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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
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00007What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 3?
8=================================
9
10*Release date: XX-XXX-2004*
11
12Core and builtins
13-----------------
14
Martin v. Löwis336e85f2004-08-19 11:31:58 +000015- Py_InitializeEx has been added.
16
Brett Cannonadd33602004-08-15 07:21:25 +000017- Fix the order of application of decorators. The proper order is bottom-up;
18 the first decorator listed is the last one called.
19
Neal Norwitzf0769532004-08-13 03:18:29 +000020- SF patch #1005778. Fix a seg fault if the list size changed while
21 calling list.index(). This could happen if a rich comparison function
22 modified the list.
23
Michael W. Hudson5e897952004-08-12 18:12:44 +000024- The ``func_name`` (a.k.a. ``__name__``) attribute of user-defined
25 functions is now writable.
26
Michael W. Hudson5523c252004-08-12 18:09:00 +000027- code_new (a.k.a new.code()) now checks its arguments sufficiently
28 carefully that passing them on to PyCode_New() won't trigger calls
29 to Py_FatalError() or PyErr_BadInternalCall(). It is still the case
30 that the returned code object might be entirely insane.
31
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +000032- Subclasses of string can no longer be interned. The semantics of
33 interning were not clear here -- a subclass could be mutable, for
34 example -- and had bugs. Explicitly interning a subclass of string
35 via intern() will raise a TypeError. Internal operations that attempt
36 to intern a string subclass will have no effect.
Jeremy Hylton4c989dd2004-08-07 19:20:05 +000037
Tim Peters83b57352004-08-08 07:24:22 +000038- Bug 1003935: xrange() could report bogus OverflowErrors. Documented
39 what xrange() intends, and repaired tests accordingly.
40
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +000041Extension modules
42-----------------
43
Tim Peters037b3ee2004-08-21 06:55:43 +000044- Patch 1012740: truncate() on a writeable cStringIO now resets the
45 position to the end of the stream. This is consistent with the original
46 StringIO module and avoids inadvertently resurrecting data that was
47 supposed to have been truncated away.
48
Dave Cole331708b2004-08-09 04:51:41 +000049- Added socket.socketpair().
50
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +000051Library
52-------
53
Martin v. Löwis75b9da42004-08-18 13:57:44 +000054- tarfile now generates GNU tar files by default.
55
Martin v. Löwisdeacce22004-08-18 12:46:26 +000056- HTTPResponse has now a getheaders method.
57
Johannes Gijsbersc473c992004-08-18 12:40:31 +000058- Patch #1006219: let inspect.getsource handle '@' decorators. Thanks Simon
59 Percivall.
60
Martin v. Löwis318a12e2004-08-18 12:27:40 +000061- logging.handlers.SMTPHandler.date_time has been removed;
62 the class now uses email.Utils.formatdate to generate the time stamp.
63
Martin v. Löwisfe84d172004-08-18 11:06:45 +000064- A new function tkFont.nametofont was added to return an existing
65 font. The Font class constructor now has an additional exists argument
66 which, if True, requests to return/configure an existing font, rather
Tim Peters037b3ee2004-08-21 06:55:43 +000067 than creating a new one.
Martin v. Löwisfe84d172004-08-18 11:06:45 +000068
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +000069- Updated the decimal package's min() and max() methods to match the
70 latest revision of the General Decimal Arithmetic Specification.
71 Quiet NaNs are ignored and equal values are sorted based on sign
72 and exponent.
73
74- The decimal package's Context.copy() method now returns deep copies.
75
76- Deprecated sys.exitfunc in favor of the atexit module. The sys.exitfunc
77 attribute will be kept around for backwards compatability and atexit
78 will just become the one preferred way to do it.
79
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +000080- patch #675551: Add get_history_item and replace_history_item functions
81 to the readline module.
82
Johannes Gijsbers34c41202004-08-14 15:19:28 +000083- bug #989672: pdb.doc and the help messages for the help_d and help_u methods
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +000084 of the pdb.Pdb class gives have been corrected. d(own) goes to a newer
85 frame, u(p) to an older frame, not the other way around.
Johannes Gijsbers34c41202004-08-14 15:19:28 +000086
Johannes Gijsbers4ec40642004-08-14 15:01:53 +000087- bug #990669: os.path.realpath() will resolve symlinks before normalizing the
88 path, as normalizing the path may alter the meaning of the path if it
89 contains symlinks.
90
Johannes Gijsbers9d134b72004-08-14 14:03:03 +000091- bug #851123: shutil.copyfile will raise an exception when trying to copy a
92 file onto a link to itself. Thanks Gregory Ball.
93
Brett Cannonb3de2e12004-08-13 18:46:24 +000094- bug #570300: Fix inspect to resolve file locations using os.path.realpath()
95 so as to properly list all functions in a module when the module itself is
96 reached through a symlink. Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
97
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +000098- doctest refactoring continued. See the docs for details. As part of
99 this effort, some old and little- (never?) used features are now
100 deprecated: the Tester class, the module is_private() function, and the
101 isprivate argument to testmod(). The Tester class supplied a feeble
102 "by hand" way to combine multiple doctests, if you knew exactly what
103 you were doing. The newer doctest features for unittest integration
104 already did a better job of that, are stronger now than ever, and the
105 new DocTestRunner class is a saner foundation if you want to do it by
106 hand. The "private name" filtering gimmick was a mistake from the
107 start, and testmod() changed long ago to ignore it by default. If
108 you want to filter out tests, the new DocTestFinder class can be used
109 to return a list of all doctests, and you can filter that list by
110 any computable criteria before passing it to a DocTestRunner instance.
111
Matthias Klose2e829c02004-08-15 17:04:33 +0000112- Bug #891637, patch #1005466: fix inspect.getargs() crash on def foo((bar)).
113
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000114Tools/Demos
115-----------
116
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +0000117- IDLE's shortcut keys for windows are now case insensitive so that
118 Control-V works the same as Control-v.
119
Matthias Klose2443d4a2004-08-16 12:10:12 +0000120- pygettext.py: Generate POT-Creation-Date header in ISO format.
121
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000122Build
123-----
124
Michael W. Hudson800ba232004-08-12 18:19:17 +0000125- The --with-tsc flag to configure to enable VM profiling with the
126 processor's timestamp counter now works on PPC platforms.
127
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +0000128- patch #1006629: Define _XOPEN_SOURCE to 500 on Solaris 8/9 to match
129 GCC's definition and avoid redefinition warnings.
130
Matthias Klosea2542be2004-08-16 11:35:51 +0000131- Detect pthreads support (provided by gnu pth pthread emulation) on
132 GNU/k*BSD systems.
133
Hye-Shik Chang3ba5bfc2004-08-19 17:52:37 +0000134- bug #1005737, #1007249: Fixed several build problems and warnings
135 found on old/legacy C compilers of HP-UX, IRIX and Tru64.
136
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000137C API
138-----
139
140Documentation
141-------------
142
Johannes Gijsbers4ec40642004-08-14 15:01:53 +0000143- bug #990669: os.path.normpath may alter the meaning of a path if it contains
Johannes Gijsbersb112d6e2004-08-14 14:41:32 +0000144symbolic links. This has been documented in a comment since 1992, but is now in
145the library reference as well.
146
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000147New platforms
148-------------
149
Hye-Shik Changf64700a2004-08-18 15:13:41 +0000150- FreeBSD 6 is now supported.
151
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000152Tests
153-----
154
155Windows
156-------
157
Tim Peters79b52b72004-08-12 18:37:10 +0000158- Boosted the stack reservation for python.exe and pythonw.exe from
159 the default 1MB to 2MB. Stack frames under VC 7.1 for 2.4 are enough
160 bigger than under VC 6.0 for 2.3.4 that deeply recursive progams
161 within the default sys.getrecursionlimit() default value of 1000 were
162 able to suffer undetected C stack overflows. The standard test program
163 test_compiler was one such program. If a Python process on Windows
164 "just vanishes" without a trace, and without an error message of any
165 kind, but with an exit code of 128, undetected stack overflow may be
166 the problem.
167
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000168Mac
169---
170
171
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000172What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 2?
173=================================
174
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +0000175*Release date: 05-AUG-2004*
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000176
177Core and builtins
178-----------------
179
Raymond Hettinger52a21b82004-08-06 18:43:09 +0000180- Patch #980695: Implements efficient string concatenation for statements
181 of the form s=s+t and s+=t. This will vary across implementations.
182 Accordingly, the str.join() method is strongly preferred for performance
183 sensitive code.
184
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +0000185- PEP-0318, Function Decorators have been added to the language. These are
186 implemented using the Java-style @decorator syntax, like so:
187 @staticmethod
188 def foo(bar):
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +0000189 (The PEP needs to be updated to reflect the current state)
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +0000190
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +0000191- When importing a module M raises an exception, Python no longer leaves M
192 in sys.modules. Before 2.4a2 it did, and a subsequent import of M would
193 succeed, picking up a module object from sys.modules reflecting as much
194 of the initialization of M as completed before the exception was raised.
195 Subsequent imports got no indication that M was in a partially-
196 initialized state, and the importers could get into arbitrarily bad
197 trouble as a result (the M they got was in an unintended state,
198 arbitrarily far removed from M's author's intent). Now subsequent
199 imports of M will continue raising exceptions (but if, for example, the
200 source code for M is edited between import attempts, then perhaps later
201 attempts will succeed, or raise a different exception).
202
203 This can break existing code, but in such cases the code was probably
204 working before by accident. In the Python source, the only case of
205 breakage discovered was in a test accidentally relying on a damaged
206 module remaining in sys.modules. Cases are also known where tests
207 deliberately provoking import errors remove damaged modules from
208 sys.modules themselves, and such tests will break now if they do an
209 unconditional del sys.modules[M].
210
Marc-André Lemburgb314ce92004-07-23 16:14:57 +0000211- u'%s' % obj will now try obj.__unicode__() first and fallback to
212 obj.__str__() if no __unicode__ method can be found.
213
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +0000214- Patch #550732: Add PyArg_VaParseTupleAndKeywords(). Analogous to
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000215 PyArg_VaParse(). Both are now documented. Thanks Greg Chapman.
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +0000216
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000217- Allow string and unicode return types from .encode()/.decode()
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000218 methods on string and unicode objects. Added unicode.decode()
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000219 which was missing for no apparent reason.
220
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000221- An attempt to fix the mess that is Python's behaviour with
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000222 signal handlers and threads, complicated by readline's behaviour.
223 It's quite possible that there are still bugs here.
224
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000225- Added C macros Py_CLEAR and Py_VISIT to ease the implementation of
226 types that support garbage collection.
227
Raymond Hettinger76d962d2004-07-16 12:16:48 +0000228- Compiler now treats None as a constant.
229
Neil Schemenauer3a313e32004-07-19 16:29:17 +0000230- The type of values returned by __int__, __float__, __long__,
231 __oct__, and __hex__ are now checked. Returning an invalid type
232 will cause a TypeError to be raised. This matches the behavior of
233 Jython.
234
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +0000235- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in locale module.
236
Hye-Shik Changb5047fd2004-08-04 06:33:51 +0000237- Added a workaround for proper string operations in BSDs. str.split
238 and str.is* methods can now work correctly with UTF-8 locales.
239
Hye-Shik Changc81c6952004-08-04 17:40:38 +0000240- Bug #989185: unicode.iswide() and unicode.width() is dropped and
241 the East Asian Width support is moved to unicodedata extension
242 module.
Hye-Shik Change9ddfbb2004-08-04 07:38:35 +0000243
Hye-Shik Chang7df44b32004-08-04 17:36:41 +0000244- Patch #941229: The source code encoding in interactive mode
245 now refers sys.stdin.encoding not just ISO-8859-1 anymore. This
246 allows for non-latin-1 users to write unicode strings directly.
247
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000248Extension modules
249-----------------
250
Martin v. Löwis544f1192004-07-27 05:22:33 +0000251- cpickle now supports the same keyword arguments as pickle.
252
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000253Library
254-------
255
Marc-André Lemburgc759f072004-08-05 12:43:30 +0000256- Added new codecs and aliases for ISO_8859-11, ISO_8859-16 and
257 TIS-620
258
Tim Peters8485b562004-08-04 18:46:34 +0000259- Thanks to Edward Loper, doctest has been massively refactored, and
260 many new features were added. Full docs will appear later. For now
261 the doctest module comments and new test cases give good coverage.
262 The refactoring provides many hook points for customizing behavior
263 (such as how to report errors, and how to compare expected to actual
264 output). New features include a <BLANKLINE> marker for expected
265 output containing blank lines, options to produce unified or context
266 diffs when actual output doesn't match expectations, an option to
267 normalize whitespace before comparing, and an option to use an
268 ellipsis to signify "don't care" regions of output.
269
Martin v. Löwis1fa649f2004-08-03 18:45:31 +0000270- Tkinter now supports the wish -sync and -use options.
271
Fred Drakef901abd2004-08-03 17:58:55 +0000272- The following methods in time support passing of None: ctime(), gmtime(),
273 and localtime(). If None is provided, the current time is used (the
274 same as when the argument is omitted).
275 [SF bug 658254, patch 663482]
276
Martin v. Löwis9513e342004-08-03 14:36:32 +0000277- nntplib does now allow to ignore a .netrc file.
278
Martin v. Löwis65a79752004-08-03 12:59:55 +0000279- urllib2 now recognizes Basic authentication even if other authentication
280 schemes are offered.
281
Neal Norwitz0e67fd42004-08-01 22:48:06 +0000282- Bug #1001053. wave.open() now accepts unicode filenames.
283
Tim Peters5cfb05e2004-07-27 21:02:02 +0000284- gzip.GzipFile has a new fileno() method, to retrieve the handle of the
285 underlying file object (provided it has a fileno() method). This is
286 needed if you want to use os.fsync() on a GzipFile.
287
Martin v. Löwis7b9190b2004-07-27 05:07:19 +0000288- imaplib has two new methods: deleteacl and myrights.
289
Martin v. Löwiscc0f9322004-07-26 12:40:50 +0000290- nntplib has two new methods: description and descriptions. They
291 use a more RFC-compliant way of getting a newsgroup description.
292
Brett Cannon8b3d92a2004-07-21 02:21:58 +0000293- Bug #993394. Fix a possible red herring of KeyError in 'threading' being
294 raised during interpreter shutdown from a registered function with atexit
295 when dummy_threading is being used.
296
Neal Norwitza4f651a2004-07-20 22:07:44 +0000297- Bug #857297/Patch #916874. Fix an error when extracting a hard link
298 from a tarfile.
299
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +0000300- Patch #846659. Fix an error in tarfile.py when using
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +0000301 GNU longname/longlink creation.
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +0000302
Tim Peters90ee7eb2004-07-18 23:58:17 +0000303- The obsolete FCNTL.py has been deleted. The builtin fcntl module
304 has been available (on platforms that support fcntl) since Python
305 1.5a3, and all FCNTL.py did is export fcntl's names, after generating
306 a deprecation warning telling you to use fcntl directly.
307
Hye-Shik Chang2bb146f2004-07-18 03:06:29 +0000308- Several new unicode codecs are added: big5hkscs, euc_jis_2004,
309 iso2022_jp_2004, shift_jis_2004.
310
Tim Peters5af0e412004-07-12 00:45:14 +0000311- Bug #788520. Queue.{get, get_nowait, put, put_nowait} have new
312 implementations, exploiting Conditions (which didn't exist at the time
313 Queue was introduced). A minor semantic change is that the Full and
314 Empty exceptions raised by non-blocking calls now occur only if the
315 queue truly was full or empty at the instant the queue was checked (of
316 course the Queue may no longer be full or empty by the time a calling
317 thread sees those exceptions, though). Before, the exceptions could
318 also be raised if it was "merely inconvenient" for the implementation
319 to determine the true state of the Queue (because the Queue was locked
320 by some other method in progress).
321
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000322- Bugs #979794 and #980117: difflib.get_grouped_opcodes() now handles the
323 case of comparing two empty lists. This affected both context_diff() and
324 unified_diff(),
Brett Cannond2c5b4b2004-07-10 23:54:07 +0000325
Brett Cannone6f8a892004-07-10 23:14:30 +0000326- Bug #980938: smtplib now prints debug output to sys.stderr.
327
Brett Cannonf50299c2004-07-10 22:55:15 +0000328- Bug #930024: posixpath.realpath() now handles infinite loops in symlinks by
329 returning the last point in the path that was not part of any loop. Thanks
330 AM Kuchling.
331
Brett Cannonbdc36272004-07-10 20:42:22 +0000332- Bug #980327: ntpath not handles compressing erroneous slashes between the
333 drive letter and the rest of the path. Also clearly handles UNC addresses now
334 as well. Thanks Paul Moore.
335
Brett Cannone6751182004-07-10 19:13:42 +0000336- bug #679953: zipfile.py should now work for files over 2 GB. The packed data
337 for file sizes (compressed and uncompressed) was being stored as signed
338 instead of unsigned.
339
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000340- decimal.py now only uses signals in the IBM spec. The other conditions are
Raymond Hettinger5aa478b2004-07-09 10:02:53 +0000341 no longer part of the public API.
342
Marc-André Lemburg88fcca62004-07-10 16:16:06 +0000343- codecs module now has two new generic APIs: encode() and decode()
344 which don't restrict the return types (unlike the unicode and
345 string methods of the same name).
346
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000347- Non-blocking SSL sockets work again; they were broken in Python 2.3.
Andrew M. Kuchling79d7e922004-07-10 21:21:55 +0000348 SF patch 945642.
349
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000350- doctest unittest integration improvements:
351
352 o Improved the unitest test output for doctest-based unit tests
353
354 o Can now pass setUp and tearDown functions when creating
355 DocTestSuites.
356
357- The threading module has a new class, local, for creating objects
358 that provide thread-local data.
359
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +0000360- Bug #990307: when keep_empty_values is True, cgi.parse_qsl()
361 no longer returns spurious empty fields.
362
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +0000363- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in gettext module.
364
365- Introduced in gettext module the l*gettext() family of functions,
366 which return translation strings encoded in the preferred encoding,
367 as informed by locale module's getpreferredencoding().
368
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +0000369- optparse module (and tests) upgraded to Optik 1.5a1. Changes:
370
371 - Add expansion of default values in help text: the string
372 "%default" in an option's help string is expanded to str() of
373 that option's default value, or "none" if no default value.
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +0000374
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +0000375 - Bug #955889: option default values that happen to be strings are
376 now processed in the same way as values from the command line; this
377 allows generation of nicer help when using custom types. Can
378 be disabled with parser.set_process_default_values(False).
379
380 - Bug #960515: don't crash when generating help for callback
381 options that specify 'type', but not 'dest' or 'metavar'.
382
383 - Feature #815264: change the default help format for short options
384 that take an argument from e.g. "-oARG" to "-o ARG"; add
385 set_short_opt_delimiter() and set_long_opt_delimiter() methods to
386 HelpFormatter to allow (slight) customization of the formatting.
387
388 - Patch #736940: internationalize Optik: all built-in user-
389 targeted literal strings are passed through gettext.gettext(). (If
390 you want translations (.po files), they're not included with Python
391 -- you'll find them in the Optik source distribution from
392 http://optik.sourceforge.net/ .)
393
394 - Bug #878453: respect $COLUMNS environment variable for
395 wrapping help output.
396
397 - Feature #988122: expand "%prog" in the 'description' passed
398 to OptionParser, just like in the 'usage' and 'version' strings.
399 (This is *not* done in the 'description' passed to OptionGroup.)
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +0000400
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000401C API
402-----
403
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +0000404- PyImport_ExecCodeModule() and PyImport_ExecCodeModuleEx(): if an
405 error occurs while loading the module, these now delete the module's
406 entry from sys.modules. All ways of loading modules eventually call
407 one of these, so this is an error-case change in semantics for all
408 ways of loading modules. In rare cases, a module loader may wish
409 to keep a module object in sys.modules despite that the module's
410 code cannot be executed. In such cases, the module loader must
411 arrange to reinsert the name and module object in sys.modules.
412 PyImport_ReloadModule() has been changed to reinsert the original
413 module object into sys.modules if the module reload fails, so that
414 its visible semantics have not changed.
415
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000416- A large pile of datetime field-extraction macros is now documented,
417 thanks to Anthony Tuininga (patch #986010).
418
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000419Documentation
420-------------
421
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +0000422- Improved the tutorial on creating types in C.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000423
424 - point out the importance of reassigning data members before
Andrew M. Kuchling78d375f2004-08-07 14:00:39 +0000425 assigning their values
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000426
Andrew M. Kuchling28025ec2004-08-07 13:59:22 +0000427 - correct my misconception about return values from visitprocs. Sigh.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000428
429 - mention the labor saving Py_VISIT and Py_CLEAR macros.
430
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +0000431- Major rewrite of the math module docs, to address common confusions.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000432
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000433Tests
434-----
435
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +0000436- The test data files for the decimal test suite are now installed on
Anthony Baxterfd4984d2004-07-12 09:33:39 +0000437 platforms that use the Makefile.
438
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +0000439- SF patch 995225: The test file testtar.tar accidentally contained
440 CVS keywords (like $Id$), which could cause spurious failures in
441 test_tarfile.py depending on how the test file was checked out.
442
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000443
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000444What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 1?
445=================================
446
Anthony Baxter3210b362004-07-08 05:59:43 +0000447*Release date: 08-JUL-2004*
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000448
449Core and builtins
450-----------------
451
Fred Drake0a4dd392004-07-02 18:57:45 +0000452- weakref.ref is now the type object also known as
453 weakref.ReferenceType; it can be subclassed like any other new-style
454 class. There's less per-entry overhead in WeakValueDictionary
455 objects now (one object instead of three).
456
Thomas Heller04c673b2004-07-02 08:56:20 +0000457- Bug #951851: Python crashed when reading import table of certain
458 Windows DLLs.
459
Raymond Hettinger66bd2332004-08-02 08:30:07 +0000460- Bug #215126. The locals argument to eval(), execfile(), and exec now
461 accept any mapping type.
Raymond Hettinger214b1c32004-07-02 06:41:07 +0000462
Martin v. Löwisef82d2f2004-06-27 16:51:46 +0000463- marshal now shares interned strings. This change introduces
464 a new .pyc magic.
465
Anthony Baxter3ecdb252004-06-11 14:41:18 +0000466- Bug #966623. classes created with type() in an exec(, {}) don't
467 have a __module__, but code in typeobject assumed it would always
468 be there.
469
Martin v. Löwis737ea822004-06-08 18:52:54 +0000470- Python no longer relies on the LC_NUMERIC locale setting to be
471 the "C" locale; as a result, it no longer tries to prevent changing
472 the LC_NUMERIC category.
473
Tim Peters604c0132004-06-07 23:04:33 +0000474- Bug #952807: Unpickling pickled instances of subclasses of
475 datetime.date, datetime.datetime and datetime.time could yield insane
476 objects. Thanks to Jiwon Seo for a fix.
477
Thomas Heller90a764c2004-06-07 15:12:44 +0000478- Bug #845802: Python crashes when __init__.py is a directory.
479
Hye-Shik Changbc555e32004-06-03 11:10:58 +0000480- Unicode objects received two new methods: iswide() and width().
481 These query East Asian width information, as specified in Unicode
482 TR11.
Hye-Shik Chang974ed7c2004-06-02 16:49:17 +0000483
Raymond Hettinger41bd0222004-06-01 06:36:24 +0000484- Improved the tuple hashing algorithm to give fewer collisions in
485 common cases. Fixes bug #942952.
486
Raymond Hettinger354433a2004-05-19 08:20:33 +0000487- Implemented generator expressions (PEP 289). Coded by Jiwon Seo.
488
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +0000489- Enabled the profiling of C extension functions (and builtins) - check
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000490 new documentation and modified profile and bdb modules for more details
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +0000491
Nicholas Bastinabce8a62004-03-21 20:24:07 +0000492- Set file.name to the object passed to open (instead of a new string)
493
Nicholas Bastina7604bf2004-03-21 18:37:23 +0000494- Moved tracebackobject into traceback.h and renamed to PyTracebackObject
495
Raymond Hettingerff5bc502004-03-21 15:12:00 +0000496- Optimized the byte coding for multiple assignments like "a,b=b,a" and
497 "a,b,c=1,2,3". Improves their speed by 25% to 30%.
498
Brett Cannon4f653312004-03-20 22:52:14 +0000499- Limit the nested depth of a tuple for the second argument to isinstance()
500 and issubclass() to the recursion limit of the interpreter.
501 Fixes bug #858016 .
502
Raymond Hettingerade08ea2004-03-18 09:48:12 +0000503- Optimized dict iterators, creating separate types for each
504 and having them reveal their length. Also optimized the
505 methods: keys(), values(), and items().
506
Raymond Hettingerdd80f762004-03-07 07:31:06 +0000507- Implemented a newcode opcode, LIST_APPEND, that simplifies
508 the generated bytecode for list comprehensions and further
509 improves their performance (about 35%).
510
Michael W. Hudsond3b33b52004-02-19 19:35:22 +0000511- Implemented rich comparisons for floats, which seems to make
512 comparisons involving NaNs somewhat less surprising when the
513 underlying C compiler actually implements C99 semantics.
514
Raymond Hettingerfa7b9d82004-02-15 04:06:39 +0000515- Optimized list.extend() to save memory and no longer create
516 intermediate sequences. Also, extend() now pre-allocates the
517 needed memory whenever the length of the iterable is known in
518 advance -- this halves the time to extend the list.
519
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +0000520- Optimized list resize operations to make fewer calls to the system
521 realloc(). Significantly speeds up list appends, list pops,
522 list comprehensions, and the list contructor (when the input iterable
523 length is not known).
524
525- Changed the internal list over-allocation scheme. For larger lists,
526 overallocation ranged between 3% and 25%. Now, it is a constant 12%.
Raymond Hettingerab517d22004-02-14 18:34:46 +0000527 For smaller lists (n<8), overallocation was upto eight elements. Now,
528 the overallocation is no more than three elements -- this improves space
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +0000529 utilization for applications that have large numbers of small lists.
530
Raymond Hettinger0468e412004-05-05 05:37:53 +0000531- Most list bodies now get re-used rather than freed. Speeds up list
532 instantiation and deletion by saving calls to malloc() and free().
533
Raymond Hettinger31017ae2004-03-04 08:25:44 +0000534- The dict.update() method now accepts all the same argument forms
535 as the dict() constructor. This now includes item lists and/or
536 keyword arguments.
537
Michael W. Hudsonecfeb7f2004-02-12 15:28:27 +0000538- Support for arbitrary objects supporting the read-only buffer
539 interface as the co_code field of code objects (something that was
540 only possible to create from C code) has been removed.
541
Fred Drake228765b2004-02-06 04:15:22 +0000542- Made omitted callback and None equivalent for weakref.ref() and
543 weakref.proxy(); the None case wasn't handled correctly in all
544 cases.
545
546- Fixed problem where PyWeakref_NewRef() and PyWeakref_NewProxy()
547 assumed that initial existing entries in an object's weakref list
548 would not be removed while allocating a new weakref object. Since
549 GC could be invoked at that time, however, that assumption was
550 invalid. In a truly obscure case of GC being triggered during
551 creation for a new weakref object for an referent which already
552 has a weakref without a callback which is only referenced from
553 cyclic trash, a memory error can occur. This consistently created a
554 segfault in a debug build, but provided less predictable behavior in
555 a release build.
556
Hye-Shik Changff83c2b2004-02-02 13:39:01 +0000557- input() builtin function now respects compiler flags such as
558 __future__ statements. SF patch 876178.
559
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +0000560- Removed PendingDeprecationWarning from apply(). apply() remains
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +0000561 deprecated, but the nuisance warning will not be issued.
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +0000562
Tim Peters1d7323e2003-12-01 21:35:27 +0000563- At Python shutdown time (Py_Finalize()), 2.3 called cyclic garbage
564 collection twice, both before and after tearing down modules. The
565 call after tearing down modules has been disabled, because too much
566 of Python has been torn down then for __del__ methods and weakref
567 callbacks to execute sanely. The most common symptom was a sequence
568 of uninformative messages on stderr when Python shut down, produced
569 by threads trying to raise exceptions, but unable to report the nature
570 of their problems because too much of the sys module had already been
571 destroyed.
572
Guido van Rossum6c9e1302003-11-29 23:52:13 +0000573- Removed FutureWarnings related to hex/oct literals and conversions
574 and left shifts. (Thanks to Kalle Svensson for SF patch 849227.)
575 This addresses most of the remaining semantic changes promised by
576 PEP 237, except for repr() of a long, which still shows the trailing
577 'L'. The PEP appears to promise warnings for operations that
578 changed semantics compared to Python 2.3, but this is not
579 implemented; we've suffered through enough warnings related to
580 hex/oct literals and I think it's best to be silent now.
581
Raymond Hettinger4f8f9762003-11-26 08:21:35 +0000582- For str and unicode objects, the ljust(), center(), and rjust()
583 methods now accept an optional argument specifying a fill
584 character other than a space.
585
Guido van Rossumbaf0f8f2003-11-22 23:55:50 +0000586- When method objects have an attribute that can be satisfied either
587 by the function object or by the method object, the function
588 object's attribute usually wins. Christian Tismer pointed out that
589 that this is really a mistake, because this only happens for special
590 methods (like __reduce__) where the method object's version is
591 really more appropriate than the function's attribute. So from now
592 on, all method attributes will have precedence over function
593 attributes with the same name.
594
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +0000595- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 839548: if a weakref with a callback,
596 its callback, and its weakly referenced object, all became part of
597 cyclic garbage during a single run of garbage collection, the order
598 in which they were torn down was unpredictable. It was possible for
599 the callback to see partially-torn-down objects, leading to immediate
600 segfaults, or, if the callback resurrected garbage objects, to
601 resurrect insane objects that caused segfaults (or other surprises)
602 later. In one sense this wasn't surprising, because Python's cyclic gc
603 had no knowledge of Python's weakref objects. It does now. When
604 weakrefs with callbacks become part of cyclic garbage now, those
605 weakrefs are cleared first. The callbacks don't trigger then,
606 preventing the problems. If you need callbacks to trigger, then just
607 as when cyclic gc is not involved, you need to write your code so
608 that weakref objects outlive the objects they weakly reference.
Raymond Hettingera690a992003-11-16 16:17:49 +0000609
Tim Petersadd09b42003-11-12 20:43:28 +0000610- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 840829: if cyclic garbage collection
611 happened to occur during a weakref callback for a new-style class
612 instance, subtle memory corruption was the result (in a release build;
613 in a debug build, a segfault occurred reliably very soon after).
614 This has been repaired.
615
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +0000616- Compiler flags set in PYTHONSTARTUP are now active in __main__.
617
618- Added two builtin types, set() and frozenset().
619
Raymond Hettinger85c20a42003-11-06 14:06:48 +0000620- Added a reversed() builtin function that returns a reverse iterator
621 over a sequence.
622
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +0000623- Added a sorted() builtin function that returns a new sorted list
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +0000624 from any iterable.
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +0000625
Martin v. Löwis01a74b22003-10-19 18:30:01 +0000626- CObjects are now mutable (on the C level) through PyCObject_SetVoidPtr.
627
Raymond Hettinger42b1ba32003-10-16 03:41:09 +0000628- list.sort() now supports three keyword arguments: cmp, key, and reverse.
629 The key argument can be a function of one argument that extracts a
630 comparison key from the original record: mylist.sort(key=str.lower).
631 The reverse argument is a boolean value and if True will change the
632 sort order as if the comparison arguments were reversed. In addition,
633 the documentation has been amended to provide a guarantee that all sorts
634 starting with Py2.3 are guaranteed to be stable (the relative order of
635 records with equal keys is unchanged).
636
Marc-André Lemburgd7160f82003-09-22 11:14:40 +0000637- Added test whether wchar_t is signed or not. A signed wchar_t is not
638 usable as internal unicode type base for Py_UNICODE since the
639 unicode implementation assumes an unsigned type.
640
Jeremy Hyltond8082792003-09-16 19:41:39 +0000641- Fixed a bug in the cache of length-one Unicode strings that could
642 lead to a seg fault. The specific problem occurred when an earlier,
643 non-fatal error left an uninitialized Unicode object in the
644 freelist.
645
Raymond Hettinger9bfe5332003-08-27 04:55:52 +0000646- The % formatting operator now supports '%F' which is equivalent to
647 '%f'. This has always been documented but never implemented.
648
Tim Peters465fa3d2003-08-15 01:16:37 +0000649- complex(obj) could leak a little memory if obj wasn't a string or
650 number.
651
Raymond Hettingereaef6152003-08-02 07:42:57 +0000652- zip() with no arguments now returns an empty list instead of raising
653 a TypeError exception.
654
Guido van Rossum02c58f82003-10-08 21:08:29 +0000655- obj.__contains__() now returns True/False instead of 1/0. SF patch
656 820195.
657
Armin Rigo2b3eb402003-10-28 12:05:48 +0000658- Python no longer tries to be smart about recursive comparisons.
659 When comparing containers with cyclic references to themselves it
660 will now just hit the recursion limit. See SF patch 825639.
661
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000662- str and unicode builtin types now have an rsplit() method that is
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +0000663 same as split() except that it scans the string from the end
664 working towards the beginning. See SF feature request 801847.
Hye-Shik Chang060ebed2003-12-15 18:51:19 +0000665
Jim Fulton8a1a5942004-02-08 04:21:26 +0000666- Fixed a bug in object.__reduce_ex__ when using protocol 2. Failure
667 to clear the error when attempts to get the __getstate__ attribute
668 fail caused intermittent errors and odd behavior.
669
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +0000670- buffer objects based on other objects no longer cache a pointer to
671 the data and the data length. Instead, the appropriate tp_as_buffer
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +0000672 method is called as necessary.
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +0000673
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +0000674- fixed: if a file is opened with an explicit buffer size >= 1, repeated
Andrew MacIntyre4e10ed32004-04-04 07:01:35 +0000675 close() calls would attempt to free() the buffer already free()ed on
676 the first call.
677
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +0000678
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000679Extension modules
680-----------------
681
Barry Warsaw11b91a02004-06-28 00:50:43 +0000682- Added socket.getservbyport(), and make the second argument in
683 getservbyname() and getservbyport() optional.
684
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +0000685- time module code that deals with input POSIX timestamps will now raise
686 ValueError if more than a second is lost in precision when the
687 timestamp is cast to the platform C time_t type. There's no chance
688 that the platform will do anything sensible with the result in such
689 cases. This includes ctime(), localtime() and gmtime(). Assorted
690 fromtimestamp() and utcfromtimestamp() methods in the datetime module
691 were also protected. Closes bugs #919012 and 975996.
Brett Cannonb46ed712004-06-19 20:50:47 +0000692
Martin v. Löwis77ca6c42004-06-03 12:47:26 +0000693- fcntl.ioctl now warns if the mutate flag is not specified.
694
Martin v. Löwisd8948722004-06-02 09:57:56 +0000695- nt now properly allows to refer to UNC roots, e.g. in nt.stat().
696
Raymond Hettinger027bb632004-05-31 03:09:25 +0000697- the weakref module now supports additional objects: array.array,
698 sre.pattern_objects, file objects, and sockets.
699
Raymond Hettingere2eda602004-04-04 08:51:41 +0000700- operator.isMappingType() and operator.isSequenceType() now give
701 fewer false positives.
702
Brett Cannon06c34792004-03-23 23:16:54 +0000703- socket.sslerror is now a subclass of socket.error . Also added
704 socket.error to the socket module's C API.
705
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000706- Bug #920575: A problem where the _locale module segfaults on
Hye-Shik Changc3a87b82004-03-21 19:34:30 +0000707 nl_langinfo(ERA) caused by GNU libc's illegal NULL return is fixed.
708
Raymond Hettinger6e2ee862004-03-14 04:37:50 +0000709- array objects now support the copy module. Also, their resizing
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000710 scheme has been updated to match that used for list objects. This improves
Raymond Hettinger49f9bd12004-03-14 05:43:59 +0000711 the performance (speed and memory usage) of append() operations.
712 Also, array.extend() now accepts any iterable argument for repeated
713 appends without needing to create another temporary array.
Raymond Hettinger3aa82c02004-03-13 18:18:51 +0000714
Raymond Hettinger3e47f652004-03-08 18:22:35 +0000715- cStringIO.writelines() now accepts any iterable argument and writes
716 the lines one at a time rather than joining them and writing once.
717 Made a parallel change to StringIO.writelines(). Saves memory and
718 makes suitable for use with generator expressions.
719
Brett Cannond1080a32004-03-02 04:38:10 +0000720- time.strftime() now checks that the values in its time tuple argument
721 are within the proper boundaries to prevent possible crashes from the
722 platform's C library implementation of strftime(). Can possibly
723 break code that uses values outside the range that didn't cause
724 problems previously (such as sitting day of year to 0). Fixes bug
725 #897625.
726
Martin v. Löwis12af0482004-01-31 12:34:17 +0000727- The socket module now supports Bluetooth sockets, if the
728 system has <bluetooth/bluetooth.h>
729
Raymond Hettinger756b3f32004-01-29 06:37:52 +0000730- Added a collections module containing a new datatype, deque(),
731 offering high-performance, thread-safe, memory friendly appends
732 and pops on either side of the deque.
733
734- Several modules now take advantage of collections.deque() for
735 improved performance: Queue, mutex, shlex, threading, and pydoc.
736
Raymond Hettinger166958b2003-12-01 13:18:39 +0000737- The operator module has two new functions, attrgetter() and
738 itemgetter() which are useful for creating fast data extractor
739 functions for map(), list.sort(), itertools.groupby(), and
740 other functions that expect a function argument.
741
Martin v. Löwis94681fc2003-11-27 19:40:22 +0000742- socket.SHUT_{RD,WR,RDWR} was added.
743
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +0000744- os.getsid was added.
745
Guido van Rossum16b9fa82003-10-23 23:54:57 +0000746- The pwd module incorrectly advertised its struct type as
747 struct_pwent; this has been renamed to struct_passwd. (The old name
748 is still supported for backwards compatibility.)
749
Fred Drakede050322003-10-21 15:41:59 +0000750- The xml.parsers.expat module now provides Expat 1.95.7.
751
Martin v. Löwis3bbd6542003-10-03 13:57:37 +0000752- socket.IPPROTO_IPV6 was added.
753
Martin v. Löwise7a97962003-09-20 16:08:33 +0000754- readline.clear_history was added.
755
Brett Cannon62dba4c2003-09-10 19:37:42 +0000756- select.select() now accepts sequences for its first three arguments.
757
Raymond Hettinger5475f232003-08-08 12:20:03 +0000758- cStringIO now supports the f.closed attribute.
759
Anthony Baxter83f52912003-08-05 06:33:56 +0000760- The signal module now exposes SIGRTMIN and SIGRTMAX (if available).
761
Andrew M. Kuchling69f31eb2003-08-13 23:11:04 +0000762- curses module now supports use_default_colors(). [patch #739124]
763
Anthony Baxter5c68ef02003-10-04 08:04:04 +0000764- Bug #811028: ncurses.h breakage on FreeBSD/MacOS X
765
766- Bug #814613: INET_ADDRSTRLEN fix needed for all compilers on SGI
767
Gustavo Niemeyerad3fc442003-10-17 22:13:16 +0000768- Implemented non-recursive SRE matching scheme (#757624).
769
770- Implemented (?(id/name)yes|no) support in SRE (#572936).
771
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +0000772- random.seed() with no arguments or None uses time.time() as a default
773 seed. Modified to match Py2.2 behavior and use fractional seconds so
774 that successive runs are more likely to produce different sequences.
775
776- random.Random has a new method, getrandbits(k), which returns an int
777 with k random bits. This method is now an optional part of the API
778 for user defined generators. Any generator that defines genrandbits()
779 can now use randrange() for ranges with a length >= 2**53. Formerly,
780 randrange would return only even numbers for ranges that large (see
781 SF bug #812202). Generators that do not define genrandbits() now
782 issue a warning when randrange() is called with a range that large.
783
Raymond Hettingerd25c1c62003-12-06 16:23:06 +0000784- itertools has a new function, groupby() for aggregating iterables
785 into groups sharing the same key (as determined by a key function).
786 It offers some of functionality of SQL's groupby keyword and of
787 the Unix uniq filter.
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +0000788
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000789- itertools now has a new tee() function which produces two independent
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +0000790 iterators from a single iterable.
791
792- itertools.izip() with no arguments now returns an empty iterator instead
793 of raising a TypeError exception.
794
Gustavo Niemeyera6e436e2004-02-14 00:02:45 +0000795- Fixed #853061: allow BZ2Compressor.compress() to receive an empty string
796 as parameter.
797
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000798Library
799-------
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000800
Guido van Rossum5124b4a2004-07-06 17:52:32 +0000801- Bug #981530: Fix UnboundLocalError in shutil.rmtree(). This affects
802 the documented behavior: the function passed to the onerror()
803 handler can now also be os.listdir.
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000804
Brett Cannon41d13f62004-07-03 03:54:54 +0000805- Bug #754449: threading.Thread objects no longer mask exceptions raised during
806 interpreter shutdown with another exception from attempting to handle the
807 original exception.
Brett Cannoncc4e9352004-07-03 03:52:35 +0000808
Raymond Hettinger21f9fce2004-07-10 16:11:03 +0000809- Added decimal.py per PEP 327.
Raymond Hettinger7c85fa42004-07-01 11:01:35 +0000810
Brett Cannon46d4ff22004-06-29 04:08:23 +0000811- Bug #981299: rsync is now a recognized protocol in urlparse that uses a
812 "netloc" portion of a URL.
Brett Cannonfbac2942004-06-29 04:02:40 +0000813
Brett Cannon1c3fa182004-06-19 21:11:35 +0000814- Bug #919012: shutil.move() will not try to move a directory into itself.
815 Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
816
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +0000817- Bug #934282: pydoc.stripid() is now case-insensitive. Thanks Robin Becker.
818
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +0000819- Bug #823209: cmath.log() now takes an optional base argument so that its
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +0000820 API matches math.log().
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +0000821
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +0000822- Bug #957381: distutils bdist_rpm no longer fails on recent RPM versions
823 that generate a *-debuginfo.rpm.
824
Martin v. Löwisbdec50f2004-06-08 08:29:33 +0000825- os.path.devnull has been added for all supported platforms.
826
Hye-Shik Chang2400e932004-06-05 18:37:53 +0000827- Fixed #877165: distutils now picks the right C++ compiler command
828 on cygwin and mingw32.
829
Hye-Shik Chang39aef792004-06-05 13:30:56 +0000830- urllib.urlopen().readline() now handles HTTP/0.9 correctly.
831
Brett Cannon0096e262004-06-05 01:12:51 +0000832- refactored site.py into functions. Also wrote regression tests for the
833 module.
834
Fred Drakeec6229e2004-06-25 23:02:59 +0000835- The distutils install command now supports the --home option and
836 installation scheme for all platforms.
837
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +0000838- asyncore.loop now has a repeat count parameter that defaults to
Michael W. Hudson7db865a2004-06-30 09:09:38 +0000839 looping forever.
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +0000840
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +0000841- The distutils sdist command now ignores all .svn directories, in
842 addition to CVS and RCS directories. .svn directories hold
843 administrative files for the Subversion source control system.
844
Martin v. Löwis2a6ba902004-05-31 18:22:40 +0000845- Added a new module: cookielib. Automatic cookie handling for HTTP
846 clients. Also, support for cookielib has been added to urllib2, so
847 urllib2.urlopen() can transparently handle cookies.
848
Raymond Hettinger059e1702004-05-19 19:56:44 +0000849- stringprep.py now uses built-in set() instead of sets.Set().
850
Thomas Heller2e7c8322004-05-11 15:10:59 +0000851- Bug #876278: Unbounded recursion in modulefinder
852
Martin v. Löwis456ab1d2004-05-06 01:54:36 +0000853- Bug #780300: Swap public and system ID in LexicalHandler.startDTD.
854 Applications relying on the wrong order need to be corrected.
855
Hye-Shik Chang0f5bf1e2004-04-20 21:11:11 +0000856- Bug #926075: Fixed a bug that returns a wrong pattern object
857 for a string or unicode object in sre.compile() when a different
858 type pattern with the same value exists.
859
Skip Montanarod0c0c412004-04-07 16:03:02 +0000860- Added countcallers arg to trace.Trace class (--trackcalls command line arg
861 when run from the command prompt).
862
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +0000863- Fixed a caching bug in platform.platform() where the argument of 'terse' was
864 not taken into consideration when caching value.
865
Nicholas Bastin824b1b22004-03-23 18:44:39 +0000866- Added two new command-line arguments for profile (output file and
867 default sort).
868
Nicholas Bastin1eb4bfc2004-03-22 20:12:56 +0000869- Added global runctx function to profile module
870
Martin v. Löwis347c30d2004-03-21 15:29:41 +0000871- Add hlist missing entryconfigure and entrycget methods.
872
Hye-Shik Chang4a7ad1a2004-03-19 08:11:56 +0000873- The ptcp154 codec was added for Kazakh character set support.
874
Martin v. Löwisa79449e2004-02-15 21:19:18 +0000875- Support non-anonymous ftp URLs in urllib2.
876
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000877- The encodings package will now apply codec name aliases
Marc-André Lemburg57cb68f2004-01-20 18:24:34 +0000878 first before starting to try the import of the codec module.
879 This simplifies overriding built-in codecs with external
880 packages, e.g. the included CJK codecs with the JapaneseCodecs
881 package, by adjusting the aliases dictionary in encodings.aliases
882 accordingly.
883
Barry Warsaw30ff12f2004-01-04 01:13:43 +0000884- base64 now supports RFC 3548 Base16, Base32, and Base64 encoding and
885 decoding standards.
886
Jeremy Hylton37c5f2a2003-12-14 05:29:45 +0000887- urllib2 now supports processors. A processor is a handler that
888 implements an xxx_request or xxx_response method. These methods are
889 called for all requests.
890
Thomas Hellerc7501d52003-12-05 20:28:07 +0000891- distutils compilers now compile source files in the same order as
892 they are passed to the compiler.
893
Walter Dörwaldc8de4582003-12-03 20:26:05 +0000894- pprint.pprint() and pprint.pformat() now have additional parameters
895 indent, width and depth.
896
Walter Dörwald7a7ede52003-12-03 20:15:28 +0000897- Patch #750542: pprint now will pretty print subclasses of list, tuple
898 and dict too, as long as they don't overwrite __repr__().
899
Thomas Hellerb3105912003-11-28 19:42:56 +0000900- Bug #848614: distutils' msvccompiler fails to find the MSVC6
901 compiler because of incomplete registry entries.
902
Martin v. Löwisaf7dc8d2003-11-19 19:51:55 +0000903- httplib.HTTP.putrequest now offers to omit the implicit Accept-Encoding.
904
Thomas Hellercf0005b2003-11-14 10:33:20 +0000905- Patch #841977: modulefinder didn't find extension modules in packages
906
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +0000907- imaplib.IMAP4.thread was added.
908
Guido van Rossum967b0632003-11-10 02:27:19 +0000909- Plugged a minor hole in tempfile.mktemp() due to the use of
910 os.path.exists(), switched to using os.lstat() directly if possible.
911
Raymond Hettinger0c410272004-01-05 10:13:35 +0000912- bisect.py and heapq.py now have underlying C implementations
Raymond Hettinger33ecffb2004-06-10 05:03:17 +0000913 for better performance.
914
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +0000915- heapq.py has two new functions, nsmallest() and nlargest().
Raymond Hettingerb3af1812003-11-08 10:24:38 +0000916
Neil Schemenauerf607fc52003-11-05 23:03:00 +0000917- traceback.format_exc has been added (similar to print_exc but it returns
918 a string).
919
Martin v. Löwis45394c22003-10-31 13:49:36 +0000920- xmlrpclib.MultiCall has been added.
921
Martin v. Löwis48440b72003-10-31 12:52:35 +0000922- poplib.POP3_SSL has been added.
923
Martin v. Löwisd6625482003-10-12 17:37:01 +0000924- tmpfile.mkstemp now returns an absolute path even if dir is relative.
925
Brett Cannon5d9ca4e2003-10-12 04:38:48 +0000926- urlparse is RFC 2396 compliant.
927
Skip Montanarodef99342003-10-03 14:07:07 +0000928- The fieldnames argument to the csv module's DictReader constructor is now
929 optional. If omitted, the first row of the file will be used as the
930 list of fieldnames.
931
Raymond Hettinger9a80c5d2003-09-23 20:21:01 +0000932- encodings.bz2_codec was added for access to bz2 compression
933 using "a long string".encode('bz2')
934
Guido van Rossum0e5a51d2003-09-22 15:03:11 +0000935- Various improvements to unittest.py, realigned with PyUnit CVS.
936
Martin v. Löwisc6bb6c02003-09-20 15:52:21 +0000937- dircache now passes exceptions to the caller, instead of returning
938 empty lists.
939
Raymond Hettingerdeadbf52003-09-12 06:33:37 +0000940- The bsddb module and dbhash module now support the iterator and
941 mapping protocols which make them more substitutable for dictionaries
942 and shelves.
943
Skip Montanaro3f7a9482003-09-06 19:52:12 +0000944- The csv module's DictReader and DictWriter classes now accept keyword
945 arguments. This was an omission in the initial implementation.
946
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +0000947- The email package handles some RFC 2231 parameters with missing
Barry Warsaw2f5bf172003-09-03 04:09:49 +0000948 CHARSET fields better. It also includes a patch to parameter
949 parsing when semicolons appear inside quotes.
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +0000950
Raymond Hettinger6a180122003-08-17 08:34:09 +0000951- sets.py now runs under Py2.2. In addition, the argument restrictions
952 for most set methods (but not the operators) have been relaxed to
Raymond Hettinger70b9f492003-11-19 15:52:14 +0000953 allow any iterable.
Raymond Hettingeree562fc2003-08-15 21:17:04 +0000954
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +0000955- _strptime.py now has a behind-the-scenes caching mechanism for the most
Brett Cannonb7150a22003-08-05 06:27:04 +0000956 recent TimeRE instance used along with the last five unique directive
957 patterns. The overall module was also made more thread-safe.
958
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +0000959- random.cunifvariate() and random.stdgamma() were deprecated in Py2.3
960 and removed in Py2.4.
961
Anthony Baxter92bee362003-11-04 14:35:49 +0000962- Bug #823328: urllib2.py's HTTP Digest Auth support works again.
963
Hye-Shik Chang84a99312004-01-17 14:59:36 +0000964- Patch #873597: CJK codecs are imported into rank of default codecs.
965
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000966Tools/Demos
967-----------
968
Skip Montanarod5a21fd2004-01-27 14:49:04 +0000969- A hotshotmain script was added to the Tools/scripts directory that
970 makes it easy to run a script under control of the hotshot profiler.
971
Skip Montanaro030f68a2003-10-28 16:24:00 +0000972- The db2pickle and pickle2db scripts can now dump/load gdbm files.
973
Skip Montanaroe2b61e02004-03-03 17:42:08 +0000974- The file order on the command line of the pickle2db script was reversed.
975 It is now [ picklefile ] dbfile. This provides better symmetry with
976 db2pickle. The file arguments to both scripts are now source followed by
977 destination in situations where both files are given.
978
Skip Montanarofd4fa882003-09-10 19:04:13 +0000979- The pydoc script will display a link to the module documentation for
980 modules determined to be part of the core distribution. The documentation
981 base directory defaults to http://www.python.org/doc/current/lib/ but can
982 be changed by setting the PYTHONDOCS environment variable.
983
Raymond Hettingere41d4c82003-08-25 04:39:55 +0000984- texcheck.py now detects double word errors.
985
Tim Peters1a3abcb2003-08-18 23:52:09 +0000986- md5sum.py mistakenly opened input files in text mode by default, a
987 silent and dangerous change from previous releases. It once again
988 opens input files in binary mode by default. The -t and -b flags
989 remain for compatibility with the 2.3 release, but -b is the default
990 now.
991
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000992- py-electric-colon now works when pending-delete/delete-selection mode is
993 in effect
994
995- py-help-at-point is no longer bound to the F1 key - it's still bound to
996 C-c C-h
997
Barry Warsaw6ec58ca2003-09-03 03:20:37 +0000998- Pynche was fixed to not crash when there is no ~/.pynche file and no
999 -d option was given.
1000
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001001Build
1002-----
1003
Brett Cannonf6af76d2004-06-26 04:03:06 +00001004- Bug #978645: Modules/getpath.c now builds properly in --disable-framework
1005 build under OS X.
1006
Skip Montanaro56f6a4f2004-06-18 02:47:22 +00001007- Profiling using gprof is now available if Python is configured with
1008 --enable-profiling.
1009
Martin v. Löwisf30d60e2004-06-08 08:17:44 +00001010- Profiling the VM using the Pentium TSC is now possible if Python
1011 is configured --with-tsc.
1012
Martin v. Löwis642c8a12004-06-04 13:55:13 +00001013- In order to find libraries, setup.py now also looks in /lib64, for use
1014 on AMD64.
1015
Hye-Shik Chang54f94392004-04-14 07:55:31 +00001016- Bug #934635: Fixed a bug where the configure script couldn't detect
1017 getaddrinfo() properly if the KAME stack had SCTP support.
1018
Skip Montanaro7befb992004-02-10 16:50:21 +00001019- Support for missing ANSI C header files (limits.h, stddef.h, etc) was
1020 removed.
1021
Skip Montanarodb608052004-02-07 13:53:46 +00001022- Systems requiring the D4, D6 or D7 variants of pthreads are no longer
1023 supported (see PEP 11).
1024
1025- Universal newline support can no longer be disabled (see PEP 11).
1026
Skip Montanarocd1f7432004-01-17 14:22:44 +00001027- Support for DGUX, SunOS 4, IRIX 4 and Minix was removed (see PEP 11).
1028
1029- Support for systems requiring --with-dl-dld or --with-sgi-dl was removed
1030 (see PEP 11).
1031
1032- Tests for sizeof(char) were removed since ANSI C mandates that
1033 sizeof(char) must be 1.
1034
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001035C API
1036-----
1037
Tim Peters9ddf40b2004-06-20 22:41:32 +00001038- Thanks to Anthony Tuininga, the datetime module now supplies a C API
1039 containing type-check macros and constructors. See new docs in the
1040 Python/C API Reference Manual for details.
1041
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +00001042- Private function _PyTime_DoubleToTimet added, to convert a Python
1043 timestamp (C double) to platform time_t with some out-of-bounds
1044 checking. Declared in new header file timefuncs.h. It would be
1045 good to expose some other internal timemodule.c functions there.
1046
Martin v. Löwise440e472004-06-01 15:22:42 +00001047- New public functions PyEval_EvaluateFrame and PyGen_New to expose
1048 generator objects.
1049
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +00001050- New public functions Py_IncRef() and Py_DecRef(), exposing the
1051 functionality of the Py_XINCREF() and Py_XDECREF macros. Useful for
Thomas Hellercc10a852004-04-22 17:28:25 +00001052 runtime dynamic embedding of Python. See patch #938302, by Bob
1053 Ippolito.
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +00001054
Raymond Hettingerc1e4f9d2004-03-12 08:04:00 +00001055- Added a new macro, PySequence_Fast_ITEMS, which retrieves a fast sequence's
1056 underlying array of PyObject pointers. Useful for high speed looping.
1057
Raymond Hettinger8f5cdaa2003-12-13 11:26:12 +00001058- Created a new method flag, METH_COEXIST, which causes a method to be loaded
1059 even if already defined by a slot wrapper. This allows a __contains__
1060 method, for example, to co-exist with a defined sq_contains slot. This
1061 is helpful because the PyCFunction can take advantage of optimized calls
1062 whenever METH_O or METH_NOARGS flags are defined.
1063
Raymond Hettingerbc0f2ab2003-11-25 21:12:14 +00001064- Added a new function, PyDict_Contains(d, k) which is like
1065 PySequence_Contains() but is specific to dictionaries and executes
1066 about 10% faster.
1067
Brett Cannon26b3a7b2003-10-19 21:31:43 +00001068- Added three new macros: Py_RETURN_NONE, Py_RETURN_TRUE, and Py_RETURN_FALSE.
1069 Each return the singleton they mention after Py_INCREF()ing them.
1070
Raymond Hettingercb2da432003-10-12 18:24:34 +00001071- Added a new function, PyTuple_Pack(n, ...) for constructing tuples from a
1072 variable length argument list of Python objects without having to invoke
1073 the more complex machinery of Py_BuildValue(). PyTuple_Pack(3, a, b, c)
1074 is equivalent to Py_BuildValue("(OOO)", a, b, c).
1075
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001076Windows
1077-------
1078
Guido van Rossumfd25aca2003-11-30 22:10:15 +00001079- The _winreg module could segfault when reading very large registry
1080 values, due to unchecked alloca() calls (SF bug 851056). The fix is
1081 uses either PyMem_Malloc(n) or PyString_FromStringAndSize(NULL, n),
1082 as appropriate, followed by a size check.
1083
Tim Petersf1827cf2003-09-07 03:30:18 +00001084- file.truncate() could misbehave if the file was open for update
1085 (modes r+, rb+, w+, wb+), and the most recent file operation before
1086 the truncate() call was an input operation. SF bug 801631.
1087
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001088
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001089What's New in Python 2.3 final?
1090===============================
1091
1092*Release date: 29-Jul-2003*
1093
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001094IDLE
1095----
1096
Tim Peters36c1afc2003-07-29 17:22:57 +00001097- Bug 778400: IDLE hangs when selecting "Edit with IDLE" from explorer.
1098 This was unique to Windows, and was fixed by adding an -n switch to
1099 the command the Windows installer creates to execute "Edit with IDLE"
1100 context-menu actions.
1101
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001102- IDLE displays a new message upon startup: some "personal firewall"
1103 kinds of programs (for example, ZoneAlarm) open a dialog of their
1104 own when any program opens a socket. IDLE does use sockets, talking
1105 on the computer's internal loopback interface. This connection is not
1106 visible on any external interface and no data is sent to or received
1107 from the Internet. So, if you get such a dialog when opening IDLE,
1108 asking whether to let pythonw.exe talk to address 127.0.0.1, say yes,
1109 and rest assured no communication external to your machine is taking
1110 place. If you don't allow it, IDLE won't be able to start.
1111
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001112
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001113What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 2?
1114=============================================
1115
Tim Peters6560a252003-07-24 00:15:46 +00001116*Release date: 24-Jul-2003*
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001117
1118Core and builtins
1119-----------------
1120
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00001121- It is now possible to import from zipfiles containing additional
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001122 data bytes before the zip compatible archive. Zipfiles containing a
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00001123 comment at the end are still unsupported.
1124
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001125Extension modules
1126-----------------
1127
1128- A longstanding bug in the parser module's initialization could cause
1129 fatal internal refcount confusion when the module got initialized more
1130 than once. This has been fixed.
1131
Fred Drake01a43122003-07-21 17:17:10 +00001132- Fixed memory leak in pyexpat; using the parser's ParseFile() method
1133 with open files that aren't instances of the standard file type
1134 caused an instance of the bound .read() method to be leaked on every
1135 call.
1136
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001137- Fixed some leaks in the locale module.
1138
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001139Library
1140-------
1141
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001142- Lib/encodings/rot_13.py when used as a script, now more properly
1143 uses the first Python interpreter on your path.
1144
1145- Removed caching of TimeRE (and thus LocaleTime) in _strptime.py to
1146 fix a locale related bug in the test suite. Although another patch
1147 was needed to actually fix the problem, the cache code was not
1148 restored.
1149
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00001150IDLE
1151----
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001152
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00001153- Calltips patches.
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001154
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001155Build
1156-----
1157
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001158- For MacOSX, added -mno-fused-madd to BASECFLAGS to fix test_coercion
1159 on Panther (OSX 10.3).
1160
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001161C API
1162-----
1163
1164Windows
1165-------
1166
Tim Peters291f14e2003-07-22 02:50:01 +00001167- The tempfile module could do insane imports on Windows if PYTHONCASEOK
1168 was set, making temp file creation impossible. Repaired.
1169
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001170- Add a patch to workaround pthread_sigmask() bugs in Cygwin.
1171
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001172Mac
1173---
1174
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001175- Various fixes to pimp.
1176
1177- Scripts runs with pythonw no longer had full window manager access.
1178
1179- Don't force boot-disk-only install, for reasons unknown it causes
1180 more problems than it solves.
1181
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001182
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001183What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 1?
1184=============================================
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001185
Jeremy Hylton0ed18c22003-07-18 20:10:02 +00001186*Release date: 18-Jul-2003*
1187
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001188Core and builtins
1189-----------------
1190
Tim Peterse5e065b2003-07-06 18:36:54 +00001191- The new function sys.getcheckinterval() returns the last value set
1192 by sys.setcheckinterval().
1193
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001194- Several bugs in the symbol table phase of the compiler have been
1195 fixed. Errors could be lost and compilation could fail without
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001196 reporting an error. SF patch 763201.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001197
1198- The interpreter is now more robust about importing the warnings
1199 module. In an executable generated by freeze or similar programs,
1200 earlier versions of 2.3 would fail if the warnings module could
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001201 not be found on the file system. Fixes SF bug 771097.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001202
1203- A warning about assignments to module attributes that shadow
1204 builtins, present in earlier releases of 2.3, has been removed.
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001205
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001206- It is not possible to create subclasses of builtin types like str
1207 and tuple that define an itemsize. Earlier releases of Python 2.3
1208 allowed this by mistake, leading to crashes and other problems.
1209
1210- The thread_id is now initialized to 0 in a non-thread build. SF bug
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001211 770247.
1212
1213- SF bug 762891: "del p[key]" on proxy object no longer raises SystemError.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001214
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001215Extension modules
1216-----------------
1217
1218- weakref.proxy() can now handle "del obj[i]" for proxy objects
1219 defining __delitem__. Formerly, it generated a SystemError.
1220
1221- SSL no longer crashes the interpreter when the remote side disconnects.
1222
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001223- On Unix the mmap module can again be used to map device files.
1224
Brett Cannon20def8b2003-07-01 05:16:08 +00001225- time.strptime now exclusively uses the Python implementation
1226 contained within the _strptime module.
1227
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001228- The print slot of weakref proxy objects was removed, because it was
1229 not consistent with the object's repr slot.
1230
1231- The mmap module only checks file size for regular files, not
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001232 character or block devices. SF patch 708374.
1233
1234- The cPickle Pickler garbage collection support was fixed to traverse
1235 the find_class attribute, if present.
1236
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001237- There are several fixes for the bsddb3 wrapper module.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001238
1239 bsddb3 no longer crashes if an environment is closed before a cursor
1240 (SF bug 763298).
1241
1242 The DB and DBEnv set_get_returns_none function was extended to take
Barry Warsawd71a5512003-07-20 18:00:54 +00001243 a level instead of a boolean flag. The new level 2 means that in
1244 addition, cursor.set()/.get() methods return None instead of raising
1245 an exception.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001246
1247 A typo was fixed in DBCursor.join_item(), preventing a crash.
1248
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001249Library
1250-------
1251
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001252- distutils now supports MSVC 7.1
1253
Raymond Hettinger71adf7e2003-07-16 19:25:22 +00001254- doctest now examines all docstrings by default. Previously, it would
1255 skip over functions with private names (as indicated by the underscore
1256 naming convention). The old default created too much of a risk that
1257 user tests were being skipped inadvertently. Note, this change could
1258 break code in the unlikely case that someone had intentionally put
1259 failing tests in the docstrings of private functions. The breakage
1260 is easily fixable by specifying the old behavior when calling testmod()
1261 or Tester().
1262
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001263- There were several fixes to the way dumbdbms are closed. It's vital
1264 that a dumbdbm database be closed properly, else the on-disk data
1265 and directory files can be left in mutually inconsistent states.
1266 dumbdbm.py's _Database.__del__() method attempted to close the
1267 database properly, but a shutdown race in _Database._commit() could
1268 prevent this from working, so that a program trusting __del__() to
1269 get the on-disk files in synch could be badly surprised. The race
1270 has been repaired. A sync() method was also added so that shelve
1271 can guarantee data is written to disk.
Tim Peters7a6c7332003-07-13 17:21:10 +00001272
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001273 The close() method can now be called more than once without complaint.
Tim Petersd7472ec2003-07-13 02:22:03 +00001274
Tim Peters59aba122003-07-01 20:01:55 +00001275- The classes in threading.py are now new-style classes. That they
1276 weren't before was an oversight.
1277
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001278- The urllib2 digest authentication handlers now define the correct
1279 auth_header. The earlier versions would fail at runtime.
1280
Neal Norwitze7dfe212003-07-01 14:59:46 +00001281- SF bug 763023: fix uncaught ZeroDivisionError in difflib ratio methods
1282 when there are no lines.
1283
Neal Norwitz3c0f2c92003-07-01 21:12:47 +00001284- SF bug 763637: fix exception in Tkinter with after_cancel
1285 which could occur with Tk 8.4
1286
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001287- SF bug 770601: CGIHTTPServer.py now passes the entire environment
1288 to child processes.
1289
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001290- SF bug 765238: add filter to fnmatch's __all__.
1291
1292- SF bug 748201: make time.strptime() error messages more helpful.
1293
1294- SF patch 764470: Do not dump the args attribute of a Fault object in
1295 xmlrpclib.
1296
1297- SF patch 549151: urllib and urllib2 now redirect POSTs on 301
1298 responses.
1299
1300- SF patch 766650: The whichdb module was fixed to recognize dbm files
1301 generated by gdbm on OS/2 EMX.
1302
1303- SF bugs 763047 and 763052: fixes bug of timezone value being left as
1304 -1 when ``time.tzname[0] == time.tzname[1] and not time.daylight``
1305 is true when it should only when time.daylight is true.
1306
1307- SF bug 764548: re now allows subclasses of str and unicode to be
1308 used as patterns.
1309
1310- SF bug 763637: In Tkinter, change after_cancel() to handle tuples
1311 of varying sizes. Tk 8.4 returns a different number of values
1312 than Tk 8.3.
1313
1314- SF bug 763023: difflib.ratio() did not catch zero division.
1315
1316- The Queue module now has an __all__ attribute.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001317
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001318Tools/Demos
1319-----------
1320
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001321- See Lib/idlelib/NEWS.txt for IDLE news.
1322
Neal Norwitz592c4cc2003-07-01 04:14:28 +00001323- SF bug 753592: webchecker/wsgui now handles user supplied directories.
1324
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001325- The trace.py script has been removed. It is now in the standard library.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001326
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001327Build
1328-----
1329
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001330- Python now compiles with -fno-strict-aliasing if possible (SF bug 766696).
1331
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001332- The socket module compiles on IRIX 6.5.10.
1333
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001334- An irix64 system is treated the same way as an irix6 system (SF
1335 patch 764560).
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001336
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001337- Several definitions were missing on FreeBSD 5.x unless the
1338 __BSD_VISIBLE symbol was defined. configure now defines it as
1339 needed.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001340
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001341C API
1342-----
1343
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001344- Unicode objects now support mbcs as a built-in encoding, so the C
1345 API can use it without deferring to the encodings package.
1346
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001347Windows
1348-------
1349
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001350- The Windows implementation of PyThread_start_new_thread() never
1351 checked error returns from Windows functions correctly. As a result,
1352 it could claim to start a new thread even when the Microsoft
1353 _beginthread() function failed (due to "too many threads" -- this is
1354 on the order of thousands when it happens). In these cases, the
1355 Python exception ::
1356
1357 thread.error: can't start new thread
1358
1359 is raised now.
1360
1361- SF bug 766669: Prevent a GPF on interpreter exit when sockets are in
1362 use. The interpreter now calls WSACleanup() from Py_Finalize()
1363 instead of from DLL teardown.
1364
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001365Mac
1366---
1367
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001368- Bundlebuilder now inherits default values in the right way. It was
Walter Dörwald73a8a4b2003-07-30 12:14:02 +00001369 previously possible for app bundles to get a type of "BNDL" instead
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001370 of "APPL." Other improvements include, a --build-id option to
1371 specify the CFBundleIdentifier and using the --python option to set
1372 the executable in the bundle.
1373
1374- Fixed two bugs in MacOSX framework handling.
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001375
Jack Jansene0040412003-07-23 22:17:28 +00001376- pythonw did not allow user interaction in 2.3rc1, this has been fixed.
1377
1378- Python is now compiled with -mno-fused-madd, making all tests pass
1379 on Panther.
1380
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001381What's New in Python 2.3 beta 2?
1382================================
1383
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00001384*Release date: 29-Jun-2003*
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001385
1386Core and builtins
1387-----------------
1388
Barry Warsaw883f2232003-06-29 17:10:11 +00001389- A program can now set the environment variable PYTHONINSPECT to some
1390 string value in Python, and cause the interpreter to enter the
1391 interactive prompt at program exit, as if Python had been invoked
1392 with the -i option.
1393
Raymond Hettingerd05abde2003-06-17 05:05:49 +00001394- list.index() now accepts optional start and stop arguments. Similar
1395 changes were made to UserList.index(). SF feature request 754014.
1396
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00001397- SF patch 751998 fixes an unwanted side effect of the previous fix
1398 for SF bug 742860 (the next item).
1399
Tim Peters50d8b8b2003-05-25 17:44:31 +00001400- SF bug 742860: "WeakKeyDictionary __delitem__ uses iterkeys". This
1401 wasn't threadsafe, was very inefficient (expected time O(len(dict))
1402 instead of O(1)), and could raise a spurious RuntimeError if another
1403 thread mutated the dict during __delitem__, or if a comparison function
1404 mutated it. It also neglected to raise KeyError when the key wasn't
1405 present; didn't raise TypeError when the key wasn't of a weakly
1406 referencable type; and broke various more-or-less obscure dict
1407 invariants by using a sequence of equality comparisons over the whole
1408 set of dict keys instead of computing the key's hash code to narrow
1409 the search to those keys with the same hash code. All of these are
1410 considered to be bugs. A new implementation of __delitem__ repairs all
1411 that, but note that fixing these bugs may change visible behavior in
1412 code relying (whether intentionally or accidentally) on old behavior.
Tim Peters886128f2003-05-25 01:45:11 +00001413
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001414- SF bug 734869: Fixed a compiler bug that caused a fatal error when
1415 compiling a list comprehension that contained another list comprehension
1416 embedded in a lambda expression.
1417
Tim Peterse87568d2003-05-24 20:18:24 +00001418- SF bug 705231: builtin pow() no longer lets the platform C pow()
1419 raise -1.0 to integer powers, because (at least) glibc gets it wrong
1420 in some cases. The result should be -1.0 if the power is odd and 1.0
1421 if the power is even, and any float with a sufficiently large exponent
1422 is (mathematically) an exact even integer.
1423
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001424- SF bug 759227: A new-style class that implements __nonzero__() must
1425 return a bool or int (but not an int subclass) from that method. This
1426 matches the restriction on classic classes.
1427
Martin v. Löwis5467d4c2003-05-10 07:10:12 +00001428- The encoding attribute has been added for file objects, and set to
1429 the terminal encoding on Unix and Windows.
1430
Tim Peters015dd822003-05-04 04:16:52 +00001431- The softspace attribute of file objects became read-only by oversight.
1432 It's writable again.
1433
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00001434- Reverted a 2.3 beta 1 change to iterators for subclasses of list and
1435 tuple. By default, the iterators now access data elements directly
1436 instead of going through __getitem__. If __getitem__ access is
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001437 preferred, then __iter__ can be overridden.
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00001438
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001439- SF bug 735247: The staticmethod and super types participate in
1440 garbage collection. Before this change, it was possible for leaks to
1441 occur in functions with non-global free variables that used these types.
1442
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001443Extension modules
1444-----------------
1445
Raymond Hettinger643bcec2003-06-29 03:29:42 +00001446- the socket module has a new exception, socket.timeout, to allow
1447 timeouts to be handled separately from other socket errors.
1448
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001449- SF bug 751276: cPickle has fixed to propagate exceptions raised in
1450 user code. In earlier versions, cPickle caught and ignored any
1451 exception when it performed operations that it expected to raise
1452 specific exceptions like AttributeError.
1453
1454- cPickle Pickler and Unpickler objects now participate in garbage
1455 collection.
1456
Tim Peterscda32b72003-06-15 23:13:35 +00001457- mimetools.choose_boundary() could return duplicate strings at times,
1458 especially likely on Windows. The strings returned are now guaranteed
1459 unique within a single program run.
1460
Brett Cannon4e64d782003-06-13 23:44:35 +00001461- thread.interrupt_main() raises KeyboardInterrupt in the main thread.
1462 dummy_thread has also been modified to try to simulate the behavior.
1463
Walter Dörwald9e46abe2003-05-18 03:15:10 +00001464- array.array.insert() now treats negative indices as being relative
1465 to the end of the array, just like list.insert() does. (SF bug #739313)
1466
Tim Petersb0c854d2003-05-17 15:57:00 +00001467- The datetime module classes datetime, time, and timedelta are now
1468 properly subclassable.
Tim Petersa98924a2003-05-17 05:55:19 +00001469
Martin v. Löwis28e9ce92003-05-09 08:19:48 +00001470- _tkinter.{get|set}busywaitinterval was added.
1471
Raymond Hettinger834f4632003-05-02 20:24:56 +00001472- itertools.islice() now accepts stop=None as documented.
1473 Fixes SF bug #730685.
1474
Skip Montanaro8c044d82003-05-06 20:42:37 +00001475- the bsddb185 module is built in one restricted instance -
1476 /usr/include/db.h exists and defines HASHVERSION to be 2. This is true
1477 for many BSD-derived systems.
1478
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001479
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001480Library
1481-------
1482
Tim Petersdb3756d2003-06-29 05:30:48 +00001483- Some happy doctest extensions from Jim Fulton have been added to
1484 doctest.py. These are already being used in Zope3. The two
1485 primary ones:
1486
1487 doctest.debug(module, name) extracts the doctests from the named object
1488 in the given module, puts them in a temp file, and starts pdb running
1489 on that file. This is great when a doctest fails.
1490
1491 doctest.DocTestSuite(module=None) returns a synthesized unittest
1492 TestSuite instance, to be run by the unittest framework, which
1493 runs all the doctests in the module. This allows writing tests in
1494 doctest style (which can be clearer and shorter than writing tests
1495 in unittest style), without losing unittest's powerful testing
1496 framework features (which doctest lacks).
1497
Tim Peters6ebe61f2003-06-27 20:48:05 +00001498- For compatibility with doctests created before 2.3, if an expected
1499 output block consists solely of "1" and the actual output block
1500 consists solely of "True", it's accepted as a match; similarly
1501 for "0" and "False". This is quite un-doctest-like, but is practical.
1502 The behavior can be disabled by passing the new doctest module
1503 constant DONT_ACCEPT_TRUE_FOR_1 to the new optionflags optional
1504 argument.
1505
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001506- ZipFile.testzip() now only traps BadZipfile exceptions. Previously,
1507 a bare except caught to much and reported all errors as a problem
1508 in the archive.
1509
1510- The logging module now has a new function, makeLogRecord() making
1511 LogHandler easier to interact with DatagramHandler and SocketHandler.
1512
Skip Montanaro364ca402003-06-17 12:58:31 +00001513- The cgitb module has been extended to support plain text display (SF patch
1514 569574).
1515
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00001516- A brand new version of IDLE (from the IDLEfork project at
1517 SourceForge) is now included as Lib/idlelib. The old Tools/idle is
1518 no more.
1519
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001520- Added a new module: trace (documentation missing). This module used
1521 to be distributed in Tools/scripts. It uses sys.settrace() to trace
1522 code execution -- either function calls or individual lines. It can
1523 generate tracing output during execution or a post-mortem report of
1524 code coverage.
1525
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00001526- The threading module has new functions settrace() and setprofile()
1527 that cooperate with the functions of the same name in the sys
1528 module. A function registered with the threading module will
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001529 be used for all threads it creates. The new trace module uses this
1530 to provide tracing for code running in threads.
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00001531
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00001532- copy.py: applied SF patch 707900, fixing bug 702858, by Steven
1533 Taschuk. Copying a new-style class that had a reference to itself
1534 didn't work. (The same thing worked fine for old-style classes.)
Martin v. Löwisba8f5ff2003-06-14 07:10:06 +00001535 Builtin functions are now treated as atomic, fixing bug #746304.
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00001536
Raymond Hettingerc24d7672003-06-08 19:42:33 +00001537- difflib.py has two new functions: context_diff() and unified_diff().
1538
Guido van Rossumfa19f7c2003-05-16 01:46:51 +00001539- More fixes to urllib (SF 549151): (a) When redirecting, always use
1540 GET. This is common practice and more-or-less sanctioned by the
1541 HTTP standard. (b) Add a handler for 307 redirection, which becomes
1542 an error for POST, but a regular redirect for GET and HEAD
1543
Guido van Rossumbf1bef82003-05-13 18:01:19 +00001544- Added optional 'onerror' argument to os.walk(), to control error
1545 handling.
1546
Martin v. Löwise59e2ba2003-05-03 09:09:02 +00001547- inspect.is{method|data}descriptor was added, to allow pydoc display
1548 __doc__ of data descriptors.
1549
Skip Montanaro4a7751c2003-04-29 21:07:16 +00001550- Fixed socket speed loss caused by use of the _socketobject wrapper class
1551 in socket.py.
1552
Raymond Hettinger22952a32003-05-20 04:59:56 +00001553- timeit.py now checks the current directory for imports.
1554
Gustavo Niemeyer9556fba2003-06-07 17:53:08 +00001555- urllib2.py now knows how to order proxy classes, so the user doesn't
1556 have to insert it in front of other classes, nor do dirty tricks like
1557 inserting a "dummy" HTTPHandler after a ProxyHandler when building an
1558 opener with proxy support.
1559
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00001560- Iterators have been added for dbm keys.
1561
1562- random.Random objects can now be pickled.
1563
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001564Tools/Demos
1565-----------
1566
Martin v. Löwisb8c084e2003-06-14 09:03:46 +00001567- pydoc now offers help on keywords and topics.
1568
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00001569- Tools/idle is gone; long live Lib/idlelib.
1570
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00001571- diff.py prints file diffs in context, unified, or ndiff formats,
1572 providing a command line interface to difflib.py.
Raymond Hettinger2f3c74a2003-06-08 23:10:15 +00001573
Raymond Hettinger71e00332003-05-10 03:30:13 +00001574- texcheck.py is a new script for making a rough validation of Python LaTeX
1575 files.
1576
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001577Build
1578-----
1579
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001580- Setting DESTDIR during 'make install' now allows specifying a
Martin v. Löwis3b8ee082003-05-11 20:25:35 +00001581 different root directory.
1582
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001583C API
1584-----
1585
Tim Peters3cfe7542003-05-21 21:29:48 +00001586- PyType_Ready(): If a type declares that it participates in gc
1587 (Py_TPFLAGS_HAVE_GC), and its base class does not, and its base class's
1588 tp_free slot is the default _PyObject_Del, and type does not define
1589 a tp_free slot itself, _PyObject_GC_Del is assigned to type->tp_free.
1590 Previously _PyObject_Del was inherited, which could at best lead to a
1591 segfault. In addition, if even after this magic the type's tp_free
1592 slot is _PyObject_Del or NULL, and the type is a base type
1593 (Py_TPFLAGS_BASETYPE), TypeError is raised: since the type is a base
1594 type, its dealloc function must call type->tp_free, and since the type
1595 is gc'able, tp_free must not be NULL or _PyObject_Del.
1596
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00001597- PyThreadState_SetAsyncExc(): A new API (deliberately accessible only
1598 from C) to interrupt a thread by sending it an exception. It is
1599 intentional that you have to write your own C extension to call it
1600 from Python.
1601
1602
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001603New platforms
1604-------------
1605
1606None this time.
1607
1608Tests
1609-----
1610
1611- test_imp rewritten so that it doesn't raise RuntimeError if run as a
1612 side effect of being imported ("import test.autotest").
1613
1614Windows
1615-------
1616
Tim Petersfaa697a2003-06-22 01:42:20 +00001617- The Windows installer ships with Tcl/Tk 8.4.3 (upgraded from 8.4.1).
1618
Tim Petersc4607da2003-05-08 18:13:59 +00001619- The installer always suggested that Python be installed on the C:
1620 drive, due to a hardcoded "C:" generated by the Wise installation
1621 wizard. People with machines where C: is not the system drive
1622 usually want Python installed on whichever drive is their system drive
1623 instead. We removed the hardcoded "C:", and two testers on machines
1624 where C: is not the system drive report that the installer now
1625 suggests their system drive. Note that you can always select the
1626 directory you want in the "Select Destination Directory" dialog --
1627 that's what it's for.
1628
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001629Mac
1630---
1631
Just van Rossum99bc1fc2003-05-09 15:01:25 +00001632- There's a new module called "autoGIL", which offers a mechanism to
1633 automatically release the Global Interpreter Lock when an event loop
1634 goes to sleep, allowing other threads to run. It's currently only
1635 supported on OSX, in the Mach-O version.
Jack Jansenf5e23ff2003-06-16 13:53:40 +00001636- The OSA modules now allow direct access to properties of the
1637 toplevel application class (in AppleScript terminology).
1638- The Package Manager can now update itself.
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001639
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00001640SourceForge Bugs and Patches Applied
1641------------------------------------
1642
1643430160, 471893, 501716, 542562, 549151, 569574, 595837, 596434,
1644598163, 604210, 604716, 610332, 612627, 614770, 620190, 621891,
1645622042, 639139, 640236, 644345, 649742, 649742, 658233, 660022,
1646661318, 661676, 662807, 662923, 666219, 672855, 678325, 682347,
1647683486, 684981, 685773, 686254, 692776, 692959, 693094, 696777,
1648697989, 700827, 703666, 708495, 708604, 708901, 710733, 711902,
1649713722, 715782, 718286, 719359, 719367, 723136, 723831, 723962,
1650724588, 724767, 724767, 725942, 726150, 726446, 726869, 727051,
1651727719, 727719, 727805, 728277, 728563, 728656, 729096, 729103,
1652729293, 729297, 729300, 729317, 729395, 729622, 729817, 730170,
1653730296, 730594, 730685, 730826, 730963, 731209, 731403, 731504,
1654731514, 731626, 731635, 731643, 731644, 731644, 731689, 732124,
1655732143, 732234, 732284, 732284, 732479, 732761, 732783, 732951,
1656733667, 733781, 734118, 734231, 734869, 735051, 735293, 735527,
1657735613, 735694, 736962, 736962, 737970, 738066, 739313, 740055,
1658740234, 740301, 741806, 742126, 742741, 742860, 742860, 742911,
1659744041, 744104, 744238, 744687, 744877, 745055, 745478, 745525,
1660745620, 746012, 746304, 746366, 746801, 746953, 747348, 747667,
1661747954, 748846, 748849, 748973, 748975, 749191, 749210, 749759,
1662749831, 749911, 750008, 750092, 750542, 750595, 751038, 751107,
1663751276, 751451, 751916, 751941, 751956, 751998, 752671, 753451,
1664753602, 753617, 753845, 753925, 754014, 754340, 754447, 755031,
1665755087, 755147, 755245, 755683, 755987, 756032, 756996, 757058,
1666757229, 757818, 757821, 757822, 758112, 758910, 759227, 759889,
1667760257, 760703, 760792, 761104, 761337, 761519, 761830, 762455
1668
1669
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001670What's New in Python 2.3 beta 1?
1671================================
1672
Guido van Rossumfa1eddf2003-04-25 19:19:52 +00001673*Release date: 25-Apr-2003*
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001674
1675Core and builtins
1676-----------------
1677
Thomas Heller5eccabc2003-04-23 19:35:25 +00001678- New format codes B, H, I, k and K have been implemented for
1679 PyArg_ParseTuple and PyBuild_Value.
1680
Alex Martellia70b1912003-04-22 08:12:33 +00001681- New builtin function sum(seq, start=0) returns the sum of all the
1682 items in iterable object seq, plus start (items are normally numbers,
1683 and cannot be strings).
1684
Guido van Rossumaa86e352003-04-19 18:15:10 +00001685- bool() called without arguments now returns False rather than
1686 raising an exception. This is consistent with calling the
1687 constructors for the other builtin types -- called without argument
1688 they all return the false value of that type. (SF patch #724135)
1689
Guido van Rossumcf8d2852003-04-17 16:53:26 +00001690- In support of PEP 269 (making the pgen parser generator accessible
1691 from Python), some changes to the pgen code structure were made; a
1692 few files that used to be linked only with pgen are now linked with
1693 Python itself.
1694
Guido van Rossumc1f6e8c2003-04-16 21:13:23 +00001695- The repr() of a weakref object now shows the __name__ attribute of
1696 the referenced object, if it has one.
1697
Guido van Rossum76ba09f2003-04-16 19:40:58 +00001698- super() no longer ignores data descriptors, except __class__. See
1699 the thread started at
1700 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2003-April/034338.html
1701
Guido van Rossum3a3cca52003-04-14 20:58:14 +00001702- list.insert(i, x) now interprets negative i as it would be
1703 interpreted by slicing, so negative values count from the end of the
1704 list. This was the only place where such an interpretation was not
1705 placed on a list index.
1706
Guido van Rossumefbbb1c2003-04-11 18:43:06 +00001707- range() now works even if the arguments are longs with magnitude
1708 larger than sys.maxint, as long as the total length of the sequence
1709 fits. E.g., range(2**100, 2**101, 2**100) is the following list:
1710 [1267650600228229401496703205376L]. (SF patch #707427.)
1711
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001712- Some horridly obscure problems were fixed involving interaction
1713 between garbage collection and old-style classes with "ambitious"
1714 getattr hooks. If an old-style instance didn't have a __del__ method,
1715 but did have a __getattr__ hook, and the instance became reachable
1716 only from an unreachable cycle, and the hook resurrected or deleted
1717 unreachable objects when asked to resolve "__del__", anything up to
1718 a segfault could happen. That's been repaired.
1719
Raymond Hettingera3e1e4c2003-03-06 23:54:28 +00001720- dict.pop now takes an optional argument specifying a default
1721 value to return if the key is not in the dict. If a default is not
1722 given and the key is not found, a KeyError will still be raised.
1723 Parallel changes were made to UserDict.UserDict and UserDict.DictMixin.
1724 [SF patch #693753] (contributed by Michael Stone.)
1725
Martin v. Löwis73d538b2003-03-05 15:13:47 +00001726- sys.getfilesystemencoding() was added to expose
1727 Py_FileSystemDefaultEncoding.
Guido van Rossum46d3dc32003-03-01 03:20:41 +00001728
1729- New function sys.exc_clear() clears the current exception. This is
1730 rarely needed, but can sometimes be useful to release objects
1731 referenced by the traceback held in sys.exc_info()[2]. (SF patch
1732 #693195.)
1733
Neal Norwitzd5a65a72003-02-23 23:11:41 +00001734- On 64-bit systems, a dictionary could contain duplicate long/int keys
1735 if the key value was larger than 2**32. See SF bug #689659.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001736
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00001737- Fixed SF bug #663074. The codec system was using global static
Walter Dörwaldfa86bf52003-03-31 16:15:13 +00001738 variables to store internal data. As a result, any attempts to use the
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00001739 unicode system with multiple active interpreters, or successive
1740 interpreter executions, would fail.
1741
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00001742- "%c" % u"a" now returns a unicode string instead of raising a
Walter Dörwald44f527f2003-04-02 16:37:24 +00001743 TypeError. u"%c" % 0xffffffff now raises a OverflowError instead
Walter Dörwald1e469c52003-04-02 16:57:59 +00001744 of a ValueError to be consistent with "%c" % 256. See SF patch #710127.
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00001745
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001746Extension modules
1747-----------------
1748
Guido van Rossume7adda92003-04-25 05:52:37 +00001749- The socket module now provides the functions inet_pton and inet_ntop
1750 for converting between string and packed representation of IP
1751 addresses. There is also a new module variable, has_ipv6, which is
1752 True iff the current Python has IPv6 support. See SF patch #658327.
1753
Martin v. Löwisbfe175c2003-04-16 19:42:51 +00001754- Tkinter wrappers around Tcl variables now pass objects directly
1755 to Tcl, instead of first converting them to strings.
1756
Guido van Rossum41c99e72003-04-14 17:59:34 +00001757- The .*? pattern in the re module is now special-cased to avoid the
1758 recursion limit. (SF patch #720991 -- many thanks to Gary Herron
1759 and Greg Chapman.)
1760
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00001761- New function sys.call_tracing() allows pdb to debug code
1762 recursively.
1763
Tim Peters730f5532003-04-08 17:17:17 +00001764- New function gc.get_referents(obj) returns a list of objects
Tim Peters0f81ab62003-04-08 16:39:48 +00001765 directly referenced by obj. In effect, it exposes what the object's
1766 tp_traverse slot does, and can be helpful when debugging memory
1767 leaks.
1768
Martin v. Löwis7fb697b2003-04-03 04:49:12 +00001769- The iconv module has been removed from this release.
1770
Tim Petersd50ade62003-03-20 18:32:13 +00001771- The platform-independent routines for packing floats in IEEE formats
1772 (struct.pack's <f, >f, <d, and >d codes; pickle and cPickle's protocol 1
1773 pickling of floats) ignored that rounding can cause a carry to
1774 propagate. The worst consequence was that, in rare cases, <f and >f
1775 could produce strings that, when unpacked again, were a factor of 2
1776 away from the original float. This has been fixed. See SF bug
1777 #705836.
1778
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001779- New function time.tzset() provides access to the C library tzset()
Guido van Rossumd11b62e2003-03-14 21:51:36 +00001780 function, if supported. (SF patch #675422.)
1781
Neal Norwitz12e22172003-03-03 21:16:39 +00001782- Using createfilehandler, deletefilehandler, createtimerhandler functions
1783 on Tkinter.tkinter (_tkinter module) no longer crashes the interpreter.
1784 See SF bug #692416.
1785
Michael W. Hudsonf0089982003-03-03 12:29:42 +00001786- Modified the fcntl.ioctl() function to allow modification of a passed
1787 mutable buffer (for details see the reference documentation).
1788
Raymond Hettinger61fe64d2003-02-23 04:40:07 +00001789- Made user requested changes to the itertools module.
1790 Subsumed the times() function into repeat().
1791 Added chain() and cycle().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001792
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00001793- The rotor module is now deprecated; the encryption algorithm it uses
Andrew M. Kuchlingfb5f4852003-04-24 13:19:56 +00001794 is not believed to be secure, and including crypto code with Python
1795 has implications for exporting and importing it in various countries.
1796
Skip Montanaro89feabc2003-03-30 04:54:24 +00001797- The socket module now always uses the _socketobject wrapper class, even on
1798 platforms which have dup(2). The makefile() method is built directly
1799 on top of the socket without duplicating the file descriptor, allowing
1800 timeouts to work properly.
1801
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001802Library
1803-------
1804
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00001805- New generator function os.walk() is an easy-to-use alternative to
1806 os.path.walk(). See os module docs for details. os.path.walk()
1807 isn't deprecated at this time, but may become deprecated in a
1808 future release.
1809
Marc-André Lemburg246d8472003-04-24 11:36:11 +00001810- Added new module "platform" which provides a wide range of tools
1811 for querying platform dependent features.
1812
Andrew M. Kuchling4e42b312003-04-24 16:45:05 +00001813- netrc now allows ASCII punctuation characters in passwords.
Raymond Hettinger1d877862003-04-23 19:06:08 +00001814
Martin v. Löwis153c9e42003-04-19 20:59:03 +00001815- shelve now supports the optional writeback argument, and exposes
1816 pickle protocol versions.
1817
Guido van Rossuma2685402003-04-19 18:04:57 +00001818- Several methods of nntplib.NNTP have grown an optional file argument
1819 which specifies a file where to divert the command's output
1820 (already supported by the body() method). (SF patch #720468)
1821
Martin v. Löwis281b2c62003-04-18 21:04:39 +00001822- The self-documenting XML server library DocXMLRPCServer was added.
1823
Martin v. Löwis2548c732003-04-18 10:39:54 +00001824- Support for internationalized domain names has been added through
1825 the 'idna' and 'punycode' encodings, the 'stringprep' module, the
1826 'mkstringprep' tool, and enhancements to the socket and httplib
1827 modules.
1828
Walter Dörwald5688b7a2003-04-16 09:46:13 +00001829- htmlentitydefs has two new dictionaries: name2codepoint maps
1830 HTML entity names to Unicode codepoints (as integers).
1831 codepoint2name is the reverse mapping. See SF patch #722017.
1832
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00001833- pdb has a new command, "debug", which lets you step through
1834 arbitrary code from the debugger's (pdb) prompt.
1835
Raymond Hettingerc377cbf2003-04-04 22:56:42 +00001836- unittest.failUnlessEqual and its equivalent unittest.assertEqual now
1837 return 'not a == b' rather than 'a != b'. This gives the desired
1838 result for classes that define __eq__ without defining __ne__.
1839
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001840- sgmllib now supports SGML marked sections, in particular the
Martin v. Löwis3163a3b2003-03-30 14:25:40 +00001841 MS Office extensions.
1842
Raymond Hettinger42182eb2003-03-09 05:33:33 +00001843- The urllib module now offers support for the iterator protocol.
1844 SF patch 698520 contributed by Brett Cannon.
1845
Guido van Rossum9589a252003-03-06 01:56:12 +00001846- New module timeit provides a simple framework for timing the
1847 execution speed of expressions and statements.
1848
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001849- sets.Set objects now support mixed-type __eq__ and __ne__, instead
1850 of raising TypeError. If x is a Set object and y is a non-Set object,
1851 x == y is False, and x != y is True. This is akin to the change made
1852 for mixed-type comparisons of datetime objects in 2.3a2; more info
1853 about the rationale is in the NEWS entry for that. See also SF bug
1854 report <http://www.python.org/sf/693121>.
1855
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00001856- On Unix platforms, if os.listdir() is called with a Unicode argument,
1857 it now returns Unicode strings. (This behavior was added earlier
1858 to the Windows NT/2k/XP version of os.listdir().)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001859
Andrew M. Kuchling6f177d42003-02-28 22:09:33 +00001860- Distutils: both 'py_modules' and 'packages' keywords can now be specified
1861 in core.setup(). Previously you could supply one or the other, but
1862 not both of them. (SF patch #695090 from Bernhard Herzog)
1863
Skip Montanaro64a839e2003-03-20 23:36:55 +00001864- New csv package makes it easy to read/write CSV files.
1865
Gustavo Niemeyer68d8cef2003-04-17 21:31:33 +00001866- Module shlex has been extended to allow posix-like shell parsings,
1867 including a split() function for easy spliting of quoted strings and
1868 commands. An iterator interface was also implemented.
1869
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001870Tools/Demos
1871-----------
1872
Tim Peters21d7d4d2003-04-18 00:45:59 +00001873- New script combinerefs.py helps analyze new PYTHONDUMPREFS output.
1874 See the module docstring for details.
1875
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001876Build
1877-----
1878
Neal Norwitz35892b92003-02-23 23:45:35 +00001879- Fix problem building on OSF1 because the compiler only accepted
1880 preprocessor directives that start in column 1. (SF bug #691793.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001881
1882C API
1883-----
1884
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00001885- Added PyGC_Collect(), equivalent to calling gc.collect().
1886
Guido van Rossum0fc8f002003-04-15 15:12:39 +00001887- PyThreadState_GetDict() was changed not to raise an exception or
1888 issue a fatal error when no current thread state is available. This
1889 makes it possible to print dictionaries when no thread is active.
1890
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00001891- LONG_LONG was renamed to PY_LONG_LONG. Extensions that use this and
1892 need compatibility with previous versions can use this:
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00001893
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00001894 #ifndef PY_LONG_LONG
1895 #define PY_LONG_LONG LONG_LONG
1896 #endif
Martin v. Löwisb9a0f912003-03-29 10:06:18 +00001897
Raymond Hettinger1da1dbf2003-03-17 19:46:11 +00001898- Added PyObject_SelfIter() to fill the tp_iter slot for the
Raymond Hettinger01538262003-03-17 08:24:35 +00001899 typical case where the method returns its self argument.
1900
Guido van Rossume5c691a2003-03-07 15:13:17 +00001901- The extended type structure used for heap types (new-style
1902 classes defined by Python code using a class statement) is now
1903 exported from object.h as PyHeapTypeObject. (SF patch #696193.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001904
1905New platforms
1906-------------
1907
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00001908None this time.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001909
1910Tests
1911-----
1912
Neal Norwitz55b61d22003-02-28 19:57:03 +00001913- test_timeout now requires -u network to be passed to regrtest to run.
1914 See SF bug #692988.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001915
1916Windows
1917-------
1918
Tim Peters11b23062003-04-23 02:39:17 +00001919- os.fsync() now exists on Windows, and calls the Microsoft _commit()
1920 function.
1921
Guido van Rossumf4050642003-04-09 19:39:06 +00001922- New function winsound.MessageBeep() wraps the Win32 API
1923 MessageBeep().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001924
1925Mac
1926---
1927
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00001928- os.listdir() now returns Unicode strings on MacOS X when called with
1929 a Unicode argument. See the general news item under "Library".
Just van Rossum46c97842003-02-25 21:42:15 +00001930
Jack Jansendeac2ac2003-02-24 11:04:17 +00001931- A new method MacOS.WMAvailable() returns true if it is safe to access
1932 the window manager, false otherwise.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001933
Jack Jansencf76be02003-03-24 12:13:54 +00001934- EasyDialogs dialogs are now movable-modal, and if the application is
1935 currently in the background they will ask to be moved to the foreground
1936 before displaying.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001937
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00001938- OSA Scripting support has improved a lot, and gensuitemodule.py can now
Jack Jansende354b72003-04-11 15:37:20 +00001939 be used by mere mortals. The documentation is now also more or less
1940 complete.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001941
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00001942- The IDE (in a framework build) now includes introductory documentation
1943 in Apple Help Viewer format.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001944
1945
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001946What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 2?
1947=================================
1948
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00001949*Release date: 19-Feb-2003*
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001950
1951Core and builtins
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00001952-----------------
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001953
Walter Dörwald2ffec022003-02-19 16:34:11 +00001954- Negative positions returned from PEP 293 error callbacks are now
1955 treated as being relative to the end of the input string. Positions
1956 that are out of bounds raise an IndexError.
1957
Guido van Rossum162e38c2003-02-19 15:25:10 +00001958- sys.path[0] (the directory from which the script is loaded) is now
1959 turned into an absolute pathname, unless it is the empty string.
1960 (SF patch #664376.)
1961
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00001962- Finally fixed the bug in compile() and exec where a string ending
1963 with an indented code block but no newline would raise SyntaxError.
1964 This would have been a four-line change in parsetok.c... Except
1965 codeop.py depends on this behavior, so a compilation flag had to be
1966 invented that causes the tokenizer to revert to the old behavior;
1967 this required extra changes to 2 .h files, 2 .c files, and 2 .py
Guido van Rossum1442dc12003-02-13 22:19:20 +00001968 files. (Fixes SF bug #501622.)
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00001969
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00001970- If a new-style class defines neither __new__ nor __init__, its
1971 constructor would ignore all arguments. This is changed now: the
1972 constructor refuses arguments in this case. This might break code
1973 that worked under Python 2.2. The simplest fix is to add a no-op
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001974 __init__: ``def __init__(self, *args, **kw): pass``.
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00001975
Guido van Rossum48035eb2003-02-12 17:05:26 +00001976- Through a bytecode optimizer bug (and I bet you didn't even know
1977 Python *had* a bytecode optimizer :-), "unsigned" hex/oct constants
1978 with a leading minus sign would come out with the wrong sign.
1979 ("Unsigned" hex/oct constants are those with a face value in the
1980 range sys.maxint+1 through sys.maxint*2+1, inclusive; these have
1981 always been interpreted as negative numbers through sign folding.)
1982 E.g. 0xffffffff is -1, and -(0xffffffff) is 1, but -0xffffffff would
1983 come out as -4294967295. This was the case in Python 2.2 through
1984 2.2.2 and 2.3a1, and in Python 2.4 it will once again have that
1985 value, but according to PEP 237 it really needs to be 1 now. This
1986 will be backported to Python 2.2.3 a well. (SF #660455)
1987
Guido van Rossum47710652003-02-12 20:48:22 +00001988- int(s, base) sometimes sign-folds hex and oct constants; it only
1989 does this when base is 0 and s.strip() starts with a '0'. When the
1990 sign is actually folded, as in int("0xffffffff", 0) on a 32-bit
1991 machine, which returns -1, a FutureWarning is now issued; in Python
1992 2.4, this will return 4294967295L, as do int("+0xffffffff", 0) and
1993 int("0xffffffff", 16) right now. (PEP 347)
1994
Guido van Rossuma89d10e2003-02-12 03:58:38 +00001995- super(X, x): x may now be a proxy for an X instance, i.e.
1996 issubclass(x.__class__, X) but not issubclass(type(x), X).
1997
Guido van Rossum03bc7d32003-02-12 03:32:58 +00001998- isinstance(x, X): if X is a new-style class, this is now equivalent
1999 to issubclass(type(x), X) or issubclass(x.__class__, X). Previously
2000 only type(x) was tested. (For classic classes this was already the
2001 case.)
2002
Just van Rossum73ffb4a2003-02-10 09:57:08 +00002003- compile(), eval() and the exec statement now fully support source code
2004 passed as unicode strings.
2005
Neal Norwitzde8b94c2003-02-10 02:12:43 +00002006- int subclasses can be initialized with longs if the value fits in an int.
2007 See SF bug #683467.
2008
Tim Petersbf2674b2003-02-02 07:51:32 +00002009- long(string, base) takes time linear in len(string) when base is a power
2010 of 2 now. It used to take time quadratic in len(string).
2011
Martin v. Löwis8afd7572003-01-25 22:46:11 +00002012- filter returns now Unicode results for Unicode arguments.
2013
Martin v. Löwisaf6a27a2003-01-03 19:16:14 +00002014- raw_input can now return Unicode objects.
2015
Skip Montanaro4abd5f02003-01-02 20:51:08 +00002016- List objects' sort() method now accepts None as the comparison function.
2017 Passing None is semantically identical to calling sort() with no
2018 arguments.
2019
Neal Norwitz1a997502003-01-13 20:13:12 +00002020- Fixed crash when printing a subclass of str and __str__ returned self.
2021 See SF bug #667147.
2022
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00002023- Fixed an invalid RuntimeWarning and an undetected error when trying
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00002024 to convert a long integer into a float which couldn't fit.
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00002025 See SF bug #676155.
2026
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00002027- Function objects now have a __module__ attribute that is bound to
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00002028 the name of the module in which the function was defined. This
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00002029 applies for C functions and methods as well as functions and methods
2030 defined in Python. This attribute is used by pickle.whichmodule(),
2031 which changes the behavior of whichmodule slightly. In Python 2.2
2032 whichmodule() returns "__main__" for functions that are not defined
2033 at the top-level of a module (examples: methods, nested functions).
2034 Now whichmodule() will return the proper module name.
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00002035
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002036Extension modules
2037-----------------
2038
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00002039- operator.isNumberType() now checks that the object has a nb_int or
2040 nb_float slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
2041 tp_as_number pointer.
2042
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00002043- The imp module now has ways to acquire and release the "import
2044 lock": imp.acquire_lock() and imp.release_lock(). Note: this is a
2045 reentrant lock, so releasing the lock only truly releases it when
2046 this is the last release_lock() call. You can check with
2047 imp.lock_held(). (SF bug #580952 and patch #683257.)
2048
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002049- Change to cPickle to match pickle.py (see below and PEP 307).
2050
Neal Norwitz9caf9c02003-02-10 01:54:06 +00002051- Fix some bugs in the parser module. SF bug #678518.
2052
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00002053- Thanks to Scott David Daniels, a subtle bug in how the zlib
Walter Dörwald28d81962003-02-03 20:53:14 +00002054 extension implemented flush() was fixed. Scott also rewrote the
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00002055 zlib test suite using the unittest module. (SF bug #640230 and
2056 patch #678531.)
2057
Raymond Hettinger96ef8112003-02-01 00:10:11 +00002058- Added an itertools module containing high speed, memory efficient
2059 looping constructs inspired by tools from Haskell and SML.
2060
Guido van Rossum99d4abf2003-01-27 22:22:50 +00002061- The SSL module now handles sockets with a timeout set correctly (SF
2062 patch #675750, fixing SF bug #675552).
2063
Barry Warsawf8ba39c2003-01-07 20:55:26 +00002064- os/posixmodule has grown the sysexits.h constants (EX_OK and friends).
2065
Guido van Rossum6d0d3652003-01-07 20:34:19 +00002066- Fixed broken threadstate swap in readline that could cause fatal
2067 errors when a readline hook was being invoked while a background
2068 thread was active. (SF bugs #660476 and #513033.)
2069
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002070- fcntl now exposes the strops.h I_* constants.
2071
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00002072- Fix a crash on Solaris that occurred when calling close() on
2073 an mmap'ed file which was already closed. (SF patch #665913)
2074
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002075- Fixed several serious bugs in the zipimport implementation.
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002076
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00002077- datetime changes:
2078
Guido van Rossum8b7a9a32003-04-14 22:01:58 +00002079 The date class is now properly subclassable. (SF bug #720908)
2080
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00002081 The datetime and datetimetz classes have been collapsed into a single
2082 datetime class, and likewise the time and timetz classes into a single
2083 time class. Previously, a datetimetz object with tzinfo=None acted
2084 exactly like a datetime object, and similarly for timetz. This wasn't
2085 enough of a difference to justify distinct classes, and life is simpler
2086 now.
2087
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00002088 today() and now() now round system timestamps to the closest
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002089 microsecond <http://www.python.org/sf/661086>. This repairs an
2090 irritation most likely seen on Windows systems.
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00002091
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00002092 In dt.astimezone(tz), if tz.utcoffset(dt) returns a duration,
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00002093 ValueError is raised if tz.dst(dt) returns None (2.3a1 treated it
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002094 as 0 instead, but a tzinfo subclass wishing to participate in
2095 time zone conversion has to take a stand on whether it supports
2096 DST; if you don't care about DST, then code dst() to return 0 minutes,
2097 meaning that DST is never in effect).
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00002098
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00002099 The tzinfo methods utcoffset() and dst() must return a timedelta object
2100 (or None) now. In 2.3a1 they could also return an int or long, but that
2101 was an unhelpfully redundant leftover from an earlier version wherein
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00002102 they couldn't return a timedelta. TOOWTDI.
2103
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00002104 The example tzinfo class for local time had a bug. It was replaced
2105 by a later example coded by Guido.
2106
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00002107 datetime.astimezone(tz) no longer raises an exception when the
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002108 input datetime has no UTC equivalent in tz. For typical "hybrid" time
2109 zones (a single tzinfo subclass modeling both standard and daylight
2110 time), this case can arise one hour per year, at the hour daylight time
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00002111 ends. See new docs for details. In short, the new behavior mimics
2112 the local wall clock's behavior of repeating an hour in local time.
2113
2114 dt.astimezone() can no longer be used to convert between naive and aware
2115 datetime objects. If you merely want to attach, or remove, a tzinfo
2116 object, without any conversion of date and time members, use
2117 dt.replace(tzinfo=whatever) instead, where "whatever" is None or a
2118 tzinfo subclass instance.
2119
2120 A new method tzinfo.fromutc(dt) can be overridden in tzinfo subclasses
2121 to give complete control over how a UTC time is to be converted to
2122 a local time. The default astimezone() implementation calls fromutc()
2123 as its last step, so a tzinfo subclass can affect that too by overriding
2124 fromutc(). It's expected that the default fromutc() implementation will
2125 be suitable as-is for "almost all" time zone subclasses, but the
2126 creativity of political time zone fiddling appears unbounded -- fromutc()
2127 allows the highly motivated to emulate any scheme expressible in Python.
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002128
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00002129 datetime.now(): The optional tzinfo argument was undocumented (that's
2130 repaired), and its name was changed to tz ("tzinfo" is overloaded enough
2131 already). With a tz argument, now(tz) used to return the local date
2132 and time, and attach tz to it, without any conversion of date and time
2133 members. This was less than useful. Now now(tz) returns the current
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002134 date and time as local time in tz's time zone, akin to ::
2135
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00002136 tz.fromutc(datetime.utcnow().replace(tzinfo=utc))
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002137
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00002138 where "utc" is an instance of a tzinfo subclass modeling UTC. Without
2139 a tz argument, now() continues to return the current local date and time,
2140 as a naive datetime object.
2141
Tim Peters2a44a8d2003-01-23 20:53:10 +00002142 datetime.fromtimestamp(): Like datetime.now() above, this had less than
2143 useful behavior when the optional tinzo argument was specified. See
2144 also SF bug report <http://www.python.org/sf/660872>.
2145
Tim Peters8d81a012003-01-24 22:36:34 +00002146 date and datetime comparison: In order to prevent comparison from
2147 falling back to the default compare-object-addresses strategy, these
2148 raised TypeError whenever they didn't understand the other object type.
2149 They still do, except when the other object has a "timetuple" attribute,
2150 in which case they return NotImplemented now. This gives other
2151 datetime objects (e.g., mxDateTime) a chance to intercept the
2152 comparison.
2153
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002154 date, time, datetime and timedelta comparison: When the exception
2155 for mixed-type comparisons in the last paragraph doesn't apply, if
2156 the comparison is == then False is returned, and if the comparison is
2157 != then True is returned. Because dict lookup and the "in" operator
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002158 only invoke __eq__, this allows, for example, ::
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002159
2160 if some_datetime in some_sequence:
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002161
2162 and ::
2163
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002164 some_dict[some_timedelta] = whatever
2165
2166 to work as expected, without raising TypeError just because the
2167 sequence is heterogeneous, or the dict has mixed-type keys. [This
2168 seems like a good idea to implement for all mixed-type comparisons
2169 that don't want to allow falling back to address comparison.]
2170
Tim Peters75a6e3b2003-01-04 18:17:36 +00002171 The constructors building a datetime from a timestamp could raise
2172 ValueError if the platform C localtime()/gmtime() inserted "leap
2173 seconds". Leap seconds are ignored now. On such platforms, it's
2174 possible to have timestamps that differ by a second, yet where
2175 datetimes constructed from them are equal.
2176
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00002177 The pickle format of date, time and datetime objects has changed
2178 completely. The undocumented pickler and unpickler functions no
Tim Petersb57f8f02003-02-01 02:54:15 +00002179 longer exist. The undocumented __setstate__() and __getstate__()
2180 methods no longer exist either.
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00002181
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002182Library
2183-------
2184
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002185- The logging module was updated slightly; the WARN level was renamed
2186 to WARNING, and the matching function/method warn() to warning().
2187
2188- The pickle and cPickle modules were updated with a new pickling
2189 protocol (documented by pickletools.py, see below) and several
2190 extensions to the pickle customization API (__reduce__, __setstate__
2191 etc.). The copy module now uses more of the pickle customization
2192 API to copy objects that don't implement __copy__ or __deepcopy__.
2193 See PEP 307 for details.
2194
2195- The distutils "register" command now uses http://www.python.org/pypi
2196 as the default repository. (See PEP 301.)
2197
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00002198- the platform dependent path related variables sep, altsep, extsep,
2199 pathsep, curdir, pardir and defpath are now defined in the platform
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00002200 dependent path modules (e.g. ntpath.py) rather than os.py, so these
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002201 variables are now available via os.path. They continue to be
2202 available from the os module.
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00002203 (see <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00002204
Tim Peters6ee04802003-02-05 18:29:34 +00002205- array.array was added to the types repr.py knows about (see
2206 <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
2207
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00002208- The new pickletools.py contains lots of documentation about pickle
2209 internals, and supplies some helpers for working with pickles, such as
2210 a symbolic pickle disassembler.
2211
Skip Montanaro9a7c96a2003-01-22 18:17:25 +00002212- Xmlrpclib.py now supports the builtin boolean type.
2213
Martin v. Löwis0c6774d2003-01-15 11:51:06 +00002214- py_compile has a new 'doraise' flag and a new PyCompileError
2215 exception.
2216
Martin v. Löwisd69663d2003-01-15 11:37:23 +00002217- SimpleXMLRPCServer now supports CGI through the CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler
2218 class.
2219
Guido van Rossum50e92232003-01-14 16:45:04 +00002220- The sets module now raises TypeError in __cmp__, to clarify that
2221 sets are not intended to be three-way-compared; the comparison
2222 operators are overloaded as subset/superset tests.
2223
Guido van Rossumcd0c0472003-01-07 23:03:05 +00002224- Bastion.py and rexec.py are disabled. These modules are not safe in
2225 Python 2.2. or 2.3.
2226
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002227- realpath is now exported when doing ``from poxixpath import *``.
Neal Norwitzbb0246a2003-01-03 18:12:28 +00002228 It is also exported for ntpath, macpath, and os2emxpath.
2229 See SF bug #659228.
2230
Neal Norwitzb9ef4ae2003-01-05 23:19:43 +00002231- New module tarfile from Lars Gustäbel provides a comprehensive interface
2232 to tar archive files with transparent gzip and bzip2 compression.
2233 See SF patch #651082.
2234
Neal Norwitz4f442372003-01-06 06:51:36 +00002235- urlparse can now parse imap:// URLs. See SF feature request #618024.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002236
Neal Norwitze931ed52003-01-10 23:24:32 +00002237- Tkinter.Canvas.scan_dragto() provides an optional parameter to support
2238 the gain value which is passed to Tk. SF bug# 602259.
2239
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00002240- Fix logging.handlers.SysLogHandler protocol when using UNIX domain sockets.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00002241 See SF patch #642974.
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00002242
Skip Montanaro12fe72e2003-02-25 17:46:20 +00002243- The dospath module was deleted. Use the ntpath module when manipulating
2244 DOS paths from other platforms.
2245
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002246Tools/Demos
2247-----------
2248
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00002249- Two new scripts (db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py) were added to the
2250 Tools/scripts directory to facilitate conversion from the old bsddb module
2251 to the new one. While the user-visible API of the new module is
2252 compatible with the old one, it's likely that the version of the
2253 underlying database library has changed. To convert from the old library,
2254 run the db2pickle.py script using the old version of Python to convert it
2255 to a pickle file. After upgrading Python, run the pickle2db.py script
2256 using the new version of Python to reconstitute your database. For
2257 example:
2258
Skip Montanaro621f0552003-02-03 15:48:10 +00002259 % python2.2 db2pickle.py -h some.db > some.pickle
2260 % python2.3 pickle2db.py -h some.db.new < some.pickle
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00002261
2262 Run the scripts without any args to get a usage message.
2263
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002264
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002265Build
2266-----
2267
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00002268- The audio driver tests (test_ossaudiodev.py and
2269 test_linuxaudiodev.py) are no longer run by default. This is
2270 because they don't always work, depending on your hardware and
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002271 software. To run these tests, you must use an invocation like ::
2272
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00002273 ./python Lib/test/regrtest.py -u audio test_ossaudiodev
2274
Skip Montanarodecc6a42003-01-01 20:07:49 +00002275- On systems which build using the configure script, compiler flags which
2276 used to be lumped together using the OPT flag have been split into two
2277 groups, OPT and BASECFLAGS. OPT is meant to carry just optimization- and
2278 debug-related flags like "-g" and "-O3". BASECFLAGS is meant to carry
2279 compiler flags that are required to get a clean compile. On some
2280 platforms (many Linux flavors in particular) BASECFLAGS will be empty by
2281 default. On others, such as Mac OS X and SCO, it will contain required
2282 flags. This change allows people building Python to override OPT without
2283 fear of clobbering compiler flags which are required to get a clean build.
2284
2285- On Darwin/Mac OS X platforms, /sw/lib and /sw/include are added to the
2286 relevant search lists in setup.py. This allows users building Python to
2287 take advantage of the many packages available from the fink project
2288 <http://fink.sf.net/>.
2289
2290- A new Makefile target, scriptsinstall, installs a number of useful scripts
2291 from the Tools/scripts directory.
2292
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002293C API
2294-----
2295
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002296- PyEval_GetFrame() is now declared to return a ``PyFrameObject *``
2297 instead of a plain ``PyObject *``. (SF patch #686601.)
Guido van Rossum6297a7a2003-02-19 15:53:17 +00002298
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00002299- PyNumber_Check() now checks that the object has a nb_int or nb_float
2300 slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
2301 tp_as_number pointer.
2302
Guido van Rossumeea47182003-02-11 20:39:59 +00002303- A C type that inherits from a base type that defines tp_as_buffer
2304 will now inherit the tp_as_buffer pointer if it doesn't define one.
2305 (SF #681367)
2306
Neil Schemenauer5042da62003-02-04 20:59:40 +00002307- The PyArg_Parse functions now issue a DeprecationWarning if a float
2308 argument is provided when an integer is specified (this affects the 'b',
2309 'B', 'h', 'H', 'i', and 'l' codes). Future versions of Python will
2310 raise a TypeError.
Neil Schemenauercd63e612003-01-24 22:15:53 +00002311
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002312Tests
2313-----
2314
Walter Dörwald11cfbd62003-03-26 16:03:16 +00002315- Several tests weren't being run from regrtest.py (test_timeout.py,
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002316 test_tarfile.py, test_netrc.py, test_multifile.py,
2317 test_importhooks.py and test_imp.py). Now they are. (Note to
2318 developers: please read Lib/test/README when creating a new test, to
2319 make sure to do it right! All tests need to use either unittest or
2320 pydoc.)
2321
2322- Added test_posix.py, a test suite for the posix module.
2323
2324- Added test_hexoct.py, a test suite for hex/oct constant folding.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002325
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002326Windows
2327-------
2328
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00002329- The timeout code for socket connect() didn't work right; this has
2330 now been fixed. test_timeout.py should pass (at least most of the
2331 time).
2332
Thomas Hellerdda583d2003-01-31 20:45:41 +00002333- distutils' msvccompiler class now passes the preprocessor options to
2334 the resource compiler. See SF patch #669198.
2335
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00002336- The bsddb module now ships with Sleepycat's 4.1.25.NC, the latest
2337 release without strong cryptography.
2338
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00002339- sys.path[0], if it contains a directory name, is now always an
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002340 absolute pathname. (SF patch #664376.)
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00002341
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00002342- The new logging package is now installed by the Windows installer. It
2343 wasn't in 2.3a1 due to oversight.
2344
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002345Mac
2346---
2347
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00002348- There are new dialogs EasyDialogs.AskFileForOpen, AskFileForSave
2349 and AskFolder. The old macfs.StandardGetFile and friends are deprecated.
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002350
Jack Jansenc9296362003-02-06 23:10:45 +00002351- Most of the standard library now uses pathnames or FSRefs in preference
2352 of FSSpecs, and use the underlying Carbon.File and Carbon.Folder modules
2353 in stead of macfs. macfs will probably be deprecated in the future.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00002354
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00002355- Type Carbon.File.FSCatalogInfo and supporting methods have been implemented.
2356 This also makes macfs.FSSpec.SetDates() work again.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002357
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00002358- There is a new module pimp, the package install manager for Python, and
2359 accompanying applet PackageManager. These allow you to easily download
2360 and install pretested extension packages either in source or binary
2361 form. Only in MacPython-OSX.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002362
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00002363- Applets are now built with bundlebuilder in MacPython-OSX, which should make
Jack Jansen5d44b342003-02-18 23:32:47 +00002364 them more robust and also provides a path towards BuildApplication. The
2365 downside of this change is that applets can no longer be run from the
2366 Terminal window, this will hopefully be fixed in the 2.3b1.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002367
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002368
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002369What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 1?
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002370=================================
2371
Guido van Rossumae548862002-12-31 15:47:36 +00002372*Release date: 31-Dec-2002*
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002373
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002374Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002375--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00002376
Michael W. Hudson96bc3b42002-11-26 14:48:23 +00002377- One can now assign to __bases__ and __name__ of new-style classes.
2378
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00002379- dict() now accepts keyword arguments so that dict(one=1, two=2)
2380 is the equivalent of {"one": 1, "two": 2}. Accordingly,
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00002381 the existing (but undocumented) 'items' keyword argument has
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00002382 been eliminated. This means that dict(items=someMapping) now has
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00002383 a different meaning than before.
2384
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00002385- int() now returns a long object if the argument is outside the
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002386 integer range, so int("4" * 1000), int(1e200) and int(1L<<1000) will
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00002387 all return long objects instead of raising an OverflowError.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002388
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00002389- Assignment to __class__ is disallowed if either the old or the new
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00002390 class is a statically allocated type object (such as defined by an
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00002391 extension module). This prevents anomalies like 2.__class__ = bool.
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00002392
2393- New-style object creation and deallocation have been sped up
2394 significantly; they are now faster than classic instance creation
2395 and deallocation.
2396
2397- The __slots__ variable can now mention "private" names, and the
2398 right thing will happen (e.g. __slots__ = ["__foo"]).
2399
2400- The built-ins slice() and buffer() are now callable types. The
2401 types classobj (formerly class), code, function, instance, and
2402 instancemethod (formerly instance-method), which have no built-in
2403 names but are accessible through the types module, are now also
2404 callable. The type dict-proxy is renamed to dictproxy.
2405
2406- Cycles going through the __class__ link of a new-style instance are
2407 now detected by the garbage collector.
2408
2409- Classes using __slots__ are now properly garbage collected.
2410 [SF bug 519621]
2411
2412- Tightened the __slots__ rules: a slot name must be a valid Python
2413 identifier.
2414
2415- The constructor for the module type now requires a name argument and
2416 takes an optional docstring argument. Previously, this constructor
2417 ignored its arguments. As a consequence, deriving a class from a
2418 module (not from the module type) is now illegal; previously this
2419 created an unnamed module, just like invoking the module type did.
2420 [SF bug 563060]
2421
2422- A new type object, 'basestring', is added. This is a common base type
2423 for 'str' and 'unicode', and can be used instead of
2424 types.StringTypes, e.g. to test whether something is "a string":
2425 isinstance(x, basestring) is True for Unicode and 8-bit strings. This
2426 is an abstract base class and cannot be instantiated directly.
2427
2428- Changed new-style class instantiation so that when C's __new__
2429 method returns something that's not a C instance, its __init__ is
2430 not called. [SF bug #537450]
2431
2432- Fixed super() to work correctly with class methods. [SF bug #535444]
2433
2434- If you try to pickle an instance of a class that has __slots__ but
2435 doesn't define or override __getstate__, a TypeError is now raised.
2436 This is done by adding a bozo __getstate__ to the class that always
2437 raises TypeError. (Before, this would appear to be pickled, but the
2438 state of the slots would be lost.)
2439
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002440Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002441-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002442
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00002443- Import from zipfiles is now supported. The name of a zipfile placed
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00002444 on sys.path causes the import statement to look for importable Python
2445 modules (with .py, pyc and .pyo extensions) and packages inside the
2446 zipfile. The zipfile import follows the specification (though not
2447 the sample implementation) of PEP 273. The semantics of __path__ are
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00002448 compatible with those that have been implemented in Jython since
2449 Jython 2.1.
2450
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002451- PEP 302 has been accepted. Although it was initially developed to
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00002452 support zipimport, it offers a new, general import hook mechanism.
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00002453 Several new variables have been added to the sys module:
2454 sys.meta_path, sys.path_hooks, and sys.path_importer_cache; these
2455 make extending the import statement much more convenient than
2456 overriding the __import__ built-in function. For a description of
2457 these, see PEP 302.
2458
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00002459- A frame object's f_lineno attribute can now be written to from a
2460 trace function to change which line will execute next. A command to
2461 exploit this from pdb has been added. [SF patch #643835]
2462
Marc-André Lemburg20b91352002-12-12 18:01:43 +00002463- The _codecs support module for codecs.py was turned into a builtin
2464 module to assure that at least the builtin codecs are available
2465 to the Python parser for source code decoding according to PEP 263.
2466
Walter Dörwaldd9a6ad32002-12-12 16:41:44 +00002467- issubclass now supports a tuple as the second argument, just like
2468 isinstance does. ``issubclass(X, (A, B))`` is equivalent to
2469 ``issubclass(X, A) or issubclass(X, B)``.
2470
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00002471- Thanks to Armin Rigo, the last known way to provoke a system crash
2472 by cleverly arranging for a comparison function to mutate a list
2473 during a list.sort() operation has been fixed. The effect of
2474 attempting to mutate a list, or even to inspect its contents or
2475 length, while a sort is in progress, is not defined by the language.
2476 The C implementation of Python 2.3 attempts to detect mutations,
2477 and raise ValueError if one occurs, but there's no guarantee that
2478 all mutations will be caught, or that any will be caught across
2479 releases or implementations.
2480
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00002481- Unicode file name processing for Windows (PEP 277) is implemented.
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00002482 All platforms now have an os.path.supports_unicode_filenames attribute,
2483 which is set to True on Windows NT/2000/XP, and False elsewhere.
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00002484
Walter Dörwald3aeb6322002-09-02 13:14:32 +00002485- Codec error handling callbacks (PEP 293) are implemented.
2486 Error handling in unicode.encode or str.decode can now be customized.
2487
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00002488- A subtle change to the semantics of the built-in function intern():
2489 interned strings are no longer immortal. You must keep a reference
2490 to the return value intern() around to get the benefit.
2491
Guido van Rossumf808b892002-08-16 03:38:10 +00002492- Use of 'None' as a variable, argument or attribute name now
2493 issues a SyntaxWarning. In the future, None may become a keyword.
2494
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00002495- SET_LINENO is gone. co_lnotab is now consulted to determine when to
2496 call the trace function. C code that accessed f_lineno should call
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00002497 PyCode_Addr2Line instead (f_lineno is still there, but only kept up
2498 to date when there is a trace function set).
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00002499
Guido van Rossum9be89462002-08-14 16:11:30 +00002500- There's a new warning category, FutureWarning. This is used to warn
2501 about a number of situations where the value or sign of an integer
2502 result will change in Python 2.4 as a result of PEP 237 (integer
2503 unification). The warnings implement stage B0 mentioned in that
2504 PEP. The warnings are about the following situations:
2505
2506 - Octal and hex literals without 'L' prefix in the inclusive range
2507 [0x80000000..0xffffffff]; these are currently negative ints, but
2508 in Python 2.4 they will be positive longs with the same bit
2509 pattern.
2510
2511 - Left shifts on integer values that cause the outcome to lose
2512 bits or have a different sign than the left operand. To be
2513 precise: x<<n where this currently doesn't yield the same value
2514 as long(x)<<n; in Python 2.4, the outcome will be long(x)<<n.
2515
2516 - Conversions from ints to string that show negative values as
2517 unsigned ints in the inclusive range [0x80000000..0xffffffff];
2518 this affects the functions hex() and oct(), and the string
2519 formatting codes %u, %o, %x, and %X. In Python 2.4, these will
2520 show signed values (e.g. hex(-1) currently returns "0xffffffff";
2521 in Python 2.4 it will return "-0x1").
2522
Guido van Rossum9a2eda52002-12-31 02:12:42 +00002523- The bits manipulated under the cover by sys.setcheckinterval() have
2524 been changed. Both the check interval and the ticker used to be
2525 per-thread values. They are now just a pair of global variables.
2526 In addition, the default check interval was boosted from 10 to 100
2527 bytecode instructions. This may have some effect on systems that
2528 relied on the old default value. In particular, in multi-threaded
2529 applications which try to be highly responsive, response time will
2530 increase by some (perhaps imperceptible) amount.
Skip Montanaro979c74b2002-09-03 21:25:14 +00002531
Tim Petersd64c1de2002-08-12 17:36:03 +00002532- When multiplying very large integers, a version of the so-called
2533 Karatsuba algorithm is now used. This is most effective if the
2534 inputs have roughly the same size. If they both have about N digits,
2535 Karatsuba multiplication has O(N**1.58) runtime (the exponent is
2536 log_base_2(3)) instead of the previous O(N**2). Measured results may
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00002537 be better or worse than that, depending on platform quirks. Besides
2538 the O() improvement in raw instruction count, the Karatsuba algorithm
2539 appears to have much better cache behavior on extremely large integers
2540 (starting in the ballpark of a million bits). Note that this is a
2541 simple implementation, and there's no intent here to compete with,
2542 e.g., GMP. It gives a very nice speedup when it applies, but a package
2543 devoted to fast large-integer arithmetic should run circles around it.
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00002544
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00002545- u'%c' will now raise a ValueError in case the argument is an
2546 integer outside the valid range of Unicode code point ordinals.
2547
Guido van Rossumdeb09362002-08-09 17:16:30 +00002548- The tempfile module has been overhauled for enhanced security. The
2549 mktemp() function is now deprecated; new, safe replacements are
2550 mkstemp() (for files) and mkdtemp() (for directories), and the
2551 higher-level functions NamedTemporaryFile() and TemporaryFile().
2552 Use of some global variables in this module is also deprecated; the
2553 new functions have keyword arguments to provide the same
2554 functionality. All Lib, Tools and Demo modules that used the unsafe
2555 interfaces have been updated to use the safe replacements. Thanks
2556 to Zack Weinberg!
2557
Guido van Rossumd81a9832002-08-09 15:57:34 +00002558- When x is an object whose class implements __mul__ and __rmul__,
2559 1.0*x would correctly invoke __rmul__, but 1*x would erroneously
2560 invoke __mul__. This was due to the sequence-repeat code in the int
2561 type. This has been fixed now.
2562
Barry Warsawd79f6832002-08-06 17:01:51 +00002563- Previously, "str1 in str2" required str1 to be a string of length 1.
2564 This restriction has been relaxed to allow str1 to be a string of
2565 any length. Thus "'el' in 'hello world'" returns True now.
2566
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00002567- File objects are now their own iterators. For a file f, iter(f) now
2568 returns f (unless f is closed), and f.next() is similar to
2569 f.readline() when EOF is not reached; however, f.next() uses a
2570 readahead buffer that messes up the file position, so mixing
2571 f.next() and f.readline() (or other methods) doesn't work right.
2572 Calling f.seek() drops the readahead buffer, but other operations
2573 don't. It so happens that this gives a nice additional speed boost
2574 to "for line in file:"; the xreadlines method and corresponding
Guido van Rossumbffb2ef2002-08-09 17:17:07 +00002575 module are now obsolete. Thanks to Oren Tirosh!
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00002576
Guido van Rossumde392d32002-08-05 14:17:20 +00002577- Encoding declarations (PEP 263, phase 1) have been implemented. A
2578 comment of the form "# -*- coding: <encodingname> -*-" in the first
2579 or second line of a Python source file indicates the encoding.
Martin v. Löwis00f1e3f2002-08-04 17:29:52 +00002580
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00002581- list.sort() has a new implementation. While cross-platform results
2582 may vary, and in data-dependent ways, this is much faster on many
2583 kinds of partially ordered lists than the previous implementation,
2584 and reported to be just as fast on randomly ordered lists on
2585 several major platforms. This sort is also stable (if A==B and A
2586 precedes B in the list at the start, A precedes B after the sort too),
2587 although the language definition does not guarantee stability. A
2588 potential drawback is that list.sort() may require temp space of
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00002589 len(list)*2 bytes (``*4`` on a 64-bit machine). It's therefore possible
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00002590 for list.sort() to raise MemoryError now, even if a comparison function
2591 does not. See <http://www.python.org/sf/587076> for full details.
2592
Guido van Rossum2d5389c2002-07-23 03:44:35 +00002593- All standard iterators now ensure that, once StopIteration has been
2594 raised, all future calls to next() on the same iterator will also
2595 raise StopIteration. There used to be various counterexamples to
2596 this behavior, which could caused confusion or subtle program
2597 breakage, without any benefits. (Note that this is still an
2598 iterator's responsibility; the iterator framework does not enforce
2599 this.)
2600
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00002601- Ctrl+C handling on Windows has been made more consistent with
2602 other platforms. KeyboardInterrupt can now reliably be caught,
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00002603 and Ctrl+C at an interactive prompt no longer terminates the
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00002604 process under NT/2k/XP (it never did under Win9x). Ctrl+C will
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00002605 interrupt time.sleep() in the main thread, and any child processes
2606 created via the popen family (on win2k; we can't make win9x work
Mark Hammond8f3afc72002-08-10 06:26:31 +00002607 reliably) are also interrupted (as generally happens on for Linux/Unix.)
2608 [SF bugs 231273, 439992 and 581232]
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00002609
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00002610- sys.getwindowsversion() has been added on Windows. This
2611 returns a tuple with information about the version of Windows
2612 currently running.
2613
Raymond Hettinger5a04aec2002-06-25 00:25:30 +00002614- Slices and repetitions of buffer objects now consistently return
2615 a string. Formerly, strings would be returned most of the time,
2616 but a buffer object would be returned when the repetition count
2617 was one or when the slice range was all inclusive.
2618
Walter Dörwald3430d702002-06-17 10:43:59 +00002619- Unicode objects in sys.path are no longer ignored but treated
2620 as directory names.
2621
Neal Norwitz1f68fc72002-06-14 00:50:42 +00002622- Fixed string.startswith and string.endswith builtin methods
2623 so they accept negative indices. [SF bug 493951]
2624
Guido van Rossumc5fe5eb2002-06-12 03:45:21 +00002625- Fixed a bug with a continue inside a try block and a yield in the
2626 finally clause. [SF bug 567538]
2627
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00002628- Most builtin sequences now support "extended slices", i.e. slices
Guido van Rossum2e82e712002-06-13 11:41:07 +00002629 with a third "stride" parameter. For example, "hello world"[::-1]
2630 gives "dlrow olleh".
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00002631
Neal Norwitzd68f5172002-05-29 15:54:55 +00002632- A new warning PendingDeprecationWarning was added to provide
2633 direction on features which are in the process of being deprecated.
2634 The warning will not be printed by default. To see the pending
2635 deprecations, use -Walways::PendingDeprecationWarning::
2636 as a command line option or warnings.filterwarnings() in code.
2637
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00002638- Deprecated features of xrange objects have been removed as
2639 promised. The start, stop, and step attributes and the tolist()
2640 method no longer exist. xrange repetition and slicing have been
2641 removed.
2642
Guido van Rossum7dab2422002-04-26 19:40:56 +00002643- New builtin function enumerate(x), from PEP 279. Example:
2644 enumerate("abc") is an iterator returning (0,"a"), (1,"b"), (2,"c").
2645 The argument can be an arbitrary iterable object.
2646
Neil Schemenauer89e3ee02002-04-26 01:58:53 +00002647- The assert statement no longer tests __debug__ at runtime. This means
2648 that assert statements cannot be disabled by assigning a false value
2649 to __debug__.
2650
Walter Dörwald068325e2002-04-15 13:36:47 +00002651- A method zfill() was added to str and unicode, that fills a numeric
2652 string to the left with zeros. For example,
2653 "+123".zfill(6) -> "+00123".
2654
Guido van Rossum862fe3c2002-04-15 12:36:47 +00002655- Complex numbers supported divmod() and the // and % operators, but
2656 these make no sense. Since this was documented, they're being
2657 deprecated now.
2658
Guido van Rossum26dd8302002-04-26 20:11:29 +00002659- String and unicode methods lstrip(), rstrip() and strip() now take
2660 an optional argument that specifies the characters to strip. For
2661 example, "Foo!!!?!?!?".rstrip("?!") -> "Foo".
Guido van Rossum49042042002-04-13 00:59:05 +00002662
Guido van Rossumc0d3f4e2002-11-27 13:10:40 +00002663- There's a new dictionary constructor (a class method of the dict
2664 class), dict.fromkeys(iterable, value=None). It constructs a
2665 dictionary with keys taken from the iterable and all values set to a
2666 single value. It can be used for building sets and for removing
2667 duplicates from sequences.
Raymond Hettingere33d3df2002-11-27 07:29:33 +00002668
Guido van Rossumc69343b2002-04-12 19:22:48 +00002669- Added a new dict method pop(key). This removes and returns the
2670 value corresponding to key. [SF patch #539949]
2671
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00002672- A new built-in type, bool, has been added, as well as built-in
2673 names for its two values, True and False. Comparisons and sundry
2674 other operations that return a truth value have been changed to
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002675 return a bool instead. Read PEP 285 for an explanation of why this
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00002676 is backward compatible.
2677
Guido van Rossum95b62a62002-03-29 01:07:24 +00002678- Fixed two bugs reported as SF #535905: under certain conditions,
2679 deallocating a deeply nested structure could cause a segfault in the
2680 garbage collector, due to interaction with the "trashcan" code;
2681 access to the current frame during destruction of a local variable
2682 could access a pointer to freed memory.
2683
Guido van Rossumfe0ca4a2002-06-18 21:20:13 +00002684- The optional object allocator ("pymalloc") has been enabled by
2685 default. The recommended practice for memory allocation and
2686 deallocation has been streamlined. A header file is included,
2687 Misc/pymemcompat.h, which can be bundled with 3rd party extensions
2688 and lets them use the same API with Python versions from 1.5.2
2689 onwards.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00002690
Martin v. Löwiscfeb3b62002-03-03 21:30:27 +00002691- PyErr_Display will provide file and line information for all exceptions
2692 that have an attribute print_file_and_line, not just SyntaxErrors.
2693
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00002694- The UTF-8 codec will now encode and decode Unicode surrogates
2695 correctly and without raising exceptions for unpaired ones.
2696
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00002697- Universal newlines (PEP 278) is implemented. Briefly, using 'U'
2698 instead of 'r' when opening a text file for reading changes the line
2699 ending convention so that any of '\r', '\r\n', and '\n' is
2700 recognized (even mixed in one file); all three are converted to
2701 '\n', the standard Python line end character.
2702
Neal Norwitz649b7592002-01-01 19:07:13 +00002703- file.xreadlines() now raises a ValueError if the file is closed:
2704 Previously, an xreadlines object was returned which would raise
2705 a ValueError when the xreadlines.next() method was called.
2706
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002707- sys.exit() inadvertently allowed more than one argument.
Neal Norwitz0c766a02002-03-27 13:03:09 +00002708 An exception will now be raised if more than one argument is used.
2709
Gustavo Niemeyer17c5a332002-12-16 14:09:22 +00002710- Changed evaluation order of dictionary literals to conform to the
2711 general left to right evaluation order rule. Now {f1(): f2()} will
2712 evaluate f1 first.
Gustavo Niemeyer78429a62002-12-16 13:54:02 +00002713
Gustavo Niemeyer786ddb22002-12-16 18:12:53 +00002714- Fixed bug #521782: when a file was in non-blocking mode, file.read()
2715 could silently lose data or wrongly throw an unknown error.
2716
Neil Schemenauerb983aa02002-12-30 20:22:23 +00002717- The sq_repeat, sq_inplace_repeat, sq_concat and sq_inplace_concat
2718 slots are now always tried after trying the corresponding nb_* slots.
2719 This fixes a number of minor bugs (see bug #624807).
2720
Neal Norwitz74a032e2003-01-10 23:29:48 +00002721- Fix problem with dynamic loading on 64-bit AIX (see bug #639945).
2722
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002723Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002724-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002725
Raymond Hettinger9543b342003-01-18 23:22:20 +00002726- Added three operators to the operator module:
2727 operator.pow(a,b) which is equivalent to: a**b.
2728 operator.is_(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is b.
2729 operator.is_not(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is not b.
2730
Martin v. Löwis24a880b2002-12-31 12:55:15 +00002731- posix.openpty now works on all systems that have /dev/ptmx.
2732
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00002733- A module zipimport exists to support importing code from zip
2734 archives.
2735
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00002736- The new datetime module supplies classes for manipulating dates and
2737 times. The basic design came from the Zope "fishbowl process", and
2738 favors practical commercial applications over calendar esoterica. See
2739
2740 http://www.zope.org/Members/fdrake/DateTimeWiki/FrontPage
2741
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00002742- _tkinter now returns Tcl objects, instead of strings. Objects which
2743 have Python equivalents are converted to Python objects, other objects
2744 are wrapped. This can be configured through the wantobjects method,
Martin v. Löwis8c8aa5d2002-11-26 21:39:48 +00002745 or Tkinter.wantobjects.
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00002746
Barry Warsawc27f4bd2002-12-30 21:03:26 +00002747- The PyBSDDB wrapper around the Sleepycat Berkeley DB library has
2748 been added as the package bsddb. The traditional bsddb module is
2749 still available in source code, but not built automatically anymore,
2750 and is now named bsddb185. This supports Berkeley DB versions from
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00002751 3.0 to 4.1. For help converting your databases from the old module (which
2752 probably used an obsolete version of Berkeley DB) to the new module, see
2753 the db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py scripts described in the Tools/Demos
2754 section above.
Martin v. Löwisef546b32002-11-19 08:12:57 +00002755
Martin v. Löwis677bde22002-11-23 22:08:15 +00002756- unicodedata was updated to Unicode 3.2. It supports normalization
2757 and names for Hangul syllables and CJK unified ideographs.
Martin v. Löwis7d41e292002-11-23 12:22:32 +00002758
Neal Norwitz94a83fd2002-11-02 17:46:24 +00002759- resource.getrlimit() now returns longs instead of ints.
2760
Martin v. Löwis080689c2002-10-26 14:42:02 +00002761- readline now dynamically adjusts its input/output stream if
2762 sys.stdin/stdout changes.
2763
Guido van Rossumba602972002-10-01 18:18:58 +00002764- The _tkinter module (and hence Tkinter) has dropped support for
2765 Tcl/Tk 8.0 and 8.1. Only Tcl/Tk versions 8.2, 8.3 and 8.4 are
2766 supported.
2767
Martin v. Löwis658009a2002-09-16 17:26:24 +00002768- cPickle.BadPickleGet is now a class.
2769
Martin v. Löwisa19bfe02002-10-16 18:28:36 +00002770- The time stamps in os.stat_result are floating point numbers
2771 after stat_float_times has been called.
Martin v. Löwis94717ed2002-09-09 14:24:16 +00002772
Neal Norwitzb5673922002-09-05 21:48:07 +00002773- If the size passed to mmap.mmap() is larger than the length of the
2774 file on non-Windows platforms, a ValueError is raised. [SF bug 585792]
2775
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00002776- The xreadlines module is slated for obsolescence.
2777
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00002778- The strptime function in the time module is now always available (a
2779 Python implementation is used when the C library doesn't define it).
2780
Guido van Rossum9562bcf2002-06-14 21:31:18 +00002781- The 'new' module is no longer an extension, but a Python module that
2782 only exists for backwards compatibility. Its contents are no longer
2783 functions but callable type objects.
2784
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00002785- The bsddb.*open functions can now take 'None' as a filename.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00002786 This will create a temporary in-memory bsddb that won't be
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00002787 written to disk.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00002788
Martin v. Löwisb96152c2002-12-31 13:20:15 +00002789- posix.getloadavg, posix.lchown, posix.killpg, posix.mknod, and
2790 posix.getpgid have been added where available.
Martin v. Löwis06a83e92002-04-14 10:19:44 +00002791
Martin v. Löwisf0a46682002-11-03 17:20:12 +00002792- The locale module now exposes the C library's gettext interface. It
2793 also has a new function getpreferredencoding.
Martin v. Löwis2e64c342002-03-27 18:49:02 +00002794
Tim Petersfbf74f22002-03-14 19:06:01 +00002795- A security hole ("double free") was found in zlib-1.1.3, a popular
2796 third party compression library used by some Python modules. The
2797 hole was quickly plugged in zlib-1.1.4, and the Windows build of
2798 Python now ships with zlib-1.1.4.
2799
Martin v. Löwis688357e2002-04-08 21:28:20 +00002800- pwd, grp, and resource return enhanced tuples now, with symbolic
2801 field names.
Martin v. Löwis29001ff2002-03-01 10:47:37 +00002802
Martin v. Löwis99866332002-03-01 10:27:01 +00002803- array.array is now a type object. A new format character
2804 'u' indicates Py_UNICODE arrays. For those, .tounicode and
2805 .fromunicode methods are available. Arrays now support __iadd__
2806 and __imul__.
2807
Neal Norwitze790eae2002-01-01 21:14:12 +00002808- dl now builds on every system that has dlfcn.h. Failure in case
Martin v. Löwis93227272002-01-01 20:18:30 +00002809 of sizeof(int)!=sizeof(long)!=sizeof(void*) is delayed until dl.open
2810 is called.
2811
Skip Montanaro8e790e72002-09-03 13:25:17 +00002812- The sys module acquired a new attribute, api_version, which evaluates
2813 to the value of the PYTHON_API_VERSION macro with which the
2814 interpreter was compiled.
2815
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00002816- Fixed bug #470582: sre module would return a tuple (None, 'a', 'ab')
2817 when applying the regular expression '^((a)c)?(ab)$' on 'ab'. It now
2818 returns (None, None, 'ab'), as expected. Also fixed handling of
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00002819 lastindex/lastgroup match attributes in similar cases. For example,
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00002820 when running the expression r'(a)(b)?b' over 'ab', lastindex must be
2821 1, not 2.
2822
Gustavo Niemeyerc523b042002-11-07 03:28:56 +00002823- Fixed bug #581080: sre scanner was not checking the buffer limit
2824 before increasing the current pointer. This was creating an infinite
2825 loop in the search function, once the pointer exceeded the buffer
2826 limit.
2827
Thomas Heller95cb7e42002-11-07 16:23:55 +00002828- The os.fdopen function now enforces a file mode starting with the
2829 letter 'r', 'w' or 'a', otherwise a ValueError is raised. This fixes
2830 bug #623464.
2831
Greg Ward6c58d462003-01-03 18:02:15 +00002832- The linuxaudiodev module is now deprecated; it is being replaced by
2833 ossaudiodev. The interface has been extended to cover a lot more of
2834 OSS (see www.opensound.com), including most DSP ioctls and the
2835 OSS mixer API. Documentation forthcoming in 2.3a2.
2836
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002837Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002838-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002839
Guido van Rossum747f8062003-01-03 16:33:49 +00002840- imaplib.py now supports SSL (Tino Lange and Piers Lauder).
2841
Just van Rossum5e156ad2002-12-31 16:38:01 +00002842- Freeze's modulefinder.py has been moved to the standard library;
2843 slightly improved so it will issue less false missing submodule
2844 reports (see sf path #643711 for details). Documentation will follow
2845 with Python 2.3a2.
2846
Martin v. Löwis96a60e42002-12-31 13:11:54 +00002847- os.path exposes getctime.
2848
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002849- unittest.py now has two additional methods called assertAlmostEqual()
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002850 and failIfAlmostEqual(). They implement an approximate comparison
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002851 by rounding the difference between the two arguments and comparing
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002852 the result to zero. Approximate comparison is essential for
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002853 unit tests of floating point results.
2854
Raymond Hettingere11b5102002-12-25 16:37:19 +00002855- calendar.py now depends on the new datetime module rather than
2856 the time module. As a result, the range of allowable dates
2857 has been increased.
2858
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00002859- pdb has a new 'j(ump)' command to select the next line to be
2860 executed.
2861
Thomas Heller1b3b49d2002-12-12 19:13:44 +00002862- The distutils created windows installers now can run a
2863 postinstallation script.
2864
Martin v. Löwis4581cfa2002-11-22 08:23:09 +00002865- doctest.testmod can now be called without argument, which means to
2866 test the current module.
2867
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002868- When canceling a server that implemented threading with a keyboard
Martin v. Löwisf86e8ef2002-11-22 08:08:44 +00002869 interrupt, the server would shut down but not terminate (waiting on
2870 client threads). A new member variable, daemon_threads, was added to
2871 the ThreadingMixIn class in SocketServer.py to make it explicit that
2872 this behavior needs to be controlled.
2873
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00002874- A new module, optparse, provides a fancy alternative to getopt for
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00002875 command line parsing. It is a slightly modified version of Greg
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00002876 Ward's Optik package.
2877
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00002878- UserDict.py now defines a DictMixin class which defines all dictionary
2879 methods for classes that already have a minimum mapping interface.
2880 This greatly simplifies writing classes that need to be substitutable
2881 for dictionaries (such as the shelve module).
2882
2883- shelve.py now subclasses from UserDict.DictMixin. Now shelve supports
2884 all dictionary methods. This eases the transition to persistent
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00002885 storage for scripts originally written with dictionaries in mind.
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00002886
Skip Montanaro3bf99e32002-12-08 18:36:24 +00002887- shelve.open and the various classes in shelve.py now accept an optional
2888 binary flag, which defaults to False. If True, the values stored in the
2889 shelf are binary pickles.
2890
Guido van Rossumfda06742002-11-13 16:29:18 +00002891- A new package, logging, implements the logging API defined by PEP
2892 282. The code is written by Vinay Sajip.
2893
Walter Dörwald4dbf1922002-11-06 16:53:44 +00002894- StreamReader, StreamReaderWriter and StreamRecoder in the codecs
2895 modules are iterators now.
2896
Tim Peters9288f952002-11-05 20:38:55 +00002897- gzip.py now handles files exceeding 2GB. Files over 4GB also work
2898 now (provided the OS supports it, and Python is configured with large
2899 file support), but in that case the underlying gzip file format can
2900 record only the least-significant 32 bits of the file size, so that
2901 some tools working with gzipped files may report an incorrect file
2902 size.
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00002903
Martin v. Löwis74b51ac2002-10-26 14:50:45 +00002904- xml.sax.saxutils.unescape has been added, to replace entity references
2905 with their entity value.
2906
Martin v. Löwis77ac4292002-10-15 15:11:13 +00002907- Queue.Queue.{put,get} now support an optional timeout argument.
2908
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00002909- Various features of Tk 8.4 are exposed in Tkinter.py. The multiple
2910 option of tkFileDialog is exposed as function askopenfile{,name}s.
Martin v. Löwis2ec36272002-10-13 10:22:08 +00002911
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00002912- Various configure methods of Tkinter have been stream-lined, so that
2913 tag_configure, image_configure, window_configure now return a
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00002914 dictionary when invoked with no argument.
Martin v. Löwis6ce13152002-10-10 14:36:13 +00002915
Guido van Rossum2b492b62002-10-09 21:40:48 +00002916- Importing the readline module now no longer has the side effect of
2917 calling setlocale(LC_CTYPE, ""). The initial "C" locale, or
2918 whatever locale is explicitly set by the user, is preserved. If you
2919 want repr() of 8-bit strings in your preferred encoding to preserve
2920 all printable characters of that encoding, you have to add the
2921 following code to your $PYTHONSTARTUP file or to your application's
2922 main():
2923
2924 import locale
2925 locale.setlocale(locale.LC_CTYPE, "")
2926
Martin v. Löwise9ce0b02002-10-07 13:23:24 +00002927- shutil.move was added. shutil.copytree now reports errors as an
2928 exception at the end, instead of printing error messages.
2929
Marc-André Lemburg97047e22002-10-04 11:55:21 +00002930- Encoding name normalization was generalized to not only
2931 replace hyphens with underscores, but also all other non-alphanumeric
2932 characters (with the exception of the dot which is used for Python
2933 package names during lookup). The aliases.py mapping was updated
2934 to the new standard.
2935
Walter Dörwald5ccaf8f2002-09-06 16:15:58 +00002936- mimetypes has two new functions: guess_all_extensions() which
2937 returns a list of all known extensions for a mime type, and
2938 add_type() which adds one mapping between a mime type and
2939 an extension to the database.
2940
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00002941- New module: sets, defines the class Set that implements a mutable
2942 set type using the keys of a dict to represent the set. There's
2943 also a class ImmutableSet which is useful when you need sets of sets
2944 or when you need to use sets as dict keys, and a class BaseSet which
Raymond Hettingeref8b9c62002-12-09 08:56:06 +00002945 is the base class of the two.
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00002946
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00002947- Added random.sample(population,k) for random sampling without replacement.
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00002948 Returns a k length list of unique elements chosen from the population.
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00002949
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00002950- random.randrange(-sys.maxint-1, sys.maxint) no longer raises
2951 OverflowError. That is, it now accepts any combination of 'start'
2952 and 'stop' arguments so long as each is in the range of Python's
2953 bounded integers.
2954
Raymond Hettinger40f62172002-12-29 23:03:38 +00002955- Thanks to Raymond Hettinger, random.random() now uses a new core
2956 generator. The Mersenne Twister algorithm is implemented in C,
2957 threadsafe, faster than the previous generator, has an astronomically
2958 large period (2**19937-1), creates random floats to full 53-bit
2959 precision, and may be the most widely tested random number generator
2960 in existence.
2961
2962 The random.jumpahead(n) method has different semantics for the new
2963 generator. Instead of jumping n steps ahead, it uses n and the
2964 existing state to create a new state. This means that jumpahead()
2965 continues to support multi-threaded code needing generators of
2966 non-overlapping sequences. However, it will break code which relies
2967 on jumpahead moving a specific number of steps forward.
2968
2969 The attributes random.whseed and random.__whseed have no meaning for
2970 the new generator. Code using these attributes should switch to a
2971 new class, random.WichmannHill which is provided for backward
2972 compatibility and to make an alternate generator available.
2973
Guido van Rossum4a57c332002-08-02 18:05:20 +00002974- New "algorithms" module: heapq, implements a heap queue. Thanks to
2975 Kevin O'Connor for the code and François Pinard for an entertaining
2976 write-up explaining the theory and practical uses of heaps.
2977
Marc-André Lemburg58e2ff22002-07-12 14:40:04 +00002978- New encoding for the Palm OS character set: palmos.
2979
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00002980- binascii.crc32() and the zipfile module had problems on some 64-bit
2981 platforms. These have been fixed. On a platform with 8-byte C longs,
2982 crc32() now returns a signed-extended 4-byte result, so that its value
2983 as a Python int is equal to the value computed a 32-bit platform.
2984
Martin v. Löwis7d650ca2002-06-30 15:05:00 +00002985- xml.dom.minidom.toxml and toprettyxml now take an optional encoding
2986 argument.
2987
Guido van Rossum9f7549b2002-06-10 21:39:42 +00002988- Some fixes in the copy module: when an object is copied through its
2989 __reduce__ method, there was no check for a __setstate__ method on
2990 the result [SF patch 565085]; deepcopy should treat instances of
2991 custom metaclasses the same way it treats instances of type 'type'
2992 [SF patch 560794].
2993
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00002994- Sockets now support timeout mode. After s.settimeout(T), where T is
2995 a float expressing seconds, subsequent operations raise an exception
2996 if they cannot be completed within T seconds. To disable timeout
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00002997 mode, use s.settimeout(None). There's also a module function,
2998 socket.setdefaulttimeout(T), which sets the default for all sockets
2999 created henceforth.
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00003000
3001- getopt.gnu_getopt was added. This supports GNU-style option
3002 processing, where options can be mixed with non-option arguments.
Martin v. Löwis446a25f2002-06-06 10:58:36 +00003003
Michael W. Hudsonb0dc1a32002-06-04 18:27:35 +00003004- Stop using strings for exceptions. String objects used for
3005 exceptions are now classes deriving from Exception. The objects
3006 changed were: Tkinter.TclError, bdb.BdbQuit, macpath.norm_error,
3007 tabnanny.NannyNag, and xdrlib.Error.
Neal Norwitzb5b5a262002-06-04 17:14:07 +00003008
Walter Dörwald474458d2002-06-04 15:16:29 +00003009- Constants BOM_UTF8, BOM_UTF16, BOM_UTF16_LE, BOM_UTF16_BE,
3010 BOM_UTF32, BOM_UTF32_LE and BOM_UTF32_BE that represent the Byte
3011 Order Mark in UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 encodings for little and
3012 big endian systems were added to the codecs module. The old names
3013 BOM32_* and BOM64_* were off by a factor of 2.
3014
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00003015- Added conversion functions math.degrees() and math.radians().
Raymond Hettinger87f59ee2002-05-13 04:17:32 +00003016
Raymond Hettinger866964c2002-12-14 19:51:34 +00003017- math.log() now takes an optional argument: math.log(x[, base]).
3018
Raymond Hettinger9b1df1d2002-05-12 06:07:21 +00003019- ftplib.retrlines() now tests for callback is None rather than testing
3020 for False. Was causing an error when given a callback object which
3021 was callable but also returned len() as zero. The change may
3022 create new breakage if the caller relied on the undocumented behavior
3023 and called with callback set to [] or some other False value not
3024 identical to None.
3025
Tim Peters46c04e12002-05-05 20:40:00 +00003026- random.gauss() uses a piece of hidden state used by nothing else,
3027 and the .seed() and .whseed() methods failed to reset it. In other
3028 words, setting the seed didn't completely determine the sequence of
3029 results produced by random.gauss(). It does now. Programs repeatedly
3030 mixing calls to a seed method with calls to gauss() may see different
3031 results now.
3032
Fred Drake7f781c92002-05-01 20:33:53 +00003033- The pickle.Pickler class grew a clear_memo() method to mimic that
3034 provided by cPickle.Pickler.
3035
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003036- difflib's SequenceMatcher class now does a dynamic analysis of
3037 which elements are so frequent as to constitute noise. For
3038 comparing files as sequences of lines, this generally works better
3039 than the IS_LINE_JUNK function, and function ndiff's linejunk
3040 argument defaults to None now as a result. A happy benefit is
3041 that SequenceMatcher may run much faster now when applied
3042 to large files with many duplicate lines (for example, C program
3043 text with lots of repeated "}" and "return NULL;" lines).
3044
Guido van Rossum256705b2002-04-23 13:29:43 +00003045- New Text.dump() method in Tkinter module.
3046
Marc-André Lemburg1ec71ea2002-04-17 20:33:40 +00003047- New distutils commands for building packagers were added to
3048 support pkgtool on Solaris and swinstall on HP-UX.
3049
3050- distutils now has a new abstract binary packager base class
3051 command/bdist_packager, which simplifies writing packagers.
3052 This will hopefully provide the missing bits to encourage
3053 people to submit more packagers, e.g. for Debian, FreeBSD
3054 and other systems.
3055
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00003056- The UTF-16, -LE and -BE stream readers now raise a
3057 NotImplementedError for all calls to .readline(). Previously, they
3058 used to just produce garbage or fail with an encoding error --
3059 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 +00003060 work well with these.
3061
Martin v. Löwis5c137c22002-03-18 12:44:08 +00003062- compileall now supports quiet operation.
3063
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003064- The BaseHTTPServer now implements optional HTTP/1.1 persistent
Martin v. Löwis587c98c2002-03-17 18:37:22 +00003065 connections.
3066
Marc-André Lemburga5d2b4c2002-02-16 18:23:30 +00003067- socket module: the SSL support was broken out of the main
3068 _socket module C helper and placed into a new _ssl helper
3069 which now gets imported by socket.py if available and working.
3070
Marc-André Lemburg37aa5802002-02-10 21:42:47 +00003071- encodings package: added aliases for all supported IANA character
3072 sets
3073
Guido van Rossum606fe4e2001-12-28 20:57:14 +00003074- ftplib: to safeguard the user's privacy, anonymous login will use
3075 "anonymous@" as default password, rather than the real user and host
3076 name.
3077
Fred Drake36736122002-01-10 13:50:31 +00003078- webbrowser: tightened up the command passed to os.system() so that
3079 arbitrary shell code can't be executed because a bogus URL was
3080 passed in.
3081
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00003082- gettext.translation has an optional fallback argument, and
Martin v. Löwisa55ffae2002-01-11 06:58:49 +00003083 gettext.find an optional all argument. Translations will now fallback
Martin v. Löwisd8996052002-11-21 21:45:32 +00003084 on a per-message basis. The module supports plural forms, by means
3085 of gettext.[d]ngettext and Translation.[u]ngettext.
Martin v. Löwis1be64192002-01-11 06:33:28 +00003086
Martin v. Löwis9668b932002-01-12 11:27:42 +00003087- distutils bdist commands now offer a --skip-build option.
3088
Walter Dörwaldb25c2b02002-03-21 10:38:40 +00003089- warnings.warn now accepts a Warning instance as first argument.
3090
Fred Drakefed7e852002-04-04 19:36:15 +00003091- The xml.sax.expatreader.ExpatParser class will no longer create
3092 circular references by using itself as the locator that gets passed
3093 to the content handler implementation. [SF bug #535474]
3094
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00003095- The email.Parser.Parser class now properly parses strings regardless
3096 of their line endings, which can be any of \r, \n, or \r\n (CR, LF,
3097 or CRLF). Also, the Header class's constructor default arguments
3098 has changed slightly so that an explicit maxlinelen value is always
Barry Warsaw497e5c42002-12-30 19:27:08 +00003099 honored, and so unicode conversion error handling can be specified.
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00003100
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003101- distutils' build_ext command now links C++ extensions with the C++
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00003102 compiler available in the Makefile or CXX environment variable, if
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003103 running under \*nix.
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00003104
3105- New module bz2: provides a comprehensive interface for the bz2 compression
3106 library. It implements a complete file interface, one-shot (de)compression
3107 functions, and types for sequential (de)compression.
3108
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003109- New pdb command 'pp' which is like 'p' except that it pretty-prints
Barry Warsaw5d8d6182002-11-05 22:41:33 +00003110 the value of its expression argument.
3111
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00003112- Now bdist_rpm distutils command understands a verify_script option in
3113 the config file, including the contents of the referred filename in
3114 the "%verifyscript" section of the rpm spec file.
3115
Gustavo Niemeyer1456fde2002-11-25 17:25:04 +00003116- Fixed bug #495695: webbrowser module would run graphic browsers in a
3117 unix environment even if DISPLAY was not set. Also, support for
3118 skipstone browser was included.
3119
Gustavo Niemeyerd5ae01a2002-12-16 13:11:57 +00003120- Fixed bug #636769: rexec would run unallowed code if subclasses of
3121 strings were used as parameters for certain functions.
3122
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003123Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003124-----------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003125
Martin v. Löwis0d1fdea2002-11-22 08:36:54 +00003126- pygettext.py now supports globbing on Windows, and accepts module
3127 names in addition to accepting file names.
3128
Guido van Rossum923e4ef2002-09-17 20:58:59 +00003129- The SGI demos (Demo/sgi) have been removed. Nobody thought they
3130 were interesting any more. (The SGI library modules and extensions
3131 are still there; it is believed that at least some of these are
3132 still used and useful.)
3133
Fred Drake40813b12002-08-05 15:24:19 +00003134- IDLE supports the new encoding declarations (PEP 263); it can also
3135 deal with legacy 8-bit files if they use the locale's encoding. It
3136 allows non-ASCII strings in the interactive shell and executes them
3137 in the locale's encoding.
Martin v. Löwis98ce7b72002-08-05 15:11:26 +00003138
Marc-André Lemburg46260092002-04-04 16:17:11 +00003139- freeze.py now produces binaries which can import shared modules,
3140 unlike before when this failed due to missing symbol exports in
3141 the generated binary.
3142
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003143Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003144-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003145
Martin v. Löwisdc461752002-11-06 21:59:33 +00003146- On Unix, IDLE is now installed automatically.
3147
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00003148- The fpectl module is not built by default; it's dangerous or useless
3149 except in the hands of experts.
3150
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003151- The public Python C API will generally be declared using PyAPI_FUNC
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00003152 and PyAPI_DATA macros, while Python extension module init functions
3153 will be declared with PyMODINIT_FUNC. DL_EXPORT/DL_IMPORT macros
3154 are deprecated.
Neal Norwitz1389f3e2002-07-22 13:21:10 +00003155
Tim Petersc6a3ff62002-07-08 22:11:52 +00003156- A bug was fixed that could cause COUNT_ALLOCS builds to segfault, or
3157 get into infinite loops, when a new-style class got garbage-collected.
3158 Unfortunately, to avoid this, the way COUNT_ALLOCS works requires
3159 that new-style classes be immortal in COUNT_ALLOCS builds. Note that
3160 COUNT_ALLOCS is not enabled by default, in either release or debug
3161 builds, and that new-style classes are immortal only in COUNT_ALLOCS
3162 builds.
3163
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00003164- Compiling out the cyclic garbage collector is no longer an option.
3165 The old symbol WITH_CYCLE_GC is now ignored, and Python.h arranges
3166 that it's always defined (for the benefit of any extension modules
3167 that may be conditionalizing on it). A bonus is that any extension
3168 type participating in cyclic gc can choose to participate in the
3169 Py_TRASHCAN mechanism now too; in the absence of cyclic gc, this used
3170 to require editing the core to teach the trashcan mechanism about the
3171 new type.
3172
Martin v. Löwis0cec0ff2002-07-28 16:33:45 +00003173- According to Annex F of the current C standard,
Tim Peters1de41bf2002-07-03 03:31:20 +00003174
3175 The Standard C macro HUGE_VAL and its float and long double analogs,
3176 HUGE_VALF and HUGE_VALL, expand to expressions whose values are
3177 positive infinities.
3178
3179 Python only uses the double HUGE_VAL, and only to #define its own symbol
3180 Py_HUGE_VAL. Some platforms have incorrect definitions for HUGE_VAL.
3181 pyport.h used to try to worm around that, but the workarounds triggered
3182 other bugs on other platforms, so we gave up. If your platform defines
3183 HUGE_VAL incorrectly, you'll need to #define Py_HUGE_VAL to something
3184 that works on your platform. The only instance of this I'm sure about
3185 is on an unknown subset of Cray systems, described here:
3186
3187 http://www.cray.com/swpubs/manuals/SN-2194_2.0/html-SN-2194_2.0/x3138.htm
3188
3189 Presumably 2.3a1 breaks such systems. If anyone uses such a system, help!
3190
Martin v. Löwisa3fb4f72002-06-09 13:33:54 +00003191- The configure option --without-doc-strings can be used to remove the
3192 doc strings from the builtin functions and modules; this reduces the
3193 size of the executable.
3194
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00003195- The universal newlines option (PEP 278) is on by default. On Unix
3196 it can be disabled by passing --without-universal-newlines to the
3197 configure script. On other platforms, remove
3198 WITH_UNIVERSAL_NEWLINES from pyconfig.h.
Tim Peters639295f2002-04-21 07:30:30 +00003199
Martin v. Löwis1142de32002-03-29 16:28:31 +00003200- On Unix, a shared libpython2.3.so can be created with --enable-shared.
3201
Tim Peters8deda702002-03-30 10:06:07 +00003202- All uses of the CACHE_HASH, INTERN_STRINGS, and DONT_SHARE_SHORT_STRINGS
3203 preprocessor symbols were eliminated. The internal decisions they
3204 controlled stopped being experimental long ago.
Tim Peters1f7df352002-03-29 03:29:08 +00003205
Fred Drake7d28b732002-05-02 21:17:00 +00003206- The tools used to build the documentation now work under Cygwin as
3207 well as Unix.
3208
Skip Montanaro57454e52002-06-14 20:30:31 +00003209- The bsddb and dbm module builds have been changed to try and avoid version
3210 skew problems and disable linkage with Berkeley DB 1.85 unless the
3211 installer knows what s/he's doing. See the section on building these
3212 modules in the README file for details.
3213
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003214C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003215-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003216
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00003217- PyNumber_Check() now returns true for string and unicode objects.
3218 This is a result of these types having a partially defined
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00003219 tp_as_number slot. (This is not a feature, but an indication that
Walter Dörwalda1a61f92002-11-19 21:20:25 +00003220 PyNumber_Check() is not very useful to determine numeric behavior.
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00003221 It may be deprecated.)
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00003222
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00003223- The string object's layout has changed: the pointer member
3224 ob_sinterned has been replaced by an int member ob_sstate. On some
3225 platforms (e.g. most 64-bit systems) this may change the offset of
3226 the ob_sval member, so as a precaution the API_VERSION has been
3227 incremented. The apparently unused feature of "indirect interned
3228 strings", supported by the ob_sinterned member, is gone. Interned
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003229 strings are now usually mortal; there is a new API,
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00003230 PyString_InternImmortal() that creates immortal interned strings.
3231 (The ob_sstate member can only take three values; however, while
3232 making it a char saves a few bytes per string object on average, in
3233 it also slowed things down a bit because ob_sval was no longer
3234 aligned.)
3235
Guido van Rossumfdb86482002-08-14 21:20:32 +00003236- The Py_InitModule*() functions now accept NULL for the 'methods'
3237 argument. Modules without global functions are becoming more common
3238 now that factories can be types rather than functions.
3239
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00003240- New C API PyUnicode_FromOrdinal() which exposes unichr() at C
3241 level.
3242
Thomas Heller085358a2002-07-29 14:27:41 +00003243- New functions PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErr() and
3244 PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErrWithFilename(). Similar to
3245 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErrWithFilename() and
3246 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErr(), but they allow to specify
3247 the exception type to raise. Available on Windows.
3248
Tim Peters7c321a82002-07-09 02:57:01 +00003249- Py_FatalError() is now declared as taking a const char* argument. It
3250 was previously declared without const. This should not affect working
3251 code.
3252
Martin v. Löwis01f94bd2002-05-08 08:44:21 +00003253- Added new macro PySequence_ITEM(o, i) that directly calls
3254 sq_item without rechecking that o is a sequence and without
3255 adjusting for negative indices.
3256
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00003257- PyRange_New() now raises ValueError if the fourth argument is not 1.
3258 This is part of the removal of deprecated features of the xrange
3259 object.
3260
Guido van Rossum517c7d42002-04-26 02:49:14 +00003261- PyNumber_Coerce() and PyNumber_CoerceEx() now also invoke the type's
3262 coercion if both arguments have the same type but this type has the
3263 CHECKTYPES flag set. This is to better support proxies.
3264
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003265- The type of tp_free has been changed from "``void (*)(PyObject *)``" to
3266 "``void (*)(void *)``".
Neil Schemenauer9344b142002-04-12 23:00:08 +00003267
3268- PyObject_Del, PyObject_GC_Del are now functions instead of macros.
3269
Guido van Rossum0986d822002-04-08 01:38:42 +00003270- A type can now inherit its metatype from its base type. Previously,
3271 when PyType_Ready() was called, if ob_type was found to be NULL, it
3272 was always set to &PyType_Type; now it is set to base->ob_type,
3273 where base is tp_base, defaulting to &PyObject_Type.
3274
3275- PyType_Ready() accidentally did not inherit tp_is_gc; now it does.
3276
Neil Schemenauerc9abc1d2002-05-08 14:14:41 +00003277- The PyCore_* family of APIs have been removed.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00003278
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003279- The "u#" parser marker will now pass through Unicode objects as-is
Marc-André Lemburg3e3eacb2002-01-09 16:21:27 +00003280 without going through the buffer API.
3281
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003282- The enumerators of cmp_op have been renamed to use the prefix ``PyCmp_``.
Martin v. Löwis7198a522002-01-01 19:59:11 +00003283
Tim Peters10a3bb52001-12-25 19:07:38 +00003284- An old #define of ANY as void has been removed from pyport.h. This
3285 hasn't been used since Python's pre-ANSI days, and the #define has
3286 been marked as obsolete since then. SF bug 495548 says it created
3287 conflicts with other packages, so keeping it around wasn't harmless.
3288
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003289- Because Python's magic number scheme broke on January 1st, we decided
3290 to stop Python development. Thanks for all the fish!
3291
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00003292- Some of us don't like fish, so we changed Python's magic number
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00003293 scheme to a new one. See Python/import.c for details.
3294
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003295New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003296-------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003297
Martin v. Löwis79acb9e2002-12-06 12:48:53 +00003298- OpenVMS is now supported.
3299
Martin v. Löwisf90ae202002-06-11 06:22:31 +00003300- AtheOS is now supported.
3301
Andrew MacIntyre161ad0e2002-08-04 07:25:58 +00003302- the EMX runtime environment on OS/2 is now supported.
3303
Martin v. Löwisa6e97582002-01-01 18:41:33 +00003304- GNU/Hurd is now supported.
3305
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003306Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003307-----
3308
Fred Drake4dd0f7e2002-11-26 21:44:56 +00003309- The regrtest.py script's -u option now provides a way to say "allow
3310 all resources except this one." For example, to allow everything
3311 except bsddb, give the option '-uall,-bsddb'.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003312
3313Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003314-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003315
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00003316- The Windows distribution now ships with version 4.0.14 of the
3317 Sleepycat Berkeley database library. This should be a huge
3318 improvement over the previous Berkeley DB 1.85, which had many
3319 bugs.
3320 XXX What are the licensing issues here?
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003321 XXX If a user has a database created with a previous version of
Tim Peters84c7a3f2002-11-23 18:48:06 +00003322 XXX Python, what must they do to convert it?
3323 XXX I'm still not sure how to link this thing (see PCbuild/readme.txt).
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00003324 XXX The version # is likely to change before 2.3a1.
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00003325
3326- The Windows distribution now ships with a Secure Sockets Library (SLL)
Mark Hammondc3de0082002-12-03 06:16:08 +00003327 module (_ssl.pyd)
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00003328
Tim Peters857fb4c2002-11-14 23:31:58 +00003329- The Windows distribution now ships with Tcl/Tk version 8.4.1 (it
3330 previously shipped with Tcl/Tk 8.3.2).
3331
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00003332- When Python is built under a Microsoft compiler, sys.version now
3333 includes the compiler version number (_MSC_VER). For example, under
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003334 MSVC 6, sys.version contains the substring "MSC v.1200 ". 1200 is
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00003335 the value of _MSC_VER under MSVC 6.
3336
Tim Peters08e72952002-04-16 20:48:01 +00003337- Sometimes the uninstall executable (UNWISE.EXE) vanishes. One cause
3338 of that has been fixed in the installer (disabled Wise's "delete in-
3339 use files" uninstall option).
3340
Guido van Rossum181e41a2002-04-06 00:23:25 +00003341- Fixed a bug in urllib's proxy handling in Windows. [SF bug #503031]
3342
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00003343- The installer now installs Start menu shortcuts under (the local
3344 equivalent of) "All Users" when doing an Admin install.
3345
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00003346- file.truncate([newsize]) now works on Windows for all newsize values.
3347 It used to fail if newsize didn't fit in 32 bits, reflecting a
3348 limitation of MS _chsize (which is no longer used).
3349
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00003350- os.waitpid() is now implemented for Windows, and can be used to block
3351 until a specified process exits. This is similar to, but not exactly
3352 the same as, os.waitpid() on POSIX systems. If you're waiting for
3353 a specific process whose pid was obtained from one of the spawn()
3354 functions, the same Python os.waitpid() code works across platforms.
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00003355 See the docs for details. The docs were changed to clarify that
3356 spawn functions return, and waitpid requires, a process handle on
3357 Windows (not the same thing as a Windows process id).
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00003358
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00003359- New tempfile.TemporaryFile implementation for Windows: this doesn't
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003360 need a TemporaryFileWrapper wrapper anymore, and should be immune
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00003361 to a nasty problem: before 2.3, if you got a temp file on Windows, it
3362 got wrapped in an object whose close() method first closed the
3363 underlying file, then deleted the file. This usually worked fine.
3364 However, the spawn family of functions on Windows create (at a low C
3365 level) the same set of open files in the spawned process Q as were
3366 open in the spawning process P. If a temp file f was among them, then
3367 doing f.close() in P first closed P's C-level file handle on f, but Q's
3368 C-level file handle on f remained open, so the attempt in P to delete f
3369 blew up with a "Permission denied" error (Windows doesn't allow
3370 deleting open files). This was surprising, subtle, and difficult to
3371 work around.
3372
3373- The os module now exports all the symbolic constants usable with the
3374 low-level os.open() on Windows: the new constants in 2.3 are
3375 O_NOINHERIT, O_SHORT_LIVED, O_TEMPORARY, O_RANDOM and O_SEQUENTIAL.
3376 The others were also available in 2.2: O_APPEND, O_BINARY, O_CREAT,
3377 O_EXCL, O_RDONLY, O_RDWR, O_TEXT, O_TRUNC and O_WRONLY. Contrary
3378 to Microsoft docs, O_SHORT_LIVED does not seem to imply O_TEMPORARY
3379 (so specify both if you want both; note that neither is useful unless
3380 specified with O_CREAT too).
3381
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003382Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003383----
3384
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003385- Mac/Relnotes is gone, the release notes are now here.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003386
Just van Rossume1ebd802003-02-10 10:06:18 +00003387- Python (the OSX-only, unix-based version, not the OS9-compatible CFM
3388 version) now fully supports unicode strings as arguments to various file
3389 system calls, eg. open(), file(), os.stat() and os.listdir().
3390
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003391- The current naming convention for Python on the Macintosh is that MacPython
3392 refers to the unix-based OSX-only version, and MacPython-OS9 refers to the
3393 CFM-based version that runs on both OS9 and OSX.
3394
3395- All MacPython-OS9 functionality is now available in an OSX unix build,
3396 including the Carbon modules, the IDE, OSA support, etc. A lot of this
3397 will only work correctly in a framework build, though, because you cannot
3398 talk to the window manager unless your application is run from a .app
3399 bundle. There is a command line tool "pythonw" that runs your script
3400 with an interpreter living in such a .app bundle, this interpreter should
3401 be used to run any Python script using the window manager (including
3402 Tkinter or wxPython scripts).
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00003403
Jack Jansen8bb80db2002-12-30 22:42:43 +00003404- Most of Mac/Lib has moved to Lib/plat-mac, which is again used both in
3405 MacPython-OSX and MacPython-OS9. The only modules remaining in Mac/Lib
3406 are specifically for MacPython-OS9 (CFM support, preference resources, etc).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003407
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003408- A new utility PythonLauncher will start a Python interpreter when a .py or
3409 .pyw script is double-clicked in the Finder. By default .py scripts are
3410 run with a normal Python interpreter in a Terminal window and .pyw
3411 files are run with a window-aware pythonw interpreter without a Terminal
3412 window, but all this can be customized.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003413
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003414- MacPython-OS9 is now Carbon-only, so it runs on Mac OS 9 or Mac OS X and
3415 possibly on Mac OS 8.6 with the right CarbonLib installed, but not on earlier
3416 releases.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003417
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003418- Many tools such as BuildApplet.py and gensuitemodule.py now support a command
3419 line interface too.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003420
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003421- All the Carbon classes are now PEP253 compliant, meaning that you can
3422 subclass them from Python. Most of the attributes have gone, you should
3423 now use the accessor function call API, which is also what Apple's
3424 documentation uses. Some attributes such as grafport.visRgn are still
3425 available for convenience.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003426
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003427- New Carbon modules File (implementing the APIs in Files.h and Aliases.h)
3428 and Folder (APIs from Folders.h). The old macfs builtin module is
3429 gone, and replaced by a Python wrapper around the new modules.
3430
3431- Pathname handling should now be fully consistent: MacPython-OSX always uses
3432 unix pathnames and MacPython-OS9 always uses colon-separated Mac pathnames
3433 (also when running on Mac OS X).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003434
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003435- New Carbon modules Help and AH give access to the Carbon Help Manager.
3436 There are hooks in the IDE to allow accessing the Python documentation
3437 (and Apple's Carbon and Cocoa documentation) through the Help Viewer.
3438 See Mac/OSX/README for converting the Python documentation to a
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003439 Help Viewer compatible form and installing it.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003440
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003441- OSA support has been redesigned and the generated Python classes now
3442 mirror the inheritance defined by the underlying OSA classes.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003443
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003444- MacPython no longer maps both \r and \n to \n on input for any text file.
3445 This feature has been replaced by universal newline support (PEP278).
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00003446
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00003447- The default encoding for Python sourcefiles in MacPython-OS9 is no longer
Guido van Rossum16c85172003-02-20 01:52:48 +00003448 mac-roman (or whatever your local Mac encoding was) but "ascii", like on
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00003449 other platforms. If you really need sourcefiles with Mac characters in them
3450 you can change this in site.py.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003451
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003452
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003453What's New in Python 2.2 final?
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003454===============================
3455
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003456*Release date: 21-Dec-2001*
3457
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003458Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003459--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003460
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003461- pickle.py, cPickle: allow pickling instances of new-style classes
3462 with a custom metaclass.
3463
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003464Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003465-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003466
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003467- weakref proxy object: when comparing, unwrap both arguments if both
3468 are proxies.
3469
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003470Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003471-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003472
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003473- binascii.b2a_base64(): fix a potential buffer overrun when encoding
3474 very short strings.
3475
3476- cPickle: the obscure "fast" mode was suspected of causing stack
3477 overflows on the Mac. Hopefully fixed this by setting the recursion
3478 limit much smaller. If the limit is too low (it only affects
3479 performance), you can change it by defining PY_CPICKLE_FAST_LIMIT
3480 when compiling cPickle.c (or in pyconfig.h).
3481
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003482Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003483-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003484
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003485- dumbdbm.py: fixed a dumb old bug (the file didn't get synched at
3486 close or delete time).
3487
3488- rfc822.py: fixed a bug where the address '<>' was converted to None
3489 instead of an empty string (also fixes the email.Utils module).
3490
3491- xmlrpclib.py: version 1.0.0; uses precision for doubles.
3492
3493- test suite: the pickle and cPickle tests were not executing any code
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003494 when run from the standard regression test.
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003495
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003496Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003497-----------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003498
3499Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003500-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003501
3502C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003503-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003504
3505New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003506-------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003507
3508Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003509-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003510
3511Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003512-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003513
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003514- distutils package: fixed broken Windows installers (bdist_wininst).
3515
3516- tempfile.py: prevent mysterious warnings when TemporaryFileWrapper
3517 instances are deleted at process exit time.
3518
3519- socket.py: prevent mysterious warnings when socket instances are
3520 deleted at process exit time.
3521
3522- posixmodule.c: fix a Windows crash with stat() of a filename ending
3523 in backslash.
3524
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003525Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003526----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003527
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003528- The Carbon toolbox modules have been upgraded to Universal Headers
3529 3.4, and experimental CoreGraphics and CarbonEvents modules have
3530 been added. All only for framework-enabled MacOSX.
3531
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003532
Tim Peters6272dfd2001-12-13 19:34:00 +00003533What's New in Python 2.2c1?
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003534===========================
3535
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003536*Release date: 14-Dec-2001*
3537
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003538Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003539--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003540
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003541- Guido's tutorial introduction to the new type/class features has
3542 been extensively updated. See
3543
3544 http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html
3545
3546 That remains the primary documentation in this area.
3547
Guido van Rossum33bab012001-12-05 22:45:48 +00003548- Fixed a leak: instance variables declared with __slots__ were never
3549 deleted!
3550
Guido van Rossum4b800852001-12-03 00:54:52 +00003551- The "delete attribute" method of descriptor objects is called
3552 __delete__, not __del__. In previous releases, it was mistakenly
3553 called __del__, which created an unfortunate overloading condition
3554 with finalizers. (The "get attribute" and "set attribute" methods
3555 are still called __get__ and __set__, respectively.)
3556
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00003557- Some subtle issues with the super built-in were fixed:
3558
3559 (a) When super itself is subclassed, its __get__ method would still
3560 return an instance of the base class (i.e., of super).
3561
3562 (b) super(C, C()).__class__ would return C rather than super. This
3563 is confusing. To fix this, I decided to change the semantics of
3564 super so that it only applies to code attributes, not to data
3565 attributes. After all, overriding data attributes is not
3566 supported anyway.
3567
3568 (c) The __get__ method didn't check whether the argument was an
3569 instance of the type used in creation of the super instance.
3570
Guido van Rossumcd7b7d62001-12-04 21:02:07 +00003571- Previously, hash() of an instance of a subclass of a mutable type
3572 (list or dictionary) would return some value, rather than raising
3573 TypeError. This has been fixed. Also, directly calling
3574 dict.__hash__ and list.__hash__ now raises the same TypeError
3575 (previously, these were the same as object.__hash__).
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00003576
Guido van Rossumd331cb52001-12-05 19:46:42 +00003577- New-style objects now support deleting their __dict__. This is for
3578 all intents and purposes equivalent to assigning a brand new empty
3579 dictionary, but saves space if the object is not used further.
3580
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003581Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003582-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003583
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00003584- -Qnew now works as documented in PEP 238: when -Qnew is passed on
3585 the command line, all occurrences of "/" use true division instead
3586 of classic division. See the PEP for details. Note that "all"
3587 means all instances in library and 3rd-party modules, as well as in
3588 your own code. As the PEP says, -Qnew is intended for use only in
3589 educational environments with control over the libraries in use.
Tim Petersbf72fe22001-12-11 21:43:14 +00003590 Note that test_coercion.py in the standard Python test suite fails
3591 under -Qnew; this is expected, and won't be repaired until true
3592 division becomes the default (in the meantime, test_coercion is
3593 testing the current rules).
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00003594
Fred Drake6c01e252001-12-14 17:08:12 +00003595- complex() now only allows the first argument to be a string
3596 argument, and raises TypeError if either the second arg is a string
3597 or if the second arg is specified when the first is a string.
3598
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003599Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003600-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003601
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00003602- gc.get_referents was renamed to gc.get_referrers.
3603
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003604Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003605-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003606
Tim Peters25059d32001-12-07 20:35:43 +00003607- Functions in the os.spawn() family now release the global interpreter
3608 lock around calling the platform spawn. They should always have done
3609 this, but did not before 2.2c1. Multithreaded programs calling
3610 an os.spawn function with P_WAIT will no longer block all Python threads
3611 until the spawned program completes. It's possible that some programs
3612 relies on blocking, although more likely by accident than by design.
3613
Martin v. Löwis3a89b2b2001-11-25 14:35:58 +00003614- webbrowser defaults to netscape.exe on OS/2 now.
3615
Martin v. Löwis652e1912001-11-25 14:50:56 +00003616- Tix.ResizeHandle exposes detach_widget, hide, and show.
3617
Martin v. Löwis714d2e22001-12-02 12:26:03 +00003618- The charset alias windows_1252 has been added.
3619
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003620- types.StringTypes is a tuple containing the defined string types;
3621 usually this will be (str, unicode), but if Python was compiled
3622 without Unicode support it will be just (str,).
3623
3624- The pulldom and minidom modules were synchronized to PyXML.
3625
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003626Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003627-----------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003628
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003629- A new script called Tools/scripts/google.py was added, which fires
3630 off a search on Google.
3631
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003632Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003633-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003634
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003635- Note that release builds of Python should arrange to define the
3636 preprocessor symbol NDEBUG on the command line (or equivalent).
3637 In the 2.2 pre-release series we tried to define this by magic in
3638 Python.h instead, but it proved to cause problems for extension
3639 authors. The Unix, Windows and Mac builds now all define NDEBUG in
3640 release builds via cmdline (or equivalent) instead. Ports to
3641 other platforms should do likewise.
3642
Jack Jansen1999ef42001-12-06 21:47:20 +00003643- It is no longer necessary to use --with-suffix when building on a
3644 case-insensitive file system (such as Mac OS X HFS+). In the build
3645 directory an extension is used, but not in the installed python.
3646
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003647C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003648-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003649
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00003650- New function PyDict_MergeFromSeq2() exposes the builtin dict
3651 constructor's logic for updating a dictionary from an iterable object
3652 producing key-value pairs.
3653
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00003654- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() requires that the number of entries in
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00003655 the keyword list equal the number of argument specifiers. This
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00003656 wasn't checked correctly, and PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords could even
3657 dump core in some bad cases. This has been repaired. As a result,
3658 PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords may raise RuntimeError in bad cases that
3659 previously went unchallenged.
3660
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003661New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003662-------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003663
3664Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003665-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003666
3667Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003668-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003669
3670Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003671----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003672
Jack Jansenffa260f2001-12-06 21:14:00 +00003673- In unix-Python on Mac OS X (and darwin) sys.platform is now "darwin",
3674 without any trailing digits.
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003675
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003676- Changed logic for finding python home in Mac OS X framework Pythons.
3677 Now sys.executable points to the executable again, in stead of to
3678 the shared library. The latter is used only for locating the python
3679 home.
3680
3681
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003682What's New in Python 2.2b2?
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003683===========================
3684
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003685*Release date: 16-Nov-2001*
3686
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003687Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003688--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003689
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00003690- Multiple inheritance mixing new-style and classic classes in the
3691 list of base classes is now allowed, so this works now:
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00003692
3693 class Classic: pass
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00003694 class Mixed(Classic, object): pass
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00003695
3696 The MRO (method resolution order) for each base class is respected
3697 according to its kind, but the MRO for the derived class is computed
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003698 using new-style MRO rules if any base class is a new-style class.
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00003699 This needs to be documented.
3700
Tim Petersa427a2b2001-10-29 22:25:45 +00003701- The new builtin dictionary() constructor, and dictionary type, have
3702 been renamed to dict. This reflects a decade of common usage.
3703
Guido van Rossum3fc08d22001-11-15 20:33:10 +00003704- dict() now accepts an iterable object producing 2-sequences. For
3705 example, dict(d.items()) == d for any dictionary d. The argument,
3706 and the elements of the argument, can be any iterable objects.
3707
Guido van Rossum7ad2d1e2001-10-29 22:11:00 +00003708- New-style classes can now have a __del__ method, which is called
3709 when the instance is deleted (just like for classic classes).
3710
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003711- Assignment to object.__dict__ is now possible, for objects that are
3712 instances of new-style classes that have a __dict__ (unless the base
3713 class forbids it).
3714
Guido van Rossumc8e56452001-10-22 00:43:43 +00003715- Methods of built-in types now properly check for keyword arguments
3716 (formerly these were silently ignored). The only built-in methods
3717 that take keyword arguments are __call__, __init__ and __new__.
3718
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00003719- The socket function has been converted to a type; see below.
3720
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003721Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003722-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003723
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00003724- Assignment to __debug__ raises SyntaxError at compile-time. This
3725 was promised when 2.1c1 was released as "What's New in Python 2.1c1"
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003726 (see below) says.
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00003727
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003728- Clarified the error messages for unsupported operands to an operator
3729 (like 1 + '').
3730
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003731Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003732-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003733
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00003734- mmap has a new keyword argument, "access", allowing a uniform way for
3735 both Windows and Unix users to create read-only, write-through and
3736 copy-on-write memory mappings. This was previously possible only on
3737 Unix. A new keyword argument was required to support this in a
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003738 uniform way because the mmap() signatures had diverged across
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00003739 platforms. Thanks to Jay T Miller for repairing this!
3740
Tim Peters169ded02001-11-03 19:57:21 +00003741- By default, the gc.garbage list now contains only those instances in
3742 unreachable cycles that have __del__ methods; in 2.1 it contained all
3743 instances in unreachable cycles. "Instances" here has been generalized
3744 to include instances of both new-style and old-style classes.
3745
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003746- The socket module defines a new method for socket objects,
3747 sendall(). This is like send() but may make multiple calls to
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00003748 send() until all data has been sent. Also, the socket function has
3749 been converted to a subclassable type, like list and tuple (etc.)
3750 before it; socket and SocketType are now the same thing.
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003751
3752- Various bugfixes to the curses module. There is now a test suite
3753 for the curses module (you have to run it manually).
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00003754
Guido van Rossum692adf12001-10-30 03:03:03 +00003755- binascii.b2a_base64 no longer places an arbitrary restriction of 57
3756 bytes on its input.
3757
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003758Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003759-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003760
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00003761- tkFileDialog exposes a Directory class and askdirectory
Martin v. Löwis25ee87c2001-11-07 22:38:08 +00003762 convenience function.
3763
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00003764- Symbolic group names in regular expressions must be unique. For
3765 example, the regexp r'(?P<abc>)(?P<abc>)' is not allowed, because a
3766 single name can't mean both "group 1" and "group 2" simultaneously.
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003767 Python 2.2 detects this error at regexp compilation time;
3768 previously, the error went undetected, and results were
3769 unpredictable. Also in sre, the pattern.split(), pattern.sub(), and
3770 pattern.subn() methods have been rewritten in C. Also, an
3771 experimental function/method finditer() has been added, which works
3772 like findall() but returns an iterator.
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00003773
Martin v. Löwisb7b32602001-11-02 23:48:20 +00003774- Tix exposes more commands through the classes DirSelectBox,
3775 DirSelectDialog, ListNoteBook, Meter, CheckList, and the
3776 methods tix_addbitmapdir, tix_cget, tix_configure, tix_filedialog,
3777 tix_getbitmap, tix_getimage, tix_option_get, and tix_resetoptions.
3778
Tim Peters98791af2001-10-23 01:59:54 +00003779- Traceback objects are now scanned by cyclic garbage collection, so
3780 cycles created by casual use of sys.exc_info() no longer cause
3781 permanent memory leaks (provided garbage collection is enabled).
3782
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00003783- os.extsep -- a new variable needed by the RISCOS support. It is the
3784 separator used by extensions, and is '.' on all platforms except
3785 RISCOS, where it is '/'. There is no need to use this variable
3786 unless you have a masochistic desire to port your code to RISCOS.
3787
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003788- mimetypes.py has optional support for non-standard, but commonly
3789 found types. guess_type() and guess_extension() now accept an
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003790 optional 'strict' flag, defaulting to true, which controls whether
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003791 recognize non-standard types or not. A few non-standard types we
3792 know about have been added. Also, when run as a script, there are
3793 new -l and -e options.
3794
3795- statcache is now deprecated.
3796
3797- email.Utils.formatdate() now produces the preferred RFC 2822 style
3798 dates with numeric timezones (it used to produce obsolete dates
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003799 hard coded to "GMT" timezone). An optional 'localtime' flag is
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003800 added to produce dates in the local timezone, with daylight savings
3801 time properly taken into account.
3802
3803- In pickle and cPickle, instead of masking errors in load() by
3804 transforming them into SystemError, we let the original exception
3805 propagate out. Also, implement support for __safe_for_unpickling__
3806 in pickle, as it already was supported in cPickle.
3807
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003808Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003809-----------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003810
3811Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003812-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003813
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003814- The dbm module is built using libdb1 if available. The bsddb module
3815 is built with libdb3 if available.
3816
3817- Misc/Makefile.pre.in has been removed by BDFL pronouncement.
3818
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003819C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003820-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003821
Tim Peters1fc240e2001-10-26 05:06:50 +00003822- New function PySequence_Fast_GET_SIZE() returns the size of a non-
3823 NULL result from PySequence_Fast(), more quickly than calling
3824 PySequence_Size().
3825
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003826- New argument unpacking function PyArg_UnpackTuple() added.
3827
3828- New functions PyObject_CallFunctionObjArgs() and
3829 PyObject_CallMethodObjArgs() have been added to make it more
3830 convenient and efficient to call functions and methods from C.
3831
3832- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() no longer masks errors, so it's
3833 possible that this will propagate errors it didn't before.
3834
3835- New function PyObject_CheckReadBuffer(), which returns true if its
3836 argument supports the single-segment readable buffer interface.
3837
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003838New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003839-------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003840
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00003841- We've finally confirmed that this release builds on HP-UX 11.00,
3842 *with* threads, and passes the test suite.
3843
Tim Peters7a33d8b2001-11-05 02:51:07 +00003844- Thanks to a series of patches from Michael Muller, Python may build
3845 again under OS/2 Visual Age C++.
3846
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00003847- Updated RISCOS port by Dietmar Schwertberger.
3848
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003849Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003850-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003851
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00003852- Added a test script for the curses module. It isn't run automatically;
3853 regrtest.py must be run with '-u curses' to enable it.
3854
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003855Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003856-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003857
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003858Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003859----
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003860
3861- PythonScript has been moved to unsupported and is slated to be
3862 removed completely in the next release.
3863
3864- It should now be possible to build applets that work on both OS9 and
3865 OSX.
3866
3867- The core is now linked with CoreServices not Carbon; as a side
3868 result, default 8bit encoding on OSX is now ASCII.
3869
3870- Python should now build on OSX 10.1.1
3871
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003872
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003873What's New in Python 2.2b1?
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003874===========================
3875
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003876*Release date: 19-Oct-2001*
3877
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003878Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003879--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003880
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00003881- New-style classes are now always dynamic (except for built-in and
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00003882 extension types). There is no longer a performance penalty, and I
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00003883 no longer see another reason to keep this baggage around. One relic
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00003884 remains: the __dict__ of a new-style class is a read-only proxy; you
3885 must set the class's attribute to modify it. As a consequence, the
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00003886 __defined__ attribute of new-style types no longer exists, for lack
3887 of need: there is once again only one __dict__ (although in the
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00003888 future a __cache__ may be resurrected with a similar function, if I
3889 can prove that it actually speeds things up).
Guido van Rossum50fda3b2001-10-04 19:46:06 +00003890
Tim Peters1c9ca872001-10-04 06:43:12 +00003891- C.__doc__ now works as expected for new-style classes (in 2.2a4 it
3892 always returned None, even when there was a class docstring).
3893
3894- doctest now finds and runs docstrings attached to new-style classes,
3895 class methods, static methods, and properties.
3896
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003897Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003898-----------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003899
Guido van Rossuma8bcf802001-10-15 15:53:58 +00003900- A very subtle syntactical pitfall in list comprehensions was fixed.
3901 For example: [a+b for a in 'abc', for b in 'def']. The comma in
3902 this example is a mistake. Previously, this would silently let 'a'
3903 iterate over the singleton tuple ('abc',), yielding ['abcd', 'abce',
3904 'abcf'] rather than the intended ['ad', 'ae', 'af', 'bd', 'be',
3905 'bf', 'cd', 'ce', 'cf']. Now, this is flagged as a syntax error.
3906 Note that [a for a in <singleton>] is a convoluted way to say
3907 [<singleton>] anyway, so it's not like any expressiveness is lost.
3908
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003909- getattr(obj, name, default) now only catches AttributeError, as
3910 documented, rather than returning the default value for all
3911 exceptions (which could mask bugs in a __getattr__ hook, for
3912 example).
3913
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00003914- Weak reference objects are now part of the core and offer a C API.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00003915 A bug which could allow a core dump when binary operations involved
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00003916 proxy reference has been fixed. weakref.ReferenceError is now a
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003917 built-in exception.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00003918
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00003919- unicode(obj) now behaves more like str(obj), accepting arbitrary
3920 objects, and calling a __unicode__ method if it exists.
3921 unicode(obj, encoding) and unicode(obj, encoding, errors) still
Marc-André Lemburgb5507ec2001-10-19 12:02:29 +00003922 require an 8-bit string or character buffer argument.
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00003923
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003924- isinstance() now allows any object as the first argument and a
3925 class, a type or something with a __bases__ tuple attribute for the
3926 second argument. The second argument may also be a tuple of a
3927 class, type, or something with __bases__, in which case isinstance()
3928 will return true if the first argument is an instance of any of the
3929 things contained in the second argument tuple. E.g.
3930
3931 isinstance(x, (A, B))
3932
3933 returns true if x is an instance of A or B.
3934
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003935Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003936-----------------
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003937
3938- thread.start_new_thread() now returns the thread ID (previously None).
3939
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00003940- binascii has now two quopri support functions, a2b_qp and b2a_qp.
3941
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00003942- readline now supports setting the startup_hook and the
3943 pre_event_hook, and adds the add_history() function.
Martin v. Löwis0daad592001-09-30 21:09:59 +00003944
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00003945- os and posix supports chroot(), setgroups() and unsetenv() where
3946 available. The stat(), fstat(), statvfs() and fstatvfs() functions
3947 now return "pseudo-sequences" -- the various fields can now be
3948 accessed as attributes (e.g. os.stat("/").st_mtime) but for
3949 backwards compatibility they also behave as a fixed-length sequence.
3950 Some platform-specific fields (e.g. st_rdev) are only accessible as
Guido van Rossum98bf58f2001-10-18 20:34:25 +00003951 attributes.
3952
3953- time: localtime(), gmtime() and strptime() now return a
3954 pseudo-sequence similar to the os.stat() return value, with
3955 attributes like tm_year etc.
Martin v. Löwis16628c92001-10-04 22:46:41 +00003956
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003957- Decompression objects in the zlib module now accept an optional
3958 second parameter to decompress() that specifies the maximum amount
3959 of memory to use for the uncompressed data.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003960
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00003961- optional SSL support in the socket module now exports OpenSSL
3962 functions RAND_add(), RAND_egd(), and RAND_status(). These calls
3963 are useful on platforms like Solaris where OpenSSL does not
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003964 automatically seed its PRNG. Also, the keyfile and certfile
3965 arguments to socket.ssl() are now optional.
3966
3967- posixmodule (and by extension, the os module on POSIX platforms) now
3968 exports O_LARGEFILE, O_DIRECT, O_DIRECTORY, and O_NOFOLLOW.
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00003969
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003970Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003971-------
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00003972
Tim Peters7402f792001-10-02 03:53:41 +00003973- doctest now excludes functions and classes not defined by the module
3974 being tested, thanks to Tim Hochberg.
3975
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00003976- HotShot, a new profiler implemented using a C-based callback, has
3977 been added. This substantially reduces the overhead of profiling,
3978 but it is still quite preliminary. Support modules and
3979 documentation will be added in upcoming releases (before 2.2 final).
3980
Guido van Rossumc4b09b42001-10-04 10:19:00 +00003981- profile now produces correct output in situations where an exception
3982 raised in Python is cleared by C code (e.g. hasattr()). This used
3983 to cause wrong output, including spurious claims of recursive
3984 functions and attribution of time spent to the wrong function.
3985
Tim Peters0a1fc4e2001-10-07 03:12:08 +00003986 The code and documentation for the derived OldProfile and HotProfile
3987 profiling classes was removed. The code hasn't worked for years (if
3988 you tried to use them, they raised exceptions). OldProfile
3989 intended to reproduce the behavior of the profiler Python used more
3990 than 7 years ago, and isn't interesting anymore. HotProfile intended
3991 to provide a faster profiler (but producing less information), and
3992 that's a worthy goal we intend to meet via a different approach (but
3993 without losing information).
3994
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00003995- Profile.calibrate() has a new implementation that should deliver
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00003996 a much better system-specific calibration constant. The constant can
3997 now be specified in an instance constructor, or as a Profile class or
3998 instance variable, instead of by editing profile.py's source code.
3999 Calibration must still be done manually (see the docs for the profile
4000 module).
4001
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004002 Note that Profile.calibrate() must be overridden by subclasses.
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00004003 Improving the accuracy required exploiting detailed knowledge of
4004 profiler internals; the earlier method abstracted away the details
4005 and measured a simplified model instead, but consequently computed
4006 a constant too small by a factor of 2 on some modern machines.
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00004007
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00004008- quopri's encode and decode methods take an optional header parameter,
Jeremy Hylton6f543b62001-10-16 20:42:52 +00004009 which indicates whether output is intended for the header 'Q'
4010 encoding.
4011
Guido van Rossuma5343cc2001-10-18 18:02:07 +00004012- The SocketServer.ThreadingMixIn class now closes the request after
4013 finish_request() returns. (Not when it errors out though.)
4014
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004015- The nntplib module's NNTP.body() method has grown a 'file' argument
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004016 to allow saving the message body to a file.
4017
4018- The email package has added a class email.Parser.HeaderParser which
4019 only parses headers and does not recurse into the message's body.
4020 Also, the module/class MIMEAudio has been added for representing
4021 audio data (contributed by Anthony Baxter).
4022
4023- ftplib should be able to handle files > 2GB.
4024
4025- ConfigParser.getboolean() now also interprets TRUE, FALSE, YES, NO,
4026 ON, and OFF.
4027
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00004028- xml.dom.minidom NodeList objects now support the length attribute
4029 and item() method as required by the DOM specifications.
4030
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00004031Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004032-----------
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00004033
4034- Demo/dns was removed. It no longer serves any purpose; a package
4035 derived from it is now maintained by Anthony Baxter, see
4036 http://PyDNS.SourceForge.net.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004037
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004038- The freeze tool has been made more robust, and two new options have
4039 been added: -X and -E.
4040
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004041Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004042-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004043
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004044- configure will use CXX in LINKCC if CXX is used to build main() and
4045 the system requires to link a C++ main using the C++ compiler.
4046
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004047C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004048-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004049
Guido van Rossum6c4bce32001-10-18 19:20:25 +00004050- The documentation for the tp_compare slot is updated to require that
4051 the return value must be -1, 0, 1; an arbitrary number <0 or >0 is
4052 not correct. This is not yet enforced but will be enforced in
4053 Python 2.3; even later, we may use -2 to indicate errors and +2 for
4054 "NotImplemented". Right now, -1 should be used for an error return.
4055
Tim Petersd38b1c72001-09-30 05:09:37 +00004056- PyLong_AsLongLong() now accepts int (as well as long) arguments.
4057 Consequently, PyArg_ParseTuple's 'L' code also accepts int (as well
4058 as long) arguments.
4059
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00004060- PyThread_start_new_thread() now returns a long int giving the thread
4061 ID, if one can be calculated; it returns -1 for error, 0 if no
4062 thread ID is calculated (this is an incompatible change, but only
4063 the thread module used this API). This code has only really been
4064 tested on Linux and Windows; other platforms please beware (and
4065 report any bugs or strange behavior).
4066
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00004067- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() no longer accepts Unicode objects as
4068 input.
4069
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004070New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004071-------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004072
4073Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004074-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004075
4076Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004077-------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004078
Tim Peters04cf1d32001-10-09 22:39:40 +00004079- Installer: If you install IDLE, and don't disable file-extension
4080 registration, a new "Edit with IDLE" context (right-click) menu entry
4081 is created for .py and .pyw files.
4082
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004083- The signal module now supports SIGBREAK on Windows, thanks to Steven
4084 Scott. Note that SIGBREAK is unique to Windows. The default SIGBREAK
4085 action remains to call Win32 ExitProcess(). This can be changed via
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004086 signal.signal(). For example::
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004087
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004088 # Make Ctrl+Break raise KeyboardInterrupt, like Python's default Ctrl+C
4089 # (SIGINT) behavior.
4090 import signal
4091 signal.signal(signal.SIGBREAK, signal.default_int_handler)
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004092
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004093 try:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004094 while 1:
4095 pass
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004096 except KeyboardInterrupt:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004097 # We get here on Ctrl+C or Ctrl+Break now; if we had not changed
4098 # SIGBREAK, only on Ctrl+C (and Ctrl+Break would terminate the
4099 # program without the possibility for any Python-level cleanup).
4100 print "Clean exit"
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004101
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004102
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004103What's New in Python 2.2a4?
4104===========================
4105
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004106*Release date: 28-Sep-2001*
4107
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004108Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004109--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004110
4111- pydoc and inspect are now aware of new-style classes;
4112 e.g. help(list) at the interactive prompt now shows proper
4113 documentation for all operations on list objects.
4114
4115- Applications using Jim Fulton's ExtensionClass module can now safely
4116 be used with Python 2.2. In particular, Zope 2.4.1 now works with
4117 Python 2.2 (as well as with Python 2.1.1). The Demo/metaclass
4118 examples also work again. It is hoped that Gtk and Boost also work
4119 with 2.2a4 and beyond. (If you can confirm this, please write
4120 webmaster@python.org; if there are still problems, please open a bug
4121 report on SourceForge.)
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004122
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00004123- property() now takes 4 keyword arguments: fget, fset, fdel and doc.
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004124 These map to read-only attributes 'fget', 'fset', 'fdel', and '__doc__'
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00004125 in the constructed property object. fget, fset and fdel weren't
4126 discoverable from Python in 2.2a3. __doc__ is new, and allows to
4127 associate a docstring with a property.
4128
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004129- Comparison overloading is now more completely implemented. For
4130 example, a str subclass instance can properly be compared to a str
4131 instance, and it can properly overload comparison. Ditto for most
4132 other built-in object types.
4133
4134- The repr() of new-style classes has changed; instead of <type
4135 'M.Foo'> a new-style class is now rendered as <class 'M.Foo'>,
4136 *except* for built-in types, which are still rendered as <type
4137 'Foo'> (to avoid upsetting existing code that might parse or
4138 otherwise rely on repr() of certain type objects).
4139
4140- The repr() of new-style objects is now always <Foo object at XXX>;
4141 previously, it was sometimes <Foo instance at XXX>.
4142
4143- For new-style classes, what was previously called __getattr__ is now
4144 called __getattribute__. This method, if defined, is called for
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00004145 *every* attribute access. A new __getattr__ hook more similar to the
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004146 one in classic classes is defined which is called only if regular
4147 attribute access raises AttributeError; to catch *all* attribute
4148 access, you can use __getattribute__ (for new-style classes). If
4149 both are defined, __getattribute__ is called first, and if it raises
4150 AttributeError, __getattr__ is called.
4151
4152- The __class__ attribute of new-style objects can be assigned to.
4153 The new class must have the same C-level object layout as the old
4154 class.
4155
4156- The builtin file type can be subclassed now. In the usual pattern,
4157 "file" is the name of the builtin type, and file() is a new builtin
4158 constructor, with the same signature as the builtin open() function.
4159 file() is now the preferred way to open a file.
4160
4161- Previously, __new__ would only see sequential arguments passed to
4162 the type in a constructor call; __init__ would see both sequential
4163 and keyword arguments. This made no sense whatsoever any more, so
4164 now both __new__ and __init__ see all arguments.
4165
4166- Previously, hash() applied to an instance of a subclass of str or
4167 unicode always returned 0. This has been repaired.
4168
4169- Previously, an operation on an instance of a subclass of an
4170 immutable type (int, long, float, complex, tuple, str, unicode),
4171 where the subtype didn't override the operation (and so the
4172 operation was handled by the builtin type), could return that
4173 instance instead a value of the base type. For example, if s was of
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004174 a str subclass type, s[:] returned s as-is. Now it returns a str
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004175 with the same value as s.
4176
Barry Warsaw86fbaf82001-09-28 15:26:12 +00004177- Provisional support for pickling new-style objects has been added.
4178
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004179Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004180----
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004181
Tim Peters2c9aa5e2001-09-23 04:06:05 +00004182- file.writelines() now accepts any iterable object producing strings.
4183
Marc-André Lemburgaefd7662001-09-20 12:59:37 +00004184- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() now works very much like
4185 PyObject_Str(obj) in that it tries to use __str__/tp_str
4186 on the object if the object is not a string or buffer. This
4187 makes unicode() behave like str() when applied to non-string/buffer
4188 objects.
4189
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00004190- PyFile_WriteObject now passes Unicode objects to the file's write
4191 method. As a result, all file-like objects which may be the target
Martin v. Löwis2777c022001-09-19 13:47:32 +00004192 of a print statement must support Unicode objects, i.e. they must
4193 at least convert them into ASCII strings.
4194
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004195- Thread scheduling on Solaris should be improved; it is no longer
4196 necessary to insert a small sleep at the start of a thread in order
4197 to let other runnable threads be scheduled.
4198
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004199Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004200-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004201
Marc-André Lemburgbf990172001-09-27 14:17:33 +00004202- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
4203 read character buffer compatible objects for their .write() methods.
4204 These objects are converted to strings and then handled as such
4205 by the instances.
4206
Barry Warsaw2f600732001-09-24 04:28:10 +00004207- The "email" package has been added. This is basically a port of the
4208 mimelib package <http://sf.net/projects/mimelib> with API changes
4209 and some implementations updated to use iterators and generators.
4210
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00004211- difflib.ndiff() and difflib.Differ.compare() are generators now. This
4212 restores the ability of Tools/scripts/ndiff.py to start producing output
4213 before the entire comparison is complete.
4214
Barry Warsaw58b072d2001-09-22 04:44:21 +00004215- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
4216 iteration just like file objects (i.e. their .readline() method is
4217 called for each iteration until it returns an empty string).
4218
Marc-André Lemburg494f2ae2001-09-19 11:33:31 +00004219- The codecs module has grown four new helper APIs to access
4220 builtin codecs: getencoder(), getdecoder(), getreader(),
4221 getwriter().
4222
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004223- SimpleXMLRPCServer: a new module (based upon SimpleHTMLServer)
4224 simplifies writing XML RPC servers.
4225
Barry Warsaw647d5e82001-09-28 17:01:02 +00004226- os.path.realpath(): a new function that returns the absolute pathname
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004227 after interpretation of symbolic links. On non-Unix systems, this
4228 is an alias for os.path.abspath().
4229
Tim Peters16a77ad2001-09-08 04:00:12 +00004230- operator.indexOf() (PySequence_Index() in the C API) now works with any
4231 iterable object.
4232
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004233- smtplib now supports various authentication and security features of
4234 the SMTP protocol through the new login() and starttls() methods.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00004235
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004236- hmac: a new module implementing keyed hashing for message
4237 authentication.
4238
4239- mimetypes now recognizes more extensions and file types. At the
4240 same time, some mappings not sanctioned by IANA were removed.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00004241
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004242- The "compiler" package has been brought up to date to the state of
Guido van Rossumc9ed5dc2001-09-20 05:30:24 +00004243 Python 2.2 bytecode generation. It has also been promoted from a
4244 Tool to a standard library package. (Tools/compiler still exists as
4245 a sample driver.)
4246
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004247Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004248-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004249
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004250- Large file support (LFS) is now automatic when the platform supports
4251 it; no more manual configuration tweaks are needed. On Linux, at
4252 least, it's possible to have a system whose C library supports large
4253 files but whose kernel doesn't; in this case, large file support is
4254 still enabled but doesn't do you any good unless you upgrade your
4255 kernel or share your Python executable with another system whose
4256 kernel has large file support.
4257
4258- The configure script now supplies plausible defaults in a
4259 cross-compilation environment. This doesn't mean that the supplied
4260 values are always correct, or that cross-compilation now works
4261 flawlessly -- but it's a first step (and it shuts up most of
4262 autoconf's warnings about AC_TRY_RUN).
4263
4264- The Unix build is now a bit less chatty, courtesy of the parser
4265 generator. The build is completely silent (except for errors) when
4266 using "make -s", thanks to a -q option to setup.py.
4267
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004268C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004269-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004270
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004271- The "structmember" API now supports some new flag bits to deny read
4272 and/or write access to attributes in restricted execution mode.
4273
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004274New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004275-------------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004276
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004277- Compaq's iPAQ handheld, running the "familiar" Linux distribution
4278 (http://familiar.handhelds.org).
4279
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004280Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004281-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004282
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00004283- The "classic" standard tests, which work by comparing stdout to
4284 an expected-output file under Lib/test/output/, no longer stop at
4285 the first mismatch. Instead the test is run to completion, and a
4286 variant of ndiff-style comparison is used to report all differences.
4287 This is much easier to understand than the previous style of reporting.
4288
4289- The unittest-based standard tests now use regrtest's test_main()
4290 convention, instead of running as a side-effect of merely being
4291 imported. This allows these tests to be run in more natural and
4292 flexible ways as unittests, outside the regrtest framework.
4293
4294- regrtest.py is much better integrated with unittest and doctest now,
4295 especially in regard to reporting errors.
4296
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004297Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004298-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004299
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004300- Large file support now also works for files > 4GB, on filesystems
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00004301 that support it (NTFS under Windows 2000). See "What's New in
4302 Python 2.2a3" for more detail.
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004303
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004304
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004305What's New in Python 2.2a3?
4306===========================
4307
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004308*Release Date: 07-Sep-2001*
4309
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004310Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004311----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004312
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004313- Conversion of long to float now raises OverflowError if the long is too
4314 big to represent as a C double.
4315
Tim Peters32f453e2001-09-03 08:35:41 +00004316- The 3-argument builtin pow() no longer allows a third non-None argument
4317 if either of the first two arguments is a float, or if both are of
4318 integer types and the second argument is negative (in which latter case
4319 the arguments are converted to float, so this is really the same
4320 restriction).
4321
Tim Peters5d2b77c2001-09-03 05:47:38 +00004322- The builtin dir() now returns more information, and sometimes much
4323 more, generally naming all attributes of an object, and all attributes
4324 reachable from the object via its class, and from its class's base
4325 classes, and so on from them too. Example: in 2.2a2, dir([]) returned
4326 an empty list. In 2.2a3,
4327
4328 >>> dir([])
4329 ['__add__', '__class__', '__contains__', '__delattr__', '__delitem__',
4330 '__eq__', '__ge__', '__getattr__', '__getitem__', '__getslice__',
4331 '__gt__', '__hash__', '__iadd__', '__imul__', '__init__', '__le__',
4332 '__len__', '__lt__', '__mul__', '__ne__', '__new__', '__repr__',
4333 '__rmul__', '__setattr__', '__setitem__', '__setslice__', '__str__',
4334 'append', 'count', 'extend', 'index', 'insert', 'pop', 'remove',
4335 'reverse', 'sort']
4336
4337 dir(module) continues to return only the module's attributes, though.
4338
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004339- Overflowing operations on plain ints now return a long int rather
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004340 than raising OverflowError. This is a partial implementation of PEP
4341 237. You can use -Wdefault::OverflowWarning to enable a warning for
4342 this situation, and -Werror::OverflowWarning to revert to the old
4343 OverflowError exception.
4344
Guido van Rossum61c345f2001-09-04 03:26:15 +00004345- A new command line option, -Q<arg>, is added to control run-time
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004346 warnings for the use of classic division. (See PEP 238.) Possible
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00004347 values are -Qold, -Qwarn, -Qwarnall, and -Qnew. The default is
4348 -Qold, meaning the / operator has its classic meaning and no
4349 warnings are issued. Using -Qwarn issues a run-time warning about
4350 all uses of classic division for int and long arguments; -Qwarnall
4351 also warns about classic division for float and complex arguments
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004352 (for use with fixdiv.py).
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004353 [Note: the remainder of this item (preserved below) became
4354 obsolete in 2.2c1 -- -Qnew has global effect in 2.2] ::
4355
4356 Using -Qnew is questionable; it turns on new division by default, but
4357 only in the __main__ module. You can usefully combine -Qwarn or
4358 -Qwarnall and -Qnew: this gives the __main__ module new division, and
4359 warns about classic division everywhere else.
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004360
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004361- Many built-in types can now be subclassed. This applies to int,
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004362 long, float, str, unicode, and tuple. (The types complex, list and
4363 dictionary can also be subclassed; this was introduced earlier.)
4364 Note that restrictions apply when subclassing immutable built-in
4365 types: you can only affect the value of the instance by overloading
4366 __new__. You can add mutable attributes, and the subclass instances
4367 will have a __dict__ attribute, but you cannot change the "value"
4368 (as implemented by the base class) of an immutable subclass instance
4369 once it is created.
4370
Guido van Rossumaaf80c82001-09-02 13:44:35 +00004371- The dictionary constructor now takes an optional argument, a
4372 mapping-like object, and initializes the dictionary from its
4373 (key, value) pairs.
4374
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004375- A new built-in type, super, has been added. This facilitates making
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004376 "cooperative super calls" in a multiple inheritance setting. For an
4377 explanation, see http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#cooperation
4378
Guido van Rossum8d7234d2001-09-06 22:02:58 +00004379- A new built-in type, property, has been added. This enables the
4380 creation of "properties". These are attributes implemented by
4381 getter and setter functions (or only one of these for read-only or
4382 write-only attributes), without the need to override __getattr__.
4383 See http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#property
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004384
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004385- The syntax of floating-point and imaginary literals has been
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004386 liberalized, to allow leading zeroes. Examples of literals now
4387 legal that were SyntaxErrors before:
4388
4389 00.0 0e3 0100j 07.5 00000000000000000008.
4390
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004391- An old tokenizer bug allowed floating point literals with an incomplete
Tim Petersc6d95812001-08-28 20:56:27 +00004392 exponent, such as 1e and 3.1e-. Such literals now raise SyntaxError.
4393
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004394Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004395-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004396
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00004397- telnetlib includes symbolic names for the options, and support for
Martin v. Löwis1da9c572002-11-04 09:56:00 +00004398 setting an option negotiation callback. It also supports processing
4399 of suboptions.
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00004400
Tim Petersa40c7932001-09-05 22:36:56 +00004401- The new C standard no longer requires that math libraries set errno to
4402 ERANGE on overflow. For platform libraries that exploit this new
4403 freedom, Python's overflow-checking was wholly broken. A new overflow-
4404 checking scheme attempts to repair that, but may not be reliable on all
4405 platforms (C doesn't seem to provide anything both useful and portable
4406 in this area anymore).
4407
Martin v. Löwis44f86962001-09-05 13:44:54 +00004408- Asynchronous timeout actions are available through the new class
4409 threading.Timer.
4410
Tim Peters78526162001-09-05 00:53:45 +00004411- math.log and math.log10 now return sensible results for even huge
4412 long arguments. For example, math.log10(10 ** 10000) ~= 10000.0.
4413
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004414- A new function, imp.lock_held(), returns 1 when the import lock is
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00004415 currently held. See the docs for the imp module.
4416
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004417- pickle, cPickle and marshal on 32-bit platforms can now correctly read
Tim Peters82112372001-08-29 02:28:42 +00004418 dumps containing ints written on platforms where Python ints are 8 bytes.
4419 When read on a box where Python ints are 4 bytes, such values are
4420 converted to Python longs.
4421
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004422- In restricted execution mode (using the rexec module), unmarshalling
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004423 code objects is no longer allowed. This plugs a security hole.
4424
Steve Purcell6091cd62001-09-06 16:05:17 +00004425- unittest.TestResult instances no longer store references to tracebacks
4426 generated by test failures. This prevents unexpected dangling references
4427 to objects that should be garbage collected between tests.
4428
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004429Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004430-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004431
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00004432- Tools/scripts/fixdiv.py has been added which can be used to fix
4433 division operators as per PEP 238.
4434
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004435Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004436-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004437
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00004438- If you are an adventurous person using Mac OS X you may want to look at
4439 Mac/OSX. There is a Makefile there that will build Python as a real Mac
4440 application, which can be used for experimenting with Carbon or Cocoa.
4441 Discussion of this on pythonmac-sig, please.
4442
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00004443C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004444-----
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00004445
4446- New function PyObject_Dir(obj), like Python __builtin__.dir(obj).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00004447
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004448- Note that PyLong_AsDouble can fail! This has always been true, but no
4449 callers checked for it. It's more likely to fail now, because overflow
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004450 errors are properly detected now. The proper way to check::
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004451
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004452 double x = PyLong_AsDouble(some_long_object);
4453 if (x == -1.0 && PyErr_Occurred()) {
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004454 /* The conversion failed. */
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004455 }
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004456
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004457- The GC API has been changed. Extensions that use the old API will still
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004458 compile but will not participate in GC. To upgrade an extension
4459 module:
4460
4461 - rename Py_TPFLAGS_GC to PyTPFLAGS_HAVE_GC
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004462
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004463 - use PyObject_GC_New or PyObject_GC_NewVar to allocate objects and
4464 PyObject_GC_Del to deallocate them
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004465
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004466 - rename PyObject_GC_Init to PyObject_GC_Track and PyObject_GC_Fini
4467 to PyObject_GC_UnTrack
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004468
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004469 - remove PyGC_HEAD_SIZE from object size calculations
4470
4471 - remove calls to PyObject_AS_GC and PyObject_FROM_GC
4472
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004473- Two new functions: PyString_FromFormat() and PyString_FromFormatV().
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004474 These can be used safely to construct string objects from a
4475 sprintf-style format string (similar to the format string supported
4476 by PyErr_Format()).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00004477
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004478New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004479-------------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004480
Tim Petersb7da0902001-09-02 23:01:43 +00004481- Stephen Hansen contributed patches sufficient to get a clean compile
4482 under Borland C (Windows), but he reports problems running it and ran
4483 out of time to complete the port. Volunteers? Expect a MemoryError
4484 when importing the types module; this is probably shallow, and
4485 causing later failures too.
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004486
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004487Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004488-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004489
4490Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004491-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004492
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00004493- Large file support is now enabled on Win32 platforms as well as on
4494 Win64. This means that, for example, you can use f.tell() and f.seek()
4495 to manipulate files larger than 2 gigabytes (provided you have enough
4496 disk space, and are using a Windows filesystem that supports large
Tim Peters9a9471c2001-09-11 23:18:51 +00004497 partitions). Windows filesystem limits: FAT has a 2GB (gigabyte)
4498 filesize limit, and large file support makes no difference there.
4499 FAT32's limit is 4GB, and files >= 2GB are easier to use from Python now.
4500 NTFS has no practical limit on file size, and files of any size can be
4501 used from Python now.
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00004502
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004503- The w9xpopen hack is now used on Windows NT and 2000 too when COMPSPEC
Tim Peters402d5982001-08-27 06:37:48 +00004504 points to command.com (patch from Brian Quinlan).
4505
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004506
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004507What's New in Python 2.2a2?
4508===========================
4509
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004510*Release Date: 22-Aug-2001*
4511
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004512Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004513-----
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004514
Barry Warsaw18b2ecf2001-08-22 20:26:56 +00004515- Tim Peters developed a brand new Windows installer using Wise 8.1,
4516 generously donated to us by Wise Solutions.
4517
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004518- configure supports a new option --enable-unicode, with the values
4519 ucs2 and ucs4 (new in 2.2a1). With --disable-unicode, the Unicode
4520 type and supporting code is completely removed from the interpreter.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004521
Jack Jansen32ce0cd2001-08-21 19:28:20 +00004522- A new configure option --enable-framework builds a Mac OS X framework,
4523 which "make frameworkinstall" will install. This provides a starting
4524 point for more mac-like functionality, join pythonmac-sig@python.org
4525 if you are interested in helping.
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004526
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004527- The NeXT platform is no longer supported.
4528
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004529- The 'new' module is now statically linked.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004530
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004531Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004532-----
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004533
4534- The new Tools/scripts/cleanfuture.py can be used to automatically
Andrew M. Kuchlingb0532092001-08-15 15:54:56 +00004535 edit out obsolete future statements from Python source code. See
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004536 the module docstring for details.
4537
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004538Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004539-----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004540
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004541- regrtest.py now knows which tests are expected to be skipped on some
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004542 platforms, allowing to give clearer test result output. regrtest
4543 also has optional --use/-u switch to run normally disabled tests
4544 which require network access or consume significant disk resources.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004545
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004546- Several new tests in the standard test suite, with special thanks to
4547 Nick Mathewson.
4548
4549Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004550----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004551
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004552- The floor division operator // has been added as outlined in PEP
4553 238. The / operator still provides classic division (and will until
4554 Python 3.0) unless "from __future__ import division" is included, in
4555 which case the / operator will provide true division. The operator
4556 module provides truediv() and floordiv() functions. Augmented
4557 assignment variants are included, as are the equivalent overloadable
4558 methods and C API methods. See the PEP for a full discussion:
4559 <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0238.html>
4560
Tim Peters6cd6a822001-08-17 22:11:27 +00004561- Future statements are now effective in simulated interactive shells
4562 (like IDLE). This should "just work" by magic, but read Michael
4563 Hudson's "Future statements in simulated shells" PEP 264 for full
4564 details: <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0264.html>.
4565
Guido van Rossumf86ddd22001-08-17 21:21:04 +00004566- The type/class unification (PEP 252-253) was integrated into the
4567 trunk and is not so tentative any more (the exact specification of
4568 some features is still tentative). A lot of work has done on fixing
4569 bugs and adding robustness and features (performance still has to
4570 come a long way).
4571
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00004572- Warnings about a mismatch in the Python API during extension import
4573 now use the Python warning framework (which makes it possible to
4574 write filters for these warnings).
4575
Barry Warsaw9b3be7f2001-08-14 18:35:02 +00004576- A function's __dict__ (aka func_dict) will now always be a
4577 dictionary. It used to be possible to delete it or set it to None,
4578 but now both actions raise TypeErrors. It is still legal to set it
4579 to a dictionary object. Getting func.__dict__ before any attributes
4580 have been assigned now returns an empty dictionary instead of None.
4581
Guido van Rossum32aa5d22001-09-05 18:43:35 +00004582- A new command line option, -E, was added which disables the use of
4583 all environment variables, or at least those that are specifically
4584 significant to Python. Usually those have a name starting with
4585 "PYTHON". This was used to fix a problem where the tests fail if
4586 the user happens to have PYTHONHOME or PYTHONPATH pointing to an
4587 older distribution.
4588
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004589Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004590-------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004591
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004592- New class Differ and new functions ndiff() and restore() in difflib.py.
4593 These package the algorithms used by the popular Tools/scripts/ndiff.py,
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004594 for programmatic reuse.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004595
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004596- New function xml.sax.saxutils.quoteattr(): Quote an XML attribute
4597 value using the minimal quoting required for the value; more
4598 reliable than using xml.sax.saxutils.escape() for attribute values.
4599
4600- Readline completion support for cmd.Cmd was added.
4601
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004602- Calling os.tempnam() or os.tmpnam() generate RuntimeWarnings.
4603
4604- Added function threading.BoundedSemaphore()
4605
4606- Added Ka-Ping Yee's cgitb.py module.
4607
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004608- The 'new' module now exposes the CO_xxx flags.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004609
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00004610- The gc module offers the get_referents function.
4611
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004612New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004613-------------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004614
4615C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004616-----
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004617
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00004618- Two new APIs PyOS_snprintf() and PyOS_vsnprintf() were added
4619 which provide a cross-platform implementations for the
4620 relatively new snprintf()/vsnprintf() C lib APIs. In contrast to
4621 the standard sprintf() and vsprintf() C lib APIs, these versions
4622 apply bounds checking on the used buffer which enhances protection
4623 against buffer overruns.
4624
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00004625- Unicode APIs now use name mangling to assure that mixing interpreters
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00004626 and extensions using different Unicode widths is rendered next to
4627 impossible. Trying to import an incompatible Unicode-aware extension
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00004628 will result in an ImportError. Unicode extensions writers must make
4629 sure to check the Unicode width compatibility in their extensions by
4630 using at least one of the mangled Unicode APIs in the extension.
4631
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004632- Two new flags METH_NOARGS and METH_O are available in method definition
4633 tables to simplify implementation of methods with no arguments and a
4634 single untyped argument. Calling such methods is more efficient than
4635 calling corresponding METH_VARARGS methods. METH_OLDARGS is now
4636 deprecated.
4637
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00004638Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004639-------
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00004640
4641- "import module" now compiles module.pyw if it exists and nothing else
4642 relevant is found.
4643
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004644
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00004645What's New in Python 2.2a1?
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004646===========================
4647
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004648*Release date: 18-Jul-2001*
4649
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004650Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004651----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004652
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00004653- TENTATIVELY, a large amount of code implementing much of what's
4654 described in PEP 252 (Making Types Look More Like Classes) and PEP
4655 253 (Subtyping Built-in Types) was added. This will be released
4656 with Python 2.2a1. Documentation will be provided separately
4657 through http://www.python.org/2.2/. The purpose of releasing this
4658 with Python 2.2a1 is to test backwards compatibility. It is
4659 possible, though not likely, that a decision is made not to release
4660 this code as part of 2.2 final, if any serious backwards
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004661 incompatibilities are found during alpha testing that cannot be
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00004662 repaired.
4663
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00004664- Generators were added; this is a new way to create an iterator (see
Tim Peters11a0d102001-07-17 18:48:00 +00004665 below) using what looks like a simple function containing one or
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00004666 more 'yield' statements. See PEP 255. Since this adds a new
4667 keyword to the language, this feature must be enabled by including a
4668 future statement: "from __future__ import generators" (see PEP 236).
4669 Generators will become a standard feature in a future release
4670 (probably 2.3). Without this future statement, 'yield' remains an
4671 ordinary identifier, but a warning is issued each time it is used.
4672 (These warnings currently don't conform to the warnings framework of
4673 PEP 230; we intend to fix this in 2.2a2.)
4674
Marc-André Lemburg12e74b32001-05-22 08:58:23 +00004675- The UTF-16 codec was modified to be more RFC compliant. It will now
4676 only remove BOM characters at the start of the string and then
4677 only if running in native mode (UTF-16-LE and -BE won't remove a
4678 leading BMO character).
4679
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00004680- Strings now have a new method .decode() to complement the already
4681 existing .encode() method. These two methods provide direct access
4682 to the corresponding decoders and encoders of the registered codecs.
4683
4684 To enhance the usability of the .encode() method, the special
4685 casing of Unicode object return values was dropped (Unicode objects
4686 were auto-magically converted to string using the default encoding).
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00004687
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00004688 Both methods will now return whatever the codec in charge of the
4689 requested encoding returns as object, e.g. Unicode codecs will
4690 return Unicode objects when decoding is requested ("äöü".decode("latin-1")
4691 will return u"äöü"). This enables codec writer to create codecs
4692 for various simple to use conversions.
4693
4694 New codecs were added to demonstrate these new features (the .encode()
4695 and .decode() columns indicate the type of the returned objects):
4696
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004697 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4698 |Name | .encode() | .decode() | Description |
4699 +=========+===========+===========+=============================+
4700 |uu | string | string | UU codec (e.g. for email) |
4701 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4702 |base64 | string | string | base64 codec |
4703 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4704 |quopri | string | string | quoted-printable codec |
4705 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4706 |zlib | string | string | zlib compression |
4707 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4708 |hex | string | string | 2-byte hex codec |
4709 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4710 |rot-13 | string | Unicode | ROT-13 Unicode charmap codec|
4711 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00004712
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004713- Some operating systems now support the concept of a default Unicode
4714 encoding for file system operations. Notably, Windows supports 'mbcs'
4715 as the default. The Macintosh will also adopt this concept in the medium
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00004716 term, although the default encoding for that platform will be other than
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004717 'mbcs'.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00004718
4719 On operating system that support non-ASCII filenames, it is common for
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004720 functions that return filenames (such as os.listdir()) to return Python
4721 string objects pre-encoded using the default file system encoding for
4722 the platform. As this encoding is likely to be different from Python's
4723 default encoding, converting this name to a Unicode object before passing
4724 it back to the Operating System would result in a Unicode error, as Python
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004725 would attempt to use its default encoding (generally ASCII) rather than
4726 the default encoding for the file system.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00004727
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004728 In general, this change simply removes surprises when working with
4729 Unicode and the file system, making these operations work as you expect,
4730 increasing the transparency of Unicode objects in this context.
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004731 See [????] for more details, including examples.
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004732
Tim Peters61dff2b2001-05-08 15:43:37 +00004733- Float (and complex) literals in source code were evaluated to full
4734 precision only when running from a .py file; the same code loaded from a
4735 .pyc (or .pyo) file could suffer numeric differences starting at about the
4736 12th significant decimal digit. For example, on a machine with IEEE-754
4737 floating arithmetic,
4738
4739 x = 9007199254740992.0
4740 print long(x)
4741
4742 printed 9007199254740992 if run directly from .py, but 9007199254740000
4743 if from a compiled (.pyc or .pyo) file. This was due to marshal using
4744 str(float) instead of repr(float) when building code objects. marshal
4745 now uses repr(float) instead, which should reproduce floats to full
4746 machine precision (assuming the platform C float<->string I/O conversion
4747 functions are of good quality).
4748
4749 This may cause floating-point results to change in some cases, and
4750 usually for the better, but may also cause numerically unstable
4751 algorithms to break.
4752
Tim Peters2f228e72001-05-13 00:19:31 +00004753- The implementation of dicts suffers fewer collisions, which has speed
4754 benefits. However, the order in which dict entries appear in dict.keys(),
4755 dict.values() and dict.items() may differ from previous releases for a
4756 given dict. Nothing is defined about this order, so no program should
4757 rely on it. Nevertheless, it's easy to write test cases that rely on the
4758 order by accident, typically because of printing the str() or repr() of a
4759 dict to an "expected results" file. See Lib/test/test_support.py's new
4760 sortdict(dict) function for a simple way to display a dict in sorted
4761 order.
4762
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00004763- Many other small changes to dicts were made, resulting in faster
4764 operation along the most common code paths.
4765
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00004766- Dictionary objects now support the "in" operator: "x in dict" means
4767 the same as dict.has_key(x).
4768
Barry Warsaw51acc8d2001-06-26 20:12:50 +00004769- The update() method of dictionaries now accepts generic mapping
4770 objects. Specifically the argument object must support the .keys()
4771 and __getitem__() methods. This allows you to say, for example,
4772 {}.update(UserDict())
4773
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00004774- Iterators were added; this is a generalized way of providing values
4775 to a for loop. See PEP 234. There's a new built-in function iter()
4776 to return an iterator. There's a new protocol to get the next value
4777 from an iterator using the next() method (in Python) or the
4778 tp_iternext slot (in C). There's a new protocol to get iterators
4779 using the __iter__() method (in Python) or the tp_iter slot (in C).
4780 Iterating (i.e. a for loop) over a dictionary generates its keys.
4781 Iterating over a file generates its lines.
4782
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004783- The following functions were generalized to work nicely with iterator
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004784 arguments::
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004785
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00004786 map(), filter(), reduce(), zip()
Tim Peters8572b4f2001-05-06 01:05:02 +00004787 list(), tuple() (PySequence_Tuple() and PySequence_Fast() in C API)
4788 max(), min()
Tim Peters1af03e92001-05-26 19:37:54 +00004789 join() method of strings
4790 extend() method of lists
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00004791 'x in y' and 'x not in y' (PySequence_Contains() in C API)
4792 operator.countOf() (PySequence_Count() in C API)
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004793 right-hand side of assignment statements with multiple targets, such as ::
Tim Petersd6d010b2001-06-21 02:49:55 +00004794 x, y, z = some_iterable_object_returning_exactly_3_values
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00004795
Tim Petersd85e1022001-05-11 21:51:48 +00004796- Accessing module attributes is significantly faster (for example,
4797 random.random or os.path or yourPythonModule.yourAttribute).
4798
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00004799- Comparing dictionary objects via == and != is faster, and now works even
4800 if the keys and values don't support comparisons other than ==.
4801
Tim Peters95bf9392001-05-10 08:32:44 +00004802- Comparing dictionaries in ways other than == and != is slower: there were
4803 insecurities in the dict comparison implementation that could cause Python
4804 to crash if the element comparison routines for the dict keys and/or
4805 values mutated the dicts. Making the code bulletproof slowed it down.
4806
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00004807- Collisions in dicts are resolved via a new approach, which can help
4808 dramatically in bad cases. For example, looking up every key in a dict
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00004809 d with d.keys() == [i << 16 for i in range(20000)] is approximately 500x
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00004810 faster now. Thanks to Christian Tismer for pointing out the cause and
4811 the nature of an effective cure (last December! better late than never).
Tim Peters15d49292001-05-27 07:39:22 +00004812
Tim Peters52e155e2001-06-16 05:42:57 +00004813- repr() is much faster for large containers (dict, list, tuple).
4814
4815
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004816Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004817-------
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004818
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00004819- The constants ascii_letters, ascii_lowercase. and ascii_uppercase
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004820 were added to the string module. These a locale-independent
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00004821 constants, unlike letters, lowercase, and uppercase. These are now
4822 use in appropriate locations in the standard library.
4823
Martin v. Löwisf0473d52001-07-18 16:17:16 +00004824- The flags used in dlopen calls can now be configured using
4825 sys.setdlopenflags and queried using sys.getdlopenflags.
4826
Guido van Rossumc7e4aca2001-07-12 11:54:37 +00004827- Fredrik Lundh's xmlrpclib is now a standard library module. This
4828 provides full client-side XML-RPC support. In addition,
4829 Demo/xmlrpc/ contains two server frameworks (one SocketServer-based,
4830 one asyncore-based). Thanks to Eric Raymond for the documentation.
4831
Guido van Rossum643d3912001-07-05 14:46:25 +00004832- The xrange() object is simplified: it no longer supports slicing,
4833 repetition, comparisons, efficient 'in' checking, the tolist()
4834 method, or the start, stop and step attributes. See PEP 260.
4835
Martin v. Löwisebf94db2001-06-06 06:25:40 +00004836- A new function fnmatch.filter to filter lists of file names was added.
4837
Barry Warsawffd674d2001-05-22 16:00:10 +00004838- calendar.py uses month and day names based on the current locale.
4839
Guido van Rossum2e0a6542001-05-15 02:14:44 +00004840- strop is now *really* obsolete (this was announced before with 1.6),
4841 and issues DeprecationWarning when used (except for the four items
4842 that are still imported into string.py).
4843
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004844- Cookie.py now sorts key+value pairs by key in output strings.
4845
4846- pprint.isrecursive(object) didn't correctly identify recursive objects.
4847 Now it does.
4848
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00004849- pprint functions now much faster for large containers (tuple, list, dict).
4850
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00004851- New 'q' and 'Q' format codes in the struct module, corresponding to C
4852 types "long long" and "unsigned long long" (on Windows, __int64). In
4853 native mode, these can be used only when the platform C compiler supports
4854 these types (when HAVE_LONG_LONG is #define'd by the Python config
4855 process), and then they inherit the sizes and alignments of the C types.
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00004856 In standard mode, 'q' and 'Q' are supported on all platforms, and are
4857 8-byte integral types.
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00004858
Guido van Rossum83213cc2001-06-12 16:48:52 +00004859- The site module installs a new built-in function 'help' that invokes
4860 pydoc.help. It must be invoked as 'help()'; when invoked as 'help',
4861 it displays a message reminding the user to use 'help()' or
4862 'help(object)'.
4863
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004864Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004865-----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004866
4867- New test_mutants.py runs dict comparisons where the key and value
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004868 comparison operators mutate the dicts randomly during comparison. This
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004869 rapidly causes Python to crash under earlier releases (not for the faint
4870 of heart: it can also cause Win9x to freeze or reboot!).
4871
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004872- New test_pprint.py verifies that pprint.isrecursive() and
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00004873 pprint.isreadable() return sensible results. Also verifies that simple
4874 cases produce correct output.
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004875
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00004876C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004877-----
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00004878
4879- Removed the unused last_is_sticky argument from the internal
4880 _PyTuple_Resize(). If this affects you, you were cheating.
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004881
4882----
4883
4884**(For information about older versions, consult the HISTORY file.)**