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Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001+++++++++++
2Python News
3+++++++++++
4
Skip Montanaro4a385832002-09-20 17:08:52 +00005(editors: check NEWS.help for information about editing NEWS using ReST.)
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Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00007What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 1?
8=================================
9
10*Release date: DD-MMM-YYYY*
11
12Core and builtins
13-----------------
14
Thomas Heller04c673b2004-07-02 08:56:20 +000015- Bug #951851: Python crashed when reading import table of certain
16 Windows DLLs.
17
Raymond Hettinger214b1c32004-07-02 06:41:07 +000018- Bug #215126. The locals argument to eval() now accepts any mapping type.
19
Martin v. Löwisef82d2f2004-06-27 16:51:46 +000020- marshal now shares interned strings. This change introduces
21 a new .pyc magic.
22
Anthony Baxter3ecdb252004-06-11 14:41:18 +000023- Bug #966623. classes created with type() in an exec(, {}) don't
24 have a __module__, but code in typeobject assumed it would always
25 be there.
26
Martin v. Löwis737ea822004-06-08 18:52:54 +000027- Python no longer relies on the LC_NUMERIC locale setting to be
28 the "C" locale; as a result, it no longer tries to prevent changing
29 the LC_NUMERIC category.
30
Tim Peters604c0132004-06-07 23:04:33 +000031- Bug #952807: Unpickling pickled instances of subclasses of
32 datetime.date, datetime.datetime and datetime.time could yield insane
33 objects. Thanks to Jiwon Seo for a fix.
34
Thomas Heller90a764c2004-06-07 15:12:44 +000035- Bug #845802: Python crashes when __init__.py is a directory.
36
Hye-Shik Changbc555e32004-06-03 11:10:58 +000037- Unicode objects received two new methods: iswide() and width().
38 These query East Asian width information, as specified in Unicode
39 TR11.
Hye-Shik Chang974ed7c2004-06-02 16:49:17 +000040
Raymond Hettinger41bd0222004-06-01 06:36:24 +000041- Improved the tuple hashing algorithm to give fewer collisions in
42 common cases. Fixes bug #942952.
43
Raymond Hettinger354433a2004-05-19 08:20:33 +000044- Implemented generator expressions (PEP 289). Coded by Jiwon Seo.
45
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +000046- Enabled the profiling of C extension functions (and builtins) - check
47 new documentation and modified profiler and bdb modules for more details
48
Nicholas Bastinabce8a62004-03-21 20:24:07 +000049- Set file.name to the object passed to open (instead of a new string)
50
Nicholas Bastina7604bf2004-03-21 18:37:23 +000051- Moved tracebackobject into traceback.h and renamed to PyTracebackObject
52
Raymond Hettingerff5bc502004-03-21 15:12:00 +000053- Optimized the byte coding for multiple assignments like "a,b=b,a" and
54 "a,b,c=1,2,3". Improves their speed by 25% to 30%.
55
Brett Cannon4f653312004-03-20 22:52:14 +000056- Limit the nested depth of a tuple for the second argument to isinstance()
57 and issubclass() to the recursion limit of the interpreter.
58 Fixes bug #858016 .
59
Raymond Hettingerade08ea2004-03-18 09:48:12 +000060- Optimized dict iterators, creating separate types for each
61 and having them reveal their length. Also optimized the
62 methods: keys(), values(), and items().
63
Raymond Hettingerdd80f762004-03-07 07:31:06 +000064- Implemented a newcode opcode, LIST_APPEND, that simplifies
65 the generated bytecode for list comprehensions and further
66 improves their performance (about 35%).
67
Michael W. Hudsond3b33b52004-02-19 19:35:22 +000068- Implemented rich comparisons for floats, which seems to make
69 comparisons involving NaNs somewhat less surprising when the
70 underlying C compiler actually implements C99 semantics.
71
Raymond Hettingerfa7b9d82004-02-15 04:06:39 +000072- Optimized list.extend() to save memory and no longer create
73 intermediate sequences. Also, extend() now pre-allocates the
74 needed memory whenever the length of the iterable is known in
75 advance -- this halves the time to extend the list.
76
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +000077- Optimized list resize operations to make fewer calls to the system
78 realloc(). Significantly speeds up list appends, list pops,
79 list comprehensions, and the list contructor (when the input iterable
80 length is not known).
81
82- Changed the internal list over-allocation scheme. For larger lists,
83 overallocation ranged between 3% and 25%. Now, it is a constant 12%.
Raymond Hettingerab517d22004-02-14 18:34:46 +000084 For smaller lists (n<8), overallocation was upto eight elements. Now,
85 the overallocation is no more than three elements -- this improves space
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +000086 utilization for applications that have large numbers of small lists.
87
Raymond Hettinger0468e412004-05-05 05:37:53 +000088- Most list bodies now get re-used rather than freed. Speeds up list
89 instantiation and deletion by saving calls to malloc() and free().
90
Raymond Hettinger31017ae2004-03-04 08:25:44 +000091- The dict.update() method now accepts all the same argument forms
92 as the dict() constructor. This now includes item lists and/or
93 keyword arguments.
94
Michael W. Hudsonecfeb7f2004-02-12 15:28:27 +000095- Support for arbitrary objects supporting the read-only buffer
96 interface as the co_code field of code objects (something that was
97 only possible to create from C code) has been removed.
98
Fred Drake228765b2004-02-06 04:15:22 +000099- Made omitted callback and None equivalent for weakref.ref() and
100 weakref.proxy(); the None case wasn't handled correctly in all
101 cases.
102
103- Fixed problem where PyWeakref_NewRef() and PyWeakref_NewProxy()
104 assumed that initial existing entries in an object's weakref list
105 would not be removed while allocating a new weakref object. Since
106 GC could be invoked at that time, however, that assumption was
107 invalid. In a truly obscure case of GC being triggered during
108 creation for a new weakref object for an referent which already
109 has a weakref without a callback which is only referenced from
110 cyclic trash, a memory error can occur. This consistently created a
111 segfault in a debug build, but provided less predictable behavior in
112 a release build.
113
Hye-Shik Changff83c2b2004-02-02 13:39:01 +0000114- input() builtin function now respects compiler flags such as
115 __future__ statements. SF patch 876178.
116
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +0000117- Removed PendingDeprecationWarning from apply(). apply() remains
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +0000118 deprecated, but the nuisance warning will not be issued.
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +0000119
Tim Peters1d7323e2003-12-01 21:35:27 +0000120- At Python shutdown time (Py_Finalize()), 2.3 called cyclic garbage
121 collection twice, both before and after tearing down modules. The
122 call after tearing down modules has been disabled, because too much
123 of Python has been torn down then for __del__ methods and weakref
124 callbacks to execute sanely. The most common symptom was a sequence
125 of uninformative messages on stderr when Python shut down, produced
126 by threads trying to raise exceptions, but unable to report the nature
127 of their problems because too much of the sys module had already been
128 destroyed.
129
Guido van Rossum6c9e1302003-11-29 23:52:13 +0000130- Removed FutureWarnings related to hex/oct literals and conversions
131 and left shifts. (Thanks to Kalle Svensson for SF patch 849227.)
132 This addresses most of the remaining semantic changes promised by
133 PEP 237, except for repr() of a long, which still shows the trailing
134 'L'. The PEP appears to promise warnings for operations that
135 changed semantics compared to Python 2.3, but this is not
136 implemented; we've suffered through enough warnings related to
137 hex/oct literals and I think it's best to be silent now.
138
Raymond Hettinger4f8f9762003-11-26 08:21:35 +0000139- For str and unicode objects, the ljust(), center(), and rjust()
140 methods now accept an optional argument specifying a fill
141 character other than a space.
142
Guido van Rossumbaf0f8f2003-11-22 23:55:50 +0000143- When method objects have an attribute that can be satisfied either
144 by the function object or by the method object, the function
145 object's attribute usually wins. Christian Tismer pointed out that
146 that this is really a mistake, because this only happens for special
147 methods (like __reduce__) where the method object's version is
148 really more appropriate than the function's attribute. So from now
149 on, all method attributes will have precedence over function
150 attributes with the same name.
151
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +0000152- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 839548: if a weakref with a callback,
153 its callback, and its weakly referenced object, all became part of
154 cyclic garbage during a single run of garbage collection, the order
155 in which they were torn down was unpredictable. It was possible for
156 the callback to see partially-torn-down objects, leading to immediate
157 segfaults, or, if the callback resurrected garbage objects, to
158 resurrect insane objects that caused segfaults (or other surprises)
159 later. In one sense this wasn't surprising, because Python's cyclic gc
160 had no knowledge of Python's weakref objects. It does now. When
161 weakrefs with callbacks become part of cyclic garbage now, those
162 weakrefs are cleared first. The callbacks don't trigger then,
163 preventing the problems. If you need callbacks to trigger, then just
164 as when cyclic gc is not involved, you need to write your code so
165 that weakref objects outlive the objects they weakly reference.
Raymond Hettingera690a992003-11-16 16:17:49 +0000166
Tim Petersadd09b42003-11-12 20:43:28 +0000167- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 840829: if cyclic garbage collection
168 happened to occur during a weakref callback for a new-style class
169 instance, subtle memory corruption was the result (in a release build;
170 in a debug build, a segfault occurred reliably very soon after).
171 This has been repaired.
172
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +0000173- Compiler flags set in PYTHONSTARTUP are now active in __main__.
174
175- Added two builtin types, set() and frozenset().
176
Raymond Hettinger85c20a42003-11-06 14:06:48 +0000177- Added a reversed() builtin function that returns a reverse iterator
178 over a sequence.
179
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +0000180- Added a sorted() builtin function that returns a new sorted list
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +0000181 from any iterable.
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +0000182
Martin v. Löwis01a74b22003-10-19 18:30:01 +0000183- CObjects are now mutable (on the C level) through PyCObject_SetVoidPtr.
184
Raymond Hettinger42b1ba32003-10-16 03:41:09 +0000185- list.sort() now supports three keyword arguments: cmp, key, and reverse.
186 The key argument can be a function of one argument that extracts a
187 comparison key from the original record: mylist.sort(key=str.lower).
188 The reverse argument is a boolean value and if True will change the
189 sort order as if the comparison arguments were reversed. In addition,
190 the documentation has been amended to provide a guarantee that all sorts
191 starting with Py2.3 are guaranteed to be stable (the relative order of
192 records with equal keys is unchanged).
193
Marc-André Lemburgd7160f82003-09-22 11:14:40 +0000194- Added test whether wchar_t is signed or not. A signed wchar_t is not
195 usable as internal unicode type base for Py_UNICODE since the
196 unicode implementation assumes an unsigned type.
197
Jeremy Hyltond8082792003-09-16 19:41:39 +0000198- Fixed a bug in the cache of length-one Unicode strings that could
199 lead to a seg fault. The specific problem occurred when an earlier,
200 non-fatal error left an uninitialized Unicode object in the
201 freelist.
202
Raymond Hettinger9bfe5332003-08-27 04:55:52 +0000203- The % formatting operator now supports '%F' which is equivalent to
204 '%f'. This has always been documented but never implemented.
205
Tim Peters465fa3d2003-08-15 01:16:37 +0000206- complex(obj) could leak a little memory if obj wasn't a string or
207 number.
208
Raymond Hettingereaef6152003-08-02 07:42:57 +0000209- zip() with no arguments now returns an empty list instead of raising
210 a TypeError exception.
211
Guido van Rossum02c58f82003-10-08 21:08:29 +0000212- obj.__contains__() now returns True/False instead of 1/0. SF patch
213 820195.
214
Armin Rigo2b3eb402003-10-28 12:05:48 +0000215- Python no longer tries to be smart about recursive comparisons.
216 When comparing containers with cyclic references to themselves it
217 will now just hit the recursion limit. See SF patch 825639.
218
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +0000219- str and unicode builtin types now have rsplit() method that is
220 same as split() except that it scans the string from the end
221 working towards the beginning. See SF feature request 801847.
Hye-Shik Chang060ebed2003-12-15 18:51:19 +0000222
Jim Fulton8a1a5942004-02-08 04:21:26 +0000223- Fixed a bug in object.__reduce_ex__ when using protocol 2. Failure
224 to clear the error when attempts to get the __getstate__ attribute
225 fail caused intermittent errors and odd behavior.
226
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +0000227- buffer objects based on other objects no longer cache a pointer to
228 the data and the data length. Instead, the appropriate tp_as_buffer
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +0000229 method is called as necessary.
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +0000230
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +0000231- fixed: if a file is opened with an explicit buffer size >= 1, repeated
Andrew MacIntyre4e10ed32004-04-04 07:01:35 +0000232 close() calls would attempt to free() the buffer already free()ed on
233 the first call.
234
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +0000235
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000236Extension modules
237-----------------
238
Barry Warsaw11b91a02004-06-28 00:50:43 +0000239- Added socket.getservbyport(), and make the second argument in
240 getservbyname() and getservbyport() optional.
241
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +0000242- time module code that deals with input POSIX timestamps will now raise
243 ValueError if more than a second is lost in precision when the
244 timestamp is cast to the platform C time_t type. There's no chance
245 that the platform will do anything sensible with the result in such
246 cases. This includes ctime(), localtime() and gmtime(). Assorted
247 fromtimestamp() and utcfromtimestamp() methods in the datetime module
248 were also protected. Closes bugs #919012 and 975996.
Brett Cannonb46ed712004-06-19 20:50:47 +0000249
Martin v. Löwis77ca6c42004-06-03 12:47:26 +0000250- fcntl.ioctl now warns if the mutate flag is not specified.
251
Martin v. Löwisd8948722004-06-02 09:57:56 +0000252- nt now properly allows to refer to UNC roots, e.g. in nt.stat().
253
Raymond Hettinger027bb632004-05-31 03:09:25 +0000254- the weakref module now supports additional objects: array.array,
255 sre.pattern_objects, file objects, and sockets.
256
Raymond Hettingere2eda602004-04-04 08:51:41 +0000257- operator.isMappingType() and operator.isSequenceType() now give
258 fewer false positives.
259
Brett Cannon06c34792004-03-23 23:16:54 +0000260- socket.sslerror is now a subclass of socket.error . Also added
261 socket.error to the socket module's C API.
262
Hye-Shik Changc3a87b82004-03-21 19:34:30 +0000263- Bug #920575: A problem that _locale module segfaults on
264 nl_langinfo(ERA) caused by GNU libc's illegal NULL return is fixed.
265
Raymond Hettinger6e2ee862004-03-14 04:37:50 +0000266- array objects now support the copy module. Also, their resizing
267 scheme has been updated the same as for list objects. The improves
Raymond Hettinger49f9bd12004-03-14 05:43:59 +0000268 the performance (speed and memory usage) of append() operations.
269 Also, array.extend() now accepts any iterable argument for repeated
270 appends without needing to create another temporary array.
Raymond Hettinger3aa82c02004-03-13 18:18:51 +0000271
Raymond Hettinger3e47f652004-03-08 18:22:35 +0000272- cStringIO.writelines() now accepts any iterable argument and writes
273 the lines one at a time rather than joining them and writing once.
274 Made a parallel change to StringIO.writelines(). Saves memory and
275 makes suitable for use with generator expressions.
276
Brett Cannond1080a32004-03-02 04:38:10 +0000277- time.strftime() now checks that the values in its time tuple argument
278 are within the proper boundaries to prevent possible crashes from the
279 platform's C library implementation of strftime(). Can possibly
280 break code that uses values outside the range that didn't cause
281 problems previously (such as sitting day of year to 0). Fixes bug
282 #897625.
283
Martin v. Löwis12af0482004-01-31 12:34:17 +0000284- The socket module now supports Bluetooth sockets, if the
285 system has <bluetooth/bluetooth.h>
286
Raymond Hettinger756b3f32004-01-29 06:37:52 +0000287- Added a collections module containing a new datatype, deque(),
288 offering high-performance, thread-safe, memory friendly appends
289 and pops on either side of the deque.
290
291- Several modules now take advantage of collections.deque() for
292 improved performance: Queue, mutex, shlex, threading, and pydoc.
293
Raymond Hettinger166958b2003-12-01 13:18:39 +0000294- The operator module has two new functions, attrgetter() and
295 itemgetter() which are useful for creating fast data extractor
296 functions for map(), list.sort(), itertools.groupby(), and
297 other functions that expect a function argument.
298
Martin v. Löwis94681fc2003-11-27 19:40:22 +0000299- socket.SHUT_{RD,WR,RDWR} was added.
300
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +0000301- os.getsid was added.
302
Guido van Rossum16b9fa82003-10-23 23:54:57 +0000303- The pwd module incorrectly advertised its struct type as
304 struct_pwent; this has been renamed to struct_passwd. (The old name
305 is still supported for backwards compatibility.)
306
Fred Drakede050322003-10-21 15:41:59 +0000307- The xml.parsers.expat module now provides Expat 1.95.7.
308
Martin v. Löwis3bbd6542003-10-03 13:57:37 +0000309- socket.IPPROTO_IPV6 was added.
310
Martin v. Löwise7a97962003-09-20 16:08:33 +0000311- readline.clear_history was added.
312
Brett Cannon62dba4c2003-09-10 19:37:42 +0000313- select.select() now accepts sequences for its first three arguments.
314
Raymond Hettinger5475f232003-08-08 12:20:03 +0000315- cStringIO now supports the f.closed attribute.
316
Anthony Baxter83f52912003-08-05 06:33:56 +0000317- The signal module now exposes SIGRTMIN and SIGRTMAX (if available).
318
Andrew M. Kuchling69f31eb2003-08-13 23:11:04 +0000319- curses module now supports use_default_colors(). [patch #739124]
320
Anthony Baxter5c68ef02003-10-04 08:04:04 +0000321- Bug #811028: ncurses.h breakage on FreeBSD/MacOS X
322
323- Bug #814613: INET_ADDRSTRLEN fix needed for all compilers on SGI
324
Gustavo Niemeyerad3fc442003-10-17 22:13:16 +0000325- Implemented non-recursive SRE matching scheme (#757624).
326
327- Implemented (?(id/name)yes|no) support in SRE (#572936).
328
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +0000329- random.seed() with no arguments or None uses time.time() as a default
330 seed. Modified to match Py2.2 behavior and use fractional seconds so
331 that successive runs are more likely to produce different sequences.
332
333- random.Random has a new method, getrandbits(k), which returns an int
334 with k random bits. This method is now an optional part of the API
335 for user defined generators. Any generator that defines genrandbits()
336 can now use randrange() for ranges with a length >= 2**53. Formerly,
337 randrange would return only even numbers for ranges that large (see
338 SF bug #812202). Generators that do not define genrandbits() now
339 issue a warning when randrange() is called with a range that large.
340
Raymond Hettingerd25c1c62003-12-06 16:23:06 +0000341- itertools has a new function, groupby() for aggregating iterables
342 into groups sharing the same key (as determined by a key function).
343 It offers some of functionality of SQL's groupby keyword and of
344 the Unix uniq filter.
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +0000345
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +0000346- itertools now has a new function, tee() which produces two independent
347 iterators from a single iterable.
348
349- itertools.izip() with no arguments now returns an empty iterator instead
350 of raising a TypeError exception.
351
Gustavo Niemeyera6e436e2004-02-14 00:02:45 +0000352- Fixed #853061: allow BZ2Compressor.compress() to receive an empty string
353 as parameter.
354
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000355Library
356-------
357
Raymond Hettinger7c85fa42004-07-01 11:01:35 +0000358- Added Decimal.py per PEP 327.
359
Brett Cannon46d4ff22004-06-29 04:08:23 +0000360- Bug #981299: rsync is now a recognized protocol in urlparse that uses a
361 "netloc" portion of a URL.
Brett Cannonfbac2942004-06-29 04:02:40 +0000362
Brett Cannon1c3fa182004-06-19 21:11:35 +0000363- Bug #919012: shutil.move() will not try to move a directory into itself.
364 Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
365
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +0000366- Bug #934282: pydoc.stripid() is now case-insensitive. Thanks Robin Becker.
367
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +0000368- Bug #823209: cmath.log() now takes an optional base argument so that its
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +0000369 API matches math.log().
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +0000370
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +0000371- Bug #957381: distutils bdist_rpm no longer fails on recent RPM versions
372 that generate a *-debuginfo.rpm.
373
Martin v. Löwisbdec50f2004-06-08 08:29:33 +0000374- os.path.devnull has been added for all supported platforms.
375
Hye-Shik Chang2400e932004-06-05 18:37:53 +0000376- Fixed #877165: distutils now picks the right C++ compiler command
377 on cygwin and mingw32.
378
Hye-Shik Chang39aef792004-06-05 13:30:56 +0000379- urllib.urlopen().readline() now handles HTTP/0.9 correctly.
380
Brett Cannon0096e262004-06-05 01:12:51 +0000381- refactored site.py into functions. Also wrote regression tests for the
382 module.
383
Fred Drakeec6229e2004-06-25 23:02:59 +0000384- The distutils install command now supports the --home option and
385 installation scheme for all platforms.
386
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +0000387- asyncore.loop now has a repeat count parameter that defaults to
Michael W. Hudson7db865a2004-06-30 09:09:38 +0000388 looping forever.
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +0000389
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +0000390- The distutils sdist command now ignores all .svn directories, in
391 addition to CVS and RCS directories. .svn directories hold
392 administrative files for the Subversion source control system.
393
Martin v. Löwis2a6ba902004-05-31 18:22:40 +0000394- Added a new module: cookielib. Automatic cookie handling for HTTP
395 clients. Also, support for cookielib has been added to urllib2, so
396 urllib2.urlopen() can transparently handle cookies.
397
Raymond Hettinger059e1702004-05-19 19:56:44 +0000398- stringprep.py now uses built-in set() instead of sets.Set().
399
Thomas Heller2e7c8322004-05-11 15:10:59 +0000400- Bug #876278: Unbounded recursion in modulefinder
401
Martin v. Löwis456ab1d2004-05-06 01:54:36 +0000402- Bug #780300: Swap public and system ID in LexicalHandler.startDTD.
403 Applications relying on the wrong order need to be corrected.
404
Hye-Shik Chang0f5bf1e2004-04-20 21:11:11 +0000405- Bug #926075: Fixed a bug that returns a wrong pattern object
406 for a string or unicode object in sre.compile() when a different
407 type pattern with the same value exists.
408
Skip Montanarod0c0c412004-04-07 16:03:02 +0000409- Added countcallers arg to trace.Trace class (--trackcalls command line arg
410 when run from the command prompt).
411
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +0000412- Fixed a caching bug in platform.platform() where the argument of 'terse' was
413 not taken into consideration when caching value.
414
Nicholas Bastin824b1b22004-03-23 18:44:39 +0000415- Added two new command-line arguments for profile (output file and
416 default sort).
417
Nicholas Bastin1eb4bfc2004-03-22 20:12:56 +0000418- Added global runctx function to profile module
419
Martin v. Löwis347c30d2004-03-21 15:29:41 +0000420- Add hlist missing entryconfigure and entrycget methods.
421
Hye-Shik Chang4a7ad1a2004-03-19 08:11:56 +0000422- The ptcp154 codec was added for Kazakh character set support.
423
Martin v. Löwisa79449e2004-02-15 21:19:18 +0000424- Support non-anonymous ftp URLs in urllib2.
425
Marc-André Lemburg57cb68f2004-01-20 18:24:34 +0000426- The encodings package will now applies codec name aliases
427 first before starting to try the import of the codec module.
428 This simplifies overriding built-in codecs with external
429 packages, e.g. the included CJK codecs with the JapaneseCodecs
430 package, by adjusting the aliases dictionary in encodings.aliases
431 accordingly.
432
Barry Warsaw30ff12f2004-01-04 01:13:43 +0000433- base64 now supports RFC 3548 Base16, Base32, and Base64 encoding and
434 decoding standards.
435
Jeremy Hylton37c5f2a2003-12-14 05:29:45 +0000436- urllib2 now supports processors. A processor is a handler that
437 implements an xxx_request or xxx_response method. These methods are
438 called for all requests.
439
Thomas Hellerc7501d52003-12-05 20:28:07 +0000440- distutils compilers now compile source files in the same order as
441 they are passed to the compiler.
442
Walter Dörwaldc8de4582003-12-03 20:26:05 +0000443- pprint.pprint() and pprint.pformat() now have additional parameters
444 indent, width and depth.
445
Walter Dörwald7a7ede52003-12-03 20:15:28 +0000446- Patch #750542: pprint now will pretty print subclasses of list, tuple
447 and dict too, as long as they don't overwrite __repr__().
448
Thomas Hellerb3105912003-11-28 19:42:56 +0000449- Bug #848614: distutils' msvccompiler fails to find the MSVC6
450 compiler because of incomplete registry entries.
451
Martin v. Löwisaf7dc8d2003-11-19 19:51:55 +0000452- httplib.HTTP.putrequest now offers to omit the implicit Accept-Encoding.
453
Thomas Hellercf0005b2003-11-14 10:33:20 +0000454- Patch #841977: modulefinder didn't find extension modules in packages
455
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +0000456- imaplib.IMAP4.thread was added.
457
Guido van Rossum967b0632003-11-10 02:27:19 +0000458- Plugged a minor hole in tempfile.mktemp() due to the use of
459 os.path.exists(), switched to using os.lstat() directly if possible.
460
Raymond Hettinger0c410272004-01-05 10:13:35 +0000461- bisect.py and heapq.py now have underlying C implementations
Raymond Hettinger33ecffb2004-06-10 05:03:17 +0000462 for better performance.
463
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +0000464- heapq.py has two new functions, nsmallest() and nlargest().
Raymond Hettingerb3af1812003-11-08 10:24:38 +0000465
Neil Schemenauerf607fc52003-11-05 23:03:00 +0000466- traceback.format_exc has been added (similar to print_exc but it returns
467 a string).
468
Martin v. Löwis45394c22003-10-31 13:49:36 +0000469- xmlrpclib.MultiCall has been added.
470
Martin v. Löwis48440b72003-10-31 12:52:35 +0000471- poplib.POP3_SSL has been added.
472
Martin v. Löwisd6625482003-10-12 17:37:01 +0000473- tmpfile.mkstemp now returns an absolute path even if dir is relative.
474
Brett Cannon5d9ca4e2003-10-12 04:38:48 +0000475- urlparse is RFC 2396 compliant.
476
Skip Montanarodef99342003-10-03 14:07:07 +0000477- The fieldnames argument to the csv module's DictReader constructor is now
478 optional. If omitted, the first row of the file will be used as the
479 list of fieldnames.
480
Raymond Hettinger9a80c5d2003-09-23 20:21:01 +0000481- encodings.bz2_codec was added for access to bz2 compression
482 using "a long string".encode('bz2')
483
Guido van Rossum0e5a51d2003-09-22 15:03:11 +0000484- Various improvements to unittest.py, realigned with PyUnit CVS.
485
Martin v. Löwisc6bb6c02003-09-20 15:52:21 +0000486- dircache now passes exceptions to the caller, instead of returning
487 empty lists.
488
Raymond Hettingerdeadbf52003-09-12 06:33:37 +0000489- The bsddb module and dbhash module now support the iterator and
490 mapping protocols which make them more substitutable for dictionaries
491 and shelves.
492
Skip Montanaro3f7a9482003-09-06 19:52:12 +0000493- The csv module's DictReader and DictWriter classes now accept keyword
494 arguments. This was an omission in the initial implementation.
495
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +0000496- The email package handles some RFC 2231 parameters with missing
Barry Warsaw2f5bf172003-09-03 04:09:49 +0000497 CHARSET fields better. It also includes a patch to parameter
498 parsing when semicolons appear inside quotes.
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +0000499
Raymond Hettinger6a180122003-08-17 08:34:09 +0000500- sets.py now runs under Py2.2. In addition, the argument restrictions
501 for most set methods (but not the operators) have been relaxed to
Raymond Hettinger70b9f492003-11-19 15:52:14 +0000502 allow any iterable.
Raymond Hettingeree562fc2003-08-15 21:17:04 +0000503
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +0000504- _strptime.py now has a behind-the-scenes caching mechanism for the most
Brett Cannonb7150a22003-08-05 06:27:04 +0000505 recent TimeRE instance used along with the last five unique directive
506 patterns. The overall module was also made more thread-safe.
507
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +0000508- random.cunifvariate() and random.stdgamma() were deprecated in Py2.3
509 and removed in Py2.4.
510
Anthony Baxter92bee362003-11-04 14:35:49 +0000511- Bug #823328: urllib2.py's HTTP Digest Auth support works again.
512
Hye-Shik Chang84a99312004-01-17 14:59:36 +0000513- Patch #873597: CJK codecs are imported into rank of default codecs.
514
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000515Tools/Demos
516-----------
517
Skip Montanarod5a21fd2004-01-27 14:49:04 +0000518- A hotshotmain script was added to the Tools/scripts directory that
519 makes it easy to run a script under control of the hotshot profiler.
520
Skip Montanaro030f68a2003-10-28 16:24:00 +0000521- The db2pickle and pickle2db scripts can now dump/load gdbm files.
522
Skip Montanaroe2b61e02004-03-03 17:42:08 +0000523- The file order on the command line of the pickle2db script was reversed.
524 It is now [ picklefile ] dbfile. This provides better symmetry with
525 db2pickle. The file arguments to both scripts are now source followed by
526 destination in situations where both files are given.
527
Skip Montanarofd4fa882003-09-10 19:04:13 +0000528- The pydoc script will display a link to the module documentation for
529 modules determined to be part of the core distribution. The documentation
530 base directory defaults to http://www.python.org/doc/current/lib/ but can
531 be changed by setting the PYTHONDOCS environment variable.
532
Raymond Hettingere41d4c82003-08-25 04:39:55 +0000533- texcheck.py now detects double word errors.
534
Tim Peters1a3abcb2003-08-18 23:52:09 +0000535- md5sum.py mistakenly opened input files in text mode by default, a
536 silent and dangerous change from previous releases. It once again
537 opens input files in binary mode by default. The -t and -b flags
538 remain for compatibility with the 2.3 release, but -b is the default
539 now.
540
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000541- py-electric-colon now works when pending-delete/delete-selection mode is
542 in effect
543
544- py-help-at-point is no longer bound to the F1 key - it's still bound to
545 C-c C-h
546
Barry Warsaw6ec58ca2003-09-03 03:20:37 +0000547- Pynche was fixed to not crash when there is no ~/.pynche file and no
548 -d option was given.
549
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000550Build
551-----
552
Brett Cannonf6af76d2004-06-26 04:03:06 +0000553- Bug #978645: Modules/getpath.c now builds properly in --disable-framework
554 build under OS X.
555
Skip Montanaro56f6a4f2004-06-18 02:47:22 +0000556- Profiling using gprof is now available if Python is configured with
557 --enable-profiling.
558
Martin v. Löwisf30d60e2004-06-08 08:17:44 +0000559- Profiling the VM using the Pentium TSC is now possible if Python
560 is configured --with-tsc.
561
Martin v. Löwis642c8a12004-06-04 13:55:13 +0000562- In order to find libraries, setup.py now also looks in /lib64, for use
563 on AMD64.
564
Hye-Shik Chang54f94392004-04-14 07:55:31 +0000565- Bug #934635: Fixed a bug where the configure script couldn't detect
566 getaddrinfo() properly if the KAME stack had SCTP support.
567
Skip Montanaro7befb992004-02-10 16:50:21 +0000568- Support for missing ANSI C header files (limits.h, stddef.h, etc) was
569 removed.
570
Skip Montanarodb608052004-02-07 13:53:46 +0000571- Systems requiring the D4, D6 or D7 variants of pthreads are no longer
572 supported (see PEP 11).
573
574- Universal newline support can no longer be disabled (see PEP 11).
575
Skip Montanarocd1f7432004-01-17 14:22:44 +0000576- Support for DGUX, SunOS 4, IRIX 4 and Minix was removed (see PEP 11).
577
578- Support for systems requiring --with-dl-dld or --with-sgi-dl was removed
579 (see PEP 11).
580
581- Tests for sizeof(char) were removed since ANSI C mandates that
582 sizeof(char) must be 1.
583
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000584C API
585-----
586
Tim Peters9ddf40b2004-06-20 22:41:32 +0000587- Thanks to Anthony Tuininga, the datetime module now supplies a C API
588 containing type-check macros and constructors. See new docs in the
589 Python/C API Reference Manual for details.
590
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +0000591- Private function _PyTime_DoubleToTimet added, to convert a Python
592 timestamp (C double) to platform time_t with some out-of-bounds
593 checking. Declared in new header file timefuncs.h. It would be
594 good to expose some other internal timemodule.c functions there.
595
Martin v. Löwise440e472004-06-01 15:22:42 +0000596- New public functions PyEval_EvaluateFrame and PyGen_New to expose
597 generator objects.
598
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +0000599- New public functions Py_IncRef() and Py_DecRef(), exposing the
600 functionality of the Py_XINCREF() and Py_XDECREF macros. Useful for
Thomas Hellercc10a852004-04-22 17:28:25 +0000601 runtime dynamic embedding of Python. See patch #938302, by Bob
602 Ippolito.
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +0000603
Raymond Hettingerc1e4f9d2004-03-12 08:04:00 +0000604- Added a new macro, PySequence_Fast_ITEMS, which retrieves a fast sequence's
605 underlying array of PyObject pointers. Useful for high speed looping.
606
Raymond Hettinger8f5cdaa2003-12-13 11:26:12 +0000607- Created a new method flag, METH_COEXIST, which causes a method to be loaded
608 even if already defined by a slot wrapper. This allows a __contains__
609 method, for example, to co-exist with a defined sq_contains slot. This
610 is helpful because the PyCFunction can take advantage of optimized calls
611 whenever METH_O or METH_NOARGS flags are defined.
612
Raymond Hettingerbc0f2ab2003-11-25 21:12:14 +0000613- Added a new function, PyDict_Contains(d, k) which is like
614 PySequence_Contains() but is specific to dictionaries and executes
615 about 10% faster.
616
Brett Cannon26b3a7b2003-10-19 21:31:43 +0000617- Added three new macros: Py_RETURN_NONE, Py_RETURN_TRUE, and Py_RETURN_FALSE.
618 Each return the singleton they mention after Py_INCREF()ing them.
619
Raymond Hettingercb2da432003-10-12 18:24:34 +0000620- Added a new function, PyTuple_Pack(n, ...) for constructing tuples from a
621 variable length argument list of Python objects without having to invoke
622 the more complex machinery of Py_BuildValue(). PyTuple_Pack(3, a, b, c)
623 is equivalent to Py_BuildValue("(OOO)", a, b, c).
624
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000625New platforms
626-------------
627
628Tests
629-----
630
631Windows
632-------
633
Guido van Rossumfd25aca2003-11-30 22:10:15 +0000634- The _winreg module could segfault when reading very large registry
635 values, due to unchecked alloca() calls (SF bug 851056). The fix is
636 uses either PyMem_Malloc(n) or PyString_FromStringAndSize(NULL, n),
637 as appropriate, followed by a size check.
638
Tim Petersf1827cf2003-09-07 03:30:18 +0000639- file.truncate() could misbehave if the file was open for update
640 (modes r+, rb+, w+, wb+), and the most recent file operation before
641 the truncate() call was an input operation. SF bug 801631.
642
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000643Mac
644----
645
646
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +0000647What's New in Python 2.3 final?
648===============================
649
650*Release date: 29-Jul-2003*
651
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +0000652IDLE
653----
654
Tim Peters36c1afc2003-07-29 17:22:57 +0000655- Bug 778400: IDLE hangs when selecting "Edit with IDLE" from explorer.
656 This was unique to Windows, and was fixed by adding an -n switch to
657 the command the Windows installer creates to execute "Edit with IDLE"
658 context-menu actions.
659
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +0000660- IDLE displays a new message upon startup: some "personal firewall"
661 kinds of programs (for example, ZoneAlarm) open a dialog of their
662 own when any program opens a socket. IDLE does use sockets, talking
663 on the computer's internal loopback interface. This connection is not
664 visible on any external interface and no data is sent to or received
665 from the Internet. So, if you get such a dialog when opening IDLE,
666 asking whether to let pythonw.exe talk to address 127.0.0.1, say yes,
667 and rest assured no communication external to your machine is taking
668 place. If you don't allow it, IDLE won't be able to start.
669
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +0000670
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000671What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 2?
672=============================================
673
Tim Peters6560a252003-07-24 00:15:46 +0000674*Release date: 24-Jul-2003*
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000675
676Core and builtins
677-----------------
678
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +0000679- It is now possible to import from zipfiles containing additional
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000680 data bytes before the zip compatible archive. Zipfiles containing a
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +0000681 comment at the end are still unsupported.
682
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000683Extension modules
684-----------------
685
686- A longstanding bug in the parser module's initialization could cause
687 fatal internal refcount confusion when the module got initialized more
688 than once. This has been fixed.
689
Fred Drake01a43122003-07-21 17:17:10 +0000690- Fixed memory leak in pyexpat; using the parser's ParseFile() method
691 with open files that aren't instances of the standard file type
692 caused an instance of the bound .read() method to be leaked on every
693 call.
694
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000695- Fixed some leaks in the locale module.
696
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000697Library
698-------
699
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000700- Lib/encodings/rot_13.py when used as a script, now more properly
701 uses the first Python interpreter on your path.
702
703- Removed caching of TimeRE (and thus LocaleTime) in _strptime.py to
704 fix a locale related bug in the test suite. Although another patch
705 was needed to actually fix the problem, the cache code was not
706 restored.
707
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +0000708IDLE
709----
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000710
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +0000711- Calltips patches.
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000712
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000713Build
714-----
715
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000716- For MacOSX, added -mno-fused-madd to BASECFLAGS to fix test_coercion
717 on Panther (OSX 10.3).
718
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000719C API
720-----
721
722Windows
723-------
724
Tim Peters291f14e2003-07-22 02:50:01 +0000725- The tempfile module could do insane imports on Windows if PYTHONCASEOK
726 was set, making temp file creation impossible. Repaired.
727
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000728- Add a patch to workaround pthread_sigmask() bugs in Cygwin.
729
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000730Mac
731---
732
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000733- Various fixes to pimp.
734
735- Scripts runs with pythonw no longer had full window manager access.
736
737- Don't force boot-disk-only install, for reasons unknown it causes
738 more problems than it solves.
739
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000740
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000741What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 1?
742=============================================
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000743
Jeremy Hylton0ed18c22003-07-18 20:10:02 +0000744*Release date: 18-Jul-2003*
745
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000746Core and builtins
747-----------------
748
Tim Peterse5e065b2003-07-06 18:36:54 +0000749- The new function sys.getcheckinterval() returns the last value set
750 by sys.setcheckinterval().
751
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000752- Several bugs in the symbol table phase of the compiler have been
753 fixed. Errors could be lost and compilation could fail without
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000754 reporting an error. SF patch 763201.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000755
756- The interpreter is now more robust about importing the warnings
757 module. In an executable generated by freeze or similar programs,
758 earlier versions of 2.3 would fail if the warnings module could
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000759 not be found on the file system. Fixes SF bug 771097.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000760
761- A warning about assignments to module attributes that shadow
762 builtins, present in earlier releases of 2.3, has been removed.
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000763
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000764- It is not possible to create subclasses of builtin types like str
765 and tuple that define an itemsize. Earlier releases of Python 2.3
766 allowed this by mistake, leading to crashes and other problems.
767
768- The thread_id is now initialized to 0 in a non-thread build. SF bug
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000769 770247.
770
771- SF bug 762891: "del p[key]" on proxy object no longer raises SystemError.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000772
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000773Extension modules
774-----------------
775
776- weakref.proxy() can now handle "del obj[i]" for proxy objects
777 defining __delitem__. Formerly, it generated a SystemError.
778
779- SSL no longer crashes the interpreter when the remote side disconnects.
780
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +0000781- On Unix the mmap module can again be used to map device files.
782
Brett Cannon20def8b2003-07-01 05:16:08 +0000783- time.strptime now exclusively uses the Python implementation
784 contained within the _strptime module.
785
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000786- The print slot of weakref proxy objects was removed, because it was
787 not consistent with the object's repr slot.
788
789- The mmap module only checks file size for regular files, not
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000790 character or block devices. SF patch 708374.
791
792- The cPickle Pickler garbage collection support was fixed to traverse
793 the find_class attribute, if present.
794
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000795- There are several fixes for the bsddb3 wrapper module.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000796
797 bsddb3 no longer crashes if an environment is closed before a cursor
798 (SF bug 763298).
799
800 The DB and DBEnv set_get_returns_none function was extended to take
Barry Warsawd71a5512003-07-20 18:00:54 +0000801 a level instead of a boolean flag. The new level 2 means that in
802 addition, cursor.set()/.get() methods return None instead of raising
803 an exception.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000804
805 A typo was fixed in DBCursor.join_item(), preventing a crash.
806
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000807Library
808-------
809
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000810- distutils now supports MSVC 7.1
811
Raymond Hettinger71adf7e2003-07-16 19:25:22 +0000812- doctest now examines all docstrings by default. Previously, it would
813 skip over functions with private names (as indicated by the underscore
814 naming convention). The old default created too much of a risk that
815 user tests were being skipped inadvertently. Note, this change could
816 break code in the unlikely case that someone had intentionally put
817 failing tests in the docstrings of private functions. The breakage
818 is easily fixable by specifying the old behavior when calling testmod()
819 or Tester().
820
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000821- There were several fixes to the way dumbdbms are closed. It's vital
822 that a dumbdbm database be closed properly, else the on-disk data
823 and directory files can be left in mutually inconsistent states.
824 dumbdbm.py's _Database.__del__() method attempted to close the
825 database properly, but a shutdown race in _Database._commit() could
826 prevent this from working, so that a program trusting __del__() to
827 get the on-disk files in synch could be badly surprised. The race
828 has been repaired. A sync() method was also added so that shelve
829 can guarantee data is written to disk.
Tim Peters7a6c7332003-07-13 17:21:10 +0000830
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000831 The close() method can now be called more than once without complaint.
Tim Petersd7472ec2003-07-13 02:22:03 +0000832
Tim Peters59aba122003-07-01 20:01:55 +0000833- The classes in threading.py are now new-style classes. That they
834 weren't before was an oversight.
835
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000836- The urllib2 digest authentication handlers now define the correct
837 auth_header. The earlier versions would fail at runtime.
838
Neal Norwitze7dfe212003-07-01 14:59:46 +0000839- SF bug 763023: fix uncaught ZeroDivisionError in difflib ratio methods
840 when there are no lines.
841
Neal Norwitz3c0f2c92003-07-01 21:12:47 +0000842- SF bug 763637: fix exception in Tkinter with after_cancel
843 which could occur with Tk 8.4
844
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000845- SF bug 770601: CGIHTTPServer.py now passes the entire environment
846 to child processes.
847
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000848- SF bug 765238: add filter to fnmatch's __all__.
849
850- SF bug 748201: make time.strptime() error messages more helpful.
851
852- SF patch 764470: Do not dump the args attribute of a Fault object in
853 xmlrpclib.
854
855- SF patch 549151: urllib and urllib2 now redirect POSTs on 301
856 responses.
857
858- SF patch 766650: The whichdb module was fixed to recognize dbm files
859 generated by gdbm on OS/2 EMX.
860
861- SF bugs 763047 and 763052: fixes bug of timezone value being left as
862 -1 when ``time.tzname[0] == time.tzname[1] and not time.daylight``
863 is true when it should only when time.daylight is true.
864
865- SF bug 764548: re now allows subclasses of str and unicode to be
866 used as patterns.
867
868- SF bug 763637: In Tkinter, change after_cancel() to handle tuples
869 of varying sizes. Tk 8.4 returns a different number of values
870 than Tk 8.3.
871
872- SF bug 763023: difflib.ratio() did not catch zero division.
873
874- The Queue module now has an __all__ attribute.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000875
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000876Tools/Demos
877-----------
878
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000879- See Lib/idlelib/NEWS.txt for IDLE news.
880
Neal Norwitz592c4cc2003-07-01 04:14:28 +0000881- SF bug 753592: webchecker/wsgui now handles user supplied directories.
882
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000883- The trace.py script has been removed. It is now in the standard library.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000884
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000885Build
886-----
887
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000888- Python now compiles with -fno-strict-aliasing if possible (SF bug 766696).
889
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000890- The socket module compiles on IRIX 6.5.10.
891
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000892- An irix64 system is treated the same way as an irix6 system (SF
893 patch 764560).
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000894
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000895- Several definitions were missing on FreeBSD 5.x unless the
896 __BSD_VISIBLE symbol was defined. configure now defines it as
897 needed.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000898
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000899C API
900-----
901
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000902- Unicode objects now support mbcs as a built-in encoding, so the C
903 API can use it without deferring to the encodings package.
904
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000905Windows
906-------
907
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000908- The Windows implementation of PyThread_start_new_thread() never
909 checked error returns from Windows functions correctly. As a result,
910 it could claim to start a new thread even when the Microsoft
911 _beginthread() function failed (due to "too many threads" -- this is
912 on the order of thousands when it happens). In these cases, the
913 Python exception ::
914
915 thread.error: can't start new thread
916
917 is raised now.
918
919- SF bug 766669: Prevent a GPF on interpreter exit when sockets are in
920 use. The interpreter now calls WSACleanup() from Py_Finalize()
921 instead of from DLL teardown.
922
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000923Mac
924---
925
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000926- Bundlebuilder now inherits default values in the right way. It was
Walter Dörwald73a8a4b2003-07-30 12:14:02 +0000927 previously possible for app bundles to get a type of "BNDL" instead
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000928 of "APPL." Other improvements include, a --build-id option to
929 specify the CFBundleIdentifier and using the --python option to set
930 the executable in the bundle.
931
932- Fixed two bugs in MacOSX framework handling.
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000933
Jack Jansene0040412003-07-23 22:17:28 +0000934- pythonw did not allow user interaction in 2.3rc1, this has been fixed.
935
936- Python is now compiled with -mno-fused-madd, making all tests pass
937 on Panther.
938
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000939What's New in Python 2.3 beta 2?
940================================
941
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +0000942*Release date: 29-Jun-2003*
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000943
944Core and builtins
945-----------------
946
Barry Warsaw883f2232003-06-29 17:10:11 +0000947- A program can now set the environment variable PYTHONINSPECT to some
948 string value in Python, and cause the interpreter to enter the
949 interactive prompt at program exit, as if Python had been invoked
950 with the -i option.
951
Raymond Hettingerd05abde2003-06-17 05:05:49 +0000952- list.index() now accepts optional start and stop arguments. Similar
953 changes were made to UserList.index(). SF feature request 754014.
954
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +0000955- SF patch 751998 fixes an unwanted side effect of the previous fix
956 for SF bug 742860 (the next item).
957
Tim Peters50d8b8b2003-05-25 17:44:31 +0000958- SF bug 742860: "WeakKeyDictionary __delitem__ uses iterkeys". This
959 wasn't threadsafe, was very inefficient (expected time O(len(dict))
960 instead of O(1)), and could raise a spurious RuntimeError if another
961 thread mutated the dict during __delitem__, or if a comparison function
962 mutated it. It also neglected to raise KeyError when the key wasn't
963 present; didn't raise TypeError when the key wasn't of a weakly
964 referencable type; and broke various more-or-less obscure dict
965 invariants by using a sequence of equality comparisons over the whole
966 set of dict keys instead of computing the key's hash code to narrow
967 the search to those keys with the same hash code. All of these are
968 considered to be bugs. A new implementation of __delitem__ repairs all
969 that, but note that fixing these bugs may change visible behavior in
970 code relying (whether intentionally or accidentally) on old behavior.
Tim Peters886128f2003-05-25 01:45:11 +0000971
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000972- SF bug 734869: Fixed a compiler bug that caused a fatal error when
973 compiling a list comprehension that contained another list comprehension
974 embedded in a lambda expression.
975
Tim Peterse87568d2003-05-24 20:18:24 +0000976- SF bug 705231: builtin pow() no longer lets the platform C pow()
977 raise -1.0 to integer powers, because (at least) glibc gets it wrong
978 in some cases. The result should be -1.0 if the power is odd and 1.0
979 if the power is even, and any float with a sufficiently large exponent
980 is (mathematically) an exact even integer.
981
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000982- SF bug 759227: A new-style class that implements __nonzero__() must
983 return a bool or int (but not an int subclass) from that method. This
984 matches the restriction on classic classes.
985
Martin v. Löwis5467d4c2003-05-10 07:10:12 +0000986- The encoding attribute has been added for file objects, and set to
987 the terminal encoding on Unix and Windows.
988
Tim Peters015dd822003-05-04 04:16:52 +0000989- The softspace attribute of file objects became read-only by oversight.
990 It's writable again.
991
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +0000992- Reverted a 2.3 beta 1 change to iterators for subclasses of list and
993 tuple. By default, the iterators now access data elements directly
994 instead of going through __getitem__. If __getitem__ access is
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +0000995 preferred, then __iter__ can be overridden.
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +0000996
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000997- SF bug 735247: The staticmethod and super types participate in
998 garbage collection. Before this change, it was possible for leaks to
999 occur in functions with non-global free variables that used these types.
1000
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001001Extension modules
1002-----------------
1003
Raymond Hettinger643bcec2003-06-29 03:29:42 +00001004- the socket module has a new exception, socket.timeout, to allow
1005 timeouts to be handled separately from other socket errors.
1006
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001007- SF bug 751276: cPickle has fixed to propagate exceptions raised in
1008 user code. In earlier versions, cPickle caught and ignored any
1009 exception when it performed operations that it expected to raise
1010 specific exceptions like AttributeError.
1011
1012- cPickle Pickler and Unpickler objects now participate in garbage
1013 collection.
1014
Tim Peterscda32b72003-06-15 23:13:35 +00001015- mimetools.choose_boundary() could return duplicate strings at times,
1016 especially likely on Windows. The strings returned are now guaranteed
1017 unique within a single program run.
1018
Brett Cannon4e64d782003-06-13 23:44:35 +00001019- thread.interrupt_main() raises KeyboardInterrupt in the main thread.
1020 dummy_thread has also been modified to try to simulate the behavior.
1021
Walter Dörwald9e46abe2003-05-18 03:15:10 +00001022- array.array.insert() now treats negative indices as being relative
1023 to the end of the array, just like list.insert() does. (SF bug #739313)
1024
Tim Petersb0c854d2003-05-17 15:57:00 +00001025- The datetime module classes datetime, time, and timedelta are now
1026 properly subclassable.
Tim Petersa98924a2003-05-17 05:55:19 +00001027
Martin v. Löwis28e9ce92003-05-09 08:19:48 +00001028- _tkinter.{get|set}busywaitinterval was added.
1029
Raymond Hettinger834f4632003-05-02 20:24:56 +00001030- itertools.islice() now accepts stop=None as documented.
1031 Fixes SF bug #730685.
1032
Skip Montanaro8c044d82003-05-06 20:42:37 +00001033- the bsddb185 module is built in one restricted instance -
1034 /usr/include/db.h exists and defines HASHVERSION to be 2. This is true
1035 for many BSD-derived systems.
1036
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001037
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001038Library
1039-------
1040
Tim Petersdb3756d2003-06-29 05:30:48 +00001041- Some happy doctest extensions from Jim Fulton have been added to
1042 doctest.py. These are already being used in Zope3. The two
1043 primary ones:
1044
1045 doctest.debug(module, name) extracts the doctests from the named object
1046 in the given module, puts them in a temp file, and starts pdb running
1047 on that file. This is great when a doctest fails.
1048
1049 doctest.DocTestSuite(module=None) returns a synthesized unittest
1050 TestSuite instance, to be run by the unittest framework, which
1051 runs all the doctests in the module. This allows writing tests in
1052 doctest style (which can be clearer and shorter than writing tests
1053 in unittest style), without losing unittest's powerful testing
1054 framework features (which doctest lacks).
1055
Tim Peters6ebe61f2003-06-27 20:48:05 +00001056- For compatibility with doctests created before 2.3, if an expected
1057 output block consists solely of "1" and the actual output block
1058 consists solely of "True", it's accepted as a match; similarly
1059 for "0" and "False". This is quite un-doctest-like, but is practical.
1060 The behavior can be disabled by passing the new doctest module
1061 constant DONT_ACCEPT_TRUE_FOR_1 to the new optionflags optional
1062 argument.
1063
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001064- ZipFile.testzip() now only traps BadZipfile exceptions. Previously,
1065 a bare except caught to much and reported all errors as a problem
1066 in the archive.
1067
1068- The logging module now has a new function, makeLogRecord() making
1069 LogHandler easier to interact with DatagramHandler and SocketHandler.
1070
Skip Montanaro364ca402003-06-17 12:58:31 +00001071- The cgitb module has been extended to support plain text display (SF patch
1072 569574).
1073
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00001074- A brand new version of IDLE (from the IDLEfork project at
1075 SourceForge) is now included as Lib/idlelib. The old Tools/idle is
1076 no more.
1077
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001078- Added a new module: trace (documentation missing). This module used
1079 to be distributed in Tools/scripts. It uses sys.settrace() to trace
1080 code execution -- either function calls or individual lines. It can
1081 generate tracing output during execution or a post-mortem report of
1082 code coverage.
1083
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00001084- The threading module has new functions settrace() and setprofile()
1085 that cooperate with the functions of the same name in the sys
1086 module. A function registered with the threading module will
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001087 be used for all threads it creates. The new trace module uses this
1088 to provide tracing for code running in threads.
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00001089
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00001090- copy.py: applied SF patch 707900, fixing bug 702858, by Steven
1091 Taschuk. Copying a new-style class that had a reference to itself
1092 didn't work. (The same thing worked fine for old-style classes.)
Martin v. Löwisba8f5ff2003-06-14 07:10:06 +00001093 Builtin functions are now treated as atomic, fixing bug #746304.
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00001094
Raymond Hettingerc24d7672003-06-08 19:42:33 +00001095- difflib.py has two new functions: context_diff() and unified_diff().
1096
Guido van Rossumfa19f7c2003-05-16 01:46:51 +00001097- More fixes to urllib (SF 549151): (a) When redirecting, always use
1098 GET. This is common practice and more-or-less sanctioned by the
1099 HTTP standard. (b) Add a handler for 307 redirection, which becomes
1100 an error for POST, but a regular redirect for GET and HEAD
1101
Guido van Rossumbf1bef82003-05-13 18:01:19 +00001102- Added optional 'onerror' argument to os.walk(), to control error
1103 handling.
1104
Martin v. Löwise59e2ba2003-05-03 09:09:02 +00001105- inspect.is{method|data}descriptor was added, to allow pydoc display
1106 __doc__ of data descriptors.
1107
Skip Montanaro4a7751c2003-04-29 21:07:16 +00001108- Fixed socket speed loss caused by use of the _socketobject wrapper class
1109 in socket.py.
1110
Raymond Hettinger22952a32003-05-20 04:59:56 +00001111- timeit.py now checks the current directory for imports.
1112
Gustavo Niemeyer9556fba2003-06-07 17:53:08 +00001113- urllib2.py now knows how to order proxy classes, so the user doesn't
1114 have to insert it in front of other classes, nor do dirty tricks like
1115 inserting a "dummy" HTTPHandler after a ProxyHandler when building an
1116 opener with proxy support.
1117
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00001118- Iterators have been added for dbm keys.
1119
1120- random.Random objects can now be pickled.
1121
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001122Tools/Demos
1123-----------
1124
Martin v. Löwisb8c084e2003-06-14 09:03:46 +00001125- pydoc now offers help on keywords and topics.
1126
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00001127- Tools/idle is gone; long live Lib/idlelib.
1128
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00001129- diff.py prints file diffs in context, unified, or ndiff formats,
1130 providing a command line interface to difflib.py.
Raymond Hettinger2f3c74a2003-06-08 23:10:15 +00001131
Raymond Hettinger71e00332003-05-10 03:30:13 +00001132- texcheck.py is a new script for making a rough validation of Python LaTeX
1133 files.
1134
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001135Build
1136-----
1137
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001138- Setting DESTDIR during 'make install' now allows specifying a
Martin v. Löwis3b8ee082003-05-11 20:25:35 +00001139 different root directory.
1140
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001141C API
1142-----
1143
Tim Peters3cfe7542003-05-21 21:29:48 +00001144- PyType_Ready(): If a type declares that it participates in gc
1145 (Py_TPFLAGS_HAVE_GC), and its base class does not, and its base class's
1146 tp_free slot is the default _PyObject_Del, and type does not define
1147 a tp_free slot itself, _PyObject_GC_Del is assigned to type->tp_free.
1148 Previously _PyObject_Del was inherited, which could at best lead to a
1149 segfault. In addition, if even after this magic the type's tp_free
1150 slot is _PyObject_Del or NULL, and the type is a base type
1151 (Py_TPFLAGS_BASETYPE), TypeError is raised: since the type is a base
1152 type, its dealloc function must call type->tp_free, and since the type
1153 is gc'able, tp_free must not be NULL or _PyObject_Del.
1154
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00001155- PyThreadState_SetAsyncExc(): A new API (deliberately accessible only
1156 from C) to interrupt a thread by sending it an exception. It is
1157 intentional that you have to write your own C extension to call it
1158 from Python.
1159
1160
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001161New platforms
1162-------------
1163
1164None this time.
1165
1166Tests
1167-----
1168
1169- test_imp rewritten so that it doesn't raise RuntimeError if run as a
1170 side effect of being imported ("import test.autotest").
1171
1172Windows
1173-------
1174
Tim Petersfaa697a2003-06-22 01:42:20 +00001175- The Windows installer ships with Tcl/Tk 8.4.3 (upgraded from 8.4.1).
1176
Tim Petersc4607da2003-05-08 18:13:59 +00001177- The installer always suggested that Python be installed on the C:
1178 drive, due to a hardcoded "C:" generated by the Wise installation
1179 wizard. People with machines where C: is not the system drive
1180 usually want Python installed on whichever drive is their system drive
1181 instead. We removed the hardcoded "C:", and two testers on machines
1182 where C: is not the system drive report that the installer now
1183 suggests their system drive. Note that you can always select the
1184 directory you want in the "Select Destination Directory" dialog --
1185 that's what it's for.
1186
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001187Mac
1188---
1189
Just van Rossum99bc1fc2003-05-09 15:01:25 +00001190- There's a new module called "autoGIL", which offers a mechanism to
1191 automatically release the Global Interpreter Lock when an event loop
1192 goes to sleep, allowing other threads to run. It's currently only
1193 supported on OSX, in the Mach-O version.
Jack Jansenf5e23ff2003-06-16 13:53:40 +00001194- The OSA modules now allow direct access to properties of the
1195 toplevel application class (in AppleScript terminology).
1196- The Package Manager can now update itself.
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001197
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00001198SourceForge Bugs and Patches Applied
1199------------------------------------
1200
1201430160, 471893, 501716, 542562, 549151, 569574, 595837, 596434,
1202598163, 604210, 604716, 610332, 612627, 614770, 620190, 621891,
1203622042, 639139, 640236, 644345, 649742, 649742, 658233, 660022,
1204661318, 661676, 662807, 662923, 666219, 672855, 678325, 682347,
1205683486, 684981, 685773, 686254, 692776, 692959, 693094, 696777,
1206697989, 700827, 703666, 708495, 708604, 708901, 710733, 711902,
1207713722, 715782, 718286, 719359, 719367, 723136, 723831, 723962,
1208724588, 724767, 724767, 725942, 726150, 726446, 726869, 727051,
1209727719, 727719, 727805, 728277, 728563, 728656, 729096, 729103,
1210729293, 729297, 729300, 729317, 729395, 729622, 729817, 730170,
1211730296, 730594, 730685, 730826, 730963, 731209, 731403, 731504,
1212731514, 731626, 731635, 731643, 731644, 731644, 731689, 732124,
1213732143, 732234, 732284, 732284, 732479, 732761, 732783, 732951,
1214733667, 733781, 734118, 734231, 734869, 735051, 735293, 735527,
1215735613, 735694, 736962, 736962, 737970, 738066, 739313, 740055,
1216740234, 740301, 741806, 742126, 742741, 742860, 742860, 742911,
1217744041, 744104, 744238, 744687, 744877, 745055, 745478, 745525,
1218745620, 746012, 746304, 746366, 746801, 746953, 747348, 747667,
1219747954, 748846, 748849, 748973, 748975, 749191, 749210, 749759,
1220749831, 749911, 750008, 750092, 750542, 750595, 751038, 751107,
1221751276, 751451, 751916, 751941, 751956, 751998, 752671, 753451,
1222753602, 753617, 753845, 753925, 754014, 754340, 754447, 755031,
1223755087, 755147, 755245, 755683, 755987, 756032, 756996, 757058,
1224757229, 757818, 757821, 757822, 758112, 758910, 759227, 759889,
1225760257, 760703, 760792, 761104, 761337, 761519, 761830, 762455
1226
1227
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001228What's New in Python 2.3 beta 1?
1229================================
1230
Guido van Rossumfa1eddf2003-04-25 19:19:52 +00001231*Release date: 25-Apr-2003*
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001232
1233Core and builtins
1234-----------------
1235
Thomas Heller5eccabc2003-04-23 19:35:25 +00001236- New format codes B, H, I, k and K have been implemented for
1237 PyArg_ParseTuple and PyBuild_Value.
1238
Alex Martellia70b1912003-04-22 08:12:33 +00001239- New builtin function sum(seq, start=0) returns the sum of all the
1240 items in iterable object seq, plus start (items are normally numbers,
1241 and cannot be strings).
1242
Guido van Rossumaa86e352003-04-19 18:15:10 +00001243- bool() called without arguments now returns False rather than
1244 raising an exception. This is consistent with calling the
1245 constructors for the other builtin types -- called without argument
1246 they all return the false value of that type. (SF patch #724135)
1247
Guido van Rossumcf8d2852003-04-17 16:53:26 +00001248- In support of PEP 269 (making the pgen parser generator accessible
1249 from Python), some changes to the pgen code structure were made; a
1250 few files that used to be linked only with pgen are now linked with
1251 Python itself.
1252
Guido van Rossumc1f6e8c2003-04-16 21:13:23 +00001253- The repr() of a weakref object now shows the __name__ attribute of
1254 the referenced object, if it has one.
1255
Guido van Rossum76ba09f2003-04-16 19:40:58 +00001256- super() no longer ignores data descriptors, except __class__. See
1257 the thread started at
1258 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2003-April/034338.html
1259
Guido van Rossum3a3cca52003-04-14 20:58:14 +00001260- list.insert(i, x) now interprets negative i as it would be
1261 interpreted by slicing, so negative values count from the end of the
1262 list. This was the only place where such an interpretation was not
1263 placed on a list index.
1264
Guido van Rossumefbbb1c2003-04-11 18:43:06 +00001265- range() now works even if the arguments are longs with magnitude
1266 larger than sys.maxint, as long as the total length of the sequence
1267 fits. E.g., range(2**100, 2**101, 2**100) is the following list:
1268 [1267650600228229401496703205376L]. (SF patch #707427.)
1269
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001270- Some horridly obscure problems were fixed involving interaction
1271 between garbage collection and old-style classes with "ambitious"
1272 getattr hooks. If an old-style instance didn't have a __del__ method,
1273 but did have a __getattr__ hook, and the instance became reachable
1274 only from an unreachable cycle, and the hook resurrected or deleted
1275 unreachable objects when asked to resolve "__del__", anything up to
1276 a segfault could happen. That's been repaired.
1277
Raymond Hettingera3e1e4c2003-03-06 23:54:28 +00001278- dict.pop now takes an optional argument specifying a default
1279 value to return if the key is not in the dict. If a default is not
1280 given and the key is not found, a KeyError will still be raised.
1281 Parallel changes were made to UserDict.UserDict and UserDict.DictMixin.
1282 [SF patch #693753] (contributed by Michael Stone.)
1283
Martin v. Löwis73d538b2003-03-05 15:13:47 +00001284- sys.getfilesystemencoding() was added to expose
1285 Py_FileSystemDefaultEncoding.
Guido van Rossum46d3dc32003-03-01 03:20:41 +00001286
1287- New function sys.exc_clear() clears the current exception. This is
1288 rarely needed, but can sometimes be useful to release objects
1289 referenced by the traceback held in sys.exc_info()[2]. (SF patch
1290 #693195.)
1291
Neal Norwitzd5a65a72003-02-23 23:11:41 +00001292- On 64-bit systems, a dictionary could contain duplicate long/int keys
1293 if the key value was larger than 2**32. See SF bug #689659.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001294
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00001295- Fixed SF bug #663074. The codec system was using global static
Walter Dörwaldfa86bf52003-03-31 16:15:13 +00001296 variables to store internal data. As a result, any attempts to use the
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00001297 unicode system with multiple active interpreters, or successive
1298 interpreter executions, would fail.
1299
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00001300- "%c" % u"a" now returns a unicode string instead of raising a
Walter Dörwald44f527f2003-04-02 16:37:24 +00001301 TypeError. u"%c" % 0xffffffff now raises a OverflowError instead
Walter Dörwald1e469c52003-04-02 16:57:59 +00001302 of a ValueError to be consistent with "%c" % 256. See SF patch #710127.
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00001303
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001304Extension modules
1305-----------------
1306
Guido van Rossume7adda92003-04-25 05:52:37 +00001307- The socket module now provides the functions inet_pton and inet_ntop
1308 for converting between string and packed representation of IP
1309 addresses. There is also a new module variable, has_ipv6, which is
1310 True iff the current Python has IPv6 support. See SF patch #658327.
1311
Martin v. Löwisbfe175c2003-04-16 19:42:51 +00001312- Tkinter wrappers around Tcl variables now pass objects directly
1313 to Tcl, instead of first converting them to strings.
1314
Guido van Rossum41c99e72003-04-14 17:59:34 +00001315- The .*? pattern in the re module is now special-cased to avoid the
1316 recursion limit. (SF patch #720991 -- many thanks to Gary Herron
1317 and Greg Chapman.)
1318
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00001319- New function sys.call_tracing() allows pdb to debug code
1320 recursively.
1321
Tim Peters730f5532003-04-08 17:17:17 +00001322- New function gc.get_referents(obj) returns a list of objects
Tim Peters0f81ab62003-04-08 16:39:48 +00001323 directly referenced by obj. In effect, it exposes what the object's
1324 tp_traverse slot does, and can be helpful when debugging memory
1325 leaks.
1326
Martin v. Löwis7fb697b2003-04-03 04:49:12 +00001327- The iconv module has been removed from this release.
1328
Tim Petersd50ade62003-03-20 18:32:13 +00001329- The platform-independent routines for packing floats in IEEE formats
1330 (struct.pack's <f, >f, <d, and >d codes; pickle and cPickle's protocol 1
1331 pickling of floats) ignored that rounding can cause a carry to
1332 propagate. The worst consequence was that, in rare cases, <f and >f
1333 could produce strings that, when unpacked again, were a factor of 2
1334 away from the original float. This has been fixed. See SF bug
1335 #705836.
1336
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001337- New function time.tzset() provides access to the C library tzset()
Guido van Rossumd11b62e2003-03-14 21:51:36 +00001338 function, if supported. (SF patch #675422.)
1339
Neal Norwitz12e22172003-03-03 21:16:39 +00001340- Using createfilehandler, deletefilehandler, createtimerhandler functions
1341 on Tkinter.tkinter (_tkinter module) no longer crashes the interpreter.
1342 See SF bug #692416.
1343
Michael W. Hudsonf0089982003-03-03 12:29:42 +00001344- Modified the fcntl.ioctl() function to allow modification of a passed
1345 mutable buffer (for details see the reference documentation).
1346
Raymond Hettinger61fe64d2003-02-23 04:40:07 +00001347- Made user requested changes to the itertools module.
1348 Subsumed the times() function into repeat().
1349 Added chain() and cycle().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001350
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00001351- The rotor module is now deprecated; the encryption algorithm it uses
Andrew M. Kuchlingfb5f4852003-04-24 13:19:56 +00001352 is not believed to be secure, and including crypto code with Python
1353 has implications for exporting and importing it in various countries.
1354
Skip Montanaro89feabc2003-03-30 04:54:24 +00001355- The socket module now always uses the _socketobject wrapper class, even on
1356 platforms which have dup(2). The makefile() method is built directly
1357 on top of the socket without duplicating the file descriptor, allowing
1358 timeouts to work properly.
1359
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001360Library
1361-------
1362
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00001363- New generator function os.walk() is an easy-to-use alternative to
1364 os.path.walk(). See os module docs for details. os.path.walk()
1365 isn't deprecated at this time, but may become deprecated in a
1366 future release.
1367
Marc-André Lemburg246d8472003-04-24 11:36:11 +00001368- Added new module "platform" which provides a wide range of tools
1369 for querying platform dependent features.
1370
Andrew M. Kuchling4e42b312003-04-24 16:45:05 +00001371- netrc now allows ASCII punctuation characters in passwords.
Raymond Hettinger1d877862003-04-23 19:06:08 +00001372
Martin v. Löwis153c9e42003-04-19 20:59:03 +00001373- shelve now supports the optional writeback argument, and exposes
1374 pickle protocol versions.
1375
Guido van Rossuma2685402003-04-19 18:04:57 +00001376- Several methods of nntplib.NNTP have grown an optional file argument
1377 which specifies a file where to divert the command's output
1378 (already supported by the body() method). (SF patch #720468)
1379
Martin v. Löwis281b2c62003-04-18 21:04:39 +00001380- The self-documenting XML server library DocXMLRPCServer was added.
1381
Martin v. Löwis2548c732003-04-18 10:39:54 +00001382- Support for internationalized domain names has been added through
1383 the 'idna' and 'punycode' encodings, the 'stringprep' module, the
1384 'mkstringprep' tool, and enhancements to the socket and httplib
1385 modules.
1386
Walter Dörwald5688b7a2003-04-16 09:46:13 +00001387- htmlentitydefs has two new dictionaries: name2codepoint maps
1388 HTML entity names to Unicode codepoints (as integers).
1389 codepoint2name is the reverse mapping. See SF patch #722017.
1390
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00001391- pdb has a new command, "debug", which lets you step through
1392 arbitrary code from the debugger's (pdb) prompt.
1393
Raymond Hettingerc377cbf2003-04-04 22:56:42 +00001394- unittest.failUnlessEqual and its equivalent unittest.assertEqual now
1395 return 'not a == b' rather than 'a != b'. This gives the desired
1396 result for classes that define __eq__ without defining __ne__.
1397
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001398- sgmllib now supports SGML marked sections, in particular the
Martin v. Löwis3163a3b2003-03-30 14:25:40 +00001399 MS Office extensions.
1400
Raymond Hettinger42182eb2003-03-09 05:33:33 +00001401- The urllib module now offers support for the iterator protocol.
1402 SF patch 698520 contributed by Brett Cannon.
1403
Guido van Rossum9589a252003-03-06 01:56:12 +00001404- New module timeit provides a simple framework for timing the
1405 execution speed of expressions and statements.
1406
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001407- sets.Set objects now support mixed-type __eq__ and __ne__, instead
1408 of raising TypeError. If x is a Set object and y is a non-Set object,
1409 x == y is False, and x != y is True. This is akin to the change made
1410 for mixed-type comparisons of datetime objects in 2.3a2; more info
1411 about the rationale is in the NEWS entry for that. See also SF bug
1412 report <http://www.python.org/sf/693121>.
1413
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00001414- On Unix platforms, if os.listdir() is called with a Unicode argument,
1415 it now returns Unicode strings. (This behavior was added earlier
1416 to the Windows NT/2k/XP version of os.listdir().)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001417
Andrew M. Kuchling6f177d42003-02-28 22:09:33 +00001418- Distutils: both 'py_modules' and 'packages' keywords can now be specified
1419 in core.setup(). Previously you could supply one or the other, but
1420 not both of them. (SF patch #695090 from Bernhard Herzog)
1421
Skip Montanaro64a839e2003-03-20 23:36:55 +00001422- New csv package makes it easy to read/write CSV files.
1423
Gustavo Niemeyer68d8cef2003-04-17 21:31:33 +00001424- Module shlex has been extended to allow posix-like shell parsings,
1425 including a split() function for easy spliting of quoted strings and
1426 commands. An iterator interface was also implemented.
1427
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001428Tools/Demos
1429-----------
1430
Tim Peters21d7d4d2003-04-18 00:45:59 +00001431- New script combinerefs.py helps analyze new PYTHONDUMPREFS output.
1432 See the module docstring for details.
1433
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001434Build
1435-----
1436
Neal Norwitz35892b92003-02-23 23:45:35 +00001437- Fix problem building on OSF1 because the compiler only accepted
1438 preprocessor directives that start in column 1. (SF bug #691793.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001439
1440C API
1441-----
1442
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00001443- Added PyGC_Collect(), equivalent to calling gc.collect().
1444
Guido van Rossum0fc8f002003-04-15 15:12:39 +00001445- PyThreadState_GetDict() was changed not to raise an exception or
1446 issue a fatal error when no current thread state is available. This
1447 makes it possible to print dictionaries when no thread is active.
1448
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00001449- LONG_LONG was renamed to PY_LONG_LONG. Extensions that use this and
1450 need compatibility with previous versions can use this:
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00001451
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00001452 #ifndef PY_LONG_LONG
1453 #define PY_LONG_LONG LONG_LONG
1454 #endif
Martin v. Löwisb9a0f912003-03-29 10:06:18 +00001455
Raymond Hettinger1da1dbf2003-03-17 19:46:11 +00001456- Added PyObject_SelfIter() to fill the tp_iter slot for the
Raymond Hettinger01538262003-03-17 08:24:35 +00001457 typical case where the method returns its self argument.
1458
Guido van Rossume5c691a2003-03-07 15:13:17 +00001459- The extended type structure used for heap types (new-style
1460 classes defined by Python code using a class statement) is now
1461 exported from object.h as PyHeapTypeObject. (SF patch #696193.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001462
1463New platforms
1464-------------
1465
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00001466None this time.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001467
1468Tests
1469-----
1470
Neal Norwitz55b61d22003-02-28 19:57:03 +00001471- test_timeout now requires -u network to be passed to regrtest to run.
1472 See SF bug #692988.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001473
1474Windows
1475-------
1476
Tim Peters11b23062003-04-23 02:39:17 +00001477- os.fsync() now exists on Windows, and calls the Microsoft _commit()
1478 function.
1479
Guido van Rossumf4050642003-04-09 19:39:06 +00001480- New function winsound.MessageBeep() wraps the Win32 API
1481 MessageBeep().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001482
1483Mac
1484---
1485
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00001486- os.listdir() now returns Unicode strings on MacOS X when called with
1487 a Unicode argument. See the general news item under "Library".
Just van Rossum46c97842003-02-25 21:42:15 +00001488
Jack Jansendeac2ac2003-02-24 11:04:17 +00001489- A new method MacOS.WMAvailable() returns true if it is safe to access
1490 the window manager, false otherwise.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001491
Jack Jansencf76be02003-03-24 12:13:54 +00001492- EasyDialogs dialogs are now movable-modal, and if the application is
1493 currently in the background they will ask to be moved to the foreground
1494 before displaying.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001495
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00001496- OSA Scripting support has improved a lot, and gensuitemodule.py can now
Jack Jansende354b72003-04-11 15:37:20 +00001497 be used by mere mortals. The documentation is now also more or less
1498 complete.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001499
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00001500- The IDE (in a framework build) now includes introductory documentation
1501 in Apple Help Viewer format.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001502
1503
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001504What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 2?
1505=================================
1506
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00001507*Release date: 19-Feb-2003*
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001508
1509Core and builtins
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00001510-----------------
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001511
Walter Dörwald2ffec022003-02-19 16:34:11 +00001512- Negative positions returned from PEP 293 error callbacks are now
1513 treated as being relative to the end of the input string. Positions
1514 that are out of bounds raise an IndexError.
1515
Guido van Rossum162e38c2003-02-19 15:25:10 +00001516- sys.path[0] (the directory from which the script is loaded) is now
1517 turned into an absolute pathname, unless it is the empty string.
1518 (SF patch #664376.)
1519
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00001520- Finally fixed the bug in compile() and exec where a string ending
1521 with an indented code block but no newline would raise SyntaxError.
1522 This would have been a four-line change in parsetok.c... Except
1523 codeop.py depends on this behavior, so a compilation flag had to be
1524 invented that causes the tokenizer to revert to the old behavior;
1525 this required extra changes to 2 .h files, 2 .c files, and 2 .py
Guido van Rossum1442dc12003-02-13 22:19:20 +00001526 files. (Fixes SF bug #501622.)
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00001527
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00001528- If a new-style class defines neither __new__ nor __init__, its
1529 constructor would ignore all arguments. This is changed now: the
1530 constructor refuses arguments in this case. This might break code
1531 that worked under Python 2.2. The simplest fix is to add a no-op
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001532 __init__: ``def __init__(self, *args, **kw): pass``.
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00001533
Guido van Rossum48035eb2003-02-12 17:05:26 +00001534- Through a bytecode optimizer bug (and I bet you didn't even know
1535 Python *had* a bytecode optimizer :-), "unsigned" hex/oct constants
1536 with a leading minus sign would come out with the wrong sign.
1537 ("Unsigned" hex/oct constants are those with a face value in the
1538 range sys.maxint+1 through sys.maxint*2+1, inclusive; these have
1539 always been interpreted as negative numbers through sign folding.)
1540 E.g. 0xffffffff is -1, and -(0xffffffff) is 1, but -0xffffffff would
1541 come out as -4294967295. This was the case in Python 2.2 through
1542 2.2.2 and 2.3a1, and in Python 2.4 it will once again have that
1543 value, but according to PEP 237 it really needs to be 1 now. This
1544 will be backported to Python 2.2.3 a well. (SF #660455)
1545
Guido van Rossum47710652003-02-12 20:48:22 +00001546- int(s, base) sometimes sign-folds hex and oct constants; it only
1547 does this when base is 0 and s.strip() starts with a '0'. When the
1548 sign is actually folded, as in int("0xffffffff", 0) on a 32-bit
1549 machine, which returns -1, a FutureWarning is now issued; in Python
1550 2.4, this will return 4294967295L, as do int("+0xffffffff", 0) and
1551 int("0xffffffff", 16) right now. (PEP 347)
1552
Guido van Rossuma89d10e2003-02-12 03:58:38 +00001553- super(X, x): x may now be a proxy for an X instance, i.e.
1554 issubclass(x.__class__, X) but not issubclass(type(x), X).
1555
Guido van Rossum03bc7d32003-02-12 03:32:58 +00001556- isinstance(x, X): if X is a new-style class, this is now equivalent
1557 to issubclass(type(x), X) or issubclass(x.__class__, X). Previously
1558 only type(x) was tested. (For classic classes this was already the
1559 case.)
1560
Just van Rossum73ffb4a2003-02-10 09:57:08 +00001561- compile(), eval() and the exec statement now fully support source code
1562 passed as unicode strings.
1563
Neal Norwitzde8b94c2003-02-10 02:12:43 +00001564- int subclasses can be initialized with longs if the value fits in an int.
1565 See SF bug #683467.
1566
Tim Petersbf2674b2003-02-02 07:51:32 +00001567- long(string, base) takes time linear in len(string) when base is a power
1568 of 2 now. It used to take time quadratic in len(string).
1569
Martin v. Löwis8afd7572003-01-25 22:46:11 +00001570- filter returns now Unicode results for Unicode arguments.
1571
Martin v. Löwisaf6a27a2003-01-03 19:16:14 +00001572- raw_input can now return Unicode objects.
1573
Skip Montanaro4abd5f02003-01-02 20:51:08 +00001574- List objects' sort() method now accepts None as the comparison function.
1575 Passing None is semantically identical to calling sort() with no
1576 arguments.
1577
Neal Norwitz1a997502003-01-13 20:13:12 +00001578- Fixed crash when printing a subclass of str and __str__ returned self.
1579 See SF bug #667147.
1580
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00001581- Fixed an invalid RuntimeWarning and an undetected error when trying
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00001582 to convert a long integer into a float which couldn't fit.
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00001583 See SF bug #676155.
1584
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00001585- Function objects now have a __module__ attribute that is bound to
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00001586 the name of the module in which the function was defined. This
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00001587 applies for C functions and methods as well as functions and methods
1588 defined in Python. This attribute is used by pickle.whichmodule(),
1589 which changes the behavior of whichmodule slightly. In Python 2.2
1590 whichmodule() returns "__main__" for functions that are not defined
1591 at the top-level of a module (examples: methods, nested functions).
1592 Now whichmodule() will return the proper module name.
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00001593
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001594Extension modules
1595-----------------
1596
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00001597- operator.isNumberType() now checks that the object has a nb_int or
1598 nb_float slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
1599 tp_as_number pointer.
1600
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00001601- The imp module now has ways to acquire and release the "import
1602 lock": imp.acquire_lock() and imp.release_lock(). Note: this is a
1603 reentrant lock, so releasing the lock only truly releases it when
1604 this is the last release_lock() call. You can check with
1605 imp.lock_held(). (SF bug #580952 and patch #683257.)
1606
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001607- Change to cPickle to match pickle.py (see below and PEP 307).
1608
Neal Norwitz9caf9c02003-02-10 01:54:06 +00001609- Fix some bugs in the parser module. SF bug #678518.
1610
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00001611- Thanks to Scott David Daniels, a subtle bug in how the zlib
Walter Dörwald28d81962003-02-03 20:53:14 +00001612 extension implemented flush() was fixed. Scott also rewrote the
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00001613 zlib test suite using the unittest module. (SF bug #640230 and
1614 patch #678531.)
1615
Raymond Hettinger96ef8112003-02-01 00:10:11 +00001616- Added an itertools module containing high speed, memory efficient
1617 looping constructs inspired by tools from Haskell and SML.
1618
Guido van Rossum99d4abf2003-01-27 22:22:50 +00001619- The SSL module now handles sockets with a timeout set correctly (SF
1620 patch #675750, fixing SF bug #675552).
1621
Barry Warsawf8ba39c2003-01-07 20:55:26 +00001622- os/posixmodule has grown the sysexits.h constants (EX_OK and friends).
1623
Guido van Rossum6d0d3652003-01-07 20:34:19 +00001624- Fixed broken threadstate swap in readline that could cause fatal
1625 errors when a readline hook was being invoked while a background
1626 thread was active. (SF bugs #660476 and #513033.)
1627
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001628- fcntl now exposes the strops.h I_* constants.
1629
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00001630- Fix a crash on Solaris that occurred when calling close() on
1631 an mmap'ed file which was already closed. (SF patch #665913)
1632
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001633- Fixed several serious bugs in the zipimport implementation.
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001634
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00001635- datetime changes:
1636
Guido van Rossum8b7a9a32003-04-14 22:01:58 +00001637 The date class is now properly subclassable. (SF bug #720908)
1638
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00001639 The datetime and datetimetz classes have been collapsed into a single
1640 datetime class, and likewise the time and timetz classes into a single
1641 time class. Previously, a datetimetz object with tzinfo=None acted
1642 exactly like a datetime object, and similarly for timetz. This wasn't
1643 enough of a difference to justify distinct classes, and life is simpler
1644 now.
1645
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00001646 today() and now() now round system timestamps to the closest
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00001647 microsecond <http://www.python.org/sf/661086>. This repairs an
1648 irritation most likely seen on Windows systems.
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00001649
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00001650 In dt.astimezone(tz), if tz.utcoffset(dt) returns a duration,
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00001651 ValueError is raised if tz.dst(dt) returns None (2.3a1 treated it
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00001652 as 0 instead, but a tzinfo subclass wishing to participate in
1653 time zone conversion has to take a stand on whether it supports
1654 DST; if you don't care about DST, then code dst() to return 0 minutes,
1655 meaning that DST is never in effect).
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00001656
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00001657 The tzinfo methods utcoffset() and dst() must return a timedelta object
1658 (or None) now. In 2.3a1 they could also return an int or long, but that
1659 was an unhelpfully redundant leftover from an earlier version wherein
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00001660 they couldn't return a timedelta. TOOWTDI.
1661
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00001662 The example tzinfo class for local time had a bug. It was replaced
1663 by a later example coded by Guido.
1664
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00001665 datetime.astimezone(tz) no longer raises an exception when the
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00001666 input datetime has no UTC equivalent in tz. For typical "hybrid" time
1667 zones (a single tzinfo subclass modeling both standard and daylight
1668 time), this case can arise one hour per year, at the hour daylight time
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00001669 ends. See new docs for details. In short, the new behavior mimics
1670 the local wall clock's behavior of repeating an hour in local time.
1671
1672 dt.astimezone() can no longer be used to convert between naive and aware
1673 datetime objects. If you merely want to attach, or remove, a tzinfo
1674 object, without any conversion of date and time members, use
1675 dt.replace(tzinfo=whatever) instead, where "whatever" is None or a
1676 tzinfo subclass instance.
1677
1678 A new method tzinfo.fromutc(dt) can be overridden in tzinfo subclasses
1679 to give complete control over how a UTC time is to be converted to
1680 a local time. The default astimezone() implementation calls fromutc()
1681 as its last step, so a tzinfo subclass can affect that too by overriding
1682 fromutc(). It's expected that the default fromutc() implementation will
1683 be suitable as-is for "almost all" time zone subclasses, but the
1684 creativity of political time zone fiddling appears unbounded -- fromutc()
1685 allows the highly motivated to emulate any scheme expressible in Python.
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00001686
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00001687 datetime.now(): The optional tzinfo argument was undocumented (that's
1688 repaired), and its name was changed to tz ("tzinfo" is overloaded enough
1689 already). With a tz argument, now(tz) used to return the local date
1690 and time, and attach tz to it, without any conversion of date and time
1691 members. This was less than useful. Now now(tz) returns the current
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001692 date and time as local time in tz's time zone, akin to ::
1693
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00001694 tz.fromutc(datetime.utcnow().replace(tzinfo=utc))
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001695
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00001696 where "utc" is an instance of a tzinfo subclass modeling UTC. Without
1697 a tz argument, now() continues to return the current local date and time,
1698 as a naive datetime object.
1699
Tim Peters2a44a8d2003-01-23 20:53:10 +00001700 datetime.fromtimestamp(): Like datetime.now() above, this had less than
1701 useful behavior when the optional tinzo argument was specified. See
1702 also SF bug report <http://www.python.org/sf/660872>.
1703
Tim Peters8d81a012003-01-24 22:36:34 +00001704 date and datetime comparison: In order to prevent comparison from
1705 falling back to the default compare-object-addresses strategy, these
1706 raised TypeError whenever they didn't understand the other object type.
1707 They still do, except when the other object has a "timetuple" attribute,
1708 in which case they return NotImplemented now. This gives other
1709 datetime objects (e.g., mxDateTime) a chance to intercept the
1710 comparison.
1711
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00001712 date, time, datetime and timedelta comparison: When the exception
1713 for mixed-type comparisons in the last paragraph doesn't apply, if
1714 the comparison is == then False is returned, and if the comparison is
1715 != then True is returned. Because dict lookup and the "in" operator
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001716 only invoke __eq__, this allows, for example, ::
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00001717
1718 if some_datetime in some_sequence:
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001719
1720 and ::
1721
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00001722 some_dict[some_timedelta] = whatever
1723
1724 to work as expected, without raising TypeError just because the
1725 sequence is heterogeneous, or the dict has mixed-type keys. [This
1726 seems like a good idea to implement for all mixed-type comparisons
1727 that don't want to allow falling back to address comparison.]
1728
Tim Peters75a6e3b2003-01-04 18:17:36 +00001729 The constructors building a datetime from a timestamp could raise
1730 ValueError if the platform C localtime()/gmtime() inserted "leap
1731 seconds". Leap seconds are ignored now. On such platforms, it's
1732 possible to have timestamps that differ by a second, yet where
1733 datetimes constructed from them are equal.
1734
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00001735 The pickle format of date, time and datetime objects has changed
1736 completely. The undocumented pickler and unpickler functions no
Tim Petersb57f8f02003-02-01 02:54:15 +00001737 longer exist. The undocumented __setstate__() and __getstate__()
1738 methods no longer exist either.
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00001739
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001740Library
1741-------
1742
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001743- The logging module was updated slightly; the WARN level was renamed
1744 to WARNING, and the matching function/method warn() to warning().
1745
1746- The pickle and cPickle modules were updated with a new pickling
1747 protocol (documented by pickletools.py, see below) and several
1748 extensions to the pickle customization API (__reduce__, __setstate__
1749 etc.). The copy module now uses more of the pickle customization
1750 API to copy objects that don't implement __copy__ or __deepcopy__.
1751 See PEP 307 for details.
1752
1753- The distutils "register" command now uses http://www.python.org/pypi
1754 as the default repository. (See PEP 301.)
1755
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00001756- the platform dependent path related variables sep, altsep, extsep,
1757 pathsep, curdir, pardir and defpath are now defined in the platform
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00001758 dependent path modules (e.g. ntpath.py) rather than os.py, so these
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001759 variables are now available via os.path. They continue to be
1760 available from the os module.
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00001761 (see <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00001762
Tim Peters6ee04802003-02-05 18:29:34 +00001763- array.array was added to the types repr.py knows about (see
1764 <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
1765
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00001766- The new pickletools.py contains lots of documentation about pickle
1767 internals, and supplies some helpers for working with pickles, such as
1768 a symbolic pickle disassembler.
1769
Skip Montanaro9a7c96a2003-01-22 18:17:25 +00001770- Xmlrpclib.py now supports the builtin boolean type.
1771
Martin v. Löwis0c6774d2003-01-15 11:51:06 +00001772- py_compile has a new 'doraise' flag and a new PyCompileError
1773 exception.
1774
Martin v. Löwisd69663d2003-01-15 11:37:23 +00001775- SimpleXMLRPCServer now supports CGI through the CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler
1776 class.
1777
Guido van Rossum50e92232003-01-14 16:45:04 +00001778- The sets module now raises TypeError in __cmp__, to clarify that
1779 sets are not intended to be three-way-compared; the comparison
1780 operators are overloaded as subset/superset tests.
1781
Guido van Rossumcd0c0472003-01-07 23:03:05 +00001782- Bastion.py and rexec.py are disabled. These modules are not safe in
1783 Python 2.2. or 2.3.
1784
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001785- realpath is now exported when doing ``from poxixpath import *``.
Neal Norwitzbb0246a2003-01-03 18:12:28 +00001786 It is also exported for ntpath, macpath, and os2emxpath.
1787 See SF bug #659228.
1788
Neal Norwitzb9ef4ae2003-01-05 23:19:43 +00001789- New module tarfile from Lars Gustäbel provides a comprehensive interface
1790 to tar archive files with transparent gzip and bzip2 compression.
1791 See SF patch #651082.
1792
Neal Norwitz4f442372003-01-06 06:51:36 +00001793- urlparse can now parse imap:// URLs. See SF feature request #618024.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001794
Neal Norwitze931ed52003-01-10 23:24:32 +00001795- Tkinter.Canvas.scan_dragto() provides an optional parameter to support
1796 the gain value which is passed to Tk. SF bug# 602259.
1797
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00001798- Fix logging.handlers.SysLogHandler protocol when using UNIX domain sockets.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00001799 See SF patch #642974.
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00001800
Skip Montanaro12fe72e2003-02-25 17:46:20 +00001801- The dospath module was deleted. Use the ntpath module when manipulating
1802 DOS paths from other platforms.
1803
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001804Tools/Demos
1805-----------
1806
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00001807- Two new scripts (db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py) were added to the
1808 Tools/scripts directory to facilitate conversion from the old bsddb module
1809 to the new one. While the user-visible API of the new module is
1810 compatible with the old one, it's likely that the version of the
1811 underlying database library has changed. To convert from the old library,
1812 run the db2pickle.py script using the old version of Python to convert it
1813 to a pickle file. After upgrading Python, run the pickle2db.py script
1814 using the new version of Python to reconstitute your database. For
1815 example:
1816
Skip Montanaro621f0552003-02-03 15:48:10 +00001817 % python2.2 db2pickle.py -h some.db > some.pickle
1818 % python2.3 pickle2db.py -h some.db.new < some.pickle
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00001819
1820 Run the scripts without any args to get a usage message.
1821
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001822
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001823Build
1824-----
1825
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00001826- The audio driver tests (test_ossaudiodev.py and
1827 test_linuxaudiodev.py) are no longer run by default. This is
1828 because they don't always work, depending on your hardware and
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001829 software. To run these tests, you must use an invocation like ::
1830
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00001831 ./python Lib/test/regrtest.py -u audio test_ossaudiodev
1832
Skip Montanarodecc6a42003-01-01 20:07:49 +00001833- On systems which build using the configure script, compiler flags which
1834 used to be lumped together using the OPT flag have been split into two
1835 groups, OPT and BASECFLAGS. OPT is meant to carry just optimization- and
1836 debug-related flags like "-g" and "-O3". BASECFLAGS is meant to carry
1837 compiler flags that are required to get a clean compile. On some
1838 platforms (many Linux flavors in particular) BASECFLAGS will be empty by
1839 default. On others, such as Mac OS X and SCO, it will contain required
1840 flags. This change allows people building Python to override OPT without
1841 fear of clobbering compiler flags which are required to get a clean build.
1842
1843- On Darwin/Mac OS X platforms, /sw/lib and /sw/include are added to the
1844 relevant search lists in setup.py. This allows users building Python to
1845 take advantage of the many packages available from the fink project
1846 <http://fink.sf.net/>.
1847
1848- A new Makefile target, scriptsinstall, installs a number of useful scripts
1849 from the Tools/scripts directory.
1850
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001851C API
1852-----
1853
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001854- PyEval_GetFrame() is now declared to return a ``PyFrameObject *``
1855 instead of a plain ``PyObject *``. (SF patch #686601.)
Guido van Rossum6297a7a2003-02-19 15:53:17 +00001856
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00001857- PyNumber_Check() now checks that the object has a nb_int or nb_float
1858 slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
1859 tp_as_number pointer.
1860
Guido van Rossumeea47182003-02-11 20:39:59 +00001861- A C type that inherits from a base type that defines tp_as_buffer
1862 will now inherit the tp_as_buffer pointer if it doesn't define one.
1863 (SF #681367)
1864
Neil Schemenauer5042da62003-02-04 20:59:40 +00001865- The PyArg_Parse functions now issue a DeprecationWarning if a float
1866 argument is provided when an integer is specified (this affects the 'b',
1867 'B', 'h', 'H', 'i', and 'l' codes). Future versions of Python will
1868 raise a TypeError.
Neil Schemenauercd63e612003-01-24 22:15:53 +00001869
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001870Tests
1871-----
1872
Walter Dörwald11cfbd62003-03-26 16:03:16 +00001873- Several tests weren't being run from regrtest.py (test_timeout.py,
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001874 test_tarfile.py, test_netrc.py, test_multifile.py,
1875 test_importhooks.py and test_imp.py). Now they are. (Note to
1876 developers: please read Lib/test/README when creating a new test, to
1877 make sure to do it right! All tests need to use either unittest or
1878 pydoc.)
1879
1880- Added test_posix.py, a test suite for the posix module.
1881
1882- Added test_hexoct.py, a test suite for hex/oct constant folding.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001883
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001884Windows
1885-------
1886
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00001887- The timeout code for socket connect() didn't work right; this has
1888 now been fixed. test_timeout.py should pass (at least most of the
1889 time).
1890
Thomas Hellerdda583d2003-01-31 20:45:41 +00001891- distutils' msvccompiler class now passes the preprocessor options to
1892 the resource compiler. See SF patch #669198.
1893
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00001894- The bsddb module now ships with Sleepycat's 4.1.25.NC, the latest
1895 release without strong cryptography.
1896
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00001897- sys.path[0], if it contains a directory name, is now always an
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001898 absolute pathname. (SF patch #664376.)
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00001899
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00001900- The new logging package is now installed by the Windows installer. It
1901 wasn't in 2.3a1 due to oversight.
1902
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001903Mac
1904---
1905
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00001906- There are new dialogs EasyDialogs.AskFileForOpen, AskFileForSave
1907 and AskFolder. The old macfs.StandardGetFile and friends are deprecated.
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00001908
Jack Jansenc9296362003-02-06 23:10:45 +00001909- Most of the standard library now uses pathnames or FSRefs in preference
1910 of FSSpecs, and use the underlying Carbon.File and Carbon.Folder modules
1911 in stead of macfs. macfs will probably be deprecated in the future.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00001912
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00001913- Type Carbon.File.FSCatalogInfo and supporting methods have been implemented.
1914 This also makes macfs.FSSpec.SetDates() work again.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001915
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00001916- There is a new module pimp, the package install manager for Python, and
1917 accompanying applet PackageManager. These allow you to easily download
1918 and install pretested extension packages either in source or binary
1919 form. Only in MacPython-OSX.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001920
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00001921- Applets are now built with bundlebuilder in MacPython-OSX, which should make
Jack Jansen5d44b342003-02-18 23:32:47 +00001922 them more robust and also provides a path towards BuildApplication. The
1923 downside of this change is that applets can no longer be run from the
1924 Terminal window, this will hopefully be fixed in the 2.3b1.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001925
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001926
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001927What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 1?
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001928=================================
1929
Guido van Rossumae548862002-12-31 15:47:36 +00001930*Release date: 31-Dec-2002*
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001931
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001932Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001933--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00001934
Michael W. Hudson96bc3b42002-11-26 14:48:23 +00001935- One can now assign to __bases__ and __name__ of new-style classes.
1936
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00001937- dict() now accepts keyword arguments so that dict(one=1, two=2)
1938 is the equivalent of {"one": 1, "two": 2}. Accordingly,
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00001939 the existing (but undocumented) 'items' keyword argument has
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00001940 been eliminated. This means that dict(items=someMapping) now has
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00001941 a different meaning than before.
1942
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00001943- int() now returns a long object if the argument is outside the
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001944 integer range, so int("4" * 1000), int(1e200) and int(1L<<1000) will
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00001945 all return long objects instead of raising an OverflowError.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001946
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00001947- Assignment to __class__ is disallowed if either the old or the new
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00001948 class is a statically allocated type object (such as defined by an
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00001949 extension module). This prevents anomalies like 2.__class__ = bool.
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00001950
1951- New-style object creation and deallocation have been sped up
1952 significantly; they are now faster than classic instance creation
1953 and deallocation.
1954
1955- The __slots__ variable can now mention "private" names, and the
1956 right thing will happen (e.g. __slots__ = ["__foo"]).
1957
1958- The built-ins slice() and buffer() are now callable types. The
1959 types classobj (formerly class), code, function, instance, and
1960 instancemethod (formerly instance-method), which have no built-in
1961 names but are accessible through the types module, are now also
1962 callable. The type dict-proxy is renamed to dictproxy.
1963
1964- Cycles going through the __class__ link of a new-style instance are
1965 now detected by the garbage collector.
1966
1967- Classes using __slots__ are now properly garbage collected.
1968 [SF bug 519621]
1969
1970- Tightened the __slots__ rules: a slot name must be a valid Python
1971 identifier.
1972
1973- The constructor for the module type now requires a name argument and
1974 takes an optional docstring argument. Previously, this constructor
1975 ignored its arguments. As a consequence, deriving a class from a
1976 module (not from the module type) is now illegal; previously this
1977 created an unnamed module, just like invoking the module type did.
1978 [SF bug 563060]
1979
1980- A new type object, 'basestring', is added. This is a common base type
1981 for 'str' and 'unicode', and can be used instead of
1982 types.StringTypes, e.g. to test whether something is "a string":
1983 isinstance(x, basestring) is True for Unicode and 8-bit strings. This
1984 is an abstract base class and cannot be instantiated directly.
1985
1986- Changed new-style class instantiation so that when C's __new__
1987 method returns something that's not a C instance, its __init__ is
1988 not called. [SF bug #537450]
1989
1990- Fixed super() to work correctly with class methods. [SF bug #535444]
1991
1992- If you try to pickle an instance of a class that has __slots__ but
1993 doesn't define or override __getstate__, a TypeError is now raised.
1994 This is done by adding a bozo __getstate__ to the class that always
1995 raises TypeError. (Before, this would appear to be pickled, but the
1996 state of the slots would be lost.)
1997
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001998Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001999-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002000
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00002001- Import from zipfiles is now supported. The name of a zipfile placed
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00002002 on sys.path causes the import statement to look for importable Python
2003 modules (with .py, pyc and .pyo extensions) and packages inside the
2004 zipfile. The zipfile import follows the specification (though not
2005 the sample implementation) of PEP 273. The semantics of __path__ are
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00002006 compatible with those that have been implemented in Jython since
2007 Jython 2.1.
2008
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002009- PEP 302 has been accepted. Although it was initially developed to
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00002010 support zipimport, it offers a new, general import hook mechanism.
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00002011 Several new variables have been added to the sys module:
2012 sys.meta_path, sys.path_hooks, and sys.path_importer_cache; these
2013 make extending the import statement much more convenient than
2014 overriding the __import__ built-in function. For a description of
2015 these, see PEP 302.
2016
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00002017- A frame object's f_lineno attribute can now be written to from a
2018 trace function to change which line will execute next. A command to
2019 exploit this from pdb has been added. [SF patch #643835]
2020
Marc-André Lemburg20b91352002-12-12 18:01:43 +00002021- The _codecs support module for codecs.py was turned into a builtin
2022 module to assure that at least the builtin codecs are available
2023 to the Python parser for source code decoding according to PEP 263.
2024
Walter Dörwaldd9a6ad32002-12-12 16:41:44 +00002025- issubclass now supports a tuple as the second argument, just like
2026 isinstance does. ``issubclass(X, (A, B))`` is equivalent to
2027 ``issubclass(X, A) or issubclass(X, B)``.
2028
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00002029- Thanks to Armin Rigo, the last known way to provoke a system crash
2030 by cleverly arranging for a comparison function to mutate a list
2031 during a list.sort() operation has been fixed. The effect of
2032 attempting to mutate a list, or even to inspect its contents or
2033 length, while a sort is in progress, is not defined by the language.
2034 The C implementation of Python 2.3 attempts to detect mutations,
2035 and raise ValueError if one occurs, but there's no guarantee that
2036 all mutations will be caught, or that any will be caught across
2037 releases or implementations.
2038
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00002039- Unicode file name processing for Windows (PEP 277) is implemented.
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00002040 All platforms now have an os.path.supports_unicode_filenames attribute,
2041 which is set to True on Windows NT/2000/XP, and False elsewhere.
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00002042
Walter Dörwald3aeb6322002-09-02 13:14:32 +00002043- Codec error handling callbacks (PEP 293) are implemented.
2044 Error handling in unicode.encode or str.decode can now be customized.
2045
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00002046- A subtle change to the semantics of the built-in function intern():
2047 interned strings are no longer immortal. You must keep a reference
2048 to the return value intern() around to get the benefit.
2049
Guido van Rossumf808b892002-08-16 03:38:10 +00002050- Use of 'None' as a variable, argument or attribute name now
2051 issues a SyntaxWarning. In the future, None may become a keyword.
2052
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00002053- SET_LINENO is gone. co_lnotab is now consulted to determine when to
2054 call the trace function. C code that accessed f_lineno should call
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00002055 PyCode_Addr2Line instead (f_lineno is still there, but only kept up
2056 to date when there is a trace function set).
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00002057
Guido van Rossum9be89462002-08-14 16:11:30 +00002058- There's a new warning category, FutureWarning. This is used to warn
2059 about a number of situations where the value or sign of an integer
2060 result will change in Python 2.4 as a result of PEP 237 (integer
2061 unification). The warnings implement stage B0 mentioned in that
2062 PEP. The warnings are about the following situations:
2063
2064 - Octal and hex literals without 'L' prefix in the inclusive range
2065 [0x80000000..0xffffffff]; these are currently negative ints, but
2066 in Python 2.4 they will be positive longs with the same bit
2067 pattern.
2068
2069 - Left shifts on integer values that cause the outcome to lose
2070 bits or have a different sign than the left operand. To be
2071 precise: x<<n where this currently doesn't yield the same value
2072 as long(x)<<n; in Python 2.4, the outcome will be long(x)<<n.
2073
2074 - Conversions from ints to string that show negative values as
2075 unsigned ints in the inclusive range [0x80000000..0xffffffff];
2076 this affects the functions hex() and oct(), and the string
2077 formatting codes %u, %o, %x, and %X. In Python 2.4, these will
2078 show signed values (e.g. hex(-1) currently returns "0xffffffff";
2079 in Python 2.4 it will return "-0x1").
2080
Guido van Rossum9a2eda52002-12-31 02:12:42 +00002081- The bits manipulated under the cover by sys.setcheckinterval() have
2082 been changed. Both the check interval and the ticker used to be
2083 per-thread values. They are now just a pair of global variables.
2084 In addition, the default check interval was boosted from 10 to 100
2085 bytecode instructions. This may have some effect on systems that
2086 relied on the old default value. In particular, in multi-threaded
2087 applications which try to be highly responsive, response time will
2088 increase by some (perhaps imperceptible) amount.
Skip Montanaro979c74b2002-09-03 21:25:14 +00002089
Tim Petersd64c1de2002-08-12 17:36:03 +00002090- When multiplying very large integers, a version of the so-called
2091 Karatsuba algorithm is now used. This is most effective if the
2092 inputs have roughly the same size. If they both have about N digits,
2093 Karatsuba multiplication has O(N**1.58) runtime (the exponent is
2094 log_base_2(3)) instead of the previous O(N**2). Measured results may
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00002095 be better or worse than that, depending on platform quirks. Besides
2096 the O() improvement in raw instruction count, the Karatsuba algorithm
2097 appears to have much better cache behavior on extremely large integers
2098 (starting in the ballpark of a million bits). Note that this is a
2099 simple implementation, and there's no intent here to compete with,
2100 e.g., GMP. It gives a very nice speedup when it applies, but a package
2101 devoted to fast large-integer arithmetic should run circles around it.
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00002102
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00002103- u'%c' will now raise a ValueError in case the argument is an
2104 integer outside the valid range of Unicode code point ordinals.
2105
Guido van Rossumdeb09362002-08-09 17:16:30 +00002106- The tempfile module has been overhauled for enhanced security. The
2107 mktemp() function is now deprecated; new, safe replacements are
2108 mkstemp() (for files) and mkdtemp() (for directories), and the
2109 higher-level functions NamedTemporaryFile() and TemporaryFile().
2110 Use of some global variables in this module is also deprecated; the
2111 new functions have keyword arguments to provide the same
2112 functionality. All Lib, Tools and Demo modules that used the unsafe
2113 interfaces have been updated to use the safe replacements. Thanks
2114 to Zack Weinberg!
2115
Guido van Rossumd81a9832002-08-09 15:57:34 +00002116- When x is an object whose class implements __mul__ and __rmul__,
2117 1.0*x would correctly invoke __rmul__, but 1*x would erroneously
2118 invoke __mul__. This was due to the sequence-repeat code in the int
2119 type. This has been fixed now.
2120
Barry Warsawd79f6832002-08-06 17:01:51 +00002121- Previously, "str1 in str2" required str1 to be a string of length 1.
2122 This restriction has been relaxed to allow str1 to be a string of
2123 any length. Thus "'el' in 'hello world'" returns True now.
2124
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00002125- File objects are now their own iterators. For a file f, iter(f) now
2126 returns f (unless f is closed), and f.next() is similar to
2127 f.readline() when EOF is not reached; however, f.next() uses a
2128 readahead buffer that messes up the file position, so mixing
2129 f.next() and f.readline() (or other methods) doesn't work right.
2130 Calling f.seek() drops the readahead buffer, but other operations
2131 don't. It so happens that this gives a nice additional speed boost
2132 to "for line in file:"; the xreadlines method and corresponding
Guido van Rossumbffb2ef2002-08-09 17:17:07 +00002133 module are now obsolete. Thanks to Oren Tirosh!
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00002134
Guido van Rossumde392d32002-08-05 14:17:20 +00002135- Encoding declarations (PEP 263, phase 1) have been implemented. A
2136 comment of the form "# -*- coding: <encodingname> -*-" in the first
2137 or second line of a Python source file indicates the encoding.
Martin v. Löwis00f1e3f2002-08-04 17:29:52 +00002138
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00002139- list.sort() has a new implementation. While cross-platform results
2140 may vary, and in data-dependent ways, this is much faster on many
2141 kinds of partially ordered lists than the previous implementation,
2142 and reported to be just as fast on randomly ordered lists on
2143 several major platforms. This sort is also stable (if A==B and A
2144 precedes B in the list at the start, A precedes B after the sort too),
2145 although the language definition does not guarantee stability. A
2146 potential drawback is that list.sort() may require temp space of
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00002147 len(list)*2 bytes (``*4`` on a 64-bit machine). It's therefore possible
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00002148 for list.sort() to raise MemoryError now, even if a comparison function
2149 does not. See <http://www.python.org/sf/587076> for full details.
2150
Guido van Rossum2d5389c2002-07-23 03:44:35 +00002151- All standard iterators now ensure that, once StopIteration has been
2152 raised, all future calls to next() on the same iterator will also
2153 raise StopIteration. There used to be various counterexamples to
2154 this behavior, which could caused confusion or subtle program
2155 breakage, without any benefits. (Note that this is still an
2156 iterator's responsibility; the iterator framework does not enforce
2157 this.)
2158
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00002159- Ctrl+C handling on Windows has been made more consistent with
2160 other platforms. KeyboardInterrupt can now reliably be caught,
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00002161 and Ctrl+C at an interactive prompt no longer terminates the
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00002162 process under NT/2k/XP (it never did under Win9x). Ctrl+C will
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00002163 interrupt time.sleep() in the main thread, and any child processes
2164 created via the popen family (on win2k; we can't make win9x work
Mark Hammond8f3afc72002-08-10 06:26:31 +00002165 reliably) are also interrupted (as generally happens on for Linux/Unix.)
2166 [SF bugs 231273, 439992 and 581232]
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00002167
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00002168- sys.getwindowsversion() has been added on Windows. This
2169 returns a tuple with information about the version of Windows
2170 currently running.
2171
Raymond Hettinger5a04aec2002-06-25 00:25:30 +00002172- Slices and repetitions of buffer objects now consistently return
2173 a string. Formerly, strings would be returned most of the time,
2174 but a buffer object would be returned when the repetition count
2175 was one or when the slice range was all inclusive.
2176
Walter Dörwald3430d702002-06-17 10:43:59 +00002177- Unicode objects in sys.path are no longer ignored but treated
2178 as directory names.
2179
Neal Norwitz1f68fc72002-06-14 00:50:42 +00002180- Fixed string.startswith and string.endswith builtin methods
2181 so they accept negative indices. [SF bug 493951]
2182
Guido van Rossumc5fe5eb2002-06-12 03:45:21 +00002183- Fixed a bug with a continue inside a try block and a yield in the
2184 finally clause. [SF bug 567538]
2185
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00002186- Most builtin sequences now support "extended slices", i.e. slices
Guido van Rossum2e82e712002-06-13 11:41:07 +00002187 with a third "stride" parameter. For example, "hello world"[::-1]
2188 gives "dlrow olleh".
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00002189
Neal Norwitzd68f5172002-05-29 15:54:55 +00002190- A new warning PendingDeprecationWarning was added to provide
2191 direction on features which are in the process of being deprecated.
2192 The warning will not be printed by default. To see the pending
2193 deprecations, use -Walways::PendingDeprecationWarning::
2194 as a command line option or warnings.filterwarnings() in code.
2195
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00002196- Deprecated features of xrange objects have been removed as
2197 promised. The start, stop, and step attributes and the tolist()
2198 method no longer exist. xrange repetition and slicing have been
2199 removed.
2200
Guido van Rossum7dab2422002-04-26 19:40:56 +00002201- New builtin function enumerate(x), from PEP 279. Example:
2202 enumerate("abc") is an iterator returning (0,"a"), (1,"b"), (2,"c").
2203 The argument can be an arbitrary iterable object.
2204
Neil Schemenauer89e3ee02002-04-26 01:58:53 +00002205- The assert statement no longer tests __debug__ at runtime. This means
2206 that assert statements cannot be disabled by assigning a false value
2207 to __debug__.
2208
Walter Dörwald068325e2002-04-15 13:36:47 +00002209- A method zfill() was added to str and unicode, that fills a numeric
2210 string to the left with zeros. For example,
2211 "+123".zfill(6) -> "+00123".
2212
Guido van Rossum862fe3c2002-04-15 12:36:47 +00002213- Complex numbers supported divmod() and the // and % operators, but
2214 these make no sense. Since this was documented, they're being
2215 deprecated now.
2216
Guido van Rossum26dd8302002-04-26 20:11:29 +00002217- String and unicode methods lstrip(), rstrip() and strip() now take
2218 an optional argument that specifies the characters to strip. For
2219 example, "Foo!!!?!?!?".rstrip("?!") -> "Foo".
Guido van Rossum49042042002-04-13 00:59:05 +00002220
Guido van Rossumc0d3f4e2002-11-27 13:10:40 +00002221- There's a new dictionary constructor (a class method of the dict
2222 class), dict.fromkeys(iterable, value=None). It constructs a
2223 dictionary with keys taken from the iterable and all values set to a
2224 single value. It can be used for building sets and for removing
2225 duplicates from sequences.
Raymond Hettingere33d3df2002-11-27 07:29:33 +00002226
Guido van Rossumc69343b2002-04-12 19:22:48 +00002227- Added a new dict method pop(key). This removes and returns the
2228 value corresponding to key. [SF patch #539949]
2229
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00002230- A new built-in type, bool, has been added, as well as built-in
2231 names for its two values, True and False. Comparisons and sundry
2232 other operations that return a truth value have been changed to
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002233 return a bool instead. Read PEP 285 for an explanation of why this
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00002234 is backward compatible.
2235
Guido van Rossum95b62a62002-03-29 01:07:24 +00002236- Fixed two bugs reported as SF #535905: under certain conditions,
2237 deallocating a deeply nested structure could cause a segfault in the
2238 garbage collector, due to interaction with the "trashcan" code;
2239 access to the current frame during destruction of a local variable
2240 could access a pointer to freed memory.
2241
Guido van Rossumfe0ca4a2002-06-18 21:20:13 +00002242- The optional object allocator ("pymalloc") has been enabled by
2243 default. The recommended practice for memory allocation and
2244 deallocation has been streamlined. A header file is included,
2245 Misc/pymemcompat.h, which can be bundled with 3rd party extensions
2246 and lets them use the same API with Python versions from 1.5.2
2247 onwards.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00002248
Martin v. Löwiscfeb3b62002-03-03 21:30:27 +00002249- PyErr_Display will provide file and line information for all exceptions
2250 that have an attribute print_file_and_line, not just SyntaxErrors.
2251
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00002252- The UTF-8 codec will now encode and decode Unicode surrogates
2253 correctly and without raising exceptions for unpaired ones.
2254
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00002255- Universal newlines (PEP 278) is implemented. Briefly, using 'U'
2256 instead of 'r' when opening a text file for reading changes the line
2257 ending convention so that any of '\r', '\r\n', and '\n' is
2258 recognized (even mixed in one file); all three are converted to
2259 '\n', the standard Python line end character.
2260
Neal Norwitz649b7592002-01-01 19:07:13 +00002261- file.xreadlines() now raises a ValueError if the file is closed:
2262 Previously, an xreadlines object was returned which would raise
2263 a ValueError when the xreadlines.next() method was called.
2264
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002265- sys.exit() inadvertently allowed more than one argument.
Neal Norwitz0c766a02002-03-27 13:03:09 +00002266 An exception will now be raised if more than one argument is used.
2267
Gustavo Niemeyer17c5a332002-12-16 14:09:22 +00002268- Changed evaluation order of dictionary literals to conform to the
2269 general left to right evaluation order rule. Now {f1(): f2()} will
2270 evaluate f1 first.
Gustavo Niemeyer78429a62002-12-16 13:54:02 +00002271
Gustavo Niemeyer786ddb22002-12-16 18:12:53 +00002272- Fixed bug #521782: when a file was in non-blocking mode, file.read()
2273 could silently lose data or wrongly throw an unknown error.
2274
Neil Schemenauerb983aa02002-12-30 20:22:23 +00002275- The sq_repeat, sq_inplace_repeat, sq_concat and sq_inplace_concat
2276 slots are now always tried after trying the corresponding nb_* slots.
2277 This fixes a number of minor bugs (see bug #624807).
2278
Neal Norwitz74a032e2003-01-10 23:29:48 +00002279- Fix problem with dynamic loading on 64-bit AIX (see bug #639945).
2280
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002281Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002282-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002283
Raymond Hettinger9543b342003-01-18 23:22:20 +00002284- Added three operators to the operator module:
2285 operator.pow(a,b) which is equivalent to: a**b.
2286 operator.is_(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is b.
2287 operator.is_not(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is not b.
2288
Martin v. Löwis24a880b2002-12-31 12:55:15 +00002289- posix.openpty now works on all systems that have /dev/ptmx.
2290
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00002291- A module zipimport exists to support importing code from zip
2292 archives.
2293
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00002294- The new datetime module supplies classes for manipulating dates and
2295 times. The basic design came from the Zope "fishbowl process", and
2296 favors practical commercial applications over calendar esoterica. See
2297
2298 http://www.zope.org/Members/fdrake/DateTimeWiki/FrontPage
2299
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00002300- _tkinter now returns Tcl objects, instead of strings. Objects which
2301 have Python equivalents are converted to Python objects, other objects
2302 are wrapped. This can be configured through the wantobjects method,
Martin v. Löwis8c8aa5d2002-11-26 21:39:48 +00002303 or Tkinter.wantobjects.
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00002304
Barry Warsawc27f4bd2002-12-30 21:03:26 +00002305- The PyBSDDB wrapper around the Sleepycat Berkeley DB library has
2306 been added as the package bsddb. The traditional bsddb module is
2307 still available in source code, but not built automatically anymore,
2308 and is now named bsddb185. This supports Berkeley DB versions from
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00002309 3.0 to 4.1. For help converting your databases from the old module (which
2310 probably used an obsolete version of Berkeley DB) to the new module, see
2311 the db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py scripts described in the Tools/Demos
2312 section above.
Martin v. Löwisef546b32002-11-19 08:12:57 +00002313
Martin v. Löwis677bde22002-11-23 22:08:15 +00002314- unicodedata was updated to Unicode 3.2. It supports normalization
2315 and names for Hangul syllables and CJK unified ideographs.
Martin v. Löwis7d41e292002-11-23 12:22:32 +00002316
Neal Norwitz94a83fd2002-11-02 17:46:24 +00002317- resource.getrlimit() now returns longs instead of ints.
2318
Martin v. Löwis080689c2002-10-26 14:42:02 +00002319- readline now dynamically adjusts its input/output stream if
2320 sys.stdin/stdout changes.
2321
Guido van Rossumba602972002-10-01 18:18:58 +00002322- The _tkinter module (and hence Tkinter) has dropped support for
2323 Tcl/Tk 8.0 and 8.1. Only Tcl/Tk versions 8.2, 8.3 and 8.4 are
2324 supported.
2325
Martin v. Löwis658009a2002-09-16 17:26:24 +00002326- cPickle.BadPickleGet is now a class.
2327
Martin v. Löwisa19bfe02002-10-16 18:28:36 +00002328- The time stamps in os.stat_result are floating point numbers
2329 after stat_float_times has been called.
Martin v. Löwis94717ed2002-09-09 14:24:16 +00002330
Neal Norwitzb5673922002-09-05 21:48:07 +00002331- If the size passed to mmap.mmap() is larger than the length of the
2332 file on non-Windows platforms, a ValueError is raised. [SF bug 585792]
2333
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00002334- The xreadlines module is slated for obsolescence.
2335
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00002336- The strptime function in the time module is now always available (a
2337 Python implementation is used when the C library doesn't define it).
2338
Guido van Rossum9562bcf2002-06-14 21:31:18 +00002339- The 'new' module is no longer an extension, but a Python module that
2340 only exists for backwards compatibility. Its contents are no longer
2341 functions but callable type objects.
2342
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00002343- The bsddb.*open functions can now take 'None' as a filename.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00002344 This will create a temporary in-memory bsddb that won't be
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00002345 written to disk.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00002346
Martin v. Löwisb96152c2002-12-31 13:20:15 +00002347- posix.getloadavg, posix.lchown, posix.killpg, posix.mknod, and
2348 posix.getpgid have been added where available.
Martin v. Löwis06a83e92002-04-14 10:19:44 +00002349
Martin v. Löwisf0a46682002-11-03 17:20:12 +00002350- The locale module now exposes the C library's gettext interface. It
2351 also has a new function getpreferredencoding.
Martin v. Löwis2e64c342002-03-27 18:49:02 +00002352
Tim Petersfbf74f22002-03-14 19:06:01 +00002353- A security hole ("double free") was found in zlib-1.1.3, a popular
2354 third party compression library used by some Python modules. The
2355 hole was quickly plugged in zlib-1.1.4, and the Windows build of
2356 Python now ships with zlib-1.1.4.
2357
Martin v. Löwis688357e2002-04-08 21:28:20 +00002358- pwd, grp, and resource return enhanced tuples now, with symbolic
2359 field names.
Martin v. Löwis29001ff2002-03-01 10:47:37 +00002360
Martin v. Löwis99866332002-03-01 10:27:01 +00002361- array.array is now a type object. A new format character
2362 'u' indicates Py_UNICODE arrays. For those, .tounicode and
2363 .fromunicode methods are available. Arrays now support __iadd__
2364 and __imul__.
2365
Neal Norwitze790eae2002-01-01 21:14:12 +00002366- dl now builds on every system that has dlfcn.h. Failure in case
Martin v. Löwis93227272002-01-01 20:18:30 +00002367 of sizeof(int)!=sizeof(long)!=sizeof(void*) is delayed until dl.open
2368 is called.
2369
Skip Montanaro8e790e72002-09-03 13:25:17 +00002370- The sys module acquired a new attribute, api_version, which evaluates
2371 to the value of the PYTHON_API_VERSION macro with which the
2372 interpreter was compiled.
2373
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00002374- Fixed bug #470582: sre module would return a tuple (None, 'a', 'ab')
2375 when applying the regular expression '^((a)c)?(ab)$' on 'ab'. It now
2376 returns (None, None, 'ab'), as expected. Also fixed handling of
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00002377 lastindex/lastgroup match attributes in similar cases. For example,
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00002378 when running the expression r'(a)(b)?b' over 'ab', lastindex must be
2379 1, not 2.
2380
Gustavo Niemeyerc523b042002-11-07 03:28:56 +00002381- Fixed bug #581080: sre scanner was not checking the buffer limit
2382 before increasing the current pointer. This was creating an infinite
2383 loop in the search function, once the pointer exceeded the buffer
2384 limit.
2385
Thomas Heller95cb7e42002-11-07 16:23:55 +00002386- The os.fdopen function now enforces a file mode starting with the
2387 letter 'r', 'w' or 'a', otherwise a ValueError is raised. This fixes
2388 bug #623464.
2389
Greg Ward6c58d462003-01-03 18:02:15 +00002390- The linuxaudiodev module is now deprecated; it is being replaced by
2391 ossaudiodev. The interface has been extended to cover a lot more of
2392 OSS (see www.opensound.com), including most DSP ioctls and the
2393 OSS mixer API. Documentation forthcoming in 2.3a2.
2394
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002395Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002396-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002397
Guido van Rossum747f8062003-01-03 16:33:49 +00002398- imaplib.py now supports SSL (Tino Lange and Piers Lauder).
2399
Just van Rossum5e156ad2002-12-31 16:38:01 +00002400- Freeze's modulefinder.py has been moved to the standard library;
2401 slightly improved so it will issue less false missing submodule
2402 reports (see sf path #643711 for details). Documentation will follow
2403 with Python 2.3a2.
2404
Martin v. Löwis96a60e42002-12-31 13:11:54 +00002405- os.path exposes getctime.
2406
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002407- unittest.py now has two additional methods called assertAlmostEqual()
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002408 and failIfAlmostEqual(). They implement an approximate comparison
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002409 by rounding the difference between the two arguments and comparing
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002410 the result to zero. Approximate comparison is essential for
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002411 unit tests of floating point results.
2412
Raymond Hettingere11b5102002-12-25 16:37:19 +00002413- calendar.py now depends on the new datetime module rather than
2414 the time module. As a result, the range of allowable dates
2415 has been increased.
2416
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00002417- pdb has a new 'j(ump)' command to select the next line to be
2418 executed.
2419
Thomas Heller1b3b49d2002-12-12 19:13:44 +00002420- The distutils created windows installers now can run a
2421 postinstallation script.
2422
Martin v. Löwis4581cfa2002-11-22 08:23:09 +00002423- doctest.testmod can now be called without argument, which means to
2424 test the current module.
2425
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002426- When canceling a server that implemented threading with a keyboard
Martin v. Löwisf86e8ef2002-11-22 08:08:44 +00002427 interrupt, the server would shut down but not terminate (waiting on
2428 client threads). A new member variable, daemon_threads, was added to
2429 the ThreadingMixIn class in SocketServer.py to make it explicit that
2430 this behavior needs to be controlled.
2431
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00002432- A new module, optparse, provides a fancy alternative to getopt for
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00002433 command line parsing. It is a slightly modified version of Greg
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00002434 Ward's Optik package.
2435
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00002436- UserDict.py now defines a DictMixin class which defines all dictionary
2437 methods for classes that already have a minimum mapping interface.
2438 This greatly simplifies writing classes that need to be substitutable
2439 for dictionaries (such as the shelve module).
2440
2441- shelve.py now subclasses from UserDict.DictMixin. Now shelve supports
2442 all dictionary methods. This eases the transition to persistent
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00002443 storage for scripts originally written with dictionaries in mind.
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00002444
Skip Montanaro3bf99e32002-12-08 18:36:24 +00002445- shelve.open and the various classes in shelve.py now accept an optional
2446 binary flag, which defaults to False. If True, the values stored in the
2447 shelf are binary pickles.
2448
Guido van Rossumfda06742002-11-13 16:29:18 +00002449- A new package, logging, implements the logging API defined by PEP
2450 282. The code is written by Vinay Sajip.
2451
Walter Dörwald4dbf1922002-11-06 16:53:44 +00002452- StreamReader, StreamReaderWriter and StreamRecoder in the codecs
2453 modules are iterators now.
2454
Tim Peters9288f952002-11-05 20:38:55 +00002455- gzip.py now handles files exceeding 2GB. Files over 4GB also work
2456 now (provided the OS supports it, and Python is configured with large
2457 file support), but in that case the underlying gzip file format can
2458 record only the least-significant 32 bits of the file size, so that
2459 some tools working with gzipped files may report an incorrect file
2460 size.
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00002461
Martin v. Löwis74b51ac2002-10-26 14:50:45 +00002462- xml.sax.saxutils.unescape has been added, to replace entity references
2463 with their entity value.
2464
Martin v. Löwis77ac4292002-10-15 15:11:13 +00002465- Queue.Queue.{put,get} now support an optional timeout argument.
2466
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00002467- Various features of Tk 8.4 are exposed in Tkinter.py. The multiple
2468 option of tkFileDialog is exposed as function askopenfile{,name}s.
Martin v. Löwis2ec36272002-10-13 10:22:08 +00002469
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00002470- Various configure methods of Tkinter have been stream-lined, so that
2471 tag_configure, image_configure, window_configure now return a
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00002472 dictionary when invoked with no argument.
Martin v. Löwis6ce13152002-10-10 14:36:13 +00002473
Guido van Rossum2b492b62002-10-09 21:40:48 +00002474- Importing the readline module now no longer has the side effect of
2475 calling setlocale(LC_CTYPE, ""). The initial "C" locale, or
2476 whatever locale is explicitly set by the user, is preserved. If you
2477 want repr() of 8-bit strings in your preferred encoding to preserve
2478 all printable characters of that encoding, you have to add the
2479 following code to your $PYTHONSTARTUP file or to your application's
2480 main():
2481
2482 import locale
2483 locale.setlocale(locale.LC_CTYPE, "")
2484
Martin v. Löwise9ce0b02002-10-07 13:23:24 +00002485- shutil.move was added. shutil.copytree now reports errors as an
2486 exception at the end, instead of printing error messages.
2487
Marc-André Lemburg97047e22002-10-04 11:55:21 +00002488- Encoding name normalization was generalized to not only
2489 replace hyphens with underscores, but also all other non-alphanumeric
2490 characters (with the exception of the dot which is used for Python
2491 package names during lookup). The aliases.py mapping was updated
2492 to the new standard.
2493
Walter Dörwald5ccaf8f2002-09-06 16:15:58 +00002494- mimetypes has two new functions: guess_all_extensions() which
2495 returns a list of all known extensions for a mime type, and
2496 add_type() which adds one mapping between a mime type and
2497 an extension to the database.
2498
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00002499- New module: sets, defines the class Set that implements a mutable
2500 set type using the keys of a dict to represent the set. There's
2501 also a class ImmutableSet which is useful when you need sets of sets
2502 or when you need to use sets as dict keys, and a class BaseSet which
Raymond Hettingeref8b9c62002-12-09 08:56:06 +00002503 is the base class of the two.
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00002504
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00002505- Added random.sample(population,k) for random sampling without replacement.
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00002506 Returns a k length list of unique elements chosen from the population.
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00002507
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00002508- random.randrange(-sys.maxint-1, sys.maxint) no longer raises
2509 OverflowError. That is, it now accepts any combination of 'start'
2510 and 'stop' arguments so long as each is in the range of Python's
2511 bounded integers.
2512
Raymond Hettinger40f62172002-12-29 23:03:38 +00002513- Thanks to Raymond Hettinger, random.random() now uses a new core
2514 generator. The Mersenne Twister algorithm is implemented in C,
2515 threadsafe, faster than the previous generator, has an astronomically
2516 large period (2**19937-1), creates random floats to full 53-bit
2517 precision, and may be the most widely tested random number generator
2518 in existence.
2519
2520 The random.jumpahead(n) method has different semantics for the new
2521 generator. Instead of jumping n steps ahead, it uses n and the
2522 existing state to create a new state. This means that jumpahead()
2523 continues to support multi-threaded code needing generators of
2524 non-overlapping sequences. However, it will break code which relies
2525 on jumpahead moving a specific number of steps forward.
2526
2527 The attributes random.whseed and random.__whseed have no meaning for
2528 the new generator. Code using these attributes should switch to a
2529 new class, random.WichmannHill which is provided for backward
2530 compatibility and to make an alternate generator available.
2531
Guido van Rossum4a57c332002-08-02 18:05:20 +00002532- New "algorithms" module: heapq, implements a heap queue. Thanks to
2533 Kevin O'Connor for the code and François Pinard for an entertaining
2534 write-up explaining the theory and practical uses of heaps.
2535
Marc-André Lemburg58e2ff22002-07-12 14:40:04 +00002536- New encoding for the Palm OS character set: palmos.
2537
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00002538- binascii.crc32() and the zipfile module had problems on some 64-bit
2539 platforms. These have been fixed. On a platform with 8-byte C longs,
2540 crc32() now returns a signed-extended 4-byte result, so that its value
2541 as a Python int is equal to the value computed a 32-bit platform.
2542
Martin v. Löwis7d650ca2002-06-30 15:05:00 +00002543- xml.dom.minidom.toxml and toprettyxml now take an optional encoding
2544 argument.
2545
Guido van Rossum9f7549b2002-06-10 21:39:42 +00002546- Some fixes in the copy module: when an object is copied through its
2547 __reduce__ method, there was no check for a __setstate__ method on
2548 the result [SF patch 565085]; deepcopy should treat instances of
2549 custom metaclasses the same way it treats instances of type 'type'
2550 [SF patch 560794].
2551
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00002552- Sockets now support timeout mode. After s.settimeout(T), where T is
2553 a float expressing seconds, subsequent operations raise an exception
2554 if they cannot be completed within T seconds. To disable timeout
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00002555 mode, use s.settimeout(None). There's also a module function,
2556 socket.setdefaulttimeout(T), which sets the default for all sockets
2557 created henceforth.
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00002558
2559- getopt.gnu_getopt was added. This supports GNU-style option
2560 processing, where options can be mixed with non-option arguments.
Martin v. Löwis446a25f2002-06-06 10:58:36 +00002561
Michael W. Hudsonb0dc1a32002-06-04 18:27:35 +00002562- Stop using strings for exceptions. String objects used for
2563 exceptions are now classes deriving from Exception. The objects
2564 changed were: Tkinter.TclError, bdb.BdbQuit, macpath.norm_error,
2565 tabnanny.NannyNag, and xdrlib.Error.
Neal Norwitzb5b5a262002-06-04 17:14:07 +00002566
Walter Dörwald474458d2002-06-04 15:16:29 +00002567- Constants BOM_UTF8, BOM_UTF16, BOM_UTF16_LE, BOM_UTF16_BE,
2568 BOM_UTF32, BOM_UTF32_LE and BOM_UTF32_BE that represent the Byte
2569 Order Mark in UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 encodings for little and
2570 big endian systems were added to the codecs module. The old names
2571 BOM32_* and BOM64_* were off by a factor of 2.
2572
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00002573- Added conversion functions math.degrees() and math.radians().
Raymond Hettinger87f59ee2002-05-13 04:17:32 +00002574
Raymond Hettinger866964c2002-12-14 19:51:34 +00002575- math.log() now takes an optional argument: math.log(x[, base]).
2576
Raymond Hettinger9b1df1d2002-05-12 06:07:21 +00002577- ftplib.retrlines() now tests for callback is None rather than testing
2578 for False. Was causing an error when given a callback object which
2579 was callable but also returned len() as zero. The change may
2580 create new breakage if the caller relied on the undocumented behavior
2581 and called with callback set to [] or some other False value not
2582 identical to None.
2583
Tim Peters46c04e12002-05-05 20:40:00 +00002584- random.gauss() uses a piece of hidden state used by nothing else,
2585 and the .seed() and .whseed() methods failed to reset it. In other
2586 words, setting the seed didn't completely determine the sequence of
2587 results produced by random.gauss(). It does now. Programs repeatedly
2588 mixing calls to a seed method with calls to gauss() may see different
2589 results now.
2590
Fred Drake7f781c92002-05-01 20:33:53 +00002591- The pickle.Pickler class grew a clear_memo() method to mimic that
2592 provided by cPickle.Pickler.
2593
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00002594- difflib's SequenceMatcher class now does a dynamic analysis of
2595 which elements are so frequent as to constitute noise. For
2596 comparing files as sequences of lines, this generally works better
2597 than the IS_LINE_JUNK function, and function ndiff's linejunk
2598 argument defaults to None now as a result. A happy benefit is
2599 that SequenceMatcher may run much faster now when applied
2600 to large files with many duplicate lines (for example, C program
2601 text with lots of repeated "}" and "return NULL;" lines).
2602
Guido van Rossum256705b2002-04-23 13:29:43 +00002603- New Text.dump() method in Tkinter module.
2604
Marc-André Lemburg1ec71ea2002-04-17 20:33:40 +00002605- New distutils commands for building packagers were added to
2606 support pkgtool on Solaris and swinstall on HP-UX.
2607
2608- distutils now has a new abstract binary packager base class
2609 command/bdist_packager, which simplifies writing packagers.
2610 This will hopefully provide the missing bits to encourage
2611 people to submit more packagers, e.g. for Debian, FreeBSD
2612 and other systems.
2613
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00002614- The UTF-16, -LE and -BE stream readers now raise a
2615 NotImplementedError for all calls to .readline(). Previously, they
2616 used to just produce garbage or fail with an encoding error --
2617 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 +00002618 work well with these.
2619
Martin v. Löwis5c137c22002-03-18 12:44:08 +00002620- compileall now supports quiet operation.
2621
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002622- The BaseHTTPServer now implements optional HTTP/1.1 persistent
Martin v. Löwis587c98c2002-03-17 18:37:22 +00002623 connections.
2624
Marc-André Lemburga5d2b4c2002-02-16 18:23:30 +00002625- socket module: the SSL support was broken out of the main
2626 _socket module C helper and placed into a new _ssl helper
2627 which now gets imported by socket.py if available and working.
2628
Marc-André Lemburg37aa5802002-02-10 21:42:47 +00002629- encodings package: added aliases for all supported IANA character
2630 sets
2631
Guido van Rossum606fe4e2001-12-28 20:57:14 +00002632- ftplib: to safeguard the user's privacy, anonymous login will use
2633 "anonymous@" as default password, rather than the real user and host
2634 name.
2635
Fred Drake36736122002-01-10 13:50:31 +00002636- webbrowser: tightened up the command passed to os.system() so that
2637 arbitrary shell code can't be executed because a bogus URL was
2638 passed in.
2639
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00002640- gettext.translation has an optional fallback argument, and
Martin v. Löwisa55ffae2002-01-11 06:58:49 +00002641 gettext.find an optional all argument. Translations will now fallback
Martin v. Löwisd8996052002-11-21 21:45:32 +00002642 on a per-message basis. The module supports plural forms, by means
2643 of gettext.[d]ngettext and Translation.[u]ngettext.
Martin v. Löwis1be64192002-01-11 06:33:28 +00002644
Martin v. Löwis9668b932002-01-12 11:27:42 +00002645- distutils bdist commands now offer a --skip-build option.
2646
Walter Dörwaldb25c2b02002-03-21 10:38:40 +00002647- warnings.warn now accepts a Warning instance as first argument.
2648
Fred Drakefed7e852002-04-04 19:36:15 +00002649- The xml.sax.expatreader.ExpatParser class will no longer create
2650 circular references by using itself as the locator that gets passed
2651 to the content handler implementation. [SF bug #535474]
2652
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00002653- The email.Parser.Parser class now properly parses strings regardless
2654 of their line endings, which can be any of \r, \n, or \r\n (CR, LF,
2655 or CRLF). Also, the Header class's constructor default arguments
2656 has changed slightly so that an explicit maxlinelen value is always
Barry Warsaw497e5c42002-12-30 19:27:08 +00002657 honored, and so unicode conversion error handling can be specified.
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00002658
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002659- distutils' build_ext command now links C++ extensions with the C++
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00002660 compiler available in the Makefile or CXX environment variable, if
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002661 running under \*nix.
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00002662
2663- New module bz2: provides a comprehensive interface for the bz2 compression
2664 library. It implements a complete file interface, one-shot (de)compression
2665 functions, and types for sequential (de)compression.
2666
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002667- New pdb command 'pp' which is like 'p' except that it pretty-prints
Barry Warsaw5d8d6182002-11-05 22:41:33 +00002668 the value of its expression argument.
2669
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00002670- Now bdist_rpm distutils command understands a verify_script option in
2671 the config file, including the contents of the referred filename in
2672 the "%verifyscript" section of the rpm spec file.
2673
Gustavo Niemeyer1456fde2002-11-25 17:25:04 +00002674- Fixed bug #495695: webbrowser module would run graphic browsers in a
2675 unix environment even if DISPLAY was not set. Also, support for
2676 skipstone browser was included.
2677
Gustavo Niemeyerd5ae01a2002-12-16 13:11:57 +00002678- Fixed bug #636769: rexec would run unallowed code if subclasses of
2679 strings were used as parameters for certain functions.
2680
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002681Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002682-----------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002683
Martin v. Löwis0d1fdea2002-11-22 08:36:54 +00002684- pygettext.py now supports globbing on Windows, and accepts module
2685 names in addition to accepting file names.
2686
Guido van Rossum923e4ef2002-09-17 20:58:59 +00002687- The SGI demos (Demo/sgi) have been removed. Nobody thought they
2688 were interesting any more. (The SGI library modules and extensions
2689 are still there; it is believed that at least some of these are
2690 still used and useful.)
2691
Fred Drake40813b12002-08-05 15:24:19 +00002692- IDLE supports the new encoding declarations (PEP 263); it can also
2693 deal with legacy 8-bit files if they use the locale's encoding. It
2694 allows non-ASCII strings in the interactive shell and executes them
2695 in the locale's encoding.
Martin v. Löwis98ce7b72002-08-05 15:11:26 +00002696
Marc-André Lemburg46260092002-04-04 16:17:11 +00002697- freeze.py now produces binaries which can import shared modules,
2698 unlike before when this failed due to missing symbol exports in
2699 the generated binary.
2700
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002701Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002702-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002703
Martin v. Löwisdc461752002-11-06 21:59:33 +00002704- On Unix, IDLE is now installed automatically.
2705
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00002706- The fpectl module is not built by default; it's dangerous or useless
2707 except in the hands of experts.
2708
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00002709- The public Python C API will generally be declared using PyAPI_FUNC
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00002710 and PyAPI_DATA macros, while Python extension module init functions
2711 will be declared with PyMODINIT_FUNC. DL_EXPORT/DL_IMPORT macros
2712 are deprecated.
Neal Norwitz1389f3e2002-07-22 13:21:10 +00002713
Tim Petersc6a3ff62002-07-08 22:11:52 +00002714- A bug was fixed that could cause COUNT_ALLOCS builds to segfault, or
2715 get into infinite loops, when a new-style class got garbage-collected.
2716 Unfortunately, to avoid this, the way COUNT_ALLOCS works requires
2717 that new-style classes be immortal in COUNT_ALLOCS builds. Note that
2718 COUNT_ALLOCS is not enabled by default, in either release or debug
2719 builds, and that new-style classes are immortal only in COUNT_ALLOCS
2720 builds.
2721
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00002722- Compiling out the cyclic garbage collector is no longer an option.
2723 The old symbol WITH_CYCLE_GC is now ignored, and Python.h arranges
2724 that it's always defined (for the benefit of any extension modules
2725 that may be conditionalizing on it). A bonus is that any extension
2726 type participating in cyclic gc can choose to participate in the
2727 Py_TRASHCAN mechanism now too; in the absence of cyclic gc, this used
2728 to require editing the core to teach the trashcan mechanism about the
2729 new type.
2730
Martin v. Löwis0cec0ff2002-07-28 16:33:45 +00002731- According to Annex F of the current C standard,
Tim Peters1de41bf2002-07-03 03:31:20 +00002732
2733 The Standard C macro HUGE_VAL and its float and long double analogs,
2734 HUGE_VALF and HUGE_VALL, expand to expressions whose values are
2735 positive infinities.
2736
2737 Python only uses the double HUGE_VAL, and only to #define its own symbol
2738 Py_HUGE_VAL. Some platforms have incorrect definitions for HUGE_VAL.
2739 pyport.h used to try to worm around that, but the workarounds triggered
2740 other bugs on other platforms, so we gave up. If your platform defines
2741 HUGE_VAL incorrectly, you'll need to #define Py_HUGE_VAL to something
2742 that works on your platform. The only instance of this I'm sure about
2743 is on an unknown subset of Cray systems, described here:
2744
2745 http://www.cray.com/swpubs/manuals/SN-2194_2.0/html-SN-2194_2.0/x3138.htm
2746
2747 Presumably 2.3a1 breaks such systems. If anyone uses such a system, help!
2748
Martin v. Löwisa3fb4f72002-06-09 13:33:54 +00002749- The configure option --without-doc-strings can be used to remove the
2750 doc strings from the builtin functions and modules; this reduces the
2751 size of the executable.
2752
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00002753- The universal newlines option (PEP 278) is on by default. On Unix
2754 it can be disabled by passing --without-universal-newlines to the
2755 configure script. On other platforms, remove
2756 WITH_UNIVERSAL_NEWLINES from pyconfig.h.
Tim Peters639295f2002-04-21 07:30:30 +00002757
Martin v. Löwis1142de32002-03-29 16:28:31 +00002758- On Unix, a shared libpython2.3.so can be created with --enable-shared.
2759
Tim Peters8deda702002-03-30 10:06:07 +00002760- All uses of the CACHE_HASH, INTERN_STRINGS, and DONT_SHARE_SHORT_STRINGS
2761 preprocessor symbols were eliminated. The internal decisions they
2762 controlled stopped being experimental long ago.
Tim Peters1f7df352002-03-29 03:29:08 +00002763
Fred Drake7d28b732002-05-02 21:17:00 +00002764- The tools used to build the documentation now work under Cygwin as
2765 well as Unix.
2766
Skip Montanaro57454e52002-06-14 20:30:31 +00002767- The bsddb and dbm module builds have been changed to try and avoid version
2768 skew problems and disable linkage with Berkeley DB 1.85 unless the
2769 installer knows what s/he's doing. See the section on building these
2770 modules in the README file for details.
2771
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002772C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002773-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002774
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00002775- PyNumber_Check() now returns true for string and unicode objects.
2776 This is a result of these types having a partially defined
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00002777 tp_as_number slot. (This is not a feature, but an indication that
Walter Dörwalda1a61f92002-11-19 21:20:25 +00002778 PyNumber_Check() is not very useful to determine numeric behavior.
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00002779 It may be deprecated.)
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00002780
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00002781- The string object's layout has changed: the pointer member
2782 ob_sinterned has been replaced by an int member ob_sstate. On some
2783 platforms (e.g. most 64-bit systems) this may change the offset of
2784 the ob_sval member, so as a precaution the API_VERSION has been
2785 incremented. The apparently unused feature of "indirect interned
2786 strings", supported by the ob_sinterned member, is gone. Interned
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002787 strings are now usually mortal; there is a new API,
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00002788 PyString_InternImmortal() that creates immortal interned strings.
2789 (The ob_sstate member can only take three values; however, while
2790 making it a char saves a few bytes per string object on average, in
2791 it also slowed things down a bit because ob_sval was no longer
2792 aligned.)
2793
Guido van Rossumfdb86482002-08-14 21:20:32 +00002794- The Py_InitModule*() functions now accept NULL for the 'methods'
2795 argument. Modules without global functions are becoming more common
2796 now that factories can be types rather than functions.
2797
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00002798- New C API PyUnicode_FromOrdinal() which exposes unichr() at C
2799 level.
2800
Thomas Heller085358a2002-07-29 14:27:41 +00002801- New functions PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErr() and
2802 PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErrWithFilename(). Similar to
2803 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErrWithFilename() and
2804 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErr(), but they allow to specify
2805 the exception type to raise. Available on Windows.
2806
Tim Peters7c321a82002-07-09 02:57:01 +00002807- Py_FatalError() is now declared as taking a const char* argument. It
2808 was previously declared without const. This should not affect working
2809 code.
2810
Martin v. Löwis01f94bd2002-05-08 08:44:21 +00002811- Added new macro PySequence_ITEM(o, i) that directly calls
2812 sq_item without rechecking that o is a sequence and without
2813 adjusting for negative indices.
2814
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00002815- PyRange_New() now raises ValueError if the fourth argument is not 1.
2816 This is part of the removal of deprecated features of the xrange
2817 object.
2818
Guido van Rossum517c7d42002-04-26 02:49:14 +00002819- PyNumber_Coerce() and PyNumber_CoerceEx() now also invoke the type's
2820 coercion if both arguments have the same type but this type has the
2821 CHECKTYPES flag set. This is to better support proxies.
2822
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00002823- The type of tp_free has been changed from "``void (*)(PyObject *)``" to
2824 "``void (*)(void *)``".
Neil Schemenauer9344b142002-04-12 23:00:08 +00002825
2826- PyObject_Del, PyObject_GC_Del are now functions instead of macros.
2827
Guido van Rossum0986d822002-04-08 01:38:42 +00002828- A type can now inherit its metatype from its base type. Previously,
2829 when PyType_Ready() was called, if ob_type was found to be NULL, it
2830 was always set to &PyType_Type; now it is set to base->ob_type,
2831 where base is tp_base, defaulting to &PyObject_Type.
2832
2833- PyType_Ready() accidentally did not inherit tp_is_gc; now it does.
2834
Neil Schemenauerc9abc1d2002-05-08 14:14:41 +00002835- The PyCore_* family of APIs have been removed.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00002836
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002837- The "u#" parser marker will now pass through Unicode objects as-is
Marc-André Lemburg3e3eacb2002-01-09 16:21:27 +00002838 without going through the buffer API.
2839
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002840- The enumerators of cmp_op have been renamed to use the prefix ``PyCmp_``.
Martin v. Löwis7198a522002-01-01 19:59:11 +00002841
Tim Peters10a3bb52001-12-25 19:07:38 +00002842- An old #define of ANY as void has been removed from pyport.h. This
2843 hasn't been used since Python's pre-ANSI days, and the #define has
2844 been marked as obsolete since then. SF bug 495548 says it created
2845 conflicts with other packages, so keeping it around wasn't harmless.
2846
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002847- Because Python's magic number scheme broke on January 1st, we decided
2848 to stop Python development. Thanks for all the fish!
2849
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00002850- Some of us don't like fish, so we changed Python's magic number
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00002851 scheme to a new one. See Python/import.c for details.
2852
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002853New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002854-------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002855
Martin v. Löwis79acb9e2002-12-06 12:48:53 +00002856- OpenVMS is now supported.
2857
Martin v. Löwisf90ae202002-06-11 06:22:31 +00002858- AtheOS is now supported.
2859
Andrew MacIntyre161ad0e2002-08-04 07:25:58 +00002860- the EMX runtime environment on OS/2 is now supported.
2861
Martin v. Löwisa6e97582002-01-01 18:41:33 +00002862- GNU/Hurd is now supported.
2863
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002864Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002865-----
2866
Fred Drake4dd0f7e2002-11-26 21:44:56 +00002867- The regrtest.py script's -u option now provides a way to say "allow
2868 all resources except this one." For example, to allow everything
2869 except bsddb, give the option '-uall,-bsddb'.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002870
2871Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002872-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002873
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00002874- The Windows distribution now ships with version 4.0.14 of the
2875 Sleepycat Berkeley database library. This should be a huge
2876 improvement over the previous Berkeley DB 1.85, which had many
2877 bugs.
2878 XXX What are the licensing issues here?
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002879 XXX If a user has a database created with a previous version of
Tim Peters84c7a3f2002-11-23 18:48:06 +00002880 XXX Python, what must they do to convert it?
2881 XXX I'm still not sure how to link this thing (see PCbuild/readme.txt).
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00002882 XXX The version # is likely to change before 2.3a1.
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00002883
2884- The Windows distribution now ships with a Secure Sockets Library (SLL)
Mark Hammondc3de0082002-12-03 06:16:08 +00002885 module (_ssl.pyd)
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00002886
Tim Peters857fb4c2002-11-14 23:31:58 +00002887- The Windows distribution now ships with Tcl/Tk version 8.4.1 (it
2888 previously shipped with Tcl/Tk 8.3.2).
2889
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00002890- When Python is built under a Microsoft compiler, sys.version now
2891 includes the compiler version number (_MSC_VER). For example, under
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002892 MSVC 6, sys.version contains the substring "MSC v.1200 ". 1200 is
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00002893 the value of _MSC_VER under MSVC 6.
2894
Tim Peters08e72952002-04-16 20:48:01 +00002895- Sometimes the uninstall executable (UNWISE.EXE) vanishes. One cause
2896 of that has been fixed in the installer (disabled Wise's "delete in-
2897 use files" uninstall option).
2898
Guido van Rossum181e41a2002-04-06 00:23:25 +00002899- Fixed a bug in urllib's proxy handling in Windows. [SF bug #503031]
2900
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00002901- The installer now installs Start menu shortcuts under (the local
2902 equivalent of) "All Users" when doing an Admin install.
2903
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00002904- file.truncate([newsize]) now works on Windows for all newsize values.
2905 It used to fail if newsize didn't fit in 32 bits, reflecting a
2906 limitation of MS _chsize (which is no longer used).
2907
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00002908- os.waitpid() is now implemented for Windows, and can be used to block
2909 until a specified process exits. This is similar to, but not exactly
2910 the same as, os.waitpid() on POSIX systems. If you're waiting for
2911 a specific process whose pid was obtained from one of the spawn()
2912 functions, the same Python os.waitpid() code works across platforms.
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00002913 See the docs for details. The docs were changed to clarify that
2914 spawn functions return, and waitpid requires, a process handle on
2915 Windows (not the same thing as a Windows process id).
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00002916
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00002917- New tempfile.TemporaryFile implementation for Windows: this doesn't
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002918 need a TemporaryFileWrapper wrapper anymore, and should be immune
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00002919 to a nasty problem: before 2.3, if you got a temp file on Windows, it
2920 got wrapped in an object whose close() method first closed the
2921 underlying file, then deleted the file. This usually worked fine.
2922 However, the spawn family of functions on Windows create (at a low C
2923 level) the same set of open files in the spawned process Q as were
2924 open in the spawning process P. If a temp file f was among them, then
2925 doing f.close() in P first closed P's C-level file handle on f, but Q's
2926 C-level file handle on f remained open, so the attempt in P to delete f
2927 blew up with a "Permission denied" error (Windows doesn't allow
2928 deleting open files). This was surprising, subtle, and difficult to
2929 work around.
2930
2931- The os module now exports all the symbolic constants usable with the
2932 low-level os.open() on Windows: the new constants in 2.3 are
2933 O_NOINHERIT, O_SHORT_LIVED, O_TEMPORARY, O_RANDOM and O_SEQUENTIAL.
2934 The others were also available in 2.2: O_APPEND, O_BINARY, O_CREAT,
2935 O_EXCL, O_RDONLY, O_RDWR, O_TEXT, O_TRUNC and O_WRONLY. Contrary
2936 to Microsoft docs, O_SHORT_LIVED does not seem to imply O_TEMPORARY
2937 (so specify both if you want both; note that neither is useful unless
2938 specified with O_CREAT too).
2939
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002940Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002941----
2942
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002943- Mac/Relnotes is gone, the release notes are now here.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002944
Just van Rossume1ebd802003-02-10 10:06:18 +00002945- Python (the OSX-only, unix-based version, not the OS9-compatible CFM
2946 version) now fully supports unicode strings as arguments to various file
2947 system calls, eg. open(), file(), os.stat() and os.listdir().
2948
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002949- The current naming convention for Python on the Macintosh is that MacPython
2950 refers to the unix-based OSX-only version, and MacPython-OS9 refers to the
2951 CFM-based version that runs on both OS9 and OSX.
2952
2953- All MacPython-OS9 functionality is now available in an OSX unix build,
2954 including the Carbon modules, the IDE, OSA support, etc. A lot of this
2955 will only work correctly in a framework build, though, because you cannot
2956 talk to the window manager unless your application is run from a .app
2957 bundle. There is a command line tool "pythonw" that runs your script
2958 with an interpreter living in such a .app bundle, this interpreter should
2959 be used to run any Python script using the window manager (including
2960 Tkinter or wxPython scripts).
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00002961
Jack Jansen8bb80db2002-12-30 22:42:43 +00002962- Most of Mac/Lib has moved to Lib/plat-mac, which is again used both in
2963 MacPython-OSX and MacPython-OS9. The only modules remaining in Mac/Lib
2964 are specifically for MacPython-OS9 (CFM support, preference resources, etc).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002965
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002966- A new utility PythonLauncher will start a Python interpreter when a .py or
2967 .pyw script is double-clicked in the Finder. By default .py scripts are
2968 run with a normal Python interpreter in a Terminal window and .pyw
2969 files are run with a window-aware pythonw interpreter without a Terminal
2970 window, but all this can be customized.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002971
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002972- MacPython-OS9 is now Carbon-only, so it runs on Mac OS 9 or Mac OS X and
2973 possibly on Mac OS 8.6 with the right CarbonLib installed, but not on earlier
2974 releases.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002975
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002976- Many tools such as BuildApplet.py and gensuitemodule.py now support a command
2977 line interface too.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002978
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002979- All the Carbon classes are now PEP253 compliant, meaning that you can
2980 subclass them from Python. Most of the attributes have gone, you should
2981 now use the accessor function call API, which is also what Apple's
2982 documentation uses. Some attributes such as grafport.visRgn are still
2983 available for convenience.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002984
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002985- New Carbon modules File (implementing the APIs in Files.h and Aliases.h)
2986 and Folder (APIs from Folders.h). The old macfs builtin module is
2987 gone, and replaced by a Python wrapper around the new modules.
2988
2989- Pathname handling should now be fully consistent: MacPython-OSX always uses
2990 unix pathnames and MacPython-OS9 always uses colon-separated Mac pathnames
2991 (also when running on Mac OS X).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002992
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002993- New Carbon modules Help and AH give access to the Carbon Help Manager.
2994 There are hooks in the IDE to allow accessing the Python documentation
2995 (and Apple's Carbon and Cocoa documentation) through the Help Viewer.
2996 See Mac/OSX/README for converting the Python documentation to a
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002997 Help Viewer compatible form and installing it.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002998
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002999- OSA support has been redesigned and the generated Python classes now
3000 mirror the inheritance defined by the underlying OSA classes.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003001
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003002- MacPython no longer maps both \r and \n to \n on input for any text file.
3003 This feature has been replaced by universal newline support (PEP278).
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00003004
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00003005- The default encoding for Python sourcefiles in MacPython-OS9 is no longer
Guido van Rossum16c85172003-02-20 01:52:48 +00003006 mac-roman (or whatever your local Mac encoding was) but "ascii", like on
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00003007 other platforms. If you really need sourcefiles with Mac characters in them
3008 you can change this in site.py.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003009
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003010
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003011What's New in Python 2.2 final?
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003012===============================
3013
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003014*Release date: 21-Dec-2001*
3015
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003016Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003017--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003018
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003019- pickle.py, cPickle: allow pickling instances of new-style classes
3020 with a custom metaclass.
3021
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003022Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003023-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003024
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003025- weakref proxy object: when comparing, unwrap both arguments if both
3026 are proxies.
3027
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003028Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003029-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003030
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003031- binascii.b2a_base64(): fix a potential buffer overrun when encoding
3032 very short strings.
3033
3034- cPickle: the obscure "fast" mode was suspected of causing stack
3035 overflows on the Mac. Hopefully fixed this by setting the recursion
3036 limit much smaller. If the limit is too low (it only affects
3037 performance), you can change it by defining PY_CPICKLE_FAST_LIMIT
3038 when compiling cPickle.c (or in pyconfig.h).
3039
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003040Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003041-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003042
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003043- dumbdbm.py: fixed a dumb old bug (the file didn't get synched at
3044 close or delete time).
3045
3046- rfc822.py: fixed a bug where the address '<>' was converted to None
3047 instead of an empty string (also fixes the email.Utils module).
3048
3049- xmlrpclib.py: version 1.0.0; uses precision for doubles.
3050
3051- test suite: the pickle and cPickle tests were not executing any code
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003052 when run from the standard regression test.
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003053
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003054Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003055-----------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003056
3057Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003058-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003059
3060C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003061-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003062
3063New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003064-------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003065
3066Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003067-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003068
3069Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003070-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003071
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003072- distutils package: fixed broken Windows installers (bdist_wininst).
3073
3074- tempfile.py: prevent mysterious warnings when TemporaryFileWrapper
3075 instances are deleted at process exit time.
3076
3077- socket.py: prevent mysterious warnings when socket instances are
3078 deleted at process exit time.
3079
3080- posixmodule.c: fix a Windows crash with stat() of a filename ending
3081 in backslash.
3082
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003083Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003084----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003085
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003086- The Carbon toolbox modules have been upgraded to Universal Headers
3087 3.4, and experimental CoreGraphics and CarbonEvents modules have
3088 been added. All only for framework-enabled MacOSX.
3089
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003090
Tim Peters6272dfd2001-12-13 19:34:00 +00003091What's New in Python 2.2c1?
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003092===========================
3093
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003094*Release date: 14-Dec-2001*
3095
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003096Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003097--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003098
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003099- Guido's tutorial introduction to the new type/class features has
3100 been extensively updated. See
3101
3102 http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html
3103
3104 That remains the primary documentation in this area.
3105
Guido van Rossum33bab012001-12-05 22:45:48 +00003106- Fixed a leak: instance variables declared with __slots__ were never
3107 deleted!
3108
Guido van Rossum4b800852001-12-03 00:54:52 +00003109- The "delete attribute" method of descriptor objects is called
3110 __delete__, not __del__. In previous releases, it was mistakenly
3111 called __del__, which created an unfortunate overloading condition
3112 with finalizers. (The "get attribute" and "set attribute" methods
3113 are still called __get__ and __set__, respectively.)
3114
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00003115- Some subtle issues with the super built-in were fixed:
3116
3117 (a) When super itself is subclassed, its __get__ method would still
3118 return an instance of the base class (i.e., of super).
3119
3120 (b) super(C, C()).__class__ would return C rather than super. This
3121 is confusing. To fix this, I decided to change the semantics of
3122 super so that it only applies to code attributes, not to data
3123 attributes. After all, overriding data attributes is not
3124 supported anyway.
3125
3126 (c) The __get__ method didn't check whether the argument was an
3127 instance of the type used in creation of the super instance.
3128
Guido van Rossumcd7b7d62001-12-04 21:02:07 +00003129- Previously, hash() of an instance of a subclass of a mutable type
3130 (list or dictionary) would return some value, rather than raising
3131 TypeError. This has been fixed. Also, directly calling
3132 dict.__hash__ and list.__hash__ now raises the same TypeError
3133 (previously, these were the same as object.__hash__).
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00003134
Guido van Rossumd331cb52001-12-05 19:46:42 +00003135- New-style objects now support deleting their __dict__. This is for
3136 all intents and purposes equivalent to assigning a brand new empty
3137 dictionary, but saves space if the object is not used further.
3138
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003139Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003140-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003141
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00003142- -Qnew now works as documented in PEP 238: when -Qnew is passed on
3143 the command line, all occurrences of "/" use true division instead
3144 of classic division. See the PEP for details. Note that "all"
3145 means all instances in library and 3rd-party modules, as well as in
3146 your own code. As the PEP says, -Qnew is intended for use only in
3147 educational environments with control over the libraries in use.
Tim Petersbf72fe22001-12-11 21:43:14 +00003148 Note that test_coercion.py in the standard Python test suite fails
3149 under -Qnew; this is expected, and won't be repaired until true
3150 division becomes the default (in the meantime, test_coercion is
3151 testing the current rules).
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00003152
Fred Drake6c01e252001-12-14 17:08:12 +00003153- complex() now only allows the first argument to be a string
3154 argument, and raises TypeError if either the second arg is a string
3155 or if the second arg is specified when the first is a string.
3156
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003157Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003158-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003159
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00003160- gc.get_referents was renamed to gc.get_referrers.
3161
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003162Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003163-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003164
Tim Peters25059d32001-12-07 20:35:43 +00003165- Functions in the os.spawn() family now release the global interpreter
3166 lock around calling the platform spawn. They should always have done
3167 this, but did not before 2.2c1. Multithreaded programs calling
3168 an os.spawn function with P_WAIT will no longer block all Python threads
3169 until the spawned program completes. It's possible that some programs
3170 relies on blocking, although more likely by accident than by design.
3171
Martin v. Löwis3a89b2b2001-11-25 14:35:58 +00003172- webbrowser defaults to netscape.exe on OS/2 now.
3173
Martin v. Löwis652e1912001-11-25 14:50:56 +00003174- Tix.ResizeHandle exposes detach_widget, hide, and show.
3175
Martin v. Löwis714d2e22001-12-02 12:26:03 +00003176- The charset alias windows_1252 has been added.
3177
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003178- types.StringTypes is a tuple containing the defined string types;
3179 usually this will be (str, unicode), but if Python was compiled
3180 without Unicode support it will be just (str,).
3181
3182- The pulldom and minidom modules were synchronized to PyXML.
3183
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003184Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003185-----------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003186
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003187- A new script called Tools/scripts/google.py was added, which fires
3188 off a search on Google.
3189
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003190Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003191-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003192
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003193- Note that release builds of Python should arrange to define the
3194 preprocessor symbol NDEBUG on the command line (or equivalent).
3195 In the 2.2 pre-release series we tried to define this by magic in
3196 Python.h instead, but it proved to cause problems for extension
3197 authors. The Unix, Windows and Mac builds now all define NDEBUG in
3198 release builds via cmdline (or equivalent) instead. Ports to
3199 other platforms should do likewise.
3200
Jack Jansen1999ef42001-12-06 21:47:20 +00003201- It is no longer necessary to use --with-suffix when building on a
3202 case-insensitive file system (such as Mac OS X HFS+). In the build
3203 directory an extension is used, but not in the installed python.
3204
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003205C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003206-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003207
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00003208- New function PyDict_MergeFromSeq2() exposes the builtin dict
3209 constructor's logic for updating a dictionary from an iterable object
3210 producing key-value pairs.
3211
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00003212- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() requires that the number of entries in
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00003213 the keyword list equal the number of argument specifiers. This
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00003214 wasn't checked correctly, and PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords could even
3215 dump core in some bad cases. This has been repaired. As a result,
3216 PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords may raise RuntimeError in bad cases that
3217 previously went unchallenged.
3218
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003219New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003220-------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003221
3222Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003223-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003224
3225Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003226-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003227
3228Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003229----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003230
Jack Jansenffa260f2001-12-06 21:14:00 +00003231- In unix-Python on Mac OS X (and darwin) sys.platform is now "darwin",
3232 without any trailing digits.
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003233
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003234- Changed logic for finding python home in Mac OS X framework Pythons.
3235 Now sys.executable points to the executable again, in stead of to
3236 the shared library. The latter is used only for locating the python
3237 home.
3238
3239
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003240What's New in Python 2.2b2?
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003241===========================
3242
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003243*Release date: 16-Nov-2001*
3244
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003245Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003246--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003247
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00003248- Multiple inheritance mixing new-style and classic classes in the
3249 list of base classes is now allowed, so this works now:
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00003250
3251 class Classic: pass
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00003252 class Mixed(Classic, object): pass
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00003253
3254 The MRO (method resolution order) for each base class is respected
3255 according to its kind, but the MRO for the derived class is computed
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003256 using new-style MRO rules if any base class is a new-style class.
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00003257 This needs to be documented.
3258
Tim Petersa427a2b2001-10-29 22:25:45 +00003259- The new builtin dictionary() constructor, and dictionary type, have
3260 been renamed to dict. This reflects a decade of common usage.
3261
Guido van Rossum3fc08d22001-11-15 20:33:10 +00003262- dict() now accepts an iterable object producing 2-sequences. For
3263 example, dict(d.items()) == d for any dictionary d. The argument,
3264 and the elements of the argument, can be any iterable objects.
3265
Guido van Rossum7ad2d1e2001-10-29 22:11:00 +00003266- New-style classes can now have a __del__ method, which is called
3267 when the instance is deleted (just like for classic classes).
3268
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003269- Assignment to object.__dict__ is now possible, for objects that are
3270 instances of new-style classes that have a __dict__ (unless the base
3271 class forbids it).
3272
Guido van Rossumc8e56452001-10-22 00:43:43 +00003273- Methods of built-in types now properly check for keyword arguments
3274 (formerly these were silently ignored). The only built-in methods
3275 that take keyword arguments are __call__, __init__ and __new__.
3276
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00003277- The socket function has been converted to a type; see below.
3278
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003279Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003280-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003281
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00003282- Assignment to __debug__ raises SyntaxError at compile-time. This
3283 was promised when 2.1c1 was released as "What's New in Python 2.1c1"
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003284 (see below) says.
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00003285
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003286- Clarified the error messages for unsupported operands to an operator
3287 (like 1 + '').
3288
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003289Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003290-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003291
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00003292- mmap has a new keyword argument, "access", allowing a uniform way for
3293 both Windows and Unix users to create read-only, write-through and
3294 copy-on-write memory mappings. This was previously possible only on
3295 Unix. A new keyword argument was required to support this in a
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003296 uniform way because the mmap() signatures had diverged across
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00003297 platforms. Thanks to Jay T Miller for repairing this!
3298
Tim Peters169ded02001-11-03 19:57:21 +00003299- By default, the gc.garbage list now contains only those instances in
3300 unreachable cycles that have __del__ methods; in 2.1 it contained all
3301 instances in unreachable cycles. "Instances" here has been generalized
3302 to include instances of both new-style and old-style classes.
3303
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003304- The socket module defines a new method for socket objects,
3305 sendall(). This is like send() but may make multiple calls to
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00003306 send() until all data has been sent. Also, the socket function has
3307 been converted to a subclassable type, like list and tuple (etc.)
3308 before it; socket and SocketType are now the same thing.
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003309
3310- Various bugfixes to the curses module. There is now a test suite
3311 for the curses module (you have to run it manually).
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00003312
Guido van Rossum692adf12001-10-30 03:03:03 +00003313- binascii.b2a_base64 no longer places an arbitrary restriction of 57
3314 bytes on its input.
3315
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003316Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003317-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003318
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00003319- tkFileDialog exposes a Directory class and askdirectory
Martin v. Löwis25ee87c2001-11-07 22:38:08 +00003320 convenience function.
3321
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00003322- Symbolic group names in regular expressions must be unique. For
3323 example, the regexp r'(?P<abc>)(?P<abc>)' is not allowed, because a
3324 single name can't mean both "group 1" and "group 2" simultaneously.
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003325 Python 2.2 detects this error at regexp compilation time;
3326 previously, the error went undetected, and results were
3327 unpredictable. Also in sre, the pattern.split(), pattern.sub(), and
3328 pattern.subn() methods have been rewritten in C. Also, an
3329 experimental function/method finditer() has been added, which works
3330 like findall() but returns an iterator.
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00003331
Martin v. Löwisb7b32602001-11-02 23:48:20 +00003332- Tix exposes more commands through the classes DirSelectBox,
3333 DirSelectDialog, ListNoteBook, Meter, CheckList, and the
3334 methods tix_addbitmapdir, tix_cget, tix_configure, tix_filedialog,
3335 tix_getbitmap, tix_getimage, tix_option_get, and tix_resetoptions.
3336
Tim Peters98791af2001-10-23 01:59:54 +00003337- Traceback objects are now scanned by cyclic garbage collection, so
3338 cycles created by casual use of sys.exc_info() no longer cause
3339 permanent memory leaks (provided garbage collection is enabled).
3340
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00003341- os.extsep -- a new variable needed by the RISCOS support. It is the
3342 separator used by extensions, and is '.' on all platforms except
3343 RISCOS, where it is '/'. There is no need to use this variable
3344 unless you have a masochistic desire to port your code to RISCOS.
3345
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003346- mimetypes.py has optional support for non-standard, but commonly
3347 found types. guess_type() and guess_extension() now accept an
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003348 optional 'strict' flag, defaulting to true, which controls whether
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003349 recognize non-standard types or not. A few non-standard types we
3350 know about have been added. Also, when run as a script, there are
3351 new -l and -e options.
3352
3353- statcache is now deprecated.
3354
3355- email.Utils.formatdate() now produces the preferred RFC 2822 style
3356 dates with numeric timezones (it used to produce obsolete dates
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003357 hard coded to "GMT" timezone). An optional 'localtime' flag is
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003358 added to produce dates in the local timezone, with daylight savings
3359 time properly taken into account.
3360
3361- In pickle and cPickle, instead of masking errors in load() by
3362 transforming them into SystemError, we let the original exception
3363 propagate out. Also, implement support for __safe_for_unpickling__
3364 in pickle, as it already was supported in cPickle.
3365
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003366Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003367-----------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003368
3369Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003370-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003371
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003372- The dbm module is built using libdb1 if available. The bsddb module
3373 is built with libdb3 if available.
3374
3375- Misc/Makefile.pre.in has been removed by BDFL pronouncement.
3376
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003377C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003378-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003379
Tim Peters1fc240e2001-10-26 05:06:50 +00003380- New function PySequence_Fast_GET_SIZE() returns the size of a non-
3381 NULL result from PySequence_Fast(), more quickly than calling
3382 PySequence_Size().
3383
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003384- New argument unpacking function PyArg_UnpackTuple() added.
3385
3386- New functions PyObject_CallFunctionObjArgs() and
3387 PyObject_CallMethodObjArgs() have been added to make it more
3388 convenient and efficient to call functions and methods from C.
3389
3390- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() no longer masks errors, so it's
3391 possible that this will propagate errors it didn't before.
3392
3393- New function PyObject_CheckReadBuffer(), which returns true if its
3394 argument supports the single-segment readable buffer interface.
3395
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003396New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003397-------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003398
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00003399- We've finally confirmed that this release builds on HP-UX 11.00,
3400 *with* threads, and passes the test suite.
3401
Tim Peters7a33d8b2001-11-05 02:51:07 +00003402- Thanks to a series of patches from Michael Muller, Python may build
3403 again under OS/2 Visual Age C++.
3404
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00003405- Updated RISCOS port by Dietmar Schwertberger.
3406
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003407Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003408-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003409
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00003410- Added a test script for the curses module. It isn't run automatically;
3411 regrtest.py must be run with '-u curses' to enable it.
3412
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003413Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003414-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003415
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003416Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003417----
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003418
3419- PythonScript has been moved to unsupported and is slated to be
3420 removed completely in the next release.
3421
3422- It should now be possible to build applets that work on both OS9 and
3423 OSX.
3424
3425- The core is now linked with CoreServices not Carbon; as a side
3426 result, default 8bit encoding on OSX is now ASCII.
3427
3428- Python should now build on OSX 10.1.1
3429
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003430
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003431What's New in Python 2.2b1?
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003432===========================
3433
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003434*Release date: 19-Oct-2001*
3435
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003436Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003437--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003438
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00003439- New-style classes are now always dynamic (except for built-in and
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00003440 extension types). There is no longer a performance penalty, and I
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00003441 no longer see another reason to keep this baggage around. One relic
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00003442 remains: the __dict__ of a new-style class is a read-only proxy; you
3443 must set the class's attribute to modify it. As a consequence, the
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00003444 __defined__ attribute of new-style types no longer exists, for lack
3445 of need: there is once again only one __dict__ (although in the
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00003446 future a __cache__ may be resurrected with a similar function, if I
3447 can prove that it actually speeds things up).
Guido van Rossum50fda3b2001-10-04 19:46:06 +00003448
Tim Peters1c9ca872001-10-04 06:43:12 +00003449- C.__doc__ now works as expected for new-style classes (in 2.2a4 it
3450 always returned None, even when there was a class docstring).
3451
3452- doctest now finds and runs docstrings attached to new-style classes,
3453 class methods, static methods, and properties.
3454
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003455Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003456-----------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003457
Guido van Rossuma8bcf802001-10-15 15:53:58 +00003458- A very subtle syntactical pitfall in list comprehensions was fixed.
3459 For example: [a+b for a in 'abc', for b in 'def']. The comma in
3460 this example is a mistake. Previously, this would silently let 'a'
3461 iterate over the singleton tuple ('abc',), yielding ['abcd', 'abce',
3462 'abcf'] rather than the intended ['ad', 'ae', 'af', 'bd', 'be',
3463 'bf', 'cd', 'ce', 'cf']. Now, this is flagged as a syntax error.
3464 Note that [a for a in <singleton>] is a convoluted way to say
3465 [<singleton>] anyway, so it's not like any expressiveness is lost.
3466
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003467- getattr(obj, name, default) now only catches AttributeError, as
3468 documented, rather than returning the default value for all
3469 exceptions (which could mask bugs in a __getattr__ hook, for
3470 example).
3471
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00003472- Weak reference objects are now part of the core and offer a C API.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00003473 A bug which could allow a core dump when binary operations involved
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00003474 proxy reference has been fixed. weakref.ReferenceError is now a
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003475 built-in exception.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00003476
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00003477- unicode(obj) now behaves more like str(obj), accepting arbitrary
3478 objects, and calling a __unicode__ method if it exists.
3479 unicode(obj, encoding) and unicode(obj, encoding, errors) still
Marc-André Lemburgb5507ec2001-10-19 12:02:29 +00003480 require an 8-bit string or character buffer argument.
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00003481
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003482- isinstance() now allows any object as the first argument and a
3483 class, a type or something with a __bases__ tuple attribute for the
3484 second argument. The second argument may also be a tuple of a
3485 class, type, or something with __bases__, in which case isinstance()
3486 will return true if the first argument is an instance of any of the
3487 things contained in the second argument tuple. E.g.
3488
3489 isinstance(x, (A, B))
3490
3491 returns true if x is an instance of A or B.
3492
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003493Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003494-----------------
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003495
3496- thread.start_new_thread() now returns the thread ID (previously None).
3497
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00003498- binascii has now two quopri support functions, a2b_qp and b2a_qp.
3499
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00003500- readline now supports setting the startup_hook and the
3501 pre_event_hook, and adds the add_history() function.
Martin v. Löwis0daad592001-09-30 21:09:59 +00003502
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00003503- os and posix supports chroot(), setgroups() and unsetenv() where
3504 available. The stat(), fstat(), statvfs() and fstatvfs() functions
3505 now return "pseudo-sequences" -- the various fields can now be
3506 accessed as attributes (e.g. os.stat("/").st_mtime) but for
3507 backwards compatibility they also behave as a fixed-length sequence.
3508 Some platform-specific fields (e.g. st_rdev) are only accessible as
Guido van Rossum98bf58f2001-10-18 20:34:25 +00003509 attributes.
3510
3511- time: localtime(), gmtime() and strptime() now return a
3512 pseudo-sequence similar to the os.stat() return value, with
3513 attributes like tm_year etc.
Martin v. Löwis16628c92001-10-04 22:46:41 +00003514
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003515- Decompression objects in the zlib module now accept an optional
3516 second parameter to decompress() that specifies the maximum amount
3517 of memory to use for the uncompressed data.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003518
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00003519- optional SSL support in the socket module now exports OpenSSL
3520 functions RAND_add(), RAND_egd(), and RAND_status(). These calls
3521 are useful on platforms like Solaris where OpenSSL does not
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003522 automatically seed its PRNG. Also, the keyfile and certfile
3523 arguments to socket.ssl() are now optional.
3524
3525- posixmodule (and by extension, the os module on POSIX platforms) now
3526 exports O_LARGEFILE, O_DIRECT, O_DIRECTORY, and O_NOFOLLOW.
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00003527
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003528Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003529-------
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00003530
Tim Peters7402f792001-10-02 03:53:41 +00003531- doctest now excludes functions and classes not defined by the module
3532 being tested, thanks to Tim Hochberg.
3533
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00003534- HotShot, a new profiler implemented using a C-based callback, has
3535 been added. This substantially reduces the overhead of profiling,
3536 but it is still quite preliminary. Support modules and
3537 documentation will be added in upcoming releases (before 2.2 final).
3538
Guido van Rossumc4b09b42001-10-04 10:19:00 +00003539- profile now produces correct output in situations where an exception
3540 raised in Python is cleared by C code (e.g. hasattr()). This used
3541 to cause wrong output, including spurious claims of recursive
3542 functions and attribution of time spent to the wrong function.
3543
Tim Peters0a1fc4e2001-10-07 03:12:08 +00003544 The code and documentation for the derived OldProfile and HotProfile
3545 profiling classes was removed. The code hasn't worked for years (if
3546 you tried to use them, they raised exceptions). OldProfile
3547 intended to reproduce the behavior of the profiler Python used more
3548 than 7 years ago, and isn't interesting anymore. HotProfile intended
3549 to provide a faster profiler (but producing less information), and
3550 that's a worthy goal we intend to meet via a different approach (but
3551 without losing information).
3552
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00003553- Profile.calibrate() has a new implementation that should deliver
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00003554 a much better system-specific calibration constant. The constant can
3555 now be specified in an instance constructor, or as a Profile class or
3556 instance variable, instead of by editing profile.py's source code.
3557 Calibration must still be done manually (see the docs for the profile
3558 module).
3559
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003560 Note that Profile.calibrate() must be overridden by subclasses.
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00003561 Improving the accuracy required exploiting detailed knowledge of
3562 profiler internals; the earlier method abstracted away the details
3563 and measured a simplified model instead, but consequently computed
3564 a constant too small by a factor of 2 on some modern machines.
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00003565
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00003566- quopri's encode and decode methods take an optional header parameter,
Jeremy Hylton6f543b62001-10-16 20:42:52 +00003567 which indicates whether output is intended for the header 'Q'
3568 encoding.
3569
Guido van Rossuma5343cc2001-10-18 18:02:07 +00003570- The SocketServer.ThreadingMixIn class now closes the request after
3571 finish_request() returns. (Not when it errors out though.)
3572
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003573- The nntplib module's NNTP.body() method has grown a 'file' argument
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003574 to allow saving the message body to a file.
3575
3576- The email package has added a class email.Parser.HeaderParser which
3577 only parses headers and does not recurse into the message's body.
3578 Also, the module/class MIMEAudio has been added for representing
3579 audio data (contributed by Anthony Baxter).
3580
3581- ftplib should be able to handle files > 2GB.
3582
3583- ConfigParser.getboolean() now also interprets TRUE, FALSE, YES, NO,
3584 ON, and OFF.
3585
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00003586- xml.dom.minidom NodeList objects now support the length attribute
3587 and item() method as required by the DOM specifications.
3588
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00003589Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003590-----------
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00003591
3592- Demo/dns was removed. It no longer serves any purpose; a package
3593 derived from it is now maintained by Anthony Baxter, see
3594 http://PyDNS.SourceForge.net.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003595
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003596- The freeze tool has been made more robust, and two new options have
3597 been added: -X and -E.
3598
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003599Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003600-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003601
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003602- configure will use CXX in LINKCC if CXX is used to build main() and
3603 the system requires to link a C++ main using the C++ compiler.
3604
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003605C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003606-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003607
Guido van Rossum6c4bce32001-10-18 19:20:25 +00003608- The documentation for the tp_compare slot is updated to require that
3609 the return value must be -1, 0, 1; an arbitrary number <0 or >0 is
3610 not correct. This is not yet enforced but will be enforced in
3611 Python 2.3; even later, we may use -2 to indicate errors and +2 for
3612 "NotImplemented". Right now, -1 should be used for an error return.
3613
Tim Petersd38b1c72001-09-30 05:09:37 +00003614- PyLong_AsLongLong() now accepts int (as well as long) arguments.
3615 Consequently, PyArg_ParseTuple's 'L' code also accepts int (as well
3616 as long) arguments.
3617
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00003618- PyThread_start_new_thread() now returns a long int giving the thread
3619 ID, if one can be calculated; it returns -1 for error, 0 if no
3620 thread ID is calculated (this is an incompatible change, but only
3621 the thread module used this API). This code has only really been
3622 tested on Linux and Windows; other platforms please beware (and
3623 report any bugs or strange behavior).
3624
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00003625- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() no longer accepts Unicode objects as
3626 input.
3627
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003628New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003629-------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003630
3631Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003632-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003633
3634Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003635-------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003636
Tim Peters04cf1d32001-10-09 22:39:40 +00003637- Installer: If you install IDLE, and don't disable file-extension
3638 registration, a new "Edit with IDLE" context (right-click) menu entry
3639 is created for .py and .pyw files.
3640
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003641- The signal module now supports SIGBREAK on Windows, thanks to Steven
3642 Scott. Note that SIGBREAK is unique to Windows. The default SIGBREAK
3643 action remains to call Win32 ExitProcess(). This can be changed via
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003644 signal.signal(). For example::
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003645
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003646 # Make Ctrl+Break raise KeyboardInterrupt, like Python's default Ctrl+C
3647 # (SIGINT) behavior.
3648 import signal
3649 signal.signal(signal.SIGBREAK, signal.default_int_handler)
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003650
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003651 try:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003652 while 1:
3653 pass
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003654 except KeyboardInterrupt:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003655 # We get here on Ctrl+C or Ctrl+Break now; if we had not changed
3656 # SIGBREAK, only on Ctrl+C (and Ctrl+Break would terminate the
3657 # program without the possibility for any Python-level cleanup).
3658 print "Clean exit"
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003659
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003660
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003661What's New in Python 2.2a4?
3662===========================
3663
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003664*Release date: 28-Sep-2001*
3665
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003666Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003667--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003668
3669- pydoc and inspect are now aware of new-style classes;
3670 e.g. help(list) at the interactive prompt now shows proper
3671 documentation for all operations on list objects.
3672
3673- Applications using Jim Fulton's ExtensionClass module can now safely
3674 be used with Python 2.2. In particular, Zope 2.4.1 now works with
3675 Python 2.2 (as well as with Python 2.1.1). The Demo/metaclass
3676 examples also work again. It is hoped that Gtk and Boost also work
3677 with 2.2a4 and beyond. (If you can confirm this, please write
3678 webmaster@python.org; if there are still problems, please open a bug
3679 report on SourceForge.)
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003680
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00003681- property() now takes 4 keyword arguments: fget, fset, fdel and doc.
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003682 These map to read-only attributes 'fget', 'fset', 'fdel', and '__doc__'
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00003683 in the constructed property object. fget, fset and fdel weren't
3684 discoverable from Python in 2.2a3. __doc__ is new, and allows to
3685 associate a docstring with a property.
3686
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003687- Comparison overloading is now more completely implemented. For
3688 example, a str subclass instance can properly be compared to a str
3689 instance, and it can properly overload comparison. Ditto for most
3690 other built-in object types.
3691
3692- The repr() of new-style classes has changed; instead of <type
3693 'M.Foo'> a new-style class is now rendered as <class 'M.Foo'>,
3694 *except* for built-in types, which are still rendered as <type
3695 'Foo'> (to avoid upsetting existing code that might parse or
3696 otherwise rely on repr() of certain type objects).
3697
3698- The repr() of new-style objects is now always <Foo object at XXX>;
3699 previously, it was sometimes <Foo instance at XXX>.
3700
3701- For new-style classes, what was previously called __getattr__ is now
3702 called __getattribute__. This method, if defined, is called for
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00003703 *every* attribute access. A new __getattr__ hook more similar to the
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003704 one in classic classes is defined which is called only if regular
3705 attribute access raises AttributeError; to catch *all* attribute
3706 access, you can use __getattribute__ (for new-style classes). If
3707 both are defined, __getattribute__ is called first, and if it raises
3708 AttributeError, __getattr__ is called.
3709
3710- The __class__ attribute of new-style objects can be assigned to.
3711 The new class must have the same C-level object layout as the old
3712 class.
3713
3714- The builtin file type can be subclassed now. In the usual pattern,
3715 "file" is the name of the builtin type, and file() is a new builtin
3716 constructor, with the same signature as the builtin open() function.
3717 file() is now the preferred way to open a file.
3718
3719- Previously, __new__ would only see sequential arguments passed to
3720 the type in a constructor call; __init__ would see both sequential
3721 and keyword arguments. This made no sense whatsoever any more, so
3722 now both __new__ and __init__ see all arguments.
3723
3724- Previously, hash() applied to an instance of a subclass of str or
3725 unicode always returned 0. This has been repaired.
3726
3727- Previously, an operation on an instance of a subclass of an
3728 immutable type (int, long, float, complex, tuple, str, unicode),
3729 where the subtype didn't override the operation (and so the
3730 operation was handled by the builtin type), could return that
3731 instance instead a value of the base type. For example, if s was of
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003732 a str subclass type, s[:] returned s as-is. Now it returns a str
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003733 with the same value as s.
3734
Barry Warsaw86fbaf82001-09-28 15:26:12 +00003735- Provisional support for pickling new-style objects has been added.
3736
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003737Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003738----
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003739
Tim Peters2c9aa5e2001-09-23 04:06:05 +00003740- file.writelines() now accepts any iterable object producing strings.
3741
Marc-André Lemburgaefd7662001-09-20 12:59:37 +00003742- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() now works very much like
3743 PyObject_Str(obj) in that it tries to use __str__/tp_str
3744 on the object if the object is not a string or buffer. This
3745 makes unicode() behave like str() when applied to non-string/buffer
3746 objects.
3747
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00003748- PyFile_WriteObject now passes Unicode objects to the file's write
3749 method. As a result, all file-like objects which may be the target
Martin v. Löwis2777c022001-09-19 13:47:32 +00003750 of a print statement must support Unicode objects, i.e. they must
3751 at least convert them into ASCII strings.
3752
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003753- Thread scheduling on Solaris should be improved; it is no longer
3754 necessary to insert a small sleep at the start of a thread in order
3755 to let other runnable threads be scheduled.
3756
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003757Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003758-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003759
Marc-André Lemburgbf990172001-09-27 14:17:33 +00003760- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
3761 read character buffer compatible objects for their .write() methods.
3762 These objects are converted to strings and then handled as such
3763 by the instances.
3764
Barry Warsaw2f600732001-09-24 04:28:10 +00003765- The "email" package has been added. This is basically a port of the
3766 mimelib package <http://sf.net/projects/mimelib> with API changes
3767 and some implementations updated to use iterators and generators.
3768
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00003769- difflib.ndiff() and difflib.Differ.compare() are generators now. This
3770 restores the ability of Tools/scripts/ndiff.py to start producing output
3771 before the entire comparison is complete.
3772
Barry Warsaw58b072d2001-09-22 04:44:21 +00003773- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
3774 iteration just like file objects (i.e. their .readline() method is
3775 called for each iteration until it returns an empty string).
3776
Marc-André Lemburg494f2ae2001-09-19 11:33:31 +00003777- The codecs module has grown four new helper APIs to access
3778 builtin codecs: getencoder(), getdecoder(), getreader(),
3779 getwriter().
3780
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003781- SimpleXMLRPCServer: a new module (based upon SimpleHTMLServer)
3782 simplifies writing XML RPC servers.
3783
Barry Warsaw647d5e82001-09-28 17:01:02 +00003784- os.path.realpath(): a new function that returns the absolute pathname
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003785 after interpretation of symbolic links. On non-Unix systems, this
3786 is an alias for os.path.abspath().
3787
Tim Peters16a77ad2001-09-08 04:00:12 +00003788- operator.indexOf() (PySequence_Index() in the C API) now works with any
3789 iterable object.
3790
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003791- smtplib now supports various authentication and security features of
3792 the SMTP protocol through the new login() and starttls() methods.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00003793
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003794- hmac: a new module implementing keyed hashing for message
3795 authentication.
3796
3797- mimetypes now recognizes more extensions and file types. At the
3798 same time, some mappings not sanctioned by IANA were removed.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00003799
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003800- The "compiler" package has been brought up to date to the state of
Guido van Rossumc9ed5dc2001-09-20 05:30:24 +00003801 Python 2.2 bytecode generation. It has also been promoted from a
3802 Tool to a standard library package. (Tools/compiler still exists as
3803 a sample driver.)
3804
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003805Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003806-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003807
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003808- Large file support (LFS) is now automatic when the platform supports
3809 it; no more manual configuration tweaks are needed. On Linux, at
3810 least, it's possible to have a system whose C library supports large
3811 files but whose kernel doesn't; in this case, large file support is
3812 still enabled but doesn't do you any good unless you upgrade your
3813 kernel or share your Python executable with another system whose
3814 kernel has large file support.
3815
3816- The configure script now supplies plausible defaults in a
3817 cross-compilation environment. This doesn't mean that the supplied
3818 values are always correct, or that cross-compilation now works
3819 flawlessly -- but it's a first step (and it shuts up most of
3820 autoconf's warnings about AC_TRY_RUN).
3821
3822- The Unix build is now a bit less chatty, courtesy of the parser
3823 generator. The build is completely silent (except for errors) when
3824 using "make -s", thanks to a -q option to setup.py.
3825
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003826C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003827-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003828
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003829- The "structmember" API now supports some new flag bits to deny read
3830 and/or write access to attributes in restricted execution mode.
3831
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003832New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003833-------------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003834
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003835- Compaq's iPAQ handheld, running the "familiar" Linux distribution
3836 (http://familiar.handhelds.org).
3837
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003838Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003839-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003840
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00003841- The "classic" standard tests, which work by comparing stdout to
3842 an expected-output file under Lib/test/output/, no longer stop at
3843 the first mismatch. Instead the test is run to completion, and a
3844 variant of ndiff-style comparison is used to report all differences.
3845 This is much easier to understand than the previous style of reporting.
3846
3847- The unittest-based standard tests now use regrtest's test_main()
3848 convention, instead of running as a side-effect of merely being
3849 imported. This allows these tests to be run in more natural and
3850 flexible ways as unittests, outside the regrtest framework.
3851
3852- regrtest.py is much better integrated with unittest and doctest now,
3853 especially in regard to reporting errors.
3854
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003855Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003856-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003857
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003858- Large file support now also works for files > 4GB, on filesystems
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00003859 that support it (NTFS under Windows 2000). See "What's New in
3860 Python 2.2a3" for more detail.
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003861
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003862
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003863What's New in Python 2.2a3?
3864===========================
3865
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003866*Release Date: 07-Sep-2001*
3867
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003868Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003869----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003870
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00003871- Conversion of long to float now raises OverflowError if the long is too
3872 big to represent as a C double.
3873
Tim Peters32f453e2001-09-03 08:35:41 +00003874- The 3-argument builtin pow() no longer allows a third non-None argument
3875 if either of the first two arguments is a float, or if both are of
3876 integer types and the second argument is negative (in which latter case
3877 the arguments are converted to float, so this is really the same
3878 restriction).
3879
Tim Peters5d2b77c2001-09-03 05:47:38 +00003880- The builtin dir() now returns more information, and sometimes much
3881 more, generally naming all attributes of an object, and all attributes
3882 reachable from the object via its class, and from its class's base
3883 classes, and so on from them too. Example: in 2.2a2, dir([]) returned
3884 an empty list. In 2.2a3,
3885
3886 >>> dir([])
3887 ['__add__', '__class__', '__contains__', '__delattr__', '__delitem__',
3888 '__eq__', '__ge__', '__getattr__', '__getitem__', '__getslice__',
3889 '__gt__', '__hash__', '__iadd__', '__imul__', '__init__', '__le__',
3890 '__len__', '__lt__', '__mul__', '__ne__', '__new__', '__repr__',
3891 '__rmul__', '__setattr__', '__setitem__', '__setslice__', '__str__',
3892 'append', 'count', 'extend', 'index', 'insert', 'pop', 'remove',
3893 'reverse', 'sort']
3894
3895 dir(module) continues to return only the module's attributes, though.
3896
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003897- Overflowing operations on plain ints now return a long int rather
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003898 than raising OverflowError. This is a partial implementation of PEP
3899 237. You can use -Wdefault::OverflowWarning to enable a warning for
3900 this situation, and -Werror::OverflowWarning to revert to the old
3901 OverflowError exception.
3902
Guido van Rossum61c345f2001-09-04 03:26:15 +00003903- A new command line option, -Q<arg>, is added to control run-time
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003904 warnings for the use of classic division. (See PEP 238.) Possible
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00003905 values are -Qold, -Qwarn, -Qwarnall, and -Qnew. The default is
3906 -Qold, meaning the / operator has its classic meaning and no
3907 warnings are issued. Using -Qwarn issues a run-time warning about
3908 all uses of classic division for int and long arguments; -Qwarnall
3909 also warns about classic division for float and complex arguments
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00003910 (for use with fixdiv.py).
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003911 [Note: the remainder of this item (preserved below) became
3912 obsolete in 2.2c1 -- -Qnew has global effect in 2.2] ::
3913
3914 Using -Qnew is questionable; it turns on new division by default, but
3915 only in the __main__ module. You can usefully combine -Qwarn or
3916 -Qwarnall and -Qnew: this gives the __main__ module new division, and
3917 warns about classic division everywhere else.
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003918
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003919- Many built-in types can now be subclassed. This applies to int,
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003920 long, float, str, unicode, and tuple. (The types complex, list and
3921 dictionary can also be subclassed; this was introduced earlier.)
3922 Note that restrictions apply when subclassing immutable built-in
3923 types: you can only affect the value of the instance by overloading
3924 __new__. You can add mutable attributes, and the subclass instances
3925 will have a __dict__ attribute, but you cannot change the "value"
3926 (as implemented by the base class) of an immutable subclass instance
3927 once it is created.
3928
Guido van Rossumaaf80c82001-09-02 13:44:35 +00003929- The dictionary constructor now takes an optional argument, a
3930 mapping-like object, and initializes the dictionary from its
3931 (key, value) pairs.
3932
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003933- A new built-in type, super, has been added. This facilitates making
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003934 "cooperative super calls" in a multiple inheritance setting. For an
3935 explanation, see http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#cooperation
3936
Guido van Rossum8d7234d2001-09-06 22:02:58 +00003937- A new built-in type, property, has been added. This enables the
3938 creation of "properties". These are attributes implemented by
3939 getter and setter functions (or only one of these for read-only or
3940 write-only attributes), without the need to override __getattr__.
3941 See http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#property
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003942
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003943- The syntax of floating-point and imaginary literals has been
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00003944 liberalized, to allow leading zeroes. Examples of literals now
3945 legal that were SyntaxErrors before:
3946
3947 00.0 0e3 0100j 07.5 00000000000000000008.
3948
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003949- An old tokenizer bug allowed floating point literals with an incomplete
Tim Petersc6d95812001-08-28 20:56:27 +00003950 exponent, such as 1e and 3.1e-. Such literals now raise SyntaxError.
3951
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003952Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003953-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003954
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00003955- telnetlib includes symbolic names for the options, and support for
Martin v. Löwis1da9c572002-11-04 09:56:00 +00003956 setting an option negotiation callback. It also supports processing
3957 of suboptions.
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00003958
Tim Petersa40c7932001-09-05 22:36:56 +00003959- The new C standard no longer requires that math libraries set errno to
3960 ERANGE on overflow. For platform libraries that exploit this new
3961 freedom, Python's overflow-checking was wholly broken. A new overflow-
3962 checking scheme attempts to repair that, but may not be reliable on all
3963 platforms (C doesn't seem to provide anything both useful and portable
3964 in this area anymore).
3965
Martin v. Löwis44f86962001-09-05 13:44:54 +00003966- Asynchronous timeout actions are available through the new class
3967 threading.Timer.
3968
Tim Peters78526162001-09-05 00:53:45 +00003969- math.log and math.log10 now return sensible results for even huge
3970 long arguments. For example, math.log10(10 ** 10000) ~= 10000.0.
3971
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003972- A new function, imp.lock_held(), returns 1 when the import lock is
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00003973 currently held. See the docs for the imp module.
3974
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003975- pickle, cPickle and marshal on 32-bit platforms can now correctly read
Tim Peters82112372001-08-29 02:28:42 +00003976 dumps containing ints written on platforms where Python ints are 8 bytes.
3977 When read on a box where Python ints are 4 bytes, such values are
3978 converted to Python longs.
3979
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003980- In restricted execution mode (using the rexec module), unmarshalling
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003981 code objects is no longer allowed. This plugs a security hole.
3982
Steve Purcell6091cd62001-09-06 16:05:17 +00003983- unittest.TestResult instances no longer store references to tracebacks
3984 generated by test failures. This prevents unexpected dangling references
3985 to objects that should be garbage collected between tests.
3986
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003987Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003988-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003989
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00003990- Tools/scripts/fixdiv.py has been added which can be used to fix
3991 division operators as per PEP 238.
3992
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003993Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003994-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003995
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00003996- If you are an adventurous person using Mac OS X you may want to look at
3997 Mac/OSX. There is a Makefile there that will build Python as a real Mac
3998 application, which can be used for experimenting with Carbon or Cocoa.
3999 Discussion of this on pythonmac-sig, please.
4000
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00004001C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004002-----
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00004003
4004- New function PyObject_Dir(obj), like Python __builtin__.dir(obj).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00004005
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004006- Note that PyLong_AsDouble can fail! This has always been true, but no
4007 callers checked for it. It's more likely to fail now, because overflow
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004008 errors are properly detected now. The proper way to check::
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004009
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004010 double x = PyLong_AsDouble(some_long_object);
4011 if (x == -1.0 && PyErr_Occurred()) {
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004012 /* The conversion failed. */
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004013 }
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004014
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004015- The GC API has been changed. Extensions that use the old API will still
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004016 compile but will not participate in GC. To upgrade an extension
4017 module:
4018
4019 - rename Py_TPFLAGS_GC to PyTPFLAGS_HAVE_GC
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004020
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004021 - use PyObject_GC_New or PyObject_GC_NewVar to allocate objects and
4022 PyObject_GC_Del to deallocate them
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004023
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004024 - rename PyObject_GC_Init to PyObject_GC_Track and PyObject_GC_Fini
4025 to PyObject_GC_UnTrack
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004026
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004027 - remove PyGC_HEAD_SIZE from object size calculations
4028
4029 - remove calls to PyObject_AS_GC and PyObject_FROM_GC
4030
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004031- Two new functions: PyString_FromFormat() and PyString_FromFormatV().
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004032 These can be used safely to construct string objects from a
4033 sprintf-style format string (similar to the format string supported
4034 by PyErr_Format()).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00004035
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004036New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004037-------------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004038
Tim Petersb7da0902001-09-02 23:01:43 +00004039- Stephen Hansen contributed patches sufficient to get a clean compile
4040 under Borland C (Windows), but he reports problems running it and ran
4041 out of time to complete the port. Volunteers? Expect a MemoryError
4042 when importing the types module; this is probably shallow, and
4043 causing later failures too.
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004044
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004045Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004046-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004047
4048Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004049-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004050
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00004051- Large file support is now enabled on Win32 platforms as well as on
4052 Win64. This means that, for example, you can use f.tell() and f.seek()
4053 to manipulate files larger than 2 gigabytes (provided you have enough
4054 disk space, and are using a Windows filesystem that supports large
Tim Peters9a9471c2001-09-11 23:18:51 +00004055 partitions). Windows filesystem limits: FAT has a 2GB (gigabyte)
4056 filesize limit, and large file support makes no difference there.
4057 FAT32's limit is 4GB, and files >= 2GB are easier to use from Python now.
4058 NTFS has no practical limit on file size, and files of any size can be
4059 used from Python now.
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00004060
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004061- The w9xpopen hack is now used on Windows NT and 2000 too when COMPSPEC
Tim Peters402d5982001-08-27 06:37:48 +00004062 points to command.com (patch from Brian Quinlan).
4063
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004064
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004065What's New in Python 2.2a2?
4066===========================
4067
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004068*Release Date: 22-Aug-2001*
4069
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004070Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004071-----
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004072
Barry Warsaw18b2ecf2001-08-22 20:26:56 +00004073- Tim Peters developed a brand new Windows installer using Wise 8.1,
4074 generously donated to us by Wise Solutions.
4075
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004076- configure supports a new option --enable-unicode, with the values
4077 ucs2 and ucs4 (new in 2.2a1). With --disable-unicode, the Unicode
4078 type and supporting code is completely removed from the interpreter.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004079
Jack Jansen32ce0cd2001-08-21 19:28:20 +00004080- A new configure option --enable-framework builds a Mac OS X framework,
4081 which "make frameworkinstall" will install. This provides a starting
4082 point for more mac-like functionality, join pythonmac-sig@python.org
4083 if you are interested in helping.
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004084
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004085- The NeXT platform is no longer supported.
4086
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004087- The 'new' module is now statically linked.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004088
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004089Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004090-----
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004091
4092- The new Tools/scripts/cleanfuture.py can be used to automatically
Andrew M. Kuchlingb0532092001-08-15 15:54:56 +00004093 edit out obsolete future statements from Python source code. See
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004094 the module docstring for details.
4095
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004096Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004097-----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004098
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004099- regrtest.py now knows which tests are expected to be skipped on some
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004100 platforms, allowing to give clearer test result output. regrtest
4101 also has optional --use/-u switch to run normally disabled tests
4102 which require network access or consume significant disk resources.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004103
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004104- Several new tests in the standard test suite, with special thanks to
4105 Nick Mathewson.
4106
4107Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004108----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004109
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004110- The floor division operator // has been added as outlined in PEP
4111 238. The / operator still provides classic division (and will until
4112 Python 3.0) unless "from __future__ import division" is included, in
4113 which case the / operator will provide true division. The operator
4114 module provides truediv() and floordiv() functions. Augmented
4115 assignment variants are included, as are the equivalent overloadable
4116 methods and C API methods. See the PEP for a full discussion:
4117 <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0238.html>
4118
Tim Peters6cd6a822001-08-17 22:11:27 +00004119- Future statements are now effective in simulated interactive shells
4120 (like IDLE). This should "just work" by magic, but read Michael
4121 Hudson's "Future statements in simulated shells" PEP 264 for full
4122 details: <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0264.html>.
4123
Guido van Rossumf86ddd22001-08-17 21:21:04 +00004124- The type/class unification (PEP 252-253) was integrated into the
4125 trunk and is not so tentative any more (the exact specification of
4126 some features is still tentative). A lot of work has done on fixing
4127 bugs and adding robustness and features (performance still has to
4128 come a long way).
4129
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00004130- Warnings about a mismatch in the Python API during extension import
4131 now use the Python warning framework (which makes it possible to
4132 write filters for these warnings).
4133
Barry Warsaw9b3be7f2001-08-14 18:35:02 +00004134- A function's __dict__ (aka func_dict) will now always be a
4135 dictionary. It used to be possible to delete it or set it to None,
4136 but now both actions raise TypeErrors. It is still legal to set it
4137 to a dictionary object. Getting func.__dict__ before any attributes
4138 have been assigned now returns an empty dictionary instead of None.
4139
Guido van Rossum32aa5d22001-09-05 18:43:35 +00004140- A new command line option, -E, was added which disables the use of
4141 all environment variables, or at least those that are specifically
4142 significant to Python. Usually those have a name starting with
4143 "PYTHON". This was used to fix a problem where the tests fail if
4144 the user happens to have PYTHONHOME or PYTHONPATH pointing to an
4145 older distribution.
4146
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004147Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004148-------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004149
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004150- New class Differ and new functions ndiff() and restore() in difflib.py.
4151 These package the algorithms used by the popular Tools/scripts/ndiff.py,
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004152 for programmatic reuse.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004153
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004154- New function xml.sax.saxutils.quoteattr(): Quote an XML attribute
4155 value using the minimal quoting required for the value; more
4156 reliable than using xml.sax.saxutils.escape() for attribute values.
4157
4158- Readline completion support for cmd.Cmd was added.
4159
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004160- Calling os.tempnam() or os.tmpnam() generate RuntimeWarnings.
4161
4162- Added function threading.BoundedSemaphore()
4163
4164- Added Ka-Ping Yee's cgitb.py module.
4165
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004166- The 'new' module now exposes the CO_xxx flags.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004167
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00004168- The gc module offers the get_referents function.
4169
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004170New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004171-------------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004172
4173C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004174-----
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004175
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00004176- Two new APIs PyOS_snprintf() and PyOS_vsnprintf() were added
4177 which provide a cross-platform implementations for the
4178 relatively new snprintf()/vsnprintf() C lib APIs. In contrast to
4179 the standard sprintf() and vsprintf() C lib APIs, these versions
4180 apply bounds checking on the used buffer which enhances protection
4181 against buffer overruns.
4182
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00004183- Unicode APIs now use name mangling to assure that mixing interpreters
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00004184 and extensions using different Unicode widths is rendered next to
4185 impossible. Trying to import an incompatible Unicode-aware extension
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00004186 will result in an ImportError. Unicode extensions writers must make
4187 sure to check the Unicode width compatibility in their extensions by
4188 using at least one of the mangled Unicode APIs in the extension.
4189
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004190- Two new flags METH_NOARGS and METH_O are available in method definition
4191 tables to simplify implementation of methods with no arguments and a
4192 single untyped argument. Calling such methods is more efficient than
4193 calling corresponding METH_VARARGS methods. METH_OLDARGS is now
4194 deprecated.
4195
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00004196Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004197-------
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00004198
4199- "import module" now compiles module.pyw if it exists and nothing else
4200 relevant is found.
4201
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004202
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00004203What's New in Python 2.2a1?
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004204===========================
4205
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004206*Release date: 18-Jul-2001*
4207
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004208Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004209----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004210
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00004211- TENTATIVELY, a large amount of code implementing much of what's
4212 described in PEP 252 (Making Types Look More Like Classes) and PEP
4213 253 (Subtyping Built-in Types) was added. This will be released
4214 with Python 2.2a1. Documentation will be provided separately
4215 through http://www.python.org/2.2/. The purpose of releasing this
4216 with Python 2.2a1 is to test backwards compatibility. It is
4217 possible, though not likely, that a decision is made not to release
4218 this code as part of 2.2 final, if any serious backwards
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004219 incompatibilities are found during alpha testing that cannot be
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00004220 repaired.
4221
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00004222- Generators were added; this is a new way to create an iterator (see
Tim Peters11a0d102001-07-17 18:48:00 +00004223 below) using what looks like a simple function containing one or
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00004224 more 'yield' statements. See PEP 255. Since this adds a new
4225 keyword to the language, this feature must be enabled by including a
4226 future statement: "from __future__ import generators" (see PEP 236).
4227 Generators will become a standard feature in a future release
4228 (probably 2.3). Without this future statement, 'yield' remains an
4229 ordinary identifier, but a warning is issued each time it is used.
4230 (These warnings currently don't conform to the warnings framework of
4231 PEP 230; we intend to fix this in 2.2a2.)
4232
Marc-André Lemburg12e74b32001-05-22 08:58:23 +00004233- The UTF-16 codec was modified to be more RFC compliant. It will now
4234 only remove BOM characters at the start of the string and then
4235 only if running in native mode (UTF-16-LE and -BE won't remove a
4236 leading BMO character).
4237
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00004238- Strings now have a new method .decode() to complement the already
4239 existing .encode() method. These two methods provide direct access
4240 to the corresponding decoders and encoders of the registered codecs.
4241
4242 To enhance the usability of the .encode() method, the special
4243 casing of Unicode object return values was dropped (Unicode objects
4244 were auto-magically converted to string using the default encoding).
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00004245
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00004246 Both methods will now return whatever the codec in charge of the
4247 requested encoding returns as object, e.g. Unicode codecs will
4248 return Unicode objects when decoding is requested ("äöü".decode("latin-1")
4249 will return u"äöü"). This enables codec writer to create codecs
4250 for various simple to use conversions.
4251
4252 New codecs were added to demonstrate these new features (the .encode()
4253 and .decode() columns indicate the type of the returned objects):
4254
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004255 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4256 |Name | .encode() | .decode() | Description |
4257 +=========+===========+===========+=============================+
4258 |uu | string | string | UU codec (e.g. for email) |
4259 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4260 |base64 | string | string | base64 codec |
4261 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4262 |quopri | string | string | quoted-printable codec |
4263 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4264 |zlib | string | string | zlib compression |
4265 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4266 |hex | string | string | 2-byte hex codec |
4267 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4268 |rot-13 | string | Unicode | ROT-13 Unicode charmap codec|
4269 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00004270
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004271- Some operating systems now support the concept of a default Unicode
4272 encoding for file system operations. Notably, Windows supports 'mbcs'
4273 as the default. The Macintosh will also adopt this concept in the medium
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00004274 term, although the default encoding for that platform will be other than
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004275 'mbcs'.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00004276
4277 On operating system that support non-ASCII filenames, it is common for
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004278 functions that return filenames (such as os.listdir()) to return Python
4279 string objects pre-encoded using the default file system encoding for
4280 the platform. As this encoding is likely to be different from Python's
4281 default encoding, converting this name to a Unicode object before passing
4282 it back to the Operating System would result in a Unicode error, as Python
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004283 would attempt to use its default encoding (generally ASCII) rather than
4284 the default encoding for the file system.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00004285
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004286 In general, this change simply removes surprises when working with
4287 Unicode and the file system, making these operations work as you expect,
4288 increasing the transparency of Unicode objects in this context.
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004289 See [????] for more details, including examples.
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004290
Tim Peters61dff2b2001-05-08 15:43:37 +00004291- Float (and complex) literals in source code were evaluated to full
4292 precision only when running from a .py file; the same code loaded from a
4293 .pyc (or .pyo) file could suffer numeric differences starting at about the
4294 12th significant decimal digit. For example, on a machine with IEEE-754
4295 floating arithmetic,
4296
4297 x = 9007199254740992.0
4298 print long(x)
4299
4300 printed 9007199254740992 if run directly from .py, but 9007199254740000
4301 if from a compiled (.pyc or .pyo) file. This was due to marshal using
4302 str(float) instead of repr(float) when building code objects. marshal
4303 now uses repr(float) instead, which should reproduce floats to full
4304 machine precision (assuming the platform C float<->string I/O conversion
4305 functions are of good quality).
4306
4307 This may cause floating-point results to change in some cases, and
4308 usually for the better, but may also cause numerically unstable
4309 algorithms to break.
4310
Tim Peters2f228e72001-05-13 00:19:31 +00004311- The implementation of dicts suffers fewer collisions, which has speed
4312 benefits. However, the order in which dict entries appear in dict.keys(),
4313 dict.values() and dict.items() may differ from previous releases for a
4314 given dict. Nothing is defined about this order, so no program should
4315 rely on it. Nevertheless, it's easy to write test cases that rely on the
4316 order by accident, typically because of printing the str() or repr() of a
4317 dict to an "expected results" file. See Lib/test/test_support.py's new
4318 sortdict(dict) function for a simple way to display a dict in sorted
4319 order.
4320
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00004321- Many other small changes to dicts were made, resulting in faster
4322 operation along the most common code paths.
4323
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00004324- Dictionary objects now support the "in" operator: "x in dict" means
4325 the same as dict.has_key(x).
4326
Barry Warsaw51acc8d2001-06-26 20:12:50 +00004327- The update() method of dictionaries now accepts generic mapping
4328 objects. Specifically the argument object must support the .keys()
4329 and __getitem__() methods. This allows you to say, for example,
4330 {}.update(UserDict())
4331
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00004332- Iterators were added; this is a generalized way of providing values
4333 to a for loop. See PEP 234. There's a new built-in function iter()
4334 to return an iterator. There's a new protocol to get the next value
4335 from an iterator using the next() method (in Python) or the
4336 tp_iternext slot (in C). There's a new protocol to get iterators
4337 using the __iter__() method (in Python) or the tp_iter slot (in C).
4338 Iterating (i.e. a for loop) over a dictionary generates its keys.
4339 Iterating over a file generates its lines.
4340
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004341- The following functions were generalized to work nicely with iterator
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004342 arguments::
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004343
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00004344 map(), filter(), reduce(), zip()
Tim Peters8572b4f2001-05-06 01:05:02 +00004345 list(), tuple() (PySequence_Tuple() and PySequence_Fast() in C API)
4346 max(), min()
Tim Peters1af03e92001-05-26 19:37:54 +00004347 join() method of strings
4348 extend() method of lists
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00004349 'x in y' and 'x not in y' (PySequence_Contains() in C API)
4350 operator.countOf() (PySequence_Count() in C API)
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004351 right-hand side of assignment statements with multiple targets, such as ::
Tim Petersd6d010b2001-06-21 02:49:55 +00004352 x, y, z = some_iterable_object_returning_exactly_3_values
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00004353
Tim Petersd85e1022001-05-11 21:51:48 +00004354- Accessing module attributes is significantly faster (for example,
4355 random.random or os.path or yourPythonModule.yourAttribute).
4356
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00004357- Comparing dictionary objects via == and != is faster, and now works even
4358 if the keys and values don't support comparisons other than ==.
4359
Tim Peters95bf9392001-05-10 08:32:44 +00004360- Comparing dictionaries in ways other than == and != is slower: there were
4361 insecurities in the dict comparison implementation that could cause Python
4362 to crash if the element comparison routines for the dict keys and/or
4363 values mutated the dicts. Making the code bulletproof slowed it down.
4364
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00004365- Collisions in dicts are resolved via a new approach, which can help
4366 dramatically in bad cases. For example, looking up every key in a dict
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00004367 d with d.keys() == [i << 16 for i in range(20000)] is approximately 500x
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00004368 faster now. Thanks to Christian Tismer for pointing out the cause and
4369 the nature of an effective cure (last December! better late than never).
Tim Peters15d49292001-05-27 07:39:22 +00004370
Tim Peters52e155e2001-06-16 05:42:57 +00004371- repr() is much faster for large containers (dict, list, tuple).
4372
4373
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004374Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004375-------
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004376
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00004377- The constants ascii_letters, ascii_lowercase. and ascii_uppercase
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004378 were added to the string module. These a locale-independent
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00004379 constants, unlike letters, lowercase, and uppercase. These are now
4380 use in appropriate locations in the standard library.
4381
Martin v. Löwisf0473d52001-07-18 16:17:16 +00004382- The flags used in dlopen calls can now be configured using
4383 sys.setdlopenflags and queried using sys.getdlopenflags.
4384
Guido van Rossumc7e4aca2001-07-12 11:54:37 +00004385- Fredrik Lundh's xmlrpclib is now a standard library module. This
4386 provides full client-side XML-RPC support. In addition,
4387 Demo/xmlrpc/ contains two server frameworks (one SocketServer-based,
4388 one asyncore-based). Thanks to Eric Raymond for the documentation.
4389
Guido van Rossum643d3912001-07-05 14:46:25 +00004390- The xrange() object is simplified: it no longer supports slicing,
4391 repetition, comparisons, efficient 'in' checking, the tolist()
4392 method, or the start, stop and step attributes. See PEP 260.
4393
Martin v. Löwisebf94db2001-06-06 06:25:40 +00004394- A new function fnmatch.filter to filter lists of file names was added.
4395
Barry Warsawffd674d2001-05-22 16:00:10 +00004396- calendar.py uses month and day names based on the current locale.
4397
Guido van Rossum2e0a6542001-05-15 02:14:44 +00004398- strop is now *really* obsolete (this was announced before with 1.6),
4399 and issues DeprecationWarning when used (except for the four items
4400 that are still imported into string.py).
4401
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004402- Cookie.py now sorts key+value pairs by key in output strings.
4403
4404- pprint.isrecursive(object) didn't correctly identify recursive objects.
4405 Now it does.
4406
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00004407- pprint functions now much faster for large containers (tuple, list, dict).
4408
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00004409- New 'q' and 'Q' format codes in the struct module, corresponding to C
4410 types "long long" and "unsigned long long" (on Windows, __int64). In
4411 native mode, these can be used only when the platform C compiler supports
4412 these types (when HAVE_LONG_LONG is #define'd by the Python config
4413 process), and then they inherit the sizes and alignments of the C types.
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00004414 In standard mode, 'q' and 'Q' are supported on all platforms, and are
4415 8-byte integral types.
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00004416
Guido van Rossum83213cc2001-06-12 16:48:52 +00004417- The site module installs a new built-in function 'help' that invokes
4418 pydoc.help. It must be invoked as 'help()'; when invoked as 'help',
4419 it displays a message reminding the user to use 'help()' or
4420 'help(object)'.
4421
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004422Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004423-----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004424
4425- New test_mutants.py runs dict comparisons where the key and value
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004426 comparison operators mutate the dicts randomly during comparison. This
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004427 rapidly causes Python to crash under earlier releases (not for the faint
4428 of heart: it can also cause Win9x to freeze or reboot!).
4429
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004430- New test_pprint.py verifies that pprint.isrecursive() and
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00004431 pprint.isreadable() return sensible results. Also verifies that simple
4432 cases produce correct output.
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004433
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00004434C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004435-----
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00004436
4437- Removed the unused last_is_sticky argument from the internal
4438 _PyTuple_Resize(). If this affects you, you were cheating.
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004439
4440----
4441
4442**(For information about older versions, consult the HISTORY file.)**