blob: 2897793eec2a8f76f689065e1f181cc6be294b28 [file] [log] [blame]
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001+++++++++++
2Python News
3+++++++++++
4
Skip Montanaro4a385832002-09-20 17:08:52 +00005(editors: check NEWS.help for information about editing NEWS using ReST.)
6
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00007What's New in Python 2.3 beta 1?
8================================
9
10*Release date: XX-XXX-2003*
11
12Core and builtins
13-----------------
14
Guido van Rossumaa86e352003-04-19 18:15:10 +000015- bool() called without arguments now returns False rather than
16 raising an exception. This is consistent with calling the
17 constructors for the other builtin types -- called without argument
18 they all return the false value of that type. (SF patch #724135)
19
Guido van Rossumcf8d2852003-04-17 16:53:26 +000020- In support of PEP 269 (making the pgen parser generator accessible
21 from Python), some changes to the pgen code structure were made; a
22 few files that used to be linked only with pgen are now linked with
23 Python itself.
24
Guido van Rossumc1f6e8c2003-04-16 21:13:23 +000025- The repr() of a weakref object now shows the __name__ attribute of
26 the referenced object, if it has one.
27
Guido van Rossum76ba09f2003-04-16 19:40:58 +000028- super() no longer ignores data descriptors, except __class__. See
29 the thread started at
30 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2003-April/034338.html
31
Guido van Rossum3a3cca52003-04-14 20:58:14 +000032- list.insert(i, x) now interprets negative i as it would be
33 interpreted by slicing, so negative values count from the end of the
34 list. This was the only place where such an interpretation was not
35 placed on a list index.
36
Guido van Rossumefbbb1c2003-04-11 18:43:06 +000037- range() now works even if the arguments are longs with magnitude
38 larger than sys.maxint, as long as the total length of the sequence
39 fits. E.g., range(2**100, 2**101, 2**100) is the following list:
40 [1267650600228229401496703205376L]. (SF patch #707427.)
41
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +000042- Some horridly obscure problems were fixed involving interaction
43 between garbage collection and old-style classes with "ambitious"
44 getattr hooks. If an old-style instance didn't have a __del__ method,
45 but did have a __getattr__ hook, and the instance became reachable
46 only from an unreachable cycle, and the hook resurrected or deleted
47 unreachable objects when asked to resolve "__del__", anything up to
48 a segfault could happen. That's been repaired.
49
Raymond Hettingera3e1e4c2003-03-06 23:54:28 +000050- dict.pop now takes an optional argument specifying a default
51 value to return if the key is not in the dict. If a default is not
52 given and the key is not found, a KeyError will still be raised.
53 Parallel changes were made to UserDict.UserDict and UserDict.DictMixin.
54 [SF patch #693753] (contributed by Michael Stone.)
55
Martin v. Löwis73d538b2003-03-05 15:13:47 +000056- sys.getfilesystemencoding() was added to expose
57 Py_FileSystemDefaultEncoding.
Guido van Rossum46d3dc32003-03-01 03:20:41 +000058
59- New function sys.exc_clear() clears the current exception. This is
60 rarely needed, but can sometimes be useful to release objects
61 referenced by the traceback held in sys.exc_info()[2]. (SF patch
62 #693195.)
63
Neal Norwitzd5a65a72003-02-23 23:11:41 +000064- On 64-bit systems, a dictionary could contain duplicate long/int keys
65 if the key value was larger than 2**32. See SF bug #689659.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +000066
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +000067- Fixed SF bug #663074. The codec system was using global static
Walter Dörwaldfa86bf52003-03-31 16:15:13 +000068 variables to store internal data. As a result, any attempts to use the
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +000069 unicode system with multiple active interpreters, or successive
70 interpreter executions, would fail.
71
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +000072- "%c" % u"a" now returns a unicode string instead of raising a
Walter Dörwald44f527f2003-04-02 16:37:24 +000073 TypeError. u"%c" % 0xffffffff now raises a OverflowError instead
Walter Dörwald1e469c52003-04-02 16:57:59 +000074 of a ValueError to be consistent with "%c" % 256. See SF patch #710127.
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +000075
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +000076Extension modules
77-----------------
78
Martin v. Löwisbfe175c2003-04-16 19:42:51 +000079- Tkinter wrappers around Tcl variables now pass objects directly
80 to Tcl, instead of first converting them to strings.
81
Guido van Rossum41c99e72003-04-14 17:59:34 +000082- The .*? pattern in the re module is now special-cased to avoid the
83 recursion limit. (SF patch #720991 -- many thanks to Gary Herron
84 and Greg Chapman.)
85
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +000086- New function sys.call_tracing() allows pdb to debug code
87 recursively.
88
Tim Peters730f5532003-04-08 17:17:17 +000089- New function gc.get_referents(obj) returns a list of objects
Tim Peters0f81ab62003-04-08 16:39:48 +000090 directly referenced by obj. In effect, it exposes what the object's
91 tp_traverse slot does, and can be helpful when debugging memory
92 leaks.
93
Martin v. Löwis7fb697b2003-04-03 04:49:12 +000094- The iconv module has been removed from this release.
95
Tim Petersd50ade62003-03-20 18:32:13 +000096- The platform-independent routines for packing floats in IEEE formats
97 (struct.pack's <f, >f, <d, and >d codes; pickle and cPickle's protocol 1
98 pickling of floats) ignored that rounding can cause a carry to
99 propagate. The worst consequence was that, in rare cases, <f and >f
100 could produce strings that, when unpacked again, were a factor of 2
101 away from the original float. This has been fixed. See SF bug
102 #705836.
103
Guido van Rossumd11b62e2003-03-14 21:51:36 +0000104- New function time.tzset() provides access to the C library tzet()
105 function, if supported. (SF patch #675422.)
106
Neal Norwitz12e22172003-03-03 21:16:39 +0000107- Using createfilehandler, deletefilehandler, createtimerhandler functions
108 on Tkinter.tkinter (_tkinter module) no longer crashes the interpreter.
109 See SF bug #692416.
110
Michael W. Hudsonf0089982003-03-03 12:29:42 +0000111- Modified the fcntl.ioctl() function to allow modification of a passed
112 mutable buffer (for details see the reference documentation).
113
Raymond Hettinger61fe64d2003-02-23 04:40:07 +0000114- Made user requested changes to the itertools module.
115 Subsumed the times() function into repeat().
116 Added chain() and cycle().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000117
Skip Montanaro89feabc2003-03-30 04:54:24 +0000118- The socket module now always uses the _socketobject wrapper class, even on
119 platforms which have dup(2). The makefile() method is built directly
120 on top of the socket without duplicating the file descriptor, allowing
121 timeouts to work properly.
122
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000123Library
124-------
125
Martin v. Löwis153c9e42003-04-19 20:59:03 +0000126- shelve now supports the optional writeback argument, and exposes
127 pickle protocol versions.
128
Guido van Rossuma2685402003-04-19 18:04:57 +0000129- Several methods of nntplib.NNTP have grown an optional file argument
130 which specifies a file where to divert the command's output
131 (already supported by the body() method). (SF patch #720468)
132
Martin v. Löwis281b2c62003-04-18 21:04:39 +0000133- The self-documenting XML server library DocXMLRPCServer was added.
134
Martin v. Löwis2548c732003-04-18 10:39:54 +0000135- Support for internationalized domain names has been added through
136 the 'idna' and 'punycode' encodings, the 'stringprep' module, the
137 'mkstringprep' tool, and enhancements to the socket and httplib
138 modules.
139
Walter Dörwald5688b7a2003-04-16 09:46:13 +0000140- htmlentitydefs has two new dictionaries: name2codepoint maps
141 HTML entity names to Unicode codepoints (as integers).
142 codepoint2name is the reverse mapping. See SF patch #722017.
143
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +0000144- pdb has a new command, "debug", which lets you step through
145 arbitrary code from the debugger's (pdb) prompt.
146
Raymond Hettingerc377cbf2003-04-04 22:56:42 +0000147- unittest.failUnlessEqual and its equivalent unittest.assertEqual now
148 return 'not a == b' rather than 'a != b'. This gives the desired
149 result for classes that define __eq__ without defining __ne__.
150
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +0000151- sgmllib now supports SGML marked sections, in particular the
Martin v. Löwis3163a3b2003-03-30 14:25:40 +0000152 MS Office extensions.
153
Raymond Hettinger42182eb2003-03-09 05:33:33 +0000154- The urllib module now offers support for the iterator protocol.
155 SF patch 698520 contributed by Brett Cannon.
156
Guido van Rossum9589a252003-03-06 01:56:12 +0000157- New module timeit provides a simple framework for timing the
158 execution speed of expressions and statements.
159
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +0000160- sets.Set objects now support mixed-type __eq__ and __ne__, instead
161 of raising TypeError. If x is a Set object and y is a non-Set object,
162 x == y is False, and x != y is True. This is akin to the change made
163 for mixed-type comparisons of datetime objects in 2.3a2; more info
164 about the rationale is in the NEWS entry for that. See also SF bug
165 report <http://www.python.org/sf/693121>.
166
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +0000167- On Unix platforms, if os.listdir() is called with a Unicode argument,
168 it now returns Unicode strings. (This behavior was added earlier
169 to the Windows NT/2k/XP version of os.listdir().)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000170
Andrew M. Kuchling6f177d42003-02-28 22:09:33 +0000171- Distutils: both 'py_modules' and 'packages' keywords can now be specified
172 in core.setup(). Previously you could supply one or the other, but
173 not both of them. (SF patch #695090 from Bernhard Herzog)
174
Skip Montanaro64a839e2003-03-20 23:36:55 +0000175- New csv package makes it easy to read/write CSV files.
176
Gustavo Niemeyer68d8cef2003-04-17 21:31:33 +0000177- Module shlex has been extended to allow posix-like shell parsings,
178 including a split() function for easy spliting of quoted strings and
179 commands. An iterator interface was also implemented.
180
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000181Tools/Demos
182-----------
183
Tim Peters21d7d4d2003-04-18 00:45:59 +0000184- New script combinerefs.py helps analyze new PYTHONDUMPREFS output.
185 See the module docstring for details.
186
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000187TBD
188
189Build
190-----
191
Neal Norwitz35892b92003-02-23 23:45:35 +0000192- Fix problem building on OSF1 because the compiler only accepted
193 preprocessor directives that start in column 1. (SF bug #691793.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000194
195C API
196-----
197
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +0000198- Added PyGC_Collect(), equivalent to calling gc.collect().
199
Guido van Rossum0fc8f002003-04-15 15:12:39 +0000200- PyThreadState_GetDict() was changed not to raise an exception or
201 issue a fatal error when no current thread state is available. This
202 makes it possible to print dictionaries when no thread is active.
203
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +0000204- LONG_LONG was renamed to PY_LONG_LONG. Extensions that use this and
205 need compatibility with previous versions can use this:
206 #ifndef PY_LONG_LONG
207 #define PY_LONG_LONG LONG_LONG
208 #endif
Martin v. Löwisb9a0f912003-03-29 10:06:18 +0000209
Raymond Hettinger1da1dbf2003-03-17 19:46:11 +0000210- Added PyObject_SelfIter() to fill the tp_iter slot for the
Raymond Hettinger01538262003-03-17 08:24:35 +0000211 typical case where the method returns its self argument.
212
Guido van Rossume5c691a2003-03-07 15:13:17 +0000213- The extended type structure used for heap types (new-style
214 classes defined by Python code using a class statement) is now
215 exported from object.h as PyHeapTypeObject. (SF patch #696193.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000216
217New platforms
218-------------
219
220TBD
221
222Tests
223-----
224
Neal Norwitz55b61d22003-02-28 19:57:03 +0000225- test_timeout now requires -u network to be passed to regrtest to run.
226 See SF bug #692988.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000227
228Windows
229-------
230
Guido van Rossumf4050642003-04-09 19:39:06 +0000231- New function winsound.MessageBeep() wraps the Win32 API
232 MessageBeep().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000233
234Mac
235---
236
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +0000237- os.listdir() now returns Unicode strings on MacOS X when called with
238 a Unicode argument. See the general news item under "Library".
Just van Rossum46c97842003-02-25 21:42:15 +0000239
Jack Jansendeac2ac2003-02-24 11:04:17 +0000240- A new method MacOS.WMAvailable() returns true if it is safe to access
241 the window manager, false otherwise.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +0000242
Jack Jansencf76be02003-03-24 12:13:54 +0000243- EasyDialogs dialogs are now movable-modal, and if the application is
244 currently in the background they will ask to be moved to the foreground
245 before displaying.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +0000246
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +0000247- OSA Scripting support has improved a lot, and gensuitemodule.py can now
Jack Jansende354b72003-04-11 15:37:20 +0000248 be used by mere mortals. The documentation is now also more or less
249 complete.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +0000250
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +0000251- The IDE (in a framework build) now includes introductory documentation
252 in Apple Help Viewer format.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000253
254
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000255What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 2?
256=================================
257
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +0000258*Release date: 19-Feb-2003*
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000259
260Core and builtins
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +0000261-----------------
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000262
Walter Dörwald2ffec022003-02-19 16:34:11 +0000263- Negative positions returned from PEP 293 error callbacks are now
264 treated as being relative to the end of the input string. Positions
265 that are out of bounds raise an IndexError.
266
Guido van Rossum162e38c2003-02-19 15:25:10 +0000267- sys.path[0] (the directory from which the script is loaded) is now
268 turned into an absolute pathname, unless it is the empty string.
269 (SF patch #664376.)
270
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +0000271- Finally fixed the bug in compile() and exec where a string ending
272 with an indented code block but no newline would raise SyntaxError.
273 This would have been a four-line change in parsetok.c... Except
274 codeop.py depends on this behavior, so a compilation flag had to be
275 invented that causes the tokenizer to revert to the old behavior;
276 this required extra changes to 2 .h files, 2 .c files, and 2 .py
Guido van Rossum1442dc12003-02-13 22:19:20 +0000277 files. (Fixes SF bug #501622.)
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +0000278
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +0000279- If a new-style class defines neither __new__ nor __init__, its
280 constructor would ignore all arguments. This is changed now: the
281 constructor refuses arguments in this case. This might break code
282 that worked under Python 2.2. The simplest fix is to add a no-op
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +0000283 __init__: ``def __init__(self, *args, **kw): pass``.
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +0000284
Guido van Rossum48035eb2003-02-12 17:05:26 +0000285- Through a bytecode optimizer bug (and I bet you didn't even know
286 Python *had* a bytecode optimizer :-), "unsigned" hex/oct constants
287 with a leading minus sign would come out with the wrong sign.
288 ("Unsigned" hex/oct constants are those with a face value in the
289 range sys.maxint+1 through sys.maxint*2+1, inclusive; these have
290 always been interpreted as negative numbers through sign folding.)
291 E.g. 0xffffffff is -1, and -(0xffffffff) is 1, but -0xffffffff would
292 come out as -4294967295. This was the case in Python 2.2 through
293 2.2.2 and 2.3a1, and in Python 2.4 it will once again have that
294 value, but according to PEP 237 it really needs to be 1 now. This
295 will be backported to Python 2.2.3 a well. (SF #660455)
296
Raymond Hettinger060641d2003-04-22 06:49:11 +0000297- Added several bytecode optimizations. Provides speed-ups to
298 inverted in/is tests, inverted jumps, while 1 loops, and jumps to
299 unconditional jumps.
300
301- Added a new opcode, NOP, which is used in some of the bytecode
302 transformations.
303
Guido van Rossum47710652003-02-12 20:48:22 +0000304- int(s, base) sometimes sign-folds hex and oct constants; it only
305 does this when base is 0 and s.strip() starts with a '0'. When the
306 sign is actually folded, as in int("0xffffffff", 0) on a 32-bit
307 machine, which returns -1, a FutureWarning is now issued; in Python
308 2.4, this will return 4294967295L, as do int("+0xffffffff", 0) and
309 int("0xffffffff", 16) right now. (PEP 347)
310
Guido van Rossuma89d10e2003-02-12 03:58:38 +0000311- super(X, x): x may now be a proxy for an X instance, i.e.
312 issubclass(x.__class__, X) but not issubclass(type(x), X).
313
Guido van Rossum03bc7d32003-02-12 03:32:58 +0000314- isinstance(x, X): if X is a new-style class, this is now equivalent
315 to issubclass(type(x), X) or issubclass(x.__class__, X). Previously
316 only type(x) was tested. (For classic classes this was already the
317 case.)
318
Just van Rossum73ffb4a2003-02-10 09:57:08 +0000319- compile(), eval() and the exec statement now fully support source code
320 passed as unicode strings.
321
Neal Norwitzde8b94c2003-02-10 02:12:43 +0000322- int subclasses can be initialized with longs if the value fits in an int.
323 See SF bug #683467.
324
Tim Petersbf2674b2003-02-02 07:51:32 +0000325- long(string, base) takes time linear in len(string) when base is a power
326 of 2 now. It used to take time quadratic in len(string).
327
Martin v. Löwis8afd7572003-01-25 22:46:11 +0000328- filter returns now Unicode results for Unicode arguments.
329
Martin v. Löwisaf6a27a2003-01-03 19:16:14 +0000330- raw_input can now return Unicode objects.
331
Skip Montanaro4abd5f02003-01-02 20:51:08 +0000332- List objects' sort() method now accepts None as the comparison function.
333 Passing None is semantically identical to calling sort() with no
334 arguments.
335
Neal Norwitz1a997502003-01-13 20:13:12 +0000336- Fixed crash when printing a subclass of str and __str__ returned self.
337 See SF bug #667147.
338
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +0000339- Fixed an invalid RuntimeWarning and an undetected error when trying
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +0000340 to convert a long integer into a float which couldn't fit.
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +0000341 See SF bug #676155.
342
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +0000343- Function objects now have a __module__ attribute that is bound to
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +0000344 the name of the module in which the function was defined. This
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +0000345 applies for C functions and methods as well as functions and methods
346 defined in Python. This attribute is used by pickle.whichmodule(),
347 which changes the behavior of whichmodule slightly. In Python 2.2
348 whichmodule() returns "__main__" for functions that are not defined
349 at the top-level of a module (examples: methods, nested functions).
350 Now whichmodule() will return the proper module name.
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +0000351
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000352Extension modules
353-----------------
354
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +0000355- operator.isNumberType() now checks that the object has a nb_int or
356 nb_float slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
357 tp_as_number pointer.
358
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +0000359- The imp module now has ways to acquire and release the "import
360 lock": imp.acquire_lock() and imp.release_lock(). Note: this is a
361 reentrant lock, so releasing the lock only truly releases it when
362 this is the last release_lock() call. You can check with
363 imp.lock_held(). (SF bug #580952 and patch #683257.)
364
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +0000365- Change to cPickle to match pickle.py (see below and PEP 307).
366
Neal Norwitz9caf9c02003-02-10 01:54:06 +0000367- Fix some bugs in the parser module. SF bug #678518.
368
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +0000369- Thanks to Scott David Daniels, a subtle bug in how the zlib
Walter Dörwald28d81962003-02-03 20:53:14 +0000370 extension implemented flush() was fixed. Scott also rewrote the
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +0000371 zlib test suite using the unittest module. (SF bug #640230 and
372 patch #678531.)
373
Raymond Hettinger96ef8112003-02-01 00:10:11 +0000374- Added an itertools module containing high speed, memory efficient
375 looping constructs inspired by tools from Haskell and SML.
376
Guido van Rossum99d4abf2003-01-27 22:22:50 +0000377- The SSL module now handles sockets with a timeout set correctly (SF
378 patch #675750, fixing SF bug #675552).
379
Barry Warsawf8ba39c2003-01-07 20:55:26 +0000380- os/posixmodule has grown the sysexits.h constants (EX_OK and friends).
381
Guido van Rossum6d0d3652003-01-07 20:34:19 +0000382- Fixed broken threadstate swap in readline that could cause fatal
383 errors when a readline hook was being invoked while a background
384 thread was active. (SF bugs #660476 and #513033.)
385
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000386- fcntl now exposes the strops.h I_* constants.
387
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +0000388- Fix a crash on Solaris that occurred when calling close() on
389 an mmap'ed file which was already closed. (SF patch #665913)
390
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +0000391- Fixed several serious bugs in the zipimport implementation.
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +0000392
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +0000393- datetime changes:
394
Guido van Rossum8b7a9a32003-04-14 22:01:58 +0000395 The date class is now properly subclassable. (SF bug #720908)
396
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +0000397 The datetime and datetimetz classes have been collapsed into a single
398 datetime class, and likewise the time and timetz classes into a single
399 time class. Previously, a datetimetz object with tzinfo=None acted
400 exactly like a datetime object, and similarly for timetz. This wasn't
401 enough of a difference to justify distinct classes, and life is simpler
402 now.
403
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +0000404 today() and now() now round system timestamps to the closest
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +0000405 microsecond <http://www.python.org/sf/661086>. This repairs an
406 irritation most likely seen on Windows systems.
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +0000407
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +0000408 In dt.astimezone(tz), if tz.utcoffset(dt) returns a duration,
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +0000409 ValueError is raised if tz.dst(dt) returns None (2.3a1 treated it
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +0000410 as 0 instead, but a tzinfo subclass wishing to participate in
411 time zone conversion has to take a stand on whether it supports
412 DST; if you don't care about DST, then code dst() to return 0 minutes,
413 meaning that DST is never in effect).
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +0000414
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +0000415 The tzinfo methods utcoffset() and dst() must return a timedelta object
416 (or None) now. In 2.3a1 they could also return an int or long, but that
417 was an unhelpfully redundant leftover from an earlier version wherein
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +0000418 they couldn't return a timedelta. TOOWTDI.
419
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +0000420 The example tzinfo class for local time had a bug. It was replaced
421 by a later example coded by Guido.
422
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +0000423 datetime.astimezone(tz) no longer raises an exception when the
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +0000424 input datetime has no UTC equivalent in tz. For typical "hybrid" time
425 zones (a single tzinfo subclass modeling both standard and daylight
426 time), this case can arise one hour per year, at the hour daylight time
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +0000427 ends. See new docs for details. In short, the new behavior mimics
428 the local wall clock's behavior of repeating an hour in local time.
429
430 dt.astimezone() can no longer be used to convert between naive and aware
431 datetime objects. If you merely want to attach, or remove, a tzinfo
432 object, without any conversion of date and time members, use
433 dt.replace(tzinfo=whatever) instead, where "whatever" is None or a
434 tzinfo subclass instance.
435
436 A new method tzinfo.fromutc(dt) can be overridden in tzinfo subclasses
437 to give complete control over how a UTC time is to be converted to
438 a local time. The default astimezone() implementation calls fromutc()
439 as its last step, so a tzinfo subclass can affect that too by overriding
440 fromutc(). It's expected that the default fromutc() implementation will
441 be suitable as-is for "almost all" time zone subclasses, but the
442 creativity of political time zone fiddling appears unbounded -- fromutc()
443 allows the highly motivated to emulate any scheme expressible in Python.
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +0000444
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +0000445 datetime.now(): The optional tzinfo argument was undocumented (that's
446 repaired), and its name was changed to tz ("tzinfo" is overloaded enough
447 already). With a tz argument, now(tz) used to return the local date
448 and time, and attach tz to it, without any conversion of date and time
449 members. This was less than useful. Now now(tz) returns the current
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +0000450 date and time as local time in tz's time zone, akin to ::
451
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +0000452 tz.fromutc(datetime.utcnow().replace(tzinfo=utc))
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +0000453
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +0000454 where "utc" is an instance of a tzinfo subclass modeling UTC. Without
455 a tz argument, now() continues to return the current local date and time,
456 as a naive datetime object.
457
Tim Peters2a44a8d2003-01-23 20:53:10 +0000458 datetime.fromtimestamp(): Like datetime.now() above, this had less than
459 useful behavior when the optional tinzo argument was specified. See
460 also SF bug report <http://www.python.org/sf/660872>.
461
Tim Peters8d81a012003-01-24 22:36:34 +0000462 date and datetime comparison: In order to prevent comparison from
463 falling back to the default compare-object-addresses strategy, these
464 raised TypeError whenever they didn't understand the other object type.
465 They still do, except when the other object has a "timetuple" attribute,
466 in which case they return NotImplemented now. This gives other
467 datetime objects (e.g., mxDateTime) a chance to intercept the
468 comparison.
469
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +0000470 date, time, datetime and timedelta comparison: When the exception
471 for mixed-type comparisons in the last paragraph doesn't apply, if
472 the comparison is == then False is returned, and if the comparison is
473 != then True is returned. Because dict lookup and the "in" operator
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +0000474 only invoke __eq__, this allows, for example, ::
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +0000475
476 if some_datetime in some_sequence:
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +0000477
478 and ::
479
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +0000480 some_dict[some_timedelta] = whatever
481
482 to work as expected, without raising TypeError just because the
483 sequence is heterogeneous, or the dict has mixed-type keys. [This
484 seems like a good idea to implement for all mixed-type comparisons
485 that don't want to allow falling back to address comparison.]
486
Tim Peters75a6e3b2003-01-04 18:17:36 +0000487 The constructors building a datetime from a timestamp could raise
488 ValueError if the platform C localtime()/gmtime() inserted "leap
489 seconds". Leap seconds are ignored now. On such platforms, it's
490 possible to have timestamps that differ by a second, yet where
491 datetimes constructed from them are equal.
492
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +0000493 The pickle format of date, time and datetime objects has changed
494 completely. The undocumented pickler and unpickler functions no
Tim Petersb57f8f02003-02-01 02:54:15 +0000495 longer exist. The undocumented __setstate__() and __getstate__()
496 methods no longer exist either.
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +0000497
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000498Library
499-------
500
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +0000501- The logging module was updated slightly; the WARN level was renamed
502 to WARNING, and the matching function/method warn() to warning().
503
504- The pickle and cPickle modules were updated with a new pickling
505 protocol (documented by pickletools.py, see below) and several
506 extensions to the pickle customization API (__reduce__, __setstate__
507 etc.). The copy module now uses more of the pickle customization
508 API to copy objects that don't implement __copy__ or __deepcopy__.
509 See PEP 307 for details.
510
511- The distutils "register" command now uses http://www.python.org/pypi
512 as the default repository. (See PEP 301.)
513
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +0000514- the platform dependent path related variables sep, altsep, extsep,
515 pathsep, curdir, pardir and defpath are now defined in the platform
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +0000516 dependent path modules (e.g. ntpath.py) rather than os.py, so these
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +0000517 variables are now available via os.path. They continue to be
518 available from the os module.
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +0000519 (see <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +0000520
Tim Peters6ee04802003-02-05 18:29:34 +0000521- array.array was added to the types repr.py knows about (see
522 <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
523
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +0000524- The new pickletools.py contains lots of documentation about pickle
525 internals, and supplies some helpers for working with pickles, such as
526 a symbolic pickle disassembler.
527
Skip Montanaro9a7c96a2003-01-22 18:17:25 +0000528- Xmlrpclib.py now supports the builtin boolean type.
529
Martin v. Löwis0c6774d2003-01-15 11:51:06 +0000530- py_compile has a new 'doraise' flag and a new PyCompileError
531 exception.
532
Martin v. Löwisd69663d2003-01-15 11:37:23 +0000533- SimpleXMLRPCServer now supports CGI through the CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler
534 class.
535
Guido van Rossum50e92232003-01-14 16:45:04 +0000536- The sets module now raises TypeError in __cmp__, to clarify that
537 sets are not intended to be three-way-compared; the comparison
538 operators are overloaded as subset/superset tests.
539
Guido van Rossumcd0c0472003-01-07 23:03:05 +0000540- Bastion.py and rexec.py are disabled. These modules are not safe in
541 Python 2.2. or 2.3.
542
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +0000543- realpath is now exported when doing ``from poxixpath import *``.
Neal Norwitzbb0246a2003-01-03 18:12:28 +0000544 It is also exported for ntpath, macpath, and os2emxpath.
545 See SF bug #659228.
546
Neal Norwitzb9ef4ae2003-01-05 23:19:43 +0000547- New module tarfile from Lars Gustäbel provides a comprehensive interface
548 to tar archive files with transparent gzip and bzip2 compression.
549 See SF patch #651082.
550
Neal Norwitz4f442372003-01-06 06:51:36 +0000551- urlparse can now parse imap:// URLs. See SF feature request #618024.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +0000552
Neal Norwitze931ed52003-01-10 23:24:32 +0000553- Tkinter.Canvas.scan_dragto() provides an optional parameter to support
554 the gain value which is passed to Tk. SF bug# 602259.
555
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +0000556- Fix logging.handlers.SysLogHandler protocol when using UNIX domain sockets.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +0000557 See SF patch #642974.
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +0000558
Skip Montanaro12fe72e2003-02-25 17:46:20 +0000559- The dospath module was deleted. Use the ntpath module when manipulating
560 DOS paths from other platforms.
561
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000562Tools/Demos
563-----------
564
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +0000565- Two new scripts (db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py) were added to the
566 Tools/scripts directory to facilitate conversion from the old bsddb module
567 to the new one. While the user-visible API of the new module is
568 compatible with the old one, it's likely that the version of the
569 underlying database library has changed. To convert from the old library,
570 run the db2pickle.py script using the old version of Python to convert it
571 to a pickle file. After upgrading Python, run the pickle2db.py script
572 using the new version of Python to reconstitute your database. For
573 example:
574
Skip Montanaro621f0552003-02-03 15:48:10 +0000575 % python2.2 db2pickle.py -h some.db > some.pickle
576 % python2.3 pickle2db.py -h some.db.new < some.pickle
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +0000577
578 Run the scripts without any args to get a usage message.
579
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +0000580
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000581Build
582-----
583
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +0000584- The audio driver tests (test_ossaudiodev.py and
585 test_linuxaudiodev.py) are no longer run by default. This is
586 because they don't always work, depending on your hardware and
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +0000587 software. To run these tests, you must use an invocation like ::
588
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +0000589 ./python Lib/test/regrtest.py -u audio test_ossaudiodev
590
Skip Montanarodecc6a42003-01-01 20:07:49 +0000591- On systems which build using the configure script, compiler flags which
592 used to be lumped together using the OPT flag have been split into two
593 groups, OPT and BASECFLAGS. OPT is meant to carry just optimization- and
594 debug-related flags like "-g" and "-O3". BASECFLAGS is meant to carry
595 compiler flags that are required to get a clean compile. On some
596 platforms (many Linux flavors in particular) BASECFLAGS will be empty by
597 default. On others, such as Mac OS X and SCO, it will contain required
598 flags. This change allows people building Python to override OPT without
599 fear of clobbering compiler flags which are required to get a clean build.
600
601- On Darwin/Mac OS X platforms, /sw/lib and /sw/include are added to the
602 relevant search lists in setup.py. This allows users building Python to
603 take advantage of the many packages available from the fink project
604 <http://fink.sf.net/>.
605
606- A new Makefile target, scriptsinstall, installs a number of useful scripts
607 from the Tools/scripts directory.
608
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000609C API
610-----
611
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +0000612- PyEval_GetFrame() is now declared to return a ``PyFrameObject *``
613 instead of a plain ``PyObject *``. (SF patch #686601.)
Guido van Rossum6297a7a2003-02-19 15:53:17 +0000614
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +0000615- PyNumber_Check() now checks that the object has a nb_int or nb_float
616 slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
617 tp_as_number pointer.
618
Guido van Rossumeea47182003-02-11 20:39:59 +0000619- A C type that inherits from a base type that defines tp_as_buffer
620 will now inherit the tp_as_buffer pointer if it doesn't define one.
621 (SF #681367)
622
Neil Schemenauer5042da62003-02-04 20:59:40 +0000623- The PyArg_Parse functions now issue a DeprecationWarning if a float
624 argument is provided when an integer is specified (this affects the 'b',
625 'B', 'h', 'H', 'i', and 'l' codes). Future versions of Python will
626 raise a TypeError.
Neil Schemenauercd63e612003-01-24 22:15:53 +0000627
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000628Tests
629-----
630
Walter Dörwald11cfbd62003-03-26 16:03:16 +0000631- Several tests weren't being run from regrtest.py (test_timeout.py,
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +0000632 test_tarfile.py, test_netrc.py, test_multifile.py,
633 test_importhooks.py and test_imp.py). Now they are. (Note to
634 developers: please read Lib/test/README when creating a new test, to
635 make sure to do it right! All tests need to use either unittest or
636 pydoc.)
637
638- Added test_posix.py, a test suite for the posix module.
639
640- Added test_hexoct.py, a test suite for hex/oct constant folding.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +0000641
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000642Windows
643-------
644
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +0000645- The timeout code for socket connect() didn't work right; this has
646 now been fixed. test_timeout.py should pass (at least most of the
647 time).
648
Thomas Hellerdda583d2003-01-31 20:45:41 +0000649- distutils' msvccompiler class now passes the preprocessor options to
650 the resource compiler. See SF patch #669198.
651
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +0000652- The bsddb module now ships with Sleepycat's 4.1.25.NC, the latest
653 release without strong cryptography.
654
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +0000655- sys.path[0], if it contains a directory name, is now always an
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +0000656 absolute pathname. (SF patch #664376.)
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +0000657
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +0000658- The new logging package is now installed by the Windows installer. It
659 wasn't in 2.3a1 due to oversight.
660
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000661Mac
662---
663
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +0000664- There are new dialogs EasyDialogs.AskFileForOpen, AskFileForSave
665 and AskFolder. The old macfs.StandardGetFile and friends are deprecated.
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +0000666
Jack Jansenc9296362003-02-06 23:10:45 +0000667- Most of the standard library now uses pathnames or FSRefs in preference
668 of FSSpecs, and use the underlying Carbon.File and Carbon.Folder modules
669 in stead of macfs. macfs will probably be deprecated in the future.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +0000670
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +0000671- Type Carbon.File.FSCatalogInfo and supporting methods have been implemented.
672 This also makes macfs.FSSpec.SetDates() work again.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +0000673
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +0000674- There is a new module pimp, the package install manager for Python, and
675 accompanying applet PackageManager. These allow you to easily download
676 and install pretested extension packages either in source or binary
677 form. Only in MacPython-OSX.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +0000678
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +0000679- Applets are now built with bundlebuilder in MacPython-OSX, which should make
Jack Jansen5d44b342003-02-18 23:32:47 +0000680 them more robust and also provides a path towards BuildApplication. The
681 downside of this change is that applets can no longer be run from the
682 Terminal window, this will hopefully be fixed in the 2.3b1.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +0000683
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000684
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000685What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 1?
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000686=================================
687
Guido van Rossumae548862002-12-31 15:47:36 +0000688*Release date: 31-Dec-2002*
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000689
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000690Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000691--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +0000692
Michael W. Hudson96bc3b42002-11-26 14:48:23 +0000693- One can now assign to __bases__ and __name__ of new-style classes.
694
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +0000695- dict() now accepts keyword arguments so that dict(one=1, two=2)
696 is the equivalent of {"one": 1, "two": 2}. Accordingly,
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +0000697 the existing (but undocumented) 'items' keyword argument has
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +0000698 been eliminated. This means that dict(items=someMapping) now has
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +0000699 a different meaning than before.
700
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +0000701- int() now returns a long object if the argument is outside the
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +0000702 integer range, so int("4" * 1000), int(1e200) and int(1L<<1000) will
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +0000703 all return long objects instead of raising an OverflowError.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000704
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +0000705- Assignment to __class__ is disallowed if either the old or the new
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +0000706 class is a statically allocated type object (such as defined by an
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +0000707 extension module). This prevents anomalies like 2.__class__ = bool.
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +0000708
709- New-style object creation and deallocation have been sped up
710 significantly; they are now faster than classic instance creation
711 and deallocation.
712
713- The __slots__ variable can now mention "private" names, and the
714 right thing will happen (e.g. __slots__ = ["__foo"]).
715
716- The built-ins slice() and buffer() are now callable types. The
717 types classobj (formerly class), code, function, instance, and
718 instancemethod (formerly instance-method), which have no built-in
719 names but are accessible through the types module, are now also
720 callable. The type dict-proxy is renamed to dictproxy.
721
722- Cycles going through the __class__ link of a new-style instance are
723 now detected by the garbage collector.
724
725- Classes using __slots__ are now properly garbage collected.
726 [SF bug 519621]
727
728- Tightened the __slots__ rules: a slot name must be a valid Python
729 identifier.
730
731- The constructor for the module type now requires a name argument and
732 takes an optional docstring argument. Previously, this constructor
733 ignored its arguments. As a consequence, deriving a class from a
734 module (not from the module type) is now illegal; previously this
735 created an unnamed module, just like invoking the module type did.
736 [SF bug 563060]
737
738- A new type object, 'basestring', is added. This is a common base type
739 for 'str' and 'unicode', and can be used instead of
740 types.StringTypes, e.g. to test whether something is "a string":
741 isinstance(x, basestring) is True for Unicode and 8-bit strings. This
742 is an abstract base class and cannot be instantiated directly.
743
744- Changed new-style class instantiation so that when C's __new__
745 method returns something that's not a C instance, its __init__ is
746 not called. [SF bug #537450]
747
748- Fixed super() to work correctly with class methods. [SF bug #535444]
749
750- If you try to pickle an instance of a class that has __slots__ but
751 doesn't define or override __getstate__, a TypeError is now raised.
752 This is done by adding a bozo __getstate__ to the class that always
753 raises TypeError. (Before, this would appear to be pickled, but the
754 state of the slots would be lost.)
755
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000756Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000757-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000758
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +0000759- Import from zipfiles is now supported. The name of a zipfile placed
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +0000760 on sys.path causes the import statement to look for importable Python
761 modules (with .py, pyc and .pyo extensions) and packages inside the
762 zipfile. The zipfile import follows the specification (though not
763 the sample implementation) of PEP 273. The semantics of __path__ are
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +0000764 compatible with those that have been implemented in Jython since
765 Jython 2.1.
766
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +0000767- PEP 302 has been accepted. Although it was initially developed to
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +0000768 support zipimport, it offers a new, general import hook mechanism.
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +0000769 Several new variables have been added to the sys module:
770 sys.meta_path, sys.path_hooks, and sys.path_importer_cache; these
771 make extending the import statement much more convenient than
772 overriding the __import__ built-in function. For a description of
773 these, see PEP 302.
774
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +0000775- A frame object's f_lineno attribute can now be written to from a
776 trace function to change which line will execute next. A command to
777 exploit this from pdb has been added. [SF patch #643835]
778
Marc-André Lemburg20b91352002-12-12 18:01:43 +0000779- The _codecs support module for codecs.py was turned into a builtin
780 module to assure that at least the builtin codecs are available
781 to the Python parser for source code decoding according to PEP 263.
782
Walter Dörwaldd9a6ad32002-12-12 16:41:44 +0000783- issubclass now supports a tuple as the second argument, just like
784 isinstance does. ``issubclass(X, (A, B))`` is equivalent to
785 ``issubclass(X, A) or issubclass(X, B)``.
786
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +0000787- Thanks to Armin Rigo, the last known way to provoke a system crash
788 by cleverly arranging for a comparison function to mutate a list
789 during a list.sort() operation has been fixed. The effect of
790 attempting to mutate a list, or even to inspect its contents or
791 length, while a sort is in progress, is not defined by the language.
792 The C implementation of Python 2.3 attempts to detect mutations,
793 and raise ValueError if one occurs, but there's no guarantee that
794 all mutations will be caught, or that any will be caught across
795 releases or implementations.
796
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +0000797- Unicode file name processing for Windows (PEP 277) is implemented.
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +0000798 All platforms now have an os.path.supports_unicode_filenames attribute,
799 which is set to True on Windows NT/2000/XP, and False elsewhere.
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +0000800
Walter Dörwald3aeb6322002-09-02 13:14:32 +0000801- Codec error handling callbacks (PEP 293) are implemented.
802 Error handling in unicode.encode or str.decode can now be customized.
803
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +0000804- A subtle change to the semantics of the built-in function intern():
805 interned strings are no longer immortal. You must keep a reference
806 to the return value intern() around to get the benefit.
807
Guido van Rossumf808b892002-08-16 03:38:10 +0000808- Use of 'None' as a variable, argument or attribute name now
809 issues a SyntaxWarning. In the future, None may become a keyword.
810
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +0000811- SET_LINENO is gone. co_lnotab is now consulted to determine when to
812 call the trace function. C code that accessed f_lineno should call
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +0000813 PyCode_Addr2Line instead (f_lineno is still there, but only kept up
814 to date when there is a trace function set).
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +0000815
Guido van Rossum9be89462002-08-14 16:11:30 +0000816- There's a new warning category, FutureWarning. This is used to warn
817 about a number of situations where the value or sign of an integer
818 result will change in Python 2.4 as a result of PEP 237 (integer
819 unification). The warnings implement stage B0 mentioned in that
820 PEP. The warnings are about the following situations:
821
822 - Octal and hex literals without 'L' prefix in the inclusive range
823 [0x80000000..0xffffffff]; these are currently negative ints, but
824 in Python 2.4 they will be positive longs with the same bit
825 pattern.
826
827 - Left shifts on integer values that cause the outcome to lose
828 bits or have a different sign than the left operand. To be
829 precise: x<<n where this currently doesn't yield the same value
830 as long(x)<<n; in Python 2.4, the outcome will be long(x)<<n.
831
832 - Conversions from ints to string that show negative values as
833 unsigned ints in the inclusive range [0x80000000..0xffffffff];
834 this affects the functions hex() and oct(), and the string
835 formatting codes %u, %o, %x, and %X. In Python 2.4, these will
836 show signed values (e.g. hex(-1) currently returns "0xffffffff";
837 in Python 2.4 it will return "-0x1").
838
Guido van Rossum9a2eda52002-12-31 02:12:42 +0000839- The bits manipulated under the cover by sys.setcheckinterval() have
840 been changed. Both the check interval and the ticker used to be
841 per-thread values. They are now just a pair of global variables.
842 In addition, the default check interval was boosted from 10 to 100
843 bytecode instructions. This may have some effect on systems that
844 relied on the old default value. In particular, in multi-threaded
845 applications which try to be highly responsive, response time will
846 increase by some (perhaps imperceptible) amount.
Skip Montanaro979c74b2002-09-03 21:25:14 +0000847
Tim Petersd64c1de2002-08-12 17:36:03 +0000848- When multiplying very large integers, a version of the so-called
849 Karatsuba algorithm is now used. This is most effective if the
850 inputs have roughly the same size. If they both have about N digits,
851 Karatsuba multiplication has O(N**1.58) runtime (the exponent is
852 log_base_2(3)) instead of the previous O(N**2). Measured results may
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +0000853 be better or worse than that, depending on platform quirks. Besides
854 the O() improvement in raw instruction count, the Karatsuba algorithm
855 appears to have much better cache behavior on extremely large integers
856 (starting in the ballpark of a million bits). Note that this is a
857 simple implementation, and there's no intent here to compete with,
858 e.g., GMP. It gives a very nice speedup when it applies, but a package
859 devoted to fast large-integer arithmetic should run circles around it.
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +0000860
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +0000861- u'%c' will now raise a ValueError in case the argument is an
862 integer outside the valid range of Unicode code point ordinals.
863
Guido van Rossumdeb09362002-08-09 17:16:30 +0000864- The tempfile module has been overhauled for enhanced security. The
865 mktemp() function is now deprecated; new, safe replacements are
866 mkstemp() (for files) and mkdtemp() (for directories), and the
867 higher-level functions NamedTemporaryFile() and TemporaryFile().
868 Use of some global variables in this module is also deprecated; the
869 new functions have keyword arguments to provide the same
870 functionality. All Lib, Tools and Demo modules that used the unsafe
871 interfaces have been updated to use the safe replacements. Thanks
872 to Zack Weinberg!
873
Guido van Rossumd81a9832002-08-09 15:57:34 +0000874- When x is an object whose class implements __mul__ and __rmul__,
875 1.0*x would correctly invoke __rmul__, but 1*x would erroneously
876 invoke __mul__. This was due to the sequence-repeat code in the int
877 type. This has been fixed now.
878
Barry Warsawd79f6832002-08-06 17:01:51 +0000879- Previously, "str1 in str2" required str1 to be a string of length 1.
880 This restriction has been relaxed to allow str1 to be a string of
881 any length. Thus "'el' in 'hello world'" returns True now.
882
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +0000883- File objects are now their own iterators. For a file f, iter(f) now
884 returns f (unless f is closed), and f.next() is similar to
885 f.readline() when EOF is not reached; however, f.next() uses a
886 readahead buffer that messes up the file position, so mixing
887 f.next() and f.readline() (or other methods) doesn't work right.
888 Calling f.seek() drops the readahead buffer, but other operations
889 don't. It so happens that this gives a nice additional speed boost
890 to "for line in file:"; the xreadlines method and corresponding
Guido van Rossumbffb2ef2002-08-09 17:17:07 +0000891 module are now obsolete. Thanks to Oren Tirosh!
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +0000892
Guido van Rossumde392d32002-08-05 14:17:20 +0000893- Encoding declarations (PEP 263, phase 1) have been implemented. A
894 comment of the form "# -*- coding: <encodingname> -*-" in the first
895 or second line of a Python source file indicates the encoding.
Martin v. Löwis00f1e3f2002-08-04 17:29:52 +0000896
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +0000897- list.sort() has a new implementation. While cross-platform results
898 may vary, and in data-dependent ways, this is much faster on many
899 kinds of partially ordered lists than the previous implementation,
900 and reported to be just as fast on randomly ordered lists on
901 several major platforms. This sort is also stable (if A==B and A
902 precedes B in the list at the start, A precedes B after the sort too),
903 although the language definition does not guarantee stability. A
904 potential drawback is that list.sort() may require temp space of
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +0000905 len(list)*2 bytes (``*4`` on a 64-bit machine). It's therefore possible
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +0000906 for list.sort() to raise MemoryError now, even if a comparison function
907 does not. See <http://www.python.org/sf/587076> for full details.
908
Guido van Rossum2d5389c2002-07-23 03:44:35 +0000909- All standard iterators now ensure that, once StopIteration has been
910 raised, all future calls to next() on the same iterator will also
911 raise StopIteration. There used to be various counterexamples to
912 this behavior, which could caused confusion or subtle program
913 breakage, without any benefits. (Note that this is still an
914 iterator's responsibility; the iterator framework does not enforce
915 this.)
916
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +0000917- Ctrl+C handling on Windows has been made more consistent with
918 other platforms. KeyboardInterrupt can now reliably be caught,
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +0000919 and Ctrl+C at an interactive prompt no longer terminates the
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +0000920 process under NT/2k/XP (it never did under Win9x). Ctrl+C will
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +0000921 interrupt time.sleep() in the main thread, and any child processes
922 created via the popen family (on win2k; we can't make win9x work
Mark Hammond8f3afc72002-08-10 06:26:31 +0000923 reliably) are also interrupted (as generally happens on for Linux/Unix.)
924 [SF bugs 231273, 439992 and 581232]
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +0000925
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +0000926- sys.getwindowsversion() has been added on Windows. This
927 returns a tuple with information about the version of Windows
928 currently running.
929
Raymond Hettinger5a04aec2002-06-25 00:25:30 +0000930- Slices and repetitions of buffer objects now consistently return
931 a string. Formerly, strings would be returned most of the time,
932 but a buffer object would be returned when the repetition count
933 was one or when the slice range was all inclusive.
934
Walter Dörwald3430d702002-06-17 10:43:59 +0000935- Unicode objects in sys.path are no longer ignored but treated
936 as directory names.
937
Neal Norwitz1f68fc72002-06-14 00:50:42 +0000938- Fixed string.startswith and string.endswith builtin methods
939 so they accept negative indices. [SF bug 493951]
940
Guido van Rossumc5fe5eb2002-06-12 03:45:21 +0000941- Fixed a bug with a continue inside a try block and a yield in the
942 finally clause. [SF bug 567538]
943
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +0000944- Most builtin sequences now support "extended slices", i.e. slices
Guido van Rossum2e82e712002-06-13 11:41:07 +0000945 with a third "stride" parameter. For example, "hello world"[::-1]
946 gives "dlrow olleh".
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +0000947
Neal Norwitzd68f5172002-05-29 15:54:55 +0000948- A new warning PendingDeprecationWarning was added to provide
949 direction on features which are in the process of being deprecated.
950 The warning will not be printed by default. To see the pending
951 deprecations, use -Walways::PendingDeprecationWarning::
952 as a command line option or warnings.filterwarnings() in code.
953
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +0000954- Deprecated features of xrange objects have been removed as
955 promised. The start, stop, and step attributes and the tolist()
956 method no longer exist. xrange repetition and slicing have been
957 removed.
958
Guido van Rossum7dab2422002-04-26 19:40:56 +0000959- New builtin function enumerate(x), from PEP 279. Example:
960 enumerate("abc") is an iterator returning (0,"a"), (1,"b"), (2,"c").
961 The argument can be an arbitrary iterable object.
962
Neil Schemenauer89e3ee02002-04-26 01:58:53 +0000963- The assert statement no longer tests __debug__ at runtime. This means
964 that assert statements cannot be disabled by assigning a false value
965 to __debug__.
966
Walter Dörwald068325e2002-04-15 13:36:47 +0000967- A method zfill() was added to str and unicode, that fills a numeric
968 string to the left with zeros. For example,
969 "+123".zfill(6) -> "+00123".
970
Guido van Rossum862fe3c2002-04-15 12:36:47 +0000971- Complex numbers supported divmod() and the // and % operators, but
972 these make no sense. Since this was documented, they're being
973 deprecated now.
974
Guido van Rossum26dd8302002-04-26 20:11:29 +0000975- String and unicode methods lstrip(), rstrip() and strip() now take
976 an optional argument that specifies the characters to strip. For
977 example, "Foo!!!?!?!?".rstrip("?!") -> "Foo".
Guido van Rossum49042042002-04-13 00:59:05 +0000978
Guido van Rossumc0d3f4e2002-11-27 13:10:40 +0000979- There's a new dictionary constructor (a class method of the dict
980 class), dict.fromkeys(iterable, value=None). It constructs a
981 dictionary with keys taken from the iterable and all values set to a
982 single value. It can be used for building sets and for removing
983 duplicates from sequences.
Raymond Hettingere33d3df2002-11-27 07:29:33 +0000984
Guido van Rossumc69343b2002-04-12 19:22:48 +0000985- Added a new dict method pop(key). This removes and returns the
986 value corresponding to key. [SF patch #539949]
987
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +0000988- A new built-in type, bool, has been added, as well as built-in
989 names for its two values, True and False. Comparisons and sundry
990 other operations that return a truth value have been changed to
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +0000991 return a bool instead. Read PEP 285 for an explanation of why this
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +0000992 is backward compatible.
993
Guido van Rossum95b62a62002-03-29 01:07:24 +0000994- Fixed two bugs reported as SF #535905: under certain conditions,
995 deallocating a deeply nested structure could cause a segfault in the
996 garbage collector, due to interaction with the "trashcan" code;
997 access to the current frame during destruction of a local variable
998 could access a pointer to freed memory.
999
Guido van Rossumfe0ca4a2002-06-18 21:20:13 +00001000- The optional object allocator ("pymalloc") has been enabled by
1001 default. The recommended practice for memory allocation and
1002 deallocation has been streamlined. A header file is included,
1003 Misc/pymemcompat.h, which can be bundled with 3rd party extensions
1004 and lets them use the same API with Python versions from 1.5.2
1005 onwards.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00001006
Martin v. Löwiscfeb3b62002-03-03 21:30:27 +00001007- PyErr_Display will provide file and line information for all exceptions
1008 that have an attribute print_file_and_line, not just SyntaxErrors.
1009
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00001010- The UTF-8 codec will now encode and decode Unicode surrogates
1011 correctly and without raising exceptions for unpaired ones.
1012
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00001013- Universal newlines (PEP 278) is implemented. Briefly, using 'U'
1014 instead of 'r' when opening a text file for reading changes the line
1015 ending convention so that any of '\r', '\r\n', and '\n' is
1016 recognized (even mixed in one file); all three are converted to
1017 '\n', the standard Python line end character.
1018
Neal Norwitz649b7592002-01-01 19:07:13 +00001019- file.xreadlines() now raises a ValueError if the file is closed:
1020 Previously, an xreadlines object was returned which would raise
1021 a ValueError when the xreadlines.next() method was called.
1022
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00001023- sys.exit() inadvertently allowed more than one argument.
Neal Norwitz0c766a02002-03-27 13:03:09 +00001024 An exception will now be raised if more than one argument is used.
1025
Gustavo Niemeyer17c5a332002-12-16 14:09:22 +00001026- Changed evaluation order of dictionary literals to conform to the
1027 general left to right evaluation order rule. Now {f1(): f2()} will
1028 evaluate f1 first.
Gustavo Niemeyer78429a62002-12-16 13:54:02 +00001029
Gustavo Niemeyer786ddb22002-12-16 18:12:53 +00001030- Fixed bug #521782: when a file was in non-blocking mode, file.read()
1031 could silently lose data or wrongly throw an unknown error.
1032
Neil Schemenauerb983aa02002-12-30 20:22:23 +00001033- The sq_repeat, sq_inplace_repeat, sq_concat and sq_inplace_concat
1034 slots are now always tried after trying the corresponding nb_* slots.
1035 This fixes a number of minor bugs (see bug #624807).
1036
Neal Norwitz74a032e2003-01-10 23:29:48 +00001037- Fix problem with dynamic loading on 64-bit AIX (see bug #639945).
1038
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001039Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001040-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001041
Raymond Hettinger9543b342003-01-18 23:22:20 +00001042- Added three operators to the operator module:
1043 operator.pow(a,b) which is equivalent to: a**b.
1044 operator.is_(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is b.
1045 operator.is_not(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is not b.
1046
Martin v. Löwis24a880b2002-12-31 12:55:15 +00001047- posix.openpty now works on all systems that have /dev/ptmx.
1048
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00001049- A module zipimport exists to support importing code from zip
1050 archives.
1051
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00001052- The new datetime module supplies classes for manipulating dates and
1053 times. The basic design came from the Zope "fishbowl process", and
1054 favors practical commercial applications over calendar esoterica. See
1055
1056 http://www.zope.org/Members/fdrake/DateTimeWiki/FrontPage
1057
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00001058- _tkinter now returns Tcl objects, instead of strings. Objects which
1059 have Python equivalents are converted to Python objects, other objects
1060 are wrapped. This can be configured through the wantobjects method,
Martin v. Löwis8c8aa5d2002-11-26 21:39:48 +00001061 or Tkinter.wantobjects.
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00001062
Barry Warsawc27f4bd2002-12-30 21:03:26 +00001063- The PyBSDDB wrapper around the Sleepycat Berkeley DB library has
1064 been added as the package bsddb. The traditional bsddb module is
1065 still available in source code, but not built automatically anymore,
1066 and is now named bsddb185. This supports Berkeley DB versions from
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00001067 3.0 to 4.1. For help converting your databases from the old module (which
1068 probably used an obsolete version of Berkeley DB) to the new module, see
1069 the db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py scripts described in the Tools/Demos
1070 section above.
Martin v. Löwisef546b32002-11-19 08:12:57 +00001071
Martin v. Löwis677bde22002-11-23 22:08:15 +00001072- unicodedata was updated to Unicode 3.2. It supports normalization
1073 and names for Hangul syllables and CJK unified ideographs.
Martin v. Löwis7d41e292002-11-23 12:22:32 +00001074
Neal Norwitz94a83fd2002-11-02 17:46:24 +00001075- resource.getrlimit() now returns longs instead of ints.
1076
Martin v. Löwis080689c2002-10-26 14:42:02 +00001077- readline now dynamically adjusts its input/output stream if
1078 sys.stdin/stdout changes.
1079
Guido van Rossumba602972002-10-01 18:18:58 +00001080- The _tkinter module (and hence Tkinter) has dropped support for
1081 Tcl/Tk 8.0 and 8.1. Only Tcl/Tk versions 8.2, 8.3 and 8.4 are
1082 supported.
1083
Martin v. Löwis658009a2002-09-16 17:26:24 +00001084- cPickle.BadPickleGet is now a class.
1085
Martin v. Löwisa19bfe02002-10-16 18:28:36 +00001086- The time stamps in os.stat_result are floating point numbers
1087 after stat_float_times has been called.
Martin v. Löwis94717ed2002-09-09 14:24:16 +00001088
Neal Norwitzb5673922002-09-05 21:48:07 +00001089- If the size passed to mmap.mmap() is larger than the length of the
1090 file on non-Windows platforms, a ValueError is raised. [SF bug 585792]
1091
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00001092- The xreadlines module is slated for obsolescence.
1093
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00001094- The strptime function in the time module is now always available (a
1095 Python implementation is used when the C library doesn't define it).
1096
Guido van Rossum9562bcf2002-06-14 21:31:18 +00001097- The 'new' module is no longer an extension, but a Python module that
1098 only exists for backwards compatibility. Its contents are no longer
1099 functions but callable type objects.
1100
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00001101- The bsddb.*open functions can now take 'None' as a filename.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00001102 This will create a temporary in-memory bsddb that won't be
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00001103 written to disk.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00001104
Martin v. Löwisb96152c2002-12-31 13:20:15 +00001105- posix.getloadavg, posix.lchown, posix.killpg, posix.mknod, and
1106 posix.getpgid have been added where available.
Martin v. Löwis06a83e92002-04-14 10:19:44 +00001107
Martin v. Löwisf0a46682002-11-03 17:20:12 +00001108- The locale module now exposes the C library's gettext interface. It
1109 also has a new function getpreferredencoding.
Martin v. Löwis2e64c342002-03-27 18:49:02 +00001110
Tim Petersfbf74f22002-03-14 19:06:01 +00001111- A security hole ("double free") was found in zlib-1.1.3, a popular
1112 third party compression library used by some Python modules. The
1113 hole was quickly plugged in zlib-1.1.4, and the Windows build of
1114 Python now ships with zlib-1.1.4.
1115
Martin v. Löwis688357e2002-04-08 21:28:20 +00001116- pwd, grp, and resource return enhanced tuples now, with symbolic
1117 field names.
Martin v. Löwis29001ff2002-03-01 10:47:37 +00001118
Martin v. Löwis99866332002-03-01 10:27:01 +00001119- array.array is now a type object. A new format character
1120 'u' indicates Py_UNICODE arrays. For those, .tounicode and
1121 .fromunicode methods are available. Arrays now support __iadd__
1122 and __imul__.
1123
Neal Norwitze790eae2002-01-01 21:14:12 +00001124- dl now builds on every system that has dlfcn.h. Failure in case
Martin v. Löwis93227272002-01-01 20:18:30 +00001125 of sizeof(int)!=sizeof(long)!=sizeof(void*) is delayed until dl.open
1126 is called.
1127
Skip Montanaro8e790e72002-09-03 13:25:17 +00001128- The sys module acquired a new attribute, api_version, which evaluates
1129 to the value of the PYTHON_API_VERSION macro with which the
1130 interpreter was compiled.
1131
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00001132- Fixed bug #470582: sre module would return a tuple (None, 'a', 'ab')
1133 when applying the regular expression '^((a)c)?(ab)$' on 'ab'. It now
1134 returns (None, None, 'ab'), as expected. Also fixed handling of
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00001135 lastindex/lastgroup match attributes in similar cases. For example,
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00001136 when running the expression r'(a)(b)?b' over 'ab', lastindex must be
1137 1, not 2.
1138
Gustavo Niemeyerc523b042002-11-07 03:28:56 +00001139- Fixed bug #581080: sre scanner was not checking the buffer limit
1140 before increasing the current pointer. This was creating an infinite
1141 loop in the search function, once the pointer exceeded the buffer
1142 limit.
1143
Thomas Heller95cb7e42002-11-07 16:23:55 +00001144- The os.fdopen function now enforces a file mode starting with the
1145 letter 'r', 'w' or 'a', otherwise a ValueError is raised. This fixes
1146 bug #623464.
1147
Greg Ward6c58d462003-01-03 18:02:15 +00001148- The linuxaudiodev module is now deprecated; it is being replaced by
1149 ossaudiodev. The interface has been extended to cover a lot more of
1150 OSS (see www.opensound.com), including most DSP ioctls and the
1151 OSS mixer API. Documentation forthcoming in 2.3a2.
1152
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001153Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001154-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001155
Guido van Rossum747f8062003-01-03 16:33:49 +00001156- imaplib.py now supports SSL (Tino Lange and Piers Lauder).
1157
Just van Rossum5e156ad2002-12-31 16:38:01 +00001158- Freeze's modulefinder.py has been moved to the standard library;
1159 slightly improved so it will issue less false missing submodule
1160 reports (see sf path #643711 for details). Documentation will follow
1161 with Python 2.3a2.
1162
Martin v. Löwis96a60e42002-12-31 13:11:54 +00001163- os.path exposes getctime.
1164
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001165- unittest.py now has two additional methods called assertAlmostEqual()
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001166 and failIfAlmostEqual(). They implement an approximate comparison
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001167 by rounding the difference between the two arguments and comparing
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001168 the result to zero. Approximate comparison is essential for
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001169 unit tests of floating point results.
1170
Raymond Hettingere11b5102002-12-25 16:37:19 +00001171- calendar.py now depends on the new datetime module rather than
1172 the time module. As a result, the range of allowable dates
1173 has been increased.
1174
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00001175- pdb has a new 'j(ump)' command to select the next line to be
1176 executed.
1177
Thomas Heller1b3b49d2002-12-12 19:13:44 +00001178- The distutils created windows installers now can run a
1179 postinstallation script.
1180
Martin v. Löwis4581cfa2002-11-22 08:23:09 +00001181- doctest.testmod can now be called without argument, which means to
1182 test the current module.
1183
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001184- When canceling a server that implemented threading with a keyboard
Martin v. Löwisf86e8ef2002-11-22 08:08:44 +00001185 interrupt, the server would shut down but not terminate (waiting on
1186 client threads). A new member variable, daemon_threads, was added to
1187 the ThreadingMixIn class in SocketServer.py to make it explicit that
1188 this behavior needs to be controlled.
1189
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00001190- A new module, optparse, provides a fancy alternative to getopt for
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00001191 command line parsing. It is a slightly modified version of Greg
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00001192 Ward's Optik package.
1193
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00001194- UserDict.py now defines a DictMixin class which defines all dictionary
1195 methods for classes that already have a minimum mapping interface.
1196 This greatly simplifies writing classes that need to be substitutable
1197 for dictionaries (such as the shelve module).
1198
1199- shelve.py now subclasses from UserDict.DictMixin. Now shelve supports
1200 all dictionary methods. This eases the transition to persistent
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00001201 storage for scripts originally written with dictionaries in mind.
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00001202
Skip Montanaro3bf99e32002-12-08 18:36:24 +00001203- shelve.open and the various classes in shelve.py now accept an optional
1204 binary flag, which defaults to False. If True, the values stored in the
1205 shelf are binary pickles.
1206
Guido van Rossumfda06742002-11-13 16:29:18 +00001207- A new package, logging, implements the logging API defined by PEP
1208 282. The code is written by Vinay Sajip.
1209
Walter Dörwald4dbf1922002-11-06 16:53:44 +00001210- StreamReader, StreamReaderWriter and StreamRecoder in the codecs
1211 modules are iterators now.
1212
Tim Peters9288f952002-11-05 20:38:55 +00001213- gzip.py now handles files exceeding 2GB. Files over 4GB also work
1214 now (provided the OS supports it, and Python is configured with large
1215 file support), but in that case the underlying gzip file format can
1216 record only the least-significant 32 bits of the file size, so that
1217 some tools working with gzipped files may report an incorrect file
1218 size.
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00001219
Martin v. Löwis74b51ac2002-10-26 14:50:45 +00001220- xml.sax.saxutils.unescape has been added, to replace entity references
1221 with their entity value.
1222
Martin v. Löwis77ac4292002-10-15 15:11:13 +00001223- Queue.Queue.{put,get} now support an optional timeout argument.
1224
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00001225- Various features of Tk 8.4 are exposed in Tkinter.py. The multiple
1226 option of tkFileDialog is exposed as function askopenfile{,name}s.
Martin v. Löwis2ec36272002-10-13 10:22:08 +00001227
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00001228- Various configure methods of Tkinter have been stream-lined, so that
1229 tag_configure, image_configure, window_configure now return a
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00001230 dictionary when invoked with no argument.
Martin v. Löwis6ce13152002-10-10 14:36:13 +00001231
Guido van Rossum2b492b62002-10-09 21:40:48 +00001232- Importing the readline module now no longer has the side effect of
1233 calling setlocale(LC_CTYPE, ""). The initial "C" locale, or
1234 whatever locale is explicitly set by the user, is preserved. If you
1235 want repr() of 8-bit strings in your preferred encoding to preserve
1236 all printable characters of that encoding, you have to add the
1237 following code to your $PYTHONSTARTUP file or to your application's
1238 main():
1239
1240 import locale
1241 locale.setlocale(locale.LC_CTYPE, "")
1242
Martin v. Löwise9ce0b02002-10-07 13:23:24 +00001243- shutil.move was added. shutil.copytree now reports errors as an
1244 exception at the end, instead of printing error messages.
1245
Marc-André Lemburg97047e22002-10-04 11:55:21 +00001246- Encoding name normalization was generalized to not only
1247 replace hyphens with underscores, but also all other non-alphanumeric
1248 characters (with the exception of the dot which is used for Python
1249 package names during lookup). The aliases.py mapping was updated
1250 to the new standard.
1251
Walter Dörwald5ccaf8f2002-09-06 16:15:58 +00001252- mimetypes has two new functions: guess_all_extensions() which
1253 returns a list of all known extensions for a mime type, and
1254 add_type() which adds one mapping between a mime type and
1255 an extension to the database.
1256
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00001257- New module: sets, defines the class Set that implements a mutable
1258 set type using the keys of a dict to represent the set. There's
1259 also a class ImmutableSet which is useful when you need sets of sets
1260 or when you need to use sets as dict keys, and a class BaseSet which
Raymond Hettingeref8b9c62002-12-09 08:56:06 +00001261 is the base class of the two.
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00001262
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00001263- Added random.sample(population,k) for random sampling without replacement.
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00001264 Returns a k length list of unique elements chosen from the population.
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00001265
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00001266- random.randrange(-sys.maxint-1, sys.maxint) no longer raises
1267 OverflowError. That is, it now accepts any combination of 'start'
1268 and 'stop' arguments so long as each is in the range of Python's
1269 bounded integers.
1270
Raymond Hettinger40f62172002-12-29 23:03:38 +00001271- Thanks to Raymond Hettinger, random.random() now uses a new core
1272 generator. The Mersenne Twister algorithm is implemented in C,
1273 threadsafe, faster than the previous generator, has an astronomically
1274 large period (2**19937-1), creates random floats to full 53-bit
1275 precision, and may be the most widely tested random number generator
1276 in existence.
1277
1278 The random.jumpahead(n) method has different semantics for the new
1279 generator. Instead of jumping n steps ahead, it uses n and the
1280 existing state to create a new state. This means that jumpahead()
1281 continues to support multi-threaded code needing generators of
1282 non-overlapping sequences. However, it will break code which relies
1283 on jumpahead moving a specific number of steps forward.
1284
1285 The attributes random.whseed and random.__whseed have no meaning for
1286 the new generator. Code using these attributes should switch to a
1287 new class, random.WichmannHill which is provided for backward
1288 compatibility and to make an alternate generator available.
1289
Guido van Rossum4a57c332002-08-02 18:05:20 +00001290- New "algorithms" module: heapq, implements a heap queue. Thanks to
1291 Kevin O'Connor for the code and François Pinard for an entertaining
1292 write-up explaining the theory and practical uses of heaps.
1293
Marc-André Lemburg58e2ff22002-07-12 14:40:04 +00001294- New encoding for the Palm OS character set: palmos.
1295
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00001296- binascii.crc32() and the zipfile module had problems on some 64-bit
1297 platforms. These have been fixed. On a platform with 8-byte C longs,
1298 crc32() now returns a signed-extended 4-byte result, so that its value
1299 as a Python int is equal to the value computed a 32-bit platform.
1300
Martin v. Löwis7d650ca2002-06-30 15:05:00 +00001301- xml.dom.minidom.toxml and toprettyxml now take an optional encoding
1302 argument.
1303
Guido van Rossum9f7549b2002-06-10 21:39:42 +00001304- Some fixes in the copy module: when an object is copied through its
1305 __reduce__ method, there was no check for a __setstate__ method on
1306 the result [SF patch 565085]; deepcopy should treat instances of
1307 custom metaclasses the same way it treats instances of type 'type'
1308 [SF patch 560794].
1309
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00001310- Sockets now support timeout mode. After s.settimeout(T), where T is
1311 a float expressing seconds, subsequent operations raise an exception
1312 if they cannot be completed within T seconds. To disable timeout
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00001313 mode, use s.settimeout(None). There's also a module function,
1314 socket.setdefaulttimeout(T), which sets the default for all sockets
1315 created henceforth.
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00001316
1317- getopt.gnu_getopt was added. This supports GNU-style option
1318 processing, where options can be mixed with non-option arguments.
Martin v. Löwis446a25f2002-06-06 10:58:36 +00001319
Michael W. Hudsonb0dc1a32002-06-04 18:27:35 +00001320- Stop using strings for exceptions. String objects used for
1321 exceptions are now classes deriving from Exception. The objects
1322 changed were: Tkinter.TclError, bdb.BdbQuit, macpath.norm_error,
1323 tabnanny.NannyNag, and xdrlib.Error.
Neal Norwitzb5b5a262002-06-04 17:14:07 +00001324
Walter Dörwald474458d2002-06-04 15:16:29 +00001325- Constants BOM_UTF8, BOM_UTF16, BOM_UTF16_LE, BOM_UTF16_BE,
1326 BOM_UTF32, BOM_UTF32_LE and BOM_UTF32_BE that represent the Byte
1327 Order Mark in UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 encodings for little and
1328 big endian systems were added to the codecs module. The old names
1329 BOM32_* and BOM64_* were off by a factor of 2.
1330
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00001331- Added conversion functions math.degrees() and math.radians().
Raymond Hettinger87f59ee2002-05-13 04:17:32 +00001332
Raymond Hettinger866964c2002-12-14 19:51:34 +00001333- math.log() now takes an optional argument: math.log(x[, base]).
1334
Raymond Hettinger9b1df1d2002-05-12 06:07:21 +00001335- ftplib.retrlines() now tests for callback is None rather than testing
1336 for False. Was causing an error when given a callback object which
1337 was callable but also returned len() as zero. The change may
1338 create new breakage if the caller relied on the undocumented behavior
1339 and called with callback set to [] or some other False value not
1340 identical to None.
1341
Tim Peters46c04e12002-05-05 20:40:00 +00001342- random.gauss() uses a piece of hidden state used by nothing else,
1343 and the .seed() and .whseed() methods failed to reset it. In other
1344 words, setting the seed didn't completely determine the sequence of
1345 results produced by random.gauss(). It does now. Programs repeatedly
1346 mixing calls to a seed method with calls to gauss() may see different
1347 results now.
1348
Fred Drake7f781c92002-05-01 20:33:53 +00001349- The pickle.Pickler class grew a clear_memo() method to mimic that
1350 provided by cPickle.Pickler.
1351
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00001352- difflib's SequenceMatcher class now does a dynamic analysis of
1353 which elements are so frequent as to constitute noise. For
1354 comparing files as sequences of lines, this generally works better
1355 than the IS_LINE_JUNK function, and function ndiff's linejunk
1356 argument defaults to None now as a result. A happy benefit is
1357 that SequenceMatcher may run much faster now when applied
1358 to large files with many duplicate lines (for example, C program
1359 text with lots of repeated "}" and "return NULL;" lines).
1360
Guido van Rossum256705b2002-04-23 13:29:43 +00001361- New Text.dump() method in Tkinter module.
1362
Marc-André Lemburg1ec71ea2002-04-17 20:33:40 +00001363- New distutils commands for building packagers were added to
1364 support pkgtool on Solaris and swinstall on HP-UX.
1365
1366- distutils now has a new abstract binary packager base class
1367 command/bdist_packager, which simplifies writing packagers.
1368 This will hopefully provide the missing bits to encourage
1369 people to submit more packagers, e.g. for Debian, FreeBSD
1370 and other systems.
1371
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00001372- The UTF-16, -LE and -BE stream readers now raise a
1373 NotImplementedError for all calls to .readline(). Previously, they
1374 used to just produce garbage or fail with an encoding error --
1375 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 +00001376 work well with these.
1377
Martin v. Löwis5c137c22002-03-18 12:44:08 +00001378- compileall now supports quiet operation.
1379
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00001380- The BaseHTTPServer now implements optional HTTP/1.1 persistent
Martin v. Löwis587c98c2002-03-17 18:37:22 +00001381 connections.
1382
Marc-André Lemburga5d2b4c2002-02-16 18:23:30 +00001383- socket module: the SSL support was broken out of the main
1384 _socket module C helper and placed into a new _ssl helper
1385 which now gets imported by socket.py if available and working.
1386
Marc-André Lemburg37aa5802002-02-10 21:42:47 +00001387- encodings package: added aliases for all supported IANA character
1388 sets
1389
Guido van Rossum606fe4e2001-12-28 20:57:14 +00001390- ftplib: to safeguard the user's privacy, anonymous login will use
1391 "anonymous@" as default password, rather than the real user and host
1392 name.
1393
Fred Drake36736122002-01-10 13:50:31 +00001394- webbrowser: tightened up the command passed to os.system() so that
1395 arbitrary shell code can't be executed because a bogus URL was
1396 passed in.
1397
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00001398- gettext.translation has an optional fallback argument, and
Martin v. Löwisa55ffae2002-01-11 06:58:49 +00001399 gettext.find an optional all argument. Translations will now fallback
Martin v. Löwisd8996052002-11-21 21:45:32 +00001400 on a per-message basis. The module supports plural forms, by means
1401 of gettext.[d]ngettext and Translation.[u]ngettext.
Martin v. Löwis1be64192002-01-11 06:33:28 +00001402
Martin v. Löwis9668b932002-01-12 11:27:42 +00001403- distutils bdist commands now offer a --skip-build option.
1404
Walter Dörwaldb25c2b02002-03-21 10:38:40 +00001405- warnings.warn now accepts a Warning instance as first argument.
1406
Fred Drakefed7e852002-04-04 19:36:15 +00001407- The xml.sax.expatreader.ExpatParser class will no longer create
1408 circular references by using itself as the locator that gets passed
1409 to the content handler implementation. [SF bug #535474]
1410
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00001411- The email.Parser.Parser class now properly parses strings regardless
1412 of their line endings, which can be any of \r, \n, or \r\n (CR, LF,
1413 or CRLF). Also, the Header class's constructor default arguments
1414 has changed slightly so that an explicit maxlinelen value is always
Barry Warsaw497e5c42002-12-30 19:27:08 +00001415 honored, and so unicode conversion error handling can be specified.
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00001416
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001417- distutils' build_ext command now links C++ extensions with the C++
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00001418 compiler available in the Makefile or CXX environment variable, if
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001419 running under \*nix.
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00001420
1421- New module bz2: provides a comprehensive interface for the bz2 compression
1422 library. It implements a complete file interface, one-shot (de)compression
1423 functions, and types for sequential (de)compression.
1424
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001425- New pdb command 'pp' which is like 'p' except that it pretty-prints
Barry Warsaw5d8d6182002-11-05 22:41:33 +00001426 the value of its expression argument.
1427
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00001428- Now bdist_rpm distutils command understands a verify_script option in
1429 the config file, including the contents of the referred filename in
1430 the "%verifyscript" section of the rpm spec file.
1431
Gustavo Niemeyer1456fde2002-11-25 17:25:04 +00001432- Fixed bug #495695: webbrowser module would run graphic browsers in a
1433 unix environment even if DISPLAY was not set. Also, support for
1434 skipstone browser was included.
1435
Gustavo Niemeyerd5ae01a2002-12-16 13:11:57 +00001436- Fixed bug #636769: rexec would run unallowed code if subclasses of
1437 strings were used as parameters for certain functions.
1438
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001439Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001440-----------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001441
Martin v. Löwis0d1fdea2002-11-22 08:36:54 +00001442- pygettext.py now supports globbing on Windows, and accepts module
1443 names in addition to accepting file names.
1444
Guido van Rossum923e4ef2002-09-17 20:58:59 +00001445- The SGI demos (Demo/sgi) have been removed. Nobody thought they
1446 were interesting any more. (The SGI library modules and extensions
1447 are still there; it is believed that at least some of these are
1448 still used and useful.)
1449
Fred Drake40813b12002-08-05 15:24:19 +00001450- IDLE supports the new encoding declarations (PEP 263); it can also
1451 deal with legacy 8-bit files if they use the locale's encoding. It
1452 allows non-ASCII strings in the interactive shell and executes them
1453 in the locale's encoding.
Martin v. Löwis98ce7b72002-08-05 15:11:26 +00001454
Marc-André Lemburg46260092002-04-04 16:17:11 +00001455- freeze.py now produces binaries which can import shared modules,
1456 unlike before when this failed due to missing symbol exports in
1457 the generated binary.
1458
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001459Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001460-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001461
Martin v. Löwisdc461752002-11-06 21:59:33 +00001462- On Unix, IDLE is now installed automatically.
1463
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00001464- The fpectl module is not built by default; it's dangerous or useless
1465 except in the hands of experts.
1466
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00001467- The public Python C API will generally be declared using PyAPI_FUNC
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00001468 and PyAPI_DATA macros, while Python extension module init functions
1469 will be declared with PyMODINIT_FUNC. DL_EXPORT/DL_IMPORT macros
1470 are deprecated.
Neal Norwitz1389f3e2002-07-22 13:21:10 +00001471
Tim Petersc6a3ff62002-07-08 22:11:52 +00001472- A bug was fixed that could cause COUNT_ALLOCS builds to segfault, or
1473 get into infinite loops, when a new-style class got garbage-collected.
1474 Unfortunately, to avoid this, the way COUNT_ALLOCS works requires
1475 that new-style classes be immortal in COUNT_ALLOCS builds. Note that
1476 COUNT_ALLOCS is not enabled by default, in either release or debug
1477 builds, and that new-style classes are immortal only in COUNT_ALLOCS
1478 builds.
1479
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00001480- Compiling out the cyclic garbage collector is no longer an option.
1481 The old symbol WITH_CYCLE_GC is now ignored, and Python.h arranges
1482 that it's always defined (for the benefit of any extension modules
1483 that may be conditionalizing on it). A bonus is that any extension
1484 type participating in cyclic gc can choose to participate in the
1485 Py_TRASHCAN mechanism now too; in the absence of cyclic gc, this used
1486 to require editing the core to teach the trashcan mechanism about the
1487 new type.
1488
Martin v. Löwis0cec0ff2002-07-28 16:33:45 +00001489- According to Annex F of the current C standard,
Tim Peters1de41bf2002-07-03 03:31:20 +00001490
1491 The Standard C macro HUGE_VAL and its float and long double analogs,
1492 HUGE_VALF and HUGE_VALL, expand to expressions whose values are
1493 positive infinities.
1494
1495 Python only uses the double HUGE_VAL, and only to #define its own symbol
1496 Py_HUGE_VAL. Some platforms have incorrect definitions for HUGE_VAL.
1497 pyport.h used to try to worm around that, but the workarounds triggered
1498 other bugs on other platforms, so we gave up. If your platform defines
1499 HUGE_VAL incorrectly, you'll need to #define Py_HUGE_VAL to something
1500 that works on your platform. The only instance of this I'm sure about
1501 is on an unknown subset of Cray systems, described here:
1502
1503 http://www.cray.com/swpubs/manuals/SN-2194_2.0/html-SN-2194_2.0/x3138.htm
1504
1505 Presumably 2.3a1 breaks such systems. If anyone uses such a system, help!
1506
Martin v. Löwisa3fb4f72002-06-09 13:33:54 +00001507- The configure option --without-doc-strings can be used to remove the
1508 doc strings from the builtin functions and modules; this reduces the
1509 size of the executable.
1510
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00001511- The universal newlines option (PEP 278) is on by default. On Unix
1512 it can be disabled by passing --without-universal-newlines to the
1513 configure script. On other platforms, remove
1514 WITH_UNIVERSAL_NEWLINES from pyconfig.h.
Tim Peters639295f2002-04-21 07:30:30 +00001515
Martin v. Löwis1142de32002-03-29 16:28:31 +00001516- On Unix, a shared libpython2.3.so can be created with --enable-shared.
1517
Tim Peters8deda702002-03-30 10:06:07 +00001518- All uses of the CACHE_HASH, INTERN_STRINGS, and DONT_SHARE_SHORT_STRINGS
1519 preprocessor symbols were eliminated. The internal decisions they
1520 controlled stopped being experimental long ago.
Tim Peters1f7df352002-03-29 03:29:08 +00001521
Fred Drake7d28b732002-05-02 21:17:00 +00001522- The tools used to build the documentation now work under Cygwin as
1523 well as Unix.
1524
Skip Montanaro57454e52002-06-14 20:30:31 +00001525- The bsddb and dbm module builds have been changed to try and avoid version
1526 skew problems and disable linkage with Berkeley DB 1.85 unless the
1527 installer knows what s/he's doing. See the section on building these
1528 modules in the README file for details.
1529
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001530C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001531-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001532
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00001533- PyNumber_Check() now returns true for string and unicode objects.
1534 This is a result of these types having a partially defined
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00001535 tp_as_number slot. (This is not a feature, but an indication that
Walter Dörwalda1a61f92002-11-19 21:20:25 +00001536 PyNumber_Check() is not very useful to determine numeric behavior.
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00001537 It may be deprecated.)
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00001538
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00001539- The string object's layout has changed: the pointer member
1540 ob_sinterned has been replaced by an int member ob_sstate. On some
1541 platforms (e.g. most 64-bit systems) this may change the offset of
1542 the ob_sval member, so as a precaution the API_VERSION has been
1543 incremented. The apparently unused feature of "indirect interned
1544 strings", supported by the ob_sinterned member, is gone. Interned
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001545 strings are now usually mortal; there is a new API,
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00001546 PyString_InternImmortal() that creates immortal interned strings.
1547 (The ob_sstate member can only take three values; however, while
1548 making it a char saves a few bytes per string object on average, in
1549 it also slowed things down a bit because ob_sval was no longer
1550 aligned.)
1551
Guido van Rossumfdb86482002-08-14 21:20:32 +00001552- The Py_InitModule*() functions now accept NULL for the 'methods'
1553 argument. Modules without global functions are becoming more common
1554 now that factories can be types rather than functions.
1555
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00001556- New C API PyUnicode_FromOrdinal() which exposes unichr() at C
1557 level.
1558
Thomas Heller085358a2002-07-29 14:27:41 +00001559- New functions PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErr() and
1560 PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErrWithFilename(). Similar to
1561 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErrWithFilename() and
1562 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErr(), but they allow to specify
1563 the exception type to raise. Available on Windows.
1564
Tim Peters7c321a82002-07-09 02:57:01 +00001565- Py_FatalError() is now declared as taking a const char* argument. It
1566 was previously declared without const. This should not affect working
1567 code.
1568
Martin v. Löwis01f94bd2002-05-08 08:44:21 +00001569- Added new macro PySequence_ITEM(o, i) that directly calls
1570 sq_item without rechecking that o is a sequence and without
1571 adjusting for negative indices.
1572
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00001573- PyRange_New() now raises ValueError if the fourth argument is not 1.
1574 This is part of the removal of deprecated features of the xrange
1575 object.
1576
Guido van Rossum517c7d42002-04-26 02:49:14 +00001577- PyNumber_Coerce() and PyNumber_CoerceEx() now also invoke the type's
1578 coercion if both arguments have the same type but this type has the
1579 CHECKTYPES flag set. This is to better support proxies.
1580
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00001581- The type of tp_free has been changed from "``void (*)(PyObject *)``" to
1582 "``void (*)(void *)``".
Neil Schemenauer9344b142002-04-12 23:00:08 +00001583
1584- PyObject_Del, PyObject_GC_Del are now functions instead of macros.
1585
Guido van Rossum0986d822002-04-08 01:38:42 +00001586- A type can now inherit its metatype from its base type. Previously,
1587 when PyType_Ready() was called, if ob_type was found to be NULL, it
1588 was always set to &PyType_Type; now it is set to base->ob_type,
1589 where base is tp_base, defaulting to &PyObject_Type.
1590
1591- PyType_Ready() accidentally did not inherit tp_is_gc; now it does.
1592
Neil Schemenauerc9abc1d2002-05-08 14:14:41 +00001593- The PyCore_* family of APIs have been removed.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00001594
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00001595- The "u#" parser marker will now pass through Unicode objects as-is
Marc-André Lemburg3e3eacb2002-01-09 16:21:27 +00001596 without going through the buffer API.
1597
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001598- The enumerators of cmp_op have been renamed to use the prefix ``PyCmp_``.
Martin v. Löwis7198a522002-01-01 19:59:11 +00001599
Tim Peters10a3bb52001-12-25 19:07:38 +00001600- An old #define of ANY as void has been removed from pyport.h. This
1601 hasn't been used since Python's pre-ANSI days, and the #define has
1602 been marked as obsolete since then. SF bug 495548 says it created
1603 conflicts with other packages, so keeping it around wasn't harmless.
1604
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001605- Because Python's magic number scheme broke on January 1st, we decided
1606 to stop Python development. Thanks for all the fish!
1607
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00001608- Some of us don't like fish, so we changed Python's magic number
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00001609 scheme to a new one. See Python/import.c for details.
1610
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001611New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001612-------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001613
Martin v. Löwis79acb9e2002-12-06 12:48:53 +00001614- OpenVMS is now supported.
1615
Martin v. Löwisf90ae202002-06-11 06:22:31 +00001616- AtheOS is now supported.
1617
Andrew MacIntyre161ad0e2002-08-04 07:25:58 +00001618- the EMX runtime environment on OS/2 is now supported.
1619
Martin v. Löwisa6e97582002-01-01 18:41:33 +00001620- GNU/Hurd is now supported.
1621
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001622Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001623-----
1624
Fred Drake4dd0f7e2002-11-26 21:44:56 +00001625- The regrtest.py script's -u option now provides a way to say "allow
1626 all resources except this one." For example, to allow everything
1627 except bsddb, give the option '-uall,-bsddb'.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001628
1629Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001630-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001631
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00001632- The Windows distribution now ships with version 4.0.14 of the
1633 Sleepycat Berkeley database library. This should be a huge
1634 improvement over the previous Berkeley DB 1.85, which had many
1635 bugs.
1636 XXX What are the licensing issues here?
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001637 XXX If a user has a database created with a previous version of
Tim Peters84c7a3f2002-11-23 18:48:06 +00001638 XXX Python, what must they do to convert it?
1639 XXX I'm still not sure how to link this thing (see PCbuild/readme.txt).
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00001640 XXX The version # is likely to change before 2.3a1.
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00001641
1642- The Windows distribution now ships with a Secure Sockets Library (SLL)
Mark Hammondc3de0082002-12-03 06:16:08 +00001643 module (_ssl.pyd)
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00001644
Tim Peters857fb4c2002-11-14 23:31:58 +00001645- The Windows distribution now ships with Tcl/Tk version 8.4.1 (it
1646 previously shipped with Tcl/Tk 8.3.2).
1647
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00001648- When Python is built under a Microsoft compiler, sys.version now
1649 includes the compiler version number (_MSC_VER). For example, under
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001650 MSVC 6, sys.version contains the substring "MSC v.1200 ". 1200 is
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00001651 the value of _MSC_VER under MSVC 6.
1652
Tim Peters08e72952002-04-16 20:48:01 +00001653- Sometimes the uninstall executable (UNWISE.EXE) vanishes. One cause
1654 of that has been fixed in the installer (disabled Wise's "delete in-
1655 use files" uninstall option).
1656
Guido van Rossum181e41a2002-04-06 00:23:25 +00001657- Fixed a bug in urllib's proxy handling in Windows. [SF bug #503031]
1658
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00001659- The installer now installs Start menu shortcuts under (the local
1660 equivalent of) "All Users" when doing an Admin install.
1661
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00001662- file.truncate([newsize]) now works on Windows for all newsize values.
1663 It used to fail if newsize didn't fit in 32 bits, reflecting a
1664 limitation of MS _chsize (which is no longer used).
1665
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00001666- os.waitpid() is now implemented for Windows, and can be used to block
1667 until a specified process exits. This is similar to, but not exactly
1668 the same as, os.waitpid() on POSIX systems. If you're waiting for
1669 a specific process whose pid was obtained from one of the spawn()
1670 functions, the same Python os.waitpid() code works across platforms.
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00001671 See the docs for details. The docs were changed to clarify that
1672 spawn functions return, and waitpid requires, a process handle on
1673 Windows (not the same thing as a Windows process id).
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00001674
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00001675- New tempfile.TemporaryFile implementation for Windows: this doesn't
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00001676 need a TemporaryFileWrapper wrapper anymore, and should be immune
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00001677 to a nasty problem: before 2.3, if you got a temp file on Windows, it
1678 got wrapped in an object whose close() method first closed the
1679 underlying file, then deleted the file. This usually worked fine.
1680 However, the spawn family of functions on Windows create (at a low C
1681 level) the same set of open files in the spawned process Q as were
1682 open in the spawning process P. If a temp file f was among them, then
1683 doing f.close() in P first closed P's C-level file handle on f, but Q's
1684 C-level file handle on f remained open, so the attempt in P to delete f
1685 blew up with a "Permission denied" error (Windows doesn't allow
1686 deleting open files). This was surprising, subtle, and difficult to
1687 work around.
1688
1689- The os module now exports all the symbolic constants usable with the
1690 low-level os.open() on Windows: the new constants in 2.3 are
1691 O_NOINHERIT, O_SHORT_LIVED, O_TEMPORARY, O_RANDOM and O_SEQUENTIAL.
1692 The others were also available in 2.2: O_APPEND, O_BINARY, O_CREAT,
1693 O_EXCL, O_RDONLY, O_RDWR, O_TEXT, O_TRUNC and O_WRONLY. Contrary
1694 to Microsoft docs, O_SHORT_LIVED does not seem to imply O_TEMPORARY
1695 (so specify both if you want both; note that neither is useful unless
1696 specified with O_CREAT too).
1697
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001698Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001699----
1700
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001701- Mac/Relnotes is gone, the release notes are now here.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001702
Just van Rossume1ebd802003-02-10 10:06:18 +00001703- Python (the OSX-only, unix-based version, not the OS9-compatible CFM
1704 version) now fully supports unicode strings as arguments to various file
1705 system calls, eg. open(), file(), os.stat() and os.listdir().
1706
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001707- The current naming convention for Python on the Macintosh is that MacPython
1708 refers to the unix-based OSX-only version, and MacPython-OS9 refers to the
1709 CFM-based version that runs on both OS9 and OSX.
1710
1711- All MacPython-OS9 functionality is now available in an OSX unix build,
1712 including the Carbon modules, the IDE, OSA support, etc. A lot of this
1713 will only work correctly in a framework build, though, because you cannot
1714 talk to the window manager unless your application is run from a .app
1715 bundle. There is a command line tool "pythonw" that runs your script
1716 with an interpreter living in such a .app bundle, this interpreter should
1717 be used to run any Python script using the window manager (including
1718 Tkinter or wxPython scripts).
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00001719
Jack Jansen8bb80db2002-12-30 22:42:43 +00001720- Most of Mac/Lib has moved to Lib/plat-mac, which is again used both in
1721 MacPython-OSX and MacPython-OS9. The only modules remaining in Mac/Lib
1722 are specifically for MacPython-OS9 (CFM support, preference resources, etc).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001723
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001724- A new utility PythonLauncher will start a Python interpreter when a .py or
1725 .pyw script is double-clicked in the Finder. By default .py scripts are
1726 run with a normal Python interpreter in a Terminal window and .pyw
1727 files are run with a window-aware pythonw interpreter without a Terminal
1728 window, but all this can be customized.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001729
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001730- MacPython-OS9 is now Carbon-only, so it runs on Mac OS 9 or Mac OS X and
1731 possibly on Mac OS 8.6 with the right CarbonLib installed, but not on earlier
1732 releases.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001733
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001734- Many tools such as BuildApplet.py and gensuitemodule.py now support a command
1735 line interface too.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001736
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001737- All the Carbon classes are now PEP253 compliant, meaning that you can
1738 subclass them from Python. Most of the attributes have gone, you should
1739 now use the accessor function call API, which is also what Apple's
1740 documentation uses. Some attributes such as grafport.visRgn are still
1741 available for convenience.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001742
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001743- New Carbon modules File (implementing the APIs in Files.h and Aliases.h)
1744 and Folder (APIs from Folders.h). The old macfs builtin module is
1745 gone, and replaced by a Python wrapper around the new modules.
1746
1747- Pathname handling should now be fully consistent: MacPython-OSX always uses
1748 unix pathnames and MacPython-OS9 always uses colon-separated Mac pathnames
1749 (also when running on Mac OS X).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001750
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001751- New Carbon modules Help and AH give access to the Carbon Help Manager.
1752 There are hooks in the IDE to allow accessing the Python documentation
1753 (and Apple's Carbon and Cocoa documentation) through the Help Viewer.
1754 See Mac/OSX/README for converting the Python documentation to a
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001755 Help Viewer compatible form and installing it.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001756
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001757- OSA support has been redesigned and the generated Python classes now
1758 mirror the inheritance defined by the underlying OSA classes.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001759
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001760- MacPython no longer maps both \r and \n to \n on input for any text file.
1761 This feature has been replaced by universal newline support (PEP278).
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00001762
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00001763- The default encoding for Python sourcefiles in MacPython-OS9 is no longer
Guido van Rossum16c85172003-02-20 01:52:48 +00001764 mac-roman (or whatever your local Mac encoding was) but "ascii", like on
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00001765 other platforms. If you really need sourcefiles with Mac characters in them
1766 you can change this in site.py.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001767
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001768
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001769What's New in Python 2.2 final?
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001770===============================
1771
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001772*Release date: 21-Dec-2001*
1773
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001774Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001775--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001776
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00001777- pickle.py, cPickle: allow pickling instances of new-style classes
1778 with a custom metaclass.
1779
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001780Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001781-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001782
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00001783- weakref proxy object: when comparing, unwrap both arguments if both
1784 are proxies.
1785
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001786Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001787-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001788
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00001789- binascii.b2a_base64(): fix a potential buffer overrun when encoding
1790 very short strings.
1791
1792- cPickle: the obscure "fast" mode was suspected of causing stack
1793 overflows on the Mac. Hopefully fixed this by setting the recursion
1794 limit much smaller. If the limit is too low (it only affects
1795 performance), you can change it by defining PY_CPICKLE_FAST_LIMIT
1796 when compiling cPickle.c (or in pyconfig.h).
1797
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001798Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001799-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001800
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00001801- dumbdbm.py: fixed a dumb old bug (the file didn't get synched at
1802 close or delete time).
1803
1804- rfc822.py: fixed a bug where the address '<>' was converted to None
1805 instead of an empty string (also fixes the email.Utils module).
1806
1807- xmlrpclib.py: version 1.0.0; uses precision for doubles.
1808
1809- test suite: the pickle and cPickle tests were not executing any code
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00001810 when run from the standard regression test.
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00001811
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001812Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001813-----------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001814
1815Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001816-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001817
1818C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001819-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001820
1821New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001822-------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001823
1824Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001825-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001826
1827Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001828-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001829
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00001830- distutils package: fixed broken Windows installers (bdist_wininst).
1831
1832- tempfile.py: prevent mysterious warnings when TemporaryFileWrapper
1833 instances are deleted at process exit time.
1834
1835- socket.py: prevent mysterious warnings when socket instances are
1836 deleted at process exit time.
1837
1838- posixmodule.c: fix a Windows crash with stat() of a filename ending
1839 in backslash.
1840
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001841Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001842----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001843
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00001844- The Carbon toolbox modules have been upgraded to Universal Headers
1845 3.4, and experimental CoreGraphics and CarbonEvents modules have
1846 been added. All only for framework-enabled MacOSX.
1847
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001848
Tim Peters6272dfd2001-12-13 19:34:00 +00001849What's New in Python 2.2c1?
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001850===========================
1851
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001852*Release date: 14-Dec-2001*
1853
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001854Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001855--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001856
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00001857- Guido's tutorial introduction to the new type/class features has
1858 been extensively updated. See
1859
1860 http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html
1861
1862 That remains the primary documentation in this area.
1863
Guido van Rossum33bab012001-12-05 22:45:48 +00001864- Fixed a leak: instance variables declared with __slots__ were never
1865 deleted!
1866
Guido van Rossum4b800852001-12-03 00:54:52 +00001867- The "delete attribute" method of descriptor objects is called
1868 __delete__, not __del__. In previous releases, it was mistakenly
1869 called __del__, which created an unfortunate overloading condition
1870 with finalizers. (The "get attribute" and "set attribute" methods
1871 are still called __get__ and __set__, respectively.)
1872
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00001873- Some subtle issues with the super built-in were fixed:
1874
1875 (a) When super itself is subclassed, its __get__ method would still
1876 return an instance of the base class (i.e., of super).
1877
1878 (b) super(C, C()).__class__ would return C rather than super. This
1879 is confusing. To fix this, I decided to change the semantics of
1880 super so that it only applies to code attributes, not to data
1881 attributes. After all, overriding data attributes is not
1882 supported anyway.
1883
1884 (c) The __get__ method didn't check whether the argument was an
1885 instance of the type used in creation of the super instance.
1886
Guido van Rossumcd7b7d62001-12-04 21:02:07 +00001887- Previously, hash() of an instance of a subclass of a mutable type
1888 (list or dictionary) would return some value, rather than raising
1889 TypeError. This has been fixed. Also, directly calling
1890 dict.__hash__ and list.__hash__ now raises the same TypeError
1891 (previously, these were the same as object.__hash__).
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00001892
Guido van Rossumd331cb52001-12-05 19:46:42 +00001893- New-style objects now support deleting their __dict__. This is for
1894 all intents and purposes equivalent to assigning a brand new empty
1895 dictionary, but saves space if the object is not used further.
1896
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001897Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001898-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001899
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00001900- -Qnew now works as documented in PEP 238: when -Qnew is passed on
1901 the command line, all occurrences of "/" use true division instead
1902 of classic division. See the PEP for details. Note that "all"
1903 means all instances in library and 3rd-party modules, as well as in
1904 your own code. As the PEP says, -Qnew is intended for use only in
1905 educational environments with control over the libraries in use.
Tim Petersbf72fe22001-12-11 21:43:14 +00001906 Note that test_coercion.py in the standard Python test suite fails
1907 under -Qnew; this is expected, and won't be repaired until true
1908 division becomes the default (in the meantime, test_coercion is
1909 testing the current rules).
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00001910
Fred Drake6c01e252001-12-14 17:08:12 +00001911- complex() now only allows the first argument to be a string
1912 argument, and raises TypeError if either the second arg is a string
1913 or if the second arg is specified when the first is a string.
1914
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001915Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001916-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001917
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00001918- gc.get_referents was renamed to gc.get_referrers.
1919
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001920Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001921-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001922
Tim Peters25059d32001-12-07 20:35:43 +00001923- Functions in the os.spawn() family now release the global interpreter
1924 lock around calling the platform spawn. They should always have done
1925 this, but did not before 2.2c1. Multithreaded programs calling
1926 an os.spawn function with P_WAIT will no longer block all Python threads
1927 until the spawned program completes. It's possible that some programs
1928 relies on blocking, although more likely by accident than by design.
1929
Martin v. Löwis3a89b2b2001-11-25 14:35:58 +00001930- webbrowser defaults to netscape.exe on OS/2 now.
1931
Martin v. Löwis652e1912001-11-25 14:50:56 +00001932- Tix.ResizeHandle exposes detach_widget, hide, and show.
1933
Martin v. Löwis714d2e22001-12-02 12:26:03 +00001934- The charset alias windows_1252 has been added.
1935
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00001936- types.StringTypes is a tuple containing the defined string types;
1937 usually this will be (str, unicode), but if Python was compiled
1938 without Unicode support it will be just (str,).
1939
1940- The pulldom and minidom modules were synchronized to PyXML.
1941
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001942Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001943-----------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001944
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00001945- A new script called Tools/scripts/google.py was added, which fires
1946 off a search on Google.
1947
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001948Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001949-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001950
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00001951- Note that release builds of Python should arrange to define the
1952 preprocessor symbol NDEBUG on the command line (or equivalent).
1953 In the 2.2 pre-release series we tried to define this by magic in
1954 Python.h instead, but it proved to cause problems for extension
1955 authors. The Unix, Windows and Mac builds now all define NDEBUG in
1956 release builds via cmdline (or equivalent) instead. Ports to
1957 other platforms should do likewise.
1958
Jack Jansen1999ef42001-12-06 21:47:20 +00001959- It is no longer necessary to use --with-suffix when building on a
1960 case-insensitive file system (such as Mac OS X HFS+). In the build
1961 directory an extension is used, but not in the installed python.
1962
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001963C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001964-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001965
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00001966- New function PyDict_MergeFromSeq2() exposes the builtin dict
1967 constructor's logic for updating a dictionary from an iterable object
1968 producing key-value pairs.
1969
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00001970- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() requires that the number of entries in
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00001971 the keyword list equal the number of argument specifiers. This
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00001972 wasn't checked correctly, and PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords could even
1973 dump core in some bad cases. This has been repaired. As a result,
1974 PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords may raise RuntimeError in bad cases that
1975 previously went unchallenged.
1976
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001977New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001978-------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001979
1980Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001981-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001982
1983Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001984-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001985
1986Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001987----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001988
Jack Jansenffa260f2001-12-06 21:14:00 +00001989- In unix-Python on Mac OS X (and darwin) sys.platform is now "darwin",
1990 without any trailing digits.
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001991
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00001992- Changed logic for finding python home in Mac OS X framework Pythons.
1993 Now sys.executable points to the executable again, in stead of to
1994 the shared library. The latter is used only for locating the python
1995 home.
1996
1997
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001998What's New in Python 2.2b2?
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001999===========================
2000
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002001*Release date: 16-Nov-2001*
2002
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002003Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002004--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002005
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00002006- Multiple inheritance mixing new-style and classic classes in the
2007 list of base classes is now allowed, so this works now:
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00002008
2009 class Classic: pass
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00002010 class Mixed(Classic, object): pass
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00002011
2012 The MRO (method resolution order) for each base class is respected
2013 according to its kind, but the MRO for the derived class is computed
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002014 using new-style MRO rules if any base class is a new-style class.
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00002015 This needs to be documented.
2016
Tim Petersa427a2b2001-10-29 22:25:45 +00002017- The new builtin dictionary() constructor, and dictionary type, have
2018 been renamed to dict. This reflects a decade of common usage.
2019
Guido van Rossum3fc08d22001-11-15 20:33:10 +00002020- dict() now accepts an iterable object producing 2-sequences. For
2021 example, dict(d.items()) == d for any dictionary d. The argument,
2022 and the elements of the argument, can be any iterable objects.
2023
Guido van Rossum7ad2d1e2001-10-29 22:11:00 +00002024- New-style classes can now have a __del__ method, which is called
2025 when the instance is deleted (just like for classic classes).
2026
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00002027- Assignment to object.__dict__ is now possible, for objects that are
2028 instances of new-style classes that have a __dict__ (unless the base
2029 class forbids it).
2030
Guido van Rossumc8e56452001-10-22 00:43:43 +00002031- Methods of built-in types now properly check for keyword arguments
2032 (formerly these were silently ignored). The only built-in methods
2033 that take keyword arguments are __call__, __init__ and __new__.
2034
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00002035- The socket function has been converted to a type; see below.
2036
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002037Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002038-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002039
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00002040- Assignment to __debug__ raises SyntaxError at compile-time. This
2041 was promised when 2.1c1 was released as "What's New in Python 2.1c1"
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00002042 (see below) says.
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00002043
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00002044- Clarified the error messages for unsupported operands to an operator
2045 (like 1 + '').
2046
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002047Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002048-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002049
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00002050- mmap has a new keyword argument, "access", allowing a uniform way for
2051 both Windows and Unix users to create read-only, write-through and
2052 copy-on-write memory mappings. This was previously possible only on
2053 Unix. A new keyword argument was required to support this in a
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002054 uniform way because the mmap() signatures had diverged across
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00002055 platforms. Thanks to Jay T Miller for repairing this!
2056
Tim Peters169ded02001-11-03 19:57:21 +00002057- By default, the gc.garbage list now contains only those instances in
2058 unreachable cycles that have __del__ methods; in 2.1 it contained all
2059 instances in unreachable cycles. "Instances" here has been generalized
2060 to include instances of both new-style and old-style classes.
2061
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00002062- The socket module defines a new method for socket objects,
2063 sendall(). This is like send() but may make multiple calls to
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00002064 send() until all data has been sent. Also, the socket function has
2065 been converted to a subclassable type, like list and tuple (etc.)
2066 before it; socket and SocketType are now the same thing.
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00002067
2068- Various bugfixes to the curses module. There is now a test suite
2069 for the curses module (you have to run it manually).
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00002070
Guido van Rossum692adf12001-10-30 03:03:03 +00002071- binascii.b2a_base64 no longer places an arbitrary restriction of 57
2072 bytes on its input.
2073
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002074Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002075-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002076
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00002077- tkFileDialog exposes a Directory class and askdirectory
Martin v. Löwis25ee87c2001-11-07 22:38:08 +00002078 convenience function.
2079
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00002080- Symbolic group names in regular expressions must be unique. For
2081 example, the regexp r'(?P<abc>)(?P<abc>)' is not allowed, because a
2082 single name can't mean both "group 1" and "group 2" simultaneously.
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00002083 Python 2.2 detects this error at regexp compilation time;
2084 previously, the error went undetected, and results were
2085 unpredictable. Also in sre, the pattern.split(), pattern.sub(), and
2086 pattern.subn() methods have been rewritten in C. Also, an
2087 experimental function/method finditer() has been added, which works
2088 like findall() but returns an iterator.
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00002089
Martin v. Löwisb7b32602001-11-02 23:48:20 +00002090- Tix exposes more commands through the classes DirSelectBox,
2091 DirSelectDialog, ListNoteBook, Meter, CheckList, and the
2092 methods tix_addbitmapdir, tix_cget, tix_configure, tix_filedialog,
2093 tix_getbitmap, tix_getimage, tix_option_get, and tix_resetoptions.
2094
Tim Peters98791af2001-10-23 01:59:54 +00002095- Traceback objects are now scanned by cyclic garbage collection, so
2096 cycles created by casual use of sys.exc_info() no longer cause
2097 permanent memory leaks (provided garbage collection is enabled).
2098
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00002099- os.extsep -- a new variable needed by the RISCOS support. It is the
2100 separator used by extensions, and is '.' on all platforms except
2101 RISCOS, where it is '/'. There is no need to use this variable
2102 unless you have a masochistic desire to port your code to RISCOS.
2103
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00002104- mimetypes.py has optional support for non-standard, but commonly
2105 found types. guess_type() and guess_extension() now accept an
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002106 optional 'strict' flag, defaulting to true, which controls whether
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00002107 recognize non-standard types or not. A few non-standard types we
2108 know about have been added. Also, when run as a script, there are
2109 new -l and -e options.
2110
2111- statcache is now deprecated.
2112
2113- email.Utils.formatdate() now produces the preferred RFC 2822 style
2114 dates with numeric timezones (it used to produce obsolete dates
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002115 hard coded to "GMT" timezone). An optional 'localtime' flag is
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00002116 added to produce dates in the local timezone, with daylight savings
2117 time properly taken into account.
2118
2119- In pickle and cPickle, instead of masking errors in load() by
2120 transforming them into SystemError, we let the original exception
2121 propagate out. Also, implement support for __safe_for_unpickling__
2122 in pickle, as it already was supported in cPickle.
2123
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002124Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002125-----------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002126
2127Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002128-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002129
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00002130- The dbm module is built using libdb1 if available. The bsddb module
2131 is built with libdb3 if available.
2132
2133- Misc/Makefile.pre.in has been removed by BDFL pronouncement.
2134
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002135C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002136-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002137
Tim Peters1fc240e2001-10-26 05:06:50 +00002138- New function PySequence_Fast_GET_SIZE() returns the size of a non-
2139 NULL result from PySequence_Fast(), more quickly than calling
2140 PySequence_Size().
2141
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00002142- New argument unpacking function PyArg_UnpackTuple() added.
2143
2144- New functions PyObject_CallFunctionObjArgs() and
2145 PyObject_CallMethodObjArgs() have been added to make it more
2146 convenient and efficient to call functions and methods from C.
2147
2148- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() no longer masks errors, so it's
2149 possible that this will propagate errors it didn't before.
2150
2151- New function PyObject_CheckReadBuffer(), which returns true if its
2152 argument supports the single-segment readable buffer interface.
2153
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002154New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002155-------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002156
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00002157- We've finally confirmed that this release builds on HP-UX 11.00,
2158 *with* threads, and passes the test suite.
2159
Tim Peters7a33d8b2001-11-05 02:51:07 +00002160- Thanks to a series of patches from Michael Muller, Python may build
2161 again under OS/2 Visual Age C++.
2162
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00002163- Updated RISCOS port by Dietmar Schwertberger.
2164
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002165Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002166-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002167
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00002168- Added a test script for the curses module. It isn't run automatically;
2169 regrtest.py must be run with '-u curses' to enable it.
2170
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002171Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002172-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002173
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00002174Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002175----
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00002176
2177- PythonScript has been moved to unsupported and is slated to be
2178 removed completely in the next release.
2179
2180- It should now be possible to build applets that work on both OS9 and
2181 OSX.
2182
2183- The core is now linked with CoreServices not Carbon; as a side
2184 result, default 8bit encoding on OSX is now ASCII.
2185
2186- Python should now build on OSX 10.1.1
2187
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002188
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002189What's New in Python 2.2b1?
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002190===========================
2191
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002192*Release date: 19-Oct-2001*
2193
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002194Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002195--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002196
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00002197- New-style classes are now always dynamic (except for built-in and
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00002198 extension types). There is no longer a performance penalty, and I
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00002199 no longer see another reason to keep this baggage around. One relic
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00002200 remains: the __dict__ of a new-style class is a read-only proxy; you
2201 must set the class's attribute to modify it. As a consequence, the
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00002202 __defined__ attribute of new-style types no longer exists, for lack
2203 of need: there is once again only one __dict__ (although in the
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00002204 future a __cache__ may be resurrected with a similar function, if I
2205 can prove that it actually speeds things up).
Guido van Rossum50fda3b2001-10-04 19:46:06 +00002206
Tim Peters1c9ca872001-10-04 06:43:12 +00002207- C.__doc__ now works as expected for new-style classes (in 2.2a4 it
2208 always returned None, even when there was a class docstring).
2209
2210- doctest now finds and runs docstrings attached to new-style classes,
2211 class methods, static methods, and properties.
2212
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00002213Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002214-----------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002215
Guido van Rossuma8bcf802001-10-15 15:53:58 +00002216- A very subtle syntactical pitfall in list comprehensions was fixed.
2217 For example: [a+b for a in 'abc', for b in 'def']. The comma in
2218 this example is a mistake. Previously, this would silently let 'a'
2219 iterate over the singleton tuple ('abc',), yielding ['abcd', 'abce',
2220 'abcf'] rather than the intended ['ad', 'ae', 'af', 'bd', 'be',
2221 'bf', 'cd', 'ce', 'cf']. Now, this is flagged as a syntax error.
2222 Note that [a for a in <singleton>] is a convoluted way to say
2223 [<singleton>] anyway, so it's not like any expressiveness is lost.
2224
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00002225- getattr(obj, name, default) now only catches AttributeError, as
2226 documented, rather than returning the default value for all
2227 exceptions (which could mask bugs in a __getattr__ hook, for
2228 example).
2229
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00002230- Weak reference objects are now part of the core and offer a C API.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00002231 A bug which could allow a core dump when binary operations involved
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00002232 proxy reference has been fixed. weakref.ReferenceError is now a
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00002233 built-in exception.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00002234
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00002235- unicode(obj) now behaves more like str(obj), accepting arbitrary
2236 objects, and calling a __unicode__ method if it exists.
2237 unicode(obj, encoding) and unicode(obj, encoding, errors) still
Marc-André Lemburgb5507ec2001-10-19 12:02:29 +00002238 require an 8-bit string or character buffer argument.
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00002239
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00002240- isinstance() now allows any object as the first argument and a
2241 class, a type or something with a __bases__ tuple attribute for the
2242 second argument. The second argument may also be a tuple of a
2243 class, type, or something with __bases__, in which case isinstance()
2244 will return true if the first argument is an instance of any of the
2245 things contained in the second argument tuple. E.g.
2246
2247 isinstance(x, (A, B))
2248
2249 returns true if x is an instance of A or B.
2250
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00002251Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002252-----------------
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00002253
2254- thread.start_new_thread() now returns the thread ID (previously None).
2255
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00002256- binascii has now two quopri support functions, a2b_qp and b2a_qp.
2257
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00002258- readline now supports setting the startup_hook and the
2259 pre_event_hook, and adds the add_history() function.
Martin v. Löwis0daad592001-09-30 21:09:59 +00002260
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00002261- os and posix supports chroot(), setgroups() and unsetenv() where
2262 available. The stat(), fstat(), statvfs() and fstatvfs() functions
2263 now return "pseudo-sequences" -- the various fields can now be
2264 accessed as attributes (e.g. os.stat("/").st_mtime) but for
2265 backwards compatibility they also behave as a fixed-length sequence.
2266 Some platform-specific fields (e.g. st_rdev) are only accessible as
Guido van Rossum98bf58f2001-10-18 20:34:25 +00002267 attributes.
2268
2269- time: localtime(), gmtime() and strptime() now return a
2270 pseudo-sequence similar to the os.stat() return value, with
2271 attributes like tm_year etc.
Martin v. Löwis16628c92001-10-04 22:46:41 +00002272
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00002273- Decompression objects in the zlib module now accept an optional
2274 second parameter to decompress() that specifies the maximum amount
2275 of memory to use for the uncompressed data.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002276
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00002277- optional SSL support in the socket module now exports OpenSSL
2278 functions RAND_add(), RAND_egd(), and RAND_status(). These calls
2279 are useful on platforms like Solaris where OpenSSL does not
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00002280 automatically seed its PRNG. Also, the keyfile and certfile
2281 arguments to socket.ssl() are now optional.
2282
2283- posixmodule (and by extension, the os module on POSIX platforms) now
2284 exports O_LARGEFILE, O_DIRECT, O_DIRECTORY, and O_NOFOLLOW.
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00002285
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00002286Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002287-------
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00002288
Tim Peters7402f792001-10-02 03:53:41 +00002289- doctest now excludes functions and classes not defined by the module
2290 being tested, thanks to Tim Hochberg.
2291
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00002292- HotShot, a new profiler implemented using a C-based callback, has
2293 been added. This substantially reduces the overhead of profiling,
2294 but it is still quite preliminary. Support modules and
2295 documentation will be added in upcoming releases (before 2.2 final).
2296
Guido van Rossumc4b09b42001-10-04 10:19:00 +00002297- profile now produces correct output in situations where an exception
2298 raised in Python is cleared by C code (e.g. hasattr()). This used
2299 to cause wrong output, including spurious claims of recursive
2300 functions and attribution of time spent to the wrong function.
2301
Tim Peters0a1fc4e2001-10-07 03:12:08 +00002302 The code and documentation for the derived OldProfile and HotProfile
2303 profiling classes was removed. The code hasn't worked for years (if
2304 you tried to use them, they raised exceptions). OldProfile
2305 intended to reproduce the behavior of the profiler Python used more
2306 than 7 years ago, and isn't interesting anymore. HotProfile intended
2307 to provide a faster profiler (but producing less information), and
2308 that's a worthy goal we intend to meet via a different approach (but
2309 without losing information).
2310
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00002311- Profile.calibrate() has a new implementation that should deliver
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00002312 a much better system-specific calibration constant. The constant can
2313 now be specified in an instance constructor, or as a Profile class or
2314 instance variable, instead of by editing profile.py's source code.
2315 Calibration must still be done manually (see the docs for the profile
2316 module).
2317
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002318 Note that Profile.calibrate() must be overridden by subclasses.
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00002319 Improving the accuracy required exploiting detailed knowledge of
2320 profiler internals; the earlier method abstracted away the details
2321 and measured a simplified model instead, but consequently computed
2322 a constant too small by a factor of 2 on some modern machines.
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00002323
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00002324- quopri's encode and decode methods take an optional header parameter,
Jeremy Hylton6f543b62001-10-16 20:42:52 +00002325 which indicates whether output is intended for the header 'Q'
2326 encoding.
2327
Guido van Rossuma5343cc2001-10-18 18:02:07 +00002328- The SocketServer.ThreadingMixIn class now closes the request after
2329 finish_request() returns. (Not when it errors out though.)
2330
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002331- The nntplib module's NNTP.body() method has grown a 'file' argument
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00002332 to allow saving the message body to a file.
2333
2334- The email package has added a class email.Parser.HeaderParser which
2335 only parses headers and does not recurse into the message's body.
2336 Also, the module/class MIMEAudio has been added for representing
2337 audio data (contributed by Anthony Baxter).
2338
2339- ftplib should be able to handle files > 2GB.
2340
2341- ConfigParser.getboolean() now also interprets TRUE, FALSE, YES, NO,
2342 ON, and OFF.
2343
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00002344- xml.dom.minidom NodeList objects now support the length attribute
2345 and item() method as required by the DOM specifications.
2346
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00002347Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002348-----------
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00002349
2350- Demo/dns was removed. It no longer serves any purpose; a package
2351 derived from it is now maintained by Anthony Baxter, see
2352 http://PyDNS.SourceForge.net.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002353
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00002354- The freeze tool has been made more robust, and two new options have
2355 been added: -X and -E.
2356
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002357Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002358-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002359
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00002360- configure will use CXX in LINKCC if CXX is used to build main() and
2361 the system requires to link a C++ main using the C++ compiler.
2362
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002363C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002364-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002365
Guido van Rossum6c4bce32001-10-18 19:20:25 +00002366- The documentation for the tp_compare slot is updated to require that
2367 the return value must be -1, 0, 1; an arbitrary number <0 or >0 is
2368 not correct. This is not yet enforced but will be enforced in
2369 Python 2.3; even later, we may use -2 to indicate errors and +2 for
2370 "NotImplemented". Right now, -1 should be used for an error return.
2371
Tim Petersd38b1c72001-09-30 05:09:37 +00002372- PyLong_AsLongLong() now accepts int (as well as long) arguments.
2373 Consequently, PyArg_ParseTuple's 'L' code also accepts int (as well
2374 as long) arguments.
2375
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00002376- PyThread_start_new_thread() now returns a long int giving the thread
2377 ID, if one can be calculated; it returns -1 for error, 0 if no
2378 thread ID is calculated (this is an incompatible change, but only
2379 the thread module used this API). This code has only really been
2380 tested on Linux and Windows; other platforms please beware (and
2381 report any bugs or strange behavior).
2382
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00002383- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() no longer accepts Unicode objects as
2384 input.
2385
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002386New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002387-------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002388
2389Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002390-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002391
2392Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002393-------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002394
Tim Peters04cf1d32001-10-09 22:39:40 +00002395- Installer: If you install IDLE, and don't disable file-extension
2396 registration, a new "Edit with IDLE" context (right-click) menu entry
2397 is created for .py and .pyw files.
2398
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00002399- The signal module now supports SIGBREAK on Windows, thanks to Steven
2400 Scott. Note that SIGBREAK is unique to Windows. The default SIGBREAK
2401 action remains to call Win32 ExitProcess(). This can be changed via
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00002402 signal.signal(). For example::
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00002403
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002404 # Make Ctrl+Break raise KeyboardInterrupt, like Python's default Ctrl+C
2405 # (SIGINT) behavior.
2406 import signal
2407 signal.signal(signal.SIGBREAK, signal.default_int_handler)
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00002408
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002409 try:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002410 while 1:
2411 pass
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002412 except KeyboardInterrupt:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002413 # We get here on Ctrl+C or Ctrl+Break now; if we had not changed
2414 # SIGBREAK, only on Ctrl+C (and Ctrl+Break would terminate the
2415 # program without the possibility for any Python-level cleanup).
2416 print "Clean exit"
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00002417
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002418
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002419What's New in Python 2.2a4?
2420===========================
2421
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002422*Release date: 28-Sep-2001*
2423
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00002424Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002425--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00002426
2427- pydoc and inspect are now aware of new-style classes;
2428 e.g. help(list) at the interactive prompt now shows proper
2429 documentation for all operations on list objects.
2430
2431- Applications using Jim Fulton's ExtensionClass module can now safely
2432 be used with Python 2.2. In particular, Zope 2.4.1 now works with
2433 Python 2.2 (as well as with Python 2.1.1). The Demo/metaclass
2434 examples also work again. It is hoped that Gtk and Boost also work
2435 with 2.2a4 and beyond. (If you can confirm this, please write
2436 webmaster@python.org; if there are still problems, please open a bug
2437 report on SourceForge.)
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002438
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00002439- property() now takes 4 keyword arguments: fget, fset, fdel and doc.
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002440 These map to read-only attributes 'fget', 'fset', 'fdel', and '__doc__'
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00002441 in the constructed property object. fget, fset and fdel weren't
2442 discoverable from Python in 2.2a3. __doc__ is new, and allows to
2443 associate a docstring with a property.
2444
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00002445- Comparison overloading is now more completely implemented. For
2446 example, a str subclass instance can properly be compared to a str
2447 instance, and it can properly overload comparison. Ditto for most
2448 other built-in object types.
2449
2450- The repr() of new-style classes has changed; instead of <type
2451 'M.Foo'> a new-style class is now rendered as <class 'M.Foo'>,
2452 *except* for built-in types, which are still rendered as <type
2453 'Foo'> (to avoid upsetting existing code that might parse or
2454 otherwise rely on repr() of certain type objects).
2455
2456- The repr() of new-style objects is now always <Foo object at XXX>;
2457 previously, it was sometimes <Foo instance at XXX>.
2458
2459- For new-style classes, what was previously called __getattr__ is now
2460 called __getattribute__. This method, if defined, is called for
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00002461 *every* attribute access. A new __getattr__ hook more similar to the
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00002462 one in classic classes is defined which is called only if regular
2463 attribute access raises AttributeError; to catch *all* attribute
2464 access, you can use __getattribute__ (for new-style classes). If
2465 both are defined, __getattribute__ is called first, and if it raises
2466 AttributeError, __getattr__ is called.
2467
2468- The __class__ attribute of new-style objects can be assigned to.
2469 The new class must have the same C-level object layout as the old
2470 class.
2471
2472- The builtin file type can be subclassed now. In the usual pattern,
2473 "file" is the name of the builtin type, and file() is a new builtin
2474 constructor, with the same signature as the builtin open() function.
2475 file() is now the preferred way to open a file.
2476
2477- Previously, __new__ would only see sequential arguments passed to
2478 the type in a constructor call; __init__ would see both sequential
2479 and keyword arguments. This made no sense whatsoever any more, so
2480 now both __new__ and __init__ see all arguments.
2481
2482- Previously, hash() applied to an instance of a subclass of str or
2483 unicode always returned 0. This has been repaired.
2484
2485- Previously, an operation on an instance of a subclass of an
2486 immutable type (int, long, float, complex, tuple, str, unicode),
2487 where the subtype didn't override the operation (and so the
2488 operation was handled by the builtin type), could return that
2489 instance instead a value of the base type. For example, if s was of
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002490 a str subclass type, s[:] returned s as-is. Now it returns a str
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00002491 with the same value as s.
2492
Barry Warsaw86fbaf82001-09-28 15:26:12 +00002493- Provisional support for pickling new-style objects has been added.
2494
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00002495Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002496----
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00002497
Tim Peters2c9aa5e2001-09-23 04:06:05 +00002498- file.writelines() now accepts any iterable object producing strings.
2499
Marc-André Lemburgaefd7662001-09-20 12:59:37 +00002500- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() now works very much like
2501 PyObject_Str(obj) in that it tries to use __str__/tp_str
2502 on the object if the object is not a string or buffer. This
2503 makes unicode() behave like str() when applied to non-string/buffer
2504 objects.
2505
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00002506- PyFile_WriteObject now passes Unicode objects to the file's write
2507 method. As a result, all file-like objects which may be the target
Martin v. Löwis2777c022001-09-19 13:47:32 +00002508 of a print statement must support Unicode objects, i.e. they must
2509 at least convert them into ASCII strings.
2510
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002511- Thread scheduling on Solaris should be improved; it is no longer
2512 necessary to insert a small sleep at the start of a thread in order
2513 to let other runnable threads be scheduled.
2514
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002515Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002516-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002517
Marc-André Lemburgbf990172001-09-27 14:17:33 +00002518- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
2519 read character buffer compatible objects for their .write() methods.
2520 These objects are converted to strings and then handled as such
2521 by the instances.
2522
Barry Warsaw2f600732001-09-24 04:28:10 +00002523- The "email" package has been added. This is basically a port of the
2524 mimelib package <http://sf.net/projects/mimelib> with API changes
2525 and some implementations updated to use iterators and generators.
2526
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00002527- difflib.ndiff() and difflib.Differ.compare() are generators now. This
2528 restores the ability of Tools/scripts/ndiff.py to start producing output
2529 before the entire comparison is complete.
2530
Barry Warsaw58b072d2001-09-22 04:44:21 +00002531- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
2532 iteration just like file objects (i.e. their .readline() method is
2533 called for each iteration until it returns an empty string).
2534
Marc-André Lemburg494f2ae2001-09-19 11:33:31 +00002535- The codecs module has grown four new helper APIs to access
2536 builtin codecs: getencoder(), getdecoder(), getreader(),
2537 getwriter().
2538
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002539- SimpleXMLRPCServer: a new module (based upon SimpleHTMLServer)
2540 simplifies writing XML RPC servers.
2541
Barry Warsaw647d5e82001-09-28 17:01:02 +00002542- os.path.realpath(): a new function that returns the absolute pathname
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002543 after interpretation of symbolic links. On non-Unix systems, this
2544 is an alias for os.path.abspath().
2545
Tim Peters16a77ad2001-09-08 04:00:12 +00002546- operator.indexOf() (PySequence_Index() in the C API) now works with any
2547 iterable object.
2548
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002549- smtplib now supports various authentication and security features of
2550 the SMTP protocol through the new login() and starttls() methods.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00002551
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002552- hmac: a new module implementing keyed hashing for message
2553 authentication.
2554
2555- mimetypes now recognizes more extensions and file types. At the
2556 same time, some mappings not sanctioned by IANA were removed.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00002557
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002558- The "compiler" package has been brought up to date to the state of
Guido van Rossumc9ed5dc2001-09-20 05:30:24 +00002559 Python 2.2 bytecode generation. It has also been promoted from a
2560 Tool to a standard library package. (Tools/compiler still exists as
2561 a sample driver.)
2562
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002563Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002564-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002565
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002566- Large file support (LFS) is now automatic when the platform supports
2567 it; no more manual configuration tweaks are needed. On Linux, at
2568 least, it's possible to have a system whose C library supports large
2569 files but whose kernel doesn't; in this case, large file support is
2570 still enabled but doesn't do you any good unless you upgrade your
2571 kernel or share your Python executable with another system whose
2572 kernel has large file support.
2573
2574- The configure script now supplies plausible defaults in a
2575 cross-compilation environment. This doesn't mean that the supplied
2576 values are always correct, or that cross-compilation now works
2577 flawlessly -- but it's a first step (and it shuts up most of
2578 autoconf's warnings about AC_TRY_RUN).
2579
2580- The Unix build is now a bit less chatty, courtesy of the parser
2581 generator. The build is completely silent (except for errors) when
2582 using "make -s", thanks to a -q option to setup.py.
2583
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002584C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002585-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002586
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002587- The "structmember" API now supports some new flag bits to deny read
2588 and/or write access to attributes in restricted execution mode.
2589
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002590New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002591-------------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002592
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002593- Compaq's iPAQ handheld, running the "familiar" Linux distribution
2594 (http://familiar.handhelds.org).
2595
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002596Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002597-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002598
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00002599- The "classic" standard tests, which work by comparing stdout to
2600 an expected-output file under Lib/test/output/, no longer stop at
2601 the first mismatch. Instead the test is run to completion, and a
2602 variant of ndiff-style comparison is used to report all differences.
2603 This is much easier to understand than the previous style of reporting.
2604
2605- The unittest-based standard tests now use regrtest's test_main()
2606 convention, instead of running as a side-effect of merely being
2607 imported. This allows these tests to be run in more natural and
2608 flexible ways as unittests, outside the regrtest framework.
2609
2610- regrtest.py is much better integrated with unittest and doctest now,
2611 especially in regard to reporting errors.
2612
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002613Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002614-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002615
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002616- Large file support now also works for files > 4GB, on filesystems
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00002617 that support it (NTFS under Windows 2000). See "What's New in
2618 Python 2.2a3" for more detail.
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002619
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002620
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002621What's New in Python 2.2a3?
2622===========================
2623
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002624*Release Date: 07-Sep-2001*
2625
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002626Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002627----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002628
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00002629- Conversion of long to float now raises OverflowError if the long is too
2630 big to represent as a C double.
2631
Tim Peters32f453e2001-09-03 08:35:41 +00002632- The 3-argument builtin pow() no longer allows a third non-None argument
2633 if either of the first two arguments is a float, or if both are of
2634 integer types and the second argument is negative (in which latter case
2635 the arguments are converted to float, so this is really the same
2636 restriction).
2637
Tim Peters5d2b77c2001-09-03 05:47:38 +00002638- The builtin dir() now returns more information, and sometimes much
2639 more, generally naming all attributes of an object, and all attributes
2640 reachable from the object via its class, and from its class's base
2641 classes, and so on from them too. Example: in 2.2a2, dir([]) returned
2642 an empty list. In 2.2a3,
2643
2644 >>> dir([])
2645 ['__add__', '__class__', '__contains__', '__delattr__', '__delitem__',
2646 '__eq__', '__ge__', '__getattr__', '__getitem__', '__getslice__',
2647 '__gt__', '__hash__', '__iadd__', '__imul__', '__init__', '__le__',
2648 '__len__', '__lt__', '__mul__', '__ne__', '__new__', '__repr__',
2649 '__rmul__', '__setattr__', '__setitem__', '__setslice__', '__str__',
2650 'append', 'count', 'extend', 'index', 'insert', 'pop', 'remove',
2651 'reverse', 'sort']
2652
2653 dir(module) continues to return only the module's attributes, though.
2654
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002655- Overflowing operations on plain ints now return a long int rather
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002656 than raising OverflowError. This is a partial implementation of PEP
2657 237. You can use -Wdefault::OverflowWarning to enable a warning for
2658 this situation, and -Werror::OverflowWarning to revert to the old
2659 OverflowError exception.
2660
Guido van Rossum61c345f2001-09-04 03:26:15 +00002661- A new command line option, -Q<arg>, is added to control run-time
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002662 warnings for the use of classic division. (See PEP 238.) Possible
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00002663 values are -Qold, -Qwarn, -Qwarnall, and -Qnew. The default is
2664 -Qold, meaning the / operator has its classic meaning and no
2665 warnings are issued. Using -Qwarn issues a run-time warning about
2666 all uses of classic division for int and long arguments; -Qwarnall
2667 also warns about classic division for float and complex arguments
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00002668 (for use with fixdiv.py).
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002669 [Note: the remainder of this item (preserved below) became
2670 obsolete in 2.2c1 -- -Qnew has global effect in 2.2] ::
2671
2672 Using -Qnew is questionable; it turns on new division by default, but
2673 only in the __main__ module. You can usefully combine -Qwarn or
2674 -Qwarnall and -Qnew: this gives the __main__ module new division, and
2675 warns about classic division everywhere else.
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002676
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002677- Many built-in types can now be subclassed. This applies to int,
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002678 long, float, str, unicode, and tuple. (The types complex, list and
2679 dictionary can also be subclassed; this was introduced earlier.)
2680 Note that restrictions apply when subclassing immutable built-in
2681 types: you can only affect the value of the instance by overloading
2682 __new__. You can add mutable attributes, and the subclass instances
2683 will have a __dict__ attribute, but you cannot change the "value"
2684 (as implemented by the base class) of an immutable subclass instance
2685 once it is created.
2686
Guido van Rossumaaf80c82001-09-02 13:44:35 +00002687- The dictionary constructor now takes an optional argument, a
2688 mapping-like object, and initializes the dictionary from its
2689 (key, value) pairs.
2690
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002691- A new built-in type, super, has been added. This facilitates making
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002692 "cooperative super calls" in a multiple inheritance setting. For an
2693 explanation, see http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#cooperation
2694
Guido van Rossum8d7234d2001-09-06 22:02:58 +00002695- A new built-in type, property, has been added. This enables the
2696 creation of "properties". These are attributes implemented by
2697 getter and setter functions (or only one of these for read-only or
2698 write-only attributes), without the need to override __getattr__.
2699 See http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#property
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002700
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002701- The syntax of floating-point and imaginary literals has been
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00002702 liberalized, to allow leading zeroes. Examples of literals now
2703 legal that were SyntaxErrors before:
2704
2705 00.0 0e3 0100j 07.5 00000000000000000008.
2706
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002707- An old tokenizer bug allowed floating point literals with an incomplete
Tim Petersc6d95812001-08-28 20:56:27 +00002708 exponent, such as 1e and 3.1e-. Such literals now raise SyntaxError.
2709
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002710Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002711-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002712
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00002713- telnetlib includes symbolic names for the options, and support for
Martin v. Löwis1da9c572002-11-04 09:56:00 +00002714 setting an option negotiation callback. It also supports processing
2715 of suboptions.
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00002716
Tim Petersa40c7932001-09-05 22:36:56 +00002717- The new C standard no longer requires that math libraries set errno to
2718 ERANGE on overflow. For platform libraries that exploit this new
2719 freedom, Python's overflow-checking was wholly broken. A new overflow-
2720 checking scheme attempts to repair that, but may not be reliable on all
2721 platforms (C doesn't seem to provide anything both useful and portable
2722 in this area anymore).
2723
Martin v. Löwis44f86962001-09-05 13:44:54 +00002724- Asynchronous timeout actions are available through the new class
2725 threading.Timer.
2726
Tim Peters78526162001-09-05 00:53:45 +00002727- math.log and math.log10 now return sensible results for even huge
2728 long arguments. For example, math.log10(10 ** 10000) ~= 10000.0.
2729
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002730- A new function, imp.lock_held(), returns 1 when the import lock is
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00002731 currently held. See the docs for the imp module.
2732
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002733- pickle, cPickle and marshal on 32-bit platforms can now correctly read
Tim Peters82112372001-08-29 02:28:42 +00002734 dumps containing ints written on platforms where Python ints are 8 bytes.
2735 When read on a box where Python ints are 4 bytes, such values are
2736 converted to Python longs.
2737
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002738- In restricted execution mode (using the rexec module), unmarshalling
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002739 code objects is no longer allowed. This plugs a security hole.
2740
Steve Purcell6091cd62001-09-06 16:05:17 +00002741- unittest.TestResult instances no longer store references to tracebacks
2742 generated by test failures. This prevents unexpected dangling references
2743 to objects that should be garbage collected between tests.
2744
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002745Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002746-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002747
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00002748- Tools/scripts/fixdiv.py has been added which can be used to fix
2749 division operators as per PEP 238.
2750
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002751Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002752-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002753
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00002754- If you are an adventurous person using Mac OS X you may want to look at
2755 Mac/OSX. There is a Makefile there that will build Python as a real Mac
2756 application, which can be used for experimenting with Carbon or Cocoa.
2757 Discussion of this on pythonmac-sig, please.
2758
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00002759C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002760-----
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00002761
2762- New function PyObject_Dir(obj), like Python __builtin__.dir(obj).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00002763
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00002764- Note that PyLong_AsDouble can fail! This has always been true, but no
2765 callers checked for it. It's more likely to fail now, because overflow
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00002766 errors are properly detected now. The proper way to check::
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00002767
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002768 double x = PyLong_AsDouble(some_long_object);
2769 if (x == -1.0 && PyErr_Occurred()) {
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002770 /* The conversion failed. */
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002771 }
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00002772
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002773- The GC API has been changed. Extensions that use the old API will still
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00002774 compile but will not participate in GC. To upgrade an extension
2775 module:
2776
2777 - rename Py_TPFLAGS_GC to PyTPFLAGS_HAVE_GC
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00002778
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00002779 - use PyObject_GC_New or PyObject_GC_NewVar to allocate objects and
2780 PyObject_GC_Del to deallocate them
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00002781
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00002782 - rename PyObject_GC_Init to PyObject_GC_Track and PyObject_GC_Fini
2783 to PyObject_GC_UnTrack
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00002784
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00002785 - remove PyGC_HEAD_SIZE from object size calculations
2786
2787 - remove calls to PyObject_AS_GC and PyObject_FROM_GC
2788
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002789- Two new functions: PyString_FromFormat() and PyString_FromFormatV().
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002790 These can be used safely to construct string objects from a
2791 sprintf-style format string (similar to the format string supported
2792 by PyErr_Format()).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00002793
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002794New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002795-------------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002796
Tim Petersb7da0902001-09-02 23:01:43 +00002797- Stephen Hansen contributed patches sufficient to get a clean compile
2798 under Borland C (Windows), but he reports problems running it and ran
2799 out of time to complete the port. Volunteers? Expect a MemoryError
2800 when importing the types module; this is probably shallow, and
2801 causing later failures too.
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002802
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002803Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002804-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002805
2806Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002807-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002808
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00002809- Large file support is now enabled on Win32 platforms as well as on
2810 Win64. This means that, for example, you can use f.tell() and f.seek()
2811 to manipulate files larger than 2 gigabytes (provided you have enough
2812 disk space, and are using a Windows filesystem that supports large
Tim Peters9a9471c2001-09-11 23:18:51 +00002813 partitions). Windows filesystem limits: FAT has a 2GB (gigabyte)
2814 filesize limit, and large file support makes no difference there.
2815 FAT32's limit is 4GB, and files >= 2GB are easier to use from Python now.
2816 NTFS has no practical limit on file size, and files of any size can be
2817 used from Python now.
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00002818
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002819- The w9xpopen hack is now used on Windows NT and 2000 too when COMPSPEC
Tim Peters402d5982001-08-27 06:37:48 +00002820 points to command.com (patch from Brian Quinlan).
2821
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002822
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00002823What's New in Python 2.2a2?
2824===========================
2825
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002826*Release Date: 22-Aug-2001*
2827
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00002828Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002829-----
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00002830
Barry Warsaw18b2ecf2001-08-22 20:26:56 +00002831- Tim Peters developed a brand new Windows installer using Wise 8.1,
2832 generously donated to us by Wise Solutions.
2833
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00002834- configure supports a new option --enable-unicode, with the values
2835 ucs2 and ucs4 (new in 2.2a1). With --disable-unicode, the Unicode
2836 type and supporting code is completely removed from the interpreter.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00002837
Jack Jansen32ce0cd2001-08-21 19:28:20 +00002838- A new configure option --enable-framework builds a Mac OS X framework,
2839 which "make frameworkinstall" will install. This provides a starting
2840 point for more mac-like functionality, join pythonmac-sig@python.org
2841 if you are interested in helping.
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00002842
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00002843- The NeXT platform is no longer supported.
2844
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002845- The 'new' module is now statically linked.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00002846
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00002847Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002848-----
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00002849
2850- The new Tools/scripts/cleanfuture.py can be used to automatically
Andrew M. Kuchlingb0532092001-08-15 15:54:56 +00002851 edit out obsolete future statements from Python source code. See
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00002852 the module docstring for details.
2853
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00002854Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002855-----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00002856
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00002857- regrtest.py now knows which tests are expected to be skipped on some
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00002858 platforms, allowing to give clearer test result output. regrtest
2859 also has optional --use/-u switch to run normally disabled tests
2860 which require network access or consume significant disk resources.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00002861
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00002862- Several new tests in the standard test suite, with special thanks to
2863 Nick Mathewson.
2864
2865Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002866----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00002867
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00002868- The floor division operator // has been added as outlined in PEP
2869 238. The / operator still provides classic division (and will until
2870 Python 3.0) unless "from __future__ import division" is included, in
2871 which case the / operator will provide true division. The operator
2872 module provides truediv() and floordiv() functions. Augmented
2873 assignment variants are included, as are the equivalent overloadable
2874 methods and C API methods. See the PEP for a full discussion:
2875 <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0238.html>
2876
Tim Peters6cd6a822001-08-17 22:11:27 +00002877- Future statements are now effective in simulated interactive shells
2878 (like IDLE). This should "just work" by magic, but read Michael
2879 Hudson's "Future statements in simulated shells" PEP 264 for full
2880 details: <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0264.html>.
2881
Guido van Rossumf86ddd22001-08-17 21:21:04 +00002882- The type/class unification (PEP 252-253) was integrated into the
2883 trunk and is not so tentative any more (the exact specification of
2884 some features is still tentative). A lot of work has done on fixing
2885 bugs and adding robustness and features (performance still has to
2886 come a long way).
2887
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00002888- Warnings about a mismatch in the Python API during extension import
2889 now use the Python warning framework (which makes it possible to
2890 write filters for these warnings).
2891
Barry Warsaw9b3be7f2001-08-14 18:35:02 +00002892- A function's __dict__ (aka func_dict) will now always be a
2893 dictionary. It used to be possible to delete it or set it to None,
2894 but now both actions raise TypeErrors. It is still legal to set it
2895 to a dictionary object. Getting func.__dict__ before any attributes
2896 have been assigned now returns an empty dictionary instead of None.
2897
Guido van Rossum32aa5d22001-09-05 18:43:35 +00002898- A new command line option, -E, was added which disables the use of
2899 all environment variables, or at least those that are specifically
2900 significant to Python. Usually those have a name starting with
2901 "PYTHON". This was used to fix a problem where the tests fail if
2902 the user happens to have PYTHONHOME or PYTHONPATH pointing to an
2903 older distribution.
2904
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00002905Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002906-------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00002907
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00002908- New class Differ and new functions ndiff() and restore() in difflib.py.
2909 These package the algorithms used by the popular Tools/scripts/ndiff.py,
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00002910 for programmatic reuse.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00002911
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00002912- New function xml.sax.saxutils.quoteattr(): Quote an XML attribute
2913 value using the minimal quoting required for the value; more
2914 reliable than using xml.sax.saxutils.escape() for attribute values.
2915
2916- Readline completion support for cmd.Cmd was added.
2917
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00002918- Calling os.tempnam() or os.tmpnam() generate RuntimeWarnings.
2919
2920- Added function threading.BoundedSemaphore()
2921
2922- Added Ka-Ping Yee's cgitb.py module.
2923
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002924- The 'new' module now exposes the CO_xxx flags.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00002925
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00002926- The gc module offers the get_referents function.
2927
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00002928New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002929-------------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00002930
2931C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002932-----
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00002933
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00002934- Two new APIs PyOS_snprintf() and PyOS_vsnprintf() were added
2935 which provide a cross-platform implementations for the
2936 relatively new snprintf()/vsnprintf() C lib APIs. In contrast to
2937 the standard sprintf() and vsprintf() C lib APIs, these versions
2938 apply bounds checking on the used buffer which enhances protection
2939 against buffer overruns.
2940
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00002941- Unicode APIs now use name mangling to assure that mixing interpreters
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00002942 and extensions using different Unicode widths is rendered next to
2943 impossible. Trying to import an incompatible Unicode-aware extension
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00002944 will result in an ImportError. Unicode extensions writers must make
2945 sure to check the Unicode width compatibility in their extensions by
2946 using at least one of the mangled Unicode APIs in the extension.
2947
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00002948- Two new flags METH_NOARGS and METH_O are available in method definition
2949 tables to simplify implementation of methods with no arguments and a
2950 single untyped argument. Calling such methods is more efficient than
2951 calling corresponding METH_VARARGS methods. METH_OLDARGS is now
2952 deprecated.
2953
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00002954Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002955-------
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00002956
2957- "import module" now compiles module.pyw if it exists and nothing else
2958 relevant is found.
2959
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00002960
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00002961What's New in Python 2.2a1?
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00002962===========================
2963
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002964*Release date: 18-Jul-2001*
2965
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00002966Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002967----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00002968
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00002969- TENTATIVELY, a large amount of code implementing much of what's
2970 described in PEP 252 (Making Types Look More Like Classes) and PEP
2971 253 (Subtyping Built-in Types) was added. This will be released
2972 with Python 2.2a1. Documentation will be provided separately
2973 through http://www.python.org/2.2/. The purpose of releasing this
2974 with Python 2.2a1 is to test backwards compatibility. It is
2975 possible, though not likely, that a decision is made not to release
2976 this code as part of 2.2 final, if any serious backwards
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00002977 incompatibilities are found during alpha testing that cannot be
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00002978 repaired.
2979
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00002980- Generators were added; this is a new way to create an iterator (see
Tim Peters11a0d102001-07-17 18:48:00 +00002981 below) using what looks like a simple function containing one or
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00002982 more 'yield' statements. See PEP 255. Since this adds a new
2983 keyword to the language, this feature must be enabled by including a
2984 future statement: "from __future__ import generators" (see PEP 236).
2985 Generators will become a standard feature in a future release
2986 (probably 2.3). Without this future statement, 'yield' remains an
2987 ordinary identifier, but a warning is issued each time it is used.
2988 (These warnings currently don't conform to the warnings framework of
2989 PEP 230; we intend to fix this in 2.2a2.)
2990
Marc-André Lemburg12e74b32001-05-22 08:58:23 +00002991- The UTF-16 codec was modified to be more RFC compliant. It will now
2992 only remove BOM characters at the start of the string and then
2993 only if running in native mode (UTF-16-LE and -BE won't remove a
2994 leading BMO character).
2995
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00002996- Strings now have a new method .decode() to complement the already
2997 existing .encode() method. These two methods provide direct access
2998 to the corresponding decoders and encoders of the registered codecs.
2999
3000 To enhance the usability of the .encode() method, the special
3001 casing of Unicode object return values was dropped (Unicode objects
3002 were auto-magically converted to string using the default encoding).
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00003003
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00003004 Both methods will now return whatever the codec in charge of the
3005 requested encoding returns as object, e.g. Unicode codecs will
3006 return Unicode objects when decoding is requested ("äöü".decode("latin-1")
3007 will return u"äöü"). This enables codec writer to create codecs
3008 for various simple to use conversions.
3009
3010 New codecs were added to demonstrate these new features (the .encode()
3011 and .decode() columns indicate the type of the returned objects):
3012
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003013 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
3014 |Name | .encode() | .decode() | Description |
3015 +=========+===========+===========+=============================+
3016 |uu | string | string | UU codec (e.g. for email) |
3017 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
3018 |base64 | string | string | base64 codec |
3019 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
3020 |quopri | string | string | quoted-printable codec |
3021 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
3022 |zlib | string | string | zlib compression |
3023 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
3024 |hex | string | string | 2-byte hex codec |
3025 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
3026 |rot-13 | string | Unicode | ROT-13 Unicode charmap codec|
3027 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00003028
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00003029- Some operating systems now support the concept of a default Unicode
3030 encoding for file system operations. Notably, Windows supports 'mbcs'
3031 as the default. The Macintosh will also adopt this concept in the medium
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00003032 term, although the default encoding for that platform will be other than
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00003033 'mbcs'.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00003034
3035 On operating system that support non-ASCII filenames, it is common for
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00003036 functions that return filenames (such as os.listdir()) to return Python
3037 string objects pre-encoded using the default file system encoding for
3038 the platform. As this encoding is likely to be different from Python's
3039 default encoding, converting this name to a Unicode object before passing
3040 it back to the Operating System would result in a Unicode error, as Python
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003041 would attempt to use its default encoding (generally ASCII) rather than
3042 the default encoding for the file system.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00003043
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003044 In general, this change simply removes surprises when working with
3045 Unicode and the file system, making these operations work as you expect,
3046 increasing the transparency of Unicode objects in this context.
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00003047 See [????] for more details, including examples.
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00003048
Tim Peters61dff2b2001-05-08 15:43:37 +00003049- Float (and complex) literals in source code were evaluated to full
3050 precision only when running from a .py file; the same code loaded from a
3051 .pyc (or .pyo) file could suffer numeric differences starting at about the
3052 12th significant decimal digit. For example, on a machine with IEEE-754
3053 floating arithmetic,
3054
3055 x = 9007199254740992.0
3056 print long(x)
3057
3058 printed 9007199254740992 if run directly from .py, but 9007199254740000
3059 if from a compiled (.pyc or .pyo) file. This was due to marshal using
3060 str(float) instead of repr(float) when building code objects. marshal
3061 now uses repr(float) instead, which should reproduce floats to full
3062 machine precision (assuming the platform C float<->string I/O conversion
3063 functions are of good quality).
3064
3065 This may cause floating-point results to change in some cases, and
3066 usually for the better, but may also cause numerically unstable
3067 algorithms to break.
3068
Tim Peters2f228e72001-05-13 00:19:31 +00003069- The implementation of dicts suffers fewer collisions, which has speed
3070 benefits. However, the order in which dict entries appear in dict.keys(),
3071 dict.values() and dict.items() may differ from previous releases for a
3072 given dict. Nothing is defined about this order, so no program should
3073 rely on it. Nevertheless, it's easy to write test cases that rely on the
3074 order by accident, typically because of printing the str() or repr() of a
3075 dict to an "expected results" file. See Lib/test/test_support.py's new
3076 sortdict(dict) function for a simple way to display a dict in sorted
3077 order.
3078
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00003079- Many other small changes to dicts were made, resulting in faster
3080 operation along the most common code paths.
3081
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00003082- Dictionary objects now support the "in" operator: "x in dict" means
3083 the same as dict.has_key(x).
3084
Barry Warsaw51acc8d2001-06-26 20:12:50 +00003085- The update() method of dictionaries now accepts generic mapping
3086 objects. Specifically the argument object must support the .keys()
3087 and __getitem__() methods. This allows you to say, for example,
3088 {}.update(UserDict())
3089
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00003090- Iterators were added; this is a generalized way of providing values
3091 to a for loop. See PEP 234. There's a new built-in function iter()
3092 to return an iterator. There's a new protocol to get the next value
3093 from an iterator using the next() method (in Python) or the
3094 tp_iternext slot (in C). There's a new protocol to get iterators
3095 using the __iter__() method (in Python) or the tp_iter slot (in C).
3096 Iterating (i.e. a for loop) over a dictionary generates its keys.
3097 Iterating over a file generates its lines.
3098
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00003099- The following functions were generalized to work nicely with iterator
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003100 arguments::
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003101
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00003102 map(), filter(), reduce(), zip()
Tim Peters8572b4f2001-05-06 01:05:02 +00003103 list(), tuple() (PySequence_Tuple() and PySequence_Fast() in C API)
3104 max(), min()
Tim Peters1af03e92001-05-26 19:37:54 +00003105 join() method of strings
3106 extend() method of lists
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00003107 'x in y' and 'x not in y' (PySequence_Contains() in C API)
3108 operator.countOf() (PySequence_Count() in C API)
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003109 right-hand side of assignment statements with multiple targets, such as ::
Tim Petersd6d010b2001-06-21 02:49:55 +00003110 x, y, z = some_iterable_object_returning_exactly_3_values
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00003111
Tim Petersd85e1022001-05-11 21:51:48 +00003112- Accessing module attributes is significantly faster (for example,
3113 random.random or os.path or yourPythonModule.yourAttribute).
3114
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00003115- Comparing dictionary objects via == and != is faster, and now works even
3116 if the keys and values don't support comparisons other than ==.
3117
Tim Peters95bf9392001-05-10 08:32:44 +00003118- Comparing dictionaries in ways other than == and != is slower: there were
3119 insecurities in the dict comparison implementation that could cause Python
3120 to crash if the element comparison routines for the dict keys and/or
3121 values mutated the dicts. Making the code bulletproof slowed it down.
3122
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00003123- Collisions in dicts are resolved via a new approach, which can help
3124 dramatically in bad cases. For example, looking up every key in a dict
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00003125 d with d.keys() == [i << 16 for i in range(20000)] is approximately 500x
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00003126 faster now. Thanks to Christian Tismer for pointing out the cause and
3127 the nature of an effective cure (last December! better late than never).
Tim Peters15d49292001-05-27 07:39:22 +00003128
Tim Peters52e155e2001-06-16 05:42:57 +00003129- repr() is much faster for large containers (dict, list, tuple).
3130
3131
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003132Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003133-------
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003134
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00003135- The constants ascii_letters, ascii_lowercase. and ascii_uppercase
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003136 were added to the string module. These a locale-independent
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00003137 constants, unlike letters, lowercase, and uppercase. These are now
3138 use in appropriate locations in the standard library.
3139
Martin v. Löwisf0473d52001-07-18 16:17:16 +00003140- The flags used in dlopen calls can now be configured using
3141 sys.setdlopenflags and queried using sys.getdlopenflags.
3142
Guido van Rossumc7e4aca2001-07-12 11:54:37 +00003143- Fredrik Lundh's xmlrpclib is now a standard library module. This
3144 provides full client-side XML-RPC support. In addition,
3145 Demo/xmlrpc/ contains two server frameworks (one SocketServer-based,
3146 one asyncore-based). Thanks to Eric Raymond for the documentation.
3147
Guido van Rossum643d3912001-07-05 14:46:25 +00003148- The xrange() object is simplified: it no longer supports slicing,
3149 repetition, comparisons, efficient 'in' checking, the tolist()
3150 method, or the start, stop and step attributes. See PEP 260.
3151
Martin v. Löwisebf94db2001-06-06 06:25:40 +00003152- A new function fnmatch.filter to filter lists of file names was added.
3153
Barry Warsawffd674d2001-05-22 16:00:10 +00003154- calendar.py uses month and day names based on the current locale.
3155
Guido van Rossum2e0a6542001-05-15 02:14:44 +00003156- strop is now *really* obsolete (this was announced before with 1.6),
3157 and issues DeprecationWarning when used (except for the four items
3158 that are still imported into string.py).
3159
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003160- Cookie.py now sorts key+value pairs by key in output strings.
3161
3162- pprint.isrecursive(object) didn't correctly identify recursive objects.
3163 Now it does.
3164
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00003165- pprint functions now much faster for large containers (tuple, list, dict).
3166
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00003167- New 'q' and 'Q' format codes in the struct module, corresponding to C
3168 types "long long" and "unsigned long long" (on Windows, __int64). In
3169 native mode, these can be used only when the platform C compiler supports
3170 these types (when HAVE_LONG_LONG is #define'd by the Python config
3171 process), and then they inherit the sizes and alignments of the C types.
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00003172 In standard mode, 'q' and 'Q' are supported on all platforms, and are
3173 8-byte integral types.
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00003174
Guido van Rossum83213cc2001-06-12 16:48:52 +00003175- The site module installs a new built-in function 'help' that invokes
3176 pydoc.help. It must be invoked as 'help()'; when invoked as 'help',
3177 it displays a message reminding the user to use 'help()' or
3178 'help(object)'.
3179
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003180Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003181-----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003182
3183- New test_mutants.py runs dict comparisons where the key and value
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003184 comparison operators mutate the dicts randomly during comparison. This
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003185 rapidly causes Python to crash under earlier releases (not for the faint
3186 of heart: it can also cause Win9x to freeze or reboot!).
3187
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003188- New test_pprint.py verifies that pprint.isrecursive() and
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00003189 pprint.isreadable() return sensible results. Also verifies that simple
3190 cases produce correct output.
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003191
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00003192C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003193-----
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00003194
3195- Removed the unused last_is_sticky argument from the internal
3196 _PyTuple_Resize(). If this affects you, you were cheating.
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003197
3198----
3199
3200**(For information about older versions, consult the HISTORY file.)**