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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
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00007What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 1?
8=================================
9
10*Release date: DD-MMM-YYYY*
11
12Core and builtins
13-----------------
14
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +000015- Enabled the profiling of C extension functions (and builtins) - check
16 new documentation and modified profiler and bdb modules for more details
17
Nicholas Bastinabce8a62004-03-21 20:24:07 +000018- Set file.name to the object passed to open (instead of a new string)
19
Nicholas Bastina7604bf2004-03-21 18:37:23 +000020- Moved tracebackobject into traceback.h and renamed to PyTracebackObject
21
Raymond Hettingerff5bc502004-03-21 15:12:00 +000022- Optimized the byte coding for multiple assignments like "a,b=b,a" and
23 "a,b,c=1,2,3". Improves their speed by 25% to 30%.
24
Brett Cannon4f653312004-03-20 22:52:14 +000025- Limit the nested depth of a tuple for the second argument to isinstance()
26 and issubclass() to the recursion limit of the interpreter.
27 Fixes bug #858016 .
28
Raymond Hettingerade08ea2004-03-18 09:48:12 +000029- Optimized dict iterators, creating separate types for each
30 and having them reveal their length. Also optimized the
31 methods: keys(), values(), and items().
32
Raymond Hettingerdd80f762004-03-07 07:31:06 +000033- Implemented a newcode opcode, LIST_APPEND, that simplifies
34 the generated bytecode for list comprehensions and further
35 improves their performance (about 35%).
36
Michael W. Hudsond3b33b52004-02-19 19:35:22 +000037- Implemented rich comparisons for floats, which seems to make
38 comparisons involving NaNs somewhat less surprising when the
39 underlying C compiler actually implements C99 semantics.
40
Raymond Hettingerfa7b9d82004-02-15 04:06:39 +000041- Optimized list.extend() to save memory and no longer create
42 intermediate sequences. Also, extend() now pre-allocates the
43 needed memory whenever the length of the iterable is known in
44 advance -- this halves the time to extend the list.
45
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +000046- Optimized list resize operations to make fewer calls to the system
47 realloc(). Significantly speeds up list appends, list pops,
48 list comprehensions, and the list contructor (when the input iterable
49 length is not known).
50
51- Changed the internal list over-allocation scheme. For larger lists,
52 overallocation ranged between 3% and 25%. Now, it is a constant 12%.
Raymond Hettingerab517d22004-02-14 18:34:46 +000053 For smaller lists (n<8), overallocation was upto eight elements. Now,
54 the overallocation is no more than three elements -- this improves space
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +000055 utilization for applications that have large numbers of small lists.
56
Raymond Hettinger31017ae2004-03-04 08:25:44 +000057- The dict.update() method now accepts all the same argument forms
58 as the dict() constructor. This now includes item lists and/or
59 keyword arguments.
60
Michael W. Hudsonecfeb7f2004-02-12 15:28:27 +000061- Support for arbitrary objects supporting the read-only buffer
62 interface as the co_code field of code objects (something that was
63 only possible to create from C code) has been removed.
64
Fred Drake228765b2004-02-06 04:15:22 +000065- Made omitted callback and None equivalent for weakref.ref() and
66 weakref.proxy(); the None case wasn't handled correctly in all
67 cases.
68
69- Fixed problem where PyWeakref_NewRef() and PyWeakref_NewProxy()
70 assumed that initial existing entries in an object's weakref list
71 would not be removed while allocating a new weakref object. Since
72 GC could be invoked at that time, however, that assumption was
73 invalid. In a truly obscure case of GC being triggered during
74 creation for a new weakref object for an referent which already
75 has a weakref without a callback which is only referenced from
76 cyclic trash, a memory error can occur. This consistently created a
77 segfault in a debug build, but provided less predictable behavior in
78 a release build.
79
Hye-Shik Changff83c2b2004-02-02 13:39:01 +000080- input() builtin function now respects compiler flags such as
81 __future__ statements. SF patch 876178.
82
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +000083- Removed PendingDeprecationWarning from apply(). apply() remains
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +000084 deprecated, but the nuisance warning will not be issued.
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +000085
Tim Peters1d7323e2003-12-01 21:35:27 +000086- At Python shutdown time (Py_Finalize()), 2.3 called cyclic garbage
87 collection twice, both before and after tearing down modules. The
88 call after tearing down modules has been disabled, because too much
89 of Python has been torn down then for __del__ methods and weakref
90 callbacks to execute sanely. The most common symptom was a sequence
91 of uninformative messages on stderr when Python shut down, produced
92 by threads trying to raise exceptions, but unable to report the nature
93 of their problems because too much of the sys module had already been
94 destroyed.
95
Guido van Rossum6c9e1302003-11-29 23:52:13 +000096- Removed FutureWarnings related to hex/oct literals and conversions
97 and left shifts. (Thanks to Kalle Svensson for SF patch 849227.)
98 This addresses most of the remaining semantic changes promised by
99 PEP 237, except for repr() of a long, which still shows the trailing
100 'L'. The PEP appears to promise warnings for operations that
101 changed semantics compared to Python 2.3, but this is not
102 implemented; we've suffered through enough warnings related to
103 hex/oct literals and I think it's best to be silent now.
104
Raymond Hettinger4f8f9762003-11-26 08:21:35 +0000105- For str and unicode objects, the ljust(), center(), and rjust()
106 methods now accept an optional argument specifying a fill
107 character other than a space.
108
Guido van Rossumbaf0f8f2003-11-22 23:55:50 +0000109- When method objects have an attribute that can be satisfied either
110 by the function object or by the method object, the function
111 object's attribute usually wins. Christian Tismer pointed out that
112 that this is really a mistake, because this only happens for special
113 methods (like __reduce__) where the method object's version is
114 really more appropriate than the function's attribute. So from now
115 on, all method attributes will have precedence over function
116 attributes with the same name.
117
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +0000118- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 839548: if a weakref with a callback,
119 its callback, and its weakly referenced object, all became part of
120 cyclic garbage during a single run of garbage collection, the order
121 in which they were torn down was unpredictable. It was possible for
122 the callback to see partially-torn-down objects, leading to immediate
123 segfaults, or, if the callback resurrected garbage objects, to
124 resurrect insane objects that caused segfaults (or other surprises)
125 later. In one sense this wasn't surprising, because Python's cyclic gc
126 had no knowledge of Python's weakref objects. It does now. When
127 weakrefs with callbacks become part of cyclic garbage now, those
128 weakrefs are cleared first. The callbacks don't trigger then,
129 preventing the problems. If you need callbacks to trigger, then just
130 as when cyclic gc is not involved, you need to write your code so
131 that weakref objects outlive the objects they weakly reference.
Raymond Hettingera690a992003-11-16 16:17:49 +0000132
Tim Petersadd09b42003-11-12 20:43:28 +0000133- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 840829: if cyclic garbage collection
134 happened to occur during a weakref callback for a new-style class
135 instance, subtle memory corruption was the result (in a release build;
136 in a debug build, a segfault occurred reliably very soon after).
137 This has been repaired.
138
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +0000139- Compiler flags set in PYTHONSTARTUP are now active in __main__.
140
141- Added two builtin types, set() and frozenset().
142
Raymond Hettinger85c20a42003-11-06 14:06:48 +0000143- Added a reversed() builtin function that returns a reverse iterator
144 over a sequence.
145
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +0000146- Added a sorted() builtin function that returns a new sorted list
147 from any iterable.
148
Martin v. Löwis01a74b22003-10-19 18:30:01 +0000149- CObjects are now mutable (on the C level) through PyCObject_SetVoidPtr.
150
Raymond Hettinger42b1ba32003-10-16 03:41:09 +0000151- list.sort() now supports three keyword arguments: cmp, key, and reverse.
152 The key argument can be a function of one argument that extracts a
153 comparison key from the original record: mylist.sort(key=str.lower).
154 The reverse argument is a boolean value and if True will change the
155 sort order as if the comparison arguments were reversed. In addition,
156 the documentation has been amended to provide a guarantee that all sorts
157 starting with Py2.3 are guaranteed to be stable (the relative order of
158 records with equal keys is unchanged).
159
Marc-André Lemburgd7160f82003-09-22 11:14:40 +0000160- Added test whether wchar_t is signed or not. A signed wchar_t is not
161 usable as internal unicode type base for Py_UNICODE since the
162 unicode implementation assumes an unsigned type.
163
Jeremy Hyltond8082792003-09-16 19:41:39 +0000164- Fixed a bug in the cache of length-one Unicode strings that could
165 lead to a seg fault. The specific problem occurred when an earlier,
166 non-fatal error left an uninitialized Unicode object in the
167 freelist.
168
Raymond Hettinger9bfe5332003-08-27 04:55:52 +0000169- The % formatting operator now supports '%F' which is equivalent to
170 '%f'. This has always been documented but never implemented.
171
Tim Peters465fa3d2003-08-15 01:16:37 +0000172- complex(obj) could leak a little memory if obj wasn't a string or
173 number.
174
Raymond Hettingereaef6152003-08-02 07:42:57 +0000175- zip() with no arguments now returns an empty list instead of raising
176 a TypeError exception.
177
Guido van Rossum02c58f82003-10-08 21:08:29 +0000178- obj.__contains__() now returns True/False instead of 1/0. SF patch
179 820195.
180
Armin Rigo2b3eb402003-10-28 12:05:48 +0000181- Python no longer tries to be smart about recursive comparisons.
182 When comparing containers with cyclic references to themselves it
183 will now just hit the recursion limit. See SF patch 825639.
184
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +0000185- str and unicode builtin types now have rsplit() method that is
186 same as split() except that it scans the string from the end
187 working towards the beginning. See SF feature request 801847.
Hye-Shik Chang060ebed2003-12-15 18:51:19 +0000188
Jim Fulton8a1a5942004-02-08 04:21:26 +0000189- Fixed a bug in object.__reduce_ex__ when using protocol 2. Failure
190 to clear the error when attempts to get the __getstate__ attribute
191 fail caused intermittent errors and odd behavior.
192
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +0000193- buffer objects based on other objects no longer cache a pointer to
194 the data and the data length. Instead, the appropriate tp_as_buffer
195 method is called as necessary.
196
Andrew MacIntyre4e10ed32004-04-04 07:01:35 +0000197- fixed: if a file is opened with an explicit buffer size >= 1, repeated
198 close() calls would attempt to free() the buffer already free()ed on
199 the first call.
200
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +0000201
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000202Extension modules
203-----------------
204
Raymond Hettingere2eda602004-04-04 08:51:41 +0000205- operator.isMappingType() and operator.isSequenceType() now give
206 fewer false positives.
207
Brett Cannon06c34792004-03-23 23:16:54 +0000208- socket.sslerror is now a subclass of socket.error . Also added
209 socket.error to the socket module's C API.
210
Hye-Shik Changc3a87b82004-03-21 19:34:30 +0000211- Bug #920575: A problem that _locale module segfaults on
212 nl_langinfo(ERA) caused by GNU libc's illegal NULL return is fixed.
213
Raymond Hettinger6e2ee862004-03-14 04:37:50 +0000214- array objects now support the copy module. Also, their resizing
215 scheme has been updated the same as for list objects. The improves
Raymond Hettinger49f9bd12004-03-14 05:43:59 +0000216 the performance (speed and memory usage) of append() operations.
217 Also, array.extend() now accepts any iterable argument for repeated
218 appends without needing to create another temporary array.
Raymond Hettinger3aa82c02004-03-13 18:18:51 +0000219
Raymond Hettinger3e47f652004-03-08 18:22:35 +0000220- cStringIO.writelines() now accepts any iterable argument and writes
221 the lines one at a time rather than joining them and writing once.
222 Made a parallel change to StringIO.writelines(). Saves memory and
223 makes suitable for use with generator expressions.
224
Brett Cannond1080a32004-03-02 04:38:10 +0000225- time.strftime() now checks that the values in its time tuple argument
226 are within the proper boundaries to prevent possible crashes from the
227 platform's C library implementation of strftime(). Can possibly
228 break code that uses values outside the range that didn't cause
229 problems previously (such as sitting day of year to 0). Fixes bug
230 #897625.
231
Martin v. Löwis12af0482004-01-31 12:34:17 +0000232- The socket module now supports Bluetooth sockets, if the
233 system has <bluetooth/bluetooth.h>
234
Raymond Hettinger756b3f32004-01-29 06:37:52 +0000235- Added a collections module containing a new datatype, deque(),
236 offering high-performance, thread-safe, memory friendly appends
237 and pops on either side of the deque.
238
239- Several modules now take advantage of collections.deque() for
240 improved performance: Queue, mutex, shlex, threading, and pydoc.
241
Raymond Hettinger166958b2003-12-01 13:18:39 +0000242- The operator module has two new functions, attrgetter() and
243 itemgetter() which are useful for creating fast data extractor
244 functions for map(), list.sort(), itertools.groupby(), and
245 other functions that expect a function argument.
246
Martin v. Löwis94681fc2003-11-27 19:40:22 +0000247- socket.SHUT_{RD,WR,RDWR} was added.
248
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +0000249- os.getsid was added.
250
Guido van Rossum16b9fa82003-10-23 23:54:57 +0000251- The pwd module incorrectly advertised its struct type as
252 struct_pwent; this has been renamed to struct_passwd. (The old name
253 is still supported for backwards compatibility.)
254
Fred Drakede050322003-10-21 15:41:59 +0000255- The xml.parsers.expat module now provides Expat 1.95.7.
256
Martin v. Löwis3bbd6542003-10-03 13:57:37 +0000257- socket.IPPROTO_IPV6 was added.
258
Martin v. Löwise7a97962003-09-20 16:08:33 +0000259- readline.clear_history was added.
260
Brett Cannon62dba4c2003-09-10 19:37:42 +0000261- select.select() now accepts sequences for its first three arguments.
262
Raymond Hettinger5475f232003-08-08 12:20:03 +0000263- cStringIO now supports the f.closed attribute.
264
Anthony Baxter83f52912003-08-05 06:33:56 +0000265- The signal module now exposes SIGRTMIN and SIGRTMAX (if available).
266
Andrew M. Kuchling69f31eb2003-08-13 23:11:04 +0000267- curses module now supports use_default_colors(). [patch #739124]
268
Anthony Baxter5c68ef02003-10-04 08:04:04 +0000269- Bug #811028: ncurses.h breakage on FreeBSD/MacOS X
270
271- Bug #814613: INET_ADDRSTRLEN fix needed for all compilers on SGI
272
Gustavo Niemeyerad3fc442003-10-17 22:13:16 +0000273- Implemented non-recursive SRE matching scheme (#757624).
274
275- Implemented (?(id/name)yes|no) support in SRE (#572936).
276
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +0000277- random.seed() with no arguments or None uses time.time() as a default
278 seed. Modified to match Py2.2 behavior and use fractional seconds so
279 that successive runs are more likely to produce different sequences.
280
281- random.Random has a new method, getrandbits(k), which returns an int
282 with k random bits. This method is now an optional part of the API
283 for user defined generators. Any generator that defines genrandbits()
284 can now use randrange() for ranges with a length >= 2**53. Formerly,
285 randrange would return only even numbers for ranges that large (see
286 SF bug #812202). Generators that do not define genrandbits() now
287 issue a warning when randrange() is called with a range that large.
288
Raymond Hettingerd25c1c62003-12-06 16:23:06 +0000289- itertools has a new function, groupby() for aggregating iterables
290 into groups sharing the same key (as determined by a key function).
291 It offers some of functionality of SQL's groupby keyword and of
292 the Unix uniq filter.
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +0000293
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +0000294- itertools now has a new function, tee() which produces two independent
295 iterators from a single iterable.
296
297- itertools.izip() with no arguments now returns an empty iterator instead
298 of raising a TypeError exception.
299
Gustavo Niemeyera6e436e2004-02-14 00:02:45 +0000300- Fixed #853061: allow BZ2Compressor.compress() to receive an empty string
301 as parameter.
302
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000303Library
304-------
305
Hye-Shik Chang0f5bf1e2004-04-20 21:11:11 +0000306- Bug #926075: Fixed a bug that returns a wrong pattern object
307 for a string or unicode object in sre.compile() when a different
308 type pattern with the same value exists.
309
Skip Montanarod0c0c412004-04-07 16:03:02 +0000310- Added countcallers arg to trace.Trace class (--trackcalls command line arg
311 when run from the command prompt).
312
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +0000313- Fixed a caching bug in platform.platform() where the argument of 'terse' was
314 not taken into consideration when caching value.
315
Nicholas Bastin824b1b22004-03-23 18:44:39 +0000316- Added two new command-line arguments for profile (output file and
317 default sort).
318
Nicholas Bastin1eb4bfc2004-03-22 20:12:56 +0000319- Added global runctx function to profile module
320
Martin v. Löwis347c30d2004-03-21 15:29:41 +0000321- Add hlist missing entryconfigure and entrycget methods.
322
Hye-Shik Chang4a7ad1a2004-03-19 08:11:56 +0000323- The ptcp154 codec was added for Kazakh character set support.
324
Martin v. Löwisa79449e2004-02-15 21:19:18 +0000325- Support non-anonymous ftp URLs in urllib2.
326
Marc-André Lemburg57cb68f2004-01-20 18:24:34 +0000327- The encodings package will now applies codec name aliases
328 first before starting to try the import of the codec module.
329 This simplifies overriding built-in codecs with external
330 packages, e.g. the included CJK codecs with the JapaneseCodecs
331 package, by adjusting the aliases dictionary in encodings.aliases
332 accordingly.
333
Barry Warsaw30ff12f2004-01-04 01:13:43 +0000334- base64 now supports RFC 3548 Base16, Base32, and Base64 encoding and
335 decoding standards.
336
Jeremy Hylton37c5f2a2003-12-14 05:29:45 +0000337- urllib2 now supports processors. A processor is a handler that
338 implements an xxx_request or xxx_response method. These methods are
339 called for all requests.
340
Thomas Hellerc7501d52003-12-05 20:28:07 +0000341- distutils compilers now compile source files in the same order as
342 they are passed to the compiler.
343
Walter Dörwaldc8de4582003-12-03 20:26:05 +0000344- pprint.pprint() and pprint.pformat() now have additional parameters
345 indent, width and depth.
346
Walter Dörwald7a7ede52003-12-03 20:15:28 +0000347- Patch #750542: pprint now will pretty print subclasses of list, tuple
348 and dict too, as long as they don't overwrite __repr__().
349
Thomas Hellerb3105912003-11-28 19:42:56 +0000350- Bug #848614: distutils' msvccompiler fails to find the MSVC6
351 compiler because of incomplete registry entries.
352
Martin v. Löwisaf7dc8d2003-11-19 19:51:55 +0000353- httplib.HTTP.putrequest now offers to omit the implicit Accept-Encoding.
354
Thomas Hellercf0005b2003-11-14 10:33:20 +0000355- Patch #841977: modulefinder didn't find extension modules in packages
356
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +0000357- imaplib.IMAP4.thread was added.
358
Guido van Rossum967b0632003-11-10 02:27:19 +0000359- Plugged a minor hole in tempfile.mktemp() due to the use of
360 os.path.exists(), switched to using os.lstat() directly if possible.
361
Raymond Hettinger0c410272004-01-05 10:13:35 +0000362- bisect.py and heapq.py now have underlying C implementations
363 for better performance
Raymond Hettingerb3af1812003-11-08 10:24:38 +0000364
Neil Schemenauerf607fc52003-11-05 23:03:00 +0000365- traceback.format_exc has been added (similar to print_exc but it returns
366 a string).
367
Martin v. Löwis45394c22003-10-31 13:49:36 +0000368- xmlrpclib.MultiCall has been added.
369
Martin v. Löwis48440b72003-10-31 12:52:35 +0000370- poplib.POP3_SSL has been added.
371
Martin v. Löwisd6625482003-10-12 17:37:01 +0000372- tmpfile.mkstemp now returns an absolute path even if dir is relative.
373
Brett Cannon5d9ca4e2003-10-12 04:38:48 +0000374- urlparse is RFC 2396 compliant.
375
Skip Montanarodef99342003-10-03 14:07:07 +0000376- The fieldnames argument to the csv module's DictReader constructor is now
377 optional. If omitted, the first row of the file will be used as the
378 list of fieldnames.
379
Raymond Hettinger9a80c5d2003-09-23 20:21:01 +0000380- encodings.bz2_codec was added for access to bz2 compression
381 using "a long string".encode('bz2')
382
Guido van Rossum0e5a51d2003-09-22 15:03:11 +0000383- Various improvements to unittest.py, realigned with PyUnit CVS.
384
Martin v. Löwisc6bb6c02003-09-20 15:52:21 +0000385- dircache now passes exceptions to the caller, instead of returning
386 empty lists.
387
Raymond Hettingerdeadbf52003-09-12 06:33:37 +0000388- The bsddb module and dbhash module now support the iterator and
389 mapping protocols which make them more substitutable for dictionaries
390 and shelves.
391
Skip Montanaro3f7a9482003-09-06 19:52:12 +0000392- The csv module's DictReader and DictWriter classes now accept keyword
393 arguments. This was an omission in the initial implementation.
394
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +0000395- The email package handles some RFC 2231 parameters with missing
Barry Warsaw2f5bf172003-09-03 04:09:49 +0000396 CHARSET fields better. It also includes a patch to parameter
397 parsing when semicolons appear inside quotes.
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +0000398
Raymond Hettinger6a180122003-08-17 08:34:09 +0000399- sets.py now runs under Py2.2. In addition, the argument restrictions
400 for most set methods (but not the operators) have been relaxed to
Raymond Hettinger70b9f492003-11-19 15:52:14 +0000401 allow any iterable.
Raymond Hettingeree562fc2003-08-15 21:17:04 +0000402
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +0000403- _strptime.py now has a behind-the-scenes caching mechanism for the most
Brett Cannonb7150a22003-08-05 06:27:04 +0000404 recent TimeRE instance used along with the last five unique directive
405 patterns. The overall module was also made more thread-safe.
406
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +0000407- random.cunifvariate() and random.stdgamma() were deprecated in Py2.3
408 and removed in Py2.4.
409
Anthony Baxter92bee362003-11-04 14:35:49 +0000410- Bug #823328: urllib2.py's HTTP Digest Auth support works again.
411
Hye-Shik Chang84a99312004-01-17 14:59:36 +0000412- Patch #873597: CJK codecs are imported into rank of default codecs.
413
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000414Tools/Demos
415-----------
416
Skip Montanarod5a21fd2004-01-27 14:49:04 +0000417- A hotshotmain script was added to the Tools/scripts directory that
418 makes it easy to run a script under control of the hotshot profiler.
419
Skip Montanaro030f68a2003-10-28 16:24:00 +0000420- The db2pickle and pickle2db scripts can now dump/load gdbm files.
421
Skip Montanaroe2b61e02004-03-03 17:42:08 +0000422- The file order on the command line of the pickle2db script was reversed.
423 It is now [ picklefile ] dbfile. This provides better symmetry with
424 db2pickle. The file arguments to both scripts are now source followed by
425 destination in situations where both files are given.
426
Skip Montanarofd4fa882003-09-10 19:04:13 +0000427- The pydoc script will display a link to the module documentation for
428 modules determined to be part of the core distribution. The documentation
429 base directory defaults to http://www.python.org/doc/current/lib/ but can
430 be changed by setting the PYTHONDOCS environment variable.
431
Raymond Hettingere41d4c82003-08-25 04:39:55 +0000432- texcheck.py now detects double word errors.
433
Tim Peters1a3abcb2003-08-18 23:52:09 +0000434- md5sum.py mistakenly opened input files in text mode by default, a
435 silent and dangerous change from previous releases. It once again
436 opens input files in binary mode by default. The -t and -b flags
437 remain for compatibility with the 2.3 release, but -b is the default
438 now.
439
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000440- py-electric-colon now works when pending-delete/delete-selection mode is
441 in effect
442
443- py-help-at-point is no longer bound to the F1 key - it's still bound to
444 C-c C-h
445
Barry Warsaw6ec58ca2003-09-03 03:20:37 +0000446- Pynche was fixed to not crash when there is no ~/.pynche file and no
447 -d option was given.
448
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000449Build
450-----
451
Hye-Shik Chang54f94392004-04-14 07:55:31 +0000452- Bug #934635: Fixed a bug where the configure script couldn't detect
453 getaddrinfo() properly if the KAME stack had SCTP support.
454
Skip Montanaro7befb992004-02-10 16:50:21 +0000455- Support for missing ANSI C header files (limits.h, stddef.h, etc) was
456 removed.
457
Skip Montanarodb608052004-02-07 13:53:46 +0000458- Systems requiring the D4, D6 or D7 variants of pthreads are no longer
459 supported (see PEP 11).
460
461- Universal newline support can no longer be disabled (see PEP 11).
462
Skip Montanarocd1f7432004-01-17 14:22:44 +0000463- Support for DGUX, SunOS 4, IRIX 4 and Minix was removed (see PEP 11).
464
465- Support for systems requiring --with-dl-dld or --with-sgi-dl was removed
466 (see PEP 11).
467
468- Tests for sizeof(char) were removed since ANSI C mandates that
469 sizeof(char) must be 1.
470
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000471C API
472-----
473
Raymond Hettingerc1e4f9d2004-03-12 08:04:00 +0000474- Added a new macro, PySequence_Fast_ITEMS, which retrieves a fast sequence's
475 underlying array of PyObject pointers. Useful for high speed looping.
476
Raymond Hettinger8f5cdaa2003-12-13 11:26:12 +0000477- Created a new method flag, METH_COEXIST, which causes a method to be loaded
478 even if already defined by a slot wrapper. This allows a __contains__
479 method, for example, to co-exist with a defined sq_contains slot. This
480 is helpful because the PyCFunction can take advantage of optimized calls
481 whenever METH_O or METH_NOARGS flags are defined.
482
Raymond Hettingerbc0f2ab2003-11-25 21:12:14 +0000483- Added a new function, PyDict_Contains(d, k) which is like
484 PySequence_Contains() but is specific to dictionaries and executes
485 about 10% faster.
486
Brett Cannon26b3a7b2003-10-19 21:31:43 +0000487- Added three new macros: Py_RETURN_NONE, Py_RETURN_TRUE, and Py_RETURN_FALSE.
488 Each return the singleton they mention after Py_INCREF()ing them.
489
Raymond Hettingercb2da432003-10-12 18:24:34 +0000490- Added a new function, PyTuple_Pack(n, ...) for constructing tuples from a
491 variable length argument list of Python objects without having to invoke
492 the more complex machinery of Py_BuildValue(). PyTuple_Pack(3, a, b, c)
493 is equivalent to Py_BuildValue("(OOO)", a, b, c).
494
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000495New platforms
496-------------
497
498Tests
499-----
500
501Windows
502-------
503
Guido van Rossumfd25aca2003-11-30 22:10:15 +0000504- The _winreg module could segfault when reading very large registry
505 values, due to unchecked alloca() calls (SF bug 851056). The fix is
506 uses either PyMem_Malloc(n) or PyString_FromStringAndSize(NULL, n),
507 as appropriate, followed by a size check.
508
Tim Petersf1827cf2003-09-07 03:30:18 +0000509- file.truncate() could misbehave if the file was open for update
510 (modes r+, rb+, w+, wb+), and the most recent file operation before
511 the truncate() call was an input operation. SF bug 801631.
512
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000513Mac
514----
515
516
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +0000517What's New in Python 2.3 final?
518===============================
519
520*Release date: 29-Jul-2003*
521
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +0000522IDLE
523----
524
Tim Peters36c1afc2003-07-29 17:22:57 +0000525- Bug 778400: IDLE hangs when selecting "Edit with IDLE" from explorer.
526 This was unique to Windows, and was fixed by adding an -n switch to
527 the command the Windows installer creates to execute "Edit with IDLE"
528 context-menu actions.
529
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +0000530- IDLE displays a new message upon startup: some "personal firewall"
531 kinds of programs (for example, ZoneAlarm) open a dialog of their
532 own when any program opens a socket. IDLE does use sockets, talking
533 on the computer's internal loopback interface. This connection is not
534 visible on any external interface and no data is sent to or received
535 from the Internet. So, if you get such a dialog when opening IDLE,
536 asking whether to let pythonw.exe talk to address 127.0.0.1, say yes,
537 and rest assured no communication external to your machine is taking
538 place. If you don't allow it, IDLE won't be able to start.
539
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +0000540
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000541What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 2?
542=============================================
543
Tim Peters6560a252003-07-24 00:15:46 +0000544*Release date: 24-Jul-2003*
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000545
546Core and builtins
547-----------------
548
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +0000549- It is now possible to import from zipfiles containing additional
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000550 data bytes before the zip compatible archive. Zipfiles containing a
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +0000551 comment at the end are still unsupported.
552
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000553Extension modules
554-----------------
555
556- A longstanding bug in the parser module's initialization could cause
557 fatal internal refcount confusion when the module got initialized more
558 than once. This has been fixed.
559
Fred Drake01a43122003-07-21 17:17:10 +0000560- Fixed memory leak in pyexpat; using the parser's ParseFile() method
561 with open files that aren't instances of the standard file type
562 caused an instance of the bound .read() method to be leaked on every
563 call.
564
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000565- Fixed some leaks in the locale module.
566
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000567Library
568-------
569
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000570- Lib/encodings/rot_13.py when used as a script, now more properly
571 uses the first Python interpreter on your path.
572
573- Removed caching of TimeRE (and thus LocaleTime) in _strptime.py to
574 fix a locale related bug in the test suite. Although another patch
575 was needed to actually fix the problem, the cache code was not
576 restored.
577
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +0000578IDLE
579----
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000580
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +0000581- Calltips patches.
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000582
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000583Build
584-----
585
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000586- For MacOSX, added -mno-fused-madd to BASECFLAGS to fix test_coercion
587 on Panther (OSX 10.3).
588
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000589C API
590-----
591
592Windows
593-------
594
Tim Peters291f14e2003-07-22 02:50:01 +0000595- The tempfile module could do insane imports on Windows if PYTHONCASEOK
596 was set, making temp file creation impossible. Repaired.
597
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000598- Add a patch to workaround pthread_sigmask() bugs in Cygwin.
599
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000600Mac
601---
602
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000603- Various fixes to pimp.
604
605- Scripts runs with pythonw no longer had full window manager access.
606
607- Don't force boot-disk-only install, for reasons unknown it causes
608 more problems than it solves.
609
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000610
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000611What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 1?
612=============================================
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000613
Jeremy Hylton0ed18c22003-07-18 20:10:02 +0000614*Release date: 18-Jul-2003*
615
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000616Core and builtins
617-----------------
618
Tim Peterse5e065b2003-07-06 18:36:54 +0000619- The new function sys.getcheckinterval() returns the last value set
620 by sys.setcheckinterval().
621
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000622- Several bugs in the symbol table phase of the compiler have been
623 fixed. Errors could be lost and compilation could fail without
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000624 reporting an error. SF patch 763201.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000625
626- The interpreter is now more robust about importing the warnings
627 module. In an executable generated by freeze or similar programs,
628 earlier versions of 2.3 would fail if the warnings module could
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000629 not be found on the file system. Fixes SF bug 771097.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000630
631- A warning about assignments to module attributes that shadow
632 builtins, present in earlier releases of 2.3, has been removed.
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000633
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000634- It is not possible to create subclasses of builtin types like str
635 and tuple that define an itemsize. Earlier releases of Python 2.3
636 allowed this by mistake, leading to crashes and other problems.
637
638- The thread_id is now initialized to 0 in a non-thread build. SF bug
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000639 770247.
640
641- SF bug 762891: "del p[key]" on proxy object no longer raises SystemError.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000642
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000643Extension modules
644-----------------
645
646- weakref.proxy() can now handle "del obj[i]" for proxy objects
647 defining __delitem__. Formerly, it generated a SystemError.
648
649- SSL no longer crashes the interpreter when the remote side disconnects.
650
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +0000651- On Unix the mmap module can again be used to map device files.
652
Brett Cannon20def8b2003-07-01 05:16:08 +0000653- time.strptime now exclusively uses the Python implementation
654 contained within the _strptime module.
655
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000656- The print slot of weakref proxy objects was removed, because it was
657 not consistent with the object's repr slot.
658
659- The mmap module only checks file size for regular files, not
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000660 character or block devices. SF patch 708374.
661
662- The cPickle Pickler garbage collection support was fixed to traverse
663 the find_class attribute, if present.
664
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000665- There are several fixes for the bsddb3 wrapper module.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000666
667 bsddb3 no longer crashes if an environment is closed before a cursor
668 (SF bug 763298).
669
670 The DB and DBEnv set_get_returns_none function was extended to take
Barry Warsawd71a5512003-07-20 18:00:54 +0000671 a level instead of a boolean flag. The new level 2 means that in
672 addition, cursor.set()/.get() methods return None instead of raising
673 an exception.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000674
675 A typo was fixed in DBCursor.join_item(), preventing a crash.
676
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000677Library
678-------
679
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000680- distutils now supports MSVC 7.1
681
Raymond Hettinger71adf7e2003-07-16 19:25:22 +0000682- doctest now examines all docstrings by default. Previously, it would
683 skip over functions with private names (as indicated by the underscore
684 naming convention). The old default created too much of a risk that
685 user tests were being skipped inadvertently. Note, this change could
686 break code in the unlikely case that someone had intentionally put
687 failing tests in the docstrings of private functions. The breakage
688 is easily fixable by specifying the old behavior when calling testmod()
689 or Tester().
690
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000691- There were several fixes to the way dumbdbms are closed. It's vital
692 that a dumbdbm database be closed properly, else the on-disk data
693 and directory files can be left in mutually inconsistent states.
694 dumbdbm.py's _Database.__del__() method attempted to close the
695 database properly, but a shutdown race in _Database._commit() could
696 prevent this from working, so that a program trusting __del__() to
697 get the on-disk files in synch could be badly surprised. The race
698 has been repaired. A sync() method was also added so that shelve
699 can guarantee data is written to disk.
Tim Peters7a6c7332003-07-13 17:21:10 +0000700
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000701 The close() method can now be called more than once without complaint.
Tim Petersd7472ec2003-07-13 02:22:03 +0000702
Tim Peters59aba122003-07-01 20:01:55 +0000703- The classes in threading.py are now new-style classes. That they
704 weren't before was an oversight.
705
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000706- The urllib2 digest authentication handlers now define the correct
707 auth_header. The earlier versions would fail at runtime.
708
Neal Norwitze7dfe212003-07-01 14:59:46 +0000709- SF bug 763023: fix uncaught ZeroDivisionError in difflib ratio methods
710 when there are no lines.
711
Neal Norwitz3c0f2c92003-07-01 21:12:47 +0000712- SF bug 763637: fix exception in Tkinter with after_cancel
713 which could occur with Tk 8.4
714
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000715- SF bug 770601: CGIHTTPServer.py now passes the entire environment
716 to child processes.
717
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000718- SF bug 765238: add filter to fnmatch's __all__.
719
720- SF bug 748201: make time.strptime() error messages more helpful.
721
722- SF patch 764470: Do not dump the args attribute of a Fault object in
723 xmlrpclib.
724
725- SF patch 549151: urllib and urllib2 now redirect POSTs on 301
726 responses.
727
728- SF patch 766650: The whichdb module was fixed to recognize dbm files
729 generated by gdbm on OS/2 EMX.
730
731- SF bugs 763047 and 763052: fixes bug of timezone value being left as
732 -1 when ``time.tzname[0] == time.tzname[1] and not time.daylight``
733 is true when it should only when time.daylight is true.
734
735- SF bug 764548: re now allows subclasses of str and unicode to be
736 used as patterns.
737
738- SF bug 763637: In Tkinter, change after_cancel() to handle tuples
739 of varying sizes. Tk 8.4 returns a different number of values
740 than Tk 8.3.
741
742- SF bug 763023: difflib.ratio() did not catch zero division.
743
744- The Queue module now has an __all__ attribute.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000745
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000746Tools/Demos
747-----------
748
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000749- See Lib/idlelib/NEWS.txt for IDLE news.
750
Neal Norwitz592c4cc2003-07-01 04:14:28 +0000751- SF bug 753592: webchecker/wsgui now handles user supplied directories.
752
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000753- The trace.py script has been removed. It is now in the standard library.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000754
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000755Build
756-----
757
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000758- Python now compiles with -fno-strict-aliasing if possible (SF bug 766696).
759
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000760- The socket module compiles on IRIX 6.5.10.
761
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000762- An irix64 system is treated the same way as an irix6 system (SF
763 patch 764560).
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000764
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000765- Several definitions were missing on FreeBSD 5.x unless the
766 __BSD_VISIBLE symbol was defined. configure now defines it as
767 needed.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000768
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000769C API
770-----
771
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000772- Unicode objects now support mbcs as a built-in encoding, so the C
773 API can use it without deferring to the encodings package.
774
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000775Windows
776-------
777
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000778- The Windows implementation of PyThread_start_new_thread() never
779 checked error returns from Windows functions correctly. As a result,
780 it could claim to start a new thread even when the Microsoft
781 _beginthread() function failed (due to "too many threads" -- this is
782 on the order of thousands when it happens). In these cases, the
783 Python exception ::
784
785 thread.error: can't start new thread
786
787 is raised now.
788
789- SF bug 766669: Prevent a GPF on interpreter exit when sockets are in
790 use. The interpreter now calls WSACleanup() from Py_Finalize()
791 instead of from DLL teardown.
792
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000793Mac
794---
795
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000796- Bundlebuilder now inherits default values in the right way. It was
Walter Dörwald73a8a4b2003-07-30 12:14:02 +0000797 previously possible for app bundles to get a type of "BNDL" instead
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000798 of "APPL." Other improvements include, a --build-id option to
799 specify the CFBundleIdentifier and using the --python option to set
800 the executable in the bundle.
801
802- Fixed two bugs in MacOSX framework handling.
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000803
Jack Jansene0040412003-07-23 22:17:28 +0000804- pythonw did not allow user interaction in 2.3rc1, this has been fixed.
805
806- Python is now compiled with -mno-fused-madd, making all tests pass
807 on Panther.
808
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000809What's New in Python 2.3 beta 2?
810================================
811
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +0000812*Release date: 29-Jun-2003*
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000813
814Core and builtins
815-----------------
816
Barry Warsaw883f2232003-06-29 17:10:11 +0000817- A program can now set the environment variable PYTHONINSPECT to some
818 string value in Python, and cause the interpreter to enter the
819 interactive prompt at program exit, as if Python had been invoked
820 with the -i option.
821
Raymond Hettingerd05abde2003-06-17 05:05:49 +0000822- list.index() now accepts optional start and stop arguments. Similar
823 changes were made to UserList.index(). SF feature request 754014.
824
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +0000825- SF patch 751998 fixes an unwanted side effect of the previous fix
826 for SF bug 742860 (the next item).
827
Tim Peters50d8b8b2003-05-25 17:44:31 +0000828- SF bug 742860: "WeakKeyDictionary __delitem__ uses iterkeys". This
829 wasn't threadsafe, was very inefficient (expected time O(len(dict))
830 instead of O(1)), and could raise a spurious RuntimeError if another
831 thread mutated the dict during __delitem__, or if a comparison function
832 mutated it. It also neglected to raise KeyError when the key wasn't
833 present; didn't raise TypeError when the key wasn't of a weakly
834 referencable type; and broke various more-or-less obscure dict
835 invariants by using a sequence of equality comparisons over the whole
836 set of dict keys instead of computing the key's hash code to narrow
837 the search to those keys with the same hash code. All of these are
838 considered to be bugs. A new implementation of __delitem__ repairs all
839 that, but note that fixing these bugs may change visible behavior in
840 code relying (whether intentionally or accidentally) on old behavior.
Tim Peters886128f2003-05-25 01:45:11 +0000841
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000842- SF bug 734869: Fixed a compiler bug that caused a fatal error when
843 compiling a list comprehension that contained another list comprehension
844 embedded in a lambda expression.
845
Tim Peterse87568d2003-05-24 20:18:24 +0000846- SF bug 705231: builtin pow() no longer lets the platform C pow()
847 raise -1.0 to integer powers, because (at least) glibc gets it wrong
848 in some cases. The result should be -1.0 if the power is odd and 1.0
849 if the power is even, and any float with a sufficiently large exponent
850 is (mathematically) an exact even integer.
851
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000852- SF bug 759227: A new-style class that implements __nonzero__() must
853 return a bool or int (but not an int subclass) from that method. This
854 matches the restriction on classic classes.
855
Martin v. Löwis5467d4c2003-05-10 07:10:12 +0000856- The encoding attribute has been added for file objects, and set to
857 the terminal encoding on Unix and Windows.
858
Tim Peters015dd822003-05-04 04:16:52 +0000859- The softspace attribute of file objects became read-only by oversight.
860 It's writable again.
861
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +0000862- Reverted a 2.3 beta 1 change to iterators for subclasses of list and
863 tuple. By default, the iterators now access data elements directly
864 instead of going through __getitem__. If __getitem__ access is
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +0000865 preferred, then __iter__ can be overridden.
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +0000866
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000867- SF bug 735247: The staticmethod and super types participate in
868 garbage collection. Before this change, it was possible for leaks to
869 occur in functions with non-global free variables that used these types.
870
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000871Extension modules
872-----------------
873
Raymond Hettinger643bcec2003-06-29 03:29:42 +0000874- the socket module has a new exception, socket.timeout, to allow
875 timeouts to be handled separately from other socket errors.
876
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000877- SF bug 751276: cPickle has fixed to propagate exceptions raised in
878 user code. In earlier versions, cPickle caught and ignored any
879 exception when it performed operations that it expected to raise
880 specific exceptions like AttributeError.
881
882- cPickle Pickler and Unpickler objects now participate in garbage
883 collection.
884
Tim Peterscda32b72003-06-15 23:13:35 +0000885- mimetools.choose_boundary() could return duplicate strings at times,
886 especially likely on Windows. The strings returned are now guaranteed
887 unique within a single program run.
888
Brett Cannon4e64d782003-06-13 23:44:35 +0000889- thread.interrupt_main() raises KeyboardInterrupt in the main thread.
890 dummy_thread has also been modified to try to simulate the behavior.
891
Walter Dörwald9e46abe2003-05-18 03:15:10 +0000892- array.array.insert() now treats negative indices as being relative
893 to the end of the array, just like list.insert() does. (SF bug #739313)
894
Tim Petersb0c854d2003-05-17 15:57:00 +0000895- The datetime module classes datetime, time, and timedelta are now
896 properly subclassable.
Tim Petersa98924a2003-05-17 05:55:19 +0000897
Martin v. Löwis28e9ce92003-05-09 08:19:48 +0000898- _tkinter.{get|set}busywaitinterval was added.
899
Raymond Hettinger834f4632003-05-02 20:24:56 +0000900- itertools.islice() now accepts stop=None as documented.
901 Fixes SF bug #730685.
902
Skip Montanaro8c044d82003-05-06 20:42:37 +0000903- the bsddb185 module is built in one restricted instance -
904 /usr/include/db.h exists and defines HASHVERSION to be 2. This is true
905 for many BSD-derived systems.
906
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000907
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000908Library
909-------
910
Tim Petersdb3756d2003-06-29 05:30:48 +0000911- Some happy doctest extensions from Jim Fulton have been added to
912 doctest.py. These are already being used in Zope3. The two
913 primary ones:
914
915 doctest.debug(module, name) extracts the doctests from the named object
916 in the given module, puts them in a temp file, and starts pdb running
917 on that file. This is great when a doctest fails.
918
919 doctest.DocTestSuite(module=None) returns a synthesized unittest
920 TestSuite instance, to be run by the unittest framework, which
921 runs all the doctests in the module. This allows writing tests in
922 doctest style (which can be clearer and shorter than writing tests
923 in unittest style), without losing unittest's powerful testing
924 framework features (which doctest lacks).
925
Tim Peters6ebe61f2003-06-27 20:48:05 +0000926- For compatibility with doctests created before 2.3, if an expected
927 output block consists solely of "1" and the actual output block
928 consists solely of "True", it's accepted as a match; similarly
929 for "0" and "False". This is quite un-doctest-like, but is practical.
930 The behavior can be disabled by passing the new doctest module
931 constant DONT_ACCEPT_TRUE_FOR_1 to the new optionflags optional
932 argument.
933
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000934- ZipFile.testzip() now only traps BadZipfile exceptions. Previously,
935 a bare except caught to much and reported all errors as a problem
936 in the archive.
937
938- The logging module now has a new function, makeLogRecord() making
939 LogHandler easier to interact with DatagramHandler and SocketHandler.
940
Skip Montanaro364ca402003-06-17 12:58:31 +0000941- The cgitb module has been extended to support plain text display (SF patch
942 569574).
943
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +0000944- A brand new version of IDLE (from the IDLEfork project at
945 SourceForge) is now included as Lib/idlelib. The old Tools/idle is
946 no more.
947
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000948- Added a new module: trace (documentation missing). This module used
949 to be distributed in Tools/scripts. It uses sys.settrace() to trace
950 code execution -- either function calls or individual lines. It can
951 generate tracing output during execution or a post-mortem report of
952 code coverage.
953
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +0000954- The threading module has new functions settrace() and setprofile()
955 that cooperate with the functions of the same name in the sys
956 module. A function registered with the threading module will
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000957 be used for all threads it creates. The new trace module uses this
958 to provide tracing for code running in threads.
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +0000959
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +0000960- copy.py: applied SF patch 707900, fixing bug 702858, by Steven
961 Taschuk. Copying a new-style class that had a reference to itself
962 didn't work. (The same thing worked fine for old-style classes.)
Martin v. Löwisba8f5ff2003-06-14 07:10:06 +0000963 Builtin functions are now treated as atomic, fixing bug #746304.
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +0000964
Raymond Hettingerc24d7672003-06-08 19:42:33 +0000965- difflib.py has two new functions: context_diff() and unified_diff().
966
Guido van Rossumfa19f7c2003-05-16 01:46:51 +0000967- More fixes to urllib (SF 549151): (a) When redirecting, always use
968 GET. This is common practice and more-or-less sanctioned by the
969 HTTP standard. (b) Add a handler for 307 redirection, which becomes
970 an error for POST, but a regular redirect for GET and HEAD
971
Guido van Rossumbf1bef82003-05-13 18:01:19 +0000972- Added optional 'onerror' argument to os.walk(), to control error
973 handling.
974
Martin v. Löwise59e2ba2003-05-03 09:09:02 +0000975- inspect.is{method|data}descriptor was added, to allow pydoc display
976 __doc__ of data descriptors.
977
Skip Montanaro4a7751c2003-04-29 21:07:16 +0000978- Fixed socket speed loss caused by use of the _socketobject wrapper class
979 in socket.py.
980
Raymond Hettinger22952a32003-05-20 04:59:56 +0000981- timeit.py now checks the current directory for imports.
982
Gustavo Niemeyer9556fba2003-06-07 17:53:08 +0000983- urllib2.py now knows how to order proxy classes, so the user doesn't
984 have to insert it in front of other classes, nor do dirty tricks like
985 inserting a "dummy" HTTPHandler after a ProxyHandler when building an
986 opener with proxy support.
987
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +0000988- Iterators have been added for dbm keys.
989
990- random.Random objects can now be pickled.
991
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000992Tools/Demos
993-----------
994
Martin v. Löwisb8c084e2003-06-14 09:03:46 +0000995- pydoc now offers help on keywords and topics.
996
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +0000997- Tools/idle is gone; long live Lib/idlelib.
998
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +0000999- diff.py prints file diffs in context, unified, or ndiff formats,
1000 providing a command line interface to difflib.py.
Raymond Hettinger2f3c74a2003-06-08 23:10:15 +00001001
Raymond Hettinger71e00332003-05-10 03:30:13 +00001002- texcheck.py is a new script for making a rough validation of Python LaTeX
1003 files.
1004
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001005Build
1006-----
1007
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001008- Setting DESTDIR during 'make install' now allows specifying a
Martin v. Löwis3b8ee082003-05-11 20:25:35 +00001009 different root directory.
1010
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001011C API
1012-----
1013
Tim Peters3cfe7542003-05-21 21:29:48 +00001014- PyType_Ready(): If a type declares that it participates in gc
1015 (Py_TPFLAGS_HAVE_GC), and its base class does not, and its base class's
1016 tp_free slot is the default _PyObject_Del, and type does not define
1017 a tp_free slot itself, _PyObject_GC_Del is assigned to type->tp_free.
1018 Previously _PyObject_Del was inherited, which could at best lead to a
1019 segfault. In addition, if even after this magic the type's tp_free
1020 slot is _PyObject_Del or NULL, and the type is a base type
1021 (Py_TPFLAGS_BASETYPE), TypeError is raised: since the type is a base
1022 type, its dealloc function must call type->tp_free, and since the type
1023 is gc'able, tp_free must not be NULL or _PyObject_Del.
1024
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00001025- PyThreadState_SetAsyncExc(): A new API (deliberately accessible only
1026 from C) to interrupt a thread by sending it an exception. It is
1027 intentional that you have to write your own C extension to call it
1028 from Python.
1029
1030
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001031New platforms
1032-------------
1033
1034None this time.
1035
1036Tests
1037-----
1038
1039- test_imp rewritten so that it doesn't raise RuntimeError if run as a
1040 side effect of being imported ("import test.autotest").
1041
1042Windows
1043-------
1044
Tim Petersfaa697a2003-06-22 01:42:20 +00001045- The Windows installer ships with Tcl/Tk 8.4.3 (upgraded from 8.4.1).
1046
Tim Petersc4607da2003-05-08 18:13:59 +00001047- The installer always suggested that Python be installed on the C:
1048 drive, due to a hardcoded "C:" generated by the Wise installation
1049 wizard. People with machines where C: is not the system drive
1050 usually want Python installed on whichever drive is their system drive
1051 instead. We removed the hardcoded "C:", and two testers on machines
1052 where C: is not the system drive report that the installer now
1053 suggests their system drive. Note that you can always select the
1054 directory you want in the "Select Destination Directory" dialog --
1055 that's what it's for.
1056
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001057Mac
1058---
1059
Just van Rossum99bc1fc2003-05-09 15:01:25 +00001060- There's a new module called "autoGIL", which offers a mechanism to
1061 automatically release the Global Interpreter Lock when an event loop
1062 goes to sleep, allowing other threads to run. It's currently only
1063 supported on OSX, in the Mach-O version.
Jack Jansenf5e23ff2003-06-16 13:53:40 +00001064- The OSA modules now allow direct access to properties of the
1065 toplevel application class (in AppleScript terminology).
1066- The Package Manager can now update itself.
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001067
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00001068SourceForge Bugs and Patches Applied
1069------------------------------------
1070
1071430160, 471893, 501716, 542562, 549151, 569574, 595837, 596434,
1072598163, 604210, 604716, 610332, 612627, 614770, 620190, 621891,
1073622042, 639139, 640236, 644345, 649742, 649742, 658233, 660022,
1074661318, 661676, 662807, 662923, 666219, 672855, 678325, 682347,
1075683486, 684981, 685773, 686254, 692776, 692959, 693094, 696777,
1076697989, 700827, 703666, 708495, 708604, 708901, 710733, 711902,
1077713722, 715782, 718286, 719359, 719367, 723136, 723831, 723962,
1078724588, 724767, 724767, 725942, 726150, 726446, 726869, 727051,
1079727719, 727719, 727805, 728277, 728563, 728656, 729096, 729103,
1080729293, 729297, 729300, 729317, 729395, 729622, 729817, 730170,
1081730296, 730594, 730685, 730826, 730963, 731209, 731403, 731504,
1082731514, 731626, 731635, 731643, 731644, 731644, 731689, 732124,
1083732143, 732234, 732284, 732284, 732479, 732761, 732783, 732951,
1084733667, 733781, 734118, 734231, 734869, 735051, 735293, 735527,
1085735613, 735694, 736962, 736962, 737970, 738066, 739313, 740055,
1086740234, 740301, 741806, 742126, 742741, 742860, 742860, 742911,
1087744041, 744104, 744238, 744687, 744877, 745055, 745478, 745525,
1088745620, 746012, 746304, 746366, 746801, 746953, 747348, 747667,
1089747954, 748846, 748849, 748973, 748975, 749191, 749210, 749759,
1090749831, 749911, 750008, 750092, 750542, 750595, 751038, 751107,
1091751276, 751451, 751916, 751941, 751956, 751998, 752671, 753451,
1092753602, 753617, 753845, 753925, 754014, 754340, 754447, 755031,
1093755087, 755147, 755245, 755683, 755987, 756032, 756996, 757058,
1094757229, 757818, 757821, 757822, 758112, 758910, 759227, 759889,
1095760257, 760703, 760792, 761104, 761337, 761519, 761830, 762455
1096
1097
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001098What's New in Python 2.3 beta 1?
1099================================
1100
Guido van Rossumfa1eddf2003-04-25 19:19:52 +00001101*Release date: 25-Apr-2003*
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001102
1103Core and builtins
1104-----------------
1105
Thomas Heller5eccabc2003-04-23 19:35:25 +00001106- New format codes B, H, I, k and K have been implemented for
1107 PyArg_ParseTuple and PyBuild_Value.
1108
Alex Martellia70b1912003-04-22 08:12:33 +00001109- New builtin function sum(seq, start=0) returns the sum of all the
1110 items in iterable object seq, plus start (items are normally numbers,
1111 and cannot be strings).
1112
Guido van Rossumaa86e352003-04-19 18:15:10 +00001113- bool() called without arguments now returns False rather than
1114 raising an exception. This is consistent with calling the
1115 constructors for the other builtin types -- called without argument
1116 they all return the false value of that type. (SF patch #724135)
1117
Guido van Rossumcf8d2852003-04-17 16:53:26 +00001118- In support of PEP 269 (making the pgen parser generator accessible
1119 from Python), some changes to the pgen code structure were made; a
1120 few files that used to be linked only with pgen are now linked with
1121 Python itself.
1122
Guido van Rossumc1f6e8c2003-04-16 21:13:23 +00001123- The repr() of a weakref object now shows the __name__ attribute of
1124 the referenced object, if it has one.
1125
Guido van Rossum76ba09f2003-04-16 19:40:58 +00001126- super() no longer ignores data descriptors, except __class__. See
1127 the thread started at
1128 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2003-April/034338.html
1129
Guido van Rossum3a3cca52003-04-14 20:58:14 +00001130- list.insert(i, x) now interprets negative i as it would be
1131 interpreted by slicing, so negative values count from the end of the
1132 list. This was the only place where such an interpretation was not
1133 placed on a list index.
1134
Guido van Rossumefbbb1c2003-04-11 18:43:06 +00001135- range() now works even if the arguments are longs with magnitude
1136 larger than sys.maxint, as long as the total length of the sequence
1137 fits. E.g., range(2**100, 2**101, 2**100) is the following list:
1138 [1267650600228229401496703205376L]. (SF patch #707427.)
1139
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001140- Some horridly obscure problems were fixed involving interaction
1141 between garbage collection and old-style classes with "ambitious"
1142 getattr hooks. If an old-style instance didn't have a __del__ method,
1143 but did have a __getattr__ hook, and the instance became reachable
1144 only from an unreachable cycle, and the hook resurrected or deleted
1145 unreachable objects when asked to resolve "__del__", anything up to
1146 a segfault could happen. That's been repaired.
1147
Raymond Hettingera3e1e4c2003-03-06 23:54:28 +00001148- dict.pop now takes an optional argument specifying a default
1149 value to return if the key is not in the dict. If a default is not
1150 given and the key is not found, a KeyError will still be raised.
1151 Parallel changes were made to UserDict.UserDict and UserDict.DictMixin.
1152 [SF patch #693753] (contributed by Michael Stone.)
1153
Martin v. Löwis73d538b2003-03-05 15:13:47 +00001154- sys.getfilesystemencoding() was added to expose
1155 Py_FileSystemDefaultEncoding.
Guido van Rossum46d3dc32003-03-01 03:20:41 +00001156
1157- New function sys.exc_clear() clears the current exception. This is
1158 rarely needed, but can sometimes be useful to release objects
1159 referenced by the traceback held in sys.exc_info()[2]. (SF patch
1160 #693195.)
1161
Neal Norwitzd5a65a72003-02-23 23:11:41 +00001162- On 64-bit systems, a dictionary could contain duplicate long/int keys
1163 if the key value was larger than 2**32. See SF bug #689659.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001164
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00001165- Fixed SF bug #663074. The codec system was using global static
Walter Dörwaldfa86bf52003-03-31 16:15:13 +00001166 variables to store internal data. As a result, any attempts to use the
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00001167 unicode system with multiple active interpreters, or successive
1168 interpreter executions, would fail.
1169
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00001170- "%c" % u"a" now returns a unicode string instead of raising a
Walter Dörwald44f527f2003-04-02 16:37:24 +00001171 TypeError. u"%c" % 0xffffffff now raises a OverflowError instead
Walter Dörwald1e469c52003-04-02 16:57:59 +00001172 of a ValueError to be consistent with "%c" % 256. See SF patch #710127.
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00001173
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001174Extension modules
1175-----------------
1176
Guido van Rossume7adda92003-04-25 05:52:37 +00001177- The socket module now provides the functions inet_pton and inet_ntop
1178 for converting between string and packed representation of IP
1179 addresses. There is also a new module variable, has_ipv6, which is
1180 True iff the current Python has IPv6 support. See SF patch #658327.
1181
Martin v. Löwisbfe175c2003-04-16 19:42:51 +00001182- Tkinter wrappers around Tcl variables now pass objects directly
1183 to Tcl, instead of first converting them to strings.
1184
Guido van Rossum41c99e72003-04-14 17:59:34 +00001185- The .*? pattern in the re module is now special-cased to avoid the
1186 recursion limit. (SF patch #720991 -- many thanks to Gary Herron
1187 and Greg Chapman.)
1188
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00001189- New function sys.call_tracing() allows pdb to debug code
1190 recursively.
1191
Tim Peters730f5532003-04-08 17:17:17 +00001192- New function gc.get_referents(obj) returns a list of objects
Tim Peters0f81ab62003-04-08 16:39:48 +00001193 directly referenced by obj. In effect, it exposes what the object's
1194 tp_traverse slot does, and can be helpful when debugging memory
1195 leaks.
1196
Martin v. Löwis7fb697b2003-04-03 04:49:12 +00001197- The iconv module has been removed from this release.
1198
Tim Petersd50ade62003-03-20 18:32:13 +00001199- The platform-independent routines for packing floats in IEEE formats
1200 (struct.pack's <f, >f, <d, and >d codes; pickle and cPickle's protocol 1
1201 pickling of floats) ignored that rounding can cause a carry to
1202 propagate. The worst consequence was that, in rare cases, <f and >f
1203 could produce strings that, when unpacked again, were a factor of 2
1204 away from the original float. This has been fixed. See SF bug
1205 #705836.
1206
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001207- New function time.tzset() provides access to the C library tzset()
Guido van Rossumd11b62e2003-03-14 21:51:36 +00001208 function, if supported. (SF patch #675422.)
1209
Neal Norwitz12e22172003-03-03 21:16:39 +00001210- Using createfilehandler, deletefilehandler, createtimerhandler functions
1211 on Tkinter.tkinter (_tkinter module) no longer crashes the interpreter.
1212 See SF bug #692416.
1213
Michael W. Hudsonf0089982003-03-03 12:29:42 +00001214- Modified the fcntl.ioctl() function to allow modification of a passed
1215 mutable buffer (for details see the reference documentation).
1216
Raymond Hettinger61fe64d2003-02-23 04:40:07 +00001217- Made user requested changes to the itertools module.
1218 Subsumed the times() function into repeat().
1219 Added chain() and cycle().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001220
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00001221- The rotor module is now deprecated; the encryption algorithm it uses
Andrew M. Kuchlingfb5f4852003-04-24 13:19:56 +00001222 is not believed to be secure, and including crypto code with Python
1223 has implications for exporting and importing it in various countries.
1224
Skip Montanaro89feabc2003-03-30 04:54:24 +00001225- The socket module now always uses the _socketobject wrapper class, even on
1226 platforms which have dup(2). The makefile() method is built directly
1227 on top of the socket without duplicating the file descriptor, allowing
1228 timeouts to work properly.
1229
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001230Library
1231-------
1232
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00001233- New generator function os.walk() is an easy-to-use alternative to
1234 os.path.walk(). See os module docs for details. os.path.walk()
1235 isn't deprecated at this time, but may become deprecated in a
1236 future release.
1237
Marc-André Lemburg246d8472003-04-24 11:36:11 +00001238- Added new module "platform" which provides a wide range of tools
1239 for querying platform dependent features.
1240
Andrew M. Kuchling4e42b312003-04-24 16:45:05 +00001241- netrc now allows ASCII punctuation characters in passwords.
Raymond Hettinger1d877862003-04-23 19:06:08 +00001242
Martin v. Löwis153c9e42003-04-19 20:59:03 +00001243- shelve now supports the optional writeback argument, and exposes
1244 pickle protocol versions.
1245
Guido van Rossuma2685402003-04-19 18:04:57 +00001246- Several methods of nntplib.NNTP have grown an optional file argument
1247 which specifies a file where to divert the command's output
1248 (already supported by the body() method). (SF patch #720468)
1249
Martin v. Löwis281b2c62003-04-18 21:04:39 +00001250- The self-documenting XML server library DocXMLRPCServer was added.
1251
Martin v. Löwis2548c732003-04-18 10:39:54 +00001252- Support for internationalized domain names has been added through
1253 the 'idna' and 'punycode' encodings, the 'stringprep' module, the
1254 'mkstringprep' tool, and enhancements to the socket and httplib
1255 modules.
1256
Walter Dörwald5688b7a2003-04-16 09:46:13 +00001257- htmlentitydefs has two new dictionaries: name2codepoint maps
1258 HTML entity names to Unicode codepoints (as integers).
1259 codepoint2name is the reverse mapping. See SF patch #722017.
1260
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00001261- pdb has a new command, "debug", which lets you step through
1262 arbitrary code from the debugger's (pdb) prompt.
1263
Raymond Hettingerc377cbf2003-04-04 22:56:42 +00001264- unittest.failUnlessEqual and its equivalent unittest.assertEqual now
1265 return 'not a == b' rather than 'a != b'. This gives the desired
1266 result for classes that define __eq__ without defining __ne__.
1267
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001268- sgmllib now supports SGML marked sections, in particular the
Martin v. Löwis3163a3b2003-03-30 14:25:40 +00001269 MS Office extensions.
1270
Raymond Hettinger42182eb2003-03-09 05:33:33 +00001271- The urllib module now offers support for the iterator protocol.
1272 SF patch 698520 contributed by Brett Cannon.
1273
Guido van Rossum9589a252003-03-06 01:56:12 +00001274- New module timeit provides a simple framework for timing the
1275 execution speed of expressions and statements.
1276
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001277- sets.Set objects now support mixed-type __eq__ and __ne__, instead
1278 of raising TypeError. If x is a Set object and y is a non-Set object,
1279 x == y is False, and x != y is True. This is akin to the change made
1280 for mixed-type comparisons of datetime objects in 2.3a2; more info
1281 about the rationale is in the NEWS entry for that. See also SF bug
1282 report <http://www.python.org/sf/693121>.
1283
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00001284- On Unix platforms, if os.listdir() is called with a Unicode argument,
1285 it now returns Unicode strings. (This behavior was added earlier
1286 to the Windows NT/2k/XP version of os.listdir().)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001287
Andrew M. Kuchling6f177d42003-02-28 22:09:33 +00001288- Distutils: both 'py_modules' and 'packages' keywords can now be specified
1289 in core.setup(). Previously you could supply one or the other, but
1290 not both of them. (SF patch #695090 from Bernhard Herzog)
1291
Skip Montanaro64a839e2003-03-20 23:36:55 +00001292- New csv package makes it easy to read/write CSV files.
1293
Gustavo Niemeyer68d8cef2003-04-17 21:31:33 +00001294- Module shlex has been extended to allow posix-like shell parsings,
1295 including a split() function for easy spliting of quoted strings and
1296 commands. An iterator interface was also implemented.
1297
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001298Tools/Demos
1299-----------
1300
Tim Peters21d7d4d2003-04-18 00:45:59 +00001301- New script combinerefs.py helps analyze new PYTHONDUMPREFS output.
1302 See the module docstring for details.
1303
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001304Build
1305-----
1306
Neal Norwitz35892b92003-02-23 23:45:35 +00001307- Fix problem building on OSF1 because the compiler only accepted
1308 preprocessor directives that start in column 1. (SF bug #691793.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001309
1310C API
1311-----
1312
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00001313- Added PyGC_Collect(), equivalent to calling gc.collect().
1314
Guido van Rossum0fc8f002003-04-15 15:12:39 +00001315- PyThreadState_GetDict() was changed not to raise an exception or
1316 issue a fatal error when no current thread state is available. This
1317 makes it possible to print dictionaries when no thread is active.
1318
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00001319- LONG_LONG was renamed to PY_LONG_LONG. Extensions that use this and
1320 need compatibility with previous versions can use this:
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00001321
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00001322 #ifndef PY_LONG_LONG
1323 #define PY_LONG_LONG LONG_LONG
1324 #endif
Martin v. Löwisb9a0f912003-03-29 10:06:18 +00001325
Raymond Hettinger1da1dbf2003-03-17 19:46:11 +00001326- Added PyObject_SelfIter() to fill the tp_iter slot for the
Raymond Hettinger01538262003-03-17 08:24:35 +00001327 typical case where the method returns its self argument.
1328
Guido van Rossume5c691a2003-03-07 15:13:17 +00001329- The extended type structure used for heap types (new-style
1330 classes defined by Python code using a class statement) is now
1331 exported from object.h as PyHeapTypeObject. (SF patch #696193.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001332
1333New platforms
1334-------------
1335
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00001336None this time.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001337
1338Tests
1339-----
1340
Neal Norwitz55b61d22003-02-28 19:57:03 +00001341- test_timeout now requires -u network to be passed to regrtest to run.
1342 See SF bug #692988.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001343
1344Windows
1345-------
1346
Tim Peters11b23062003-04-23 02:39:17 +00001347- os.fsync() now exists on Windows, and calls the Microsoft _commit()
1348 function.
1349
Guido van Rossumf4050642003-04-09 19:39:06 +00001350- New function winsound.MessageBeep() wraps the Win32 API
1351 MessageBeep().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001352
1353Mac
1354---
1355
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00001356- os.listdir() now returns Unicode strings on MacOS X when called with
1357 a Unicode argument. See the general news item under "Library".
Just van Rossum46c97842003-02-25 21:42:15 +00001358
Jack Jansendeac2ac2003-02-24 11:04:17 +00001359- A new method MacOS.WMAvailable() returns true if it is safe to access
1360 the window manager, false otherwise.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001361
Jack Jansencf76be02003-03-24 12:13:54 +00001362- EasyDialogs dialogs are now movable-modal, and if the application is
1363 currently in the background they will ask to be moved to the foreground
1364 before displaying.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001365
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00001366- OSA Scripting support has improved a lot, and gensuitemodule.py can now
Jack Jansende354b72003-04-11 15:37:20 +00001367 be used by mere mortals. The documentation is now also more or less
1368 complete.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001369
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00001370- The IDE (in a framework build) now includes introductory documentation
1371 in Apple Help Viewer format.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001372
1373
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001374What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 2?
1375=================================
1376
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00001377*Release date: 19-Feb-2003*
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001378
1379Core and builtins
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00001380-----------------
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001381
Walter Dörwald2ffec022003-02-19 16:34:11 +00001382- Negative positions returned from PEP 293 error callbacks are now
1383 treated as being relative to the end of the input string. Positions
1384 that are out of bounds raise an IndexError.
1385
Guido van Rossum162e38c2003-02-19 15:25:10 +00001386- sys.path[0] (the directory from which the script is loaded) is now
1387 turned into an absolute pathname, unless it is the empty string.
1388 (SF patch #664376.)
1389
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00001390- Finally fixed the bug in compile() and exec where a string ending
1391 with an indented code block but no newline would raise SyntaxError.
1392 This would have been a four-line change in parsetok.c... Except
1393 codeop.py depends on this behavior, so a compilation flag had to be
1394 invented that causes the tokenizer to revert to the old behavior;
1395 this required extra changes to 2 .h files, 2 .c files, and 2 .py
Guido van Rossum1442dc12003-02-13 22:19:20 +00001396 files. (Fixes SF bug #501622.)
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00001397
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00001398- If a new-style class defines neither __new__ nor __init__, its
1399 constructor would ignore all arguments. This is changed now: the
1400 constructor refuses arguments in this case. This might break code
1401 that worked under Python 2.2. The simplest fix is to add a no-op
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001402 __init__: ``def __init__(self, *args, **kw): pass``.
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00001403
Guido van Rossum48035eb2003-02-12 17:05:26 +00001404- Through a bytecode optimizer bug (and I bet you didn't even know
1405 Python *had* a bytecode optimizer :-), "unsigned" hex/oct constants
1406 with a leading minus sign would come out with the wrong sign.
1407 ("Unsigned" hex/oct constants are those with a face value in the
1408 range sys.maxint+1 through sys.maxint*2+1, inclusive; these have
1409 always been interpreted as negative numbers through sign folding.)
1410 E.g. 0xffffffff is -1, and -(0xffffffff) is 1, but -0xffffffff would
1411 come out as -4294967295. This was the case in Python 2.2 through
1412 2.2.2 and 2.3a1, and in Python 2.4 it will once again have that
1413 value, but according to PEP 237 it really needs to be 1 now. This
1414 will be backported to Python 2.2.3 a well. (SF #660455)
1415
Guido van Rossum47710652003-02-12 20:48:22 +00001416- int(s, base) sometimes sign-folds hex and oct constants; it only
1417 does this when base is 0 and s.strip() starts with a '0'. When the
1418 sign is actually folded, as in int("0xffffffff", 0) on a 32-bit
1419 machine, which returns -1, a FutureWarning is now issued; in Python
1420 2.4, this will return 4294967295L, as do int("+0xffffffff", 0) and
1421 int("0xffffffff", 16) right now. (PEP 347)
1422
Guido van Rossuma89d10e2003-02-12 03:58:38 +00001423- super(X, x): x may now be a proxy for an X instance, i.e.
1424 issubclass(x.__class__, X) but not issubclass(type(x), X).
1425
Guido van Rossum03bc7d32003-02-12 03:32:58 +00001426- isinstance(x, X): if X is a new-style class, this is now equivalent
1427 to issubclass(type(x), X) or issubclass(x.__class__, X). Previously
1428 only type(x) was tested. (For classic classes this was already the
1429 case.)
1430
Just van Rossum73ffb4a2003-02-10 09:57:08 +00001431- compile(), eval() and the exec statement now fully support source code
1432 passed as unicode strings.
1433
Neal Norwitzde8b94c2003-02-10 02:12:43 +00001434- int subclasses can be initialized with longs if the value fits in an int.
1435 See SF bug #683467.
1436
Tim Petersbf2674b2003-02-02 07:51:32 +00001437- long(string, base) takes time linear in len(string) when base is a power
1438 of 2 now. It used to take time quadratic in len(string).
1439
Martin v. Löwis8afd7572003-01-25 22:46:11 +00001440- filter returns now Unicode results for Unicode arguments.
1441
Martin v. Löwisaf6a27a2003-01-03 19:16:14 +00001442- raw_input can now return Unicode objects.
1443
Skip Montanaro4abd5f02003-01-02 20:51:08 +00001444- List objects' sort() method now accepts None as the comparison function.
1445 Passing None is semantically identical to calling sort() with no
1446 arguments.
1447
Neal Norwitz1a997502003-01-13 20:13:12 +00001448- Fixed crash when printing a subclass of str and __str__ returned self.
1449 See SF bug #667147.
1450
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00001451- Fixed an invalid RuntimeWarning and an undetected error when trying
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00001452 to convert a long integer into a float which couldn't fit.
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00001453 See SF bug #676155.
1454
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00001455- Function objects now have a __module__ attribute that is bound to
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00001456 the name of the module in which the function was defined. This
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00001457 applies for C functions and methods as well as functions and methods
1458 defined in Python. This attribute is used by pickle.whichmodule(),
1459 which changes the behavior of whichmodule slightly. In Python 2.2
1460 whichmodule() returns "__main__" for functions that are not defined
1461 at the top-level of a module (examples: methods, nested functions).
1462 Now whichmodule() will return the proper module name.
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00001463
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001464Extension modules
1465-----------------
1466
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00001467- operator.isNumberType() now checks that the object has a nb_int or
1468 nb_float slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
1469 tp_as_number pointer.
1470
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00001471- The imp module now has ways to acquire and release the "import
1472 lock": imp.acquire_lock() and imp.release_lock(). Note: this is a
1473 reentrant lock, so releasing the lock only truly releases it when
1474 this is the last release_lock() call. You can check with
1475 imp.lock_held(). (SF bug #580952 and patch #683257.)
1476
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001477- Change to cPickle to match pickle.py (see below and PEP 307).
1478
Neal Norwitz9caf9c02003-02-10 01:54:06 +00001479- Fix some bugs in the parser module. SF bug #678518.
1480
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00001481- Thanks to Scott David Daniels, a subtle bug in how the zlib
Walter Dörwald28d81962003-02-03 20:53:14 +00001482 extension implemented flush() was fixed. Scott also rewrote the
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00001483 zlib test suite using the unittest module. (SF bug #640230 and
1484 patch #678531.)
1485
Raymond Hettinger96ef8112003-02-01 00:10:11 +00001486- Added an itertools module containing high speed, memory efficient
1487 looping constructs inspired by tools from Haskell and SML.
1488
Guido van Rossum99d4abf2003-01-27 22:22:50 +00001489- The SSL module now handles sockets with a timeout set correctly (SF
1490 patch #675750, fixing SF bug #675552).
1491
Barry Warsawf8ba39c2003-01-07 20:55:26 +00001492- os/posixmodule has grown the sysexits.h constants (EX_OK and friends).
1493
Guido van Rossum6d0d3652003-01-07 20:34:19 +00001494- Fixed broken threadstate swap in readline that could cause fatal
1495 errors when a readline hook was being invoked while a background
1496 thread was active. (SF bugs #660476 and #513033.)
1497
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001498- fcntl now exposes the strops.h I_* constants.
1499
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00001500- Fix a crash on Solaris that occurred when calling close() on
1501 an mmap'ed file which was already closed. (SF patch #665913)
1502
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001503- Fixed several serious bugs in the zipimport implementation.
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001504
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00001505- datetime changes:
1506
Guido van Rossum8b7a9a32003-04-14 22:01:58 +00001507 The date class is now properly subclassable. (SF bug #720908)
1508
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00001509 The datetime and datetimetz classes have been collapsed into a single
1510 datetime class, and likewise the time and timetz classes into a single
1511 time class. Previously, a datetimetz object with tzinfo=None acted
1512 exactly like a datetime object, and similarly for timetz. This wasn't
1513 enough of a difference to justify distinct classes, and life is simpler
1514 now.
1515
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00001516 today() and now() now round system timestamps to the closest
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00001517 microsecond <http://www.python.org/sf/661086>. This repairs an
1518 irritation most likely seen on Windows systems.
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00001519
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00001520 In dt.astimezone(tz), if tz.utcoffset(dt) returns a duration,
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00001521 ValueError is raised if tz.dst(dt) returns None (2.3a1 treated it
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00001522 as 0 instead, but a tzinfo subclass wishing to participate in
1523 time zone conversion has to take a stand on whether it supports
1524 DST; if you don't care about DST, then code dst() to return 0 minutes,
1525 meaning that DST is never in effect).
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00001526
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00001527 The tzinfo methods utcoffset() and dst() must return a timedelta object
1528 (or None) now. In 2.3a1 they could also return an int or long, but that
1529 was an unhelpfully redundant leftover from an earlier version wherein
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00001530 they couldn't return a timedelta. TOOWTDI.
1531
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00001532 The example tzinfo class for local time had a bug. It was replaced
1533 by a later example coded by Guido.
1534
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00001535 datetime.astimezone(tz) no longer raises an exception when the
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00001536 input datetime has no UTC equivalent in tz. For typical "hybrid" time
1537 zones (a single tzinfo subclass modeling both standard and daylight
1538 time), this case can arise one hour per year, at the hour daylight time
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00001539 ends. See new docs for details. In short, the new behavior mimics
1540 the local wall clock's behavior of repeating an hour in local time.
1541
1542 dt.astimezone() can no longer be used to convert between naive and aware
1543 datetime objects. If you merely want to attach, or remove, a tzinfo
1544 object, without any conversion of date and time members, use
1545 dt.replace(tzinfo=whatever) instead, where "whatever" is None or a
1546 tzinfo subclass instance.
1547
1548 A new method tzinfo.fromutc(dt) can be overridden in tzinfo subclasses
1549 to give complete control over how a UTC time is to be converted to
1550 a local time. The default astimezone() implementation calls fromutc()
1551 as its last step, so a tzinfo subclass can affect that too by overriding
1552 fromutc(). It's expected that the default fromutc() implementation will
1553 be suitable as-is for "almost all" time zone subclasses, but the
1554 creativity of political time zone fiddling appears unbounded -- fromutc()
1555 allows the highly motivated to emulate any scheme expressible in Python.
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00001556
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00001557 datetime.now(): The optional tzinfo argument was undocumented (that's
1558 repaired), and its name was changed to tz ("tzinfo" is overloaded enough
1559 already). With a tz argument, now(tz) used to return the local date
1560 and time, and attach tz to it, without any conversion of date and time
1561 members. This was less than useful. Now now(tz) returns the current
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001562 date and time as local time in tz's time zone, akin to ::
1563
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00001564 tz.fromutc(datetime.utcnow().replace(tzinfo=utc))
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001565
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00001566 where "utc" is an instance of a tzinfo subclass modeling UTC. Without
1567 a tz argument, now() continues to return the current local date and time,
1568 as a naive datetime object.
1569
Tim Peters2a44a8d2003-01-23 20:53:10 +00001570 datetime.fromtimestamp(): Like datetime.now() above, this had less than
1571 useful behavior when the optional tinzo argument was specified. See
1572 also SF bug report <http://www.python.org/sf/660872>.
1573
Tim Peters8d81a012003-01-24 22:36:34 +00001574 date and datetime comparison: In order to prevent comparison from
1575 falling back to the default compare-object-addresses strategy, these
1576 raised TypeError whenever they didn't understand the other object type.
1577 They still do, except when the other object has a "timetuple" attribute,
1578 in which case they return NotImplemented now. This gives other
1579 datetime objects (e.g., mxDateTime) a chance to intercept the
1580 comparison.
1581
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00001582 date, time, datetime and timedelta comparison: When the exception
1583 for mixed-type comparisons in the last paragraph doesn't apply, if
1584 the comparison is == then False is returned, and if the comparison is
1585 != then True is returned. Because dict lookup and the "in" operator
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001586 only invoke __eq__, this allows, for example, ::
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00001587
1588 if some_datetime in some_sequence:
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001589
1590 and ::
1591
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00001592 some_dict[some_timedelta] = whatever
1593
1594 to work as expected, without raising TypeError just because the
1595 sequence is heterogeneous, or the dict has mixed-type keys. [This
1596 seems like a good idea to implement for all mixed-type comparisons
1597 that don't want to allow falling back to address comparison.]
1598
Tim Peters75a6e3b2003-01-04 18:17:36 +00001599 The constructors building a datetime from a timestamp could raise
1600 ValueError if the platform C localtime()/gmtime() inserted "leap
1601 seconds". Leap seconds are ignored now. On such platforms, it's
1602 possible to have timestamps that differ by a second, yet where
1603 datetimes constructed from them are equal.
1604
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00001605 The pickle format of date, time and datetime objects has changed
1606 completely. The undocumented pickler and unpickler functions no
Tim Petersb57f8f02003-02-01 02:54:15 +00001607 longer exist. The undocumented __setstate__() and __getstate__()
1608 methods no longer exist either.
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00001609
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001610Library
1611-------
1612
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001613- The logging module was updated slightly; the WARN level was renamed
1614 to WARNING, and the matching function/method warn() to warning().
1615
1616- The pickle and cPickle modules were updated with a new pickling
1617 protocol (documented by pickletools.py, see below) and several
1618 extensions to the pickle customization API (__reduce__, __setstate__
1619 etc.). The copy module now uses more of the pickle customization
1620 API to copy objects that don't implement __copy__ or __deepcopy__.
1621 See PEP 307 for details.
1622
1623- The distutils "register" command now uses http://www.python.org/pypi
1624 as the default repository. (See PEP 301.)
1625
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00001626- the platform dependent path related variables sep, altsep, extsep,
1627 pathsep, curdir, pardir and defpath are now defined in the platform
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00001628 dependent path modules (e.g. ntpath.py) rather than os.py, so these
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001629 variables are now available via os.path. They continue to be
1630 available from the os module.
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00001631 (see <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00001632
Tim Peters6ee04802003-02-05 18:29:34 +00001633- array.array was added to the types repr.py knows about (see
1634 <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
1635
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00001636- The new pickletools.py contains lots of documentation about pickle
1637 internals, and supplies some helpers for working with pickles, such as
1638 a symbolic pickle disassembler.
1639
Skip Montanaro9a7c96a2003-01-22 18:17:25 +00001640- Xmlrpclib.py now supports the builtin boolean type.
1641
Martin v. Löwis0c6774d2003-01-15 11:51:06 +00001642- py_compile has a new 'doraise' flag and a new PyCompileError
1643 exception.
1644
Martin v. Löwisd69663d2003-01-15 11:37:23 +00001645- SimpleXMLRPCServer now supports CGI through the CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler
1646 class.
1647
Guido van Rossum50e92232003-01-14 16:45:04 +00001648- The sets module now raises TypeError in __cmp__, to clarify that
1649 sets are not intended to be three-way-compared; the comparison
1650 operators are overloaded as subset/superset tests.
1651
Guido van Rossumcd0c0472003-01-07 23:03:05 +00001652- Bastion.py and rexec.py are disabled. These modules are not safe in
1653 Python 2.2. or 2.3.
1654
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001655- realpath is now exported when doing ``from poxixpath import *``.
Neal Norwitzbb0246a2003-01-03 18:12:28 +00001656 It is also exported for ntpath, macpath, and os2emxpath.
1657 See SF bug #659228.
1658
Neal Norwitzb9ef4ae2003-01-05 23:19:43 +00001659- New module tarfile from Lars Gustäbel provides a comprehensive interface
1660 to tar archive files with transparent gzip and bzip2 compression.
1661 See SF patch #651082.
1662
Neal Norwitz4f442372003-01-06 06:51:36 +00001663- urlparse can now parse imap:// URLs. See SF feature request #618024.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001664
Neal Norwitze931ed52003-01-10 23:24:32 +00001665- Tkinter.Canvas.scan_dragto() provides an optional parameter to support
1666 the gain value which is passed to Tk. SF bug# 602259.
1667
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00001668- Fix logging.handlers.SysLogHandler protocol when using UNIX domain sockets.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00001669 See SF patch #642974.
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00001670
Skip Montanaro12fe72e2003-02-25 17:46:20 +00001671- The dospath module was deleted. Use the ntpath module when manipulating
1672 DOS paths from other platforms.
1673
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001674Tools/Demos
1675-----------
1676
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00001677- Two new scripts (db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py) were added to the
1678 Tools/scripts directory to facilitate conversion from the old bsddb module
1679 to the new one. While the user-visible API of the new module is
1680 compatible with the old one, it's likely that the version of the
1681 underlying database library has changed. To convert from the old library,
1682 run the db2pickle.py script using the old version of Python to convert it
1683 to a pickle file. After upgrading Python, run the pickle2db.py script
1684 using the new version of Python to reconstitute your database. For
1685 example:
1686
Skip Montanaro621f0552003-02-03 15:48:10 +00001687 % python2.2 db2pickle.py -h some.db > some.pickle
1688 % python2.3 pickle2db.py -h some.db.new < some.pickle
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00001689
1690 Run the scripts without any args to get a usage message.
1691
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001692
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001693Build
1694-----
1695
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00001696- The audio driver tests (test_ossaudiodev.py and
1697 test_linuxaudiodev.py) are no longer run by default. This is
1698 because they don't always work, depending on your hardware and
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001699 software. To run these tests, you must use an invocation like ::
1700
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00001701 ./python Lib/test/regrtest.py -u audio test_ossaudiodev
1702
Skip Montanarodecc6a42003-01-01 20:07:49 +00001703- On systems which build using the configure script, compiler flags which
1704 used to be lumped together using the OPT flag have been split into two
1705 groups, OPT and BASECFLAGS. OPT is meant to carry just optimization- and
1706 debug-related flags like "-g" and "-O3". BASECFLAGS is meant to carry
1707 compiler flags that are required to get a clean compile. On some
1708 platforms (many Linux flavors in particular) BASECFLAGS will be empty by
1709 default. On others, such as Mac OS X and SCO, it will contain required
1710 flags. This change allows people building Python to override OPT without
1711 fear of clobbering compiler flags which are required to get a clean build.
1712
1713- On Darwin/Mac OS X platforms, /sw/lib and /sw/include are added to the
1714 relevant search lists in setup.py. This allows users building Python to
1715 take advantage of the many packages available from the fink project
1716 <http://fink.sf.net/>.
1717
1718- A new Makefile target, scriptsinstall, installs a number of useful scripts
1719 from the Tools/scripts directory.
1720
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001721C API
1722-----
1723
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001724- PyEval_GetFrame() is now declared to return a ``PyFrameObject *``
1725 instead of a plain ``PyObject *``. (SF patch #686601.)
Guido van Rossum6297a7a2003-02-19 15:53:17 +00001726
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00001727- PyNumber_Check() now checks that the object has a nb_int or nb_float
1728 slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
1729 tp_as_number pointer.
1730
Guido van Rossumeea47182003-02-11 20:39:59 +00001731- A C type that inherits from a base type that defines tp_as_buffer
1732 will now inherit the tp_as_buffer pointer if it doesn't define one.
1733 (SF #681367)
1734
Neil Schemenauer5042da62003-02-04 20:59:40 +00001735- The PyArg_Parse functions now issue a DeprecationWarning if a float
1736 argument is provided when an integer is specified (this affects the 'b',
1737 'B', 'h', 'H', 'i', and 'l' codes). Future versions of Python will
1738 raise a TypeError.
Neil Schemenauercd63e612003-01-24 22:15:53 +00001739
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001740Tests
1741-----
1742
Walter Dörwald11cfbd62003-03-26 16:03:16 +00001743- Several tests weren't being run from regrtest.py (test_timeout.py,
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001744 test_tarfile.py, test_netrc.py, test_multifile.py,
1745 test_importhooks.py and test_imp.py). Now they are. (Note to
1746 developers: please read Lib/test/README when creating a new test, to
1747 make sure to do it right! All tests need to use either unittest or
1748 pydoc.)
1749
1750- Added test_posix.py, a test suite for the posix module.
1751
1752- Added test_hexoct.py, a test suite for hex/oct constant folding.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001753
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001754Windows
1755-------
1756
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00001757- The timeout code for socket connect() didn't work right; this has
1758 now been fixed. test_timeout.py should pass (at least most of the
1759 time).
1760
Thomas Hellerdda583d2003-01-31 20:45:41 +00001761- distutils' msvccompiler class now passes the preprocessor options to
1762 the resource compiler. See SF patch #669198.
1763
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00001764- The bsddb module now ships with Sleepycat's 4.1.25.NC, the latest
1765 release without strong cryptography.
1766
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00001767- sys.path[0], if it contains a directory name, is now always an
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001768 absolute pathname. (SF patch #664376.)
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00001769
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00001770- The new logging package is now installed by the Windows installer. It
1771 wasn't in 2.3a1 due to oversight.
1772
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001773Mac
1774---
1775
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00001776- There are new dialogs EasyDialogs.AskFileForOpen, AskFileForSave
1777 and AskFolder. The old macfs.StandardGetFile and friends are deprecated.
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00001778
Jack Jansenc9296362003-02-06 23:10:45 +00001779- Most of the standard library now uses pathnames or FSRefs in preference
1780 of FSSpecs, and use the underlying Carbon.File and Carbon.Folder modules
1781 in stead of macfs. macfs will probably be deprecated in the future.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00001782
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00001783- Type Carbon.File.FSCatalogInfo and supporting methods have been implemented.
1784 This also makes macfs.FSSpec.SetDates() work again.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001785
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00001786- There is a new module pimp, the package install manager for Python, and
1787 accompanying applet PackageManager. These allow you to easily download
1788 and install pretested extension packages either in source or binary
1789 form. Only in MacPython-OSX.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001790
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00001791- Applets are now built with bundlebuilder in MacPython-OSX, which should make
Jack Jansen5d44b342003-02-18 23:32:47 +00001792 them more robust and also provides a path towards BuildApplication. The
1793 downside of this change is that applets can no longer be run from the
1794 Terminal window, this will hopefully be fixed in the 2.3b1.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001795
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001796
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001797What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 1?
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001798=================================
1799
Guido van Rossumae548862002-12-31 15:47:36 +00001800*Release date: 31-Dec-2002*
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001801
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001802Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001803--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00001804
Michael W. Hudson96bc3b42002-11-26 14:48:23 +00001805- One can now assign to __bases__ and __name__ of new-style classes.
1806
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00001807- dict() now accepts keyword arguments so that dict(one=1, two=2)
1808 is the equivalent of {"one": 1, "two": 2}. Accordingly,
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00001809 the existing (but undocumented) 'items' keyword argument has
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00001810 been eliminated. This means that dict(items=someMapping) now has
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00001811 a different meaning than before.
1812
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00001813- int() now returns a long object if the argument is outside the
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001814 integer range, so int("4" * 1000), int(1e200) and int(1L<<1000) will
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00001815 all return long objects instead of raising an OverflowError.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001816
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00001817- Assignment to __class__ is disallowed if either the old or the new
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00001818 class is a statically allocated type object (such as defined by an
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00001819 extension module). This prevents anomalies like 2.__class__ = bool.
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00001820
1821- New-style object creation and deallocation have been sped up
1822 significantly; they are now faster than classic instance creation
1823 and deallocation.
1824
1825- The __slots__ variable can now mention "private" names, and the
1826 right thing will happen (e.g. __slots__ = ["__foo"]).
1827
1828- The built-ins slice() and buffer() are now callable types. The
1829 types classobj (formerly class), code, function, instance, and
1830 instancemethod (formerly instance-method), which have no built-in
1831 names but are accessible through the types module, are now also
1832 callable. The type dict-proxy is renamed to dictproxy.
1833
1834- Cycles going through the __class__ link of a new-style instance are
1835 now detected by the garbage collector.
1836
1837- Classes using __slots__ are now properly garbage collected.
1838 [SF bug 519621]
1839
1840- Tightened the __slots__ rules: a slot name must be a valid Python
1841 identifier.
1842
1843- The constructor for the module type now requires a name argument and
1844 takes an optional docstring argument. Previously, this constructor
1845 ignored its arguments. As a consequence, deriving a class from a
1846 module (not from the module type) is now illegal; previously this
1847 created an unnamed module, just like invoking the module type did.
1848 [SF bug 563060]
1849
1850- A new type object, 'basestring', is added. This is a common base type
1851 for 'str' and 'unicode', and can be used instead of
1852 types.StringTypes, e.g. to test whether something is "a string":
1853 isinstance(x, basestring) is True for Unicode and 8-bit strings. This
1854 is an abstract base class and cannot be instantiated directly.
1855
1856- Changed new-style class instantiation so that when C's __new__
1857 method returns something that's not a C instance, its __init__ is
1858 not called. [SF bug #537450]
1859
1860- Fixed super() to work correctly with class methods. [SF bug #535444]
1861
1862- If you try to pickle an instance of a class that has __slots__ but
1863 doesn't define or override __getstate__, a TypeError is now raised.
1864 This is done by adding a bozo __getstate__ to the class that always
1865 raises TypeError. (Before, this would appear to be pickled, but the
1866 state of the slots would be lost.)
1867
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001868Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001869-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001870
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00001871- Import from zipfiles is now supported. The name of a zipfile placed
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00001872 on sys.path causes the import statement to look for importable Python
1873 modules (with .py, pyc and .pyo extensions) and packages inside the
1874 zipfile. The zipfile import follows the specification (though not
1875 the sample implementation) of PEP 273. The semantics of __path__ are
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00001876 compatible with those that have been implemented in Jython since
1877 Jython 2.1.
1878
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001879- PEP 302 has been accepted. Although it was initially developed to
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00001880 support zipimport, it offers a new, general import hook mechanism.
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00001881 Several new variables have been added to the sys module:
1882 sys.meta_path, sys.path_hooks, and sys.path_importer_cache; these
1883 make extending the import statement much more convenient than
1884 overriding the __import__ built-in function. For a description of
1885 these, see PEP 302.
1886
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00001887- A frame object's f_lineno attribute can now be written to from a
1888 trace function to change which line will execute next. A command to
1889 exploit this from pdb has been added. [SF patch #643835]
1890
Marc-André Lemburg20b91352002-12-12 18:01:43 +00001891- The _codecs support module for codecs.py was turned into a builtin
1892 module to assure that at least the builtin codecs are available
1893 to the Python parser for source code decoding according to PEP 263.
1894
Walter Dörwaldd9a6ad32002-12-12 16:41:44 +00001895- issubclass now supports a tuple as the second argument, just like
1896 isinstance does. ``issubclass(X, (A, B))`` is equivalent to
1897 ``issubclass(X, A) or issubclass(X, B)``.
1898
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00001899- Thanks to Armin Rigo, the last known way to provoke a system crash
1900 by cleverly arranging for a comparison function to mutate a list
1901 during a list.sort() operation has been fixed. The effect of
1902 attempting to mutate a list, or even to inspect its contents or
1903 length, while a sort is in progress, is not defined by the language.
1904 The C implementation of Python 2.3 attempts to detect mutations,
1905 and raise ValueError if one occurs, but there's no guarantee that
1906 all mutations will be caught, or that any will be caught across
1907 releases or implementations.
1908
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00001909- Unicode file name processing for Windows (PEP 277) is implemented.
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00001910 All platforms now have an os.path.supports_unicode_filenames attribute,
1911 which is set to True on Windows NT/2000/XP, and False elsewhere.
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00001912
Walter Dörwald3aeb6322002-09-02 13:14:32 +00001913- Codec error handling callbacks (PEP 293) are implemented.
1914 Error handling in unicode.encode or str.decode can now be customized.
1915
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00001916- A subtle change to the semantics of the built-in function intern():
1917 interned strings are no longer immortal. You must keep a reference
1918 to the return value intern() around to get the benefit.
1919
Guido van Rossumf808b892002-08-16 03:38:10 +00001920- Use of 'None' as a variable, argument or attribute name now
1921 issues a SyntaxWarning. In the future, None may become a keyword.
1922
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00001923- SET_LINENO is gone. co_lnotab is now consulted to determine when to
1924 call the trace function. C code that accessed f_lineno should call
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00001925 PyCode_Addr2Line instead (f_lineno is still there, but only kept up
1926 to date when there is a trace function set).
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00001927
Guido van Rossum9be89462002-08-14 16:11:30 +00001928- There's a new warning category, FutureWarning. This is used to warn
1929 about a number of situations where the value or sign of an integer
1930 result will change in Python 2.4 as a result of PEP 237 (integer
1931 unification). The warnings implement stage B0 mentioned in that
1932 PEP. The warnings are about the following situations:
1933
1934 - Octal and hex literals without 'L' prefix in the inclusive range
1935 [0x80000000..0xffffffff]; these are currently negative ints, but
1936 in Python 2.4 they will be positive longs with the same bit
1937 pattern.
1938
1939 - Left shifts on integer values that cause the outcome to lose
1940 bits or have a different sign than the left operand. To be
1941 precise: x<<n where this currently doesn't yield the same value
1942 as long(x)<<n; in Python 2.4, the outcome will be long(x)<<n.
1943
1944 - Conversions from ints to string that show negative values as
1945 unsigned ints in the inclusive range [0x80000000..0xffffffff];
1946 this affects the functions hex() and oct(), and the string
1947 formatting codes %u, %o, %x, and %X. In Python 2.4, these will
1948 show signed values (e.g. hex(-1) currently returns "0xffffffff";
1949 in Python 2.4 it will return "-0x1").
1950
Guido van Rossum9a2eda52002-12-31 02:12:42 +00001951- The bits manipulated under the cover by sys.setcheckinterval() have
1952 been changed. Both the check interval and the ticker used to be
1953 per-thread values. They are now just a pair of global variables.
1954 In addition, the default check interval was boosted from 10 to 100
1955 bytecode instructions. This may have some effect on systems that
1956 relied on the old default value. In particular, in multi-threaded
1957 applications which try to be highly responsive, response time will
1958 increase by some (perhaps imperceptible) amount.
Skip Montanaro979c74b2002-09-03 21:25:14 +00001959
Tim Petersd64c1de2002-08-12 17:36:03 +00001960- When multiplying very large integers, a version of the so-called
1961 Karatsuba algorithm is now used. This is most effective if the
1962 inputs have roughly the same size. If they both have about N digits,
1963 Karatsuba multiplication has O(N**1.58) runtime (the exponent is
1964 log_base_2(3)) instead of the previous O(N**2). Measured results may
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00001965 be better or worse than that, depending on platform quirks. Besides
1966 the O() improvement in raw instruction count, the Karatsuba algorithm
1967 appears to have much better cache behavior on extremely large integers
1968 (starting in the ballpark of a million bits). Note that this is a
1969 simple implementation, and there's no intent here to compete with,
1970 e.g., GMP. It gives a very nice speedup when it applies, but a package
1971 devoted to fast large-integer arithmetic should run circles around it.
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00001972
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00001973- u'%c' will now raise a ValueError in case the argument is an
1974 integer outside the valid range of Unicode code point ordinals.
1975
Guido van Rossumdeb09362002-08-09 17:16:30 +00001976- The tempfile module has been overhauled for enhanced security. The
1977 mktemp() function is now deprecated; new, safe replacements are
1978 mkstemp() (for files) and mkdtemp() (for directories), and the
1979 higher-level functions NamedTemporaryFile() and TemporaryFile().
1980 Use of some global variables in this module is also deprecated; the
1981 new functions have keyword arguments to provide the same
1982 functionality. All Lib, Tools and Demo modules that used the unsafe
1983 interfaces have been updated to use the safe replacements. Thanks
1984 to Zack Weinberg!
1985
Guido van Rossumd81a9832002-08-09 15:57:34 +00001986- When x is an object whose class implements __mul__ and __rmul__,
1987 1.0*x would correctly invoke __rmul__, but 1*x would erroneously
1988 invoke __mul__. This was due to the sequence-repeat code in the int
1989 type. This has been fixed now.
1990
Barry Warsawd79f6832002-08-06 17:01:51 +00001991- Previously, "str1 in str2" required str1 to be a string of length 1.
1992 This restriction has been relaxed to allow str1 to be a string of
1993 any length. Thus "'el' in 'hello world'" returns True now.
1994
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00001995- File objects are now their own iterators. For a file f, iter(f) now
1996 returns f (unless f is closed), and f.next() is similar to
1997 f.readline() when EOF is not reached; however, f.next() uses a
1998 readahead buffer that messes up the file position, so mixing
1999 f.next() and f.readline() (or other methods) doesn't work right.
2000 Calling f.seek() drops the readahead buffer, but other operations
2001 don't. It so happens that this gives a nice additional speed boost
2002 to "for line in file:"; the xreadlines method and corresponding
Guido van Rossumbffb2ef2002-08-09 17:17:07 +00002003 module are now obsolete. Thanks to Oren Tirosh!
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00002004
Guido van Rossumde392d32002-08-05 14:17:20 +00002005- Encoding declarations (PEP 263, phase 1) have been implemented. A
2006 comment of the form "# -*- coding: <encodingname> -*-" in the first
2007 or second line of a Python source file indicates the encoding.
Martin v. Löwis00f1e3f2002-08-04 17:29:52 +00002008
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00002009- list.sort() has a new implementation. While cross-platform results
2010 may vary, and in data-dependent ways, this is much faster on many
2011 kinds of partially ordered lists than the previous implementation,
2012 and reported to be just as fast on randomly ordered lists on
2013 several major platforms. This sort is also stable (if A==B and A
2014 precedes B in the list at the start, A precedes B after the sort too),
2015 although the language definition does not guarantee stability. A
2016 potential drawback is that list.sort() may require temp space of
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00002017 len(list)*2 bytes (``*4`` on a 64-bit machine). It's therefore possible
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00002018 for list.sort() to raise MemoryError now, even if a comparison function
2019 does not. See <http://www.python.org/sf/587076> for full details.
2020
Guido van Rossum2d5389c2002-07-23 03:44:35 +00002021- All standard iterators now ensure that, once StopIteration has been
2022 raised, all future calls to next() on the same iterator will also
2023 raise StopIteration. There used to be various counterexamples to
2024 this behavior, which could caused confusion or subtle program
2025 breakage, without any benefits. (Note that this is still an
2026 iterator's responsibility; the iterator framework does not enforce
2027 this.)
2028
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00002029- Ctrl+C handling on Windows has been made more consistent with
2030 other platforms. KeyboardInterrupt can now reliably be caught,
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00002031 and Ctrl+C at an interactive prompt no longer terminates the
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00002032 process under NT/2k/XP (it never did under Win9x). Ctrl+C will
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00002033 interrupt time.sleep() in the main thread, and any child processes
2034 created via the popen family (on win2k; we can't make win9x work
Mark Hammond8f3afc72002-08-10 06:26:31 +00002035 reliably) are also interrupted (as generally happens on for Linux/Unix.)
2036 [SF bugs 231273, 439992 and 581232]
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00002037
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00002038- sys.getwindowsversion() has been added on Windows. This
2039 returns a tuple with information about the version of Windows
2040 currently running.
2041
Raymond Hettinger5a04aec2002-06-25 00:25:30 +00002042- Slices and repetitions of buffer objects now consistently return
2043 a string. Formerly, strings would be returned most of the time,
2044 but a buffer object would be returned when the repetition count
2045 was one or when the slice range was all inclusive.
2046
Walter Dörwald3430d702002-06-17 10:43:59 +00002047- Unicode objects in sys.path are no longer ignored but treated
2048 as directory names.
2049
Neal Norwitz1f68fc72002-06-14 00:50:42 +00002050- Fixed string.startswith and string.endswith builtin methods
2051 so they accept negative indices. [SF bug 493951]
2052
Guido van Rossumc5fe5eb2002-06-12 03:45:21 +00002053- Fixed a bug with a continue inside a try block and a yield in the
2054 finally clause. [SF bug 567538]
2055
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00002056- Most builtin sequences now support "extended slices", i.e. slices
Guido van Rossum2e82e712002-06-13 11:41:07 +00002057 with a third "stride" parameter. For example, "hello world"[::-1]
2058 gives "dlrow olleh".
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00002059
Neal Norwitzd68f5172002-05-29 15:54:55 +00002060- A new warning PendingDeprecationWarning was added to provide
2061 direction on features which are in the process of being deprecated.
2062 The warning will not be printed by default. To see the pending
2063 deprecations, use -Walways::PendingDeprecationWarning::
2064 as a command line option or warnings.filterwarnings() in code.
2065
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00002066- Deprecated features of xrange objects have been removed as
2067 promised. The start, stop, and step attributes and the tolist()
2068 method no longer exist. xrange repetition and slicing have been
2069 removed.
2070
Guido van Rossum7dab2422002-04-26 19:40:56 +00002071- New builtin function enumerate(x), from PEP 279. Example:
2072 enumerate("abc") is an iterator returning (0,"a"), (1,"b"), (2,"c").
2073 The argument can be an arbitrary iterable object.
2074
Neil Schemenauer89e3ee02002-04-26 01:58:53 +00002075- The assert statement no longer tests __debug__ at runtime. This means
2076 that assert statements cannot be disabled by assigning a false value
2077 to __debug__.
2078
Walter Dörwald068325e2002-04-15 13:36:47 +00002079- A method zfill() was added to str and unicode, that fills a numeric
2080 string to the left with zeros. For example,
2081 "+123".zfill(6) -> "+00123".
2082
Guido van Rossum862fe3c2002-04-15 12:36:47 +00002083- Complex numbers supported divmod() and the // and % operators, but
2084 these make no sense. Since this was documented, they're being
2085 deprecated now.
2086
Guido van Rossum26dd8302002-04-26 20:11:29 +00002087- String and unicode methods lstrip(), rstrip() and strip() now take
2088 an optional argument that specifies the characters to strip. For
2089 example, "Foo!!!?!?!?".rstrip("?!") -> "Foo".
Guido van Rossum49042042002-04-13 00:59:05 +00002090
Guido van Rossumc0d3f4e2002-11-27 13:10:40 +00002091- There's a new dictionary constructor (a class method of the dict
2092 class), dict.fromkeys(iterable, value=None). It constructs a
2093 dictionary with keys taken from the iterable and all values set to a
2094 single value. It can be used for building sets and for removing
2095 duplicates from sequences.
Raymond Hettingere33d3df2002-11-27 07:29:33 +00002096
Guido van Rossumc69343b2002-04-12 19:22:48 +00002097- Added a new dict method pop(key). This removes and returns the
2098 value corresponding to key. [SF patch #539949]
2099
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00002100- A new built-in type, bool, has been added, as well as built-in
2101 names for its two values, True and False. Comparisons and sundry
2102 other operations that return a truth value have been changed to
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002103 return a bool instead. Read PEP 285 for an explanation of why this
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00002104 is backward compatible.
2105
Guido van Rossum95b62a62002-03-29 01:07:24 +00002106- Fixed two bugs reported as SF #535905: under certain conditions,
2107 deallocating a deeply nested structure could cause a segfault in the
2108 garbage collector, due to interaction with the "trashcan" code;
2109 access to the current frame during destruction of a local variable
2110 could access a pointer to freed memory.
2111
Guido van Rossumfe0ca4a2002-06-18 21:20:13 +00002112- The optional object allocator ("pymalloc") has been enabled by
2113 default. The recommended practice for memory allocation and
2114 deallocation has been streamlined. A header file is included,
2115 Misc/pymemcompat.h, which can be bundled with 3rd party extensions
2116 and lets them use the same API with Python versions from 1.5.2
2117 onwards.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00002118
Martin v. Löwiscfeb3b62002-03-03 21:30:27 +00002119- PyErr_Display will provide file and line information for all exceptions
2120 that have an attribute print_file_and_line, not just SyntaxErrors.
2121
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00002122- The UTF-8 codec will now encode and decode Unicode surrogates
2123 correctly and without raising exceptions for unpaired ones.
2124
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00002125- Universal newlines (PEP 278) is implemented. Briefly, using 'U'
2126 instead of 'r' when opening a text file for reading changes the line
2127 ending convention so that any of '\r', '\r\n', and '\n' is
2128 recognized (even mixed in one file); all three are converted to
2129 '\n', the standard Python line end character.
2130
Neal Norwitz649b7592002-01-01 19:07:13 +00002131- file.xreadlines() now raises a ValueError if the file is closed:
2132 Previously, an xreadlines object was returned which would raise
2133 a ValueError when the xreadlines.next() method was called.
2134
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002135- sys.exit() inadvertently allowed more than one argument.
Neal Norwitz0c766a02002-03-27 13:03:09 +00002136 An exception will now be raised if more than one argument is used.
2137
Gustavo Niemeyer17c5a332002-12-16 14:09:22 +00002138- Changed evaluation order of dictionary literals to conform to the
2139 general left to right evaluation order rule. Now {f1(): f2()} will
2140 evaluate f1 first.
Gustavo Niemeyer78429a62002-12-16 13:54:02 +00002141
Gustavo Niemeyer786ddb22002-12-16 18:12:53 +00002142- Fixed bug #521782: when a file was in non-blocking mode, file.read()
2143 could silently lose data or wrongly throw an unknown error.
2144
Neil Schemenauerb983aa02002-12-30 20:22:23 +00002145- The sq_repeat, sq_inplace_repeat, sq_concat and sq_inplace_concat
2146 slots are now always tried after trying the corresponding nb_* slots.
2147 This fixes a number of minor bugs (see bug #624807).
2148
Neal Norwitz74a032e2003-01-10 23:29:48 +00002149- Fix problem with dynamic loading on 64-bit AIX (see bug #639945).
2150
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002151Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002152-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002153
Raymond Hettinger9543b342003-01-18 23:22:20 +00002154- Added three operators to the operator module:
2155 operator.pow(a,b) which is equivalent to: a**b.
2156 operator.is_(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is b.
2157 operator.is_not(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is not b.
2158
Martin v. Löwis24a880b2002-12-31 12:55:15 +00002159- posix.openpty now works on all systems that have /dev/ptmx.
2160
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00002161- A module zipimport exists to support importing code from zip
2162 archives.
2163
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00002164- The new datetime module supplies classes for manipulating dates and
2165 times. The basic design came from the Zope "fishbowl process", and
2166 favors practical commercial applications over calendar esoterica. See
2167
2168 http://www.zope.org/Members/fdrake/DateTimeWiki/FrontPage
2169
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00002170- _tkinter now returns Tcl objects, instead of strings. Objects which
2171 have Python equivalents are converted to Python objects, other objects
2172 are wrapped. This can be configured through the wantobjects method,
Martin v. Löwis8c8aa5d2002-11-26 21:39:48 +00002173 or Tkinter.wantobjects.
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00002174
Barry Warsawc27f4bd2002-12-30 21:03:26 +00002175- The PyBSDDB wrapper around the Sleepycat Berkeley DB library has
2176 been added as the package bsddb. The traditional bsddb module is
2177 still available in source code, but not built automatically anymore,
2178 and is now named bsddb185. This supports Berkeley DB versions from
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00002179 3.0 to 4.1. For help converting your databases from the old module (which
2180 probably used an obsolete version of Berkeley DB) to the new module, see
2181 the db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py scripts described in the Tools/Demos
2182 section above.
Martin v. Löwisef546b32002-11-19 08:12:57 +00002183
Martin v. Löwis677bde22002-11-23 22:08:15 +00002184- unicodedata was updated to Unicode 3.2. It supports normalization
2185 and names for Hangul syllables and CJK unified ideographs.
Martin v. Löwis7d41e292002-11-23 12:22:32 +00002186
Neal Norwitz94a83fd2002-11-02 17:46:24 +00002187- resource.getrlimit() now returns longs instead of ints.
2188
Martin v. Löwis080689c2002-10-26 14:42:02 +00002189- readline now dynamically adjusts its input/output stream if
2190 sys.stdin/stdout changes.
2191
Guido van Rossumba602972002-10-01 18:18:58 +00002192- The _tkinter module (and hence Tkinter) has dropped support for
2193 Tcl/Tk 8.0 and 8.1. Only Tcl/Tk versions 8.2, 8.3 and 8.4 are
2194 supported.
2195
Martin v. Löwis658009a2002-09-16 17:26:24 +00002196- cPickle.BadPickleGet is now a class.
2197
Martin v. Löwisa19bfe02002-10-16 18:28:36 +00002198- The time stamps in os.stat_result are floating point numbers
2199 after stat_float_times has been called.
Martin v. Löwis94717ed2002-09-09 14:24:16 +00002200
Neal Norwitzb5673922002-09-05 21:48:07 +00002201- If the size passed to mmap.mmap() is larger than the length of the
2202 file on non-Windows platforms, a ValueError is raised. [SF bug 585792]
2203
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00002204- The xreadlines module is slated for obsolescence.
2205
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00002206- The strptime function in the time module is now always available (a
2207 Python implementation is used when the C library doesn't define it).
2208
Guido van Rossum9562bcf2002-06-14 21:31:18 +00002209- The 'new' module is no longer an extension, but a Python module that
2210 only exists for backwards compatibility. Its contents are no longer
2211 functions but callable type objects.
2212
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00002213- The bsddb.*open functions can now take 'None' as a filename.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00002214 This will create a temporary in-memory bsddb that won't be
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00002215 written to disk.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00002216
Martin v. Löwisb96152c2002-12-31 13:20:15 +00002217- posix.getloadavg, posix.lchown, posix.killpg, posix.mknod, and
2218 posix.getpgid have been added where available.
Martin v. Löwis06a83e92002-04-14 10:19:44 +00002219
Martin v. Löwisf0a46682002-11-03 17:20:12 +00002220- The locale module now exposes the C library's gettext interface. It
2221 also has a new function getpreferredencoding.
Martin v. Löwis2e64c342002-03-27 18:49:02 +00002222
Tim Petersfbf74f22002-03-14 19:06:01 +00002223- A security hole ("double free") was found in zlib-1.1.3, a popular
2224 third party compression library used by some Python modules. The
2225 hole was quickly plugged in zlib-1.1.4, and the Windows build of
2226 Python now ships with zlib-1.1.4.
2227
Martin v. Löwis688357e2002-04-08 21:28:20 +00002228- pwd, grp, and resource return enhanced tuples now, with symbolic
2229 field names.
Martin v. Löwis29001ff2002-03-01 10:47:37 +00002230
Martin v. Löwis99866332002-03-01 10:27:01 +00002231- array.array is now a type object. A new format character
2232 'u' indicates Py_UNICODE arrays. For those, .tounicode and
2233 .fromunicode methods are available. Arrays now support __iadd__
2234 and __imul__.
2235
Neal Norwitze790eae2002-01-01 21:14:12 +00002236- dl now builds on every system that has dlfcn.h. Failure in case
Martin v. Löwis93227272002-01-01 20:18:30 +00002237 of sizeof(int)!=sizeof(long)!=sizeof(void*) is delayed until dl.open
2238 is called.
2239
Skip Montanaro8e790e72002-09-03 13:25:17 +00002240- The sys module acquired a new attribute, api_version, which evaluates
2241 to the value of the PYTHON_API_VERSION macro with which the
2242 interpreter was compiled.
2243
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00002244- Fixed bug #470582: sre module would return a tuple (None, 'a', 'ab')
2245 when applying the regular expression '^((a)c)?(ab)$' on 'ab'. It now
2246 returns (None, None, 'ab'), as expected. Also fixed handling of
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00002247 lastindex/lastgroup match attributes in similar cases. For example,
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00002248 when running the expression r'(a)(b)?b' over 'ab', lastindex must be
2249 1, not 2.
2250
Gustavo Niemeyerc523b042002-11-07 03:28:56 +00002251- Fixed bug #581080: sre scanner was not checking the buffer limit
2252 before increasing the current pointer. This was creating an infinite
2253 loop in the search function, once the pointer exceeded the buffer
2254 limit.
2255
Thomas Heller95cb7e42002-11-07 16:23:55 +00002256- The os.fdopen function now enforces a file mode starting with the
2257 letter 'r', 'w' or 'a', otherwise a ValueError is raised. This fixes
2258 bug #623464.
2259
Greg Ward6c58d462003-01-03 18:02:15 +00002260- The linuxaudiodev module is now deprecated; it is being replaced by
2261 ossaudiodev. The interface has been extended to cover a lot more of
2262 OSS (see www.opensound.com), including most DSP ioctls and the
2263 OSS mixer API. Documentation forthcoming in 2.3a2.
2264
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002265Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002266-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002267
Guido van Rossum747f8062003-01-03 16:33:49 +00002268- imaplib.py now supports SSL (Tino Lange and Piers Lauder).
2269
Just van Rossum5e156ad2002-12-31 16:38:01 +00002270- Freeze's modulefinder.py has been moved to the standard library;
2271 slightly improved so it will issue less false missing submodule
2272 reports (see sf path #643711 for details). Documentation will follow
2273 with Python 2.3a2.
2274
Martin v. Löwis96a60e42002-12-31 13:11:54 +00002275- os.path exposes getctime.
2276
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002277- unittest.py now has two additional methods called assertAlmostEqual()
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002278 and failIfAlmostEqual(). They implement an approximate comparison
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002279 by rounding the difference between the two arguments and comparing
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002280 the result to zero. Approximate comparison is essential for
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002281 unit tests of floating point results.
2282
Raymond Hettingere11b5102002-12-25 16:37:19 +00002283- calendar.py now depends on the new datetime module rather than
2284 the time module. As a result, the range of allowable dates
2285 has been increased.
2286
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00002287- pdb has a new 'j(ump)' command to select the next line to be
2288 executed.
2289
Thomas Heller1b3b49d2002-12-12 19:13:44 +00002290- The distutils created windows installers now can run a
2291 postinstallation script.
2292
Martin v. Löwis4581cfa2002-11-22 08:23:09 +00002293- doctest.testmod can now be called without argument, which means to
2294 test the current module.
2295
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002296- When canceling a server that implemented threading with a keyboard
Martin v. Löwisf86e8ef2002-11-22 08:08:44 +00002297 interrupt, the server would shut down but not terminate (waiting on
2298 client threads). A new member variable, daemon_threads, was added to
2299 the ThreadingMixIn class in SocketServer.py to make it explicit that
2300 this behavior needs to be controlled.
2301
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00002302- A new module, optparse, provides a fancy alternative to getopt for
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00002303 command line parsing. It is a slightly modified version of Greg
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00002304 Ward's Optik package.
2305
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00002306- UserDict.py now defines a DictMixin class which defines all dictionary
2307 methods for classes that already have a minimum mapping interface.
2308 This greatly simplifies writing classes that need to be substitutable
2309 for dictionaries (such as the shelve module).
2310
2311- shelve.py now subclasses from UserDict.DictMixin. Now shelve supports
2312 all dictionary methods. This eases the transition to persistent
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00002313 storage for scripts originally written with dictionaries in mind.
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00002314
Skip Montanaro3bf99e32002-12-08 18:36:24 +00002315- shelve.open and the various classes in shelve.py now accept an optional
2316 binary flag, which defaults to False. If True, the values stored in the
2317 shelf are binary pickles.
2318
Guido van Rossumfda06742002-11-13 16:29:18 +00002319- A new package, logging, implements the logging API defined by PEP
2320 282. The code is written by Vinay Sajip.
2321
Walter Dörwald4dbf1922002-11-06 16:53:44 +00002322- StreamReader, StreamReaderWriter and StreamRecoder in the codecs
2323 modules are iterators now.
2324
Tim Peters9288f952002-11-05 20:38:55 +00002325- gzip.py now handles files exceeding 2GB. Files over 4GB also work
2326 now (provided the OS supports it, and Python is configured with large
2327 file support), but in that case the underlying gzip file format can
2328 record only the least-significant 32 bits of the file size, so that
2329 some tools working with gzipped files may report an incorrect file
2330 size.
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00002331
Martin v. Löwis74b51ac2002-10-26 14:50:45 +00002332- xml.sax.saxutils.unescape has been added, to replace entity references
2333 with their entity value.
2334
Martin v. Löwis77ac4292002-10-15 15:11:13 +00002335- Queue.Queue.{put,get} now support an optional timeout argument.
2336
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00002337- Various features of Tk 8.4 are exposed in Tkinter.py. The multiple
2338 option of tkFileDialog is exposed as function askopenfile{,name}s.
Martin v. Löwis2ec36272002-10-13 10:22:08 +00002339
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00002340- Various configure methods of Tkinter have been stream-lined, so that
2341 tag_configure, image_configure, window_configure now return a
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00002342 dictionary when invoked with no argument.
Martin v. Löwis6ce13152002-10-10 14:36:13 +00002343
Guido van Rossum2b492b62002-10-09 21:40:48 +00002344- Importing the readline module now no longer has the side effect of
2345 calling setlocale(LC_CTYPE, ""). The initial "C" locale, or
2346 whatever locale is explicitly set by the user, is preserved. If you
2347 want repr() of 8-bit strings in your preferred encoding to preserve
2348 all printable characters of that encoding, you have to add the
2349 following code to your $PYTHONSTARTUP file or to your application's
2350 main():
2351
2352 import locale
2353 locale.setlocale(locale.LC_CTYPE, "")
2354
Martin v. Löwise9ce0b02002-10-07 13:23:24 +00002355- shutil.move was added. shutil.copytree now reports errors as an
2356 exception at the end, instead of printing error messages.
2357
Marc-André Lemburg97047e22002-10-04 11:55:21 +00002358- Encoding name normalization was generalized to not only
2359 replace hyphens with underscores, but also all other non-alphanumeric
2360 characters (with the exception of the dot which is used for Python
2361 package names during lookup). The aliases.py mapping was updated
2362 to the new standard.
2363
Walter Dörwald5ccaf8f2002-09-06 16:15:58 +00002364- mimetypes has two new functions: guess_all_extensions() which
2365 returns a list of all known extensions for a mime type, and
2366 add_type() which adds one mapping between a mime type and
2367 an extension to the database.
2368
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00002369- New module: sets, defines the class Set that implements a mutable
2370 set type using the keys of a dict to represent the set. There's
2371 also a class ImmutableSet which is useful when you need sets of sets
2372 or when you need to use sets as dict keys, and a class BaseSet which
Raymond Hettingeref8b9c62002-12-09 08:56:06 +00002373 is the base class of the two.
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00002374
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00002375- Added random.sample(population,k) for random sampling without replacement.
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00002376 Returns a k length list of unique elements chosen from the population.
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00002377
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00002378- random.randrange(-sys.maxint-1, sys.maxint) no longer raises
2379 OverflowError. That is, it now accepts any combination of 'start'
2380 and 'stop' arguments so long as each is in the range of Python's
2381 bounded integers.
2382
Raymond Hettinger40f62172002-12-29 23:03:38 +00002383- Thanks to Raymond Hettinger, random.random() now uses a new core
2384 generator. The Mersenne Twister algorithm is implemented in C,
2385 threadsafe, faster than the previous generator, has an astronomically
2386 large period (2**19937-1), creates random floats to full 53-bit
2387 precision, and may be the most widely tested random number generator
2388 in existence.
2389
2390 The random.jumpahead(n) method has different semantics for the new
2391 generator. Instead of jumping n steps ahead, it uses n and the
2392 existing state to create a new state. This means that jumpahead()
2393 continues to support multi-threaded code needing generators of
2394 non-overlapping sequences. However, it will break code which relies
2395 on jumpahead moving a specific number of steps forward.
2396
2397 The attributes random.whseed and random.__whseed have no meaning for
2398 the new generator. Code using these attributes should switch to a
2399 new class, random.WichmannHill which is provided for backward
2400 compatibility and to make an alternate generator available.
2401
Guido van Rossum4a57c332002-08-02 18:05:20 +00002402- New "algorithms" module: heapq, implements a heap queue. Thanks to
2403 Kevin O'Connor for the code and François Pinard for an entertaining
2404 write-up explaining the theory and practical uses of heaps.
2405
Marc-André Lemburg58e2ff22002-07-12 14:40:04 +00002406- New encoding for the Palm OS character set: palmos.
2407
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00002408- binascii.crc32() and the zipfile module had problems on some 64-bit
2409 platforms. These have been fixed. On a platform with 8-byte C longs,
2410 crc32() now returns a signed-extended 4-byte result, so that its value
2411 as a Python int is equal to the value computed a 32-bit platform.
2412
Martin v. Löwis7d650ca2002-06-30 15:05:00 +00002413- xml.dom.minidom.toxml and toprettyxml now take an optional encoding
2414 argument.
2415
Guido van Rossum9f7549b2002-06-10 21:39:42 +00002416- Some fixes in the copy module: when an object is copied through its
2417 __reduce__ method, there was no check for a __setstate__ method on
2418 the result [SF patch 565085]; deepcopy should treat instances of
2419 custom metaclasses the same way it treats instances of type 'type'
2420 [SF patch 560794].
2421
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00002422- Sockets now support timeout mode. After s.settimeout(T), where T is
2423 a float expressing seconds, subsequent operations raise an exception
2424 if they cannot be completed within T seconds. To disable timeout
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00002425 mode, use s.settimeout(None). There's also a module function,
2426 socket.setdefaulttimeout(T), which sets the default for all sockets
2427 created henceforth.
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00002428
2429- getopt.gnu_getopt was added. This supports GNU-style option
2430 processing, where options can be mixed with non-option arguments.
Martin v. Löwis446a25f2002-06-06 10:58:36 +00002431
Michael W. Hudsonb0dc1a32002-06-04 18:27:35 +00002432- Stop using strings for exceptions. String objects used for
2433 exceptions are now classes deriving from Exception. The objects
2434 changed were: Tkinter.TclError, bdb.BdbQuit, macpath.norm_error,
2435 tabnanny.NannyNag, and xdrlib.Error.
Neal Norwitzb5b5a262002-06-04 17:14:07 +00002436
Walter Dörwald474458d2002-06-04 15:16:29 +00002437- Constants BOM_UTF8, BOM_UTF16, BOM_UTF16_LE, BOM_UTF16_BE,
2438 BOM_UTF32, BOM_UTF32_LE and BOM_UTF32_BE that represent the Byte
2439 Order Mark in UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 encodings for little and
2440 big endian systems were added to the codecs module. The old names
2441 BOM32_* and BOM64_* were off by a factor of 2.
2442
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00002443- Added conversion functions math.degrees() and math.radians().
Raymond Hettinger87f59ee2002-05-13 04:17:32 +00002444
Raymond Hettinger866964c2002-12-14 19:51:34 +00002445- math.log() now takes an optional argument: math.log(x[, base]).
2446
Raymond Hettinger9b1df1d2002-05-12 06:07:21 +00002447- ftplib.retrlines() now tests for callback is None rather than testing
2448 for False. Was causing an error when given a callback object which
2449 was callable but also returned len() as zero. The change may
2450 create new breakage if the caller relied on the undocumented behavior
2451 and called with callback set to [] or some other False value not
2452 identical to None.
2453
Tim Peters46c04e12002-05-05 20:40:00 +00002454- random.gauss() uses a piece of hidden state used by nothing else,
2455 and the .seed() and .whseed() methods failed to reset it. In other
2456 words, setting the seed didn't completely determine the sequence of
2457 results produced by random.gauss(). It does now. Programs repeatedly
2458 mixing calls to a seed method with calls to gauss() may see different
2459 results now.
2460
Fred Drake7f781c92002-05-01 20:33:53 +00002461- The pickle.Pickler class grew a clear_memo() method to mimic that
2462 provided by cPickle.Pickler.
2463
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00002464- difflib's SequenceMatcher class now does a dynamic analysis of
2465 which elements are so frequent as to constitute noise. For
2466 comparing files as sequences of lines, this generally works better
2467 than the IS_LINE_JUNK function, and function ndiff's linejunk
2468 argument defaults to None now as a result. A happy benefit is
2469 that SequenceMatcher may run much faster now when applied
2470 to large files with many duplicate lines (for example, C program
2471 text with lots of repeated "}" and "return NULL;" lines).
2472
Guido van Rossum256705b2002-04-23 13:29:43 +00002473- New Text.dump() method in Tkinter module.
2474
Marc-André Lemburg1ec71ea2002-04-17 20:33:40 +00002475- New distutils commands for building packagers were added to
2476 support pkgtool on Solaris and swinstall on HP-UX.
2477
2478- distutils now has a new abstract binary packager base class
2479 command/bdist_packager, which simplifies writing packagers.
2480 This will hopefully provide the missing bits to encourage
2481 people to submit more packagers, e.g. for Debian, FreeBSD
2482 and other systems.
2483
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00002484- The UTF-16, -LE and -BE stream readers now raise a
2485 NotImplementedError for all calls to .readline(). Previously, they
2486 used to just produce garbage or fail with an encoding error --
2487 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 +00002488 work well with these.
2489
Martin v. Löwis5c137c22002-03-18 12:44:08 +00002490- compileall now supports quiet operation.
2491
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002492- The BaseHTTPServer now implements optional HTTP/1.1 persistent
Martin v. Löwis587c98c2002-03-17 18:37:22 +00002493 connections.
2494
Marc-André Lemburga5d2b4c2002-02-16 18:23:30 +00002495- socket module: the SSL support was broken out of the main
2496 _socket module C helper and placed into a new _ssl helper
2497 which now gets imported by socket.py if available and working.
2498
Marc-André Lemburg37aa5802002-02-10 21:42:47 +00002499- encodings package: added aliases for all supported IANA character
2500 sets
2501
Guido van Rossum606fe4e2001-12-28 20:57:14 +00002502- ftplib: to safeguard the user's privacy, anonymous login will use
2503 "anonymous@" as default password, rather than the real user and host
2504 name.
2505
Fred Drake36736122002-01-10 13:50:31 +00002506- webbrowser: tightened up the command passed to os.system() so that
2507 arbitrary shell code can't be executed because a bogus URL was
2508 passed in.
2509
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00002510- gettext.translation has an optional fallback argument, and
Martin v. Löwisa55ffae2002-01-11 06:58:49 +00002511 gettext.find an optional all argument. Translations will now fallback
Martin v. Löwisd8996052002-11-21 21:45:32 +00002512 on a per-message basis. The module supports plural forms, by means
2513 of gettext.[d]ngettext and Translation.[u]ngettext.
Martin v. Löwis1be64192002-01-11 06:33:28 +00002514
Martin v. Löwis9668b932002-01-12 11:27:42 +00002515- distutils bdist commands now offer a --skip-build option.
2516
Walter Dörwaldb25c2b02002-03-21 10:38:40 +00002517- warnings.warn now accepts a Warning instance as first argument.
2518
Fred Drakefed7e852002-04-04 19:36:15 +00002519- The xml.sax.expatreader.ExpatParser class will no longer create
2520 circular references by using itself as the locator that gets passed
2521 to the content handler implementation. [SF bug #535474]
2522
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00002523- The email.Parser.Parser class now properly parses strings regardless
2524 of their line endings, which can be any of \r, \n, or \r\n (CR, LF,
2525 or CRLF). Also, the Header class's constructor default arguments
2526 has changed slightly so that an explicit maxlinelen value is always
Barry Warsaw497e5c42002-12-30 19:27:08 +00002527 honored, and so unicode conversion error handling can be specified.
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00002528
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002529- distutils' build_ext command now links C++ extensions with the C++
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00002530 compiler available in the Makefile or CXX environment variable, if
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002531 running under \*nix.
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00002532
2533- New module bz2: provides a comprehensive interface for the bz2 compression
2534 library. It implements a complete file interface, one-shot (de)compression
2535 functions, and types for sequential (de)compression.
2536
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002537- New pdb command 'pp' which is like 'p' except that it pretty-prints
Barry Warsaw5d8d6182002-11-05 22:41:33 +00002538 the value of its expression argument.
2539
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00002540- Now bdist_rpm distutils command understands a verify_script option in
2541 the config file, including the contents of the referred filename in
2542 the "%verifyscript" section of the rpm spec file.
2543
Gustavo Niemeyer1456fde2002-11-25 17:25:04 +00002544- Fixed bug #495695: webbrowser module would run graphic browsers in a
2545 unix environment even if DISPLAY was not set. Also, support for
2546 skipstone browser was included.
2547
Gustavo Niemeyerd5ae01a2002-12-16 13:11:57 +00002548- Fixed bug #636769: rexec would run unallowed code if subclasses of
2549 strings were used as parameters for certain functions.
2550
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002551Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002552-----------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002553
Martin v. Löwis0d1fdea2002-11-22 08:36:54 +00002554- pygettext.py now supports globbing on Windows, and accepts module
2555 names in addition to accepting file names.
2556
Guido van Rossum923e4ef2002-09-17 20:58:59 +00002557- The SGI demos (Demo/sgi) have been removed. Nobody thought they
2558 were interesting any more. (The SGI library modules and extensions
2559 are still there; it is believed that at least some of these are
2560 still used and useful.)
2561
Fred Drake40813b12002-08-05 15:24:19 +00002562- IDLE supports the new encoding declarations (PEP 263); it can also
2563 deal with legacy 8-bit files if they use the locale's encoding. It
2564 allows non-ASCII strings in the interactive shell and executes them
2565 in the locale's encoding.
Martin v. Löwis98ce7b72002-08-05 15:11:26 +00002566
Marc-André Lemburg46260092002-04-04 16:17:11 +00002567- freeze.py now produces binaries which can import shared modules,
2568 unlike before when this failed due to missing symbol exports in
2569 the generated binary.
2570
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002571Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002572-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002573
Martin v. Löwisdc461752002-11-06 21:59:33 +00002574- On Unix, IDLE is now installed automatically.
2575
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00002576- The fpectl module is not built by default; it's dangerous or useless
2577 except in the hands of experts.
2578
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00002579- The public Python C API will generally be declared using PyAPI_FUNC
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00002580 and PyAPI_DATA macros, while Python extension module init functions
2581 will be declared with PyMODINIT_FUNC. DL_EXPORT/DL_IMPORT macros
2582 are deprecated.
Neal Norwitz1389f3e2002-07-22 13:21:10 +00002583
Tim Petersc6a3ff62002-07-08 22:11:52 +00002584- A bug was fixed that could cause COUNT_ALLOCS builds to segfault, or
2585 get into infinite loops, when a new-style class got garbage-collected.
2586 Unfortunately, to avoid this, the way COUNT_ALLOCS works requires
2587 that new-style classes be immortal in COUNT_ALLOCS builds. Note that
2588 COUNT_ALLOCS is not enabled by default, in either release or debug
2589 builds, and that new-style classes are immortal only in COUNT_ALLOCS
2590 builds.
2591
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00002592- Compiling out the cyclic garbage collector is no longer an option.
2593 The old symbol WITH_CYCLE_GC is now ignored, and Python.h arranges
2594 that it's always defined (for the benefit of any extension modules
2595 that may be conditionalizing on it). A bonus is that any extension
2596 type participating in cyclic gc can choose to participate in the
2597 Py_TRASHCAN mechanism now too; in the absence of cyclic gc, this used
2598 to require editing the core to teach the trashcan mechanism about the
2599 new type.
2600
Martin v. Löwis0cec0ff2002-07-28 16:33:45 +00002601- According to Annex F of the current C standard,
Tim Peters1de41bf2002-07-03 03:31:20 +00002602
2603 The Standard C macro HUGE_VAL and its float and long double analogs,
2604 HUGE_VALF and HUGE_VALL, expand to expressions whose values are
2605 positive infinities.
2606
2607 Python only uses the double HUGE_VAL, and only to #define its own symbol
2608 Py_HUGE_VAL. Some platforms have incorrect definitions for HUGE_VAL.
2609 pyport.h used to try to worm around that, but the workarounds triggered
2610 other bugs on other platforms, so we gave up. If your platform defines
2611 HUGE_VAL incorrectly, you'll need to #define Py_HUGE_VAL to something
2612 that works on your platform. The only instance of this I'm sure about
2613 is on an unknown subset of Cray systems, described here:
2614
2615 http://www.cray.com/swpubs/manuals/SN-2194_2.0/html-SN-2194_2.0/x3138.htm
2616
2617 Presumably 2.3a1 breaks such systems. If anyone uses such a system, help!
2618
Martin v. Löwisa3fb4f72002-06-09 13:33:54 +00002619- The configure option --without-doc-strings can be used to remove the
2620 doc strings from the builtin functions and modules; this reduces the
2621 size of the executable.
2622
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00002623- The universal newlines option (PEP 278) is on by default. On Unix
2624 it can be disabled by passing --without-universal-newlines to the
2625 configure script. On other platforms, remove
2626 WITH_UNIVERSAL_NEWLINES from pyconfig.h.
Tim Peters639295f2002-04-21 07:30:30 +00002627
Martin v. Löwis1142de32002-03-29 16:28:31 +00002628- On Unix, a shared libpython2.3.so can be created with --enable-shared.
2629
Tim Peters8deda702002-03-30 10:06:07 +00002630- All uses of the CACHE_HASH, INTERN_STRINGS, and DONT_SHARE_SHORT_STRINGS
2631 preprocessor symbols were eliminated. The internal decisions they
2632 controlled stopped being experimental long ago.
Tim Peters1f7df352002-03-29 03:29:08 +00002633
Fred Drake7d28b732002-05-02 21:17:00 +00002634- The tools used to build the documentation now work under Cygwin as
2635 well as Unix.
2636
Skip Montanaro57454e52002-06-14 20:30:31 +00002637- The bsddb and dbm module builds have been changed to try and avoid version
2638 skew problems and disable linkage with Berkeley DB 1.85 unless the
2639 installer knows what s/he's doing. See the section on building these
2640 modules in the README file for details.
2641
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002642C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002643-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002644
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00002645- PyNumber_Check() now returns true for string and unicode objects.
2646 This is a result of these types having a partially defined
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00002647 tp_as_number slot. (This is not a feature, but an indication that
Walter Dörwalda1a61f92002-11-19 21:20:25 +00002648 PyNumber_Check() is not very useful to determine numeric behavior.
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00002649 It may be deprecated.)
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00002650
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00002651- The string object's layout has changed: the pointer member
2652 ob_sinterned has been replaced by an int member ob_sstate. On some
2653 platforms (e.g. most 64-bit systems) this may change the offset of
2654 the ob_sval member, so as a precaution the API_VERSION has been
2655 incremented. The apparently unused feature of "indirect interned
2656 strings", supported by the ob_sinterned member, is gone. Interned
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002657 strings are now usually mortal; there is a new API,
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00002658 PyString_InternImmortal() that creates immortal interned strings.
2659 (The ob_sstate member can only take three values; however, while
2660 making it a char saves a few bytes per string object on average, in
2661 it also slowed things down a bit because ob_sval was no longer
2662 aligned.)
2663
Guido van Rossumfdb86482002-08-14 21:20:32 +00002664- The Py_InitModule*() functions now accept NULL for the 'methods'
2665 argument. Modules without global functions are becoming more common
2666 now that factories can be types rather than functions.
2667
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00002668- New C API PyUnicode_FromOrdinal() which exposes unichr() at C
2669 level.
2670
Thomas Heller085358a2002-07-29 14:27:41 +00002671- New functions PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErr() and
2672 PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErrWithFilename(). Similar to
2673 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErrWithFilename() and
2674 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErr(), but they allow to specify
2675 the exception type to raise. Available on Windows.
2676
Tim Peters7c321a82002-07-09 02:57:01 +00002677- Py_FatalError() is now declared as taking a const char* argument. It
2678 was previously declared without const. This should not affect working
2679 code.
2680
Martin v. Löwis01f94bd2002-05-08 08:44:21 +00002681- Added new macro PySequence_ITEM(o, i) that directly calls
2682 sq_item without rechecking that o is a sequence and without
2683 adjusting for negative indices.
2684
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00002685- PyRange_New() now raises ValueError if the fourth argument is not 1.
2686 This is part of the removal of deprecated features of the xrange
2687 object.
2688
Guido van Rossum517c7d42002-04-26 02:49:14 +00002689- PyNumber_Coerce() and PyNumber_CoerceEx() now also invoke the type's
2690 coercion if both arguments have the same type but this type has the
2691 CHECKTYPES flag set. This is to better support proxies.
2692
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00002693- The type of tp_free has been changed from "``void (*)(PyObject *)``" to
2694 "``void (*)(void *)``".
Neil Schemenauer9344b142002-04-12 23:00:08 +00002695
2696- PyObject_Del, PyObject_GC_Del are now functions instead of macros.
2697
Guido van Rossum0986d822002-04-08 01:38:42 +00002698- A type can now inherit its metatype from its base type. Previously,
2699 when PyType_Ready() was called, if ob_type was found to be NULL, it
2700 was always set to &PyType_Type; now it is set to base->ob_type,
2701 where base is tp_base, defaulting to &PyObject_Type.
2702
2703- PyType_Ready() accidentally did not inherit tp_is_gc; now it does.
2704
Neil Schemenauerc9abc1d2002-05-08 14:14:41 +00002705- The PyCore_* family of APIs have been removed.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00002706
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002707- The "u#" parser marker will now pass through Unicode objects as-is
Marc-André Lemburg3e3eacb2002-01-09 16:21:27 +00002708 without going through the buffer API.
2709
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002710- The enumerators of cmp_op have been renamed to use the prefix ``PyCmp_``.
Martin v. Löwis7198a522002-01-01 19:59:11 +00002711
Tim Peters10a3bb52001-12-25 19:07:38 +00002712- An old #define of ANY as void has been removed from pyport.h. This
2713 hasn't been used since Python's pre-ANSI days, and the #define has
2714 been marked as obsolete since then. SF bug 495548 says it created
2715 conflicts with other packages, so keeping it around wasn't harmless.
2716
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002717- Because Python's magic number scheme broke on January 1st, we decided
2718 to stop Python development. Thanks for all the fish!
2719
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00002720- Some of us don't like fish, so we changed Python's magic number
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00002721 scheme to a new one. See Python/import.c for details.
2722
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002723New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002724-------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002725
Martin v. Löwis79acb9e2002-12-06 12:48:53 +00002726- OpenVMS is now supported.
2727
Martin v. Löwisf90ae202002-06-11 06:22:31 +00002728- AtheOS is now supported.
2729
Andrew MacIntyre161ad0e2002-08-04 07:25:58 +00002730- the EMX runtime environment on OS/2 is now supported.
2731
Martin v. Löwisa6e97582002-01-01 18:41:33 +00002732- GNU/Hurd is now supported.
2733
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002734Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002735-----
2736
Fred Drake4dd0f7e2002-11-26 21:44:56 +00002737- The regrtest.py script's -u option now provides a way to say "allow
2738 all resources except this one." For example, to allow everything
2739 except bsddb, give the option '-uall,-bsddb'.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002740
2741Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002742-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002743
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00002744- The Windows distribution now ships with version 4.0.14 of the
2745 Sleepycat Berkeley database library. This should be a huge
2746 improvement over the previous Berkeley DB 1.85, which had many
2747 bugs.
2748 XXX What are the licensing issues here?
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002749 XXX If a user has a database created with a previous version of
Tim Peters84c7a3f2002-11-23 18:48:06 +00002750 XXX Python, what must they do to convert it?
2751 XXX I'm still not sure how to link this thing (see PCbuild/readme.txt).
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00002752 XXX The version # is likely to change before 2.3a1.
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00002753
2754- The Windows distribution now ships with a Secure Sockets Library (SLL)
Mark Hammondc3de0082002-12-03 06:16:08 +00002755 module (_ssl.pyd)
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00002756
Tim Peters857fb4c2002-11-14 23:31:58 +00002757- The Windows distribution now ships with Tcl/Tk version 8.4.1 (it
2758 previously shipped with Tcl/Tk 8.3.2).
2759
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00002760- When Python is built under a Microsoft compiler, sys.version now
2761 includes the compiler version number (_MSC_VER). For example, under
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002762 MSVC 6, sys.version contains the substring "MSC v.1200 ". 1200 is
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00002763 the value of _MSC_VER under MSVC 6.
2764
Tim Peters08e72952002-04-16 20:48:01 +00002765- Sometimes the uninstall executable (UNWISE.EXE) vanishes. One cause
2766 of that has been fixed in the installer (disabled Wise's "delete in-
2767 use files" uninstall option).
2768
Guido van Rossum181e41a2002-04-06 00:23:25 +00002769- Fixed a bug in urllib's proxy handling in Windows. [SF bug #503031]
2770
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00002771- The installer now installs Start menu shortcuts under (the local
2772 equivalent of) "All Users" when doing an Admin install.
2773
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00002774- file.truncate([newsize]) now works on Windows for all newsize values.
2775 It used to fail if newsize didn't fit in 32 bits, reflecting a
2776 limitation of MS _chsize (which is no longer used).
2777
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00002778- os.waitpid() is now implemented for Windows, and can be used to block
2779 until a specified process exits. This is similar to, but not exactly
2780 the same as, os.waitpid() on POSIX systems. If you're waiting for
2781 a specific process whose pid was obtained from one of the spawn()
2782 functions, the same Python os.waitpid() code works across platforms.
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00002783 See the docs for details. The docs were changed to clarify that
2784 spawn functions return, and waitpid requires, a process handle on
2785 Windows (not the same thing as a Windows process id).
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00002786
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00002787- New tempfile.TemporaryFile implementation for Windows: this doesn't
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002788 need a TemporaryFileWrapper wrapper anymore, and should be immune
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00002789 to a nasty problem: before 2.3, if you got a temp file on Windows, it
2790 got wrapped in an object whose close() method first closed the
2791 underlying file, then deleted the file. This usually worked fine.
2792 However, the spawn family of functions on Windows create (at a low C
2793 level) the same set of open files in the spawned process Q as were
2794 open in the spawning process P. If a temp file f was among them, then
2795 doing f.close() in P first closed P's C-level file handle on f, but Q's
2796 C-level file handle on f remained open, so the attempt in P to delete f
2797 blew up with a "Permission denied" error (Windows doesn't allow
2798 deleting open files). This was surprising, subtle, and difficult to
2799 work around.
2800
2801- The os module now exports all the symbolic constants usable with the
2802 low-level os.open() on Windows: the new constants in 2.3 are
2803 O_NOINHERIT, O_SHORT_LIVED, O_TEMPORARY, O_RANDOM and O_SEQUENTIAL.
2804 The others were also available in 2.2: O_APPEND, O_BINARY, O_CREAT,
2805 O_EXCL, O_RDONLY, O_RDWR, O_TEXT, O_TRUNC and O_WRONLY. Contrary
2806 to Microsoft docs, O_SHORT_LIVED does not seem to imply O_TEMPORARY
2807 (so specify both if you want both; note that neither is useful unless
2808 specified with O_CREAT too).
2809
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002810Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002811----
2812
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002813- Mac/Relnotes is gone, the release notes are now here.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002814
Just van Rossume1ebd802003-02-10 10:06:18 +00002815- Python (the OSX-only, unix-based version, not the OS9-compatible CFM
2816 version) now fully supports unicode strings as arguments to various file
2817 system calls, eg. open(), file(), os.stat() and os.listdir().
2818
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002819- The current naming convention for Python on the Macintosh is that MacPython
2820 refers to the unix-based OSX-only version, and MacPython-OS9 refers to the
2821 CFM-based version that runs on both OS9 and OSX.
2822
2823- All MacPython-OS9 functionality is now available in an OSX unix build,
2824 including the Carbon modules, the IDE, OSA support, etc. A lot of this
2825 will only work correctly in a framework build, though, because you cannot
2826 talk to the window manager unless your application is run from a .app
2827 bundle. There is a command line tool "pythonw" that runs your script
2828 with an interpreter living in such a .app bundle, this interpreter should
2829 be used to run any Python script using the window manager (including
2830 Tkinter or wxPython scripts).
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00002831
Jack Jansen8bb80db2002-12-30 22:42:43 +00002832- Most of Mac/Lib has moved to Lib/plat-mac, which is again used both in
2833 MacPython-OSX and MacPython-OS9. The only modules remaining in Mac/Lib
2834 are specifically for MacPython-OS9 (CFM support, preference resources, etc).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002835
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002836- A new utility PythonLauncher will start a Python interpreter when a .py or
2837 .pyw script is double-clicked in the Finder. By default .py scripts are
2838 run with a normal Python interpreter in a Terminal window and .pyw
2839 files are run with a window-aware pythonw interpreter without a Terminal
2840 window, but all this can be customized.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002841
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002842- MacPython-OS9 is now Carbon-only, so it runs on Mac OS 9 or Mac OS X and
2843 possibly on Mac OS 8.6 with the right CarbonLib installed, but not on earlier
2844 releases.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002845
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002846- Many tools such as BuildApplet.py and gensuitemodule.py now support a command
2847 line interface too.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002848
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002849- All the Carbon classes are now PEP253 compliant, meaning that you can
2850 subclass them from Python. Most of the attributes have gone, you should
2851 now use the accessor function call API, which is also what Apple's
2852 documentation uses. Some attributes such as grafport.visRgn are still
2853 available for convenience.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002854
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002855- New Carbon modules File (implementing the APIs in Files.h and Aliases.h)
2856 and Folder (APIs from Folders.h). The old macfs builtin module is
2857 gone, and replaced by a Python wrapper around the new modules.
2858
2859- Pathname handling should now be fully consistent: MacPython-OSX always uses
2860 unix pathnames and MacPython-OS9 always uses colon-separated Mac pathnames
2861 (also when running on Mac OS X).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002862
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002863- New Carbon modules Help and AH give access to the Carbon Help Manager.
2864 There are hooks in the IDE to allow accessing the Python documentation
2865 (and Apple's Carbon and Cocoa documentation) through the Help Viewer.
2866 See Mac/OSX/README for converting the Python documentation to a
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002867 Help Viewer compatible form and installing it.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002868
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002869- OSA support has been redesigned and the generated Python classes now
2870 mirror the inheritance defined by the underlying OSA classes.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002871
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002872- MacPython no longer maps both \r and \n to \n on input for any text file.
2873 This feature has been replaced by universal newline support (PEP278).
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00002874
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00002875- The default encoding for Python sourcefiles in MacPython-OS9 is no longer
Guido van Rossum16c85172003-02-20 01:52:48 +00002876 mac-roman (or whatever your local Mac encoding was) but "ascii", like on
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00002877 other platforms. If you really need sourcefiles with Mac characters in them
2878 you can change this in site.py.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002879
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002880
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002881What's New in Python 2.2 final?
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002882===============================
2883
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002884*Release date: 21-Dec-2001*
2885
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002886Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002887--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002888
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002889- pickle.py, cPickle: allow pickling instances of new-style classes
2890 with a custom metaclass.
2891
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002892Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002893-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002894
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002895- weakref proxy object: when comparing, unwrap both arguments if both
2896 are proxies.
2897
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002898Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002899-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002900
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002901- binascii.b2a_base64(): fix a potential buffer overrun when encoding
2902 very short strings.
2903
2904- cPickle: the obscure "fast" mode was suspected of causing stack
2905 overflows on the Mac. Hopefully fixed this by setting the recursion
2906 limit much smaller. If the limit is too low (it only affects
2907 performance), you can change it by defining PY_CPICKLE_FAST_LIMIT
2908 when compiling cPickle.c (or in pyconfig.h).
2909
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002910Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002911-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002912
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002913- dumbdbm.py: fixed a dumb old bug (the file didn't get synched at
2914 close or delete time).
2915
2916- rfc822.py: fixed a bug where the address '<>' was converted to None
2917 instead of an empty string (also fixes the email.Utils module).
2918
2919- xmlrpclib.py: version 1.0.0; uses precision for doubles.
2920
2921- test suite: the pickle and cPickle tests were not executing any code
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002922 when run from the standard regression test.
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002923
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002924Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002925-----------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002926
2927Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002928-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002929
2930C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002931-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002932
2933New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002934-------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002935
2936Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002937-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002938
2939Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002940-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002941
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002942- distutils package: fixed broken Windows installers (bdist_wininst).
2943
2944- tempfile.py: prevent mysterious warnings when TemporaryFileWrapper
2945 instances are deleted at process exit time.
2946
2947- socket.py: prevent mysterious warnings when socket instances are
2948 deleted at process exit time.
2949
2950- posixmodule.c: fix a Windows crash with stat() of a filename ending
2951 in backslash.
2952
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002953Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002954----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002955
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002956- The Carbon toolbox modules have been upgraded to Universal Headers
2957 3.4, and experimental CoreGraphics and CarbonEvents modules have
2958 been added. All only for framework-enabled MacOSX.
2959
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002960
Tim Peters6272dfd2001-12-13 19:34:00 +00002961What's New in Python 2.2c1?
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002962===========================
2963
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002964*Release date: 14-Dec-2001*
2965
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002966Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002967--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002968
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00002969- Guido's tutorial introduction to the new type/class features has
2970 been extensively updated. See
2971
2972 http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html
2973
2974 That remains the primary documentation in this area.
2975
Guido van Rossum33bab012001-12-05 22:45:48 +00002976- Fixed a leak: instance variables declared with __slots__ were never
2977 deleted!
2978
Guido van Rossum4b800852001-12-03 00:54:52 +00002979- The "delete attribute" method of descriptor objects is called
2980 __delete__, not __del__. In previous releases, it was mistakenly
2981 called __del__, which created an unfortunate overloading condition
2982 with finalizers. (The "get attribute" and "set attribute" methods
2983 are still called __get__ and __set__, respectively.)
2984
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00002985- Some subtle issues with the super built-in were fixed:
2986
2987 (a) When super itself is subclassed, its __get__ method would still
2988 return an instance of the base class (i.e., of super).
2989
2990 (b) super(C, C()).__class__ would return C rather than super. This
2991 is confusing. To fix this, I decided to change the semantics of
2992 super so that it only applies to code attributes, not to data
2993 attributes. After all, overriding data attributes is not
2994 supported anyway.
2995
2996 (c) The __get__ method didn't check whether the argument was an
2997 instance of the type used in creation of the super instance.
2998
Guido van Rossumcd7b7d62001-12-04 21:02:07 +00002999- Previously, hash() of an instance of a subclass of a mutable type
3000 (list or dictionary) would return some value, rather than raising
3001 TypeError. This has been fixed. Also, directly calling
3002 dict.__hash__ and list.__hash__ now raises the same TypeError
3003 (previously, these were the same as object.__hash__).
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00003004
Guido van Rossumd331cb52001-12-05 19:46:42 +00003005- New-style objects now support deleting their __dict__. This is for
3006 all intents and purposes equivalent to assigning a brand new empty
3007 dictionary, but saves space if the object is not used further.
3008
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003009Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003010-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003011
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00003012- -Qnew now works as documented in PEP 238: when -Qnew is passed on
3013 the command line, all occurrences of "/" use true division instead
3014 of classic division. See the PEP for details. Note that "all"
3015 means all instances in library and 3rd-party modules, as well as in
3016 your own code. As the PEP says, -Qnew is intended for use only in
3017 educational environments with control over the libraries in use.
Tim Petersbf72fe22001-12-11 21:43:14 +00003018 Note that test_coercion.py in the standard Python test suite fails
3019 under -Qnew; this is expected, and won't be repaired until true
3020 division becomes the default (in the meantime, test_coercion is
3021 testing the current rules).
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00003022
Fred Drake6c01e252001-12-14 17:08:12 +00003023- complex() now only allows the first argument to be a string
3024 argument, and raises TypeError if either the second arg is a string
3025 or if the second arg is specified when the first is a string.
3026
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003027Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003028-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003029
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00003030- gc.get_referents was renamed to gc.get_referrers.
3031
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003032Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003033-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003034
Tim Peters25059d32001-12-07 20:35:43 +00003035- Functions in the os.spawn() family now release the global interpreter
3036 lock around calling the platform spawn. They should always have done
3037 this, but did not before 2.2c1. Multithreaded programs calling
3038 an os.spawn function with P_WAIT will no longer block all Python threads
3039 until the spawned program completes. It's possible that some programs
3040 relies on blocking, although more likely by accident than by design.
3041
Martin v. Löwis3a89b2b2001-11-25 14:35:58 +00003042- webbrowser defaults to netscape.exe on OS/2 now.
3043
Martin v. Löwis652e1912001-11-25 14:50:56 +00003044- Tix.ResizeHandle exposes detach_widget, hide, and show.
3045
Martin v. Löwis714d2e22001-12-02 12:26:03 +00003046- The charset alias windows_1252 has been added.
3047
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003048- types.StringTypes is a tuple containing the defined string types;
3049 usually this will be (str, unicode), but if Python was compiled
3050 without Unicode support it will be just (str,).
3051
3052- The pulldom and minidom modules were synchronized to PyXML.
3053
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003054Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003055-----------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003056
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003057- A new script called Tools/scripts/google.py was added, which fires
3058 off a search on Google.
3059
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003060Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003061-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003062
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003063- Note that release builds of Python should arrange to define the
3064 preprocessor symbol NDEBUG on the command line (or equivalent).
3065 In the 2.2 pre-release series we tried to define this by magic in
3066 Python.h instead, but it proved to cause problems for extension
3067 authors. The Unix, Windows and Mac builds now all define NDEBUG in
3068 release builds via cmdline (or equivalent) instead. Ports to
3069 other platforms should do likewise.
3070
Jack Jansen1999ef42001-12-06 21:47:20 +00003071- It is no longer necessary to use --with-suffix when building on a
3072 case-insensitive file system (such as Mac OS X HFS+). In the build
3073 directory an extension is used, but not in the installed python.
3074
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003075C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003076-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003077
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00003078- New function PyDict_MergeFromSeq2() exposes the builtin dict
3079 constructor's logic for updating a dictionary from an iterable object
3080 producing key-value pairs.
3081
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00003082- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() requires that the number of entries in
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00003083 the keyword list equal the number of argument specifiers. This
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00003084 wasn't checked correctly, and PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords could even
3085 dump core in some bad cases. This has been repaired. As a result,
3086 PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords may raise RuntimeError in bad cases that
3087 previously went unchallenged.
3088
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003089New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003090-------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003091
3092Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003093-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003094
3095Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003096-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003097
3098Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003099----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003100
Jack Jansenffa260f2001-12-06 21:14:00 +00003101- In unix-Python on Mac OS X (and darwin) sys.platform is now "darwin",
3102 without any trailing digits.
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003103
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003104- Changed logic for finding python home in Mac OS X framework Pythons.
3105 Now sys.executable points to the executable again, in stead of to
3106 the shared library. The latter is used only for locating the python
3107 home.
3108
3109
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003110What's New in Python 2.2b2?
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003111===========================
3112
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003113*Release date: 16-Nov-2001*
3114
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003115Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003116--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003117
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00003118- Multiple inheritance mixing new-style and classic classes in the
3119 list of base classes is now allowed, so this works now:
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00003120
3121 class Classic: pass
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00003122 class Mixed(Classic, object): pass
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00003123
3124 The MRO (method resolution order) for each base class is respected
3125 according to its kind, but the MRO for the derived class is computed
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003126 using new-style MRO rules if any base class is a new-style class.
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00003127 This needs to be documented.
3128
Tim Petersa427a2b2001-10-29 22:25:45 +00003129- The new builtin dictionary() constructor, and dictionary type, have
3130 been renamed to dict. This reflects a decade of common usage.
3131
Guido van Rossum3fc08d22001-11-15 20:33:10 +00003132- dict() now accepts an iterable object producing 2-sequences. For
3133 example, dict(d.items()) == d for any dictionary d. The argument,
3134 and the elements of the argument, can be any iterable objects.
3135
Guido van Rossum7ad2d1e2001-10-29 22:11:00 +00003136- New-style classes can now have a __del__ method, which is called
3137 when the instance is deleted (just like for classic classes).
3138
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003139- Assignment to object.__dict__ is now possible, for objects that are
3140 instances of new-style classes that have a __dict__ (unless the base
3141 class forbids it).
3142
Guido van Rossumc8e56452001-10-22 00:43:43 +00003143- Methods of built-in types now properly check for keyword arguments
3144 (formerly these were silently ignored). The only built-in methods
3145 that take keyword arguments are __call__, __init__ and __new__.
3146
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00003147- The socket function has been converted to a type; see below.
3148
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003149Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003150-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003151
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00003152- Assignment to __debug__ raises SyntaxError at compile-time. This
3153 was promised when 2.1c1 was released as "What's New in Python 2.1c1"
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003154 (see below) says.
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00003155
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003156- Clarified the error messages for unsupported operands to an operator
3157 (like 1 + '').
3158
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003159Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003160-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003161
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00003162- mmap has a new keyword argument, "access", allowing a uniform way for
3163 both Windows and Unix users to create read-only, write-through and
3164 copy-on-write memory mappings. This was previously possible only on
3165 Unix. A new keyword argument was required to support this in a
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003166 uniform way because the mmap() signatures had diverged across
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00003167 platforms. Thanks to Jay T Miller for repairing this!
3168
Tim Peters169ded02001-11-03 19:57:21 +00003169- By default, the gc.garbage list now contains only those instances in
3170 unreachable cycles that have __del__ methods; in 2.1 it contained all
3171 instances in unreachable cycles. "Instances" here has been generalized
3172 to include instances of both new-style and old-style classes.
3173
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003174- The socket module defines a new method for socket objects,
3175 sendall(). This is like send() but may make multiple calls to
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00003176 send() until all data has been sent. Also, the socket function has
3177 been converted to a subclassable type, like list and tuple (etc.)
3178 before it; socket and SocketType are now the same thing.
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003179
3180- Various bugfixes to the curses module. There is now a test suite
3181 for the curses module (you have to run it manually).
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00003182
Guido van Rossum692adf12001-10-30 03:03:03 +00003183- binascii.b2a_base64 no longer places an arbitrary restriction of 57
3184 bytes on its input.
3185
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003186Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003187-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003188
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00003189- tkFileDialog exposes a Directory class and askdirectory
Martin v. Löwis25ee87c2001-11-07 22:38:08 +00003190 convenience function.
3191
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00003192- Symbolic group names in regular expressions must be unique. For
3193 example, the regexp r'(?P<abc>)(?P<abc>)' is not allowed, because a
3194 single name can't mean both "group 1" and "group 2" simultaneously.
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003195 Python 2.2 detects this error at regexp compilation time;
3196 previously, the error went undetected, and results were
3197 unpredictable. Also in sre, the pattern.split(), pattern.sub(), and
3198 pattern.subn() methods have been rewritten in C. Also, an
3199 experimental function/method finditer() has been added, which works
3200 like findall() but returns an iterator.
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00003201
Martin v. Löwisb7b32602001-11-02 23:48:20 +00003202- Tix exposes more commands through the classes DirSelectBox,
3203 DirSelectDialog, ListNoteBook, Meter, CheckList, and the
3204 methods tix_addbitmapdir, tix_cget, tix_configure, tix_filedialog,
3205 tix_getbitmap, tix_getimage, tix_option_get, and tix_resetoptions.
3206
Tim Peters98791af2001-10-23 01:59:54 +00003207- Traceback objects are now scanned by cyclic garbage collection, so
3208 cycles created by casual use of sys.exc_info() no longer cause
3209 permanent memory leaks (provided garbage collection is enabled).
3210
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00003211- os.extsep -- a new variable needed by the RISCOS support. It is the
3212 separator used by extensions, and is '.' on all platforms except
3213 RISCOS, where it is '/'. There is no need to use this variable
3214 unless you have a masochistic desire to port your code to RISCOS.
3215
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003216- mimetypes.py has optional support for non-standard, but commonly
3217 found types. guess_type() and guess_extension() now accept an
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003218 optional 'strict' flag, defaulting to true, which controls whether
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003219 recognize non-standard types or not. A few non-standard types we
3220 know about have been added. Also, when run as a script, there are
3221 new -l and -e options.
3222
3223- statcache is now deprecated.
3224
3225- email.Utils.formatdate() now produces the preferred RFC 2822 style
3226 dates with numeric timezones (it used to produce obsolete dates
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003227 hard coded to "GMT" timezone). An optional 'localtime' flag is
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003228 added to produce dates in the local timezone, with daylight savings
3229 time properly taken into account.
3230
3231- In pickle and cPickle, instead of masking errors in load() by
3232 transforming them into SystemError, we let the original exception
3233 propagate out. Also, implement support for __safe_for_unpickling__
3234 in pickle, as it already was supported in cPickle.
3235
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003236Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003237-----------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003238
3239Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003240-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003241
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003242- The dbm module is built using libdb1 if available. The bsddb module
3243 is built with libdb3 if available.
3244
3245- Misc/Makefile.pre.in has been removed by BDFL pronouncement.
3246
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003247C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003248-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003249
Tim Peters1fc240e2001-10-26 05:06:50 +00003250- New function PySequence_Fast_GET_SIZE() returns the size of a non-
3251 NULL result from PySequence_Fast(), more quickly than calling
3252 PySequence_Size().
3253
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003254- New argument unpacking function PyArg_UnpackTuple() added.
3255
3256- New functions PyObject_CallFunctionObjArgs() and
3257 PyObject_CallMethodObjArgs() have been added to make it more
3258 convenient and efficient to call functions and methods from C.
3259
3260- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() no longer masks errors, so it's
3261 possible that this will propagate errors it didn't before.
3262
3263- New function PyObject_CheckReadBuffer(), which returns true if its
3264 argument supports the single-segment readable buffer interface.
3265
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003266New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003267-------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003268
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00003269- We've finally confirmed that this release builds on HP-UX 11.00,
3270 *with* threads, and passes the test suite.
3271
Tim Peters7a33d8b2001-11-05 02:51:07 +00003272- Thanks to a series of patches from Michael Muller, Python may build
3273 again under OS/2 Visual Age C++.
3274
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00003275- Updated RISCOS port by Dietmar Schwertberger.
3276
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003277Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003278-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003279
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00003280- Added a test script for the curses module. It isn't run automatically;
3281 regrtest.py must be run with '-u curses' to enable it.
3282
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003283Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003284-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003285
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003286Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003287----
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003288
3289- PythonScript has been moved to unsupported and is slated to be
3290 removed completely in the next release.
3291
3292- It should now be possible to build applets that work on both OS9 and
3293 OSX.
3294
3295- The core is now linked with CoreServices not Carbon; as a side
3296 result, default 8bit encoding on OSX is now ASCII.
3297
3298- Python should now build on OSX 10.1.1
3299
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003300
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003301What's New in Python 2.2b1?
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003302===========================
3303
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003304*Release date: 19-Oct-2001*
3305
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003306Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003307--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003308
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00003309- New-style classes are now always dynamic (except for built-in and
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00003310 extension types). There is no longer a performance penalty, and I
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00003311 no longer see another reason to keep this baggage around. One relic
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00003312 remains: the __dict__ of a new-style class is a read-only proxy; you
3313 must set the class's attribute to modify it. As a consequence, the
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00003314 __defined__ attribute of new-style types no longer exists, for lack
3315 of need: there is once again only one __dict__ (although in the
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00003316 future a __cache__ may be resurrected with a similar function, if I
3317 can prove that it actually speeds things up).
Guido van Rossum50fda3b2001-10-04 19:46:06 +00003318
Tim Peters1c9ca872001-10-04 06:43:12 +00003319- C.__doc__ now works as expected for new-style classes (in 2.2a4 it
3320 always returned None, even when there was a class docstring).
3321
3322- doctest now finds and runs docstrings attached to new-style classes,
3323 class methods, static methods, and properties.
3324
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003325Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003326-----------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003327
Guido van Rossuma8bcf802001-10-15 15:53:58 +00003328- A very subtle syntactical pitfall in list comprehensions was fixed.
3329 For example: [a+b for a in 'abc', for b in 'def']. The comma in
3330 this example is a mistake. Previously, this would silently let 'a'
3331 iterate over the singleton tuple ('abc',), yielding ['abcd', 'abce',
3332 'abcf'] rather than the intended ['ad', 'ae', 'af', 'bd', 'be',
3333 'bf', 'cd', 'ce', 'cf']. Now, this is flagged as a syntax error.
3334 Note that [a for a in <singleton>] is a convoluted way to say
3335 [<singleton>] anyway, so it's not like any expressiveness is lost.
3336
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003337- getattr(obj, name, default) now only catches AttributeError, as
3338 documented, rather than returning the default value for all
3339 exceptions (which could mask bugs in a __getattr__ hook, for
3340 example).
3341
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00003342- Weak reference objects are now part of the core and offer a C API.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00003343 A bug which could allow a core dump when binary operations involved
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00003344 proxy reference has been fixed. weakref.ReferenceError is now a
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003345 built-in exception.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00003346
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00003347- unicode(obj) now behaves more like str(obj), accepting arbitrary
3348 objects, and calling a __unicode__ method if it exists.
3349 unicode(obj, encoding) and unicode(obj, encoding, errors) still
Marc-André Lemburgb5507ec2001-10-19 12:02:29 +00003350 require an 8-bit string or character buffer argument.
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00003351
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003352- isinstance() now allows any object as the first argument and a
3353 class, a type or something with a __bases__ tuple attribute for the
3354 second argument. The second argument may also be a tuple of a
3355 class, type, or something with __bases__, in which case isinstance()
3356 will return true if the first argument is an instance of any of the
3357 things contained in the second argument tuple. E.g.
3358
3359 isinstance(x, (A, B))
3360
3361 returns true if x is an instance of A or B.
3362
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003363Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003364-----------------
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003365
3366- thread.start_new_thread() now returns the thread ID (previously None).
3367
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00003368- binascii has now two quopri support functions, a2b_qp and b2a_qp.
3369
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00003370- readline now supports setting the startup_hook and the
3371 pre_event_hook, and adds the add_history() function.
Martin v. Löwis0daad592001-09-30 21:09:59 +00003372
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00003373- os and posix supports chroot(), setgroups() and unsetenv() where
3374 available. The stat(), fstat(), statvfs() and fstatvfs() functions
3375 now return "pseudo-sequences" -- the various fields can now be
3376 accessed as attributes (e.g. os.stat("/").st_mtime) but for
3377 backwards compatibility they also behave as a fixed-length sequence.
3378 Some platform-specific fields (e.g. st_rdev) are only accessible as
Guido van Rossum98bf58f2001-10-18 20:34:25 +00003379 attributes.
3380
3381- time: localtime(), gmtime() and strptime() now return a
3382 pseudo-sequence similar to the os.stat() return value, with
3383 attributes like tm_year etc.
Martin v. Löwis16628c92001-10-04 22:46:41 +00003384
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003385- Decompression objects in the zlib module now accept an optional
3386 second parameter to decompress() that specifies the maximum amount
3387 of memory to use for the uncompressed data.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003388
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00003389- optional SSL support in the socket module now exports OpenSSL
3390 functions RAND_add(), RAND_egd(), and RAND_status(). These calls
3391 are useful on platforms like Solaris where OpenSSL does not
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003392 automatically seed its PRNG. Also, the keyfile and certfile
3393 arguments to socket.ssl() are now optional.
3394
3395- posixmodule (and by extension, the os module on POSIX platforms) now
3396 exports O_LARGEFILE, O_DIRECT, O_DIRECTORY, and O_NOFOLLOW.
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00003397
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003398Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003399-------
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00003400
Tim Peters7402f792001-10-02 03:53:41 +00003401- doctest now excludes functions and classes not defined by the module
3402 being tested, thanks to Tim Hochberg.
3403
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00003404- HotShot, a new profiler implemented using a C-based callback, has
3405 been added. This substantially reduces the overhead of profiling,
3406 but it is still quite preliminary. Support modules and
3407 documentation will be added in upcoming releases (before 2.2 final).
3408
Guido van Rossumc4b09b42001-10-04 10:19:00 +00003409- profile now produces correct output in situations where an exception
3410 raised in Python is cleared by C code (e.g. hasattr()). This used
3411 to cause wrong output, including spurious claims of recursive
3412 functions and attribution of time spent to the wrong function.
3413
Tim Peters0a1fc4e2001-10-07 03:12:08 +00003414 The code and documentation for the derived OldProfile and HotProfile
3415 profiling classes was removed. The code hasn't worked for years (if
3416 you tried to use them, they raised exceptions). OldProfile
3417 intended to reproduce the behavior of the profiler Python used more
3418 than 7 years ago, and isn't interesting anymore. HotProfile intended
3419 to provide a faster profiler (but producing less information), and
3420 that's a worthy goal we intend to meet via a different approach (but
3421 without losing information).
3422
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00003423- Profile.calibrate() has a new implementation that should deliver
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00003424 a much better system-specific calibration constant. The constant can
3425 now be specified in an instance constructor, or as a Profile class or
3426 instance variable, instead of by editing profile.py's source code.
3427 Calibration must still be done manually (see the docs for the profile
3428 module).
3429
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003430 Note that Profile.calibrate() must be overridden by subclasses.
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00003431 Improving the accuracy required exploiting detailed knowledge of
3432 profiler internals; the earlier method abstracted away the details
3433 and measured a simplified model instead, but consequently computed
3434 a constant too small by a factor of 2 on some modern machines.
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00003435
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00003436- quopri's encode and decode methods take an optional header parameter,
Jeremy Hylton6f543b62001-10-16 20:42:52 +00003437 which indicates whether output is intended for the header 'Q'
3438 encoding.
3439
Guido van Rossuma5343cc2001-10-18 18:02:07 +00003440- The SocketServer.ThreadingMixIn class now closes the request after
3441 finish_request() returns. (Not when it errors out though.)
3442
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003443- The nntplib module's NNTP.body() method has grown a 'file' argument
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003444 to allow saving the message body to a file.
3445
3446- The email package has added a class email.Parser.HeaderParser which
3447 only parses headers and does not recurse into the message's body.
3448 Also, the module/class MIMEAudio has been added for representing
3449 audio data (contributed by Anthony Baxter).
3450
3451- ftplib should be able to handle files > 2GB.
3452
3453- ConfigParser.getboolean() now also interprets TRUE, FALSE, YES, NO,
3454 ON, and OFF.
3455
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00003456- xml.dom.minidom NodeList objects now support the length attribute
3457 and item() method as required by the DOM specifications.
3458
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00003459Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003460-----------
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00003461
3462- Demo/dns was removed. It no longer serves any purpose; a package
3463 derived from it is now maintained by Anthony Baxter, see
3464 http://PyDNS.SourceForge.net.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003465
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003466- The freeze tool has been made more robust, and two new options have
3467 been added: -X and -E.
3468
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003469Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003470-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003471
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003472- configure will use CXX in LINKCC if CXX is used to build main() and
3473 the system requires to link a C++ main using the C++ compiler.
3474
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003475C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003476-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003477
Guido van Rossum6c4bce32001-10-18 19:20:25 +00003478- The documentation for the tp_compare slot is updated to require that
3479 the return value must be -1, 0, 1; an arbitrary number <0 or >0 is
3480 not correct. This is not yet enforced but will be enforced in
3481 Python 2.3; even later, we may use -2 to indicate errors and +2 for
3482 "NotImplemented". Right now, -1 should be used for an error return.
3483
Tim Petersd38b1c72001-09-30 05:09:37 +00003484- PyLong_AsLongLong() now accepts int (as well as long) arguments.
3485 Consequently, PyArg_ParseTuple's 'L' code also accepts int (as well
3486 as long) arguments.
3487
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00003488- PyThread_start_new_thread() now returns a long int giving the thread
3489 ID, if one can be calculated; it returns -1 for error, 0 if no
3490 thread ID is calculated (this is an incompatible change, but only
3491 the thread module used this API). This code has only really been
3492 tested on Linux and Windows; other platforms please beware (and
3493 report any bugs or strange behavior).
3494
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00003495- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() no longer accepts Unicode objects as
3496 input.
3497
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003498New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003499-------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003500
3501Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003502-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003503
3504Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003505-------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003506
Tim Peters04cf1d32001-10-09 22:39:40 +00003507- Installer: If you install IDLE, and don't disable file-extension
3508 registration, a new "Edit with IDLE" context (right-click) menu entry
3509 is created for .py and .pyw files.
3510
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003511- The signal module now supports SIGBREAK on Windows, thanks to Steven
3512 Scott. Note that SIGBREAK is unique to Windows. The default SIGBREAK
3513 action remains to call Win32 ExitProcess(). This can be changed via
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003514 signal.signal(). For example::
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003515
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003516 # Make Ctrl+Break raise KeyboardInterrupt, like Python's default Ctrl+C
3517 # (SIGINT) behavior.
3518 import signal
3519 signal.signal(signal.SIGBREAK, signal.default_int_handler)
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003520
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003521 try:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003522 while 1:
3523 pass
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003524 except KeyboardInterrupt:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003525 # We get here on Ctrl+C or Ctrl+Break now; if we had not changed
3526 # SIGBREAK, only on Ctrl+C (and Ctrl+Break would terminate the
3527 # program without the possibility for any Python-level cleanup).
3528 print "Clean exit"
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003529
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003530
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003531What's New in Python 2.2a4?
3532===========================
3533
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003534*Release date: 28-Sep-2001*
3535
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003536Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003537--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003538
3539- pydoc and inspect are now aware of new-style classes;
3540 e.g. help(list) at the interactive prompt now shows proper
3541 documentation for all operations on list objects.
3542
3543- Applications using Jim Fulton's ExtensionClass module can now safely
3544 be used with Python 2.2. In particular, Zope 2.4.1 now works with
3545 Python 2.2 (as well as with Python 2.1.1). The Demo/metaclass
3546 examples also work again. It is hoped that Gtk and Boost also work
3547 with 2.2a4 and beyond. (If you can confirm this, please write
3548 webmaster@python.org; if there are still problems, please open a bug
3549 report on SourceForge.)
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003550
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00003551- property() now takes 4 keyword arguments: fget, fset, fdel and doc.
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003552 These map to read-only attributes 'fget', 'fset', 'fdel', and '__doc__'
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00003553 in the constructed property object. fget, fset and fdel weren't
3554 discoverable from Python in 2.2a3. __doc__ is new, and allows to
3555 associate a docstring with a property.
3556
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003557- Comparison overloading is now more completely implemented. For
3558 example, a str subclass instance can properly be compared to a str
3559 instance, and it can properly overload comparison. Ditto for most
3560 other built-in object types.
3561
3562- The repr() of new-style classes has changed; instead of <type
3563 'M.Foo'> a new-style class is now rendered as <class 'M.Foo'>,
3564 *except* for built-in types, which are still rendered as <type
3565 'Foo'> (to avoid upsetting existing code that might parse or
3566 otherwise rely on repr() of certain type objects).
3567
3568- The repr() of new-style objects is now always <Foo object at XXX>;
3569 previously, it was sometimes <Foo instance at XXX>.
3570
3571- For new-style classes, what was previously called __getattr__ is now
3572 called __getattribute__. This method, if defined, is called for
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00003573 *every* attribute access. A new __getattr__ hook more similar to the
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003574 one in classic classes is defined which is called only if regular
3575 attribute access raises AttributeError; to catch *all* attribute
3576 access, you can use __getattribute__ (for new-style classes). If
3577 both are defined, __getattribute__ is called first, and if it raises
3578 AttributeError, __getattr__ is called.
3579
3580- The __class__ attribute of new-style objects can be assigned to.
3581 The new class must have the same C-level object layout as the old
3582 class.
3583
3584- The builtin file type can be subclassed now. In the usual pattern,
3585 "file" is the name of the builtin type, and file() is a new builtin
3586 constructor, with the same signature as the builtin open() function.
3587 file() is now the preferred way to open a file.
3588
3589- Previously, __new__ would only see sequential arguments passed to
3590 the type in a constructor call; __init__ would see both sequential
3591 and keyword arguments. This made no sense whatsoever any more, so
3592 now both __new__ and __init__ see all arguments.
3593
3594- Previously, hash() applied to an instance of a subclass of str or
3595 unicode always returned 0. This has been repaired.
3596
3597- Previously, an operation on an instance of a subclass of an
3598 immutable type (int, long, float, complex, tuple, str, unicode),
3599 where the subtype didn't override the operation (and so the
3600 operation was handled by the builtin type), could return that
3601 instance instead a value of the base type. For example, if s was of
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003602 a str subclass type, s[:] returned s as-is. Now it returns a str
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003603 with the same value as s.
3604
Barry Warsaw86fbaf82001-09-28 15:26:12 +00003605- Provisional support for pickling new-style objects has been added.
3606
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003607Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003608----
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003609
Tim Peters2c9aa5e2001-09-23 04:06:05 +00003610- file.writelines() now accepts any iterable object producing strings.
3611
Marc-André Lemburgaefd7662001-09-20 12:59:37 +00003612- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() now works very much like
3613 PyObject_Str(obj) in that it tries to use __str__/tp_str
3614 on the object if the object is not a string or buffer. This
3615 makes unicode() behave like str() when applied to non-string/buffer
3616 objects.
3617
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00003618- PyFile_WriteObject now passes Unicode objects to the file's write
3619 method. As a result, all file-like objects which may be the target
Martin v. Löwis2777c022001-09-19 13:47:32 +00003620 of a print statement must support Unicode objects, i.e. they must
3621 at least convert them into ASCII strings.
3622
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003623- Thread scheduling on Solaris should be improved; it is no longer
3624 necessary to insert a small sleep at the start of a thread in order
3625 to let other runnable threads be scheduled.
3626
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003627Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003628-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003629
Marc-André Lemburgbf990172001-09-27 14:17:33 +00003630- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
3631 read character buffer compatible objects for their .write() methods.
3632 These objects are converted to strings and then handled as such
3633 by the instances.
3634
Barry Warsaw2f600732001-09-24 04:28:10 +00003635- The "email" package has been added. This is basically a port of the
3636 mimelib package <http://sf.net/projects/mimelib> with API changes
3637 and some implementations updated to use iterators and generators.
3638
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00003639- difflib.ndiff() and difflib.Differ.compare() are generators now. This
3640 restores the ability of Tools/scripts/ndiff.py to start producing output
3641 before the entire comparison is complete.
3642
Barry Warsaw58b072d2001-09-22 04:44:21 +00003643- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
3644 iteration just like file objects (i.e. their .readline() method is
3645 called for each iteration until it returns an empty string).
3646
Marc-André Lemburg494f2ae2001-09-19 11:33:31 +00003647- The codecs module has grown four new helper APIs to access
3648 builtin codecs: getencoder(), getdecoder(), getreader(),
3649 getwriter().
3650
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003651- SimpleXMLRPCServer: a new module (based upon SimpleHTMLServer)
3652 simplifies writing XML RPC servers.
3653
Barry Warsaw647d5e82001-09-28 17:01:02 +00003654- os.path.realpath(): a new function that returns the absolute pathname
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003655 after interpretation of symbolic links. On non-Unix systems, this
3656 is an alias for os.path.abspath().
3657
Tim Peters16a77ad2001-09-08 04:00:12 +00003658- operator.indexOf() (PySequence_Index() in the C API) now works with any
3659 iterable object.
3660
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003661- smtplib now supports various authentication and security features of
3662 the SMTP protocol through the new login() and starttls() methods.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00003663
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003664- hmac: a new module implementing keyed hashing for message
3665 authentication.
3666
3667- mimetypes now recognizes more extensions and file types. At the
3668 same time, some mappings not sanctioned by IANA were removed.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00003669
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003670- The "compiler" package has been brought up to date to the state of
Guido van Rossumc9ed5dc2001-09-20 05:30:24 +00003671 Python 2.2 bytecode generation. It has also been promoted from a
3672 Tool to a standard library package. (Tools/compiler still exists as
3673 a sample driver.)
3674
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003675Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003676-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003677
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003678- Large file support (LFS) is now automatic when the platform supports
3679 it; no more manual configuration tweaks are needed. On Linux, at
3680 least, it's possible to have a system whose C library supports large
3681 files but whose kernel doesn't; in this case, large file support is
3682 still enabled but doesn't do you any good unless you upgrade your
3683 kernel or share your Python executable with another system whose
3684 kernel has large file support.
3685
3686- The configure script now supplies plausible defaults in a
3687 cross-compilation environment. This doesn't mean that the supplied
3688 values are always correct, or that cross-compilation now works
3689 flawlessly -- but it's a first step (and it shuts up most of
3690 autoconf's warnings about AC_TRY_RUN).
3691
3692- The Unix build is now a bit less chatty, courtesy of the parser
3693 generator. The build is completely silent (except for errors) when
3694 using "make -s", thanks to a -q option to setup.py.
3695
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003696C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003697-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003698
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003699- The "structmember" API now supports some new flag bits to deny read
3700 and/or write access to attributes in restricted execution mode.
3701
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003702New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003703-------------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003704
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003705- Compaq's iPAQ handheld, running the "familiar" Linux distribution
3706 (http://familiar.handhelds.org).
3707
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003708Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003709-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003710
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00003711- The "classic" standard tests, which work by comparing stdout to
3712 an expected-output file under Lib/test/output/, no longer stop at
3713 the first mismatch. Instead the test is run to completion, and a
3714 variant of ndiff-style comparison is used to report all differences.
3715 This is much easier to understand than the previous style of reporting.
3716
3717- The unittest-based standard tests now use regrtest's test_main()
3718 convention, instead of running as a side-effect of merely being
3719 imported. This allows these tests to be run in more natural and
3720 flexible ways as unittests, outside the regrtest framework.
3721
3722- regrtest.py is much better integrated with unittest and doctest now,
3723 especially in regard to reporting errors.
3724
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003725Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003726-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003727
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003728- Large file support now also works for files > 4GB, on filesystems
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00003729 that support it (NTFS under Windows 2000). See "What's New in
3730 Python 2.2a3" for more detail.
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003731
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003732
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003733What's New in Python 2.2a3?
3734===========================
3735
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003736*Release Date: 07-Sep-2001*
3737
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003738Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003739----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003740
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00003741- Conversion of long to float now raises OverflowError if the long is too
3742 big to represent as a C double.
3743
Tim Peters32f453e2001-09-03 08:35:41 +00003744- The 3-argument builtin pow() no longer allows a third non-None argument
3745 if either of the first two arguments is a float, or if both are of
3746 integer types and the second argument is negative (in which latter case
3747 the arguments are converted to float, so this is really the same
3748 restriction).
3749
Tim Peters5d2b77c2001-09-03 05:47:38 +00003750- The builtin dir() now returns more information, and sometimes much
3751 more, generally naming all attributes of an object, and all attributes
3752 reachable from the object via its class, and from its class's base
3753 classes, and so on from them too. Example: in 2.2a2, dir([]) returned
3754 an empty list. In 2.2a3,
3755
3756 >>> dir([])
3757 ['__add__', '__class__', '__contains__', '__delattr__', '__delitem__',
3758 '__eq__', '__ge__', '__getattr__', '__getitem__', '__getslice__',
3759 '__gt__', '__hash__', '__iadd__', '__imul__', '__init__', '__le__',
3760 '__len__', '__lt__', '__mul__', '__ne__', '__new__', '__repr__',
3761 '__rmul__', '__setattr__', '__setitem__', '__setslice__', '__str__',
3762 'append', 'count', 'extend', 'index', 'insert', 'pop', 'remove',
3763 'reverse', 'sort']
3764
3765 dir(module) continues to return only the module's attributes, though.
3766
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003767- Overflowing operations on plain ints now return a long int rather
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003768 than raising OverflowError. This is a partial implementation of PEP
3769 237. You can use -Wdefault::OverflowWarning to enable a warning for
3770 this situation, and -Werror::OverflowWarning to revert to the old
3771 OverflowError exception.
3772
Guido van Rossum61c345f2001-09-04 03:26:15 +00003773- A new command line option, -Q<arg>, is added to control run-time
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003774 warnings for the use of classic division. (See PEP 238.) Possible
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00003775 values are -Qold, -Qwarn, -Qwarnall, and -Qnew. The default is
3776 -Qold, meaning the / operator has its classic meaning and no
3777 warnings are issued. Using -Qwarn issues a run-time warning about
3778 all uses of classic division for int and long arguments; -Qwarnall
3779 also warns about classic division for float and complex arguments
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00003780 (for use with fixdiv.py).
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003781 [Note: the remainder of this item (preserved below) became
3782 obsolete in 2.2c1 -- -Qnew has global effect in 2.2] ::
3783
3784 Using -Qnew is questionable; it turns on new division by default, but
3785 only in the __main__ module. You can usefully combine -Qwarn or
3786 -Qwarnall and -Qnew: this gives the __main__ module new division, and
3787 warns about classic division everywhere else.
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003788
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003789- Many built-in types can now be subclassed. This applies to int,
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003790 long, float, str, unicode, and tuple. (The types complex, list and
3791 dictionary can also be subclassed; this was introduced earlier.)
3792 Note that restrictions apply when subclassing immutable built-in
3793 types: you can only affect the value of the instance by overloading
3794 __new__. You can add mutable attributes, and the subclass instances
3795 will have a __dict__ attribute, but you cannot change the "value"
3796 (as implemented by the base class) of an immutable subclass instance
3797 once it is created.
3798
Guido van Rossumaaf80c82001-09-02 13:44:35 +00003799- The dictionary constructor now takes an optional argument, a
3800 mapping-like object, and initializes the dictionary from its
3801 (key, value) pairs.
3802
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003803- A new built-in type, super, has been added. This facilitates making
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003804 "cooperative super calls" in a multiple inheritance setting. For an
3805 explanation, see http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#cooperation
3806
Guido van Rossum8d7234d2001-09-06 22:02:58 +00003807- A new built-in type, property, has been added. This enables the
3808 creation of "properties". These are attributes implemented by
3809 getter and setter functions (or only one of these for read-only or
3810 write-only attributes), without the need to override __getattr__.
3811 See http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#property
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003812
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003813- The syntax of floating-point and imaginary literals has been
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00003814 liberalized, to allow leading zeroes. Examples of literals now
3815 legal that were SyntaxErrors before:
3816
3817 00.0 0e3 0100j 07.5 00000000000000000008.
3818
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003819- An old tokenizer bug allowed floating point literals with an incomplete
Tim Petersc6d95812001-08-28 20:56:27 +00003820 exponent, such as 1e and 3.1e-. Such literals now raise SyntaxError.
3821
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003822Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003823-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003824
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00003825- telnetlib includes symbolic names for the options, and support for
Martin v. Löwis1da9c572002-11-04 09:56:00 +00003826 setting an option negotiation callback. It also supports processing
3827 of suboptions.
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00003828
Tim Petersa40c7932001-09-05 22:36:56 +00003829- The new C standard no longer requires that math libraries set errno to
3830 ERANGE on overflow. For platform libraries that exploit this new
3831 freedom, Python's overflow-checking was wholly broken. A new overflow-
3832 checking scheme attempts to repair that, but may not be reliable on all
3833 platforms (C doesn't seem to provide anything both useful and portable
3834 in this area anymore).
3835
Martin v. Löwis44f86962001-09-05 13:44:54 +00003836- Asynchronous timeout actions are available through the new class
3837 threading.Timer.
3838
Tim Peters78526162001-09-05 00:53:45 +00003839- math.log and math.log10 now return sensible results for even huge
3840 long arguments. For example, math.log10(10 ** 10000) ~= 10000.0.
3841
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003842- A new function, imp.lock_held(), returns 1 when the import lock is
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00003843 currently held. See the docs for the imp module.
3844
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003845- pickle, cPickle and marshal on 32-bit platforms can now correctly read
Tim Peters82112372001-08-29 02:28:42 +00003846 dumps containing ints written on platforms where Python ints are 8 bytes.
3847 When read on a box where Python ints are 4 bytes, such values are
3848 converted to Python longs.
3849
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003850- In restricted execution mode (using the rexec module), unmarshalling
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003851 code objects is no longer allowed. This plugs a security hole.
3852
Steve Purcell6091cd62001-09-06 16:05:17 +00003853- unittest.TestResult instances no longer store references to tracebacks
3854 generated by test failures. This prevents unexpected dangling references
3855 to objects that should be garbage collected between tests.
3856
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003857Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003858-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003859
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00003860- Tools/scripts/fixdiv.py has been added which can be used to fix
3861 division operators as per PEP 238.
3862
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003863Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003864-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003865
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00003866- If you are an adventurous person using Mac OS X you may want to look at
3867 Mac/OSX. There is a Makefile there that will build Python as a real Mac
3868 application, which can be used for experimenting with Carbon or Cocoa.
3869 Discussion of this on pythonmac-sig, please.
3870
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00003871C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003872-----
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00003873
3874- New function PyObject_Dir(obj), like Python __builtin__.dir(obj).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00003875
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00003876- Note that PyLong_AsDouble can fail! This has always been true, but no
3877 callers checked for it. It's more likely to fail now, because overflow
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003878 errors are properly detected now. The proper way to check::
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00003879
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003880 double x = PyLong_AsDouble(some_long_object);
3881 if (x == -1.0 && PyErr_Occurred()) {
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003882 /* The conversion failed. */
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003883 }
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00003884
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003885- The GC API has been changed. Extensions that use the old API will still
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00003886 compile but will not participate in GC. To upgrade an extension
3887 module:
3888
3889 - rename Py_TPFLAGS_GC to PyTPFLAGS_HAVE_GC
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00003890
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00003891 - use PyObject_GC_New or PyObject_GC_NewVar to allocate objects and
3892 PyObject_GC_Del to deallocate them
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00003893
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00003894 - rename PyObject_GC_Init to PyObject_GC_Track and PyObject_GC_Fini
3895 to PyObject_GC_UnTrack
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00003896
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00003897 - remove PyGC_HEAD_SIZE from object size calculations
3898
3899 - remove calls to PyObject_AS_GC and PyObject_FROM_GC
3900
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003901- Two new functions: PyString_FromFormat() and PyString_FromFormatV().
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003902 These can be used safely to construct string objects from a
3903 sprintf-style format string (similar to the format string supported
3904 by PyErr_Format()).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00003905
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003906New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003907-------------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003908
Tim Petersb7da0902001-09-02 23:01:43 +00003909- Stephen Hansen contributed patches sufficient to get a clean compile
3910 under Borland C (Windows), but he reports problems running it and ran
3911 out of time to complete the port. Volunteers? Expect a MemoryError
3912 when importing the types module; this is probably shallow, and
3913 causing later failures too.
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003914
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003915Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003916-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003917
3918Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003919-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003920
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00003921- Large file support is now enabled on Win32 platforms as well as on
3922 Win64. This means that, for example, you can use f.tell() and f.seek()
3923 to manipulate files larger than 2 gigabytes (provided you have enough
3924 disk space, and are using a Windows filesystem that supports large
Tim Peters9a9471c2001-09-11 23:18:51 +00003925 partitions). Windows filesystem limits: FAT has a 2GB (gigabyte)
3926 filesize limit, and large file support makes no difference there.
3927 FAT32's limit is 4GB, and files >= 2GB are easier to use from Python now.
3928 NTFS has no practical limit on file size, and files of any size can be
3929 used from Python now.
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00003930
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003931- The w9xpopen hack is now used on Windows NT and 2000 too when COMPSPEC
Tim Peters402d5982001-08-27 06:37:48 +00003932 points to command.com (patch from Brian Quinlan).
3933
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003934
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00003935What's New in Python 2.2a2?
3936===========================
3937
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003938*Release Date: 22-Aug-2001*
3939
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00003940Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003941-----
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00003942
Barry Warsaw18b2ecf2001-08-22 20:26:56 +00003943- Tim Peters developed a brand new Windows installer using Wise 8.1,
3944 generously donated to us by Wise Solutions.
3945
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00003946- configure supports a new option --enable-unicode, with the values
3947 ucs2 and ucs4 (new in 2.2a1). With --disable-unicode, the Unicode
3948 type and supporting code is completely removed from the interpreter.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00003949
Jack Jansen32ce0cd2001-08-21 19:28:20 +00003950- A new configure option --enable-framework builds a Mac OS X framework,
3951 which "make frameworkinstall" will install. This provides a starting
3952 point for more mac-like functionality, join pythonmac-sig@python.org
3953 if you are interested in helping.
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00003954
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00003955- The NeXT platform is no longer supported.
3956
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003957- The 'new' module is now statically linked.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00003958
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00003959Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003960-----
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00003961
3962- The new Tools/scripts/cleanfuture.py can be used to automatically
Andrew M. Kuchlingb0532092001-08-15 15:54:56 +00003963 edit out obsolete future statements from Python source code. See
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00003964 the module docstring for details.
3965
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00003966Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003967-----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00003968
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00003969- regrtest.py now knows which tests are expected to be skipped on some
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00003970 platforms, allowing to give clearer test result output. regrtest
3971 also has optional --use/-u switch to run normally disabled tests
3972 which require network access or consume significant disk resources.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00003973
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00003974- Several new tests in the standard test suite, with special thanks to
3975 Nick Mathewson.
3976
3977Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003978----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00003979
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00003980- The floor division operator // has been added as outlined in PEP
3981 238. The / operator still provides classic division (and will until
3982 Python 3.0) unless "from __future__ import division" is included, in
3983 which case the / operator will provide true division. The operator
3984 module provides truediv() and floordiv() functions. Augmented
3985 assignment variants are included, as are the equivalent overloadable
3986 methods and C API methods. See the PEP for a full discussion:
3987 <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0238.html>
3988
Tim Peters6cd6a822001-08-17 22:11:27 +00003989- Future statements are now effective in simulated interactive shells
3990 (like IDLE). This should "just work" by magic, but read Michael
3991 Hudson's "Future statements in simulated shells" PEP 264 for full
3992 details: <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0264.html>.
3993
Guido van Rossumf86ddd22001-08-17 21:21:04 +00003994- The type/class unification (PEP 252-253) was integrated into the
3995 trunk and is not so tentative any more (the exact specification of
3996 some features is still tentative). A lot of work has done on fixing
3997 bugs and adding robustness and features (performance still has to
3998 come a long way).
3999
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00004000- Warnings about a mismatch in the Python API during extension import
4001 now use the Python warning framework (which makes it possible to
4002 write filters for these warnings).
4003
Barry Warsaw9b3be7f2001-08-14 18:35:02 +00004004- A function's __dict__ (aka func_dict) will now always be a
4005 dictionary. It used to be possible to delete it or set it to None,
4006 but now both actions raise TypeErrors. It is still legal to set it
4007 to a dictionary object. Getting func.__dict__ before any attributes
4008 have been assigned now returns an empty dictionary instead of None.
4009
Guido van Rossum32aa5d22001-09-05 18:43:35 +00004010- A new command line option, -E, was added which disables the use of
4011 all environment variables, or at least those that are specifically
4012 significant to Python. Usually those have a name starting with
4013 "PYTHON". This was used to fix a problem where the tests fail if
4014 the user happens to have PYTHONHOME or PYTHONPATH pointing to an
4015 older distribution.
4016
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004017Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004018-------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004019
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004020- New class Differ and new functions ndiff() and restore() in difflib.py.
4021 These package the algorithms used by the popular Tools/scripts/ndiff.py,
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004022 for programmatic reuse.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004023
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004024- New function xml.sax.saxutils.quoteattr(): Quote an XML attribute
4025 value using the minimal quoting required for the value; more
4026 reliable than using xml.sax.saxutils.escape() for attribute values.
4027
4028- Readline completion support for cmd.Cmd was added.
4029
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004030- Calling os.tempnam() or os.tmpnam() generate RuntimeWarnings.
4031
4032- Added function threading.BoundedSemaphore()
4033
4034- Added Ka-Ping Yee's cgitb.py module.
4035
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004036- The 'new' module now exposes the CO_xxx flags.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004037
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00004038- The gc module offers the get_referents function.
4039
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004040New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004041-------------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004042
4043C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004044-----
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004045
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00004046- Two new APIs PyOS_snprintf() and PyOS_vsnprintf() were added
4047 which provide a cross-platform implementations for the
4048 relatively new snprintf()/vsnprintf() C lib APIs. In contrast to
4049 the standard sprintf() and vsprintf() C lib APIs, these versions
4050 apply bounds checking on the used buffer which enhances protection
4051 against buffer overruns.
4052
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00004053- Unicode APIs now use name mangling to assure that mixing interpreters
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00004054 and extensions using different Unicode widths is rendered next to
4055 impossible. Trying to import an incompatible Unicode-aware extension
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00004056 will result in an ImportError. Unicode extensions writers must make
4057 sure to check the Unicode width compatibility in their extensions by
4058 using at least one of the mangled Unicode APIs in the extension.
4059
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004060- Two new flags METH_NOARGS and METH_O are available in method definition
4061 tables to simplify implementation of methods with no arguments and a
4062 single untyped argument. Calling such methods is more efficient than
4063 calling corresponding METH_VARARGS methods. METH_OLDARGS is now
4064 deprecated.
4065
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00004066Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004067-------
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00004068
4069- "import module" now compiles module.pyw if it exists and nothing else
4070 relevant is found.
4071
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004072
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00004073What's New in Python 2.2a1?
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004074===========================
4075
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004076*Release date: 18-Jul-2001*
4077
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004078Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004079----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004080
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00004081- TENTATIVELY, a large amount of code implementing much of what's
4082 described in PEP 252 (Making Types Look More Like Classes) and PEP
4083 253 (Subtyping Built-in Types) was added. This will be released
4084 with Python 2.2a1. Documentation will be provided separately
4085 through http://www.python.org/2.2/. The purpose of releasing this
4086 with Python 2.2a1 is to test backwards compatibility. It is
4087 possible, though not likely, that a decision is made not to release
4088 this code as part of 2.2 final, if any serious backwards
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004089 incompatibilities are found during alpha testing that cannot be
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00004090 repaired.
4091
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00004092- Generators were added; this is a new way to create an iterator (see
Tim Peters11a0d102001-07-17 18:48:00 +00004093 below) using what looks like a simple function containing one or
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00004094 more 'yield' statements. See PEP 255. Since this adds a new
4095 keyword to the language, this feature must be enabled by including a
4096 future statement: "from __future__ import generators" (see PEP 236).
4097 Generators will become a standard feature in a future release
4098 (probably 2.3). Without this future statement, 'yield' remains an
4099 ordinary identifier, but a warning is issued each time it is used.
4100 (These warnings currently don't conform to the warnings framework of
4101 PEP 230; we intend to fix this in 2.2a2.)
4102
Marc-André Lemburg12e74b32001-05-22 08:58:23 +00004103- The UTF-16 codec was modified to be more RFC compliant. It will now
4104 only remove BOM characters at the start of the string and then
4105 only if running in native mode (UTF-16-LE and -BE won't remove a
4106 leading BMO character).
4107
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00004108- Strings now have a new method .decode() to complement the already
4109 existing .encode() method. These two methods provide direct access
4110 to the corresponding decoders and encoders of the registered codecs.
4111
4112 To enhance the usability of the .encode() method, the special
4113 casing of Unicode object return values was dropped (Unicode objects
4114 were auto-magically converted to string using the default encoding).
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00004115
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00004116 Both methods will now return whatever the codec in charge of the
4117 requested encoding returns as object, e.g. Unicode codecs will
4118 return Unicode objects when decoding is requested ("äöü".decode("latin-1")
4119 will return u"äöü"). This enables codec writer to create codecs
4120 for various simple to use conversions.
4121
4122 New codecs were added to demonstrate these new features (the .encode()
4123 and .decode() columns indicate the type of the returned objects):
4124
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004125 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4126 |Name | .encode() | .decode() | Description |
4127 +=========+===========+===========+=============================+
4128 |uu | string | string | UU codec (e.g. for email) |
4129 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4130 |base64 | string | string | base64 codec |
4131 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4132 |quopri | string | string | quoted-printable codec |
4133 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4134 |zlib | string | string | zlib compression |
4135 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4136 |hex | string | string | 2-byte hex codec |
4137 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4138 |rot-13 | string | Unicode | ROT-13 Unicode charmap codec|
4139 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00004140
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004141- Some operating systems now support the concept of a default Unicode
4142 encoding for file system operations. Notably, Windows supports 'mbcs'
4143 as the default. The Macintosh will also adopt this concept in the medium
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00004144 term, although the default encoding for that platform will be other than
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004145 'mbcs'.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00004146
4147 On operating system that support non-ASCII filenames, it is common for
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004148 functions that return filenames (such as os.listdir()) to return Python
4149 string objects pre-encoded using the default file system encoding for
4150 the platform. As this encoding is likely to be different from Python's
4151 default encoding, converting this name to a Unicode object before passing
4152 it back to the Operating System would result in a Unicode error, as Python
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004153 would attempt to use its default encoding (generally ASCII) rather than
4154 the default encoding for the file system.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00004155
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004156 In general, this change simply removes surprises when working with
4157 Unicode and the file system, making these operations work as you expect,
4158 increasing the transparency of Unicode objects in this context.
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004159 See [????] for more details, including examples.
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004160
Tim Peters61dff2b2001-05-08 15:43:37 +00004161- Float (and complex) literals in source code were evaluated to full
4162 precision only when running from a .py file; the same code loaded from a
4163 .pyc (or .pyo) file could suffer numeric differences starting at about the
4164 12th significant decimal digit. For example, on a machine with IEEE-754
4165 floating arithmetic,
4166
4167 x = 9007199254740992.0
4168 print long(x)
4169
4170 printed 9007199254740992 if run directly from .py, but 9007199254740000
4171 if from a compiled (.pyc or .pyo) file. This was due to marshal using
4172 str(float) instead of repr(float) when building code objects. marshal
4173 now uses repr(float) instead, which should reproduce floats to full
4174 machine precision (assuming the platform C float<->string I/O conversion
4175 functions are of good quality).
4176
4177 This may cause floating-point results to change in some cases, and
4178 usually for the better, but may also cause numerically unstable
4179 algorithms to break.
4180
Tim Peters2f228e72001-05-13 00:19:31 +00004181- The implementation of dicts suffers fewer collisions, which has speed
4182 benefits. However, the order in which dict entries appear in dict.keys(),
4183 dict.values() and dict.items() may differ from previous releases for a
4184 given dict. Nothing is defined about this order, so no program should
4185 rely on it. Nevertheless, it's easy to write test cases that rely on the
4186 order by accident, typically because of printing the str() or repr() of a
4187 dict to an "expected results" file. See Lib/test/test_support.py's new
4188 sortdict(dict) function for a simple way to display a dict in sorted
4189 order.
4190
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00004191- Many other small changes to dicts were made, resulting in faster
4192 operation along the most common code paths.
4193
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00004194- Dictionary objects now support the "in" operator: "x in dict" means
4195 the same as dict.has_key(x).
4196
Barry Warsaw51acc8d2001-06-26 20:12:50 +00004197- The update() method of dictionaries now accepts generic mapping
4198 objects. Specifically the argument object must support the .keys()
4199 and __getitem__() methods. This allows you to say, for example,
4200 {}.update(UserDict())
4201
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00004202- Iterators were added; this is a generalized way of providing values
4203 to a for loop. See PEP 234. There's a new built-in function iter()
4204 to return an iterator. There's a new protocol to get the next value
4205 from an iterator using the next() method (in Python) or the
4206 tp_iternext slot (in C). There's a new protocol to get iterators
4207 using the __iter__() method (in Python) or the tp_iter slot (in C).
4208 Iterating (i.e. a for loop) over a dictionary generates its keys.
4209 Iterating over a file generates its lines.
4210
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004211- The following functions were generalized to work nicely with iterator
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004212 arguments::
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004213
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00004214 map(), filter(), reduce(), zip()
Tim Peters8572b4f2001-05-06 01:05:02 +00004215 list(), tuple() (PySequence_Tuple() and PySequence_Fast() in C API)
4216 max(), min()
Tim Peters1af03e92001-05-26 19:37:54 +00004217 join() method of strings
4218 extend() method of lists
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00004219 'x in y' and 'x not in y' (PySequence_Contains() in C API)
4220 operator.countOf() (PySequence_Count() in C API)
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004221 right-hand side of assignment statements with multiple targets, such as ::
Tim Petersd6d010b2001-06-21 02:49:55 +00004222 x, y, z = some_iterable_object_returning_exactly_3_values
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00004223
Tim Petersd85e1022001-05-11 21:51:48 +00004224- Accessing module attributes is significantly faster (for example,
4225 random.random or os.path or yourPythonModule.yourAttribute).
4226
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00004227- Comparing dictionary objects via == and != is faster, and now works even
4228 if the keys and values don't support comparisons other than ==.
4229
Tim Peters95bf9392001-05-10 08:32:44 +00004230- Comparing dictionaries in ways other than == and != is slower: there were
4231 insecurities in the dict comparison implementation that could cause Python
4232 to crash if the element comparison routines for the dict keys and/or
4233 values mutated the dicts. Making the code bulletproof slowed it down.
4234
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00004235- Collisions in dicts are resolved via a new approach, which can help
4236 dramatically in bad cases. For example, looking up every key in a dict
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00004237 d with d.keys() == [i << 16 for i in range(20000)] is approximately 500x
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00004238 faster now. Thanks to Christian Tismer for pointing out the cause and
4239 the nature of an effective cure (last December! better late than never).
Tim Peters15d49292001-05-27 07:39:22 +00004240
Tim Peters52e155e2001-06-16 05:42:57 +00004241- repr() is much faster for large containers (dict, list, tuple).
4242
4243
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004244Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004245-------
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004246
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00004247- The constants ascii_letters, ascii_lowercase. and ascii_uppercase
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004248 were added to the string module. These a locale-independent
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00004249 constants, unlike letters, lowercase, and uppercase. These are now
4250 use in appropriate locations in the standard library.
4251
Martin v. Löwisf0473d52001-07-18 16:17:16 +00004252- The flags used in dlopen calls can now be configured using
4253 sys.setdlopenflags and queried using sys.getdlopenflags.
4254
Guido van Rossumc7e4aca2001-07-12 11:54:37 +00004255- Fredrik Lundh's xmlrpclib is now a standard library module. This
4256 provides full client-side XML-RPC support. In addition,
4257 Demo/xmlrpc/ contains two server frameworks (one SocketServer-based,
4258 one asyncore-based). Thanks to Eric Raymond for the documentation.
4259
Guido van Rossum643d3912001-07-05 14:46:25 +00004260- The xrange() object is simplified: it no longer supports slicing,
4261 repetition, comparisons, efficient 'in' checking, the tolist()
4262 method, or the start, stop and step attributes. See PEP 260.
4263
Martin v. Löwisebf94db2001-06-06 06:25:40 +00004264- A new function fnmatch.filter to filter lists of file names was added.
4265
Barry Warsawffd674d2001-05-22 16:00:10 +00004266- calendar.py uses month and day names based on the current locale.
4267
Guido van Rossum2e0a6542001-05-15 02:14:44 +00004268- strop is now *really* obsolete (this was announced before with 1.6),
4269 and issues DeprecationWarning when used (except for the four items
4270 that are still imported into string.py).
4271
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004272- Cookie.py now sorts key+value pairs by key in output strings.
4273
4274- pprint.isrecursive(object) didn't correctly identify recursive objects.
4275 Now it does.
4276
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00004277- pprint functions now much faster for large containers (tuple, list, dict).
4278
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00004279- New 'q' and 'Q' format codes in the struct module, corresponding to C
4280 types "long long" and "unsigned long long" (on Windows, __int64). In
4281 native mode, these can be used only when the platform C compiler supports
4282 these types (when HAVE_LONG_LONG is #define'd by the Python config
4283 process), and then they inherit the sizes and alignments of the C types.
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00004284 In standard mode, 'q' and 'Q' are supported on all platforms, and are
4285 8-byte integral types.
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00004286
Guido van Rossum83213cc2001-06-12 16:48:52 +00004287- The site module installs a new built-in function 'help' that invokes
4288 pydoc.help. It must be invoked as 'help()'; when invoked as 'help',
4289 it displays a message reminding the user to use 'help()' or
4290 'help(object)'.
4291
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004292Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004293-----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004294
4295- New test_mutants.py runs dict comparisons where the key and value
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004296 comparison operators mutate the dicts randomly during comparison. This
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004297 rapidly causes Python to crash under earlier releases (not for the faint
4298 of heart: it can also cause Win9x to freeze or reboot!).
4299
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004300- New test_pprint.py verifies that pprint.isrecursive() and
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00004301 pprint.isreadable() return sensible results. Also verifies that simple
4302 cases produce correct output.
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004303
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00004304C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004305-----
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00004306
4307- Removed the unused last_is_sticky argument from the internal
4308 _PyTuple_Resize(). If this affects you, you were cheating.
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004309
4310----
4311
4312**(For information about older versions, consult the HISTORY file.)**