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Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001+++++++++++
2Python News
3+++++++++++
4
Skip Montanaro4a385832002-09-20 17:08:52 +00005(editors: check NEWS.help for information about editing NEWS using ReST.)
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Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00007What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 1?
8=================================
9
10*Release date: DD-MMM-YYYY*
11
12Core and builtins
13-----------------
14
Raymond Hettinger354433a2004-05-19 08:20:33 +000015- Implemented generator expressions (PEP 289). Coded by Jiwon Seo.
16
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +000017- Enabled the profiling of C extension functions (and builtins) - check
18 new documentation and modified profiler and bdb modules for more details
19
Nicholas Bastinabce8a62004-03-21 20:24:07 +000020- Set file.name to the object passed to open (instead of a new string)
21
Nicholas Bastina7604bf2004-03-21 18:37:23 +000022- Moved tracebackobject into traceback.h and renamed to PyTracebackObject
23
Raymond Hettingerff5bc502004-03-21 15:12:00 +000024- Optimized the byte coding for multiple assignments like "a,b=b,a" and
25 "a,b,c=1,2,3". Improves their speed by 25% to 30%.
26
Brett Cannon4f653312004-03-20 22:52:14 +000027- Limit the nested depth of a tuple for the second argument to isinstance()
28 and issubclass() to the recursion limit of the interpreter.
29 Fixes bug #858016 .
30
Raymond Hettingerade08ea2004-03-18 09:48:12 +000031- Optimized dict iterators, creating separate types for each
32 and having them reveal their length. Also optimized the
33 methods: keys(), values(), and items().
34
Raymond Hettingerdd80f762004-03-07 07:31:06 +000035- Implemented a newcode opcode, LIST_APPEND, that simplifies
36 the generated bytecode for list comprehensions and further
37 improves their performance (about 35%).
38
Michael W. Hudsond3b33b52004-02-19 19:35:22 +000039- Implemented rich comparisons for floats, which seems to make
40 comparisons involving NaNs somewhat less surprising when the
41 underlying C compiler actually implements C99 semantics.
42
Raymond Hettingerfa7b9d82004-02-15 04:06:39 +000043- Optimized list.extend() to save memory and no longer create
44 intermediate sequences. Also, extend() now pre-allocates the
45 needed memory whenever the length of the iterable is known in
46 advance -- this halves the time to extend the list.
47
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +000048- Optimized list resize operations to make fewer calls to the system
49 realloc(). Significantly speeds up list appends, list pops,
50 list comprehensions, and the list contructor (when the input iterable
51 length is not known).
52
53- Changed the internal list over-allocation scheme. For larger lists,
54 overallocation ranged between 3% and 25%. Now, it is a constant 12%.
Raymond Hettingerab517d22004-02-14 18:34:46 +000055 For smaller lists (n<8), overallocation was upto eight elements. Now,
56 the overallocation is no more than three elements -- this improves space
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +000057 utilization for applications that have large numbers of small lists.
58
Raymond Hettinger0468e412004-05-05 05:37:53 +000059- Most list bodies now get re-used rather than freed. Speeds up list
60 instantiation and deletion by saving calls to malloc() and free().
61
Raymond Hettinger31017ae2004-03-04 08:25:44 +000062- The dict.update() method now accepts all the same argument forms
63 as the dict() constructor. This now includes item lists and/or
64 keyword arguments.
65
Michael W. Hudsonecfeb7f2004-02-12 15:28:27 +000066- Support for arbitrary objects supporting the read-only buffer
67 interface as the co_code field of code objects (something that was
68 only possible to create from C code) has been removed.
69
Fred Drake228765b2004-02-06 04:15:22 +000070- Made omitted callback and None equivalent for weakref.ref() and
71 weakref.proxy(); the None case wasn't handled correctly in all
72 cases.
73
74- Fixed problem where PyWeakref_NewRef() and PyWeakref_NewProxy()
75 assumed that initial existing entries in an object's weakref list
76 would not be removed while allocating a new weakref object. Since
77 GC could be invoked at that time, however, that assumption was
78 invalid. In a truly obscure case of GC being triggered during
79 creation for a new weakref object for an referent which already
80 has a weakref without a callback which is only referenced from
81 cyclic trash, a memory error can occur. This consistently created a
82 segfault in a debug build, but provided less predictable behavior in
83 a release build.
84
Hye-Shik Changff83c2b2004-02-02 13:39:01 +000085- input() builtin function now respects compiler flags such as
86 __future__ statements. SF patch 876178.
87
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +000088- Removed PendingDeprecationWarning from apply(). apply() remains
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +000089 deprecated, but the nuisance warning will not be issued.
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +000090
Tim Peters1d7323e2003-12-01 21:35:27 +000091- At Python shutdown time (Py_Finalize()), 2.3 called cyclic garbage
92 collection twice, both before and after tearing down modules. The
93 call after tearing down modules has been disabled, because too much
94 of Python has been torn down then for __del__ methods and weakref
95 callbacks to execute sanely. The most common symptom was a sequence
96 of uninformative messages on stderr when Python shut down, produced
97 by threads trying to raise exceptions, but unable to report the nature
98 of their problems because too much of the sys module had already been
99 destroyed.
100
Guido van Rossum6c9e1302003-11-29 23:52:13 +0000101- Removed FutureWarnings related to hex/oct literals and conversions
102 and left shifts. (Thanks to Kalle Svensson for SF patch 849227.)
103 This addresses most of the remaining semantic changes promised by
104 PEP 237, except for repr() of a long, which still shows the trailing
105 'L'. The PEP appears to promise warnings for operations that
106 changed semantics compared to Python 2.3, but this is not
107 implemented; we've suffered through enough warnings related to
108 hex/oct literals and I think it's best to be silent now.
109
Raymond Hettinger4f8f9762003-11-26 08:21:35 +0000110- For str and unicode objects, the ljust(), center(), and rjust()
111 methods now accept an optional argument specifying a fill
112 character other than a space.
113
Guido van Rossumbaf0f8f2003-11-22 23:55:50 +0000114- When method objects have an attribute that can be satisfied either
115 by the function object or by the method object, the function
116 object's attribute usually wins. Christian Tismer pointed out that
117 that this is really a mistake, because this only happens for special
118 methods (like __reduce__) where the method object's version is
119 really more appropriate than the function's attribute. So from now
120 on, all method attributes will have precedence over function
121 attributes with the same name.
122
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +0000123- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 839548: if a weakref with a callback,
124 its callback, and its weakly referenced object, all became part of
125 cyclic garbage during a single run of garbage collection, the order
126 in which they were torn down was unpredictable. It was possible for
127 the callback to see partially-torn-down objects, leading to immediate
128 segfaults, or, if the callback resurrected garbage objects, to
129 resurrect insane objects that caused segfaults (or other surprises)
130 later. In one sense this wasn't surprising, because Python's cyclic gc
131 had no knowledge of Python's weakref objects. It does now. When
132 weakrefs with callbacks become part of cyclic garbage now, those
133 weakrefs are cleared first. The callbacks don't trigger then,
134 preventing the problems. If you need callbacks to trigger, then just
135 as when cyclic gc is not involved, you need to write your code so
136 that weakref objects outlive the objects they weakly reference.
Raymond Hettingera690a992003-11-16 16:17:49 +0000137
Tim Petersadd09b42003-11-12 20:43:28 +0000138- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 840829: if cyclic garbage collection
139 happened to occur during a weakref callback for a new-style class
140 instance, subtle memory corruption was the result (in a release build;
141 in a debug build, a segfault occurred reliably very soon after).
142 This has been repaired.
143
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +0000144- Compiler flags set in PYTHONSTARTUP are now active in __main__.
145
146- Added two builtin types, set() and frozenset().
147
Raymond Hettinger85c20a42003-11-06 14:06:48 +0000148- Added a reversed() builtin function that returns a reverse iterator
149 over a sequence.
150
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +0000151- Added a sorted() builtin function that returns a new sorted list
152 from any iterable.
153
Martin v. Löwis01a74b22003-10-19 18:30:01 +0000154- CObjects are now mutable (on the C level) through PyCObject_SetVoidPtr.
155
Raymond Hettinger42b1ba32003-10-16 03:41:09 +0000156- list.sort() now supports three keyword arguments: cmp, key, and reverse.
157 The key argument can be a function of one argument that extracts a
158 comparison key from the original record: mylist.sort(key=str.lower).
159 The reverse argument is a boolean value and if True will change the
160 sort order as if the comparison arguments were reversed. In addition,
161 the documentation has been amended to provide a guarantee that all sorts
162 starting with Py2.3 are guaranteed to be stable (the relative order of
163 records with equal keys is unchanged).
164
Marc-André Lemburgd7160f82003-09-22 11:14:40 +0000165- Added test whether wchar_t is signed or not. A signed wchar_t is not
166 usable as internal unicode type base for Py_UNICODE since the
167 unicode implementation assumes an unsigned type.
168
Jeremy Hyltond8082792003-09-16 19:41:39 +0000169- Fixed a bug in the cache of length-one Unicode strings that could
170 lead to a seg fault. The specific problem occurred when an earlier,
171 non-fatal error left an uninitialized Unicode object in the
172 freelist.
173
Raymond Hettinger9bfe5332003-08-27 04:55:52 +0000174- The % formatting operator now supports '%F' which is equivalent to
175 '%f'. This has always been documented but never implemented.
176
Tim Peters465fa3d2003-08-15 01:16:37 +0000177- complex(obj) could leak a little memory if obj wasn't a string or
178 number.
179
Raymond Hettingereaef6152003-08-02 07:42:57 +0000180- zip() with no arguments now returns an empty list instead of raising
181 a TypeError exception.
182
Guido van Rossum02c58f82003-10-08 21:08:29 +0000183- obj.__contains__() now returns True/False instead of 1/0. SF patch
184 820195.
185
Armin Rigo2b3eb402003-10-28 12:05:48 +0000186- Python no longer tries to be smart about recursive comparisons.
187 When comparing containers with cyclic references to themselves it
188 will now just hit the recursion limit. See SF patch 825639.
189
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +0000190- str and unicode builtin types now have rsplit() method that is
191 same as split() except that it scans the string from the end
192 working towards the beginning. See SF feature request 801847.
Hye-Shik Chang060ebed2003-12-15 18:51:19 +0000193
Jim Fulton8a1a5942004-02-08 04:21:26 +0000194- Fixed a bug in object.__reduce_ex__ when using protocol 2. Failure
195 to clear the error when attempts to get the __getstate__ attribute
196 fail caused intermittent errors and odd behavior.
197
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +0000198- buffer objects based on other objects no longer cache a pointer to
199 the data and the data length. Instead, the appropriate tp_as_buffer
200 method is called as necessary.
201
Andrew MacIntyre4e10ed32004-04-04 07:01:35 +0000202- fixed: if a file is opened with an explicit buffer size >= 1, repeated
203 close() calls would attempt to free() the buffer already free()ed on
204 the first call.
205
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +0000206
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000207Extension modules
208-----------------
209
Raymond Hettinger027bb632004-05-31 03:09:25 +0000210- the weakref module now supports additional objects: array.array,
211 sre.pattern_objects, file objects, and sockets.
212
Raymond Hettingere2eda602004-04-04 08:51:41 +0000213- operator.isMappingType() and operator.isSequenceType() now give
214 fewer false positives.
215
Brett Cannon06c34792004-03-23 23:16:54 +0000216- socket.sslerror is now a subclass of socket.error . Also added
217 socket.error to the socket module's C API.
218
Hye-Shik Changc3a87b82004-03-21 19:34:30 +0000219- Bug #920575: A problem that _locale module segfaults on
220 nl_langinfo(ERA) caused by GNU libc's illegal NULL return is fixed.
221
Raymond Hettinger6e2ee862004-03-14 04:37:50 +0000222- array objects now support the copy module. Also, their resizing
223 scheme has been updated the same as for list objects. The improves
Raymond Hettinger49f9bd12004-03-14 05:43:59 +0000224 the performance (speed and memory usage) of append() operations.
225 Also, array.extend() now accepts any iterable argument for repeated
226 appends without needing to create another temporary array.
Raymond Hettinger3aa82c02004-03-13 18:18:51 +0000227
Raymond Hettinger3e47f652004-03-08 18:22:35 +0000228- cStringIO.writelines() now accepts any iterable argument and writes
229 the lines one at a time rather than joining them and writing once.
230 Made a parallel change to StringIO.writelines(). Saves memory and
231 makes suitable for use with generator expressions.
232
Brett Cannond1080a32004-03-02 04:38:10 +0000233- time.strftime() now checks that the values in its time tuple argument
234 are within the proper boundaries to prevent possible crashes from the
235 platform's C library implementation of strftime(). Can possibly
236 break code that uses values outside the range that didn't cause
237 problems previously (such as sitting day of year to 0). Fixes bug
238 #897625.
239
Martin v. Löwis12af0482004-01-31 12:34:17 +0000240- The socket module now supports Bluetooth sockets, if the
241 system has <bluetooth/bluetooth.h>
242
Raymond Hettinger756b3f32004-01-29 06:37:52 +0000243- Added a collections module containing a new datatype, deque(),
244 offering high-performance, thread-safe, memory friendly appends
245 and pops on either side of the deque.
246
247- Several modules now take advantage of collections.deque() for
248 improved performance: Queue, mutex, shlex, threading, and pydoc.
249
Raymond Hettinger166958b2003-12-01 13:18:39 +0000250- The operator module has two new functions, attrgetter() and
251 itemgetter() which are useful for creating fast data extractor
252 functions for map(), list.sort(), itertools.groupby(), and
253 other functions that expect a function argument.
254
Martin v. Löwis94681fc2003-11-27 19:40:22 +0000255- socket.SHUT_{RD,WR,RDWR} was added.
256
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +0000257- os.getsid was added.
258
Guido van Rossum16b9fa82003-10-23 23:54:57 +0000259- The pwd module incorrectly advertised its struct type as
260 struct_pwent; this has been renamed to struct_passwd. (The old name
261 is still supported for backwards compatibility.)
262
Fred Drakede050322003-10-21 15:41:59 +0000263- The xml.parsers.expat module now provides Expat 1.95.7.
264
Martin v. Löwis3bbd6542003-10-03 13:57:37 +0000265- socket.IPPROTO_IPV6 was added.
266
Martin v. Löwise7a97962003-09-20 16:08:33 +0000267- readline.clear_history was added.
268
Brett Cannon62dba4c2003-09-10 19:37:42 +0000269- select.select() now accepts sequences for its first three arguments.
270
Raymond Hettinger5475f232003-08-08 12:20:03 +0000271- cStringIO now supports the f.closed attribute.
272
Anthony Baxter83f52912003-08-05 06:33:56 +0000273- The signal module now exposes SIGRTMIN and SIGRTMAX (if available).
274
Andrew M. Kuchling69f31eb2003-08-13 23:11:04 +0000275- curses module now supports use_default_colors(). [patch #739124]
276
Anthony Baxter5c68ef02003-10-04 08:04:04 +0000277- Bug #811028: ncurses.h breakage on FreeBSD/MacOS X
278
279- Bug #814613: INET_ADDRSTRLEN fix needed for all compilers on SGI
280
Gustavo Niemeyerad3fc442003-10-17 22:13:16 +0000281- Implemented non-recursive SRE matching scheme (#757624).
282
283- Implemented (?(id/name)yes|no) support in SRE (#572936).
284
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +0000285- random.seed() with no arguments or None uses time.time() as a default
286 seed. Modified to match Py2.2 behavior and use fractional seconds so
287 that successive runs are more likely to produce different sequences.
288
289- random.Random has a new method, getrandbits(k), which returns an int
290 with k random bits. This method is now an optional part of the API
291 for user defined generators. Any generator that defines genrandbits()
292 can now use randrange() for ranges with a length >= 2**53. Formerly,
293 randrange would return only even numbers for ranges that large (see
294 SF bug #812202). Generators that do not define genrandbits() now
295 issue a warning when randrange() is called with a range that large.
296
Raymond Hettingerd25c1c62003-12-06 16:23:06 +0000297- itertools has a new function, groupby() for aggregating iterables
298 into groups sharing the same key (as determined by a key function).
299 It offers some of functionality of SQL's groupby keyword and of
300 the Unix uniq filter.
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +0000301
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +0000302- itertools now has a new function, tee() which produces two independent
303 iterators from a single iterable.
304
305- itertools.izip() with no arguments now returns an empty iterator instead
306 of raising a TypeError exception.
307
Gustavo Niemeyera6e436e2004-02-14 00:02:45 +0000308- Fixed #853061: allow BZ2Compressor.compress() to receive an empty string
309 as parameter.
310
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000311Library
312-------
313
Raymond Hettinger059e1702004-05-19 19:56:44 +0000314- stringprep.py now uses built-in set() instead of sets.Set().
315
Thomas Heller2e7c8322004-05-11 15:10:59 +0000316- Bug #876278: Unbounded recursion in modulefinder
317
Martin v. Löwis456ab1d2004-05-06 01:54:36 +0000318- Bug #780300: Swap public and system ID in LexicalHandler.startDTD.
319 Applications relying on the wrong order need to be corrected.
320
Hye-Shik Chang0f5bf1e2004-04-20 21:11:11 +0000321- Bug #926075: Fixed a bug that returns a wrong pattern object
322 for a string or unicode object in sre.compile() when a different
323 type pattern with the same value exists.
324
Skip Montanarod0c0c412004-04-07 16:03:02 +0000325- Added countcallers arg to trace.Trace class (--trackcalls command line arg
326 when run from the command prompt).
327
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +0000328- Fixed a caching bug in platform.platform() where the argument of 'terse' was
329 not taken into consideration when caching value.
330
Nicholas Bastin824b1b22004-03-23 18:44:39 +0000331- Added two new command-line arguments for profile (output file and
332 default sort).
333
Nicholas Bastin1eb4bfc2004-03-22 20:12:56 +0000334- Added global runctx function to profile module
335
Martin v. Löwis347c30d2004-03-21 15:29:41 +0000336- Add hlist missing entryconfigure and entrycget methods.
337
Hye-Shik Chang4a7ad1a2004-03-19 08:11:56 +0000338- The ptcp154 codec was added for Kazakh character set support.
339
Martin v. Löwisa79449e2004-02-15 21:19:18 +0000340- Support non-anonymous ftp URLs in urllib2.
341
Marc-André Lemburg57cb68f2004-01-20 18:24:34 +0000342- The encodings package will now applies codec name aliases
343 first before starting to try the import of the codec module.
344 This simplifies overriding built-in codecs with external
345 packages, e.g. the included CJK codecs with the JapaneseCodecs
346 package, by adjusting the aliases dictionary in encodings.aliases
347 accordingly.
348
Barry Warsaw30ff12f2004-01-04 01:13:43 +0000349- base64 now supports RFC 3548 Base16, Base32, and Base64 encoding and
350 decoding standards.
351
Jeremy Hylton37c5f2a2003-12-14 05:29:45 +0000352- urllib2 now supports processors. A processor is a handler that
353 implements an xxx_request or xxx_response method. These methods are
354 called for all requests.
355
Thomas Hellerc7501d52003-12-05 20:28:07 +0000356- distutils compilers now compile source files in the same order as
357 they are passed to the compiler.
358
Walter Dörwaldc8de4582003-12-03 20:26:05 +0000359- pprint.pprint() and pprint.pformat() now have additional parameters
360 indent, width and depth.
361
Walter Dörwald7a7ede52003-12-03 20:15:28 +0000362- Patch #750542: pprint now will pretty print subclasses of list, tuple
363 and dict too, as long as they don't overwrite __repr__().
364
Thomas Hellerb3105912003-11-28 19:42:56 +0000365- Bug #848614: distutils' msvccompiler fails to find the MSVC6
366 compiler because of incomplete registry entries.
367
Martin v. Löwisaf7dc8d2003-11-19 19:51:55 +0000368- httplib.HTTP.putrequest now offers to omit the implicit Accept-Encoding.
369
Thomas Hellercf0005b2003-11-14 10:33:20 +0000370- Patch #841977: modulefinder didn't find extension modules in packages
371
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +0000372- imaplib.IMAP4.thread was added.
373
Guido van Rossum967b0632003-11-10 02:27:19 +0000374- Plugged a minor hole in tempfile.mktemp() due to the use of
375 os.path.exists(), switched to using os.lstat() directly if possible.
376
Raymond Hettinger0c410272004-01-05 10:13:35 +0000377- bisect.py and heapq.py now have underlying C implementations
378 for better performance
Raymond Hettingerb3af1812003-11-08 10:24:38 +0000379
Neil Schemenauerf607fc52003-11-05 23:03:00 +0000380- traceback.format_exc has been added (similar to print_exc but it returns
381 a string).
382
Martin v. Löwis45394c22003-10-31 13:49:36 +0000383- xmlrpclib.MultiCall has been added.
384
Martin v. Löwis48440b72003-10-31 12:52:35 +0000385- poplib.POP3_SSL has been added.
386
Martin v. Löwisd6625482003-10-12 17:37:01 +0000387- tmpfile.mkstemp now returns an absolute path even if dir is relative.
388
Brett Cannon5d9ca4e2003-10-12 04:38:48 +0000389- urlparse is RFC 2396 compliant.
390
Skip Montanarodef99342003-10-03 14:07:07 +0000391- The fieldnames argument to the csv module's DictReader constructor is now
392 optional. If omitted, the first row of the file will be used as the
393 list of fieldnames.
394
Raymond Hettinger9a80c5d2003-09-23 20:21:01 +0000395- encodings.bz2_codec was added for access to bz2 compression
396 using "a long string".encode('bz2')
397
Guido van Rossum0e5a51d2003-09-22 15:03:11 +0000398- Various improvements to unittest.py, realigned with PyUnit CVS.
399
Martin v. Löwisc6bb6c02003-09-20 15:52:21 +0000400- dircache now passes exceptions to the caller, instead of returning
401 empty lists.
402
Raymond Hettingerdeadbf52003-09-12 06:33:37 +0000403- The bsddb module and dbhash module now support the iterator and
404 mapping protocols which make them more substitutable for dictionaries
405 and shelves.
406
Skip Montanaro3f7a9482003-09-06 19:52:12 +0000407- The csv module's DictReader and DictWriter classes now accept keyword
408 arguments. This was an omission in the initial implementation.
409
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +0000410- The email package handles some RFC 2231 parameters with missing
Barry Warsaw2f5bf172003-09-03 04:09:49 +0000411 CHARSET fields better. It also includes a patch to parameter
412 parsing when semicolons appear inside quotes.
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +0000413
Raymond Hettinger6a180122003-08-17 08:34:09 +0000414- sets.py now runs under Py2.2. In addition, the argument restrictions
415 for most set methods (but not the operators) have been relaxed to
Raymond Hettinger70b9f492003-11-19 15:52:14 +0000416 allow any iterable.
Raymond Hettingeree562fc2003-08-15 21:17:04 +0000417
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +0000418- _strptime.py now has a behind-the-scenes caching mechanism for the most
Brett Cannonb7150a22003-08-05 06:27:04 +0000419 recent TimeRE instance used along with the last five unique directive
420 patterns. The overall module was also made more thread-safe.
421
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +0000422- random.cunifvariate() and random.stdgamma() were deprecated in Py2.3
423 and removed in Py2.4.
424
Anthony Baxter92bee362003-11-04 14:35:49 +0000425- Bug #823328: urllib2.py's HTTP Digest Auth support works again.
426
Hye-Shik Chang84a99312004-01-17 14:59:36 +0000427- Patch #873597: CJK codecs are imported into rank of default codecs.
428
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000429Tools/Demos
430-----------
431
Skip Montanarod5a21fd2004-01-27 14:49:04 +0000432- A hotshotmain script was added to the Tools/scripts directory that
433 makes it easy to run a script under control of the hotshot profiler.
434
Skip Montanaro030f68a2003-10-28 16:24:00 +0000435- The db2pickle and pickle2db scripts can now dump/load gdbm files.
436
Skip Montanaroe2b61e02004-03-03 17:42:08 +0000437- The file order on the command line of the pickle2db script was reversed.
438 It is now [ picklefile ] dbfile. This provides better symmetry with
439 db2pickle. The file arguments to both scripts are now source followed by
440 destination in situations where both files are given.
441
Skip Montanarofd4fa882003-09-10 19:04:13 +0000442- The pydoc script will display a link to the module documentation for
443 modules determined to be part of the core distribution. The documentation
444 base directory defaults to http://www.python.org/doc/current/lib/ but can
445 be changed by setting the PYTHONDOCS environment variable.
446
Raymond Hettingere41d4c82003-08-25 04:39:55 +0000447- texcheck.py now detects double word errors.
448
Tim Peters1a3abcb2003-08-18 23:52:09 +0000449- md5sum.py mistakenly opened input files in text mode by default, a
450 silent and dangerous change from previous releases. It once again
451 opens input files in binary mode by default. The -t and -b flags
452 remain for compatibility with the 2.3 release, but -b is the default
453 now.
454
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000455- py-electric-colon now works when pending-delete/delete-selection mode is
456 in effect
457
458- py-help-at-point is no longer bound to the F1 key - it's still bound to
459 C-c C-h
460
Barry Warsaw6ec58ca2003-09-03 03:20:37 +0000461- Pynche was fixed to not crash when there is no ~/.pynche file and no
462 -d option was given.
463
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000464Build
465-----
466
Hye-Shik Chang54f94392004-04-14 07:55:31 +0000467- Bug #934635: Fixed a bug where the configure script couldn't detect
468 getaddrinfo() properly if the KAME stack had SCTP support.
469
Skip Montanaro7befb992004-02-10 16:50:21 +0000470- Support for missing ANSI C header files (limits.h, stddef.h, etc) was
471 removed.
472
Skip Montanarodb608052004-02-07 13:53:46 +0000473- Systems requiring the D4, D6 or D7 variants of pthreads are no longer
474 supported (see PEP 11).
475
476- Universal newline support can no longer be disabled (see PEP 11).
477
Skip Montanarocd1f7432004-01-17 14:22:44 +0000478- Support for DGUX, SunOS 4, IRIX 4 and Minix was removed (see PEP 11).
479
480- Support for systems requiring --with-dl-dld or --with-sgi-dl was removed
481 (see PEP 11).
482
483- Tests for sizeof(char) were removed since ANSI C mandates that
484 sizeof(char) must be 1.
485
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000486C API
487-----
488
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +0000489- New public functions Py_IncRef() and Py_DecRef(), exposing the
490 functionality of the Py_XINCREF() and Py_XDECREF macros. Useful for
Thomas Hellercc10a852004-04-22 17:28:25 +0000491 runtime dynamic embedding of Python. See patch #938302, by Bob
492 Ippolito.
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +0000493
Raymond Hettingerc1e4f9d2004-03-12 08:04:00 +0000494- Added a new macro, PySequence_Fast_ITEMS, which retrieves a fast sequence's
495 underlying array of PyObject pointers. Useful for high speed looping.
496
Raymond Hettinger8f5cdaa2003-12-13 11:26:12 +0000497- Created a new method flag, METH_COEXIST, which causes a method to be loaded
498 even if already defined by a slot wrapper. This allows a __contains__
499 method, for example, to co-exist with a defined sq_contains slot. This
500 is helpful because the PyCFunction can take advantage of optimized calls
501 whenever METH_O or METH_NOARGS flags are defined.
502
Raymond Hettingerbc0f2ab2003-11-25 21:12:14 +0000503- Added a new function, PyDict_Contains(d, k) which is like
504 PySequence_Contains() but is specific to dictionaries and executes
505 about 10% faster.
506
Brett Cannon26b3a7b2003-10-19 21:31:43 +0000507- Added three new macros: Py_RETURN_NONE, Py_RETURN_TRUE, and Py_RETURN_FALSE.
508 Each return the singleton they mention after Py_INCREF()ing them.
509
Raymond Hettingercb2da432003-10-12 18:24:34 +0000510- Added a new function, PyTuple_Pack(n, ...) for constructing tuples from a
511 variable length argument list of Python objects without having to invoke
512 the more complex machinery of Py_BuildValue(). PyTuple_Pack(3, a, b, c)
513 is equivalent to Py_BuildValue("(OOO)", a, b, c).
514
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000515New platforms
516-------------
517
518Tests
519-----
520
521Windows
522-------
523
Guido van Rossumfd25aca2003-11-30 22:10:15 +0000524- The _winreg module could segfault when reading very large registry
525 values, due to unchecked alloca() calls (SF bug 851056). The fix is
526 uses either PyMem_Malloc(n) or PyString_FromStringAndSize(NULL, n),
527 as appropriate, followed by a size check.
528
Tim Petersf1827cf2003-09-07 03:30:18 +0000529- file.truncate() could misbehave if the file was open for update
530 (modes r+, rb+, w+, wb+), and the most recent file operation before
531 the truncate() call was an input operation. SF bug 801631.
532
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000533Mac
534----
535
536
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +0000537What's New in Python 2.3 final?
538===============================
539
540*Release date: 29-Jul-2003*
541
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +0000542IDLE
543----
544
Tim Peters36c1afc2003-07-29 17:22:57 +0000545- Bug 778400: IDLE hangs when selecting "Edit with IDLE" from explorer.
546 This was unique to Windows, and was fixed by adding an -n switch to
547 the command the Windows installer creates to execute "Edit with IDLE"
548 context-menu actions.
549
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +0000550- IDLE displays a new message upon startup: some "personal firewall"
551 kinds of programs (for example, ZoneAlarm) open a dialog of their
552 own when any program opens a socket. IDLE does use sockets, talking
553 on the computer's internal loopback interface. This connection is not
554 visible on any external interface and no data is sent to or received
555 from the Internet. So, if you get such a dialog when opening IDLE,
556 asking whether to let pythonw.exe talk to address 127.0.0.1, say yes,
557 and rest assured no communication external to your machine is taking
558 place. If you don't allow it, IDLE won't be able to start.
559
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +0000560
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000561What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 2?
562=============================================
563
Tim Peters6560a252003-07-24 00:15:46 +0000564*Release date: 24-Jul-2003*
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000565
566Core and builtins
567-----------------
568
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +0000569- It is now possible to import from zipfiles containing additional
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000570 data bytes before the zip compatible archive. Zipfiles containing a
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +0000571 comment at the end are still unsupported.
572
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000573Extension modules
574-----------------
575
576- A longstanding bug in the parser module's initialization could cause
577 fatal internal refcount confusion when the module got initialized more
578 than once. This has been fixed.
579
Fred Drake01a43122003-07-21 17:17:10 +0000580- Fixed memory leak in pyexpat; using the parser's ParseFile() method
581 with open files that aren't instances of the standard file type
582 caused an instance of the bound .read() method to be leaked on every
583 call.
584
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000585- Fixed some leaks in the locale module.
586
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000587Library
588-------
589
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000590- Lib/encodings/rot_13.py when used as a script, now more properly
591 uses the first Python interpreter on your path.
592
593- Removed caching of TimeRE (and thus LocaleTime) in _strptime.py to
594 fix a locale related bug in the test suite. Although another patch
595 was needed to actually fix the problem, the cache code was not
596 restored.
597
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +0000598IDLE
599----
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000600
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +0000601- Calltips patches.
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000602
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000603Build
604-----
605
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000606- For MacOSX, added -mno-fused-madd to BASECFLAGS to fix test_coercion
607 on Panther (OSX 10.3).
608
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000609C API
610-----
611
612Windows
613-------
614
Tim Peters291f14e2003-07-22 02:50:01 +0000615- The tempfile module could do insane imports on Windows if PYTHONCASEOK
616 was set, making temp file creation impossible. Repaired.
617
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000618- Add a patch to workaround pthread_sigmask() bugs in Cygwin.
619
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000620Mac
621---
622
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000623- Various fixes to pimp.
624
625- Scripts runs with pythonw no longer had full window manager access.
626
627- Don't force boot-disk-only install, for reasons unknown it causes
628 more problems than it solves.
629
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000630
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000631What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 1?
632=============================================
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000633
Jeremy Hylton0ed18c22003-07-18 20:10:02 +0000634*Release date: 18-Jul-2003*
635
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000636Core and builtins
637-----------------
638
Tim Peterse5e065b2003-07-06 18:36:54 +0000639- The new function sys.getcheckinterval() returns the last value set
640 by sys.setcheckinterval().
641
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000642- Several bugs in the symbol table phase of the compiler have been
643 fixed. Errors could be lost and compilation could fail without
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000644 reporting an error. SF patch 763201.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000645
646- The interpreter is now more robust about importing the warnings
647 module. In an executable generated by freeze or similar programs,
648 earlier versions of 2.3 would fail if the warnings module could
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000649 not be found on the file system. Fixes SF bug 771097.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000650
651- A warning about assignments to module attributes that shadow
652 builtins, present in earlier releases of 2.3, has been removed.
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000653
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000654- It is not possible to create subclasses of builtin types like str
655 and tuple that define an itemsize. Earlier releases of Python 2.3
656 allowed this by mistake, leading to crashes and other problems.
657
658- The thread_id is now initialized to 0 in a non-thread build. SF bug
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000659 770247.
660
661- SF bug 762891: "del p[key]" on proxy object no longer raises SystemError.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000662
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000663Extension modules
664-----------------
665
666- weakref.proxy() can now handle "del obj[i]" for proxy objects
667 defining __delitem__. Formerly, it generated a SystemError.
668
669- SSL no longer crashes the interpreter when the remote side disconnects.
670
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +0000671- On Unix the mmap module can again be used to map device files.
672
Brett Cannon20def8b2003-07-01 05:16:08 +0000673- time.strptime now exclusively uses the Python implementation
674 contained within the _strptime module.
675
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000676- The print slot of weakref proxy objects was removed, because it was
677 not consistent with the object's repr slot.
678
679- The mmap module only checks file size for regular files, not
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000680 character or block devices. SF patch 708374.
681
682- The cPickle Pickler garbage collection support was fixed to traverse
683 the find_class attribute, if present.
684
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000685- There are several fixes for the bsddb3 wrapper module.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000686
687 bsddb3 no longer crashes if an environment is closed before a cursor
688 (SF bug 763298).
689
690 The DB and DBEnv set_get_returns_none function was extended to take
Barry Warsawd71a5512003-07-20 18:00:54 +0000691 a level instead of a boolean flag. The new level 2 means that in
692 addition, cursor.set()/.get() methods return None instead of raising
693 an exception.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000694
695 A typo was fixed in DBCursor.join_item(), preventing a crash.
696
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000697Library
698-------
699
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000700- distutils now supports MSVC 7.1
701
Raymond Hettinger71adf7e2003-07-16 19:25:22 +0000702- doctest now examines all docstrings by default. Previously, it would
703 skip over functions with private names (as indicated by the underscore
704 naming convention). The old default created too much of a risk that
705 user tests were being skipped inadvertently. Note, this change could
706 break code in the unlikely case that someone had intentionally put
707 failing tests in the docstrings of private functions. The breakage
708 is easily fixable by specifying the old behavior when calling testmod()
709 or Tester().
710
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000711- There were several fixes to the way dumbdbms are closed. It's vital
712 that a dumbdbm database be closed properly, else the on-disk data
713 and directory files can be left in mutually inconsistent states.
714 dumbdbm.py's _Database.__del__() method attempted to close the
715 database properly, but a shutdown race in _Database._commit() could
716 prevent this from working, so that a program trusting __del__() to
717 get the on-disk files in synch could be badly surprised. The race
718 has been repaired. A sync() method was also added so that shelve
719 can guarantee data is written to disk.
Tim Peters7a6c7332003-07-13 17:21:10 +0000720
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000721 The close() method can now be called more than once without complaint.
Tim Petersd7472ec2003-07-13 02:22:03 +0000722
Tim Peters59aba122003-07-01 20:01:55 +0000723- The classes in threading.py are now new-style classes. That they
724 weren't before was an oversight.
725
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000726- The urllib2 digest authentication handlers now define the correct
727 auth_header. The earlier versions would fail at runtime.
728
Neal Norwitze7dfe212003-07-01 14:59:46 +0000729- SF bug 763023: fix uncaught ZeroDivisionError in difflib ratio methods
730 when there are no lines.
731
Neal Norwitz3c0f2c92003-07-01 21:12:47 +0000732- SF bug 763637: fix exception in Tkinter with after_cancel
733 which could occur with Tk 8.4
734
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000735- SF bug 770601: CGIHTTPServer.py now passes the entire environment
736 to child processes.
737
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000738- SF bug 765238: add filter to fnmatch's __all__.
739
740- SF bug 748201: make time.strptime() error messages more helpful.
741
742- SF patch 764470: Do not dump the args attribute of a Fault object in
743 xmlrpclib.
744
745- SF patch 549151: urllib and urllib2 now redirect POSTs on 301
746 responses.
747
748- SF patch 766650: The whichdb module was fixed to recognize dbm files
749 generated by gdbm on OS/2 EMX.
750
751- SF bugs 763047 and 763052: fixes bug of timezone value being left as
752 -1 when ``time.tzname[0] == time.tzname[1] and not time.daylight``
753 is true when it should only when time.daylight is true.
754
755- SF bug 764548: re now allows subclasses of str and unicode to be
756 used as patterns.
757
758- SF bug 763637: In Tkinter, change after_cancel() to handle tuples
759 of varying sizes. Tk 8.4 returns a different number of values
760 than Tk 8.3.
761
762- SF bug 763023: difflib.ratio() did not catch zero division.
763
764- The Queue module now has an __all__ attribute.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000765
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000766Tools/Demos
767-----------
768
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000769- See Lib/idlelib/NEWS.txt for IDLE news.
770
Neal Norwitz592c4cc2003-07-01 04:14:28 +0000771- SF bug 753592: webchecker/wsgui now handles user supplied directories.
772
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000773- The trace.py script has been removed. It is now in the standard library.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000774
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000775Build
776-----
777
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000778- Python now compiles with -fno-strict-aliasing if possible (SF bug 766696).
779
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000780- The socket module compiles on IRIX 6.5.10.
781
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000782- An irix64 system is treated the same way as an irix6 system (SF
783 patch 764560).
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000784
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000785- Several definitions were missing on FreeBSD 5.x unless the
786 __BSD_VISIBLE symbol was defined. configure now defines it as
787 needed.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000788
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000789C API
790-----
791
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000792- Unicode objects now support mbcs as a built-in encoding, so the C
793 API can use it without deferring to the encodings package.
794
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000795Windows
796-------
797
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000798- The Windows implementation of PyThread_start_new_thread() never
799 checked error returns from Windows functions correctly. As a result,
800 it could claim to start a new thread even when the Microsoft
801 _beginthread() function failed (due to "too many threads" -- this is
802 on the order of thousands when it happens). In these cases, the
803 Python exception ::
804
805 thread.error: can't start new thread
806
807 is raised now.
808
809- SF bug 766669: Prevent a GPF on interpreter exit when sockets are in
810 use. The interpreter now calls WSACleanup() from Py_Finalize()
811 instead of from DLL teardown.
812
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000813Mac
814---
815
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000816- Bundlebuilder now inherits default values in the right way. It was
Walter Dörwald73a8a4b2003-07-30 12:14:02 +0000817 previously possible for app bundles to get a type of "BNDL" instead
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000818 of "APPL." Other improvements include, a --build-id option to
819 specify the CFBundleIdentifier and using the --python option to set
820 the executable in the bundle.
821
822- Fixed two bugs in MacOSX framework handling.
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000823
Jack Jansene0040412003-07-23 22:17:28 +0000824- pythonw did not allow user interaction in 2.3rc1, this has been fixed.
825
826- Python is now compiled with -mno-fused-madd, making all tests pass
827 on Panther.
828
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000829What's New in Python 2.3 beta 2?
830================================
831
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +0000832*Release date: 29-Jun-2003*
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000833
834Core and builtins
835-----------------
836
Barry Warsaw883f2232003-06-29 17:10:11 +0000837- A program can now set the environment variable PYTHONINSPECT to some
838 string value in Python, and cause the interpreter to enter the
839 interactive prompt at program exit, as if Python had been invoked
840 with the -i option.
841
Raymond Hettingerd05abde2003-06-17 05:05:49 +0000842- list.index() now accepts optional start and stop arguments. Similar
843 changes were made to UserList.index(). SF feature request 754014.
844
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +0000845- SF patch 751998 fixes an unwanted side effect of the previous fix
846 for SF bug 742860 (the next item).
847
Tim Peters50d8b8b2003-05-25 17:44:31 +0000848- SF bug 742860: "WeakKeyDictionary __delitem__ uses iterkeys". This
849 wasn't threadsafe, was very inefficient (expected time O(len(dict))
850 instead of O(1)), and could raise a spurious RuntimeError if another
851 thread mutated the dict during __delitem__, or if a comparison function
852 mutated it. It also neglected to raise KeyError when the key wasn't
853 present; didn't raise TypeError when the key wasn't of a weakly
854 referencable type; and broke various more-or-less obscure dict
855 invariants by using a sequence of equality comparisons over the whole
856 set of dict keys instead of computing the key's hash code to narrow
857 the search to those keys with the same hash code. All of these are
858 considered to be bugs. A new implementation of __delitem__ repairs all
859 that, but note that fixing these bugs may change visible behavior in
860 code relying (whether intentionally or accidentally) on old behavior.
Tim Peters886128f2003-05-25 01:45:11 +0000861
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000862- SF bug 734869: Fixed a compiler bug that caused a fatal error when
863 compiling a list comprehension that contained another list comprehension
864 embedded in a lambda expression.
865
Tim Peterse87568d2003-05-24 20:18:24 +0000866- SF bug 705231: builtin pow() no longer lets the platform C pow()
867 raise -1.0 to integer powers, because (at least) glibc gets it wrong
868 in some cases. The result should be -1.0 if the power is odd and 1.0
869 if the power is even, and any float with a sufficiently large exponent
870 is (mathematically) an exact even integer.
871
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000872- SF bug 759227: A new-style class that implements __nonzero__() must
873 return a bool or int (but not an int subclass) from that method. This
874 matches the restriction on classic classes.
875
Martin v. Löwis5467d4c2003-05-10 07:10:12 +0000876- The encoding attribute has been added for file objects, and set to
877 the terminal encoding on Unix and Windows.
878
Tim Peters015dd822003-05-04 04:16:52 +0000879- The softspace attribute of file objects became read-only by oversight.
880 It's writable again.
881
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +0000882- Reverted a 2.3 beta 1 change to iterators for subclasses of list and
883 tuple. By default, the iterators now access data elements directly
884 instead of going through __getitem__. If __getitem__ access is
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +0000885 preferred, then __iter__ can be overridden.
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +0000886
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000887- SF bug 735247: The staticmethod and super types participate in
888 garbage collection. Before this change, it was possible for leaks to
889 occur in functions with non-global free variables that used these types.
890
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000891Extension modules
892-----------------
893
Raymond Hettinger643bcec2003-06-29 03:29:42 +0000894- the socket module has a new exception, socket.timeout, to allow
895 timeouts to be handled separately from other socket errors.
896
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000897- SF bug 751276: cPickle has fixed to propagate exceptions raised in
898 user code. In earlier versions, cPickle caught and ignored any
899 exception when it performed operations that it expected to raise
900 specific exceptions like AttributeError.
901
902- cPickle Pickler and Unpickler objects now participate in garbage
903 collection.
904
Tim Peterscda32b72003-06-15 23:13:35 +0000905- mimetools.choose_boundary() could return duplicate strings at times,
906 especially likely on Windows. The strings returned are now guaranteed
907 unique within a single program run.
908
Brett Cannon4e64d782003-06-13 23:44:35 +0000909- thread.interrupt_main() raises KeyboardInterrupt in the main thread.
910 dummy_thread has also been modified to try to simulate the behavior.
911
Walter Dörwald9e46abe2003-05-18 03:15:10 +0000912- array.array.insert() now treats negative indices as being relative
913 to the end of the array, just like list.insert() does. (SF bug #739313)
914
Tim Petersb0c854d2003-05-17 15:57:00 +0000915- The datetime module classes datetime, time, and timedelta are now
916 properly subclassable.
Tim Petersa98924a2003-05-17 05:55:19 +0000917
Martin v. Löwis28e9ce92003-05-09 08:19:48 +0000918- _tkinter.{get|set}busywaitinterval was added.
919
Raymond Hettinger834f4632003-05-02 20:24:56 +0000920- itertools.islice() now accepts stop=None as documented.
921 Fixes SF bug #730685.
922
Skip Montanaro8c044d82003-05-06 20:42:37 +0000923- the bsddb185 module is built in one restricted instance -
924 /usr/include/db.h exists and defines HASHVERSION to be 2. This is true
925 for many BSD-derived systems.
926
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000927
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000928Library
929-------
930
Tim Petersdb3756d2003-06-29 05:30:48 +0000931- Some happy doctest extensions from Jim Fulton have been added to
932 doctest.py. These are already being used in Zope3. The two
933 primary ones:
934
935 doctest.debug(module, name) extracts the doctests from the named object
936 in the given module, puts them in a temp file, and starts pdb running
937 on that file. This is great when a doctest fails.
938
939 doctest.DocTestSuite(module=None) returns a synthesized unittest
940 TestSuite instance, to be run by the unittest framework, which
941 runs all the doctests in the module. This allows writing tests in
942 doctest style (which can be clearer and shorter than writing tests
943 in unittest style), without losing unittest's powerful testing
944 framework features (which doctest lacks).
945
Tim Peters6ebe61f2003-06-27 20:48:05 +0000946- For compatibility with doctests created before 2.3, if an expected
947 output block consists solely of "1" and the actual output block
948 consists solely of "True", it's accepted as a match; similarly
949 for "0" and "False". This is quite un-doctest-like, but is practical.
950 The behavior can be disabled by passing the new doctest module
951 constant DONT_ACCEPT_TRUE_FOR_1 to the new optionflags optional
952 argument.
953
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000954- ZipFile.testzip() now only traps BadZipfile exceptions. Previously,
955 a bare except caught to much and reported all errors as a problem
956 in the archive.
957
958- The logging module now has a new function, makeLogRecord() making
959 LogHandler easier to interact with DatagramHandler and SocketHandler.
960
Skip Montanaro364ca402003-06-17 12:58:31 +0000961- The cgitb module has been extended to support plain text display (SF patch
962 569574).
963
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +0000964- A brand new version of IDLE (from the IDLEfork project at
965 SourceForge) is now included as Lib/idlelib. The old Tools/idle is
966 no more.
967
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000968- Added a new module: trace (documentation missing). This module used
969 to be distributed in Tools/scripts. It uses sys.settrace() to trace
970 code execution -- either function calls or individual lines. It can
971 generate tracing output during execution or a post-mortem report of
972 code coverage.
973
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +0000974- The threading module has new functions settrace() and setprofile()
975 that cooperate with the functions of the same name in the sys
976 module. A function registered with the threading module will
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000977 be used for all threads it creates. The new trace module uses this
978 to provide tracing for code running in threads.
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +0000979
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +0000980- copy.py: applied SF patch 707900, fixing bug 702858, by Steven
981 Taschuk. Copying a new-style class that had a reference to itself
982 didn't work. (The same thing worked fine for old-style classes.)
Martin v. Löwisba8f5ff2003-06-14 07:10:06 +0000983 Builtin functions are now treated as atomic, fixing bug #746304.
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +0000984
Raymond Hettingerc24d7672003-06-08 19:42:33 +0000985- difflib.py has two new functions: context_diff() and unified_diff().
986
Guido van Rossumfa19f7c2003-05-16 01:46:51 +0000987- More fixes to urllib (SF 549151): (a) When redirecting, always use
988 GET. This is common practice and more-or-less sanctioned by the
989 HTTP standard. (b) Add a handler for 307 redirection, which becomes
990 an error for POST, but a regular redirect for GET and HEAD
991
Guido van Rossumbf1bef82003-05-13 18:01:19 +0000992- Added optional 'onerror' argument to os.walk(), to control error
993 handling.
994
Martin v. Löwise59e2ba2003-05-03 09:09:02 +0000995- inspect.is{method|data}descriptor was added, to allow pydoc display
996 __doc__ of data descriptors.
997
Skip Montanaro4a7751c2003-04-29 21:07:16 +0000998- Fixed socket speed loss caused by use of the _socketobject wrapper class
999 in socket.py.
1000
Raymond Hettinger22952a32003-05-20 04:59:56 +00001001- timeit.py now checks the current directory for imports.
1002
Gustavo Niemeyer9556fba2003-06-07 17:53:08 +00001003- urllib2.py now knows how to order proxy classes, so the user doesn't
1004 have to insert it in front of other classes, nor do dirty tricks like
1005 inserting a "dummy" HTTPHandler after a ProxyHandler when building an
1006 opener with proxy support.
1007
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00001008- Iterators have been added for dbm keys.
1009
1010- random.Random objects can now be pickled.
1011
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001012Tools/Demos
1013-----------
1014
Martin v. Löwisb8c084e2003-06-14 09:03:46 +00001015- pydoc now offers help on keywords and topics.
1016
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00001017- Tools/idle is gone; long live Lib/idlelib.
1018
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00001019- diff.py prints file diffs in context, unified, or ndiff formats,
1020 providing a command line interface to difflib.py.
Raymond Hettinger2f3c74a2003-06-08 23:10:15 +00001021
Raymond Hettinger71e00332003-05-10 03:30:13 +00001022- texcheck.py is a new script for making a rough validation of Python LaTeX
1023 files.
1024
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001025Build
1026-----
1027
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001028- Setting DESTDIR during 'make install' now allows specifying a
Martin v. Löwis3b8ee082003-05-11 20:25:35 +00001029 different root directory.
1030
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001031C API
1032-----
1033
Tim Peters3cfe7542003-05-21 21:29:48 +00001034- PyType_Ready(): If a type declares that it participates in gc
1035 (Py_TPFLAGS_HAVE_GC), and its base class does not, and its base class's
1036 tp_free slot is the default _PyObject_Del, and type does not define
1037 a tp_free slot itself, _PyObject_GC_Del is assigned to type->tp_free.
1038 Previously _PyObject_Del was inherited, which could at best lead to a
1039 segfault. In addition, if even after this magic the type's tp_free
1040 slot is _PyObject_Del or NULL, and the type is a base type
1041 (Py_TPFLAGS_BASETYPE), TypeError is raised: since the type is a base
1042 type, its dealloc function must call type->tp_free, and since the type
1043 is gc'able, tp_free must not be NULL or _PyObject_Del.
1044
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00001045- PyThreadState_SetAsyncExc(): A new API (deliberately accessible only
1046 from C) to interrupt a thread by sending it an exception. It is
1047 intentional that you have to write your own C extension to call it
1048 from Python.
1049
1050
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001051New platforms
1052-------------
1053
1054None this time.
1055
1056Tests
1057-----
1058
1059- test_imp rewritten so that it doesn't raise RuntimeError if run as a
1060 side effect of being imported ("import test.autotest").
1061
1062Windows
1063-------
1064
Tim Petersfaa697a2003-06-22 01:42:20 +00001065- The Windows installer ships with Tcl/Tk 8.4.3 (upgraded from 8.4.1).
1066
Tim Petersc4607da2003-05-08 18:13:59 +00001067- The installer always suggested that Python be installed on the C:
1068 drive, due to a hardcoded "C:" generated by the Wise installation
1069 wizard. People with machines where C: is not the system drive
1070 usually want Python installed on whichever drive is their system drive
1071 instead. We removed the hardcoded "C:", and two testers on machines
1072 where C: is not the system drive report that the installer now
1073 suggests their system drive. Note that you can always select the
1074 directory you want in the "Select Destination Directory" dialog --
1075 that's what it's for.
1076
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001077Mac
1078---
1079
Just van Rossum99bc1fc2003-05-09 15:01:25 +00001080- There's a new module called "autoGIL", which offers a mechanism to
1081 automatically release the Global Interpreter Lock when an event loop
1082 goes to sleep, allowing other threads to run. It's currently only
1083 supported on OSX, in the Mach-O version.
Jack Jansenf5e23ff2003-06-16 13:53:40 +00001084- The OSA modules now allow direct access to properties of the
1085 toplevel application class (in AppleScript terminology).
1086- The Package Manager can now update itself.
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001087
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00001088SourceForge Bugs and Patches Applied
1089------------------------------------
1090
1091430160, 471893, 501716, 542562, 549151, 569574, 595837, 596434,
1092598163, 604210, 604716, 610332, 612627, 614770, 620190, 621891,
1093622042, 639139, 640236, 644345, 649742, 649742, 658233, 660022,
1094661318, 661676, 662807, 662923, 666219, 672855, 678325, 682347,
1095683486, 684981, 685773, 686254, 692776, 692959, 693094, 696777,
1096697989, 700827, 703666, 708495, 708604, 708901, 710733, 711902,
1097713722, 715782, 718286, 719359, 719367, 723136, 723831, 723962,
1098724588, 724767, 724767, 725942, 726150, 726446, 726869, 727051,
1099727719, 727719, 727805, 728277, 728563, 728656, 729096, 729103,
1100729293, 729297, 729300, 729317, 729395, 729622, 729817, 730170,
1101730296, 730594, 730685, 730826, 730963, 731209, 731403, 731504,
1102731514, 731626, 731635, 731643, 731644, 731644, 731689, 732124,
1103732143, 732234, 732284, 732284, 732479, 732761, 732783, 732951,
1104733667, 733781, 734118, 734231, 734869, 735051, 735293, 735527,
1105735613, 735694, 736962, 736962, 737970, 738066, 739313, 740055,
1106740234, 740301, 741806, 742126, 742741, 742860, 742860, 742911,
1107744041, 744104, 744238, 744687, 744877, 745055, 745478, 745525,
1108745620, 746012, 746304, 746366, 746801, 746953, 747348, 747667,
1109747954, 748846, 748849, 748973, 748975, 749191, 749210, 749759,
1110749831, 749911, 750008, 750092, 750542, 750595, 751038, 751107,
1111751276, 751451, 751916, 751941, 751956, 751998, 752671, 753451,
1112753602, 753617, 753845, 753925, 754014, 754340, 754447, 755031,
1113755087, 755147, 755245, 755683, 755987, 756032, 756996, 757058,
1114757229, 757818, 757821, 757822, 758112, 758910, 759227, 759889,
1115760257, 760703, 760792, 761104, 761337, 761519, 761830, 762455
1116
1117
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001118What's New in Python 2.3 beta 1?
1119================================
1120
Guido van Rossumfa1eddf2003-04-25 19:19:52 +00001121*Release date: 25-Apr-2003*
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001122
1123Core and builtins
1124-----------------
1125
Thomas Heller5eccabc2003-04-23 19:35:25 +00001126- New format codes B, H, I, k and K have been implemented for
1127 PyArg_ParseTuple and PyBuild_Value.
1128
Alex Martellia70b1912003-04-22 08:12:33 +00001129- New builtin function sum(seq, start=0) returns the sum of all the
1130 items in iterable object seq, plus start (items are normally numbers,
1131 and cannot be strings).
1132
Guido van Rossumaa86e352003-04-19 18:15:10 +00001133- bool() called without arguments now returns False rather than
1134 raising an exception. This is consistent with calling the
1135 constructors for the other builtin types -- called without argument
1136 they all return the false value of that type. (SF patch #724135)
1137
Guido van Rossumcf8d2852003-04-17 16:53:26 +00001138- In support of PEP 269 (making the pgen parser generator accessible
1139 from Python), some changes to the pgen code structure were made; a
1140 few files that used to be linked only with pgen are now linked with
1141 Python itself.
1142
Guido van Rossumc1f6e8c2003-04-16 21:13:23 +00001143- The repr() of a weakref object now shows the __name__ attribute of
1144 the referenced object, if it has one.
1145
Guido van Rossum76ba09f2003-04-16 19:40:58 +00001146- super() no longer ignores data descriptors, except __class__. See
1147 the thread started at
1148 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2003-April/034338.html
1149
Guido van Rossum3a3cca52003-04-14 20:58:14 +00001150- list.insert(i, x) now interprets negative i as it would be
1151 interpreted by slicing, so negative values count from the end of the
1152 list. This was the only place where such an interpretation was not
1153 placed on a list index.
1154
Guido van Rossumefbbb1c2003-04-11 18:43:06 +00001155- range() now works even if the arguments are longs with magnitude
1156 larger than sys.maxint, as long as the total length of the sequence
1157 fits. E.g., range(2**100, 2**101, 2**100) is the following list:
1158 [1267650600228229401496703205376L]. (SF patch #707427.)
1159
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001160- Some horridly obscure problems were fixed involving interaction
1161 between garbage collection and old-style classes with "ambitious"
1162 getattr hooks. If an old-style instance didn't have a __del__ method,
1163 but did have a __getattr__ hook, and the instance became reachable
1164 only from an unreachable cycle, and the hook resurrected or deleted
1165 unreachable objects when asked to resolve "__del__", anything up to
1166 a segfault could happen. That's been repaired.
1167
Raymond Hettingera3e1e4c2003-03-06 23:54:28 +00001168- dict.pop now takes an optional argument specifying a default
1169 value to return if the key is not in the dict. If a default is not
1170 given and the key is not found, a KeyError will still be raised.
1171 Parallel changes were made to UserDict.UserDict and UserDict.DictMixin.
1172 [SF patch #693753] (contributed by Michael Stone.)
1173
Martin v. Löwis73d538b2003-03-05 15:13:47 +00001174- sys.getfilesystemencoding() was added to expose
1175 Py_FileSystemDefaultEncoding.
Guido van Rossum46d3dc32003-03-01 03:20:41 +00001176
1177- New function sys.exc_clear() clears the current exception. This is
1178 rarely needed, but can sometimes be useful to release objects
1179 referenced by the traceback held in sys.exc_info()[2]. (SF patch
1180 #693195.)
1181
Neal Norwitzd5a65a72003-02-23 23:11:41 +00001182- On 64-bit systems, a dictionary could contain duplicate long/int keys
1183 if the key value was larger than 2**32. See SF bug #689659.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001184
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00001185- Fixed SF bug #663074. The codec system was using global static
Walter Dörwaldfa86bf52003-03-31 16:15:13 +00001186 variables to store internal data. As a result, any attempts to use the
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00001187 unicode system with multiple active interpreters, or successive
1188 interpreter executions, would fail.
1189
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00001190- "%c" % u"a" now returns a unicode string instead of raising a
Walter Dörwald44f527f2003-04-02 16:37:24 +00001191 TypeError. u"%c" % 0xffffffff now raises a OverflowError instead
Walter Dörwald1e469c52003-04-02 16:57:59 +00001192 of a ValueError to be consistent with "%c" % 256. See SF patch #710127.
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00001193
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001194Extension modules
1195-----------------
1196
Guido van Rossume7adda92003-04-25 05:52:37 +00001197- The socket module now provides the functions inet_pton and inet_ntop
1198 for converting between string and packed representation of IP
1199 addresses. There is also a new module variable, has_ipv6, which is
1200 True iff the current Python has IPv6 support. See SF patch #658327.
1201
Martin v. Löwisbfe175c2003-04-16 19:42:51 +00001202- Tkinter wrappers around Tcl variables now pass objects directly
1203 to Tcl, instead of first converting them to strings.
1204
Guido van Rossum41c99e72003-04-14 17:59:34 +00001205- The .*? pattern in the re module is now special-cased to avoid the
1206 recursion limit. (SF patch #720991 -- many thanks to Gary Herron
1207 and Greg Chapman.)
1208
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00001209- New function sys.call_tracing() allows pdb to debug code
1210 recursively.
1211
Tim Peters730f5532003-04-08 17:17:17 +00001212- New function gc.get_referents(obj) returns a list of objects
Tim Peters0f81ab62003-04-08 16:39:48 +00001213 directly referenced by obj. In effect, it exposes what the object's
1214 tp_traverse slot does, and can be helpful when debugging memory
1215 leaks.
1216
Martin v. Löwis7fb697b2003-04-03 04:49:12 +00001217- The iconv module has been removed from this release.
1218
Tim Petersd50ade62003-03-20 18:32:13 +00001219- The platform-independent routines for packing floats in IEEE formats
1220 (struct.pack's <f, >f, <d, and >d codes; pickle and cPickle's protocol 1
1221 pickling of floats) ignored that rounding can cause a carry to
1222 propagate. The worst consequence was that, in rare cases, <f and >f
1223 could produce strings that, when unpacked again, were a factor of 2
1224 away from the original float. This has been fixed. See SF bug
1225 #705836.
1226
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001227- New function time.tzset() provides access to the C library tzset()
Guido van Rossumd11b62e2003-03-14 21:51:36 +00001228 function, if supported. (SF patch #675422.)
1229
Neal Norwitz12e22172003-03-03 21:16:39 +00001230- Using createfilehandler, deletefilehandler, createtimerhandler functions
1231 on Tkinter.tkinter (_tkinter module) no longer crashes the interpreter.
1232 See SF bug #692416.
1233
Michael W. Hudsonf0089982003-03-03 12:29:42 +00001234- Modified the fcntl.ioctl() function to allow modification of a passed
1235 mutable buffer (for details see the reference documentation).
1236
Raymond Hettinger61fe64d2003-02-23 04:40:07 +00001237- Made user requested changes to the itertools module.
1238 Subsumed the times() function into repeat().
1239 Added chain() and cycle().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001240
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00001241- The rotor module is now deprecated; the encryption algorithm it uses
Andrew M. Kuchlingfb5f4852003-04-24 13:19:56 +00001242 is not believed to be secure, and including crypto code with Python
1243 has implications for exporting and importing it in various countries.
1244
Skip Montanaro89feabc2003-03-30 04:54:24 +00001245- The socket module now always uses the _socketobject wrapper class, even on
1246 platforms which have dup(2). The makefile() method is built directly
1247 on top of the socket without duplicating the file descriptor, allowing
1248 timeouts to work properly.
1249
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001250Library
1251-------
1252
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00001253- New generator function os.walk() is an easy-to-use alternative to
1254 os.path.walk(). See os module docs for details. os.path.walk()
1255 isn't deprecated at this time, but may become deprecated in a
1256 future release.
1257
Marc-André Lemburg246d8472003-04-24 11:36:11 +00001258- Added new module "platform" which provides a wide range of tools
1259 for querying platform dependent features.
1260
Andrew M. Kuchling4e42b312003-04-24 16:45:05 +00001261- netrc now allows ASCII punctuation characters in passwords.
Raymond Hettinger1d877862003-04-23 19:06:08 +00001262
Martin v. Löwis153c9e42003-04-19 20:59:03 +00001263- shelve now supports the optional writeback argument, and exposes
1264 pickle protocol versions.
1265
Guido van Rossuma2685402003-04-19 18:04:57 +00001266- Several methods of nntplib.NNTP have grown an optional file argument
1267 which specifies a file where to divert the command's output
1268 (already supported by the body() method). (SF patch #720468)
1269
Martin v. Löwis281b2c62003-04-18 21:04:39 +00001270- The self-documenting XML server library DocXMLRPCServer was added.
1271
Martin v. Löwis2548c732003-04-18 10:39:54 +00001272- Support for internationalized domain names has been added through
1273 the 'idna' and 'punycode' encodings, the 'stringprep' module, the
1274 'mkstringprep' tool, and enhancements to the socket and httplib
1275 modules.
1276
Walter Dörwald5688b7a2003-04-16 09:46:13 +00001277- htmlentitydefs has two new dictionaries: name2codepoint maps
1278 HTML entity names to Unicode codepoints (as integers).
1279 codepoint2name is the reverse mapping. See SF patch #722017.
1280
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00001281- pdb has a new command, "debug", which lets you step through
1282 arbitrary code from the debugger's (pdb) prompt.
1283
Raymond Hettingerc377cbf2003-04-04 22:56:42 +00001284- unittest.failUnlessEqual and its equivalent unittest.assertEqual now
1285 return 'not a == b' rather than 'a != b'. This gives the desired
1286 result for classes that define __eq__ without defining __ne__.
1287
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001288- sgmllib now supports SGML marked sections, in particular the
Martin v. Löwis3163a3b2003-03-30 14:25:40 +00001289 MS Office extensions.
1290
Raymond Hettinger42182eb2003-03-09 05:33:33 +00001291- The urllib module now offers support for the iterator protocol.
1292 SF patch 698520 contributed by Brett Cannon.
1293
Guido van Rossum9589a252003-03-06 01:56:12 +00001294- New module timeit provides a simple framework for timing the
1295 execution speed of expressions and statements.
1296
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001297- sets.Set objects now support mixed-type __eq__ and __ne__, instead
1298 of raising TypeError. If x is a Set object and y is a non-Set object,
1299 x == y is False, and x != y is True. This is akin to the change made
1300 for mixed-type comparisons of datetime objects in 2.3a2; more info
1301 about the rationale is in the NEWS entry for that. See also SF bug
1302 report <http://www.python.org/sf/693121>.
1303
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00001304- On Unix platforms, if os.listdir() is called with a Unicode argument,
1305 it now returns Unicode strings. (This behavior was added earlier
1306 to the Windows NT/2k/XP version of os.listdir().)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001307
Andrew M. Kuchling6f177d42003-02-28 22:09:33 +00001308- Distutils: both 'py_modules' and 'packages' keywords can now be specified
1309 in core.setup(). Previously you could supply one or the other, but
1310 not both of them. (SF patch #695090 from Bernhard Herzog)
1311
Skip Montanaro64a839e2003-03-20 23:36:55 +00001312- New csv package makes it easy to read/write CSV files.
1313
Gustavo Niemeyer68d8cef2003-04-17 21:31:33 +00001314- Module shlex has been extended to allow posix-like shell parsings,
1315 including a split() function for easy spliting of quoted strings and
1316 commands. An iterator interface was also implemented.
1317
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001318Tools/Demos
1319-----------
1320
Tim Peters21d7d4d2003-04-18 00:45:59 +00001321- New script combinerefs.py helps analyze new PYTHONDUMPREFS output.
1322 See the module docstring for details.
1323
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001324Build
1325-----
1326
Neal Norwitz35892b92003-02-23 23:45:35 +00001327- Fix problem building on OSF1 because the compiler only accepted
1328 preprocessor directives that start in column 1. (SF bug #691793.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001329
1330C API
1331-----
1332
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00001333- Added PyGC_Collect(), equivalent to calling gc.collect().
1334
Guido van Rossum0fc8f002003-04-15 15:12:39 +00001335- PyThreadState_GetDict() was changed not to raise an exception or
1336 issue a fatal error when no current thread state is available. This
1337 makes it possible to print dictionaries when no thread is active.
1338
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00001339- LONG_LONG was renamed to PY_LONG_LONG. Extensions that use this and
1340 need compatibility with previous versions can use this:
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00001341
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00001342 #ifndef PY_LONG_LONG
1343 #define PY_LONG_LONG LONG_LONG
1344 #endif
Martin v. Löwisb9a0f912003-03-29 10:06:18 +00001345
Raymond Hettinger1da1dbf2003-03-17 19:46:11 +00001346- Added PyObject_SelfIter() to fill the tp_iter slot for the
Raymond Hettinger01538262003-03-17 08:24:35 +00001347 typical case where the method returns its self argument.
1348
Guido van Rossume5c691a2003-03-07 15:13:17 +00001349- The extended type structure used for heap types (new-style
1350 classes defined by Python code using a class statement) is now
1351 exported from object.h as PyHeapTypeObject. (SF patch #696193.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001352
1353New platforms
1354-------------
1355
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00001356None this time.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001357
1358Tests
1359-----
1360
Neal Norwitz55b61d22003-02-28 19:57:03 +00001361- test_timeout now requires -u network to be passed to regrtest to run.
1362 See SF bug #692988.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001363
1364Windows
1365-------
1366
Tim Peters11b23062003-04-23 02:39:17 +00001367- os.fsync() now exists on Windows, and calls the Microsoft _commit()
1368 function.
1369
Guido van Rossumf4050642003-04-09 19:39:06 +00001370- New function winsound.MessageBeep() wraps the Win32 API
1371 MessageBeep().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001372
1373Mac
1374---
1375
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00001376- os.listdir() now returns Unicode strings on MacOS X when called with
1377 a Unicode argument. See the general news item under "Library".
Just van Rossum46c97842003-02-25 21:42:15 +00001378
Jack Jansendeac2ac2003-02-24 11:04:17 +00001379- A new method MacOS.WMAvailable() returns true if it is safe to access
1380 the window manager, false otherwise.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001381
Jack Jansencf76be02003-03-24 12:13:54 +00001382- EasyDialogs dialogs are now movable-modal, and if the application is
1383 currently in the background they will ask to be moved to the foreground
1384 before displaying.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001385
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00001386- OSA Scripting support has improved a lot, and gensuitemodule.py can now
Jack Jansende354b72003-04-11 15:37:20 +00001387 be used by mere mortals. The documentation is now also more or less
1388 complete.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001389
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00001390- The IDE (in a framework build) now includes introductory documentation
1391 in Apple Help Viewer format.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001392
1393
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001394What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 2?
1395=================================
1396
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00001397*Release date: 19-Feb-2003*
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001398
1399Core and builtins
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00001400-----------------
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001401
Walter Dörwald2ffec022003-02-19 16:34:11 +00001402- Negative positions returned from PEP 293 error callbacks are now
1403 treated as being relative to the end of the input string. Positions
1404 that are out of bounds raise an IndexError.
1405
Guido van Rossum162e38c2003-02-19 15:25:10 +00001406- sys.path[0] (the directory from which the script is loaded) is now
1407 turned into an absolute pathname, unless it is the empty string.
1408 (SF patch #664376.)
1409
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00001410- Finally fixed the bug in compile() and exec where a string ending
1411 with an indented code block but no newline would raise SyntaxError.
1412 This would have been a four-line change in parsetok.c... Except
1413 codeop.py depends on this behavior, so a compilation flag had to be
1414 invented that causes the tokenizer to revert to the old behavior;
1415 this required extra changes to 2 .h files, 2 .c files, and 2 .py
Guido van Rossum1442dc12003-02-13 22:19:20 +00001416 files. (Fixes SF bug #501622.)
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00001417
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00001418- If a new-style class defines neither __new__ nor __init__, its
1419 constructor would ignore all arguments. This is changed now: the
1420 constructor refuses arguments in this case. This might break code
1421 that worked under Python 2.2. The simplest fix is to add a no-op
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001422 __init__: ``def __init__(self, *args, **kw): pass``.
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00001423
Guido van Rossum48035eb2003-02-12 17:05:26 +00001424- Through a bytecode optimizer bug (and I bet you didn't even know
1425 Python *had* a bytecode optimizer :-), "unsigned" hex/oct constants
1426 with a leading minus sign would come out with the wrong sign.
1427 ("Unsigned" hex/oct constants are those with a face value in the
1428 range sys.maxint+1 through sys.maxint*2+1, inclusive; these have
1429 always been interpreted as negative numbers through sign folding.)
1430 E.g. 0xffffffff is -1, and -(0xffffffff) is 1, but -0xffffffff would
1431 come out as -4294967295. This was the case in Python 2.2 through
1432 2.2.2 and 2.3a1, and in Python 2.4 it will once again have that
1433 value, but according to PEP 237 it really needs to be 1 now. This
1434 will be backported to Python 2.2.3 a well. (SF #660455)
1435
Guido van Rossum47710652003-02-12 20:48:22 +00001436- int(s, base) sometimes sign-folds hex and oct constants; it only
1437 does this when base is 0 and s.strip() starts with a '0'. When the
1438 sign is actually folded, as in int("0xffffffff", 0) on a 32-bit
1439 machine, which returns -1, a FutureWarning is now issued; in Python
1440 2.4, this will return 4294967295L, as do int("+0xffffffff", 0) and
1441 int("0xffffffff", 16) right now. (PEP 347)
1442
Guido van Rossuma89d10e2003-02-12 03:58:38 +00001443- super(X, x): x may now be a proxy for an X instance, i.e.
1444 issubclass(x.__class__, X) but not issubclass(type(x), X).
1445
Guido van Rossum03bc7d32003-02-12 03:32:58 +00001446- isinstance(x, X): if X is a new-style class, this is now equivalent
1447 to issubclass(type(x), X) or issubclass(x.__class__, X). Previously
1448 only type(x) was tested. (For classic classes this was already the
1449 case.)
1450
Just van Rossum73ffb4a2003-02-10 09:57:08 +00001451- compile(), eval() and the exec statement now fully support source code
1452 passed as unicode strings.
1453
Neal Norwitzde8b94c2003-02-10 02:12:43 +00001454- int subclasses can be initialized with longs if the value fits in an int.
1455 See SF bug #683467.
1456
Tim Petersbf2674b2003-02-02 07:51:32 +00001457- long(string, base) takes time linear in len(string) when base is a power
1458 of 2 now. It used to take time quadratic in len(string).
1459
Martin v. Löwis8afd7572003-01-25 22:46:11 +00001460- filter returns now Unicode results for Unicode arguments.
1461
Martin v. Löwisaf6a27a2003-01-03 19:16:14 +00001462- raw_input can now return Unicode objects.
1463
Skip Montanaro4abd5f02003-01-02 20:51:08 +00001464- List objects' sort() method now accepts None as the comparison function.
1465 Passing None is semantically identical to calling sort() with no
1466 arguments.
1467
Neal Norwitz1a997502003-01-13 20:13:12 +00001468- Fixed crash when printing a subclass of str and __str__ returned self.
1469 See SF bug #667147.
1470
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00001471- Fixed an invalid RuntimeWarning and an undetected error when trying
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00001472 to convert a long integer into a float which couldn't fit.
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00001473 See SF bug #676155.
1474
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00001475- Function objects now have a __module__ attribute that is bound to
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00001476 the name of the module in which the function was defined. This
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00001477 applies for C functions and methods as well as functions and methods
1478 defined in Python. This attribute is used by pickle.whichmodule(),
1479 which changes the behavior of whichmodule slightly. In Python 2.2
1480 whichmodule() returns "__main__" for functions that are not defined
1481 at the top-level of a module (examples: methods, nested functions).
1482 Now whichmodule() will return the proper module name.
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00001483
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001484Extension modules
1485-----------------
1486
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00001487- operator.isNumberType() now checks that the object has a nb_int or
1488 nb_float slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
1489 tp_as_number pointer.
1490
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00001491- The imp module now has ways to acquire and release the "import
1492 lock": imp.acquire_lock() and imp.release_lock(). Note: this is a
1493 reentrant lock, so releasing the lock only truly releases it when
1494 this is the last release_lock() call. You can check with
1495 imp.lock_held(). (SF bug #580952 and patch #683257.)
1496
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001497- Change to cPickle to match pickle.py (see below and PEP 307).
1498
Neal Norwitz9caf9c02003-02-10 01:54:06 +00001499- Fix some bugs in the parser module. SF bug #678518.
1500
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00001501- Thanks to Scott David Daniels, a subtle bug in how the zlib
Walter Dörwald28d81962003-02-03 20:53:14 +00001502 extension implemented flush() was fixed. Scott also rewrote the
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00001503 zlib test suite using the unittest module. (SF bug #640230 and
1504 patch #678531.)
1505
Raymond Hettinger96ef8112003-02-01 00:10:11 +00001506- Added an itertools module containing high speed, memory efficient
1507 looping constructs inspired by tools from Haskell and SML.
1508
Guido van Rossum99d4abf2003-01-27 22:22:50 +00001509- The SSL module now handles sockets with a timeout set correctly (SF
1510 patch #675750, fixing SF bug #675552).
1511
Barry Warsawf8ba39c2003-01-07 20:55:26 +00001512- os/posixmodule has grown the sysexits.h constants (EX_OK and friends).
1513
Guido van Rossum6d0d3652003-01-07 20:34:19 +00001514- Fixed broken threadstate swap in readline that could cause fatal
1515 errors when a readline hook was being invoked while a background
1516 thread was active. (SF bugs #660476 and #513033.)
1517
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001518- fcntl now exposes the strops.h I_* constants.
1519
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00001520- Fix a crash on Solaris that occurred when calling close() on
1521 an mmap'ed file which was already closed. (SF patch #665913)
1522
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001523- Fixed several serious bugs in the zipimport implementation.
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001524
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00001525- datetime changes:
1526
Guido van Rossum8b7a9a32003-04-14 22:01:58 +00001527 The date class is now properly subclassable. (SF bug #720908)
1528
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00001529 The datetime and datetimetz classes have been collapsed into a single
1530 datetime class, and likewise the time and timetz classes into a single
1531 time class. Previously, a datetimetz object with tzinfo=None acted
1532 exactly like a datetime object, and similarly for timetz. This wasn't
1533 enough of a difference to justify distinct classes, and life is simpler
1534 now.
1535
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00001536 today() and now() now round system timestamps to the closest
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00001537 microsecond <http://www.python.org/sf/661086>. This repairs an
1538 irritation most likely seen on Windows systems.
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00001539
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00001540 In dt.astimezone(tz), if tz.utcoffset(dt) returns a duration,
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00001541 ValueError is raised if tz.dst(dt) returns None (2.3a1 treated it
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00001542 as 0 instead, but a tzinfo subclass wishing to participate in
1543 time zone conversion has to take a stand on whether it supports
1544 DST; if you don't care about DST, then code dst() to return 0 minutes,
1545 meaning that DST is never in effect).
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00001546
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00001547 The tzinfo methods utcoffset() and dst() must return a timedelta object
1548 (or None) now. In 2.3a1 they could also return an int or long, but that
1549 was an unhelpfully redundant leftover from an earlier version wherein
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00001550 they couldn't return a timedelta. TOOWTDI.
1551
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00001552 The example tzinfo class for local time had a bug. It was replaced
1553 by a later example coded by Guido.
1554
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00001555 datetime.astimezone(tz) no longer raises an exception when the
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00001556 input datetime has no UTC equivalent in tz. For typical "hybrid" time
1557 zones (a single tzinfo subclass modeling both standard and daylight
1558 time), this case can arise one hour per year, at the hour daylight time
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00001559 ends. See new docs for details. In short, the new behavior mimics
1560 the local wall clock's behavior of repeating an hour in local time.
1561
1562 dt.astimezone() can no longer be used to convert between naive and aware
1563 datetime objects. If you merely want to attach, or remove, a tzinfo
1564 object, without any conversion of date and time members, use
1565 dt.replace(tzinfo=whatever) instead, where "whatever" is None or a
1566 tzinfo subclass instance.
1567
1568 A new method tzinfo.fromutc(dt) can be overridden in tzinfo subclasses
1569 to give complete control over how a UTC time is to be converted to
1570 a local time. The default astimezone() implementation calls fromutc()
1571 as its last step, so a tzinfo subclass can affect that too by overriding
1572 fromutc(). It's expected that the default fromutc() implementation will
1573 be suitable as-is for "almost all" time zone subclasses, but the
1574 creativity of political time zone fiddling appears unbounded -- fromutc()
1575 allows the highly motivated to emulate any scheme expressible in Python.
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00001576
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00001577 datetime.now(): The optional tzinfo argument was undocumented (that's
1578 repaired), and its name was changed to tz ("tzinfo" is overloaded enough
1579 already). With a tz argument, now(tz) used to return the local date
1580 and time, and attach tz to it, without any conversion of date and time
1581 members. This was less than useful. Now now(tz) returns the current
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001582 date and time as local time in tz's time zone, akin to ::
1583
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00001584 tz.fromutc(datetime.utcnow().replace(tzinfo=utc))
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001585
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00001586 where "utc" is an instance of a tzinfo subclass modeling UTC. Without
1587 a tz argument, now() continues to return the current local date and time,
1588 as a naive datetime object.
1589
Tim Peters2a44a8d2003-01-23 20:53:10 +00001590 datetime.fromtimestamp(): Like datetime.now() above, this had less than
1591 useful behavior when the optional tinzo argument was specified. See
1592 also SF bug report <http://www.python.org/sf/660872>.
1593
Tim Peters8d81a012003-01-24 22:36:34 +00001594 date and datetime comparison: In order to prevent comparison from
1595 falling back to the default compare-object-addresses strategy, these
1596 raised TypeError whenever they didn't understand the other object type.
1597 They still do, except when the other object has a "timetuple" attribute,
1598 in which case they return NotImplemented now. This gives other
1599 datetime objects (e.g., mxDateTime) a chance to intercept the
1600 comparison.
1601
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00001602 date, time, datetime and timedelta comparison: When the exception
1603 for mixed-type comparisons in the last paragraph doesn't apply, if
1604 the comparison is == then False is returned, and if the comparison is
1605 != then True is returned. Because dict lookup and the "in" operator
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001606 only invoke __eq__, this allows, for example, ::
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00001607
1608 if some_datetime in some_sequence:
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001609
1610 and ::
1611
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00001612 some_dict[some_timedelta] = whatever
1613
1614 to work as expected, without raising TypeError just because the
1615 sequence is heterogeneous, or the dict has mixed-type keys. [This
1616 seems like a good idea to implement for all mixed-type comparisons
1617 that don't want to allow falling back to address comparison.]
1618
Tim Peters75a6e3b2003-01-04 18:17:36 +00001619 The constructors building a datetime from a timestamp could raise
1620 ValueError if the platform C localtime()/gmtime() inserted "leap
1621 seconds". Leap seconds are ignored now. On such platforms, it's
1622 possible to have timestamps that differ by a second, yet where
1623 datetimes constructed from them are equal.
1624
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00001625 The pickle format of date, time and datetime objects has changed
1626 completely. The undocumented pickler and unpickler functions no
Tim Petersb57f8f02003-02-01 02:54:15 +00001627 longer exist. The undocumented __setstate__() and __getstate__()
1628 methods no longer exist either.
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00001629
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001630Library
1631-------
1632
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001633- The logging module was updated slightly; the WARN level was renamed
1634 to WARNING, and the matching function/method warn() to warning().
1635
1636- The pickle and cPickle modules were updated with a new pickling
1637 protocol (documented by pickletools.py, see below) and several
1638 extensions to the pickle customization API (__reduce__, __setstate__
1639 etc.). The copy module now uses more of the pickle customization
1640 API to copy objects that don't implement __copy__ or __deepcopy__.
1641 See PEP 307 for details.
1642
1643- The distutils "register" command now uses http://www.python.org/pypi
1644 as the default repository. (See PEP 301.)
1645
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00001646- the platform dependent path related variables sep, altsep, extsep,
1647 pathsep, curdir, pardir and defpath are now defined in the platform
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00001648 dependent path modules (e.g. ntpath.py) rather than os.py, so these
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001649 variables are now available via os.path. They continue to be
1650 available from the os module.
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00001651 (see <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00001652
Tim Peters6ee04802003-02-05 18:29:34 +00001653- array.array was added to the types repr.py knows about (see
1654 <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
1655
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00001656- The new pickletools.py contains lots of documentation about pickle
1657 internals, and supplies some helpers for working with pickles, such as
1658 a symbolic pickle disassembler.
1659
Skip Montanaro9a7c96a2003-01-22 18:17:25 +00001660- Xmlrpclib.py now supports the builtin boolean type.
1661
Martin v. Löwis0c6774d2003-01-15 11:51:06 +00001662- py_compile has a new 'doraise' flag and a new PyCompileError
1663 exception.
1664
Martin v. Löwisd69663d2003-01-15 11:37:23 +00001665- SimpleXMLRPCServer now supports CGI through the CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler
1666 class.
1667
Guido van Rossum50e92232003-01-14 16:45:04 +00001668- The sets module now raises TypeError in __cmp__, to clarify that
1669 sets are not intended to be three-way-compared; the comparison
1670 operators are overloaded as subset/superset tests.
1671
Guido van Rossumcd0c0472003-01-07 23:03:05 +00001672- Bastion.py and rexec.py are disabled. These modules are not safe in
1673 Python 2.2. or 2.3.
1674
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001675- realpath is now exported when doing ``from poxixpath import *``.
Neal Norwitzbb0246a2003-01-03 18:12:28 +00001676 It is also exported for ntpath, macpath, and os2emxpath.
1677 See SF bug #659228.
1678
Neal Norwitzb9ef4ae2003-01-05 23:19:43 +00001679- New module tarfile from Lars Gustäbel provides a comprehensive interface
1680 to tar archive files with transparent gzip and bzip2 compression.
1681 See SF patch #651082.
1682
Neal Norwitz4f442372003-01-06 06:51:36 +00001683- urlparse can now parse imap:// URLs. See SF feature request #618024.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001684
Neal Norwitze931ed52003-01-10 23:24:32 +00001685- Tkinter.Canvas.scan_dragto() provides an optional parameter to support
1686 the gain value which is passed to Tk. SF bug# 602259.
1687
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00001688- Fix logging.handlers.SysLogHandler protocol when using UNIX domain sockets.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00001689 See SF patch #642974.
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00001690
Skip Montanaro12fe72e2003-02-25 17:46:20 +00001691- The dospath module was deleted. Use the ntpath module when manipulating
1692 DOS paths from other platforms.
1693
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001694Tools/Demos
1695-----------
1696
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00001697- Two new scripts (db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py) were added to the
1698 Tools/scripts directory to facilitate conversion from the old bsddb module
1699 to the new one. While the user-visible API of the new module is
1700 compatible with the old one, it's likely that the version of the
1701 underlying database library has changed. To convert from the old library,
1702 run the db2pickle.py script using the old version of Python to convert it
1703 to a pickle file. After upgrading Python, run the pickle2db.py script
1704 using the new version of Python to reconstitute your database. For
1705 example:
1706
Skip Montanaro621f0552003-02-03 15:48:10 +00001707 % python2.2 db2pickle.py -h some.db > some.pickle
1708 % python2.3 pickle2db.py -h some.db.new < some.pickle
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00001709
1710 Run the scripts without any args to get a usage message.
1711
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001712
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001713Build
1714-----
1715
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00001716- The audio driver tests (test_ossaudiodev.py and
1717 test_linuxaudiodev.py) are no longer run by default. This is
1718 because they don't always work, depending on your hardware and
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001719 software. To run these tests, you must use an invocation like ::
1720
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00001721 ./python Lib/test/regrtest.py -u audio test_ossaudiodev
1722
Skip Montanarodecc6a42003-01-01 20:07:49 +00001723- On systems which build using the configure script, compiler flags which
1724 used to be lumped together using the OPT flag have been split into two
1725 groups, OPT and BASECFLAGS. OPT is meant to carry just optimization- and
1726 debug-related flags like "-g" and "-O3". BASECFLAGS is meant to carry
1727 compiler flags that are required to get a clean compile. On some
1728 platforms (many Linux flavors in particular) BASECFLAGS will be empty by
1729 default. On others, such as Mac OS X and SCO, it will contain required
1730 flags. This change allows people building Python to override OPT without
1731 fear of clobbering compiler flags which are required to get a clean build.
1732
1733- On Darwin/Mac OS X platforms, /sw/lib and /sw/include are added to the
1734 relevant search lists in setup.py. This allows users building Python to
1735 take advantage of the many packages available from the fink project
1736 <http://fink.sf.net/>.
1737
1738- A new Makefile target, scriptsinstall, installs a number of useful scripts
1739 from the Tools/scripts directory.
1740
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001741C API
1742-----
1743
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001744- PyEval_GetFrame() is now declared to return a ``PyFrameObject *``
1745 instead of a plain ``PyObject *``. (SF patch #686601.)
Guido van Rossum6297a7a2003-02-19 15:53:17 +00001746
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00001747- PyNumber_Check() now checks that the object has a nb_int or nb_float
1748 slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
1749 tp_as_number pointer.
1750
Guido van Rossumeea47182003-02-11 20:39:59 +00001751- A C type that inherits from a base type that defines tp_as_buffer
1752 will now inherit the tp_as_buffer pointer if it doesn't define one.
1753 (SF #681367)
1754
Neil Schemenauer5042da62003-02-04 20:59:40 +00001755- The PyArg_Parse functions now issue a DeprecationWarning if a float
1756 argument is provided when an integer is specified (this affects the 'b',
1757 'B', 'h', 'H', 'i', and 'l' codes). Future versions of Python will
1758 raise a TypeError.
Neil Schemenauercd63e612003-01-24 22:15:53 +00001759
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001760Tests
1761-----
1762
Walter Dörwald11cfbd62003-03-26 16:03:16 +00001763- Several tests weren't being run from regrtest.py (test_timeout.py,
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001764 test_tarfile.py, test_netrc.py, test_multifile.py,
1765 test_importhooks.py and test_imp.py). Now they are. (Note to
1766 developers: please read Lib/test/README when creating a new test, to
1767 make sure to do it right! All tests need to use either unittest or
1768 pydoc.)
1769
1770- Added test_posix.py, a test suite for the posix module.
1771
1772- Added test_hexoct.py, a test suite for hex/oct constant folding.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001773
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001774Windows
1775-------
1776
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00001777- The timeout code for socket connect() didn't work right; this has
1778 now been fixed. test_timeout.py should pass (at least most of the
1779 time).
1780
Thomas Hellerdda583d2003-01-31 20:45:41 +00001781- distutils' msvccompiler class now passes the preprocessor options to
1782 the resource compiler. See SF patch #669198.
1783
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00001784- The bsddb module now ships with Sleepycat's 4.1.25.NC, the latest
1785 release without strong cryptography.
1786
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00001787- sys.path[0], if it contains a directory name, is now always an
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001788 absolute pathname. (SF patch #664376.)
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00001789
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00001790- The new logging package is now installed by the Windows installer. It
1791 wasn't in 2.3a1 due to oversight.
1792
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001793Mac
1794---
1795
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00001796- There are new dialogs EasyDialogs.AskFileForOpen, AskFileForSave
1797 and AskFolder. The old macfs.StandardGetFile and friends are deprecated.
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00001798
Jack Jansenc9296362003-02-06 23:10:45 +00001799- Most of the standard library now uses pathnames or FSRefs in preference
1800 of FSSpecs, and use the underlying Carbon.File and Carbon.Folder modules
1801 in stead of macfs. macfs will probably be deprecated in the future.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00001802
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00001803- Type Carbon.File.FSCatalogInfo and supporting methods have been implemented.
1804 This also makes macfs.FSSpec.SetDates() work again.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001805
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00001806- There is a new module pimp, the package install manager for Python, and
1807 accompanying applet PackageManager. These allow you to easily download
1808 and install pretested extension packages either in source or binary
1809 form. Only in MacPython-OSX.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001810
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00001811- Applets are now built with bundlebuilder in MacPython-OSX, which should make
Jack Jansen5d44b342003-02-18 23:32:47 +00001812 them more robust and also provides a path towards BuildApplication. The
1813 downside of this change is that applets can no longer be run from the
1814 Terminal window, this will hopefully be fixed in the 2.3b1.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001815
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001816
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001817What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 1?
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001818=================================
1819
Guido van Rossumae548862002-12-31 15:47:36 +00001820*Release date: 31-Dec-2002*
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001821
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001822Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001823--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00001824
Michael W. Hudson96bc3b42002-11-26 14:48:23 +00001825- One can now assign to __bases__ and __name__ of new-style classes.
1826
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00001827- dict() now accepts keyword arguments so that dict(one=1, two=2)
1828 is the equivalent of {"one": 1, "two": 2}. Accordingly,
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00001829 the existing (but undocumented) 'items' keyword argument has
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00001830 been eliminated. This means that dict(items=someMapping) now has
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00001831 a different meaning than before.
1832
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00001833- int() now returns a long object if the argument is outside the
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001834 integer range, so int("4" * 1000), int(1e200) and int(1L<<1000) will
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00001835 all return long objects instead of raising an OverflowError.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001836
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00001837- Assignment to __class__ is disallowed if either the old or the new
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00001838 class is a statically allocated type object (such as defined by an
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00001839 extension module). This prevents anomalies like 2.__class__ = bool.
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00001840
1841- New-style object creation and deallocation have been sped up
1842 significantly; they are now faster than classic instance creation
1843 and deallocation.
1844
1845- The __slots__ variable can now mention "private" names, and the
1846 right thing will happen (e.g. __slots__ = ["__foo"]).
1847
1848- The built-ins slice() and buffer() are now callable types. The
1849 types classobj (formerly class), code, function, instance, and
1850 instancemethod (formerly instance-method), which have no built-in
1851 names but are accessible through the types module, are now also
1852 callable. The type dict-proxy is renamed to dictproxy.
1853
1854- Cycles going through the __class__ link of a new-style instance are
1855 now detected by the garbage collector.
1856
1857- Classes using __slots__ are now properly garbage collected.
1858 [SF bug 519621]
1859
1860- Tightened the __slots__ rules: a slot name must be a valid Python
1861 identifier.
1862
1863- The constructor for the module type now requires a name argument and
1864 takes an optional docstring argument. Previously, this constructor
1865 ignored its arguments. As a consequence, deriving a class from a
1866 module (not from the module type) is now illegal; previously this
1867 created an unnamed module, just like invoking the module type did.
1868 [SF bug 563060]
1869
1870- A new type object, 'basestring', is added. This is a common base type
1871 for 'str' and 'unicode', and can be used instead of
1872 types.StringTypes, e.g. to test whether something is "a string":
1873 isinstance(x, basestring) is True for Unicode and 8-bit strings. This
1874 is an abstract base class and cannot be instantiated directly.
1875
1876- Changed new-style class instantiation so that when C's __new__
1877 method returns something that's not a C instance, its __init__ is
1878 not called. [SF bug #537450]
1879
1880- Fixed super() to work correctly with class methods. [SF bug #535444]
1881
1882- If you try to pickle an instance of a class that has __slots__ but
1883 doesn't define or override __getstate__, a TypeError is now raised.
1884 This is done by adding a bozo __getstate__ to the class that always
1885 raises TypeError. (Before, this would appear to be pickled, but the
1886 state of the slots would be lost.)
1887
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001888Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001889-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001890
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00001891- Import from zipfiles is now supported. The name of a zipfile placed
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00001892 on sys.path causes the import statement to look for importable Python
1893 modules (with .py, pyc and .pyo extensions) and packages inside the
1894 zipfile. The zipfile import follows the specification (though not
1895 the sample implementation) of PEP 273. The semantics of __path__ are
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00001896 compatible with those that have been implemented in Jython since
1897 Jython 2.1.
1898
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001899- PEP 302 has been accepted. Although it was initially developed to
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00001900 support zipimport, it offers a new, general import hook mechanism.
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00001901 Several new variables have been added to the sys module:
1902 sys.meta_path, sys.path_hooks, and sys.path_importer_cache; these
1903 make extending the import statement much more convenient than
1904 overriding the __import__ built-in function. For a description of
1905 these, see PEP 302.
1906
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00001907- A frame object's f_lineno attribute can now be written to from a
1908 trace function to change which line will execute next. A command to
1909 exploit this from pdb has been added. [SF patch #643835]
1910
Marc-André Lemburg20b91352002-12-12 18:01:43 +00001911- The _codecs support module for codecs.py was turned into a builtin
1912 module to assure that at least the builtin codecs are available
1913 to the Python parser for source code decoding according to PEP 263.
1914
Walter Dörwaldd9a6ad32002-12-12 16:41:44 +00001915- issubclass now supports a tuple as the second argument, just like
1916 isinstance does. ``issubclass(X, (A, B))`` is equivalent to
1917 ``issubclass(X, A) or issubclass(X, B)``.
1918
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00001919- Thanks to Armin Rigo, the last known way to provoke a system crash
1920 by cleverly arranging for a comparison function to mutate a list
1921 during a list.sort() operation has been fixed. The effect of
1922 attempting to mutate a list, or even to inspect its contents or
1923 length, while a sort is in progress, is not defined by the language.
1924 The C implementation of Python 2.3 attempts to detect mutations,
1925 and raise ValueError if one occurs, but there's no guarantee that
1926 all mutations will be caught, or that any will be caught across
1927 releases or implementations.
1928
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00001929- Unicode file name processing for Windows (PEP 277) is implemented.
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00001930 All platforms now have an os.path.supports_unicode_filenames attribute,
1931 which is set to True on Windows NT/2000/XP, and False elsewhere.
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00001932
Walter Dörwald3aeb6322002-09-02 13:14:32 +00001933- Codec error handling callbacks (PEP 293) are implemented.
1934 Error handling in unicode.encode or str.decode can now be customized.
1935
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00001936- A subtle change to the semantics of the built-in function intern():
1937 interned strings are no longer immortal. You must keep a reference
1938 to the return value intern() around to get the benefit.
1939
Guido van Rossumf808b892002-08-16 03:38:10 +00001940- Use of 'None' as a variable, argument or attribute name now
1941 issues a SyntaxWarning. In the future, None may become a keyword.
1942
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00001943- SET_LINENO is gone. co_lnotab is now consulted to determine when to
1944 call the trace function. C code that accessed f_lineno should call
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00001945 PyCode_Addr2Line instead (f_lineno is still there, but only kept up
1946 to date when there is a trace function set).
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00001947
Guido van Rossum9be89462002-08-14 16:11:30 +00001948- There's a new warning category, FutureWarning. This is used to warn
1949 about a number of situations where the value or sign of an integer
1950 result will change in Python 2.4 as a result of PEP 237 (integer
1951 unification). The warnings implement stage B0 mentioned in that
1952 PEP. The warnings are about the following situations:
1953
1954 - Octal and hex literals without 'L' prefix in the inclusive range
1955 [0x80000000..0xffffffff]; these are currently negative ints, but
1956 in Python 2.4 they will be positive longs with the same bit
1957 pattern.
1958
1959 - Left shifts on integer values that cause the outcome to lose
1960 bits or have a different sign than the left operand. To be
1961 precise: x<<n where this currently doesn't yield the same value
1962 as long(x)<<n; in Python 2.4, the outcome will be long(x)<<n.
1963
1964 - Conversions from ints to string that show negative values as
1965 unsigned ints in the inclusive range [0x80000000..0xffffffff];
1966 this affects the functions hex() and oct(), and the string
1967 formatting codes %u, %o, %x, and %X. In Python 2.4, these will
1968 show signed values (e.g. hex(-1) currently returns "0xffffffff";
1969 in Python 2.4 it will return "-0x1").
1970
Guido van Rossum9a2eda52002-12-31 02:12:42 +00001971- The bits manipulated under the cover by sys.setcheckinterval() have
1972 been changed. Both the check interval and the ticker used to be
1973 per-thread values. They are now just a pair of global variables.
1974 In addition, the default check interval was boosted from 10 to 100
1975 bytecode instructions. This may have some effect on systems that
1976 relied on the old default value. In particular, in multi-threaded
1977 applications which try to be highly responsive, response time will
1978 increase by some (perhaps imperceptible) amount.
Skip Montanaro979c74b2002-09-03 21:25:14 +00001979
Tim Petersd64c1de2002-08-12 17:36:03 +00001980- When multiplying very large integers, a version of the so-called
1981 Karatsuba algorithm is now used. This is most effective if the
1982 inputs have roughly the same size. If they both have about N digits,
1983 Karatsuba multiplication has O(N**1.58) runtime (the exponent is
1984 log_base_2(3)) instead of the previous O(N**2). Measured results may
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00001985 be better or worse than that, depending on platform quirks. Besides
1986 the O() improvement in raw instruction count, the Karatsuba algorithm
1987 appears to have much better cache behavior on extremely large integers
1988 (starting in the ballpark of a million bits). Note that this is a
1989 simple implementation, and there's no intent here to compete with,
1990 e.g., GMP. It gives a very nice speedup when it applies, but a package
1991 devoted to fast large-integer arithmetic should run circles around it.
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00001992
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00001993- u'%c' will now raise a ValueError in case the argument is an
1994 integer outside the valid range of Unicode code point ordinals.
1995
Guido van Rossumdeb09362002-08-09 17:16:30 +00001996- The tempfile module has been overhauled for enhanced security. The
1997 mktemp() function is now deprecated; new, safe replacements are
1998 mkstemp() (for files) and mkdtemp() (for directories), and the
1999 higher-level functions NamedTemporaryFile() and TemporaryFile().
2000 Use of some global variables in this module is also deprecated; the
2001 new functions have keyword arguments to provide the same
2002 functionality. All Lib, Tools and Demo modules that used the unsafe
2003 interfaces have been updated to use the safe replacements. Thanks
2004 to Zack Weinberg!
2005
Guido van Rossumd81a9832002-08-09 15:57:34 +00002006- When x is an object whose class implements __mul__ and __rmul__,
2007 1.0*x would correctly invoke __rmul__, but 1*x would erroneously
2008 invoke __mul__. This was due to the sequence-repeat code in the int
2009 type. This has been fixed now.
2010
Barry Warsawd79f6832002-08-06 17:01:51 +00002011- Previously, "str1 in str2" required str1 to be a string of length 1.
2012 This restriction has been relaxed to allow str1 to be a string of
2013 any length. Thus "'el' in 'hello world'" returns True now.
2014
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00002015- File objects are now their own iterators. For a file f, iter(f) now
2016 returns f (unless f is closed), and f.next() is similar to
2017 f.readline() when EOF is not reached; however, f.next() uses a
2018 readahead buffer that messes up the file position, so mixing
2019 f.next() and f.readline() (or other methods) doesn't work right.
2020 Calling f.seek() drops the readahead buffer, but other operations
2021 don't. It so happens that this gives a nice additional speed boost
2022 to "for line in file:"; the xreadlines method and corresponding
Guido van Rossumbffb2ef2002-08-09 17:17:07 +00002023 module are now obsolete. Thanks to Oren Tirosh!
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00002024
Guido van Rossumde392d32002-08-05 14:17:20 +00002025- Encoding declarations (PEP 263, phase 1) have been implemented. A
2026 comment of the form "# -*- coding: <encodingname> -*-" in the first
2027 or second line of a Python source file indicates the encoding.
Martin v. Löwis00f1e3f2002-08-04 17:29:52 +00002028
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00002029- list.sort() has a new implementation. While cross-platform results
2030 may vary, and in data-dependent ways, this is much faster on many
2031 kinds of partially ordered lists than the previous implementation,
2032 and reported to be just as fast on randomly ordered lists on
2033 several major platforms. This sort is also stable (if A==B and A
2034 precedes B in the list at the start, A precedes B after the sort too),
2035 although the language definition does not guarantee stability. A
2036 potential drawback is that list.sort() may require temp space of
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00002037 len(list)*2 bytes (``*4`` on a 64-bit machine). It's therefore possible
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00002038 for list.sort() to raise MemoryError now, even if a comparison function
2039 does not. See <http://www.python.org/sf/587076> for full details.
2040
Guido van Rossum2d5389c2002-07-23 03:44:35 +00002041- All standard iterators now ensure that, once StopIteration has been
2042 raised, all future calls to next() on the same iterator will also
2043 raise StopIteration. There used to be various counterexamples to
2044 this behavior, which could caused confusion or subtle program
2045 breakage, without any benefits. (Note that this is still an
2046 iterator's responsibility; the iterator framework does not enforce
2047 this.)
2048
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00002049- Ctrl+C handling on Windows has been made more consistent with
2050 other platforms. KeyboardInterrupt can now reliably be caught,
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00002051 and Ctrl+C at an interactive prompt no longer terminates the
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00002052 process under NT/2k/XP (it never did under Win9x). Ctrl+C will
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00002053 interrupt time.sleep() in the main thread, and any child processes
2054 created via the popen family (on win2k; we can't make win9x work
Mark Hammond8f3afc72002-08-10 06:26:31 +00002055 reliably) are also interrupted (as generally happens on for Linux/Unix.)
2056 [SF bugs 231273, 439992 and 581232]
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00002057
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00002058- sys.getwindowsversion() has been added on Windows. This
2059 returns a tuple with information about the version of Windows
2060 currently running.
2061
Raymond Hettinger5a04aec2002-06-25 00:25:30 +00002062- Slices and repetitions of buffer objects now consistently return
2063 a string. Formerly, strings would be returned most of the time,
2064 but a buffer object would be returned when the repetition count
2065 was one or when the slice range was all inclusive.
2066
Walter Dörwald3430d702002-06-17 10:43:59 +00002067- Unicode objects in sys.path are no longer ignored but treated
2068 as directory names.
2069
Neal Norwitz1f68fc72002-06-14 00:50:42 +00002070- Fixed string.startswith and string.endswith builtin methods
2071 so they accept negative indices. [SF bug 493951]
2072
Guido van Rossumc5fe5eb2002-06-12 03:45:21 +00002073- Fixed a bug with a continue inside a try block and a yield in the
2074 finally clause. [SF bug 567538]
2075
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00002076- Most builtin sequences now support "extended slices", i.e. slices
Guido van Rossum2e82e712002-06-13 11:41:07 +00002077 with a third "stride" parameter. For example, "hello world"[::-1]
2078 gives "dlrow olleh".
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00002079
Neal Norwitzd68f5172002-05-29 15:54:55 +00002080- A new warning PendingDeprecationWarning was added to provide
2081 direction on features which are in the process of being deprecated.
2082 The warning will not be printed by default. To see the pending
2083 deprecations, use -Walways::PendingDeprecationWarning::
2084 as a command line option or warnings.filterwarnings() in code.
2085
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00002086- Deprecated features of xrange objects have been removed as
2087 promised. The start, stop, and step attributes and the tolist()
2088 method no longer exist. xrange repetition and slicing have been
2089 removed.
2090
Guido van Rossum7dab2422002-04-26 19:40:56 +00002091- New builtin function enumerate(x), from PEP 279. Example:
2092 enumerate("abc") is an iterator returning (0,"a"), (1,"b"), (2,"c").
2093 The argument can be an arbitrary iterable object.
2094
Neil Schemenauer89e3ee02002-04-26 01:58:53 +00002095- The assert statement no longer tests __debug__ at runtime. This means
2096 that assert statements cannot be disabled by assigning a false value
2097 to __debug__.
2098
Walter Dörwald068325e2002-04-15 13:36:47 +00002099- A method zfill() was added to str and unicode, that fills a numeric
2100 string to the left with zeros. For example,
2101 "+123".zfill(6) -> "+00123".
2102
Guido van Rossum862fe3c2002-04-15 12:36:47 +00002103- Complex numbers supported divmod() and the // and % operators, but
2104 these make no sense. Since this was documented, they're being
2105 deprecated now.
2106
Guido van Rossum26dd8302002-04-26 20:11:29 +00002107- String and unicode methods lstrip(), rstrip() and strip() now take
2108 an optional argument that specifies the characters to strip. For
2109 example, "Foo!!!?!?!?".rstrip("?!") -> "Foo".
Guido van Rossum49042042002-04-13 00:59:05 +00002110
Guido van Rossumc0d3f4e2002-11-27 13:10:40 +00002111- There's a new dictionary constructor (a class method of the dict
2112 class), dict.fromkeys(iterable, value=None). It constructs a
2113 dictionary with keys taken from the iterable and all values set to a
2114 single value. It can be used for building sets and for removing
2115 duplicates from sequences.
Raymond Hettingere33d3df2002-11-27 07:29:33 +00002116
Guido van Rossumc69343b2002-04-12 19:22:48 +00002117- Added a new dict method pop(key). This removes and returns the
2118 value corresponding to key. [SF patch #539949]
2119
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00002120- A new built-in type, bool, has been added, as well as built-in
2121 names for its two values, True and False. Comparisons and sundry
2122 other operations that return a truth value have been changed to
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002123 return a bool instead. Read PEP 285 for an explanation of why this
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00002124 is backward compatible.
2125
Guido van Rossum95b62a62002-03-29 01:07:24 +00002126- Fixed two bugs reported as SF #535905: under certain conditions,
2127 deallocating a deeply nested structure could cause a segfault in the
2128 garbage collector, due to interaction with the "trashcan" code;
2129 access to the current frame during destruction of a local variable
2130 could access a pointer to freed memory.
2131
Guido van Rossumfe0ca4a2002-06-18 21:20:13 +00002132- The optional object allocator ("pymalloc") has been enabled by
2133 default. The recommended practice for memory allocation and
2134 deallocation has been streamlined. A header file is included,
2135 Misc/pymemcompat.h, which can be bundled with 3rd party extensions
2136 and lets them use the same API with Python versions from 1.5.2
2137 onwards.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00002138
Martin v. Löwiscfeb3b62002-03-03 21:30:27 +00002139- PyErr_Display will provide file and line information for all exceptions
2140 that have an attribute print_file_and_line, not just SyntaxErrors.
2141
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00002142- The UTF-8 codec will now encode and decode Unicode surrogates
2143 correctly and without raising exceptions for unpaired ones.
2144
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00002145- Universal newlines (PEP 278) is implemented. Briefly, using 'U'
2146 instead of 'r' when opening a text file for reading changes the line
2147 ending convention so that any of '\r', '\r\n', and '\n' is
2148 recognized (even mixed in one file); all three are converted to
2149 '\n', the standard Python line end character.
2150
Neal Norwitz649b7592002-01-01 19:07:13 +00002151- file.xreadlines() now raises a ValueError if the file is closed:
2152 Previously, an xreadlines object was returned which would raise
2153 a ValueError when the xreadlines.next() method was called.
2154
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002155- sys.exit() inadvertently allowed more than one argument.
Neal Norwitz0c766a02002-03-27 13:03:09 +00002156 An exception will now be raised if more than one argument is used.
2157
Gustavo Niemeyer17c5a332002-12-16 14:09:22 +00002158- Changed evaluation order of dictionary literals to conform to the
2159 general left to right evaluation order rule. Now {f1(): f2()} will
2160 evaluate f1 first.
Gustavo Niemeyer78429a62002-12-16 13:54:02 +00002161
Gustavo Niemeyer786ddb22002-12-16 18:12:53 +00002162- Fixed bug #521782: when a file was in non-blocking mode, file.read()
2163 could silently lose data or wrongly throw an unknown error.
2164
Neil Schemenauerb983aa02002-12-30 20:22:23 +00002165- The sq_repeat, sq_inplace_repeat, sq_concat and sq_inplace_concat
2166 slots are now always tried after trying the corresponding nb_* slots.
2167 This fixes a number of minor bugs (see bug #624807).
2168
Neal Norwitz74a032e2003-01-10 23:29:48 +00002169- Fix problem with dynamic loading on 64-bit AIX (see bug #639945).
2170
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002171Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002172-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002173
Raymond Hettinger9543b342003-01-18 23:22:20 +00002174- Added three operators to the operator module:
2175 operator.pow(a,b) which is equivalent to: a**b.
2176 operator.is_(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is b.
2177 operator.is_not(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is not b.
2178
Martin v. Löwis24a880b2002-12-31 12:55:15 +00002179- posix.openpty now works on all systems that have /dev/ptmx.
2180
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00002181- A module zipimport exists to support importing code from zip
2182 archives.
2183
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00002184- The new datetime module supplies classes for manipulating dates and
2185 times. The basic design came from the Zope "fishbowl process", and
2186 favors practical commercial applications over calendar esoterica. See
2187
2188 http://www.zope.org/Members/fdrake/DateTimeWiki/FrontPage
2189
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00002190- _tkinter now returns Tcl objects, instead of strings. Objects which
2191 have Python equivalents are converted to Python objects, other objects
2192 are wrapped. This can be configured through the wantobjects method,
Martin v. Löwis8c8aa5d2002-11-26 21:39:48 +00002193 or Tkinter.wantobjects.
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00002194
Barry Warsawc27f4bd2002-12-30 21:03:26 +00002195- The PyBSDDB wrapper around the Sleepycat Berkeley DB library has
2196 been added as the package bsddb. The traditional bsddb module is
2197 still available in source code, but not built automatically anymore,
2198 and is now named bsddb185. This supports Berkeley DB versions from
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00002199 3.0 to 4.1. For help converting your databases from the old module (which
2200 probably used an obsolete version of Berkeley DB) to the new module, see
2201 the db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py scripts described in the Tools/Demos
2202 section above.
Martin v. Löwisef546b32002-11-19 08:12:57 +00002203
Martin v. Löwis677bde22002-11-23 22:08:15 +00002204- unicodedata was updated to Unicode 3.2. It supports normalization
2205 and names for Hangul syllables and CJK unified ideographs.
Martin v. Löwis7d41e292002-11-23 12:22:32 +00002206
Neal Norwitz94a83fd2002-11-02 17:46:24 +00002207- resource.getrlimit() now returns longs instead of ints.
2208
Martin v. Löwis080689c2002-10-26 14:42:02 +00002209- readline now dynamically adjusts its input/output stream if
2210 sys.stdin/stdout changes.
2211
Guido van Rossumba602972002-10-01 18:18:58 +00002212- The _tkinter module (and hence Tkinter) has dropped support for
2213 Tcl/Tk 8.0 and 8.1. Only Tcl/Tk versions 8.2, 8.3 and 8.4 are
2214 supported.
2215
Martin v. Löwis658009a2002-09-16 17:26:24 +00002216- cPickle.BadPickleGet is now a class.
2217
Martin v. Löwisa19bfe02002-10-16 18:28:36 +00002218- The time stamps in os.stat_result are floating point numbers
2219 after stat_float_times has been called.
Martin v. Löwis94717ed2002-09-09 14:24:16 +00002220
Neal Norwitzb5673922002-09-05 21:48:07 +00002221- If the size passed to mmap.mmap() is larger than the length of the
2222 file on non-Windows platforms, a ValueError is raised. [SF bug 585792]
2223
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00002224- The xreadlines module is slated for obsolescence.
2225
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00002226- The strptime function in the time module is now always available (a
2227 Python implementation is used when the C library doesn't define it).
2228
Guido van Rossum9562bcf2002-06-14 21:31:18 +00002229- The 'new' module is no longer an extension, but a Python module that
2230 only exists for backwards compatibility. Its contents are no longer
2231 functions but callable type objects.
2232
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00002233- The bsddb.*open functions can now take 'None' as a filename.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00002234 This will create a temporary in-memory bsddb that won't be
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00002235 written to disk.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00002236
Martin v. Löwisb96152c2002-12-31 13:20:15 +00002237- posix.getloadavg, posix.lchown, posix.killpg, posix.mknod, and
2238 posix.getpgid have been added where available.
Martin v. Löwis06a83e92002-04-14 10:19:44 +00002239
Martin v. Löwisf0a46682002-11-03 17:20:12 +00002240- The locale module now exposes the C library's gettext interface. It
2241 also has a new function getpreferredencoding.
Martin v. Löwis2e64c342002-03-27 18:49:02 +00002242
Tim Petersfbf74f22002-03-14 19:06:01 +00002243- A security hole ("double free") was found in zlib-1.1.3, a popular
2244 third party compression library used by some Python modules. The
2245 hole was quickly plugged in zlib-1.1.4, and the Windows build of
2246 Python now ships with zlib-1.1.4.
2247
Martin v. Löwis688357e2002-04-08 21:28:20 +00002248- pwd, grp, and resource return enhanced tuples now, with symbolic
2249 field names.
Martin v. Löwis29001ff2002-03-01 10:47:37 +00002250
Martin v. Löwis99866332002-03-01 10:27:01 +00002251- array.array is now a type object. A new format character
2252 'u' indicates Py_UNICODE arrays. For those, .tounicode and
2253 .fromunicode methods are available. Arrays now support __iadd__
2254 and __imul__.
2255
Neal Norwitze790eae2002-01-01 21:14:12 +00002256- dl now builds on every system that has dlfcn.h. Failure in case
Martin v. Löwis93227272002-01-01 20:18:30 +00002257 of sizeof(int)!=sizeof(long)!=sizeof(void*) is delayed until dl.open
2258 is called.
2259
Skip Montanaro8e790e72002-09-03 13:25:17 +00002260- The sys module acquired a new attribute, api_version, which evaluates
2261 to the value of the PYTHON_API_VERSION macro with which the
2262 interpreter was compiled.
2263
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00002264- Fixed bug #470582: sre module would return a tuple (None, 'a', 'ab')
2265 when applying the regular expression '^((a)c)?(ab)$' on 'ab'. It now
2266 returns (None, None, 'ab'), as expected. Also fixed handling of
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00002267 lastindex/lastgroup match attributes in similar cases. For example,
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00002268 when running the expression r'(a)(b)?b' over 'ab', lastindex must be
2269 1, not 2.
2270
Gustavo Niemeyerc523b042002-11-07 03:28:56 +00002271- Fixed bug #581080: sre scanner was not checking the buffer limit
2272 before increasing the current pointer. This was creating an infinite
2273 loop in the search function, once the pointer exceeded the buffer
2274 limit.
2275
Thomas Heller95cb7e42002-11-07 16:23:55 +00002276- The os.fdopen function now enforces a file mode starting with the
2277 letter 'r', 'w' or 'a', otherwise a ValueError is raised. This fixes
2278 bug #623464.
2279
Greg Ward6c58d462003-01-03 18:02:15 +00002280- The linuxaudiodev module is now deprecated; it is being replaced by
2281 ossaudiodev. The interface has been extended to cover a lot more of
2282 OSS (see www.opensound.com), including most DSP ioctls and the
2283 OSS mixer API. Documentation forthcoming in 2.3a2.
2284
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002285Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002286-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002287
Guido van Rossum747f8062003-01-03 16:33:49 +00002288- imaplib.py now supports SSL (Tino Lange and Piers Lauder).
2289
Just van Rossum5e156ad2002-12-31 16:38:01 +00002290- Freeze's modulefinder.py has been moved to the standard library;
2291 slightly improved so it will issue less false missing submodule
2292 reports (see sf path #643711 for details). Documentation will follow
2293 with Python 2.3a2.
2294
Martin v. Löwis96a60e42002-12-31 13:11:54 +00002295- os.path exposes getctime.
2296
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002297- unittest.py now has two additional methods called assertAlmostEqual()
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002298 and failIfAlmostEqual(). They implement an approximate comparison
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002299 by rounding the difference between the two arguments and comparing
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002300 the result to zero. Approximate comparison is essential for
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002301 unit tests of floating point results.
2302
Raymond Hettingere11b5102002-12-25 16:37:19 +00002303- calendar.py now depends on the new datetime module rather than
2304 the time module. As a result, the range of allowable dates
2305 has been increased.
2306
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00002307- pdb has a new 'j(ump)' command to select the next line to be
2308 executed.
2309
Thomas Heller1b3b49d2002-12-12 19:13:44 +00002310- The distutils created windows installers now can run a
2311 postinstallation script.
2312
Martin v. Löwis4581cfa2002-11-22 08:23:09 +00002313- doctest.testmod can now be called without argument, which means to
2314 test the current module.
2315
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002316- When canceling a server that implemented threading with a keyboard
Martin v. Löwisf86e8ef2002-11-22 08:08:44 +00002317 interrupt, the server would shut down but not terminate (waiting on
2318 client threads). A new member variable, daemon_threads, was added to
2319 the ThreadingMixIn class in SocketServer.py to make it explicit that
2320 this behavior needs to be controlled.
2321
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00002322- A new module, optparse, provides a fancy alternative to getopt for
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00002323 command line parsing. It is a slightly modified version of Greg
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00002324 Ward's Optik package.
2325
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00002326- UserDict.py now defines a DictMixin class which defines all dictionary
2327 methods for classes that already have a minimum mapping interface.
2328 This greatly simplifies writing classes that need to be substitutable
2329 for dictionaries (such as the shelve module).
2330
2331- shelve.py now subclasses from UserDict.DictMixin. Now shelve supports
2332 all dictionary methods. This eases the transition to persistent
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00002333 storage for scripts originally written with dictionaries in mind.
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00002334
Skip Montanaro3bf99e32002-12-08 18:36:24 +00002335- shelve.open and the various classes in shelve.py now accept an optional
2336 binary flag, which defaults to False. If True, the values stored in the
2337 shelf are binary pickles.
2338
Guido van Rossumfda06742002-11-13 16:29:18 +00002339- A new package, logging, implements the logging API defined by PEP
2340 282. The code is written by Vinay Sajip.
2341
Walter Dörwald4dbf1922002-11-06 16:53:44 +00002342- StreamReader, StreamReaderWriter and StreamRecoder in the codecs
2343 modules are iterators now.
2344
Tim Peters9288f952002-11-05 20:38:55 +00002345- gzip.py now handles files exceeding 2GB. Files over 4GB also work
2346 now (provided the OS supports it, and Python is configured with large
2347 file support), but in that case the underlying gzip file format can
2348 record only the least-significant 32 bits of the file size, so that
2349 some tools working with gzipped files may report an incorrect file
2350 size.
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00002351
Martin v. Löwis74b51ac2002-10-26 14:50:45 +00002352- xml.sax.saxutils.unescape has been added, to replace entity references
2353 with their entity value.
2354
Martin v. Löwis77ac4292002-10-15 15:11:13 +00002355- Queue.Queue.{put,get} now support an optional timeout argument.
2356
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00002357- Various features of Tk 8.4 are exposed in Tkinter.py. The multiple
2358 option of tkFileDialog is exposed as function askopenfile{,name}s.
Martin v. Löwis2ec36272002-10-13 10:22:08 +00002359
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00002360- Various configure methods of Tkinter have been stream-lined, so that
2361 tag_configure, image_configure, window_configure now return a
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00002362 dictionary when invoked with no argument.
Martin v. Löwis6ce13152002-10-10 14:36:13 +00002363
Guido van Rossum2b492b62002-10-09 21:40:48 +00002364- Importing the readline module now no longer has the side effect of
2365 calling setlocale(LC_CTYPE, ""). The initial "C" locale, or
2366 whatever locale is explicitly set by the user, is preserved. If you
2367 want repr() of 8-bit strings in your preferred encoding to preserve
2368 all printable characters of that encoding, you have to add the
2369 following code to your $PYTHONSTARTUP file or to your application's
2370 main():
2371
2372 import locale
2373 locale.setlocale(locale.LC_CTYPE, "")
2374
Martin v. Löwise9ce0b02002-10-07 13:23:24 +00002375- shutil.move was added. shutil.copytree now reports errors as an
2376 exception at the end, instead of printing error messages.
2377
Marc-André Lemburg97047e22002-10-04 11:55:21 +00002378- Encoding name normalization was generalized to not only
2379 replace hyphens with underscores, but also all other non-alphanumeric
2380 characters (with the exception of the dot which is used for Python
2381 package names during lookup). The aliases.py mapping was updated
2382 to the new standard.
2383
Walter Dörwald5ccaf8f2002-09-06 16:15:58 +00002384- mimetypes has two new functions: guess_all_extensions() which
2385 returns a list of all known extensions for a mime type, and
2386 add_type() which adds one mapping between a mime type and
2387 an extension to the database.
2388
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00002389- New module: sets, defines the class Set that implements a mutable
2390 set type using the keys of a dict to represent the set. There's
2391 also a class ImmutableSet which is useful when you need sets of sets
2392 or when you need to use sets as dict keys, and a class BaseSet which
Raymond Hettingeref8b9c62002-12-09 08:56:06 +00002393 is the base class of the two.
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00002394
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00002395- Added random.sample(population,k) for random sampling without replacement.
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00002396 Returns a k length list of unique elements chosen from the population.
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00002397
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00002398- random.randrange(-sys.maxint-1, sys.maxint) no longer raises
2399 OverflowError. That is, it now accepts any combination of 'start'
2400 and 'stop' arguments so long as each is in the range of Python's
2401 bounded integers.
2402
Raymond Hettinger40f62172002-12-29 23:03:38 +00002403- Thanks to Raymond Hettinger, random.random() now uses a new core
2404 generator. The Mersenne Twister algorithm is implemented in C,
2405 threadsafe, faster than the previous generator, has an astronomically
2406 large period (2**19937-1), creates random floats to full 53-bit
2407 precision, and may be the most widely tested random number generator
2408 in existence.
2409
2410 The random.jumpahead(n) method has different semantics for the new
2411 generator. Instead of jumping n steps ahead, it uses n and the
2412 existing state to create a new state. This means that jumpahead()
2413 continues to support multi-threaded code needing generators of
2414 non-overlapping sequences. However, it will break code which relies
2415 on jumpahead moving a specific number of steps forward.
2416
2417 The attributes random.whseed and random.__whseed have no meaning for
2418 the new generator. Code using these attributes should switch to a
2419 new class, random.WichmannHill which is provided for backward
2420 compatibility and to make an alternate generator available.
2421
Guido van Rossum4a57c332002-08-02 18:05:20 +00002422- New "algorithms" module: heapq, implements a heap queue. Thanks to
2423 Kevin O'Connor for the code and François Pinard for an entertaining
2424 write-up explaining the theory and practical uses of heaps.
2425
Marc-André Lemburg58e2ff22002-07-12 14:40:04 +00002426- New encoding for the Palm OS character set: palmos.
2427
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00002428- binascii.crc32() and the zipfile module had problems on some 64-bit
2429 platforms. These have been fixed. On a platform with 8-byte C longs,
2430 crc32() now returns a signed-extended 4-byte result, so that its value
2431 as a Python int is equal to the value computed a 32-bit platform.
2432
Martin v. Löwis7d650ca2002-06-30 15:05:00 +00002433- xml.dom.minidom.toxml and toprettyxml now take an optional encoding
2434 argument.
2435
Guido van Rossum9f7549b2002-06-10 21:39:42 +00002436- Some fixes in the copy module: when an object is copied through its
2437 __reduce__ method, there was no check for a __setstate__ method on
2438 the result [SF patch 565085]; deepcopy should treat instances of
2439 custom metaclasses the same way it treats instances of type 'type'
2440 [SF patch 560794].
2441
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00002442- Sockets now support timeout mode. After s.settimeout(T), where T is
2443 a float expressing seconds, subsequent operations raise an exception
2444 if they cannot be completed within T seconds. To disable timeout
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00002445 mode, use s.settimeout(None). There's also a module function,
2446 socket.setdefaulttimeout(T), which sets the default for all sockets
2447 created henceforth.
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00002448
2449- getopt.gnu_getopt was added. This supports GNU-style option
2450 processing, where options can be mixed with non-option arguments.
Martin v. Löwis446a25f2002-06-06 10:58:36 +00002451
Michael W. Hudsonb0dc1a32002-06-04 18:27:35 +00002452- Stop using strings for exceptions. String objects used for
2453 exceptions are now classes deriving from Exception. The objects
2454 changed were: Tkinter.TclError, bdb.BdbQuit, macpath.norm_error,
2455 tabnanny.NannyNag, and xdrlib.Error.
Neal Norwitzb5b5a262002-06-04 17:14:07 +00002456
Walter Dörwald474458d2002-06-04 15:16:29 +00002457- Constants BOM_UTF8, BOM_UTF16, BOM_UTF16_LE, BOM_UTF16_BE,
2458 BOM_UTF32, BOM_UTF32_LE and BOM_UTF32_BE that represent the Byte
2459 Order Mark in UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 encodings for little and
2460 big endian systems were added to the codecs module. The old names
2461 BOM32_* and BOM64_* were off by a factor of 2.
2462
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00002463- Added conversion functions math.degrees() and math.radians().
Raymond Hettinger87f59ee2002-05-13 04:17:32 +00002464
Raymond Hettinger866964c2002-12-14 19:51:34 +00002465- math.log() now takes an optional argument: math.log(x[, base]).
2466
Raymond Hettinger9b1df1d2002-05-12 06:07:21 +00002467- ftplib.retrlines() now tests for callback is None rather than testing
2468 for False. Was causing an error when given a callback object which
2469 was callable but also returned len() as zero. The change may
2470 create new breakage if the caller relied on the undocumented behavior
2471 and called with callback set to [] or some other False value not
2472 identical to None.
2473
Tim Peters46c04e12002-05-05 20:40:00 +00002474- random.gauss() uses a piece of hidden state used by nothing else,
2475 and the .seed() and .whseed() methods failed to reset it. In other
2476 words, setting the seed didn't completely determine the sequence of
2477 results produced by random.gauss(). It does now. Programs repeatedly
2478 mixing calls to a seed method with calls to gauss() may see different
2479 results now.
2480
Fred Drake7f781c92002-05-01 20:33:53 +00002481- The pickle.Pickler class grew a clear_memo() method to mimic that
2482 provided by cPickle.Pickler.
2483
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00002484- difflib's SequenceMatcher class now does a dynamic analysis of
2485 which elements are so frequent as to constitute noise. For
2486 comparing files as sequences of lines, this generally works better
2487 than the IS_LINE_JUNK function, and function ndiff's linejunk
2488 argument defaults to None now as a result. A happy benefit is
2489 that SequenceMatcher may run much faster now when applied
2490 to large files with many duplicate lines (for example, C program
2491 text with lots of repeated "}" and "return NULL;" lines).
2492
Guido van Rossum256705b2002-04-23 13:29:43 +00002493- New Text.dump() method in Tkinter module.
2494
Marc-André Lemburg1ec71ea2002-04-17 20:33:40 +00002495- New distutils commands for building packagers were added to
2496 support pkgtool on Solaris and swinstall on HP-UX.
2497
2498- distutils now has a new abstract binary packager base class
2499 command/bdist_packager, which simplifies writing packagers.
2500 This will hopefully provide the missing bits to encourage
2501 people to submit more packagers, e.g. for Debian, FreeBSD
2502 and other systems.
2503
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00002504- The UTF-16, -LE and -BE stream readers now raise a
2505 NotImplementedError for all calls to .readline(). Previously, they
2506 used to just produce garbage or fail with an encoding error --
2507 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 +00002508 work well with these.
2509
Martin v. Löwis5c137c22002-03-18 12:44:08 +00002510- compileall now supports quiet operation.
2511
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002512- The BaseHTTPServer now implements optional HTTP/1.1 persistent
Martin v. Löwis587c98c2002-03-17 18:37:22 +00002513 connections.
2514
Marc-André Lemburga5d2b4c2002-02-16 18:23:30 +00002515- socket module: the SSL support was broken out of the main
2516 _socket module C helper and placed into a new _ssl helper
2517 which now gets imported by socket.py if available and working.
2518
Marc-André Lemburg37aa5802002-02-10 21:42:47 +00002519- encodings package: added aliases for all supported IANA character
2520 sets
2521
Guido van Rossum606fe4e2001-12-28 20:57:14 +00002522- ftplib: to safeguard the user's privacy, anonymous login will use
2523 "anonymous@" as default password, rather than the real user and host
2524 name.
2525
Fred Drake36736122002-01-10 13:50:31 +00002526- webbrowser: tightened up the command passed to os.system() so that
2527 arbitrary shell code can't be executed because a bogus URL was
2528 passed in.
2529
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00002530- gettext.translation has an optional fallback argument, and
Martin v. Löwisa55ffae2002-01-11 06:58:49 +00002531 gettext.find an optional all argument. Translations will now fallback
Martin v. Löwisd8996052002-11-21 21:45:32 +00002532 on a per-message basis. The module supports plural forms, by means
2533 of gettext.[d]ngettext and Translation.[u]ngettext.
Martin v. Löwis1be64192002-01-11 06:33:28 +00002534
Martin v. Löwis9668b932002-01-12 11:27:42 +00002535- distutils bdist commands now offer a --skip-build option.
2536
Walter Dörwaldb25c2b02002-03-21 10:38:40 +00002537- warnings.warn now accepts a Warning instance as first argument.
2538
Fred Drakefed7e852002-04-04 19:36:15 +00002539- The xml.sax.expatreader.ExpatParser class will no longer create
2540 circular references by using itself as the locator that gets passed
2541 to the content handler implementation. [SF bug #535474]
2542
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00002543- The email.Parser.Parser class now properly parses strings regardless
2544 of their line endings, which can be any of \r, \n, or \r\n (CR, LF,
2545 or CRLF). Also, the Header class's constructor default arguments
2546 has changed slightly so that an explicit maxlinelen value is always
Barry Warsaw497e5c42002-12-30 19:27:08 +00002547 honored, and so unicode conversion error handling can be specified.
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00002548
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002549- distutils' build_ext command now links C++ extensions with the C++
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00002550 compiler available in the Makefile or CXX environment variable, if
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002551 running under \*nix.
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00002552
2553- New module bz2: provides a comprehensive interface for the bz2 compression
2554 library. It implements a complete file interface, one-shot (de)compression
2555 functions, and types for sequential (de)compression.
2556
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002557- New pdb command 'pp' which is like 'p' except that it pretty-prints
Barry Warsaw5d8d6182002-11-05 22:41:33 +00002558 the value of its expression argument.
2559
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00002560- Now bdist_rpm distutils command understands a verify_script option in
2561 the config file, including the contents of the referred filename in
2562 the "%verifyscript" section of the rpm spec file.
2563
Gustavo Niemeyer1456fde2002-11-25 17:25:04 +00002564- Fixed bug #495695: webbrowser module would run graphic browsers in a
2565 unix environment even if DISPLAY was not set. Also, support for
2566 skipstone browser was included.
2567
Gustavo Niemeyerd5ae01a2002-12-16 13:11:57 +00002568- Fixed bug #636769: rexec would run unallowed code if subclasses of
2569 strings were used as parameters for certain functions.
2570
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002571Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002572-----------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002573
Martin v. Löwis0d1fdea2002-11-22 08:36:54 +00002574- pygettext.py now supports globbing on Windows, and accepts module
2575 names in addition to accepting file names.
2576
Guido van Rossum923e4ef2002-09-17 20:58:59 +00002577- The SGI demos (Demo/sgi) have been removed. Nobody thought they
2578 were interesting any more. (The SGI library modules and extensions
2579 are still there; it is believed that at least some of these are
2580 still used and useful.)
2581
Fred Drake40813b12002-08-05 15:24:19 +00002582- IDLE supports the new encoding declarations (PEP 263); it can also
2583 deal with legacy 8-bit files if they use the locale's encoding. It
2584 allows non-ASCII strings in the interactive shell and executes them
2585 in the locale's encoding.
Martin v. Löwis98ce7b72002-08-05 15:11:26 +00002586
Marc-André Lemburg46260092002-04-04 16:17:11 +00002587- freeze.py now produces binaries which can import shared modules,
2588 unlike before when this failed due to missing symbol exports in
2589 the generated binary.
2590
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002591Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002592-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002593
Martin v. Löwisdc461752002-11-06 21:59:33 +00002594- On Unix, IDLE is now installed automatically.
2595
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00002596- The fpectl module is not built by default; it's dangerous or useless
2597 except in the hands of experts.
2598
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00002599- The public Python C API will generally be declared using PyAPI_FUNC
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00002600 and PyAPI_DATA macros, while Python extension module init functions
2601 will be declared with PyMODINIT_FUNC. DL_EXPORT/DL_IMPORT macros
2602 are deprecated.
Neal Norwitz1389f3e2002-07-22 13:21:10 +00002603
Tim Petersc6a3ff62002-07-08 22:11:52 +00002604- A bug was fixed that could cause COUNT_ALLOCS builds to segfault, or
2605 get into infinite loops, when a new-style class got garbage-collected.
2606 Unfortunately, to avoid this, the way COUNT_ALLOCS works requires
2607 that new-style classes be immortal in COUNT_ALLOCS builds. Note that
2608 COUNT_ALLOCS is not enabled by default, in either release or debug
2609 builds, and that new-style classes are immortal only in COUNT_ALLOCS
2610 builds.
2611
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00002612- Compiling out the cyclic garbage collector is no longer an option.
2613 The old symbol WITH_CYCLE_GC is now ignored, and Python.h arranges
2614 that it's always defined (for the benefit of any extension modules
2615 that may be conditionalizing on it). A bonus is that any extension
2616 type participating in cyclic gc can choose to participate in the
2617 Py_TRASHCAN mechanism now too; in the absence of cyclic gc, this used
2618 to require editing the core to teach the trashcan mechanism about the
2619 new type.
2620
Martin v. Löwis0cec0ff2002-07-28 16:33:45 +00002621- According to Annex F of the current C standard,
Tim Peters1de41bf2002-07-03 03:31:20 +00002622
2623 The Standard C macro HUGE_VAL and its float and long double analogs,
2624 HUGE_VALF and HUGE_VALL, expand to expressions whose values are
2625 positive infinities.
2626
2627 Python only uses the double HUGE_VAL, and only to #define its own symbol
2628 Py_HUGE_VAL. Some platforms have incorrect definitions for HUGE_VAL.
2629 pyport.h used to try to worm around that, but the workarounds triggered
2630 other bugs on other platforms, so we gave up. If your platform defines
2631 HUGE_VAL incorrectly, you'll need to #define Py_HUGE_VAL to something
2632 that works on your platform. The only instance of this I'm sure about
2633 is on an unknown subset of Cray systems, described here:
2634
2635 http://www.cray.com/swpubs/manuals/SN-2194_2.0/html-SN-2194_2.0/x3138.htm
2636
2637 Presumably 2.3a1 breaks such systems. If anyone uses such a system, help!
2638
Martin v. Löwisa3fb4f72002-06-09 13:33:54 +00002639- The configure option --without-doc-strings can be used to remove the
2640 doc strings from the builtin functions and modules; this reduces the
2641 size of the executable.
2642
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00002643- The universal newlines option (PEP 278) is on by default. On Unix
2644 it can be disabled by passing --without-universal-newlines to the
2645 configure script. On other platforms, remove
2646 WITH_UNIVERSAL_NEWLINES from pyconfig.h.
Tim Peters639295f2002-04-21 07:30:30 +00002647
Martin v. Löwis1142de32002-03-29 16:28:31 +00002648- On Unix, a shared libpython2.3.so can be created with --enable-shared.
2649
Tim Peters8deda702002-03-30 10:06:07 +00002650- All uses of the CACHE_HASH, INTERN_STRINGS, and DONT_SHARE_SHORT_STRINGS
2651 preprocessor symbols were eliminated. The internal decisions they
2652 controlled stopped being experimental long ago.
Tim Peters1f7df352002-03-29 03:29:08 +00002653
Fred Drake7d28b732002-05-02 21:17:00 +00002654- The tools used to build the documentation now work under Cygwin as
2655 well as Unix.
2656
Skip Montanaro57454e52002-06-14 20:30:31 +00002657- The bsddb and dbm module builds have been changed to try and avoid version
2658 skew problems and disable linkage with Berkeley DB 1.85 unless the
2659 installer knows what s/he's doing. See the section on building these
2660 modules in the README file for details.
2661
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002662C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002663-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002664
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00002665- PyNumber_Check() now returns true for string and unicode objects.
2666 This is a result of these types having a partially defined
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00002667 tp_as_number slot. (This is not a feature, but an indication that
Walter Dörwalda1a61f92002-11-19 21:20:25 +00002668 PyNumber_Check() is not very useful to determine numeric behavior.
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00002669 It may be deprecated.)
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00002670
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00002671- The string object's layout has changed: the pointer member
2672 ob_sinterned has been replaced by an int member ob_sstate. On some
2673 platforms (e.g. most 64-bit systems) this may change the offset of
2674 the ob_sval member, so as a precaution the API_VERSION has been
2675 incremented. The apparently unused feature of "indirect interned
2676 strings", supported by the ob_sinterned member, is gone. Interned
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002677 strings are now usually mortal; there is a new API,
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00002678 PyString_InternImmortal() that creates immortal interned strings.
2679 (The ob_sstate member can only take three values; however, while
2680 making it a char saves a few bytes per string object on average, in
2681 it also slowed things down a bit because ob_sval was no longer
2682 aligned.)
2683
Guido van Rossumfdb86482002-08-14 21:20:32 +00002684- The Py_InitModule*() functions now accept NULL for the 'methods'
2685 argument. Modules without global functions are becoming more common
2686 now that factories can be types rather than functions.
2687
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00002688- New C API PyUnicode_FromOrdinal() which exposes unichr() at C
2689 level.
2690
Thomas Heller085358a2002-07-29 14:27:41 +00002691- New functions PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErr() and
2692 PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErrWithFilename(). Similar to
2693 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErrWithFilename() and
2694 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErr(), but they allow to specify
2695 the exception type to raise. Available on Windows.
2696
Tim Peters7c321a82002-07-09 02:57:01 +00002697- Py_FatalError() is now declared as taking a const char* argument. It
2698 was previously declared without const. This should not affect working
2699 code.
2700
Martin v. Löwis01f94bd2002-05-08 08:44:21 +00002701- Added new macro PySequence_ITEM(o, i) that directly calls
2702 sq_item without rechecking that o is a sequence and without
2703 adjusting for negative indices.
2704
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00002705- PyRange_New() now raises ValueError if the fourth argument is not 1.
2706 This is part of the removal of deprecated features of the xrange
2707 object.
2708
Guido van Rossum517c7d42002-04-26 02:49:14 +00002709- PyNumber_Coerce() and PyNumber_CoerceEx() now also invoke the type's
2710 coercion if both arguments have the same type but this type has the
2711 CHECKTYPES flag set. This is to better support proxies.
2712
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00002713- The type of tp_free has been changed from "``void (*)(PyObject *)``" to
2714 "``void (*)(void *)``".
Neil Schemenauer9344b142002-04-12 23:00:08 +00002715
2716- PyObject_Del, PyObject_GC_Del are now functions instead of macros.
2717
Guido van Rossum0986d822002-04-08 01:38:42 +00002718- A type can now inherit its metatype from its base type. Previously,
2719 when PyType_Ready() was called, if ob_type was found to be NULL, it
2720 was always set to &PyType_Type; now it is set to base->ob_type,
2721 where base is tp_base, defaulting to &PyObject_Type.
2722
2723- PyType_Ready() accidentally did not inherit tp_is_gc; now it does.
2724
Neil Schemenauerc9abc1d2002-05-08 14:14:41 +00002725- The PyCore_* family of APIs have been removed.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00002726
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002727- The "u#" parser marker will now pass through Unicode objects as-is
Marc-André Lemburg3e3eacb2002-01-09 16:21:27 +00002728 without going through the buffer API.
2729
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002730- The enumerators of cmp_op have been renamed to use the prefix ``PyCmp_``.
Martin v. Löwis7198a522002-01-01 19:59:11 +00002731
Tim Peters10a3bb52001-12-25 19:07:38 +00002732- An old #define of ANY as void has been removed from pyport.h. This
2733 hasn't been used since Python's pre-ANSI days, and the #define has
2734 been marked as obsolete since then. SF bug 495548 says it created
2735 conflicts with other packages, so keeping it around wasn't harmless.
2736
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002737- Because Python's magic number scheme broke on January 1st, we decided
2738 to stop Python development. Thanks for all the fish!
2739
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00002740- Some of us don't like fish, so we changed Python's magic number
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00002741 scheme to a new one. See Python/import.c for details.
2742
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002743New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002744-------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002745
Martin v. Löwis79acb9e2002-12-06 12:48:53 +00002746- OpenVMS is now supported.
2747
Martin v. Löwisf90ae202002-06-11 06:22:31 +00002748- AtheOS is now supported.
2749
Andrew MacIntyre161ad0e2002-08-04 07:25:58 +00002750- the EMX runtime environment on OS/2 is now supported.
2751
Martin v. Löwisa6e97582002-01-01 18:41:33 +00002752- GNU/Hurd is now supported.
2753
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002754Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002755-----
2756
Fred Drake4dd0f7e2002-11-26 21:44:56 +00002757- The regrtest.py script's -u option now provides a way to say "allow
2758 all resources except this one." For example, to allow everything
2759 except bsddb, give the option '-uall,-bsddb'.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002760
2761Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002762-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002763
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00002764- The Windows distribution now ships with version 4.0.14 of the
2765 Sleepycat Berkeley database library. This should be a huge
2766 improvement over the previous Berkeley DB 1.85, which had many
2767 bugs.
2768 XXX What are the licensing issues here?
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002769 XXX If a user has a database created with a previous version of
Tim Peters84c7a3f2002-11-23 18:48:06 +00002770 XXX Python, what must they do to convert it?
2771 XXX I'm still not sure how to link this thing (see PCbuild/readme.txt).
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00002772 XXX The version # is likely to change before 2.3a1.
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00002773
2774- The Windows distribution now ships with a Secure Sockets Library (SLL)
Mark Hammondc3de0082002-12-03 06:16:08 +00002775 module (_ssl.pyd)
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00002776
Tim Peters857fb4c2002-11-14 23:31:58 +00002777- The Windows distribution now ships with Tcl/Tk version 8.4.1 (it
2778 previously shipped with Tcl/Tk 8.3.2).
2779
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00002780- When Python is built under a Microsoft compiler, sys.version now
2781 includes the compiler version number (_MSC_VER). For example, under
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002782 MSVC 6, sys.version contains the substring "MSC v.1200 ". 1200 is
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00002783 the value of _MSC_VER under MSVC 6.
2784
Tim Peters08e72952002-04-16 20:48:01 +00002785- Sometimes the uninstall executable (UNWISE.EXE) vanishes. One cause
2786 of that has been fixed in the installer (disabled Wise's "delete in-
2787 use files" uninstall option).
2788
Guido van Rossum181e41a2002-04-06 00:23:25 +00002789- Fixed a bug in urllib's proxy handling in Windows. [SF bug #503031]
2790
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00002791- The installer now installs Start menu shortcuts under (the local
2792 equivalent of) "All Users" when doing an Admin install.
2793
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00002794- file.truncate([newsize]) now works on Windows for all newsize values.
2795 It used to fail if newsize didn't fit in 32 bits, reflecting a
2796 limitation of MS _chsize (which is no longer used).
2797
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00002798- os.waitpid() is now implemented for Windows, and can be used to block
2799 until a specified process exits. This is similar to, but not exactly
2800 the same as, os.waitpid() on POSIX systems. If you're waiting for
2801 a specific process whose pid was obtained from one of the spawn()
2802 functions, the same Python os.waitpid() code works across platforms.
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00002803 See the docs for details. The docs were changed to clarify that
2804 spawn functions return, and waitpid requires, a process handle on
2805 Windows (not the same thing as a Windows process id).
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00002806
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00002807- New tempfile.TemporaryFile implementation for Windows: this doesn't
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002808 need a TemporaryFileWrapper wrapper anymore, and should be immune
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00002809 to a nasty problem: before 2.3, if you got a temp file on Windows, it
2810 got wrapped in an object whose close() method first closed the
2811 underlying file, then deleted the file. This usually worked fine.
2812 However, the spawn family of functions on Windows create (at a low C
2813 level) the same set of open files in the spawned process Q as were
2814 open in the spawning process P. If a temp file f was among them, then
2815 doing f.close() in P first closed P's C-level file handle on f, but Q's
2816 C-level file handle on f remained open, so the attempt in P to delete f
2817 blew up with a "Permission denied" error (Windows doesn't allow
2818 deleting open files). This was surprising, subtle, and difficult to
2819 work around.
2820
2821- The os module now exports all the symbolic constants usable with the
2822 low-level os.open() on Windows: the new constants in 2.3 are
2823 O_NOINHERIT, O_SHORT_LIVED, O_TEMPORARY, O_RANDOM and O_SEQUENTIAL.
2824 The others were also available in 2.2: O_APPEND, O_BINARY, O_CREAT,
2825 O_EXCL, O_RDONLY, O_RDWR, O_TEXT, O_TRUNC and O_WRONLY. Contrary
2826 to Microsoft docs, O_SHORT_LIVED does not seem to imply O_TEMPORARY
2827 (so specify both if you want both; note that neither is useful unless
2828 specified with O_CREAT too).
2829
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002830Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002831----
2832
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002833- Mac/Relnotes is gone, the release notes are now here.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002834
Just van Rossume1ebd802003-02-10 10:06:18 +00002835- Python (the OSX-only, unix-based version, not the OS9-compatible CFM
2836 version) now fully supports unicode strings as arguments to various file
2837 system calls, eg. open(), file(), os.stat() and os.listdir().
2838
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002839- The current naming convention for Python on the Macintosh is that MacPython
2840 refers to the unix-based OSX-only version, and MacPython-OS9 refers to the
2841 CFM-based version that runs on both OS9 and OSX.
2842
2843- All MacPython-OS9 functionality is now available in an OSX unix build,
2844 including the Carbon modules, the IDE, OSA support, etc. A lot of this
2845 will only work correctly in a framework build, though, because you cannot
2846 talk to the window manager unless your application is run from a .app
2847 bundle. There is a command line tool "pythonw" that runs your script
2848 with an interpreter living in such a .app bundle, this interpreter should
2849 be used to run any Python script using the window manager (including
2850 Tkinter or wxPython scripts).
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00002851
Jack Jansen8bb80db2002-12-30 22:42:43 +00002852- Most of Mac/Lib has moved to Lib/plat-mac, which is again used both in
2853 MacPython-OSX and MacPython-OS9. The only modules remaining in Mac/Lib
2854 are specifically for MacPython-OS9 (CFM support, preference resources, etc).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002855
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002856- A new utility PythonLauncher will start a Python interpreter when a .py or
2857 .pyw script is double-clicked in the Finder. By default .py scripts are
2858 run with a normal Python interpreter in a Terminal window and .pyw
2859 files are run with a window-aware pythonw interpreter without a Terminal
2860 window, but all this can be customized.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002861
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002862- MacPython-OS9 is now Carbon-only, so it runs on Mac OS 9 or Mac OS X and
2863 possibly on Mac OS 8.6 with the right CarbonLib installed, but not on earlier
2864 releases.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002865
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002866- Many tools such as BuildApplet.py and gensuitemodule.py now support a command
2867 line interface too.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002868
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002869- All the Carbon classes are now PEP253 compliant, meaning that you can
2870 subclass them from Python. Most of the attributes have gone, you should
2871 now use the accessor function call API, which is also what Apple's
2872 documentation uses. Some attributes such as grafport.visRgn are still
2873 available for convenience.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002874
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002875- New Carbon modules File (implementing the APIs in Files.h and Aliases.h)
2876 and Folder (APIs from Folders.h). The old macfs builtin module is
2877 gone, and replaced by a Python wrapper around the new modules.
2878
2879- Pathname handling should now be fully consistent: MacPython-OSX always uses
2880 unix pathnames and MacPython-OS9 always uses colon-separated Mac pathnames
2881 (also when running on Mac OS X).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002882
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002883- New Carbon modules Help and AH give access to the Carbon Help Manager.
2884 There are hooks in the IDE to allow accessing the Python documentation
2885 (and Apple's Carbon and Cocoa documentation) through the Help Viewer.
2886 See Mac/OSX/README for converting the Python documentation to a
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002887 Help Viewer compatible form and installing it.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002888
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002889- OSA support has been redesigned and the generated Python classes now
2890 mirror the inheritance defined by the underlying OSA classes.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002891
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002892- MacPython no longer maps both \r and \n to \n on input for any text file.
2893 This feature has been replaced by universal newline support (PEP278).
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00002894
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00002895- The default encoding for Python sourcefiles in MacPython-OS9 is no longer
Guido van Rossum16c85172003-02-20 01:52:48 +00002896 mac-roman (or whatever your local Mac encoding was) but "ascii", like on
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00002897 other platforms. If you really need sourcefiles with Mac characters in them
2898 you can change this in site.py.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002899
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002900
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002901What's New in Python 2.2 final?
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002902===============================
2903
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002904*Release date: 21-Dec-2001*
2905
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002906Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002907--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002908
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002909- pickle.py, cPickle: allow pickling instances of new-style classes
2910 with a custom metaclass.
2911
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002912Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002913-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002914
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002915- weakref proxy object: when comparing, unwrap both arguments if both
2916 are proxies.
2917
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002918Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002919-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002920
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002921- binascii.b2a_base64(): fix a potential buffer overrun when encoding
2922 very short strings.
2923
2924- cPickle: the obscure "fast" mode was suspected of causing stack
2925 overflows on the Mac. Hopefully fixed this by setting the recursion
2926 limit much smaller. If the limit is too low (it only affects
2927 performance), you can change it by defining PY_CPICKLE_FAST_LIMIT
2928 when compiling cPickle.c (or in pyconfig.h).
2929
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002930Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002931-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002932
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002933- dumbdbm.py: fixed a dumb old bug (the file didn't get synched at
2934 close or delete time).
2935
2936- rfc822.py: fixed a bug where the address '<>' was converted to None
2937 instead of an empty string (also fixes the email.Utils module).
2938
2939- xmlrpclib.py: version 1.0.0; uses precision for doubles.
2940
2941- test suite: the pickle and cPickle tests were not executing any code
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002942 when run from the standard regression test.
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002943
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002944Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002945-----------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002946
2947Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002948-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002949
2950C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002951-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002952
2953New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002954-------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002955
2956Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002957-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002958
2959Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002960-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002961
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002962- distutils package: fixed broken Windows installers (bdist_wininst).
2963
2964- tempfile.py: prevent mysterious warnings when TemporaryFileWrapper
2965 instances are deleted at process exit time.
2966
2967- socket.py: prevent mysterious warnings when socket instances are
2968 deleted at process exit time.
2969
2970- posixmodule.c: fix a Windows crash with stat() of a filename ending
2971 in backslash.
2972
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002973Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002974----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002975
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002976- The Carbon toolbox modules have been upgraded to Universal Headers
2977 3.4, and experimental CoreGraphics and CarbonEvents modules have
2978 been added. All only for framework-enabled MacOSX.
2979
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002980
Tim Peters6272dfd2001-12-13 19:34:00 +00002981What's New in Python 2.2c1?
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002982===========================
2983
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002984*Release date: 14-Dec-2001*
2985
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002986Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002987--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002988
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00002989- Guido's tutorial introduction to the new type/class features has
2990 been extensively updated. See
2991
2992 http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html
2993
2994 That remains the primary documentation in this area.
2995
Guido van Rossum33bab012001-12-05 22:45:48 +00002996- Fixed a leak: instance variables declared with __slots__ were never
2997 deleted!
2998
Guido van Rossum4b800852001-12-03 00:54:52 +00002999- The "delete attribute" method of descriptor objects is called
3000 __delete__, not __del__. In previous releases, it was mistakenly
3001 called __del__, which created an unfortunate overloading condition
3002 with finalizers. (The "get attribute" and "set attribute" methods
3003 are still called __get__ and __set__, respectively.)
3004
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00003005- Some subtle issues with the super built-in were fixed:
3006
3007 (a) When super itself is subclassed, its __get__ method would still
3008 return an instance of the base class (i.e., of super).
3009
3010 (b) super(C, C()).__class__ would return C rather than super. This
3011 is confusing. To fix this, I decided to change the semantics of
3012 super so that it only applies to code attributes, not to data
3013 attributes. After all, overriding data attributes is not
3014 supported anyway.
3015
3016 (c) The __get__ method didn't check whether the argument was an
3017 instance of the type used in creation of the super instance.
3018
Guido van Rossumcd7b7d62001-12-04 21:02:07 +00003019- Previously, hash() of an instance of a subclass of a mutable type
3020 (list or dictionary) would return some value, rather than raising
3021 TypeError. This has been fixed. Also, directly calling
3022 dict.__hash__ and list.__hash__ now raises the same TypeError
3023 (previously, these were the same as object.__hash__).
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00003024
Guido van Rossumd331cb52001-12-05 19:46:42 +00003025- New-style objects now support deleting their __dict__. This is for
3026 all intents and purposes equivalent to assigning a brand new empty
3027 dictionary, but saves space if the object is not used further.
3028
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003029Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003030-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003031
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00003032- -Qnew now works as documented in PEP 238: when -Qnew is passed on
3033 the command line, all occurrences of "/" use true division instead
3034 of classic division. See the PEP for details. Note that "all"
3035 means all instances in library and 3rd-party modules, as well as in
3036 your own code. As the PEP says, -Qnew is intended for use only in
3037 educational environments with control over the libraries in use.
Tim Petersbf72fe22001-12-11 21:43:14 +00003038 Note that test_coercion.py in the standard Python test suite fails
3039 under -Qnew; this is expected, and won't be repaired until true
3040 division becomes the default (in the meantime, test_coercion is
3041 testing the current rules).
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00003042
Fred Drake6c01e252001-12-14 17:08:12 +00003043- complex() now only allows the first argument to be a string
3044 argument, and raises TypeError if either the second arg is a string
3045 or if the second arg is specified when the first is a string.
3046
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003047Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003048-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003049
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00003050- gc.get_referents was renamed to gc.get_referrers.
3051
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003052Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003053-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003054
Tim Peters25059d32001-12-07 20:35:43 +00003055- Functions in the os.spawn() family now release the global interpreter
3056 lock around calling the platform spawn. They should always have done
3057 this, but did not before 2.2c1. Multithreaded programs calling
3058 an os.spawn function with P_WAIT will no longer block all Python threads
3059 until the spawned program completes. It's possible that some programs
3060 relies on blocking, although more likely by accident than by design.
3061
Martin v. Löwis3a89b2b2001-11-25 14:35:58 +00003062- webbrowser defaults to netscape.exe on OS/2 now.
3063
Martin v. Löwis652e1912001-11-25 14:50:56 +00003064- Tix.ResizeHandle exposes detach_widget, hide, and show.
3065
Martin v. Löwis714d2e22001-12-02 12:26:03 +00003066- The charset alias windows_1252 has been added.
3067
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003068- types.StringTypes is a tuple containing the defined string types;
3069 usually this will be (str, unicode), but if Python was compiled
3070 without Unicode support it will be just (str,).
3071
3072- The pulldom and minidom modules were synchronized to PyXML.
3073
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003074Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003075-----------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003076
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003077- A new script called Tools/scripts/google.py was added, which fires
3078 off a search on Google.
3079
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003080Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003081-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003082
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003083- Note that release builds of Python should arrange to define the
3084 preprocessor symbol NDEBUG on the command line (or equivalent).
3085 In the 2.2 pre-release series we tried to define this by magic in
3086 Python.h instead, but it proved to cause problems for extension
3087 authors. The Unix, Windows and Mac builds now all define NDEBUG in
3088 release builds via cmdline (or equivalent) instead. Ports to
3089 other platforms should do likewise.
3090
Jack Jansen1999ef42001-12-06 21:47:20 +00003091- It is no longer necessary to use --with-suffix when building on a
3092 case-insensitive file system (such as Mac OS X HFS+). In the build
3093 directory an extension is used, but not in the installed python.
3094
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003095C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003096-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003097
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00003098- New function PyDict_MergeFromSeq2() exposes the builtin dict
3099 constructor's logic for updating a dictionary from an iterable object
3100 producing key-value pairs.
3101
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00003102- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() requires that the number of entries in
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00003103 the keyword list equal the number of argument specifiers. This
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00003104 wasn't checked correctly, and PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords could even
3105 dump core in some bad cases. This has been repaired. As a result,
3106 PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords may raise RuntimeError in bad cases that
3107 previously went unchallenged.
3108
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003109New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003110-------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003111
3112Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003113-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003114
3115Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003116-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003117
3118Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003119----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003120
Jack Jansenffa260f2001-12-06 21:14:00 +00003121- In unix-Python on Mac OS X (and darwin) sys.platform is now "darwin",
3122 without any trailing digits.
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003123
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003124- Changed logic for finding python home in Mac OS X framework Pythons.
3125 Now sys.executable points to the executable again, in stead of to
3126 the shared library. The latter is used only for locating the python
3127 home.
3128
3129
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003130What's New in Python 2.2b2?
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003131===========================
3132
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003133*Release date: 16-Nov-2001*
3134
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003135Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003136--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003137
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00003138- Multiple inheritance mixing new-style and classic classes in the
3139 list of base classes is now allowed, so this works now:
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00003140
3141 class Classic: pass
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00003142 class Mixed(Classic, object): pass
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00003143
3144 The MRO (method resolution order) for each base class is respected
3145 according to its kind, but the MRO for the derived class is computed
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003146 using new-style MRO rules if any base class is a new-style class.
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00003147 This needs to be documented.
3148
Tim Petersa427a2b2001-10-29 22:25:45 +00003149- The new builtin dictionary() constructor, and dictionary type, have
3150 been renamed to dict. This reflects a decade of common usage.
3151
Guido van Rossum3fc08d22001-11-15 20:33:10 +00003152- dict() now accepts an iterable object producing 2-sequences. For
3153 example, dict(d.items()) == d for any dictionary d. The argument,
3154 and the elements of the argument, can be any iterable objects.
3155
Guido van Rossum7ad2d1e2001-10-29 22:11:00 +00003156- New-style classes can now have a __del__ method, which is called
3157 when the instance is deleted (just like for classic classes).
3158
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003159- Assignment to object.__dict__ is now possible, for objects that are
3160 instances of new-style classes that have a __dict__ (unless the base
3161 class forbids it).
3162
Guido van Rossumc8e56452001-10-22 00:43:43 +00003163- Methods of built-in types now properly check for keyword arguments
3164 (formerly these were silently ignored). The only built-in methods
3165 that take keyword arguments are __call__, __init__ and __new__.
3166
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00003167- The socket function has been converted to a type; see below.
3168
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003169Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003170-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003171
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00003172- Assignment to __debug__ raises SyntaxError at compile-time. This
3173 was promised when 2.1c1 was released as "What's New in Python 2.1c1"
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003174 (see below) says.
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00003175
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003176- Clarified the error messages for unsupported operands to an operator
3177 (like 1 + '').
3178
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003179Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003180-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003181
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00003182- mmap has a new keyword argument, "access", allowing a uniform way for
3183 both Windows and Unix users to create read-only, write-through and
3184 copy-on-write memory mappings. This was previously possible only on
3185 Unix. A new keyword argument was required to support this in a
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003186 uniform way because the mmap() signatures had diverged across
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00003187 platforms. Thanks to Jay T Miller for repairing this!
3188
Tim Peters169ded02001-11-03 19:57:21 +00003189- By default, the gc.garbage list now contains only those instances in
3190 unreachable cycles that have __del__ methods; in 2.1 it contained all
3191 instances in unreachable cycles. "Instances" here has been generalized
3192 to include instances of both new-style and old-style classes.
3193
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003194- The socket module defines a new method for socket objects,
3195 sendall(). This is like send() but may make multiple calls to
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00003196 send() until all data has been sent. Also, the socket function has
3197 been converted to a subclassable type, like list and tuple (etc.)
3198 before it; socket and SocketType are now the same thing.
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003199
3200- Various bugfixes to the curses module. There is now a test suite
3201 for the curses module (you have to run it manually).
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00003202
Guido van Rossum692adf12001-10-30 03:03:03 +00003203- binascii.b2a_base64 no longer places an arbitrary restriction of 57
3204 bytes on its input.
3205
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003206Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003207-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003208
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00003209- tkFileDialog exposes a Directory class and askdirectory
Martin v. Löwis25ee87c2001-11-07 22:38:08 +00003210 convenience function.
3211
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00003212- Symbolic group names in regular expressions must be unique. For
3213 example, the regexp r'(?P<abc>)(?P<abc>)' is not allowed, because a
3214 single name can't mean both "group 1" and "group 2" simultaneously.
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003215 Python 2.2 detects this error at regexp compilation time;
3216 previously, the error went undetected, and results were
3217 unpredictable. Also in sre, the pattern.split(), pattern.sub(), and
3218 pattern.subn() methods have been rewritten in C. Also, an
3219 experimental function/method finditer() has been added, which works
3220 like findall() but returns an iterator.
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00003221
Martin v. Löwisb7b32602001-11-02 23:48:20 +00003222- Tix exposes more commands through the classes DirSelectBox,
3223 DirSelectDialog, ListNoteBook, Meter, CheckList, and the
3224 methods tix_addbitmapdir, tix_cget, tix_configure, tix_filedialog,
3225 tix_getbitmap, tix_getimage, tix_option_get, and tix_resetoptions.
3226
Tim Peters98791af2001-10-23 01:59:54 +00003227- Traceback objects are now scanned by cyclic garbage collection, so
3228 cycles created by casual use of sys.exc_info() no longer cause
3229 permanent memory leaks (provided garbage collection is enabled).
3230
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00003231- os.extsep -- a new variable needed by the RISCOS support. It is the
3232 separator used by extensions, and is '.' on all platforms except
3233 RISCOS, where it is '/'. There is no need to use this variable
3234 unless you have a masochistic desire to port your code to RISCOS.
3235
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003236- mimetypes.py has optional support for non-standard, but commonly
3237 found types. guess_type() and guess_extension() now accept an
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003238 optional 'strict' flag, defaulting to true, which controls whether
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003239 recognize non-standard types or not. A few non-standard types we
3240 know about have been added. Also, when run as a script, there are
3241 new -l and -e options.
3242
3243- statcache is now deprecated.
3244
3245- email.Utils.formatdate() now produces the preferred RFC 2822 style
3246 dates with numeric timezones (it used to produce obsolete dates
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003247 hard coded to "GMT" timezone). An optional 'localtime' flag is
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003248 added to produce dates in the local timezone, with daylight savings
3249 time properly taken into account.
3250
3251- In pickle and cPickle, instead of masking errors in load() by
3252 transforming them into SystemError, we let the original exception
3253 propagate out. Also, implement support for __safe_for_unpickling__
3254 in pickle, as it already was supported in cPickle.
3255
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003256Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003257-----------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003258
3259Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003260-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003261
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003262- The dbm module is built using libdb1 if available. The bsddb module
3263 is built with libdb3 if available.
3264
3265- Misc/Makefile.pre.in has been removed by BDFL pronouncement.
3266
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003267C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003268-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003269
Tim Peters1fc240e2001-10-26 05:06:50 +00003270- New function PySequence_Fast_GET_SIZE() returns the size of a non-
3271 NULL result from PySequence_Fast(), more quickly than calling
3272 PySequence_Size().
3273
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003274- New argument unpacking function PyArg_UnpackTuple() added.
3275
3276- New functions PyObject_CallFunctionObjArgs() and
3277 PyObject_CallMethodObjArgs() have been added to make it more
3278 convenient and efficient to call functions and methods from C.
3279
3280- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() no longer masks errors, so it's
3281 possible that this will propagate errors it didn't before.
3282
3283- New function PyObject_CheckReadBuffer(), which returns true if its
3284 argument supports the single-segment readable buffer interface.
3285
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003286New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003287-------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003288
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00003289- We've finally confirmed that this release builds on HP-UX 11.00,
3290 *with* threads, and passes the test suite.
3291
Tim Peters7a33d8b2001-11-05 02:51:07 +00003292- Thanks to a series of patches from Michael Muller, Python may build
3293 again under OS/2 Visual Age C++.
3294
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00003295- Updated RISCOS port by Dietmar Schwertberger.
3296
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003297Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003298-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003299
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00003300- Added a test script for the curses module. It isn't run automatically;
3301 regrtest.py must be run with '-u curses' to enable it.
3302
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003303Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003304-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003305
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003306Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003307----
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003308
3309- PythonScript has been moved to unsupported and is slated to be
3310 removed completely in the next release.
3311
3312- It should now be possible to build applets that work on both OS9 and
3313 OSX.
3314
3315- The core is now linked with CoreServices not Carbon; as a side
3316 result, default 8bit encoding on OSX is now ASCII.
3317
3318- Python should now build on OSX 10.1.1
3319
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003320
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003321What's New in Python 2.2b1?
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003322===========================
3323
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003324*Release date: 19-Oct-2001*
3325
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003326Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003327--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003328
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00003329- New-style classes are now always dynamic (except for built-in and
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00003330 extension types). There is no longer a performance penalty, and I
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00003331 no longer see another reason to keep this baggage around. One relic
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00003332 remains: the __dict__ of a new-style class is a read-only proxy; you
3333 must set the class's attribute to modify it. As a consequence, the
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00003334 __defined__ attribute of new-style types no longer exists, for lack
3335 of need: there is once again only one __dict__ (although in the
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00003336 future a __cache__ may be resurrected with a similar function, if I
3337 can prove that it actually speeds things up).
Guido van Rossum50fda3b2001-10-04 19:46:06 +00003338
Tim Peters1c9ca872001-10-04 06:43:12 +00003339- C.__doc__ now works as expected for new-style classes (in 2.2a4 it
3340 always returned None, even when there was a class docstring).
3341
3342- doctest now finds and runs docstrings attached to new-style classes,
3343 class methods, static methods, and properties.
3344
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003345Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003346-----------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003347
Guido van Rossuma8bcf802001-10-15 15:53:58 +00003348- A very subtle syntactical pitfall in list comprehensions was fixed.
3349 For example: [a+b for a in 'abc', for b in 'def']. The comma in
3350 this example is a mistake. Previously, this would silently let 'a'
3351 iterate over the singleton tuple ('abc',), yielding ['abcd', 'abce',
3352 'abcf'] rather than the intended ['ad', 'ae', 'af', 'bd', 'be',
3353 'bf', 'cd', 'ce', 'cf']. Now, this is flagged as a syntax error.
3354 Note that [a for a in <singleton>] is a convoluted way to say
3355 [<singleton>] anyway, so it's not like any expressiveness is lost.
3356
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003357- getattr(obj, name, default) now only catches AttributeError, as
3358 documented, rather than returning the default value for all
3359 exceptions (which could mask bugs in a __getattr__ hook, for
3360 example).
3361
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00003362- Weak reference objects are now part of the core and offer a C API.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00003363 A bug which could allow a core dump when binary operations involved
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00003364 proxy reference has been fixed. weakref.ReferenceError is now a
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003365 built-in exception.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00003366
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00003367- unicode(obj) now behaves more like str(obj), accepting arbitrary
3368 objects, and calling a __unicode__ method if it exists.
3369 unicode(obj, encoding) and unicode(obj, encoding, errors) still
Marc-André Lemburgb5507ec2001-10-19 12:02:29 +00003370 require an 8-bit string or character buffer argument.
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00003371
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003372- isinstance() now allows any object as the first argument and a
3373 class, a type or something with a __bases__ tuple attribute for the
3374 second argument. The second argument may also be a tuple of a
3375 class, type, or something with __bases__, in which case isinstance()
3376 will return true if the first argument is an instance of any of the
3377 things contained in the second argument tuple. E.g.
3378
3379 isinstance(x, (A, B))
3380
3381 returns true if x is an instance of A or B.
3382
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003383Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003384-----------------
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003385
3386- thread.start_new_thread() now returns the thread ID (previously None).
3387
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00003388- binascii has now two quopri support functions, a2b_qp and b2a_qp.
3389
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00003390- readline now supports setting the startup_hook and the
3391 pre_event_hook, and adds the add_history() function.
Martin v. Löwis0daad592001-09-30 21:09:59 +00003392
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00003393- os and posix supports chroot(), setgroups() and unsetenv() where
3394 available. The stat(), fstat(), statvfs() and fstatvfs() functions
3395 now return "pseudo-sequences" -- the various fields can now be
3396 accessed as attributes (e.g. os.stat("/").st_mtime) but for
3397 backwards compatibility they also behave as a fixed-length sequence.
3398 Some platform-specific fields (e.g. st_rdev) are only accessible as
Guido van Rossum98bf58f2001-10-18 20:34:25 +00003399 attributes.
3400
3401- time: localtime(), gmtime() and strptime() now return a
3402 pseudo-sequence similar to the os.stat() return value, with
3403 attributes like tm_year etc.
Martin v. Löwis16628c92001-10-04 22:46:41 +00003404
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003405- Decompression objects in the zlib module now accept an optional
3406 second parameter to decompress() that specifies the maximum amount
3407 of memory to use for the uncompressed data.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003408
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00003409- optional SSL support in the socket module now exports OpenSSL
3410 functions RAND_add(), RAND_egd(), and RAND_status(). These calls
3411 are useful on platforms like Solaris where OpenSSL does not
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003412 automatically seed its PRNG. Also, the keyfile and certfile
3413 arguments to socket.ssl() are now optional.
3414
3415- posixmodule (and by extension, the os module on POSIX platforms) now
3416 exports O_LARGEFILE, O_DIRECT, O_DIRECTORY, and O_NOFOLLOW.
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00003417
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003418Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003419-------
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00003420
Tim Peters7402f792001-10-02 03:53:41 +00003421- doctest now excludes functions and classes not defined by the module
3422 being tested, thanks to Tim Hochberg.
3423
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00003424- HotShot, a new profiler implemented using a C-based callback, has
3425 been added. This substantially reduces the overhead of profiling,
3426 but it is still quite preliminary. Support modules and
3427 documentation will be added in upcoming releases (before 2.2 final).
3428
Guido van Rossumc4b09b42001-10-04 10:19:00 +00003429- profile now produces correct output in situations where an exception
3430 raised in Python is cleared by C code (e.g. hasattr()). This used
3431 to cause wrong output, including spurious claims of recursive
3432 functions and attribution of time spent to the wrong function.
3433
Tim Peters0a1fc4e2001-10-07 03:12:08 +00003434 The code and documentation for the derived OldProfile and HotProfile
3435 profiling classes was removed. The code hasn't worked for years (if
3436 you tried to use them, they raised exceptions). OldProfile
3437 intended to reproduce the behavior of the profiler Python used more
3438 than 7 years ago, and isn't interesting anymore. HotProfile intended
3439 to provide a faster profiler (but producing less information), and
3440 that's a worthy goal we intend to meet via a different approach (but
3441 without losing information).
3442
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00003443- Profile.calibrate() has a new implementation that should deliver
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00003444 a much better system-specific calibration constant. The constant can
3445 now be specified in an instance constructor, or as a Profile class or
3446 instance variable, instead of by editing profile.py's source code.
3447 Calibration must still be done manually (see the docs for the profile
3448 module).
3449
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003450 Note that Profile.calibrate() must be overridden by subclasses.
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00003451 Improving the accuracy required exploiting detailed knowledge of
3452 profiler internals; the earlier method abstracted away the details
3453 and measured a simplified model instead, but consequently computed
3454 a constant too small by a factor of 2 on some modern machines.
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00003455
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00003456- quopri's encode and decode methods take an optional header parameter,
Jeremy Hylton6f543b62001-10-16 20:42:52 +00003457 which indicates whether output is intended for the header 'Q'
3458 encoding.
3459
Guido van Rossuma5343cc2001-10-18 18:02:07 +00003460- The SocketServer.ThreadingMixIn class now closes the request after
3461 finish_request() returns. (Not when it errors out though.)
3462
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003463- The nntplib module's NNTP.body() method has grown a 'file' argument
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003464 to allow saving the message body to a file.
3465
3466- The email package has added a class email.Parser.HeaderParser which
3467 only parses headers and does not recurse into the message's body.
3468 Also, the module/class MIMEAudio has been added for representing
3469 audio data (contributed by Anthony Baxter).
3470
3471- ftplib should be able to handle files > 2GB.
3472
3473- ConfigParser.getboolean() now also interprets TRUE, FALSE, YES, NO,
3474 ON, and OFF.
3475
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00003476- xml.dom.minidom NodeList objects now support the length attribute
3477 and item() method as required by the DOM specifications.
3478
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00003479Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003480-----------
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00003481
3482- Demo/dns was removed. It no longer serves any purpose; a package
3483 derived from it is now maintained by Anthony Baxter, see
3484 http://PyDNS.SourceForge.net.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003485
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003486- The freeze tool has been made more robust, and two new options have
3487 been added: -X and -E.
3488
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003489Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003490-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003491
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003492- configure will use CXX in LINKCC if CXX is used to build main() and
3493 the system requires to link a C++ main using the C++ compiler.
3494
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003495C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003496-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003497
Guido van Rossum6c4bce32001-10-18 19:20:25 +00003498- The documentation for the tp_compare slot is updated to require that
3499 the return value must be -1, 0, 1; an arbitrary number <0 or >0 is
3500 not correct. This is not yet enforced but will be enforced in
3501 Python 2.3; even later, we may use -2 to indicate errors and +2 for
3502 "NotImplemented". Right now, -1 should be used for an error return.
3503
Tim Petersd38b1c72001-09-30 05:09:37 +00003504- PyLong_AsLongLong() now accepts int (as well as long) arguments.
3505 Consequently, PyArg_ParseTuple's 'L' code also accepts int (as well
3506 as long) arguments.
3507
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00003508- PyThread_start_new_thread() now returns a long int giving the thread
3509 ID, if one can be calculated; it returns -1 for error, 0 if no
3510 thread ID is calculated (this is an incompatible change, but only
3511 the thread module used this API). This code has only really been
3512 tested on Linux and Windows; other platforms please beware (and
3513 report any bugs or strange behavior).
3514
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00003515- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() no longer accepts Unicode objects as
3516 input.
3517
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003518New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003519-------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003520
3521Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003522-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003523
3524Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003525-------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003526
Tim Peters04cf1d32001-10-09 22:39:40 +00003527- Installer: If you install IDLE, and don't disable file-extension
3528 registration, a new "Edit with IDLE" context (right-click) menu entry
3529 is created for .py and .pyw files.
3530
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003531- The signal module now supports SIGBREAK on Windows, thanks to Steven
3532 Scott. Note that SIGBREAK is unique to Windows. The default SIGBREAK
3533 action remains to call Win32 ExitProcess(). This can be changed via
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003534 signal.signal(). For example::
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003535
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003536 # Make Ctrl+Break raise KeyboardInterrupt, like Python's default Ctrl+C
3537 # (SIGINT) behavior.
3538 import signal
3539 signal.signal(signal.SIGBREAK, signal.default_int_handler)
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003540
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003541 try:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003542 while 1:
3543 pass
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003544 except KeyboardInterrupt:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003545 # We get here on Ctrl+C or Ctrl+Break now; if we had not changed
3546 # SIGBREAK, only on Ctrl+C (and Ctrl+Break would terminate the
3547 # program without the possibility for any Python-level cleanup).
3548 print "Clean exit"
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003549
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003550
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003551What's New in Python 2.2a4?
3552===========================
3553
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003554*Release date: 28-Sep-2001*
3555
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003556Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003557--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003558
3559- pydoc and inspect are now aware of new-style classes;
3560 e.g. help(list) at the interactive prompt now shows proper
3561 documentation for all operations on list objects.
3562
3563- Applications using Jim Fulton's ExtensionClass module can now safely
3564 be used with Python 2.2. In particular, Zope 2.4.1 now works with
3565 Python 2.2 (as well as with Python 2.1.1). The Demo/metaclass
3566 examples also work again. It is hoped that Gtk and Boost also work
3567 with 2.2a4 and beyond. (If you can confirm this, please write
3568 webmaster@python.org; if there are still problems, please open a bug
3569 report on SourceForge.)
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003570
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00003571- property() now takes 4 keyword arguments: fget, fset, fdel and doc.
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003572 These map to read-only attributes 'fget', 'fset', 'fdel', and '__doc__'
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00003573 in the constructed property object. fget, fset and fdel weren't
3574 discoverable from Python in 2.2a3. __doc__ is new, and allows to
3575 associate a docstring with a property.
3576
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003577- Comparison overloading is now more completely implemented. For
3578 example, a str subclass instance can properly be compared to a str
3579 instance, and it can properly overload comparison. Ditto for most
3580 other built-in object types.
3581
3582- The repr() of new-style classes has changed; instead of <type
3583 'M.Foo'> a new-style class is now rendered as <class 'M.Foo'>,
3584 *except* for built-in types, which are still rendered as <type
3585 'Foo'> (to avoid upsetting existing code that might parse or
3586 otherwise rely on repr() of certain type objects).
3587
3588- The repr() of new-style objects is now always <Foo object at XXX>;
3589 previously, it was sometimes <Foo instance at XXX>.
3590
3591- For new-style classes, what was previously called __getattr__ is now
3592 called __getattribute__. This method, if defined, is called for
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00003593 *every* attribute access. A new __getattr__ hook more similar to the
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003594 one in classic classes is defined which is called only if regular
3595 attribute access raises AttributeError; to catch *all* attribute
3596 access, you can use __getattribute__ (for new-style classes). If
3597 both are defined, __getattribute__ is called first, and if it raises
3598 AttributeError, __getattr__ is called.
3599
3600- The __class__ attribute of new-style objects can be assigned to.
3601 The new class must have the same C-level object layout as the old
3602 class.
3603
3604- The builtin file type can be subclassed now. In the usual pattern,
3605 "file" is the name of the builtin type, and file() is a new builtin
3606 constructor, with the same signature as the builtin open() function.
3607 file() is now the preferred way to open a file.
3608
3609- Previously, __new__ would only see sequential arguments passed to
3610 the type in a constructor call; __init__ would see both sequential
3611 and keyword arguments. This made no sense whatsoever any more, so
3612 now both __new__ and __init__ see all arguments.
3613
3614- Previously, hash() applied to an instance of a subclass of str or
3615 unicode always returned 0. This has been repaired.
3616
3617- Previously, an operation on an instance of a subclass of an
3618 immutable type (int, long, float, complex, tuple, str, unicode),
3619 where the subtype didn't override the operation (and so the
3620 operation was handled by the builtin type), could return that
3621 instance instead a value of the base type. For example, if s was of
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003622 a str subclass type, s[:] returned s as-is. Now it returns a str
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003623 with the same value as s.
3624
Barry Warsaw86fbaf82001-09-28 15:26:12 +00003625- Provisional support for pickling new-style objects has been added.
3626
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003627Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003628----
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003629
Tim Peters2c9aa5e2001-09-23 04:06:05 +00003630- file.writelines() now accepts any iterable object producing strings.
3631
Marc-André Lemburgaefd7662001-09-20 12:59:37 +00003632- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() now works very much like
3633 PyObject_Str(obj) in that it tries to use __str__/tp_str
3634 on the object if the object is not a string or buffer. This
3635 makes unicode() behave like str() when applied to non-string/buffer
3636 objects.
3637
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00003638- PyFile_WriteObject now passes Unicode objects to the file's write
3639 method. As a result, all file-like objects which may be the target
Martin v. Löwis2777c022001-09-19 13:47:32 +00003640 of a print statement must support Unicode objects, i.e. they must
3641 at least convert them into ASCII strings.
3642
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003643- Thread scheduling on Solaris should be improved; it is no longer
3644 necessary to insert a small sleep at the start of a thread in order
3645 to let other runnable threads be scheduled.
3646
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003647Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003648-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003649
Marc-André Lemburgbf990172001-09-27 14:17:33 +00003650- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
3651 read character buffer compatible objects for their .write() methods.
3652 These objects are converted to strings and then handled as such
3653 by the instances.
3654
Barry Warsaw2f600732001-09-24 04:28:10 +00003655- The "email" package has been added. This is basically a port of the
3656 mimelib package <http://sf.net/projects/mimelib> with API changes
3657 and some implementations updated to use iterators and generators.
3658
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00003659- difflib.ndiff() and difflib.Differ.compare() are generators now. This
3660 restores the ability of Tools/scripts/ndiff.py to start producing output
3661 before the entire comparison is complete.
3662
Barry Warsaw58b072d2001-09-22 04:44:21 +00003663- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
3664 iteration just like file objects (i.e. their .readline() method is
3665 called for each iteration until it returns an empty string).
3666
Marc-André Lemburg494f2ae2001-09-19 11:33:31 +00003667- The codecs module has grown four new helper APIs to access
3668 builtin codecs: getencoder(), getdecoder(), getreader(),
3669 getwriter().
3670
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003671- SimpleXMLRPCServer: a new module (based upon SimpleHTMLServer)
3672 simplifies writing XML RPC servers.
3673
Barry Warsaw647d5e82001-09-28 17:01:02 +00003674- os.path.realpath(): a new function that returns the absolute pathname
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003675 after interpretation of symbolic links. On non-Unix systems, this
3676 is an alias for os.path.abspath().
3677
Tim Peters16a77ad2001-09-08 04:00:12 +00003678- operator.indexOf() (PySequence_Index() in the C API) now works with any
3679 iterable object.
3680
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003681- smtplib now supports various authentication and security features of
3682 the SMTP protocol through the new login() and starttls() methods.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00003683
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003684- hmac: a new module implementing keyed hashing for message
3685 authentication.
3686
3687- mimetypes now recognizes more extensions and file types. At the
3688 same time, some mappings not sanctioned by IANA were removed.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00003689
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003690- The "compiler" package has been brought up to date to the state of
Guido van Rossumc9ed5dc2001-09-20 05:30:24 +00003691 Python 2.2 bytecode generation. It has also been promoted from a
3692 Tool to a standard library package. (Tools/compiler still exists as
3693 a sample driver.)
3694
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003695Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003696-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003697
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003698- Large file support (LFS) is now automatic when the platform supports
3699 it; no more manual configuration tweaks are needed. On Linux, at
3700 least, it's possible to have a system whose C library supports large
3701 files but whose kernel doesn't; in this case, large file support is
3702 still enabled but doesn't do you any good unless you upgrade your
3703 kernel or share your Python executable with another system whose
3704 kernel has large file support.
3705
3706- The configure script now supplies plausible defaults in a
3707 cross-compilation environment. This doesn't mean that the supplied
3708 values are always correct, or that cross-compilation now works
3709 flawlessly -- but it's a first step (and it shuts up most of
3710 autoconf's warnings about AC_TRY_RUN).
3711
3712- The Unix build is now a bit less chatty, courtesy of the parser
3713 generator. The build is completely silent (except for errors) when
3714 using "make -s", thanks to a -q option to setup.py.
3715
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003716C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003717-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003718
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003719- The "structmember" API now supports some new flag bits to deny read
3720 and/or write access to attributes in restricted execution mode.
3721
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003722New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003723-------------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003724
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003725- Compaq's iPAQ handheld, running the "familiar" Linux distribution
3726 (http://familiar.handhelds.org).
3727
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003728Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003729-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003730
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00003731- The "classic" standard tests, which work by comparing stdout to
3732 an expected-output file under Lib/test/output/, no longer stop at
3733 the first mismatch. Instead the test is run to completion, and a
3734 variant of ndiff-style comparison is used to report all differences.
3735 This is much easier to understand than the previous style of reporting.
3736
3737- The unittest-based standard tests now use regrtest's test_main()
3738 convention, instead of running as a side-effect of merely being
3739 imported. This allows these tests to be run in more natural and
3740 flexible ways as unittests, outside the regrtest framework.
3741
3742- regrtest.py is much better integrated with unittest and doctest now,
3743 especially in regard to reporting errors.
3744
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003745Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003746-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003747
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003748- Large file support now also works for files > 4GB, on filesystems
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00003749 that support it (NTFS under Windows 2000). See "What's New in
3750 Python 2.2a3" for more detail.
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003751
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003752
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003753What's New in Python 2.2a3?
3754===========================
3755
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003756*Release Date: 07-Sep-2001*
3757
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003758Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003759----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003760
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00003761- Conversion of long to float now raises OverflowError if the long is too
3762 big to represent as a C double.
3763
Tim Peters32f453e2001-09-03 08:35:41 +00003764- The 3-argument builtin pow() no longer allows a third non-None argument
3765 if either of the first two arguments is a float, or if both are of
3766 integer types and the second argument is negative (in which latter case
3767 the arguments are converted to float, so this is really the same
3768 restriction).
3769
Tim Peters5d2b77c2001-09-03 05:47:38 +00003770- The builtin dir() now returns more information, and sometimes much
3771 more, generally naming all attributes of an object, and all attributes
3772 reachable from the object via its class, and from its class's base
3773 classes, and so on from them too. Example: in 2.2a2, dir([]) returned
3774 an empty list. In 2.2a3,
3775
3776 >>> dir([])
3777 ['__add__', '__class__', '__contains__', '__delattr__', '__delitem__',
3778 '__eq__', '__ge__', '__getattr__', '__getitem__', '__getslice__',
3779 '__gt__', '__hash__', '__iadd__', '__imul__', '__init__', '__le__',
3780 '__len__', '__lt__', '__mul__', '__ne__', '__new__', '__repr__',
3781 '__rmul__', '__setattr__', '__setitem__', '__setslice__', '__str__',
3782 'append', 'count', 'extend', 'index', 'insert', 'pop', 'remove',
3783 'reverse', 'sort']
3784
3785 dir(module) continues to return only the module's attributes, though.
3786
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003787- Overflowing operations on plain ints now return a long int rather
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003788 than raising OverflowError. This is a partial implementation of PEP
3789 237. You can use -Wdefault::OverflowWarning to enable a warning for
3790 this situation, and -Werror::OverflowWarning to revert to the old
3791 OverflowError exception.
3792
Guido van Rossum61c345f2001-09-04 03:26:15 +00003793- A new command line option, -Q<arg>, is added to control run-time
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003794 warnings for the use of classic division. (See PEP 238.) Possible
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00003795 values are -Qold, -Qwarn, -Qwarnall, and -Qnew. The default is
3796 -Qold, meaning the / operator has its classic meaning and no
3797 warnings are issued. Using -Qwarn issues a run-time warning about
3798 all uses of classic division for int and long arguments; -Qwarnall
3799 also warns about classic division for float and complex arguments
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00003800 (for use with fixdiv.py).
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003801 [Note: the remainder of this item (preserved below) became
3802 obsolete in 2.2c1 -- -Qnew has global effect in 2.2] ::
3803
3804 Using -Qnew is questionable; it turns on new division by default, but
3805 only in the __main__ module. You can usefully combine -Qwarn or
3806 -Qwarnall and -Qnew: this gives the __main__ module new division, and
3807 warns about classic division everywhere else.
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003808
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003809- Many built-in types can now be subclassed. This applies to int,
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003810 long, float, str, unicode, and tuple. (The types complex, list and
3811 dictionary can also be subclassed; this was introduced earlier.)
3812 Note that restrictions apply when subclassing immutable built-in
3813 types: you can only affect the value of the instance by overloading
3814 __new__. You can add mutable attributes, and the subclass instances
3815 will have a __dict__ attribute, but you cannot change the "value"
3816 (as implemented by the base class) of an immutable subclass instance
3817 once it is created.
3818
Guido van Rossumaaf80c82001-09-02 13:44:35 +00003819- The dictionary constructor now takes an optional argument, a
3820 mapping-like object, and initializes the dictionary from its
3821 (key, value) pairs.
3822
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003823- A new built-in type, super, has been added. This facilitates making
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003824 "cooperative super calls" in a multiple inheritance setting. For an
3825 explanation, see http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#cooperation
3826
Guido van Rossum8d7234d2001-09-06 22:02:58 +00003827- A new built-in type, property, has been added. This enables the
3828 creation of "properties". These are attributes implemented by
3829 getter and setter functions (or only one of these for read-only or
3830 write-only attributes), without the need to override __getattr__.
3831 See http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#property
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003832
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003833- The syntax of floating-point and imaginary literals has been
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00003834 liberalized, to allow leading zeroes. Examples of literals now
3835 legal that were SyntaxErrors before:
3836
3837 00.0 0e3 0100j 07.5 00000000000000000008.
3838
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003839- An old tokenizer bug allowed floating point literals with an incomplete
Tim Petersc6d95812001-08-28 20:56:27 +00003840 exponent, such as 1e and 3.1e-. Such literals now raise SyntaxError.
3841
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003842Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003843-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003844
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00003845- telnetlib includes symbolic names for the options, and support for
Martin v. Löwis1da9c572002-11-04 09:56:00 +00003846 setting an option negotiation callback. It also supports processing
3847 of suboptions.
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00003848
Tim Petersa40c7932001-09-05 22:36:56 +00003849- The new C standard no longer requires that math libraries set errno to
3850 ERANGE on overflow. For platform libraries that exploit this new
3851 freedom, Python's overflow-checking was wholly broken. A new overflow-
3852 checking scheme attempts to repair that, but may not be reliable on all
3853 platforms (C doesn't seem to provide anything both useful and portable
3854 in this area anymore).
3855
Martin v. Löwis44f86962001-09-05 13:44:54 +00003856- Asynchronous timeout actions are available through the new class
3857 threading.Timer.
3858
Tim Peters78526162001-09-05 00:53:45 +00003859- math.log and math.log10 now return sensible results for even huge
3860 long arguments. For example, math.log10(10 ** 10000) ~= 10000.0.
3861
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003862- A new function, imp.lock_held(), returns 1 when the import lock is
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00003863 currently held. See the docs for the imp module.
3864
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003865- pickle, cPickle and marshal on 32-bit platforms can now correctly read
Tim Peters82112372001-08-29 02:28:42 +00003866 dumps containing ints written on platforms where Python ints are 8 bytes.
3867 When read on a box where Python ints are 4 bytes, such values are
3868 converted to Python longs.
3869
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003870- In restricted execution mode (using the rexec module), unmarshalling
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003871 code objects is no longer allowed. This plugs a security hole.
3872
Steve Purcell6091cd62001-09-06 16:05:17 +00003873- unittest.TestResult instances no longer store references to tracebacks
3874 generated by test failures. This prevents unexpected dangling references
3875 to objects that should be garbage collected between tests.
3876
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003877Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003878-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003879
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00003880- Tools/scripts/fixdiv.py has been added which can be used to fix
3881 division operators as per PEP 238.
3882
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003883Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003884-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003885
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00003886- If you are an adventurous person using Mac OS X you may want to look at
3887 Mac/OSX. There is a Makefile there that will build Python as a real Mac
3888 application, which can be used for experimenting with Carbon or Cocoa.
3889 Discussion of this on pythonmac-sig, please.
3890
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00003891C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003892-----
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00003893
3894- New function PyObject_Dir(obj), like Python __builtin__.dir(obj).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00003895
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00003896- Note that PyLong_AsDouble can fail! This has always been true, but no
3897 callers checked for it. It's more likely to fail now, because overflow
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003898 errors are properly detected now. The proper way to check::
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00003899
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003900 double x = PyLong_AsDouble(some_long_object);
3901 if (x == -1.0 && PyErr_Occurred()) {
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003902 /* The conversion failed. */
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003903 }
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00003904
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003905- The GC API has been changed. Extensions that use the old API will still
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00003906 compile but will not participate in GC. To upgrade an extension
3907 module:
3908
3909 - rename Py_TPFLAGS_GC to PyTPFLAGS_HAVE_GC
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00003910
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00003911 - use PyObject_GC_New or PyObject_GC_NewVar to allocate objects and
3912 PyObject_GC_Del to deallocate them
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00003913
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00003914 - rename PyObject_GC_Init to PyObject_GC_Track and PyObject_GC_Fini
3915 to PyObject_GC_UnTrack
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00003916
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00003917 - remove PyGC_HEAD_SIZE from object size calculations
3918
3919 - remove calls to PyObject_AS_GC and PyObject_FROM_GC
3920
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003921- Two new functions: PyString_FromFormat() and PyString_FromFormatV().
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003922 These can be used safely to construct string objects from a
3923 sprintf-style format string (similar to the format string supported
3924 by PyErr_Format()).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00003925
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003926New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003927-------------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003928
Tim Petersb7da0902001-09-02 23:01:43 +00003929- Stephen Hansen contributed patches sufficient to get a clean compile
3930 under Borland C (Windows), but he reports problems running it and ran
3931 out of time to complete the port. Volunteers? Expect a MemoryError
3932 when importing the types module; this is probably shallow, and
3933 causing later failures too.
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003934
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003935Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003936-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003937
3938Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003939-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003940
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00003941- Large file support is now enabled on Win32 platforms as well as on
3942 Win64. This means that, for example, you can use f.tell() and f.seek()
3943 to manipulate files larger than 2 gigabytes (provided you have enough
3944 disk space, and are using a Windows filesystem that supports large
Tim Peters9a9471c2001-09-11 23:18:51 +00003945 partitions). Windows filesystem limits: FAT has a 2GB (gigabyte)
3946 filesize limit, and large file support makes no difference there.
3947 FAT32's limit is 4GB, and files >= 2GB are easier to use from Python now.
3948 NTFS has no practical limit on file size, and files of any size can be
3949 used from Python now.
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00003950
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003951- The w9xpopen hack is now used on Windows NT and 2000 too when COMPSPEC
Tim Peters402d5982001-08-27 06:37:48 +00003952 points to command.com (patch from Brian Quinlan).
3953
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003954
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00003955What's New in Python 2.2a2?
3956===========================
3957
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003958*Release Date: 22-Aug-2001*
3959
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00003960Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003961-----
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00003962
Barry Warsaw18b2ecf2001-08-22 20:26:56 +00003963- Tim Peters developed a brand new Windows installer using Wise 8.1,
3964 generously donated to us by Wise Solutions.
3965
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00003966- configure supports a new option --enable-unicode, with the values
3967 ucs2 and ucs4 (new in 2.2a1). With --disable-unicode, the Unicode
3968 type and supporting code is completely removed from the interpreter.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00003969
Jack Jansen32ce0cd2001-08-21 19:28:20 +00003970- A new configure option --enable-framework builds a Mac OS X framework,
3971 which "make frameworkinstall" will install. This provides a starting
3972 point for more mac-like functionality, join pythonmac-sig@python.org
3973 if you are interested in helping.
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00003974
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00003975- The NeXT platform is no longer supported.
3976
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003977- The 'new' module is now statically linked.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00003978
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00003979Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003980-----
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00003981
3982- The new Tools/scripts/cleanfuture.py can be used to automatically
Andrew M. Kuchlingb0532092001-08-15 15:54:56 +00003983 edit out obsolete future statements from Python source code. See
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00003984 the module docstring for details.
3985
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00003986Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003987-----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00003988
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00003989- regrtest.py now knows which tests are expected to be skipped on some
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00003990 platforms, allowing to give clearer test result output. regrtest
3991 also has optional --use/-u switch to run normally disabled tests
3992 which require network access or consume significant disk resources.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00003993
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00003994- Several new tests in the standard test suite, with special thanks to
3995 Nick Mathewson.
3996
3997Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003998----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00003999
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004000- The floor division operator // has been added as outlined in PEP
4001 238. The / operator still provides classic division (and will until
4002 Python 3.0) unless "from __future__ import division" is included, in
4003 which case the / operator will provide true division. The operator
4004 module provides truediv() and floordiv() functions. Augmented
4005 assignment variants are included, as are the equivalent overloadable
4006 methods and C API methods. See the PEP for a full discussion:
4007 <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0238.html>
4008
Tim Peters6cd6a822001-08-17 22:11:27 +00004009- Future statements are now effective in simulated interactive shells
4010 (like IDLE). This should "just work" by magic, but read Michael
4011 Hudson's "Future statements in simulated shells" PEP 264 for full
4012 details: <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0264.html>.
4013
Guido van Rossumf86ddd22001-08-17 21:21:04 +00004014- The type/class unification (PEP 252-253) was integrated into the
4015 trunk and is not so tentative any more (the exact specification of
4016 some features is still tentative). A lot of work has done on fixing
4017 bugs and adding robustness and features (performance still has to
4018 come a long way).
4019
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00004020- Warnings about a mismatch in the Python API during extension import
4021 now use the Python warning framework (which makes it possible to
4022 write filters for these warnings).
4023
Barry Warsaw9b3be7f2001-08-14 18:35:02 +00004024- A function's __dict__ (aka func_dict) will now always be a
4025 dictionary. It used to be possible to delete it or set it to None,
4026 but now both actions raise TypeErrors. It is still legal to set it
4027 to a dictionary object. Getting func.__dict__ before any attributes
4028 have been assigned now returns an empty dictionary instead of None.
4029
Guido van Rossum32aa5d22001-09-05 18:43:35 +00004030- A new command line option, -E, was added which disables the use of
4031 all environment variables, or at least those that are specifically
4032 significant to Python. Usually those have a name starting with
4033 "PYTHON". This was used to fix a problem where the tests fail if
4034 the user happens to have PYTHONHOME or PYTHONPATH pointing to an
4035 older distribution.
4036
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004037Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004038-------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004039
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004040- New class Differ and new functions ndiff() and restore() in difflib.py.
4041 These package the algorithms used by the popular Tools/scripts/ndiff.py,
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004042 for programmatic reuse.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004043
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004044- New function xml.sax.saxutils.quoteattr(): Quote an XML attribute
4045 value using the minimal quoting required for the value; more
4046 reliable than using xml.sax.saxutils.escape() for attribute values.
4047
4048- Readline completion support for cmd.Cmd was added.
4049
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004050- Calling os.tempnam() or os.tmpnam() generate RuntimeWarnings.
4051
4052- Added function threading.BoundedSemaphore()
4053
4054- Added Ka-Ping Yee's cgitb.py module.
4055
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004056- The 'new' module now exposes the CO_xxx flags.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004057
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00004058- The gc module offers the get_referents function.
4059
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004060New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004061-------------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004062
4063C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004064-----
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004065
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00004066- Two new APIs PyOS_snprintf() and PyOS_vsnprintf() were added
4067 which provide a cross-platform implementations for the
4068 relatively new snprintf()/vsnprintf() C lib APIs. In contrast to
4069 the standard sprintf() and vsprintf() C lib APIs, these versions
4070 apply bounds checking on the used buffer which enhances protection
4071 against buffer overruns.
4072
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00004073- Unicode APIs now use name mangling to assure that mixing interpreters
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00004074 and extensions using different Unicode widths is rendered next to
4075 impossible. Trying to import an incompatible Unicode-aware extension
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00004076 will result in an ImportError. Unicode extensions writers must make
4077 sure to check the Unicode width compatibility in their extensions by
4078 using at least one of the mangled Unicode APIs in the extension.
4079
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004080- Two new flags METH_NOARGS and METH_O are available in method definition
4081 tables to simplify implementation of methods with no arguments and a
4082 single untyped argument. Calling such methods is more efficient than
4083 calling corresponding METH_VARARGS methods. METH_OLDARGS is now
4084 deprecated.
4085
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00004086Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004087-------
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00004088
4089- "import module" now compiles module.pyw if it exists and nothing else
4090 relevant is found.
4091
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004092
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00004093What's New in Python 2.2a1?
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004094===========================
4095
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004096*Release date: 18-Jul-2001*
4097
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004098Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004099----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004100
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00004101- TENTATIVELY, a large amount of code implementing much of what's
4102 described in PEP 252 (Making Types Look More Like Classes) and PEP
4103 253 (Subtyping Built-in Types) was added. This will be released
4104 with Python 2.2a1. Documentation will be provided separately
4105 through http://www.python.org/2.2/. The purpose of releasing this
4106 with Python 2.2a1 is to test backwards compatibility. It is
4107 possible, though not likely, that a decision is made not to release
4108 this code as part of 2.2 final, if any serious backwards
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004109 incompatibilities are found during alpha testing that cannot be
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00004110 repaired.
4111
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00004112- Generators were added; this is a new way to create an iterator (see
Tim Peters11a0d102001-07-17 18:48:00 +00004113 below) using what looks like a simple function containing one or
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00004114 more 'yield' statements. See PEP 255. Since this adds a new
4115 keyword to the language, this feature must be enabled by including a
4116 future statement: "from __future__ import generators" (see PEP 236).
4117 Generators will become a standard feature in a future release
4118 (probably 2.3). Without this future statement, 'yield' remains an
4119 ordinary identifier, but a warning is issued each time it is used.
4120 (These warnings currently don't conform to the warnings framework of
4121 PEP 230; we intend to fix this in 2.2a2.)
4122
Marc-André Lemburg12e74b32001-05-22 08:58:23 +00004123- The UTF-16 codec was modified to be more RFC compliant. It will now
4124 only remove BOM characters at the start of the string and then
4125 only if running in native mode (UTF-16-LE and -BE won't remove a
4126 leading BMO character).
4127
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00004128- Strings now have a new method .decode() to complement the already
4129 existing .encode() method. These two methods provide direct access
4130 to the corresponding decoders and encoders of the registered codecs.
4131
4132 To enhance the usability of the .encode() method, the special
4133 casing of Unicode object return values was dropped (Unicode objects
4134 were auto-magically converted to string using the default encoding).
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00004135
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00004136 Both methods will now return whatever the codec in charge of the
4137 requested encoding returns as object, e.g. Unicode codecs will
4138 return Unicode objects when decoding is requested ("äöü".decode("latin-1")
4139 will return u"äöü"). This enables codec writer to create codecs
4140 for various simple to use conversions.
4141
4142 New codecs were added to demonstrate these new features (the .encode()
4143 and .decode() columns indicate the type of the returned objects):
4144
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004145 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4146 |Name | .encode() | .decode() | Description |
4147 +=========+===========+===========+=============================+
4148 |uu | string | string | UU codec (e.g. for email) |
4149 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4150 |base64 | string | string | base64 codec |
4151 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4152 |quopri | string | string | quoted-printable codec |
4153 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4154 |zlib | string | string | zlib compression |
4155 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4156 |hex | string | string | 2-byte hex codec |
4157 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4158 |rot-13 | string | Unicode | ROT-13 Unicode charmap codec|
4159 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00004160
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004161- Some operating systems now support the concept of a default Unicode
4162 encoding for file system operations. Notably, Windows supports 'mbcs'
4163 as the default. The Macintosh will also adopt this concept in the medium
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00004164 term, although the default encoding for that platform will be other than
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004165 'mbcs'.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00004166
4167 On operating system that support non-ASCII filenames, it is common for
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004168 functions that return filenames (such as os.listdir()) to return Python
4169 string objects pre-encoded using the default file system encoding for
4170 the platform. As this encoding is likely to be different from Python's
4171 default encoding, converting this name to a Unicode object before passing
4172 it back to the Operating System would result in a Unicode error, as Python
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004173 would attempt to use its default encoding (generally ASCII) rather than
4174 the default encoding for the file system.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00004175
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004176 In general, this change simply removes surprises when working with
4177 Unicode and the file system, making these operations work as you expect,
4178 increasing the transparency of Unicode objects in this context.
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004179 See [????] for more details, including examples.
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004180
Tim Peters61dff2b2001-05-08 15:43:37 +00004181- Float (and complex) literals in source code were evaluated to full
4182 precision only when running from a .py file; the same code loaded from a
4183 .pyc (or .pyo) file could suffer numeric differences starting at about the
4184 12th significant decimal digit. For example, on a machine with IEEE-754
4185 floating arithmetic,
4186
4187 x = 9007199254740992.0
4188 print long(x)
4189
4190 printed 9007199254740992 if run directly from .py, but 9007199254740000
4191 if from a compiled (.pyc or .pyo) file. This was due to marshal using
4192 str(float) instead of repr(float) when building code objects. marshal
4193 now uses repr(float) instead, which should reproduce floats to full
4194 machine precision (assuming the platform C float<->string I/O conversion
4195 functions are of good quality).
4196
4197 This may cause floating-point results to change in some cases, and
4198 usually for the better, but may also cause numerically unstable
4199 algorithms to break.
4200
Tim Peters2f228e72001-05-13 00:19:31 +00004201- The implementation of dicts suffers fewer collisions, which has speed
4202 benefits. However, the order in which dict entries appear in dict.keys(),
4203 dict.values() and dict.items() may differ from previous releases for a
4204 given dict. Nothing is defined about this order, so no program should
4205 rely on it. Nevertheless, it's easy to write test cases that rely on the
4206 order by accident, typically because of printing the str() or repr() of a
4207 dict to an "expected results" file. See Lib/test/test_support.py's new
4208 sortdict(dict) function for a simple way to display a dict in sorted
4209 order.
4210
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00004211- Many other small changes to dicts were made, resulting in faster
4212 operation along the most common code paths.
4213
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00004214- Dictionary objects now support the "in" operator: "x in dict" means
4215 the same as dict.has_key(x).
4216
Barry Warsaw51acc8d2001-06-26 20:12:50 +00004217- The update() method of dictionaries now accepts generic mapping
4218 objects. Specifically the argument object must support the .keys()
4219 and __getitem__() methods. This allows you to say, for example,
4220 {}.update(UserDict())
4221
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00004222- Iterators were added; this is a generalized way of providing values
4223 to a for loop. See PEP 234. There's a new built-in function iter()
4224 to return an iterator. There's a new protocol to get the next value
4225 from an iterator using the next() method (in Python) or the
4226 tp_iternext slot (in C). There's a new protocol to get iterators
4227 using the __iter__() method (in Python) or the tp_iter slot (in C).
4228 Iterating (i.e. a for loop) over a dictionary generates its keys.
4229 Iterating over a file generates its lines.
4230
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004231- The following functions were generalized to work nicely with iterator
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004232 arguments::
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004233
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00004234 map(), filter(), reduce(), zip()
Tim Peters8572b4f2001-05-06 01:05:02 +00004235 list(), tuple() (PySequence_Tuple() and PySequence_Fast() in C API)
4236 max(), min()
Tim Peters1af03e92001-05-26 19:37:54 +00004237 join() method of strings
4238 extend() method of lists
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00004239 'x in y' and 'x not in y' (PySequence_Contains() in C API)
4240 operator.countOf() (PySequence_Count() in C API)
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004241 right-hand side of assignment statements with multiple targets, such as ::
Tim Petersd6d010b2001-06-21 02:49:55 +00004242 x, y, z = some_iterable_object_returning_exactly_3_values
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00004243
Tim Petersd85e1022001-05-11 21:51:48 +00004244- Accessing module attributes is significantly faster (for example,
4245 random.random or os.path or yourPythonModule.yourAttribute).
4246
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00004247- Comparing dictionary objects via == and != is faster, and now works even
4248 if the keys and values don't support comparisons other than ==.
4249
Tim Peters95bf9392001-05-10 08:32:44 +00004250- Comparing dictionaries in ways other than == and != is slower: there were
4251 insecurities in the dict comparison implementation that could cause Python
4252 to crash if the element comparison routines for the dict keys and/or
4253 values mutated the dicts. Making the code bulletproof slowed it down.
4254
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00004255- Collisions in dicts are resolved via a new approach, which can help
4256 dramatically in bad cases. For example, looking up every key in a dict
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00004257 d with d.keys() == [i << 16 for i in range(20000)] is approximately 500x
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00004258 faster now. Thanks to Christian Tismer for pointing out the cause and
4259 the nature of an effective cure (last December! better late than never).
Tim Peters15d49292001-05-27 07:39:22 +00004260
Tim Peters52e155e2001-06-16 05:42:57 +00004261- repr() is much faster for large containers (dict, list, tuple).
4262
4263
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004264Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004265-------
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004266
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00004267- The constants ascii_letters, ascii_lowercase. and ascii_uppercase
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004268 were added to the string module. These a locale-independent
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00004269 constants, unlike letters, lowercase, and uppercase. These are now
4270 use in appropriate locations in the standard library.
4271
Martin v. Löwisf0473d52001-07-18 16:17:16 +00004272- The flags used in dlopen calls can now be configured using
4273 sys.setdlopenflags and queried using sys.getdlopenflags.
4274
Guido van Rossumc7e4aca2001-07-12 11:54:37 +00004275- Fredrik Lundh's xmlrpclib is now a standard library module. This
4276 provides full client-side XML-RPC support. In addition,
4277 Demo/xmlrpc/ contains two server frameworks (one SocketServer-based,
4278 one asyncore-based). Thanks to Eric Raymond for the documentation.
4279
Guido van Rossum643d3912001-07-05 14:46:25 +00004280- The xrange() object is simplified: it no longer supports slicing,
4281 repetition, comparisons, efficient 'in' checking, the tolist()
4282 method, or the start, stop and step attributes. See PEP 260.
4283
Martin v. Löwisebf94db2001-06-06 06:25:40 +00004284- A new function fnmatch.filter to filter lists of file names was added.
4285
Barry Warsawffd674d2001-05-22 16:00:10 +00004286- calendar.py uses month and day names based on the current locale.
4287
Guido van Rossum2e0a6542001-05-15 02:14:44 +00004288- strop is now *really* obsolete (this was announced before with 1.6),
4289 and issues DeprecationWarning when used (except for the four items
4290 that are still imported into string.py).
4291
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004292- Cookie.py now sorts key+value pairs by key in output strings.
4293
4294- pprint.isrecursive(object) didn't correctly identify recursive objects.
4295 Now it does.
4296
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00004297- pprint functions now much faster for large containers (tuple, list, dict).
4298
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00004299- New 'q' and 'Q' format codes in the struct module, corresponding to C
4300 types "long long" and "unsigned long long" (on Windows, __int64). In
4301 native mode, these can be used only when the platform C compiler supports
4302 these types (when HAVE_LONG_LONG is #define'd by the Python config
4303 process), and then they inherit the sizes and alignments of the C types.
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00004304 In standard mode, 'q' and 'Q' are supported on all platforms, and are
4305 8-byte integral types.
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00004306
Guido van Rossum83213cc2001-06-12 16:48:52 +00004307- The site module installs a new built-in function 'help' that invokes
4308 pydoc.help. It must be invoked as 'help()'; when invoked as 'help',
4309 it displays a message reminding the user to use 'help()' or
4310 'help(object)'.
4311
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004312Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004313-----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004314
4315- New test_mutants.py runs dict comparisons where the key and value
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004316 comparison operators mutate the dicts randomly during comparison. This
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004317 rapidly causes Python to crash under earlier releases (not for the faint
4318 of heart: it can also cause Win9x to freeze or reboot!).
4319
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004320- New test_pprint.py verifies that pprint.isrecursive() and
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00004321 pprint.isreadable() return sensible results. Also verifies that simple
4322 cases produce correct output.
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004323
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00004324C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004325-----
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00004326
4327- Removed the unused last_is_sticky argument from the internal
4328 _PyTuple_Resize(). If this affects you, you were cheating.
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004329
4330----
4331
4332**(For information about older versions, consult the HISTORY file.)**