blob: bc8382ec212fce8eff03566cbb7ba3060410f820 [file] [log] [blame]
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
Martin v. Löwisb45b3152005-11-28 17:34:23 +000015- Patch #1350409: Work around signal handling bug in Visual Studio 2005.
16
Georg Brandlf06e30a2005-11-24 15:37:42 +000017- Bug #1281408: Py_BuildValue now works correct even with unsigned longs
18 and long longs.
19
Neal Norwitz67715f02005-11-09 06:59:35 +000020- SF Bug #1350188, "setdlopenflags" leads to crash upon "import"
21 It was possible dlerror() returns a NULL pointer, use a default error
22 message in this case.
23
Marc-André Lemburga5bafc42005-10-23 13:43:40 +000024- Replaced most Unicode charmap codecs with new ones using the
25 new Unicode translate string feature in the builtin charmap
26 codec; the codecs were created from the mapping tables available
27 at ftp.unicode.org and contain a few updates (e.g. the Mac OS
28 encodings now include a mapping for the Apple logo)
29
30- Added a few more codecs for Mac OS encodings
31
Neal Norwitzfed9b3e2005-10-21 06:32:02 +000032- Speed up some Unicode operations.
33
34- A new AST parser implementation was completed.
35
Neal Norwitzb6570f52005-10-21 06:26:10 +000036- SF bug #1167751: fix incorrect code being for generator expressions.
Neal Norwitz16af7342005-10-21 06:25:33 +000037 The following code now raises a SyntaxError: foo(a = i for i in range(10))
38
Neal Norwitz708e51a2005-10-03 04:48:15 +000039- SF Bug #976608: fix SystemError when mtime of an imported file is -1.
40
Neal Norwitz11bd1192005-10-03 00:54:56 +000041- SF Bug #887946: fix segfault when redirecting stdin from a directory.
42 Provide a warning when a directory is passed on the command line.
43
Neal Norwitz40d37812005-10-02 01:48:49 +000044- Fix segfault with invalid coding.
45
46- SF bug #772896: unknown encoding results in MemoryError.
47
Raymond Hettinger6b27cda2005-09-24 21:23:05 +000048- All iterators now have a Boolean value of true. Formerly, some iterators
49 supported a __len__() method which evaluated to False when the iterator
50 was empty.
51
Guido van Rossum630db602005-09-20 18:49:54 +000052- On 64-bit platforms, when __len__() returns a value that cannot be
53 represented as a C int, raise OverflowError.
54
Skip Montanarof8948ca2005-09-19 03:54:46 +000055- test__locale is skipped on OS X < 10.4 (only partial locale support is
Walter Dörwald6611a8b2005-10-09 19:28:35 +000056 present).
Skip Montanarof8948ca2005-09-19 03:54:46 +000057
Georg Brandl80bbf3f2005-09-14 19:38:29 +000058- SF bug #893549: parsing keyword arguments was broken with a few format
59 codes.
60
Guido van Rossum8ee3e5a2005-09-14 18:09:42 +000061- Changes donated by Elemental Security to make it work on AIX 5.3
62 with IBM's 64-bit compiler (SF patch #1284289). This also closes SF
63 bug #105470: test_pwd fails on 64bit system (Opteron).
64
Guido van Rossum539c6622005-09-14 17:49:54 +000065- Changes donated by Elemental Security to make it work on HP-UX 11 on
66 Itanium2 with HP's 64-bit compiler (SF patch #1225212).
67
Georg Brandl4550b8d2005-08-26 06:43:52 +000068- Disallow keyword arguments for type constructors that don't use them
Georg Brandl02c42872005-08-26 06:42:30 +000069 (fixes bug #1119418).
70
Martin v. Löwisd35edda2005-08-24 08:39:24 +000071- Forward UnicodeDecodeError into SyntaxError for source encoding errors.
72
Barry Warsawe2eca0b2005-08-15 18:14:19 +000073- SF bug #900092: When tracing (e.g. for hotshot), restore 'return' events for
74 exceptions that cause a function to exit.
75
Raymond Hettinger9f1a6792005-07-31 01:16:36 +000076- The implementation of set() and frozenset() was revised to use its
77 own internal data structure. Memory consumption is reduced by 1/3
78 and there are modest speed-ups as well. The API is unchanged.
79
Tim Petersde7990b2005-07-17 23:45:23 +000080- SF bug #1238681: freed pointer is used in longobject.c:long_pow().
81
Michael W. Hudson0edc7a02005-07-12 10:21:19 +000082- SF bug #1229429: PyObject_CallMethod failed to decrement some
83 reference counts in some error exit cases.
84
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +000085- SF bug #1185883: Python's small-object memory allocator took over
86 a block managed by the platform C library whenever a realloc specified
87 a small new size. However, there's no portable way to know then how
88 much of the address space following the pointer is valid, so no
89 portable way to copy data from the C-managed block into Python's
90 small-object space without risking a memory fault. Python's small-object
91 realloc now leaves such blocks under the control of the platform C
92 realloc.
93
Michael W. Hudsonb8963812005-07-05 15:21:58 +000094- SF bug #1232517: An overflow error was not detected properly when
95 attempting to convert a large float to an int in os.utime().
96
Raymond Hettinger3296e692005-06-29 23:29:56 +000097- SF bug #1224347: hex longs now print with lowercase letters just
98 like their int counterparts.
99
Michael W. Hudson188d4362005-06-20 16:52:57 +0000100- SF bug #1163563: the original fix for bug #1010677 ("thread Module
101 Breaks PyGILState_Ensure()") broke badly in the case of multiple
102 interpreter states; back out that fix and do a better job (see
103 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2005-June/054258.html
104 for a longer write-up of the problem).
105
Michael W. Hudsondf888462005-06-03 14:41:55 +0000106- SF patch #1180995: marshal now uses a binary format by default when
107 serializing floats.
108
Michael W. Hudsonda85a902005-06-01 11:34:22 +0000109- SF patch #1181301: on platforms that appear to use IEEE 754 floats,
110 the routines that promise to produce IEEE 754 binary representations
111 of floats now simply copy bytes around.
112
Skip Montanarobbf12ba2005-05-20 03:07:06 +0000113- bug #967182: disallow opening files with 'wU' or 'aU' as specified by PEP
114 278.
115
Brett Cannonc3647ac2005-04-26 03:45:26 +0000116- patch #1109424: int, long, float, complex, and unicode now check for the
117 proper magic slot for type conversions when subclassed. Previously the
118 magic slot was ignored during conversion. Semantics now match the way
119 subclasses of str always behaved. int/long/float, conversion of an instance
Walter Dörwald78a78b02005-09-01 12:04:29 +0000120 to the base class has been moved to the proper nb_* magic slot and out of
Brett Cannonc3647ac2005-04-26 03:45:26 +0000121 PyNumber_*().
122 Thanks Walter Dörwald.
123
Barry Warsawc8d907c2005-04-19 23:43:40 +0000124- Descriptors defined in C with a PyGetSetDef structure, where the setter is
125 NULL, now raise an AttributeError when attempting to set or delete the
126 attribute. Previously a TypeError was raised, but this was inconsistent
127 with the equivalent pure-Python implementation.
128
Michael W. Hudson774479c2005-04-18 08:46:17 +0000129- It is now safe to call PyGILState_Release() before
130 PyEval_InitThreads() (note that if there is reason to believe there
131 are multiple threads around you still must call PyEval_InitThreads()
132 before using the Python API; this fix is for extension modules that
133 have no way of knowing if Python is multi-threaded yet).
134
Michael W. Hudsone3afc592005-04-07 10:11:19 +0000135- Typing Ctrl-C whilst raw_input() was waiting in a build with threads
136 disabled caused a crash.
137
Michael W. Hudsonb330adf2005-03-31 09:35:44 +0000138- Bug #1165306: instancemethod_new allowed the creation of a method
139 with im_class == im_self == NULL, which caused a crash when called.
140
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000141- Move exception finalisation later in the shutdown process - this
Anthony Baxter12b6f6c2005-03-29 13:36:16 +0000142 fixes the crash seen in bug #1165761
143
Raymond Hettinger96229b12005-03-11 06:49:40 +0000144- Added two new builtins, any() and all().
145
Brett Cannon409d8f22005-03-05 06:47:57 +0000146- Defining a class with empty parentheses is now allowed
Brett Cannonf4189912005-04-09 02:30:16 +0000147 (e.g., ``class C(): pass`` is no longer a syntax error).
148 Patch #1176012 added support to the 'parser' module and 'compiler' package
149 (thanks to logistix for that added support).
Brett Cannon409d8f22005-03-05 06:47:57 +0000150
Martin v. Löwis96d743e2005-03-03 23:00:26 +0000151- Patch #1115086: Support PY_LONGLONG in structmember.
152
Raymond Hettingerb67cc802005-03-03 16:45:19 +0000153- Bug #1155938: new style classes did not check that __init__() was
154 returning None.
155
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000156- Patch #802188: Report characters after line continuation character
Martin v. Löwis4bf108d2005-03-03 11:45:45 +0000157 ('\') with a specific error message.
158
Martin v. Löwisff232d72005-03-03 09:24:38 +0000159- Bug #723201: Raise a TypeError for passing bad objects to 'L' format.
160
Michael W. Hudson8e1afab2005-02-17 14:55:21 +0000161- Bug #1124295: the __name__ attribute of file objects was
162 inadvertently made inaccessible in restricted mode.
163
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000164- Bug #1074011: closing sys.std{out,err} now causes a flush() and
Martin v. Löwis8e3ca8a2005-01-23 09:41:49 +0000165 an ferror() call.
166
Raymond Hettinger3b0c7c22004-12-03 08:30:39 +0000167- min() and max() now support key= arguments with the same meaning as in
168 list.sort().
169
Raymond Hettingerc34f8672005-01-02 06:17:33 +0000170- The peephole optimizer now performs simple constant folding in expressions:
171 (2+3) --> (5).
172
Raymond Hettingera422c342005-01-11 03:03:27 +0000173- set and frozenset objects can now be marshalled. SF #1098985.
174
Michael W. Hudsonfaa76482005-01-31 17:09:25 +0000175- Bug #1077106: Poor argument checking could cause memory corruption
176 in calls to os.read().
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000177
Jeremy Hyltonab630502005-02-04 18:44:06 +0000178- The parser did not complain about future statements in illegal
179 positions. It once again reports a syntax error if a future
180 statement occurs after anything other than a doc string.
181
Neil Schemenauercf52c072005-08-12 17:34:58 +0000182- Change the %s format specifier for str objects so that it returns a
183 unicode instance if the argument is not an instance of basestring and
184 calling __str__ on the argument returns a unicode instance.
185
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000186Extension Modules
187-----------------
188
Georg Brandla13c2442005-11-22 19:30:31 +0000189- Bug #869197: os.setgroups rejects long integer arguments
190
Neal Norwitz0f46bbf2005-11-03 05:00:25 +0000191- Bug #1346533, select.poll() doesn't raise an error if timeout > sys.maxint
192
Neal Norwitz7b631792005-11-02 05:26:07 +0000193- Bug #1344508, Fix UNIX mmap leaking file descriptors
194
Neal Norwitzf3396542005-10-28 05:52:22 +0000195- Patch #1338314, Bug #1336623: fix tarfile so it can extract
196 REGTYPE directories from tarfiles written by old programs.
197
Neal Norwitzfed9b3e2005-10-21 06:32:02 +0000198- Get bsddb module to build with BSD DB version 3.2
199
Neal Norwitz484d9a42005-09-30 04:46:49 +0000200- Patch #1309009, Fix segfault in pyexpat when the XML document is in latin_1,
201 but Python incorrectly assumes it is in UTF-8 format
202
Georg Brandle677adc2005-09-29 13:40:49 +0000203- Fix parse errors in the readline module when compiling without threads.
204
Hye-Shik Chang9ceebd52005-09-24 14:58:47 +0000205- Patch #1288833: Removed thread lock from socket.getaddrinfo on
206 FreeBSD 5.3 and later versions which got thread-safe getaddrinfo(3).
207
Michael W. Hudson10402a32005-09-22 09:19:01 +0000208- Patches #1298449 and #1298499: Add some missing checks for error
209 returns in cStringIO.c.
210
Neal Norwitz058bde12005-09-21 06:44:25 +0000211- Patch #1297028: fix segfault if call type on MultibyteCodec,
212 MultibyteStreamReader, or MultibyteStreamWriter
213
Neal Norwitzcfe7dd92005-09-19 06:49:27 +0000214- Fix memory leak in posix.access().
215
Martin v. Löwis8b291e22005-09-18 08:17:56 +0000216- Patch #1213831: Fix typo in unicodedata._getcode.
217
Georg Brandlfb1ef852005-09-14 20:53:32 +0000218- Bug #1007046: os.startfile() did not accept unicode strings encoded in
219 the file system encoding.
220
Georg Brandld2e3ba72005-08-26 08:34:00 +0000221- Patch #756021: Special-case socket.inet_aton('255.255.255.255') for
222 platforms that don't have inet_aton().
Georg Brandl02760f92005-08-25 13:10:41 +0000223
Georg Brandld2e3ba72005-08-26 08:34:00 +0000224- Bug #1215928: Fix bz2.BZ2File.seek() for 64-bit file offsets.
225
226- Bug #1191043: Fix bz2.BZ2File.(x)readlines for files containing one
Georg Brandl02760f92005-08-25 13:10:41 +0000227 line without newlines.
228
Georg Brandl38387b82005-08-24 07:17:40 +0000229- Bug #728515: mmap.resize() now resizes the file on Unix as it did
230 on Windows.
231
Walter Dörwalda05834e2005-10-09 19:38:21 +0000232- Patch #1180695: Add nanosecond stat resolution, and st_gen,
Martin v. Löwisebd9d5b2005-08-09 15:00:59 +0000233 st_birthtime for FreeBSD.
234
Michael W. Hudson8137bea2005-07-27 20:24:40 +0000235- Patch #1231069: The fcntl.ioctl function now uses the 'I' code for
236 the request code argument, which results in more C-like behaviour
237 for large or negative values.
238
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000239- Bug #1234979: For the argument of thread.Lock.acquire, the Windows
Andrew M. Kuchling88b85822005-08-23 00:57:07 +0000240 implementation treated all integer values except 1 as false.
Georg Brandlaf410b52005-07-08 22:26:13 +0000241
Georg Brandl6b95f1d2005-06-03 19:47:00 +0000242- Bug #1194181: bz2.BZ2File didn't handle mode 'U' correctly.
243
Hye-Shik Chang5f937a72005-06-02 13:09:30 +0000244- Patch #1212117: os.stat().st_flags is now accessible as a attribute
245 if available on the platform.
246
Skip Montanaro5ff14922005-05-16 02:42:22 +0000247- Patch #1103951: Expose O_SHLOCK and O_EXLOCK in the posix module if
248 available on the platform.
249
Michael W. Hudsonb330adf2005-03-31 09:35:44 +0000250- Bug #1166660: The readline module could segfault if hook functions
251 were set in a different thread than that which called readline.
252
Raymond Hettinger4aec61e2005-03-18 21:20:23 +0000253- collections.deque objects now support a remove() method.
254
Raymond Hettinger984f9bb2005-03-09 16:38:48 +0000255- operator.itemgetter() and operator.attrgetter() now support retrieving
256 multiple fields. This provides direct support for sorting on multiple
257 keys (primary, secondary, etc).
258
Martin v. Löwisb60ae992005-03-08 09:10:29 +0000259- os.access now supports Unicode path names on non-Win32 systems.
260
Martin v. Löwisfd78a6f2005-03-04 14:37:01 +0000261- Patches #925152, #1118602: Avoid reading after the end of the buffer
262 in pyexpat.GetInputContext.
263
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000264- Patches #749830, #1144555: allow UNIX mmap size to default to current
Martin v. Löwis7fe60c02005-03-03 11:22:44 +0000265 file size.
266
Raymond Hettinger9c323f82005-02-28 19:39:44 +0000267- Added functional.partial(). See PEP309.
268
Martin v. Löwis9533e342005-02-27 20:33:25 +0000269- Patch #1093585: raise a ValueError for negative history items in readline.
270 {remove_history,replace_history}
271
Fred Drake9c131f22005-01-23 15:16:08 +0000272- The spwd module has been added, allowing access to the shadow password
273 database.
Martin v. Löwisc3001752005-01-23 09:27:24 +0000274
Martin v. Löwisfe33d0b2005-01-16 08:57:39 +0000275- stat_float_times is now True.
276
Raymond Hettingerb0900e62004-12-16 16:23:40 +0000277- array.array objects are now picklable.
278
Raymond Hettingera6b45cc2004-12-07 07:05:57 +0000279- the cPickle module no longer accepts the deprecated None option in the
280 args tuple returned by __reduce__().
281
Raymond Hettingerb2594052004-12-05 09:25:51 +0000282- itertools.islice() now accepts None for the start and step arguments.
283 This allows islice() to work more readily with slices:
284 islice(s.start, s.stop, s.step)
285
Skip Montanaro0af3ade2005-01-13 04:12:31 +0000286- datetime.datetime() now has a strptime class method which can be used to
287 create datetime object using a string and format.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000288
289Library
290-------
291
Martin v. Löwis307021f2005-11-27 16:59:04 +0000292- Patch #1162825: Support non-ASCII characters in IDLE window titles.
293
Georg Brandl1f663572005-11-26 16:50:44 +0000294- Bug #1365984: urllib now opens "data:" URLs again.
295
Brett Cannonad07ff22005-11-23 02:15:50 +0000296- Patch #1314396: prevent deadlock for threading.Thread.join() when an exception
297 is raised within the method itself on a previous call (e.g., passing in an
298 illegal argument)
299
Brett Cannon5d0bf942005-11-02 23:04:26 +0000300- Bug #1340337: change time.strptime() to always return ValueError when there
301 is an error in the format string.
302
Georg Brandle8f24432005-10-03 14:16:44 +0000303- Patch #754022: Greatly enhanced webbrowser.py (by Oleg Broytmann).
304
Walter Dörwalda05834e2005-10-09 19:38:21 +0000305- Bug #729103: pydoc.py: Fix docother() method to accept additional
Georg Brandl8b813db2005-10-01 16:32:31 +0000306 "parent" argument.
307
Georg Brandlaa935172005-09-29 20:49:16 +0000308- Patch #1300515: xdrlib.py: Fix pack_fstring() to really use null bytes
309 for padding.
310
Georg Brandl80ba8e82005-09-29 20:16:07 +0000311- Bug #1296004: httplib.py: Limit maximal amount of data read from the
312 socket to avoid a MemoryError on Windows.
313
Matthias Klosef3f231f2005-09-20 07:02:49 +0000314- Patch #1166948: locale.py: Prefer LC_ALL, LC_CTYPE and LANG over LANGUAGE
315 to get the correct encoding.
316
317- Patch #1166938: locale.py: Parse LANGUAGE as a colon separated list of
318 languages.
319
Martin v. Löwis4ed67382005-09-18 08:34:39 +0000320- Patch #1268314: Cache lines in StreamReader.readlines for performance.
321
Brett Cannona783d062005-09-15 02:34:56 +0000322- Bug #1290505: Fix clearing the regex cache for time.strptime().
323
Martin v. Löwis5dbdc592005-08-27 10:07:56 +0000324- Bug #1167128: Fix size of a symlink in a tarfile to be 0.
325
Georg Brandl5a650a22005-08-26 08:51:34 +0000326- Patch #810023: Fix off-by-one bug in urllib.urlretrieve reporthook
327 functionality.
328
Martin v. Löwis8b595142005-08-25 11:03:38 +0000329- Bug #1163178: Make IDNA return an empty string when the input is empty.
330
Georg Brandl532efab2005-08-24 22:34:21 +0000331- Patch #848017: Make Cookie more RFC-compliant. Use CRLF as default output
332 separator and do not output trailing semicola.
333
Georg Brandlb9256022005-08-24 18:46:39 +0000334- Patch #1062060: urllib.urlretrieve() now raises a new exception, named
335 ContentTooShortException, when the actually downloaded size does not
336 match the Content-Length header.
337
Martin v. Löwis0a5d4a22005-08-24 14:55:22 +0000338- Bug #1121494: distutils.dir_utils.mkpath now accepts Unicode strings.
339
Martin v. Löwis56066d22005-08-24 07:38:12 +0000340- Bug #1178484: Return complete lines from codec stream readers
341 even if there is an exception in later lines, resulting in
Walter Dörwalda05834e2005-10-09 19:38:21 +0000342 correct line numbers for decoding errors in source code.
Martin v. Löwis56066d22005-08-24 07:38:12 +0000343
Georg Brandl6d2b3462005-08-24 07:36:17 +0000344- Bug #1192315: Disallow negative arguments to clear() in pdb.
345
Martin v. Löwisb813c532005-08-07 20:51:04 +0000346- Patch #827386: Support absolute source paths in msvccompiler.py.
347
Georg Brandl649f8e72005-08-03 07:30:12 +0000348- Patch #1105730: Apply the new implementation of commonprefix in posixpath
349 to ntpath, macpath, os2emxpath and riscospath.
350
Guido van Rossum755149f2005-07-27 00:00:44 +0000351- Fix a problem in Tkinter introduced by SF patch #869468: delete bogus
352 __hasattr__ and __delattr__ methods on class Tk that were breaking
353 Tkdnd.
354
Georg Brandl5dbda752005-07-17 20:27:41 +0000355- Bug #1015140: disambiguated the term "article id" in nntplib docs and
356 docstrings to either "article number" or "message id".
357
Georg Brandla4a8b822005-07-15 09:13:21 +0000358- Bug #1238170: threading.Thread.__init__ no longer has "kwargs={}" as a
359 parameter, but uses the usual "kwargs=None".
360
Andrew M. Kuchling88b85822005-08-23 00:57:07 +0000361- textwrap now processes text chunks at O(n) speed instead of O(n**2).
Raymond Hettinger8bfa8932005-07-15 06:53:35 +0000362 Patch #1209527 (Contributed by Connelly).
363
Georg Brandl5c5fe2f2005-07-14 06:40:47 +0000364- urllib2 has now an attribute 'httpresponses' mapping from HTTP status code
365 to W3C name (404 -> 'Not Found'). RFE #1216944.
366
Georg Brandl9e43acf2005-07-04 17:16:07 +0000367- Bug #1177468: Don't cache the /dev/urandom file descriptor for os.urandom,
368 as this can cause problems with apps closing all file descriptors.
369
Georg Brandl5284b532005-06-26 22:54:58 +0000370- Bug #839151: Fix an attempt to access sys.argv in the warnings module
Andrew M. Kuchling88b85822005-08-23 00:57:07 +0000371 it can be missing in embedded interpreters
Georg Brandl5284b532005-06-26 22:54:58 +0000372
Georg Brandl2f210b62005-06-26 22:09:06 +0000373- Bug #1155638: Fix a bug which affected HTTP 0.9 responses in httplib.
374
Georg Brandlfbff1bc2005-06-26 21:36:25 +0000375- Bug #1100201: Cross-site scripting was possible on BaseHTTPServer via
376 error messages.
377
Georg Brandl379f99d2005-06-26 21:09:38 +0000378- Bug #1108948: Cookie.py produced invalid JavaScript code.
379
Raymond Hettingerda99d1c2005-06-21 07:43:58 +0000380- The tokenize module now detects and reports indentation errors.
381 Bug #1224621.
382
Raymond Hettinger68c04532005-06-10 11:05:19 +0000383- The tokenize module has a new untokenize() function to support a full
384 roundtrip from lexed tokens back to Python sourcecode. In addition,
385 the generate_tokens() function now accepts a callable argument that
386 terminates by raising StopIteration.
387
Georg Brandl9166e1a2005-06-04 09:20:03 +0000388- Bug #1196315: fix weakref.WeakValueDictionary constructor.
389
Georg Brandl268e61c2005-06-03 14:28:50 +0000390- Bug #1213894: os.path.realpath didn't resolve symlinks that were the first
391 component of the path.
392
Skip Montanaro174dd222005-05-14 20:54:16 +0000393- Patch #1120353: The xmlrpclib module provides better, more transparent,
394 support for datetime.{datetime,date,time} objects. With use_datetime set
395 to True, applications shouldn't have to fiddle with the DateTime wrapper
396 class at all.
397
Martin v. Löwis55f1bb82005-03-21 20:56:35 +0000398- distutils.commands.upload was added to support uploading distribution
399 files to PyPI.
400
Walter Dörwalda6e8a4a2005-03-31 13:57:38 +0000401- distutils.commands.register now encodes the data as UTF-8 before posting
402 them to PyPI.
403
Raymond Hettinger267b8682005-03-27 10:47:39 +0000404- decimal operator and comparison methods now return NotImplemented
405 instead of raising a TypeError when interacting with other types. This
406 allows other classes to implement __radd__ style methods and have them
407 work as expected.
408
Raymond Hettingerbea3f6f2005-03-15 04:59:17 +0000409- Bug #1163325: Decimal infinities failed to hash. Attempting to
410 hash a NaN raised an InvalidOperation instead of a TypeError.
411
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000412- Patch #918101: Add tarfile open mode r|* for auto-detection of the
Martin v. Löwis78be7df2005-03-05 12:47:42 +0000413 stream compression; add, for symmetry reasons, r:* as a synonym of r.
414
Martin v. Löwis00a73e72005-03-04 19:40:34 +0000415- Patch #1043890: Add extractall method to tarfile.
416
Martin v. Löwisc72dd382005-03-04 13:50:17 +0000417- Patch #1075887: Don't require MSVC in distutils if there is nothing
418 to build.
419
Martin v. Löwis637431b2005-03-03 23:12:42 +0000420- Patch #1103407: Properly deal with tarfile iterators when untarring
421 symbolic links on Windows.
422
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000423- Patch #645894: Use getrusage for computing the time consumption in
Martin v. Löwisa4dac402005-03-03 11:39:45 +0000424 profile.py if available.
425
Martin v. Löwisdf37c8c2005-03-03 11:08:03 +0000426- Patch #1046831: Use get_python_version where appropriate in sysconfig.py.
427
Martin v. Löwisc5574e82005-03-03 10:57:37 +0000428- Patch #1117454: Remove code to special-case cookies without values
429 in LWPCookieJar.
430
Martin v. Löwis4ea3ead2005-03-03 10:48:12 +0000431- Patch #1117339: Add cookielib special name tests.
432
Martin v. Löwise869eb12005-03-03 09:46:07 +0000433- Patch #1112812: Make bsddb/__init__.py more friendly for modulefinder.
434
Martin v. Löwisf2a8d632005-03-03 08:35:22 +0000435- Patch #1110248: SYNC_FLUSH the zlib buffer for GZipFile.flush.
436
Martin v. Löwisdf241532005-03-03 08:17:42 +0000437- Patch #1107973: Allow to iterate over the lines of a tarfile.ExFileObject.
438
Martin v. Löwis8ed338a2005-03-03 08:12:27 +0000439- Patch #1104111: Alter setup.py --help and --help-commands.
440
Martin v. Löwis4afe1542005-03-01 08:09:28 +0000441- Patch #1121234: Properly cleanup _exit and tkerror commands.
442
Martin v. Löwisc2a0ac22005-02-24 20:22:10 +0000443- Patch #1049151: xdrlib now unpacks booleans as True or False.
444
Raymond Hettingerbab41432005-02-05 01:31:19 +0000445- Fixed bug in a NameError bug in cookielib. Patch #1116583.
446
Guido van Rossumd0641422005-02-03 15:01:24 +0000447- Applied a security fix to SimpleXMLRPCserver (PSF-2005-001). This
448 disables recursive traversal through instance attributes, which can
449 be exploited in various ways.
450
Andrew M. Kuchling3a976052005-12-04 15:07:41 +0000451- Bug #1222790: in SimpleXMLRPCServer, set the reuse-address and close-on-exec
452 flags on the HTTP listening socket.
453
Andrew M. Kuchlinge63fde72005-12-04 15:36:57 +0000454- Bug #792570: SimpleXMLRPCServer had problems if the request grew too large.
455 Fixed by reading the HTTP body in chunks instead of one big socket.read().
456
Andrew M. Kuchling10a16de2005-12-04 16:34:40 +0000457- Patch #893642: add allow_none argument to constructors of
458 SimpleXMLRPCServer and CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler.
459
Martin v. Löwis1d11de62005-01-29 13:29:23 +0000460- Bug #1110478: Revert os.environ.update to do putenv again.
461
Thomas Hellerd6c6e222005-01-20 19:20:16 +0000462- Bug #1103844: fix distutils.install.dump_dirs() with negated options.
463
Martin v. Löwis22b457e2005-01-16 08:40:58 +0000464- os.{SEEK_SET, SEEK_CUR, SEEK_END} have been added for convenience.
465
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000466- Enhancements to the csv module:
467
468 + Dialects are now validated by the underlying C code, better
Georg Brandl7eb4b7d2005-07-22 21:49:32 +0000469 reflecting its capabilities, and improving its compliance with
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000470 PEP 305.
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000471 + Dialect parameter parsing has been re-implemented to improve error
472 reporting.
473 + quotechar=None and quoting=QUOTE_NONE now work the way PEP 305
474 dictates.
475 + the parser now removes the escapechar prefix from escaped characters.
Andrew McNamara0f0599d2005-01-12 09:45:18 +0000476 + when quoting=QUOTE_NONNUMERIC, the writer now tests for numeric
Andrew McNamaraf69d94f2005-01-13 11:30:54 +0000477 types, rather than any object than can be represented as a numeric.
Andrew McNamara0f0599d2005-01-12 09:45:18 +0000478 + when quoting=QUOTE_NONNUMERIC, the reader now casts unquoted fields
479 to floats.
Andrew McNamaraf69d94f2005-01-13 11:30:54 +0000480 + reader now allows \r characters to be quoted (previously it only allowed
481 \n to be quoted).
Andrew McNamarac89f2842005-01-12 07:44:42 +0000482 + writer doublequote handling improved.
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000483 + Dialect classes passed to the module are no longer instantiated by
484 the module before being parsed (the former validation scheme required
485 this, but the mechanism was unreliable).
486 + The dialect registry now contains instances of the internal
487 C-coded dialect type, rather than references to python objects.
488 + the internal c-coded dialect type is now immutable.
489 + register_dialect now accepts the same keyword dialect specifications
490 as the reader and writer, allowing the user to register dialects
491 without first creating a dialect class.
492 + a configurable limit to the size of parsed fields has been added -
493 previously, an unmatched quote character could result in the entire
494 file being read into the field buffer before an error was reported.
Andrew McNamara31d88962005-01-12 03:45:10 +0000495 + A new module method csv.field_size_limit() has been added that sets
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000496 the parser field size limit (returning the former limit). The initial
497 limit is 128kB.
Andrew McNamara7f2053e2005-01-12 11:17:16 +0000498 + A line_num attribute has been added to the reader object, which tracks
499 the number of lines read from the source iterator. This is not
500 the same as the number of records returned, as records can span
501 multiple lines.
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000502 + reader and writer objects were not being registered with the cyclic-GC.
503 This has been fixed.
504
Brett Cannone6539c42005-01-08 02:43:53 +0000505- _DummyThread objects in the threading module now delete self.__block that is
506 inherited from _Thread since it uses up a lock allocated by 'thread'. The
507 lock primitives tend to be limited in number and thus should not be wasted on
508 a _DummyThread object. Fixes bug #1089632.
509
Raymond Hettinger97db05d2005-01-07 08:15:41 +0000510- The imghdr module now detects Exif files.
511
Raymond Hettinger6065d322004-12-20 23:51:53 +0000512- StringIO.truncate() now correctly adjusts the size attribute.
513 (Bug #951915).
514
Marc-André Lemburgbb4f1bd2004-12-10 21:58:14 +0000515- locale.py now uses an updated locale alias table (built using
516 Tools/i18n/makelocalealias.py, a tool to parse the X11 locale
517 alias file); the encoding lookup was enhanced to use Python's
Andrew M. Kuchling88b85822005-08-23 00:57:07 +0000518 encoding alias table.
Marc-André Lemburgbb4f1bd2004-12-10 21:58:14 +0000519
Raymond Hettinger3557f422004-12-07 12:02:02 +0000520- moved deprecated modules to Lib/lib-old: whrandom, tzparse, statcache.
521
Raymond Hettingera6b45cc2004-12-07 07:05:57 +0000522- the pickle module no longer accepts the deprecated None option in the
523 args tuple returned by __reduce__().
524
Brett Cannon84667c02004-12-07 03:25:18 +0000525- optparse now optionally imports gettext. This allows its use in setup.py.
526
Raymond Hettinger3489cad2004-12-05 05:20:42 +0000527- the pickle module no longer uses the deprecated bin parameter.
528
Raymond Hettinger1bc82f82004-12-05 03:58:17 +0000529- the shelve module no longer uses the deprecated binary parameter.
530
Raymond Hettinger6c92d762004-12-05 03:28:00 +0000531- the pstats module no longer uses the deprecated ignore() method.
532
Raymond Hettingerf3fa9462004-12-05 01:58:09 +0000533- the filecmp module no longer uses the deprecated use_statcache argument.
534
Raymond Hettinger664347b2004-12-04 21:21:53 +0000535- unittest.TestCase.run() and unittest.TestSuite.run() can now be successfully
536 extended or overridden by subclasses. Formerly, the subclassed method would
537 be ignored by the rest of the module. (Bug #1078905).
538
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000539- heapq.nsmallest() and heapq.nlargest() now support key= arguments with
Raymond Hettinger3b0c7c22004-12-03 08:30:39 +0000540 the same meaning as in list.sort().
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000541
Walter Dörwald36733692004-12-22 12:50:50 +0000542- Bug #1076985: ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` now calls ``read()`` only
543 once when a size argument is given. This prevents a buffer overflow in the
544 tokenizer with very long source lines.
545
Andrew M. Kuchling3b585b32004-12-28 20:10:48 +0000546- Bug #1083110: ``zlib.decompress.flush()`` would segfault if called immediately
547 after creating the object, without any intervening ``.decompress()`` calls.
548
Skip Montanaro05885812005-01-16 20:48:27 +0000549- The reconvert.quote function can now emit triple-quoted strings. The
550 reconvert module now has some simple documentation.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000551
Walter Dörwaldaf3b39a2005-02-18 13:22:43 +0000552- ``UserString.MutableString`` now supports negative indices in
553 ``__setitem__`` and ``__delitem__``
554
Greg Ward40407942005-03-05 02:53:17 +0000555- Bug #1149508: ``textwrap`` now handles hyphenated numbers (eg. "2004-03-05")
556 correctly.
557
Walter Dörwaldbc8e6422005-04-21 21:32:03 +0000558- Partial fixes for SF bugs #1163244 and #1175396: If a chunk read by
559 ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` has a trailing "\r", read one more
560 character even if the user has passed a size parameter to get a proper
561 line ending. Remove the special handling of a "\r\n" that has been split
562 between two lines.
563
Walter Dörwalda47d1c02005-08-30 10:23:14 +0000564- Bug #1251300: On UCS-4 builds the "unicode-internal" codec will now complain
565 about illegal code points. The codec now supports PEP 293 style error
566 handlers.
567
Walter Dörwald78a78b02005-09-01 12:04:29 +0000568- Bug #1235646: ``codecs.StreamRecoder.next()`` now reencodes the data it reads
Walter Dörwaldc5238b82005-09-01 11:56:53 +0000569 from the input stream, so that the output is a byte string in the correct
570 encoding instead of a unicode string.
Greg Ward40407942005-03-05 02:53:17 +0000571
Gustavo Niemeyer6fa0c5a2005-09-14 08:54:39 +0000572- Bug #1202493: Fixing SRE parser to handle '{}' as perl does, rather than
573 considering it exactly like a '*'.
574
Walter Dörwald007f8df2005-10-09 19:42:27 +0000575- Bug #1245379: Add "unicode-1-1-utf-7" as an alias for "utf-7" to
576 ``encodings.aliases``.
Gustavo Niemeyer6fa0c5a2005-09-14 08:54:39 +0000577
Walter Dörwald09f0dd52005-11-21 19:10:07 +0000578- ` uu.encode()`` and ``uu.decode()`` now support unicode filenames.
579
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000580Build
581-----
582
Martin v. Löwis147fbe52005-08-07 21:09:30 +0000583- Bug #1189330: configure did not correctly determine the necessary
584 value of LINKCC if python was built with GCC 4.0.
585
Trent Mick8321b422005-07-26 02:29:21 +0000586- Upgrade Windows build to zlib 1.2.3 which eliminates a potential security
587 vulnerability in zlib 1.2.1 and 1.2.2.
588
Brett Cannon08cd5982005-04-24 22:26:38 +0000589- EXTRA_CFLAGS has been introduced as an environment variable to hold compiler
590 flags that change binary compatibility. Changes were also made to
591 distutils.sysconfig to also use the environment variable when used during
Martin v. Löwisd7c795e2005-04-25 07:14:03 +0000592 compilation of the interpreter and of C extensions through distutils.
Brett Cannon08cd5982005-04-24 22:26:38 +0000593
Bob Ippolitoed233462005-03-29 13:47:59 +0000594- SF patch 1171735: Darwin 8's headers are anal about POSIX compliance,
595 and linking has changed (prebinding is now deprecated, and libcc_dynamic
596 no longer exists). This configure patch makes things right.
597
Martin v. Löwise2713be2005-03-08 15:03:08 +0000598- Bug #1158607: Build with --disable-unicode again.
599
Brett Cannon46d96232005-02-16 00:07:19 +0000600- spwdmodule.c is built only if either HAVE_GETSPNAM or HAVE_HAVE_GETSPENT is
601 defined. Discovered as a result of not being able to build on OS X.
602
Brett Cannon516592f2004-12-07 00:42:59 +0000603- setup.py now uses the directories specified in LDFLAGS using the -L option
604 and in CPPFLAGS using the -I option for adding library and include
605 directories, respectively, for compiling extension modules against. This has
606 led to the core being compiled using the values in CPPFLAGS. It also removes
607 the need for the special-casing of both DarwinPorts and Fink for darwin since
608 the proper directories can be specified in LDFLAGS (``-L/sw/lib`` for Fink,
609 ``-L/opt/local/lib`` for DarwinPorts) and CPPFLAGS (``-I/sw/include`` for
610 Fink, ``-I/opt/local/include`` for DarwinPorts).
611
Brett Cannon43802422005-02-10 20:48:03 +0000612- Test in configure.in that checks for tzset no longer dependent on tm->tm_zone
613 to exist in the struct (not required by either ISO C nor the UNIX 2 spec).
614 Tests for sanity in tzname when HAVE_TZNAME defined were also defined.
615 Closes bug #1096244. Thanks Gregory Bond.
616
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000617
618C API
619-----
620
Raymond Hettingerbeb31012005-08-16 03:47:52 +0000621- Added a C API for set and frozenset objects.
622
Raymond Hettinger66517482004-12-03 11:45:13 +0000623- Removed PyRange_New().
624
Walter Dörwaldd1c1e102005-10-06 20:29:57 +0000625- Patch #1313939: PyUnicode_DecodeCharmap() accepts a unicode string as the
626 mapping argument now. This string is used as a mapping table. Byte values
627 greater than the length of the string and 0xFFFE are treated as undefined
628 mappings.
629
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000630
631Tests
632-----
633
Martin v. Löwis4d394df2005-01-23 09:19:22 +0000634- In test_os, st_?time is now truncated before comparing it with ST_?TIME.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000635
Brett Cannonced04e02005-02-13 22:53:22 +0000636
637Documentation
638-------------
639
Georg Brandl32252422005-09-14 20:42:00 +0000640- Bug #1274828: Document os.path.splitunc().
641
Georg Brandl79c122f2005-08-24 07:31:33 +0000642- Bug #1190204: Clarify which directories are searched by site.py.
643
Georg Brandl6f2bbd32005-08-24 07:26:55 +0000644- Bug #1193849: Clarify os.path.expanduser() documentation.
645
Georg Brandlf13c4ba2005-08-02 10:28:08 +0000646- Bug #1243192: re.UNICODE and re.LOCALE affect \d, \D, \s and \S.
647
Georg Brandl150db732005-07-18 08:53:17 +0000648- Bug #755617: Document the effects of os.chown() on Windows.
649
Georg Brandl379f99d2005-06-26 21:09:38 +0000650- Patch #1180012: The documentation for modulefinder is now in the library reference.
651
652- Patch #1213031: Document that os.chown() accepts argument values of -1.
653
654- Bug #1190563: Document os.waitpid() return value with WNOHANG flag.
655
656- Bug #1175022: Correct the example code for property().
657
Georg Brandl40c71652005-06-25 21:08:46 +0000658- Document the IterableUserDict class in the UserDict module.
659 Closes bug #1166582.
660
Brett Cannonced04e02005-02-13 22:53:22 +0000661- Remove all latent references for "Macintosh" that referred to semantics for
662 Mac OS 9 and change to reflect the state for OS X.
663 Closes patch #1095802. Thanks Jack Jansen.
664
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000665Mac
666---
667
668
Hye-Shik Chang4e422812005-07-17 02:36:59 +0000669New platforms
670-------------
671
672- FreeBSD 7 support is added.
673
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000674
675Tools/Demos
676-----------
677
Georg Brandl56897312005-08-24 18:32:30 +0000678- Added two new files to Tools/scripts: pysource.py, which recursively
679 finds Python source files, and findnocoding.py, which finds Python
680 source files that need an encoding declaration.
681 Patch #784089, credits to Oleg Broytmann.
682
Georg Brandl379f99d2005-06-26 21:09:38 +0000683- Bug #1072853: pindent.py used an uninitialized variable.
684
Martin v. Löwisab9ec162005-04-09 10:53:34 +0000685- Patch #1177597: Correct Complex.__init__.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000686
687
Anthony Baxtere2648ee2004-11-30 01:28:55 +0000688What's New in Python 2.4 final?
689===============================
Kurt B. Kaiser4c79a832004-11-23 18:06:08 +0000690
Anthony Baxtere2648ee2004-11-30 01:28:55 +0000691*Release date: 30-NOV-2004*
Kurt B. Kaiser4c79a832004-11-23 18:06:08 +0000692
693Core and builtins
694-----------------
695
696- Bug 875692: Improve signal handling, especially when using threads, by
697 forcing an early re-execution of PyEval_EvalFrame() "periodic" code when
698 things_to_do is not cleared by Py_MakePendingCalls().
699
700
Anthony Baxter4277ed82004-11-30 11:53:10 +0000701What's New in Python 2.4 (release candidate 1)
702==============================================
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000703
Anthony Baxter5cc727a2004-11-18 12:32:27 +0000704*Release date: 18-NOV-2004*
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000705
706Core and builtins
707-----------------
708
Tim Petersfb1ffb02004-11-08 04:30:21 +0000709- Bug 1061968: Fixes in 2.4a3 to address thread bug 1010677 reintroduced
710 the years-old thread shutdown race bug 225673. Numeric history lesson
711 aside, all bugs in all three reports are fixed now.
712
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000713
Skip Montanaro599bd5e2004-11-04 04:31:30 +0000714Library
715-------
716
717- Bug 1052242: If exceptions are raised by an atexit handler function an
718 attempt is made to execute the remaining handlers. The last exception
719 raised is re-raised.
720
Tim Peters50c6bdb2004-11-08 22:07:37 +0000721- ``doctest``'s new support for adding ``pdb.set_trace()`` calls to
722 doctests was broken in a dramatic but shallow way. Fixed.
723
Tim Petersbbc0d442004-11-13 16:18:32 +0000724- Bug 1065388: ``calendar``'s ``day_name``, ``day_abbr``, ``month_name``,
725 and ``month_abbr`` attributes emulate sequences of locale-correct
726 spellings of month and day names. Because the locale can change at
727 any time, the correct spelling is recomputed whenever one of these is
728 indexed. In the worst case, the index may be a slice object, so these
729 recomputed every day or month name each time they were indexed. This is
730 much slower than necessary in the usual case, when the index is just an
731 integer. In that case, only the single spelling needed is recomputed
732 now; and, when the index is a slice object, only the spellings needed
733 by the slice are recomputed now.
734
Tim Peters50c6bdb2004-11-08 22:07:37 +0000735- Patch 1061679: Added ``__all__`` to pickletools.py.
Tim Peters90cf2122004-11-06 23:45:48 +0000736
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000737Build
738-----
Skip Montanaro599bd5e2004-11-04 04:31:30 +0000739
Brett Cannon7d28e962004-11-07 01:19:00 +0000740- Bug 1034277 / Patch 1035255: Remove compilation of core against CoreServices
741 and CoreFoundation on OS X. Involved removing PyMac_GetAppletScriptFile()
742 which has no known users. Thanks Bob Ippolito.
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000743
744C API
745-----
746
Raymond Hettinger39e92ea2004-11-18 09:41:45 +0000747- The PyRange_New() function is deprecated.
748
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000749
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000750What's New in Python 2.4 beta 2?
751================================
752
Anthony Baxter9f41f3a2004-11-03 06:21:37 +0000753*Release date: 03-NOV-2004*
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000754
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000755License
756-------
757
758The Python Software Foundation changed the license under which Python
759is released, to remove Python version numbers. There were no other
760changes to the license. So, for example, wherever the license for
761Python 2.3 said "Python 2.3", the new license says "Python". The
762intent is to make it possible to refer to the PSF license in a more
763durable way. For example, some people say they're confused by that
764the Open Source Initiative's entry for the Python Software Foundation
765License::
766
767 http://www.opensource.org/licenses/PythonSoftFoundation.php
768
769says "Python 2.1.1" all over it, wondering whether it applies only
770to Python 2.1.1.
771
772The official name of the new license is the Python Software Foundation
773License Version 2.
774
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000775Core and builtins
776-----------------
777
Tim Petersead8b7a2004-10-30 23:09:22 +0000778- Bug #1055820 Cyclic garbage collection was not protecting against that
779 calling a live weakref to a piece of cyclic trash could resurrect an
780 insane mutation of the trash if any Python code ran during gc (via
781 running a dead object's __del__ method, running another callback on a
782 weakref to a dead object, or via any Python code run in any other thread
783 that managed to obtain the GIL while a __del__ or callback was running
784 in the thread doing gc). The most likely symptom was "impossible"
Andrew M. Kuchlingb2a739d2005-11-22 15:14:44 +0000785 ``AttributeError`` exceptions, appearing seemingly at random, on weakly
Tim Petersead8b7a2004-10-30 23:09:22 +0000786 referenced objects. The cure was to clear all weakrefs to unreachable
787 objects before allowing any callbacks to run.
788
Raymond Hettinger561fbf12004-10-26 01:52:37 +0000789- Bug #1054139 _PyString_Resize() now invalidates its cached hash value.
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000790
791Extension Modules
792-----------------
793
Raymond Hettinger9047c8f2004-10-24 00:10:06 +0000794- Bug #1048870: the compiler now generates distinct code objects for
795 functions with identical bodies. This was producing confusing
796 traceback messages which pointed to the function where the code
797 object was first defined rather than the function being executed.
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000798
799Library
800-------
801
Barry Warsaw8c72eae2004-11-01 03:52:43 +0000802- Patch #1056967 changes the semantics of Template.safe_substitute() so that
803 no ValueError is raised on an 'invalid' match group. Now the delimiter is
804 returned.
805
Raymond Hettinger2ef7e6c2004-10-24 00:32:24 +0000806- Bug #1052503 pdb.runcall() was not passing along keyword arguments.
807
Raymond Hettingerc64aab82004-10-20 08:21:57 +0000808- Bug #902037: XML.sax.saxutils.prepare_input_source() now combines relative
809 paths with a base path before checking os.path.isfile().
810
Raymond Hettingere54e7262004-10-20 07:17:16 +0000811- The whichdb module can now be run from the command line.
812
Brett Cannon8abcc5d2004-10-18 01:37:57 +0000813- Bug #1045381: time.strptime() can now infer the date using %U or %W (week of
814 the year) when the day of the week and year are also specified.
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000815
Andrew M. Kuchling0d19bae2004-10-19 19:54:41 +0000816- Bug #1048816: fix bug in Ctrl-K at start of line in curses.textpad.Textbox
817
Andrew M. Kuchling66e80ba2004-10-20 11:56:15 +0000818- Bug #1017553: fix bug in tarfile.filemode()
819
Hye-Shik Chang33761492004-10-26 09:53:46 +0000820- Patch #737473: fix bug that old source code is shown in tracebacks even if
Hye-Shik Chang182ac852004-10-26 09:16:42 +0000821 the source code is updated and reloaded.
822
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000823Build
824-----
825
Hye-Shik Chang33761492004-10-26 09:53:46 +0000826- Patch #1044395: --enable-shared is allowed in FreeBSD also.
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000827
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000828What's New in Python 2.4 beta 1?
829================================
830
Anthony Baxter6a587c12004-10-15 08:07:21 +0000831*Release date: 15-OCT-2004*
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000832
833Core and builtins
834-----------------
835
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000836- Patch #975056: Restartable signals were not correctly disabled on
Anthony Baxtere4f8a482004-10-13 14:55:56 +0000837 BSD systems. Consistently use PyOS_setsig() instead of signal().
838
Tim Peters263091e2004-10-10 01:58:44 +0000839- The internal portable implementation of thread-local storage (TLS), used
840 by the ``PyGILState_Ensure()``/``PyGILState_Release()`` API, was not
841 thread-correct. This could lead to a variety of problems, up to and
842 including segfaults. See bug 1041645 for an example.
843
Raymond Hettingerdb29e0f2004-10-07 06:46:25 +0000844- Added a command line option, -m module, which searches sys.path for the
845 module and then runs it. (Contributed by Nick Coghlan.)
846
Raymond Hettinger2c31a052004-09-22 18:44:21 +0000847- The bytecode optimizer now folds tuples of constants into a single
848 constant.
849
Tim Peters307fa782004-09-23 08:06:40 +0000850- SF bug #513866: Float/long comparison anomaly. Prior to 2.4b1, when
851 an integer was compared to a float, the integer was coerced to a float.
852 That could yield spurious overflow errors (if the integer was very
853 large), and to anomalies such as
854 ``long(1e200)+1 == 1e200 == long(1e200)-1``. Coercion to float is no
855 longer performed, and cases like ``long(1e200)-1 < 1e200``,
856 ``long(1e200)+1 > 1e200`` and ``(1 << 20000) > 1e200`` are computed
857 correctly now.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000858
859Extension modules
860-----------------
861
Tim Peterscf8997f2004-10-01 02:13:16 +0000862- ``collections.deque`` objects didn't play quite right with garbage
863 collection, which could lead to a segfault in a release build, or
Raymond Hettingerdb29e0f2004-10-07 06:46:25 +0000864 an assert failure in a debug build. Also, added overflow checks,
865 better detection of mutation during iteration, and shielded deque
866 comparisons from unusual subclass overrides of the __iter__() method.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000867
868Library
869-------
Raymond Hettinger0318a932004-09-22 18:03:47 +0000870
Anthony Baxtera0240342004-10-14 10:02:08 +0000871- Patch 1046644: distutils build_ext grew two new options - --swig for
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000872 specifying the swig executable to use, and --swig-opts to specify
Anthony Baxtera0240342004-10-14 10:02:08 +0000873 options to pass to swig. --swig-opts="-c++" is the new way to spell
874 --swig-cpp.
875
Anthony Baxter22dcf662004-10-13 15:54:17 +0000876- Patch 983206: distutils now obeys environment variable LDSHARED, if
877 it is set.
878
Andrew M. Kuchling518d3932004-10-12 15:32:10 +0000879- Added Peter Astrand's subprocess.py module. See PEP 324 for details.
Fredrik Lundh5b3687d2004-10-12 15:26:28 +0000880
Brett Cannon4f35c712004-10-06 02:11:37 +0000881- time.strptime() now properly escapes timezones and all other locale-specific
882 strings for regex-specific symbols. Was breaking under Japanese Windows when
883 the timezone was specified as "Tokyo (standard time)".
884 Closes bug #1039270.
885
Barry Warsawbb113862004-10-03 03:16:19 +0000886- Updates for the email package:
Brett Cannon06a30b02004-10-22 06:22:54 +0000887
Barry Warsaw418de1f2004-10-11 14:32:47 +0000888 + email.Utils.formatdate() grew a 'usegmt' argument for HTTP support.
Barry Warsawbb113862004-10-03 03:16:19 +0000889 + All deprecated APIs that in email 2.x issued warnings have been removed:
890 _encoder argument to the MIMEText constructor, Message.add_payload(),
891 Utils.dump_address_pair(), Utils.decode(), Utils.encode()
892 + New deprecations: Generator.__call__(), Message.get_type(),
893 Message.get_main_type(), Message.get_subtype(), the 'strict' argument to
894 the Parser constructor. These will be removed in email 3.1.
895 + Support for Python earlier than 2.3 has been removed (see PEP 291).
896 + All defect classes have been renamed to end in 'Defect'.
897 + Some FeedParser fixes; also a MultipartInvariantViolationDefect will be
898 added to messages that claim to be multipart but really aren't.
899 + Updates to documentation.
900
Raymond Hettinger596ba4d2004-09-24 03:41:05 +0000901- re's findall() and finditer() functions now take an optional flags argument
902 just like the compile(), search(), and match() functions. Also, documented
903 the previously existing start and stop parameters for the findall() and
904 finditer() methods of regular expression objects.
905
Raymond Hettinger0318a932004-09-22 18:03:47 +0000906- rfc822 Messages now support iterating over the headers.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000907
Martin v. Löwisf3c56112004-09-18 09:08:52 +0000908- The (undocumented) tarfile.Tarfile.membernames has been removed;
909 applications should use the getmember function.
910
Martin v. Löwis39a31782004-09-18 09:03:49 +0000911- httplib now offers symbolic constants for the HTTP status codes.
912
Tim Peters528ca532004-09-16 01:30:50 +0000913- SF bug #1028306: Trying to compare a ``datetime.date`` to a
914 ``datetime.datetime`` mistakenly compared only the year, month and day.
915 Now it acts like a mixed-type comparison: ``False`` for ``==``,
916 ``True`` for ``!=``, and raises ``TypeError`` for other comparison
917 operators. Because datetime is a subclass of date, comparing only the
918 base class (date) members can still be done, if that's desired, by
919 forcing using of the approprate date method; e.g.,
920 ``a_date.__eq__(a_datetime)`` is true if and only if the year, month
921 and day members of ``a_date`` and ``a_datetime`` are equal.
922
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000923- bdist_rpm now supports command line options --force-arch,
924 {pre,post}-install, {pre,post}-uninstall, and
Martin v. Löwis23c48a12004-09-10 06:32:54 +0000925 {prep,build,install,clean,verify}-script.
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000926
Walter Dörwald69652032004-09-07 20:24:22 +0000927- SF patch #998993: The UTF-8 and the UTF-16 stateful decoders now support
928 decoding incomplete input (when the input stream is temporarily exhausted).
929 ``codecs.StreamReader`` now implements buffering, which enables proper
930 readline support for the UTF-16 decoders. ``codecs.StreamReader.read()``
931 has a new argument ``chars`` which specifies the number of characters to
932 return. ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` and
933 ``codecs.StreamReader.readlines()`` have a new argument ``keepends``.
934 Trailing "\n"s will be stripped from the lines if ``keepends`` is false.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000935
Tim Petersa80a2c82004-09-26 05:13:18 +0000936- The documentation for doctest is greatly expanded, and now covers all
937 the new public features (of which there are many).
938
Walter Dörwald5011d0c2004-09-13 08:53:15 +0000939- ``doctest.master`` was put back in, and ``doctest.testmod()`` once again
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000940 updates it. This isn't good, because every ``testmod()`` call
941 contributes to bloating the "hidden" state of ``doctest.master``, but
942 some old code apparently relies on it. For now, all we can do is
943 encourage people to stitch doctests together via doctest's unittest
Tim Petersa80a2c82004-09-26 05:13:18 +0000944 integration features instead.
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000945
Skip Montanaro82d0eec2004-09-14 17:58:31 +0000946- httplib now handles ipv6 address/port pairs.
947
David Goodger68a1abd2004-10-03 15:40:25 +0000948- SF bug #1017864: ConfigParser now correctly handles default keys,
949 processing them with ``ConfigParser.optionxform`` when supplied,
950 consistent with the handling of config file entries and runtime-set
951 options.
952
David Goodger1cbf2062004-10-03 15:55:09 +0000953- SF bug #997050: Document, test, & check for non-string values in
954 ConfigParser. Moved the new string-only restriction added in
955 rev. 1.65 to the SafeConfigParser class, leaving existing
956 ConfigParser & RawConfigParser behavior alone, and documented the
957 conditions under which non-string values work.
958
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000959Build
960-----
961
Brett Cannonbfef8692004-09-28 04:08:11 +0000962- Building on darwin now includes /opt/local/include and /opt/local/lib for
963 building extension modules. This is so as to include software installed as
964 a DarwinPorts port <http://darwinports.opendarwin.org/>
965
Tim Peters862f0592004-09-23 19:11:32 +0000966- pyport.h now defines a Py_IS_NAN macro. It works as-is when the
967 platform C computes true for ``x != x`` if and only if X is a NaN.
968 Other platforms can override the default definition with a platform-
969 specific spelling in that platform's pyconfig.h. You can also override
970 pyport.h's default Py_IS_INFINITY definition now.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000971
972C API
973-----
974
Tim Peters7f468f22004-10-11 02:40:51 +0000975- SF patch 1044089: New function ``PyEval_ThreadsInitialized()`` returns
976 non-zero if PyEval_InitThreads() has been called.
977
978- The undocumented and unused extern int ``_PyThread_Started`` was removed.
979
Tim Peters84705582004-10-10 02:47:33 +0000980- The C API calls ``PyInterpreterState_New()`` and ``PyThreadState_New()``
981 are two of the very few advertised as being safe to call without holding
982 the GIL. However, this wasn't true in a debug build, as bug 1041645
983 demonstrated. In a debug build, Python redirects the ``PyMem`` family
984 of calls to Python's small-object allocator, to get the benefit of
985 its extra debugging capabilities. But Python's small-object allocator
986 isn't threadsafe, relying on the GIL to avoid the expense of doing its
987 own locking. ``PyInterpreterState_New()`` and ``PyThreadState_New()``
988 call the platform ``malloc()`` directly now, regardless of build type.
989
Tim Peters307fa782004-09-23 08:06:40 +0000990- PyLong_AsUnsignedLong[Mask] now support int objects as well.
991
Walter Dörwald69652032004-09-07 20:24:22 +0000992- SF patch #998993: ``PyUnicode_DecodeUTF8Stateful`` and
993 ``PyUnicode_DecodeUTF16Stateful`` have been added, which implement stateful
994 decoding.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000995
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000996Tests
997-----
998
999- test__locale ported to unittest
1000
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001001Mac
1002---
1003
Just van Rossumdd3c8372004-10-03 16:27:09 +00001004- ``plistlib`` now supports non-dict root objects. There is also a new
1005 interface for reading and writing plist files: ``readPlist(pathOrFile)``
1006 and ``writePlist(rootObject, pathOrFile)``
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001007
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001008Tools/Demos
1009-----------
1010
Tim Peters130e37f2004-10-03 19:03:19 +00001011- The text file comparison scripts ``ndiff.py`` and ``diff.py`` now
1012 read the input files in universal-newline mode. This spares them
1013 from consuming a great deal of time to deduce the useless result that,
1014 e.g., a file with Windows line ends and a file with Linux line ends
1015 have no lines in common.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001016
1017
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001018What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 3?
1019=================================
1020
Anthony Baxtere13943a2004-09-02 16:37:15 +00001021*Release date: 02-SEP-2004*
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001022
1023Core and builtins
1024-----------------
1025
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001026- SF patch #1007189: ``from ... import ...`` statements now allow the name
Anthony Baxter1a4ddae2004-08-31 10:07:13 +00001027 list to be surrounded by parentheses.
1028
Tim Peters0973b992004-08-29 22:16:50 +00001029- Some speedups for long arithmetic, thanks to Trevor Perrin. Gradeschool
1030 multiplication was sped a little by optimizing the C code. Gradeschool
1031 squaring was sped by about a factor of 2, by exploiting that about half
1032 the digit products are duplicates in a square. Because exponentiation
1033 uses squaring often, this also speeds long power. For example, the time
1034 to compute 17**1000000 dropped from about 14 seconds to 9 on my box due
1035 to this much. The cutoff for Karatsuba multiplication was raised,
1036 since gradeschool multiplication got quicker, and the cutoff was
Tim Peters47e52ee2004-08-30 02:44:38 +00001037 aggressively small regardless. The exponentiation algorithm was switched
1038 from right-to-left to left-to-right, which is more efficient for small
1039 bases. In addition, if the exponent is large, the algorithm now does
1040 5 bits (instead of 1 bit) at a time. That cut the time to compute
1041 17**1000000 on my box in half again, down to about 4.5 seconds.
Tim Peters0973b992004-08-29 22:16:50 +00001042
Tim Petersc8854432004-08-25 02:14:08 +00001043- OverflowWarning is no longer generated. PEP 237 scheduled this to
1044 occur in Python 2.3, but since OverflowWarning was disabled by default,
1045 nobody realized it was still being generated. On the chance that user
1046 code is still using them, the Python builtin OverflowWarning, and
1047 corresponding C API PyExc_OverflowWarning, will exist until Python 2.5.
1048
Martin v. Löwis336e85f2004-08-19 11:31:58 +00001049- Py_InitializeEx has been added.
1050
Brett Cannonadd33602004-08-15 07:21:25 +00001051- Fix the order of application of decorators. The proper order is bottom-up;
1052 the first decorator listed is the last one called.
1053
Neal Norwitzf0769532004-08-13 03:18:29 +00001054- SF patch #1005778. Fix a seg fault if the list size changed while
1055 calling list.index(). This could happen if a rich comparison function
1056 modified the list.
1057
Michael W. Hudson5e897952004-08-12 18:12:44 +00001058- The ``func_name`` (a.k.a. ``__name__``) attribute of user-defined
1059 functions is now writable.
1060
Michael W. Hudson5523c252004-08-12 18:09:00 +00001061- code_new (a.k.a new.code()) now checks its arguments sufficiently
1062 carefully that passing them on to PyCode_New() won't trigger calls
1063 to Py_FatalError() or PyErr_BadInternalCall(). It is still the case
1064 that the returned code object might be entirely insane.
1065
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +00001066- Subclasses of string can no longer be interned. The semantics of
1067 interning were not clear here -- a subclass could be mutable, for
1068 example -- and had bugs. Explicitly interning a subclass of string
1069 via intern() will raise a TypeError. Internal operations that attempt
1070 to intern a string subclass will have no effect.
Jeremy Hylton4c989dd2004-08-07 19:20:05 +00001071
Tim Peters83b57352004-08-08 07:24:22 +00001072- Bug 1003935: xrange() could report bogus OverflowErrors. Documented
1073 what xrange() intends, and repaired tests accordingly.
1074
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001075Extension modules
1076-----------------
1077
Martin v. Löwise064b412004-08-29 16:34:40 +00001078- difflib now supports HTML side-by-side diff.
1079
Martin v. Löwisdc3883f2004-08-29 15:46:35 +00001080- os.urandom has been added for systems that support sources of random
1081 data.
1082
Tim Peters037b3ee2004-08-21 06:55:43 +00001083- Patch 1012740: truncate() on a writeable cStringIO now resets the
1084 position to the end of the stream. This is consistent with the original
1085 StringIO module and avoids inadvertently resurrecting data that was
1086 supposed to have been truncated away.
1087
Dave Cole331708b2004-08-09 04:51:41 +00001088- Added socket.socketpair().
1089
Dave Cole3203efb2004-08-26 00:37:31 +00001090- Added CurrentByteIndex, CurrentColumnNumber, CurrentLineNumber
1091 members to xml.parsers.expat.XMLParser object.
1092
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001093- The mpz, rotor, and xreadlines modules, all deprecated in earlier
Andrew M. Kuchling00873432004-08-31 13:50:43 +00001094 versions of Python, have now been removed.
1095
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001096Library
1097-------
1098
Johannes Gijsbers4c11f602004-08-30 14:13:04 +00001099- Patch #934356: if a module defines __all__, believe that rather than using
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001100 heuristics for filtering out imported names.
Johannes Gijsbers4c11f602004-08-30 14:13:04 +00001101
Johannes Gijsbersae882f72004-08-30 10:19:56 +00001102- Patch #941486: added os.path.lexists(), which returns True for broken
1103 symlinks, unlike os.path.exists().
1104
Raymond Hettinger356a4592004-08-30 06:14:31 +00001105- the random module now uses os.urandom() for seeding if it is available.
1106 Added a new generator based on os.urandom().
1107
Martin v. Löwise064b412004-08-29 16:34:40 +00001108- difflib and diff.py can now generate HTML.
1109
Martin v. Löwiscae9e672004-08-25 13:04:53 +00001110- bdist_rpm now includes version and release in the BuildRoot, and
1111 replaces - by ``_`` in version and release.
Martin v. Löwiscf525242004-08-25 13:00:34 +00001112
Martin v. Löwis9f5c0c42004-08-25 11:37:43 +00001113- distutils build/build_scripts now has an -e option to specify the
1114 path to the Python interpreter for installed scripts.
1115
Barry Warsaw8bee7612004-08-25 02:22:30 +00001116- PEP 292 classes Template and SafeTemplate are added to the string module.
1117
Martin v. Löwis75b9da42004-08-18 13:57:44 +00001118- tarfile now generates GNU tar files by default.
1119
Martin v. Löwisdeacce22004-08-18 12:46:26 +00001120- HTTPResponse has now a getheaders method.
1121
Johannes Gijsbersc473c992004-08-18 12:40:31 +00001122- Patch #1006219: let inspect.getsource handle '@' decorators. Thanks Simon
1123 Percivall.
1124
Martin v. Löwis318a12e2004-08-18 12:27:40 +00001125- logging.handlers.SMTPHandler.date_time has been removed;
1126 the class now uses email.Utils.formatdate to generate the time stamp.
1127
Martin v. Löwisfe84d172004-08-18 11:06:45 +00001128- A new function tkFont.nametofont was added to return an existing
1129 font. The Font class constructor now has an additional exists argument
1130 which, if True, requests to return/configure an existing font, rather
Tim Peters037b3ee2004-08-21 06:55:43 +00001131 than creating a new one.
Martin v. Löwisfe84d172004-08-18 11:06:45 +00001132
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +00001133- Updated the decimal package's min() and max() methods to match the
1134 latest revision of the General Decimal Arithmetic Specification.
1135 Quiet NaNs are ignored and equal values are sorted based on sign
1136 and exponent.
1137
1138- The decimal package's Context.copy() method now returns deep copies.
1139
1140- Deprecated sys.exitfunc in favor of the atexit module. The sys.exitfunc
Georg Brandl08c02db2005-07-22 18:39:19 +00001141 attribute will be kept around for backwards compatibility and atexit
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +00001142 will just become the one preferred way to do it.
1143
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +00001144- patch #675551: Add get_history_item and replace_history_item functions
1145 to the readline module.
1146
Johannes Gijsbers34c41202004-08-14 15:19:28 +00001147- bug #989672: pdb.doc and the help messages for the help_d and help_u methods
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +00001148 of the pdb.Pdb class gives have been corrected. d(own) goes to a newer
1149 frame, u(p) to an older frame, not the other way around.
Johannes Gijsbers34c41202004-08-14 15:19:28 +00001150
Johannes Gijsbers4ec40642004-08-14 15:01:53 +00001151- bug #990669: os.path.realpath() will resolve symlinks before normalizing the
1152 path, as normalizing the path may alter the meaning of the path if it
1153 contains symlinks.
1154
Johannes Gijsbers9d134b72004-08-14 14:03:03 +00001155- bug #851123: shutil.copyfile will raise an exception when trying to copy a
1156 file onto a link to itself. Thanks Gregory Ball.
1157
Brett Cannonb3de2e12004-08-13 18:46:24 +00001158- bug #570300: Fix inspect to resolve file locations using os.path.realpath()
1159 so as to properly list all functions in a module when the module itself is
1160 reached through a symlink. Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
1161
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +00001162- doctest refactoring continued. See the docs for details. As part of
1163 this effort, some old and little- (never?) used features are now
1164 deprecated: the Tester class, the module is_private() function, and the
1165 isprivate argument to testmod(). The Tester class supplied a feeble
1166 "by hand" way to combine multiple doctests, if you knew exactly what
1167 you were doing. The newer doctest features for unittest integration
1168 already did a better job of that, are stronger now than ever, and the
1169 new DocTestRunner class is a saner foundation if you want to do it by
1170 hand. The "private name" filtering gimmick was a mistake from the
1171 start, and testmod() changed long ago to ignore it by default. If
1172 you want to filter out tests, the new DocTestFinder class can be used
1173 to return a list of all doctests, and you can filter that list by
1174 any computable criteria before passing it to a DocTestRunner instance.
1175
Matthias Klose2e829c02004-08-15 17:04:33 +00001176- Bug #891637, patch #1005466: fix inspect.getargs() crash on def foo((bar)).
1177
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001178Tools/Demos
1179-----------
1180
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +00001181- IDLE's shortcut keys for windows are now case insensitive so that
1182 Control-V works the same as Control-v.
1183
Matthias Klose2443d4a2004-08-16 12:10:12 +00001184- pygettext.py: Generate POT-Creation-Date header in ISO format.
1185
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001186Build
1187-----
1188
Tim Peters47e52ee2004-08-30 02:44:38 +00001189- Backward incompatibility: longintrepr.h now triggers a compile-time
1190 error if SHIFT (the number of bits in a Python long "digit") isn't
1191 divisible by 5. This new requirement allows simple code for the new
1192 5-bits-at-a-time long_pow() implementation. If necessary, the
1193 restriction could be removed (by complicating long_pow(), or by
1194 falling back to the 1-bit-at-a-time algorithm), but there are no
1195 plans to do so.
1196
Brett Cannoncc8a4f62004-08-26 01:44:07 +00001197- bug #991962: When building with --disable-toolbox-glue on Darwin no
1198 attempt to build Mac-specific modules occurs.
1199
Michael W. Hudson800ba232004-08-12 18:19:17 +00001200- The --with-tsc flag to configure to enable VM profiling with the
1201 processor's timestamp counter now works on PPC platforms.
1202
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +00001203- patch #1006629: Define _XOPEN_SOURCE to 500 on Solaris 8/9 to match
1204 GCC's definition and avoid redefinition warnings.
1205
Matthias Klosea2542be2004-08-16 11:35:51 +00001206- Detect pthreads support (provided by gnu pth pthread emulation) on
1207 GNU/k*BSD systems.
1208
Hye-Shik Chang3ba5bfc2004-08-19 17:52:37 +00001209- bug #1005737, #1007249: Fixed several build problems and warnings
1210 found on old/legacy C compilers of HP-UX, IRIX and Tru64.
1211
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001212C API
1213-----
1214
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +00001215..
1216
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001217Documentation
1218-------------
1219
Neal Norwitz5268c392004-08-21 15:13:52 +00001220- patch #1005936, bug #1009373: fix index entries which contain
1221 an underscore when viewed with Acrobat.
1222
1223- bug #990669: os.path.normpath may alter the meaning of a path if
1224 it contains symbolic links. This has been documented in a comment
1225 since 1992, but is now in the library reference as well.
Johannes Gijsbersb112d6e2004-08-14 14:41:32 +00001226
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001227New platforms
1228-------------
1229
Hye-Shik Changf64700a2004-08-18 15:13:41 +00001230- FreeBSD 6 is now supported.
1231
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001232Tests
1233-----
1234
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +00001235..
1236
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001237Windows
1238-------
1239
Tim Peters79b52b72004-08-12 18:37:10 +00001240- Boosted the stack reservation for python.exe and pythonw.exe from
1241 the default 1MB to 2MB. Stack frames under VC 7.1 for 2.4 are enough
1242 bigger than under VC 6.0 for 2.3.4 that deeply recursive progams
1243 within the default sys.getrecursionlimit() default value of 1000 were
1244 able to suffer undetected C stack overflows. The standard test program
1245 test_compiler was one such program. If a Python process on Windows
1246 "just vanishes" without a trace, and without an error message of any
1247 kind, but with an exit code of 128, undetected stack overflow may be
1248 the problem.
1249
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001250Mac
1251---
1252
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +00001253..
1254
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001255
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001256What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 2?
1257=================================
1258
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +00001259*Release date: 05-AUG-2004*
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001260
1261Core and builtins
1262-----------------
1263
Raymond Hettinger52a21b82004-08-06 18:43:09 +00001264- Patch #980695: Implements efficient string concatenation for statements
1265 of the form s=s+t and s+=t. This will vary across implementations.
1266 Accordingly, the str.join() method is strongly preferred for performance
1267 sensitive code.
1268
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +00001269- PEP-0318, Function Decorators have been added to the language. These are
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +00001270 implemented using the Java-style @decorator syntax, like so::
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001271
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +00001272 @staticmethod
1273 def foo(bar):
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001274
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +00001275 (The PEP needs to be updated to reflect the current state)
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +00001276
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +00001277- When importing a module M raises an exception, Python no longer leaves M
1278 in sys.modules. Before 2.4a2 it did, and a subsequent import of M would
1279 succeed, picking up a module object from sys.modules reflecting as much
1280 of the initialization of M as completed before the exception was raised.
1281 Subsequent imports got no indication that M was in a partially-
1282 initialized state, and the importers could get into arbitrarily bad
1283 trouble as a result (the M they got was in an unintended state,
1284 arbitrarily far removed from M's author's intent). Now subsequent
1285 imports of M will continue raising exceptions (but if, for example, the
1286 source code for M is edited between import attempts, then perhaps later
1287 attempts will succeed, or raise a different exception).
1288
1289 This can break existing code, but in such cases the code was probably
1290 working before by accident. In the Python source, the only case of
1291 breakage discovered was in a test accidentally relying on a damaged
1292 module remaining in sys.modules. Cases are also known where tests
1293 deliberately provoking import errors remove damaged modules from
1294 sys.modules themselves, and such tests will break now if they do an
1295 unconditional del sys.modules[M].
1296
Marc-André Lemburgb314ce92004-07-23 16:14:57 +00001297- u'%s' % obj will now try obj.__unicode__() first and fallback to
1298 obj.__str__() if no __unicode__ method can be found.
1299
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +00001300- Patch #550732: Add PyArg_VaParseTupleAndKeywords(). Analogous to
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001301 PyArg_VaParse(). Both are now documented. Thanks Greg Chapman.
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +00001302
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001303- Allow string and unicode return types from .encode()/.decode()
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001304 methods on string and unicode objects. Added unicode.decode()
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001305 which was missing for no apparent reason.
1306
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001307- An attempt to fix the mess that is Python's behaviour with
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001308 signal handlers and threads, complicated by readline's behaviour.
1309 It's quite possible that there are still bugs here.
1310
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001311- Added C macros Py_CLEAR and Py_VISIT to ease the implementation of
1312 types that support garbage collection.
1313
Raymond Hettinger76d962d2004-07-16 12:16:48 +00001314- Compiler now treats None as a constant.
1315
Neil Schemenauer3a313e32004-07-19 16:29:17 +00001316- The type of values returned by __int__, __float__, __long__,
1317 __oct__, and __hex__ are now checked. Returning an invalid type
1318 will cause a TypeError to be raised. This matches the behavior of
1319 Jython.
1320
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +00001321- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in locale module.
1322
Hye-Shik Changb5047fd2004-08-04 06:33:51 +00001323- Added a workaround for proper string operations in BSDs. str.split
1324 and str.is* methods can now work correctly with UTF-8 locales.
1325
Hye-Shik Changc81c6952004-08-04 17:40:38 +00001326- Bug #989185: unicode.iswide() and unicode.width() is dropped and
1327 the East Asian Width support is moved to unicodedata extension
1328 module.
Hye-Shik Change9ddfbb2004-08-04 07:38:35 +00001329
Hye-Shik Chang7df44b32004-08-04 17:36:41 +00001330- Patch #941229: The source code encoding in interactive mode
1331 now refers sys.stdin.encoding not just ISO-8859-1 anymore. This
1332 allows for non-latin-1 users to write unicode strings directly.
1333
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001334Extension modules
1335-----------------
1336
Martin v. Löwis544f1192004-07-27 05:22:33 +00001337- cpickle now supports the same keyword arguments as pickle.
1338
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001339Library
1340-------
1341
Marc-André Lemburgc759f072004-08-05 12:43:30 +00001342- Added new codecs and aliases for ISO_8859-11, ISO_8859-16 and
1343 TIS-620
1344
Tim Peters8485b562004-08-04 18:46:34 +00001345- Thanks to Edward Loper, doctest has been massively refactored, and
1346 many new features were added. Full docs will appear later. For now
1347 the doctest module comments and new test cases give good coverage.
1348 The refactoring provides many hook points for customizing behavior
1349 (such as how to report errors, and how to compare expected to actual
1350 output). New features include a <BLANKLINE> marker for expected
1351 output containing blank lines, options to produce unified or context
1352 diffs when actual output doesn't match expectations, an option to
1353 normalize whitespace before comparing, and an option to use an
1354 ellipsis to signify "don't care" regions of output.
1355
Martin v. Löwis1fa649f2004-08-03 18:45:31 +00001356- Tkinter now supports the wish -sync and -use options.
1357
Fred Drakef901abd2004-08-03 17:58:55 +00001358- The following methods in time support passing of None: ctime(), gmtime(),
1359 and localtime(). If None is provided, the current time is used (the
1360 same as when the argument is omitted).
1361 [SF bug 658254, patch 663482]
1362
Martin v. Löwis9513e342004-08-03 14:36:32 +00001363- nntplib does now allow to ignore a .netrc file.
1364
Martin v. Löwis65a79752004-08-03 12:59:55 +00001365- urllib2 now recognizes Basic authentication even if other authentication
1366 schemes are offered.
1367
Neal Norwitz0e67fd42004-08-01 22:48:06 +00001368- Bug #1001053. wave.open() now accepts unicode filenames.
1369
Tim Peters5cfb05e2004-07-27 21:02:02 +00001370- gzip.GzipFile has a new fileno() method, to retrieve the handle of the
1371 underlying file object (provided it has a fileno() method). This is
1372 needed if you want to use os.fsync() on a GzipFile.
1373
Martin v. Löwis7b9190b2004-07-27 05:07:19 +00001374- imaplib has two new methods: deleteacl and myrights.
1375
Martin v. Löwiscc0f9322004-07-26 12:40:50 +00001376- nntplib has two new methods: description and descriptions. They
1377 use a more RFC-compliant way of getting a newsgroup description.
1378
Brett Cannon8b3d92a2004-07-21 02:21:58 +00001379- Bug #993394. Fix a possible red herring of KeyError in 'threading' being
1380 raised during interpreter shutdown from a registered function with atexit
1381 when dummy_threading is being used.
1382
Neal Norwitza4f651a2004-07-20 22:07:44 +00001383- Bug #857297/Patch #916874. Fix an error when extracting a hard link
1384 from a tarfile.
1385
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +00001386- Patch #846659. Fix an error in tarfile.py when using
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +00001387 GNU longname/longlink creation.
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +00001388
Tim Peters90ee7eb2004-07-18 23:58:17 +00001389- The obsolete FCNTL.py has been deleted. The builtin fcntl module
1390 has been available (on platforms that support fcntl) since Python
1391 1.5a3, and all FCNTL.py did is export fcntl's names, after generating
1392 a deprecation warning telling you to use fcntl directly.
1393
Hye-Shik Chang2bb146f2004-07-18 03:06:29 +00001394- Several new unicode codecs are added: big5hkscs, euc_jis_2004,
1395 iso2022_jp_2004, shift_jis_2004.
1396
Tim Peters5af0e412004-07-12 00:45:14 +00001397- Bug #788520. Queue.{get, get_nowait, put, put_nowait} have new
1398 implementations, exploiting Conditions (which didn't exist at the time
1399 Queue was introduced). A minor semantic change is that the Full and
1400 Empty exceptions raised by non-blocking calls now occur only if the
1401 queue truly was full or empty at the instant the queue was checked (of
1402 course the Queue may no longer be full or empty by the time a calling
1403 thread sees those exceptions, though). Before, the exceptions could
1404 also be raised if it was "merely inconvenient" for the implementation
1405 to determine the true state of the Queue (because the Queue was locked
1406 by some other method in progress).
1407
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001408- Bugs #979794 and #980117: difflib.get_grouped_opcodes() now handles the
1409 case of comparing two empty lists. This affected both context_diff() and
1410 unified_diff(),
Brett Cannond2c5b4b2004-07-10 23:54:07 +00001411
Brett Cannone6f8a892004-07-10 23:14:30 +00001412- Bug #980938: smtplib now prints debug output to sys.stderr.
1413
Brett Cannonf50299c2004-07-10 22:55:15 +00001414- Bug #930024: posixpath.realpath() now handles infinite loops in symlinks by
1415 returning the last point in the path that was not part of any loop. Thanks
1416 AM Kuchling.
1417
Brett Cannonbdc36272004-07-10 20:42:22 +00001418- Bug #980327: ntpath not handles compressing erroneous slashes between the
1419 drive letter and the rest of the path. Also clearly handles UNC addresses now
1420 as well. Thanks Paul Moore.
1421
Brett Cannone6751182004-07-10 19:13:42 +00001422- bug #679953: zipfile.py should now work for files over 2 GB. The packed data
1423 for file sizes (compressed and uncompressed) was being stored as signed
1424 instead of unsigned.
1425
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001426- decimal.py now only uses signals in the IBM spec. The other conditions are
Raymond Hettinger5aa478b2004-07-09 10:02:53 +00001427 no longer part of the public API.
1428
Marc-André Lemburg88fcca62004-07-10 16:16:06 +00001429- codecs module now has two new generic APIs: encode() and decode()
1430 which don't restrict the return types (unlike the unicode and
1431 string methods of the same name).
1432
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001433- Non-blocking SSL sockets work again; they were broken in Python 2.3.
Andrew M. Kuchling79d7e922004-07-10 21:21:55 +00001434 SF patch 945642.
1435
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001436- doctest unittest integration improvements:
1437
1438 o Improved the unitest test output for doctest-based unit tests
1439
1440 o Can now pass setUp and tearDown functions when creating
1441 DocTestSuites.
1442
1443- The threading module has a new class, local, for creating objects
1444 that provide thread-local data.
1445
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +00001446- Bug #990307: when keep_empty_values is True, cgi.parse_qsl()
1447 no longer returns spurious empty fields.
1448
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +00001449- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in gettext module.
1450
1451- Introduced in gettext module the l*gettext() family of functions,
1452 which return translation strings encoded in the preferred encoding,
1453 as informed by locale module's getpreferredencoding().
1454
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +00001455- optparse module (and tests) upgraded to Optik 1.5a1. Changes:
1456
1457 - Add expansion of default values in help text: the string
1458 "%default" in an option's help string is expanded to str() of
1459 that option's default value, or "none" if no default value.
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +00001460
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +00001461 - Bug #955889: option default values that happen to be strings are
1462 now processed in the same way as values from the command line; this
1463 allows generation of nicer help when using custom types. Can
1464 be disabled with parser.set_process_default_values(False).
1465
1466 - Bug #960515: don't crash when generating help for callback
1467 options that specify 'type', but not 'dest' or 'metavar'.
1468
1469 - Feature #815264: change the default help format for short options
1470 that take an argument from e.g. "-oARG" to "-o ARG"; add
1471 set_short_opt_delimiter() and set_long_opt_delimiter() methods to
1472 HelpFormatter to allow (slight) customization of the formatting.
1473
1474 - Patch #736940: internationalize Optik: all built-in user-
1475 targeted literal strings are passed through gettext.gettext(). (If
1476 you want translations (.po files), they're not included with Python
1477 -- you'll find them in the Optik source distribution from
1478 http://optik.sourceforge.net/ .)
1479
1480 - Bug #878453: respect $COLUMNS environment variable for
1481 wrapping help output.
1482
1483 - Feature #988122: expand "%prog" in the 'description' passed
1484 to OptionParser, just like in the 'usage' and 'version' strings.
1485 (This is *not* done in the 'description' passed to OptionGroup.)
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +00001486
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001487C API
1488-----
1489
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +00001490- PyImport_ExecCodeModule() and PyImport_ExecCodeModuleEx(): if an
1491 error occurs while loading the module, these now delete the module's
1492 entry from sys.modules. All ways of loading modules eventually call
1493 one of these, so this is an error-case change in semantics for all
1494 ways of loading modules. In rare cases, a module loader may wish
1495 to keep a module object in sys.modules despite that the module's
1496 code cannot be executed. In such cases, the module loader must
1497 arrange to reinsert the name and module object in sys.modules.
1498 PyImport_ReloadModule() has been changed to reinsert the original
1499 module object into sys.modules if the module reload fails, so that
1500 its visible semantics have not changed.
1501
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001502- A large pile of datetime field-extraction macros is now documented,
1503 thanks to Anthony Tuininga (patch #986010).
1504
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001505Documentation
1506-------------
1507
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +00001508- Improved the tutorial on creating types in C.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001509
1510 - point out the importance of reassigning data members before
Andrew M. Kuchling78d375f2004-08-07 14:00:39 +00001511 assigning their values
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001512
Andrew M. Kuchling28025ec2004-08-07 13:59:22 +00001513 - correct my misconception about return values from visitprocs. Sigh.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001514
1515 - mention the labor saving Py_VISIT and Py_CLEAR macros.
1516
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +00001517- Major rewrite of the math module docs, to address common confusions.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001518
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001519Tests
1520-----
1521
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +00001522- The test data files for the decimal test suite are now installed on
Anthony Baxterfd4984d2004-07-12 09:33:39 +00001523 platforms that use the Makefile.
1524
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +00001525- SF patch 995225: The test file testtar.tar accidentally contained
1526 CVS keywords (like $Id$), which could cause spurious failures in
1527 test_tarfile.py depending on how the test file was checked out.
1528
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001529
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001530What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 1?
1531=================================
1532
Anthony Baxter3210b362004-07-08 05:59:43 +00001533*Release date: 08-JUL-2004*
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001534
1535Core and builtins
1536-----------------
1537
Fred Drake0a4dd392004-07-02 18:57:45 +00001538- weakref.ref is now the type object also known as
1539 weakref.ReferenceType; it can be subclassed like any other new-style
1540 class. There's less per-entry overhead in WeakValueDictionary
1541 objects now (one object instead of three).
1542
Thomas Heller04c673b2004-07-02 08:56:20 +00001543- Bug #951851: Python crashed when reading import table of certain
1544 Windows DLLs.
1545
Raymond Hettinger66bd2332004-08-02 08:30:07 +00001546- Bug #215126. The locals argument to eval(), execfile(), and exec now
1547 accept any mapping type.
Raymond Hettinger214b1c32004-07-02 06:41:07 +00001548
Martin v. Löwisef82d2f2004-06-27 16:51:46 +00001549- marshal now shares interned strings. This change introduces
1550 a new .pyc magic.
1551
Anthony Baxter3ecdb252004-06-11 14:41:18 +00001552- Bug #966623. classes created with type() in an exec(, {}) don't
1553 have a __module__, but code in typeobject assumed it would always
1554 be there.
1555
Martin v. Löwis737ea822004-06-08 18:52:54 +00001556- Python no longer relies on the LC_NUMERIC locale setting to be
1557 the "C" locale; as a result, it no longer tries to prevent changing
1558 the LC_NUMERIC category.
1559
Tim Peters604c0132004-06-07 23:04:33 +00001560- Bug #952807: Unpickling pickled instances of subclasses of
1561 datetime.date, datetime.datetime and datetime.time could yield insane
1562 objects. Thanks to Jiwon Seo for a fix.
1563
Thomas Heller90a764c2004-06-07 15:12:44 +00001564- Bug #845802: Python crashes when __init__.py is a directory.
1565
Hye-Shik Changbc555e32004-06-03 11:10:58 +00001566- Unicode objects received two new methods: iswide() and width().
1567 These query East Asian width information, as specified in Unicode
1568 TR11.
Hye-Shik Chang974ed7c2004-06-02 16:49:17 +00001569
Raymond Hettinger41bd0222004-06-01 06:36:24 +00001570- Improved the tuple hashing algorithm to give fewer collisions in
1571 common cases. Fixes bug #942952.
1572
Raymond Hettinger354433a2004-05-19 08:20:33 +00001573- Implemented generator expressions (PEP 289). Coded by Jiwon Seo.
1574
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +00001575- Enabled the profiling of C extension functions (and builtins) - check
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001576 new documentation and modified profile and bdb modules for more details
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +00001577
Nicholas Bastinabce8a62004-03-21 20:24:07 +00001578- Set file.name to the object passed to open (instead of a new string)
1579
Nicholas Bastina7604bf2004-03-21 18:37:23 +00001580- Moved tracebackobject into traceback.h and renamed to PyTracebackObject
1581
Raymond Hettingerff5bc502004-03-21 15:12:00 +00001582- Optimized the byte coding for multiple assignments like "a,b=b,a" and
1583 "a,b,c=1,2,3". Improves their speed by 25% to 30%.
1584
Brett Cannon4f653312004-03-20 22:52:14 +00001585- Limit the nested depth of a tuple for the second argument to isinstance()
1586 and issubclass() to the recursion limit of the interpreter.
1587 Fixes bug #858016 .
1588
Raymond Hettingerade08ea2004-03-18 09:48:12 +00001589- Optimized dict iterators, creating separate types for each
1590 and having them reveal their length. Also optimized the
1591 methods: keys(), values(), and items().
1592
Raymond Hettingerdd80f762004-03-07 07:31:06 +00001593- Implemented a newcode opcode, LIST_APPEND, that simplifies
1594 the generated bytecode for list comprehensions and further
1595 improves their performance (about 35%).
1596
Michael W. Hudsond3b33b52004-02-19 19:35:22 +00001597- Implemented rich comparisons for floats, which seems to make
1598 comparisons involving NaNs somewhat less surprising when the
1599 underlying C compiler actually implements C99 semantics.
1600
Raymond Hettingerfa7b9d82004-02-15 04:06:39 +00001601- Optimized list.extend() to save memory and no longer create
1602 intermediate sequences. Also, extend() now pre-allocates the
1603 needed memory whenever the length of the iterable is known in
1604 advance -- this halves the time to extend the list.
1605
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001606- Optimized list resize operations to make fewer calls to the system
1607 realloc(). Significantly speeds up list appends, list pops,
Walter Dörwald09515af2005-03-18 10:28:24 +00001608 list comprehensions, and the list constructor (when the input iterable
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001609 length is not known).
1610
1611- Changed the internal list over-allocation scheme. For larger lists,
1612 overallocation ranged between 3% and 25%. Now, it is a constant 12%.
Raymond Hettingerab517d22004-02-14 18:34:46 +00001613 For smaller lists (n<8), overallocation was upto eight elements. Now,
1614 the overallocation is no more than three elements -- this improves space
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001615 utilization for applications that have large numbers of small lists.
1616
Raymond Hettinger0468e412004-05-05 05:37:53 +00001617- Most list bodies now get re-used rather than freed. Speeds up list
1618 instantiation and deletion by saving calls to malloc() and free().
1619
Raymond Hettinger31017ae2004-03-04 08:25:44 +00001620- The dict.update() method now accepts all the same argument forms
1621 as the dict() constructor. This now includes item lists and/or
1622 keyword arguments.
1623
Michael W. Hudsonecfeb7f2004-02-12 15:28:27 +00001624- Support for arbitrary objects supporting the read-only buffer
1625 interface as the co_code field of code objects (something that was
1626 only possible to create from C code) has been removed.
1627
Fred Drake228765b2004-02-06 04:15:22 +00001628- Made omitted callback and None equivalent for weakref.ref() and
1629 weakref.proxy(); the None case wasn't handled correctly in all
1630 cases.
1631
1632- Fixed problem where PyWeakref_NewRef() and PyWeakref_NewProxy()
1633 assumed that initial existing entries in an object's weakref list
1634 would not be removed while allocating a new weakref object. Since
1635 GC could be invoked at that time, however, that assumption was
1636 invalid. In a truly obscure case of GC being triggered during
1637 creation for a new weakref object for an referent which already
1638 has a weakref without a callback which is only referenced from
1639 cyclic trash, a memory error can occur. This consistently created a
1640 segfault in a debug build, but provided less predictable behavior in
1641 a release build.
1642
Hye-Shik Changff83c2b2004-02-02 13:39:01 +00001643- input() builtin function now respects compiler flags such as
1644 __future__ statements. SF patch 876178.
1645
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +00001646- Removed PendingDeprecationWarning from apply(). apply() remains
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +00001647 deprecated, but the nuisance warning will not be issued.
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +00001648
Tim Peters1d7323e2003-12-01 21:35:27 +00001649- At Python shutdown time (Py_Finalize()), 2.3 called cyclic garbage
1650 collection twice, both before and after tearing down modules. The
1651 call after tearing down modules has been disabled, because too much
1652 of Python has been torn down then for __del__ methods and weakref
1653 callbacks to execute sanely. The most common symptom was a sequence
1654 of uninformative messages on stderr when Python shut down, produced
1655 by threads trying to raise exceptions, but unable to report the nature
1656 of their problems because too much of the sys module had already been
1657 destroyed.
1658
Guido van Rossum6c9e1302003-11-29 23:52:13 +00001659- Removed FutureWarnings related to hex/oct literals and conversions
1660 and left shifts. (Thanks to Kalle Svensson for SF patch 849227.)
1661 This addresses most of the remaining semantic changes promised by
1662 PEP 237, except for repr() of a long, which still shows the trailing
1663 'L'. The PEP appears to promise warnings for operations that
1664 changed semantics compared to Python 2.3, but this is not
1665 implemented; we've suffered through enough warnings related to
1666 hex/oct literals and I think it's best to be silent now.
1667
Raymond Hettinger4f8f9762003-11-26 08:21:35 +00001668- For str and unicode objects, the ljust(), center(), and rjust()
1669 methods now accept an optional argument specifying a fill
1670 character other than a space.
1671
Guido van Rossumbaf0f8f2003-11-22 23:55:50 +00001672- When method objects have an attribute that can be satisfied either
1673 by the function object or by the method object, the function
1674 object's attribute usually wins. Christian Tismer pointed out that
1675 that this is really a mistake, because this only happens for special
1676 methods (like __reduce__) where the method object's version is
1677 really more appropriate than the function's attribute. So from now
1678 on, all method attributes will have precedence over function
1679 attributes with the same name.
1680
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +00001681- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 839548: if a weakref with a callback,
1682 its callback, and its weakly referenced object, all became part of
1683 cyclic garbage during a single run of garbage collection, the order
1684 in which they were torn down was unpredictable. It was possible for
1685 the callback to see partially-torn-down objects, leading to immediate
1686 segfaults, or, if the callback resurrected garbage objects, to
1687 resurrect insane objects that caused segfaults (or other surprises)
1688 later. In one sense this wasn't surprising, because Python's cyclic gc
1689 had no knowledge of Python's weakref objects. It does now. When
1690 weakrefs with callbacks become part of cyclic garbage now, those
1691 weakrefs are cleared first. The callbacks don't trigger then,
1692 preventing the problems. If you need callbacks to trigger, then just
1693 as when cyclic gc is not involved, you need to write your code so
1694 that weakref objects outlive the objects they weakly reference.
Raymond Hettingera690a992003-11-16 16:17:49 +00001695
Tim Petersadd09b42003-11-12 20:43:28 +00001696- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 840829: if cyclic garbage collection
1697 happened to occur during a weakref callback for a new-style class
1698 instance, subtle memory corruption was the result (in a release build;
1699 in a debug build, a segfault occurred reliably very soon after).
1700 This has been repaired.
1701
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +00001702- Compiler flags set in PYTHONSTARTUP are now active in __main__.
1703
1704- Added two builtin types, set() and frozenset().
1705
Raymond Hettinger85c20a42003-11-06 14:06:48 +00001706- Added a reversed() builtin function that returns a reverse iterator
1707 over a sequence.
1708
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +00001709- Added a sorted() builtin function that returns a new sorted list
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001710 from any iterable.
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +00001711
Martin v. Löwis01a74b22003-10-19 18:30:01 +00001712- CObjects are now mutable (on the C level) through PyCObject_SetVoidPtr.
1713
Raymond Hettinger42b1ba32003-10-16 03:41:09 +00001714- list.sort() now supports three keyword arguments: cmp, key, and reverse.
1715 The key argument can be a function of one argument that extracts a
1716 comparison key from the original record: mylist.sort(key=str.lower).
1717 The reverse argument is a boolean value and if True will change the
1718 sort order as if the comparison arguments were reversed. In addition,
1719 the documentation has been amended to provide a guarantee that all sorts
1720 starting with Py2.3 are guaranteed to be stable (the relative order of
1721 records with equal keys is unchanged).
1722
Marc-André Lemburgd7160f82003-09-22 11:14:40 +00001723- Added test whether wchar_t is signed or not. A signed wchar_t is not
1724 usable as internal unicode type base for Py_UNICODE since the
1725 unicode implementation assumes an unsigned type.
1726
Jeremy Hyltond8082792003-09-16 19:41:39 +00001727- Fixed a bug in the cache of length-one Unicode strings that could
1728 lead to a seg fault. The specific problem occurred when an earlier,
1729 non-fatal error left an uninitialized Unicode object in the
1730 freelist.
1731
Raymond Hettinger9bfe5332003-08-27 04:55:52 +00001732- The % formatting operator now supports '%F' which is equivalent to
1733 '%f'. This has always been documented but never implemented.
1734
Tim Peters465fa3d2003-08-15 01:16:37 +00001735- complex(obj) could leak a little memory if obj wasn't a string or
1736 number.
1737
Raymond Hettingereaef6152003-08-02 07:42:57 +00001738- zip() with no arguments now returns an empty list instead of raising
1739 a TypeError exception.
1740
Guido van Rossum02c58f82003-10-08 21:08:29 +00001741- obj.__contains__() now returns True/False instead of 1/0. SF patch
1742 820195.
1743
Armin Rigo2b3eb402003-10-28 12:05:48 +00001744- Python no longer tries to be smart about recursive comparisons.
1745 When comparing containers with cyclic references to themselves it
1746 will now just hit the recursion limit. See SF patch 825639.
1747
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001748- str and unicode builtin types now have an rsplit() method that is
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +00001749 same as split() except that it scans the string from the end
1750 working towards the beginning. See SF feature request 801847.
Hye-Shik Chang060ebed2003-12-15 18:51:19 +00001751
Jim Fulton8a1a5942004-02-08 04:21:26 +00001752- Fixed a bug in object.__reduce_ex__ when using protocol 2. Failure
1753 to clear the error when attempts to get the __getstate__ attribute
1754 fail caused intermittent errors and odd behavior.
1755
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001756- buffer objects based on other objects no longer cache a pointer to
1757 the data and the data length. Instead, the appropriate tp_as_buffer
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001758 method is called as necessary.
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001759
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001760- fixed: if a file is opened with an explicit buffer size >= 1, repeated
Andrew MacIntyre4e10ed32004-04-04 07:01:35 +00001761 close() calls would attempt to free() the buffer already free()ed on
1762 the first call.
1763
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001764
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001765Extension modules
1766-----------------
1767
Barry Warsaw11b91a02004-06-28 00:50:43 +00001768- Added socket.getservbyport(), and make the second argument in
1769 getservbyname() and getservbyport() optional.
1770
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +00001771- time module code that deals with input POSIX timestamps will now raise
1772 ValueError if more than a second is lost in precision when the
1773 timestamp is cast to the platform C time_t type. There's no chance
1774 that the platform will do anything sensible with the result in such
1775 cases. This includes ctime(), localtime() and gmtime(). Assorted
1776 fromtimestamp() and utcfromtimestamp() methods in the datetime module
1777 were also protected. Closes bugs #919012 and 975996.
Brett Cannonb46ed712004-06-19 20:50:47 +00001778
Martin v. Löwis77ca6c42004-06-03 12:47:26 +00001779- fcntl.ioctl now warns if the mutate flag is not specified.
1780
Martin v. Löwisd8948722004-06-02 09:57:56 +00001781- nt now properly allows to refer to UNC roots, e.g. in nt.stat().
1782
Raymond Hettinger027bb632004-05-31 03:09:25 +00001783- the weakref module now supports additional objects: array.array,
1784 sre.pattern_objects, file objects, and sockets.
1785
Raymond Hettingere2eda602004-04-04 08:51:41 +00001786- operator.isMappingType() and operator.isSequenceType() now give
1787 fewer false positives.
1788
Brett Cannon06c34792004-03-23 23:16:54 +00001789- socket.sslerror is now a subclass of socket.error . Also added
1790 socket.error to the socket module's C API.
1791
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001792- Bug #920575: A problem where the _locale module segfaults on
Hye-Shik Changc3a87b82004-03-21 19:34:30 +00001793 nl_langinfo(ERA) caused by GNU libc's illegal NULL return is fixed.
1794
Raymond Hettinger6e2ee862004-03-14 04:37:50 +00001795- array objects now support the copy module. Also, their resizing
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001796 scheme has been updated to match that used for list objects. This improves
Raymond Hettinger49f9bd12004-03-14 05:43:59 +00001797 the performance (speed and memory usage) of append() operations.
Raymond Hettinger6ab78cd2004-08-29 07:50:43 +00001798 Also, array.array() and array.extend() now accept any iterable argument
1799 for repeated appends without needing to create another temporary array.
Raymond Hettinger3aa82c02004-03-13 18:18:51 +00001800
Raymond Hettinger3e47f652004-03-08 18:22:35 +00001801- cStringIO.writelines() now accepts any iterable argument and writes
1802 the lines one at a time rather than joining them and writing once.
1803 Made a parallel change to StringIO.writelines(). Saves memory and
1804 makes suitable for use with generator expressions.
1805
Brett Cannond1080a32004-03-02 04:38:10 +00001806- time.strftime() now checks that the values in its time tuple argument
1807 are within the proper boundaries to prevent possible crashes from the
1808 platform's C library implementation of strftime(). Can possibly
1809 break code that uses values outside the range that didn't cause
1810 problems previously (such as sitting day of year to 0). Fixes bug
1811 #897625.
1812
Martin v. Löwis12af0482004-01-31 12:34:17 +00001813- The socket module now supports Bluetooth sockets, if the
1814 system has <bluetooth/bluetooth.h>
1815
Raymond Hettinger756b3f32004-01-29 06:37:52 +00001816- Added a collections module containing a new datatype, deque(),
1817 offering high-performance, thread-safe, memory friendly appends
1818 and pops on either side of the deque.
1819
1820- Several modules now take advantage of collections.deque() for
1821 improved performance: Queue, mutex, shlex, threading, and pydoc.
1822
Raymond Hettinger166958b2003-12-01 13:18:39 +00001823- The operator module has two new functions, attrgetter() and
1824 itemgetter() which are useful for creating fast data extractor
1825 functions for map(), list.sort(), itertools.groupby(), and
1826 other functions that expect a function argument.
1827
Martin v. Löwis94681fc2003-11-27 19:40:22 +00001828- socket.SHUT_{RD,WR,RDWR} was added.
1829
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +00001830- os.getsid was added.
1831
Guido van Rossum16b9fa82003-10-23 23:54:57 +00001832- The pwd module incorrectly advertised its struct type as
1833 struct_pwent; this has been renamed to struct_passwd. (The old name
1834 is still supported for backwards compatibility.)
1835
Fred Drakede050322003-10-21 15:41:59 +00001836- The xml.parsers.expat module now provides Expat 1.95.7.
1837
Martin v. Löwis3bbd6542003-10-03 13:57:37 +00001838- socket.IPPROTO_IPV6 was added.
1839
Martin v. Löwise7a97962003-09-20 16:08:33 +00001840- readline.clear_history was added.
1841
Brett Cannon62dba4c2003-09-10 19:37:42 +00001842- select.select() now accepts sequences for its first three arguments.
1843
Raymond Hettinger5475f232003-08-08 12:20:03 +00001844- cStringIO now supports the f.closed attribute.
1845
Anthony Baxter83f52912003-08-05 06:33:56 +00001846- The signal module now exposes SIGRTMIN and SIGRTMAX (if available).
1847
Andrew M. Kuchling69f31eb2003-08-13 23:11:04 +00001848- curses module now supports use_default_colors(). [patch #739124]
1849
Anthony Baxter5c68ef02003-10-04 08:04:04 +00001850- Bug #811028: ncurses.h breakage on FreeBSD/MacOS X
1851
1852- Bug #814613: INET_ADDRSTRLEN fix needed for all compilers on SGI
1853
Gustavo Niemeyerad3fc442003-10-17 22:13:16 +00001854- Implemented non-recursive SRE matching scheme (#757624).
1855
1856- Implemented (?(id/name)yes|no) support in SRE (#572936).
1857
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +00001858- random.seed() with no arguments or None uses time.time() as a default
1859 seed. Modified to match Py2.2 behavior and use fractional seconds so
1860 that successive runs are more likely to produce different sequences.
1861
1862- random.Random has a new method, getrandbits(k), which returns an int
1863 with k random bits. This method is now an optional part of the API
1864 for user defined generators. Any generator that defines genrandbits()
1865 can now use randrange() for ranges with a length >= 2**53. Formerly,
1866 randrange would return only even numbers for ranges that large (see
1867 SF bug #812202). Generators that do not define genrandbits() now
1868 issue a warning when randrange() is called with a range that large.
1869
Raymond Hettingerd25c1c62003-12-06 16:23:06 +00001870- itertools has a new function, groupby() for aggregating iterables
1871 into groups sharing the same key (as determined by a key function).
1872 It offers some of functionality of SQL's groupby keyword and of
1873 the Unix uniq filter.
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +00001874
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001875- itertools now has a new tee() function which produces two independent
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +00001876 iterators from a single iterable.
1877
1878- itertools.izip() with no arguments now returns an empty iterator instead
1879 of raising a TypeError exception.
1880
Gustavo Niemeyera6e436e2004-02-14 00:02:45 +00001881- Fixed #853061: allow BZ2Compressor.compress() to receive an empty string
1882 as parameter.
1883
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001884Library
1885-------
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001886
Georg Brandlf0de6a12005-08-22 18:02:59 +00001887- Bug #1266283: The new function "lexists" is now in os.path.__all__.
1888
Guido van Rossum5124b4a2004-07-06 17:52:32 +00001889- Bug #981530: Fix UnboundLocalError in shutil.rmtree(). This affects
1890 the documented behavior: the function passed to the onerror()
1891 handler can now also be os.listdir.
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001892
Brett Cannon41d13f62004-07-03 03:54:54 +00001893- Bug #754449: threading.Thread objects no longer mask exceptions raised during
1894 interpreter shutdown with another exception from attempting to handle the
1895 original exception.
Brett Cannoncc4e9352004-07-03 03:52:35 +00001896
Raymond Hettinger21f9fce2004-07-10 16:11:03 +00001897- Added decimal.py per PEP 327.
Raymond Hettinger7c85fa42004-07-01 11:01:35 +00001898
Brett Cannon46d4ff22004-06-29 04:08:23 +00001899- Bug #981299: rsync is now a recognized protocol in urlparse that uses a
1900 "netloc" portion of a URL.
Brett Cannonfbac2942004-06-29 04:02:40 +00001901
Brett Cannon1c3fa182004-06-19 21:11:35 +00001902- Bug #919012: shutil.move() will not try to move a directory into itself.
1903 Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
1904
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +00001905- Bug #934282: pydoc.stripid() is now case-insensitive. Thanks Robin Becker.
1906
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +00001907- Bug #823209: cmath.log() now takes an optional base argument so that its
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +00001908 API matches math.log().
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +00001909
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001910- Bug #957381: distutils bdist_rpm no longer fails on recent RPM versions
Anthony Baxter1a4ddae2004-08-31 10:07:13 +00001911 that generate a -debuginfo.rpm
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001912
Martin v. Löwisbdec50f2004-06-08 08:29:33 +00001913- os.path.devnull has been added for all supported platforms.
1914
Hye-Shik Chang2400e932004-06-05 18:37:53 +00001915- Fixed #877165: distutils now picks the right C++ compiler command
1916 on cygwin and mingw32.
1917
Hye-Shik Chang39aef792004-06-05 13:30:56 +00001918- urllib.urlopen().readline() now handles HTTP/0.9 correctly.
1919
Brett Cannon0096e262004-06-05 01:12:51 +00001920- refactored site.py into functions. Also wrote regression tests for the
1921 module.
1922
Fred Drakeec6229e2004-06-25 23:02:59 +00001923- The distutils install command now supports the --home option and
1924 installation scheme for all platforms.
1925
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +00001926- asyncore.loop now has a repeat count parameter that defaults to
Michael W. Hudson7db865a2004-06-30 09:09:38 +00001927 looping forever.
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +00001928
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001929- The distutils sdist command now ignores all .svn directories, in
1930 addition to CVS and RCS directories. .svn directories hold
1931 administrative files for the Subversion source control system.
1932
Martin v. Löwis2a6ba902004-05-31 18:22:40 +00001933- Added a new module: cookielib. Automatic cookie handling for HTTP
1934 clients. Also, support for cookielib has been added to urllib2, so
1935 urllib2.urlopen() can transparently handle cookies.
1936
Raymond Hettinger059e1702004-05-19 19:56:44 +00001937- stringprep.py now uses built-in set() instead of sets.Set().
1938
Thomas Heller2e7c8322004-05-11 15:10:59 +00001939- Bug #876278: Unbounded recursion in modulefinder
1940
Martin v. Löwis456ab1d2004-05-06 01:54:36 +00001941- Bug #780300: Swap public and system ID in LexicalHandler.startDTD.
1942 Applications relying on the wrong order need to be corrected.
1943
Hye-Shik Chang0f5bf1e2004-04-20 21:11:11 +00001944- Bug #926075: Fixed a bug that returns a wrong pattern object
1945 for a string or unicode object in sre.compile() when a different
1946 type pattern with the same value exists.
1947
Skip Montanarod0c0c412004-04-07 16:03:02 +00001948- Added countcallers arg to trace.Trace class (--trackcalls command line arg
1949 when run from the command prompt).
1950
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +00001951- Fixed a caching bug in platform.platform() where the argument of 'terse' was
1952 not taken into consideration when caching value.
1953
Nicholas Bastin824b1b22004-03-23 18:44:39 +00001954- Added two new command-line arguments for profile (output file and
1955 default sort).
1956
Nicholas Bastin1eb4bfc2004-03-22 20:12:56 +00001957- Added global runctx function to profile module
1958
Martin v. Löwis347c30d2004-03-21 15:29:41 +00001959- Add hlist missing entryconfigure and entrycget methods.
1960
Hye-Shik Chang4a7ad1a2004-03-19 08:11:56 +00001961- The ptcp154 codec was added for Kazakh character set support.
1962
Martin v. Löwisa79449e2004-02-15 21:19:18 +00001963- Support non-anonymous ftp URLs in urllib2.
1964
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001965- The encodings package will now apply codec name aliases
Marc-André Lemburg57cb68f2004-01-20 18:24:34 +00001966 first before starting to try the import of the codec module.
1967 This simplifies overriding built-in codecs with external
1968 packages, e.g. the included CJK codecs with the JapaneseCodecs
1969 package, by adjusting the aliases dictionary in encodings.aliases
1970 accordingly.
1971
Barry Warsaw30ff12f2004-01-04 01:13:43 +00001972- base64 now supports RFC 3548 Base16, Base32, and Base64 encoding and
1973 decoding standards.
1974
Jeremy Hylton37c5f2a2003-12-14 05:29:45 +00001975- urllib2 now supports processors. A processor is a handler that
1976 implements an xxx_request or xxx_response method. These methods are
1977 called for all requests.
1978
Thomas Hellerc7501d52003-12-05 20:28:07 +00001979- distutils compilers now compile source files in the same order as
1980 they are passed to the compiler.
1981
Walter Dörwaldc8de4582003-12-03 20:26:05 +00001982- pprint.pprint() and pprint.pformat() now have additional parameters
1983 indent, width and depth.
1984
Walter Dörwald7a7ede52003-12-03 20:15:28 +00001985- Patch #750542: pprint now will pretty print subclasses of list, tuple
1986 and dict too, as long as they don't overwrite __repr__().
1987
Thomas Hellerb3105912003-11-28 19:42:56 +00001988- Bug #848614: distutils' msvccompiler fails to find the MSVC6
1989 compiler because of incomplete registry entries.
1990
Martin v. Löwisaf7dc8d2003-11-19 19:51:55 +00001991- httplib.HTTP.putrequest now offers to omit the implicit Accept-Encoding.
1992
Thomas Hellercf0005b2003-11-14 10:33:20 +00001993- Patch #841977: modulefinder didn't find extension modules in packages
1994
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +00001995- imaplib.IMAP4.thread was added.
1996
Guido van Rossum967b0632003-11-10 02:27:19 +00001997- Plugged a minor hole in tempfile.mktemp() due to the use of
1998 os.path.exists(), switched to using os.lstat() directly if possible.
1999
Raymond Hettinger0c410272004-01-05 10:13:35 +00002000- bisect.py and heapq.py now have underlying C implementations
Raymond Hettinger33ecffb2004-06-10 05:03:17 +00002001 for better performance.
2002
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00002003- heapq.py has two new functions, nsmallest() and nlargest().
Raymond Hettingerb3af1812003-11-08 10:24:38 +00002004
Neil Schemenauerf607fc52003-11-05 23:03:00 +00002005- traceback.format_exc has been added (similar to print_exc but it returns
2006 a string).
2007
Martin v. Löwis45394c22003-10-31 13:49:36 +00002008- xmlrpclib.MultiCall has been added.
2009
Martin v. Löwis48440b72003-10-31 12:52:35 +00002010- poplib.POP3_SSL has been added.
2011
Martin v. Löwisd6625482003-10-12 17:37:01 +00002012- tmpfile.mkstemp now returns an absolute path even if dir is relative.
2013
Brett Cannon5d9ca4e2003-10-12 04:38:48 +00002014- urlparse is RFC 2396 compliant.
2015
Skip Montanarodef99342003-10-03 14:07:07 +00002016- The fieldnames argument to the csv module's DictReader constructor is now
2017 optional. If omitted, the first row of the file will be used as the
2018 list of fieldnames.
2019
Raymond Hettinger9a80c5d2003-09-23 20:21:01 +00002020- encodings.bz2_codec was added for access to bz2 compression
2021 using "a long string".encode('bz2')
2022
Guido van Rossum0e5a51d2003-09-22 15:03:11 +00002023- Various improvements to unittest.py, realigned with PyUnit CVS.
2024
Martin v. Löwisc6bb6c02003-09-20 15:52:21 +00002025- dircache now passes exceptions to the caller, instead of returning
2026 empty lists.
2027
Raymond Hettingerdeadbf52003-09-12 06:33:37 +00002028- The bsddb module and dbhash module now support the iterator and
2029 mapping protocols which make them more substitutable for dictionaries
2030 and shelves.
2031
Skip Montanaro3f7a9482003-09-06 19:52:12 +00002032- The csv module's DictReader and DictWriter classes now accept keyword
2033 arguments. This was an omission in the initial implementation.
2034
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +00002035- The email package handles some RFC 2231 parameters with missing
Barry Warsaw2f5bf172003-09-03 04:09:49 +00002036 CHARSET fields better. It also includes a patch to parameter
2037 parsing when semicolons appear inside quotes.
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +00002038
Raymond Hettinger6a180122003-08-17 08:34:09 +00002039- sets.py now runs under Py2.2. In addition, the argument restrictions
2040 for most set methods (but not the operators) have been relaxed to
Raymond Hettinger70b9f492003-11-19 15:52:14 +00002041 allow any iterable.
Raymond Hettingeree562fc2003-08-15 21:17:04 +00002042
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +00002043- _strptime.py now has a behind-the-scenes caching mechanism for the most
Brett Cannonb7150a22003-08-05 06:27:04 +00002044 recent TimeRE instance used along with the last five unique directive
2045 patterns. The overall module was also made more thread-safe.
2046
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +00002047- random.cunifvariate() and random.stdgamma() were deprecated in Py2.3
2048 and removed in Py2.4.
2049
Anthony Baxter92bee362003-11-04 14:35:49 +00002050- Bug #823328: urllib2.py's HTTP Digest Auth support works again.
2051
Hye-Shik Chang84a99312004-01-17 14:59:36 +00002052- Patch #873597: CJK codecs are imported into rank of default codecs.
2053
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002054Tools/Demos
2055-----------
2056
Skip Montanarod5a21fd2004-01-27 14:49:04 +00002057- A hotshotmain script was added to the Tools/scripts directory that
2058 makes it easy to run a script under control of the hotshot profiler.
2059
Skip Montanaro030f68a2003-10-28 16:24:00 +00002060- The db2pickle and pickle2db scripts can now dump/load gdbm files.
2061
Skip Montanaroe2b61e02004-03-03 17:42:08 +00002062- The file order on the command line of the pickle2db script was reversed.
2063 It is now [ picklefile ] dbfile. This provides better symmetry with
2064 db2pickle. The file arguments to both scripts are now source followed by
2065 destination in situations where both files are given.
2066
Skip Montanarofd4fa882003-09-10 19:04:13 +00002067- The pydoc script will display a link to the module documentation for
2068 modules determined to be part of the core distribution. The documentation
2069 base directory defaults to http://www.python.org/doc/current/lib/ but can
2070 be changed by setting the PYTHONDOCS environment variable.
2071
Raymond Hettingere41d4c82003-08-25 04:39:55 +00002072- texcheck.py now detects double word errors.
2073
Tim Peters1a3abcb2003-08-18 23:52:09 +00002074- md5sum.py mistakenly opened input files in text mode by default, a
2075 silent and dangerous change from previous releases. It once again
2076 opens input files in binary mode by default. The -t and -b flags
2077 remain for compatibility with the 2.3 release, but -b is the default
2078 now.
2079
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002080- py-electric-colon now works when pending-delete/delete-selection mode is
2081 in effect
2082
2083- py-help-at-point is no longer bound to the F1 key - it's still bound to
2084 C-c C-h
2085
Barry Warsaw6ec58ca2003-09-03 03:20:37 +00002086- Pynche was fixed to not crash when there is no ~/.pynche file and no
2087 -d option was given.
2088
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002089Build
2090-----
2091
Brett Cannonf6af76d2004-06-26 04:03:06 +00002092- Bug #978645: Modules/getpath.c now builds properly in --disable-framework
2093 build under OS X.
2094
Skip Montanaro56f6a4f2004-06-18 02:47:22 +00002095- Profiling using gprof is now available if Python is configured with
2096 --enable-profiling.
2097
Martin v. Löwisf30d60e2004-06-08 08:17:44 +00002098- Profiling the VM using the Pentium TSC is now possible if Python
2099 is configured --with-tsc.
2100
Martin v. Löwis642c8a12004-06-04 13:55:13 +00002101- In order to find libraries, setup.py now also looks in /lib64, for use
2102 on AMD64.
2103
Hye-Shik Chang54f94392004-04-14 07:55:31 +00002104- Bug #934635: Fixed a bug where the configure script couldn't detect
2105 getaddrinfo() properly if the KAME stack had SCTP support.
2106
Skip Montanaro7befb992004-02-10 16:50:21 +00002107- Support for missing ANSI C header files (limits.h, stddef.h, etc) was
2108 removed.
2109
Skip Montanarodb608052004-02-07 13:53:46 +00002110- Systems requiring the D4, D6 or D7 variants of pthreads are no longer
2111 supported (see PEP 11).
2112
2113- Universal newline support can no longer be disabled (see PEP 11).
2114
Skip Montanarocd1f7432004-01-17 14:22:44 +00002115- Support for DGUX, SunOS 4, IRIX 4 and Minix was removed (see PEP 11).
2116
2117- Support for systems requiring --with-dl-dld or --with-sgi-dl was removed
2118 (see PEP 11).
2119
2120- Tests for sizeof(char) were removed since ANSI C mandates that
2121 sizeof(char) must be 1.
2122
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002123C API
2124-----
2125
Tim Peters9ddf40b2004-06-20 22:41:32 +00002126- Thanks to Anthony Tuininga, the datetime module now supplies a C API
2127 containing type-check macros and constructors. See new docs in the
2128 Python/C API Reference Manual for details.
2129
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +00002130- Private function _PyTime_DoubleToTimet added, to convert a Python
2131 timestamp (C double) to platform time_t with some out-of-bounds
2132 checking. Declared in new header file timefuncs.h. It would be
2133 good to expose some other internal timemodule.c functions there.
2134
Martin v. Löwise440e472004-06-01 15:22:42 +00002135- New public functions PyEval_EvaluateFrame and PyGen_New to expose
2136 generator objects.
2137
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +00002138- New public functions Py_IncRef() and Py_DecRef(), exposing the
2139 functionality of the Py_XINCREF() and Py_XDECREF macros. Useful for
Thomas Hellercc10a852004-04-22 17:28:25 +00002140 runtime dynamic embedding of Python. See patch #938302, by Bob
2141 Ippolito.
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +00002142
Raymond Hettingerc1e4f9d2004-03-12 08:04:00 +00002143- Added a new macro, PySequence_Fast_ITEMS, which retrieves a fast sequence's
2144 underlying array of PyObject pointers. Useful for high speed looping.
2145
Raymond Hettinger8f5cdaa2003-12-13 11:26:12 +00002146- Created a new method flag, METH_COEXIST, which causes a method to be loaded
2147 even if already defined by a slot wrapper. This allows a __contains__
2148 method, for example, to co-exist with a defined sq_contains slot. This
2149 is helpful because the PyCFunction can take advantage of optimized calls
2150 whenever METH_O or METH_NOARGS flags are defined.
2151
Raymond Hettingerbc0f2ab2003-11-25 21:12:14 +00002152- Added a new function, PyDict_Contains(d, k) which is like
2153 PySequence_Contains() but is specific to dictionaries and executes
2154 about 10% faster.
2155
Brett Cannon26b3a7b2003-10-19 21:31:43 +00002156- Added three new macros: Py_RETURN_NONE, Py_RETURN_TRUE, and Py_RETURN_FALSE.
2157 Each return the singleton they mention after Py_INCREF()ing them.
2158
Raymond Hettingercb2da432003-10-12 18:24:34 +00002159- Added a new function, PyTuple_Pack(n, ...) for constructing tuples from a
2160 variable length argument list of Python objects without having to invoke
2161 the more complex machinery of Py_BuildValue(). PyTuple_Pack(3, a, b, c)
2162 is equivalent to Py_BuildValue("(OOO)", a, b, c).
2163
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002164Windows
2165-------
2166
Guido van Rossumfd25aca2003-11-30 22:10:15 +00002167- The _winreg module could segfault when reading very large registry
2168 values, due to unchecked alloca() calls (SF bug 851056). The fix is
2169 uses either PyMem_Malloc(n) or PyString_FromStringAndSize(NULL, n),
2170 as appropriate, followed by a size check.
2171
Tim Petersf1827cf2003-09-07 03:30:18 +00002172- file.truncate() could misbehave if the file was open for update
2173 (modes r+, rb+, w+, wb+), and the most recent file operation before
2174 the truncate() call was an input operation. SF bug 801631.
2175
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002176
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00002177What's New in Python 2.3 final?
2178===============================
2179
2180*Release date: 29-Jul-2003*
2181
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00002182IDLE
2183----
2184
Tim Peters36c1afc2003-07-29 17:22:57 +00002185- Bug 778400: IDLE hangs when selecting "Edit with IDLE" from explorer.
2186 This was unique to Windows, and was fixed by adding an -n switch to
2187 the command the Windows installer creates to execute "Edit with IDLE"
2188 context-menu actions.
2189
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00002190- IDLE displays a new message upon startup: some "personal firewall"
2191 kinds of programs (for example, ZoneAlarm) open a dialog of their
2192 own when any program opens a socket. IDLE does use sockets, talking
2193 on the computer's internal loopback interface. This connection is not
2194 visible on any external interface and no data is sent to or received
2195 from the Internet. So, if you get such a dialog when opening IDLE,
2196 asking whether to let pythonw.exe talk to address 127.0.0.1, say yes,
2197 and rest assured no communication external to your machine is taking
2198 place. If you don't allow it, IDLE won't be able to start.
2199
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00002200
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002201What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 2?
2202=============================================
2203
Tim Peters6560a252003-07-24 00:15:46 +00002204*Release date: 24-Jul-2003*
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002205
2206Core and builtins
2207-----------------
2208
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00002209- It is now possible to import from zipfiles containing additional
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002210 data bytes before the zip compatible archive. Zipfiles containing a
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00002211 comment at the end are still unsupported.
2212
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002213Extension modules
2214-----------------
2215
2216- A longstanding bug in the parser module's initialization could cause
2217 fatal internal refcount confusion when the module got initialized more
2218 than once. This has been fixed.
2219
Fred Drake01a43122003-07-21 17:17:10 +00002220- Fixed memory leak in pyexpat; using the parser's ParseFile() method
2221 with open files that aren't instances of the standard file type
2222 caused an instance of the bound .read() method to be leaked on every
2223 call.
2224
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002225- Fixed some leaks in the locale module.
2226
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002227Library
2228-------
2229
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002230- Lib/encodings/rot_13.py when used as a script, now more properly
2231 uses the first Python interpreter on your path.
2232
2233- Removed caching of TimeRE (and thus LocaleTime) in _strptime.py to
2234 fix a locale related bug in the test suite. Although another patch
2235 was needed to actually fix the problem, the cache code was not
2236 restored.
2237
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00002238IDLE
2239----
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002240
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00002241- Calltips patches.
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002242
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002243Build
2244-----
2245
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002246- For MacOSX, added -mno-fused-madd to BASECFLAGS to fix test_coercion
2247 on Panther (OSX 10.3).
2248
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002249C API
2250-----
2251
2252Windows
2253-------
2254
Tim Peters291f14e2003-07-22 02:50:01 +00002255- The tempfile module could do insane imports on Windows if PYTHONCASEOK
2256 was set, making temp file creation impossible. Repaired.
2257
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002258- Add a patch to workaround pthread_sigmask() bugs in Cygwin.
2259
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002260Mac
2261---
2262
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002263- Various fixes to pimp.
2264
2265- Scripts runs with pythonw no longer had full window manager access.
2266
2267- Don't force boot-disk-only install, for reasons unknown it causes
2268 more problems than it solves.
2269
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002270
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002271What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 1?
2272=============================================
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002273
Jeremy Hylton0ed18c22003-07-18 20:10:02 +00002274*Release date: 18-Jul-2003*
2275
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002276Core and builtins
2277-----------------
2278
Tim Peterse5e065b2003-07-06 18:36:54 +00002279- The new function sys.getcheckinterval() returns the last value set
2280 by sys.setcheckinterval().
2281
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002282- Several bugs in the symbol table phase of the compiler have been
2283 fixed. Errors could be lost and compilation could fail without
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002284 reporting an error. SF patch 763201.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002285
2286- The interpreter is now more robust about importing the warnings
2287 module. In an executable generated by freeze or similar programs,
2288 earlier versions of 2.3 would fail if the warnings module could
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002289 not be found on the file system. Fixes SF bug 771097.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002290
2291- A warning about assignments to module attributes that shadow
2292 builtins, present in earlier releases of 2.3, has been removed.
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002293
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002294- It is not possible to create subclasses of builtin types like str
2295 and tuple that define an itemsize. Earlier releases of Python 2.3
2296 allowed this by mistake, leading to crashes and other problems.
2297
2298- The thread_id is now initialized to 0 in a non-thread build. SF bug
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002299 770247.
2300
2301- SF bug 762891: "del p[key]" on proxy object no longer raises SystemError.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002302
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002303Extension modules
2304-----------------
2305
2306- weakref.proxy() can now handle "del obj[i]" for proxy objects
2307 defining __delitem__. Formerly, it generated a SystemError.
2308
2309- SSL no longer crashes the interpreter when the remote side disconnects.
2310
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002311- On Unix the mmap module can again be used to map device files.
2312
Brett Cannon20def8b2003-07-01 05:16:08 +00002313- time.strptime now exclusively uses the Python implementation
2314 contained within the _strptime module.
2315
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002316- The print slot of weakref proxy objects was removed, because it was
2317 not consistent with the object's repr slot.
2318
2319- The mmap module only checks file size for regular files, not
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002320 character or block devices. SF patch 708374.
2321
2322- The cPickle Pickler garbage collection support was fixed to traverse
2323 the find_class attribute, if present.
2324
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002325- There are several fixes for the bsddb3 wrapper module.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002326
2327 bsddb3 no longer crashes if an environment is closed before a cursor
2328 (SF bug 763298).
2329
2330 The DB and DBEnv set_get_returns_none function was extended to take
Barry Warsawd71a5512003-07-20 18:00:54 +00002331 a level instead of a boolean flag. The new level 2 means that in
2332 addition, cursor.set()/.get() methods return None instead of raising
2333 an exception.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002334
2335 A typo was fixed in DBCursor.join_item(), preventing a crash.
2336
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002337Library
2338-------
2339
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002340- distutils now supports MSVC 7.1
2341
Raymond Hettinger71adf7e2003-07-16 19:25:22 +00002342- doctest now examines all docstrings by default. Previously, it would
2343 skip over functions with private names (as indicated by the underscore
2344 naming convention). The old default created too much of a risk that
2345 user tests were being skipped inadvertently. Note, this change could
2346 break code in the unlikely case that someone had intentionally put
2347 failing tests in the docstrings of private functions. The breakage
2348 is easily fixable by specifying the old behavior when calling testmod()
2349 or Tester().
2350
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002351- There were several fixes to the way dumbdbms are closed. It's vital
2352 that a dumbdbm database be closed properly, else the on-disk data
2353 and directory files can be left in mutually inconsistent states.
2354 dumbdbm.py's _Database.__del__() method attempted to close the
2355 database properly, but a shutdown race in _Database._commit() could
2356 prevent this from working, so that a program trusting __del__() to
2357 get the on-disk files in synch could be badly surprised. The race
2358 has been repaired. A sync() method was also added so that shelve
2359 can guarantee data is written to disk.
Tim Peters7a6c7332003-07-13 17:21:10 +00002360
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002361 The close() method can now be called more than once without complaint.
Tim Petersd7472ec2003-07-13 02:22:03 +00002362
Tim Peters59aba122003-07-01 20:01:55 +00002363- The classes in threading.py are now new-style classes. That they
2364 weren't before was an oversight.
2365
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002366- The urllib2 digest authentication handlers now define the correct
2367 auth_header. The earlier versions would fail at runtime.
2368
Neal Norwitze7dfe212003-07-01 14:59:46 +00002369- SF bug 763023: fix uncaught ZeroDivisionError in difflib ratio methods
2370 when there are no lines.
2371
Neal Norwitz3c0f2c92003-07-01 21:12:47 +00002372- SF bug 763637: fix exception in Tkinter with after_cancel
2373 which could occur with Tk 8.4
2374
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002375- SF bug 770601: CGIHTTPServer.py now passes the entire environment
2376 to child processes.
2377
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002378- SF bug 765238: add filter to fnmatch's __all__.
2379
2380- SF bug 748201: make time.strptime() error messages more helpful.
2381
2382- SF patch 764470: Do not dump the args attribute of a Fault object in
2383 xmlrpclib.
2384
2385- SF patch 549151: urllib and urllib2 now redirect POSTs on 301
2386 responses.
2387
2388- SF patch 766650: The whichdb module was fixed to recognize dbm files
2389 generated by gdbm on OS/2 EMX.
2390
2391- SF bugs 763047 and 763052: fixes bug of timezone value being left as
2392 -1 when ``time.tzname[0] == time.tzname[1] and not time.daylight``
2393 is true when it should only when time.daylight is true.
2394
2395- SF bug 764548: re now allows subclasses of str and unicode to be
2396 used as patterns.
2397
2398- SF bug 763637: In Tkinter, change after_cancel() to handle tuples
2399 of varying sizes. Tk 8.4 returns a different number of values
2400 than Tk 8.3.
2401
2402- SF bug 763023: difflib.ratio() did not catch zero division.
2403
2404- The Queue module now has an __all__ attribute.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002405
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002406Tools/Demos
2407-----------
2408
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002409- See Lib/idlelib/NEWS.txt for IDLE news.
2410
Neal Norwitz592c4cc2003-07-01 04:14:28 +00002411- SF bug 753592: webchecker/wsgui now handles user supplied directories.
2412
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002413- The trace.py script has been removed. It is now in the standard library.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002414
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002415Build
2416-----
2417
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002418- Python now compiles with -fno-strict-aliasing if possible (SF bug 766696).
2419
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002420- The socket module compiles on IRIX 6.5.10.
2421
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002422- An irix64 system is treated the same way as an irix6 system (SF
2423 patch 764560).
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002424
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002425- Several definitions were missing on FreeBSD 5.x unless the
2426 __BSD_VISIBLE symbol was defined. configure now defines it as
2427 needed.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002428
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002429C API
2430-----
2431
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002432- Unicode objects now support mbcs as a built-in encoding, so the C
2433 API can use it without deferring to the encodings package.
2434
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002435Windows
2436-------
2437
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002438- The Windows implementation of PyThread_start_new_thread() never
2439 checked error returns from Windows functions correctly. As a result,
2440 it could claim to start a new thread even when the Microsoft
2441 _beginthread() function failed (due to "too many threads" -- this is
2442 on the order of thousands when it happens). In these cases, the
2443 Python exception ::
2444
2445 thread.error: can't start new thread
2446
2447 is raised now.
2448
2449- SF bug 766669: Prevent a GPF on interpreter exit when sockets are in
2450 use. The interpreter now calls WSACleanup() from Py_Finalize()
2451 instead of from DLL teardown.
2452
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002453Mac
2454---
2455
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002456- Bundlebuilder now inherits default values in the right way. It was
Walter Dörwald73a8a4b2003-07-30 12:14:02 +00002457 previously possible for app bundles to get a type of "BNDL" instead
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002458 of "APPL." Other improvements include, a --build-id option to
2459 specify the CFBundleIdentifier and using the --python option to set
2460 the executable in the bundle.
2461
2462- Fixed two bugs in MacOSX framework handling.
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002463
Jack Jansene0040412003-07-23 22:17:28 +00002464- pythonw did not allow user interaction in 2.3rc1, this has been fixed.
2465
2466- Python is now compiled with -mno-fused-madd, making all tests pass
2467 on Panther.
2468
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002469What's New in Python 2.3 beta 2?
2470================================
2471
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00002472*Release date: 29-Jun-2003*
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002473
2474Core and builtins
2475-----------------
2476
Barry Warsaw883f2232003-06-29 17:10:11 +00002477- A program can now set the environment variable PYTHONINSPECT to some
2478 string value in Python, and cause the interpreter to enter the
2479 interactive prompt at program exit, as if Python had been invoked
2480 with the -i option.
2481
Raymond Hettingerd05abde2003-06-17 05:05:49 +00002482- list.index() now accepts optional start and stop arguments. Similar
2483 changes were made to UserList.index(). SF feature request 754014.
2484
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002485- SF patch 751998 fixes an unwanted side effect of the previous fix
2486 for SF bug 742860 (the next item).
2487
Tim Peters50d8b8b2003-05-25 17:44:31 +00002488- SF bug 742860: "WeakKeyDictionary __delitem__ uses iterkeys". This
2489 wasn't threadsafe, was very inefficient (expected time O(len(dict))
2490 instead of O(1)), and could raise a spurious RuntimeError if another
2491 thread mutated the dict during __delitem__, or if a comparison function
2492 mutated it. It also neglected to raise KeyError when the key wasn't
2493 present; didn't raise TypeError when the key wasn't of a weakly
2494 referencable type; and broke various more-or-less obscure dict
2495 invariants by using a sequence of equality comparisons over the whole
2496 set of dict keys instead of computing the key's hash code to narrow
2497 the search to those keys with the same hash code. All of these are
2498 considered to be bugs. A new implementation of __delitem__ repairs all
2499 that, but note that fixing these bugs may change visible behavior in
2500 code relying (whether intentionally or accidentally) on old behavior.
Tim Peters886128f2003-05-25 01:45:11 +00002501
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002502- SF bug 734869: Fixed a compiler bug that caused a fatal error when
2503 compiling a list comprehension that contained another list comprehension
2504 embedded in a lambda expression.
2505
Tim Peterse87568d2003-05-24 20:18:24 +00002506- SF bug 705231: builtin pow() no longer lets the platform C pow()
2507 raise -1.0 to integer powers, because (at least) glibc gets it wrong
2508 in some cases. The result should be -1.0 if the power is odd and 1.0
2509 if the power is even, and any float with a sufficiently large exponent
2510 is (mathematically) an exact even integer.
2511
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002512- SF bug 759227: A new-style class that implements __nonzero__() must
2513 return a bool or int (but not an int subclass) from that method. This
2514 matches the restriction on classic classes.
2515
Martin v. Löwis5467d4c2003-05-10 07:10:12 +00002516- The encoding attribute has been added for file objects, and set to
2517 the terminal encoding on Unix and Windows.
2518
Tim Peters015dd822003-05-04 04:16:52 +00002519- The softspace attribute of file objects became read-only by oversight.
2520 It's writable again.
2521
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00002522- Reverted a 2.3 beta 1 change to iterators for subclasses of list and
2523 tuple. By default, the iterators now access data elements directly
2524 instead of going through __getitem__. If __getitem__ access is
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002525 preferred, then __iter__ can be overridden.
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00002526
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002527- SF bug 735247: The staticmethod and super types participate in
2528 garbage collection. Before this change, it was possible for leaks to
2529 occur in functions with non-global free variables that used these types.
2530
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002531Extension modules
2532-----------------
2533
Raymond Hettinger643bcec2003-06-29 03:29:42 +00002534- the socket module has a new exception, socket.timeout, to allow
2535 timeouts to be handled separately from other socket errors.
2536
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002537- SF bug 751276: cPickle has fixed to propagate exceptions raised in
2538 user code. In earlier versions, cPickle caught and ignored any
2539 exception when it performed operations that it expected to raise
2540 specific exceptions like AttributeError.
2541
2542- cPickle Pickler and Unpickler objects now participate in garbage
2543 collection.
2544
Tim Peterscda32b72003-06-15 23:13:35 +00002545- mimetools.choose_boundary() could return duplicate strings at times,
2546 especially likely on Windows. The strings returned are now guaranteed
2547 unique within a single program run.
2548
Brett Cannon4e64d782003-06-13 23:44:35 +00002549- thread.interrupt_main() raises KeyboardInterrupt in the main thread.
2550 dummy_thread has also been modified to try to simulate the behavior.
2551
Walter Dörwald9e46abe2003-05-18 03:15:10 +00002552- array.array.insert() now treats negative indices as being relative
2553 to the end of the array, just like list.insert() does. (SF bug #739313)
2554
Tim Petersb0c854d2003-05-17 15:57:00 +00002555- The datetime module classes datetime, time, and timedelta are now
2556 properly subclassable.
Tim Petersa98924a2003-05-17 05:55:19 +00002557
Martin v. Löwis28e9ce92003-05-09 08:19:48 +00002558- _tkinter.{get|set}busywaitinterval was added.
2559
Raymond Hettinger834f4632003-05-02 20:24:56 +00002560- itertools.islice() now accepts stop=None as documented.
2561 Fixes SF bug #730685.
2562
Skip Montanaro8c044d82003-05-06 20:42:37 +00002563- the bsddb185 module is built in one restricted instance -
2564 /usr/include/db.h exists and defines HASHVERSION to be 2. This is true
2565 for many BSD-derived systems.
2566
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002567
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002568Library
2569-------
2570
Tim Petersdb3756d2003-06-29 05:30:48 +00002571- Some happy doctest extensions from Jim Fulton have been added to
2572 doctest.py. These are already being used in Zope3. The two
2573 primary ones:
2574
2575 doctest.debug(module, name) extracts the doctests from the named object
2576 in the given module, puts them in a temp file, and starts pdb running
2577 on that file. This is great when a doctest fails.
2578
2579 doctest.DocTestSuite(module=None) returns a synthesized unittest
2580 TestSuite instance, to be run by the unittest framework, which
2581 runs all the doctests in the module. This allows writing tests in
2582 doctest style (which can be clearer and shorter than writing tests
2583 in unittest style), without losing unittest's powerful testing
2584 framework features (which doctest lacks).
2585
Tim Peters6ebe61f2003-06-27 20:48:05 +00002586- For compatibility with doctests created before 2.3, if an expected
2587 output block consists solely of "1" and the actual output block
2588 consists solely of "True", it's accepted as a match; similarly
2589 for "0" and "False". This is quite un-doctest-like, but is practical.
2590 The behavior can be disabled by passing the new doctest module
2591 constant DONT_ACCEPT_TRUE_FOR_1 to the new optionflags optional
2592 argument.
2593
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002594- ZipFile.testzip() now only traps BadZipfile exceptions. Previously,
2595 a bare except caught to much and reported all errors as a problem
2596 in the archive.
2597
2598- The logging module now has a new function, makeLogRecord() making
2599 LogHandler easier to interact with DatagramHandler and SocketHandler.
2600
Skip Montanaro364ca402003-06-17 12:58:31 +00002601- The cgitb module has been extended to support plain text display (SF patch
2602 569574).
2603
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002604- A brand new version of IDLE (from the IDLEfork project at
2605 SourceForge) is now included as Lib/idlelib. The old Tools/idle is
2606 no more.
2607
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002608- Added a new module: trace (documentation missing). This module used
2609 to be distributed in Tools/scripts. It uses sys.settrace() to trace
2610 code execution -- either function calls or individual lines. It can
2611 generate tracing output during execution or a post-mortem report of
2612 code coverage.
2613
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00002614- The threading module has new functions settrace() and setprofile()
2615 that cooperate with the functions of the same name in the sys
2616 module. A function registered with the threading module will
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002617 be used for all threads it creates. The new trace module uses this
2618 to provide tracing for code running in threads.
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00002619
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00002620- copy.py: applied SF patch 707900, fixing bug 702858, by Steven
2621 Taschuk. Copying a new-style class that had a reference to itself
2622 didn't work. (The same thing worked fine for old-style classes.)
Martin v. Löwisba8f5ff2003-06-14 07:10:06 +00002623 Builtin functions are now treated as atomic, fixing bug #746304.
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00002624
Raymond Hettingerc24d7672003-06-08 19:42:33 +00002625- difflib.py has two new functions: context_diff() and unified_diff().
2626
Guido van Rossumfa19f7c2003-05-16 01:46:51 +00002627- More fixes to urllib (SF 549151): (a) When redirecting, always use
2628 GET. This is common practice and more-or-less sanctioned by the
2629 HTTP standard. (b) Add a handler for 307 redirection, which becomes
2630 an error for POST, but a regular redirect for GET and HEAD
2631
Guido van Rossumbf1bef82003-05-13 18:01:19 +00002632- Added optional 'onerror' argument to os.walk(), to control error
2633 handling.
2634
Martin v. Löwise59e2ba2003-05-03 09:09:02 +00002635- inspect.is{method|data}descriptor was added, to allow pydoc display
2636 __doc__ of data descriptors.
2637
Skip Montanaro4a7751c2003-04-29 21:07:16 +00002638- Fixed socket speed loss caused by use of the _socketobject wrapper class
2639 in socket.py.
2640
Raymond Hettinger22952a32003-05-20 04:59:56 +00002641- timeit.py now checks the current directory for imports.
2642
Gustavo Niemeyer9556fba2003-06-07 17:53:08 +00002643- urllib2.py now knows how to order proxy classes, so the user doesn't
2644 have to insert it in front of other classes, nor do dirty tricks like
2645 inserting a "dummy" HTTPHandler after a ProxyHandler when building an
2646 opener with proxy support.
2647
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002648- Iterators have been added for dbm keys.
2649
2650- random.Random objects can now be pickled.
2651
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002652Tools/Demos
2653-----------
2654
Martin v. Löwisb8c084e2003-06-14 09:03:46 +00002655- pydoc now offers help on keywords and topics.
2656
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002657- Tools/idle is gone; long live Lib/idlelib.
2658
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00002659- diff.py prints file diffs in context, unified, or ndiff formats,
2660 providing a command line interface to difflib.py.
Raymond Hettinger2f3c74a2003-06-08 23:10:15 +00002661
Raymond Hettinger71e00332003-05-10 03:30:13 +00002662- texcheck.py is a new script for making a rough validation of Python LaTeX
2663 files.
2664
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002665Build
2666-----
2667
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002668- Setting DESTDIR during 'make install' now allows specifying a
Martin v. Löwis3b8ee082003-05-11 20:25:35 +00002669 different root directory.
2670
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002671C API
2672-----
2673
Tim Peters3cfe7542003-05-21 21:29:48 +00002674- PyType_Ready(): If a type declares that it participates in gc
2675 (Py_TPFLAGS_HAVE_GC), and its base class does not, and its base class's
2676 tp_free slot is the default _PyObject_Del, and type does not define
2677 a tp_free slot itself, _PyObject_GC_Del is assigned to type->tp_free.
2678 Previously _PyObject_Del was inherited, which could at best lead to a
2679 segfault. In addition, if even after this magic the type's tp_free
2680 slot is _PyObject_Del or NULL, and the type is a base type
2681 (Py_TPFLAGS_BASETYPE), TypeError is raised: since the type is a base
2682 type, its dealloc function must call type->tp_free, and since the type
2683 is gc'able, tp_free must not be NULL or _PyObject_Del.
2684
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002685- PyThreadState_SetAsyncExc(): A new API (deliberately accessible only
2686 from C) to interrupt a thread by sending it an exception. It is
2687 intentional that you have to write your own C extension to call it
2688 from Python.
2689
2690
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002691New platforms
2692-------------
2693
2694None this time.
2695
2696Tests
2697-----
2698
2699- test_imp rewritten so that it doesn't raise RuntimeError if run as a
2700 side effect of being imported ("import test.autotest").
2701
2702Windows
2703-------
2704
Tim Petersfaa697a2003-06-22 01:42:20 +00002705- The Windows installer ships with Tcl/Tk 8.4.3 (upgraded from 8.4.1).
2706
Tim Petersc4607da2003-05-08 18:13:59 +00002707- The installer always suggested that Python be installed on the C:
2708 drive, due to a hardcoded "C:" generated by the Wise installation
2709 wizard. People with machines where C: is not the system drive
2710 usually want Python installed on whichever drive is their system drive
2711 instead. We removed the hardcoded "C:", and two testers on machines
2712 where C: is not the system drive report that the installer now
2713 suggests their system drive. Note that you can always select the
2714 directory you want in the "Select Destination Directory" dialog --
2715 that's what it's for.
2716
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002717Mac
2718---
2719
Just van Rossum99bc1fc2003-05-09 15:01:25 +00002720- There's a new module called "autoGIL", which offers a mechanism to
2721 automatically release the Global Interpreter Lock when an event loop
2722 goes to sleep, allowing other threads to run. It's currently only
2723 supported on OSX, in the Mach-O version.
Jack Jansenf5e23ff2003-06-16 13:53:40 +00002724- The OSA modules now allow direct access to properties of the
2725 toplevel application class (in AppleScript terminology).
2726- The Package Manager can now update itself.
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002727
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002728SourceForge Bugs and Patches Applied
2729------------------------------------
2730
2731430160, 471893, 501716, 542562, 549151, 569574, 595837, 596434,
2732598163, 604210, 604716, 610332, 612627, 614770, 620190, 621891,
2733622042, 639139, 640236, 644345, 649742, 649742, 658233, 660022,
2734661318, 661676, 662807, 662923, 666219, 672855, 678325, 682347,
2735683486, 684981, 685773, 686254, 692776, 692959, 693094, 696777,
2736697989, 700827, 703666, 708495, 708604, 708901, 710733, 711902,
2737713722, 715782, 718286, 719359, 719367, 723136, 723831, 723962,
2738724588, 724767, 724767, 725942, 726150, 726446, 726869, 727051,
2739727719, 727719, 727805, 728277, 728563, 728656, 729096, 729103,
2740729293, 729297, 729300, 729317, 729395, 729622, 729817, 730170,
2741730296, 730594, 730685, 730826, 730963, 731209, 731403, 731504,
2742731514, 731626, 731635, 731643, 731644, 731644, 731689, 732124,
2743732143, 732234, 732284, 732284, 732479, 732761, 732783, 732951,
2744733667, 733781, 734118, 734231, 734869, 735051, 735293, 735527,
2745735613, 735694, 736962, 736962, 737970, 738066, 739313, 740055,
2746740234, 740301, 741806, 742126, 742741, 742860, 742860, 742911,
2747744041, 744104, 744238, 744687, 744877, 745055, 745478, 745525,
2748745620, 746012, 746304, 746366, 746801, 746953, 747348, 747667,
2749747954, 748846, 748849, 748973, 748975, 749191, 749210, 749759,
2750749831, 749911, 750008, 750092, 750542, 750595, 751038, 751107,
2751751276, 751451, 751916, 751941, 751956, 751998, 752671, 753451,
2752753602, 753617, 753845, 753925, 754014, 754340, 754447, 755031,
2753755087, 755147, 755245, 755683, 755987, 756032, 756996, 757058,
2754757229, 757818, 757821, 757822, 758112, 758910, 759227, 759889,
2755760257, 760703, 760792, 761104, 761337, 761519, 761830, 762455
2756
2757
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002758What's New in Python 2.3 beta 1?
2759================================
2760
Guido van Rossumfa1eddf2003-04-25 19:19:52 +00002761*Release date: 25-Apr-2003*
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002762
2763Core and builtins
2764-----------------
2765
Thomas Heller5eccabc2003-04-23 19:35:25 +00002766- New format codes B, H, I, k and K have been implemented for
2767 PyArg_ParseTuple and PyBuild_Value.
2768
Alex Martellia70b1912003-04-22 08:12:33 +00002769- New builtin function sum(seq, start=0) returns the sum of all the
2770 items in iterable object seq, plus start (items are normally numbers,
2771 and cannot be strings).
2772
Guido van Rossumaa86e352003-04-19 18:15:10 +00002773- bool() called without arguments now returns False rather than
2774 raising an exception. This is consistent with calling the
2775 constructors for the other builtin types -- called without argument
2776 they all return the false value of that type. (SF patch #724135)
2777
Guido van Rossumcf8d2852003-04-17 16:53:26 +00002778- In support of PEP 269 (making the pgen parser generator accessible
2779 from Python), some changes to the pgen code structure were made; a
2780 few files that used to be linked only with pgen are now linked with
2781 Python itself.
2782
Guido van Rossumc1f6e8c2003-04-16 21:13:23 +00002783- The repr() of a weakref object now shows the __name__ attribute of
2784 the referenced object, if it has one.
2785
Guido van Rossum76ba09f2003-04-16 19:40:58 +00002786- super() no longer ignores data descriptors, except __class__. See
2787 the thread started at
2788 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2003-April/034338.html
2789
Guido van Rossum3a3cca52003-04-14 20:58:14 +00002790- list.insert(i, x) now interprets negative i as it would be
2791 interpreted by slicing, so negative values count from the end of the
2792 list. This was the only place where such an interpretation was not
2793 placed on a list index.
2794
Guido van Rossumefbbb1c2003-04-11 18:43:06 +00002795- range() now works even if the arguments are longs with magnitude
2796 larger than sys.maxint, as long as the total length of the sequence
2797 fits. E.g., range(2**100, 2**101, 2**100) is the following list:
2798 [1267650600228229401496703205376L]. (SF patch #707427.)
2799
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002800- Some horridly obscure problems were fixed involving interaction
2801 between garbage collection and old-style classes with "ambitious"
2802 getattr hooks. If an old-style instance didn't have a __del__ method,
2803 but did have a __getattr__ hook, and the instance became reachable
2804 only from an unreachable cycle, and the hook resurrected or deleted
2805 unreachable objects when asked to resolve "__del__", anything up to
2806 a segfault could happen. That's been repaired.
2807
Raymond Hettingera3e1e4c2003-03-06 23:54:28 +00002808- dict.pop now takes an optional argument specifying a default
2809 value to return if the key is not in the dict. If a default is not
2810 given and the key is not found, a KeyError will still be raised.
2811 Parallel changes were made to UserDict.UserDict and UserDict.DictMixin.
2812 [SF patch #693753] (contributed by Michael Stone.)
2813
Martin v. Löwis73d538b2003-03-05 15:13:47 +00002814- sys.getfilesystemencoding() was added to expose
2815 Py_FileSystemDefaultEncoding.
Guido van Rossum46d3dc32003-03-01 03:20:41 +00002816
2817- New function sys.exc_clear() clears the current exception. This is
2818 rarely needed, but can sometimes be useful to release objects
2819 referenced by the traceback held in sys.exc_info()[2]. (SF patch
2820 #693195.)
2821
Neal Norwitzd5a65a72003-02-23 23:11:41 +00002822- On 64-bit systems, a dictionary could contain duplicate long/int keys
2823 if the key value was larger than 2**32. See SF bug #689659.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002824
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00002825- Fixed SF bug #663074. The codec system was using global static
Walter Dörwaldfa86bf52003-03-31 16:15:13 +00002826 variables to store internal data. As a result, any attempts to use the
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00002827 unicode system with multiple active interpreters, or successive
2828 interpreter executions, would fail.
2829
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00002830- "%c" % u"a" now returns a unicode string instead of raising a
Walter Dörwald44f527f2003-04-02 16:37:24 +00002831 TypeError. u"%c" % 0xffffffff now raises a OverflowError instead
Walter Dörwald1e469c52003-04-02 16:57:59 +00002832 of a ValueError to be consistent with "%c" % 256. See SF patch #710127.
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00002833
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002834Extension modules
2835-----------------
2836
Guido van Rossume7adda92003-04-25 05:52:37 +00002837- The socket module now provides the functions inet_pton and inet_ntop
2838 for converting between string and packed representation of IP
2839 addresses. There is also a new module variable, has_ipv6, which is
2840 True iff the current Python has IPv6 support. See SF patch #658327.
2841
Martin v. Löwisbfe175c2003-04-16 19:42:51 +00002842- Tkinter wrappers around Tcl variables now pass objects directly
2843 to Tcl, instead of first converting them to strings.
2844
Guido van Rossum41c99e72003-04-14 17:59:34 +00002845- The .*? pattern in the re module is now special-cased to avoid the
2846 recursion limit. (SF patch #720991 -- many thanks to Gary Herron
2847 and Greg Chapman.)
2848
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00002849- New function sys.call_tracing() allows pdb to debug code
2850 recursively.
2851
Tim Peters730f5532003-04-08 17:17:17 +00002852- New function gc.get_referents(obj) returns a list of objects
Tim Peters0f81ab62003-04-08 16:39:48 +00002853 directly referenced by obj. In effect, it exposes what the object's
2854 tp_traverse slot does, and can be helpful when debugging memory
2855 leaks.
2856
Martin v. Löwis7fb697b2003-04-03 04:49:12 +00002857- The iconv module has been removed from this release.
2858
Tim Petersd50ade62003-03-20 18:32:13 +00002859- The platform-independent routines for packing floats in IEEE formats
2860 (struct.pack's <f, >f, <d, and >d codes; pickle and cPickle's protocol 1
2861 pickling of floats) ignored that rounding can cause a carry to
2862 propagate. The worst consequence was that, in rare cases, <f and >f
2863 could produce strings that, when unpacked again, were a factor of 2
2864 away from the original float. This has been fixed. See SF bug
2865 #705836.
2866
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002867- New function time.tzset() provides access to the C library tzset()
Guido van Rossumd11b62e2003-03-14 21:51:36 +00002868 function, if supported. (SF patch #675422.)
2869
Neal Norwitz12e22172003-03-03 21:16:39 +00002870- Using createfilehandler, deletefilehandler, createtimerhandler functions
2871 on Tkinter.tkinter (_tkinter module) no longer crashes the interpreter.
2872 See SF bug #692416.
2873
Michael W. Hudsonf0089982003-03-03 12:29:42 +00002874- Modified the fcntl.ioctl() function to allow modification of a passed
2875 mutable buffer (for details see the reference documentation).
2876
Raymond Hettinger61fe64d2003-02-23 04:40:07 +00002877- Made user requested changes to the itertools module.
2878 Subsumed the times() function into repeat().
2879 Added chain() and cycle().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002880
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00002881- The rotor module is now deprecated; the encryption algorithm it uses
Andrew M. Kuchlingfb5f4852003-04-24 13:19:56 +00002882 is not believed to be secure, and including crypto code with Python
2883 has implications for exporting and importing it in various countries.
2884
Skip Montanaro89feabc2003-03-30 04:54:24 +00002885- The socket module now always uses the _socketobject wrapper class, even on
2886 platforms which have dup(2). The makefile() method is built directly
2887 on top of the socket without duplicating the file descriptor, allowing
2888 timeouts to work properly.
2889
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002890Library
2891-------
2892
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00002893- New generator function os.walk() is an easy-to-use alternative to
2894 os.path.walk(). See os module docs for details. os.path.walk()
2895 isn't deprecated at this time, but may become deprecated in a
2896 future release.
2897
Marc-André Lemburg246d8472003-04-24 11:36:11 +00002898- Added new module "platform" which provides a wide range of tools
2899 for querying platform dependent features.
2900
Andrew M. Kuchling4e42b312003-04-24 16:45:05 +00002901- netrc now allows ASCII punctuation characters in passwords.
Raymond Hettinger1d877862003-04-23 19:06:08 +00002902
Martin v. Löwis153c9e42003-04-19 20:59:03 +00002903- shelve now supports the optional writeback argument, and exposes
2904 pickle protocol versions.
2905
Guido van Rossuma2685402003-04-19 18:04:57 +00002906- Several methods of nntplib.NNTP have grown an optional file argument
2907 which specifies a file where to divert the command's output
2908 (already supported by the body() method). (SF patch #720468)
2909
Martin v. Löwis281b2c62003-04-18 21:04:39 +00002910- The self-documenting XML server library DocXMLRPCServer was added.
2911
Martin v. Löwis2548c732003-04-18 10:39:54 +00002912- Support for internationalized domain names has been added through
2913 the 'idna' and 'punycode' encodings, the 'stringprep' module, the
2914 'mkstringprep' tool, and enhancements to the socket and httplib
2915 modules.
2916
Walter Dörwald5688b7a2003-04-16 09:46:13 +00002917- htmlentitydefs has two new dictionaries: name2codepoint maps
2918 HTML entity names to Unicode codepoints (as integers).
2919 codepoint2name is the reverse mapping. See SF patch #722017.
2920
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00002921- pdb has a new command, "debug", which lets you step through
2922 arbitrary code from the debugger's (pdb) prompt.
2923
Raymond Hettingerc377cbf2003-04-04 22:56:42 +00002924- unittest.failUnlessEqual and its equivalent unittest.assertEqual now
2925 return 'not a == b' rather than 'a != b'. This gives the desired
2926 result for classes that define __eq__ without defining __ne__.
2927
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002928- sgmllib now supports SGML marked sections, in particular the
Martin v. Löwis3163a3b2003-03-30 14:25:40 +00002929 MS Office extensions.
2930
Raymond Hettinger42182eb2003-03-09 05:33:33 +00002931- The urllib module now offers support for the iterator protocol.
2932 SF patch 698520 contributed by Brett Cannon.
2933
Guido van Rossum9589a252003-03-06 01:56:12 +00002934- New module timeit provides a simple framework for timing the
2935 execution speed of expressions and statements.
2936
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002937- sets.Set objects now support mixed-type __eq__ and __ne__, instead
2938 of raising TypeError. If x is a Set object and y is a non-Set object,
2939 x == y is False, and x != y is True. This is akin to the change made
2940 for mixed-type comparisons of datetime objects in 2.3a2; more info
2941 about the rationale is in the NEWS entry for that. See also SF bug
2942 report <http://www.python.org/sf/693121>.
2943
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00002944- On Unix platforms, if os.listdir() is called with a Unicode argument,
2945 it now returns Unicode strings. (This behavior was added earlier
2946 to the Windows NT/2k/XP version of os.listdir().)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002947
Andrew M. Kuchling6f177d42003-02-28 22:09:33 +00002948- Distutils: both 'py_modules' and 'packages' keywords can now be specified
2949 in core.setup(). Previously you could supply one or the other, but
2950 not both of them. (SF patch #695090 from Bernhard Herzog)
2951
Skip Montanaro64a839e2003-03-20 23:36:55 +00002952- New csv package makes it easy to read/write CSV files.
2953
Gustavo Niemeyer68d8cef2003-04-17 21:31:33 +00002954- Module shlex has been extended to allow posix-like shell parsings,
2955 including a split() function for easy spliting of quoted strings and
2956 commands. An iterator interface was also implemented.
2957
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002958Tools/Demos
2959-----------
2960
Tim Peters21d7d4d2003-04-18 00:45:59 +00002961- New script combinerefs.py helps analyze new PYTHONDUMPREFS output.
2962 See the module docstring for details.
2963
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002964Build
2965-----
2966
Neal Norwitz35892b92003-02-23 23:45:35 +00002967- Fix problem building on OSF1 because the compiler only accepted
2968 preprocessor directives that start in column 1. (SF bug #691793.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002969
2970C API
2971-----
2972
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002973- Added PyGC_Collect(), equivalent to calling gc.collect().
2974
Guido van Rossum0fc8f002003-04-15 15:12:39 +00002975- PyThreadState_GetDict() was changed not to raise an exception or
2976 issue a fatal error when no current thread state is available. This
2977 makes it possible to print dictionaries when no thread is active.
2978
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002979- LONG_LONG was renamed to PY_LONG_LONG. Extensions that use this and
2980 need compatibility with previous versions can use this:
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00002981
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002982 #ifndef PY_LONG_LONG
2983 #define PY_LONG_LONG LONG_LONG
2984 #endif
Martin v. Löwisb9a0f912003-03-29 10:06:18 +00002985
Raymond Hettinger1da1dbf2003-03-17 19:46:11 +00002986- Added PyObject_SelfIter() to fill the tp_iter slot for the
Raymond Hettinger01538262003-03-17 08:24:35 +00002987 typical case where the method returns its self argument.
2988
Guido van Rossume5c691a2003-03-07 15:13:17 +00002989- The extended type structure used for heap types (new-style
2990 classes defined by Python code using a class statement) is now
2991 exported from object.h as PyHeapTypeObject. (SF patch #696193.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002992
2993New platforms
2994-------------
2995
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00002996None this time.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002997
2998Tests
2999-----
3000
Neal Norwitz55b61d22003-02-28 19:57:03 +00003001- test_timeout now requires -u network to be passed to regrtest to run.
3002 See SF bug #692988.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003003
3004Windows
3005-------
3006
Tim Peters11b23062003-04-23 02:39:17 +00003007- os.fsync() now exists on Windows, and calls the Microsoft _commit()
3008 function.
3009
Guido van Rossumf4050642003-04-09 19:39:06 +00003010- New function winsound.MessageBeep() wraps the Win32 API
3011 MessageBeep().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003012
3013Mac
3014---
3015
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00003016- os.listdir() now returns Unicode strings on MacOS X when called with
3017 a Unicode argument. See the general news item under "Library".
Just van Rossum46c97842003-02-25 21:42:15 +00003018
Jack Jansendeac2ac2003-02-24 11:04:17 +00003019- A new method MacOS.WMAvailable() returns true if it is safe to access
3020 the window manager, false otherwise.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003021
Jack Jansencf76be02003-03-24 12:13:54 +00003022- EasyDialogs dialogs are now movable-modal, and if the application is
3023 currently in the background they will ask to be moved to the foreground
3024 before displaying.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00003025
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00003026- OSA Scripting support has improved a lot, and gensuitemodule.py can now
Jack Jansende354b72003-04-11 15:37:20 +00003027 be used by mere mortals. The documentation is now also more or less
3028 complete.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00003029
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00003030- The IDE (in a framework build) now includes introductory documentation
3031 in Apple Help Viewer format.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003032
3033
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003034What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 2?
3035=================================
3036
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00003037*Release date: 19-Feb-2003*
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003038
3039Core and builtins
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00003040-----------------
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003041
Walter Dörwald2ffec022003-02-19 16:34:11 +00003042- Negative positions returned from PEP 293 error callbacks are now
3043 treated as being relative to the end of the input string. Positions
3044 that are out of bounds raise an IndexError.
3045
Guido van Rossum162e38c2003-02-19 15:25:10 +00003046- sys.path[0] (the directory from which the script is loaded) is now
3047 turned into an absolute pathname, unless it is the empty string.
3048 (SF patch #664376.)
3049
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00003050- Finally fixed the bug in compile() and exec where a string ending
3051 with an indented code block but no newline would raise SyntaxError.
3052 This would have been a four-line change in parsetok.c... Except
3053 codeop.py depends on this behavior, so a compilation flag had to be
3054 invented that causes the tokenizer to revert to the old behavior;
3055 this required extra changes to 2 .h files, 2 .c files, and 2 .py
Guido van Rossum1442dc12003-02-13 22:19:20 +00003056 files. (Fixes SF bug #501622.)
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00003057
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00003058- If a new-style class defines neither __new__ nor __init__, its
3059 constructor would ignore all arguments. This is changed now: the
3060 constructor refuses arguments in this case. This might break code
3061 that worked under Python 2.2. The simplest fix is to add a no-op
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003062 __init__: ``def __init__(self, *args, **kw): pass``.
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00003063
Guido van Rossum48035eb2003-02-12 17:05:26 +00003064- Through a bytecode optimizer bug (and I bet you didn't even know
3065 Python *had* a bytecode optimizer :-), "unsigned" hex/oct constants
3066 with a leading minus sign would come out with the wrong sign.
3067 ("Unsigned" hex/oct constants are those with a face value in the
3068 range sys.maxint+1 through sys.maxint*2+1, inclusive; these have
3069 always been interpreted as negative numbers through sign folding.)
3070 E.g. 0xffffffff is -1, and -(0xffffffff) is 1, but -0xffffffff would
3071 come out as -4294967295. This was the case in Python 2.2 through
3072 2.2.2 and 2.3a1, and in Python 2.4 it will once again have that
3073 value, but according to PEP 237 it really needs to be 1 now. This
3074 will be backported to Python 2.2.3 a well. (SF #660455)
3075
Guido van Rossum47710652003-02-12 20:48:22 +00003076- int(s, base) sometimes sign-folds hex and oct constants; it only
3077 does this when base is 0 and s.strip() starts with a '0'. When the
3078 sign is actually folded, as in int("0xffffffff", 0) on a 32-bit
3079 machine, which returns -1, a FutureWarning is now issued; in Python
3080 2.4, this will return 4294967295L, as do int("+0xffffffff", 0) and
3081 int("0xffffffff", 16) right now. (PEP 347)
3082
Guido van Rossuma89d10e2003-02-12 03:58:38 +00003083- super(X, x): x may now be a proxy for an X instance, i.e.
3084 issubclass(x.__class__, X) but not issubclass(type(x), X).
3085
Guido van Rossum03bc7d32003-02-12 03:32:58 +00003086- isinstance(x, X): if X is a new-style class, this is now equivalent
3087 to issubclass(type(x), X) or issubclass(x.__class__, X). Previously
3088 only type(x) was tested. (For classic classes this was already the
3089 case.)
3090
Just van Rossum73ffb4a2003-02-10 09:57:08 +00003091- compile(), eval() and the exec statement now fully support source code
3092 passed as unicode strings.
3093
Neal Norwitzde8b94c2003-02-10 02:12:43 +00003094- int subclasses can be initialized with longs if the value fits in an int.
3095 See SF bug #683467.
3096
Tim Petersbf2674b2003-02-02 07:51:32 +00003097- long(string, base) takes time linear in len(string) when base is a power
3098 of 2 now. It used to take time quadratic in len(string).
3099
Martin v. Löwis8afd7572003-01-25 22:46:11 +00003100- filter returns now Unicode results for Unicode arguments.
3101
Martin v. Löwisaf6a27a2003-01-03 19:16:14 +00003102- raw_input can now return Unicode objects.
3103
Skip Montanaro4abd5f02003-01-02 20:51:08 +00003104- List objects' sort() method now accepts None as the comparison function.
3105 Passing None is semantically identical to calling sort() with no
3106 arguments.
3107
Neal Norwitz1a997502003-01-13 20:13:12 +00003108- Fixed crash when printing a subclass of str and __str__ returned self.
3109 See SF bug #667147.
3110
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00003111- Fixed an invalid RuntimeWarning and an undetected error when trying
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00003112 to convert a long integer into a float which couldn't fit.
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00003113 See SF bug #676155.
3114
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00003115- Function objects now have a __module__ attribute that is bound to
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00003116 the name of the module in which the function was defined. This
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00003117 applies for C functions and methods as well as functions and methods
3118 defined in Python. This attribute is used by pickle.whichmodule(),
3119 which changes the behavior of whichmodule slightly. In Python 2.2
3120 whichmodule() returns "__main__" for functions that are not defined
3121 at the top-level of a module (examples: methods, nested functions).
3122 Now whichmodule() will return the proper module name.
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00003123
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003124Extension modules
3125-----------------
3126
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00003127- operator.isNumberType() now checks that the object has a nb_int or
3128 nb_float slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
3129 tp_as_number pointer.
3130
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00003131- The imp module now has ways to acquire and release the "import
3132 lock": imp.acquire_lock() and imp.release_lock(). Note: this is a
3133 reentrant lock, so releasing the lock only truly releases it when
3134 this is the last release_lock() call. You can check with
3135 imp.lock_held(). (SF bug #580952 and patch #683257.)
3136
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003137- Change to cPickle to match pickle.py (see below and PEP 307).
3138
Neal Norwitz9caf9c02003-02-10 01:54:06 +00003139- Fix some bugs in the parser module. SF bug #678518.
3140
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00003141- Thanks to Scott David Daniels, a subtle bug in how the zlib
Walter Dörwald28d81962003-02-03 20:53:14 +00003142 extension implemented flush() was fixed. Scott also rewrote the
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00003143 zlib test suite using the unittest module. (SF bug #640230 and
3144 patch #678531.)
3145
Raymond Hettinger96ef8112003-02-01 00:10:11 +00003146- Added an itertools module containing high speed, memory efficient
3147 looping constructs inspired by tools from Haskell and SML.
3148
Guido van Rossum99d4abf2003-01-27 22:22:50 +00003149- The SSL module now handles sockets with a timeout set correctly (SF
3150 patch #675750, fixing SF bug #675552).
3151
Barry Warsawf8ba39c2003-01-07 20:55:26 +00003152- os/posixmodule has grown the sysexits.h constants (EX_OK and friends).
3153
Guido van Rossum6d0d3652003-01-07 20:34:19 +00003154- Fixed broken threadstate swap in readline that could cause fatal
3155 errors when a readline hook was being invoked while a background
3156 thread was active. (SF bugs #660476 and #513033.)
3157
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003158- fcntl now exposes the strops.h I_* constants.
3159
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00003160- Fix a crash on Solaris that occurred when calling close() on
3161 an mmap'ed file which was already closed. (SF patch #665913)
3162
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003163- Fixed several serious bugs in the zipimport implementation.
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003164
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00003165- datetime changes:
3166
Guido van Rossum8b7a9a32003-04-14 22:01:58 +00003167 The date class is now properly subclassable. (SF bug #720908)
3168
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00003169 The datetime and datetimetz classes have been collapsed into a single
3170 datetime class, and likewise the time and timetz classes into a single
3171 time class. Previously, a datetimetz object with tzinfo=None acted
3172 exactly like a datetime object, and similarly for timetz. This wasn't
3173 enough of a difference to justify distinct classes, and life is simpler
3174 now.
3175
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00003176 today() and now() now round system timestamps to the closest
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00003177 microsecond <http://www.python.org/sf/661086>. This repairs an
3178 irritation most likely seen on Windows systems.
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00003179
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00003180 In dt.astimezone(tz), if tz.utcoffset(dt) returns a duration,
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00003181 ValueError is raised if tz.dst(dt) returns None (2.3a1 treated it
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00003182 as 0 instead, but a tzinfo subclass wishing to participate in
3183 time zone conversion has to take a stand on whether it supports
3184 DST; if you don't care about DST, then code dst() to return 0 minutes,
3185 meaning that DST is never in effect).
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00003186
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00003187 The tzinfo methods utcoffset() and dst() must return a timedelta object
3188 (or None) now. In 2.3a1 they could also return an int or long, but that
3189 was an unhelpfully redundant leftover from an earlier version wherein
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00003190 they couldn't return a timedelta. TOOWTDI.
3191
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00003192 The example tzinfo class for local time had a bug. It was replaced
3193 by a later example coded by Guido.
3194
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00003195 datetime.astimezone(tz) no longer raises an exception when the
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00003196 input datetime has no UTC equivalent in tz. For typical "hybrid" time
3197 zones (a single tzinfo subclass modeling both standard and daylight
3198 time), this case can arise one hour per year, at the hour daylight time
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00003199 ends. See new docs for details. In short, the new behavior mimics
3200 the local wall clock's behavior of repeating an hour in local time.
3201
3202 dt.astimezone() can no longer be used to convert between naive and aware
3203 datetime objects. If you merely want to attach, or remove, a tzinfo
3204 object, without any conversion of date and time members, use
3205 dt.replace(tzinfo=whatever) instead, where "whatever" is None or a
3206 tzinfo subclass instance.
3207
3208 A new method tzinfo.fromutc(dt) can be overridden in tzinfo subclasses
3209 to give complete control over how a UTC time is to be converted to
3210 a local time. The default astimezone() implementation calls fromutc()
3211 as its last step, so a tzinfo subclass can affect that too by overriding
3212 fromutc(). It's expected that the default fromutc() implementation will
3213 be suitable as-is for "almost all" time zone subclasses, but the
3214 creativity of political time zone fiddling appears unbounded -- fromutc()
3215 allows the highly motivated to emulate any scheme expressible in Python.
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00003216
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00003217 datetime.now(): The optional tzinfo argument was undocumented (that's
3218 repaired), and its name was changed to tz ("tzinfo" is overloaded enough
3219 already). With a tz argument, now(tz) used to return the local date
3220 and time, and attach tz to it, without any conversion of date and time
3221 members. This was less than useful. Now now(tz) returns the current
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003222 date and time as local time in tz's time zone, akin to ::
3223
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00003224 tz.fromutc(datetime.utcnow().replace(tzinfo=utc))
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003225
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00003226 where "utc" is an instance of a tzinfo subclass modeling UTC. Without
3227 a tz argument, now() continues to return the current local date and time,
3228 as a naive datetime object.
3229
Tim Peters2a44a8d2003-01-23 20:53:10 +00003230 datetime.fromtimestamp(): Like datetime.now() above, this had less than
3231 useful behavior when the optional tinzo argument was specified. See
3232 also SF bug report <http://www.python.org/sf/660872>.
3233
Tim Peters8d81a012003-01-24 22:36:34 +00003234 date and datetime comparison: In order to prevent comparison from
3235 falling back to the default compare-object-addresses strategy, these
3236 raised TypeError whenever they didn't understand the other object type.
3237 They still do, except when the other object has a "timetuple" attribute,
3238 in which case they return NotImplemented now. This gives other
3239 datetime objects (e.g., mxDateTime) a chance to intercept the
3240 comparison.
3241
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00003242 date, time, datetime and timedelta comparison: When the exception
3243 for mixed-type comparisons in the last paragraph doesn't apply, if
3244 the comparison is == then False is returned, and if the comparison is
3245 != then True is returned. Because dict lookup and the "in" operator
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003246 only invoke __eq__, this allows, for example, ::
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00003247
3248 if some_datetime in some_sequence:
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003249
3250 and ::
3251
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00003252 some_dict[some_timedelta] = whatever
3253
3254 to work as expected, without raising TypeError just because the
3255 sequence is heterogeneous, or the dict has mixed-type keys. [This
3256 seems like a good idea to implement for all mixed-type comparisons
3257 that don't want to allow falling back to address comparison.]
3258
Tim Peters75a6e3b2003-01-04 18:17:36 +00003259 The constructors building a datetime from a timestamp could raise
3260 ValueError if the platform C localtime()/gmtime() inserted "leap
3261 seconds". Leap seconds are ignored now. On such platforms, it's
3262 possible to have timestamps that differ by a second, yet where
3263 datetimes constructed from them are equal.
3264
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00003265 The pickle format of date, time and datetime objects has changed
3266 completely. The undocumented pickler and unpickler functions no
Tim Petersb57f8f02003-02-01 02:54:15 +00003267 longer exist. The undocumented __setstate__() and __getstate__()
3268 methods no longer exist either.
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00003269
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003270Library
3271-------
3272
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003273- The logging module was updated slightly; the WARN level was renamed
3274 to WARNING, and the matching function/method warn() to warning().
3275
3276- The pickle and cPickle modules were updated with a new pickling
3277 protocol (documented by pickletools.py, see below) and several
3278 extensions to the pickle customization API (__reduce__, __setstate__
3279 etc.). The copy module now uses more of the pickle customization
3280 API to copy objects that don't implement __copy__ or __deepcopy__.
3281 See PEP 307 for details.
3282
3283- The distutils "register" command now uses http://www.python.org/pypi
3284 as the default repository. (See PEP 301.)
3285
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00003286- the platform dependent path related variables sep, altsep, extsep,
3287 pathsep, curdir, pardir and defpath are now defined in the platform
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00003288 dependent path modules (e.g. ntpath.py) rather than os.py, so these
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003289 variables are now available via os.path. They continue to be
3290 available from the os module.
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00003291 (see <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00003292
Tim Peters6ee04802003-02-05 18:29:34 +00003293- array.array was added to the types repr.py knows about (see
3294 <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
3295
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00003296- The new pickletools.py contains lots of documentation about pickle
3297 internals, and supplies some helpers for working with pickles, such as
3298 a symbolic pickle disassembler.
3299
Skip Montanaro9a7c96a2003-01-22 18:17:25 +00003300- Xmlrpclib.py now supports the builtin boolean type.
3301
Martin v. Löwis0c6774d2003-01-15 11:51:06 +00003302- py_compile has a new 'doraise' flag and a new PyCompileError
3303 exception.
3304
Martin v. Löwisd69663d2003-01-15 11:37:23 +00003305- SimpleXMLRPCServer now supports CGI through the CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler
3306 class.
3307
Guido van Rossum50e92232003-01-14 16:45:04 +00003308- The sets module now raises TypeError in __cmp__, to clarify that
3309 sets are not intended to be three-way-compared; the comparison
3310 operators are overloaded as subset/superset tests.
3311
Guido van Rossumcd0c0472003-01-07 23:03:05 +00003312- Bastion.py and rexec.py are disabled. These modules are not safe in
3313 Python 2.2. or 2.3.
3314
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003315- realpath is now exported when doing ``from poxixpath import *``.
Neal Norwitzbb0246a2003-01-03 18:12:28 +00003316 It is also exported for ntpath, macpath, and os2emxpath.
3317 See SF bug #659228.
3318
Neal Norwitzb9ef4ae2003-01-05 23:19:43 +00003319- New module tarfile from Lars Gustäbel provides a comprehensive interface
3320 to tar archive files with transparent gzip and bzip2 compression.
3321 See SF patch #651082.
3322
Neal Norwitz4f442372003-01-06 06:51:36 +00003323- urlparse can now parse imap:// URLs. See SF feature request #618024.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003324
Neal Norwitze931ed52003-01-10 23:24:32 +00003325- Tkinter.Canvas.scan_dragto() provides an optional parameter to support
3326 the gain value which is passed to Tk. SF bug# 602259.
3327
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00003328- Fix logging.handlers.SysLogHandler protocol when using UNIX domain sockets.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00003329 See SF patch #642974.
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00003330
Skip Montanaro12fe72e2003-02-25 17:46:20 +00003331- The dospath module was deleted. Use the ntpath module when manipulating
3332 DOS paths from other platforms.
3333
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003334Tools/Demos
3335-----------
3336
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00003337- Two new scripts (db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py) were added to the
3338 Tools/scripts directory to facilitate conversion from the old bsddb module
3339 to the new one. While the user-visible API of the new module is
3340 compatible with the old one, it's likely that the version of the
3341 underlying database library has changed. To convert from the old library,
3342 run the db2pickle.py script using the old version of Python to convert it
3343 to a pickle file. After upgrading Python, run the pickle2db.py script
3344 using the new version of Python to reconstitute your database. For
3345 example:
3346
Skip Montanaro621f0552003-02-03 15:48:10 +00003347 % python2.2 db2pickle.py -h some.db > some.pickle
3348 % python2.3 pickle2db.py -h some.db.new < some.pickle
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00003349
3350 Run the scripts without any args to get a usage message.
3351
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003352
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003353Build
3354-----
3355
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00003356- The audio driver tests (test_ossaudiodev.py and
3357 test_linuxaudiodev.py) are no longer run by default. This is
3358 because they don't always work, depending on your hardware and
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003359 software. To run these tests, you must use an invocation like ::
3360
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00003361 ./python Lib/test/regrtest.py -u audio test_ossaudiodev
3362
Skip Montanarodecc6a42003-01-01 20:07:49 +00003363- On systems which build using the configure script, compiler flags which
3364 used to be lumped together using the OPT flag have been split into two
3365 groups, OPT and BASECFLAGS. OPT is meant to carry just optimization- and
3366 debug-related flags like "-g" and "-O3". BASECFLAGS is meant to carry
3367 compiler flags that are required to get a clean compile. On some
3368 platforms (many Linux flavors in particular) BASECFLAGS will be empty by
3369 default. On others, such as Mac OS X and SCO, it will contain required
3370 flags. This change allows people building Python to override OPT without
3371 fear of clobbering compiler flags which are required to get a clean build.
3372
3373- On Darwin/Mac OS X platforms, /sw/lib and /sw/include are added to the
3374 relevant search lists in setup.py. This allows users building Python to
3375 take advantage of the many packages available from the fink project
3376 <http://fink.sf.net/>.
3377
3378- A new Makefile target, scriptsinstall, installs a number of useful scripts
3379 from the Tools/scripts directory.
3380
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003381C API
3382-----
3383
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003384- PyEval_GetFrame() is now declared to return a ``PyFrameObject *``
3385 instead of a plain ``PyObject *``. (SF patch #686601.)
Guido van Rossum6297a7a2003-02-19 15:53:17 +00003386
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00003387- PyNumber_Check() now checks that the object has a nb_int or nb_float
3388 slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
3389 tp_as_number pointer.
3390
Guido van Rossumeea47182003-02-11 20:39:59 +00003391- A C type that inherits from a base type that defines tp_as_buffer
3392 will now inherit the tp_as_buffer pointer if it doesn't define one.
3393 (SF #681367)
3394
Neil Schemenauer5042da62003-02-04 20:59:40 +00003395- The PyArg_Parse functions now issue a DeprecationWarning if a float
3396 argument is provided when an integer is specified (this affects the 'b',
3397 'B', 'h', 'H', 'i', and 'l' codes). Future versions of Python will
3398 raise a TypeError.
Neil Schemenauercd63e612003-01-24 22:15:53 +00003399
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003400Tests
3401-----
3402
Walter Dörwald11cfbd62003-03-26 16:03:16 +00003403- Several tests weren't being run from regrtest.py (test_timeout.py,
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003404 test_tarfile.py, test_netrc.py, test_multifile.py,
3405 test_importhooks.py and test_imp.py). Now they are. (Note to
3406 developers: please read Lib/test/README when creating a new test, to
3407 make sure to do it right! All tests need to use either unittest or
3408 pydoc.)
3409
3410- Added test_posix.py, a test suite for the posix module.
3411
3412- Added test_hexoct.py, a test suite for hex/oct constant folding.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003413
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003414Windows
3415-------
3416
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00003417- The timeout code for socket connect() didn't work right; this has
3418 now been fixed. test_timeout.py should pass (at least most of the
3419 time).
3420
Thomas Hellerdda583d2003-01-31 20:45:41 +00003421- distutils' msvccompiler class now passes the preprocessor options to
3422 the resource compiler. See SF patch #669198.
3423
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00003424- The bsddb module now ships with Sleepycat's 4.1.25.NC, the latest
3425 release without strong cryptography.
3426
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00003427- sys.path[0], if it contains a directory name, is now always an
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003428 absolute pathname. (SF patch #664376.)
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00003429
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00003430- The new logging package is now installed by the Windows installer. It
3431 wasn't in 2.3a1 due to oversight.
3432
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003433Mac
3434---
3435
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00003436- There are new dialogs EasyDialogs.AskFileForOpen, AskFileForSave
3437 and AskFolder. The old macfs.StandardGetFile and friends are deprecated.
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00003438
Jack Jansenc9296362003-02-06 23:10:45 +00003439- Most of the standard library now uses pathnames or FSRefs in preference
3440 of FSSpecs, and use the underlying Carbon.File and Carbon.Folder modules
3441 in stead of macfs. macfs will probably be deprecated in the future.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00003442
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00003443- Type Carbon.File.FSCatalogInfo and supporting methods have been implemented.
3444 This also makes macfs.FSSpec.SetDates() work again.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003445
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00003446- There is a new module pimp, the package install manager for Python, and
3447 accompanying applet PackageManager. These allow you to easily download
3448 and install pretested extension packages either in source or binary
3449 form. Only in MacPython-OSX.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003450
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00003451- Applets are now built with bundlebuilder in MacPython-OSX, which should make
Jack Jansen5d44b342003-02-18 23:32:47 +00003452 them more robust and also provides a path towards BuildApplication. The
3453 downside of this change is that applets can no longer be run from the
3454 Terminal window, this will hopefully be fixed in the 2.3b1.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003455
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003456
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003457What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 1?
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003458=================================
3459
Guido van Rossumae548862002-12-31 15:47:36 +00003460*Release date: 31-Dec-2002*
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003461
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003462Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003463--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00003464
Michael W. Hudson96bc3b42002-11-26 14:48:23 +00003465- One can now assign to __bases__ and __name__ of new-style classes.
3466
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00003467- dict() now accepts keyword arguments so that dict(one=1, two=2)
3468 is the equivalent of {"one": 1, "two": 2}. Accordingly,
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00003469 the existing (but undocumented) 'items' keyword argument has
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00003470 been eliminated. This means that dict(items=someMapping) now has
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00003471 a different meaning than before.
3472
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00003473- int() now returns a long object if the argument is outside the
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003474 integer range, so int("4" * 1000), int(1e200) and int(1L<<1000) will
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00003475 all return long objects instead of raising an OverflowError.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003476
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003477- Assignment to __class__ is disallowed if either the old or the new
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00003478 class is a statically allocated type object (such as defined by an
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003479 extension module). This prevents anomalies like 2.__class__ = bool.
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00003480
3481- New-style object creation and deallocation have been sped up
3482 significantly; they are now faster than classic instance creation
3483 and deallocation.
3484
3485- The __slots__ variable can now mention "private" names, and the
3486 right thing will happen (e.g. __slots__ = ["__foo"]).
3487
3488- The built-ins slice() and buffer() are now callable types. The
3489 types classobj (formerly class), code, function, instance, and
3490 instancemethod (formerly instance-method), which have no built-in
3491 names but are accessible through the types module, are now also
3492 callable. The type dict-proxy is renamed to dictproxy.
3493
3494- Cycles going through the __class__ link of a new-style instance are
3495 now detected by the garbage collector.
3496
3497- Classes using __slots__ are now properly garbage collected.
3498 [SF bug 519621]
3499
3500- Tightened the __slots__ rules: a slot name must be a valid Python
3501 identifier.
3502
3503- The constructor for the module type now requires a name argument and
3504 takes an optional docstring argument. Previously, this constructor
3505 ignored its arguments. As a consequence, deriving a class from a
3506 module (not from the module type) is now illegal; previously this
3507 created an unnamed module, just like invoking the module type did.
3508 [SF bug 563060]
3509
3510- A new type object, 'basestring', is added. This is a common base type
3511 for 'str' and 'unicode', and can be used instead of
3512 types.StringTypes, e.g. to test whether something is "a string":
3513 isinstance(x, basestring) is True for Unicode and 8-bit strings. This
3514 is an abstract base class and cannot be instantiated directly.
3515
3516- Changed new-style class instantiation so that when C's __new__
3517 method returns something that's not a C instance, its __init__ is
3518 not called. [SF bug #537450]
3519
3520- Fixed super() to work correctly with class methods. [SF bug #535444]
3521
3522- If you try to pickle an instance of a class that has __slots__ but
3523 doesn't define or override __getstate__, a TypeError is now raised.
3524 This is done by adding a bozo __getstate__ to the class that always
3525 raises TypeError. (Before, this would appear to be pickled, but the
3526 state of the slots would be lost.)
3527
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003528Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003529-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003530
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003531- Import from zipfiles is now supported. The name of a zipfile placed
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00003532 on sys.path causes the import statement to look for importable Python
3533 modules (with .py, pyc and .pyo extensions) and packages inside the
3534 zipfile. The zipfile import follows the specification (though not
3535 the sample implementation) of PEP 273. The semantics of __path__ are
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003536 compatible with those that have been implemented in Jython since
3537 Jython 2.1.
3538
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003539- PEP 302 has been accepted. Although it was initially developed to
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00003540 support zipimport, it offers a new, general import hook mechanism.
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00003541 Several new variables have been added to the sys module:
3542 sys.meta_path, sys.path_hooks, and sys.path_importer_cache; these
3543 make extending the import statement much more convenient than
3544 overriding the __import__ built-in function. For a description of
3545 these, see PEP 302.
3546
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003547- A frame object's f_lineno attribute can now be written to from a
3548 trace function to change which line will execute next. A command to
3549 exploit this from pdb has been added. [SF patch #643835]
3550
Marc-André Lemburg20b91352002-12-12 18:01:43 +00003551- The _codecs support module for codecs.py was turned into a builtin
3552 module to assure that at least the builtin codecs are available
3553 to the Python parser for source code decoding according to PEP 263.
3554
Walter Dörwaldd9a6ad32002-12-12 16:41:44 +00003555- issubclass now supports a tuple as the second argument, just like
3556 isinstance does. ``issubclass(X, (A, B))`` is equivalent to
3557 ``issubclass(X, A) or issubclass(X, B)``.
3558
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00003559- Thanks to Armin Rigo, the last known way to provoke a system crash
3560 by cleverly arranging for a comparison function to mutate a list
3561 during a list.sort() operation has been fixed. The effect of
3562 attempting to mutate a list, or even to inspect its contents or
3563 length, while a sort is in progress, is not defined by the language.
3564 The C implementation of Python 2.3 attempts to detect mutations,
3565 and raise ValueError if one occurs, but there's no guarantee that
3566 all mutations will be caught, or that any will be caught across
3567 releases or implementations.
3568
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00003569- Unicode file name processing for Windows (PEP 277) is implemented.
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00003570 All platforms now have an os.path.supports_unicode_filenames attribute,
3571 which is set to True on Windows NT/2000/XP, and False elsewhere.
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00003572
Walter Dörwald3aeb6322002-09-02 13:14:32 +00003573- Codec error handling callbacks (PEP 293) are implemented.
3574 Error handling in unicode.encode or str.decode can now be customized.
3575
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00003576- A subtle change to the semantics of the built-in function intern():
3577 interned strings are no longer immortal. You must keep a reference
3578 to the return value intern() around to get the benefit.
3579
Guido van Rossumf808b892002-08-16 03:38:10 +00003580- Use of 'None' as a variable, argument or attribute name now
3581 issues a SyntaxWarning. In the future, None may become a keyword.
3582
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00003583- SET_LINENO is gone. co_lnotab is now consulted to determine when to
3584 call the trace function. C code that accessed f_lineno should call
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003585 PyCode_Addr2Line instead (f_lineno is still there, but only kept up
3586 to date when there is a trace function set).
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00003587
Guido van Rossum9be89462002-08-14 16:11:30 +00003588- There's a new warning category, FutureWarning. This is used to warn
3589 about a number of situations where the value or sign of an integer
3590 result will change in Python 2.4 as a result of PEP 237 (integer
3591 unification). The warnings implement stage B0 mentioned in that
3592 PEP. The warnings are about the following situations:
3593
3594 - Octal and hex literals without 'L' prefix in the inclusive range
3595 [0x80000000..0xffffffff]; these are currently negative ints, but
3596 in Python 2.4 they will be positive longs with the same bit
3597 pattern.
3598
3599 - Left shifts on integer values that cause the outcome to lose
3600 bits or have a different sign than the left operand. To be
3601 precise: x<<n where this currently doesn't yield the same value
3602 as long(x)<<n; in Python 2.4, the outcome will be long(x)<<n.
3603
3604 - Conversions from ints to string that show negative values as
3605 unsigned ints in the inclusive range [0x80000000..0xffffffff];
3606 this affects the functions hex() and oct(), and the string
3607 formatting codes %u, %o, %x, and %X. In Python 2.4, these will
3608 show signed values (e.g. hex(-1) currently returns "0xffffffff";
3609 in Python 2.4 it will return "-0x1").
3610
Guido van Rossum9a2eda52002-12-31 02:12:42 +00003611- The bits manipulated under the cover by sys.setcheckinterval() have
3612 been changed. Both the check interval and the ticker used to be
3613 per-thread values. They are now just a pair of global variables.
3614 In addition, the default check interval was boosted from 10 to 100
3615 bytecode instructions. This may have some effect on systems that
3616 relied on the old default value. In particular, in multi-threaded
3617 applications which try to be highly responsive, response time will
3618 increase by some (perhaps imperceptible) amount.
Skip Montanaro979c74b2002-09-03 21:25:14 +00003619
Tim Petersd64c1de2002-08-12 17:36:03 +00003620- When multiplying very large integers, a version of the so-called
3621 Karatsuba algorithm is now used. This is most effective if the
3622 inputs have roughly the same size. If they both have about N digits,
3623 Karatsuba multiplication has O(N**1.58) runtime (the exponent is
3624 log_base_2(3)) instead of the previous O(N**2). Measured results may
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00003625 be better or worse than that, depending on platform quirks. Besides
3626 the O() improvement in raw instruction count, the Karatsuba algorithm
3627 appears to have much better cache behavior on extremely large integers
3628 (starting in the ballpark of a million bits). Note that this is a
3629 simple implementation, and there's no intent here to compete with,
3630 e.g., GMP. It gives a very nice speedup when it applies, but a package
3631 devoted to fast large-integer arithmetic should run circles around it.
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00003632
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00003633- u'%c' will now raise a ValueError in case the argument is an
3634 integer outside the valid range of Unicode code point ordinals.
3635
Guido van Rossumdeb09362002-08-09 17:16:30 +00003636- The tempfile module has been overhauled for enhanced security. The
3637 mktemp() function is now deprecated; new, safe replacements are
3638 mkstemp() (for files) and mkdtemp() (for directories), and the
3639 higher-level functions NamedTemporaryFile() and TemporaryFile().
3640 Use of some global variables in this module is also deprecated; the
3641 new functions have keyword arguments to provide the same
3642 functionality. All Lib, Tools and Demo modules that used the unsafe
3643 interfaces have been updated to use the safe replacements. Thanks
3644 to Zack Weinberg!
3645
Guido van Rossumd81a9832002-08-09 15:57:34 +00003646- When x is an object whose class implements __mul__ and __rmul__,
3647 1.0*x would correctly invoke __rmul__, but 1*x would erroneously
3648 invoke __mul__. This was due to the sequence-repeat code in the int
3649 type. This has been fixed now.
3650
Barry Warsawd79f6832002-08-06 17:01:51 +00003651- Previously, "str1 in str2" required str1 to be a string of length 1.
3652 This restriction has been relaxed to allow str1 to be a string of
3653 any length. Thus "'el' in 'hello world'" returns True now.
3654
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003655- File objects are now their own iterators. For a file f, iter(f) now
3656 returns f (unless f is closed), and f.next() is similar to
3657 f.readline() when EOF is not reached; however, f.next() uses a
3658 readahead buffer that messes up the file position, so mixing
3659 f.next() and f.readline() (or other methods) doesn't work right.
3660 Calling f.seek() drops the readahead buffer, but other operations
3661 don't. It so happens that this gives a nice additional speed boost
3662 to "for line in file:"; the xreadlines method and corresponding
Guido van Rossumbffb2ef2002-08-09 17:17:07 +00003663 module are now obsolete. Thanks to Oren Tirosh!
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003664
Guido van Rossumde392d32002-08-05 14:17:20 +00003665- Encoding declarations (PEP 263, phase 1) have been implemented. A
3666 comment of the form "# -*- coding: <encodingname> -*-" in the first
3667 or second line of a Python source file indicates the encoding.
Martin v. Löwis00f1e3f2002-08-04 17:29:52 +00003668
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003669- list.sort() has a new implementation. While cross-platform results
3670 may vary, and in data-dependent ways, this is much faster on many
3671 kinds of partially ordered lists than the previous implementation,
3672 and reported to be just as fast on randomly ordered lists on
3673 several major platforms. This sort is also stable (if A==B and A
3674 precedes B in the list at the start, A precedes B after the sort too),
3675 although the language definition does not guarantee stability. A
3676 potential drawback is that list.sort() may require temp space of
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003677 len(list)*2 bytes (``*4`` on a 64-bit machine). It's therefore possible
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003678 for list.sort() to raise MemoryError now, even if a comparison function
3679 does not. See <http://www.python.org/sf/587076> for full details.
3680
Guido van Rossum2d5389c2002-07-23 03:44:35 +00003681- All standard iterators now ensure that, once StopIteration has been
3682 raised, all future calls to next() on the same iterator will also
3683 raise StopIteration. There used to be various counterexamples to
3684 this behavior, which could caused confusion or subtle program
3685 breakage, without any benefits. (Note that this is still an
3686 iterator's responsibility; the iterator framework does not enforce
3687 this.)
3688
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003689- Ctrl+C handling on Windows has been made more consistent with
3690 other platforms. KeyboardInterrupt can now reliably be caught,
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003691 and Ctrl+C at an interactive prompt no longer terminates the
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003692 process under NT/2k/XP (it never did under Win9x). Ctrl+C will
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00003693 interrupt time.sleep() in the main thread, and any child processes
3694 created via the popen family (on win2k; we can't make win9x work
Mark Hammond8f3afc72002-08-10 06:26:31 +00003695 reliably) are also interrupted (as generally happens on for Linux/Unix.)
3696 [SF bugs 231273, 439992 and 581232]
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003697
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00003698- sys.getwindowsversion() has been added on Windows. This
3699 returns a tuple with information about the version of Windows
3700 currently running.
3701
Raymond Hettinger5a04aec2002-06-25 00:25:30 +00003702- Slices and repetitions of buffer objects now consistently return
3703 a string. Formerly, strings would be returned most of the time,
3704 but a buffer object would be returned when the repetition count
3705 was one or when the slice range was all inclusive.
3706
Walter Dörwald3430d702002-06-17 10:43:59 +00003707- Unicode objects in sys.path are no longer ignored but treated
3708 as directory names.
3709
Neal Norwitz1f68fc72002-06-14 00:50:42 +00003710- Fixed string.startswith and string.endswith builtin methods
3711 so they accept negative indices. [SF bug 493951]
3712
Guido van Rossumc5fe5eb2002-06-12 03:45:21 +00003713- Fixed a bug with a continue inside a try block and a yield in the
3714 finally clause. [SF bug 567538]
3715
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00003716- Most builtin sequences now support "extended slices", i.e. slices
Guido van Rossum2e82e712002-06-13 11:41:07 +00003717 with a third "stride" parameter. For example, "hello world"[::-1]
3718 gives "dlrow olleh".
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00003719
Neal Norwitzd68f5172002-05-29 15:54:55 +00003720- A new warning PendingDeprecationWarning was added to provide
3721 direction on features which are in the process of being deprecated.
3722 The warning will not be printed by default. To see the pending
3723 deprecations, use -Walways::PendingDeprecationWarning::
3724 as a command line option or warnings.filterwarnings() in code.
3725
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00003726- Deprecated features of xrange objects have been removed as
3727 promised. The start, stop, and step attributes and the tolist()
3728 method no longer exist. xrange repetition and slicing have been
3729 removed.
3730
Guido van Rossum7dab2422002-04-26 19:40:56 +00003731- New builtin function enumerate(x), from PEP 279. Example:
3732 enumerate("abc") is an iterator returning (0,"a"), (1,"b"), (2,"c").
3733 The argument can be an arbitrary iterable object.
3734
Neil Schemenauer89e3ee02002-04-26 01:58:53 +00003735- The assert statement no longer tests __debug__ at runtime. This means
3736 that assert statements cannot be disabled by assigning a false value
3737 to __debug__.
3738
Walter Dörwald068325e2002-04-15 13:36:47 +00003739- A method zfill() was added to str and unicode, that fills a numeric
3740 string to the left with zeros. For example,
3741 "+123".zfill(6) -> "+00123".
3742
Guido van Rossum862fe3c2002-04-15 12:36:47 +00003743- Complex numbers supported divmod() and the // and % operators, but
3744 these make no sense. Since this was documented, they're being
3745 deprecated now.
3746
Guido van Rossum26dd8302002-04-26 20:11:29 +00003747- String and unicode methods lstrip(), rstrip() and strip() now take
3748 an optional argument that specifies the characters to strip. For
3749 example, "Foo!!!?!?!?".rstrip("?!") -> "Foo".
Guido van Rossum49042042002-04-13 00:59:05 +00003750
Guido van Rossumc0d3f4e2002-11-27 13:10:40 +00003751- There's a new dictionary constructor (a class method of the dict
3752 class), dict.fromkeys(iterable, value=None). It constructs a
3753 dictionary with keys taken from the iterable and all values set to a
3754 single value. It can be used for building sets and for removing
3755 duplicates from sequences.
Raymond Hettingere33d3df2002-11-27 07:29:33 +00003756
Guido van Rossumc69343b2002-04-12 19:22:48 +00003757- Added a new dict method pop(key). This removes and returns the
3758 value corresponding to key. [SF patch #539949]
3759
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00003760- A new built-in type, bool, has been added, as well as built-in
3761 names for its two values, True and False. Comparisons and sundry
3762 other operations that return a truth value have been changed to
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003763 return a bool instead. Read PEP 285 for an explanation of why this
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00003764 is backward compatible.
3765
Guido van Rossum95b62a62002-03-29 01:07:24 +00003766- Fixed two bugs reported as SF #535905: under certain conditions,
3767 deallocating a deeply nested structure could cause a segfault in the
3768 garbage collector, due to interaction with the "trashcan" code;
3769 access to the current frame during destruction of a local variable
3770 could access a pointer to freed memory.
3771
Guido van Rossumfe0ca4a2002-06-18 21:20:13 +00003772- The optional object allocator ("pymalloc") has been enabled by
3773 default. The recommended practice for memory allocation and
3774 deallocation has been streamlined. A header file is included,
3775 Misc/pymemcompat.h, which can be bundled with 3rd party extensions
3776 and lets them use the same API with Python versions from 1.5.2
3777 onwards.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00003778
Martin v. Löwiscfeb3b62002-03-03 21:30:27 +00003779- PyErr_Display will provide file and line information for all exceptions
3780 that have an attribute print_file_and_line, not just SyntaxErrors.
3781
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00003782- The UTF-8 codec will now encode and decode Unicode surrogates
3783 correctly and without raising exceptions for unpaired ones.
3784
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00003785- Universal newlines (PEP 278) is implemented. Briefly, using 'U'
3786 instead of 'r' when opening a text file for reading changes the line
3787 ending convention so that any of '\r', '\r\n', and '\n' is
3788 recognized (even mixed in one file); all three are converted to
3789 '\n', the standard Python line end character.
3790
Neal Norwitz649b7592002-01-01 19:07:13 +00003791- file.xreadlines() now raises a ValueError if the file is closed:
3792 Previously, an xreadlines object was returned which would raise
3793 a ValueError when the xreadlines.next() method was called.
3794
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003795- sys.exit() inadvertently allowed more than one argument.
Neal Norwitz0c766a02002-03-27 13:03:09 +00003796 An exception will now be raised if more than one argument is used.
3797
Gustavo Niemeyer17c5a332002-12-16 14:09:22 +00003798- Changed evaluation order of dictionary literals to conform to the
3799 general left to right evaluation order rule. Now {f1(): f2()} will
3800 evaluate f1 first.
Gustavo Niemeyer78429a62002-12-16 13:54:02 +00003801
Gustavo Niemeyer786ddb22002-12-16 18:12:53 +00003802- Fixed bug #521782: when a file was in non-blocking mode, file.read()
3803 could silently lose data or wrongly throw an unknown error.
3804
Neil Schemenauerb983aa02002-12-30 20:22:23 +00003805- The sq_repeat, sq_inplace_repeat, sq_concat and sq_inplace_concat
3806 slots are now always tried after trying the corresponding nb_* slots.
3807 This fixes a number of minor bugs (see bug #624807).
3808
Neal Norwitz74a032e2003-01-10 23:29:48 +00003809- Fix problem with dynamic loading on 64-bit AIX (see bug #639945).
3810
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003811Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003812-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003813
Raymond Hettinger9543b342003-01-18 23:22:20 +00003814- Added three operators to the operator module:
3815 operator.pow(a,b) which is equivalent to: a**b.
3816 operator.is_(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is b.
3817 operator.is_not(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is not b.
3818
Martin v. Löwis24a880b2002-12-31 12:55:15 +00003819- posix.openpty now works on all systems that have /dev/ptmx.
3820
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003821- A module zipimport exists to support importing code from zip
3822 archives.
3823
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00003824- The new datetime module supplies classes for manipulating dates and
3825 times. The basic design came from the Zope "fishbowl process", and
3826 favors practical commercial applications over calendar esoterica. See
3827
3828 http://www.zope.org/Members/fdrake/DateTimeWiki/FrontPage
3829
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00003830- _tkinter now returns Tcl objects, instead of strings. Objects which
3831 have Python equivalents are converted to Python objects, other objects
3832 are wrapped. This can be configured through the wantobjects method,
Martin v. Löwis8c8aa5d2002-11-26 21:39:48 +00003833 or Tkinter.wantobjects.
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00003834
Barry Warsawc27f4bd2002-12-30 21:03:26 +00003835- The PyBSDDB wrapper around the Sleepycat Berkeley DB library has
3836 been added as the package bsddb. The traditional bsddb module is
3837 still available in source code, but not built automatically anymore,
3838 and is now named bsddb185. This supports Berkeley DB versions from
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00003839 3.0 to 4.1. For help converting your databases from the old module (which
3840 probably used an obsolete version of Berkeley DB) to the new module, see
3841 the db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py scripts described in the Tools/Demos
3842 section above.
Martin v. Löwisef546b32002-11-19 08:12:57 +00003843
Martin v. Löwis677bde22002-11-23 22:08:15 +00003844- unicodedata was updated to Unicode 3.2. It supports normalization
3845 and names for Hangul syllables and CJK unified ideographs.
Martin v. Löwis7d41e292002-11-23 12:22:32 +00003846
Neal Norwitz94a83fd2002-11-02 17:46:24 +00003847- resource.getrlimit() now returns longs instead of ints.
3848
Martin v. Löwis080689c2002-10-26 14:42:02 +00003849- readline now dynamically adjusts its input/output stream if
3850 sys.stdin/stdout changes.
3851
Guido van Rossumba602972002-10-01 18:18:58 +00003852- The _tkinter module (and hence Tkinter) has dropped support for
3853 Tcl/Tk 8.0 and 8.1. Only Tcl/Tk versions 8.2, 8.3 and 8.4 are
3854 supported.
3855
Martin v. Löwis658009a2002-09-16 17:26:24 +00003856- cPickle.BadPickleGet is now a class.
3857
Martin v. Löwisa19bfe02002-10-16 18:28:36 +00003858- The time stamps in os.stat_result are floating point numbers
3859 after stat_float_times has been called.
Martin v. Löwis94717ed2002-09-09 14:24:16 +00003860
Neal Norwitzb5673922002-09-05 21:48:07 +00003861- If the size passed to mmap.mmap() is larger than the length of the
3862 file on non-Windows platforms, a ValueError is raised. [SF bug 585792]
3863
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003864- The xreadlines module is slated for obsolescence.
3865
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00003866- The strptime function in the time module is now always available (a
3867 Python implementation is used when the C library doesn't define it).
3868
Guido van Rossum9562bcf2002-06-14 21:31:18 +00003869- The 'new' module is no longer an extension, but a Python module that
3870 only exists for backwards compatibility. Its contents are no longer
3871 functions but callable type objects.
3872
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003873- The bsddb.*open functions can now take 'None' as a filename.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00003874 This will create a temporary in-memory bsddb that won't be
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003875 written to disk.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00003876
Martin v. Löwisb96152c2002-12-31 13:20:15 +00003877- posix.getloadavg, posix.lchown, posix.killpg, posix.mknod, and
3878 posix.getpgid have been added where available.
Martin v. Löwis06a83e92002-04-14 10:19:44 +00003879
Martin v. Löwisf0a46682002-11-03 17:20:12 +00003880- The locale module now exposes the C library's gettext interface. It
3881 also has a new function getpreferredencoding.
Martin v. Löwis2e64c342002-03-27 18:49:02 +00003882
Tim Petersfbf74f22002-03-14 19:06:01 +00003883- A security hole ("double free") was found in zlib-1.1.3, a popular
3884 third party compression library used by some Python modules. The
3885 hole was quickly plugged in zlib-1.1.4, and the Windows build of
3886 Python now ships with zlib-1.1.4.
3887
Martin v. Löwis688357e2002-04-08 21:28:20 +00003888- pwd, grp, and resource return enhanced tuples now, with symbolic
3889 field names.
Martin v. Löwis29001ff2002-03-01 10:47:37 +00003890
Martin v. Löwis99866332002-03-01 10:27:01 +00003891- array.array is now a type object. A new format character
3892 'u' indicates Py_UNICODE arrays. For those, .tounicode and
3893 .fromunicode methods are available. Arrays now support __iadd__
3894 and __imul__.
3895
Neal Norwitze790eae2002-01-01 21:14:12 +00003896- dl now builds on every system that has dlfcn.h. Failure in case
Martin v. Löwis93227272002-01-01 20:18:30 +00003897 of sizeof(int)!=sizeof(long)!=sizeof(void*) is delayed until dl.open
3898 is called.
3899
Skip Montanaro8e790e72002-09-03 13:25:17 +00003900- The sys module acquired a new attribute, api_version, which evaluates
3901 to the value of the PYTHON_API_VERSION macro with which the
3902 interpreter was compiled.
3903
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00003904- Fixed bug #470582: sre module would return a tuple (None, 'a', 'ab')
3905 when applying the regular expression '^((a)c)?(ab)$' on 'ab'. It now
3906 returns (None, None, 'ab'), as expected. Also fixed handling of
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00003907 lastindex/lastgroup match attributes in similar cases. For example,
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00003908 when running the expression r'(a)(b)?b' over 'ab', lastindex must be
3909 1, not 2.
3910
Gustavo Niemeyerc523b042002-11-07 03:28:56 +00003911- Fixed bug #581080: sre scanner was not checking the buffer limit
3912 before increasing the current pointer. This was creating an infinite
3913 loop in the search function, once the pointer exceeded the buffer
3914 limit.
3915
Thomas Heller95cb7e42002-11-07 16:23:55 +00003916- The os.fdopen function now enforces a file mode starting with the
3917 letter 'r', 'w' or 'a', otherwise a ValueError is raised. This fixes
3918 bug #623464.
3919
Greg Ward6c58d462003-01-03 18:02:15 +00003920- The linuxaudiodev module is now deprecated; it is being replaced by
3921 ossaudiodev. The interface has been extended to cover a lot more of
3922 OSS (see www.opensound.com), including most DSP ioctls and the
3923 OSS mixer API. Documentation forthcoming in 2.3a2.
3924
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003925Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003926-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003927
Guido van Rossum747f8062003-01-03 16:33:49 +00003928- imaplib.py now supports SSL (Tino Lange and Piers Lauder).
3929
Just van Rossum5e156ad2002-12-31 16:38:01 +00003930- Freeze's modulefinder.py has been moved to the standard library;
3931 slightly improved so it will issue less false missing submodule
3932 reports (see sf path #643711 for details). Documentation will follow
3933 with Python 2.3a2.
3934
Martin v. Löwis96a60e42002-12-31 13:11:54 +00003935- os.path exposes getctime.
3936
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003937- unittest.py now has two additional methods called assertAlmostEqual()
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003938 and failIfAlmostEqual(). They implement an approximate comparison
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003939 by rounding the difference between the two arguments and comparing
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003940 the result to zero. Approximate comparison is essential for
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003941 unit tests of floating point results.
3942
Raymond Hettingere11b5102002-12-25 16:37:19 +00003943- calendar.py now depends on the new datetime module rather than
3944 the time module. As a result, the range of allowable dates
3945 has been increased.
3946
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003947- pdb has a new 'j(ump)' command to select the next line to be
3948 executed.
3949
Thomas Heller1b3b49d2002-12-12 19:13:44 +00003950- The distutils created windows installers now can run a
3951 postinstallation script.
3952
Martin v. Löwis4581cfa2002-11-22 08:23:09 +00003953- doctest.testmod can now be called without argument, which means to
3954 test the current module.
3955
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003956- When canceling a server that implemented threading with a keyboard
Martin v. Löwisf86e8ef2002-11-22 08:08:44 +00003957 interrupt, the server would shut down but not terminate (waiting on
3958 client threads). A new member variable, daemon_threads, was added to
3959 the ThreadingMixIn class in SocketServer.py to make it explicit that
3960 this behavior needs to be controlled.
3961
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00003962- A new module, optparse, provides a fancy alternative to getopt for
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003963 command line parsing. It is a slightly modified version of Greg
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00003964 Ward's Optik package.
3965
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00003966- UserDict.py now defines a DictMixin class which defines all dictionary
3967 methods for classes that already have a minimum mapping interface.
3968 This greatly simplifies writing classes that need to be substitutable
3969 for dictionaries (such as the shelve module).
3970
3971- shelve.py now subclasses from UserDict.DictMixin. Now shelve supports
3972 all dictionary methods. This eases the transition to persistent
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003973 storage for scripts originally written with dictionaries in mind.
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00003974
Skip Montanaro3bf99e32002-12-08 18:36:24 +00003975- shelve.open and the various classes in shelve.py now accept an optional
3976 binary flag, which defaults to False. If True, the values stored in the
3977 shelf are binary pickles.
3978
Guido van Rossumfda06742002-11-13 16:29:18 +00003979- A new package, logging, implements the logging API defined by PEP
3980 282. The code is written by Vinay Sajip.
3981
Walter Dörwald4dbf1922002-11-06 16:53:44 +00003982- StreamReader, StreamReaderWriter and StreamRecoder in the codecs
3983 modules are iterators now.
3984
Tim Peters9288f952002-11-05 20:38:55 +00003985- gzip.py now handles files exceeding 2GB. Files over 4GB also work
3986 now (provided the OS supports it, and Python is configured with large
3987 file support), but in that case the underlying gzip file format can
3988 record only the least-significant 32 bits of the file size, so that
3989 some tools working with gzipped files may report an incorrect file
3990 size.
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00003991
Martin v. Löwis74b51ac2002-10-26 14:50:45 +00003992- xml.sax.saxutils.unescape has been added, to replace entity references
3993 with their entity value.
3994
Martin v. Löwis77ac4292002-10-15 15:11:13 +00003995- Queue.Queue.{put,get} now support an optional timeout argument.
3996
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00003997- Various features of Tk 8.4 are exposed in Tkinter.py. The multiple
3998 option of tkFileDialog is exposed as function askopenfile{,name}s.
Martin v. Löwis2ec36272002-10-13 10:22:08 +00003999
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00004000- Various configure methods of Tkinter have been stream-lined, so that
4001 tag_configure, image_configure, window_configure now return a
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00004002 dictionary when invoked with no argument.
Martin v. Löwis6ce13152002-10-10 14:36:13 +00004003
Guido van Rossum2b492b62002-10-09 21:40:48 +00004004- Importing the readline module now no longer has the side effect of
4005 calling setlocale(LC_CTYPE, ""). The initial "C" locale, or
4006 whatever locale is explicitly set by the user, is preserved. If you
4007 want repr() of 8-bit strings in your preferred encoding to preserve
4008 all printable characters of that encoding, you have to add the
4009 following code to your $PYTHONSTARTUP file or to your application's
4010 main():
4011
4012 import locale
4013 locale.setlocale(locale.LC_CTYPE, "")
4014
Martin v. Löwise9ce0b02002-10-07 13:23:24 +00004015- shutil.move was added. shutil.copytree now reports errors as an
4016 exception at the end, instead of printing error messages.
4017
Marc-André Lemburg97047e22002-10-04 11:55:21 +00004018- Encoding name normalization was generalized to not only
4019 replace hyphens with underscores, but also all other non-alphanumeric
4020 characters (with the exception of the dot which is used for Python
4021 package names during lookup). The aliases.py mapping was updated
4022 to the new standard.
4023
Walter Dörwald5ccaf8f2002-09-06 16:15:58 +00004024- mimetypes has two new functions: guess_all_extensions() which
4025 returns a list of all known extensions for a mime type, and
4026 add_type() which adds one mapping between a mime type and
4027 an extension to the database.
4028
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00004029- New module: sets, defines the class Set that implements a mutable
4030 set type using the keys of a dict to represent the set. There's
4031 also a class ImmutableSet which is useful when you need sets of sets
4032 or when you need to use sets as dict keys, and a class BaseSet which
Raymond Hettingeref8b9c62002-12-09 08:56:06 +00004033 is the base class of the two.
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00004034
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00004035- Added random.sample(population,k) for random sampling without replacement.
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00004036 Returns a k length list of unique elements chosen from the population.
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00004037
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00004038- random.randrange(-sys.maxint-1, sys.maxint) no longer raises
4039 OverflowError. That is, it now accepts any combination of 'start'
4040 and 'stop' arguments so long as each is in the range of Python's
4041 bounded integers.
4042
Raymond Hettinger40f62172002-12-29 23:03:38 +00004043- Thanks to Raymond Hettinger, random.random() now uses a new core
4044 generator. The Mersenne Twister algorithm is implemented in C,
4045 threadsafe, faster than the previous generator, has an astronomically
4046 large period (2**19937-1), creates random floats to full 53-bit
4047 precision, and may be the most widely tested random number generator
4048 in existence.
4049
4050 The random.jumpahead(n) method has different semantics for the new
4051 generator. Instead of jumping n steps ahead, it uses n and the
4052 existing state to create a new state. This means that jumpahead()
4053 continues to support multi-threaded code needing generators of
4054 non-overlapping sequences. However, it will break code which relies
4055 on jumpahead moving a specific number of steps forward.
4056
4057 The attributes random.whseed and random.__whseed have no meaning for
4058 the new generator. Code using these attributes should switch to a
4059 new class, random.WichmannHill which is provided for backward
4060 compatibility and to make an alternate generator available.
4061
Guido van Rossum4a57c332002-08-02 18:05:20 +00004062- New "algorithms" module: heapq, implements a heap queue. Thanks to
4063 Kevin O'Connor for the code and François Pinard for an entertaining
4064 write-up explaining the theory and practical uses of heaps.
4065
Marc-André Lemburg58e2ff22002-07-12 14:40:04 +00004066- New encoding for the Palm OS character set: palmos.
4067
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00004068- binascii.crc32() and the zipfile module had problems on some 64-bit
4069 platforms. These have been fixed. On a platform with 8-byte C longs,
4070 crc32() now returns a signed-extended 4-byte result, so that its value
4071 as a Python int is equal to the value computed a 32-bit platform.
4072
Martin v. Löwis7d650ca2002-06-30 15:05:00 +00004073- xml.dom.minidom.toxml and toprettyxml now take an optional encoding
4074 argument.
4075
Guido van Rossum9f7549b2002-06-10 21:39:42 +00004076- Some fixes in the copy module: when an object is copied through its
4077 __reduce__ method, there was no check for a __setstate__ method on
4078 the result [SF patch 565085]; deepcopy should treat instances of
4079 custom metaclasses the same way it treats instances of type 'type'
4080 [SF patch 560794].
4081
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00004082- Sockets now support timeout mode. After s.settimeout(T), where T is
4083 a float expressing seconds, subsequent operations raise an exception
4084 if they cannot be completed within T seconds. To disable timeout
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00004085 mode, use s.settimeout(None). There's also a module function,
4086 socket.setdefaulttimeout(T), which sets the default for all sockets
4087 created henceforth.
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00004088
4089- getopt.gnu_getopt was added. This supports GNU-style option
4090 processing, where options can be mixed with non-option arguments.
Martin v. Löwis446a25f2002-06-06 10:58:36 +00004091
Michael W. Hudsonb0dc1a32002-06-04 18:27:35 +00004092- Stop using strings for exceptions. String objects used for
4093 exceptions are now classes deriving from Exception. The objects
4094 changed were: Tkinter.TclError, bdb.BdbQuit, macpath.norm_error,
4095 tabnanny.NannyNag, and xdrlib.Error.
Neal Norwitzb5b5a262002-06-04 17:14:07 +00004096
Walter Dörwald474458d2002-06-04 15:16:29 +00004097- Constants BOM_UTF8, BOM_UTF16, BOM_UTF16_LE, BOM_UTF16_BE,
4098 BOM_UTF32, BOM_UTF32_LE and BOM_UTF32_BE that represent the Byte
4099 Order Mark in UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 encodings for little and
4100 big endian systems were added to the codecs module. The old names
4101 BOM32_* and BOM64_* were off by a factor of 2.
4102
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00004103- Added conversion functions math.degrees() and math.radians().
Raymond Hettinger87f59ee2002-05-13 04:17:32 +00004104
Raymond Hettinger866964c2002-12-14 19:51:34 +00004105- math.log() now takes an optional argument: math.log(x[, base]).
4106
Raymond Hettinger9b1df1d2002-05-12 06:07:21 +00004107- ftplib.retrlines() now tests for callback is None rather than testing
4108 for False. Was causing an error when given a callback object which
4109 was callable but also returned len() as zero. The change may
4110 create new breakage if the caller relied on the undocumented behavior
4111 and called with callback set to [] or some other False value not
4112 identical to None.
4113
Tim Peters46c04e12002-05-05 20:40:00 +00004114- random.gauss() uses a piece of hidden state used by nothing else,
4115 and the .seed() and .whseed() methods failed to reset it. In other
4116 words, setting the seed didn't completely determine the sequence of
4117 results produced by random.gauss(). It does now. Programs repeatedly
4118 mixing calls to a seed method with calls to gauss() may see different
4119 results now.
4120
Fred Drake7f781c92002-05-01 20:33:53 +00004121- The pickle.Pickler class grew a clear_memo() method to mimic that
4122 provided by cPickle.Pickler.
4123
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00004124- difflib's SequenceMatcher class now does a dynamic analysis of
4125 which elements are so frequent as to constitute noise. For
4126 comparing files as sequences of lines, this generally works better
4127 than the IS_LINE_JUNK function, and function ndiff's linejunk
4128 argument defaults to None now as a result. A happy benefit is
4129 that SequenceMatcher may run much faster now when applied
4130 to large files with many duplicate lines (for example, C program
4131 text with lots of repeated "}" and "return NULL;" lines).
4132
Guido van Rossum256705b2002-04-23 13:29:43 +00004133- New Text.dump() method in Tkinter module.
4134
Marc-André Lemburg1ec71ea2002-04-17 20:33:40 +00004135- New distutils commands for building packagers were added to
4136 support pkgtool on Solaris and swinstall on HP-UX.
4137
4138- distutils now has a new abstract binary packager base class
4139 command/bdist_packager, which simplifies writing packagers.
4140 This will hopefully provide the missing bits to encourage
4141 people to submit more packagers, e.g. for Debian, FreeBSD
4142 and other systems.
4143
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00004144- The UTF-16, -LE and -BE stream readers now raise a
4145 NotImplementedError for all calls to .readline(). Previously, they
4146 used to just produce garbage or fail with an encoding error --
4147 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 +00004148 work well with these.
4149
Martin v. Löwis5c137c22002-03-18 12:44:08 +00004150- compileall now supports quiet operation.
4151
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004152- The BaseHTTPServer now implements optional HTTP/1.1 persistent
Martin v. Löwis587c98c2002-03-17 18:37:22 +00004153 connections.
4154
Marc-André Lemburga5d2b4c2002-02-16 18:23:30 +00004155- socket module: the SSL support was broken out of the main
4156 _socket module C helper and placed into a new _ssl helper
4157 which now gets imported by socket.py if available and working.
4158
Marc-André Lemburg37aa5802002-02-10 21:42:47 +00004159- encodings package: added aliases for all supported IANA character
4160 sets
4161
Guido van Rossum606fe4e2001-12-28 20:57:14 +00004162- ftplib: to safeguard the user's privacy, anonymous login will use
4163 "anonymous@" as default password, rather than the real user and host
4164 name.
4165
Fred Drake36736122002-01-10 13:50:31 +00004166- webbrowser: tightened up the command passed to os.system() so that
4167 arbitrary shell code can't be executed because a bogus URL was
4168 passed in.
4169
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00004170- gettext.translation has an optional fallback argument, and
Martin v. Löwisa55ffae2002-01-11 06:58:49 +00004171 gettext.find an optional all argument. Translations will now fallback
Martin v. Löwisd8996052002-11-21 21:45:32 +00004172 on a per-message basis. The module supports plural forms, by means
4173 of gettext.[d]ngettext and Translation.[u]ngettext.
Martin v. Löwis1be64192002-01-11 06:33:28 +00004174
Martin v. Löwis9668b932002-01-12 11:27:42 +00004175- distutils bdist commands now offer a --skip-build option.
4176
Walter Dörwaldb25c2b02002-03-21 10:38:40 +00004177- warnings.warn now accepts a Warning instance as first argument.
4178
Fred Drakefed7e852002-04-04 19:36:15 +00004179- The xml.sax.expatreader.ExpatParser class will no longer create
4180 circular references by using itself as the locator that gets passed
4181 to the content handler implementation. [SF bug #535474]
4182
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00004183- The email.Parser.Parser class now properly parses strings regardless
4184 of their line endings, which can be any of \r, \n, or \r\n (CR, LF,
4185 or CRLF). Also, the Header class's constructor default arguments
4186 has changed slightly so that an explicit maxlinelen value is always
Barry Warsaw497e5c42002-12-30 19:27:08 +00004187 honored, and so unicode conversion error handling can be specified.
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00004188
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00004189- distutils' build_ext command now links C++ extensions with the C++
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00004190 compiler available in the Makefile or CXX environment variable, if
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00004191 running under \*nix.
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00004192
4193- New module bz2: provides a comprehensive interface for the bz2 compression
4194 library. It implements a complete file interface, one-shot (de)compression
4195 functions, and types for sequential (de)compression.
4196
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00004197- New pdb command 'pp' which is like 'p' except that it pretty-prints
Barry Warsaw5d8d6182002-11-05 22:41:33 +00004198 the value of its expression argument.
4199
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00004200- Now bdist_rpm distutils command understands a verify_script option in
4201 the config file, including the contents of the referred filename in
4202 the "%verifyscript" section of the rpm spec file.
4203
Gustavo Niemeyer1456fde2002-11-25 17:25:04 +00004204- Fixed bug #495695: webbrowser module would run graphic browsers in a
4205 unix environment even if DISPLAY was not set. Also, support for
4206 skipstone browser was included.
4207
Gustavo Niemeyerd5ae01a2002-12-16 13:11:57 +00004208- Fixed bug #636769: rexec would run unallowed code if subclasses of
4209 strings were used as parameters for certain functions.
4210
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004211Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004212-----------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004213
Martin v. Löwis0d1fdea2002-11-22 08:36:54 +00004214- pygettext.py now supports globbing on Windows, and accepts module
4215 names in addition to accepting file names.
4216
Guido van Rossum923e4ef2002-09-17 20:58:59 +00004217- The SGI demos (Demo/sgi) have been removed. Nobody thought they
4218 were interesting any more. (The SGI library modules and extensions
4219 are still there; it is believed that at least some of these are
4220 still used and useful.)
4221
Fred Drake40813b12002-08-05 15:24:19 +00004222- IDLE supports the new encoding declarations (PEP 263); it can also
4223 deal with legacy 8-bit files if they use the locale's encoding. It
4224 allows non-ASCII strings in the interactive shell and executes them
4225 in the locale's encoding.
Martin v. Löwis98ce7b72002-08-05 15:11:26 +00004226
Marc-André Lemburg46260092002-04-04 16:17:11 +00004227- freeze.py now produces binaries which can import shared modules,
4228 unlike before when this failed due to missing symbol exports in
4229 the generated binary.
4230
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004231Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004232-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004233
Martin v. Löwisdc461752002-11-06 21:59:33 +00004234- On Unix, IDLE is now installed automatically.
4235
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00004236- The fpectl module is not built by default; it's dangerous or useless
4237 except in the hands of experts.
4238
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00004239- The public Python C API will generally be declared using PyAPI_FUNC
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00004240 and PyAPI_DATA macros, while Python extension module init functions
4241 will be declared with PyMODINIT_FUNC. DL_EXPORT/DL_IMPORT macros
4242 are deprecated.
Neal Norwitz1389f3e2002-07-22 13:21:10 +00004243
Tim Petersc6a3ff62002-07-08 22:11:52 +00004244- A bug was fixed that could cause COUNT_ALLOCS builds to segfault, or
4245 get into infinite loops, when a new-style class got garbage-collected.
4246 Unfortunately, to avoid this, the way COUNT_ALLOCS works requires
4247 that new-style classes be immortal in COUNT_ALLOCS builds. Note that
4248 COUNT_ALLOCS is not enabled by default, in either release or debug
4249 builds, and that new-style classes are immortal only in COUNT_ALLOCS
4250 builds.
4251
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00004252- Compiling out the cyclic garbage collector is no longer an option.
4253 The old symbol WITH_CYCLE_GC is now ignored, and Python.h arranges
4254 that it's always defined (for the benefit of any extension modules
4255 that may be conditionalizing on it). A bonus is that any extension
4256 type participating in cyclic gc can choose to participate in the
4257 Py_TRASHCAN mechanism now too; in the absence of cyclic gc, this used
4258 to require editing the core to teach the trashcan mechanism about the
4259 new type.
4260
Martin v. Löwis0cec0ff2002-07-28 16:33:45 +00004261- According to Annex F of the current C standard,
Tim Peters1de41bf2002-07-03 03:31:20 +00004262
4263 The Standard C macro HUGE_VAL and its float and long double analogs,
4264 HUGE_VALF and HUGE_VALL, expand to expressions whose values are
4265 positive infinities.
4266
4267 Python only uses the double HUGE_VAL, and only to #define its own symbol
4268 Py_HUGE_VAL. Some platforms have incorrect definitions for HUGE_VAL.
4269 pyport.h used to try to worm around that, but the workarounds triggered
4270 other bugs on other platforms, so we gave up. If your platform defines
4271 HUGE_VAL incorrectly, you'll need to #define Py_HUGE_VAL to something
4272 that works on your platform. The only instance of this I'm sure about
4273 is on an unknown subset of Cray systems, described here:
4274
4275 http://www.cray.com/swpubs/manuals/SN-2194_2.0/html-SN-2194_2.0/x3138.htm
4276
4277 Presumably 2.3a1 breaks such systems. If anyone uses such a system, help!
4278
Martin v. Löwisa3fb4f72002-06-09 13:33:54 +00004279- The configure option --without-doc-strings can be used to remove the
4280 doc strings from the builtin functions and modules; this reduces the
4281 size of the executable.
4282
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00004283- The universal newlines option (PEP 278) is on by default. On Unix
4284 it can be disabled by passing --without-universal-newlines to the
4285 configure script. On other platforms, remove
4286 WITH_UNIVERSAL_NEWLINES from pyconfig.h.
Tim Peters639295f2002-04-21 07:30:30 +00004287
Martin v. Löwis1142de32002-03-29 16:28:31 +00004288- On Unix, a shared libpython2.3.so can be created with --enable-shared.
4289
Tim Peters8deda702002-03-30 10:06:07 +00004290- All uses of the CACHE_HASH, INTERN_STRINGS, and DONT_SHARE_SHORT_STRINGS
4291 preprocessor symbols were eliminated. The internal decisions they
4292 controlled stopped being experimental long ago.
Tim Peters1f7df352002-03-29 03:29:08 +00004293
Fred Drake7d28b732002-05-02 21:17:00 +00004294- The tools used to build the documentation now work under Cygwin as
4295 well as Unix.
4296
Skip Montanaro57454e52002-06-14 20:30:31 +00004297- The bsddb and dbm module builds have been changed to try and avoid version
4298 skew problems and disable linkage with Berkeley DB 1.85 unless the
4299 installer knows what s/he's doing. See the section on building these
4300 modules in the README file for details.
4301
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004302C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004303-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004304
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00004305- PyNumber_Check() now returns true for string and unicode objects.
4306 This is a result of these types having a partially defined
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00004307 tp_as_number slot. (This is not a feature, but an indication that
Walter Dörwalda1a61f92002-11-19 21:20:25 +00004308 PyNumber_Check() is not very useful to determine numeric behavior.
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00004309 It may be deprecated.)
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00004310
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00004311- The string object's layout has changed: the pointer member
4312 ob_sinterned has been replaced by an int member ob_sstate. On some
4313 platforms (e.g. most 64-bit systems) this may change the offset of
4314 the ob_sval member, so as a precaution the API_VERSION has been
4315 incremented. The apparently unused feature of "indirect interned
4316 strings", supported by the ob_sinterned member, is gone. Interned
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004317 strings are now usually mortal; there is a new API,
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00004318 PyString_InternImmortal() that creates immortal interned strings.
4319 (The ob_sstate member can only take three values; however, while
4320 making it a char saves a few bytes per string object on average, in
4321 it also slowed things down a bit because ob_sval was no longer
4322 aligned.)
4323
Guido van Rossumfdb86482002-08-14 21:20:32 +00004324- The Py_InitModule*() functions now accept NULL for the 'methods'
4325 argument. Modules without global functions are becoming more common
4326 now that factories can be types rather than functions.
4327
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00004328- New C API PyUnicode_FromOrdinal() which exposes unichr() at C
4329 level.
4330
Thomas Heller085358a2002-07-29 14:27:41 +00004331- New functions PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErr() and
4332 PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErrWithFilename(). Similar to
4333 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErrWithFilename() and
4334 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErr(), but they allow to specify
4335 the exception type to raise. Available on Windows.
4336
Tim Peters7c321a82002-07-09 02:57:01 +00004337- Py_FatalError() is now declared as taking a const char* argument. It
4338 was previously declared without const. This should not affect working
4339 code.
4340
Martin v. Löwis01f94bd2002-05-08 08:44:21 +00004341- Added new macro PySequence_ITEM(o, i) that directly calls
4342 sq_item without rechecking that o is a sequence and without
4343 adjusting for negative indices.
4344
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00004345- PyRange_New() now raises ValueError if the fourth argument is not 1.
4346 This is part of the removal of deprecated features of the xrange
4347 object.
4348
Guido van Rossum517c7d42002-04-26 02:49:14 +00004349- PyNumber_Coerce() and PyNumber_CoerceEx() now also invoke the type's
4350 coercion if both arguments have the same type but this type has the
4351 CHECKTYPES flag set. This is to better support proxies.
4352
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004353- The type of tp_free has been changed from "``void (*)(PyObject *)``" to
4354 "``void (*)(void *)``".
Neil Schemenauer9344b142002-04-12 23:00:08 +00004355
4356- PyObject_Del, PyObject_GC_Del are now functions instead of macros.
4357
Guido van Rossum0986d822002-04-08 01:38:42 +00004358- A type can now inherit its metatype from its base type. Previously,
4359 when PyType_Ready() was called, if ob_type was found to be NULL, it
4360 was always set to &PyType_Type; now it is set to base->ob_type,
4361 where base is tp_base, defaulting to &PyObject_Type.
4362
4363- PyType_Ready() accidentally did not inherit tp_is_gc; now it does.
4364
Neil Schemenauerc9abc1d2002-05-08 14:14:41 +00004365- The PyCore_* family of APIs have been removed.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00004366
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004367- The "u#" parser marker will now pass through Unicode objects as-is
Marc-André Lemburg3e3eacb2002-01-09 16:21:27 +00004368 without going through the buffer API.
4369
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004370- The enumerators of cmp_op have been renamed to use the prefix ``PyCmp_``.
Martin v. Löwis7198a522002-01-01 19:59:11 +00004371
Tim Peters10a3bb52001-12-25 19:07:38 +00004372- An old #define of ANY as void has been removed from pyport.h. This
4373 hasn't been used since Python's pre-ANSI days, and the #define has
4374 been marked as obsolete since then. SF bug 495548 says it created
4375 conflicts with other packages, so keeping it around wasn't harmless.
4376
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004377- Because Python's magic number scheme broke on January 1st, we decided
4378 to stop Python development. Thanks for all the fish!
4379
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00004380- Some of us don't like fish, so we changed Python's magic number
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00004381 scheme to a new one. See Python/import.c for details.
4382
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004383New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004384-------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004385
Martin v. Löwis79acb9e2002-12-06 12:48:53 +00004386- OpenVMS is now supported.
4387
Martin v. Löwisf90ae202002-06-11 06:22:31 +00004388- AtheOS is now supported.
4389
Andrew MacIntyre161ad0e2002-08-04 07:25:58 +00004390- the EMX runtime environment on OS/2 is now supported.
4391
Martin v. Löwisa6e97582002-01-01 18:41:33 +00004392- GNU/Hurd is now supported.
4393
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004394Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004395-----
4396
Fred Drake4dd0f7e2002-11-26 21:44:56 +00004397- The regrtest.py script's -u option now provides a way to say "allow
4398 all resources except this one." For example, to allow everything
4399 except bsddb, give the option '-uall,-bsddb'.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004400
4401Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004402-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004403
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00004404- The Windows distribution now ships with version 4.0.14 of the
4405 Sleepycat Berkeley database library. This should be a huge
4406 improvement over the previous Berkeley DB 1.85, which had many
4407 bugs.
4408 XXX What are the licensing issues here?
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004409 XXX If a user has a database created with a previous version of
Tim Peters84c7a3f2002-11-23 18:48:06 +00004410 XXX Python, what must they do to convert it?
4411 XXX I'm still not sure how to link this thing (see PCbuild/readme.txt).
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00004412 XXX The version # is likely to change before 2.3a1.
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00004413
4414- The Windows distribution now ships with a Secure Sockets Library (SLL)
Mark Hammondc3de0082002-12-03 06:16:08 +00004415 module (_ssl.pyd)
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00004416
Tim Peters857fb4c2002-11-14 23:31:58 +00004417- The Windows distribution now ships with Tcl/Tk version 8.4.1 (it
4418 previously shipped with Tcl/Tk 8.3.2).
4419
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00004420- When Python is built under a Microsoft compiler, sys.version now
4421 includes the compiler version number (_MSC_VER). For example, under
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004422 MSVC 6, sys.version contains the substring "MSC v.1200 ". 1200 is
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00004423 the value of _MSC_VER under MSVC 6.
4424
Tim Peters08e72952002-04-16 20:48:01 +00004425- Sometimes the uninstall executable (UNWISE.EXE) vanishes. One cause
4426 of that has been fixed in the installer (disabled Wise's "delete in-
4427 use files" uninstall option).
4428
Guido van Rossum181e41a2002-04-06 00:23:25 +00004429- Fixed a bug in urllib's proxy handling in Windows. [SF bug #503031]
4430
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00004431- The installer now installs Start menu shortcuts under (the local
4432 equivalent of) "All Users" when doing an Admin install.
4433
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00004434- file.truncate([newsize]) now works on Windows for all newsize values.
4435 It used to fail if newsize didn't fit in 32 bits, reflecting a
4436 limitation of MS _chsize (which is no longer used).
4437
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00004438- os.waitpid() is now implemented for Windows, and can be used to block
4439 until a specified process exits. This is similar to, but not exactly
4440 the same as, os.waitpid() on POSIX systems. If you're waiting for
4441 a specific process whose pid was obtained from one of the spawn()
4442 functions, the same Python os.waitpid() code works across platforms.
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00004443 See the docs for details. The docs were changed to clarify that
4444 spawn functions return, and waitpid requires, a process handle on
4445 Windows (not the same thing as a Windows process id).
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00004446
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00004447- New tempfile.TemporaryFile implementation for Windows: this doesn't
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004448 need a TemporaryFileWrapper wrapper anymore, and should be immune
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00004449 to a nasty problem: before 2.3, if you got a temp file on Windows, it
4450 got wrapped in an object whose close() method first closed the
4451 underlying file, then deleted the file. This usually worked fine.
4452 However, the spawn family of functions on Windows create (at a low C
4453 level) the same set of open files in the spawned process Q as were
4454 open in the spawning process P. If a temp file f was among them, then
4455 doing f.close() in P first closed P's C-level file handle on f, but Q's
4456 C-level file handle on f remained open, so the attempt in P to delete f
4457 blew up with a "Permission denied" error (Windows doesn't allow
4458 deleting open files). This was surprising, subtle, and difficult to
4459 work around.
4460
4461- The os module now exports all the symbolic constants usable with the
4462 low-level os.open() on Windows: the new constants in 2.3 are
4463 O_NOINHERIT, O_SHORT_LIVED, O_TEMPORARY, O_RANDOM and O_SEQUENTIAL.
4464 The others were also available in 2.2: O_APPEND, O_BINARY, O_CREAT,
4465 O_EXCL, O_RDONLY, O_RDWR, O_TEXT, O_TRUNC and O_WRONLY. Contrary
4466 to Microsoft docs, O_SHORT_LIVED does not seem to imply O_TEMPORARY
4467 (so specify both if you want both; note that neither is useful unless
4468 specified with O_CREAT too).
4469
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004470Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004471----
4472
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004473- Mac/Relnotes is gone, the release notes are now here.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004474
Just van Rossume1ebd802003-02-10 10:06:18 +00004475- Python (the OSX-only, unix-based version, not the OS9-compatible CFM
4476 version) now fully supports unicode strings as arguments to various file
4477 system calls, eg. open(), file(), os.stat() and os.listdir().
4478
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004479- The current naming convention for Python on the Macintosh is that MacPython
4480 refers to the unix-based OSX-only version, and MacPython-OS9 refers to the
4481 CFM-based version that runs on both OS9 and OSX.
4482
4483- All MacPython-OS9 functionality is now available in an OSX unix build,
4484 including the Carbon modules, the IDE, OSA support, etc. A lot of this
4485 will only work correctly in a framework build, though, because you cannot
4486 talk to the window manager unless your application is run from a .app
4487 bundle. There is a command line tool "pythonw" that runs your script
4488 with an interpreter living in such a .app bundle, this interpreter should
4489 be used to run any Python script using the window manager (including
4490 Tkinter or wxPython scripts).
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00004491
Jack Jansen8bb80db2002-12-30 22:42:43 +00004492- Most of Mac/Lib has moved to Lib/plat-mac, which is again used both in
4493 MacPython-OSX and MacPython-OS9. The only modules remaining in Mac/Lib
4494 are specifically for MacPython-OS9 (CFM support, preference resources, etc).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004495
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004496- A new utility PythonLauncher will start a Python interpreter when a .py or
4497 .pyw script is double-clicked in the Finder. By default .py scripts are
4498 run with a normal Python interpreter in a Terminal window and .pyw
4499 files are run with a window-aware pythonw interpreter without a Terminal
4500 window, but all this can be customized.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004501
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004502- MacPython-OS9 is now Carbon-only, so it runs on Mac OS 9 or Mac OS X and
4503 possibly on Mac OS 8.6 with the right CarbonLib installed, but not on earlier
4504 releases.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004505
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004506- Many tools such as BuildApplet.py and gensuitemodule.py now support a command
4507 line interface too.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004508
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004509- All the Carbon classes are now PEP253 compliant, meaning that you can
4510 subclass them from Python. Most of the attributes have gone, you should
4511 now use the accessor function call API, which is also what Apple's
4512 documentation uses. Some attributes such as grafport.visRgn are still
4513 available for convenience.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004514
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004515- New Carbon modules File (implementing the APIs in Files.h and Aliases.h)
4516 and Folder (APIs from Folders.h). The old macfs builtin module is
4517 gone, and replaced by a Python wrapper around the new modules.
4518
4519- Pathname handling should now be fully consistent: MacPython-OSX always uses
4520 unix pathnames and MacPython-OS9 always uses colon-separated Mac pathnames
4521 (also when running on Mac OS X).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004522
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004523- New Carbon modules Help and AH give access to the Carbon Help Manager.
4524 There are hooks in the IDE to allow accessing the Python documentation
4525 (and Apple's Carbon and Cocoa documentation) through the Help Viewer.
4526 See Mac/OSX/README for converting the Python documentation to a
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004527 Help Viewer compatible form and installing it.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004528
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004529- OSA support has been redesigned and the generated Python classes now
4530 mirror the inheritance defined by the underlying OSA classes.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004531
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004532- MacPython no longer maps both \r and \n to \n on input for any text file.
4533 This feature has been replaced by universal newline support (PEP278).
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00004534
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00004535- The default encoding for Python sourcefiles in MacPython-OS9 is no longer
Guido van Rossum16c85172003-02-20 01:52:48 +00004536 mac-roman (or whatever your local Mac encoding was) but "ascii", like on
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00004537 other platforms. If you really need sourcefiles with Mac characters in them
4538 you can change this in site.py.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004539
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00004540
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004541What's New in Python 2.2 final?
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004542===============================
4543
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004544*Release date: 21-Dec-2001*
4545
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004546Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004547--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004548
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004549- pickle.py, cPickle: allow pickling instances of new-style classes
4550 with a custom metaclass.
4551
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004552Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004553-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004554
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004555- weakref proxy object: when comparing, unwrap both arguments if both
4556 are proxies.
4557
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004558Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004559-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004560
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004561- binascii.b2a_base64(): fix a potential buffer overrun when encoding
4562 very short strings.
4563
4564- cPickle: the obscure "fast" mode was suspected of causing stack
4565 overflows on the Mac. Hopefully fixed this by setting the recursion
4566 limit much smaller. If the limit is too low (it only affects
4567 performance), you can change it by defining PY_CPICKLE_FAST_LIMIT
4568 when compiling cPickle.c (or in pyconfig.h).
4569
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004570Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004571-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004572
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004573- dumbdbm.py: fixed a dumb old bug (the file didn't get synched at
4574 close or delete time).
4575
4576- rfc822.py: fixed a bug where the address '<>' was converted to None
4577 instead of an empty string (also fixes the email.Utils module).
4578
4579- xmlrpclib.py: version 1.0.0; uses precision for doubles.
4580
4581- test suite: the pickle and cPickle tests were not executing any code
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004582 when run from the standard regression test.
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004583
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004584Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004585-----------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004586
4587Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004588-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004589
4590C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004591-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004592
4593New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004594-------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004595
4596Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004597-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004598
4599Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004600-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004601
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004602- distutils package: fixed broken Windows installers (bdist_wininst).
4603
4604- tempfile.py: prevent mysterious warnings when TemporaryFileWrapper
4605 instances are deleted at process exit time.
4606
4607- socket.py: prevent mysterious warnings when socket instances are
4608 deleted at process exit time.
4609
4610- posixmodule.c: fix a Windows crash with stat() of a filename ending
4611 in backslash.
4612
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004613Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004614----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004615
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004616- The Carbon toolbox modules have been upgraded to Universal Headers
4617 3.4, and experimental CoreGraphics and CarbonEvents modules have
4618 been added. All only for framework-enabled MacOSX.
4619
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004620
Tim Peters6272dfd2001-12-13 19:34:00 +00004621What's New in Python 2.2c1?
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004622===========================
4623
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004624*Release date: 14-Dec-2001*
4625
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004626Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004627--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004628
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004629- Guido's tutorial introduction to the new type/class features has
4630 been extensively updated. See
4631
4632 http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html
4633
4634 That remains the primary documentation in this area.
4635
Guido van Rossum33bab012001-12-05 22:45:48 +00004636- Fixed a leak: instance variables declared with __slots__ were never
4637 deleted!
4638
Guido van Rossum4b800852001-12-03 00:54:52 +00004639- The "delete attribute" method of descriptor objects is called
4640 __delete__, not __del__. In previous releases, it was mistakenly
4641 called __del__, which created an unfortunate overloading condition
4642 with finalizers. (The "get attribute" and "set attribute" methods
4643 are still called __get__ and __set__, respectively.)
4644
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00004645- Some subtle issues with the super built-in were fixed:
4646
4647 (a) When super itself is subclassed, its __get__ method would still
4648 return an instance of the base class (i.e., of super).
4649
4650 (b) super(C, C()).__class__ would return C rather than super. This
4651 is confusing. To fix this, I decided to change the semantics of
4652 super so that it only applies to code attributes, not to data
4653 attributes. After all, overriding data attributes is not
4654 supported anyway.
4655
4656 (c) The __get__ method didn't check whether the argument was an
4657 instance of the type used in creation of the super instance.
4658
Guido van Rossumcd7b7d62001-12-04 21:02:07 +00004659- Previously, hash() of an instance of a subclass of a mutable type
4660 (list or dictionary) would return some value, rather than raising
4661 TypeError. This has been fixed. Also, directly calling
4662 dict.__hash__ and list.__hash__ now raises the same TypeError
4663 (previously, these were the same as object.__hash__).
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00004664
Guido van Rossumd331cb52001-12-05 19:46:42 +00004665- New-style objects now support deleting their __dict__. This is for
4666 all intents and purposes equivalent to assigning a brand new empty
4667 dictionary, but saves space if the object is not used further.
4668
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004669Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004670-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004671
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004672- -Qnew now works as documented in PEP 238: when -Qnew is passed on
4673 the command line, all occurrences of "/" use true division instead
4674 of classic division. See the PEP for details. Note that "all"
4675 means all instances in library and 3rd-party modules, as well as in
4676 your own code. As the PEP says, -Qnew is intended for use only in
4677 educational environments with control over the libraries in use.
Tim Petersbf72fe22001-12-11 21:43:14 +00004678 Note that test_coercion.py in the standard Python test suite fails
4679 under -Qnew; this is expected, and won't be repaired until true
4680 division becomes the default (in the meantime, test_coercion is
4681 testing the current rules).
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004682
Fred Drake6c01e252001-12-14 17:08:12 +00004683- complex() now only allows the first argument to be a string
4684 argument, and raises TypeError if either the second arg is a string
4685 or if the second arg is specified when the first is a string.
4686
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004687Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004688-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004689
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00004690- gc.get_referents was renamed to gc.get_referrers.
4691
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004692Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004693-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004694
Tim Peters25059d32001-12-07 20:35:43 +00004695- Functions in the os.spawn() family now release the global interpreter
4696 lock around calling the platform spawn. They should always have done
4697 this, but did not before 2.2c1. Multithreaded programs calling
4698 an os.spawn function with P_WAIT will no longer block all Python threads
4699 until the spawned program completes. It's possible that some programs
4700 relies on blocking, although more likely by accident than by design.
4701
Martin v. Löwis3a89b2b2001-11-25 14:35:58 +00004702- webbrowser defaults to netscape.exe on OS/2 now.
4703
Martin v. Löwis652e1912001-11-25 14:50:56 +00004704- Tix.ResizeHandle exposes detach_widget, hide, and show.
4705
Martin v. Löwis714d2e22001-12-02 12:26:03 +00004706- The charset alias windows_1252 has been added.
4707
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004708- types.StringTypes is a tuple containing the defined string types;
4709 usually this will be (str, unicode), but if Python was compiled
4710 without Unicode support it will be just (str,).
4711
4712- The pulldom and minidom modules were synchronized to PyXML.
4713
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004714Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004715-----------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004716
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004717- A new script called Tools/scripts/google.py was added, which fires
4718 off a search on Google.
4719
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004720Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004721-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004722
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004723- Note that release builds of Python should arrange to define the
4724 preprocessor symbol NDEBUG on the command line (or equivalent).
4725 In the 2.2 pre-release series we tried to define this by magic in
4726 Python.h instead, but it proved to cause problems for extension
4727 authors. The Unix, Windows and Mac builds now all define NDEBUG in
4728 release builds via cmdline (or equivalent) instead. Ports to
4729 other platforms should do likewise.
4730
Jack Jansen1999ef42001-12-06 21:47:20 +00004731- It is no longer necessary to use --with-suffix when building on a
4732 case-insensitive file system (such as Mac OS X HFS+). In the build
4733 directory an extension is used, but not in the installed python.
4734
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004735C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004736-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004737
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00004738- New function PyDict_MergeFromSeq2() exposes the builtin dict
4739 constructor's logic for updating a dictionary from an iterable object
4740 producing key-value pairs.
4741
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00004742- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() requires that the number of entries in
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00004743 the keyword list equal the number of argument specifiers. This
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00004744 wasn't checked correctly, and PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords could even
4745 dump core in some bad cases. This has been repaired. As a result,
4746 PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords may raise RuntimeError in bad cases that
4747 previously went unchallenged.
4748
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004749New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004750-------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004751
4752Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004753-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004754
4755Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004756-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004757
4758Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004759----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004760
Jack Jansenffa260f2001-12-06 21:14:00 +00004761- In unix-Python on Mac OS X (and darwin) sys.platform is now "darwin",
4762 without any trailing digits.
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004763
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004764- Changed logic for finding python home in Mac OS X framework Pythons.
4765 Now sys.executable points to the executable again, in stead of to
4766 the shared library. The latter is used only for locating the python
4767 home.
4768
4769
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004770What's New in Python 2.2b2?
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004771===========================
4772
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004773*Release date: 16-Nov-2001*
4774
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004775Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004776--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004777
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00004778- Multiple inheritance mixing new-style and classic classes in the
4779 list of base classes is now allowed, so this works now:
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004780
4781 class Classic: pass
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00004782 class Mixed(Classic, object): pass
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004783
4784 The MRO (method resolution order) for each base class is respected
4785 according to its kind, but the MRO for the derived class is computed
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004786 using new-style MRO rules if any base class is a new-style class.
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004787 This needs to be documented.
4788
Tim Petersa427a2b2001-10-29 22:25:45 +00004789- The new builtin dictionary() constructor, and dictionary type, have
4790 been renamed to dict. This reflects a decade of common usage.
4791
Guido van Rossum3fc08d22001-11-15 20:33:10 +00004792- dict() now accepts an iterable object producing 2-sequences. For
4793 example, dict(d.items()) == d for any dictionary d. The argument,
4794 and the elements of the argument, can be any iterable objects.
4795
Guido van Rossum7ad2d1e2001-10-29 22:11:00 +00004796- New-style classes can now have a __del__ method, which is called
4797 when the instance is deleted (just like for classic classes).
4798
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004799- Assignment to object.__dict__ is now possible, for objects that are
4800 instances of new-style classes that have a __dict__ (unless the base
4801 class forbids it).
4802
Guido van Rossumc8e56452001-10-22 00:43:43 +00004803- Methods of built-in types now properly check for keyword arguments
4804 (formerly these were silently ignored). The only built-in methods
4805 that take keyword arguments are __call__, __init__ and __new__.
4806
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004807- The socket function has been converted to a type; see below.
4808
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004809Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004810-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004811
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00004812- Assignment to __debug__ raises SyntaxError at compile-time. This
4813 was promised when 2.1c1 was released as "What's New in Python 2.1c1"
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004814 (see below) says.
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00004815
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004816- Clarified the error messages for unsupported operands to an operator
4817 (like 1 + '').
4818
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004819Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004820-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004821
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004822- mmap has a new keyword argument, "access", allowing a uniform way for
4823 both Windows and Unix users to create read-only, write-through and
4824 copy-on-write memory mappings. This was previously possible only on
4825 Unix. A new keyword argument was required to support this in a
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004826 uniform way because the mmap() signatures had diverged across
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004827 platforms. Thanks to Jay T Miller for repairing this!
4828
Tim Peters169ded02001-11-03 19:57:21 +00004829- By default, the gc.garbage list now contains only those instances in
4830 unreachable cycles that have __del__ methods; in 2.1 it contained all
4831 instances in unreachable cycles. "Instances" here has been generalized
4832 to include instances of both new-style and old-style classes.
4833
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004834- The socket module defines a new method for socket objects,
4835 sendall(). This is like send() but may make multiple calls to
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004836 send() until all data has been sent. Also, the socket function has
4837 been converted to a subclassable type, like list and tuple (etc.)
4838 before it; socket and SocketType are now the same thing.
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004839
4840- Various bugfixes to the curses module. There is now a test suite
4841 for the curses module (you have to run it manually).
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00004842
Guido van Rossum692adf12001-10-30 03:03:03 +00004843- binascii.b2a_base64 no longer places an arbitrary restriction of 57
4844 bytes on its input.
4845
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004846Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004847-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004848
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004849- tkFileDialog exposes a Directory class and askdirectory
Martin v. Löwis25ee87c2001-11-07 22:38:08 +00004850 convenience function.
4851
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00004852- Symbolic group names in regular expressions must be unique. For
4853 example, the regexp r'(?P<abc>)(?P<abc>)' is not allowed, because a
4854 single name can't mean both "group 1" and "group 2" simultaneously.
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004855 Python 2.2 detects this error at regexp compilation time;
4856 previously, the error went undetected, and results were
4857 unpredictable. Also in sre, the pattern.split(), pattern.sub(), and
4858 pattern.subn() methods have been rewritten in C. Also, an
4859 experimental function/method finditer() has been added, which works
4860 like findall() but returns an iterator.
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00004861
Martin v. Löwisb7b32602001-11-02 23:48:20 +00004862- Tix exposes more commands through the classes DirSelectBox,
4863 DirSelectDialog, ListNoteBook, Meter, CheckList, and the
4864 methods tix_addbitmapdir, tix_cget, tix_configure, tix_filedialog,
4865 tix_getbitmap, tix_getimage, tix_option_get, and tix_resetoptions.
4866
Tim Peters98791af2001-10-23 01:59:54 +00004867- Traceback objects are now scanned by cyclic garbage collection, so
4868 cycles created by casual use of sys.exc_info() no longer cause
4869 permanent memory leaks (provided garbage collection is enabled).
4870
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00004871- os.extsep -- a new variable needed by the RISCOS support. It is the
4872 separator used by extensions, and is '.' on all platforms except
4873 RISCOS, where it is '/'. There is no need to use this variable
4874 unless you have a masochistic desire to port your code to RISCOS.
4875
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004876- mimetypes.py has optional support for non-standard, but commonly
4877 found types. guess_type() and guess_extension() now accept an
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004878 optional 'strict' flag, defaulting to true, which controls whether
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004879 recognize non-standard types or not. A few non-standard types we
4880 know about have been added. Also, when run as a script, there are
4881 new -l and -e options.
4882
4883- statcache is now deprecated.
4884
4885- email.Utils.formatdate() now produces the preferred RFC 2822 style
4886 dates with numeric timezones (it used to produce obsolete dates
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004887 hard coded to "GMT" timezone). An optional 'localtime' flag is
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004888 added to produce dates in the local timezone, with daylight savings
4889 time properly taken into account.
4890
4891- In pickle and cPickle, instead of masking errors in load() by
4892 transforming them into SystemError, we let the original exception
4893 propagate out. Also, implement support for __safe_for_unpickling__
4894 in pickle, as it already was supported in cPickle.
4895
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004896Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004897-----------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004898
4899Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004900-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004901
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004902- The dbm module is built using libdb1 if available. The bsddb module
4903 is built with libdb3 if available.
4904
4905- Misc/Makefile.pre.in has been removed by BDFL pronouncement.
4906
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004907C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004908-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004909
Tim Peters1fc240e2001-10-26 05:06:50 +00004910- New function PySequence_Fast_GET_SIZE() returns the size of a non-
4911 NULL result from PySequence_Fast(), more quickly than calling
4912 PySequence_Size().
4913
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004914- New argument unpacking function PyArg_UnpackTuple() added.
4915
4916- New functions PyObject_CallFunctionObjArgs() and
4917 PyObject_CallMethodObjArgs() have been added to make it more
4918 convenient and efficient to call functions and methods from C.
4919
4920- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() no longer masks errors, so it's
4921 possible that this will propagate errors it didn't before.
4922
4923- New function PyObject_CheckReadBuffer(), which returns true if its
4924 argument supports the single-segment readable buffer interface.
4925
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004926New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004927-------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004928
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004929- We've finally confirmed that this release builds on HP-UX 11.00,
4930 *with* threads, and passes the test suite.
4931
Tim Peters7a33d8b2001-11-05 02:51:07 +00004932- Thanks to a series of patches from Michael Muller, Python may build
4933 again under OS/2 Visual Age C++.
4934
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00004935- Updated RISCOS port by Dietmar Schwertberger.
4936
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004937Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004938-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004939
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00004940- Added a test script for the curses module. It isn't run automatically;
4941 regrtest.py must be run with '-u curses' to enable it.
4942
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004943Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004944-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004945
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004946Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004947----
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004948
4949- PythonScript has been moved to unsupported and is slated to be
4950 removed completely in the next release.
4951
4952- It should now be possible to build applets that work on both OS9 and
4953 OSX.
4954
4955- The core is now linked with CoreServices not Carbon; as a side
4956 result, default 8bit encoding on OSX is now ASCII.
4957
4958- Python should now build on OSX 10.1.1
4959
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004960
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004961What's New in Python 2.2b1?
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004962===========================
4963
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004964*Release date: 19-Oct-2001*
4965
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004966Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004967--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004968
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004969- New-style classes are now always dynamic (except for built-in and
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004970 extension types). There is no longer a performance penalty, and I
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004971 no longer see another reason to keep this baggage around. One relic
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004972 remains: the __dict__ of a new-style class is a read-only proxy; you
4973 must set the class's attribute to modify it. As a consequence, the
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004974 __defined__ attribute of new-style types no longer exists, for lack
4975 of need: there is once again only one __dict__ (although in the
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004976 future a __cache__ may be resurrected with a similar function, if I
4977 can prove that it actually speeds things up).
Guido van Rossum50fda3b2001-10-04 19:46:06 +00004978
Tim Peters1c9ca872001-10-04 06:43:12 +00004979- C.__doc__ now works as expected for new-style classes (in 2.2a4 it
4980 always returned None, even when there was a class docstring).
4981
4982- doctest now finds and runs docstrings attached to new-style classes,
4983 class methods, static methods, and properties.
4984
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004985Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004986-----------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004987
Guido van Rossuma8bcf802001-10-15 15:53:58 +00004988- A very subtle syntactical pitfall in list comprehensions was fixed.
4989 For example: [a+b for a in 'abc', for b in 'def']. The comma in
4990 this example is a mistake. Previously, this would silently let 'a'
4991 iterate over the singleton tuple ('abc',), yielding ['abcd', 'abce',
4992 'abcf'] rather than the intended ['ad', 'ae', 'af', 'bd', 'be',
4993 'bf', 'cd', 'ce', 'cf']. Now, this is flagged as a syntax error.
4994 Note that [a for a in <singleton>] is a convoluted way to say
4995 [<singleton>] anyway, so it's not like any expressiveness is lost.
4996
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004997- getattr(obj, name, default) now only catches AttributeError, as
4998 documented, rather than returning the default value for all
4999 exceptions (which could mask bugs in a __getattr__ hook, for
5000 example).
5001
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00005002- Weak reference objects are now part of the core and offer a C API.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00005003 A bug which could allow a core dump when binary operations involved
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00005004 proxy reference has been fixed. weakref.ReferenceError is now a
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00005005 built-in exception.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00005006
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00005007- unicode(obj) now behaves more like str(obj), accepting arbitrary
5008 objects, and calling a __unicode__ method if it exists.
5009 unicode(obj, encoding) and unicode(obj, encoding, errors) still
Marc-André Lemburgb5507ec2001-10-19 12:02:29 +00005010 require an 8-bit string or character buffer argument.
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00005011
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00005012- isinstance() now allows any object as the first argument and a
5013 class, a type or something with a __bases__ tuple attribute for the
5014 second argument. The second argument may also be a tuple of a
5015 class, type, or something with __bases__, in which case isinstance()
5016 will return true if the first argument is an instance of any of the
5017 things contained in the second argument tuple. E.g.
5018
5019 isinstance(x, (A, B))
5020
5021 returns true if x is an instance of A or B.
5022
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00005023Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005024-----------------
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00005025
5026- thread.start_new_thread() now returns the thread ID (previously None).
5027
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00005028- binascii has now two quopri support functions, a2b_qp and b2a_qp.
5029
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00005030- readline now supports setting the startup_hook and the
5031 pre_event_hook, and adds the add_history() function.
Martin v. Löwis0daad592001-09-30 21:09:59 +00005032
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00005033- os and posix supports chroot(), setgroups() and unsetenv() where
5034 available. The stat(), fstat(), statvfs() and fstatvfs() functions
5035 now return "pseudo-sequences" -- the various fields can now be
5036 accessed as attributes (e.g. os.stat("/").st_mtime) but for
5037 backwards compatibility they also behave as a fixed-length sequence.
5038 Some platform-specific fields (e.g. st_rdev) are only accessible as
Guido van Rossum98bf58f2001-10-18 20:34:25 +00005039 attributes.
5040
5041- time: localtime(), gmtime() and strptime() now return a
5042 pseudo-sequence similar to the os.stat() return value, with
5043 attributes like tm_year etc.
Martin v. Löwis16628c92001-10-04 22:46:41 +00005044
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00005045- Decompression objects in the zlib module now accept an optional
5046 second parameter to decompress() that specifies the maximum amount
5047 of memory to use for the uncompressed data.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005048
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00005049- optional SSL support in the socket module now exports OpenSSL
5050 functions RAND_add(), RAND_egd(), and RAND_status(). These calls
5051 are useful on platforms like Solaris where OpenSSL does not
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00005052 automatically seed its PRNG. Also, the keyfile and certfile
5053 arguments to socket.ssl() are now optional.
5054
5055- posixmodule (and by extension, the os module on POSIX platforms) now
5056 exports O_LARGEFILE, O_DIRECT, O_DIRECTORY, and O_NOFOLLOW.
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00005057
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00005058Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005059-------
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00005060
Tim Peters7402f792001-10-02 03:53:41 +00005061- doctest now excludes functions and classes not defined by the module
5062 being tested, thanks to Tim Hochberg.
5063
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00005064- HotShot, a new profiler implemented using a C-based callback, has
5065 been added. This substantially reduces the overhead of profiling,
5066 but it is still quite preliminary. Support modules and
5067 documentation will be added in upcoming releases (before 2.2 final).
5068
Guido van Rossumc4b09b42001-10-04 10:19:00 +00005069- profile now produces correct output in situations where an exception
5070 raised in Python is cleared by C code (e.g. hasattr()). This used
5071 to cause wrong output, including spurious claims of recursive
5072 functions and attribution of time spent to the wrong function.
5073
Tim Peters0a1fc4e2001-10-07 03:12:08 +00005074 The code and documentation for the derived OldProfile and HotProfile
5075 profiling classes was removed. The code hasn't worked for years (if
5076 you tried to use them, they raised exceptions). OldProfile
5077 intended to reproduce the behavior of the profiler Python used more
5078 than 7 years ago, and isn't interesting anymore. HotProfile intended
5079 to provide a faster profiler (but producing less information), and
5080 that's a worthy goal we intend to meet via a different approach (but
5081 without losing information).
5082
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00005083- Profile.calibrate() has a new implementation that should deliver
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00005084 a much better system-specific calibration constant. The constant can
5085 now be specified in an instance constructor, or as a Profile class or
5086 instance variable, instead of by editing profile.py's source code.
5087 Calibration must still be done manually (see the docs for the profile
5088 module).
5089
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00005090 Note that Profile.calibrate() must be overridden by subclasses.
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00005091 Improving the accuracy required exploiting detailed knowledge of
5092 profiler internals; the earlier method abstracted away the details
5093 and measured a simplified model instead, but consequently computed
5094 a constant too small by a factor of 2 on some modern machines.
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00005095
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00005096- quopri's encode and decode methods take an optional header parameter,
Jeremy Hylton6f543b62001-10-16 20:42:52 +00005097 which indicates whether output is intended for the header 'Q'
5098 encoding.
5099
Guido van Rossuma5343cc2001-10-18 18:02:07 +00005100- The SocketServer.ThreadingMixIn class now closes the request after
5101 finish_request() returns. (Not when it errors out though.)
5102
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005103- The nntplib module's NNTP.body() method has grown a 'file' argument
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00005104 to allow saving the message body to a file.
5105
5106- The email package has added a class email.Parser.HeaderParser which
5107 only parses headers and does not recurse into the message's body.
5108 Also, the module/class MIMEAudio has been added for representing
5109 audio data (contributed by Anthony Baxter).
5110
5111- ftplib should be able to handle files > 2GB.
5112
5113- ConfigParser.getboolean() now also interprets TRUE, FALSE, YES, NO,
5114 ON, and OFF.
5115
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00005116- xml.dom.minidom NodeList objects now support the length attribute
5117 and item() method as required by the DOM specifications.
5118
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00005119Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005120-----------
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00005121
5122- Demo/dns was removed. It no longer serves any purpose; a package
5123 derived from it is now maintained by Anthony Baxter, see
5124 http://PyDNS.SourceForge.net.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005125
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00005126- The freeze tool has been made more robust, and two new options have
5127 been added: -X and -E.
5128
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005129Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005130-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005131
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00005132- configure will use CXX in LINKCC if CXX is used to build main() and
5133 the system requires to link a C++ main using the C++ compiler.
5134
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005135C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005136-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005137
Guido van Rossum6c4bce32001-10-18 19:20:25 +00005138- The documentation for the tp_compare slot is updated to require that
5139 the return value must be -1, 0, 1; an arbitrary number <0 or >0 is
5140 not correct. This is not yet enforced but will be enforced in
5141 Python 2.3; even later, we may use -2 to indicate errors and +2 for
5142 "NotImplemented". Right now, -1 should be used for an error return.
5143
Tim Petersd38b1c72001-09-30 05:09:37 +00005144- PyLong_AsLongLong() now accepts int (as well as long) arguments.
5145 Consequently, PyArg_ParseTuple's 'L' code also accepts int (as well
5146 as long) arguments.
5147
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00005148- PyThread_start_new_thread() now returns a long int giving the thread
5149 ID, if one can be calculated; it returns -1 for error, 0 if no
5150 thread ID is calculated (this is an incompatible change, but only
5151 the thread module used this API). This code has only really been
5152 tested on Linux and Windows; other platforms please beware (and
5153 report any bugs or strange behavior).
5154
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00005155- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() no longer accepts Unicode objects as
5156 input.
5157
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005158New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005159-------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005160
5161Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005162-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005163
5164Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005165-------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005166
Tim Peters04cf1d32001-10-09 22:39:40 +00005167- Installer: If you install IDLE, and don't disable file-extension
5168 registration, a new "Edit with IDLE" context (right-click) menu entry
5169 is created for .py and .pyw files.
5170
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00005171- The signal module now supports SIGBREAK on Windows, thanks to Steven
5172 Scott. Note that SIGBREAK is unique to Windows. The default SIGBREAK
5173 action remains to call Win32 ExitProcess(). This can be changed via
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00005174 signal.signal(). For example::
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00005175
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005176 # Make Ctrl+Break raise KeyboardInterrupt, like Python's default Ctrl+C
5177 # (SIGINT) behavior.
5178 import signal
5179 signal.signal(signal.SIGBREAK, signal.default_int_handler)
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00005180
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005181 try:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00005182 while 1:
5183 pass
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005184 except KeyboardInterrupt:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00005185 # We get here on Ctrl+C or Ctrl+Break now; if we had not changed
5186 # SIGBREAK, only on Ctrl+C (and Ctrl+Break would terminate the
5187 # program without the possibility for any Python-level cleanup).
5188 print "Clean exit"
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00005189
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005190
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005191What's New in Python 2.2a4?
5192===========================
5193
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005194*Release date: 28-Sep-2001*
5195
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005196Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005197--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005198
5199- pydoc and inspect are now aware of new-style classes;
5200 e.g. help(list) at the interactive prompt now shows proper
5201 documentation for all operations on list objects.
5202
5203- Applications using Jim Fulton's ExtensionClass module can now safely
5204 be used with Python 2.2. In particular, Zope 2.4.1 now works with
5205 Python 2.2 (as well as with Python 2.1.1). The Demo/metaclass
5206 examples also work again. It is hoped that Gtk and Boost also work
5207 with 2.2a4 and beyond. (If you can confirm this, please write
5208 webmaster@python.org; if there are still problems, please open a bug
5209 report on SourceForge.)
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005210
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00005211- property() now takes 4 keyword arguments: fget, fset, fdel and doc.
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00005212 These map to read-only attributes 'fget', 'fset', 'fdel', and '__doc__'
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00005213 in the constructed property object. fget, fset and fdel weren't
5214 discoverable from Python in 2.2a3. __doc__ is new, and allows to
5215 associate a docstring with a property.
5216
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005217- Comparison overloading is now more completely implemented. For
5218 example, a str subclass instance can properly be compared to a str
5219 instance, and it can properly overload comparison. Ditto for most
5220 other built-in object types.
5221
5222- The repr() of new-style classes has changed; instead of <type
5223 'M.Foo'> a new-style class is now rendered as <class 'M.Foo'>,
5224 *except* for built-in types, which are still rendered as <type
5225 'Foo'> (to avoid upsetting existing code that might parse or
5226 otherwise rely on repr() of certain type objects).
5227
5228- The repr() of new-style objects is now always <Foo object at XXX>;
5229 previously, it was sometimes <Foo instance at XXX>.
5230
5231- For new-style classes, what was previously called __getattr__ is now
5232 called __getattribute__. This method, if defined, is called for
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00005233 *every* attribute access. A new __getattr__ hook more similar to the
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005234 one in classic classes is defined which is called only if regular
5235 attribute access raises AttributeError; to catch *all* attribute
5236 access, you can use __getattribute__ (for new-style classes). If
5237 both are defined, __getattribute__ is called first, and if it raises
5238 AttributeError, __getattr__ is called.
5239
5240- The __class__ attribute of new-style objects can be assigned to.
5241 The new class must have the same C-level object layout as the old
5242 class.
5243
5244- The builtin file type can be subclassed now. In the usual pattern,
5245 "file" is the name of the builtin type, and file() is a new builtin
5246 constructor, with the same signature as the builtin open() function.
5247 file() is now the preferred way to open a file.
5248
5249- Previously, __new__ would only see sequential arguments passed to
5250 the type in a constructor call; __init__ would see both sequential
5251 and keyword arguments. This made no sense whatsoever any more, so
5252 now both __new__ and __init__ see all arguments.
5253
5254- Previously, hash() applied to an instance of a subclass of str or
5255 unicode always returned 0. This has been repaired.
5256
5257- Previously, an operation on an instance of a subclass of an
5258 immutable type (int, long, float, complex, tuple, str, unicode),
5259 where the subtype didn't override the operation (and so the
5260 operation was handled by the builtin type), could return that
5261 instance instead a value of the base type. For example, if s was of
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00005262 a str subclass type, s[:] returned s as-is. Now it returns a str
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005263 with the same value as s.
5264
Barry Warsaw86fbaf82001-09-28 15:26:12 +00005265- Provisional support for pickling new-style objects has been added.
5266
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005267Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005268----
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005269
Tim Peters2c9aa5e2001-09-23 04:06:05 +00005270- file.writelines() now accepts any iterable object producing strings.
5271
Marc-André Lemburgaefd7662001-09-20 12:59:37 +00005272- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() now works very much like
5273 PyObject_Str(obj) in that it tries to use __str__/tp_str
5274 on the object if the object is not a string or buffer. This
5275 makes unicode() behave like str() when applied to non-string/buffer
5276 objects.
5277
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00005278- PyFile_WriteObject now passes Unicode objects to the file's write
5279 method. As a result, all file-like objects which may be the target
Martin v. Löwis2777c022001-09-19 13:47:32 +00005280 of a print statement must support Unicode objects, i.e. they must
5281 at least convert them into ASCII strings.
5282
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005283- Thread scheduling on Solaris should be improved; it is no longer
5284 necessary to insert a small sleep at the start of a thread in order
5285 to let other runnable threads be scheduled.
5286
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005287Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005288-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005289
Marc-André Lemburgbf990172001-09-27 14:17:33 +00005290- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
5291 read character buffer compatible objects for their .write() methods.
5292 These objects are converted to strings and then handled as such
5293 by the instances.
5294
Barry Warsaw2f600732001-09-24 04:28:10 +00005295- The "email" package has been added. This is basically a port of the
5296 mimelib package <http://sf.net/projects/mimelib> with API changes
5297 and some implementations updated to use iterators and generators.
5298
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00005299- difflib.ndiff() and difflib.Differ.compare() are generators now. This
5300 restores the ability of Tools/scripts/ndiff.py to start producing output
5301 before the entire comparison is complete.
5302
Barry Warsaw58b072d2001-09-22 04:44:21 +00005303- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
5304 iteration just like file objects (i.e. their .readline() method is
5305 called for each iteration until it returns an empty string).
5306
Marc-André Lemburg494f2ae2001-09-19 11:33:31 +00005307- The codecs module has grown four new helper APIs to access
5308 builtin codecs: getencoder(), getdecoder(), getreader(),
5309 getwriter().
5310
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005311- SimpleXMLRPCServer: a new module (based upon SimpleHTMLServer)
5312 simplifies writing XML RPC servers.
5313
Barry Warsaw647d5e82001-09-28 17:01:02 +00005314- os.path.realpath(): a new function that returns the absolute pathname
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005315 after interpretation of symbolic links. On non-Unix systems, this
5316 is an alias for os.path.abspath().
5317
Tim Peters16a77ad2001-09-08 04:00:12 +00005318- operator.indexOf() (PySequence_Index() in the C API) now works with any
5319 iterable object.
5320
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005321- smtplib now supports various authentication and security features of
5322 the SMTP protocol through the new login() and starttls() methods.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00005323
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005324- hmac: a new module implementing keyed hashing for message
5325 authentication.
5326
5327- mimetypes now recognizes more extensions and file types. At the
5328 same time, some mappings not sanctioned by IANA were removed.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00005329
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005330- The "compiler" package has been brought up to date to the state of
Guido van Rossumc9ed5dc2001-09-20 05:30:24 +00005331 Python 2.2 bytecode generation. It has also been promoted from a
5332 Tool to a standard library package. (Tools/compiler still exists as
5333 a sample driver.)
5334
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005335Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005336-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005337
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005338- Large file support (LFS) is now automatic when the platform supports
5339 it; no more manual configuration tweaks are needed. On Linux, at
5340 least, it's possible to have a system whose C library supports large
5341 files but whose kernel doesn't; in this case, large file support is
5342 still enabled but doesn't do you any good unless you upgrade your
5343 kernel or share your Python executable with another system whose
5344 kernel has large file support.
5345
5346- The configure script now supplies plausible defaults in a
5347 cross-compilation environment. This doesn't mean that the supplied
5348 values are always correct, or that cross-compilation now works
5349 flawlessly -- but it's a first step (and it shuts up most of
5350 autoconf's warnings about AC_TRY_RUN).
5351
5352- The Unix build is now a bit less chatty, courtesy of the parser
5353 generator. The build is completely silent (except for errors) when
5354 using "make -s", thanks to a -q option to setup.py.
5355
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005356C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005357-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005358
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005359- The "structmember" API now supports some new flag bits to deny read
5360 and/or write access to attributes in restricted execution mode.
5361
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005362New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005363-------------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005364
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005365- Compaq's iPAQ handheld, running the "familiar" Linux distribution
5366 (http://familiar.handhelds.org).
5367
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005368Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005369-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005370
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00005371- The "classic" standard tests, which work by comparing stdout to
5372 an expected-output file under Lib/test/output/, no longer stop at
5373 the first mismatch. Instead the test is run to completion, and a
5374 variant of ndiff-style comparison is used to report all differences.
5375 This is much easier to understand than the previous style of reporting.
5376
5377- The unittest-based standard tests now use regrtest's test_main()
5378 convention, instead of running as a side-effect of merely being
5379 imported. This allows these tests to be run in more natural and
5380 flexible ways as unittests, outside the regrtest framework.
5381
5382- regrtest.py is much better integrated with unittest and doctest now,
5383 especially in regard to reporting errors.
5384
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005385Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005386-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005387
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005388- Large file support now also works for files > 4GB, on filesystems
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00005389 that support it (NTFS under Windows 2000). See "What's New in
5390 Python 2.2a3" for more detail.
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005391
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005392
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005393What's New in Python 2.2a3?
5394===========================
5395
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005396*Release Date: 07-Sep-2001*
5397
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005398Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005399----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005400
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005401- Conversion of long to float now raises OverflowError if the long is too
5402 big to represent as a C double.
5403
Tim Peters32f453e2001-09-03 08:35:41 +00005404- The 3-argument builtin pow() no longer allows a third non-None argument
5405 if either of the first two arguments is a float, or if both are of
5406 integer types and the second argument is negative (in which latter case
5407 the arguments are converted to float, so this is really the same
5408 restriction).
5409
Tim Peters5d2b77c2001-09-03 05:47:38 +00005410- The builtin dir() now returns more information, and sometimes much
5411 more, generally naming all attributes of an object, and all attributes
5412 reachable from the object via its class, and from its class's base
5413 classes, and so on from them too. Example: in 2.2a2, dir([]) returned
5414 an empty list. In 2.2a3,
5415
5416 >>> dir([])
5417 ['__add__', '__class__', '__contains__', '__delattr__', '__delitem__',
5418 '__eq__', '__ge__', '__getattr__', '__getitem__', '__getslice__',
5419 '__gt__', '__hash__', '__iadd__', '__imul__', '__init__', '__le__',
5420 '__len__', '__lt__', '__mul__', '__ne__', '__new__', '__repr__',
5421 '__rmul__', '__setattr__', '__setitem__', '__setslice__', '__str__',
5422 'append', 'count', 'extend', 'index', 'insert', 'pop', 'remove',
5423 'reverse', 'sort']
5424
5425 dir(module) continues to return only the module's attributes, though.
5426
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005427- Overflowing operations on plain ints now return a long int rather
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005428 than raising OverflowError. This is a partial implementation of PEP
5429 237. You can use -Wdefault::OverflowWarning to enable a warning for
5430 this situation, and -Werror::OverflowWarning to revert to the old
5431 OverflowError exception.
5432
Guido van Rossum61c345f2001-09-04 03:26:15 +00005433- A new command line option, -Q<arg>, is added to control run-time
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005434 warnings for the use of classic division. (See PEP 238.) Possible
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00005435 values are -Qold, -Qwarn, -Qwarnall, and -Qnew. The default is
5436 -Qold, meaning the / operator has its classic meaning and no
5437 warnings are issued. Using -Qwarn issues a run-time warning about
5438 all uses of classic division for int and long arguments; -Qwarnall
5439 also warns about classic division for float and complex arguments
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00005440 (for use with fixdiv.py).
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005441 [Note: the remainder of this item (preserved below) became
5442 obsolete in 2.2c1 -- -Qnew has global effect in 2.2] ::
5443
5444 Using -Qnew is questionable; it turns on new division by default, but
5445 only in the __main__ module. You can usefully combine -Qwarn or
5446 -Qwarnall and -Qnew: this gives the __main__ module new division, and
5447 warns about classic division everywhere else.
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005448
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005449- Many built-in types can now be subclassed. This applies to int,
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005450 long, float, str, unicode, and tuple. (The types complex, list and
5451 dictionary can also be subclassed; this was introduced earlier.)
5452 Note that restrictions apply when subclassing immutable built-in
5453 types: you can only affect the value of the instance by overloading
5454 __new__. You can add mutable attributes, and the subclass instances
5455 will have a __dict__ attribute, but you cannot change the "value"
5456 (as implemented by the base class) of an immutable subclass instance
5457 once it is created.
5458
Guido van Rossumaaf80c82001-09-02 13:44:35 +00005459- The dictionary constructor now takes an optional argument, a
5460 mapping-like object, and initializes the dictionary from its
5461 (key, value) pairs.
5462
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005463- A new built-in type, super, has been added. This facilitates making
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005464 "cooperative super calls" in a multiple inheritance setting. For an
5465 explanation, see http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#cooperation
5466
Guido van Rossum8d7234d2001-09-06 22:02:58 +00005467- A new built-in type, property, has been added. This enables the
5468 creation of "properties". These are attributes implemented by
5469 getter and setter functions (or only one of these for read-only or
5470 write-only attributes), without the need to override __getattr__.
5471 See http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#property
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005472
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005473- The syntax of floating-point and imaginary literals has been
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005474 liberalized, to allow leading zeroes. Examples of literals now
5475 legal that were SyntaxErrors before:
5476
5477 00.0 0e3 0100j 07.5 00000000000000000008.
5478
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005479- An old tokenizer bug allowed floating point literals with an incomplete
Tim Petersc6d95812001-08-28 20:56:27 +00005480 exponent, such as 1e and 3.1e-. Such literals now raise SyntaxError.
5481
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005482Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005483-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005484
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00005485- telnetlib includes symbolic names for the options, and support for
Martin v. Löwis1da9c572002-11-04 09:56:00 +00005486 setting an option negotiation callback. It also supports processing
5487 of suboptions.
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00005488
Tim Petersa40c7932001-09-05 22:36:56 +00005489- The new C standard no longer requires that math libraries set errno to
5490 ERANGE on overflow. For platform libraries that exploit this new
5491 freedom, Python's overflow-checking was wholly broken. A new overflow-
5492 checking scheme attempts to repair that, but may not be reliable on all
5493 platforms (C doesn't seem to provide anything both useful and portable
5494 in this area anymore).
5495
Martin v. Löwis44f86962001-09-05 13:44:54 +00005496- Asynchronous timeout actions are available through the new class
5497 threading.Timer.
5498
Tim Peters78526162001-09-05 00:53:45 +00005499- math.log and math.log10 now return sensible results for even huge
5500 long arguments. For example, math.log10(10 ** 10000) ~= 10000.0.
5501
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005502- A new function, imp.lock_held(), returns 1 when the import lock is
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005503 currently held. See the docs for the imp module.
5504
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005505- pickle, cPickle and marshal on 32-bit platforms can now correctly read
Tim Peters82112372001-08-29 02:28:42 +00005506 dumps containing ints written on platforms where Python ints are 8 bytes.
5507 When read on a box where Python ints are 4 bytes, such values are
5508 converted to Python longs.
5509
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005510- In restricted execution mode (using the rexec module), unmarshalling
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005511 code objects is no longer allowed. This plugs a security hole.
5512
Steve Purcell6091cd62001-09-06 16:05:17 +00005513- unittest.TestResult instances no longer store references to tracebacks
5514 generated by test failures. This prevents unexpected dangling references
5515 to objects that should be garbage collected between tests.
5516
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005517Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005518-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005519
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00005520- Tools/scripts/fixdiv.py has been added which can be used to fix
5521 division operators as per PEP 238.
5522
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005523Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005524-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005525
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00005526- If you are an adventurous person using Mac OS X you may want to look at
5527 Mac/OSX. There is a Makefile there that will build Python as a real Mac
5528 application, which can be used for experimenting with Carbon or Cocoa.
5529 Discussion of this on pythonmac-sig, please.
5530
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00005531C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005532-----
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00005533
5534- New function PyObject_Dir(obj), like Python __builtin__.dir(obj).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005535
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005536- Note that PyLong_AsDouble can fail! This has always been true, but no
5537 callers checked for it. It's more likely to fail now, because overflow
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00005538 errors are properly detected now. The proper way to check::
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005539
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005540 double x = PyLong_AsDouble(some_long_object);
5541 if (x == -1.0 && PyErr_Occurred()) {
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00005542 /* The conversion failed. */
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005543 }
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005544
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005545- The GC API has been changed. Extensions that use the old API will still
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005546 compile but will not participate in GC. To upgrade an extension
5547 module:
5548
5549 - rename Py_TPFLAGS_GC to PyTPFLAGS_HAVE_GC
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005550
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005551 - use PyObject_GC_New or PyObject_GC_NewVar to allocate objects and
5552 PyObject_GC_Del to deallocate them
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005553
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005554 - rename PyObject_GC_Init to PyObject_GC_Track and PyObject_GC_Fini
5555 to PyObject_GC_UnTrack
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005556
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005557 - remove PyGC_HEAD_SIZE from object size calculations
5558
5559 - remove calls to PyObject_AS_GC and PyObject_FROM_GC
5560
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005561- Two new functions: PyString_FromFormat() and PyString_FromFormatV().
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005562 These can be used safely to construct string objects from a
5563 sprintf-style format string (similar to the format string supported
5564 by PyErr_Format()).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005565
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005566New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005567-------------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005568
Tim Petersb7da0902001-09-02 23:01:43 +00005569- Stephen Hansen contributed patches sufficient to get a clean compile
5570 under Borland C (Windows), but he reports problems running it and ran
5571 out of time to complete the port. Volunteers? Expect a MemoryError
5572 when importing the types module; this is probably shallow, and
5573 causing later failures too.
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005574
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005575Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005576-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005577
5578Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005579-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005580
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00005581- Large file support is now enabled on Win32 platforms as well as on
5582 Win64. This means that, for example, you can use f.tell() and f.seek()
5583 to manipulate files larger than 2 gigabytes (provided you have enough
5584 disk space, and are using a Windows filesystem that supports large
Tim Peters9a9471c2001-09-11 23:18:51 +00005585 partitions). Windows filesystem limits: FAT has a 2GB (gigabyte)
5586 filesize limit, and large file support makes no difference there.
5587 FAT32's limit is 4GB, and files >= 2GB are easier to use from Python now.
5588 NTFS has no practical limit on file size, and files of any size can be
5589 used from Python now.
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00005590
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005591- The w9xpopen hack is now used on Windows NT and 2000 too when COMPSPEC
Tim Peters402d5982001-08-27 06:37:48 +00005592 points to command.com (patch from Brian Quinlan).
5593
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005594
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005595What's New in Python 2.2a2?
5596===========================
5597
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005598*Release Date: 22-Aug-2001*
5599
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005600Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005601-----
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005602
Barry Warsaw18b2ecf2001-08-22 20:26:56 +00005603- Tim Peters developed a brand new Windows installer using Wise 8.1,
5604 generously donated to us by Wise Solutions.
5605
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005606- configure supports a new option --enable-unicode, with the values
5607 ucs2 and ucs4 (new in 2.2a1). With --disable-unicode, the Unicode
5608 type and supporting code is completely removed from the interpreter.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005609
Jack Jansen32ce0cd2001-08-21 19:28:20 +00005610- A new configure option --enable-framework builds a Mac OS X framework,
5611 which "make frameworkinstall" will install. This provides a starting
5612 point for more mac-like functionality, join pythonmac-sig@python.org
5613 if you are interested in helping.
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005614
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005615- The NeXT platform is no longer supported.
5616
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005617- The 'new' module is now statically linked.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005618
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005619Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005620-----
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005621
5622- The new Tools/scripts/cleanfuture.py can be used to automatically
Andrew M. Kuchlingb0532092001-08-15 15:54:56 +00005623 edit out obsolete future statements from Python source code. See
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005624 the module docstring for details.
5625
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005626Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005627-----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005628
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005629- regrtest.py now knows which tests are expected to be skipped on some
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005630 platforms, allowing to give clearer test result output. regrtest
5631 also has optional --use/-u switch to run normally disabled tests
5632 which require network access or consume significant disk resources.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005633
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005634- Several new tests in the standard test suite, with special thanks to
5635 Nick Mathewson.
5636
5637Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005638----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005639
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005640- The floor division operator // has been added as outlined in PEP
5641 238. The / operator still provides classic division (and will until
5642 Python 3.0) unless "from __future__ import division" is included, in
5643 which case the / operator will provide true division. The operator
5644 module provides truediv() and floordiv() functions. Augmented
5645 assignment variants are included, as are the equivalent overloadable
5646 methods and C API methods. See the PEP for a full discussion:
5647 <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0238.html>
5648
Tim Peters6cd6a822001-08-17 22:11:27 +00005649- Future statements are now effective in simulated interactive shells
5650 (like IDLE). This should "just work" by magic, but read Michael
5651 Hudson's "Future statements in simulated shells" PEP 264 for full
5652 details: <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0264.html>.
5653
Guido van Rossumf86ddd22001-08-17 21:21:04 +00005654- The type/class unification (PEP 252-253) was integrated into the
5655 trunk and is not so tentative any more (the exact specification of
5656 some features is still tentative). A lot of work has done on fixing
5657 bugs and adding robustness and features (performance still has to
5658 come a long way).
5659
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00005660- Warnings about a mismatch in the Python API during extension import
5661 now use the Python warning framework (which makes it possible to
5662 write filters for these warnings).
5663
Barry Warsaw9b3be7f2001-08-14 18:35:02 +00005664- A function's __dict__ (aka func_dict) will now always be a
5665 dictionary. It used to be possible to delete it or set it to None,
5666 but now both actions raise TypeErrors. It is still legal to set it
5667 to a dictionary object. Getting func.__dict__ before any attributes
5668 have been assigned now returns an empty dictionary instead of None.
5669
Guido van Rossum32aa5d22001-09-05 18:43:35 +00005670- A new command line option, -E, was added which disables the use of
5671 all environment variables, or at least those that are specifically
5672 significant to Python. Usually those have a name starting with
5673 "PYTHON". This was used to fix a problem where the tests fail if
5674 the user happens to have PYTHONHOME or PYTHONPATH pointing to an
5675 older distribution.
5676
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005677Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005678-------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005679
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005680- New class Differ and new functions ndiff() and restore() in difflib.py.
5681 These package the algorithms used by the popular Tools/scripts/ndiff.py,
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005682 for programmatic reuse.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005683
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005684- New function xml.sax.saxutils.quoteattr(): Quote an XML attribute
5685 value using the minimal quoting required for the value; more
5686 reliable than using xml.sax.saxutils.escape() for attribute values.
5687
5688- Readline completion support for cmd.Cmd was added.
5689
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005690- Calling os.tempnam() or os.tmpnam() generate RuntimeWarnings.
5691
5692- Added function threading.BoundedSemaphore()
5693
5694- Added Ka-Ping Yee's cgitb.py module.
5695
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005696- The 'new' module now exposes the CO_xxx flags.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005697
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00005698- The gc module offers the get_referents function.
5699
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005700New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005701-------------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005702
5703C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005704-----
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005705
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00005706- Two new APIs PyOS_snprintf() and PyOS_vsnprintf() were added
5707 which provide a cross-platform implementations for the
5708 relatively new snprintf()/vsnprintf() C lib APIs. In contrast to
5709 the standard sprintf() and vsprintf() C lib APIs, these versions
5710 apply bounds checking on the used buffer which enhances protection
5711 against buffer overruns.
5712
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00005713- Unicode APIs now use name mangling to assure that mixing interpreters
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005714 and extensions using different Unicode widths is rendered next to
5715 impossible. Trying to import an incompatible Unicode-aware extension
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00005716 will result in an ImportError. Unicode extensions writers must make
5717 sure to check the Unicode width compatibility in their extensions by
5718 using at least one of the mangled Unicode APIs in the extension.
5719
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005720- Two new flags METH_NOARGS and METH_O are available in method definition
5721 tables to simplify implementation of methods with no arguments and a
5722 single untyped argument. Calling such methods is more efficient than
5723 calling corresponding METH_VARARGS methods. METH_OLDARGS is now
5724 deprecated.
5725
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005726Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005727-------
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005728
5729- "import module" now compiles module.pyw if it exists and nothing else
5730 relevant is found.
5731
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005732
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005733What's New in Python 2.2a1?
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005734===========================
5735
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005736*Release date: 18-Jul-2001*
5737
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005738Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005739----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005740
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00005741- TENTATIVELY, a large amount of code implementing much of what's
5742 described in PEP 252 (Making Types Look More Like Classes) and PEP
5743 253 (Subtyping Built-in Types) was added. This will be released
5744 with Python 2.2a1. Documentation will be provided separately
5745 through http://www.python.org/2.2/. The purpose of releasing this
5746 with Python 2.2a1 is to test backwards compatibility. It is
5747 possible, though not likely, that a decision is made not to release
5748 this code as part of 2.2 final, if any serious backwards
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005749 incompatibilities are found during alpha testing that cannot be
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00005750 repaired.
5751
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005752- Generators were added; this is a new way to create an iterator (see
Tim Peters11a0d102001-07-17 18:48:00 +00005753 below) using what looks like a simple function containing one or
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005754 more 'yield' statements. See PEP 255. Since this adds a new
5755 keyword to the language, this feature must be enabled by including a
5756 future statement: "from __future__ import generators" (see PEP 236).
5757 Generators will become a standard feature in a future release
5758 (probably 2.3). Without this future statement, 'yield' remains an
5759 ordinary identifier, but a warning is issued each time it is used.
5760 (These warnings currently don't conform to the warnings framework of
5761 PEP 230; we intend to fix this in 2.2a2.)
5762
Marc-André Lemburg12e74b32001-05-22 08:58:23 +00005763- The UTF-16 codec was modified to be more RFC compliant. It will now
5764 only remove BOM characters at the start of the string and then
5765 only if running in native mode (UTF-16-LE and -BE won't remove a
5766 leading BMO character).
5767
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005768- Strings now have a new method .decode() to complement the already
5769 existing .encode() method. These two methods provide direct access
5770 to the corresponding decoders and encoders of the registered codecs.
5771
5772 To enhance the usability of the .encode() method, the special
5773 casing of Unicode object return values was dropped (Unicode objects
5774 were auto-magically converted to string using the default encoding).
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005775
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005776 Both methods will now return whatever the codec in charge of the
5777 requested encoding returns as object, e.g. Unicode codecs will
5778 return Unicode objects when decoding is requested ("äöü".decode("latin-1")
5779 will return u"äöü"). This enables codec writer to create codecs
5780 for various simple to use conversions.
5781
5782 New codecs were added to demonstrate these new features (the .encode()
5783 and .decode() columns indicate the type of the returned objects):
5784
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005785 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5786 |Name | .encode() | .decode() | Description |
5787 +=========+===========+===========+=============================+
5788 |uu | string | string | UU codec (e.g. for email) |
5789 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5790 |base64 | string | string | base64 codec |
5791 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5792 |quopri | string | string | quoted-printable codec |
5793 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5794 |zlib | string | string | zlib compression |
5795 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5796 |hex | string | string | 2-byte hex codec |
5797 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5798 |rot-13 | string | Unicode | ROT-13 Unicode charmap codec|
5799 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005800
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005801- Some operating systems now support the concept of a default Unicode
5802 encoding for file system operations. Notably, Windows supports 'mbcs'
5803 as the default. The Macintosh will also adopt this concept in the medium
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005804 term, although the default encoding for that platform will be other than
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005805 'mbcs'.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005806
5807 On operating system that support non-ASCII filenames, it is common for
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005808 functions that return filenames (such as os.listdir()) to return Python
5809 string objects pre-encoded using the default file system encoding for
5810 the platform. As this encoding is likely to be different from Python's
5811 default encoding, converting this name to a Unicode object before passing
5812 it back to the Operating System would result in a Unicode error, as Python
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005813 would attempt to use its default encoding (generally ASCII) rather than
5814 the default encoding for the file system.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005815
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005816 In general, this change simply removes surprises when working with
5817 Unicode and the file system, making these operations work as you expect,
5818 increasing the transparency of Unicode objects in this context.
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005819 See [????] for more details, including examples.
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005820
Tim Peters61dff2b2001-05-08 15:43:37 +00005821- Float (and complex) literals in source code were evaluated to full
5822 precision only when running from a .py file; the same code loaded from a
5823 .pyc (or .pyo) file could suffer numeric differences starting at about the
5824 12th significant decimal digit. For example, on a machine with IEEE-754
5825 floating arithmetic,
5826
5827 x = 9007199254740992.0
5828 print long(x)
5829
5830 printed 9007199254740992 if run directly from .py, but 9007199254740000
5831 if from a compiled (.pyc or .pyo) file. This was due to marshal using
5832 str(float) instead of repr(float) when building code objects. marshal
5833 now uses repr(float) instead, which should reproduce floats to full
5834 machine precision (assuming the platform C float<->string I/O conversion
5835 functions are of good quality).
5836
5837 This may cause floating-point results to change in some cases, and
5838 usually for the better, but may also cause numerically unstable
5839 algorithms to break.
5840
Tim Peters2f228e72001-05-13 00:19:31 +00005841- The implementation of dicts suffers fewer collisions, which has speed
5842 benefits. However, the order in which dict entries appear in dict.keys(),
5843 dict.values() and dict.items() may differ from previous releases for a
5844 given dict. Nothing is defined about this order, so no program should
5845 rely on it. Nevertheless, it's easy to write test cases that rely on the
5846 order by accident, typically because of printing the str() or repr() of a
5847 dict to an "expected results" file. See Lib/test/test_support.py's new
5848 sortdict(dict) function for a simple way to display a dict in sorted
5849 order.
5850
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005851- Many other small changes to dicts were made, resulting in faster
5852 operation along the most common code paths.
5853
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00005854- Dictionary objects now support the "in" operator: "x in dict" means
5855 the same as dict.has_key(x).
5856
Barry Warsaw51acc8d2001-06-26 20:12:50 +00005857- The update() method of dictionaries now accepts generic mapping
5858 objects. Specifically the argument object must support the .keys()
5859 and __getitem__() methods. This allows you to say, for example,
5860 {}.update(UserDict())
5861
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00005862- Iterators were added; this is a generalized way of providing values
5863 to a for loop. See PEP 234. There's a new built-in function iter()
5864 to return an iterator. There's a new protocol to get the next value
5865 from an iterator using the next() method (in Python) or the
5866 tp_iternext slot (in C). There's a new protocol to get iterators
5867 using the __iter__() method (in Python) or the tp_iter slot (in C).
5868 Iterating (i.e. a for loop) over a dictionary generates its keys.
5869 Iterating over a file generates its lines.
5870
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005871- The following functions were generalized to work nicely with iterator
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00005872 arguments::
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005873
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00005874 map(), filter(), reduce(), zip()
Tim Peters8572b4f2001-05-06 01:05:02 +00005875 list(), tuple() (PySequence_Tuple() and PySequence_Fast() in C API)
5876 max(), min()
Tim Peters1af03e92001-05-26 19:37:54 +00005877 join() method of strings
5878 extend() method of lists
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00005879 'x in y' and 'x not in y' (PySequence_Contains() in C API)
5880 operator.countOf() (PySequence_Count() in C API)
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005881 right-hand side of assignment statements with multiple targets, such as ::
Tim Petersd6d010b2001-06-21 02:49:55 +00005882 x, y, z = some_iterable_object_returning_exactly_3_values
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00005883
Tim Petersd85e1022001-05-11 21:51:48 +00005884- Accessing module attributes is significantly faster (for example,
5885 random.random or os.path or yourPythonModule.yourAttribute).
5886
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00005887- Comparing dictionary objects via == and != is faster, and now works even
5888 if the keys and values don't support comparisons other than ==.
5889
Tim Peters95bf9392001-05-10 08:32:44 +00005890- Comparing dictionaries in ways other than == and != is slower: there were
5891 insecurities in the dict comparison implementation that could cause Python
5892 to crash if the element comparison routines for the dict keys and/or
5893 values mutated the dicts. Making the code bulletproof slowed it down.
5894
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005895- Collisions in dicts are resolved via a new approach, which can help
5896 dramatically in bad cases. For example, looking up every key in a dict
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005897 d with d.keys() == [i << 16 for i in range(20000)] is approximately 500x
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005898 faster now. Thanks to Christian Tismer for pointing out the cause and
5899 the nature of an effective cure (last December! better late than never).
Tim Peters15d49292001-05-27 07:39:22 +00005900
Tim Peters52e155e2001-06-16 05:42:57 +00005901- repr() is much faster for large containers (dict, list, tuple).
5902
5903
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005904Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005905-------
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005906
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00005907- The constants ascii_letters, ascii_lowercase. and ascii_uppercase
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005908 were added to the string module. These a locale-independent
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00005909 constants, unlike letters, lowercase, and uppercase. These are now
5910 use in appropriate locations in the standard library.
5911
Martin v. Löwisf0473d52001-07-18 16:17:16 +00005912- The flags used in dlopen calls can now be configured using
5913 sys.setdlopenflags and queried using sys.getdlopenflags.
5914
Guido van Rossumc7e4aca2001-07-12 11:54:37 +00005915- Fredrik Lundh's xmlrpclib is now a standard library module. This
5916 provides full client-side XML-RPC support. In addition,
5917 Demo/xmlrpc/ contains two server frameworks (one SocketServer-based,
5918 one asyncore-based). Thanks to Eric Raymond for the documentation.
5919
Guido van Rossum643d3912001-07-05 14:46:25 +00005920- The xrange() object is simplified: it no longer supports slicing,
5921 repetition, comparisons, efficient 'in' checking, the tolist()
5922 method, or the start, stop and step attributes. See PEP 260.
5923
Martin v. Löwisebf94db2001-06-06 06:25:40 +00005924- A new function fnmatch.filter to filter lists of file names was added.
5925
Barry Warsawffd674d2001-05-22 16:00:10 +00005926- calendar.py uses month and day names based on the current locale.
5927
Guido van Rossum2e0a6542001-05-15 02:14:44 +00005928- strop is now *really* obsolete (this was announced before with 1.6),
5929 and issues DeprecationWarning when used (except for the four items
5930 that are still imported into string.py).
5931
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005932- Cookie.py now sorts key+value pairs by key in output strings.
5933
5934- pprint.isrecursive(object) didn't correctly identify recursive objects.
5935 Now it does.
5936
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00005937- pprint functions now much faster for large containers (tuple, list, dict).
5938
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00005939- New 'q' and 'Q' format codes in the struct module, corresponding to C
5940 types "long long" and "unsigned long long" (on Windows, __int64). In
5941 native mode, these can be used only when the platform C compiler supports
5942 these types (when HAVE_LONG_LONG is #define'd by the Python config
5943 process), and then they inherit the sizes and alignments of the C types.
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005944 In standard mode, 'q' and 'Q' are supported on all platforms, and are
5945 8-byte integral types.
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00005946
Guido van Rossum83213cc2001-06-12 16:48:52 +00005947- The site module installs a new built-in function 'help' that invokes
5948 pydoc.help. It must be invoked as 'help()'; when invoked as 'help',
5949 it displays a message reminding the user to use 'help()' or
5950 'help(object)'.
5951
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005952Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005953-----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005954
5955- New test_mutants.py runs dict comparisons where the key and value
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005956 comparison operators mutate the dicts randomly during comparison. This
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005957 rapidly causes Python to crash under earlier releases (not for the faint
5958 of heart: it can also cause Win9x to freeze or reboot!).
5959
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005960- New test_pprint.py verifies that pprint.isrecursive() and
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00005961 pprint.isreadable() return sensible results. Also verifies that simple
5962 cases produce correct output.
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005963
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00005964C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005965-----
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00005966
5967- Removed the unused last_is_sticky argument from the internal
5968 _PyTuple_Resize(). If this affects you, you were cheating.
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005969
5970----
5971
5972**(For information about older versions, consult the HISTORY file.)**