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Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001+++++++++++
2Python News
3+++++++++++
4
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +00005(editors: check NEWS.help for information about editing NEWS using ReST.)
6
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +00007What's New in Python 2.5 alpha 1?
8=================================
9
Anthony Baxter12b6f6c2005-03-29 13:36:16 +000010*Release date: XX-XXX-2006*
11
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +000012Core and builtins
13-----------------
14
Guido van Rossum630db602005-09-20 18:49:54 +000015- On 64-bit platforms, when __len__() returns a value that cannot be
16 represented as a C int, raise OverflowError.
17
Skip Montanarof8948ca2005-09-19 03:54:46 +000018- test__locale is skipped on OS X < 10.4 (only partial locale support is
19present).
20
Georg Brandl80bbf3f2005-09-14 19:38:29 +000021- SF bug #893549: parsing keyword arguments was broken with a few format
22 codes.
23
Guido van Rossum8ee3e5a2005-09-14 18:09:42 +000024- Changes donated by Elemental Security to make it work on AIX 5.3
25 with IBM's 64-bit compiler (SF patch #1284289). This also closes SF
26 bug #105470: test_pwd fails on 64bit system (Opteron).
27
Guido van Rossum539c6622005-09-14 17:49:54 +000028- Changes donated by Elemental Security to make it work on HP-UX 11 on
29 Itanium2 with HP's 64-bit compiler (SF patch #1225212).
30
Georg Brandl4550b8d2005-08-26 06:43:52 +000031- Disallow keyword arguments for type constructors that don't use them
Georg Brandl02c42872005-08-26 06:42:30 +000032 (fixes bug #1119418).
33
Martin v. Löwisd35edda2005-08-24 08:39:24 +000034- Forward UnicodeDecodeError into SyntaxError for source encoding errors.
35
Barry Warsawe2eca0b2005-08-15 18:14:19 +000036- SF bug #900092: When tracing (e.g. for hotshot), restore 'return' events for
37 exceptions that cause a function to exit.
38
Raymond Hettinger9f1a6792005-07-31 01:16:36 +000039- The implementation of set() and frozenset() was revised to use its
40 own internal data structure. Memory consumption is reduced by 1/3
41 and there are modest speed-ups as well. The API is unchanged.
42
Tim Petersde7990b2005-07-17 23:45:23 +000043- SF bug #1238681: freed pointer is used in longobject.c:long_pow().
44
Michael W. Hudson0edc7a02005-07-12 10:21:19 +000045- SF bug #1229429: PyObject_CallMethod failed to decrement some
46 reference counts in some error exit cases.
47
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +000048- SF bug #1185883: Python's small-object memory allocator took over
49 a block managed by the platform C library whenever a realloc specified
50 a small new size. However, there's no portable way to know then how
51 much of the address space following the pointer is valid, so no
52 portable way to copy data from the C-managed block into Python's
53 small-object space without risking a memory fault. Python's small-object
54 realloc now leaves such blocks under the control of the platform C
55 realloc.
56
Michael W. Hudsonb8963812005-07-05 15:21:58 +000057- SF bug #1232517: An overflow error was not detected properly when
58 attempting to convert a large float to an int in os.utime().
59
Raymond Hettinger3296e692005-06-29 23:29:56 +000060- SF bug #1224347: hex longs now print with lowercase letters just
61 like their int counterparts.
62
Michael W. Hudson188d4362005-06-20 16:52:57 +000063- SF bug #1163563: the original fix for bug #1010677 ("thread Module
64 Breaks PyGILState_Ensure()") broke badly in the case of multiple
65 interpreter states; back out that fix and do a better job (see
66 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2005-June/054258.html
67 for a longer write-up of the problem).
68
Michael W. Hudsondf888462005-06-03 14:41:55 +000069- SF patch #1180995: marshal now uses a binary format by default when
70 serializing floats.
71
Michael W. Hudsonda85a902005-06-01 11:34:22 +000072- SF patch #1181301: on platforms that appear to use IEEE 754 floats,
73 the routines that promise to produce IEEE 754 binary representations
74 of floats now simply copy bytes around.
75
Skip Montanarobbf12ba2005-05-20 03:07:06 +000076- bug #967182: disallow opening files with 'wU' or 'aU' as specified by PEP
77 278.
78
Brett Cannonc3647ac2005-04-26 03:45:26 +000079- patch #1109424: int, long, float, complex, and unicode now check for the
80 proper magic slot for type conversions when subclassed. Previously the
81 magic slot was ignored during conversion. Semantics now match the way
82 subclasses of str always behaved. int/long/float, conversion of an instance
Walter Dörwald78a78b02005-09-01 12:04:29 +000083 to the base class has been moved to the proper nb_* magic slot and out of
Brett Cannonc3647ac2005-04-26 03:45:26 +000084 PyNumber_*().
85 Thanks Walter Dörwald.
86
Barry Warsawc8d907c2005-04-19 23:43:40 +000087- Descriptors defined in C with a PyGetSetDef structure, where the setter is
88 NULL, now raise an AttributeError when attempting to set or delete the
89 attribute. Previously a TypeError was raised, but this was inconsistent
90 with the equivalent pure-Python implementation.
91
Michael W. Hudson774479c2005-04-18 08:46:17 +000092- It is now safe to call PyGILState_Release() before
93 PyEval_InitThreads() (note that if there is reason to believe there
94 are multiple threads around you still must call PyEval_InitThreads()
95 before using the Python API; this fix is for extension modules that
96 have no way of knowing if Python is multi-threaded yet).
97
Michael W. Hudsone3afc592005-04-07 10:11:19 +000098- Typing Ctrl-C whilst raw_input() was waiting in a build with threads
99 disabled caused a crash.
100
Michael W. Hudsonb330adf2005-03-31 09:35:44 +0000101- Bug #1165306: instancemethod_new allowed the creation of a method
102 with im_class == im_self == NULL, which caused a crash when called.
103
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000104- Move exception finalisation later in the shutdown process - this
Anthony Baxter12b6f6c2005-03-29 13:36:16 +0000105 fixes the crash seen in bug #1165761
106
Raymond Hettinger96229b12005-03-11 06:49:40 +0000107- Added two new builtins, any() and all().
108
Brett Cannon409d8f22005-03-05 06:47:57 +0000109- Defining a class with empty parentheses is now allowed
Brett Cannonf4189912005-04-09 02:30:16 +0000110 (e.g., ``class C(): pass`` is no longer a syntax error).
111 Patch #1176012 added support to the 'parser' module and 'compiler' package
112 (thanks to logistix for that added support).
Brett Cannon409d8f22005-03-05 06:47:57 +0000113
Martin v. Löwis96d743e2005-03-03 23:00:26 +0000114- Patch #1115086: Support PY_LONGLONG in structmember.
115
Raymond Hettingerb67cc802005-03-03 16:45:19 +0000116- Bug #1155938: new style classes did not check that __init__() was
117 returning None.
118
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000119- Patch #802188: Report characters after line continuation character
Martin v. Löwis4bf108d2005-03-03 11:45:45 +0000120 ('\') with a specific error message.
121
Martin v. Löwisff232d72005-03-03 09:24:38 +0000122- Bug #723201: Raise a TypeError for passing bad objects to 'L' format.
123
Michael W. Hudson8e1afab2005-02-17 14:55:21 +0000124- Bug #1124295: the __name__ attribute of file objects was
125 inadvertently made inaccessible in restricted mode.
126
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000127- Bug #1074011: closing sys.std{out,err} now causes a flush() and
Martin v. Löwis8e3ca8a2005-01-23 09:41:49 +0000128 an ferror() call.
129
Raymond Hettinger3b0c7c22004-12-03 08:30:39 +0000130- min() and max() now support key= arguments with the same meaning as in
131 list.sort().
132
Raymond Hettingerc34f8672005-01-02 06:17:33 +0000133- The peephole optimizer now performs simple constant folding in expressions:
134 (2+3) --> (5).
135
Raymond Hettingera422c342005-01-11 03:03:27 +0000136- set and frozenset objects can now be marshalled. SF #1098985.
137
Michael W. Hudsonfaa76482005-01-31 17:09:25 +0000138- Bug #1077106: Poor argument checking could cause memory corruption
139 in calls to os.read().
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000140
Jeremy Hyltonab630502005-02-04 18:44:06 +0000141- The parser did not complain about future statements in illegal
142 positions. It once again reports a syntax error if a future
143 statement occurs after anything other than a doc string.
144
Neil Schemenauercf52c072005-08-12 17:34:58 +0000145- Change the %s format specifier for str objects so that it returns a
146 unicode instance if the argument is not an instance of basestring and
147 calling __str__ on the argument returns a unicode instance.
148
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000149Extension Modules
150-----------------
151
Michael W. Hudson10402a32005-09-22 09:19:01 +0000152- Patches #1298449 and #1298499: Add some missing checks for error
153 returns in cStringIO.c.
154
Neal Norwitz058bde12005-09-21 06:44:25 +0000155- Patch #1297028: fix segfault if call type on MultibyteCodec,
156 MultibyteStreamReader, or MultibyteStreamWriter
157
Neal Norwitzcfe7dd92005-09-19 06:49:27 +0000158- Fix memory leak in posix.access().
159
Martin v. Löwis8b291e22005-09-18 08:17:56 +0000160- Patch #1213831: Fix typo in unicodedata._getcode.
161
Georg Brandlfb1ef852005-09-14 20:53:32 +0000162- Bug #1007046: os.startfile() did not accept unicode strings encoded in
163 the file system encoding.
164
Georg Brandld2e3ba72005-08-26 08:34:00 +0000165- Patch #756021: Special-case socket.inet_aton('255.255.255.255') for
166 platforms that don't have inet_aton().
Georg Brandl02760f92005-08-25 13:10:41 +0000167
Georg Brandld2e3ba72005-08-26 08:34:00 +0000168- Bug #1215928: Fix bz2.BZ2File.seek() for 64-bit file offsets.
169
170- Bug #1191043: Fix bz2.BZ2File.(x)readlines for files containing one
Georg Brandl02760f92005-08-25 13:10:41 +0000171 line without newlines.
172
Georg Brandl38387b82005-08-24 07:17:40 +0000173- Bug #728515: mmap.resize() now resizes the file on Unix as it did
174 on Windows.
175
Martin v. Löwisebd9d5b2005-08-09 15:00:59 +0000176- Patch #1180695: Add nanosecond stat resolution, and st_gen,
177 st_birthtime for FreeBSD.
178
Michael W. Hudson8137bea2005-07-27 20:24:40 +0000179- Patch #1231069: The fcntl.ioctl function now uses the 'I' code for
180 the request code argument, which results in more C-like behaviour
181 for large or negative values.
182
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000183- Bug #1234979: For the argument of thread.Lock.acquire, the Windows
Andrew M. Kuchling88b85822005-08-23 00:57:07 +0000184 implementation treated all integer values except 1 as false.
Georg Brandlaf410b52005-07-08 22:26:13 +0000185
Georg Brandl6b95f1d2005-06-03 19:47:00 +0000186- Bug #1194181: bz2.BZ2File didn't handle mode 'U' correctly.
187
Hye-Shik Chang5f937a72005-06-02 13:09:30 +0000188- Patch #1212117: os.stat().st_flags is now accessible as a attribute
189 if available on the platform.
190
Skip Montanaro5ff14922005-05-16 02:42:22 +0000191- Patch #1103951: Expose O_SHLOCK and O_EXLOCK in the posix module if
192 available on the platform.
193
Michael W. Hudsonb330adf2005-03-31 09:35:44 +0000194- Bug #1166660: The readline module could segfault if hook functions
195 were set in a different thread than that which called readline.
196
Raymond Hettinger4aec61e2005-03-18 21:20:23 +0000197- collections.deque objects now support a remove() method.
198
Raymond Hettinger984f9bb2005-03-09 16:38:48 +0000199- operator.itemgetter() and operator.attrgetter() now support retrieving
200 multiple fields. This provides direct support for sorting on multiple
201 keys (primary, secondary, etc).
202
Martin v. Löwisb60ae992005-03-08 09:10:29 +0000203- os.access now supports Unicode path names on non-Win32 systems.
204
Martin v. Löwisfd78a6f2005-03-04 14:37:01 +0000205- Patches #925152, #1118602: Avoid reading after the end of the buffer
206 in pyexpat.GetInputContext.
207
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000208- Patches #749830, #1144555: allow UNIX mmap size to default to current
Martin v. Löwis7fe60c02005-03-03 11:22:44 +0000209 file size.
210
Raymond Hettinger9c323f82005-02-28 19:39:44 +0000211- Added functional.partial(). See PEP309.
212
Martin v. Löwis9533e342005-02-27 20:33:25 +0000213- Patch #1093585: raise a ValueError for negative history items in readline.
214 {remove_history,replace_history}
215
Fred Drake9c131f22005-01-23 15:16:08 +0000216- The spwd module has been added, allowing access to the shadow password
217 database.
Martin v. Löwisc3001752005-01-23 09:27:24 +0000218
Martin v. Löwisfe33d0b2005-01-16 08:57:39 +0000219- stat_float_times is now True.
220
Raymond Hettingerb0900e62004-12-16 16:23:40 +0000221- array.array objects are now picklable.
222
Raymond Hettingera6b45cc2004-12-07 07:05:57 +0000223- the cPickle module no longer accepts the deprecated None option in the
224 args tuple returned by __reduce__().
225
Raymond Hettingerb2594052004-12-05 09:25:51 +0000226- itertools.islice() now accepts None for the start and step arguments.
227 This allows islice() to work more readily with slices:
228 islice(s.start, s.stop, s.step)
229
Skip Montanaro0af3ade2005-01-13 04:12:31 +0000230- datetime.datetime() now has a strptime class method which can be used to
231 create datetime object using a string and format.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000232
233Library
234-------
235
Matthias Klosef3f231f2005-09-20 07:02:49 +0000236- Patch #1166948: locale.py: Prefer LC_ALL, LC_CTYPE and LANG over LANGUAGE
237 to get the correct encoding.
238
239- Patch #1166938: locale.py: Parse LANGUAGE as a colon separated list of
240 languages.
241
Martin v. Löwis4ed67382005-09-18 08:34:39 +0000242- Patch #1268314: Cache lines in StreamReader.readlines for performance.
243
Brett Cannona783d062005-09-15 02:34:56 +0000244- Bug #1290505: Fix clearing the regex cache for time.strptime().
245
Martin v. Löwis5dbdc592005-08-27 10:07:56 +0000246- Bug #1167128: Fix size of a symlink in a tarfile to be 0.
247
Georg Brandl5a650a22005-08-26 08:51:34 +0000248- Patch #810023: Fix off-by-one bug in urllib.urlretrieve reporthook
249 functionality.
250
Martin v. Löwis8b595142005-08-25 11:03:38 +0000251- Bug #1163178: Make IDNA return an empty string when the input is empty.
252
Georg Brandl532efab2005-08-24 22:34:21 +0000253- Patch #848017: Make Cookie more RFC-compliant. Use CRLF as default output
254 separator and do not output trailing semicola.
255
Georg Brandlb9256022005-08-24 18:46:39 +0000256- Patch #1062060: urllib.urlretrieve() now raises a new exception, named
257 ContentTooShortException, when the actually downloaded size does not
258 match the Content-Length header.
259
Martin v. Löwis0a5d4a22005-08-24 14:55:22 +0000260- Bug #1121494: distutils.dir_utils.mkpath now accepts Unicode strings.
261
Martin v. Löwis56066d22005-08-24 07:38:12 +0000262- Bug #1178484: Return complete lines from codec stream readers
263 even if there is an exception in later lines, resulting in
264 correct line numbers for decoding errors in source code.
265
Georg Brandl6d2b3462005-08-24 07:36:17 +0000266- Bug #1192315: Disallow negative arguments to clear() in pdb.
267
Martin v. Löwisb813c532005-08-07 20:51:04 +0000268- Patch #827386: Support absolute source paths in msvccompiler.py.
269
Georg Brandl649f8e72005-08-03 07:30:12 +0000270- Patch #1105730: Apply the new implementation of commonprefix in posixpath
271 to ntpath, macpath, os2emxpath and riscospath.
272
Guido van Rossum755149f2005-07-27 00:00:44 +0000273- Fix a problem in Tkinter introduced by SF patch #869468: delete bogus
274 __hasattr__ and __delattr__ methods on class Tk that were breaking
275 Tkdnd.
276
Georg Brandl5dbda752005-07-17 20:27:41 +0000277- Bug #1015140: disambiguated the term "article id" in nntplib docs and
278 docstrings to either "article number" or "message id".
279
Georg Brandla4a8b822005-07-15 09:13:21 +0000280- Bug #1238170: threading.Thread.__init__ no longer has "kwargs={}" as a
281 parameter, but uses the usual "kwargs=None".
282
Andrew M. Kuchling88b85822005-08-23 00:57:07 +0000283- textwrap now processes text chunks at O(n) speed instead of O(n**2).
Raymond Hettinger8bfa8932005-07-15 06:53:35 +0000284 Patch #1209527 (Contributed by Connelly).
285
Georg Brandl5c5fe2f2005-07-14 06:40:47 +0000286- urllib2 has now an attribute 'httpresponses' mapping from HTTP status code
287 to W3C name (404 -> 'Not Found'). RFE #1216944.
288
Georg Brandl9e43acf2005-07-04 17:16:07 +0000289- Bug #1177468: Don't cache the /dev/urandom file descriptor for os.urandom,
290 as this can cause problems with apps closing all file descriptors.
291
Georg Brandl5284b532005-06-26 22:54:58 +0000292- Bug #839151: Fix an attempt to access sys.argv in the warnings module
Andrew M. Kuchling88b85822005-08-23 00:57:07 +0000293 it can be missing in embedded interpreters
Georg Brandl5284b532005-06-26 22:54:58 +0000294
Georg Brandl2f210b62005-06-26 22:09:06 +0000295- Bug #1155638: Fix a bug which affected HTTP 0.9 responses in httplib.
296
Georg Brandlfbff1bc2005-06-26 21:36:25 +0000297- Bug #1100201: Cross-site scripting was possible on BaseHTTPServer via
298 error messages.
299
Georg Brandl379f99d2005-06-26 21:09:38 +0000300- Bug #1108948: Cookie.py produced invalid JavaScript code.
301
Raymond Hettingerda99d1c2005-06-21 07:43:58 +0000302- The tokenize module now detects and reports indentation errors.
303 Bug #1224621.
304
Raymond Hettinger68c04532005-06-10 11:05:19 +0000305- The tokenize module has a new untokenize() function to support a full
306 roundtrip from lexed tokens back to Python sourcecode. In addition,
307 the generate_tokens() function now accepts a callable argument that
308 terminates by raising StopIteration.
309
Georg Brandl9166e1a2005-06-04 09:20:03 +0000310- Bug #1196315: fix weakref.WeakValueDictionary constructor.
311
Georg Brandl268e61c2005-06-03 14:28:50 +0000312- Bug #1213894: os.path.realpath didn't resolve symlinks that were the first
313 component of the path.
314
Skip Montanaro174dd222005-05-14 20:54:16 +0000315- Patch #1120353: The xmlrpclib module provides better, more transparent,
316 support for datetime.{datetime,date,time} objects. With use_datetime set
317 to True, applications shouldn't have to fiddle with the DateTime wrapper
318 class at all.
319
Martin v. Löwis55f1bb82005-03-21 20:56:35 +0000320- distutils.commands.upload was added to support uploading distribution
321 files to PyPI.
322
Walter Dörwalda6e8a4a2005-03-31 13:57:38 +0000323- distutils.commands.register now encodes the data as UTF-8 before posting
324 them to PyPI.
325
Raymond Hettinger267b8682005-03-27 10:47:39 +0000326- decimal operator and comparison methods now return NotImplemented
327 instead of raising a TypeError when interacting with other types. This
328 allows other classes to implement __radd__ style methods and have them
329 work as expected.
330
Raymond Hettingerbea3f6f2005-03-15 04:59:17 +0000331- Bug #1163325: Decimal infinities failed to hash. Attempting to
332 hash a NaN raised an InvalidOperation instead of a TypeError.
333
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000334- Patch #918101: Add tarfile open mode r|* for auto-detection of the
Martin v. Löwis78be7df2005-03-05 12:47:42 +0000335 stream compression; add, for symmetry reasons, r:* as a synonym of r.
336
Martin v. Löwis00a73e72005-03-04 19:40:34 +0000337- Patch #1043890: Add extractall method to tarfile.
338
Martin v. Löwisc72dd382005-03-04 13:50:17 +0000339- Patch #1075887: Don't require MSVC in distutils if there is nothing
340 to build.
341
Martin v. Löwis637431b2005-03-03 23:12:42 +0000342- Patch #1103407: Properly deal with tarfile iterators when untarring
343 symbolic links on Windows.
344
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000345- Patch #645894: Use getrusage for computing the time consumption in
Martin v. Löwisa4dac402005-03-03 11:39:45 +0000346 profile.py if available.
347
Martin v. Löwisdf37c8c2005-03-03 11:08:03 +0000348- Patch #1046831: Use get_python_version where appropriate in sysconfig.py.
349
Martin v. Löwisc5574e82005-03-03 10:57:37 +0000350- Patch #1117454: Remove code to special-case cookies without values
351 in LWPCookieJar.
352
Martin v. Löwis4ea3ead2005-03-03 10:48:12 +0000353- Patch #1117339: Add cookielib special name tests.
354
Martin v. Löwise869eb12005-03-03 09:46:07 +0000355- Patch #1112812: Make bsddb/__init__.py more friendly for modulefinder.
356
Martin v. Löwisf2a8d632005-03-03 08:35:22 +0000357- Patch #1110248: SYNC_FLUSH the zlib buffer for GZipFile.flush.
358
Martin v. Löwisdf241532005-03-03 08:17:42 +0000359- Patch #1107973: Allow to iterate over the lines of a tarfile.ExFileObject.
360
Martin v. Löwis8ed338a2005-03-03 08:12:27 +0000361- Patch #1104111: Alter setup.py --help and --help-commands.
362
Martin v. Löwis4afe1542005-03-01 08:09:28 +0000363- Patch #1121234: Properly cleanup _exit and tkerror commands.
364
Martin v. Löwisc2a0ac22005-02-24 20:22:10 +0000365- Patch #1049151: xdrlib now unpacks booleans as True or False.
366
Raymond Hettingerbab41432005-02-05 01:31:19 +0000367- Fixed bug in a NameError bug in cookielib. Patch #1116583.
368
Guido van Rossumd0641422005-02-03 15:01:24 +0000369- Applied a security fix to SimpleXMLRPCserver (PSF-2005-001). This
370 disables recursive traversal through instance attributes, which can
371 be exploited in various ways.
372
Martin v. Löwis1d11de62005-01-29 13:29:23 +0000373- Bug #1110478: Revert os.environ.update to do putenv again.
374
Thomas Hellerd6c6e222005-01-20 19:20:16 +0000375- Bug #1103844: fix distutils.install.dump_dirs() with negated options.
376
Martin v. Löwis22b457e2005-01-16 08:40:58 +0000377- os.{SEEK_SET, SEEK_CUR, SEEK_END} have been added for convenience.
378
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000379- Enhancements to the csv module:
380
381 + Dialects are now validated by the underlying C code, better
Georg Brandl7eb4b7d2005-07-22 21:49:32 +0000382 reflecting its capabilities, and improving its compliance with
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000383 PEP 305.
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000384 + Dialect parameter parsing has been re-implemented to improve error
385 reporting.
386 + quotechar=None and quoting=QUOTE_NONE now work the way PEP 305
387 dictates.
388 + the parser now removes the escapechar prefix from escaped characters.
Andrew McNamara0f0599d2005-01-12 09:45:18 +0000389 + when quoting=QUOTE_NONNUMERIC, the writer now tests for numeric
Andrew McNamaraf69d94f2005-01-13 11:30:54 +0000390 types, rather than any object than can be represented as a numeric.
Andrew McNamara0f0599d2005-01-12 09:45:18 +0000391 + when quoting=QUOTE_NONNUMERIC, the reader now casts unquoted fields
392 to floats.
Andrew McNamaraf69d94f2005-01-13 11:30:54 +0000393 + reader now allows \r characters to be quoted (previously it only allowed
394 \n to be quoted).
Andrew McNamarac89f2842005-01-12 07:44:42 +0000395 + writer doublequote handling improved.
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000396 + Dialect classes passed to the module are no longer instantiated by
397 the module before being parsed (the former validation scheme required
398 this, but the mechanism was unreliable).
399 + The dialect registry now contains instances of the internal
400 C-coded dialect type, rather than references to python objects.
401 + the internal c-coded dialect type is now immutable.
402 + register_dialect now accepts the same keyword dialect specifications
403 as the reader and writer, allowing the user to register dialects
404 without first creating a dialect class.
405 + a configurable limit to the size of parsed fields has been added -
406 previously, an unmatched quote character could result in the entire
407 file being read into the field buffer before an error was reported.
Andrew McNamara31d88962005-01-12 03:45:10 +0000408 + A new module method csv.field_size_limit() has been added that sets
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000409 the parser field size limit (returning the former limit). The initial
410 limit is 128kB.
Andrew McNamara7f2053e2005-01-12 11:17:16 +0000411 + A line_num attribute has been added to the reader object, which tracks
412 the number of lines read from the source iterator. This is not
413 the same as the number of records returned, as records can span
414 multiple lines.
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000415 + reader and writer objects were not being registered with the cyclic-GC.
416 This has been fixed.
417
Brett Cannone6539c42005-01-08 02:43:53 +0000418- _DummyThread objects in the threading module now delete self.__block that is
419 inherited from _Thread since it uses up a lock allocated by 'thread'. The
420 lock primitives tend to be limited in number and thus should not be wasted on
421 a _DummyThread object. Fixes bug #1089632.
422
Raymond Hettinger97db05d2005-01-07 08:15:41 +0000423- The imghdr module now detects Exif files.
424
Raymond Hettinger6065d322004-12-20 23:51:53 +0000425- StringIO.truncate() now correctly adjusts the size attribute.
426 (Bug #951915).
427
Marc-André Lemburgbb4f1bd2004-12-10 21:58:14 +0000428- locale.py now uses an updated locale alias table (built using
429 Tools/i18n/makelocalealias.py, a tool to parse the X11 locale
430 alias file); the encoding lookup was enhanced to use Python's
Andrew M. Kuchling88b85822005-08-23 00:57:07 +0000431 encoding alias table.
Marc-André Lemburgbb4f1bd2004-12-10 21:58:14 +0000432
Raymond Hettinger3557f422004-12-07 12:02:02 +0000433- moved deprecated modules to Lib/lib-old: whrandom, tzparse, statcache.
434
Raymond Hettingera6b45cc2004-12-07 07:05:57 +0000435- the pickle module no longer accepts the deprecated None option in the
436 args tuple returned by __reduce__().
437
Brett Cannon84667c02004-12-07 03:25:18 +0000438- optparse now optionally imports gettext. This allows its use in setup.py.
439
Raymond Hettinger3489cad2004-12-05 05:20:42 +0000440- the pickle module no longer uses the deprecated bin parameter.
441
Raymond Hettinger1bc82f82004-12-05 03:58:17 +0000442- the shelve module no longer uses the deprecated binary parameter.
443
Raymond Hettinger6c92d762004-12-05 03:28:00 +0000444- the pstats module no longer uses the deprecated ignore() method.
445
Raymond Hettingerf3fa9462004-12-05 01:58:09 +0000446- the filecmp module no longer uses the deprecated use_statcache argument.
447
Raymond Hettinger664347b2004-12-04 21:21:53 +0000448- unittest.TestCase.run() and unittest.TestSuite.run() can now be successfully
449 extended or overridden by subclasses. Formerly, the subclassed method would
450 be ignored by the rest of the module. (Bug #1078905).
451
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000452- heapq.nsmallest() and heapq.nlargest() now support key= arguments with
Raymond Hettinger3b0c7c22004-12-03 08:30:39 +0000453 the same meaning as in list.sort().
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000454
Walter Dörwald36733692004-12-22 12:50:50 +0000455- Bug #1076985: ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` now calls ``read()`` only
456 once when a size argument is given. This prevents a buffer overflow in the
457 tokenizer with very long source lines.
458
Andrew M. Kuchling3b585b32004-12-28 20:10:48 +0000459- Bug #1083110: ``zlib.decompress.flush()`` would segfault if called immediately
460 after creating the object, without any intervening ``.decompress()`` calls.
461
Skip Montanaro05885812005-01-16 20:48:27 +0000462- The reconvert.quote function can now emit triple-quoted strings. The
463 reconvert module now has some simple documentation.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000464
Walter Dörwaldaf3b39a2005-02-18 13:22:43 +0000465- ``UserString.MutableString`` now supports negative indices in
466 ``__setitem__`` and ``__delitem__``
467
Greg Ward40407942005-03-05 02:53:17 +0000468- Bug #1149508: ``textwrap`` now handles hyphenated numbers (eg. "2004-03-05")
469 correctly.
470
Walter Dörwaldbc8e6422005-04-21 21:32:03 +0000471- Partial fixes for SF bugs #1163244 and #1175396: If a chunk read by
472 ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` has a trailing "\r", read one more
473 character even if the user has passed a size parameter to get a proper
474 line ending. Remove the special handling of a "\r\n" that has been split
475 between two lines.
476
Walter Dörwalda47d1c02005-08-30 10:23:14 +0000477- Bug #1251300: On UCS-4 builds the "unicode-internal" codec will now complain
478 about illegal code points. The codec now supports PEP 293 style error
479 handlers.
480
Walter Dörwald78a78b02005-09-01 12:04:29 +0000481- Bug #1235646: ``codecs.StreamRecoder.next()`` now reencodes the data it reads
Walter Dörwaldc5238b82005-09-01 11:56:53 +0000482 from the input stream, so that the output is a byte string in the correct
483 encoding instead of a unicode string.
Greg Ward40407942005-03-05 02:53:17 +0000484
Gustavo Niemeyer6fa0c5a2005-09-14 08:54:39 +0000485- Bug #1202493: Fixing SRE parser to handle '{}' as perl does, rather than
486 considering it exactly like a '*'.
487
488
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000489Build
490-----
491
Martin v. Löwis147fbe52005-08-07 21:09:30 +0000492- Bug #1189330: configure did not correctly determine the necessary
493 value of LINKCC if python was built with GCC 4.0.
494
Trent Mick8321b422005-07-26 02:29:21 +0000495- Upgrade Windows build to zlib 1.2.3 which eliminates a potential security
496 vulnerability in zlib 1.2.1 and 1.2.2.
497
Brett Cannon08cd5982005-04-24 22:26:38 +0000498- EXTRA_CFLAGS has been introduced as an environment variable to hold compiler
499 flags that change binary compatibility. Changes were also made to
500 distutils.sysconfig to also use the environment variable when used during
Martin v. Löwisd7c795e2005-04-25 07:14:03 +0000501 compilation of the interpreter and of C extensions through distutils.
Brett Cannon08cd5982005-04-24 22:26:38 +0000502
Bob Ippolitoed233462005-03-29 13:47:59 +0000503- SF patch 1171735: Darwin 8's headers are anal about POSIX compliance,
504 and linking has changed (prebinding is now deprecated, and libcc_dynamic
505 no longer exists). This configure patch makes things right.
506
Martin v. Löwise2713be2005-03-08 15:03:08 +0000507- Bug #1158607: Build with --disable-unicode again.
508
Brett Cannon46d96232005-02-16 00:07:19 +0000509- spwdmodule.c is built only if either HAVE_GETSPNAM or HAVE_HAVE_GETSPENT is
510 defined. Discovered as a result of not being able to build on OS X.
511
Brett Cannon516592f2004-12-07 00:42:59 +0000512- setup.py now uses the directories specified in LDFLAGS using the -L option
513 and in CPPFLAGS using the -I option for adding library and include
514 directories, respectively, for compiling extension modules against. This has
515 led to the core being compiled using the values in CPPFLAGS. It also removes
516 the need for the special-casing of both DarwinPorts and Fink for darwin since
517 the proper directories can be specified in LDFLAGS (``-L/sw/lib`` for Fink,
518 ``-L/opt/local/lib`` for DarwinPorts) and CPPFLAGS (``-I/sw/include`` for
519 Fink, ``-I/opt/local/include`` for DarwinPorts).
520
Brett Cannon43802422005-02-10 20:48:03 +0000521- Test in configure.in that checks for tzset no longer dependent on tm->tm_zone
522 to exist in the struct (not required by either ISO C nor the UNIX 2 spec).
523 Tests for sanity in tzname when HAVE_TZNAME defined were also defined.
524 Closes bug #1096244. Thanks Gregory Bond.
525
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000526
527C API
528-----
529
Raymond Hettingerbeb31012005-08-16 03:47:52 +0000530- Added a C API for set and frozenset objects.
531
Raymond Hettinger66517482004-12-03 11:45:13 +0000532- Removed PyRange_New().
533
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000534
535Tests
536-----
537
Martin v. Löwis4d394df2005-01-23 09:19:22 +0000538- In test_os, st_?time is now truncated before comparing it with ST_?TIME.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000539
Brett Cannonced04e02005-02-13 22:53:22 +0000540
541Documentation
542-------------
543
Georg Brandl32252422005-09-14 20:42:00 +0000544- Bug #1274828: Document os.path.splitunc().
545
Georg Brandl79c122f2005-08-24 07:31:33 +0000546- Bug #1190204: Clarify which directories are searched by site.py.
547
Georg Brandl6f2bbd32005-08-24 07:26:55 +0000548- Bug #1193849: Clarify os.path.expanduser() documentation.
549
Georg Brandlf13c4ba2005-08-02 10:28:08 +0000550- Bug #1243192: re.UNICODE and re.LOCALE affect \d, \D, \s and \S.
551
Georg Brandl150db732005-07-18 08:53:17 +0000552- Bug #755617: Document the effects of os.chown() on Windows.
553
Georg Brandl379f99d2005-06-26 21:09:38 +0000554- Patch #1180012: The documentation for modulefinder is now in the library reference.
555
556- Patch #1213031: Document that os.chown() accepts argument values of -1.
557
558- Bug #1190563: Document os.waitpid() return value with WNOHANG flag.
559
560- Bug #1175022: Correct the example code for property().
561
Georg Brandl40c71652005-06-25 21:08:46 +0000562- Document the IterableUserDict class in the UserDict module.
563 Closes bug #1166582.
564
Brett Cannonced04e02005-02-13 22:53:22 +0000565- Remove all latent references for "Macintosh" that referred to semantics for
566 Mac OS 9 and change to reflect the state for OS X.
567 Closes patch #1095802. Thanks Jack Jansen.
568
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000569Mac
570---
571
572
Hye-Shik Chang4e422812005-07-17 02:36:59 +0000573New platforms
574-------------
575
576- FreeBSD 7 support is added.
577
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000578
579Tools/Demos
580-----------
581
Georg Brandl56897312005-08-24 18:32:30 +0000582- Added two new files to Tools/scripts: pysource.py, which recursively
583 finds Python source files, and findnocoding.py, which finds Python
584 source files that need an encoding declaration.
585 Patch #784089, credits to Oleg Broytmann.
586
Georg Brandl379f99d2005-06-26 21:09:38 +0000587- Bug #1072853: pindent.py used an uninitialized variable.
588
Martin v. Löwisab9ec162005-04-09 10:53:34 +0000589- Patch #1177597: Correct Complex.__init__.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000590
591
Anthony Baxtere2648ee2004-11-30 01:28:55 +0000592What's New in Python 2.4 final?
593===============================
Kurt B. Kaiser4c79a832004-11-23 18:06:08 +0000594
Anthony Baxtere2648ee2004-11-30 01:28:55 +0000595*Release date: 30-NOV-2004*
Kurt B. Kaiser4c79a832004-11-23 18:06:08 +0000596
597Core and builtins
598-----------------
599
600- Bug 875692: Improve signal handling, especially when using threads, by
601 forcing an early re-execution of PyEval_EvalFrame() "periodic" code when
602 things_to_do is not cleared by Py_MakePendingCalls().
603
604
Anthony Baxter4277ed82004-11-30 11:53:10 +0000605What's New in Python 2.4 (release candidate 1)
606==============================================
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000607
Anthony Baxter5cc727a2004-11-18 12:32:27 +0000608*Release date: 18-NOV-2004*
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000609
610Core and builtins
611-----------------
612
Tim Petersfb1ffb02004-11-08 04:30:21 +0000613- Bug 1061968: Fixes in 2.4a3 to address thread bug 1010677 reintroduced
614 the years-old thread shutdown race bug 225673. Numeric history lesson
615 aside, all bugs in all three reports are fixed now.
616
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000617
Skip Montanaro599bd5e2004-11-04 04:31:30 +0000618Library
619-------
620
621- Bug 1052242: If exceptions are raised by an atexit handler function an
622 attempt is made to execute the remaining handlers. The last exception
623 raised is re-raised.
624
Tim Peters50c6bdb2004-11-08 22:07:37 +0000625- ``doctest``'s new support for adding ``pdb.set_trace()`` calls to
626 doctests was broken in a dramatic but shallow way. Fixed.
627
Tim Petersbbc0d442004-11-13 16:18:32 +0000628- Bug 1065388: ``calendar``'s ``day_name``, ``day_abbr``, ``month_name``,
629 and ``month_abbr`` attributes emulate sequences of locale-correct
630 spellings of month and day names. Because the locale can change at
631 any time, the correct spelling is recomputed whenever one of these is
632 indexed. In the worst case, the index may be a slice object, so these
633 recomputed every day or month name each time they were indexed. This is
634 much slower than necessary in the usual case, when the index is just an
635 integer. In that case, only the single spelling needed is recomputed
636 now; and, when the index is a slice object, only the spellings needed
637 by the slice are recomputed now.
638
Tim Peters50c6bdb2004-11-08 22:07:37 +0000639- Patch 1061679: Added ``__all__`` to pickletools.py.
Tim Peters90cf2122004-11-06 23:45:48 +0000640
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000641Build
642-----
Skip Montanaro599bd5e2004-11-04 04:31:30 +0000643
Brett Cannon7d28e962004-11-07 01:19:00 +0000644- Bug 1034277 / Patch 1035255: Remove compilation of core against CoreServices
645 and CoreFoundation on OS X. Involved removing PyMac_GetAppletScriptFile()
646 which has no known users. Thanks Bob Ippolito.
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000647
648C API
649-----
650
Raymond Hettinger39e92ea2004-11-18 09:41:45 +0000651- The PyRange_New() function is deprecated.
652
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000653
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000654What's New in Python 2.4 beta 2?
655================================
656
Anthony Baxter9f41f3a2004-11-03 06:21:37 +0000657*Release date: 03-NOV-2004*
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000658
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000659License
660-------
661
662The Python Software Foundation changed the license under which Python
663is released, to remove Python version numbers. There were no other
664changes to the license. So, for example, wherever the license for
665Python 2.3 said "Python 2.3", the new license says "Python". The
666intent is to make it possible to refer to the PSF license in a more
667durable way. For example, some people say they're confused by that
668the Open Source Initiative's entry for the Python Software Foundation
669License::
670
671 http://www.opensource.org/licenses/PythonSoftFoundation.php
672
673says "Python 2.1.1" all over it, wondering whether it applies only
674to Python 2.1.1.
675
676The official name of the new license is the Python Software Foundation
677License Version 2.
678
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000679Core and builtins
680-----------------
681
Tim Petersead8b7a2004-10-30 23:09:22 +0000682- Bug #1055820 Cyclic garbage collection was not protecting against that
683 calling a live weakref to a piece of cyclic trash could resurrect an
684 insane mutation of the trash if any Python code ran during gc (via
685 running a dead object's __del__ method, running another callback on a
686 weakref to a dead object, or via any Python code run in any other thread
687 that managed to obtain the GIL while a __del__ or callback was running
688 in the thread doing gc). The most likely symptom was "impossible"
689 ``AttributeEror`` exceptions, appearing seemingly at random, on weakly
690 referenced objects. The cure was to clear all weakrefs to unreachable
691 objects before allowing any callbacks to run.
692
Raymond Hettinger561fbf12004-10-26 01:52:37 +0000693- Bug #1054139 _PyString_Resize() now invalidates its cached hash value.
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000694
695Extension Modules
696-----------------
697
Raymond Hettinger9047c8f2004-10-24 00:10:06 +0000698- Bug #1048870: the compiler now generates distinct code objects for
699 functions with identical bodies. This was producing confusing
700 traceback messages which pointed to the function where the code
701 object was first defined rather than the function being executed.
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000702
703Library
704-------
705
Barry Warsaw8c72eae2004-11-01 03:52:43 +0000706- Patch #1056967 changes the semantics of Template.safe_substitute() so that
707 no ValueError is raised on an 'invalid' match group. Now the delimiter is
708 returned.
709
Raymond Hettinger2ef7e6c2004-10-24 00:32:24 +0000710- Bug #1052503 pdb.runcall() was not passing along keyword arguments.
711
Raymond Hettingerc64aab82004-10-20 08:21:57 +0000712- Bug #902037: XML.sax.saxutils.prepare_input_source() now combines relative
713 paths with a base path before checking os.path.isfile().
714
Raymond Hettingere54e7262004-10-20 07:17:16 +0000715- The whichdb module can now be run from the command line.
716
Brett Cannon8abcc5d2004-10-18 01:37:57 +0000717- Bug #1045381: time.strptime() can now infer the date using %U or %W (week of
718 the year) when the day of the week and year are also specified.
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000719
Andrew M. Kuchling0d19bae2004-10-19 19:54:41 +0000720- Bug #1048816: fix bug in Ctrl-K at start of line in curses.textpad.Textbox
721
Andrew M. Kuchling66e80ba2004-10-20 11:56:15 +0000722- Bug #1017553: fix bug in tarfile.filemode()
723
Hye-Shik Chang33761492004-10-26 09:53:46 +0000724- Patch #737473: fix bug that old source code is shown in tracebacks even if
Hye-Shik Chang182ac852004-10-26 09:16:42 +0000725 the source code is updated and reloaded.
726
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000727Build
728-----
729
Hye-Shik Chang33761492004-10-26 09:53:46 +0000730- Patch #1044395: --enable-shared is allowed in FreeBSD also.
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000731
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000732What's New in Python 2.4 beta 1?
733================================
734
Anthony Baxter6a587c12004-10-15 08:07:21 +0000735*Release date: 15-OCT-2004*
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000736
737Core and builtins
738-----------------
739
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000740- Patch #975056: Restartable signals were not correctly disabled on
Anthony Baxtere4f8a482004-10-13 14:55:56 +0000741 BSD systems. Consistently use PyOS_setsig() instead of signal().
742
Tim Peters263091e2004-10-10 01:58:44 +0000743- The internal portable implementation of thread-local storage (TLS), used
744 by the ``PyGILState_Ensure()``/``PyGILState_Release()`` API, was not
745 thread-correct. This could lead to a variety of problems, up to and
746 including segfaults. See bug 1041645 for an example.
747
Raymond Hettingerdb29e0f2004-10-07 06:46:25 +0000748- Added a command line option, -m module, which searches sys.path for the
749 module and then runs it. (Contributed by Nick Coghlan.)
750
Raymond Hettinger2c31a052004-09-22 18:44:21 +0000751- The bytecode optimizer now folds tuples of constants into a single
752 constant.
753
Tim Peters307fa782004-09-23 08:06:40 +0000754- SF bug #513866: Float/long comparison anomaly. Prior to 2.4b1, when
755 an integer was compared to a float, the integer was coerced to a float.
756 That could yield spurious overflow errors (if the integer was very
757 large), and to anomalies such as
758 ``long(1e200)+1 == 1e200 == long(1e200)-1``. Coercion to float is no
759 longer performed, and cases like ``long(1e200)-1 < 1e200``,
760 ``long(1e200)+1 > 1e200`` and ``(1 << 20000) > 1e200`` are computed
761 correctly now.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000762
763Extension modules
764-----------------
765
Tim Peterscf8997f2004-10-01 02:13:16 +0000766- ``collections.deque`` objects didn't play quite right with garbage
767 collection, which could lead to a segfault in a release build, or
Raymond Hettingerdb29e0f2004-10-07 06:46:25 +0000768 an assert failure in a debug build. Also, added overflow checks,
769 better detection of mutation during iteration, and shielded deque
770 comparisons from unusual subclass overrides of the __iter__() method.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000771
772Library
773-------
Raymond Hettinger0318a932004-09-22 18:03:47 +0000774
Anthony Baxtera0240342004-10-14 10:02:08 +0000775- Patch 1046644: distutils build_ext grew two new options - --swig for
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000776 specifying the swig executable to use, and --swig-opts to specify
Anthony Baxtera0240342004-10-14 10:02:08 +0000777 options to pass to swig. --swig-opts="-c++" is the new way to spell
778 --swig-cpp.
779
Anthony Baxter22dcf662004-10-13 15:54:17 +0000780- Patch 983206: distutils now obeys environment variable LDSHARED, if
781 it is set.
782
Andrew M. Kuchling518d3932004-10-12 15:32:10 +0000783- Added Peter Astrand's subprocess.py module. See PEP 324 for details.
Fredrik Lundh5b3687d2004-10-12 15:26:28 +0000784
Brett Cannon4f35c712004-10-06 02:11:37 +0000785- time.strptime() now properly escapes timezones and all other locale-specific
786 strings for regex-specific symbols. Was breaking under Japanese Windows when
787 the timezone was specified as "Tokyo (standard time)".
788 Closes bug #1039270.
789
Barry Warsawbb113862004-10-03 03:16:19 +0000790- Updates for the email package:
Brett Cannon06a30b02004-10-22 06:22:54 +0000791
Barry Warsaw418de1f2004-10-11 14:32:47 +0000792 + email.Utils.formatdate() grew a 'usegmt' argument for HTTP support.
Barry Warsawbb113862004-10-03 03:16:19 +0000793 + All deprecated APIs that in email 2.x issued warnings have been removed:
794 _encoder argument to the MIMEText constructor, Message.add_payload(),
795 Utils.dump_address_pair(), Utils.decode(), Utils.encode()
796 + New deprecations: Generator.__call__(), Message.get_type(),
797 Message.get_main_type(), Message.get_subtype(), the 'strict' argument to
798 the Parser constructor. These will be removed in email 3.1.
799 + Support for Python earlier than 2.3 has been removed (see PEP 291).
800 + All defect classes have been renamed to end in 'Defect'.
801 + Some FeedParser fixes; also a MultipartInvariantViolationDefect will be
802 added to messages that claim to be multipart but really aren't.
803 + Updates to documentation.
804
Raymond Hettinger596ba4d2004-09-24 03:41:05 +0000805- re's findall() and finditer() functions now take an optional flags argument
806 just like the compile(), search(), and match() functions. Also, documented
807 the previously existing start and stop parameters for the findall() and
808 finditer() methods of regular expression objects.
809
Raymond Hettinger0318a932004-09-22 18:03:47 +0000810- rfc822 Messages now support iterating over the headers.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000811
Martin v. Löwisf3c56112004-09-18 09:08:52 +0000812- The (undocumented) tarfile.Tarfile.membernames has been removed;
813 applications should use the getmember function.
814
Martin v. Löwis39a31782004-09-18 09:03:49 +0000815- httplib now offers symbolic constants for the HTTP status codes.
816
Tim Peters528ca532004-09-16 01:30:50 +0000817- SF bug #1028306: Trying to compare a ``datetime.date`` to a
818 ``datetime.datetime`` mistakenly compared only the year, month and day.
819 Now it acts like a mixed-type comparison: ``False`` for ``==``,
820 ``True`` for ``!=``, and raises ``TypeError`` for other comparison
821 operators. Because datetime is a subclass of date, comparing only the
822 base class (date) members can still be done, if that's desired, by
823 forcing using of the approprate date method; e.g.,
824 ``a_date.__eq__(a_datetime)`` is true if and only if the year, month
825 and day members of ``a_date`` and ``a_datetime`` are equal.
826
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000827- bdist_rpm now supports command line options --force-arch,
828 {pre,post}-install, {pre,post}-uninstall, and
Martin v. Löwis23c48a12004-09-10 06:32:54 +0000829 {prep,build,install,clean,verify}-script.
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000830
Walter Dörwald69652032004-09-07 20:24:22 +0000831- SF patch #998993: The UTF-8 and the UTF-16 stateful decoders now support
832 decoding incomplete input (when the input stream is temporarily exhausted).
833 ``codecs.StreamReader`` now implements buffering, which enables proper
834 readline support for the UTF-16 decoders. ``codecs.StreamReader.read()``
835 has a new argument ``chars`` which specifies the number of characters to
836 return. ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` and
837 ``codecs.StreamReader.readlines()`` have a new argument ``keepends``.
838 Trailing "\n"s will be stripped from the lines if ``keepends`` is false.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000839
Tim Petersa80a2c82004-09-26 05:13:18 +0000840- The documentation for doctest is greatly expanded, and now covers all
841 the new public features (of which there are many).
842
Walter Dörwald5011d0c2004-09-13 08:53:15 +0000843- ``doctest.master`` was put back in, and ``doctest.testmod()`` once again
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000844 updates it. This isn't good, because every ``testmod()`` call
845 contributes to bloating the "hidden" state of ``doctest.master``, but
846 some old code apparently relies on it. For now, all we can do is
847 encourage people to stitch doctests together via doctest's unittest
Tim Petersa80a2c82004-09-26 05:13:18 +0000848 integration features instead.
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000849
Skip Montanaro82d0eec2004-09-14 17:58:31 +0000850- httplib now handles ipv6 address/port pairs.
851
David Goodger68a1abd2004-10-03 15:40:25 +0000852- SF bug #1017864: ConfigParser now correctly handles default keys,
853 processing them with ``ConfigParser.optionxform`` when supplied,
854 consistent with the handling of config file entries and runtime-set
855 options.
856
David Goodger1cbf2062004-10-03 15:55:09 +0000857- SF bug #997050: Document, test, & check for non-string values in
858 ConfigParser. Moved the new string-only restriction added in
859 rev. 1.65 to the SafeConfigParser class, leaving existing
860 ConfigParser & RawConfigParser behavior alone, and documented the
861 conditions under which non-string values work.
862
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000863Build
864-----
865
Brett Cannonbfef8692004-09-28 04:08:11 +0000866- Building on darwin now includes /opt/local/include and /opt/local/lib for
867 building extension modules. This is so as to include software installed as
868 a DarwinPorts port <http://darwinports.opendarwin.org/>
869
Tim Peters862f0592004-09-23 19:11:32 +0000870- pyport.h now defines a Py_IS_NAN macro. It works as-is when the
871 platform C computes true for ``x != x`` if and only if X is a NaN.
872 Other platforms can override the default definition with a platform-
873 specific spelling in that platform's pyconfig.h. You can also override
874 pyport.h's default Py_IS_INFINITY definition now.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000875
876C API
877-----
878
Tim Peters7f468f22004-10-11 02:40:51 +0000879- SF patch 1044089: New function ``PyEval_ThreadsInitialized()`` returns
880 non-zero if PyEval_InitThreads() has been called.
881
882- The undocumented and unused extern int ``_PyThread_Started`` was removed.
883
Tim Peters84705582004-10-10 02:47:33 +0000884- The C API calls ``PyInterpreterState_New()`` and ``PyThreadState_New()``
885 are two of the very few advertised as being safe to call without holding
886 the GIL. However, this wasn't true in a debug build, as bug 1041645
887 demonstrated. In a debug build, Python redirects the ``PyMem`` family
888 of calls to Python's small-object allocator, to get the benefit of
889 its extra debugging capabilities. But Python's small-object allocator
890 isn't threadsafe, relying on the GIL to avoid the expense of doing its
891 own locking. ``PyInterpreterState_New()`` and ``PyThreadState_New()``
892 call the platform ``malloc()`` directly now, regardless of build type.
893
Tim Peters307fa782004-09-23 08:06:40 +0000894- PyLong_AsUnsignedLong[Mask] now support int objects as well.
895
Walter Dörwald69652032004-09-07 20:24:22 +0000896- SF patch #998993: ``PyUnicode_DecodeUTF8Stateful`` and
897 ``PyUnicode_DecodeUTF16Stateful`` have been added, which implement stateful
898 decoding.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000899
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000900Tests
901-----
902
903- test__locale ported to unittest
904
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000905Mac
906---
907
Just van Rossumdd3c8372004-10-03 16:27:09 +0000908- ``plistlib`` now supports non-dict root objects. There is also a new
909 interface for reading and writing plist files: ``readPlist(pathOrFile)``
910 and ``writePlist(rootObject, pathOrFile)``
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000911
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000912Tools/Demos
913-----------
914
Tim Peters130e37f2004-10-03 19:03:19 +0000915- The text file comparison scripts ``ndiff.py`` and ``diff.py`` now
916 read the input files in universal-newline mode. This spares them
917 from consuming a great deal of time to deduce the useless result that,
918 e.g., a file with Windows line ends and a file with Linux line ends
919 have no lines in common.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000920
921
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000922What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 3?
923=================================
924
Anthony Baxtere13943a2004-09-02 16:37:15 +0000925*Release date: 02-SEP-2004*
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000926
927Core and builtins
928-----------------
929
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000930- SF patch #1007189: ``from ... import ...`` statements now allow the name
Anthony Baxter1a4ddae2004-08-31 10:07:13 +0000931 list to be surrounded by parentheses.
932
Tim Peters0973b992004-08-29 22:16:50 +0000933- Some speedups for long arithmetic, thanks to Trevor Perrin. Gradeschool
934 multiplication was sped a little by optimizing the C code. Gradeschool
935 squaring was sped by about a factor of 2, by exploiting that about half
936 the digit products are duplicates in a square. Because exponentiation
937 uses squaring often, this also speeds long power. For example, the time
938 to compute 17**1000000 dropped from about 14 seconds to 9 on my box due
939 to this much. The cutoff for Karatsuba multiplication was raised,
940 since gradeschool multiplication got quicker, and the cutoff was
Tim Peters47e52ee2004-08-30 02:44:38 +0000941 aggressively small regardless. The exponentiation algorithm was switched
942 from right-to-left to left-to-right, which is more efficient for small
943 bases. In addition, if the exponent is large, the algorithm now does
944 5 bits (instead of 1 bit) at a time. That cut the time to compute
945 17**1000000 on my box in half again, down to about 4.5 seconds.
Tim Peters0973b992004-08-29 22:16:50 +0000946
Tim Petersc8854432004-08-25 02:14:08 +0000947- OverflowWarning is no longer generated. PEP 237 scheduled this to
948 occur in Python 2.3, but since OverflowWarning was disabled by default,
949 nobody realized it was still being generated. On the chance that user
950 code is still using them, the Python builtin OverflowWarning, and
951 corresponding C API PyExc_OverflowWarning, will exist until Python 2.5.
952
Martin v. Löwis336e85f2004-08-19 11:31:58 +0000953- Py_InitializeEx has been added.
954
Brett Cannonadd33602004-08-15 07:21:25 +0000955- Fix the order of application of decorators. The proper order is bottom-up;
956 the first decorator listed is the last one called.
957
Neal Norwitzf0769532004-08-13 03:18:29 +0000958- SF patch #1005778. Fix a seg fault if the list size changed while
959 calling list.index(). This could happen if a rich comparison function
960 modified the list.
961
Michael W. Hudson5e897952004-08-12 18:12:44 +0000962- The ``func_name`` (a.k.a. ``__name__``) attribute of user-defined
963 functions is now writable.
964
Michael W. Hudson5523c252004-08-12 18:09:00 +0000965- code_new (a.k.a new.code()) now checks its arguments sufficiently
966 carefully that passing them on to PyCode_New() won't trigger calls
967 to Py_FatalError() or PyErr_BadInternalCall(). It is still the case
968 that the returned code object might be entirely insane.
969
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +0000970- Subclasses of string can no longer be interned. The semantics of
971 interning were not clear here -- a subclass could be mutable, for
972 example -- and had bugs. Explicitly interning a subclass of string
973 via intern() will raise a TypeError. Internal operations that attempt
974 to intern a string subclass will have no effect.
Jeremy Hylton4c989dd2004-08-07 19:20:05 +0000975
Tim Peters83b57352004-08-08 07:24:22 +0000976- Bug 1003935: xrange() could report bogus OverflowErrors. Documented
977 what xrange() intends, and repaired tests accordingly.
978
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000979Extension modules
980-----------------
981
Martin v. Löwise064b412004-08-29 16:34:40 +0000982- difflib now supports HTML side-by-side diff.
983
Martin v. Löwisdc3883f2004-08-29 15:46:35 +0000984- os.urandom has been added for systems that support sources of random
985 data.
986
Tim Peters037b3ee2004-08-21 06:55:43 +0000987- Patch 1012740: truncate() on a writeable cStringIO now resets the
988 position to the end of the stream. This is consistent with the original
989 StringIO module and avoids inadvertently resurrecting data that was
990 supposed to have been truncated away.
991
Dave Cole331708b2004-08-09 04:51:41 +0000992- Added socket.socketpair().
993
Dave Cole3203efb2004-08-26 00:37:31 +0000994- Added CurrentByteIndex, CurrentColumnNumber, CurrentLineNumber
995 members to xml.parsers.expat.XMLParser object.
996
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000997- The mpz, rotor, and xreadlines modules, all deprecated in earlier
Andrew M. Kuchling00873432004-08-31 13:50:43 +0000998 versions of Python, have now been removed.
999
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001000Library
1001-------
1002
Johannes Gijsbers4c11f602004-08-30 14:13:04 +00001003- Patch #934356: if a module defines __all__, believe that rather than using
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001004 heuristics for filtering out imported names.
Johannes Gijsbers4c11f602004-08-30 14:13:04 +00001005
Johannes Gijsbersae882f72004-08-30 10:19:56 +00001006- Patch #941486: added os.path.lexists(), which returns True for broken
1007 symlinks, unlike os.path.exists().
1008
Raymond Hettinger356a4592004-08-30 06:14:31 +00001009- the random module now uses os.urandom() for seeding if it is available.
1010 Added a new generator based on os.urandom().
1011
Martin v. Löwise064b412004-08-29 16:34:40 +00001012- difflib and diff.py can now generate HTML.
1013
Martin v. Löwiscae9e672004-08-25 13:04:53 +00001014- bdist_rpm now includes version and release in the BuildRoot, and
1015 replaces - by ``_`` in version and release.
Martin v. Löwiscf525242004-08-25 13:00:34 +00001016
Martin v. Löwis9f5c0c42004-08-25 11:37:43 +00001017- distutils build/build_scripts now has an -e option to specify the
1018 path to the Python interpreter for installed scripts.
1019
Barry Warsaw8bee7612004-08-25 02:22:30 +00001020- PEP 292 classes Template and SafeTemplate are added to the string module.
1021
Martin v. Löwis75b9da42004-08-18 13:57:44 +00001022- tarfile now generates GNU tar files by default.
1023
Martin v. Löwisdeacce22004-08-18 12:46:26 +00001024- HTTPResponse has now a getheaders method.
1025
Johannes Gijsbersc473c992004-08-18 12:40:31 +00001026- Patch #1006219: let inspect.getsource handle '@' decorators. Thanks Simon
1027 Percivall.
1028
Martin v. Löwis318a12e2004-08-18 12:27:40 +00001029- logging.handlers.SMTPHandler.date_time has been removed;
1030 the class now uses email.Utils.formatdate to generate the time stamp.
1031
Martin v. Löwisfe84d172004-08-18 11:06:45 +00001032- A new function tkFont.nametofont was added to return an existing
1033 font. The Font class constructor now has an additional exists argument
1034 which, if True, requests to return/configure an existing font, rather
Tim Peters037b3ee2004-08-21 06:55:43 +00001035 than creating a new one.
Martin v. Löwisfe84d172004-08-18 11:06:45 +00001036
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +00001037- Updated the decimal package's min() and max() methods to match the
1038 latest revision of the General Decimal Arithmetic Specification.
1039 Quiet NaNs are ignored and equal values are sorted based on sign
1040 and exponent.
1041
1042- The decimal package's Context.copy() method now returns deep copies.
1043
1044- Deprecated sys.exitfunc in favor of the atexit module. The sys.exitfunc
Georg Brandl08c02db2005-07-22 18:39:19 +00001045 attribute will be kept around for backwards compatibility and atexit
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +00001046 will just become the one preferred way to do it.
1047
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +00001048- patch #675551: Add get_history_item and replace_history_item functions
1049 to the readline module.
1050
Johannes Gijsbers34c41202004-08-14 15:19:28 +00001051- bug #989672: pdb.doc and the help messages for the help_d and help_u methods
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +00001052 of the pdb.Pdb class gives have been corrected. d(own) goes to a newer
1053 frame, u(p) to an older frame, not the other way around.
Johannes Gijsbers34c41202004-08-14 15:19:28 +00001054
Johannes Gijsbers4ec40642004-08-14 15:01:53 +00001055- bug #990669: os.path.realpath() will resolve symlinks before normalizing the
1056 path, as normalizing the path may alter the meaning of the path if it
1057 contains symlinks.
1058
Johannes Gijsbers9d134b72004-08-14 14:03:03 +00001059- bug #851123: shutil.copyfile will raise an exception when trying to copy a
1060 file onto a link to itself. Thanks Gregory Ball.
1061
Brett Cannonb3de2e12004-08-13 18:46:24 +00001062- bug #570300: Fix inspect to resolve file locations using os.path.realpath()
1063 so as to properly list all functions in a module when the module itself is
1064 reached through a symlink. Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
1065
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +00001066- doctest refactoring continued. See the docs for details. As part of
1067 this effort, some old and little- (never?) used features are now
1068 deprecated: the Tester class, the module is_private() function, and the
1069 isprivate argument to testmod(). The Tester class supplied a feeble
1070 "by hand" way to combine multiple doctests, if you knew exactly what
1071 you were doing. The newer doctest features for unittest integration
1072 already did a better job of that, are stronger now than ever, and the
1073 new DocTestRunner class is a saner foundation if you want to do it by
1074 hand. The "private name" filtering gimmick was a mistake from the
1075 start, and testmod() changed long ago to ignore it by default. If
1076 you want to filter out tests, the new DocTestFinder class can be used
1077 to return a list of all doctests, and you can filter that list by
1078 any computable criteria before passing it to a DocTestRunner instance.
1079
Matthias Klose2e829c02004-08-15 17:04:33 +00001080- Bug #891637, patch #1005466: fix inspect.getargs() crash on def foo((bar)).
1081
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001082Tools/Demos
1083-----------
1084
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +00001085- IDLE's shortcut keys for windows are now case insensitive so that
1086 Control-V works the same as Control-v.
1087
Matthias Klose2443d4a2004-08-16 12:10:12 +00001088- pygettext.py: Generate POT-Creation-Date header in ISO format.
1089
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001090Build
1091-----
1092
Tim Peters47e52ee2004-08-30 02:44:38 +00001093- Backward incompatibility: longintrepr.h now triggers a compile-time
1094 error if SHIFT (the number of bits in a Python long "digit") isn't
1095 divisible by 5. This new requirement allows simple code for the new
1096 5-bits-at-a-time long_pow() implementation. If necessary, the
1097 restriction could be removed (by complicating long_pow(), or by
1098 falling back to the 1-bit-at-a-time algorithm), but there are no
1099 plans to do so.
1100
Brett Cannoncc8a4f62004-08-26 01:44:07 +00001101- bug #991962: When building with --disable-toolbox-glue on Darwin no
1102 attempt to build Mac-specific modules occurs.
1103
Michael W. Hudson800ba232004-08-12 18:19:17 +00001104- The --with-tsc flag to configure to enable VM profiling with the
1105 processor's timestamp counter now works on PPC platforms.
1106
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +00001107- patch #1006629: Define _XOPEN_SOURCE to 500 on Solaris 8/9 to match
1108 GCC's definition and avoid redefinition warnings.
1109
Matthias Klosea2542be2004-08-16 11:35:51 +00001110- Detect pthreads support (provided by gnu pth pthread emulation) on
1111 GNU/k*BSD systems.
1112
Hye-Shik Chang3ba5bfc2004-08-19 17:52:37 +00001113- bug #1005737, #1007249: Fixed several build problems and warnings
1114 found on old/legacy C compilers of HP-UX, IRIX and Tru64.
1115
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001116C API
1117-----
1118
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +00001119..
1120
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001121Documentation
1122-------------
1123
Neal Norwitz5268c392004-08-21 15:13:52 +00001124- patch #1005936, bug #1009373: fix index entries which contain
1125 an underscore when viewed with Acrobat.
1126
1127- bug #990669: os.path.normpath may alter the meaning of a path if
1128 it contains symbolic links. This has been documented in a comment
1129 since 1992, but is now in the library reference as well.
Johannes Gijsbersb112d6e2004-08-14 14:41:32 +00001130
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001131New platforms
1132-------------
1133
Hye-Shik Changf64700a2004-08-18 15:13:41 +00001134- FreeBSD 6 is now supported.
1135
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001136Tests
1137-----
1138
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +00001139..
1140
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001141Windows
1142-------
1143
Tim Peters79b52b72004-08-12 18:37:10 +00001144- Boosted the stack reservation for python.exe and pythonw.exe from
1145 the default 1MB to 2MB. Stack frames under VC 7.1 for 2.4 are enough
1146 bigger than under VC 6.0 for 2.3.4 that deeply recursive progams
1147 within the default sys.getrecursionlimit() default value of 1000 were
1148 able to suffer undetected C stack overflows. The standard test program
1149 test_compiler was one such program. If a Python process on Windows
1150 "just vanishes" without a trace, and without an error message of any
1151 kind, but with an exit code of 128, undetected stack overflow may be
1152 the problem.
1153
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001154Mac
1155---
1156
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +00001157..
1158
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001159
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001160What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 2?
1161=================================
1162
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +00001163*Release date: 05-AUG-2004*
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001164
1165Core and builtins
1166-----------------
1167
Raymond Hettinger52a21b82004-08-06 18:43:09 +00001168- Patch #980695: Implements efficient string concatenation for statements
1169 of the form s=s+t and s+=t. This will vary across implementations.
1170 Accordingly, the str.join() method is strongly preferred for performance
1171 sensitive code.
1172
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +00001173- PEP-0318, Function Decorators have been added to the language. These are
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +00001174 implemented using the Java-style @decorator syntax, like so::
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001175
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +00001176 @staticmethod
1177 def foo(bar):
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001178
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +00001179 (The PEP needs to be updated to reflect the current state)
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +00001180
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +00001181- When importing a module M raises an exception, Python no longer leaves M
1182 in sys.modules. Before 2.4a2 it did, and a subsequent import of M would
1183 succeed, picking up a module object from sys.modules reflecting as much
1184 of the initialization of M as completed before the exception was raised.
1185 Subsequent imports got no indication that M was in a partially-
1186 initialized state, and the importers could get into arbitrarily bad
1187 trouble as a result (the M they got was in an unintended state,
1188 arbitrarily far removed from M's author's intent). Now subsequent
1189 imports of M will continue raising exceptions (but if, for example, the
1190 source code for M is edited between import attempts, then perhaps later
1191 attempts will succeed, or raise a different exception).
1192
1193 This can break existing code, but in such cases the code was probably
1194 working before by accident. In the Python source, the only case of
1195 breakage discovered was in a test accidentally relying on a damaged
1196 module remaining in sys.modules. Cases are also known where tests
1197 deliberately provoking import errors remove damaged modules from
1198 sys.modules themselves, and such tests will break now if they do an
1199 unconditional del sys.modules[M].
1200
Marc-André Lemburgb314ce92004-07-23 16:14:57 +00001201- u'%s' % obj will now try obj.__unicode__() first and fallback to
1202 obj.__str__() if no __unicode__ method can be found.
1203
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +00001204- Patch #550732: Add PyArg_VaParseTupleAndKeywords(). Analogous to
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001205 PyArg_VaParse(). Both are now documented. Thanks Greg Chapman.
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +00001206
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001207- Allow string and unicode return types from .encode()/.decode()
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001208 methods on string and unicode objects. Added unicode.decode()
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001209 which was missing for no apparent reason.
1210
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001211- An attempt to fix the mess that is Python's behaviour with
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001212 signal handlers and threads, complicated by readline's behaviour.
1213 It's quite possible that there are still bugs here.
1214
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001215- Added C macros Py_CLEAR and Py_VISIT to ease the implementation of
1216 types that support garbage collection.
1217
Raymond Hettinger76d962d2004-07-16 12:16:48 +00001218- Compiler now treats None as a constant.
1219
Neil Schemenauer3a313e32004-07-19 16:29:17 +00001220- The type of values returned by __int__, __float__, __long__,
1221 __oct__, and __hex__ are now checked. Returning an invalid type
1222 will cause a TypeError to be raised. This matches the behavior of
1223 Jython.
1224
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +00001225- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in locale module.
1226
Hye-Shik Changb5047fd2004-08-04 06:33:51 +00001227- Added a workaround for proper string operations in BSDs. str.split
1228 and str.is* methods can now work correctly with UTF-8 locales.
1229
Hye-Shik Changc81c6952004-08-04 17:40:38 +00001230- Bug #989185: unicode.iswide() and unicode.width() is dropped and
1231 the East Asian Width support is moved to unicodedata extension
1232 module.
Hye-Shik Change9ddfbb2004-08-04 07:38:35 +00001233
Hye-Shik Chang7df44b32004-08-04 17:36:41 +00001234- Patch #941229: The source code encoding in interactive mode
1235 now refers sys.stdin.encoding not just ISO-8859-1 anymore. This
1236 allows for non-latin-1 users to write unicode strings directly.
1237
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001238Extension modules
1239-----------------
1240
Martin v. Löwis544f1192004-07-27 05:22:33 +00001241- cpickle now supports the same keyword arguments as pickle.
1242
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001243Library
1244-------
1245
Marc-André Lemburgc759f072004-08-05 12:43:30 +00001246- Added new codecs and aliases for ISO_8859-11, ISO_8859-16 and
1247 TIS-620
1248
Tim Peters8485b562004-08-04 18:46:34 +00001249- Thanks to Edward Loper, doctest has been massively refactored, and
1250 many new features were added. Full docs will appear later. For now
1251 the doctest module comments and new test cases give good coverage.
1252 The refactoring provides many hook points for customizing behavior
1253 (such as how to report errors, and how to compare expected to actual
1254 output). New features include a <BLANKLINE> marker for expected
1255 output containing blank lines, options to produce unified or context
1256 diffs when actual output doesn't match expectations, an option to
1257 normalize whitespace before comparing, and an option to use an
1258 ellipsis to signify "don't care" regions of output.
1259
Martin v. Löwis1fa649f2004-08-03 18:45:31 +00001260- Tkinter now supports the wish -sync and -use options.
1261
Fred Drakef901abd2004-08-03 17:58:55 +00001262- The following methods in time support passing of None: ctime(), gmtime(),
1263 and localtime(). If None is provided, the current time is used (the
1264 same as when the argument is omitted).
1265 [SF bug 658254, patch 663482]
1266
Martin v. Löwis9513e342004-08-03 14:36:32 +00001267- nntplib does now allow to ignore a .netrc file.
1268
Martin v. Löwis65a79752004-08-03 12:59:55 +00001269- urllib2 now recognizes Basic authentication even if other authentication
1270 schemes are offered.
1271
Neal Norwitz0e67fd42004-08-01 22:48:06 +00001272- Bug #1001053. wave.open() now accepts unicode filenames.
1273
Tim Peters5cfb05e2004-07-27 21:02:02 +00001274- gzip.GzipFile has a new fileno() method, to retrieve the handle of the
1275 underlying file object (provided it has a fileno() method). This is
1276 needed if you want to use os.fsync() on a GzipFile.
1277
Martin v. Löwis7b9190b2004-07-27 05:07:19 +00001278- imaplib has two new methods: deleteacl and myrights.
1279
Martin v. Löwiscc0f9322004-07-26 12:40:50 +00001280- nntplib has two new methods: description and descriptions. They
1281 use a more RFC-compliant way of getting a newsgroup description.
1282
Brett Cannon8b3d92a2004-07-21 02:21:58 +00001283- Bug #993394. Fix a possible red herring of KeyError in 'threading' being
1284 raised during interpreter shutdown from a registered function with atexit
1285 when dummy_threading is being used.
1286
Neal Norwitza4f651a2004-07-20 22:07:44 +00001287- Bug #857297/Patch #916874. Fix an error when extracting a hard link
1288 from a tarfile.
1289
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +00001290- Patch #846659. Fix an error in tarfile.py when using
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +00001291 GNU longname/longlink creation.
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +00001292
Tim Peters90ee7eb2004-07-18 23:58:17 +00001293- The obsolete FCNTL.py has been deleted. The builtin fcntl module
1294 has been available (on platforms that support fcntl) since Python
1295 1.5a3, and all FCNTL.py did is export fcntl's names, after generating
1296 a deprecation warning telling you to use fcntl directly.
1297
Hye-Shik Chang2bb146f2004-07-18 03:06:29 +00001298- Several new unicode codecs are added: big5hkscs, euc_jis_2004,
1299 iso2022_jp_2004, shift_jis_2004.
1300
Tim Peters5af0e412004-07-12 00:45:14 +00001301- Bug #788520. Queue.{get, get_nowait, put, put_nowait} have new
1302 implementations, exploiting Conditions (which didn't exist at the time
1303 Queue was introduced). A minor semantic change is that the Full and
1304 Empty exceptions raised by non-blocking calls now occur only if the
1305 queue truly was full or empty at the instant the queue was checked (of
1306 course the Queue may no longer be full or empty by the time a calling
1307 thread sees those exceptions, though). Before, the exceptions could
1308 also be raised if it was "merely inconvenient" for the implementation
1309 to determine the true state of the Queue (because the Queue was locked
1310 by some other method in progress).
1311
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001312- Bugs #979794 and #980117: difflib.get_grouped_opcodes() now handles the
1313 case of comparing two empty lists. This affected both context_diff() and
1314 unified_diff(),
Brett Cannond2c5b4b2004-07-10 23:54:07 +00001315
Brett Cannone6f8a892004-07-10 23:14:30 +00001316- Bug #980938: smtplib now prints debug output to sys.stderr.
1317
Brett Cannonf50299c2004-07-10 22:55:15 +00001318- Bug #930024: posixpath.realpath() now handles infinite loops in symlinks by
1319 returning the last point in the path that was not part of any loop. Thanks
1320 AM Kuchling.
1321
Brett Cannonbdc36272004-07-10 20:42:22 +00001322- Bug #980327: ntpath not handles compressing erroneous slashes between the
1323 drive letter and the rest of the path. Also clearly handles UNC addresses now
1324 as well. Thanks Paul Moore.
1325
Brett Cannone6751182004-07-10 19:13:42 +00001326- bug #679953: zipfile.py should now work for files over 2 GB. The packed data
1327 for file sizes (compressed and uncompressed) was being stored as signed
1328 instead of unsigned.
1329
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001330- decimal.py now only uses signals in the IBM spec. The other conditions are
Raymond Hettinger5aa478b2004-07-09 10:02:53 +00001331 no longer part of the public API.
1332
Marc-André Lemburg88fcca62004-07-10 16:16:06 +00001333- codecs module now has two new generic APIs: encode() and decode()
1334 which don't restrict the return types (unlike the unicode and
1335 string methods of the same name).
1336
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001337- Non-blocking SSL sockets work again; they were broken in Python 2.3.
Andrew M. Kuchling79d7e922004-07-10 21:21:55 +00001338 SF patch 945642.
1339
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001340- doctest unittest integration improvements:
1341
1342 o Improved the unitest test output for doctest-based unit tests
1343
1344 o Can now pass setUp and tearDown functions when creating
1345 DocTestSuites.
1346
1347- The threading module has a new class, local, for creating objects
1348 that provide thread-local data.
1349
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +00001350- Bug #990307: when keep_empty_values is True, cgi.parse_qsl()
1351 no longer returns spurious empty fields.
1352
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +00001353- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in gettext module.
1354
1355- Introduced in gettext module the l*gettext() family of functions,
1356 which return translation strings encoded in the preferred encoding,
1357 as informed by locale module's getpreferredencoding().
1358
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +00001359- optparse module (and tests) upgraded to Optik 1.5a1. Changes:
1360
1361 - Add expansion of default values in help text: the string
1362 "%default" in an option's help string is expanded to str() of
1363 that option's default value, or "none" if no default value.
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +00001364
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +00001365 - Bug #955889: option default values that happen to be strings are
1366 now processed in the same way as values from the command line; this
1367 allows generation of nicer help when using custom types. Can
1368 be disabled with parser.set_process_default_values(False).
1369
1370 - Bug #960515: don't crash when generating help for callback
1371 options that specify 'type', but not 'dest' or 'metavar'.
1372
1373 - Feature #815264: change the default help format for short options
1374 that take an argument from e.g. "-oARG" to "-o ARG"; add
1375 set_short_opt_delimiter() and set_long_opt_delimiter() methods to
1376 HelpFormatter to allow (slight) customization of the formatting.
1377
1378 - Patch #736940: internationalize Optik: all built-in user-
1379 targeted literal strings are passed through gettext.gettext(). (If
1380 you want translations (.po files), they're not included with Python
1381 -- you'll find them in the Optik source distribution from
1382 http://optik.sourceforge.net/ .)
1383
1384 - Bug #878453: respect $COLUMNS environment variable for
1385 wrapping help output.
1386
1387 - Feature #988122: expand "%prog" in the 'description' passed
1388 to OptionParser, just like in the 'usage' and 'version' strings.
1389 (This is *not* done in the 'description' passed to OptionGroup.)
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +00001390
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001391C API
1392-----
1393
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +00001394- PyImport_ExecCodeModule() and PyImport_ExecCodeModuleEx(): if an
1395 error occurs while loading the module, these now delete the module's
1396 entry from sys.modules. All ways of loading modules eventually call
1397 one of these, so this is an error-case change in semantics for all
1398 ways of loading modules. In rare cases, a module loader may wish
1399 to keep a module object in sys.modules despite that the module's
1400 code cannot be executed. In such cases, the module loader must
1401 arrange to reinsert the name and module object in sys.modules.
1402 PyImport_ReloadModule() has been changed to reinsert the original
1403 module object into sys.modules if the module reload fails, so that
1404 its visible semantics have not changed.
1405
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001406- A large pile of datetime field-extraction macros is now documented,
1407 thanks to Anthony Tuininga (patch #986010).
1408
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001409Documentation
1410-------------
1411
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +00001412- Improved the tutorial on creating types in C.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001413
1414 - point out the importance of reassigning data members before
Andrew M. Kuchling78d375f2004-08-07 14:00:39 +00001415 assigning their values
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001416
Andrew M. Kuchling28025ec2004-08-07 13:59:22 +00001417 - correct my misconception about return values from visitprocs. Sigh.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001418
1419 - mention the labor saving Py_VISIT and Py_CLEAR macros.
1420
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +00001421- Major rewrite of the math module docs, to address common confusions.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001422
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001423Tests
1424-----
1425
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +00001426- The test data files for the decimal test suite are now installed on
Anthony Baxterfd4984d2004-07-12 09:33:39 +00001427 platforms that use the Makefile.
1428
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +00001429- SF patch 995225: The test file testtar.tar accidentally contained
1430 CVS keywords (like $Id$), which could cause spurious failures in
1431 test_tarfile.py depending on how the test file was checked out.
1432
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001433
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001434What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 1?
1435=================================
1436
Anthony Baxter3210b362004-07-08 05:59:43 +00001437*Release date: 08-JUL-2004*
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001438
1439Core and builtins
1440-----------------
1441
Fred Drake0a4dd392004-07-02 18:57:45 +00001442- weakref.ref is now the type object also known as
1443 weakref.ReferenceType; it can be subclassed like any other new-style
1444 class. There's less per-entry overhead in WeakValueDictionary
1445 objects now (one object instead of three).
1446
Thomas Heller04c673b2004-07-02 08:56:20 +00001447- Bug #951851: Python crashed when reading import table of certain
1448 Windows DLLs.
1449
Raymond Hettinger66bd2332004-08-02 08:30:07 +00001450- Bug #215126. The locals argument to eval(), execfile(), and exec now
1451 accept any mapping type.
Raymond Hettinger214b1c32004-07-02 06:41:07 +00001452
Martin v. Löwisef82d2f2004-06-27 16:51:46 +00001453- marshal now shares interned strings. This change introduces
1454 a new .pyc magic.
1455
Anthony Baxter3ecdb252004-06-11 14:41:18 +00001456- Bug #966623. classes created with type() in an exec(, {}) don't
1457 have a __module__, but code in typeobject assumed it would always
1458 be there.
1459
Martin v. Löwis737ea822004-06-08 18:52:54 +00001460- Python no longer relies on the LC_NUMERIC locale setting to be
1461 the "C" locale; as a result, it no longer tries to prevent changing
1462 the LC_NUMERIC category.
1463
Tim Peters604c0132004-06-07 23:04:33 +00001464- Bug #952807: Unpickling pickled instances of subclasses of
1465 datetime.date, datetime.datetime and datetime.time could yield insane
1466 objects. Thanks to Jiwon Seo for a fix.
1467
Thomas Heller90a764c2004-06-07 15:12:44 +00001468- Bug #845802: Python crashes when __init__.py is a directory.
1469
Hye-Shik Changbc555e32004-06-03 11:10:58 +00001470- Unicode objects received two new methods: iswide() and width().
1471 These query East Asian width information, as specified in Unicode
1472 TR11.
Hye-Shik Chang974ed7c2004-06-02 16:49:17 +00001473
Raymond Hettinger41bd0222004-06-01 06:36:24 +00001474- Improved the tuple hashing algorithm to give fewer collisions in
1475 common cases. Fixes bug #942952.
1476
Raymond Hettinger354433a2004-05-19 08:20:33 +00001477- Implemented generator expressions (PEP 289). Coded by Jiwon Seo.
1478
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +00001479- Enabled the profiling of C extension functions (and builtins) - check
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001480 new documentation and modified profile and bdb modules for more details
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +00001481
Nicholas Bastinabce8a62004-03-21 20:24:07 +00001482- Set file.name to the object passed to open (instead of a new string)
1483
Nicholas Bastina7604bf2004-03-21 18:37:23 +00001484- Moved tracebackobject into traceback.h and renamed to PyTracebackObject
1485
Raymond Hettingerff5bc502004-03-21 15:12:00 +00001486- Optimized the byte coding for multiple assignments like "a,b=b,a" and
1487 "a,b,c=1,2,3". Improves their speed by 25% to 30%.
1488
Brett Cannon4f653312004-03-20 22:52:14 +00001489- Limit the nested depth of a tuple for the second argument to isinstance()
1490 and issubclass() to the recursion limit of the interpreter.
1491 Fixes bug #858016 .
1492
Raymond Hettingerade08ea2004-03-18 09:48:12 +00001493- Optimized dict iterators, creating separate types for each
1494 and having them reveal their length. Also optimized the
1495 methods: keys(), values(), and items().
1496
Raymond Hettingerdd80f762004-03-07 07:31:06 +00001497- Implemented a newcode opcode, LIST_APPEND, that simplifies
1498 the generated bytecode for list comprehensions and further
1499 improves their performance (about 35%).
1500
Michael W. Hudsond3b33b52004-02-19 19:35:22 +00001501- Implemented rich comparisons for floats, which seems to make
1502 comparisons involving NaNs somewhat less surprising when the
1503 underlying C compiler actually implements C99 semantics.
1504
Raymond Hettingerfa7b9d82004-02-15 04:06:39 +00001505- Optimized list.extend() to save memory and no longer create
1506 intermediate sequences. Also, extend() now pre-allocates the
1507 needed memory whenever the length of the iterable is known in
1508 advance -- this halves the time to extend the list.
1509
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001510- Optimized list resize operations to make fewer calls to the system
1511 realloc(). Significantly speeds up list appends, list pops,
Walter Dörwald09515af2005-03-18 10:28:24 +00001512 list comprehensions, and the list constructor (when the input iterable
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001513 length is not known).
1514
1515- Changed the internal list over-allocation scheme. For larger lists,
1516 overallocation ranged between 3% and 25%. Now, it is a constant 12%.
Raymond Hettingerab517d22004-02-14 18:34:46 +00001517 For smaller lists (n<8), overallocation was upto eight elements. Now,
1518 the overallocation is no more than three elements -- this improves space
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001519 utilization for applications that have large numbers of small lists.
1520
Raymond Hettinger0468e412004-05-05 05:37:53 +00001521- Most list bodies now get re-used rather than freed. Speeds up list
1522 instantiation and deletion by saving calls to malloc() and free().
1523
Raymond Hettinger31017ae2004-03-04 08:25:44 +00001524- The dict.update() method now accepts all the same argument forms
1525 as the dict() constructor. This now includes item lists and/or
1526 keyword arguments.
1527
Michael W. Hudsonecfeb7f2004-02-12 15:28:27 +00001528- Support for arbitrary objects supporting the read-only buffer
1529 interface as the co_code field of code objects (something that was
1530 only possible to create from C code) has been removed.
1531
Fred Drake228765b2004-02-06 04:15:22 +00001532- Made omitted callback and None equivalent for weakref.ref() and
1533 weakref.proxy(); the None case wasn't handled correctly in all
1534 cases.
1535
1536- Fixed problem where PyWeakref_NewRef() and PyWeakref_NewProxy()
1537 assumed that initial existing entries in an object's weakref list
1538 would not be removed while allocating a new weakref object. Since
1539 GC could be invoked at that time, however, that assumption was
1540 invalid. In a truly obscure case of GC being triggered during
1541 creation for a new weakref object for an referent which already
1542 has a weakref without a callback which is only referenced from
1543 cyclic trash, a memory error can occur. This consistently created a
1544 segfault in a debug build, but provided less predictable behavior in
1545 a release build.
1546
Hye-Shik Changff83c2b2004-02-02 13:39:01 +00001547- input() builtin function now respects compiler flags such as
1548 __future__ statements. SF patch 876178.
1549
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +00001550- Removed PendingDeprecationWarning from apply(). apply() remains
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +00001551 deprecated, but the nuisance warning will not be issued.
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +00001552
Tim Peters1d7323e2003-12-01 21:35:27 +00001553- At Python shutdown time (Py_Finalize()), 2.3 called cyclic garbage
1554 collection twice, both before and after tearing down modules. The
1555 call after tearing down modules has been disabled, because too much
1556 of Python has been torn down then for __del__ methods and weakref
1557 callbacks to execute sanely. The most common symptom was a sequence
1558 of uninformative messages on stderr when Python shut down, produced
1559 by threads trying to raise exceptions, but unable to report the nature
1560 of their problems because too much of the sys module had already been
1561 destroyed.
1562
Guido van Rossum6c9e1302003-11-29 23:52:13 +00001563- Removed FutureWarnings related to hex/oct literals and conversions
1564 and left shifts. (Thanks to Kalle Svensson for SF patch 849227.)
1565 This addresses most of the remaining semantic changes promised by
1566 PEP 237, except for repr() of a long, which still shows the trailing
1567 'L'. The PEP appears to promise warnings for operations that
1568 changed semantics compared to Python 2.3, but this is not
1569 implemented; we've suffered through enough warnings related to
1570 hex/oct literals and I think it's best to be silent now.
1571
Raymond Hettinger4f8f9762003-11-26 08:21:35 +00001572- For str and unicode objects, the ljust(), center(), and rjust()
1573 methods now accept an optional argument specifying a fill
1574 character other than a space.
1575
Guido van Rossumbaf0f8f2003-11-22 23:55:50 +00001576- When method objects have an attribute that can be satisfied either
1577 by the function object or by the method object, the function
1578 object's attribute usually wins. Christian Tismer pointed out that
1579 that this is really a mistake, because this only happens for special
1580 methods (like __reduce__) where the method object's version is
1581 really more appropriate than the function's attribute. So from now
1582 on, all method attributes will have precedence over function
1583 attributes with the same name.
1584
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +00001585- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 839548: if a weakref with a callback,
1586 its callback, and its weakly referenced object, all became part of
1587 cyclic garbage during a single run of garbage collection, the order
1588 in which they were torn down was unpredictable. It was possible for
1589 the callback to see partially-torn-down objects, leading to immediate
1590 segfaults, or, if the callback resurrected garbage objects, to
1591 resurrect insane objects that caused segfaults (or other surprises)
1592 later. In one sense this wasn't surprising, because Python's cyclic gc
1593 had no knowledge of Python's weakref objects. It does now. When
1594 weakrefs with callbacks become part of cyclic garbage now, those
1595 weakrefs are cleared first. The callbacks don't trigger then,
1596 preventing the problems. If you need callbacks to trigger, then just
1597 as when cyclic gc is not involved, you need to write your code so
1598 that weakref objects outlive the objects they weakly reference.
Raymond Hettingera690a992003-11-16 16:17:49 +00001599
Tim Petersadd09b42003-11-12 20:43:28 +00001600- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 840829: if cyclic garbage collection
1601 happened to occur during a weakref callback for a new-style class
1602 instance, subtle memory corruption was the result (in a release build;
1603 in a debug build, a segfault occurred reliably very soon after).
1604 This has been repaired.
1605
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +00001606- Compiler flags set in PYTHONSTARTUP are now active in __main__.
1607
1608- Added two builtin types, set() and frozenset().
1609
Raymond Hettinger85c20a42003-11-06 14:06:48 +00001610- Added a reversed() builtin function that returns a reverse iterator
1611 over a sequence.
1612
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +00001613- Added a sorted() builtin function that returns a new sorted list
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001614 from any iterable.
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +00001615
Martin v. Löwis01a74b22003-10-19 18:30:01 +00001616- CObjects are now mutable (on the C level) through PyCObject_SetVoidPtr.
1617
Raymond Hettinger42b1ba32003-10-16 03:41:09 +00001618- list.sort() now supports three keyword arguments: cmp, key, and reverse.
1619 The key argument can be a function of one argument that extracts a
1620 comparison key from the original record: mylist.sort(key=str.lower).
1621 The reverse argument is a boolean value and if True will change the
1622 sort order as if the comparison arguments were reversed. In addition,
1623 the documentation has been amended to provide a guarantee that all sorts
1624 starting with Py2.3 are guaranteed to be stable (the relative order of
1625 records with equal keys is unchanged).
1626
Marc-André Lemburgd7160f82003-09-22 11:14:40 +00001627- Added test whether wchar_t is signed or not. A signed wchar_t is not
1628 usable as internal unicode type base for Py_UNICODE since the
1629 unicode implementation assumes an unsigned type.
1630
Jeremy Hyltond8082792003-09-16 19:41:39 +00001631- Fixed a bug in the cache of length-one Unicode strings that could
1632 lead to a seg fault. The specific problem occurred when an earlier,
1633 non-fatal error left an uninitialized Unicode object in the
1634 freelist.
1635
Raymond Hettinger9bfe5332003-08-27 04:55:52 +00001636- The % formatting operator now supports '%F' which is equivalent to
1637 '%f'. This has always been documented but never implemented.
1638
Tim Peters465fa3d2003-08-15 01:16:37 +00001639- complex(obj) could leak a little memory if obj wasn't a string or
1640 number.
1641
Raymond Hettingereaef6152003-08-02 07:42:57 +00001642- zip() with no arguments now returns an empty list instead of raising
1643 a TypeError exception.
1644
Guido van Rossum02c58f82003-10-08 21:08:29 +00001645- obj.__contains__() now returns True/False instead of 1/0. SF patch
1646 820195.
1647
Armin Rigo2b3eb402003-10-28 12:05:48 +00001648- Python no longer tries to be smart about recursive comparisons.
1649 When comparing containers with cyclic references to themselves it
1650 will now just hit the recursion limit. See SF patch 825639.
1651
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001652- str and unicode builtin types now have an rsplit() method that is
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +00001653 same as split() except that it scans the string from the end
1654 working towards the beginning. See SF feature request 801847.
Hye-Shik Chang060ebed2003-12-15 18:51:19 +00001655
Jim Fulton8a1a5942004-02-08 04:21:26 +00001656- Fixed a bug in object.__reduce_ex__ when using protocol 2. Failure
1657 to clear the error when attempts to get the __getstate__ attribute
1658 fail caused intermittent errors and odd behavior.
1659
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001660- buffer objects based on other objects no longer cache a pointer to
1661 the data and the data length. Instead, the appropriate tp_as_buffer
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001662 method is called as necessary.
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001663
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001664- fixed: if a file is opened with an explicit buffer size >= 1, repeated
Andrew MacIntyre4e10ed32004-04-04 07:01:35 +00001665 close() calls would attempt to free() the buffer already free()ed on
1666 the first call.
1667
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001668
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001669Extension modules
1670-----------------
1671
Barry Warsaw11b91a02004-06-28 00:50:43 +00001672- Added socket.getservbyport(), and make the second argument in
1673 getservbyname() and getservbyport() optional.
1674
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +00001675- time module code that deals with input POSIX timestamps will now raise
1676 ValueError if more than a second is lost in precision when the
1677 timestamp is cast to the platform C time_t type. There's no chance
1678 that the platform will do anything sensible with the result in such
1679 cases. This includes ctime(), localtime() and gmtime(). Assorted
1680 fromtimestamp() and utcfromtimestamp() methods in the datetime module
1681 were also protected. Closes bugs #919012 and 975996.
Brett Cannonb46ed712004-06-19 20:50:47 +00001682
Martin v. Löwis77ca6c42004-06-03 12:47:26 +00001683- fcntl.ioctl now warns if the mutate flag is not specified.
1684
Martin v. Löwisd8948722004-06-02 09:57:56 +00001685- nt now properly allows to refer to UNC roots, e.g. in nt.stat().
1686
Raymond Hettinger027bb632004-05-31 03:09:25 +00001687- the weakref module now supports additional objects: array.array,
1688 sre.pattern_objects, file objects, and sockets.
1689
Raymond Hettingere2eda602004-04-04 08:51:41 +00001690- operator.isMappingType() and operator.isSequenceType() now give
1691 fewer false positives.
1692
Brett Cannon06c34792004-03-23 23:16:54 +00001693- socket.sslerror is now a subclass of socket.error . Also added
1694 socket.error to the socket module's C API.
1695
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001696- Bug #920575: A problem where the _locale module segfaults on
Hye-Shik Changc3a87b82004-03-21 19:34:30 +00001697 nl_langinfo(ERA) caused by GNU libc's illegal NULL return is fixed.
1698
Raymond Hettinger6e2ee862004-03-14 04:37:50 +00001699- array objects now support the copy module. Also, their resizing
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001700 scheme has been updated to match that used for list objects. This improves
Raymond Hettinger49f9bd12004-03-14 05:43:59 +00001701 the performance (speed and memory usage) of append() operations.
Raymond Hettinger6ab78cd2004-08-29 07:50:43 +00001702 Also, array.array() and array.extend() now accept any iterable argument
1703 for repeated appends without needing to create another temporary array.
Raymond Hettinger3aa82c02004-03-13 18:18:51 +00001704
Raymond Hettinger3e47f652004-03-08 18:22:35 +00001705- cStringIO.writelines() now accepts any iterable argument and writes
1706 the lines one at a time rather than joining them and writing once.
1707 Made a parallel change to StringIO.writelines(). Saves memory and
1708 makes suitable for use with generator expressions.
1709
Brett Cannond1080a32004-03-02 04:38:10 +00001710- time.strftime() now checks that the values in its time tuple argument
1711 are within the proper boundaries to prevent possible crashes from the
1712 platform's C library implementation of strftime(). Can possibly
1713 break code that uses values outside the range that didn't cause
1714 problems previously (such as sitting day of year to 0). Fixes bug
1715 #897625.
1716
Martin v. Löwis12af0482004-01-31 12:34:17 +00001717- The socket module now supports Bluetooth sockets, if the
1718 system has <bluetooth/bluetooth.h>
1719
Raymond Hettinger756b3f32004-01-29 06:37:52 +00001720- Added a collections module containing a new datatype, deque(),
1721 offering high-performance, thread-safe, memory friendly appends
1722 and pops on either side of the deque.
1723
1724- Several modules now take advantage of collections.deque() for
1725 improved performance: Queue, mutex, shlex, threading, and pydoc.
1726
Raymond Hettinger166958b2003-12-01 13:18:39 +00001727- The operator module has two new functions, attrgetter() and
1728 itemgetter() which are useful for creating fast data extractor
1729 functions for map(), list.sort(), itertools.groupby(), and
1730 other functions that expect a function argument.
1731
Martin v. Löwis94681fc2003-11-27 19:40:22 +00001732- socket.SHUT_{RD,WR,RDWR} was added.
1733
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +00001734- os.getsid was added.
1735
Guido van Rossum16b9fa82003-10-23 23:54:57 +00001736- The pwd module incorrectly advertised its struct type as
1737 struct_pwent; this has been renamed to struct_passwd. (The old name
1738 is still supported for backwards compatibility.)
1739
Fred Drakede050322003-10-21 15:41:59 +00001740- The xml.parsers.expat module now provides Expat 1.95.7.
1741
Martin v. Löwis3bbd6542003-10-03 13:57:37 +00001742- socket.IPPROTO_IPV6 was added.
1743
Martin v. Löwise7a97962003-09-20 16:08:33 +00001744- readline.clear_history was added.
1745
Brett Cannon62dba4c2003-09-10 19:37:42 +00001746- select.select() now accepts sequences for its first three arguments.
1747
Raymond Hettinger5475f232003-08-08 12:20:03 +00001748- cStringIO now supports the f.closed attribute.
1749
Anthony Baxter83f52912003-08-05 06:33:56 +00001750- The signal module now exposes SIGRTMIN and SIGRTMAX (if available).
1751
Andrew M. Kuchling69f31eb2003-08-13 23:11:04 +00001752- curses module now supports use_default_colors(). [patch #739124]
1753
Anthony Baxter5c68ef02003-10-04 08:04:04 +00001754- Bug #811028: ncurses.h breakage on FreeBSD/MacOS X
1755
1756- Bug #814613: INET_ADDRSTRLEN fix needed for all compilers on SGI
1757
Gustavo Niemeyerad3fc442003-10-17 22:13:16 +00001758- Implemented non-recursive SRE matching scheme (#757624).
1759
1760- Implemented (?(id/name)yes|no) support in SRE (#572936).
1761
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +00001762- random.seed() with no arguments or None uses time.time() as a default
1763 seed. Modified to match Py2.2 behavior and use fractional seconds so
1764 that successive runs are more likely to produce different sequences.
1765
1766- random.Random has a new method, getrandbits(k), which returns an int
1767 with k random bits. This method is now an optional part of the API
1768 for user defined generators. Any generator that defines genrandbits()
1769 can now use randrange() for ranges with a length >= 2**53. Formerly,
1770 randrange would return only even numbers for ranges that large (see
1771 SF bug #812202). Generators that do not define genrandbits() now
1772 issue a warning when randrange() is called with a range that large.
1773
Raymond Hettingerd25c1c62003-12-06 16:23:06 +00001774- itertools has a new function, groupby() for aggregating iterables
1775 into groups sharing the same key (as determined by a key function).
1776 It offers some of functionality of SQL's groupby keyword and of
1777 the Unix uniq filter.
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +00001778
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001779- itertools now has a new tee() function which produces two independent
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +00001780 iterators from a single iterable.
1781
1782- itertools.izip() with no arguments now returns an empty iterator instead
1783 of raising a TypeError exception.
1784
Gustavo Niemeyera6e436e2004-02-14 00:02:45 +00001785- Fixed #853061: allow BZ2Compressor.compress() to receive an empty string
1786 as parameter.
1787
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001788Library
1789-------
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001790
Georg Brandlf0de6a12005-08-22 18:02:59 +00001791- Bug #1266283: The new function "lexists" is now in os.path.__all__.
1792
Guido van Rossum5124b4a2004-07-06 17:52:32 +00001793- Bug #981530: Fix UnboundLocalError in shutil.rmtree(). This affects
1794 the documented behavior: the function passed to the onerror()
1795 handler can now also be os.listdir.
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001796
Brett Cannon41d13f62004-07-03 03:54:54 +00001797- Bug #754449: threading.Thread objects no longer mask exceptions raised during
1798 interpreter shutdown with another exception from attempting to handle the
1799 original exception.
Brett Cannoncc4e9352004-07-03 03:52:35 +00001800
Raymond Hettinger21f9fce2004-07-10 16:11:03 +00001801- Added decimal.py per PEP 327.
Raymond Hettinger7c85fa42004-07-01 11:01:35 +00001802
Brett Cannon46d4ff22004-06-29 04:08:23 +00001803- Bug #981299: rsync is now a recognized protocol in urlparse that uses a
1804 "netloc" portion of a URL.
Brett Cannonfbac2942004-06-29 04:02:40 +00001805
Brett Cannon1c3fa182004-06-19 21:11:35 +00001806- Bug #919012: shutil.move() will not try to move a directory into itself.
1807 Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
1808
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +00001809- Bug #934282: pydoc.stripid() is now case-insensitive. Thanks Robin Becker.
1810
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +00001811- Bug #823209: cmath.log() now takes an optional base argument so that its
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +00001812 API matches math.log().
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +00001813
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001814- Bug #957381: distutils bdist_rpm no longer fails on recent RPM versions
Anthony Baxter1a4ddae2004-08-31 10:07:13 +00001815 that generate a -debuginfo.rpm
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001816
Martin v. Löwisbdec50f2004-06-08 08:29:33 +00001817- os.path.devnull has been added for all supported platforms.
1818
Hye-Shik Chang2400e932004-06-05 18:37:53 +00001819- Fixed #877165: distutils now picks the right C++ compiler command
1820 on cygwin and mingw32.
1821
Hye-Shik Chang39aef792004-06-05 13:30:56 +00001822- urllib.urlopen().readline() now handles HTTP/0.9 correctly.
1823
Brett Cannon0096e262004-06-05 01:12:51 +00001824- refactored site.py into functions. Also wrote regression tests for the
1825 module.
1826
Fred Drakeec6229e2004-06-25 23:02:59 +00001827- The distutils install command now supports the --home option and
1828 installation scheme for all platforms.
1829
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +00001830- asyncore.loop now has a repeat count parameter that defaults to
Michael W. Hudson7db865a2004-06-30 09:09:38 +00001831 looping forever.
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +00001832
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001833- The distutils sdist command now ignores all .svn directories, in
1834 addition to CVS and RCS directories. .svn directories hold
1835 administrative files for the Subversion source control system.
1836
Martin v. Löwis2a6ba902004-05-31 18:22:40 +00001837- Added a new module: cookielib. Automatic cookie handling for HTTP
1838 clients. Also, support for cookielib has been added to urllib2, so
1839 urllib2.urlopen() can transparently handle cookies.
1840
Raymond Hettinger059e1702004-05-19 19:56:44 +00001841- stringprep.py now uses built-in set() instead of sets.Set().
1842
Thomas Heller2e7c8322004-05-11 15:10:59 +00001843- Bug #876278: Unbounded recursion in modulefinder
1844
Martin v. Löwis456ab1d2004-05-06 01:54:36 +00001845- Bug #780300: Swap public and system ID in LexicalHandler.startDTD.
1846 Applications relying on the wrong order need to be corrected.
1847
Hye-Shik Chang0f5bf1e2004-04-20 21:11:11 +00001848- Bug #926075: Fixed a bug that returns a wrong pattern object
1849 for a string or unicode object in sre.compile() when a different
1850 type pattern with the same value exists.
1851
Skip Montanarod0c0c412004-04-07 16:03:02 +00001852- Added countcallers arg to trace.Trace class (--trackcalls command line arg
1853 when run from the command prompt).
1854
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +00001855- Fixed a caching bug in platform.platform() where the argument of 'terse' was
1856 not taken into consideration when caching value.
1857
Nicholas Bastin824b1b22004-03-23 18:44:39 +00001858- Added two new command-line arguments for profile (output file and
1859 default sort).
1860
Nicholas Bastin1eb4bfc2004-03-22 20:12:56 +00001861- Added global runctx function to profile module
1862
Martin v. Löwis347c30d2004-03-21 15:29:41 +00001863- Add hlist missing entryconfigure and entrycget methods.
1864
Hye-Shik Chang4a7ad1a2004-03-19 08:11:56 +00001865- The ptcp154 codec was added for Kazakh character set support.
1866
Martin v. Löwisa79449e2004-02-15 21:19:18 +00001867- Support non-anonymous ftp URLs in urllib2.
1868
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001869- The encodings package will now apply codec name aliases
Marc-André Lemburg57cb68f2004-01-20 18:24:34 +00001870 first before starting to try the import of the codec module.
1871 This simplifies overriding built-in codecs with external
1872 packages, e.g. the included CJK codecs with the JapaneseCodecs
1873 package, by adjusting the aliases dictionary in encodings.aliases
1874 accordingly.
1875
Barry Warsaw30ff12f2004-01-04 01:13:43 +00001876- base64 now supports RFC 3548 Base16, Base32, and Base64 encoding and
1877 decoding standards.
1878
Jeremy Hylton37c5f2a2003-12-14 05:29:45 +00001879- urllib2 now supports processors. A processor is a handler that
1880 implements an xxx_request or xxx_response method. These methods are
1881 called for all requests.
1882
Thomas Hellerc7501d52003-12-05 20:28:07 +00001883- distutils compilers now compile source files in the same order as
1884 they are passed to the compiler.
1885
Walter Dörwaldc8de4582003-12-03 20:26:05 +00001886- pprint.pprint() and pprint.pformat() now have additional parameters
1887 indent, width and depth.
1888
Walter Dörwald7a7ede52003-12-03 20:15:28 +00001889- Patch #750542: pprint now will pretty print subclasses of list, tuple
1890 and dict too, as long as they don't overwrite __repr__().
1891
Thomas Hellerb3105912003-11-28 19:42:56 +00001892- Bug #848614: distutils' msvccompiler fails to find the MSVC6
1893 compiler because of incomplete registry entries.
1894
Martin v. Löwisaf7dc8d2003-11-19 19:51:55 +00001895- httplib.HTTP.putrequest now offers to omit the implicit Accept-Encoding.
1896
Thomas Hellercf0005b2003-11-14 10:33:20 +00001897- Patch #841977: modulefinder didn't find extension modules in packages
1898
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +00001899- imaplib.IMAP4.thread was added.
1900
Guido van Rossum967b0632003-11-10 02:27:19 +00001901- Plugged a minor hole in tempfile.mktemp() due to the use of
1902 os.path.exists(), switched to using os.lstat() directly if possible.
1903
Raymond Hettinger0c410272004-01-05 10:13:35 +00001904- bisect.py and heapq.py now have underlying C implementations
Raymond Hettinger33ecffb2004-06-10 05:03:17 +00001905 for better performance.
1906
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001907- heapq.py has two new functions, nsmallest() and nlargest().
Raymond Hettingerb3af1812003-11-08 10:24:38 +00001908
Neil Schemenauerf607fc52003-11-05 23:03:00 +00001909- traceback.format_exc has been added (similar to print_exc but it returns
1910 a string).
1911
Martin v. Löwis45394c22003-10-31 13:49:36 +00001912- xmlrpclib.MultiCall has been added.
1913
Martin v. Löwis48440b72003-10-31 12:52:35 +00001914- poplib.POP3_SSL has been added.
1915
Martin v. Löwisd6625482003-10-12 17:37:01 +00001916- tmpfile.mkstemp now returns an absolute path even if dir is relative.
1917
Brett Cannon5d9ca4e2003-10-12 04:38:48 +00001918- urlparse is RFC 2396 compliant.
1919
Skip Montanarodef99342003-10-03 14:07:07 +00001920- The fieldnames argument to the csv module's DictReader constructor is now
1921 optional. If omitted, the first row of the file will be used as the
1922 list of fieldnames.
1923
Raymond Hettinger9a80c5d2003-09-23 20:21:01 +00001924- encodings.bz2_codec was added for access to bz2 compression
1925 using "a long string".encode('bz2')
1926
Guido van Rossum0e5a51d2003-09-22 15:03:11 +00001927- Various improvements to unittest.py, realigned with PyUnit CVS.
1928
Martin v. Löwisc6bb6c02003-09-20 15:52:21 +00001929- dircache now passes exceptions to the caller, instead of returning
1930 empty lists.
1931
Raymond Hettingerdeadbf52003-09-12 06:33:37 +00001932- The bsddb module and dbhash module now support the iterator and
1933 mapping protocols which make them more substitutable for dictionaries
1934 and shelves.
1935
Skip Montanaro3f7a9482003-09-06 19:52:12 +00001936- The csv module's DictReader and DictWriter classes now accept keyword
1937 arguments. This was an omission in the initial implementation.
1938
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +00001939- The email package handles some RFC 2231 parameters with missing
Barry Warsaw2f5bf172003-09-03 04:09:49 +00001940 CHARSET fields better. It also includes a patch to parameter
1941 parsing when semicolons appear inside quotes.
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +00001942
Raymond Hettinger6a180122003-08-17 08:34:09 +00001943- sets.py now runs under Py2.2. In addition, the argument restrictions
1944 for most set methods (but not the operators) have been relaxed to
Raymond Hettinger70b9f492003-11-19 15:52:14 +00001945 allow any iterable.
Raymond Hettingeree562fc2003-08-15 21:17:04 +00001946
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +00001947- _strptime.py now has a behind-the-scenes caching mechanism for the most
Brett Cannonb7150a22003-08-05 06:27:04 +00001948 recent TimeRE instance used along with the last five unique directive
1949 patterns. The overall module was also made more thread-safe.
1950
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +00001951- random.cunifvariate() and random.stdgamma() were deprecated in Py2.3
1952 and removed in Py2.4.
1953
Anthony Baxter92bee362003-11-04 14:35:49 +00001954- Bug #823328: urllib2.py's HTTP Digest Auth support works again.
1955
Hye-Shik Chang84a99312004-01-17 14:59:36 +00001956- Patch #873597: CJK codecs are imported into rank of default codecs.
1957
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001958Tools/Demos
1959-----------
1960
Skip Montanarod5a21fd2004-01-27 14:49:04 +00001961- A hotshotmain script was added to the Tools/scripts directory that
1962 makes it easy to run a script under control of the hotshot profiler.
1963
Skip Montanaro030f68a2003-10-28 16:24:00 +00001964- The db2pickle and pickle2db scripts can now dump/load gdbm files.
1965
Skip Montanaroe2b61e02004-03-03 17:42:08 +00001966- The file order on the command line of the pickle2db script was reversed.
1967 It is now [ picklefile ] dbfile. This provides better symmetry with
1968 db2pickle. The file arguments to both scripts are now source followed by
1969 destination in situations where both files are given.
1970
Skip Montanarofd4fa882003-09-10 19:04:13 +00001971- The pydoc script will display a link to the module documentation for
1972 modules determined to be part of the core distribution. The documentation
1973 base directory defaults to http://www.python.org/doc/current/lib/ but can
1974 be changed by setting the PYTHONDOCS environment variable.
1975
Raymond Hettingere41d4c82003-08-25 04:39:55 +00001976- texcheck.py now detects double word errors.
1977
Tim Peters1a3abcb2003-08-18 23:52:09 +00001978- md5sum.py mistakenly opened input files in text mode by default, a
1979 silent and dangerous change from previous releases. It once again
1980 opens input files in binary mode by default. The -t and -b flags
1981 remain for compatibility with the 2.3 release, but -b is the default
1982 now.
1983
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001984- py-electric-colon now works when pending-delete/delete-selection mode is
1985 in effect
1986
1987- py-help-at-point is no longer bound to the F1 key - it's still bound to
1988 C-c C-h
1989
Barry Warsaw6ec58ca2003-09-03 03:20:37 +00001990- Pynche was fixed to not crash when there is no ~/.pynche file and no
1991 -d option was given.
1992
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001993Build
1994-----
1995
Brett Cannonf6af76d2004-06-26 04:03:06 +00001996- Bug #978645: Modules/getpath.c now builds properly in --disable-framework
1997 build under OS X.
1998
Skip Montanaro56f6a4f2004-06-18 02:47:22 +00001999- Profiling using gprof is now available if Python is configured with
2000 --enable-profiling.
2001
Martin v. Löwisf30d60e2004-06-08 08:17:44 +00002002- Profiling the VM using the Pentium TSC is now possible if Python
2003 is configured --with-tsc.
2004
Martin v. Löwis642c8a12004-06-04 13:55:13 +00002005- In order to find libraries, setup.py now also looks in /lib64, for use
2006 on AMD64.
2007
Hye-Shik Chang54f94392004-04-14 07:55:31 +00002008- Bug #934635: Fixed a bug where the configure script couldn't detect
2009 getaddrinfo() properly if the KAME stack had SCTP support.
2010
Skip Montanaro7befb992004-02-10 16:50:21 +00002011- Support for missing ANSI C header files (limits.h, stddef.h, etc) was
2012 removed.
2013
Skip Montanarodb608052004-02-07 13:53:46 +00002014- Systems requiring the D4, D6 or D7 variants of pthreads are no longer
2015 supported (see PEP 11).
2016
2017- Universal newline support can no longer be disabled (see PEP 11).
2018
Skip Montanarocd1f7432004-01-17 14:22:44 +00002019- Support for DGUX, SunOS 4, IRIX 4 and Minix was removed (see PEP 11).
2020
2021- Support for systems requiring --with-dl-dld or --with-sgi-dl was removed
2022 (see PEP 11).
2023
2024- Tests for sizeof(char) were removed since ANSI C mandates that
2025 sizeof(char) must be 1.
2026
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002027C API
2028-----
2029
Tim Peters9ddf40b2004-06-20 22:41:32 +00002030- Thanks to Anthony Tuininga, the datetime module now supplies a C API
2031 containing type-check macros and constructors. See new docs in the
2032 Python/C API Reference Manual for details.
2033
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +00002034- Private function _PyTime_DoubleToTimet added, to convert a Python
2035 timestamp (C double) to platform time_t with some out-of-bounds
2036 checking. Declared in new header file timefuncs.h. It would be
2037 good to expose some other internal timemodule.c functions there.
2038
Martin v. Löwise440e472004-06-01 15:22:42 +00002039- New public functions PyEval_EvaluateFrame and PyGen_New to expose
2040 generator objects.
2041
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +00002042- New public functions Py_IncRef() and Py_DecRef(), exposing the
2043 functionality of the Py_XINCREF() and Py_XDECREF macros. Useful for
Thomas Hellercc10a852004-04-22 17:28:25 +00002044 runtime dynamic embedding of Python. See patch #938302, by Bob
2045 Ippolito.
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +00002046
Raymond Hettingerc1e4f9d2004-03-12 08:04:00 +00002047- Added a new macro, PySequence_Fast_ITEMS, which retrieves a fast sequence's
2048 underlying array of PyObject pointers. Useful for high speed looping.
2049
Raymond Hettinger8f5cdaa2003-12-13 11:26:12 +00002050- Created a new method flag, METH_COEXIST, which causes a method to be loaded
2051 even if already defined by a slot wrapper. This allows a __contains__
2052 method, for example, to co-exist with a defined sq_contains slot. This
2053 is helpful because the PyCFunction can take advantage of optimized calls
2054 whenever METH_O or METH_NOARGS flags are defined.
2055
Raymond Hettingerbc0f2ab2003-11-25 21:12:14 +00002056- Added a new function, PyDict_Contains(d, k) which is like
2057 PySequence_Contains() but is specific to dictionaries and executes
2058 about 10% faster.
2059
Brett Cannon26b3a7b2003-10-19 21:31:43 +00002060- Added three new macros: Py_RETURN_NONE, Py_RETURN_TRUE, and Py_RETURN_FALSE.
2061 Each return the singleton they mention after Py_INCREF()ing them.
2062
Raymond Hettingercb2da432003-10-12 18:24:34 +00002063- Added a new function, PyTuple_Pack(n, ...) for constructing tuples from a
2064 variable length argument list of Python objects without having to invoke
2065 the more complex machinery of Py_BuildValue(). PyTuple_Pack(3, a, b, c)
2066 is equivalent to Py_BuildValue("(OOO)", a, b, c).
2067
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002068Windows
2069-------
2070
Guido van Rossumfd25aca2003-11-30 22:10:15 +00002071- The _winreg module could segfault when reading very large registry
2072 values, due to unchecked alloca() calls (SF bug 851056). The fix is
2073 uses either PyMem_Malloc(n) or PyString_FromStringAndSize(NULL, n),
2074 as appropriate, followed by a size check.
2075
Tim Petersf1827cf2003-09-07 03:30:18 +00002076- file.truncate() could misbehave if the file was open for update
2077 (modes r+, rb+, w+, wb+), and the most recent file operation before
2078 the truncate() call was an input operation. SF bug 801631.
2079
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002080
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00002081What's New in Python 2.3 final?
2082===============================
2083
2084*Release date: 29-Jul-2003*
2085
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00002086IDLE
2087----
2088
Tim Peters36c1afc2003-07-29 17:22:57 +00002089- Bug 778400: IDLE hangs when selecting "Edit with IDLE" from explorer.
2090 This was unique to Windows, and was fixed by adding an -n switch to
2091 the command the Windows installer creates to execute "Edit with IDLE"
2092 context-menu actions.
2093
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00002094- IDLE displays a new message upon startup: some "personal firewall"
2095 kinds of programs (for example, ZoneAlarm) open a dialog of their
2096 own when any program opens a socket. IDLE does use sockets, talking
2097 on the computer's internal loopback interface. This connection is not
2098 visible on any external interface and no data is sent to or received
2099 from the Internet. So, if you get such a dialog when opening IDLE,
2100 asking whether to let pythonw.exe talk to address 127.0.0.1, say yes,
2101 and rest assured no communication external to your machine is taking
2102 place. If you don't allow it, IDLE won't be able to start.
2103
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00002104
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002105What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 2?
2106=============================================
2107
Tim Peters6560a252003-07-24 00:15:46 +00002108*Release date: 24-Jul-2003*
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002109
2110Core and builtins
2111-----------------
2112
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00002113- It is now possible to import from zipfiles containing additional
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002114 data bytes before the zip compatible archive. Zipfiles containing a
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00002115 comment at the end are still unsupported.
2116
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002117Extension modules
2118-----------------
2119
2120- A longstanding bug in the parser module's initialization could cause
2121 fatal internal refcount confusion when the module got initialized more
2122 than once. This has been fixed.
2123
Fred Drake01a43122003-07-21 17:17:10 +00002124- Fixed memory leak in pyexpat; using the parser's ParseFile() method
2125 with open files that aren't instances of the standard file type
2126 caused an instance of the bound .read() method to be leaked on every
2127 call.
2128
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002129- Fixed some leaks in the locale module.
2130
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002131Library
2132-------
2133
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002134- Lib/encodings/rot_13.py when used as a script, now more properly
2135 uses the first Python interpreter on your path.
2136
2137- Removed caching of TimeRE (and thus LocaleTime) in _strptime.py to
2138 fix a locale related bug in the test suite. Although another patch
2139 was needed to actually fix the problem, the cache code was not
2140 restored.
2141
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00002142IDLE
2143----
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002144
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00002145- Calltips patches.
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002146
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002147Build
2148-----
2149
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002150- For MacOSX, added -mno-fused-madd to BASECFLAGS to fix test_coercion
2151 on Panther (OSX 10.3).
2152
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002153C API
2154-----
2155
2156Windows
2157-------
2158
Tim Peters291f14e2003-07-22 02:50:01 +00002159- The tempfile module could do insane imports on Windows if PYTHONCASEOK
2160 was set, making temp file creation impossible. Repaired.
2161
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002162- Add a patch to workaround pthread_sigmask() bugs in Cygwin.
2163
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002164Mac
2165---
2166
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002167- Various fixes to pimp.
2168
2169- Scripts runs with pythonw no longer had full window manager access.
2170
2171- Don't force boot-disk-only install, for reasons unknown it causes
2172 more problems than it solves.
2173
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002174
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002175What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 1?
2176=============================================
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002177
Jeremy Hylton0ed18c22003-07-18 20:10:02 +00002178*Release date: 18-Jul-2003*
2179
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002180Core and builtins
2181-----------------
2182
Tim Peterse5e065b2003-07-06 18:36:54 +00002183- The new function sys.getcheckinterval() returns the last value set
2184 by sys.setcheckinterval().
2185
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002186- Several bugs in the symbol table phase of the compiler have been
2187 fixed. Errors could be lost and compilation could fail without
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002188 reporting an error. SF patch 763201.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002189
2190- The interpreter is now more robust about importing the warnings
2191 module. In an executable generated by freeze or similar programs,
2192 earlier versions of 2.3 would fail if the warnings module could
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002193 not be found on the file system. Fixes SF bug 771097.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002194
2195- A warning about assignments to module attributes that shadow
2196 builtins, present in earlier releases of 2.3, has been removed.
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002197
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002198- It is not possible to create subclasses of builtin types like str
2199 and tuple that define an itemsize. Earlier releases of Python 2.3
2200 allowed this by mistake, leading to crashes and other problems.
2201
2202- The thread_id is now initialized to 0 in a non-thread build. SF bug
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002203 770247.
2204
2205- SF bug 762891: "del p[key]" on proxy object no longer raises SystemError.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002206
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002207Extension modules
2208-----------------
2209
2210- weakref.proxy() can now handle "del obj[i]" for proxy objects
2211 defining __delitem__. Formerly, it generated a SystemError.
2212
2213- SSL no longer crashes the interpreter when the remote side disconnects.
2214
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002215- On Unix the mmap module can again be used to map device files.
2216
Brett Cannon20def8b2003-07-01 05:16:08 +00002217- time.strptime now exclusively uses the Python implementation
2218 contained within the _strptime module.
2219
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002220- The print slot of weakref proxy objects was removed, because it was
2221 not consistent with the object's repr slot.
2222
2223- The mmap module only checks file size for regular files, not
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002224 character or block devices. SF patch 708374.
2225
2226- The cPickle Pickler garbage collection support was fixed to traverse
2227 the find_class attribute, if present.
2228
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002229- There are several fixes for the bsddb3 wrapper module.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002230
2231 bsddb3 no longer crashes if an environment is closed before a cursor
2232 (SF bug 763298).
2233
2234 The DB and DBEnv set_get_returns_none function was extended to take
Barry Warsawd71a5512003-07-20 18:00:54 +00002235 a level instead of a boolean flag. The new level 2 means that in
2236 addition, cursor.set()/.get() methods return None instead of raising
2237 an exception.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002238
2239 A typo was fixed in DBCursor.join_item(), preventing a crash.
2240
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002241Library
2242-------
2243
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002244- distutils now supports MSVC 7.1
2245
Raymond Hettinger71adf7e2003-07-16 19:25:22 +00002246- doctest now examines all docstrings by default. Previously, it would
2247 skip over functions with private names (as indicated by the underscore
2248 naming convention). The old default created too much of a risk that
2249 user tests were being skipped inadvertently. Note, this change could
2250 break code in the unlikely case that someone had intentionally put
2251 failing tests in the docstrings of private functions. The breakage
2252 is easily fixable by specifying the old behavior when calling testmod()
2253 or Tester().
2254
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002255- There were several fixes to the way dumbdbms are closed. It's vital
2256 that a dumbdbm database be closed properly, else the on-disk data
2257 and directory files can be left in mutually inconsistent states.
2258 dumbdbm.py's _Database.__del__() method attempted to close the
2259 database properly, but a shutdown race in _Database._commit() could
2260 prevent this from working, so that a program trusting __del__() to
2261 get the on-disk files in synch could be badly surprised. The race
2262 has been repaired. A sync() method was also added so that shelve
2263 can guarantee data is written to disk.
Tim Peters7a6c7332003-07-13 17:21:10 +00002264
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002265 The close() method can now be called more than once without complaint.
Tim Petersd7472ec2003-07-13 02:22:03 +00002266
Tim Peters59aba122003-07-01 20:01:55 +00002267- The classes in threading.py are now new-style classes. That they
2268 weren't before was an oversight.
2269
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002270- The urllib2 digest authentication handlers now define the correct
2271 auth_header. The earlier versions would fail at runtime.
2272
Neal Norwitze7dfe212003-07-01 14:59:46 +00002273- SF bug 763023: fix uncaught ZeroDivisionError in difflib ratio methods
2274 when there are no lines.
2275
Neal Norwitz3c0f2c92003-07-01 21:12:47 +00002276- SF bug 763637: fix exception in Tkinter with after_cancel
2277 which could occur with Tk 8.4
2278
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002279- SF bug 770601: CGIHTTPServer.py now passes the entire environment
2280 to child processes.
2281
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002282- SF bug 765238: add filter to fnmatch's __all__.
2283
2284- SF bug 748201: make time.strptime() error messages more helpful.
2285
2286- SF patch 764470: Do not dump the args attribute of a Fault object in
2287 xmlrpclib.
2288
2289- SF patch 549151: urllib and urllib2 now redirect POSTs on 301
2290 responses.
2291
2292- SF patch 766650: The whichdb module was fixed to recognize dbm files
2293 generated by gdbm on OS/2 EMX.
2294
2295- SF bugs 763047 and 763052: fixes bug of timezone value being left as
2296 -1 when ``time.tzname[0] == time.tzname[1] and not time.daylight``
2297 is true when it should only when time.daylight is true.
2298
2299- SF bug 764548: re now allows subclasses of str and unicode to be
2300 used as patterns.
2301
2302- SF bug 763637: In Tkinter, change after_cancel() to handle tuples
2303 of varying sizes. Tk 8.4 returns a different number of values
2304 than Tk 8.3.
2305
2306- SF bug 763023: difflib.ratio() did not catch zero division.
2307
2308- The Queue module now has an __all__ attribute.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002309
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002310Tools/Demos
2311-----------
2312
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002313- See Lib/idlelib/NEWS.txt for IDLE news.
2314
Neal Norwitz592c4cc2003-07-01 04:14:28 +00002315- SF bug 753592: webchecker/wsgui now handles user supplied directories.
2316
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002317- The trace.py script has been removed. It is now in the standard library.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002318
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002319Build
2320-----
2321
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002322- Python now compiles with -fno-strict-aliasing if possible (SF bug 766696).
2323
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002324- The socket module compiles on IRIX 6.5.10.
2325
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002326- An irix64 system is treated the same way as an irix6 system (SF
2327 patch 764560).
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002328
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002329- Several definitions were missing on FreeBSD 5.x unless the
2330 __BSD_VISIBLE symbol was defined. configure now defines it as
2331 needed.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002332
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002333C API
2334-----
2335
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002336- Unicode objects now support mbcs as a built-in encoding, so the C
2337 API can use it without deferring to the encodings package.
2338
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002339Windows
2340-------
2341
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002342- The Windows implementation of PyThread_start_new_thread() never
2343 checked error returns from Windows functions correctly. As a result,
2344 it could claim to start a new thread even when the Microsoft
2345 _beginthread() function failed (due to "too many threads" -- this is
2346 on the order of thousands when it happens). In these cases, the
2347 Python exception ::
2348
2349 thread.error: can't start new thread
2350
2351 is raised now.
2352
2353- SF bug 766669: Prevent a GPF on interpreter exit when sockets are in
2354 use. The interpreter now calls WSACleanup() from Py_Finalize()
2355 instead of from DLL teardown.
2356
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002357Mac
2358---
2359
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002360- Bundlebuilder now inherits default values in the right way. It was
Walter Dörwald73a8a4b2003-07-30 12:14:02 +00002361 previously possible for app bundles to get a type of "BNDL" instead
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002362 of "APPL." Other improvements include, a --build-id option to
2363 specify the CFBundleIdentifier and using the --python option to set
2364 the executable in the bundle.
2365
2366- Fixed two bugs in MacOSX framework handling.
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002367
Jack Jansene0040412003-07-23 22:17:28 +00002368- pythonw did not allow user interaction in 2.3rc1, this has been fixed.
2369
2370- Python is now compiled with -mno-fused-madd, making all tests pass
2371 on Panther.
2372
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002373What's New in Python 2.3 beta 2?
2374================================
2375
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00002376*Release date: 29-Jun-2003*
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002377
2378Core and builtins
2379-----------------
2380
Barry Warsaw883f2232003-06-29 17:10:11 +00002381- A program can now set the environment variable PYTHONINSPECT to some
2382 string value in Python, and cause the interpreter to enter the
2383 interactive prompt at program exit, as if Python had been invoked
2384 with the -i option.
2385
Raymond Hettingerd05abde2003-06-17 05:05:49 +00002386- list.index() now accepts optional start and stop arguments. Similar
2387 changes were made to UserList.index(). SF feature request 754014.
2388
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002389- SF patch 751998 fixes an unwanted side effect of the previous fix
2390 for SF bug 742860 (the next item).
2391
Tim Peters50d8b8b2003-05-25 17:44:31 +00002392- SF bug 742860: "WeakKeyDictionary __delitem__ uses iterkeys". This
2393 wasn't threadsafe, was very inefficient (expected time O(len(dict))
2394 instead of O(1)), and could raise a spurious RuntimeError if another
2395 thread mutated the dict during __delitem__, or if a comparison function
2396 mutated it. It also neglected to raise KeyError when the key wasn't
2397 present; didn't raise TypeError when the key wasn't of a weakly
2398 referencable type; and broke various more-or-less obscure dict
2399 invariants by using a sequence of equality comparisons over the whole
2400 set of dict keys instead of computing the key's hash code to narrow
2401 the search to those keys with the same hash code. All of these are
2402 considered to be bugs. A new implementation of __delitem__ repairs all
2403 that, but note that fixing these bugs may change visible behavior in
2404 code relying (whether intentionally or accidentally) on old behavior.
Tim Peters886128f2003-05-25 01:45:11 +00002405
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002406- SF bug 734869: Fixed a compiler bug that caused a fatal error when
2407 compiling a list comprehension that contained another list comprehension
2408 embedded in a lambda expression.
2409
Tim Peterse87568d2003-05-24 20:18:24 +00002410- SF bug 705231: builtin pow() no longer lets the platform C pow()
2411 raise -1.0 to integer powers, because (at least) glibc gets it wrong
2412 in some cases. The result should be -1.0 if the power is odd and 1.0
2413 if the power is even, and any float with a sufficiently large exponent
2414 is (mathematically) an exact even integer.
2415
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002416- SF bug 759227: A new-style class that implements __nonzero__() must
2417 return a bool or int (but not an int subclass) from that method. This
2418 matches the restriction on classic classes.
2419
Martin v. Löwis5467d4c2003-05-10 07:10:12 +00002420- The encoding attribute has been added for file objects, and set to
2421 the terminal encoding on Unix and Windows.
2422
Tim Peters015dd822003-05-04 04:16:52 +00002423- The softspace attribute of file objects became read-only by oversight.
2424 It's writable again.
2425
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00002426- Reverted a 2.3 beta 1 change to iterators for subclasses of list and
2427 tuple. By default, the iterators now access data elements directly
2428 instead of going through __getitem__. If __getitem__ access is
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002429 preferred, then __iter__ can be overridden.
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00002430
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002431- SF bug 735247: The staticmethod and super types participate in
2432 garbage collection. Before this change, it was possible for leaks to
2433 occur in functions with non-global free variables that used these types.
2434
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002435Extension modules
2436-----------------
2437
Raymond Hettinger643bcec2003-06-29 03:29:42 +00002438- the socket module has a new exception, socket.timeout, to allow
2439 timeouts to be handled separately from other socket errors.
2440
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002441- SF bug 751276: cPickle has fixed to propagate exceptions raised in
2442 user code. In earlier versions, cPickle caught and ignored any
2443 exception when it performed operations that it expected to raise
2444 specific exceptions like AttributeError.
2445
2446- cPickle Pickler and Unpickler objects now participate in garbage
2447 collection.
2448
Tim Peterscda32b72003-06-15 23:13:35 +00002449- mimetools.choose_boundary() could return duplicate strings at times,
2450 especially likely on Windows. The strings returned are now guaranteed
2451 unique within a single program run.
2452
Brett Cannon4e64d782003-06-13 23:44:35 +00002453- thread.interrupt_main() raises KeyboardInterrupt in the main thread.
2454 dummy_thread has also been modified to try to simulate the behavior.
2455
Walter Dörwald9e46abe2003-05-18 03:15:10 +00002456- array.array.insert() now treats negative indices as being relative
2457 to the end of the array, just like list.insert() does. (SF bug #739313)
2458
Tim Petersb0c854d2003-05-17 15:57:00 +00002459- The datetime module classes datetime, time, and timedelta are now
2460 properly subclassable.
Tim Petersa98924a2003-05-17 05:55:19 +00002461
Martin v. Löwis28e9ce92003-05-09 08:19:48 +00002462- _tkinter.{get|set}busywaitinterval was added.
2463
Raymond Hettinger834f4632003-05-02 20:24:56 +00002464- itertools.islice() now accepts stop=None as documented.
2465 Fixes SF bug #730685.
2466
Skip Montanaro8c044d82003-05-06 20:42:37 +00002467- the bsddb185 module is built in one restricted instance -
2468 /usr/include/db.h exists and defines HASHVERSION to be 2. This is true
2469 for many BSD-derived systems.
2470
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002471
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002472Library
2473-------
2474
Tim Petersdb3756d2003-06-29 05:30:48 +00002475- Some happy doctest extensions from Jim Fulton have been added to
2476 doctest.py. These are already being used in Zope3. The two
2477 primary ones:
2478
2479 doctest.debug(module, name) extracts the doctests from the named object
2480 in the given module, puts them in a temp file, and starts pdb running
2481 on that file. This is great when a doctest fails.
2482
2483 doctest.DocTestSuite(module=None) returns a synthesized unittest
2484 TestSuite instance, to be run by the unittest framework, which
2485 runs all the doctests in the module. This allows writing tests in
2486 doctest style (which can be clearer and shorter than writing tests
2487 in unittest style), without losing unittest's powerful testing
2488 framework features (which doctest lacks).
2489
Tim Peters6ebe61f2003-06-27 20:48:05 +00002490- For compatibility with doctests created before 2.3, if an expected
2491 output block consists solely of "1" and the actual output block
2492 consists solely of "True", it's accepted as a match; similarly
2493 for "0" and "False". This is quite un-doctest-like, but is practical.
2494 The behavior can be disabled by passing the new doctest module
2495 constant DONT_ACCEPT_TRUE_FOR_1 to the new optionflags optional
2496 argument.
2497
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002498- ZipFile.testzip() now only traps BadZipfile exceptions. Previously,
2499 a bare except caught to much and reported all errors as a problem
2500 in the archive.
2501
2502- The logging module now has a new function, makeLogRecord() making
2503 LogHandler easier to interact with DatagramHandler and SocketHandler.
2504
Skip Montanaro364ca402003-06-17 12:58:31 +00002505- The cgitb module has been extended to support plain text display (SF patch
2506 569574).
2507
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002508- A brand new version of IDLE (from the IDLEfork project at
2509 SourceForge) is now included as Lib/idlelib. The old Tools/idle is
2510 no more.
2511
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002512- Added a new module: trace (documentation missing). This module used
2513 to be distributed in Tools/scripts. It uses sys.settrace() to trace
2514 code execution -- either function calls or individual lines. It can
2515 generate tracing output during execution or a post-mortem report of
2516 code coverage.
2517
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00002518- The threading module has new functions settrace() and setprofile()
2519 that cooperate with the functions of the same name in the sys
2520 module. A function registered with the threading module will
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002521 be used for all threads it creates. The new trace module uses this
2522 to provide tracing for code running in threads.
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00002523
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00002524- copy.py: applied SF patch 707900, fixing bug 702858, by Steven
2525 Taschuk. Copying a new-style class that had a reference to itself
2526 didn't work. (The same thing worked fine for old-style classes.)
Martin v. Löwisba8f5ff2003-06-14 07:10:06 +00002527 Builtin functions are now treated as atomic, fixing bug #746304.
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00002528
Raymond Hettingerc24d7672003-06-08 19:42:33 +00002529- difflib.py has two new functions: context_diff() and unified_diff().
2530
Guido van Rossumfa19f7c2003-05-16 01:46:51 +00002531- More fixes to urllib (SF 549151): (a) When redirecting, always use
2532 GET. This is common practice and more-or-less sanctioned by the
2533 HTTP standard. (b) Add a handler for 307 redirection, which becomes
2534 an error for POST, but a regular redirect for GET and HEAD
2535
Guido van Rossumbf1bef82003-05-13 18:01:19 +00002536- Added optional 'onerror' argument to os.walk(), to control error
2537 handling.
2538
Martin v. Löwise59e2ba2003-05-03 09:09:02 +00002539- inspect.is{method|data}descriptor was added, to allow pydoc display
2540 __doc__ of data descriptors.
2541
Skip Montanaro4a7751c2003-04-29 21:07:16 +00002542- Fixed socket speed loss caused by use of the _socketobject wrapper class
2543 in socket.py.
2544
Raymond Hettinger22952a32003-05-20 04:59:56 +00002545- timeit.py now checks the current directory for imports.
2546
Gustavo Niemeyer9556fba2003-06-07 17:53:08 +00002547- urllib2.py now knows how to order proxy classes, so the user doesn't
2548 have to insert it in front of other classes, nor do dirty tricks like
2549 inserting a "dummy" HTTPHandler after a ProxyHandler when building an
2550 opener with proxy support.
2551
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002552- Iterators have been added for dbm keys.
2553
2554- random.Random objects can now be pickled.
2555
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002556Tools/Demos
2557-----------
2558
Martin v. Löwisb8c084e2003-06-14 09:03:46 +00002559- pydoc now offers help on keywords and topics.
2560
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002561- Tools/idle is gone; long live Lib/idlelib.
2562
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00002563- diff.py prints file diffs in context, unified, or ndiff formats,
2564 providing a command line interface to difflib.py.
Raymond Hettinger2f3c74a2003-06-08 23:10:15 +00002565
Raymond Hettinger71e00332003-05-10 03:30:13 +00002566- texcheck.py is a new script for making a rough validation of Python LaTeX
2567 files.
2568
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002569Build
2570-----
2571
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002572- Setting DESTDIR during 'make install' now allows specifying a
Martin v. Löwis3b8ee082003-05-11 20:25:35 +00002573 different root directory.
2574
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002575C API
2576-----
2577
Tim Peters3cfe7542003-05-21 21:29:48 +00002578- PyType_Ready(): If a type declares that it participates in gc
2579 (Py_TPFLAGS_HAVE_GC), and its base class does not, and its base class's
2580 tp_free slot is the default _PyObject_Del, and type does not define
2581 a tp_free slot itself, _PyObject_GC_Del is assigned to type->tp_free.
2582 Previously _PyObject_Del was inherited, which could at best lead to a
2583 segfault. In addition, if even after this magic the type's tp_free
2584 slot is _PyObject_Del or NULL, and the type is a base type
2585 (Py_TPFLAGS_BASETYPE), TypeError is raised: since the type is a base
2586 type, its dealloc function must call type->tp_free, and since the type
2587 is gc'able, tp_free must not be NULL or _PyObject_Del.
2588
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002589- PyThreadState_SetAsyncExc(): A new API (deliberately accessible only
2590 from C) to interrupt a thread by sending it an exception. It is
2591 intentional that you have to write your own C extension to call it
2592 from Python.
2593
2594
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002595New platforms
2596-------------
2597
2598None this time.
2599
2600Tests
2601-----
2602
2603- test_imp rewritten so that it doesn't raise RuntimeError if run as a
2604 side effect of being imported ("import test.autotest").
2605
2606Windows
2607-------
2608
Tim Petersfaa697a2003-06-22 01:42:20 +00002609- The Windows installer ships with Tcl/Tk 8.4.3 (upgraded from 8.4.1).
2610
Tim Petersc4607da2003-05-08 18:13:59 +00002611- The installer always suggested that Python be installed on the C:
2612 drive, due to a hardcoded "C:" generated by the Wise installation
2613 wizard. People with machines where C: is not the system drive
2614 usually want Python installed on whichever drive is their system drive
2615 instead. We removed the hardcoded "C:", and two testers on machines
2616 where C: is not the system drive report that the installer now
2617 suggests their system drive. Note that you can always select the
2618 directory you want in the "Select Destination Directory" dialog --
2619 that's what it's for.
2620
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002621Mac
2622---
2623
Just van Rossum99bc1fc2003-05-09 15:01:25 +00002624- There's a new module called "autoGIL", which offers a mechanism to
2625 automatically release the Global Interpreter Lock when an event loop
2626 goes to sleep, allowing other threads to run. It's currently only
2627 supported on OSX, in the Mach-O version.
Jack Jansenf5e23ff2003-06-16 13:53:40 +00002628- The OSA modules now allow direct access to properties of the
2629 toplevel application class (in AppleScript terminology).
2630- The Package Manager can now update itself.
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002631
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002632SourceForge Bugs and Patches Applied
2633------------------------------------
2634
2635430160, 471893, 501716, 542562, 549151, 569574, 595837, 596434,
2636598163, 604210, 604716, 610332, 612627, 614770, 620190, 621891,
2637622042, 639139, 640236, 644345, 649742, 649742, 658233, 660022,
2638661318, 661676, 662807, 662923, 666219, 672855, 678325, 682347,
2639683486, 684981, 685773, 686254, 692776, 692959, 693094, 696777,
2640697989, 700827, 703666, 708495, 708604, 708901, 710733, 711902,
2641713722, 715782, 718286, 719359, 719367, 723136, 723831, 723962,
2642724588, 724767, 724767, 725942, 726150, 726446, 726869, 727051,
2643727719, 727719, 727805, 728277, 728563, 728656, 729096, 729103,
2644729293, 729297, 729300, 729317, 729395, 729622, 729817, 730170,
2645730296, 730594, 730685, 730826, 730963, 731209, 731403, 731504,
2646731514, 731626, 731635, 731643, 731644, 731644, 731689, 732124,
2647732143, 732234, 732284, 732284, 732479, 732761, 732783, 732951,
2648733667, 733781, 734118, 734231, 734869, 735051, 735293, 735527,
2649735613, 735694, 736962, 736962, 737970, 738066, 739313, 740055,
2650740234, 740301, 741806, 742126, 742741, 742860, 742860, 742911,
2651744041, 744104, 744238, 744687, 744877, 745055, 745478, 745525,
2652745620, 746012, 746304, 746366, 746801, 746953, 747348, 747667,
2653747954, 748846, 748849, 748973, 748975, 749191, 749210, 749759,
2654749831, 749911, 750008, 750092, 750542, 750595, 751038, 751107,
2655751276, 751451, 751916, 751941, 751956, 751998, 752671, 753451,
2656753602, 753617, 753845, 753925, 754014, 754340, 754447, 755031,
2657755087, 755147, 755245, 755683, 755987, 756032, 756996, 757058,
2658757229, 757818, 757821, 757822, 758112, 758910, 759227, 759889,
2659760257, 760703, 760792, 761104, 761337, 761519, 761830, 762455
2660
2661
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002662What's New in Python 2.3 beta 1?
2663================================
2664
Guido van Rossumfa1eddf2003-04-25 19:19:52 +00002665*Release date: 25-Apr-2003*
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002666
2667Core and builtins
2668-----------------
2669
Thomas Heller5eccabc2003-04-23 19:35:25 +00002670- New format codes B, H, I, k and K have been implemented for
2671 PyArg_ParseTuple and PyBuild_Value.
2672
Alex Martellia70b1912003-04-22 08:12:33 +00002673- New builtin function sum(seq, start=0) returns the sum of all the
2674 items in iterable object seq, plus start (items are normally numbers,
2675 and cannot be strings).
2676
Guido van Rossumaa86e352003-04-19 18:15:10 +00002677- bool() called without arguments now returns False rather than
2678 raising an exception. This is consistent with calling the
2679 constructors for the other builtin types -- called without argument
2680 they all return the false value of that type. (SF patch #724135)
2681
Guido van Rossumcf8d2852003-04-17 16:53:26 +00002682- In support of PEP 269 (making the pgen parser generator accessible
2683 from Python), some changes to the pgen code structure were made; a
2684 few files that used to be linked only with pgen are now linked with
2685 Python itself.
2686
Guido van Rossumc1f6e8c2003-04-16 21:13:23 +00002687- The repr() of a weakref object now shows the __name__ attribute of
2688 the referenced object, if it has one.
2689
Guido van Rossum76ba09f2003-04-16 19:40:58 +00002690- super() no longer ignores data descriptors, except __class__. See
2691 the thread started at
2692 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2003-April/034338.html
2693
Guido van Rossum3a3cca52003-04-14 20:58:14 +00002694- list.insert(i, x) now interprets negative i as it would be
2695 interpreted by slicing, so negative values count from the end of the
2696 list. This was the only place where such an interpretation was not
2697 placed on a list index.
2698
Guido van Rossumefbbb1c2003-04-11 18:43:06 +00002699- range() now works even if the arguments are longs with magnitude
2700 larger than sys.maxint, as long as the total length of the sequence
2701 fits. E.g., range(2**100, 2**101, 2**100) is the following list:
2702 [1267650600228229401496703205376L]. (SF patch #707427.)
2703
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002704- Some horridly obscure problems were fixed involving interaction
2705 between garbage collection and old-style classes with "ambitious"
2706 getattr hooks. If an old-style instance didn't have a __del__ method,
2707 but did have a __getattr__ hook, and the instance became reachable
2708 only from an unreachable cycle, and the hook resurrected or deleted
2709 unreachable objects when asked to resolve "__del__", anything up to
2710 a segfault could happen. That's been repaired.
2711
Raymond Hettingera3e1e4c2003-03-06 23:54:28 +00002712- dict.pop now takes an optional argument specifying a default
2713 value to return if the key is not in the dict. If a default is not
2714 given and the key is not found, a KeyError will still be raised.
2715 Parallel changes were made to UserDict.UserDict and UserDict.DictMixin.
2716 [SF patch #693753] (contributed by Michael Stone.)
2717
Martin v. Löwis73d538b2003-03-05 15:13:47 +00002718- sys.getfilesystemencoding() was added to expose
2719 Py_FileSystemDefaultEncoding.
Guido van Rossum46d3dc32003-03-01 03:20:41 +00002720
2721- New function sys.exc_clear() clears the current exception. This is
2722 rarely needed, but can sometimes be useful to release objects
2723 referenced by the traceback held in sys.exc_info()[2]. (SF patch
2724 #693195.)
2725
Neal Norwitzd5a65a72003-02-23 23:11:41 +00002726- On 64-bit systems, a dictionary could contain duplicate long/int keys
2727 if the key value was larger than 2**32. See SF bug #689659.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002728
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00002729- Fixed SF bug #663074. The codec system was using global static
Walter Dörwaldfa86bf52003-03-31 16:15:13 +00002730 variables to store internal data. As a result, any attempts to use the
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00002731 unicode system with multiple active interpreters, or successive
2732 interpreter executions, would fail.
2733
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00002734- "%c" % u"a" now returns a unicode string instead of raising a
Walter Dörwald44f527f2003-04-02 16:37:24 +00002735 TypeError. u"%c" % 0xffffffff now raises a OverflowError instead
Walter Dörwald1e469c52003-04-02 16:57:59 +00002736 of a ValueError to be consistent with "%c" % 256. See SF patch #710127.
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00002737
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002738Extension modules
2739-----------------
2740
Guido van Rossume7adda92003-04-25 05:52:37 +00002741- The socket module now provides the functions inet_pton and inet_ntop
2742 for converting between string and packed representation of IP
2743 addresses. There is also a new module variable, has_ipv6, which is
2744 True iff the current Python has IPv6 support. See SF patch #658327.
2745
Martin v. Löwisbfe175c2003-04-16 19:42:51 +00002746- Tkinter wrappers around Tcl variables now pass objects directly
2747 to Tcl, instead of first converting them to strings.
2748
Guido van Rossum41c99e72003-04-14 17:59:34 +00002749- The .*? pattern in the re module is now special-cased to avoid the
2750 recursion limit. (SF patch #720991 -- many thanks to Gary Herron
2751 and Greg Chapman.)
2752
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00002753- New function sys.call_tracing() allows pdb to debug code
2754 recursively.
2755
Tim Peters730f5532003-04-08 17:17:17 +00002756- New function gc.get_referents(obj) returns a list of objects
Tim Peters0f81ab62003-04-08 16:39:48 +00002757 directly referenced by obj. In effect, it exposes what the object's
2758 tp_traverse slot does, and can be helpful when debugging memory
2759 leaks.
2760
Martin v. Löwis7fb697b2003-04-03 04:49:12 +00002761- The iconv module has been removed from this release.
2762
Tim Petersd50ade62003-03-20 18:32:13 +00002763- The platform-independent routines for packing floats in IEEE formats
2764 (struct.pack's <f, >f, <d, and >d codes; pickle and cPickle's protocol 1
2765 pickling of floats) ignored that rounding can cause a carry to
2766 propagate. The worst consequence was that, in rare cases, <f and >f
2767 could produce strings that, when unpacked again, were a factor of 2
2768 away from the original float. This has been fixed. See SF bug
2769 #705836.
2770
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002771- New function time.tzset() provides access to the C library tzset()
Guido van Rossumd11b62e2003-03-14 21:51:36 +00002772 function, if supported. (SF patch #675422.)
2773
Neal Norwitz12e22172003-03-03 21:16:39 +00002774- Using createfilehandler, deletefilehandler, createtimerhandler functions
2775 on Tkinter.tkinter (_tkinter module) no longer crashes the interpreter.
2776 See SF bug #692416.
2777
Michael W. Hudsonf0089982003-03-03 12:29:42 +00002778- Modified the fcntl.ioctl() function to allow modification of a passed
2779 mutable buffer (for details see the reference documentation).
2780
Raymond Hettinger61fe64d2003-02-23 04:40:07 +00002781- Made user requested changes to the itertools module.
2782 Subsumed the times() function into repeat().
2783 Added chain() and cycle().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002784
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00002785- The rotor module is now deprecated; the encryption algorithm it uses
Andrew M. Kuchlingfb5f4852003-04-24 13:19:56 +00002786 is not believed to be secure, and including crypto code with Python
2787 has implications for exporting and importing it in various countries.
2788
Skip Montanaro89feabc2003-03-30 04:54:24 +00002789- The socket module now always uses the _socketobject wrapper class, even on
2790 platforms which have dup(2). The makefile() method is built directly
2791 on top of the socket without duplicating the file descriptor, allowing
2792 timeouts to work properly.
2793
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002794Library
2795-------
2796
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00002797- New generator function os.walk() is an easy-to-use alternative to
2798 os.path.walk(). See os module docs for details. os.path.walk()
2799 isn't deprecated at this time, but may become deprecated in a
2800 future release.
2801
Marc-André Lemburg246d8472003-04-24 11:36:11 +00002802- Added new module "platform" which provides a wide range of tools
2803 for querying platform dependent features.
2804
Andrew M. Kuchling4e42b312003-04-24 16:45:05 +00002805- netrc now allows ASCII punctuation characters in passwords.
Raymond Hettinger1d877862003-04-23 19:06:08 +00002806
Martin v. Löwis153c9e42003-04-19 20:59:03 +00002807- shelve now supports the optional writeback argument, and exposes
2808 pickle protocol versions.
2809
Guido van Rossuma2685402003-04-19 18:04:57 +00002810- Several methods of nntplib.NNTP have grown an optional file argument
2811 which specifies a file where to divert the command's output
2812 (already supported by the body() method). (SF patch #720468)
2813
Martin v. Löwis281b2c62003-04-18 21:04:39 +00002814- The self-documenting XML server library DocXMLRPCServer was added.
2815
Martin v. Löwis2548c732003-04-18 10:39:54 +00002816- Support for internationalized domain names has been added through
2817 the 'idna' and 'punycode' encodings, the 'stringprep' module, the
2818 'mkstringprep' tool, and enhancements to the socket and httplib
2819 modules.
2820
Walter Dörwald5688b7a2003-04-16 09:46:13 +00002821- htmlentitydefs has two new dictionaries: name2codepoint maps
2822 HTML entity names to Unicode codepoints (as integers).
2823 codepoint2name is the reverse mapping. See SF patch #722017.
2824
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00002825- pdb has a new command, "debug", which lets you step through
2826 arbitrary code from the debugger's (pdb) prompt.
2827
Raymond Hettingerc377cbf2003-04-04 22:56:42 +00002828- unittest.failUnlessEqual and its equivalent unittest.assertEqual now
2829 return 'not a == b' rather than 'a != b'. This gives the desired
2830 result for classes that define __eq__ without defining __ne__.
2831
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002832- sgmllib now supports SGML marked sections, in particular the
Martin v. Löwis3163a3b2003-03-30 14:25:40 +00002833 MS Office extensions.
2834
Raymond Hettinger42182eb2003-03-09 05:33:33 +00002835- The urllib module now offers support for the iterator protocol.
2836 SF patch 698520 contributed by Brett Cannon.
2837
Guido van Rossum9589a252003-03-06 01:56:12 +00002838- New module timeit provides a simple framework for timing the
2839 execution speed of expressions and statements.
2840
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002841- sets.Set objects now support mixed-type __eq__ and __ne__, instead
2842 of raising TypeError. If x is a Set object and y is a non-Set object,
2843 x == y is False, and x != y is True. This is akin to the change made
2844 for mixed-type comparisons of datetime objects in 2.3a2; more info
2845 about the rationale is in the NEWS entry for that. See also SF bug
2846 report <http://www.python.org/sf/693121>.
2847
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00002848- On Unix platforms, if os.listdir() is called with a Unicode argument,
2849 it now returns Unicode strings. (This behavior was added earlier
2850 to the Windows NT/2k/XP version of os.listdir().)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002851
Andrew M. Kuchling6f177d42003-02-28 22:09:33 +00002852- Distutils: both 'py_modules' and 'packages' keywords can now be specified
2853 in core.setup(). Previously you could supply one or the other, but
2854 not both of them. (SF patch #695090 from Bernhard Herzog)
2855
Skip Montanaro64a839e2003-03-20 23:36:55 +00002856- New csv package makes it easy to read/write CSV files.
2857
Gustavo Niemeyer68d8cef2003-04-17 21:31:33 +00002858- Module shlex has been extended to allow posix-like shell parsings,
2859 including a split() function for easy spliting of quoted strings and
2860 commands. An iterator interface was also implemented.
2861
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002862Tools/Demos
2863-----------
2864
Tim Peters21d7d4d2003-04-18 00:45:59 +00002865- New script combinerefs.py helps analyze new PYTHONDUMPREFS output.
2866 See the module docstring for details.
2867
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002868Build
2869-----
2870
Neal Norwitz35892b92003-02-23 23:45:35 +00002871- Fix problem building on OSF1 because the compiler only accepted
2872 preprocessor directives that start in column 1. (SF bug #691793.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002873
2874C API
2875-----
2876
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002877- Added PyGC_Collect(), equivalent to calling gc.collect().
2878
Guido van Rossum0fc8f002003-04-15 15:12:39 +00002879- PyThreadState_GetDict() was changed not to raise an exception or
2880 issue a fatal error when no current thread state is available. This
2881 makes it possible to print dictionaries when no thread is active.
2882
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002883- LONG_LONG was renamed to PY_LONG_LONG. Extensions that use this and
2884 need compatibility with previous versions can use this:
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00002885
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002886 #ifndef PY_LONG_LONG
2887 #define PY_LONG_LONG LONG_LONG
2888 #endif
Martin v. Löwisb9a0f912003-03-29 10:06:18 +00002889
Raymond Hettinger1da1dbf2003-03-17 19:46:11 +00002890- Added PyObject_SelfIter() to fill the tp_iter slot for the
Raymond Hettinger01538262003-03-17 08:24:35 +00002891 typical case where the method returns its self argument.
2892
Guido van Rossume5c691a2003-03-07 15:13:17 +00002893- The extended type structure used for heap types (new-style
2894 classes defined by Python code using a class statement) is now
2895 exported from object.h as PyHeapTypeObject. (SF patch #696193.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002896
2897New platforms
2898-------------
2899
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00002900None this time.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002901
2902Tests
2903-----
2904
Neal Norwitz55b61d22003-02-28 19:57:03 +00002905- test_timeout now requires -u network to be passed to regrtest to run.
2906 See SF bug #692988.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002907
2908Windows
2909-------
2910
Tim Peters11b23062003-04-23 02:39:17 +00002911- os.fsync() now exists on Windows, and calls the Microsoft _commit()
2912 function.
2913
Guido van Rossumf4050642003-04-09 19:39:06 +00002914- New function winsound.MessageBeep() wraps the Win32 API
2915 MessageBeep().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002916
2917Mac
2918---
2919
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00002920- os.listdir() now returns Unicode strings on MacOS X when called with
2921 a Unicode argument. See the general news item under "Library".
Just van Rossum46c97842003-02-25 21:42:15 +00002922
Jack Jansendeac2ac2003-02-24 11:04:17 +00002923- A new method MacOS.WMAvailable() returns true if it is safe to access
2924 the window manager, false otherwise.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002925
Jack Jansencf76be02003-03-24 12:13:54 +00002926- EasyDialogs dialogs are now movable-modal, and if the application is
2927 currently in the background they will ask to be moved to the foreground
2928 before displaying.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002929
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00002930- OSA Scripting support has improved a lot, and gensuitemodule.py can now
Jack Jansende354b72003-04-11 15:37:20 +00002931 be used by mere mortals. The documentation is now also more or less
2932 complete.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002933
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00002934- The IDE (in a framework build) now includes introductory documentation
2935 in Apple Help Viewer format.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002936
2937
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002938What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 2?
2939=================================
2940
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00002941*Release date: 19-Feb-2003*
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002942
2943Core and builtins
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00002944-----------------
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002945
Walter Dörwald2ffec022003-02-19 16:34:11 +00002946- Negative positions returned from PEP 293 error callbacks are now
2947 treated as being relative to the end of the input string. Positions
2948 that are out of bounds raise an IndexError.
2949
Guido van Rossum162e38c2003-02-19 15:25:10 +00002950- sys.path[0] (the directory from which the script is loaded) is now
2951 turned into an absolute pathname, unless it is the empty string.
2952 (SF patch #664376.)
2953
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00002954- Finally fixed the bug in compile() and exec where a string ending
2955 with an indented code block but no newline would raise SyntaxError.
2956 This would have been a four-line change in parsetok.c... Except
2957 codeop.py depends on this behavior, so a compilation flag had to be
2958 invented that causes the tokenizer to revert to the old behavior;
2959 this required extra changes to 2 .h files, 2 .c files, and 2 .py
Guido van Rossum1442dc12003-02-13 22:19:20 +00002960 files. (Fixes SF bug #501622.)
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00002961
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00002962- If a new-style class defines neither __new__ nor __init__, its
2963 constructor would ignore all arguments. This is changed now: the
2964 constructor refuses arguments in this case. This might break code
2965 that worked under Python 2.2. The simplest fix is to add a no-op
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002966 __init__: ``def __init__(self, *args, **kw): pass``.
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00002967
Guido van Rossum48035eb2003-02-12 17:05:26 +00002968- Through a bytecode optimizer bug (and I bet you didn't even know
2969 Python *had* a bytecode optimizer :-), "unsigned" hex/oct constants
2970 with a leading minus sign would come out with the wrong sign.
2971 ("Unsigned" hex/oct constants are those with a face value in the
2972 range sys.maxint+1 through sys.maxint*2+1, inclusive; these have
2973 always been interpreted as negative numbers through sign folding.)
2974 E.g. 0xffffffff is -1, and -(0xffffffff) is 1, but -0xffffffff would
2975 come out as -4294967295. This was the case in Python 2.2 through
2976 2.2.2 and 2.3a1, and in Python 2.4 it will once again have that
2977 value, but according to PEP 237 it really needs to be 1 now. This
2978 will be backported to Python 2.2.3 a well. (SF #660455)
2979
Guido van Rossum47710652003-02-12 20:48:22 +00002980- int(s, base) sometimes sign-folds hex and oct constants; it only
2981 does this when base is 0 and s.strip() starts with a '0'. When the
2982 sign is actually folded, as in int("0xffffffff", 0) on a 32-bit
2983 machine, which returns -1, a FutureWarning is now issued; in Python
2984 2.4, this will return 4294967295L, as do int("+0xffffffff", 0) and
2985 int("0xffffffff", 16) right now. (PEP 347)
2986
Guido van Rossuma89d10e2003-02-12 03:58:38 +00002987- super(X, x): x may now be a proxy for an X instance, i.e.
2988 issubclass(x.__class__, X) but not issubclass(type(x), X).
2989
Guido van Rossum03bc7d32003-02-12 03:32:58 +00002990- isinstance(x, X): if X is a new-style class, this is now equivalent
2991 to issubclass(type(x), X) or issubclass(x.__class__, X). Previously
2992 only type(x) was tested. (For classic classes this was already the
2993 case.)
2994
Just van Rossum73ffb4a2003-02-10 09:57:08 +00002995- compile(), eval() and the exec statement now fully support source code
2996 passed as unicode strings.
2997
Neal Norwitzde8b94c2003-02-10 02:12:43 +00002998- int subclasses can be initialized with longs if the value fits in an int.
2999 See SF bug #683467.
3000
Tim Petersbf2674b2003-02-02 07:51:32 +00003001- long(string, base) takes time linear in len(string) when base is a power
3002 of 2 now. It used to take time quadratic in len(string).
3003
Martin v. Löwis8afd7572003-01-25 22:46:11 +00003004- filter returns now Unicode results for Unicode arguments.
3005
Martin v. Löwisaf6a27a2003-01-03 19:16:14 +00003006- raw_input can now return Unicode objects.
3007
Skip Montanaro4abd5f02003-01-02 20:51:08 +00003008- List objects' sort() method now accepts None as the comparison function.
3009 Passing None is semantically identical to calling sort() with no
3010 arguments.
3011
Neal Norwitz1a997502003-01-13 20:13:12 +00003012- Fixed crash when printing a subclass of str and __str__ returned self.
3013 See SF bug #667147.
3014
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00003015- Fixed an invalid RuntimeWarning and an undetected error when trying
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00003016 to convert a long integer into a float which couldn't fit.
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00003017 See SF bug #676155.
3018
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00003019- Function objects now have a __module__ attribute that is bound to
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00003020 the name of the module in which the function was defined. This
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00003021 applies for C functions and methods as well as functions and methods
3022 defined in Python. This attribute is used by pickle.whichmodule(),
3023 which changes the behavior of whichmodule slightly. In Python 2.2
3024 whichmodule() returns "__main__" for functions that are not defined
3025 at the top-level of a module (examples: methods, nested functions).
3026 Now whichmodule() will return the proper module name.
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00003027
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003028Extension modules
3029-----------------
3030
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00003031- operator.isNumberType() now checks that the object has a nb_int or
3032 nb_float slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
3033 tp_as_number pointer.
3034
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00003035- The imp module now has ways to acquire and release the "import
3036 lock": imp.acquire_lock() and imp.release_lock(). Note: this is a
3037 reentrant lock, so releasing the lock only truly releases it when
3038 this is the last release_lock() call. You can check with
3039 imp.lock_held(). (SF bug #580952 and patch #683257.)
3040
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003041- Change to cPickle to match pickle.py (see below and PEP 307).
3042
Neal Norwitz9caf9c02003-02-10 01:54:06 +00003043- Fix some bugs in the parser module. SF bug #678518.
3044
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00003045- Thanks to Scott David Daniels, a subtle bug in how the zlib
Walter Dörwald28d81962003-02-03 20:53:14 +00003046 extension implemented flush() was fixed. Scott also rewrote the
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00003047 zlib test suite using the unittest module. (SF bug #640230 and
3048 patch #678531.)
3049
Raymond Hettinger96ef8112003-02-01 00:10:11 +00003050- Added an itertools module containing high speed, memory efficient
3051 looping constructs inspired by tools from Haskell and SML.
3052
Guido van Rossum99d4abf2003-01-27 22:22:50 +00003053- The SSL module now handles sockets with a timeout set correctly (SF
3054 patch #675750, fixing SF bug #675552).
3055
Barry Warsawf8ba39c2003-01-07 20:55:26 +00003056- os/posixmodule has grown the sysexits.h constants (EX_OK and friends).
3057
Guido van Rossum6d0d3652003-01-07 20:34:19 +00003058- Fixed broken threadstate swap in readline that could cause fatal
3059 errors when a readline hook was being invoked while a background
3060 thread was active. (SF bugs #660476 and #513033.)
3061
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003062- fcntl now exposes the strops.h I_* constants.
3063
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00003064- Fix a crash on Solaris that occurred when calling close() on
3065 an mmap'ed file which was already closed. (SF patch #665913)
3066
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003067- Fixed several serious bugs in the zipimport implementation.
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003068
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00003069- datetime changes:
3070
Guido van Rossum8b7a9a32003-04-14 22:01:58 +00003071 The date class is now properly subclassable. (SF bug #720908)
3072
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00003073 The datetime and datetimetz classes have been collapsed into a single
3074 datetime class, and likewise the time and timetz classes into a single
3075 time class. Previously, a datetimetz object with tzinfo=None acted
3076 exactly like a datetime object, and similarly for timetz. This wasn't
3077 enough of a difference to justify distinct classes, and life is simpler
3078 now.
3079
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00003080 today() and now() now round system timestamps to the closest
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00003081 microsecond <http://www.python.org/sf/661086>. This repairs an
3082 irritation most likely seen on Windows systems.
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00003083
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00003084 In dt.astimezone(tz), if tz.utcoffset(dt) returns a duration,
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00003085 ValueError is raised if tz.dst(dt) returns None (2.3a1 treated it
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00003086 as 0 instead, but a tzinfo subclass wishing to participate in
3087 time zone conversion has to take a stand on whether it supports
3088 DST; if you don't care about DST, then code dst() to return 0 minutes,
3089 meaning that DST is never in effect).
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00003090
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00003091 The tzinfo methods utcoffset() and dst() must return a timedelta object
3092 (or None) now. In 2.3a1 they could also return an int or long, but that
3093 was an unhelpfully redundant leftover from an earlier version wherein
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00003094 they couldn't return a timedelta. TOOWTDI.
3095
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00003096 The example tzinfo class for local time had a bug. It was replaced
3097 by a later example coded by Guido.
3098
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00003099 datetime.astimezone(tz) no longer raises an exception when the
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00003100 input datetime has no UTC equivalent in tz. For typical "hybrid" time
3101 zones (a single tzinfo subclass modeling both standard and daylight
3102 time), this case can arise one hour per year, at the hour daylight time
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00003103 ends. See new docs for details. In short, the new behavior mimics
3104 the local wall clock's behavior of repeating an hour in local time.
3105
3106 dt.astimezone() can no longer be used to convert between naive and aware
3107 datetime objects. If you merely want to attach, or remove, a tzinfo
3108 object, without any conversion of date and time members, use
3109 dt.replace(tzinfo=whatever) instead, where "whatever" is None or a
3110 tzinfo subclass instance.
3111
3112 A new method tzinfo.fromutc(dt) can be overridden in tzinfo subclasses
3113 to give complete control over how a UTC time is to be converted to
3114 a local time. The default astimezone() implementation calls fromutc()
3115 as its last step, so a tzinfo subclass can affect that too by overriding
3116 fromutc(). It's expected that the default fromutc() implementation will
3117 be suitable as-is for "almost all" time zone subclasses, but the
3118 creativity of political time zone fiddling appears unbounded -- fromutc()
3119 allows the highly motivated to emulate any scheme expressible in Python.
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00003120
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00003121 datetime.now(): The optional tzinfo argument was undocumented (that's
3122 repaired), and its name was changed to tz ("tzinfo" is overloaded enough
3123 already). With a tz argument, now(tz) used to return the local date
3124 and time, and attach tz to it, without any conversion of date and time
3125 members. This was less than useful. Now now(tz) returns the current
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003126 date and time as local time in tz's time zone, akin to ::
3127
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00003128 tz.fromutc(datetime.utcnow().replace(tzinfo=utc))
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003129
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00003130 where "utc" is an instance of a tzinfo subclass modeling UTC. Without
3131 a tz argument, now() continues to return the current local date and time,
3132 as a naive datetime object.
3133
Tim Peters2a44a8d2003-01-23 20:53:10 +00003134 datetime.fromtimestamp(): Like datetime.now() above, this had less than
3135 useful behavior when the optional tinzo argument was specified. See
3136 also SF bug report <http://www.python.org/sf/660872>.
3137
Tim Peters8d81a012003-01-24 22:36:34 +00003138 date and datetime comparison: In order to prevent comparison from
3139 falling back to the default compare-object-addresses strategy, these
3140 raised TypeError whenever they didn't understand the other object type.
3141 They still do, except when the other object has a "timetuple" attribute,
3142 in which case they return NotImplemented now. This gives other
3143 datetime objects (e.g., mxDateTime) a chance to intercept the
3144 comparison.
3145
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00003146 date, time, datetime and timedelta comparison: When the exception
3147 for mixed-type comparisons in the last paragraph doesn't apply, if
3148 the comparison is == then False is returned, and if the comparison is
3149 != then True is returned. Because dict lookup and the "in" operator
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003150 only invoke __eq__, this allows, for example, ::
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00003151
3152 if some_datetime in some_sequence:
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003153
3154 and ::
3155
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00003156 some_dict[some_timedelta] = whatever
3157
3158 to work as expected, without raising TypeError just because the
3159 sequence is heterogeneous, or the dict has mixed-type keys. [This
3160 seems like a good idea to implement for all mixed-type comparisons
3161 that don't want to allow falling back to address comparison.]
3162
Tim Peters75a6e3b2003-01-04 18:17:36 +00003163 The constructors building a datetime from a timestamp could raise
3164 ValueError if the platform C localtime()/gmtime() inserted "leap
3165 seconds". Leap seconds are ignored now. On such platforms, it's
3166 possible to have timestamps that differ by a second, yet where
3167 datetimes constructed from them are equal.
3168
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00003169 The pickle format of date, time and datetime objects has changed
3170 completely. The undocumented pickler and unpickler functions no
Tim Petersb57f8f02003-02-01 02:54:15 +00003171 longer exist. The undocumented __setstate__() and __getstate__()
3172 methods no longer exist either.
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00003173
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003174Library
3175-------
3176
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003177- The logging module was updated slightly; the WARN level was renamed
3178 to WARNING, and the matching function/method warn() to warning().
3179
3180- The pickle and cPickle modules were updated with a new pickling
3181 protocol (documented by pickletools.py, see below) and several
3182 extensions to the pickle customization API (__reduce__, __setstate__
3183 etc.). The copy module now uses more of the pickle customization
3184 API to copy objects that don't implement __copy__ or __deepcopy__.
3185 See PEP 307 for details.
3186
3187- The distutils "register" command now uses http://www.python.org/pypi
3188 as the default repository. (See PEP 301.)
3189
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00003190- the platform dependent path related variables sep, altsep, extsep,
3191 pathsep, curdir, pardir and defpath are now defined in the platform
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00003192 dependent path modules (e.g. ntpath.py) rather than os.py, so these
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003193 variables are now available via os.path. They continue to be
3194 available from the os module.
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00003195 (see <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00003196
Tim Peters6ee04802003-02-05 18:29:34 +00003197- array.array was added to the types repr.py knows about (see
3198 <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
3199
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00003200- The new pickletools.py contains lots of documentation about pickle
3201 internals, and supplies some helpers for working with pickles, such as
3202 a symbolic pickle disassembler.
3203
Skip Montanaro9a7c96a2003-01-22 18:17:25 +00003204- Xmlrpclib.py now supports the builtin boolean type.
3205
Martin v. Löwis0c6774d2003-01-15 11:51:06 +00003206- py_compile has a new 'doraise' flag and a new PyCompileError
3207 exception.
3208
Martin v. Löwisd69663d2003-01-15 11:37:23 +00003209- SimpleXMLRPCServer now supports CGI through the CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler
3210 class.
3211
Guido van Rossum50e92232003-01-14 16:45:04 +00003212- The sets module now raises TypeError in __cmp__, to clarify that
3213 sets are not intended to be three-way-compared; the comparison
3214 operators are overloaded as subset/superset tests.
3215
Guido van Rossumcd0c0472003-01-07 23:03:05 +00003216- Bastion.py and rexec.py are disabled. These modules are not safe in
3217 Python 2.2. or 2.3.
3218
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003219- realpath is now exported when doing ``from poxixpath import *``.
Neal Norwitzbb0246a2003-01-03 18:12:28 +00003220 It is also exported for ntpath, macpath, and os2emxpath.
3221 See SF bug #659228.
3222
Neal Norwitzb9ef4ae2003-01-05 23:19:43 +00003223- New module tarfile from Lars Gustäbel provides a comprehensive interface
3224 to tar archive files with transparent gzip and bzip2 compression.
3225 See SF patch #651082.
3226
Neal Norwitz4f442372003-01-06 06:51:36 +00003227- urlparse can now parse imap:// URLs. See SF feature request #618024.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003228
Neal Norwitze931ed52003-01-10 23:24:32 +00003229- Tkinter.Canvas.scan_dragto() provides an optional parameter to support
3230 the gain value which is passed to Tk. SF bug# 602259.
3231
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00003232- Fix logging.handlers.SysLogHandler protocol when using UNIX domain sockets.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00003233 See SF patch #642974.
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00003234
Skip Montanaro12fe72e2003-02-25 17:46:20 +00003235- The dospath module was deleted. Use the ntpath module when manipulating
3236 DOS paths from other platforms.
3237
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003238Tools/Demos
3239-----------
3240
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00003241- Two new scripts (db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py) were added to the
3242 Tools/scripts directory to facilitate conversion from the old bsddb module
3243 to the new one. While the user-visible API of the new module is
3244 compatible with the old one, it's likely that the version of the
3245 underlying database library has changed. To convert from the old library,
3246 run the db2pickle.py script using the old version of Python to convert it
3247 to a pickle file. After upgrading Python, run the pickle2db.py script
3248 using the new version of Python to reconstitute your database. For
3249 example:
3250
Skip Montanaro621f0552003-02-03 15:48:10 +00003251 % python2.2 db2pickle.py -h some.db > some.pickle
3252 % python2.3 pickle2db.py -h some.db.new < some.pickle
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00003253
3254 Run the scripts without any args to get a usage message.
3255
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003256
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003257Build
3258-----
3259
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00003260- The audio driver tests (test_ossaudiodev.py and
3261 test_linuxaudiodev.py) are no longer run by default. This is
3262 because they don't always work, depending on your hardware and
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003263 software. To run these tests, you must use an invocation like ::
3264
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00003265 ./python Lib/test/regrtest.py -u audio test_ossaudiodev
3266
Skip Montanarodecc6a42003-01-01 20:07:49 +00003267- On systems which build using the configure script, compiler flags which
3268 used to be lumped together using the OPT flag have been split into two
3269 groups, OPT and BASECFLAGS. OPT is meant to carry just optimization- and
3270 debug-related flags like "-g" and "-O3". BASECFLAGS is meant to carry
3271 compiler flags that are required to get a clean compile. On some
3272 platforms (many Linux flavors in particular) BASECFLAGS will be empty by
3273 default. On others, such as Mac OS X and SCO, it will contain required
3274 flags. This change allows people building Python to override OPT without
3275 fear of clobbering compiler flags which are required to get a clean build.
3276
3277- On Darwin/Mac OS X platforms, /sw/lib and /sw/include are added to the
3278 relevant search lists in setup.py. This allows users building Python to
3279 take advantage of the many packages available from the fink project
3280 <http://fink.sf.net/>.
3281
3282- A new Makefile target, scriptsinstall, installs a number of useful scripts
3283 from the Tools/scripts directory.
3284
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003285C API
3286-----
3287
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003288- PyEval_GetFrame() is now declared to return a ``PyFrameObject *``
3289 instead of a plain ``PyObject *``. (SF patch #686601.)
Guido van Rossum6297a7a2003-02-19 15:53:17 +00003290
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00003291- PyNumber_Check() now checks that the object has a nb_int or nb_float
3292 slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
3293 tp_as_number pointer.
3294
Guido van Rossumeea47182003-02-11 20:39:59 +00003295- A C type that inherits from a base type that defines tp_as_buffer
3296 will now inherit the tp_as_buffer pointer if it doesn't define one.
3297 (SF #681367)
3298
Neil Schemenauer5042da62003-02-04 20:59:40 +00003299- The PyArg_Parse functions now issue a DeprecationWarning if a float
3300 argument is provided when an integer is specified (this affects the 'b',
3301 'B', 'h', 'H', 'i', and 'l' codes). Future versions of Python will
3302 raise a TypeError.
Neil Schemenauercd63e612003-01-24 22:15:53 +00003303
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003304Tests
3305-----
3306
Walter Dörwald11cfbd62003-03-26 16:03:16 +00003307- Several tests weren't being run from regrtest.py (test_timeout.py,
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003308 test_tarfile.py, test_netrc.py, test_multifile.py,
3309 test_importhooks.py and test_imp.py). Now they are. (Note to
3310 developers: please read Lib/test/README when creating a new test, to
3311 make sure to do it right! All tests need to use either unittest or
3312 pydoc.)
3313
3314- Added test_posix.py, a test suite for the posix module.
3315
3316- Added test_hexoct.py, a test suite for hex/oct constant folding.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003317
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003318Windows
3319-------
3320
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00003321- The timeout code for socket connect() didn't work right; this has
3322 now been fixed. test_timeout.py should pass (at least most of the
3323 time).
3324
Thomas Hellerdda583d2003-01-31 20:45:41 +00003325- distutils' msvccompiler class now passes the preprocessor options to
3326 the resource compiler. See SF patch #669198.
3327
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00003328- The bsddb module now ships with Sleepycat's 4.1.25.NC, the latest
3329 release without strong cryptography.
3330
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00003331- sys.path[0], if it contains a directory name, is now always an
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003332 absolute pathname. (SF patch #664376.)
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00003333
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00003334- The new logging package is now installed by the Windows installer. It
3335 wasn't in 2.3a1 due to oversight.
3336
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003337Mac
3338---
3339
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00003340- There are new dialogs EasyDialogs.AskFileForOpen, AskFileForSave
3341 and AskFolder. The old macfs.StandardGetFile and friends are deprecated.
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00003342
Jack Jansenc9296362003-02-06 23:10:45 +00003343- Most of the standard library now uses pathnames or FSRefs in preference
3344 of FSSpecs, and use the underlying Carbon.File and Carbon.Folder modules
3345 in stead of macfs. macfs will probably be deprecated in the future.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00003346
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00003347- Type Carbon.File.FSCatalogInfo and supporting methods have been implemented.
3348 This also makes macfs.FSSpec.SetDates() work again.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003349
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00003350- There is a new module pimp, the package install manager for Python, and
3351 accompanying applet PackageManager. These allow you to easily download
3352 and install pretested extension packages either in source or binary
3353 form. Only in MacPython-OSX.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003354
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00003355- Applets are now built with bundlebuilder in MacPython-OSX, which should make
Jack Jansen5d44b342003-02-18 23:32:47 +00003356 them more robust and also provides a path towards BuildApplication. The
3357 downside of this change is that applets can no longer be run from the
3358 Terminal window, this will hopefully be fixed in the 2.3b1.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003359
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003360
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003361What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 1?
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003362=================================
3363
Guido van Rossumae548862002-12-31 15:47:36 +00003364*Release date: 31-Dec-2002*
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003365
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003366Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003367--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00003368
Michael W. Hudson96bc3b42002-11-26 14:48:23 +00003369- One can now assign to __bases__ and __name__ of new-style classes.
3370
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00003371- dict() now accepts keyword arguments so that dict(one=1, two=2)
3372 is the equivalent of {"one": 1, "two": 2}. Accordingly,
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00003373 the existing (but undocumented) 'items' keyword argument has
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00003374 been eliminated. This means that dict(items=someMapping) now has
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00003375 a different meaning than before.
3376
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00003377- int() now returns a long object if the argument is outside the
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003378 integer range, so int("4" * 1000), int(1e200) and int(1L<<1000) will
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00003379 all return long objects instead of raising an OverflowError.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003380
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003381- Assignment to __class__ is disallowed if either the old or the new
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00003382 class is a statically allocated type object (such as defined by an
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003383 extension module). This prevents anomalies like 2.__class__ = bool.
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00003384
3385- New-style object creation and deallocation have been sped up
3386 significantly; they are now faster than classic instance creation
3387 and deallocation.
3388
3389- The __slots__ variable can now mention "private" names, and the
3390 right thing will happen (e.g. __slots__ = ["__foo"]).
3391
3392- The built-ins slice() and buffer() are now callable types. The
3393 types classobj (formerly class), code, function, instance, and
3394 instancemethod (formerly instance-method), which have no built-in
3395 names but are accessible through the types module, are now also
3396 callable. The type dict-proxy is renamed to dictproxy.
3397
3398- Cycles going through the __class__ link of a new-style instance are
3399 now detected by the garbage collector.
3400
3401- Classes using __slots__ are now properly garbage collected.
3402 [SF bug 519621]
3403
3404- Tightened the __slots__ rules: a slot name must be a valid Python
3405 identifier.
3406
3407- The constructor for the module type now requires a name argument and
3408 takes an optional docstring argument. Previously, this constructor
3409 ignored its arguments. As a consequence, deriving a class from a
3410 module (not from the module type) is now illegal; previously this
3411 created an unnamed module, just like invoking the module type did.
3412 [SF bug 563060]
3413
3414- A new type object, 'basestring', is added. This is a common base type
3415 for 'str' and 'unicode', and can be used instead of
3416 types.StringTypes, e.g. to test whether something is "a string":
3417 isinstance(x, basestring) is True for Unicode and 8-bit strings. This
3418 is an abstract base class and cannot be instantiated directly.
3419
3420- Changed new-style class instantiation so that when C's __new__
3421 method returns something that's not a C instance, its __init__ is
3422 not called. [SF bug #537450]
3423
3424- Fixed super() to work correctly with class methods. [SF bug #535444]
3425
3426- If you try to pickle an instance of a class that has __slots__ but
3427 doesn't define or override __getstate__, a TypeError is now raised.
3428 This is done by adding a bozo __getstate__ to the class that always
3429 raises TypeError. (Before, this would appear to be pickled, but the
3430 state of the slots would be lost.)
3431
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003432Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003433-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003434
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003435- Import from zipfiles is now supported. The name of a zipfile placed
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00003436 on sys.path causes the import statement to look for importable Python
3437 modules (with .py, pyc and .pyo extensions) and packages inside the
3438 zipfile. The zipfile import follows the specification (though not
3439 the sample implementation) of PEP 273. The semantics of __path__ are
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003440 compatible with those that have been implemented in Jython since
3441 Jython 2.1.
3442
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003443- PEP 302 has been accepted. Although it was initially developed to
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00003444 support zipimport, it offers a new, general import hook mechanism.
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00003445 Several new variables have been added to the sys module:
3446 sys.meta_path, sys.path_hooks, and sys.path_importer_cache; these
3447 make extending the import statement much more convenient than
3448 overriding the __import__ built-in function. For a description of
3449 these, see PEP 302.
3450
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003451- A frame object's f_lineno attribute can now be written to from a
3452 trace function to change which line will execute next. A command to
3453 exploit this from pdb has been added. [SF patch #643835]
3454
Marc-André Lemburg20b91352002-12-12 18:01:43 +00003455- The _codecs support module for codecs.py was turned into a builtin
3456 module to assure that at least the builtin codecs are available
3457 to the Python parser for source code decoding according to PEP 263.
3458
Walter Dörwaldd9a6ad32002-12-12 16:41:44 +00003459- issubclass now supports a tuple as the second argument, just like
3460 isinstance does. ``issubclass(X, (A, B))`` is equivalent to
3461 ``issubclass(X, A) or issubclass(X, B)``.
3462
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00003463- Thanks to Armin Rigo, the last known way to provoke a system crash
3464 by cleverly arranging for a comparison function to mutate a list
3465 during a list.sort() operation has been fixed. The effect of
3466 attempting to mutate a list, or even to inspect its contents or
3467 length, while a sort is in progress, is not defined by the language.
3468 The C implementation of Python 2.3 attempts to detect mutations,
3469 and raise ValueError if one occurs, but there's no guarantee that
3470 all mutations will be caught, or that any will be caught across
3471 releases or implementations.
3472
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00003473- Unicode file name processing for Windows (PEP 277) is implemented.
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00003474 All platforms now have an os.path.supports_unicode_filenames attribute,
3475 which is set to True on Windows NT/2000/XP, and False elsewhere.
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00003476
Walter Dörwald3aeb6322002-09-02 13:14:32 +00003477- Codec error handling callbacks (PEP 293) are implemented.
3478 Error handling in unicode.encode or str.decode can now be customized.
3479
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00003480- A subtle change to the semantics of the built-in function intern():
3481 interned strings are no longer immortal. You must keep a reference
3482 to the return value intern() around to get the benefit.
3483
Guido van Rossumf808b892002-08-16 03:38:10 +00003484- Use of 'None' as a variable, argument or attribute name now
3485 issues a SyntaxWarning. In the future, None may become a keyword.
3486
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00003487- SET_LINENO is gone. co_lnotab is now consulted to determine when to
3488 call the trace function. C code that accessed f_lineno should call
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003489 PyCode_Addr2Line instead (f_lineno is still there, but only kept up
3490 to date when there is a trace function set).
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00003491
Guido van Rossum9be89462002-08-14 16:11:30 +00003492- There's a new warning category, FutureWarning. This is used to warn
3493 about a number of situations where the value or sign of an integer
3494 result will change in Python 2.4 as a result of PEP 237 (integer
3495 unification). The warnings implement stage B0 mentioned in that
3496 PEP. The warnings are about the following situations:
3497
3498 - Octal and hex literals without 'L' prefix in the inclusive range
3499 [0x80000000..0xffffffff]; these are currently negative ints, but
3500 in Python 2.4 they will be positive longs with the same bit
3501 pattern.
3502
3503 - Left shifts on integer values that cause the outcome to lose
3504 bits or have a different sign than the left operand. To be
3505 precise: x<<n where this currently doesn't yield the same value
3506 as long(x)<<n; in Python 2.4, the outcome will be long(x)<<n.
3507
3508 - Conversions from ints to string that show negative values as
3509 unsigned ints in the inclusive range [0x80000000..0xffffffff];
3510 this affects the functions hex() and oct(), and the string
3511 formatting codes %u, %o, %x, and %X. In Python 2.4, these will
3512 show signed values (e.g. hex(-1) currently returns "0xffffffff";
3513 in Python 2.4 it will return "-0x1").
3514
Guido van Rossum9a2eda52002-12-31 02:12:42 +00003515- The bits manipulated under the cover by sys.setcheckinterval() have
3516 been changed. Both the check interval and the ticker used to be
3517 per-thread values. They are now just a pair of global variables.
3518 In addition, the default check interval was boosted from 10 to 100
3519 bytecode instructions. This may have some effect on systems that
3520 relied on the old default value. In particular, in multi-threaded
3521 applications which try to be highly responsive, response time will
3522 increase by some (perhaps imperceptible) amount.
Skip Montanaro979c74b2002-09-03 21:25:14 +00003523
Tim Petersd64c1de2002-08-12 17:36:03 +00003524- When multiplying very large integers, a version of the so-called
3525 Karatsuba algorithm is now used. This is most effective if the
3526 inputs have roughly the same size. If they both have about N digits,
3527 Karatsuba multiplication has O(N**1.58) runtime (the exponent is
3528 log_base_2(3)) instead of the previous O(N**2). Measured results may
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00003529 be better or worse than that, depending on platform quirks. Besides
3530 the O() improvement in raw instruction count, the Karatsuba algorithm
3531 appears to have much better cache behavior on extremely large integers
3532 (starting in the ballpark of a million bits). Note that this is a
3533 simple implementation, and there's no intent here to compete with,
3534 e.g., GMP. It gives a very nice speedup when it applies, but a package
3535 devoted to fast large-integer arithmetic should run circles around it.
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00003536
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00003537- u'%c' will now raise a ValueError in case the argument is an
3538 integer outside the valid range of Unicode code point ordinals.
3539
Guido van Rossumdeb09362002-08-09 17:16:30 +00003540- The tempfile module has been overhauled for enhanced security. The
3541 mktemp() function is now deprecated; new, safe replacements are
3542 mkstemp() (for files) and mkdtemp() (for directories), and the
3543 higher-level functions NamedTemporaryFile() and TemporaryFile().
3544 Use of some global variables in this module is also deprecated; the
3545 new functions have keyword arguments to provide the same
3546 functionality. All Lib, Tools and Demo modules that used the unsafe
3547 interfaces have been updated to use the safe replacements. Thanks
3548 to Zack Weinberg!
3549
Guido van Rossumd81a9832002-08-09 15:57:34 +00003550- When x is an object whose class implements __mul__ and __rmul__,
3551 1.0*x would correctly invoke __rmul__, but 1*x would erroneously
3552 invoke __mul__. This was due to the sequence-repeat code in the int
3553 type. This has been fixed now.
3554
Barry Warsawd79f6832002-08-06 17:01:51 +00003555- Previously, "str1 in str2" required str1 to be a string of length 1.
3556 This restriction has been relaxed to allow str1 to be a string of
3557 any length. Thus "'el' in 'hello world'" returns True now.
3558
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003559- File objects are now their own iterators. For a file f, iter(f) now
3560 returns f (unless f is closed), and f.next() is similar to
3561 f.readline() when EOF is not reached; however, f.next() uses a
3562 readahead buffer that messes up the file position, so mixing
3563 f.next() and f.readline() (or other methods) doesn't work right.
3564 Calling f.seek() drops the readahead buffer, but other operations
3565 don't. It so happens that this gives a nice additional speed boost
3566 to "for line in file:"; the xreadlines method and corresponding
Guido van Rossumbffb2ef2002-08-09 17:17:07 +00003567 module are now obsolete. Thanks to Oren Tirosh!
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003568
Guido van Rossumde392d32002-08-05 14:17:20 +00003569- Encoding declarations (PEP 263, phase 1) have been implemented. A
3570 comment of the form "# -*- coding: <encodingname> -*-" in the first
3571 or second line of a Python source file indicates the encoding.
Martin v. Löwis00f1e3f2002-08-04 17:29:52 +00003572
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003573- list.sort() has a new implementation. While cross-platform results
3574 may vary, and in data-dependent ways, this is much faster on many
3575 kinds of partially ordered lists than the previous implementation,
3576 and reported to be just as fast on randomly ordered lists on
3577 several major platforms. This sort is also stable (if A==B and A
3578 precedes B in the list at the start, A precedes B after the sort too),
3579 although the language definition does not guarantee stability. A
3580 potential drawback is that list.sort() may require temp space of
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003581 len(list)*2 bytes (``*4`` on a 64-bit machine). It's therefore possible
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003582 for list.sort() to raise MemoryError now, even if a comparison function
3583 does not. See <http://www.python.org/sf/587076> for full details.
3584
Guido van Rossum2d5389c2002-07-23 03:44:35 +00003585- All standard iterators now ensure that, once StopIteration has been
3586 raised, all future calls to next() on the same iterator will also
3587 raise StopIteration. There used to be various counterexamples to
3588 this behavior, which could caused confusion or subtle program
3589 breakage, without any benefits. (Note that this is still an
3590 iterator's responsibility; the iterator framework does not enforce
3591 this.)
3592
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003593- Ctrl+C handling on Windows has been made more consistent with
3594 other platforms. KeyboardInterrupt can now reliably be caught,
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003595 and Ctrl+C at an interactive prompt no longer terminates the
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003596 process under NT/2k/XP (it never did under Win9x). Ctrl+C will
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00003597 interrupt time.sleep() in the main thread, and any child processes
3598 created via the popen family (on win2k; we can't make win9x work
Mark Hammond8f3afc72002-08-10 06:26:31 +00003599 reliably) are also interrupted (as generally happens on for Linux/Unix.)
3600 [SF bugs 231273, 439992 and 581232]
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003601
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00003602- sys.getwindowsversion() has been added on Windows. This
3603 returns a tuple with information about the version of Windows
3604 currently running.
3605
Raymond Hettinger5a04aec2002-06-25 00:25:30 +00003606- Slices and repetitions of buffer objects now consistently return
3607 a string. Formerly, strings would be returned most of the time,
3608 but a buffer object would be returned when the repetition count
3609 was one or when the slice range was all inclusive.
3610
Walter Dörwald3430d702002-06-17 10:43:59 +00003611- Unicode objects in sys.path are no longer ignored but treated
3612 as directory names.
3613
Neal Norwitz1f68fc72002-06-14 00:50:42 +00003614- Fixed string.startswith and string.endswith builtin methods
3615 so they accept negative indices. [SF bug 493951]
3616
Guido van Rossumc5fe5eb2002-06-12 03:45:21 +00003617- Fixed a bug with a continue inside a try block and a yield in the
3618 finally clause. [SF bug 567538]
3619
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00003620- Most builtin sequences now support "extended slices", i.e. slices
Guido van Rossum2e82e712002-06-13 11:41:07 +00003621 with a third "stride" parameter. For example, "hello world"[::-1]
3622 gives "dlrow olleh".
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00003623
Neal Norwitzd68f5172002-05-29 15:54:55 +00003624- A new warning PendingDeprecationWarning was added to provide
3625 direction on features which are in the process of being deprecated.
3626 The warning will not be printed by default. To see the pending
3627 deprecations, use -Walways::PendingDeprecationWarning::
3628 as a command line option or warnings.filterwarnings() in code.
3629
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00003630- Deprecated features of xrange objects have been removed as
3631 promised. The start, stop, and step attributes and the tolist()
3632 method no longer exist. xrange repetition and slicing have been
3633 removed.
3634
Guido van Rossum7dab2422002-04-26 19:40:56 +00003635- New builtin function enumerate(x), from PEP 279. Example:
3636 enumerate("abc") is an iterator returning (0,"a"), (1,"b"), (2,"c").
3637 The argument can be an arbitrary iterable object.
3638
Neil Schemenauer89e3ee02002-04-26 01:58:53 +00003639- The assert statement no longer tests __debug__ at runtime. This means
3640 that assert statements cannot be disabled by assigning a false value
3641 to __debug__.
3642
Walter Dörwald068325e2002-04-15 13:36:47 +00003643- A method zfill() was added to str and unicode, that fills a numeric
3644 string to the left with zeros. For example,
3645 "+123".zfill(6) -> "+00123".
3646
Guido van Rossum862fe3c2002-04-15 12:36:47 +00003647- Complex numbers supported divmod() and the // and % operators, but
3648 these make no sense. Since this was documented, they're being
3649 deprecated now.
3650
Guido van Rossum26dd8302002-04-26 20:11:29 +00003651- String and unicode methods lstrip(), rstrip() and strip() now take
3652 an optional argument that specifies the characters to strip. For
3653 example, "Foo!!!?!?!?".rstrip("?!") -> "Foo".
Guido van Rossum49042042002-04-13 00:59:05 +00003654
Guido van Rossumc0d3f4e2002-11-27 13:10:40 +00003655- There's a new dictionary constructor (a class method of the dict
3656 class), dict.fromkeys(iterable, value=None). It constructs a
3657 dictionary with keys taken from the iterable and all values set to a
3658 single value. It can be used for building sets and for removing
3659 duplicates from sequences.
Raymond Hettingere33d3df2002-11-27 07:29:33 +00003660
Guido van Rossumc69343b2002-04-12 19:22:48 +00003661- Added a new dict method pop(key). This removes and returns the
3662 value corresponding to key. [SF patch #539949]
3663
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00003664- A new built-in type, bool, has been added, as well as built-in
3665 names for its two values, True and False. Comparisons and sundry
3666 other operations that return a truth value have been changed to
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003667 return a bool instead. Read PEP 285 for an explanation of why this
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00003668 is backward compatible.
3669
Guido van Rossum95b62a62002-03-29 01:07:24 +00003670- Fixed two bugs reported as SF #535905: under certain conditions,
3671 deallocating a deeply nested structure could cause a segfault in the
3672 garbage collector, due to interaction with the "trashcan" code;
3673 access to the current frame during destruction of a local variable
3674 could access a pointer to freed memory.
3675
Guido van Rossumfe0ca4a2002-06-18 21:20:13 +00003676- The optional object allocator ("pymalloc") has been enabled by
3677 default. The recommended practice for memory allocation and
3678 deallocation has been streamlined. A header file is included,
3679 Misc/pymemcompat.h, which can be bundled with 3rd party extensions
3680 and lets them use the same API with Python versions from 1.5.2
3681 onwards.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00003682
Martin v. Löwiscfeb3b62002-03-03 21:30:27 +00003683- PyErr_Display will provide file and line information for all exceptions
3684 that have an attribute print_file_and_line, not just SyntaxErrors.
3685
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00003686- The UTF-8 codec will now encode and decode Unicode surrogates
3687 correctly and without raising exceptions for unpaired ones.
3688
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00003689- Universal newlines (PEP 278) is implemented. Briefly, using 'U'
3690 instead of 'r' when opening a text file for reading changes the line
3691 ending convention so that any of '\r', '\r\n', and '\n' is
3692 recognized (even mixed in one file); all three are converted to
3693 '\n', the standard Python line end character.
3694
Neal Norwitz649b7592002-01-01 19:07:13 +00003695- file.xreadlines() now raises a ValueError if the file is closed:
3696 Previously, an xreadlines object was returned which would raise
3697 a ValueError when the xreadlines.next() method was called.
3698
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003699- sys.exit() inadvertently allowed more than one argument.
Neal Norwitz0c766a02002-03-27 13:03:09 +00003700 An exception will now be raised if more than one argument is used.
3701
Gustavo Niemeyer17c5a332002-12-16 14:09:22 +00003702- Changed evaluation order of dictionary literals to conform to the
3703 general left to right evaluation order rule. Now {f1(): f2()} will
3704 evaluate f1 first.
Gustavo Niemeyer78429a62002-12-16 13:54:02 +00003705
Gustavo Niemeyer786ddb22002-12-16 18:12:53 +00003706- Fixed bug #521782: when a file was in non-blocking mode, file.read()
3707 could silently lose data or wrongly throw an unknown error.
3708
Neil Schemenauerb983aa02002-12-30 20:22:23 +00003709- The sq_repeat, sq_inplace_repeat, sq_concat and sq_inplace_concat
3710 slots are now always tried after trying the corresponding nb_* slots.
3711 This fixes a number of minor bugs (see bug #624807).
3712
Neal Norwitz74a032e2003-01-10 23:29:48 +00003713- Fix problem with dynamic loading on 64-bit AIX (see bug #639945).
3714
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003715Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003716-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003717
Raymond Hettinger9543b342003-01-18 23:22:20 +00003718- Added three operators to the operator module:
3719 operator.pow(a,b) which is equivalent to: a**b.
3720 operator.is_(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is b.
3721 operator.is_not(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is not b.
3722
Martin v. Löwis24a880b2002-12-31 12:55:15 +00003723- posix.openpty now works on all systems that have /dev/ptmx.
3724
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003725- A module zipimport exists to support importing code from zip
3726 archives.
3727
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00003728- The new datetime module supplies classes for manipulating dates and
3729 times. The basic design came from the Zope "fishbowl process", and
3730 favors practical commercial applications over calendar esoterica. See
3731
3732 http://www.zope.org/Members/fdrake/DateTimeWiki/FrontPage
3733
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00003734- _tkinter now returns Tcl objects, instead of strings. Objects which
3735 have Python equivalents are converted to Python objects, other objects
3736 are wrapped. This can be configured through the wantobjects method,
Martin v. Löwis8c8aa5d2002-11-26 21:39:48 +00003737 or Tkinter.wantobjects.
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00003738
Barry Warsawc27f4bd2002-12-30 21:03:26 +00003739- The PyBSDDB wrapper around the Sleepycat Berkeley DB library has
3740 been added as the package bsddb. The traditional bsddb module is
3741 still available in source code, but not built automatically anymore,
3742 and is now named bsddb185. This supports Berkeley DB versions from
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00003743 3.0 to 4.1. For help converting your databases from the old module (which
3744 probably used an obsolete version of Berkeley DB) to the new module, see
3745 the db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py scripts described in the Tools/Demos
3746 section above.
Martin v. Löwisef546b32002-11-19 08:12:57 +00003747
Martin v. Löwis677bde22002-11-23 22:08:15 +00003748- unicodedata was updated to Unicode 3.2. It supports normalization
3749 and names for Hangul syllables and CJK unified ideographs.
Martin v. Löwis7d41e292002-11-23 12:22:32 +00003750
Neal Norwitz94a83fd2002-11-02 17:46:24 +00003751- resource.getrlimit() now returns longs instead of ints.
3752
Martin v. Löwis080689c2002-10-26 14:42:02 +00003753- readline now dynamically adjusts its input/output stream if
3754 sys.stdin/stdout changes.
3755
Guido van Rossumba602972002-10-01 18:18:58 +00003756- The _tkinter module (and hence Tkinter) has dropped support for
3757 Tcl/Tk 8.0 and 8.1. Only Tcl/Tk versions 8.2, 8.3 and 8.4 are
3758 supported.
3759
Martin v. Löwis658009a2002-09-16 17:26:24 +00003760- cPickle.BadPickleGet is now a class.
3761
Martin v. Löwisa19bfe02002-10-16 18:28:36 +00003762- The time stamps in os.stat_result are floating point numbers
3763 after stat_float_times has been called.
Martin v. Löwis94717ed2002-09-09 14:24:16 +00003764
Neal Norwitzb5673922002-09-05 21:48:07 +00003765- If the size passed to mmap.mmap() is larger than the length of the
3766 file on non-Windows platforms, a ValueError is raised. [SF bug 585792]
3767
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003768- The xreadlines module is slated for obsolescence.
3769
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00003770- The strptime function in the time module is now always available (a
3771 Python implementation is used when the C library doesn't define it).
3772
Guido van Rossum9562bcf2002-06-14 21:31:18 +00003773- The 'new' module is no longer an extension, but a Python module that
3774 only exists for backwards compatibility. Its contents are no longer
3775 functions but callable type objects.
3776
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003777- The bsddb.*open functions can now take 'None' as a filename.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00003778 This will create a temporary in-memory bsddb that won't be
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003779 written to disk.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00003780
Martin v. Löwisb96152c2002-12-31 13:20:15 +00003781- posix.getloadavg, posix.lchown, posix.killpg, posix.mknod, and
3782 posix.getpgid have been added where available.
Martin v. Löwis06a83e92002-04-14 10:19:44 +00003783
Martin v. Löwisf0a46682002-11-03 17:20:12 +00003784- The locale module now exposes the C library's gettext interface. It
3785 also has a new function getpreferredencoding.
Martin v. Löwis2e64c342002-03-27 18:49:02 +00003786
Tim Petersfbf74f22002-03-14 19:06:01 +00003787- A security hole ("double free") was found in zlib-1.1.3, a popular
3788 third party compression library used by some Python modules. The
3789 hole was quickly plugged in zlib-1.1.4, and the Windows build of
3790 Python now ships with zlib-1.1.4.
3791
Martin v. Löwis688357e2002-04-08 21:28:20 +00003792- pwd, grp, and resource return enhanced tuples now, with symbolic
3793 field names.
Martin v. Löwis29001ff2002-03-01 10:47:37 +00003794
Martin v. Löwis99866332002-03-01 10:27:01 +00003795- array.array is now a type object. A new format character
3796 'u' indicates Py_UNICODE arrays. For those, .tounicode and
3797 .fromunicode methods are available. Arrays now support __iadd__
3798 and __imul__.
3799
Neal Norwitze790eae2002-01-01 21:14:12 +00003800- dl now builds on every system that has dlfcn.h. Failure in case
Martin v. Löwis93227272002-01-01 20:18:30 +00003801 of sizeof(int)!=sizeof(long)!=sizeof(void*) is delayed until dl.open
3802 is called.
3803
Skip Montanaro8e790e72002-09-03 13:25:17 +00003804- The sys module acquired a new attribute, api_version, which evaluates
3805 to the value of the PYTHON_API_VERSION macro with which the
3806 interpreter was compiled.
3807
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00003808- Fixed bug #470582: sre module would return a tuple (None, 'a', 'ab')
3809 when applying the regular expression '^((a)c)?(ab)$' on 'ab'. It now
3810 returns (None, None, 'ab'), as expected. Also fixed handling of
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00003811 lastindex/lastgroup match attributes in similar cases. For example,
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00003812 when running the expression r'(a)(b)?b' over 'ab', lastindex must be
3813 1, not 2.
3814
Gustavo Niemeyerc523b042002-11-07 03:28:56 +00003815- Fixed bug #581080: sre scanner was not checking the buffer limit
3816 before increasing the current pointer. This was creating an infinite
3817 loop in the search function, once the pointer exceeded the buffer
3818 limit.
3819
Thomas Heller95cb7e42002-11-07 16:23:55 +00003820- The os.fdopen function now enforces a file mode starting with the
3821 letter 'r', 'w' or 'a', otherwise a ValueError is raised. This fixes
3822 bug #623464.
3823
Greg Ward6c58d462003-01-03 18:02:15 +00003824- The linuxaudiodev module is now deprecated; it is being replaced by
3825 ossaudiodev. The interface has been extended to cover a lot more of
3826 OSS (see www.opensound.com), including most DSP ioctls and the
3827 OSS mixer API. Documentation forthcoming in 2.3a2.
3828
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003829Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003830-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003831
Guido van Rossum747f8062003-01-03 16:33:49 +00003832- imaplib.py now supports SSL (Tino Lange and Piers Lauder).
3833
Just van Rossum5e156ad2002-12-31 16:38:01 +00003834- Freeze's modulefinder.py has been moved to the standard library;
3835 slightly improved so it will issue less false missing submodule
3836 reports (see sf path #643711 for details). Documentation will follow
3837 with Python 2.3a2.
3838
Martin v. Löwis96a60e42002-12-31 13:11:54 +00003839- os.path exposes getctime.
3840
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003841- unittest.py now has two additional methods called assertAlmostEqual()
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003842 and failIfAlmostEqual(). They implement an approximate comparison
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003843 by rounding the difference between the two arguments and comparing
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003844 the result to zero. Approximate comparison is essential for
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003845 unit tests of floating point results.
3846
Raymond Hettingere11b5102002-12-25 16:37:19 +00003847- calendar.py now depends on the new datetime module rather than
3848 the time module. As a result, the range of allowable dates
3849 has been increased.
3850
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003851- pdb has a new 'j(ump)' command to select the next line to be
3852 executed.
3853
Thomas Heller1b3b49d2002-12-12 19:13:44 +00003854- The distutils created windows installers now can run a
3855 postinstallation script.
3856
Martin v. Löwis4581cfa2002-11-22 08:23:09 +00003857- doctest.testmod can now be called without argument, which means to
3858 test the current module.
3859
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003860- When canceling a server that implemented threading with a keyboard
Martin v. Löwisf86e8ef2002-11-22 08:08:44 +00003861 interrupt, the server would shut down but not terminate (waiting on
3862 client threads). A new member variable, daemon_threads, was added to
3863 the ThreadingMixIn class in SocketServer.py to make it explicit that
3864 this behavior needs to be controlled.
3865
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00003866- A new module, optparse, provides a fancy alternative to getopt for
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003867 command line parsing. It is a slightly modified version of Greg
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00003868 Ward's Optik package.
3869
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00003870- UserDict.py now defines a DictMixin class which defines all dictionary
3871 methods for classes that already have a minimum mapping interface.
3872 This greatly simplifies writing classes that need to be substitutable
3873 for dictionaries (such as the shelve module).
3874
3875- shelve.py now subclasses from UserDict.DictMixin. Now shelve supports
3876 all dictionary methods. This eases the transition to persistent
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003877 storage for scripts originally written with dictionaries in mind.
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00003878
Skip Montanaro3bf99e32002-12-08 18:36:24 +00003879- shelve.open and the various classes in shelve.py now accept an optional
3880 binary flag, which defaults to False. If True, the values stored in the
3881 shelf are binary pickles.
3882
Guido van Rossumfda06742002-11-13 16:29:18 +00003883- A new package, logging, implements the logging API defined by PEP
3884 282. The code is written by Vinay Sajip.
3885
Walter Dörwald4dbf1922002-11-06 16:53:44 +00003886- StreamReader, StreamReaderWriter and StreamRecoder in the codecs
3887 modules are iterators now.
3888
Tim Peters9288f952002-11-05 20:38:55 +00003889- gzip.py now handles files exceeding 2GB. Files over 4GB also work
3890 now (provided the OS supports it, and Python is configured with large
3891 file support), but in that case the underlying gzip file format can
3892 record only the least-significant 32 bits of the file size, so that
3893 some tools working with gzipped files may report an incorrect file
3894 size.
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00003895
Martin v. Löwis74b51ac2002-10-26 14:50:45 +00003896- xml.sax.saxutils.unescape has been added, to replace entity references
3897 with their entity value.
3898
Martin v. Löwis77ac4292002-10-15 15:11:13 +00003899- Queue.Queue.{put,get} now support an optional timeout argument.
3900
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00003901- Various features of Tk 8.4 are exposed in Tkinter.py. The multiple
3902 option of tkFileDialog is exposed as function askopenfile{,name}s.
Martin v. Löwis2ec36272002-10-13 10:22:08 +00003903
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00003904- Various configure methods of Tkinter have been stream-lined, so that
3905 tag_configure, image_configure, window_configure now return a
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00003906 dictionary when invoked with no argument.
Martin v. Löwis6ce13152002-10-10 14:36:13 +00003907
Guido van Rossum2b492b62002-10-09 21:40:48 +00003908- Importing the readline module now no longer has the side effect of
3909 calling setlocale(LC_CTYPE, ""). The initial "C" locale, or
3910 whatever locale is explicitly set by the user, is preserved. If you
3911 want repr() of 8-bit strings in your preferred encoding to preserve
3912 all printable characters of that encoding, you have to add the
3913 following code to your $PYTHONSTARTUP file or to your application's
3914 main():
3915
3916 import locale
3917 locale.setlocale(locale.LC_CTYPE, "")
3918
Martin v. Löwise9ce0b02002-10-07 13:23:24 +00003919- shutil.move was added. shutil.copytree now reports errors as an
3920 exception at the end, instead of printing error messages.
3921
Marc-André Lemburg97047e22002-10-04 11:55:21 +00003922- Encoding name normalization was generalized to not only
3923 replace hyphens with underscores, but also all other non-alphanumeric
3924 characters (with the exception of the dot which is used for Python
3925 package names during lookup). The aliases.py mapping was updated
3926 to the new standard.
3927
Walter Dörwald5ccaf8f2002-09-06 16:15:58 +00003928- mimetypes has two new functions: guess_all_extensions() which
3929 returns a list of all known extensions for a mime type, and
3930 add_type() which adds one mapping between a mime type and
3931 an extension to the database.
3932
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00003933- New module: sets, defines the class Set that implements a mutable
3934 set type using the keys of a dict to represent the set. There's
3935 also a class ImmutableSet which is useful when you need sets of sets
3936 or when you need to use sets as dict keys, and a class BaseSet which
Raymond Hettingeref8b9c62002-12-09 08:56:06 +00003937 is the base class of the two.
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00003938
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00003939- Added random.sample(population,k) for random sampling without replacement.
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00003940 Returns a k length list of unique elements chosen from the population.
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00003941
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00003942- random.randrange(-sys.maxint-1, sys.maxint) no longer raises
3943 OverflowError. That is, it now accepts any combination of 'start'
3944 and 'stop' arguments so long as each is in the range of Python's
3945 bounded integers.
3946
Raymond Hettinger40f62172002-12-29 23:03:38 +00003947- Thanks to Raymond Hettinger, random.random() now uses a new core
3948 generator. The Mersenne Twister algorithm is implemented in C,
3949 threadsafe, faster than the previous generator, has an astronomically
3950 large period (2**19937-1), creates random floats to full 53-bit
3951 precision, and may be the most widely tested random number generator
3952 in existence.
3953
3954 The random.jumpahead(n) method has different semantics for the new
3955 generator. Instead of jumping n steps ahead, it uses n and the
3956 existing state to create a new state. This means that jumpahead()
3957 continues to support multi-threaded code needing generators of
3958 non-overlapping sequences. However, it will break code which relies
3959 on jumpahead moving a specific number of steps forward.
3960
3961 The attributes random.whseed and random.__whseed have no meaning for
3962 the new generator. Code using these attributes should switch to a
3963 new class, random.WichmannHill which is provided for backward
3964 compatibility and to make an alternate generator available.
3965
Guido van Rossum4a57c332002-08-02 18:05:20 +00003966- New "algorithms" module: heapq, implements a heap queue. Thanks to
3967 Kevin O'Connor for the code and François Pinard for an entertaining
3968 write-up explaining the theory and practical uses of heaps.
3969
Marc-André Lemburg58e2ff22002-07-12 14:40:04 +00003970- New encoding for the Palm OS character set: palmos.
3971
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00003972- binascii.crc32() and the zipfile module had problems on some 64-bit
3973 platforms. These have been fixed. On a platform with 8-byte C longs,
3974 crc32() now returns a signed-extended 4-byte result, so that its value
3975 as a Python int is equal to the value computed a 32-bit platform.
3976
Martin v. Löwis7d650ca2002-06-30 15:05:00 +00003977- xml.dom.minidom.toxml and toprettyxml now take an optional encoding
3978 argument.
3979
Guido van Rossum9f7549b2002-06-10 21:39:42 +00003980- Some fixes in the copy module: when an object is copied through its
3981 __reduce__ method, there was no check for a __setstate__ method on
3982 the result [SF patch 565085]; deepcopy should treat instances of
3983 custom metaclasses the same way it treats instances of type 'type'
3984 [SF patch 560794].
3985
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00003986- Sockets now support timeout mode. After s.settimeout(T), where T is
3987 a float expressing seconds, subsequent operations raise an exception
3988 if they cannot be completed within T seconds. To disable timeout
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00003989 mode, use s.settimeout(None). There's also a module function,
3990 socket.setdefaulttimeout(T), which sets the default for all sockets
3991 created henceforth.
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00003992
3993- getopt.gnu_getopt was added. This supports GNU-style option
3994 processing, where options can be mixed with non-option arguments.
Martin v. Löwis446a25f2002-06-06 10:58:36 +00003995
Michael W. Hudsonb0dc1a32002-06-04 18:27:35 +00003996- Stop using strings for exceptions. String objects used for
3997 exceptions are now classes deriving from Exception. The objects
3998 changed were: Tkinter.TclError, bdb.BdbQuit, macpath.norm_error,
3999 tabnanny.NannyNag, and xdrlib.Error.
Neal Norwitzb5b5a262002-06-04 17:14:07 +00004000
Walter Dörwald474458d2002-06-04 15:16:29 +00004001- Constants BOM_UTF8, BOM_UTF16, BOM_UTF16_LE, BOM_UTF16_BE,
4002 BOM_UTF32, BOM_UTF32_LE and BOM_UTF32_BE that represent the Byte
4003 Order Mark in UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 encodings for little and
4004 big endian systems were added to the codecs module. The old names
4005 BOM32_* and BOM64_* were off by a factor of 2.
4006
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00004007- Added conversion functions math.degrees() and math.radians().
Raymond Hettinger87f59ee2002-05-13 04:17:32 +00004008
Raymond Hettinger866964c2002-12-14 19:51:34 +00004009- math.log() now takes an optional argument: math.log(x[, base]).
4010
Raymond Hettinger9b1df1d2002-05-12 06:07:21 +00004011- ftplib.retrlines() now tests for callback is None rather than testing
4012 for False. Was causing an error when given a callback object which
4013 was callable but also returned len() as zero. The change may
4014 create new breakage if the caller relied on the undocumented behavior
4015 and called with callback set to [] or some other False value not
4016 identical to None.
4017
Tim Peters46c04e12002-05-05 20:40:00 +00004018- random.gauss() uses a piece of hidden state used by nothing else,
4019 and the .seed() and .whseed() methods failed to reset it. In other
4020 words, setting the seed didn't completely determine the sequence of
4021 results produced by random.gauss(). It does now. Programs repeatedly
4022 mixing calls to a seed method with calls to gauss() may see different
4023 results now.
4024
Fred Drake7f781c92002-05-01 20:33:53 +00004025- The pickle.Pickler class grew a clear_memo() method to mimic that
4026 provided by cPickle.Pickler.
4027
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00004028- difflib's SequenceMatcher class now does a dynamic analysis of
4029 which elements are so frequent as to constitute noise. For
4030 comparing files as sequences of lines, this generally works better
4031 than the IS_LINE_JUNK function, and function ndiff's linejunk
4032 argument defaults to None now as a result. A happy benefit is
4033 that SequenceMatcher may run much faster now when applied
4034 to large files with many duplicate lines (for example, C program
4035 text with lots of repeated "}" and "return NULL;" lines).
4036
Guido van Rossum256705b2002-04-23 13:29:43 +00004037- New Text.dump() method in Tkinter module.
4038
Marc-André Lemburg1ec71ea2002-04-17 20:33:40 +00004039- New distutils commands for building packagers were added to
4040 support pkgtool on Solaris and swinstall on HP-UX.
4041
4042- distutils now has a new abstract binary packager base class
4043 command/bdist_packager, which simplifies writing packagers.
4044 This will hopefully provide the missing bits to encourage
4045 people to submit more packagers, e.g. for Debian, FreeBSD
4046 and other systems.
4047
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00004048- The UTF-16, -LE and -BE stream readers now raise a
4049 NotImplementedError for all calls to .readline(). Previously, they
4050 used to just produce garbage or fail with an encoding error --
4051 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 +00004052 work well with these.
4053
Martin v. Löwis5c137c22002-03-18 12:44:08 +00004054- compileall now supports quiet operation.
4055
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004056- The BaseHTTPServer now implements optional HTTP/1.1 persistent
Martin v. Löwis587c98c2002-03-17 18:37:22 +00004057 connections.
4058
Marc-André Lemburga5d2b4c2002-02-16 18:23:30 +00004059- socket module: the SSL support was broken out of the main
4060 _socket module C helper and placed into a new _ssl helper
4061 which now gets imported by socket.py if available and working.
4062
Marc-André Lemburg37aa5802002-02-10 21:42:47 +00004063- encodings package: added aliases for all supported IANA character
4064 sets
4065
Guido van Rossum606fe4e2001-12-28 20:57:14 +00004066- ftplib: to safeguard the user's privacy, anonymous login will use
4067 "anonymous@" as default password, rather than the real user and host
4068 name.
4069
Fred Drake36736122002-01-10 13:50:31 +00004070- webbrowser: tightened up the command passed to os.system() so that
4071 arbitrary shell code can't be executed because a bogus URL was
4072 passed in.
4073
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00004074- gettext.translation has an optional fallback argument, and
Martin v. Löwisa55ffae2002-01-11 06:58:49 +00004075 gettext.find an optional all argument. Translations will now fallback
Martin v. Löwisd8996052002-11-21 21:45:32 +00004076 on a per-message basis. The module supports plural forms, by means
4077 of gettext.[d]ngettext and Translation.[u]ngettext.
Martin v. Löwis1be64192002-01-11 06:33:28 +00004078
Martin v. Löwis9668b932002-01-12 11:27:42 +00004079- distutils bdist commands now offer a --skip-build option.
4080
Walter Dörwaldb25c2b02002-03-21 10:38:40 +00004081- warnings.warn now accepts a Warning instance as first argument.
4082
Fred Drakefed7e852002-04-04 19:36:15 +00004083- The xml.sax.expatreader.ExpatParser class will no longer create
4084 circular references by using itself as the locator that gets passed
4085 to the content handler implementation. [SF bug #535474]
4086
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00004087- The email.Parser.Parser class now properly parses strings regardless
4088 of their line endings, which can be any of \r, \n, or \r\n (CR, LF,
4089 or CRLF). Also, the Header class's constructor default arguments
4090 has changed slightly so that an explicit maxlinelen value is always
Barry Warsaw497e5c42002-12-30 19:27:08 +00004091 honored, and so unicode conversion error handling can be specified.
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00004092
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00004093- distutils' build_ext command now links C++ extensions with the C++
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00004094 compiler available in the Makefile or CXX environment variable, if
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00004095 running under \*nix.
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00004096
4097- New module bz2: provides a comprehensive interface for the bz2 compression
4098 library. It implements a complete file interface, one-shot (de)compression
4099 functions, and types for sequential (de)compression.
4100
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00004101- New pdb command 'pp' which is like 'p' except that it pretty-prints
Barry Warsaw5d8d6182002-11-05 22:41:33 +00004102 the value of its expression argument.
4103
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00004104- Now bdist_rpm distutils command understands a verify_script option in
4105 the config file, including the contents of the referred filename in
4106 the "%verifyscript" section of the rpm spec file.
4107
Gustavo Niemeyer1456fde2002-11-25 17:25:04 +00004108- Fixed bug #495695: webbrowser module would run graphic browsers in a
4109 unix environment even if DISPLAY was not set. Also, support for
4110 skipstone browser was included.
4111
Gustavo Niemeyerd5ae01a2002-12-16 13:11:57 +00004112- Fixed bug #636769: rexec would run unallowed code if subclasses of
4113 strings were used as parameters for certain functions.
4114
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004115Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004116-----------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004117
Martin v. Löwis0d1fdea2002-11-22 08:36:54 +00004118- pygettext.py now supports globbing on Windows, and accepts module
4119 names in addition to accepting file names.
4120
Guido van Rossum923e4ef2002-09-17 20:58:59 +00004121- The SGI demos (Demo/sgi) have been removed. Nobody thought they
4122 were interesting any more. (The SGI library modules and extensions
4123 are still there; it is believed that at least some of these are
4124 still used and useful.)
4125
Fred Drake40813b12002-08-05 15:24:19 +00004126- IDLE supports the new encoding declarations (PEP 263); it can also
4127 deal with legacy 8-bit files if they use the locale's encoding. It
4128 allows non-ASCII strings in the interactive shell and executes them
4129 in the locale's encoding.
Martin v. Löwis98ce7b72002-08-05 15:11:26 +00004130
Marc-André Lemburg46260092002-04-04 16:17:11 +00004131- freeze.py now produces binaries which can import shared modules,
4132 unlike before when this failed due to missing symbol exports in
4133 the generated binary.
4134
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004135Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004136-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004137
Martin v. Löwisdc461752002-11-06 21:59:33 +00004138- On Unix, IDLE is now installed automatically.
4139
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00004140- The fpectl module is not built by default; it's dangerous or useless
4141 except in the hands of experts.
4142
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00004143- The public Python C API will generally be declared using PyAPI_FUNC
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00004144 and PyAPI_DATA macros, while Python extension module init functions
4145 will be declared with PyMODINIT_FUNC. DL_EXPORT/DL_IMPORT macros
4146 are deprecated.
Neal Norwitz1389f3e2002-07-22 13:21:10 +00004147
Tim Petersc6a3ff62002-07-08 22:11:52 +00004148- A bug was fixed that could cause COUNT_ALLOCS builds to segfault, or
4149 get into infinite loops, when a new-style class got garbage-collected.
4150 Unfortunately, to avoid this, the way COUNT_ALLOCS works requires
4151 that new-style classes be immortal in COUNT_ALLOCS builds. Note that
4152 COUNT_ALLOCS is not enabled by default, in either release or debug
4153 builds, and that new-style classes are immortal only in COUNT_ALLOCS
4154 builds.
4155
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00004156- Compiling out the cyclic garbage collector is no longer an option.
4157 The old symbol WITH_CYCLE_GC is now ignored, and Python.h arranges
4158 that it's always defined (for the benefit of any extension modules
4159 that may be conditionalizing on it). A bonus is that any extension
4160 type participating in cyclic gc can choose to participate in the
4161 Py_TRASHCAN mechanism now too; in the absence of cyclic gc, this used
4162 to require editing the core to teach the trashcan mechanism about the
4163 new type.
4164
Martin v. Löwis0cec0ff2002-07-28 16:33:45 +00004165- According to Annex F of the current C standard,
Tim Peters1de41bf2002-07-03 03:31:20 +00004166
4167 The Standard C macro HUGE_VAL and its float and long double analogs,
4168 HUGE_VALF and HUGE_VALL, expand to expressions whose values are
4169 positive infinities.
4170
4171 Python only uses the double HUGE_VAL, and only to #define its own symbol
4172 Py_HUGE_VAL. Some platforms have incorrect definitions for HUGE_VAL.
4173 pyport.h used to try to worm around that, but the workarounds triggered
4174 other bugs on other platforms, so we gave up. If your platform defines
4175 HUGE_VAL incorrectly, you'll need to #define Py_HUGE_VAL to something
4176 that works on your platform. The only instance of this I'm sure about
4177 is on an unknown subset of Cray systems, described here:
4178
4179 http://www.cray.com/swpubs/manuals/SN-2194_2.0/html-SN-2194_2.0/x3138.htm
4180
4181 Presumably 2.3a1 breaks such systems. If anyone uses such a system, help!
4182
Martin v. Löwisa3fb4f72002-06-09 13:33:54 +00004183- The configure option --without-doc-strings can be used to remove the
4184 doc strings from the builtin functions and modules; this reduces the
4185 size of the executable.
4186
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00004187- The universal newlines option (PEP 278) is on by default. On Unix
4188 it can be disabled by passing --without-universal-newlines to the
4189 configure script. On other platforms, remove
4190 WITH_UNIVERSAL_NEWLINES from pyconfig.h.
Tim Peters639295f2002-04-21 07:30:30 +00004191
Martin v. Löwis1142de32002-03-29 16:28:31 +00004192- On Unix, a shared libpython2.3.so can be created with --enable-shared.
4193
Tim Peters8deda702002-03-30 10:06:07 +00004194- All uses of the CACHE_HASH, INTERN_STRINGS, and DONT_SHARE_SHORT_STRINGS
4195 preprocessor symbols were eliminated. The internal decisions they
4196 controlled stopped being experimental long ago.
Tim Peters1f7df352002-03-29 03:29:08 +00004197
Fred Drake7d28b732002-05-02 21:17:00 +00004198- The tools used to build the documentation now work under Cygwin as
4199 well as Unix.
4200
Skip Montanaro57454e52002-06-14 20:30:31 +00004201- The bsddb and dbm module builds have been changed to try and avoid version
4202 skew problems and disable linkage with Berkeley DB 1.85 unless the
4203 installer knows what s/he's doing. See the section on building these
4204 modules in the README file for details.
4205
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004206C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004207-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004208
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00004209- PyNumber_Check() now returns true for string and unicode objects.
4210 This is a result of these types having a partially defined
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00004211 tp_as_number slot. (This is not a feature, but an indication that
Walter Dörwalda1a61f92002-11-19 21:20:25 +00004212 PyNumber_Check() is not very useful to determine numeric behavior.
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00004213 It may be deprecated.)
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00004214
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00004215- The string object's layout has changed: the pointer member
4216 ob_sinterned has been replaced by an int member ob_sstate. On some
4217 platforms (e.g. most 64-bit systems) this may change the offset of
4218 the ob_sval member, so as a precaution the API_VERSION has been
4219 incremented. The apparently unused feature of "indirect interned
4220 strings", supported by the ob_sinterned member, is gone. Interned
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004221 strings are now usually mortal; there is a new API,
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00004222 PyString_InternImmortal() that creates immortal interned strings.
4223 (The ob_sstate member can only take three values; however, while
4224 making it a char saves a few bytes per string object on average, in
4225 it also slowed things down a bit because ob_sval was no longer
4226 aligned.)
4227
Guido van Rossumfdb86482002-08-14 21:20:32 +00004228- The Py_InitModule*() functions now accept NULL for the 'methods'
4229 argument. Modules without global functions are becoming more common
4230 now that factories can be types rather than functions.
4231
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00004232- New C API PyUnicode_FromOrdinal() which exposes unichr() at C
4233 level.
4234
Thomas Heller085358a2002-07-29 14:27:41 +00004235- New functions PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErr() and
4236 PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErrWithFilename(). Similar to
4237 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErrWithFilename() and
4238 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErr(), but they allow to specify
4239 the exception type to raise. Available on Windows.
4240
Tim Peters7c321a82002-07-09 02:57:01 +00004241- Py_FatalError() is now declared as taking a const char* argument. It
4242 was previously declared without const. This should not affect working
4243 code.
4244
Martin v. Löwis01f94bd2002-05-08 08:44:21 +00004245- Added new macro PySequence_ITEM(o, i) that directly calls
4246 sq_item without rechecking that o is a sequence and without
4247 adjusting for negative indices.
4248
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00004249- PyRange_New() now raises ValueError if the fourth argument is not 1.
4250 This is part of the removal of deprecated features of the xrange
4251 object.
4252
Guido van Rossum517c7d42002-04-26 02:49:14 +00004253- PyNumber_Coerce() and PyNumber_CoerceEx() now also invoke the type's
4254 coercion if both arguments have the same type but this type has the
4255 CHECKTYPES flag set. This is to better support proxies.
4256
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004257- The type of tp_free has been changed from "``void (*)(PyObject *)``" to
4258 "``void (*)(void *)``".
Neil Schemenauer9344b142002-04-12 23:00:08 +00004259
4260- PyObject_Del, PyObject_GC_Del are now functions instead of macros.
4261
Guido van Rossum0986d822002-04-08 01:38:42 +00004262- A type can now inherit its metatype from its base type. Previously,
4263 when PyType_Ready() was called, if ob_type was found to be NULL, it
4264 was always set to &PyType_Type; now it is set to base->ob_type,
4265 where base is tp_base, defaulting to &PyObject_Type.
4266
4267- PyType_Ready() accidentally did not inherit tp_is_gc; now it does.
4268
Neil Schemenauerc9abc1d2002-05-08 14:14:41 +00004269- The PyCore_* family of APIs have been removed.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00004270
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004271- The "u#" parser marker will now pass through Unicode objects as-is
Marc-André Lemburg3e3eacb2002-01-09 16:21:27 +00004272 without going through the buffer API.
4273
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004274- The enumerators of cmp_op have been renamed to use the prefix ``PyCmp_``.
Martin v. Löwis7198a522002-01-01 19:59:11 +00004275
Tim Peters10a3bb52001-12-25 19:07:38 +00004276- An old #define of ANY as void has been removed from pyport.h. This
4277 hasn't been used since Python's pre-ANSI days, and the #define has
4278 been marked as obsolete since then. SF bug 495548 says it created
4279 conflicts with other packages, so keeping it around wasn't harmless.
4280
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004281- Because Python's magic number scheme broke on January 1st, we decided
4282 to stop Python development. Thanks for all the fish!
4283
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00004284- Some of us don't like fish, so we changed Python's magic number
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00004285 scheme to a new one. See Python/import.c for details.
4286
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004287New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004288-------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004289
Martin v. Löwis79acb9e2002-12-06 12:48:53 +00004290- OpenVMS is now supported.
4291
Martin v. Löwisf90ae202002-06-11 06:22:31 +00004292- AtheOS is now supported.
4293
Andrew MacIntyre161ad0e2002-08-04 07:25:58 +00004294- the EMX runtime environment on OS/2 is now supported.
4295
Martin v. Löwisa6e97582002-01-01 18:41:33 +00004296- GNU/Hurd is now supported.
4297
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004298Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004299-----
4300
Fred Drake4dd0f7e2002-11-26 21:44:56 +00004301- The regrtest.py script's -u option now provides a way to say "allow
4302 all resources except this one." For example, to allow everything
4303 except bsddb, give the option '-uall,-bsddb'.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004304
4305Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004306-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004307
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00004308- The Windows distribution now ships with version 4.0.14 of the
4309 Sleepycat Berkeley database library. This should be a huge
4310 improvement over the previous Berkeley DB 1.85, which had many
4311 bugs.
4312 XXX What are the licensing issues here?
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004313 XXX If a user has a database created with a previous version of
Tim Peters84c7a3f2002-11-23 18:48:06 +00004314 XXX Python, what must they do to convert it?
4315 XXX I'm still not sure how to link this thing (see PCbuild/readme.txt).
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00004316 XXX The version # is likely to change before 2.3a1.
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00004317
4318- The Windows distribution now ships with a Secure Sockets Library (SLL)
Mark Hammondc3de0082002-12-03 06:16:08 +00004319 module (_ssl.pyd)
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00004320
Tim Peters857fb4c2002-11-14 23:31:58 +00004321- The Windows distribution now ships with Tcl/Tk version 8.4.1 (it
4322 previously shipped with Tcl/Tk 8.3.2).
4323
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00004324- When Python is built under a Microsoft compiler, sys.version now
4325 includes the compiler version number (_MSC_VER). For example, under
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004326 MSVC 6, sys.version contains the substring "MSC v.1200 ". 1200 is
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00004327 the value of _MSC_VER under MSVC 6.
4328
Tim Peters08e72952002-04-16 20:48:01 +00004329- Sometimes the uninstall executable (UNWISE.EXE) vanishes. One cause
4330 of that has been fixed in the installer (disabled Wise's "delete in-
4331 use files" uninstall option).
4332
Guido van Rossum181e41a2002-04-06 00:23:25 +00004333- Fixed a bug in urllib's proxy handling in Windows. [SF bug #503031]
4334
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00004335- The installer now installs Start menu shortcuts under (the local
4336 equivalent of) "All Users" when doing an Admin install.
4337
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00004338- file.truncate([newsize]) now works on Windows for all newsize values.
4339 It used to fail if newsize didn't fit in 32 bits, reflecting a
4340 limitation of MS _chsize (which is no longer used).
4341
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00004342- os.waitpid() is now implemented for Windows, and can be used to block
4343 until a specified process exits. This is similar to, but not exactly
4344 the same as, os.waitpid() on POSIX systems. If you're waiting for
4345 a specific process whose pid was obtained from one of the spawn()
4346 functions, the same Python os.waitpid() code works across platforms.
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00004347 See the docs for details. The docs were changed to clarify that
4348 spawn functions return, and waitpid requires, a process handle on
4349 Windows (not the same thing as a Windows process id).
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00004350
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00004351- New tempfile.TemporaryFile implementation for Windows: this doesn't
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004352 need a TemporaryFileWrapper wrapper anymore, and should be immune
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00004353 to a nasty problem: before 2.3, if you got a temp file on Windows, it
4354 got wrapped in an object whose close() method first closed the
4355 underlying file, then deleted the file. This usually worked fine.
4356 However, the spawn family of functions on Windows create (at a low C
4357 level) the same set of open files in the spawned process Q as were
4358 open in the spawning process P. If a temp file f was among them, then
4359 doing f.close() in P first closed P's C-level file handle on f, but Q's
4360 C-level file handle on f remained open, so the attempt in P to delete f
4361 blew up with a "Permission denied" error (Windows doesn't allow
4362 deleting open files). This was surprising, subtle, and difficult to
4363 work around.
4364
4365- The os module now exports all the symbolic constants usable with the
4366 low-level os.open() on Windows: the new constants in 2.3 are
4367 O_NOINHERIT, O_SHORT_LIVED, O_TEMPORARY, O_RANDOM and O_SEQUENTIAL.
4368 The others were also available in 2.2: O_APPEND, O_BINARY, O_CREAT,
4369 O_EXCL, O_RDONLY, O_RDWR, O_TEXT, O_TRUNC and O_WRONLY. Contrary
4370 to Microsoft docs, O_SHORT_LIVED does not seem to imply O_TEMPORARY
4371 (so specify both if you want both; note that neither is useful unless
4372 specified with O_CREAT too).
4373
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004374Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004375----
4376
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004377- Mac/Relnotes is gone, the release notes are now here.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004378
Just van Rossume1ebd802003-02-10 10:06:18 +00004379- Python (the OSX-only, unix-based version, not the OS9-compatible CFM
4380 version) now fully supports unicode strings as arguments to various file
4381 system calls, eg. open(), file(), os.stat() and os.listdir().
4382
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004383- The current naming convention for Python on the Macintosh is that MacPython
4384 refers to the unix-based OSX-only version, and MacPython-OS9 refers to the
4385 CFM-based version that runs on both OS9 and OSX.
4386
4387- All MacPython-OS9 functionality is now available in an OSX unix build,
4388 including the Carbon modules, the IDE, OSA support, etc. A lot of this
4389 will only work correctly in a framework build, though, because you cannot
4390 talk to the window manager unless your application is run from a .app
4391 bundle. There is a command line tool "pythonw" that runs your script
4392 with an interpreter living in such a .app bundle, this interpreter should
4393 be used to run any Python script using the window manager (including
4394 Tkinter or wxPython scripts).
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00004395
Jack Jansen8bb80db2002-12-30 22:42:43 +00004396- Most of Mac/Lib has moved to Lib/plat-mac, which is again used both in
4397 MacPython-OSX and MacPython-OS9. The only modules remaining in Mac/Lib
4398 are specifically for MacPython-OS9 (CFM support, preference resources, etc).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004399
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004400- A new utility PythonLauncher will start a Python interpreter when a .py or
4401 .pyw script is double-clicked in the Finder. By default .py scripts are
4402 run with a normal Python interpreter in a Terminal window and .pyw
4403 files are run with a window-aware pythonw interpreter without a Terminal
4404 window, but all this can be customized.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004405
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004406- MacPython-OS9 is now Carbon-only, so it runs on Mac OS 9 or Mac OS X and
4407 possibly on Mac OS 8.6 with the right CarbonLib installed, but not on earlier
4408 releases.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004409
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004410- Many tools such as BuildApplet.py and gensuitemodule.py now support a command
4411 line interface too.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004412
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004413- All the Carbon classes are now PEP253 compliant, meaning that you can
4414 subclass them from Python. Most of the attributes have gone, you should
4415 now use the accessor function call API, which is also what Apple's
4416 documentation uses. Some attributes such as grafport.visRgn are still
4417 available for convenience.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004418
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004419- New Carbon modules File (implementing the APIs in Files.h and Aliases.h)
4420 and Folder (APIs from Folders.h). The old macfs builtin module is
4421 gone, and replaced by a Python wrapper around the new modules.
4422
4423- Pathname handling should now be fully consistent: MacPython-OSX always uses
4424 unix pathnames and MacPython-OS9 always uses colon-separated Mac pathnames
4425 (also when running on Mac OS X).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004426
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004427- New Carbon modules Help and AH give access to the Carbon Help Manager.
4428 There are hooks in the IDE to allow accessing the Python documentation
4429 (and Apple's Carbon and Cocoa documentation) through the Help Viewer.
4430 See Mac/OSX/README for converting the Python documentation to a
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004431 Help Viewer compatible form and installing it.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004432
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004433- OSA support has been redesigned and the generated Python classes now
4434 mirror the inheritance defined by the underlying OSA classes.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004435
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004436- MacPython no longer maps both \r and \n to \n on input for any text file.
4437 This feature has been replaced by universal newline support (PEP278).
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00004438
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00004439- The default encoding for Python sourcefiles in MacPython-OS9 is no longer
Guido van Rossum16c85172003-02-20 01:52:48 +00004440 mac-roman (or whatever your local Mac encoding was) but "ascii", like on
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00004441 other platforms. If you really need sourcefiles with Mac characters in them
4442 you can change this in site.py.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004443
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00004444
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004445What's New in Python 2.2 final?
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004446===============================
4447
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004448*Release date: 21-Dec-2001*
4449
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004450Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004451--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004452
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004453- pickle.py, cPickle: allow pickling instances of new-style classes
4454 with a custom metaclass.
4455
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004456Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004457-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004458
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004459- weakref proxy object: when comparing, unwrap both arguments if both
4460 are proxies.
4461
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004462Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004463-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004464
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004465- binascii.b2a_base64(): fix a potential buffer overrun when encoding
4466 very short strings.
4467
4468- cPickle: the obscure "fast" mode was suspected of causing stack
4469 overflows on the Mac. Hopefully fixed this by setting the recursion
4470 limit much smaller. If the limit is too low (it only affects
4471 performance), you can change it by defining PY_CPICKLE_FAST_LIMIT
4472 when compiling cPickle.c (or in pyconfig.h).
4473
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004474Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004475-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004476
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004477- dumbdbm.py: fixed a dumb old bug (the file didn't get synched at
4478 close or delete time).
4479
4480- rfc822.py: fixed a bug where the address '<>' was converted to None
4481 instead of an empty string (also fixes the email.Utils module).
4482
4483- xmlrpclib.py: version 1.0.0; uses precision for doubles.
4484
4485- test suite: the pickle and cPickle tests were not executing any code
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004486 when run from the standard regression test.
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004487
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004488Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004489-----------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004490
4491Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004492-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004493
4494C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004495-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004496
4497New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004498-------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004499
4500Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004501-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004502
4503Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004504-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004505
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004506- distutils package: fixed broken Windows installers (bdist_wininst).
4507
4508- tempfile.py: prevent mysterious warnings when TemporaryFileWrapper
4509 instances are deleted at process exit time.
4510
4511- socket.py: prevent mysterious warnings when socket instances are
4512 deleted at process exit time.
4513
4514- posixmodule.c: fix a Windows crash with stat() of a filename ending
4515 in backslash.
4516
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004517Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004518----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004519
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004520- The Carbon toolbox modules have been upgraded to Universal Headers
4521 3.4, and experimental CoreGraphics and CarbonEvents modules have
4522 been added. All only for framework-enabled MacOSX.
4523
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004524
Tim Peters6272dfd2001-12-13 19:34:00 +00004525What's New in Python 2.2c1?
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004526===========================
4527
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004528*Release date: 14-Dec-2001*
4529
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004530Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004531--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004532
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004533- Guido's tutorial introduction to the new type/class features has
4534 been extensively updated. See
4535
4536 http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html
4537
4538 That remains the primary documentation in this area.
4539
Guido van Rossum33bab012001-12-05 22:45:48 +00004540- Fixed a leak: instance variables declared with __slots__ were never
4541 deleted!
4542
Guido van Rossum4b800852001-12-03 00:54:52 +00004543- The "delete attribute" method of descriptor objects is called
4544 __delete__, not __del__. In previous releases, it was mistakenly
4545 called __del__, which created an unfortunate overloading condition
4546 with finalizers. (The "get attribute" and "set attribute" methods
4547 are still called __get__ and __set__, respectively.)
4548
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00004549- Some subtle issues with the super built-in were fixed:
4550
4551 (a) When super itself is subclassed, its __get__ method would still
4552 return an instance of the base class (i.e., of super).
4553
4554 (b) super(C, C()).__class__ would return C rather than super. This
4555 is confusing. To fix this, I decided to change the semantics of
4556 super so that it only applies to code attributes, not to data
4557 attributes. After all, overriding data attributes is not
4558 supported anyway.
4559
4560 (c) The __get__ method didn't check whether the argument was an
4561 instance of the type used in creation of the super instance.
4562
Guido van Rossumcd7b7d62001-12-04 21:02:07 +00004563- Previously, hash() of an instance of a subclass of a mutable type
4564 (list or dictionary) would return some value, rather than raising
4565 TypeError. This has been fixed. Also, directly calling
4566 dict.__hash__ and list.__hash__ now raises the same TypeError
4567 (previously, these were the same as object.__hash__).
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00004568
Guido van Rossumd331cb52001-12-05 19:46:42 +00004569- New-style objects now support deleting their __dict__. This is for
4570 all intents and purposes equivalent to assigning a brand new empty
4571 dictionary, but saves space if the object is not used further.
4572
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004573Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004574-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004575
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004576- -Qnew now works as documented in PEP 238: when -Qnew is passed on
4577 the command line, all occurrences of "/" use true division instead
4578 of classic division. See the PEP for details. Note that "all"
4579 means all instances in library and 3rd-party modules, as well as in
4580 your own code. As the PEP says, -Qnew is intended for use only in
4581 educational environments with control over the libraries in use.
Tim Petersbf72fe22001-12-11 21:43:14 +00004582 Note that test_coercion.py in the standard Python test suite fails
4583 under -Qnew; this is expected, and won't be repaired until true
4584 division becomes the default (in the meantime, test_coercion is
4585 testing the current rules).
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004586
Fred Drake6c01e252001-12-14 17:08:12 +00004587- complex() now only allows the first argument to be a string
4588 argument, and raises TypeError if either the second arg is a string
4589 or if the second arg is specified when the first is a string.
4590
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004591Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004592-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004593
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00004594- gc.get_referents was renamed to gc.get_referrers.
4595
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004596Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004597-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004598
Tim Peters25059d32001-12-07 20:35:43 +00004599- Functions in the os.spawn() family now release the global interpreter
4600 lock around calling the platform spawn. They should always have done
4601 this, but did not before 2.2c1. Multithreaded programs calling
4602 an os.spawn function with P_WAIT will no longer block all Python threads
4603 until the spawned program completes. It's possible that some programs
4604 relies on blocking, although more likely by accident than by design.
4605
Martin v. Löwis3a89b2b2001-11-25 14:35:58 +00004606- webbrowser defaults to netscape.exe on OS/2 now.
4607
Martin v. Löwis652e1912001-11-25 14:50:56 +00004608- Tix.ResizeHandle exposes detach_widget, hide, and show.
4609
Martin v. Löwis714d2e22001-12-02 12:26:03 +00004610- The charset alias windows_1252 has been added.
4611
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004612- types.StringTypes is a tuple containing the defined string types;
4613 usually this will be (str, unicode), but if Python was compiled
4614 without Unicode support it will be just (str,).
4615
4616- The pulldom and minidom modules were synchronized to PyXML.
4617
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004618Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004619-----------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004620
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004621- A new script called Tools/scripts/google.py was added, which fires
4622 off a search on Google.
4623
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004624Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004625-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004626
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004627- Note that release builds of Python should arrange to define the
4628 preprocessor symbol NDEBUG on the command line (or equivalent).
4629 In the 2.2 pre-release series we tried to define this by magic in
4630 Python.h instead, but it proved to cause problems for extension
4631 authors. The Unix, Windows and Mac builds now all define NDEBUG in
4632 release builds via cmdline (or equivalent) instead. Ports to
4633 other platforms should do likewise.
4634
Jack Jansen1999ef42001-12-06 21:47:20 +00004635- It is no longer necessary to use --with-suffix when building on a
4636 case-insensitive file system (such as Mac OS X HFS+). In the build
4637 directory an extension is used, but not in the installed python.
4638
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004639C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004640-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004641
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00004642- New function PyDict_MergeFromSeq2() exposes the builtin dict
4643 constructor's logic for updating a dictionary from an iterable object
4644 producing key-value pairs.
4645
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00004646- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() requires that the number of entries in
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00004647 the keyword list equal the number of argument specifiers. This
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00004648 wasn't checked correctly, and PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords could even
4649 dump core in some bad cases. This has been repaired. As a result,
4650 PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords may raise RuntimeError in bad cases that
4651 previously went unchallenged.
4652
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004653New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004654-------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004655
4656Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004657-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004658
4659Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004660-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004661
4662Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004663----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004664
Jack Jansenffa260f2001-12-06 21:14:00 +00004665- In unix-Python on Mac OS X (and darwin) sys.platform is now "darwin",
4666 without any trailing digits.
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004667
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004668- Changed logic for finding python home in Mac OS X framework Pythons.
4669 Now sys.executable points to the executable again, in stead of to
4670 the shared library. The latter is used only for locating the python
4671 home.
4672
4673
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004674What's New in Python 2.2b2?
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004675===========================
4676
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004677*Release date: 16-Nov-2001*
4678
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004679Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004680--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004681
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00004682- Multiple inheritance mixing new-style and classic classes in the
4683 list of base classes is now allowed, so this works now:
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004684
4685 class Classic: pass
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00004686 class Mixed(Classic, object): pass
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004687
4688 The MRO (method resolution order) for each base class is respected
4689 according to its kind, but the MRO for the derived class is computed
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004690 using new-style MRO rules if any base class is a new-style class.
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004691 This needs to be documented.
4692
Tim Petersa427a2b2001-10-29 22:25:45 +00004693- The new builtin dictionary() constructor, and dictionary type, have
4694 been renamed to dict. This reflects a decade of common usage.
4695
Guido van Rossum3fc08d22001-11-15 20:33:10 +00004696- dict() now accepts an iterable object producing 2-sequences. For
4697 example, dict(d.items()) == d for any dictionary d. The argument,
4698 and the elements of the argument, can be any iterable objects.
4699
Guido van Rossum7ad2d1e2001-10-29 22:11:00 +00004700- New-style classes can now have a __del__ method, which is called
4701 when the instance is deleted (just like for classic classes).
4702
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004703- Assignment to object.__dict__ is now possible, for objects that are
4704 instances of new-style classes that have a __dict__ (unless the base
4705 class forbids it).
4706
Guido van Rossumc8e56452001-10-22 00:43:43 +00004707- Methods of built-in types now properly check for keyword arguments
4708 (formerly these were silently ignored). The only built-in methods
4709 that take keyword arguments are __call__, __init__ and __new__.
4710
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004711- The socket function has been converted to a type; see below.
4712
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004713Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004714-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004715
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00004716- Assignment to __debug__ raises SyntaxError at compile-time. This
4717 was promised when 2.1c1 was released as "What's New in Python 2.1c1"
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004718 (see below) says.
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00004719
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004720- Clarified the error messages for unsupported operands to an operator
4721 (like 1 + '').
4722
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004723Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004724-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004725
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004726- mmap has a new keyword argument, "access", allowing a uniform way for
4727 both Windows and Unix users to create read-only, write-through and
4728 copy-on-write memory mappings. This was previously possible only on
4729 Unix. A new keyword argument was required to support this in a
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004730 uniform way because the mmap() signatures had diverged across
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004731 platforms. Thanks to Jay T Miller for repairing this!
4732
Tim Peters169ded02001-11-03 19:57:21 +00004733- By default, the gc.garbage list now contains only those instances in
4734 unreachable cycles that have __del__ methods; in 2.1 it contained all
4735 instances in unreachable cycles. "Instances" here has been generalized
4736 to include instances of both new-style and old-style classes.
4737
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004738- The socket module defines a new method for socket objects,
4739 sendall(). This is like send() but may make multiple calls to
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004740 send() until all data has been sent. Also, the socket function has
4741 been converted to a subclassable type, like list and tuple (etc.)
4742 before it; socket and SocketType are now the same thing.
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004743
4744- Various bugfixes to the curses module. There is now a test suite
4745 for the curses module (you have to run it manually).
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00004746
Guido van Rossum692adf12001-10-30 03:03:03 +00004747- binascii.b2a_base64 no longer places an arbitrary restriction of 57
4748 bytes on its input.
4749
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004750Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004751-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004752
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004753- tkFileDialog exposes a Directory class and askdirectory
Martin v. Löwis25ee87c2001-11-07 22:38:08 +00004754 convenience function.
4755
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00004756- Symbolic group names in regular expressions must be unique. For
4757 example, the regexp r'(?P<abc>)(?P<abc>)' is not allowed, because a
4758 single name can't mean both "group 1" and "group 2" simultaneously.
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004759 Python 2.2 detects this error at regexp compilation time;
4760 previously, the error went undetected, and results were
4761 unpredictable. Also in sre, the pattern.split(), pattern.sub(), and
4762 pattern.subn() methods have been rewritten in C. Also, an
4763 experimental function/method finditer() has been added, which works
4764 like findall() but returns an iterator.
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00004765
Martin v. Löwisb7b32602001-11-02 23:48:20 +00004766- Tix exposes more commands through the classes DirSelectBox,
4767 DirSelectDialog, ListNoteBook, Meter, CheckList, and the
4768 methods tix_addbitmapdir, tix_cget, tix_configure, tix_filedialog,
4769 tix_getbitmap, tix_getimage, tix_option_get, and tix_resetoptions.
4770
Tim Peters98791af2001-10-23 01:59:54 +00004771- Traceback objects are now scanned by cyclic garbage collection, so
4772 cycles created by casual use of sys.exc_info() no longer cause
4773 permanent memory leaks (provided garbage collection is enabled).
4774
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00004775- os.extsep -- a new variable needed by the RISCOS support. It is the
4776 separator used by extensions, and is '.' on all platforms except
4777 RISCOS, where it is '/'. There is no need to use this variable
4778 unless you have a masochistic desire to port your code to RISCOS.
4779
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004780- mimetypes.py has optional support for non-standard, but commonly
4781 found types. guess_type() and guess_extension() now accept an
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004782 optional 'strict' flag, defaulting to true, which controls whether
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004783 recognize non-standard types or not. A few non-standard types we
4784 know about have been added. Also, when run as a script, there are
4785 new -l and -e options.
4786
4787- statcache is now deprecated.
4788
4789- email.Utils.formatdate() now produces the preferred RFC 2822 style
4790 dates with numeric timezones (it used to produce obsolete dates
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004791 hard coded to "GMT" timezone). An optional 'localtime' flag is
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004792 added to produce dates in the local timezone, with daylight savings
4793 time properly taken into account.
4794
4795- In pickle and cPickle, instead of masking errors in load() by
4796 transforming them into SystemError, we let the original exception
4797 propagate out. Also, implement support for __safe_for_unpickling__
4798 in pickle, as it already was supported in cPickle.
4799
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004800Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004801-----------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004802
4803Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004804-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004805
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004806- The dbm module is built using libdb1 if available. The bsddb module
4807 is built with libdb3 if available.
4808
4809- Misc/Makefile.pre.in has been removed by BDFL pronouncement.
4810
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004811C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004812-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004813
Tim Peters1fc240e2001-10-26 05:06:50 +00004814- New function PySequence_Fast_GET_SIZE() returns the size of a non-
4815 NULL result from PySequence_Fast(), more quickly than calling
4816 PySequence_Size().
4817
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004818- New argument unpacking function PyArg_UnpackTuple() added.
4819
4820- New functions PyObject_CallFunctionObjArgs() and
4821 PyObject_CallMethodObjArgs() have been added to make it more
4822 convenient and efficient to call functions and methods from C.
4823
4824- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() no longer masks errors, so it's
4825 possible that this will propagate errors it didn't before.
4826
4827- New function PyObject_CheckReadBuffer(), which returns true if its
4828 argument supports the single-segment readable buffer interface.
4829
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004830New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004831-------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004832
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004833- We've finally confirmed that this release builds on HP-UX 11.00,
4834 *with* threads, and passes the test suite.
4835
Tim Peters7a33d8b2001-11-05 02:51:07 +00004836- Thanks to a series of patches from Michael Muller, Python may build
4837 again under OS/2 Visual Age C++.
4838
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00004839- Updated RISCOS port by Dietmar Schwertberger.
4840
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004841Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004842-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004843
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00004844- Added a test script for the curses module. It isn't run automatically;
4845 regrtest.py must be run with '-u curses' to enable it.
4846
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004847Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004848-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004849
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004850Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004851----
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004852
4853- PythonScript has been moved to unsupported and is slated to be
4854 removed completely in the next release.
4855
4856- It should now be possible to build applets that work on both OS9 and
4857 OSX.
4858
4859- The core is now linked with CoreServices not Carbon; as a side
4860 result, default 8bit encoding on OSX is now ASCII.
4861
4862- Python should now build on OSX 10.1.1
4863
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004864
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004865What's New in Python 2.2b1?
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004866===========================
4867
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004868*Release date: 19-Oct-2001*
4869
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004870Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004871--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004872
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004873- New-style classes are now always dynamic (except for built-in and
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004874 extension types). There is no longer a performance penalty, and I
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004875 no longer see another reason to keep this baggage around. One relic
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004876 remains: the __dict__ of a new-style class is a read-only proxy; you
4877 must set the class's attribute to modify it. As a consequence, the
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004878 __defined__ attribute of new-style types no longer exists, for lack
4879 of need: there is once again only one __dict__ (although in the
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004880 future a __cache__ may be resurrected with a similar function, if I
4881 can prove that it actually speeds things up).
Guido van Rossum50fda3b2001-10-04 19:46:06 +00004882
Tim Peters1c9ca872001-10-04 06:43:12 +00004883- C.__doc__ now works as expected for new-style classes (in 2.2a4 it
4884 always returned None, even when there was a class docstring).
4885
4886- doctest now finds and runs docstrings attached to new-style classes,
4887 class methods, static methods, and properties.
4888
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004889Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004890-----------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004891
Guido van Rossuma8bcf802001-10-15 15:53:58 +00004892- A very subtle syntactical pitfall in list comprehensions was fixed.
4893 For example: [a+b for a in 'abc', for b in 'def']. The comma in
4894 this example is a mistake. Previously, this would silently let 'a'
4895 iterate over the singleton tuple ('abc',), yielding ['abcd', 'abce',
4896 'abcf'] rather than the intended ['ad', 'ae', 'af', 'bd', 'be',
4897 'bf', 'cd', 'ce', 'cf']. Now, this is flagged as a syntax error.
4898 Note that [a for a in <singleton>] is a convoluted way to say
4899 [<singleton>] anyway, so it's not like any expressiveness is lost.
4900
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004901- getattr(obj, name, default) now only catches AttributeError, as
4902 documented, rather than returning the default value for all
4903 exceptions (which could mask bugs in a __getattr__ hook, for
4904 example).
4905
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00004906- Weak reference objects are now part of the core and offer a C API.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00004907 A bug which could allow a core dump when binary operations involved
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00004908 proxy reference has been fixed. weakref.ReferenceError is now a
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004909 built-in exception.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00004910
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00004911- unicode(obj) now behaves more like str(obj), accepting arbitrary
4912 objects, and calling a __unicode__ method if it exists.
4913 unicode(obj, encoding) and unicode(obj, encoding, errors) still
Marc-André Lemburgb5507ec2001-10-19 12:02:29 +00004914 require an 8-bit string or character buffer argument.
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00004915
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004916- isinstance() now allows any object as the first argument and a
4917 class, a type or something with a __bases__ tuple attribute for the
4918 second argument. The second argument may also be a tuple of a
4919 class, type, or something with __bases__, in which case isinstance()
4920 will return true if the first argument is an instance of any of the
4921 things contained in the second argument tuple. E.g.
4922
4923 isinstance(x, (A, B))
4924
4925 returns true if x is an instance of A or B.
4926
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004927Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004928-----------------
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004929
4930- thread.start_new_thread() now returns the thread ID (previously None).
4931
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00004932- binascii has now two quopri support functions, a2b_qp and b2a_qp.
4933
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00004934- readline now supports setting the startup_hook and the
4935 pre_event_hook, and adds the add_history() function.
Martin v. Löwis0daad592001-09-30 21:09:59 +00004936
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00004937- os and posix supports chroot(), setgroups() and unsetenv() where
4938 available. The stat(), fstat(), statvfs() and fstatvfs() functions
4939 now return "pseudo-sequences" -- the various fields can now be
4940 accessed as attributes (e.g. os.stat("/").st_mtime) but for
4941 backwards compatibility they also behave as a fixed-length sequence.
4942 Some platform-specific fields (e.g. st_rdev) are only accessible as
Guido van Rossum98bf58f2001-10-18 20:34:25 +00004943 attributes.
4944
4945- time: localtime(), gmtime() and strptime() now return a
4946 pseudo-sequence similar to the os.stat() return value, with
4947 attributes like tm_year etc.
Martin v. Löwis16628c92001-10-04 22:46:41 +00004948
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004949- Decompression objects in the zlib module now accept an optional
4950 second parameter to decompress() that specifies the maximum amount
4951 of memory to use for the uncompressed data.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004952
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00004953- optional SSL support in the socket module now exports OpenSSL
4954 functions RAND_add(), RAND_egd(), and RAND_status(). These calls
4955 are useful on platforms like Solaris where OpenSSL does not
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004956 automatically seed its PRNG. Also, the keyfile and certfile
4957 arguments to socket.ssl() are now optional.
4958
4959- posixmodule (and by extension, the os module on POSIX platforms) now
4960 exports O_LARGEFILE, O_DIRECT, O_DIRECTORY, and O_NOFOLLOW.
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00004961
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004962Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004963-------
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00004964
Tim Peters7402f792001-10-02 03:53:41 +00004965- doctest now excludes functions and classes not defined by the module
4966 being tested, thanks to Tim Hochberg.
4967
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00004968- HotShot, a new profiler implemented using a C-based callback, has
4969 been added. This substantially reduces the overhead of profiling,
4970 but it is still quite preliminary. Support modules and
4971 documentation will be added in upcoming releases (before 2.2 final).
4972
Guido van Rossumc4b09b42001-10-04 10:19:00 +00004973- profile now produces correct output in situations where an exception
4974 raised in Python is cleared by C code (e.g. hasattr()). This used
4975 to cause wrong output, including spurious claims of recursive
4976 functions and attribution of time spent to the wrong function.
4977
Tim Peters0a1fc4e2001-10-07 03:12:08 +00004978 The code and documentation for the derived OldProfile and HotProfile
4979 profiling classes was removed. The code hasn't worked for years (if
4980 you tried to use them, they raised exceptions). OldProfile
4981 intended to reproduce the behavior of the profiler Python used more
4982 than 7 years ago, and isn't interesting anymore. HotProfile intended
4983 to provide a faster profiler (but producing less information), and
4984 that's a worthy goal we intend to meet via a different approach (but
4985 without losing information).
4986
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00004987- Profile.calibrate() has a new implementation that should deliver
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00004988 a much better system-specific calibration constant. The constant can
4989 now be specified in an instance constructor, or as a Profile class or
4990 instance variable, instead of by editing profile.py's source code.
4991 Calibration must still be done manually (see the docs for the profile
4992 module).
4993
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004994 Note that Profile.calibrate() must be overridden by subclasses.
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00004995 Improving the accuracy required exploiting detailed knowledge of
4996 profiler internals; the earlier method abstracted away the details
4997 and measured a simplified model instead, but consequently computed
4998 a constant too small by a factor of 2 on some modern machines.
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00004999
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00005000- quopri's encode and decode methods take an optional header parameter,
Jeremy Hylton6f543b62001-10-16 20:42:52 +00005001 which indicates whether output is intended for the header 'Q'
5002 encoding.
5003
Guido van Rossuma5343cc2001-10-18 18:02:07 +00005004- The SocketServer.ThreadingMixIn class now closes the request after
5005 finish_request() returns. (Not when it errors out though.)
5006
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005007- The nntplib module's NNTP.body() method has grown a 'file' argument
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00005008 to allow saving the message body to a file.
5009
5010- The email package has added a class email.Parser.HeaderParser which
5011 only parses headers and does not recurse into the message's body.
5012 Also, the module/class MIMEAudio has been added for representing
5013 audio data (contributed by Anthony Baxter).
5014
5015- ftplib should be able to handle files > 2GB.
5016
5017- ConfigParser.getboolean() now also interprets TRUE, FALSE, YES, NO,
5018 ON, and OFF.
5019
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00005020- xml.dom.minidom NodeList objects now support the length attribute
5021 and item() method as required by the DOM specifications.
5022
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00005023Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005024-----------
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00005025
5026- Demo/dns was removed. It no longer serves any purpose; a package
5027 derived from it is now maintained by Anthony Baxter, see
5028 http://PyDNS.SourceForge.net.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005029
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00005030- The freeze tool has been made more robust, and two new options have
5031 been added: -X and -E.
5032
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005033Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005034-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005035
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00005036- configure will use CXX in LINKCC if CXX is used to build main() and
5037 the system requires to link a C++ main using the C++ compiler.
5038
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005039C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005040-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005041
Guido van Rossum6c4bce32001-10-18 19:20:25 +00005042- The documentation for the tp_compare slot is updated to require that
5043 the return value must be -1, 0, 1; an arbitrary number <0 or >0 is
5044 not correct. This is not yet enforced but will be enforced in
5045 Python 2.3; even later, we may use -2 to indicate errors and +2 for
5046 "NotImplemented". Right now, -1 should be used for an error return.
5047
Tim Petersd38b1c72001-09-30 05:09:37 +00005048- PyLong_AsLongLong() now accepts int (as well as long) arguments.
5049 Consequently, PyArg_ParseTuple's 'L' code also accepts int (as well
5050 as long) arguments.
5051
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00005052- PyThread_start_new_thread() now returns a long int giving the thread
5053 ID, if one can be calculated; it returns -1 for error, 0 if no
5054 thread ID is calculated (this is an incompatible change, but only
5055 the thread module used this API). This code has only really been
5056 tested on Linux and Windows; other platforms please beware (and
5057 report any bugs or strange behavior).
5058
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00005059- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() no longer accepts Unicode objects as
5060 input.
5061
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005062New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005063-------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005064
5065Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005066-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005067
5068Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005069-------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005070
Tim Peters04cf1d32001-10-09 22:39:40 +00005071- Installer: If you install IDLE, and don't disable file-extension
5072 registration, a new "Edit with IDLE" context (right-click) menu entry
5073 is created for .py and .pyw files.
5074
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00005075- The signal module now supports SIGBREAK on Windows, thanks to Steven
5076 Scott. Note that SIGBREAK is unique to Windows. The default SIGBREAK
5077 action remains to call Win32 ExitProcess(). This can be changed via
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00005078 signal.signal(). For example::
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00005079
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005080 # Make Ctrl+Break raise KeyboardInterrupt, like Python's default Ctrl+C
5081 # (SIGINT) behavior.
5082 import signal
5083 signal.signal(signal.SIGBREAK, signal.default_int_handler)
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00005084
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005085 try:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00005086 while 1:
5087 pass
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005088 except KeyboardInterrupt:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00005089 # We get here on Ctrl+C or Ctrl+Break now; if we had not changed
5090 # SIGBREAK, only on Ctrl+C (and Ctrl+Break would terminate the
5091 # program without the possibility for any Python-level cleanup).
5092 print "Clean exit"
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00005093
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005094
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005095What's New in Python 2.2a4?
5096===========================
5097
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005098*Release date: 28-Sep-2001*
5099
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005100Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005101--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005102
5103- pydoc and inspect are now aware of new-style classes;
5104 e.g. help(list) at the interactive prompt now shows proper
5105 documentation for all operations on list objects.
5106
5107- Applications using Jim Fulton's ExtensionClass module can now safely
5108 be used with Python 2.2. In particular, Zope 2.4.1 now works with
5109 Python 2.2 (as well as with Python 2.1.1). The Demo/metaclass
5110 examples also work again. It is hoped that Gtk and Boost also work
5111 with 2.2a4 and beyond. (If you can confirm this, please write
5112 webmaster@python.org; if there are still problems, please open a bug
5113 report on SourceForge.)
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005114
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00005115- property() now takes 4 keyword arguments: fget, fset, fdel and doc.
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00005116 These map to read-only attributes 'fget', 'fset', 'fdel', and '__doc__'
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00005117 in the constructed property object. fget, fset and fdel weren't
5118 discoverable from Python in 2.2a3. __doc__ is new, and allows to
5119 associate a docstring with a property.
5120
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005121- Comparison overloading is now more completely implemented. For
5122 example, a str subclass instance can properly be compared to a str
5123 instance, and it can properly overload comparison. Ditto for most
5124 other built-in object types.
5125
5126- The repr() of new-style classes has changed; instead of <type
5127 'M.Foo'> a new-style class is now rendered as <class 'M.Foo'>,
5128 *except* for built-in types, which are still rendered as <type
5129 'Foo'> (to avoid upsetting existing code that might parse or
5130 otherwise rely on repr() of certain type objects).
5131
5132- The repr() of new-style objects is now always <Foo object at XXX>;
5133 previously, it was sometimes <Foo instance at XXX>.
5134
5135- For new-style classes, what was previously called __getattr__ is now
5136 called __getattribute__. This method, if defined, is called for
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00005137 *every* attribute access. A new __getattr__ hook more similar to the
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005138 one in classic classes is defined which is called only if regular
5139 attribute access raises AttributeError; to catch *all* attribute
5140 access, you can use __getattribute__ (for new-style classes). If
5141 both are defined, __getattribute__ is called first, and if it raises
5142 AttributeError, __getattr__ is called.
5143
5144- The __class__ attribute of new-style objects can be assigned to.
5145 The new class must have the same C-level object layout as the old
5146 class.
5147
5148- The builtin file type can be subclassed now. In the usual pattern,
5149 "file" is the name of the builtin type, and file() is a new builtin
5150 constructor, with the same signature as the builtin open() function.
5151 file() is now the preferred way to open a file.
5152
5153- Previously, __new__ would only see sequential arguments passed to
5154 the type in a constructor call; __init__ would see both sequential
5155 and keyword arguments. This made no sense whatsoever any more, so
5156 now both __new__ and __init__ see all arguments.
5157
5158- Previously, hash() applied to an instance of a subclass of str or
5159 unicode always returned 0. This has been repaired.
5160
5161- Previously, an operation on an instance of a subclass of an
5162 immutable type (int, long, float, complex, tuple, str, unicode),
5163 where the subtype didn't override the operation (and so the
5164 operation was handled by the builtin type), could return that
5165 instance instead a value of the base type. For example, if s was of
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00005166 a str subclass type, s[:] returned s as-is. Now it returns a str
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005167 with the same value as s.
5168
Barry Warsaw86fbaf82001-09-28 15:26:12 +00005169- Provisional support for pickling new-style objects has been added.
5170
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005171Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005172----
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005173
Tim Peters2c9aa5e2001-09-23 04:06:05 +00005174- file.writelines() now accepts any iterable object producing strings.
5175
Marc-André Lemburgaefd7662001-09-20 12:59:37 +00005176- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() now works very much like
5177 PyObject_Str(obj) in that it tries to use __str__/tp_str
5178 on the object if the object is not a string or buffer. This
5179 makes unicode() behave like str() when applied to non-string/buffer
5180 objects.
5181
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00005182- PyFile_WriteObject now passes Unicode objects to the file's write
5183 method. As a result, all file-like objects which may be the target
Martin v. Löwis2777c022001-09-19 13:47:32 +00005184 of a print statement must support Unicode objects, i.e. they must
5185 at least convert them into ASCII strings.
5186
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005187- Thread scheduling on Solaris should be improved; it is no longer
5188 necessary to insert a small sleep at the start of a thread in order
5189 to let other runnable threads be scheduled.
5190
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005191Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005192-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005193
Marc-André Lemburgbf990172001-09-27 14:17:33 +00005194- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
5195 read character buffer compatible objects for their .write() methods.
5196 These objects are converted to strings and then handled as such
5197 by the instances.
5198
Barry Warsaw2f600732001-09-24 04:28:10 +00005199- The "email" package has been added. This is basically a port of the
5200 mimelib package <http://sf.net/projects/mimelib> with API changes
5201 and some implementations updated to use iterators and generators.
5202
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00005203- difflib.ndiff() and difflib.Differ.compare() are generators now. This
5204 restores the ability of Tools/scripts/ndiff.py to start producing output
5205 before the entire comparison is complete.
5206
Barry Warsaw58b072d2001-09-22 04:44:21 +00005207- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
5208 iteration just like file objects (i.e. their .readline() method is
5209 called for each iteration until it returns an empty string).
5210
Marc-André Lemburg494f2ae2001-09-19 11:33:31 +00005211- The codecs module has grown four new helper APIs to access
5212 builtin codecs: getencoder(), getdecoder(), getreader(),
5213 getwriter().
5214
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005215- SimpleXMLRPCServer: a new module (based upon SimpleHTMLServer)
5216 simplifies writing XML RPC servers.
5217
Barry Warsaw647d5e82001-09-28 17:01:02 +00005218- os.path.realpath(): a new function that returns the absolute pathname
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005219 after interpretation of symbolic links. On non-Unix systems, this
5220 is an alias for os.path.abspath().
5221
Tim Peters16a77ad2001-09-08 04:00:12 +00005222- operator.indexOf() (PySequence_Index() in the C API) now works with any
5223 iterable object.
5224
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005225- smtplib now supports various authentication and security features of
5226 the SMTP protocol through the new login() and starttls() methods.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00005227
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005228- hmac: a new module implementing keyed hashing for message
5229 authentication.
5230
5231- mimetypes now recognizes more extensions and file types. At the
5232 same time, some mappings not sanctioned by IANA were removed.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00005233
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005234- The "compiler" package has been brought up to date to the state of
Guido van Rossumc9ed5dc2001-09-20 05:30:24 +00005235 Python 2.2 bytecode generation. It has also been promoted from a
5236 Tool to a standard library package. (Tools/compiler still exists as
5237 a sample driver.)
5238
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005239Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005240-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005241
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005242- Large file support (LFS) is now automatic when the platform supports
5243 it; no more manual configuration tweaks are needed. On Linux, at
5244 least, it's possible to have a system whose C library supports large
5245 files but whose kernel doesn't; in this case, large file support is
5246 still enabled but doesn't do you any good unless you upgrade your
5247 kernel or share your Python executable with another system whose
5248 kernel has large file support.
5249
5250- The configure script now supplies plausible defaults in a
5251 cross-compilation environment. This doesn't mean that the supplied
5252 values are always correct, or that cross-compilation now works
5253 flawlessly -- but it's a first step (and it shuts up most of
5254 autoconf's warnings about AC_TRY_RUN).
5255
5256- The Unix build is now a bit less chatty, courtesy of the parser
5257 generator. The build is completely silent (except for errors) when
5258 using "make -s", thanks to a -q option to setup.py.
5259
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005260C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005261-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005262
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005263- The "structmember" API now supports some new flag bits to deny read
5264 and/or write access to attributes in restricted execution mode.
5265
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005266New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005267-------------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005268
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005269- Compaq's iPAQ handheld, running the "familiar" Linux distribution
5270 (http://familiar.handhelds.org).
5271
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005272Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005273-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005274
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00005275- The "classic" standard tests, which work by comparing stdout to
5276 an expected-output file under Lib/test/output/, no longer stop at
5277 the first mismatch. Instead the test is run to completion, and a
5278 variant of ndiff-style comparison is used to report all differences.
5279 This is much easier to understand than the previous style of reporting.
5280
5281- The unittest-based standard tests now use regrtest's test_main()
5282 convention, instead of running as a side-effect of merely being
5283 imported. This allows these tests to be run in more natural and
5284 flexible ways as unittests, outside the regrtest framework.
5285
5286- regrtest.py is much better integrated with unittest and doctest now,
5287 especially in regard to reporting errors.
5288
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005289Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005290-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005291
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005292- Large file support now also works for files > 4GB, on filesystems
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00005293 that support it (NTFS under Windows 2000). See "What's New in
5294 Python 2.2a3" for more detail.
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005295
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005296
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005297What's New in Python 2.2a3?
5298===========================
5299
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005300*Release Date: 07-Sep-2001*
5301
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005302Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005303----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005304
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005305- Conversion of long to float now raises OverflowError if the long is too
5306 big to represent as a C double.
5307
Tim Peters32f453e2001-09-03 08:35:41 +00005308- The 3-argument builtin pow() no longer allows a third non-None argument
5309 if either of the first two arguments is a float, or if both are of
5310 integer types and the second argument is negative (in which latter case
5311 the arguments are converted to float, so this is really the same
5312 restriction).
5313
Tim Peters5d2b77c2001-09-03 05:47:38 +00005314- The builtin dir() now returns more information, and sometimes much
5315 more, generally naming all attributes of an object, and all attributes
5316 reachable from the object via its class, and from its class's base
5317 classes, and so on from them too. Example: in 2.2a2, dir([]) returned
5318 an empty list. In 2.2a3,
5319
5320 >>> dir([])
5321 ['__add__', '__class__', '__contains__', '__delattr__', '__delitem__',
5322 '__eq__', '__ge__', '__getattr__', '__getitem__', '__getslice__',
5323 '__gt__', '__hash__', '__iadd__', '__imul__', '__init__', '__le__',
5324 '__len__', '__lt__', '__mul__', '__ne__', '__new__', '__repr__',
5325 '__rmul__', '__setattr__', '__setitem__', '__setslice__', '__str__',
5326 'append', 'count', 'extend', 'index', 'insert', 'pop', 'remove',
5327 'reverse', 'sort']
5328
5329 dir(module) continues to return only the module's attributes, though.
5330
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005331- Overflowing operations on plain ints now return a long int rather
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005332 than raising OverflowError. This is a partial implementation of PEP
5333 237. You can use -Wdefault::OverflowWarning to enable a warning for
5334 this situation, and -Werror::OverflowWarning to revert to the old
5335 OverflowError exception.
5336
Guido van Rossum61c345f2001-09-04 03:26:15 +00005337- A new command line option, -Q<arg>, is added to control run-time
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005338 warnings for the use of classic division. (See PEP 238.) Possible
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00005339 values are -Qold, -Qwarn, -Qwarnall, and -Qnew. The default is
5340 -Qold, meaning the / operator has its classic meaning and no
5341 warnings are issued. Using -Qwarn issues a run-time warning about
5342 all uses of classic division for int and long arguments; -Qwarnall
5343 also warns about classic division for float and complex arguments
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00005344 (for use with fixdiv.py).
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005345 [Note: the remainder of this item (preserved below) became
5346 obsolete in 2.2c1 -- -Qnew has global effect in 2.2] ::
5347
5348 Using -Qnew is questionable; it turns on new division by default, but
5349 only in the __main__ module. You can usefully combine -Qwarn or
5350 -Qwarnall and -Qnew: this gives the __main__ module new division, and
5351 warns about classic division everywhere else.
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005352
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005353- Many built-in types can now be subclassed. This applies to int,
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005354 long, float, str, unicode, and tuple. (The types complex, list and
5355 dictionary can also be subclassed; this was introduced earlier.)
5356 Note that restrictions apply when subclassing immutable built-in
5357 types: you can only affect the value of the instance by overloading
5358 __new__. You can add mutable attributes, and the subclass instances
5359 will have a __dict__ attribute, but you cannot change the "value"
5360 (as implemented by the base class) of an immutable subclass instance
5361 once it is created.
5362
Guido van Rossumaaf80c82001-09-02 13:44:35 +00005363- The dictionary constructor now takes an optional argument, a
5364 mapping-like object, and initializes the dictionary from its
5365 (key, value) pairs.
5366
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005367- A new built-in type, super, has been added. This facilitates making
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005368 "cooperative super calls" in a multiple inheritance setting. For an
5369 explanation, see http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#cooperation
5370
Guido van Rossum8d7234d2001-09-06 22:02:58 +00005371- A new built-in type, property, has been added. This enables the
5372 creation of "properties". These are attributes implemented by
5373 getter and setter functions (or only one of these for read-only or
5374 write-only attributes), without the need to override __getattr__.
5375 See http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#property
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005376
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005377- The syntax of floating-point and imaginary literals has been
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005378 liberalized, to allow leading zeroes. Examples of literals now
5379 legal that were SyntaxErrors before:
5380
5381 00.0 0e3 0100j 07.5 00000000000000000008.
5382
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005383- An old tokenizer bug allowed floating point literals with an incomplete
Tim Petersc6d95812001-08-28 20:56:27 +00005384 exponent, such as 1e and 3.1e-. Such literals now raise SyntaxError.
5385
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005386Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005387-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005388
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00005389- telnetlib includes symbolic names for the options, and support for
Martin v. Löwis1da9c572002-11-04 09:56:00 +00005390 setting an option negotiation callback. It also supports processing
5391 of suboptions.
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00005392
Tim Petersa40c7932001-09-05 22:36:56 +00005393- The new C standard no longer requires that math libraries set errno to
5394 ERANGE on overflow. For platform libraries that exploit this new
5395 freedom, Python's overflow-checking was wholly broken. A new overflow-
5396 checking scheme attempts to repair that, but may not be reliable on all
5397 platforms (C doesn't seem to provide anything both useful and portable
5398 in this area anymore).
5399
Martin v. Löwis44f86962001-09-05 13:44:54 +00005400- Asynchronous timeout actions are available through the new class
5401 threading.Timer.
5402
Tim Peters78526162001-09-05 00:53:45 +00005403- math.log and math.log10 now return sensible results for even huge
5404 long arguments. For example, math.log10(10 ** 10000) ~= 10000.0.
5405
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005406- A new function, imp.lock_held(), returns 1 when the import lock is
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005407 currently held. See the docs for the imp module.
5408
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005409- pickle, cPickle and marshal on 32-bit platforms can now correctly read
Tim Peters82112372001-08-29 02:28:42 +00005410 dumps containing ints written on platforms where Python ints are 8 bytes.
5411 When read on a box where Python ints are 4 bytes, such values are
5412 converted to Python longs.
5413
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005414- In restricted execution mode (using the rexec module), unmarshalling
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005415 code objects is no longer allowed. This plugs a security hole.
5416
Steve Purcell6091cd62001-09-06 16:05:17 +00005417- unittest.TestResult instances no longer store references to tracebacks
5418 generated by test failures. This prevents unexpected dangling references
5419 to objects that should be garbage collected between tests.
5420
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005421Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005422-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005423
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00005424- Tools/scripts/fixdiv.py has been added which can be used to fix
5425 division operators as per PEP 238.
5426
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005427Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005428-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005429
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00005430- If you are an adventurous person using Mac OS X you may want to look at
5431 Mac/OSX. There is a Makefile there that will build Python as a real Mac
5432 application, which can be used for experimenting with Carbon or Cocoa.
5433 Discussion of this on pythonmac-sig, please.
5434
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00005435C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005436-----
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00005437
5438- New function PyObject_Dir(obj), like Python __builtin__.dir(obj).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005439
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005440- Note that PyLong_AsDouble can fail! This has always been true, but no
5441 callers checked for it. It's more likely to fail now, because overflow
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00005442 errors are properly detected now. The proper way to check::
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005443
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005444 double x = PyLong_AsDouble(some_long_object);
5445 if (x == -1.0 && PyErr_Occurred()) {
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00005446 /* The conversion failed. */
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005447 }
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005448
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005449- The GC API has been changed. Extensions that use the old API will still
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005450 compile but will not participate in GC. To upgrade an extension
5451 module:
5452
5453 - rename Py_TPFLAGS_GC to PyTPFLAGS_HAVE_GC
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005454
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005455 - use PyObject_GC_New or PyObject_GC_NewVar to allocate objects and
5456 PyObject_GC_Del to deallocate them
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005457
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005458 - rename PyObject_GC_Init to PyObject_GC_Track and PyObject_GC_Fini
5459 to PyObject_GC_UnTrack
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005460
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005461 - remove PyGC_HEAD_SIZE from object size calculations
5462
5463 - remove calls to PyObject_AS_GC and PyObject_FROM_GC
5464
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005465- Two new functions: PyString_FromFormat() and PyString_FromFormatV().
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005466 These can be used safely to construct string objects from a
5467 sprintf-style format string (similar to the format string supported
5468 by PyErr_Format()).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005469
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005470New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005471-------------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005472
Tim Petersb7da0902001-09-02 23:01:43 +00005473- Stephen Hansen contributed patches sufficient to get a clean compile
5474 under Borland C (Windows), but he reports problems running it and ran
5475 out of time to complete the port. Volunteers? Expect a MemoryError
5476 when importing the types module; this is probably shallow, and
5477 causing later failures too.
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005478
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005479Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005480-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005481
5482Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005483-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005484
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00005485- Large file support is now enabled on Win32 platforms as well as on
5486 Win64. This means that, for example, you can use f.tell() and f.seek()
5487 to manipulate files larger than 2 gigabytes (provided you have enough
5488 disk space, and are using a Windows filesystem that supports large
Tim Peters9a9471c2001-09-11 23:18:51 +00005489 partitions). Windows filesystem limits: FAT has a 2GB (gigabyte)
5490 filesize limit, and large file support makes no difference there.
5491 FAT32's limit is 4GB, and files >= 2GB are easier to use from Python now.
5492 NTFS has no practical limit on file size, and files of any size can be
5493 used from Python now.
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00005494
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005495- The w9xpopen hack is now used on Windows NT and 2000 too when COMPSPEC
Tim Peters402d5982001-08-27 06:37:48 +00005496 points to command.com (patch from Brian Quinlan).
5497
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005498
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005499What's New in Python 2.2a2?
5500===========================
5501
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005502*Release Date: 22-Aug-2001*
5503
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005504Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005505-----
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005506
Barry Warsaw18b2ecf2001-08-22 20:26:56 +00005507- Tim Peters developed a brand new Windows installer using Wise 8.1,
5508 generously donated to us by Wise Solutions.
5509
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005510- configure supports a new option --enable-unicode, with the values
5511 ucs2 and ucs4 (new in 2.2a1). With --disable-unicode, the Unicode
5512 type and supporting code is completely removed from the interpreter.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005513
Jack Jansen32ce0cd2001-08-21 19:28:20 +00005514- A new configure option --enable-framework builds a Mac OS X framework,
5515 which "make frameworkinstall" will install. This provides a starting
5516 point for more mac-like functionality, join pythonmac-sig@python.org
5517 if you are interested in helping.
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005518
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005519- The NeXT platform is no longer supported.
5520
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005521- The 'new' module is now statically linked.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005522
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005523Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005524-----
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005525
5526- The new Tools/scripts/cleanfuture.py can be used to automatically
Andrew M. Kuchlingb0532092001-08-15 15:54:56 +00005527 edit out obsolete future statements from Python source code. See
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005528 the module docstring for details.
5529
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005530Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005531-----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005532
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005533- regrtest.py now knows which tests are expected to be skipped on some
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005534 platforms, allowing to give clearer test result output. regrtest
5535 also has optional --use/-u switch to run normally disabled tests
5536 which require network access or consume significant disk resources.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005537
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005538- Several new tests in the standard test suite, with special thanks to
5539 Nick Mathewson.
5540
5541Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005542----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005543
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005544- The floor division operator // has been added as outlined in PEP
5545 238. The / operator still provides classic division (and will until
5546 Python 3.0) unless "from __future__ import division" is included, in
5547 which case the / operator will provide true division. The operator
5548 module provides truediv() and floordiv() functions. Augmented
5549 assignment variants are included, as are the equivalent overloadable
5550 methods and C API methods. See the PEP for a full discussion:
5551 <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0238.html>
5552
Tim Peters6cd6a822001-08-17 22:11:27 +00005553- Future statements are now effective in simulated interactive shells
5554 (like IDLE). This should "just work" by magic, but read Michael
5555 Hudson's "Future statements in simulated shells" PEP 264 for full
5556 details: <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0264.html>.
5557
Guido van Rossumf86ddd22001-08-17 21:21:04 +00005558- The type/class unification (PEP 252-253) was integrated into the
5559 trunk and is not so tentative any more (the exact specification of
5560 some features is still tentative). A lot of work has done on fixing
5561 bugs and adding robustness and features (performance still has to
5562 come a long way).
5563
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00005564- Warnings about a mismatch in the Python API during extension import
5565 now use the Python warning framework (which makes it possible to
5566 write filters for these warnings).
5567
Barry Warsaw9b3be7f2001-08-14 18:35:02 +00005568- A function's __dict__ (aka func_dict) will now always be a
5569 dictionary. It used to be possible to delete it or set it to None,
5570 but now both actions raise TypeErrors. It is still legal to set it
5571 to a dictionary object. Getting func.__dict__ before any attributes
5572 have been assigned now returns an empty dictionary instead of None.
5573
Guido van Rossum32aa5d22001-09-05 18:43:35 +00005574- A new command line option, -E, was added which disables the use of
5575 all environment variables, or at least those that are specifically
5576 significant to Python. Usually those have a name starting with
5577 "PYTHON". This was used to fix a problem where the tests fail if
5578 the user happens to have PYTHONHOME or PYTHONPATH pointing to an
5579 older distribution.
5580
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005581Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005582-------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005583
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005584- New class Differ and new functions ndiff() and restore() in difflib.py.
5585 These package the algorithms used by the popular Tools/scripts/ndiff.py,
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005586 for programmatic reuse.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005587
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005588- New function xml.sax.saxutils.quoteattr(): Quote an XML attribute
5589 value using the minimal quoting required for the value; more
5590 reliable than using xml.sax.saxutils.escape() for attribute values.
5591
5592- Readline completion support for cmd.Cmd was added.
5593
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005594- Calling os.tempnam() or os.tmpnam() generate RuntimeWarnings.
5595
5596- Added function threading.BoundedSemaphore()
5597
5598- Added Ka-Ping Yee's cgitb.py module.
5599
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005600- The 'new' module now exposes the CO_xxx flags.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005601
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00005602- The gc module offers the get_referents function.
5603
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005604New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005605-------------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005606
5607C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005608-----
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005609
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00005610- Two new APIs PyOS_snprintf() and PyOS_vsnprintf() were added
5611 which provide a cross-platform implementations for the
5612 relatively new snprintf()/vsnprintf() C lib APIs. In contrast to
5613 the standard sprintf() and vsprintf() C lib APIs, these versions
5614 apply bounds checking on the used buffer which enhances protection
5615 against buffer overruns.
5616
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00005617- Unicode APIs now use name mangling to assure that mixing interpreters
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005618 and extensions using different Unicode widths is rendered next to
5619 impossible. Trying to import an incompatible Unicode-aware extension
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00005620 will result in an ImportError. Unicode extensions writers must make
5621 sure to check the Unicode width compatibility in their extensions by
5622 using at least one of the mangled Unicode APIs in the extension.
5623
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005624- Two new flags METH_NOARGS and METH_O are available in method definition
5625 tables to simplify implementation of methods with no arguments and a
5626 single untyped argument. Calling such methods is more efficient than
5627 calling corresponding METH_VARARGS methods. METH_OLDARGS is now
5628 deprecated.
5629
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005630Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005631-------
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005632
5633- "import module" now compiles module.pyw if it exists and nothing else
5634 relevant is found.
5635
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005636
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005637What's New in Python 2.2a1?
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005638===========================
5639
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005640*Release date: 18-Jul-2001*
5641
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005642Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005643----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005644
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00005645- TENTATIVELY, a large amount of code implementing much of what's
5646 described in PEP 252 (Making Types Look More Like Classes) and PEP
5647 253 (Subtyping Built-in Types) was added. This will be released
5648 with Python 2.2a1. Documentation will be provided separately
5649 through http://www.python.org/2.2/. The purpose of releasing this
5650 with Python 2.2a1 is to test backwards compatibility. It is
5651 possible, though not likely, that a decision is made not to release
5652 this code as part of 2.2 final, if any serious backwards
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005653 incompatibilities are found during alpha testing that cannot be
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00005654 repaired.
5655
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005656- Generators were added; this is a new way to create an iterator (see
Tim Peters11a0d102001-07-17 18:48:00 +00005657 below) using what looks like a simple function containing one or
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005658 more 'yield' statements. See PEP 255. Since this adds a new
5659 keyword to the language, this feature must be enabled by including a
5660 future statement: "from __future__ import generators" (see PEP 236).
5661 Generators will become a standard feature in a future release
5662 (probably 2.3). Without this future statement, 'yield' remains an
5663 ordinary identifier, but a warning is issued each time it is used.
5664 (These warnings currently don't conform to the warnings framework of
5665 PEP 230; we intend to fix this in 2.2a2.)
5666
Marc-André Lemburg12e74b32001-05-22 08:58:23 +00005667- The UTF-16 codec was modified to be more RFC compliant. It will now
5668 only remove BOM characters at the start of the string and then
5669 only if running in native mode (UTF-16-LE and -BE won't remove a
5670 leading BMO character).
5671
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005672- Strings now have a new method .decode() to complement the already
5673 existing .encode() method. These two methods provide direct access
5674 to the corresponding decoders and encoders of the registered codecs.
5675
5676 To enhance the usability of the .encode() method, the special
5677 casing of Unicode object return values was dropped (Unicode objects
5678 were auto-magically converted to string using the default encoding).
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005679
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005680 Both methods will now return whatever the codec in charge of the
5681 requested encoding returns as object, e.g. Unicode codecs will
5682 return Unicode objects when decoding is requested ("äöü".decode("latin-1")
5683 will return u"äöü"). This enables codec writer to create codecs
5684 for various simple to use conversions.
5685
5686 New codecs were added to demonstrate these new features (the .encode()
5687 and .decode() columns indicate the type of the returned objects):
5688
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005689 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5690 |Name | .encode() | .decode() | Description |
5691 +=========+===========+===========+=============================+
5692 |uu | string | string | UU codec (e.g. for email) |
5693 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5694 |base64 | string | string | base64 codec |
5695 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5696 |quopri | string | string | quoted-printable codec |
5697 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5698 |zlib | string | string | zlib compression |
5699 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5700 |hex | string | string | 2-byte hex codec |
5701 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5702 |rot-13 | string | Unicode | ROT-13 Unicode charmap codec|
5703 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005704
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005705- Some operating systems now support the concept of a default Unicode
5706 encoding for file system operations. Notably, Windows supports 'mbcs'
5707 as the default. The Macintosh will also adopt this concept in the medium
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005708 term, although the default encoding for that platform will be other than
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005709 'mbcs'.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005710
5711 On operating system that support non-ASCII filenames, it is common for
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005712 functions that return filenames (such as os.listdir()) to return Python
5713 string objects pre-encoded using the default file system encoding for
5714 the platform. As this encoding is likely to be different from Python's
5715 default encoding, converting this name to a Unicode object before passing
5716 it back to the Operating System would result in a Unicode error, as Python
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005717 would attempt to use its default encoding (generally ASCII) rather than
5718 the default encoding for the file system.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005719
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005720 In general, this change simply removes surprises when working with
5721 Unicode and the file system, making these operations work as you expect,
5722 increasing the transparency of Unicode objects in this context.
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005723 See [????] for more details, including examples.
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005724
Tim Peters61dff2b2001-05-08 15:43:37 +00005725- Float (and complex) literals in source code were evaluated to full
5726 precision only when running from a .py file; the same code loaded from a
5727 .pyc (or .pyo) file could suffer numeric differences starting at about the
5728 12th significant decimal digit. For example, on a machine with IEEE-754
5729 floating arithmetic,
5730
5731 x = 9007199254740992.0
5732 print long(x)
5733
5734 printed 9007199254740992 if run directly from .py, but 9007199254740000
5735 if from a compiled (.pyc or .pyo) file. This was due to marshal using
5736 str(float) instead of repr(float) when building code objects. marshal
5737 now uses repr(float) instead, which should reproduce floats to full
5738 machine precision (assuming the platform C float<->string I/O conversion
5739 functions are of good quality).
5740
5741 This may cause floating-point results to change in some cases, and
5742 usually for the better, but may also cause numerically unstable
5743 algorithms to break.
5744
Tim Peters2f228e72001-05-13 00:19:31 +00005745- The implementation of dicts suffers fewer collisions, which has speed
5746 benefits. However, the order in which dict entries appear in dict.keys(),
5747 dict.values() and dict.items() may differ from previous releases for a
5748 given dict. Nothing is defined about this order, so no program should
5749 rely on it. Nevertheless, it's easy to write test cases that rely on the
5750 order by accident, typically because of printing the str() or repr() of a
5751 dict to an "expected results" file. See Lib/test/test_support.py's new
5752 sortdict(dict) function for a simple way to display a dict in sorted
5753 order.
5754
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005755- Many other small changes to dicts were made, resulting in faster
5756 operation along the most common code paths.
5757
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00005758- Dictionary objects now support the "in" operator: "x in dict" means
5759 the same as dict.has_key(x).
5760
Barry Warsaw51acc8d2001-06-26 20:12:50 +00005761- The update() method of dictionaries now accepts generic mapping
5762 objects. Specifically the argument object must support the .keys()
5763 and __getitem__() methods. This allows you to say, for example,
5764 {}.update(UserDict())
5765
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00005766- Iterators were added; this is a generalized way of providing values
5767 to a for loop. See PEP 234. There's a new built-in function iter()
5768 to return an iterator. There's a new protocol to get the next value
5769 from an iterator using the next() method (in Python) or the
5770 tp_iternext slot (in C). There's a new protocol to get iterators
5771 using the __iter__() method (in Python) or the tp_iter slot (in C).
5772 Iterating (i.e. a for loop) over a dictionary generates its keys.
5773 Iterating over a file generates its lines.
5774
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005775- The following functions were generalized to work nicely with iterator
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00005776 arguments::
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005777
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00005778 map(), filter(), reduce(), zip()
Tim Peters8572b4f2001-05-06 01:05:02 +00005779 list(), tuple() (PySequence_Tuple() and PySequence_Fast() in C API)
5780 max(), min()
Tim Peters1af03e92001-05-26 19:37:54 +00005781 join() method of strings
5782 extend() method of lists
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00005783 'x in y' and 'x not in y' (PySequence_Contains() in C API)
5784 operator.countOf() (PySequence_Count() in C API)
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005785 right-hand side of assignment statements with multiple targets, such as ::
Tim Petersd6d010b2001-06-21 02:49:55 +00005786 x, y, z = some_iterable_object_returning_exactly_3_values
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00005787
Tim Petersd85e1022001-05-11 21:51:48 +00005788- Accessing module attributes is significantly faster (for example,
5789 random.random or os.path or yourPythonModule.yourAttribute).
5790
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00005791- Comparing dictionary objects via == and != is faster, and now works even
5792 if the keys and values don't support comparisons other than ==.
5793
Tim Peters95bf9392001-05-10 08:32:44 +00005794- Comparing dictionaries in ways other than == and != is slower: there were
5795 insecurities in the dict comparison implementation that could cause Python
5796 to crash if the element comparison routines for the dict keys and/or
5797 values mutated the dicts. Making the code bulletproof slowed it down.
5798
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005799- Collisions in dicts are resolved via a new approach, which can help
5800 dramatically in bad cases. For example, looking up every key in a dict
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005801 d with d.keys() == [i << 16 for i in range(20000)] is approximately 500x
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005802 faster now. Thanks to Christian Tismer for pointing out the cause and
5803 the nature of an effective cure (last December! better late than never).
Tim Peters15d49292001-05-27 07:39:22 +00005804
Tim Peters52e155e2001-06-16 05:42:57 +00005805- repr() is much faster for large containers (dict, list, tuple).
5806
5807
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005808Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005809-------
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005810
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00005811- The constants ascii_letters, ascii_lowercase. and ascii_uppercase
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005812 were added to the string module. These a locale-independent
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00005813 constants, unlike letters, lowercase, and uppercase. These are now
5814 use in appropriate locations in the standard library.
5815
Martin v. Löwisf0473d52001-07-18 16:17:16 +00005816- The flags used in dlopen calls can now be configured using
5817 sys.setdlopenflags and queried using sys.getdlopenflags.
5818
Guido van Rossumc7e4aca2001-07-12 11:54:37 +00005819- Fredrik Lundh's xmlrpclib is now a standard library module. This
5820 provides full client-side XML-RPC support. In addition,
5821 Demo/xmlrpc/ contains two server frameworks (one SocketServer-based,
5822 one asyncore-based). Thanks to Eric Raymond for the documentation.
5823
Guido van Rossum643d3912001-07-05 14:46:25 +00005824- The xrange() object is simplified: it no longer supports slicing,
5825 repetition, comparisons, efficient 'in' checking, the tolist()
5826 method, or the start, stop and step attributes. See PEP 260.
5827
Martin v. Löwisebf94db2001-06-06 06:25:40 +00005828- A new function fnmatch.filter to filter lists of file names was added.
5829
Barry Warsawffd674d2001-05-22 16:00:10 +00005830- calendar.py uses month and day names based on the current locale.
5831
Guido van Rossum2e0a6542001-05-15 02:14:44 +00005832- strop is now *really* obsolete (this was announced before with 1.6),
5833 and issues DeprecationWarning when used (except for the four items
5834 that are still imported into string.py).
5835
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005836- Cookie.py now sorts key+value pairs by key in output strings.
5837
5838- pprint.isrecursive(object) didn't correctly identify recursive objects.
5839 Now it does.
5840
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00005841- pprint functions now much faster for large containers (tuple, list, dict).
5842
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00005843- New 'q' and 'Q' format codes in the struct module, corresponding to C
5844 types "long long" and "unsigned long long" (on Windows, __int64). In
5845 native mode, these can be used only when the platform C compiler supports
5846 these types (when HAVE_LONG_LONG is #define'd by the Python config
5847 process), and then they inherit the sizes and alignments of the C types.
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005848 In standard mode, 'q' and 'Q' are supported on all platforms, and are
5849 8-byte integral types.
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00005850
Guido van Rossum83213cc2001-06-12 16:48:52 +00005851- The site module installs a new built-in function 'help' that invokes
5852 pydoc.help. It must be invoked as 'help()'; when invoked as 'help',
5853 it displays a message reminding the user to use 'help()' or
5854 'help(object)'.
5855
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005856Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005857-----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005858
5859- New test_mutants.py runs dict comparisons where the key and value
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005860 comparison operators mutate the dicts randomly during comparison. This
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005861 rapidly causes Python to crash under earlier releases (not for the faint
5862 of heart: it can also cause Win9x to freeze or reboot!).
5863
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005864- New test_pprint.py verifies that pprint.isrecursive() and
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00005865 pprint.isreadable() return sensible results. Also verifies that simple
5866 cases produce correct output.
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005867
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00005868C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005869-----
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00005870
5871- Removed the unused last_is_sticky argument from the internal
5872 _PyTuple_Resize(). If this affects you, you were cheating.
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005873
5874----
5875
5876**(For information about older versions, consult the HISTORY file.)**