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Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001+++++++++++
2Python News
3+++++++++++
4
Skip Montanaro4a385832002-09-20 17:08:52 +00005(editors: check NEWS.help for information about editing NEWS using ReST.)
6
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00007What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 3?
8=================================
9
10*Release date: XX-XXX-2004*
11
12Core and builtins
13-----------------
14
Tim Petersc8854432004-08-25 02:14:08 +000015- OverflowWarning is no longer generated. PEP 237 scheduled this to
16 occur in Python 2.3, but since OverflowWarning was disabled by default,
17 nobody realized it was still being generated. On the chance that user
18 code is still using them, the Python builtin OverflowWarning, and
19 corresponding C API PyExc_OverflowWarning, will exist until Python 2.5.
20
Martin v. Löwis336e85f2004-08-19 11:31:58 +000021- Py_InitializeEx has been added.
22
Brett Cannonadd33602004-08-15 07:21:25 +000023- Fix the order of application of decorators. The proper order is bottom-up;
24 the first decorator listed is the last one called.
25
Neal Norwitzf0769532004-08-13 03:18:29 +000026- SF patch #1005778. Fix a seg fault if the list size changed while
27 calling list.index(). This could happen if a rich comparison function
28 modified the list.
29
Michael W. Hudson5e897952004-08-12 18:12:44 +000030- The ``func_name`` (a.k.a. ``__name__``) attribute of user-defined
31 functions is now writable.
32
Michael W. Hudson5523c252004-08-12 18:09:00 +000033- code_new (a.k.a new.code()) now checks its arguments sufficiently
34 carefully that passing them on to PyCode_New() won't trigger calls
35 to Py_FatalError() or PyErr_BadInternalCall(). It is still the case
36 that the returned code object might be entirely insane.
37
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +000038- Subclasses of string can no longer be interned. The semantics of
39 interning were not clear here -- a subclass could be mutable, for
40 example -- and had bugs. Explicitly interning a subclass of string
41 via intern() will raise a TypeError. Internal operations that attempt
42 to intern a string subclass will have no effect.
Jeremy Hylton4c989dd2004-08-07 19:20:05 +000043
Tim Peters83b57352004-08-08 07:24:22 +000044- Bug 1003935: xrange() could report bogus OverflowErrors. Documented
45 what xrange() intends, and repaired tests accordingly.
46
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +000047Extension modules
48-----------------
49
Martin v. Löwise064b412004-08-29 16:34:40 +000050- difflib now supports HTML side-by-side diff.
51
Martin v. Löwisdc3883f2004-08-29 15:46:35 +000052- os.urandom has been added for systems that support sources of random
53 data.
54
Tim Peters037b3ee2004-08-21 06:55:43 +000055- Patch 1012740: truncate() on a writeable cStringIO now resets the
56 position to the end of the stream. This is consistent with the original
57 StringIO module and avoids inadvertently resurrecting data that was
58 supposed to have been truncated away.
59
Dave Cole331708b2004-08-09 04:51:41 +000060- Added socket.socketpair().
61
Dave Cole3203efb2004-08-26 00:37:31 +000062- Added CurrentByteIndex, CurrentColumnNumber, CurrentLineNumber
63 members to xml.parsers.expat.XMLParser object.
64
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +000065Library
66-------
67
Martin v. Löwise064b412004-08-29 16:34:40 +000068- difflib and diff.py can now generate HTML.
69
Martin v. Löwiscae9e672004-08-25 13:04:53 +000070- bdist_rpm now includes version and release in the BuildRoot, and
71 replaces - by ``_`` in version and release.
Martin v. Löwiscf525242004-08-25 13:00:34 +000072
Martin v. Löwis9f5c0c42004-08-25 11:37:43 +000073- distutils build/build_scripts now has an -e option to specify the
74 path to the Python interpreter for installed scripts.
75
Barry Warsaw8bee7612004-08-25 02:22:30 +000076- PEP 292 classes Template and SafeTemplate are added to the string module.
77
Martin v. Löwis75b9da42004-08-18 13:57:44 +000078- tarfile now generates GNU tar files by default.
79
Martin v. Löwisdeacce22004-08-18 12:46:26 +000080- HTTPResponse has now a getheaders method.
81
Johannes Gijsbersc473c992004-08-18 12:40:31 +000082- Patch #1006219: let inspect.getsource handle '@' decorators. Thanks Simon
83 Percivall.
84
Martin v. Löwis318a12e2004-08-18 12:27:40 +000085- logging.handlers.SMTPHandler.date_time has been removed;
86 the class now uses email.Utils.formatdate to generate the time stamp.
87
Martin v. Löwisfe84d172004-08-18 11:06:45 +000088- A new function tkFont.nametofont was added to return an existing
89 font. The Font class constructor now has an additional exists argument
90 which, if True, requests to return/configure an existing font, rather
Tim Peters037b3ee2004-08-21 06:55:43 +000091 than creating a new one.
Martin v. Löwisfe84d172004-08-18 11:06:45 +000092
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +000093- Updated the decimal package's min() and max() methods to match the
94 latest revision of the General Decimal Arithmetic Specification.
95 Quiet NaNs are ignored and equal values are sorted based on sign
96 and exponent.
97
98- The decimal package's Context.copy() method now returns deep copies.
99
100- Deprecated sys.exitfunc in favor of the atexit module. The sys.exitfunc
101 attribute will be kept around for backwards compatability and atexit
102 will just become the one preferred way to do it.
103
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +0000104- patch #675551: Add get_history_item and replace_history_item functions
105 to the readline module.
106
Johannes Gijsbers34c41202004-08-14 15:19:28 +0000107- bug #989672: pdb.doc and the help messages for the help_d and help_u methods
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +0000108 of the pdb.Pdb class gives have been corrected. d(own) goes to a newer
109 frame, u(p) to an older frame, not the other way around.
Johannes Gijsbers34c41202004-08-14 15:19:28 +0000110
Johannes Gijsbers4ec40642004-08-14 15:01:53 +0000111- bug #990669: os.path.realpath() will resolve symlinks before normalizing the
112 path, as normalizing the path may alter the meaning of the path if it
113 contains symlinks.
114
Johannes Gijsbers9d134b72004-08-14 14:03:03 +0000115- bug #851123: shutil.copyfile will raise an exception when trying to copy a
116 file onto a link to itself. Thanks Gregory Ball.
117
Brett Cannonb3de2e12004-08-13 18:46:24 +0000118- bug #570300: Fix inspect to resolve file locations using os.path.realpath()
119 so as to properly list all functions in a module when the module itself is
120 reached through a symlink. Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
121
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +0000122- doctest refactoring continued. See the docs for details. As part of
123 this effort, some old and little- (never?) used features are now
124 deprecated: the Tester class, the module is_private() function, and the
125 isprivate argument to testmod(). The Tester class supplied a feeble
126 "by hand" way to combine multiple doctests, if you knew exactly what
127 you were doing. The newer doctest features for unittest integration
128 already did a better job of that, are stronger now than ever, and the
129 new DocTestRunner class is a saner foundation if you want to do it by
130 hand. The "private name" filtering gimmick was a mistake from the
131 start, and testmod() changed long ago to ignore it by default. If
132 you want to filter out tests, the new DocTestFinder class can be used
133 to return a list of all doctests, and you can filter that list by
134 any computable criteria before passing it to a DocTestRunner instance.
135
Matthias Klose2e829c02004-08-15 17:04:33 +0000136- Bug #891637, patch #1005466: fix inspect.getargs() crash on def foo((bar)).
137
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000138Tools/Demos
139-----------
140
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +0000141- IDLE's shortcut keys for windows are now case insensitive so that
142 Control-V works the same as Control-v.
143
Matthias Klose2443d4a2004-08-16 12:10:12 +0000144- pygettext.py: Generate POT-Creation-Date header in ISO format.
145
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000146Build
147-----
148
Brett Cannoncc8a4f62004-08-26 01:44:07 +0000149- bug #991962: When building with --disable-toolbox-glue on Darwin no
150 attempt to build Mac-specific modules occurs.
151
Michael W. Hudson800ba232004-08-12 18:19:17 +0000152- The --with-tsc flag to configure to enable VM profiling with the
153 processor's timestamp counter now works on PPC platforms.
154
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +0000155- patch #1006629: Define _XOPEN_SOURCE to 500 on Solaris 8/9 to match
156 GCC's definition and avoid redefinition warnings.
157
Matthias Klosea2542be2004-08-16 11:35:51 +0000158- Detect pthreads support (provided by gnu pth pthread emulation) on
159 GNU/k*BSD systems.
160
Hye-Shik Chang3ba5bfc2004-08-19 17:52:37 +0000161- bug #1005737, #1007249: Fixed several build problems and warnings
162 found on old/legacy C compilers of HP-UX, IRIX and Tru64.
163
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000164C API
165-----
166
167Documentation
168-------------
169
Neal Norwitz5268c392004-08-21 15:13:52 +0000170- patch #1005936, bug #1009373: fix index entries which contain
171 an underscore when viewed with Acrobat.
172
173- bug #990669: os.path.normpath may alter the meaning of a path if
174 it contains symbolic links. This has been documented in a comment
175 since 1992, but is now in the library reference as well.
Johannes Gijsbersb112d6e2004-08-14 14:41:32 +0000176
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000177New platforms
178-------------
179
Hye-Shik Changf64700a2004-08-18 15:13:41 +0000180- FreeBSD 6 is now supported.
181
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000182Tests
183-----
184
185Windows
186-------
187
Tim Peters79b52b72004-08-12 18:37:10 +0000188- Boosted the stack reservation for python.exe and pythonw.exe from
189 the default 1MB to 2MB. Stack frames under VC 7.1 for 2.4 are enough
190 bigger than under VC 6.0 for 2.3.4 that deeply recursive progams
191 within the default sys.getrecursionlimit() default value of 1000 were
192 able to suffer undetected C stack overflows. The standard test program
193 test_compiler was one such program. If a Python process on Windows
194 "just vanishes" without a trace, and without an error message of any
195 kind, but with an exit code of 128, undetected stack overflow may be
196 the problem.
197
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000198Mac
199---
200
201
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000202What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 2?
203=================================
204
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +0000205*Release date: 05-AUG-2004*
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000206
207Core and builtins
208-----------------
209
Raymond Hettinger52a21b82004-08-06 18:43:09 +0000210- Patch #980695: Implements efficient string concatenation for statements
211 of the form s=s+t and s+=t. This will vary across implementations.
212 Accordingly, the str.join() method is strongly preferred for performance
213 sensitive code.
214
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +0000215- PEP-0318, Function Decorators have been added to the language. These are
216 implemented using the Java-style @decorator syntax, like so:
217 @staticmethod
218 def foo(bar):
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +0000219 (The PEP needs to be updated to reflect the current state)
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +0000220
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +0000221- When importing a module M raises an exception, Python no longer leaves M
222 in sys.modules. Before 2.4a2 it did, and a subsequent import of M would
223 succeed, picking up a module object from sys.modules reflecting as much
224 of the initialization of M as completed before the exception was raised.
225 Subsequent imports got no indication that M was in a partially-
226 initialized state, and the importers could get into arbitrarily bad
227 trouble as a result (the M they got was in an unintended state,
228 arbitrarily far removed from M's author's intent). Now subsequent
229 imports of M will continue raising exceptions (but if, for example, the
230 source code for M is edited between import attempts, then perhaps later
231 attempts will succeed, or raise a different exception).
232
233 This can break existing code, but in such cases the code was probably
234 working before by accident. In the Python source, the only case of
235 breakage discovered was in a test accidentally relying on a damaged
236 module remaining in sys.modules. Cases are also known where tests
237 deliberately provoking import errors remove damaged modules from
238 sys.modules themselves, and such tests will break now if they do an
239 unconditional del sys.modules[M].
240
Marc-André Lemburgb314ce92004-07-23 16:14:57 +0000241- u'%s' % obj will now try obj.__unicode__() first and fallback to
242 obj.__str__() if no __unicode__ method can be found.
243
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +0000244- Patch #550732: Add PyArg_VaParseTupleAndKeywords(). Analogous to
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000245 PyArg_VaParse(). Both are now documented. Thanks Greg Chapman.
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +0000246
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000247- Allow string and unicode return types from .encode()/.decode()
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000248 methods on string and unicode objects. Added unicode.decode()
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000249 which was missing for no apparent reason.
250
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000251- An attempt to fix the mess that is Python's behaviour with
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000252 signal handlers and threads, complicated by readline's behaviour.
253 It's quite possible that there are still bugs here.
254
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000255- Added C macros Py_CLEAR and Py_VISIT to ease the implementation of
256 types that support garbage collection.
257
Raymond Hettinger76d962d2004-07-16 12:16:48 +0000258- Compiler now treats None as a constant.
259
Neil Schemenauer3a313e32004-07-19 16:29:17 +0000260- The type of values returned by __int__, __float__, __long__,
261 __oct__, and __hex__ are now checked. Returning an invalid type
262 will cause a TypeError to be raised. This matches the behavior of
263 Jython.
264
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +0000265- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in locale module.
266
Hye-Shik Changb5047fd2004-08-04 06:33:51 +0000267- Added a workaround for proper string operations in BSDs. str.split
268 and str.is* methods can now work correctly with UTF-8 locales.
269
Hye-Shik Changc81c6952004-08-04 17:40:38 +0000270- Bug #989185: unicode.iswide() and unicode.width() is dropped and
271 the East Asian Width support is moved to unicodedata extension
272 module.
Hye-Shik Change9ddfbb2004-08-04 07:38:35 +0000273
Hye-Shik Chang7df44b32004-08-04 17:36:41 +0000274- Patch #941229: The source code encoding in interactive mode
275 now refers sys.stdin.encoding not just ISO-8859-1 anymore. This
276 allows for non-latin-1 users to write unicode strings directly.
277
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000278Extension modules
279-----------------
280
Martin v. Löwis544f1192004-07-27 05:22:33 +0000281- cpickle now supports the same keyword arguments as pickle.
282
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000283Library
284-------
285
Marc-André Lemburgc759f072004-08-05 12:43:30 +0000286- Added new codecs and aliases for ISO_8859-11, ISO_8859-16 and
287 TIS-620
288
Tim Peters8485b562004-08-04 18:46:34 +0000289- Thanks to Edward Loper, doctest has been massively refactored, and
290 many new features were added. Full docs will appear later. For now
291 the doctest module comments and new test cases give good coverage.
292 The refactoring provides many hook points for customizing behavior
293 (such as how to report errors, and how to compare expected to actual
294 output). New features include a <BLANKLINE> marker for expected
295 output containing blank lines, options to produce unified or context
296 diffs when actual output doesn't match expectations, an option to
297 normalize whitespace before comparing, and an option to use an
298 ellipsis to signify "don't care" regions of output.
299
Martin v. Löwis1fa649f2004-08-03 18:45:31 +0000300- Tkinter now supports the wish -sync and -use options.
301
Fred Drakef901abd2004-08-03 17:58:55 +0000302- The following methods in time support passing of None: ctime(), gmtime(),
303 and localtime(). If None is provided, the current time is used (the
304 same as when the argument is omitted).
305 [SF bug 658254, patch 663482]
306
Martin v. Löwis9513e342004-08-03 14:36:32 +0000307- nntplib does now allow to ignore a .netrc file.
308
Martin v. Löwis65a79752004-08-03 12:59:55 +0000309- urllib2 now recognizes Basic authentication even if other authentication
310 schemes are offered.
311
Neal Norwitz0e67fd42004-08-01 22:48:06 +0000312- Bug #1001053. wave.open() now accepts unicode filenames.
313
Tim Peters5cfb05e2004-07-27 21:02:02 +0000314- gzip.GzipFile has a new fileno() method, to retrieve the handle of the
315 underlying file object (provided it has a fileno() method). This is
316 needed if you want to use os.fsync() on a GzipFile.
317
Martin v. Löwis7b9190b2004-07-27 05:07:19 +0000318- imaplib has two new methods: deleteacl and myrights.
319
Martin v. Löwiscc0f9322004-07-26 12:40:50 +0000320- nntplib has two new methods: description and descriptions. They
321 use a more RFC-compliant way of getting a newsgroup description.
322
Brett Cannon8b3d92a2004-07-21 02:21:58 +0000323- Bug #993394. Fix a possible red herring of KeyError in 'threading' being
324 raised during interpreter shutdown from a registered function with atexit
325 when dummy_threading is being used.
326
Neal Norwitza4f651a2004-07-20 22:07:44 +0000327- Bug #857297/Patch #916874. Fix an error when extracting a hard link
328 from a tarfile.
329
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +0000330- Patch #846659. Fix an error in tarfile.py when using
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +0000331 GNU longname/longlink creation.
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +0000332
Tim Peters90ee7eb2004-07-18 23:58:17 +0000333- The obsolete FCNTL.py has been deleted. The builtin fcntl module
334 has been available (on platforms that support fcntl) since Python
335 1.5a3, and all FCNTL.py did is export fcntl's names, after generating
336 a deprecation warning telling you to use fcntl directly.
337
Hye-Shik Chang2bb146f2004-07-18 03:06:29 +0000338- Several new unicode codecs are added: big5hkscs, euc_jis_2004,
339 iso2022_jp_2004, shift_jis_2004.
340
Tim Peters5af0e412004-07-12 00:45:14 +0000341- Bug #788520. Queue.{get, get_nowait, put, put_nowait} have new
342 implementations, exploiting Conditions (which didn't exist at the time
343 Queue was introduced). A minor semantic change is that the Full and
344 Empty exceptions raised by non-blocking calls now occur only if the
345 queue truly was full or empty at the instant the queue was checked (of
346 course the Queue may no longer be full or empty by the time a calling
347 thread sees those exceptions, though). Before, the exceptions could
348 also be raised if it was "merely inconvenient" for the implementation
349 to determine the true state of the Queue (because the Queue was locked
350 by some other method in progress).
351
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000352- Bugs #979794 and #980117: difflib.get_grouped_opcodes() now handles the
353 case of comparing two empty lists. This affected both context_diff() and
354 unified_diff(),
Brett Cannond2c5b4b2004-07-10 23:54:07 +0000355
Brett Cannone6f8a892004-07-10 23:14:30 +0000356- Bug #980938: smtplib now prints debug output to sys.stderr.
357
Brett Cannonf50299c2004-07-10 22:55:15 +0000358- Bug #930024: posixpath.realpath() now handles infinite loops in symlinks by
359 returning the last point in the path that was not part of any loop. Thanks
360 AM Kuchling.
361
Brett Cannonbdc36272004-07-10 20:42:22 +0000362- Bug #980327: ntpath not handles compressing erroneous slashes between the
363 drive letter and the rest of the path. Also clearly handles UNC addresses now
364 as well. Thanks Paul Moore.
365
Brett Cannone6751182004-07-10 19:13:42 +0000366- bug #679953: zipfile.py should now work for files over 2 GB. The packed data
367 for file sizes (compressed and uncompressed) was being stored as signed
368 instead of unsigned.
369
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000370- decimal.py now only uses signals in the IBM spec. The other conditions are
Raymond Hettinger5aa478b2004-07-09 10:02:53 +0000371 no longer part of the public API.
372
Marc-André Lemburg88fcca62004-07-10 16:16:06 +0000373- codecs module now has two new generic APIs: encode() and decode()
374 which don't restrict the return types (unlike the unicode and
375 string methods of the same name).
376
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000377- Non-blocking SSL sockets work again; they were broken in Python 2.3.
Andrew M. Kuchling79d7e922004-07-10 21:21:55 +0000378 SF patch 945642.
379
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000380- doctest unittest integration improvements:
381
382 o Improved the unitest test output for doctest-based unit tests
383
384 o Can now pass setUp and tearDown functions when creating
385 DocTestSuites.
386
387- The threading module has a new class, local, for creating objects
388 that provide thread-local data.
389
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +0000390- Bug #990307: when keep_empty_values is True, cgi.parse_qsl()
391 no longer returns spurious empty fields.
392
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +0000393- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in gettext module.
394
395- Introduced in gettext module the l*gettext() family of functions,
396 which return translation strings encoded in the preferred encoding,
397 as informed by locale module's getpreferredencoding().
398
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +0000399- optparse module (and tests) upgraded to Optik 1.5a1. Changes:
400
401 - Add expansion of default values in help text: the string
402 "%default" in an option's help string is expanded to str() of
403 that option's default value, or "none" if no default value.
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +0000404
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +0000405 - Bug #955889: option default values that happen to be strings are
406 now processed in the same way as values from the command line; this
407 allows generation of nicer help when using custom types. Can
408 be disabled with parser.set_process_default_values(False).
409
410 - Bug #960515: don't crash when generating help for callback
411 options that specify 'type', but not 'dest' or 'metavar'.
412
413 - Feature #815264: change the default help format for short options
414 that take an argument from e.g. "-oARG" to "-o ARG"; add
415 set_short_opt_delimiter() and set_long_opt_delimiter() methods to
416 HelpFormatter to allow (slight) customization of the formatting.
417
418 - Patch #736940: internationalize Optik: all built-in user-
419 targeted literal strings are passed through gettext.gettext(). (If
420 you want translations (.po files), they're not included with Python
421 -- you'll find them in the Optik source distribution from
422 http://optik.sourceforge.net/ .)
423
424 - Bug #878453: respect $COLUMNS environment variable for
425 wrapping help output.
426
427 - Feature #988122: expand "%prog" in the 'description' passed
428 to OptionParser, just like in the 'usage' and 'version' strings.
429 (This is *not* done in the 'description' passed to OptionGroup.)
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +0000430
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000431C API
432-----
433
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +0000434- PyImport_ExecCodeModule() and PyImport_ExecCodeModuleEx(): if an
435 error occurs while loading the module, these now delete the module's
436 entry from sys.modules. All ways of loading modules eventually call
437 one of these, so this is an error-case change in semantics for all
438 ways of loading modules. In rare cases, a module loader may wish
439 to keep a module object in sys.modules despite that the module's
440 code cannot be executed. In such cases, the module loader must
441 arrange to reinsert the name and module object in sys.modules.
442 PyImport_ReloadModule() has been changed to reinsert the original
443 module object into sys.modules if the module reload fails, so that
444 its visible semantics have not changed.
445
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000446- A large pile of datetime field-extraction macros is now documented,
447 thanks to Anthony Tuininga (patch #986010).
448
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000449Documentation
450-------------
451
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +0000452- Improved the tutorial on creating types in C.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000453
454 - point out the importance of reassigning data members before
Andrew M. Kuchling78d375f2004-08-07 14:00:39 +0000455 assigning their values
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000456
Andrew M. Kuchling28025ec2004-08-07 13:59:22 +0000457 - correct my misconception about return values from visitprocs. Sigh.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000458
459 - mention the labor saving Py_VISIT and Py_CLEAR macros.
460
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +0000461- Major rewrite of the math module docs, to address common confusions.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000462
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000463Tests
464-----
465
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +0000466- The test data files for the decimal test suite are now installed on
Anthony Baxterfd4984d2004-07-12 09:33:39 +0000467 platforms that use the Makefile.
468
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +0000469- SF patch 995225: The test file testtar.tar accidentally contained
470 CVS keywords (like $Id$), which could cause spurious failures in
471 test_tarfile.py depending on how the test file was checked out.
472
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000473
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000474What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 1?
475=================================
476
Anthony Baxter3210b362004-07-08 05:59:43 +0000477*Release date: 08-JUL-2004*
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000478
479Core and builtins
480-----------------
481
Fred Drake0a4dd392004-07-02 18:57:45 +0000482- weakref.ref is now the type object also known as
483 weakref.ReferenceType; it can be subclassed like any other new-style
484 class. There's less per-entry overhead in WeakValueDictionary
485 objects now (one object instead of three).
486
Thomas Heller04c673b2004-07-02 08:56:20 +0000487- Bug #951851: Python crashed when reading import table of certain
488 Windows DLLs.
489
Raymond Hettinger66bd2332004-08-02 08:30:07 +0000490- Bug #215126. The locals argument to eval(), execfile(), and exec now
491 accept any mapping type.
Raymond Hettinger214b1c32004-07-02 06:41:07 +0000492
Martin v. Löwisef82d2f2004-06-27 16:51:46 +0000493- marshal now shares interned strings. This change introduces
494 a new .pyc magic.
495
Anthony Baxter3ecdb252004-06-11 14:41:18 +0000496- Bug #966623. classes created with type() in an exec(, {}) don't
497 have a __module__, but code in typeobject assumed it would always
498 be there.
499
Martin v. Löwis737ea822004-06-08 18:52:54 +0000500- Python no longer relies on the LC_NUMERIC locale setting to be
501 the "C" locale; as a result, it no longer tries to prevent changing
502 the LC_NUMERIC category.
503
Tim Peters604c0132004-06-07 23:04:33 +0000504- Bug #952807: Unpickling pickled instances of subclasses of
505 datetime.date, datetime.datetime and datetime.time could yield insane
506 objects. Thanks to Jiwon Seo for a fix.
507
Thomas Heller90a764c2004-06-07 15:12:44 +0000508- Bug #845802: Python crashes when __init__.py is a directory.
509
Hye-Shik Changbc555e32004-06-03 11:10:58 +0000510- Unicode objects received two new methods: iswide() and width().
511 These query East Asian width information, as specified in Unicode
512 TR11.
Hye-Shik Chang974ed7c2004-06-02 16:49:17 +0000513
Raymond Hettinger41bd0222004-06-01 06:36:24 +0000514- Improved the tuple hashing algorithm to give fewer collisions in
515 common cases. Fixes bug #942952.
516
Raymond Hettinger354433a2004-05-19 08:20:33 +0000517- Implemented generator expressions (PEP 289). Coded by Jiwon Seo.
518
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +0000519- Enabled the profiling of C extension functions (and builtins) - check
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000520 new documentation and modified profile and bdb modules for more details
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +0000521
Nicholas Bastinabce8a62004-03-21 20:24:07 +0000522- Set file.name to the object passed to open (instead of a new string)
523
Nicholas Bastina7604bf2004-03-21 18:37:23 +0000524- Moved tracebackobject into traceback.h and renamed to PyTracebackObject
525
Raymond Hettingerff5bc502004-03-21 15:12:00 +0000526- Optimized the byte coding for multiple assignments like "a,b=b,a" and
527 "a,b,c=1,2,3". Improves their speed by 25% to 30%.
528
Brett Cannon4f653312004-03-20 22:52:14 +0000529- Limit the nested depth of a tuple for the second argument to isinstance()
530 and issubclass() to the recursion limit of the interpreter.
531 Fixes bug #858016 .
532
Raymond Hettingerade08ea2004-03-18 09:48:12 +0000533- Optimized dict iterators, creating separate types for each
534 and having them reveal their length. Also optimized the
535 methods: keys(), values(), and items().
536
Raymond Hettingerdd80f762004-03-07 07:31:06 +0000537- Implemented a newcode opcode, LIST_APPEND, that simplifies
538 the generated bytecode for list comprehensions and further
539 improves their performance (about 35%).
540
Michael W. Hudsond3b33b52004-02-19 19:35:22 +0000541- Implemented rich comparisons for floats, which seems to make
542 comparisons involving NaNs somewhat less surprising when the
543 underlying C compiler actually implements C99 semantics.
544
Raymond Hettingerfa7b9d82004-02-15 04:06:39 +0000545- Optimized list.extend() to save memory and no longer create
546 intermediate sequences. Also, extend() now pre-allocates the
547 needed memory whenever the length of the iterable is known in
548 advance -- this halves the time to extend the list.
549
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +0000550- Optimized list resize operations to make fewer calls to the system
551 realloc(). Significantly speeds up list appends, list pops,
552 list comprehensions, and the list contructor (when the input iterable
553 length is not known).
554
555- Changed the internal list over-allocation scheme. For larger lists,
556 overallocation ranged between 3% and 25%. Now, it is a constant 12%.
Raymond Hettingerab517d22004-02-14 18:34:46 +0000557 For smaller lists (n<8), overallocation was upto eight elements. Now,
558 the overallocation is no more than three elements -- this improves space
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +0000559 utilization for applications that have large numbers of small lists.
560
Raymond Hettinger0468e412004-05-05 05:37:53 +0000561- Most list bodies now get re-used rather than freed. Speeds up list
562 instantiation and deletion by saving calls to malloc() and free().
563
Raymond Hettinger31017ae2004-03-04 08:25:44 +0000564- The dict.update() method now accepts all the same argument forms
565 as the dict() constructor. This now includes item lists and/or
566 keyword arguments.
567
Michael W. Hudsonecfeb7f2004-02-12 15:28:27 +0000568- Support for arbitrary objects supporting the read-only buffer
569 interface as the co_code field of code objects (something that was
570 only possible to create from C code) has been removed.
571
Fred Drake228765b2004-02-06 04:15:22 +0000572- Made omitted callback and None equivalent for weakref.ref() and
573 weakref.proxy(); the None case wasn't handled correctly in all
574 cases.
575
576- Fixed problem where PyWeakref_NewRef() and PyWeakref_NewProxy()
577 assumed that initial existing entries in an object's weakref list
578 would not be removed while allocating a new weakref object. Since
579 GC could be invoked at that time, however, that assumption was
580 invalid. In a truly obscure case of GC being triggered during
581 creation for a new weakref object for an referent which already
582 has a weakref without a callback which is only referenced from
583 cyclic trash, a memory error can occur. This consistently created a
584 segfault in a debug build, but provided less predictable behavior in
585 a release build.
586
Hye-Shik Changff83c2b2004-02-02 13:39:01 +0000587- input() builtin function now respects compiler flags such as
588 __future__ statements. SF patch 876178.
589
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +0000590- Removed PendingDeprecationWarning from apply(). apply() remains
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +0000591 deprecated, but the nuisance warning will not be issued.
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +0000592
Tim Peters1d7323e2003-12-01 21:35:27 +0000593- At Python shutdown time (Py_Finalize()), 2.3 called cyclic garbage
594 collection twice, both before and after tearing down modules. The
595 call after tearing down modules has been disabled, because too much
596 of Python has been torn down then for __del__ methods and weakref
597 callbacks to execute sanely. The most common symptom was a sequence
598 of uninformative messages on stderr when Python shut down, produced
599 by threads trying to raise exceptions, but unable to report the nature
600 of their problems because too much of the sys module had already been
601 destroyed.
602
Guido van Rossum6c9e1302003-11-29 23:52:13 +0000603- Removed FutureWarnings related to hex/oct literals and conversions
604 and left shifts. (Thanks to Kalle Svensson for SF patch 849227.)
605 This addresses most of the remaining semantic changes promised by
606 PEP 237, except for repr() of a long, which still shows the trailing
607 'L'. The PEP appears to promise warnings for operations that
608 changed semantics compared to Python 2.3, but this is not
609 implemented; we've suffered through enough warnings related to
610 hex/oct literals and I think it's best to be silent now.
611
Raymond Hettinger4f8f9762003-11-26 08:21:35 +0000612- For str and unicode objects, the ljust(), center(), and rjust()
613 methods now accept an optional argument specifying a fill
614 character other than a space.
615
Guido van Rossumbaf0f8f2003-11-22 23:55:50 +0000616- When method objects have an attribute that can be satisfied either
617 by the function object or by the method object, the function
618 object's attribute usually wins. Christian Tismer pointed out that
619 that this is really a mistake, because this only happens for special
620 methods (like __reduce__) where the method object's version is
621 really more appropriate than the function's attribute. So from now
622 on, all method attributes will have precedence over function
623 attributes with the same name.
624
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +0000625- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 839548: if a weakref with a callback,
626 its callback, and its weakly referenced object, all became part of
627 cyclic garbage during a single run of garbage collection, the order
628 in which they were torn down was unpredictable. It was possible for
629 the callback to see partially-torn-down objects, leading to immediate
630 segfaults, or, if the callback resurrected garbage objects, to
631 resurrect insane objects that caused segfaults (or other surprises)
632 later. In one sense this wasn't surprising, because Python's cyclic gc
633 had no knowledge of Python's weakref objects. It does now. When
634 weakrefs with callbacks become part of cyclic garbage now, those
635 weakrefs are cleared first. The callbacks don't trigger then,
636 preventing the problems. If you need callbacks to trigger, then just
637 as when cyclic gc is not involved, you need to write your code so
638 that weakref objects outlive the objects they weakly reference.
Raymond Hettingera690a992003-11-16 16:17:49 +0000639
Tim Petersadd09b42003-11-12 20:43:28 +0000640- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 840829: if cyclic garbage collection
641 happened to occur during a weakref callback for a new-style class
642 instance, subtle memory corruption was the result (in a release build;
643 in a debug build, a segfault occurred reliably very soon after).
644 This has been repaired.
645
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +0000646- Compiler flags set in PYTHONSTARTUP are now active in __main__.
647
648- Added two builtin types, set() and frozenset().
649
Raymond Hettinger85c20a42003-11-06 14:06:48 +0000650- Added a reversed() builtin function that returns a reverse iterator
651 over a sequence.
652
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +0000653- Added a sorted() builtin function that returns a new sorted list
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +0000654 from any iterable.
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +0000655
Martin v. Löwis01a74b22003-10-19 18:30:01 +0000656- CObjects are now mutable (on the C level) through PyCObject_SetVoidPtr.
657
Raymond Hettinger42b1ba32003-10-16 03:41:09 +0000658- list.sort() now supports three keyword arguments: cmp, key, and reverse.
659 The key argument can be a function of one argument that extracts a
660 comparison key from the original record: mylist.sort(key=str.lower).
661 The reverse argument is a boolean value and if True will change the
662 sort order as if the comparison arguments were reversed. In addition,
663 the documentation has been amended to provide a guarantee that all sorts
664 starting with Py2.3 are guaranteed to be stable (the relative order of
665 records with equal keys is unchanged).
666
Marc-André Lemburgd7160f82003-09-22 11:14:40 +0000667- Added test whether wchar_t is signed or not. A signed wchar_t is not
668 usable as internal unicode type base for Py_UNICODE since the
669 unicode implementation assumes an unsigned type.
670
Jeremy Hyltond8082792003-09-16 19:41:39 +0000671- Fixed a bug in the cache of length-one Unicode strings that could
672 lead to a seg fault. The specific problem occurred when an earlier,
673 non-fatal error left an uninitialized Unicode object in the
674 freelist.
675
Raymond Hettinger9bfe5332003-08-27 04:55:52 +0000676- The % formatting operator now supports '%F' which is equivalent to
677 '%f'. This has always been documented but never implemented.
678
Tim Peters465fa3d2003-08-15 01:16:37 +0000679- complex(obj) could leak a little memory if obj wasn't a string or
680 number.
681
Raymond Hettingereaef6152003-08-02 07:42:57 +0000682- zip() with no arguments now returns an empty list instead of raising
683 a TypeError exception.
684
Guido van Rossum02c58f82003-10-08 21:08:29 +0000685- obj.__contains__() now returns True/False instead of 1/0. SF patch
686 820195.
687
Armin Rigo2b3eb402003-10-28 12:05:48 +0000688- Python no longer tries to be smart about recursive comparisons.
689 When comparing containers with cyclic references to themselves it
690 will now just hit the recursion limit. See SF patch 825639.
691
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000692- str and unicode builtin types now have an rsplit() method that is
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +0000693 same as split() except that it scans the string from the end
694 working towards the beginning. See SF feature request 801847.
Hye-Shik Chang060ebed2003-12-15 18:51:19 +0000695
Jim Fulton8a1a5942004-02-08 04:21:26 +0000696- Fixed a bug in object.__reduce_ex__ when using protocol 2. Failure
697 to clear the error when attempts to get the __getstate__ attribute
698 fail caused intermittent errors and odd behavior.
699
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +0000700- buffer objects based on other objects no longer cache a pointer to
701 the data and the data length. Instead, the appropriate tp_as_buffer
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +0000702 method is called as necessary.
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +0000703
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +0000704- fixed: if a file is opened with an explicit buffer size >= 1, repeated
Andrew MacIntyre4e10ed32004-04-04 07:01:35 +0000705 close() calls would attempt to free() the buffer already free()ed on
706 the first call.
707
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +0000708
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000709Extension modules
710-----------------
711
Barry Warsaw11b91a02004-06-28 00:50:43 +0000712- Added socket.getservbyport(), and make the second argument in
713 getservbyname() and getservbyport() optional.
714
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +0000715- time module code that deals with input POSIX timestamps will now raise
716 ValueError if more than a second is lost in precision when the
717 timestamp is cast to the platform C time_t type. There's no chance
718 that the platform will do anything sensible with the result in such
719 cases. This includes ctime(), localtime() and gmtime(). Assorted
720 fromtimestamp() and utcfromtimestamp() methods in the datetime module
721 were also protected. Closes bugs #919012 and 975996.
Brett Cannonb46ed712004-06-19 20:50:47 +0000722
Martin v. Löwis77ca6c42004-06-03 12:47:26 +0000723- fcntl.ioctl now warns if the mutate flag is not specified.
724
Martin v. Löwisd8948722004-06-02 09:57:56 +0000725- nt now properly allows to refer to UNC roots, e.g. in nt.stat().
726
Raymond Hettinger027bb632004-05-31 03:09:25 +0000727- the weakref module now supports additional objects: array.array,
728 sre.pattern_objects, file objects, and sockets.
729
Raymond Hettingere2eda602004-04-04 08:51:41 +0000730- operator.isMappingType() and operator.isSequenceType() now give
731 fewer false positives.
732
Brett Cannon06c34792004-03-23 23:16:54 +0000733- socket.sslerror is now a subclass of socket.error . Also added
734 socket.error to the socket module's C API.
735
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000736- Bug #920575: A problem where the _locale module segfaults on
Hye-Shik Changc3a87b82004-03-21 19:34:30 +0000737 nl_langinfo(ERA) caused by GNU libc's illegal NULL return is fixed.
738
Raymond Hettinger6e2ee862004-03-14 04:37:50 +0000739- array objects now support the copy module. Also, their resizing
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000740 scheme has been updated to match that used for list objects. This improves
Raymond Hettinger49f9bd12004-03-14 05:43:59 +0000741 the performance (speed and memory usage) of append() operations.
Raymond Hettinger6ab78cd2004-08-29 07:50:43 +0000742 Also, array.array() and array.extend() now accept any iterable argument
743 for repeated appends without needing to create another temporary array.
Raymond Hettinger3aa82c02004-03-13 18:18:51 +0000744
Raymond Hettinger3e47f652004-03-08 18:22:35 +0000745- cStringIO.writelines() now accepts any iterable argument and writes
746 the lines one at a time rather than joining them and writing once.
747 Made a parallel change to StringIO.writelines(). Saves memory and
748 makes suitable for use with generator expressions.
749
Brett Cannond1080a32004-03-02 04:38:10 +0000750- time.strftime() now checks that the values in its time tuple argument
751 are within the proper boundaries to prevent possible crashes from the
752 platform's C library implementation of strftime(). Can possibly
753 break code that uses values outside the range that didn't cause
754 problems previously (such as sitting day of year to 0). Fixes bug
755 #897625.
756
Martin v. Löwis12af0482004-01-31 12:34:17 +0000757- The socket module now supports Bluetooth sockets, if the
758 system has <bluetooth/bluetooth.h>
759
Raymond Hettinger756b3f32004-01-29 06:37:52 +0000760- Added a collections module containing a new datatype, deque(),
761 offering high-performance, thread-safe, memory friendly appends
762 and pops on either side of the deque.
763
764- Several modules now take advantage of collections.deque() for
765 improved performance: Queue, mutex, shlex, threading, and pydoc.
766
Raymond Hettinger166958b2003-12-01 13:18:39 +0000767- The operator module has two new functions, attrgetter() and
768 itemgetter() which are useful for creating fast data extractor
769 functions for map(), list.sort(), itertools.groupby(), and
770 other functions that expect a function argument.
771
Martin v. Löwis94681fc2003-11-27 19:40:22 +0000772- socket.SHUT_{RD,WR,RDWR} was added.
773
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +0000774- os.getsid was added.
775
Guido van Rossum16b9fa82003-10-23 23:54:57 +0000776- The pwd module incorrectly advertised its struct type as
777 struct_pwent; this has been renamed to struct_passwd. (The old name
778 is still supported for backwards compatibility.)
779
Fred Drakede050322003-10-21 15:41:59 +0000780- The xml.parsers.expat module now provides Expat 1.95.7.
781
Martin v. Löwis3bbd6542003-10-03 13:57:37 +0000782- socket.IPPROTO_IPV6 was added.
783
Martin v. Löwise7a97962003-09-20 16:08:33 +0000784- readline.clear_history was added.
785
Brett Cannon62dba4c2003-09-10 19:37:42 +0000786- select.select() now accepts sequences for its first three arguments.
787
Raymond Hettinger5475f232003-08-08 12:20:03 +0000788- cStringIO now supports the f.closed attribute.
789
Anthony Baxter83f52912003-08-05 06:33:56 +0000790- The signal module now exposes SIGRTMIN and SIGRTMAX (if available).
791
Andrew M. Kuchling69f31eb2003-08-13 23:11:04 +0000792- curses module now supports use_default_colors(). [patch #739124]
793
Anthony Baxter5c68ef02003-10-04 08:04:04 +0000794- Bug #811028: ncurses.h breakage on FreeBSD/MacOS X
795
796- Bug #814613: INET_ADDRSTRLEN fix needed for all compilers on SGI
797
Gustavo Niemeyerad3fc442003-10-17 22:13:16 +0000798- Implemented non-recursive SRE matching scheme (#757624).
799
800- Implemented (?(id/name)yes|no) support in SRE (#572936).
801
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +0000802- random.seed() with no arguments or None uses time.time() as a default
803 seed. Modified to match Py2.2 behavior and use fractional seconds so
804 that successive runs are more likely to produce different sequences.
805
806- random.Random has a new method, getrandbits(k), which returns an int
807 with k random bits. This method is now an optional part of the API
808 for user defined generators. Any generator that defines genrandbits()
809 can now use randrange() for ranges with a length >= 2**53. Formerly,
810 randrange would return only even numbers for ranges that large (see
811 SF bug #812202). Generators that do not define genrandbits() now
812 issue a warning when randrange() is called with a range that large.
813
Raymond Hettingerd25c1c62003-12-06 16:23:06 +0000814- itertools has a new function, groupby() for aggregating iterables
815 into groups sharing the same key (as determined by a key function).
816 It offers some of functionality of SQL's groupby keyword and of
817 the Unix uniq filter.
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +0000818
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000819- itertools now has a new tee() function which produces two independent
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +0000820 iterators from a single iterable.
821
822- itertools.izip() with no arguments now returns an empty iterator instead
823 of raising a TypeError exception.
824
Gustavo Niemeyera6e436e2004-02-14 00:02:45 +0000825- Fixed #853061: allow BZ2Compressor.compress() to receive an empty string
826 as parameter.
827
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000828Library
829-------
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000830
Guido van Rossum5124b4a2004-07-06 17:52:32 +0000831- Bug #981530: Fix UnboundLocalError in shutil.rmtree(). This affects
832 the documented behavior: the function passed to the onerror()
833 handler can now also be os.listdir.
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000834
Brett Cannon41d13f62004-07-03 03:54:54 +0000835- Bug #754449: threading.Thread objects no longer mask exceptions raised during
836 interpreter shutdown with another exception from attempting to handle the
837 original exception.
Brett Cannoncc4e9352004-07-03 03:52:35 +0000838
Raymond Hettinger21f9fce2004-07-10 16:11:03 +0000839- Added decimal.py per PEP 327.
Raymond Hettinger7c85fa42004-07-01 11:01:35 +0000840
Brett Cannon46d4ff22004-06-29 04:08:23 +0000841- Bug #981299: rsync is now a recognized protocol in urlparse that uses a
842 "netloc" portion of a URL.
Brett Cannonfbac2942004-06-29 04:02:40 +0000843
Brett Cannon1c3fa182004-06-19 21:11:35 +0000844- Bug #919012: shutil.move() will not try to move a directory into itself.
845 Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
846
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +0000847- Bug #934282: pydoc.stripid() is now case-insensitive. Thanks Robin Becker.
848
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +0000849- Bug #823209: cmath.log() now takes an optional base argument so that its
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +0000850 API matches math.log().
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +0000851
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +0000852- Bug #957381: distutils bdist_rpm no longer fails on recent RPM versions
853 that generate a *-debuginfo.rpm.
854
Martin v. Löwisbdec50f2004-06-08 08:29:33 +0000855- os.path.devnull has been added for all supported platforms.
856
Hye-Shik Chang2400e932004-06-05 18:37:53 +0000857- Fixed #877165: distutils now picks the right C++ compiler command
858 on cygwin and mingw32.
859
Hye-Shik Chang39aef792004-06-05 13:30:56 +0000860- urllib.urlopen().readline() now handles HTTP/0.9 correctly.
861
Brett Cannon0096e262004-06-05 01:12:51 +0000862- refactored site.py into functions. Also wrote regression tests for the
863 module.
864
Fred Drakeec6229e2004-06-25 23:02:59 +0000865- The distutils install command now supports the --home option and
866 installation scheme for all platforms.
867
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +0000868- asyncore.loop now has a repeat count parameter that defaults to
Michael W. Hudson7db865a2004-06-30 09:09:38 +0000869 looping forever.
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +0000870
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +0000871- The distutils sdist command now ignores all .svn directories, in
872 addition to CVS and RCS directories. .svn directories hold
873 administrative files for the Subversion source control system.
874
Martin v. Löwis2a6ba902004-05-31 18:22:40 +0000875- Added a new module: cookielib. Automatic cookie handling for HTTP
876 clients. Also, support for cookielib has been added to urllib2, so
877 urllib2.urlopen() can transparently handle cookies.
878
Raymond Hettinger059e1702004-05-19 19:56:44 +0000879- stringprep.py now uses built-in set() instead of sets.Set().
880
Thomas Heller2e7c8322004-05-11 15:10:59 +0000881- Bug #876278: Unbounded recursion in modulefinder
882
Martin v. Löwis456ab1d2004-05-06 01:54:36 +0000883- Bug #780300: Swap public and system ID in LexicalHandler.startDTD.
884 Applications relying on the wrong order need to be corrected.
885
Hye-Shik Chang0f5bf1e2004-04-20 21:11:11 +0000886- Bug #926075: Fixed a bug that returns a wrong pattern object
887 for a string or unicode object in sre.compile() when a different
888 type pattern with the same value exists.
889
Skip Montanarod0c0c412004-04-07 16:03:02 +0000890- Added countcallers arg to trace.Trace class (--trackcalls command line arg
891 when run from the command prompt).
892
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +0000893- Fixed a caching bug in platform.platform() where the argument of 'terse' was
894 not taken into consideration when caching value.
895
Nicholas Bastin824b1b22004-03-23 18:44:39 +0000896- Added two new command-line arguments for profile (output file and
897 default sort).
898
Nicholas Bastin1eb4bfc2004-03-22 20:12:56 +0000899- Added global runctx function to profile module
900
Martin v. Löwis347c30d2004-03-21 15:29:41 +0000901- Add hlist missing entryconfigure and entrycget methods.
902
Hye-Shik Chang4a7ad1a2004-03-19 08:11:56 +0000903- The ptcp154 codec was added for Kazakh character set support.
904
Martin v. Löwisa79449e2004-02-15 21:19:18 +0000905- Support non-anonymous ftp URLs in urllib2.
906
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000907- The encodings package will now apply codec name aliases
Marc-André Lemburg57cb68f2004-01-20 18:24:34 +0000908 first before starting to try the import of the codec module.
909 This simplifies overriding built-in codecs with external
910 packages, e.g. the included CJK codecs with the JapaneseCodecs
911 package, by adjusting the aliases dictionary in encodings.aliases
912 accordingly.
913
Barry Warsaw30ff12f2004-01-04 01:13:43 +0000914- base64 now supports RFC 3548 Base16, Base32, and Base64 encoding and
915 decoding standards.
916
Jeremy Hylton37c5f2a2003-12-14 05:29:45 +0000917- urllib2 now supports processors. A processor is a handler that
918 implements an xxx_request or xxx_response method. These methods are
919 called for all requests.
920
Thomas Hellerc7501d52003-12-05 20:28:07 +0000921- distutils compilers now compile source files in the same order as
922 they are passed to the compiler.
923
Walter Dörwaldc8de4582003-12-03 20:26:05 +0000924- pprint.pprint() and pprint.pformat() now have additional parameters
925 indent, width and depth.
926
Walter Dörwald7a7ede52003-12-03 20:15:28 +0000927- Patch #750542: pprint now will pretty print subclasses of list, tuple
928 and dict too, as long as they don't overwrite __repr__().
929
Thomas Hellerb3105912003-11-28 19:42:56 +0000930- Bug #848614: distutils' msvccompiler fails to find the MSVC6
931 compiler because of incomplete registry entries.
932
Martin v. Löwisaf7dc8d2003-11-19 19:51:55 +0000933- httplib.HTTP.putrequest now offers to omit the implicit Accept-Encoding.
934
Thomas Hellercf0005b2003-11-14 10:33:20 +0000935- Patch #841977: modulefinder didn't find extension modules in packages
936
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +0000937- imaplib.IMAP4.thread was added.
938
Guido van Rossum967b0632003-11-10 02:27:19 +0000939- Plugged a minor hole in tempfile.mktemp() due to the use of
940 os.path.exists(), switched to using os.lstat() directly if possible.
941
Raymond Hettinger0c410272004-01-05 10:13:35 +0000942- bisect.py and heapq.py now have underlying C implementations
Raymond Hettinger33ecffb2004-06-10 05:03:17 +0000943 for better performance.
944
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +0000945- heapq.py has two new functions, nsmallest() and nlargest().
Raymond Hettingerb3af1812003-11-08 10:24:38 +0000946
Neil Schemenauerf607fc52003-11-05 23:03:00 +0000947- traceback.format_exc has been added (similar to print_exc but it returns
948 a string).
949
Martin v. Löwis45394c22003-10-31 13:49:36 +0000950- xmlrpclib.MultiCall has been added.
951
Martin v. Löwis48440b72003-10-31 12:52:35 +0000952- poplib.POP3_SSL has been added.
953
Martin v. Löwisd6625482003-10-12 17:37:01 +0000954- tmpfile.mkstemp now returns an absolute path even if dir is relative.
955
Brett Cannon5d9ca4e2003-10-12 04:38:48 +0000956- urlparse is RFC 2396 compliant.
957
Skip Montanarodef99342003-10-03 14:07:07 +0000958- The fieldnames argument to the csv module's DictReader constructor is now
959 optional. If omitted, the first row of the file will be used as the
960 list of fieldnames.
961
Raymond Hettinger9a80c5d2003-09-23 20:21:01 +0000962- encodings.bz2_codec was added for access to bz2 compression
963 using "a long string".encode('bz2')
964
Guido van Rossum0e5a51d2003-09-22 15:03:11 +0000965- Various improvements to unittest.py, realigned with PyUnit CVS.
966
Martin v. Löwisc6bb6c02003-09-20 15:52:21 +0000967- dircache now passes exceptions to the caller, instead of returning
968 empty lists.
969
Raymond Hettingerdeadbf52003-09-12 06:33:37 +0000970- The bsddb module and dbhash module now support the iterator and
971 mapping protocols which make them more substitutable for dictionaries
972 and shelves.
973
Skip Montanaro3f7a9482003-09-06 19:52:12 +0000974- The csv module's DictReader and DictWriter classes now accept keyword
975 arguments. This was an omission in the initial implementation.
976
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +0000977- The email package handles some RFC 2231 parameters with missing
Barry Warsaw2f5bf172003-09-03 04:09:49 +0000978 CHARSET fields better. It also includes a patch to parameter
979 parsing when semicolons appear inside quotes.
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +0000980
Raymond Hettinger6a180122003-08-17 08:34:09 +0000981- sets.py now runs under Py2.2. In addition, the argument restrictions
982 for most set methods (but not the operators) have been relaxed to
Raymond Hettinger70b9f492003-11-19 15:52:14 +0000983 allow any iterable.
Raymond Hettingeree562fc2003-08-15 21:17:04 +0000984
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +0000985- _strptime.py now has a behind-the-scenes caching mechanism for the most
Brett Cannonb7150a22003-08-05 06:27:04 +0000986 recent TimeRE instance used along with the last five unique directive
987 patterns. The overall module was also made more thread-safe.
988
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +0000989- random.cunifvariate() and random.stdgamma() were deprecated in Py2.3
990 and removed in Py2.4.
991
Anthony Baxter92bee362003-11-04 14:35:49 +0000992- Bug #823328: urllib2.py's HTTP Digest Auth support works again.
993
Hye-Shik Chang84a99312004-01-17 14:59:36 +0000994- Patch #873597: CJK codecs are imported into rank of default codecs.
995
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000996Tools/Demos
997-----------
998
Skip Montanarod5a21fd2004-01-27 14:49:04 +0000999- A hotshotmain script was added to the Tools/scripts directory that
1000 makes it easy to run a script under control of the hotshot profiler.
1001
Skip Montanaro030f68a2003-10-28 16:24:00 +00001002- The db2pickle and pickle2db scripts can now dump/load gdbm files.
1003
Skip Montanaroe2b61e02004-03-03 17:42:08 +00001004- The file order on the command line of the pickle2db script was reversed.
1005 It is now [ picklefile ] dbfile. This provides better symmetry with
1006 db2pickle. The file arguments to both scripts are now source followed by
1007 destination in situations where both files are given.
1008
Skip Montanarofd4fa882003-09-10 19:04:13 +00001009- The pydoc script will display a link to the module documentation for
1010 modules determined to be part of the core distribution. The documentation
1011 base directory defaults to http://www.python.org/doc/current/lib/ but can
1012 be changed by setting the PYTHONDOCS environment variable.
1013
Raymond Hettingere41d4c82003-08-25 04:39:55 +00001014- texcheck.py now detects double word errors.
1015
Tim Peters1a3abcb2003-08-18 23:52:09 +00001016- md5sum.py mistakenly opened input files in text mode by default, a
1017 silent and dangerous change from previous releases. It once again
1018 opens input files in binary mode by default. The -t and -b flags
1019 remain for compatibility with the 2.3 release, but -b is the default
1020 now.
1021
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001022- py-electric-colon now works when pending-delete/delete-selection mode is
1023 in effect
1024
1025- py-help-at-point is no longer bound to the F1 key - it's still bound to
1026 C-c C-h
1027
Barry Warsaw6ec58ca2003-09-03 03:20:37 +00001028- Pynche was fixed to not crash when there is no ~/.pynche file and no
1029 -d option was given.
1030
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001031Build
1032-----
1033
Brett Cannonf6af76d2004-06-26 04:03:06 +00001034- Bug #978645: Modules/getpath.c now builds properly in --disable-framework
1035 build under OS X.
1036
Skip Montanaro56f6a4f2004-06-18 02:47:22 +00001037- Profiling using gprof is now available if Python is configured with
1038 --enable-profiling.
1039
Martin v. Löwisf30d60e2004-06-08 08:17:44 +00001040- Profiling the VM using the Pentium TSC is now possible if Python
1041 is configured --with-tsc.
1042
Martin v. Löwis642c8a12004-06-04 13:55:13 +00001043- In order to find libraries, setup.py now also looks in /lib64, for use
1044 on AMD64.
1045
Hye-Shik Chang54f94392004-04-14 07:55:31 +00001046- Bug #934635: Fixed a bug where the configure script couldn't detect
1047 getaddrinfo() properly if the KAME stack had SCTP support.
1048
Skip Montanaro7befb992004-02-10 16:50:21 +00001049- Support for missing ANSI C header files (limits.h, stddef.h, etc) was
1050 removed.
1051
Skip Montanarodb608052004-02-07 13:53:46 +00001052- Systems requiring the D4, D6 or D7 variants of pthreads are no longer
1053 supported (see PEP 11).
1054
1055- Universal newline support can no longer be disabled (see PEP 11).
1056
Skip Montanarocd1f7432004-01-17 14:22:44 +00001057- Support for DGUX, SunOS 4, IRIX 4 and Minix was removed (see PEP 11).
1058
1059- Support for systems requiring --with-dl-dld or --with-sgi-dl was removed
1060 (see PEP 11).
1061
1062- Tests for sizeof(char) were removed since ANSI C mandates that
1063 sizeof(char) must be 1.
1064
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001065C API
1066-----
1067
Tim Peters9ddf40b2004-06-20 22:41:32 +00001068- Thanks to Anthony Tuininga, the datetime module now supplies a C API
1069 containing type-check macros and constructors. See new docs in the
1070 Python/C API Reference Manual for details.
1071
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +00001072- Private function _PyTime_DoubleToTimet added, to convert a Python
1073 timestamp (C double) to platform time_t with some out-of-bounds
1074 checking. Declared in new header file timefuncs.h. It would be
1075 good to expose some other internal timemodule.c functions there.
1076
Martin v. Löwise440e472004-06-01 15:22:42 +00001077- New public functions PyEval_EvaluateFrame and PyGen_New to expose
1078 generator objects.
1079
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +00001080- New public functions Py_IncRef() and Py_DecRef(), exposing the
1081 functionality of the Py_XINCREF() and Py_XDECREF macros. Useful for
Thomas Hellercc10a852004-04-22 17:28:25 +00001082 runtime dynamic embedding of Python. See patch #938302, by Bob
1083 Ippolito.
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +00001084
Raymond Hettingerc1e4f9d2004-03-12 08:04:00 +00001085- Added a new macro, PySequence_Fast_ITEMS, which retrieves a fast sequence's
1086 underlying array of PyObject pointers. Useful for high speed looping.
1087
Raymond Hettinger8f5cdaa2003-12-13 11:26:12 +00001088- Created a new method flag, METH_COEXIST, which causes a method to be loaded
1089 even if already defined by a slot wrapper. This allows a __contains__
1090 method, for example, to co-exist with a defined sq_contains slot. This
1091 is helpful because the PyCFunction can take advantage of optimized calls
1092 whenever METH_O or METH_NOARGS flags are defined.
1093
Raymond Hettingerbc0f2ab2003-11-25 21:12:14 +00001094- Added a new function, PyDict_Contains(d, k) which is like
1095 PySequence_Contains() but is specific to dictionaries and executes
1096 about 10% faster.
1097
Brett Cannon26b3a7b2003-10-19 21:31:43 +00001098- Added three new macros: Py_RETURN_NONE, Py_RETURN_TRUE, and Py_RETURN_FALSE.
1099 Each return the singleton they mention after Py_INCREF()ing them.
1100
Raymond Hettingercb2da432003-10-12 18:24:34 +00001101- Added a new function, PyTuple_Pack(n, ...) for constructing tuples from a
1102 variable length argument list of Python objects without having to invoke
1103 the more complex machinery of Py_BuildValue(). PyTuple_Pack(3, a, b, c)
1104 is equivalent to Py_BuildValue("(OOO)", a, b, c).
1105
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001106Windows
1107-------
1108
Guido van Rossumfd25aca2003-11-30 22:10:15 +00001109- The _winreg module could segfault when reading very large registry
1110 values, due to unchecked alloca() calls (SF bug 851056). The fix is
1111 uses either PyMem_Malloc(n) or PyString_FromStringAndSize(NULL, n),
1112 as appropriate, followed by a size check.
1113
Tim Petersf1827cf2003-09-07 03:30:18 +00001114- file.truncate() could misbehave if the file was open for update
1115 (modes r+, rb+, w+, wb+), and the most recent file operation before
1116 the truncate() call was an input operation. SF bug 801631.
1117
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001118
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001119What's New in Python 2.3 final?
1120===============================
1121
1122*Release date: 29-Jul-2003*
1123
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001124IDLE
1125----
1126
Tim Peters36c1afc2003-07-29 17:22:57 +00001127- Bug 778400: IDLE hangs when selecting "Edit with IDLE" from explorer.
1128 This was unique to Windows, and was fixed by adding an -n switch to
1129 the command the Windows installer creates to execute "Edit with IDLE"
1130 context-menu actions.
1131
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001132- IDLE displays a new message upon startup: some "personal firewall"
1133 kinds of programs (for example, ZoneAlarm) open a dialog of their
1134 own when any program opens a socket. IDLE does use sockets, talking
1135 on the computer's internal loopback interface. This connection is not
1136 visible on any external interface and no data is sent to or received
1137 from the Internet. So, if you get such a dialog when opening IDLE,
1138 asking whether to let pythonw.exe talk to address 127.0.0.1, say yes,
1139 and rest assured no communication external to your machine is taking
1140 place. If you don't allow it, IDLE won't be able to start.
1141
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001142
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001143What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 2?
1144=============================================
1145
Tim Peters6560a252003-07-24 00:15:46 +00001146*Release date: 24-Jul-2003*
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001147
1148Core and builtins
1149-----------------
1150
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00001151- It is now possible to import from zipfiles containing additional
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001152 data bytes before the zip compatible archive. Zipfiles containing a
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00001153 comment at the end are still unsupported.
1154
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001155Extension modules
1156-----------------
1157
1158- A longstanding bug in the parser module's initialization could cause
1159 fatal internal refcount confusion when the module got initialized more
1160 than once. This has been fixed.
1161
Fred Drake01a43122003-07-21 17:17:10 +00001162- Fixed memory leak in pyexpat; using the parser's ParseFile() method
1163 with open files that aren't instances of the standard file type
1164 caused an instance of the bound .read() method to be leaked on every
1165 call.
1166
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001167- Fixed some leaks in the locale module.
1168
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001169Library
1170-------
1171
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001172- Lib/encodings/rot_13.py when used as a script, now more properly
1173 uses the first Python interpreter on your path.
1174
1175- Removed caching of TimeRE (and thus LocaleTime) in _strptime.py to
1176 fix a locale related bug in the test suite. Although another patch
1177 was needed to actually fix the problem, the cache code was not
1178 restored.
1179
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00001180IDLE
1181----
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001182
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00001183- Calltips patches.
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001184
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001185Build
1186-----
1187
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001188- For MacOSX, added -mno-fused-madd to BASECFLAGS to fix test_coercion
1189 on Panther (OSX 10.3).
1190
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001191C API
1192-----
1193
1194Windows
1195-------
1196
Tim Peters291f14e2003-07-22 02:50:01 +00001197- The tempfile module could do insane imports on Windows if PYTHONCASEOK
1198 was set, making temp file creation impossible. Repaired.
1199
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001200- Add a patch to workaround pthread_sigmask() bugs in Cygwin.
1201
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001202Mac
1203---
1204
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001205- Various fixes to pimp.
1206
1207- Scripts runs with pythonw no longer had full window manager access.
1208
1209- Don't force boot-disk-only install, for reasons unknown it causes
1210 more problems than it solves.
1211
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001212
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001213What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 1?
1214=============================================
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001215
Jeremy Hylton0ed18c22003-07-18 20:10:02 +00001216*Release date: 18-Jul-2003*
1217
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001218Core and builtins
1219-----------------
1220
Tim Peterse5e065b2003-07-06 18:36:54 +00001221- The new function sys.getcheckinterval() returns the last value set
1222 by sys.setcheckinterval().
1223
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001224- Several bugs in the symbol table phase of the compiler have been
1225 fixed. Errors could be lost and compilation could fail without
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001226 reporting an error. SF patch 763201.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001227
1228- The interpreter is now more robust about importing the warnings
1229 module. In an executable generated by freeze or similar programs,
1230 earlier versions of 2.3 would fail if the warnings module could
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001231 not be found on the file system. Fixes SF bug 771097.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001232
1233- A warning about assignments to module attributes that shadow
1234 builtins, present in earlier releases of 2.3, has been removed.
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001235
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001236- It is not possible to create subclasses of builtin types like str
1237 and tuple that define an itemsize. Earlier releases of Python 2.3
1238 allowed this by mistake, leading to crashes and other problems.
1239
1240- The thread_id is now initialized to 0 in a non-thread build. SF bug
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001241 770247.
1242
1243- SF bug 762891: "del p[key]" on proxy object no longer raises SystemError.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001244
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001245Extension modules
1246-----------------
1247
1248- weakref.proxy() can now handle "del obj[i]" for proxy objects
1249 defining __delitem__. Formerly, it generated a SystemError.
1250
1251- SSL no longer crashes the interpreter when the remote side disconnects.
1252
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001253- On Unix the mmap module can again be used to map device files.
1254
Brett Cannon20def8b2003-07-01 05:16:08 +00001255- time.strptime now exclusively uses the Python implementation
1256 contained within the _strptime module.
1257
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001258- The print slot of weakref proxy objects was removed, because it was
1259 not consistent with the object's repr slot.
1260
1261- The mmap module only checks file size for regular files, not
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001262 character or block devices. SF patch 708374.
1263
1264- The cPickle Pickler garbage collection support was fixed to traverse
1265 the find_class attribute, if present.
1266
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001267- There are several fixes for the bsddb3 wrapper module.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001268
1269 bsddb3 no longer crashes if an environment is closed before a cursor
1270 (SF bug 763298).
1271
1272 The DB and DBEnv set_get_returns_none function was extended to take
Barry Warsawd71a5512003-07-20 18:00:54 +00001273 a level instead of a boolean flag. The new level 2 means that in
1274 addition, cursor.set()/.get() methods return None instead of raising
1275 an exception.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001276
1277 A typo was fixed in DBCursor.join_item(), preventing a crash.
1278
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001279Library
1280-------
1281
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001282- distutils now supports MSVC 7.1
1283
Raymond Hettinger71adf7e2003-07-16 19:25:22 +00001284- doctest now examines all docstrings by default. Previously, it would
1285 skip over functions with private names (as indicated by the underscore
1286 naming convention). The old default created too much of a risk that
1287 user tests were being skipped inadvertently. Note, this change could
1288 break code in the unlikely case that someone had intentionally put
1289 failing tests in the docstrings of private functions. The breakage
1290 is easily fixable by specifying the old behavior when calling testmod()
1291 or Tester().
1292
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001293- There were several fixes to the way dumbdbms are closed. It's vital
1294 that a dumbdbm database be closed properly, else the on-disk data
1295 and directory files can be left in mutually inconsistent states.
1296 dumbdbm.py's _Database.__del__() method attempted to close the
1297 database properly, but a shutdown race in _Database._commit() could
1298 prevent this from working, so that a program trusting __del__() to
1299 get the on-disk files in synch could be badly surprised. The race
1300 has been repaired. A sync() method was also added so that shelve
1301 can guarantee data is written to disk.
Tim Peters7a6c7332003-07-13 17:21:10 +00001302
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001303 The close() method can now be called more than once without complaint.
Tim Petersd7472ec2003-07-13 02:22:03 +00001304
Tim Peters59aba122003-07-01 20:01:55 +00001305- The classes in threading.py are now new-style classes. That they
1306 weren't before was an oversight.
1307
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001308- The urllib2 digest authentication handlers now define the correct
1309 auth_header. The earlier versions would fail at runtime.
1310
Neal Norwitze7dfe212003-07-01 14:59:46 +00001311- SF bug 763023: fix uncaught ZeroDivisionError in difflib ratio methods
1312 when there are no lines.
1313
Neal Norwitz3c0f2c92003-07-01 21:12:47 +00001314- SF bug 763637: fix exception in Tkinter with after_cancel
1315 which could occur with Tk 8.4
1316
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001317- SF bug 770601: CGIHTTPServer.py now passes the entire environment
1318 to child processes.
1319
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001320- SF bug 765238: add filter to fnmatch's __all__.
1321
1322- SF bug 748201: make time.strptime() error messages more helpful.
1323
1324- SF patch 764470: Do not dump the args attribute of a Fault object in
1325 xmlrpclib.
1326
1327- SF patch 549151: urllib and urllib2 now redirect POSTs on 301
1328 responses.
1329
1330- SF patch 766650: The whichdb module was fixed to recognize dbm files
1331 generated by gdbm on OS/2 EMX.
1332
1333- SF bugs 763047 and 763052: fixes bug of timezone value being left as
1334 -1 when ``time.tzname[0] == time.tzname[1] and not time.daylight``
1335 is true when it should only when time.daylight is true.
1336
1337- SF bug 764548: re now allows subclasses of str and unicode to be
1338 used as patterns.
1339
1340- SF bug 763637: In Tkinter, change after_cancel() to handle tuples
1341 of varying sizes. Tk 8.4 returns a different number of values
1342 than Tk 8.3.
1343
1344- SF bug 763023: difflib.ratio() did not catch zero division.
1345
1346- The Queue module now has an __all__ attribute.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001347
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001348Tools/Demos
1349-----------
1350
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001351- See Lib/idlelib/NEWS.txt for IDLE news.
1352
Neal Norwitz592c4cc2003-07-01 04:14:28 +00001353- SF bug 753592: webchecker/wsgui now handles user supplied directories.
1354
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001355- The trace.py script has been removed. It is now in the standard library.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001356
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001357Build
1358-----
1359
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001360- Python now compiles with -fno-strict-aliasing if possible (SF bug 766696).
1361
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001362- The socket module compiles on IRIX 6.5.10.
1363
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001364- An irix64 system is treated the same way as an irix6 system (SF
1365 patch 764560).
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001366
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001367- Several definitions were missing on FreeBSD 5.x unless the
1368 __BSD_VISIBLE symbol was defined. configure now defines it as
1369 needed.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001370
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001371C API
1372-----
1373
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001374- Unicode objects now support mbcs as a built-in encoding, so the C
1375 API can use it without deferring to the encodings package.
1376
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001377Windows
1378-------
1379
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001380- The Windows implementation of PyThread_start_new_thread() never
1381 checked error returns from Windows functions correctly. As a result,
1382 it could claim to start a new thread even when the Microsoft
1383 _beginthread() function failed (due to "too many threads" -- this is
1384 on the order of thousands when it happens). In these cases, the
1385 Python exception ::
1386
1387 thread.error: can't start new thread
1388
1389 is raised now.
1390
1391- SF bug 766669: Prevent a GPF on interpreter exit when sockets are in
1392 use. The interpreter now calls WSACleanup() from Py_Finalize()
1393 instead of from DLL teardown.
1394
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001395Mac
1396---
1397
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001398- Bundlebuilder now inherits default values in the right way. It was
Walter Dörwald73a8a4b2003-07-30 12:14:02 +00001399 previously possible for app bundles to get a type of "BNDL" instead
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001400 of "APPL." Other improvements include, a --build-id option to
1401 specify the CFBundleIdentifier and using the --python option to set
1402 the executable in the bundle.
1403
1404- Fixed two bugs in MacOSX framework handling.
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001405
Jack Jansene0040412003-07-23 22:17:28 +00001406- pythonw did not allow user interaction in 2.3rc1, this has been fixed.
1407
1408- Python is now compiled with -mno-fused-madd, making all tests pass
1409 on Panther.
1410
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001411What's New in Python 2.3 beta 2?
1412================================
1413
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00001414*Release date: 29-Jun-2003*
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001415
1416Core and builtins
1417-----------------
1418
Barry Warsaw883f2232003-06-29 17:10:11 +00001419- A program can now set the environment variable PYTHONINSPECT to some
1420 string value in Python, and cause the interpreter to enter the
1421 interactive prompt at program exit, as if Python had been invoked
1422 with the -i option.
1423
Raymond Hettingerd05abde2003-06-17 05:05:49 +00001424- list.index() now accepts optional start and stop arguments. Similar
1425 changes were made to UserList.index(). SF feature request 754014.
1426
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00001427- SF patch 751998 fixes an unwanted side effect of the previous fix
1428 for SF bug 742860 (the next item).
1429
Tim Peters50d8b8b2003-05-25 17:44:31 +00001430- SF bug 742860: "WeakKeyDictionary __delitem__ uses iterkeys". This
1431 wasn't threadsafe, was very inefficient (expected time O(len(dict))
1432 instead of O(1)), and could raise a spurious RuntimeError if another
1433 thread mutated the dict during __delitem__, or if a comparison function
1434 mutated it. It also neglected to raise KeyError when the key wasn't
1435 present; didn't raise TypeError when the key wasn't of a weakly
1436 referencable type; and broke various more-or-less obscure dict
1437 invariants by using a sequence of equality comparisons over the whole
1438 set of dict keys instead of computing the key's hash code to narrow
1439 the search to those keys with the same hash code. All of these are
1440 considered to be bugs. A new implementation of __delitem__ repairs all
1441 that, but note that fixing these bugs may change visible behavior in
1442 code relying (whether intentionally or accidentally) on old behavior.
Tim Peters886128f2003-05-25 01:45:11 +00001443
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001444- SF bug 734869: Fixed a compiler bug that caused a fatal error when
1445 compiling a list comprehension that contained another list comprehension
1446 embedded in a lambda expression.
1447
Tim Peterse87568d2003-05-24 20:18:24 +00001448- SF bug 705231: builtin pow() no longer lets the platform C pow()
1449 raise -1.0 to integer powers, because (at least) glibc gets it wrong
1450 in some cases. The result should be -1.0 if the power is odd and 1.0
1451 if the power is even, and any float with a sufficiently large exponent
1452 is (mathematically) an exact even integer.
1453
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001454- SF bug 759227: A new-style class that implements __nonzero__() must
1455 return a bool or int (but not an int subclass) from that method. This
1456 matches the restriction on classic classes.
1457
Martin v. Löwis5467d4c2003-05-10 07:10:12 +00001458- The encoding attribute has been added for file objects, and set to
1459 the terminal encoding on Unix and Windows.
1460
Tim Peters015dd822003-05-04 04:16:52 +00001461- The softspace attribute of file objects became read-only by oversight.
1462 It's writable again.
1463
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00001464- Reverted a 2.3 beta 1 change to iterators for subclasses of list and
1465 tuple. By default, the iterators now access data elements directly
1466 instead of going through __getitem__. If __getitem__ access is
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001467 preferred, then __iter__ can be overridden.
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00001468
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001469- SF bug 735247: The staticmethod and super types participate in
1470 garbage collection. Before this change, it was possible for leaks to
1471 occur in functions with non-global free variables that used these types.
1472
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001473Extension modules
1474-----------------
1475
Raymond Hettinger643bcec2003-06-29 03:29:42 +00001476- the socket module has a new exception, socket.timeout, to allow
1477 timeouts to be handled separately from other socket errors.
1478
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001479- SF bug 751276: cPickle has fixed to propagate exceptions raised in
1480 user code. In earlier versions, cPickle caught and ignored any
1481 exception when it performed operations that it expected to raise
1482 specific exceptions like AttributeError.
1483
1484- cPickle Pickler and Unpickler objects now participate in garbage
1485 collection.
1486
Tim Peterscda32b72003-06-15 23:13:35 +00001487- mimetools.choose_boundary() could return duplicate strings at times,
1488 especially likely on Windows. The strings returned are now guaranteed
1489 unique within a single program run.
1490
Brett Cannon4e64d782003-06-13 23:44:35 +00001491- thread.interrupt_main() raises KeyboardInterrupt in the main thread.
1492 dummy_thread has also been modified to try to simulate the behavior.
1493
Walter Dörwald9e46abe2003-05-18 03:15:10 +00001494- array.array.insert() now treats negative indices as being relative
1495 to the end of the array, just like list.insert() does. (SF bug #739313)
1496
Tim Petersb0c854d2003-05-17 15:57:00 +00001497- The datetime module classes datetime, time, and timedelta are now
1498 properly subclassable.
Tim Petersa98924a2003-05-17 05:55:19 +00001499
Martin v. Löwis28e9ce92003-05-09 08:19:48 +00001500- _tkinter.{get|set}busywaitinterval was added.
1501
Raymond Hettinger834f4632003-05-02 20:24:56 +00001502- itertools.islice() now accepts stop=None as documented.
1503 Fixes SF bug #730685.
1504
Skip Montanaro8c044d82003-05-06 20:42:37 +00001505- the bsddb185 module is built in one restricted instance -
1506 /usr/include/db.h exists and defines HASHVERSION to be 2. This is true
1507 for many BSD-derived systems.
1508
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001509
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001510Library
1511-------
1512
Tim Petersdb3756d2003-06-29 05:30:48 +00001513- Some happy doctest extensions from Jim Fulton have been added to
1514 doctest.py. These are already being used in Zope3. The two
1515 primary ones:
1516
1517 doctest.debug(module, name) extracts the doctests from the named object
1518 in the given module, puts them in a temp file, and starts pdb running
1519 on that file. This is great when a doctest fails.
1520
1521 doctest.DocTestSuite(module=None) returns a synthesized unittest
1522 TestSuite instance, to be run by the unittest framework, which
1523 runs all the doctests in the module. This allows writing tests in
1524 doctest style (which can be clearer and shorter than writing tests
1525 in unittest style), without losing unittest's powerful testing
1526 framework features (which doctest lacks).
1527
Tim Peters6ebe61f2003-06-27 20:48:05 +00001528- For compatibility with doctests created before 2.3, if an expected
1529 output block consists solely of "1" and the actual output block
1530 consists solely of "True", it's accepted as a match; similarly
1531 for "0" and "False". This is quite un-doctest-like, but is practical.
1532 The behavior can be disabled by passing the new doctest module
1533 constant DONT_ACCEPT_TRUE_FOR_1 to the new optionflags optional
1534 argument.
1535
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001536- ZipFile.testzip() now only traps BadZipfile exceptions. Previously,
1537 a bare except caught to much and reported all errors as a problem
1538 in the archive.
1539
1540- The logging module now has a new function, makeLogRecord() making
1541 LogHandler easier to interact with DatagramHandler and SocketHandler.
1542
Skip Montanaro364ca402003-06-17 12:58:31 +00001543- The cgitb module has been extended to support plain text display (SF patch
1544 569574).
1545
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00001546- A brand new version of IDLE (from the IDLEfork project at
1547 SourceForge) is now included as Lib/idlelib. The old Tools/idle is
1548 no more.
1549
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001550- Added a new module: trace (documentation missing). This module used
1551 to be distributed in Tools/scripts. It uses sys.settrace() to trace
1552 code execution -- either function calls or individual lines. It can
1553 generate tracing output during execution or a post-mortem report of
1554 code coverage.
1555
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00001556- The threading module has new functions settrace() and setprofile()
1557 that cooperate with the functions of the same name in the sys
1558 module. A function registered with the threading module will
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001559 be used for all threads it creates. The new trace module uses this
1560 to provide tracing for code running in threads.
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00001561
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00001562- copy.py: applied SF patch 707900, fixing bug 702858, by Steven
1563 Taschuk. Copying a new-style class that had a reference to itself
1564 didn't work. (The same thing worked fine for old-style classes.)
Martin v. Löwisba8f5ff2003-06-14 07:10:06 +00001565 Builtin functions are now treated as atomic, fixing bug #746304.
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00001566
Raymond Hettingerc24d7672003-06-08 19:42:33 +00001567- difflib.py has two new functions: context_diff() and unified_diff().
1568
Guido van Rossumfa19f7c2003-05-16 01:46:51 +00001569- More fixes to urllib (SF 549151): (a) When redirecting, always use
1570 GET. This is common practice and more-or-less sanctioned by the
1571 HTTP standard. (b) Add a handler for 307 redirection, which becomes
1572 an error for POST, but a regular redirect for GET and HEAD
1573
Guido van Rossumbf1bef82003-05-13 18:01:19 +00001574- Added optional 'onerror' argument to os.walk(), to control error
1575 handling.
1576
Martin v. Löwise59e2ba2003-05-03 09:09:02 +00001577- inspect.is{method|data}descriptor was added, to allow pydoc display
1578 __doc__ of data descriptors.
1579
Skip Montanaro4a7751c2003-04-29 21:07:16 +00001580- Fixed socket speed loss caused by use of the _socketobject wrapper class
1581 in socket.py.
1582
Raymond Hettinger22952a32003-05-20 04:59:56 +00001583- timeit.py now checks the current directory for imports.
1584
Gustavo Niemeyer9556fba2003-06-07 17:53:08 +00001585- urllib2.py now knows how to order proxy classes, so the user doesn't
1586 have to insert it in front of other classes, nor do dirty tricks like
1587 inserting a "dummy" HTTPHandler after a ProxyHandler when building an
1588 opener with proxy support.
1589
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00001590- Iterators have been added for dbm keys.
1591
1592- random.Random objects can now be pickled.
1593
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001594Tools/Demos
1595-----------
1596
Martin v. Löwisb8c084e2003-06-14 09:03:46 +00001597- pydoc now offers help on keywords and topics.
1598
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00001599- Tools/idle is gone; long live Lib/idlelib.
1600
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00001601- diff.py prints file diffs in context, unified, or ndiff formats,
1602 providing a command line interface to difflib.py.
Raymond Hettinger2f3c74a2003-06-08 23:10:15 +00001603
Raymond Hettinger71e00332003-05-10 03:30:13 +00001604- texcheck.py is a new script for making a rough validation of Python LaTeX
1605 files.
1606
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001607Build
1608-----
1609
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001610- Setting DESTDIR during 'make install' now allows specifying a
Martin v. Löwis3b8ee082003-05-11 20:25:35 +00001611 different root directory.
1612
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001613C API
1614-----
1615
Tim Peters3cfe7542003-05-21 21:29:48 +00001616- PyType_Ready(): If a type declares that it participates in gc
1617 (Py_TPFLAGS_HAVE_GC), and its base class does not, and its base class's
1618 tp_free slot is the default _PyObject_Del, and type does not define
1619 a tp_free slot itself, _PyObject_GC_Del is assigned to type->tp_free.
1620 Previously _PyObject_Del was inherited, which could at best lead to a
1621 segfault. In addition, if even after this magic the type's tp_free
1622 slot is _PyObject_Del or NULL, and the type is a base type
1623 (Py_TPFLAGS_BASETYPE), TypeError is raised: since the type is a base
1624 type, its dealloc function must call type->tp_free, and since the type
1625 is gc'able, tp_free must not be NULL or _PyObject_Del.
1626
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00001627- PyThreadState_SetAsyncExc(): A new API (deliberately accessible only
1628 from C) to interrupt a thread by sending it an exception. It is
1629 intentional that you have to write your own C extension to call it
1630 from Python.
1631
1632
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001633New platforms
1634-------------
1635
1636None this time.
1637
1638Tests
1639-----
1640
1641- test_imp rewritten so that it doesn't raise RuntimeError if run as a
1642 side effect of being imported ("import test.autotest").
1643
1644Windows
1645-------
1646
Tim Petersfaa697a2003-06-22 01:42:20 +00001647- The Windows installer ships with Tcl/Tk 8.4.3 (upgraded from 8.4.1).
1648
Tim Petersc4607da2003-05-08 18:13:59 +00001649- The installer always suggested that Python be installed on the C:
1650 drive, due to a hardcoded "C:" generated by the Wise installation
1651 wizard. People with machines where C: is not the system drive
1652 usually want Python installed on whichever drive is their system drive
1653 instead. We removed the hardcoded "C:", and two testers on machines
1654 where C: is not the system drive report that the installer now
1655 suggests their system drive. Note that you can always select the
1656 directory you want in the "Select Destination Directory" dialog --
1657 that's what it's for.
1658
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001659Mac
1660---
1661
Just van Rossum99bc1fc2003-05-09 15:01:25 +00001662- There's a new module called "autoGIL", which offers a mechanism to
1663 automatically release the Global Interpreter Lock when an event loop
1664 goes to sleep, allowing other threads to run. It's currently only
1665 supported on OSX, in the Mach-O version.
Jack Jansenf5e23ff2003-06-16 13:53:40 +00001666- The OSA modules now allow direct access to properties of the
1667 toplevel application class (in AppleScript terminology).
1668- The Package Manager can now update itself.
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001669
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00001670SourceForge Bugs and Patches Applied
1671------------------------------------
1672
1673430160, 471893, 501716, 542562, 549151, 569574, 595837, 596434,
1674598163, 604210, 604716, 610332, 612627, 614770, 620190, 621891,
1675622042, 639139, 640236, 644345, 649742, 649742, 658233, 660022,
1676661318, 661676, 662807, 662923, 666219, 672855, 678325, 682347,
1677683486, 684981, 685773, 686254, 692776, 692959, 693094, 696777,
1678697989, 700827, 703666, 708495, 708604, 708901, 710733, 711902,
1679713722, 715782, 718286, 719359, 719367, 723136, 723831, 723962,
1680724588, 724767, 724767, 725942, 726150, 726446, 726869, 727051,
1681727719, 727719, 727805, 728277, 728563, 728656, 729096, 729103,
1682729293, 729297, 729300, 729317, 729395, 729622, 729817, 730170,
1683730296, 730594, 730685, 730826, 730963, 731209, 731403, 731504,
1684731514, 731626, 731635, 731643, 731644, 731644, 731689, 732124,
1685732143, 732234, 732284, 732284, 732479, 732761, 732783, 732951,
1686733667, 733781, 734118, 734231, 734869, 735051, 735293, 735527,
1687735613, 735694, 736962, 736962, 737970, 738066, 739313, 740055,
1688740234, 740301, 741806, 742126, 742741, 742860, 742860, 742911,
1689744041, 744104, 744238, 744687, 744877, 745055, 745478, 745525,
1690745620, 746012, 746304, 746366, 746801, 746953, 747348, 747667,
1691747954, 748846, 748849, 748973, 748975, 749191, 749210, 749759,
1692749831, 749911, 750008, 750092, 750542, 750595, 751038, 751107,
1693751276, 751451, 751916, 751941, 751956, 751998, 752671, 753451,
1694753602, 753617, 753845, 753925, 754014, 754340, 754447, 755031,
1695755087, 755147, 755245, 755683, 755987, 756032, 756996, 757058,
1696757229, 757818, 757821, 757822, 758112, 758910, 759227, 759889,
1697760257, 760703, 760792, 761104, 761337, 761519, 761830, 762455
1698
1699
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001700What's New in Python 2.3 beta 1?
1701================================
1702
Guido van Rossumfa1eddf2003-04-25 19:19:52 +00001703*Release date: 25-Apr-2003*
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001704
1705Core and builtins
1706-----------------
1707
Thomas Heller5eccabc2003-04-23 19:35:25 +00001708- New format codes B, H, I, k and K have been implemented for
1709 PyArg_ParseTuple and PyBuild_Value.
1710
Alex Martellia70b1912003-04-22 08:12:33 +00001711- New builtin function sum(seq, start=0) returns the sum of all the
1712 items in iterable object seq, plus start (items are normally numbers,
1713 and cannot be strings).
1714
Guido van Rossumaa86e352003-04-19 18:15:10 +00001715- bool() called without arguments now returns False rather than
1716 raising an exception. This is consistent with calling the
1717 constructors for the other builtin types -- called without argument
1718 they all return the false value of that type. (SF patch #724135)
1719
Guido van Rossumcf8d2852003-04-17 16:53:26 +00001720- In support of PEP 269 (making the pgen parser generator accessible
1721 from Python), some changes to the pgen code structure were made; a
1722 few files that used to be linked only with pgen are now linked with
1723 Python itself.
1724
Guido van Rossumc1f6e8c2003-04-16 21:13:23 +00001725- The repr() of a weakref object now shows the __name__ attribute of
1726 the referenced object, if it has one.
1727
Guido van Rossum76ba09f2003-04-16 19:40:58 +00001728- super() no longer ignores data descriptors, except __class__. See
1729 the thread started at
1730 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2003-April/034338.html
1731
Guido van Rossum3a3cca52003-04-14 20:58:14 +00001732- list.insert(i, x) now interprets negative i as it would be
1733 interpreted by slicing, so negative values count from the end of the
1734 list. This was the only place where such an interpretation was not
1735 placed on a list index.
1736
Guido van Rossumefbbb1c2003-04-11 18:43:06 +00001737- range() now works even if the arguments are longs with magnitude
1738 larger than sys.maxint, as long as the total length of the sequence
1739 fits. E.g., range(2**100, 2**101, 2**100) is the following list:
1740 [1267650600228229401496703205376L]. (SF patch #707427.)
1741
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001742- Some horridly obscure problems were fixed involving interaction
1743 between garbage collection and old-style classes with "ambitious"
1744 getattr hooks. If an old-style instance didn't have a __del__ method,
1745 but did have a __getattr__ hook, and the instance became reachable
1746 only from an unreachable cycle, and the hook resurrected or deleted
1747 unreachable objects when asked to resolve "__del__", anything up to
1748 a segfault could happen. That's been repaired.
1749
Raymond Hettingera3e1e4c2003-03-06 23:54:28 +00001750- dict.pop now takes an optional argument specifying a default
1751 value to return if the key is not in the dict. If a default is not
1752 given and the key is not found, a KeyError will still be raised.
1753 Parallel changes were made to UserDict.UserDict and UserDict.DictMixin.
1754 [SF patch #693753] (contributed by Michael Stone.)
1755
Martin v. Löwis73d538b2003-03-05 15:13:47 +00001756- sys.getfilesystemencoding() was added to expose
1757 Py_FileSystemDefaultEncoding.
Guido van Rossum46d3dc32003-03-01 03:20:41 +00001758
1759- New function sys.exc_clear() clears the current exception. This is
1760 rarely needed, but can sometimes be useful to release objects
1761 referenced by the traceback held in sys.exc_info()[2]. (SF patch
1762 #693195.)
1763
Neal Norwitzd5a65a72003-02-23 23:11:41 +00001764- On 64-bit systems, a dictionary could contain duplicate long/int keys
1765 if the key value was larger than 2**32. See SF bug #689659.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001766
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00001767- Fixed SF bug #663074. The codec system was using global static
Walter Dörwaldfa86bf52003-03-31 16:15:13 +00001768 variables to store internal data. As a result, any attempts to use the
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00001769 unicode system with multiple active interpreters, or successive
1770 interpreter executions, would fail.
1771
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00001772- "%c" % u"a" now returns a unicode string instead of raising a
Walter Dörwald44f527f2003-04-02 16:37:24 +00001773 TypeError. u"%c" % 0xffffffff now raises a OverflowError instead
Walter Dörwald1e469c52003-04-02 16:57:59 +00001774 of a ValueError to be consistent with "%c" % 256. See SF patch #710127.
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00001775
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001776Extension modules
1777-----------------
1778
Guido van Rossume7adda92003-04-25 05:52:37 +00001779- The socket module now provides the functions inet_pton and inet_ntop
1780 for converting between string and packed representation of IP
1781 addresses. There is also a new module variable, has_ipv6, which is
1782 True iff the current Python has IPv6 support. See SF patch #658327.
1783
Martin v. Löwisbfe175c2003-04-16 19:42:51 +00001784- Tkinter wrappers around Tcl variables now pass objects directly
1785 to Tcl, instead of first converting them to strings.
1786
Guido van Rossum41c99e72003-04-14 17:59:34 +00001787- The .*? pattern in the re module is now special-cased to avoid the
1788 recursion limit. (SF patch #720991 -- many thanks to Gary Herron
1789 and Greg Chapman.)
1790
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00001791- New function sys.call_tracing() allows pdb to debug code
1792 recursively.
1793
Tim Peters730f5532003-04-08 17:17:17 +00001794- New function gc.get_referents(obj) returns a list of objects
Tim Peters0f81ab62003-04-08 16:39:48 +00001795 directly referenced by obj. In effect, it exposes what the object's
1796 tp_traverse slot does, and can be helpful when debugging memory
1797 leaks.
1798
Martin v. Löwis7fb697b2003-04-03 04:49:12 +00001799- The iconv module has been removed from this release.
1800
Tim Petersd50ade62003-03-20 18:32:13 +00001801- The platform-independent routines for packing floats in IEEE formats
1802 (struct.pack's <f, >f, <d, and >d codes; pickle and cPickle's protocol 1
1803 pickling of floats) ignored that rounding can cause a carry to
1804 propagate. The worst consequence was that, in rare cases, <f and >f
1805 could produce strings that, when unpacked again, were a factor of 2
1806 away from the original float. This has been fixed. See SF bug
1807 #705836.
1808
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001809- New function time.tzset() provides access to the C library tzset()
Guido van Rossumd11b62e2003-03-14 21:51:36 +00001810 function, if supported. (SF patch #675422.)
1811
Neal Norwitz12e22172003-03-03 21:16:39 +00001812- Using createfilehandler, deletefilehandler, createtimerhandler functions
1813 on Tkinter.tkinter (_tkinter module) no longer crashes the interpreter.
1814 See SF bug #692416.
1815
Michael W. Hudsonf0089982003-03-03 12:29:42 +00001816- Modified the fcntl.ioctl() function to allow modification of a passed
1817 mutable buffer (for details see the reference documentation).
1818
Raymond Hettinger61fe64d2003-02-23 04:40:07 +00001819- Made user requested changes to the itertools module.
1820 Subsumed the times() function into repeat().
1821 Added chain() and cycle().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001822
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00001823- The rotor module is now deprecated; the encryption algorithm it uses
Andrew M. Kuchlingfb5f4852003-04-24 13:19:56 +00001824 is not believed to be secure, and including crypto code with Python
1825 has implications for exporting and importing it in various countries.
1826
Skip Montanaro89feabc2003-03-30 04:54:24 +00001827- The socket module now always uses the _socketobject wrapper class, even on
1828 platforms which have dup(2). The makefile() method is built directly
1829 on top of the socket without duplicating the file descriptor, allowing
1830 timeouts to work properly.
1831
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001832Library
1833-------
1834
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00001835- New generator function os.walk() is an easy-to-use alternative to
1836 os.path.walk(). See os module docs for details. os.path.walk()
1837 isn't deprecated at this time, but may become deprecated in a
1838 future release.
1839
Marc-André Lemburg246d8472003-04-24 11:36:11 +00001840- Added new module "platform" which provides a wide range of tools
1841 for querying platform dependent features.
1842
Andrew M. Kuchling4e42b312003-04-24 16:45:05 +00001843- netrc now allows ASCII punctuation characters in passwords.
Raymond Hettinger1d877862003-04-23 19:06:08 +00001844
Martin v. Löwis153c9e42003-04-19 20:59:03 +00001845- shelve now supports the optional writeback argument, and exposes
1846 pickle protocol versions.
1847
Guido van Rossuma2685402003-04-19 18:04:57 +00001848- Several methods of nntplib.NNTP have grown an optional file argument
1849 which specifies a file where to divert the command's output
1850 (already supported by the body() method). (SF patch #720468)
1851
Martin v. Löwis281b2c62003-04-18 21:04:39 +00001852- The self-documenting XML server library DocXMLRPCServer was added.
1853
Martin v. Löwis2548c732003-04-18 10:39:54 +00001854- Support for internationalized domain names has been added through
1855 the 'idna' and 'punycode' encodings, the 'stringprep' module, the
1856 'mkstringprep' tool, and enhancements to the socket and httplib
1857 modules.
1858
Walter Dörwald5688b7a2003-04-16 09:46:13 +00001859- htmlentitydefs has two new dictionaries: name2codepoint maps
1860 HTML entity names to Unicode codepoints (as integers).
1861 codepoint2name is the reverse mapping. See SF patch #722017.
1862
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00001863- pdb has a new command, "debug", which lets you step through
1864 arbitrary code from the debugger's (pdb) prompt.
1865
Raymond Hettingerc377cbf2003-04-04 22:56:42 +00001866- unittest.failUnlessEqual and its equivalent unittest.assertEqual now
1867 return 'not a == b' rather than 'a != b'. This gives the desired
1868 result for classes that define __eq__ without defining __ne__.
1869
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001870- sgmllib now supports SGML marked sections, in particular the
Martin v. Löwis3163a3b2003-03-30 14:25:40 +00001871 MS Office extensions.
1872
Raymond Hettinger42182eb2003-03-09 05:33:33 +00001873- The urllib module now offers support for the iterator protocol.
1874 SF patch 698520 contributed by Brett Cannon.
1875
Guido van Rossum9589a252003-03-06 01:56:12 +00001876- New module timeit provides a simple framework for timing the
1877 execution speed of expressions and statements.
1878
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001879- sets.Set objects now support mixed-type __eq__ and __ne__, instead
1880 of raising TypeError. If x is a Set object and y is a non-Set object,
1881 x == y is False, and x != y is True. This is akin to the change made
1882 for mixed-type comparisons of datetime objects in 2.3a2; more info
1883 about the rationale is in the NEWS entry for that. See also SF bug
1884 report <http://www.python.org/sf/693121>.
1885
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00001886- On Unix platforms, if os.listdir() is called with a Unicode argument,
1887 it now returns Unicode strings. (This behavior was added earlier
1888 to the Windows NT/2k/XP version of os.listdir().)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001889
Andrew M. Kuchling6f177d42003-02-28 22:09:33 +00001890- Distutils: both 'py_modules' and 'packages' keywords can now be specified
1891 in core.setup(). Previously you could supply one or the other, but
1892 not both of them. (SF patch #695090 from Bernhard Herzog)
1893
Skip Montanaro64a839e2003-03-20 23:36:55 +00001894- New csv package makes it easy to read/write CSV files.
1895
Gustavo Niemeyer68d8cef2003-04-17 21:31:33 +00001896- Module shlex has been extended to allow posix-like shell parsings,
1897 including a split() function for easy spliting of quoted strings and
1898 commands. An iterator interface was also implemented.
1899
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001900Tools/Demos
1901-----------
1902
Tim Peters21d7d4d2003-04-18 00:45:59 +00001903- New script combinerefs.py helps analyze new PYTHONDUMPREFS output.
1904 See the module docstring for details.
1905
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001906Build
1907-----
1908
Neal Norwitz35892b92003-02-23 23:45:35 +00001909- Fix problem building on OSF1 because the compiler only accepted
1910 preprocessor directives that start in column 1. (SF bug #691793.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001911
1912C API
1913-----
1914
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00001915- Added PyGC_Collect(), equivalent to calling gc.collect().
1916
Guido van Rossum0fc8f002003-04-15 15:12:39 +00001917- PyThreadState_GetDict() was changed not to raise an exception or
1918 issue a fatal error when no current thread state is available. This
1919 makes it possible to print dictionaries when no thread is active.
1920
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00001921- LONG_LONG was renamed to PY_LONG_LONG. Extensions that use this and
1922 need compatibility with previous versions can use this:
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00001923
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00001924 #ifndef PY_LONG_LONG
1925 #define PY_LONG_LONG LONG_LONG
1926 #endif
Martin v. Löwisb9a0f912003-03-29 10:06:18 +00001927
Raymond Hettinger1da1dbf2003-03-17 19:46:11 +00001928- Added PyObject_SelfIter() to fill the tp_iter slot for the
Raymond Hettinger01538262003-03-17 08:24:35 +00001929 typical case where the method returns its self argument.
1930
Guido van Rossume5c691a2003-03-07 15:13:17 +00001931- The extended type structure used for heap types (new-style
1932 classes defined by Python code using a class statement) is now
1933 exported from object.h as PyHeapTypeObject. (SF patch #696193.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001934
1935New platforms
1936-------------
1937
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00001938None this time.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001939
1940Tests
1941-----
1942
Neal Norwitz55b61d22003-02-28 19:57:03 +00001943- test_timeout now requires -u network to be passed to regrtest to run.
1944 See SF bug #692988.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001945
1946Windows
1947-------
1948
Tim Peters11b23062003-04-23 02:39:17 +00001949- os.fsync() now exists on Windows, and calls the Microsoft _commit()
1950 function.
1951
Guido van Rossumf4050642003-04-09 19:39:06 +00001952- New function winsound.MessageBeep() wraps the Win32 API
1953 MessageBeep().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001954
1955Mac
1956---
1957
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00001958- os.listdir() now returns Unicode strings on MacOS X when called with
1959 a Unicode argument. See the general news item under "Library".
Just van Rossum46c97842003-02-25 21:42:15 +00001960
Jack Jansendeac2ac2003-02-24 11:04:17 +00001961- A new method MacOS.WMAvailable() returns true if it is safe to access
1962 the window manager, false otherwise.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001963
Jack Jansencf76be02003-03-24 12:13:54 +00001964- EasyDialogs dialogs are now movable-modal, and if the application is
1965 currently in the background they will ask to be moved to the foreground
1966 before displaying.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001967
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00001968- OSA Scripting support has improved a lot, and gensuitemodule.py can now
Jack Jansende354b72003-04-11 15:37:20 +00001969 be used by mere mortals. The documentation is now also more or less
1970 complete.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001971
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00001972- The IDE (in a framework build) now includes introductory documentation
1973 in Apple Help Viewer format.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001974
1975
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001976What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 2?
1977=================================
1978
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00001979*Release date: 19-Feb-2003*
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001980
1981Core and builtins
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00001982-----------------
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001983
Walter Dörwald2ffec022003-02-19 16:34:11 +00001984- Negative positions returned from PEP 293 error callbacks are now
1985 treated as being relative to the end of the input string. Positions
1986 that are out of bounds raise an IndexError.
1987
Guido van Rossum162e38c2003-02-19 15:25:10 +00001988- sys.path[0] (the directory from which the script is loaded) is now
1989 turned into an absolute pathname, unless it is the empty string.
1990 (SF patch #664376.)
1991
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00001992- Finally fixed the bug in compile() and exec where a string ending
1993 with an indented code block but no newline would raise SyntaxError.
1994 This would have been a four-line change in parsetok.c... Except
1995 codeop.py depends on this behavior, so a compilation flag had to be
1996 invented that causes the tokenizer to revert to the old behavior;
1997 this required extra changes to 2 .h files, 2 .c files, and 2 .py
Guido van Rossum1442dc12003-02-13 22:19:20 +00001998 files. (Fixes SF bug #501622.)
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00001999
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00002000- If a new-style class defines neither __new__ nor __init__, its
2001 constructor would ignore all arguments. This is changed now: the
2002 constructor refuses arguments in this case. This might break code
2003 that worked under Python 2.2. The simplest fix is to add a no-op
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002004 __init__: ``def __init__(self, *args, **kw): pass``.
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00002005
Guido van Rossum48035eb2003-02-12 17:05:26 +00002006- Through a bytecode optimizer bug (and I bet you didn't even know
2007 Python *had* a bytecode optimizer :-), "unsigned" hex/oct constants
2008 with a leading minus sign would come out with the wrong sign.
2009 ("Unsigned" hex/oct constants are those with a face value in the
2010 range sys.maxint+1 through sys.maxint*2+1, inclusive; these have
2011 always been interpreted as negative numbers through sign folding.)
2012 E.g. 0xffffffff is -1, and -(0xffffffff) is 1, but -0xffffffff would
2013 come out as -4294967295. This was the case in Python 2.2 through
2014 2.2.2 and 2.3a1, and in Python 2.4 it will once again have that
2015 value, but according to PEP 237 it really needs to be 1 now. This
2016 will be backported to Python 2.2.3 a well. (SF #660455)
2017
Guido van Rossum47710652003-02-12 20:48:22 +00002018- int(s, base) sometimes sign-folds hex and oct constants; it only
2019 does this when base is 0 and s.strip() starts with a '0'. When the
2020 sign is actually folded, as in int("0xffffffff", 0) on a 32-bit
2021 machine, which returns -1, a FutureWarning is now issued; in Python
2022 2.4, this will return 4294967295L, as do int("+0xffffffff", 0) and
2023 int("0xffffffff", 16) right now. (PEP 347)
2024
Guido van Rossuma89d10e2003-02-12 03:58:38 +00002025- super(X, x): x may now be a proxy for an X instance, i.e.
2026 issubclass(x.__class__, X) but not issubclass(type(x), X).
2027
Guido van Rossum03bc7d32003-02-12 03:32:58 +00002028- isinstance(x, X): if X is a new-style class, this is now equivalent
2029 to issubclass(type(x), X) or issubclass(x.__class__, X). Previously
2030 only type(x) was tested. (For classic classes this was already the
2031 case.)
2032
Just van Rossum73ffb4a2003-02-10 09:57:08 +00002033- compile(), eval() and the exec statement now fully support source code
2034 passed as unicode strings.
2035
Neal Norwitzde8b94c2003-02-10 02:12:43 +00002036- int subclasses can be initialized with longs if the value fits in an int.
2037 See SF bug #683467.
2038
Tim Petersbf2674b2003-02-02 07:51:32 +00002039- long(string, base) takes time linear in len(string) when base is a power
2040 of 2 now. It used to take time quadratic in len(string).
2041
Martin v. Löwis8afd7572003-01-25 22:46:11 +00002042- filter returns now Unicode results for Unicode arguments.
2043
Martin v. Löwisaf6a27a2003-01-03 19:16:14 +00002044- raw_input can now return Unicode objects.
2045
Skip Montanaro4abd5f02003-01-02 20:51:08 +00002046- List objects' sort() method now accepts None as the comparison function.
2047 Passing None is semantically identical to calling sort() with no
2048 arguments.
2049
Neal Norwitz1a997502003-01-13 20:13:12 +00002050- Fixed crash when printing a subclass of str and __str__ returned self.
2051 See SF bug #667147.
2052
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00002053- Fixed an invalid RuntimeWarning and an undetected error when trying
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00002054 to convert a long integer into a float which couldn't fit.
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00002055 See SF bug #676155.
2056
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00002057- Function objects now have a __module__ attribute that is bound to
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00002058 the name of the module in which the function was defined. This
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00002059 applies for C functions and methods as well as functions and methods
2060 defined in Python. This attribute is used by pickle.whichmodule(),
2061 which changes the behavior of whichmodule slightly. In Python 2.2
2062 whichmodule() returns "__main__" for functions that are not defined
2063 at the top-level of a module (examples: methods, nested functions).
2064 Now whichmodule() will return the proper module name.
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00002065
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002066Extension modules
2067-----------------
2068
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00002069- operator.isNumberType() now checks that the object has a nb_int or
2070 nb_float slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
2071 tp_as_number pointer.
2072
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00002073- The imp module now has ways to acquire and release the "import
2074 lock": imp.acquire_lock() and imp.release_lock(). Note: this is a
2075 reentrant lock, so releasing the lock only truly releases it when
2076 this is the last release_lock() call. You can check with
2077 imp.lock_held(). (SF bug #580952 and patch #683257.)
2078
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002079- Change to cPickle to match pickle.py (see below and PEP 307).
2080
Neal Norwitz9caf9c02003-02-10 01:54:06 +00002081- Fix some bugs in the parser module. SF bug #678518.
2082
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00002083- Thanks to Scott David Daniels, a subtle bug in how the zlib
Walter Dörwald28d81962003-02-03 20:53:14 +00002084 extension implemented flush() was fixed. Scott also rewrote the
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00002085 zlib test suite using the unittest module. (SF bug #640230 and
2086 patch #678531.)
2087
Raymond Hettinger96ef8112003-02-01 00:10:11 +00002088- Added an itertools module containing high speed, memory efficient
2089 looping constructs inspired by tools from Haskell and SML.
2090
Guido van Rossum99d4abf2003-01-27 22:22:50 +00002091- The SSL module now handles sockets with a timeout set correctly (SF
2092 patch #675750, fixing SF bug #675552).
2093
Barry Warsawf8ba39c2003-01-07 20:55:26 +00002094- os/posixmodule has grown the sysexits.h constants (EX_OK and friends).
2095
Guido van Rossum6d0d3652003-01-07 20:34:19 +00002096- Fixed broken threadstate swap in readline that could cause fatal
2097 errors when a readline hook was being invoked while a background
2098 thread was active. (SF bugs #660476 and #513033.)
2099
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002100- fcntl now exposes the strops.h I_* constants.
2101
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00002102- Fix a crash on Solaris that occurred when calling close() on
2103 an mmap'ed file which was already closed. (SF patch #665913)
2104
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002105- Fixed several serious bugs in the zipimport implementation.
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002106
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00002107- datetime changes:
2108
Guido van Rossum8b7a9a32003-04-14 22:01:58 +00002109 The date class is now properly subclassable. (SF bug #720908)
2110
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00002111 The datetime and datetimetz classes have been collapsed into a single
2112 datetime class, and likewise the time and timetz classes into a single
2113 time class. Previously, a datetimetz object with tzinfo=None acted
2114 exactly like a datetime object, and similarly for timetz. This wasn't
2115 enough of a difference to justify distinct classes, and life is simpler
2116 now.
2117
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00002118 today() and now() now round system timestamps to the closest
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002119 microsecond <http://www.python.org/sf/661086>. This repairs an
2120 irritation most likely seen on Windows systems.
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00002121
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00002122 In dt.astimezone(tz), if tz.utcoffset(dt) returns a duration,
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00002123 ValueError is raised if tz.dst(dt) returns None (2.3a1 treated it
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002124 as 0 instead, but a tzinfo subclass wishing to participate in
2125 time zone conversion has to take a stand on whether it supports
2126 DST; if you don't care about DST, then code dst() to return 0 minutes,
2127 meaning that DST is never in effect).
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00002128
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00002129 The tzinfo methods utcoffset() and dst() must return a timedelta object
2130 (or None) now. In 2.3a1 they could also return an int or long, but that
2131 was an unhelpfully redundant leftover from an earlier version wherein
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00002132 they couldn't return a timedelta. TOOWTDI.
2133
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00002134 The example tzinfo class for local time had a bug. It was replaced
2135 by a later example coded by Guido.
2136
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00002137 datetime.astimezone(tz) no longer raises an exception when the
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002138 input datetime has no UTC equivalent in tz. For typical "hybrid" time
2139 zones (a single tzinfo subclass modeling both standard and daylight
2140 time), this case can arise one hour per year, at the hour daylight time
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00002141 ends. See new docs for details. In short, the new behavior mimics
2142 the local wall clock's behavior of repeating an hour in local time.
2143
2144 dt.astimezone() can no longer be used to convert between naive and aware
2145 datetime objects. If you merely want to attach, or remove, a tzinfo
2146 object, without any conversion of date and time members, use
2147 dt.replace(tzinfo=whatever) instead, where "whatever" is None or a
2148 tzinfo subclass instance.
2149
2150 A new method tzinfo.fromutc(dt) can be overridden in tzinfo subclasses
2151 to give complete control over how a UTC time is to be converted to
2152 a local time. The default astimezone() implementation calls fromutc()
2153 as its last step, so a tzinfo subclass can affect that too by overriding
2154 fromutc(). It's expected that the default fromutc() implementation will
2155 be suitable as-is for "almost all" time zone subclasses, but the
2156 creativity of political time zone fiddling appears unbounded -- fromutc()
2157 allows the highly motivated to emulate any scheme expressible in Python.
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002158
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00002159 datetime.now(): The optional tzinfo argument was undocumented (that's
2160 repaired), and its name was changed to tz ("tzinfo" is overloaded enough
2161 already). With a tz argument, now(tz) used to return the local date
2162 and time, and attach tz to it, without any conversion of date and time
2163 members. This was less than useful. Now now(tz) returns the current
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002164 date and time as local time in tz's time zone, akin to ::
2165
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00002166 tz.fromutc(datetime.utcnow().replace(tzinfo=utc))
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002167
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00002168 where "utc" is an instance of a tzinfo subclass modeling UTC. Without
2169 a tz argument, now() continues to return the current local date and time,
2170 as a naive datetime object.
2171
Tim Peters2a44a8d2003-01-23 20:53:10 +00002172 datetime.fromtimestamp(): Like datetime.now() above, this had less than
2173 useful behavior when the optional tinzo argument was specified. See
2174 also SF bug report <http://www.python.org/sf/660872>.
2175
Tim Peters8d81a012003-01-24 22:36:34 +00002176 date and datetime comparison: In order to prevent comparison from
2177 falling back to the default compare-object-addresses strategy, these
2178 raised TypeError whenever they didn't understand the other object type.
2179 They still do, except when the other object has a "timetuple" attribute,
2180 in which case they return NotImplemented now. This gives other
2181 datetime objects (e.g., mxDateTime) a chance to intercept the
2182 comparison.
2183
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002184 date, time, datetime and timedelta comparison: When the exception
2185 for mixed-type comparisons in the last paragraph doesn't apply, if
2186 the comparison is == then False is returned, and if the comparison is
2187 != then True is returned. Because dict lookup and the "in" operator
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002188 only invoke __eq__, this allows, for example, ::
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002189
2190 if some_datetime in some_sequence:
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002191
2192 and ::
2193
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002194 some_dict[some_timedelta] = whatever
2195
2196 to work as expected, without raising TypeError just because the
2197 sequence is heterogeneous, or the dict has mixed-type keys. [This
2198 seems like a good idea to implement for all mixed-type comparisons
2199 that don't want to allow falling back to address comparison.]
2200
Tim Peters75a6e3b2003-01-04 18:17:36 +00002201 The constructors building a datetime from a timestamp could raise
2202 ValueError if the platform C localtime()/gmtime() inserted "leap
2203 seconds". Leap seconds are ignored now. On such platforms, it's
2204 possible to have timestamps that differ by a second, yet where
2205 datetimes constructed from them are equal.
2206
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00002207 The pickle format of date, time and datetime objects has changed
2208 completely. The undocumented pickler and unpickler functions no
Tim Petersb57f8f02003-02-01 02:54:15 +00002209 longer exist. The undocumented __setstate__() and __getstate__()
2210 methods no longer exist either.
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00002211
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002212Library
2213-------
2214
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002215- The logging module was updated slightly; the WARN level was renamed
2216 to WARNING, and the matching function/method warn() to warning().
2217
2218- The pickle and cPickle modules were updated with a new pickling
2219 protocol (documented by pickletools.py, see below) and several
2220 extensions to the pickle customization API (__reduce__, __setstate__
2221 etc.). The copy module now uses more of the pickle customization
2222 API to copy objects that don't implement __copy__ or __deepcopy__.
2223 See PEP 307 for details.
2224
2225- The distutils "register" command now uses http://www.python.org/pypi
2226 as the default repository. (See PEP 301.)
2227
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00002228- the platform dependent path related variables sep, altsep, extsep,
2229 pathsep, curdir, pardir and defpath are now defined in the platform
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00002230 dependent path modules (e.g. ntpath.py) rather than os.py, so these
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002231 variables are now available via os.path. They continue to be
2232 available from the os module.
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00002233 (see <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00002234
Tim Peters6ee04802003-02-05 18:29:34 +00002235- array.array was added to the types repr.py knows about (see
2236 <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
2237
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00002238- The new pickletools.py contains lots of documentation about pickle
2239 internals, and supplies some helpers for working with pickles, such as
2240 a symbolic pickle disassembler.
2241
Skip Montanaro9a7c96a2003-01-22 18:17:25 +00002242- Xmlrpclib.py now supports the builtin boolean type.
2243
Martin v. Löwis0c6774d2003-01-15 11:51:06 +00002244- py_compile has a new 'doraise' flag and a new PyCompileError
2245 exception.
2246
Martin v. Löwisd69663d2003-01-15 11:37:23 +00002247- SimpleXMLRPCServer now supports CGI through the CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler
2248 class.
2249
Guido van Rossum50e92232003-01-14 16:45:04 +00002250- The sets module now raises TypeError in __cmp__, to clarify that
2251 sets are not intended to be three-way-compared; the comparison
2252 operators are overloaded as subset/superset tests.
2253
Guido van Rossumcd0c0472003-01-07 23:03:05 +00002254- Bastion.py and rexec.py are disabled. These modules are not safe in
2255 Python 2.2. or 2.3.
2256
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002257- realpath is now exported when doing ``from poxixpath import *``.
Neal Norwitzbb0246a2003-01-03 18:12:28 +00002258 It is also exported for ntpath, macpath, and os2emxpath.
2259 See SF bug #659228.
2260
Neal Norwitzb9ef4ae2003-01-05 23:19:43 +00002261- New module tarfile from Lars Gustäbel provides a comprehensive interface
2262 to tar archive files with transparent gzip and bzip2 compression.
2263 See SF patch #651082.
2264
Neal Norwitz4f442372003-01-06 06:51:36 +00002265- urlparse can now parse imap:// URLs. See SF feature request #618024.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002266
Neal Norwitze931ed52003-01-10 23:24:32 +00002267- Tkinter.Canvas.scan_dragto() provides an optional parameter to support
2268 the gain value which is passed to Tk. SF bug# 602259.
2269
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00002270- Fix logging.handlers.SysLogHandler protocol when using UNIX domain sockets.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00002271 See SF patch #642974.
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00002272
Skip Montanaro12fe72e2003-02-25 17:46:20 +00002273- The dospath module was deleted. Use the ntpath module when manipulating
2274 DOS paths from other platforms.
2275
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002276Tools/Demos
2277-----------
2278
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00002279- Two new scripts (db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py) were added to the
2280 Tools/scripts directory to facilitate conversion from the old bsddb module
2281 to the new one. While the user-visible API of the new module is
2282 compatible with the old one, it's likely that the version of the
2283 underlying database library has changed. To convert from the old library,
2284 run the db2pickle.py script using the old version of Python to convert it
2285 to a pickle file. After upgrading Python, run the pickle2db.py script
2286 using the new version of Python to reconstitute your database. For
2287 example:
2288
Skip Montanaro621f0552003-02-03 15:48:10 +00002289 % python2.2 db2pickle.py -h some.db > some.pickle
2290 % python2.3 pickle2db.py -h some.db.new < some.pickle
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00002291
2292 Run the scripts without any args to get a usage message.
2293
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002294
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002295Build
2296-----
2297
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00002298- The audio driver tests (test_ossaudiodev.py and
2299 test_linuxaudiodev.py) are no longer run by default. This is
2300 because they don't always work, depending on your hardware and
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002301 software. To run these tests, you must use an invocation like ::
2302
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00002303 ./python Lib/test/regrtest.py -u audio test_ossaudiodev
2304
Skip Montanarodecc6a42003-01-01 20:07:49 +00002305- On systems which build using the configure script, compiler flags which
2306 used to be lumped together using the OPT flag have been split into two
2307 groups, OPT and BASECFLAGS. OPT is meant to carry just optimization- and
2308 debug-related flags like "-g" and "-O3". BASECFLAGS is meant to carry
2309 compiler flags that are required to get a clean compile. On some
2310 platforms (many Linux flavors in particular) BASECFLAGS will be empty by
2311 default. On others, such as Mac OS X and SCO, it will contain required
2312 flags. This change allows people building Python to override OPT without
2313 fear of clobbering compiler flags which are required to get a clean build.
2314
2315- On Darwin/Mac OS X platforms, /sw/lib and /sw/include are added to the
2316 relevant search lists in setup.py. This allows users building Python to
2317 take advantage of the many packages available from the fink project
2318 <http://fink.sf.net/>.
2319
2320- A new Makefile target, scriptsinstall, installs a number of useful scripts
2321 from the Tools/scripts directory.
2322
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002323C API
2324-----
2325
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002326- PyEval_GetFrame() is now declared to return a ``PyFrameObject *``
2327 instead of a plain ``PyObject *``. (SF patch #686601.)
Guido van Rossum6297a7a2003-02-19 15:53:17 +00002328
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00002329- PyNumber_Check() now checks that the object has a nb_int or nb_float
2330 slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
2331 tp_as_number pointer.
2332
Guido van Rossumeea47182003-02-11 20:39:59 +00002333- A C type that inherits from a base type that defines tp_as_buffer
2334 will now inherit the tp_as_buffer pointer if it doesn't define one.
2335 (SF #681367)
2336
Neil Schemenauer5042da62003-02-04 20:59:40 +00002337- The PyArg_Parse functions now issue a DeprecationWarning if a float
2338 argument is provided when an integer is specified (this affects the 'b',
2339 'B', 'h', 'H', 'i', and 'l' codes). Future versions of Python will
2340 raise a TypeError.
Neil Schemenauercd63e612003-01-24 22:15:53 +00002341
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002342Tests
2343-----
2344
Walter Dörwald11cfbd62003-03-26 16:03:16 +00002345- Several tests weren't being run from regrtest.py (test_timeout.py,
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002346 test_tarfile.py, test_netrc.py, test_multifile.py,
2347 test_importhooks.py and test_imp.py). Now they are. (Note to
2348 developers: please read Lib/test/README when creating a new test, to
2349 make sure to do it right! All tests need to use either unittest or
2350 pydoc.)
2351
2352- Added test_posix.py, a test suite for the posix module.
2353
2354- Added test_hexoct.py, a test suite for hex/oct constant folding.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002355
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002356Windows
2357-------
2358
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00002359- The timeout code for socket connect() didn't work right; this has
2360 now been fixed. test_timeout.py should pass (at least most of the
2361 time).
2362
Thomas Hellerdda583d2003-01-31 20:45:41 +00002363- distutils' msvccompiler class now passes the preprocessor options to
2364 the resource compiler. See SF patch #669198.
2365
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00002366- The bsddb module now ships with Sleepycat's 4.1.25.NC, the latest
2367 release without strong cryptography.
2368
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00002369- sys.path[0], if it contains a directory name, is now always an
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002370 absolute pathname. (SF patch #664376.)
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00002371
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00002372- The new logging package is now installed by the Windows installer. It
2373 wasn't in 2.3a1 due to oversight.
2374
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002375Mac
2376---
2377
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00002378- There are new dialogs EasyDialogs.AskFileForOpen, AskFileForSave
2379 and AskFolder. The old macfs.StandardGetFile and friends are deprecated.
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002380
Jack Jansenc9296362003-02-06 23:10:45 +00002381- Most of the standard library now uses pathnames or FSRefs in preference
2382 of FSSpecs, and use the underlying Carbon.File and Carbon.Folder modules
2383 in stead of macfs. macfs will probably be deprecated in the future.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00002384
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00002385- Type Carbon.File.FSCatalogInfo and supporting methods have been implemented.
2386 This also makes macfs.FSSpec.SetDates() work again.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002387
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00002388- There is a new module pimp, the package install manager for Python, and
2389 accompanying applet PackageManager. These allow you to easily download
2390 and install pretested extension packages either in source or binary
2391 form. Only in MacPython-OSX.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002392
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00002393- Applets are now built with bundlebuilder in MacPython-OSX, which should make
Jack Jansen5d44b342003-02-18 23:32:47 +00002394 them more robust and also provides a path towards BuildApplication. The
2395 downside of this change is that applets can no longer be run from the
2396 Terminal window, this will hopefully be fixed in the 2.3b1.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002397
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002398
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002399What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 1?
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002400=================================
2401
Guido van Rossumae548862002-12-31 15:47:36 +00002402*Release date: 31-Dec-2002*
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002403
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002404Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002405--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00002406
Michael W. Hudson96bc3b42002-11-26 14:48:23 +00002407- One can now assign to __bases__ and __name__ of new-style classes.
2408
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00002409- dict() now accepts keyword arguments so that dict(one=1, two=2)
2410 is the equivalent of {"one": 1, "two": 2}. Accordingly,
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00002411 the existing (but undocumented) 'items' keyword argument has
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00002412 been eliminated. This means that dict(items=someMapping) now has
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00002413 a different meaning than before.
2414
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00002415- int() now returns a long object if the argument is outside the
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002416 integer range, so int("4" * 1000), int(1e200) and int(1L<<1000) will
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00002417 all return long objects instead of raising an OverflowError.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002418
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00002419- Assignment to __class__ is disallowed if either the old or the new
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00002420 class is a statically allocated type object (such as defined by an
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00002421 extension module). This prevents anomalies like 2.__class__ = bool.
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00002422
2423- New-style object creation and deallocation have been sped up
2424 significantly; they are now faster than classic instance creation
2425 and deallocation.
2426
2427- The __slots__ variable can now mention "private" names, and the
2428 right thing will happen (e.g. __slots__ = ["__foo"]).
2429
2430- The built-ins slice() and buffer() are now callable types. The
2431 types classobj (formerly class), code, function, instance, and
2432 instancemethod (formerly instance-method), which have no built-in
2433 names but are accessible through the types module, are now also
2434 callable. The type dict-proxy is renamed to dictproxy.
2435
2436- Cycles going through the __class__ link of a new-style instance are
2437 now detected by the garbage collector.
2438
2439- Classes using __slots__ are now properly garbage collected.
2440 [SF bug 519621]
2441
2442- Tightened the __slots__ rules: a slot name must be a valid Python
2443 identifier.
2444
2445- The constructor for the module type now requires a name argument and
2446 takes an optional docstring argument. Previously, this constructor
2447 ignored its arguments. As a consequence, deriving a class from a
2448 module (not from the module type) is now illegal; previously this
2449 created an unnamed module, just like invoking the module type did.
2450 [SF bug 563060]
2451
2452- A new type object, 'basestring', is added. This is a common base type
2453 for 'str' and 'unicode', and can be used instead of
2454 types.StringTypes, e.g. to test whether something is "a string":
2455 isinstance(x, basestring) is True for Unicode and 8-bit strings. This
2456 is an abstract base class and cannot be instantiated directly.
2457
2458- Changed new-style class instantiation so that when C's __new__
2459 method returns something that's not a C instance, its __init__ is
2460 not called. [SF bug #537450]
2461
2462- Fixed super() to work correctly with class methods. [SF bug #535444]
2463
2464- If you try to pickle an instance of a class that has __slots__ but
2465 doesn't define or override __getstate__, a TypeError is now raised.
2466 This is done by adding a bozo __getstate__ to the class that always
2467 raises TypeError. (Before, this would appear to be pickled, but the
2468 state of the slots would be lost.)
2469
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002470Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002471-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002472
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00002473- Import from zipfiles is now supported. The name of a zipfile placed
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00002474 on sys.path causes the import statement to look for importable Python
2475 modules (with .py, pyc and .pyo extensions) and packages inside the
2476 zipfile. The zipfile import follows the specification (though not
2477 the sample implementation) of PEP 273. The semantics of __path__ are
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00002478 compatible with those that have been implemented in Jython since
2479 Jython 2.1.
2480
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002481- PEP 302 has been accepted. Although it was initially developed to
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00002482 support zipimport, it offers a new, general import hook mechanism.
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00002483 Several new variables have been added to the sys module:
2484 sys.meta_path, sys.path_hooks, and sys.path_importer_cache; these
2485 make extending the import statement much more convenient than
2486 overriding the __import__ built-in function. For a description of
2487 these, see PEP 302.
2488
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00002489- A frame object's f_lineno attribute can now be written to from a
2490 trace function to change which line will execute next. A command to
2491 exploit this from pdb has been added. [SF patch #643835]
2492
Marc-André Lemburg20b91352002-12-12 18:01:43 +00002493- The _codecs support module for codecs.py was turned into a builtin
2494 module to assure that at least the builtin codecs are available
2495 to the Python parser for source code decoding according to PEP 263.
2496
Walter Dörwaldd9a6ad32002-12-12 16:41:44 +00002497- issubclass now supports a tuple as the second argument, just like
2498 isinstance does. ``issubclass(X, (A, B))`` is equivalent to
2499 ``issubclass(X, A) or issubclass(X, B)``.
2500
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00002501- Thanks to Armin Rigo, the last known way to provoke a system crash
2502 by cleverly arranging for a comparison function to mutate a list
2503 during a list.sort() operation has been fixed. The effect of
2504 attempting to mutate a list, or even to inspect its contents or
2505 length, while a sort is in progress, is not defined by the language.
2506 The C implementation of Python 2.3 attempts to detect mutations,
2507 and raise ValueError if one occurs, but there's no guarantee that
2508 all mutations will be caught, or that any will be caught across
2509 releases or implementations.
2510
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00002511- Unicode file name processing for Windows (PEP 277) is implemented.
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00002512 All platforms now have an os.path.supports_unicode_filenames attribute,
2513 which is set to True on Windows NT/2000/XP, and False elsewhere.
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00002514
Walter Dörwald3aeb6322002-09-02 13:14:32 +00002515- Codec error handling callbacks (PEP 293) are implemented.
2516 Error handling in unicode.encode or str.decode can now be customized.
2517
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00002518- A subtle change to the semantics of the built-in function intern():
2519 interned strings are no longer immortal. You must keep a reference
2520 to the return value intern() around to get the benefit.
2521
Guido van Rossumf808b892002-08-16 03:38:10 +00002522- Use of 'None' as a variable, argument or attribute name now
2523 issues a SyntaxWarning. In the future, None may become a keyword.
2524
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00002525- SET_LINENO is gone. co_lnotab is now consulted to determine when to
2526 call the trace function. C code that accessed f_lineno should call
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00002527 PyCode_Addr2Line instead (f_lineno is still there, but only kept up
2528 to date when there is a trace function set).
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00002529
Guido van Rossum9be89462002-08-14 16:11:30 +00002530- There's a new warning category, FutureWarning. This is used to warn
2531 about a number of situations where the value or sign of an integer
2532 result will change in Python 2.4 as a result of PEP 237 (integer
2533 unification). The warnings implement stage B0 mentioned in that
2534 PEP. The warnings are about the following situations:
2535
2536 - Octal and hex literals without 'L' prefix in the inclusive range
2537 [0x80000000..0xffffffff]; these are currently negative ints, but
2538 in Python 2.4 they will be positive longs with the same bit
2539 pattern.
2540
2541 - Left shifts on integer values that cause the outcome to lose
2542 bits or have a different sign than the left operand. To be
2543 precise: x<<n where this currently doesn't yield the same value
2544 as long(x)<<n; in Python 2.4, the outcome will be long(x)<<n.
2545
2546 - Conversions from ints to string that show negative values as
2547 unsigned ints in the inclusive range [0x80000000..0xffffffff];
2548 this affects the functions hex() and oct(), and the string
2549 formatting codes %u, %o, %x, and %X. In Python 2.4, these will
2550 show signed values (e.g. hex(-1) currently returns "0xffffffff";
2551 in Python 2.4 it will return "-0x1").
2552
Guido van Rossum9a2eda52002-12-31 02:12:42 +00002553- The bits manipulated under the cover by sys.setcheckinterval() have
2554 been changed. Both the check interval and the ticker used to be
2555 per-thread values. They are now just a pair of global variables.
2556 In addition, the default check interval was boosted from 10 to 100
2557 bytecode instructions. This may have some effect on systems that
2558 relied on the old default value. In particular, in multi-threaded
2559 applications which try to be highly responsive, response time will
2560 increase by some (perhaps imperceptible) amount.
Skip Montanaro979c74b2002-09-03 21:25:14 +00002561
Tim Petersd64c1de2002-08-12 17:36:03 +00002562- When multiplying very large integers, a version of the so-called
2563 Karatsuba algorithm is now used. This is most effective if the
2564 inputs have roughly the same size. If they both have about N digits,
2565 Karatsuba multiplication has O(N**1.58) runtime (the exponent is
2566 log_base_2(3)) instead of the previous O(N**2). Measured results may
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00002567 be better or worse than that, depending on platform quirks. Besides
2568 the O() improvement in raw instruction count, the Karatsuba algorithm
2569 appears to have much better cache behavior on extremely large integers
2570 (starting in the ballpark of a million bits). Note that this is a
2571 simple implementation, and there's no intent here to compete with,
2572 e.g., GMP. It gives a very nice speedup when it applies, but a package
2573 devoted to fast large-integer arithmetic should run circles around it.
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00002574
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00002575- u'%c' will now raise a ValueError in case the argument is an
2576 integer outside the valid range of Unicode code point ordinals.
2577
Guido van Rossumdeb09362002-08-09 17:16:30 +00002578- The tempfile module has been overhauled for enhanced security. The
2579 mktemp() function is now deprecated; new, safe replacements are
2580 mkstemp() (for files) and mkdtemp() (for directories), and the
2581 higher-level functions NamedTemporaryFile() and TemporaryFile().
2582 Use of some global variables in this module is also deprecated; the
2583 new functions have keyword arguments to provide the same
2584 functionality. All Lib, Tools and Demo modules that used the unsafe
2585 interfaces have been updated to use the safe replacements. Thanks
2586 to Zack Weinberg!
2587
Guido van Rossumd81a9832002-08-09 15:57:34 +00002588- When x is an object whose class implements __mul__ and __rmul__,
2589 1.0*x would correctly invoke __rmul__, but 1*x would erroneously
2590 invoke __mul__. This was due to the sequence-repeat code in the int
2591 type. This has been fixed now.
2592
Barry Warsawd79f6832002-08-06 17:01:51 +00002593- Previously, "str1 in str2" required str1 to be a string of length 1.
2594 This restriction has been relaxed to allow str1 to be a string of
2595 any length. Thus "'el' in 'hello world'" returns True now.
2596
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00002597- File objects are now their own iterators. For a file f, iter(f) now
2598 returns f (unless f is closed), and f.next() is similar to
2599 f.readline() when EOF is not reached; however, f.next() uses a
2600 readahead buffer that messes up the file position, so mixing
2601 f.next() and f.readline() (or other methods) doesn't work right.
2602 Calling f.seek() drops the readahead buffer, but other operations
2603 don't. It so happens that this gives a nice additional speed boost
2604 to "for line in file:"; the xreadlines method and corresponding
Guido van Rossumbffb2ef2002-08-09 17:17:07 +00002605 module are now obsolete. Thanks to Oren Tirosh!
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00002606
Guido van Rossumde392d32002-08-05 14:17:20 +00002607- Encoding declarations (PEP 263, phase 1) have been implemented. A
2608 comment of the form "# -*- coding: <encodingname> -*-" in the first
2609 or second line of a Python source file indicates the encoding.
Martin v. Löwis00f1e3f2002-08-04 17:29:52 +00002610
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00002611- list.sort() has a new implementation. While cross-platform results
2612 may vary, and in data-dependent ways, this is much faster on many
2613 kinds of partially ordered lists than the previous implementation,
2614 and reported to be just as fast on randomly ordered lists on
2615 several major platforms. This sort is also stable (if A==B and A
2616 precedes B in the list at the start, A precedes B after the sort too),
2617 although the language definition does not guarantee stability. A
2618 potential drawback is that list.sort() may require temp space of
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00002619 len(list)*2 bytes (``*4`` on a 64-bit machine). It's therefore possible
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00002620 for list.sort() to raise MemoryError now, even if a comparison function
2621 does not. See <http://www.python.org/sf/587076> for full details.
2622
Guido van Rossum2d5389c2002-07-23 03:44:35 +00002623- All standard iterators now ensure that, once StopIteration has been
2624 raised, all future calls to next() on the same iterator will also
2625 raise StopIteration. There used to be various counterexamples to
2626 this behavior, which could caused confusion or subtle program
2627 breakage, without any benefits. (Note that this is still an
2628 iterator's responsibility; the iterator framework does not enforce
2629 this.)
2630
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00002631- Ctrl+C handling on Windows has been made more consistent with
2632 other platforms. KeyboardInterrupt can now reliably be caught,
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00002633 and Ctrl+C at an interactive prompt no longer terminates the
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00002634 process under NT/2k/XP (it never did under Win9x). Ctrl+C will
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00002635 interrupt time.sleep() in the main thread, and any child processes
2636 created via the popen family (on win2k; we can't make win9x work
Mark Hammond8f3afc72002-08-10 06:26:31 +00002637 reliably) are also interrupted (as generally happens on for Linux/Unix.)
2638 [SF bugs 231273, 439992 and 581232]
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00002639
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00002640- sys.getwindowsversion() has been added on Windows. This
2641 returns a tuple with information about the version of Windows
2642 currently running.
2643
Raymond Hettinger5a04aec2002-06-25 00:25:30 +00002644- Slices and repetitions of buffer objects now consistently return
2645 a string. Formerly, strings would be returned most of the time,
2646 but a buffer object would be returned when the repetition count
2647 was one or when the slice range was all inclusive.
2648
Walter Dörwald3430d702002-06-17 10:43:59 +00002649- Unicode objects in sys.path are no longer ignored but treated
2650 as directory names.
2651
Neal Norwitz1f68fc72002-06-14 00:50:42 +00002652- Fixed string.startswith and string.endswith builtin methods
2653 so they accept negative indices. [SF bug 493951]
2654
Guido van Rossumc5fe5eb2002-06-12 03:45:21 +00002655- Fixed a bug with a continue inside a try block and a yield in the
2656 finally clause. [SF bug 567538]
2657
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00002658- Most builtin sequences now support "extended slices", i.e. slices
Guido van Rossum2e82e712002-06-13 11:41:07 +00002659 with a third "stride" parameter. For example, "hello world"[::-1]
2660 gives "dlrow olleh".
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00002661
Neal Norwitzd68f5172002-05-29 15:54:55 +00002662- A new warning PendingDeprecationWarning was added to provide
2663 direction on features which are in the process of being deprecated.
2664 The warning will not be printed by default. To see the pending
2665 deprecations, use -Walways::PendingDeprecationWarning::
2666 as a command line option or warnings.filterwarnings() in code.
2667
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00002668- Deprecated features of xrange objects have been removed as
2669 promised. The start, stop, and step attributes and the tolist()
2670 method no longer exist. xrange repetition and slicing have been
2671 removed.
2672
Guido van Rossum7dab2422002-04-26 19:40:56 +00002673- New builtin function enumerate(x), from PEP 279. Example:
2674 enumerate("abc") is an iterator returning (0,"a"), (1,"b"), (2,"c").
2675 The argument can be an arbitrary iterable object.
2676
Neil Schemenauer89e3ee02002-04-26 01:58:53 +00002677- The assert statement no longer tests __debug__ at runtime. This means
2678 that assert statements cannot be disabled by assigning a false value
2679 to __debug__.
2680
Walter Dörwald068325e2002-04-15 13:36:47 +00002681- A method zfill() was added to str and unicode, that fills a numeric
2682 string to the left with zeros. For example,
2683 "+123".zfill(6) -> "+00123".
2684
Guido van Rossum862fe3c2002-04-15 12:36:47 +00002685- Complex numbers supported divmod() and the // and % operators, but
2686 these make no sense. Since this was documented, they're being
2687 deprecated now.
2688
Guido van Rossum26dd8302002-04-26 20:11:29 +00002689- String and unicode methods lstrip(), rstrip() and strip() now take
2690 an optional argument that specifies the characters to strip. For
2691 example, "Foo!!!?!?!?".rstrip("?!") -> "Foo".
Guido van Rossum49042042002-04-13 00:59:05 +00002692
Guido van Rossumc0d3f4e2002-11-27 13:10:40 +00002693- There's a new dictionary constructor (a class method of the dict
2694 class), dict.fromkeys(iterable, value=None). It constructs a
2695 dictionary with keys taken from the iterable and all values set to a
2696 single value. It can be used for building sets and for removing
2697 duplicates from sequences.
Raymond Hettingere33d3df2002-11-27 07:29:33 +00002698
Guido van Rossumc69343b2002-04-12 19:22:48 +00002699- Added a new dict method pop(key). This removes and returns the
2700 value corresponding to key. [SF patch #539949]
2701
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00002702- A new built-in type, bool, has been added, as well as built-in
2703 names for its two values, True and False. Comparisons and sundry
2704 other operations that return a truth value have been changed to
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002705 return a bool instead. Read PEP 285 for an explanation of why this
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00002706 is backward compatible.
2707
Guido van Rossum95b62a62002-03-29 01:07:24 +00002708- Fixed two bugs reported as SF #535905: under certain conditions,
2709 deallocating a deeply nested structure could cause a segfault in the
2710 garbage collector, due to interaction with the "trashcan" code;
2711 access to the current frame during destruction of a local variable
2712 could access a pointer to freed memory.
2713
Guido van Rossumfe0ca4a2002-06-18 21:20:13 +00002714- The optional object allocator ("pymalloc") has been enabled by
2715 default. The recommended practice for memory allocation and
2716 deallocation has been streamlined. A header file is included,
2717 Misc/pymemcompat.h, which can be bundled with 3rd party extensions
2718 and lets them use the same API with Python versions from 1.5.2
2719 onwards.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00002720
Martin v. Löwiscfeb3b62002-03-03 21:30:27 +00002721- PyErr_Display will provide file and line information for all exceptions
2722 that have an attribute print_file_and_line, not just SyntaxErrors.
2723
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00002724- The UTF-8 codec will now encode and decode Unicode surrogates
2725 correctly and without raising exceptions for unpaired ones.
2726
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00002727- Universal newlines (PEP 278) is implemented. Briefly, using 'U'
2728 instead of 'r' when opening a text file for reading changes the line
2729 ending convention so that any of '\r', '\r\n', and '\n' is
2730 recognized (even mixed in one file); all three are converted to
2731 '\n', the standard Python line end character.
2732
Neal Norwitz649b7592002-01-01 19:07:13 +00002733- file.xreadlines() now raises a ValueError if the file is closed:
2734 Previously, an xreadlines object was returned which would raise
2735 a ValueError when the xreadlines.next() method was called.
2736
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002737- sys.exit() inadvertently allowed more than one argument.
Neal Norwitz0c766a02002-03-27 13:03:09 +00002738 An exception will now be raised if more than one argument is used.
2739
Gustavo Niemeyer17c5a332002-12-16 14:09:22 +00002740- Changed evaluation order of dictionary literals to conform to the
2741 general left to right evaluation order rule. Now {f1(): f2()} will
2742 evaluate f1 first.
Gustavo Niemeyer78429a62002-12-16 13:54:02 +00002743
Gustavo Niemeyer786ddb22002-12-16 18:12:53 +00002744- Fixed bug #521782: when a file was in non-blocking mode, file.read()
2745 could silently lose data or wrongly throw an unknown error.
2746
Neil Schemenauerb983aa02002-12-30 20:22:23 +00002747- The sq_repeat, sq_inplace_repeat, sq_concat and sq_inplace_concat
2748 slots are now always tried after trying the corresponding nb_* slots.
2749 This fixes a number of minor bugs (see bug #624807).
2750
Neal Norwitz74a032e2003-01-10 23:29:48 +00002751- Fix problem with dynamic loading on 64-bit AIX (see bug #639945).
2752
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002753Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002754-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002755
Raymond Hettinger9543b342003-01-18 23:22:20 +00002756- Added three operators to the operator module:
2757 operator.pow(a,b) which is equivalent to: a**b.
2758 operator.is_(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is b.
2759 operator.is_not(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is not b.
2760
Martin v. Löwis24a880b2002-12-31 12:55:15 +00002761- posix.openpty now works on all systems that have /dev/ptmx.
2762
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00002763- A module zipimport exists to support importing code from zip
2764 archives.
2765
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00002766- The new datetime module supplies classes for manipulating dates and
2767 times. The basic design came from the Zope "fishbowl process", and
2768 favors practical commercial applications over calendar esoterica. See
2769
2770 http://www.zope.org/Members/fdrake/DateTimeWiki/FrontPage
2771
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00002772- _tkinter now returns Tcl objects, instead of strings. Objects which
2773 have Python equivalents are converted to Python objects, other objects
2774 are wrapped. This can be configured through the wantobjects method,
Martin v. Löwis8c8aa5d2002-11-26 21:39:48 +00002775 or Tkinter.wantobjects.
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00002776
Barry Warsawc27f4bd2002-12-30 21:03:26 +00002777- The PyBSDDB wrapper around the Sleepycat Berkeley DB library has
2778 been added as the package bsddb. The traditional bsddb module is
2779 still available in source code, but not built automatically anymore,
2780 and is now named bsddb185. This supports Berkeley DB versions from
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00002781 3.0 to 4.1. For help converting your databases from the old module (which
2782 probably used an obsolete version of Berkeley DB) to the new module, see
2783 the db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py scripts described in the Tools/Demos
2784 section above.
Martin v. Löwisef546b32002-11-19 08:12:57 +00002785
Martin v. Löwis677bde22002-11-23 22:08:15 +00002786- unicodedata was updated to Unicode 3.2. It supports normalization
2787 and names for Hangul syllables and CJK unified ideographs.
Martin v. Löwis7d41e292002-11-23 12:22:32 +00002788
Neal Norwitz94a83fd2002-11-02 17:46:24 +00002789- resource.getrlimit() now returns longs instead of ints.
2790
Martin v. Löwis080689c2002-10-26 14:42:02 +00002791- readline now dynamically adjusts its input/output stream if
2792 sys.stdin/stdout changes.
2793
Guido van Rossumba602972002-10-01 18:18:58 +00002794- The _tkinter module (and hence Tkinter) has dropped support for
2795 Tcl/Tk 8.0 and 8.1. Only Tcl/Tk versions 8.2, 8.3 and 8.4 are
2796 supported.
2797
Martin v. Löwis658009a2002-09-16 17:26:24 +00002798- cPickle.BadPickleGet is now a class.
2799
Martin v. Löwisa19bfe02002-10-16 18:28:36 +00002800- The time stamps in os.stat_result are floating point numbers
2801 after stat_float_times has been called.
Martin v. Löwis94717ed2002-09-09 14:24:16 +00002802
Neal Norwitzb5673922002-09-05 21:48:07 +00002803- If the size passed to mmap.mmap() is larger than the length of the
2804 file on non-Windows platforms, a ValueError is raised. [SF bug 585792]
2805
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00002806- The xreadlines module is slated for obsolescence.
2807
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00002808- The strptime function in the time module is now always available (a
2809 Python implementation is used when the C library doesn't define it).
2810
Guido van Rossum9562bcf2002-06-14 21:31:18 +00002811- The 'new' module is no longer an extension, but a Python module that
2812 only exists for backwards compatibility. Its contents are no longer
2813 functions but callable type objects.
2814
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00002815- The bsddb.*open functions can now take 'None' as a filename.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00002816 This will create a temporary in-memory bsddb that won't be
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00002817 written to disk.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00002818
Martin v. Löwisb96152c2002-12-31 13:20:15 +00002819- posix.getloadavg, posix.lchown, posix.killpg, posix.mknod, and
2820 posix.getpgid have been added where available.
Martin v. Löwis06a83e92002-04-14 10:19:44 +00002821
Martin v. Löwisf0a46682002-11-03 17:20:12 +00002822- The locale module now exposes the C library's gettext interface. It
2823 also has a new function getpreferredencoding.
Martin v. Löwis2e64c342002-03-27 18:49:02 +00002824
Tim Petersfbf74f22002-03-14 19:06:01 +00002825- A security hole ("double free") was found in zlib-1.1.3, a popular
2826 third party compression library used by some Python modules. The
2827 hole was quickly plugged in zlib-1.1.4, and the Windows build of
2828 Python now ships with zlib-1.1.4.
2829
Martin v. Löwis688357e2002-04-08 21:28:20 +00002830- pwd, grp, and resource return enhanced tuples now, with symbolic
2831 field names.
Martin v. Löwis29001ff2002-03-01 10:47:37 +00002832
Martin v. Löwis99866332002-03-01 10:27:01 +00002833- array.array is now a type object. A new format character
2834 'u' indicates Py_UNICODE arrays. For those, .tounicode and
2835 .fromunicode methods are available. Arrays now support __iadd__
2836 and __imul__.
2837
Neal Norwitze790eae2002-01-01 21:14:12 +00002838- dl now builds on every system that has dlfcn.h. Failure in case
Martin v. Löwis93227272002-01-01 20:18:30 +00002839 of sizeof(int)!=sizeof(long)!=sizeof(void*) is delayed until dl.open
2840 is called.
2841
Skip Montanaro8e790e72002-09-03 13:25:17 +00002842- The sys module acquired a new attribute, api_version, which evaluates
2843 to the value of the PYTHON_API_VERSION macro with which the
2844 interpreter was compiled.
2845
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00002846- Fixed bug #470582: sre module would return a tuple (None, 'a', 'ab')
2847 when applying the regular expression '^((a)c)?(ab)$' on 'ab'. It now
2848 returns (None, None, 'ab'), as expected. Also fixed handling of
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00002849 lastindex/lastgroup match attributes in similar cases. For example,
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00002850 when running the expression r'(a)(b)?b' over 'ab', lastindex must be
2851 1, not 2.
2852
Gustavo Niemeyerc523b042002-11-07 03:28:56 +00002853- Fixed bug #581080: sre scanner was not checking the buffer limit
2854 before increasing the current pointer. This was creating an infinite
2855 loop in the search function, once the pointer exceeded the buffer
2856 limit.
2857
Thomas Heller95cb7e42002-11-07 16:23:55 +00002858- The os.fdopen function now enforces a file mode starting with the
2859 letter 'r', 'w' or 'a', otherwise a ValueError is raised. This fixes
2860 bug #623464.
2861
Greg Ward6c58d462003-01-03 18:02:15 +00002862- The linuxaudiodev module is now deprecated; it is being replaced by
2863 ossaudiodev. The interface has been extended to cover a lot more of
2864 OSS (see www.opensound.com), including most DSP ioctls and the
2865 OSS mixer API. Documentation forthcoming in 2.3a2.
2866
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002867Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002868-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002869
Guido van Rossum747f8062003-01-03 16:33:49 +00002870- imaplib.py now supports SSL (Tino Lange and Piers Lauder).
2871
Just van Rossum5e156ad2002-12-31 16:38:01 +00002872- Freeze's modulefinder.py has been moved to the standard library;
2873 slightly improved so it will issue less false missing submodule
2874 reports (see sf path #643711 for details). Documentation will follow
2875 with Python 2.3a2.
2876
Martin v. Löwis96a60e42002-12-31 13:11:54 +00002877- os.path exposes getctime.
2878
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002879- unittest.py now has two additional methods called assertAlmostEqual()
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002880 and failIfAlmostEqual(). They implement an approximate comparison
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002881 by rounding the difference between the two arguments and comparing
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002882 the result to zero. Approximate comparison is essential for
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002883 unit tests of floating point results.
2884
Raymond Hettingere11b5102002-12-25 16:37:19 +00002885- calendar.py now depends on the new datetime module rather than
2886 the time module. As a result, the range of allowable dates
2887 has been increased.
2888
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00002889- pdb has a new 'j(ump)' command to select the next line to be
2890 executed.
2891
Thomas Heller1b3b49d2002-12-12 19:13:44 +00002892- The distutils created windows installers now can run a
2893 postinstallation script.
2894
Martin v. Löwis4581cfa2002-11-22 08:23:09 +00002895- doctest.testmod can now be called without argument, which means to
2896 test the current module.
2897
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002898- When canceling a server that implemented threading with a keyboard
Martin v. Löwisf86e8ef2002-11-22 08:08:44 +00002899 interrupt, the server would shut down but not terminate (waiting on
2900 client threads). A new member variable, daemon_threads, was added to
2901 the ThreadingMixIn class in SocketServer.py to make it explicit that
2902 this behavior needs to be controlled.
2903
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00002904- A new module, optparse, provides a fancy alternative to getopt for
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00002905 command line parsing. It is a slightly modified version of Greg
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00002906 Ward's Optik package.
2907
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00002908- UserDict.py now defines a DictMixin class which defines all dictionary
2909 methods for classes that already have a minimum mapping interface.
2910 This greatly simplifies writing classes that need to be substitutable
2911 for dictionaries (such as the shelve module).
2912
2913- shelve.py now subclasses from UserDict.DictMixin. Now shelve supports
2914 all dictionary methods. This eases the transition to persistent
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00002915 storage for scripts originally written with dictionaries in mind.
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00002916
Skip Montanaro3bf99e32002-12-08 18:36:24 +00002917- shelve.open and the various classes in shelve.py now accept an optional
2918 binary flag, which defaults to False. If True, the values stored in the
2919 shelf are binary pickles.
2920
Guido van Rossumfda06742002-11-13 16:29:18 +00002921- A new package, logging, implements the logging API defined by PEP
2922 282. The code is written by Vinay Sajip.
2923
Walter Dörwald4dbf1922002-11-06 16:53:44 +00002924- StreamReader, StreamReaderWriter and StreamRecoder in the codecs
2925 modules are iterators now.
2926
Tim Peters9288f952002-11-05 20:38:55 +00002927- gzip.py now handles files exceeding 2GB. Files over 4GB also work
2928 now (provided the OS supports it, and Python is configured with large
2929 file support), but in that case the underlying gzip file format can
2930 record only the least-significant 32 bits of the file size, so that
2931 some tools working with gzipped files may report an incorrect file
2932 size.
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00002933
Martin v. Löwis74b51ac2002-10-26 14:50:45 +00002934- xml.sax.saxutils.unescape has been added, to replace entity references
2935 with their entity value.
2936
Martin v. Löwis77ac4292002-10-15 15:11:13 +00002937- Queue.Queue.{put,get} now support an optional timeout argument.
2938
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00002939- Various features of Tk 8.4 are exposed in Tkinter.py. The multiple
2940 option of tkFileDialog is exposed as function askopenfile{,name}s.
Martin v. Löwis2ec36272002-10-13 10:22:08 +00002941
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00002942- Various configure methods of Tkinter have been stream-lined, so that
2943 tag_configure, image_configure, window_configure now return a
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00002944 dictionary when invoked with no argument.
Martin v. Löwis6ce13152002-10-10 14:36:13 +00002945
Guido van Rossum2b492b62002-10-09 21:40:48 +00002946- Importing the readline module now no longer has the side effect of
2947 calling setlocale(LC_CTYPE, ""). The initial "C" locale, or
2948 whatever locale is explicitly set by the user, is preserved. If you
2949 want repr() of 8-bit strings in your preferred encoding to preserve
2950 all printable characters of that encoding, you have to add the
2951 following code to your $PYTHONSTARTUP file or to your application's
2952 main():
2953
2954 import locale
2955 locale.setlocale(locale.LC_CTYPE, "")
2956
Martin v. Löwise9ce0b02002-10-07 13:23:24 +00002957- shutil.move was added. shutil.copytree now reports errors as an
2958 exception at the end, instead of printing error messages.
2959
Marc-André Lemburg97047e22002-10-04 11:55:21 +00002960- Encoding name normalization was generalized to not only
2961 replace hyphens with underscores, but also all other non-alphanumeric
2962 characters (with the exception of the dot which is used for Python
2963 package names during lookup). The aliases.py mapping was updated
2964 to the new standard.
2965
Walter Dörwald5ccaf8f2002-09-06 16:15:58 +00002966- mimetypes has two new functions: guess_all_extensions() which
2967 returns a list of all known extensions for a mime type, and
2968 add_type() which adds one mapping between a mime type and
2969 an extension to the database.
2970
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00002971- New module: sets, defines the class Set that implements a mutable
2972 set type using the keys of a dict to represent the set. There's
2973 also a class ImmutableSet which is useful when you need sets of sets
2974 or when you need to use sets as dict keys, and a class BaseSet which
Raymond Hettingeref8b9c62002-12-09 08:56:06 +00002975 is the base class of the two.
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00002976
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00002977- Added random.sample(population,k) for random sampling without replacement.
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00002978 Returns a k length list of unique elements chosen from the population.
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00002979
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00002980- random.randrange(-sys.maxint-1, sys.maxint) no longer raises
2981 OverflowError. That is, it now accepts any combination of 'start'
2982 and 'stop' arguments so long as each is in the range of Python's
2983 bounded integers.
2984
Raymond Hettinger40f62172002-12-29 23:03:38 +00002985- Thanks to Raymond Hettinger, random.random() now uses a new core
2986 generator. The Mersenne Twister algorithm is implemented in C,
2987 threadsafe, faster than the previous generator, has an astronomically
2988 large period (2**19937-1), creates random floats to full 53-bit
2989 precision, and may be the most widely tested random number generator
2990 in existence.
2991
2992 The random.jumpahead(n) method has different semantics for the new
2993 generator. Instead of jumping n steps ahead, it uses n and the
2994 existing state to create a new state. This means that jumpahead()
2995 continues to support multi-threaded code needing generators of
2996 non-overlapping sequences. However, it will break code which relies
2997 on jumpahead moving a specific number of steps forward.
2998
2999 The attributes random.whseed and random.__whseed have no meaning for
3000 the new generator. Code using these attributes should switch to a
3001 new class, random.WichmannHill which is provided for backward
3002 compatibility and to make an alternate generator available.
3003
Guido van Rossum4a57c332002-08-02 18:05:20 +00003004- New "algorithms" module: heapq, implements a heap queue. Thanks to
3005 Kevin O'Connor for the code and François Pinard for an entertaining
3006 write-up explaining the theory and practical uses of heaps.
3007
Marc-André Lemburg58e2ff22002-07-12 14:40:04 +00003008- New encoding for the Palm OS character set: palmos.
3009
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00003010- binascii.crc32() and the zipfile module had problems on some 64-bit
3011 platforms. These have been fixed. On a platform with 8-byte C longs,
3012 crc32() now returns a signed-extended 4-byte result, so that its value
3013 as a Python int is equal to the value computed a 32-bit platform.
3014
Martin v. Löwis7d650ca2002-06-30 15:05:00 +00003015- xml.dom.minidom.toxml and toprettyxml now take an optional encoding
3016 argument.
3017
Guido van Rossum9f7549b2002-06-10 21:39:42 +00003018- Some fixes in the copy module: when an object is copied through its
3019 __reduce__ method, there was no check for a __setstate__ method on
3020 the result [SF patch 565085]; deepcopy should treat instances of
3021 custom metaclasses the same way it treats instances of type 'type'
3022 [SF patch 560794].
3023
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00003024- Sockets now support timeout mode. After s.settimeout(T), where T is
3025 a float expressing seconds, subsequent operations raise an exception
3026 if they cannot be completed within T seconds. To disable timeout
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00003027 mode, use s.settimeout(None). There's also a module function,
3028 socket.setdefaulttimeout(T), which sets the default for all sockets
3029 created henceforth.
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00003030
3031- getopt.gnu_getopt was added. This supports GNU-style option
3032 processing, where options can be mixed with non-option arguments.
Martin v. Löwis446a25f2002-06-06 10:58:36 +00003033
Michael W. Hudsonb0dc1a32002-06-04 18:27:35 +00003034- Stop using strings for exceptions. String objects used for
3035 exceptions are now classes deriving from Exception. The objects
3036 changed were: Tkinter.TclError, bdb.BdbQuit, macpath.norm_error,
3037 tabnanny.NannyNag, and xdrlib.Error.
Neal Norwitzb5b5a262002-06-04 17:14:07 +00003038
Walter Dörwald474458d2002-06-04 15:16:29 +00003039- Constants BOM_UTF8, BOM_UTF16, BOM_UTF16_LE, BOM_UTF16_BE,
3040 BOM_UTF32, BOM_UTF32_LE and BOM_UTF32_BE that represent the Byte
3041 Order Mark in UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 encodings for little and
3042 big endian systems were added to the codecs module. The old names
3043 BOM32_* and BOM64_* were off by a factor of 2.
3044
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00003045- Added conversion functions math.degrees() and math.radians().
Raymond Hettinger87f59ee2002-05-13 04:17:32 +00003046
Raymond Hettinger866964c2002-12-14 19:51:34 +00003047- math.log() now takes an optional argument: math.log(x[, base]).
3048
Raymond Hettinger9b1df1d2002-05-12 06:07:21 +00003049- ftplib.retrlines() now tests for callback is None rather than testing
3050 for False. Was causing an error when given a callback object which
3051 was callable but also returned len() as zero. The change may
3052 create new breakage if the caller relied on the undocumented behavior
3053 and called with callback set to [] or some other False value not
3054 identical to None.
3055
Tim Peters46c04e12002-05-05 20:40:00 +00003056- random.gauss() uses a piece of hidden state used by nothing else,
3057 and the .seed() and .whseed() methods failed to reset it. In other
3058 words, setting the seed didn't completely determine the sequence of
3059 results produced by random.gauss(). It does now. Programs repeatedly
3060 mixing calls to a seed method with calls to gauss() may see different
3061 results now.
3062
Fred Drake7f781c92002-05-01 20:33:53 +00003063- The pickle.Pickler class grew a clear_memo() method to mimic that
3064 provided by cPickle.Pickler.
3065
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003066- difflib's SequenceMatcher class now does a dynamic analysis of
3067 which elements are so frequent as to constitute noise. For
3068 comparing files as sequences of lines, this generally works better
3069 than the IS_LINE_JUNK function, and function ndiff's linejunk
3070 argument defaults to None now as a result. A happy benefit is
3071 that SequenceMatcher may run much faster now when applied
3072 to large files with many duplicate lines (for example, C program
3073 text with lots of repeated "}" and "return NULL;" lines).
3074
Guido van Rossum256705b2002-04-23 13:29:43 +00003075- New Text.dump() method in Tkinter module.
3076
Marc-André Lemburg1ec71ea2002-04-17 20:33:40 +00003077- New distutils commands for building packagers were added to
3078 support pkgtool on Solaris and swinstall on HP-UX.
3079
3080- distutils now has a new abstract binary packager base class
3081 command/bdist_packager, which simplifies writing packagers.
3082 This will hopefully provide the missing bits to encourage
3083 people to submit more packagers, e.g. for Debian, FreeBSD
3084 and other systems.
3085
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00003086- The UTF-16, -LE and -BE stream readers now raise a
3087 NotImplementedError for all calls to .readline(). Previously, they
3088 used to just produce garbage or fail with an encoding error --
3089 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 +00003090 work well with these.
3091
Martin v. Löwis5c137c22002-03-18 12:44:08 +00003092- compileall now supports quiet operation.
3093
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003094- The BaseHTTPServer now implements optional HTTP/1.1 persistent
Martin v. Löwis587c98c2002-03-17 18:37:22 +00003095 connections.
3096
Marc-André Lemburga5d2b4c2002-02-16 18:23:30 +00003097- socket module: the SSL support was broken out of the main
3098 _socket module C helper and placed into a new _ssl helper
3099 which now gets imported by socket.py if available and working.
3100
Marc-André Lemburg37aa5802002-02-10 21:42:47 +00003101- encodings package: added aliases for all supported IANA character
3102 sets
3103
Guido van Rossum606fe4e2001-12-28 20:57:14 +00003104- ftplib: to safeguard the user's privacy, anonymous login will use
3105 "anonymous@" as default password, rather than the real user and host
3106 name.
3107
Fred Drake36736122002-01-10 13:50:31 +00003108- webbrowser: tightened up the command passed to os.system() so that
3109 arbitrary shell code can't be executed because a bogus URL was
3110 passed in.
3111
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00003112- gettext.translation has an optional fallback argument, and
Martin v. Löwisa55ffae2002-01-11 06:58:49 +00003113 gettext.find an optional all argument. Translations will now fallback
Martin v. Löwisd8996052002-11-21 21:45:32 +00003114 on a per-message basis. The module supports plural forms, by means
3115 of gettext.[d]ngettext and Translation.[u]ngettext.
Martin v. Löwis1be64192002-01-11 06:33:28 +00003116
Martin v. Löwis9668b932002-01-12 11:27:42 +00003117- distutils bdist commands now offer a --skip-build option.
3118
Walter Dörwaldb25c2b02002-03-21 10:38:40 +00003119- warnings.warn now accepts a Warning instance as first argument.
3120
Fred Drakefed7e852002-04-04 19:36:15 +00003121- The xml.sax.expatreader.ExpatParser class will no longer create
3122 circular references by using itself as the locator that gets passed
3123 to the content handler implementation. [SF bug #535474]
3124
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00003125- The email.Parser.Parser class now properly parses strings regardless
3126 of their line endings, which can be any of \r, \n, or \r\n (CR, LF,
3127 or CRLF). Also, the Header class's constructor default arguments
3128 has changed slightly so that an explicit maxlinelen value is always
Barry Warsaw497e5c42002-12-30 19:27:08 +00003129 honored, and so unicode conversion error handling can be specified.
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00003130
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003131- distutils' build_ext command now links C++ extensions with the C++
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00003132 compiler available in the Makefile or CXX environment variable, if
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003133 running under \*nix.
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00003134
3135- New module bz2: provides a comprehensive interface for the bz2 compression
3136 library. It implements a complete file interface, one-shot (de)compression
3137 functions, and types for sequential (de)compression.
3138
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003139- New pdb command 'pp' which is like 'p' except that it pretty-prints
Barry Warsaw5d8d6182002-11-05 22:41:33 +00003140 the value of its expression argument.
3141
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00003142- Now bdist_rpm distutils command understands a verify_script option in
3143 the config file, including the contents of the referred filename in
3144 the "%verifyscript" section of the rpm spec file.
3145
Gustavo Niemeyer1456fde2002-11-25 17:25:04 +00003146- Fixed bug #495695: webbrowser module would run graphic browsers in a
3147 unix environment even if DISPLAY was not set. Also, support for
3148 skipstone browser was included.
3149
Gustavo Niemeyerd5ae01a2002-12-16 13:11:57 +00003150- Fixed bug #636769: rexec would run unallowed code if subclasses of
3151 strings were used as parameters for certain functions.
3152
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003153Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003154-----------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003155
Martin v. Löwis0d1fdea2002-11-22 08:36:54 +00003156- pygettext.py now supports globbing on Windows, and accepts module
3157 names in addition to accepting file names.
3158
Guido van Rossum923e4ef2002-09-17 20:58:59 +00003159- The SGI demos (Demo/sgi) have been removed. Nobody thought they
3160 were interesting any more. (The SGI library modules and extensions
3161 are still there; it is believed that at least some of these are
3162 still used and useful.)
3163
Fred Drake40813b12002-08-05 15:24:19 +00003164- IDLE supports the new encoding declarations (PEP 263); it can also
3165 deal with legacy 8-bit files if they use the locale's encoding. It
3166 allows non-ASCII strings in the interactive shell and executes them
3167 in the locale's encoding.
Martin v. Löwis98ce7b72002-08-05 15:11:26 +00003168
Marc-André Lemburg46260092002-04-04 16:17:11 +00003169- freeze.py now produces binaries which can import shared modules,
3170 unlike before when this failed due to missing symbol exports in
3171 the generated binary.
3172
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003173Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003174-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003175
Martin v. Löwisdc461752002-11-06 21:59:33 +00003176- On Unix, IDLE is now installed automatically.
3177
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00003178- The fpectl module is not built by default; it's dangerous or useless
3179 except in the hands of experts.
3180
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003181- The public Python C API will generally be declared using PyAPI_FUNC
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00003182 and PyAPI_DATA macros, while Python extension module init functions
3183 will be declared with PyMODINIT_FUNC. DL_EXPORT/DL_IMPORT macros
3184 are deprecated.
Neal Norwitz1389f3e2002-07-22 13:21:10 +00003185
Tim Petersc6a3ff62002-07-08 22:11:52 +00003186- A bug was fixed that could cause COUNT_ALLOCS builds to segfault, or
3187 get into infinite loops, when a new-style class got garbage-collected.
3188 Unfortunately, to avoid this, the way COUNT_ALLOCS works requires
3189 that new-style classes be immortal in COUNT_ALLOCS builds. Note that
3190 COUNT_ALLOCS is not enabled by default, in either release or debug
3191 builds, and that new-style classes are immortal only in COUNT_ALLOCS
3192 builds.
3193
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00003194- Compiling out the cyclic garbage collector is no longer an option.
3195 The old symbol WITH_CYCLE_GC is now ignored, and Python.h arranges
3196 that it's always defined (for the benefit of any extension modules
3197 that may be conditionalizing on it). A bonus is that any extension
3198 type participating in cyclic gc can choose to participate in the
3199 Py_TRASHCAN mechanism now too; in the absence of cyclic gc, this used
3200 to require editing the core to teach the trashcan mechanism about the
3201 new type.
3202
Martin v. Löwis0cec0ff2002-07-28 16:33:45 +00003203- According to Annex F of the current C standard,
Tim Peters1de41bf2002-07-03 03:31:20 +00003204
3205 The Standard C macro HUGE_VAL and its float and long double analogs,
3206 HUGE_VALF and HUGE_VALL, expand to expressions whose values are
3207 positive infinities.
3208
3209 Python only uses the double HUGE_VAL, and only to #define its own symbol
3210 Py_HUGE_VAL. Some platforms have incorrect definitions for HUGE_VAL.
3211 pyport.h used to try to worm around that, but the workarounds triggered
3212 other bugs on other platforms, so we gave up. If your platform defines
3213 HUGE_VAL incorrectly, you'll need to #define Py_HUGE_VAL to something
3214 that works on your platform. The only instance of this I'm sure about
3215 is on an unknown subset of Cray systems, described here:
3216
3217 http://www.cray.com/swpubs/manuals/SN-2194_2.0/html-SN-2194_2.0/x3138.htm
3218
3219 Presumably 2.3a1 breaks such systems. If anyone uses such a system, help!
3220
Martin v. Löwisa3fb4f72002-06-09 13:33:54 +00003221- The configure option --without-doc-strings can be used to remove the
3222 doc strings from the builtin functions and modules; this reduces the
3223 size of the executable.
3224
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00003225- The universal newlines option (PEP 278) is on by default. On Unix
3226 it can be disabled by passing --without-universal-newlines to the
3227 configure script. On other platforms, remove
3228 WITH_UNIVERSAL_NEWLINES from pyconfig.h.
Tim Peters639295f2002-04-21 07:30:30 +00003229
Martin v. Löwis1142de32002-03-29 16:28:31 +00003230- On Unix, a shared libpython2.3.so can be created with --enable-shared.
3231
Tim Peters8deda702002-03-30 10:06:07 +00003232- All uses of the CACHE_HASH, INTERN_STRINGS, and DONT_SHARE_SHORT_STRINGS
3233 preprocessor symbols were eliminated. The internal decisions they
3234 controlled stopped being experimental long ago.
Tim Peters1f7df352002-03-29 03:29:08 +00003235
Fred Drake7d28b732002-05-02 21:17:00 +00003236- The tools used to build the documentation now work under Cygwin as
3237 well as Unix.
3238
Skip Montanaro57454e52002-06-14 20:30:31 +00003239- The bsddb and dbm module builds have been changed to try and avoid version
3240 skew problems and disable linkage with Berkeley DB 1.85 unless the
3241 installer knows what s/he's doing. See the section on building these
3242 modules in the README file for details.
3243
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003244C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003245-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003246
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00003247- PyNumber_Check() now returns true for string and unicode objects.
3248 This is a result of these types having a partially defined
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00003249 tp_as_number slot. (This is not a feature, but an indication that
Walter Dörwalda1a61f92002-11-19 21:20:25 +00003250 PyNumber_Check() is not very useful to determine numeric behavior.
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00003251 It may be deprecated.)
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00003252
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00003253- The string object's layout has changed: the pointer member
3254 ob_sinterned has been replaced by an int member ob_sstate. On some
3255 platforms (e.g. most 64-bit systems) this may change the offset of
3256 the ob_sval member, so as a precaution the API_VERSION has been
3257 incremented. The apparently unused feature of "indirect interned
3258 strings", supported by the ob_sinterned member, is gone. Interned
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003259 strings are now usually mortal; there is a new API,
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00003260 PyString_InternImmortal() that creates immortal interned strings.
3261 (The ob_sstate member can only take three values; however, while
3262 making it a char saves a few bytes per string object on average, in
3263 it also slowed things down a bit because ob_sval was no longer
3264 aligned.)
3265
Guido van Rossumfdb86482002-08-14 21:20:32 +00003266- The Py_InitModule*() functions now accept NULL for the 'methods'
3267 argument. Modules without global functions are becoming more common
3268 now that factories can be types rather than functions.
3269
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00003270- New C API PyUnicode_FromOrdinal() which exposes unichr() at C
3271 level.
3272
Thomas Heller085358a2002-07-29 14:27:41 +00003273- New functions PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErr() and
3274 PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErrWithFilename(). Similar to
3275 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErrWithFilename() and
3276 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErr(), but they allow to specify
3277 the exception type to raise. Available on Windows.
3278
Tim Peters7c321a82002-07-09 02:57:01 +00003279- Py_FatalError() is now declared as taking a const char* argument. It
3280 was previously declared without const. This should not affect working
3281 code.
3282
Martin v. Löwis01f94bd2002-05-08 08:44:21 +00003283- Added new macro PySequence_ITEM(o, i) that directly calls
3284 sq_item without rechecking that o is a sequence and without
3285 adjusting for negative indices.
3286
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00003287- PyRange_New() now raises ValueError if the fourth argument is not 1.
3288 This is part of the removal of deprecated features of the xrange
3289 object.
3290
Guido van Rossum517c7d42002-04-26 02:49:14 +00003291- PyNumber_Coerce() and PyNumber_CoerceEx() now also invoke the type's
3292 coercion if both arguments have the same type but this type has the
3293 CHECKTYPES flag set. This is to better support proxies.
3294
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003295- The type of tp_free has been changed from "``void (*)(PyObject *)``" to
3296 "``void (*)(void *)``".
Neil Schemenauer9344b142002-04-12 23:00:08 +00003297
3298- PyObject_Del, PyObject_GC_Del are now functions instead of macros.
3299
Guido van Rossum0986d822002-04-08 01:38:42 +00003300- A type can now inherit its metatype from its base type. Previously,
3301 when PyType_Ready() was called, if ob_type was found to be NULL, it
3302 was always set to &PyType_Type; now it is set to base->ob_type,
3303 where base is tp_base, defaulting to &PyObject_Type.
3304
3305- PyType_Ready() accidentally did not inherit tp_is_gc; now it does.
3306
Neil Schemenauerc9abc1d2002-05-08 14:14:41 +00003307- The PyCore_* family of APIs have been removed.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00003308
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003309- The "u#" parser marker will now pass through Unicode objects as-is
Marc-André Lemburg3e3eacb2002-01-09 16:21:27 +00003310 without going through the buffer API.
3311
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003312- The enumerators of cmp_op have been renamed to use the prefix ``PyCmp_``.
Martin v. Löwis7198a522002-01-01 19:59:11 +00003313
Tim Peters10a3bb52001-12-25 19:07:38 +00003314- An old #define of ANY as void has been removed from pyport.h. This
3315 hasn't been used since Python's pre-ANSI days, and the #define has
3316 been marked as obsolete since then. SF bug 495548 says it created
3317 conflicts with other packages, so keeping it around wasn't harmless.
3318
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003319- Because Python's magic number scheme broke on January 1st, we decided
3320 to stop Python development. Thanks for all the fish!
3321
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00003322- Some of us don't like fish, so we changed Python's magic number
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00003323 scheme to a new one. See Python/import.c for details.
3324
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003325New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003326-------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003327
Martin v. Löwis79acb9e2002-12-06 12:48:53 +00003328- OpenVMS is now supported.
3329
Martin v. Löwisf90ae202002-06-11 06:22:31 +00003330- AtheOS is now supported.
3331
Andrew MacIntyre161ad0e2002-08-04 07:25:58 +00003332- the EMX runtime environment on OS/2 is now supported.
3333
Martin v. Löwisa6e97582002-01-01 18:41:33 +00003334- GNU/Hurd is now supported.
3335
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003336Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003337-----
3338
Fred Drake4dd0f7e2002-11-26 21:44:56 +00003339- The regrtest.py script's -u option now provides a way to say "allow
3340 all resources except this one." For example, to allow everything
3341 except bsddb, give the option '-uall,-bsddb'.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003342
3343Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003344-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003345
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00003346- The Windows distribution now ships with version 4.0.14 of the
3347 Sleepycat Berkeley database library. This should be a huge
3348 improvement over the previous Berkeley DB 1.85, which had many
3349 bugs.
3350 XXX What are the licensing issues here?
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003351 XXX If a user has a database created with a previous version of
Tim Peters84c7a3f2002-11-23 18:48:06 +00003352 XXX Python, what must they do to convert it?
3353 XXX I'm still not sure how to link this thing (see PCbuild/readme.txt).
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00003354 XXX The version # is likely to change before 2.3a1.
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00003355
3356- The Windows distribution now ships with a Secure Sockets Library (SLL)
Mark Hammondc3de0082002-12-03 06:16:08 +00003357 module (_ssl.pyd)
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00003358
Tim Peters857fb4c2002-11-14 23:31:58 +00003359- The Windows distribution now ships with Tcl/Tk version 8.4.1 (it
3360 previously shipped with Tcl/Tk 8.3.2).
3361
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00003362- When Python is built under a Microsoft compiler, sys.version now
3363 includes the compiler version number (_MSC_VER). For example, under
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003364 MSVC 6, sys.version contains the substring "MSC v.1200 ". 1200 is
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00003365 the value of _MSC_VER under MSVC 6.
3366
Tim Peters08e72952002-04-16 20:48:01 +00003367- Sometimes the uninstall executable (UNWISE.EXE) vanishes. One cause
3368 of that has been fixed in the installer (disabled Wise's "delete in-
3369 use files" uninstall option).
3370
Guido van Rossum181e41a2002-04-06 00:23:25 +00003371- Fixed a bug in urllib's proxy handling in Windows. [SF bug #503031]
3372
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00003373- The installer now installs Start menu shortcuts under (the local
3374 equivalent of) "All Users" when doing an Admin install.
3375
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00003376- file.truncate([newsize]) now works on Windows for all newsize values.
3377 It used to fail if newsize didn't fit in 32 bits, reflecting a
3378 limitation of MS _chsize (which is no longer used).
3379
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00003380- os.waitpid() is now implemented for Windows, and can be used to block
3381 until a specified process exits. This is similar to, but not exactly
3382 the same as, os.waitpid() on POSIX systems. If you're waiting for
3383 a specific process whose pid was obtained from one of the spawn()
3384 functions, the same Python os.waitpid() code works across platforms.
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00003385 See the docs for details. The docs were changed to clarify that
3386 spawn functions return, and waitpid requires, a process handle on
3387 Windows (not the same thing as a Windows process id).
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00003388
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00003389- New tempfile.TemporaryFile implementation for Windows: this doesn't
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003390 need a TemporaryFileWrapper wrapper anymore, and should be immune
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00003391 to a nasty problem: before 2.3, if you got a temp file on Windows, it
3392 got wrapped in an object whose close() method first closed the
3393 underlying file, then deleted the file. This usually worked fine.
3394 However, the spawn family of functions on Windows create (at a low C
3395 level) the same set of open files in the spawned process Q as were
3396 open in the spawning process P. If a temp file f was among them, then
3397 doing f.close() in P first closed P's C-level file handle on f, but Q's
3398 C-level file handle on f remained open, so the attempt in P to delete f
3399 blew up with a "Permission denied" error (Windows doesn't allow
3400 deleting open files). This was surprising, subtle, and difficult to
3401 work around.
3402
3403- The os module now exports all the symbolic constants usable with the
3404 low-level os.open() on Windows: the new constants in 2.3 are
3405 O_NOINHERIT, O_SHORT_LIVED, O_TEMPORARY, O_RANDOM and O_SEQUENTIAL.
3406 The others were also available in 2.2: O_APPEND, O_BINARY, O_CREAT,
3407 O_EXCL, O_RDONLY, O_RDWR, O_TEXT, O_TRUNC and O_WRONLY. Contrary
3408 to Microsoft docs, O_SHORT_LIVED does not seem to imply O_TEMPORARY
3409 (so specify both if you want both; note that neither is useful unless
3410 specified with O_CREAT too).
3411
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003412Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003413----
3414
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003415- Mac/Relnotes is gone, the release notes are now here.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003416
Just van Rossume1ebd802003-02-10 10:06:18 +00003417- Python (the OSX-only, unix-based version, not the OS9-compatible CFM
3418 version) now fully supports unicode strings as arguments to various file
3419 system calls, eg. open(), file(), os.stat() and os.listdir().
3420
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003421- The current naming convention for Python on the Macintosh is that MacPython
3422 refers to the unix-based OSX-only version, and MacPython-OS9 refers to the
3423 CFM-based version that runs on both OS9 and OSX.
3424
3425- All MacPython-OS9 functionality is now available in an OSX unix build,
3426 including the Carbon modules, the IDE, OSA support, etc. A lot of this
3427 will only work correctly in a framework build, though, because you cannot
3428 talk to the window manager unless your application is run from a .app
3429 bundle. There is a command line tool "pythonw" that runs your script
3430 with an interpreter living in such a .app bundle, this interpreter should
3431 be used to run any Python script using the window manager (including
3432 Tkinter or wxPython scripts).
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00003433
Jack Jansen8bb80db2002-12-30 22:42:43 +00003434- Most of Mac/Lib has moved to Lib/plat-mac, which is again used both in
3435 MacPython-OSX and MacPython-OS9. The only modules remaining in Mac/Lib
3436 are specifically for MacPython-OS9 (CFM support, preference resources, etc).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003437
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003438- A new utility PythonLauncher will start a Python interpreter when a .py or
3439 .pyw script is double-clicked in the Finder. By default .py scripts are
3440 run with a normal Python interpreter in a Terminal window and .pyw
3441 files are run with a window-aware pythonw interpreter without a Terminal
3442 window, but all this can be customized.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003443
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003444- MacPython-OS9 is now Carbon-only, so it runs on Mac OS 9 or Mac OS X and
3445 possibly on Mac OS 8.6 with the right CarbonLib installed, but not on earlier
3446 releases.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003447
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003448- Many tools such as BuildApplet.py and gensuitemodule.py now support a command
3449 line interface too.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003450
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003451- All the Carbon classes are now PEP253 compliant, meaning that you can
3452 subclass them from Python. Most of the attributes have gone, you should
3453 now use the accessor function call API, which is also what Apple's
3454 documentation uses. Some attributes such as grafport.visRgn are still
3455 available for convenience.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003456
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003457- New Carbon modules File (implementing the APIs in Files.h and Aliases.h)
3458 and Folder (APIs from Folders.h). The old macfs builtin module is
3459 gone, and replaced by a Python wrapper around the new modules.
3460
3461- Pathname handling should now be fully consistent: MacPython-OSX always uses
3462 unix pathnames and MacPython-OS9 always uses colon-separated Mac pathnames
3463 (also when running on Mac OS X).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003464
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003465- New Carbon modules Help and AH give access to the Carbon Help Manager.
3466 There are hooks in the IDE to allow accessing the Python documentation
3467 (and Apple's Carbon and Cocoa documentation) through the Help Viewer.
3468 See Mac/OSX/README for converting the Python documentation to a
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003469 Help Viewer compatible form and installing it.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003470
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003471- OSA support has been redesigned and the generated Python classes now
3472 mirror the inheritance defined by the underlying OSA classes.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003473
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003474- MacPython no longer maps both \r and \n to \n on input for any text file.
3475 This feature has been replaced by universal newline support (PEP278).
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00003476
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00003477- The default encoding for Python sourcefiles in MacPython-OS9 is no longer
Guido van Rossum16c85172003-02-20 01:52:48 +00003478 mac-roman (or whatever your local Mac encoding was) but "ascii", like on
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00003479 other platforms. If you really need sourcefiles with Mac characters in them
3480 you can change this in site.py.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003481
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003482
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003483What's New in Python 2.2 final?
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003484===============================
3485
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003486*Release date: 21-Dec-2001*
3487
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003488Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003489--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003490
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003491- pickle.py, cPickle: allow pickling instances of new-style classes
3492 with a custom metaclass.
3493
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003494Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003495-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003496
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003497- weakref proxy object: when comparing, unwrap both arguments if both
3498 are proxies.
3499
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003500Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003501-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003502
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003503- binascii.b2a_base64(): fix a potential buffer overrun when encoding
3504 very short strings.
3505
3506- cPickle: the obscure "fast" mode was suspected of causing stack
3507 overflows on the Mac. Hopefully fixed this by setting the recursion
3508 limit much smaller. If the limit is too low (it only affects
3509 performance), you can change it by defining PY_CPICKLE_FAST_LIMIT
3510 when compiling cPickle.c (or in pyconfig.h).
3511
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003512Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003513-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003514
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003515- dumbdbm.py: fixed a dumb old bug (the file didn't get synched at
3516 close or delete time).
3517
3518- rfc822.py: fixed a bug where the address '<>' was converted to None
3519 instead of an empty string (also fixes the email.Utils module).
3520
3521- xmlrpclib.py: version 1.0.0; uses precision for doubles.
3522
3523- test suite: the pickle and cPickle tests were not executing any code
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003524 when run from the standard regression test.
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003525
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003526Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003527-----------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003528
3529Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003530-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003531
3532C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003533-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003534
3535New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003536-------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003537
3538Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003539-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003540
3541Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003542-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003543
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003544- distutils package: fixed broken Windows installers (bdist_wininst).
3545
3546- tempfile.py: prevent mysterious warnings when TemporaryFileWrapper
3547 instances are deleted at process exit time.
3548
3549- socket.py: prevent mysterious warnings when socket instances are
3550 deleted at process exit time.
3551
3552- posixmodule.c: fix a Windows crash with stat() of a filename ending
3553 in backslash.
3554
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003555Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003556----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003557
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003558- The Carbon toolbox modules have been upgraded to Universal Headers
3559 3.4, and experimental CoreGraphics and CarbonEvents modules have
3560 been added. All only for framework-enabled MacOSX.
3561
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003562
Tim Peters6272dfd2001-12-13 19:34:00 +00003563What's New in Python 2.2c1?
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003564===========================
3565
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003566*Release date: 14-Dec-2001*
3567
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003568Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003569--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003570
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003571- Guido's tutorial introduction to the new type/class features has
3572 been extensively updated. See
3573
3574 http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html
3575
3576 That remains the primary documentation in this area.
3577
Guido van Rossum33bab012001-12-05 22:45:48 +00003578- Fixed a leak: instance variables declared with __slots__ were never
3579 deleted!
3580
Guido van Rossum4b800852001-12-03 00:54:52 +00003581- The "delete attribute" method of descriptor objects is called
3582 __delete__, not __del__. In previous releases, it was mistakenly
3583 called __del__, which created an unfortunate overloading condition
3584 with finalizers. (The "get attribute" and "set attribute" methods
3585 are still called __get__ and __set__, respectively.)
3586
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00003587- Some subtle issues with the super built-in were fixed:
3588
3589 (a) When super itself is subclassed, its __get__ method would still
3590 return an instance of the base class (i.e., of super).
3591
3592 (b) super(C, C()).__class__ would return C rather than super. This
3593 is confusing. To fix this, I decided to change the semantics of
3594 super so that it only applies to code attributes, not to data
3595 attributes. After all, overriding data attributes is not
3596 supported anyway.
3597
3598 (c) The __get__ method didn't check whether the argument was an
3599 instance of the type used in creation of the super instance.
3600
Guido van Rossumcd7b7d62001-12-04 21:02:07 +00003601- Previously, hash() of an instance of a subclass of a mutable type
3602 (list or dictionary) would return some value, rather than raising
3603 TypeError. This has been fixed. Also, directly calling
3604 dict.__hash__ and list.__hash__ now raises the same TypeError
3605 (previously, these were the same as object.__hash__).
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00003606
Guido van Rossumd331cb52001-12-05 19:46:42 +00003607- New-style objects now support deleting their __dict__. This is for
3608 all intents and purposes equivalent to assigning a brand new empty
3609 dictionary, but saves space if the object is not used further.
3610
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003611Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003612-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003613
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00003614- -Qnew now works as documented in PEP 238: when -Qnew is passed on
3615 the command line, all occurrences of "/" use true division instead
3616 of classic division. See the PEP for details. Note that "all"
3617 means all instances in library and 3rd-party modules, as well as in
3618 your own code. As the PEP says, -Qnew is intended for use only in
3619 educational environments with control over the libraries in use.
Tim Petersbf72fe22001-12-11 21:43:14 +00003620 Note that test_coercion.py in the standard Python test suite fails
3621 under -Qnew; this is expected, and won't be repaired until true
3622 division becomes the default (in the meantime, test_coercion is
3623 testing the current rules).
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00003624
Fred Drake6c01e252001-12-14 17:08:12 +00003625- complex() now only allows the first argument to be a string
3626 argument, and raises TypeError if either the second arg is a string
3627 or if the second arg is specified when the first is a string.
3628
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003629Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003630-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003631
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00003632- gc.get_referents was renamed to gc.get_referrers.
3633
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003634Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003635-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003636
Tim Peters25059d32001-12-07 20:35:43 +00003637- Functions in the os.spawn() family now release the global interpreter
3638 lock around calling the platform spawn. They should always have done
3639 this, but did not before 2.2c1. Multithreaded programs calling
3640 an os.spawn function with P_WAIT will no longer block all Python threads
3641 until the spawned program completes. It's possible that some programs
3642 relies on blocking, although more likely by accident than by design.
3643
Martin v. Löwis3a89b2b2001-11-25 14:35:58 +00003644- webbrowser defaults to netscape.exe on OS/2 now.
3645
Martin v. Löwis652e1912001-11-25 14:50:56 +00003646- Tix.ResizeHandle exposes detach_widget, hide, and show.
3647
Martin v. Löwis714d2e22001-12-02 12:26:03 +00003648- The charset alias windows_1252 has been added.
3649
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003650- types.StringTypes is a tuple containing the defined string types;
3651 usually this will be (str, unicode), but if Python was compiled
3652 without Unicode support it will be just (str,).
3653
3654- The pulldom and minidom modules were synchronized to PyXML.
3655
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003656Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003657-----------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003658
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003659- A new script called Tools/scripts/google.py was added, which fires
3660 off a search on Google.
3661
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003662Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003663-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003664
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003665- Note that release builds of Python should arrange to define the
3666 preprocessor symbol NDEBUG on the command line (or equivalent).
3667 In the 2.2 pre-release series we tried to define this by magic in
3668 Python.h instead, but it proved to cause problems for extension
3669 authors. The Unix, Windows and Mac builds now all define NDEBUG in
3670 release builds via cmdline (or equivalent) instead. Ports to
3671 other platforms should do likewise.
3672
Jack Jansen1999ef42001-12-06 21:47:20 +00003673- It is no longer necessary to use --with-suffix when building on a
3674 case-insensitive file system (such as Mac OS X HFS+). In the build
3675 directory an extension is used, but not in the installed python.
3676
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003677C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003678-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003679
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00003680- New function PyDict_MergeFromSeq2() exposes the builtin dict
3681 constructor's logic for updating a dictionary from an iterable object
3682 producing key-value pairs.
3683
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00003684- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() requires that the number of entries in
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00003685 the keyword list equal the number of argument specifiers. This
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00003686 wasn't checked correctly, and PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords could even
3687 dump core in some bad cases. This has been repaired. As a result,
3688 PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords may raise RuntimeError in bad cases that
3689 previously went unchallenged.
3690
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003691New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003692-------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003693
3694Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003695-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003696
3697Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003698-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003699
3700Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003701----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003702
Jack Jansenffa260f2001-12-06 21:14:00 +00003703- In unix-Python on Mac OS X (and darwin) sys.platform is now "darwin",
3704 without any trailing digits.
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003705
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003706- Changed logic for finding python home in Mac OS X framework Pythons.
3707 Now sys.executable points to the executable again, in stead of to
3708 the shared library. The latter is used only for locating the python
3709 home.
3710
3711
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003712What's New in Python 2.2b2?
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003713===========================
3714
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003715*Release date: 16-Nov-2001*
3716
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003717Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003718--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003719
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00003720- Multiple inheritance mixing new-style and classic classes in the
3721 list of base classes is now allowed, so this works now:
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00003722
3723 class Classic: pass
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00003724 class Mixed(Classic, object): pass
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00003725
3726 The MRO (method resolution order) for each base class is respected
3727 according to its kind, but the MRO for the derived class is computed
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003728 using new-style MRO rules if any base class is a new-style class.
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00003729 This needs to be documented.
3730
Tim Petersa427a2b2001-10-29 22:25:45 +00003731- The new builtin dictionary() constructor, and dictionary type, have
3732 been renamed to dict. This reflects a decade of common usage.
3733
Guido van Rossum3fc08d22001-11-15 20:33:10 +00003734- dict() now accepts an iterable object producing 2-sequences. For
3735 example, dict(d.items()) == d for any dictionary d. The argument,
3736 and the elements of the argument, can be any iterable objects.
3737
Guido van Rossum7ad2d1e2001-10-29 22:11:00 +00003738- New-style classes can now have a __del__ method, which is called
3739 when the instance is deleted (just like for classic classes).
3740
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003741- Assignment to object.__dict__ is now possible, for objects that are
3742 instances of new-style classes that have a __dict__ (unless the base
3743 class forbids it).
3744
Guido van Rossumc8e56452001-10-22 00:43:43 +00003745- Methods of built-in types now properly check for keyword arguments
3746 (formerly these were silently ignored). The only built-in methods
3747 that take keyword arguments are __call__, __init__ and __new__.
3748
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00003749- The socket function has been converted to a type; see below.
3750
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003751Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003752-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003753
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00003754- Assignment to __debug__ raises SyntaxError at compile-time. This
3755 was promised when 2.1c1 was released as "What's New in Python 2.1c1"
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003756 (see below) says.
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00003757
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003758- Clarified the error messages for unsupported operands to an operator
3759 (like 1 + '').
3760
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003761Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003762-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003763
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00003764- mmap has a new keyword argument, "access", allowing a uniform way for
3765 both Windows and Unix users to create read-only, write-through and
3766 copy-on-write memory mappings. This was previously possible only on
3767 Unix. A new keyword argument was required to support this in a
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003768 uniform way because the mmap() signatures had diverged across
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00003769 platforms. Thanks to Jay T Miller for repairing this!
3770
Tim Peters169ded02001-11-03 19:57:21 +00003771- By default, the gc.garbage list now contains only those instances in
3772 unreachable cycles that have __del__ methods; in 2.1 it contained all
3773 instances in unreachable cycles. "Instances" here has been generalized
3774 to include instances of both new-style and old-style classes.
3775
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003776- The socket module defines a new method for socket objects,
3777 sendall(). This is like send() but may make multiple calls to
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00003778 send() until all data has been sent. Also, the socket function has
3779 been converted to a subclassable type, like list and tuple (etc.)
3780 before it; socket and SocketType are now the same thing.
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003781
3782- Various bugfixes to the curses module. There is now a test suite
3783 for the curses module (you have to run it manually).
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00003784
Guido van Rossum692adf12001-10-30 03:03:03 +00003785- binascii.b2a_base64 no longer places an arbitrary restriction of 57
3786 bytes on its input.
3787
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003788Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003789-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003790
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00003791- tkFileDialog exposes a Directory class and askdirectory
Martin v. Löwis25ee87c2001-11-07 22:38:08 +00003792 convenience function.
3793
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00003794- Symbolic group names in regular expressions must be unique. For
3795 example, the regexp r'(?P<abc>)(?P<abc>)' is not allowed, because a
3796 single name can't mean both "group 1" and "group 2" simultaneously.
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003797 Python 2.2 detects this error at regexp compilation time;
3798 previously, the error went undetected, and results were
3799 unpredictable. Also in sre, the pattern.split(), pattern.sub(), and
3800 pattern.subn() methods have been rewritten in C. Also, an
3801 experimental function/method finditer() has been added, which works
3802 like findall() but returns an iterator.
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00003803
Martin v. Löwisb7b32602001-11-02 23:48:20 +00003804- Tix exposes more commands through the classes DirSelectBox,
3805 DirSelectDialog, ListNoteBook, Meter, CheckList, and the
3806 methods tix_addbitmapdir, tix_cget, tix_configure, tix_filedialog,
3807 tix_getbitmap, tix_getimage, tix_option_get, and tix_resetoptions.
3808
Tim Peters98791af2001-10-23 01:59:54 +00003809- Traceback objects are now scanned by cyclic garbage collection, so
3810 cycles created by casual use of sys.exc_info() no longer cause
3811 permanent memory leaks (provided garbage collection is enabled).
3812
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00003813- os.extsep -- a new variable needed by the RISCOS support. It is the
3814 separator used by extensions, and is '.' on all platforms except
3815 RISCOS, where it is '/'. There is no need to use this variable
3816 unless you have a masochistic desire to port your code to RISCOS.
3817
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003818- mimetypes.py has optional support for non-standard, but commonly
3819 found types. guess_type() and guess_extension() now accept an
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003820 optional 'strict' flag, defaulting to true, which controls whether
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003821 recognize non-standard types or not. A few non-standard types we
3822 know about have been added. Also, when run as a script, there are
3823 new -l and -e options.
3824
3825- statcache is now deprecated.
3826
3827- email.Utils.formatdate() now produces the preferred RFC 2822 style
3828 dates with numeric timezones (it used to produce obsolete dates
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003829 hard coded to "GMT" timezone). An optional 'localtime' flag is
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003830 added to produce dates in the local timezone, with daylight savings
3831 time properly taken into account.
3832
3833- In pickle and cPickle, instead of masking errors in load() by
3834 transforming them into SystemError, we let the original exception
3835 propagate out. Also, implement support for __safe_for_unpickling__
3836 in pickle, as it already was supported in cPickle.
3837
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003838Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003839-----------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003840
3841Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003842-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003843
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003844- The dbm module is built using libdb1 if available. The bsddb module
3845 is built with libdb3 if available.
3846
3847- Misc/Makefile.pre.in has been removed by BDFL pronouncement.
3848
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003849C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003850-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003851
Tim Peters1fc240e2001-10-26 05:06:50 +00003852- New function PySequence_Fast_GET_SIZE() returns the size of a non-
3853 NULL result from PySequence_Fast(), more quickly than calling
3854 PySequence_Size().
3855
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003856- New argument unpacking function PyArg_UnpackTuple() added.
3857
3858- New functions PyObject_CallFunctionObjArgs() and
3859 PyObject_CallMethodObjArgs() have been added to make it more
3860 convenient and efficient to call functions and methods from C.
3861
3862- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() no longer masks errors, so it's
3863 possible that this will propagate errors it didn't before.
3864
3865- New function PyObject_CheckReadBuffer(), which returns true if its
3866 argument supports the single-segment readable buffer interface.
3867
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003868New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003869-------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003870
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00003871- We've finally confirmed that this release builds on HP-UX 11.00,
3872 *with* threads, and passes the test suite.
3873
Tim Peters7a33d8b2001-11-05 02:51:07 +00003874- Thanks to a series of patches from Michael Muller, Python may build
3875 again under OS/2 Visual Age C++.
3876
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00003877- Updated RISCOS port by Dietmar Schwertberger.
3878
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003879Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003880-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003881
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00003882- Added a test script for the curses module. It isn't run automatically;
3883 regrtest.py must be run with '-u curses' to enable it.
3884
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003885Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003886-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003887
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003888Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003889----
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003890
3891- PythonScript has been moved to unsupported and is slated to be
3892 removed completely in the next release.
3893
3894- It should now be possible to build applets that work on both OS9 and
3895 OSX.
3896
3897- The core is now linked with CoreServices not Carbon; as a side
3898 result, default 8bit encoding on OSX is now ASCII.
3899
3900- Python should now build on OSX 10.1.1
3901
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003902
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003903What's New in Python 2.2b1?
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003904===========================
3905
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003906*Release date: 19-Oct-2001*
3907
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003908Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003909--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003910
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00003911- New-style classes are now always dynamic (except for built-in and
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00003912 extension types). There is no longer a performance penalty, and I
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00003913 no longer see another reason to keep this baggage around. One relic
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00003914 remains: the __dict__ of a new-style class is a read-only proxy; you
3915 must set the class's attribute to modify it. As a consequence, the
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00003916 __defined__ attribute of new-style types no longer exists, for lack
3917 of need: there is once again only one __dict__ (although in the
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00003918 future a __cache__ may be resurrected with a similar function, if I
3919 can prove that it actually speeds things up).
Guido van Rossum50fda3b2001-10-04 19:46:06 +00003920
Tim Peters1c9ca872001-10-04 06:43:12 +00003921- C.__doc__ now works as expected for new-style classes (in 2.2a4 it
3922 always returned None, even when there was a class docstring).
3923
3924- doctest now finds and runs docstrings attached to new-style classes,
3925 class methods, static methods, and properties.
3926
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003927Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003928-----------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003929
Guido van Rossuma8bcf802001-10-15 15:53:58 +00003930- A very subtle syntactical pitfall in list comprehensions was fixed.
3931 For example: [a+b for a in 'abc', for b in 'def']. The comma in
3932 this example is a mistake. Previously, this would silently let 'a'
3933 iterate over the singleton tuple ('abc',), yielding ['abcd', 'abce',
3934 'abcf'] rather than the intended ['ad', 'ae', 'af', 'bd', 'be',
3935 'bf', 'cd', 'ce', 'cf']. Now, this is flagged as a syntax error.
3936 Note that [a for a in <singleton>] is a convoluted way to say
3937 [<singleton>] anyway, so it's not like any expressiveness is lost.
3938
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003939- getattr(obj, name, default) now only catches AttributeError, as
3940 documented, rather than returning the default value for all
3941 exceptions (which could mask bugs in a __getattr__ hook, for
3942 example).
3943
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00003944- Weak reference objects are now part of the core and offer a C API.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00003945 A bug which could allow a core dump when binary operations involved
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00003946 proxy reference has been fixed. weakref.ReferenceError is now a
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003947 built-in exception.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00003948
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00003949- unicode(obj) now behaves more like str(obj), accepting arbitrary
3950 objects, and calling a __unicode__ method if it exists.
3951 unicode(obj, encoding) and unicode(obj, encoding, errors) still
Marc-André Lemburgb5507ec2001-10-19 12:02:29 +00003952 require an 8-bit string or character buffer argument.
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00003953
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003954- isinstance() now allows any object as the first argument and a
3955 class, a type or something with a __bases__ tuple attribute for the
3956 second argument. The second argument may also be a tuple of a
3957 class, type, or something with __bases__, in which case isinstance()
3958 will return true if the first argument is an instance of any of the
3959 things contained in the second argument tuple. E.g.
3960
3961 isinstance(x, (A, B))
3962
3963 returns true if x is an instance of A or B.
3964
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003965Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003966-----------------
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003967
3968- thread.start_new_thread() now returns the thread ID (previously None).
3969
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00003970- binascii has now two quopri support functions, a2b_qp and b2a_qp.
3971
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00003972- readline now supports setting the startup_hook and the
3973 pre_event_hook, and adds the add_history() function.
Martin v. Löwis0daad592001-09-30 21:09:59 +00003974
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00003975- os and posix supports chroot(), setgroups() and unsetenv() where
3976 available. The stat(), fstat(), statvfs() and fstatvfs() functions
3977 now return "pseudo-sequences" -- the various fields can now be
3978 accessed as attributes (e.g. os.stat("/").st_mtime) but for
3979 backwards compatibility they also behave as a fixed-length sequence.
3980 Some platform-specific fields (e.g. st_rdev) are only accessible as
Guido van Rossum98bf58f2001-10-18 20:34:25 +00003981 attributes.
3982
3983- time: localtime(), gmtime() and strptime() now return a
3984 pseudo-sequence similar to the os.stat() return value, with
3985 attributes like tm_year etc.
Martin v. Löwis16628c92001-10-04 22:46:41 +00003986
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003987- Decompression objects in the zlib module now accept an optional
3988 second parameter to decompress() that specifies the maximum amount
3989 of memory to use for the uncompressed data.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003990
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00003991- optional SSL support in the socket module now exports OpenSSL
3992 functions RAND_add(), RAND_egd(), and RAND_status(). These calls
3993 are useful on platforms like Solaris where OpenSSL does not
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003994 automatically seed its PRNG. Also, the keyfile and certfile
3995 arguments to socket.ssl() are now optional.
3996
3997- posixmodule (and by extension, the os module on POSIX platforms) now
3998 exports O_LARGEFILE, O_DIRECT, O_DIRECTORY, and O_NOFOLLOW.
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00003999
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004000Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004001-------
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00004002
Tim Peters7402f792001-10-02 03:53:41 +00004003- doctest now excludes functions and classes not defined by the module
4004 being tested, thanks to Tim Hochberg.
4005
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00004006- HotShot, a new profiler implemented using a C-based callback, has
4007 been added. This substantially reduces the overhead of profiling,
4008 but it is still quite preliminary. Support modules and
4009 documentation will be added in upcoming releases (before 2.2 final).
4010
Guido van Rossumc4b09b42001-10-04 10:19:00 +00004011- profile now produces correct output in situations where an exception
4012 raised in Python is cleared by C code (e.g. hasattr()). This used
4013 to cause wrong output, including spurious claims of recursive
4014 functions and attribution of time spent to the wrong function.
4015
Tim Peters0a1fc4e2001-10-07 03:12:08 +00004016 The code and documentation for the derived OldProfile and HotProfile
4017 profiling classes was removed. The code hasn't worked for years (if
4018 you tried to use them, they raised exceptions). OldProfile
4019 intended to reproduce the behavior of the profiler Python used more
4020 than 7 years ago, and isn't interesting anymore. HotProfile intended
4021 to provide a faster profiler (but producing less information), and
4022 that's a worthy goal we intend to meet via a different approach (but
4023 without losing information).
4024
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00004025- Profile.calibrate() has a new implementation that should deliver
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00004026 a much better system-specific calibration constant. The constant can
4027 now be specified in an instance constructor, or as a Profile class or
4028 instance variable, instead of by editing profile.py's source code.
4029 Calibration must still be done manually (see the docs for the profile
4030 module).
4031
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004032 Note that Profile.calibrate() must be overridden by subclasses.
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00004033 Improving the accuracy required exploiting detailed knowledge of
4034 profiler internals; the earlier method abstracted away the details
4035 and measured a simplified model instead, but consequently computed
4036 a constant too small by a factor of 2 on some modern machines.
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00004037
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00004038- quopri's encode and decode methods take an optional header parameter,
Jeremy Hylton6f543b62001-10-16 20:42:52 +00004039 which indicates whether output is intended for the header 'Q'
4040 encoding.
4041
Guido van Rossuma5343cc2001-10-18 18:02:07 +00004042- The SocketServer.ThreadingMixIn class now closes the request after
4043 finish_request() returns. (Not when it errors out though.)
4044
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004045- The nntplib module's NNTP.body() method has grown a 'file' argument
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004046 to allow saving the message body to a file.
4047
4048- The email package has added a class email.Parser.HeaderParser which
4049 only parses headers and does not recurse into the message's body.
4050 Also, the module/class MIMEAudio has been added for representing
4051 audio data (contributed by Anthony Baxter).
4052
4053- ftplib should be able to handle files > 2GB.
4054
4055- ConfigParser.getboolean() now also interprets TRUE, FALSE, YES, NO,
4056 ON, and OFF.
4057
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00004058- xml.dom.minidom NodeList objects now support the length attribute
4059 and item() method as required by the DOM specifications.
4060
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00004061Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004062-----------
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00004063
4064- Demo/dns was removed. It no longer serves any purpose; a package
4065 derived from it is now maintained by Anthony Baxter, see
4066 http://PyDNS.SourceForge.net.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004067
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004068- The freeze tool has been made more robust, and two new options have
4069 been added: -X and -E.
4070
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004071Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004072-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004073
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004074- configure will use CXX in LINKCC if CXX is used to build main() and
4075 the system requires to link a C++ main using the C++ compiler.
4076
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004077C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004078-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004079
Guido van Rossum6c4bce32001-10-18 19:20:25 +00004080- The documentation for the tp_compare slot is updated to require that
4081 the return value must be -1, 0, 1; an arbitrary number <0 or >0 is
4082 not correct. This is not yet enforced but will be enforced in
4083 Python 2.3; even later, we may use -2 to indicate errors and +2 for
4084 "NotImplemented". Right now, -1 should be used for an error return.
4085
Tim Petersd38b1c72001-09-30 05:09:37 +00004086- PyLong_AsLongLong() now accepts int (as well as long) arguments.
4087 Consequently, PyArg_ParseTuple's 'L' code also accepts int (as well
4088 as long) arguments.
4089
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00004090- PyThread_start_new_thread() now returns a long int giving the thread
4091 ID, if one can be calculated; it returns -1 for error, 0 if no
4092 thread ID is calculated (this is an incompatible change, but only
4093 the thread module used this API). This code has only really been
4094 tested on Linux and Windows; other platforms please beware (and
4095 report any bugs or strange behavior).
4096
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00004097- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() no longer accepts Unicode objects as
4098 input.
4099
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004100New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004101-------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004102
4103Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004104-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004105
4106Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004107-------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004108
Tim Peters04cf1d32001-10-09 22:39:40 +00004109- Installer: If you install IDLE, and don't disable file-extension
4110 registration, a new "Edit with IDLE" context (right-click) menu entry
4111 is created for .py and .pyw files.
4112
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004113- The signal module now supports SIGBREAK on Windows, thanks to Steven
4114 Scott. Note that SIGBREAK is unique to Windows. The default SIGBREAK
4115 action remains to call Win32 ExitProcess(). This can be changed via
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004116 signal.signal(). For example::
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004117
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004118 # Make Ctrl+Break raise KeyboardInterrupt, like Python's default Ctrl+C
4119 # (SIGINT) behavior.
4120 import signal
4121 signal.signal(signal.SIGBREAK, signal.default_int_handler)
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004122
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004123 try:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004124 while 1:
4125 pass
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004126 except KeyboardInterrupt:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004127 # We get here on Ctrl+C or Ctrl+Break now; if we had not changed
4128 # SIGBREAK, only on Ctrl+C (and Ctrl+Break would terminate the
4129 # program without the possibility for any Python-level cleanup).
4130 print "Clean exit"
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004131
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004132
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004133What's New in Python 2.2a4?
4134===========================
4135
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004136*Release date: 28-Sep-2001*
4137
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004138Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004139--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004140
4141- pydoc and inspect are now aware of new-style classes;
4142 e.g. help(list) at the interactive prompt now shows proper
4143 documentation for all operations on list objects.
4144
4145- Applications using Jim Fulton's ExtensionClass module can now safely
4146 be used with Python 2.2. In particular, Zope 2.4.1 now works with
4147 Python 2.2 (as well as with Python 2.1.1). The Demo/metaclass
4148 examples also work again. It is hoped that Gtk and Boost also work
4149 with 2.2a4 and beyond. (If you can confirm this, please write
4150 webmaster@python.org; if there are still problems, please open a bug
4151 report on SourceForge.)
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004152
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00004153- property() now takes 4 keyword arguments: fget, fset, fdel and doc.
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004154 These map to read-only attributes 'fget', 'fset', 'fdel', and '__doc__'
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00004155 in the constructed property object. fget, fset and fdel weren't
4156 discoverable from Python in 2.2a3. __doc__ is new, and allows to
4157 associate a docstring with a property.
4158
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004159- Comparison overloading is now more completely implemented. For
4160 example, a str subclass instance can properly be compared to a str
4161 instance, and it can properly overload comparison. Ditto for most
4162 other built-in object types.
4163
4164- The repr() of new-style classes has changed; instead of <type
4165 'M.Foo'> a new-style class is now rendered as <class 'M.Foo'>,
4166 *except* for built-in types, which are still rendered as <type
4167 'Foo'> (to avoid upsetting existing code that might parse or
4168 otherwise rely on repr() of certain type objects).
4169
4170- The repr() of new-style objects is now always <Foo object at XXX>;
4171 previously, it was sometimes <Foo instance at XXX>.
4172
4173- For new-style classes, what was previously called __getattr__ is now
4174 called __getattribute__. This method, if defined, is called for
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00004175 *every* attribute access. A new __getattr__ hook more similar to the
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004176 one in classic classes is defined which is called only if regular
4177 attribute access raises AttributeError; to catch *all* attribute
4178 access, you can use __getattribute__ (for new-style classes). If
4179 both are defined, __getattribute__ is called first, and if it raises
4180 AttributeError, __getattr__ is called.
4181
4182- The __class__ attribute of new-style objects can be assigned to.
4183 The new class must have the same C-level object layout as the old
4184 class.
4185
4186- The builtin file type can be subclassed now. In the usual pattern,
4187 "file" is the name of the builtin type, and file() is a new builtin
4188 constructor, with the same signature as the builtin open() function.
4189 file() is now the preferred way to open a file.
4190
4191- Previously, __new__ would only see sequential arguments passed to
4192 the type in a constructor call; __init__ would see both sequential
4193 and keyword arguments. This made no sense whatsoever any more, so
4194 now both __new__ and __init__ see all arguments.
4195
4196- Previously, hash() applied to an instance of a subclass of str or
4197 unicode always returned 0. This has been repaired.
4198
4199- Previously, an operation on an instance of a subclass of an
4200 immutable type (int, long, float, complex, tuple, str, unicode),
4201 where the subtype didn't override the operation (and so the
4202 operation was handled by the builtin type), could return that
4203 instance instead a value of the base type. For example, if s was of
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004204 a str subclass type, s[:] returned s as-is. Now it returns a str
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004205 with the same value as s.
4206
Barry Warsaw86fbaf82001-09-28 15:26:12 +00004207- Provisional support for pickling new-style objects has been added.
4208
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004209Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004210----
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004211
Tim Peters2c9aa5e2001-09-23 04:06:05 +00004212- file.writelines() now accepts any iterable object producing strings.
4213
Marc-André Lemburgaefd7662001-09-20 12:59:37 +00004214- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() now works very much like
4215 PyObject_Str(obj) in that it tries to use __str__/tp_str
4216 on the object if the object is not a string or buffer. This
4217 makes unicode() behave like str() when applied to non-string/buffer
4218 objects.
4219
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00004220- PyFile_WriteObject now passes Unicode objects to the file's write
4221 method. As a result, all file-like objects which may be the target
Martin v. Löwis2777c022001-09-19 13:47:32 +00004222 of a print statement must support Unicode objects, i.e. they must
4223 at least convert them into ASCII strings.
4224
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004225- Thread scheduling on Solaris should be improved; it is no longer
4226 necessary to insert a small sleep at the start of a thread in order
4227 to let other runnable threads be scheduled.
4228
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004229Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004230-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004231
Marc-André Lemburgbf990172001-09-27 14:17:33 +00004232- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
4233 read character buffer compatible objects for their .write() methods.
4234 These objects are converted to strings and then handled as such
4235 by the instances.
4236
Barry Warsaw2f600732001-09-24 04:28:10 +00004237- The "email" package has been added. This is basically a port of the
4238 mimelib package <http://sf.net/projects/mimelib> with API changes
4239 and some implementations updated to use iterators and generators.
4240
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00004241- difflib.ndiff() and difflib.Differ.compare() are generators now. This
4242 restores the ability of Tools/scripts/ndiff.py to start producing output
4243 before the entire comparison is complete.
4244
Barry Warsaw58b072d2001-09-22 04:44:21 +00004245- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
4246 iteration just like file objects (i.e. their .readline() method is
4247 called for each iteration until it returns an empty string).
4248
Marc-André Lemburg494f2ae2001-09-19 11:33:31 +00004249- The codecs module has grown four new helper APIs to access
4250 builtin codecs: getencoder(), getdecoder(), getreader(),
4251 getwriter().
4252
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004253- SimpleXMLRPCServer: a new module (based upon SimpleHTMLServer)
4254 simplifies writing XML RPC servers.
4255
Barry Warsaw647d5e82001-09-28 17:01:02 +00004256- os.path.realpath(): a new function that returns the absolute pathname
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004257 after interpretation of symbolic links. On non-Unix systems, this
4258 is an alias for os.path.abspath().
4259
Tim Peters16a77ad2001-09-08 04:00:12 +00004260- operator.indexOf() (PySequence_Index() in the C API) now works with any
4261 iterable object.
4262
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004263- smtplib now supports various authentication and security features of
4264 the SMTP protocol through the new login() and starttls() methods.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00004265
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004266- hmac: a new module implementing keyed hashing for message
4267 authentication.
4268
4269- mimetypes now recognizes more extensions and file types. At the
4270 same time, some mappings not sanctioned by IANA were removed.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00004271
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004272- The "compiler" package has been brought up to date to the state of
Guido van Rossumc9ed5dc2001-09-20 05:30:24 +00004273 Python 2.2 bytecode generation. It has also been promoted from a
4274 Tool to a standard library package. (Tools/compiler still exists as
4275 a sample driver.)
4276
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004277Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004278-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004279
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004280- Large file support (LFS) is now automatic when the platform supports
4281 it; no more manual configuration tweaks are needed. On Linux, at
4282 least, it's possible to have a system whose C library supports large
4283 files but whose kernel doesn't; in this case, large file support is
4284 still enabled but doesn't do you any good unless you upgrade your
4285 kernel or share your Python executable with another system whose
4286 kernel has large file support.
4287
4288- The configure script now supplies plausible defaults in a
4289 cross-compilation environment. This doesn't mean that the supplied
4290 values are always correct, or that cross-compilation now works
4291 flawlessly -- but it's a first step (and it shuts up most of
4292 autoconf's warnings about AC_TRY_RUN).
4293
4294- The Unix build is now a bit less chatty, courtesy of the parser
4295 generator. The build is completely silent (except for errors) when
4296 using "make -s", thanks to a -q option to setup.py.
4297
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004298C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004299-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004300
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004301- The "structmember" API now supports some new flag bits to deny read
4302 and/or write access to attributes in restricted execution mode.
4303
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004304New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004305-------------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004306
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004307- Compaq's iPAQ handheld, running the "familiar" Linux distribution
4308 (http://familiar.handhelds.org).
4309
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004310Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004311-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004312
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00004313- The "classic" standard tests, which work by comparing stdout to
4314 an expected-output file under Lib/test/output/, no longer stop at
4315 the first mismatch. Instead the test is run to completion, and a
4316 variant of ndiff-style comparison is used to report all differences.
4317 This is much easier to understand than the previous style of reporting.
4318
4319- The unittest-based standard tests now use regrtest's test_main()
4320 convention, instead of running as a side-effect of merely being
4321 imported. This allows these tests to be run in more natural and
4322 flexible ways as unittests, outside the regrtest framework.
4323
4324- regrtest.py is much better integrated with unittest and doctest now,
4325 especially in regard to reporting errors.
4326
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004327Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004328-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004329
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004330- Large file support now also works for files > 4GB, on filesystems
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00004331 that support it (NTFS under Windows 2000). See "What's New in
4332 Python 2.2a3" for more detail.
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004333
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004334
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004335What's New in Python 2.2a3?
4336===========================
4337
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004338*Release Date: 07-Sep-2001*
4339
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004340Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004341----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004342
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004343- Conversion of long to float now raises OverflowError if the long is too
4344 big to represent as a C double.
4345
Tim Peters32f453e2001-09-03 08:35:41 +00004346- The 3-argument builtin pow() no longer allows a third non-None argument
4347 if either of the first two arguments is a float, or if both are of
4348 integer types and the second argument is negative (in which latter case
4349 the arguments are converted to float, so this is really the same
4350 restriction).
4351
Tim Peters5d2b77c2001-09-03 05:47:38 +00004352- The builtin dir() now returns more information, and sometimes much
4353 more, generally naming all attributes of an object, and all attributes
4354 reachable from the object via its class, and from its class's base
4355 classes, and so on from them too. Example: in 2.2a2, dir([]) returned
4356 an empty list. In 2.2a3,
4357
4358 >>> dir([])
4359 ['__add__', '__class__', '__contains__', '__delattr__', '__delitem__',
4360 '__eq__', '__ge__', '__getattr__', '__getitem__', '__getslice__',
4361 '__gt__', '__hash__', '__iadd__', '__imul__', '__init__', '__le__',
4362 '__len__', '__lt__', '__mul__', '__ne__', '__new__', '__repr__',
4363 '__rmul__', '__setattr__', '__setitem__', '__setslice__', '__str__',
4364 'append', 'count', 'extend', 'index', 'insert', 'pop', 'remove',
4365 'reverse', 'sort']
4366
4367 dir(module) continues to return only the module's attributes, though.
4368
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004369- Overflowing operations on plain ints now return a long int rather
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004370 than raising OverflowError. This is a partial implementation of PEP
4371 237. You can use -Wdefault::OverflowWarning to enable a warning for
4372 this situation, and -Werror::OverflowWarning to revert to the old
4373 OverflowError exception.
4374
Guido van Rossum61c345f2001-09-04 03:26:15 +00004375- A new command line option, -Q<arg>, is added to control run-time
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004376 warnings for the use of classic division. (See PEP 238.) Possible
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00004377 values are -Qold, -Qwarn, -Qwarnall, and -Qnew. The default is
4378 -Qold, meaning the / operator has its classic meaning and no
4379 warnings are issued. Using -Qwarn issues a run-time warning about
4380 all uses of classic division for int and long arguments; -Qwarnall
4381 also warns about classic division for float and complex arguments
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004382 (for use with fixdiv.py).
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004383 [Note: the remainder of this item (preserved below) became
4384 obsolete in 2.2c1 -- -Qnew has global effect in 2.2] ::
4385
4386 Using -Qnew is questionable; it turns on new division by default, but
4387 only in the __main__ module. You can usefully combine -Qwarn or
4388 -Qwarnall and -Qnew: this gives the __main__ module new division, and
4389 warns about classic division everywhere else.
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004390
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004391- Many built-in types can now be subclassed. This applies to int,
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004392 long, float, str, unicode, and tuple. (The types complex, list and
4393 dictionary can also be subclassed; this was introduced earlier.)
4394 Note that restrictions apply when subclassing immutable built-in
4395 types: you can only affect the value of the instance by overloading
4396 __new__. You can add mutable attributes, and the subclass instances
4397 will have a __dict__ attribute, but you cannot change the "value"
4398 (as implemented by the base class) of an immutable subclass instance
4399 once it is created.
4400
Guido van Rossumaaf80c82001-09-02 13:44:35 +00004401- The dictionary constructor now takes an optional argument, a
4402 mapping-like object, and initializes the dictionary from its
4403 (key, value) pairs.
4404
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004405- A new built-in type, super, has been added. This facilitates making
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004406 "cooperative super calls" in a multiple inheritance setting. For an
4407 explanation, see http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#cooperation
4408
Guido van Rossum8d7234d2001-09-06 22:02:58 +00004409- A new built-in type, property, has been added. This enables the
4410 creation of "properties". These are attributes implemented by
4411 getter and setter functions (or only one of these for read-only or
4412 write-only attributes), without the need to override __getattr__.
4413 See http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#property
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004414
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004415- The syntax of floating-point and imaginary literals has been
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004416 liberalized, to allow leading zeroes. Examples of literals now
4417 legal that were SyntaxErrors before:
4418
4419 00.0 0e3 0100j 07.5 00000000000000000008.
4420
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004421- An old tokenizer bug allowed floating point literals with an incomplete
Tim Petersc6d95812001-08-28 20:56:27 +00004422 exponent, such as 1e and 3.1e-. Such literals now raise SyntaxError.
4423
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004424Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004425-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004426
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00004427- telnetlib includes symbolic names for the options, and support for
Martin v. Löwis1da9c572002-11-04 09:56:00 +00004428 setting an option negotiation callback. It also supports processing
4429 of suboptions.
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00004430
Tim Petersa40c7932001-09-05 22:36:56 +00004431- The new C standard no longer requires that math libraries set errno to
4432 ERANGE on overflow. For platform libraries that exploit this new
4433 freedom, Python's overflow-checking was wholly broken. A new overflow-
4434 checking scheme attempts to repair that, but may not be reliable on all
4435 platforms (C doesn't seem to provide anything both useful and portable
4436 in this area anymore).
4437
Martin v. Löwis44f86962001-09-05 13:44:54 +00004438- Asynchronous timeout actions are available through the new class
4439 threading.Timer.
4440
Tim Peters78526162001-09-05 00:53:45 +00004441- math.log and math.log10 now return sensible results for even huge
4442 long arguments. For example, math.log10(10 ** 10000) ~= 10000.0.
4443
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004444- A new function, imp.lock_held(), returns 1 when the import lock is
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00004445 currently held. See the docs for the imp module.
4446
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004447- pickle, cPickle and marshal on 32-bit platforms can now correctly read
Tim Peters82112372001-08-29 02:28:42 +00004448 dumps containing ints written on platforms where Python ints are 8 bytes.
4449 When read on a box where Python ints are 4 bytes, such values are
4450 converted to Python longs.
4451
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004452- In restricted execution mode (using the rexec module), unmarshalling
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004453 code objects is no longer allowed. This plugs a security hole.
4454
Steve Purcell6091cd62001-09-06 16:05:17 +00004455- unittest.TestResult instances no longer store references to tracebacks
4456 generated by test failures. This prevents unexpected dangling references
4457 to objects that should be garbage collected between tests.
4458
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004459Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004460-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004461
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00004462- Tools/scripts/fixdiv.py has been added which can be used to fix
4463 division operators as per PEP 238.
4464
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004465Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004466-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004467
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00004468- If you are an adventurous person using Mac OS X you may want to look at
4469 Mac/OSX. There is a Makefile there that will build Python as a real Mac
4470 application, which can be used for experimenting with Carbon or Cocoa.
4471 Discussion of this on pythonmac-sig, please.
4472
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00004473C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004474-----
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00004475
4476- New function PyObject_Dir(obj), like Python __builtin__.dir(obj).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00004477
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004478- Note that PyLong_AsDouble can fail! This has always been true, but no
4479 callers checked for it. It's more likely to fail now, because overflow
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004480 errors are properly detected now. The proper way to check::
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004481
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004482 double x = PyLong_AsDouble(some_long_object);
4483 if (x == -1.0 && PyErr_Occurred()) {
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004484 /* The conversion failed. */
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004485 }
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004486
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004487- The GC API has been changed. Extensions that use the old API will still
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004488 compile but will not participate in GC. To upgrade an extension
4489 module:
4490
4491 - rename Py_TPFLAGS_GC to PyTPFLAGS_HAVE_GC
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004492
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004493 - use PyObject_GC_New or PyObject_GC_NewVar to allocate objects and
4494 PyObject_GC_Del to deallocate them
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004495
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004496 - rename PyObject_GC_Init to PyObject_GC_Track and PyObject_GC_Fini
4497 to PyObject_GC_UnTrack
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004498
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004499 - remove PyGC_HEAD_SIZE from object size calculations
4500
4501 - remove calls to PyObject_AS_GC and PyObject_FROM_GC
4502
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004503- Two new functions: PyString_FromFormat() and PyString_FromFormatV().
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004504 These can be used safely to construct string objects from a
4505 sprintf-style format string (similar to the format string supported
4506 by PyErr_Format()).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00004507
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004508New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004509-------------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004510
Tim Petersb7da0902001-09-02 23:01:43 +00004511- Stephen Hansen contributed patches sufficient to get a clean compile
4512 under Borland C (Windows), but he reports problems running it and ran
4513 out of time to complete the port. Volunteers? Expect a MemoryError
4514 when importing the types module; this is probably shallow, and
4515 causing later failures too.
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004516
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004517Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004518-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004519
4520Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004521-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004522
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00004523- Large file support is now enabled on Win32 platforms as well as on
4524 Win64. This means that, for example, you can use f.tell() and f.seek()
4525 to manipulate files larger than 2 gigabytes (provided you have enough
4526 disk space, and are using a Windows filesystem that supports large
Tim Peters9a9471c2001-09-11 23:18:51 +00004527 partitions). Windows filesystem limits: FAT has a 2GB (gigabyte)
4528 filesize limit, and large file support makes no difference there.
4529 FAT32's limit is 4GB, and files >= 2GB are easier to use from Python now.
4530 NTFS has no practical limit on file size, and files of any size can be
4531 used from Python now.
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00004532
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004533- The w9xpopen hack is now used on Windows NT and 2000 too when COMPSPEC
Tim Peters402d5982001-08-27 06:37:48 +00004534 points to command.com (patch from Brian Quinlan).
4535
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004536
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004537What's New in Python 2.2a2?
4538===========================
4539
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004540*Release Date: 22-Aug-2001*
4541
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004542Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004543-----
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004544
Barry Warsaw18b2ecf2001-08-22 20:26:56 +00004545- Tim Peters developed a brand new Windows installer using Wise 8.1,
4546 generously donated to us by Wise Solutions.
4547
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004548- configure supports a new option --enable-unicode, with the values
4549 ucs2 and ucs4 (new in 2.2a1). With --disable-unicode, the Unicode
4550 type and supporting code is completely removed from the interpreter.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004551
Jack Jansen32ce0cd2001-08-21 19:28:20 +00004552- A new configure option --enable-framework builds a Mac OS X framework,
4553 which "make frameworkinstall" will install. This provides a starting
4554 point for more mac-like functionality, join pythonmac-sig@python.org
4555 if you are interested in helping.
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004556
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004557- The NeXT platform is no longer supported.
4558
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004559- The 'new' module is now statically linked.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004560
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004561Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004562-----
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004563
4564- The new Tools/scripts/cleanfuture.py can be used to automatically
Andrew M. Kuchlingb0532092001-08-15 15:54:56 +00004565 edit out obsolete future statements from Python source code. See
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004566 the module docstring for details.
4567
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004568Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004569-----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004570
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004571- regrtest.py now knows which tests are expected to be skipped on some
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004572 platforms, allowing to give clearer test result output. regrtest
4573 also has optional --use/-u switch to run normally disabled tests
4574 which require network access or consume significant disk resources.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004575
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004576- Several new tests in the standard test suite, with special thanks to
4577 Nick Mathewson.
4578
4579Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004580----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004581
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004582- The floor division operator // has been added as outlined in PEP
4583 238. The / operator still provides classic division (and will until
4584 Python 3.0) unless "from __future__ import division" is included, in
4585 which case the / operator will provide true division. The operator
4586 module provides truediv() and floordiv() functions. Augmented
4587 assignment variants are included, as are the equivalent overloadable
4588 methods and C API methods. See the PEP for a full discussion:
4589 <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0238.html>
4590
Tim Peters6cd6a822001-08-17 22:11:27 +00004591- Future statements are now effective in simulated interactive shells
4592 (like IDLE). This should "just work" by magic, but read Michael
4593 Hudson's "Future statements in simulated shells" PEP 264 for full
4594 details: <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0264.html>.
4595
Guido van Rossumf86ddd22001-08-17 21:21:04 +00004596- The type/class unification (PEP 252-253) was integrated into the
4597 trunk and is not so tentative any more (the exact specification of
4598 some features is still tentative). A lot of work has done on fixing
4599 bugs and adding robustness and features (performance still has to
4600 come a long way).
4601
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00004602- Warnings about a mismatch in the Python API during extension import
4603 now use the Python warning framework (which makes it possible to
4604 write filters for these warnings).
4605
Barry Warsaw9b3be7f2001-08-14 18:35:02 +00004606- A function's __dict__ (aka func_dict) will now always be a
4607 dictionary. It used to be possible to delete it or set it to None,
4608 but now both actions raise TypeErrors. It is still legal to set it
4609 to a dictionary object. Getting func.__dict__ before any attributes
4610 have been assigned now returns an empty dictionary instead of None.
4611
Guido van Rossum32aa5d22001-09-05 18:43:35 +00004612- A new command line option, -E, was added which disables the use of
4613 all environment variables, or at least those that are specifically
4614 significant to Python. Usually those have a name starting with
4615 "PYTHON". This was used to fix a problem where the tests fail if
4616 the user happens to have PYTHONHOME or PYTHONPATH pointing to an
4617 older distribution.
4618
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004619Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004620-------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004621
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004622- New class Differ and new functions ndiff() and restore() in difflib.py.
4623 These package the algorithms used by the popular Tools/scripts/ndiff.py,
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004624 for programmatic reuse.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004625
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004626- New function xml.sax.saxutils.quoteattr(): Quote an XML attribute
4627 value using the minimal quoting required for the value; more
4628 reliable than using xml.sax.saxutils.escape() for attribute values.
4629
4630- Readline completion support for cmd.Cmd was added.
4631
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004632- Calling os.tempnam() or os.tmpnam() generate RuntimeWarnings.
4633
4634- Added function threading.BoundedSemaphore()
4635
4636- Added Ka-Ping Yee's cgitb.py module.
4637
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004638- The 'new' module now exposes the CO_xxx flags.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004639
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00004640- The gc module offers the get_referents function.
4641
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004642New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004643-------------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004644
4645C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004646-----
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004647
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00004648- Two new APIs PyOS_snprintf() and PyOS_vsnprintf() were added
4649 which provide a cross-platform implementations for the
4650 relatively new snprintf()/vsnprintf() C lib APIs. In contrast to
4651 the standard sprintf() and vsprintf() C lib APIs, these versions
4652 apply bounds checking on the used buffer which enhances protection
4653 against buffer overruns.
4654
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00004655- Unicode APIs now use name mangling to assure that mixing interpreters
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00004656 and extensions using different Unicode widths is rendered next to
4657 impossible. Trying to import an incompatible Unicode-aware extension
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00004658 will result in an ImportError. Unicode extensions writers must make
4659 sure to check the Unicode width compatibility in their extensions by
4660 using at least one of the mangled Unicode APIs in the extension.
4661
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004662- Two new flags METH_NOARGS and METH_O are available in method definition
4663 tables to simplify implementation of methods with no arguments and a
4664 single untyped argument. Calling such methods is more efficient than
4665 calling corresponding METH_VARARGS methods. METH_OLDARGS is now
4666 deprecated.
4667
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00004668Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004669-------
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00004670
4671- "import module" now compiles module.pyw if it exists and nothing else
4672 relevant is found.
4673
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004674
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00004675What's New in Python 2.2a1?
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004676===========================
4677
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004678*Release date: 18-Jul-2001*
4679
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004680Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004681----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004682
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00004683- TENTATIVELY, a large amount of code implementing much of what's
4684 described in PEP 252 (Making Types Look More Like Classes) and PEP
4685 253 (Subtyping Built-in Types) was added. This will be released
4686 with Python 2.2a1. Documentation will be provided separately
4687 through http://www.python.org/2.2/. The purpose of releasing this
4688 with Python 2.2a1 is to test backwards compatibility. It is
4689 possible, though not likely, that a decision is made not to release
4690 this code as part of 2.2 final, if any serious backwards
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004691 incompatibilities are found during alpha testing that cannot be
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00004692 repaired.
4693
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00004694- Generators were added; this is a new way to create an iterator (see
Tim Peters11a0d102001-07-17 18:48:00 +00004695 below) using what looks like a simple function containing one or
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00004696 more 'yield' statements. See PEP 255. Since this adds a new
4697 keyword to the language, this feature must be enabled by including a
4698 future statement: "from __future__ import generators" (see PEP 236).
4699 Generators will become a standard feature in a future release
4700 (probably 2.3). Without this future statement, 'yield' remains an
4701 ordinary identifier, but a warning is issued each time it is used.
4702 (These warnings currently don't conform to the warnings framework of
4703 PEP 230; we intend to fix this in 2.2a2.)
4704
Marc-André Lemburg12e74b32001-05-22 08:58:23 +00004705- The UTF-16 codec was modified to be more RFC compliant. It will now
4706 only remove BOM characters at the start of the string and then
4707 only if running in native mode (UTF-16-LE and -BE won't remove a
4708 leading BMO character).
4709
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00004710- Strings now have a new method .decode() to complement the already
4711 existing .encode() method. These two methods provide direct access
4712 to the corresponding decoders and encoders of the registered codecs.
4713
4714 To enhance the usability of the .encode() method, the special
4715 casing of Unicode object return values was dropped (Unicode objects
4716 were auto-magically converted to string using the default encoding).
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00004717
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00004718 Both methods will now return whatever the codec in charge of the
4719 requested encoding returns as object, e.g. Unicode codecs will
4720 return Unicode objects when decoding is requested ("äöü".decode("latin-1")
4721 will return u"äöü"). This enables codec writer to create codecs
4722 for various simple to use conversions.
4723
4724 New codecs were added to demonstrate these new features (the .encode()
4725 and .decode() columns indicate the type of the returned objects):
4726
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004727 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4728 |Name | .encode() | .decode() | Description |
4729 +=========+===========+===========+=============================+
4730 |uu | string | string | UU codec (e.g. for email) |
4731 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4732 |base64 | string | string | base64 codec |
4733 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4734 |quopri | string | string | quoted-printable codec |
4735 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4736 |zlib | string | string | zlib compression |
4737 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4738 |hex | string | string | 2-byte hex codec |
4739 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4740 |rot-13 | string | Unicode | ROT-13 Unicode charmap codec|
4741 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00004742
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004743- Some operating systems now support the concept of a default Unicode
4744 encoding for file system operations. Notably, Windows supports 'mbcs'
4745 as the default. The Macintosh will also adopt this concept in the medium
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00004746 term, although the default encoding for that platform will be other than
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004747 'mbcs'.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00004748
4749 On operating system that support non-ASCII filenames, it is common for
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004750 functions that return filenames (such as os.listdir()) to return Python
4751 string objects pre-encoded using the default file system encoding for
4752 the platform. As this encoding is likely to be different from Python's
4753 default encoding, converting this name to a Unicode object before passing
4754 it back to the Operating System would result in a Unicode error, as Python
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004755 would attempt to use its default encoding (generally ASCII) rather than
4756 the default encoding for the file system.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00004757
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004758 In general, this change simply removes surprises when working with
4759 Unicode and the file system, making these operations work as you expect,
4760 increasing the transparency of Unicode objects in this context.
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004761 See [????] for more details, including examples.
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004762
Tim Peters61dff2b2001-05-08 15:43:37 +00004763- Float (and complex) literals in source code were evaluated to full
4764 precision only when running from a .py file; the same code loaded from a
4765 .pyc (or .pyo) file could suffer numeric differences starting at about the
4766 12th significant decimal digit. For example, on a machine with IEEE-754
4767 floating arithmetic,
4768
4769 x = 9007199254740992.0
4770 print long(x)
4771
4772 printed 9007199254740992 if run directly from .py, but 9007199254740000
4773 if from a compiled (.pyc or .pyo) file. This was due to marshal using
4774 str(float) instead of repr(float) when building code objects. marshal
4775 now uses repr(float) instead, which should reproduce floats to full
4776 machine precision (assuming the platform C float<->string I/O conversion
4777 functions are of good quality).
4778
4779 This may cause floating-point results to change in some cases, and
4780 usually for the better, but may also cause numerically unstable
4781 algorithms to break.
4782
Tim Peters2f228e72001-05-13 00:19:31 +00004783- The implementation of dicts suffers fewer collisions, which has speed
4784 benefits. However, the order in which dict entries appear in dict.keys(),
4785 dict.values() and dict.items() may differ from previous releases for a
4786 given dict. Nothing is defined about this order, so no program should
4787 rely on it. Nevertheless, it's easy to write test cases that rely on the
4788 order by accident, typically because of printing the str() or repr() of a
4789 dict to an "expected results" file. See Lib/test/test_support.py's new
4790 sortdict(dict) function for a simple way to display a dict in sorted
4791 order.
4792
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00004793- Many other small changes to dicts were made, resulting in faster
4794 operation along the most common code paths.
4795
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00004796- Dictionary objects now support the "in" operator: "x in dict" means
4797 the same as dict.has_key(x).
4798
Barry Warsaw51acc8d2001-06-26 20:12:50 +00004799- The update() method of dictionaries now accepts generic mapping
4800 objects. Specifically the argument object must support the .keys()
4801 and __getitem__() methods. This allows you to say, for example,
4802 {}.update(UserDict())
4803
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00004804- Iterators were added; this is a generalized way of providing values
4805 to a for loop. See PEP 234. There's a new built-in function iter()
4806 to return an iterator. There's a new protocol to get the next value
4807 from an iterator using the next() method (in Python) or the
4808 tp_iternext slot (in C). There's a new protocol to get iterators
4809 using the __iter__() method (in Python) or the tp_iter slot (in C).
4810 Iterating (i.e. a for loop) over a dictionary generates its keys.
4811 Iterating over a file generates its lines.
4812
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004813- The following functions were generalized to work nicely with iterator
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004814 arguments::
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004815
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00004816 map(), filter(), reduce(), zip()
Tim Peters8572b4f2001-05-06 01:05:02 +00004817 list(), tuple() (PySequence_Tuple() and PySequence_Fast() in C API)
4818 max(), min()
Tim Peters1af03e92001-05-26 19:37:54 +00004819 join() method of strings
4820 extend() method of lists
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00004821 'x in y' and 'x not in y' (PySequence_Contains() in C API)
4822 operator.countOf() (PySequence_Count() in C API)
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004823 right-hand side of assignment statements with multiple targets, such as ::
Tim Petersd6d010b2001-06-21 02:49:55 +00004824 x, y, z = some_iterable_object_returning_exactly_3_values
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00004825
Tim Petersd85e1022001-05-11 21:51:48 +00004826- Accessing module attributes is significantly faster (for example,
4827 random.random or os.path or yourPythonModule.yourAttribute).
4828
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00004829- Comparing dictionary objects via == and != is faster, and now works even
4830 if the keys and values don't support comparisons other than ==.
4831
Tim Peters95bf9392001-05-10 08:32:44 +00004832- Comparing dictionaries in ways other than == and != is slower: there were
4833 insecurities in the dict comparison implementation that could cause Python
4834 to crash if the element comparison routines for the dict keys and/or
4835 values mutated the dicts. Making the code bulletproof slowed it down.
4836
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00004837- Collisions in dicts are resolved via a new approach, which can help
4838 dramatically in bad cases. For example, looking up every key in a dict
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00004839 d with d.keys() == [i << 16 for i in range(20000)] is approximately 500x
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00004840 faster now. Thanks to Christian Tismer for pointing out the cause and
4841 the nature of an effective cure (last December! better late than never).
Tim Peters15d49292001-05-27 07:39:22 +00004842
Tim Peters52e155e2001-06-16 05:42:57 +00004843- repr() is much faster for large containers (dict, list, tuple).
4844
4845
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004846Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004847-------
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004848
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00004849- The constants ascii_letters, ascii_lowercase. and ascii_uppercase
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004850 were added to the string module. These a locale-independent
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00004851 constants, unlike letters, lowercase, and uppercase. These are now
4852 use in appropriate locations in the standard library.
4853
Martin v. Löwisf0473d52001-07-18 16:17:16 +00004854- The flags used in dlopen calls can now be configured using
4855 sys.setdlopenflags and queried using sys.getdlopenflags.
4856
Guido van Rossumc7e4aca2001-07-12 11:54:37 +00004857- Fredrik Lundh's xmlrpclib is now a standard library module. This
4858 provides full client-side XML-RPC support. In addition,
4859 Demo/xmlrpc/ contains two server frameworks (one SocketServer-based,
4860 one asyncore-based). Thanks to Eric Raymond for the documentation.
4861
Guido van Rossum643d3912001-07-05 14:46:25 +00004862- The xrange() object is simplified: it no longer supports slicing,
4863 repetition, comparisons, efficient 'in' checking, the tolist()
4864 method, or the start, stop and step attributes. See PEP 260.
4865
Martin v. Löwisebf94db2001-06-06 06:25:40 +00004866- A new function fnmatch.filter to filter lists of file names was added.
4867
Barry Warsawffd674d2001-05-22 16:00:10 +00004868- calendar.py uses month and day names based on the current locale.
4869
Guido van Rossum2e0a6542001-05-15 02:14:44 +00004870- strop is now *really* obsolete (this was announced before with 1.6),
4871 and issues DeprecationWarning when used (except for the four items
4872 that are still imported into string.py).
4873
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004874- Cookie.py now sorts key+value pairs by key in output strings.
4875
4876- pprint.isrecursive(object) didn't correctly identify recursive objects.
4877 Now it does.
4878
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00004879- pprint functions now much faster for large containers (tuple, list, dict).
4880
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00004881- New 'q' and 'Q' format codes in the struct module, corresponding to C
4882 types "long long" and "unsigned long long" (on Windows, __int64). In
4883 native mode, these can be used only when the platform C compiler supports
4884 these types (when HAVE_LONG_LONG is #define'd by the Python config
4885 process), and then they inherit the sizes and alignments of the C types.
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00004886 In standard mode, 'q' and 'Q' are supported on all platforms, and are
4887 8-byte integral types.
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00004888
Guido van Rossum83213cc2001-06-12 16:48:52 +00004889- The site module installs a new built-in function 'help' that invokes
4890 pydoc.help. It must be invoked as 'help()'; when invoked as 'help',
4891 it displays a message reminding the user to use 'help()' or
4892 'help(object)'.
4893
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004894Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004895-----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004896
4897- New test_mutants.py runs dict comparisons where the key and value
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004898 comparison operators mutate the dicts randomly during comparison. This
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004899 rapidly causes Python to crash under earlier releases (not for the faint
4900 of heart: it can also cause Win9x to freeze or reboot!).
4901
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004902- New test_pprint.py verifies that pprint.isrecursive() and
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00004903 pprint.isreadable() return sensible results. Also verifies that simple
4904 cases produce correct output.
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004905
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00004906C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004907-----
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00004908
4909- Removed the unused last_is_sticky argument from the internal
4910 _PyTuple_Resize(). If this affects you, you were cheating.
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004911
4912----
4913
4914**(For information about older versions, consult the HISTORY file.)**