blob: 65ee65b9a0a87ed978675334ea18976f89edfe8e [file] [log] [blame]
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 1?
2XXX Release date: DD-MMM-2002 XXX
3=================================
4
5Type/class unification and new-style classes
6
7Core and builtins
8
9Extension modules
10
11Library
12
13Tools/Demos
14
15Build
16
17C API
18
Tim Peters10a3bb52001-12-25 19:07:38 +000019- An old #define of ANY as void has been removed from pyport.h. This
20 hasn't been used since Python's pre-ANSI days, and the #define has
21 been marked as obsolete since then. SF bug 495548 says it created
22 conflicts with other packages, so keeping it around wasn't harmless.
23
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +000024- Because Python's magic number scheme broke on January 1st, we decided
25 to stop Python development. Thanks for all the fish!
26
27New platforms
28
29Tests
30
31Windows
32
33Mac
34
35
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +000036What's New in Python 2.2 final?
37Release date: 21-Dec-2001
38===============================
39
40Type/class unification and new-style classes
41
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +000042- pickle.py, cPickle: allow pickling instances of new-style classes
43 with a custom metaclass.
44
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +000045Core and builtins
46
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +000047- weakref proxy object: when comparing, unwrap both arguments if both
48 are proxies.
49
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +000050Extension modules
51
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +000052- binascii.b2a_base64(): fix a potential buffer overrun when encoding
53 very short strings.
54
55- cPickle: the obscure "fast" mode was suspected of causing stack
56 overflows on the Mac. Hopefully fixed this by setting the recursion
57 limit much smaller. If the limit is too low (it only affects
58 performance), you can change it by defining PY_CPICKLE_FAST_LIMIT
59 when compiling cPickle.c (or in pyconfig.h).
60
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +000061Library
62
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +000063- dumbdbm.py: fixed a dumb old bug (the file didn't get synched at
64 close or delete time).
65
66- rfc822.py: fixed a bug where the address '<>' was converted to None
67 instead of an empty string (also fixes the email.Utils module).
68
69- xmlrpclib.py: version 1.0.0; uses precision for doubles.
70
71- test suite: the pickle and cPickle tests were not executing any code
72 when run from the standard regresssion test.
73
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +000074Tools/Demos
75
76Build
77
78C API
79
80New platforms
81
82Tests
83
84Windows
85
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +000086- distutils package: fixed broken Windows installers (bdist_wininst).
87
88- tempfile.py: prevent mysterious warnings when TemporaryFileWrapper
89 instances are deleted at process exit time.
90
91- socket.py: prevent mysterious warnings when socket instances are
92 deleted at process exit time.
93
94- posixmodule.c: fix a Windows crash with stat() of a filename ending
95 in backslash.
96
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +000097Mac
98
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +000099- The Carbon toolbox modules have been upgraded to Universal Headers
100 3.4, and experimental CoreGraphics and CarbonEvents modules have
101 been added. All only for framework-enabled MacOSX.
102
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +0000103
Tim Peters6272dfd2001-12-13 19:34:00 +0000104What's New in Python 2.2c1?
105Release date: 14-Dec-2001
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +0000106===========================
107
108Type/class unification and new-style classes
109
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +0000110- Guido's tutorial introduction to the new type/class features has
111 been extensively updated. See
112
113 http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html
114
115 That remains the primary documentation in this area.
116
Guido van Rossum33bab012001-12-05 22:45:48 +0000117- Fixed a leak: instance variables declared with __slots__ were never
118 deleted!
119
Guido van Rossum4b800852001-12-03 00:54:52 +0000120- The "delete attribute" method of descriptor objects is called
121 __delete__, not __del__. In previous releases, it was mistakenly
122 called __del__, which created an unfortunate overloading condition
123 with finalizers. (The "get attribute" and "set attribute" methods
124 are still called __get__ and __set__, respectively.)
125
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +0000126- Some subtle issues with the super built-in were fixed:
127
128 (a) When super itself is subclassed, its __get__ method would still
129 return an instance of the base class (i.e., of super).
130
131 (b) super(C, C()).__class__ would return C rather than super. This
132 is confusing. To fix this, I decided to change the semantics of
133 super so that it only applies to code attributes, not to data
134 attributes. After all, overriding data attributes is not
135 supported anyway.
136
137 (c) The __get__ method didn't check whether the argument was an
138 instance of the type used in creation of the super instance.
139
Guido van Rossumcd7b7d62001-12-04 21:02:07 +0000140- Previously, hash() of an instance of a subclass of a mutable type
141 (list or dictionary) would return some value, rather than raising
142 TypeError. This has been fixed. Also, directly calling
143 dict.__hash__ and list.__hash__ now raises the same TypeError
144 (previously, these were the same as object.__hash__).
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +0000145
Guido van Rossumd331cb52001-12-05 19:46:42 +0000146- New-style objects now support deleting their __dict__. This is for
147 all intents and purposes equivalent to assigning a brand new empty
148 dictionary, but saves space if the object is not used further.
149
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +0000150Core and builtins
151
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +0000152- -Qnew now works as documented in PEP 238: when -Qnew is passed on
153 the command line, all occurrences of "/" use true division instead
154 of classic division. See the PEP for details. Note that "all"
155 means all instances in library and 3rd-party modules, as well as in
156 your own code. As the PEP says, -Qnew is intended for use only in
157 educational environments with control over the libraries in use.
Tim Petersbf72fe22001-12-11 21:43:14 +0000158 Note that test_coercion.py in the standard Python test suite fails
159 under -Qnew; this is expected, and won't be repaired until true
160 division becomes the default (in the meantime, test_coercion is
161 testing the current rules).
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +0000162
Fred Drake6c01e252001-12-14 17:08:12 +0000163- complex() now only allows the first argument to be a string
164 argument, and raises TypeError if either the second arg is a string
165 or if the second arg is specified when the first is a string.
166
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +0000167Extension modules
168
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +0000169- gc.get_referents was renamed to gc.get_referrers.
170
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +0000171Library
172
Tim Peters25059d32001-12-07 20:35:43 +0000173- Functions in the os.spawn() family now release the global interpreter
174 lock around calling the platform spawn. They should always have done
175 this, but did not before 2.2c1. Multithreaded programs calling
176 an os.spawn function with P_WAIT will no longer block all Python threads
177 until the spawned program completes. It's possible that some programs
178 relies on blocking, although more likely by accident than by design.
179
Martin v. Löwis3a89b2b2001-11-25 14:35:58 +0000180- webbrowser defaults to netscape.exe on OS/2 now.
181
Martin v. Löwis652e1912001-11-25 14:50:56 +0000182- Tix.ResizeHandle exposes detach_widget, hide, and show.
183
Martin v. Löwis714d2e22001-12-02 12:26:03 +0000184- The charset alias windows_1252 has been added.
185
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +0000186- types.StringTypes is a tuple containing the defined string types;
187 usually this will be (str, unicode), but if Python was compiled
188 without Unicode support it will be just (str,).
189
190- The pulldom and minidom modules were synchronized to PyXML.
191
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +0000192Tools/Demos
193
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +0000194- A new script called Tools/scripts/google.py was added, which fires
195 off a search on Google.
196
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +0000197Build
198
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +0000199- Note that release builds of Python should arrange to define the
200 preprocessor symbol NDEBUG on the command line (or equivalent).
201 In the 2.2 pre-release series we tried to define this by magic in
202 Python.h instead, but it proved to cause problems for extension
203 authors. The Unix, Windows and Mac builds now all define NDEBUG in
204 release builds via cmdline (or equivalent) instead. Ports to
205 other platforms should do likewise.
206
Jack Jansen1999ef42001-12-06 21:47:20 +0000207- It is no longer necessary to use --with-suffix when building on a
208 case-insensitive file system (such as Mac OS X HFS+). In the build
209 directory an extension is used, but not in the installed python.
210
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +0000211C API
212
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +0000213- New function PyDict_MergeFromSeq2() exposes the builtin dict
214 constructor's logic for updating a dictionary from an iterable object
215 producing key-value pairs.
216
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +0000217- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() requires that the number of entries in
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +0000218 the keyword list equal the number of argument specifiers. This
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +0000219 wasn't checked correctly, and PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords could even
220 dump core in some bad cases. This has been repaired. As a result,
221 PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords may raise RuntimeError in bad cases that
222 previously went unchallenged.
223
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +0000224New platforms
225
226Tests
227
228Windows
229
230Mac
231
Jack Jansenffa260f2001-12-06 21:14:00 +0000232- In unix-Python on Mac OS X (and darwin) sys.platform is now "darwin",
233 without any trailing digits.
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +0000234
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +0000235- Changed logic for finding python home in Mac OS X framework Pythons.
236 Now sys.executable points to the executable again, in stead of to
237 the shared library. The latter is used only for locating the python
238 home.
239
240
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +0000241What's New in Python 2.2b2?
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +0000242Release date: 16-Nov-2001
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +0000243===========================
244
245Type/class unification and new-style classes
246
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +0000247- Multiple inheritance mixing new-style and classic classes in the
248 list of base classes is now allowed, so this works now:
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +0000249
250 class Classic: pass
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +0000251 class Mixed(Classic, object): pass
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +0000252
253 The MRO (method resolution order) for each base class is respected
254 according to its kind, but the MRO for the derived class is computed
255 using new-style MRO rules if any base clase is a new-style class.
256 This needs to be documented.
257
Tim Petersa427a2b2001-10-29 22:25:45 +0000258- The new builtin dictionary() constructor, and dictionary type, have
259 been renamed to dict. This reflects a decade of common usage.
260
Guido van Rossum3fc08d22001-11-15 20:33:10 +0000261- dict() now accepts an iterable object producing 2-sequences. For
262 example, dict(d.items()) == d for any dictionary d. The argument,
263 and the elements of the argument, can be any iterable objects.
264
Guido van Rossum7ad2d1e2001-10-29 22:11:00 +0000265- New-style classes can now have a __del__ method, which is called
266 when the instance is deleted (just like for classic classes).
267
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +0000268- Assignment to object.__dict__ is now possible, for objects that are
269 instances of new-style classes that have a __dict__ (unless the base
270 class forbids it).
271
Guido van Rossumc8e56452001-10-22 00:43:43 +0000272- Methods of built-in types now properly check for keyword arguments
273 (formerly these were silently ignored). The only built-in methods
274 that take keyword arguments are __call__, __init__ and __new__.
275
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +0000276- The socket function has been converted to a type; see below.
277
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +0000278Core and builtins
279
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +0000280- Assignment to __debug__ raises SyntaxError at compile-time. This
281 was promised when 2.1c1 was released as "What's New in Python 2.1c1"
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +0000282 (see below) says.
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +0000283
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +0000284- Clarified the error messages for unsupported operands to an operator
285 (like 1 + '').
286
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +0000287Extension modules
288
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +0000289- mmap has a new keyword argument, "access", allowing a uniform way for
290 both Windows and Unix users to create read-only, write-through and
291 copy-on-write memory mappings. This was previously possible only on
292 Unix. A new keyword argument was required to support this in a
293 uniform way because the mmap() signuatures had diverged across
294 platforms. Thanks to Jay T Miller for repairing this!
295
Tim Peters169ded02001-11-03 19:57:21 +0000296- By default, the gc.garbage list now contains only those instances in
297 unreachable cycles that have __del__ methods; in 2.1 it contained all
298 instances in unreachable cycles. "Instances" here has been generalized
299 to include instances of both new-style and old-style classes.
300
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +0000301- The socket module defines a new method for socket objects,
302 sendall(). This is like send() but may make multiple calls to
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +0000303 send() until all data has been sent. Also, the socket function has
304 been converted to a subclassable type, like list and tuple (etc.)
305 before it; socket and SocketType are now the same thing.
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +0000306
307- Various bugfixes to the curses module. There is now a test suite
308 for the curses module (you have to run it manually).
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +0000309
Guido van Rossum692adf12001-10-30 03:03:03 +0000310- binascii.b2a_base64 no longer places an arbitrary restriction of 57
311 bytes on its input.
312
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +0000313Library
314
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +0000315- tkFileDialog exposes a Directory class and askdirectory
Martin v. Löwis25ee87c2001-11-07 22:38:08 +0000316 convenience function.
317
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +0000318- Symbolic group names in regular expressions must be unique. For
319 example, the regexp r'(?P<abc>)(?P<abc>)' is not allowed, because a
320 single name can't mean both "group 1" and "group 2" simultaneously.
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +0000321 Python 2.2 detects this error at regexp compilation time;
322 previously, the error went undetected, and results were
323 unpredictable. Also in sre, the pattern.split(), pattern.sub(), and
324 pattern.subn() methods have been rewritten in C. Also, an
325 experimental function/method finditer() has been added, which works
326 like findall() but returns an iterator.
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +0000327
Martin v. Löwisb7b32602001-11-02 23:48:20 +0000328- Tix exposes more commands through the classes DirSelectBox,
329 DirSelectDialog, ListNoteBook, Meter, CheckList, and the
330 methods tix_addbitmapdir, tix_cget, tix_configure, tix_filedialog,
331 tix_getbitmap, tix_getimage, tix_option_get, and tix_resetoptions.
332
Tim Peters98791af2001-10-23 01:59:54 +0000333- Traceback objects are now scanned by cyclic garbage collection, so
334 cycles created by casual use of sys.exc_info() no longer cause
335 permanent memory leaks (provided garbage collection is enabled).
336
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +0000337- os.extsep -- a new variable needed by the RISCOS support. It is the
338 separator used by extensions, and is '.' on all platforms except
339 RISCOS, where it is '/'. There is no need to use this variable
340 unless you have a masochistic desire to port your code to RISCOS.
341
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +0000342- mimetypes.py has optional support for non-standard, but commonly
343 found types. guess_type() and guess_extension() now accept an
344 optional `strict' flag, defaulting to true, which controls whether
345 recognize non-standard types or not. A few non-standard types we
346 know about have been added. Also, when run as a script, there are
347 new -l and -e options.
348
349- statcache is now deprecated.
350
351- email.Utils.formatdate() now produces the preferred RFC 2822 style
352 dates with numeric timezones (it used to produce obsolete dates
353 hard coded to "GMT" timezone). An optional `localtime' flag is
354 added to produce dates in the local timezone, with daylight savings
355 time properly taken into account.
356
357- In pickle and cPickle, instead of masking errors in load() by
358 transforming them into SystemError, we let the original exception
359 propagate out. Also, implement support for __safe_for_unpickling__
360 in pickle, as it already was supported in cPickle.
361
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +0000362Tools/Demos
363
364Build
365
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +0000366- The dbm module is built using libdb1 if available. The bsddb module
367 is built with libdb3 if available.
368
369- Misc/Makefile.pre.in has been removed by BDFL pronouncement.
370
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +0000371C API
372
Tim Peters1fc240e2001-10-26 05:06:50 +0000373- New function PySequence_Fast_GET_SIZE() returns the size of a non-
374 NULL result from PySequence_Fast(), more quickly than calling
375 PySequence_Size().
376
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +0000377- New argument unpacking function PyArg_UnpackTuple() added.
378
379- New functions PyObject_CallFunctionObjArgs() and
380 PyObject_CallMethodObjArgs() have been added to make it more
381 convenient and efficient to call functions and methods from C.
382
383- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() no longer masks errors, so it's
384 possible that this will propagate errors it didn't before.
385
386- New function PyObject_CheckReadBuffer(), which returns true if its
387 argument supports the single-segment readable buffer interface.
388
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +0000389New platforms
390
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +0000391- We've finally confirmed that this release builds on HP-UX 11.00,
392 *with* threads, and passes the test suite.
393
Tim Peters7a33d8b2001-11-05 02:51:07 +0000394- Thanks to a series of patches from Michael Muller, Python may build
395 again under OS/2 Visual Age C++.
396
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +0000397- Updated RISCOS port by Dietmar Schwertberger.
398
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +0000399Tests
400
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +0000401- Added a test script for the curses module. It isn't run automatically;
402 regrtest.py must be run with '-u curses' to enable it.
403
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +0000404Windows
405
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +0000406Mac
407
408- PythonScript has been moved to unsupported and is slated to be
409 removed completely in the next release.
410
411- It should now be possible to build applets that work on both OS9 and
412 OSX.
413
414- The core is now linked with CoreServices not Carbon; as a side
415 result, default 8bit encoding on OSX is now ASCII.
416
417- Python should now build on OSX 10.1.1
418
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +0000419
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +0000420What's New in Python 2.2b1?
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +0000421Release date: 19-Oct-2001
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +0000422===========================
423
424Type/class unification and new-style classes
425
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +0000426- New-style classes are now always dynamic (except for built-in and
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +0000427 extension types). There is no longer a performance penalty, and I
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +0000428 no longer see another reason to keep this baggage around. One relic
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +0000429 remains: the __dict__ of a new-style class is a read-only proxy; you
430 must set the class's attribute to modify it. As a consequence, the
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +0000431 __defined__ attribute of new-style types no longer exists, for lack
432 of need: there is once again only one __dict__ (although in the
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +0000433 future a __cache__ may be resurrected with a similar function, if I
434 can prove that it actually speeds things up).
Guido van Rossum50fda3b2001-10-04 19:46:06 +0000435
Tim Peters1c9ca872001-10-04 06:43:12 +0000436- C.__doc__ now works as expected for new-style classes (in 2.2a4 it
437 always returned None, even when there was a class docstring).
438
439- doctest now finds and runs docstrings attached to new-style classes,
440 class methods, static methods, and properties.
441
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +0000442Core and builtins
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +0000443
Guido van Rossuma8bcf802001-10-15 15:53:58 +0000444- A very subtle syntactical pitfall in list comprehensions was fixed.
445 For example: [a+b for a in 'abc', for b in 'def']. The comma in
446 this example is a mistake. Previously, this would silently let 'a'
447 iterate over the singleton tuple ('abc',), yielding ['abcd', 'abce',
448 'abcf'] rather than the intended ['ad', 'ae', 'af', 'bd', 'be',
449 'bf', 'cd', 'ce', 'cf']. Now, this is flagged as a syntax error.
450 Note that [a for a in <singleton>] is a convoluted way to say
451 [<singleton>] anyway, so it's not like any expressiveness is lost.
452
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +0000453- getattr(obj, name, default) now only catches AttributeError, as
454 documented, rather than returning the default value for all
455 exceptions (which could mask bugs in a __getattr__ hook, for
456 example).
457
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +0000458- Weak reference objects are now part of the core and offer a C API.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +0000459 A bug which could allow a core dump when binary operations involved
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +0000460 proxy reference has been fixed. weakref.ReferenceError is now a
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +0000461 built-in exception.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +0000462
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +0000463- unicode(obj) now behaves more like str(obj), accepting arbitrary
464 objects, and calling a __unicode__ method if it exists.
465 unicode(obj, encoding) and unicode(obj, encoding, errors) still
Marc-André Lemburgb5507ec2001-10-19 12:02:29 +0000466 require an 8-bit string or character buffer argument.
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +0000467
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +0000468- isinstance() now allows any object as the first argument and a
469 class, a type or something with a __bases__ tuple attribute for the
470 second argument. The second argument may also be a tuple of a
471 class, type, or something with __bases__, in which case isinstance()
472 will return true if the first argument is an instance of any of the
473 things contained in the second argument tuple. E.g.
474
475 isinstance(x, (A, B))
476
477 returns true if x is an instance of A or B.
478
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +0000479Extension modules
480
481- thread.start_new_thread() now returns the thread ID (previously None).
482
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +0000483- binascii has now two quopri support functions, a2b_qp and b2a_qp.
484
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +0000485- readline now supports setting the startup_hook and the
486 pre_event_hook, and adds the add_history() function.
Martin v. Löwis0daad592001-09-30 21:09:59 +0000487
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +0000488- os and posix supports chroot(), setgroups() and unsetenv() where
489 available. The stat(), fstat(), statvfs() and fstatvfs() functions
490 now return "pseudo-sequences" -- the various fields can now be
491 accessed as attributes (e.g. os.stat("/").st_mtime) but for
492 backwards compatibility they also behave as a fixed-length sequence.
493 Some platform-specific fields (e.g. st_rdev) are only accessible as
Guido van Rossum98bf58f2001-10-18 20:34:25 +0000494 attributes.
495
496- time: localtime(), gmtime() and strptime() now return a
497 pseudo-sequence similar to the os.stat() return value, with
498 attributes like tm_year etc.
Martin v. Löwis16628c92001-10-04 22:46:41 +0000499
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +0000500- Decompression objects in the zlib module now accept an optional
501 second parameter to decompress() that specifies the maximum amount
502 of memory to use for the uncompressed data.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +0000503
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +0000504- optional SSL support in the socket module now exports OpenSSL
505 functions RAND_add(), RAND_egd(), and RAND_status(). These calls
506 are useful on platforms like Solaris where OpenSSL does not
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +0000507 automatically seed its PRNG. Also, the keyfile and certfile
508 arguments to socket.ssl() are now optional.
509
510- posixmodule (and by extension, the os module on POSIX platforms) now
511 exports O_LARGEFILE, O_DIRECT, O_DIRECTORY, and O_NOFOLLOW.
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +0000512
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +0000513Library
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +0000514
Tim Peters7402f792001-10-02 03:53:41 +0000515- doctest now excludes functions and classes not defined by the module
516 being tested, thanks to Tim Hochberg.
517
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +0000518- HotShot, a new profiler implemented using a C-based callback, has
519 been added. This substantially reduces the overhead of profiling,
520 but it is still quite preliminary. Support modules and
521 documentation will be added in upcoming releases (before 2.2 final).
522
Guido van Rossumc4b09b42001-10-04 10:19:00 +0000523- profile now produces correct output in situations where an exception
524 raised in Python is cleared by C code (e.g. hasattr()). This used
525 to cause wrong output, including spurious claims of recursive
526 functions and attribution of time spent to the wrong function.
527
Tim Peters0a1fc4e2001-10-07 03:12:08 +0000528 The code and documentation for the derived OldProfile and HotProfile
529 profiling classes was removed. The code hasn't worked for years (if
530 you tried to use them, they raised exceptions). OldProfile
531 intended to reproduce the behavior of the profiler Python used more
532 than 7 years ago, and isn't interesting anymore. HotProfile intended
533 to provide a faster profiler (but producing less information), and
534 that's a worthy goal we intend to meet via a different approach (but
535 without losing information).
536
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +0000537- Profile.calibrate() has a new implementation that should deliver
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +0000538 a much better system-specific calibration constant. The constant can
539 now be specified in an instance constructor, or as a Profile class or
540 instance variable, instead of by editing profile.py's source code.
541 Calibration must still be done manually (see the docs for the profile
542 module).
543
544 Note that Profile.calibrate() must be overriden by subclasses.
545 Improving the accuracy required exploiting detailed knowledge of
546 profiler internals; the earlier method abstracted away the details
547 and measured a simplified model instead, but consequently computed
548 a constant too small by a factor of 2 on some modern machines.
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +0000549
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +0000550- quopri's encode and decode methods take an optional header parameter,
Jeremy Hylton6f543b62001-10-16 20:42:52 +0000551 which indicates whether output is intended for the header 'Q'
552 encoding.
553
Guido van Rossuma5343cc2001-10-18 18:02:07 +0000554- The SocketServer.ThreadingMixIn class now closes the request after
555 finish_request() returns. (Not when it errors out though.)
556
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +0000557- The nntplib module's NNTP.body() method has grown a `file' argument
558 to allow saving the message body to a file.
559
560- The email package has added a class email.Parser.HeaderParser which
561 only parses headers and does not recurse into the message's body.
562 Also, the module/class MIMEAudio has been added for representing
563 audio data (contributed by Anthony Baxter).
564
565- ftplib should be able to handle files > 2GB.
566
567- ConfigParser.getboolean() now also interprets TRUE, FALSE, YES, NO,
568 ON, and OFF.
569
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +0000570- xml.dom.minidom NodeList objects now support the length attribute
571 and item() method as required by the DOM specifications.
572
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +0000573Tools/Demos
574
575- Demo/dns was removed. It no longer serves any purpose; a package
576 derived from it is now maintained by Anthony Baxter, see
577 http://PyDNS.SourceForge.net.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +0000578
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +0000579- The freeze tool has been made more robust, and two new options have
580 been added: -X and -E.
581
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +0000582Build
583
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +0000584- configure will use CXX in LINKCC if CXX is used to build main() and
585 the system requires to link a C++ main using the C++ compiler.
586
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +0000587C API
588
Guido van Rossum6c4bce32001-10-18 19:20:25 +0000589- The documentation for the tp_compare slot is updated to require that
590 the return value must be -1, 0, 1; an arbitrary number <0 or >0 is
591 not correct. This is not yet enforced but will be enforced in
592 Python 2.3; even later, we may use -2 to indicate errors and +2 for
593 "NotImplemented". Right now, -1 should be used for an error return.
594
Tim Petersd38b1c72001-09-30 05:09:37 +0000595- PyLong_AsLongLong() now accepts int (as well as long) arguments.
596 Consequently, PyArg_ParseTuple's 'L' code also accepts int (as well
597 as long) arguments.
598
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +0000599- PyThread_start_new_thread() now returns a long int giving the thread
600 ID, if one can be calculated; it returns -1 for error, 0 if no
601 thread ID is calculated (this is an incompatible change, but only
602 the thread module used this API). This code has only really been
603 tested on Linux and Windows; other platforms please beware (and
604 report any bugs or strange behavior).
605
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +0000606- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() no longer accepts Unicode objects as
607 input.
608
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +0000609New platforms
610
611Tests
612
613Windows
614
Tim Peters04cf1d32001-10-09 22:39:40 +0000615- Installer: If you install IDLE, and don't disable file-extension
616 registration, a new "Edit with IDLE" context (right-click) menu entry
617 is created for .py and .pyw files.
618
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +0000619- The signal module now supports SIGBREAK on Windows, thanks to Steven
620 Scott. Note that SIGBREAK is unique to Windows. The default SIGBREAK
621 action remains to call Win32 ExitProcess(). This can be changed via
622 signal.signal(). For example:
623
624 # Make Ctrl+Break raise KeyboardInterrupt, like Python's default Ctrl+C
625 # (SIGINT) behavior.
626 import signal
627 signal.signal(signal.SIGBREAK,
628 signal.default_int_handler)
629
630 try:
631 while 1:
632 pass
633 except KeyboardInterrupt:
634 # We get here on Ctrl+C or Ctrl+Break now; if we had not changed
635 # SIGBREAK, only on Ctrl+C (and Ctrl+Break would terminate the
636 # program without the possibility for any Python-level cleanup).
637 print "Clean exit"
638
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +0000639
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +0000640What's New in Python 2.2a4?
Barry Warsaw86fbaf82001-09-28 15:26:12 +0000641Release date: 28-Sep-2001
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +0000642===========================
643
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +0000644Type/class unification and new-style classes
645
646- pydoc and inspect are now aware of new-style classes;
647 e.g. help(list) at the interactive prompt now shows proper
648 documentation for all operations on list objects.
649
650- Applications using Jim Fulton's ExtensionClass module can now safely
651 be used with Python 2.2. In particular, Zope 2.4.1 now works with
652 Python 2.2 (as well as with Python 2.1.1). The Demo/metaclass
653 examples also work again. It is hoped that Gtk and Boost also work
654 with 2.2a4 and beyond. (If you can confirm this, please write
655 webmaster@python.org; if there are still problems, please open a bug
656 report on SourceForge.)
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +0000657
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +0000658- property() now takes 4 keyword arguments: fget, fset, fdel and doc.
659 These map to readonly attributes 'fget', 'fset', 'fdel', and '__doc__'
660 in the constructed property object. fget, fset and fdel weren't
661 discoverable from Python in 2.2a3. __doc__ is new, and allows to
662 associate a docstring with a property.
663
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +0000664- Comparison overloading is now more completely implemented. For
665 example, a str subclass instance can properly be compared to a str
666 instance, and it can properly overload comparison. Ditto for most
667 other built-in object types.
668
669- The repr() of new-style classes has changed; instead of <type
670 'M.Foo'> a new-style class is now rendered as <class 'M.Foo'>,
671 *except* for built-in types, which are still rendered as <type
672 'Foo'> (to avoid upsetting existing code that might parse or
673 otherwise rely on repr() of certain type objects).
674
675- The repr() of new-style objects is now always <Foo object at XXX>;
676 previously, it was sometimes <Foo instance at XXX>.
677
678- For new-style classes, what was previously called __getattr__ is now
679 called __getattribute__. This method, if defined, is called for
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +0000680 *every* attribute access. A new __getattr__ hook more similar to the
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +0000681 one in classic classes is defined which is called only if regular
682 attribute access raises AttributeError; to catch *all* attribute
683 access, you can use __getattribute__ (for new-style classes). If
684 both are defined, __getattribute__ is called first, and if it raises
685 AttributeError, __getattr__ is called.
686
687- The __class__ attribute of new-style objects can be assigned to.
688 The new class must have the same C-level object layout as the old
689 class.
690
691- The builtin file type can be subclassed now. In the usual pattern,
692 "file" is the name of the builtin type, and file() is a new builtin
693 constructor, with the same signature as the builtin open() function.
694 file() is now the preferred way to open a file.
695
696- Previously, __new__ would only see sequential arguments passed to
697 the type in a constructor call; __init__ would see both sequential
698 and keyword arguments. This made no sense whatsoever any more, so
699 now both __new__ and __init__ see all arguments.
700
701- Previously, hash() applied to an instance of a subclass of str or
702 unicode always returned 0. This has been repaired.
703
704- Previously, an operation on an instance of a subclass of an
705 immutable type (int, long, float, complex, tuple, str, unicode),
706 where the subtype didn't override the operation (and so the
707 operation was handled by the builtin type), could return that
708 instance instead a value of the base type. For example, if s was of
709 a str sublass type, s[:] returned s as-is. Now it returns a str
710 with the same value as s.
711
Barry Warsaw86fbaf82001-09-28 15:26:12 +0000712- Provisional support for pickling new-style objects has been added.
713
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +0000714Core
715
Tim Peters2c9aa5e2001-09-23 04:06:05 +0000716- file.writelines() now accepts any iterable object producing strings.
717
Marc-André Lemburgaefd7662001-09-20 12:59:37 +0000718- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() now works very much like
719 PyObject_Str(obj) in that it tries to use __str__/tp_str
720 on the object if the object is not a string or buffer. This
721 makes unicode() behave like str() when applied to non-string/buffer
722 objects.
723
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +0000724- PyFile_WriteObject now passes Unicode objects to the file's write
725 method. As a result, all file-like objects which may be the target
Martin v. Löwis2777c022001-09-19 13:47:32 +0000726 of a print statement must support Unicode objects, i.e. they must
727 at least convert them into ASCII strings.
728
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +0000729- Thread scheduling on Solaris should be improved; it is no longer
730 necessary to insert a small sleep at the start of a thread in order
731 to let other runnable threads be scheduled.
732
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +0000733Library
734
Marc-André Lemburgbf990172001-09-27 14:17:33 +0000735- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
736 read character buffer compatible objects for their .write() methods.
737 These objects are converted to strings and then handled as such
738 by the instances.
739
Barry Warsaw2f600732001-09-24 04:28:10 +0000740- The "email" package has been added. This is basically a port of the
741 mimelib package <http://sf.net/projects/mimelib> with API changes
742 and some implementations updated to use iterators and generators.
743
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +0000744- difflib.ndiff() and difflib.Differ.compare() are generators now. This
745 restores the ability of Tools/scripts/ndiff.py to start producing output
746 before the entire comparison is complete.
747
Barry Warsaw58b072d2001-09-22 04:44:21 +0000748- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
749 iteration just like file objects (i.e. their .readline() method is
750 called for each iteration until it returns an empty string).
751
Marc-André Lemburg494f2ae2001-09-19 11:33:31 +0000752- The codecs module has grown four new helper APIs to access
753 builtin codecs: getencoder(), getdecoder(), getreader(),
754 getwriter().
755
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +0000756- SimpleXMLRPCServer: a new module (based upon SimpleHTMLServer)
757 simplifies writing XML RPC servers.
758
Barry Warsaw647d5e82001-09-28 17:01:02 +0000759- os.path.realpath(): a new function that returns the absolute pathname
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +0000760 after interpretation of symbolic links. On non-Unix systems, this
761 is an alias for os.path.abspath().
762
Tim Peters16a77ad2001-09-08 04:00:12 +0000763- operator.indexOf() (PySequence_Index() in the C API) now works with any
764 iterable object.
765
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +0000766- smtplib now supports various authentication and security features of
767 the SMTP protocol through the new login() and starttls() methods.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +0000768
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +0000769- hmac: a new module implementing keyed hashing for message
770 authentication.
771
772- mimetypes now recognizes more extensions and file types. At the
773 same time, some mappings not sanctioned by IANA were removed.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +0000774
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +0000775- The "compiler" package has been brought up to date to the state of
Guido van Rossumc9ed5dc2001-09-20 05:30:24 +0000776 Python 2.2 bytecode generation. It has also been promoted from a
777 Tool to a standard library package. (Tools/compiler still exists as
778 a sample driver.)
779
Guido van Rossumc9ed5dc2001-09-20 05:30:24 +0000780Tools
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +0000781
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +0000782Build
783
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +0000784- Large file support (LFS) is now automatic when the platform supports
785 it; no more manual configuration tweaks are needed. On Linux, at
786 least, it's possible to have a system whose C library supports large
787 files but whose kernel doesn't; in this case, large file support is
788 still enabled but doesn't do you any good unless you upgrade your
789 kernel or share your Python executable with another system whose
790 kernel has large file support.
791
792- The configure script now supplies plausible defaults in a
793 cross-compilation environment. This doesn't mean that the supplied
794 values are always correct, or that cross-compilation now works
795 flawlessly -- but it's a first step (and it shuts up most of
796 autoconf's warnings about AC_TRY_RUN).
797
798- The Unix build is now a bit less chatty, courtesy of the parser
799 generator. The build is completely silent (except for errors) when
800 using "make -s", thanks to a -q option to setup.py.
801
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +0000802C API
803
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +0000804- The "structmember" API now supports some new flag bits to deny read
805 and/or write access to attributes in restricted execution mode.
806
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +0000807New platforms
808
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +0000809- Compaq's iPAQ handheld, running the "familiar" Linux distribution
810 (http://familiar.handhelds.org).
811
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +0000812Tests
813
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +0000814- The "classic" standard tests, which work by comparing stdout to
815 an expected-output file under Lib/test/output/, no longer stop at
816 the first mismatch. Instead the test is run to completion, and a
817 variant of ndiff-style comparison is used to report all differences.
818 This is much easier to understand than the previous style of reporting.
819
820- The unittest-based standard tests now use regrtest's test_main()
821 convention, instead of running as a side-effect of merely being
822 imported. This allows these tests to be run in more natural and
823 flexible ways as unittests, outside the regrtest framework.
824
825- regrtest.py is much better integrated with unittest and doctest now,
826 especially in regard to reporting errors.
827
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +0000828Windows
829
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +0000830- Large file support now also works for files > 4GB, on filesystems
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +0000831 that support it (NTFS under Windows 2000). See "What's New in
832 Python 2.2a3" for more detail.
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +0000833
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +0000834
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +0000835What's New in Python 2.2a3?
Barry Warsaw86fbaf82001-09-28 15:26:12 +0000836Release Date: 07-Sep-2001
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +0000837===========================
838
839Core
840
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +0000841- Conversion of long to float now raises OverflowError if the long is too
842 big to represent as a C double.
843
Tim Peters32f453e2001-09-03 08:35:41 +0000844- The 3-argument builtin pow() no longer allows a third non-None argument
845 if either of the first two arguments is a float, or if both are of
846 integer types and the second argument is negative (in which latter case
847 the arguments are converted to float, so this is really the same
848 restriction).
849
Tim Peters5d2b77c2001-09-03 05:47:38 +0000850- The builtin dir() now returns more information, and sometimes much
851 more, generally naming all attributes of an object, and all attributes
852 reachable from the object via its class, and from its class's base
853 classes, and so on from them too. Example: in 2.2a2, dir([]) returned
854 an empty list. In 2.2a3,
855
856 >>> dir([])
857 ['__add__', '__class__', '__contains__', '__delattr__', '__delitem__',
858 '__eq__', '__ge__', '__getattr__', '__getitem__', '__getslice__',
859 '__gt__', '__hash__', '__iadd__', '__imul__', '__init__', '__le__',
860 '__len__', '__lt__', '__mul__', '__ne__', '__new__', '__repr__',
861 '__rmul__', '__setattr__', '__setitem__', '__setslice__', '__str__',
862 'append', 'count', 'extend', 'index', 'insert', 'pop', 'remove',
863 'reverse', 'sort']
864
865 dir(module) continues to return only the module's attributes, though.
866
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +0000867- Overflowing operations on plain ints now return a long int rather
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +0000868 than raising OverflowError. This is a partial implementation of PEP
869 237. You can use -Wdefault::OverflowWarning to enable a warning for
870 this situation, and -Werror::OverflowWarning to revert to the old
871 OverflowError exception.
872
Guido van Rossum61c345f2001-09-04 03:26:15 +0000873- A new command line option, -Q<arg>, is added to control run-time
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +0000874 warnings for the use of classic division. (See PEP 238.) Possible
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +0000875 values are -Qold, -Qwarn, -Qwarnall, and -Qnew. The default is
876 -Qold, meaning the / operator has its classic meaning and no
877 warnings are issued. Using -Qwarn issues a run-time warning about
878 all uses of classic division for int and long arguments; -Qwarnall
879 also warns about classic division for float and complex arguments
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +0000880 (for use with fixdiv.py).
881 [Note: the remainder of this paragraph (preserved below) became
882 obsolete in 2.2c1 -- -Qnew has global effect in 2.2]
883 <obsolete>
884 Using -Qnew is questionable; it turns on new division by default, but
885 only in the __main__ module. You can usefully combine -Qwarn or
886 -Qwarnall and -Qnew: this gives the __main__ module new division, and
887 warns about classic division everywhere else.
888 </obsolete>
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +0000889
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +0000890- Many built-in types can now be subclassed. This applies to int,
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +0000891 long, float, str, unicode, and tuple. (The types complex, list and
892 dictionary can also be subclassed; this was introduced earlier.)
893 Note that restrictions apply when subclassing immutable built-in
894 types: you can only affect the value of the instance by overloading
895 __new__. You can add mutable attributes, and the subclass instances
896 will have a __dict__ attribute, but you cannot change the "value"
897 (as implemented by the base class) of an immutable subclass instance
898 once it is created.
899
Guido van Rossumaaf80c82001-09-02 13:44:35 +0000900- The dictionary constructor now takes an optional argument, a
901 mapping-like object, and initializes the dictionary from its
902 (key, value) pairs.
903
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +0000904- A new built-in type, super, has been added. This facilitates making
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +0000905 "cooperative super calls" in a multiple inheritance setting. For an
906 explanation, see http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#cooperation
907
Guido van Rossum8d7234d2001-09-06 22:02:58 +0000908- A new built-in type, property, has been added. This enables the
909 creation of "properties". These are attributes implemented by
910 getter and setter functions (or only one of these for read-only or
911 write-only attributes), without the need to override __getattr__.
912 See http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#property
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +0000913
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +0000914- The syntax of floating-point and imaginary literals has been
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +0000915 liberalized, to allow leading zeroes. Examples of literals now
916 legal that were SyntaxErrors before:
917
918 00.0 0e3 0100j 07.5 00000000000000000008.
919
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +0000920- An old tokenizer bug allowed floating point literals with an incomplete
Tim Petersc6d95812001-08-28 20:56:27 +0000921 exponent, such as 1e and 3.1e-. Such literals now raise SyntaxError.
922
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +0000923Library
924
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +0000925- telnetlib includes symbolic names for the options, and support for
926 setting an option negotiation callback.
927
Tim Petersa40c7932001-09-05 22:36:56 +0000928- The new C standard no longer requires that math libraries set errno to
929 ERANGE on overflow. For platform libraries that exploit this new
930 freedom, Python's overflow-checking was wholly broken. A new overflow-
931 checking scheme attempts to repair that, but may not be reliable on all
932 platforms (C doesn't seem to provide anything both useful and portable
933 in this area anymore).
934
Martin v. Löwis44f86962001-09-05 13:44:54 +0000935- Asynchronous timeout actions are available through the new class
936 threading.Timer.
937
Tim Peters78526162001-09-05 00:53:45 +0000938- math.log and math.log10 now return sensible results for even huge
939 long arguments. For example, math.log10(10 ** 10000) ~= 10000.0.
940
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +0000941- A new function, imp.lock_held(), returns 1 when the import lock is
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +0000942 currently held. See the docs for the imp module.
943
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +0000944- pickle, cPickle and marshal on 32-bit platforms can now correctly read
Tim Peters82112372001-08-29 02:28:42 +0000945 dumps containing ints written on platforms where Python ints are 8 bytes.
946 When read on a box where Python ints are 4 bytes, such values are
947 converted to Python longs.
948
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +0000949- In restricted execution mode (using the rexec module), unmarshalling
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +0000950 code objects is no longer allowed. This plugs a security hole.
951
Steve Purcell6091cd62001-09-06 16:05:17 +0000952- unittest.TestResult instances no longer store references to tracebacks
953 generated by test failures. This prevents unexpected dangling references
954 to objects that should be garbage collected between tests.
955
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +0000956Tools
957
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +0000958- Tools/scripts/fixdiv.py has been added which can be used to fix
959 division operators as per PEP 238.
960
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +0000961Build
962
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +0000963- If you are an adventurous person using Mac OS X you may want to look at
964 Mac/OSX. There is a Makefile there that will build Python as a real Mac
965 application, which can be used for experimenting with Carbon or Cocoa.
966 Discussion of this on pythonmac-sig, please.
967
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +0000968C API
969
970- New function PyObject_Dir(obj), like Python __builtin__.dir(obj).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +0000971
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +0000972- Note that PyLong_AsDouble can fail! This has always been true, but no
973 callers checked for it. It's more likely to fail now, because overflow
974 errors are properly detected now. The proper way to check:
975
976 double x = PyLong_AsDouble(some_long_object);
977 if (x == -1.0 && PyErr_Occurred()) {
978 /* The conversion failed. */
979 }
980
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +0000981- The GC API has been changed. Extensions that use the old API will still
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +0000982 compile but will not participate in GC. To upgrade an extension
983 module:
984
985 - rename Py_TPFLAGS_GC to PyTPFLAGS_HAVE_GC
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +0000986
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +0000987 - use PyObject_GC_New or PyObject_GC_NewVar to allocate objects and
988 PyObject_GC_Del to deallocate them
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +0000989
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +0000990 - rename PyObject_GC_Init to PyObject_GC_Track and PyObject_GC_Fini
991 to PyObject_GC_UnTrack
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +0000992
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +0000993 - remove PyGC_HEAD_SIZE from object size calculations
994
995 - remove calls to PyObject_AS_GC and PyObject_FROM_GC
996
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +0000997- Two new functions: PyString_FromFormat() and PyString_FromFormatV().
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +0000998 These can be used safely to construct string objects from a
999 sprintf-style format string (similar to the format string supported
1000 by PyErr_Format()).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00001001
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00001002New platforms
1003
Tim Petersb7da0902001-09-02 23:01:43 +00001004- Stephen Hansen contributed patches sufficient to get a clean compile
1005 under Borland C (Windows), but he reports problems running it and ran
1006 out of time to complete the port. Volunteers? Expect a MemoryError
1007 when importing the types module; this is probably shallow, and
1008 causing later failures too.
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00001009
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00001010Tests
1011
1012Windows
1013
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00001014- Large file support is now enabled on Win32 platforms as well as on
1015 Win64. This means that, for example, you can use f.tell() and f.seek()
1016 to manipulate files larger than 2 gigabytes (provided you have enough
1017 disk space, and are using a Windows filesystem that supports large
Tim Peters9a9471c2001-09-11 23:18:51 +00001018 partitions). Windows filesystem limits: FAT has a 2GB (gigabyte)
1019 filesize limit, and large file support makes no difference there.
1020 FAT32's limit is 4GB, and files >= 2GB are easier to use from Python now.
1021 NTFS has no practical limit on file size, and files of any size can be
1022 used from Python now.
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00001023
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00001024- The w9xpopen hack is now used on Windows NT and 2000 too when COMPSPEC
Tim Peters402d5982001-08-27 06:37:48 +00001025 points to command.com (patch from Brian Quinlan).
1026
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00001027
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00001028What's New in Python 2.2a2?
Barry Warsaw86fbaf82001-09-28 15:26:12 +00001029Release Date: 22-Aug-2001
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00001030===========================
1031
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00001032Build
1033
Barry Warsaw18b2ecf2001-08-22 20:26:56 +00001034- Tim Peters developed a brand new Windows installer using Wise 8.1,
1035 generously donated to us by Wise Solutions.
1036
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00001037- configure supports a new option --enable-unicode, with the values
1038 ucs2 and ucs4 (new in 2.2a1). With --disable-unicode, the Unicode
1039 type and supporting code is completely removed from the interpreter.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00001040
Jack Jansen32ce0cd2001-08-21 19:28:20 +00001041- A new configure option --enable-framework builds a Mac OS X framework,
1042 which "make frameworkinstall" will install. This provides a starting
1043 point for more mac-like functionality, join pythonmac-sig@python.org
1044 if you are interested in helping.
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00001045
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00001046- The NeXT platform is no longer supported.
1047
1048- The `new' module is now statically linked.
1049
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00001050Tools
1051
1052- The new Tools/scripts/cleanfuture.py can be used to automatically
Andrew M. Kuchlingb0532092001-08-15 15:54:56 +00001053 edit out obsolete future statements from Python source code. See
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00001054 the module docstring for details.
1055
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00001056Tests
1057
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00001058- regrtest.py now knows which tests are expected to be skipped on some
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00001059 platforms, allowing to give clearer test result output. regrtest
1060 also has optional --use/-u switch to run normally disabled tests
1061 which require network access or consume significant disk resources.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00001062
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00001063- Several new tests in the standard test suite, with special thanks to
1064 Nick Mathewson.
1065
1066Core
1067
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00001068- The floor division operator // has been added as outlined in PEP
1069 238. The / operator still provides classic division (and will until
1070 Python 3.0) unless "from __future__ import division" is included, in
1071 which case the / operator will provide true division. The operator
1072 module provides truediv() and floordiv() functions. Augmented
1073 assignment variants are included, as are the equivalent overloadable
1074 methods and C API methods. See the PEP for a full discussion:
1075 <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0238.html>
1076
Tim Peters6cd6a822001-08-17 22:11:27 +00001077- Future statements are now effective in simulated interactive shells
1078 (like IDLE). This should "just work" by magic, but read Michael
1079 Hudson's "Future statements in simulated shells" PEP 264 for full
1080 details: <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0264.html>.
1081
Guido van Rossumf86ddd22001-08-17 21:21:04 +00001082- The type/class unification (PEP 252-253) was integrated into the
1083 trunk and is not so tentative any more (the exact specification of
1084 some features is still tentative). A lot of work has done on fixing
1085 bugs and adding robustness and features (performance still has to
1086 come a long way).
1087
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00001088- Warnings about a mismatch in the Python API during extension import
1089 now use the Python warning framework (which makes it possible to
1090 write filters for these warnings).
1091
Barry Warsaw9b3be7f2001-08-14 18:35:02 +00001092- A function's __dict__ (aka func_dict) will now always be a
1093 dictionary. It used to be possible to delete it or set it to None,
1094 but now both actions raise TypeErrors. It is still legal to set it
1095 to a dictionary object. Getting func.__dict__ before any attributes
1096 have been assigned now returns an empty dictionary instead of None.
1097
Guido van Rossum32aa5d22001-09-05 18:43:35 +00001098- A new command line option, -E, was added which disables the use of
1099 all environment variables, or at least those that are specifically
1100 significant to Python. Usually those have a name starting with
1101 "PYTHON". This was used to fix a problem where the tests fail if
1102 the user happens to have PYTHONHOME or PYTHONPATH pointing to an
1103 older distribution.
1104
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00001105Library
1106
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00001107- New class Differ and new functions ndiff() and restore() in difflib.py.
1108 These package the algorithms used by the popular Tools/scripts/ndiff.py,
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00001109 for programmatic reuse.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00001110
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00001111- New function xml.sax.saxutils.quoteattr(): Quote an XML attribute
1112 value using the minimal quoting required for the value; more
1113 reliable than using xml.sax.saxutils.escape() for attribute values.
1114
1115- Readline completion support for cmd.Cmd was added.
1116
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00001117- Calling os.tempnam() or os.tmpnam() generate RuntimeWarnings.
1118
1119- Added function threading.BoundedSemaphore()
1120
1121- Added Ka-Ping Yee's cgitb.py module.
1122
1123- The `new' module now exposes the CO_xxx flags.
1124
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00001125- The gc module offers the get_referents function.
1126
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00001127New platforms
1128
1129C API
1130
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00001131- Two new APIs PyOS_snprintf() and PyOS_vsnprintf() were added
1132 which provide a cross-platform implementations for the
1133 relatively new snprintf()/vsnprintf() C lib APIs. In contrast to
1134 the standard sprintf() and vsprintf() C lib APIs, these versions
1135 apply bounds checking on the used buffer which enhances protection
1136 against buffer overruns.
1137
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00001138- Unicode APIs now use name mangling to assure that mixing interpreters
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00001139 and extensions using different Unicode widths is rendered next to
1140 impossible. Trying to import an incompatible Unicode-aware extension
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00001141 will result in an ImportError. Unicode extensions writers must make
1142 sure to check the Unicode width compatibility in their extensions by
1143 using at least one of the mangled Unicode APIs in the extension.
1144
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00001145- Two new flags METH_NOARGS and METH_O are available in method definition
1146 tables to simplify implementation of methods with no arguments and a
1147 single untyped argument. Calling such methods is more efficient than
1148 calling corresponding METH_VARARGS methods. METH_OLDARGS is now
1149 deprecated.
1150
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00001151Windows
1152
1153- "import module" now compiles module.pyw if it exists and nothing else
1154 relevant is found.
1155
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00001156
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00001157What's New in Python 2.2a1?
Barry Warsawd970fe42001-10-25 21:53:30 +00001158Release date: 18-Jul-2001
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00001159===========================
1160
1161Core
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00001162
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00001163- TENTATIVELY, a large amount of code implementing much of what's
1164 described in PEP 252 (Making Types Look More Like Classes) and PEP
1165 253 (Subtyping Built-in Types) was added. This will be released
1166 with Python 2.2a1. Documentation will be provided separately
1167 through http://www.python.org/2.2/. The purpose of releasing this
1168 with Python 2.2a1 is to test backwards compatibility. It is
1169 possible, though not likely, that a decision is made not to release
1170 this code as part of 2.2 final, if any serious backwards
1171 incompapatibilities are found during alpha testing that cannot be
1172 repaired.
1173
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00001174- Generators were added; this is a new way to create an iterator (see
Tim Peters11a0d102001-07-17 18:48:00 +00001175 below) using what looks like a simple function containing one or
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00001176 more 'yield' statements. See PEP 255. Since this adds a new
1177 keyword to the language, this feature must be enabled by including a
1178 future statement: "from __future__ import generators" (see PEP 236).
1179 Generators will become a standard feature in a future release
1180 (probably 2.3). Without this future statement, 'yield' remains an
1181 ordinary identifier, but a warning is issued each time it is used.
1182 (These warnings currently don't conform to the warnings framework of
1183 PEP 230; we intend to fix this in 2.2a2.)
1184
Marc-André Lemburg12e74b32001-05-22 08:58:23 +00001185- The UTF-16 codec was modified to be more RFC compliant. It will now
1186 only remove BOM characters at the start of the string and then
1187 only if running in native mode (UTF-16-LE and -BE won't remove a
1188 leading BMO character).
1189
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00001190- Strings now have a new method .decode() to complement the already
1191 existing .encode() method. These two methods provide direct access
1192 to the corresponding decoders and encoders of the registered codecs.
1193
1194 To enhance the usability of the .encode() method, the special
1195 casing of Unicode object return values was dropped (Unicode objects
1196 were auto-magically converted to string using the default encoding).
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00001197
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00001198 Both methods will now return whatever the codec in charge of the
1199 requested encoding returns as object, e.g. Unicode codecs will
1200 return Unicode objects when decoding is requested ("äöü".decode("latin-1")
1201 will return u"äöü"). This enables codec writer to create codecs
1202 for various simple to use conversions.
1203
1204 New codecs were added to demonstrate these new features (the .encode()
1205 and .decode() columns indicate the type of the returned objects):
1206
1207 Name | .encode() | .decode() | Description
1208 ----------------------------------------------------------------------
1209 uu | string | string | UU codec (e.g. for email)
1210 base64 | string | string | base64 codec
Guido van Rossumc3415802001-06-06 13:30:54 +00001211 quopri | string | string | quoted-printable codec
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00001212 zlib | string | string | zlib compression
1213 hex | string | string | 2-byte hex codec
1214 rot-13 | string | Unicode | ROT-13 Unicode charmap codec
1215
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00001216- Some operating systems now support the concept of a default Unicode
1217 encoding for file system operations. Notably, Windows supports 'mbcs'
1218 as the default. The Macintosh will also adopt this concept in the medium
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00001219 term, although the default encoding for that platform will be other than
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00001220 'mbcs'.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00001221
1222 On operating system that support non-ASCII filenames, it is common for
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00001223 functions that return filenames (such as os.listdir()) to return Python
1224 string objects pre-encoded using the default file system encoding for
1225 the platform. As this encoding is likely to be different from Python's
1226 default encoding, converting this name to a Unicode object before passing
1227 it back to the Operating System would result in a Unicode error, as Python
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00001228 would attempt to use its default encoding (generally ASCII) rather than
1229 the default encoding for the file system.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00001230
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00001231 In general, this change simply removes surprises when working with
1232 Unicode and the file system, making these operations work as you expect,
1233 increasing the transparency of Unicode objects in this context.
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00001234 See [????] for more details, including examples.
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00001235
Tim Peters61dff2b2001-05-08 15:43:37 +00001236- Float (and complex) literals in source code were evaluated to full
1237 precision only when running from a .py file; the same code loaded from a
1238 .pyc (or .pyo) file could suffer numeric differences starting at about the
1239 12th significant decimal digit. For example, on a machine with IEEE-754
1240 floating arithmetic,
1241
1242 x = 9007199254740992.0
1243 print long(x)
1244
1245 printed 9007199254740992 if run directly from .py, but 9007199254740000
1246 if from a compiled (.pyc or .pyo) file. This was due to marshal using
1247 str(float) instead of repr(float) when building code objects. marshal
1248 now uses repr(float) instead, which should reproduce floats to full
1249 machine precision (assuming the platform C float<->string I/O conversion
1250 functions are of good quality).
1251
1252 This may cause floating-point results to change in some cases, and
1253 usually for the better, but may also cause numerically unstable
1254 algorithms to break.
1255
Tim Peters2f228e72001-05-13 00:19:31 +00001256- The implementation of dicts suffers fewer collisions, which has speed
1257 benefits. However, the order in which dict entries appear in dict.keys(),
1258 dict.values() and dict.items() may differ from previous releases for a
1259 given dict. Nothing is defined about this order, so no program should
1260 rely on it. Nevertheless, it's easy to write test cases that rely on the
1261 order by accident, typically because of printing the str() or repr() of a
1262 dict to an "expected results" file. See Lib/test/test_support.py's new
1263 sortdict(dict) function for a simple way to display a dict in sorted
1264 order.
1265
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00001266- Many other small changes to dicts were made, resulting in faster
1267 operation along the most common code paths.
1268
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00001269- Dictionary objects now support the "in" operator: "x in dict" means
1270 the same as dict.has_key(x).
1271
Barry Warsaw51acc8d2001-06-26 20:12:50 +00001272- The update() method of dictionaries now accepts generic mapping
1273 objects. Specifically the argument object must support the .keys()
1274 and __getitem__() methods. This allows you to say, for example,
1275 {}.update(UserDict())
1276
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00001277- Iterators were added; this is a generalized way of providing values
1278 to a for loop. See PEP 234. There's a new built-in function iter()
1279 to return an iterator. There's a new protocol to get the next value
1280 from an iterator using the next() method (in Python) or the
1281 tp_iternext slot (in C). There's a new protocol to get iterators
1282 using the __iter__() method (in Python) or the tp_iter slot (in C).
1283 Iterating (i.e. a for loop) over a dictionary generates its keys.
1284 Iterating over a file generates its lines.
1285
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00001286- The following functions were generalized to work nicely with iterator
1287 arguments:
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00001288 map(), filter(), reduce(), zip()
Tim Peters8572b4f2001-05-06 01:05:02 +00001289 list(), tuple() (PySequence_Tuple() and PySequence_Fast() in C API)
1290 max(), min()
Tim Peters1af03e92001-05-26 19:37:54 +00001291 join() method of strings
1292 extend() method of lists
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00001293 'x in y' and 'x not in y' (PySequence_Contains() in C API)
1294 operator.countOf() (PySequence_Count() in C API)
Tim Petersd6d010b2001-06-21 02:49:55 +00001295 right-hand side of assignment statements with multiple targets, such as
1296 x, y, z = some_iterable_object_returning_exactly_3_values
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00001297
Tim Petersd85e1022001-05-11 21:51:48 +00001298- Accessing module attributes is significantly faster (for example,
1299 random.random or os.path or yourPythonModule.yourAttribute).
1300
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00001301- Comparing dictionary objects via == and != is faster, and now works even
1302 if the keys and values don't support comparisons other than ==.
1303
Tim Peters95bf9392001-05-10 08:32:44 +00001304- Comparing dictionaries in ways other than == and != is slower: there were
1305 insecurities in the dict comparison implementation that could cause Python
1306 to crash if the element comparison routines for the dict keys and/or
1307 values mutated the dicts. Making the code bulletproof slowed it down.
1308
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00001309- Collisions in dicts are resolved via a new approach, which can help
1310 dramatically in bad cases. For example, looking up every key in a dict
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00001311 d with d.keys() == [i << 16 for i in range(20000)] is approximately 500x
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00001312 faster now. Thanks to Christian Tismer for pointing out the cause and
1313 the nature of an effective cure (last December! better late than never).
Tim Peters15d49292001-05-27 07:39:22 +00001314
Tim Peters52e155e2001-06-16 05:42:57 +00001315- repr() is much faster for large containers (dict, list, tuple).
1316
1317
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00001318Library
1319
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00001320- The constants ascii_letters, ascii_lowercase. and ascii_uppercase
1321 were added to the string module. These a locale-indenpendent
1322 constants, unlike letters, lowercase, and uppercase. These are now
1323 use in appropriate locations in the standard library.
1324
Martin v. Löwisf0473d52001-07-18 16:17:16 +00001325- The flags used in dlopen calls can now be configured using
1326 sys.setdlopenflags and queried using sys.getdlopenflags.
1327
Guido van Rossumc7e4aca2001-07-12 11:54:37 +00001328- Fredrik Lundh's xmlrpclib is now a standard library module. This
1329 provides full client-side XML-RPC support. In addition,
1330 Demo/xmlrpc/ contains two server frameworks (one SocketServer-based,
1331 one asyncore-based). Thanks to Eric Raymond for the documentation.
1332
Guido van Rossum643d3912001-07-05 14:46:25 +00001333- The xrange() object is simplified: it no longer supports slicing,
1334 repetition, comparisons, efficient 'in' checking, the tolist()
1335 method, or the start, stop and step attributes. See PEP 260.
1336
Martin v. Löwisebf94db2001-06-06 06:25:40 +00001337- A new function fnmatch.filter to filter lists of file names was added.
1338
Barry Warsawffd674d2001-05-22 16:00:10 +00001339- calendar.py uses month and day names based on the current locale.
1340
Guido van Rossum2e0a6542001-05-15 02:14:44 +00001341- strop is now *really* obsolete (this was announced before with 1.6),
1342 and issues DeprecationWarning when used (except for the four items
1343 that are still imported into string.py).
1344
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00001345- Cookie.py now sorts key+value pairs by key in output strings.
1346
1347- pprint.isrecursive(object) didn't correctly identify recursive objects.
1348 Now it does.
1349
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00001350- pprint functions now much faster for large containers (tuple, list, dict).
1351
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00001352- New 'q' and 'Q' format codes in the struct module, corresponding to C
1353 types "long long" and "unsigned long long" (on Windows, __int64). In
1354 native mode, these can be used only when the platform C compiler supports
1355 these types (when HAVE_LONG_LONG is #define'd by the Python config
1356 process), and then they inherit the sizes and alignments of the C types.
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00001357 In standard mode, 'q' and 'Q' are supported on all platforms, and are
1358 8-byte integral types.
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00001359
Guido van Rossum83213cc2001-06-12 16:48:52 +00001360- The site module installs a new built-in function 'help' that invokes
1361 pydoc.help. It must be invoked as 'help()'; when invoked as 'help',
1362 it displays a message reminding the user to use 'help()' or
1363 'help(object)'.
1364
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00001365Tests
1366
1367- New test_mutants.py runs dict comparisons where the key and value
1368 comparison operators mutute the dicts randomly during comparison. This
1369 rapidly causes Python to crash under earlier releases (not for the faint
1370 of heart: it can also cause Win9x to freeze or reboot!).
1371
1372- New test_pprint.py verfies that pprint.isrecursive() and
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00001373 pprint.isreadable() return sensible results. Also verifies that simple
1374 cases produce correct output.
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00001375
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00001376C API
1377
1378- Removed the unused last_is_sticky argument from the internal
1379 _PyTuple_Resize(). If this affects you, you were cheating.
1380
1381
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00001382======================================================================
1383
1384
Guido van Rossumffe13be2001-04-16 18:46:45 +00001385What's New in Python 2.1 (final)?
1386=================================
1387
1388We only changed a few things since the last release candidate, all in
1389Python library code:
1390
1391- A bug in the locale module was fixed that affected locales which
1392 define no grouping for numeric formatting.
1393
1394- A few bugs in the weakref module's implementations of weak
1395 dictionaries (WeakValueDictionary and WeakKeyDictionary) were fixed,
1396 and the test suite was updated to check for these bugs.
1397
1398- An old bug in the os.path.walk() function (introduced in Python
1399 2.0!) was fixed: a non-existent file would cause an exception
1400 instead of being ignored.
1401
1402- Fixed a few bugs in the new symtable module found by Neil Norwitz's
1403 PyChecker.
1404
1405
Guido van Rossum5b08f132001-04-16 02:05:23 +00001406What's New in Python 2.1c2?
1407===========================
Barry Warsaw11e89c72001-04-11 20:37:57 +00001408
Guido van Rossum5b08f132001-04-16 02:05:23 +00001409A flurry of small changes, and one showstopper fixed in the nick of
1410time made it necessary to release another release candidate. The list
1411here is the *complete* list of patches (except version updates):
Guido van Rossum4fb60362001-04-13 00:46:14 +00001412
Guido van Rossum5b08f132001-04-16 02:05:23 +00001413Core
Guido van Rossum4fb60362001-04-13 00:46:14 +00001414
Guido van Rossum5b08f132001-04-16 02:05:23 +00001415- Tim discovered a nasty bug in the dictionary code, caused by
1416 PyDict_Next() calling dict_resize(), and the GC code's use of
1417 PyDict_Next() violating an assumption in dict_items(). This was
1418 fixed with considerable amounts of band-aid, but the net effect is a
1419 saner and more robust implementation.
1420
1421- Made a bunch of symbols static that were accidentally global.
1422
1423Build and Ports
1424
1425- The setup.py script didn't check for a new enough version of zlib
1426 (1.1.3 is needed). Now it does.
1427
1428- Changed "make clean" target to also remove shared libraries.
1429
1430- Added a more general warning about the SGI Irix optimizer to README.
1431
1432Library
1433
1434- Fix a bug in urllib.basejoin("http://host", "../file.html") which
1435 omitted the slash between host and file.html.
1436
1437- The mailbox module's _Mailbox class contained a completely broken
1438 and undocumented seek() method. Ripped it out.
1439
1440- Fixed a bunch of typos in various library modules (urllib2, smtpd,
1441 sgmllib, netrc, chunk) found by Neil Norwitz's PyChecker.
1442
1443- Fixed a few last-minute bugs in unittest.
1444
1445Extensions
1446
1447- Reverted the patch to the OpenSSL code in socketmodule.c to support
1448 RAND_status() and the EGD, and the subsequent patch that tried to
1449 fix it for pre-0.9.5 versions; the problem with the patch is that on
1450 some systems it issues a warning whenever socket is imported, and
1451 that's unacceptable.
1452
1453Tests
1454
1455- Fixed the pickle tests to work with "import test.test_pickle".
1456
1457- Tweaked test_locale.py to actually run the test Windows.
1458
1459- In distutils/archive_util.py, call zipfile.ZipFile() with mode "w",
1460 not "wb" (which is not a valid mode at all).
1461
1462- Fix pstats browser crashes. Import readline if it exists to make
1463 the user interface nicer.
1464
1465- Add "import thread" to the top of test modules that import the
1466 threading module (test_asynchat and test_threadedtempfile). This
1467 prevents test failures caused by a broken threading module resulting
1468 from a previously caught failed import.
1469
1470- Changed test_asynchat.py to set the SO_REUSEADDR option; this was
1471 needed on some platforms (e.g. Solaris 8) when the tests are run
1472 twice in succession.
1473
1474- Skip rather than fail test_sunaudiodev if no audio device is found.
1475
1476
1477What's New in Python 2.1c1?
1478===========================
1479
1480This list was significantly updated when 2.1c2 was released; the 2.1c1
1481release didn't mention most changes that were actually part of 2.1c1:
1482
1483Legal
1484
1485- Copyright was assigned to the Python Software Foundation (PSF) and a
1486 PSF license (very similar to the CNRI license) was added.
1487
1488- The CNRI copyright notice was updated to include 2001.
1489
1490Core
Barry Warsaw11e89c72001-04-11 20:37:57 +00001491
Guido van Rossumc9932722001-04-12 02:31:27 +00001492- After a public outcry, assignment to __debug__ is no longer illegal;
1493 instead, a warning is issued. It will become illegal in 2.2.
1494
Guido van Rossum5b08f132001-04-16 02:05:23 +00001495- Fixed a core dump with "%#x" % 0, and changed the semantics so that
1496 "%#x" now always prepends "0x", even if the value is zero.
1497
1498- Fixed some nits in the bytecode compiler.
1499
1500- Fixed core dumps when calling certain kinds of non-functions.
1501
1502- Fixed various core dumps caused by reference count bugs.
1503
1504Build and Ports
1505
1506- Use INSTALL_SCRIPT to install script files.
1507
Guido van Rossum34d37dc2001-04-11 21:03:32 +00001508- New port: SCO Unixware 7, by Billy G. Allie.
1509
Guido van Rossum5b08f132001-04-16 02:05:23 +00001510- Updated RISCOS port.
1511
1512- Updated BeOS port and notes.
1513
1514- Various other porting problems resolved.
1515
1516Library
1517
1518- The TERMIOS and SOCKET modules are now truly obsolete and
1519 unnecessary. Their symbols are incorporated in the termios and
1520 socket modules.
1521
1522- Fixed some 64-bit bugs in pickle, cPickle, and struct, and added
1523 better tests for pickling.
1524
1525- threading: make Condition.wait() robust against KeyboardInterrupt.
1526
1527- zipfile: add support to zipfile to support opening an archive
1528 represented by an open file rather than a file name. Fix bug where
1529 the archive was not properly closed. Fixed a bug in this bugfix
1530 where flush() was called for a read-only file.
1531
1532- imputil: added an uninstall() method to the ImportManager.
1533
1534- Canvas: fixed bugs in lower() and tkraise() methods.
1535
1536- SocketServer: API change (added overridable close_request() method)
1537 so that the TCP server can explicitly close the request.
1538
1539- pstats: Eric Raymond added a simple interactive statistics browser,
1540 invoked when the module is run as a script.
1541
1542- locale: fixed a problem in format().
1543
1544- webbrowser: made it work when the BROWSER environment variable has a
1545 value like "/usr/bin/netscape". Made it auto-detect Konqueror for
1546 KDE 2. Fixed some other nits.
1547
1548- unittest: changes to allow using a different exception than
1549 AssertionError, and added a few more function aliases. Some other
1550 small changes.
1551
1552- urllib, urllib2: fixed redirect problems and a coupleof other nits.
1553
1554- asynchat: fixed a critical bug in asynchat that slipped through the
1555 2.1b2 release. Fixed another rare bug.
1556
1557- Fix some unqualified except: clauses (always a bad code example).
1558
1559XML
1560
1561- pyexpat: new API get_version_string().
1562
1563- Fixed some minidom bugs.
1564
1565Extensions
1566
1567- Fixed a core dump in _weakref. Removed the weakref.mapping()
1568 function (it adds nothing to the API).
1569
1570- Rationalized the use of header files in the readline module, to make
1571 it compile (albeit with some warnings) with the very recent readline
1572 4.2, without breaking for earlier versions.
1573
1574- Hopefully fixed a buffering problem in linuxaudiodev.
1575
1576- Attempted a fix to make the OpenSSL support in the socket module
1577 work again with pre-0.9.5 versions of OpenSSL.
1578
1579Tests
1580
1581- Added a test case for asynchat and asyncore.
1582
1583- Removed coupling between tests where one test failing could break
1584 another.
1585
1586Tools
1587
1588- Ping added an interactive help browser to pydoc, fixed some nits
1589 in the rest of the pydoc code, and added some features to his
1590 inspect module.
1591
1592- An updated python-mode.el version 4.1 which integrates Ken
1593 Manheimer's pdbtrack.el. This makes debugging Python code via pdb
1594 much nicer in XEmacs and Emacs. When stepping through your program
1595 with pdb, in either the shell window or the *Python* window, the
1596 source file and line will be tracked by an arrow. Very cool!
1597
1598- IDLE: syntax warnings in interactive mode are changed into errors.
1599
1600- Some improvements to Tools/webchecker (ignore some more URL types,
Tim Peters0e57abf2001-05-02 07:39:38 +00001601 follow some more links).
Guido van Rossum5b08f132001-04-16 02:05:23 +00001602
1603- Brought the Tools/compiler package up to date.
Guido van Rossum34d37dc2001-04-11 21:03:32 +00001604
Barry Warsaw11e89c72001-04-11 20:37:57 +00001605
Martin v. Löwis0411f6f2001-03-21 08:01:39 +00001606What's New in Python 2.1 beta 2?
1607================================
1608
Guido van Rossum053ae352001-03-22 14:17:21 +00001609(Unlisted are many fixed bugs, more documentation, etc.)
1610
Martin v. Löwis0411f6f2001-03-21 08:01:39 +00001611Core language, builtins, and interpreter
1612
Guido van Rossum053ae352001-03-22 14:17:21 +00001613- The nested scopes work (enabled by "from __future__ import
1614 nested_scopes") is completed; in particular, the future now extends
1615 into code executed through exec, eval() and execfile(), and into the
1616 interactive interpreter.
1617
1618- When calling a base class method (e.g. BaseClass.__init__(self)),
1619 this is now allowed even if self is not strictly spoken a class
1620 instance (e.g. when using metaclasses or the Don Beaudry hook).
1621
1622- Slice objects are now comparable but not hashable; this prevents
1623 dict[:] from being accepted but meaningless.
1624
1625- Complex division is now calculated using less braindead algorithms.
1626 This doesn't change semantics except it's more likely to give useful
1627 results in extreme cases. Complex repr() now uses full precision
1628 like float repr().
1629
1630- sgmllib.py now calls handle_decl() for simple <!...> declarations.
1631
Jeremy Hyltonf626db72001-03-23 14:18:27 +00001632- It is illegal to assign to the name __debug__, which is set when the
1633 interpreter starts. It is effectively a compile-time constant.
1634
1635- A warning will be issued if a global statement for a variable
1636 follows a use or assignment of that variable.
1637
Martin v. Löwis0411f6f2001-03-21 08:01:39 +00001638Standard library
1639
Guido van Rossum053ae352001-03-22 14:17:21 +00001640- unittest.py, a unit testing framework by Steve Purcell (PyUNIT,
1641 inspired by JUnit), is now part of the standard library. You now
1642 have a choice of two testing frameworks: unittest requires you to
1643 write testcases as separate code, doctest gathers them from
1644 docstrings. Both approaches have their advantages and
1645 disadvantages.
1646
1647- A new module Tix was added, which wraps the Tix extension library
1648 for Tk. With that module, it is not necessary to statically link
1649 Tix with _tkinter, since Tix will be loaded with Tcl's "package
1650 require" command. See Demo/tix/.
1651
1652- tzparse.py is now obsolete.
1653
1654- In gzip.py, the seek() and tell() methods are removed -- they were
1655 non-functional anyway, and it's better if callers can test for their
1656 existence with hasattr().
1657
1658Python/C API
1659
1660- PyDict_Next(): it is now safe to call PyDict_SetItem() with a key
1661 that's already in the dictionary during a PyDict_Next() iteration.
1662 This used to fail occasionally when a dictionary resize operation
1663 could be triggered that would rehash all the keys. All other
1664 modifications to the dictionary are still off-limits during a
1665 PyDict_Next() iteration!
1666
1667- New extended APIs related to passing compiler variables around.
1668
1669- New abstract APIs PyObject_IsInstance(), PyObject_IsSubclass()
1670 implement isinstance() and issubclass().
1671
1672- Py_BuildValue() now has a "D" conversion to create a Python complex
1673 number from a Py_complex C value.
Martin v. Löwis0411f6f2001-03-21 08:01:39 +00001674
Fred Drake4e262a92001-03-22 18:26:47 +00001675- Extensions types which support weak references must now set the
1676 field allocated for the weak reference machinery to NULL themselves;
1677 this is done to avoid the cost of checking each object for having a
1678 weakly referencable type in PyObject_INIT(), since most types are
1679 not weakly referencable.
1680
Jeremy Hyltonf626db72001-03-23 14:18:27 +00001681- PyFrame_FastToLocals() and PyFrame_LocalsToFast() copy bindings for
1682 free variables and cell variables to and from the frame's f_locals.
1683
1684- Variants of several functions defined in pythonrun.h have been added
1685 to support the nested_scopes future statement. The variants all end
1686 in Flags and take an extra argument, a PyCompilerFlags *; examples:
1687 PyRun_AnyFileExFlags(), PyRun_InteractiveLoopFlags(). These
1688 variants may be removed in Python 2.2, when nested scopes are
Tim Peters0e57abf2001-05-02 07:39:38 +00001689 mandatory.
Jeremy Hyltonf626db72001-03-23 14:18:27 +00001690
Andrew M. Kuchling8e9972c2001-03-22 15:42:08 +00001691Distutils
1692
1693- the sdist command now writes a PKG-INFO file, as described in PEP 241,
1694 into the release tree.
1695
Tim Peters0e57abf2001-05-02 07:39:38 +00001696- several enhancements to the bdist_wininst command from Thomas Heller
Andrew M. Kuchling8e9972c2001-03-22 15:42:08 +00001697 (an uninstaller, more customization of the installer's display)
1698
1699- from Jack Jansen: added Mac-specific code to generate a dialog for
1700 users to specify the command-line (because providing a command-line with
Tim Peters0e57abf2001-05-02 07:39:38 +00001701 MacPython is awkward). Jack also made various fixes for the Mac
Andrew M. Kuchling8e9972c2001-03-22 15:42:08 +00001702 and the Metrowerks compiler.
Tim Peters0e57abf2001-05-02 07:39:38 +00001703
1704- added 'platforms' and 'keywords' to the set of metadata that can be
1705 specified for a distribution.
Andrew M. Kuchling8e9972c2001-03-22 15:42:08 +00001706
1707- applied patches from Jason Tishler to make the compiler class work with
1708 Cygwin.
1709
1710
Tim Peters2fe289a2001-03-01 22:19:38 +00001711What's New in Python 2.1 beta 1?
1712================================
Tim Petersd66595f2001-02-04 03:09:53 +00001713
1714Core language, builtins, and interpreter
1715
Guido van Rossum9d0fbde2001-03-02 14:00:32 +00001716- Following an outcry from the community about the amount of code
1717 broken by the nested scopes feature introduced in 2.1a2, we decided
1718 to make this feature optional, and to wait until Python 2.2 (or at
1719 least 6 months) to make it standard. The option can be enabled on a
1720 per-module basis by adding "from __future__ import nested_scopes" at
1721 the beginning of a module (before any other statements, but after
1722 comments and an optional docstring). See PEP 236 (Back to the
1723 __future__) for a description of the __future__ statement. PEP 227
1724 (Statically Nested Scopes) has been updated to reflect this change,
1725 and to clarify the semantics in a number of endcases.
1726
1727- The nested scopes code, when enabled, has been hardened, and most
1728 bugs and memory leaks in it have been fixed.
1729
1730- Compile-time warnings are now generated for a number of conditions
1731 that will break or change in meaning when nested scopes are enabled:
1732
1733 - Using "from...import *" or "exec" without in-clause in a function
1734 scope that also defines a lambda or nested function with one or
1735 more free (non-local) variables. The presence of the import* or
1736 bare exec makes it impossible for the compiler to determine the
1737 exact set of local variables in the outer scope, which makes it
1738 impossible to determine the bindings for free variables in the
1739 inner scope. To avoid the warning about import *, change it into
1740 an import of explicitly name object, or move the import* statement
1741 to the global scope; to avoid the warning about bare exec, use
1742 exec...in... (a good idea anyway -- there's a possibility that
1743 bare exec will be deprecated in the future).
1744
1745 - Use of a global variable in a nested scope with the same name as a
1746 local variable in a surrounding scope. This will change in
1747 meaning with nested scopes: the name in the inner scope will
1748 reference the variable in the outer scope rather than the global
1749 of the same name. To avoid the warning, either rename the outer
1750 variable, or use a global statement in the inner function.
1751
Neil Schemenauera35c6882001-02-27 04:45:05 +00001752- An optional object allocator has been included. This allocator is
1753 optimized for Python objects and should be faster and use less memory
1754 than the standard system allocator. It is not enabled by default
1755 because of possible thread safety problems. The allocator is only
1756 protected by the Python interpreter lock and it is possible that some
1757 extension modules require a thread safe allocator. The object
1758 allocator can be enabled by providing the "--with-pymalloc" option to
1759 configure.
1760
Tim Petersd66595f2001-02-04 03:09:53 +00001761Standard library
1762
Martin v. Löwis2a5130e2001-02-27 04:21:58 +00001763- pyexpat now detects the expat version if expat.h defines it. A
1764 number of additional handlers are provided, which are only available
1765 since expat 1.95. In addition, the methods SetParamEntityParsing and
1766 GetInputContext of Parser objects are available with 1.95.x
1767 only. Parser objects now provide the ordered_attributes and
1768 specified_attributes attributes. A new module expat.model was added,
1769 which offers a number of additional constants if 1.95.x is used.
1770
1771- xml.dom offers the new functions registerDOMImplementation and
1772 getDOMImplementation.
1773
1774- xml.dom.minidom offers a toprettyxml method. A number of DOM
1775 conformance issues have been resolved. In particular, Element now
1776 has an hasAttributes method, and the handling of namespaces was
1777 improved.
1778
Andrew M. Kuchlingd6a1d792001-02-28 21:05:42 +00001779- Ka-Ping Yee contributed two new modules: inspect.py, a module for
1780 getting information about live Python code, and pydoc.py, a module
1781 for interactively converting docstrings to HTML or text.
1782 Tools/scripts/pydoc, which is now automatically installed into
Tim Peters1eff7962001-03-01 02:31:33 +00001783 <prefix>/bin, uses pydoc.py to display documentation; try running
Guido van Rossume3955a82001-03-02 14:05:59 +00001784 "pydoc -h" for instructions. "pydoc -g" pops up a small GUI that
1785 lets you browse the module docstrings using a web browser.
Andrew M. Kuchlingd6a1d792001-02-28 21:05:42 +00001786
Tim Peters1eff7962001-03-01 02:31:33 +00001787- New library module difflib.py, primarily packaging the SequenceMatcher
1788 class at the heart of the popular ndiff.py file-comparison tool.
1789
1790- doctest.py (a framework for verifying Python code examples in docstrings)
1791 is now part of the std library.
1792
Tim Petersd66595f2001-02-04 03:09:53 +00001793Windows changes
1794
Guido van Rossume3955a82001-03-02 14:05:59 +00001795- A new entry in the Start menu, "Module Docs", runs "pydoc -g" -- a
1796 small GUI that lets you browse the module docstrings using your
1797 default web browser.
1798
Tim Peters1eff7962001-03-01 02:31:33 +00001799- Import is now case-sensitive. PEP 235 (Import on Case-Insensitive
1800 Platforms) is implemented. See
1801
1802 http://python.sourceforge.net/peps/pep-0235.html
1803
1804 for full details, especially the "Current Lower-Left Semantics" section.
1805 The new Windows import rules are simpler than before:
1806
1807 A. If the PYTHONCASEOK environment variable exists, same as
1808 before: silently accept the first case-insensitive match of any
1809 kind; raise ImportError if none found.
1810
1811 B. Else search sys.path for the first case-sensitive match; raise
1812 ImportError if none found.
1813
1814 The same rules have been implented on other platforms with case-
1815 insensitive but case-preserving filesystems too (including Cygwin, and
1816 several flavors of Macintosh operating systems).
Tim Petersd66595f2001-02-04 03:09:53 +00001817
Tim Peters25a9ce32001-02-19 07:06:36 +00001818- winsound module: Under Win9x, winsound.Beep() now attempts to simulate
1819 what it's supposed to do (and does do under NT and 2000) via direct
1820 port manipulation. It's unknown whether this will work on all systems,
Tim Peters1eff7962001-03-01 02:31:33 +00001821 but it does work on my Win98SE systems now and was known to be useless on
Tim Peters25a9ce32001-02-19 07:06:36 +00001822 all Win9x systems before.
1823
Tim Peters1eff7962001-03-01 02:31:33 +00001824- Build: Subproject _test (effectively) renamed to _testcapi.
1825
Tim Peters2fe289a2001-03-01 22:19:38 +00001826New platforms
1827
1828- 2.1 should compile and run out of the box under MacOS X, even using HFS+.
1829 Thanks to Steven Majewski!
1830
1831- 2.1 should compile and run out of the box on Cygwin. Thanks to Jason
1832 Tishler!
1833
Guido van Rossum9089b272001-03-02 06:49:50 +00001834- 2.1 contains new files and patches for RISCOS, thanks to Dietmar
1835 Schwertberger! See RISCOS/README for more information -- it seems
1836 that because of the bizarre filename conventions on RISCOS, no port
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00001837 to that platform is easy.
Guido van Rossum9089b272001-03-02 06:49:50 +00001838
Tim Peters25a9ce32001-02-19 07:06:36 +00001839
Tim Petersd7b5e882001-01-25 03:36:26 +00001840What's New in Python 2.1 alpha 2?
1841=================================
Tim Peters40ead762001-01-27 05:35:26 +00001842
Tim Petersd7b5e882001-01-25 03:36:26 +00001843Core language, builtins, and interpreter
1844
Jeremy Hylton4589bd82001-02-01 20:38:45 +00001845- Scopes nest. If a name is used in a function or class, but is not
1846 local, the definition in the nearest enclosing function scope will
1847 be used. One consequence of this change is that lambda statements
1848 could reference variables in the namespaces where the lambda is
1849 defined. In some unusual cases, this change will break code.
1850
1851 In all previous version of Python, names were resolved in exactly
1852 three namespaces -- the local namespace, the global namespace, and
Jeremy Hyltond6b1cf92001-02-02 20:06:28 +00001853 the builtin namespace. According to this old definition, if a
Jeremy Hylton4589bd82001-02-01 20:38:45 +00001854 function A is defined within a function B, the names bound in B are
1855 not visible in A. The new rules make names bound in B visible in A,
1856 unless A contains a name binding that hides the binding in B.
1857
1858 Section 4.1 of the reference manual describes the new scoping rules
1859 in detail. The test script in Lib/test/test_scope.py demonstrates
1860 some of the effects of the change.
1861
1862 The new rules will cause existing code to break if it defines nested
1863 functions where an outer function has local variables with the same
1864 name as globals or builtins used by the inner function. Example:
1865
1866 def munge(str):
1867 def helper(x):
1868 return str(x)
1869 if type(str) != type(''):
1870 str = helper(str)
1871 return str.strip()
1872
1873 Under the old rules, the name str in helper() is bound to the
1874 builtin function str(). Under the new rules, it will be bound to
1875 the argument named str and an error will occur when helper() is
1876 called.
1877
Jeremy Hyltond6b1cf92001-02-02 20:06:28 +00001878- The compiler will report a SyntaxError if "from ... import *" occurs
1879 in a function or class scope. The language reference has documented
1880 that this case is illegal, but the compiler never checked for it.
1881 The recent introduction of nested scope makes the meaning of this
1882 form of name binding ambiguous. In a future release, the compiler
1883 may allow this form when there is no possibility of ambiguity.
1884
Tim Peters40ead762001-01-27 05:35:26 +00001885- repr(string) is easier to read, now using hex escapes instead of octal,
1886 and using \t, \n and \r instead of \011, \012 and \015 (respectively):
1887
1888 >>> "\texample \r\n" + chr(0) + chr(255)
1889 '\texample \r\n\x00\xff' # in 2.1
1890 '\011example \015\012\000\377' # in 2.0
1891
Moshe Zadka6af0ce02001-01-29 06:41:00 +00001892- Functions are now compared and hashed by identity, not by value, since
1893 the func_code attribute is writable.
1894
Fred Drakefb9d7122001-02-01 20:00:40 +00001895- Weak references (PEP 205) have been added. This involves a few
1896 changes in the core, an extension module (_weakref), and a Python
1897 module (weakref). The weakref module is the public interface. It
1898 includes support for "explicit" weak references, proxy objects, and
1899 mappings with weakly held values.
1900
Jeremy Hylton0072d5a2001-02-01 22:53:15 +00001901- A 'continue' statement can now appear in a try block within the body
1902 of a loop. It is still not possible to use continue in a finally
Tim Peters9ea17ac2001-02-02 05:57:15 +00001903 clause.
Jeremy Hylton0072d5a2001-02-01 22:53:15 +00001904
Tim Petersd7b5e882001-01-25 03:36:26 +00001905Standard library
1906
Barry Warsaw30dbd142001-01-31 22:14:01 +00001907- mailbox.py now has a new class, PortableUnixMailbox which is
1908 identical to UnixMailbox but uses a more portable scheme for
1909 determining From_ separators. Also, the constructors for all the
1910 classes in this module have a new optional `factory' argument, which
1911 is a callable used when new message classes must be instantiated by
1912 the next() method.
1913
Tim Petersd7b5e882001-01-25 03:36:26 +00001914- random.py is now self-contained, and offers all the functionality of
1915 the now-deprecated whrandom.py. See the docs for details. random.py
1916 also supports new functions getstate() and setstate(), for saving
Tim Petersd52269b2001-01-25 06:23:18 +00001917 and restoring the internal state of the generator; and jumpahead(n),
1918 for quickly forcing the internal state to be the same as if n calls to
1919 random() had been made. The latter is particularly useful for multi-
1920 threaded programs, creating one instance of the random.Random() class for
1921 each thread, then using .jumpahead() to force each instance to use a
1922 non-overlapping segment of the full period.
Tim Petersd7b5e882001-01-25 03:36:26 +00001923
Tim Peters0de88fc2001-02-01 04:59:18 +00001924- random.py's seed() function is new. For bit-for-bit compatibility with
1925 prior releases, use the whseed function instead. The new seed function
1926 addresses two problems: (1) The old function couldn't produce more than
1927 about 2**24 distinct internal states; the new one about 2**45 (the best
1928 that can be done in the Wichmann-Hill generator). (2) The old function
1929 sometimes produced identical internal states when passed distinct
1930 integers, and there was no simple way to predict when that would happen;
1931 the new one guarantees to produce distinct internal states for all
1932 arguments in [0, 27814431486576L).
1933
Jeremy Hylton4c4fda02001-02-02 03:29:24 +00001934- The socket module now supports raw packets on Linux. The socket
1935 family is AF_PACKET.
1936
Tim Peters9ea17ac2001-02-02 05:57:15 +00001937- test_capi.py is a start at running tests of the Python C API. The tests
1938 are implemented by the new Modules/_testmodule.c.
1939
Jeremy Hyltond6b1cf92001-02-02 20:06:28 +00001940- A new extension module, _symtable, provides provisional access to the
1941 internal symbol table used by the Python compiler. A higher-level
1942 interface will be added on top of _symtable in a future release.
1943
Andrew M. Kuchlingdebc3522001-02-22 15:53:21 +00001944- Removed the obsolete soundex module.
1945
Martin v. Löwis2a5130e2001-02-27 04:21:58 +00001946- xml.dom.minidom now uses the standard DOM exceptions. Node supports
1947 the isSameNode method; NamedNodeMap the get method.
1948
1949- xml.sax.expatreader supports the lexical handler property; it
1950 generates comment, startCDATA, and endCDATA events.
1951
Tim Petersee826f82001-01-31 19:39:44 +00001952Windows changes
1953
1954- Build procedure: the zlib project is built in a different way that
1955 ensures the zlib header files used can no longer get out of synch with
Tim Peters9ea17ac2001-02-02 05:57:15 +00001956 the zlib binary used. See PCbuild\readme.txt for details. Your old
1957 zlib-related directories can be deleted; you'll need to download fresh
1958 source for zlib and unpack it into a new directory.
Tim Petersee826f82001-01-31 19:39:44 +00001959
Tim Peters9ea17ac2001-02-02 05:57:15 +00001960- Build: New subproject _test for the benefit of test_capi.py (see above).
1961
Tim Petersb16c56f2001-02-02 21:24:51 +00001962- Build: New subproject _symtable, for new DLL _symtable.pyd (a nascent
1963 interface to some Python compiler internals).
1964
1965- Build: Subproject ucnhash is gone, since the code was folded into the
Tim Peters9ea17ac2001-02-02 05:57:15 +00001966 unicodedata subproject.
Tim Petersd7b5e882001-01-25 03:36:26 +00001967
Tim Petersa3a3a032000-11-30 05:22:44 +00001968What's New in Python 2.1 alpha 1?
1969=================================
1970
1971Core language, builtins, and interpreter
1972
Marc-André Lemburgebb195b2001-01-20 10:34:52 +00001973- There is a new Unicode companion to the PyObject_Str() API
1974 called PyObject_Unicode(). It behaves in the same way as the
1975 former, but assures that the returned value is an Unicode object
1976 (applying the usual coercion if necessary).
Marc-André Lemburgad7c98e2001-01-17 17:09:53 +00001977
Guido van Rossumf98eda02001-01-17 15:54:45 +00001978- The comparison operators support "rich comparison overloading" (PEP
1979 207). C extension types can provide a rich comparison function in
1980 the new tp_richcompare slot in the type object. The cmp() function
1981 and the C function PyObject_Compare() first try the new rich
1982 comparison operators before trying the old 3-way comparison. There
1983 is also a new C API PyObject_RichCompare() (which also falls back on
1984 the old 3-way comparison, but does not constrain the outcome of the
1985 rich comparison to a Boolean result).
1986
1987 The rich comparison function takes two objects (at least one of
1988 which is guaranteed to have the type that provided the function) and
1989 an integer indicating the opcode, which can be Py_LT, Py_LE, Py_EQ,
1990 Py_NE, Py_GT, Py_GE (for <, <=, ==, !=, >, >=), and returns a Python
1991 object, which may be NotImplemented (in which case the tp_compare
1992 slot function is used as a fallback, if defined).
1993
1994 Classes can overload individual comparison operators by defining one
1995 or more of the methods__lt__, __le__, __eq__, __ne__, __gt__,
Guido van Rossuma88479f2001-01-18 14:28:08 +00001996 __ge__. There are no explicit "reflected argument" versions of
1997 these; instead, __lt__ and __gt__ are each other's reflection,
1998 likewise for__le__ and __ge__; __eq__ and __ne__ are their own
1999 reflection (similar at the C level). No other implications are
2000 made; in particular, Python does not assume that == is the Boolean
2001 inverse of !=, or that < is the Boolean inverse of >=. This makes
2002 it possible to define types with partial orderings.
Guido van Rossumf98eda02001-01-17 15:54:45 +00002003
2004 Classes or types that want to implement (in)equality tests but not
2005 the ordering operators (i.e. unordered types) should implement ==
2006 and !=, and raise an error for the ordering operators.
2007
Guido van Rossuma88479f2001-01-18 14:28:08 +00002008 It is possible to define types whose rich comparison results are not
Guido van Rossumf98eda02001-01-17 15:54:45 +00002009 Boolean; e.g. a matrix type might want to return a matrix of bits
2010 for A < B, giving elementwise comparisons. Such types should ensure
2011 that any interpretation of their value in a Boolean context raises
2012 an exception, e.g. by defining __nonzero__ (or the tp_nonzero slot
2013 at the C level) to always raise an exception.
2014
Guido van Rossuma88479f2001-01-18 14:28:08 +00002015- Complex numbers use rich comparisons to define == and != but raise
2016 an exception for <, <=, > and >=. Unfortunately, this also means
2017 that cmp() of two complex numbers raises an exception when the two
2018 numbers differ. Since it is not mathematically meaningful to compare
2019 complex numbers except for equality, I hope that this doesn't break
2020 too much code.
2021
Tim Peters3389f192001-02-18 08:48:49 +00002022- The outcome of comparing non-numeric objects of different types is
Tim Peters14495852001-02-18 08:28:33 +00002023 not defined by the language, other than that it's arbitrary but
2024 consistent (see the Reference Manual). An implementation detail changed
2025 in 2.1a1 such that None now compares less than any other object. Code
2026 relying on this new behavior (like code that relied on the previous
2027 behavior) does so at its own risk.
2028
Barry Warsaw573b5412001-01-15 20:43:18 +00002029- Functions and methods now support getting and setting arbitrarily
2030 named attributes (PEP 232). Functions have a new __dict__
2031 (a.k.a. func_dict) which hold the function attributes. Methods get
2032 and set attributes on their underlying im_func. It is a TypeError
2033 to set an attribute on a bound method.
2034
Guido van Rossum051e3352001-01-15 19:11:10 +00002035- The xrange() object implementation has been improved so that
2036 xrange(sys.maxint) can be used on 64-bit platforms. There's still a
2037 limitation that in this case len(xrange(sys.maxint)) can't be
2038 calculated, but the common idiom "for i in xrange(sys.maxint)" will
2039 work fine as long as the index i doesn't actually reach 2**31.
2040 (Python uses regular ints for sequence and string indices; fixing
2041 that is much more work.)
2042
Guido van Rossum1cc8f832001-01-12 16:25:08 +00002043- Two changes to from...import:
2044
Guido van Rossumba381232001-02-03 15:06:40 +00002045 1) "from M import X" now works even if (after loading module M)
2046 sys.modules['M'] is not a real module; it's basically a getattr()
2047 operation with AttributeError exceptions changed into ImportError.
Guido van Rossum1cc8f832001-01-12 16:25:08 +00002048
2049 2) "from M import *" now looks for M.__all__ to decide which names to
2050 import; if M.__all__ doesn't exist, it uses M.__dict__.keys() but
2051 filters out names starting with '_' as before. Whether or not
2052 __all__ exists, there's no restriction on the type of M.
2053
Guido van Rossumf61f1662001-01-10 20:13:55 +00002054- File objects have a new method, xreadlines(). This is the fastest
2055 way to iterate over all lines in a file:
2056
2057 for line in file.xreadlines():
2058 ...do something to line...
2059
2060 See the xreadlines module (mentioned below) for how to do this for
2061 other file-like objects.
2062
2063- Even if you don't use file.xreadlines(), you may expect a speedup on
2064 line-by-line input. The file.readline() method has been optimized
Tim Petersf29b64d2001-01-15 06:33:19 +00002065 quite a bit in platform-specific ways: on systems (like Linux) that
2066 support flockfile(), getc_unlocked(), and funlockfile(), those are
2067 used by default. On systems (like Windows) without getc_unlocked(),
2068 a complicated (but still thread-safe) method using fgets() is used by
2069 default.
2070
Tim Petersd52269b2001-01-25 06:23:18 +00002071 You can force use of the fgets() method by #define'ing
2072 USE_FGETS_IN_GETLINE at build time (it may be faster than
Tim Petersf29b64d2001-01-15 06:33:19 +00002073 getc_unlocked()).
2074
Tim Petersd52269b2001-01-25 06:23:18 +00002075 You can force fgets() not to be used by #define'ing
2076 DONT_USE_FGETS_IN_GETLINE (this is the first thing to try if std test
Tim Petersf29b64d2001-01-15 06:33:19 +00002077 test_bufio.py fails -- and let us know if it does!).
2078
2079- In addition, the fileinput module, while still slower than the other
2080 methods on most platforms, has been sped up too, by using
2081 file.readlines(sizehint).
Guido van Rossumf61f1662001-01-10 20:13:55 +00002082
2083- Support for run-time warnings has been added, including a new
2084 command line option (-W) to specify the disposition of warnings.
2085 See the description of the warnings module below.
2086
2087- Extensive changes have been made to the coercion code. This mostly
2088 affects extension modules (which can now implement mixed-type
2089 numerical operators without having to use coercion), but
2090 occasionally, in boundary cases the coercion semantics have changed
2091 subtly. Since this was a terrible gray area of the language, this
Guido van Rossumae72d872001-01-11 15:00:14 +00002092 is considered an improvement. Also note that __rcmp__ is no longer
Guido van Rossumf61f1662001-01-10 20:13:55 +00002093 supported -- instead of calling __rcmp__, __cmp__ is called with
Guido van Rossuma88479f2001-01-18 14:28:08 +00002094 reflected arguments.
Guido van Rossumf61f1662001-01-10 20:13:55 +00002095
Guido van Rossumf98eda02001-01-17 15:54:45 +00002096- In connection with the coercion changes, a new built-in singleton
2097 object, NotImplemented is defined. This can be returned for
2098 operations that wish to indicate they are not implemented for a
2099 particular combination of arguments. From C, this is
2100 Py_NotImplemented.
2101
Martin v. Löwisbe4c0f52001-01-04 20:30:56 +00002102- The interpreter accepts now bytecode files on the command line even
2103 if they do not have a .pyc or .pyo extension. On Linux, after executing
2104
Martin v. Löwise214baa2001-02-04 22:37:56 +00002105import imp,sys,string
2106magic = string.join(["\\x%.2x" % ord(c) for c in imp.get_magic()],"")
2107reg = ':pyc:M::%s::%s:' % (magic, sys.executable)
2108open("/proc/sys/fs/binfmt_misc/register","wb").write(reg)
Martin v. Löwisbe4c0f52001-01-04 20:30:56 +00002109
2110 any byte code file can be used as an executable (i.e. as an argument
2111 to execve(2)).
2112
Tim Peters9940b802000-12-01 07:59:35 +00002113- %[xXo] formats of negative Python longs now produce a sign
Tim Petersa3a3a032000-11-30 05:22:44 +00002114 character. In 1.6 and earlier, they never produced a sign,
2115 and raised an error if the value of the long was too large
2116 to fit in a Python int. In 2.0, they produced a sign if and
2117 only if too large to fit in an int. This was inconsistent
2118 across platforms (because the size of an int varies across
2119 platforms), and inconsistent with hex() and oct(). Example:
2120
2121 >>> "%x" % -0x42L
Tim Peters9940b802000-12-01 07:59:35 +00002122 '-42' # in 2.1
Tim Petersa3a3a032000-11-30 05:22:44 +00002123 'ffffffbe' # in 2.0 and before, on 32-bit machines
2124 >>> hex(-0x42L)
2125 '-0x42L' # in all versions of Python
2126
Tim Peters9940b802000-12-01 07:59:35 +00002127 The behavior of %d formats for negative Python longs remains
2128 the same as in 2.0 (although in 1.6 and before, they raised
2129 an error if the long didn't fit in a Python int).
2130
2131 %u formats don't make sense for Python longs, but are allowed
2132 and treated the same as %d in 2.1. In 2.0, a negative long
2133 formatted via %u produced a sign if and only if too large to
2134 fit in an int. In 1.6 and earlier, a negative long formatted
2135 via %u raised an error if it was too big to fit in an int.
2136
Guido van Rossum3661d392000-12-12 22:10:31 +00002137- Dictionary objects have an odd new method, popitem(). This removes
2138 an arbitrary item from the dictionary and returns it (in the form of
2139 a (key, value) pair). This can be useful for algorithms that use a
2140 dictionary as a bag of "to do" items and repeatedly need to pick one
2141 item. Such algorithms normally end up running in quadratic time;
2142 using popitem() they can usually be made to run in linear time.
2143
Tim Peters36cdad12000-12-29 02:06:45 +00002144Standard library
2145
Thomas Woutersfe385252001-01-19 23:16:56 +00002146- In the time module, the time argument to the functions strftime,
2147 localtime, gmtime, asctime and ctime is now optional, defaulting to
2148 the current time (in the local timezone).
2149
Guido van Rossumda91f222001-01-15 16:36:08 +00002150- The ftplib module now defaults to passive mode, which is deemed a
2151 more useful default given that clients are often inside firewalls
2152 these days. Note that this could break if ftplib is used to connect
2153 to a *server* that is inside a firewall, from outside; this is
2154 expected to be a very rare situation. To fix that, you can call
2155 ftp.set_pasv(0).
2156
Martin v. Löwis10a27872001-01-13 09:54:41 +00002157- The module site now treats .pth files not only for path configuration,
2158 but also supports extensions to the initialization code: Lines starting
2159 with import are executed.
2160
Guido van Rossumf61f1662001-01-10 20:13:55 +00002161- There's a new module, warnings, which implements a mechanism for
2162 issuing and filtering warnings. There are some new built-in
2163 exceptions that serve as warning categories, and a new command line
2164 option, -W, to control warnings (e.g. -Wi ignores all warnings, -We
2165 turns warnings into errors). warnings.warn(message[, category])
2166 issues a warning message; this can also be called from C as
2167 PyErr_Warn(category, message).
2168
2169- A new module xreadlines was added. This exports a single factory
2170 function, xreadlines(). The intention is that this code is the
2171 absolutely fastest way to iterate over all lines in an open
2172 file(-like) object:
2173
2174 import xreadlines
2175 for line in xreadlines.xreadlines(file):
2176 ...do something to line...
2177
2178 This is equivalent to the previous the speed record holder using
2179 file.readlines(sizehint). Note that if file is a real file object
2180 (as opposed to a file-like object), this is equivalent:
2181
2182 for line in file.xreadlines():
2183 ...do something to line...
2184
Tim Peters36cdad12000-12-29 02:06:45 +00002185- The bisect module has new functions bisect_left, insort_left,
2186 bisect_right and insort_right. The old names bisect and insort
2187 are now aliases for bisect_right and insort_right. XXX_right
2188 and XXX_left methods differ in what happens when the new element
2189 compares equal to one or more elements already in the list: the
2190 XXX_left methods insert to the left, the XXX_right methods to the
Tim Peters742bb6f2001-01-05 08:05:32 +00002191 right. Code that doesn't care where equal elements end up should
2192 continue to use the old, short names ("bisect" and "insort").
Tim Peters36cdad12000-12-29 02:06:45 +00002193
Andrew M. Kuchlingf6f3a892001-01-13 14:53:34 +00002194- The new curses.panel module wraps the panel library that forms part
2195 of SYSV curses and ncurses. Contributed by Thomas Gellekum.
2196
Guido van Rossumf61f1662001-01-10 20:13:55 +00002197- The SocketServer module now sets the allow_reuse_address flag by
2198 default in the TCPServer class.
2199
2200- A new function, sys._getframe(), returns the stack frame pointer of
2201 the caller. This is intended only as a building block for
2202 higher-level mechanisms such as string interpolation.
2203
Martin v. Löwis2a5130e2001-02-27 04:21:58 +00002204- The pyexpat module supports a number of new handlers, which are
2205 available only in expat 1.2. If invocation of a callback fails, it
2206 will report an additional frame in the traceback. Parser objects
2207 participate now in garbage collection. If expat reports an unknown
2208 encoding, pyexpat will try to use a Python codec; that works only
2209 for single-byte charsets. The parser type objects is exposed as
2210 XMLParserObject.
2211
2212- xml.dom now offers standard definitions for symbolic node type and
2213 exception code constants, and a hierarchy of DOM exceptions. minidom
2214 was adjusted to use them.
2215
2216- The conformance of xml.dom.minidom to the DOM specification was
2217 improved. It detects a number of additional error cases; the
2218 previous/next relationship works even when the tree is modified;
2219 Node supports the normalize() method; NamedNodeMap, DocumentType and
2220 DOMImplementation classes were added; Element supports the
2221 hasAttribute and hasAttributeNS methods; and Text supports the splitText
2222 method.
2223
Guido van Rossumf61f1662001-01-10 20:13:55 +00002224Build issues
2225
Guido van Rossum1e33bdc2001-01-23 03:17:00 +00002226- For Unix (and Unix-compatible) builds, configuration and building of
2227 extension modules is now greatly automated. Rather than having to
2228 edit the Modules/Setup file to indicate which modules should be
2229 built and where their include files and libraries are, a
2230 distutils-based setup.py script now takes care of building most
2231 extension modules. All extension modules built this way are built
2232 as shared libraries. Only a few modules that must be linked
2233 statically are still listed in the Setup file; you won't need to
2234 edit their configuration.
2235
2236- Python should now build out of the box on Cygwin. If it doesn't,
2237 mail to Jason Tishler (jlt63 at users.sourceforge.net).
Guido van Rossumf61f1662001-01-10 20:13:55 +00002238
2239- Python now always uses its own (renamed) implementation of getopt()
2240 -- there's too much variation among C library getopt()
2241 implementations.
2242
2243- C++ compilers are better supported; the CXX macro is always set to a
2244 C++ compiler if one is found.
Tim Peters36cdad12000-12-29 02:06:45 +00002245
Tim Petersd92dfe02000-12-12 01:18:41 +00002246Windows changes
2247
2248- select module: By default under Windows, a select() call
2249 can specify no more than 64 sockets. Python now boosts
2250 this Microsoft default to 512. If you need even more than
2251 that, see the MS docs (you'll need to #define FD_SETSIZE
2252 and recompile Python from source).
2253
Guido van Rossumf61f1662001-01-10 20:13:55 +00002254- Support for Windows 3.1, DOS and OS/2 is gone. The Lib/dos-8x3
2255 subdirectory is no more!
2256
Tim Petersa3a3a032000-11-30 05:22:44 +00002257
Jeremy Hyltond6e20232000-10-16 20:08:38 +00002258What's New in Python 2.0?
Fred Drake1a640502000-10-16 20:27:25 +00002259=========================
Guido van Rossum61000331997-08-15 04:39:58 +00002260
Guido van Rossum8ed602b2000-09-01 22:34:33 +00002261Below is a list of all relevant changes since release 1.6. Older
Guido van Rossumf2ffce02000-09-05 04:38:34 +00002262changes are in the file HISTORY. If you are making the jump directly
2263from Python 1.5.2 to 2.0, make sure to read the section for 1.6 in the
2264HISTORY file! Many important changes listed there.
Guido van Rossum61000331997-08-15 04:39:58 +00002265
Guido van Rossumf2ffce02000-09-05 04:38:34 +00002266Alternatively, a good overview of the changes between 1.5.2 and 2.0 is
2267the document "What's New in Python 2.0" by Kuchling and Moshe Zadka:
2268http://starship.python.net/crew/amk/python/writing/new-python/.
Guido van Rossum1f83cce1997-10-06 21:04:35 +00002269
Guido van Rossumf2ffce02000-09-05 04:38:34 +00002270--Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.pythonlabs.com/~guido/)
Guido van Rossum437cfe81999-04-08 20:17:57 +00002271
2272======================================================================
2273
Jeremy Hyltond6e20232000-10-16 20:08:38 +00002274What's new in 2.0 (since release candidate 1)?
2275==============================================
2276
2277Standard library
2278
2279- The copy_reg module was modified to clarify its intended use: to
2280 register pickle support for extension types, not for classes.
2281 pickle() will raise a TypeError if it is passed a class.
2282
2283- Fixed a bug in gettext's "normalize and expand" code that prevented
2284 it from finding an existing .mo file.
2285
2286- Restored support for HTTP/0.9 servers in httplib.
2287
Tim Peters989b7b92000-10-16 20:24:53 +00002288- The math module was changed to stop raising OverflowError in case of
2289 underflow, and return 0 instead in underflow cases. Whether Python
2290 used to raise OverflowError in case of underflow was platform-
2291 dependent (it did when the platform math library set errno to ERANGE
2292 on underflow).
Jeremy Hyltond6e20232000-10-16 20:08:38 +00002293
2294- Fixed a bug in StringIO that occurred when the file position was not
2295 at the end of the file and write() was called with enough data to
2296 extend past the end of the file.
2297
2298- Fixed a bug that caused Tkinter error messages to get lost on
2299 Windows. The bug was fixed by replacing direct use of
2300 interp->result with Tcl_GetStringResult(interp).
2301
2302- Fixed bug in urllib2 that caused it to fail when it received an HTTP
2303 redirect response.
2304
2305- Several changes were made to distutils: Some debugging code was
2306 removed from util. Fixed the installer used when an external zip
2307 program (like WinZip) is not found; the source code for this
2308 installer is in Misc/distutils. check_lib() was modified to behave
2309 more like AC_CHECK_LIB by add other_libraries() as a parameter. The
2310 test for whether installed modules are on sys.path was changed to
2311 use both normcase() and normpath().
2312
Jeremy Hyltond867a2c2000-10-16 20:41:38 +00002313- Several minor bugs were fixed in the xml package (the minidom,
2314 pulldom, expatreader, and saxutils modules).
Jeremy Hyltond6e20232000-10-16 20:08:38 +00002315
2316- The regression test driver (regrtest.py) behavior when invoked with
2317 -l changed: It now reports a count of objects that are recognized as
2318 garbage but not freed by the garbage collector.
2319
Tim Peters989b7b92000-10-16 20:24:53 +00002320- The regression test for the math module was changed to test
2321 exceptional behavior when the test is run in verbose mode. Python
2322 cannot yet guarantee consistent exception behavior across platforms,
2323 so the exception part of test_math is run only in verbose mode, and
2324 may fail on your platform.
Jeremy Hyltond6e20232000-10-16 20:08:38 +00002325
2326Internals
2327
2328- PyOS_CheckStack() has been disabled on Win64, where it caused
2329 test_sre to fail.
2330
2331Build issues
2332
2333- Changed compiler flags, so that gcc is always invoked with -Wall and
2334 -Wstrict-prototypes. Users compiling Python with GCC should see
2335 exactly one warning, except if they have passed configure the
Tim Peters989b7b92000-10-16 20:24:53 +00002336 --with-pydebug flag. The expected warning is for getopt() in
Tim Petersadfb94f2000-10-16 20:51:33 +00002337 Modules/main.c. This warning will be fixed for Python 2.1.
Jeremy Hyltond6e20232000-10-16 20:08:38 +00002338
Tim Petersa3a3a032000-11-30 05:22:44 +00002339- Fixed configure to add -threads argument during linking on OSF1.
Jeremy Hyltond6e20232000-10-16 20:08:38 +00002340
2341Tools and other miscellany
2342
2343- The compiler in Tools/compiler was updated to support the new
2344 language features introduced in 2.0: extended print statement, list
2345 comprehensions, and augmented assignments. The new compiler should
2346 also be backwards compatible with Python 1.5.2; the compiler will
2347 always generate code for the version of the interpreter it runs
Tim Petersa3a3a032000-11-30 05:22:44 +00002348 under.
Jeremy Hyltond6e20232000-10-16 20:08:38 +00002349
Jeremy Hyltoned9e6442000-10-09 18:26:42 +00002350What's new in 2.0 release candidate 1 (since beta 2)?
2351=====================================================
2352
Jeremy Hylton6040aaa2000-10-09 21:27:22 +00002353What is release candidate 1?
2354
2355We believe that release candidate 1 will fix all known bugs that we
2356intend to fix for the 2.0 final release. This release should be a bit
2357more stable than the previous betas. We would like to see even more
2358widespread testing before the final release, so we are producing this
2359release candidate. The final release will be exactly the same unless
2360any show-stopping (or brown bag) bugs are found by testers of the
2361release candidate.
2362
Jeremy Hyltoned9e6442000-10-09 18:26:42 +00002363All the changes since the last beta release are bug fixes or changes
Jeremy Hyltond6e20232000-10-16 20:08:38 +00002364to support building Python for specific platforms.
Jeremy Hyltoned9e6442000-10-09 18:26:42 +00002365
2366Core language, builtins, and interpreter
2367
2368- A bug that caused crashes when __coerce__ was used with augmented
2369 assignment, e.g. +=, was fixed.
2370
2371- Raise ZeroDivisionError when raising zero to a negative number,
2372 e.g. 0.0 ** -2.0. Note that math.pow is unrelated to the builtin
2373 power operator and the result of math.pow(0.0, -2.0) will vary by
2374 platform. On Linux, it raises a ValueError.
2375
2376- A bug in Unicode string interpolation was fixed that occasionally
2377 caused errors with formats including "%%". For example, the
2378 following expression "%% %s" % u"abc" no longer raises a TypeError.
2379
2380- Compilation of deeply nested expressions raises MemoryError instead
2381 of SyntaxError, e.g. eval("[" * 50 + "]" * 50).
2382
2383- In 2.0b2 on Windows, the interpreter wrote .pyc files in text mode,
2384 rendering them useless. They are now written in binary mode again.
2385
2386Standard library
2387
2388- Keyword arguments are now accepted for most pattern and match object
2389 methods in SRE, the standard regular expression engine.
2390
Jeremy Hyltond6e20232000-10-16 20:08:38 +00002391- In SRE, fixed error with negative lookahead and lookbehind that
Jeremy Hylton32e20ff2000-10-09 19:48:11 +00002392 manifested itself as a runtime error in patterns like "(?<!abc)(def)".
Jeremy Hyltoned9e6442000-10-09 18:26:42 +00002393
Jeremy Hyltond6e20232000-10-16 20:08:38 +00002394- Several bugs in the Unicode handling and error handling in _tkinter
2395 were fixed.
Jeremy Hyltoned9e6442000-10-09 18:26:42 +00002396
2397- Fix memory management errors in Merge() and Tkapp_Call() routines.
2398
2399- Several changes were made to cStringIO to make it compatible with
2400 the file-like object interface and with StringIO. If operations are
2401 performed on a closed object, an exception is raised. The truncate
2402 method now accepts a position argument and readline accepts a size
Tim Petersa3a3a032000-11-30 05:22:44 +00002403 argument.
Jeremy Hyltoned9e6442000-10-09 18:26:42 +00002404
2405- There were many changes made to the linuxaudiodev module and its
2406 test suite; as a result, a short, unexpected audio sample should now
Tim Petersa3a3a032000-11-30 05:22:44 +00002407 play when the regression test is run.
Jeremy Hyltoned9e6442000-10-09 18:26:42 +00002408
2409 Note that this module is named poorly, because it should work
2410 correctly on any platform that supports the Open Sound System
Tim Petersa3a3a032000-11-30 05:22:44 +00002411 (OSS).
Jeremy Hyltoned9e6442000-10-09 18:26:42 +00002412
2413 The module now raises exceptions when errors occur instead of
2414 crashing. It also defines the AFMT_A_LAW format (logarithmic A-law
2415 audio) and defines a getptr() method that calls the
2416 SNDCTL_DSP_GETxPTR ioctl defined in the OSS Programmer's Guide.
2417
2418- The library_version attribute, introduced in an earlier beta, was
2419 removed because it can not be supported with early versions of the C
2420 readline library, which provides no way to determine the version at
2421 compile-time.
2422
2423- The binascii module is now enabled on Win64.
2424
Tim Peters46446d62000-10-09 21:19:31 +00002425- tokenize.py no longer suffers "recursion depth" errors when parsing
2426 programs with very long string literals.
2427
Jeremy Hyltoned9e6442000-10-09 18:26:42 +00002428Internals
2429
Jeremy Hyltond6e20232000-10-16 20:08:38 +00002430- Fixed several buffer overflow vulnerabilities in calculate_path(),
Jeremy Hyltoned9e6442000-10-09 18:26:42 +00002431 which is called when the interpreter starts up to determine where
2432 the standard library is installed. These vulnerabilities affect all
2433 previous versions of Python and can be exploited by setting very
2434 long values for PYTHONHOME or argv[0]. The risk is greatest for a
2435 setuid Python script, although use of the wrapper in
2436 Misc/setuid-prog.c will eliminate the vulnerability.
2437
2438- Fixed garbage collection bugs in instance creation that were
2439 triggered when errors occurred during initialization. The solution,
2440 applied in cPickle and in PyInstance_New(), is to call
2441 PyObject_GC_Init() after the initialization of the object's
2442 container attributes is complete.
2443
2444- pyexpat adds definitions of PyModule_AddStringConstant and
2445 PyModule_AddObject if the Python version is less than 2.0, which
2446 provides compatibility with PyXML on Python 1.5.2.
2447
2448- If the platform has a bogus definition for LONG_BIT (the number of
2449 bits in a long), an error will be reported at compile time.
2450
2451- Fix bugs in _PyTuple_Resize() which caused hard-to-interpret garbage
2452 collection crashes and possibly other, unreported crashes.
2453
2454- Fixed a memory leak in _PyUnicode_Fini().
2455
2456Build issues
2457
2458- configure now accepts a --with-suffix option that specifies the
Jeremy Hyltond6e20232000-10-16 20:08:38 +00002459 executable suffix. This is useful for builds on Cygwin and Mac OS
Tim Petersa3a3a032000-11-30 05:22:44 +00002460 X, for example.
Jeremy Hyltoned9e6442000-10-09 18:26:42 +00002461
2462- The mmap.PAGESIZE constant is now initialized using sysconf when
2463 possible, which eliminates a dependency on -lucb for Reliant UNIX.
2464
2465- The md5 file should now compile on all platforms.
2466
2467- The select module now compiles on platforms that do not define
2468 POLLRDNORM and related constants.
2469
2470- Darwin (Mac OS X): Initial support for static builds on this
Tim Petersa3a3a032000-11-30 05:22:44 +00002471 platform.
Jeremy Hyltoned9e6442000-10-09 18:26:42 +00002472
Jeremy Hylton10921202000-10-09 18:34:12 +00002473- BeOS: A number of changes were made to the build and installation
2474 process. ar-fake now operates on a directory of object files.
2475 dl_export.h is gone, and its macros now appear on the mwcc command
2476 line during build on PPC BeOS.
2477
Jeremy Hyltond6e20232000-10-16 20:08:38 +00002478- Platform directory in lib/python2.0 is "plat-beos5" (or
Jeremy Hylton10921202000-10-09 18:34:12 +00002479 "plat-beos4", if building on BeOS 4.5), rather than "plat-beos".
Jeremy Hyltoned9e6442000-10-09 18:26:42 +00002480
2481- Cygwin: Support for shared libraries, Tkinter, and sockets.
2482
2483- SunOS 4.1.4_JL: Fix test for directory existence in configure.
2484
2485Tools and other miscellany
2486
2487- Removed debugging prints from main used with freeze.
2488
Tim Peters46446d62000-10-09 21:19:31 +00002489- IDLE auto-indent no longer crashes when it encounters Unicode
2490 characters.
Jeremy Hylton1b618592000-09-26 05:32:36 +00002491
2492What's new in 2.0 beta 2 (since beta 1)?
2493========================================
2494
2495Core language, builtins, and interpreter
2496
Tim Peters482c0212000-09-26 06:33:09 +00002497- Add support for unbounded ints in %d,i,u,x,X,o formats; for example
Guido van Rossumf62ed9c2000-09-26 11:16:10 +00002498 "%d" % 2L**64 == "18446744073709551616".
Jeremy Hylton1b618592000-09-26 05:32:36 +00002499
Guido van Rossumf62ed9c2000-09-26 11:16:10 +00002500- Add -h and -V command line options to print the usage message and
2501 Python version number and exit immediately.
2502
Jeremy Hyltonfa2e2c12000-09-26 16:31:30 +00002503- eval() and exec accept Unicode objects as code parameters.
2504
2505- getattr() and setattr() now also accept Unicode objects for the
2506 attribute name, which are converted to strings using the default
2507 encoding before lookup.
2508
2509- Multiplication on string and Unicode now does proper bounds
2510 checking; e.g. 'a' * 65536 * 65536 will raise ValueError, "repeated
2511 string is too long."
2512
2513- Better error message when continue is found in try statement in a
Tim Petersa3a3a032000-11-30 05:22:44 +00002514 loop.
Jeremy Hyltonfa2e2c12000-09-26 16:31:30 +00002515
Jeremy Hylton1b618592000-09-26 05:32:36 +00002516
2517Standard library and extensions
2518
Guido van Rossum5b08f132001-04-16 02:05:23 +00002519- socket module: the OpenSSL code now adds support for RAND_status()
2520 and EGD (Entropy Gathering Device).
2521
Guido van Rossumf62ed9c2000-09-26 11:16:10 +00002522- array: reverse() method of array now works. buffer_info() now does
Jeremy Hylton1b618592000-09-26 05:32:36 +00002523 argument checking; it still takes no arguments.
2524
Guido van Rossumf62ed9c2000-09-26 11:16:10 +00002525- asyncore/asynchat: Included most recent version from Sam Rushing.
Jeremy Hylton1b618592000-09-26 05:32:36 +00002526
Guido van Rossumf62ed9c2000-09-26 11:16:10 +00002527- cgi: Accept '&' or ';' as separator characters when parsing form data.
Jeremy Hylton1b618592000-09-26 05:32:36 +00002528
Guido van Rossumf62ed9c2000-09-26 11:16:10 +00002529- CGIHTTPServer: Now works on Windows (and perhaps even Mac).
Jeremy Hylton1b618592000-09-26 05:32:36 +00002530
2531- ConfigParser: When reading the file, options spelled in upper case
Guido van Rossumf62ed9c2000-09-26 11:16:10 +00002532 letters are now correctly converted to lowercase.
Jeremy Hylton1b618592000-09-26 05:32:36 +00002533
2534- copy: Copy Unicode objects atomically.
2535
Guido van Rossumf62ed9c2000-09-26 11:16:10 +00002536- cPickle: Fail gracefully when copy_reg can't be imported.
Jeremy Hylton1b618592000-09-26 05:32:36 +00002537
Guido van Rossumf62ed9c2000-09-26 11:16:10 +00002538- cStringIO: Implemented readlines() method.
Jeremy Hylton1b618592000-09-26 05:32:36 +00002539
Fred Drake67233bc2000-09-26 16:40:27 +00002540- dbm: Add get() and setdefault() methods to dbm object. Add constant
2541 `library' to module that names the library used. Added doc strings
2542 and method names to error messages. Uses configure to determine
2543 which ndbm.h file to include; Berkeley DB's nbdm and GDBM's ndbm is
2544 now available options.
Jeremy Hylton1b618592000-09-26 05:32:36 +00002545
2546- distutils: Update to version 0.9.3.
2547
2548- dl: Add several dl.RTLD_ constants.
2549
2550- fpectl: Now supported on FreeBSD.
2551
2552- gc: Add DEBUG_SAVEALL option. When enabled all garbage objects
2553 found by the collector will be saved in gc.garbage. This is useful
2554 for debugging a program that creates reference cycles.
2555
Guido van Rossumf62ed9c2000-09-26 11:16:10 +00002556- httplib: Three changes: Restore support for set_debuglevel feature
Jeremy Hylton1b618592000-09-26 05:32:36 +00002557 of HTTP class. Do not close socket on zero-length response. Do not
2558 crash when server sends invalid content-length header.
2559
Guido van Rossumf62ed9c2000-09-26 11:16:10 +00002560- mailbox: Mailbox class conforms better to qmail specifications.
Jeremy Hylton1b618592000-09-26 05:32:36 +00002561
Jeremy Hyltonfa2e2c12000-09-26 16:31:30 +00002562- marshal: When reading a short, sign-extend on platforms where shorts
2563 are bigger than 16 bits. When reading a long, repair the unportable
2564 sign extension that was being done for 64-bit machines. (It assumed
2565 that signed right shift sign-extends.)
2566
Guido van Rossumf62ed9c2000-09-26 11:16:10 +00002567- operator: Add contains(), invert(), __invert__() as aliases for
2568 __contains__(), inv(), and __inv__() respectively.
Jeremy Hylton1b618592000-09-26 05:32:36 +00002569
Guido van Rossumf62ed9c2000-09-26 11:16:10 +00002570- os: Add support for popen2() and popen3() on all platforms where
2571 fork() exists. (popen4() is still in the works.)
Jeremy Hylton1b618592000-09-26 05:32:36 +00002572
Guido van Rossumf62ed9c2000-09-26 11:16:10 +00002573- os: (Windows only:) Add startfile() function that acts like double-
Tim Peters482c0212000-09-26 06:33:09 +00002574 clicking on a file in Explorer (or passing the file name to the
2575 DOS "start" command).
Jeremy Hylton1b618592000-09-26 05:32:36 +00002576
Guido van Rossumf62ed9c2000-09-26 11:16:10 +00002577- os.path: (Windows, DOS:) Treat trailing colon correctly in
Tim Peters482c0212000-09-26 06:33:09 +00002578 os.path.join. os.path.join("a:", "b") yields "a:b".
Jeremy Hylton1b618592000-09-26 05:32:36 +00002579
2580- pickle: Now raises ValueError when an invalid pickle that contains
2581 a non-string repr where a string repr was expected. This behavior
2582 matches cPickle.
2583
Guido van Rossumf62ed9c2000-09-26 11:16:10 +00002584- posixfile: Remove broken __del__() method.
Jeremy Hylton1b618592000-09-26 05:32:36 +00002585
Guido van Rossumf62ed9c2000-09-26 11:16:10 +00002586- py_compile: support CR+LF line terminators in source file.
Jeremy Hylton1b618592000-09-26 05:32:36 +00002587
2588- readline: Does not immediately exit when ^C is hit when readline and
Jeremy Hyltonfa2e2c12000-09-26 16:31:30 +00002589 threads are configured. Adds definition of rl_library_version. (The
Guido van Rossumf62ed9c2000-09-26 11:16:10 +00002590 latter addition requires GNU readline 2.2 or later.)
Jeremy Hylton1b618592000-09-26 05:32:36 +00002591
2592- rfc822: Domain literals returned by AddrlistClass method
Guido van Rossumf62ed9c2000-09-26 11:16:10 +00002593 getdomainliteral() are now properly wrapped in brackets.
Jeremy Hylton1b618592000-09-26 05:32:36 +00002594
2595- site: sys.setdefaultencoding() should only be called in case the
Tim Peters482c0212000-09-26 06:33:09 +00002596 standard default encoding ("ascii") is changed. This saves quite a
Jeremy Hylton1b618592000-09-26 05:32:36 +00002597 few cycles during startup since the first call to
2598 setdefaultencoding() will initialize the codec registry and the
2599 encodings package.
2600
Guido van Rossumf62ed9c2000-09-26 11:16:10 +00002601- socket: Support for size hint in readlines() method of object returned
2602 by makefile().
Jeremy Hylton1b618592000-09-26 05:32:36 +00002603
Guido van Rossumf62ed9c2000-09-26 11:16:10 +00002604- sre: Added experimental expand() method to match objects. Does not
Jeremy Hylton625915e2000-10-02 13:43:33 +00002605 use buffer interface on Unicode strings. Does not hang if group id
Jeremy Hylton1b618592000-09-26 05:32:36 +00002606 is followed by whitespace.
2607
Tim Petersa3a3a032000-11-30 05:22:44 +00002608- StringIO: Size hint in readlines() is now supported as documented.
Jeremy Hylton1b618592000-09-26 05:32:36 +00002609
2610- struct: Check ranges for bytes and shorts.
2611
2612- urllib: Improved handling of win32 proxy settings. Fixed quote and
Guido van Rossumf62ed9c2000-09-26 11:16:10 +00002613 quote_plus functions so that the always encode a comma.
Jeremy Hylton1b618592000-09-26 05:32:36 +00002614
2615- Tkinter: Image objects are now guaranteed to have unique ids. Set
2616 event.delta to zero if Tk version doesn't support mousewheel.
2617 Removed some debugging prints.
2618
Guido van Rossumf62ed9c2000-09-26 11:16:10 +00002619- UserList: now implements __contains__().
Jeremy Hylton1b618592000-09-26 05:32:36 +00002620
Fred Drake67233bc2000-09-26 16:40:27 +00002621- webbrowser: On Windows, use os.startfile() instead of os.popen(),
Guido van Rossumf62ed9c2000-09-26 11:16:10 +00002622 which works around a bug in Norton AntiVirus 2000 that leads directly
2623 to a Blue Screen freeze.
Jeremy Hylton1b618592000-09-26 05:32:36 +00002624
2625- xml: New version detection code allows PyXML to override standard
2626 XML package if PyXML version is greater than 0.6.1.
2627
Fred Drake64bb3802000-09-26 16:21:35 +00002628- xml.dom: DOM level 1 support for basic XML. Includes xml.dom.minidom
2629 (conventional DOM), and xml.dom.pulldom, which allows building the DOM
2630 tree only for nodes which are sufficiently interesting to a specific
2631 application. Does not provide the HTML-specific extensions. Still
2632 undocumented.
Jeremy Hylton1b618592000-09-26 05:32:36 +00002633
Fred Drake64bb3802000-09-26 16:21:35 +00002634- xml.sax: SAX 2 support for Python, including all the handler
2635 interfaces needed to process XML 1.0 compliant XML. Some
2636 documentation is already available.
Jeremy Hylton1b618592000-09-26 05:32:36 +00002637
Fred Drake64bb3802000-09-26 16:21:35 +00002638- pyexpat: Renamed to xml.parsers.expat since this is part of the new,
2639 packagized XML support.
Jeremy Hylton1b618592000-09-26 05:32:36 +00002640
Guido van Rossumf62ed9c2000-09-26 11:16:10 +00002641
Jeremy Hylton1b618592000-09-26 05:32:36 +00002642C API
2643
2644- Add three new convenience functions for module initialization --
2645 PyModule_AddObject(), PyModule_AddIntConstant(), and
2646 PyModule_AddStringConstant().
2647
Jeremy Hyltonfa2e2c12000-09-26 16:31:30 +00002648- Cleaned up definition of NULL in C source code; all definitions were
Jeremy Hylton1b618592000-09-26 05:32:36 +00002649 removed and add #error to Python.h if NULL isn't defined after
2650 #include of stdio.h.
2651
Guido van Rossumf62ed9c2000-09-26 11:16:10 +00002652- Py_PROTO() macros that were removed in 2.0b1 have been restored for
Jeremy Hylton1b618592000-09-26 05:32:36 +00002653 backwards compatibility (at the source level) with old extensions.
2654
Guido van Rossumf62ed9c2000-09-26 11:16:10 +00002655- A wrapper API was added for signal() and sigaction(). Instead of
2656 either function, always use PyOS_getsig() to get a signal handler
2657 and PyOS_setsig() to set one. A new convenience typedef
2658 PyOS_sighandler_t is defined for the type of signal handlers.
Jeremy Hylton1b618592000-09-26 05:32:36 +00002659
Guido van Rossumf62ed9c2000-09-26 11:16:10 +00002660- Add PyString_AsStringAndSize() function that provides access to the
Jeremy Hylton1b618592000-09-26 05:32:36 +00002661 internal data buffer and size of a string object -- or the default
2662 encoded version of a Unicode object.
2663
Jeremy Hyltonfa2e2c12000-09-26 16:31:30 +00002664- PyString_Size() and PyString_AsString() accept Unicode objects.
2665
Guido van Rossumf62ed9c2000-09-26 11:16:10 +00002666- The standard header <limits.h> is now included by Python.h (if it
Fred Drake64bb3802000-09-26 16:21:35 +00002667 exists). INT_MAX and LONG_MAX will always be defined, even if
2668 <limits.h> is not available.
Guido van Rossumf62ed9c2000-09-26 11:16:10 +00002669
Jeremy Hyltonfa2e2c12000-09-26 16:31:30 +00002670- PyFloat_FromString takes a second argument, pend, that was
2671 effectively useless. It is now officially useless but preserved for
2672 backwards compatibility. If the pend argument is not NULL, *pend is
2673 set to NULL.
2674
2675- PyObject_GetAttr() and PyObject_SetAttr() now accept Unicode objects
2676 for the attribute name. See note on getattr() above.
2677
2678- A few bug fixes to argument processing for Unicode.
2679 PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() now accepts "es#" and "es".
2680 PyArg_Parse() special cases "s#" for Unicode objects; it returns a
2681 pointer to the default encoded string data instead of to the raw
Tim Petersa3a3a032000-11-30 05:22:44 +00002682 UTF-16.
Jeremy Hyltonfa2e2c12000-09-26 16:31:30 +00002683
2684- Py_BuildValue accepts B format (for bgen-generated code).
2685
Guido van Rossumf62ed9c2000-09-26 11:16:10 +00002686
Jeremy Hylton1b618592000-09-26 05:32:36 +00002687Internals
2688
2689- On Unix, fix code for finding Python installation directory so that
2690 it works when argv[0] is a relative path.
2691
Andrew M. Kuchlinga1099be2000-12-15 01:16:43 +00002692- Added a true unicode_internal_encode() function and fixed the
Guido van Rossumf62ed9c2000-09-26 11:16:10 +00002693 unicode_internal_decode function() to support Unicode objects directly
Jeremy Hylton1b618592000-09-26 05:32:36 +00002694 rather than by generating a copy of the object.
2695
Tim Peters482c0212000-09-26 06:33:09 +00002696- Several of the internal Unicode tables are much smaller now, and
2697 the source code should be much friendlier to weaker compilers.
Jeremy Hylton1b618592000-09-26 05:32:36 +00002698
Jeremy Hylton97693b02000-09-26 17:42:51 +00002699- In the garbage collector: Fixed bug in collection of tuples. Fixed
2700 bug that caused some instances to be removed from the container set
2701 while they were still live. Fixed parsing in gc.set_debug() for
2702 platforms where sizeof(long) > sizeof(int).
Jeremy Hyltonfa2e2c12000-09-26 16:31:30 +00002703
2704- Fixed refcount problem in instance deallocation that only occurred
2705 when Py_REF_DEBUG was defined and Py_TRACE_REFS was not.
2706
Jeremy Hyltonfa2e2c12000-09-26 16:31:30 +00002707- On Windows, getpythonregpath is now protected against null data in
2708 registry key.
2709
2710- On Unix, create .pyc/.pyo files with O_EXCL flag to avoid a race
Tim Petersa3a3a032000-11-30 05:22:44 +00002711 condition.
Jeremy Hyltonfa2e2c12000-09-26 16:31:30 +00002712
Guido van Rossumf62ed9c2000-09-26 11:16:10 +00002713
Jeremy Hylton1b618592000-09-26 05:32:36 +00002714Build and platform-specific issues
2715
2716- Better support of GNU Pth via --with-pth configure option.
2717
Jeremy Hyltonfa2e2c12000-09-26 16:31:30 +00002718- Python/C API now properly exposed to dynamically-loaded extension
2719 modules on Reliant UNIX.
Jeremy Hylton1b618592000-09-26 05:32:36 +00002720
2721- Changes for the benefit of SunOS 4.1.4 (really!). mmapmodule.c:
2722 Don't define MS_SYNC to be zero when it is undefined. Added missing
2723 prototypes in posixmodule.c.
2724
Jeremy Hyltonfa2e2c12000-09-26 16:31:30 +00002725- Improved support for HP-UX build. Threads should now be correctly
Guido van Rossumf62ed9c2000-09-26 11:16:10 +00002726 configured (on HP-UX 10.20 and 11.00).
Jeremy Hylton1b618592000-09-26 05:32:36 +00002727
Jeremy Hyltonfa2e2c12000-09-26 16:31:30 +00002728- Fix largefile support on older NetBSD systems and OpenBSD by adding
2729 define for TELL64.
2730
2731
2732Tools and other miscellany
2733
2734- ftpmirror: Call to main() is wrapped in if __name__ == "__main__".
2735
2736- freeze: The modulefinder now works with 2.0 opcodes.
2737
Tim Petersa3a3a032000-11-30 05:22:44 +00002738- IDLE:
Jeremy Hyltonfa2e2c12000-09-26 16:31:30 +00002739 Move hackery of sys.argv until after the Tk instance has been
2740 created, which allows the application-specific Tkinter
2741 initialization to be executed if present; also pass an explicit
2742 className parameter to the Tk() constructor.
Fred Drake64bb3802000-09-26 16:21:35 +00002743
Jeremy Hylton1b618592000-09-26 05:32:36 +00002744
2745What's new in 2.0 beta 1?
2746=========================
2747
Guido van Rossumf2ffce02000-09-05 04:38:34 +00002748Source Incompatibilities
2749------------------------
2750
2751None. Note that 1.6 introduced several incompatibilities with 1.5.2,
2752such as single-argument append(), connect() and bind(), and changes to
2753str(long) and repr(float).
2754
2755
2756Binary Incompatibilities
2757------------------------
2758
2759- Third party extensions built for Python 1.5.x or 1.6 cannot be used
2760with Python 2.0; these extensions will have to be rebuilt for Python
27612.0.
2762
2763- On Windows, attempting to import a third party extension built for
2764Python 1.5.x or 1.6 results in an immediate crash; there's not much we
2765can do about this. Check your PYTHONPATH environment variable!
2766
2767- Python bytecode files (*.pyc and *.pyo) are not compatible between
2768releases.
2769
2770
2771Overview of Changes Since 1.6
2772-----------------------------
2773
2774There are many new modules (including brand new XML support through
2775the xml package, and i18n support through the gettext module); a list
2776of all new modules is included below. Lots of bugs have been fixed.
2777
Jeremy Hylton24c3d602000-09-05 19:36:26 +00002778The process for making major new changes to the language has changed
2779since Python 1.6. Enhancements must now be documented by a Python
2780Enhancement Proposal (PEP) before they can be accepted.
2781
Guido van Rossumf2ffce02000-09-05 04:38:34 +00002782There are several important syntax enhancements, described in more
2783detail below:
2784
2785 - Augmented assignment, e.g. x += 1
2786
2787 - List comprehensions, e.g. [x**2 for x in range(10)]
2788
2789 - Extended import statement, e.g. import Module as Name
2790
2791 - Extended print statement, e.g. print >> file, "Hello"
2792
2793Other important changes:
2794
2795 - Optional collection of cyclical garbage
2796
Jeremy Hylton24c3d602000-09-05 19:36:26 +00002797Python Enhancement Proposal (PEP)
2798---------------------------------
2799
2800PEP stands for Python Enhancement Proposal. A PEP is a design
2801document providing information to the Python community, or describing
2802a new feature for Python. The PEP should provide a concise technical
2803specification of the feature and a rationale for the feature.
2804
2805We intend PEPs to be the primary mechanisms for proposing new
2806features, for collecting community input on an issue, and for
2807documenting the design decisions that have gone into Python. The PEP
2808author is responsible for building consensus within the community and
2809documenting dissenting opinions.
2810
2811The PEPs are available at http://python.sourceforge.net/peps/.
Guido van Rossumf2ffce02000-09-05 04:38:34 +00002812
2813Augmented Assignment
2814--------------------
2815
2816This must have been the most-requested feature of the past years!
2817Eleven new assignment operators were added:
2818
Guido van Rossume905e952000-09-05 12:42:46 +00002819 += -= *= /= %= **= <<= >>= &= ^= |=
Guido van Rossumf2ffce02000-09-05 04:38:34 +00002820
2821For example,
2822
2823 A += B
2824
2825is similar to
2826
2827 A = A + B
2828
2829except that A is evaluated only once (relevant when A is something
2830like dict[index].attr).
2831
2832However, if A is a mutable object, A may be modified in place. Thus,
2833if A is a number or a string, A += B has the same effect as A = A+B
2834(except A is only evaluated once); but if a is a list, A += B has the
2835same effect as A.extend(B)!
2836
2837Classes and built-in object types can override the new operators in
2838order to implement the in-place behavior; the not-in-place behavior is
2839used automatically as a fallback when an object doesn't implement the
2840in-place behavior. For classes, the method name is derived from the
2841method name for the corresponding not-in-place operator by inserting
2842an 'i' in front of the name, e.g. __iadd__ implements in-place
2843__add__.
2844
2845Augmented assignment was implemented by Thomas Wouters.
2846
2847
2848List Comprehensions
2849-------------------
2850
2851This is a flexible new notation for lists whose elements are computed
2852from another list (or lists). The simplest form is:
2853
2854 [<expression> for <variable> in <sequence>]
2855
Guido van Rossum56db0952000-09-06 23:34:25 +00002856For example, [i**2 for i in range(4)] yields the list [0, 1, 4, 9].
Guido van Rossumf62ed9c2000-09-26 11:16:10 +00002857This is more efficient than a for loop with a list.append() call.
Guido van Rossumf2ffce02000-09-05 04:38:34 +00002858
2859You can also add a condition:
2860
2861 [<expression> for <variable> in <sequence> if <condition>]
2862
2863For example, [w for w in words if w == w.lower()] would yield the list
2864of words that contain no uppercase characters. This is more efficient
Guido van Rossumf62ed9c2000-09-26 11:16:10 +00002865than a for loop with an if statement and a list.append() call.
Guido van Rossumf2ffce02000-09-05 04:38:34 +00002866
2867You can also have nested for loops and more than one 'if' clause. For
2868example, here's a function that flattens a sequence of sequences::
2869
2870 def flatten(seq):
2871 return [x for subseq in seq for x in subseq]
2872
2873 flatten([[0], [1,2,3], [4,5], [6,7,8,9], []])
2874
2875This prints
2876
2877 [0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9]
2878
2879List comprehensions originated as a patch set from Greg Ewing; Skip
Jeremy Hylton24c3d602000-09-05 19:36:26 +00002880Montanaro and Thomas Wouters also contributed. Described by PEP 202.
Guido van Rossumf2ffce02000-09-05 04:38:34 +00002881
2882
2883Extended Import Statement
2884-------------------------
2885
2886Many people have asked for a way to import a module under a different
2887name. This can be accomplished like this:
2888
2889 import foo
2890 bar = foo
2891 del foo
2892
2893but this common idiom gets old quickly. A simple extension of the
2894import statement now allows this to be written as follows:
2895
2896 import foo as bar
2897
2898There's also a variant for 'from ... import':
2899
2900 from foo import bar as spam
2901
2902This also works with packages; e.g. you can write this:
2903
2904 import test.regrtest as regrtest
2905
2906Note that 'as' is not a new keyword -- it is recognized only in this
2907context (this is only possible because the syntax for the import
2908statement doesn't involve expressions).
2909
Jeremy Hylton24c3d602000-09-05 19:36:26 +00002910Implemented by Thomas Wouters. Described by PEP 221.
Guido van Rossumf2ffce02000-09-05 04:38:34 +00002911
2912
2913Extended Print Statement
2914------------------------
2915
2916Easily the most controversial new feature, this extension to the print
2917statement adds an option to make the output go to a different file
2918than the default sys.stdout.
2919
2920For example, to write an error message to sys.stderr, you can now
2921write:
2922
2923 print >> sys.stderr, "Error: bad dog!"
2924
2925As a special feature, if the expression used to indicate the file
Fred Drake45888ff2000-09-29 17:09:11 +00002926evaluates to None, the current value of sys.stdout is used. Thus:
Guido van Rossumf2ffce02000-09-05 04:38:34 +00002927
2928 print >> None, "Hello world"
2929
2930is equivalent to
2931
2932 print "Hello world"
2933
Jeremy Hylton24c3d602000-09-05 19:36:26 +00002934Design and implementation by Barry Warsaw. Described by PEP 214.
Guido van Rossumf2ffce02000-09-05 04:38:34 +00002935
2936
2937Optional Collection of Cyclical Garbage
2938---------------------------------------
2939
2940Python is now equipped with a garbage collector that can hunt down
2941cyclical references between Python objects. It's no replacement for
2942reference counting; in fact, it depends on the reference counts being
2943correct, and decides that a set of objects belong to a cycle if all
2944their reference counts can be accounted for from their references to
2945each other. This devious scheme was first proposed by Eric Tiedemann,
2946and brought to implementation by Neil Schemenauer.
2947
2948There's a module "gc" that lets you control some parameters of the
2949garbage collection. There's also an option to the configure script
2950that lets you enable or disable the garbage collection. In 2.0b1,
2951it's on by default, so that we (hopefully) can collect decent user
2952experience with this new feature. There are some questions about its
Fred Drake9f11cf82000-09-29 17:54:40 +00002953performance. If it proves to be too much of a problem, we'll turn it
Guido van Rossumf2ffce02000-09-05 04:38:34 +00002954off by default in the final 2.0 release.
2955
2956
2957Smaller Changes
2958---------------
2959
2960A new function zip() was added. zip(seq1, seq2, ...) is equivalent to
2961map(None, seq1, seq2, ...) when the sequences have the same length;
2962i.e. zip([1,2,3], [10,20,30]) returns [(1,10), (2,20), (3,30)]. When
2963the lists are not all the same length, the shortest list wins:
Jeremy Hylton24c3d602000-09-05 19:36:26 +00002964zip([1,2,3], [10,20]) returns [(1,10), (2,20)]. See PEP 201.
Guido van Rossumf2ffce02000-09-05 04:38:34 +00002965
2966sys.version_info is a tuple (major, minor, micro, level, serial).
2967
2968Dictionaries have an odd new method, setdefault(key, default).
2969dict.setdefault(key, default) returns dict[key] if it exists; if not,
2970it sets dict[key] to default and returns that value. Thus:
2971
2972 dict.setdefault(key, []).append(item)
2973
2974does the same work as this common idiom:
2975
2976 if not dict.has_key(key):
2977 dict[key] = []
2978 dict[key].append(item)
2979
Jeremy Hylton24c3d602000-09-05 19:36:26 +00002980There are two new variants of SyntaxError that are raised for
2981indentation-related errors: IndentationError and TabError.
2982
2983Changed \x to consume exactly two hex digits; see PEP 223. Added \U
2984escape that consumes exactly eight hex digits.
Jeremy Hyltonbdebd542000-09-05 18:28:54 +00002985
2986The limits on the size of expressions and file in Python source code
2987have been raised from 2**16 to 2**32. Previous versions of Python
2988were limited because the maximum argument size the Python VM accepted
2989was 2**16. This limited the size of object constructor expressions,
2990e.g. [1,2,3] or {'a':1, 'b':2}, and the size of source files. This
2991limit was raised thanks to a patch by Charles Waldman that effectively
2992fixes the problem. It is now much more likely that you will be
2993limited by available memory than by an arbitrary limit in Python.
2994
2995The interpreter's maximum recursion depth can be modified by Python
2996programs using sys.getrecursionlimit and sys.setrecursionlimit. This
2997limit is the maximum number of recursive calls that can be made by
2998Python code. The limit exists to prevent infinite recursion from
2999overflowing the C stack and causing a core dump. The default value is
30001000. The maximum safe value for a particular platform can be found
3001by running Misc/find_recursionlimit.py.
Guido van Rossumf2ffce02000-09-05 04:38:34 +00003002
3003New Modules and Packages
3004------------------------
3005
3006atexit - for registering functions to be called when Python exits.
3007
3008imputil - Greg Stein's alternative API for writing custom import
3009hooks.
3010
3011pyexpat - an interface to the Expat XML parser, contributed by Paul
3012Prescod.
3013
3014xml - a new package with XML support code organized (so far) in three
3015subpackages: xml.dom, xml.sax, and xml.parsers. Describing these
3016would fill a volume. There's a special feature whereby a
3017user-installed package named _xmlplus overrides the standard
3018xmlpackage; this is intended to give the XML SIG a hook to distribute
3019backwards-compatible updates to the standard xml package.
3020
3021webbrowser - a platform-independent API to launch a web browser.
3022
3023
Guido van Rossume905e952000-09-05 12:42:46 +00003024Changed Modules
3025---------------
3026
Jeremy Hylton24c3d602000-09-05 19:36:26 +00003027array -- new methods for array objects: count, extend, index, pop, and
3028remove
3029
3030binascii -- new functions b2a_hex and a2b_hex that convert between
3031binary data and its hex representation
3032
Jeremy Hyltonbdebd542000-09-05 18:28:54 +00003033calendar -- Many new functions that support features including control
3034over which day of the week is the first day, returning strings instead
3035of printing them. Also new symbolic constants for days of week,
3036e.g. MONDAY, ..., SUNDAY.
3037
3038cgi -- FieldStorage objects have a getvalue method that works like a
3039dictionary's get method and returns the value attribute of the object.
3040
3041ConfigParser -- The parser object has new methods has_option,
3042remove_section, remove_option, set, and write. They allow the module
3043to be used for writing config files as well as reading them.
3044
3045ftplib -- ntransfercmd(), transfercmd(), and retrbinary() all now
Guido van Rossume905e952000-09-05 12:42:46 +00003046optionally support the RFC 959 REST command.
3047
Jeremy Hyltonbdebd542000-09-05 18:28:54 +00003048gzip -- readline and readlines now accept optional size arguments
Guido van Rossume905e952000-09-05 12:42:46 +00003049
Jeremy Hyltonbdebd542000-09-05 18:28:54 +00003050httplib -- New interfaces and support for HTTP/1.1 by Greg Stein. See
3051the module doc strings for details.
Guido van Rossum830ca2a2000-09-05 15:34:16 +00003052
Jeremy Hylton24c3d602000-09-05 19:36:26 +00003053locale -- implement getdefaultlocale for Win32 and Macintosh
3054
3055marshal -- no longer dumps core when marshaling deeply nested or
3056recursive data structures
3057
3058os -- new functions isatty, seteuid, setegid, setreuid, setregid
3059
Jeremy Hyltonbdebd542000-09-05 18:28:54 +00003060os/popen2 -- popen2/popen3/popen4 support under Windows. popen2/popen3
3061support under Unix.
3062
Jeremy Hylton24c3d602000-09-05 19:36:26 +00003063os/pty -- support for openpty and forkpty
Jeremy Hyltonbdebd542000-09-05 18:28:54 +00003064
3065os.path -- fix semantics of os.path.commonprefix
3066
3067smtplib -- support for sending very long messages
3068
3069socket -- new function getfqdn()
3070
3071readline -- new functions to read, write and truncate history files.
3072The readline section of the library reference manual contains an
3073example.
3074
Jeremy Hylton24c3d602000-09-05 19:36:26 +00003075select -- add interface to poll system call
3076
Jeremy Hyltonbdebd542000-09-05 18:28:54 +00003077shutil -- new copyfileobj function
3078
3079SimpleHTTPServer, CGIHTTPServer -- Fix problems with buffering in the
3080HTTP server.
3081
Jeremy Hylton24c3d602000-09-05 19:36:26 +00003082Tkinter -- optimization of function flatten
Jeremy Hyltonbdebd542000-09-05 18:28:54 +00003083
3084urllib -- scans environment variables for proxy configuration,
Tim Peters8b092332000-09-05 20:15:25 +00003085e.g. http_proxy.
Jeremy Hyltonbdebd542000-09-05 18:28:54 +00003086
3087whichdb -- recognizes dumbdbm format
Guido van Rossume905e952000-09-05 12:42:46 +00003088
3089
3090Obsolete Modules
3091----------------
3092
3093None. However note that 1.6 made a whole slew of modules obsolete:
3094stdwin, soundex, cml, cmpcache, dircache, dump, find, grep, packmail,
3095poly, zmod, strop, util, whatsound.
3096
3097
3098Changed, New, Obsolete Tools
3099----------------------------
3100
Tim Peters8b092332000-09-05 20:15:25 +00003101None.
Guido van Rossume905e952000-09-05 12:42:46 +00003102
3103
Guido van Rossumf2ffce02000-09-05 04:38:34 +00003104C-level Changes
3105---------------
3106
3107Several cleanup jobs were carried out throughout the source code.
3108
3109All C code was converted to ANSI C; we got rid of all uses of the
3110Py_PROTO() macro, which makes the header files a lot more readable.
3111
3112Most of the portability hacks were moved to a new header file,
3113pyport.h; several other new header files were added and some old
3114header files were removed, in an attempt to create a more rational set
3115of header files. (Few of these ever need to be included explicitly;
3116they are all included by Python.h.)
3117
Guido van Rossumf2ffce02000-09-05 04:38:34 +00003118Trent Mick ensured portability to 64-bit platforms, under both Linux
Jeremy Hylton24c3d602000-09-05 19:36:26 +00003119and Win64, especially for the new Intel Itanium processor. Mick also
3120added large file support for Linux64 and Win64.
Guido van Rossumf2ffce02000-09-05 04:38:34 +00003121
Jeremy Hyltonbdebd542000-09-05 18:28:54 +00003122The C APIs to return an object's size have been update to consistently
3123use the form PyXXX_Size, e.g. PySequence_Size and PyDict_Size. In
3124previous versions, the abstract interfaces used PyXXX_Length and the
3125concrete interfaces used PyXXX_Size. The old names,
3126e.g. PyObject_Length, are still available for backwards compatibility
3127at the API level, but are deprecated.
3128
Jeremy Hylton24c3d602000-09-05 19:36:26 +00003129The PyOS_CheckStack function has been implemented on Windows by
3130Fredrik Lundh. It prevents Python from failing with a stack overflow
3131on Windows.
Jeremy Hyltonbdebd542000-09-05 18:28:54 +00003132
3133The GC changes resulted in creation of two new slots on object,
3134tp_traverse and tp_clear. The augmented assignment changes result in
Guido van Rossum4338a282000-09-06 13:02:08 +00003135the creation of a new slot for each in-place operator.
Jeremy Hyltonbdebd542000-09-05 18:28:54 +00003136
3137The GC API creates new requirements for container types implemented in
Guido van Rossum4338a282000-09-06 13:02:08 +00003138C extension modules. See Include/objimpl.h for details.
Jeremy Hyltonbdebd542000-09-05 18:28:54 +00003139
Jeremy Hylton24c3d602000-09-05 19:36:26 +00003140PyErr_Format has been updated to automatically calculate the size of
3141the buffer needed to hold the formatted result string. This change
3142prevents crashes caused by programmer error.
Jeremy Hyltonbdebd542000-09-05 18:28:54 +00003143
Jeremy Hylton24c3d602000-09-05 19:36:26 +00003144New C API calls: PyObject_AsFileDescriptor, PyErr_WriteUnraisable.
Guido van Rossume905e952000-09-05 12:42:46 +00003145
Jeremy Hylton24c3d602000-09-05 19:36:26 +00003146PyRun_AnyFileEx, PyRun_SimpleFileEx, PyRun_FileEx -- New functions
3147that are the same as their non-Ex counterparts except they take an
3148extra flag argument that tells them to close the file when done.
3149
3150XXX There were other API changes that should be fleshed out here.
Guido van Rossumab9d6f01998-08-10 22:01:13 +00003151
Tim Peters8b092332000-09-05 20:15:25 +00003152
3153Windows Changes
3154---------------
3155
3156New popen2/popen3/peopen4 in os module (see Changed Modules above).
3157
3158os.popen is much more usable on Windows 95 and 98. See Microsoft
3159Knowledge Base article Q150956. The Win9x workaround described there
3160is implemented by the new w9xpopen.exe helper in the root of your
3161Python installation. Note that Python uses this internally; it is not
3162a standalone program.
3163
3164Administrator privileges are no longer required to install Python
3165on Windows NT or Windows 2000. If you have administrator privileges,
3166Python's registry info will be written under HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE.
3167Otherwise the installer backs off to writing Python's registry info
Guido van Rossum4338a282000-09-06 13:02:08 +00003168under HKEY_CURRENT_USER. The latter is sufficient for all "normal"
Tim Peters8b092332000-09-05 20:15:25 +00003169uses of Python, but will prevent some advanced uses from working
3170(for example, running a Python script as an NT service, or possibly
3171from CGI).
3172
3173[This was new in 1.6] The installer no longer runs a separate Tcl/Tk
3174installer; instead, it installs the needed Tcl/Tk files directly in the
3175Python directory. If you already have a Tcl/Tk installation, this
3176wastes some disk space (about 4 Megs) but avoids problems with
3177conflicting Tcl/Tk installations, and makes it much easier for Python
3178to ensure that Tcl/Tk can find all its files.
3179
3180[This was new in 1.6] The Windows installer now installs by default in
3181\Python20\ on the default volume, instead of \Program Files\Python-2.0\.
3182
Guido van Rossumf62ed9c2000-09-26 11:16:10 +00003183
3184Updates to the changes between 1.5.2 and 1.6
3185--------------------------------------------
3186
3187The 1.6 NEWS file can't be changed after the release is done, so here
3188is some late-breaking news:
3189
3190New APIs in locale.py: normalize(), getdefaultlocale(), resetlocale(),
3191and changes to getlocale() and setlocale().
3192
3193The new module is now enabled per default.
3194
3195It is not true that the encodings codecs cannot be used for normal
3196strings: the string.encode() (which is also present on 8-bit strings
3197!) allows using them for 8-bit strings too, e.g. to convert files from
3198cp1252 (Windows) to latin-1 or vice-versa.
3199
3200Japanese codecs are available from Tamito KAJIYAMA:
3201http://pseudo.grad.sccs.chukyo-u.ac.jp/~kajiyama/python/
3202
3203
Guido van Rossumab9d6f01998-08-10 22:01:13 +00003204======================================================================