blob: 3940d4d616453928ffd58ed4550477d3182cc00f [file] [log] [blame]
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001+++++++++++
2Python News
3+++++++++++
4
Skip Montanaro4a385832002-09-20 17:08:52 +00005(editors: check NEWS.help for information about editing NEWS using ReST.)
6
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00007What's New in Python 2.3 final?
8===============================
9
10*Release date: 29-Jul-2003*
11
12Core and builtins
13-----------------
14
15Extension modules
16-----------------
17
18Library
19-------
20
21IDLE
22----
23
24- IDLE displays a new message upon startup: some "personal firewall"
25 kinds of programs (for example, ZoneAlarm) open a dialog of their
26 own when any program opens a socket. IDLE does use sockets, talking
27 on the computer's internal loopback interface. This connection is not
28 visible on any external interface and no data is sent to or received
29 from the Internet. So, if you get such a dialog when opening IDLE,
30 asking whether to let pythonw.exe talk to address 127.0.0.1, say yes,
31 and rest assured no communication external to your machine is taking
32 place. If you don't allow it, IDLE won't be able to start.
33
34Build
35-----
36
37C API
38-----
39
40Windows
41-------
42
43
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +000044What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 2?
45=============================================
46
Tim Peters6560a252003-07-24 00:15:46 +000047*Release date: 24-Jul-2003*
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +000048
49Core and builtins
50-----------------
51
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +000052- It is now possible to import from zipfiles containing additional
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +000053 data bytes before the zip compatible archive. Zipfiles containing a
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +000054 comment at the end are still unsupported.
55
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +000056Extension modules
57-----------------
58
59- A longstanding bug in the parser module's initialization could cause
60 fatal internal refcount confusion when the module got initialized more
61 than once. This has been fixed.
62
Fred Drake01a43122003-07-21 17:17:10 +000063- Fixed memory leak in pyexpat; using the parser's ParseFile() method
64 with open files that aren't instances of the standard file type
65 caused an instance of the bound .read() method to be leaked on every
66 call.
67
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +000068- Fixed some leaks in the locale module.
69
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +000070Library
71-------
72
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +000073- Lib/encodings/rot_13.py when used as a script, now more properly
74 uses the first Python interpreter on your path.
75
76- Removed caching of TimeRE (and thus LocaleTime) in _strptime.py to
77 fix a locale related bug in the test suite. Although another patch
78 was needed to actually fix the problem, the cache code was not
79 restored.
80
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +000081IDLE
82----
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +000083
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +000084- Calltips patches.
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +000085
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +000086Build
87-----
88
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +000089- For MacOSX, added -mno-fused-madd to BASECFLAGS to fix test_coercion
90 on Panther (OSX 10.3).
91
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +000092C API
93-----
94
95Windows
96-------
97
Tim Peters291f14e2003-07-22 02:50:01 +000098- The tempfile module could do insane imports on Windows if PYTHONCASEOK
99 was set, making temp file creation impossible. Repaired.
100
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000101- Add a patch to workaround pthread_sigmask() bugs in Cygwin.
102
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000103Mac
104---
105
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000106- Various fixes to pimp.
107
108- Scripts runs with pythonw no longer had full window manager access.
109
110- Don't force boot-disk-only install, for reasons unknown it causes
111 more problems than it solves.
112
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000113
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000114What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 1?
115=============================================
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000116
Jeremy Hylton0ed18c22003-07-18 20:10:02 +0000117*Release date: 18-Jul-2003*
118
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000119Core and builtins
120-----------------
121
Tim Peterse5e065b2003-07-06 18:36:54 +0000122- The new function sys.getcheckinterval() returns the last value set
123 by sys.setcheckinterval().
124
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000125- Several bugs in the symbol table phase of the compiler have been
126 fixed. Errors could be lost and compilation could fail without
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000127 reporting an error. SF patch 763201.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000128
129- The interpreter is now more robust about importing the warnings
130 module. In an executable generated by freeze or similar programs,
131 earlier versions of 2.3 would fail if the warnings module could
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000132 not be found on the file system. Fixes SF bug 771097.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000133
134- A warning about assignments to module attributes that shadow
135 builtins, present in earlier releases of 2.3, has been removed.
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000136
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000137- It is not possible to create subclasses of builtin types like str
138 and tuple that define an itemsize. Earlier releases of Python 2.3
139 allowed this by mistake, leading to crashes and other problems.
140
141- The thread_id is now initialized to 0 in a non-thread build. SF bug
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000142 770247.
143
144- SF bug 762891: "del p[key]" on proxy object no longer raises SystemError.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000145
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000146Extension modules
147-----------------
148
149- weakref.proxy() can now handle "del obj[i]" for proxy objects
150 defining __delitem__. Formerly, it generated a SystemError.
151
152- SSL no longer crashes the interpreter when the remote side disconnects.
153
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +0000154- On Unix the mmap module can again be used to map device files.
155
Brett Cannon20def8b2003-07-01 05:16:08 +0000156- time.strptime now exclusively uses the Python implementation
157 contained within the _strptime module.
158
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000159- The print slot of weakref proxy objects was removed, because it was
160 not consistent with the object's repr slot.
161
162- The mmap module only checks file size for regular files, not
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000163 character or block devices. SF patch 708374.
164
165- The cPickle Pickler garbage collection support was fixed to traverse
166 the find_class attribute, if present.
167
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000168- There are several fixes for the bsddb3 wrapper module.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000169
170 bsddb3 no longer crashes if an environment is closed before a cursor
171 (SF bug 763298).
172
173 The DB and DBEnv set_get_returns_none function was extended to take
Barry Warsawd71a5512003-07-20 18:00:54 +0000174 a level instead of a boolean flag. The new level 2 means that in
175 addition, cursor.set()/.get() methods return None instead of raising
176 an exception.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000177
178 A typo was fixed in DBCursor.join_item(), preventing a crash.
179
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000180Library
181-------
182
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000183- distutils now supports MSVC 7.1
184
Raymond Hettinger71adf7e2003-07-16 19:25:22 +0000185- doctest now examines all docstrings by default. Previously, it would
186 skip over functions with private names (as indicated by the underscore
187 naming convention). The old default created too much of a risk that
188 user tests were being skipped inadvertently. Note, this change could
189 break code in the unlikely case that someone had intentionally put
190 failing tests in the docstrings of private functions. The breakage
191 is easily fixable by specifying the old behavior when calling testmod()
192 or Tester().
193
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000194- There were several fixes to the way dumbdbms are closed. It's vital
195 that a dumbdbm database be closed properly, else the on-disk data
196 and directory files can be left in mutually inconsistent states.
197 dumbdbm.py's _Database.__del__() method attempted to close the
198 database properly, but a shutdown race in _Database._commit() could
199 prevent this from working, so that a program trusting __del__() to
200 get the on-disk files in synch could be badly surprised. The race
201 has been repaired. A sync() method was also added so that shelve
202 can guarantee data is written to disk.
Tim Peters7a6c7332003-07-13 17:21:10 +0000203
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000204 The close() method can now be called more than once without complaint.
Tim Petersd7472ec2003-07-13 02:22:03 +0000205
Tim Peters59aba122003-07-01 20:01:55 +0000206- The classes in threading.py are now new-style classes. That they
207 weren't before was an oversight.
208
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000209- The urllib2 digest authentication handlers now define the correct
210 auth_header. The earlier versions would fail at runtime.
211
Neal Norwitze7dfe212003-07-01 14:59:46 +0000212- SF bug 763023: fix uncaught ZeroDivisionError in difflib ratio methods
213 when there are no lines.
214
Neal Norwitz3c0f2c92003-07-01 21:12:47 +0000215- SF bug 763637: fix exception in Tkinter with after_cancel
216 which could occur with Tk 8.4
217
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000218- SF bug 770601: CGIHTTPServer.py now passes the entire environment
219 to child processes.
220
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000221- SF bug 765238: add filter to fnmatch's __all__.
222
223- SF bug 748201: make time.strptime() error messages more helpful.
224
225- SF patch 764470: Do not dump the args attribute of a Fault object in
226 xmlrpclib.
227
228- SF patch 549151: urllib and urllib2 now redirect POSTs on 301
229 responses.
230
231- SF patch 766650: The whichdb module was fixed to recognize dbm files
232 generated by gdbm on OS/2 EMX.
233
234- SF bugs 763047 and 763052: fixes bug of timezone value being left as
235 -1 when ``time.tzname[0] == time.tzname[1] and not time.daylight``
236 is true when it should only when time.daylight is true.
237
238- SF bug 764548: re now allows subclasses of str and unicode to be
239 used as patterns.
240
241- SF bug 763637: In Tkinter, change after_cancel() to handle tuples
242 of varying sizes. Tk 8.4 returns a different number of values
243 than Tk 8.3.
244
245- SF bug 763023: difflib.ratio() did not catch zero division.
246
247- The Queue module now has an __all__ attribute.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000248
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000249Tools/Demos
250-----------
251
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000252- See Lib/idlelib/NEWS.txt for IDLE news.
253
Neal Norwitz592c4cc2003-07-01 04:14:28 +0000254- SF bug 753592: webchecker/wsgui now handles user supplied directories.
255
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000256- The trace.py script has been removed. It is now in the standard library.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000257
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000258Build
259-----
260
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000261- Python now compiles with -fno-strict-aliasing if possible (SF bug 766696).
262
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000263- The socket module compiles on IRIX 6.5.10.
264
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000265- An irix64 system is treated the same way as an irix6 system (SF
266 patch 764560).
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000267
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000268- Several definitions were missing on FreeBSD 5.x unless the
269 __BSD_VISIBLE symbol was defined. configure now defines it as
270 needed.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000271
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000272C API
273-----
274
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000275- Unicode objects now support mbcs as a built-in encoding, so the C
276 API can use it without deferring to the encodings package.
277
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000278Windows
279-------
280
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000281- The Windows implementation of PyThread_start_new_thread() never
282 checked error returns from Windows functions correctly. As a result,
283 it could claim to start a new thread even when the Microsoft
284 _beginthread() function failed (due to "too many threads" -- this is
285 on the order of thousands when it happens). In these cases, the
286 Python exception ::
287
288 thread.error: can't start new thread
289
290 is raised now.
291
292- SF bug 766669: Prevent a GPF on interpreter exit when sockets are in
293 use. The interpreter now calls WSACleanup() from Py_Finalize()
294 instead of from DLL teardown.
295
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000296Mac
297---
298
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000299- Bundlebuilder now inherits default values in the right way. It was
300 previously possible for app bundles to et a type of "BNDL" instead
301 of "APPL." Other improvements include, a --build-id option to
302 specify the CFBundleIdentifier and using the --python option to set
303 the executable in the bundle.
304
305- Fixed two bugs in MacOSX framework handling.
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000306
Jack Jansene0040412003-07-23 22:17:28 +0000307- pythonw did not allow user interaction in 2.3rc1, this has been fixed.
308
309- Python is now compiled with -mno-fused-madd, making all tests pass
310 on Panther.
311
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000312What's New in Python 2.3 beta 2?
313================================
314
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +0000315*Release date: 29-Jun-2003*
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000316
317Core and builtins
318-----------------
319
Barry Warsaw883f2232003-06-29 17:10:11 +0000320- A program can now set the environment variable PYTHONINSPECT to some
321 string value in Python, and cause the interpreter to enter the
322 interactive prompt at program exit, as if Python had been invoked
323 with the -i option.
324
Raymond Hettingerd05abde2003-06-17 05:05:49 +0000325- list.index() now accepts optional start and stop arguments. Similar
326 changes were made to UserList.index(). SF feature request 754014.
327
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +0000328- SF patch 751998 fixes an unwanted side effect of the previous fix
329 for SF bug 742860 (the next item).
330
Tim Peters50d8b8b2003-05-25 17:44:31 +0000331- SF bug 742860: "WeakKeyDictionary __delitem__ uses iterkeys". This
332 wasn't threadsafe, was very inefficient (expected time O(len(dict))
333 instead of O(1)), and could raise a spurious RuntimeError if another
334 thread mutated the dict during __delitem__, or if a comparison function
335 mutated it. It also neglected to raise KeyError when the key wasn't
336 present; didn't raise TypeError when the key wasn't of a weakly
337 referencable type; and broke various more-or-less obscure dict
338 invariants by using a sequence of equality comparisons over the whole
339 set of dict keys instead of computing the key's hash code to narrow
340 the search to those keys with the same hash code. All of these are
341 considered to be bugs. A new implementation of __delitem__ repairs all
342 that, but note that fixing these bugs may change visible behavior in
343 code relying (whether intentionally or accidentally) on old behavior.
Tim Peters886128f2003-05-25 01:45:11 +0000344
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000345- SF bug 734869: Fixed a compiler bug that caused a fatal error when
346 compiling a list comprehension that contained another list comprehension
347 embedded in a lambda expression.
348
Tim Peterse87568d2003-05-24 20:18:24 +0000349- SF bug 705231: builtin pow() no longer lets the platform C pow()
350 raise -1.0 to integer powers, because (at least) glibc gets it wrong
351 in some cases. The result should be -1.0 if the power is odd and 1.0
352 if the power is even, and any float with a sufficiently large exponent
353 is (mathematically) an exact even integer.
354
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000355- SF bug 759227: A new-style class that implements __nonzero__() must
356 return a bool or int (but not an int subclass) from that method. This
357 matches the restriction on classic classes.
358
Martin v. Löwis5467d4c2003-05-10 07:10:12 +0000359- The encoding attribute has been added for file objects, and set to
360 the terminal encoding on Unix and Windows.
361
Tim Peters015dd822003-05-04 04:16:52 +0000362- The softspace attribute of file objects became read-only by oversight.
363 It's writable again.
364
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +0000365- Reverted a 2.3 beta 1 change to iterators for subclasses of list and
366 tuple. By default, the iterators now access data elements directly
367 instead of going through __getitem__. If __getitem__ access is
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +0000368 preferred, then __iter__ can be overridden.
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +0000369
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000370- SF bug 735247: The staticmethod and super types participate in
371 garbage collection. Before this change, it was possible for leaks to
372 occur in functions with non-global free variables that used these types.
373
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000374Extension modules
375-----------------
376
Raymond Hettinger643bcec2003-06-29 03:29:42 +0000377- the socket module has a new exception, socket.timeout, to allow
378 timeouts to be handled separately from other socket errors.
379
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000380- SF bug 751276: cPickle has fixed to propagate exceptions raised in
381 user code. In earlier versions, cPickle caught and ignored any
382 exception when it performed operations that it expected to raise
383 specific exceptions like AttributeError.
384
385- cPickle Pickler and Unpickler objects now participate in garbage
386 collection.
387
Tim Peterscda32b72003-06-15 23:13:35 +0000388- mimetools.choose_boundary() could return duplicate strings at times,
389 especially likely on Windows. The strings returned are now guaranteed
390 unique within a single program run.
391
Brett Cannon4e64d782003-06-13 23:44:35 +0000392- thread.interrupt_main() raises KeyboardInterrupt in the main thread.
393 dummy_thread has also been modified to try to simulate the behavior.
394
Walter Dörwald9e46abe2003-05-18 03:15:10 +0000395- array.array.insert() now treats negative indices as being relative
396 to the end of the array, just like list.insert() does. (SF bug #739313)
397
Tim Petersb0c854d2003-05-17 15:57:00 +0000398- The datetime module classes datetime, time, and timedelta are now
399 properly subclassable.
Tim Petersa98924a2003-05-17 05:55:19 +0000400
Martin v. Löwis28e9ce92003-05-09 08:19:48 +0000401- _tkinter.{get|set}busywaitinterval was added.
402
Raymond Hettinger834f4632003-05-02 20:24:56 +0000403- itertools.islice() now accepts stop=None as documented.
404 Fixes SF bug #730685.
405
Skip Montanaro8c044d82003-05-06 20:42:37 +0000406- the bsddb185 module is built in one restricted instance -
407 /usr/include/db.h exists and defines HASHVERSION to be 2. This is true
408 for many BSD-derived systems.
409
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000410
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000411Library
412-------
413
Tim Petersdb3756d2003-06-29 05:30:48 +0000414- Some happy doctest extensions from Jim Fulton have been added to
415 doctest.py. These are already being used in Zope3. The two
416 primary ones:
417
418 doctest.debug(module, name) extracts the doctests from the named object
419 in the given module, puts them in a temp file, and starts pdb running
420 on that file. This is great when a doctest fails.
421
422 doctest.DocTestSuite(module=None) returns a synthesized unittest
423 TestSuite instance, to be run by the unittest framework, which
424 runs all the doctests in the module. This allows writing tests in
425 doctest style (which can be clearer and shorter than writing tests
426 in unittest style), without losing unittest's powerful testing
427 framework features (which doctest lacks).
428
Tim Peters6ebe61f2003-06-27 20:48:05 +0000429- For compatibility with doctests created before 2.3, if an expected
430 output block consists solely of "1" and the actual output block
431 consists solely of "True", it's accepted as a match; similarly
432 for "0" and "False". This is quite un-doctest-like, but is practical.
433 The behavior can be disabled by passing the new doctest module
434 constant DONT_ACCEPT_TRUE_FOR_1 to the new optionflags optional
435 argument.
436
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000437- ZipFile.testzip() now only traps BadZipfile exceptions. Previously,
438 a bare except caught to much and reported all errors as a problem
439 in the archive.
440
441- The logging module now has a new function, makeLogRecord() making
442 LogHandler easier to interact with DatagramHandler and SocketHandler.
443
Skip Montanaro364ca402003-06-17 12:58:31 +0000444- The cgitb module has been extended to support plain text display (SF patch
445 569574).
446
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +0000447- A brand new version of IDLE (from the IDLEfork project at
448 SourceForge) is now included as Lib/idlelib. The old Tools/idle is
449 no more.
450
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000451- Added a new module: trace (documentation missing). This module used
452 to be distributed in Tools/scripts. It uses sys.settrace() to trace
453 code execution -- either function calls or individual lines. It can
454 generate tracing output during execution or a post-mortem report of
455 code coverage.
456
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +0000457- The threading module has new functions settrace() and setprofile()
458 that cooperate with the functions of the same name in the sys
459 module. A function registered with the threading module will
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000460 be used for all threads it creates. The new trace module uses this
461 to provide tracing for code running in threads.
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +0000462
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +0000463- copy.py: applied SF patch 707900, fixing bug 702858, by Steven
464 Taschuk. Copying a new-style class that had a reference to itself
465 didn't work. (The same thing worked fine for old-style classes.)
Martin v. Löwisba8f5ff2003-06-14 07:10:06 +0000466 Builtin functions are now treated as atomic, fixing bug #746304.
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +0000467
Raymond Hettingerc24d7672003-06-08 19:42:33 +0000468- difflib.py has two new functions: context_diff() and unified_diff().
469
Guido van Rossumfa19f7c2003-05-16 01:46:51 +0000470- More fixes to urllib (SF 549151): (a) When redirecting, always use
471 GET. This is common practice and more-or-less sanctioned by the
472 HTTP standard. (b) Add a handler for 307 redirection, which becomes
473 an error for POST, but a regular redirect for GET and HEAD
474
Guido van Rossumbf1bef82003-05-13 18:01:19 +0000475- Added optional 'onerror' argument to os.walk(), to control error
476 handling.
477
Martin v. Löwise59e2ba2003-05-03 09:09:02 +0000478- inspect.is{method|data}descriptor was added, to allow pydoc display
479 __doc__ of data descriptors.
480
Skip Montanaro4a7751c2003-04-29 21:07:16 +0000481- Fixed socket speed loss caused by use of the _socketobject wrapper class
482 in socket.py.
483
Raymond Hettinger22952a32003-05-20 04:59:56 +0000484- timeit.py now checks the current directory for imports.
485
Gustavo Niemeyer9556fba2003-06-07 17:53:08 +0000486- urllib2.py now knows how to order proxy classes, so the user doesn't
487 have to insert it in front of other classes, nor do dirty tricks like
488 inserting a "dummy" HTTPHandler after a ProxyHandler when building an
489 opener with proxy support.
490
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +0000491- Iterators have been added for dbm keys.
492
493- random.Random objects can now be pickled.
494
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000495Tools/Demos
496-----------
497
Martin v. Löwisb8c084e2003-06-14 09:03:46 +0000498- pydoc now offers help on keywords and topics.
499
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +0000500- Tools/idle is gone; long live Lib/idlelib.
501
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +0000502- diff.py prints file diffs in context, unified, or ndiff formats,
503 providing a command line interface to difflib.py.
Raymond Hettinger2f3c74a2003-06-08 23:10:15 +0000504
Raymond Hettinger71e00332003-05-10 03:30:13 +0000505- texcheck.py is a new script for making a rough validation of Python LaTeX
506 files.
507
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000508Build
509-----
510
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +0000511- Setting DESTDIR during 'make install' now allows specifying a
Martin v. Löwis3b8ee082003-05-11 20:25:35 +0000512 different root directory.
513
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000514C API
515-----
516
Tim Peters3cfe7542003-05-21 21:29:48 +0000517- PyType_Ready(): If a type declares that it participates in gc
518 (Py_TPFLAGS_HAVE_GC), and its base class does not, and its base class's
519 tp_free slot is the default _PyObject_Del, and type does not define
520 a tp_free slot itself, _PyObject_GC_Del is assigned to type->tp_free.
521 Previously _PyObject_Del was inherited, which could at best lead to a
522 segfault. In addition, if even after this magic the type's tp_free
523 slot is _PyObject_Del or NULL, and the type is a base type
524 (Py_TPFLAGS_BASETYPE), TypeError is raised: since the type is a base
525 type, its dealloc function must call type->tp_free, and since the type
526 is gc'able, tp_free must not be NULL or _PyObject_Del.
527
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +0000528- PyThreadState_SetAsyncExc(): A new API (deliberately accessible only
529 from C) to interrupt a thread by sending it an exception. It is
530 intentional that you have to write your own C extension to call it
531 from Python.
532
533
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000534New platforms
535-------------
536
537None this time.
538
539Tests
540-----
541
542- test_imp rewritten so that it doesn't raise RuntimeError if run as a
543 side effect of being imported ("import test.autotest").
544
545Windows
546-------
547
Tim Petersfaa697a2003-06-22 01:42:20 +0000548- The Windows installer ships with Tcl/Tk 8.4.3 (upgraded from 8.4.1).
549
Tim Petersc4607da2003-05-08 18:13:59 +0000550- The installer always suggested that Python be installed on the C:
551 drive, due to a hardcoded "C:" generated by the Wise installation
552 wizard. People with machines where C: is not the system drive
553 usually want Python installed on whichever drive is their system drive
554 instead. We removed the hardcoded "C:", and two testers on machines
555 where C: is not the system drive report that the installer now
556 suggests their system drive. Note that you can always select the
557 directory you want in the "Select Destination Directory" dialog --
558 that's what it's for.
559
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000560Mac
561---
562
Just van Rossum99bc1fc2003-05-09 15:01:25 +0000563- There's a new module called "autoGIL", which offers a mechanism to
564 automatically release the Global Interpreter Lock when an event loop
565 goes to sleep, allowing other threads to run. It's currently only
566 supported on OSX, in the Mach-O version.
Jack Jansenf5e23ff2003-06-16 13:53:40 +0000567- The OSA modules now allow direct access to properties of the
568 toplevel application class (in AppleScript terminology).
569- The Package Manager can now update itself.
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000570
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +0000571SourceForge Bugs and Patches Applied
572------------------------------------
573
574430160, 471893, 501716, 542562, 549151, 569574, 595837, 596434,
575598163, 604210, 604716, 610332, 612627, 614770, 620190, 621891,
576622042, 639139, 640236, 644345, 649742, 649742, 658233, 660022,
577661318, 661676, 662807, 662923, 666219, 672855, 678325, 682347,
578683486, 684981, 685773, 686254, 692776, 692959, 693094, 696777,
579697989, 700827, 703666, 708495, 708604, 708901, 710733, 711902,
580713722, 715782, 718286, 719359, 719367, 723136, 723831, 723962,
581724588, 724767, 724767, 725942, 726150, 726446, 726869, 727051,
582727719, 727719, 727805, 728277, 728563, 728656, 729096, 729103,
583729293, 729297, 729300, 729317, 729395, 729622, 729817, 730170,
584730296, 730594, 730685, 730826, 730963, 731209, 731403, 731504,
585731514, 731626, 731635, 731643, 731644, 731644, 731689, 732124,
586732143, 732234, 732284, 732284, 732479, 732761, 732783, 732951,
587733667, 733781, 734118, 734231, 734869, 735051, 735293, 735527,
588735613, 735694, 736962, 736962, 737970, 738066, 739313, 740055,
589740234, 740301, 741806, 742126, 742741, 742860, 742860, 742911,
590744041, 744104, 744238, 744687, 744877, 745055, 745478, 745525,
591745620, 746012, 746304, 746366, 746801, 746953, 747348, 747667,
592747954, 748846, 748849, 748973, 748975, 749191, 749210, 749759,
593749831, 749911, 750008, 750092, 750542, 750595, 751038, 751107,
594751276, 751451, 751916, 751941, 751956, 751998, 752671, 753451,
595753602, 753617, 753845, 753925, 754014, 754340, 754447, 755031,
596755087, 755147, 755245, 755683, 755987, 756032, 756996, 757058,
597757229, 757818, 757821, 757822, 758112, 758910, 759227, 759889,
598760257, 760703, 760792, 761104, 761337, 761519, 761830, 762455
599
600
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000601What's New in Python 2.3 beta 1?
602================================
603
Guido van Rossumfa1eddf2003-04-25 19:19:52 +0000604*Release date: 25-Apr-2003*
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000605
606Core and builtins
607-----------------
608
Thomas Heller5eccabc2003-04-23 19:35:25 +0000609- New format codes B, H, I, k and K have been implemented for
610 PyArg_ParseTuple and PyBuild_Value.
611
Alex Martellia70b1912003-04-22 08:12:33 +0000612- New builtin function sum(seq, start=0) returns the sum of all the
613 items in iterable object seq, plus start (items are normally numbers,
614 and cannot be strings).
615
Guido van Rossumaa86e352003-04-19 18:15:10 +0000616- bool() called without arguments now returns False rather than
617 raising an exception. This is consistent with calling the
618 constructors for the other builtin types -- called without argument
619 they all return the false value of that type. (SF patch #724135)
620
Guido van Rossumcf8d2852003-04-17 16:53:26 +0000621- In support of PEP 269 (making the pgen parser generator accessible
622 from Python), some changes to the pgen code structure were made; a
623 few files that used to be linked only with pgen are now linked with
624 Python itself.
625
Guido van Rossumc1f6e8c2003-04-16 21:13:23 +0000626- The repr() of a weakref object now shows the __name__ attribute of
627 the referenced object, if it has one.
628
Guido van Rossum76ba09f2003-04-16 19:40:58 +0000629- super() no longer ignores data descriptors, except __class__. See
630 the thread started at
631 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2003-April/034338.html
632
Guido van Rossum3a3cca52003-04-14 20:58:14 +0000633- list.insert(i, x) now interprets negative i as it would be
634 interpreted by slicing, so negative values count from the end of the
635 list. This was the only place where such an interpretation was not
636 placed on a list index.
637
Guido van Rossumefbbb1c2003-04-11 18:43:06 +0000638- range() now works even if the arguments are longs with magnitude
639 larger than sys.maxint, as long as the total length of the sequence
640 fits. E.g., range(2**100, 2**101, 2**100) is the following list:
641 [1267650600228229401496703205376L]. (SF patch #707427.)
642
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +0000643- Some horridly obscure problems were fixed involving interaction
644 between garbage collection and old-style classes with "ambitious"
645 getattr hooks. If an old-style instance didn't have a __del__ method,
646 but did have a __getattr__ hook, and the instance became reachable
647 only from an unreachable cycle, and the hook resurrected or deleted
648 unreachable objects when asked to resolve "__del__", anything up to
649 a segfault could happen. That's been repaired.
650
Raymond Hettingera3e1e4c2003-03-06 23:54:28 +0000651- dict.pop now takes an optional argument specifying a default
652 value to return if the key is not in the dict. If a default is not
653 given and the key is not found, a KeyError will still be raised.
654 Parallel changes were made to UserDict.UserDict and UserDict.DictMixin.
655 [SF patch #693753] (contributed by Michael Stone.)
656
Martin v. Löwis73d538b2003-03-05 15:13:47 +0000657- sys.getfilesystemencoding() was added to expose
658 Py_FileSystemDefaultEncoding.
Guido van Rossum46d3dc32003-03-01 03:20:41 +0000659
660- New function sys.exc_clear() clears the current exception. This is
661 rarely needed, but can sometimes be useful to release objects
662 referenced by the traceback held in sys.exc_info()[2]. (SF patch
663 #693195.)
664
Neal Norwitzd5a65a72003-02-23 23:11:41 +0000665- On 64-bit systems, a dictionary could contain duplicate long/int keys
666 if the key value was larger than 2**32. See SF bug #689659.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000667
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +0000668- Fixed SF bug #663074. The codec system was using global static
Walter Dörwaldfa86bf52003-03-31 16:15:13 +0000669 variables to store internal data. As a result, any attempts to use the
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +0000670 unicode system with multiple active interpreters, or successive
671 interpreter executions, would fail.
672
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +0000673- "%c" % u"a" now returns a unicode string instead of raising a
Walter Dörwald44f527f2003-04-02 16:37:24 +0000674 TypeError. u"%c" % 0xffffffff now raises a OverflowError instead
Walter Dörwald1e469c52003-04-02 16:57:59 +0000675 of a ValueError to be consistent with "%c" % 256. See SF patch #710127.
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +0000676
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000677Extension modules
678-----------------
679
Guido van Rossume7adda92003-04-25 05:52:37 +0000680- The socket module now provides the functions inet_pton and inet_ntop
681 for converting between string and packed representation of IP
682 addresses. There is also a new module variable, has_ipv6, which is
683 True iff the current Python has IPv6 support. See SF patch #658327.
684
Martin v. Löwisbfe175c2003-04-16 19:42:51 +0000685- Tkinter wrappers around Tcl variables now pass objects directly
686 to Tcl, instead of first converting them to strings.
687
Guido van Rossum41c99e72003-04-14 17:59:34 +0000688- The .*? pattern in the re module is now special-cased to avoid the
689 recursion limit. (SF patch #720991 -- many thanks to Gary Herron
690 and Greg Chapman.)
691
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +0000692- New function sys.call_tracing() allows pdb to debug code
693 recursively.
694
Tim Peters730f5532003-04-08 17:17:17 +0000695- New function gc.get_referents(obj) returns a list of objects
Tim Peters0f81ab62003-04-08 16:39:48 +0000696 directly referenced by obj. In effect, it exposes what the object's
697 tp_traverse slot does, and can be helpful when debugging memory
698 leaks.
699
Martin v. Löwis7fb697b2003-04-03 04:49:12 +0000700- The iconv module has been removed from this release.
701
Tim Petersd50ade62003-03-20 18:32:13 +0000702- The platform-independent routines for packing floats in IEEE formats
703 (struct.pack's <f, >f, <d, and >d codes; pickle and cPickle's protocol 1
704 pickling of floats) ignored that rounding can cause a carry to
705 propagate. The worst consequence was that, in rare cases, <f and >f
706 could produce strings that, when unpacked again, were a factor of 2
707 away from the original float. This has been fixed. See SF bug
708 #705836.
709
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +0000710- New function time.tzset() provides access to the C library tzset()
Guido van Rossumd11b62e2003-03-14 21:51:36 +0000711 function, if supported. (SF patch #675422.)
712
Neal Norwitz12e22172003-03-03 21:16:39 +0000713- Using createfilehandler, deletefilehandler, createtimerhandler functions
714 on Tkinter.tkinter (_tkinter module) no longer crashes the interpreter.
715 See SF bug #692416.
716
Michael W. Hudsonf0089982003-03-03 12:29:42 +0000717- Modified the fcntl.ioctl() function to allow modification of a passed
718 mutable buffer (for details see the reference documentation).
719
Raymond Hettinger61fe64d2003-02-23 04:40:07 +0000720- Made user requested changes to the itertools module.
721 Subsumed the times() function into repeat().
722 Added chain() and cycle().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000723
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +0000724- The rotor module is now deprecated; the encryption algorithm it uses
Andrew M. Kuchlingfb5f4852003-04-24 13:19:56 +0000725 is not believed to be secure, and including crypto code with Python
726 has implications for exporting and importing it in various countries.
727
Skip Montanaro89feabc2003-03-30 04:54:24 +0000728- The socket module now always uses the _socketobject wrapper class, even on
729 platforms which have dup(2). The makefile() method is built directly
730 on top of the socket without duplicating the file descriptor, allowing
731 timeouts to work properly.
732
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000733Library
734-------
735
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +0000736- New generator function os.walk() is an easy-to-use alternative to
737 os.path.walk(). See os module docs for details. os.path.walk()
738 isn't deprecated at this time, but may become deprecated in a
739 future release.
740
Marc-André Lemburg246d8472003-04-24 11:36:11 +0000741- Added new module "platform" which provides a wide range of tools
742 for querying platform dependent features.
743
Andrew M. Kuchling4e42b312003-04-24 16:45:05 +0000744- netrc now allows ASCII punctuation characters in passwords.
Raymond Hettinger1d877862003-04-23 19:06:08 +0000745
Martin v. Löwis153c9e42003-04-19 20:59:03 +0000746- shelve now supports the optional writeback argument, and exposes
747 pickle protocol versions.
748
Guido van Rossuma2685402003-04-19 18:04:57 +0000749- Several methods of nntplib.NNTP have grown an optional file argument
750 which specifies a file where to divert the command's output
751 (already supported by the body() method). (SF patch #720468)
752
Martin v. Löwis281b2c62003-04-18 21:04:39 +0000753- The self-documenting XML server library DocXMLRPCServer was added.
754
Martin v. Löwis2548c732003-04-18 10:39:54 +0000755- Support for internationalized domain names has been added through
756 the 'idna' and 'punycode' encodings, the 'stringprep' module, the
757 'mkstringprep' tool, and enhancements to the socket and httplib
758 modules.
759
Walter Dörwald5688b7a2003-04-16 09:46:13 +0000760- htmlentitydefs has two new dictionaries: name2codepoint maps
761 HTML entity names to Unicode codepoints (as integers).
762 codepoint2name is the reverse mapping. See SF patch #722017.
763
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +0000764- pdb has a new command, "debug", which lets you step through
765 arbitrary code from the debugger's (pdb) prompt.
766
Raymond Hettingerc377cbf2003-04-04 22:56:42 +0000767- unittest.failUnlessEqual and its equivalent unittest.assertEqual now
768 return 'not a == b' rather than 'a != b'. This gives the desired
769 result for classes that define __eq__ without defining __ne__.
770
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +0000771- sgmllib now supports SGML marked sections, in particular the
Martin v. Löwis3163a3b2003-03-30 14:25:40 +0000772 MS Office extensions.
773
Raymond Hettinger42182eb2003-03-09 05:33:33 +0000774- The urllib module now offers support for the iterator protocol.
775 SF patch 698520 contributed by Brett Cannon.
776
Guido van Rossum9589a252003-03-06 01:56:12 +0000777- New module timeit provides a simple framework for timing the
778 execution speed of expressions and statements.
779
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +0000780- sets.Set objects now support mixed-type __eq__ and __ne__, instead
781 of raising TypeError. If x is a Set object and y is a non-Set object,
782 x == y is False, and x != y is True. This is akin to the change made
783 for mixed-type comparisons of datetime objects in 2.3a2; more info
784 about the rationale is in the NEWS entry for that. See also SF bug
785 report <http://www.python.org/sf/693121>.
786
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +0000787- On Unix platforms, if os.listdir() is called with a Unicode argument,
788 it now returns Unicode strings. (This behavior was added earlier
789 to the Windows NT/2k/XP version of os.listdir().)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000790
Andrew M. Kuchling6f177d42003-02-28 22:09:33 +0000791- Distutils: both 'py_modules' and 'packages' keywords can now be specified
792 in core.setup(). Previously you could supply one or the other, but
793 not both of them. (SF patch #695090 from Bernhard Herzog)
794
Skip Montanaro64a839e2003-03-20 23:36:55 +0000795- New csv package makes it easy to read/write CSV files.
796
Gustavo Niemeyer68d8cef2003-04-17 21:31:33 +0000797- Module shlex has been extended to allow posix-like shell parsings,
798 including a split() function for easy spliting of quoted strings and
799 commands. An iterator interface was also implemented.
800
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000801Tools/Demos
802-----------
803
Tim Peters21d7d4d2003-04-18 00:45:59 +0000804- New script combinerefs.py helps analyze new PYTHONDUMPREFS output.
805 See the module docstring for details.
806
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000807Build
808-----
809
Neal Norwitz35892b92003-02-23 23:45:35 +0000810- Fix problem building on OSF1 because the compiler only accepted
811 preprocessor directives that start in column 1. (SF bug #691793.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000812
813C API
814-----
815
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +0000816- Added PyGC_Collect(), equivalent to calling gc.collect().
817
Guido van Rossum0fc8f002003-04-15 15:12:39 +0000818- PyThreadState_GetDict() was changed not to raise an exception or
819 issue a fatal error when no current thread state is available. This
820 makes it possible to print dictionaries when no thread is active.
821
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +0000822- LONG_LONG was renamed to PY_LONG_LONG. Extensions that use this and
823 need compatibility with previous versions can use this:
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +0000824
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +0000825 #ifndef PY_LONG_LONG
826 #define PY_LONG_LONG LONG_LONG
827 #endif
Martin v. Löwisb9a0f912003-03-29 10:06:18 +0000828
Raymond Hettinger1da1dbf2003-03-17 19:46:11 +0000829- Added PyObject_SelfIter() to fill the tp_iter slot for the
Raymond Hettinger01538262003-03-17 08:24:35 +0000830 typical case where the method returns its self argument.
831
Guido van Rossume5c691a2003-03-07 15:13:17 +0000832- The extended type structure used for heap types (new-style
833 classes defined by Python code using a class statement) is now
834 exported from object.h as PyHeapTypeObject. (SF patch #696193.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000835
836New platforms
837-------------
838
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +0000839None this time.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000840
841Tests
842-----
843
Neal Norwitz55b61d22003-02-28 19:57:03 +0000844- test_timeout now requires -u network to be passed to regrtest to run.
845 See SF bug #692988.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000846
847Windows
848-------
849
Tim Peters11b23062003-04-23 02:39:17 +0000850- os.fsync() now exists on Windows, and calls the Microsoft _commit()
851 function.
852
Guido van Rossumf4050642003-04-09 19:39:06 +0000853- New function winsound.MessageBeep() wraps the Win32 API
854 MessageBeep().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000855
856Mac
857---
858
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +0000859- os.listdir() now returns Unicode strings on MacOS X when called with
860 a Unicode argument. See the general news item under "Library".
Just van Rossum46c97842003-02-25 21:42:15 +0000861
Jack Jansendeac2ac2003-02-24 11:04:17 +0000862- A new method MacOS.WMAvailable() returns true if it is safe to access
863 the window manager, false otherwise.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +0000864
Jack Jansencf76be02003-03-24 12:13:54 +0000865- EasyDialogs dialogs are now movable-modal, and if the application is
866 currently in the background they will ask to be moved to the foreground
867 before displaying.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +0000868
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +0000869- OSA Scripting support has improved a lot, and gensuitemodule.py can now
Jack Jansende354b72003-04-11 15:37:20 +0000870 be used by mere mortals. The documentation is now also more or less
871 complete.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +0000872
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +0000873- The IDE (in a framework build) now includes introductory documentation
874 in Apple Help Viewer format.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000875
876
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000877What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 2?
878=================================
879
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +0000880*Release date: 19-Feb-2003*
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000881
882Core and builtins
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +0000883-----------------
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000884
Walter Dörwald2ffec022003-02-19 16:34:11 +0000885- Negative positions returned from PEP 293 error callbacks are now
886 treated as being relative to the end of the input string. Positions
887 that are out of bounds raise an IndexError.
888
Guido van Rossum162e38c2003-02-19 15:25:10 +0000889- sys.path[0] (the directory from which the script is loaded) is now
890 turned into an absolute pathname, unless it is the empty string.
891 (SF patch #664376.)
892
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +0000893- Finally fixed the bug in compile() and exec where a string ending
894 with an indented code block but no newline would raise SyntaxError.
895 This would have been a four-line change in parsetok.c... Except
896 codeop.py depends on this behavior, so a compilation flag had to be
897 invented that causes the tokenizer to revert to the old behavior;
898 this required extra changes to 2 .h files, 2 .c files, and 2 .py
Guido van Rossum1442dc12003-02-13 22:19:20 +0000899 files. (Fixes SF bug #501622.)
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +0000900
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +0000901- If a new-style class defines neither __new__ nor __init__, its
902 constructor would ignore all arguments. This is changed now: the
903 constructor refuses arguments in this case. This might break code
904 that worked under Python 2.2. The simplest fix is to add a no-op
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +0000905 __init__: ``def __init__(self, *args, **kw): pass``.
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +0000906
Guido van Rossum48035eb2003-02-12 17:05:26 +0000907- Through a bytecode optimizer bug (and I bet you didn't even know
908 Python *had* a bytecode optimizer :-), "unsigned" hex/oct constants
909 with a leading minus sign would come out with the wrong sign.
910 ("Unsigned" hex/oct constants are those with a face value in the
911 range sys.maxint+1 through sys.maxint*2+1, inclusive; these have
912 always been interpreted as negative numbers through sign folding.)
913 E.g. 0xffffffff is -1, and -(0xffffffff) is 1, but -0xffffffff would
914 come out as -4294967295. This was the case in Python 2.2 through
915 2.2.2 and 2.3a1, and in Python 2.4 it will once again have that
916 value, but according to PEP 237 it really needs to be 1 now. This
917 will be backported to Python 2.2.3 a well. (SF #660455)
918
Guido van Rossum47710652003-02-12 20:48:22 +0000919- int(s, base) sometimes sign-folds hex and oct constants; it only
920 does this when base is 0 and s.strip() starts with a '0'. When the
921 sign is actually folded, as in int("0xffffffff", 0) on a 32-bit
922 machine, which returns -1, a FutureWarning is now issued; in Python
923 2.4, this will return 4294967295L, as do int("+0xffffffff", 0) and
924 int("0xffffffff", 16) right now. (PEP 347)
925
Guido van Rossuma89d10e2003-02-12 03:58:38 +0000926- super(X, x): x may now be a proxy for an X instance, i.e.
927 issubclass(x.__class__, X) but not issubclass(type(x), X).
928
Guido van Rossum03bc7d32003-02-12 03:32:58 +0000929- isinstance(x, X): if X is a new-style class, this is now equivalent
930 to issubclass(type(x), X) or issubclass(x.__class__, X). Previously
931 only type(x) was tested. (For classic classes this was already the
932 case.)
933
Just van Rossum73ffb4a2003-02-10 09:57:08 +0000934- compile(), eval() and the exec statement now fully support source code
935 passed as unicode strings.
936
Neal Norwitzde8b94c2003-02-10 02:12:43 +0000937- int subclasses can be initialized with longs if the value fits in an int.
938 See SF bug #683467.
939
Tim Petersbf2674b2003-02-02 07:51:32 +0000940- long(string, base) takes time linear in len(string) when base is a power
941 of 2 now. It used to take time quadratic in len(string).
942
Martin v. Löwis8afd7572003-01-25 22:46:11 +0000943- filter returns now Unicode results for Unicode arguments.
944
Martin v. Löwisaf6a27a2003-01-03 19:16:14 +0000945- raw_input can now return Unicode objects.
946
Skip Montanaro4abd5f02003-01-02 20:51:08 +0000947- List objects' sort() method now accepts None as the comparison function.
948 Passing None is semantically identical to calling sort() with no
949 arguments.
950
Neal Norwitz1a997502003-01-13 20:13:12 +0000951- Fixed crash when printing a subclass of str and __str__ returned self.
952 See SF bug #667147.
953
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +0000954- Fixed an invalid RuntimeWarning and an undetected error when trying
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +0000955 to convert a long integer into a float which couldn't fit.
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +0000956 See SF bug #676155.
957
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +0000958- Function objects now have a __module__ attribute that is bound to
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +0000959 the name of the module in which the function was defined. This
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +0000960 applies for C functions and methods as well as functions and methods
961 defined in Python. This attribute is used by pickle.whichmodule(),
962 which changes the behavior of whichmodule slightly. In Python 2.2
963 whichmodule() returns "__main__" for functions that are not defined
964 at the top-level of a module (examples: methods, nested functions).
965 Now whichmodule() will return the proper module name.
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +0000966
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000967Extension modules
968-----------------
969
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +0000970- operator.isNumberType() now checks that the object has a nb_int or
971 nb_float slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
972 tp_as_number pointer.
973
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +0000974- The imp module now has ways to acquire and release the "import
975 lock": imp.acquire_lock() and imp.release_lock(). Note: this is a
976 reentrant lock, so releasing the lock only truly releases it when
977 this is the last release_lock() call. You can check with
978 imp.lock_held(). (SF bug #580952 and patch #683257.)
979
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +0000980- Change to cPickle to match pickle.py (see below and PEP 307).
981
Neal Norwitz9caf9c02003-02-10 01:54:06 +0000982- Fix some bugs in the parser module. SF bug #678518.
983
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +0000984- Thanks to Scott David Daniels, a subtle bug in how the zlib
Walter Dörwald28d81962003-02-03 20:53:14 +0000985 extension implemented flush() was fixed. Scott also rewrote the
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +0000986 zlib test suite using the unittest module. (SF bug #640230 and
987 patch #678531.)
988
Raymond Hettinger96ef8112003-02-01 00:10:11 +0000989- Added an itertools module containing high speed, memory efficient
990 looping constructs inspired by tools from Haskell and SML.
991
Guido van Rossum99d4abf2003-01-27 22:22:50 +0000992- The SSL module now handles sockets with a timeout set correctly (SF
993 patch #675750, fixing SF bug #675552).
994
Barry Warsawf8ba39c2003-01-07 20:55:26 +0000995- os/posixmodule has grown the sysexits.h constants (EX_OK and friends).
996
Guido van Rossum6d0d3652003-01-07 20:34:19 +0000997- Fixed broken threadstate swap in readline that could cause fatal
998 errors when a readline hook was being invoked while a background
999 thread was active. (SF bugs #660476 and #513033.)
1000
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001001- fcntl now exposes the strops.h I_* constants.
1002
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00001003- Fix a crash on Solaris that occurred when calling close() on
1004 an mmap'ed file which was already closed. (SF patch #665913)
1005
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001006- Fixed several serious bugs in the zipimport implementation.
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001007
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00001008- datetime changes:
1009
Guido van Rossum8b7a9a32003-04-14 22:01:58 +00001010 The date class is now properly subclassable. (SF bug #720908)
1011
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00001012 The datetime and datetimetz classes have been collapsed into a single
1013 datetime class, and likewise the time and timetz classes into a single
1014 time class. Previously, a datetimetz object with tzinfo=None acted
1015 exactly like a datetime object, and similarly for timetz. This wasn't
1016 enough of a difference to justify distinct classes, and life is simpler
1017 now.
1018
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00001019 today() and now() now round system timestamps to the closest
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00001020 microsecond <http://www.python.org/sf/661086>. This repairs an
1021 irritation most likely seen on Windows systems.
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00001022
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00001023 In dt.astimezone(tz), if tz.utcoffset(dt) returns a duration,
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00001024 ValueError is raised if tz.dst(dt) returns None (2.3a1 treated it
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00001025 as 0 instead, but a tzinfo subclass wishing to participate in
1026 time zone conversion has to take a stand on whether it supports
1027 DST; if you don't care about DST, then code dst() to return 0 minutes,
1028 meaning that DST is never in effect).
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00001029
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00001030 The tzinfo methods utcoffset() and dst() must return a timedelta object
1031 (or None) now. In 2.3a1 they could also return an int or long, but that
1032 was an unhelpfully redundant leftover from an earlier version wherein
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00001033 they couldn't return a timedelta. TOOWTDI.
1034
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00001035 The example tzinfo class for local time had a bug. It was replaced
1036 by a later example coded by Guido.
1037
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00001038 datetime.astimezone(tz) no longer raises an exception when the
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00001039 input datetime has no UTC equivalent in tz. For typical "hybrid" time
1040 zones (a single tzinfo subclass modeling both standard and daylight
1041 time), this case can arise one hour per year, at the hour daylight time
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00001042 ends. See new docs for details. In short, the new behavior mimics
1043 the local wall clock's behavior of repeating an hour in local time.
1044
1045 dt.astimezone() can no longer be used to convert between naive and aware
1046 datetime objects. If you merely want to attach, or remove, a tzinfo
1047 object, without any conversion of date and time members, use
1048 dt.replace(tzinfo=whatever) instead, where "whatever" is None or a
1049 tzinfo subclass instance.
1050
1051 A new method tzinfo.fromutc(dt) can be overridden in tzinfo subclasses
1052 to give complete control over how a UTC time is to be converted to
1053 a local time. The default astimezone() implementation calls fromutc()
1054 as its last step, so a tzinfo subclass can affect that too by overriding
1055 fromutc(). It's expected that the default fromutc() implementation will
1056 be suitable as-is for "almost all" time zone subclasses, but the
1057 creativity of political time zone fiddling appears unbounded -- fromutc()
1058 allows the highly motivated to emulate any scheme expressible in Python.
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00001059
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00001060 datetime.now(): The optional tzinfo argument was undocumented (that's
1061 repaired), and its name was changed to tz ("tzinfo" is overloaded enough
1062 already). With a tz argument, now(tz) used to return the local date
1063 and time, and attach tz to it, without any conversion of date and time
1064 members. This was less than useful. Now now(tz) returns the current
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001065 date and time as local time in tz's time zone, akin to ::
1066
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00001067 tz.fromutc(datetime.utcnow().replace(tzinfo=utc))
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001068
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00001069 where "utc" is an instance of a tzinfo subclass modeling UTC. Without
1070 a tz argument, now() continues to return the current local date and time,
1071 as a naive datetime object.
1072
Tim Peters2a44a8d2003-01-23 20:53:10 +00001073 datetime.fromtimestamp(): Like datetime.now() above, this had less than
1074 useful behavior when the optional tinzo argument was specified. See
1075 also SF bug report <http://www.python.org/sf/660872>.
1076
Tim Peters8d81a012003-01-24 22:36:34 +00001077 date and datetime comparison: In order to prevent comparison from
1078 falling back to the default compare-object-addresses strategy, these
1079 raised TypeError whenever they didn't understand the other object type.
1080 They still do, except when the other object has a "timetuple" attribute,
1081 in which case they return NotImplemented now. This gives other
1082 datetime objects (e.g., mxDateTime) a chance to intercept the
1083 comparison.
1084
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00001085 date, time, datetime and timedelta comparison: When the exception
1086 for mixed-type comparisons in the last paragraph doesn't apply, if
1087 the comparison is == then False is returned, and if the comparison is
1088 != then True is returned. Because dict lookup and the "in" operator
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001089 only invoke __eq__, this allows, for example, ::
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00001090
1091 if some_datetime in some_sequence:
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001092
1093 and ::
1094
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00001095 some_dict[some_timedelta] = whatever
1096
1097 to work as expected, without raising TypeError just because the
1098 sequence is heterogeneous, or the dict has mixed-type keys. [This
1099 seems like a good idea to implement for all mixed-type comparisons
1100 that don't want to allow falling back to address comparison.]
1101
Tim Peters75a6e3b2003-01-04 18:17:36 +00001102 The constructors building a datetime from a timestamp could raise
1103 ValueError if the platform C localtime()/gmtime() inserted "leap
1104 seconds". Leap seconds are ignored now. On such platforms, it's
1105 possible to have timestamps that differ by a second, yet where
1106 datetimes constructed from them are equal.
1107
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00001108 The pickle format of date, time and datetime objects has changed
1109 completely. The undocumented pickler and unpickler functions no
Tim Petersb57f8f02003-02-01 02:54:15 +00001110 longer exist. The undocumented __setstate__() and __getstate__()
1111 methods no longer exist either.
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00001112
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001113Library
1114-------
1115
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001116- The logging module was updated slightly; the WARN level was renamed
1117 to WARNING, and the matching function/method warn() to warning().
1118
1119- The pickle and cPickle modules were updated with a new pickling
1120 protocol (documented by pickletools.py, see below) and several
1121 extensions to the pickle customization API (__reduce__, __setstate__
1122 etc.). The copy module now uses more of the pickle customization
1123 API to copy objects that don't implement __copy__ or __deepcopy__.
1124 See PEP 307 for details.
1125
1126- The distutils "register" command now uses http://www.python.org/pypi
1127 as the default repository. (See PEP 301.)
1128
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00001129- the platform dependent path related variables sep, altsep, extsep,
1130 pathsep, curdir, pardir and defpath are now defined in the platform
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00001131 dependent path modules (e.g. ntpath.py) rather than os.py, so these
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001132 variables are now available via os.path. They continue to be
1133 available from the os module.
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00001134 (see <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00001135
Tim Peters6ee04802003-02-05 18:29:34 +00001136- array.array was added to the types repr.py knows about (see
1137 <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
1138
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00001139- The new pickletools.py contains lots of documentation about pickle
1140 internals, and supplies some helpers for working with pickles, such as
1141 a symbolic pickle disassembler.
1142
Skip Montanaro9a7c96a2003-01-22 18:17:25 +00001143- Xmlrpclib.py now supports the builtin boolean type.
1144
Martin v. Löwis0c6774d2003-01-15 11:51:06 +00001145- py_compile has a new 'doraise' flag and a new PyCompileError
1146 exception.
1147
Martin v. Löwisd69663d2003-01-15 11:37:23 +00001148- SimpleXMLRPCServer now supports CGI through the CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler
1149 class.
1150
Guido van Rossum50e92232003-01-14 16:45:04 +00001151- The sets module now raises TypeError in __cmp__, to clarify that
1152 sets are not intended to be three-way-compared; the comparison
1153 operators are overloaded as subset/superset tests.
1154
Guido van Rossumcd0c0472003-01-07 23:03:05 +00001155- Bastion.py and rexec.py are disabled. These modules are not safe in
1156 Python 2.2. or 2.3.
1157
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001158- realpath is now exported when doing ``from poxixpath import *``.
Neal Norwitzbb0246a2003-01-03 18:12:28 +00001159 It is also exported for ntpath, macpath, and os2emxpath.
1160 See SF bug #659228.
1161
Neal Norwitzb9ef4ae2003-01-05 23:19:43 +00001162- New module tarfile from Lars Gustäbel provides a comprehensive interface
1163 to tar archive files with transparent gzip and bzip2 compression.
1164 See SF patch #651082.
1165
Neal Norwitz4f442372003-01-06 06:51:36 +00001166- urlparse can now parse imap:// URLs. See SF feature request #618024.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001167
Neal Norwitze931ed52003-01-10 23:24:32 +00001168- Tkinter.Canvas.scan_dragto() provides an optional parameter to support
1169 the gain value which is passed to Tk. SF bug# 602259.
1170
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00001171- Fix logging.handlers.SysLogHandler protocol when using UNIX domain sockets.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00001172 See SF patch #642974.
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00001173
Skip Montanaro12fe72e2003-02-25 17:46:20 +00001174- The dospath module was deleted. Use the ntpath module when manipulating
1175 DOS paths from other platforms.
1176
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001177Tools/Demos
1178-----------
1179
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00001180- Two new scripts (db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py) were added to the
1181 Tools/scripts directory to facilitate conversion from the old bsddb module
1182 to the new one. While the user-visible API of the new module is
1183 compatible with the old one, it's likely that the version of the
1184 underlying database library has changed. To convert from the old library,
1185 run the db2pickle.py script using the old version of Python to convert it
1186 to a pickle file. After upgrading Python, run the pickle2db.py script
1187 using the new version of Python to reconstitute your database. For
1188 example:
1189
Skip Montanaro621f0552003-02-03 15:48:10 +00001190 % python2.2 db2pickle.py -h some.db > some.pickle
1191 % python2.3 pickle2db.py -h some.db.new < some.pickle
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00001192
1193 Run the scripts without any args to get a usage message.
1194
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001195
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001196Build
1197-----
1198
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00001199- The audio driver tests (test_ossaudiodev.py and
1200 test_linuxaudiodev.py) are no longer run by default. This is
1201 because they don't always work, depending on your hardware and
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001202 software. To run these tests, you must use an invocation like ::
1203
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00001204 ./python Lib/test/regrtest.py -u audio test_ossaudiodev
1205
Skip Montanarodecc6a42003-01-01 20:07:49 +00001206- On systems which build using the configure script, compiler flags which
1207 used to be lumped together using the OPT flag have been split into two
1208 groups, OPT and BASECFLAGS. OPT is meant to carry just optimization- and
1209 debug-related flags like "-g" and "-O3". BASECFLAGS is meant to carry
1210 compiler flags that are required to get a clean compile. On some
1211 platforms (many Linux flavors in particular) BASECFLAGS will be empty by
1212 default. On others, such as Mac OS X and SCO, it will contain required
1213 flags. This change allows people building Python to override OPT without
1214 fear of clobbering compiler flags which are required to get a clean build.
1215
1216- On Darwin/Mac OS X platforms, /sw/lib and /sw/include are added to the
1217 relevant search lists in setup.py. This allows users building Python to
1218 take advantage of the many packages available from the fink project
1219 <http://fink.sf.net/>.
1220
1221- A new Makefile target, scriptsinstall, installs a number of useful scripts
1222 from the Tools/scripts directory.
1223
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001224C API
1225-----
1226
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001227- PyEval_GetFrame() is now declared to return a ``PyFrameObject *``
1228 instead of a plain ``PyObject *``. (SF patch #686601.)
Guido van Rossum6297a7a2003-02-19 15:53:17 +00001229
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00001230- PyNumber_Check() now checks that the object has a nb_int or nb_float
1231 slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
1232 tp_as_number pointer.
1233
Guido van Rossumeea47182003-02-11 20:39:59 +00001234- A C type that inherits from a base type that defines tp_as_buffer
1235 will now inherit the tp_as_buffer pointer if it doesn't define one.
1236 (SF #681367)
1237
Neil Schemenauer5042da62003-02-04 20:59:40 +00001238- The PyArg_Parse functions now issue a DeprecationWarning if a float
1239 argument is provided when an integer is specified (this affects the 'b',
1240 'B', 'h', 'H', 'i', and 'l' codes). Future versions of Python will
1241 raise a TypeError.
Neil Schemenauercd63e612003-01-24 22:15:53 +00001242
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001243Tests
1244-----
1245
Walter Dörwald11cfbd62003-03-26 16:03:16 +00001246- Several tests weren't being run from regrtest.py (test_timeout.py,
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001247 test_tarfile.py, test_netrc.py, test_multifile.py,
1248 test_importhooks.py and test_imp.py). Now they are. (Note to
1249 developers: please read Lib/test/README when creating a new test, to
1250 make sure to do it right! All tests need to use either unittest or
1251 pydoc.)
1252
1253- Added test_posix.py, a test suite for the posix module.
1254
1255- Added test_hexoct.py, a test suite for hex/oct constant folding.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001256
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001257Windows
1258-------
1259
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00001260- The timeout code for socket connect() didn't work right; this has
1261 now been fixed. test_timeout.py should pass (at least most of the
1262 time).
1263
Thomas Hellerdda583d2003-01-31 20:45:41 +00001264- distutils' msvccompiler class now passes the preprocessor options to
1265 the resource compiler. See SF patch #669198.
1266
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00001267- The bsddb module now ships with Sleepycat's 4.1.25.NC, the latest
1268 release without strong cryptography.
1269
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00001270- sys.path[0], if it contains a directory name, is now always an
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001271 absolute pathname. (SF patch #664376.)
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00001272
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00001273- The new logging package is now installed by the Windows installer. It
1274 wasn't in 2.3a1 due to oversight.
1275
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001276Mac
1277---
1278
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00001279- There are new dialogs EasyDialogs.AskFileForOpen, AskFileForSave
1280 and AskFolder. The old macfs.StandardGetFile and friends are deprecated.
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00001281
Jack Jansenc9296362003-02-06 23:10:45 +00001282- Most of the standard library now uses pathnames or FSRefs in preference
1283 of FSSpecs, and use the underlying Carbon.File and Carbon.Folder modules
1284 in stead of macfs. macfs will probably be deprecated in the future.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00001285
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00001286- Type Carbon.File.FSCatalogInfo and supporting methods have been implemented.
1287 This also makes macfs.FSSpec.SetDates() work again.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001288
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00001289- There is a new module pimp, the package install manager for Python, and
1290 accompanying applet PackageManager. These allow you to easily download
1291 and install pretested extension packages either in source or binary
1292 form. Only in MacPython-OSX.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001293
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00001294- Applets are now built with bundlebuilder in MacPython-OSX, which should make
Jack Jansen5d44b342003-02-18 23:32:47 +00001295 them more robust and also provides a path towards BuildApplication. The
1296 downside of this change is that applets can no longer be run from the
1297 Terminal window, this will hopefully be fixed in the 2.3b1.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001298
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001299
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001300What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 1?
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001301=================================
1302
Guido van Rossumae548862002-12-31 15:47:36 +00001303*Release date: 31-Dec-2002*
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001304
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001305Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001306--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00001307
Michael W. Hudson96bc3b42002-11-26 14:48:23 +00001308- One can now assign to __bases__ and __name__ of new-style classes.
1309
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00001310- dict() now accepts keyword arguments so that dict(one=1, two=2)
1311 is the equivalent of {"one": 1, "two": 2}. Accordingly,
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00001312 the existing (but undocumented) 'items' keyword argument has
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00001313 been eliminated. This means that dict(items=someMapping) now has
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00001314 a different meaning than before.
1315
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00001316- int() now returns a long object if the argument is outside the
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001317 integer range, so int("4" * 1000), int(1e200) and int(1L<<1000) will
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00001318 all return long objects instead of raising an OverflowError.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001319
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00001320- Assignment to __class__ is disallowed if either the old or the new
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00001321 class is a statically allocated type object (such as defined by an
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00001322 extension module). This prevents anomalies like 2.__class__ = bool.
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00001323
1324- New-style object creation and deallocation have been sped up
1325 significantly; they are now faster than classic instance creation
1326 and deallocation.
1327
1328- The __slots__ variable can now mention "private" names, and the
1329 right thing will happen (e.g. __slots__ = ["__foo"]).
1330
1331- The built-ins slice() and buffer() are now callable types. The
1332 types classobj (formerly class), code, function, instance, and
1333 instancemethod (formerly instance-method), which have no built-in
1334 names but are accessible through the types module, are now also
1335 callable. The type dict-proxy is renamed to dictproxy.
1336
1337- Cycles going through the __class__ link of a new-style instance are
1338 now detected by the garbage collector.
1339
1340- Classes using __slots__ are now properly garbage collected.
1341 [SF bug 519621]
1342
1343- Tightened the __slots__ rules: a slot name must be a valid Python
1344 identifier.
1345
1346- The constructor for the module type now requires a name argument and
1347 takes an optional docstring argument. Previously, this constructor
1348 ignored its arguments. As a consequence, deriving a class from a
1349 module (not from the module type) is now illegal; previously this
1350 created an unnamed module, just like invoking the module type did.
1351 [SF bug 563060]
1352
1353- A new type object, 'basestring', is added. This is a common base type
1354 for 'str' and 'unicode', and can be used instead of
1355 types.StringTypes, e.g. to test whether something is "a string":
1356 isinstance(x, basestring) is True for Unicode and 8-bit strings. This
1357 is an abstract base class and cannot be instantiated directly.
1358
1359- Changed new-style class instantiation so that when C's __new__
1360 method returns something that's not a C instance, its __init__ is
1361 not called. [SF bug #537450]
1362
1363- Fixed super() to work correctly with class methods. [SF bug #535444]
1364
1365- If you try to pickle an instance of a class that has __slots__ but
1366 doesn't define or override __getstate__, a TypeError is now raised.
1367 This is done by adding a bozo __getstate__ to the class that always
1368 raises TypeError. (Before, this would appear to be pickled, but the
1369 state of the slots would be lost.)
1370
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001371Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001372-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001373
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00001374- Import from zipfiles is now supported. The name of a zipfile placed
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00001375 on sys.path causes the import statement to look for importable Python
1376 modules (with .py, pyc and .pyo extensions) and packages inside the
1377 zipfile. The zipfile import follows the specification (though not
1378 the sample implementation) of PEP 273. The semantics of __path__ are
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00001379 compatible with those that have been implemented in Jython since
1380 Jython 2.1.
1381
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001382- PEP 302 has been accepted. Although it was initially developed to
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00001383 support zipimport, it offers a new, general import hook mechanism.
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00001384 Several new variables have been added to the sys module:
1385 sys.meta_path, sys.path_hooks, and sys.path_importer_cache; these
1386 make extending the import statement much more convenient than
1387 overriding the __import__ built-in function. For a description of
1388 these, see PEP 302.
1389
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00001390- A frame object's f_lineno attribute can now be written to from a
1391 trace function to change which line will execute next. A command to
1392 exploit this from pdb has been added. [SF patch #643835]
1393
Marc-André Lemburg20b91352002-12-12 18:01:43 +00001394- The _codecs support module for codecs.py was turned into a builtin
1395 module to assure that at least the builtin codecs are available
1396 to the Python parser for source code decoding according to PEP 263.
1397
Walter Dörwaldd9a6ad32002-12-12 16:41:44 +00001398- issubclass now supports a tuple as the second argument, just like
1399 isinstance does. ``issubclass(X, (A, B))`` is equivalent to
1400 ``issubclass(X, A) or issubclass(X, B)``.
1401
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00001402- Thanks to Armin Rigo, the last known way to provoke a system crash
1403 by cleverly arranging for a comparison function to mutate a list
1404 during a list.sort() operation has been fixed. The effect of
1405 attempting to mutate a list, or even to inspect its contents or
1406 length, while a sort is in progress, is not defined by the language.
1407 The C implementation of Python 2.3 attempts to detect mutations,
1408 and raise ValueError if one occurs, but there's no guarantee that
1409 all mutations will be caught, or that any will be caught across
1410 releases or implementations.
1411
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00001412- Unicode file name processing for Windows (PEP 277) is implemented.
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00001413 All platforms now have an os.path.supports_unicode_filenames attribute,
1414 which is set to True on Windows NT/2000/XP, and False elsewhere.
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00001415
Walter Dörwald3aeb6322002-09-02 13:14:32 +00001416- Codec error handling callbacks (PEP 293) are implemented.
1417 Error handling in unicode.encode or str.decode can now be customized.
1418
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00001419- A subtle change to the semantics of the built-in function intern():
1420 interned strings are no longer immortal. You must keep a reference
1421 to the return value intern() around to get the benefit.
1422
Guido van Rossumf808b892002-08-16 03:38:10 +00001423- Use of 'None' as a variable, argument or attribute name now
1424 issues a SyntaxWarning. In the future, None may become a keyword.
1425
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00001426- SET_LINENO is gone. co_lnotab is now consulted to determine when to
1427 call the trace function. C code that accessed f_lineno should call
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00001428 PyCode_Addr2Line instead (f_lineno is still there, but only kept up
1429 to date when there is a trace function set).
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00001430
Guido van Rossum9be89462002-08-14 16:11:30 +00001431- There's a new warning category, FutureWarning. This is used to warn
1432 about a number of situations where the value or sign of an integer
1433 result will change in Python 2.4 as a result of PEP 237 (integer
1434 unification). The warnings implement stage B0 mentioned in that
1435 PEP. The warnings are about the following situations:
1436
1437 - Octal and hex literals without 'L' prefix in the inclusive range
1438 [0x80000000..0xffffffff]; these are currently negative ints, but
1439 in Python 2.4 they will be positive longs with the same bit
1440 pattern.
1441
1442 - Left shifts on integer values that cause the outcome to lose
1443 bits or have a different sign than the left operand. To be
1444 precise: x<<n where this currently doesn't yield the same value
1445 as long(x)<<n; in Python 2.4, the outcome will be long(x)<<n.
1446
1447 - Conversions from ints to string that show negative values as
1448 unsigned ints in the inclusive range [0x80000000..0xffffffff];
1449 this affects the functions hex() and oct(), and the string
1450 formatting codes %u, %o, %x, and %X. In Python 2.4, these will
1451 show signed values (e.g. hex(-1) currently returns "0xffffffff";
1452 in Python 2.4 it will return "-0x1").
1453
Guido van Rossum9a2eda52002-12-31 02:12:42 +00001454- The bits manipulated under the cover by sys.setcheckinterval() have
1455 been changed. Both the check interval and the ticker used to be
1456 per-thread values. They are now just a pair of global variables.
1457 In addition, the default check interval was boosted from 10 to 100
1458 bytecode instructions. This may have some effect on systems that
1459 relied on the old default value. In particular, in multi-threaded
1460 applications which try to be highly responsive, response time will
1461 increase by some (perhaps imperceptible) amount.
Skip Montanaro979c74b2002-09-03 21:25:14 +00001462
Tim Petersd64c1de2002-08-12 17:36:03 +00001463- When multiplying very large integers, a version of the so-called
1464 Karatsuba algorithm is now used. This is most effective if the
1465 inputs have roughly the same size. If they both have about N digits,
1466 Karatsuba multiplication has O(N**1.58) runtime (the exponent is
1467 log_base_2(3)) instead of the previous O(N**2). Measured results may
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00001468 be better or worse than that, depending on platform quirks. Besides
1469 the O() improvement in raw instruction count, the Karatsuba algorithm
1470 appears to have much better cache behavior on extremely large integers
1471 (starting in the ballpark of a million bits). Note that this is a
1472 simple implementation, and there's no intent here to compete with,
1473 e.g., GMP. It gives a very nice speedup when it applies, but a package
1474 devoted to fast large-integer arithmetic should run circles around it.
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00001475
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00001476- u'%c' will now raise a ValueError in case the argument is an
1477 integer outside the valid range of Unicode code point ordinals.
1478
Guido van Rossumdeb09362002-08-09 17:16:30 +00001479- The tempfile module has been overhauled for enhanced security. The
1480 mktemp() function is now deprecated; new, safe replacements are
1481 mkstemp() (for files) and mkdtemp() (for directories), and the
1482 higher-level functions NamedTemporaryFile() and TemporaryFile().
1483 Use of some global variables in this module is also deprecated; the
1484 new functions have keyword arguments to provide the same
1485 functionality. All Lib, Tools and Demo modules that used the unsafe
1486 interfaces have been updated to use the safe replacements. Thanks
1487 to Zack Weinberg!
1488
Guido van Rossumd81a9832002-08-09 15:57:34 +00001489- When x is an object whose class implements __mul__ and __rmul__,
1490 1.0*x would correctly invoke __rmul__, but 1*x would erroneously
1491 invoke __mul__. This was due to the sequence-repeat code in the int
1492 type. This has been fixed now.
1493
Barry Warsawd79f6832002-08-06 17:01:51 +00001494- Previously, "str1 in str2" required str1 to be a string of length 1.
1495 This restriction has been relaxed to allow str1 to be a string of
1496 any length. Thus "'el' in 'hello world'" returns True now.
1497
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00001498- File objects are now their own iterators. For a file f, iter(f) now
1499 returns f (unless f is closed), and f.next() is similar to
1500 f.readline() when EOF is not reached; however, f.next() uses a
1501 readahead buffer that messes up the file position, so mixing
1502 f.next() and f.readline() (or other methods) doesn't work right.
1503 Calling f.seek() drops the readahead buffer, but other operations
1504 don't. It so happens that this gives a nice additional speed boost
1505 to "for line in file:"; the xreadlines method and corresponding
Guido van Rossumbffb2ef2002-08-09 17:17:07 +00001506 module are now obsolete. Thanks to Oren Tirosh!
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00001507
Guido van Rossumde392d32002-08-05 14:17:20 +00001508- Encoding declarations (PEP 263, phase 1) have been implemented. A
1509 comment of the form "# -*- coding: <encodingname> -*-" in the first
1510 or second line of a Python source file indicates the encoding.
Martin v. Löwis00f1e3f2002-08-04 17:29:52 +00001511
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00001512- list.sort() has a new implementation. While cross-platform results
1513 may vary, and in data-dependent ways, this is much faster on many
1514 kinds of partially ordered lists than the previous implementation,
1515 and reported to be just as fast on randomly ordered lists on
1516 several major platforms. This sort is also stable (if A==B and A
1517 precedes B in the list at the start, A precedes B after the sort too),
1518 although the language definition does not guarantee stability. A
1519 potential drawback is that list.sort() may require temp space of
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00001520 len(list)*2 bytes (``*4`` on a 64-bit machine). It's therefore possible
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00001521 for list.sort() to raise MemoryError now, even if a comparison function
1522 does not. See <http://www.python.org/sf/587076> for full details.
1523
Guido van Rossum2d5389c2002-07-23 03:44:35 +00001524- All standard iterators now ensure that, once StopIteration has been
1525 raised, all future calls to next() on the same iterator will also
1526 raise StopIteration. There used to be various counterexamples to
1527 this behavior, which could caused confusion or subtle program
1528 breakage, without any benefits. (Note that this is still an
1529 iterator's responsibility; the iterator framework does not enforce
1530 this.)
1531
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00001532- Ctrl+C handling on Windows has been made more consistent with
1533 other platforms. KeyboardInterrupt can now reliably be caught,
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00001534 and Ctrl+C at an interactive prompt no longer terminates the
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00001535 process under NT/2k/XP (it never did under Win9x). Ctrl+C will
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00001536 interrupt time.sleep() in the main thread, and any child processes
1537 created via the popen family (on win2k; we can't make win9x work
Mark Hammond8f3afc72002-08-10 06:26:31 +00001538 reliably) are also interrupted (as generally happens on for Linux/Unix.)
1539 [SF bugs 231273, 439992 and 581232]
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00001540
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00001541- sys.getwindowsversion() has been added on Windows. This
1542 returns a tuple with information about the version of Windows
1543 currently running.
1544
Raymond Hettinger5a04aec2002-06-25 00:25:30 +00001545- Slices and repetitions of buffer objects now consistently return
1546 a string. Formerly, strings would be returned most of the time,
1547 but a buffer object would be returned when the repetition count
1548 was one or when the slice range was all inclusive.
1549
Walter Dörwald3430d702002-06-17 10:43:59 +00001550- Unicode objects in sys.path are no longer ignored but treated
1551 as directory names.
1552
Neal Norwitz1f68fc72002-06-14 00:50:42 +00001553- Fixed string.startswith and string.endswith builtin methods
1554 so they accept negative indices. [SF bug 493951]
1555
Guido van Rossumc5fe5eb2002-06-12 03:45:21 +00001556- Fixed a bug with a continue inside a try block and a yield in the
1557 finally clause. [SF bug 567538]
1558
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00001559- Most builtin sequences now support "extended slices", i.e. slices
Guido van Rossum2e82e712002-06-13 11:41:07 +00001560 with a third "stride" parameter. For example, "hello world"[::-1]
1561 gives "dlrow olleh".
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00001562
Neal Norwitzd68f5172002-05-29 15:54:55 +00001563- A new warning PendingDeprecationWarning was added to provide
1564 direction on features which are in the process of being deprecated.
1565 The warning will not be printed by default. To see the pending
1566 deprecations, use -Walways::PendingDeprecationWarning::
1567 as a command line option or warnings.filterwarnings() in code.
1568
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00001569- Deprecated features of xrange objects have been removed as
1570 promised. The start, stop, and step attributes and the tolist()
1571 method no longer exist. xrange repetition and slicing have been
1572 removed.
1573
Guido van Rossum7dab2422002-04-26 19:40:56 +00001574- New builtin function enumerate(x), from PEP 279. Example:
1575 enumerate("abc") is an iterator returning (0,"a"), (1,"b"), (2,"c").
1576 The argument can be an arbitrary iterable object.
1577
Neil Schemenauer89e3ee02002-04-26 01:58:53 +00001578- The assert statement no longer tests __debug__ at runtime. This means
1579 that assert statements cannot be disabled by assigning a false value
1580 to __debug__.
1581
Walter Dörwald068325e2002-04-15 13:36:47 +00001582- A method zfill() was added to str and unicode, that fills a numeric
1583 string to the left with zeros. For example,
1584 "+123".zfill(6) -> "+00123".
1585
Guido van Rossum862fe3c2002-04-15 12:36:47 +00001586- Complex numbers supported divmod() and the // and % operators, but
1587 these make no sense. Since this was documented, they're being
1588 deprecated now.
1589
Guido van Rossum26dd8302002-04-26 20:11:29 +00001590- String and unicode methods lstrip(), rstrip() and strip() now take
1591 an optional argument that specifies the characters to strip. For
1592 example, "Foo!!!?!?!?".rstrip("?!") -> "Foo".
Guido van Rossum49042042002-04-13 00:59:05 +00001593
Guido van Rossumc0d3f4e2002-11-27 13:10:40 +00001594- There's a new dictionary constructor (a class method of the dict
1595 class), dict.fromkeys(iterable, value=None). It constructs a
1596 dictionary with keys taken from the iterable and all values set to a
1597 single value. It can be used for building sets and for removing
1598 duplicates from sequences.
Raymond Hettingere33d3df2002-11-27 07:29:33 +00001599
Guido van Rossumc69343b2002-04-12 19:22:48 +00001600- Added a new dict method pop(key). This removes and returns the
1601 value corresponding to key. [SF patch #539949]
1602
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00001603- A new built-in type, bool, has been added, as well as built-in
1604 names for its two values, True and False. Comparisons and sundry
1605 other operations that return a truth value have been changed to
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00001606 return a bool instead. Read PEP 285 for an explanation of why this
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00001607 is backward compatible.
1608
Guido van Rossum95b62a62002-03-29 01:07:24 +00001609- Fixed two bugs reported as SF #535905: under certain conditions,
1610 deallocating a deeply nested structure could cause a segfault in the
1611 garbage collector, due to interaction with the "trashcan" code;
1612 access to the current frame during destruction of a local variable
1613 could access a pointer to freed memory.
1614
Guido van Rossumfe0ca4a2002-06-18 21:20:13 +00001615- The optional object allocator ("pymalloc") has been enabled by
1616 default. The recommended practice for memory allocation and
1617 deallocation has been streamlined. A header file is included,
1618 Misc/pymemcompat.h, which can be bundled with 3rd party extensions
1619 and lets them use the same API with Python versions from 1.5.2
1620 onwards.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00001621
Martin v. Löwiscfeb3b62002-03-03 21:30:27 +00001622- PyErr_Display will provide file and line information for all exceptions
1623 that have an attribute print_file_and_line, not just SyntaxErrors.
1624
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00001625- The UTF-8 codec will now encode and decode Unicode surrogates
1626 correctly and without raising exceptions for unpaired ones.
1627
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00001628- Universal newlines (PEP 278) is implemented. Briefly, using 'U'
1629 instead of 'r' when opening a text file for reading changes the line
1630 ending convention so that any of '\r', '\r\n', and '\n' is
1631 recognized (even mixed in one file); all three are converted to
1632 '\n', the standard Python line end character.
1633
Neal Norwitz649b7592002-01-01 19:07:13 +00001634- file.xreadlines() now raises a ValueError if the file is closed:
1635 Previously, an xreadlines object was returned which would raise
1636 a ValueError when the xreadlines.next() method was called.
1637
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00001638- sys.exit() inadvertently allowed more than one argument.
Neal Norwitz0c766a02002-03-27 13:03:09 +00001639 An exception will now be raised if more than one argument is used.
1640
Gustavo Niemeyer17c5a332002-12-16 14:09:22 +00001641- Changed evaluation order of dictionary literals to conform to the
1642 general left to right evaluation order rule. Now {f1(): f2()} will
1643 evaluate f1 first.
Gustavo Niemeyer78429a62002-12-16 13:54:02 +00001644
Gustavo Niemeyer786ddb22002-12-16 18:12:53 +00001645- Fixed bug #521782: when a file was in non-blocking mode, file.read()
1646 could silently lose data or wrongly throw an unknown error.
1647
Neil Schemenauerb983aa02002-12-30 20:22:23 +00001648- The sq_repeat, sq_inplace_repeat, sq_concat and sq_inplace_concat
1649 slots are now always tried after trying the corresponding nb_* slots.
1650 This fixes a number of minor bugs (see bug #624807).
1651
Neal Norwitz74a032e2003-01-10 23:29:48 +00001652- Fix problem with dynamic loading on 64-bit AIX (see bug #639945).
1653
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001654Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001655-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001656
Raymond Hettinger9543b342003-01-18 23:22:20 +00001657- Added three operators to the operator module:
1658 operator.pow(a,b) which is equivalent to: a**b.
1659 operator.is_(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is b.
1660 operator.is_not(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is not b.
1661
Martin v. Löwis24a880b2002-12-31 12:55:15 +00001662- posix.openpty now works on all systems that have /dev/ptmx.
1663
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00001664- A module zipimport exists to support importing code from zip
1665 archives.
1666
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00001667- The new datetime module supplies classes for manipulating dates and
1668 times. The basic design came from the Zope "fishbowl process", and
1669 favors practical commercial applications over calendar esoterica. See
1670
1671 http://www.zope.org/Members/fdrake/DateTimeWiki/FrontPage
1672
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00001673- _tkinter now returns Tcl objects, instead of strings. Objects which
1674 have Python equivalents are converted to Python objects, other objects
1675 are wrapped. This can be configured through the wantobjects method,
Martin v. Löwis8c8aa5d2002-11-26 21:39:48 +00001676 or Tkinter.wantobjects.
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00001677
Barry Warsawc27f4bd2002-12-30 21:03:26 +00001678- The PyBSDDB wrapper around the Sleepycat Berkeley DB library has
1679 been added as the package bsddb. The traditional bsddb module is
1680 still available in source code, but not built automatically anymore,
1681 and is now named bsddb185. This supports Berkeley DB versions from
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00001682 3.0 to 4.1. For help converting your databases from the old module (which
1683 probably used an obsolete version of Berkeley DB) to the new module, see
1684 the db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py scripts described in the Tools/Demos
1685 section above.
Martin v. Löwisef546b32002-11-19 08:12:57 +00001686
Martin v. Löwis677bde22002-11-23 22:08:15 +00001687- unicodedata was updated to Unicode 3.2. It supports normalization
1688 and names for Hangul syllables and CJK unified ideographs.
Martin v. Löwis7d41e292002-11-23 12:22:32 +00001689
Neal Norwitz94a83fd2002-11-02 17:46:24 +00001690- resource.getrlimit() now returns longs instead of ints.
1691
Martin v. Löwis080689c2002-10-26 14:42:02 +00001692- readline now dynamically adjusts its input/output stream if
1693 sys.stdin/stdout changes.
1694
Guido van Rossumba602972002-10-01 18:18:58 +00001695- The _tkinter module (and hence Tkinter) has dropped support for
1696 Tcl/Tk 8.0 and 8.1. Only Tcl/Tk versions 8.2, 8.3 and 8.4 are
1697 supported.
1698
Martin v. Löwis658009a2002-09-16 17:26:24 +00001699- cPickle.BadPickleGet is now a class.
1700
Martin v. Löwisa19bfe02002-10-16 18:28:36 +00001701- The time stamps in os.stat_result are floating point numbers
1702 after stat_float_times has been called.
Martin v. Löwis94717ed2002-09-09 14:24:16 +00001703
Neal Norwitzb5673922002-09-05 21:48:07 +00001704- If the size passed to mmap.mmap() is larger than the length of the
1705 file on non-Windows platforms, a ValueError is raised. [SF bug 585792]
1706
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00001707- The xreadlines module is slated for obsolescence.
1708
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00001709- The strptime function in the time module is now always available (a
1710 Python implementation is used when the C library doesn't define it).
1711
Guido van Rossum9562bcf2002-06-14 21:31:18 +00001712- The 'new' module is no longer an extension, but a Python module that
1713 only exists for backwards compatibility. Its contents are no longer
1714 functions but callable type objects.
1715
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00001716- The bsddb.*open functions can now take 'None' as a filename.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00001717 This will create a temporary in-memory bsddb that won't be
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00001718 written to disk.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00001719
Martin v. Löwisb96152c2002-12-31 13:20:15 +00001720- posix.getloadavg, posix.lchown, posix.killpg, posix.mknod, and
1721 posix.getpgid have been added where available.
Martin v. Löwis06a83e92002-04-14 10:19:44 +00001722
Martin v. Löwisf0a46682002-11-03 17:20:12 +00001723- The locale module now exposes the C library's gettext interface. It
1724 also has a new function getpreferredencoding.
Martin v. Löwis2e64c342002-03-27 18:49:02 +00001725
Tim Petersfbf74f22002-03-14 19:06:01 +00001726- A security hole ("double free") was found in zlib-1.1.3, a popular
1727 third party compression library used by some Python modules. The
1728 hole was quickly plugged in zlib-1.1.4, and the Windows build of
1729 Python now ships with zlib-1.1.4.
1730
Martin v. Löwis688357e2002-04-08 21:28:20 +00001731- pwd, grp, and resource return enhanced tuples now, with symbolic
1732 field names.
Martin v. Löwis29001ff2002-03-01 10:47:37 +00001733
Martin v. Löwis99866332002-03-01 10:27:01 +00001734- array.array is now a type object. A new format character
1735 'u' indicates Py_UNICODE arrays. For those, .tounicode and
1736 .fromunicode methods are available. Arrays now support __iadd__
1737 and __imul__.
1738
Neal Norwitze790eae2002-01-01 21:14:12 +00001739- dl now builds on every system that has dlfcn.h. Failure in case
Martin v. Löwis93227272002-01-01 20:18:30 +00001740 of sizeof(int)!=sizeof(long)!=sizeof(void*) is delayed until dl.open
1741 is called.
1742
Skip Montanaro8e790e72002-09-03 13:25:17 +00001743- The sys module acquired a new attribute, api_version, which evaluates
1744 to the value of the PYTHON_API_VERSION macro with which the
1745 interpreter was compiled.
1746
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00001747- Fixed bug #470582: sre module would return a tuple (None, 'a', 'ab')
1748 when applying the regular expression '^((a)c)?(ab)$' on 'ab'. It now
1749 returns (None, None, 'ab'), as expected. Also fixed handling of
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00001750 lastindex/lastgroup match attributes in similar cases. For example,
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00001751 when running the expression r'(a)(b)?b' over 'ab', lastindex must be
1752 1, not 2.
1753
Gustavo Niemeyerc523b042002-11-07 03:28:56 +00001754- Fixed bug #581080: sre scanner was not checking the buffer limit
1755 before increasing the current pointer. This was creating an infinite
1756 loop in the search function, once the pointer exceeded the buffer
1757 limit.
1758
Thomas Heller95cb7e42002-11-07 16:23:55 +00001759- The os.fdopen function now enforces a file mode starting with the
1760 letter 'r', 'w' or 'a', otherwise a ValueError is raised. This fixes
1761 bug #623464.
1762
Greg Ward6c58d462003-01-03 18:02:15 +00001763- The linuxaudiodev module is now deprecated; it is being replaced by
1764 ossaudiodev. The interface has been extended to cover a lot more of
1765 OSS (see www.opensound.com), including most DSP ioctls and the
1766 OSS mixer API. Documentation forthcoming in 2.3a2.
1767
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001768Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001769-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001770
Guido van Rossum747f8062003-01-03 16:33:49 +00001771- imaplib.py now supports SSL (Tino Lange and Piers Lauder).
1772
Just van Rossum5e156ad2002-12-31 16:38:01 +00001773- Freeze's modulefinder.py has been moved to the standard library;
1774 slightly improved so it will issue less false missing submodule
1775 reports (see sf path #643711 for details). Documentation will follow
1776 with Python 2.3a2.
1777
Martin v. Löwis96a60e42002-12-31 13:11:54 +00001778- os.path exposes getctime.
1779
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001780- unittest.py now has two additional methods called assertAlmostEqual()
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001781 and failIfAlmostEqual(). They implement an approximate comparison
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001782 by rounding the difference between the two arguments and comparing
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001783 the result to zero. Approximate comparison is essential for
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001784 unit tests of floating point results.
1785
Raymond Hettingere11b5102002-12-25 16:37:19 +00001786- calendar.py now depends on the new datetime module rather than
1787 the time module. As a result, the range of allowable dates
1788 has been increased.
1789
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00001790- pdb has a new 'j(ump)' command to select the next line to be
1791 executed.
1792
Thomas Heller1b3b49d2002-12-12 19:13:44 +00001793- The distutils created windows installers now can run a
1794 postinstallation script.
1795
Martin v. Löwis4581cfa2002-11-22 08:23:09 +00001796- doctest.testmod can now be called without argument, which means to
1797 test the current module.
1798
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001799- When canceling a server that implemented threading with a keyboard
Martin v. Löwisf86e8ef2002-11-22 08:08:44 +00001800 interrupt, the server would shut down but not terminate (waiting on
1801 client threads). A new member variable, daemon_threads, was added to
1802 the ThreadingMixIn class in SocketServer.py to make it explicit that
1803 this behavior needs to be controlled.
1804
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00001805- A new module, optparse, provides a fancy alternative to getopt for
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00001806 command line parsing. It is a slightly modified version of Greg
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00001807 Ward's Optik package.
1808
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00001809- UserDict.py now defines a DictMixin class which defines all dictionary
1810 methods for classes that already have a minimum mapping interface.
1811 This greatly simplifies writing classes that need to be substitutable
1812 for dictionaries (such as the shelve module).
1813
1814- shelve.py now subclasses from UserDict.DictMixin. Now shelve supports
1815 all dictionary methods. This eases the transition to persistent
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00001816 storage for scripts originally written with dictionaries in mind.
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00001817
Skip Montanaro3bf99e32002-12-08 18:36:24 +00001818- shelve.open and the various classes in shelve.py now accept an optional
1819 binary flag, which defaults to False. If True, the values stored in the
1820 shelf are binary pickles.
1821
Guido van Rossumfda06742002-11-13 16:29:18 +00001822- A new package, logging, implements the logging API defined by PEP
1823 282. The code is written by Vinay Sajip.
1824
Walter Dörwald4dbf1922002-11-06 16:53:44 +00001825- StreamReader, StreamReaderWriter and StreamRecoder in the codecs
1826 modules are iterators now.
1827
Tim Peters9288f952002-11-05 20:38:55 +00001828- gzip.py now handles files exceeding 2GB. Files over 4GB also work
1829 now (provided the OS supports it, and Python is configured with large
1830 file support), but in that case the underlying gzip file format can
1831 record only the least-significant 32 bits of the file size, so that
1832 some tools working with gzipped files may report an incorrect file
1833 size.
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00001834
Martin v. Löwis74b51ac2002-10-26 14:50:45 +00001835- xml.sax.saxutils.unescape has been added, to replace entity references
1836 with their entity value.
1837
Martin v. Löwis77ac4292002-10-15 15:11:13 +00001838- Queue.Queue.{put,get} now support an optional timeout argument.
1839
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00001840- Various features of Tk 8.4 are exposed in Tkinter.py. The multiple
1841 option of tkFileDialog is exposed as function askopenfile{,name}s.
Martin v. Löwis2ec36272002-10-13 10:22:08 +00001842
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00001843- Various configure methods of Tkinter have been stream-lined, so that
1844 tag_configure, image_configure, window_configure now return a
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00001845 dictionary when invoked with no argument.
Martin v. Löwis6ce13152002-10-10 14:36:13 +00001846
Guido van Rossum2b492b62002-10-09 21:40:48 +00001847- Importing the readline module now no longer has the side effect of
1848 calling setlocale(LC_CTYPE, ""). The initial "C" locale, or
1849 whatever locale is explicitly set by the user, is preserved. If you
1850 want repr() of 8-bit strings in your preferred encoding to preserve
1851 all printable characters of that encoding, you have to add the
1852 following code to your $PYTHONSTARTUP file or to your application's
1853 main():
1854
1855 import locale
1856 locale.setlocale(locale.LC_CTYPE, "")
1857
Martin v. Löwise9ce0b02002-10-07 13:23:24 +00001858- shutil.move was added. shutil.copytree now reports errors as an
1859 exception at the end, instead of printing error messages.
1860
Marc-André Lemburg97047e22002-10-04 11:55:21 +00001861- Encoding name normalization was generalized to not only
1862 replace hyphens with underscores, but also all other non-alphanumeric
1863 characters (with the exception of the dot which is used for Python
1864 package names during lookup). The aliases.py mapping was updated
1865 to the new standard.
1866
Walter Dörwald5ccaf8f2002-09-06 16:15:58 +00001867- mimetypes has two new functions: guess_all_extensions() which
1868 returns a list of all known extensions for a mime type, and
1869 add_type() which adds one mapping between a mime type and
1870 an extension to the database.
1871
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00001872- New module: sets, defines the class Set that implements a mutable
1873 set type using the keys of a dict to represent the set. There's
1874 also a class ImmutableSet which is useful when you need sets of sets
1875 or when you need to use sets as dict keys, and a class BaseSet which
Raymond Hettingeref8b9c62002-12-09 08:56:06 +00001876 is the base class of the two.
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00001877
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00001878- Added random.sample(population,k) for random sampling without replacement.
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00001879 Returns a k length list of unique elements chosen from the population.
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00001880
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00001881- random.randrange(-sys.maxint-1, sys.maxint) no longer raises
1882 OverflowError. That is, it now accepts any combination of 'start'
1883 and 'stop' arguments so long as each is in the range of Python's
1884 bounded integers.
1885
Raymond Hettinger40f62172002-12-29 23:03:38 +00001886- Thanks to Raymond Hettinger, random.random() now uses a new core
1887 generator. The Mersenne Twister algorithm is implemented in C,
1888 threadsafe, faster than the previous generator, has an astronomically
1889 large period (2**19937-1), creates random floats to full 53-bit
1890 precision, and may be the most widely tested random number generator
1891 in existence.
1892
1893 The random.jumpahead(n) method has different semantics for the new
1894 generator. Instead of jumping n steps ahead, it uses n and the
1895 existing state to create a new state. This means that jumpahead()
1896 continues to support multi-threaded code needing generators of
1897 non-overlapping sequences. However, it will break code which relies
1898 on jumpahead moving a specific number of steps forward.
1899
1900 The attributes random.whseed and random.__whseed have no meaning for
1901 the new generator. Code using these attributes should switch to a
1902 new class, random.WichmannHill which is provided for backward
1903 compatibility and to make an alternate generator available.
1904
Guido van Rossum4a57c332002-08-02 18:05:20 +00001905- New "algorithms" module: heapq, implements a heap queue. Thanks to
1906 Kevin O'Connor for the code and François Pinard for an entertaining
1907 write-up explaining the theory and practical uses of heaps.
1908
Marc-André Lemburg58e2ff22002-07-12 14:40:04 +00001909- New encoding for the Palm OS character set: palmos.
1910
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00001911- binascii.crc32() and the zipfile module had problems on some 64-bit
1912 platforms. These have been fixed. On a platform with 8-byte C longs,
1913 crc32() now returns a signed-extended 4-byte result, so that its value
1914 as a Python int is equal to the value computed a 32-bit platform.
1915
Martin v. Löwis7d650ca2002-06-30 15:05:00 +00001916- xml.dom.minidom.toxml and toprettyxml now take an optional encoding
1917 argument.
1918
Guido van Rossum9f7549b2002-06-10 21:39:42 +00001919- Some fixes in the copy module: when an object is copied through its
1920 __reduce__ method, there was no check for a __setstate__ method on
1921 the result [SF patch 565085]; deepcopy should treat instances of
1922 custom metaclasses the same way it treats instances of type 'type'
1923 [SF patch 560794].
1924
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00001925- Sockets now support timeout mode. After s.settimeout(T), where T is
1926 a float expressing seconds, subsequent operations raise an exception
1927 if they cannot be completed within T seconds. To disable timeout
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00001928 mode, use s.settimeout(None). There's also a module function,
1929 socket.setdefaulttimeout(T), which sets the default for all sockets
1930 created henceforth.
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00001931
1932- getopt.gnu_getopt was added. This supports GNU-style option
1933 processing, where options can be mixed with non-option arguments.
Martin v. Löwis446a25f2002-06-06 10:58:36 +00001934
Michael W. Hudsonb0dc1a32002-06-04 18:27:35 +00001935- Stop using strings for exceptions. String objects used for
1936 exceptions are now classes deriving from Exception. The objects
1937 changed were: Tkinter.TclError, bdb.BdbQuit, macpath.norm_error,
1938 tabnanny.NannyNag, and xdrlib.Error.
Neal Norwitzb5b5a262002-06-04 17:14:07 +00001939
Walter Dörwald474458d2002-06-04 15:16:29 +00001940- Constants BOM_UTF8, BOM_UTF16, BOM_UTF16_LE, BOM_UTF16_BE,
1941 BOM_UTF32, BOM_UTF32_LE and BOM_UTF32_BE that represent the Byte
1942 Order Mark in UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 encodings for little and
1943 big endian systems were added to the codecs module. The old names
1944 BOM32_* and BOM64_* were off by a factor of 2.
1945
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00001946- Added conversion functions math.degrees() and math.radians().
Raymond Hettinger87f59ee2002-05-13 04:17:32 +00001947
Raymond Hettinger866964c2002-12-14 19:51:34 +00001948- math.log() now takes an optional argument: math.log(x[, base]).
1949
Raymond Hettinger9b1df1d2002-05-12 06:07:21 +00001950- ftplib.retrlines() now tests for callback is None rather than testing
1951 for False. Was causing an error when given a callback object which
1952 was callable but also returned len() as zero. The change may
1953 create new breakage if the caller relied on the undocumented behavior
1954 and called with callback set to [] or some other False value not
1955 identical to None.
1956
Tim Peters46c04e12002-05-05 20:40:00 +00001957- random.gauss() uses a piece of hidden state used by nothing else,
1958 and the .seed() and .whseed() methods failed to reset it. In other
1959 words, setting the seed didn't completely determine the sequence of
1960 results produced by random.gauss(). It does now. Programs repeatedly
1961 mixing calls to a seed method with calls to gauss() may see different
1962 results now.
1963
Fred Drake7f781c92002-05-01 20:33:53 +00001964- The pickle.Pickler class grew a clear_memo() method to mimic that
1965 provided by cPickle.Pickler.
1966
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00001967- difflib's SequenceMatcher class now does a dynamic analysis of
1968 which elements are so frequent as to constitute noise. For
1969 comparing files as sequences of lines, this generally works better
1970 than the IS_LINE_JUNK function, and function ndiff's linejunk
1971 argument defaults to None now as a result. A happy benefit is
1972 that SequenceMatcher may run much faster now when applied
1973 to large files with many duplicate lines (for example, C program
1974 text with lots of repeated "}" and "return NULL;" lines).
1975
Guido van Rossum256705b2002-04-23 13:29:43 +00001976- New Text.dump() method in Tkinter module.
1977
Marc-André Lemburg1ec71ea2002-04-17 20:33:40 +00001978- New distutils commands for building packagers were added to
1979 support pkgtool on Solaris and swinstall on HP-UX.
1980
1981- distutils now has a new abstract binary packager base class
1982 command/bdist_packager, which simplifies writing packagers.
1983 This will hopefully provide the missing bits to encourage
1984 people to submit more packagers, e.g. for Debian, FreeBSD
1985 and other systems.
1986
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00001987- The UTF-16, -LE and -BE stream readers now raise a
1988 NotImplementedError for all calls to .readline(). Previously, they
1989 used to just produce garbage or fail with an encoding error --
1990 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 +00001991 work well with these.
1992
Martin v. Löwis5c137c22002-03-18 12:44:08 +00001993- compileall now supports quiet operation.
1994
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00001995- The BaseHTTPServer now implements optional HTTP/1.1 persistent
Martin v. Löwis587c98c2002-03-17 18:37:22 +00001996 connections.
1997
Marc-André Lemburga5d2b4c2002-02-16 18:23:30 +00001998- socket module: the SSL support was broken out of the main
1999 _socket module C helper and placed into a new _ssl helper
2000 which now gets imported by socket.py if available and working.
2001
Marc-André Lemburg37aa5802002-02-10 21:42:47 +00002002- encodings package: added aliases for all supported IANA character
2003 sets
2004
Guido van Rossum606fe4e2001-12-28 20:57:14 +00002005- ftplib: to safeguard the user's privacy, anonymous login will use
2006 "anonymous@" as default password, rather than the real user and host
2007 name.
2008
Fred Drake36736122002-01-10 13:50:31 +00002009- webbrowser: tightened up the command passed to os.system() so that
2010 arbitrary shell code can't be executed because a bogus URL was
2011 passed in.
2012
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00002013- gettext.translation has an optional fallback argument, and
Martin v. Löwisa55ffae2002-01-11 06:58:49 +00002014 gettext.find an optional all argument. Translations will now fallback
Martin v. Löwisd8996052002-11-21 21:45:32 +00002015 on a per-message basis. The module supports plural forms, by means
2016 of gettext.[d]ngettext and Translation.[u]ngettext.
Martin v. Löwis1be64192002-01-11 06:33:28 +00002017
Martin v. Löwis9668b932002-01-12 11:27:42 +00002018- distutils bdist commands now offer a --skip-build option.
2019
Walter Dörwaldb25c2b02002-03-21 10:38:40 +00002020- warnings.warn now accepts a Warning instance as first argument.
2021
Fred Drakefed7e852002-04-04 19:36:15 +00002022- The xml.sax.expatreader.ExpatParser class will no longer create
2023 circular references by using itself as the locator that gets passed
2024 to the content handler implementation. [SF bug #535474]
2025
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00002026- The email.Parser.Parser class now properly parses strings regardless
2027 of their line endings, which can be any of \r, \n, or \r\n (CR, LF,
2028 or CRLF). Also, the Header class's constructor default arguments
2029 has changed slightly so that an explicit maxlinelen value is always
Barry Warsaw497e5c42002-12-30 19:27:08 +00002030 honored, and so unicode conversion error handling can be specified.
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00002031
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002032- distutils' build_ext command now links C++ extensions with the C++
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00002033 compiler available in the Makefile or CXX environment variable, if
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002034 running under \*nix.
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00002035
2036- New module bz2: provides a comprehensive interface for the bz2 compression
2037 library. It implements a complete file interface, one-shot (de)compression
2038 functions, and types for sequential (de)compression.
2039
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002040- New pdb command 'pp' which is like 'p' except that it pretty-prints
Barry Warsaw5d8d6182002-11-05 22:41:33 +00002041 the value of its expression argument.
2042
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00002043- Now bdist_rpm distutils command understands a verify_script option in
2044 the config file, including the contents of the referred filename in
2045 the "%verifyscript" section of the rpm spec file.
2046
Gustavo Niemeyer1456fde2002-11-25 17:25:04 +00002047- Fixed bug #495695: webbrowser module would run graphic browsers in a
2048 unix environment even if DISPLAY was not set. Also, support for
2049 skipstone browser was included.
2050
Gustavo Niemeyerd5ae01a2002-12-16 13:11:57 +00002051- Fixed bug #636769: rexec would run unallowed code if subclasses of
2052 strings were used as parameters for certain functions.
2053
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002054Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002055-----------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002056
Martin v. Löwis0d1fdea2002-11-22 08:36:54 +00002057- pygettext.py now supports globbing on Windows, and accepts module
2058 names in addition to accepting file names.
2059
Guido van Rossum923e4ef2002-09-17 20:58:59 +00002060- The SGI demos (Demo/sgi) have been removed. Nobody thought they
2061 were interesting any more. (The SGI library modules and extensions
2062 are still there; it is believed that at least some of these are
2063 still used and useful.)
2064
Fred Drake40813b12002-08-05 15:24:19 +00002065- IDLE supports the new encoding declarations (PEP 263); it can also
2066 deal with legacy 8-bit files if they use the locale's encoding. It
2067 allows non-ASCII strings in the interactive shell and executes them
2068 in the locale's encoding.
Martin v. Löwis98ce7b72002-08-05 15:11:26 +00002069
Marc-André Lemburg46260092002-04-04 16:17:11 +00002070- freeze.py now produces binaries which can import shared modules,
2071 unlike before when this failed due to missing symbol exports in
2072 the generated binary.
2073
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002074Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002075-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002076
Martin v. Löwisdc461752002-11-06 21:59:33 +00002077- On Unix, IDLE is now installed automatically.
2078
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00002079- The fpectl module is not built by default; it's dangerous or useless
2080 except in the hands of experts.
2081
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00002082- The public Python C API will generally be declared using PyAPI_FUNC
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00002083 and PyAPI_DATA macros, while Python extension module init functions
2084 will be declared with PyMODINIT_FUNC. DL_EXPORT/DL_IMPORT macros
2085 are deprecated.
Neal Norwitz1389f3e2002-07-22 13:21:10 +00002086
Tim Petersc6a3ff62002-07-08 22:11:52 +00002087- A bug was fixed that could cause COUNT_ALLOCS builds to segfault, or
2088 get into infinite loops, when a new-style class got garbage-collected.
2089 Unfortunately, to avoid this, the way COUNT_ALLOCS works requires
2090 that new-style classes be immortal in COUNT_ALLOCS builds. Note that
2091 COUNT_ALLOCS is not enabled by default, in either release or debug
2092 builds, and that new-style classes are immortal only in COUNT_ALLOCS
2093 builds.
2094
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00002095- Compiling out the cyclic garbage collector is no longer an option.
2096 The old symbol WITH_CYCLE_GC is now ignored, and Python.h arranges
2097 that it's always defined (for the benefit of any extension modules
2098 that may be conditionalizing on it). A bonus is that any extension
2099 type participating in cyclic gc can choose to participate in the
2100 Py_TRASHCAN mechanism now too; in the absence of cyclic gc, this used
2101 to require editing the core to teach the trashcan mechanism about the
2102 new type.
2103
Martin v. Löwis0cec0ff2002-07-28 16:33:45 +00002104- According to Annex F of the current C standard,
Tim Peters1de41bf2002-07-03 03:31:20 +00002105
2106 The Standard C macro HUGE_VAL and its float and long double analogs,
2107 HUGE_VALF and HUGE_VALL, expand to expressions whose values are
2108 positive infinities.
2109
2110 Python only uses the double HUGE_VAL, and only to #define its own symbol
2111 Py_HUGE_VAL. Some platforms have incorrect definitions for HUGE_VAL.
2112 pyport.h used to try to worm around that, but the workarounds triggered
2113 other bugs on other platforms, so we gave up. If your platform defines
2114 HUGE_VAL incorrectly, you'll need to #define Py_HUGE_VAL to something
2115 that works on your platform. The only instance of this I'm sure about
2116 is on an unknown subset of Cray systems, described here:
2117
2118 http://www.cray.com/swpubs/manuals/SN-2194_2.0/html-SN-2194_2.0/x3138.htm
2119
2120 Presumably 2.3a1 breaks such systems. If anyone uses such a system, help!
2121
Martin v. Löwisa3fb4f72002-06-09 13:33:54 +00002122- The configure option --without-doc-strings can be used to remove the
2123 doc strings from the builtin functions and modules; this reduces the
2124 size of the executable.
2125
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00002126- The universal newlines option (PEP 278) is on by default. On Unix
2127 it can be disabled by passing --without-universal-newlines to the
2128 configure script. On other platforms, remove
2129 WITH_UNIVERSAL_NEWLINES from pyconfig.h.
Tim Peters639295f2002-04-21 07:30:30 +00002130
Martin v. Löwis1142de32002-03-29 16:28:31 +00002131- On Unix, a shared libpython2.3.so can be created with --enable-shared.
2132
Tim Peters8deda702002-03-30 10:06:07 +00002133- All uses of the CACHE_HASH, INTERN_STRINGS, and DONT_SHARE_SHORT_STRINGS
2134 preprocessor symbols were eliminated. The internal decisions they
2135 controlled stopped being experimental long ago.
Tim Peters1f7df352002-03-29 03:29:08 +00002136
Fred Drake7d28b732002-05-02 21:17:00 +00002137- The tools used to build the documentation now work under Cygwin as
2138 well as Unix.
2139
Skip Montanaro57454e52002-06-14 20:30:31 +00002140- The bsddb and dbm module builds have been changed to try and avoid version
2141 skew problems and disable linkage with Berkeley DB 1.85 unless the
2142 installer knows what s/he's doing. See the section on building these
2143 modules in the README file for details.
2144
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002145C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002146-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002147
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00002148- PyNumber_Check() now returns true for string and unicode objects.
2149 This is a result of these types having a partially defined
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00002150 tp_as_number slot. (This is not a feature, but an indication that
Walter Dörwalda1a61f92002-11-19 21:20:25 +00002151 PyNumber_Check() is not very useful to determine numeric behavior.
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00002152 It may be deprecated.)
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00002153
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00002154- The string object's layout has changed: the pointer member
2155 ob_sinterned has been replaced by an int member ob_sstate. On some
2156 platforms (e.g. most 64-bit systems) this may change the offset of
2157 the ob_sval member, so as a precaution the API_VERSION has been
2158 incremented. The apparently unused feature of "indirect interned
2159 strings", supported by the ob_sinterned member, is gone. Interned
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002160 strings are now usually mortal; there is a new API,
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00002161 PyString_InternImmortal() that creates immortal interned strings.
2162 (The ob_sstate member can only take three values; however, while
2163 making it a char saves a few bytes per string object on average, in
2164 it also slowed things down a bit because ob_sval was no longer
2165 aligned.)
2166
Guido van Rossumfdb86482002-08-14 21:20:32 +00002167- The Py_InitModule*() functions now accept NULL for the 'methods'
2168 argument. Modules without global functions are becoming more common
2169 now that factories can be types rather than functions.
2170
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00002171- New C API PyUnicode_FromOrdinal() which exposes unichr() at C
2172 level.
2173
Thomas Heller085358a2002-07-29 14:27:41 +00002174- New functions PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErr() and
2175 PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErrWithFilename(). Similar to
2176 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErrWithFilename() and
2177 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErr(), but they allow to specify
2178 the exception type to raise. Available on Windows.
2179
Tim Peters7c321a82002-07-09 02:57:01 +00002180- Py_FatalError() is now declared as taking a const char* argument. It
2181 was previously declared without const. This should not affect working
2182 code.
2183
Martin v. Löwis01f94bd2002-05-08 08:44:21 +00002184- Added new macro PySequence_ITEM(o, i) that directly calls
2185 sq_item without rechecking that o is a sequence and without
2186 adjusting for negative indices.
2187
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00002188- PyRange_New() now raises ValueError if the fourth argument is not 1.
2189 This is part of the removal of deprecated features of the xrange
2190 object.
2191
Guido van Rossum517c7d42002-04-26 02:49:14 +00002192- PyNumber_Coerce() and PyNumber_CoerceEx() now also invoke the type's
2193 coercion if both arguments have the same type but this type has the
2194 CHECKTYPES flag set. This is to better support proxies.
2195
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00002196- The type of tp_free has been changed from "``void (*)(PyObject *)``" to
2197 "``void (*)(void *)``".
Neil Schemenauer9344b142002-04-12 23:00:08 +00002198
2199- PyObject_Del, PyObject_GC_Del are now functions instead of macros.
2200
Guido van Rossum0986d822002-04-08 01:38:42 +00002201- A type can now inherit its metatype from its base type. Previously,
2202 when PyType_Ready() was called, if ob_type was found to be NULL, it
2203 was always set to &PyType_Type; now it is set to base->ob_type,
2204 where base is tp_base, defaulting to &PyObject_Type.
2205
2206- PyType_Ready() accidentally did not inherit tp_is_gc; now it does.
2207
Neil Schemenauerc9abc1d2002-05-08 14:14:41 +00002208- The PyCore_* family of APIs have been removed.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00002209
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002210- The "u#" parser marker will now pass through Unicode objects as-is
Marc-André Lemburg3e3eacb2002-01-09 16:21:27 +00002211 without going through the buffer API.
2212
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002213- The enumerators of cmp_op have been renamed to use the prefix ``PyCmp_``.
Martin v. Löwis7198a522002-01-01 19:59:11 +00002214
Tim Peters10a3bb52001-12-25 19:07:38 +00002215- An old #define of ANY as void has been removed from pyport.h. This
2216 hasn't been used since Python's pre-ANSI days, and the #define has
2217 been marked as obsolete since then. SF bug 495548 says it created
2218 conflicts with other packages, so keeping it around wasn't harmless.
2219
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002220- Because Python's magic number scheme broke on January 1st, we decided
2221 to stop Python development. Thanks for all the fish!
2222
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00002223- Some of us don't like fish, so we changed Python's magic number
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00002224 scheme to a new one. See Python/import.c for details.
2225
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002226New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002227-------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002228
Martin v. Löwis79acb9e2002-12-06 12:48:53 +00002229- OpenVMS is now supported.
2230
Martin v. Löwisf90ae202002-06-11 06:22:31 +00002231- AtheOS is now supported.
2232
Andrew MacIntyre161ad0e2002-08-04 07:25:58 +00002233- the EMX runtime environment on OS/2 is now supported.
2234
Martin v. Löwisa6e97582002-01-01 18:41:33 +00002235- GNU/Hurd is now supported.
2236
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002237Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002238-----
2239
Fred Drake4dd0f7e2002-11-26 21:44:56 +00002240- The regrtest.py script's -u option now provides a way to say "allow
2241 all resources except this one." For example, to allow everything
2242 except bsddb, give the option '-uall,-bsddb'.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002243
2244Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002245-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002246
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00002247- The Windows distribution now ships with version 4.0.14 of the
2248 Sleepycat Berkeley database library. This should be a huge
2249 improvement over the previous Berkeley DB 1.85, which had many
2250 bugs.
2251 XXX What are the licensing issues here?
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002252 XXX If a user has a database created with a previous version of
Tim Peters84c7a3f2002-11-23 18:48:06 +00002253 XXX Python, what must they do to convert it?
2254 XXX I'm still not sure how to link this thing (see PCbuild/readme.txt).
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00002255 XXX The version # is likely to change before 2.3a1.
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00002256
2257- The Windows distribution now ships with a Secure Sockets Library (SLL)
Mark Hammondc3de0082002-12-03 06:16:08 +00002258 module (_ssl.pyd)
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00002259
Tim Peters857fb4c2002-11-14 23:31:58 +00002260- The Windows distribution now ships with Tcl/Tk version 8.4.1 (it
2261 previously shipped with Tcl/Tk 8.3.2).
2262
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00002263- When Python is built under a Microsoft compiler, sys.version now
2264 includes the compiler version number (_MSC_VER). For example, under
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002265 MSVC 6, sys.version contains the substring "MSC v.1200 ". 1200 is
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00002266 the value of _MSC_VER under MSVC 6.
2267
Tim Peters08e72952002-04-16 20:48:01 +00002268- Sometimes the uninstall executable (UNWISE.EXE) vanishes. One cause
2269 of that has been fixed in the installer (disabled Wise's "delete in-
2270 use files" uninstall option).
2271
Guido van Rossum181e41a2002-04-06 00:23:25 +00002272- Fixed a bug in urllib's proxy handling in Windows. [SF bug #503031]
2273
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00002274- The installer now installs Start menu shortcuts under (the local
2275 equivalent of) "All Users" when doing an Admin install.
2276
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00002277- file.truncate([newsize]) now works on Windows for all newsize values.
2278 It used to fail if newsize didn't fit in 32 bits, reflecting a
2279 limitation of MS _chsize (which is no longer used).
2280
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00002281- os.waitpid() is now implemented for Windows, and can be used to block
2282 until a specified process exits. This is similar to, but not exactly
2283 the same as, os.waitpid() on POSIX systems. If you're waiting for
2284 a specific process whose pid was obtained from one of the spawn()
2285 functions, the same Python os.waitpid() code works across platforms.
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00002286 See the docs for details. The docs were changed to clarify that
2287 spawn functions return, and waitpid requires, a process handle on
2288 Windows (not the same thing as a Windows process id).
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00002289
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00002290- New tempfile.TemporaryFile implementation for Windows: this doesn't
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002291 need a TemporaryFileWrapper wrapper anymore, and should be immune
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00002292 to a nasty problem: before 2.3, if you got a temp file on Windows, it
2293 got wrapped in an object whose close() method first closed the
2294 underlying file, then deleted the file. This usually worked fine.
2295 However, the spawn family of functions on Windows create (at a low C
2296 level) the same set of open files in the spawned process Q as were
2297 open in the spawning process P. If a temp file f was among them, then
2298 doing f.close() in P first closed P's C-level file handle on f, but Q's
2299 C-level file handle on f remained open, so the attempt in P to delete f
2300 blew up with a "Permission denied" error (Windows doesn't allow
2301 deleting open files). This was surprising, subtle, and difficult to
2302 work around.
2303
2304- The os module now exports all the symbolic constants usable with the
2305 low-level os.open() on Windows: the new constants in 2.3 are
2306 O_NOINHERIT, O_SHORT_LIVED, O_TEMPORARY, O_RANDOM and O_SEQUENTIAL.
2307 The others were also available in 2.2: O_APPEND, O_BINARY, O_CREAT,
2308 O_EXCL, O_RDONLY, O_RDWR, O_TEXT, O_TRUNC and O_WRONLY. Contrary
2309 to Microsoft docs, O_SHORT_LIVED does not seem to imply O_TEMPORARY
2310 (so specify both if you want both; note that neither is useful unless
2311 specified with O_CREAT too).
2312
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002313Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002314----
2315
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002316- Mac/Relnotes is gone, the release notes are now here.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002317
Just van Rossume1ebd802003-02-10 10:06:18 +00002318- Python (the OSX-only, unix-based version, not the OS9-compatible CFM
2319 version) now fully supports unicode strings as arguments to various file
2320 system calls, eg. open(), file(), os.stat() and os.listdir().
2321
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002322- The current naming convention for Python on the Macintosh is that MacPython
2323 refers to the unix-based OSX-only version, and MacPython-OS9 refers to the
2324 CFM-based version that runs on both OS9 and OSX.
2325
2326- All MacPython-OS9 functionality is now available in an OSX unix build,
2327 including the Carbon modules, the IDE, OSA support, etc. A lot of this
2328 will only work correctly in a framework build, though, because you cannot
2329 talk to the window manager unless your application is run from a .app
2330 bundle. There is a command line tool "pythonw" that runs your script
2331 with an interpreter living in such a .app bundle, this interpreter should
2332 be used to run any Python script using the window manager (including
2333 Tkinter or wxPython scripts).
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00002334
Jack Jansen8bb80db2002-12-30 22:42:43 +00002335- Most of Mac/Lib has moved to Lib/plat-mac, which is again used both in
2336 MacPython-OSX and MacPython-OS9. The only modules remaining in Mac/Lib
2337 are specifically for MacPython-OS9 (CFM support, preference resources, etc).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002338
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002339- A new utility PythonLauncher will start a Python interpreter when a .py or
2340 .pyw script is double-clicked in the Finder. By default .py scripts are
2341 run with a normal Python interpreter in a Terminal window and .pyw
2342 files are run with a window-aware pythonw interpreter without a Terminal
2343 window, but all this can be customized.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002344
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002345- MacPython-OS9 is now Carbon-only, so it runs on Mac OS 9 or Mac OS X and
2346 possibly on Mac OS 8.6 with the right CarbonLib installed, but not on earlier
2347 releases.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002348
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002349- Many tools such as BuildApplet.py and gensuitemodule.py now support a command
2350 line interface too.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002351
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002352- All the Carbon classes are now PEP253 compliant, meaning that you can
2353 subclass them from Python. Most of the attributes have gone, you should
2354 now use the accessor function call API, which is also what Apple's
2355 documentation uses. Some attributes such as grafport.visRgn are still
2356 available for convenience.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002357
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002358- New Carbon modules File (implementing the APIs in Files.h and Aliases.h)
2359 and Folder (APIs from Folders.h). The old macfs builtin module is
2360 gone, and replaced by a Python wrapper around the new modules.
2361
2362- Pathname handling should now be fully consistent: MacPython-OSX always uses
2363 unix pathnames and MacPython-OS9 always uses colon-separated Mac pathnames
2364 (also when running on Mac OS X).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002365
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002366- New Carbon modules Help and AH give access to the Carbon Help Manager.
2367 There are hooks in the IDE to allow accessing the Python documentation
2368 (and Apple's Carbon and Cocoa documentation) through the Help Viewer.
2369 See Mac/OSX/README for converting the Python documentation to a
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002370 Help Viewer compatible form and installing it.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002371
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002372- OSA support has been redesigned and the generated Python classes now
2373 mirror the inheritance defined by the underlying OSA classes.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002374
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002375- MacPython no longer maps both \r and \n to \n on input for any text file.
2376 This feature has been replaced by universal newline support (PEP278).
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00002377
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00002378- The default encoding for Python sourcefiles in MacPython-OS9 is no longer
Guido van Rossum16c85172003-02-20 01:52:48 +00002379 mac-roman (or whatever your local Mac encoding was) but "ascii", like on
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00002380 other platforms. If you really need sourcefiles with Mac characters in them
2381 you can change this in site.py.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002382
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002383
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002384What's New in Python 2.2 final?
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002385===============================
2386
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002387*Release date: 21-Dec-2001*
2388
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002389Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002390--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002391
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002392- pickle.py, cPickle: allow pickling instances of new-style classes
2393 with a custom metaclass.
2394
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002395Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002396-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002397
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002398- weakref proxy object: when comparing, unwrap both arguments if both
2399 are proxies.
2400
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002401Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002402-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002403
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002404- binascii.b2a_base64(): fix a potential buffer overrun when encoding
2405 very short strings.
2406
2407- cPickle: the obscure "fast" mode was suspected of causing stack
2408 overflows on the Mac. Hopefully fixed this by setting the recursion
2409 limit much smaller. If the limit is too low (it only affects
2410 performance), you can change it by defining PY_CPICKLE_FAST_LIMIT
2411 when compiling cPickle.c (or in pyconfig.h).
2412
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002413Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002414-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002415
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002416- dumbdbm.py: fixed a dumb old bug (the file didn't get synched at
2417 close or delete time).
2418
2419- rfc822.py: fixed a bug where the address '<>' was converted to None
2420 instead of an empty string (also fixes the email.Utils module).
2421
2422- xmlrpclib.py: version 1.0.0; uses precision for doubles.
2423
2424- test suite: the pickle and cPickle tests were not executing any code
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002425 when run from the standard regression test.
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002426
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002427Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002428-----------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002429
2430Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002431-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002432
2433C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002434-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002435
2436New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002437-------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002438
2439Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002440-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002441
2442Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002443-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002444
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002445- distutils package: fixed broken Windows installers (bdist_wininst).
2446
2447- tempfile.py: prevent mysterious warnings when TemporaryFileWrapper
2448 instances are deleted at process exit time.
2449
2450- socket.py: prevent mysterious warnings when socket instances are
2451 deleted at process exit time.
2452
2453- posixmodule.c: fix a Windows crash with stat() of a filename ending
2454 in backslash.
2455
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002456Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002457----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002458
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002459- The Carbon toolbox modules have been upgraded to Universal Headers
2460 3.4, and experimental CoreGraphics and CarbonEvents modules have
2461 been added. All only for framework-enabled MacOSX.
2462
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002463
Tim Peters6272dfd2001-12-13 19:34:00 +00002464What's New in Python 2.2c1?
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002465===========================
2466
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002467*Release date: 14-Dec-2001*
2468
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002469Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002470--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002471
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00002472- Guido's tutorial introduction to the new type/class features has
2473 been extensively updated. See
2474
2475 http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html
2476
2477 That remains the primary documentation in this area.
2478
Guido van Rossum33bab012001-12-05 22:45:48 +00002479- Fixed a leak: instance variables declared with __slots__ were never
2480 deleted!
2481
Guido van Rossum4b800852001-12-03 00:54:52 +00002482- The "delete attribute" method of descriptor objects is called
2483 __delete__, not __del__. In previous releases, it was mistakenly
2484 called __del__, which created an unfortunate overloading condition
2485 with finalizers. (The "get attribute" and "set attribute" methods
2486 are still called __get__ and __set__, respectively.)
2487
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00002488- Some subtle issues with the super built-in were fixed:
2489
2490 (a) When super itself is subclassed, its __get__ method would still
2491 return an instance of the base class (i.e., of super).
2492
2493 (b) super(C, C()).__class__ would return C rather than super. This
2494 is confusing. To fix this, I decided to change the semantics of
2495 super so that it only applies to code attributes, not to data
2496 attributes. After all, overriding data attributes is not
2497 supported anyway.
2498
2499 (c) The __get__ method didn't check whether the argument was an
2500 instance of the type used in creation of the super instance.
2501
Guido van Rossumcd7b7d62001-12-04 21:02:07 +00002502- Previously, hash() of an instance of a subclass of a mutable type
2503 (list or dictionary) would return some value, rather than raising
2504 TypeError. This has been fixed. Also, directly calling
2505 dict.__hash__ and list.__hash__ now raises the same TypeError
2506 (previously, these were the same as object.__hash__).
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00002507
Guido van Rossumd331cb52001-12-05 19:46:42 +00002508- New-style objects now support deleting their __dict__. This is for
2509 all intents and purposes equivalent to assigning a brand new empty
2510 dictionary, but saves space if the object is not used further.
2511
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002512Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002513-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002514
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00002515- -Qnew now works as documented in PEP 238: when -Qnew is passed on
2516 the command line, all occurrences of "/" use true division instead
2517 of classic division. See the PEP for details. Note that "all"
2518 means all instances in library and 3rd-party modules, as well as in
2519 your own code. As the PEP says, -Qnew is intended for use only in
2520 educational environments with control over the libraries in use.
Tim Petersbf72fe22001-12-11 21:43:14 +00002521 Note that test_coercion.py in the standard Python test suite fails
2522 under -Qnew; this is expected, and won't be repaired until true
2523 division becomes the default (in the meantime, test_coercion is
2524 testing the current rules).
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00002525
Fred Drake6c01e252001-12-14 17:08:12 +00002526- complex() now only allows the first argument to be a string
2527 argument, and raises TypeError if either the second arg is a string
2528 or if the second arg is specified when the first is a string.
2529
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002530Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002531-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002532
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00002533- gc.get_referents was renamed to gc.get_referrers.
2534
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002535Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002536-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002537
Tim Peters25059d32001-12-07 20:35:43 +00002538- Functions in the os.spawn() family now release the global interpreter
2539 lock around calling the platform spawn. They should always have done
2540 this, but did not before 2.2c1. Multithreaded programs calling
2541 an os.spawn function with P_WAIT will no longer block all Python threads
2542 until the spawned program completes. It's possible that some programs
2543 relies on blocking, although more likely by accident than by design.
2544
Martin v. Löwis3a89b2b2001-11-25 14:35:58 +00002545- webbrowser defaults to netscape.exe on OS/2 now.
2546
Martin v. Löwis652e1912001-11-25 14:50:56 +00002547- Tix.ResizeHandle exposes detach_widget, hide, and show.
2548
Martin v. Löwis714d2e22001-12-02 12:26:03 +00002549- The charset alias windows_1252 has been added.
2550
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00002551- types.StringTypes is a tuple containing the defined string types;
2552 usually this will be (str, unicode), but if Python was compiled
2553 without Unicode support it will be just (str,).
2554
2555- The pulldom and minidom modules were synchronized to PyXML.
2556
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002557Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002558-----------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002559
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00002560- A new script called Tools/scripts/google.py was added, which fires
2561 off a search on Google.
2562
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002563Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002564-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002565
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00002566- Note that release builds of Python should arrange to define the
2567 preprocessor symbol NDEBUG on the command line (or equivalent).
2568 In the 2.2 pre-release series we tried to define this by magic in
2569 Python.h instead, but it proved to cause problems for extension
2570 authors. The Unix, Windows and Mac builds now all define NDEBUG in
2571 release builds via cmdline (or equivalent) instead. Ports to
2572 other platforms should do likewise.
2573
Jack Jansen1999ef42001-12-06 21:47:20 +00002574- It is no longer necessary to use --with-suffix when building on a
2575 case-insensitive file system (such as Mac OS X HFS+). In the build
2576 directory an extension is used, but not in the installed python.
2577
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002578C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002579-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002580
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00002581- New function PyDict_MergeFromSeq2() exposes the builtin dict
2582 constructor's logic for updating a dictionary from an iterable object
2583 producing key-value pairs.
2584
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00002585- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() requires that the number of entries in
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00002586 the keyword list equal the number of argument specifiers. This
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00002587 wasn't checked correctly, and PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords could even
2588 dump core in some bad cases. This has been repaired. As a result,
2589 PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords may raise RuntimeError in bad cases that
2590 previously went unchallenged.
2591
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002592New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002593-------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002594
2595Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002596-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002597
2598Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002599-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002600
2601Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002602----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002603
Jack Jansenffa260f2001-12-06 21:14:00 +00002604- In unix-Python on Mac OS X (and darwin) sys.platform is now "darwin",
2605 without any trailing digits.
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002606
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00002607- Changed logic for finding python home in Mac OS X framework Pythons.
2608 Now sys.executable points to the executable again, in stead of to
2609 the shared library. The latter is used only for locating the python
2610 home.
2611
2612
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002613What's New in Python 2.2b2?
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002614===========================
2615
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002616*Release date: 16-Nov-2001*
2617
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002618Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002619--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002620
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00002621- Multiple inheritance mixing new-style and classic classes in the
2622 list of base classes is now allowed, so this works now:
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00002623
2624 class Classic: pass
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00002625 class Mixed(Classic, object): pass
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00002626
2627 The MRO (method resolution order) for each base class is respected
2628 according to its kind, but the MRO for the derived class is computed
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002629 using new-style MRO rules if any base class is a new-style class.
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00002630 This needs to be documented.
2631
Tim Petersa427a2b2001-10-29 22:25:45 +00002632- The new builtin dictionary() constructor, and dictionary type, have
2633 been renamed to dict. This reflects a decade of common usage.
2634
Guido van Rossum3fc08d22001-11-15 20:33:10 +00002635- dict() now accepts an iterable object producing 2-sequences. For
2636 example, dict(d.items()) == d for any dictionary d. The argument,
2637 and the elements of the argument, can be any iterable objects.
2638
Guido van Rossum7ad2d1e2001-10-29 22:11:00 +00002639- New-style classes can now have a __del__ method, which is called
2640 when the instance is deleted (just like for classic classes).
2641
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00002642- Assignment to object.__dict__ is now possible, for objects that are
2643 instances of new-style classes that have a __dict__ (unless the base
2644 class forbids it).
2645
Guido van Rossumc8e56452001-10-22 00:43:43 +00002646- Methods of built-in types now properly check for keyword arguments
2647 (formerly these were silently ignored). The only built-in methods
2648 that take keyword arguments are __call__, __init__ and __new__.
2649
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00002650- The socket function has been converted to a type; see below.
2651
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002652Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002653-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002654
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00002655- Assignment to __debug__ raises SyntaxError at compile-time. This
2656 was promised when 2.1c1 was released as "What's New in Python 2.1c1"
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00002657 (see below) says.
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00002658
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00002659- Clarified the error messages for unsupported operands to an operator
2660 (like 1 + '').
2661
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002662Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002663-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002664
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00002665- mmap has a new keyword argument, "access", allowing a uniform way for
2666 both Windows and Unix users to create read-only, write-through and
2667 copy-on-write memory mappings. This was previously possible only on
2668 Unix. A new keyword argument was required to support this in a
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002669 uniform way because the mmap() signatures had diverged across
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00002670 platforms. Thanks to Jay T Miller for repairing this!
2671
Tim Peters169ded02001-11-03 19:57:21 +00002672- By default, the gc.garbage list now contains only those instances in
2673 unreachable cycles that have __del__ methods; in 2.1 it contained all
2674 instances in unreachable cycles. "Instances" here has been generalized
2675 to include instances of both new-style and old-style classes.
2676
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00002677- The socket module defines a new method for socket objects,
2678 sendall(). This is like send() but may make multiple calls to
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00002679 send() until all data has been sent. Also, the socket function has
2680 been converted to a subclassable type, like list and tuple (etc.)
2681 before it; socket and SocketType are now the same thing.
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00002682
2683- Various bugfixes to the curses module. There is now a test suite
2684 for the curses module (you have to run it manually).
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00002685
Guido van Rossum692adf12001-10-30 03:03:03 +00002686- binascii.b2a_base64 no longer places an arbitrary restriction of 57
2687 bytes on its input.
2688
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002689Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002690-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002691
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00002692- tkFileDialog exposes a Directory class and askdirectory
Martin v. Löwis25ee87c2001-11-07 22:38:08 +00002693 convenience function.
2694
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00002695- Symbolic group names in regular expressions must be unique. For
2696 example, the regexp r'(?P<abc>)(?P<abc>)' is not allowed, because a
2697 single name can't mean both "group 1" and "group 2" simultaneously.
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00002698 Python 2.2 detects this error at regexp compilation time;
2699 previously, the error went undetected, and results were
2700 unpredictable. Also in sre, the pattern.split(), pattern.sub(), and
2701 pattern.subn() methods have been rewritten in C. Also, an
2702 experimental function/method finditer() has been added, which works
2703 like findall() but returns an iterator.
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00002704
Martin v. Löwisb7b32602001-11-02 23:48:20 +00002705- Tix exposes more commands through the classes DirSelectBox,
2706 DirSelectDialog, ListNoteBook, Meter, CheckList, and the
2707 methods tix_addbitmapdir, tix_cget, tix_configure, tix_filedialog,
2708 tix_getbitmap, tix_getimage, tix_option_get, and tix_resetoptions.
2709
Tim Peters98791af2001-10-23 01:59:54 +00002710- Traceback objects are now scanned by cyclic garbage collection, so
2711 cycles created by casual use of sys.exc_info() no longer cause
2712 permanent memory leaks (provided garbage collection is enabled).
2713
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00002714- os.extsep -- a new variable needed by the RISCOS support. It is the
2715 separator used by extensions, and is '.' on all platforms except
2716 RISCOS, where it is '/'. There is no need to use this variable
2717 unless you have a masochistic desire to port your code to RISCOS.
2718
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00002719- mimetypes.py has optional support for non-standard, but commonly
2720 found types. guess_type() and guess_extension() now accept an
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002721 optional 'strict' flag, defaulting to true, which controls whether
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00002722 recognize non-standard types or not. A few non-standard types we
2723 know about have been added. Also, when run as a script, there are
2724 new -l and -e options.
2725
2726- statcache is now deprecated.
2727
2728- email.Utils.formatdate() now produces the preferred RFC 2822 style
2729 dates with numeric timezones (it used to produce obsolete dates
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002730 hard coded to "GMT" timezone). An optional 'localtime' flag is
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00002731 added to produce dates in the local timezone, with daylight savings
2732 time properly taken into account.
2733
2734- In pickle and cPickle, instead of masking errors in load() by
2735 transforming them into SystemError, we let the original exception
2736 propagate out. Also, implement support for __safe_for_unpickling__
2737 in pickle, as it already was supported in cPickle.
2738
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002739Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002740-----------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002741
2742Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002743-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002744
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00002745- The dbm module is built using libdb1 if available. The bsddb module
2746 is built with libdb3 if available.
2747
2748- Misc/Makefile.pre.in has been removed by BDFL pronouncement.
2749
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002750C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002751-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002752
Tim Peters1fc240e2001-10-26 05:06:50 +00002753- New function PySequence_Fast_GET_SIZE() returns the size of a non-
2754 NULL result from PySequence_Fast(), more quickly than calling
2755 PySequence_Size().
2756
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00002757- New argument unpacking function PyArg_UnpackTuple() added.
2758
2759- New functions PyObject_CallFunctionObjArgs() and
2760 PyObject_CallMethodObjArgs() have been added to make it more
2761 convenient and efficient to call functions and methods from C.
2762
2763- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() no longer masks errors, so it's
2764 possible that this will propagate errors it didn't before.
2765
2766- New function PyObject_CheckReadBuffer(), which returns true if its
2767 argument supports the single-segment readable buffer interface.
2768
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002769New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002770-------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002771
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00002772- We've finally confirmed that this release builds on HP-UX 11.00,
2773 *with* threads, and passes the test suite.
2774
Tim Peters7a33d8b2001-11-05 02:51:07 +00002775- Thanks to a series of patches from Michael Muller, Python may build
2776 again under OS/2 Visual Age C++.
2777
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00002778- Updated RISCOS port by Dietmar Schwertberger.
2779
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002780Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002781-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002782
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00002783- Added a test script for the curses module. It isn't run automatically;
2784 regrtest.py must be run with '-u curses' to enable it.
2785
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002786Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002787-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002788
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00002789Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002790----
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00002791
2792- PythonScript has been moved to unsupported and is slated to be
2793 removed completely in the next release.
2794
2795- It should now be possible to build applets that work on both OS9 and
2796 OSX.
2797
2798- The core is now linked with CoreServices not Carbon; as a side
2799 result, default 8bit encoding on OSX is now ASCII.
2800
2801- Python should now build on OSX 10.1.1
2802
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002803
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002804What's New in Python 2.2b1?
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002805===========================
2806
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002807*Release date: 19-Oct-2001*
2808
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002809Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002810--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002811
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00002812- New-style classes are now always dynamic (except for built-in and
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00002813 extension types). There is no longer a performance penalty, and I
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00002814 no longer see another reason to keep this baggage around. One relic
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00002815 remains: the __dict__ of a new-style class is a read-only proxy; you
2816 must set the class's attribute to modify it. As a consequence, the
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00002817 __defined__ attribute of new-style types no longer exists, for lack
2818 of need: there is once again only one __dict__ (although in the
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00002819 future a __cache__ may be resurrected with a similar function, if I
2820 can prove that it actually speeds things up).
Guido van Rossum50fda3b2001-10-04 19:46:06 +00002821
Tim Peters1c9ca872001-10-04 06:43:12 +00002822- C.__doc__ now works as expected for new-style classes (in 2.2a4 it
2823 always returned None, even when there was a class docstring).
2824
2825- doctest now finds and runs docstrings attached to new-style classes,
2826 class methods, static methods, and properties.
2827
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00002828Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002829-----------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002830
Guido van Rossuma8bcf802001-10-15 15:53:58 +00002831- A very subtle syntactical pitfall in list comprehensions was fixed.
2832 For example: [a+b for a in 'abc', for b in 'def']. The comma in
2833 this example is a mistake. Previously, this would silently let 'a'
2834 iterate over the singleton tuple ('abc',), yielding ['abcd', 'abce',
2835 'abcf'] rather than the intended ['ad', 'ae', 'af', 'bd', 'be',
2836 'bf', 'cd', 'ce', 'cf']. Now, this is flagged as a syntax error.
2837 Note that [a for a in <singleton>] is a convoluted way to say
2838 [<singleton>] anyway, so it's not like any expressiveness is lost.
2839
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00002840- getattr(obj, name, default) now only catches AttributeError, as
2841 documented, rather than returning the default value for all
2842 exceptions (which could mask bugs in a __getattr__ hook, for
2843 example).
2844
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00002845- Weak reference objects are now part of the core and offer a C API.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00002846 A bug which could allow a core dump when binary operations involved
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00002847 proxy reference has been fixed. weakref.ReferenceError is now a
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00002848 built-in exception.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00002849
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00002850- unicode(obj) now behaves more like str(obj), accepting arbitrary
2851 objects, and calling a __unicode__ method if it exists.
2852 unicode(obj, encoding) and unicode(obj, encoding, errors) still
Marc-André Lemburgb5507ec2001-10-19 12:02:29 +00002853 require an 8-bit string or character buffer argument.
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00002854
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00002855- isinstance() now allows any object as the first argument and a
2856 class, a type or something with a __bases__ tuple attribute for the
2857 second argument. The second argument may also be a tuple of a
2858 class, type, or something with __bases__, in which case isinstance()
2859 will return true if the first argument is an instance of any of the
2860 things contained in the second argument tuple. E.g.
2861
2862 isinstance(x, (A, B))
2863
2864 returns true if x is an instance of A or B.
2865
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00002866Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002867-----------------
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00002868
2869- thread.start_new_thread() now returns the thread ID (previously None).
2870
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00002871- binascii has now two quopri support functions, a2b_qp and b2a_qp.
2872
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00002873- readline now supports setting the startup_hook and the
2874 pre_event_hook, and adds the add_history() function.
Martin v. Löwis0daad592001-09-30 21:09:59 +00002875
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00002876- os and posix supports chroot(), setgroups() and unsetenv() where
2877 available. The stat(), fstat(), statvfs() and fstatvfs() functions
2878 now return "pseudo-sequences" -- the various fields can now be
2879 accessed as attributes (e.g. os.stat("/").st_mtime) but for
2880 backwards compatibility they also behave as a fixed-length sequence.
2881 Some platform-specific fields (e.g. st_rdev) are only accessible as
Guido van Rossum98bf58f2001-10-18 20:34:25 +00002882 attributes.
2883
2884- time: localtime(), gmtime() and strptime() now return a
2885 pseudo-sequence similar to the os.stat() return value, with
2886 attributes like tm_year etc.
Martin v. Löwis16628c92001-10-04 22:46:41 +00002887
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00002888- Decompression objects in the zlib module now accept an optional
2889 second parameter to decompress() that specifies the maximum amount
2890 of memory to use for the uncompressed data.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002891
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00002892- optional SSL support in the socket module now exports OpenSSL
2893 functions RAND_add(), RAND_egd(), and RAND_status(). These calls
2894 are useful on platforms like Solaris where OpenSSL does not
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00002895 automatically seed its PRNG. Also, the keyfile and certfile
2896 arguments to socket.ssl() are now optional.
2897
2898- posixmodule (and by extension, the os module on POSIX platforms) now
2899 exports O_LARGEFILE, O_DIRECT, O_DIRECTORY, and O_NOFOLLOW.
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00002900
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00002901Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002902-------
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00002903
Tim Peters7402f792001-10-02 03:53:41 +00002904- doctest now excludes functions and classes not defined by the module
2905 being tested, thanks to Tim Hochberg.
2906
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00002907- HotShot, a new profiler implemented using a C-based callback, has
2908 been added. This substantially reduces the overhead of profiling,
2909 but it is still quite preliminary. Support modules and
2910 documentation will be added in upcoming releases (before 2.2 final).
2911
Guido van Rossumc4b09b42001-10-04 10:19:00 +00002912- profile now produces correct output in situations where an exception
2913 raised in Python is cleared by C code (e.g. hasattr()). This used
2914 to cause wrong output, including spurious claims of recursive
2915 functions and attribution of time spent to the wrong function.
2916
Tim Peters0a1fc4e2001-10-07 03:12:08 +00002917 The code and documentation for the derived OldProfile and HotProfile
2918 profiling classes was removed. The code hasn't worked for years (if
2919 you tried to use them, they raised exceptions). OldProfile
2920 intended to reproduce the behavior of the profiler Python used more
2921 than 7 years ago, and isn't interesting anymore. HotProfile intended
2922 to provide a faster profiler (but producing less information), and
2923 that's a worthy goal we intend to meet via a different approach (but
2924 without losing information).
2925
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00002926- Profile.calibrate() has a new implementation that should deliver
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00002927 a much better system-specific calibration constant. The constant can
2928 now be specified in an instance constructor, or as a Profile class or
2929 instance variable, instead of by editing profile.py's source code.
2930 Calibration must still be done manually (see the docs for the profile
2931 module).
2932
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002933 Note that Profile.calibrate() must be overridden by subclasses.
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00002934 Improving the accuracy required exploiting detailed knowledge of
2935 profiler internals; the earlier method abstracted away the details
2936 and measured a simplified model instead, but consequently computed
2937 a constant too small by a factor of 2 on some modern machines.
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00002938
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00002939- quopri's encode and decode methods take an optional header parameter,
Jeremy Hylton6f543b62001-10-16 20:42:52 +00002940 which indicates whether output is intended for the header 'Q'
2941 encoding.
2942
Guido van Rossuma5343cc2001-10-18 18:02:07 +00002943- The SocketServer.ThreadingMixIn class now closes the request after
2944 finish_request() returns. (Not when it errors out though.)
2945
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002946- The nntplib module's NNTP.body() method has grown a 'file' argument
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00002947 to allow saving the message body to a file.
2948
2949- The email package has added a class email.Parser.HeaderParser which
2950 only parses headers and does not recurse into the message's body.
2951 Also, the module/class MIMEAudio has been added for representing
2952 audio data (contributed by Anthony Baxter).
2953
2954- ftplib should be able to handle files > 2GB.
2955
2956- ConfigParser.getboolean() now also interprets TRUE, FALSE, YES, NO,
2957 ON, and OFF.
2958
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00002959- xml.dom.minidom NodeList objects now support the length attribute
2960 and item() method as required by the DOM specifications.
2961
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00002962Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002963-----------
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00002964
2965- Demo/dns was removed. It no longer serves any purpose; a package
2966 derived from it is now maintained by Anthony Baxter, see
2967 http://PyDNS.SourceForge.net.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002968
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00002969- The freeze tool has been made more robust, and two new options have
2970 been added: -X and -E.
2971
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002972Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002973-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002974
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00002975- configure will use CXX in LINKCC if CXX is used to build main() and
2976 the system requires to link a C++ main using the C++ compiler.
2977
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002978C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002979-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002980
Guido van Rossum6c4bce32001-10-18 19:20:25 +00002981- The documentation for the tp_compare slot is updated to require that
2982 the return value must be -1, 0, 1; an arbitrary number <0 or >0 is
2983 not correct. This is not yet enforced but will be enforced in
2984 Python 2.3; even later, we may use -2 to indicate errors and +2 for
2985 "NotImplemented". Right now, -1 should be used for an error return.
2986
Tim Petersd38b1c72001-09-30 05:09:37 +00002987- PyLong_AsLongLong() now accepts int (as well as long) arguments.
2988 Consequently, PyArg_ParseTuple's 'L' code also accepts int (as well
2989 as long) arguments.
2990
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00002991- PyThread_start_new_thread() now returns a long int giving the thread
2992 ID, if one can be calculated; it returns -1 for error, 0 if no
2993 thread ID is calculated (this is an incompatible change, but only
2994 the thread module used this API). This code has only really been
2995 tested on Linux and Windows; other platforms please beware (and
2996 report any bugs or strange behavior).
2997
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00002998- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() no longer accepts Unicode objects as
2999 input.
3000
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003001New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003002-------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003003
3004Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003005-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003006
3007Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003008-------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003009
Tim Peters04cf1d32001-10-09 22:39:40 +00003010- Installer: If you install IDLE, and don't disable file-extension
3011 registration, a new "Edit with IDLE" context (right-click) menu entry
3012 is created for .py and .pyw files.
3013
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003014- The signal module now supports SIGBREAK on Windows, thanks to Steven
3015 Scott. Note that SIGBREAK is unique to Windows. The default SIGBREAK
3016 action remains to call Win32 ExitProcess(). This can be changed via
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003017 signal.signal(). For example::
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003018
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003019 # Make Ctrl+Break raise KeyboardInterrupt, like Python's default Ctrl+C
3020 # (SIGINT) behavior.
3021 import signal
3022 signal.signal(signal.SIGBREAK, signal.default_int_handler)
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003023
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003024 try:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003025 while 1:
3026 pass
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003027 except KeyboardInterrupt:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003028 # We get here on Ctrl+C or Ctrl+Break now; if we had not changed
3029 # SIGBREAK, only on Ctrl+C (and Ctrl+Break would terminate the
3030 # program without the possibility for any Python-level cleanup).
3031 print "Clean exit"
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003032
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003033
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003034What's New in Python 2.2a4?
3035===========================
3036
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003037*Release date: 28-Sep-2001*
3038
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003039Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003040--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003041
3042- pydoc and inspect are now aware of new-style classes;
3043 e.g. help(list) at the interactive prompt now shows proper
3044 documentation for all operations on list objects.
3045
3046- Applications using Jim Fulton's ExtensionClass module can now safely
3047 be used with Python 2.2. In particular, Zope 2.4.1 now works with
3048 Python 2.2 (as well as with Python 2.1.1). The Demo/metaclass
3049 examples also work again. It is hoped that Gtk and Boost also work
3050 with 2.2a4 and beyond. (If you can confirm this, please write
3051 webmaster@python.org; if there are still problems, please open a bug
3052 report on SourceForge.)
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003053
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00003054- property() now takes 4 keyword arguments: fget, fset, fdel and doc.
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003055 These map to read-only attributes 'fget', 'fset', 'fdel', and '__doc__'
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00003056 in the constructed property object. fget, fset and fdel weren't
3057 discoverable from Python in 2.2a3. __doc__ is new, and allows to
3058 associate a docstring with a property.
3059
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003060- Comparison overloading is now more completely implemented. For
3061 example, a str subclass instance can properly be compared to a str
3062 instance, and it can properly overload comparison. Ditto for most
3063 other built-in object types.
3064
3065- The repr() of new-style classes has changed; instead of <type
3066 'M.Foo'> a new-style class is now rendered as <class 'M.Foo'>,
3067 *except* for built-in types, which are still rendered as <type
3068 'Foo'> (to avoid upsetting existing code that might parse or
3069 otherwise rely on repr() of certain type objects).
3070
3071- The repr() of new-style objects is now always <Foo object at XXX>;
3072 previously, it was sometimes <Foo instance at XXX>.
3073
3074- For new-style classes, what was previously called __getattr__ is now
3075 called __getattribute__. This method, if defined, is called for
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00003076 *every* attribute access. A new __getattr__ hook more similar to the
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003077 one in classic classes is defined which is called only if regular
3078 attribute access raises AttributeError; to catch *all* attribute
3079 access, you can use __getattribute__ (for new-style classes). If
3080 both are defined, __getattribute__ is called first, and if it raises
3081 AttributeError, __getattr__ is called.
3082
3083- The __class__ attribute of new-style objects can be assigned to.
3084 The new class must have the same C-level object layout as the old
3085 class.
3086
3087- The builtin file type can be subclassed now. In the usual pattern,
3088 "file" is the name of the builtin type, and file() is a new builtin
3089 constructor, with the same signature as the builtin open() function.
3090 file() is now the preferred way to open a file.
3091
3092- Previously, __new__ would only see sequential arguments passed to
3093 the type in a constructor call; __init__ would see both sequential
3094 and keyword arguments. This made no sense whatsoever any more, so
3095 now both __new__ and __init__ see all arguments.
3096
3097- Previously, hash() applied to an instance of a subclass of str or
3098 unicode always returned 0. This has been repaired.
3099
3100- Previously, an operation on an instance of a subclass of an
3101 immutable type (int, long, float, complex, tuple, str, unicode),
3102 where the subtype didn't override the operation (and so the
3103 operation was handled by the builtin type), could return that
3104 instance instead a value of the base type. For example, if s was of
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003105 a str subclass type, s[:] returned s as-is. Now it returns a str
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003106 with the same value as s.
3107
Barry Warsaw86fbaf82001-09-28 15:26:12 +00003108- Provisional support for pickling new-style objects has been added.
3109
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003110Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003111----
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003112
Tim Peters2c9aa5e2001-09-23 04:06:05 +00003113- file.writelines() now accepts any iterable object producing strings.
3114
Marc-André Lemburgaefd7662001-09-20 12:59:37 +00003115- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() now works very much like
3116 PyObject_Str(obj) in that it tries to use __str__/tp_str
3117 on the object if the object is not a string or buffer. This
3118 makes unicode() behave like str() when applied to non-string/buffer
3119 objects.
3120
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00003121- PyFile_WriteObject now passes Unicode objects to the file's write
3122 method. As a result, all file-like objects which may be the target
Martin v. Löwis2777c022001-09-19 13:47:32 +00003123 of a print statement must support Unicode objects, i.e. they must
3124 at least convert them into ASCII strings.
3125
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003126- Thread scheduling on Solaris should be improved; it is no longer
3127 necessary to insert a small sleep at the start of a thread in order
3128 to let other runnable threads be scheduled.
3129
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003130Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003131-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003132
Marc-André Lemburgbf990172001-09-27 14:17:33 +00003133- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
3134 read character buffer compatible objects for their .write() methods.
3135 These objects are converted to strings and then handled as such
3136 by the instances.
3137
Barry Warsaw2f600732001-09-24 04:28:10 +00003138- The "email" package has been added. This is basically a port of the
3139 mimelib package <http://sf.net/projects/mimelib> with API changes
3140 and some implementations updated to use iterators and generators.
3141
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00003142- difflib.ndiff() and difflib.Differ.compare() are generators now. This
3143 restores the ability of Tools/scripts/ndiff.py to start producing output
3144 before the entire comparison is complete.
3145
Barry Warsaw58b072d2001-09-22 04:44:21 +00003146- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
3147 iteration just like file objects (i.e. their .readline() method is
3148 called for each iteration until it returns an empty string).
3149
Marc-André Lemburg494f2ae2001-09-19 11:33:31 +00003150- The codecs module has grown four new helper APIs to access
3151 builtin codecs: getencoder(), getdecoder(), getreader(),
3152 getwriter().
3153
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003154- SimpleXMLRPCServer: a new module (based upon SimpleHTMLServer)
3155 simplifies writing XML RPC servers.
3156
Barry Warsaw647d5e82001-09-28 17:01:02 +00003157- os.path.realpath(): a new function that returns the absolute pathname
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003158 after interpretation of symbolic links. On non-Unix systems, this
3159 is an alias for os.path.abspath().
3160
Tim Peters16a77ad2001-09-08 04:00:12 +00003161- operator.indexOf() (PySequence_Index() in the C API) now works with any
3162 iterable object.
3163
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003164- smtplib now supports various authentication and security features of
3165 the SMTP protocol through the new login() and starttls() methods.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00003166
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003167- hmac: a new module implementing keyed hashing for message
3168 authentication.
3169
3170- mimetypes now recognizes more extensions and file types. At the
3171 same time, some mappings not sanctioned by IANA were removed.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00003172
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003173- The "compiler" package has been brought up to date to the state of
Guido van Rossumc9ed5dc2001-09-20 05:30:24 +00003174 Python 2.2 bytecode generation. It has also been promoted from a
3175 Tool to a standard library package. (Tools/compiler still exists as
3176 a sample driver.)
3177
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003178Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003179-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003180
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003181- Large file support (LFS) is now automatic when the platform supports
3182 it; no more manual configuration tweaks are needed. On Linux, at
3183 least, it's possible to have a system whose C library supports large
3184 files but whose kernel doesn't; in this case, large file support is
3185 still enabled but doesn't do you any good unless you upgrade your
3186 kernel or share your Python executable with another system whose
3187 kernel has large file support.
3188
3189- The configure script now supplies plausible defaults in a
3190 cross-compilation environment. This doesn't mean that the supplied
3191 values are always correct, or that cross-compilation now works
3192 flawlessly -- but it's a first step (and it shuts up most of
3193 autoconf's warnings about AC_TRY_RUN).
3194
3195- The Unix build is now a bit less chatty, courtesy of the parser
3196 generator. The build is completely silent (except for errors) when
3197 using "make -s", thanks to a -q option to setup.py.
3198
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003199C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003200-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003201
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003202- The "structmember" API now supports some new flag bits to deny read
3203 and/or write access to attributes in restricted execution mode.
3204
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003205New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003206-------------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003207
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003208- Compaq's iPAQ handheld, running the "familiar" Linux distribution
3209 (http://familiar.handhelds.org).
3210
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003211Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003212-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003213
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00003214- The "classic" standard tests, which work by comparing stdout to
3215 an expected-output file under Lib/test/output/, no longer stop at
3216 the first mismatch. Instead the test is run to completion, and a
3217 variant of ndiff-style comparison is used to report all differences.
3218 This is much easier to understand than the previous style of reporting.
3219
3220- The unittest-based standard tests now use regrtest's test_main()
3221 convention, instead of running as a side-effect of merely being
3222 imported. This allows these tests to be run in more natural and
3223 flexible ways as unittests, outside the regrtest framework.
3224
3225- regrtest.py is much better integrated with unittest and doctest now,
3226 especially in regard to reporting errors.
3227
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003228Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003229-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003230
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003231- Large file support now also works for files > 4GB, on filesystems
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00003232 that support it (NTFS under Windows 2000). See "What's New in
3233 Python 2.2a3" for more detail.
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003234
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003235
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003236What's New in Python 2.2a3?
3237===========================
3238
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003239*Release Date: 07-Sep-2001*
3240
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003241Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003242----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003243
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00003244- Conversion of long to float now raises OverflowError if the long is too
3245 big to represent as a C double.
3246
Tim Peters32f453e2001-09-03 08:35:41 +00003247- The 3-argument builtin pow() no longer allows a third non-None argument
3248 if either of the first two arguments is a float, or if both are of
3249 integer types and the second argument is negative (in which latter case
3250 the arguments are converted to float, so this is really the same
3251 restriction).
3252
Tim Peters5d2b77c2001-09-03 05:47:38 +00003253- The builtin dir() now returns more information, and sometimes much
3254 more, generally naming all attributes of an object, and all attributes
3255 reachable from the object via its class, and from its class's base
3256 classes, and so on from them too. Example: in 2.2a2, dir([]) returned
3257 an empty list. In 2.2a3,
3258
3259 >>> dir([])
3260 ['__add__', '__class__', '__contains__', '__delattr__', '__delitem__',
3261 '__eq__', '__ge__', '__getattr__', '__getitem__', '__getslice__',
3262 '__gt__', '__hash__', '__iadd__', '__imul__', '__init__', '__le__',
3263 '__len__', '__lt__', '__mul__', '__ne__', '__new__', '__repr__',
3264 '__rmul__', '__setattr__', '__setitem__', '__setslice__', '__str__',
3265 'append', 'count', 'extend', 'index', 'insert', 'pop', 'remove',
3266 'reverse', 'sort']
3267
3268 dir(module) continues to return only the module's attributes, though.
3269
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003270- Overflowing operations on plain ints now return a long int rather
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003271 than raising OverflowError. This is a partial implementation of PEP
3272 237. You can use -Wdefault::OverflowWarning to enable a warning for
3273 this situation, and -Werror::OverflowWarning to revert to the old
3274 OverflowError exception.
3275
Guido van Rossum61c345f2001-09-04 03:26:15 +00003276- A new command line option, -Q<arg>, is added to control run-time
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003277 warnings for the use of classic division. (See PEP 238.) Possible
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00003278 values are -Qold, -Qwarn, -Qwarnall, and -Qnew. The default is
3279 -Qold, meaning the / operator has its classic meaning and no
3280 warnings are issued. Using -Qwarn issues a run-time warning about
3281 all uses of classic division for int and long arguments; -Qwarnall
3282 also warns about classic division for float and complex arguments
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00003283 (for use with fixdiv.py).
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003284 [Note: the remainder of this item (preserved below) became
3285 obsolete in 2.2c1 -- -Qnew has global effect in 2.2] ::
3286
3287 Using -Qnew is questionable; it turns on new division by default, but
3288 only in the __main__ module. You can usefully combine -Qwarn or
3289 -Qwarnall and -Qnew: this gives the __main__ module new division, and
3290 warns about classic division everywhere else.
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003291
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003292- Many built-in types can now be subclassed. This applies to int,
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003293 long, float, str, unicode, and tuple. (The types complex, list and
3294 dictionary can also be subclassed; this was introduced earlier.)
3295 Note that restrictions apply when subclassing immutable built-in
3296 types: you can only affect the value of the instance by overloading
3297 __new__. You can add mutable attributes, and the subclass instances
3298 will have a __dict__ attribute, but you cannot change the "value"
3299 (as implemented by the base class) of an immutable subclass instance
3300 once it is created.
3301
Guido van Rossumaaf80c82001-09-02 13:44:35 +00003302- The dictionary constructor now takes an optional argument, a
3303 mapping-like object, and initializes the dictionary from its
3304 (key, value) pairs.
3305
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003306- A new built-in type, super, has been added. This facilitates making
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003307 "cooperative super calls" in a multiple inheritance setting. For an
3308 explanation, see http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#cooperation
3309
Guido van Rossum8d7234d2001-09-06 22:02:58 +00003310- A new built-in type, property, has been added. This enables the
3311 creation of "properties". These are attributes implemented by
3312 getter and setter functions (or only one of these for read-only or
3313 write-only attributes), without the need to override __getattr__.
3314 See http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#property
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003315
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003316- The syntax of floating-point and imaginary literals has been
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00003317 liberalized, to allow leading zeroes. Examples of literals now
3318 legal that were SyntaxErrors before:
3319
3320 00.0 0e3 0100j 07.5 00000000000000000008.
3321
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003322- An old tokenizer bug allowed floating point literals with an incomplete
Tim Petersc6d95812001-08-28 20:56:27 +00003323 exponent, such as 1e and 3.1e-. Such literals now raise SyntaxError.
3324
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003325Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003326-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003327
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00003328- telnetlib includes symbolic names for the options, and support for
Martin v. Löwis1da9c572002-11-04 09:56:00 +00003329 setting an option negotiation callback. It also supports processing
3330 of suboptions.
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00003331
Tim Petersa40c7932001-09-05 22:36:56 +00003332- The new C standard no longer requires that math libraries set errno to
3333 ERANGE on overflow. For platform libraries that exploit this new
3334 freedom, Python's overflow-checking was wholly broken. A new overflow-
3335 checking scheme attempts to repair that, but may not be reliable on all
3336 platforms (C doesn't seem to provide anything both useful and portable
3337 in this area anymore).
3338
Martin v. Löwis44f86962001-09-05 13:44:54 +00003339- Asynchronous timeout actions are available through the new class
3340 threading.Timer.
3341
Tim Peters78526162001-09-05 00:53:45 +00003342- math.log and math.log10 now return sensible results for even huge
3343 long arguments. For example, math.log10(10 ** 10000) ~= 10000.0.
3344
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003345- A new function, imp.lock_held(), returns 1 when the import lock is
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00003346 currently held. See the docs for the imp module.
3347
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003348- pickle, cPickle and marshal on 32-bit platforms can now correctly read
Tim Peters82112372001-08-29 02:28:42 +00003349 dumps containing ints written on platforms where Python ints are 8 bytes.
3350 When read on a box where Python ints are 4 bytes, such values are
3351 converted to Python longs.
3352
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003353- In restricted execution mode (using the rexec module), unmarshalling
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003354 code objects is no longer allowed. This plugs a security hole.
3355
Steve Purcell6091cd62001-09-06 16:05:17 +00003356- unittest.TestResult instances no longer store references to tracebacks
3357 generated by test failures. This prevents unexpected dangling references
3358 to objects that should be garbage collected between tests.
3359
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003360Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003361-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003362
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00003363- Tools/scripts/fixdiv.py has been added which can be used to fix
3364 division operators as per PEP 238.
3365
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003366Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003367-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003368
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00003369- If you are an adventurous person using Mac OS X you may want to look at
3370 Mac/OSX. There is a Makefile there that will build Python as a real Mac
3371 application, which can be used for experimenting with Carbon or Cocoa.
3372 Discussion of this on pythonmac-sig, please.
3373
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00003374C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003375-----
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00003376
3377- New function PyObject_Dir(obj), like Python __builtin__.dir(obj).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00003378
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00003379- Note that PyLong_AsDouble can fail! This has always been true, but no
3380 callers checked for it. It's more likely to fail now, because overflow
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003381 errors are properly detected now. The proper way to check::
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00003382
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003383 double x = PyLong_AsDouble(some_long_object);
3384 if (x == -1.0 && PyErr_Occurred()) {
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003385 /* The conversion failed. */
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003386 }
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00003387
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003388- The GC API has been changed. Extensions that use the old API will still
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00003389 compile but will not participate in GC. To upgrade an extension
3390 module:
3391
3392 - rename Py_TPFLAGS_GC to PyTPFLAGS_HAVE_GC
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00003393
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00003394 - use PyObject_GC_New or PyObject_GC_NewVar to allocate objects and
3395 PyObject_GC_Del to deallocate them
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00003396
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00003397 - rename PyObject_GC_Init to PyObject_GC_Track and PyObject_GC_Fini
3398 to PyObject_GC_UnTrack
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00003399
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00003400 - remove PyGC_HEAD_SIZE from object size calculations
3401
3402 - remove calls to PyObject_AS_GC and PyObject_FROM_GC
3403
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003404- Two new functions: PyString_FromFormat() and PyString_FromFormatV().
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003405 These can be used safely to construct string objects from a
3406 sprintf-style format string (similar to the format string supported
3407 by PyErr_Format()).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00003408
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003409New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003410-------------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003411
Tim Petersb7da0902001-09-02 23:01:43 +00003412- Stephen Hansen contributed patches sufficient to get a clean compile
3413 under Borland C (Windows), but he reports problems running it and ran
3414 out of time to complete the port. Volunteers? Expect a MemoryError
3415 when importing the types module; this is probably shallow, and
3416 causing later failures too.
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003417
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003418Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003419-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003420
3421Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003422-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003423
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00003424- Large file support is now enabled on Win32 platforms as well as on
3425 Win64. This means that, for example, you can use f.tell() and f.seek()
3426 to manipulate files larger than 2 gigabytes (provided you have enough
3427 disk space, and are using a Windows filesystem that supports large
Tim Peters9a9471c2001-09-11 23:18:51 +00003428 partitions). Windows filesystem limits: FAT has a 2GB (gigabyte)
3429 filesize limit, and large file support makes no difference there.
3430 FAT32's limit is 4GB, and files >= 2GB are easier to use from Python now.
3431 NTFS has no practical limit on file size, and files of any size can be
3432 used from Python now.
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00003433
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003434- The w9xpopen hack is now used on Windows NT and 2000 too when COMPSPEC
Tim Peters402d5982001-08-27 06:37:48 +00003435 points to command.com (patch from Brian Quinlan).
3436
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003437
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00003438What's New in Python 2.2a2?
3439===========================
3440
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003441*Release Date: 22-Aug-2001*
3442
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00003443Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003444-----
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00003445
Barry Warsaw18b2ecf2001-08-22 20:26:56 +00003446- Tim Peters developed a brand new Windows installer using Wise 8.1,
3447 generously donated to us by Wise Solutions.
3448
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00003449- configure supports a new option --enable-unicode, with the values
3450 ucs2 and ucs4 (new in 2.2a1). With --disable-unicode, the Unicode
3451 type and supporting code is completely removed from the interpreter.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00003452
Jack Jansen32ce0cd2001-08-21 19:28:20 +00003453- A new configure option --enable-framework builds a Mac OS X framework,
3454 which "make frameworkinstall" will install. This provides a starting
3455 point for more mac-like functionality, join pythonmac-sig@python.org
3456 if you are interested in helping.
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00003457
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00003458- The NeXT platform is no longer supported.
3459
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003460- The 'new' module is now statically linked.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00003461
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00003462Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003463-----
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00003464
3465- The new Tools/scripts/cleanfuture.py can be used to automatically
Andrew M. Kuchlingb0532092001-08-15 15:54:56 +00003466 edit out obsolete future statements from Python source code. See
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00003467 the module docstring for details.
3468
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00003469Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003470-----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00003471
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00003472- regrtest.py now knows which tests are expected to be skipped on some
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00003473 platforms, allowing to give clearer test result output. regrtest
3474 also has optional --use/-u switch to run normally disabled tests
3475 which require network access or consume significant disk resources.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00003476
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00003477- Several new tests in the standard test suite, with special thanks to
3478 Nick Mathewson.
3479
3480Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003481----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00003482
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00003483- The floor division operator // has been added as outlined in PEP
3484 238. The / operator still provides classic division (and will until
3485 Python 3.0) unless "from __future__ import division" is included, in
3486 which case the / operator will provide true division. The operator
3487 module provides truediv() and floordiv() functions. Augmented
3488 assignment variants are included, as are the equivalent overloadable
3489 methods and C API methods. See the PEP for a full discussion:
3490 <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0238.html>
3491
Tim Peters6cd6a822001-08-17 22:11:27 +00003492- Future statements are now effective in simulated interactive shells
3493 (like IDLE). This should "just work" by magic, but read Michael
3494 Hudson's "Future statements in simulated shells" PEP 264 for full
3495 details: <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0264.html>.
3496
Guido van Rossumf86ddd22001-08-17 21:21:04 +00003497- The type/class unification (PEP 252-253) was integrated into the
3498 trunk and is not so tentative any more (the exact specification of
3499 some features is still tentative). A lot of work has done on fixing
3500 bugs and adding robustness and features (performance still has to
3501 come a long way).
3502
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00003503- Warnings about a mismatch in the Python API during extension import
3504 now use the Python warning framework (which makes it possible to
3505 write filters for these warnings).
3506
Barry Warsaw9b3be7f2001-08-14 18:35:02 +00003507- A function's __dict__ (aka func_dict) will now always be a
3508 dictionary. It used to be possible to delete it or set it to None,
3509 but now both actions raise TypeErrors. It is still legal to set it
3510 to a dictionary object. Getting func.__dict__ before any attributes
3511 have been assigned now returns an empty dictionary instead of None.
3512
Guido van Rossum32aa5d22001-09-05 18:43:35 +00003513- A new command line option, -E, was added which disables the use of
3514 all environment variables, or at least those that are specifically
3515 significant to Python. Usually those have a name starting with
3516 "PYTHON". This was used to fix a problem where the tests fail if
3517 the user happens to have PYTHONHOME or PYTHONPATH pointing to an
3518 older distribution.
3519
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00003520Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003521-------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00003522
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00003523- New class Differ and new functions ndiff() and restore() in difflib.py.
3524 These package the algorithms used by the popular Tools/scripts/ndiff.py,
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00003525 for programmatic reuse.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00003526
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00003527- New function xml.sax.saxutils.quoteattr(): Quote an XML attribute
3528 value using the minimal quoting required for the value; more
3529 reliable than using xml.sax.saxutils.escape() for attribute values.
3530
3531- Readline completion support for cmd.Cmd was added.
3532
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00003533- Calling os.tempnam() or os.tmpnam() generate RuntimeWarnings.
3534
3535- Added function threading.BoundedSemaphore()
3536
3537- Added Ka-Ping Yee's cgitb.py module.
3538
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003539- The 'new' module now exposes the CO_xxx flags.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00003540
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00003541- The gc module offers the get_referents function.
3542
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00003543New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003544-------------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00003545
3546C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003547-----
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00003548
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00003549- Two new APIs PyOS_snprintf() and PyOS_vsnprintf() were added
3550 which provide a cross-platform implementations for the
3551 relatively new snprintf()/vsnprintf() C lib APIs. In contrast to
3552 the standard sprintf() and vsprintf() C lib APIs, these versions
3553 apply bounds checking on the used buffer which enhances protection
3554 against buffer overruns.
3555
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00003556- Unicode APIs now use name mangling to assure that mixing interpreters
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00003557 and extensions using different Unicode widths is rendered next to
3558 impossible. Trying to import an incompatible Unicode-aware extension
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00003559 will result in an ImportError. Unicode extensions writers must make
3560 sure to check the Unicode width compatibility in their extensions by
3561 using at least one of the mangled Unicode APIs in the extension.
3562
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00003563- Two new flags METH_NOARGS and METH_O are available in method definition
3564 tables to simplify implementation of methods with no arguments and a
3565 single untyped argument. Calling such methods is more efficient than
3566 calling corresponding METH_VARARGS methods. METH_OLDARGS is now
3567 deprecated.
3568
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00003569Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003570-------
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00003571
3572- "import module" now compiles module.pyw if it exists and nothing else
3573 relevant is found.
3574
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00003575
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00003576What's New in Python 2.2a1?
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00003577===========================
3578
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003579*Release date: 18-Jul-2001*
3580
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00003581Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003582----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003583
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00003584- TENTATIVELY, a large amount of code implementing much of what's
3585 described in PEP 252 (Making Types Look More Like Classes) and PEP
3586 253 (Subtyping Built-in Types) was added. This will be released
3587 with Python 2.2a1. Documentation will be provided separately
3588 through http://www.python.org/2.2/. The purpose of releasing this
3589 with Python 2.2a1 is to test backwards compatibility. It is
3590 possible, though not likely, that a decision is made not to release
3591 this code as part of 2.2 final, if any serious backwards
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003592 incompatibilities are found during alpha testing that cannot be
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00003593 repaired.
3594
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00003595- Generators were added; this is a new way to create an iterator (see
Tim Peters11a0d102001-07-17 18:48:00 +00003596 below) using what looks like a simple function containing one or
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00003597 more 'yield' statements. See PEP 255. Since this adds a new
3598 keyword to the language, this feature must be enabled by including a
3599 future statement: "from __future__ import generators" (see PEP 236).
3600 Generators will become a standard feature in a future release
3601 (probably 2.3). Without this future statement, 'yield' remains an
3602 ordinary identifier, but a warning is issued each time it is used.
3603 (These warnings currently don't conform to the warnings framework of
3604 PEP 230; we intend to fix this in 2.2a2.)
3605
Marc-André Lemburg12e74b32001-05-22 08:58:23 +00003606- The UTF-16 codec was modified to be more RFC compliant. It will now
3607 only remove BOM characters at the start of the string and then
3608 only if running in native mode (UTF-16-LE and -BE won't remove a
3609 leading BMO character).
3610
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00003611- Strings now have a new method .decode() to complement the already
3612 existing .encode() method. These two methods provide direct access
3613 to the corresponding decoders and encoders of the registered codecs.
3614
3615 To enhance the usability of the .encode() method, the special
3616 casing of Unicode object return values was dropped (Unicode objects
3617 were auto-magically converted to string using the default encoding).
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00003618
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00003619 Both methods will now return whatever the codec in charge of the
3620 requested encoding returns as object, e.g. Unicode codecs will
3621 return Unicode objects when decoding is requested ("äöü".decode("latin-1")
3622 will return u"äöü"). This enables codec writer to create codecs
3623 for various simple to use conversions.
3624
3625 New codecs were added to demonstrate these new features (the .encode()
3626 and .decode() columns indicate the type of the returned objects):
3627
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003628 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
3629 |Name | .encode() | .decode() | Description |
3630 +=========+===========+===========+=============================+
3631 |uu | string | string | UU codec (e.g. for email) |
3632 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
3633 |base64 | string | string | base64 codec |
3634 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
3635 |quopri | string | string | quoted-printable codec |
3636 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
3637 |zlib | string | string | zlib compression |
3638 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
3639 |hex | string | string | 2-byte hex codec |
3640 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
3641 |rot-13 | string | Unicode | ROT-13 Unicode charmap codec|
3642 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00003643
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00003644- Some operating systems now support the concept of a default Unicode
3645 encoding for file system operations. Notably, Windows supports 'mbcs'
3646 as the default. The Macintosh will also adopt this concept in the medium
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00003647 term, although the default encoding for that platform will be other than
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00003648 'mbcs'.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00003649
3650 On operating system that support non-ASCII filenames, it is common for
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00003651 functions that return filenames (such as os.listdir()) to return Python
3652 string objects pre-encoded using the default file system encoding for
3653 the platform. As this encoding is likely to be different from Python's
3654 default encoding, converting this name to a Unicode object before passing
3655 it back to the Operating System would result in a Unicode error, as Python
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003656 would attempt to use its default encoding (generally ASCII) rather than
3657 the default encoding for the file system.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00003658
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003659 In general, this change simply removes surprises when working with
3660 Unicode and the file system, making these operations work as you expect,
3661 increasing the transparency of Unicode objects in this context.
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00003662 See [????] for more details, including examples.
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00003663
Tim Peters61dff2b2001-05-08 15:43:37 +00003664- Float (and complex) literals in source code were evaluated to full
3665 precision only when running from a .py file; the same code loaded from a
3666 .pyc (or .pyo) file could suffer numeric differences starting at about the
3667 12th significant decimal digit. For example, on a machine with IEEE-754
3668 floating arithmetic,
3669
3670 x = 9007199254740992.0
3671 print long(x)
3672
3673 printed 9007199254740992 if run directly from .py, but 9007199254740000
3674 if from a compiled (.pyc or .pyo) file. This was due to marshal using
3675 str(float) instead of repr(float) when building code objects. marshal
3676 now uses repr(float) instead, which should reproduce floats to full
3677 machine precision (assuming the platform C float<->string I/O conversion
3678 functions are of good quality).
3679
3680 This may cause floating-point results to change in some cases, and
3681 usually for the better, but may also cause numerically unstable
3682 algorithms to break.
3683
Tim Peters2f228e72001-05-13 00:19:31 +00003684- The implementation of dicts suffers fewer collisions, which has speed
3685 benefits. However, the order in which dict entries appear in dict.keys(),
3686 dict.values() and dict.items() may differ from previous releases for a
3687 given dict. Nothing is defined about this order, so no program should
3688 rely on it. Nevertheless, it's easy to write test cases that rely on the
3689 order by accident, typically because of printing the str() or repr() of a
3690 dict to an "expected results" file. See Lib/test/test_support.py's new
3691 sortdict(dict) function for a simple way to display a dict in sorted
3692 order.
3693
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00003694- Many other small changes to dicts were made, resulting in faster
3695 operation along the most common code paths.
3696
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00003697- Dictionary objects now support the "in" operator: "x in dict" means
3698 the same as dict.has_key(x).
3699
Barry Warsaw51acc8d2001-06-26 20:12:50 +00003700- The update() method of dictionaries now accepts generic mapping
3701 objects. Specifically the argument object must support the .keys()
3702 and __getitem__() methods. This allows you to say, for example,
3703 {}.update(UserDict())
3704
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00003705- Iterators were added; this is a generalized way of providing values
3706 to a for loop. See PEP 234. There's a new built-in function iter()
3707 to return an iterator. There's a new protocol to get the next value
3708 from an iterator using the next() method (in Python) or the
3709 tp_iternext slot (in C). There's a new protocol to get iterators
3710 using the __iter__() method (in Python) or the tp_iter slot (in C).
3711 Iterating (i.e. a for loop) over a dictionary generates its keys.
3712 Iterating over a file generates its lines.
3713
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00003714- The following functions were generalized to work nicely with iterator
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003715 arguments::
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003716
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00003717 map(), filter(), reduce(), zip()
Tim Peters8572b4f2001-05-06 01:05:02 +00003718 list(), tuple() (PySequence_Tuple() and PySequence_Fast() in C API)
3719 max(), min()
Tim Peters1af03e92001-05-26 19:37:54 +00003720 join() method of strings
3721 extend() method of lists
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00003722 'x in y' and 'x not in y' (PySequence_Contains() in C API)
3723 operator.countOf() (PySequence_Count() in C API)
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003724 right-hand side of assignment statements with multiple targets, such as ::
Tim Petersd6d010b2001-06-21 02:49:55 +00003725 x, y, z = some_iterable_object_returning_exactly_3_values
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00003726
Tim Petersd85e1022001-05-11 21:51:48 +00003727- Accessing module attributes is significantly faster (for example,
3728 random.random or os.path or yourPythonModule.yourAttribute).
3729
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00003730- Comparing dictionary objects via == and != is faster, and now works even
3731 if the keys and values don't support comparisons other than ==.
3732
Tim Peters95bf9392001-05-10 08:32:44 +00003733- Comparing dictionaries in ways other than == and != is slower: there were
3734 insecurities in the dict comparison implementation that could cause Python
3735 to crash if the element comparison routines for the dict keys and/or
3736 values mutated the dicts. Making the code bulletproof slowed it down.
3737
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00003738- Collisions in dicts are resolved via a new approach, which can help
3739 dramatically in bad cases. For example, looking up every key in a dict
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00003740 d with d.keys() == [i << 16 for i in range(20000)] is approximately 500x
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00003741 faster now. Thanks to Christian Tismer for pointing out the cause and
3742 the nature of an effective cure (last December! better late than never).
Tim Peters15d49292001-05-27 07:39:22 +00003743
Tim Peters52e155e2001-06-16 05:42:57 +00003744- repr() is much faster for large containers (dict, list, tuple).
3745
3746
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003747Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003748-------
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003749
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00003750- The constants ascii_letters, ascii_lowercase. and ascii_uppercase
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003751 were added to the string module. These a locale-independent
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00003752 constants, unlike letters, lowercase, and uppercase. These are now
3753 use in appropriate locations in the standard library.
3754
Martin v. Löwisf0473d52001-07-18 16:17:16 +00003755- The flags used in dlopen calls can now be configured using
3756 sys.setdlopenflags and queried using sys.getdlopenflags.
3757
Guido van Rossumc7e4aca2001-07-12 11:54:37 +00003758- Fredrik Lundh's xmlrpclib is now a standard library module. This
3759 provides full client-side XML-RPC support. In addition,
3760 Demo/xmlrpc/ contains two server frameworks (one SocketServer-based,
3761 one asyncore-based). Thanks to Eric Raymond for the documentation.
3762
Guido van Rossum643d3912001-07-05 14:46:25 +00003763- The xrange() object is simplified: it no longer supports slicing,
3764 repetition, comparisons, efficient 'in' checking, the tolist()
3765 method, or the start, stop and step attributes. See PEP 260.
3766
Martin v. Löwisebf94db2001-06-06 06:25:40 +00003767- A new function fnmatch.filter to filter lists of file names was added.
3768
Barry Warsawffd674d2001-05-22 16:00:10 +00003769- calendar.py uses month and day names based on the current locale.
3770
Guido van Rossum2e0a6542001-05-15 02:14:44 +00003771- strop is now *really* obsolete (this was announced before with 1.6),
3772 and issues DeprecationWarning when used (except for the four items
3773 that are still imported into string.py).
3774
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003775- Cookie.py now sorts key+value pairs by key in output strings.
3776
3777- pprint.isrecursive(object) didn't correctly identify recursive objects.
3778 Now it does.
3779
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00003780- pprint functions now much faster for large containers (tuple, list, dict).
3781
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00003782- New 'q' and 'Q' format codes in the struct module, corresponding to C
3783 types "long long" and "unsigned long long" (on Windows, __int64). In
3784 native mode, these can be used only when the platform C compiler supports
3785 these types (when HAVE_LONG_LONG is #define'd by the Python config
3786 process), and then they inherit the sizes and alignments of the C types.
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00003787 In standard mode, 'q' and 'Q' are supported on all platforms, and are
3788 8-byte integral types.
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00003789
Guido van Rossum83213cc2001-06-12 16:48:52 +00003790- The site module installs a new built-in function 'help' that invokes
3791 pydoc.help. It must be invoked as 'help()'; when invoked as 'help',
3792 it displays a message reminding the user to use 'help()' or
3793 'help(object)'.
3794
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003795Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003796-----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003797
3798- New test_mutants.py runs dict comparisons where the key and value
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003799 comparison operators mutate the dicts randomly during comparison. This
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003800 rapidly causes Python to crash under earlier releases (not for the faint
3801 of heart: it can also cause Win9x to freeze or reboot!).
3802
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003803- New test_pprint.py verifies that pprint.isrecursive() and
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00003804 pprint.isreadable() return sensible results. Also verifies that simple
3805 cases produce correct output.
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003806
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00003807C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003808-----
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00003809
3810- Removed the unused last_is_sticky argument from the internal
3811 _PyTuple_Resize(). If this affects you, you were cheating.
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003812
3813----
3814
3815**(For information about older versions, consult the HISTORY file.)**