends).
1156
Guido van Rossum6d0d3652003-01-07 20:34:19 +00001157- Fixed broken threadstate swap in readline that could cause fatal
1158 errors when a readline hook was being invoked while a background
1159 thread was active. (SF bugs #660476 and #513033.)
1160
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001161- fcntl now exposes the strops.h I_* constants.
1162
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00001163- Fix a crash on Solaris that occurred when calling close() on
1164 an mmap'ed file which was already closed. (SF patch #665913)
1165
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001166- Fixed several serious bugs in the zipimport implementation.
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001167
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00001168- datetime changes:
1169
Guido van Rossum8b7a9a32003-04-14 22:01:58 +00001170 The date class is now properly subclassable. (SF bug #720908)
1171
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00001172 The datetime and datetimetz classes have been collapsed into a single
1173 datetime class, and likewise the time and timetz classes into a single
1174 time class. Previously, a datetimetz object with tzinfo=None acted
1175 exactly like a datetime object, and similarly for timetz. This wasn't
1176 enough of a difference to justify distinct classes, and life is simpler
1177 now.
1178
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00001179 today() and now() now round system timestamps to the closest
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00001180 microsecond <http://www.python.org/sf/661086>. This repairs an
1181 irritation most likely seen on Windows systems.
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00001182
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00001183 In dt.astimezone(tz), if tz.utcoffset(dt) returns a duration,
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00001184 ValueError is raised if tz.dst(dt) returns None (2.3a1 treated it
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00001185 as 0 instead, but a tzinfo subclass wishing to participate in
1186 time zone conversion has to take a stand on whether it supports
1187 DST; if you don't care about DST, then code dst() to return 0 minutes,
1188 meaning that DST is never in effect).
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00001189
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00001190 The tzinfo methods utcoffset() and dst() must return a timedelta object
1191 (or None) now. In 2.3a1 they could also return an int or long, but that
1192 was an unhelpfully redundant leftover from an earlier version wherein
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00001193 they couldn't return a timedelta. TOOWTDI.
1194
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00001195 The example tzinfo class for local time had a bug. It was replaced
1196 by a later example coded by Guido.
1197
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00001198 datetime.astimezone(tz) no longer raises an exception when the
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00001199 input datetime has no UTC equivalent in tz. For typical "hybrid" time
1200 zones (a single tzinfo subclass modeling both standard and daylight
1201 time), this case can arise one hour per year, at the hour daylight time
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00001202 ends. See new docs for details. In short, the new behavior mimics
1203 the local wall clock's behavior of repeating an hour in local time.
1204
1205 dt.astimezone() can no longer be used to convert between naive and aware
1206 datetime objects. If you merely want to attach, or remove, a tzinfo
1207 object, without any conversion of date and time members, use
1208 dt.replace(tzinfo=whatever) instead, where "whatever" is None or a
1209 tzinfo subclass instance.
1210
1211 A new method tzinfo.fromutc(dt) can be overridden in tzinfo subclasses
1212 to give complete control over how a UTC time is to be converted to
1213 a local time. The default astimezone() implementation calls fromutc()
1214 as its last step, so a tzinfo subclass can affect that too by overriding
1215 fromutc(). It's expected that the default fromutc() implementation will
1216 be suitable as-is for "almost all" time zone subclasses, but the
1217 creativity of political time zone fiddling appears unbounded -- fromutc()
1218 allows the highly motivated to emulate any scheme expressible in Python.
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00001219
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00001220 datetime.now(): The optional tzinfo argument was undocumented (that's
1221 repaired), and its name was changed to tz ("tzinfo" is overloaded enough
1222 already). With a tz argument, now(tz) used to return the local date
1223 and time, and attach tz to it, without any conversion of date and time
1224 members. This was less than useful. Now now(tz) returns the current
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001225 date and time as local time in tz's time zone, akin to ::
1226
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00001227 tz.fromutc(datetime.utcnow().replace(tzinfo=utc))
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001228
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00001229 where "utc" is an instance of a tzinfo subclass modeling UTC. Without
1230 a tz argument, now() continues to return the current local date and time,
1231 as a naive datetime object.
1232
Tim Peters2a44a8d2003-01-23 20:53:10 +00001233 datetime.fromtimestamp(): Like datetime.now() above, this had less than
1234 useful behavior when the optional tinzo argument was specified. See
1235 also SF bug report <http://www.python.org/sf/660872>.
1236
Tim Peters8d81a012003-01-24 22:36:34 +00001237 date and datetime comparison: In order to prevent comparison from
1238 falling back to the default compare-object-addresses strategy, these
1239 raised TypeError whenever they didn't understand the other object type.
1240 They still do, except when the other object has a "timetuple" attribute,
1241 in which case they return NotImplemented now. This gives other
1242 datetime objects (e.g., mxDateTime) a chance to intercept the
1243 comparison.
1244
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00001245 date, time, datetime and timedelta comparison: When the exception
1246 for mixed-type comparisons in the last paragraph doesn't apply, if
1247 the comparison is == then False is returned, and if the comparison is
1248 != then True is returned. Because dict lookup and the "in" operator
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001249 only invoke __eq__, this allows, for example, ::
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00001250
1251 if some_datetime in some_sequence:
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001252
1253 and ::
1254
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00001255 some_dict[some_timedelta] = whatever
1256
1257 to work as expected, without raising TypeError just because the
1258 sequence is heterogeneous, or the dict has mixed-type keys. [This
1259 seems like a good idea to implement for all mixed-type comparisons
1260 that don't want to allow falling back to address comparison.]
1261
Tim Peters75a6e3b2003-01-04 18:17:36 +00001262 The constructors building a datetime from a timestamp could raise
1263 ValueError if the platform C localtime()/gmtime() inserted "leap
1264 seconds". Leap seconds are ignored now. On such platforms, it's
1265 possible to have timestamps that differ by a second, yet where
1266 datetimes constructed from them are equal.
1267
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00001268 The pickle format of date, time and datetime objects has changed
1269 completely. The undocumented pickler and unpickler functions no
Tim Petersb57f8f02003-02-01 02:54:15 +00001270 longer exist. The undocumented __setstate__() and __getstate__()
1271 methods no longer exist either.
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00001272
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001273Library
1274-------
1275
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001276- The logging module was updated slightly; the WARN level was renamed
1277 to WARNING, and the matching function/method warn() to warning().
1278
1279- The pickle and cPickle modules were updated with a new pickling
1280 protocol (documented by pickletools.py, see below) and several
1281 extensions to the pickle customization API (__reduce__, __setstate__
1282 etc.). The copy module now uses more of the pickle customization
1283 API to copy objects that don't implement __copy__ or __deepcopy__.
1284 See PEP 307 for details.
1285
1286- The distutils "register" command now uses http://www.python.org/pypi
1287 as the default repository. (See PEP 301.)
1288
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00001289- the platform dependent path related variables sep, altsep, extsep,
1290 pathsep, curdir, pardir and defpath are now defined in the platform
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00001291 dependent path modules (e.g. ntpath.py) rather than os.py, so these
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001292 variables are now available via os.path. They continue to be
1293 available from the os module.
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00001294 (see <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00001295
Tim Peters6ee04802003-02-05 18:29:34 +00001296- array.array was added to the types repr.py knows about (see
1297 <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
1298
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00001299- The new pickletools.py contains lots of documentation about pickle
1300 internals, and supplies some helpers for working with pickles, such as
1301 a symbolic pickle disassembler.
1302
Skip Montanaro9a7c96a2003-01-22 18:17:25 +00001303- Xmlrpclib.py now supports the builtin boolean type.
1304
Martin v. Löwis0c6774d2003-01-15 11:51:06 +00001305- py_compile has a new 'doraise' flag and a new PyCompileError
1306 exception.
1307
Martin v. Löwisd69663d2003-01-15 11:37:23 +00001308- SimpleXMLRPCServer now supports CGI through the CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler
1309 class.
1310
Guido van Rossum50e92232003-01-14 16:45:04 +00001311- The sets module now raises TypeError in __cmp__, to clarify that
1312 sets are not intended to be three-way-compared; the comparison
1313 operators are overloaded as subset/superset tests.
1314
Guido van Rossumcd0c0472003-01-07 23:03:05 +00001315- Bastion.py and rexec.py are disabled. These modules are not safe in
1316 Python 2.2. or 2.3.
1317
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001318- realpath is now exported when doing ``from poxixpath import *``.
Neal Norwitzbb0246a2003-01-03 18:12:28 +00001319 It is also exported for ntpath, macpath, and os2emxpath.
1320 See SF bug #659228.
1321
Neal Norwitzb9ef4ae2003-01-05 23:19:43 +00001322- New module tarfile from Lars Gustäbel provides a comprehensive interface
1323 to tar archive files with transparent gzip and bzip2 compression.
1324 See SF patch #651082.
1325
Neal Norwitz4f442372003-01-06 06:51:36 +00001326- urlparse can now parse imap:// URLs. See SF feature request #618024.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001327
Neal Norwitze931ed52003-01-10 23:24:32 +00001328- Tkinter.Canvas.scan_dragto() provides an optional parameter to support
1329 the gain value which is passed to Tk. SF bug# 602259.
1330
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00001331- Fix logging.handlers.SysLogHandler protocol when using UNIX domain sockets.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00001332 See SF patch #642974.
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00001333
Skip Montanaro12fe72e2003-02-25 17:46:20 +00001334- The dospath module was deleted. Use the ntpath module when manipulating
1335 DOS paths from other platforms.
1336
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001337Tools/Demos
1338-----------
1339
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00001340- Two new scripts (db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py) were added to the
1341 Tools/scripts directory to facilitate conversion from the old bsddb module
1342 to the new one. While the user-visible API of the new module is
1343 compatible with the old one, it's likely that the version of the
1344 underlying database library has changed. To convert from the old library,
1345 run the db2pickle.py script using the old version of Python to convert it
1346 to a pickle file. After upgrading Python, run the pickle2db.py script
1347 using the new version of Python to reconstitute your database. For
1348 example:
1349
Skip Montanaro621f0552003-02-03 15:48:10 +00001350 % python2.2 db2pickle.py -h some.db > some.pickle
1351 % python2.3 pickle2db.py -h some.db.new < some.pickle
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00001352
1353 Run the scripts without any args to get a usage message.
1354
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001355
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001356Build
1357-----
1358
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00001359- The audio driver tests (test_ossaudiodev.py and
1360 test_linuxaudiodev.py) are no longer run by default. This is
1361 because they don't always work, depending on your hardware and
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001362 software. To run these tests, you must use an invocation like ::
1363
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00001364 ./python Lib/test/regrtest.py -u audio test_ossaudiodev
1365
Skip Montanarodecc6a42003-01-01 20:07:49 +00001366- On systems which build using the configure script, compiler flags which
1367 used to be lumped together using the OPT flag have been split into two
1368 groups, OPT and BASECFLAGS. OPT is meant to carry just optimization- and
1369 debug-related flags like "-g" and "-O3". BASECFLAGS is meant to carry
1370 compiler flags that are required to get a clean compile. On some
1371 platforms (many Linux flavors in particular) BASECFLAGS will be empty by
1372 default. On others, such as Mac OS X and SCO, it will contain required
1373 flags. This change allows people building Python to override OPT without
1374 fear of clobbering compiler flags which are required to get a clean build.
1375
1376- On Darwin/Mac OS X platforms, /sw/lib and /sw/include are added to the
1377 relevant search lists in setup.py. This allows users building Python to
1378 take advantage of the many packages available from the fink project
1379 <http://fink.sf.net/>.
1380
1381- A new Makefile target, scriptsinstall, installs a number of useful scripts
1382 from the Tools/scripts directory.
1383
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001384C API
1385-----
1386
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001387- PyEval_GetFrame() is now declared to return a ``PyFrameObject *``
1388 instead of a plain ``PyObject *``. (SF patch #686601.)
Guido van Rossum6297a7a2003-02-19 15:53:17 +00001389
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00001390- PyNumber_Check() now checks that the object has a nb_int or nb_float
1391 slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
1392 tp_as_number pointer.
1393
Guido van Rossumeea47182003-02-11 20:39:59 +00001394- A C type that inherits from a base type that defines tp_as_buffer
1395 will now inherit the tp_as_buffer pointer if it doesn't define one.
1396 (SF #681367)
1397
Neil Schemenauer5042da62003-02-04 20:59:40 +00001398- The PyArg_Parse functions now issue a DeprecationWarning if a float
1399 argument is provided when an integer is specified (this affects the 'b',
1400 'B', 'h', 'H', 'i', and 'l' codes). Future versions of Python will
1401 raise a TypeError.
Neil Schemenauercd63e612003-01-24 22:15:53 +00001402
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001403Tests
1404-----
1405
Walter Dörwald11cfbd62003-03-26 16:03:16 +00001406- Several tests weren't being run from regrtest.py (test_timeout.py,
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001407 test_tarfile.py, test_netrc.py, test_multifile.py,
1408 test_importhooks.py and test_imp.py). Now they are. (Note to
1409 developers: please read Lib/test/README when creating a new test, to
1410 make sure to do it right! All tests need to use either unittest or
1411 pydoc.)
1412
1413- Added test_posix.py, a test suite for the posix module.
1414
1415- Added test_hexoct.py, a test suite for hex/oct constant folding.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001416
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001417Windows
1418-------
1419
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00001420- The timeout code for socket connect() didn't work right; this has
1421 now been fixed. test_timeout.py should pass (at least most of the
1422 time).
1423
Thomas Hellerdda583d2003-01-31 20:45:41 +00001424- distutils' msvccompiler class now passes the preprocessor options to
1425 the resource compiler. See SF patch #669198.
1426
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00001427- The bsddb module now ships with Sleepycat's 4.1.25.NC, the latest
1428 release without strong cryptography.
1429
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00001430- sys.path[0], if it contains a directory name, is now always an
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001431 absolute pathname. (SF patch #664376.)
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00001432
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00001433- The new logging package is now installed by the Windows installer. It
1434 wasn't in 2.3a1 due to oversight.
1435
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001436Mac
1437---
1438
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00001439- There are new dialogs EasyDialogs.AskFileForOpen, AskFileForSave
1440 and AskFolder. The old macfs.StandardGetFile and friends are deprecated.
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00001441
Jack Jansenc9296362003-02-06 23:10:45 +00001442- Most of the standard library now uses pathnames or FSRefs in preference
1443 of FSSpecs, and use the underlying Carbon.File and Carbon.Folder modules
1444 in stead of macfs. macfs will probably be deprecated in the future.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00001445
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00001446- Type Carbon.File.FSCatalogInfo and supporting methods have been implemented.
1447 This also makes macfs.FSSpec.SetDates() work again.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001448
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00001449- There is a new module pimp, the package install manager for Python, and
1450 accompanying applet PackageManager. These allow you to easily download
1451 and install pretested extension packages either in source or binary
1452 form. Only in MacPython-OSX.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001453
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00001454- Applets are now built with bundlebuilder in MacPython-OSX, which should make
Jack Jansen5d44b342003-02-18 23:32:47 +00001455 them more robust and also provides a path towards BuildApplication. The
1456 downside of this change is that applets can no longer be run from the
1457 Terminal window, this will hopefully be fixed in the 2.3b1.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001458
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001459
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001460What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 1?
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001461=================================
1462
Guido van Rossumae548862002-12-31 15:47:36 +00001463*Release date: 31-Dec-2002*
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001464
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001465Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001466--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00001467
Michael W. Hudson96bc3b42002-11-26 14:48:23 +00001468- One can now assign to __bases__ and __name__ of new-style classes.
1469
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00001470- dict() now accepts keyword arguments so that dict(one=1, two=2)
1471 is the equivalent of {"one": 1, "two": 2}. Accordingly,
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00001472 the existing (but undocumented) 'items' keyword argument has
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00001473 been eliminated. This means that dict(items=someMapping) now has
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00001474 a different meaning than before.
1475
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00001476- int() now returns a long object if the argument is outside the
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001477 integer range, so int("4" * 1000), int(1e200) and int(1L<<1000) will
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00001478 all return long objects instead of raising an OverflowError.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001479
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00001480- Assignment to __class__ is disallowed if either the old or the new
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00001481 class is a statically allocated type object (such as defined by an
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00001482 extension module). This prevents anomalies like 2.__class__ = bool.
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00001483
1484- New-style object creation and deallocation have been sped up
1485 significantly; they are now faster than classic instance creation
1486 and deallocation.
1487
1488- The __slots__ variable can now mention "private" names, and the
1489 right thing will happen (e.g. __slots__ = ["__foo"]).
1490
1491- The built-ins slice() and buffer() are now callable types. The
1492 types classobj (formerly class), code, function, instance, and
1493 instancemethod (formerly instance-method), which have no built-in
1494 names but are accessible through the types module, are now also
1495 callable. The type dict-proxy is renamed to dictproxy.
1496
1497- Cycles going through the __class__ link of a new-style instance are
1498 now detected by the garbage collector.
1499
1500- Classes using __slots__ are now properly garbage collected.
1501 [SF bug 519621]
1502
1503- Tightened the __slots__ rules: a slot name must be a valid Python
1504 identifier.
1505
1506- The constructor for the module type now requires a name argument and
1507 takes an optional docstring argument. Previously, this constructor
1508 ignored its arguments. As a consequence, deriving a class from a
1509 module (not from the module type) is now illegal; previously this
1510 created an unnamed module, just like invoking the module type did.
1511 [SF bug 563060]
1512
1513- A new type object, 'basestring', is added. This is a common base type
1514 for 'str' and 'unicode', and can be used instead of
1515 types.StringTypes, e.g. to test whether something is "a string":
1516 isinstance(x, basestring) is True for Unicode and 8-bit strings. This
1517 is an abstract base class and cannot be instantiated directly.
1518
1519- Changed new-style class instantiation so that when C's __new__
1520 method returns something that's not a C instance, its __init__ is
1521 not called. [SF bug #537450]
1522
1523- Fixed super() to work correctly with class methods. [SF bug #535444]
1524
1525- If you try to pickle an instance of a class that has __slots__ but
1526 doesn't define or override __getstate__, a TypeError is now raised.
1527 This is done by adding a bozo __getstate__ to the class that always
1528 raises TypeError. (Before, this would appear to be pickled, but the
1529 state of the slots would be lost.)
1530
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001531Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001532-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001533
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00001534- Import from zipfiles is now supported. The name of a zipfile placed
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00001535 on sys.path causes the import statement to look for importable Python
1536 modules (with .py, pyc and .pyo extensions) and packages inside the
1537 zipfile. The zipfile import follows the specification (though not
1538 the sample implementation) of PEP 273. The semantics of __path__ are
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00001539 compatible with those that have been implemented in Jython since
1540 Jython 2.1.
1541
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001542- PEP 302 has been accepted. Although it was initially developed to
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00001543 support zipimport, it offers a new, general import hook mechanism.
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00001544 Several new variables have been added to the sys module:
1545 sys.meta_path, sys.path_hooks, and sys.path_importer_cache; these
1546 make extending the import statement much more convenient than
1547 overriding the __import__ built-in function. For a description of
1548 these, see PEP 302.
1549
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00001550- A frame object's f_lineno attribute can now be written to from a
1551 trace function to change which line will execute next. A command to
1552 exploit this from pdb has been added. [SF patch #643835]
1553
Marc-André Lemburg20b91352002-12-12 18:01:43 +00001554- The _codecs support module for codecs.py was turned into a builtin
1555 module to assure that at least the builtin codecs are available
1556 to the Python parser for source code decoding according to PEP 263.
1557
Walter Dörwaldd9a6ad32002-12-12 16:41:44 +00001558- issubclass now supports a tuple as the second argument, just like
1559 isinstance does. ``issubclass(X, (A, B))`` is equivalent to
1560 ``issubclass(X, A) or issubclass(X, B)``.
1561
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00001562- Thanks to Armin Rigo, the last known way to provoke a system crash
1563 by cleverly arranging for a comparison function to mutate a list
1564 during a list.sort() operation has been fixed. The effect of
1565 attempting to mutate a list, or even to inspect its contents or
1566 length, while a sort is in progress, is not defined by the language.
1567 The C implementation of Python 2.3 attempts to detect mutations,
1568 and raise ValueError if one occurs, but there's no guarantee that
1569 all mutations will be caught, or that any will be caught across
1570 releases or implementations.
1571
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00001572- Unicode file name processing for Windows (PEP 277) is implemented.
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00001573 All platforms now have an os.path.supports_unicode_filenames attribute,
1574 which is set to True on Windows NT/2000/XP, and False elsewhere.
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00001575
Walter Dörwald3aeb6322002-09-02 13:14:32 +00001576- Codec error handling callbacks (PEP 293) are implemented.
1577 Error handling in unicode.encode or str.decode can now be customized.
1578
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00001579- A subtle change to the semantics of the built-in function intern():
1580 interned strings are no longer immortal. You must keep a reference
1581 to the return value intern() around to get the benefit.
1582
Guido van Rossumf808b892002-08-16 03:38:10 +00001583- Use of 'None' as a variable, argument or attribute name now
1584 issues a SyntaxWarning. In the future, None may become a keyword.
1585
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00001586- SET_LINENO is gone. co_lnotab is now consulted to determine when to
1587 call the trace function. C code that accessed f_lineno should call
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00001588 PyCode_Addr2Line instead (f_lineno is still there, but only kept up
1589 to date when there is a trace function set).
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00001590
Guido van Rossum9be89462002-08-14 16:11:30 +00001591- There's a new warning category, FutureWarning. This is used to warn
1592 about a number of situations where the value or sign of an integer
1593 result will change in Python 2.4 as a result of PEP 237 (integer
1594 unification). The warnings implement stage B0 mentioned in that
1595 PEP. The warnings are about the following situations:
1596
1597 - Octal and hex literals without 'L' prefix in the inclusive range
1598 [0x80000000..0xffffffff]; these are currently negative ints, but
1599 in Python 2.4 they will be positive longs with the same bit
1600 pattern.
1601
1602 - Left shifts on integer values that cause the outcome to lose
1603 bits or have a different sign than the left operand. To be
1604 precise: x<<n where this currently doesn't yield the same value
1605 as long(x)<<n; in Python 2.4, the outcome will be long(x)<<n.
1606
1607 - Conversions from ints to string that show negative values as
1608 unsigned ints in the inclusive range [0x80000000..0xffffffff];
1609 this affects the functions hex() and oct(), and the string
1610 formatting codes %u, %o, %x, and %X. In Python 2.4, these will
1611 show signed values (e.g. hex(-1) currently returns "0xffffffff";
1612 in Python 2.4 it will return "-0x1").
1613
Guido van Rossum9a2eda52002-12-31 02:12:42 +00001614- The bits manipulated under the cover by sys.setcheckinterval() have
1615 been changed. Both the check interval and the ticker used to be
1616 per-thread values. They are now just a pair of global variables.
1617 In addition, the default check interval was boosted from 10 to 100
1618 bytecode instructions. This may have some effect on systems that
1619 relied on the old default value. In particular, in multi-threaded
1620 applications which try to be highly responsive, response time will
1621 increase by some (perhaps imperceptible) amount.
Skip Montanaro979c74b2002-09-03 21:25:14 +00001622
Tim Petersd64c1de2002-08-12 17:36:03 +00001623- When multiplying very large integers, a version of the so-called
1624 Karatsuba algorithm is now used. This is most effective if the
1625 inputs have roughly the same size. If they both have about N digits,
1626 Karatsuba multiplication has O(N**1.58) runtime (the exponent is
1627 log_base_2(3)) instead of the previous O(N**2). Measured results may
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00001628 be better or worse than that, depending on platform quirks. Besides
1629 the O() improvement in raw instruction count, the Karatsuba algorithm
1630 appears to have much better cache behavior on extremely large integers
1631 (starting in the ballpark of a million bits). Note that this is a
1632 simple implementation, and there's no intent here to compete with,
1633 e.g., GMP. It gives a very nice speedup when it applies, but a package
1634 devoted to fast large-integer arithmetic should run circles around it.
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00001635
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00001636- u'%c' will now raise a ValueError in case the argument is an
1637 integer outside the valid range of Unicode code point ordinals.
1638
Guido van Rossumdeb09362002-08-09 17:16:30 +00001639- The tempfile module has been overhauled for enhanced security. The
1640 mktemp() function is now deprecated; new, safe replacements are
1641 mkstemp() (for files) and mkdtemp() (for directories), and the
1642 higher-level functions NamedTemporaryFile() and TemporaryFile().
1643 Use of some global variables in this module is also deprecated; the
1644 new functions have keyword arguments to provide the same
1645 functionality. All Lib, Tools and Demo modules that used the unsafe
1646 interfaces have been updated to use the safe replacements. Thanks
1647 to Zack Weinberg!
1648
Guido van Rossumd81a9832002-08-09 15:57:34 +00001649- When x is an object whose class implements __mul__ and __rmul__,
1650 1.0*x would correctly invoke __rmul__, but 1*x would erroneously
1651 invoke __mul__. This was due to the sequence-repeat code in the int
1652 type. This has been fixed now.
1653
Barry Warsawd79f6832002-08-06 17:01:51 +00001654- Previously, "str1 in str2" required str1 to be a string of length 1.
1655 This restriction has been relaxed to allow str1 to be a string of
1656 any length. Thus "'el' in 'hello world'" returns True now.
1657
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00001658- File objects are now their own iterators. For a file f, iter(f) now
1659 returns f (unless f is closed), and f.next() is similar to
1660 f.readline() when EOF is not reached; however, f.next() uses a
1661 readahead buffer that messes up the file position, so mixing
1662 f.next() and f.readline() (or other methods) doesn't work right.
1663 Calling f.seek() drops the readahead buffer, but other operations
1664 don't. It so happens that this gives a nice additional speed boost
1665 to "for line in file:"; the xreadlines method and corresponding
Guido van Rossumbffb2ef2002-08-09 17:17:07 +00001666 module are now obsolete. Thanks to Oren Tirosh!
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00001667
Guido van Rossumde392d32002-08-05 14:17:20 +00001668- Encoding declarations (PEP 263, phase 1) have been implemented. A
1669 comment of the form "# -*- coding: <encodingname> -*-" in the first
1670 or second line of a Python source file indicates the encoding.
Martin v. Löwis00f1e3f2002-08-04 17:29:52 +00001671
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00001672- list.sort() has a new implementation. While cross-platform results
1673 may vary, and in data-dependent ways, this is much faster on many
1674 kinds of partially ordered lists than the previous implementation,
1675 and reported to be just as fast on randomly ordered lists on
1676 several major platforms. This sort is also stable (if A==B and A
1677 precedes B in the list at the start, A precedes B after the sort too),
1678 although the language definition does not guarantee stability. A
1679 potential drawback is that list.sort() may require temp space of
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00001680 len(list)*2 bytes (``*4`` on a 64-bit machine). It's therefore possible
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00001681 for list.sort() to raise MemoryError now, even if a comparison function
1682 does not. See <http://www.python.org/sf/587076> for full details.
1683
Guido van Rossum2d5389c2002-07-23 03:44:35 +00001684- All standard iterators now ensure that, once StopIteration has been
1685 raised, all future calls to next() on the same iterator will also
1686 raise StopIteration. There used to be various counterexamples to
1687 this behavior, which could caused confusion or subtle program
1688 breakage, without any benefits. (Note that this is still an
1689 iterator's responsibility; the iterator framework does not enforce
1690 this.)
1691
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00001692- Ctrl+C handling on Windows has been made more consistent with
1693 other platforms. KeyboardInterrupt can now reliably be caught,
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00001694 and Ctrl+C at an interactive prompt no longer terminates the
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00001695 process under NT/2k/XP (it never did under Win9x). Ctrl+C will
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00001696 interrupt time.sleep() in the main thread, and any child processes
1697 created via the popen family (on win2k; we can't make win9x work
Mark Hammond8f3afc72002-08-10 06:26:31 +00001698 reliably) are also interrupted (as generally happens on for Linux/Unix.)
1699 [SF bugs 231273, 439992 and 581232]
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00001700
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00001701- sys.getwindowsversion() has been added on Windows. This
1702 returns a tuple with information about the version of Windows
1703 currently running.
1704
Raymond Hettinger5a04aec2002-06-25 00:25:30 +00001705- Slices and repetitions of buffer objects now consistently return
1706 a string. Formerly, strings would be returned most of the time,
1707 but a buffer object would be returned when the repetition count
1708 was one or when the slice range was all inclusive.
1709
Walter Dörwald3430d702002-06-17 10:43:59 +00001710- Unicode objects in sys.path are no longer ignored but treated
1711 as directory names.
1712
Neal Norwitz1f68fc72002-06-14 00:50:42 +00001713- Fixed string.startswith and string.endswith builtin methods
1714 so they accept negative indices. [SF bug 493951]
1715
Guido van Rossumc5fe5eb2002-06-12 03:45:21 +00001716- Fixed a bug with a continue inside a try block and a yield in the
1717 finally clause. [SF bug 567538]
1718
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00001719- Most builtin sequences now support "extended slices", i.e. slices
Guido van Rossum2e82e712002-06-13 11:41:07 +00001720 with a third "stride" parameter. For example, "hello world"[::-1]
1721 gives "dlrow olleh".
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00001722
Neal Norwitzd68f5172002-05-29 15:54:55 +00001723- A new warning PendingDeprecationWarning was added to provide
1724 direction on features which are in the process of being deprecated.
1725 The warning will not be printed by default. To see the pending
1726 deprecations, use -Walways::PendingDeprecationWarning::
1727 as a command line option or warnings.filterwarnings() in code.
1728
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00001729- Deprecated features of xrange objects have been removed as
1730 promised. The start, stop, and step attributes and the tolist()
1731 method no longer exist. xrange repetition and slicing have been
1732 removed.
1733
Guido van Rossum7dab2422002-04-26 19:40:56 +00001734- New builtin function enumerate(x), from PEP 279. Example:
1735 enumerate("abc") is an iterator returning (0,"a"), (1,"b"), (2,"c").
1736 The argument can be an arbitrary iterable object.
1737
Neil Schemenauer89e3ee02002-04-26 01:58:53 +00001738- The assert statement no longer tests __debug__ at runtime. This means
1739 that assert statements cannot be disabled by assigning a false value
1740 to __debug__.
1741
Walter Dörwald068325e2002-04-15 13:36:47 +00001742- A method zfill() was added to str and unicode, that fills a numeric
1743 string to the left with zeros. For example,
1744 "+123".zfill(6) -> "+00123".
1745
Guido van Rossum862fe3c2002-04-15 12:36:47 +00001746- Complex numbers supported divmod() and the // and % operators, but
1747 these make no sense. Since this was documented, they're being
1748 deprecated now.
1749
Guido van Rossum26dd8302002-04-26 20:11:29 +00001750- String and unicode methods lstrip(), rstrip() and strip() now take
1751 an optional argument that specifies the characters to strip. For
1752 example, "Foo!!!?!?!?".rstrip("?!") -> "Foo".
Guido van Rossum49042042002-04-13 00:59:05 +00001753
Guido van Rossumc0d3f4e2002-11-27 13:10:40 +00001754- There's a new dictionary constructor (a class method of the dict
1755 class), dict.fromkeys(iterable, value=None). It constructs a
1756 dictionary with keys taken from the iterable and all values set to a
1757 single value. It can be used for building sets and for removing
1758 duplicates from sequences.
Raymond Hettingere33d3df2002-11-27 07:29:33 +00001759
Guido van Rossumc69343b2002-04-12 19:22:48 +00001760- Added a new dict method pop(key). This removes and returns the
1761 value corresponding to key. [SF patch #539949]
1762
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00001763- A new built-in type, bool, has been added, as well as built-in
1764 names for its two values, True and False. Comparisons and sundry
1765 other operations that return a truth value have been changed to
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00001766 return a bool instead. Read PEP 285 for an explanation of why this
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00001767 is backward compatible.
1768
Guido van Rossum95b62a62002-03-29 01:07:24 +00001769- Fixed two bugs reported as SF #535905: under certain conditions,
1770 deallocating a deeply nested structure could cause a segfault in the
1771 garbage collector, due to interaction with the "trashcan" code;
1772 access to the current frame during destruction of a local variable
1773 could access a pointer to freed memory.
1774
Guido van Rossumfe0ca4a2002-06-18 21:20:13 +00001775- The optional object allocator ("pymalloc") has been enabled by
1776 default. The recommended practice for memory allocation and
1777 deallocation has been streamlined. A header file is included,
1778 Misc/pymemcompat.h, which can be bundled with 3rd party extensions
1779 and lets them use the same API with Python versions from 1.5.2
1780 onwards.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00001781
Martin v. Löwiscfeb3b62002-03-03 21:30:27 +00001782- PyErr_Display will provide file and line information for all exceptions
1783 that have an attribute print_file_and_line, not just SyntaxErrors.
1784
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00001785- The UTF-8 codec will now encode and decode Unicode surrogates
1786 correctly and without raising exceptions for unpaired ones.
1787
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00001788- Universal newlines (PEP 278) is implemented. Briefly, using 'U'
1789 instead of 'r' when opening a text file for reading changes the line
1790 ending convention so that any of '\r', '\r\n', and '\n' is
1791 recognized (even mixed in one file); all three are converted to
1792 '\n', the standard Python line end character.
1793
Neal Norwitz649b7592002-01-01 19:07:13 +00001794- file.xreadlines() now raises a ValueError if the file is closed:
1795 Previously, an xreadlines object was returned which would raise
1796 a ValueError when the xreadlines.next() method was called.
1797
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00001798- sys.exit() inadvertently allowed more than one argument.
Neal Norwitz0c766a02002-03-27 13:03:09 +00001799 An exception will now be raised if more than one argument is used.
1800
Gustavo Niemeyer17c5a332002-12-16 14:09:22 +00001801- Changed evaluation order of dictionary literals to conform to the
1802 general left to right evaluation order rule. Now {f1(): f2()} will
1803 evaluate f1 first.
Gustavo Niemeyer78429a62002-12-16 13:54:02 +00001804
Gustavo Niemeyer786ddb22002-12-16 18:12:53 +00001805- Fixed bug #521782: when a file was in non-blocking mode, file.read()
1806 could silently lose data or wrongly throw an unknown error.
1807
Neil Schemenauerb983aa02002-12-30 20:22:23 +00001808- The sq_repeat, sq_inplace_repeat, sq_concat and sq_inplace_concat
1809 slots are now always tried after trying the corresponding nb_* slots.
1810 This fixes a number of minor bugs (see bug #624807).
1811
Neal Norwitz74a032e2003-01-10 23:29:48 +00001812- Fix problem with dynamic loading on 64-bit AIX (see bug #639945).
1813
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001814Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001815-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001816
Raymond Hettinger9543b342003-01-18 23:22:20 +00001817- Added three operators to the operator module:
1818 operator.pow(a,b) which is equivalent to: a**b.
1819 operator.is_(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is b.
1820 operator.is_not(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is not b.
1821
Martin v. Löwis24a880b2002-12-31 12:55:15 +00001822- posix.openpty now works on all systems that have /dev/ptmx.
1823
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00001824- A module zipimport exists to support importing code from zip
1825 archives.
1826
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00001827- The new datetime module supplies classes for manipulating dates and
1828 times. The basic design came from the Zope "fishbowl process", and
1829 favors practical commercial applications over calendar esoterica. See
1830
1831 http://www.zope.org/Members/fdrake/DateTimeWiki/FrontPage
1832
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00001833- _tkinter now returns Tcl objects, instead of strings. Objects which
1834 have Python equivalents are converted to Python objects, other objects
1835 are wrapped. This can be configured through the wantobjects method,
Martin v. Löwis8c8aa5d2002-11-26 21:39:48 +00001836 or Tkinter.wantobjects.
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00001837
Barry Warsawc27f4bd2002-12-30 21:03:26 +00001838- The PyBSDDB wrapper around the Sleepycat Berkeley DB library has
1839 been added as the package bsddb. The traditional bsddb module is
1840 still available in source code, but not built automatically anymore,
1841 and is now named bsddb185. This supports Berkeley DB versions from
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00001842 3.0 to 4.1. For help converting your databases from the old module (which
1843 probably used an obsolete version of Berkeley DB) to the new module, see
1844 the db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py scripts described in the Tools/Demos
1845 section above.
Martin v. Löwisef546b32002-11-19 08:12:57 +00001846
Martin v. Löwis677bde22002-11-23 22:08:15 +00001847- unicodedata was updated to Unicode 3.2. It supports normalization
1848 and names for Hangul syllables and CJK unified ideographs.
Martin v. Löwis7d41e292002-11-23 12:22:32 +00001849
Neal Norwitz94a83fd2002-11-02 17:46:24 +00001850- resource.getrlimit() now returns longs instead of ints.
1851
Martin v. Löwis080689c2002-10-26 14:42:02 +00001852- readline now dynamically adjusts its input/output stream if
1853 sys.stdin/stdout changes.
1854
Guido van Rossumba602972002-10-01 18:18:58 +00001855- The _tkinter module (and hence Tkinter) has dropped support for
1856 Tcl/Tk 8.0 and 8.1. Only Tcl/Tk versions 8.2, 8.3 and 8.4 are
1857 supported.
1858
Martin v. Löwis658009a2002-09-16 17:26:24 +00001859- cPickle.BadPickleGet is now a class.
1860
Martin v. Löwisa19bfe02002-10-16 18:28:36 +00001861- The time stamps in os.stat_result are floating point numbers
1862 after stat_float_times has been called.
Martin v. Löwis94717ed2002-09-09 14:24:16 +00001863
Neal Norwitzb5673922002-09-05 21:48:07 +00001864- If the size passed to mmap.mmap() is larger than the length of the
1865 file on non-Windows platforms, a ValueError is raised. [SF bug 585792]
1866
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00001867- The xreadlines module is slated for obsolescence.
1868
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00001869- The strptime function in the time module is now always available (a
1870 Python implementation is used when the C library doesn't define it).
1871
Guido van Rossum9562bcf2002-06-14 21:31:18 +00001872- The 'new' module is no longer an extension, but a Python module that
1873 only exists for backwards compatibility. Its contents are no longer
1874 functions but callable type objects.
1875
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00001876- The bsddb.*open functions can now take 'None' as a filename.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00001877 This will create a temporary in-memory bsddb that won't be
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00001878 written to disk.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00001879
Martin v. Löwisb96152c2002-12-31 13:20:15 +00001880- posix.getloadavg, posix.lchown, posix.killpg, posix.mknod, and
1881 posix.getpgid have been added where available.
Martin v. Löwis06a83e92002-04-14 10:19:44 +00001882
Martin v. Löwisf0a46682002-11-03 17:20:12 +00001883- The locale module now exposes the C library's gettext interface. It
1884 also has a new function getpreferredencoding.
Martin v. Löwis2e64c342002-03-27 18:49:02 +00001885
Tim Petersfbf74f22002-03-14 19:06:01 +00001886- A security hole ("double free") was found in zlib-1.1.3, a popular
1887 third party compression library used by some Python modules. The
1888 hole was quickly plugged in zlib-1.1.4, and the Windows build of
1889 Python now ships with zlib-1.1.4.
1890
Martin v. Löwis688357e2002-04-08 21:28:20 +00001891- pwd, grp, and resource return enhanced tuples now, with symbolic
1892 field names.
Martin v. Löwis29001ff2002-03-01 10:47:37 +00001893
Martin v. Löwis99866332002-03-01 10:27:01 +00001894- array.array is now a type object. A new format character
1895 'u' indicates Py_UNICODE arrays. For those, .tounicode and
1896 .fromunicode methods are available. Arrays now support __iadd__
1897 and __imul__.
1898
Neal Norwitze790eae2002-01-01 21:14:12 +00001899- dl now builds on every system that has dlfcn.h. Failure in case
Martin v. Löwis93227272002-01-01 20:18:30 +00001900 of sizeof(int)!=sizeof(long)!=sizeof(void*) is delayed until dl.open
1901 is called.
1902
Skip Montanaro8e790e72002-09-03 13:25:17 +00001903- The sys module acquired a new attribute, api_version, which evaluates
1904 to the value of the PYTHON_API_VERSION macro with which the
1905 interpreter was compiled.
1906
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00001907- Fixed bug #470582: sre module would return a tuple (None, 'a', 'ab')
1908 when applying the regular expression '^((a)c)?(ab)$' on 'ab'. It now
1909 returns (None, None, 'ab'), as expected. Also fixed handling of
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00001910 lastindex/lastgroup match attributes in similar cases. For example,
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00001911 when running the expression r'(a)(b)?b' over 'ab', lastindex must be
1912 1, not 2.
1913
Gustavo Niemeyerc523b042002-11-07 03:28:56 +00001914- Fixed bug #581080: sre scanner was not checking the buffer limit
1915 before increasing the current pointer. This was creating an infinite
1916 loop in the search function, once the pointer exceeded the buffer
1917 limit.
1918
Thomas Heller95cb7e42002-11-07 16:23:55 +00001919- The os.fdopen function now enforces a file mode starting with the
1920 letter 'r', 'w' or 'a', otherwise a ValueError is raised. This fixes
1921 bug #623464.
1922
Greg Ward6c58d462003-01-03 18:02:15 +00001923- The linuxaudiodev module is now deprecated; it is being replaced by
1924 ossaudiodev. The interface has been extended to cover a lot more of
1925 OSS (see www.opensound.com), including most DSP ioctls and the
1926 OSS mixer API. Documentation forthcoming in 2.3a2.
1927
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001928Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001929-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001930
Guido van Rossum747f8062003-01-03 16:33:49 +00001931- imaplib.py now supports SSL (Tino Lange and Piers Lauder).
1932
Just van Rossum5e156ad2002-12-31 16:38:01 +00001933- Freeze's modulefinder.py has been moved to the standard library;
1934 slightly improved so it will issue less false missing submodule
1935 reports (see sf path #643711 for details). Documentation will follow
1936 with Python 2.3a2.
1937
Martin v. Löwis96a60e42002-12-31 13:11:54 +00001938- os.path exposes getctime.
1939
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001940- unittest.py now has two additional methods called assertAlmostEqual()
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001941 and failIfAlmostEqual(). They implement an approximate comparison
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001942 by rounding the difference between the two arguments and comparing
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001943 the result to zero. Approximate comparison is essential for
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001944 unit tests of floating point results.
1945
Raymond Hettingere11b5102002-12-25 16:37:19 +00001946- calendar.py now depends on the new datetime module rather than
1947 the time module. As a result, the range of allowable dates
1948 has been increased.
1949
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00001950- pdb has a new 'j(ump)' command to select the next line to be
1951 executed.
1952
Thomas Heller1b3b49d2002-12-12 19:13:44 +00001953- The distutils created windows installers now can run a
1954 postinstallation script.
1955
Martin v. Löwis4581cfa2002-11-22 08:23:09 +00001956- doctest.testmod can now be called without argument, which means to
1957 test the current module.
1958
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001959- When canceling a server that implemented threading with a keyboard
Martin v. Löwisf86e8ef2002-11-22 08:08:44 +00001960 interrupt, the server would shut down but not terminate (waiting on
1961 client threads). A new member variable, daemon_threads, was added to
1962 the ThreadingMixIn class in SocketServer.py to make it explicit that
1963 this behavior needs to be controlled.
1964
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00001965- A new module, optparse, provides a fancy alternative to getopt for
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00001966 command line parsing. It is a slightly modified version of Greg
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00001967 Ward's Optik package.
1968
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00001969- UserDict.py now defines a DictMixin class which defines all dictionary
1970 methods for classes that already have a minimum mapping interface.
1971 This greatly simplifies writing classes that need to be substitutable
1972 for dictionaries (such as the shelve module).
1973
1974- shelve.py now subclasses from UserDict.DictMixin. Now shelve supports
1975 all dictionary methods. This eases the transition to persistent
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00001976 storage for scripts originally written with dictionaries in mind.
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00001977
Skip Montanaro3bf99e32002-12-08 18:36:24 +00001978- shelve.open and the various classes in shelve.py now accept an optional
1979 binary flag, which defaults to False. If True, the values stored in the
1980 shelf are binary pickles.
1981
Guido van Rossumfda06742002-11-13 16:29:18 +00001982- A new package, logging, implements the logging API defined by PEP
1983 282. The code is written by Vinay Sajip.
1984
Walter Dörwald4dbf1922002-11-06 16:53:44 +00001985- StreamReader, StreamReaderWriter and StreamRecoder in the codecs
1986 modules are iterators now.
1987
Tim Peters9288f952002-11-05 20:38:55 +00001988- gzip.py now handles files exceeding 2GB. Files over 4GB also work
1989 now (provided the OS supports it, and Python is configured with large
1990 file support), but in that case the underlying gzip file format can
1991 record only the least-significant 32 bits of the file size, so that
1992 some tools working with gzipped files may report an incorrect file
1993 size.
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00001994
Martin v. Löwis74b51ac2002-10-26 14:50:45 +00001995- xml.sax.saxutils.unescape has been added, to replace entity references
1996 with their entity value.
1997
Martin v. Löwis77ac4292002-10-15 15:11:13 +00001998- Queue.Queue.{put,get} now support an optional timeout argument.
1999
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00002000- Various features of Tk 8.4 are exposed in Tkinter.py. The multiple
2001 option of tkFileDialog is exposed as function askopenfile{,name}s.
Martin v. Löwis2ec36272002-10-13 10:22:08 +00002002
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00002003- Various configure methods of Tkinter have been stream-lined, so that
2004 tag_configure, image_configure, window_configure now return a
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00002005 dictionary when invoked with no argument.
Martin v. Löwis6ce13152002-10-10 14:36:13 +00002006
Guido van Rossum2b492b62002-10-09 21:40:48 +00002007- Importing the readline module now no longer has the side effect of
2008 calling setlocale(LC_CTYPE, ""). The initial "C" locale, or
2009 whatever locale is explicitly set by the user, is preserved. If you
2010 want repr() of 8-bit strings in your preferred encoding to preserve
2011 all printable characters of that encoding, you have to add the
2012 following code to your $PYTHONSTARTUP file or to your application's
2013 main():
2014
2015 import locale
2016 locale.setlocale(locale.LC_CTYPE, "")
2017
Martin v. Löwise9ce0b02002-10-07 13:23:24 +00002018- shutil.move was added. shutil.copytree now reports errors as an
2019 exception at the end, instead of printing error messages.
2020
Marc-André Lemburg97047e22002-10-04 11:55:21 +00002021- Encoding name normalization was generalized to not only
2022 replace hyphens with underscores, but also all other non-alphanumeric
2023 characters (with the exception of the dot which is used for Python
2024 package names during lookup). The aliases.py mapping was updated
2025 to the new standard.
2026
Walter Dörwald5ccaf8f2002-09-06 16:15:58 +00002027- mimetypes has two new functions: guess_all_extensions() which
2028 returns a list of all known extensions for a mime type, and
2029 add_type() which adds one mapping between a mime type and
2030 an extension to the database.
2031
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00002032- New module: sets, defines the class Set that implements a mutable
2033 set type using the keys of a dict to represent the set. There's
2034 also a class ImmutableSet which is useful when you need sets of sets
2035 or when you need to use sets as dict keys, and a class BaseSet which
Raymond Hettingeref8b9c62002-12-09 08:56:06 +00002036 is the base class of the two.
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00002037
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00002038- Added random.sample(population,k) for random sampling without replacement.
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00002039 Returns a k length list of unique elements chosen from the population.
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00002040
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00002041- random.randrange(-sys.maxint-1, sys.maxint) no longer raises
2042 OverflowError. That is, it now accepts any combination of 'start'
2043 and 'stop' arguments so long as each is in the range of Python's
2044 bounded integers.
2045
Raymond Hettinger40f62172002-12-29 23:03:38 +00002046- Thanks to Raymond Hettinger, random.random() now uses a new core
2047 generator. The Mersenne Twister algorithm is implemented in C,
2048 threadsafe, faster than the previous generator, has an astronomically
2049 large period (2**19937-1), creates random floats to full 53-bit
2050 precision, and may be the most widely tested random number generator
2051 in existence.
2052
2053 The random.jumpahead(n) method has different semantics for the new
2054 generator. Instead of jumping n steps ahead, it uses n and the
2055 existing state to create a new state. This means that jumpahead()
2056 continues to support multi-threaded code needing generators of
2057 non-overlapping sequences. However, it will break code which relies
2058 on jumpahead moving a specific number of steps forward.
2059
2060 The attributes random.whseed and random.__whseed have no meaning for
2061 the new generator. Code using these attributes should switch to a
2062 new class, random.WichmannHill which is provided for backward
2063 compatibility and to make an alternate generator available.
2064
Guido van Rossum4a57c332002-08-02 18:05:20 +00002065- New "algorithms" module: heapq, implements a heap queue. Thanks to
2066 Kevin O'Connor for the code and François Pinard for an entertaining
2067 write-up explaining the theory and practical uses of heaps.
2068
Marc-André Lemburg58e2ff22002-07-12 14:40:04 +00002069- New encoding for the Palm OS character set: palmos.
2070
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00002071- binascii.crc32() and the zipfile module had problems on some 64-bit
2072 platforms. These have been fixed. On a platform with 8-byte C longs,
2073 crc32() now returns a signed-extended 4-byte result, so that its value
2074 as a Python int is equal to the value computed a 32-bit platform.
2075
Martin v. Löwis7d650ca2002-06-30 15:05:00 +00002076- xml.dom.minidom.toxml and toprettyxml now take an optional encoding
2077 argument.
2078
Guido van Rossum9f7549b2002-06-10 21:39:42 +00002079- Some fixes in the copy module: when an object is copied through its
2080 __reduce__ method, there was no check for a __setstate__ method on
2081 the result [SF patch 565085]; deepcopy should treat instances of
2082 custom metaclasses the same way it treats instances of type 'type'
2083 [SF patch 560794].
2084
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00002085- Sockets now support timeout mode. After s.settimeout(T), where T is
2086 a float expressing seconds, subsequent operations raise an exception
2087 if they cannot be completed within T seconds. To disable timeout
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00002088 mode, use s.settimeout(None). There's also a module function,
2089 socket.setdefaulttimeout(T), which sets the default for all sockets
2090 created henceforth.
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00002091
2092- getopt.gnu_getopt was added. This supports GNU-style option
2093 processing, where options can be mixed with non-option arguments.
Martin v. Löwis446a25f2002-06-06 10:58:36 +00002094
Michael W. Hudsonb0dc1a32002-06-04 18:27:35 +00002095- Stop using strings for exceptions. String objects used for
2096 exceptions are now classes deriving from Exception. The objects
2097 changed were: Tkinter.TclError, bdb.BdbQuit, macpath.norm_error,
2098 tabnanny.NannyNag, and xdrlib.Error.
Neal Norwitzb5b5a262002-06-04 17:14:07 +00002099
Walter Dörwald474458d2002-06-04 15:16:29 +00002100- Constants BOM_UTF8, BOM_UTF16, BOM_UTF16_LE, BOM_UTF16_BE,
2101 BOM_UTF32, BOM_UTF32_LE and BOM_UTF32_BE that represent the Byte
2102 Order Mark in UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 encodings for little and
2103 big endian systems were added to the codecs module. The old names
2104 BOM32_* and BOM64_* were off by a factor of 2.
2105
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00002106- Added conversion functions math.degrees() and math.radians().
Raymond Hettinger87f59ee2002-05-13 04:17:32 +00002107
Raymond Hettinger866964c2002-12-14 19:51:34 +00002108- math.log() now takes an optional argument: math.log(x[, base]).
2109
Raymond Hettinger9b1df1d2002-05-12 06:07:21 +00002110- ftplib.retrlines() now tests for callback is None rather than testing
2111 for False. Was causing an error when given a callback object which
2112 was callable but also returned len() as zero. The change may
2113 create new breakage if the caller relied on the undocumented behavior
2114 and called with callback set to [] or some other False value not
2115 identical to None.
2116
Tim Peters46c04e12002-05-05 20:40:00 +00002117- random.gauss() uses a piece of hidden state used by nothing else,
2118 and the .seed() and .whseed() methods failed to reset it. In other
2119 words, setting the seed didn't completely determine the sequence of
2120 results produced by random.gauss(). It does now. Programs repeatedly
2121 mixing calls to a seed method with calls to gauss() may see different
2122 results now.
2123
Fred Drake7f781c92002-05-01 20:33:53 +00002124- The pickle.Pickler class grew a clear_memo() method to mimic that
2125 provided by cPickle.Pickler.
2126
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00002127- difflib's SequenceMatcher class now does a dynamic analysis of
2128 which elements are so frequent as to constitute noise. For
2129 comparing files as sequences of lines, this generally works better
2130 than the IS_LINE_JUNK function, and function ndiff's linejunk
2131 argument defaults to None now as a result. A happy benefit is
2132 that SequenceMatcher may run much faster now when applied
2133 to large files with many duplicate lines (for example, C program
2134 text with lots of repeated "}" and "return NULL;" lines).
2135
Guido van Rossum256705b2002-04-23 13:29:43 +00002136- New Text.dump() method in Tkinter module.
2137
Marc-André Lemburg1ec71ea2002-04-17 20:33:40 +00002138- New distutils commands for building packagers were added to
2139 support pkgtool on Solaris and swinstall on HP-UX.
2140
2141- distutils now has a new abstract binary packager base class
2142 command/bdist_packager, which simplifies writing packagers.
2143 This will hopefully provide the missing bits to encourage
2144 people to submit more packagers, e.g. for Debian, FreeBSD
2145 and other systems.
2146
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00002147- The UTF-16, -LE and -BE stream readers now raise a
2148 NotImplementedError for all calls to .readline(). Previously, they
2149 used to just produce garbage or fail with an encoding error --
2150 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 +00002151 work well with these.
2152
Martin v. Löwis5c137c22002-03-18 12:44:08 +00002153- compileall now supports quiet operation.
2154
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002155- The BaseHTTPServer now implements optional HTTP/1.1 persistent
Martin v. Löwis587c98c2002-03-17 18:37:22 +00002156 connections.
2157
Marc-André Lemburga5d2b4c2002-02-16 18:23:30 +00002158- socket module: the SSL support was broken out of the main
2159 _socket module C helper and placed into a new _ssl helper
2160 which now gets imported by socket.py if available and working.
2161
Marc-André Lemburg37aa5802002-02-10 21:42:47 +00002162- encodings package: added aliases for all supported IANA character
2163 sets
2164
Guido van Rossum606fe4e2001-12-28 20:57:14 +00002165- ftplib: to safeguard the user's privacy, anonymous login will use
2166 "anonymous@" as default password, rather than the real user and host
2167 name.
2168
Fred Drake36736122002-01-10 13:50:31 +00002169- webbrowser: tightened up the command passed to os.system() so that
2170 arbitrary shell code can't be executed because a bogus URL was
2171 passed in.
2172
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00002173- gettext.translation has an optional fallback argument, and
Martin v. Löwisa55ffae2002-01-11 06:58:49 +00002174 gettext.find an optional all argument. Translations will now fallback
Martin v. Löwisd8996052002-11-21 21:45:32 +00002175 on a per-message basis. The module supports plural forms, by means
2176 of gettext.[d]ngettext and Translation.[u]ngettext.
Martin v. Löwis1be64192002-01-11 06:33:28 +00002177
Martin v. Löwis9668b932002-01-12 11:27:42 +00002178- distutils bdist commands now offer a --skip-build option.
2179
Walter Dörwaldb25c2b02002-03-21 10:38:40 +00002180- warnings.warn now accepts a Warning instance as first argument.
2181
Fred Drakefed7e852002-04-04 19:36:15 +00002182- The xml.sax.expatreader.ExpatParser class will no longer create
2183 circular references by using itself as the locator that gets passed
2184 to the content handler implementation. [SF bug #535474]
2185
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00002186- The email.Parser.Parser class now properly parses strings regardless
2187 of their line endings, which can be any of \r, \n, or \r\n (CR, LF,
2188 or CRLF). Also, the Header class's constructor default arguments
2189 has changed slightly so that an explicit maxlinelen value is always
Barry Warsaw497e5c42002-12-30 19:27:08 +00002190 honored, and so unicode conversion error handling can be specified.
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00002191
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002192- distutils' build_ext command now links C++ extensions with the C++
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00002193 compiler available in the Makefile or CXX environment variable, if
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002194 running under \*nix.
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00002195
2196- New module bz2: provides a comprehensive interface for the bz2 compression
2197 library. It implements a complete file interface, one-shot (de)compression
2198 functions, and types for sequential (de)compression.
2199
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002200- New pdb command 'pp' which is like 'p' except that it pretty-prints
Barry Warsaw5d8d6182002-11-05 22:41:33 +00002201 the value of its expression argument.
2202
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00002203- Now bdist_rpm distutils command understands a verify_script option in
2204 the config file, including the contents of the referred filename in
2205 the "%verifyscript" section of the rpm spec file.
2206
Gustavo Niemeyer1456fde2002-11-25 17:25:04 +00002207- Fixed bug #495695: webbrowser module would run graphic browsers in a
2208 unix environment even if DISPLAY was not set. Also, support for
2209 skipstone browser was included.
2210
Gustavo Niemeyerd5ae01a2002-12-16 13:11:57 +00002211- Fixed bug #636769: rexec would run unallowed code if subclasses of
2212 strings were used as parameters for certain functions.
2213
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002214Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002215-----------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002216
Martin v. Löwis0d1fdea2002-11-22 08:36:54 +00002217- pygettext.py now supports globbing on Windows, and accepts module
2218 names in addition to accepting file names.
2219
Guido van Rossum923e4ef2002-09-17 20:58:59 +00002220- The SGI demos (Demo/sgi) have been removed. Nobody thought they
2221 were interesting any more. (The SGI library modules and extensions
2222 are still there; it is believed that at least some of these are
2223 still used and useful.)
2224
Fred Drake40813b12002-08-05 15:24:19 +00002225- IDLE supports the new encoding declarations (PEP 263); it can also
2226 deal with legacy 8-bit files if they use the locale's encoding. It
2227 allows non-ASCII strings in the interactive shell and executes them
2228 in the locale's encoding.
Martin v. Löwis98ce7b72002-08-05 15:11:26 +00002229
Marc-André Lemburg46260092002-04-04 16:17:11 +00002230- freeze.py now produces binaries which can import shared modules,
2231 unlike before when this failed due to missing symbol exports in
2232 the generated binary.
2233
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002234Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002235-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002236
Martin v. Löwisdc461752002-11-06 21:59:33 +00002237- On Unix, IDLE is now installed automatically.
2238
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00002239- The fpectl module is not built by default; it's dangerous or useless
2240 except in the hands of experts.
2241
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00002242- The public Python C API will generally be declared using PyAPI_FUNC
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00002243 and PyAPI_DATA macros, while Python extension module init functions
2244 will be declared with PyMODINIT_FUNC. DL_EXPORT/DL_IMPORT macros
2245 are deprecated.
Neal Norwitz1389f3e2002-07-22 13:21:10 +00002246
Tim Petersc6a3ff62002-07-08 22:11:52 +00002247- A bug was fixed that could cause COUNT_ALLOCS builds to segfault, or
2248 get into infinite loops, when a new-style class got garbage-collected.
2249 Unfortunately, to avoid this, the way COUNT_ALLOCS works requires
2250 that new-style classes be immortal in COUNT_ALLOCS builds. Note that
2251 COUNT_ALLOCS is not enabled by default, in either release or debug
2252 builds, and that new-style classes are immortal only in COUNT_ALLOCS
2253 builds.
2254
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00002255- Compiling out the cyclic garbage collector is no longer an option.
2256 The old symbol WITH_CYCLE_GC is now ignored, and Python.h arranges
2257 that it's always defined (for the benefit of any extension modules
2258 that may be conditionalizing on it). A bonus is that any extension
2259 type participating in cyclic gc can choose to participate in the
2260 Py_TRASHCAN mechanism now too; in the absence of cyclic gc, this used
2261 to require editing the core to teach the trashcan mechanism about the
2262 new type.
2263
Martin v. Löwis0cec0ff2002-07-28 16:33:45 +00002264- According to Annex F of the current C standard,
Tim Peters1de41bf2002-07-03 03:31:20 +00002265
2266 The Standard C macro HUGE_VAL and its float and long double analogs,
2267 HUGE_VALF and HUGE_VALL, expand to expressions whose values are
2268 positive infinities.
2269
2270 Python only uses the double HUGE_VAL, and only to #define its own symbol
2271 Py_HUGE_VAL. Some platforms have incorrect definitions for HUGE_VAL.
2272 pyport.h used to try to worm around that, but the workarounds triggered
2273 other bugs on other platforms, so we gave up. If your platform defines
2274 HUGE_VAL incorrectly, you'll need to #define Py_HUGE_VAL to something
2275 that works on your platform. The only instance of this I'm sure about
2276 is on an unknown subset of Cray systems, described here:
2277
2278 http://www.cray.com/swpubs/manuals/SN-2194_2.0/html-SN-2194_2.0/x3138.htm
2279
2280 Presumably 2.3a1 breaks such systems. If anyone uses such a system, help!
2281
Martin v. Löwisa3fb4f72002-06-09 13:33:54 +00002282- The configure option --without-doc-strings can be used to remove the
2283 doc strings from the builtin functions and modules; this reduces the
2284 size of the executable.
2285
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00002286- The universal newlines option (PEP 278) is on by default. On Unix
2287 it can be disabled by passing --without-universal-newlines to the
2288 configure script. On other platforms, remove
2289 WITH_UNIVERSAL_NEWLINES from pyconfig.h.
Tim Peters639295f2002-04-21 07:30:30 +00002290
Martin v. Löwis1142de32002-03-29 16:28:31 +00002291- On Unix, a shared libpython2.3.so can be created with --enable-shared.
2292
Tim Peters8deda702002-03-30 10:06:07 +00002293- All uses of the CACHE_HASH, INTERN_STRINGS, and DONT_SHARE_SHORT_STRINGS
2294 preprocessor symbols were eliminated. The internal decisions they
2295 controlled stopped being experimental long ago.
Tim Peters1f7df352002-03-29 03:29:08 +00002296
Fred Drake7d28b732002-05-02 21:17:00 +00002297- The tools used to build the documentation now work under Cygwin as
2298 well as Unix.
2299
Skip Montanaro57454e52002-06-14 20:30:31 +00002300- The bsddb and dbm module builds have been changed to try and avoid version
2301 skew problems and disable linkage with Berkeley DB 1.85 unless the
2302 installer knows what s/he's doing. See the section on building these
2303 modules in the README file for details.
2304
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002305C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002306-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002307
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00002308- PyNumber_Check() now returns true for string and unicode objects.
2309 This is a result of these types having a partially defined
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00002310 tp_as_number slot. (This is not a feature, but an indication that
Walter Dörwalda1a61f92002-11-19 21:20:25 +00002311 PyNumber_Check() is not very useful to determine numeric behavior.
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00002312 It may be deprecated.)
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00002313
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00002314- The string object's layout has changed: the pointer member
2315 ob_sinterned has been replaced by an int member ob_sstate. On some
2316 platforms (e.g. most 64-bit systems) this may change the offset of
2317 the ob_sval member, so as a precaution the API_VERSION has been
2318 incremented. The apparently unused feature of "indirect interned
2319 strings", supported by the ob_sinterned member, is gone. Interned
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002320 strings are now usually mortal; there is a new API,
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00002321 PyString_InternImmortal() that creates immortal interned strings.
2322 (The ob_sstate member can only take three values; however, while
2323 making it a char saves a few bytes per string object on average, in
2324 it also slowed things down a bit because ob_sval was no longer
2325 aligned.)
2326
Guido van Rossumfdb86482002-08-14 21:20:32 +00002327- The Py_InitModule*() functions now accept NULL for the 'methods'
2328 argument. Modules without global functions are becoming more common
2329 now that factories can be types rather than functions.
2330
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00002331- New C API PyUnicode_FromOrdinal() which exposes unichr() at C
2332 level.
2333
Thomas Heller085358a2002-07-29 14:27:41 +00002334- New functions PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErr() and
2335 PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErrWithFilename(). Similar to
2336 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErrWithFilename() and
2337 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErr(), but they allow to specify
2338 the exception type to raise. Available on Windows.
2339
Tim Peters7c321a82002-07-09 02:57:01 +00002340- Py_FatalError() is now declared as taking a const char* argument. It
2341 was previously declared without const. This should not affect working
2342 code.
2343
Martin v. Löwis01f94bd2002-05-08 08:44:21 +00002344- Added new macro PySequence_ITEM(o, i) that directly calls
2345 sq_item without rechecking that o is a sequence and without
2346 adjusting for negative indices.
2347
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00002348- PyRange_New() now raises ValueError if the fourth argument is not 1.
2349 This is part of the removal of deprecated features of the xrange
2350 object.
2351
Guido van Rossum517c7d42002-04-26 02:49:14 +00002352- PyNumber_Coerce() and PyNumber_CoerceEx() now also invoke the type's
2353 coercion if both arguments have the same type but this type has the
2354 CHECKTYPES flag set. This is to better support proxies.
2355
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00002356- The type of tp_free has been changed from "``void (*)(PyObject *)``" to
2357 "``void (*)(void *)``".
Neil Schemenauer9344b142002-04-12 23:00:08 +00002358
2359- PyObject_Del, PyObject_GC_Del are now functions instead of macros.
2360
Guido van Rossum0986d822002-04-08 01:38:42 +00002361- A type can now inherit its metatype from its base type. Previously,
2362 when PyType_Ready() was called, if ob_type was found to be NULL, it
2363 was always set to &PyType_Type; now it is set to base->ob_type,
2364 where base is tp_base, defaulting to &PyObject_Type.
2365
2366- PyType_Ready() accidentally did not inherit tp_is_gc; now it does.
2367
Neil Schemenauerc9abc1d2002-05-08 14:14:41 +00002368- The PyCore_* family of APIs have been removed.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00002369
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002370- The "u#" parser marker will now pass through Unicode objects as-is
Marc-André Lemburg3e3eacb2002-01-09 16:21:27 +00002371 without going through the buffer API.
2372
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002373- The enumerators of cmp_op have been renamed to use the prefix ``PyCmp_``.
Martin v. Löwis7198a522002-01-01 19:59:11 +00002374
Tim Peters10a3bb52001-12-25 19:07:38 +00002375- An old #define of ANY as void has been removed from pyport.h. This
2376 hasn't been used since Python's pre-ANSI days, and the #define has
2377 been marked as obsolete since then. SF bug 495548 says it created
2378 conflicts with other packages, so keeping it around wasn't harmless.
2379
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002380- Because Python's magic number scheme broke on January 1st, we decided
2381 to stop Python development. Thanks for all the fish!
2382
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00002383- Some of us don't like fish, so we changed Python's magic number
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00002384 scheme to a new one. See Python/import.c for details.
2385
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002386New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002387-------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002388
Martin v. Löwis79acb9e2002-12-06 12:48:53 +00002389- OpenVMS is now supported.
2390
Martin v. Löwisf90ae202002-06-11 06:22:31 +00002391- AtheOS is now supported.
2392
Andrew MacIntyre161ad0e2002-08-04 07:25:58 +00002393- the EMX runtime environment on OS/2 is now supported.
2394
Martin v. Löwisa6e97582002-01-01 18:41:33 +00002395- GNU/Hurd is now supported.
2396
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002397Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002398-----
2399
Fred Drake4dd0f7e2002-11-26 21:44:56 +00002400- The regrtest.py script's -u option now provides a way to say "allow
2401 all resources except this one." For example, to allow everything
2402 except bsddb, give the option '-uall,-bsddb'.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002403
2404Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002405-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002406
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00002407- The Windows distribution now ships with version 4.0.14 of the
2408 Sleepycat Berkeley database library. This should be a huge
2409 improvement over the previous Berkeley DB 1.85, which had many
2410 bugs.
2411 XXX What are the licensing issues here?
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002412 XXX If a user has a database created with a previous version of
Tim Peters84c7a3f2002-11-23 18:48:06 +00002413 XXX Python, what must they do to convert it?
2414 XXX I'm still not sure how to link this thing (see PCbuild/readme.txt).
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00002415 XXX The version # is likely to change before 2.3a1.
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00002416
2417- The Windows distribution now ships with a Secure Sockets Library (SLL)
Mark Hammondc3de0082002-12-03 06:16:08 +00002418 module (_ssl.pyd)
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00002419
Tim Peters857fb4c2002-11-14 23:31:58 +00002420- The Windows distribution now ships with Tcl/Tk version 8.4.1 (it
2421 previously shipped with Tcl/Tk 8.3.2).
2422
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00002423- When Python is built under a Microsoft compiler, sys.version now
2424 includes the compiler version number (_MSC_VER). For example, under
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002425 MSVC 6, sys.version contains the substring "MSC v.1200 ". 1200 is
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00002426 the value of _MSC_VER under MSVC 6.
2427
Tim Peters08e72952002-04-16 20:48:01 +00002428- Sometimes the uninstall executable (UNWISE.EXE) vanishes. One cause
2429 of that has been fixed in the installer (disabled Wise's "delete in-
2430 use files" uninstall option).
2431
Guido van Rossum181e41a2002-04-06 00:23:25 +00002432- Fixed a bug in urllib's proxy handling in Windows. [SF bug #503031]
2433
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00002434- The installer now installs Start menu shortcuts under (the local
2435 equivalent of) "All Users" when doing an Admin install.
2436
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00002437- file.truncate([newsize]) now works on Windows for all newsize values.
2438 It used to fail if newsize didn't fit in 32 bits, reflecting a
2439 limitation of MS _chsize (which is no longer used).
2440
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00002441- os.waitpid() is now implemented for Windows, and can be used to block
2442 until a specified process exits. This is similar to, but not exactly
2443 the same as, os.waitpid() on POSIX systems. If you're waiting for
2444 a specific process whose pid was obtained from one of the spawn()
2445 functions, the same Python os.waitpid() code works across platforms.
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00002446 See the docs for details. The docs were changed to clarify that
2447 spawn functions return, and waitpid requires, a process handle on
2448 Windows (not the same thing as a Windows process id).
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00002449
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00002450- New tempfile.TemporaryFile implementation for Windows: this doesn't
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002451 need a TemporaryFileWrapper wrapper anymore, and should be immune
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00002452 to a nasty problem: before 2.3, if you got a temp file on Windows, it
2453 got wrapped in an object whose close() method first closed the
2454 underlying file, then deleted the file. This usually worked fine.
2455 However, the spawn family of functions on Windows create (at a low C
2456 level) the same set of open files in the spawned process Q as were
2457 open in the spawning process P. If a temp file f was among them, then
2458 doing f.close() in P first closed P's C-level file handle on f, but Q's
2459 C-level file handle on f remained open, so the attempt in P to delete f
2460 blew up with a "Permission denied" error (Windows doesn't allow
2461 deleting open files). This was surprising, subtle, and difficult to
2462 work around.
2463
2464- The os module now exports all the symbolic constants usable with the
2465 low-level os.open() on Windows: the new constants in 2.3 are
2466 O_NOINHERIT, O_SHORT_LIVED, O_TEMPORARY, O_RANDOM and O_SEQUENTIAL.
2467 The others were also available in 2.2: O_APPEND, O_BINARY, O_CREAT,
2468 O_EXCL, O_RDONLY, O_RDWR, O_TEXT, O_TRUNC and O_WRONLY. Contrary
2469 to Microsoft docs, O_SHORT_LIVED does not seem to imply O_TEMPORARY
2470 (so specify both if you want both; note that neither is useful unless
2471 specified with O_CREAT too).
2472
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002473Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002474----
2475
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002476- Mac/Relnotes is gone, the release notes are now here.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002477
Just van Rossume1ebd802003-02-10 10:06:18 +00002478- Python (the OSX-only, unix-based version, not the OS9-compatible CFM
2479 version) now fully supports unicode strings as arguments to various file
2480 system calls, eg. open(), file(), os.stat() and os.listdir().
2481
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002482- The current naming convention for Python on the Macintosh is that MacPython
2483 refers to the unix-based OSX-only version, and MacPython-OS9 refers to the
2484 CFM-based version that runs on both OS9 and OSX.
2485
2486- All MacPython-OS9 functionality is now available in an OSX unix build,
2487 including the Carbon modules, the IDE, OSA support, etc. A lot of this
2488 will only work correctly in a framework build, though, because you cannot
2489 talk to the window manager unless your application is run from a .app
2490 bundle. There is a command line tool "pythonw" that runs your script
2491 with an interpreter living in such a .app bundle, this interpreter should
2492 be used to run any Python script using the window manager (including
2493 Tkinter or wxPython scripts).
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00002494
Jack Jansen8bb80db2002-12-30 22:42:43 +00002495- Most of Mac/Lib has moved to Lib/plat-mac, which is again used both in
2496 MacPython-OSX and MacPython-OS9. The only modules remaining in Mac/Lib
2497 are specifically for MacPython-OS9 (CFM support, preference resources, etc).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002498
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002499- A new utility PythonLauncher will start a Python interpreter when a .py or
2500 .pyw script is double-clicked in the Finder. By default .py scripts are
2501 run with a normal Python interpreter in a Terminal window and .pyw
2502 files are run with a window-aware pythonw interpreter without a Terminal
2503 window, but all this can be customized.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002504
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002505- MacPython-OS9 is now Carbon-only, so it runs on Mac OS 9 or Mac OS X and
2506 possibly on Mac OS 8.6 with the right CarbonLib installed, but not on earlier
2507 releases.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002508
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002509- Many tools such as BuildApplet.py and gensuitemodule.py now support a command
2510 line interface too.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002511
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002512- All the Carbon classes are now PEP253 compliant, meaning that you can
2513 subclass them from Python. Most of the attributes have gone, you should
2514 now use the accessor function call API, which is also what Apple's
2515 documentation uses. Some attributes such as grafport.visRgn are still
2516 available for convenience.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002517
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002518- New Carbon modules File (implementing the APIs in Files.h and Aliases.h)
2519 and Folder (APIs from Folders.h). The old macfs builtin module is
2520 gone, and replaced by a Python wrapper around the new modules.
2521
2522- Pathname handling should now be fully consistent: MacPython-OSX always uses
2523 unix pathnames and MacPython-OS9 always uses colon-separated Mac pathnames
2524 (also when running on Mac OS X).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002525
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002526- New Carbon modules Help and AH give access to the Carbon Help Manager.
2527 There are hooks in the IDE to allow accessing the Python documentation
2528 (and Apple's Carbon and Cocoa documentation) through the Help Viewer.
2529 See Mac/OSX/README for converting the Python documentation to a
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002530 Help Viewer compatible form and installing it.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002531
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002532- OSA support has been redesigned and the generated Python classes now
2533 mirror the inheritance defined by the underlying OSA classes.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002534
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002535- MacPython no longer maps both \r and \n to \n on input for any text file.
2536 This feature has been replaced by universal newline support (PEP278).
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00002537
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00002538- The default encoding for Python sourcefiles in MacPython-OS9 is no longer
Guido van Rossum16c85172003-02-20 01:52:48 +00002539 mac-roman (or whatever your local Mac encoding was) but "ascii", like on
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00002540 other platforms. If you really need sourcefiles with Mac characters in them
2541 you can change this in site.py.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002542
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002543
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002544What's New in Python 2.2 final?
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002545===============================
2546
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002547*Release date: 21-Dec-2001*
2548
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002549Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002550--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002551
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002552- pickle.py, cPickle: allow pickling instances of new-style classes
2553 with a custom metaclass.
2554
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002555Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002556-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002557
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002558- weakref proxy object: when comparing, unwrap both arguments if both
2559 are proxies.
2560
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002561Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002562-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002563
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002564- binascii.b2a_base64(): fix a potential buffer overrun when encoding
2565 very short strings.
2566
2567- cPickle: the obscure "fast" mode was suspected of causing stack
2568 overflows on the Mac. Hopefully fixed this by setting the recursion
2569 limit much smaller. If the limit is too low (it only affects
2570 performance), you can change it by defining PY_CPICKLE_FAST_LIMIT
2571 when compiling cPickle.c (or in pyconfig.h).
2572
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002573Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002574-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002575
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002576- dumbdbm.py: fixed a dumb old bug (the file didn't get synched at
2577 close or delete time).
2578
2579- rfc822.py: fixed a bug where the address '<>' was converted to None
2580 instead of an empty string (also fixes the email.Utils module).
2581
2582- xmlrpclib.py: version 1.0.0; uses precision for doubles.
2583
2584- test suite: the pickle and cPickle tests were not executing any code
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002585 when run from the standard regression test.
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002586
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002587Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002588-----------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002589
2590Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002591-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002592
2593C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002594-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002595
2596New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002597-------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002598
2599Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002600-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002601
2602Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002603-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002604
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002605- distutils package: fixed broken Windows installers (bdist_wininst).
2606
2607- tempfile.py: prevent mysterious warnings when TemporaryFileWrapper
2608 instances are deleted at process exit time.
2609
2610- socket.py: prevent mysterious warnings when socket instances are
2611 deleted at process exit time.
2612
2613- posixmodule.c: fix a Windows crash with stat() of a filename ending
2614 in backslash.
2615
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002616Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002617----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002618
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002619- The Carbon toolbox modules have been upgraded to Universal Headers
2620 3.4, and experimental CoreGraphics and CarbonEvents modules have
2621 been added. All only for framework-enabled MacOSX.
2622
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002623
Tim Peters6272dfd2001-12-13 19:34:00 +00002624What's New in Python 2.2c1?
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002625===========================
2626
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002627*Release date: 14-Dec-2001*
2628
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002629Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002630--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002631
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00002632- Guido's tutorial introduction to the new type/class features has
2633 been extensively updated. See
2634
2635 http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html
2636
2637 That remains the primary documentation in this area.
2638
Guido van Rossum33bab012001-12-05 22:45:48 +00002639- Fixed a leak: instance variables declared with __slots__ were never
2640 deleted!
2641
Guido van Rossum4b800852001-12-03 00:54:52 +00002642- The "delete attribute" method of descriptor objects is called
2643 __delete__, not __del__. In previous releases, it was mistakenly
2644 called __del__, which created an unfortunate overloading condition
2645 with finalizers. (The "get attribute" and "set attribute" methods
2646 are still called __get__ and __set__, respectively.)
2647
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00002648- Some subtle issues with the super built-in were fixed:
2649
2650 (a) When super itself is subclassed, its __get__ method would still
2651 return an instance of the base class (i.e., of super).
2652
2653 (b) super(C, C()).__class__ would return C rather than super. This
2654 is confusing. To fix this, I decided to change the semantics of
2655 super so that it only applies to code attributes, not to data
2656 attributes. After all, overriding data attributes is not
2657 supported anyway.
2658
2659 (c) The __get__ method didn't check whether the argument was an
2660 instance of the type used in creation of the super instance.
2661
Guido van Rossumcd7b7d62001-12-04 21:02:07 +00002662- Previously, hash() of an instance of a subclass of a mutable type
2663 (list or dictionary) would return some value, rather than raising
2664 TypeError. This has been fixed. Also, directly calling
2665 dict.__hash__ and list.__hash__ now raises the same TypeError
2666 (previously, these were the same as object.__hash__).
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00002667
Guido van Rossumd331cb52001-12-05 19:46:42 +00002668- New-style objects now support deleting their __dict__. This is for
2669 all intents and purposes equivalent to assigning a brand new empty
2670 dictionary, but saves space if the object is not used further.
2671
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002672Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002673-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002674
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00002675- -Qnew now works as documented in PEP 238: when -Qnew is passed on
2676 the command line, all occurrences of "/" use true division instead
2677 of classic division. See the PEP for details. Note that "all"
2678 means all instances in library and 3rd-party modules, as well as in
2679 your own code. As the PEP says, -Qnew is intended for use only in
2680 educational environments with control over the libraries in use.
Tim Petersbf72fe22001-12-11 21:43:14 +00002681 Note that test_coercion.py in the standard Python test suite fails
2682 under -Qnew; this is expected, and won't be repaired until true
2683 division becomes the default (in the meantime, test_coercion is
2684 testing the current rules).
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00002685
Fred Drake6c01e252001-12-14 17:08:12 +00002686- complex() now only allows the first argument to be a string
2687 argument, and raises TypeError if either the second arg is a string
2688 or if the second arg is specified when the first is a string.
2689
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002690Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002691-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002692
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00002693- gc.get_referents was renamed to gc.get_referrers.
2694
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002695Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002696-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002697
Tim Peters25059d32001-12-07 20:35:43 +00002698- Functions in the os.spawn() family now release the global interpreter
2699 lock around calling the platform spawn. They should always have done
2700 this, but did not before 2.2c1. Multithreaded programs calling
2701 an os.spawn function with P_WAIT will no longer block all Python threads
2702 until the spawned program completes. It's possible that some programs
2703 relies on blocking, although more likely by accident than by design.
2704
Martin v. Löwis3a89b2b2001-11-25 14:35:58 +00002705- webbrowser defaults to netscape.exe on OS/2 now.
2706
Martin v. Löwis652e1912001-11-25 14:50:56 +00002707- Tix.ResizeHandle exposes detach_widget, hide, and show.
2708
Martin v. Löwis714d2e22001-12-02 12:26:03 +00002709- The charset alias windows_1252 has been added.
2710
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00002711- types.StringTypes is a tuple containing the defined string types;
2712 usually this will be (str, unicode), but if Python was compiled
2713 without Unicode support it will be just (str,).
2714
2715- The pulldom and minidom modules were synchronized to PyXML.
2716
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002717Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002718-----------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002719
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00002720- A new script called Tools/scripts/google.py was added, which fires
2721 off a search on Google.
2722
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002723Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002724-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002725
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00002726- Note that release builds of Python should arrange to define the
2727 preprocessor symbol NDEBUG on the command line (or equivalent).
2728 In the 2.2 pre-release series we tried to define this by magic in
2729 Python.h instead, but it proved to cause problems for extension
2730 authors. The Unix, Windows and Mac builds now all define NDEBUG in
2731 release builds via cmdline (or equivalent) instead. Ports to
2732 other platforms should do likewise.
2733
Jack Jansen1999ef42001-12-06 21:47:20 +00002734- It is no longer necessary to use --with-suffix when building on a
2735 case-insensitive file system (such as Mac OS X HFS+). In the build
2736 directory an extension is used, but not in the installed python.
2737
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002738C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002739-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002740
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00002741- New function PyDict_MergeFromSeq2() exposes the builtin dict
2742 constructor's logic for updating a dictionary from an iterable object
2743 producing key-value pairs.
2744
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00002745- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() requires that the number of entries in
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00002746 the keyword list equal the number of argument specifiers. This
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00002747 wasn't checked correctly, and PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords could even
2748 dump core in some bad cases. This has been repaired. As a result,
2749 PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords may raise RuntimeError in bad cases that
2750 previously went unchallenged.
2751
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002752New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002753-------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002754
2755Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002756-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002757
2758Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002759-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002760
2761Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002762----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002763
Jack Jansenffa260f2001-12-06 21:14:00 +00002764- In unix-Python on Mac OS X (and darwin) sys.platform is now "darwin",
2765 without any trailing digits.
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002766
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00002767- Changed logic for finding python home in Mac OS X framework Pythons.
2768 Now sys.executable points to the executable again, in stead of to
2769 the shared library. The latter is used only for locating the python
2770 home.
2771
2772
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002773What's New in Python 2.2b2?
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002774===========================
2775
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002776*Release date: 16-Nov-2001*
2777
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002778Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002779--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002780
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00002781- Multiple inheritance mixing new-style and classic classes in the
2782 list of base classes is now allowed, so this works now:
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00002783
2784 class Classic: pass
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00002785 class Mixed(Classic, object): pass
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00002786
2787 The MRO (method resolution order) for each base class is respected
2788 according to its kind, but the MRO for the derived class is computed
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002789 using new-style MRO rules if any base class is a new-style class.
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00002790 This needs to be documented.
2791
Tim Petersa427a2b2001-10-29 22:25:45 +00002792- The new builtin dictionary() constructor, and dictionary type, have
2793 been renamed to dict. This reflects a decade of common usage.
2794
Guido van Rossum3fc08d22001-11-15 20:33:10 +00002795- dict() now accepts an iterable object producing 2-sequences. For
2796 example, dict(d.items()) == d for any dictionary d. The argument,
2797 and the elements of the argument, can be any iterable objects.
2798
Guido van Rossum7ad2d1e2001-10-29 22:11:00 +00002799- New-style classes can now have a __del__ method, which is called
2800 when the instance is deleted (just like for classic classes).
2801
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00002802- Assignment to object.__dict__ is now possible, for objects that are
2803 instances of new-style classes that have a __dict__ (unless the base
2804 class forbids it).
2805
Guido van Rossumc8e56452001-10-22 00:43:43 +00002806- Methods of built-in types now properly check for keyword arguments
2807 (formerly these were silently ignored). The only built-in methods
2808 that take keyword arguments are __call__, __init__ and __new__.
2809
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00002810- The socket function has been converted to a type; see below.
2811
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002812Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002813-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002814
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00002815- Assignment to __debug__ raises SyntaxError at compile-time. This
2816 was promised when 2.1c1 was released as "What's New in Python 2.1c1"
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00002817 (see below) says.
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00002818
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00002819- Clarified the error messages for unsupported operands to an operator
2820 (like 1 + '').
2821
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002822Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002823-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002824
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00002825- mmap has a new keyword argument, "access", allowing a uniform way for
2826 both Windows and Unix users to create read-only, write-through and
2827 copy-on-write memory mappings. This was previously possible only on
2828 Unix. A new keyword argument was required to support this in a
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002829 uniform way because the mmap() signatures had diverged across
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00002830 platforms. Thanks to Jay T Miller for repairing this!
2831
Tim Peters169ded02001-11-03 19:57:21 +00002832- By default, the gc.garbage list now contains only those instances in
2833 unreachable cycles that have __del__ methods; in 2.1 it contained all
2834 instances in unreachable cycles. "Instances" here has been generalized
2835 to include instances of both new-style and old-style classes.
2836
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00002837- The socket module defines a new method for socket objects,
2838 sendall(). This is like send() but may make multiple calls to
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00002839 send() until all data has been sent. Also, the socket function has
2840 been converted to a subclassable type, like list and tuple (etc.)
2841 before it; socket and SocketType are now the same thing.
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00002842
2843- Various bugfixes to the curses module. There is now a test suite
2844 for the curses module (you have to run it manually).
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00002845
Guido van Rossum692adf12001-10-30 03:03:03 +00002846- binascii.b2a_base64 no longer places an arbitrary restriction of 57
2847 bytes on its input.
2848
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002849Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002850-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002851
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00002852- tkFileDialog exposes a Directory class and askdirectory
Martin v. Löwis25ee87c2001-11-07 22:38:08 +00002853 convenience function.
2854
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00002855- Symbolic group names in regular expressions must be unique. For
2856 example, the regexp r'(?P<abc>)(?P<abc>)' is not allowed, because a
2857 single name can't mean both "group 1" and "group 2" simultaneously.
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00002858 Python 2.2 detects this error at regexp compilation time;
2859 previously, the error went undetected, and results were
2860 unpredictable. Also in sre, the pattern.split(), pattern.sub(), and
2861 pattern.subn() methods have been rewritten in C. Also, an
2862 experimental function/method finditer() has been added, which works
2863 like findall() but returns an iterator.
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00002864
Martin v. Löwisb7b32602001-11-02 23:48:20 +00002865- Tix exposes more commands through the classes DirSelectBox,
2866 DirSelectDialog, ListNoteBook, Meter, CheckList, and the
2867 methods tix_addbitmapdir, tix_cget, tix_configure, tix_filedialog,
2868 tix_getbitmap, tix_getimage, tix_option_get, and tix_resetoptions.
2869
Tim Peters98791af2001-10-23 01:59:54 +00002870- Traceback objects are now scanned by cyclic garbage collection, so
2871 cycles created by casual use of sys.exc_info() no longer cause
2872 permanent memory leaks (provided garbage collection is enabled).
2873
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00002874- os.extsep -- a new variable needed by the RISCOS support. It is the
2875 separator used by extensions, and is '.' on all platforms except
2876 RISCOS, where it is '/'. There is no need to use this variable
2877 unless you have a masochistic desire to port your code to RISCOS.
2878
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00002879- mimetypes.py has optional support for non-standard, but commonly
2880 found types. guess_type() and guess_extension() now accept an
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002881 optional 'strict' flag, defaulting to true, which controls whether
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00002882 recognize non-standard types or not. A few non-standard types we
2883 know about have been added. Also, when run as a script, there are
2884 new -l and -e options.
2885
2886- statcache is now deprecated.
2887
2888- email.Utils.formatdate() now produces the preferred RFC 2822 style
2889 dates with numeric timezones (it used to produce obsolete dates
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002890 hard coded to "GMT" timezone). An optional 'localtime' flag is
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00002891 added to produce dates in the local timezone, with daylight savings
2892 time properly taken into account.
2893
2894- In pickle and cPickle, instead of masking errors in load() by
2895 transforming them into SystemError, we let the original exception
2896 propagate out. Also, implement support for __safe_for_unpickling__
2897 in pickle, as it already was supported in cPickle.
2898
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002899Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002900-----------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002901
2902Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002903-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002904
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00002905- The dbm module is built using libdb1 if available. The bsddb module
2906 is built with libdb3 if available.
2907
2908- Misc/Makefile.pre.in has been removed by BDFL pronouncement.
2909
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002910C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002911-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002912
Tim Peters1fc240e2001-10-26 05:06:50 +00002913- New function PySequence_Fast_GET_SIZE() returns the size of a non-
2914 NULL result from PySequence_Fast(), more quickly than calling
2915 PySequence_Size().
2916
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00002917- New argument unpacking function PyArg_UnpackTuple() added.
2918
2919- New functions PyObject_CallFunctionObjArgs() and
2920 PyObject_CallMethodObjArgs() have been added to make it more
2921 convenient and efficient to call functions and methods from C.
2922
2923- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() no longer masks errors, so it's
2924 possible that this will propagate errors it didn't before.
2925
2926- New function PyObject_CheckReadBuffer(), which returns true if its
2927 argument supports the single-segment readable buffer interface.
2928
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002929New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002930-------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002931
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00002932- We've finally confirmed that this release builds on HP-UX 11.00,
2933 *with* threads, and passes the test suite.
2934
Tim Peters7a33d8b2001-11-05 02:51:07 +00002935- Thanks to a series of patches from Michael Muller, Python may build
2936 again under OS/2 Visual Age C++.
2937
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00002938- Updated RISCOS port by Dietmar Schwertberger.
2939
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002940Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002941-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002942
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00002943- Added a test script for the curses module. It isn't run automatically;
2944 regrtest.py must be run with '-u curses' to enable it.
2945
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002946Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002947-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002948
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00002949Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002950----
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00002951
2952- PythonScript has been moved to unsupported and is slated to be
2953 removed completely in the next release.
2954
2955- It should now be possible to build applets that work on both OS9 and
2956 OSX.
2957
2958- The core is now linked with CoreServices not Carbon; as a side
2959 result, default 8bit encoding on OSX is now ASCII.
2960
2961- Python should now build on OSX 10.1.1
2962
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002963
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002964What's New in Python 2.2b1?
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002965===========================
2966
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002967*Release date: 19-Oct-2001*
2968
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002969Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002970--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002971
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00002972- New-style classes are now always dynamic (except for built-in and
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00002973 extension types). There is no longer a performance penalty, and I
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00002974 no longer see another reason to keep this baggage around. One relic
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00002975 remains: the __dict__ of a new-style class is a read-only proxy; you
2976 must set the class's attribute to modify it. As a consequence, the
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00002977 __defined__ attribute of new-style types no longer exists, for lack
2978 of need: there is once again only one __dict__ (although in the
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00002979 future a __cache__ may be resurrected with a similar function, if I
2980 can prove that it actually speeds things up).
Guido van Rossum50fda3b2001-10-04 19:46:06 +00002981
Tim Peters1c9ca872001-10-04 06:43:12 +00002982- C.__doc__ now works as expected for new-style classes (in 2.2a4 it
2983 always returned None, even when there was a class docstring).
2984
2985- doctest now finds and runs docstrings attached to new-style classes,
2986 class methods, static methods, and properties.
2987
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00002988Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002989-----------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002990
Guido van Rossuma8bcf802001-10-15 15:53:58 +00002991- A very subtle syntactical pitfall in list comprehensions was fixed.
2992 For example: [a+b for a in 'abc', for b in 'def']. The comma in
2993 this example is a mistake. Previously, this would silently let 'a'
2994 iterate over the singleton tuple ('abc',), yielding ['abcd', 'abce',
2995 'abcf'] rather than the intended ['ad', 'ae', 'af', 'bd', 'be',
2996 'bf', 'cd', 'ce', 'cf']. Now, this is flagged as a syntax error.
2997 Note that [a for a in <singleton>] is a convoluted way to say
2998 [<singleton>] anyway, so it's not like any expressiveness is lost.
2999
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003000- getattr(obj, name, default) now only catches AttributeError, as
3001 documented, rather than returning the default value for all
3002 exceptions (which could mask bugs in a __getattr__ hook, for
3003 example).
3004
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00003005- Weak reference objects are now part of the core and offer a C API.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00003006 A bug which could allow a core dump when binary operations involved
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00003007 proxy reference has been fixed. weakref.ReferenceError is now a
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003008 built-in exception.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00003009
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00003010- unicode(obj) now behaves more like str(obj), accepting arbitrary
3011 objects, and calling a __unicode__ method if it exists.
3012 unicode(obj, encoding) and unicode(obj, encoding, errors) still
Marc-André Lemburgb5507ec2001-10-19 12:02:29 +00003013 require an 8-bit string or character buffer argument.
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00003014
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003015- isinstance() now allows any object as the first argument and a
3016 class, a type or something with a __bases__ tuple attribute for the
3017 second argument. The second argument may also be a tuple of a
3018 class, type, or something with __bases__, in which case isinstance()
3019 will return true if the first argument is an instance of any of the
3020 things contained in the second argument tuple. E.g.
3021
3022 isinstance(x, (A, B))
3023
3024 returns true if x is an instance of A or B.
3025
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003026Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003027-----------------
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003028
3029- thread.start_new_thread() now returns the thread ID (previously None).
3030
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00003031- binascii has now two quopri support functions, a2b_qp and b2a_qp.
3032
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00003033- readline now supports setting the startup_hook and the
3034 pre_event_hook, and adds the add_history() function.
Martin v. Löwis0daad592001-09-30 21:09:59 +00003035
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00003036- os and posix supports chroot(), setgroups() and unsetenv() where
3037 available. The stat(), fstat(), statvfs() and fstatvfs() functions
3038 now return "pseudo-sequences" -- the various fields can now be
3039 accessed as attributes (e.g. os.stat("/").st_mtime) but for
3040 backwards compatibility they also behave as a fixed-length sequence.
3041 Some platform-specific fields (e.g. st_rdev) are only accessible as
Guido van Rossum98bf58f2001-10-18 20:34:25 +00003042 attributes.
3043
3044- time: localtime(), gmtime() and strptime() now return a
3045 pseudo-sequence similar to the os.stat() return value, with
3046 attributes like tm_year etc.
Martin v. Löwis16628c92001-10-04 22:46:41 +00003047
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003048- Decompression objects in the zlib module now accept an optional
3049 second parameter to decompress() that specifies the maximum amount
3050 of memory to use for the uncompressed data.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003051
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00003052- optional SSL support in the socket module now exports OpenSSL
3053 functions RAND_add(), RAND_egd(), and RAND_status(). These calls
3054 are useful on platforms like Solaris where OpenSSL does not
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003055 automatically seed its PRNG. Also, the keyfile and certfile
3056 arguments to socket.ssl() are now optional.
3057
3058- posixmodule (and by extension, the os module on POSIX platforms) now
3059 exports O_LARGEFILE, O_DIRECT, O_DIRECTORY, and O_NOFOLLOW.
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00003060
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003061Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003062-------
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00003063
Tim Peters7402f792001-10-02 03:53:41 +00003064- doctest now excludes functions and classes not defined by the module
3065 being tested, thanks to Tim Hochberg.
3066
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00003067- HotShot, a new profiler implemented using a C-based callback, has
3068 been added. This substantially reduces the overhead of profiling,
3069 but it is still quite preliminary. Support modules and
3070 documentation will be added in upcoming releases (before 2.2 final).
3071
Guido van Rossumc4b09b42001-10-04 10:19:00 +00003072- profile now produces correct output in situations where an exception
3073 raised in Python is cleared by C code (e.g. hasattr()). This used
3074 to cause wrong output, including spurious claims of recursive
3075 functions and attribution of time spent to the wrong function.
3076
Tim Peters0a1fc4e2001-10-07 03:12:08 +00003077 The code and documentation for the derived OldProfile and HotProfile
3078 profiling classes was removed. The code hasn't worked for years (if
3079 you tried to use them, they raised exceptions). OldProfile
3080 intended to reproduce the behavior of the profiler Python used more
3081 than 7 years ago, and isn't interesting anymore. HotProfile intended
3082 to provide a faster profiler (but producing less information), and
3083 that's a worthy goal we intend to meet via a different approach (but
3084 without losing information).
3085
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00003086- Profile.calibrate() has a new implementation that should deliver
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00003087 a much better system-specific calibration constant. The constant can
3088 now be specified in an instance constructor, or as a Profile class or
3089 instance variable, instead of by editing profile.py's source code.
3090 Calibration must still be done manually (see the docs for the profile
3091 module).
3092
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003093 Note that Profile.calibrate() must be overridden by subclasses.
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00003094 Improving the accuracy required exploiting detailed knowledge of
3095 profiler internals; the earlier method abstracted away the details
3096 and measured a simplified model instead, but consequently computed
3097 a constant too small by a factor of 2 on some modern machines.
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00003098
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00003099- quopri's encode and decode methods take an optional header parameter,
Jeremy Hylton6f543b62001-10-16 20:42:52 +00003100 which indicates whether output is intended for the header 'Q'
3101 encoding.
3102
Guido van Rossuma5343cc2001-10-18 18:02:07 +00003103- The SocketServer.ThreadingMixIn class now closes the request after
3104 finish_request() returns. (Not when it errors out though.)
3105
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003106- The nntplib module's NNTP.body() method has grown a 'file' argument
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003107 to allow saving the message body to a file.
3108
3109- The email package has added a class email.Parser.HeaderParser which
3110 only parses headers and does not recurse into the message's body.
3111 Also, the module/class MIMEAudio has been added for representing
3112 audio data (contributed by Anthony Baxter).
3113
3114- ftplib should be able to handle files > 2GB.
3115
3116- ConfigParser.getboolean() now also interprets TRUE, FALSE, YES, NO,
3117 ON, and OFF.
3118
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00003119- xml.dom.minidom NodeList objects now support the length attribute
3120 and item() method as required by the DOM specifications.
3121
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00003122Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003123-----------
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00003124
3125- Demo/dns was removed. It no longer serves any purpose; a package
3126 derived from it is now maintained by Anthony Baxter, see
3127 http://PyDNS.SourceForge.net.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003128
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003129- The freeze tool has been made more robust, and two new options have
3130 been added: -X and -E.
3131
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003132Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003133-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003134
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003135- configure will use CXX in LINKCC if CXX is used to build main() and
3136 the system requires to link a C++ main using the C++ compiler.
3137
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003138C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003139-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003140
Guido van Rossum6c4bce32001-10-18 19:20:25 +00003141- The documentation for the tp_compare slot is updated to require that
3142 the return value must be -1, 0, 1; an arbitrary number <0 or >0 is
3143 not correct. This is not yet enforced but will be enforced in
3144 Python 2.3; even later, we may use -2 to indicate errors and +2 for
3145 "NotImplemented". Right now, -1 should be used for an error return.
3146
Tim Petersd38b1c72001-09-30 05:09:37 +00003147- PyLong_AsLongLong() now accepts int (as well as long) arguments.
3148 Consequently, PyArg_ParseTuple's 'L' code also accepts int (as well
3149 as long) arguments.
3150
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00003151- PyThread_start_new_thread() now returns a long int giving the thread
3152 ID, if one can be calculated; it returns -1 for error, 0 if no
3153 thread ID is calculated (this is an incompatible change, but only
3154 the thread module used this API). This code has only really been
3155 tested on Linux and Windows; other platforms please beware (and
3156 report any bugs or strange behavior).
3157
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00003158- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() no longer accepts Unicode objects as
3159 input.
3160
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003161New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003162-------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003163
3164Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003165-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003166
3167Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003168-------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003169
Tim Peters04cf1d32001-10-09 22:39:40 +00003170- Installer: If you install IDLE, and don't disable file-extension
3171 registration, a new "Edit with IDLE" context (right-click) menu entry
3172 is created for .py and .pyw files.
3173
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003174- The signal module now supports SIGBREAK on Windows, thanks to Steven
3175 Scott. Note that SIGBREAK is unique to Windows. The default SIGBREAK
3176 action remains to call Win32 ExitProcess(). This can be changed via
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003177 signal.signal(). For example::
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003178
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003179 # Make Ctrl+Break raise KeyboardInterrupt, like Python's default Ctrl+C
3180 # (SIGINT) behavior.
3181 import signal
3182 signal.signal(signal.SIGBREAK, signal.default_int_handler)
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003183
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003184 try:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003185 while 1:
3186 pass
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003187 except KeyboardInterrupt:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003188 # We get here on Ctrl+C or Ctrl+Break now; if we had not changed
3189 # SIGBREAK, only on Ctrl+C (and Ctrl+Break would terminate the
3190 # program without the possibility for any Python-level cleanup).
3191 print "Clean exit"
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003192
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003193
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003194What's New in Python 2.2a4?
3195===========================
3196
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003197*Release date: 28-Sep-2001*
3198
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003199Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003200--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003201
3202- pydoc and inspect are now aware of new-style classes;
3203 e.g. help(list) at the interactive prompt now shows proper
3204 documentation for all operations on list objects.
3205
3206- Applications using Jim Fulton's ExtensionClass module can now safely
3207 be used with Python 2.2. In particular, Zope 2.4.1 now works with
3208 Python 2.2 (as well as with Python 2.1.1). The Demo/metaclass
3209 examples also work again. It is hoped that Gtk and Boost also work
3210 with 2.2a4 and beyond. (If you can confirm this, please write
3211 webmaster@python.org; if there are still problems, please open a bug
3212 report on SourceForge.)
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003213
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00003214- property() now takes 4 keyword arguments: fget, fset, fdel and doc.
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003215 These map to read-only attributes 'fget', 'fset', 'fdel', and '__doc__'
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00003216 in the constructed property object. fget, fset and fdel weren't
3217 discoverable from Python in 2.2a3. __doc__ is new, and allows to
3218 associate a docstring with a property.
3219
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003220- Comparison overloading is now more completely implemented. For
3221 example, a str subclass instance can properly be compared to a str
3222 instance, and it can properly overload comparison. Ditto for most
3223 other built-in object types.
3224
3225- The repr() of new-style classes has changed; instead of <type
3226 'M.Foo'> a new-style class is now rendered as <class 'M.Foo'>,
3227 *except* for built-in types, which are still rendered as <type
3228 'Foo'> (to avoid upsetting existing code that might parse or
3229 otherwise rely on repr() of certain type objects).
3230
3231- The repr() of new-style objects is now always <Foo object at XXX>;
3232 previously, it was sometimes <Foo instance at XXX>.
3233
3234- For new-style classes, what was previously called __getattr__ is now
3235 called __getattribute__. This method, if defined, is called for
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00003236 *every* attribute access. A new __getattr__ hook more similar to the
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003237 one in classic classes is defined which is called only if regular
3238 attribute access raises AttributeError; to catch *all* attribute
3239 access, you can use __getattribute__ (for new-style classes). If
3240 both are defined, __getattribute__ is called first, and if it raises
3241 AttributeError, __getattr__ is called.
3242
3243- The __class__ attribute of new-style objects can be assigned to.
3244 The new class must have the same C-level object layout as the old
3245 class.
3246
3247- The builtin file type can be subclassed now. In the usual pattern,
3248 "file" is the name of the builtin type, and file() is a new builtin
3249 constructor, with the same signature as the builtin open() function.
3250 file() is now the preferred way to open a file.
3251
3252- Previously, __new__ would only see sequential arguments passed to
3253 the type in a constructor call; __init__ would see both sequential
3254 and keyword arguments. This made no sense whatsoever any more, so
3255 now both __new__ and __init__ see all arguments.
3256
3257- Previously, hash() applied to an instance of a subclass of str or
3258 unicode always returned 0. This has been repaired.
3259
3260- Previously, an operation on an instance of a subclass of an
3261 immutable type (int, long, float, complex, tuple, str, unicode),
3262 where the subtype didn't override the operation (and so the
3263 operation was handled by the builtin type), could return that
3264 instance instead a value of the base type. For example, if s was of
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003265 a str subclass type, s[:] returned s as-is. Now it returns a str
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003266 with the same value as s.
3267
Barry Warsaw86fbaf82001-09-28 15:26:12 +00003268- Provisional support for pickling new-style objects has been added.
3269
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003270Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003271----
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003272
Tim Peters2c9aa5e2001-09-23 04:06:05 +00003273- file.writelines() now accepts any iterable object producing strings.
3274
Marc-André Lemburgaefd7662001-09-20 12:59:37 +00003275- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() now works very much like
3276 PyObject_Str(obj) in that it tries to use __str__/tp_str
3277 on the object if the object is not a string or buffer. This
3278 makes unicode() behave like str() when applied to non-string/buffer
3279 objects.
3280
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00003281- PyFile_WriteObject now passes Unicode objects to the file's write
3282 method. As a result, all file-like objects which may be the target
Martin v. Löwis2777c022001-09-19 13:47:32 +00003283 of a print statement must support Unicode objects, i.e. they must
3284 at least convert them into ASCII strings.
3285
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003286- Thread scheduling on Solaris should be improved; it is no longer
3287 necessary to insert a small sleep at the start of a thread in order
3288 to let other runnable threads be scheduled.
3289
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003290Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003291-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003292
Marc-André Lemburgbf990172001-09-27 14:17:33 +00003293- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
3294 read character buffer compatible objects for their .write() methods.
3295 These objects are converted to strings and then handled as such
3296 by the instances.
3297
Barry Warsaw2f600732001-09-24 04:28:10 +00003298- The "email" package has been added. This is basically a port of the
3299 mimelib package <http://sf.net/projects/mimelib> with API changes
3300 and some implementations updated to use iterators and generators.
3301
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00003302- difflib.ndiff() and difflib.Differ.compare() are generators now. This
3303 restores the ability of Tools/scripts/ndiff.py to start producing output
3304 before the entire comparison is complete.
3305
Barry Warsaw58b072d2001-09-22 04:44:21 +00003306- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
3307 iteration just like file objects (i.e. their .readline() method is
3308 called for each iteration until it returns an empty string).
3309
Marc-André Lemburg494f2ae2001-09-19 11:33:31 +00003310- The codecs module has grown four new helper APIs to access
3311 builtin codecs: getencoder(), getdecoder(), getreader(),
3312 getwriter().
3313
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003314- SimpleXMLRPCServer: a new module (based upon SimpleHTMLServer)
3315 simplifies writing XML RPC servers.
3316
Barry Warsaw647d5e82001-09-28 17:01:02 +00003317- os.path.realpath(): a new function that returns the absolute pathname
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003318 after interpretation of symbolic links. On non-Unix systems, this
3319 is an alias for os.path.abspath().
3320
Tim Peters16a77ad2001-09-08 04:00:12 +00003321- operator.indexOf() (PySequence_Index() in the C API) now works with any
3322 iterable object.
3323
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003324- smtplib now supports various authentication and security features of
3325 the SMTP protocol through the new login() and starttls() methods.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00003326
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003327- hmac: a new module implementing keyed hashing for message
3328 authentication.
3329
3330- mimetypes now recognizes more extensions and file types. At the
3331 same time, some mappings not sanctioned by IANA were removed.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00003332
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003333- The "compiler" package has been brought up to date to the state of
Guido van Rossumc9ed5dc2001-09-20 05:30:24 +00003334 Python 2.2 bytecode generation. It has also been promoted from a
3335 Tool to a standard library package. (Tools/compiler still exists as
3336 a sample driver.)
3337
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003338Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003339-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003340
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003341- Large file support (LFS) is now automatic when the platform supports
3342 it; no more manual configuration tweaks are needed. On Linux, at
3343 least, it's possible to have a system whose C library supports large
3344 files but whose kernel doesn't; in this case, large file support is
3345 still enabled but doesn't do you any good unless you upgrade your
3346 kernel or share your Python executable with another system whose
3347 kernel has large file support.
3348
3349- The configure script now supplies plausible defaults in a
3350 cross-compilation environment. This doesn't mean that the supplied
3351 values are always correct, or that cross-compilation now works
3352 flawlessly -- but it's a first step (and it shuts up most of
3353 autoconf's warnings about AC_TRY_RUN).
3354
3355- The Unix build is now a bit less chatty, courtesy of the parser
3356 generator. The build is completely silent (except for errors) when
3357 using "make -s", thanks to a -q option to setup.py.
3358
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003359C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003360-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003361
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003362- The "structmember" API now supports some new flag bits to deny read
3363 and/or write access to attributes in restricted execution mode.
3364
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003365New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003366-------------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003367
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003368- Compaq's iPAQ handheld, running the "familiar" Linux distribution
3369 (http://familiar.handhelds.org).
3370
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003371Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003372-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003373
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00003374- The "classic" standard tests, which work by comparing stdout to
3375 an expected-output file under Lib/test/output/, no longer stop at
3376 the first mismatch. Instead the test is run to completion, and a
3377 variant of ndiff-style comparison is used to report all differences.
3378 This is much easier to understand than the previous style of reporting.
3379
3380- The unittest-based standard tests now use regrtest's test_main()
3381 convention, instead of running as a side-effect of merely being
3382 imported. This allows these tests to be run in more natural and
3383 flexible ways as unittests, outside the regrtest framework.
3384
3385- regrtest.py is much better integrated with unittest and doctest now,
3386 especially in regard to reporting errors.
3387
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003388Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003389-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003390
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003391- Large file support now also works for files > 4GB, on filesystems
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00003392 that support it (NTFS under Windows 2000). See "What's New in
3393 Python 2.2a3" for more detail.
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003394
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003395
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003396What's New in Python 2.2a3?
3397===========================
3398
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003399*Release Date: 07-Sep-2001*
3400
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003401Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003402----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003403
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00003404- Conversion of long to float now raises OverflowError if the long is too
3405 big to represent as a C double.
3406
Tim Peters32f453e2001-09-03 08:35:41 +00003407- The 3-argument builtin pow() no longer allows a third non-None argument
3408 if either of the first two arguments is a float, or if both are of
3409 integer types and the second argument is negative (in which latter case
3410 the arguments are converted to float, so this is really the same
3411 restriction).
3412
Tim Peters5d2b77c2001-09-03 05:47:38 +00003413- The builtin dir() now returns more information, and sometimes much
3414 more, generally naming all attributes of an object, and all attributes
3415 reachable from the object via its class, and from its class's base
3416 classes, and so on from them too. Example: in 2.2a2, dir([]) returned
3417 an empty list. In 2.2a3,
3418
3419 >>> dir([])
3420 ['__add__', '__class__', '__contains__', '__delattr__', '__delitem__',
3421 '__eq__', '__ge__', '__getattr__', '__getitem__', '__getslice__',
3422 '__gt__', '__hash__', '__iadd__', '__imul__', '__init__', '__le__',
3423 '__len__', '__lt__', '__mul__', '__ne__', '__new__', '__repr__',
3424 '__rmul__', '__setattr__', '__setitem__', '__setslice__', '__str__',
3425 'append', 'count', 'extend', 'index', 'insert', 'pop', 'remove',
3426 'reverse', 'sort']
3427
3428 dir(module) continues to return only the module's attributes, though.
3429
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003430- Overflowing operations on plain ints now return a long int rather
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003431 than raising OverflowError. This is a partial implementation of PEP
3432 237. You can use -Wdefault::OverflowWarning to enable a warning for
3433 this situation, and -Werror::OverflowWarning to revert to the old
3434 OverflowError exception.
3435
Guido van Rossum61c345f2001-09-04 03:26:15 +00003436- A new command line option, -Q<arg>, is added to control run-time
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003437 warnings for the use of classic division. (See PEP 238.) Possible
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00003438 values are -Qold, -Qwarn, -Qwarnall, and -Qnew. The default is
3439 -Qold, meaning the / operator has its classic meaning and no
3440 warnings are issued. Using -Qwarn issues a run-time warning about
3441 all uses of classic division for int and long arguments; -Qwarnall
3442 also warns about classic division for float and complex arguments
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00003443 (for use with fixdiv.py).
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003444 [Note: the remainder of this item (preserved below) became
3445 obsolete in 2.2c1 -- -Qnew has global effect in 2.2] ::
3446
3447 Using -Qnew is questionable; it turns on new division by default, but
3448 only in the __main__ module. You can usefully combine -Qwarn or
3449 -Qwarnall and -Qnew: this gives the __main__ module new division, and
3450 warns about classic division everywhere else.
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003451
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003452- Many built-in types can now be subclassed. This applies to int,
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003453 long, float, str, unicode, and tuple. (The types complex, list and
3454 dictionary can also be subclassed; this was introduced earlier.)
3455 Note that restrictions apply when subclassing immutable built-in
3456 types: you can only affect the value of the instance by overloading
3457 __new__. You can add mutable attributes, and the subclass instances
3458 will have a __dict__ attribute, but you cannot change the "value"
3459 (as implemented by the base class) of an immutable subclass instance
3460 once it is created.
3461
Guido van Rossumaaf80c82001-09-02 13:44:35 +00003462- The dictionary constructor now takes an optional argument, a
3463 mapping-like object, and initializes the dictionary from its
3464 (key, value) pairs.
3465
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003466- A new built-in type, super, has been added. This facilitates making
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003467 "cooperative super calls" in a multiple inheritance setting. For an
3468 explanation, see http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#cooperation
3469
Guido van Rossum8d7234d2001-09-06 22:02:58 +00003470- A new built-in type, property, has been added. This enables the
3471 creation of "properties". These are attributes implemented by
3472 getter and setter functions (or only one of these for read-only or
3473 write-only attributes), without the need to override __getattr__.
3474 See http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#property
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003475
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003476- The syntax of floating-point and imaginary literals has been
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00003477 liberalized, to allow leading zeroes. Examples of literals now
3478 legal that were SyntaxErrors before:
3479
3480 00.0 0e3 0100j 07.5 00000000000000000008.
3481
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003482- An old tokenizer bug allowed floating point literals with an incomplete
Tim Petersc6d95812001-08-28 20:56:27 +00003483 exponent, such as 1e and 3.1e-. Such literals now raise SyntaxError.
3484
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003485Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003486-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003487
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00003488- telnetlib includes symbolic names for the options, and support for
Martin v. Löwis1da9c572002-11-04 09:56:00 +00003489 setting an option negotiation callback. It also supports processing
3490 of suboptions.
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00003491
Tim Petersa40c7932001-09-05 22:36:56 +00003492- The new C standard no longer requires that math libraries set errno to
3493 ERANGE on overflow. For platform libraries that exploit this new
3494 freedom, Python's overflow-checking was wholly broken. A new overflow-
3495 checking scheme attempts to repair that, but may not be reliable on all
3496 platforms (C doesn't seem to provide anything both useful and portable
3497 in this area anymore).
3498
Martin v. Löwis44f86962001-09-05 13:44:54 +00003499- Asynchronous timeout actions are available through the new class
3500 threading.Timer.
3501
Tim Peters78526162001-09-05 00:53:45 +00003502- math.log and math.log10 now return sensible results for even huge
3503 long arguments. For example, math.log10(10 ** 10000) ~= 10000.0.
3504
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003505- A new function, imp.lock_held(), returns 1 when the import lock is
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00003506 currently held. See the docs for the imp module.
3507
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003508- pickle, cPickle and marshal on 32-bit platforms can now correctly read
Tim Peters82112372001-08-29 02:28:42 +00003509 dumps containing ints written on platforms where Python ints are 8 bytes.
3510 When read on a box where Python ints are 4 bytes, such values are
3511 converted to Python longs.
3512
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003513- In restricted execution mode (using the rexec module), unmarshalling
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003514 code objects is no longer allowed. This plugs a security hole.
3515
Steve Purcell6091cd62001-09-06 16:05:17 +00003516- unittest.TestResult instances no longer store references to tracebacks
3517 generated by test failures. This prevents unexpected dangling references
3518 to objects that should be garbage collected between tests.
3519
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003520Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003521-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003522
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00003523- Tools/scripts/fixdiv.py has been added which can be used to fix
3524 division operators as per PEP 238.
3525
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003526Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003527-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003528
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00003529- If you are an adventurous person using Mac OS X you may want to look at
3530 Mac/OSX. There is a Makefile there that will build Python as a real Mac
3531 application, which can be used for experimenting with Carbon or Cocoa.
3532 Discussion of this on pythonmac-sig, please.
3533
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00003534C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003535-----
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00003536
3537- New function PyObject_Dir(obj), like Python __builtin__.dir(obj).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00003538
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00003539- Note that PyLong_AsDouble can fail! This has always been true, but no
3540 callers checked for it. It's more likely to fail now, because overflow
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003541 errors are properly detected now. The proper way to check::
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00003542
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003543 double x = PyLong_AsDouble(some_long_object);
3544 if (x == -1.0 && PyErr_Occurred()) {
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003545 /* The conversion failed. */
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003546 }
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00003547
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003548- The GC API has been changed. Extensions that use the old API will still
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00003549 compile but will not participate in GC. To upgrade an extension
3550 module:
3551
3552 - rename Py_TPFLAGS_GC to PyTPFLAGS_HAVE_GC
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00003553
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00003554 - use PyObject_GC_New or PyObject_GC_NewVar to allocate objects and
3555 PyObject_GC_Del to deallocate them
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00003556
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00003557 - rename PyObject_GC_Init to PyObject_GC_Track and PyObject_GC_Fini
3558 to PyObject_GC_UnTrack
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00003559
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00003560 - remove PyGC_HEAD_SIZE from object size calculations
3561
3562 - remove calls to PyObject_AS_GC and PyObject_FROM_GC
3563
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003564- Two new functions: PyString_FromFormat() and PyString_FromFormatV().
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003565 These can be used safely to construct string objects from a
3566 sprintf-style format string (similar to the format string supported
3567 by PyErr_Format()).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00003568
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003569New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003570-------------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003571
Tim Petersb7da0902001-09-02 23:01:43 +00003572- Stephen Hansen contributed patches sufficient to get a clean compile
3573 under Borland C (Windows), but he reports problems running it and ran
3574 out of time to complete the port. Volunteers? Expect a MemoryError
3575 when importing the types module; this is probably shallow, and
3576 causing later failures too.
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003577
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003578Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003579-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003580
3581Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003582-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003583
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00003584- Large file support is now enabled on Win32 platforms as well as on
3585 Win64. This means that, for example, you can use f.tell() and f.seek()
3586 to manipulate files larger than 2 gigabytes (provided you have enough
3587 disk space, and are using a Windows filesystem that supports large
Tim Peters9a9471c2001-09-11 23:18:51 +00003588 partitions). Windows filesystem limits: FAT has a 2GB (gigabyte)
3589 filesize limit, and large file support makes no difference there.
3590 FAT32's limit is 4GB, and files >= 2GB are easier to use from Python now.
3591 NTFS has no practical limit on file size, and files of any size can be
3592 used from Python now.
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00003593
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003594- The w9xpopen hack is now used on Windows NT and 2000 too when COMPSPEC
Tim Peters402d5982001-08-27 06:37:48 +00003595 points to command.com (patch from Brian Quinlan).
3596
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003597
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00003598What's New in Python 2.2a2?
3599===========================
3600
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003601*Release Date: 22-Aug-2001*
3602
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00003603Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003604-----
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00003605
Barry Warsaw18b2ecf2001-08-22 20:26:56 +00003606- Tim Peters developed a brand new Windows installer using Wise 8.1,
3607 generously donated to us by Wise Solutions.
3608
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00003609- configure supports a new option --enable-unicode, with the values
3610 ucs2 and ucs4 (new in 2.2a1). With --disable-unicode, the Unicode
3611 type and supporting code is completely removed from the interpreter.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00003612
Jack Jansen32ce0cd2001-08-21 19:28:20 +00003613- A new configure option --enable-framework builds a Mac OS X framework,
3614 which "make frameworkinstall" will install. This provides a starting
3615 point for more mac-like functionality, join pythonmac-sig@python.org
3616 if you are interested in helping.
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00003617
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00003618- The NeXT platform is no longer supported.
3619
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003620- The 'new' module is now statically linked.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00003621
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00003622Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003623-----
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00003624
3625- The new Tools/scripts/cleanfuture.py can be used to automatically
Andrew M. Kuchlingb0532092001-08-15 15:54:56 +00003626 edit out obsolete future statements from Python source code. See
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00003627 the module docstring for details.
3628
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00003629Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003630-----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00003631
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00003632- regrtest.py now knows which tests are expected to be skipped on some
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00003633 platforms, allowing to give clearer test result output. regrtest
3634 also has optional --use/-u switch to run normally disabled tests
3635 which require network access or consume significant disk resources.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00003636
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00003637- Several new tests in the standard test suite, with special thanks to
3638 Nick Mathewson.
3639
3640Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003641----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00003642
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00003643- The floor division operator // has been added as outlined in PEP
3644 238. The / operator still provides classic division (and will until
3645 Python 3.0) unless "from __future__ import division" is included, in
3646 which case the / operator will provide true division. The operator
3647 module provides truediv() and floordiv() functions. Augmented
3648 assignment variants are included, as are the equivalent overloadable
3649 methods and C API methods. See the PEP for a full discussion:
3650 <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0238.html>
3651
Tim Peters6cd6a822001-08-17 22:11:27 +00003652- Future statements are now effective in simulated interactive shells
3653 (like IDLE). This should "just work" by magic, but read Michael
3654 Hudson's "Future statements in simulated shells" PEP 264 for full
3655 details: <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0264.html>.
3656
Guido van Rossumf86ddd22001-08-17 21:21:04 +00003657- The type/class unification (PEP 252-253) was integrated into the
3658 trunk and is not so tentative any more (the exact specification of
3659 some features is still tentative). A lot of work has done on fixing
3660 bugs and adding robustness and features (performance still has to
3661 come a long way).
3662
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00003663- Warnings about a mismatch in the Python API during extension import
3664 now use the Python warning framework (which makes it possible to
3665 write filters for these warnings).
3666
Barry Warsaw9b3be7f2001-08-14 18:35:02 +00003667- A function's __dict__ (aka func_dict) will now always be a
3668 dictionary. It used to be possible to delete it or set it to None,
3669 but now both actions raise TypeErrors. It is still legal to set it
3670 to a dictionary object. Getting func.__dict__ before any attributes
3671 have been assigned now returns an empty dictionary instead of None.
3672
Guido van Rossum32aa5d22001-09-05 18:43:35 +00003673- A new command line option, -E, was added which disables the use of
3674 all environment variables, or at least those that are specifically
3675 significant to Python. Usually those have a name starting with
3676 "PYTHON". This was used to fix a problem where the tests fail if
3677 the user happens to have PYTHONHOME or PYTHONPATH pointing to an
3678 older distribution.
3679
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00003680Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003681-------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00003682
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00003683- New class Differ and new functions ndiff() and restore() in difflib.py.
3684 These package the algorithms used by the popular Tools/scripts/ndiff.py,
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00003685 for programmatic reuse.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00003686
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00003687- New function xml.sax.saxutils.quoteattr(): Quote an XML attribute
3688 value using the minimal quoting required for the value; more
3689 reliable than using xml.sax.saxutils.escape() for attribute values.
3690
3691- Readline completion support for cmd.Cmd was added.
3692
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00003693- Calling os.tempnam() or os.tmpnam() generate RuntimeWarnings.
3694
3695- Added function threading.BoundedSemaphore()
3696
3697- Added Ka-Ping Yee's cgitb.py module.
3698
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003699- The 'new' module now exposes the CO_xxx flags.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00003700
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00003701- The gc module offers the get_referents function.
3702
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00003703New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003704-------------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00003705
3706C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003707-----
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00003708
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00003709- Two new APIs PyOS_snprintf() and PyOS_vsnprintf() were added
3710 which provide a cross-platform implementations for the
3711 relatively new snprintf()/vsnprintf() C lib APIs. In contrast to
3712 the standard sprintf() and vsprintf() C lib APIs, these versions
3713 apply bounds checking on the used buffer which enhances protection
3714 against buffer overruns.
3715
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00003716- Unicode APIs now use name mangling to assure that mixing interpreters
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00003717 and extensions using different Unicode widths is rendered next to
3718 impossible. Trying to import an incompatible Unicode-aware extension
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00003719 will result in an ImportError. Unicode extensions writers must make
3720 sure to check the Unicode width compatibility in their extensions by
3721 using at least one of the mangled Unicode APIs in the extension.
3722
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00003723- Two new flags METH_NOARGS and METH_O are available in method definition
3724 tables to simplify implementation of methods with no arguments and a
3725 single untyped argument. Calling such methods is more efficient than
3726 calling corresponding METH_VARARGS methods. METH_OLDARGS is now
3727 deprecated.
3728
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00003729Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003730-------
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00003731
3732- "import module" now compiles module.pyw if it exists and nothing else
3733 relevant is found.
3734
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00003735
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00003736What's New in Python 2.2a1?
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00003737===========================
3738
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003739*Release date: 18-Jul-2001*
3740
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00003741Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003742----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003743
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00003744- TENTATIVELY, a large amount of code implementing much of what's
3745 described in PEP 252 (Making Types Look More Like Classes) and PEP
3746 253 (Subtyping Built-in Types) was added. This will be released
3747 with Python 2.2a1. Documentation will be provided separately
3748 through http://www.python.org/2.2/. The purpose of releasing this
3749 with Python 2.2a1 is to test backwards compatibility. It is
3750 possible, though not likely, that a decision is made not to release
3751 this code as part of 2.2 final, if any serious backwards
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003752 incompatibilities are found during alpha testing that cannot be
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00003753 repaired.
3754
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00003755- Generators were added; this is a new way to create an iterator (see
Tim Peters11a0d102001-07-17 18:48:00 +00003756 below) using what looks like a simple function containing one or
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00003757 more 'yield' statements. See PEP 255. Since this adds a new
3758 keyword to the language, this feature must be enabled by including a
3759 future statement: "from __future__ import generators" (see PEP 236).
3760 Generators will become a standard feature in a future release
3761 (probably 2.3). Without this future statement, 'yield' remains an
3762 ordinary identifier, but a warning is issued each time it is used.
3763 (These warnings currently don't conform to the warnings framework of
3764 PEP 230; we intend to fix this in 2.2a2.)
3765
Marc-André Lemburg12e74b32001-05-22 08:58:23 +00003766- The UTF-16 codec was modified to be more RFC compliant. It will now
3767 only remove BOM characters at the start of the string and then
3768 only if running in native mode (UTF-16-LE and -BE won't remove a
3769 leading BMO character).
3770
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00003771- Strings now have a new method .decode() to complement the already
3772 existing .encode() method. These two methods provide direct access
3773 to the corresponding decoders and encoders of the registered codecs.
3774
3775 To enhance the usability of the .encode() method, the special
3776 casing of Unicode object return values was dropped (Unicode objects
3777 were auto-magically converted to string using the default encoding).
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00003778
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00003779 Both methods will now return whatever the codec in charge of the
3780 requested encoding returns as object, e.g. Unicode codecs will
3781 return Unicode objects when decoding is requested ("äöü".decode("latin-1")
3782 will return u"äöü"). This enables codec writer to create codecs
3783 for various simple to use conversions.
3784
3785 New codecs were added to demonstrate these new features (the .encode()
3786 and .decode() columns indicate the type of the returned objects):
3787
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003788 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
3789 |Name | .encode() | .decode() | Description |
3790 +=========+===========+===========+=============================+
3791 |uu | string | string | UU codec (e.g. for email) |
3792 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
3793 |base64 | string | string | base64 codec |
3794 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
3795 |quopri | string | string | quoted-printable codec |
3796 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
3797 |zlib | string | string | zlib compression |
3798 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
3799 |hex | string | string | 2-byte hex codec |
3800 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
3801 |rot-13 | string | Unicode | ROT-13 Unicode charmap codec|
3802 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00003803
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00003804- Some operating systems now support the concept of a default Unicode
3805 encoding for file system operations. Notably, Windows supports 'mbcs'
3806 as the default. The Macintosh will also adopt this concept in the medium
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00003807 term, although the default encoding for that platform will be other than
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00003808 'mbcs'.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00003809
3810 On operating system that support non-ASCII filenames, it is common for
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00003811 functions that return filenames (such as os.listdir()) to return Python
3812 string objects pre-encoded using the default file system encoding for
3813 the platform. As this encoding is likely to be different from Python's
3814 default encoding, converting this name to a Unicode object before passing
3815 it back to the Operating System would result in a Unicode error, as Python
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003816 would attempt to use its default encoding (generally ASCII) rather than
3817 the default encoding for the file system.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00003818
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003819 In general, this change simply removes surprises when working with
3820 Unicode and the file system, making these operations work as you expect,
3821 increasing the transparency of Unicode objects in this context.
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00003822 See [????] for more details, including examples.
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00003823
Tim Peters61dff2b2001-05-08 15:43:37 +00003824- Float (and complex) literals in source code were evaluated to full
3825 precision only when running from a .py file; the same code loaded from a
3826 .pyc (or .pyo) file could suffer numeric differences starting at about the
3827 12th significant decimal digit. For example, on a machine with IEEE-754
3828 floating arithmetic,
3829
3830 x = 9007199254740992.0
3831 print long(x)
3832
3833 printed 9007199254740992 if run directly from .py, but 9007199254740000
3834 if from a compiled (.pyc or .pyo) file. This was due to marshal using
3835 str(float) instead of repr(float) when building code objects. marshal
3836 now uses repr(float) instead, which should reproduce floats to full
3837 machine precision (assuming the platform C float<->string I/O conversion
3838 functions are of good quality).
3839
3840 This may cause floating-point results to change in some cases, and
3841 usually for the better, but may also cause numerically unstable
3842 algorithms to break.
3843
Tim Peters2f228e72001-05-13 00:19:31 +00003844- The implementation of dicts suffers fewer collisions, which has speed
3845 benefits. However, the order in which dict entries appear in dict.keys(),
3846 dict.values() and dict.items() may differ from previous releases for a
3847 given dict. Nothing is defined about this order, so no program should
3848 rely on it. Nevertheless, it's easy to write test cases that rely on the
3849 order by accident, typically because of printing the str() or repr() of a
3850 dict to an "expected results" file. See Lib/test/test_support.py's new
3851 sortdict(dict) function for a simple way to display a dict in sorted
3852 order.
3853
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00003854- Many other small changes to dicts were made, resulting in faster
3855 operation along the most common code paths.
3856
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00003857- Dictionary objects now support the "in" operator: "x in dict" means
3858 the same as dict.has_key(x).
3859
Barry Warsaw51acc8d2001-06-26 20:12:50 +00003860- The update() method of dictionaries now accepts generic mapping
3861 objects. Specifically the argument object must support the .keys()
3862 and __getitem__() methods. This allows you to say, for example,
3863 {}.update(UserDict())
3864
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00003865- Iterators were added; this is a generalized way of providing values
3866 to a for loop. See PEP 234. There's a new built-in function iter()
3867 to return an iterator. There's a new protocol to get the next value
3868 from an iterator using the next() method (in Python) or the
3869 tp_iternext slot (in C). There's a new protocol to get iterators
3870 using the __iter__() method (in Python) or the tp_iter slot (in C).
3871 Iterating (i.e. a for loop) over a dictionary generates its keys.
3872 Iterating over a file generates its lines.
3873
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00003874- The following functions were generalized to work nicely with iterator
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003875 arguments::
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003876
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00003877 map(), filter(), reduce(), zip()
Tim Peters8572b4f2001-05-06 01:05:02 +00003878 list(), tuple() (PySequence_Tuple() and PySequence_Fast() in C API)
3879 max(), min()
Tim Peters1af03e92001-05-26 19:37:54 +00003880 join() method of strings
3881 extend() method of lists
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00003882 'x in y' and 'x not in y' (PySequence_Contains() in C API)
3883 operator.countOf() (PySequence_Count() in C API)
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003884 right-hand side of assignment statements with multiple targets, such as ::
Tim Petersd6d010b2001-06-21 02:49:55 +00003885 x, y, z = some_iterable_object_returning_exactly_3_values
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00003886
Tim Petersd85e1022001-05-11 21:51:48 +00003887- Accessing module attributes is significantly faster (for example,
3888 random.random or os.path or yourPythonModule.yourAttribute).
3889
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00003890- Comparing dictionary objects via == and != is faster, and now works even
3891 if the keys and values don't support comparisons other than ==.
3892
Tim Peters95bf9392001-05-10 08:32:44 +00003893- Comparing dictionaries in ways other than == and != is slower: there were
3894 insecurities in the dict comparison implementation that could cause Python
3895 to crash if the element comparison routines for the dict keys and/or
3896 values mutated the dicts. Making the code bulletproof slowed it down.
3897
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00003898- Collisions in dicts are resolved via a new approach, which can help
3899 dramatically in bad cases. For example, looking up every key in a dict
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00003900 d with d.keys() == [i << 16 for i in range(20000)] is approximately 500x
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00003901 faster now. Thanks to Christian Tismer for pointing out the cause and
3902 the nature of an effective cure (last December! better late than never).
Tim Peters15d49292001-05-27 07:39:22 +00003903
Tim Peters52e155e2001-06-16 05:42:57 +00003904- repr() is much faster for large containers (dict, list, tuple).
3905
3906
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003907Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003908-------
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003909
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00003910- The constants ascii_letters, ascii_lowercase. and ascii_uppercase
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003911 were added to the string module. These a locale-independent
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00003912 constants, unlike letters, lowercase, and uppercase. These are now
3913 use in appropriate locations in the standard library.
3914
Martin v. Löwisf0473d52001-07-18 16:17:16 +00003915- The flags used in dlopen calls can now be configured using
3916 sys.setdlopenflags and queried using sys.getdlopenflags.
3917
Guido van Rossumc7e4aca2001-07-12 11:54:37 +00003918- Fredrik Lundh's xmlrpclib is now a standard library module. This
3919 provides full client-side XML-RPC support. In addition,
3920 Demo/xmlrpc/ contains two server frameworks (one SocketServer-based,
3921 one asyncore-based). Thanks to Eric Raymond for the documentation.
3922
Guido van Rossum643d3912001-07-05 14:46:25 +00003923- The xrange() object is simplified: it no longer supports slicing,
3924 repetition, comparisons, efficient 'in' checking, the tolist()
3925 method, or the start, stop and step attributes. See PEP 260.
3926
Martin v. Löwisebf94db2001-06-06 06:25:40 +00003927- A new function fnmatch.filter to filter lists of file names was added.
3928
Barry Warsawffd674d2001-05-22 16:00:10 +00003929- calendar.py uses month and day names based on the current locale.
3930
Guido van Rossum2e0a6542001-05-15 02:14:44 +00003931- strop is now *really* obsolete (this was announced before with 1.6),
3932 and issues DeprecationWarning when used (except for the four items
3933 that are still imported into string.py).
3934
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003935- Cookie.py now sorts key+value pairs by key in output strings.
3936
3937- pprint.isrecursive(object) didn't correctly identify recursive objects.
3938 Now it does.
3939
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00003940- pprint functions now much faster for large containers (tuple, list, dict).
3941
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00003942- New 'q' and 'Q' format codes in the struct module, corresponding to C
3943 types "long long" and "unsigned long long" (on Windows, __int64). In
3944 native mode, these can be used only when the platform C compiler supports
3945 these types (when HAVE_LONG_LONG is #define'd by the Python config
3946 process), and then they inherit the sizes and alignments of the C types.
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00003947 In standard mode, 'q' and 'Q' are supported on all platforms, and are
3948 8-byte integral types.
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00003949
Guido van Rossum83213cc2001-06-12 16:48:52 +00003950- The site module installs a new built-in function 'help' that invokes
3951 pydoc.help. It must be invoked as 'help()'; when invoked as 'help',
3952 it displays a message reminding the user to use 'help()' or
3953 'help(object)'.
3954
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003955Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003956-----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003957
3958- New test_mutants.py runs dict comparisons where the key and value
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003959 comparison operators mutate the dicts randomly during comparison. This
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003960 rapidly causes Python to crash under earlier releases (not for the faint
3961 of heart: it can also cause Win9x to freeze or reboot!).
3962
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003963- New test_pprint.py verifies that pprint.isrecursive() and
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00003964 pprint.isreadable() return sensible results. Also verifies that simple
3965 cases produce correct output.
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003966
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00003967C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003968-----
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00003969
3970- Removed the unused last_is_sticky argument from the internal
3971 _PyTuple_Resize(). If this affects you, you were cheating.
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003972
3973----
3974
3975**(For information about older versions, consult the HISTORY file.)**