blob: 1557a46ce1b57a9fd6595b836bf29af2a62e62d7 [file] [log] [blame]
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001+++++++++++
2Python News
3+++++++++++
4
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +00005(editors: check NEWS.help for information about editing NEWS using ReST.)
6
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +00007What's New in Python 2.5 alpha 1?
8=================================
9
Anthony Baxter12b6f6c2005-03-29 13:36:16 +000010*Release date: XX-XXX-2006*
11
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +000012Core and builtins
13-----------------
14
Barry Warsawc8d907c2005-04-19 23:43:40 +000015- Descriptors defined in C with a PyGetSetDef structure, where the setter is
16 NULL, now raise an AttributeError when attempting to set or delete the
17 attribute. Previously a TypeError was raised, but this was inconsistent
18 with the equivalent pure-Python implementation.
19
Michael W. Hudson774479c2005-04-18 08:46:17 +000020- It is now safe to call PyGILState_Release() before
21 PyEval_InitThreads() (note that if there is reason to believe there
22 are multiple threads around you still must call PyEval_InitThreads()
23 before using the Python API; this fix is for extension modules that
24 have no way of knowing if Python is multi-threaded yet).
25
Michael W. Hudsone3afc592005-04-07 10:11:19 +000026- Typing Ctrl-C whilst raw_input() was waiting in a build with threads
27 disabled caused a crash.
28
Michael W. Hudsonb330adf2005-03-31 09:35:44 +000029- Bug #1165306: instancemethod_new allowed the creation of a method
30 with im_class == im_self == NULL, which caused a crash when called.
31
Anthony Baxter12b6f6c2005-03-29 13:36:16 +000032- Move exception finalisation later in the shutdown process - this
33 fixes the crash seen in bug #1165761
34
Raymond Hettinger96229b12005-03-11 06:49:40 +000035- Added two new builtins, any() and all().
36
Brett Cannon409d8f22005-03-05 06:47:57 +000037- Defining a class with empty parentheses is now allowed
Brett Cannonf4189912005-04-09 02:30:16 +000038 (e.g., ``class C(): pass`` is no longer a syntax error).
39 Patch #1176012 added support to the 'parser' module and 'compiler' package
40 (thanks to logistix for that added support).
Brett Cannon409d8f22005-03-05 06:47:57 +000041
Martin v. Löwis96d743e2005-03-03 23:00:26 +000042- Patch #1115086: Support PY_LONGLONG in structmember.
43
Raymond Hettingerb67cc802005-03-03 16:45:19 +000044- Bug #1155938: new style classes did not check that __init__() was
45 returning None.
46
Martin v. Löwis4bf108d2005-03-03 11:45:45 +000047- Patch #802188: Report characters after line continuation character
48 ('\') with a specific error message.
49
Martin v. Löwisff232d72005-03-03 09:24:38 +000050- Bug #723201: Raise a TypeError for passing bad objects to 'L' format.
51
Michael W. Hudson8e1afab2005-02-17 14:55:21 +000052- Bug #1124295: the __name__ attribute of file objects was
53 inadvertently made inaccessible in restricted mode.
54
Martin v. Löwis13a1fde2005-01-27 18:56:16 +000055- Bug #1074011: closing sys.std{out,err} now causes a flush() and
Martin v. Löwis8e3ca8a2005-01-23 09:41:49 +000056 an ferror() call.
57
Raymond Hettinger3b0c7c22004-12-03 08:30:39 +000058- min() and max() now support key= arguments with the same meaning as in
59 list.sort().
60
Raymond Hettingerc34f8672005-01-02 06:17:33 +000061- The peephole optimizer now performs simple constant folding in expressions:
62 (2+3) --> (5).
63
Raymond Hettingera422c342005-01-11 03:03:27 +000064- set and frozenset objects can now be marshalled. SF #1098985.
65
Michael W. Hudsonfaa76482005-01-31 17:09:25 +000066- Bug #1077106: Poor argument checking could cause memory corruption
67 in calls to os.read().
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +000068
Jeremy Hyltonab630502005-02-04 18:44:06 +000069- The parser did not complain about future statements in illegal
70 positions. It once again reports a syntax error if a future
71 statement occurs after anything other than a doc string.
72
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +000073Extension Modules
74-----------------
75
Michael W. Hudsonb330adf2005-03-31 09:35:44 +000076- Bug #1166660: The readline module could segfault if hook functions
77 were set in a different thread than that which called readline.
78
Raymond Hettinger4aec61e2005-03-18 21:20:23 +000079- collections.deque objects now support a remove() method.
80
Raymond Hettinger984f9bb2005-03-09 16:38:48 +000081- operator.itemgetter() and operator.attrgetter() now support retrieving
82 multiple fields. This provides direct support for sorting on multiple
83 keys (primary, secondary, etc).
84
Martin v. Löwisb60ae992005-03-08 09:10:29 +000085- os.access now supports Unicode path names on non-Win32 systems.
86
Martin v. Löwisfd78a6f2005-03-04 14:37:01 +000087- Patches #925152, #1118602: Avoid reading after the end of the buffer
88 in pyexpat.GetInputContext.
89
Martin v. Löwis7fe60c02005-03-03 11:22:44 +000090- Patches #749830, #1144555: allow UNIX mmap size to default to current
91 file size.
92
Raymond Hettinger9c323f82005-02-28 19:39:44 +000093- Added functional.partial(). See PEP309.
94
Martin v. Löwis9533e342005-02-27 20:33:25 +000095- Patch #1093585: raise a ValueError for negative history items in readline.
96 {remove_history,replace_history}
97
Fred Drake9c131f22005-01-23 15:16:08 +000098- The spwd module has been added, allowing access to the shadow password
99 database.
Martin v. Löwisc3001752005-01-23 09:27:24 +0000100
Martin v. Löwisfe33d0b2005-01-16 08:57:39 +0000101- stat_float_times is now True.
102
Raymond Hettingerb0900e62004-12-16 16:23:40 +0000103- array.array objects are now picklable.
104
Raymond Hettingera6b45cc2004-12-07 07:05:57 +0000105- the cPickle module no longer accepts the deprecated None option in the
106 args tuple returned by __reduce__().
107
Raymond Hettingerb2594052004-12-05 09:25:51 +0000108- itertools.islice() now accepts None for the start and step arguments.
109 This allows islice() to work more readily with slices:
110 islice(s.start, s.stop, s.step)
111
Skip Montanaro0af3ade2005-01-13 04:12:31 +0000112- datetime.datetime() now has a strptime class method which can be used to
113 create datetime object using a string and format.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000114
115Library
116-------
117
Martin v. Löwis55f1bb82005-03-21 20:56:35 +0000118- distutils.commands.upload was added to support uploading distribution
119 files to PyPI.
120
Walter Dörwalda6e8a4a2005-03-31 13:57:38 +0000121- distutils.commands.register now encodes the data as UTF-8 before posting
122 them to PyPI.
123
Raymond Hettinger267b8682005-03-27 10:47:39 +0000124- decimal operator and comparison methods now return NotImplemented
125 instead of raising a TypeError when interacting with other types. This
126 allows other classes to implement __radd__ style methods and have them
127 work as expected.
128
Raymond Hettingerbea3f6f2005-03-15 04:59:17 +0000129- Bug #1163325: Decimal infinities failed to hash. Attempting to
130 hash a NaN raised an InvalidOperation instead of a TypeError.
131
Martin v. Löwis78be7df2005-03-05 12:47:42 +0000132- Patch #918101: Add tarfile open mode r|* for auto-detection of the
133 stream compression; add, for symmetry reasons, r:* as a synonym of r.
134
Martin v. Löwis00a73e72005-03-04 19:40:34 +0000135- Patch #1043890: Add extractall method to tarfile.
136
Martin v. Löwisc72dd382005-03-04 13:50:17 +0000137- Patch #1075887: Don't require MSVC in distutils if there is nothing
138 to build.
139
Martin v. Löwis637431b2005-03-03 23:12:42 +0000140- Patch #1103407: Properly deal with tarfile iterators when untarring
141 symbolic links on Windows.
142
Martin v. Löwisa4dac402005-03-03 11:39:45 +0000143- Patch #645894: Use getrusage for computing the time consumption in
144 profile.py if available.
145
Martin v. Löwisdf37c8c2005-03-03 11:08:03 +0000146- Patch #1046831: Use get_python_version where appropriate in sysconfig.py.
147
Martin v. Löwisc5574e82005-03-03 10:57:37 +0000148- Patch #1117454: Remove code to special-case cookies without values
149 in LWPCookieJar.
150
Martin v. Löwis4ea3ead2005-03-03 10:48:12 +0000151- Patch #1117339: Add cookielib special name tests.
152
Martin v. Löwise869eb12005-03-03 09:46:07 +0000153- Patch #1112812: Make bsddb/__init__.py more friendly for modulefinder.
154
Martin v. Löwisf2a8d632005-03-03 08:35:22 +0000155- Patch #1110248: SYNC_FLUSH the zlib buffer for GZipFile.flush.
156
Martin v. Löwisdf241532005-03-03 08:17:42 +0000157- Patch #1107973: Allow to iterate over the lines of a tarfile.ExFileObject.
158
Martin v. Löwis8ed338a2005-03-03 08:12:27 +0000159- Patch #1104111: Alter setup.py --help and --help-commands.
160
Martin v. Löwis4afe1542005-03-01 08:09:28 +0000161- Patch #1121234: Properly cleanup _exit and tkerror commands.
162
Martin v. Löwisc2a0ac22005-02-24 20:22:10 +0000163- Patch #1049151: xdrlib now unpacks booleans as True or False.
164
Raymond Hettingerbab41432005-02-05 01:31:19 +0000165- Fixed bug in a NameError bug in cookielib. Patch #1116583.
166
Guido van Rossumd0641422005-02-03 15:01:24 +0000167- Applied a security fix to SimpleXMLRPCserver (PSF-2005-001). This
168 disables recursive traversal through instance attributes, which can
169 be exploited in various ways.
170
Martin v. Löwis1d11de62005-01-29 13:29:23 +0000171- Bug #1110478: Revert os.environ.update to do putenv again.
172
Thomas Hellerd6c6e222005-01-20 19:20:16 +0000173- Bug #1103844: fix distutils.install.dump_dirs() with negated options.
174
Martin v. Löwis22b457e2005-01-16 08:40:58 +0000175- os.{SEEK_SET, SEEK_CUR, SEEK_END} have been added for convenience.
176
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000177- Enhancements to the csv module:
178
179 + Dialects are now validated by the underlying C code, better
180 reflecting it's capabilities, and improving it's compliance with
181 PEP 305.
182 + Dialect parameter parsing has been re-implemented to improve error
183 reporting.
184 + quotechar=None and quoting=QUOTE_NONE now work the way PEP 305
185 dictates.
186 + the parser now removes the escapechar prefix from escaped characters.
Andrew McNamara0f0599d2005-01-12 09:45:18 +0000187 + when quoting=QUOTE_NONNUMERIC, the writer now tests for numeric
Andrew McNamaraf69d94f2005-01-13 11:30:54 +0000188 types, rather than any object than can be represented as a numeric.
Andrew McNamara0f0599d2005-01-12 09:45:18 +0000189 + when quoting=QUOTE_NONNUMERIC, the reader now casts unquoted fields
190 to floats.
Andrew McNamaraf69d94f2005-01-13 11:30:54 +0000191 + reader now allows \r characters to be quoted (previously it only allowed
192 \n to be quoted).
Andrew McNamarac89f2842005-01-12 07:44:42 +0000193 + writer doublequote handling improved.
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000194 + Dialect classes passed to the module are no longer instantiated by
195 the module before being parsed (the former validation scheme required
196 this, but the mechanism was unreliable).
197 + The dialect registry now contains instances of the internal
198 C-coded dialect type, rather than references to python objects.
199 + the internal c-coded dialect type is now immutable.
200 + register_dialect now accepts the same keyword dialect specifications
201 as the reader and writer, allowing the user to register dialects
202 without first creating a dialect class.
203 + a configurable limit to the size of parsed fields has been added -
204 previously, an unmatched quote character could result in the entire
205 file being read into the field buffer before an error was reported.
Andrew McNamara31d88962005-01-12 03:45:10 +0000206 + A new module method csv.field_size_limit() has been added that sets
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000207 the parser field size limit (returning the former limit). The initial
208 limit is 128kB.
Andrew McNamara7f2053e2005-01-12 11:17:16 +0000209 + A line_num attribute has been added to the reader object, which tracks
210 the number of lines read from the source iterator. This is not
211 the same as the number of records returned, as records can span
212 multiple lines.
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000213 + reader and writer objects were not being registered with the cyclic-GC.
214 This has been fixed.
215
Brett Cannone6539c42005-01-08 02:43:53 +0000216- _DummyThread objects in the threading module now delete self.__block that is
217 inherited from _Thread since it uses up a lock allocated by 'thread'. The
218 lock primitives tend to be limited in number and thus should not be wasted on
219 a _DummyThread object. Fixes bug #1089632.
220
Raymond Hettinger97db05d2005-01-07 08:15:41 +0000221- The imghdr module now detects Exif files.
222
Raymond Hettinger6065d322004-12-20 23:51:53 +0000223- StringIO.truncate() now correctly adjusts the size attribute.
224 (Bug #951915).
225
Marc-André Lemburgbb4f1bd2004-12-10 21:58:14 +0000226- locale.py now uses an updated locale alias table (built using
227 Tools/i18n/makelocalealias.py, a tool to parse the X11 locale
228 alias file); the encoding lookup was enhanced to use Python's
229 encoding alias table
230
Raymond Hettinger3557f422004-12-07 12:02:02 +0000231- moved deprecated modules to Lib/lib-old: whrandom, tzparse, statcache.
232
Raymond Hettingera6b45cc2004-12-07 07:05:57 +0000233- the pickle module no longer accepts the deprecated None option in the
234 args tuple returned by __reduce__().
235
Brett Cannon84667c02004-12-07 03:25:18 +0000236- optparse now optionally imports gettext. This allows its use in setup.py.
237
Raymond Hettinger3489cad2004-12-05 05:20:42 +0000238- the pickle module no longer uses the deprecated bin parameter.
239
Raymond Hettinger1bc82f82004-12-05 03:58:17 +0000240- the shelve module no longer uses the deprecated binary parameter.
241
Raymond Hettinger6c92d762004-12-05 03:28:00 +0000242- the pstats module no longer uses the deprecated ignore() method.
243
Raymond Hettingerf3fa9462004-12-05 01:58:09 +0000244- the filecmp module no longer uses the deprecated use_statcache argument.
245
Raymond Hettinger664347b2004-12-04 21:21:53 +0000246- unittest.TestCase.run() and unittest.TestSuite.run() can now be successfully
247 extended or overridden by subclasses. Formerly, the subclassed method would
248 be ignored by the rest of the module. (Bug #1078905).
249
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000250- heapq.nsmallest() and heapq.nlargest() now support key= arguments with
Raymond Hettinger3b0c7c22004-12-03 08:30:39 +0000251 the same meaning as in list.sort().
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000252
Walter Dörwald36733692004-12-22 12:50:50 +0000253- Bug #1076985: ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` now calls ``read()`` only
254 once when a size argument is given. This prevents a buffer overflow in the
255 tokenizer with very long source lines.
256
Andrew M. Kuchling3b585b32004-12-28 20:10:48 +0000257- Bug #1083110: ``zlib.decompress.flush()`` would segfault if called immediately
258 after creating the object, without any intervening ``.decompress()`` calls.
259
Skip Montanaro05885812005-01-16 20:48:27 +0000260- The reconvert.quote function can now emit triple-quoted strings. The
261 reconvert module now has some simple documentation.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000262
Walter Dörwaldaf3b39a2005-02-18 13:22:43 +0000263- ``UserString.MutableString`` now supports negative indices in
264 ``__setitem__`` and ``__delitem__``
265
Greg Ward40407942005-03-05 02:53:17 +0000266- Bug #1149508: ``textwrap`` now handles hyphenated numbers (eg. "2004-03-05")
267 correctly.
268
Walter Dörwaldbc8e6422005-04-21 21:32:03 +0000269- Partial fixes for SF bugs #1163244 and #1175396: If a chunk read by
270 ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` has a trailing "\r", read one more
271 character even if the user has passed a size parameter to get a proper
272 line ending. Remove the special handling of a "\r\n" that has been split
273 between two lines.
274
Greg Ward40407942005-03-05 02:53:17 +0000275
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000276Build
277-----
278
Brett Cannon08cd5982005-04-24 22:26:38 +0000279- EXTRA_CFLAGS has been introduced as an environment variable to hold compiler
280 flags that change binary compatibility. Changes were also made to
281 distutils.sysconfig to also use the environment variable when used during
282 compilation of the interpreter.
283
Bob Ippolitoed233462005-03-29 13:47:59 +0000284- SF patch 1171735: Darwin 8's headers are anal about POSIX compliance,
285 and linking has changed (prebinding is now deprecated, and libcc_dynamic
286 no longer exists). This configure patch makes things right.
287
Martin v. Löwise2713be2005-03-08 15:03:08 +0000288- Bug #1158607: Build with --disable-unicode again.
289
Brett Cannon46d96232005-02-16 00:07:19 +0000290- spwdmodule.c is built only if either HAVE_GETSPNAM or HAVE_HAVE_GETSPENT is
291 defined. Discovered as a result of not being able to build on OS X.
292
Brett Cannon516592f2004-12-07 00:42:59 +0000293- setup.py now uses the directories specified in LDFLAGS using the -L option
294 and in CPPFLAGS using the -I option for adding library and include
295 directories, respectively, for compiling extension modules against. This has
296 led to the core being compiled using the values in CPPFLAGS. It also removes
297 the need for the special-casing of both DarwinPorts and Fink for darwin since
298 the proper directories can be specified in LDFLAGS (``-L/sw/lib`` for Fink,
299 ``-L/opt/local/lib`` for DarwinPorts) and CPPFLAGS (``-I/sw/include`` for
300 Fink, ``-I/opt/local/include`` for DarwinPorts).
301
Brett Cannon43802422005-02-10 20:48:03 +0000302- Test in configure.in that checks for tzset no longer dependent on tm->tm_zone
303 to exist in the struct (not required by either ISO C nor the UNIX 2 spec).
304 Tests for sanity in tzname when HAVE_TZNAME defined were also defined.
305 Closes bug #1096244. Thanks Gregory Bond.
306
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000307
308C API
309-----
310
Raymond Hettinger66517482004-12-03 11:45:13 +0000311- Removed PyRange_New().
312
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000313
314Tests
315-----
316
Martin v. Löwis4d394df2005-01-23 09:19:22 +0000317- In test_os, st_?time is now truncated before comparing it with ST_?TIME.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000318
Brett Cannonced04e02005-02-13 22:53:22 +0000319
320Documentation
321-------------
322
323- Remove all latent references for "Macintosh" that referred to semantics for
324 Mac OS 9 and change to reflect the state for OS X.
325 Closes patch #1095802. Thanks Jack Jansen.
326
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000327Mac
328---
329
330
331
332Tools/Demos
333-----------
334
Martin v. Löwisab9ec162005-04-09 10:53:34 +0000335- Patch #1177597: Correct Complex.__init__.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000336
337
Anthony Baxtere2648ee2004-11-30 01:28:55 +0000338What's New in Python 2.4 final?
339===============================
Kurt B. Kaiser4c79a832004-11-23 18:06:08 +0000340
Anthony Baxtere2648ee2004-11-30 01:28:55 +0000341*Release date: 30-NOV-2004*
Kurt B. Kaiser4c79a832004-11-23 18:06:08 +0000342
343Core and builtins
344-----------------
345
346- Bug 875692: Improve signal handling, especially when using threads, by
347 forcing an early re-execution of PyEval_EvalFrame() "periodic" code when
348 things_to_do is not cleared by Py_MakePendingCalls().
349
350
Anthony Baxter4277ed82004-11-30 11:53:10 +0000351What's New in Python 2.4 (release candidate 1)
352==============================================
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000353
Anthony Baxter5cc727a2004-11-18 12:32:27 +0000354*Release date: 18-NOV-2004*
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000355
356Core and builtins
357-----------------
358
Tim Petersfb1ffb02004-11-08 04:30:21 +0000359- Bug 1061968: Fixes in 2.4a3 to address thread bug 1010677 reintroduced
360 the years-old thread shutdown race bug 225673. Numeric history lesson
361 aside, all bugs in all three reports are fixed now.
362
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000363
Skip Montanaro599bd5e2004-11-04 04:31:30 +0000364Library
365-------
366
367- Bug 1052242: If exceptions are raised by an atexit handler function an
368 attempt is made to execute the remaining handlers. The last exception
369 raised is re-raised.
370
Tim Peters50c6bdb2004-11-08 22:07:37 +0000371- ``doctest``'s new support for adding ``pdb.set_trace()`` calls to
372 doctests was broken in a dramatic but shallow way. Fixed.
373
Tim Petersbbc0d442004-11-13 16:18:32 +0000374- Bug 1065388: ``calendar``'s ``day_name``, ``day_abbr``, ``month_name``,
375 and ``month_abbr`` attributes emulate sequences of locale-correct
376 spellings of month and day names. Because the locale can change at
377 any time, the correct spelling is recomputed whenever one of these is
378 indexed. In the worst case, the index may be a slice object, so these
379 recomputed every day or month name each time they were indexed. This is
380 much slower than necessary in the usual case, when the index is just an
381 integer. In that case, only the single spelling needed is recomputed
382 now; and, when the index is a slice object, only the spellings needed
383 by the slice are recomputed now.
384
Tim Peters50c6bdb2004-11-08 22:07:37 +0000385- Patch 1061679: Added ``__all__`` to pickletools.py.
Tim Peters90cf2122004-11-06 23:45:48 +0000386
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000387Build
388-----
Skip Montanaro599bd5e2004-11-04 04:31:30 +0000389
Brett Cannon7d28e962004-11-07 01:19:00 +0000390- Bug 1034277 / Patch 1035255: Remove compilation of core against CoreServices
391 and CoreFoundation on OS X. Involved removing PyMac_GetAppletScriptFile()
392 which has no known users. Thanks Bob Ippolito.
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000393
394C API
395-----
396
Raymond Hettinger39e92ea2004-11-18 09:41:45 +0000397- The PyRange_New() function is deprecated.
398
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000399
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000400What's New in Python 2.4 beta 2?
401================================
402
Anthony Baxter9f41f3a2004-11-03 06:21:37 +0000403*Release date: 03-NOV-2004*
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000404
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000405License
406-------
407
408The Python Software Foundation changed the license under which Python
409is released, to remove Python version numbers. There were no other
410changes to the license. So, for example, wherever the license for
411Python 2.3 said "Python 2.3", the new license says "Python". The
412intent is to make it possible to refer to the PSF license in a more
413durable way. For example, some people say they're confused by that
414the Open Source Initiative's entry for the Python Software Foundation
415License::
416
417 http://www.opensource.org/licenses/PythonSoftFoundation.php
418
419says "Python 2.1.1" all over it, wondering whether it applies only
420to Python 2.1.1.
421
422The official name of the new license is the Python Software Foundation
423License Version 2.
424
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000425Core and builtins
426-----------------
427
Tim Petersead8b7a2004-10-30 23:09:22 +0000428- Bug #1055820 Cyclic garbage collection was not protecting against that
429 calling a live weakref to a piece of cyclic trash could resurrect an
430 insane mutation of the trash if any Python code ran during gc (via
431 running a dead object's __del__ method, running another callback on a
432 weakref to a dead object, or via any Python code run in any other thread
433 that managed to obtain the GIL while a __del__ or callback was running
434 in the thread doing gc). The most likely symptom was "impossible"
435 ``AttributeEror`` exceptions, appearing seemingly at random, on weakly
436 referenced objects. The cure was to clear all weakrefs to unreachable
437 objects before allowing any callbacks to run.
438
Raymond Hettinger561fbf12004-10-26 01:52:37 +0000439- Bug #1054139 _PyString_Resize() now invalidates its cached hash value.
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000440
441Extension Modules
442-----------------
443
Raymond Hettinger9047c8f2004-10-24 00:10:06 +0000444- Bug #1048870: the compiler now generates distinct code objects for
445 functions with identical bodies. This was producing confusing
446 traceback messages which pointed to the function where the code
447 object was first defined rather than the function being executed.
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000448
449Library
450-------
451
Barry Warsaw8c72eae2004-11-01 03:52:43 +0000452- Patch #1056967 changes the semantics of Template.safe_substitute() so that
453 no ValueError is raised on an 'invalid' match group. Now the delimiter is
454 returned.
455
Raymond Hettinger2ef7e6c2004-10-24 00:32:24 +0000456- Bug #1052503 pdb.runcall() was not passing along keyword arguments.
457
Raymond Hettingerc64aab82004-10-20 08:21:57 +0000458- Bug #902037: XML.sax.saxutils.prepare_input_source() now combines relative
459 paths with a base path before checking os.path.isfile().
460
Raymond Hettingere54e7262004-10-20 07:17:16 +0000461- The whichdb module can now be run from the command line.
462
Brett Cannon8abcc5d2004-10-18 01:37:57 +0000463- Bug #1045381: time.strptime() can now infer the date using %U or %W (week of
464 the year) when the day of the week and year are also specified.
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000465
Andrew M. Kuchling0d19bae2004-10-19 19:54:41 +0000466- Bug #1048816: fix bug in Ctrl-K at start of line in curses.textpad.Textbox
467
Andrew M. Kuchling66e80ba2004-10-20 11:56:15 +0000468- Bug #1017553: fix bug in tarfile.filemode()
469
Hye-Shik Chang33761492004-10-26 09:53:46 +0000470- Patch #737473: fix bug that old source code is shown in tracebacks even if
Hye-Shik Chang182ac852004-10-26 09:16:42 +0000471 the source code is updated and reloaded.
472
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000473Build
474-----
475
Hye-Shik Chang33761492004-10-26 09:53:46 +0000476- Patch #1044395: --enable-shared is allowed in FreeBSD also.
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000477
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000478What's New in Python 2.4 beta 1?
479================================
480
Anthony Baxter6a587c12004-10-15 08:07:21 +0000481*Release date: 15-OCT-2004*
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000482
483Core and builtins
484-----------------
485
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000486- Patch #975056: Restartable signals were not correctly disabled on
Anthony Baxtere4f8a482004-10-13 14:55:56 +0000487 BSD systems. Consistently use PyOS_setsig() instead of signal().
488
Tim Peters263091e2004-10-10 01:58:44 +0000489- The internal portable implementation of thread-local storage (TLS), used
490 by the ``PyGILState_Ensure()``/``PyGILState_Release()`` API, was not
491 thread-correct. This could lead to a variety of problems, up to and
492 including segfaults. See bug 1041645 for an example.
493
Raymond Hettingerdb29e0f2004-10-07 06:46:25 +0000494- Added a command line option, -m module, which searches sys.path for the
495 module and then runs it. (Contributed by Nick Coghlan.)
496
Raymond Hettinger2c31a052004-09-22 18:44:21 +0000497- The bytecode optimizer now folds tuples of constants into a single
498 constant.
499
Tim Peters307fa782004-09-23 08:06:40 +0000500- SF bug #513866: Float/long comparison anomaly. Prior to 2.4b1, when
501 an integer was compared to a float, the integer was coerced to a float.
502 That could yield spurious overflow errors (if the integer was very
503 large), and to anomalies such as
504 ``long(1e200)+1 == 1e200 == long(1e200)-1``. Coercion to float is no
505 longer performed, and cases like ``long(1e200)-1 < 1e200``,
506 ``long(1e200)+1 > 1e200`` and ``(1 << 20000) > 1e200`` are computed
507 correctly now.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000508
509Extension modules
510-----------------
511
Tim Peterscf8997f2004-10-01 02:13:16 +0000512- ``collections.deque`` objects didn't play quite right with garbage
513 collection, which could lead to a segfault in a release build, or
Raymond Hettingerdb29e0f2004-10-07 06:46:25 +0000514 an assert failure in a debug build. Also, added overflow checks,
515 better detection of mutation during iteration, and shielded deque
516 comparisons from unusual subclass overrides of the __iter__() method.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000517
518Library
519-------
Raymond Hettinger0318a932004-09-22 18:03:47 +0000520
Anthony Baxtera0240342004-10-14 10:02:08 +0000521- Patch 1046644: distutils build_ext grew two new options - --swig for
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000522 specifying the swig executable to use, and --swig-opts to specify
Anthony Baxtera0240342004-10-14 10:02:08 +0000523 options to pass to swig. --swig-opts="-c++" is the new way to spell
524 --swig-cpp.
525
Anthony Baxter22dcf662004-10-13 15:54:17 +0000526- Patch 983206: distutils now obeys environment variable LDSHARED, if
527 it is set.
528
Andrew M. Kuchling518d3932004-10-12 15:32:10 +0000529- Added Peter Astrand's subprocess.py module. See PEP 324 for details.
Fredrik Lundh5b3687d2004-10-12 15:26:28 +0000530
Brett Cannon4f35c712004-10-06 02:11:37 +0000531- time.strptime() now properly escapes timezones and all other locale-specific
532 strings for regex-specific symbols. Was breaking under Japanese Windows when
533 the timezone was specified as "Tokyo (standard time)".
534 Closes bug #1039270.
535
Barry Warsawbb113862004-10-03 03:16:19 +0000536- Updates for the email package:
Brett Cannon06a30b02004-10-22 06:22:54 +0000537
Barry Warsaw418de1f2004-10-11 14:32:47 +0000538 + email.Utils.formatdate() grew a 'usegmt' argument for HTTP support.
Barry Warsawbb113862004-10-03 03:16:19 +0000539 + All deprecated APIs that in email 2.x issued warnings have been removed:
540 _encoder argument to the MIMEText constructor, Message.add_payload(),
541 Utils.dump_address_pair(), Utils.decode(), Utils.encode()
542 + New deprecations: Generator.__call__(), Message.get_type(),
543 Message.get_main_type(), Message.get_subtype(), the 'strict' argument to
544 the Parser constructor. These will be removed in email 3.1.
545 + Support for Python earlier than 2.3 has been removed (see PEP 291).
546 + All defect classes have been renamed to end in 'Defect'.
547 + Some FeedParser fixes; also a MultipartInvariantViolationDefect will be
548 added to messages that claim to be multipart but really aren't.
549 + Updates to documentation.
550
Raymond Hettinger596ba4d2004-09-24 03:41:05 +0000551- re's findall() and finditer() functions now take an optional flags argument
552 just like the compile(), search(), and match() functions. Also, documented
553 the previously existing start and stop parameters for the findall() and
554 finditer() methods of regular expression objects.
555
Raymond Hettinger0318a932004-09-22 18:03:47 +0000556- rfc822 Messages now support iterating over the headers.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000557
Martin v. Löwisf3c56112004-09-18 09:08:52 +0000558- The (undocumented) tarfile.Tarfile.membernames has been removed;
559 applications should use the getmember function.
560
Martin v. Löwis39a31782004-09-18 09:03:49 +0000561- httplib now offers symbolic constants for the HTTP status codes.
562
Tim Peters528ca532004-09-16 01:30:50 +0000563- SF bug #1028306: Trying to compare a ``datetime.date`` to a
564 ``datetime.datetime`` mistakenly compared only the year, month and day.
565 Now it acts like a mixed-type comparison: ``False`` for ``==``,
566 ``True`` for ``!=``, and raises ``TypeError`` for other comparison
567 operators. Because datetime is a subclass of date, comparing only the
568 base class (date) members can still be done, if that's desired, by
569 forcing using of the approprate date method; e.g.,
570 ``a_date.__eq__(a_datetime)`` is true if and only if the year, month
571 and day members of ``a_date`` and ``a_datetime`` are equal.
572
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000573- bdist_rpm now supports command line options --force-arch,
574 {pre,post}-install, {pre,post}-uninstall, and
Martin v. Löwis23c48a12004-09-10 06:32:54 +0000575 {prep,build,install,clean,verify}-script.
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000576
Walter Dörwald69652032004-09-07 20:24:22 +0000577- SF patch #998993: The UTF-8 and the UTF-16 stateful decoders now support
578 decoding incomplete input (when the input stream is temporarily exhausted).
579 ``codecs.StreamReader`` now implements buffering, which enables proper
580 readline support for the UTF-16 decoders. ``codecs.StreamReader.read()``
581 has a new argument ``chars`` which specifies the number of characters to
582 return. ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` and
583 ``codecs.StreamReader.readlines()`` have a new argument ``keepends``.
584 Trailing "\n"s will be stripped from the lines if ``keepends`` is false.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000585
Tim Petersa80a2c82004-09-26 05:13:18 +0000586- The documentation for doctest is greatly expanded, and now covers all
587 the new public features (of which there are many).
588
Walter Dörwald5011d0c2004-09-13 08:53:15 +0000589- ``doctest.master`` was put back in, and ``doctest.testmod()`` once again
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000590 updates it. This isn't good, because every ``testmod()`` call
591 contributes to bloating the "hidden" state of ``doctest.master``, but
592 some old code apparently relies on it. For now, all we can do is
593 encourage people to stitch doctests together via doctest's unittest
Tim Petersa80a2c82004-09-26 05:13:18 +0000594 integration features instead.
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000595
Skip Montanaro82d0eec2004-09-14 17:58:31 +0000596- httplib now handles ipv6 address/port pairs.
597
David Goodger68a1abd2004-10-03 15:40:25 +0000598- SF bug #1017864: ConfigParser now correctly handles default keys,
599 processing them with ``ConfigParser.optionxform`` when supplied,
600 consistent with the handling of config file entries and runtime-set
601 options.
602
David Goodger1cbf2062004-10-03 15:55:09 +0000603- SF bug #997050: Document, test, & check for non-string values in
604 ConfigParser. Moved the new string-only restriction added in
605 rev. 1.65 to the SafeConfigParser class, leaving existing
606 ConfigParser & RawConfigParser behavior alone, and documented the
607 conditions under which non-string values work.
608
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000609Build
610-----
611
Brett Cannonbfef8692004-09-28 04:08:11 +0000612- Building on darwin now includes /opt/local/include and /opt/local/lib for
613 building extension modules. This is so as to include software installed as
614 a DarwinPorts port <http://darwinports.opendarwin.org/>
615
Tim Peters862f0592004-09-23 19:11:32 +0000616- pyport.h now defines a Py_IS_NAN macro. It works as-is when the
617 platform C computes true for ``x != x`` if and only if X is a NaN.
618 Other platforms can override the default definition with a platform-
619 specific spelling in that platform's pyconfig.h. You can also override
620 pyport.h's default Py_IS_INFINITY definition now.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000621
622C API
623-----
624
Tim Peters7f468f22004-10-11 02:40:51 +0000625- SF patch 1044089: New function ``PyEval_ThreadsInitialized()`` returns
626 non-zero if PyEval_InitThreads() has been called.
627
628- The undocumented and unused extern int ``_PyThread_Started`` was removed.
629
Tim Peters84705582004-10-10 02:47:33 +0000630- The C API calls ``PyInterpreterState_New()`` and ``PyThreadState_New()``
631 are two of the very few advertised as being safe to call without holding
632 the GIL. However, this wasn't true in a debug build, as bug 1041645
633 demonstrated. In a debug build, Python redirects the ``PyMem`` family
634 of calls to Python's small-object allocator, to get the benefit of
635 its extra debugging capabilities. But Python's small-object allocator
636 isn't threadsafe, relying on the GIL to avoid the expense of doing its
637 own locking. ``PyInterpreterState_New()`` and ``PyThreadState_New()``
638 call the platform ``malloc()`` directly now, regardless of build type.
639
Tim Peters307fa782004-09-23 08:06:40 +0000640- PyLong_AsUnsignedLong[Mask] now support int objects as well.
641
Walter Dörwald69652032004-09-07 20:24:22 +0000642- SF patch #998993: ``PyUnicode_DecodeUTF8Stateful`` and
643 ``PyUnicode_DecodeUTF16Stateful`` have been added, which implement stateful
644 decoding.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000645
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000646Tests
647-----
648
649- test__locale ported to unittest
650
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000651Mac
652---
653
Just van Rossumdd3c8372004-10-03 16:27:09 +0000654- ``plistlib`` now supports non-dict root objects. There is also a new
655 interface for reading and writing plist files: ``readPlist(pathOrFile)``
656 and ``writePlist(rootObject, pathOrFile)``
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000657
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000658Tools/Demos
659-----------
660
Tim Peters130e37f2004-10-03 19:03:19 +0000661- The text file comparison scripts ``ndiff.py`` and ``diff.py`` now
662 read the input files in universal-newline mode. This spares them
663 from consuming a great deal of time to deduce the useless result that,
664 e.g., a file with Windows line ends and a file with Linux line ends
665 have no lines in common.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000666
667
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000668What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 3?
669=================================
670
Anthony Baxtere13943a2004-09-02 16:37:15 +0000671*Release date: 02-SEP-2004*
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000672
673Core and builtins
674-----------------
675
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000676- SF patch #1007189: ``from ... import ...`` statements now allow the name
Anthony Baxter1a4ddae2004-08-31 10:07:13 +0000677 list to be surrounded by parentheses.
678
Tim Peters0973b992004-08-29 22:16:50 +0000679- Some speedups for long arithmetic, thanks to Trevor Perrin. Gradeschool
680 multiplication was sped a little by optimizing the C code. Gradeschool
681 squaring was sped by about a factor of 2, by exploiting that about half
682 the digit products are duplicates in a square. Because exponentiation
683 uses squaring often, this also speeds long power. For example, the time
684 to compute 17**1000000 dropped from about 14 seconds to 9 on my box due
685 to this much. The cutoff for Karatsuba multiplication was raised,
686 since gradeschool multiplication got quicker, and the cutoff was
Tim Peters47e52ee2004-08-30 02:44:38 +0000687 aggressively small regardless. The exponentiation algorithm was switched
688 from right-to-left to left-to-right, which is more efficient for small
689 bases. In addition, if the exponent is large, the algorithm now does
690 5 bits (instead of 1 bit) at a time. That cut the time to compute
691 17**1000000 on my box in half again, down to about 4.5 seconds.
Tim Peters0973b992004-08-29 22:16:50 +0000692
Tim Petersc8854432004-08-25 02:14:08 +0000693- OverflowWarning is no longer generated. PEP 237 scheduled this to
694 occur in Python 2.3, but since OverflowWarning was disabled by default,
695 nobody realized it was still being generated. On the chance that user
696 code is still using them, the Python builtin OverflowWarning, and
697 corresponding C API PyExc_OverflowWarning, will exist until Python 2.5.
698
Martin v. Löwis336e85f2004-08-19 11:31:58 +0000699- Py_InitializeEx has been added.
700
Brett Cannonadd33602004-08-15 07:21:25 +0000701- Fix the order of application of decorators. The proper order is bottom-up;
702 the first decorator listed is the last one called.
703
Neal Norwitzf0769532004-08-13 03:18:29 +0000704- SF patch #1005778. Fix a seg fault if the list size changed while
705 calling list.index(). This could happen if a rich comparison function
706 modified the list.
707
Michael W. Hudson5e897952004-08-12 18:12:44 +0000708- The ``func_name`` (a.k.a. ``__name__``) attribute of user-defined
709 functions is now writable.
710
Michael W. Hudson5523c252004-08-12 18:09:00 +0000711- code_new (a.k.a new.code()) now checks its arguments sufficiently
712 carefully that passing them on to PyCode_New() won't trigger calls
713 to Py_FatalError() or PyErr_BadInternalCall(). It is still the case
714 that the returned code object might be entirely insane.
715
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +0000716- Subclasses of string can no longer be interned. The semantics of
717 interning were not clear here -- a subclass could be mutable, for
718 example -- and had bugs. Explicitly interning a subclass of string
719 via intern() will raise a TypeError. Internal operations that attempt
720 to intern a string subclass will have no effect.
Jeremy Hylton4c989dd2004-08-07 19:20:05 +0000721
Tim Peters83b57352004-08-08 07:24:22 +0000722- Bug 1003935: xrange() could report bogus OverflowErrors. Documented
723 what xrange() intends, and repaired tests accordingly.
724
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000725Extension modules
726-----------------
727
Martin v. Löwise064b412004-08-29 16:34:40 +0000728- difflib now supports HTML side-by-side diff.
729
Martin v. Löwisdc3883f2004-08-29 15:46:35 +0000730- os.urandom has been added for systems that support sources of random
731 data.
732
Tim Peters037b3ee2004-08-21 06:55:43 +0000733- Patch 1012740: truncate() on a writeable cStringIO now resets the
734 position to the end of the stream. This is consistent with the original
735 StringIO module and avoids inadvertently resurrecting data that was
736 supposed to have been truncated away.
737
Dave Cole331708b2004-08-09 04:51:41 +0000738- Added socket.socketpair().
739
Dave Cole3203efb2004-08-26 00:37:31 +0000740- Added CurrentByteIndex, CurrentColumnNumber, CurrentLineNumber
741 members to xml.parsers.expat.XMLParser object.
742
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000743- The mpz, rotor, and xreadlines modules, all deprecated in earlier
Andrew M. Kuchling00873432004-08-31 13:50:43 +0000744 versions of Python, have now been removed.
745
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000746Library
747-------
748
Johannes Gijsbers4c11f602004-08-30 14:13:04 +0000749- Patch #934356: if a module defines __all__, believe that rather than using
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000750 heuristics for filtering out imported names.
Johannes Gijsbers4c11f602004-08-30 14:13:04 +0000751
Johannes Gijsbersae882f72004-08-30 10:19:56 +0000752- Patch #941486: added os.path.lexists(), which returns True for broken
753 symlinks, unlike os.path.exists().
754
Raymond Hettinger356a4592004-08-30 06:14:31 +0000755- the random module now uses os.urandom() for seeding if it is available.
756 Added a new generator based on os.urandom().
757
Martin v. Löwise064b412004-08-29 16:34:40 +0000758- difflib and diff.py can now generate HTML.
759
Martin v. Löwiscae9e672004-08-25 13:04:53 +0000760- bdist_rpm now includes version and release in the BuildRoot, and
761 replaces - by ``_`` in version and release.
Martin v. Löwiscf525242004-08-25 13:00:34 +0000762
Martin v. Löwis9f5c0c42004-08-25 11:37:43 +0000763- distutils build/build_scripts now has an -e option to specify the
764 path to the Python interpreter for installed scripts.
765
Barry Warsaw8bee7612004-08-25 02:22:30 +0000766- PEP 292 classes Template and SafeTemplate are added to the string module.
767
Martin v. Löwis75b9da42004-08-18 13:57:44 +0000768- tarfile now generates GNU tar files by default.
769
Martin v. Löwisdeacce22004-08-18 12:46:26 +0000770- HTTPResponse has now a getheaders method.
771
Johannes Gijsbersc473c992004-08-18 12:40:31 +0000772- Patch #1006219: let inspect.getsource handle '@' decorators. Thanks Simon
773 Percivall.
774
Martin v. Löwis318a12e2004-08-18 12:27:40 +0000775- logging.handlers.SMTPHandler.date_time has been removed;
776 the class now uses email.Utils.formatdate to generate the time stamp.
777
Martin v. Löwisfe84d172004-08-18 11:06:45 +0000778- A new function tkFont.nametofont was added to return an existing
779 font. The Font class constructor now has an additional exists argument
780 which, if True, requests to return/configure an existing font, rather
Tim Peters037b3ee2004-08-21 06:55:43 +0000781 than creating a new one.
Martin v. Löwisfe84d172004-08-18 11:06:45 +0000782
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +0000783- Updated the decimal package's min() and max() methods to match the
784 latest revision of the General Decimal Arithmetic Specification.
785 Quiet NaNs are ignored and equal values are sorted based on sign
786 and exponent.
787
788- The decimal package's Context.copy() method now returns deep copies.
789
790- Deprecated sys.exitfunc in favor of the atexit module. The sys.exitfunc
791 attribute will be kept around for backwards compatability and atexit
792 will just become the one preferred way to do it.
793
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +0000794- patch #675551: Add get_history_item and replace_history_item functions
795 to the readline module.
796
Johannes Gijsbers34c41202004-08-14 15:19:28 +0000797- bug #989672: pdb.doc and the help messages for the help_d and help_u methods
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +0000798 of the pdb.Pdb class gives have been corrected. d(own) goes to a newer
799 frame, u(p) to an older frame, not the other way around.
Johannes Gijsbers34c41202004-08-14 15:19:28 +0000800
Johannes Gijsbers4ec40642004-08-14 15:01:53 +0000801- bug #990669: os.path.realpath() will resolve symlinks before normalizing the
802 path, as normalizing the path may alter the meaning of the path if it
803 contains symlinks.
804
Johannes Gijsbers9d134b72004-08-14 14:03:03 +0000805- bug #851123: shutil.copyfile will raise an exception when trying to copy a
806 file onto a link to itself. Thanks Gregory Ball.
807
Brett Cannonb3de2e12004-08-13 18:46:24 +0000808- bug #570300: Fix inspect to resolve file locations using os.path.realpath()
809 so as to properly list all functions in a module when the module itself is
810 reached through a symlink. Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
811
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +0000812- doctest refactoring continued. See the docs for details. As part of
813 this effort, some old and little- (never?) used features are now
814 deprecated: the Tester class, the module is_private() function, and the
815 isprivate argument to testmod(). The Tester class supplied a feeble
816 "by hand" way to combine multiple doctests, if you knew exactly what
817 you were doing. The newer doctest features for unittest integration
818 already did a better job of that, are stronger now than ever, and the
819 new DocTestRunner class is a saner foundation if you want to do it by
820 hand. The "private name" filtering gimmick was a mistake from the
821 start, and testmod() changed long ago to ignore it by default. If
822 you want to filter out tests, the new DocTestFinder class can be used
823 to return a list of all doctests, and you can filter that list by
824 any computable criteria before passing it to a DocTestRunner instance.
825
Matthias Klose2e829c02004-08-15 17:04:33 +0000826- Bug #891637, patch #1005466: fix inspect.getargs() crash on def foo((bar)).
827
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000828Tools/Demos
829-----------
830
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +0000831- IDLE's shortcut keys for windows are now case insensitive so that
832 Control-V works the same as Control-v.
833
Matthias Klose2443d4a2004-08-16 12:10:12 +0000834- pygettext.py: Generate POT-Creation-Date header in ISO format.
835
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000836Build
837-----
838
Tim Peters47e52ee2004-08-30 02:44:38 +0000839- Backward incompatibility: longintrepr.h now triggers a compile-time
840 error if SHIFT (the number of bits in a Python long "digit") isn't
841 divisible by 5. This new requirement allows simple code for the new
842 5-bits-at-a-time long_pow() implementation. If necessary, the
843 restriction could be removed (by complicating long_pow(), or by
844 falling back to the 1-bit-at-a-time algorithm), but there are no
845 plans to do so.
846
Brett Cannoncc8a4f62004-08-26 01:44:07 +0000847- bug #991962: When building with --disable-toolbox-glue on Darwin no
848 attempt to build Mac-specific modules occurs.
849
Michael W. Hudson800ba232004-08-12 18:19:17 +0000850- The --with-tsc flag to configure to enable VM profiling with the
851 processor's timestamp counter now works on PPC platforms.
852
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +0000853- patch #1006629: Define _XOPEN_SOURCE to 500 on Solaris 8/9 to match
854 GCC's definition and avoid redefinition warnings.
855
Matthias Klosea2542be2004-08-16 11:35:51 +0000856- Detect pthreads support (provided by gnu pth pthread emulation) on
857 GNU/k*BSD systems.
858
Hye-Shik Chang3ba5bfc2004-08-19 17:52:37 +0000859- bug #1005737, #1007249: Fixed several build problems and warnings
860 found on old/legacy C compilers of HP-UX, IRIX and Tru64.
861
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000862C API
863-----
864
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +0000865..
866
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000867Documentation
868-------------
869
Neal Norwitz5268c392004-08-21 15:13:52 +0000870- patch #1005936, bug #1009373: fix index entries which contain
871 an underscore when viewed with Acrobat.
872
873- bug #990669: os.path.normpath may alter the meaning of a path if
874 it contains symbolic links. This has been documented in a comment
875 since 1992, but is now in the library reference as well.
Johannes Gijsbersb112d6e2004-08-14 14:41:32 +0000876
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000877New platforms
878-------------
879
Hye-Shik Changf64700a2004-08-18 15:13:41 +0000880- FreeBSD 6 is now supported.
881
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000882Tests
883-----
884
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +0000885..
886
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000887Windows
888-------
889
Tim Peters79b52b72004-08-12 18:37:10 +0000890- Boosted the stack reservation for python.exe and pythonw.exe from
891 the default 1MB to 2MB. Stack frames under VC 7.1 for 2.4 are enough
892 bigger than under VC 6.0 for 2.3.4 that deeply recursive progams
893 within the default sys.getrecursionlimit() default value of 1000 were
894 able to suffer undetected C stack overflows. The standard test program
895 test_compiler was one such program. If a Python process on Windows
896 "just vanishes" without a trace, and without an error message of any
897 kind, but with an exit code of 128, undetected stack overflow may be
898 the problem.
899
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000900Mac
901---
902
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +0000903..
904
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000905
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000906What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 2?
907=================================
908
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +0000909*Release date: 05-AUG-2004*
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000910
911Core and builtins
912-----------------
913
Raymond Hettinger52a21b82004-08-06 18:43:09 +0000914- Patch #980695: Implements efficient string concatenation for statements
915 of the form s=s+t and s+=t. This will vary across implementations.
916 Accordingly, the str.join() method is strongly preferred for performance
917 sensitive code.
918
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +0000919- PEP-0318, Function Decorators have been added to the language. These are
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +0000920 implemented using the Java-style @decorator syntax, like so::
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000921
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +0000922 @staticmethod
923 def foo(bar):
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000924
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +0000925 (The PEP needs to be updated to reflect the current state)
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +0000926
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +0000927- When importing a module M raises an exception, Python no longer leaves M
928 in sys.modules. Before 2.4a2 it did, and a subsequent import of M would
929 succeed, picking up a module object from sys.modules reflecting as much
930 of the initialization of M as completed before the exception was raised.
931 Subsequent imports got no indication that M was in a partially-
932 initialized state, and the importers could get into arbitrarily bad
933 trouble as a result (the M they got was in an unintended state,
934 arbitrarily far removed from M's author's intent). Now subsequent
935 imports of M will continue raising exceptions (but if, for example, the
936 source code for M is edited between import attempts, then perhaps later
937 attempts will succeed, or raise a different exception).
938
939 This can break existing code, but in such cases the code was probably
940 working before by accident. In the Python source, the only case of
941 breakage discovered was in a test accidentally relying on a damaged
942 module remaining in sys.modules. Cases are also known where tests
943 deliberately provoking import errors remove damaged modules from
944 sys.modules themselves, and such tests will break now if they do an
945 unconditional del sys.modules[M].
946
Marc-André Lemburgb314ce92004-07-23 16:14:57 +0000947- u'%s' % obj will now try obj.__unicode__() first and fallback to
948 obj.__str__() if no __unicode__ method can be found.
949
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +0000950- Patch #550732: Add PyArg_VaParseTupleAndKeywords(). Analogous to
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000951 PyArg_VaParse(). Both are now documented. Thanks Greg Chapman.
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +0000952
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000953- Allow string and unicode return types from .encode()/.decode()
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000954 methods on string and unicode objects. Added unicode.decode()
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000955 which was missing for no apparent reason.
956
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000957- An attempt to fix the mess that is Python's behaviour with
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000958 signal handlers and threads, complicated by readline's behaviour.
959 It's quite possible that there are still bugs here.
960
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000961- Added C macros Py_CLEAR and Py_VISIT to ease the implementation of
962 types that support garbage collection.
963
Raymond Hettinger76d962d2004-07-16 12:16:48 +0000964- Compiler now treats None as a constant.
965
Neil Schemenauer3a313e32004-07-19 16:29:17 +0000966- The type of values returned by __int__, __float__, __long__,
967 __oct__, and __hex__ are now checked. Returning an invalid type
968 will cause a TypeError to be raised. This matches the behavior of
969 Jython.
970
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +0000971- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in locale module.
972
Hye-Shik Changb5047fd2004-08-04 06:33:51 +0000973- Added a workaround for proper string operations in BSDs. str.split
974 and str.is* methods can now work correctly with UTF-8 locales.
975
Hye-Shik Changc81c6952004-08-04 17:40:38 +0000976- Bug #989185: unicode.iswide() and unicode.width() is dropped and
977 the East Asian Width support is moved to unicodedata extension
978 module.
Hye-Shik Change9ddfbb2004-08-04 07:38:35 +0000979
Hye-Shik Chang7df44b32004-08-04 17:36:41 +0000980- Patch #941229: The source code encoding in interactive mode
981 now refers sys.stdin.encoding not just ISO-8859-1 anymore. This
982 allows for non-latin-1 users to write unicode strings directly.
983
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000984Extension modules
985-----------------
986
Martin v. Löwis544f1192004-07-27 05:22:33 +0000987- cpickle now supports the same keyword arguments as pickle.
988
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000989Library
990-------
991
Marc-André Lemburgc759f072004-08-05 12:43:30 +0000992- Added new codecs and aliases for ISO_8859-11, ISO_8859-16 and
993 TIS-620
994
Tim Peters8485b562004-08-04 18:46:34 +0000995- Thanks to Edward Loper, doctest has been massively refactored, and
996 many new features were added. Full docs will appear later. For now
997 the doctest module comments and new test cases give good coverage.
998 The refactoring provides many hook points for customizing behavior
999 (such as how to report errors, and how to compare expected to actual
1000 output). New features include a <BLANKLINE> marker for expected
1001 output containing blank lines, options to produce unified or context
1002 diffs when actual output doesn't match expectations, an option to
1003 normalize whitespace before comparing, and an option to use an
1004 ellipsis to signify "don't care" regions of output.
1005
Martin v. Löwis1fa649f2004-08-03 18:45:31 +00001006- Tkinter now supports the wish -sync and -use options.
1007
Fred Drakef901abd2004-08-03 17:58:55 +00001008- The following methods in time support passing of None: ctime(), gmtime(),
1009 and localtime(). If None is provided, the current time is used (the
1010 same as when the argument is omitted).
1011 [SF bug 658254, patch 663482]
1012
Martin v. Löwis9513e342004-08-03 14:36:32 +00001013- nntplib does now allow to ignore a .netrc file.
1014
Martin v. Löwis65a79752004-08-03 12:59:55 +00001015- urllib2 now recognizes Basic authentication even if other authentication
1016 schemes are offered.
1017
Neal Norwitz0e67fd42004-08-01 22:48:06 +00001018- Bug #1001053. wave.open() now accepts unicode filenames.
1019
Tim Peters5cfb05e2004-07-27 21:02:02 +00001020- gzip.GzipFile has a new fileno() method, to retrieve the handle of the
1021 underlying file object (provided it has a fileno() method). This is
1022 needed if you want to use os.fsync() on a GzipFile.
1023
Martin v. Löwis7b9190b2004-07-27 05:07:19 +00001024- imaplib has two new methods: deleteacl and myrights.
1025
Martin v. Löwiscc0f9322004-07-26 12:40:50 +00001026- nntplib has two new methods: description and descriptions. They
1027 use a more RFC-compliant way of getting a newsgroup description.
1028
Brett Cannon8b3d92a2004-07-21 02:21:58 +00001029- Bug #993394. Fix a possible red herring of KeyError in 'threading' being
1030 raised during interpreter shutdown from a registered function with atexit
1031 when dummy_threading is being used.
1032
Neal Norwitza4f651a2004-07-20 22:07:44 +00001033- Bug #857297/Patch #916874. Fix an error when extracting a hard link
1034 from a tarfile.
1035
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +00001036- Patch #846659. Fix an error in tarfile.py when using
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +00001037 GNU longname/longlink creation.
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +00001038
Tim Peters90ee7eb2004-07-18 23:58:17 +00001039- The obsolete FCNTL.py has been deleted. The builtin fcntl module
1040 has been available (on platforms that support fcntl) since Python
1041 1.5a3, and all FCNTL.py did is export fcntl's names, after generating
1042 a deprecation warning telling you to use fcntl directly.
1043
Hye-Shik Chang2bb146f2004-07-18 03:06:29 +00001044- Several new unicode codecs are added: big5hkscs, euc_jis_2004,
1045 iso2022_jp_2004, shift_jis_2004.
1046
Tim Peters5af0e412004-07-12 00:45:14 +00001047- Bug #788520. Queue.{get, get_nowait, put, put_nowait} have new
1048 implementations, exploiting Conditions (which didn't exist at the time
1049 Queue was introduced). A minor semantic change is that the Full and
1050 Empty exceptions raised by non-blocking calls now occur only if the
1051 queue truly was full or empty at the instant the queue was checked (of
1052 course the Queue may no longer be full or empty by the time a calling
1053 thread sees those exceptions, though). Before, the exceptions could
1054 also be raised if it was "merely inconvenient" for the implementation
1055 to determine the true state of the Queue (because the Queue was locked
1056 by some other method in progress).
1057
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001058- Bugs #979794 and #980117: difflib.get_grouped_opcodes() now handles the
1059 case of comparing two empty lists. This affected both context_diff() and
1060 unified_diff(),
Brett Cannond2c5b4b2004-07-10 23:54:07 +00001061
Brett Cannone6f8a892004-07-10 23:14:30 +00001062- Bug #980938: smtplib now prints debug output to sys.stderr.
1063
Brett Cannonf50299c2004-07-10 22:55:15 +00001064- Bug #930024: posixpath.realpath() now handles infinite loops in symlinks by
1065 returning the last point in the path that was not part of any loop. Thanks
1066 AM Kuchling.
1067
Brett Cannonbdc36272004-07-10 20:42:22 +00001068- Bug #980327: ntpath not handles compressing erroneous slashes between the
1069 drive letter and the rest of the path. Also clearly handles UNC addresses now
1070 as well. Thanks Paul Moore.
1071
Brett Cannone6751182004-07-10 19:13:42 +00001072- bug #679953: zipfile.py should now work for files over 2 GB. The packed data
1073 for file sizes (compressed and uncompressed) was being stored as signed
1074 instead of unsigned.
1075
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001076- decimal.py now only uses signals in the IBM spec. The other conditions are
Raymond Hettinger5aa478b2004-07-09 10:02:53 +00001077 no longer part of the public API.
1078
Marc-André Lemburg88fcca62004-07-10 16:16:06 +00001079- codecs module now has two new generic APIs: encode() and decode()
1080 which don't restrict the return types (unlike the unicode and
1081 string methods of the same name).
1082
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001083- Non-blocking SSL sockets work again; they were broken in Python 2.3.
Andrew M. Kuchling79d7e922004-07-10 21:21:55 +00001084 SF patch 945642.
1085
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001086- doctest unittest integration improvements:
1087
1088 o Improved the unitest test output for doctest-based unit tests
1089
1090 o Can now pass setUp and tearDown functions when creating
1091 DocTestSuites.
1092
1093- The threading module has a new class, local, for creating objects
1094 that provide thread-local data.
1095
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +00001096- Bug #990307: when keep_empty_values is True, cgi.parse_qsl()
1097 no longer returns spurious empty fields.
1098
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +00001099- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in gettext module.
1100
1101- Introduced in gettext module the l*gettext() family of functions,
1102 which return translation strings encoded in the preferred encoding,
1103 as informed by locale module's getpreferredencoding().
1104
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +00001105- optparse module (and tests) upgraded to Optik 1.5a1. Changes:
1106
1107 - Add expansion of default values in help text: the string
1108 "%default" in an option's help string is expanded to str() of
1109 that option's default value, or "none" if no default value.
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +00001110
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +00001111 - Bug #955889: option default values that happen to be strings are
1112 now processed in the same way as values from the command line; this
1113 allows generation of nicer help when using custom types. Can
1114 be disabled with parser.set_process_default_values(False).
1115
1116 - Bug #960515: don't crash when generating help for callback
1117 options that specify 'type', but not 'dest' or 'metavar'.
1118
1119 - Feature #815264: change the default help format for short options
1120 that take an argument from e.g. "-oARG" to "-o ARG"; add
1121 set_short_opt_delimiter() and set_long_opt_delimiter() methods to
1122 HelpFormatter to allow (slight) customization of the formatting.
1123
1124 - Patch #736940: internationalize Optik: all built-in user-
1125 targeted literal strings are passed through gettext.gettext(). (If
1126 you want translations (.po files), they're not included with Python
1127 -- you'll find them in the Optik source distribution from
1128 http://optik.sourceforge.net/ .)
1129
1130 - Bug #878453: respect $COLUMNS environment variable for
1131 wrapping help output.
1132
1133 - Feature #988122: expand "%prog" in the 'description' passed
1134 to OptionParser, just like in the 'usage' and 'version' strings.
1135 (This is *not* done in the 'description' passed to OptionGroup.)
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +00001136
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001137C API
1138-----
1139
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +00001140- PyImport_ExecCodeModule() and PyImport_ExecCodeModuleEx(): if an
1141 error occurs while loading the module, these now delete the module's
1142 entry from sys.modules. All ways of loading modules eventually call
1143 one of these, so this is an error-case change in semantics for all
1144 ways of loading modules. In rare cases, a module loader may wish
1145 to keep a module object in sys.modules despite that the module's
1146 code cannot be executed. In such cases, the module loader must
1147 arrange to reinsert the name and module object in sys.modules.
1148 PyImport_ReloadModule() has been changed to reinsert the original
1149 module object into sys.modules if the module reload fails, so that
1150 its visible semantics have not changed.
1151
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001152- A large pile of datetime field-extraction macros is now documented,
1153 thanks to Anthony Tuininga (patch #986010).
1154
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001155Documentation
1156-------------
1157
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +00001158- Improved the tutorial on creating types in C.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001159
1160 - point out the importance of reassigning data members before
Andrew M. Kuchling78d375f2004-08-07 14:00:39 +00001161 assigning their values
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001162
Andrew M. Kuchling28025ec2004-08-07 13:59:22 +00001163 - correct my misconception about return values from visitprocs. Sigh.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001164
1165 - mention the labor saving Py_VISIT and Py_CLEAR macros.
1166
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +00001167- Major rewrite of the math module docs, to address common confusions.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001168
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001169Tests
1170-----
1171
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +00001172- The test data files for the decimal test suite are now installed on
Anthony Baxterfd4984d2004-07-12 09:33:39 +00001173 platforms that use the Makefile.
1174
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +00001175- SF patch 995225: The test file testtar.tar accidentally contained
1176 CVS keywords (like $Id$), which could cause spurious failures in
1177 test_tarfile.py depending on how the test file was checked out.
1178
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001179
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001180What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 1?
1181=================================
1182
Anthony Baxter3210b362004-07-08 05:59:43 +00001183*Release date: 08-JUL-2004*
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001184
1185Core and builtins
1186-----------------
1187
Fred Drake0a4dd392004-07-02 18:57:45 +00001188- weakref.ref is now the type object also known as
1189 weakref.ReferenceType; it can be subclassed like any other new-style
1190 class. There's less per-entry overhead in WeakValueDictionary
1191 objects now (one object instead of three).
1192
Thomas Heller04c673b2004-07-02 08:56:20 +00001193- Bug #951851: Python crashed when reading import table of certain
1194 Windows DLLs.
1195
Raymond Hettinger66bd2332004-08-02 08:30:07 +00001196- Bug #215126. The locals argument to eval(), execfile(), and exec now
1197 accept any mapping type.
Raymond Hettinger214b1c32004-07-02 06:41:07 +00001198
Martin v. Löwisef82d2f2004-06-27 16:51:46 +00001199- marshal now shares interned strings. This change introduces
1200 a new .pyc magic.
1201
Anthony Baxter3ecdb252004-06-11 14:41:18 +00001202- Bug #966623. classes created with type() in an exec(, {}) don't
1203 have a __module__, but code in typeobject assumed it would always
1204 be there.
1205
Martin v. Löwis737ea822004-06-08 18:52:54 +00001206- Python no longer relies on the LC_NUMERIC locale setting to be
1207 the "C" locale; as a result, it no longer tries to prevent changing
1208 the LC_NUMERIC category.
1209
Tim Peters604c0132004-06-07 23:04:33 +00001210- Bug #952807: Unpickling pickled instances of subclasses of
1211 datetime.date, datetime.datetime and datetime.time could yield insane
1212 objects. Thanks to Jiwon Seo for a fix.
1213
Thomas Heller90a764c2004-06-07 15:12:44 +00001214- Bug #845802: Python crashes when __init__.py is a directory.
1215
Hye-Shik Changbc555e32004-06-03 11:10:58 +00001216- Unicode objects received two new methods: iswide() and width().
1217 These query East Asian width information, as specified in Unicode
1218 TR11.
Hye-Shik Chang974ed7c2004-06-02 16:49:17 +00001219
Raymond Hettinger41bd0222004-06-01 06:36:24 +00001220- Improved the tuple hashing algorithm to give fewer collisions in
1221 common cases. Fixes bug #942952.
1222
Raymond Hettinger354433a2004-05-19 08:20:33 +00001223- Implemented generator expressions (PEP 289). Coded by Jiwon Seo.
1224
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +00001225- Enabled the profiling of C extension functions (and builtins) - check
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001226 new documentation and modified profile and bdb modules for more details
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +00001227
Nicholas Bastinabce8a62004-03-21 20:24:07 +00001228- Set file.name to the object passed to open (instead of a new string)
1229
Nicholas Bastina7604bf2004-03-21 18:37:23 +00001230- Moved tracebackobject into traceback.h and renamed to PyTracebackObject
1231
Raymond Hettingerff5bc502004-03-21 15:12:00 +00001232- Optimized the byte coding for multiple assignments like "a,b=b,a" and
1233 "a,b,c=1,2,3". Improves their speed by 25% to 30%.
1234
Brett Cannon4f653312004-03-20 22:52:14 +00001235- Limit the nested depth of a tuple for the second argument to isinstance()
1236 and issubclass() to the recursion limit of the interpreter.
1237 Fixes bug #858016 .
1238
Raymond Hettingerade08ea2004-03-18 09:48:12 +00001239- Optimized dict iterators, creating separate types for each
1240 and having them reveal their length. Also optimized the
1241 methods: keys(), values(), and items().
1242
Raymond Hettingerdd80f762004-03-07 07:31:06 +00001243- Implemented a newcode opcode, LIST_APPEND, that simplifies
1244 the generated bytecode for list comprehensions and further
1245 improves their performance (about 35%).
1246
Michael W. Hudsond3b33b52004-02-19 19:35:22 +00001247- Implemented rich comparisons for floats, which seems to make
1248 comparisons involving NaNs somewhat less surprising when the
1249 underlying C compiler actually implements C99 semantics.
1250
Raymond Hettingerfa7b9d82004-02-15 04:06:39 +00001251- Optimized list.extend() to save memory and no longer create
1252 intermediate sequences. Also, extend() now pre-allocates the
1253 needed memory whenever the length of the iterable is known in
1254 advance -- this halves the time to extend the list.
1255
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001256- Optimized list resize operations to make fewer calls to the system
1257 realloc(). Significantly speeds up list appends, list pops,
Walter Dörwald09515af2005-03-18 10:28:24 +00001258 list comprehensions, and the list constructor (when the input iterable
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001259 length is not known).
1260
1261- Changed the internal list over-allocation scheme. For larger lists,
1262 overallocation ranged between 3% and 25%. Now, it is a constant 12%.
Raymond Hettingerab517d22004-02-14 18:34:46 +00001263 For smaller lists (n<8), overallocation was upto eight elements. Now,
1264 the overallocation is no more than three elements -- this improves space
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001265 utilization for applications that have large numbers of small lists.
1266
Raymond Hettinger0468e412004-05-05 05:37:53 +00001267- Most list bodies now get re-used rather than freed. Speeds up list
1268 instantiation and deletion by saving calls to malloc() and free().
1269
Raymond Hettinger31017ae2004-03-04 08:25:44 +00001270- The dict.update() method now accepts all the same argument forms
1271 as the dict() constructor. This now includes item lists and/or
1272 keyword arguments.
1273
Michael W. Hudsonecfeb7f2004-02-12 15:28:27 +00001274- Support for arbitrary objects supporting the read-only buffer
1275 interface as the co_code field of code objects (something that was
1276 only possible to create from C code) has been removed.
1277
Fred Drake228765b2004-02-06 04:15:22 +00001278- Made omitted callback and None equivalent for weakref.ref() and
1279 weakref.proxy(); the None case wasn't handled correctly in all
1280 cases.
1281
1282- Fixed problem where PyWeakref_NewRef() and PyWeakref_NewProxy()
1283 assumed that initial existing entries in an object's weakref list
1284 would not be removed while allocating a new weakref object. Since
1285 GC could be invoked at that time, however, that assumption was
1286 invalid. In a truly obscure case of GC being triggered during
1287 creation for a new weakref object for an referent which already
1288 has a weakref without a callback which is only referenced from
1289 cyclic trash, a memory error can occur. This consistently created a
1290 segfault in a debug build, but provided less predictable behavior in
1291 a release build.
1292
Hye-Shik Changff83c2b2004-02-02 13:39:01 +00001293- input() builtin function now respects compiler flags such as
1294 __future__ statements. SF patch 876178.
1295
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +00001296- Removed PendingDeprecationWarning from apply(). apply() remains
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +00001297 deprecated, but the nuisance warning will not be issued.
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +00001298
Tim Peters1d7323e2003-12-01 21:35:27 +00001299- At Python shutdown time (Py_Finalize()), 2.3 called cyclic garbage
1300 collection twice, both before and after tearing down modules. The
1301 call after tearing down modules has been disabled, because too much
1302 of Python has been torn down then for __del__ methods and weakref
1303 callbacks to execute sanely. The most common symptom was a sequence
1304 of uninformative messages on stderr when Python shut down, produced
1305 by threads trying to raise exceptions, but unable to report the nature
1306 of their problems because too much of the sys module had already been
1307 destroyed.
1308
Guido van Rossum6c9e1302003-11-29 23:52:13 +00001309- Removed FutureWarnings related to hex/oct literals and conversions
1310 and left shifts. (Thanks to Kalle Svensson for SF patch 849227.)
1311 This addresses most of the remaining semantic changes promised by
1312 PEP 237, except for repr() of a long, which still shows the trailing
1313 'L'. The PEP appears to promise warnings for operations that
1314 changed semantics compared to Python 2.3, but this is not
1315 implemented; we've suffered through enough warnings related to
1316 hex/oct literals and I think it's best to be silent now.
1317
Raymond Hettinger4f8f9762003-11-26 08:21:35 +00001318- For str and unicode objects, the ljust(), center(), and rjust()
1319 methods now accept an optional argument specifying a fill
1320 character other than a space.
1321
Guido van Rossumbaf0f8f2003-11-22 23:55:50 +00001322- When method objects have an attribute that can be satisfied either
1323 by the function object or by the method object, the function
1324 object's attribute usually wins. Christian Tismer pointed out that
1325 that this is really a mistake, because this only happens for special
1326 methods (like __reduce__) where the method object's version is
1327 really more appropriate than the function's attribute. So from now
1328 on, all method attributes will have precedence over function
1329 attributes with the same name.
1330
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +00001331- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 839548: if a weakref with a callback,
1332 its callback, and its weakly referenced object, all became part of
1333 cyclic garbage during a single run of garbage collection, the order
1334 in which they were torn down was unpredictable. It was possible for
1335 the callback to see partially-torn-down objects, leading to immediate
1336 segfaults, or, if the callback resurrected garbage objects, to
1337 resurrect insane objects that caused segfaults (or other surprises)
1338 later. In one sense this wasn't surprising, because Python's cyclic gc
1339 had no knowledge of Python's weakref objects. It does now. When
1340 weakrefs with callbacks become part of cyclic garbage now, those
1341 weakrefs are cleared first. The callbacks don't trigger then,
1342 preventing the problems. If you need callbacks to trigger, then just
1343 as when cyclic gc is not involved, you need to write your code so
1344 that weakref objects outlive the objects they weakly reference.
Raymond Hettingera690a992003-11-16 16:17:49 +00001345
Tim Petersadd09b42003-11-12 20:43:28 +00001346- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 840829: if cyclic garbage collection
1347 happened to occur during a weakref callback for a new-style class
1348 instance, subtle memory corruption was the result (in a release build;
1349 in a debug build, a segfault occurred reliably very soon after).
1350 This has been repaired.
1351
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +00001352- Compiler flags set in PYTHONSTARTUP are now active in __main__.
1353
1354- Added two builtin types, set() and frozenset().
1355
Raymond Hettinger85c20a42003-11-06 14:06:48 +00001356- Added a reversed() builtin function that returns a reverse iterator
1357 over a sequence.
1358
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +00001359- Added a sorted() builtin function that returns a new sorted list
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001360 from any iterable.
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +00001361
Martin v. Löwis01a74b22003-10-19 18:30:01 +00001362- CObjects are now mutable (on the C level) through PyCObject_SetVoidPtr.
1363
Raymond Hettinger42b1ba32003-10-16 03:41:09 +00001364- list.sort() now supports three keyword arguments: cmp, key, and reverse.
1365 The key argument can be a function of one argument that extracts a
1366 comparison key from the original record: mylist.sort(key=str.lower).
1367 The reverse argument is a boolean value and if True will change the
1368 sort order as if the comparison arguments were reversed. In addition,
1369 the documentation has been amended to provide a guarantee that all sorts
1370 starting with Py2.3 are guaranteed to be stable (the relative order of
1371 records with equal keys is unchanged).
1372
Marc-André Lemburgd7160f82003-09-22 11:14:40 +00001373- Added test whether wchar_t is signed or not. A signed wchar_t is not
1374 usable as internal unicode type base for Py_UNICODE since the
1375 unicode implementation assumes an unsigned type.
1376
Jeremy Hyltond8082792003-09-16 19:41:39 +00001377- Fixed a bug in the cache of length-one Unicode strings that could
1378 lead to a seg fault. The specific problem occurred when an earlier,
1379 non-fatal error left an uninitialized Unicode object in the
1380 freelist.
1381
Raymond Hettinger9bfe5332003-08-27 04:55:52 +00001382- The % formatting operator now supports '%F' which is equivalent to
1383 '%f'. This has always been documented but never implemented.
1384
Tim Peters465fa3d2003-08-15 01:16:37 +00001385- complex(obj) could leak a little memory if obj wasn't a string or
1386 number.
1387
Raymond Hettingereaef6152003-08-02 07:42:57 +00001388- zip() with no arguments now returns an empty list instead of raising
1389 a TypeError exception.
1390
Guido van Rossum02c58f82003-10-08 21:08:29 +00001391- obj.__contains__() now returns True/False instead of 1/0. SF patch
1392 820195.
1393
Armin Rigo2b3eb402003-10-28 12:05:48 +00001394- Python no longer tries to be smart about recursive comparisons.
1395 When comparing containers with cyclic references to themselves it
1396 will now just hit the recursion limit. See SF patch 825639.
1397
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001398- str and unicode builtin types now have an rsplit() method that is
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +00001399 same as split() except that it scans the string from the end
1400 working towards the beginning. See SF feature request 801847.
Hye-Shik Chang060ebed2003-12-15 18:51:19 +00001401
Jim Fulton8a1a5942004-02-08 04:21:26 +00001402- Fixed a bug in object.__reduce_ex__ when using protocol 2. Failure
1403 to clear the error when attempts to get the __getstate__ attribute
1404 fail caused intermittent errors and odd behavior.
1405
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001406- buffer objects based on other objects no longer cache a pointer to
1407 the data and the data length. Instead, the appropriate tp_as_buffer
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001408 method is called as necessary.
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001409
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001410- fixed: if a file is opened with an explicit buffer size >= 1, repeated
Andrew MacIntyre4e10ed32004-04-04 07:01:35 +00001411 close() calls would attempt to free() the buffer already free()ed on
1412 the first call.
1413
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001414
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001415Extension modules
1416-----------------
1417
Barry Warsaw11b91a02004-06-28 00:50:43 +00001418- Added socket.getservbyport(), and make the second argument in
1419 getservbyname() and getservbyport() optional.
1420
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +00001421- time module code that deals with input POSIX timestamps will now raise
1422 ValueError if more than a second is lost in precision when the
1423 timestamp is cast to the platform C time_t type. There's no chance
1424 that the platform will do anything sensible with the result in such
1425 cases. This includes ctime(), localtime() and gmtime(). Assorted
1426 fromtimestamp() and utcfromtimestamp() methods in the datetime module
1427 were also protected. Closes bugs #919012 and 975996.
Brett Cannonb46ed712004-06-19 20:50:47 +00001428
Martin v. Löwis77ca6c42004-06-03 12:47:26 +00001429- fcntl.ioctl now warns if the mutate flag is not specified.
1430
Martin v. Löwisd8948722004-06-02 09:57:56 +00001431- nt now properly allows to refer to UNC roots, e.g. in nt.stat().
1432
Raymond Hettinger027bb632004-05-31 03:09:25 +00001433- the weakref module now supports additional objects: array.array,
1434 sre.pattern_objects, file objects, and sockets.
1435
Raymond Hettingere2eda602004-04-04 08:51:41 +00001436- operator.isMappingType() and operator.isSequenceType() now give
1437 fewer false positives.
1438
Brett Cannon06c34792004-03-23 23:16:54 +00001439- socket.sslerror is now a subclass of socket.error . Also added
1440 socket.error to the socket module's C API.
1441
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001442- Bug #920575: A problem where the _locale module segfaults on
Hye-Shik Changc3a87b82004-03-21 19:34:30 +00001443 nl_langinfo(ERA) caused by GNU libc's illegal NULL return is fixed.
1444
Raymond Hettinger6e2ee862004-03-14 04:37:50 +00001445- array objects now support the copy module. Also, their resizing
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001446 scheme has been updated to match that used for list objects. This improves
Raymond Hettinger49f9bd12004-03-14 05:43:59 +00001447 the performance (speed and memory usage) of append() operations.
Raymond Hettinger6ab78cd2004-08-29 07:50:43 +00001448 Also, array.array() and array.extend() now accept any iterable argument
1449 for repeated appends without needing to create another temporary array.
Raymond Hettinger3aa82c02004-03-13 18:18:51 +00001450
Raymond Hettinger3e47f652004-03-08 18:22:35 +00001451- cStringIO.writelines() now accepts any iterable argument and writes
1452 the lines one at a time rather than joining them and writing once.
1453 Made a parallel change to StringIO.writelines(). Saves memory and
1454 makes suitable for use with generator expressions.
1455
Brett Cannond1080a32004-03-02 04:38:10 +00001456- time.strftime() now checks that the values in its time tuple argument
1457 are within the proper boundaries to prevent possible crashes from the
1458 platform's C library implementation of strftime(). Can possibly
1459 break code that uses values outside the range that didn't cause
1460 problems previously (such as sitting day of year to 0). Fixes bug
1461 #897625.
1462
Martin v. Löwis12af0482004-01-31 12:34:17 +00001463- The socket module now supports Bluetooth sockets, if the
1464 system has <bluetooth/bluetooth.h>
1465
Raymond Hettinger756b3f32004-01-29 06:37:52 +00001466- Added a collections module containing a new datatype, deque(),
1467 offering high-performance, thread-safe, memory friendly appends
1468 and pops on either side of the deque.
1469
1470- Several modules now take advantage of collections.deque() for
1471 improved performance: Queue, mutex, shlex, threading, and pydoc.
1472
Raymond Hettinger166958b2003-12-01 13:18:39 +00001473- The operator module has two new functions, attrgetter() and
1474 itemgetter() which are useful for creating fast data extractor
1475 functions for map(), list.sort(), itertools.groupby(), and
1476 other functions that expect a function argument.
1477
Martin v. Löwis94681fc2003-11-27 19:40:22 +00001478- socket.SHUT_{RD,WR,RDWR} was added.
1479
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +00001480- os.getsid was added.
1481
Guido van Rossum16b9fa82003-10-23 23:54:57 +00001482- The pwd module incorrectly advertised its struct type as
1483 struct_pwent; this has been renamed to struct_passwd. (The old name
1484 is still supported for backwards compatibility.)
1485
Fred Drakede050322003-10-21 15:41:59 +00001486- The xml.parsers.expat module now provides Expat 1.95.7.
1487
Martin v. Löwis3bbd6542003-10-03 13:57:37 +00001488- socket.IPPROTO_IPV6 was added.
1489
Martin v. Löwise7a97962003-09-20 16:08:33 +00001490- readline.clear_history was added.
1491
Brett Cannon62dba4c2003-09-10 19:37:42 +00001492- select.select() now accepts sequences for its first three arguments.
1493
Raymond Hettinger5475f232003-08-08 12:20:03 +00001494- cStringIO now supports the f.closed attribute.
1495
Anthony Baxter83f52912003-08-05 06:33:56 +00001496- The signal module now exposes SIGRTMIN and SIGRTMAX (if available).
1497
Andrew M. Kuchling69f31eb2003-08-13 23:11:04 +00001498- curses module now supports use_default_colors(). [patch #739124]
1499
Anthony Baxter5c68ef02003-10-04 08:04:04 +00001500- Bug #811028: ncurses.h breakage on FreeBSD/MacOS X
1501
1502- Bug #814613: INET_ADDRSTRLEN fix needed for all compilers on SGI
1503
Gustavo Niemeyerad3fc442003-10-17 22:13:16 +00001504- Implemented non-recursive SRE matching scheme (#757624).
1505
1506- Implemented (?(id/name)yes|no) support in SRE (#572936).
1507
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +00001508- random.seed() with no arguments or None uses time.time() as a default
1509 seed. Modified to match Py2.2 behavior and use fractional seconds so
1510 that successive runs are more likely to produce different sequences.
1511
1512- random.Random has a new method, getrandbits(k), which returns an int
1513 with k random bits. This method is now an optional part of the API
1514 for user defined generators. Any generator that defines genrandbits()
1515 can now use randrange() for ranges with a length >= 2**53. Formerly,
1516 randrange would return only even numbers for ranges that large (see
1517 SF bug #812202). Generators that do not define genrandbits() now
1518 issue a warning when randrange() is called with a range that large.
1519
Raymond Hettingerd25c1c62003-12-06 16:23:06 +00001520- itertools has a new function, groupby() for aggregating iterables
1521 into groups sharing the same key (as determined by a key function).
1522 It offers some of functionality of SQL's groupby keyword and of
1523 the Unix uniq filter.
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +00001524
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001525- itertools now has a new tee() function which produces two independent
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +00001526 iterators from a single iterable.
1527
1528- itertools.izip() with no arguments now returns an empty iterator instead
1529 of raising a TypeError exception.
1530
Gustavo Niemeyera6e436e2004-02-14 00:02:45 +00001531- Fixed #853061: allow BZ2Compressor.compress() to receive an empty string
1532 as parameter.
1533
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001534Library
1535-------
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001536
Guido van Rossum5124b4a2004-07-06 17:52:32 +00001537- Bug #981530: Fix UnboundLocalError in shutil.rmtree(). This affects
1538 the documented behavior: the function passed to the onerror()
1539 handler can now also be os.listdir.
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001540
Brett Cannon41d13f62004-07-03 03:54:54 +00001541- Bug #754449: threading.Thread objects no longer mask exceptions raised during
1542 interpreter shutdown with another exception from attempting to handle the
1543 original exception.
Brett Cannoncc4e9352004-07-03 03:52:35 +00001544
Raymond Hettinger21f9fce2004-07-10 16:11:03 +00001545- Added decimal.py per PEP 327.
Raymond Hettinger7c85fa42004-07-01 11:01:35 +00001546
Brett Cannon46d4ff22004-06-29 04:08:23 +00001547- Bug #981299: rsync is now a recognized protocol in urlparse that uses a
1548 "netloc" portion of a URL.
Brett Cannonfbac2942004-06-29 04:02:40 +00001549
Brett Cannon1c3fa182004-06-19 21:11:35 +00001550- Bug #919012: shutil.move() will not try to move a directory into itself.
1551 Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
1552
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +00001553- Bug #934282: pydoc.stripid() is now case-insensitive. Thanks Robin Becker.
1554
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +00001555- Bug #823209: cmath.log() now takes an optional base argument so that its
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +00001556 API matches math.log().
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +00001557
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001558- Bug #957381: distutils bdist_rpm no longer fails on recent RPM versions
Anthony Baxter1a4ddae2004-08-31 10:07:13 +00001559 that generate a -debuginfo.rpm
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001560
Martin v. Löwisbdec50f2004-06-08 08:29:33 +00001561- os.path.devnull has been added for all supported platforms.
1562
Hye-Shik Chang2400e932004-06-05 18:37:53 +00001563- Fixed #877165: distutils now picks the right C++ compiler command
1564 on cygwin and mingw32.
1565
Hye-Shik Chang39aef792004-06-05 13:30:56 +00001566- urllib.urlopen().readline() now handles HTTP/0.9 correctly.
1567
Brett Cannon0096e262004-06-05 01:12:51 +00001568- refactored site.py into functions. Also wrote regression tests for the
1569 module.
1570
Fred Drakeec6229e2004-06-25 23:02:59 +00001571- The distutils install command now supports the --home option and
1572 installation scheme for all platforms.
1573
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +00001574- asyncore.loop now has a repeat count parameter that defaults to
Michael W. Hudson7db865a2004-06-30 09:09:38 +00001575 looping forever.
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +00001576
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001577- The distutils sdist command now ignores all .svn directories, in
1578 addition to CVS and RCS directories. .svn directories hold
1579 administrative files for the Subversion source control system.
1580
Martin v. Löwis2a6ba902004-05-31 18:22:40 +00001581- Added a new module: cookielib. Automatic cookie handling for HTTP
1582 clients. Also, support for cookielib has been added to urllib2, so
1583 urllib2.urlopen() can transparently handle cookies.
1584
Raymond Hettinger059e1702004-05-19 19:56:44 +00001585- stringprep.py now uses built-in set() instead of sets.Set().
1586
Thomas Heller2e7c8322004-05-11 15:10:59 +00001587- Bug #876278: Unbounded recursion in modulefinder
1588
Martin v. Löwis456ab1d2004-05-06 01:54:36 +00001589- Bug #780300: Swap public and system ID in LexicalHandler.startDTD.
1590 Applications relying on the wrong order need to be corrected.
1591
Hye-Shik Chang0f5bf1e2004-04-20 21:11:11 +00001592- Bug #926075: Fixed a bug that returns a wrong pattern object
1593 for a string or unicode object in sre.compile() when a different
1594 type pattern with the same value exists.
1595
Skip Montanarod0c0c412004-04-07 16:03:02 +00001596- Added countcallers arg to trace.Trace class (--trackcalls command line arg
1597 when run from the command prompt).
1598
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +00001599- Fixed a caching bug in platform.platform() where the argument of 'terse' was
1600 not taken into consideration when caching value.
1601
Nicholas Bastin824b1b22004-03-23 18:44:39 +00001602- Added two new command-line arguments for profile (output file and
1603 default sort).
1604
Nicholas Bastin1eb4bfc2004-03-22 20:12:56 +00001605- Added global runctx function to profile module
1606
Martin v. Löwis347c30d2004-03-21 15:29:41 +00001607- Add hlist missing entryconfigure and entrycget methods.
1608
Hye-Shik Chang4a7ad1a2004-03-19 08:11:56 +00001609- The ptcp154 codec was added for Kazakh character set support.
1610
Martin v. Löwisa79449e2004-02-15 21:19:18 +00001611- Support non-anonymous ftp URLs in urllib2.
1612
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001613- The encodings package will now apply codec name aliases
Marc-André Lemburg57cb68f2004-01-20 18:24:34 +00001614 first before starting to try the import of the codec module.
1615 This simplifies overriding built-in codecs with external
1616 packages, e.g. the included CJK codecs with the JapaneseCodecs
1617 package, by adjusting the aliases dictionary in encodings.aliases
1618 accordingly.
1619
Barry Warsaw30ff12f2004-01-04 01:13:43 +00001620- base64 now supports RFC 3548 Base16, Base32, and Base64 encoding and
1621 decoding standards.
1622
Jeremy Hylton37c5f2a2003-12-14 05:29:45 +00001623- urllib2 now supports processors. A processor is a handler that
1624 implements an xxx_request or xxx_response method. These methods are
1625 called for all requests.
1626
Thomas Hellerc7501d52003-12-05 20:28:07 +00001627- distutils compilers now compile source files in the same order as
1628 they are passed to the compiler.
1629
Walter Dörwaldc8de4582003-12-03 20:26:05 +00001630- pprint.pprint() and pprint.pformat() now have additional parameters
1631 indent, width and depth.
1632
Walter Dörwald7a7ede52003-12-03 20:15:28 +00001633- Patch #750542: pprint now will pretty print subclasses of list, tuple
1634 and dict too, as long as they don't overwrite __repr__().
1635
Thomas Hellerb3105912003-11-28 19:42:56 +00001636- Bug #848614: distutils' msvccompiler fails to find the MSVC6
1637 compiler because of incomplete registry entries.
1638
Martin v. Löwisaf7dc8d2003-11-19 19:51:55 +00001639- httplib.HTTP.putrequest now offers to omit the implicit Accept-Encoding.
1640
Thomas Hellercf0005b2003-11-14 10:33:20 +00001641- Patch #841977: modulefinder didn't find extension modules in packages
1642
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +00001643- imaplib.IMAP4.thread was added.
1644
Guido van Rossum967b0632003-11-10 02:27:19 +00001645- Plugged a minor hole in tempfile.mktemp() due to the use of
1646 os.path.exists(), switched to using os.lstat() directly if possible.
1647
Raymond Hettinger0c410272004-01-05 10:13:35 +00001648- bisect.py and heapq.py now have underlying C implementations
Raymond Hettinger33ecffb2004-06-10 05:03:17 +00001649 for better performance.
1650
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001651- heapq.py has two new functions, nsmallest() and nlargest().
Raymond Hettingerb3af1812003-11-08 10:24:38 +00001652
Neil Schemenauerf607fc52003-11-05 23:03:00 +00001653- traceback.format_exc has been added (similar to print_exc but it returns
1654 a string).
1655
Martin v. Löwis45394c22003-10-31 13:49:36 +00001656- xmlrpclib.MultiCall has been added.
1657
Martin v. Löwis48440b72003-10-31 12:52:35 +00001658- poplib.POP3_SSL has been added.
1659
Martin v. Löwisd6625482003-10-12 17:37:01 +00001660- tmpfile.mkstemp now returns an absolute path even if dir is relative.
1661
Brett Cannon5d9ca4e2003-10-12 04:38:48 +00001662- urlparse is RFC 2396 compliant.
1663
Skip Montanarodef99342003-10-03 14:07:07 +00001664- The fieldnames argument to the csv module's DictReader constructor is now
1665 optional. If omitted, the first row of the file will be used as the
1666 list of fieldnames.
1667
Raymond Hettinger9a80c5d2003-09-23 20:21:01 +00001668- encodings.bz2_codec was added for access to bz2 compression
1669 using "a long string".encode('bz2')
1670
Guido van Rossum0e5a51d2003-09-22 15:03:11 +00001671- Various improvements to unittest.py, realigned with PyUnit CVS.
1672
Martin v. Löwisc6bb6c02003-09-20 15:52:21 +00001673- dircache now passes exceptions to the caller, instead of returning
1674 empty lists.
1675
Raymond Hettingerdeadbf52003-09-12 06:33:37 +00001676- The bsddb module and dbhash module now support the iterator and
1677 mapping protocols which make them more substitutable for dictionaries
1678 and shelves.
1679
Skip Montanaro3f7a9482003-09-06 19:52:12 +00001680- The csv module's DictReader and DictWriter classes now accept keyword
1681 arguments. This was an omission in the initial implementation.
1682
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +00001683- The email package handles some RFC 2231 parameters with missing
Barry Warsaw2f5bf172003-09-03 04:09:49 +00001684 CHARSET fields better. It also includes a patch to parameter
1685 parsing when semicolons appear inside quotes.
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +00001686
Raymond Hettinger6a180122003-08-17 08:34:09 +00001687- sets.py now runs under Py2.2. In addition, the argument restrictions
1688 for most set methods (but not the operators) have been relaxed to
Raymond Hettinger70b9f492003-11-19 15:52:14 +00001689 allow any iterable.
Raymond Hettingeree562fc2003-08-15 21:17:04 +00001690
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +00001691- _strptime.py now has a behind-the-scenes caching mechanism for the most
Brett Cannonb7150a22003-08-05 06:27:04 +00001692 recent TimeRE instance used along with the last five unique directive
1693 patterns. The overall module was also made more thread-safe.
1694
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +00001695- random.cunifvariate() and random.stdgamma() were deprecated in Py2.3
1696 and removed in Py2.4.
1697
Anthony Baxter92bee362003-11-04 14:35:49 +00001698- Bug #823328: urllib2.py's HTTP Digest Auth support works again.
1699
Hye-Shik Chang84a99312004-01-17 14:59:36 +00001700- Patch #873597: CJK codecs are imported into rank of default codecs.
1701
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001702Tools/Demos
1703-----------
1704
Skip Montanarod5a21fd2004-01-27 14:49:04 +00001705- A hotshotmain script was added to the Tools/scripts directory that
1706 makes it easy to run a script under control of the hotshot profiler.
1707
Skip Montanaro030f68a2003-10-28 16:24:00 +00001708- The db2pickle and pickle2db scripts can now dump/load gdbm files.
1709
Skip Montanaroe2b61e02004-03-03 17:42:08 +00001710- The file order on the command line of the pickle2db script was reversed.
1711 It is now [ picklefile ] dbfile. This provides better symmetry with
1712 db2pickle. The file arguments to both scripts are now source followed by
1713 destination in situations where both files are given.
1714
Skip Montanarofd4fa882003-09-10 19:04:13 +00001715- The pydoc script will display a link to the module documentation for
1716 modules determined to be part of the core distribution. The documentation
1717 base directory defaults to http://www.python.org/doc/current/lib/ but can
1718 be changed by setting the PYTHONDOCS environment variable.
1719
Raymond Hettingere41d4c82003-08-25 04:39:55 +00001720- texcheck.py now detects double word errors.
1721
Tim Peters1a3abcb2003-08-18 23:52:09 +00001722- md5sum.py mistakenly opened input files in text mode by default, a
1723 silent and dangerous change from previous releases. It once again
1724 opens input files in binary mode by default. The -t and -b flags
1725 remain for compatibility with the 2.3 release, but -b is the default
1726 now.
1727
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001728- py-electric-colon now works when pending-delete/delete-selection mode is
1729 in effect
1730
1731- py-help-at-point is no longer bound to the F1 key - it's still bound to
1732 C-c C-h
1733
Barry Warsaw6ec58ca2003-09-03 03:20:37 +00001734- Pynche was fixed to not crash when there is no ~/.pynche file and no
1735 -d option was given.
1736
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001737Build
1738-----
1739
Brett Cannonf6af76d2004-06-26 04:03:06 +00001740- Bug #978645: Modules/getpath.c now builds properly in --disable-framework
1741 build under OS X.
1742
Skip Montanaro56f6a4f2004-06-18 02:47:22 +00001743- Profiling using gprof is now available if Python is configured with
1744 --enable-profiling.
1745
Martin v. Löwisf30d60e2004-06-08 08:17:44 +00001746- Profiling the VM using the Pentium TSC is now possible if Python
1747 is configured --with-tsc.
1748
Martin v. Löwis642c8a12004-06-04 13:55:13 +00001749- In order to find libraries, setup.py now also looks in /lib64, for use
1750 on AMD64.
1751
Hye-Shik Chang54f94392004-04-14 07:55:31 +00001752- Bug #934635: Fixed a bug where the configure script couldn't detect
1753 getaddrinfo() properly if the KAME stack had SCTP support.
1754
Skip Montanaro7befb992004-02-10 16:50:21 +00001755- Support for missing ANSI C header files (limits.h, stddef.h, etc) was
1756 removed.
1757
Skip Montanarodb608052004-02-07 13:53:46 +00001758- Systems requiring the D4, D6 or D7 variants of pthreads are no longer
1759 supported (see PEP 11).
1760
1761- Universal newline support can no longer be disabled (see PEP 11).
1762
Skip Montanarocd1f7432004-01-17 14:22:44 +00001763- Support for DGUX, SunOS 4, IRIX 4 and Minix was removed (see PEP 11).
1764
1765- Support for systems requiring --with-dl-dld or --with-sgi-dl was removed
1766 (see PEP 11).
1767
1768- Tests for sizeof(char) were removed since ANSI C mandates that
1769 sizeof(char) must be 1.
1770
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001771C API
1772-----
1773
Tim Peters9ddf40b2004-06-20 22:41:32 +00001774- Thanks to Anthony Tuininga, the datetime module now supplies a C API
1775 containing type-check macros and constructors. See new docs in the
1776 Python/C API Reference Manual for details.
1777
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +00001778- Private function _PyTime_DoubleToTimet added, to convert a Python
1779 timestamp (C double) to platform time_t with some out-of-bounds
1780 checking. Declared in new header file timefuncs.h. It would be
1781 good to expose some other internal timemodule.c functions there.
1782
Martin v. Löwise440e472004-06-01 15:22:42 +00001783- New public functions PyEval_EvaluateFrame and PyGen_New to expose
1784 generator objects.
1785
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +00001786- New public functions Py_IncRef() and Py_DecRef(), exposing the
1787 functionality of the Py_XINCREF() and Py_XDECREF macros. Useful for
Thomas Hellercc10a852004-04-22 17:28:25 +00001788 runtime dynamic embedding of Python. See patch #938302, by Bob
1789 Ippolito.
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +00001790
Raymond Hettingerc1e4f9d2004-03-12 08:04:00 +00001791- Added a new macro, PySequence_Fast_ITEMS, which retrieves a fast sequence's
1792 underlying array of PyObject pointers. Useful for high speed looping.
1793
Raymond Hettinger8f5cdaa2003-12-13 11:26:12 +00001794- Created a new method flag, METH_COEXIST, which causes a method to be loaded
1795 even if already defined by a slot wrapper. This allows a __contains__
1796 method, for example, to co-exist with a defined sq_contains slot. This
1797 is helpful because the PyCFunction can take advantage of optimized calls
1798 whenever METH_O or METH_NOARGS flags are defined.
1799
Raymond Hettingerbc0f2ab2003-11-25 21:12:14 +00001800- Added a new function, PyDict_Contains(d, k) which is like
1801 PySequence_Contains() but is specific to dictionaries and executes
1802 about 10% faster.
1803
Brett Cannon26b3a7b2003-10-19 21:31:43 +00001804- Added three new macros: Py_RETURN_NONE, Py_RETURN_TRUE, and Py_RETURN_FALSE.
1805 Each return the singleton they mention after Py_INCREF()ing them.
1806
Raymond Hettingercb2da432003-10-12 18:24:34 +00001807- Added a new function, PyTuple_Pack(n, ...) for constructing tuples from a
1808 variable length argument list of Python objects without having to invoke
1809 the more complex machinery of Py_BuildValue(). PyTuple_Pack(3, a, b, c)
1810 is equivalent to Py_BuildValue("(OOO)", a, b, c).
1811
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001812Windows
1813-------
1814
Guido van Rossumfd25aca2003-11-30 22:10:15 +00001815- The _winreg module could segfault when reading very large registry
1816 values, due to unchecked alloca() calls (SF bug 851056). The fix is
1817 uses either PyMem_Malloc(n) or PyString_FromStringAndSize(NULL, n),
1818 as appropriate, followed by a size check.
1819
Tim Petersf1827cf2003-09-07 03:30:18 +00001820- file.truncate() could misbehave if the file was open for update
1821 (modes r+, rb+, w+, wb+), and the most recent file operation before
1822 the truncate() call was an input operation. SF bug 801631.
1823
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001824
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001825What's New in Python 2.3 final?
1826===============================
1827
1828*Release date: 29-Jul-2003*
1829
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001830IDLE
1831----
1832
Tim Peters36c1afc2003-07-29 17:22:57 +00001833- Bug 778400: IDLE hangs when selecting "Edit with IDLE" from explorer.
1834 This was unique to Windows, and was fixed by adding an -n switch to
1835 the command the Windows installer creates to execute "Edit with IDLE"
1836 context-menu actions.
1837
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001838- IDLE displays a new message upon startup: some "personal firewall"
1839 kinds of programs (for example, ZoneAlarm) open a dialog of their
1840 own when any program opens a socket. IDLE does use sockets, talking
1841 on the computer's internal loopback interface. This connection is not
1842 visible on any external interface and no data is sent to or received
1843 from the Internet. So, if you get such a dialog when opening IDLE,
1844 asking whether to let pythonw.exe talk to address 127.0.0.1, say yes,
1845 and rest assured no communication external to your machine is taking
1846 place. If you don't allow it, IDLE won't be able to start.
1847
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001848
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001849What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 2?
1850=============================================
1851
Tim Peters6560a252003-07-24 00:15:46 +00001852*Release date: 24-Jul-2003*
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001853
1854Core and builtins
1855-----------------
1856
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00001857- It is now possible to import from zipfiles containing additional
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001858 data bytes before the zip compatible archive. Zipfiles containing a
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00001859 comment at the end are still unsupported.
1860
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001861Extension modules
1862-----------------
1863
1864- A longstanding bug in the parser module's initialization could cause
1865 fatal internal refcount confusion when the module got initialized more
1866 than once. This has been fixed.
1867
Fred Drake01a43122003-07-21 17:17:10 +00001868- Fixed memory leak in pyexpat; using the parser's ParseFile() method
1869 with open files that aren't instances of the standard file type
1870 caused an instance of the bound .read() method to be leaked on every
1871 call.
1872
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001873- Fixed some leaks in the locale module.
1874
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001875Library
1876-------
1877
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001878- Lib/encodings/rot_13.py when used as a script, now more properly
1879 uses the first Python interpreter on your path.
1880
1881- Removed caching of TimeRE (and thus LocaleTime) in _strptime.py to
1882 fix a locale related bug in the test suite. Although another patch
1883 was needed to actually fix the problem, the cache code was not
1884 restored.
1885
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00001886IDLE
1887----
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001888
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00001889- Calltips patches.
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001890
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001891Build
1892-----
1893
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001894- For MacOSX, added -mno-fused-madd to BASECFLAGS to fix test_coercion
1895 on Panther (OSX 10.3).
1896
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001897C API
1898-----
1899
1900Windows
1901-------
1902
Tim Peters291f14e2003-07-22 02:50:01 +00001903- The tempfile module could do insane imports on Windows if PYTHONCASEOK
1904 was set, making temp file creation impossible. Repaired.
1905
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001906- Add a patch to workaround pthread_sigmask() bugs in Cygwin.
1907
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001908Mac
1909---
1910
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001911- Various fixes to pimp.
1912
1913- Scripts runs with pythonw no longer had full window manager access.
1914
1915- Don't force boot-disk-only install, for reasons unknown it causes
1916 more problems than it solves.
1917
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001918
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001919What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 1?
1920=============================================
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001921
Jeremy Hylton0ed18c22003-07-18 20:10:02 +00001922*Release date: 18-Jul-2003*
1923
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001924Core and builtins
1925-----------------
1926
Tim Peterse5e065b2003-07-06 18:36:54 +00001927- The new function sys.getcheckinterval() returns the last value set
1928 by sys.setcheckinterval().
1929
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001930- Several bugs in the symbol table phase of the compiler have been
1931 fixed. Errors could be lost and compilation could fail without
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001932 reporting an error. SF patch 763201.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001933
1934- The interpreter is now more robust about importing the warnings
1935 module. In an executable generated by freeze or similar programs,
1936 earlier versions of 2.3 would fail if the warnings module could
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001937 not be found on the file system. Fixes SF bug 771097.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001938
1939- A warning about assignments to module attributes that shadow
1940 builtins, present in earlier releases of 2.3, has been removed.
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001941
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001942- It is not possible to create subclasses of builtin types like str
1943 and tuple that define an itemsize. Earlier releases of Python 2.3
1944 allowed this by mistake, leading to crashes and other problems.
1945
1946- The thread_id is now initialized to 0 in a non-thread build. SF bug
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001947 770247.
1948
1949- SF bug 762891: "del p[key]" on proxy object no longer raises SystemError.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001950
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001951Extension modules
1952-----------------
1953
1954- weakref.proxy() can now handle "del obj[i]" for proxy objects
1955 defining __delitem__. Formerly, it generated a SystemError.
1956
1957- SSL no longer crashes the interpreter when the remote side disconnects.
1958
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001959- On Unix the mmap module can again be used to map device files.
1960
Brett Cannon20def8b2003-07-01 05:16:08 +00001961- time.strptime now exclusively uses the Python implementation
1962 contained within the _strptime module.
1963
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001964- The print slot of weakref proxy objects was removed, because it was
1965 not consistent with the object's repr slot.
1966
1967- The mmap module only checks file size for regular files, not
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001968 character or block devices. SF patch 708374.
1969
1970- The cPickle Pickler garbage collection support was fixed to traverse
1971 the find_class attribute, if present.
1972
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001973- There are several fixes for the bsddb3 wrapper module.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001974
1975 bsddb3 no longer crashes if an environment is closed before a cursor
1976 (SF bug 763298).
1977
1978 The DB and DBEnv set_get_returns_none function was extended to take
Barry Warsawd71a5512003-07-20 18:00:54 +00001979 a level instead of a boolean flag. The new level 2 means that in
1980 addition, cursor.set()/.get() methods return None instead of raising
1981 an exception.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001982
1983 A typo was fixed in DBCursor.join_item(), preventing a crash.
1984
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001985Library
1986-------
1987
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001988- distutils now supports MSVC 7.1
1989
Raymond Hettinger71adf7e2003-07-16 19:25:22 +00001990- doctest now examines all docstrings by default. Previously, it would
1991 skip over functions with private names (as indicated by the underscore
1992 naming convention). The old default created too much of a risk that
1993 user tests were being skipped inadvertently. Note, this change could
1994 break code in the unlikely case that someone had intentionally put
1995 failing tests in the docstrings of private functions. The breakage
1996 is easily fixable by specifying the old behavior when calling testmod()
1997 or Tester().
1998
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001999- There were several fixes to the way dumbdbms are closed. It's vital
2000 that a dumbdbm database be closed properly, else the on-disk data
2001 and directory files can be left in mutually inconsistent states.
2002 dumbdbm.py's _Database.__del__() method attempted to close the
2003 database properly, but a shutdown race in _Database._commit() could
2004 prevent this from working, so that a program trusting __del__() to
2005 get the on-disk files in synch could be badly surprised. The race
2006 has been repaired. A sync() method was also added so that shelve
2007 can guarantee data is written to disk.
Tim Peters7a6c7332003-07-13 17:21:10 +00002008
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002009 The close() method can now be called more than once without complaint.
Tim Petersd7472ec2003-07-13 02:22:03 +00002010
Tim Peters59aba122003-07-01 20:01:55 +00002011- The classes in threading.py are now new-style classes. That they
2012 weren't before was an oversight.
2013
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002014- The urllib2 digest authentication handlers now define the correct
2015 auth_header. The earlier versions would fail at runtime.
2016
Neal Norwitze7dfe212003-07-01 14:59:46 +00002017- SF bug 763023: fix uncaught ZeroDivisionError in difflib ratio methods
2018 when there are no lines.
2019
Neal Norwitz3c0f2c92003-07-01 21:12:47 +00002020- SF bug 763637: fix exception in Tkinter with after_cancel
2021 which could occur with Tk 8.4
2022
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002023- SF bug 770601: CGIHTTPServer.py now passes the entire environment
2024 to child processes.
2025
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002026- SF bug 765238: add filter to fnmatch's __all__.
2027
2028- SF bug 748201: make time.strptime() error messages more helpful.
2029
2030- SF patch 764470: Do not dump the args attribute of a Fault object in
2031 xmlrpclib.
2032
2033- SF patch 549151: urllib and urllib2 now redirect POSTs on 301
2034 responses.
2035
2036- SF patch 766650: The whichdb module was fixed to recognize dbm files
2037 generated by gdbm on OS/2 EMX.
2038
2039- SF bugs 763047 and 763052: fixes bug of timezone value being left as
2040 -1 when ``time.tzname[0] == time.tzname[1] and not time.daylight``
2041 is true when it should only when time.daylight is true.
2042
2043- SF bug 764548: re now allows subclasses of str and unicode to be
2044 used as patterns.
2045
2046- SF bug 763637: In Tkinter, change after_cancel() to handle tuples
2047 of varying sizes. Tk 8.4 returns a different number of values
2048 than Tk 8.3.
2049
2050- SF bug 763023: difflib.ratio() did not catch zero division.
2051
2052- The Queue module now has an __all__ attribute.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002053
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002054Tools/Demos
2055-----------
2056
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002057- See Lib/idlelib/NEWS.txt for IDLE news.
2058
Neal Norwitz592c4cc2003-07-01 04:14:28 +00002059- SF bug 753592: webchecker/wsgui now handles user supplied directories.
2060
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002061- The trace.py script has been removed. It is now in the standard library.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002062
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002063Build
2064-----
2065
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002066- Python now compiles with -fno-strict-aliasing if possible (SF bug 766696).
2067
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002068- The socket module compiles on IRIX 6.5.10.
2069
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002070- An irix64 system is treated the same way as an irix6 system (SF
2071 patch 764560).
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002072
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002073- Several definitions were missing on FreeBSD 5.x unless the
2074 __BSD_VISIBLE symbol was defined. configure now defines it as
2075 needed.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002076
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002077C API
2078-----
2079
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002080- Unicode objects now support mbcs as a built-in encoding, so the C
2081 API can use it without deferring to the encodings package.
2082
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002083Windows
2084-------
2085
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002086- The Windows implementation of PyThread_start_new_thread() never
2087 checked error returns from Windows functions correctly. As a result,
2088 it could claim to start a new thread even when the Microsoft
2089 _beginthread() function failed (due to "too many threads" -- this is
2090 on the order of thousands when it happens). In these cases, the
2091 Python exception ::
2092
2093 thread.error: can't start new thread
2094
2095 is raised now.
2096
2097- SF bug 766669: Prevent a GPF on interpreter exit when sockets are in
2098 use. The interpreter now calls WSACleanup() from Py_Finalize()
2099 instead of from DLL teardown.
2100
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002101Mac
2102---
2103
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002104- Bundlebuilder now inherits default values in the right way. It was
Walter Dörwald73a8a4b2003-07-30 12:14:02 +00002105 previously possible for app bundles to get a type of "BNDL" instead
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002106 of "APPL." Other improvements include, a --build-id option to
2107 specify the CFBundleIdentifier and using the --python option to set
2108 the executable in the bundle.
2109
2110- Fixed two bugs in MacOSX framework handling.
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002111
Jack Jansene0040412003-07-23 22:17:28 +00002112- pythonw did not allow user interaction in 2.3rc1, this has been fixed.
2113
2114- Python is now compiled with -mno-fused-madd, making all tests pass
2115 on Panther.
2116
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002117What's New in Python 2.3 beta 2?
2118================================
2119
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00002120*Release date: 29-Jun-2003*
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002121
2122Core and builtins
2123-----------------
2124
Barry Warsaw883f2232003-06-29 17:10:11 +00002125- A program can now set the environment variable PYTHONINSPECT to some
2126 string value in Python, and cause the interpreter to enter the
2127 interactive prompt at program exit, as if Python had been invoked
2128 with the -i option.
2129
Raymond Hettingerd05abde2003-06-17 05:05:49 +00002130- list.index() now accepts optional start and stop arguments. Similar
2131 changes were made to UserList.index(). SF feature request 754014.
2132
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002133- SF patch 751998 fixes an unwanted side effect of the previous fix
2134 for SF bug 742860 (the next item).
2135
Tim Peters50d8b8b2003-05-25 17:44:31 +00002136- SF bug 742860: "WeakKeyDictionary __delitem__ uses iterkeys". This
2137 wasn't threadsafe, was very inefficient (expected time O(len(dict))
2138 instead of O(1)), and could raise a spurious RuntimeError if another
2139 thread mutated the dict during __delitem__, or if a comparison function
2140 mutated it. It also neglected to raise KeyError when the key wasn't
2141 present; didn't raise TypeError when the key wasn't of a weakly
2142 referencable type; and broke various more-or-less obscure dict
2143 invariants by using a sequence of equality comparisons over the whole
2144 set of dict keys instead of computing the key's hash code to narrow
2145 the search to those keys with the same hash code. All of these are
2146 considered to be bugs. A new implementation of __delitem__ repairs all
2147 that, but note that fixing these bugs may change visible behavior in
2148 code relying (whether intentionally or accidentally) on old behavior.
Tim Peters886128f2003-05-25 01:45:11 +00002149
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002150- SF bug 734869: Fixed a compiler bug that caused a fatal error when
2151 compiling a list comprehension that contained another list comprehension
2152 embedded in a lambda expression.
2153
Tim Peterse87568d2003-05-24 20:18:24 +00002154- SF bug 705231: builtin pow() no longer lets the platform C pow()
2155 raise -1.0 to integer powers, because (at least) glibc gets it wrong
2156 in some cases. The result should be -1.0 if the power is odd and 1.0
2157 if the power is even, and any float with a sufficiently large exponent
2158 is (mathematically) an exact even integer.
2159
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002160- SF bug 759227: A new-style class that implements __nonzero__() must
2161 return a bool or int (but not an int subclass) from that method. This
2162 matches the restriction on classic classes.
2163
Martin v. Löwis5467d4c2003-05-10 07:10:12 +00002164- The encoding attribute has been added for file objects, and set to
2165 the terminal encoding on Unix and Windows.
2166
Tim Peters015dd822003-05-04 04:16:52 +00002167- The softspace attribute of file objects became read-only by oversight.
2168 It's writable again.
2169
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00002170- Reverted a 2.3 beta 1 change to iterators for subclasses of list and
2171 tuple. By default, the iterators now access data elements directly
2172 instead of going through __getitem__. If __getitem__ access is
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002173 preferred, then __iter__ can be overridden.
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00002174
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002175- SF bug 735247: The staticmethod and super types participate in
2176 garbage collection. Before this change, it was possible for leaks to
2177 occur in functions with non-global free variables that used these types.
2178
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002179Extension modules
2180-----------------
2181
Raymond Hettinger643bcec2003-06-29 03:29:42 +00002182- the socket module has a new exception, socket.timeout, to allow
2183 timeouts to be handled separately from other socket errors.
2184
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002185- SF bug 751276: cPickle has fixed to propagate exceptions raised in
2186 user code. In earlier versions, cPickle caught and ignored any
2187 exception when it performed operations that it expected to raise
2188 specific exceptions like AttributeError.
2189
2190- cPickle Pickler and Unpickler objects now participate in garbage
2191 collection.
2192
Tim Peterscda32b72003-06-15 23:13:35 +00002193- mimetools.choose_boundary() could return duplicate strings at times,
2194 especially likely on Windows. The strings returned are now guaranteed
2195 unique within a single program run.
2196
Brett Cannon4e64d782003-06-13 23:44:35 +00002197- thread.interrupt_main() raises KeyboardInterrupt in the main thread.
2198 dummy_thread has also been modified to try to simulate the behavior.
2199
Walter Dörwald9e46abe2003-05-18 03:15:10 +00002200- array.array.insert() now treats negative indices as being relative
2201 to the end of the array, just like list.insert() does. (SF bug #739313)
2202
Tim Petersb0c854d2003-05-17 15:57:00 +00002203- The datetime module classes datetime, time, and timedelta are now
2204 properly subclassable.
Tim Petersa98924a2003-05-17 05:55:19 +00002205
Martin v. Löwis28e9ce92003-05-09 08:19:48 +00002206- _tkinter.{get|set}busywaitinterval was added.
2207
Raymond Hettinger834f4632003-05-02 20:24:56 +00002208- itertools.islice() now accepts stop=None as documented.
2209 Fixes SF bug #730685.
2210
Skip Montanaro8c044d82003-05-06 20:42:37 +00002211- the bsddb185 module is built in one restricted instance -
2212 /usr/include/db.h exists and defines HASHVERSION to be 2. This is true
2213 for many BSD-derived systems.
2214
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002215
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002216Library
2217-------
2218
Tim Petersdb3756d2003-06-29 05:30:48 +00002219- Some happy doctest extensions from Jim Fulton have been added to
2220 doctest.py. These are already being used in Zope3. The two
2221 primary ones:
2222
2223 doctest.debug(module, name) extracts the doctests from the named object
2224 in the given module, puts them in a temp file, and starts pdb running
2225 on that file. This is great when a doctest fails.
2226
2227 doctest.DocTestSuite(module=None) returns a synthesized unittest
2228 TestSuite instance, to be run by the unittest framework, which
2229 runs all the doctests in the module. This allows writing tests in
2230 doctest style (which can be clearer and shorter than writing tests
2231 in unittest style), without losing unittest's powerful testing
2232 framework features (which doctest lacks).
2233
Tim Peters6ebe61f2003-06-27 20:48:05 +00002234- For compatibility with doctests created before 2.3, if an expected
2235 output block consists solely of "1" and the actual output block
2236 consists solely of "True", it's accepted as a match; similarly
2237 for "0" and "False". This is quite un-doctest-like, but is practical.
2238 The behavior can be disabled by passing the new doctest module
2239 constant DONT_ACCEPT_TRUE_FOR_1 to the new optionflags optional
2240 argument.
2241
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002242- ZipFile.testzip() now only traps BadZipfile exceptions. Previously,
2243 a bare except caught to much and reported all errors as a problem
2244 in the archive.
2245
2246- The logging module now has a new function, makeLogRecord() making
2247 LogHandler easier to interact with DatagramHandler and SocketHandler.
2248
Skip Montanaro364ca402003-06-17 12:58:31 +00002249- The cgitb module has been extended to support plain text display (SF patch
2250 569574).
2251
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002252- A brand new version of IDLE (from the IDLEfork project at
2253 SourceForge) is now included as Lib/idlelib. The old Tools/idle is
2254 no more.
2255
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002256- Added a new module: trace (documentation missing). This module used
2257 to be distributed in Tools/scripts. It uses sys.settrace() to trace
2258 code execution -- either function calls or individual lines. It can
2259 generate tracing output during execution or a post-mortem report of
2260 code coverage.
2261
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00002262- The threading module has new functions settrace() and setprofile()
2263 that cooperate with the functions of the same name in the sys
2264 module. A function registered with the threading module will
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002265 be used for all threads it creates. The new trace module uses this
2266 to provide tracing for code running in threads.
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00002267
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00002268- copy.py: applied SF patch 707900, fixing bug 702858, by Steven
2269 Taschuk. Copying a new-style class that had a reference to itself
2270 didn't work. (The same thing worked fine for old-style classes.)
Martin v. Löwisba8f5ff2003-06-14 07:10:06 +00002271 Builtin functions are now treated as atomic, fixing bug #746304.
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00002272
Raymond Hettingerc24d7672003-06-08 19:42:33 +00002273- difflib.py has two new functions: context_diff() and unified_diff().
2274
Guido van Rossumfa19f7c2003-05-16 01:46:51 +00002275- More fixes to urllib (SF 549151): (a) When redirecting, always use
2276 GET. This is common practice and more-or-less sanctioned by the
2277 HTTP standard. (b) Add a handler for 307 redirection, which becomes
2278 an error for POST, but a regular redirect for GET and HEAD
2279
Guido van Rossumbf1bef82003-05-13 18:01:19 +00002280- Added optional 'onerror' argument to os.walk(), to control error
2281 handling.
2282
Martin v. Löwise59e2ba2003-05-03 09:09:02 +00002283- inspect.is{method|data}descriptor was added, to allow pydoc display
2284 __doc__ of data descriptors.
2285
Skip Montanaro4a7751c2003-04-29 21:07:16 +00002286- Fixed socket speed loss caused by use of the _socketobject wrapper class
2287 in socket.py.
2288
Raymond Hettinger22952a32003-05-20 04:59:56 +00002289- timeit.py now checks the current directory for imports.
2290
Gustavo Niemeyer9556fba2003-06-07 17:53:08 +00002291- urllib2.py now knows how to order proxy classes, so the user doesn't
2292 have to insert it in front of other classes, nor do dirty tricks like
2293 inserting a "dummy" HTTPHandler after a ProxyHandler when building an
2294 opener with proxy support.
2295
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002296- Iterators have been added for dbm keys.
2297
2298- random.Random objects can now be pickled.
2299
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002300Tools/Demos
2301-----------
2302
Martin v. Löwisb8c084e2003-06-14 09:03:46 +00002303- pydoc now offers help on keywords and topics.
2304
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002305- Tools/idle is gone; long live Lib/idlelib.
2306
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00002307- diff.py prints file diffs in context, unified, or ndiff formats,
2308 providing a command line interface to difflib.py.
Raymond Hettinger2f3c74a2003-06-08 23:10:15 +00002309
Raymond Hettinger71e00332003-05-10 03:30:13 +00002310- texcheck.py is a new script for making a rough validation of Python LaTeX
2311 files.
2312
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002313Build
2314-----
2315
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002316- Setting DESTDIR during 'make install' now allows specifying a
Martin v. Löwis3b8ee082003-05-11 20:25:35 +00002317 different root directory.
2318
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002319C API
2320-----
2321
Tim Peters3cfe7542003-05-21 21:29:48 +00002322- PyType_Ready(): If a type declares that it participates in gc
2323 (Py_TPFLAGS_HAVE_GC), and its base class does not, and its base class's
2324 tp_free slot is the default _PyObject_Del, and type does not define
2325 a tp_free slot itself, _PyObject_GC_Del is assigned to type->tp_free.
2326 Previously _PyObject_Del was inherited, which could at best lead to a
2327 segfault. In addition, if even after this magic the type's tp_free
2328 slot is _PyObject_Del or NULL, and the type is a base type
2329 (Py_TPFLAGS_BASETYPE), TypeError is raised: since the type is a base
2330 type, its dealloc function must call type->tp_free, and since the type
2331 is gc'able, tp_free must not be NULL or _PyObject_Del.
2332
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002333- PyThreadState_SetAsyncExc(): A new API (deliberately accessible only
2334 from C) to interrupt a thread by sending it an exception. It is
2335 intentional that you have to write your own C extension to call it
2336 from Python.
2337
2338
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002339New platforms
2340-------------
2341
2342None this time.
2343
2344Tests
2345-----
2346
2347- test_imp rewritten so that it doesn't raise RuntimeError if run as a
2348 side effect of being imported ("import test.autotest").
2349
2350Windows
2351-------
2352
Tim Petersfaa697a2003-06-22 01:42:20 +00002353- The Windows installer ships with Tcl/Tk 8.4.3 (upgraded from 8.4.1).
2354
Tim Petersc4607da2003-05-08 18:13:59 +00002355- The installer always suggested that Python be installed on the C:
2356 drive, due to a hardcoded "C:" generated by the Wise installation
2357 wizard. People with machines where C: is not the system drive
2358 usually want Python installed on whichever drive is their system drive
2359 instead. We removed the hardcoded "C:", and two testers on machines
2360 where C: is not the system drive report that the installer now
2361 suggests their system drive. Note that you can always select the
2362 directory you want in the "Select Destination Directory" dialog --
2363 that's what it's for.
2364
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002365Mac
2366---
2367
Just van Rossum99bc1fc2003-05-09 15:01:25 +00002368- There's a new module called "autoGIL", which offers a mechanism to
2369 automatically release the Global Interpreter Lock when an event loop
2370 goes to sleep, allowing other threads to run. It's currently only
2371 supported on OSX, in the Mach-O version.
Jack Jansenf5e23ff2003-06-16 13:53:40 +00002372- The OSA modules now allow direct access to properties of the
2373 toplevel application class (in AppleScript terminology).
2374- The Package Manager can now update itself.
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002375
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002376SourceForge Bugs and Patches Applied
2377------------------------------------
2378
2379430160, 471893, 501716, 542562, 549151, 569574, 595837, 596434,
2380598163, 604210, 604716, 610332, 612627, 614770, 620190, 621891,
2381622042, 639139, 640236, 644345, 649742, 649742, 658233, 660022,
2382661318, 661676, 662807, 662923, 666219, 672855, 678325, 682347,
2383683486, 684981, 685773, 686254, 692776, 692959, 693094, 696777,
2384697989, 700827, 703666, 708495, 708604, 708901, 710733, 711902,
2385713722, 715782, 718286, 719359, 719367, 723136, 723831, 723962,
2386724588, 724767, 724767, 725942, 726150, 726446, 726869, 727051,
2387727719, 727719, 727805, 728277, 728563, 728656, 729096, 729103,
2388729293, 729297, 729300, 729317, 729395, 729622, 729817, 730170,
2389730296, 730594, 730685, 730826, 730963, 731209, 731403, 731504,
2390731514, 731626, 731635, 731643, 731644, 731644, 731689, 732124,
2391732143, 732234, 732284, 732284, 732479, 732761, 732783, 732951,
2392733667, 733781, 734118, 734231, 734869, 735051, 735293, 735527,
2393735613, 735694, 736962, 736962, 737970, 738066, 739313, 740055,
2394740234, 740301, 741806, 742126, 742741, 742860, 742860, 742911,
2395744041, 744104, 744238, 744687, 744877, 745055, 745478, 745525,
2396745620, 746012, 746304, 746366, 746801, 746953, 747348, 747667,
2397747954, 748846, 748849, 748973, 748975, 749191, 749210, 749759,
2398749831, 749911, 750008, 750092, 750542, 750595, 751038, 751107,
2399751276, 751451, 751916, 751941, 751956, 751998, 752671, 753451,
2400753602, 753617, 753845, 753925, 754014, 754340, 754447, 755031,
2401755087, 755147, 755245, 755683, 755987, 756032, 756996, 757058,
2402757229, 757818, 757821, 757822, 758112, 758910, 759227, 759889,
2403760257, 760703, 760792, 761104, 761337, 761519, 761830, 762455
2404
2405
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002406What's New in Python 2.3 beta 1?
2407================================
2408
Guido van Rossumfa1eddf2003-04-25 19:19:52 +00002409*Release date: 25-Apr-2003*
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002410
2411Core and builtins
2412-----------------
2413
Thomas Heller5eccabc2003-04-23 19:35:25 +00002414- New format codes B, H, I, k and K have been implemented for
2415 PyArg_ParseTuple and PyBuild_Value.
2416
Alex Martellia70b1912003-04-22 08:12:33 +00002417- New builtin function sum(seq, start=0) returns the sum of all the
2418 items in iterable object seq, plus start (items are normally numbers,
2419 and cannot be strings).
2420
Guido van Rossumaa86e352003-04-19 18:15:10 +00002421- bool() called without arguments now returns False rather than
2422 raising an exception. This is consistent with calling the
2423 constructors for the other builtin types -- called without argument
2424 they all return the false value of that type. (SF patch #724135)
2425
Guido van Rossumcf8d2852003-04-17 16:53:26 +00002426- In support of PEP 269 (making the pgen parser generator accessible
2427 from Python), some changes to the pgen code structure were made; a
2428 few files that used to be linked only with pgen are now linked with
2429 Python itself.
2430
Guido van Rossumc1f6e8c2003-04-16 21:13:23 +00002431- The repr() of a weakref object now shows the __name__ attribute of
2432 the referenced object, if it has one.
2433
Guido van Rossum76ba09f2003-04-16 19:40:58 +00002434- super() no longer ignores data descriptors, except __class__. See
2435 the thread started at
2436 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2003-April/034338.html
2437
Guido van Rossum3a3cca52003-04-14 20:58:14 +00002438- list.insert(i, x) now interprets negative i as it would be
2439 interpreted by slicing, so negative values count from the end of the
2440 list. This was the only place where such an interpretation was not
2441 placed on a list index.
2442
Guido van Rossumefbbb1c2003-04-11 18:43:06 +00002443- range() now works even if the arguments are longs with magnitude
2444 larger than sys.maxint, as long as the total length of the sequence
2445 fits. E.g., range(2**100, 2**101, 2**100) is the following list:
2446 [1267650600228229401496703205376L]. (SF patch #707427.)
2447
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002448- Some horridly obscure problems were fixed involving interaction
2449 between garbage collection and old-style classes with "ambitious"
2450 getattr hooks. If an old-style instance didn't have a __del__ method,
2451 but did have a __getattr__ hook, and the instance became reachable
2452 only from an unreachable cycle, and the hook resurrected or deleted
2453 unreachable objects when asked to resolve "__del__", anything up to
2454 a segfault could happen. That's been repaired.
2455
Raymond Hettingera3e1e4c2003-03-06 23:54:28 +00002456- dict.pop now takes an optional argument specifying a default
2457 value to return if the key is not in the dict. If a default is not
2458 given and the key is not found, a KeyError will still be raised.
2459 Parallel changes were made to UserDict.UserDict and UserDict.DictMixin.
2460 [SF patch #693753] (contributed by Michael Stone.)
2461
Martin v. Löwis73d538b2003-03-05 15:13:47 +00002462- sys.getfilesystemencoding() was added to expose
2463 Py_FileSystemDefaultEncoding.
Guido van Rossum46d3dc32003-03-01 03:20:41 +00002464
2465- New function sys.exc_clear() clears the current exception. This is
2466 rarely needed, but can sometimes be useful to release objects
2467 referenced by the traceback held in sys.exc_info()[2]. (SF patch
2468 #693195.)
2469
Neal Norwitzd5a65a72003-02-23 23:11:41 +00002470- On 64-bit systems, a dictionary could contain duplicate long/int keys
2471 if the key value was larger than 2**32. See SF bug #689659.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002472
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00002473- Fixed SF bug #663074. The codec system was using global static
Walter Dörwaldfa86bf52003-03-31 16:15:13 +00002474 variables to store internal data. As a result, any attempts to use the
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00002475 unicode system with multiple active interpreters, or successive
2476 interpreter executions, would fail.
2477
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00002478- "%c" % u"a" now returns a unicode string instead of raising a
Walter Dörwald44f527f2003-04-02 16:37:24 +00002479 TypeError. u"%c" % 0xffffffff now raises a OverflowError instead
Walter Dörwald1e469c52003-04-02 16:57:59 +00002480 of a ValueError to be consistent with "%c" % 256. See SF patch #710127.
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00002481
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002482Extension modules
2483-----------------
2484
Guido van Rossume7adda92003-04-25 05:52:37 +00002485- The socket module now provides the functions inet_pton and inet_ntop
2486 for converting between string and packed representation of IP
2487 addresses. There is also a new module variable, has_ipv6, which is
2488 True iff the current Python has IPv6 support. See SF patch #658327.
2489
Martin v. Löwisbfe175c2003-04-16 19:42:51 +00002490- Tkinter wrappers around Tcl variables now pass objects directly
2491 to Tcl, instead of first converting them to strings.
2492
Guido van Rossum41c99e72003-04-14 17:59:34 +00002493- The .*? pattern in the re module is now special-cased to avoid the
2494 recursion limit. (SF patch #720991 -- many thanks to Gary Herron
2495 and Greg Chapman.)
2496
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00002497- New function sys.call_tracing() allows pdb to debug code
2498 recursively.
2499
Tim Peters730f5532003-04-08 17:17:17 +00002500- New function gc.get_referents(obj) returns a list of objects
Tim Peters0f81ab62003-04-08 16:39:48 +00002501 directly referenced by obj. In effect, it exposes what the object's
2502 tp_traverse slot does, and can be helpful when debugging memory
2503 leaks.
2504
Martin v. Löwis7fb697b2003-04-03 04:49:12 +00002505- The iconv module has been removed from this release.
2506
Tim Petersd50ade62003-03-20 18:32:13 +00002507- The platform-independent routines for packing floats in IEEE formats
2508 (struct.pack's <f, >f, <d, and >d codes; pickle and cPickle's protocol 1
2509 pickling of floats) ignored that rounding can cause a carry to
2510 propagate. The worst consequence was that, in rare cases, <f and >f
2511 could produce strings that, when unpacked again, were a factor of 2
2512 away from the original float. This has been fixed. See SF bug
2513 #705836.
2514
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002515- New function time.tzset() provides access to the C library tzset()
Guido van Rossumd11b62e2003-03-14 21:51:36 +00002516 function, if supported. (SF patch #675422.)
2517
Neal Norwitz12e22172003-03-03 21:16:39 +00002518- Using createfilehandler, deletefilehandler, createtimerhandler functions
2519 on Tkinter.tkinter (_tkinter module) no longer crashes the interpreter.
2520 See SF bug #692416.
2521
Michael W. Hudsonf0089982003-03-03 12:29:42 +00002522- Modified the fcntl.ioctl() function to allow modification of a passed
2523 mutable buffer (for details see the reference documentation).
2524
Raymond Hettinger61fe64d2003-02-23 04:40:07 +00002525- Made user requested changes to the itertools module.
2526 Subsumed the times() function into repeat().
2527 Added chain() and cycle().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002528
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00002529- The rotor module is now deprecated; the encryption algorithm it uses
Andrew M. Kuchlingfb5f4852003-04-24 13:19:56 +00002530 is not believed to be secure, and including crypto code with Python
2531 has implications for exporting and importing it in various countries.
2532
Skip Montanaro89feabc2003-03-30 04:54:24 +00002533- The socket module now always uses the _socketobject wrapper class, even on
2534 platforms which have dup(2). The makefile() method is built directly
2535 on top of the socket without duplicating the file descriptor, allowing
2536 timeouts to work properly.
2537
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002538Library
2539-------
2540
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00002541- New generator function os.walk() is an easy-to-use alternative to
2542 os.path.walk(). See os module docs for details. os.path.walk()
2543 isn't deprecated at this time, but may become deprecated in a
2544 future release.
2545
Marc-André Lemburg246d8472003-04-24 11:36:11 +00002546- Added new module "platform" which provides a wide range of tools
2547 for querying platform dependent features.
2548
Andrew M. Kuchling4e42b312003-04-24 16:45:05 +00002549- netrc now allows ASCII punctuation characters in passwords.
Raymond Hettinger1d877862003-04-23 19:06:08 +00002550
Martin v. Löwis153c9e42003-04-19 20:59:03 +00002551- shelve now supports the optional writeback argument, and exposes
2552 pickle protocol versions.
2553
Guido van Rossuma2685402003-04-19 18:04:57 +00002554- Several methods of nntplib.NNTP have grown an optional file argument
2555 which specifies a file where to divert the command's output
2556 (already supported by the body() method). (SF patch #720468)
2557
Martin v. Löwis281b2c62003-04-18 21:04:39 +00002558- The self-documenting XML server library DocXMLRPCServer was added.
2559
Martin v. Löwis2548c732003-04-18 10:39:54 +00002560- Support for internationalized domain names has been added through
2561 the 'idna' and 'punycode' encodings, the 'stringprep' module, the
2562 'mkstringprep' tool, and enhancements to the socket and httplib
2563 modules.
2564
Walter Dörwald5688b7a2003-04-16 09:46:13 +00002565- htmlentitydefs has two new dictionaries: name2codepoint maps
2566 HTML entity names to Unicode codepoints (as integers).
2567 codepoint2name is the reverse mapping. See SF patch #722017.
2568
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00002569- pdb has a new command, "debug", which lets you step through
2570 arbitrary code from the debugger's (pdb) prompt.
2571
Raymond Hettingerc377cbf2003-04-04 22:56:42 +00002572- unittest.failUnlessEqual and its equivalent unittest.assertEqual now
2573 return 'not a == b' rather than 'a != b'. This gives the desired
2574 result for classes that define __eq__ without defining __ne__.
2575
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002576- sgmllib now supports SGML marked sections, in particular the
Martin v. Löwis3163a3b2003-03-30 14:25:40 +00002577 MS Office extensions.
2578
Raymond Hettinger42182eb2003-03-09 05:33:33 +00002579- The urllib module now offers support for the iterator protocol.
2580 SF patch 698520 contributed by Brett Cannon.
2581
Guido van Rossum9589a252003-03-06 01:56:12 +00002582- New module timeit provides a simple framework for timing the
2583 execution speed of expressions and statements.
2584
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002585- sets.Set objects now support mixed-type __eq__ and __ne__, instead
2586 of raising TypeError. If x is a Set object and y is a non-Set object,
2587 x == y is False, and x != y is True. This is akin to the change made
2588 for mixed-type comparisons of datetime objects in 2.3a2; more info
2589 about the rationale is in the NEWS entry for that. See also SF bug
2590 report <http://www.python.org/sf/693121>.
2591
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00002592- On Unix platforms, if os.listdir() is called with a Unicode argument,
2593 it now returns Unicode strings. (This behavior was added earlier
2594 to the Windows NT/2k/XP version of os.listdir().)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002595
Andrew M. Kuchling6f177d42003-02-28 22:09:33 +00002596- Distutils: both 'py_modules' and 'packages' keywords can now be specified
2597 in core.setup(). Previously you could supply one or the other, but
2598 not both of them. (SF patch #695090 from Bernhard Herzog)
2599
Skip Montanaro64a839e2003-03-20 23:36:55 +00002600- New csv package makes it easy to read/write CSV files.
2601
Gustavo Niemeyer68d8cef2003-04-17 21:31:33 +00002602- Module shlex has been extended to allow posix-like shell parsings,
2603 including a split() function for easy spliting of quoted strings and
2604 commands. An iterator interface was also implemented.
2605
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002606Tools/Demos
2607-----------
2608
Tim Peters21d7d4d2003-04-18 00:45:59 +00002609- New script combinerefs.py helps analyze new PYTHONDUMPREFS output.
2610 See the module docstring for details.
2611
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002612Build
2613-----
2614
Neal Norwitz35892b92003-02-23 23:45:35 +00002615- Fix problem building on OSF1 because the compiler only accepted
2616 preprocessor directives that start in column 1. (SF bug #691793.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002617
2618C API
2619-----
2620
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002621- Added PyGC_Collect(), equivalent to calling gc.collect().
2622
Guido van Rossum0fc8f002003-04-15 15:12:39 +00002623- PyThreadState_GetDict() was changed not to raise an exception or
2624 issue a fatal error when no current thread state is available. This
2625 makes it possible to print dictionaries when no thread is active.
2626
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002627- LONG_LONG was renamed to PY_LONG_LONG. Extensions that use this and
2628 need compatibility with previous versions can use this:
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00002629
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002630 #ifndef PY_LONG_LONG
2631 #define PY_LONG_LONG LONG_LONG
2632 #endif
Martin v. Löwisb9a0f912003-03-29 10:06:18 +00002633
Raymond Hettinger1da1dbf2003-03-17 19:46:11 +00002634- Added PyObject_SelfIter() to fill the tp_iter slot for the
Raymond Hettinger01538262003-03-17 08:24:35 +00002635 typical case where the method returns its self argument.
2636
Guido van Rossume5c691a2003-03-07 15:13:17 +00002637- The extended type structure used for heap types (new-style
2638 classes defined by Python code using a class statement) is now
2639 exported from object.h as PyHeapTypeObject. (SF patch #696193.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002640
2641New platforms
2642-------------
2643
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00002644None this time.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002645
2646Tests
2647-----
2648
Neal Norwitz55b61d22003-02-28 19:57:03 +00002649- test_timeout now requires -u network to be passed to regrtest to run.
2650 See SF bug #692988.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002651
2652Windows
2653-------
2654
Tim Peters11b23062003-04-23 02:39:17 +00002655- os.fsync() now exists on Windows, and calls the Microsoft _commit()
2656 function.
2657
Guido van Rossumf4050642003-04-09 19:39:06 +00002658- New function winsound.MessageBeep() wraps the Win32 API
2659 MessageBeep().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002660
2661Mac
2662---
2663
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00002664- os.listdir() now returns Unicode strings on MacOS X when called with
2665 a Unicode argument. See the general news item under "Library".
Just van Rossum46c97842003-02-25 21:42:15 +00002666
Jack Jansendeac2ac2003-02-24 11:04:17 +00002667- A new method MacOS.WMAvailable() returns true if it is safe to access
2668 the window manager, false otherwise.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002669
Jack Jansencf76be02003-03-24 12:13:54 +00002670- EasyDialogs dialogs are now movable-modal, and if the application is
2671 currently in the background they will ask to be moved to the foreground
2672 before displaying.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002673
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00002674- OSA Scripting support has improved a lot, and gensuitemodule.py can now
Jack Jansende354b72003-04-11 15:37:20 +00002675 be used by mere mortals. The documentation is now also more or less
2676 complete.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002677
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00002678- The IDE (in a framework build) now includes introductory documentation
2679 in Apple Help Viewer format.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002680
2681
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002682What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 2?
2683=================================
2684
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00002685*Release date: 19-Feb-2003*
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002686
2687Core and builtins
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00002688-----------------
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002689
Walter Dörwald2ffec022003-02-19 16:34:11 +00002690- Negative positions returned from PEP 293 error callbacks are now
2691 treated as being relative to the end of the input string. Positions
2692 that are out of bounds raise an IndexError.
2693
Guido van Rossum162e38c2003-02-19 15:25:10 +00002694- sys.path[0] (the directory from which the script is loaded) is now
2695 turned into an absolute pathname, unless it is the empty string.
2696 (SF patch #664376.)
2697
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00002698- Finally fixed the bug in compile() and exec where a string ending
2699 with an indented code block but no newline would raise SyntaxError.
2700 This would have been a four-line change in parsetok.c... Except
2701 codeop.py depends on this behavior, so a compilation flag had to be
2702 invented that causes the tokenizer to revert to the old behavior;
2703 this required extra changes to 2 .h files, 2 .c files, and 2 .py
Guido van Rossum1442dc12003-02-13 22:19:20 +00002704 files. (Fixes SF bug #501622.)
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00002705
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00002706- If a new-style class defines neither __new__ nor __init__, its
2707 constructor would ignore all arguments. This is changed now: the
2708 constructor refuses arguments in this case. This might break code
2709 that worked under Python 2.2. The simplest fix is to add a no-op
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002710 __init__: ``def __init__(self, *args, **kw): pass``.
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00002711
Guido van Rossum48035eb2003-02-12 17:05:26 +00002712- Through a bytecode optimizer bug (and I bet you didn't even know
2713 Python *had* a bytecode optimizer :-), "unsigned" hex/oct constants
2714 with a leading minus sign would come out with the wrong sign.
2715 ("Unsigned" hex/oct constants are those with a face value in the
2716 range sys.maxint+1 through sys.maxint*2+1, inclusive; these have
2717 always been interpreted as negative numbers through sign folding.)
2718 E.g. 0xffffffff is -1, and -(0xffffffff) is 1, but -0xffffffff would
2719 come out as -4294967295. This was the case in Python 2.2 through
2720 2.2.2 and 2.3a1, and in Python 2.4 it will once again have that
2721 value, but according to PEP 237 it really needs to be 1 now. This
2722 will be backported to Python 2.2.3 a well. (SF #660455)
2723
Guido van Rossum47710652003-02-12 20:48:22 +00002724- int(s, base) sometimes sign-folds hex and oct constants; it only
2725 does this when base is 0 and s.strip() starts with a '0'. When the
2726 sign is actually folded, as in int("0xffffffff", 0) on a 32-bit
2727 machine, which returns -1, a FutureWarning is now issued; in Python
2728 2.4, this will return 4294967295L, as do int("+0xffffffff", 0) and
2729 int("0xffffffff", 16) right now. (PEP 347)
2730
Guido van Rossuma89d10e2003-02-12 03:58:38 +00002731- super(X, x): x may now be a proxy for an X instance, i.e.
2732 issubclass(x.__class__, X) but not issubclass(type(x), X).
2733
Guido van Rossum03bc7d32003-02-12 03:32:58 +00002734- isinstance(x, X): if X is a new-style class, this is now equivalent
2735 to issubclass(type(x), X) or issubclass(x.__class__, X). Previously
2736 only type(x) was tested. (For classic classes this was already the
2737 case.)
2738
Just van Rossum73ffb4a2003-02-10 09:57:08 +00002739- compile(), eval() and the exec statement now fully support source code
2740 passed as unicode strings.
2741
Neal Norwitzde8b94c2003-02-10 02:12:43 +00002742- int subclasses can be initialized with longs if the value fits in an int.
2743 See SF bug #683467.
2744
Tim Petersbf2674b2003-02-02 07:51:32 +00002745- long(string, base) takes time linear in len(string) when base is a power
2746 of 2 now. It used to take time quadratic in len(string).
2747
Martin v. Löwis8afd7572003-01-25 22:46:11 +00002748- filter returns now Unicode results for Unicode arguments.
2749
Martin v. Löwisaf6a27a2003-01-03 19:16:14 +00002750- raw_input can now return Unicode objects.
2751
Skip Montanaro4abd5f02003-01-02 20:51:08 +00002752- List objects' sort() method now accepts None as the comparison function.
2753 Passing None is semantically identical to calling sort() with no
2754 arguments.
2755
Neal Norwitz1a997502003-01-13 20:13:12 +00002756- Fixed crash when printing a subclass of str and __str__ returned self.
2757 See SF bug #667147.
2758
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00002759- Fixed an invalid RuntimeWarning and an undetected error when trying
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00002760 to convert a long integer into a float which couldn't fit.
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00002761 See SF bug #676155.
2762
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00002763- Function objects now have a __module__ attribute that is bound to
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00002764 the name of the module in which the function was defined. This
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00002765 applies for C functions and methods as well as functions and methods
2766 defined in Python. This attribute is used by pickle.whichmodule(),
2767 which changes the behavior of whichmodule slightly. In Python 2.2
2768 whichmodule() returns "__main__" for functions that are not defined
2769 at the top-level of a module (examples: methods, nested functions).
2770 Now whichmodule() will return the proper module name.
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00002771
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002772Extension modules
2773-----------------
2774
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00002775- operator.isNumberType() now checks that the object has a nb_int or
2776 nb_float slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
2777 tp_as_number pointer.
2778
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00002779- The imp module now has ways to acquire and release the "import
2780 lock": imp.acquire_lock() and imp.release_lock(). Note: this is a
2781 reentrant lock, so releasing the lock only truly releases it when
2782 this is the last release_lock() call. You can check with
2783 imp.lock_held(). (SF bug #580952 and patch #683257.)
2784
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002785- Change to cPickle to match pickle.py (see below and PEP 307).
2786
Neal Norwitz9caf9c02003-02-10 01:54:06 +00002787- Fix some bugs in the parser module. SF bug #678518.
2788
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00002789- Thanks to Scott David Daniels, a subtle bug in how the zlib
Walter Dörwald28d81962003-02-03 20:53:14 +00002790 extension implemented flush() was fixed. Scott also rewrote the
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00002791 zlib test suite using the unittest module. (SF bug #640230 and
2792 patch #678531.)
2793
Raymond Hettinger96ef8112003-02-01 00:10:11 +00002794- Added an itertools module containing high speed, memory efficient
2795 looping constructs inspired by tools from Haskell and SML.
2796
Guido van Rossum99d4abf2003-01-27 22:22:50 +00002797- The SSL module now handles sockets with a timeout set correctly (SF
2798 patch #675750, fixing SF bug #675552).
2799
Barry Warsawf8ba39c2003-01-07 20:55:26 +00002800- os/posixmodule has grown the sysexits.h constants (EX_OK and friends).
2801
Guido van Rossum6d0d3652003-01-07 20:34:19 +00002802- Fixed broken threadstate swap in readline that could cause fatal
2803 errors when a readline hook was being invoked while a background
2804 thread was active. (SF bugs #660476 and #513033.)
2805
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002806- fcntl now exposes the strops.h I_* constants.
2807
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00002808- Fix a crash on Solaris that occurred when calling close() on
2809 an mmap'ed file which was already closed. (SF patch #665913)
2810
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002811- Fixed several serious bugs in the zipimport implementation.
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002812
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00002813- datetime changes:
2814
Guido van Rossum8b7a9a32003-04-14 22:01:58 +00002815 The date class is now properly subclassable. (SF bug #720908)
2816
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00002817 The datetime and datetimetz classes have been collapsed into a single
2818 datetime class, and likewise the time and timetz classes into a single
2819 time class. Previously, a datetimetz object with tzinfo=None acted
2820 exactly like a datetime object, and similarly for timetz. This wasn't
2821 enough of a difference to justify distinct classes, and life is simpler
2822 now.
2823
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00002824 today() and now() now round system timestamps to the closest
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002825 microsecond <http://www.python.org/sf/661086>. This repairs an
2826 irritation most likely seen on Windows systems.
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00002827
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00002828 In dt.astimezone(tz), if tz.utcoffset(dt) returns a duration,
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00002829 ValueError is raised if tz.dst(dt) returns None (2.3a1 treated it
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002830 as 0 instead, but a tzinfo subclass wishing to participate in
2831 time zone conversion has to take a stand on whether it supports
2832 DST; if you don't care about DST, then code dst() to return 0 minutes,
2833 meaning that DST is never in effect).
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00002834
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00002835 The tzinfo methods utcoffset() and dst() must return a timedelta object
2836 (or None) now. In 2.3a1 they could also return an int or long, but that
2837 was an unhelpfully redundant leftover from an earlier version wherein
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00002838 they couldn't return a timedelta. TOOWTDI.
2839
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00002840 The example tzinfo class for local time had a bug. It was replaced
2841 by a later example coded by Guido.
2842
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00002843 datetime.astimezone(tz) no longer raises an exception when the
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002844 input datetime has no UTC equivalent in tz. For typical "hybrid" time
2845 zones (a single tzinfo subclass modeling both standard and daylight
2846 time), this case can arise one hour per year, at the hour daylight time
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00002847 ends. See new docs for details. In short, the new behavior mimics
2848 the local wall clock's behavior of repeating an hour in local time.
2849
2850 dt.astimezone() can no longer be used to convert between naive and aware
2851 datetime objects. If you merely want to attach, or remove, a tzinfo
2852 object, without any conversion of date and time members, use
2853 dt.replace(tzinfo=whatever) instead, where "whatever" is None or a
2854 tzinfo subclass instance.
2855
2856 A new method tzinfo.fromutc(dt) can be overridden in tzinfo subclasses
2857 to give complete control over how a UTC time is to be converted to
2858 a local time. The default astimezone() implementation calls fromutc()
2859 as its last step, so a tzinfo subclass can affect that too by overriding
2860 fromutc(). It's expected that the default fromutc() implementation will
2861 be suitable as-is for "almost all" time zone subclasses, but the
2862 creativity of political time zone fiddling appears unbounded -- fromutc()
2863 allows the highly motivated to emulate any scheme expressible in Python.
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002864
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00002865 datetime.now(): The optional tzinfo argument was undocumented (that's
2866 repaired), and its name was changed to tz ("tzinfo" is overloaded enough
2867 already). With a tz argument, now(tz) used to return the local date
2868 and time, and attach tz to it, without any conversion of date and time
2869 members. This was less than useful. Now now(tz) returns the current
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002870 date and time as local time in tz's time zone, akin to ::
2871
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00002872 tz.fromutc(datetime.utcnow().replace(tzinfo=utc))
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002873
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00002874 where "utc" is an instance of a tzinfo subclass modeling UTC. Without
2875 a tz argument, now() continues to return the current local date and time,
2876 as a naive datetime object.
2877
Tim Peters2a44a8d2003-01-23 20:53:10 +00002878 datetime.fromtimestamp(): Like datetime.now() above, this had less than
2879 useful behavior when the optional tinzo argument was specified. See
2880 also SF bug report <http://www.python.org/sf/660872>.
2881
Tim Peters8d81a012003-01-24 22:36:34 +00002882 date and datetime comparison: In order to prevent comparison from
2883 falling back to the default compare-object-addresses strategy, these
2884 raised TypeError whenever they didn't understand the other object type.
2885 They still do, except when the other object has a "timetuple" attribute,
2886 in which case they return NotImplemented now. This gives other
2887 datetime objects (e.g., mxDateTime) a chance to intercept the
2888 comparison.
2889
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002890 date, time, datetime and timedelta comparison: When the exception
2891 for mixed-type comparisons in the last paragraph doesn't apply, if
2892 the comparison is == then False is returned, and if the comparison is
2893 != then True is returned. Because dict lookup and the "in" operator
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002894 only invoke __eq__, this allows, for example, ::
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002895
2896 if some_datetime in some_sequence:
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002897
2898 and ::
2899
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002900 some_dict[some_timedelta] = whatever
2901
2902 to work as expected, without raising TypeError just because the
2903 sequence is heterogeneous, or the dict has mixed-type keys. [This
2904 seems like a good idea to implement for all mixed-type comparisons
2905 that don't want to allow falling back to address comparison.]
2906
Tim Peters75a6e3b2003-01-04 18:17:36 +00002907 The constructors building a datetime from a timestamp could raise
2908 ValueError if the platform C localtime()/gmtime() inserted "leap
2909 seconds". Leap seconds are ignored now. On such platforms, it's
2910 possible to have timestamps that differ by a second, yet where
2911 datetimes constructed from them are equal.
2912
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00002913 The pickle format of date, time and datetime objects has changed
2914 completely. The undocumented pickler and unpickler functions no
Tim Petersb57f8f02003-02-01 02:54:15 +00002915 longer exist. The undocumented __setstate__() and __getstate__()
2916 methods no longer exist either.
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00002917
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002918Library
2919-------
2920
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002921- The logging module was updated slightly; the WARN level was renamed
2922 to WARNING, and the matching function/method warn() to warning().
2923
2924- The pickle and cPickle modules were updated with a new pickling
2925 protocol (documented by pickletools.py, see below) and several
2926 extensions to the pickle customization API (__reduce__, __setstate__
2927 etc.). The copy module now uses more of the pickle customization
2928 API to copy objects that don't implement __copy__ or __deepcopy__.
2929 See PEP 307 for details.
2930
2931- The distutils "register" command now uses http://www.python.org/pypi
2932 as the default repository. (See PEP 301.)
2933
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00002934- the platform dependent path related variables sep, altsep, extsep,
2935 pathsep, curdir, pardir and defpath are now defined in the platform
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00002936 dependent path modules (e.g. ntpath.py) rather than os.py, so these
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002937 variables are now available via os.path. They continue to be
2938 available from the os module.
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00002939 (see <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00002940
Tim Peters6ee04802003-02-05 18:29:34 +00002941- array.array was added to the types repr.py knows about (see
2942 <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
2943
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00002944- The new pickletools.py contains lots of documentation about pickle
2945 internals, and supplies some helpers for working with pickles, such as
2946 a symbolic pickle disassembler.
2947
Skip Montanaro9a7c96a2003-01-22 18:17:25 +00002948- Xmlrpclib.py now supports the builtin boolean type.
2949
Martin v. Löwis0c6774d2003-01-15 11:51:06 +00002950- py_compile has a new 'doraise' flag and a new PyCompileError
2951 exception.
2952
Martin v. Löwisd69663d2003-01-15 11:37:23 +00002953- SimpleXMLRPCServer now supports CGI through the CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler
2954 class.
2955
Guido van Rossum50e92232003-01-14 16:45:04 +00002956- The sets module now raises TypeError in __cmp__, to clarify that
2957 sets are not intended to be three-way-compared; the comparison
2958 operators are overloaded as subset/superset tests.
2959
Guido van Rossumcd0c0472003-01-07 23:03:05 +00002960- Bastion.py and rexec.py are disabled. These modules are not safe in
2961 Python 2.2. or 2.3.
2962
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002963- realpath is now exported when doing ``from poxixpath import *``.
Neal Norwitzbb0246a2003-01-03 18:12:28 +00002964 It is also exported for ntpath, macpath, and os2emxpath.
2965 See SF bug #659228.
2966
Neal Norwitzb9ef4ae2003-01-05 23:19:43 +00002967- New module tarfile from Lars Gustäbel provides a comprehensive interface
2968 to tar archive files with transparent gzip and bzip2 compression.
2969 See SF patch #651082.
2970
Neal Norwitz4f442372003-01-06 06:51:36 +00002971- urlparse can now parse imap:// URLs. See SF feature request #618024.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002972
Neal Norwitze931ed52003-01-10 23:24:32 +00002973- Tkinter.Canvas.scan_dragto() provides an optional parameter to support
2974 the gain value which is passed to Tk. SF bug# 602259.
2975
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00002976- Fix logging.handlers.SysLogHandler protocol when using UNIX domain sockets.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00002977 See SF patch #642974.
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00002978
Skip Montanaro12fe72e2003-02-25 17:46:20 +00002979- The dospath module was deleted. Use the ntpath module when manipulating
2980 DOS paths from other platforms.
2981
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002982Tools/Demos
2983-----------
2984
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00002985- Two new scripts (db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py) were added to the
2986 Tools/scripts directory to facilitate conversion from the old bsddb module
2987 to the new one. While the user-visible API of the new module is
2988 compatible with the old one, it's likely that the version of the
2989 underlying database library has changed. To convert from the old library,
2990 run the db2pickle.py script using the old version of Python to convert it
2991 to a pickle file. After upgrading Python, run the pickle2db.py script
2992 using the new version of Python to reconstitute your database. For
2993 example:
2994
Skip Montanaro621f0552003-02-03 15:48:10 +00002995 % python2.2 db2pickle.py -h some.db > some.pickle
2996 % python2.3 pickle2db.py -h some.db.new < some.pickle
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00002997
2998 Run the scripts without any args to get a usage message.
2999
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003000
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003001Build
3002-----
3003
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00003004- The audio driver tests (test_ossaudiodev.py and
3005 test_linuxaudiodev.py) are no longer run by default. This is
3006 because they don't always work, depending on your hardware and
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003007 software. To run these tests, you must use an invocation like ::
3008
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00003009 ./python Lib/test/regrtest.py -u audio test_ossaudiodev
3010
Skip Montanarodecc6a42003-01-01 20:07:49 +00003011- On systems which build using the configure script, compiler flags which
3012 used to be lumped together using the OPT flag have been split into two
3013 groups, OPT and BASECFLAGS. OPT is meant to carry just optimization- and
3014 debug-related flags like "-g" and "-O3". BASECFLAGS is meant to carry
3015 compiler flags that are required to get a clean compile. On some
3016 platforms (many Linux flavors in particular) BASECFLAGS will be empty by
3017 default. On others, such as Mac OS X and SCO, it will contain required
3018 flags. This change allows people building Python to override OPT without
3019 fear of clobbering compiler flags which are required to get a clean build.
3020
3021- On Darwin/Mac OS X platforms, /sw/lib and /sw/include are added to the
3022 relevant search lists in setup.py. This allows users building Python to
3023 take advantage of the many packages available from the fink project
3024 <http://fink.sf.net/>.
3025
3026- A new Makefile target, scriptsinstall, installs a number of useful scripts
3027 from the Tools/scripts directory.
3028
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003029C API
3030-----
3031
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003032- PyEval_GetFrame() is now declared to return a ``PyFrameObject *``
3033 instead of a plain ``PyObject *``. (SF patch #686601.)
Guido van Rossum6297a7a2003-02-19 15:53:17 +00003034
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00003035- PyNumber_Check() now checks that the object has a nb_int or nb_float
3036 slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
3037 tp_as_number pointer.
3038
Guido van Rossumeea47182003-02-11 20:39:59 +00003039- A C type that inherits from a base type that defines tp_as_buffer
3040 will now inherit the tp_as_buffer pointer if it doesn't define one.
3041 (SF #681367)
3042
Neil Schemenauer5042da62003-02-04 20:59:40 +00003043- The PyArg_Parse functions now issue a DeprecationWarning if a float
3044 argument is provided when an integer is specified (this affects the 'b',
3045 'B', 'h', 'H', 'i', and 'l' codes). Future versions of Python will
3046 raise a TypeError.
Neil Schemenauercd63e612003-01-24 22:15:53 +00003047
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003048Tests
3049-----
3050
Walter Dörwald11cfbd62003-03-26 16:03:16 +00003051- Several tests weren't being run from regrtest.py (test_timeout.py,
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003052 test_tarfile.py, test_netrc.py, test_multifile.py,
3053 test_importhooks.py and test_imp.py). Now they are. (Note to
3054 developers: please read Lib/test/README when creating a new test, to
3055 make sure to do it right! All tests need to use either unittest or
3056 pydoc.)
3057
3058- Added test_posix.py, a test suite for the posix module.
3059
3060- Added test_hexoct.py, a test suite for hex/oct constant folding.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003061
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003062Windows
3063-------
3064
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00003065- The timeout code for socket connect() didn't work right; this has
3066 now been fixed. test_timeout.py should pass (at least most of the
3067 time).
3068
Thomas Hellerdda583d2003-01-31 20:45:41 +00003069- distutils' msvccompiler class now passes the preprocessor options to
3070 the resource compiler. See SF patch #669198.
3071
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00003072- The bsddb module now ships with Sleepycat's 4.1.25.NC, the latest
3073 release without strong cryptography.
3074
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00003075- sys.path[0], if it contains a directory name, is now always an
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003076 absolute pathname. (SF patch #664376.)
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00003077
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00003078- The new logging package is now installed by the Windows installer. It
3079 wasn't in 2.3a1 due to oversight.
3080
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003081Mac
3082---
3083
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00003084- There are new dialogs EasyDialogs.AskFileForOpen, AskFileForSave
3085 and AskFolder. The old macfs.StandardGetFile and friends are deprecated.
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00003086
Jack Jansenc9296362003-02-06 23:10:45 +00003087- Most of the standard library now uses pathnames or FSRefs in preference
3088 of FSSpecs, and use the underlying Carbon.File and Carbon.Folder modules
3089 in stead of macfs. macfs will probably be deprecated in the future.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00003090
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00003091- Type Carbon.File.FSCatalogInfo and supporting methods have been implemented.
3092 This also makes macfs.FSSpec.SetDates() work again.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003093
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00003094- There is a new module pimp, the package install manager for Python, and
3095 accompanying applet PackageManager. These allow you to easily download
3096 and install pretested extension packages either in source or binary
3097 form. Only in MacPython-OSX.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003098
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00003099- Applets are now built with bundlebuilder in MacPython-OSX, which should make
Jack Jansen5d44b342003-02-18 23:32:47 +00003100 them more robust and also provides a path towards BuildApplication. The
3101 downside of this change is that applets can no longer be run from the
3102 Terminal window, this will hopefully be fixed in the 2.3b1.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003103
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003104
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003105What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 1?
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003106=================================
3107
Guido van Rossumae548862002-12-31 15:47:36 +00003108*Release date: 31-Dec-2002*
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003109
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003110Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003111--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00003112
Michael W. Hudson96bc3b42002-11-26 14:48:23 +00003113- One can now assign to __bases__ and __name__ of new-style classes.
3114
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00003115- dict() now accepts keyword arguments so that dict(one=1, two=2)
3116 is the equivalent of {"one": 1, "two": 2}. Accordingly,
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00003117 the existing (but undocumented) 'items' keyword argument has
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00003118 been eliminated. This means that dict(items=someMapping) now has
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00003119 a different meaning than before.
3120
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00003121- int() now returns a long object if the argument is outside the
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003122 integer range, so int("4" * 1000), int(1e200) and int(1L<<1000) will
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00003123 all return long objects instead of raising an OverflowError.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003124
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003125- Assignment to __class__ is disallowed if either the old or the new
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00003126 class is a statically allocated type object (such as defined by an
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003127 extension module). This prevents anomalies like 2.__class__ = bool.
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00003128
3129- New-style object creation and deallocation have been sped up
3130 significantly; they are now faster than classic instance creation
3131 and deallocation.
3132
3133- The __slots__ variable can now mention "private" names, and the
3134 right thing will happen (e.g. __slots__ = ["__foo"]).
3135
3136- The built-ins slice() and buffer() are now callable types. The
3137 types classobj (formerly class), code, function, instance, and
3138 instancemethod (formerly instance-method), which have no built-in
3139 names but are accessible through the types module, are now also
3140 callable. The type dict-proxy is renamed to dictproxy.
3141
3142- Cycles going through the __class__ link of a new-style instance are
3143 now detected by the garbage collector.
3144
3145- Classes using __slots__ are now properly garbage collected.
3146 [SF bug 519621]
3147
3148- Tightened the __slots__ rules: a slot name must be a valid Python
3149 identifier.
3150
3151- The constructor for the module type now requires a name argument and
3152 takes an optional docstring argument. Previously, this constructor
3153 ignored its arguments. As a consequence, deriving a class from a
3154 module (not from the module type) is now illegal; previously this
3155 created an unnamed module, just like invoking the module type did.
3156 [SF bug 563060]
3157
3158- A new type object, 'basestring', is added. This is a common base type
3159 for 'str' and 'unicode', and can be used instead of
3160 types.StringTypes, e.g. to test whether something is "a string":
3161 isinstance(x, basestring) is True for Unicode and 8-bit strings. This
3162 is an abstract base class and cannot be instantiated directly.
3163
3164- Changed new-style class instantiation so that when C's __new__
3165 method returns something that's not a C instance, its __init__ is
3166 not called. [SF bug #537450]
3167
3168- Fixed super() to work correctly with class methods. [SF bug #535444]
3169
3170- If you try to pickle an instance of a class that has __slots__ but
3171 doesn't define or override __getstate__, a TypeError is now raised.
3172 This is done by adding a bozo __getstate__ to the class that always
3173 raises TypeError. (Before, this would appear to be pickled, but the
3174 state of the slots would be lost.)
3175
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003176Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003177-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003178
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003179- Import from zipfiles is now supported. The name of a zipfile placed
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00003180 on sys.path causes the import statement to look for importable Python
3181 modules (with .py, pyc and .pyo extensions) and packages inside the
3182 zipfile. The zipfile import follows the specification (though not
3183 the sample implementation) of PEP 273. The semantics of __path__ are
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003184 compatible with those that have been implemented in Jython since
3185 Jython 2.1.
3186
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003187- PEP 302 has been accepted. Although it was initially developed to
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00003188 support zipimport, it offers a new, general import hook mechanism.
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00003189 Several new variables have been added to the sys module:
3190 sys.meta_path, sys.path_hooks, and sys.path_importer_cache; these
3191 make extending the import statement much more convenient than
3192 overriding the __import__ built-in function. For a description of
3193 these, see PEP 302.
3194
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003195- A frame object's f_lineno attribute can now be written to from a
3196 trace function to change which line will execute next. A command to
3197 exploit this from pdb has been added. [SF patch #643835]
3198
Marc-André Lemburg20b91352002-12-12 18:01:43 +00003199- The _codecs support module for codecs.py was turned into a builtin
3200 module to assure that at least the builtin codecs are available
3201 to the Python parser for source code decoding according to PEP 263.
3202
Walter Dörwaldd9a6ad32002-12-12 16:41:44 +00003203- issubclass now supports a tuple as the second argument, just like
3204 isinstance does. ``issubclass(X, (A, B))`` is equivalent to
3205 ``issubclass(X, A) or issubclass(X, B)``.
3206
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00003207- Thanks to Armin Rigo, the last known way to provoke a system crash
3208 by cleverly arranging for a comparison function to mutate a list
3209 during a list.sort() operation has been fixed. The effect of
3210 attempting to mutate a list, or even to inspect its contents or
3211 length, while a sort is in progress, is not defined by the language.
3212 The C implementation of Python 2.3 attempts to detect mutations,
3213 and raise ValueError if one occurs, but there's no guarantee that
3214 all mutations will be caught, or that any will be caught across
3215 releases or implementations.
3216
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00003217- Unicode file name processing for Windows (PEP 277) is implemented.
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00003218 All platforms now have an os.path.supports_unicode_filenames attribute,
3219 which is set to True on Windows NT/2000/XP, and False elsewhere.
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00003220
Walter Dörwald3aeb6322002-09-02 13:14:32 +00003221- Codec error handling callbacks (PEP 293) are implemented.
3222 Error handling in unicode.encode or str.decode can now be customized.
3223
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00003224- A subtle change to the semantics of the built-in function intern():
3225 interned strings are no longer immortal. You must keep a reference
3226 to the return value intern() around to get the benefit.
3227
Guido van Rossumf808b892002-08-16 03:38:10 +00003228- Use of 'None' as a variable, argument or attribute name now
3229 issues a SyntaxWarning. In the future, None may become a keyword.
3230
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00003231- SET_LINENO is gone. co_lnotab is now consulted to determine when to
3232 call the trace function. C code that accessed f_lineno should call
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003233 PyCode_Addr2Line instead (f_lineno is still there, but only kept up
3234 to date when there is a trace function set).
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00003235
Guido van Rossum9be89462002-08-14 16:11:30 +00003236- There's a new warning category, FutureWarning. This is used to warn
3237 about a number of situations where the value or sign of an integer
3238 result will change in Python 2.4 as a result of PEP 237 (integer
3239 unification). The warnings implement stage B0 mentioned in that
3240 PEP. The warnings are about the following situations:
3241
3242 - Octal and hex literals without 'L' prefix in the inclusive range
3243 [0x80000000..0xffffffff]; these are currently negative ints, but
3244 in Python 2.4 they will be positive longs with the same bit
3245 pattern.
3246
3247 - Left shifts on integer values that cause the outcome to lose
3248 bits or have a different sign than the left operand. To be
3249 precise: x<<n where this currently doesn't yield the same value
3250 as long(x)<<n; in Python 2.4, the outcome will be long(x)<<n.
3251
3252 - Conversions from ints to string that show negative values as
3253 unsigned ints in the inclusive range [0x80000000..0xffffffff];
3254 this affects the functions hex() and oct(), and the string
3255 formatting codes %u, %o, %x, and %X. In Python 2.4, these will
3256 show signed values (e.g. hex(-1) currently returns "0xffffffff";
3257 in Python 2.4 it will return "-0x1").
3258
Guido van Rossum9a2eda52002-12-31 02:12:42 +00003259- The bits manipulated under the cover by sys.setcheckinterval() have
3260 been changed. Both the check interval and the ticker used to be
3261 per-thread values. They are now just a pair of global variables.
3262 In addition, the default check interval was boosted from 10 to 100
3263 bytecode instructions. This may have some effect on systems that
3264 relied on the old default value. In particular, in multi-threaded
3265 applications which try to be highly responsive, response time will
3266 increase by some (perhaps imperceptible) amount.
Skip Montanaro979c74b2002-09-03 21:25:14 +00003267
Tim Petersd64c1de2002-08-12 17:36:03 +00003268- When multiplying very large integers, a version of the so-called
3269 Karatsuba algorithm is now used. This is most effective if the
3270 inputs have roughly the same size. If they both have about N digits,
3271 Karatsuba multiplication has O(N**1.58) runtime (the exponent is
3272 log_base_2(3)) instead of the previous O(N**2). Measured results may
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00003273 be better or worse than that, depending on platform quirks. Besides
3274 the O() improvement in raw instruction count, the Karatsuba algorithm
3275 appears to have much better cache behavior on extremely large integers
3276 (starting in the ballpark of a million bits). Note that this is a
3277 simple implementation, and there's no intent here to compete with,
3278 e.g., GMP. It gives a very nice speedup when it applies, but a package
3279 devoted to fast large-integer arithmetic should run circles around it.
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00003280
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00003281- u'%c' will now raise a ValueError in case the argument is an
3282 integer outside the valid range of Unicode code point ordinals.
3283
Guido van Rossumdeb09362002-08-09 17:16:30 +00003284- The tempfile module has been overhauled for enhanced security. The
3285 mktemp() function is now deprecated; new, safe replacements are
3286 mkstemp() (for files) and mkdtemp() (for directories), and the
3287 higher-level functions NamedTemporaryFile() and TemporaryFile().
3288 Use of some global variables in this module is also deprecated; the
3289 new functions have keyword arguments to provide the same
3290 functionality. All Lib, Tools and Demo modules that used the unsafe
3291 interfaces have been updated to use the safe replacements. Thanks
3292 to Zack Weinberg!
3293
Guido van Rossumd81a9832002-08-09 15:57:34 +00003294- When x is an object whose class implements __mul__ and __rmul__,
3295 1.0*x would correctly invoke __rmul__, but 1*x would erroneously
3296 invoke __mul__. This was due to the sequence-repeat code in the int
3297 type. This has been fixed now.
3298
Barry Warsawd79f6832002-08-06 17:01:51 +00003299- Previously, "str1 in str2" required str1 to be a string of length 1.
3300 This restriction has been relaxed to allow str1 to be a string of
3301 any length. Thus "'el' in 'hello world'" returns True now.
3302
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003303- File objects are now their own iterators. For a file f, iter(f) now
3304 returns f (unless f is closed), and f.next() is similar to
3305 f.readline() when EOF is not reached; however, f.next() uses a
3306 readahead buffer that messes up the file position, so mixing
3307 f.next() and f.readline() (or other methods) doesn't work right.
3308 Calling f.seek() drops the readahead buffer, but other operations
3309 don't. It so happens that this gives a nice additional speed boost
3310 to "for line in file:"; the xreadlines method and corresponding
Guido van Rossumbffb2ef2002-08-09 17:17:07 +00003311 module are now obsolete. Thanks to Oren Tirosh!
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003312
Guido van Rossumde392d32002-08-05 14:17:20 +00003313- Encoding declarations (PEP 263, phase 1) have been implemented. A
3314 comment of the form "# -*- coding: <encodingname> -*-" in the first
3315 or second line of a Python source file indicates the encoding.
Martin v. Löwis00f1e3f2002-08-04 17:29:52 +00003316
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003317- list.sort() has a new implementation. While cross-platform results
3318 may vary, and in data-dependent ways, this is much faster on many
3319 kinds of partially ordered lists than the previous implementation,
3320 and reported to be just as fast on randomly ordered lists on
3321 several major platforms. This sort is also stable (if A==B and A
3322 precedes B in the list at the start, A precedes B after the sort too),
3323 although the language definition does not guarantee stability. A
3324 potential drawback is that list.sort() may require temp space of
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003325 len(list)*2 bytes (``*4`` on a 64-bit machine). It's therefore possible
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003326 for list.sort() to raise MemoryError now, even if a comparison function
3327 does not. See <http://www.python.org/sf/587076> for full details.
3328
Guido van Rossum2d5389c2002-07-23 03:44:35 +00003329- All standard iterators now ensure that, once StopIteration has been
3330 raised, all future calls to next() on the same iterator will also
3331 raise StopIteration. There used to be various counterexamples to
3332 this behavior, which could caused confusion or subtle program
3333 breakage, without any benefits. (Note that this is still an
3334 iterator's responsibility; the iterator framework does not enforce
3335 this.)
3336
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003337- Ctrl+C handling on Windows has been made more consistent with
3338 other platforms. KeyboardInterrupt can now reliably be caught,
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003339 and Ctrl+C at an interactive prompt no longer terminates the
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003340 process under NT/2k/XP (it never did under Win9x). Ctrl+C will
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00003341 interrupt time.sleep() in the main thread, and any child processes
3342 created via the popen family (on win2k; we can't make win9x work
Mark Hammond8f3afc72002-08-10 06:26:31 +00003343 reliably) are also interrupted (as generally happens on for Linux/Unix.)
3344 [SF bugs 231273, 439992 and 581232]
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003345
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00003346- sys.getwindowsversion() has been added on Windows. This
3347 returns a tuple with information about the version of Windows
3348 currently running.
3349
Raymond Hettinger5a04aec2002-06-25 00:25:30 +00003350- Slices and repetitions of buffer objects now consistently return
3351 a string. Formerly, strings would be returned most of the time,
3352 but a buffer object would be returned when the repetition count
3353 was one or when the slice range was all inclusive.
3354
Walter Dörwald3430d702002-06-17 10:43:59 +00003355- Unicode objects in sys.path are no longer ignored but treated
3356 as directory names.
3357
Neal Norwitz1f68fc72002-06-14 00:50:42 +00003358- Fixed string.startswith and string.endswith builtin methods
3359 so they accept negative indices. [SF bug 493951]
3360
Guido van Rossumc5fe5eb2002-06-12 03:45:21 +00003361- Fixed a bug with a continue inside a try block and a yield in the
3362 finally clause. [SF bug 567538]
3363
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00003364- Most builtin sequences now support "extended slices", i.e. slices
Guido van Rossum2e82e712002-06-13 11:41:07 +00003365 with a third "stride" parameter. For example, "hello world"[::-1]
3366 gives "dlrow olleh".
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00003367
Neal Norwitzd68f5172002-05-29 15:54:55 +00003368- A new warning PendingDeprecationWarning was added to provide
3369 direction on features which are in the process of being deprecated.
3370 The warning will not be printed by default. To see the pending
3371 deprecations, use -Walways::PendingDeprecationWarning::
3372 as a command line option or warnings.filterwarnings() in code.
3373
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00003374- Deprecated features of xrange objects have been removed as
3375 promised. The start, stop, and step attributes and the tolist()
3376 method no longer exist. xrange repetition and slicing have been
3377 removed.
3378
Guido van Rossum7dab2422002-04-26 19:40:56 +00003379- New builtin function enumerate(x), from PEP 279. Example:
3380 enumerate("abc") is an iterator returning (0,"a"), (1,"b"), (2,"c").
3381 The argument can be an arbitrary iterable object.
3382
Neil Schemenauer89e3ee02002-04-26 01:58:53 +00003383- The assert statement no longer tests __debug__ at runtime. This means
3384 that assert statements cannot be disabled by assigning a false value
3385 to __debug__.
3386
Walter Dörwald068325e2002-04-15 13:36:47 +00003387- A method zfill() was added to str and unicode, that fills a numeric
3388 string to the left with zeros. For example,
3389 "+123".zfill(6) -> "+00123".
3390
Guido van Rossum862fe3c2002-04-15 12:36:47 +00003391- Complex numbers supported divmod() and the // and % operators, but
3392 these make no sense. Since this was documented, they're being
3393 deprecated now.
3394
Guido van Rossum26dd8302002-04-26 20:11:29 +00003395- String and unicode methods lstrip(), rstrip() and strip() now take
3396 an optional argument that specifies the characters to strip. For
3397 example, "Foo!!!?!?!?".rstrip("?!") -> "Foo".
Guido van Rossum49042042002-04-13 00:59:05 +00003398
Guido van Rossumc0d3f4e2002-11-27 13:10:40 +00003399- There's a new dictionary constructor (a class method of the dict
3400 class), dict.fromkeys(iterable, value=None). It constructs a
3401 dictionary with keys taken from the iterable and all values set to a
3402 single value. It can be used for building sets and for removing
3403 duplicates from sequences.
Raymond Hettingere33d3df2002-11-27 07:29:33 +00003404
Guido van Rossumc69343b2002-04-12 19:22:48 +00003405- Added a new dict method pop(key). This removes and returns the
3406 value corresponding to key. [SF patch #539949]
3407
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00003408- A new built-in type, bool, has been added, as well as built-in
3409 names for its two values, True and False. Comparisons and sundry
3410 other operations that return a truth value have been changed to
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003411 return a bool instead. Read PEP 285 for an explanation of why this
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00003412 is backward compatible.
3413
Guido van Rossum95b62a62002-03-29 01:07:24 +00003414- Fixed two bugs reported as SF #535905: under certain conditions,
3415 deallocating a deeply nested structure could cause a segfault in the
3416 garbage collector, due to interaction with the "trashcan" code;
3417 access to the current frame during destruction of a local variable
3418 could access a pointer to freed memory.
3419
Guido van Rossumfe0ca4a2002-06-18 21:20:13 +00003420- The optional object allocator ("pymalloc") has been enabled by
3421 default. The recommended practice for memory allocation and
3422 deallocation has been streamlined. A header file is included,
3423 Misc/pymemcompat.h, which can be bundled with 3rd party extensions
3424 and lets them use the same API with Python versions from 1.5.2
3425 onwards.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00003426
Martin v. Löwiscfeb3b62002-03-03 21:30:27 +00003427- PyErr_Display will provide file and line information for all exceptions
3428 that have an attribute print_file_and_line, not just SyntaxErrors.
3429
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00003430- The UTF-8 codec will now encode and decode Unicode surrogates
3431 correctly and without raising exceptions for unpaired ones.
3432
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00003433- Universal newlines (PEP 278) is implemented. Briefly, using 'U'
3434 instead of 'r' when opening a text file for reading changes the line
3435 ending convention so that any of '\r', '\r\n', and '\n' is
3436 recognized (even mixed in one file); all three are converted to
3437 '\n', the standard Python line end character.
3438
Neal Norwitz649b7592002-01-01 19:07:13 +00003439- file.xreadlines() now raises a ValueError if the file is closed:
3440 Previously, an xreadlines object was returned which would raise
3441 a ValueError when the xreadlines.next() method was called.
3442
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003443- sys.exit() inadvertently allowed more than one argument.
Neal Norwitz0c766a02002-03-27 13:03:09 +00003444 An exception will now be raised if more than one argument is used.
3445
Gustavo Niemeyer17c5a332002-12-16 14:09:22 +00003446- Changed evaluation order of dictionary literals to conform to the
3447 general left to right evaluation order rule. Now {f1(): f2()} will
3448 evaluate f1 first.
Gustavo Niemeyer78429a62002-12-16 13:54:02 +00003449
Gustavo Niemeyer786ddb22002-12-16 18:12:53 +00003450- Fixed bug #521782: when a file was in non-blocking mode, file.read()
3451 could silently lose data or wrongly throw an unknown error.
3452
Neil Schemenauerb983aa02002-12-30 20:22:23 +00003453- The sq_repeat, sq_inplace_repeat, sq_concat and sq_inplace_concat
3454 slots are now always tried after trying the corresponding nb_* slots.
3455 This fixes a number of minor bugs (see bug #624807).
3456
Neal Norwitz74a032e2003-01-10 23:29:48 +00003457- Fix problem with dynamic loading on 64-bit AIX (see bug #639945).
3458
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003459Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003460-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003461
Raymond Hettinger9543b342003-01-18 23:22:20 +00003462- Added three operators to the operator module:
3463 operator.pow(a,b) which is equivalent to: a**b.
3464 operator.is_(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is b.
3465 operator.is_not(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is not b.
3466
Martin v. Löwis24a880b2002-12-31 12:55:15 +00003467- posix.openpty now works on all systems that have /dev/ptmx.
3468
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003469- A module zipimport exists to support importing code from zip
3470 archives.
3471
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00003472- The new datetime module supplies classes for manipulating dates and
3473 times. The basic design came from the Zope "fishbowl process", and
3474 favors practical commercial applications over calendar esoterica. See
3475
3476 http://www.zope.org/Members/fdrake/DateTimeWiki/FrontPage
3477
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00003478- _tkinter now returns Tcl objects, instead of strings. Objects which
3479 have Python equivalents are converted to Python objects, other objects
3480 are wrapped. This can be configured through the wantobjects method,
Martin v. Löwis8c8aa5d2002-11-26 21:39:48 +00003481 or Tkinter.wantobjects.
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00003482
Barry Warsawc27f4bd2002-12-30 21:03:26 +00003483- The PyBSDDB wrapper around the Sleepycat Berkeley DB library has
3484 been added as the package bsddb. The traditional bsddb module is
3485 still available in source code, but not built automatically anymore,
3486 and is now named bsddb185. This supports Berkeley DB versions from
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00003487 3.0 to 4.1. For help converting your databases from the old module (which
3488 probably used an obsolete version of Berkeley DB) to the new module, see
3489 the db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py scripts described in the Tools/Demos
3490 section above.
Martin v. Löwisef546b32002-11-19 08:12:57 +00003491
Martin v. Löwis677bde22002-11-23 22:08:15 +00003492- unicodedata was updated to Unicode 3.2. It supports normalization
3493 and names for Hangul syllables and CJK unified ideographs.
Martin v. Löwis7d41e292002-11-23 12:22:32 +00003494
Neal Norwitz94a83fd2002-11-02 17:46:24 +00003495- resource.getrlimit() now returns longs instead of ints.
3496
Martin v. Löwis080689c2002-10-26 14:42:02 +00003497- readline now dynamically adjusts its input/output stream if
3498 sys.stdin/stdout changes.
3499
Guido van Rossumba602972002-10-01 18:18:58 +00003500- The _tkinter module (and hence Tkinter) has dropped support for
3501 Tcl/Tk 8.0 and 8.1. Only Tcl/Tk versions 8.2, 8.3 and 8.4 are
3502 supported.
3503
Martin v. Löwis658009a2002-09-16 17:26:24 +00003504- cPickle.BadPickleGet is now a class.
3505
Martin v. Löwisa19bfe02002-10-16 18:28:36 +00003506- The time stamps in os.stat_result are floating point numbers
3507 after stat_float_times has been called.
Martin v. Löwis94717ed2002-09-09 14:24:16 +00003508
Neal Norwitzb5673922002-09-05 21:48:07 +00003509- If the size passed to mmap.mmap() is larger than the length of the
3510 file on non-Windows platforms, a ValueError is raised. [SF bug 585792]
3511
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003512- The xreadlines module is slated for obsolescence.
3513
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00003514- The strptime function in the time module is now always available (a
3515 Python implementation is used when the C library doesn't define it).
3516
Guido van Rossum9562bcf2002-06-14 21:31:18 +00003517- The 'new' module is no longer an extension, but a Python module that
3518 only exists for backwards compatibility. Its contents are no longer
3519 functions but callable type objects.
3520
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003521- The bsddb.*open functions can now take 'None' as a filename.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00003522 This will create a temporary in-memory bsddb that won't be
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003523 written to disk.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00003524
Martin v. Löwisb96152c2002-12-31 13:20:15 +00003525- posix.getloadavg, posix.lchown, posix.killpg, posix.mknod, and
3526 posix.getpgid have been added where available.
Martin v. Löwis06a83e92002-04-14 10:19:44 +00003527
Martin v. Löwisf0a46682002-11-03 17:20:12 +00003528- The locale module now exposes the C library's gettext interface. It
3529 also has a new function getpreferredencoding.
Martin v. Löwis2e64c342002-03-27 18:49:02 +00003530
Tim Petersfbf74f22002-03-14 19:06:01 +00003531- A security hole ("double free") was found in zlib-1.1.3, a popular
3532 third party compression library used by some Python modules. The
3533 hole was quickly plugged in zlib-1.1.4, and the Windows build of
3534 Python now ships with zlib-1.1.4.
3535
Martin v. Löwis688357e2002-04-08 21:28:20 +00003536- pwd, grp, and resource return enhanced tuples now, with symbolic
3537 field names.
Martin v. Löwis29001ff2002-03-01 10:47:37 +00003538
Martin v. Löwis99866332002-03-01 10:27:01 +00003539- array.array is now a type object. A new format character
3540 'u' indicates Py_UNICODE arrays. For those, .tounicode and
3541 .fromunicode methods are available. Arrays now support __iadd__
3542 and __imul__.
3543
Neal Norwitze790eae2002-01-01 21:14:12 +00003544- dl now builds on every system that has dlfcn.h. Failure in case
Martin v. Löwis93227272002-01-01 20:18:30 +00003545 of sizeof(int)!=sizeof(long)!=sizeof(void*) is delayed until dl.open
3546 is called.
3547
Skip Montanaro8e790e72002-09-03 13:25:17 +00003548- The sys module acquired a new attribute, api_version, which evaluates
3549 to the value of the PYTHON_API_VERSION macro with which the
3550 interpreter was compiled.
3551
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00003552- Fixed bug #470582: sre module would return a tuple (None, 'a', 'ab')
3553 when applying the regular expression '^((a)c)?(ab)$' on 'ab'. It now
3554 returns (None, None, 'ab'), as expected. Also fixed handling of
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00003555 lastindex/lastgroup match attributes in similar cases. For example,
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00003556 when running the expression r'(a)(b)?b' over 'ab', lastindex must be
3557 1, not 2.
3558
Gustavo Niemeyerc523b042002-11-07 03:28:56 +00003559- Fixed bug #581080: sre scanner was not checking the buffer limit
3560 before increasing the current pointer. This was creating an infinite
3561 loop in the search function, once the pointer exceeded the buffer
3562 limit.
3563
Thomas Heller95cb7e42002-11-07 16:23:55 +00003564- The os.fdopen function now enforces a file mode starting with the
3565 letter 'r', 'w' or 'a', otherwise a ValueError is raised. This fixes
3566 bug #623464.
3567
Greg Ward6c58d462003-01-03 18:02:15 +00003568- The linuxaudiodev module is now deprecated; it is being replaced by
3569 ossaudiodev. The interface has been extended to cover a lot more of
3570 OSS (see www.opensound.com), including most DSP ioctls and the
3571 OSS mixer API. Documentation forthcoming in 2.3a2.
3572
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003573Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003574-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003575
Guido van Rossum747f8062003-01-03 16:33:49 +00003576- imaplib.py now supports SSL (Tino Lange and Piers Lauder).
3577
Just van Rossum5e156ad2002-12-31 16:38:01 +00003578- Freeze's modulefinder.py has been moved to the standard library;
3579 slightly improved so it will issue less false missing submodule
3580 reports (see sf path #643711 for details). Documentation will follow
3581 with Python 2.3a2.
3582
Martin v. Löwis96a60e42002-12-31 13:11:54 +00003583- os.path exposes getctime.
3584
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003585- unittest.py now has two additional methods called assertAlmostEqual()
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003586 and failIfAlmostEqual(). They implement an approximate comparison
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003587 by rounding the difference between the two arguments and comparing
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003588 the result to zero. Approximate comparison is essential for
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003589 unit tests of floating point results.
3590
Raymond Hettingere11b5102002-12-25 16:37:19 +00003591- calendar.py now depends on the new datetime module rather than
3592 the time module. As a result, the range of allowable dates
3593 has been increased.
3594
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003595- pdb has a new 'j(ump)' command to select the next line to be
3596 executed.
3597
Thomas Heller1b3b49d2002-12-12 19:13:44 +00003598- The distutils created windows installers now can run a
3599 postinstallation script.
3600
Martin v. Löwis4581cfa2002-11-22 08:23:09 +00003601- doctest.testmod can now be called without argument, which means to
3602 test the current module.
3603
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003604- When canceling a server that implemented threading with a keyboard
Martin v. Löwisf86e8ef2002-11-22 08:08:44 +00003605 interrupt, the server would shut down but not terminate (waiting on
3606 client threads). A new member variable, daemon_threads, was added to
3607 the ThreadingMixIn class in SocketServer.py to make it explicit that
3608 this behavior needs to be controlled.
3609
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00003610- A new module, optparse, provides a fancy alternative to getopt for
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003611 command line parsing. It is a slightly modified version of Greg
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00003612 Ward's Optik package.
3613
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00003614- UserDict.py now defines a DictMixin class which defines all dictionary
3615 methods for classes that already have a minimum mapping interface.
3616 This greatly simplifies writing classes that need to be substitutable
3617 for dictionaries (such as the shelve module).
3618
3619- shelve.py now subclasses from UserDict.DictMixin. Now shelve supports
3620 all dictionary methods. This eases the transition to persistent
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003621 storage for scripts originally written with dictionaries in mind.
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00003622
Skip Montanaro3bf99e32002-12-08 18:36:24 +00003623- shelve.open and the various classes in shelve.py now accept an optional
3624 binary flag, which defaults to False. If True, the values stored in the
3625 shelf are binary pickles.
3626
Guido van Rossumfda06742002-11-13 16:29:18 +00003627- A new package, logging, implements the logging API defined by PEP
3628 282. The code is written by Vinay Sajip.
3629
Walter Dörwald4dbf1922002-11-06 16:53:44 +00003630- StreamReader, StreamReaderWriter and StreamRecoder in the codecs
3631 modules are iterators now.
3632
Tim Peters9288f952002-11-05 20:38:55 +00003633- gzip.py now handles files exceeding 2GB. Files over 4GB also work
3634 now (provided the OS supports it, and Python is configured with large
3635 file support), but in that case the underlying gzip file format can
3636 record only the least-significant 32 bits of the file size, so that
3637 some tools working with gzipped files may report an incorrect file
3638 size.
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00003639
Martin v. Löwis74b51ac2002-10-26 14:50:45 +00003640- xml.sax.saxutils.unescape has been added, to replace entity references
3641 with their entity value.
3642
Martin v. Löwis77ac4292002-10-15 15:11:13 +00003643- Queue.Queue.{put,get} now support an optional timeout argument.
3644
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00003645- Various features of Tk 8.4 are exposed in Tkinter.py. The multiple
3646 option of tkFileDialog is exposed as function askopenfile{,name}s.
Martin v. Löwis2ec36272002-10-13 10:22:08 +00003647
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00003648- Various configure methods of Tkinter have been stream-lined, so that
3649 tag_configure, image_configure, window_configure now return a
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00003650 dictionary when invoked with no argument.
Martin v. Löwis6ce13152002-10-10 14:36:13 +00003651
Guido van Rossum2b492b62002-10-09 21:40:48 +00003652- Importing the readline module now no longer has the side effect of
3653 calling setlocale(LC_CTYPE, ""). The initial "C" locale, or
3654 whatever locale is explicitly set by the user, is preserved. If you
3655 want repr() of 8-bit strings in your preferred encoding to preserve
3656 all printable characters of that encoding, you have to add the
3657 following code to your $PYTHONSTARTUP file or to your application's
3658 main():
3659
3660 import locale
3661 locale.setlocale(locale.LC_CTYPE, "")
3662
Martin v. Löwise9ce0b02002-10-07 13:23:24 +00003663- shutil.move was added. shutil.copytree now reports errors as an
3664 exception at the end, instead of printing error messages.
3665
Marc-André Lemburg97047e22002-10-04 11:55:21 +00003666- Encoding name normalization was generalized to not only
3667 replace hyphens with underscores, but also all other non-alphanumeric
3668 characters (with the exception of the dot which is used for Python
3669 package names during lookup). The aliases.py mapping was updated
3670 to the new standard.
3671
Walter Dörwald5ccaf8f2002-09-06 16:15:58 +00003672- mimetypes has two new functions: guess_all_extensions() which
3673 returns a list of all known extensions for a mime type, and
3674 add_type() which adds one mapping between a mime type and
3675 an extension to the database.
3676
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00003677- New module: sets, defines the class Set that implements a mutable
3678 set type using the keys of a dict to represent the set. There's
3679 also a class ImmutableSet which is useful when you need sets of sets
3680 or when you need to use sets as dict keys, and a class BaseSet which
Raymond Hettingeref8b9c62002-12-09 08:56:06 +00003681 is the base class of the two.
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00003682
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00003683- Added random.sample(population,k) for random sampling without replacement.
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00003684 Returns a k length list of unique elements chosen from the population.
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00003685
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00003686- random.randrange(-sys.maxint-1, sys.maxint) no longer raises
3687 OverflowError. That is, it now accepts any combination of 'start'
3688 and 'stop' arguments so long as each is in the range of Python's
3689 bounded integers.
3690
Raymond Hettinger40f62172002-12-29 23:03:38 +00003691- Thanks to Raymond Hettinger, random.random() now uses a new core
3692 generator. The Mersenne Twister algorithm is implemented in C,
3693 threadsafe, faster than the previous generator, has an astronomically
3694 large period (2**19937-1), creates random floats to full 53-bit
3695 precision, and may be the most widely tested random number generator
3696 in existence.
3697
3698 The random.jumpahead(n) method has different semantics for the new
3699 generator. Instead of jumping n steps ahead, it uses n and the
3700 existing state to create a new state. This means that jumpahead()
3701 continues to support multi-threaded code needing generators of
3702 non-overlapping sequences. However, it will break code which relies
3703 on jumpahead moving a specific number of steps forward.
3704
3705 The attributes random.whseed and random.__whseed have no meaning for
3706 the new generator. Code using these attributes should switch to a
3707 new class, random.WichmannHill which is provided for backward
3708 compatibility and to make an alternate generator available.
3709
Guido van Rossum4a57c332002-08-02 18:05:20 +00003710- New "algorithms" module: heapq, implements a heap queue. Thanks to
3711 Kevin O'Connor for the code and François Pinard for an entertaining
3712 write-up explaining the theory and practical uses of heaps.
3713
Marc-André Lemburg58e2ff22002-07-12 14:40:04 +00003714- New encoding for the Palm OS character set: palmos.
3715
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00003716- binascii.crc32() and the zipfile module had problems on some 64-bit
3717 platforms. These have been fixed. On a platform with 8-byte C longs,
3718 crc32() now returns a signed-extended 4-byte result, so that its value
3719 as a Python int is equal to the value computed a 32-bit platform.
3720
Martin v. Löwis7d650ca2002-06-30 15:05:00 +00003721- xml.dom.minidom.toxml and toprettyxml now take an optional encoding
3722 argument.
3723
Guido van Rossum9f7549b2002-06-10 21:39:42 +00003724- Some fixes in the copy module: when an object is copied through its
3725 __reduce__ method, there was no check for a __setstate__ method on
3726 the result [SF patch 565085]; deepcopy should treat instances of
3727 custom metaclasses the same way it treats instances of type 'type'
3728 [SF patch 560794].
3729
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00003730- Sockets now support timeout mode. After s.settimeout(T), where T is
3731 a float expressing seconds, subsequent operations raise an exception
3732 if they cannot be completed within T seconds. To disable timeout
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00003733 mode, use s.settimeout(None). There's also a module function,
3734 socket.setdefaulttimeout(T), which sets the default for all sockets
3735 created henceforth.
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00003736
3737- getopt.gnu_getopt was added. This supports GNU-style option
3738 processing, where options can be mixed with non-option arguments.
Martin v. Löwis446a25f2002-06-06 10:58:36 +00003739
Michael W. Hudsonb0dc1a32002-06-04 18:27:35 +00003740- Stop using strings for exceptions. String objects used for
3741 exceptions are now classes deriving from Exception. The objects
3742 changed were: Tkinter.TclError, bdb.BdbQuit, macpath.norm_error,
3743 tabnanny.NannyNag, and xdrlib.Error.
Neal Norwitzb5b5a262002-06-04 17:14:07 +00003744
Walter Dörwald474458d2002-06-04 15:16:29 +00003745- Constants BOM_UTF8, BOM_UTF16, BOM_UTF16_LE, BOM_UTF16_BE,
3746 BOM_UTF32, BOM_UTF32_LE and BOM_UTF32_BE that represent the Byte
3747 Order Mark in UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 encodings for little and
3748 big endian systems were added to the codecs module. The old names
3749 BOM32_* and BOM64_* were off by a factor of 2.
3750
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00003751- Added conversion functions math.degrees() and math.radians().
Raymond Hettinger87f59ee2002-05-13 04:17:32 +00003752
Raymond Hettinger866964c2002-12-14 19:51:34 +00003753- math.log() now takes an optional argument: math.log(x[, base]).
3754
Raymond Hettinger9b1df1d2002-05-12 06:07:21 +00003755- ftplib.retrlines() now tests for callback is None rather than testing
3756 for False. Was causing an error when given a callback object which
3757 was callable but also returned len() as zero. The change may
3758 create new breakage if the caller relied on the undocumented behavior
3759 and called with callback set to [] or some other False value not
3760 identical to None.
3761
Tim Peters46c04e12002-05-05 20:40:00 +00003762- random.gauss() uses a piece of hidden state used by nothing else,
3763 and the .seed() and .whseed() methods failed to reset it. In other
3764 words, setting the seed didn't completely determine the sequence of
3765 results produced by random.gauss(). It does now. Programs repeatedly
3766 mixing calls to a seed method with calls to gauss() may see different
3767 results now.
3768
Fred Drake7f781c92002-05-01 20:33:53 +00003769- The pickle.Pickler class grew a clear_memo() method to mimic that
3770 provided by cPickle.Pickler.
3771
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003772- difflib's SequenceMatcher class now does a dynamic analysis of
3773 which elements are so frequent as to constitute noise. For
3774 comparing files as sequences of lines, this generally works better
3775 than the IS_LINE_JUNK function, and function ndiff's linejunk
3776 argument defaults to None now as a result. A happy benefit is
3777 that SequenceMatcher may run much faster now when applied
3778 to large files with many duplicate lines (for example, C program
3779 text with lots of repeated "}" and "return NULL;" lines).
3780
Guido van Rossum256705b2002-04-23 13:29:43 +00003781- New Text.dump() method in Tkinter module.
3782
Marc-André Lemburg1ec71ea2002-04-17 20:33:40 +00003783- New distutils commands for building packagers were added to
3784 support pkgtool on Solaris and swinstall on HP-UX.
3785
3786- distutils now has a new abstract binary packager base class
3787 command/bdist_packager, which simplifies writing packagers.
3788 This will hopefully provide the missing bits to encourage
3789 people to submit more packagers, e.g. for Debian, FreeBSD
3790 and other systems.
3791
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00003792- The UTF-16, -LE and -BE stream readers now raise a
3793 NotImplementedError for all calls to .readline(). Previously, they
3794 used to just produce garbage or fail with an encoding error --
3795 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 +00003796 work well with these.
3797
Martin v. Löwis5c137c22002-03-18 12:44:08 +00003798- compileall now supports quiet operation.
3799
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003800- The BaseHTTPServer now implements optional HTTP/1.1 persistent
Martin v. Löwis587c98c2002-03-17 18:37:22 +00003801 connections.
3802
Marc-André Lemburga5d2b4c2002-02-16 18:23:30 +00003803- socket module: the SSL support was broken out of the main
3804 _socket module C helper and placed into a new _ssl helper
3805 which now gets imported by socket.py if available and working.
3806
Marc-André Lemburg37aa5802002-02-10 21:42:47 +00003807- encodings package: added aliases for all supported IANA character
3808 sets
3809
Guido van Rossum606fe4e2001-12-28 20:57:14 +00003810- ftplib: to safeguard the user's privacy, anonymous login will use
3811 "anonymous@" as default password, rather than the real user and host
3812 name.
3813
Fred Drake36736122002-01-10 13:50:31 +00003814- webbrowser: tightened up the command passed to os.system() so that
3815 arbitrary shell code can't be executed because a bogus URL was
3816 passed in.
3817
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00003818- gettext.translation has an optional fallback argument, and
Martin v. Löwisa55ffae2002-01-11 06:58:49 +00003819 gettext.find an optional all argument. Translations will now fallback
Martin v. Löwisd8996052002-11-21 21:45:32 +00003820 on a per-message basis. The module supports plural forms, by means
3821 of gettext.[d]ngettext and Translation.[u]ngettext.
Martin v. Löwis1be64192002-01-11 06:33:28 +00003822
Martin v. Löwis9668b932002-01-12 11:27:42 +00003823- distutils bdist commands now offer a --skip-build option.
3824
Walter Dörwaldb25c2b02002-03-21 10:38:40 +00003825- warnings.warn now accepts a Warning instance as first argument.
3826
Fred Drakefed7e852002-04-04 19:36:15 +00003827- The xml.sax.expatreader.ExpatParser class will no longer create
3828 circular references by using itself as the locator that gets passed
3829 to the content handler implementation. [SF bug #535474]
3830
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00003831- The email.Parser.Parser class now properly parses strings regardless
3832 of their line endings, which can be any of \r, \n, or \r\n (CR, LF,
3833 or CRLF). Also, the Header class's constructor default arguments
3834 has changed slightly so that an explicit maxlinelen value is always
Barry Warsaw497e5c42002-12-30 19:27:08 +00003835 honored, and so unicode conversion error handling can be specified.
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00003836
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003837- distutils' build_ext command now links C++ extensions with the C++
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00003838 compiler available in the Makefile or CXX environment variable, if
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003839 running under \*nix.
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00003840
3841- New module bz2: provides a comprehensive interface for the bz2 compression
3842 library. It implements a complete file interface, one-shot (de)compression
3843 functions, and types for sequential (de)compression.
3844
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003845- New pdb command 'pp' which is like 'p' except that it pretty-prints
Barry Warsaw5d8d6182002-11-05 22:41:33 +00003846 the value of its expression argument.
3847
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00003848- Now bdist_rpm distutils command understands a verify_script option in
3849 the config file, including the contents of the referred filename in
3850 the "%verifyscript" section of the rpm spec file.
3851
Gustavo Niemeyer1456fde2002-11-25 17:25:04 +00003852- Fixed bug #495695: webbrowser module would run graphic browsers in a
3853 unix environment even if DISPLAY was not set. Also, support for
3854 skipstone browser was included.
3855
Gustavo Niemeyerd5ae01a2002-12-16 13:11:57 +00003856- Fixed bug #636769: rexec would run unallowed code if subclasses of
3857 strings were used as parameters for certain functions.
3858
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003859Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003860-----------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003861
Martin v. Löwis0d1fdea2002-11-22 08:36:54 +00003862- pygettext.py now supports globbing on Windows, and accepts module
3863 names in addition to accepting file names.
3864
Guido van Rossum923e4ef2002-09-17 20:58:59 +00003865- The SGI demos (Demo/sgi) have been removed. Nobody thought they
3866 were interesting any more. (The SGI library modules and extensions
3867 are still there; it is believed that at least some of these are
3868 still used and useful.)
3869
Fred Drake40813b12002-08-05 15:24:19 +00003870- IDLE supports the new encoding declarations (PEP 263); it can also
3871 deal with legacy 8-bit files if they use the locale's encoding. It
3872 allows non-ASCII strings in the interactive shell and executes them
3873 in the locale's encoding.
Martin v. Löwis98ce7b72002-08-05 15:11:26 +00003874
Marc-André Lemburg46260092002-04-04 16:17:11 +00003875- freeze.py now produces binaries which can import shared modules,
3876 unlike before when this failed due to missing symbol exports in
3877 the generated binary.
3878
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003879Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003880-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003881
Martin v. Löwisdc461752002-11-06 21:59:33 +00003882- On Unix, IDLE is now installed automatically.
3883
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00003884- The fpectl module is not built by default; it's dangerous or useless
3885 except in the hands of experts.
3886
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003887- The public Python C API will generally be declared using PyAPI_FUNC
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00003888 and PyAPI_DATA macros, while Python extension module init functions
3889 will be declared with PyMODINIT_FUNC. DL_EXPORT/DL_IMPORT macros
3890 are deprecated.
Neal Norwitz1389f3e2002-07-22 13:21:10 +00003891
Tim Petersc6a3ff62002-07-08 22:11:52 +00003892- A bug was fixed that could cause COUNT_ALLOCS builds to segfault, or
3893 get into infinite loops, when a new-style class got garbage-collected.
3894 Unfortunately, to avoid this, the way COUNT_ALLOCS works requires
3895 that new-style classes be immortal in COUNT_ALLOCS builds. Note that
3896 COUNT_ALLOCS is not enabled by default, in either release or debug
3897 builds, and that new-style classes are immortal only in COUNT_ALLOCS
3898 builds.
3899
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00003900- Compiling out the cyclic garbage collector is no longer an option.
3901 The old symbol WITH_CYCLE_GC is now ignored, and Python.h arranges
3902 that it's always defined (for the benefit of any extension modules
3903 that may be conditionalizing on it). A bonus is that any extension
3904 type participating in cyclic gc can choose to participate in the
3905 Py_TRASHCAN mechanism now too; in the absence of cyclic gc, this used
3906 to require editing the core to teach the trashcan mechanism about the
3907 new type.
3908
Martin v. Löwis0cec0ff2002-07-28 16:33:45 +00003909- According to Annex F of the current C standard,
Tim Peters1de41bf2002-07-03 03:31:20 +00003910
3911 The Standard C macro HUGE_VAL and its float and long double analogs,
3912 HUGE_VALF and HUGE_VALL, expand to expressions whose values are
3913 positive infinities.
3914
3915 Python only uses the double HUGE_VAL, and only to #define its own symbol
3916 Py_HUGE_VAL. Some platforms have incorrect definitions for HUGE_VAL.
3917 pyport.h used to try to worm around that, but the workarounds triggered
3918 other bugs on other platforms, so we gave up. If your platform defines
3919 HUGE_VAL incorrectly, you'll need to #define Py_HUGE_VAL to something
3920 that works on your platform. The only instance of this I'm sure about
3921 is on an unknown subset of Cray systems, described here:
3922
3923 http://www.cray.com/swpubs/manuals/SN-2194_2.0/html-SN-2194_2.0/x3138.htm
3924
3925 Presumably 2.3a1 breaks such systems. If anyone uses such a system, help!
3926
Martin v. Löwisa3fb4f72002-06-09 13:33:54 +00003927- The configure option --without-doc-strings can be used to remove the
3928 doc strings from the builtin functions and modules; this reduces the
3929 size of the executable.
3930
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00003931- The universal newlines option (PEP 278) is on by default. On Unix
3932 it can be disabled by passing --without-universal-newlines to the
3933 configure script. On other platforms, remove
3934 WITH_UNIVERSAL_NEWLINES from pyconfig.h.
Tim Peters639295f2002-04-21 07:30:30 +00003935
Martin v. Löwis1142de32002-03-29 16:28:31 +00003936- On Unix, a shared libpython2.3.so can be created with --enable-shared.
3937
Tim Peters8deda702002-03-30 10:06:07 +00003938- All uses of the CACHE_HASH, INTERN_STRINGS, and DONT_SHARE_SHORT_STRINGS
3939 preprocessor symbols were eliminated. The internal decisions they
3940 controlled stopped being experimental long ago.
Tim Peters1f7df352002-03-29 03:29:08 +00003941
Fred Drake7d28b732002-05-02 21:17:00 +00003942- The tools used to build the documentation now work under Cygwin as
3943 well as Unix.
3944
Skip Montanaro57454e52002-06-14 20:30:31 +00003945- The bsddb and dbm module builds have been changed to try and avoid version
3946 skew problems and disable linkage with Berkeley DB 1.85 unless the
3947 installer knows what s/he's doing. See the section on building these
3948 modules in the README file for details.
3949
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003950C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003951-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003952
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00003953- PyNumber_Check() now returns true for string and unicode objects.
3954 This is a result of these types having a partially defined
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00003955 tp_as_number slot. (This is not a feature, but an indication that
Walter Dörwalda1a61f92002-11-19 21:20:25 +00003956 PyNumber_Check() is not very useful to determine numeric behavior.
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00003957 It may be deprecated.)
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00003958
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00003959- The string object's layout has changed: the pointer member
3960 ob_sinterned has been replaced by an int member ob_sstate. On some
3961 platforms (e.g. most 64-bit systems) this may change the offset of
3962 the ob_sval member, so as a precaution the API_VERSION has been
3963 incremented. The apparently unused feature of "indirect interned
3964 strings", supported by the ob_sinterned member, is gone. Interned
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003965 strings are now usually mortal; there is a new API,
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00003966 PyString_InternImmortal() that creates immortal interned strings.
3967 (The ob_sstate member can only take three values; however, while
3968 making it a char saves a few bytes per string object on average, in
3969 it also slowed things down a bit because ob_sval was no longer
3970 aligned.)
3971
Guido van Rossumfdb86482002-08-14 21:20:32 +00003972- The Py_InitModule*() functions now accept NULL for the 'methods'
3973 argument. Modules without global functions are becoming more common
3974 now that factories can be types rather than functions.
3975
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00003976- New C API PyUnicode_FromOrdinal() which exposes unichr() at C
3977 level.
3978
Thomas Heller085358a2002-07-29 14:27:41 +00003979- New functions PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErr() and
3980 PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErrWithFilename(). Similar to
3981 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErrWithFilename() and
3982 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErr(), but they allow to specify
3983 the exception type to raise. Available on Windows.
3984
Tim Peters7c321a82002-07-09 02:57:01 +00003985- Py_FatalError() is now declared as taking a const char* argument. It
3986 was previously declared without const. This should not affect working
3987 code.
3988
Martin v. Löwis01f94bd2002-05-08 08:44:21 +00003989- Added new macro PySequence_ITEM(o, i) that directly calls
3990 sq_item without rechecking that o is a sequence and without
3991 adjusting for negative indices.
3992
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00003993- PyRange_New() now raises ValueError if the fourth argument is not 1.
3994 This is part of the removal of deprecated features of the xrange
3995 object.
3996
Guido van Rossum517c7d42002-04-26 02:49:14 +00003997- PyNumber_Coerce() and PyNumber_CoerceEx() now also invoke the type's
3998 coercion if both arguments have the same type but this type has the
3999 CHECKTYPES flag set. This is to better support proxies.
4000
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004001- The type of tp_free has been changed from "``void (*)(PyObject *)``" to
4002 "``void (*)(void *)``".
Neil Schemenauer9344b142002-04-12 23:00:08 +00004003
4004- PyObject_Del, PyObject_GC_Del are now functions instead of macros.
4005
Guido van Rossum0986d822002-04-08 01:38:42 +00004006- A type can now inherit its metatype from its base type. Previously,
4007 when PyType_Ready() was called, if ob_type was found to be NULL, it
4008 was always set to &PyType_Type; now it is set to base->ob_type,
4009 where base is tp_base, defaulting to &PyObject_Type.
4010
4011- PyType_Ready() accidentally did not inherit tp_is_gc; now it does.
4012
Neil Schemenauerc9abc1d2002-05-08 14:14:41 +00004013- The PyCore_* family of APIs have been removed.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00004014
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004015- The "u#" parser marker will now pass through Unicode objects as-is
Marc-André Lemburg3e3eacb2002-01-09 16:21:27 +00004016 without going through the buffer API.
4017
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004018- The enumerators of cmp_op have been renamed to use the prefix ``PyCmp_``.
Martin v. Löwis7198a522002-01-01 19:59:11 +00004019
Tim Peters10a3bb52001-12-25 19:07:38 +00004020- An old #define of ANY as void has been removed from pyport.h. This
4021 hasn't been used since Python's pre-ANSI days, and the #define has
4022 been marked as obsolete since then. SF bug 495548 says it created
4023 conflicts with other packages, so keeping it around wasn't harmless.
4024
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004025- Because Python's magic number scheme broke on January 1st, we decided
4026 to stop Python development. Thanks for all the fish!
4027
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00004028- Some of us don't like fish, so we changed Python's magic number
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00004029 scheme to a new one. See Python/import.c for details.
4030
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004031New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004032-------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004033
Martin v. Löwis79acb9e2002-12-06 12:48:53 +00004034- OpenVMS is now supported.
4035
Martin v. Löwisf90ae202002-06-11 06:22:31 +00004036- AtheOS is now supported.
4037
Andrew MacIntyre161ad0e2002-08-04 07:25:58 +00004038- the EMX runtime environment on OS/2 is now supported.
4039
Martin v. Löwisa6e97582002-01-01 18:41:33 +00004040- GNU/Hurd is now supported.
4041
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004042Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004043-----
4044
Fred Drake4dd0f7e2002-11-26 21:44:56 +00004045- The regrtest.py script's -u option now provides a way to say "allow
4046 all resources except this one." For example, to allow everything
4047 except bsddb, give the option '-uall,-bsddb'.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004048
4049Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004050-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004051
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00004052- The Windows distribution now ships with version 4.0.14 of the
4053 Sleepycat Berkeley database library. This should be a huge
4054 improvement over the previous Berkeley DB 1.85, which had many
4055 bugs.
4056 XXX What are the licensing issues here?
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004057 XXX If a user has a database created with a previous version of
Tim Peters84c7a3f2002-11-23 18:48:06 +00004058 XXX Python, what must they do to convert it?
4059 XXX I'm still not sure how to link this thing (see PCbuild/readme.txt).
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00004060 XXX The version # is likely to change before 2.3a1.
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00004061
4062- The Windows distribution now ships with a Secure Sockets Library (SLL)
Mark Hammondc3de0082002-12-03 06:16:08 +00004063 module (_ssl.pyd)
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00004064
Tim Peters857fb4c2002-11-14 23:31:58 +00004065- The Windows distribution now ships with Tcl/Tk version 8.4.1 (it
4066 previously shipped with Tcl/Tk 8.3.2).
4067
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00004068- When Python is built under a Microsoft compiler, sys.version now
4069 includes the compiler version number (_MSC_VER). For example, under
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004070 MSVC 6, sys.version contains the substring "MSC v.1200 ". 1200 is
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00004071 the value of _MSC_VER under MSVC 6.
4072
Tim Peters08e72952002-04-16 20:48:01 +00004073- Sometimes the uninstall executable (UNWISE.EXE) vanishes. One cause
4074 of that has been fixed in the installer (disabled Wise's "delete in-
4075 use files" uninstall option).
4076
Guido van Rossum181e41a2002-04-06 00:23:25 +00004077- Fixed a bug in urllib's proxy handling in Windows. [SF bug #503031]
4078
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00004079- The installer now installs Start menu shortcuts under (the local
4080 equivalent of) "All Users" when doing an Admin install.
4081
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00004082- file.truncate([newsize]) now works on Windows for all newsize values.
4083 It used to fail if newsize didn't fit in 32 bits, reflecting a
4084 limitation of MS _chsize (which is no longer used).
4085
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00004086- os.waitpid() is now implemented for Windows, and can be used to block
4087 until a specified process exits. This is similar to, but not exactly
4088 the same as, os.waitpid() on POSIX systems. If you're waiting for
4089 a specific process whose pid was obtained from one of the spawn()
4090 functions, the same Python os.waitpid() code works across platforms.
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00004091 See the docs for details. The docs were changed to clarify that
4092 spawn functions return, and waitpid requires, a process handle on
4093 Windows (not the same thing as a Windows process id).
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00004094
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00004095- New tempfile.TemporaryFile implementation for Windows: this doesn't
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004096 need a TemporaryFileWrapper wrapper anymore, and should be immune
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00004097 to a nasty problem: before 2.3, if you got a temp file on Windows, it
4098 got wrapped in an object whose close() method first closed the
4099 underlying file, then deleted the file. This usually worked fine.
4100 However, the spawn family of functions on Windows create (at a low C
4101 level) the same set of open files in the spawned process Q as were
4102 open in the spawning process P. If a temp file f was among them, then
4103 doing f.close() in P first closed P's C-level file handle on f, but Q's
4104 C-level file handle on f remained open, so the attempt in P to delete f
4105 blew up with a "Permission denied" error (Windows doesn't allow
4106 deleting open files). This was surprising, subtle, and difficult to
4107 work around.
4108
4109- The os module now exports all the symbolic constants usable with the
4110 low-level os.open() on Windows: the new constants in 2.3 are
4111 O_NOINHERIT, O_SHORT_LIVED, O_TEMPORARY, O_RANDOM and O_SEQUENTIAL.
4112 The others were also available in 2.2: O_APPEND, O_BINARY, O_CREAT,
4113 O_EXCL, O_RDONLY, O_RDWR, O_TEXT, O_TRUNC and O_WRONLY. Contrary
4114 to Microsoft docs, O_SHORT_LIVED does not seem to imply O_TEMPORARY
4115 (so specify both if you want both; note that neither is useful unless
4116 specified with O_CREAT too).
4117
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004118Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004119----
4120
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004121- Mac/Relnotes is gone, the release notes are now here.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004122
Just van Rossume1ebd802003-02-10 10:06:18 +00004123- Python (the OSX-only, unix-based version, not the OS9-compatible CFM
4124 version) now fully supports unicode strings as arguments to various file
4125 system calls, eg. open(), file(), os.stat() and os.listdir().
4126
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004127- The current naming convention for Python on the Macintosh is that MacPython
4128 refers to the unix-based OSX-only version, and MacPython-OS9 refers to the
4129 CFM-based version that runs on both OS9 and OSX.
4130
4131- All MacPython-OS9 functionality is now available in an OSX unix build,
4132 including the Carbon modules, the IDE, OSA support, etc. A lot of this
4133 will only work correctly in a framework build, though, because you cannot
4134 talk to the window manager unless your application is run from a .app
4135 bundle. There is a command line tool "pythonw" that runs your script
4136 with an interpreter living in such a .app bundle, this interpreter should
4137 be used to run any Python script using the window manager (including
4138 Tkinter or wxPython scripts).
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00004139
Jack Jansen8bb80db2002-12-30 22:42:43 +00004140- Most of Mac/Lib has moved to Lib/plat-mac, which is again used both in
4141 MacPython-OSX and MacPython-OS9. The only modules remaining in Mac/Lib
4142 are specifically for MacPython-OS9 (CFM support, preference resources, etc).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004143
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004144- A new utility PythonLauncher will start a Python interpreter when a .py or
4145 .pyw script is double-clicked in the Finder. By default .py scripts are
4146 run with a normal Python interpreter in a Terminal window and .pyw
4147 files are run with a window-aware pythonw interpreter without a Terminal
4148 window, but all this can be customized.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004149
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004150- MacPython-OS9 is now Carbon-only, so it runs on Mac OS 9 or Mac OS X and
4151 possibly on Mac OS 8.6 with the right CarbonLib installed, but not on earlier
4152 releases.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004153
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004154- Many tools such as BuildApplet.py and gensuitemodule.py now support a command
4155 line interface too.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004156
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004157- All the Carbon classes are now PEP253 compliant, meaning that you can
4158 subclass them from Python. Most of the attributes have gone, you should
4159 now use the accessor function call API, which is also what Apple's
4160 documentation uses. Some attributes such as grafport.visRgn are still
4161 available for convenience.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004162
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004163- New Carbon modules File (implementing the APIs in Files.h and Aliases.h)
4164 and Folder (APIs from Folders.h). The old macfs builtin module is
4165 gone, and replaced by a Python wrapper around the new modules.
4166
4167- Pathname handling should now be fully consistent: MacPython-OSX always uses
4168 unix pathnames and MacPython-OS9 always uses colon-separated Mac pathnames
4169 (also when running on Mac OS X).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004170
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004171- New Carbon modules Help and AH give access to the Carbon Help Manager.
4172 There are hooks in the IDE to allow accessing the Python documentation
4173 (and Apple's Carbon and Cocoa documentation) through the Help Viewer.
4174 See Mac/OSX/README for converting the Python documentation to a
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004175 Help Viewer compatible form and installing it.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004176
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004177- OSA support has been redesigned and the generated Python classes now
4178 mirror the inheritance defined by the underlying OSA classes.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004179
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004180- MacPython no longer maps both \r and \n to \n on input for any text file.
4181 This feature has been replaced by universal newline support (PEP278).
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00004182
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00004183- The default encoding for Python sourcefiles in MacPython-OS9 is no longer
Guido van Rossum16c85172003-02-20 01:52:48 +00004184 mac-roman (or whatever your local Mac encoding was) but "ascii", like on
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00004185 other platforms. If you really need sourcefiles with Mac characters in them
4186 you can change this in site.py.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004187
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00004188
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004189What's New in Python 2.2 final?
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004190===============================
4191
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004192*Release date: 21-Dec-2001*
4193
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004194Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004195--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004196
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004197- pickle.py, cPickle: allow pickling instances of new-style classes
4198 with a custom metaclass.
4199
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004200Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004201-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004202
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004203- weakref proxy object: when comparing, unwrap both arguments if both
4204 are proxies.
4205
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004206Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004207-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004208
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004209- binascii.b2a_base64(): fix a potential buffer overrun when encoding
4210 very short strings.
4211
4212- cPickle: the obscure "fast" mode was suspected of causing stack
4213 overflows on the Mac. Hopefully fixed this by setting the recursion
4214 limit much smaller. If the limit is too low (it only affects
4215 performance), you can change it by defining PY_CPICKLE_FAST_LIMIT
4216 when compiling cPickle.c (or in pyconfig.h).
4217
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004218Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004219-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004220
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004221- dumbdbm.py: fixed a dumb old bug (the file didn't get synched at
4222 close or delete time).
4223
4224- rfc822.py: fixed a bug where the address '<>' was converted to None
4225 instead of an empty string (also fixes the email.Utils module).
4226
4227- xmlrpclib.py: version 1.0.0; uses precision for doubles.
4228
4229- test suite: the pickle and cPickle tests were not executing any code
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004230 when run from the standard regression test.
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004231
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004232Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004233-----------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004234
4235Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004236-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004237
4238C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004239-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004240
4241New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004242-------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004243
4244Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004245-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004246
4247Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004248-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004249
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004250- distutils package: fixed broken Windows installers (bdist_wininst).
4251
4252- tempfile.py: prevent mysterious warnings when TemporaryFileWrapper
4253 instances are deleted at process exit time.
4254
4255- socket.py: prevent mysterious warnings when socket instances are
4256 deleted at process exit time.
4257
4258- posixmodule.c: fix a Windows crash with stat() of a filename ending
4259 in backslash.
4260
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004261Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004262----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004263
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004264- The Carbon toolbox modules have been upgraded to Universal Headers
4265 3.4, and experimental CoreGraphics and CarbonEvents modules have
4266 been added. All only for framework-enabled MacOSX.
4267
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004268
Tim Peters6272dfd2001-12-13 19:34:00 +00004269What's New in Python 2.2c1?
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004270===========================
4271
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004272*Release date: 14-Dec-2001*
4273
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004274Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004275--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004276
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004277- Guido's tutorial introduction to the new type/class features has
4278 been extensively updated. See
4279
4280 http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html
4281
4282 That remains the primary documentation in this area.
4283
Guido van Rossum33bab012001-12-05 22:45:48 +00004284- Fixed a leak: instance variables declared with __slots__ were never
4285 deleted!
4286
Guido van Rossum4b800852001-12-03 00:54:52 +00004287- The "delete attribute" method of descriptor objects is called
4288 __delete__, not __del__. In previous releases, it was mistakenly
4289 called __del__, which created an unfortunate overloading condition
4290 with finalizers. (The "get attribute" and "set attribute" methods
4291 are still called __get__ and __set__, respectively.)
4292
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00004293- Some subtle issues with the super built-in were fixed:
4294
4295 (a) When super itself is subclassed, its __get__ method would still
4296 return an instance of the base class (i.e., of super).
4297
4298 (b) super(C, C()).__class__ would return C rather than super. This
4299 is confusing. To fix this, I decided to change the semantics of
4300 super so that it only applies to code attributes, not to data
4301 attributes. After all, overriding data attributes is not
4302 supported anyway.
4303
4304 (c) The __get__ method didn't check whether the argument was an
4305 instance of the type used in creation of the super instance.
4306
Guido van Rossumcd7b7d62001-12-04 21:02:07 +00004307- Previously, hash() of an instance of a subclass of a mutable type
4308 (list or dictionary) would return some value, rather than raising
4309 TypeError. This has been fixed. Also, directly calling
4310 dict.__hash__ and list.__hash__ now raises the same TypeError
4311 (previously, these were the same as object.__hash__).
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00004312
Guido van Rossumd331cb52001-12-05 19:46:42 +00004313- New-style objects now support deleting their __dict__. This is for
4314 all intents and purposes equivalent to assigning a brand new empty
4315 dictionary, but saves space if the object is not used further.
4316
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004317Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004318-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004319
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004320- -Qnew now works as documented in PEP 238: when -Qnew is passed on
4321 the command line, all occurrences of "/" use true division instead
4322 of classic division. See the PEP for details. Note that "all"
4323 means all instances in library and 3rd-party modules, as well as in
4324 your own code. As the PEP says, -Qnew is intended for use only in
4325 educational environments with control over the libraries in use.
Tim Petersbf72fe22001-12-11 21:43:14 +00004326 Note that test_coercion.py in the standard Python test suite fails
4327 under -Qnew; this is expected, and won't be repaired until true
4328 division becomes the default (in the meantime, test_coercion is
4329 testing the current rules).
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004330
Fred Drake6c01e252001-12-14 17:08:12 +00004331- complex() now only allows the first argument to be a string
4332 argument, and raises TypeError if either the second arg is a string
4333 or if the second arg is specified when the first is a string.
4334
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004335Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004336-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004337
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00004338- gc.get_referents was renamed to gc.get_referrers.
4339
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004340Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004341-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004342
Tim Peters25059d32001-12-07 20:35:43 +00004343- Functions in the os.spawn() family now release the global interpreter
4344 lock around calling the platform spawn. They should always have done
4345 this, but did not before 2.2c1. Multithreaded programs calling
4346 an os.spawn function with P_WAIT will no longer block all Python threads
4347 until the spawned program completes. It's possible that some programs
4348 relies on blocking, although more likely by accident than by design.
4349
Martin v. Löwis3a89b2b2001-11-25 14:35:58 +00004350- webbrowser defaults to netscape.exe on OS/2 now.
4351
Martin v. Löwis652e1912001-11-25 14:50:56 +00004352- Tix.ResizeHandle exposes detach_widget, hide, and show.
4353
Martin v. Löwis714d2e22001-12-02 12:26:03 +00004354- The charset alias windows_1252 has been added.
4355
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004356- types.StringTypes is a tuple containing the defined string types;
4357 usually this will be (str, unicode), but if Python was compiled
4358 without Unicode support it will be just (str,).
4359
4360- The pulldom and minidom modules were synchronized to PyXML.
4361
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004362Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004363-----------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004364
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004365- A new script called Tools/scripts/google.py was added, which fires
4366 off a search on Google.
4367
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004368Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004369-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004370
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004371- Note that release builds of Python should arrange to define the
4372 preprocessor symbol NDEBUG on the command line (or equivalent).
4373 In the 2.2 pre-release series we tried to define this by magic in
4374 Python.h instead, but it proved to cause problems for extension
4375 authors. The Unix, Windows and Mac builds now all define NDEBUG in
4376 release builds via cmdline (or equivalent) instead. Ports to
4377 other platforms should do likewise.
4378
Jack Jansen1999ef42001-12-06 21:47:20 +00004379- It is no longer necessary to use --with-suffix when building on a
4380 case-insensitive file system (such as Mac OS X HFS+). In the build
4381 directory an extension is used, but not in the installed python.
4382
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004383C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004384-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004385
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00004386- New function PyDict_MergeFromSeq2() exposes the builtin dict
4387 constructor's logic for updating a dictionary from an iterable object
4388 producing key-value pairs.
4389
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00004390- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() requires that the number of entries in
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00004391 the keyword list equal the number of argument specifiers. This
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00004392 wasn't checked correctly, and PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords could even
4393 dump core in some bad cases. This has been repaired. As a result,
4394 PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords may raise RuntimeError in bad cases that
4395 previously went unchallenged.
4396
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004397New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004398-------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004399
4400Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004401-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004402
4403Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004404-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004405
4406Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004407----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004408
Jack Jansenffa260f2001-12-06 21:14:00 +00004409- In unix-Python on Mac OS X (and darwin) sys.platform is now "darwin",
4410 without any trailing digits.
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004411
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004412- Changed logic for finding python home in Mac OS X framework Pythons.
4413 Now sys.executable points to the executable again, in stead of to
4414 the shared library. The latter is used only for locating the python
4415 home.
4416
4417
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004418What's New in Python 2.2b2?
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004419===========================
4420
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004421*Release date: 16-Nov-2001*
4422
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004423Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004424--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004425
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00004426- Multiple inheritance mixing new-style and classic classes in the
4427 list of base classes is now allowed, so this works now:
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004428
4429 class Classic: pass
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00004430 class Mixed(Classic, object): pass
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004431
4432 The MRO (method resolution order) for each base class is respected
4433 according to its kind, but the MRO for the derived class is computed
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004434 using new-style MRO rules if any base class is a new-style class.
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004435 This needs to be documented.
4436
Tim Petersa427a2b2001-10-29 22:25:45 +00004437- The new builtin dictionary() constructor, and dictionary type, have
4438 been renamed to dict. This reflects a decade of common usage.
4439
Guido van Rossum3fc08d22001-11-15 20:33:10 +00004440- dict() now accepts an iterable object producing 2-sequences. For
4441 example, dict(d.items()) == d for any dictionary d. The argument,
4442 and the elements of the argument, can be any iterable objects.
4443
Guido van Rossum7ad2d1e2001-10-29 22:11:00 +00004444- New-style classes can now have a __del__ method, which is called
4445 when the instance is deleted (just like for classic classes).
4446
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004447- Assignment to object.__dict__ is now possible, for objects that are
4448 instances of new-style classes that have a __dict__ (unless the base
4449 class forbids it).
4450
Guido van Rossumc8e56452001-10-22 00:43:43 +00004451- Methods of built-in types now properly check for keyword arguments
4452 (formerly these were silently ignored). The only built-in methods
4453 that take keyword arguments are __call__, __init__ and __new__.
4454
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004455- The socket function has been converted to a type; see below.
4456
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004457Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004458-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004459
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00004460- Assignment to __debug__ raises SyntaxError at compile-time. This
4461 was promised when 2.1c1 was released as "What's New in Python 2.1c1"
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004462 (see below) says.
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00004463
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004464- Clarified the error messages for unsupported operands to an operator
4465 (like 1 + '').
4466
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004467Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004468-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004469
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004470- mmap has a new keyword argument, "access", allowing a uniform way for
4471 both Windows and Unix users to create read-only, write-through and
4472 copy-on-write memory mappings. This was previously possible only on
4473 Unix. A new keyword argument was required to support this in a
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004474 uniform way because the mmap() signatures had diverged across
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004475 platforms. Thanks to Jay T Miller for repairing this!
4476
Tim Peters169ded02001-11-03 19:57:21 +00004477- By default, the gc.garbage list now contains only those instances in
4478 unreachable cycles that have __del__ methods; in 2.1 it contained all
4479 instances in unreachable cycles. "Instances" here has been generalized
4480 to include instances of both new-style and old-style classes.
4481
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004482- The socket module defines a new method for socket objects,
4483 sendall(). This is like send() but may make multiple calls to
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004484 send() until all data has been sent. Also, the socket function has
4485 been converted to a subclassable type, like list and tuple (etc.)
4486 before it; socket and SocketType are now the same thing.
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004487
4488- Various bugfixes to the curses module. There is now a test suite
4489 for the curses module (you have to run it manually).
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00004490
Guido van Rossum692adf12001-10-30 03:03:03 +00004491- binascii.b2a_base64 no longer places an arbitrary restriction of 57
4492 bytes on its input.
4493
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004494Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004495-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004496
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004497- tkFileDialog exposes a Directory class and askdirectory
Martin v. Löwis25ee87c2001-11-07 22:38:08 +00004498 convenience function.
4499
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00004500- Symbolic group names in regular expressions must be unique. For
4501 example, the regexp r'(?P<abc>)(?P<abc>)' is not allowed, because a
4502 single name can't mean both "group 1" and "group 2" simultaneously.
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004503 Python 2.2 detects this error at regexp compilation time;
4504 previously, the error went undetected, and results were
4505 unpredictable. Also in sre, the pattern.split(), pattern.sub(), and
4506 pattern.subn() methods have been rewritten in C. Also, an
4507 experimental function/method finditer() has been added, which works
4508 like findall() but returns an iterator.
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00004509
Martin v. Löwisb7b32602001-11-02 23:48:20 +00004510- Tix exposes more commands through the classes DirSelectBox,
4511 DirSelectDialog, ListNoteBook, Meter, CheckList, and the
4512 methods tix_addbitmapdir, tix_cget, tix_configure, tix_filedialog,
4513 tix_getbitmap, tix_getimage, tix_option_get, and tix_resetoptions.
4514
Tim Peters98791af2001-10-23 01:59:54 +00004515- Traceback objects are now scanned by cyclic garbage collection, so
4516 cycles created by casual use of sys.exc_info() no longer cause
4517 permanent memory leaks (provided garbage collection is enabled).
4518
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00004519- os.extsep -- a new variable needed by the RISCOS support. It is the
4520 separator used by extensions, and is '.' on all platforms except
4521 RISCOS, where it is '/'. There is no need to use this variable
4522 unless you have a masochistic desire to port your code to RISCOS.
4523
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004524- mimetypes.py has optional support for non-standard, but commonly
4525 found types. guess_type() and guess_extension() now accept an
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004526 optional 'strict' flag, defaulting to true, which controls whether
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004527 recognize non-standard types or not. A few non-standard types we
4528 know about have been added. Also, when run as a script, there are
4529 new -l and -e options.
4530
4531- statcache is now deprecated.
4532
4533- email.Utils.formatdate() now produces the preferred RFC 2822 style
4534 dates with numeric timezones (it used to produce obsolete dates
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004535 hard coded to "GMT" timezone). An optional 'localtime' flag is
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004536 added to produce dates in the local timezone, with daylight savings
4537 time properly taken into account.
4538
4539- In pickle and cPickle, instead of masking errors in load() by
4540 transforming them into SystemError, we let the original exception
4541 propagate out. Also, implement support for __safe_for_unpickling__
4542 in pickle, as it already was supported in cPickle.
4543
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004544Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004545-----------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004546
4547Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004548-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004549
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004550- The dbm module is built using libdb1 if available. The bsddb module
4551 is built with libdb3 if available.
4552
4553- Misc/Makefile.pre.in has been removed by BDFL pronouncement.
4554
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004555C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004556-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004557
Tim Peters1fc240e2001-10-26 05:06:50 +00004558- New function PySequence_Fast_GET_SIZE() returns the size of a non-
4559 NULL result from PySequence_Fast(), more quickly than calling
4560 PySequence_Size().
4561
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004562- New argument unpacking function PyArg_UnpackTuple() added.
4563
4564- New functions PyObject_CallFunctionObjArgs() and
4565 PyObject_CallMethodObjArgs() have been added to make it more
4566 convenient and efficient to call functions and methods from C.
4567
4568- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() no longer masks errors, so it's
4569 possible that this will propagate errors it didn't before.
4570
4571- New function PyObject_CheckReadBuffer(), which returns true if its
4572 argument supports the single-segment readable buffer interface.
4573
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004574New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004575-------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004576
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004577- We've finally confirmed that this release builds on HP-UX 11.00,
4578 *with* threads, and passes the test suite.
4579
Tim Peters7a33d8b2001-11-05 02:51:07 +00004580- Thanks to a series of patches from Michael Muller, Python may build
4581 again under OS/2 Visual Age C++.
4582
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00004583- Updated RISCOS port by Dietmar Schwertberger.
4584
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004585Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004586-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004587
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00004588- Added a test script for the curses module. It isn't run automatically;
4589 regrtest.py must be run with '-u curses' to enable it.
4590
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004591Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004592-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004593
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004594Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004595----
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004596
4597- PythonScript has been moved to unsupported and is slated to be
4598 removed completely in the next release.
4599
4600- It should now be possible to build applets that work on both OS9 and
4601 OSX.
4602
4603- The core is now linked with CoreServices not Carbon; as a side
4604 result, default 8bit encoding on OSX is now ASCII.
4605
4606- Python should now build on OSX 10.1.1
4607
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004608
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004609What's New in Python 2.2b1?
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004610===========================
4611
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004612*Release date: 19-Oct-2001*
4613
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004614Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004615--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004616
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004617- New-style classes are now always dynamic (except for built-in and
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004618 extension types). There is no longer a performance penalty, and I
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004619 no longer see another reason to keep this baggage around. One relic
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004620 remains: the __dict__ of a new-style class is a read-only proxy; you
4621 must set the class's attribute to modify it. As a consequence, the
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004622 __defined__ attribute of new-style types no longer exists, for lack
4623 of need: there is once again only one __dict__ (although in the
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004624 future a __cache__ may be resurrected with a similar function, if I
4625 can prove that it actually speeds things up).
Guido van Rossum50fda3b2001-10-04 19:46:06 +00004626
Tim Peters1c9ca872001-10-04 06:43:12 +00004627- C.__doc__ now works as expected for new-style classes (in 2.2a4 it
4628 always returned None, even when there was a class docstring).
4629
4630- doctest now finds and runs docstrings attached to new-style classes,
4631 class methods, static methods, and properties.
4632
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004633Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004634-----------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004635
Guido van Rossuma8bcf802001-10-15 15:53:58 +00004636- A very subtle syntactical pitfall in list comprehensions was fixed.
4637 For example: [a+b for a in 'abc', for b in 'def']. The comma in
4638 this example is a mistake. Previously, this would silently let 'a'
4639 iterate over the singleton tuple ('abc',), yielding ['abcd', 'abce',
4640 'abcf'] rather than the intended ['ad', 'ae', 'af', 'bd', 'be',
4641 'bf', 'cd', 'ce', 'cf']. Now, this is flagged as a syntax error.
4642 Note that [a for a in <singleton>] is a convoluted way to say
4643 [<singleton>] anyway, so it's not like any expressiveness is lost.
4644
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004645- getattr(obj, name, default) now only catches AttributeError, as
4646 documented, rather than returning the default value for all
4647 exceptions (which could mask bugs in a __getattr__ hook, for
4648 example).
4649
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00004650- Weak reference objects are now part of the core and offer a C API.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00004651 A bug which could allow a core dump when binary operations involved
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00004652 proxy reference has been fixed. weakref.ReferenceError is now a
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004653 built-in exception.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00004654
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00004655- unicode(obj) now behaves more like str(obj), accepting arbitrary
4656 objects, and calling a __unicode__ method if it exists.
4657 unicode(obj, encoding) and unicode(obj, encoding, errors) still
Marc-André Lemburgb5507ec2001-10-19 12:02:29 +00004658 require an 8-bit string or character buffer argument.
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00004659
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004660- isinstance() now allows any object as the first argument and a
4661 class, a type or something with a __bases__ tuple attribute for the
4662 second argument. The second argument may also be a tuple of a
4663 class, type, or something with __bases__, in which case isinstance()
4664 will return true if the first argument is an instance of any of the
4665 things contained in the second argument tuple. E.g.
4666
4667 isinstance(x, (A, B))
4668
4669 returns true if x is an instance of A or B.
4670
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004671Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004672-----------------
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004673
4674- thread.start_new_thread() now returns the thread ID (previously None).
4675
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00004676- binascii has now two quopri support functions, a2b_qp and b2a_qp.
4677
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00004678- readline now supports setting the startup_hook and the
4679 pre_event_hook, and adds the add_history() function.
Martin v. Löwis0daad592001-09-30 21:09:59 +00004680
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00004681- os and posix supports chroot(), setgroups() and unsetenv() where
4682 available. The stat(), fstat(), statvfs() and fstatvfs() functions
4683 now return "pseudo-sequences" -- the various fields can now be
4684 accessed as attributes (e.g. os.stat("/").st_mtime) but for
4685 backwards compatibility they also behave as a fixed-length sequence.
4686 Some platform-specific fields (e.g. st_rdev) are only accessible as
Guido van Rossum98bf58f2001-10-18 20:34:25 +00004687 attributes.
4688
4689- time: localtime(), gmtime() and strptime() now return a
4690 pseudo-sequence similar to the os.stat() return value, with
4691 attributes like tm_year etc.
Martin v. Löwis16628c92001-10-04 22:46:41 +00004692
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004693- Decompression objects in the zlib module now accept an optional
4694 second parameter to decompress() that specifies the maximum amount
4695 of memory to use for the uncompressed data.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004696
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00004697- optional SSL support in the socket module now exports OpenSSL
4698 functions RAND_add(), RAND_egd(), and RAND_status(). These calls
4699 are useful on platforms like Solaris where OpenSSL does not
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004700 automatically seed its PRNG. Also, the keyfile and certfile
4701 arguments to socket.ssl() are now optional.
4702
4703- posixmodule (and by extension, the os module on POSIX platforms) now
4704 exports O_LARGEFILE, O_DIRECT, O_DIRECTORY, and O_NOFOLLOW.
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00004705
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004706Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004707-------
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00004708
Tim Peters7402f792001-10-02 03:53:41 +00004709- doctest now excludes functions and classes not defined by the module
4710 being tested, thanks to Tim Hochberg.
4711
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00004712- HotShot, a new profiler implemented using a C-based callback, has
4713 been added. This substantially reduces the overhead of profiling,
4714 but it is still quite preliminary. Support modules and
4715 documentation will be added in upcoming releases (before 2.2 final).
4716
Guido van Rossumc4b09b42001-10-04 10:19:00 +00004717- profile now produces correct output in situations where an exception
4718 raised in Python is cleared by C code (e.g. hasattr()). This used
4719 to cause wrong output, including spurious claims of recursive
4720 functions and attribution of time spent to the wrong function.
4721
Tim Peters0a1fc4e2001-10-07 03:12:08 +00004722 The code and documentation for the derived OldProfile and HotProfile
4723 profiling classes was removed. The code hasn't worked for years (if
4724 you tried to use them, they raised exceptions). OldProfile
4725 intended to reproduce the behavior of the profiler Python used more
4726 than 7 years ago, and isn't interesting anymore. HotProfile intended
4727 to provide a faster profiler (but producing less information), and
4728 that's a worthy goal we intend to meet via a different approach (but
4729 without losing information).
4730
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00004731- Profile.calibrate() has a new implementation that should deliver
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00004732 a much better system-specific calibration constant. The constant can
4733 now be specified in an instance constructor, or as a Profile class or
4734 instance variable, instead of by editing profile.py's source code.
4735 Calibration must still be done manually (see the docs for the profile
4736 module).
4737
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004738 Note that Profile.calibrate() must be overridden by subclasses.
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00004739 Improving the accuracy required exploiting detailed knowledge of
4740 profiler internals; the earlier method abstracted away the details
4741 and measured a simplified model instead, but consequently computed
4742 a constant too small by a factor of 2 on some modern machines.
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00004743
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00004744- quopri's encode and decode methods take an optional header parameter,
Jeremy Hylton6f543b62001-10-16 20:42:52 +00004745 which indicates whether output is intended for the header 'Q'
4746 encoding.
4747
Guido van Rossuma5343cc2001-10-18 18:02:07 +00004748- The SocketServer.ThreadingMixIn class now closes the request after
4749 finish_request() returns. (Not when it errors out though.)
4750
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004751- The nntplib module's NNTP.body() method has grown a 'file' argument
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004752 to allow saving the message body to a file.
4753
4754- The email package has added a class email.Parser.HeaderParser which
4755 only parses headers and does not recurse into the message's body.
4756 Also, the module/class MIMEAudio has been added for representing
4757 audio data (contributed by Anthony Baxter).
4758
4759- ftplib should be able to handle files > 2GB.
4760
4761- ConfigParser.getboolean() now also interprets TRUE, FALSE, YES, NO,
4762 ON, and OFF.
4763
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00004764- xml.dom.minidom NodeList objects now support the length attribute
4765 and item() method as required by the DOM specifications.
4766
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00004767Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004768-----------
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00004769
4770- Demo/dns was removed. It no longer serves any purpose; a package
4771 derived from it is now maintained by Anthony Baxter, see
4772 http://PyDNS.SourceForge.net.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004773
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004774- The freeze tool has been made more robust, and two new options have
4775 been added: -X and -E.
4776
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004777Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004778-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004779
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004780- configure will use CXX in LINKCC if CXX is used to build main() and
4781 the system requires to link a C++ main using the C++ compiler.
4782
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004783C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004784-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004785
Guido van Rossum6c4bce32001-10-18 19:20:25 +00004786- The documentation for the tp_compare slot is updated to require that
4787 the return value must be -1, 0, 1; an arbitrary number <0 or >0 is
4788 not correct. This is not yet enforced but will be enforced in
4789 Python 2.3; even later, we may use -2 to indicate errors and +2 for
4790 "NotImplemented". Right now, -1 should be used for an error return.
4791
Tim Petersd38b1c72001-09-30 05:09:37 +00004792- PyLong_AsLongLong() now accepts int (as well as long) arguments.
4793 Consequently, PyArg_ParseTuple's 'L' code also accepts int (as well
4794 as long) arguments.
4795
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00004796- PyThread_start_new_thread() now returns a long int giving the thread
4797 ID, if one can be calculated; it returns -1 for error, 0 if no
4798 thread ID is calculated (this is an incompatible change, but only
4799 the thread module used this API). This code has only really been
4800 tested on Linux and Windows; other platforms please beware (and
4801 report any bugs or strange behavior).
4802
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00004803- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() no longer accepts Unicode objects as
4804 input.
4805
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004806New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004807-------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004808
4809Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004810-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004811
4812Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004813-------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004814
Tim Peters04cf1d32001-10-09 22:39:40 +00004815- Installer: If you install IDLE, and don't disable file-extension
4816 registration, a new "Edit with IDLE" context (right-click) menu entry
4817 is created for .py and .pyw files.
4818
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004819- The signal module now supports SIGBREAK on Windows, thanks to Steven
4820 Scott. Note that SIGBREAK is unique to Windows. The default SIGBREAK
4821 action remains to call Win32 ExitProcess(). This can be changed via
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004822 signal.signal(). For example::
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004823
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004824 # Make Ctrl+Break raise KeyboardInterrupt, like Python's default Ctrl+C
4825 # (SIGINT) behavior.
4826 import signal
4827 signal.signal(signal.SIGBREAK, signal.default_int_handler)
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004828
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004829 try:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004830 while 1:
4831 pass
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004832 except KeyboardInterrupt:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004833 # We get here on Ctrl+C or Ctrl+Break now; if we had not changed
4834 # SIGBREAK, only on Ctrl+C (and Ctrl+Break would terminate the
4835 # program without the possibility for any Python-level cleanup).
4836 print "Clean exit"
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004837
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004838
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004839What's New in Python 2.2a4?
4840===========================
4841
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004842*Release date: 28-Sep-2001*
4843
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004844Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004845--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004846
4847- pydoc and inspect are now aware of new-style classes;
4848 e.g. help(list) at the interactive prompt now shows proper
4849 documentation for all operations on list objects.
4850
4851- Applications using Jim Fulton's ExtensionClass module can now safely
4852 be used with Python 2.2. In particular, Zope 2.4.1 now works with
4853 Python 2.2 (as well as with Python 2.1.1). The Demo/metaclass
4854 examples also work again. It is hoped that Gtk and Boost also work
4855 with 2.2a4 and beyond. (If you can confirm this, please write
4856 webmaster@python.org; if there are still problems, please open a bug
4857 report on SourceForge.)
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004858
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00004859- property() now takes 4 keyword arguments: fget, fset, fdel and doc.
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004860 These map to read-only attributes 'fget', 'fset', 'fdel', and '__doc__'
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00004861 in the constructed property object. fget, fset and fdel weren't
4862 discoverable from Python in 2.2a3. __doc__ is new, and allows to
4863 associate a docstring with a property.
4864
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004865- Comparison overloading is now more completely implemented. For
4866 example, a str subclass instance can properly be compared to a str
4867 instance, and it can properly overload comparison. Ditto for most
4868 other built-in object types.
4869
4870- The repr() of new-style classes has changed; instead of <type
4871 'M.Foo'> a new-style class is now rendered as <class 'M.Foo'>,
4872 *except* for built-in types, which are still rendered as <type
4873 'Foo'> (to avoid upsetting existing code that might parse or
4874 otherwise rely on repr() of certain type objects).
4875
4876- The repr() of new-style objects is now always <Foo object at XXX>;
4877 previously, it was sometimes <Foo instance at XXX>.
4878
4879- For new-style classes, what was previously called __getattr__ is now
4880 called __getattribute__. This method, if defined, is called for
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00004881 *every* attribute access. A new __getattr__ hook more similar to the
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004882 one in classic classes is defined which is called only if regular
4883 attribute access raises AttributeError; to catch *all* attribute
4884 access, you can use __getattribute__ (for new-style classes). If
4885 both are defined, __getattribute__ is called first, and if it raises
4886 AttributeError, __getattr__ is called.
4887
4888- The __class__ attribute of new-style objects can be assigned to.
4889 The new class must have the same C-level object layout as the old
4890 class.
4891
4892- The builtin file type can be subclassed now. In the usual pattern,
4893 "file" is the name of the builtin type, and file() is a new builtin
4894 constructor, with the same signature as the builtin open() function.
4895 file() is now the preferred way to open a file.
4896
4897- Previously, __new__ would only see sequential arguments passed to
4898 the type in a constructor call; __init__ would see both sequential
4899 and keyword arguments. This made no sense whatsoever any more, so
4900 now both __new__ and __init__ see all arguments.
4901
4902- Previously, hash() applied to an instance of a subclass of str or
4903 unicode always returned 0. This has been repaired.
4904
4905- Previously, an operation on an instance of a subclass of an
4906 immutable type (int, long, float, complex, tuple, str, unicode),
4907 where the subtype didn't override the operation (and so the
4908 operation was handled by the builtin type), could return that
4909 instance instead a value of the base type. For example, if s was of
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004910 a str subclass type, s[:] returned s as-is. Now it returns a str
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004911 with the same value as s.
4912
Barry Warsaw86fbaf82001-09-28 15:26:12 +00004913- Provisional support for pickling new-style objects has been added.
4914
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004915Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004916----
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004917
Tim Peters2c9aa5e2001-09-23 04:06:05 +00004918- file.writelines() now accepts any iterable object producing strings.
4919
Marc-André Lemburgaefd7662001-09-20 12:59:37 +00004920- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() now works very much like
4921 PyObject_Str(obj) in that it tries to use __str__/tp_str
4922 on the object if the object is not a string or buffer. This
4923 makes unicode() behave like str() when applied to non-string/buffer
4924 objects.
4925
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00004926- PyFile_WriteObject now passes Unicode objects to the file's write
4927 method. As a result, all file-like objects which may be the target
Martin v. Löwis2777c022001-09-19 13:47:32 +00004928 of a print statement must support Unicode objects, i.e. they must
4929 at least convert them into ASCII strings.
4930
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004931- Thread scheduling on Solaris should be improved; it is no longer
4932 necessary to insert a small sleep at the start of a thread in order
4933 to let other runnable threads be scheduled.
4934
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004935Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004936-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004937
Marc-André Lemburgbf990172001-09-27 14:17:33 +00004938- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
4939 read character buffer compatible objects for their .write() methods.
4940 These objects are converted to strings and then handled as such
4941 by the instances.
4942
Barry Warsaw2f600732001-09-24 04:28:10 +00004943- The "email" package has been added. This is basically a port of the
4944 mimelib package <http://sf.net/projects/mimelib> with API changes
4945 and some implementations updated to use iterators and generators.
4946
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00004947- difflib.ndiff() and difflib.Differ.compare() are generators now. This
4948 restores the ability of Tools/scripts/ndiff.py to start producing output
4949 before the entire comparison is complete.
4950
Barry Warsaw58b072d2001-09-22 04:44:21 +00004951- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
4952 iteration just like file objects (i.e. their .readline() method is
4953 called for each iteration until it returns an empty string).
4954
Marc-André Lemburg494f2ae2001-09-19 11:33:31 +00004955- The codecs module has grown four new helper APIs to access
4956 builtin codecs: getencoder(), getdecoder(), getreader(),
4957 getwriter().
4958
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004959- SimpleXMLRPCServer: a new module (based upon SimpleHTMLServer)
4960 simplifies writing XML RPC servers.
4961
Barry Warsaw647d5e82001-09-28 17:01:02 +00004962- os.path.realpath(): a new function that returns the absolute pathname
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004963 after interpretation of symbolic links. On non-Unix systems, this
4964 is an alias for os.path.abspath().
4965
Tim Peters16a77ad2001-09-08 04:00:12 +00004966- operator.indexOf() (PySequence_Index() in the C API) now works with any
4967 iterable object.
4968
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004969- smtplib now supports various authentication and security features of
4970 the SMTP protocol through the new login() and starttls() methods.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00004971
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004972- hmac: a new module implementing keyed hashing for message
4973 authentication.
4974
4975- mimetypes now recognizes more extensions and file types. At the
4976 same time, some mappings not sanctioned by IANA were removed.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00004977
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004978- The "compiler" package has been brought up to date to the state of
Guido van Rossumc9ed5dc2001-09-20 05:30:24 +00004979 Python 2.2 bytecode generation. It has also been promoted from a
4980 Tool to a standard library package. (Tools/compiler still exists as
4981 a sample driver.)
4982
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004983Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004984-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004985
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004986- Large file support (LFS) is now automatic when the platform supports
4987 it; no more manual configuration tweaks are needed. On Linux, at
4988 least, it's possible to have a system whose C library supports large
4989 files but whose kernel doesn't; in this case, large file support is
4990 still enabled but doesn't do you any good unless you upgrade your
4991 kernel or share your Python executable with another system whose
4992 kernel has large file support.
4993
4994- The configure script now supplies plausible defaults in a
4995 cross-compilation environment. This doesn't mean that the supplied
4996 values are always correct, or that cross-compilation now works
4997 flawlessly -- but it's a first step (and it shuts up most of
4998 autoconf's warnings about AC_TRY_RUN).
4999
5000- The Unix build is now a bit less chatty, courtesy of the parser
5001 generator. The build is completely silent (except for errors) when
5002 using "make -s", thanks to a -q option to setup.py.
5003
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005004C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005005-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005006
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005007- The "structmember" API now supports some new flag bits to deny read
5008 and/or write access to attributes in restricted execution mode.
5009
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005010New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005011-------------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005012
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005013- Compaq's iPAQ handheld, running the "familiar" Linux distribution
5014 (http://familiar.handhelds.org).
5015
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005016Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005017-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005018
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00005019- The "classic" standard tests, which work by comparing stdout to
5020 an expected-output file under Lib/test/output/, no longer stop at
5021 the first mismatch. Instead the test is run to completion, and a
5022 variant of ndiff-style comparison is used to report all differences.
5023 This is much easier to understand than the previous style of reporting.
5024
5025- The unittest-based standard tests now use regrtest's test_main()
5026 convention, instead of running as a side-effect of merely being
5027 imported. This allows these tests to be run in more natural and
5028 flexible ways as unittests, outside the regrtest framework.
5029
5030- regrtest.py is much better integrated with unittest and doctest now,
5031 especially in regard to reporting errors.
5032
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005033Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005034-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005035
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005036- Large file support now also works for files > 4GB, on filesystems
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00005037 that support it (NTFS under Windows 2000). See "What's New in
5038 Python 2.2a3" for more detail.
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005039
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005040
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005041What's New in Python 2.2a3?
5042===========================
5043
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005044*Release Date: 07-Sep-2001*
5045
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005046Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005047----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005048
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005049- Conversion of long to float now raises OverflowError if the long is too
5050 big to represent as a C double.
5051
Tim Peters32f453e2001-09-03 08:35:41 +00005052- The 3-argument builtin pow() no longer allows a third non-None argument
5053 if either of the first two arguments is a float, or if both are of
5054 integer types and the second argument is negative (in which latter case
5055 the arguments are converted to float, so this is really the same
5056 restriction).
5057
Tim Peters5d2b77c2001-09-03 05:47:38 +00005058- The builtin dir() now returns more information, and sometimes much
5059 more, generally naming all attributes of an object, and all attributes
5060 reachable from the object via its class, and from its class's base
5061 classes, and so on from them too. Example: in 2.2a2, dir([]) returned
5062 an empty list. In 2.2a3,
5063
5064 >>> dir([])
5065 ['__add__', '__class__', '__contains__', '__delattr__', '__delitem__',
5066 '__eq__', '__ge__', '__getattr__', '__getitem__', '__getslice__',
5067 '__gt__', '__hash__', '__iadd__', '__imul__', '__init__', '__le__',
5068 '__len__', '__lt__', '__mul__', '__ne__', '__new__', '__repr__',
5069 '__rmul__', '__setattr__', '__setitem__', '__setslice__', '__str__',
5070 'append', 'count', 'extend', 'index', 'insert', 'pop', 'remove',
5071 'reverse', 'sort']
5072
5073 dir(module) continues to return only the module's attributes, though.
5074
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005075- Overflowing operations on plain ints now return a long int rather
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005076 than raising OverflowError. This is a partial implementation of PEP
5077 237. You can use -Wdefault::OverflowWarning to enable a warning for
5078 this situation, and -Werror::OverflowWarning to revert to the old
5079 OverflowError exception.
5080
Guido van Rossum61c345f2001-09-04 03:26:15 +00005081- A new command line option, -Q<arg>, is added to control run-time
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005082 warnings for the use of classic division. (See PEP 238.) Possible
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00005083 values are -Qold, -Qwarn, -Qwarnall, and -Qnew. The default is
5084 -Qold, meaning the / operator has its classic meaning and no
5085 warnings are issued. Using -Qwarn issues a run-time warning about
5086 all uses of classic division for int and long arguments; -Qwarnall
5087 also warns about classic division for float and complex arguments
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00005088 (for use with fixdiv.py).
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005089 [Note: the remainder of this item (preserved below) became
5090 obsolete in 2.2c1 -- -Qnew has global effect in 2.2] ::
5091
5092 Using -Qnew is questionable; it turns on new division by default, but
5093 only in the __main__ module. You can usefully combine -Qwarn or
5094 -Qwarnall and -Qnew: this gives the __main__ module new division, and
5095 warns about classic division everywhere else.
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005096
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005097- Many built-in types can now be subclassed. This applies to int,
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005098 long, float, str, unicode, and tuple. (The types complex, list and
5099 dictionary can also be subclassed; this was introduced earlier.)
5100 Note that restrictions apply when subclassing immutable built-in
5101 types: you can only affect the value of the instance by overloading
5102 __new__. You can add mutable attributes, and the subclass instances
5103 will have a __dict__ attribute, but you cannot change the "value"
5104 (as implemented by the base class) of an immutable subclass instance
5105 once it is created.
5106
Guido van Rossumaaf80c82001-09-02 13:44:35 +00005107- The dictionary constructor now takes an optional argument, a
5108 mapping-like object, and initializes the dictionary from its
5109 (key, value) pairs.
5110
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005111- A new built-in type, super, has been added. This facilitates making
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005112 "cooperative super calls" in a multiple inheritance setting. For an
5113 explanation, see http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#cooperation
5114
Guido van Rossum8d7234d2001-09-06 22:02:58 +00005115- A new built-in type, property, has been added. This enables the
5116 creation of "properties". These are attributes implemented by
5117 getter and setter functions (or only one of these for read-only or
5118 write-only attributes), without the need to override __getattr__.
5119 See http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#property
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005120
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005121- The syntax of floating-point and imaginary literals has been
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005122 liberalized, to allow leading zeroes. Examples of literals now
5123 legal that were SyntaxErrors before:
5124
5125 00.0 0e3 0100j 07.5 00000000000000000008.
5126
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005127- An old tokenizer bug allowed floating point literals with an incomplete
Tim Petersc6d95812001-08-28 20:56:27 +00005128 exponent, such as 1e and 3.1e-. Such literals now raise SyntaxError.
5129
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005130Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005131-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005132
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00005133- telnetlib includes symbolic names for the options, and support for
Martin v. Löwis1da9c572002-11-04 09:56:00 +00005134 setting an option negotiation callback. It also supports processing
5135 of suboptions.
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00005136
Tim Petersa40c7932001-09-05 22:36:56 +00005137- The new C standard no longer requires that math libraries set errno to
5138 ERANGE on overflow. For platform libraries that exploit this new
5139 freedom, Python's overflow-checking was wholly broken. A new overflow-
5140 checking scheme attempts to repair that, but may not be reliable on all
5141 platforms (C doesn't seem to provide anything both useful and portable
5142 in this area anymore).
5143
Martin v. Löwis44f86962001-09-05 13:44:54 +00005144- Asynchronous timeout actions are available through the new class
5145 threading.Timer.
5146
Tim Peters78526162001-09-05 00:53:45 +00005147- math.log and math.log10 now return sensible results for even huge
5148 long arguments. For example, math.log10(10 ** 10000) ~= 10000.0.
5149
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005150- A new function, imp.lock_held(), returns 1 when the import lock is
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005151 currently held. See the docs for the imp module.
5152
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005153- pickle, cPickle and marshal on 32-bit platforms can now correctly read
Tim Peters82112372001-08-29 02:28:42 +00005154 dumps containing ints written on platforms where Python ints are 8 bytes.
5155 When read on a box where Python ints are 4 bytes, such values are
5156 converted to Python longs.
5157
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005158- In restricted execution mode (using the rexec module), unmarshalling
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005159 code objects is no longer allowed. This plugs a security hole.
5160
Steve Purcell6091cd62001-09-06 16:05:17 +00005161- unittest.TestResult instances no longer store references to tracebacks
5162 generated by test failures. This prevents unexpected dangling references
5163 to objects that should be garbage collected between tests.
5164
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005165Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005166-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005167
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00005168- Tools/scripts/fixdiv.py has been added which can be used to fix
5169 division operators as per PEP 238.
5170
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005171Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005172-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005173
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00005174- If you are an adventurous person using Mac OS X you may want to look at
5175 Mac/OSX. There is a Makefile there that will build Python as a real Mac
5176 application, which can be used for experimenting with Carbon or Cocoa.
5177 Discussion of this on pythonmac-sig, please.
5178
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00005179C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005180-----
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00005181
5182- New function PyObject_Dir(obj), like Python __builtin__.dir(obj).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005183
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005184- Note that PyLong_AsDouble can fail! This has always been true, but no
5185 callers checked for it. It's more likely to fail now, because overflow
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00005186 errors are properly detected now. The proper way to check::
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005187
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005188 double x = PyLong_AsDouble(some_long_object);
5189 if (x == -1.0 && PyErr_Occurred()) {
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00005190 /* The conversion failed. */
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005191 }
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005192
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005193- The GC API has been changed. Extensions that use the old API will still
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005194 compile but will not participate in GC. To upgrade an extension
5195 module:
5196
5197 - rename Py_TPFLAGS_GC to PyTPFLAGS_HAVE_GC
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005198
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005199 - use PyObject_GC_New or PyObject_GC_NewVar to allocate objects and
5200 PyObject_GC_Del to deallocate them
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005201
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005202 - rename PyObject_GC_Init to PyObject_GC_Track and PyObject_GC_Fini
5203 to PyObject_GC_UnTrack
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005204
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005205 - remove PyGC_HEAD_SIZE from object size calculations
5206
5207 - remove calls to PyObject_AS_GC and PyObject_FROM_GC
5208
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005209- Two new functions: PyString_FromFormat() and PyString_FromFormatV().
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005210 These can be used safely to construct string objects from a
5211 sprintf-style format string (similar to the format string supported
5212 by PyErr_Format()).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005213
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005214New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005215-------------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005216
Tim Petersb7da0902001-09-02 23:01:43 +00005217- Stephen Hansen contributed patches sufficient to get a clean compile
5218 under Borland C (Windows), but he reports problems running it and ran
5219 out of time to complete the port. Volunteers? Expect a MemoryError
5220 when importing the types module; this is probably shallow, and
5221 causing later failures too.
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005222
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005223Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005224-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005225
5226Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005227-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005228
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00005229- Large file support is now enabled on Win32 platforms as well as on
5230 Win64. This means that, for example, you can use f.tell() and f.seek()
5231 to manipulate files larger than 2 gigabytes (provided you have enough
5232 disk space, and are using a Windows filesystem that supports large
Tim Peters9a9471c2001-09-11 23:18:51 +00005233 partitions). Windows filesystem limits: FAT has a 2GB (gigabyte)
5234 filesize limit, and large file support makes no difference there.
5235 FAT32's limit is 4GB, and files >= 2GB are easier to use from Python now.
5236 NTFS has no practical limit on file size, and files of any size can be
5237 used from Python now.
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00005238
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005239- The w9xpopen hack is now used on Windows NT and 2000 too when COMPSPEC
Tim Peters402d5982001-08-27 06:37:48 +00005240 points to command.com (patch from Brian Quinlan).
5241
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005242
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005243What's New in Python 2.2a2?
5244===========================
5245
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005246*Release Date: 22-Aug-2001*
5247
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005248Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005249-----
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005250
Barry Warsaw18b2ecf2001-08-22 20:26:56 +00005251- Tim Peters developed a brand new Windows installer using Wise 8.1,
5252 generously donated to us by Wise Solutions.
5253
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005254- configure supports a new option --enable-unicode, with the values
5255 ucs2 and ucs4 (new in 2.2a1). With --disable-unicode, the Unicode
5256 type and supporting code is completely removed from the interpreter.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005257
Jack Jansen32ce0cd2001-08-21 19:28:20 +00005258- A new configure option --enable-framework builds a Mac OS X framework,
5259 which "make frameworkinstall" will install. This provides a starting
5260 point for more mac-like functionality, join pythonmac-sig@python.org
5261 if you are interested in helping.
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005262
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005263- The NeXT platform is no longer supported.
5264
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005265- The 'new' module is now statically linked.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005266
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005267Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005268-----
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005269
5270- The new Tools/scripts/cleanfuture.py can be used to automatically
Andrew M. Kuchlingb0532092001-08-15 15:54:56 +00005271 edit out obsolete future statements from Python source code. See
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005272 the module docstring for details.
5273
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005274Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005275-----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005276
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005277- regrtest.py now knows which tests are expected to be skipped on some
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005278 platforms, allowing to give clearer test result output. regrtest
5279 also has optional --use/-u switch to run normally disabled tests
5280 which require network access or consume significant disk resources.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005281
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005282- Several new tests in the standard test suite, with special thanks to
5283 Nick Mathewson.
5284
5285Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005286----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005287
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005288- The floor division operator // has been added as outlined in PEP
5289 238. The / operator still provides classic division (and will until
5290 Python 3.0) unless "from __future__ import division" is included, in
5291 which case the / operator will provide true division. The operator
5292 module provides truediv() and floordiv() functions. Augmented
5293 assignment variants are included, as are the equivalent overloadable
5294 methods and C API methods. See the PEP for a full discussion:
5295 <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0238.html>
5296
Tim Peters6cd6a822001-08-17 22:11:27 +00005297- Future statements are now effective in simulated interactive shells
5298 (like IDLE). This should "just work" by magic, but read Michael
5299 Hudson's "Future statements in simulated shells" PEP 264 for full
5300 details: <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0264.html>.
5301
Guido van Rossumf86ddd22001-08-17 21:21:04 +00005302- The type/class unification (PEP 252-253) was integrated into the
5303 trunk and is not so tentative any more (the exact specification of
5304 some features is still tentative). A lot of work has done on fixing
5305 bugs and adding robustness and features (performance still has to
5306 come a long way).
5307
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00005308- Warnings about a mismatch in the Python API during extension import
5309 now use the Python warning framework (which makes it possible to
5310 write filters for these warnings).
5311
Barry Warsaw9b3be7f2001-08-14 18:35:02 +00005312- A function's __dict__ (aka func_dict) will now always be a
5313 dictionary. It used to be possible to delete it or set it to None,
5314 but now both actions raise TypeErrors. It is still legal to set it
5315 to a dictionary object. Getting func.__dict__ before any attributes
5316 have been assigned now returns an empty dictionary instead of None.
5317
Guido van Rossum32aa5d22001-09-05 18:43:35 +00005318- A new command line option, -E, was added which disables the use of
5319 all environment variables, or at least those that are specifically
5320 significant to Python. Usually those have a name starting with
5321 "PYTHON". This was used to fix a problem where the tests fail if
5322 the user happens to have PYTHONHOME or PYTHONPATH pointing to an
5323 older distribution.
5324
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005325Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005326-------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005327
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005328- New class Differ and new functions ndiff() and restore() in difflib.py.
5329 These package the algorithms used by the popular Tools/scripts/ndiff.py,
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005330 for programmatic reuse.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005331
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005332- New function xml.sax.saxutils.quoteattr(): Quote an XML attribute
5333 value using the minimal quoting required for the value; more
5334 reliable than using xml.sax.saxutils.escape() for attribute values.
5335
5336- Readline completion support for cmd.Cmd was added.
5337
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005338- Calling os.tempnam() or os.tmpnam() generate RuntimeWarnings.
5339
5340- Added function threading.BoundedSemaphore()
5341
5342- Added Ka-Ping Yee's cgitb.py module.
5343
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005344- The 'new' module now exposes the CO_xxx flags.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005345
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00005346- The gc module offers the get_referents function.
5347
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005348New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005349-------------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005350
5351C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005352-----
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005353
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00005354- Two new APIs PyOS_snprintf() and PyOS_vsnprintf() were added
5355 which provide a cross-platform implementations for the
5356 relatively new snprintf()/vsnprintf() C lib APIs. In contrast to
5357 the standard sprintf() and vsprintf() C lib APIs, these versions
5358 apply bounds checking on the used buffer which enhances protection
5359 against buffer overruns.
5360
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00005361- Unicode APIs now use name mangling to assure that mixing interpreters
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005362 and extensions using different Unicode widths is rendered next to
5363 impossible. Trying to import an incompatible Unicode-aware extension
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00005364 will result in an ImportError. Unicode extensions writers must make
5365 sure to check the Unicode width compatibility in their extensions by
5366 using at least one of the mangled Unicode APIs in the extension.
5367
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005368- Two new flags METH_NOARGS and METH_O are available in method definition
5369 tables to simplify implementation of methods with no arguments and a
5370 single untyped argument. Calling such methods is more efficient than
5371 calling corresponding METH_VARARGS methods. METH_OLDARGS is now
5372 deprecated.
5373
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005374Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005375-------
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005376
5377- "import module" now compiles module.pyw if it exists and nothing else
5378 relevant is found.
5379
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005380
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005381What's New in Python 2.2a1?
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005382===========================
5383
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005384*Release date: 18-Jul-2001*
5385
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005386Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005387----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005388
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00005389- TENTATIVELY, a large amount of code implementing much of what's
5390 described in PEP 252 (Making Types Look More Like Classes) and PEP
5391 253 (Subtyping Built-in Types) was added. This will be released
5392 with Python 2.2a1. Documentation will be provided separately
5393 through http://www.python.org/2.2/. The purpose of releasing this
5394 with Python 2.2a1 is to test backwards compatibility. It is
5395 possible, though not likely, that a decision is made not to release
5396 this code as part of 2.2 final, if any serious backwards
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005397 incompatibilities are found during alpha testing that cannot be
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00005398 repaired.
5399
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005400- Generators were added; this is a new way to create an iterator (see
Tim Peters11a0d102001-07-17 18:48:00 +00005401 below) using what looks like a simple function containing one or
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005402 more 'yield' statements. See PEP 255. Since this adds a new
5403 keyword to the language, this feature must be enabled by including a
5404 future statement: "from __future__ import generators" (see PEP 236).
5405 Generators will become a standard feature in a future release
5406 (probably 2.3). Without this future statement, 'yield' remains an
5407 ordinary identifier, but a warning is issued each time it is used.
5408 (These warnings currently don't conform to the warnings framework of
5409 PEP 230; we intend to fix this in 2.2a2.)
5410
Marc-André Lemburg12e74b32001-05-22 08:58:23 +00005411- The UTF-16 codec was modified to be more RFC compliant. It will now
5412 only remove BOM characters at the start of the string and then
5413 only if running in native mode (UTF-16-LE and -BE won't remove a
5414 leading BMO character).
5415
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005416- Strings now have a new method .decode() to complement the already
5417 existing .encode() method. These two methods provide direct access
5418 to the corresponding decoders and encoders of the registered codecs.
5419
5420 To enhance the usability of the .encode() method, the special
5421 casing of Unicode object return values was dropped (Unicode objects
5422 were auto-magically converted to string using the default encoding).
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005423
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005424 Both methods will now return whatever the codec in charge of the
5425 requested encoding returns as object, e.g. Unicode codecs will
5426 return Unicode objects when decoding is requested ("äöü".decode("latin-1")
5427 will return u"äöü"). This enables codec writer to create codecs
5428 for various simple to use conversions.
5429
5430 New codecs were added to demonstrate these new features (the .encode()
5431 and .decode() columns indicate the type of the returned objects):
5432
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005433 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5434 |Name | .encode() | .decode() | Description |
5435 +=========+===========+===========+=============================+
5436 |uu | string | string | UU codec (e.g. for email) |
5437 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5438 |base64 | string | string | base64 codec |
5439 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5440 |quopri | string | string | quoted-printable codec |
5441 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5442 |zlib | string | string | zlib compression |
5443 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5444 |hex | string | string | 2-byte hex codec |
5445 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5446 |rot-13 | string | Unicode | ROT-13 Unicode charmap codec|
5447 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005448
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005449- Some operating systems now support the concept of a default Unicode
5450 encoding for file system operations. Notably, Windows supports 'mbcs'
5451 as the default. The Macintosh will also adopt this concept in the medium
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005452 term, although the default encoding for that platform will be other than
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005453 'mbcs'.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005454
5455 On operating system that support non-ASCII filenames, it is common for
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005456 functions that return filenames (such as os.listdir()) to return Python
5457 string objects pre-encoded using the default file system encoding for
5458 the platform. As this encoding is likely to be different from Python's
5459 default encoding, converting this name to a Unicode object before passing
5460 it back to the Operating System would result in a Unicode error, as Python
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005461 would attempt to use its default encoding (generally ASCII) rather than
5462 the default encoding for the file system.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005463
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005464 In general, this change simply removes surprises when working with
5465 Unicode and the file system, making these operations work as you expect,
5466 increasing the transparency of Unicode objects in this context.
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005467 See [????] for more details, including examples.
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005468
Tim Peters61dff2b2001-05-08 15:43:37 +00005469- Float (and complex) literals in source code were evaluated to full
5470 precision only when running from a .py file; the same code loaded from a
5471 .pyc (or .pyo) file could suffer numeric differences starting at about the
5472 12th significant decimal digit. For example, on a machine with IEEE-754
5473 floating arithmetic,
5474
5475 x = 9007199254740992.0
5476 print long(x)
5477
5478 printed 9007199254740992 if run directly from .py, but 9007199254740000
5479 if from a compiled (.pyc or .pyo) file. This was due to marshal using
5480 str(float) instead of repr(float) when building code objects. marshal
5481 now uses repr(float) instead, which should reproduce floats to full
5482 machine precision (assuming the platform C float<->string I/O conversion
5483 functions are of good quality).
5484
5485 This may cause floating-point results to change in some cases, and
5486 usually for the better, but may also cause numerically unstable
5487 algorithms to break.
5488
Tim Peters2f228e72001-05-13 00:19:31 +00005489- The implementation of dicts suffers fewer collisions, which has speed
5490 benefits. However, the order in which dict entries appear in dict.keys(),
5491 dict.values() and dict.items() may differ from previous releases for a
5492 given dict. Nothing is defined about this order, so no program should
5493 rely on it. Nevertheless, it's easy to write test cases that rely on the
5494 order by accident, typically because of printing the str() or repr() of a
5495 dict to an "expected results" file. See Lib/test/test_support.py's new
5496 sortdict(dict) function for a simple way to display a dict in sorted
5497 order.
5498
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005499- Many other small changes to dicts were made, resulting in faster
5500 operation along the most common code paths.
5501
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00005502- Dictionary objects now support the "in" operator: "x in dict" means
5503 the same as dict.has_key(x).
5504
Barry Warsaw51acc8d2001-06-26 20:12:50 +00005505- The update() method of dictionaries now accepts generic mapping
5506 objects. Specifically the argument object must support the .keys()
5507 and __getitem__() methods. This allows you to say, for example,
5508 {}.update(UserDict())
5509
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00005510- Iterators were added; this is a generalized way of providing values
5511 to a for loop. See PEP 234. There's a new built-in function iter()
5512 to return an iterator. There's a new protocol to get the next value
5513 from an iterator using the next() method (in Python) or the
5514 tp_iternext slot (in C). There's a new protocol to get iterators
5515 using the __iter__() method (in Python) or the tp_iter slot (in C).
5516 Iterating (i.e. a for loop) over a dictionary generates its keys.
5517 Iterating over a file generates its lines.
5518
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005519- The following functions were generalized to work nicely with iterator
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00005520 arguments::
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005521
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00005522 map(), filter(), reduce(), zip()
Tim Peters8572b4f2001-05-06 01:05:02 +00005523 list(), tuple() (PySequence_Tuple() and PySequence_Fast() in C API)
5524 max(), min()
Tim Peters1af03e92001-05-26 19:37:54 +00005525 join() method of strings
5526 extend() method of lists
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00005527 'x in y' and 'x not in y' (PySequence_Contains() in C API)
5528 operator.countOf() (PySequence_Count() in C API)
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005529 right-hand side of assignment statements with multiple targets, such as ::
Tim Petersd6d010b2001-06-21 02:49:55 +00005530 x, y, z = some_iterable_object_returning_exactly_3_values
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00005531
Tim Petersd85e1022001-05-11 21:51:48 +00005532- Accessing module attributes is significantly faster (for example,
5533 random.random or os.path or yourPythonModule.yourAttribute).
5534
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00005535- Comparing dictionary objects via == and != is faster, and now works even
5536 if the keys and values don't support comparisons other than ==.
5537
Tim Peters95bf9392001-05-10 08:32:44 +00005538- Comparing dictionaries in ways other than == and != is slower: there were
5539 insecurities in the dict comparison implementation that could cause Python
5540 to crash if the element comparison routines for the dict keys and/or
5541 values mutated the dicts. Making the code bulletproof slowed it down.
5542
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005543- Collisions in dicts are resolved via a new approach, which can help
5544 dramatically in bad cases. For example, looking up every key in a dict
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005545 d with d.keys() == [i << 16 for i in range(20000)] is approximately 500x
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005546 faster now. Thanks to Christian Tismer for pointing out the cause and
5547 the nature of an effective cure (last December! better late than never).
Tim Peters15d49292001-05-27 07:39:22 +00005548
Tim Peters52e155e2001-06-16 05:42:57 +00005549- repr() is much faster for large containers (dict, list, tuple).
5550
5551
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005552Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005553-------
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005554
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00005555- The constants ascii_letters, ascii_lowercase. and ascii_uppercase
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005556 were added to the string module. These a locale-independent
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00005557 constants, unlike letters, lowercase, and uppercase. These are now
5558 use in appropriate locations in the standard library.
5559
Martin v. Löwisf0473d52001-07-18 16:17:16 +00005560- The flags used in dlopen calls can now be configured using
5561 sys.setdlopenflags and queried using sys.getdlopenflags.
5562
Guido van Rossumc7e4aca2001-07-12 11:54:37 +00005563- Fredrik Lundh's xmlrpclib is now a standard library module. This
5564 provides full client-side XML-RPC support. In addition,
5565 Demo/xmlrpc/ contains two server frameworks (one SocketServer-based,
5566 one asyncore-based). Thanks to Eric Raymond for the documentation.
5567
Guido van Rossum643d3912001-07-05 14:46:25 +00005568- The xrange() object is simplified: it no longer supports slicing,
5569 repetition, comparisons, efficient 'in' checking, the tolist()
5570 method, or the start, stop and step attributes. See PEP 260.
5571
Martin v. Löwisebf94db2001-06-06 06:25:40 +00005572- A new function fnmatch.filter to filter lists of file names was added.
5573
Barry Warsawffd674d2001-05-22 16:00:10 +00005574- calendar.py uses month and day names based on the current locale.
5575
Guido van Rossum2e0a6542001-05-15 02:14:44 +00005576- strop is now *really* obsolete (this was announced before with 1.6),
5577 and issues DeprecationWarning when used (except for the four items
5578 that are still imported into string.py).
5579
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005580- Cookie.py now sorts key+value pairs by key in output strings.
5581
5582- pprint.isrecursive(object) didn't correctly identify recursive objects.
5583 Now it does.
5584
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00005585- pprint functions now much faster for large containers (tuple, list, dict).
5586
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00005587- New 'q' and 'Q' format codes in the struct module, corresponding to C
5588 types "long long" and "unsigned long long" (on Windows, __int64). In
5589 native mode, these can be used only when the platform C compiler supports
5590 these types (when HAVE_LONG_LONG is #define'd by the Python config
5591 process), and then they inherit the sizes and alignments of the C types.
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005592 In standard mode, 'q' and 'Q' are supported on all platforms, and are
5593 8-byte integral types.
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00005594
Guido van Rossum83213cc2001-06-12 16:48:52 +00005595- The site module installs a new built-in function 'help' that invokes
5596 pydoc.help. It must be invoked as 'help()'; when invoked as 'help',
5597 it displays a message reminding the user to use 'help()' or
5598 'help(object)'.
5599
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005600Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005601-----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005602
5603- New test_mutants.py runs dict comparisons where the key and value
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005604 comparison operators mutate the dicts randomly during comparison. This
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005605 rapidly causes Python to crash under earlier releases (not for the faint
5606 of heart: it can also cause Win9x to freeze or reboot!).
5607
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005608- New test_pprint.py verifies that pprint.isrecursive() and
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00005609 pprint.isreadable() return sensible results. Also verifies that simple
5610 cases produce correct output.
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005611
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00005612C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005613-----
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00005614
5615- Removed the unused last_is_sticky argument from the internal
5616 _PyTuple_Resize(). If this affects you, you were cheating.
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005617
5618----
5619
5620**(For information about older versions, consult the HISTORY file.)**