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Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001+++++++++++
2Python News
3+++++++++++
4
Skip Montanaro4a385832002-09-20 17:08:52 +00005(editors: check NEWS.help for information about editing NEWS using ReST.)
6
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00007What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 1?
8=================================
9
10*Release date: DD-MMM-YYYY*
11
12Core and builtins
13-----------------
14
Marc-André Lemburgd7160f82003-09-22 11:14:40 +000015- Added test whether wchar_t is signed or not. A signed wchar_t is not
16 usable as internal unicode type base for Py_UNICODE since the
17 unicode implementation assumes an unsigned type.
18
Jeremy Hyltond8082792003-09-16 19:41:39 +000019- Fixed a bug in the cache of length-one Unicode strings that could
20 lead to a seg fault. The specific problem occurred when an earlier,
21 non-fatal error left an uninitialized Unicode object in the
22 freelist.
23
Raymond Hettinger9bfe5332003-08-27 04:55:52 +000024- The % formatting operator now supports '%F' which is equivalent to
25 '%f'. This has always been documented but never implemented.
26
Tim Peters465fa3d2003-08-15 01:16:37 +000027- complex(obj) could leak a little memory if obj wasn't a string or
28 number.
29
Raymond Hettingereaef6152003-08-02 07:42:57 +000030- zip() with no arguments now returns an empty list instead of raising
31 a TypeError exception.
32
Guido van Rossum02c58f82003-10-08 21:08:29 +000033- obj.__contains__() now returns True/False instead of 1/0. SF patch
34 820195.
35
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +000036Extension modules
37-----------------
38
Martin v. Löwis3bbd6542003-10-03 13:57:37 +000039- socket.IPPROTO_IPV6 was added.
40
Martin v. Löwise7a97962003-09-20 16:08:33 +000041- readline.clear_history was added.
42
Brett Cannon62dba4c2003-09-10 19:37:42 +000043- select.select() now accepts sequences for its first three arguments.
44
Raymond Hettinger5475f232003-08-08 12:20:03 +000045- cStringIO now supports the f.closed attribute.
46
Anthony Baxter83f52912003-08-05 06:33:56 +000047- The signal module now exposes SIGRTMIN and SIGRTMAX (if available).
48
Andrew M. Kuchling69f31eb2003-08-13 23:11:04 +000049- curses module now supports use_default_colors(). [patch #739124]
50
Anthony Baxter5c68ef02003-10-04 08:04:04 +000051- Bug #811028: ncurses.h breakage on FreeBSD/MacOS X
52
53- Bug #814613: INET_ADDRSTRLEN fix needed for all compilers on SGI
54
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +000055Library
56-------
57
Skip Montanarodef99342003-10-03 14:07:07 +000058- The fieldnames argument to the csv module's DictReader constructor is now
59 optional. If omitted, the first row of the file will be used as the
60 list of fieldnames.
61
Raymond Hettinger9a80c5d2003-09-23 20:21:01 +000062- encodings.bz2_codec was added for access to bz2 compression
63 using "a long string".encode('bz2')
64
Guido van Rossum0e5a51d2003-09-22 15:03:11 +000065- Various improvements to unittest.py, realigned with PyUnit CVS.
66
Martin v. Löwisc6bb6c02003-09-20 15:52:21 +000067- dircache now passes exceptions to the caller, instead of returning
68 empty lists.
69
Raymond Hettingerdeadbf52003-09-12 06:33:37 +000070- The bsddb module and dbhash module now support the iterator and
71 mapping protocols which make them more substitutable for dictionaries
72 and shelves.
73
Skip Montanaro3f7a9482003-09-06 19:52:12 +000074- The csv module's DictReader and DictWriter classes now accept keyword
75 arguments. This was an omission in the initial implementation.
76
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +000077- The email package handles some RFC 2231 parameters with missing
Barry Warsaw2f5bf172003-09-03 04:09:49 +000078 CHARSET fields better. It also includes a patch to parameter
79 parsing when semicolons appear inside quotes.
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +000080
Raymond Hettinger6a180122003-08-17 08:34:09 +000081- sets.py now runs under Py2.2. In addition, the argument restrictions
82 for most set methods (but not the operators) have been relaxed to
83 allow any iterable. Also the Set.update() has been deprecated because
84 it duplicates Set.union_update().
Raymond Hettingeree562fc2003-08-15 21:17:04 +000085
Raymond Hettinger3081d592003-08-09 18:30:57 +000086- random.seed() with no arguments or None uses time.time() as a default
87 seed. Modified to match Py2.2 behavior and use fractional seconds so
88 that successive runs are more likely to produce different sequences.
89
Raymond Hettinger2f726e92003-10-05 09:09:15 +000090- random.Random has a new method, getrandbits(k), which returns an int
91 with k random bits. This method is now an optional part of the API
92 for user defined generators. Any generator that defines genrandbits()
93 can now use randrange() for ranges with a length >= 2**53. Formerly,
94 randrange would return only even numbers for ranges that large (see
95 SF bug #812202). Generators that do not define genrandbits() now
96 issue a warning when randrange() is called with a range that large.
97
Raymond Hettingerb5a42082003-08-08 05:10:41 +000098- itertools.izip() with no arguments now returns an empty iterator instead
99 of raising a TypeError exception.
100
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +0000101- _strptime.py now has a behind-the-scenes caching mechanism for the most
Brett Cannonb7150a22003-08-05 06:27:04 +0000102 recent TimeRE instance used along with the last five unique directive
103 patterns. The overall module was also made more thread-safe.
104
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +0000105- random.cunifvariate() and random.stdgamma() were deprecated in Py2.3
106 and removed in Py2.4.
107
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000108Tools/Demos
109-----------
110
Skip Montanarofd4fa882003-09-10 19:04:13 +0000111- The pydoc script will display a link to the module documentation for
112 modules determined to be part of the core distribution. The documentation
113 base directory defaults to http://www.python.org/doc/current/lib/ but can
114 be changed by setting the PYTHONDOCS environment variable.
115
Raymond Hettingere41d4c82003-08-25 04:39:55 +0000116- texcheck.py now detects double word errors.
117
Tim Peters1a3abcb2003-08-18 23:52:09 +0000118- md5sum.py mistakenly opened input files in text mode by default, a
119 silent and dangerous change from previous releases. It once again
120 opens input files in binary mode by default. The -t and -b flags
121 remain for compatibility with the 2.3 release, but -b is the default
122 now.
123
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000124- py-electric-colon now works when pending-delete/delete-selection mode is
125 in effect
126
127- py-help-at-point is no longer bound to the F1 key - it's still bound to
128 C-c C-h
129
Barry Warsaw6ec58ca2003-09-03 03:20:37 +0000130- Pynche was fixed to not crash when there is no ~/.pynche file and no
131 -d option was given.
132
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000133Build
134-----
135
136C API
137-----
138
139New platforms
140-------------
141
142Tests
143-----
144
145Windows
146-------
147
Tim Petersf1827cf2003-09-07 03:30:18 +0000148- file.truncate() could misbehave if the file was open for update
149 (modes r+, rb+, w+, wb+), and the most recent file operation before
150 the truncate() call was an input operation. SF bug 801631.
151
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000152Mac
153----
154
155
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +0000156What's New in Python 2.3 final?
157===============================
158
159*Release date: 29-Jul-2003*
160
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +0000161IDLE
162----
163
Tim Peters36c1afc2003-07-29 17:22:57 +0000164- Bug 778400: IDLE hangs when selecting "Edit with IDLE" from explorer.
165 This was unique to Windows, and was fixed by adding an -n switch to
166 the command the Windows installer creates to execute "Edit with IDLE"
167 context-menu actions.
168
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +0000169- IDLE displays a new message upon startup: some "personal firewall"
170 kinds of programs (for example, ZoneAlarm) open a dialog of their
171 own when any program opens a socket. IDLE does use sockets, talking
172 on the computer's internal loopback interface. This connection is not
173 visible on any external interface and no data is sent to or received
174 from the Internet. So, if you get such a dialog when opening IDLE,
175 asking whether to let pythonw.exe talk to address 127.0.0.1, say yes,
176 and rest assured no communication external to your machine is taking
177 place. If you don't allow it, IDLE won't be able to start.
178
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +0000179
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000180What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 2?
181=============================================
182
Tim Peters6560a252003-07-24 00:15:46 +0000183*Release date: 24-Jul-2003*
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000184
185Core and builtins
186-----------------
187
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +0000188- It is now possible to import from zipfiles containing additional
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000189 data bytes before the zip compatible archive. Zipfiles containing a
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +0000190 comment at the end are still unsupported.
191
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000192Extension modules
193-----------------
194
195- A longstanding bug in the parser module's initialization could cause
196 fatal internal refcount confusion when the module got initialized more
197 than once. This has been fixed.
198
Fred Drake01a43122003-07-21 17:17:10 +0000199- Fixed memory leak in pyexpat; using the parser's ParseFile() method
200 with open files that aren't instances of the standard file type
201 caused an instance of the bound .read() method to be leaked on every
202 call.
203
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000204- Fixed some leaks in the locale module.
205
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000206Library
207-------
208
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000209- Lib/encodings/rot_13.py when used as a script, now more properly
210 uses the first Python interpreter on your path.
211
212- Removed caching of TimeRE (and thus LocaleTime) in _strptime.py to
213 fix a locale related bug in the test suite. Although another patch
214 was needed to actually fix the problem, the cache code was not
215 restored.
216
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +0000217IDLE
218----
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000219
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +0000220- Calltips patches.
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000221
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000222Build
223-----
224
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000225- For MacOSX, added -mno-fused-madd to BASECFLAGS to fix test_coercion
226 on Panther (OSX 10.3).
227
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000228C API
229-----
230
231Windows
232-------
233
Tim Peters291f14e2003-07-22 02:50:01 +0000234- The tempfile module could do insane imports on Windows if PYTHONCASEOK
235 was set, making temp file creation impossible. Repaired.
236
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000237- Add a patch to workaround pthread_sigmask() bugs in Cygwin.
238
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000239Mac
240---
241
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000242- Various fixes to pimp.
243
244- Scripts runs with pythonw no longer had full window manager access.
245
246- Don't force boot-disk-only install, for reasons unknown it causes
247 more problems than it solves.
248
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000249
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000250What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 1?
251=============================================
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000252
Jeremy Hylton0ed18c22003-07-18 20:10:02 +0000253*Release date: 18-Jul-2003*
254
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000255Core and builtins
256-----------------
257
Tim Peterse5e065b2003-07-06 18:36:54 +0000258- The new function sys.getcheckinterval() returns the last value set
259 by sys.setcheckinterval().
260
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000261- Several bugs in the symbol table phase of the compiler have been
262 fixed. Errors could be lost and compilation could fail without
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000263 reporting an error. SF patch 763201.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000264
265- The interpreter is now more robust about importing the warnings
266 module. In an executable generated by freeze or similar programs,
267 earlier versions of 2.3 would fail if the warnings module could
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000268 not be found on the file system. Fixes SF bug 771097.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000269
270- A warning about assignments to module attributes that shadow
271 builtins, present in earlier releases of 2.3, has been removed.
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000272
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000273- It is not possible to create subclasses of builtin types like str
274 and tuple that define an itemsize. Earlier releases of Python 2.3
275 allowed this by mistake, leading to crashes and other problems.
276
277- The thread_id is now initialized to 0 in a non-thread build. SF bug
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000278 770247.
279
280- SF bug 762891: "del p[key]" on proxy object no longer raises SystemError.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000281
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000282Extension modules
283-----------------
284
285- weakref.proxy() can now handle "del obj[i]" for proxy objects
286 defining __delitem__. Formerly, it generated a SystemError.
287
288- SSL no longer crashes the interpreter when the remote side disconnects.
289
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +0000290- On Unix the mmap module can again be used to map device files.
291
Brett Cannon20def8b2003-07-01 05:16:08 +0000292- time.strptime now exclusively uses the Python implementation
293 contained within the _strptime module.
294
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000295- The print slot of weakref proxy objects was removed, because it was
296 not consistent with the object's repr slot.
297
298- The mmap module only checks file size for regular files, not
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000299 character or block devices. SF patch 708374.
300
301- The cPickle Pickler garbage collection support was fixed to traverse
302 the find_class attribute, if present.
303
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000304- There are several fixes for the bsddb3 wrapper module.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000305
306 bsddb3 no longer crashes if an environment is closed before a cursor
307 (SF bug 763298).
308
309 The DB and DBEnv set_get_returns_none function was extended to take
Barry Warsawd71a5512003-07-20 18:00:54 +0000310 a level instead of a boolean flag. The new level 2 means that in
311 addition, cursor.set()/.get() methods return None instead of raising
312 an exception.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000313
314 A typo was fixed in DBCursor.join_item(), preventing a crash.
315
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000316Library
317-------
318
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000319- distutils now supports MSVC 7.1
320
Raymond Hettinger71adf7e2003-07-16 19:25:22 +0000321- doctest now examines all docstrings by default. Previously, it would
322 skip over functions with private names (as indicated by the underscore
323 naming convention). The old default created too much of a risk that
324 user tests were being skipped inadvertently. Note, this change could
325 break code in the unlikely case that someone had intentionally put
326 failing tests in the docstrings of private functions. The breakage
327 is easily fixable by specifying the old behavior when calling testmod()
328 or Tester().
329
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000330- There were several fixes to the way dumbdbms are closed. It's vital
331 that a dumbdbm database be closed properly, else the on-disk data
332 and directory files can be left in mutually inconsistent states.
333 dumbdbm.py's _Database.__del__() method attempted to close the
334 database properly, but a shutdown race in _Database._commit() could
335 prevent this from working, so that a program trusting __del__() to
336 get the on-disk files in synch could be badly surprised. The race
337 has been repaired. A sync() method was also added so that shelve
338 can guarantee data is written to disk.
Tim Peters7a6c7332003-07-13 17:21:10 +0000339
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000340 The close() method can now be called more than once without complaint.
Tim Petersd7472ec2003-07-13 02:22:03 +0000341
Tim Peters59aba122003-07-01 20:01:55 +0000342- The classes in threading.py are now new-style classes. That they
343 weren't before was an oversight.
344
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000345- The urllib2 digest authentication handlers now define the correct
346 auth_header. The earlier versions would fail at runtime.
347
Neal Norwitze7dfe212003-07-01 14:59:46 +0000348- SF bug 763023: fix uncaught ZeroDivisionError in difflib ratio methods
349 when there are no lines.
350
Neal Norwitz3c0f2c92003-07-01 21:12:47 +0000351- SF bug 763637: fix exception in Tkinter with after_cancel
352 which could occur with Tk 8.4
353
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000354- SF bug 770601: CGIHTTPServer.py now passes the entire environment
355 to child processes.
356
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000357- SF bug 765238: add filter to fnmatch's __all__.
358
359- SF bug 748201: make time.strptime() error messages more helpful.
360
361- SF patch 764470: Do not dump the args attribute of a Fault object in
362 xmlrpclib.
363
364- SF patch 549151: urllib and urllib2 now redirect POSTs on 301
365 responses.
366
367- SF patch 766650: The whichdb module was fixed to recognize dbm files
368 generated by gdbm on OS/2 EMX.
369
370- SF bugs 763047 and 763052: fixes bug of timezone value being left as
371 -1 when ``time.tzname[0] == time.tzname[1] and not time.daylight``
372 is true when it should only when time.daylight is true.
373
374- SF bug 764548: re now allows subclasses of str and unicode to be
375 used as patterns.
376
377- SF bug 763637: In Tkinter, change after_cancel() to handle tuples
378 of varying sizes. Tk 8.4 returns a different number of values
379 than Tk 8.3.
380
381- SF bug 763023: difflib.ratio() did not catch zero division.
382
383- The Queue module now has an __all__ attribute.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000384
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000385Tools/Demos
386-----------
387
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000388- See Lib/idlelib/NEWS.txt for IDLE news.
389
Neal Norwitz592c4cc2003-07-01 04:14:28 +0000390- SF bug 753592: webchecker/wsgui now handles user supplied directories.
391
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000392- The trace.py script has been removed. It is now in the standard library.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000393
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000394Build
395-----
396
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000397- Python now compiles with -fno-strict-aliasing if possible (SF bug 766696).
398
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000399- The socket module compiles on IRIX 6.5.10.
400
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000401- An irix64 system is treated the same way as an irix6 system (SF
402 patch 764560).
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000403
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000404- Several definitions were missing on FreeBSD 5.x unless the
405 __BSD_VISIBLE symbol was defined. configure now defines it as
406 needed.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000407
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000408C API
409-----
410
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000411- Unicode objects now support mbcs as a built-in encoding, so the C
412 API can use it without deferring to the encodings package.
413
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000414Windows
415-------
416
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000417- The Windows implementation of PyThread_start_new_thread() never
418 checked error returns from Windows functions correctly. As a result,
419 it could claim to start a new thread even when the Microsoft
420 _beginthread() function failed (due to "too many threads" -- this is
421 on the order of thousands when it happens). In these cases, the
422 Python exception ::
423
424 thread.error: can't start new thread
425
426 is raised now.
427
428- SF bug 766669: Prevent a GPF on interpreter exit when sockets are in
429 use. The interpreter now calls WSACleanup() from Py_Finalize()
430 instead of from DLL teardown.
431
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000432Mac
433---
434
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000435- Bundlebuilder now inherits default values in the right way. It was
Walter Dörwald73a8a4b2003-07-30 12:14:02 +0000436 previously possible for app bundles to get a type of "BNDL" instead
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000437 of "APPL." Other improvements include, a --build-id option to
438 specify the CFBundleIdentifier and using the --python option to set
439 the executable in the bundle.
440
441- Fixed two bugs in MacOSX framework handling.
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000442
Jack Jansene0040412003-07-23 22:17:28 +0000443- pythonw did not allow user interaction in 2.3rc1, this has been fixed.
444
445- Python is now compiled with -mno-fused-madd, making all tests pass
446 on Panther.
447
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000448What's New in Python 2.3 beta 2?
449================================
450
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +0000451*Release date: 29-Jun-2003*
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000452
453Core and builtins
454-----------------
455
Barry Warsaw883f2232003-06-29 17:10:11 +0000456- A program can now set the environment variable PYTHONINSPECT to some
457 string value in Python, and cause the interpreter to enter the
458 interactive prompt at program exit, as if Python had been invoked
459 with the -i option.
460
Raymond Hettingerd05abde2003-06-17 05:05:49 +0000461- list.index() now accepts optional start and stop arguments. Similar
462 changes were made to UserList.index(). SF feature request 754014.
463
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +0000464- SF patch 751998 fixes an unwanted side effect of the previous fix
465 for SF bug 742860 (the next item).
466
Tim Peters50d8b8b2003-05-25 17:44:31 +0000467- SF bug 742860: "WeakKeyDictionary __delitem__ uses iterkeys". This
468 wasn't threadsafe, was very inefficient (expected time O(len(dict))
469 instead of O(1)), and could raise a spurious RuntimeError if another
470 thread mutated the dict during __delitem__, or if a comparison function
471 mutated it. It also neglected to raise KeyError when the key wasn't
472 present; didn't raise TypeError when the key wasn't of a weakly
473 referencable type; and broke various more-or-less obscure dict
474 invariants by using a sequence of equality comparisons over the whole
475 set of dict keys instead of computing the key's hash code to narrow
476 the search to those keys with the same hash code. All of these are
477 considered to be bugs. A new implementation of __delitem__ repairs all
478 that, but note that fixing these bugs may change visible behavior in
479 code relying (whether intentionally or accidentally) on old behavior.
Tim Peters886128f2003-05-25 01:45:11 +0000480
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000481- SF bug 734869: Fixed a compiler bug that caused a fatal error when
482 compiling a list comprehension that contained another list comprehension
483 embedded in a lambda expression.
484
Tim Peterse87568d2003-05-24 20:18:24 +0000485- SF bug 705231: builtin pow() no longer lets the platform C pow()
486 raise -1.0 to integer powers, because (at least) glibc gets it wrong
487 in some cases. The result should be -1.0 if the power is odd and 1.0
488 if the power is even, and any float with a sufficiently large exponent
489 is (mathematically) an exact even integer.
490
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000491- SF bug 759227: A new-style class that implements __nonzero__() must
492 return a bool or int (but not an int subclass) from that method. This
493 matches the restriction on classic classes.
494
Martin v. Löwis5467d4c2003-05-10 07:10:12 +0000495- The encoding attribute has been added for file objects, and set to
496 the terminal encoding on Unix and Windows.
497
Tim Peters015dd822003-05-04 04:16:52 +0000498- The softspace attribute of file objects became read-only by oversight.
499 It's writable again.
500
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +0000501- Reverted a 2.3 beta 1 change to iterators for subclasses of list and
502 tuple. By default, the iterators now access data elements directly
503 instead of going through __getitem__. If __getitem__ access is
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +0000504 preferred, then __iter__ can be overridden.
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +0000505
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000506- SF bug 735247: The staticmethod and super types participate in
507 garbage collection. Before this change, it was possible for leaks to
508 occur in functions with non-global free variables that used these types.
509
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000510Extension modules
511-----------------
512
Raymond Hettinger643bcec2003-06-29 03:29:42 +0000513- the socket module has a new exception, socket.timeout, to allow
514 timeouts to be handled separately from other socket errors.
515
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000516- SF bug 751276: cPickle has fixed to propagate exceptions raised in
517 user code. In earlier versions, cPickle caught and ignored any
518 exception when it performed operations that it expected to raise
519 specific exceptions like AttributeError.
520
521- cPickle Pickler and Unpickler objects now participate in garbage
522 collection.
523
Tim Peterscda32b72003-06-15 23:13:35 +0000524- mimetools.choose_boundary() could return duplicate strings at times,
525 especially likely on Windows. The strings returned are now guaranteed
526 unique within a single program run.
527
Brett Cannon4e64d782003-06-13 23:44:35 +0000528- thread.interrupt_main() raises KeyboardInterrupt in the main thread.
529 dummy_thread has also been modified to try to simulate the behavior.
530
Walter Dörwald9e46abe2003-05-18 03:15:10 +0000531- array.array.insert() now treats negative indices as being relative
532 to the end of the array, just like list.insert() does. (SF bug #739313)
533
Tim Petersb0c854d2003-05-17 15:57:00 +0000534- The datetime module classes datetime, time, and timedelta are now
535 properly subclassable.
Tim Petersa98924a2003-05-17 05:55:19 +0000536
Martin v. Löwis28e9ce92003-05-09 08:19:48 +0000537- _tkinter.{get|set}busywaitinterval was added.
538
Raymond Hettinger834f4632003-05-02 20:24:56 +0000539- itertools.islice() now accepts stop=None as documented.
540 Fixes SF bug #730685.
541
Skip Montanaro8c044d82003-05-06 20:42:37 +0000542- the bsddb185 module is built in one restricted instance -
543 /usr/include/db.h exists and defines HASHVERSION to be 2. This is true
544 for many BSD-derived systems.
545
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000546
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000547Library
548-------
549
Tim Petersdb3756d2003-06-29 05:30:48 +0000550- Some happy doctest extensions from Jim Fulton have been added to
551 doctest.py. These are already being used in Zope3. The two
552 primary ones:
553
554 doctest.debug(module, name) extracts the doctests from the named object
555 in the given module, puts them in a temp file, and starts pdb running
556 on that file. This is great when a doctest fails.
557
558 doctest.DocTestSuite(module=None) returns a synthesized unittest
559 TestSuite instance, to be run by the unittest framework, which
560 runs all the doctests in the module. This allows writing tests in
561 doctest style (which can be clearer and shorter than writing tests
562 in unittest style), without losing unittest's powerful testing
563 framework features (which doctest lacks).
564
Tim Peters6ebe61f2003-06-27 20:48:05 +0000565- For compatibility with doctests created before 2.3, if an expected
566 output block consists solely of "1" and the actual output block
567 consists solely of "True", it's accepted as a match; similarly
568 for "0" and "False". This is quite un-doctest-like, but is practical.
569 The behavior can be disabled by passing the new doctest module
570 constant DONT_ACCEPT_TRUE_FOR_1 to the new optionflags optional
571 argument.
572
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000573- ZipFile.testzip() now only traps BadZipfile exceptions. Previously,
574 a bare except caught to much and reported all errors as a problem
575 in the archive.
576
577- The logging module now has a new function, makeLogRecord() making
578 LogHandler easier to interact with DatagramHandler and SocketHandler.
579
Skip Montanaro364ca402003-06-17 12:58:31 +0000580- The cgitb module has been extended to support plain text display (SF patch
581 569574).
582
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +0000583- A brand new version of IDLE (from the IDLEfork project at
584 SourceForge) is now included as Lib/idlelib. The old Tools/idle is
585 no more.
586
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000587- Added a new module: trace (documentation missing). This module used
588 to be distributed in Tools/scripts. It uses sys.settrace() to trace
589 code execution -- either function calls or individual lines. It can
590 generate tracing output during execution or a post-mortem report of
591 code coverage.
592
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +0000593- The threading module has new functions settrace() and setprofile()
594 that cooperate with the functions of the same name in the sys
595 module. A function registered with the threading module will
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000596 be used for all threads it creates. The new trace module uses this
597 to provide tracing for code running in threads.
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +0000598
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +0000599- copy.py: applied SF patch 707900, fixing bug 702858, by Steven
600 Taschuk. Copying a new-style class that had a reference to itself
601 didn't work. (The same thing worked fine for old-style classes.)
Martin v. Löwisba8f5ff2003-06-14 07:10:06 +0000602 Builtin functions are now treated as atomic, fixing bug #746304.
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +0000603
Raymond Hettingerc24d7672003-06-08 19:42:33 +0000604- difflib.py has two new functions: context_diff() and unified_diff().
605
Guido van Rossumfa19f7c2003-05-16 01:46:51 +0000606- More fixes to urllib (SF 549151): (a) When redirecting, always use
607 GET. This is common practice and more-or-less sanctioned by the
608 HTTP standard. (b) Add a handler for 307 redirection, which becomes
609 an error for POST, but a regular redirect for GET and HEAD
610
Guido van Rossumbf1bef82003-05-13 18:01:19 +0000611- Added optional 'onerror' argument to os.walk(), to control error
612 handling.
613
Martin v. Löwise59e2ba2003-05-03 09:09:02 +0000614- inspect.is{method|data}descriptor was added, to allow pydoc display
615 __doc__ of data descriptors.
616
Skip Montanaro4a7751c2003-04-29 21:07:16 +0000617- Fixed socket speed loss caused by use of the _socketobject wrapper class
618 in socket.py.
619
Raymond Hettinger22952a32003-05-20 04:59:56 +0000620- timeit.py now checks the current directory for imports.
621
Gustavo Niemeyer9556fba2003-06-07 17:53:08 +0000622- urllib2.py now knows how to order proxy classes, so the user doesn't
623 have to insert it in front of other classes, nor do dirty tricks like
624 inserting a "dummy" HTTPHandler after a ProxyHandler when building an
625 opener with proxy support.
626
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +0000627- Iterators have been added for dbm keys.
628
629- random.Random objects can now be pickled.
630
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000631Tools/Demos
632-----------
633
Martin v. Löwisb8c084e2003-06-14 09:03:46 +0000634- pydoc now offers help on keywords and topics.
635
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +0000636- Tools/idle is gone; long live Lib/idlelib.
637
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +0000638- diff.py prints file diffs in context, unified, or ndiff formats,
639 providing a command line interface to difflib.py.
Raymond Hettinger2f3c74a2003-06-08 23:10:15 +0000640
Raymond Hettinger71e00332003-05-10 03:30:13 +0000641- texcheck.py is a new script for making a rough validation of Python LaTeX
642 files.
643
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000644Build
645-----
646
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +0000647- Setting DESTDIR during 'make install' now allows specifying a
Martin v. Löwis3b8ee082003-05-11 20:25:35 +0000648 different root directory.
649
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000650C API
651-----
652
Tim Peters3cfe7542003-05-21 21:29:48 +0000653- PyType_Ready(): If a type declares that it participates in gc
654 (Py_TPFLAGS_HAVE_GC), and its base class does not, and its base class's
655 tp_free slot is the default _PyObject_Del, and type does not define
656 a tp_free slot itself, _PyObject_GC_Del is assigned to type->tp_free.
657 Previously _PyObject_Del was inherited, which could at best lead to a
658 segfault. In addition, if even after this magic the type's tp_free
659 slot is _PyObject_Del or NULL, and the type is a base type
660 (Py_TPFLAGS_BASETYPE), TypeError is raised: since the type is a base
661 type, its dealloc function must call type->tp_free, and since the type
662 is gc'able, tp_free must not be NULL or _PyObject_Del.
663
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +0000664- PyThreadState_SetAsyncExc(): A new API (deliberately accessible only
665 from C) to interrupt a thread by sending it an exception. It is
666 intentional that you have to write your own C extension to call it
667 from Python.
668
669
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000670New platforms
671-------------
672
673None this time.
674
675Tests
676-----
677
678- test_imp rewritten so that it doesn't raise RuntimeError if run as a
679 side effect of being imported ("import test.autotest").
680
681Windows
682-------
683
Tim Petersfaa697a2003-06-22 01:42:20 +0000684- The Windows installer ships with Tcl/Tk 8.4.3 (upgraded from 8.4.1).
685
Tim Petersc4607da2003-05-08 18:13:59 +0000686- The installer always suggested that Python be installed on the C:
687 drive, due to a hardcoded "C:" generated by the Wise installation
688 wizard. People with machines where C: is not the system drive
689 usually want Python installed on whichever drive is their system drive
690 instead. We removed the hardcoded "C:", and two testers on machines
691 where C: is not the system drive report that the installer now
692 suggests their system drive. Note that you can always select the
693 directory you want in the "Select Destination Directory" dialog --
694 that's what it's for.
695
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000696Mac
697---
698
Just van Rossum99bc1fc2003-05-09 15:01:25 +0000699- There's a new module called "autoGIL", which offers a mechanism to
700 automatically release the Global Interpreter Lock when an event loop
701 goes to sleep, allowing other threads to run. It's currently only
702 supported on OSX, in the Mach-O version.
Jack Jansenf5e23ff2003-06-16 13:53:40 +0000703- The OSA modules now allow direct access to properties of the
704 toplevel application class (in AppleScript terminology).
705- The Package Manager can now update itself.
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000706
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +0000707SourceForge Bugs and Patches Applied
708------------------------------------
709
710430160, 471893, 501716, 542562, 549151, 569574, 595837, 596434,
711598163, 604210, 604716, 610332, 612627, 614770, 620190, 621891,
712622042, 639139, 640236, 644345, 649742, 649742, 658233, 660022,
713661318, 661676, 662807, 662923, 666219, 672855, 678325, 682347,
714683486, 684981, 685773, 686254, 692776, 692959, 693094, 696777,
715697989, 700827, 703666, 708495, 708604, 708901, 710733, 711902,
716713722, 715782, 718286, 719359, 719367, 723136, 723831, 723962,
717724588, 724767, 724767, 725942, 726150, 726446, 726869, 727051,
718727719, 727719, 727805, 728277, 728563, 728656, 729096, 729103,
719729293, 729297, 729300, 729317, 729395, 729622, 729817, 730170,
720730296, 730594, 730685, 730826, 730963, 731209, 731403, 731504,
721731514, 731626, 731635, 731643, 731644, 731644, 731689, 732124,
722732143, 732234, 732284, 732284, 732479, 732761, 732783, 732951,
723733667, 733781, 734118, 734231, 734869, 735051, 735293, 735527,
724735613, 735694, 736962, 736962, 737970, 738066, 739313, 740055,
725740234, 740301, 741806, 742126, 742741, 742860, 742860, 742911,
726744041, 744104, 744238, 744687, 744877, 745055, 745478, 745525,
727745620, 746012, 746304, 746366, 746801, 746953, 747348, 747667,
728747954, 748846, 748849, 748973, 748975, 749191, 749210, 749759,
729749831, 749911, 750008, 750092, 750542, 750595, 751038, 751107,
730751276, 751451, 751916, 751941, 751956, 751998, 752671, 753451,
731753602, 753617, 753845, 753925, 754014, 754340, 754447, 755031,
732755087, 755147, 755245, 755683, 755987, 756032, 756996, 757058,
733757229, 757818, 757821, 757822, 758112, 758910, 759227, 759889,
734760257, 760703, 760792, 761104, 761337, 761519, 761830, 762455
735
736
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000737What's New in Python 2.3 beta 1?
738================================
739
Guido van Rossumfa1eddf2003-04-25 19:19:52 +0000740*Release date: 25-Apr-2003*
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000741
742Core and builtins
743-----------------
744
Thomas Heller5eccabc2003-04-23 19:35:25 +0000745- New format codes B, H, I, k and K have been implemented for
746 PyArg_ParseTuple and PyBuild_Value.
747
Alex Martellia70b1912003-04-22 08:12:33 +0000748- New builtin function sum(seq, start=0) returns the sum of all the
749 items in iterable object seq, plus start (items are normally numbers,
750 and cannot be strings).
751
Guido van Rossumaa86e352003-04-19 18:15:10 +0000752- bool() called without arguments now returns False rather than
753 raising an exception. This is consistent with calling the
754 constructors for the other builtin types -- called without argument
755 they all return the false value of that type. (SF patch #724135)
756
Guido van Rossumcf8d2852003-04-17 16:53:26 +0000757- In support of PEP 269 (making the pgen parser generator accessible
758 from Python), some changes to the pgen code structure were made; a
759 few files that used to be linked only with pgen are now linked with
760 Python itself.
761
Guido van Rossumc1f6e8c2003-04-16 21:13:23 +0000762- The repr() of a weakref object now shows the __name__ attribute of
763 the referenced object, if it has one.
764
Guido van Rossum76ba09f2003-04-16 19:40:58 +0000765- super() no longer ignores data descriptors, except __class__. See
766 the thread started at
767 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2003-April/034338.html
768
Guido van Rossum3a3cca52003-04-14 20:58:14 +0000769- list.insert(i, x) now interprets negative i as it would be
770 interpreted by slicing, so negative values count from the end of the
771 list. This was the only place where such an interpretation was not
772 placed on a list index.
773
Guido van Rossumefbbb1c2003-04-11 18:43:06 +0000774- range() now works even if the arguments are longs with magnitude
775 larger than sys.maxint, as long as the total length of the sequence
776 fits. E.g., range(2**100, 2**101, 2**100) is the following list:
777 [1267650600228229401496703205376L]. (SF patch #707427.)
778
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +0000779- Some horridly obscure problems were fixed involving interaction
780 between garbage collection and old-style classes with "ambitious"
781 getattr hooks. If an old-style instance didn't have a __del__ method,
782 but did have a __getattr__ hook, and the instance became reachable
783 only from an unreachable cycle, and the hook resurrected or deleted
784 unreachable objects when asked to resolve "__del__", anything up to
785 a segfault could happen. That's been repaired.
786
Raymond Hettingera3e1e4c2003-03-06 23:54:28 +0000787- dict.pop now takes an optional argument specifying a default
788 value to return if the key is not in the dict. If a default is not
789 given and the key is not found, a KeyError will still be raised.
790 Parallel changes were made to UserDict.UserDict and UserDict.DictMixin.
791 [SF patch #693753] (contributed by Michael Stone.)
792
Martin v. Löwis73d538b2003-03-05 15:13:47 +0000793- sys.getfilesystemencoding() was added to expose
794 Py_FileSystemDefaultEncoding.
Guido van Rossum46d3dc32003-03-01 03:20:41 +0000795
796- New function sys.exc_clear() clears the current exception. This is
797 rarely needed, but can sometimes be useful to release objects
798 referenced by the traceback held in sys.exc_info()[2]. (SF patch
799 #693195.)
800
Neal Norwitzd5a65a72003-02-23 23:11:41 +0000801- On 64-bit systems, a dictionary could contain duplicate long/int keys
802 if the key value was larger than 2**32. See SF bug #689659.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000803
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +0000804- Fixed SF bug #663074. The codec system was using global static
Walter Dörwaldfa86bf52003-03-31 16:15:13 +0000805 variables to store internal data. As a result, any attempts to use the
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +0000806 unicode system with multiple active interpreters, or successive
807 interpreter executions, would fail.
808
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +0000809- "%c" % u"a" now returns a unicode string instead of raising a
Walter Dörwald44f527f2003-04-02 16:37:24 +0000810 TypeError. u"%c" % 0xffffffff now raises a OverflowError instead
Walter Dörwald1e469c52003-04-02 16:57:59 +0000811 of a ValueError to be consistent with "%c" % 256. See SF patch #710127.
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +0000812
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000813Extension modules
814-----------------
815
Guido van Rossume7adda92003-04-25 05:52:37 +0000816- The socket module now provides the functions inet_pton and inet_ntop
817 for converting between string and packed representation of IP
818 addresses. There is also a new module variable, has_ipv6, which is
819 True iff the current Python has IPv6 support. See SF patch #658327.
820
Martin v. Löwisbfe175c2003-04-16 19:42:51 +0000821- Tkinter wrappers around Tcl variables now pass objects directly
822 to Tcl, instead of first converting them to strings.
823
Guido van Rossum41c99e72003-04-14 17:59:34 +0000824- The .*? pattern in the re module is now special-cased to avoid the
825 recursion limit. (SF patch #720991 -- many thanks to Gary Herron
826 and Greg Chapman.)
827
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +0000828- New function sys.call_tracing() allows pdb to debug code
829 recursively.
830
Tim Peters730f5532003-04-08 17:17:17 +0000831- New function gc.get_referents(obj) returns a list of objects
Tim Peters0f81ab62003-04-08 16:39:48 +0000832 directly referenced by obj. In effect, it exposes what the object's
833 tp_traverse slot does, and can be helpful when debugging memory
834 leaks.
835
Martin v. Löwis7fb697b2003-04-03 04:49:12 +0000836- The iconv module has been removed from this release.
837
Tim Petersd50ade62003-03-20 18:32:13 +0000838- The platform-independent routines for packing floats in IEEE formats
839 (struct.pack's <f, >f, <d, and >d codes; pickle and cPickle's protocol 1
840 pickling of floats) ignored that rounding can cause a carry to
841 propagate. The worst consequence was that, in rare cases, <f and >f
842 could produce strings that, when unpacked again, were a factor of 2
843 away from the original float. This has been fixed. See SF bug
844 #705836.
845
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +0000846- New function time.tzset() provides access to the C library tzset()
Guido van Rossumd11b62e2003-03-14 21:51:36 +0000847 function, if supported. (SF patch #675422.)
848
Neal Norwitz12e22172003-03-03 21:16:39 +0000849- Using createfilehandler, deletefilehandler, createtimerhandler functions
850 on Tkinter.tkinter (_tkinter module) no longer crashes the interpreter.
851 See SF bug #692416.
852
Michael W. Hudsonf0089982003-03-03 12:29:42 +0000853- Modified the fcntl.ioctl() function to allow modification of a passed
854 mutable buffer (for details see the reference documentation).
855
Raymond Hettinger61fe64d2003-02-23 04:40:07 +0000856- Made user requested changes to the itertools module.
857 Subsumed the times() function into repeat().
858 Added chain() and cycle().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000859
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +0000860- The rotor module is now deprecated; the encryption algorithm it uses
Andrew M. Kuchlingfb5f4852003-04-24 13:19:56 +0000861 is not believed to be secure, and including crypto code with Python
862 has implications for exporting and importing it in various countries.
863
Skip Montanaro89feabc2003-03-30 04:54:24 +0000864- The socket module now always uses the _socketobject wrapper class, even on
865 platforms which have dup(2). The makefile() method is built directly
866 on top of the socket without duplicating the file descriptor, allowing
867 timeouts to work properly.
868
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000869Library
870-------
871
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +0000872- New generator function os.walk() is an easy-to-use alternative to
873 os.path.walk(). See os module docs for details. os.path.walk()
874 isn't deprecated at this time, but may become deprecated in a
875 future release.
876
Marc-André Lemburg246d8472003-04-24 11:36:11 +0000877- Added new module "platform" which provides a wide range of tools
878 for querying platform dependent features.
879
Andrew M. Kuchling4e42b312003-04-24 16:45:05 +0000880- netrc now allows ASCII punctuation characters in passwords.
Raymond Hettinger1d877862003-04-23 19:06:08 +0000881
Martin v. Löwis153c9e42003-04-19 20:59:03 +0000882- shelve now supports the optional writeback argument, and exposes
883 pickle protocol versions.
884
Guido van Rossuma2685402003-04-19 18:04:57 +0000885- Several methods of nntplib.NNTP have grown an optional file argument
886 which specifies a file where to divert the command's output
887 (already supported by the body() method). (SF patch #720468)
888
Martin v. Löwis281b2c62003-04-18 21:04:39 +0000889- The self-documenting XML server library DocXMLRPCServer was added.
890
Martin v. Löwis2548c732003-04-18 10:39:54 +0000891- Support for internationalized domain names has been added through
892 the 'idna' and 'punycode' encodings, the 'stringprep' module, the
893 'mkstringprep' tool, and enhancements to the socket and httplib
894 modules.
895
Walter Dörwald5688b7a2003-04-16 09:46:13 +0000896- htmlentitydefs has two new dictionaries: name2codepoint maps
897 HTML entity names to Unicode codepoints (as integers).
898 codepoint2name is the reverse mapping. See SF patch #722017.
899
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +0000900- pdb has a new command, "debug", which lets you step through
901 arbitrary code from the debugger's (pdb) prompt.
902
Raymond Hettingerc377cbf2003-04-04 22:56:42 +0000903- unittest.failUnlessEqual and its equivalent unittest.assertEqual now
904 return 'not a == b' rather than 'a != b'. This gives the desired
905 result for classes that define __eq__ without defining __ne__.
906
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +0000907- sgmllib now supports SGML marked sections, in particular the
Martin v. Löwis3163a3b2003-03-30 14:25:40 +0000908 MS Office extensions.
909
Raymond Hettinger42182eb2003-03-09 05:33:33 +0000910- The urllib module now offers support for the iterator protocol.
911 SF patch 698520 contributed by Brett Cannon.
912
Guido van Rossum9589a252003-03-06 01:56:12 +0000913- New module timeit provides a simple framework for timing the
914 execution speed of expressions and statements.
915
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +0000916- sets.Set objects now support mixed-type __eq__ and __ne__, instead
917 of raising TypeError. If x is a Set object and y is a non-Set object,
918 x == y is False, and x != y is True. This is akin to the change made
919 for mixed-type comparisons of datetime objects in 2.3a2; more info
920 about the rationale is in the NEWS entry for that. See also SF bug
921 report <http://www.python.org/sf/693121>.
922
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +0000923- On Unix platforms, if os.listdir() is called with a Unicode argument,
924 it now returns Unicode strings. (This behavior was added earlier
925 to the Windows NT/2k/XP version of os.listdir().)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000926
Andrew M. Kuchling6f177d42003-02-28 22:09:33 +0000927- Distutils: both 'py_modules' and 'packages' keywords can now be specified
928 in core.setup(). Previously you could supply one or the other, but
929 not both of them. (SF patch #695090 from Bernhard Herzog)
930
Skip Montanaro64a839e2003-03-20 23:36:55 +0000931- New csv package makes it easy to read/write CSV files.
932
Gustavo Niemeyer68d8cef2003-04-17 21:31:33 +0000933- Module shlex has been extended to allow posix-like shell parsings,
934 including a split() function for easy spliting of quoted strings and
935 commands. An iterator interface was also implemented.
936
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000937Tools/Demos
938-----------
939
Tim Peters21d7d4d2003-04-18 00:45:59 +0000940- New script combinerefs.py helps analyze new PYTHONDUMPREFS output.
941 See the module docstring for details.
942
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000943Build
944-----
945
Neal Norwitz35892b92003-02-23 23:45:35 +0000946- Fix problem building on OSF1 because the compiler only accepted
947 preprocessor directives that start in column 1. (SF bug #691793.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000948
949C API
950-----
951
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +0000952- Added PyGC_Collect(), equivalent to calling gc.collect().
953
Guido van Rossum0fc8f002003-04-15 15:12:39 +0000954- PyThreadState_GetDict() was changed not to raise an exception or
955 issue a fatal error when no current thread state is available. This
956 makes it possible to print dictionaries when no thread is active.
957
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +0000958- LONG_LONG was renamed to PY_LONG_LONG. Extensions that use this and
959 need compatibility with previous versions can use this:
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +0000960
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +0000961 #ifndef PY_LONG_LONG
962 #define PY_LONG_LONG LONG_LONG
963 #endif
Martin v. Löwisb9a0f912003-03-29 10:06:18 +0000964
Raymond Hettinger1da1dbf2003-03-17 19:46:11 +0000965- Added PyObject_SelfIter() to fill the tp_iter slot for the
Raymond Hettinger01538262003-03-17 08:24:35 +0000966 typical case where the method returns its self argument.
967
Guido van Rossume5c691a2003-03-07 15:13:17 +0000968- The extended type structure used for heap types (new-style
969 classes defined by Python code using a class statement) is now
970 exported from object.h as PyHeapTypeObject. (SF patch #696193.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000971
972New platforms
973-------------
974
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +0000975None this time.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000976
977Tests
978-----
979
Neal Norwitz55b61d22003-02-28 19:57:03 +0000980- test_timeout now requires -u network to be passed to regrtest to run.
981 See SF bug #692988.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000982
983Windows
984-------
985
Tim Peters11b23062003-04-23 02:39:17 +0000986- os.fsync() now exists on Windows, and calls the Microsoft _commit()
987 function.
988
Guido van Rossumf4050642003-04-09 19:39:06 +0000989- New function winsound.MessageBeep() wraps the Win32 API
990 MessageBeep().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000991
992Mac
993---
994
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +0000995- os.listdir() now returns Unicode strings on MacOS X when called with
996 a Unicode argument. See the general news item under "Library".
Just van Rossum46c97842003-02-25 21:42:15 +0000997
Jack Jansendeac2ac2003-02-24 11:04:17 +0000998- A new method MacOS.WMAvailable() returns true if it is safe to access
999 the window manager, false otherwise.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001000
Jack Jansencf76be02003-03-24 12:13:54 +00001001- EasyDialogs dialogs are now movable-modal, and if the application is
1002 currently in the background they will ask to be moved to the foreground
1003 before displaying.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001004
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00001005- OSA Scripting support has improved a lot, and gensuitemodule.py can now
Jack Jansende354b72003-04-11 15:37:20 +00001006 be used by mere mortals. The documentation is now also more or less
1007 complete.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001008
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00001009- The IDE (in a framework build) now includes introductory documentation
1010 in Apple Help Viewer format.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001011
1012
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001013What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 2?
1014=================================
1015
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00001016*Release date: 19-Feb-2003*
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001017
1018Core and builtins
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00001019-----------------
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001020
Walter Dörwald2ffec022003-02-19 16:34:11 +00001021- Negative positions returned from PEP 293 error callbacks are now
1022 treated as being relative to the end of the input string. Positions
1023 that are out of bounds raise an IndexError.
1024
Guido van Rossum162e38c2003-02-19 15:25:10 +00001025- sys.path[0] (the directory from which the script is loaded) is now
1026 turned into an absolute pathname, unless it is the empty string.
1027 (SF patch #664376.)
1028
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00001029- Finally fixed the bug in compile() and exec where a string ending
1030 with an indented code block but no newline would raise SyntaxError.
1031 This would have been a four-line change in parsetok.c... Except
1032 codeop.py depends on this behavior, so a compilation flag had to be
1033 invented that causes the tokenizer to revert to the old behavior;
1034 this required extra changes to 2 .h files, 2 .c files, and 2 .py
Guido van Rossum1442dc12003-02-13 22:19:20 +00001035 files. (Fixes SF bug #501622.)
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00001036
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00001037- If a new-style class defines neither __new__ nor __init__, its
1038 constructor would ignore all arguments. This is changed now: the
1039 constructor refuses arguments in this case. This might break code
1040 that worked under Python 2.2. The simplest fix is to add a no-op
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001041 __init__: ``def __init__(self, *args, **kw): pass``.
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00001042
Guido van Rossum48035eb2003-02-12 17:05:26 +00001043- Through a bytecode optimizer bug (and I bet you didn't even know
1044 Python *had* a bytecode optimizer :-), "unsigned" hex/oct constants
1045 with a leading minus sign would come out with the wrong sign.
1046 ("Unsigned" hex/oct constants are those with a face value in the
1047 range sys.maxint+1 through sys.maxint*2+1, inclusive; these have
1048 always been interpreted as negative numbers through sign folding.)
1049 E.g. 0xffffffff is -1, and -(0xffffffff) is 1, but -0xffffffff would
1050 come out as -4294967295. This was the case in Python 2.2 through
1051 2.2.2 and 2.3a1, and in Python 2.4 it will once again have that
1052 value, but according to PEP 237 it really needs to be 1 now. This
1053 will be backported to Python 2.2.3 a well. (SF #660455)
1054
Guido van Rossum47710652003-02-12 20:48:22 +00001055- int(s, base) sometimes sign-folds hex and oct constants; it only
1056 does this when base is 0 and s.strip() starts with a '0'. When the
1057 sign is actually folded, as in int("0xffffffff", 0) on a 32-bit
1058 machine, which returns -1, a FutureWarning is now issued; in Python
1059 2.4, this will return 4294967295L, as do int("+0xffffffff", 0) and
1060 int("0xffffffff", 16) right now. (PEP 347)
1061
Guido van Rossuma89d10e2003-02-12 03:58:38 +00001062- super(X, x): x may now be a proxy for an X instance, i.e.
1063 issubclass(x.__class__, X) but not issubclass(type(x), X).
1064
Guido van Rossum03bc7d32003-02-12 03:32:58 +00001065- isinstance(x, X): if X is a new-style class, this is now equivalent
1066 to issubclass(type(x), X) or issubclass(x.__class__, X). Previously
1067 only type(x) was tested. (For classic classes this was already the
1068 case.)
1069
Just van Rossum73ffb4a2003-02-10 09:57:08 +00001070- compile(), eval() and the exec statement now fully support source code
1071 passed as unicode strings.
1072
Neal Norwitzde8b94c2003-02-10 02:12:43 +00001073- int subclasses can be initialized with longs if the value fits in an int.
1074 See SF bug #683467.
1075
Tim Petersbf2674b2003-02-02 07:51:32 +00001076- long(string, base) takes time linear in len(string) when base is a power
1077 of 2 now. It used to take time quadratic in len(string).
1078
Martin v. Löwis8afd7572003-01-25 22:46:11 +00001079- filter returns now Unicode results for Unicode arguments.
1080
Martin v. Löwisaf6a27a2003-01-03 19:16:14 +00001081- raw_input can now return Unicode objects.
1082
Skip Montanaro4abd5f02003-01-02 20:51:08 +00001083- List objects' sort() method now accepts None as the comparison function.
1084 Passing None is semantically identical to calling sort() with no
1085 arguments.
1086
Neal Norwitz1a997502003-01-13 20:13:12 +00001087- Fixed crash when printing a subclass of str and __str__ returned self.
1088 See SF bug #667147.
1089
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00001090- Fixed an invalid RuntimeWarning and an undetected error when trying
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00001091 to convert a long integer into a float which couldn't fit.
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00001092 See SF bug #676155.
1093
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00001094- Function objects now have a __module__ attribute that is bound to
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00001095 the name of the module in which the function was defined. This
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00001096 applies for C functions and methods as well as functions and methods
1097 defined in Python. This attribute is used by pickle.whichmodule(),
1098 which changes the behavior of whichmodule slightly. In Python 2.2
1099 whichmodule() returns "__main__" for functions that are not defined
1100 at the top-level of a module (examples: methods, nested functions).
1101 Now whichmodule() will return the proper module name.
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00001102
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001103Extension modules
1104-----------------
1105
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00001106- operator.isNumberType() now checks that the object has a nb_int or
1107 nb_float slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
1108 tp_as_number pointer.
1109
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00001110- The imp module now has ways to acquire and release the "import
1111 lock": imp.acquire_lock() and imp.release_lock(). Note: this is a
1112 reentrant lock, so releasing the lock only truly releases it when
1113 this is the last release_lock() call. You can check with
1114 imp.lock_held(). (SF bug #580952 and patch #683257.)
1115
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001116- Change to cPickle to match pickle.py (see below and PEP 307).
1117
Neal Norwitz9caf9c02003-02-10 01:54:06 +00001118- Fix some bugs in the parser module. SF bug #678518.
1119
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00001120- Thanks to Scott David Daniels, a subtle bug in how the zlib
Walter Dörwald28d81962003-02-03 20:53:14 +00001121 extension implemented flush() was fixed. Scott also rewrote the
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00001122 zlib test suite using the unittest module. (SF bug #640230 and
1123 patch #678531.)
1124
Raymond Hettinger96ef8112003-02-01 00:10:11 +00001125- Added an itertools module containing high speed, memory efficient
1126 looping constructs inspired by tools from Haskell and SML.
1127
Guido van Rossum99d4abf2003-01-27 22:22:50 +00001128- The SSL module now handles sockets with a timeout set correctly (SF
1129 patch #675750, fixing SF bug #675552).
1130
Barry Warsawf8ba39c2003-01-07 20:55:26 +00001131- os/posixmodule has grown the sysexits.h constants (EX_OK and friends).
1132
Guido van Rossum6d0d3652003-01-07 20:34:19 +00001133- Fixed broken threadstate swap in readline that could cause fatal
1134 errors when a readline hook was being invoked while a background
1135 thread was active. (SF bugs #660476 and #513033.)
1136
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001137- fcntl now exposes the strops.h I_* constants.
1138
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00001139- Fix a crash on Solaris that occurred when calling close() on
1140 an mmap'ed file which was already closed. (SF patch #665913)
1141
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001142- Fixed several serious bugs in the zipimport implementation.
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001143
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00001144- datetime changes:
1145
Guido van Rossum8b7a9a32003-04-14 22:01:58 +00001146 The date class is now properly subclassable. (SF bug #720908)
1147
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00001148 The datetime and datetimetz classes have been collapsed into a single
1149 datetime class, and likewise the time and timetz classes into a single
1150 time class. Previously, a datetimetz object with tzinfo=None acted
1151 exactly like a datetime object, and similarly for timetz. This wasn't
1152 enough of a difference to justify distinct classes, and life is simpler
1153 now.
1154
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00001155 today() and now() now round system timestamps to the closest
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00001156 microsecond <http://www.python.org/sf/661086>. This repairs an
1157 irritation most likely seen on Windows systems.
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00001158
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00001159 In dt.astimezone(tz), if tz.utcoffset(dt) returns a duration,
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00001160 ValueError is raised if tz.dst(dt) returns None (2.3a1 treated it
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00001161 as 0 instead, but a tzinfo subclass wishing to participate in
1162 time zone conversion has to take a stand on whether it supports
1163 DST; if you don't care about DST, then code dst() to return 0 minutes,
1164 meaning that DST is never in effect).
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00001165
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00001166 The tzinfo methods utcoffset() and dst() must return a timedelta object
1167 (or None) now. In 2.3a1 they could also return an int or long, but that
1168 was an unhelpfully redundant leftover from an earlier version wherein
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00001169 they couldn't return a timedelta. TOOWTDI.
1170
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00001171 The example tzinfo class for local time had a bug. It was replaced
1172 by a later example coded by Guido.
1173
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00001174 datetime.astimezone(tz) no longer raises an exception when the
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00001175 input datetime has no UTC equivalent in tz. For typical "hybrid" time
1176 zones (a single tzinfo subclass modeling both standard and daylight
1177 time), this case can arise one hour per year, at the hour daylight time
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00001178 ends. See new docs for details. In short, the new behavior mimics
1179 the local wall clock's behavior of repeating an hour in local time.
1180
1181 dt.astimezone() can no longer be used to convert between naive and aware
1182 datetime objects. If you merely want to attach, or remove, a tzinfo
1183 object, without any conversion of date and time members, use
1184 dt.replace(tzinfo=whatever) instead, where "whatever" is None or a
1185 tzinfo subclass instance.
1186
1187 A new method tzinfo.fromutc(dt) can be overridden in tzinfo subclasses
1188 to give complete control over how a UTC time is to be converted to
1189 a local time. The default astimezone() implementation calls fromutc()
1190 as its last step, so a tzinfo subclass can affect that too by overriding
1191 fromutc(). It's expected that the default fromutc() implementation will
1192 be suitable as-is for "almost all" time zone subclasses, but the
1193 creativity of political time zone fiddling appears unbounded -- fromutc()
1194 allows the highly motivated to emulate any scheme expressible in Python.
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00001195
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00001196 datetime.now(): The optional tzinfo argument was undocumented (that's
1197 repaired), and its name was changed to tz ("tzinfo" is overloaded enough
1198 already). With a tz argument, now(tz) used to return the local date
1199 and time, and attach tz to it, without any conversion of date and time
1200 members. This was less than useful. Now now(tz) returns the current
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001201 date and time as local time in tz's time zone, akin to ::
1202
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00001203 tz.fromutc(datetime.utcnow().replace(tzinfo=utc))
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001204
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00001205 where "utc" is an instance of a tzinfo subclass modeling UTC. Without
1206 a tz argument, now() continues to return the current local date and time,
1207 as a naive datetime object.
1208
Tim Peters2a44a8d2003-01-23 20:53:10 +00001209 datetime.fromtimestamp(): Like datetime.now() above, this had less than
1210 useful behavior when the optional tinzo argument was specified. See
1211 also SF bug report <http://www.python.org/sf/660872>.
1212
Tim Peters8d81a012003-01-24 22:36:34 +00001213 date and datetime comparison: In order to prevent comparison from
1214 falling back to the default compare-object-addresses strategy, these
1215 raised TypeError whenever they didn't understand the other object type.
1216 They still do, except when the other object has a "timetuple" attribute,
1217 in which case they return NotImplemented now. This gives other
1218 datetime objects (e.g., mxDateTime) a chance to intercept the
1219 comparison.
1220
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00001221 date, time, datetime and timedelta comparison: When the exception
1222 for mixed-type comparisons in the last paragraph doesn't apply, if
1223 the comparison is == then False is returned, and if the comparison is
1224 != then True is returned. Because dict lookup and the "in" operator
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001225 only invoke __eq__, this allows, for example, ::
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00001226
1227 if some_datetime in some_sequence:
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001228
1229 and ::
1230
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00001231 some_dict[some_timedelta] = whatever
1232
1233 to work as expected, without raising TypeError just because the
1234 sequence is heterogeneous, or the dict has mixed-type keys. [This
1235 seems like a good idea to implement for all mixed-type comparisons
1236 that don't want to allow falling back to address comparison.]
1237
Tim Peters75a6e3b2003-01-04 18:17:36 +00001238 The constructors building a datetime from a timestamp could raise
1239 ValueError if the platform C localtime()/gmtime() inserted "leap
1240 seconds". Leap seconds are ignored now. On such platforms, it's
1241 possible to have timestamps that differ by a second, yet where
1242 datetimes constructed from them are equal.
1243
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00001244 The pickle format of date, time and datetime objects has changed
1245 completely. The undocumented pickler and unpickler functions no
Tim Petersb57f8f02003-02-01 02:54:15 +00001246 longer exist. The undocumented __setstate__() and __getstate__()
1247 methods no longer exist either.
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00001248
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001249Library
1250-------
1251
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001252- The logging module was updated slightly; the WARN level was renamed
1253 to WARNING, and the matching function/method warn() to warning().
1254
1255- The pickle and cPickle modules were updated with a new pickling
1256 protocol (documented by pickletools.py, see below) and several
1257 extensions to the pickle customization API (__reduce__, __setstate__
1258 etc.). The copy module now uses more of the pickle customization
1259 API to copy objects that don't implement __copy__ or __deepcopy__.
1260 See PEP 307 for details.
1261
1262- The distutils "register" command now uses http://www.python.org/pypi
1263 as the default repository. (See PEP 301.)
1264
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00001265- the platform dependent path related variables sep, altsep, extsep,
1266 pathsep, curdir, pardir and defpath are now defined in the platform
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00001267 dependent path modules (e.g. ntpath.py) rather than os.py, so these
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001268 variables are now available via os.path. They continue to be
1269 available from the os module.
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00001270 (see <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00001271
Tim Peters6ee04802003-02-05 18:29:34 +00001272- array.array was added to the types repr.py knows about (see
1273 <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
1274
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00001275- The new pickletools.py contains lots of documentation about pickle
1276 internals, and supplies some helpers for working with pickles, such as
1277 a symbolic pickle disassembler.
1278
Skip Montanaro9a7c96a2003-01-22 18:17:25 +00001279- Xmlrpclib.py now supports the builtin boolean type.
1280
Martin v. Löwis0c6774d2003-01-15 11:51:06 +00001281- py_compile has a new 'doraise' flag and a new PyCompileError
1282 exception.
1283
Martin v. Löwisd69663d2003-01-15 11:37:23 +00001284- SimpleXMLRPCServer now supports CGI through the CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler
1285 class.
1286
Guido van Rossum50e92232003-01-14 16:45:04 +00001287- The sets module now raises TypeError in __cmp__, to clarify that
1288 sets are not intended to be three-way-compared; the comparison
1289 operators are overloaded as subset/superset tests.
1290
Guido van Rossumcd0c0472003-01-07 23:03:05 +00001291- Bastion.py and rexec.py are disabled. These modules are not safe in
1292 Python 2.2. or 2.3.
1293
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001294- realpath is now exported when doing ``from poxixpath import *``.
Neal Norwitzbb0246a2003-01-03 18:12:28 +00001295 It is also exported for ntpath, macpath, and os2emxpath.
1296 See SF bug #659228.
1297
Neal Norwitzb9ef4ae2003-01-05 23:19:43 +00001298- New module tarfile from Lars Gustäbel provides a comprehensive interface
1299 to tar archive files with transparent gzip and bzip2 compression.
1300 See SF patch #651082.
1301
Neal Norwitz4f442372003-01-06 06:51:36 +00001302- urlparse can now parse imap:// URLs. See SF feature request #618024.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001303
Neal Norwitze931ed52003-01-10 23:24:32 +00001304- Tkinter.Canvas.scan_dragto() provides an optional parameter to support
1305 the gain value which is passed to Tk. SF bug# 602259.
1306
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00001307- Fix logging.handlers.SysLogHandler protocol when using UNIX domain sockets.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00001308 See SF patch #642974.
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00001309
Skip Montanaro12fe72e2003-02-25 17:46:20 +00001310- The dospath module was deleted. Use the ntpath module when manipulating
1311 DOS paths from other platforms.
1312
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001313Tools/Demos
1314-----------
1315
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00001316- Two new scripts (db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py) were added to the
1317 Tools/scripts directory to facilitate conversion from the old bsddb module
1318 to the new one. While the user-visible API of the new module is
1319 compatible with the old one, it's likely that the version of the
1320 underlying database library has changed. To convert from the old library,
1321 run the db2pickle.py script using the old version of Python to convert it
1322 to a pickle file. After upgrading Python, run the pickle2db.py script
1323 using the new version of Python to reconstitute your database. For
1324 example:
1325
Skip Montanaro621f0552003-02-03 15:48:10 +00001326 % python2.2 db2pickle.py -h some.db > some.pickle
1327 % python2.3 pickle2db.py -h some.db.new < some.pickle
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00001328
1329 Run the scripts without any args to get a usage message.
1330
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001331
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001332Build
1333-----
1334
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00001335- The audio driver tests (test_ossaudiodev.py and
1336 test_linuxaudiodev.py) are no longer run by default. This is
1337 because they don't always work, depending on your hardware and
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001338 software. To run these tests, you must use an invocation like ::
1339
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00001340 ./python Lib/test/regrtest.py -u audio test_ossaudiodev
1341
Skip Montanarodecc6a42003-01-01 20:07:49 +00001342- On systems which build using the configure script, compiler flags which
1343 used to be lumped together using the OPT flag have been split into two
1344 groups, OPT and BASECFLAGS. OPT is meant to carry just optimization- and
1345 debug-related flags like "-g" and "-O3". BASECFLAGS is meant to carry
1346 compiler flags that are required to get a clean compile. On some
1347 platforms (many Linux flavors in particular) BASECFLAGS will be empty by
1348 default. On others, such as Mac OS X and SCO, it will contain required
1349 flags. This change allows people building Python to override OPT without
1350 fear of clobbering compiler flags which are required to get a clean build.
1351
1352- On Darwin/Mac OS X platforms, /sw/lib and /sw/include are added to the
1353 relevant search lists in setup.py. This allows users building Python to
1354 take advantage of the many packages available from the fink project
1355 <http://fink.sf.net/>.
1356
1357- A new Makefile target, scriptsinstall, installs a number of useful scripts
1358 from the Tools/scripts directory.
1359
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001360C API
1361-----
1362
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001363- PyEval_GetFrame() is now declared to return a ``PyFrameObject *``
1364 instead of a plain ``PyObject *``. (SF patch #686601.)
Guido van Rossum6297a7a2003-02-19 15:53:17 +00001365
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00001366- PyNumber_Check() now checks that the object has a nb_int or nb_float
1367 slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
1368 tp_as_number pointer.
1369
Guido van Rossumeea47182003-02-11 20:39:59 +00001370- A C type that inherits from a base type that defines tp_as_buffer
1371 will now inherit the tp_as_buffer pointer if it doesn't define one.
1372 (SF #681367)
1373
Neil Schemenauer5042da62003-02-04 20:59:40 +00001374- The PyArg_Parse functions now issue a DeprecationWarning if a float
1375 argument is provided when an integer is specified (this affects the 'b',
1376 'B', 'h', 'H', 'i', and 'l' codes). Future versions of Python will
1377 raise a TypeError.
Neil Schemenauercd63e612003-01-24 22:15:53 +00001378
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001379Tests
1380-----
1381
Walter Dörwald11cfbd62003-03-26 16:03:16 +00001382- Several tests weren't being run from regrtest.py (test_timeout.py,
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001383 test_tarfile.py, test_netrc.py, test_multifile.py,
1384 test_importhooks.py and test_imp.py). Now they are. (Note to
1385 developers: please read Lib/test/README when creating a new test, to
1386 make sure to do it right! All tests need to use either unittest or
1387 pydoc.)
1388
1389- Added test_posix.py, a test suite for the posix module.
1390
1391- Added test_hexoct.py, a test suite for hex/oct constant folding.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001392
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001393Windows
1394-------
1395
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00001396- The timeout code for socket connect() didn't work right; this has
1397 now been fixed. test_timeout.py should pass (at least most of the
1398 time).
1399
Thomas Hellerdda583d2003-01-31 20:45:41 +00001400- distutils' msvccompiler class now passes the preprocessor options to
1401 the resource compiler. See SF patch #669198.
1402
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00001403- The bsddb module now ships with Sleepycat's 4.1.25.NC, the latest
1404 release without strong cryptography.
1405
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00001406- sys.path[0], if it contains a directory name, is now always an
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001407 absolute pathname. (SF patch #664376.)
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00001408
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00001409- The new logging package is now installed by the Windows installer. It
1410 wasn't in 2.3a1 due to oversight.
1411
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001412Mac
1413---
1414
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00001415- There are new dialogs EasyDialogs.AskFileForOpen, AskFileForSave
1416 and AskFolder. The old macfs.StandardGetFile and friends are deprecated.
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00001417
Jack Jansenc9296362003-02-06 23:10:45 +00001418- Most of the standard library now uses pathnames or FSRefs in preference
1419 of FSSpecs, and use the underlying Carbon.File and Carbon.Folder modules
1420 in stead of macfs. macfs will probably be deprecated in the future.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00001421
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00001422- Type Carbon.File.FSCatalogInfo and supporting methods have been implemented.
1423 This also makes macfs.FSSpec.SetDates() work again.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001424
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00001425- There is a new module pimp, the package install manager for Python, and
1426 accompanying applet PackageManager. These allow you to easily download
1427 and install pretested extension packages either in source or binary
1428 form. Only in MacPython-OSX.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001429
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00001430- Applets are now built with bundlebuilder in MacPython-OSX, which should make
Jack Jansen5d44b342003-02-18 23:32:47 +00001431 them more robust and also provides a path towards BuildApplication. The
1432 downside of this change is that applets can no longer be run from the
1433 Terminal window, this will hopefully be fixed in the 2.3b1.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001434
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001435
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001436What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 1?
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001437=================================
1438
Guido van Rossumae548862002-12-31 15:47:36 +00001439*Release date: 31-Dec-2002*
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001440
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001441Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001442--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00001443
Michael W. Hudson96bc3b42002-11-26 14:48:23 +00001444- One can now assign to __bases__ and __name__ of new-style classes.
1445
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00001446- dict() now accepts keyword arguments so that dict(one=1, two=2)
1447 is the equivalent of {"one": 1, "two": 2}. Accordingly,
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00001448 the existing (but undocumented) 'items' keyword argument has
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00001449 been eliminated. This means that dict(items=someMapping) now has
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00001450 a different meaning than before.
1451
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00001452- int() now returns a long object if the argument is outside the
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001453 integer range, so int("4" * 1000), int(1e200) and int(1L<<1000) will
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00001454 all return long objects instead of raising an OverflowError.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001455
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00001456- Assignment to __class__ is disallowed if either the old or the new
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00001457 class is a statically allocated type object (such as defined by an
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00001458 extension module). This prevents anomalies like 2.__class__ = bool.
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00001459
1460- New-style object creation and deallocation have been sped up
1461 significantly; they are now faster than classic instance creation
1462 and deallocation.
1463
1464- The __slots__ variable can now mention "private" names, and the
1465 right thing will happen (e.g. __slots__ = ["__foo"]).
1466
1467- The built-ins slice() and buffer() are now callable types. The
1468 types classobj (formerly class), code, function, instance, and
1469 instancemethod (formerly instance-method), which have no built-in
1470 names but are accessible through the types module, are now also
1471 callable. The type dict-proxy is renamed to dictproxy.
1472
1473- Cycles going through the __class__ link of a new-style instance are
1474 now detected by the garbage collector.
1475
1476- Classes using __slots__ are now properly garbage collected.
1477 [SF bug 519621]
1478
1479- Tightened the __slots__ rules: a slot name must be a valid Python
1480 identifier.
1481
1482- The constructor for the module type now requires a name argument and
1483 takes an optional docstring argument. Previously, this constructor
1484 ignored its arguments. As a consequence, deriving a class from a
1485 module (not from the module type) is now illegal; previously this
1486 created an unnamed module, just like invoking the module type did.
1487 [SF bug 563060]
1488
1489- A new type object, 'basestring', is added. This is a common base type
1490 for 'str' and 'unicode', and can be used instead of
1491 types.StringTypes, e.g. to test whether something is "a string":
1492 isinstance(x, basestring) is True for Unicode and 8-bit strings. This
1493 is an abstract base class and cannot be instantiated directly.
1494
1495- Changed new-style class instantiation so that when C's __new__
1496 method returns something that's not a C instance, its __init__ is
1497 not called. [SF bug #537450]
1498
1499- Fixed super() to work correctly with class methods. [SF bug #535444]
1500
1501- If you try to pickle an instance of a class that has __slots__ but
1502 doesn't define or override __getstate__, a TypeError is now raised.
1503 This is done by adding a bozo __getstate__ to the class that always
1504 raises TypeError. (Before, this would appear to be pickled, but the
1505 state of the slots would be lost.)
1506
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001507Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001508-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001509
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00001510- Import from zipfiles is now supported. The name of a zipfile placed
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00001511 on sys.path causes the import statement to look for importable Python
1512 modules (with .py, pyc and .pyo extensions) and packages inside the
1513 zipfile. The zipfile import follows the specification (though not
1514 the sample implementation) of PEP 273. The semantics of __path__ are
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00001515 compatible with those that have been implemented in Jython since
1516 Jython 2.1.
1517
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001518- PEP 302 has been accepted. Although it was initially developed to
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00001519 support zipimport, it offers a new, general import hook mechanism.
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00001520 Several new variables have been added to the sys module:
1521 sys.meta_path, sys.path_hooks, and sys.path_importer_cache; these
1522 make extending the import statement much more convenient than
1523 overriding the __import__ built-in function. For a description of
1524 these, see PEP 302.
1525
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00001526- A frame object's f_lineno attribute can now be written to from a
1527 trace function to change which line will execute next. A command to
1528 exploit this from pdb has been added. [SF patch #643835]
1529
Marc-André Lemburg20b91352002-12-12 18:01:43 +00001530- The _codecs support module for codecs.py was turned into a builtin
1531 module to assure that at least the builtin codecs are available
1532 to the Python parser for source code decoding according to PEP 263.
1533
Walter Dörwaldd9a6ad32002-12-12 16:41:44 +00001534- issubclass now supports a tuple as the second argument, just like
1535 isinstance does. ``issubclass(X, (A, B))`` is equivalent to
1536 ``issubclass(X, A) or issubclass(X, B)``.
1537
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00001538- Thanks to Armin Rigo, the last known way to provoke a system crash
1539 by cleverly arranging for a comparison function to mutate a list
1540 during a list.sort() operation has been fixed. The effect of
1541 attempting to mutate a list, or even to inspect its contents or
1542 length, while a sort is in progress, is not defined by the language.
1543 The C implementation of Python 2.3 attempts to detect mutations,
1544 and raise ValueError if one occurs, but there's no guarantee that
1545 all mutations will be caught, or that any will be caught across
1546 releases or implementations.
1547
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00001548- Unicode file name processing for Windows (PEP 277) is implemented.
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00001549 All platforms now have an os.path.supports_unicode_filenames attribute,
1550 which is set to True on Windows NT/2000/XP, and False elsewhere.
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00001551
Walter Dörwald3aeb6322002-09-02 13:14:32 +00001552- Codec error handling callbacks (PEP 293) are implemented.
1553 Error handling in unicode.encode or str.decode can now be customized.
1554
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00001555- A subtle change to the semantics of the built-in function intern():
1556 interned strings are no longer immortal. You must keep a reference
1557 to the return value intern() around to get the benefit.
1558
Guido van Rossumf808b892002-08-16 03:38:10 +00001559- Use of 'None' as a variable, argument or attribute name now
1560 issues a SyntaxWarning. In the future, None may become a keyword.
1561
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00001562- SET_LINENO is gone. co_lnotab is now consulted to determine when to
1563 call the trace function. C code that accessed f_lineno should call
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00001564 PyCode_Addr2Line instead (f_lineno is still there, but only kept up
1565 to date when there is a trace function set).
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00001566
Guido van Rossum9be89462002-08-14 16:11:30 +00001567- There's a new warning category, FutureWarning. This is used to warn
1568 about a number of situations where the value or sign of an integer
1569 result will change in Python 2.4 as a result of PEP 237 (integer
1570 unification). The warnings implement stage B0 mentioned in that
1571 PEP. The warnings are about the following situations:
1572
1573 - Octal and hex literals without 'L' prefix in the inclusive range
1574 [0x80000000..0xffffffff]; these are currently negative ints, but
1575 in Python 2.4 they will be positive longs with the same bit
1576 pattern.
1577
1578 - Left shifts on integer values that cause the outcome to lose
1579 bits or have a different sign than the left operand. To be
1580 precise: x<<n where this currently doesn't yield the same value
1581 as long(x)<<n; in Python 2.4, the outcome will be long(x)<<n.
1582
1583 - Conversions from ints to string that show negative values as
1584 unsigned ints in the inclusive range [0x80000000..0xffffffff];
1585 this affects the functions hex() and oct(), and the string
1586 formatting codes %u, %o, %x, and %X. In Python 2.4, these will
1587 show signed values (e.g. hex(-1) currently returns "0xffffffff";
1588 in Python 2.4 it will return "-0x1").
1589
Guido van Rossum9a2eda52002-12-31 02:12:42 +00001590- The bits manipulated under the cover by sys.setcheckinterval() have
1591 been changed. Both the check interval and the ticker used to be
1592 per-thread values. They are now just a pair of global variables.
1593 In addition, the default check interval was boosted from 10 to 100
1594 bytecode instructions. This may have some effect on systems that
1595 relied on the old default value. In particular, in multi-threaded
1596 applications which try to be highly responsive, response time will
1597 increase by some (perhaps imperceptible) amount.
Skip Montanaro979c74b2002-09-03 21:25:14 +00001598
Tim Petersd64c1de2002-08-12 17:36:03 +00001599- When multiplying very large integers, a version of the so-called
1600 Karatsuba algorithm is now used. This is most effective if the
1601 inputs have roughly the same size. If they both have about N digits,
1602 Karatsuba multiplication has O(N**1.58) runtime (the exponent is
1603 log_base_2(3)) instead of the previous O(N**2). Measured results may
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00001604 be better or worse than that, depending on platform quirks. Besides
1605 the O() improvement in raw instruction count, the Karatsuba algorithm
1606 appears to have much better cache behavior on extremely large integers
1607 (starting in the ballpark of a million bits). Note that this is a
1608 simple implementation, and there's no intent here to compete with,
1609 e.g., GMP. It gives a very nice speedup when it applies, but a package
1610 devoted to fast large-integer arithmetic should run circles around it.
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00001611
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00001612- u'%c' will now raise a ValueError in case the argument is an
1613 integer outside the valid range of Unicode code point ordinals.
1614
Guido van Rossumdeb09362002-08-09 17:16:30 +00001615- The tempfile module has been overhauled for enhanced security. The
1616 mktemp() function is now deprecated; new, safe replacements are
1617 mkstemp() (for files) and mkdtemp() (for directories), and the
1618 higher-level functions NamedTemporaryFile() and TemporaryFile().
1619 Use of some global variables in this module is also deprecated; the
1620 new functions have keyword arguments to provide the same
1621 functionality. All Lib, Tools and Demo modules that used the unsafe
1622 interfaces have been updated to use the safe replacements. Thanks
1623 to Zack Weinberg!
1624
Guido van Rossumd81a9832002-08-09 15:57:34 +00001625- When x is an object whose class implements __mul__ and __rmul__,
1626 1.0*x would correctly invoke __rmul__, but 1*x would erroneously
1627 invoke __mul__. This was due to the sequence-repeat code in the int
1628 type. This has been fixed now.
1629
Barry Warsawd79f6832002-08-06 17:01:51 +00001630- Previously, "str1 in str2" required str1 to be a string of length 1.
1631 This restriction has been relaxed to allow str1 to be a string of
1632 any length. Thus "'el' in 'hello world'" returns True now.
1633
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00001634- File objects are now their own iterators. For a file f, iter(f) now
1635 returns f (unless f is closed), and f.next() is similar to
1636 f.readline() when EOF is not reached; however, f.next() uses a
1637 readahead buffer that messes up the file position, so mixing
1638 f.next() and f.readline() (or other methods) doesn't work right.
1639 Calling f.seek() drops the readahead buffer, but other operations
1640 don't. It so happens that this gives a nice additional speed boost
1641 to "for line in file:"; the xreadlines method and corresponding
Guido van Rossumbffb2ef2002-08-09 17:17:07 +00001642 module are now obsolete. Thanks to Oren Tirosh!
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00001643
Guido van Rossumde392d32002-08-05 14:17:20 +00001644- Encoding declarations (PEP 263, phase 1) have been implemented. A
1645 comment of the form "# -*- coding: <encodingname> -*-" in the first
1646 or second line of a Python source file indicates the encoding.
Martin v. Löwis00f1e3f2002-08-04 17:29:52 +00001647
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00001648- list.sort() has a new implementation. While cross-platform results
1649 may vary, and in data-dependent ways, this is much faster on many
1650 kinds of partially ordered lists than the previous implementation,
1651 and reported to be just as fast on randomly ordered lists on
1652 several major platforms. This sort is also stable (if A==B and A
1653 precedes B in the list at the start, A precedes B after the sort too),
1654 although the language definition does not guarantee stability. A
1655 potential drawback is that list.sort() may require temp space of
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00001656 len(list)*2 bytes (``*4`` on a 64-bit machine). It's therefore possible
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00001657 for list.sort() to raise MemoryError now, even if a comparison function
1658 does not. See <http://www.python.org/sf/587076> for full details.
1659
Guido van Rossum2d5389c2002-07-23 03:44:35 +00001660- All standard iterators now ensure that, once StopIteration has been
1661 raised, all future calls to next() on the same iterator will also
1662 raise StopIteration. There used to be various counterexamples to
1663 this behavior, which could caused confusion or subtle program
1664 breakage, without any benefits. (Note that this is still an
1665 iterator's responsibility; the iterator framework does not enforce
1666 this.)
1667
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00001668- Ctrl+C handling on Windows has been made more consistent with
1669 other platforms. KeyboardInterrupt can now reliably be caught,
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00001670 and Ctrl+C at an interactive prompt no longer terminates the
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00001671 process under NT/2k/XP (it never did under Win9x). Ctrl+C will
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00001672 interrupt time.sleep() in the main thread, and any child processes
1673 created via the popen family (on win2k; we can't make win9x work
Mark Hammond8f3afc72002-08-10 06:26:31 +00001674 reliably) are also interrupted (as generally happens on for Linux/Unix.)
1675 [SF bugs 231273, 439992 and 581232]
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00001676
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00001677- sys.getwindowsversion() has been added on Windows. This
1678 returns a tuple with information about the version of Windows
1679 currently running.
1680
Raymond Hettinger5a04aec2002-06-25 00:25:30 +00001681- Slices and repetitions of buffer objects now consistently return
1682 a string. Formerly, strings would be returned most of the time,
1683 but a buffer object would be returned when the repetition count
1684 was one or when the slice range was all inclusive.
1685
Walter Dörwald3430d702002-06-17 10:43:59 +00001686- Unicode objects in sys.path are no longer ignored but treated
1687 as directory names.
1688
Neal Norwitz1f68fc72002-06-14 00:50:42 +00001689- Fixed string.startswith and string.endswith builtin methods
1690 so they accept negative indices. [SF bug 493951]
1691
Guido van Rossumc5fe5eb2002-06-12 03:45:21 +00001692- Fixed a bug with a continue inside a try block and a yield in the
1693 finally clause. [SF bug 567538]
1694
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00001695- Most builtin sequences now support "extended slices", i.e. slices
Guido van Rossum2e82e712002-06-13 11:41:07 +00001696 with a third "stride" parameter. For example, "hello world"[::-1]
1697 gives "dlrow olleh".
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00001698
Neal Norwitzd68f5172002-05-29 15:54:55 +00001699- A new warning PendingDeprecationWarning was added to provide
1700 direction on features which are in the process of being deprecated.
1701 The warning will not be printed by default. To see the pending
1702 deprecations, use -Walways::PendingDeprecationWarning::
1703 as a command line option or warnings.filterwarnings() in code.
1704
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00001705- Deprecated features of xrange objects have been removed as
1706 promised. The start, stop, and step attributes and the tolist()
1707 method no longer exist. xrange repetition and slicing have been
1708 removed.
1709
Guido van Rossum7dab2422002-04-26 19:40:56 +00001710- New builtin function enumerate(x), from PEP 279. Example:
1711 enumerate("abc") is an iterator returning (0,"a"), (1,"b"), (2,"c").
1712 The argument can be an arbitrary iterable object.
1713
Neil Schemenauer89e3ee02002-04-26 01:58:53 +00001714- The assert statement no longer tests __debug__ at runtime. This means
1715 that assert statements cannot be disabled by assigning a false value
1716 to __debug__.
1717
Walter Dörwald068325e2002-04-15 13:36:47 +00001718- A method zfill() was added to str and unicode, that fills a numeric
1719 string to the left with zeros. For example,
1720 "+123".zfill(6) -> "+00123".
1721
Guido van Rossum862fe3c2002-04-15 12:36:47 +00001722- Complex numbers supported divmod() and the // and % operators, but
1723 these make no sense. Since this was documented, they're being
1724 deprecated now.
1725
Guido van Rossum26dd8302002-04-26 20:11:29 +00001726- String and unicode methods lstrip(), rstrip() and strip() now take
1727 an optional argument that specifies the characters to strip. For
1728 example, "Foo!!!?!?!?".rstrip("?!") -> "Foo".
Guido van Rossum49042042002-04-13 00:59:05 +00001729
Guido van Rossumc0d3f4e2002-11-27 13:10:40 +00001730- There's a new dictionary constructor (a class method of the dict
1731 class), dict.fromkeys(iterable, value=None). It constructs a
1732 dictionary with keys taken from the iterable and all values set to a
1733 single value. It can be used for building sets and for removing
1734 duplicates from sequences.
Raymond Hettingere33d3df2002-11-27 07:29:33 +00001735
Guido van Rossumc69343b2002-04-12 19:22:48 +00001736- Added a new dict method pop(key). This removes and returns the
1737 value corresponding to key. [SF patch #539949]
1738
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00001739- A new built-in type, bool, has been added, as well as built-in
1740 names for its two values, True and False. Comparisons and sundry
1741 other operations that return a truth value have been changed to
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00001742 return a bool instead. Read PEP 285 for an explanation of why this
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00001743 is backward compatible.
1744
Guido van Rossum95b62a62002-03-29 01:07:24 +00001745- Fixed two bugs reported as SF #535905: under certain conditions,
1746 deallocating a deeply nested structure could cause a segfault in the
1747 garbage collector, due to interaction with the "trashcan" code;
1748 access to the current frame during destruction of a local variable
1749 could access a pointer to freed memory.
1750
Guido van Rossumfe0ca4a2002-06-18 21:20:13 +00001751- The optional object allocator ("pymalloc") has been enabled by
1752 default. The recommended practice for memory allocation and
1753 deallocation has been streamlined. A header file is included,
1754 Misc/pymemcompat.h, which can be bundled with 3rd party extensions
1755 and lets them use the same API with Python versions from 1.5.2
1756 onwards.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00001757
Martin v. Löwiscfeb3b62002-03-03 21:30:27 +00001758- PyErr_Display will provide file and line information for all exceptions
1759 that have an attribute print_file_and_line, not just SyntaxErrors.
1760
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00001761- The UTF-8 codec will now encode and decode Unicode surrogates
1762 correctly and without raising exceptions for unpaired ones.
1763
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00001764- Universal newlines (PEP 278) is implemented. Briefly, using 'U'
1765 instead of 'r' when opening a text file for reading changes the line
1766 ending convention so that any of '\r', '\r\n', and '\n' is
1767 recognized (even mixed in one file); all three are converted to
1768 '\n', the standard Python line end character.
1769
Neal Norwitz649b7592002-01-01 19:07:13 +00001770- file.xreadlines() now raises a ValueError if the file is closed:
1771 Previously, an xreadlines object was returned which would raise
1772 a ValueError when the xreadlines.next() method was called.
1773
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00001774- sys.exit() inadvertently allowed more than one argument.
Neal Norwitz0c766a02002-03-27 13:03:09 +00001775 An exception will now be raised if more than one argument is used.
1776
Gustavo Niemeyer17c5a332002-12-16 14:09:22 +00001777- Changed evaluation order of dictionary literals to conform to the
1778 general left to right evaluation order rule. Now {f1(): f2()} will
1779 evaluate f1 first.
Gustavo Niemeyer78429a62002-12-16 13:54:02 +00001780
Gustavo Niemeyer786ddb22002-12-16 18:12:53 +00001781- Fixed bug #521782: when a file was in non-blocking mode, file.read()
1782 could silently lose data or wrongly throw an unknown error.
1783
Neil Schemenauerb983aa02002-12-30 20:22:23 +00001784- The sq_repeat, sq_inplace_repeat, sq_concat and sq_inplace_concat
1785 slots are now always tried after trying the corresponding nb_* slots.
1786 This fixes a number of minor bugs (see bug #624807).
1787
Neal Norwitz74a032e2003-01-10 23:29:48 +00001788- Fix problem with dynamic loading on 64-bit AIX (see bug #639945).
1789
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001790Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001791-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001792
Raymond Hettinger9543b342003-01-18 23:22:20 +00001793- Added three operators to the operator module:
1794 operator.pow(a,b) which is equivalent to: a**b.
1795 operator.is_(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is b.
1796 operator.is_not(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is not b.
1797
Martin v. Löwis24a880b2002-12-31 12:55:15 +00001798- posix.openpty now works on all systems that have /dev/ptmx.
1799
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00001800- A module zipimport exists to support importing code from zip
1801 archives.
1802
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00001803- The new datetime module supplies classes for manipulating dates and
1804 times. The basic design came from the Zope "fishbowl process", and
1805 favors practical commercial applications over calendar esoterica. See
1806
1807 http://www.zope.org/Members/fdrake/DateTimeWiki/FrontPage
1808
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00001809- _tkinter now returns Tcl objects, instead of strings. Objects which
1810 have Python equivalents are converted to Python objects, other objects
1811 are wrapped. This can be configured through the wantobjects method,
Martin v. Löwis8c8aa5d2002-11-26 21:39:48 +00001812 or Tkinter.wantobjects.
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00001813
Barry Warsawc27f4bd2002-12-30 21:03:26 +00001814- The PyBSDDB wrapper around the Sleepycat Berkeley DB library has
1815 been added as the package bsddb. The traditional bsddb module is
1816 still available in source code, but not built automatically anymore,
1817 and is now named bsddb185. This supports Berkeley DB versions from
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00001818 3.0 to 4.1. For help converting your databases from the old module (which
1819 probably used an obsolete version of Berkeley DB) to the new module, see
1820 the db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py scripts described in the Tools/Demos
1821 section above.
Martin v. Löwisef546b32002-11-19 08:12:57 +00001822
Martin v. Löwis677bde22002-11-23 22:08:15 +00001823- unicodedata was updated to Unicode 3.2. It supports normalization
1824 and names for Hangul syllables and CJK unified ideographs.
Martin v. Löwis7d41e292002-11-23 12:22:32 +00001825
Neal Norwitz94a83fd2002-11-02 17:46:24 +00001826- resource.getrlimit() now returns longs instead of ints.
1827
Martin v. Löwis080689c2002-10-26 14:42:02 +00001828- readline now dynamically adjusts its input/output stream if
1829 sys.stdin/stdout changes.
1830
Guido van Rossumba602972002-10-01 18:18:58 +00001831- The _tkinter module (and hence Tkinter) has dropped support for
1832 Tcl/Tk 8.0 and 8.1. Only Tcl/Tk versions 8.2, 8.3 and 8.4 are
1833 supported.
1834
Martin v. Löwis658009a2002-09-16 17:26:24 +00001835- cPickle.BadPickleGet is now a class.
1836
Martin v. Löwisa19bfe02002-10-16 18:28:36 +00001837- The time stamps in os.stat_result are floating point numbers
1838 after stat_float_times has been called.
Martin v. Löwis94717ed2002-09-09 14:24:16 +00001839
Neal Norwitzb5673922002-09-05 21:48:07 +00001840- If the size passed to mmap.mmap() is larger than the length of the
1841 file on non-Windows platforms, a ValueError is raised. [SF bug 585792]
1842
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00001843- The xreadlines module is slated for obsolescence.
1844
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00001845- The strptime function in the time module is now always available (a
1846 Python implementation is used when the C library doesn't define it).
1847
Guido van Rossum9562bcf2002-06-14 21:31:18 +00001848- The 'new' module is no longer an extension, but a Python module that
1849 only exists for backwards compatibility. Its contents are no longer
1850 functions but callable type objects.
1851
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00001852- The bsddb.*open functions can now take 'None' as a filename.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00001853 This will create a temporary in-memory bsddb that won't be
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00001854 written to disk.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00001855
Martin v. Löwisb96152c2002-12-31 13:20:15 +00001856- posix.getloadavg, posix.lchown, posix.killpg, posix.mknod, and
1857 posix.getpgid have been added where available.
Martin v. Löwis06a83e92002-04-14 10:19:44 +00001858
Martin v. Löwisf0a46682002-11-03 17:20:12 +00001859- The locale module now exposes the C library's gettext interface. It
1860 also has a new function getpreferredencoding.
Martin v. Löwis2e64c342002-03-27 18:49:02 +00001861
Tim Petersfbf74f22002-03-14 19:06:01 +00001862- A security hole ("double free") was found in zlib-1.1.3, a popular
1863 third party compression library used by some Python modules. The
1864 hole was quickly plugged in zlib-1.1.4, and the Windows build of
1865 Python now ships with zlib-1.1.4.
1866
Martin v. Löwis688357e2002-04-08 21:28:20 +00001867- pwd, grp, and resource return enhanced tuples now, with symbolic
1868 field names.
Martin v. Löwis29001ff2002-03-01 10:47:37 +00001869
Martin v. Löwis99866332002-03-01 10:27:01 +00001870- array.array is now a type object. A new format character
1871 'u' indicates Py_UNICODE arrays. For those, .tounicode and
1872 .fromunicode methods are available. Arrays now support __iadd__
1873 and __imul__.
1874
Neal Norwitze790eae2002-01-01 21:14:12 +00001875- dl now builds on every system that has dlfcn.h. Failure in case
Martin v. Löwis93227272002-01-01 20:18:30 +00001876 of sizeof(int)!=sizeof(long)!=sizeof(void*) is delayed until dl.open
1877 is called.
1878
Skip Montanaro8e790e72002-09-03 13:25:17 +00001879- The sys module acquired a new attribute, api_version, which evaluates
1880 to the value of the PYTHON_API_VERSION macro with which the
1881 interpreter was compiled.
1882
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00001883- Fixed bug #470582: sre module would return a tuple (None, 'a', 'ab')
1884 when applying the regular expression '^((a)c)?(ab)$' on 'ab'. It now
1885 returns (None, None, 'ab'), as expected. Also fixed handling of
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00001886 lastindex/lastgroup match attributes in similar cases. For example,
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00001887 when running the expression r'(a)(b)?b' over 'ab', lastindex must be
1888 1, not 2.
1889
Gustavo Niemeyerc523b042002-11-07 03:28:56 +00001890- Fixed bug #581080: sre scanner was not checking the buffer limit
1891 before increasing the current pointer. This was creating an infinite
1892 loop in the search function, once the pointer exceeded the buffer
1893 limit.
1894
Thomas Heller95cb7e42002-11-07 16:23:55 +00001895- The os.fdopen function now enforces a file mode starting with the
1896 letter 'r', 'w' or 'a', otherwise a ValueError is raised. This fixes
1897 bug #623464.
1898
Greg Ward6c58d462003-01-03 18:02:15 +00001899- The linuxaudiodev module is now deprecated; it is being replaced by
1900 ossaudiodev. The interface has been extended to cover a lot more of
1901 OSS (see www.opensound.com), including most DSP ioctls and the
1902 OSS mixer API. Documentation forthcoming in 2.3a2.
1903
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001904Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001905-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001906
Guido van Rossum747f8062003-01-03 16:33:49 +00001907- imaplib.py now supports SSL (Tino Lange and Piers Lauder).
1908
Just van Rossum5e156ad2002-12-31 16:38:01 +00001909- Freeze's modulefinder.py has been moved to the standard library;
1910 slightly improved so it will issue less false missing submodule
1911 reports (see sf path #643711 for details). Documentation will follow
1912 with Python 2.3a2.
1913
Martin v. Löwis96a60e42002-12-31 13:11:54 +00001914- os.path exposes getctime.
1915
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001916- unittest.py now has two additional methods called assertAlmostEqual()
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001917 and failIfAlmostEqual(). They implement an approximate comparison
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001918 by rounding the difference between the two arguments and comparing
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001919 the result to zero. Approximate comparison is essential for
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001920 unit tests of floating point results.
1921
Raymond Hettingere11b5102002-12-25 16:37:19 +00001922- calendar.py now depends on the new datetime module rather than
1923 the time module. As a result, the range of allowable dates
1924 has been increased.
1925
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00001926- pdb has a new 'j(ump)' command to select the next line to be
1927 executed.
1928
Thomas Heller1b3b49d2002-12-12 19:13:44 +00001929- The distutils created windows installers now can run a
1930 postinstallation script.
1931
Martin v. Löwis4581cfa2002-11-22 08:23:09 +00001932- doctest.testmod can now be called without argument, which means to
1933 test the current module.
1934
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001935- When canceling a server that implemented threading with a keyboard
Martin v. Löwisf86e8ef2002-11-22 08:08:44 +00001936 interrupt, the server would shut down but not terminate (waiting on
1937 client threads). A new member variable, daemon_threads, was added to
1938 the ThreadingMixIn class in SocketServer.py to make it explicit that
1939 this behavior needs to be controlled.
1940
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00001941- A new module, optparse, provides a fancy alternative to getopt for
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00001942 command line parsing. It is a slightly modified version of Greg
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00001943 Ward's Optik package.
1944
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00001945- UserDict.py now defines a DictMixin class which defines all dictionary
1946 methods for classes that already have a minimum mapping interface.
1947 This greatly simplifies writing classes that need to be substitutable
1948 for dictionaries (such as the shelve module).
1949
1950- shelve.py now subclasses from UserDict.DictMixin. Now shelve supports
1951 all dictionary methods. This eases the transition to persistent
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00001952 storage for scripts originally written with dictionaries in mind.
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00001953
Skip Montanaro3bf99e32002-12-08 18:36:24 +00001954- shelve.open and the various classes in shelve.py now accept an optional
1955 binary flag, which defaults to False. If True, the values stored in the
1956 shelf are binary pickles.
1957
Guido van Rossumfda06742002-11-13 16:29:18 +00001958- A new package, logging, implements the logging API defined by PEP
1959 282. The code is written by Vinay Sajip.
1960
Walter Dörwald4dbf1922002-11-06 16:53:44 +00001961- StreamReader, StreamReaderWriter and StreamRecoder in the codecs
1962 modules are iterators now.
1963
Tim Peters9288f952002-11-05 20:38:55 +00001964- gzip.py now handles files exceeding 2GB. Files over 4GB also work
1965 now (provided the OS supports it, and Python is configured with large
1966 file support), but in that case the underlying gzip file format can
1967 record only the least-significant 32 bits of the file size, so that
1968 some tools working with gzipped files may report an incorrect file
1969 size.
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00001970
Martin v. Löwis74b51ac2002-10-26 14:50:45 +00001971- xml.sax.saxutils.unescape has been added, to replace entity references
1972 with their entity value.
1973
Martin v. Löwis77ac4292002-10-15 15:11:13 +00001974- Queue.Queue.{put,get} now support an optional timeout argument.
1975
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00001976- Various features of Tk 8.4 are exposed in Tkinter.py. The multiple
1977 option of tkFileDialog is exposed as function askopenfile{,name}s.
Martin v. Löwis2ec36272002-10-13 10:22:08 +00001978
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00001979- Various configure methods of Tkinter have been stream-lined, so that
1980 tag_configure, image_configure, window_configure now return a
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00001981 dictionary when invoked with no argument.
Martin v. Löwis6ce13152002-10-10 14:36:13 +00001982
Guido van Rossum2b492b62002-10-09 21:40:48 +00001983- Importing the readline module now no longer has the side effect of
1984 calling setlocale(LC_CTYPE, ""). The initial "C" locale, or
1985 whatever locale is explicitly set by the user, is preserved. If you
1986 want repr() of 8-bit strings in your preferred encoding to preserve
1987 all printable characters of that encoding, you have to add the
1988 following code to your $PYTHONSTARTUP file or to your application's
1989 main():
1990
1991 import locale
1992 locale.setlocale(locale.LC_CTYPE, "")
1993
Martin v. Löwise9ce0b02002-10-07 13:23:24 +00001994- shutil.move was added. shutil.copytree now reports errors as an
1995 exception at the end, instead of printing error messages.
1996
Marc-André Lemburg97047e22002-10-04 11:55:21 +00001997- Encoding name normalization was generalized to not only
1998 replace hyphens with underscores, but also all other non-alphanumeric
1999 characters (with the exception of the dot which is used for Python
2000 package names during lookup). The aliases.py mapping was updated
2001 to the new standard.
2002
Walter Dörwald5ccaf8f2002-09-06 16:15:58 +00002003- mimetypes has two new functions: guess_all_extensions() which
2004 returns a list of all known extensions for a mime type, and
2005 add_type() which adds one mapping between a mime type and
2006 an extension to the database.
2007
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00002008- New module: sets, defines the class Set that implements a mutable
2009 set type using the keys of a dict to represent the set. There's
2010 also a class ImmutableSet which is useful when you need sets of sets
2011 or when you need to use sets as dict keys, and a class BaseSet which
Raymond Hettingeref8b9c62002-12-09 08:56:06 +00002012 is the base class of the two.
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00002013
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00002014- Added random.sample(population,k) for random sampling without replacement.
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00002015 Returns a k length list of unique elements chosen from the population.
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00002016
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00002017- random.randrange(-sys.maxint-1, sys.maxint) no longer raises
2018 OverflowError. That is, it now accepts any combination of 'start'
2019 and 'stop' arguments so long as each is in the range of Python's
2020 bounded integers.
2021
Raymond Hettinger40f62172002-12-29 23:03:38 +00002022- Thanks to Raymond Hettinger, random.random() now uses a new core
2023 generator. The Mersenne Twister algorithm is implemented in C,
2024 threadsafe, faster than the previous generator, has an astronomically
2025 large period (2**19937-1), creates random floats to full 53-bit
2026 precision, and may be the most widely tested random number generator
2027 in existence.
2028
2029 The random.jumpahead(n) method has different semantics for the new
2030 generator. Instead of jumping n steps ahead, it uses n and the
2031 existing state to create a new state. This means that jumpahead()
2032 continues to support multi-threaded code needing generators of
2033 non-overlapping sequences. However, it will break code which relies
2034 on jumpahead moving a specific number of steps forward.
2035
2036 The attributes random.whseed and random.__whseed have no meaning for
2037 the new generator. Code using these attributes should switch to a
2038 new class, random.WichmannHill which is provided for backward
2039 compatibility and to make an alternate generator available.
2040
Guido van Rossum4a57c332002-08-02 18:05:20 +00002041- New "algorithms" module: heapq, implements a heap queue. Thanks to
2042 Kevin O'Connor for the code and François Pinard for an entertaining
2043 write-up explaining the theory and practical uses of heaps.
2044
Marc-André Lemburg58e2ff22002-07-12 14:40:04 +00002045- New encoding for the Palm OS character set: palmos.
2046
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00002047- binascii.crc32() and the zipfile module had problems on some 64-bit
2048 platforms. These have been fixed. On a platform with 8-byte C longs,
2049 crc32() now returns a signed-extended 4-byte result, so that its value
2050 as a Python int is equal to the value computed a 32-bit platform.
2051
Martin v. Löwis7d650ca2002-06-30 15:05:00 +00002052- xml.dom.minidom.toxml and toprettyxml now take an optional encoding
2053 argument.
2054
Guido van Rossum9f7549b2002-06-10 21:39:42 +00002055- Some fixes in the copy module: when an object is copied through its
2056 __reduce__ method, there was no check for a __setstate__ method on
2057 the result [SF patch 565085]; deepcopy should treat instances of
2058 custom metaclasses the same way it treats instances of type 'type'
2059 [SF patch 560794].
2060
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00002061- Sockets now support timeout mode. After s.settimeout(T), where T is
2062 a float expressing seconds, subsequent operations raise an exception
2063 if they cannot be completed within T seconds. To disable timeout
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00002064 mode, use s.settimeout(None). There's also a module function,
2065 socket.setdefaulttimeout(T), which sets the default for all sockets
2066 created henceforth.
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00002067
2068- getopt.gnu_getopt was added. This supports GNU-style option
2069 processing, where options can be mixed with non-option arguments.
Martin v. Löwis446a25f2002-06-06 10:58:36 +00002070
Michael W. Hudsonb0dc1a32002-06-04 18:27:35 +00002071- Stop using strings for exceptions. String objects used for
2072 exceptions are now classes deriving from Exception. The objects
2073 changed were: Tkinter.TclError, bdb.BdbQuit, macpath.norm_error,
2074 tabnanny.NannyNag, and xdrlib.Error.
Neal Norwitzb5b5a262002-06-04 17:14:07 +00002075
Walter Dörwald474458d2002-06-04 15:16:29 +00002076- Constants BOM_UTF8, BOM_UTF16, BOM_UTF16_LE, BOM_UTF16_BE,
2077 BOM_UTF32, BOM_UTF32_LE and BOM_UTF32_BE that represent the Byte
2078 Order Mark in UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 encodings for little and
2079 big endian systems were added to the codecs module. The old names
2080 BOM32_* and BOM64_* were off by a factor of 2.
2081
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00002082- Added conversion functions math.degrees() and math.radians().
Raymond Hettinger87f59ee2002-05-13 04:17:32 +00002083
Raymond Hettinger866964c2002-12-14 19:51:34 +00002084- math.log() now takes an optional argument: math.log(x[, base]).
2085
Raymond Hettinger9b1df1d2002-05-12 06:07:21 +00002086- ftplib.retrlines() now tests for callback is None rather than testing
2087 for False. Was causing an error when given a callback object which
2088 was callable but also returned len() as zero. The change may
2089 create new breakage if the caller relied on the undocumented behavior
2090 and called with callback set to [] or some other False value not
2091 identical to None.
2092
Tim Peters46c04e12002-05-05 20:40:00 +00002093- random.gauss() uses a piece of hidden state used by nothing else,
2094 and the .seed() and .whseed() methods failed to reset it. In other
2095 words, setting the seed didn't completely determine the sequence of
2096 results produced by random.gauss(). It does now. Programs repeatedly
2097 mixing calls to a seed method with calls to gauss() may see different
2098 results now.
2099
Fred Drake7f781c92002-05-01 20:33:53 +00002100- The pickle.Pickler class grew a clear_memo() method to mimic that
2101 provided by cPickle.Pickler.
2102
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00002103- difflib's SequenceMatcher class now does a dynamic analysis of
2104 which elements are so frequent as to constitute noise. For
2105 comparing files as sequences of lines, this generally works better
2106 than the IS_LINE_JUNK function, and function ndiff's linejunk
2107 argument defaults to None now as a result. A happy benefit is
2108 that SequenceMatcher may run much faster now when applied
2109 to large files with many duplicate lines (for example, C program
2110 text with lots of repeated "}" and "return NULL;" lines).
2111
Guido van Rossum256705b2002-04-23 13:29:43 +00002112- New Text.dump() method in Tkinter module.
2113
Marc-André Lemburg1ec71ea2002-04-17 20:33:40 +00002114- New distutils commands for building packagers were added to
2115 support pkgtool on Solaris and swinstall on HP-UX.
2116
2117- distutils now has a new abstract binary packager base class
2118 command/bdist_packager, which simplifies writing packagers.
2119 This will hopefully provide the missing bits to encourage
2120 people to submit more packagers, e.g. for Debian, FreeBSD
2121 and other systems.
2122
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00002123- The UTF-16, -LE and -BE stream readers now raise a
2124 NotImplementedError for all calls to .readline(). Previously, they
2125 used to just produce garbage or fail with an encoding error --
2126 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 +00002127 work well with these.
2128
Martin v. Löwis5c137c22002-03-18 12:44:08 +00002129- compileall now supports quiet operation.
2130
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002131- The BaseHTTPServer now implements optional HTTP/1.1 persistent
Martin v. Löwis587c98c2002-03-17 18:37:22 +00002132 connections.
2133
Marc-André Lemburga5d2b4c2002-02-16 18:23:30 +00002134- socket module: the SSL support was broken out of the main
2135 _socket module C helper and placed into a new _ssl helper
2136 which now gets imported by socket.py if available and working.
2137
Marc-André Lemburg37aa5802002-02-10 21:42:47 +00002138- encodings package: added aliases for all supported IANA character
2139 sets
2140
Guido van Rossum606fe4e2001-12-28 20:57:14 +00002141- ftplib: to safeguard the user's privacy, anonymous login will use
2142 "anonymous@" as default password, rather than the real user and host
2143 name.
2144
Fred Drake36736122002-01-10 13:50:31 +00002145- webbrowser: tightened up the command passed to os.system() so that
2146 arbitrary shell code can't be executed because a bogus URL was
2147 passed in.
2148
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00002149- gettext.translation has an optional fallback argument, and
Martin v. Löwisa55ffae2002-01-11 06:58:49 +00002150 gettext.find an optional all argument. Translations will now fallback
Martin v. Löwisd8996052002-11-21 21:45:32 +00002151 on a per-message basis. The module supports plural forms, by means
2152 of gettext.[d]ngettext and Translation.[u]ngettext.
Martin v. Löwis1be64192002-01-11 06:33:28 +00002153
Martin v. Löwis9668b932002-01-12 11:27:42 +00002154- distutils bdist commands now offer a --skip-build option.
2155
Walter Dörwaldb25c2b02002-03-21 10:38:40 +00002156- warnings.warn now accepts a Warning instance as first argument.
2157
Fred Drakefed7e852002-04-04 19:36:15 +00002158- The xml.sax.expatreader.ExpatParser class will no longer create
2159 circular references by using itself as the locator that gets passed
2160 to the content handler implementation. [SF bug #535474]
2161
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00002162- The email.Parser.Parser class now properly parses strings regardless
2163 of their line endings, which can be any of \r, \n, or \r\n (CR, LF,
2164 or CRLF). Also, the Header class's constructor default arguments
2165 has changed slightly so that an explicit maxlinelen value is always
Barry Warsaw497e5c42002-12-30 19:27:08 +00002166 honored, and so unicode conversion error handling can be specified.
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00002167
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002168- distutils' build_ext command now links C++ extensions with the C++
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00002169 compiler available in the Makefile or CXX environment variable, if
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002170 running under \*nix.
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00002171
2172- New module bz2: provides a comprehensive interface for the bz2 compression
2173 library. It implements a complete file interface, one-shot (de)compression
2174 functions, and types for sequential (de)compression.
2175
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002176- New pdb command 'pp' which is like 'p' except that it pretty-prints
Barry Warsaw5d8d6182002-11-05 22:41:33 +00002177 the value of its expression argument.
2178
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00002179- Now bdist_rpm distutils command understands a verify_script option in
2180 the config file, including the contents of the referred filename in
2181 the "%verifyscript" section of the rpm spec file.
2182
Gustavo Niemeyer1456fde2002-11-25 17:25:04 +00002183- Fixed bug #495695: webbrowser module would run graphic browsers in a
2184 unix environment even if DISPLAY was not set. Also, support for
2185 skipstone browser was included.
2186
Gustavo Niemeyerd5ae01a2002-12-16 13:11:57 +00002187- Fixed bug #636769: rexec would run unallowed code if subclasses of
2188 strings were used as parameters for certain functions.
2189
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002190Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002191-----------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002192
Martin v. Löwis0d1fdea2002-11-22 08:36:54 +00002193- pygettext.py now supports globbing on Windows, and accepts module
2194 names in addition to accepting file names.
2195
Guido van Rossum923e4ef2002-09-17 20:58:59 +00002196- The SGI demos (Demo/sgi) have been removed. Nobody thought they
2197 were interesting any more. (The SGI library modules and extensions
2198 are still there; it is believed that at least some of these are
2199 still used and useful.)
2200
Fred Drake40813b12002-08-05 15:24:19 +00002201- IDLE supports the new encoding declarations (PEP 263); it can also
2202 deal with legacy 8-bit files if they use the locale's encoding. It
2203 allows non-ASCII strings in the interactive shell and executes them
2204 in the locale's encoding.
Martin v. Löwis98ce7b72002-08-05 15:11:26 +00002205
Marc-André Lemburg46260092002-04-04 16:17:11 +00002206- freeze.py now produces binaries which can import shared modules,
2207 unlike before when this failed due to missing symbol exports in
2208 the generated binary.
2209
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002210Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002211-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002212
Martin v. Löwisdc461752002-11-06 21:59:33 +00002213- On Unix, IDLE is now installed automatically.
2214
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00002215- The fpectl module is not built by default; it's dangerous or useless
2216 except in the hands of experts.
2217
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00002218- The public Python C API will generally be declared using PyAPI_FUNC
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00002219 and PyAPI_DATA macros, while Python extension module init functions
2220 will be declared with PyMODINIT_FUNC. DL_EXPORT/DL_IMPORT macros
2221 are deprecated.
Neal Norwitz1389f3e2002-07-22 13:21:10 +00002222
Tim Petersc6a3ff62002-07-08 22:11:52 +00002223- A bug was fixed that could cause COUNT_ALLOCS builds to segfault, or
2224 get into infinite loops, when a new-style class got garbage-collected.
2225 Unfortunately, to avoid this, the way COUNT_ALLOCS works requires
2226 that new-style classes be immortal in COUNT_ALLOCS builds. Note that
2227 COUNT_ALLOCS is not enabled by default, in either release or debug
2228 builds, and that new-style classes are immortal only in COUNT_ALLOCS
2229 builds.
2230
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00002231- Compiling out the cyclic garbage collector is no longer an option.
2232 The old symbol WITH_CYCLE_GC is now ignored, and Python.h arranges
2233 that it's always defined (for the benefit of any extension modules
2234 that may be conditionalizing on it). A bonus is that any extension
2235 type participating in cyclic gc can choose to participate in the
2236 Py_TRASHCAN mechanism now too; in the absence of cyclic gc, this used
2237 to require editing the core to teach the trashcan mechanism about the
2238 new type.
2239
Martin v. Löwis0cec0ff2002-07-28 16:33:45 +00002240- According to Annex F of the current C standard,
Tim Peters1de41bf2002-07-03 03:31:20 +00002241
2242 The Standard C macro HUGE_VAL and its float and long double analogs,
2243 HUGE_VALF and HUGE_VALL, expand to expressions whose values are
2244 positive infinities.
2245
2246 Python only uses the double HUGE_VAL, and only to #define its own symbol
2247 Py_HUGE_VAL. Some platforms have incorrect definitions for HUGE_VAL.
2248 pyport.h used to try to worm around that, but the workarounds triggered
2249 other bugs on other platforms, so we gave up. If your platform defines
2250 HUGE_VAL incorrectly, you'll need to #define Py_HUGE_VAL to something
2251 that works on your platform. The only instance of this I'm sure about
2252 is on an unknown subset of Cray systems, described here:
2253
2254 http://www.cray.com/swpubs/manuals/SN-2194_2.0/html-SN-2194_2.0/x3138.htm
2255
2256 Presumably 2.3a1 breaks such systems. If anyone uses such a system, help!
2257
Martin v. Löwisa3fb4f72002-06-09 13:33:54 +00002258- The configure option --without-doc-strings can be used to remove the
2259 doc strings from the builtin functions and modules; this reduces the
2260 size of the executable.
2261
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00002262- The universal newlines option (PEP 278) is on by default. On Unix
2263 it can be disabled by passing --without-universal-newlines to the
2264 configure script. On other platforms, remove
2265 WITH_UNIVERSAL_NEWLINES from pyconfig.h.
Tim Peters639295f2002-04-21 07:30:30 +00002266
Martin v. Löwis1142de32002-03-29 16:28:31 +00002267- On Unix, a shared libpython2.3.so can be created with --enable-shared.
2268
Tim Peters8deda702002-03-30 10:06:07 +00002269- All uses of the CACHE_HASH, INTERN_STRINGS, and DONT_SHARE_SHORT_STRINGS
2270 preprocessor symbols were eliminated. The internal decisions they
2271 controlled stopped being experimental long ago.
Tim Peters1f7df352002-03-29 03:29:08 +00002272
Fred Drake7d28b732002-05-02 21:17:00 +00002273- The tools used to build the documentation now work under Cygwin as
2274 well as Unix.
2275
Skip Montanaro57454e52002-06-14 20:30:31 +00002276- The bsddb and dbm module builds have been changed to try and avoid version
2277 skew problems and disable linkage with Berkeley DB 1.85 unless the
2278 installer knows what s/he's doing. See the section on building these
2279 modules in the README file for details.
2280
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002281C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002282-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002283
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00002284- PyNumber_Check() now returns true for string and unicode objects.
2285 This is a result of these types having a partially defined
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00002286 tp_as_number slot. (This is not a feature, but an indication that
Walter Dörwalda1a61f92002-11-19 21:20:25 +00002287 PyNumber_Check() is not very useful to determine numeric behavior.
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00002288 It may be deprecated.)
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00002289
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00002290- The string object's layout has changed: the pointer member
2291 ob_sinterned has been replaced by an int member ob_sstate. On some
2292 platforms (e.g. most 64-bit systems) this may change the offset of
2293 the ob_sval member, so as a precaution the API_VERSION has been
2294 incremented. The apparently unused feature of "indirect interned
2295 strings", supported by the ob_sinterned member, is gone. Interned
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002296 strings are now usually mortal; there is a new API,
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00002297 PyString_InternImmortal() that creates immortal interned strings.
2298 (The ob_sstate member can only take three values; however, while
2299 making it a char saves a few bytes per string object on average, in
2300 it also slowed things down a bit because ob_sval was no longer
2301 aligned.)
2302
Guido van Rossumfdb86482002-08-14 21:20:32 +00002303- The Py_InitModule*() functions now accept NULL for the 'methods'
2304 argument. Modules without global functions are becoming more common
2305 now that factories can be types rather than functions.
2306
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00002307- New C API PyUnicode_FromOrdinal() which exposes unichr() at C
2308 level.
2309
Thomas Heller085358a2002-07-29 14:27:41 +00002310- New functions PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErr() and
2311 PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErrWithFilename(). Similar to
2312 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErrWithFilename() and
2313 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErr(), but they allow to specify
2314 the exception type to raise. Available on Windows.
2315
Tim Peters7c321a82002-07-09 02:57:01 +00002316- Py_FatalError() is now declared as taking a const char* argument. It
2317 was previously declared without const. This should not affect working
2318 code.
2319
Martin v. Löwis01f94bd2002-05-08 08:44:21 +00002320- Added new macro PySequence_ITEM(o, i) that directly calls
2321 sq_item without rechecking that o is a sequence and without
2322 adjusting for negative indices.
2323
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00002324- PyRange_New() now raises ValueError if the fourth argument is not 1.
2325 This is part of the removal of deprecated features of the xrange
2326 object.
2327
Guido van Rossum517c7d42002-04-26 02:49:14 +00002328- PyNumber_Coerce() and PyNumber_CoerceEx() now also invoke the type's
2329 coercion if both arguments have the same type but this type has the
2330 CHECKTYPES flag set. This is to better support proxies.
2331
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00002332- The type of tp_free has been changed from "``void (*)(PyObject *)``" to
2333 "``void (*)(void *)``".
Neil Schemenauer9344b142002-04-12 23:00:08 +00002334
2335- PyObject_Del, PyObject_GC_Del are now functions instead of macros.
2336
Guido van Rossum0986d822002-04-08 01:38:42 +00002337- A type can now inherit its metatype from its base type. Previously,
2338 when PyType_Ready() was called, if ob_type was found to be NULL, it
2339 was always set to &PyType_Type; now it is set to base->ob_type,
2340 where base is tp_base, defaulting to &PyObject_Type.
2341
2342- PyType_Ready() accidentally did not inherit tp_is_gc; now it does.
2343
Neil Schemenauerc9abc1d2002-05-08 14:14:41 +00002344- The PyCore_* family of APIs have been removed.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00002345
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002346- The "u#" parser marker will now pass through Unicode objects as-is
Marc-André Lemburg3e3eacb2002-01-09 16:21:27 +00002347 without going through the buffer API.
2348
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002349- The enumerators of cmp_op have been renamed to use the prefix ``PyCmp_``.
Martin v. Löwis7198a522002-01-01 19:59:11 +00002350
Tim Peters10a3bb52001-12-25 19:07:38 +00002351- An old #define of ANY as void has been removed from pyport.h. This
2352 hasn't been used since Python's pre-ANSI days, and the #define has
2353 been marked as obsolete since then. SF bug 495548 says it created
2354 conflicts with other packages, so keeping it around wasn't harmless.
2355
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002356- Because Python's magic number scheme broke on January 1st, we decided
2357 to stop Python development. Thanks for all the fish!
2358
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00002359- Some of us don't like fish, so we changed Python's magic number
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00002360 scheme to a new one. See Python/import.c for details.
2361
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002362New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002363-------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002364
Martin v. Löwis79acb9e2002-12-06 12:48:53 +00002365- OpenVMS is now supported.
2366
Martin v. Löwisf90ae202002-06-11 06:22:31 +00002367- AtheOS is now supported.
2368
Andrew MacIntyre161ad0e2002-08-04 07:25:58 +00002369- the EMX runtime environment on OS/2 is now supported.
2370
Martin v. Löwisa6e97582002-01-01 18:41:33 +00002371- GNU/Hurd is now supported.
2372
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002373Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002374-----
2375
Fred Drake4dd0f7e2002-11-26 21:44:56 +00002376- The regrtest.py script's -u option now provides a way to say "allow
2377 all resources except this one." For example, to allow everything
2378 except bsddb, give the option '-uall,-bsddb'.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002379
2380Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002381-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002382
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00002383- The Windows distribution now ships with version 4.0.14 of the
2384 Sleepycat Berkeley database library. This should be a huge
2385 improvement over the previous Berkeley DB 1.85, which had many
2386 bugs.
2387 XXX What are the licensing issues here?
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002388 XXX If a user has a database created with a previous version of
Tim Peters84c7a3f2002-11-23 18:48:06 +00002389 XXX Python, what must they do to convert it?
2390 XXX I'm still not sure how to link this thing (see PCbuild/readme.txt).
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00002391 XXX The version # is likely to change before 2.3a1.
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00002392
2393- The Windows distribution now ships with a Secure Sockets Library (SLL)
Mark Hammondc3de0082002-12-03 06:16:08 +00002394 module (_ssl.pyd)
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00002395
Tim Peters857fb4c2002-11-14 23:31:58 +00002396- The Windows distribution now ships with Tcl/Tk version 8.4.1 (it
2397 previously shipped with Tcl/Tk 8.3.2).
2398
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00002399- When Python is built under a Microsoft compiler, sys.version now
2400 includes the compiler version number (_MSC_VER). For example, under
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002401 MSVC 6, sys.version contains the substring "MSC v.1200 ". 1200 is
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00002402 the value of _MSC_VER under MSVC 6.
2403
Tim Peters08e72952002-04-16 20:48:01 +00002404- Sometimes the uninstall executable (UNWISE.EXE) vanishes. One cause
2405 of that has been fixed in the installer (disabled Wise's "delete in-
2406 use files" uninstall option).
2407
Guido van Rossum181e41a2002-04-06 00:23:25 +00002408- Fixed a bug in urllib's proxy handling in Windows. [SF bug #503031]
2409
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00002410- The installer now installs Start menu shortcuts under (the local
2411 equivalent of) "All Users" when doing an Admin install.
2412
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00002413- file.truncate([newsize]) now works on Windows for all newsize values.
2414 It used to fail if newsize didn't fit in 32 bits, reflecting a
2415 limitation of MS _chsize (which is no longer used).
2416
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00002417- os.waitpid() is now implemented for Windows, and can be used to block
2418 until a specified process exits. This is similar to, but not exactly
2419 the same as, os.waitpid() on POSIX systems. If you're waiting for
2420 a specific process whose pid was obtained from one of the spawn()
2421 functions, the same Python os.waitpid() code works across platforms.
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00002422 See the docs for details. The docs were changed to clarify that
2423 spawn functions return, and waitpid requires, a process handle on
2424 Windows (not the same thing as a Windows process id).
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00002425
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00002426- New tempfile.TemporaryFile implementation for Windows: this doesn't
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002427 need a TemporaryFileWrapper wrapper anymore, and should be immune
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00002428 to a nasty problem: before 2.3, if you got a temp file on Windows, it
2429 got wrapped in an object whose close() method first closed the
2430 underlying file, then deleted the file. This usually worked fine.
2431 However, the spawn family of functions on Windows create (at a low C
2432 level) the same set of open files in the spawned process Q as were
2433 open in the spawning process P. If a temp file f was among them, then
2434 doing f.close() in P first closed P's C-level file handle on f, but Q's
2435 C-level file handle on f remained open, so the attempt in P to delete f
2436 blew up with a "Permission denied" error (Windows doesn't allow
2437 deleting open files). This was surprising, subtle, and difficult to
2438 work around.
2439
2440- The os module now exports all the symbolic constants usable with the
2441 low-level os.open() on Windows: the new constants in 2.3 are
2442 O_NOINHERIT, O_SHORT_LIVED, O_TEMPORARY, O_RANDOM and O_SEQUENTIAL.
2443 The others were also available in 2.2: O_APPEND, O_BINARY, O_CREAT,
2444 O_EXCL, O_RDONLY, O_RDWR, O_TEXT, O_TRUNC and O_WRONLY. Contrary
2445 to Microsoft docs, O_SHORT_LIVED does not seem to imply O_TEMPORARY
2446 (so specify both if you want both; note that neither is useful unless
2447 specified with O_CREAT too).
2448
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002449Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002450----
2451
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002452- Mac/Relnotes is gone, the release notes are now here.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002453
Just van Rossume1ebd802003-02-10 10:06:18 +00002454- Python (the OSX-only, unix-based version, not the OS9-compatible CFM
2455 version) now fully supports unicode strings as arguments to various file
2456 system calls, eg. open(), file(), os.stat() and os.listdir().
2457
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002458- The current naming convention for Python on the Macintosh is that MacPython
2459 refers to the unix-based OSX-only version, and MacPython-OS9 refers to the
2460 CFM-based version that runs on both OS9 and OSX.
2461
2462- All MacPython-OS9 functionality is now available in an OSX unix build,
2463 including the Carbon modules, the IDE, OSA support, etc. A lot of this
2464 will only work correctly in a framework build, though, because you cannot
2465 talk to the window manager unless your application is run from a .app
2466 bundle. There is a command line tool "pythonw" that runs your script
2467 with an interpreter living in such a .app bundle, this interpreter should
2468 be used to run any Python script using the window manager (including
2469 Tkinter or wxPython scripts).
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00002470
Jack Jansen8bb80db2002-12-30 22:42:43 +00002471- Most of Mac/Lib has moved to Lib/plat-mac, which is again used both in
2472 MacPython-OSX and MacPython-OS9. The only modules remaining in Mac/Lib
2473 are specifically for MacPython-OS9 (CFM support, preference resources, etc).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002474
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002475- A new utility PythonLauncher will start a Python interpreter when a .py or
2476 .pyw script is double-clicked in the Finder. By default .py scripts are
2477 run with a normal Python interpreter in a Terminal window and .pyw
2478 files are run with a window-aware pythonw interpreter without a Terminal
2479 window, but all this can be customized.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002480
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002481- MacPython-OS9 is now Carbon-only, so it runs on Mac OS 9 or Mac OS X and
2482 possibly on Mac OS 8.6 with the right CarbonLib installed, but not on earlier
2483 releases.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002484
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002485- Many tools such as BuildApplet.py and gensuitemodule.py now support a command
2486 line interface too.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002487
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002488- All the Carbon classes are now PEP253 compliant, meaning that you can
2489 subclass them from Python. Most of the attributes have gone, you should
2490 now use the accessor function call API, which is also what Apple's
2491 documentation uses. Some attributes such as grafport.visRgn are still
2492 available for convenience.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002493
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002494- New Carbon modules File (implementing the APIs in Files.h and Aliases.h)
2495 and Folder (APIs from Folders.h). The old macfs builtin module is
2496 gone, and replaced by a Python wrapper around the new modules.
2497
2498- Pathname handling should now be fully consistent: MacPython-OSX always uses
2499 unix pathnames and MacPython-OS9 always uses colon-separated Mac pathnames
2500 (also when running on Mac OS X).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002501
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002502- New Carbon modules Help and AH give access to the Carbon Help Manager.
2503 There are hooks in the IDE to allow accessing the Python documentation
2504 (and Apple's Carbon and Cocoa documentation) through the Help Viewer.
2505 See Mac/OSX/README for converting the Python documentation to a
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002506 Help Viewer compatible form and installing it.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002507
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002508- OSA support has been redesigned and the generated Python classes now
2509 mirror the inheritance defined by the underlying OSA classes.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002510
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002511- MacPython no longer maps both \r and \n to \n on input for any text file.
2512 This feature has been replaced by universal newline support (PEP278).
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00002513
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00002514- The default encoding for Python sourcefiles in MacPython-OS9 is no longer
Guido van Rossum16c85172003-02-20 01:52:48 +00002515 mac-roman (or whatever your local Mac encoding was) but "ascii", like on
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00002516 other platforms. If you really need sourcefiles with Mac characters in them
2517 you can change this in site.py.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002518
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002519
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002520What's New in Python 2.2 final?
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002521===============================
2522
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002523*Release date: 21-Dec-2001*
2524
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002525Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002526--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002527
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002528- pickle.py, cPickle: allow pickling instances of new-style classes
2529 with a custom metaclass.
2530
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002531Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002532-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002533
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002534- weakref proxy object: when comparing, unwrap both arguments if both
2535 are proxies.
2536
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002537Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002538-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002539
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002540- binascii.b2a_base64(): fix a potential buffer overrun when encoding
2541 very short strings.
2542
2543- cPickle: the obscure "fast" mode was suspected of causing stack
2544 overflows on the Mac. Hopefully fixed this by setting the recursion
2545 limit much smaller. If the limit is too low (it only affects
2546 performance), you can change it by defining PY_CPICKLE_FAST_LIMIT
2547 when compiling cPickle.c (or in pyconfig.h).
2548
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002549Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002550-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002551
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002552- dumbdbm.py: fixed a dumb old bug (the file didn't get synched at
2553 close or delete time).
2554
2555- rfc822.py: fixed a bug where the address '<>' was converted to None
2556 instead of an empty string (also fixes the email.Utils module).
2557
2558- xmlrpclib.py: version 1.0.0; uses precision for doubles.
2559
2560- test suite: the pickle and cPickle tests were not executing any code
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002561 when run from the standard regression test.
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002562
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002563Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002564-----------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002565
2566Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002567-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002568
2569C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002570-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002571
2572New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002573-------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002574
2575Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002576-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002577
2578Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002579-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002580
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002581- distutils package: fixed broken Windows installers (bdist_wininst).
2582
2583- tempfile.py: prevent mysterious warnings when TemporaryFileWrapper
2584 instances are deleted at process exit time.
2585
2586- socket.py: prevent mysterious warnings when socket instances are
2587 deleted at process exit time.
2588
2589- posixmodule.c: fix a Windows crash with stat() of a filename ending
2590 in backslash.
2591
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002592Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002593----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002594
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002595- The Carbon toolbox modules have been upgraded to Universal Headers
2596 3.4, and experimental CoreGraphics and CarbonEvents modules have
2597 been added. All only for framework-enabled MacOSX.
2598
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002599
Tim Peters6272dfd2001-12-13 19:34:00 +00002600What's New in Python 2.2c1?
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002601===========================
2602
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002603*Release date: 14-Dec-2001*
2604
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002605Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002606--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002607
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00002608- Guido's tutorial introduction to the new type/class features has
2609 been extensively updated. See
2610
2611 http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html
2612
2613 That remains the primary documentation in this area.
2614
Guido van Rossum33bab012001-12-05 22:45:48 +00002615- Fixed a leak: instance variables declared with __slots__ were never
2616 deleted!
2617
Guido van Rossum4b800852001-12-03 00:54:52 +00002618- The "delete attribute" method of descriptor objects is called
2619 __delete__, not __del__. In previous releases, it was mistakenly
2620 called __del__, which created an unfortunate overloading condition
2621 with finalizers. (The "get attribute" and "set attribute" methods
2622 are still called __get__ and __set__, respectively.)
2623
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00002624- Some subtle issues with the super built-in were fixed:
2625
2626 (a) When super itself is subclassed, its __get__ method would still
2627 return an instance of the base class (i.e., of super).
2628
2629 (b) super(C, C()).__class__ would return C rather than super. This
2630 is confusing. To fix this, I decided to change the semantics of
2631 super so that it only applies to code attributes, not to data
2632 attributes. After all, overriding data attributes is not
2633 supported anyway.
2634
2635 (c) The __get__ method didn't check whether the argument was an
2636 instance of the type used in creation of the super instance.
2637
Guido van Rossumcd7b7d62001-12-04 21:02:07 +00002638- Previously, hash() of an instance of a subclass of a mutable type
2639 (list or dictionary) would return some value, rather than raising
2640 TypeError. This has been fixed. Also, directly calling
2641 dict.__hash__ and list.__hash__ now raises the same TypeError
2642 (previously, these were the same as object.__hash__).
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00002643
Guido van Rossumd331cb52001-12-05 19:46:42 +00002644- New-style objects now support deleting their __dict__. This is for
2645 all intents and purposes equivalent to assigning a brand new empty
2646 dictionary, but saves space if the object is not used further.
2647
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002648Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002649-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002650
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00002651- -Qnew now works as documented in PEP 238: when -Qnew is passed on
2652 the command line, all occurrences of "/" use true division instead
2653 of classic division. See the PEP for details. Note that "all"
2654 means all instances in library and 3rd-party modules, as well as in
2655 your own code. As the PEP says, -Qnew is intended for use only in
2656 educational environments with control over the libraries in use.
Tim Petersbf72fe22001-12-11 21:43:14 +00002657 Note that test_coercion.py in the standard Python test suite fails
2658 under -Qnew; this is expected, and won't be repaired until true
2659 division becomes the default (in the meantime, test_coercion is
2660 testing the current rules).
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00002661
Fred Drake6c01e252001-12-14 17:08:12 +00002662- complex() now only allows the first argument to be a string
2663 argument, and raises TypeError if either the second arg is a string
2664 or if the second arg is specified when the first is a string.
2665
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002666Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002667-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002668
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00002669- gc.get_referents was renamed to gc.get_referrers.
2670
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002671Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002672-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002673
Tim Peters25059d32001-12-07 20:35:43 +00002674- Functions in the os.spawn() family now release the global interpreter
2675 lock around calling the platform spawn. They should always have done
2676 this, but did not before 2.2c1. Multithreaded programs calling
2677 an os.spawn function with P_WAIT will no longer block all Python threads
2678 until the spawned program completes. It's possible that some programs
2679 relies on blocking, although more likely by accident than by design.
2680
Martin v. Löwis3a89b2b2001-11-25 14:35:58 +00002681- webbrowser defaults to netscape.exe on OS/2 now.
2682
Martin v. Löwis652e1912001-11-25 14:50:56 +00002683- Tix.ResizeHandle exposes detach_widget, hide, and show.
2684
Martin v. Löwis714d2e22001-12-02 12:26:03 +00002685- The charset alias windows_1252 has been added.
2686
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00002687- types.StringTypes is a tuple containing the defined string types;
2688 usually this will be (str, unicode), but if Python was compiled
2689 without Unicode support it will be just (str,).
2690
2691- The pulldom and minidom modules were synchronized to PyXML.
2692
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002693Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002694-----------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002695
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00002696- A new script called Tools/scripts/google.py was added, which fires
2697 off a search on Google.
2698
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002699Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002700-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002701
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00002702- Note that release builds of Python should arrange to define the
2703 preprocessor symbol NDEBUG on the command line (or equivalent).
2704 In the 2.2 pre-release series we tried to define this by magic in
2705 Python.h instead, but it proved to cause problems for extension
2706 authors. The Unix, Windows and Mac builds now all define NDEBUG in
2707 release builds via cmdline (or equivalent) instead. Ports to
2708 other platforms should do likewise.
2709
Jack Jansen1999ef42001-12-06 21:47:20 +00002710- It is no longer necessary to use --with-suffix when building on a
2711 case-insensitive file system (such as Mac OS X HFS+). In the build
2712 directory an extension is used, but not in the installed python.
2713
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002714C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002715-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002716
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00002717- New function PyDict_MergeFromSeq2() exposes the builtin dict
2718 constructor's logic for updating a dictionary from an iterable object
2719 producing key-value pairs.
2720
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00002721- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() requires that the number of entries in
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00002722 the keyword list equal the number of argument specifiers. This
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00002723 wasn't checked correctly, and PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords could even
2724 dump core in some bad cases. This has been repaired. As a result,
2725 PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords may raise RuntimeError in bad cases that
2726 previously went unchallenged.
2727
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002728New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002729-------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002730
2731Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002732-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002733
2734Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002735-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002736
2737Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002738----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002739
Jack Jansenffa260f2001-12-06 21:14:00 +00002740- In unix-Python on Mac OS X (and darwin) sys.platform is now "darwin",
2741 without any trailing digits.
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002742
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00002743- Changed logic for finding python home in Mac OS X framework Pythons.
2744 Now sys.executable points to the executable again, in stead of to
2745 the shared library. The latter is used only for locating the python
2746 home.
2747
2748
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002749What's New in Python 2.2b2?
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002750===========================
2751
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002752*Release date: 16-Nov-2001*
2753
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002754Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002755--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002756
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00002757- Multiple inheritance mixing new-style and classic classes in the
2758 list of base classes is now allowed, so this works now:
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00002759
2760 class Classic: pass
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00002761 class Mixed(Classic, object): pass
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00002762
2763 The MRO (method resolution order) for each base class is respected
2764 according to its kind, but the MRO for the derived class is computed
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002765 using new-style MRO rules if any base class is a new-style class.
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00002766 This needs to be documented.
2767
Tim Petersa427a2b2001-10-29 22:25:45 +00002768- The new builtin dictionary() constructor, and dictionary type, have
2769 been renamed to dict. This reflects a decade of common usage.
2770
Guido van Rossum3fc08d22001-11-15 20:33:10 +00002771- dict() now accepts an iterable object producing 2-sequences. For
2772 example, dict(d.items()) == d for any dictionary d. The argument,
2773 and the elements of the argument, can be any iterable objects.
2774
Guido van Rossum7ad2d1e2001-10-29 22:11:00 +00002775- New-style classes can now have a __del__ method, which is called
2776 when the instance is deleted (just like for classic classes).
2777
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00002778- Assignment to object.__dict__ is now possible, for objects that are
2779 instances of new-style classes that have a __dict__ (unless the base
2780 class forbids it).
2781
Guido van Rossumc8e56452001-10-22 00:43:43 +00002782- Methods of built-in types now properly check for keyword arguments
2783 (formerly these were silently ignored). The only built-in methods
2784 that take keyword arguments are __call__, __init__ and __new__.
2785
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00002786- The socket function has been converted to a type; see below.
2787
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002788Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002789-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002790
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00002791- Assignment to __debug__ raises SyntaxError at compile-time. This
2792 was promised when 2.1c1 was released as "What's New in Python 2.1c1"
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00002793 (see below) says.
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00002794
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00002795- Clarified the error messages for unsupported operands to an operator
2796 (like 1 + '').
2797
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002798Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002799-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002800
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00002801- mmap has a new keyword argument, "access", allowing a uniform way for
2802 both Windows and Unix users to create read-only, write-through and
2803 copy-on-write memory mappings. This was previously possible only on
2804 Unix. A new keyword argument was required to support this in a
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002805 uniform way because the mmap() signatures had diverged across
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00002806 platforms. Thanks to Jay T Miller for repairing this!
2807
Tim Peters169ded02001-11-03 19:57:21 +00002808- By default, the gc.garbage list now contains only those instances in
2809 unreachable cycles that have __del__ methods; in 2.1 it contained all
2810 instances in unreachable cycles. "Instances" here has been generalized
2811 to include instances of both new-style and old-style classes.
2812
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00002813- The socket module defines a new method for socket objects,
2814 sendall(). This is like send() but may make multiple calls to
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00002815 send() until all data has been sent. Also, the socket function has
2816 been converted to a subclassable type, like list and tuple (etc.)
2817 before it; socket and SocketType are now the same thing.
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00002818
2819- Various bugfixes to the curses module. There is now a test suite
2820 for the curses module (you have to run it manually).
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00002821
Guido van Rossum692adf12001-10-30 03:03:03 +00002822- binascii.b2a_base64 no longer places an arbitrary restriction of 57
2823 bytes on its input.
2824
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002825Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002826-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002827
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00002828- tkFileDialog exposes a Directory class and askdirectory
Martin v. Löwis25ee87c2001-11-07 22:38:08 +00002829 convenience function.
2830
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00002831- Symbolic group names in regular expressions must be unique. For
2832 example, the regexp r'(?P<abc>)(?P<abc>)' is not allowed, because a
2833 single name can't mean both "group 1" and "group 2" simultaneously.
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00002834 Python 2.2 detects this error at regexp compilation time;
2835 previously, the error went undetected, and results were
2836 unpredictable. Also in sre, the pattern.split(), pattern.sub(), and
2837 pattern.subn() methods have been rewritten in C. Also, an
2838 experimental function/method finditer() has been added, which works
2839 like findall() but returns an iterator.
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00002840
Martin v. Löwisb7b32602001-11-02 23:48:20 +00002841- Tix exposes more commands through the classes DirSelectBox,
2842 DirSelectDialog, ListNoteBook, Meter, CheckList, and the
2843 methods tix_addbitmapdir, tix_cget, tix_configure, tix_filedialog,
2844 tix_getbitmap, tix_getimage, tix_option_get, and tix_resetoptions.
2845
Tim Peters98791af2001-10-23 01:59:54 +00002846- Traceback objects are now scanned by cyclic garbage collection, so
2847 cycles created by casual use of sys.exc_info() no longer cause
2848 permanent memory leaks (provided garbage collection is enabled).
2849
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00002850- os.extsep -- a new variable needed by the RISCOS support. It is the
2851 separator used by extensions, and is '.' on all platforms except
2852 RISCOS, where it is '/'. There is no need to use this variable
2853 unless you have a masochistic desire to port your code to RISCOS.
2854
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00002855- mimetypes.py has optional support for non-standard, but commonly
2856 found types. guess_type() and guess_extension() now accept an
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002857 optional 'strict' flag, defaulting to true, which controls whether
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00002858 recognize non-standard types or not. A few non-standard types we
2859 know about have been added. Also, when run as a script, there are
2860 new -l and -e options.
2861
2862- statcache is now deprecated.
2863
2864- email.Utils.formatdate() now produces the preferred RFC 2822 style
2865 dates with numeric timezones (it used to produce obsolete dates
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002866 hard coded to "GMT" timezone). An optional 'localtime' flag is
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00002867 added to produce dates in the local timezone, with daylight savings
2868 time properly taken into account.
2869
2870- In pickle and cPickle, instead of masking errors in load() by
2871 transforming them into SystemError, we let the original exception
2872 propagate out. Also, implement support for __safe_for_unpickling__
2873 in pickle, as it already was supported in cPickle.
2874
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002875Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002876-----------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002877
2878Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002879-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002880
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00002881- The dbm module is built using libdb1 if available. The bsddb module
2882 is built with libdb3 if available.
2883
2884- Misc/Makefile.pre.in has been removed by BDFL pronouncement.
2885
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002886C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002887-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002888
Tim Peters1fc240e2001-10-26 05:06:50 +00002889- New function PySequence_Fast_GET_SIZE() returns the size of a non-
2890 NULL result from PySequence_Fast(), more quickly than calling
2891 PySequence_Size().
2892
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00002893- New argument unpacking function PyArg_UnpackTuple() added.
2894
2895- New functions PyObject_CallFunctionObjArgs() and
2896 PyObject_CallMethodObjArgs() have been added to make it more
2897 convenient and efficient to call functions and methods from C.
2898
2899- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() no longer masks errors, so it's
2900 possible that this will propagate errors it didn't before.
2901
2902- New function PyObject_CheckReadBuffer(), which returns true if its
2903 argument supports the single-segment readable buffer interface.
2904
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002905New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002906-------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002907
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00002908- We've finally confirmed that this release builds on HP-UX 11.00,
2909 *with* threads, and passes the test suite.
2910
Tim Peters7a33d8b2001-11-05 02:51:07 +00002911- Thanks to a series of patches from Michael Muller, Python may build
2912 again under OS/2 Visual Age C++.
2913
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00002914- Updated RISCOS port by Dietmar Schwertberger.
2915
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002916Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002917-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002918
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00002919- Added a test script for the curses module. It isn't run automatically;
2920 regrtest.py must be run with '-u curses' to enable it.
2921
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002922Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002923-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002924
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00002925Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002926----
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00002927
2928- PythonScript has been moved to unsupported and is slated to be
2929 removed completely in the next release.
2930
2931- It should now be possible to build applets that work on both OS9 and
2932 OSX.
2933
2934- The core is now linked with CoreServices not Carbon; as a side
2935 result, default 8bit encoding on OSX is now ASCII.
2936
2937- Python should now build on OSX 10.1.1
2938
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002939
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002940What's New in Python 2.2b1?
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002941===========================
2942
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002943*Release date: 19-Oct-2001*
2944
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002945Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002946--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002947
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00002948- New-style classes are now always dynamic (except for built-in and
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00002949 extension types). There is no longer a performance penalty, and I
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00002950 no longer see another reason to keep this baggage around. One relic
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00002951 remains: the __dict__ of a new-style class is a read-only proxy; you
2952 must set the class's attribute to modify it. As a consequence, the
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00002953 __defined__ attribute of new-style types no longer exists, for lack
2954 of need: there is once again only one __dict__ (although in the
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00002955 future a __cache__ may be resurrected with a similar function, if I
2956 can prove that it actually speeds things up).
Guido van Rossum50fda3b2001-10-04 19:46:06 +00002957
Tim Peters1c9ca872001-10-04 06:43:12 +00002958- C.__doc__ now works as expected for new-style classes (in 2.2a4 it
2959 always returned None, even when there was a class docstring).
2960
2961- doctest now finds and runs docstrings attached to new-style classes,
2962 class methods, static methods, and properties.
2963
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00002964Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002965-----------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002966
Guido van Rossuma8bcf802001-10-15 15:53:58 +00002967- A very subtle syntactical pitfall in list comprehensions was fixed.
2968 For example: [a+b for a in 'abc', for b in 'def']. The comma in
2969 this example is a mistake. Previously, this would silently let 'a'
2970 iterate over the singleton tuple ('abc',), yielding ['abcd', 'abce',
2971 'abcf'] rather than the intended ['ad', 'ae', 'af', 'bd', 'be',
2972 'bf', 'cd', 'ce', 'cf']. Now, this is flagged as a syntax error.
2973 Note that [a for a in <singleton>] is a convoluted way to say
2974 [<singleton>] anyway, so it's not like any expressiveness is lost.
2975
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00002976- getattr(obj, name, default) now only catches AttributeError, as
2977 documented, rather than returning the default value for all
2978 exceptions (which could mask bugs in a __getattr__ hook, for
2979 example).
2980
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00002981- Weak reference objects are now part of the core and offer a C API.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00002982 A bug which could allow a core dump when binary operations involved
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00002983 proxy reference has been fixed. weakref.ReferenceError is now a
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00002984 built-in exception.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00002985
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00002986- unicode(obj) now behaves more like str(obj), accepting arbitrary
2987 objects, and calling a __unicode__ method if it exists.
2988 unicode(obj, encoding) and unicode(obj, encoding, errors) still
Marc-André Lemburgb5507ec2001-10-19 12:02:29 +00002989 require an 8-bit string or character buffer argument.
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00002990
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00002991- isinstance() now allows any object as the first argument and a
2992 class, a type or something with a __bases__ tuple attribute for the
2993 second argument. The second argument may also be a tuple of a
2994 class, type, or something with __bases__, in which case isinstance()
2995 will return true if the first argument is an instance of any of the
2996 things contained in the second argument tuple. E.g.
2997
2998 isinstance(x, (A, B))
2999
3000 returns true if x is an instance of A or B.
3001
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003002Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003003-----------------
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003004
3005- thread.start_new_thread() now returns the thread ID (previously None).
3006
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00003007- binascii has now two quopri support functions, a2b_qp and b2a_qp.
3008
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00003009- readline now supports setting the startup_hook and the
3010 pre_event_hook, and adds the add_history() function.
Martin v. Löwis0daad592001-09-30 21:09:59 +00003011
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00003012- os and posix supports chroot(), setgroups() and unsetenv() where
3013 available. The stat(), fstat(), statvfs() and fstatvfs() functions
3014 now return "pseudo-sequences" -- the various fields can now be
3015 accessed as attributes (e.g. os.stat("/").st_mtime) but for
3016 backwards compatibility they also behave as a fixed-length sequence.
3017 Some platform-specific fields (e.g. st_rdev) are only accessible as
Guido van Rossum98bf58f2001-10-18 20:34:25 +00003018 attributes.
3019
3020- time: localtime(), gmtime() and strptime() now return a
3021 pseudo-sequence similar to the os.stat() return value, with
3022 attributes like tm_year etc.
Martin v. Löwis16628c92001-10-04 22:46:41 +00003023
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003024- Decompression objects in the zlib module now accept an optional
3025 second parameter to decompress() that specifies the maximum amount
3026 of memory to use for the uncompressed data.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003027
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00003028- optional SSL support in the socket module now exports OpenSSL
3029 functions RAND_add(), RAND_egd(), and RAND_status(). These calls
3030 are useful on platforms like Solaris where OpenSSL does not
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003031 automatically seed its PRNG. Also, the keyfile and certfile
3032 arguments to socket.ssl() are now optional.
3033
3034- posixmodule (and by extension, the os module on POSIX platforms) now
3035 exports O_LARGEFILE, O_DIRECT, O_DIRECTORY, and O_NOFOLLOW.
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00003036
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003037Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003038-------
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00003039
Tim Peters7402f792001-10-02 03:53:41 +00003040- doctest now excludes functions and classes not defined by the module
3041 being tested, thanks to Tim Hochberg.
3042
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00003043- HotShot, a new profiler implemented using a C-based callback, has
3044 been added. This substantially reduces the overhead of profiling,
3045 but it is still quite preliminary. Support modules and
3046 documentation will be added in upcoming releases (before 2.2 final).
3047
Guido van Rossumc4b09b42001-10-04 10:19:00 +00003048- profile now produces correct output in situations where an exception
3049 raised in Python is cleared by C code (e.g. hasattr()). This used
3050 to cause wrong output, including spurious claims of recursive
3051 functions and attribution of time spent to the wrong function.
3052
Tim Peters0a1fc4e2001-10-07 03:12:08 +00003053 The code and documentation for the derived OldProfile and HotProfile
3054 profiling classes was removed. The code hasn't worked for years (if
3055 you tried to use them, they raised exceptions). OldProfile
3056 intended to reproduce the behavior of the profiler Python used more
3057 than 7 years ago, and isn't interesting anymore. HotProfile intended
3058 to provide a faster profiler (but producing less information), and
3059 that's a worthy goal we intend to meet via a different approach (but
3060 without losing information).
3061
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00003062- Profile.calibrate() has a new implementation that should deliver
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00003063 a much better system-specific calibration constant. The constant can
3064 now be specified in an instance constructor, or as a Profile class or
3065 instance variable, instead of by editing profile.py's source code.
3066 Calibration must still be done manually (see the docs for the profile
3067 module).
3068
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003069 Note that Profile.calibrate() must be overridden by subclasses.
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00003070 Improving the accuracy required exploiting detailed knowledge of
3071 profiler internals; the earlier method abstracted away the details
3072 and measured a simplified model instead, but consequently computed
3073 a constant too small by a factor of 2 on some modern machines.
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00003074
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00003075- quopri's encode and decode methods take an optional header parameter,
Jeremy Hylton6f543b62001-10-16 20:42:52 +00003076 which indicates whether output is intended for the header 'Q'
3077 encoding.
3078
Guido van Rossuma5343cc2001-10-18 18:02:07 +00003079- The SocketServer.ThreadingMixIn class now closes the request after
3080 finish_request() returns. (Not when it errors out though.)
3081
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003082- The nntplib module's NNTP.body() method has grown a 'file' argument
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003083 to allow saving the message body to a file.
3084
3085- The email package has added a class email.Parser.HeaderParser which
3086 only parses headers and does not recurse into the message's body.
3087 Also, the module/class MIMEAudio has been added for representing
3088 audio data (contributed by Anthony Baxter).
3089
3090- ftplib should be able to handle files > 2GB.
3091
3092- ConfigParser.getboolean() now also interprets TRUE, FALSE, YES, NO,
3093 ON, and OFF.
3094
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00003095- xml.dom.minidom NodeList objects now support the length attribute
3096 and item() method as required by the DOM specifications.
3097
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00003098Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003099-----------
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00003100
3101- Demo/dns was removed. It no longer serves any purpose; a package
3102 derived from it is now maintained by Anthony Baxter, see
3103 http://PyDNS.SourceForge.net.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003104
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003105- The freeze tool has been made more robust, and two new options have
3106 been added: -X and -E.
3107
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003108Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003109-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003110
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003111- configure will use CXX in LINKCC if CXX is used to build main() and
3112 the system requires to link a C++ main using the C++ compiler.
3113
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003114C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003115-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003116
Guido van Rossum6c4bce32001-10-18 19:20:25 +00003117- The documentation for the tp_compare slot is updated to require that
3118 the return value must be -1, 0, 1; an arbitrary number <0 or >0 is
3119 not correct. This is not yet enforced but will be enforced in
3120 Python 2.3; even later, we may use -2 to indicate errors and +2 for
3121 "NotImplemented". Right now, -1 should be used for an error return.
3122
Tim Petersd38b1c72001-09-30 05:09:37 +00003123- PyLong_AsLongLong() now accepts int (as well as long) arguments.
3124 Consequently, PyArg_ParseTuple's 'L' code also accepts int (as well
3125 as long) arguments.
3126
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00003127- PyThread_start_new_thread() now returns a long int giving the thread
3128 ID, if one can be calculated; it returns -1 for error, 0 if no
3129 thread ID is calculated (this is an incompatible change, but only
3130 the thread module used this API). This code has only really been
3131 tested on Linux and Windows; other platforms please beware (and
3132 report any bugs or strange behavior).
3133
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00003134- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() no longer accepts Unicode objects as
3135 input.
3136
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003137New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003138-------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003139
3140Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003141-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003142
3143Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003144-------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003145
Tim Peters04cf1d32001-10-09 22:39:40 +00003146- Installer: If you install IDLE, and don't disable file-extension
3147 registration, a new "Edit with IDLE" context (right-click) menu entry
3148 is created for .py and .pyw files.
3149
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003150- The signal module now supports SIGBREAK on Windows, thanks to Steven
3151 Scott. Note that SIGBREAK is unique to Windows. The default SIGBREAK
3152 action remains to call Win32 ExitProcess(). This can be changed via
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003153 signal.signal(). For example::
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003154
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003155 # Make Ctrl+Break raise KeyboardInterrupt, like Python's default Ctrl+C
3156 # (SIGINT) behavior.
3157 import signal
3158 signal.signal(signal.SIGBREAK, signal.default_int_handler)
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003159
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003160 try:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003161 while 1:
3162 pass
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003163 except KeyboardInterrupt:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003164 # We get here on Ctrl+C or Ctrl+Break now; if we had not changed
3165 # SIGBREAK, only on Ctrl+C (and Ctrl+Break would terminate the
3166 # program without the possibility for any Python-level cleanup).
3167 print "Clean exit"
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003168
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003169
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003170What's New in Python 2.2a4?
3171===========================
3172
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003173*Release date: 28-Sep-2001*
3174
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003175Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003176--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003177
3178- pydoc and inspect are now aware of new-style classes;
3179 e.g. help(list) at the interactive prompt now shows proper
3180 documentation for all operations on list objects.
3181
3182- Applications using Jim Fulton's ExtensionClass module can now safely
3183 be used with Python 2.2. In particular, Zope 2.4.1 now works with
3184 Python 2.2 (as well as with Python 2.1.1). The Demo/metaclass
3185 examples also work again. It is hoped that Gtk and Boost also work
3186 with 2.2a4 and beyond. (If you can confirm this, please write
3187 webmaster@python.org; if there are still problems, please open a bug
3188 report on SourceForge.)
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003189
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00003190- property() now takes 4 keyword arguments: fget, fset, fdel and doc.
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003191 These map to read-only attributes 'fget', 'fset', 'fdel', and '__doc__'
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00003192 in the constructed property object. fget, fset and fdel weren't
3193 discoverable from Python in 2.2a3. __doc__ is new, and allows to
3194 associate a docstring with a property.
3195
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003196- Comparison overloading is now more completely implemented. For
3197 example, a str subclass instance can properly be compared to a str
3198 instance, and it can properly overload comparison. Ditto for most
3199 other built-in object types.
3200
3201- The repr() of new-style classes has changed; instead of <type
3202 'M.Foo'> a new-style class is now rendered as <class 'M.Foo'>,
3203 *except* for built-in types, which are still rendered as <type
3204 'Foo'> (to avoid upsetting existing code that might parse or
3205 otherwise rely on repr() of certain type objects).
3206
3207- The repr() of new-style objects is now always <Foo object at XXX>;
3208 previously, it was sometimes <Foo instance at XXX>.
3209
3210- For new-style classes, what was previously called __getattr__ is now
3211 called __getattribute__. This method, if defined, is called for
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00003212 *every* attribute access. A new __getattr__ hook more similar to the
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003213 one in classic classes is defined which is called only if regular
3214 attribute access raises AttributeError; to catch *all* attribute
3215 access, you can use __getattribute__ (for new-style classes). If
3216 both are defined, __getattribute__ is called first, and if it raises
3217 AttributeError, __getattr__ is called.
3218
3219- The __class__ attribute of new-style objects can be assigned to.
3220 The new class must have the same C-level object layout as the old
3221 class.
3222
3223- The builtin file type can be subclassed now. In the usual pattern,
3224 "file" is the name of the builtin type, and file() is a new builtin
3225 constructor, with the same signature as the builtin open() function.
3226 file() is now the preferred way to open a file.
3227
3228- Previously, __new__ would only see sequential arguments passed to
3229 the type in a constructor call; __init__ would see both sequential
3230 and keyword arguments. This made no sense whatsoever any more, so
3231 now both __new__ and __init__ see all arguments.
3232
3233- Previously, hash() applied to an instance of a subclass of str or
3234 unicode always returned 0. This has been repaired.
3235
3236- Previously, an operation on an instance of a subclass of an
3237 immutable type (int, long, float, complex, tuple, str, unicode),
3238 where the subtype didn't override the operation (and so the
3239 operation was handled by the builtin type), could return that
3240 instance instead a value of the base type. For example, if s was of
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003241 a str subclass type, s[:] returned s as-is. Now it returns a str
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003242 with the same value as s.
3243
Barry Warsaw86fbaf82001-09-28 15:26:12 +00003244- Provisional support for pickling new-style objects has been added.
3245
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003246Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003247----
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003248
Tim Peters2c9aa5e2001-09-23 04:06:05 +00003249- file.writelines() now accepts any iterable object producing strings.
3250
Marc-André Lemburgaefd7662001-09-20 12:59:37 +00003251- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() now works very much like
3252 PyObject_Str(obj) in that it tries to use __str__/tp_str
3253 on the object if the object is not a string or buffer. This
3254 makes unicode() behave like str() when applied to non-string/buffer
3255 objects.
3256
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00003257- PyFile_WriteObject now passes Unicode objects to the file's write
3258 method. As a result, all file-like objects which may be the target
Martin v. Löwis2777c022001-09-19 13:47:32 +00003259 of a print statement must support Unicode objects, i.e. they must
3260 at least convert them into ASCII strings.
3261
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003262- Thread scheduling on Solaris should be improved; it is no longer
3263 necessary to insert a small sleep at the start of a thread in order
3264 to let other runnable threads be scheduled.
3265
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003266Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003267-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003268
Marc-André Lemburgbf990172001-09-27 14:17:33 +00003269- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
3270 read character buffer compatible objects for their .write() methods.
3271 These objects are converted to strings and then handled as such
3272 by the instances.
3273
Barry Warsaw2f600732001-09-24 04:28:10 +00003274- The "email" package has been added. This is basically a port of the
3275 mimelib package <http://sf.net/projects/mimelib> with API changes
3276 and some implementations updated to use iterators and generators.
3277
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00003278- difflib.ndiff() and difflib.Differ.compare() are generators now. This
3279 restores the ability of Tools/scripts/ndiff.py to start producing output
3280 before the entire comparison is complete.
3281
Barry Warsaw58b072d2001-09-22 04:44:21 +00003282- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
3283 iteration just like file objects (i.e. their .readline() method is
3284 called for each iteration until it returns an empty string).
3285
Marc-André Lemburg494f2ae2001-09-19 11:33:31 +00003286- The codecs module has grown four new helper APIs to access
3287 builtin codecs: getencoder(), getdecoder(), getreader(),
3288 getwriter().
3289
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003290- SimpleXMLRPCServer: a new module (based upon SimpleHTMLServer)
3291 simplifies writing XML RPC servers.
3292
Barry Warsaw647d5e82001-09-28 17:01:02 +00003293- os.path.realpath(): a new function that returns the absolute pathname
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003294 after interpretation of symbolic links. On non-Unix systems, this
3295 is an alias for os.path.abspath().
3296
Tim Peters16a77ad2001-09-08 04:00:12 +00003297- operator.indexOf() (PySequence_Index() in the C API) now works with any
3298 iterable object.
3299
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003300- smtplib now supports various authentication and security features of
3301 the SMTP protocol through the new login() and starttls() methods.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00003302
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003303- hmac: a new module implementing keyed hashing for message
3304 authentication.
3305
3306- mimetypes now recognizes more extensions and file types. At the
3307 same time, some mappings not sanctioned by IANA were removed.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00003308
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003309- The "compiler" package has been brought up to date to the state of
Guido van Rossumc9ed5dc2001-09-20 05:30:24 +00003310 Python 2.2 bytecode generation. It has also been promoted from a
3311 Tool to a standard library package. (Tools/compiler still exists as
3312 a sample driver.)
3313
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003314Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003315-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003316
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003317- Large file support (LFS) is now automatic when the platform supports
3318 it; no more manual configuration tweaks are needed. On Linux, at
3319 least, it's possible to have a system whose C library supports large
3320 files but whose kernel doesn't; in this case, large file support is
3321 still enabled but doesn't do you any good unless you upgrade your
3322 kernel or share your Python executable with another system whose
3323 kernel has large file support.
3324
3325- The configure script now supplies plausible defaults in a
3326 cross-compilation environment. This doesn't mean that the supplied
3327 values are always correct, or that cross-compilation now works
3328 flawlessly -- but it's a first step (and it shuts up most of
3329 autoconf's warnings about AC_TRY_RUN).
3330
3331- The Unix build is now a bit less chatty, courtesy of the parser
3332 generator. The build is completely silent (except for errors) when
3333 using "make -s", thanks to a -q option to setup.py.
3334
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003335C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003336-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003337
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003338- The "structmember" API now supports some new flag bits to deny read
3339 and/or write access to attributes in restricted execution mode.
3340
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003341New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003342-------------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003343
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003344- Compaq's iPAQ handheld, running the "familiar" Linux distribution
3345 (http://familiar.handhelds.org).
3346
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003347Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003348-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003349
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00003350- The "classic" standard tests, which work by comparing stdout to
3351 an expected-output file under Lib/test/output/, no longer stop at
3352 the first mismatch. Instead the test is run to completion, and a
3353 variant of ndiff-style comparison is used to report all differences.
3354 This is much easier to understand than the previous style of reporting.
3355
3356- The unittest-based standard tests now use regrtest's test_main()
3357 convention, instead of running as a side-effect of merely being
3358 imported. This allows these tests to be run in more natural and
3359 flexible ways as unittests, outside the regrtest framework.
3360
3361- regrtest.py is much better integrated with unittest and doctest now,
3362 especially in regard to reporting errors.
3363
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003364Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003365-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003366
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003367- Large file support now also works for files > 4GB, on filesystems
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00003368 that support it (NTFS under Windows 2000). See "What's New in
3369 Python 2.2a3" for more detail.
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003370
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003371
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003372What's New in Python 2.2a3?
3373===========================
3374
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003375*Release Date: 07-Sep-2001*
3376
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003377Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003378----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003379
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00003380- Conversion of long to float now raises OverflowError if the long is too
3381 big to represent as a C double.
3382
Tim Peters32f453e2001-09-03 08:35:41 +00003383- The 3-argument builtin pow() no longer allows a third non-None argument
3384 if either of the first two arguments is a float, or if both are of
3385 integer types and the second argument is negative (in which latter case
3386 the arguments are converted to float, so this is really the same
3387 restriction).
3388
Tim Peters5d2b77c2001-09-03 05:47:38 +00003389- The builtin dir() now returns more information, and sometimes much
3390 more, generally naming all attributes of an object, and all attributes
3391 reachable from the object via its class, and from its class's base
3392 classes, and so on from them too. Example: in 2.2a2, dir([]) returned
3393 an empty list. In 2.2a3,
3394
3395 >>> dir([])
3396 ['__add__', '__class__', '__contains__', '__delattr__', '__delitem__',
3397 '__eq__', '__ge__', '__getattr__', '__getitem__', '__getslice__',
3398 '__gt__', '__hash__', '__iadd__', '__imul__', '__init__', '__le__',
3399 '__len__', '__lt__', '__mul__', '__ne__', '__new__', '__repr__',
3400 '__rmul__', '__setattr__', '__setitem__', '__setslice__', '__str__',
3401 'append', 'count', 'extend', 'index', 'insert', 'pop', 'remove',
3402 'reverse', 'sort']
3403
3404 dir(module) continues to return only the module's attributes, though.
3405
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003406- Overflowing operations on plain ints now return a long int rather
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003407 than raising OverflowError. This is a partial implementation of PEP
3408 237. You can use -Wdefault::OverflowWarning to enable a warning for
3409 this situation, and -Werror::OverflowWarning to revert to the old
3410 OverflowError exception.
3411
Guido van Rossum61c345f2001-09-04 03:26:15 +00003412- A new command line option, -Q<arg>, is added to control run-time
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003413 warnings for the use of classic division. (See PEP 238.) Possible
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00003414 values are -Qold, -Qwarn, -Qwarnall, and -Qnew. The default is
3415 -Qold, meaning the / operator has its classic meaning and no
3416 warnings are issued. Using -Qwarn issues a run-time warning about
3417 all uses of classic division for int and long arguments; -Qwarnall
3418 also warns about classic division for float and complex arguments
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00003419 (for use with fixdiv.py).
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003420 [Note: the remainder of this item (preserved below) became
3421 obsolete in 2.2c1 -- -Qnew has global effect in 2.2] ::
3422
3423 Using -Qnew is questionable; it turns on new division by default, but
3424 only in the __main__ module. You can usefully combine -Qwarn or
3425 -Qwarnall and -Qnew: this gives the __main__ module new division, and
3426 warns about classic division everywhere else.
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003427
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003428- Many built-in types can now be subclassed. This applies to int,
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003429 long, float, str, unicode, and tuple. (The types complex, list and
3430 dictionary can also be subclassed; this was introduced earlier.)
3431 Note that restrictions apply when subclassing immutable built-in
3432 types: you can only affect the value of the instance by overloading
3433 __new__. You can add mutable attributes, and the subclass instances
3434 will have a __dict__ attribute, but you cannot change the "value"
3435 (as implemented by the base class) of an immutable subclass instance
3436 once it is created.
3437
Guido van Rossumaaf80c82001-09-02 13:44:35 +00003438- The dictionary constructor now takes an optional argument, a
3439 mapping-like object, and initializes the dictionary from its
3440 (key, value) pairs.
3441
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003442- A new built-in type, super, has been added. This facilitates making
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003443 "cooperative super calls" in a multiple inheritance setting. For an
3444 explanation, see http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#cooperation
3445
Guido van Rossum8d7234d2001-09-06 22:02:58 +00003446- A new built-in type, property, has been added. This enables the
3447 creation of "properties". These are attributes implemented by
3448 getter and setter functions (or only one of these for read-only or
3449 write-only attributes), without the need to override __getattr__.
3450 See http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#property
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003451
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003452- The syntax of floating-point and imaginary literals has been
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00003453 liberalized, to allow leading zeroes. Examples of literals now
3454 legal that were SyntaxErrors before:
3455
3456 00.0 0e3 0100j 07.5 00000000000000000008.
3457
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003458- An old tokenizer bug allowed floating point literals with an incomplete
Tim Petersc6d95812001-08-28 20:56:27 +00003459 exponent, such as 1e and 3.1e-. Such literals now raise SyntaxError.
3460
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003461Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003462-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003463
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00003464- telnetlib includes symbolic names for the options, and support for
Martin v. Löwis1da9c572002-11-04 09:56:00 +00003465 setting an option negotiation callback. It also supports processing
3466 of suboptions.
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00003467
Tim Petersa40c7932001-09-05 22:36:56 +00003468- The new C standard no longer requires that math libraries set errno to
3469 ERANGE on overflow. For platform libraries that exploit this new
3470 freedom, Python's overflow-checking was wholly broken. A new overflow-
3471 checking scheme attempts to repair that, but may not be reliable on all
3472 platforms (C doesn't seem to provide anything both useful and portable
3473 in this area anymore).
3474
Martin v. Löwis44f86962001-09-05 13:44:54 +00003475- Asynchronous timeout actions are available through the new class
3476 threading.Timer.
3477
Tim Peters78526162001-09-05 00:53:45 +00003478- math.log and math.log10 now return sensible results for even huge
3479 long arguments. For example, math.log10(10 ** 10000) ~= 10000.0.
3480
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003481- A new function, imp.lock_held(), returns 1 when the import lock is
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00003482 currently held. See the docs for the imp module.
3483
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003484- pickle, cPickle and marshal on 32-bit platforms can now correctly read
Tim Peters82112372001-08-29 02:28:42 +00003485 dumps containing ints written on platforms where Python ints are 8 bytes.
3486 When read on a box where Python ints are 4 bytes, such values are
3487 converted to Python longs.
3488
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003489- In restricted execution mode (using the rexec module), unmarshalling
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003490 code objects is no longer allowed. This plugs a security hole.
3491
Steve Purcell6091cd62001-09-06 16:05:17 +00003492- unittest.TestResult instances no longer store references to tracebacks
3493 generated by test failures. This prevents unexpected dangling references
3494 to objects that should be garbage collected between tests.
3495
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003496Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003497-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003498
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00003499- Tools/scripts/fixdiv.py has been added which can be used to fix
3500 division operators as per PEP 238.
3501
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003502Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003503-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003504
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00003505- If you are an adventurous person using Mac OS X you may want to look at
3506 Mac/OSX. There is a Makefile there that will build Python as a real Mac
3507 application, which can be used for experimenting with Carbon or Cocoa.
3508 Discussion of this on pythonmac-sig, please.
3509
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00003510C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003511-----
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00003512
3513- New function PyObject_Dir(obj), like Python __builtin__.dir(obj).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00003514
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00003515- Note that PyLong_AsDouble can fail! This has always been true, but no
3516 callers checked for it. It's more likely to fail now, because overflow
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003517 errors are properly detected now. The proper way to check::
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00003518
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003519 double x = PyLong_AsDouble(some_long_object);
3520 if (x == -1.0 && PyErr_Occurred()) {
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003521 /* The conversion failed. */
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003522 }
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00003523
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003524- The GC API has been changed. Extensions that use the old API will still
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00003525 compile but will not participate in GC. To upgrade an extension
3526 module:
3527
3528 - rename Py_TPFLAGS_GC to PyTPFLAGS_HAVE_GC
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00003529
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00003530 - use PyObject_GC_New or PyObject_GC_NewVar to allocate objects and
3531 PyObject_GC_Del to deallocate them
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00003532
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00003533 - rename PyObject_GC_Init to PyObject_GC_Track and PyObject_GC_Fini
3534 to PyObject_GC_UnTrack
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00003535
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00003536 - remove PyGC_HEAD_SIZE from object size calculations
3537
3538 - remove calls to PyObject_AS_GC and PyObject_FROM_GC
3539
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003540- Two new functions: PyString_FromFormat() and PyString_FromFormatV().
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003541 These can be used safely to construct string objects from a
3542 sprintf-style format string (similar to the format string supported
3543 by PyErr_Format()).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00003544
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003545New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003546-------------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003547
Tim Petersb7da0902001-09-02 23:01:43 +00003548- Stephen Hansen contributed patches sufficient to get a clean compile
3549 under Borland C (Windows), but he reports problems running it and ran
3550 out of time to complete the port. Volunteers? Expect a MemoryError
3551 when importing the types module; this is probably shallow, and
3552 causing later failures too.
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003553
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003554Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003555-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003556
3557Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003558-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003559
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00003560- Large file support is now enabled on Win32 platforms as well as on
3561 Win64. This means that, for example, you can use f.tell() and f.seek()
3562 to manipulate files larger than 2 gigabytes (provided you have enough
3563 disk space, and are using a Windows filesystem that supports large
Tim Peters9a9471c2001-09-11 23:18:51 +00003564 partitions). Windows filesystem limits: FAT has a 2GB (gigabyte)
3565 filesize limit, and large file support makes no difference there.
3566 FAT32's limit is 4GB, and files >= 2GB are easier to use from Python now.
3567 NTFS has no practical limit on file size, and files of any size can be
3568 used from Python now.
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00003569
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003570- The w9xpopen hack is now used on Windows NT and 2000 too when COMPSPEC
Tim Peters402d5982001-08-27 06:37:48 +00003571 points to command.com (patch from Brian Quinlan).
3572
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003573
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00003574What's New in Python 2.2a2?
3575===========================
3576
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003577*Release Date: 22-Aug-2001*
3578
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00003579Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003580-----
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00003581
Barry Warsaw18b2ecf2001-08-22 20:26:56 +00003582- Tim Peters developed a brand new Windows installer using Wise 8.1,
3583 generously donated to us by Wise Solutions.
3584
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00003585- configure supports a new option --enable-unicode, with the values
3586 ucs2 and ucs4 (new in 2.2a1). With --disable-unicode, the Unicode
3587 type and supporting code is completely removed from the interpreter.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00003588
Jack Jansen32ce0cd2001-08-21 19:28:20 +00003589- A new configure option --enable-framework builds a Mac OS X framework,
3590 which "make frameworkinstall" will install. This provides a starting
3591 point for more mac-like functionality, join pythonmac-sig@python.org
3592 if you are interested in helping.
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00003593
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00003594- The NeXT platform is no longer supported.
3595
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003596- The 'new' module is now statically linked.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00003597
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00003598Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003599-----
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00003600
3601- The new Tools/scripts/cleanfuture.py can be used to automatically
Andrew M. Kuchlingb0532092001-08-15 15:54:56 +00003602 edit out obsolete future statements from Python source code. See
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00003603 the module docstring for details.
3604
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00003605Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003606-----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00003607
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00003608- regrtest.py now knows which tests are expected to be skipped on some
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00003609 platforms, allowing to give clearer test result output. regrtest
3610 also has optional --use/-u switch to run normally disabled tests
3611 which require network access or consume significant disk resources.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00003612
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00003613- Several new tests in the standard test suite, with special thanks to
3614 Nick Mathewson.
3615
3616Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003617----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00003618
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00003619- The floor division operator // has been added as outlined in PEP
3620 238. The / operator still provides classic division (and will until
3621 Python 3.0) unless "from __future__ import division" is included, in
3622 which case the / operator will provide true division. The operator
3623 module provides truediv() and floordiv() functions. Augmented
3624 assignment variants are included, as are the equivalent overloadable
3625 methods and C API methods. See the PEP for a full discussion:
3626 <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0238.html>
3627
Tim Peters6cd6a822001-08-17 22:11:27 +00003628- Future statements are now effective in simulated interactive shells
3629 (like IDLE). This should "just work" by magic, but read Michael
3630 Hudson's "Future statements in simulated shells" PEP 264 for full
3631 details: <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0264.html>.
3632
Guido van Rossumf86ddd22001-08-17 21:21:04 +00003633- The type/class unification (PEP 252-253) was integrated into the
3634 trunk and is not so tentative any more (the exact specification of
3635 some features is still tentative). A lot of work has done on fixing
3636 bugs and adding robustness and features (performance still has to
3637 come a long way).
3638
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00003639- Warnings about a mismatch in the Python API during extension import
3640 now use the Python warning framework (which makes it possible to
3641 write filters for these warnings).
3642
Barry Warsaw9b3be7f2001-08-14 18:35:02 +00003643- A function's __dict__ (aka func_dict) will now always be a
3644 dictionary. It used to be possible to delete it or set it to None,
3645 but now both actions raise TypeErrors. It is still legal to set it
3646 to a dictionary object. Getting func.__dict__ before any attributes
3647 have been assigned now returns an empty dictionary instead of None.
3648
Guido van Rossum32aa5d22001-09-05 18:43:35 +00003649- A new command line option, -E, was added which disables the use of
3650 all environment variables, or at least those that are specifically
3651 significant to Python. Usually those have a name starting with
3652 "PYTHON". This was used to fix a problem where the tests fail if
3653 the user happens to have PYTHONHOME or PYTHONPATH pointing to an
3654 older distribution.
3655
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00003656Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003657-------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00003658
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00003659- New class Differ and new functions ndiff() and restore() in difflib.py.
3660 These package the algorithms used by the popular Tools/scripts/ndiff.py,
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00003661 for programmatic reuse.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00003662
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00003663- New function xml.sax.saxutils.quoteattr(): Quote an XML attribute
3664 value using the minimal quoting required for the value; more
3665 reliable than using xml.sax.saxutils.escape() for attribute values.
3666
3667- Readline completion support for cmd.Cmd was added.
3668
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00003669- Calling os.tempnam() or os.tmpnam() generate RuntimeWarnings.
3670
3671- Added function threading.BoundedSemaphore()
3672
3673- Added Ka-Ping Yee's cgitb.py module.
3674
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003675- The 'new' module now exposes the CO_xxx flags.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00003676
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00003677- The gc module offers the get_referents function.
3678
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00003679New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003680-------------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00003681
3682C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003683-----
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00003684
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00003685- Two new APIs PyOS_snprintf() and PyOS_vsnprintf() were added
3686 which provide a cross-platform implementations for the
3687 relatively new snprintf()/vsnprintf() C lib APIs. In contrast to
3688 the standard sprintf() and vsprintf() C lib APIs, these versions
3689 apply bounds checking on the used buffer which enhances protection
3690 against buffer overruns.
3691
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00003692- Unicode APIs now use name mangling to assure that mixing interpreters
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00003693 and extensions using different Unicode widths is rendered next to
3694 impossible. Trying to import an incompatible Unicode-aware extension
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00003695 will result in an ImportError. Unicode extensions writers must make
3696 sure to check the Unicode width compatibility in their extensions by
3697 using at least one of the mangled Unicode APIs in the extension.
3698
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00003699- Two new flags METH_NOARGS and METH_O are available in method definition
3700 tables to simplify implementation of methods with no arguments and a
3701 single untyped argument. Calling such methods is more efficient than
3702 calling corresponding METH_VARARGS methods. METH_OLDARGS is now
3703 deprecated.
3704
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00003705Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003706-------
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00003707
3708- "import module" now compiles module.pyw if it exists and nothing else
3709 relevant is found.
3710
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00003711
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00003712What's New in Python 2.2a1?
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00003713===========================
3714
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003715*Release date: 18-Jul-2001*
3716
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00003717Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003718----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003719
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00003720- TENTATIVELY, a large amount of code implementing much of what's
3721 described in PEP 252 (Making Types Look More Like Classes) and PEP
3722 253 (Subtyping Built-in Types) was added. This will be released
3723 with Python 2.2a1. Documentation will be provided separately
3724 through http://www.python.org/2.2/. The purpose of releasing this
3725 with Python 2.2a1 is to test backwards compatibility. It is
3726 possible, though not likely, that a decision is made not to release
3727 this code as part of 2.2 final, if any serious backwards
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003728 incompatibilities are found during alpha testing that cannot be
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00003729 repaired.
3730
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00003731- Generators were added; this is a new way to create an iterator (see
Tim Peters11a0d102001-07-17 18:48:00 +00003732 below) using what looks like a simple function containing one or
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00003733 more 'yield' statements. See PEP 255. Since this adds a new
3734 keyword to the language, this feature must be enabled by including a
3735 future statement: "from __future__ import generators" (see PEP 236).
3736 Generators will become a standard feature in a future release
3737 (probably 2.3). Without this future statement, 'yield' remains an
3738 ordinary identifier, but a warning is issued each time it is used.
3739 (These warnings currently don't conform to the warnings framework of
3740 PEP 230; we intend to fix this in 2.2a2.)
3741
Marc-André Lemburg12e74b32001-05-22 08:58:23 +00003742- The UTF-16 codec was modified to be more RFC compliant. It will now
3743 only remove BOM characters at the start of the string and then
3744 only if running in native mode (UTF-16-LE and -BE won't remove a
3745 leading BMO character).
3746
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00003747- Strings now have a new method .decode() to complement the already
3748 existing .encode() method. These two methods provide direct access
3749 to the corresponding decoders and encoders of the registered codecs.
3750
3751 To enhance the usability of the .encode() method, the special
3752 casing of Unicode object return values was dropped (Unicode objects
3753 were auto-magically converted to string using the default encoding).
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00003754
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00003755 Both methods will now return whatever the codec in charge of the
3756 requested encoding returns as object, e.g. Unicode codecs will
3757 return Unicode objects when decoding is requested ("äöü".decode("latin-1")
3758 will return u"äöü"). This enables codec writer to create codecs
3759 for various simple to use conversions.
3760
3761 New codecs were added to demonstrate these new features (the .encode()
3762 and .decode() columns indicate the type of the returned objects):
3763
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003764 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
3765 |Name | .encode() | .decode() | Description |
3766 +=========+===========+===========+=============================+
3767 |uu | string | string | UU codec (e.g. for email) |
3768 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
3769 |base64 | string | string | base64 codec |
3770 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
3771 |quopri | string | string | quoted-printable codec |
3772 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
3773 |zlib | string | string | zlib compression |
3774 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
3775 |hex | string | string | 2-byte hex codec |
3776 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
3777 |rot-13 | string | Unicode | ROT-13 Unicode charmap codec|
3778 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00003779
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00003780- Some operating systems now support the concept of a default Unicode
3781 encoding for file system operations. Notably, Windows supports 'mbcs'
3782 as the default. The Macintosh will also adopt this concept in the medium
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00003783 term, although the default encoding for that platform will be other than
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00003784 'mbcs'.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00003785
3786 On operating system that support non-ASCII filenames, it is common for
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00003787 functions that return filenames (such as os.listdir()) to return Python
3788 string objects pre-encoded using the default file system encoding for
3789 the platform. As this encoding is likely to be different from Python's
3790 default encoding, converting this name to a Unicode object before passing
3791 it back to the Operating System would result in a Unicode error, as Python
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003792 would attempt to use its default encoding (generally ASCII) rather than
3793 the default encoding for the file system.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00003794
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003795 In general, this change simply removes surprises when working with
3796 Unicode and the file system, making these operations work as you expect,
3797 increasing the transparency of Unicode objects in this context.
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00003798 See [????] for more details, including examples.
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00003799
Tim Peters61dff2b2001-05-08 15:43:37 +00003800- Float (and complex) literals in source code were evaluated to full
3801 precision only when running from a .py file; the same code loaded from a
3802 .pyc (or .pyo) file could suffer numeric differences starting at about the
3803 12th significant decimal digit. For example, on a machine with IEEE-754
3804 floating arithmetic,
3805
3806 x = 9007199254740992.0
3807 print long(x)
3808
3809 printed 9007199254740992 if run directly from .py, but 9007199254740000
3810 if from a compiled (.pyc or .pyo) file. This was due to marshal using
3811 str(float) instead of repr(float) when building code objects. marshal
3812 now uses repr(float) instead, which should reproduce floats to full
3813 machine precision (assuming the platform C float<->string I/O conversion
3814 functions are of good quality).
3815
3816 This may cause floating-point results to change in some cases, and
3817 usually for the better, but may also cause numerically unstable
3818 algorithms to break.
3819
Tim Peters2f228e72001-05-13 00:19:31 +00003820- The implementation of dicts suffers fewer collisions, which has speed
3821 benefits. However, the order in which dict entries appear in dict.keys(),
3822 dict.values() and dict.items() may differ from previous releases for a
3823 given dict. Nothing is defined about this order, so no program should
3824 rely on it. Nevertheless, it's easy to write test cases that rely on the
3825 order by accident, typically because of printing the str() or repr() of a
3826 dict to an "expected results" file. See Lib/test/test_support.py's new
3827 sortdict(dict) function for a simple way to display a dict in sorted
3828 order.
3829
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00003830- Many other small changes to dicts were made, resulting in faster
3831 operation along the most common code paths.
3832
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00003833- Dictionary objects now support the "in" operator: "x in dict" means
3834 the same as dict.has_key(x).
3835
Barry Warsaw51acc8d2001-06-26 20:12:50 +00003836- The update() method of dictionaries now accepts generic mapping
3837 objects. Specifically the argument object must support the .keys()
3838 and __getitem__() methods. This allows you to say, for example,
3839 {}.update(UserDict())
3840
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00003841- Iterators were added; this is a generalized way of providing values
3842 to a for loop. See PEP 234. There's a new built-in function iter()
3843 to return an iterator. There's a new protocol to get the next value
3844 from an iterator using the next() method (in Python) or the
3845 tp_iternext slot (in C). There's a new protocol to get iterators
3846 using the __iter__() method (in Python) or the tp_iter slot (in C).
3847 Iterating (i.e. a for loop) over a dictionary generates its keys.
3848 Iterating over a file generates its lines.
3849
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00003850- The following functions were generalized to work nicely with iterator
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003851 arguments::
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003852
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00003853 map(), filter(), reduce(), zip()
Tim Peters8572b4f2001-05-06 01:05:02 +00003854 list(), tuple() (PySequence_Tuple() and PySequence_Fast() in C API)
3855 max(), min()
Tim Peters1af03e92001-05-26 19:37:54 +00003856 join() method of strings
3857 extend() method of lists
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00003858 'x in y' and 'x not in y' (PySequence_Contains() in C API)
3859 operator.countOf() (PySequence_Count() in C API)
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003860 right-hand side of assignment statements with multiple targets, such as ::
Tim Petersd6d010b2001-06-21 02:49:55 +00003861 x, y, z = some_iterable_object_returning_exactly_3_values
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00003862
Tim Petersd85e1022001-05-11 21:51:48 +00003863- Accessing module attributes is significantly faster (for example,
3864 random.random or os.path or yourPythonModule.yourAttribute).
3865
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00003866- Comparing dictionary objects via == and != is faster, and now works even
3867 if the keys and values don't support comparisons other than ==.
3868
Tim Peters95bf9392001-05-10 08:32:44 +00003869- Comparing dictionaries in ways other than == and != is slower: there were
3870 insecurities in the dict comparison implementation that could cause Python
3871 to crash if the element comparison routines for the dict keys and/or
3872 values mutated the dicts. Making the code bulletproof slowed it down.
3873
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00003874- Collisions in dicts are resolved via a new approach, which can help
3875 dramatically in bad cases. For example, looking up every key in a dict
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00003876 d with d.keys() == [i << 16 for i in range(20000)] is approximately 500x
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00003877 faster now. Thanks to Christian Tismer for pointing out the cause and
3878 the nature of an effective cure (last December! better late than never).
Tim Peters15d49292001-05-27 07:39:22 +00003879
Tim Peters52e155e2001-06-16 05:42:57 +00003880- repr() is much faster for large containers (dict, list, tuple).
3881
3882
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003883Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003884-------
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003885
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00003886- The constants ascii_letters, ascii_lowercase. and ascii_uppercase
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003887 were added to the string module. These a locale-independent
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00003888 constants, unlike letters, lowercase, and uppercase. These are now
3889 use in appropriate locations in the standard library.
3890
Martin v. Löwisf0473d52001-07-18 16:17:16 +00003891- The flags used in dlopen calls can now be configured using
3892 sys.setdlopenflags and queried using sys.getdlopenflags.
3893
Guido van Rossumc7e4aca2001-07-12 11:54:37 +00003894- Fredrik Lundh's xmlrpclib is now a standard library module. This
3895 provides full client-side XML-RPC support. In addition,
3896 Demo/xmlrpc/ contains two server frameworks (one SocketServer-based,
3897 one asyncore-based). Thanks to Eric Raymond for the documentation.
3898
Guido van Rossum643d3912001-07-05 14:46:25 +00003899- The xrange() object is simplified: it no longer supports slicing,
3900 repetition, comparisons, efficient 'in' checking, the tolist()
3901 method, or the start, stop and step attributes. See PEP 260.
3902
Martin v. Löwisebf94db2001-06-06 06:25:40 +00003903- A new function fnmatch.filter to filter lists of file names was added.
3904
Barry Warsawffd674d2001-05-22 16:00:10 +00003905- calendar.py uses month and day names based on the current locale.
3906
Guido van Rossum2e0a6542001-05-15 02:14:44 +00003907- strop is now *really* obsolete (this was announced before with 1.6),
3908 and issues DeprecationWarning when used (except for the four items
3909 that are still imported into string.py).
3910
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003911- Cookie.py now sorts key+value pairs by key in output strings.
3912
3913- pprint.isrecursive(object) didn't correctly identify recursive objects.
3914 Now it does.
3915
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00003916- pprint functions now much faster for large containers (tuple, list, dict).
3917
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00003918- New 'q' and 'Q' format codes in the struct module, corresponding to C
3919 types "long long" and "unsigned long long" (on Windows, __int64). In
3920 native mode, these can be used only when the platform C compiler supports
3921 these types (when HAVE_LONG_LONG is #define'd by the Python config
3922 process), and then they inherit the sizes and alignments of the C types.
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00003923 In standard mode, 'q' and 'Q' are supported on all platforms, and are
3924 8-byte integral types.
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00003925
Guido van Rossum83213cc2001-06-12 16:48:52 +00003926- The site module installs a new built-in function 'help' that invokes
3927 pydoc.help. It must be invoked as 'help()'; when invoked as 'help',
3928 it displays a message reminding the user to use 'help()' or
3929 'help(object)'.
3930
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003931Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003932-----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003933
3934- New test_mutants.py runs dict comparisons where the key and value
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003935 comparison operators mutate the dicts randomly during comparison. This
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003936 rapidly causes Python to crash under earlier releases (not for the faint
3937 of heart: it can also cause Win9x to freeze or reboot!).
3938
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003939- New test_pprint.py verifies that pprint.isrecursive() and
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00003940 pprint.isreadable() return sensible results. Also verifies that simple
3941 cases produce correct output.
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003942
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00003943C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003944-----
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00003945
3946- Removed the unused last_is_sticky argument from the internal
3947 _PyTuple_Resize(). If this affects you, you were cheating.
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003948
3949----
3950
3951**(For information about older versions, consult the HISTORY file.)**