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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
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00007What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 2?
8=================================
9
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +000010*Release date: XX-XXX-2003*
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +000011
12Core and builtins
13-----------------
14
Martin v. Löwisaf6a27a2003-01-03 19:16:14 +000015- raw_input can now return Unicode objects.
16
Skip Montanaro4abd5f02003-01-02 20:51:08 +000017- List objects' sort() method now accepts None as the comparison function.
18 Passing None is semantically identical to calling sort() with no
19 arguments.
20
Neal Norwitz1a997502003-01-13 20:13:12 +000021- Fixed crash when printing a subclass of str and __str__ returned self.
22 See SF bug #667147.
23
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +000024Extension modules
25-----------------
26
Barry Warsawf8ba39c2003-01-07 20:55:26 +000027- os/posixmodule has grown the sysexits.h constants (EX_OK and friends).
28
Guido van Rossum6d0d3652003-01-07 20:34:19 +000029- Fixed broken threadstate swap in readline that could cause fatal
30 errors when a readline hook was being invoked while a background
31 thread was active. (SF bugs #660476 and #513033.)
32
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +000033- fcntl now exposes the strops.h I_* constants.
34
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +000035- datetime changes:
36
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +000037 The datetime and datetimetz classes have been collapsed into a single
38 datetime class, and likewise the time and timetz classes into a single
39 time class. Previously, a datetimetz object with tzinfo=None acted
40 exactly like a datetime object, and similarly for timetz. This wasn't
41 enough of a difference to justify distinct classes, and life is simpler
42 now.
43
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +000044 today() and now() now round system timestamps to the closest
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +000045 microsecond <http://www.python.org/sf/661086>. This repairs an
46 irritation most likely seen on Windows systems.
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +000047
Tim Peters710fb152003-01-02 19:35:54 +000048 In dt.asdatetime(tz), if tz.utcoffset(dt) returns a duration,
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +000049 ValueError is raised if tz.dst(dt) returns None (2.3a1 treated it
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +000050 as 0 instead, but a tzinfo subclass wishing to participate in
51 time zone conversion has to take a stand on whether it supports
52 DST; if you don't care about DST, then code dst() to return 0 minutes,
53 meaning that DST is never in effect).
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +000054
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +000055 The tzinfo methods utcoffset() and dst() must return a timedelta object
56 (or None) now. In 2.3a1 they could also return an int or long, but that
57 was an unhelpfully redundant leftover from an earlier version wherein
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +000058 they couldn't return a timedelta. TOOWTDI.
59
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +000060 The example tzinfo class for local time had a bug. It was replaced
61 by a later example coded by Guido.
62
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +000063 datetimetz.astimezone(tz) no longer raises an exception when the
64 input datetime has no UTC equivalent in tz. For typical "hybrid" time
65 zones (a single tzinfo subclass modeling both standard and daylight
66 time), this case can arise one hour per year, at the hour daylight time
67 ends. See new docs for details.
68
Tim Peters75a6e3b2003-01-04 18:17:36 +000069 The constructors building a datetime from a timestamp could raise
70 ValueError if the platform C localtime()/gmtime() inserted "leap
71 seconds". Leap seconds are ignored now. On such platforms, it's
72 possible to have timestamps that differ by a second, yet where
73 datetimes constructed from them are equal.
74
Neal Norwitzdf8b47f2003-01-10 20:57:54 +000075- Fix a crash on Solaris that occurred when calling close() on
76 an mmap'ed file which was already closed. (SF patch #665913)
77
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +000078Library
79-------
80
Martin v. Löwis0c6774d2003-01-15 11:51:06 +000081- py_compile has a new 'doraise' flag and a new PyCompileError
82 exception.
83
Martin v. Löwisd69663d2003-01-15 11:37:23 +000084- SimpleXMLRPCServer now supports CGI through the CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler
85 class.
86
Guido van Rossum50e92232003-01-14 16:45:04 +000087- The sets module now raises TypeError in __cmp__, to clarify that
88 sets are not intended to be three-way-compared; the comparison
89 operators are overloaded as subset/superset tests.
90
Guido van Rossumcd0c0472003-01-07 23:03:05 +000091- Bastion.py and rexec.py are disabled. These modules are not safe in
92 Python 2.2. or 2.3.
93
Neal Norwitzbb0246a2003-01-03 18:12:28 +000094- realpath is now exported when doing from poxixpath import *.
95 It is also exported for ntpath, macpath, and os2emxpath.
96 See SF bug #659228.
97
Neal Norwitzb9ef4ae2003-01-05 23:19:43 +000098- New module tarfile from Lars Gustäbel provides a comprehensive interface
99 to tar archive files with transparent gzip and bzip2 compression.
100 See SF patch #651082.
101
Neal Norwitz4f442372003-01-06 06:51:36 +0000102- urlparse can now parse imap:// URLs. See SF feature request #618024.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +0000103
Neal Norwitze931ed52003-01-10 23:24:32 +0000104- Tkinter.Canvas.scan_dragto() provides an optional parameter to support
105 the gain value which is passed to Tk. SF bug# 602259.
106
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000107Tools/Demos
108-----------
109
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +0000110TBD
111
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000112Build
113-----
114
Skip Montanarodecc6a42003-01-01 20:07:49 +0000115- On systems which build using the configure script, compiler flags which
116 used to be lumped together using the OPT flag have been split into two
117 groups, OPT and BASECFLAGS. OPT is meant to carry just optimization- and
118 debug-related flags like "-g" and "-O3". BASECFLAGS is meant to carry
119 compiler flags that are required to get a clean compile. On some
120 platforms (many Linux flavors in particular) BASECFLAGS will be empty by
121 default. On others, such as Mac OS X and SCO, it will contain required
122 flags. This change allows people building Python to override OPT without
123 fear of clobbering compiler flags which are required to get a clean build.
124
125- On Darwin/Mac OS X platforms, /sw/lib and /sw/include are added to the
126 relevant search lists in setup.py. This allows users building Python to
127 take advantage of the many packages available from the fink project
128 <http://fink.sf.net/>.
129
130- A new Makefile target, scriptsinstall, installs a number of useful scripts
131 from the Tools/scripts directory.
132
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000133C API
134-----
135
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +0000136TBD
137
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000138New platforms
139-------------
140
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +0000141TBD
142
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000143Tests
144-----
145
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +0000146TBD
147
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000148Windows
149-------
150
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +0000151- sys.path[0], if it contains a directory name, is now always an
152 absolute pathname.
153
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +0000154- The new logging package is now installed by the Windows installer. It
155 wasn't in 2.3a1 due to oversight.
156
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000157Mac
158---
159
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +0000160TBD
161
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000162
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000163What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 1?
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000164=================================
165
Guido van Rossumae548862002-12-31 15:47:36 +0000166*Release date: 31-Dec-2002*
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000167
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000168Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000169--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +0000170
Michael W. Hudson96bc3b42002-11-26 14:48:23 +0000171- One can now assign to __bases__ and __name__ of new-style classes.
172
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +0000173- dict() now accepts keyword arguments so that dict(one=1, two=2)
174 is the equivalent of {"one": 1, "two": 2}. Accordingly,
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +0000175 the existing (but undocumented) 'items' keyword argument has
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +0000176 been eliminated. This means that dict(items=someMapping) now has
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +0000177 a different meaning than before.
178
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +0000179- int() now returns a long object if the argument is outside the
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +0000180 integer range, so int("4" * 1000), int(1e200) and int(1L<<1000) will
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +0000181 all return long objects instead of raising an OverflowError.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000182
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +0000183- Assignment to __class__ is disallowed if either the old or the new
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +0000184 class is a statically allocated type object (such as defined by an
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +0000185 extension module). This prevents anomalies like 2.__class__ = bool.
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +0000186
187- New-style object creation and deallocation have been sped up
188 significantly; they are now faster than classic instance creation
189 and deallocation.
190
191- The __slots__ variable can now mention "private" names, and the
192 right thing will happen (e.g. __slots__ = ["__foo"]).
193
194- The built-ins slice() and buffer() are now callable types. The
195 types classobj (formerly class), code, function, instance, and
196 instancemethod (formerly instance-method), which have no built-in
197 names but are accessible through the types module, are now also
198 callable. The type dict-proxy is renamed to dictproxy.
199
200- Cycles going through the __class__ link of a new-style instance are
201 now detected by the garbage collector.
202
203- Classes using __slots__ are now properly garbage collected.
204 [SF bug 519621]
205
206- Tightened the __slots__ rules: a slot name must be a valid Python
207 identifier.
208
209- The constructor for the module type now requires a name argument and
210 takes an optional docstring argument. Previously, this constructor
211 ignored its arguments. As a consequence, deriving a class from a
212 module (not from the module type) is now illegal; previously this
213 created an unnamed module, just like invoking the module type did.
214 [SF bug 563060]
215
216- A new type object, 'basestring', is added. This is a common base type
217 for 'str' and 'unicode', and can be used instead of
218 types.StringTypes, e.g. to test whether something is "a string":
219 isinstance(x, basestring) is True for Unicode and 8-bit strings. This
220 is an abstract base class and cannot be instantiated directly.
221
222- Changed new-style class instantiation so that when C's __new__
223 method returns something that's not a C instance, its __init__ is
224 not called. [SF bug #537450]
225
226- Fixed super() to work correctly with class methods. [SF bug #535444]
227
228- If you try to pickle an instance of a class that has __slots__ but
229 doesn't define or override __getstate__, a TypeError is now raised.
230 This is done by adding a bozo __getstate__ to the class that always
231 raises TypeError. (Before, this would appear to be pickled, but the
232 state of the slots would be lost.)
233
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000234Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000235-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000236
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +0000237- Import from zipfiles is now supported. The name of a zipfile placed
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +0000238 on sys.path causes the import statement to look for importable Python
239 modules (with .py, pyc and .pyo extensions) and packages inside the
240 zipfile. The zipfile import follows the specification (though not
241 the sample implementation) of PEP 273. The semantics of __path__ are
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +0000242 compatible with those that have been implemented in Jython since
243 Jython 2.1.
244
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +0000245- PEP 302 has been accepted. Although it was inititally developed to
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +0000246 support zipimport, it offers a new, general import hook mechanism.
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +0000247 Several new variables have been added to the sys module:
248 sys.meta_path, sys.path_hooks, and sys.path_importer_cache; these
249 make extending the import statement much more convenient than
250 overriding the __import__ built-in function. For a description of
251 these, see PEP 302.
252
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +0000253- A frame object's f_lineno attribute can now be written to from a
254 trace function to change which line will execute next. A command to
255 exploit this from pdb has been added. [SF patch #643835]
256
Marc-André Lemburg20b91352002-12-12 18:01:43 +0000257- The _codecs support module for codecs.py was turned into a builtin
258 module to assure that at least the builtin codecs are available
259 to the Python parser for source code decoding according to PEP 263.
260
Walter Dörwaldd9a6ad32002-12-12 16:41:44 +0000261- issubclass now supports a tuple as the second argument, just like
262 isinstance does. ``issubclass(X, (A, B))`` is equivalent to
263 ``issubclass(X, A) or issubclass(X, B)``.
264
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +0000265- Thanks to Armin Rigo, the last known way to provoke a system crash
266 by cleverly arranging for a comparison function to mutate a list
267 during a list.sort() operation has been fixed. The effect of
268 attempting to mutate a list, or even to inspect its contents or
269 length, while a sort is in progress, is not defined by the language.
270 The C implementation of Python 2.3 attempts to detect mutations,
271 and raise ValueError if one occurs, but there's no guarantee that
272 all mutations will be caught, or that any will be caught across
273 releases or implementations.
274
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +0000275- Unicode file name processing for Windows (PEP 277) is implemented.
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +0000276 All platforms now have an os.path.supports_unicode_filenames attribute,
277 which is set to True on Windows NT/2000/XP, and False elsewhere.
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +0000278
Walter Dörwald3aeb6322002-09-02 13:14:32 +0000279- Codec error handling callbacks (PEP 293) are implemented.
280 Error handling in unicode.encode or str.decode can now be customized.
281
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +0000282- A subtle change to the semantics of the built-in function intern():
283 interned strings are no longer immortal. You must keep a reference
284 to the return value intern() around to get the benefit.
285
Guido van Rossumf808b892002-08-16 03:38:10 +0000286- Use of 'None' as a variable, argument or attribute name now
287 issues a SyntaxWarning. In the future, None may become a keyword.
288
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +0000289- SET_LINENO is gone. co_lnotab is now consulted to determine when to
290 call the trace function. C code that accessed f_lineno should call
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +0000291 PyCode_Addr2Line instead (f_lineno is still there, but only kept up
292 to date when there is a trace function set).
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +0000293
Guido van Rossum9be89462002-08-14 16:11:30 +0000294- There's a new warning category, FutureWarning. This is used to warn
295 about a number of situations where the value or sign of an integer
296 result will change in Python 2.4 as a result of PEP 237 (integer
297 unification). The warnings implement stage B0 mentioned in that
298 PEP. The warnings are about the following situations:
299
300 - Octal and hex literals without 'L' prefix in the inclusive range
301 [0x80000000..0xffffffff]; these are currently negative ints, but
302 in Python 2.4 they will be positive longs with the same bit
303 pattern.
304
305 - Left shifts on integer values that cause the outcome to lose
306 bits or have a different sign than the left operand. To be
307 precise: x<<n where this currently doesn't yield the same value
308 as long(x)<<n; in Python 2.4, the outcome will be long(x)<<n.
309
310 - Conversions from ints to string that show negative values as
311 unsigned ints in the inclusive range [0x80000000..0xffffffff];
312 this affects the functions hex() and oct(), and the string
313 formatting codes %u, %o, %x, and %X. In Python 2.4, these will
314 show signed values (e.g. hex(-1) currently returns "0xffffffff";
315 in Python 2.4 it will return "-0x1").
316
Guido van Rossum9a2eda52002-12-31 02:12:42 +0000317- The bits manipulated under the cover by sys.setcheckinterval() have
318 been changed. Both the check interval and the ticker used to be
319 per-thread values. They are now just a pair of global variables.
320 In addition, the default check interval was boosted from 10 to 100
321 bytecode instructions. This may have some effect on systems that
322 relied on the old default value. In particular, in multi-threaded
323 applications which try to be highly responsive, response time will
324 increase by some (perhaps imperceptible) amount.
Skip Montanaro979c74b2002-09-03 21:25:14 +0000325
Tim Petersd64c1de2002-08-12 17:36:03 +0000326- When multiplying very large integers, a version of the so-called
327 Karatsuba algorithm is now used. This is most effective if the
328 inputs have roughly the same size. If they both have about N digits,
329 Karatsuba multiplication has O(N**1.58) runtime (the exponent is
330 log_base_2(3)) instead of the previous O(N**2). Measured results may
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +0000331 be better or worse than that, depending on platform quirks. Besides
332 the O() improvement in raw instruction count, the Karatsuba algorithm
333 appears to have much better cache behavior on extremely large integers
334 (starting in the ballpark of a million bits). Note that this is a
335 simple implementation, and there's no intent here to compete with,
336 e.g., GMP. It gives a very nice speedup when it applies, but a package
337 devoted to fast large-integer arithmetic should run circles around it.
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +0000338
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +0000339- u'%c' will now raise a ValueError in case the argument is an
340 integer outside the valid range of Unicode code point ordinals.
341
Guido van Rossumdeb09362002-08-09 17:16:30 +0000342- The tempfile module has been overhauled for enhanced security. The
343 mktemp() function is now deprecated; new, safe replacements are
344 mkstemp() (for files) and mkdtemp() (for directories), and the
345 higher-level functions NamedTemporaryFile() and TemporaryFile().
346 Use of some global variables in this module is also deprecated; the
347 new functions have keyword arguments to provide the same
348 functionality. All Lib, Tools and Demo modules that used the unsafe
349 interfaces have been updated to use the safe replacements. Thanks
350 to Zack Weinberg!
351
Guido van Rossumd81a9832002-08-09 15:57:34 +0000352- When x is an object whose class implements __mul__ and __rmul__,
353 1.0*x would correctly invoke __rmul__, but 1*x would erroneously
354 invoke __mul__. This was due to the sequence-repeat code in the int
355 type. This has been fixed now.
356
Barry Warsawd79f6832002-08-06 17:01:51 +0000357- Previously, "str1 in str2" required str1 to be a string of length 1.
358 This restriction has been relaxed to allow str1 to be a string of
359 any length. Thus "'el' in 'hello world'" returns True now.
360
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +0000361- File objects are now their own iterators. For a file f, iter(f) now
362 returns f (unless f is closed), and f.next() is similar to
363 f.readline() when EOF is not reached; however, f.next() uses a
364 readahead buffer that messes up the file position, so mixing
365 f.next() and f.readline() (or other methods) doesn't work right.
366 Calling f.seek() drops the readahead buffer, but other operations
367 don't. It so happens that this gives a nice additional speed boost
368 to "for line in file:"; the xreadlines method and corresponding
Guido van Rossumbffb2ef2002-08-09 17:17:07 +0000369 module are now obsolete. Thanks to Oren Tirosh!
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +0000370
Guido van Rossumde392d32002-08-05 14:17:20 +0000371- Encoding declarations (PEP 263, phase 1) have been implemented. A
372 comment of the form "# -*- coding: <encodingname> -*-" in the first
373 or second line of a Python source file indicates the encoding.
Martin v. Löwis00f1e3f2002-08-04 17:29:52 +0000374
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +0000375- list.sort() has a new implementation. While cross-platform results
376 may vary, and in data-dependent ways, this is much faster on many
377 kinds of partially ordered lists than the previous implementation,
378 and reported to be just as fast on randomly ordered lists on
379 several major platforms. This sort is also stable (if A==B and A
380 precedes B in the list at the start, A precedes B after the sort too),
381 although the language definition does not guarantee stability. A
382 potential drawback is that list.sort() may require temp space of
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +0000383 len(list)*2 bytes (``*4`` on a 64-bit machine). It's therefore possible
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +0000384 for list.sort() to raise MemoryError now, even if a comparison function
385 does not. See <http://www.python.org/sf/587076> for full details.
386
Guido van Rossum2d5389c2002-07-23 03:44:35 +0000387- All standard iterators now ensure that, once StopIteration has been
388 raised, all future calls to next() on the same iterator will also
389 raise StopIteration. There used to be various counterexamples to
390 this behavior, which could caused confusion or subtle program
391 breakage, without any benefits. (Note that this is still an
392 iterator's responsibility; the iterator framework does not enforce
393 this.)
394
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +0000395- Ctrl+C handling on Windows has been made more consistent with
396 other platforms. KeyboardInterrupt can now reliably be caught,
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +0000397 and Ctrl+C at an interactive prompt no longer terminates the
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +0000398 process under NT/2k/XP (it never did under Win9x). Ctrl+C will
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +0000399 interrupt time.sleep() in the main thread, and any child processes
400 created via the popen family (on win2k; we can't make win9x work
Mark Hammond8f3afc72002-08-10 06:26:31 +0000401 reliably) are also interrupted (as generally happens on for Linux/Unix.)
402 [SF bugs 231273, 439992 and 581232]
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +0000403
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +0000404- sys.getwindowsversion() has been added on Windows. This
405 returns a tuple with information about the version of Windows
406 currently running.
407
Raymond Hettinger5a04aec2002-06-25 00:25:30 +0000408- Slices and repetitions of buffer objects now consistently return
409 a string. Formerly, strings would be returned most of the time,
410 but a buffer object would be returned when the repetition count
411 was one or when the slice range was all inclusive.
412
Walter Dörwald3430d702002-06-17 10:43:59 +0000413- Unicode objects in sys.path are no longer ignored but treated
414 as directory names.
415
Neal Norwitz1f68fc72002-06-14 00:50:42 +0000416- Fixed string.startswith and string.endswith builtin methods
417 so they accept negative indices. [SF bug 493951]
418
Guido van Rossumc5fe5eb2002-06-12 03:45:21 +0000419- Fixed a bug with a continue inside a try block and a yield in the
420 finally clause. [SF bug 567538]
421
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +0000422- Most builtin sequences now support "extended slices", i.e. slices
Guido van Rossum2e82e712002-06-13 11:41:07 +0000423 with a third "stride" parameter. For example, "hello world"[::-1]
424 gives "dlrow olleh".
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +0000425
Neal Norwitzd68f5172002-05-29 15:54:55 +0000426- A new warning PendingDeprecationWarning was added to provide
427 direction on features which are in the process of being deprecated.
428 The warning will not be printed by default. To see the pending
429 deprecations, use -Walways::PendingDeprecationWarning::
430 as a command line option or warnings.filterwarnings() in code.
431
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +0000432- Deprecated features of xrange objects have been removed as
433 promised. The start, stop, and step attributes and the tolist()
434 method no longer exist. xrange repetition and slicing have been
435 removed.
436
Guido van Rossum7dab2422002-04-26 19:40:56 +0000437- New builtin function enumerate(x), from PEP 279. Example:
438 enumerate("abc") is an iterator returning (0,"a"), (1,"b"), (2,"c").
439 The argument can be an arbitrary iterable object.
440
Neil Schemenauer89e3ee02002-04-26 01:58:53 +0000441- The assert statement no longer tests __debug__ at runtime. This means
442 that assert statements cannot be disabled by assigning a false value
443 to __debug__.
444
Walter Dörwald068325e2002-04-15 13:36:47 +0000445- A method zfill() was added to str and unicode, that fills a numeric
446 string to the left with zeros. For example,
447 "+123".zfill(6) -> "+00123".
448
Guido van Rossum862fe3c2002-04-15 12:36:47 +0000449- Complex numbers supported divmod() and the // and % operators, but
450 these make no sense. Since this was documented, they're being
451 deprecated now.
452
Guido van Rossum26dd8302002-04-26 20:11:29 +0000453- String and unicode methods lstrip(), rstrip() and strip() now take
454 an optional argument that specifies the characters to strip. For
455 example, "Foo!!!?!?!?".rstrip("?!") -> "Foo".
Guido van Rossum49042042002-04-13 00:59:05 +0000456
Guido van Rossumc0d3f4e2002-11-27 13:10:40 +0000457- There's a new dictionary constructor (a class method of the dict
458 class), dict.fromkeys(iterable, value=None). It constructs a
459 dictionary with keys taken from the iterable and all values set to a
460 single value. It can be used for building sets and for removing
461 duplicates from sequences.
Raymond Hettingere33d3df2002-11-27 07:29:33 +0000462
Guido van Rossumc69343b2002-04-12 19:22:48 +0000463- Added a new dict method pop(key). This removes and returns the
464 value corresponding to key. [SF patch #539949]
465
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +0000466- A new built-in type, bool, has been added, as well as built-in
467 names for its two values, True and False. Comparisons and sundry
468 other operations that return a truth value have been changed to
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +0000469 return a bool instead. Read PEP 285 for an explanation of why this
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +0000470 is backward compatible.
471
Guido van Rossum95b62a62002-03-29 01:07:24 +0000472- Fixed two bugs reported as SF #535905: under certain conditions,
473 deallocating a deeply nested structure could cause a segfault in the
474 garbage collector, due to interaction with the "trashcan" code;
475 access to the current frame during destruction of a local variable
476 could access a pointer to freed memory.
477
Guido van Rossumfe0ca4a2002-06-18 21:20:13 +0000478- The optional object allocator ("pymalloc") has been enabled by
479 default. The recommended practice for memory allocation and
480 deallocation has been streamlined. A header file is included,
481 Misc/pymemcompat.h, which can be bundled with 3rd party extensions
482 and lets them use the same API with Python versions from 1.5.2
483 onwards.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +0000484
Martin v. Löwiscfeb3b62002-03-03 21:30:27 +0000485- PyErr_Display will provide file and line information for all exceptions
486 that have an attribute print_file_and_line, not just SyntaxErrors.
487
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +0000488- The UTF-8 codec will now encode and decode Unicode surrogates
489 correctly and without raising exceptions for unpaired ones.
490
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +0000491- Universal newlines (PEP 278) is implemented. Briefly, using 'U'
492 instead of 'r' when opening a text file for reading changes the line
493 ending convention so that any of '\r', '\r\n', and '\n' is
494 recognized (even mixed in one file); all three are converted to
495 '\n', the standard Python line end character.
496
Neal Norwitz649b7592002-01-01 19:07:13 +0000497- file.xreadlines() now raises a ValueError if the file is closed:
498 Previously, an xreadlines object was returned which would raise
499 a ValueError when the xreadlines.next() method was called.
500
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +0000501- sys.exit() inadvertently allowed more than one argument.
Neal Norwitz0c766a02002-03-27 13:03:09 +0000502 An exception will now be raised if more than one argument is used.
503
Gustavo Niemeyer17c5a332002-12-16 14:09:22 +0000504- Changed evaluation order of dictionary literals to conform to the
505 general left to right evaluation order rule. Now {f1(): f2()} will
506 evaluate f1 first.
Gustavo Niemeyer78429a62002-12-16 13:54:02 +0000507
Gustavo Niemeyer786ddb22002-12-16 18:12:53 +0000508- Fixed bug #521782: when a file was in non-blocking mode, file.read()
509 could silently lose data or wrongly throw an unknown error.
510
Neil Schemenauerb983aa02002-12-30 20:22:23 +0000511- The sq_repeat, sq_inplace_repeat, sq_concat and sq_inplace_concat
512 slots are now always tried after trying the corresponding nb_* slots.
513 This fixes a number of minor bugs (see bug #624807).
514
Neal Norwitz74a032e2003-01-10 23:29:48 +0000515- Fix problem with dynamic loading on 64-bit AIX (see bug #639945).
516
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000517Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000518-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000519
Martin v. Löwis24a880b2002-12-31 12:55:15 +0000520- posix.openpty now works on all systems that have /dev/ptmx.
521
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +0000522- A module zipimport exists to support importing code from zip
523 archives.
524
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +0000525- The new datetime module supplies classes for manipulating dates and
526 times. The basic design came from the Zope "fishbowl process", and
527 favors practical commercial applications over calendar esoterica. See
528
529 http://www.zope.org/Members/fdrake/DateTimeWiki/FrontPage
530
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +0000531- _tkinter now returns Tcl objects, instead of strings. Objects which
532 have Python equivalents are converted to Python objects, other objects
533 are wrapped. This can be configured through the wantobjects method,
Martin v. Löwis8c8aa5d2002-11-26 21:39:48 +0000534 or Tkinter.wantobjects.
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +0000535
Barry Warsawc27f4bd2002-12-30 21:03:26 +0000536- The PyBSDDB wrapper around the Sleepycat Berkeley DB library has
537 been added as the package bsddb. The traditional bsddb module is
538 still available in source code, but not built automatically anymore,
539 and is now named bsddb185. This supports Berkeley DB versions from
540 3.0 to 4.1.
Martin v. Löwisef546b32002-11-19 08:12:57 +0000541
Martin v. Löwis677bde22002-11-23 22:08:15 +0000542- unicodedata was updated to Unicode 3.2. It supports normalization
543 and names for Hangul syllables and CJK unified ideographs.
Martin v. Löwis7d41e292002-11-23 12:22:32 +0000544
Neal Norwitz94a83fd2002-11-02 17:46:24 +0000545- resource.getrlimit() now returns longs instead of ints.
546
Martin v. Löwis080689c2002-10-26 14:42:02 +0000547- readline now dynamically adjusts its input/output stream if
548 sys.stdin/stdout changes.
549
Guido van Rossumba602972002-10-01 18:18:58 +0000550- The _tkinter module (and hence Tkinter) has dropped support for
551 Tcl/Tk 8.0 and 8.1. Only Tcl/Tk versions 8.2, 8.3 and 8.4 are
552 supported.
553
Martin v. Löwis658009a2002-09-16 17:26:24 +0000554- cPickle.BadPickleGet is now a class.
555
Martin v. Löwisa19bfe02002-10-16 18:28:36 +0000556- The time stamps in os.stat_result are floating point numbers
557 after stat_float_times has been called.
Martin v. Löwis94717ed2002-09-09 14:24:16 +0000558
Neal Norwitzb5673922002-09-05 21:48:07 +0000559- If the size passed to mmap.mmap() is larger than the length of the
560 file on non-Windows platforms, a ValueError is raised. [SF bug 585792]
561
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +0000562- The xreadlines module is slated for obsolescence.
563
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +0000564- The strptime function in the time module is now always available (a
565 Python implementation is used when the C library doesn't define it).
566
Guido van Rossum9562bcf2002-06-14 21:31:18 +0000567- The 'new' module is no longer an extension, but a Python module that
568 only exists for backwards compatibility. Its contents are no longer
569 functions but callable type objects.
570
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +0000571- The bsddb.*open functions can now take 'None' as a filename.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +0000572 This will create a temporary in-memory bsddb that won't be
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +0000573 written to disk.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +0000574
Martin v. Löwisb96152c2002-12-31 13:20:15 +0000575- posix.getloadavg, posix.lchown, posix.killpg, posix.mknod, and
576 posix.getpgid have been added where available.
Martin v. Löwis06a83e92002-04-14 10:19:44 +0000577
Martin v. Löwisf0a46682002-11-03 17:20:12 +0000578- The locale module now exposes the C library's gettext interface. It
579 also has a new function getpreferredencoding.
Martin v. Löwis2e64c342002-03-27 18:49:02 +0000580
Tim Petersfbf74f22002-03-14 19:06:01 +0000581- A security hole ("double free") was found in zlib-1.1.3, a popular
582 third party compression library used by some Python modules. The
583 hole was quickly plugged in zlib-1.1.4, and the Windows build of
584 Python now ships with zlib-1.1.4.
585
Martin v. Löwis688357e2002-04-08 21:28:20 +0000586- pwd, grp, and resource return enhanced tuples now, with symbolic
587 field names.
Martin v. Löwis29001ff2002-03-01 10:47:37 +0000588
Martin v. Löwis99866332002-03-01 10:27:01 +0000589- array.array is now a type object. A new format character
590 'u' indicates Py_UNICODE arrays. For those, .tounicode and
591 .fromunicode methods are available. Arrays now support __iadd__
592 and __imul__.
593
Neal Norwitze790eae2002-01-01 21:14:12 +0000594- dl now builds on every system that has dlfcn.h. Failure in case
Martin v. Löwis93227272002-01-01 20:18:30 +0000595 of sizeof(int)!=sizeof(long)!=sizeof(void*) is delayed until dl.open
596 is called.
597
Michael W. Hudson34f20ea2002-05-27 15:08:24 +0000598- signal.sigpending, signal.sigprocmask and signal.sigsuspend have
599 been added where available.
600
Skip Montanaro8e790e72002-09-03 13:25:17 +0000601- The sys module acquired a new attribute, api_version, which evaluates
602 to the value of the PYTHON_API_VERSION macro with which the
603 interpreter was compiled.
604
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +0000605- Fixed bug #470582: sre module would return a tuple (None, 'a', 'ab')
606 when applying the regular expression '^((a)c)?(ab)$' on 'ab'. It now
607 returns (None, None, 'ab'), as expected. Also fixed handling of
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +0000608 lastindex/lastgroup match attributes in similar cases. For example,
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +0000609 when running the expression r'(a)(b)?b' over 'ab', lastindex must be
610 1, not 2.
611
Gustavo Niemeyerc523b042002-11-07 03:28:56 +0000612- Fixed bug #581080: sre scanner was not checking the buffer limit
613 before increasing the current pointer. This was creating an infinite
614 loop in the search function, once the pointer exceeded the buffer
615 limit.
616
Thomas Heller95cb7e42002-11-07 16:23:55 +0000617- The os.fdopen function now enforces a file mode starting with the
618 letter 'r', 'w' or 'a', otherwise a ValueError is raised. This fixes
619 bug #623464.
620
Greg Ward6c58d462003-01-03 18:02:15 +0000621- The linuxaudiodev module is now deprecated; it is being replaced by
622 ossaudiodev. The interface has been extended to cover a lot more of
623 OSS (see www.opensound.com), including most DSP ioctls and the
624 OSS mixer API. Documentation forthcoming in 2.3a2.
625
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000626Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000627-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000628
Guido van Rossum747f8062003-01-03 16:33:49 +0000629- imaplib.py now supports SSL (Tino Lange and Piers Lauder).
630
Just van Rossum5e156ad2002-12-31 16:38:01 +0000631- Freeze's modulefinder.py has been moved to the standard library;
632 slightly improved so it will issue less false missing submodule
633 reports (see sf path #643711 for details). Documentation will follow
634 with Python 2.3a2.
635
Martin v. Löwis96a60e42002-12-31 13:11:54 +0000636- os.path exposes getctime.
637
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +0000638- unittest.py now has two additional methods called assertAlmostEqual()
639 and failIfAlmostEqual(). They implement an approximate comparision
640 by rounding the difference between the two arguments and comparing
641 the result to zero. Approximate comparision is essential for
642 unit tests of floating point results.
643
Raymond Hettingere11b5102002-12-25 16:37:19 +0000644- calendar.py now depends on the new datetime module rather than
645 the time module. As a result, the range of allowable dates
646 has been increased.
647
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +0000648- pdb has a new 'j(ump)' command to select the next line to be
649 executed.
650
Thomas Heller1b3b49d2002-12-12 19:13:44 +0000651- The distutils created windows installers now can run a
652 postinstallation script.
653
Martin v. Löwis4581cfa2002-11-22 08:23:09 +0000654- doctest.testmod can now be called without argument, which means to
655 test the current module.
656
Martin v. Löwisf86e8ef2002-11-22 08:08:44 +0000657- When cancelling a server that implemented threading with a keyboard
658 interrupt, the server would shut down but not terminate (waiting on
659 client threads). A new member variable, daemon_threads, was added to
660 the ThreadingMixIn class in SocketServer.py to make it explicit that
661 this behavior needs to be controlled.
662
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +0000663- A new module, optparse, provides a fancy alternative to getopt for
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +0000664 command line parsing. It is a slightly modified version of Greg
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +0000665 Ward's Optik package.
666
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +0000667- UserDict.py now defines a DictMixin class which defines all dictionary
668 methods for classes that already have a minimum mapping interface.
669 This greatly simplifies writing classes that need to be substitutable
670 for dictionaries (such as the shelve module).
671
672- shelve.py now subclasses from UserDict.DictMixin. Now shelve supports
673 all dictionary methods. This eases the transition to persistent
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +0000674 storage for scripts originally written with dictionaries in mind.
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +0000675
Skip Montanaro3bf99e32002-12-08 18:36:24 +0000676- shelve.open and the various classes in shelve.py now accept an optional
677 binary flag, which defaults to False. If True, the values stored in the
678 shelf are binary pickles.
679
Guido van Rossumfda06742002-11-13 16:29:18 +0000680- A new package, logging, implements the logging API defined by PEP
681 282. The code is written by Vinay Sajip.
682
Walter Dörwald4dbf1922002-11-06 16:53:44 +0000683- StreamReader, StreamReaderWriter and StreamRecoder in the codecs
684 modules are iterators now.
685
Tim Peters9288f952002-11-05 20:38:55 +0000686- gzip.py now handles files exceeding 2GB. Files over 4GB also work
687 now (provided the OS supports it, and Python is configured with large
688 file support), but in that case the underlying gzip file format can
689 record only the least-significant 32 bits of the file size, so that
690 some tools working with gzipped files may report an incorrect file
691 size.
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +0000692
Martin v. Löwis74b51ac2002-10-26 14:50:45 +0000693- xml.sax.saxutils.unescape has been added, to replace entity references
694 with their entity value.
695
Martin v. Löwis77ac4292002-10-15 15:11:13 +0000696- Queue.Queue.{put,get} now support an optional timeout argument.
697
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +0000698- Various features of Tk 8.4 are exposed in Tkinter.py. The multiple
699 option of tkFileDialog is exposed as function askopenfile{,name}s.
Martin v. Löwis2ec36272002-10-13 10:22:08 +0000700
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +0000701- Various configure methods of Tkinter have been stream-lined, so that
702 tag_configure, image_configure, window_configure now return a
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +0000703 dictionary when invoked with no argument.
Martin v. Löwis6ce13152002-10-10 14:36:13 +0000704
Guido van Rossum2b492b62002-10-09 21:40:48 +0000705- Importing the readline module now no longer has the side effect of
706 calling setlocale(LC_CTYPE, ""). The initial "C" locale, or
707 whatever locale is explicitly set by the user, is preserved. If you
708 want repr() of 8-bit strings in your preferred encoding to preserve
709 all printable characters of that encoding, you have to add the
710 following code to your $PYTHONSTARTUP file or to your application's
711 main():
712
713 import locale
714 locale.setlocale(locale.LC_CTYPE, "")
715
Martin v. Löwise9ce0b02002-10-07 13:23:24 +0000716- shutil.move was added. shutil.copytree now reports errors as an
717 exception at the end, instead of printing error messages.
718
Marc-André Lemburg97047e22002-10-04 11:55:21 +0000719- Encoding name normalization was generalized to not only
720 replace hyphens with underscores, but also all other non-alphanumeric
721 characters (with the exception of the dot which is used for Python
722 package names during lookup). The aliases.py mapping was updated
723 to the new standard.
724
Walter Dörwald5ccaf8f2002-09-06 16:15:58 +0000725- mimetypes has two new functions: guess_all_extensions() which
726 returns a list of all known extensions for a mime type, and
727 add_type() which adds one mapping between a mime type and
728 an extension to the database.
729
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +0000730- New module: sets, defines the class Set that implements a mutable
731 set type using the keys of a dict to represent the set. There's
732 also a class ImmutableSet which is useful when you need sets of sets
733 or when you need to use sets as dict keys, and a class BaseSet which
Raymond Hettingeref8b9c62002-12-09 08:56:06 +0000734 is the base class of the two.
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +0000735
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +0000736- Added operator.pow(a,b) which is equivalent to a**b.
737
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +0000738- Added random.sample(population,k) for random sampling without replacement.
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +0000739 Returns a k length list of unique elements chosen from the population.
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +0000740
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +0000741- random.randrange(-sys.maxint-1, sys.maxint) no longer raises
742 OverflowError. That is, it now accepts any combination of 'start'
743 and 'stop' arguments so long as each is in the range of Python's
744 bounded integers.
745
Raymond Hettinger40f62172002-12-29 23:03:38 +0000746- Thanks to Raymond Hettinger, random.random() now uses a new core
747 generator. The Mersenne Twister algorithm is implemented in C,
748 threadsafe, faster than the previous generator, has an astronomically
749 large period (2**19937-1), creates random floats to full 53-bit
750 precision, and may be the most widely tested random number generator
751 in existence.
752
753 The random.jumpahead(n) method has different semantics for the new
754 generator. Instead of jumping n steps ahead, it uses n and the
755 existing state to create a new state. This means that jumpahead()
756 continues to support multi-threaded code needing generators of
757 non-overlapping sequences. However, it will break code which relies
758 on jumpahead moving a specific number of steps forward.
759
760 The attributes random.whseed and random.__whseed have no meaning for
761 the new generator. Code using these attributes should switch to a
762 new class, random.WichmannHill which is provided for backward
763 compatibility and to make an alternate generator available.
764
Guido van Rossum4a57c332002-08-02 18:05:20 +0000765- New "algorithms" module: heapq, implements a heap queue. Thanks to
766 Kevin O'Connor for the code and François Pinard for an entertaining
767 write-up explaining the theory and practical uses of heaps.
768
Marc-André Lemburg58e2ff22002-07-12 14:40:04 +0000769- New encoding for the Palm OS character set: palmos.
770
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +0000771- binascii.crc32() and the zipfile module had problems on some 64-bit
772 platforms. These have been fixed. On a platform with 8-byte C longs,
773 crc32() now returns a signed-extended 4-byte result, so that its value
774 as a Python int is equal to the value computed a 32-bit platform.
775
Martin v. Löwis7d650ca2002-06-30 15:05:00 +0000776- xml.dom.minidom.toxml and toprettyxml now take an optional encoding
777 argument.
778
Guido van Rossum9f7549b2002-06-10 21:39:42 +0000779- Some fixes in the copy module: when an object is copied through its
780 __reduce__ method, there was no check for a __setstate__ method on
781 the result [SF patch 565085]; deepcopy should treat instances of
782 custom metaclasses the same way it treats instances of type 'type'
783 [SF patch 560794].
784
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +0000785- Sockets now support timeout mode. After s.settimeout(T), where T is
786 a float expressing seconds, subsequent operations raise an exception
787 if they cannot be completed within T seconds. To disable timeout
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +0000788 mode, use s.settimeout(None). There's also a module function,
789 socket.setdefaulttimeout(T), which sets the default for all sockets
790 created henceforth.
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +0000791
792- getopt.gnu_getopt was added. This supports GNU-style option
793 processing, where options can be mixed with non-option arguments.
Martin v. Löwis446a25f2002-06-06 10:58:36 +0000794
Michael W. Hudsonb0dc1a32002-06-04 18:27:35 +0000795- Stop using strings for exceptions. String objects used for
796 exceptions are now classes deriving from Exception. The objects
797 changed were: Tkinter.TclError, bdb.BdbQuit, macpath.norm_error,
798 tabnanny.NannyNag, and xdrlib.Error.
Neal Norwitzb5b5a262002-06-04 17:14:07 +0000799
Walter Dörwald474458d2002-06-04 15:16:29 +0000800- Constants BOM_UTF8, BOM_UTF16, BOM_UTF16_LE, BOM_UTF16_BE,
801 BOM_UTF32, BOM_UTF32_LE and BOM_UTF32_BE that represent the Byte
802 Order Mark in UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 encodings for little and
803 big endian systems were added to the codecs module. The old names
804 BOM32_* and BOM64_* were off by a factor of 2.
805
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +0000806- Added conversion functions math.degrees() and math.radians().
Raymond Hettinger87f59ee2002-05-13 04:17:32 +0000807
Raymond Hettinger866964c2002-12-14 19:51:34 +0000808- math.log() now takes an optional argument: math.log(x[, base]).
809
Raymond Hettinger9b1df1d2002-05-12 06:07:21 +0000810- ftplib.retrlines() now tests for callback is None rather than testing
811 for False. Was causing an error when given a callback object which
812 was callable but also returned len() as zero. The change may
813 create new breakage if the caller relied on the undocumented behavior
814 and called with callback set to [] or some other False value not
815 identical to None.
816
Tim Peters46c04e12002-05-05 20:40:00 +0000817- random.gauss() uses a piece of hidden state used by nothing else,
818 and the .seed() and .whseed() methods failed to reset it. In other
819 words, setting the seed didn't completely determine the sequence of
820 results produced by random.gauss(). It does now. Programs repeatedly
821 mixing calls to a seed method with calls to gauss() may see different
822 results now.
823
Fred Drake7f781c92002-05-01 20:33:53 +0000824- The pickle.Pickler class grew a clear_memo() method to mimic that
825 provided by cPickle.Pickler.
826
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +0000827- difflib's SequenceMatcher class now does a dynamic analysis of
828 which elements are so frequent as to constitute noise. For
829 comparing files as sequences of lines, this generally works better
830 than the IS_LINE_JUNK function, and function ndiff's linejunk
831 argument defaults to None now as a result. A happy benefit is
832 that SequenceMatcher may run much faster now when applied
833 to large files with many duplicate lines (for example, C program
834 text with lots of repeated "}" and "return NULL;" lines).
835
Guido van Rossum256705b2002-04-23 13:29:43 +0000836- New Text.dump() method in Tkinter module.
837
Marc-André Lemburg1ec71ea2002-04-17 20:33:40 +0000838- New distutils commands for building packagers were added to
839 support pkgtool on Solaris and swinstall on HP-UX.
840
841- distutils now has a new abstract binary packager base class
842 command/bdist_packager, which simplifies writing packagers.
843 This will hopefully provide the missing bits to encourage
844 people to submit more packagers, e.g. for Debian, FreeBSD
845 and other systems.
846
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +0000847- The UTF-16, -LE and -BE stream readers now raise a
848 NotImplementedError for all calls to .readline(). Previously, they
849 used to just produce garbage or fail with an encoding error --
850 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 +0000851 work well with these.
852
Martin v. Löwis5c137c22002-03-18 12:44:08 +0000853- compileall now supports quiet operation.
854
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +0000855- The BaseHTTPServer now implements optional HTTP/1.1 persistent
Martin v. Löwis587c98c2002-03-17 18:37:22 +0000856 connections.
857
Marc-André Lemburga5d2b4c2002-02-16 18:23:30 +0000858- socket module: the SSL support was broken out of the main
859 _socket module C helper and placed into a new _ssl helper
860 which now gets imported by socket.py if available and working.
861
Marc-André Lemburg37aa5802002-02-10 21:42:47 +0000862- encodings package: added aliases for all supported IANA character
863 sets
864
Guido van Rossum606fe4e2001-12-28 20:57:14 +0000865- ftplib: to safeguard the user's privacy, anonymous login will use
866 "anonymous@" as default password, rather than the real user and host
867 name.
868
Fred Drake36736122002-01-10 13:50:31 +0000869- webbrowser: tightened up the command passed to os.system() so that
870 arbitrary shell code can't be executed because a bogus URL was
871 passed in.
872
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +0000873- gettext.translation has an optional fallback argument, and
Martin v. Löwisa55ffae2002-01-11 06:58:49 +0000874 gettext.find an optional all argument. Translations will now fallback
Martin v. Löwisd8996052002-11-21 21:45:32 +0000875 on a per-message basis. The module supports plural forms, by means
876 of gettext.[d]ngettext and Translation.[u]ngettext.
Martin v. Löwis1be64192002-01-11 06:33:28 +0000877
Martin v. Löwis9668b932002-01-12 11:27:42 +0000878- distutils bdist commands now offer a --skip-build option.
879
Walter Dörwaldb25c2b02002-03-21 10:38:40 +0000880- warnings.warn now accepts a Warning instance as first argument.
881
Fred Drakefed7e852002-04-04 19:36:15 +0000882- The xml.sax.expatreader.ExpatParser class will no longer create
883 circular references by using itself as the locator that gets passed
884 to the content handler implementation. [SF bug #535474]
885
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +0000886- The email.Parser.Parser class now properly parses strings regardless
887 of their line endings, which can be any of \r, \n, or \r\n (CR, LF,
888 or CRLF). Also, the Header class's constructor default arguments
889 has changed slightly so that an explicit maxlinelen value is always
Barry Warsaw497e5c42002-12-30 19:27:08 +0000890 honored, and so unicode conversion error handling can be specified.
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +0000891
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +0000892- distutils' build_ext command now links C++ extensions with the C++
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +0000893 compiler available in the Makefile or CXX environment variable, if
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +0000894 running under \*nix.
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +0000895
896- New module bz2: provides a comprehensive interface for the bz2 compression
897 library. It implements a complete file interface, one-shot (de)compression
898 functions, and types for sequential (de)compression.
899
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +0000900- New pdb command 'pp' which is like 'p' except that it pretty-prints
Barry Warsaw5d8d6182002-11-05 22:41:33 +0000901 the value of its expression argument.
902
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +0000903- Now bdist_rpm distutils command understands a verify_script option in
904 the config file, including the contents of the referred filename in
905 the "%verifyscript" section of the rpm spec file.
906
Gustavo Niemeyer1456fde2002-11-25 17:25:04 +0000907- Fixed bug #495695: webbrowser module would run graphic browsers in a
908 unix environment even if DISPLAY was not set. Also, support for
909 skipstone browser was included.
910
Gustavo Niemeyerd5ae01a2002-12-16 13:11:57 +0000911- Fixed bug #636769: rexec would run unallowed code if subclasses of
912 strings were used as parameters for certain functions.
913
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000914Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000915-----------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000916
Martin v. Löwis0d1fdea2002-11-22 08:36:54 +0000917- pygettext.py now supports globbing on Windows, and accepts module
918 names in addition to accepting file names.
919
Guido van Rossum923e4ef2002-09-17 20:58:59 +0000920- The SGI demos (Demo/sgi) have been removed. Nobody thought they
921 were interesting any more. (The SGI library modules and extensions
922 are still there; it is believed that at least some of these are
923 still used and useful.)
924
Fred Drake40813b12002-08-05 15:24:19 +0000925- IDLE supports the new encoding declarations (PEP 263); it can also
926 deal with legacy 8-bit files if they use the locale's encoding. It
927 allows non-ASCII strings in the interactive shell and executes them
928 in the locale's encoding.
Martin v. Löwis98ce7b72002-08-05 15:11:26 +0000929
Marc-André Lemburg46260092002-04-04 16:17:11 +0000930- freeze.py now produces binaries which can import shared modules,
931 unlike before when this failed due to missing symbol exports in
932 the generated binary.
933
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000934Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000935-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000936
Martin v. Löwisdc461752002-11-06 21:59:33 +0000937- On Unix, IDLE is now installed automatically.
938
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +0000939- The fpectl module is not built by default; it's dangerous or useless
940 except in the hands of experts.
941
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +0000942- The public Python C API will generally be declared using PyAPI_FUNC
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +0000943 and PyAPI_DATA macros, while Python extension module init functions
944 will be declared with PyMODINIT_FUNC. DL_EXPORT/DL_IMPORT macros
945 are deprecated.
Neal Norwitz1389f3e2002-07-22 13:21:10 +0000946
Tim Petersc6a3ff62002-07-08 22:11:52 +0000947- A bug was fixed that could cause COUNT_ALLOCS builds to segfault, or
948 get into infinite loops, when a new-style class got garbage-collected.
949 Unfortunately, to avoid this, the way COUNT_ALLOCS works requires
950 that new-style classes be immortal in COUNT_ALLOCS builds. Note that
951 COUNT_ALLOCS is not enabled by default, in either release or debug
952 builds, and that new-style classes are immortal only in COUNT_ALLOCS
953 builds.
954
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +0000955- Compiling out the cyclic garbage collector is no longer an option.
956 The old symbol WITH_CYCLE_GC is now ignored, and Python.h arranges
957 that it's always defined (for the benefit of any extension modules
958 that may be conditionalizing on it). A bonus is that any extension
959 type participating in cyclic gc can choose to participate in the
960 Py_TRASHCAN mechanism now too; in the absence of cyclic gc, this used
961 to require editing the core to teach the trashcan mechanism about the
962 new type.
963
Martin v. Löwis0cec0ff2002-07-28 16:33:45 +0000964- According to Annex F of the current C standard,
Tim Peters1de41bf2002-07-03 03:31:20 +0000965
966 The Standard C macro HUGE_VAL and its float and long double analogs,
967 HUGE_VALF and HUGE_VALL, expand to expressions whose values are
968 positive infinities.
969
970 Python only uses the double HUGE_VAL, and only to #define its own symbol
971 Py_HUGE_VAL. Some platforms have incorrect definitions for HUGE_VAL.
972 pyport.h used to try to worm around that, but the workarounds triggered
973 other bugs on other platforms, so we gave up. If your platform defines
974 HUGE_VAL incorrectly, you'll need to #define Py_HUGE_VAL to something
975 that works on your platform. The only instance of this I'm sure about
976 is on an unknown subset of Cray systems, described here:
977
978 http://www.cray.com/swpubs/manuals/SN-2194_2.0/html-SN-2194_2.0/x3138.htm
979
980 Presumably 2.3a1 breaks such systems. If anyone uses such a system, help!
981
Martin v. Löwisa3fb4f72002-06-09 13:33:54 +0000982- The configure option --without-doc-strings can be used to remove the
983 doc strings from the builtin functions and modules; this reduces the
984 size of the executable.
985
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +0000986- The universal newlines option (PEP 278) is on by default. On Unix
987 it can be disabled by passing --without-universal-newlines to the
988 configure script. On other platforms, remove
989 WITH_UNIVERSAL_NEWLINES from pyconfig.h.
Tim Peters639295f2002-04-21 07:30:30 +0000990
Martin v. Löwis1142de32002-03-29 16:28:31 +0000991- On Unix, a shared libpython2.3.so can be created with --enable-shared.
992
Tim Peters8deda702002-03-30 10:06:07 +0000993- All uses of the CACHE_HASH, INTERN_STRINGS, and DONT_SHARE_SHORT_STRINGS
994 preprocessor symbols were eliminated. The internal decisions they
995 controlled stopped being experimental long ago.
Tim Peters1f7df352002-03-29 03:29:08 +0000996
Fred Drake7d28b732002-05-02 21:17:00 +0000997- The tools used to build the documentation now work under Cygwin as
998 well as Unix.
999
Skip Montanaro57454e52002-06-14 20:30:31 +00001000- The bsddb and dbm module builds have been changed to try and avoid version
1001 skew problems and disable linkage with Berkeley DB 1.85 unless the
1002 installer knows what s/he's doing. See the section on building these
1003 modules in the README file for details.
1004
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001005C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001006-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001007
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00001008- PyNumber_Check() now returns true for string and unicode objects.
1009 This is a result of these types having a partially defined
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00001010 tp_as_number slot. (This is not a feature, but an indication that
Walter Dörwalda1a61f92002-11-19 21:20:25 +00001011 PyNumber_Check() is not very useful to determine numeric behavior.
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00001012 It may be deprecated.)
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00001013
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00001014- The string object's layout has changed: the pointer member
1015 ob_sinterned has been replaced by an int member ob_sstate. On some
1016 platforms (e.g. most 64-bit systems) this may change the offset of
1017 the ob_sval member, so as a precaution the API_VERSION has been
1018 incremented. The apparently unused feature of "indirect interned
1019 strings", supported by the ob_sinterned member, is gone. Interned
1020 strings are now usually mortal; theres a new API,
1021 PyString_InternImmortal() that creates immortal interned strings.
1022 (The ob_sstate member can only take three values; however, while
1023 making it a char saves a few bytes per string object on average, in
1024 it also slowed things down a bit because ob_sval was no longer
1025 aligned.)
1026
Guido van Rossumfdb86482002-08-14 21:20:32 +00001027- The Py_InitModule*() functions now accept NULL for the 'methods'
1028 argument. Modules without global functions are becoming more common
1029 now that factories can be types rather than functions.
1030
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00001031- New C API PyUnicode_FromOrdinal() which exposes unichr() at C
1032 level.
1033
Thomas Heller085358a2002-07-29 14:27:41 +00001034- New functions PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErr() and
1035 PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErrWithFilename(). Similar to
1036 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErrWithFilename() and
1037 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErr(), but they allow to specify
1038 the exception type to raise. Available on Windows.
1039
Tim Peters7c321a82002-07-09 02:57:01 +00001040- Py_FatalError() is now declared as taking a const char* argument. It
1041 was previously declared without const. This should not affect working
1042 code.
1043
Martin v. Löwis01f94bd2002-05-08 08:44:21 +00001044- Added new macro PySequence_ITEM(o, i) that directly calls
1045 sq_item without rechecking that o is a sequence and without
1046 adjusting for negative indices.
1047
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00001048- PyRange_New() now raises ValueError if the fourth argument is not 1.
1049 This is part of the removal of deprecated features of the xrange
1050 object.
1051
Guido van Rossum517c7d42002-04-26 02:49:14 +00001052- PyNumber_Coerce() and PyNumber_CoerceEx() now also invoke the type's
1053 coercion if both arguments have the same type but this type has the
1054 CHECKTYPES flag set. This is to better support proxies.
1055
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00001056- The type of tp_free has been changed from "``void (*)(PyObject *)``" to
1057 "``void (*)(void *)``".
Neil Schemenauer9344b142002-04-12 23:00:08 +00001058
1059- PyObject_Del, PyObject_GC_Del are now functions instead of macros.
1060
Guido van Rossum0986d822002-04-08 01:38:42 +00001061- A type can now inherit its metatype from its base type. Previously,
1062 when PyType_Ready() was called, if ob_type was found to be NULL, it
1063 was always set to &PyType_Type; now it is set to base->ob_type,
1064 where base is tp_base, defaulting to &PyObject_Type.
1065
1066- PyType_Ready() accidentally did not inherit tp_is_gc; now it does.
1067
Neil Schemenauerc9abc1d2002-05-08 14:14:41 +00001068- The PyCore_* family of APIs have been removed.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00001069
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00001070- The "u#" parser marker will now pass through Unicode objects as-is
Marc-André Lemburg3e3eacb2002-01-09 16:21:27 +00001071 without going through the buffer API.
1072
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001073- The enumerators of cmp_op have been renamed to use the prefix ``PyCmp_``.
Martin v. Löwis7198a522002-01-01 19:59:11 +00001074
Tim Peters10a3bb52001-12-25 19:07:38 +00001075- An old #define of ANY as void has been removed from pyport.h. This
1076 hasn't been used since Python's pre-ANSI days, and the #define has
1077 been marked as obsolete since then. SF bug 495548 says it created
1078 conflicts with other packages, so keeping it around wasn't harmless.
1079
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001080- Because Python's magic number scheme broke on January 1st, we decided
1081 to stop Python development. Thanks for all the fish!
1082
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00001083- Some of us don't like fish, so we changed Python's magic number
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00001084 scheme to a new one. See Python/import.c for details.
1085
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001086New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001087-------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001088
Martin v. Löwis79acb9e2002-12-06 12:48:53 +00001089- OpenVMS is now supported.
1090
Martin v. Löwisf90ae202002-06-11 06:22:31 +00001091- AtheOS is now supported.
1092
Andrew MacIntyre161ad0e2002-08-04 07:25:58 +00001093- the EMX runtime environment on OS/2 is now supported.
1094
Martin v. Löwisa6e97582002-01-01 18:41:33 +00001095- GNU/Hurd is now supported.
1096
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001097Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001098-----
1099
Fred Drake4dd0f7e2002-11-26 21:44:56 +00001100- The regrtest.py script's -u option now provides a way to say "allow
1101 all resources except this one." For example, to allow everything
1102 except bsddb, give the option '-uall,-bsddb'.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001103
1104Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001105-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001106
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00001107- The Windows distribution now ships with version 4.0.14 of the
1108 Sleepycat Berkeley database library. This should be a huge
1109 improvement over the previous Berkeley DB 1.85, which had many
1110 bugs.
1111 XXX What are the licensing issues here?
Tim Peters84c7a3f2002-11-23 18:48:06 +00001112 XXX If a user has a database created with a previous verion of
1113 XXX Python, what must they do to convert it?
1114 XXX I'm still not sure how to link this thing (see PCbuild/readme.txt).
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00001115 XXX The version # is likely to change before 2.3a1.
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00001116
1117- The Windows distribution now ships with a Secure Sockets Library (SLL)
Mark Hammondc3de0082002-12-03 06:16:08 +00001118 module (_ssl.pyd)
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00001119
Tim Peters857fb4c2002-11-14 23:31:58 +00001120- The Windows distribution now ships with Tcl/Tk version 8.4.1 (it
1121 previously shipped with Tcl/Tk 8.3.2).
1122
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00001123- When Python is built under a Microsoft compiler, sys.version now
1124 includes the compiler version number (_MSC_VER). For example, under
1125 MSVC 6, sys.version constains the substring "MSC v.1200 ". 1200 is
1126 the value of _MSC_VER under MSVC 6.
1127
Tim Peters08e72952002-04-16 20:48:01 +00001128- Sometimes the uninstall executable (UNWISE.EXE) vanishes. One cause
1129 of that has been fixed in the installer (disabled Wise's "delete in-
1130 use files" uninstall option).
1131
Guido van Rossum181e41a2002-04-06 00:23:25 +00001132- Fixed a bug in urllib's proxy handling in Windows. [SF bug #503031]
1133
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00001134- The installer now installs Start menu shortcuts under (the local
1135 equivalent of) "All Users" when doing an Admin install.
1136
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00001137- file.truncate([newsize]) now works on Windows for all newsize values.
1138 It used to fail if newsize didn't fit in 32 bits, reflecting a
1139 limitation of MS _chsize (which is no longer used).
1140
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00001141- os.waitpid() is now implemented for Windows, and can be used to block
1142 until a specified process exits. This is similar to, but not exactly
1143 the same as, os.waitpid() on POSIX systems. If you're waiting for
1144 a specific process whose pid was obtained from one of the spawn()
1145 functions, the same Python os.waitpid() code works across platforms.
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00001146 See the docs for details. The docs were changed to clarify that
1147 spawn functions return, and waitpid requires, a process handle on
1148 Windows (not the same thing as a Windows process id).
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00001149
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00001150- New tempfile.TemporaryFile implementation for Windows: this doesn't
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00001151 need a TemporaryFileWrapper wrapper anymore, and should be immune
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00001152 to a nasty problem: before 2.3, if you got a temp file on Windows, it
1153 got wrapped in an object whose close() method first closed the
1154 underlying file, then deleted the file. This usually worked fine.
1155 However, the spawn family of functions on Windows create (at a low C
1156 level) the same set of open files in the spawned process Q as were
1157 open in the spawning process P. If a temp file f was among them, then
1158 doing f.close() in P first closed P's C-level file handle on f, but Q's
1159 C-level file handle on f remained open, so the attempt in P to delete f
1160 blew up with a "Permission denied" error (Windows doesn't allow
1161 deleting open files). This was surprising, subtle, and difficult to
1162 work around.
1163
1164- The os module now exports all the symbolic constants usable with the
1165 low-level os.open() on Windows: the new constants in 2.3 are
1166 O_NOINHERIT, O_SHORT_LIVED, O_TEMPORARY, O_RANDOM and O_SEQUENTIAL.
1167 The others were also available in 2.2: O_APPEND, O_BINARY, O_CREAT,
1168 O_EXCL, O_RDONLY, O_RDWR, O_TEXT, O_TRUNC and O_WRONLY. Contrary
1169 to Microsoft docs, O_SHORT_LIVED does not seem to imply O_TEMPORARY
1170 (so specify both if you want both; note that neither is useful unless
1171 specified with O_CREAT too).
1172
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001173Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001174----
1175
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001176- Mac/Relnotes is gone, the release notes are now here.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001177
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001178- The current naming convention for Python on the Macintosh is that MacPython
1179 refers to the unix-based OSX-only version, and MacPython-OS9 refers to the
1180 CFM-based version that runs on both OS9 and OSX.
1181
1182- All MacPython-OS9 functionality is now available in an OSX unix build,
1183 including the Carbon modules, the IDE, OSA support, etc. A lot of this
1184 will only work correctly in a framework build, though, because you cannot
1185 talk to the window manager unless your application is run from a .app
1186 bundle. There is a command line tool "pythonw" that runs your script
1187 with an interpreter living in such a .app bundle, this interpreter should
1188 be used to run any Python script using the window manager (including
1189 Tkinter or wxPython scripts).
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00001190
Jack Jansen8bb80db2002-12-30 22:42:43 +00001191- Most of Mac/Lib has moved to Lib/plat-mac, which is again used both in
1192 MacPython-OSX and MacPython-OS9. The only modules remaining in Mac/Lib
1193 are specifically for MacPython-OS9 (CFM support, preference resources, etc).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001194
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001195- A new utility PythonLauncher will start a Python interpreter when a .py or
1196 .pyw script is double-clicked in the Finder. By default .py scripts are
1197 run with a normal Python interpreter in a Terminal window and .pyw
1198 files are run with a window-aware pythonw interpreter without a Terminal
1199 window, but all this can be customized.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001200
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001201- MacPython-OS9 is now Carbon-only, so it runs on Mac OS 9 or Mac OS X and
1202 possibly on Mac OS 8.6 with the right CarbonLib installed, but not on earlier
1203 releases.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001204
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001205- Many tools such as BuildApplet.py and gensuitemodule.py now support a command
1206 line interface too.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001207
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001208- All the Carbon classes are now PEP253 compliant, meaning that you can
1209 subclass them from Python. Most of the attributes have gone, you should
1210 now use the accessor function call API, which is also what Apple's
1211 documentation uses. Some attributes such as grafport.visRgn are still
1212 available for convenience.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001213
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001214- New Carbon modules File (implementing the APIs in Files.h and Aliases.h)
1215 and Folder (APIs from Folders.h). The old macfs builtin module is
1216 gone, and replaced by a Python wrapper around the new modules.
1217
1218- Pathname handling should now be fully consistent: MacPython-OSX always uses
1219 unix pathnames and MacPython-OS9 always uses colon-separated Mac pathnames
1220 (also when running on Mac OS X).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001221
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001222- New Carbon modules Help and AH give access to the Carbon Help Manager.
1223 There are hooks in the IDE to allow accessing the Python documentation
1224 (and Apple's Carbon and Cocoa documentation) through the Help Viewer.
1225 See Mac/OSX/README for converting the Python documentation to a
1226 Help Viewer comaptible form and installing it.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001227
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001228- OSA support has been redesigned and the generated Python classes now
1229 mirror the inheritance defined by the underlying OSA classes.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001230
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001231- MacPython no longer maps both \r and \n to \n on input for any text file.
1232 This feature has been replaced by universal newline support (PEP278).
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00001233
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00001234- The default encoding for Python sourcefiles in MacPython-OS9 is no longer
1235 mac-roman (or whatever your local Mac encoding was but "ascii", like on
1236 other platforms. If you really need sourcefiles with Mac characters in them
1237 you can change this in site.py.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001238
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001239What's New in Python 2.2 final?
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001240===============================
1241
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001242*Release date: 21-Dec-2001*
1243
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001244Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001245--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001246
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00001247- pickle.py, cPickle: allow pickling instances of new-style classes
1248 with a custom metaclass.
1249
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001250Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001251-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001252
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00001253- weakref proxy object: when comparing, unwrap both arguments if both
1254 are proxies.
1255
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001256Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001257-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001258
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00001259- binascii.b2a_base64(): fix a potential buffer overrun when encoding
1260 very short strings.
1261
1262- cPickle: the obscure "fast" mode was suspected of causing stack
1263 overflows on the Mac. Hopefully fixed this by setting the recursion
1264 limit much smaller. If the limit is too low (it only affects
1265 performance), you can change it by defining PY_CPICKLE_FAST_LIMIT
1266 when compiling cPickle.c (or in pyconfig.h).
1267
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001268Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001269-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001270
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00001271- dumbdbm.py: fixed a dumb old bug (the file didn't get synched at
1272 close or delete time).
1273
1274- rfc822.py: fixed a bug where the address '<>' was converted to None
1275 instead of an empty string (also fixes the email.Utils module).
1276
1277- xmlrpclib.py: version 1.0.0; uses precision for doubles.
1278
1279- test suite: the pickle and cPickle tests were not executing any code
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00001280 when run from the standard regression test.
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00001281
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001282Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001283-----------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001284
1285Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001286-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001287
1288C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001289-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001290
1291New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001292-------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001293
1294Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001295-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001296
1297Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001298-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001299
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00001300- distutils package: fixed broken Windows installers (bdist_wininst).
1301
1302- tempfile.py: prevent mysterious warnings when TemporaryFileWrapper
1303 instances are deleted at process exit time.
1304
1305- socket.py: prevent mysterious warnings when socket instances are
1306 deleted at process exit time.
1307
1308- posixmodule.c: fix a Windows crash with stat() of a filename ending
1309 in backslash.
1310
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001311Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001312----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001313
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00001314- The Carbon toolbox modules have been upgraded to Universal Headers
1315 3.4, and experimental CoreGraphics and CarbonEvents modules have
1316 been added. All only for framework-enabled MacOSX.
1317
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001318
Tim Peters6272dfd2001-12-13 19:34:00 +00001319What's New in Python 2.2c1?
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001320===========================
1321
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001322*Release date: 14-Dec-2001*
1323
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001324Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001325--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001326
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00001327- Guido's tutorial introduction to the new type/class features has
1328 been extensively updated. See
1329
1330 http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html
1331
1332 That remains the primary documentation in this area.
1333
Guido van Rossum33bab012001-12-05 22:45:48 +00001334- Fixed a leak: instance variables declared with __slots__ were never
1335 deleted!
1336
Guido van Rossum4b800852001-12-03 00:54:52 +00001337- The "delete attribute" method of descriptor objects is called
1338 __delete__, not __del__. In previous releases, it was mistakenly
1339 called __del__, which created an unfortunate overloading condition
1340 with finalizers. (The "get attribute" and "set attribute" methods
1341 are still called __get__ and __set__, respectively.)
1342
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00001343- Some subtle issues with the super built-in were fixed:
1344
1345 (a) When super itself is subclassed, its __get__ method would still
1346 return an instance of the base class (i.e., of super).
1347
1348 (b) super(C, C()).__class__ would return C rather than super. This
1349 is confusing. To fix this, I decided to change the semantics of
1350 super so that it only applies to code attributes, not to data
1351 attributes. After all, overriding data attributes is not
1352 supported anyway.
1353
1354 (c) The __get__ method didn't check whether the argument was an
1355 instance of the type used in creation of the super instance.
1356
Guido van Rossumcd7b7d62001-12-04 21:02:07 +00001357- Previously, hash() of an instance of a subclass of a mutable type
1358 (list or dictionary) would return some value, rather than raising
1359 TypeError. This has been fixed. Also, directly calling
1360 dict.__hash__ and list.__hash__ now raises the same TypeError
1361 (previously, these were the same as object.__hash__).
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00001362
Guido van Rossumd331cb52001-12-05 19:46:42 +00001363- New-style objects now support deleting their __dict__. This is for
1364 all intents and purposes equivalent to assigning a brand new empty
1365 dictionary, but saves space if the object is not used further.
1366
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001367Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001368-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001369
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00001370- -Qnew now works as documented in PEP 238: when -Qnew is passed on
1371 the command line, all occurrences of "/" use true division instead
1372 of classic division. See the PEP for details. Note that "all"
1373 means all instances in library and 3rd-party modules, as well as in
1374 your own code. As the PEP says, -Qnew is intended for use only in
1375 educational environments with control over the libraries in use.
Tim Petersbf72fe22001-12-11 21:43:14 +00001376 Note that test_coercion.py in the standard Python test suite fails
1377 under -Qnew; this is expected, and won't be repaired until true
1378 division becomes the default (in the meantime, test_coercion is
1379 testing the current rules).
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00001380
Fred Drake6c01e252001-12-14 17:08:12 +00001381- complex() now only allows the first argument to be a string
1382 argument, and raises TypeError if either the second arg is a string
1383 or if the second arg is specified when the first is a string.
1384
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001385Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001386-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001387
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00001388- gc.get_referents was renamed to gc.get_referrers.
1389
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001390Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001391-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001392
Tim Peters25059d32001-12-07 20:35:43 +00001393- Functions in the os.spawn() family now release the global interpreter
1394 lock around calling the platform spawn. They should always have done
1395 this, but did not before 2.2c1. Multithreaded programs calling
1396 an os.spawn function with P_WAIT will no longer block all Python threads
1397 until the spawned program completes. It's possible that some programs
1398 relies on blocking, although more likely by accident than by design.
1399
Martin v. Löwis3a89b2b2001-11-25 14:35:58 +00001400- webbrowser defaults to netscape.exe on OS/2 now.
1401
Martin v. Löwis652e1912001-11-25 14:50:56 +00001402- Tix.ResizeHandle exposes detach_widget, hide, and show.
1403
Martin v. Löwis714d2e22001-12-02 12:26:03 +00001404- The charset alias windows_1252 has been added.
1405
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00001406- types.StringTypes is a tuple containing the defined string types;
1407 usually this will be (str, unicode), but if Python was compiled
1408 without Unicode support it will be just (str,).
1409
1410- The pulldom and minidom modules were synchronized to PyXML.
1411
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001412Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001413-----------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001414
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00001415- A new script called Tools/scripts/google.py was added, which fires
1416 off a search on Google.
1417
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001418Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001419-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001420
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00001421- Note that release builds of Python should arrange to define the
1422 preprocessor symbol NDEBUG on the command line (or equivalent).
1423 In the 2.2 pre-release series we tried to define this by magic in
1424 Python.h instead, but it proved to cause problems for extension
1425 authors. The Unix, Windows and Mac builds now all define NDEBUG in
1426 release builds via cmdline (or equivalent) instead. Ports to
1427 other platforms should do likewise.
1428
Jack Jansen1999ef42001-12-06 21:47:20 +00001429- It is no longer necessary to use --with-suffix when building on a
1430 case-insensitive file system (such as Mac OS X HFS+). In the build
1431 directory an extension is used, but not in the installed python.
1432
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001433C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001434-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001435
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00001436- New function PyDict_MergeFromSeq2() exposes the builtin dict
1437 constructor's logic for updating a dictionary from an iterable object
1438 producing key-value pairs.
1439
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00001440- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() requires that the number of entries in
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00001441 the keyword list equal the number of argument specifiers. This
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00001442 wasn't checked correctly, and PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords could even
1443 dump core in some bad cases. This has been repaired. As a result,
1444 PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords may raise RuntimeError in bad cases that
1445 previously went unchallenged.
1446
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001447New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001448-------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001449
1450Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001451-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001452
1453Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001454-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001455
1456Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001457----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001458
Jack Jansenffa260f2001-12-06 21:14:00 +00001459- In unix-Python on Mac OS X (and darwin) sys.platform is now "darwin",
1460 without any trailing digits.
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001461
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00001462- Changed logic for finding python home in Mac OS X framework Pythons.
1463 Now sys.executable points to the executable again, in stead of to
1464 the shared library. The latter is used only for locating the python
1465 home.
1466
1467
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001468What's New in Python 2.2b2?
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001469===========================
1470
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001471*Release date: 16-Nov-2001*
1472
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001473Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001474--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001475
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00001476- Multiple inheritance mixing new-style and classic classes in the
1477 list of base classes is now allowed, so this works now:
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00001478
1479 class Classic: pass
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00001480 class Mixed(Classic, object): pass
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00001481
1482 The MRO (method resolution order) for each base class is respected
1483 according to its kind, but the MRO for the derived class is computed
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00001484 using new-style MRO rules if any base class is a new-style class.
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00001485 This needs to be documented.
1486
Tim Petersa427a2b2001-10-29 22:25:45 +00001487- The new builtin dictionary() constructor, and dictionary type, have
1488 been renamed to dict. This reflects a decade of common usage.
1489
Guido van Rossum3fc08d22001-11-15 20:33:10 +00001490- dict() now accepts an iterable object producing 2-sequences. For
1491 example, dict(d.items()) == d for any dictionary d. The argument,
1492 and the elements of the argument, can be any iterable objects.
1493
Guido van Rossum7ad2d1e2001-10-29 22:11:00 +00001494- New-style classes can now have a __del__ method, which is called
1495 when the instance is deleted (just like for classic classes).
1496
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00001497- Assignment to object.__dict__ is now possible, for objects that are
1498 instances of new-style classes that have a __dict__ (unless the base
1499 class forbids it).
1500
Guido van Rossumc8e56452001-10-22 00:43:43 +00001501- Methods of built-in types now properly check for keyword arguments
1502 (formerly these were silently ignored). The only built-in methods
1503 that take keyword arguments are __call__, __init__ and __new__.
1504
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00001505- The socket function has been converted to a type; see below.
1506
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001507Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001508-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001509
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00001510- Assignment to __debug__ raises SyntaxError at compile-time. This
1511 was promised when 2.1c1 was released as "What's New in Python 2.1c1"
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00001512 (see below) says.
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00001513
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00001514- Clarified the error messages for unsupported operands to an operator
1515 (like 1 + '').
1516
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001517Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001518-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001519
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00001520- mmap has a new keyword argument, "access", allowing a uniform way for
1521 both Windows and Unix users to create read-only, write-through and
1522 copy-on-write memory mappings. This was previously possible only on
1523 Unix. A new keyword argument was required to support this in a
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00001524 uniform way because the mmap() signatures had diverged across
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00001525 platforms. Thanks to Jay T Miller for repairing this!
1526
Tim Peters169ded02001-11-03 19:57:21 +00001527- By default, the gc.garbage list now contains only those instances in
1528 unreachable cycles that have __del__ methods; in 2.1 it contained all
1529 instances in unreachable cycles. "Instances" here has been generalized
1530 to include instances of both new-style and old-style classes.
1531
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00001532- The socket module defines a new method for socket objects,
1533 sendall(). This is like send() but may make multiple calls to
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00001534 send() until all data has been sent. Also, the socket function has
1535 been converted to a subclassable type, like list and tuple (etc.)
1536 before it; socket and SocketType are now the same thing.
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00001537
1538- Various bugfixes to the curses module. There is now a test suite
1539 for the curses module (you have to run it manually).
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00001540
Guido van Rossum692adf12001-10-30 03:03:03 +00001541- binascii.b2a_base64 no longer places an arbitrary restriction of 57
1542 bytes on its input.
1543
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001544Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001545-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001546
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00001547- tkFileDialog exposes a Directory class and askdirectory
Martin v. Löwis25ee87c2001-11-07 22:38:08 +00001548 convenience function.
1549
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00001550- Symbolic group names in regular expressions must be unique. For
1551 example, the regexp r'(?P<abc>)(?P<abc>)' is not allowed, because a
1552 single name can't mean both "group 1" and "group 2" simultaneously.
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00001553 Python 2.2 detects this error at regexp compilation time;
1554 previously, the error went undetected, and results were
1555 unpredictable. Also in sre, the pattern.split(), pattern.sub(), and
1556 pattern.subn() methods have been rewritten in C. Also, an
1557 experimental function/method finditer() has been added, which works
1558 like findall() but returns an iterator.
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00001559
Martin v. Löwisb7b32602001-11-02 23:48:20 +00001560- Tix exposes more commands through the classes DirSelectBox,
1561 DirSelectDialog, ListNoteBook, Meter, CheckList, and the
1562 methods tix_addbitmapdir, tix_cget, tix_configure, tix_filedialog,
1563 tix_getbitmap, tix_getimage, tix_option_get, and tix_resetoptions.
1564
Tim Peters98791af2001-10-23 01:59:54 +00001565- Traceback objects are now scanned by cyclic garbage collection, so
1566 cycles created by casual use of sys.exc_info() no longer cause
1567 permanent memory leaks (provided garbage collection is enabled).
1568
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00001569- os.extsep -- a new variable needed by the RISCOS support. It is the
1570 separator used by extensions, and is '.' on all platforms except
1571 RISCOS, where it is '/'. There is no need to use this variable
1572 unless you have a masochistic desire to port your code to RISCOS.
1573
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00001574- mimetypes.py has optional support for non-standard, but commonly
1575 found types. guess_type() and guess_extension() now accept an
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001576 optional 'strict' flag, defaulting to true, which controls whether
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00001577 recognize non-standard types or not. A few non-standard types we
1578 know about have been added. Also, when run as a script, there are
1579 new -l and -e options.
1580
1581- statcache is now deprecated.
1582
1583- email.Utils.formatdate() now produces the preferred RFC 2822 style
1584 dates with numeric timezones (it used to produce obsolete dates
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001585 hard coded to "GMT" timezone). An optional 'localtime' flag is
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00001586 added to produce dates in the local timezone, with daylight savings
1587 time properly taken into account.
1588
1589- In pickle and cPickle, instead of masking errors in load() by
1590 transforming them into SystemError, we let the original exception
1591 propagate out. Also, implement support for __safe_for_unpickling__
1592 in pickle, as it already was supported in cPickle.
1593
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001594Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001595-----------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001596
1597Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001598-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001599
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00001600- The dbm module is built using libdb1 if available. The bsddb module
1601 is built with libdb3 if available.
1602
1603- Misc/Makefile.pre.in has been removed by BDFL pronouncement.
1604
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001605C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001606-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001607
Tim Peters1fc240e2001-10-26 05:06:50 +00001608- New function PySequence_Fast_GET_SIZE() returns the size of a non-
1609 NULL result from PySequence_Fast(), more quickly than calling
1610 PySequence_Size().
1611
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00001612- New argument unpacking function PyArg_UnpackTuple() added.
1613
1614- New functions PyObject_CallFunctionObjArgs() and
1615 PyObject_CallMethodObjArgs() have been added to make it more
1616 convenient and efficient to call functions and methods from C.
1617
1618- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() no longer masks errors, so it's
1619 possible that this will propagate errors it didn't before.
1620
1621- New function PyObject_CheckReadBuffer(), which returns true if its
1622 argument supports the single-segment readable buffer interface.
1623
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001624New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001625-------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001626
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00001627- We've finally confirmed that this release builds on HP-UX 11.00,
1628 *with* threads, and passes the test suite.
1629
Tim Peters7a33d8b2001-11-05 02:51:07 +00001630- Thanks to a series of patches from Michael Muller, Python may build
1631 again under OS/2 Visual Age C++.
1632
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00001633- Updated RISCOS port by Dietmar Schwertberger.
1634
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001635Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001636-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001637
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00001638- Added a test script for the curses module. It isn't run automatically;
1639 regrtest.py must be run with '-u curses' to enable it.
1640
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001641Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001642-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001643
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00001644Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001645----
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00001646
1647- PythonScript has been moved to unsupported and is slated to be
1648 removed completely in the next release.
1649
1650- It should now be possible to build applets that work on both OS9 and
1651 OSX.
1652
1653- The core is now linked with CoreServices not Carbon; as a side
1654 result, default 8bit encoding on OSX is now ASCII.
1655
1656- Python should now build on OSX 10.1.1
1657
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001658
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00001659What's New in Python 2.2b1?
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00001660===========================
1661
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001662*Release date: 19-Oct-2001*
1663
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00001664Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001665--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00001666
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00001667- New-style classes are now always dynamic (except for built-in and
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00001668 extension types). There is no longer a performance penalty, and I
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00001669 no longer see another reason to keep this baggage around. One relic
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00001670 remains: the __dict__ of a new-style class is a read-only proxy; you
1671 must set the class's attribute to modify it. As a consequence, the
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00001672 __defined__ attribute of new-style types no longer exists, for lack
1673 of need: there is once again only one __dict__ (although in the
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00001674 future a __cache__ may be resurrected with a similar function, if I
1675 can prove that it actually speeds things up).
Guido van Rossum50fda3b2001-10-04 19:46:06 +00001676
Tim Peters1c9ca872001-10-04 06:43:12 +00001677- C.__doc__ now works as expected for new-style classes (in 2.2a4 it
1678 always returned None, even when there was a class docstring).
1679
1680- doctest now finds and runs docstrings attached to new-style classes,
1681 class methods, static methods, and properties.
1682
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00001683Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001684-----------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00001685
Guido van Rossuma8bcf802001-10-15 15:53:58 +00001686- A very subtle syntactical pitfall in list comprehensions was fixed.
1687 For example: [a+b for a in 'abc', for b in 'def']. The comma in
1688 this example is a mistake. Previously, this would silently let 'a'
1689 iterate over the singleton tuple ('abc',), yielding ['abcd', 'abce',
1690 'abcf'] rather than the intended ['ad', 'ae', 'af', 'bd', 'be',
1691 'bf', 'cd', 'ce', 'cf']. Now, this is flagged as a syntax error.
1692 Note that [a for a in <singleton>] is a convoluted way to say
1693 [<singleton>] anyway, so it's not like any expressiveness is lost.
1694
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00001695- getattr(obj, name, default) now only catches AttributeError, as
1696 documented, rather than returning the default value for all
1697 exceptions (which could mask bugs in a __getattr__ hook, for
1698 example).
1699
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00001700- Weak reference objects are now part of the core and offer a C API.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00001701 A bug which could allow a core dump when binary operations involved
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00001702 proxy reference has been fixed. weakref.ReferenceError is now a
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00001703 built-in exception.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00001704
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00001705- unicode(obj) now behaves more like str(obj), accepting arbitrary
1706 objects, and calling a __unicode__ method if it exists.
1707 unicode(obj, encoding) and unicode(obj, encoding, errors) still
Marc-André Lemburgb5507ec2001-10-19 12:02:29 +00001708 require an 8-bit string or character buffer argument.
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00001709
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00001710- isinstance() now allows any object as the first argument and a
1711 class, a type or something with a __bases__ tuple attribute for the
1712 second argument. The second argument may also be a tuple of a
1713 class, type, or something with __bases__, in which case isinstance()
1714 will return true if the first argument is an instance of any of the
1715 things contained in the second argument tuple. E.g.
1716
1717 isinstance(x, (A, B))
1718
1719 returns true if x is an instance of A or B.
1720
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00001721Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001722-----------------
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00001723
1724- thread.start_new_thread() now returns the thread ID (previously None).
1725
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00001726- binascii has now two quopri support functions, a2b_qp and b2a_qp.
1727
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00001728- readline now supports setting the startup_hook and the
1729 pre_event_hook, and adds the add_history() function.
Martin v. Löwis0daad592001-09-30 21:09:59 +00001730
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00001731- os and posix supports chroot(), setgroups() and unsetenv() where
1732 available. The stat(), fstat(), statvfs() and fstatvfs() functions
1733 now return "pseudo-sequences" -- the various fields can now be
1734 accessed as attributes (e.g. os.stat("/").st_mtime) but for
1735 backwards compatibility they also behave as a fixed-length sequence.
1736 Some platform-specific fields (e.g. st_rdev) are only accessible as
Guido van Rossum98bf58f2001-10-18 20:34:25 +00001737 attributes.
1738
1739- time: localtime(), gmtime() and strptime() now return a
1740 pseudo-sequence similar to the os.stat() return value, with
1741 attributes like tm_year etc.
Martin v. Löwis16628c92001-10-04 22:46:41 +00001742
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00001743- Decompression objects in the zlib module now accept an optional
1744 second parameter to decompress() that specifies the maximum amount
1745 of memory to use for the uncompressed data.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00001746
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00001747- optional SSL support in the socket module now exports OpenSSL
1748 functions RAND_add(), RAND_egd(), and RAND_status(). These calls
1749 are useful on platforms like Solaris where OpenSSL does not
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00001750 automatically seed its PRNG. Also, the keyfile and certfile
1751 arguments to socket.ssl() are now optional.
1752
1753- posixmodule (and by extension, the os module on POSIX platforms) now
1754 exports O_LARGEFILE, O_DIRECT, O_DIRECTORY, and O_NOFOLLOW.
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00001755
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00001756Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001757-------
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00001758
Tim Peters7402f792001-10-02 03:53:41 +00001759- doctest now excludes functions and classes not defined by the module
1760 being tested, thanks to Tim Hochberg.
1761
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00001762- HotShot, a new profiler implemented using a C-based callback, has
1763 been added. This substantially reduces the overhead of profiling,
1764 but it is still quite preliminary. Support modules and
1765 documentation will be added in upcoming releases (before 2.2 final).
1766
Guido van Rossumc4b09b42001-10-04 10:19:00 +00001767- profile now produces correct output in situations where an exception
1768 raised in Python is cleared by C code (e.g. hasattr()). This used
1769 to cause wrong output, including spurious claims of recursive
1770 functions and attribution of time spent to the wrong function.
1771
Tim Peters0a1fc4e2001-10-07 03:12:08 +00001772 The code and documentation for the derived OldProfile and HotProfile
1773 profiling classes was removed. The code hasn't worked for years (if
1774 you tried to use them, they raised exceptions). OldProfile
1775 intended to reproduce the behavior of the profiler Python used more
1776 than 7 years ago, and isn't interesting anymore. HotProfile intended
1777 to provide a faster profiler (but producing less information), and
1778 that's a worthy goal we intend to meet via a different approach (but
1779 without losing information).
1780
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00001781- Profile.calibrate() has a new implementation that should deliver
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00001782 a much better system-specific calibration constant. The constant can
1783 now be specified in an instance constructor, or as a Profile class or
1784 instance variable, instead of by editing profile.py's source code.
1785 Calibration must still be done manually (see the docs for the profile
1786 module).
1787
1788 Note that Profile.calibrate() must be overriden by subclasses.
1789 Improving the accuracy required exploiting detailed knowledge of
1790 profiler internals; the earlier method abstracted away the details
1791 and measured a simplified model instead, but consequently computed
1792 a constant too small by a factor of 2 on some modern machines.
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00001793
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00001794- quopri's encode and decode methods take an optional header parameter,
Jeremy Hylton6f543b62001-10-16 20:42:52 +00001795 which indicates whether output is intended for the header 'Q'
1796 encoding.
1797
Guido van Rossuma5343cc2001-10-18 18:02:07 +00001798- The SocketServer.ThreadingMixIn class now closes the request after
1799 finish_request() returns. (Not when it errors out though.)
1800
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001801- The nntplib module's NNTP.body() method has grown a 'file' argument
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00001802 to allow saving the message body to a file.
1803
1804- The email package has added a class email.Parser.HeaderParser which
1805 only parses headers and does not recurse into the message's body.
1806 Also, the module/class MIMEAudio has been added for representing
1807 audio data (contributed by Anthony Baxter).
1808
1809- ftplib should be able to handle files > 2GB.
1810
1811- ConfigParser.getboolean() now also interprets TRUE, FALSE, YES, NO,
1812 ON, and OFF.
1813
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00001814- xml.dom.minidom NodeList objects now support the length attribute
1815 and item() method as required by the DOM specifications.
1816
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00001817Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001818-----------
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00001819
1820- Demo/dns was removed. It no longer serves any purpose; a package
1821 derived from it is now maintained by Anthony Baxter, see
1822 http://PyDNS.SourceForge.net.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00001823
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00001824- The freeze tool has been made more robust, and two new options have
1825 been added: -X and -E.
1826
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00001827Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001828-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00001829
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00001830- configure will use CXX in LINKCC if CXX is used to build main() and
1831 the system requires to link a C++ main using the C++ compiler.
1832
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00001833C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001834-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00001835
Guido van Rossum6c4bce32001-10-18 19:20:25 +00001836- The documentation for the tp_compare slot is updated to require that
1837 the return value must be -1, 0, 1; an arbitrary number <0 or >0 is
1838 not correct. This is not yet enforced but will be enforced in
1839 Python 2.3; even later, we may use -2 to indicate errors and +2 for
1840 "NotImplemented". Right now, -1 should be used for an error return.
1841
Tim Petersd38b1c72001-09-30 05:09:37 +00001842- PyLong_AsLongLong() now accepts int (as well as long) arguments.
1843 Consequently, PyArg_ParseTuple's 'L' code also accepts int (as well
1844 as long) arguments.
1845
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00001846- PyThread_start_new_thread() now returns a long int giving the thread
1847 ID, if one can be calculated; it returns -1 for error, 0 if no
1848 thread ID is calculated (this is an incompatible change, but only
1849 the thread module used this API). This code has only really been
1850 tested on Linux and Windows; other platforms please beware (and
1851 report any bugs or strange behavior).
1852
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00001853- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() no longer accepts Unicode objects as
1854 input.
1855
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00001856New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001857-------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00001858
1859Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001860-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00001861
1862Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001863-------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00001864
Tim Peters04cf1d32001-10-09 22:39:40 +00001865- Installer: If you install IDLE, and don't disable file-extension
1866 registration, a new "Edit with IDLE" context (right-click) menu entry
1867 is created for .py and .pyw files.
1868
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00001869- The signal module now supports SIGBREAK on Windows, thanks to Steven
1870 Scott. Note that SIGBREAK is unique to Windows. The default SIGBREAK
1871 action remains to call Win32 ExitProcess(). This can be changed via
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00001872 signal.signal(). For example::
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00001873
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001874 # Make Ctrl+Break raise KeyboardInterrupt, like Python's default Ctrl+C
1875 # (SIGINT) behavior.
1876 import signal
1877 signal.signal(signal.SIGBREAK, signal.default_int_handler)
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00001878
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001879 try:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001880 while 1:
1881 pass
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001882 except KeyboardInterrupt:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001883 # We get here on Ctrl+C or Ctrl+Break now; if we had not changed
1884 # SIGBREAK, only on Ctrl+C (and Ctrl+Break would terminate the
1885 # program without the possibility for any Python-level cleanup).
1886 print "Clean exit"
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00001887
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00001888
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00001889What's New in Python 2.2a4?
1890===========================
1891
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001892*Release date: 28-Sep-2001*
1893
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00001894Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001895--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00001896
1897- pydoc and inspect are now aware of new-style classes;
1898 e.g. help(list) at the interactive prompt now shows proper
1899 documentation for all operations on list objects.
1900
1901- Applications using Jim Fulton's ExtensionClass module can now safely
1902 be used with Python 2.2. In particular, Zope 2.4.1 now works with
1903 Python 2.2 (as well as with Python 2.1.1). The Demo/metaclass
1904 examples also work again. It is hoped that Gtk and Boost also work
1905 with 2.2a4 and beyond. (If you can confirm this, please write
1906 webmaster@python.org; if there are still problems, please open a bug
1907 report on SourceForge.)
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00001908
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00001909- property() now takes 4 keyword arguments: fget, fset, fdel and doc.
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00001910 These map to read-only attributes 'fget', 'fset', 'fdel', and '__doc__'
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00001911 in the constructed property object. fget, fset and fdel weren't
1912 discoverable from Python in 2.2a3. __doc__ is new, and allows to
1913 associate a docstring with a property.
1914
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00001915- Comparison overloading is now more completely implemented. For
1916 example, a str subclass instance can properly be compared to a str
1917 instance, and it can properly overload comparison. Ditto for most
1918 other built-in object types.
1919
1920- The repr() of new-style classes has changed; instead of <type
1921 'M.Foo'> a new-style class is now rendered as <class 'M.Foo'>,
1922 *except* for built-in types, which are still rendered as <type
1923 'Foo'> (to avoid upsetting existing code that might parse or
1924 otherwise rely on repr() of certain type objects).
1925
1926- The repr() of new-style objects is now always <Foo object at XXX>;
1927 previously, it was sometimes <Foo instance at XXX>.
1928
1929- For new-style classes, what was previously called __getattr__ is now
1930 called __getattribute__. This method, if defined, is called for
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00001931 *every* attribute access. A new __getattr__ hook more similar to the
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00001932 one in classic classes is defined which is called only if regular
1933 attribute access raises AttributeError; to catch *all* attribute
1934 access, you can use __getattribute__ (for new-style classes). If
1935 both are defined, __getattribute__ is called first, and if it raises
1936 AttributeError, __getattr__ is called.
1937
1938- The __class__ attribute of new-style objects can be assigned to.
1939 The new class must have the same C-level object layout as the old
1940 class.
1941
1942- The builtin file type can be subclassed now. In the usual pattern,
1943 "file" is the name of the builtin type, and file() is a new builtin
1944 constructor, with the same signature as the builtin open() function.
1945 file() is now the preferred way to open a file.
1946
1947- Previously, __new__ would only see sequential arguments passed to
1948 the type in a constructor call; __init__ would see both sequential
1949 and keyword arguments. This made no sense whatsoever any more, so
1950 now both __new__ and __init__ see all arguments.
1951
1952- Previously, hash() applied to an instance of a subclass of str or
1953 unicode always returned 0. This has been repaired.
1954
1955- Previously, an operation on an instance of a subclass of an
1956 immutable type (int, long, float, complex, tuple, str, unicode),
1957 where the subtype didn't override the operation (and so the
1958 operation was handled by the builtin type), could return that
1959 instance instead a value of the base type. For example, if s was of
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00001960 a str subclass type, s[:] returned s as-is. Now it returns a str
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00001961 with the same value as s.
1962
Barry Warsaw86fbaf82001-09-28 15:26:12 +00001963- Provisional support for pickling new-style objects has been added.
1964
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00001965Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001966----
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00001967
Tim Peters2c9aa5e2001-09-23 04:06:05 +00001968- file.writelines() now accepts any iterable object producing strings.
1969
Marc-André Lemburgaefd7662001-09-20 12:59:37 +00001970- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() now works very much like
1971 PyObject_Str(obj) in that it tries to use __str__/tp_str
1972 on the object if the object is not a string or buffer. This
1973 makes unicode() behave like str() when applied to non-string/buffer
1974 objects.
1975
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00001976- PyFile_WriteObject now passes Unicode objects to the file's write
1977 method. As a result, all file-like objects which may be the target
Martin v. Löwis2777c022001-09-19 13:47:32 +00001978 of a print statement must support Unicode objects, i.e. they must
1979 at least convert them into ASCII strings.
1980
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00001981- Thread scheduling on Solaris should be improved; it is no longer
1982 necessary to insert a small sleep at the start of a thread in order
1983 to let other runnable threads be scheduled.
1984
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00001985Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001986-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00001987
Marc-André Lemburgbf990172001-09-27 14:17:33 +00001988- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
1989 read character buffer compatible objects for their .write() methods.
1990 These objects are converted to strings and then handled as such
1991 by the instances.
1992
Barry Warsaw2f600732001-09-24 04:28:10 +00001993- The "email" package has been added. This is basically a port of the
1994 mimelib package <http://sf.net/projects/mimelib> with API changes
1995 and some implementations updated to use iterators and generators.
1996
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00001997- difflib.ndiff() and difflib.Differ.compare() are generators now. This
1998 restores the ability of Tools/scripts/ndiff.py to start producing output
1999 before the entire comparison is complete.
2000
Barry Warsaw58b072d2001-09-22 04:44:21 +00002001- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
2002 iteration just like file objects (i.e. their .readline() method is
2003 called for each iteration until it returns an empty string).
2004
Marc-André Lemburg494f2ae2001-09-19 11:33:31 +00002005- The codecs module has grown four new helper APIs to access
2006 builtin codecs: getencoder(), getdecoder(), getreader(),
2007 getwriter().
2008
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002009- SimpleXMLRPCServer: a new module (based upon SimpleHTMLServer)
2010 simplifies writing XML RPC servers.
2011
Barry Warsaw647d5e82001-09-28 17:01:02 +00002012- os.path.realpath(): a new function that returns the absolute pathname
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002013 after interpretation of symbolic links. On non-Unix systems, this
2014 is an alias for os.path.abspath().
2015
Tim Peters16a77ad2001-09-08 04:00:12 +00002016- operator.indexOf() (PySequence_Index() in the C API) now works with any
2017 iterable object.
2018
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002019- smtplib now supports various authentication and security features of
2020 the SMTP protocol through the new login() and starttls() methods.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00002021
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002022- hmac: a new module implementing keyed hashing for message
2023 authentication.
2024
2025- mimetypes now recognizes more extensions and file types. At the
2026 same time, some mappings not sanctioned by IANA were removed.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00002027
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002028- The "compiler" package has been brought up to date to the state of
Guido van Rossumc9ed5dc2001-09-20 05:30:24 +00002029 Python 2.2 bytecode generation. It has also been promoted from a
2030 Tool to a standard library package. (Tools/compiler still exists as
2031 a sample driver.)
2032
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002033Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002034-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002035
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002036- Large file support (LFS) is now automatic when the platform supports
2037 it; no more manual configuration tweaks are needed. On Linux, at
2038 least, it's possible to have a system whose C library supports large
2039 files but whose kernel doesn't; in this case, large file support is
2040 still enabled but doesn't do you any good unless you upgrade your
2041 kernel or share your Python executable with another system whose
2042 kernel has large file support.
2043
2044- The configure script now supplies plausible defaults in a
2045 cross-compilation environment. This doesn't mean that the supplied
2046 values are always correct, or that cross-compilation now works
2047 flawlessly -- but it's a first step (and it shuts up most of
2048 autoconf's warnings about AC_TRY_RUN).
2049
2050- The Unix build is now a bit less chatty, courtesy of the parser
2051 generator. The build is completely silent (except for errors) when
2052 using "make -s", thanks to a -q option to setup.py.
2053
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002054C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002055-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002056
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002057- The "structmember" API now supports some new flag bits to deny read
2058 and/or write access to attributes in restricted execution mode.
2059
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002060New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002061-------------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002062
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002063- Compaq's iPAQ handheld, running the "familiar" Linux distribution
2064 (http://familiar.handhelds.org).
2065
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002066Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002067-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002068
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00002069- The "classic" standard tests, which work by comparing stdout to
2070 an expected-output file under Lib/test/output/, no longer stop at
2071 the first mismatch. Instead the test is run to completion, and a
2072 variant of ndiff-style comparison is used to report all differences.
2073 This is much easier to understand than the previous style of reporting.
2074
2075- The unittest-based standard tests now use regrtest's test_main()
2076 convention, instead of running as a side-effect of merely being
2077 imported. This allows these tests to be run in more natural and
2078 flexible ways as unittests, outside the regrtest framework.
2079
2080- regrtest.py is much better integrated with unittest and doctest now,
2081 especially in regard to reporting errors.
2082
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002083Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002084-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002085
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002086- Large file support now also works for files > 4GB, on filesystems
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00002087 that support it (NTFS under Windows 2000). See "What's New in
2088 Python 2.2a3" for more detail.
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002089
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002090
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002091What's New in Python 2.2a3?
2092===========================
2093
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002094*Release Date: 07-Sep-2001*
2095
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002096Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002097----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002098
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00002099- Conversion of long to float now raises OverflowError if the long is too
2100 big to represent as a C double.
2101
Tim Peters32f453e2001-09-03 08:35:41 +00002102- The 3-argument builtin pow() no longer allows a third non-None argument
2103 if either of the first two arguments is a float, or if both are of
2104 integer types and the second argument is negative (in which latter case
2105 the arguments are converted to float, so this is really the same
2106 restriction).
2107
Tim Peters5d2b77c2001-09-03 05:47:38 +00002108- The builtin dir() now returns more information, and sometimes much
2109 more, generally naming all attributes of an object, and all attributes
2110 reachable from the object via its class, and from its class's base
2111 classes, and so on from them too. Example: in 2.2a2, dir([]) returned
2112 an empty list. In 2.2a3,
2113
2114 >>> dir([])
2115 ['__add__', '__class__', '__contains__', '__delattr__', '__delitem__',
2116 '__eq__', '__ge__', '__getattr__', '__getitem__', '__getslice__',
2117 '__gt__', '__hash__', '__iadd__', '__imul__', '__init__', '__le__',
2118 '__len__', '__lt__', '__mul__', '__ne__', '__new__', '__repr__',
2119 '__rmul__', '__setattr__', '__setitem__', '__setslice__', '__str__',
2120 'append', 'count', 'extend', 'index', 'insert', 'pop', 'remove',
2121 'reverse', 'sort']
2122
2123 dir(module) continues to return only the module's attributes, though.
2124
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002125- Overflowing operations on plain ints now return a long int rather
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002126 than raising OverflowError. This is a partial implementation of PEP
2127 237. You can use -Wdefault::OverflowWarning to enable a warning for
2128 this situation, and -Werror::OverflowWarning to revert to the old
2129 OverflowError exception.
2130
Guido van Rossum61c345f2001-09-04 03:26:15 +00002131- A new command line option, -Q<arg>, is added to control run-time
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002132 warnings for the use of classic division. (See PEP 238.) Possible
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00002133 values are -Qold, -Qwarn, -Qwarnall, and -Qnew. The default is
2134 -Qold, meaning the / operator has its classic meaning and no
2135 warnings are issued. Using -Qwarn issues a run-time warning about
2136 all uses of classic division for int and long arguments; -Qwarnall
2137 also warns about classic division for float and complex arguments
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00002138 (for use with fixdiv.py).
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002139 [Note: the remainder of this item (preserved below) became
2140 obsolete in 2.2c1 -- -Qnew has global effect in 2.2] ::
2141
2142 Using -Qnew is questionable; it turns on new division by default, but
2143 only in the __main__ module. You can usefully combine -Qwarn or
2144 -Qwarnall and -Qnew: this gives the __main__ module new division, and
2145 warns about classic division everywhere else.
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002146
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002147- Many built-in types can now be subclassed. This applies to int,
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002148 long, float, str, unicode, and tuple. (The types complex, list and
2149 dictionary can also be subclassed; this was introduced earlier.)
2150 Note that restrictions apply when subclassing immutable built-in
2151 types: you can only affect the value of the instance by overloading
2152 __new__. You can add mutable attributes, and the subclass instances
2153 will have a __dict__ attribute, but you cannot change the "value"
2154 (as implemented by the base class) of an immutable subclass instance
2155 once it is created.
2156
Guido van Rossumaaf80c82001-09-02 13:44:35 +00002157- The dictionary constructor now takes an optional argument, a
2158 mapping-like object, and initializes the dictionary from its
2159 (key, value) pairs.
2160
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002161- A new built-in type, super, has been added. This facilitates making
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002162 "cooperative super calls" in a multiple inheritance setting. For an
2163 explanation, see http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#cooperation
2164
Guido van Rossum8d7234d2001-09-06 22:02:58 +00002165- A new built-in type, property, has been added. This enables the
2166 creation of "properties". These are attributes implemented by
2167 getter and setter functions (or only one of these for read-only or
2168 write-only attributes), without the need to override __getattr__.
2169 See http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#property
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002170
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002171- The syntax of floating-point and imaginary literals has been
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00002172 liberalized, to allow leading zeroes. Examples of literals now
2173 legal that were SyntaxErrors before:
2174
2175 00.0 0e3 0100j 07.5 00000000000000000008.
2176
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002177- An old tokenizer bug allowed floating point literals with an incomplete
Tim Petersc6d95812001-08-28 20:56:27 +00002178 exponent, such as 1e and 3.1e-. Such literals now raise SyntaxError.
2179
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002180Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002181-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002182
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00002183- telnetlib includes symbolic names for the options, and support for
Martin v. Löwis1da9c572002-11-04 09:56:00 +00002184 setting an option negotiation callback. It also supports processing
2185 of suboptions.
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00002186
Tim Petersa40c7932001-09-05 22:36:56 +00002187- The new C standard no longer requires that math libraries set errno to
2188 ERANGE on overflow. For platform libraries that exploit this new
2189 freedom, Python's overflow-checking was wholly broken. A new overflow-
2190 checking scheme attempts to repair that, but may not be reliable on all
2191 platforms (C doesn't seem to provide anything both useful and portable
2192 in this area anymore).
2193
Martin v. Löwis44f86962001-09-05 13:44:54 +00002194- Asynchronous timeout actions are available through the new class
2195 threading.Timer.
2196
Tim Peters78526162001-09-05 00:53:45 +00002197- math.log and math.log10 now return sensible results for even huge
2198 long arguments. For example, math.log10(10 ** 10000) ~= 10000.0.
2199
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002200- A new function, imp.lock_held(), returns 1 when the import lock is
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00002201 currently held. See the docs for the imp module.
2202
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002203- pickle, cPickle and marshal on 32-bit platforms can now correctly read
Tim Peters82112372001-08-29 02:28:42 +00002204 dumps containing ints written on platforms where Python ints are 8 bytes.
2205 When read on a box where Python ints are 4 bytes, such values are
2206 converted to Python longs.
2207
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002208- In restricted execution mode (using the rexec module), unmarshalling
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002209 code objects is no longer allowed. This plugs a security hole.
2210
Steve Purcell6091cd62001-09-06 16:05:17 +00002211- unittest.TestResult instances no longer store references to tracebacks
2212 generated by test failures. This prevents unexpected dangling references
2213 to objects that should be garbage collected between tests.
2214
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002215Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002216-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002217
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00002218- Tools/scripts/fixdiv.py has been added which can be used to fix
2219 division operators as per PEP 238.
2220
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002221Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002222-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002223
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00002224- If you are an adventurous person using Mac OS X you may want to look at
2225 Mac/OSX. There is a Makefile there that will build Python as a real Mac
2226 application, which can be used for experimenting with Carbon or Cocoa.
2227 Discussion of this on pythonmac-sig, please.
2228
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00002229C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002230-----
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00002231
2232- New function PyObject_Dir(obj), like Python __builtin__.dir(obj).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00002233
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00002234- Note that PyLong_AsDouble can fail! This has always been true, but no
2235 callers checked for it. It's more likely to fail now, because overflow
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00002236 errors are properly detected now. The proper way to check::
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00002237
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002238 double x = PyLong_AsDouble(some_long_object);
2239 if (x == -1.0 && PyErr_Occurred()) {
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002240 /* The conversion failed. */
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002241 }
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00002242
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002243- The GC API has been changed. Extensions that use the old API will still
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00002244 compile but will not participate in GC. To upgrade an extension
2245 module:
2246
2247 - rename Py_TPFLAGS_GC to PyTPFLAGS_HAVE_GC
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00002248
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00002249 - use PyObject_GC_New or PyObject_GC_NewVar to allocate objects and
2250 PyObject_GC_Del to deallocate them
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00002251
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00002252 - rename PyObject_GC_Init to PyObject_GC_Track and PyObject_GC_Fini
2253 to PyObject_GC_UnTrack
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00002254
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00002255 - remove PyGC_HEAD_SIZE from object size calculations
2256
2257 - remove calls to PyObject_AS_GC and PyObject_FROM_GC
2258
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002259- Two new functions: PyString_FromFormat() and PyString_FromFormatV().
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002260 These can be used safely to construct string objects from a
2261 sprintf-style format string (similar to the format string supported
2262 by PyErr_Format()).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00002263
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002264New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002265-------------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002266
Tim Petersb7da0902001-09-02 23:01:43 +00002267- Stephen Hansen contributed patches sufficient to get a clean compile
2268 under Borland C (Windows), but he reports problems running it and ran
2269 out of time to complete the port. Volunteers? Expect a MemoryError
2270 when importing the types module; this is probably shallow, and
2271 causing later failures too.
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002272
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002273Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002274-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002275
2276Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002277-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002278
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00002279- Large file support is now enabled on Win32 platforms as well as on
2280 Win64. This means that, for example, you can use f.tell() and f.seek()
2281 to manipulate files larger than 2 gigabytes (provided you have enough
2282 disk space, and are using a Windows filesystem that supports large
Tim Peters9a9471c2001-09-11 23:18:51 +00002283 partitions). Windows filesystem limits: FAT has a 2GB (gigabyte)
2284 filesize limit, and large file support makes no difference there.
2285 FAT32's limit is 4GB, and files >= 2GB are easier to use from Python now.
2286 NTFS has no practical limit on file size, and files of any size can be
2287 used from Python now.
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00002288
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002289- The w9xpopen hack is now used on Windows NT and 2000 too when COMPSPEC
Tim Peters402d5982001-08-27 06:37:48 +00002290 points to command.com (patch from Brian Quinlan).
2291
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002292
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00002293What's New in Python 2.2a2?
2294===========================
2295
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002296*Release Date: 22-Aug-2001*
2297
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00002298Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002299-----
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00002300
Barry Warsaw18b2ecf2001-08-22 20:26:56 +00002301- Tim Peters developed a brand new Windows installer using Wise 8.1,
2302 generously donated to us by Wise Solutions.
2303
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00002304- configure supports a new option --enable-unicode, with the values
2305 ucs2 and ucs4 (new in 2.2a1). With --disable-unicode, the Unicode
2306 type and supporting code is completely removed from the interpreter.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00002307
Jack Jansen32ce0cd2001-08-21 19:28:20 +00002308- A new configure option --enable-framework builds a Mac OS X framework,
2309 which "make frameworkinstall" will install. This provides a starting
2310 point for more mac-like functionality, join pythonmac-sig@python.org
2311 if you are interested in helping.
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00002312
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00002313- The NeXT platform is no longer supported.
2314
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002315- The 'new' module is now statically linked.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00002316
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00002317Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002318-----
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00002319
2320- The new Tools/scripts/cleanfuture.py can be used to automatically
Andrew M. Kuchlingb0532092001-08-15 15:54:56 +00002321 edit out obsolete future statements from Python source code. See
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00002322 the module docstring for details.
2323
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00002324Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002325-----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00002326
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00002327- regrtest.py now knows which tests are expected to be skipped on some
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00002328 platforms, allowing to give clearer test result output. regrtest
2329 also has optional --use/-u switch to run normally disabled tests
2330 which require network access or consume significant disk resources.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00002331
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00002332- Several new tests in the standard test suite, with special thanks to
2333 Nick Mathewson.
2334
2335Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002336----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00002337
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00002338- The floor division operator // has been added as outlined in PEP
2339 238. The / operator still provides classic division (and will until
2340 Python 3.0) unless "from __future__ import division" is included, in
2341 which case the / operator will provide true division. The operator
2342 module provides truediv() and floordiv() functions. Augmented
2343 assignment variants are included, as are the equivalent overloadable
2344 methods and C API methods. See the PEP for a full discussion:
2345 <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0238.html>
2346
Tim Peters6cd6a822001-08-17 22:11:27 +00002347- Future statements are now effective in simulated interactive shells
2348 (like IDLE). This should "just work" by magic, but read Michael
2349 Hudson's "Future statements in simulated shells" PEP 264 for full
2350 details: <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0264.html>.
2351
Guido van Rossumf86ddd22001-08-17 21:21:04 +00002352- The type/class unification (PEP 252-253) was integrated into the
2353 trunk and is not so tentative any more (the exact specification of
2354 some features is still tentative). A lot of work has done on fixing
2355 bugs and adding robustness and features (performance still has to
2356 come a long way).
2357
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00002358- Warnings about a mismatch in the Python API during extension import
2359 now use the Python warning framework (which makes it possible to
2360 write filters for these warnings).
2361
Barry Warsaw9b3be7f2001-08-14 18:35:02 +00002362- A function's __dict__ (aka func_dict) will now always be a
2363 dictionary. It used to be possible to delete it or set it to None,
2364 but now both actions raise TypeErrors. It is still legal to set it
2365 to a dictionary object. Getting func.__dict__ before any attributes
2366 have been assigned now returns an empty dictionary instead of None.
2367
Guido van Rossum32aa5d22001-09-05 18:43:35 +00002368- A new command line option, -E, was added which disables the use of
2369 all environment variables, or at least those that are specifically
2370 significant to Python. Usually those have a name starting with
2371 "PYTHON". This was used to fix a problem where the tests fail if
2372 the user happens to have PYTHONHOME or PYTHONPATH pointing to an
2373 older distribution.
2374
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00002375Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002376-------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00002377
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00002378- New class Differ and new functions ndiff() and restore() in difflib.py.
2379 These package the algorithms used by the popular Tools/scripts/ndiff.py,
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00002380 for programmatic reuse.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00002381
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00002382- New function xml.sax.saxutils.quoteattr(): Quote an XML attribute
2383 value using the minimal quoting required for the value; more
2384 reliable than using xml.sax.saxutils.escape() for attribute values.
2385
2386- Readline completion support for cmd.Cmd was added.
2387
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00002388- Calling os.tempnam() or os.tmpnam() generate RuntimeWarnings.
2389
2390- Added function threading.BoundedSemaphore()
2391
2392- Added Ka-Ping Yee's cgitb.py module.
2393
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002394- The 'new' module now exposes the CO_xxx flags.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00002395
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00002396- The gc module offers the get_referents function.
2397
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00002398New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002399-------------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00002400
2401C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002402-----
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00002403
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00002404- Two new APIs PyOS_snprintf() and PyOS_vsnprintf() were added
2405 which provide a cross-platform implementations for the
2406 relatively new snprintf()/vsnprintf() C lib APIs. In contrast to
2407 the standard sprintf() and vsprintf() C lib APIs, these versions
2408 apply bounds checking on the used buffer which enhances protection
2409 against buffer overruns.
2410
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00002411- Unicode APIs now use name mangling to assure that mixing interpreters
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00002412 and extensions using different Unicode widths is rendered next to
2413 impossible. Trying to import an incompatible Unicode-aware extension
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00002414 will result in an ImportError. Unicode extensions writers must make
2415 sure to check the Unicode width compatibility in their extensions by
2416 using at least one of the mangled Unicode APIs in the extension.
2417
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00002418- Two new flags METH_NOARGS and METH_O are available in method definition
2419 tables to simplify implementation of methods with no arguments and a
2420 single untyped argument. Calling such methods is more efficient than
2421 calling corresponding METH_VARARGS methods. METH_OLDARGS is now
2422 deprecated.
2423
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00002424Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002425-------
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00002426
2427- "import module" now compiles module.pyw if it exists and nothing else
2428 relevant is found.
2429
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00002430
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00002431What's New in Python 2.2a1?
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00002432===========================
2433
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002434*Release date: 18-Jul-2001*
2435
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00002436Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002437----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00002438
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00002439- TENTATIVELY, a large amount of code implementing much of what's
2440 described in PEP 252 (Making Types Look More Like Classes) and PEP
2441 253 (Subtyping Built-in Types) was added. This will be released
2442 with Python 2.2a1. Documentation will be provided separately
2443 through http://www.python.org/2.2/. The purpose of releasing this
2444 with Python 2.2a1 is to test backwards compatibility. It is
2445 possible, though not likely, that a decision is made not to release
2446 this code as part of 2.2 final, if any serious backwards
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00002447 incompatibilities are found during alpha testing that cannot be
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00002448 repaired.
2449
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00002450- Generators were added; this is a new way to create an iterator (see
Tim Peters11a0d102001-07-17 18:48:00 +00002451 below) using what looks like a simple function containing one or
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00002452 more 'yield' statements. See PEP 255. Since this adds a new
2453 keyword to the language, this feature must be enabled by including a
2454 future statement: "from __future__ import generators" (see PEP 236).
2455 Generators will become a standard feature in a future release
2456 (probably 2.3). Without this future statement, 'yield' remains an
2457 ordinary identifier, but a warning is issued each time it is used.
2458 (These warnings currently don't conform to the warnings framework of
2459 PEP 230; we intend to fix this in 2.2a2.)
2460
Marc-André Lemburg12e74b32001-05-22 08:58:23 +00002461- The UTF-16 codec was modified to be more RFC compliant. It will now
2462 only remove BOM characters at the start of the string and then
2463 only if running in native mode (UTF-16-LE and -BE won't remove a
2464 leading BMO character).
2465
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00002466- Strings now have a new method .decode() to complement the already
2467 existing .encode() method. These two methods provide direct access
2468 to the corresponding decoders and encoders of the registered codecs.
2469
2470 To enhance the usability of the .encode() method, the special
2471 casing of Unicode object return values was dropped (Unicode objects
2472 were auto-magically converted to string using the default encoding).
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00002473
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00002474 Both methods will now return whatever the codec in charge of the
2475 requested encoding returns as object, e.g. Unicode codecs will
2476 return Unicode objects when decoding is requested ("äöü".decode("latin-1")
2477 will return u"äöü"). This enables codec writer to create codecs
2478 for various simple to use conversions.
2479
2480 New codecs were added to demonstrate these new features (the .encode()
2481 and .decode() columns indicate the type of the returned objects):
2482
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002483 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
2484 |Name | .encode() | .decode() | Description |
2485 +=========+===========+===========+=============================+
2486 |uu | string | string | UU codec (e.g. for email) |
2487 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
2488 |base64 | string | string | base64 codec |
2489 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
2490 |quopri | string | string | quoted-printable codec |
2491 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
2492 |zlib | string | string | zlib compression |
2493 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
2494 |hex | string | string | 2-byte hex codec |
2495 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
2496 |rot-13 | string | Unicode | ROT-13 Unicode charmap codec|
2497 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00002498
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00002499- Some operating systems now support the concept of a default Unicode
2500 encoding for file system operations. Notably, Windows supports 'mbcs'
2501 as the default. The Macintosh will also adopt this concept in the medium
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00002502 term, although the default encoding for that platform will be other than
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00002503 'mbcs'.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00002504
2505 On operating system that support non-ASCII filenames, it is common for
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00002506 functions that return filenames (such as os.listdir()) to return Python
2507 string objects pre-encoded using the default file system encoding for
2508 the platform. As this encoding is likely to be different from Python's
2509 default encoding, converting this name to a Unicode object before passing
2510 it back to the Operating System would result in a Unicode error, as Python
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00002511 would attempt to use its default encoding (generally ASCII) rather than
2512 the default encoding for the file system.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00002513
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00002514 In general, this change simply removes surprises when working with
2515 Unicode and the file system, making these operations work as you expect,
2516 increasing the transparency of Unicode objects in this context.
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00002517 See [????] for more details, including examples.
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00002518
Tim Peters61dff2b2001-05-08 15:43:37 +00002519- Float (and complex) literals in source code were evaluated to full
2520 precision only when running from a .py file; the same code loaded from a
2521 .pyc (or .pyo) file could suffer numeric differences starting at about the
2522 12th significant decimal digit. For example, on a machine with IEEE-754
2523 floating arithmetic,
2524
2525 x = 9007199254740992.0
2526 print long(x)
2527
2528 printed 9007199254740992 if run directly from .py, but 9007199254740000
2529 if from a compiled (.pyc or .pyo) file. This was due to marshal using
2530 str(float) instead of repr(float) when building code objects. marshal
2531 now uses repr(float) instead, which should reproduce floats to full
2532 machine precision (assuming the platform C float<->string I/O conversion
2533 functions are of good quality).
2534
2535 This may cause floating-point results to change in some cases, and
2536 usually for the better, but may also cause numerically unstable
2537 algorithms to break.
2538
Tim Peters2f228e72001-05-13 00:19:31 +00002539- The implementation of dicts suffers fewer collisions, which has speed
2540 benefits. However, the order in which dict entries appear in dict.keys(),
2541 dict.values() and dict.items() may differ from previous releases for a
2542 given dict. Nothing is defined about this order, so no program should
2543 rely on it. Nevertheless, it's easy to write test cases that rely on the
2544 order by accident, typically because of printing the str() or repr() of a
2545 dict to an "expected results" file. See Lib/test/test_support.py's new
2546 sortdict(dict) function for a simple way to display a dict in sorted
2547 order.
2548
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00002549- Many other small changes to dicts were made, resulting in faster
2550 operation along the most common code paths.
2551
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00002552- Dictionary objects now support the "in" operator: "x in dict" means
2553 the same as dict.has_key(x).
2554
Barry Warsaw51acc8d2001-06-26 20:12:50 +00002555- The update() method of dictionaries now accepts generic mapping
2556 objects. Specifically the argument object must support the .keys()
2557 and __getitem__() methods. This allows you to say, for example,
2558 {}.update(UserDict())
2559
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00002560- Iterators were added; this is a generalized way of providing values
2561 to a for loop. See PEP 234. There's a new built-in function iter()
2562 to return an iterator. There's a new protocol to get the next value
2563 from an iterator using the next() method (in Python) or the
2564 tp_iternext slot (in C). There's a new protocol to get iterators
2565 using the __iter__() method (in Python) or the tp_iter slot (in C).
2566 Iterating (i.e. a for loop) over a dictionary generates its keys.
2567 Iterating over a file generates its lines.
2568
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00002569- The following functions were generalized to work nicely with iterator
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00002570 arguments::
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002571
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00002572 map(), filter(), reduce(), zip()
Tim Peters8572b4f2001-05-06 01:05:02 +00002573 list(), tuple() (PySequence_Tuple() and PySequence_Fast() in C API)
2574 max(), min()
Tim Peters1af03e92001-05-26 19:37:54 +00002575 join() method of strings
2576 extend() method of lists
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00002577 'x in y' and 'x not in y' (PySequence_Contains() in C API)
2578 operator.countOf() (PySequence_Count() in C API)
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002579 right-hand side of assignment statements with multiple targets, such as ::
Tim Petersd6d010b2001-06-21 02:49:55 +00002580 x, y, z = some_iterable_object_returning_exactly_3_values
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00002581
Tim Petersd85e1022001-05-11 21:51:48 +00002582- Accessing module attributes is significantly faster (for example,
2583 random.random or os.path or yourPythonModule.yourAttribute).
2584
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00002585- Comparing dictionary objects via == and != is faster, and now works even
2586 if the keys and values don't support comparisons other than ==.
2587
Tim Peters95bf9392001-05-10 08:32:44 +00002588- Comparing dictionaries in ways other than == and != is slower: there were
2589 insecurities in the dict comparison implementation that could cause Python
2590 to crash if the element comparison routines for the dict keys and/or
2591 values mutated the dicts. Making the code bulletproof slowed it down.
2592
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00002593- Collisions in dicts are resolved via a new approach, which can help
2594 dramatically in bad cases. For example, looking up every key in a dict
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00002595 d with d.keys() == [i << 16 for i in range(20000)] is approximately 500x
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00002596 faster now. Thanks to Christian Tismer for pointing out the cause and
2597 the nature of an effective cure (last December! better late than never).
Tim Peters15d49292001-05-27 07:39:22 +00002598
Tim Peters52e155e2001-06-16 05:42:57 +00002599- repr() is much faster for large containers (dict, list, tuple).
2600
2601
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00002602Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002603-------
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00002604
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00002605- The constants ascii_letters, ascii_lowercase. and ascii_uppercase
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00002606 were added to the string module. These a locale-independent
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00002607 constants, unlike letters, lowercase, and uppercase. These are now
2608 use in appropriate locations in the standard library.
2609
Martin v. Löwisf0473d52001-07-18 16:17:16 +00002610- The flags used in dlopen calls can now be configured using
2611 sys.setdlopenflags and queried using sys.getdlopenflags.
2612
Guido van Rossumc7e4aca2001-07-12 11:54:37 +00002613- Fredrik Lundh's xmlrpclib is now a standard library module. This
2614 provides full client-side XML-RPC support. In addition,
2615 Demo/xmlrpc/ contains two server frameworks (one SocketServer-based,
2616 one asyncore-based). Thanks to Eric Raymond for the documentation.
2617
Guido van Rossum643d3912001-07-05 14:46:25 +00002618- The xrange() object is simplified: it no longer supports slicing,
2619 repetition, comparisons, efficient 'in' checking, the tolist()
2620 method, or the start, stop and step attributes. See PEP 260.
2621
Martin v. Löwisebf94db2001-06-06 06:25:40 +00002622- A new function fnmatch.filter to filter lists of file names was added.
2623
Barry Warsawffd674d2001-05-22 16:00:10 +00002624- calendar.py uses month and day names based on the current locale.
2625
Guido van Rossum2e0a6542001-05-15 02:14:44 +00002626- strop is now *really* obsolete (this was announced before with 1.6),
2627 and issues DeprecationWarning when used (except for the four items
2628 that are still imported into string.py).
2629
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00002630- Cookie.py now sorts key+value pairs by key in output strings.
2631
2632- pprint.isrecursive(object) didn't correctly identify recursive objects.
2633 Now it does.
2634
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00002635- pprint functions now much faster for large containers (tuple, list, dict).
2636
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00002637- New 'q' and 'Q' format codes in the struct module, corresponding to C
2638 types "long long" and "unsigned long long" (on Windows, __int64). In
2639 native mode, these can be used only when the platform C compiler supports
2640 these types (when HAVE_LONG_LONG is #define'd by the Python config
2641 process), and then they inherit the sizes and alignments of the C types.
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00002642 In standard mode, 'q' and 'Q' are supported on all platforms, and are
2643 8-byte integral types.
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00002644
Guido van Rossum83213cc2001-06-12 16:48:52 +00002645- The site module installs a new built-in function 'help' that invokes
2646 pydoc.help. It must be invoked as 'help()'; when invoked as 'help',
2647 it displays a message reminding the user to use 'help()' or
2648 'help(object)'.
2649
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00002650Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002651-----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00002652
2653- New test_mutants.py runs dict comparisons where the key and value
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00002654 comparison operators mutate the dicts randomly during comparison. This
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00002655 rapidly causes Python to crash under earlier releases (not for the faint
2656 of heart: it can also cause Win9x to freeze or reboot!).
2657
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00002658- New test_pprint.py verifies that pprint.isrecursive() and
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00002659 pprint.isreadable() return sensible results. Also verifies that simple
2660 cases produce correct output.
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00002661
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00002662C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002663-----
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00002664
2665- Removed the unused last_is_sticky argument from the internal
2666 _PyTuple_Resize(). If this affects you, you were cheating.
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002667
2668----
2669
2670**(For information about older versions, consult the HISTORY file.)**