blob: 496ad0b563cb69febe62c362be31135a570ff9c0 [file] [log] [blame]
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001+++++++++++
2Python News
3+++++++++++
4
Skip Montanaro4a385832002-09-20 17:08:52 +00005(editors: check NEWS.help for information about editing NEWS using ReST.)
6
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00007What's New in Python 2.3 beta 1?
8================================
9
10*Release date: XX-XXX-2003*
11
12Core and builtins
13-----------------
14
Alex Martellia70b1912003-04-22 08:12:33 +000015- New builtin function sum(seq, start=0) returns the sum of all the
16 items in iterable object seq, plus start (items are normally numbers,
17 and cannot be strings).
18
Guido van Rossumaa86e352003-04-19 18:15:10 +000019- bool() called without arguments now returns False rather than
20 raising an exception. This is consistent with calling the
21 constructors for the other builtin types -- called without argument
22 they all return the false value of that type. (SF patch #724135)
23
Guido van Rossumcf8d2852003-04-17 16:53:26 +000024- In support of PEP 269 (making the pgen parser generator accessible
25 from Python), some changes to the pgen code structure were made; a
26 few files that used to be linked only with pgen are now linked with
27 Python itself.
28
Guido van Rossumc1f6e8c2003-04-16 21:13:23 +000029- The repr() of a weakref object now shows the __name__ attribute of
30 the referenced object, if it has one.
31
Guido van Rossum76ba09f2003-04-16 19:40:58 +000032- super() no longer ignores data descriptors, except __class__. See
33 the thread started at
34 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2003-April/034338.html
35
Guido van Rossum3a3cca52003-04-14 20:58:14 +000036- list.insert(i, x) now interprets negative i as it would be
37 interpreted by slicing, so negative values count from the end of the
38 list. This was the only place where such an interpretation was not
39 placed on a list index.
40
Guido van Rossumefbbb1c2003-04-11 18:43:06 +000041- range() now works even if the arguments are longs with magnitude
42 larger than sys.maxint, as long as the total length of the sequence
43 fits. E.g., range(2**100, 2**101, 2**100) is the following list:
44 [1267650600228229401496703205376L]. (SF patch #707427.)
45
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +000046- Some horridly obscure problems were fixed involving interaction
47 between garbage collection and old-style classes with "ambitious"
48 getattr hooks. If an old-style instance didn't have a __del__ method,
49 but did have a __getattr__ hook, and the instance became reachable
50 only from an unreachable cycle, and the hook resurrected or deleted
51 unreachable objects when asked to resolve "__del__", anything up to
52 a segfault could happen. That's been repaired.
53
Raymond Hettingera3e1e4c2003-03-06 23:54:28 +000054- dict.pop now takes an optional argument specifying a default
55 value to return if the key is not in the dict. If a default is not
56 given and the key is not found, a KeyError will still be raised.
57 Parallel changes were made to UserDict.UserDict and UserDict.DictMixin.
58 [SF patch #693753] (contributed by Michael Stone.)
59
Martin v. Löwis73d538b2003-03-05 15:13:47 +000060- sys.getfilesystemencoding() was added to expose
61 Py_FileSystemDefaultEncoding.
Guido van Rossum46d3dc32003-03-01 03:20:41 +000062
63- New function sys.exc_clear() clears the current exception. This is
64 rarely needed, but can sometimes be useful to release objects
65 referenced by the traceback held in sys.exc_info()[2]. (SF patch
66 #693195.)
67
Neal Norwitzd5a65a72003-02-23 23:11:41 +000068- On 64-bit systems, a dictionary could contain duplicate long/int keys
69 if the key value was larger than 2**32. See SF bug #689659.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +000070
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +000071- Fixed SF bug #663074. The codec system was using global static
Walter Dörwaldfa86bf52003-03-31 16:15:13 +000072 variables to store internal data. As a result, any attempts to use the
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +000073 unicode system with multiple active interpreters, or successive
74 interpreter executions, would fail.
75
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +000076- "%c" % u"a" now returns a unicode string instead of raising a
Walter Dörwald44f527f2003-04-02 16:37:24 +000077 TypeError. u"%c" % 0xffffffff now raises a OverflowError instead
Walter Dörwald1e469c52003-04-02 16:57:59 +000078 of a ValueError to be consistent with "%c" % 256. See SF patch #710127.
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +000079
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +000080Extension modules
81-----------------
82
Martin v. Löwisbfe175c2003-04-16 19:42:51 +000083- Tkinter wrappers around Tcl variables now pass objects directly
84 to Tcl, instead of first converting them to strings.
85
Guido van Rossum41c99e72003-04-14 17:59:34 +000086- The .*? pattern in the re module is now special-cased to avoid the
87 recursion limit. (SF patch #720991 -- many thanks to Gary Herron
88 and Greg Chapman.)
89
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +000090- New function sys.call_tracing() allows pdb to debug code
91 recursively.
92
Tim Peters730f5532003-04-08 17:17:17 +000093- New function gc.get_referents(obj) returns a list of objects
Tim Peters0f81ab62003-04-08 16:39:48 +000094 directly referenced by obj. In effect, it exposes what the object's
95 tp_traverse slot does, and can be helpful when debugging memory
96 leaks.
97
Martin v. Löwis7fb697b2003-04-03 04:49:12 +000098- The iconv module has been removed from this release.
99
Tim Petersd50ade62003-03-20 18:32:13 +0000100- The platform-independent routines for packing floats in IEEE formats
101 (struct.pack's <f, >f, <d, and >d codes; pickle and cPickle's protocol 1
102 pickling of floats) ignored that rounding can cause a carry to
103 propagate. The worst consequence was that, in rare cases, <f and >f
104 could produce strings that, when unpacked again, were a factor of 2
105 away from the original float. This has been fixed. See SF bug
106 #705836.
107
Guido van Rossumd11b62e2003-03-14 21:51:36 +0000108- New function time.tzset() provides access to the C library tzet()
109 function, if supported. (SF patch #675422.)
110
Neal Norwitz12e22172003-03-03 21:16:39 +0000111- Using createfilehandler, deletefilehandler, createtimerhandler functions
112 on Tkinter.tkinter (_tkinter module) no longer crashes the interpreter.
113 See SF bug #692416.
114
Michael W. Hudsonf0089982003-03-03 12:29:42 +0000115- Modified the fcntl.ioctl() function to allow modification of a passed
116 mutable buffer (for details see the reference documentation).
117
Raymond Hettinger61fe64d2003-02-23 04:40:07 +0000118- Made user requested changes to the itertools module.
119 Subsumed the times() function into repeat().
120 Added chain() and cycle().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000121
Skip Montanaro89feabc2003-03-30 04:54:24 +0000122- The socket module now always uses the _socketobject wrapper class, even on
123 platforms which have dup(2). The makefile() method is built directly
124 on top of the socket without duplicating the file descriptor, allowing
125 timeouts to work properly.
126
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000127Library
128-------
129
Martin v. Löwis153c9e42003-04-19 20:59:03 +0000130- shelve now supports the optional writeback argument, and exposes
131 pickle protocol versions.
132
Guido van Rossuma2685402003-04-19 18:04:57 +0000133- Several methods of nntplib.NNTP have grown an optional file argument
134 which specifies a file where to divert the command's output
135 (already supported by the body() method). (SF patch #720468)
136
Martin v. Löwis281b2c62003-04-18 21:04:39 +0000137- The self-documenting XML server library DocXMLRPCServer was added.
138
Martin v. Löwis2548c732003-04-18 10:39:54 +0000139- Support for internationalized domain names has been added through
140 the 'idna' and 'punycode' encodings, the 'stringprep' module, the
141 'mkstringprep' tool, and enhancements to the socket and httplib
142 modules.
143
Walter Dörwald5688b7a2003-04-16 09:46:13 +0000144- htmlentitydefs has two new dictionaries: name2codepoint maps
145 HTML entity names to Unicode codepoints (as integers).
146 codepoint2name is the reverse mapping. See SF patch #722017.
147
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +0000148- pdb has a new command, "debug", which lets you step through
149 arbitrary code from the debugger's (pdb) prompt.
150
Raymond Hettingerc377cbf2003-04-04 22:56:42 +0000151- unittest.failUnlessEqual and its equivalent unittest.assertEqual now
152 return 'not a == b' rather than 'a != b'. This gives the desired
153 result for classes that define __eq__ without defining __ne__.
154
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +0000155- sgmllib now supports SGML marked sections, in particular the
Martin v. Löwis3163a3b2003-03-30 14:25:40 +0000156 MS Office extensions.
157
Raymond Hettinger42182eb2003-03-09 05:33:33 +0000158- The urllib module now offers support for the iterator protocol.
159 SF patch 698520 contributed by Brett Cannon.
160
Guido van Rossum9589a252003-03-06 01:56:12 +0000161- New module timeit provides a simple framework for timing the
162 execution speed of expressions and statements.
163
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +0000164- sets.Set objects now support mixed-type __eq__ and __ne__, instead
165 of raising TypeError. If x is a Set object and y is a non-Set object,
166 x == y is False, and x != y is True. This is akin to the change made
167 for mixed-type comparisons of datetime objects in 2.3a2; more info
168 about the rationale is in the NEWS entry for that. See also SF bug
169 report <http://www.python.org/sf/693121>.
170
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +0000171- On Unix platforms, if os.listdir() is called with a Unicode argument,
172 it now returns Unicode strings. (This behavior was added earlier
173 to the Windows NT/2k/XP version of os.listdir().)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000174
Andrew M. Kuchling6f177d42003-02-28 22:09:33 +0000175- Distutils: both 'py_modules' and 'packages' keywords can now be specified
176 in core.setup(). Previously you could supply one or the other, but
177 not both of them. (SF patch #695090 from Bernhard Herzog)
178
Skip Montanaro64a839e2003-03-20 23:36:55 +0000179- New csv package makes it easy to read/write CSV files.
180
Gustavo Niemeyer68d8cef2003-04-17 21:31:33 +0000181- Module shlex has been extended to allow posix-like shell parsings,
182 including a split() function for easy spliting of quoted strings and
183 commands. An iterator interface was also implemented.
184
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000185Tools/Demos
186-----------
187
Tim Peters21d7d4d2003-04-18 00:45:59 +0000188- New script combinerefs.py helps analyze new PYTHONDUMPREFS output.
189 See the module docstring for details.
190
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000191TBD
192
193Build
194-----
195
Neal Norwitz35892b92003-02-23 23:45:35 +0000196- Fix problem building on OSF1 because the compiler only accepted
197 preprocessor directives that start in column 1. (SF bug #691793.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000198
199C API
200-----
201
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +0000202- Added PyGC_Collect(), equivalent to calling gc.collect().
203
Guido van Rossum0fc8f002003-04-15 15:12:39 +0000204- PyThreadState_GetDict() was changed not to raise an exception or
205 issue a fatal error when no current thread state is available. This
206 makes it possible to print dictionaries when no thread is active.
207
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +0000208- LONG_LONG was renamed to PY_LONG_LONG. Extensions that use this and
209 need compatibility with previous versions can use this:
210 #ifndef PY_LONG_LONG
211 #define PY_LONG_LONG LONG_LONG
212 #endif
Martin v. Löwisb9a0f912003-03-29 10:06:18 +0000213
Raymond Hettinger1da1dbf2003-03-17 19:46:11 +0000214- Added PyObject_SelfIter() to fill the tp_iter slot for the
Raymond Hettinger01538262003-03-17 08:24:35 +0000215 typical case where the method returns its self argument.
216
Guido van Rossume5c691a2003-03-07 15:13:17 +0000217- The extended type structure used for heap types (new-style
218 classes defined by Python code using a class statement) is now
219 exported from object.h as PyHeapTypeObject. (SF patch #696193.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000220
221New platforms
222-------------
223
224TBD
225
226Tests
227-----
228
Neal Norwitz55b61d22003-02-28 19:57:03 +0000229- test_timeout now requires -u network to be passed to regrtest to run.
230 See SF bug #692988.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000231
232Windows
233-------
234
Tim Peters11b23062003-04-23 02:39:17 +0000235- os.fsync() now exists on Windows, and calls the Microsoft _commit()
236 function.
237
Guido van Rossumf4050642003-04-09 19:39:06 +0000238- New function winsound.MessageBeep() wraps the Win32 API
239 MessageBeep().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000240
241Mac
242---
243
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +0000244- os.listdir() now returns Unicode strings on MacOS X when called with
245 a Unicode argument. See the general news item under "Library".
Just van Rossum46c97842003-02-25 21:42:15 +0000246
Jack Jansendeac2ac2003-02-24 11:04:17 +0000247- A new method MacOS.WMAvailable() returns true if it is safe to access
248 the window manager, false otherwise.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +0000249
Jack Jansencf76be02003-03-24 12:13:54 +0000250- EasyDialogs dialogs are now movable-modal, and if the application is
251 currently in the background they will ask to be moved to the foreground
252 before displaying.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +0000253
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +0000254- OSA Scripting support has improved a lot, and gensuitemodule.py can now
Jack Jansende354b72003-04-11 15:37:20 +0000255 be used by mere mortals. The documentation is now also more or less
256 complete.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +0000257
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +0000258- The IDE (in a framework build) now includes introductory documentation
259 in Apple Help Viewer format.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000260
261
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000262What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 2?
263=================================
264
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +0000265*Release date: 19-Feb-2003*
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000266
267Core and builtins
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +0000268-----------------
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000269
Walter Dörwald2ffec022003-02-19 16:34:11 +0000270- Negative positions returned from PEP 293 error callbacks are now
271 treated as being relative to the end of the input string. Positions
272 that are out of bounds raise an IndexError.
273
Guido van Rossum162e38c2003-02-19 15:25:10 +0000274- sys.path[0] (the directory from which the script is loaded) is now
275 turned into an absolute pathname, unless it is the empty string.
276 (SF patch #664376.)
277
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +0000278- Finally fixed the bug in compile() and exec where a string ending
279 with an indented code block but no newline would raise SyntaxError.
280 This would have been a four-line change in parsetok.c... Except
281 codeop.py depends on this behavior, so a compilation flag had to be
282 invented that causes the tokenizer to revert to the old behavior;
283 this required extra changes to 2 .h files, 2 .c files, and 2 .py
Guido van Rossum1442dc12003-02-13 22:19:20 +0000284 files. (Fixes SF bug #501622.)
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +0000285
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +0000286- If a new-style class defines neither __new__ nor __init__, its
287 constructor would ignore all arguments. This is changed now: the
288 constructor refuses arguments in this case. This might break code
289 that worked under Python 2.2. The simplest fix is to add a no-op
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +0000290 __init__: ``def __init__(self, *args, **kw): pass``.
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +0000291
Guido van Rossum48035eb2003-02-12 17:05:26 +0000292- Through a bytecode optimizer bug (and I bet you didn't even know
293 Python *had* a bytecode optimizer :-), "unsigned" hex/oct constants
294 with a leading minus sign would come out with the wrong sign.
295 ("Unsigned" hex/oct constants are those with a face value in the
296 range sys.maxint+1 through sys.maxint*2+1, inclusive; these have
297 always been interpreted as negative numbers through sign folding.)
298 E.g. 0xffffffff is -1, and -(0xffffffff) is 1, but -0xffffffff would
299 come out as -4294967295. This was the case in Python 2.2 through
300 2.2.2 and 2.3a1, and in Python 2.4 it will once again have that
301 value, but according to PEP 237 it really needs to be 1 now. This
302 will be backported to Python 2.2.3 a well. (SF #660455)
303
Raymond Hettinger060641d2003-04-22 06:49:11 +0000304- Added several bytecode optimizations. Provides speed-ups to
305 inverted in/is tests, inverted jumps, while 1 loops, and jumps to
306 unconditional jumps.
307
308- Added a new opcode, NOP, which is used in some of the bytecode
309 transformations.
310
Guido van Rossum47710652003-02-12 20:48:22 +0000311- int(s, base) sometimes sign-folds hex and oct constants; it only
312 does this when base is 0 and s.strip() starts with a '0'. When the
313 sign is actually folded, as in int("0xffffffff", 0) on a 32-bit
314 machine, which returns -1, a FutureWarning is now issued; in Python
315 2.4, this will return 4294967295L, as do int("+0xffffffff", 0) and
316 int("0xffffffff", 16) right now. (PEP 347)
317
Guido van Rossuma89d10e2003-02-12 03:58:38 +0000318- super(X, x): x may now be a proxy for an X instance, i.e.
319 issubclass(x.__class__, X) but not issubclass(type(x), X).
320
Guido van Rossum03bc7d32003-02-12 03:32:58 +0000321- isinstance(x, X): if X is a new-style class, this is now equivalent
322 to issubclass(type(x), X) or issubclass(x.__class__, X). Previously
323 only type(x) was tested. (For classic classes this was already the
324 case.)
325
Just van Rossum73ffb4a2003-02-10 09:57:08 +0000326- compile(), eval() and the exec statement now fully support source code
327 passed as unicode strings.
328
Neal Norwitzde8b94c2003-02-10 02:12:43 +0000329- int subclasses can be initialized with longs if the value fits in an int.
330 See SF bug #683467.
331
Tim Petersbf2674b2003-02-02 07:51:32 +0000332- long(string, base) takes time linear in len(string) when base is a power
333 of 2 now. It used to take time quadratic in len(string).
334
Martin v. Löwis8afd7572003-01-25 22:46:11 +0000335- filter returns now Unicode results for Unicode arguments.
336
Martin v. Löwisaf6a27a2003-01-03 19:16:14 +0000337- raw_input can now return Unicode objects.
338
Skip Montanaro4abd5f02003-01-02 20:51:08 +0000339- List objects' sort() method now accepts None as the comparison function.
340 Passing None is semantically identical to calling sort() with no
341 arguments.
342
Neal Norwitz1a997502003-01-13 20:13:12 +0000343- Fixed crash when printing a subclass of str and __str__ returned self.
344 See SF bug #667147.
345
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +0000346- Fixed an invalid RuntimeWarning and an undetected error when trying
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +0000347 to convert a long integer into a float which couldn't fit.
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +0000348 See SF bug #676155.
349
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +0000350- Function objects now have a __module__ attribute that is bound to
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +0000351 the name of the module in which the function was defined. This
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +0000352 applies for C functions and methods as well as functions and methods
353 defined in Python. This attribute is used by pickle.whichmodule(),
354 which changes the behavior of whichmodule slightly. In Python 2.2
355 whichmodule() returns "__main__" for functions that are not defined
356 at the top-level of a module (examples: methods, nested functions).
357 Now whichmodule() will return the proper module name.
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +0000358
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000359Extension modules
360-----------------
361
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +0000362- operator.isNumberType() now checks that the object has a nb_int or
363 nb_float slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
364 tp_as_number pointer.
365
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +0000366- The imp module now has ways to acquire and release the "import
367 lock": imp.acquire_lock() and imp.release_lock(). Note: this is a
368 reentrant lock, so releasing the lock only truly releases it when
369 this is the last release_lock() call. You can check with
370 imp.lock_held(). (SF bug #580952 and patch #683257.)
371
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +0000372- Change to cPickle to match pickle.py (see below and PEP 307).
373
Neal Norwitz9caf9c02003-02-10 01:54:06 +0000374- Fix some bugs in the parser module. SF bug #678518.
375
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +0000376- Thanks to Scott David Daniels, a subtle bug in how the zlib
Walter Dörwald28d81962003-02-03 20:53:14 +0000377 extension implemented flush() was fixed. Scott also rewrote the
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +0000378 zlib test suite using the unittest module. (SF bug #640230 and
379 patch #678531.)
380
Raymond Hettinger96ef8112003-02-01 00:10:11 +0000381- Added an itertools module containing high speed, memory efficient
382 looping constructs inspired by tools from Haskell and SML.
383
Guido van Rossum99d4abf2003-01-27 22:22:50 +0000384- The SSL module now handles sockets with a timeout set correctly (SF
385 patch #675750, fixing SF bug #675552).
386
Barry Warsawf8ba39c2003-01-07 20:55:26 +0000387- os/posixmodule has grown the sysexits.h constants (EX_OK and friends).
388
Guido van Rossum6d0d3652003-01-07 20:34:19 +0000389- Fixed broken threadstate swap in readline that could cause fatal
390 errors when a readline hook was being invoked while a background
391 thread was active. (SF bugs #660476 and #513033.)
392
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000393- fcntl now exposes the strops.h I_* constants.
394
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +0000395- Fix a crash on Solaris that occurred when calling close() on
396 an mmap'ed file which was already closed. (SF patch #665913)
397
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +0000398- Fixed several serious bugs in the zipimport implementation.
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +0000399
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +0000400- datetime changes:
401
Guido van Rossum8b7a9a32003-04-14 22:01:58 +0000402 The date class is now properly subclassable. (SF bug #720908)
403
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +0000404 The datetime and datetimetz classes have been collapsed into a single
405 datetime class, and likewise the time and timetz classes into a single
406 time class. Previously, a datetimetz object with tzinfo=None acted
407 exactly like a datetime object, and similarly for timetz. This wasn't
408 enough of a difference to justify distinct classes, and life is simpler
409 now.
410
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +0000411 today() and now() now round system timestamps to the closest
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +0000412 microsecond <http://www.python.org/sf/661086>. This repairs an
413 irritation most likely seen on Windows systems.
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +0000414
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +0000415 In dt.astimezone(tz), if tz.utcoffset(dt) returns a duration,
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +0000416 ValueError is raised if tz.dst(dt) returns None (2.3a1 treated it
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +0000417 as 0 instead, but a tzinfo subclass wishing to participate in
418 time zone conversion has to take a stand on whether it supports
419 DST; if you don't care about DST, then code dst() to return 0 minutes,
420 meaning that DST is never in effect).
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +0000421
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +0000422 The tzinfo methods utcoffset() and dst() must return a timedelta object
423 (or None) now. In 2.3a1 they could also return an int or long, but that
424 was an unhelpfully redundant leftover from an earlier version wherein
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +0000425 they couldn't return a timedelta. TOOWTDI.
426
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +0000427 The example tzinfo class for local time had a bug. It was replaced
428 by a later example coded by Guido.
429
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +0000430 datetime.astimezone(tz) no longer raises an exception when the
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +0000431 input datetime has no UTC equivalent in tz. For typical "hybrid" time
432 zones (a single tzinfo subclass modeling both standard and daylight
433 time), this case can arise one hour per year, at the hour daylight time
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +0000434 ends. See new docs for details. In short, the new behavior mimics
435 the local wall clock's behavior of repeating an hour in local time.
436
437 dt.astimezone() can no longer be used to convert between naive and aware
438 datetime objects. If you merely want to attach, or remove, a tzinfo
439 object, without any conversion of date and time members, use
440 dt.replace(tzinfo=whatever) instead, where "whatever" is None or a
441 tzinfo subclass instance.
442
443 A new method tzinfo.fromutc(dt) can be overridden in tzinfo subclasses
444 to give complete control over how a UTC time is to be converted to
445 a local time. The default astimezone() implementation calls fromutc()
446 as its last step, so a tzinfo subclass can affect that too by overriding
447 fromutc(). It's expected that the default fromutc() implementation will
448 be suitable as-is for "almost all" time zone subclasses, but the
449 creativity of political time zone fiddling appears unbounded -- fromutc()
450 allows the highly motivated to emulate any scheme expressible in Python.
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +0000451
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +0000452 datetime.now(): The optional tzinfo argument was undocumented (that's
453 repaired), and its name was changed to tz ("tzinfo" is overloaded enough
454 already). With a tz argument, now(tz) used to return the local date
455 and time, and attach tz to it, without any conversion of date and time
456 members. This was less than useful. Now now(tz) returns the current
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +0000457 date and time as local time in tz's time zone, akin to ::
458
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +0000459 tz.fromutc(datetime.utcnow().replace(tzinfo=utc))
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +0000460
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +0000461 where "utc" is an instance of a tzinfo subclass modeling UTC. Without
462 a tz argument, now() continues to return the current local date and time,
463 as a naive datetime object.
464
Tim Peters2a44a8d2003-01-23 20:53:10 +0000465 datetime.fromtimestamp(): Like datetime.now() above, this had less than
466 useful behavior when the optional tinzo argument was specified. See
467 also SF bug report <http://www.python.org/sf/660872>.
468
Tim Peters8d81a012003-01-24 22:36:34 +0000469 date and datetime comparison: In order to prevent comparison from
470 falling back to the default compare-object-addresses strategy, these
471 raised TypeError whenever they didn't understand the other object type.
472 They still do, except when the other object has a "timetuple" attribute,
473 in which case they return NotImplemented now. This gives other
474 datetime objects (e.g., mxDateTime) a chance to intercept the
475 comparison.
476
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +0000477 date, time, datetime and timedelta comparison: When the exception
478 for mixed-type comparisons in the last paragraph doesn't apply, if
479 the comparison is == then False is returned, and if the comparison is
480 != then True is returned. Because dict lookup and the "in" operator
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +0000481 only invoke __eq__, this allows, for example, ::
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +0000482
483 if some_datetime in some_sequence:
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +0000484
485 and ::
486
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +0000487 some_dict[some_timedelta] = whatever
488
489 to work as expected, without raising TypeError just because the
490 sequence is heterogeneous, or the dict has mixed-type keys. [This
491 seems like a good idea to implement for all mixed-type comparisons
492 that don't want to allow falling back to address comparison.]
493
Tim Peters75a6e3b2003-01-04 18:17:36 +0000494 The constructors building a datetime from a timestamp could raise
495 ValueError if the platform C localtime()/gmtime() inserted "leap
496 seconds". Leap seconds are ignored now. On such platforms, it's
497 possible to have timestamps that differ by a second, yet where
498 datetimes constructed from them are equal.
499
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +0000500 The pickle format of date, time and datetime objects has changed
501 completely. The undocumented pickler and unpickler functions no
Tim Petersb57f8f02003-02-01 02:54:15 +0000502 longer exist. The undocumented __setstate__() and __getstate__()
503 methods no longer exist either.
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +0000504
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000505Library
506-------
507
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +0000508- The logging module was updated slightly; the WARN level was renamed
509 to WARNING, and the matching function/method warn() to warning().
510
511- The pickle and cPickle modules were updated with a new pickling
512 protocol (documented by pickletools.py, see below) and several
513 extensions to the pickle customization API (__reduce__, __setstate__
514 etc.). The copy module now uses more of the pickle customization
515 API to copy objects that don't implement __copy__ or __deepcopy__.
516 See PEP 307 for details.
517
518- The distutils "register" command now uses http://www.python.org/pypi
519 as the default repository. (See PEP 301.)
520
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +0000521- the platform dependent path related variables sep, altsep, extsep,
522 pathsep, curdir, pardir and defpath are now defined in the platform
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +0000523 dependent path modules (e.g. ntpath.py) rather than os.py, so these
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +0000524 variables are now available via os.path. They continue to be
525 available from the os module.
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +0000526 (see <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +0000527
Tim Peters6ee04802003-02-05 18:29:34 +0000528- array.array was added to the types repr.py knows about (see
529 <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
530
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +0000531- The new pickletools.py contains lots of documentation about pickle
532 internals, and supplies some helpers for working with pickles, such as
533 a symbolic pickle disassembler.
534
Skip Montanaro9a7c96a2003-01-22 18:17:25 +0000535- Xmlrpclib.py now supports the builtin boolean type.
536
Martin v. Löwis0c6774d2003-01-15 11:51:06 +0000537- py_compile has a new 'doraise' flag and a new PyCompileError
538 exception.
539
Martin v. Löwisd69663d2003-01-15 11:37:23 +0000540- SimpleXMLRPCServer now supports CGI through the CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler
541 class.
542
Guido van Rossum50e92232003-01-14 16:45:04 +0000543- The sets module now raises TypeError in __cmp__, to clarify that
544 sets are not intended to be three-way-compared; the comparison
545 operators are overloaded as subset/superset tests.
546
Guido van Rossumcd0c0472003-01-07 23:03:05 +0000547- Bastion.py and rexec.py are disabled. These modules are not safe in
548 Python 2.2. or 2.3.
549
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +0000550- realpath is now exported when doing ``from poxixpath import *``.
Neal Norwitzbb0246a2003-01-03 18:12:28 +0000551 It is also exported for ntpath, macpath, and os2emxpath.
552 See SF bug #659228.
553
Neal Norwitzb9ef4ae2003-01-05 23:19:43 +0000554- New module tarfile from Lars Gustäbel provides a comprehensive interface
555 to tar archive files with transparent gzip and bzip2 compression.
556 See SF patch #651082.
557
Neal Norwitz4f442372003-01-06 06:51:36 +0000558- urlparse can now parse imap:// URLs. See SF feature request #618024.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +0000559
Neal Norwitze931ed52003-01-10 23:24:32 +0000560- Tkinter.Canvas.scan_dragto() provides an optional parameter to support
561 the gain value which is passed to Tk. SF bug# 602259.
562
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +0000563- Fix logging.handlers.SysLogHandler protocol when using UNIX domain sockets.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +0000564 See SF patch #642974.
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +0000565
Skip Montanaro12fe72e2003-02-25 17:46:20 +0000566- The dospath module was deleted. Use the ntpath module when manipulating
567 DOS paths from other platforms.
568
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000569Tools/Demos
570-----------
571
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +0000572- Two new scripts (db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py) were added to the
573 Tools/scripts directory to facilitate conversion from the old bsddb module
574 to the new one. While the user-visible API of the new module is
575 compatible with the old one, it's likely that the version of the
576 underlying database library has changed. To convert from the old library,
577 run the db2pickle.py script using the old version of Python to convert it
578 to a pickle file. After upgrading Python, run the pickle2db.py script
579 using the new version of Python to reconstitute your database. For
580 example:
581
Skip Montanaro621f0552003-02-03 15:48:10 +0000582 % python2.2 db2pickle.py -h some.db > some.pickle
583 % python2.3 pickle2db.py -h some.db.new < some.pickle
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +0000584
585 Run the scripts without any args to get a usage message.
586
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +0000587
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000588Build
589-----
590
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +0000591- The audio driver tests (test_ossaudiodev.py and
592 test_linuxaudiodev.py) are no longer run by default. This is
593 because they don't always work, depending on your hardware and
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +0000594 software. To run these tests, you must use an invocation like ::
595
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +0000596 ./python Lib/test/regrtest.py -u audio test_ossaudiodev
597
Skip Montanarodecc6a42003-01-01 20:07:49 +0000598- On systems which build using the configure script, compiler flags which
599 used to be lumped together using the OPT flag have been split into two
600 groups, OPT and BASECFLAGS. OPT is meant to carry just optimization- and
601 debug-related flags like "-g" and "-O3". BASECFLAGS is meant to carry
602 compiler flags that are required to get a clean compile. On some
603 platforms (many Linux flavors in particular) BASECFLAGS will be empty by
604 default. On others, such as Mac OS X and SCO, it will contain required
605 flags. This change allows people building Python to override OPT without
606 fear of clobbering compiler flags which are required to get a clean build.
607
608- On Darwin/Mac OS X platforms, /sw/lib and /sw/include are added to the
609 relevant search lists in setup.py. This allows users building Python to
610 take advantage of the many packages available from the fink project
611 <http://fink.sf.net/>.
612
613- A new Makefile target, scriptsinstall, installs a number of useful scripts
614 from the Tools/scripts directory.
615
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000616C API
617-----
618
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +0000619- PyEval_GetFrame() is now declared to return a ``PyFrameObject *``
620 instead of a plain ``PyObject *``. (SF patch #686601.)
Guido van Rossum6297a7a2003-02-19 15:53:17 +0000621
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +0000622- PyNumber_Check() now checks that the object has a nb_int or nb_float
623 slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
624 tp_as_number pointer.
625
Guido van Rossumeea47182003-02-11 20:39:59 +0000626- A C type that inherits from a base type that defines tp_as_buffer
627 will now inherit the tp_as_buffer pointer if it doesn't define one.
628 (SF #681367)
629
Neil Schemenauer5042da62003-02-04 20:59:40 +0000630- The PyArg_Parse functions now issue a DeprecationWarning if a float
631 argument is provided when an integer is specified (this affects the 'b',
632 'B', 'h', 'H', 'i', and 'l' codes). Future versions of Python will
633 raise a TypeError.
Neil Schemenauercd63e612003-01-24 22:15:53 +0000634
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000635Tests
636-----
637
Walter Dörwald11cfbd62003-03-26 16:03:16 +0000638- Several tests weren't being run from regrtest.py (test_timeout.py,
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +0000639 test_tarfile.py, test_netrc.py, test_multifile.py,
640 test_importhooks.py and test_imp.py). Now they are. (Note to
641 developers: please read Lib/test/README when creating a new test, to
642 make sure to do it right! All tests need to use either unittest or
643 pydoc.)
644
645- Added test_posix.py, a test suite for the posix module.
646
647- Added test_hexoct.py, a test suite for hex/oct constant folding.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +0000648
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000649Windows
650-------
651
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +0000652- The timeout code for socket connect() didn't work right; this has
653 now been fixed. test_timeout.py should pass (at least most of the
654 time).
655
Thomas Hellerdda583d2003-01-31 20:45:41 +0000656- distutils' msvccompiler class now passes the preprocessor options to
657 the resource compiler. See SF patch #669198.
658
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +0000659- The bsddb module now ships with Sleepycat's 4.1.25.NC, the latest
660 release without strong cryptography.
661
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +0000662- sys.path[0], if it contains a directory name, is now always an
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +0000663 absolute pathname. (SF patch #664376.)
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +0000664
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +0000665- The new logging package is now installed by the Windows installer. It
666 wasn't in 2.3a1 due to oversight.
667
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000668Mac
669---
670
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +0000671- There are new dialogs EasyDialogs.AskFileForOpen, AskFileForSave
672 and AskFolder. The old macfs.StandardGetFile and friends are deprecated.
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +0000673
Jack Jansenc9296362003-02-06 23:10:45 +0000674- Most of the standard library now uses pathnames or FSRefs in preference
675 of FSSpecs, and use the underlying Carbon.File and Carbon.Folder modules
676 in stead of macfs. macfs will probably be deprecated in the future.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +0000677
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +0000678- Type Carbon.File.FSCatalogInfo and supporting methods have been implemented.
679 This also makes macfs.FSSpec.SetDates() work again.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +0000680
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +0000681- There is a new module pimp, the package install manager for Python, and
682 accompanying applet PackageManager. These allow you to easily download
683 and install pretested extension packages either in source or binary
684 form. Only in MacPython-OSX.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +0000685
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +0000686- Applets are now built with bundlebuilder in MacPython-OSX, which should make
Jack Jansen5d44b342003-02-18 23:32:47 +0000687 them more robust and also provides a path towards BuildApplication. The
688 downside of this change is that applets can no longer be run from the
689 Terminal window, this will hopefully be fixed in the 2.3b1.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +0000690
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000691
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000692What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 1?
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000693=================================
694
Guido van Rossumae548862002-12-31 15:47:36 +0000695*Release date: 31-Dec-2002*
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000696
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000697Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000698--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +0000699
Michael W. Hudson96bc3b42002-11-26 14:48:23 +0000700- One can now assign to __bases__ and __name__ of new-style classes.
701
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +0000702- dict() now accepts keyword arguments so that dict(one=1, two=2)
703 is the equivalent of {"one": 1, "two": 2}. Accordingly,
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +0000704 the existing (but undocumented) 'items' keyword argument has
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +0000705 been eliminated. This means that dict(items=someMapping) now has
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +0000706 a different meaning than before.
707
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +0000708- int() now returns a long object if the argument is outside the
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +0000709 integer range, so int("4" * 1000), int(1e200) and int(1L<<1000) will
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +0000710 all return long objects instead of raising an OverflowError.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000711
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +0000712- Assignment to __class__ is disallowed if either the old or the new
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +0000713 class is a statically allocated type object (such as defined by an
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +0000714 extension module). This prevents anomalies like 2.__class__ = bool.
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +0000715
716- New-style object creation and deallocation have been sped up
717 significantly; they are now faster than classic instance creation
718 and deallocation.
719
720- The __slots__ variable can now mention "private" names, and the
721 right thing will happen (e.g. __slots__ = ["__foo"]).
722
723- The built-ins slice() and buffer() are now callable types. The
724 types classobj (formerly class), code, function, instance, and
725 instancemethod (formerly instance-method), which have no built-in
726 names but are accessible through the types module, are now also
727 callable. The type dict-proxy is renamed to dictproxy.
728
729- Cycles going through the __class__ link of a new-style instance are
730 now detected by the garbage collector.
731
732- Classes using __slots__ are now properly garbage collected.
733 [SF bug 519621]
734
735- Tightened the __slots__ rules: a slot name must be a valid Python
736 identifier.
737
738- The constructor for the module type now requires a name argument and
739 takes an optional docstring argument. Previously, this constructor
740 ignored its arguments. As a consequence, deriving a class from a
741 module (not from the module type) is now illegal; previously this
742 created an unnamed module, just like invoking the module type did.
743 [SF bug 563060]
744
745- A new type object, 'basestring', is added. This is a common base type
746 for 'str' and 'unicode', and can be used instead of
747 types.StringTypes, e.g. to test whether something is "a string":
748 isinstance(x, basestring) is True for Unicode and 8-bit strings. This
749 is an abstract base class and cannot be instantiated directly.
750
751- Changed new-style class instantiation so that when C's __new__
752 method returns something that's not a C instance, its __init__ is
753 not called. [SF bug #537450]
754
755- Fixed super() to work correctly with class methods. [SF bug #535444]
756
757- If you try to pickle an instance of a class that has __slots__ but
758 doesn't define or override __getstate__, a TypeError is now raised.
759 This is done by adding a bozo __getstate__ to the class that always
760 raises TypeError. (Before, this would appear to be pickled, but the
761 state of the slots would be lost.)
762
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000763Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000764-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000765
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +0000766- Import from zipfiles is now supported. The name of a zipfile placed
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +0000767 on sys.path causes the import statement to look for importable Python
768 modules (with .py, pyc and .pyo extensions) and packages inside the
769 zipfile. The zipfile import follows the specification (though not
770 the sample implementation) of PEP 273. The semantics of __path__ are
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +0000771 compatible with those that have been implemented in Jython since
772 Jython 2.1.
773
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +0000774- PEP 302 has been accepted. Although it was initially developed to
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +0000775 support zipimport, it offers a new, general import hook mechanism.
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +0000776 Several new variables have been added to the sys module:
777 sys.meta_path, sys.path_hooks, and sys.path_importer_cache; these
778 make extending the import statement much more convenient than
779 overriding the __import__ built-in function. For a description of
780 these, see PEP 302.
781
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +0000782- A frame object's f_lineno attribute can now be written to from a
783 trace function to change which line will execute next. A command to
784 exploit this from pdb has been added. [SF patch #643835]
785
Marc-André Lemburg20b91352002-12-12 18:01:43 +0000786- The _codecs support module for codecs.py was turned into a builtin
787 module to assure that at least the builtin codecs are available
788 to the Python parser for source code decoding according to PEP 263.
789
Walter Dörwaldd9a6ad32002-12-12 16:41:44 +0000790- issubclass now supports a tuple as the second argument, just like
791 isinstance does. ``issubclass(X, (A, B))`` is equivalent to
792 ``issubclass(X, A) or issubclass(X, B)``.
793
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +0000794- Thanks to Armin Rigo, the last known way to provoke a system crash
795 by cleverly arranging for a comparison function to mutate a list
796 during a list.sort() operation has been fixed. The effect of
797 attempting to mutate a list, or even to inspect its contents or
798 length, while a sort is in progress, is not defined by the language.
799 The C implementation of Python 2.3 attempts to detect mutations,
800 and raise ValueError if one occurs, but there's no guarantee that
801 all mutations will be caught, or that any will be caught across
802 releases or implementations.
803
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +0000804- Unicode file name processing for Windows (PEP 277) is implemented.
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +0000805 All platforms now have an os.path.supports_unicode_filenames attribute,
806 which is set to True on Windows NT/2000/XP, and False elsewhere.
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +0000807
Walter Dörwald3aeb6322002-09-02 13:14:32 +0000808- Codec error handling callbacks (PEP 293) are implemented.
809 Error handling in unicode.encode or str.decode can now be customized.
810
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +0000811- A subtle change to the semantics of the built-in function intern():
812 interned strings are no longer immortal. You must keep a reference
813 to the return value intern() around to get the benefit.
814
Guido van Rossumf808b892002-08-16 03:38:10 +0000815- Use of 'None' as a variable, argument or attribute name now
816 issues a SyntaxWarning. In the future, None may become a keyword.
817
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +0000818- SET_LINENO is gone. co_lnotab is now consulted to determine when to
819 call the trace function. C code that accessed f_lineno should call
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +0000820 PyCode_Addr2Line instead (f_lineno is still there, but only kept up
821 to date when there is a trace function set).
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +0000822
Guido van Rossum9be89462002-08-14 16:11:30 +0000823- There's a new warning category, FutureWarning. This is used to warn
824 about a number of situations where the value or sign of an integer
825 result will change in Python 2.4 as a result of PEP 237 (integer
826 unification). The warnings implement stage B0 mentioned in that
827 PEP. The warnings are about the following situations:
828
829 - Octal and hex literals without 'L' prefix in the inclusive range
830 [0x80000000..0xffffffff]; these are currently negative ints, but
831 in Python 2.4 they will be positive longs with the same bit
832 pattern.
833
834 - Left shifts on integer values that cause the outcome to lose
835 bits or have a different sign than the left operand. To be
836 precise: x<<n where this currently doesn't yield the same value
837 as long(x)<<n; in Python 2.4, the outcome will be long(x)<<n.
838
839 - Conversions from ints to string that show negative values as
840 unsigned ints in the inclusive range [0x80000000..0xffffffff];
841 this affects the functions hex() and oct(), and the string
842 formatting codes %u, %o, %x, and %X. In Python 2.4, these will
843 show signed values (e.g. hex(-1) currently returns "0xffffffff";
844 in Python 2.4 it will return "-0x1").
845
Guido van Rossum9a2eda52002-12-31 02:12:42 +0000846- The bits manipulated under the cover by sys.setcheckinterval() have
847 been changed. Both the check interval and the ticker used to be
848 per-thread values. They are now just a pair of global variables.
849 In addition, the default check interval was boosted from 10 to 100
850 bytecode instructions. This may have some effect on systems that
851 relied on the old default value. In particular, in multi-threaded
852 applications which try to be highly responsive, response time will
853 increase by some (perhaps imperceptible) amount.
Skip Montanaro979c74b2002-09-03 21:25:14 +0000854
Tim Petersd64c1de2002-08-12 17:36:03 +0000855- When multiplying very large integers, a version of the so-called
856 Karatsuba algorithm is now used. This is most effective if the
857 inputs have roughly the same size. If they both have about N digits,
858 Karatsuba multiplication has O(N**1.58) runtime (the exponent is
859 log_base_2(3)) instead of the previous O(N**2). Measured results may
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +0000860 be better or worse than that, depending on platform quirks. Besides
861 the O() improvement in raw instruction count, the Karatsuba algorithm
862 appears to have much better cache behavior on extremely large integers
863 (starting in the ballpark of a million bits). Note that this is a
864 simple implementation, and there's no intent here to compete with,
865 e.g., GMP. It gives a very nice speedup when it applies, but a package
866 devoted to fast large-integer arithmetic should run circles around it.
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +0000867
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +0000868- u'%c' will now raise a ValueError in case the argument is an
869 integer outside the valid range of Unicode code point ordinals.
870
Guido van Rossumdeb09362002-08-09 17:16:30 +0000871- The tempfile module has been overhauled for enhanced security. The
872 mktemp() function is now deprecated; new, safe replacements are
873 mkstemp() (for files) and mkdtemp() (for directories), and the
874 higher-level functions NamedTemporaryFile() and TemporaryFile().
875 Use of some global variables in this module is also deprecated; the
876 new functions have keyword arguments to provide the same
877 functionality. All Lib, Tools and Demo modules that used the unsafe
878 interfaces have been updated to use the safe replacements. Thanks
879 to Zack Weinberg!
880
Guido van Rossumd81a9832002-08-09 15:57:34 +0000881- When x is an object whose class implements __mul__ and __rmul__,
882 1.0*x would correctly invoke __rmul__, but 1*x would erroneously
883 invoke __mul__. This was due to the sequence-repeat code in the int
884 type. This has been fixed now.
885
Barry Warsawd79f6832002-08-06 17:01:51 +0000886- Previously, "str1 in str2" required str1 to be a string of length 1.
887 This restriction has been relaxed to allow str1 to be a string of
888 any length. Thus "'el' in 'hello world'" returns True now.
889
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +0000890- File objects are now their own iterators. For a file f, iter(f) now
891 returns f (unless f is closed), and f.next() is similar to
892 f.readline() when EOF is not reached; however, f.next() uses a
893 readahead buffer that messes up the file position, so mixing
894 f.next() and f.readline() (or other methods) doesn't work right.
895 Calling f.seek() drops the readahead buffer, but other operations
896 don't. It so happens that this gives a nice additional speed boost
897 to "for line in file:"; the xreadlines method and corresponding
Guido van Rossumbffb2ef2002-08-09 17:17:07 +0000898 module are now obsolete. Thanks to Oren Tirosh!
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +0000899
Guido van Rossumde392d32002-08-05 14:17:20 +0000900- Encoding declarations (PEP 263, phase 1) have been implemented. A
901 comment of the form "# -*- coding: <encodingname> -*-" in the first
902 or second line of a Python source file indicates the encoding.
Martin v. Löwis00f1e3f2002-08-04 17:29:52 +0000903
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +0000904- list.sort() has a new implementation. While cross-platform results
905 may vary, and in data-dependent ways, this is much faster on many
906 kinds of partially ordered lists than the previous implementation,
907 and reported to be just as fast on randomly ordered lists on
908 several major platforms. This sort is also stable (if A==B and A
909 precedes B in the list at the start, A precedes B after the sort too),
910 although the language definition does not guarantee stability. A
911 potential drawback is that list.sort() may require temp space of
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +0000912 len(list)*2 bytes (``*4`` on a 64-bit machine). It's therefore possible
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +0000913 for list.sort() to raise MemoryError now, even if a comparison function
914 does not. See <http://www.python.org/sf/587076> for full details.
915
Guido van Rossum2d5389c2002-07-23 03:44:35 +0000916- All standard iterators now ensure that, once StopIteration has been
917 raised, all future calls to next() on the same iterator will also
918 raise StopIteration. There used to be various counterexamples to
919 this behavior, which could caused confusion or subtle program
920 breakage, without any benefits. (Note that this is still an
921 iterator's responsibility; the iterator framework does not enforce
922 this.)
923
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +0000924- Ctrl+C handling on Windows has been made more consistent with
925 other platforms. KeyboardInterrupt can now reliably be caught,
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +0000926 and Ctrl+C at an interactive prompt no longer terminates the
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +0000927 process under NT/2k/XP (it never did under Win9x). Ctrl+C will
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +0000928 interrupt time.sleep() in the main thread, and any child processes
929 created via the popen family (on win2k; we can't make win9x work
Mark Hammond8f3afc72002-08-10 06:26:31 +0000930 reliably) are also interrupted (as generally happens on for Linux/Unix.)
931 [SF bugs 231273, 439992 and 581232]
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +0000932
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +0000933- sys.getwindowsversion() has been added on Windows. This
934 returns a tuple with information about the version of Windows
935 currently running.
936
Raymond Hettinger5a04aec2002-06-25 00:25:30 +0000937- Slices and repetitions of buffer objects now consistently return
938 a string. Formerly, strings would be returned most of the time,
939 but a buffer object would be returned when the repetition count
940 was one or when the slice range was all inclusive.
941
Walter Dörwald3430d702002-06-17 10:43:59 +0000942- Unicode objects in sys.path are no longer ignored but treated
943 as directory names.
944
Neal Norwitz1f68fc72002-06-14 00:50:42 +0000945- Fixed string.startswith and string.endswith builtin methods
946 so they accept negative indices. [SF bug 493951]
947
Guido van Rossumc5fe5eb2002-06-12 03:45:21 +0000948- Fixed a bug with a continue inside a try block and a yield in the
949 finally clause. [SF bug 567538]
950
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +0000951- Most builtin sequences now support "extended slices", i.e. slices
Guido van Rossum2e82e712002-06-13 11:41:07 +0000952 with a third "stride" parameter. For example, "hello world"[::-1]
953 gives "dlrow olleh".
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +0000954
Neal Norwitzd68f5172002-05-29 15:54:55 +0000955- A new warning PendingDeprecationWarning was added to provide
956 direction on features which are in the process of being deprecated.
957 The warning will not be printed by default. To see the pending
958 deprecations, use -Walways::PendingDeprecationWarning::
959 as a command line option or warnings.filterwarnings() in code.
960
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +0000961- Deprecated features of xrange objects have been removed as
962 promised. The start, stop, and step attributes and the tolist()
963 method no longer exist. xrange repetition and slicing have been
964 removed.
965
Guido van Rossum7dab2422002-04-26 19:40:56 +0000966- New builtin function enumerate(x), from PEP 279. Example:
967 enumerate("abc") is an iterator returning (0,"a"), (1,"b"), (2,"c").
968 The argument can be an arbitrary iterable object.
969
Neil Schemenauer89e3ee02002-04-26 01:58:53 +0000970- The assert statement no longer tests __debug__ at runtime. This means
971 that assert statements cannot be disabled by assigning a false value
972 to __debug__.
973
Walter Dörwald068325e2002-04-15 13:36:47 +0000974- A method zfill() was added to str and unicode, that fills a numeric
975 string to the left with zeros. For example,
976 "+123".zfill(6) -> "+00123".
977
Guido van Rossum862fe3c2002-04-15 12:36:47 +0000978- Complex numbers supported divmod() and the // and % operators, but
979 these make no sense. Since this was documented, they're being
980 deprecated now.
981
Guido van Rossum26dd8302002-04-26 20:11:29 +0000982- String and unicode methods lstrip(), rstrip() and strip() now take
983 an optional argument that specifies the characters to strip. For
984 example, "Foo!!!?!?!?".rstrip("?!") -> "Foo".
Guido van Rossum49042042002-04-13 00:59:05 +0000985
Guido van Rossumc0d3f4e2002-11-27 13:10:40 +0000986- There's a new dictionary constructor (a class method of the dict
987 class), dict.fromkeys(iterable, value=None). It constructs a
988 dictionary with keys taken from the iterable and all values set to a
989 single value. It can be used for building sets and for removing
990 duplicates from sequences.
Raymond Hettingere33d3df2002-11-27 07:29:33 +0000991
Guido van Rossumc69343b2002-04-12 19:22:48 +0000992- Added a new dict method pop(key). This removes and returns the
993 value corresponding to key. [SF patch #539949]
994
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +0000995- A new built-in type, bool, has been added, as well as built-in
996 names for its two values, True and False. Comparisons and sundry
997 other operations that return a truth value have been changed to
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +0000998 return a bool instead. Read PEP 285 for an explanation of why this
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +0000999 is backward compatible.
1000
Guido van Rossum95b62a62002-03-29 01:07:24 +00001001- Fixed two bugs reported as SF #535905: under certain conditions,
1002 deallocating a deeply nested structure could cause a segfault in the
1003 garbage collector, due to interaction with the "trashcan" code;
1004 access to the current frame during destruction of a local variable
1005 could access a pointer to freed memory.
1006
Guido van Rossumfe0ca4a2002-06-18 21:20:13 +00001007- The optional object allocator ("pymalloc") has been enabled by
1008 default. The recommended practice for memory allocation and
1009 deallocation has been streamlined. A header file is included,
1010 Misc/pymemcompat.h, which can be bundled with 3rd party extensions
1011 and lets them use the same API with Python versions from 1.5.2
1012 onwards.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00001013
Martin v. Löwiscfeb3b62002-03-03 21:30:27 +00001014- PyErr_Display will provide file and line information for all exceptions
1015 that have an attribute print_file_and_line, not just SyntaxErrors.
1016
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00001017- The UTF-8 codec will now encode and decode Unicode surrogates
1018 correctly and without raising exceptions for unpaired ones.
1019
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00001020- Universal newlines (PEP 278) is implemented. Briefly, using 'U'
1021 instead of 'r' when opening a text file for reading changes the line
1022 ending convention so that any of '\r', '\r\n', and '\n' is
1023 recognized (even mixed in one file); all three are converted to
1024 '\n', the standard Python line end character.
1025
Neal Norwitz649b7592002-01-01 19:07:13 +00001026- file.xreadlines() now raises a ValueError if the file is closed:
1027 Previously, an xreadlines object was returned which would raise
1028 a ValueError when the xreadlines.next() method was called.
1029
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00001030- sys.exit() inadvertently allowed more than one argument.
Neal Norwitz0c766a02002-03-27 13:03:09 +00001031 An exception will now be raised if more than one argument is used.
1032
Gustavo Niemeyer17c5a332002-12-16 14:09:22 +00001033- Changed evaluation order of dictionary literals to conform to the
1034 general left to right evaluation order rule. Now {f1(): f2()} will
1035 evaluate f1 first.
Gustavo Niemeyer78429a62002-12-16 13:54:02 +00001036
Gustavo Niemeyer786ddb22002-12-16 18:12:53 +00001037- Fixed bug #521782: when a file was in non-blocking mode, file.read()
1038 could silently lose data or wrongly throw an unknown error.
1039
Neil Schemenauerb983aa02002-12-30 20:22:23 +00001040- The sq_repeat, sq_inplace_repeat, sq_concat and sq_inplace_concat
1041 slots are now always tried after trying the corresponding nb_* slots.
1042 This fixes a number of minor bugs (see bug #624807).
1043
Neal Norwitz74a032e2003-01-10 23:29:48 +00001044- Fix problem with dynamic loading on 64-bit AIX (see bug #639945).
1045
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001046Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001047-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001048
Raymond Hettinger9543b342003-01-18 23:22:20 +00001049- Added three operators to the operator module:
1050 operator.pow(a,b) which is equivalent to: a**b.
1051 operator.is_(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is b.
1052 operator.is_not(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is not b.
1053
Martin v. Löwis24a880b2002-12-31 12:55:15 +00001054- posix.openpty now works on all systems that have /dev/ptmx.
1055
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00001056- A module zipimport exists to support importing code from zip
1057 archives.
1058
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00001059- The new datetime module supplies classes for manipulating dates and
1060 times. The basic design came from the Zope "fishbowl process", and
1061 favors practical commercial applications over calendar esoterica. See
1062
1063 http://www.zope.org/Members/fdrake/DateTimeWiki/FrontPage
1064
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00001065- _tkinter now returns Tcl objects, instead of strings. Objects which
1066 have Python equivalents are converted to Python objects, other objects
1067 are wrapped. This can be configured through the wantobjects method,
Martin v. Löwis8c8aa5d2002-11-26 21:39:48 +00001068 or Tkinter.wantobjects.
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00001069
Barry Warsawc27f4bd2002-12-30 21:03:26 +00001070- The PyBSDDB wrapper around the Sleepycat Berkeley DB library has
1071 been added as the package bsddb. The traditional bsddb module is
1072 still available in source code, but not built automatically anymore,
1073 and is now named bsddb185. This supports Berkeley DB versions from
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00001074 3.0 to 4.1. For help converting your databases from the old module (which
1075 probably used an obsolete version of Berkeley DB) to the new module, see
1076 the db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py scripts described in the Tools/Demos
1077 section above.
Martin v. Löwisef546b32002-11-19 08:12:57 +00001078
Martin v. Löwis677bde22002-11-23 22:08:15 +00001079- unicodedata was updated to Unicode 3.2. It supports normalization
1080 and names for Hangul syllables and CJK unified ideographs.
Martin v. Löwis7d41e292002-11-23 12:22:32 +00001081
Neal Norwitz94a83fd2002-11-02 17:46:24 +00001082- resource.getrlimit() now returns longs instead of ints.
1083
Martin v. Löwis080689c2002-10-26 14:42:02 +00001084- readline now dynamically adjusts its input/output stream if
1085 sys.stdin/stdout changes.
1086
Guido van Rossumba602972002-10-01 18:18:58 +00001087- The _tkinter module (and hence Tkinter) has dropped support for
1088 Tcl/Tk 8.0 and 8.1. Only Tcl/Tk versions 8.2, 8.3 and 8.4 are
1089 supported.
1090
Martin v. Löwis658009a2002-09-16 17:26:24 +00001091- cPickle.BadPickleGet is now a class.
1092
Martin v. Löwisa19bfe02002-10-16 18:28:36 +00001093- The time stamps in os.stat_result are floating point numbers
1094 after stat_float_times has been called.
Martin v. Löwis94717ed2002-09-09 14:24:16 +00001095
Neal Norwitzb5673922002-09-05 21:48:07 +00001096- If the size passed to mmap.mmap() is larger than the length of the
1097 file on non-Windows platforms, a ValueError is raised. [SF bug 585792]
1098
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00001099- The xreadlines module is slated for obsolescence.
1100
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00001101- The strptime function in the time module is now always available (a
1102 Python implementation is used when the C library doesn't define it).
1103
Guido van Rossum9562bcf2002-06-14 21:31:18 +00001104- The 'new' module is no longer an extension, but a Python module that
1105 only exists for backwards compatibility. Its contents are no longer
1106 functions but callable type objects.
1107
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00001108- The bsddb.*open functions can now take 'None' as a filename.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00001109 This will create a temporary in-memory bsddb that won't be
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00001110 written to disk.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00001111
Martin v. Löwisb96152c2002-12-31 13:20:15 +00001112- posix.getloadavg, posix.lchown, posix.killpg, posix.mknod, and
1113 posix.getpgid have been added where available.
Martin v. Löwis06a83e92002-04-14 10:19:44 +00001114
Martin v. Löwisf0a46682002-11-03 17:20:12 +00001115- The locale module now exposes the C library's gettext interface. It
1116 also has a new function getpreferredencoding.
Martin v. Löwis2e64c342002-03-27 18:49:02 +00001117
Tim Petersfbf74f22002-03-14 19:06:01 +00001118- A security hole ("double free") was found in zlib-1.1.3, a popular
1119 third party compression library used by some Python modules. The
1120 hole was quickly plugged in zlib-1.1.4, and the Windows build of
1121 Python now ships with zlib-1.1.4.
1122
Martin v. Löwis688357e2002-04-08 21:28:20 +00001123- pwd, grp, and resource return enhanced tuples now, with symbolic
1124 field names.
Martin v. Löwis29001ff2002-03-01 10:47:37 +00001125
Martin v. Löwis99866332002-03-01 10:27:01 +00001126- array.array is now a type object. A new format character
1127 'u' indicates Py_UNICODE arrays. For those, .tounicode and
1128 .fromunicode methods are available. Arrays now support __iadd__
1129 and __imul__.
1130
Neal Norwitze790eae2002-01-01 21:14:12 +00001131- dl now builds on every system that has dlfcn.h. Failure in case
Martin v. Löwis93227272002-01-01 20:18:30 +00001132 of sizeof(int)!=sizeof(long)!=sizeof(void*) is delayed until dl.open
1133 is called.
1134
Skip Montanaro8e790e72002-09-03 13:25:17 +00001135- The sys module acquired a new attribute, api_version, which evaluates
1136 to the value of the PYTHON_API_VERSION macro with which the
1137 interpreter was compiled.
1138
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00001139- Fixed bug #470582: sre module would return a tuple (None, 'a', 'ab')
1140 when applying the regular expression '^((a)c)?(ab)$' on 'ab'. It now
1141 returns (None, None, 'ab'), as expected. Also fixed handling of
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00001142 lastindex/lastgroup match attributes in similar cases. For example,
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00001143 when running the expression r'(a)(b)?b' over 'ab', lastindex must be
1144 1, not 2.
1145
Gustavo Niemeyerc523b042002-11-07 03:28:56 +00001146- Fixed bug #581080: sre scanner was not checking the buffer limit
1147 before increasing the current pointer. This was creating an infinite
1148 loop in the search function, once the pointer exceeded the buffer
1149 limit.
1150
Thomas Heller95cb7e42002-11-07 16:23:55 +00001151- The os.fdopen function now enforces a file mode starting with the
1152 letter 'r', 'w' or 'a', otherwise a ValueError is raised. This fixes
1153 bug #623464.
1154
Greg Ward6c58d462003-01-03 18:02:15 +00001155- The linuxaudiodev module is now deprecated; it is being replaced by
1156 ossaudiodev. The interface has been extended to cover a lot more of
1157 OSS (see www.opensound.com), including most DSP ioctls and the
1158 OSS mixer API. Documentation forthcoming in 2.3a2.
1159
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001160Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001161-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001162
Guido van Rossum747f8062003-01-03 16:33:49 +00001163- imaplib.py now supports SSL (Tino Lange and Piers Lauder).
1164
Just van Rossum5e156ad2002-12-31 16:38:01 +00001165- Freeze's modulefinder.py has been moved to the standard library;
1166 slightly improved so it will issue less false missing submodule
1167 reports (see sf path #643711 for details). Documentation will follow
1168 with Python 2.3a2.
1169
Martin v. Löwis96a60e42002-12-31 13:11:54 +00001170- os.path exposes getctime.
1171
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001172- unittest.py now has two additional methods called assertAlmostEqual()
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001173 and failIfAlmostEqual(). They implement an approximate comparison
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001174 by rounding the difference between the two arguments and comparing
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001175 the result to zero. Approximate comparison is essential for
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001176 unit tests of floating point results.
1177
Raymond Hettingere11b5102002-12-25 16:37:19 +00001178- calendar.py now depends on the new datetime module rather than
1179 the time module. As a result, the range of allowable dates
1180 has been increased.
1181
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00001182- pdb has a new 'j(ump)' command to select the next line to be
1183 executed.
1184
Thomas Heller1b3b49d2002-12-12 19:13:44 +00001185- The distutils created windows installers now can run a
1186 postinstallation script.
1187
Martin v. Löwis4581cfa2002-11-22 08:23:09 +00001188- doctest.testmod can now be called without argument, which means to
1189 test the current module.
1190
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001191- When canceling a server that implemented threading with a keyboard
Martin v. Löwisf86e8ef2002-11-22 08:08:44 +00001192 interrupt, the server would shut down but not terminate (waiting on
1193 client threads). A new member variable, daemon_threads, was added to
1194 the ThreadingMixIn class in SocketServer.py to make it explicit that
1195 this behavior needs to be controlled.
1196
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00001197- A new module, optparse, provides a fancy alternative to getopt for
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00001198 command line parsing. It is a slightly modified version of Greg
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00001199 Ward's Optik package.
1200
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00001201- UserDict.py now defines a DictMixin class which defines all dictionary
1202 methods for classes that already have a minimum mapping interface.
1203 This greatly simplifies writing classes that need to be substitutable
1204 for dictionaries (such as the shelve module).
1205
1206- shelve.py now subclasses from UserDict.DictMixin. Now shelve supports
1207 all dictionary methods. This eases the transition to persistent
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00001208 storage for scripts originally written with dictionaries in mind.
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00001209
Skip Montanaro3bf99e32002-12-08 18:36:24 +00001210- shelve.open and the various classes in shelve.py now accept an optional
1211 binary flag, which defaults to False. If True, the values stored in the
1212 shelf are binary pickles.
1213
Guido van Rossumfda06742002-11-13 16:29:18 +00001214- A new package, logging, implements the logging API defined by PEP
1215 282. The code is written by Vinay Sajip.
1216
Walter Dörwald4dbf1922002-11-06 16:53:44 +00001217- StreamReader, StreamReaderWriter and StreamRecoder in the codecs
1218 modules are iterators now.
1219
Tim Peters9288f952002-11-05 20:38:55 +00001220- gzip.py now handles files exceeding 2GB. Files over 4GB also work
1221 now (provided the OS supports it, and Python is configured with large
1222 file support), but in that case the underlying gzip file format can
1223 record only the least-significant 32 bits of the file size, so that
1224 some tools working with gzipped files may report an incorrect file
1225 size.
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00001226
Martin v. Löwis74b51ac2002-10-26 14:50:45 +00001227- xml.sax.saxutils.unescape has been added, to replace entity references
1228 with their entity value.
1229
Martin v. Löwis77ac4292002-10-15 15:11:13 +00001230- Queue.Queue.{put,get} now support an optional timeout argument.
1231
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00001232- Various features of Tk 8.4 are exposed in Tkinter.py. The multiple
1233 option of tkFileDialog is exposed as function askopenfile{,name}s.
Martin v. Löwis2ec36272002-10-13 10:22:08 +00001234
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00001235- Various configure methods of Tkinter have been stream-lined, so that
1236 tag_configure, image_configure, window_configure now return a
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00001237 dictionary when invoked with no argument.
Martin v. Löwis6ce13152002-10-10 14:36:13 +00001238
Guido van Rossum2b492b62002-10-09 21:40:48 +00001239- Importing the readline module now no longer has the side effect of
1240 calling setlocale(LC_CTYPE, ""). The initial "C" locale, or
1241 whatever locale is explicitly set by the user, is preserved. If you
1242 want repr() of 8-bit strings in your preferred encoding to preserve
1243 all printable characters of that encoding, you have to add the
1244 following code to your $PYTHONSTARTUP file or to your application's
1245 main():
1246
1247 import locale
1248 locale.setlocale(locale.LC_CTYPE, "")
1249
Martin v. Löwise9ce0b02002-10-07 13:23:24 +00001250- shutil.move was added. shutil.copytree now reports errors as an
1251 exception at the end, instead of printing error messages.
1252
Marc-André Lemburg97047e22002-10-04 11:55:21 +00001253- Encoding name normalization was generalized to not only
1254 replace hyphens with underscores, but also all other non-alphanumeric
1255 characters (with the exception of the dot which is used for Python
1256 package names during lookup). The aliases.py mapping was updated
1257 to the new standard.
1258
Walter Dörwald5ccaf8f2002-09-06 16:15:58 +00001259- mimetypes has two new functions: guess_all_extensions() which
1260 returns a list of all known extensions for a mime type, and
1261 add_type() which adds one mapping between a mime type and
1262 an extension to the database.
1263
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00001264- New module: sets, defines the class Set that implements a mutable
1265 set type using the keys of a dict to represent the set. There's
1266 also a class ImmutableSet which is useful when you need sets of sets
1267 or when you need to use sets as dict keys, and a class BaseSet which
Raymond Hettingeref8b9c62002-12-09 08:56:06 +00001268 is the base class of the two.
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00001269
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00001270- Added random.sample(population,k) for random sampling without replacement.
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00001271 Returns a k length list of unique elements chosen from the population.
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00001272
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00001273- random.randrange(-sys.maxint-1, sys.maxint) no longer raises
1274 OverflowError. That is, it now accepts any combination of 'start'
1275 and 'stop' arguments so long as each is in the range of Python's
1276 bounded integers.
1277
Raymond Hettinger40f62172002-12-29 23:03:38 +00001278- Thanks to Raymond Hettinger, random.random() now uses a new core
1279 generator. The Mersenne Twister algorithm is implemented in C,
1280 threadsafe, faster than the previous generator, has an astronomically
1281 large period (2**19937-1), creates random floats to full 53-bit
1282 precision, and may be the most widely tested random number generator
1283 in existence.
1284
1285 The random.jumpahead(n) method has different semantics for the new
1286 generator. Instead of jumping n steps ahead, it uses n and the
1287 existing state to create a new state. This means that jumpahead()
1288 continues to support multi-threaded code needing generators of
1289 non-overlapping sequences. However, it will break code which relies
1290 on jumpahead moving a specific number of steps forward.
1291
1292 The attributes random.whseed and random.__whseed have no meaning for
1293 the new generator. Code using these attributes should switch to a
1294 new class, random.WichmannHill which is provided for backward
1295 compatibility and to make an alternate generator available.
1296
Guido van Rossum4a57c332002-08-02 18:05:20 +00001297- New "algorithms" module: heapq, implements a heap queue. Thanks to
1298 Kevin O'Connor for the code and François Pinard for an entertaining
1299 write-up explaining the theory and practical uses of heaps.
1300
Marc-André Lemburg58e2ff22002-07-12 14:40:04 +00001301- New encoding for the Palm OS character set: palmos.
1302
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00001303- binascii.crc32() and the zipfile module had problems on some 64-bit
1304 platforms. These have been fixed. On a platform with 8-byte C longs,
1305 crc32() now returns a signed-extended 4-byte result, so that its value
1306 as a Python int is equal to the value computed a 32-bit platform.
1307
Martin v. Löwis7d650ca2002-06-30 15:05:00 +00001308- xml.dom.minidom.toxml and toprettyxml now take an optional encoding
1309 argument.
1310
Guido van Rossum9f7549b2002-06-10 21:39:42 +00001311- Some fixes in the copy module: when an object is copied through its
1312 __reduce__ method, there was no check for a __setstate__ method on
1313 the result [SF patch 565085]; deepcopy should treat instances of
1314 custom metaclasses the same way it treats instances of type 'type'
1315 [SF patch 560794].
1316
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00001317- Sockets now support timeout mode. After s.settimeout(T), where T is
1318 a float expressing seconds, subsequent operations raise an exception
1319 if they cannot be completed within T seconds. To disable timeout
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00001320 mode, use s.settimeout(None). There's also a module function,
1321 socket.setdefaulttimeout(T), which sets the default for all sockets
1322 created henceforth.
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00001323
1324- getopt.gnu_getopt was added. This supports GNU-style option
1325 processing, where options can be mixed with non-option arguments.
Martin v. Löwis446a25f2002-06-06 10:58:36 +00001326
Michael W. Hudsonb0dc1a32002-06-04 18:27:35 +00001327- Stop using strings for exceptions. String objects used for
1328 exceptions are now classes deriving from Exception. The objects
1329 changed were: Tkinter.TclError, bdb.BdbQuit, macpath.norm_error,
1330 tabnanny.NannyNag, and xdrlib.Error.
Neal Norwitzb5b5a262002-06-04 17:14:07 +00001331
Walter Dörwald474458d2002-06-04 15:16:29 +00001332- Constants BOM_UTF8, BOM_UTF16, BOM_UTF16_LE, BOM_UTF16_BE,
1333 BOM_UTF32, BOM_UTF32_LE and BOM_UTF32_BE that represent the Byte
1334 Order Mark in UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 encodings for little and
1335 big endian systems were added to the codecs module. The old names
1336 BOM32_* and BOM64_* were off by a factor of 2.
1337
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00001338- Added conversion functions math.degrees() and math.radians().
Raymond Hettinger87f59ee2002-05-13 04:17:32 +00001339
Raymond Hettinger866964c2002-12-14 19:51:34 +00001340- math.log() now takes an optional argument: math.log(x[, base]).
1341
Raymond Hettinger9b1df1d2002-05-12 06:07:21 +00001342- ftplib.retrlines() now tests for callback is None rather than testing
1343 for False. Was causing an error when given a callback object which
1344 was callable but also returned len() as zero. The change may
1345 create new breakage if the caller relied on the undocumented behavior
1346 and called with callback set to [] or some other False value not
1347 identical to None.
1348
Tim Peters46c04e12002-05-05 20:40:00 +00001349- random.gauss() uses a piece of hidden state used by nothing else,
1350 and the .seed() and .whseed() methods failed to reset it. In other
1351 words, setting the seed didn't completely determine the sequence of
1352 results produced by random.gauss(). It does now. Programs repeatedly
1353 mixing calls to a seed method with calls to gauss() may see different
1354 results now.
1355
Fred Drake7f781c92002-05-01 20:33:53 +00001356- The pickle.Pickler class grew a clear_memo() method to mimic that
1357 provided by cPickle.Pickler.
1358
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00001359- difflib's SequenceMatcher class now does a dynamic analysis of
1360 which elements are so frequent as to constitute noise. For
1361 comparing files as sequences of lines, this generally works better
1362 than the IS_LINE_JUNK function, and function ndiff's linejunk
1363 argument defaults to None now as a result. A happy benefit is
1364 that SequenceMatcher may run much faster now when applied
1365 to large files with many duplicate lines (for example, C program
1366 text with lots of repeated "}" and "return NULL;" lines).
1367
Guido van Rossum256705b2002-04-23 13:29:43 +00001368- New Text.dump() method in Tkinter module.
1369
Marc-André Lemburg1ec71ea2002-04-17 20:33:40 +00001370- New distutils commands for building packagers were added to
1371 support pkgtool on Solaris and swinstall on HP-UX.
1372
1373- distutils now has a new abstract binary packager base class
1374 command/bdist_packager, which simplifies writing packagers.
1375 This will hopefully provide the missing bits to encourage
1376 people to submit more packagers, e.g. for Debian, FreeBSD
1377 and other systems.
1378
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00001379- The UTF-16, -LE and -BE stream readers now raise a
1380 NotImplementedError for all calls to .readline(). Previously, they
1381 used to just produce garbage or fail with an encoding error --
1382 UTF-16 is a 2-byte encoding and the C lib's line reading APIs don't
Marc-André Lemburg4179a012002-04-05 12:15:05 +00001383 work well with these.
1384
Martin v. Löwis5c137c22002-03-18 12:44:08 +00001385- compileall now supports quiet operation.
1386
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00001387- The BaseHTTPServer now implements optional HTTP/1.1 persistent
Martin v. Löwis587c98c2002-03-17 18:37:22 +00001388 connections.
1389
Marc-André Lemburga5d2b4c2002-02-16 18:23:30 +00001390- socket module: the SSL support was broken out of the main
1391 _socket module C helper and placed into a new _ssl helper
1392 which now gets imported by socket.py if available and working.
1393
Marc-André Lemburg37aa5802002-02-10 21:42:47 +00001394- encodings package: added aliases for all supported IANA character
1395 sets
1396
Guido van Rossum606fe4e2001-12-28 20:57:14 +00001397- ftplib: to safeguard the user's privacy, anonymous login will use
1398 "anonymous@" as default password, rather than the real user and host
1399 name.
1400
Fred Drake36736122002-01-10 13:50:31 +00001401- webbrowser: tightened up the command passed to os.system() so that
1402 arbitrary shell code can't be executed because a bogus URL was
1403 passed in.
1404
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00001405- gettext.translation has an optional fallback argument, and
Martin v. Löwisa55ffae2002-01-11 06:58:49 +00001406 gettext.find an optional all argument. Translations will now fallback
Martin v. Löwisd8996052002-11-21 21:45:32 +00001407 on a per-message basis. The module supports plural forms, by means
1408 of gettext.[d]ngettext and Translation.[u]ngettext.
Martin v. Löwis1be64192002-01-11 06:33:28 +00001409
Martin v. Löwis9668b932002-01-12 11:27:42 +00001410- distutils bdist commands now offer a --skip-build option.
1411
Walter Dörwaldb25c2b02002-03-21 10:38:40 +00001412- warnings.warn now accepts a Warning instance as first argument.
1413
Fred Drakefed7e852002-04-04 19:36:15 +00001414- The xml.sax.expatreader.ExpatParser class will no longer create
1415 circular references by using itself as the locator that gets passed
1416 to the content handler implementation. [SF bug #535474]
1417
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00001418- The email.Parser.Parser class now properly parses strings regardless
1419 of their line endings, which can be any of \r, \n, or \r\n (CR, LF,
1420 or CRLF). Also, the Header class's constructor default arguments
1421 has changed slightly so that an explicit maxlinelen value is always
Barry Warsaw497e5c42002-12-30 19:27:08 +00001422 honored, and so unicode conversion error handling can be specified.
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00001423
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001424- distutils' build_ext command now links C++ extensions with the C++
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00001425 compiler available in the Makefile or CXX environment variable, if
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001426 running under \*nix.
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00001427
1428- New module bz2: provides a comprehensive interface for the bz2 compression
1429 library. It implements a complete file interface, one-shot (de)compression
1430 functions, and types for sequential (de)compression.
1431
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001432- New pdb command 'pp' which is like 'p' except that it pretty-prints
Barry Warsaw5d8d6182002-11-05 22:41:33 +00001433 the value of its expression argument.
1434
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00001435- Now bdist_rpm distutils command understands a verify_script option in
1436 the config file, including the contents of the referred filename in
1437 the "%verifyscript" section of the rpm spec file.
1438
Gustavo Niemeyer1456fde2002-11-25 17:25:04 +00001439- Fixed bug #495695: webbrowser module would run graphic browsers in a
1440 unix environment even if DISPLAY was not set. Also, support for
1441 skipstone browser was included.
1442
Gustavo Niemeyerd5ae01a2002-12-16 13:11:57 +00001443- Fixed bug #636769: rexec would run unallowed code if subclasses of
1444 strings were used as parameters for certain functions.
1445
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001446Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001447-----------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001448
Martin v. Löwis0d1fdea2002-11-22 08:36:54 +00001449- pygettext.py now supports globbing on Windows, and accepts module
1450 names in addition to accepting file names.
1451
Guido van Rossum923e4ef2002-09-17 20:58:59 +00001452- The SGI demos (Demo/sgi) have been removed. Nobody thought they
1453 were interesting any more. (The SGI library modules and extensions
1454 are still there; it is believed that at least some of these are
1455 still used and useful.)
1456
Fred Drake40813b12002-08-05 15:24:19 +00001457- IDLE supports the new encoding declarations (PEP 263); it can also
1458 deal with legacy 8-bit files if they use the locale's encoding. It
1459 allows non-ASCII strings in the interactive shell and executes them
1460 in the locale's encoding.
Martin v. Löwis98ce7b72002-08-05 15:11:26 +00001461
Marc-André Lemburg46260092002-04-04 16:17:11 +00001462- freeze.py now produces binaries which can import shared modules,
1463 unlike before when this failed due to missing symbol exports in
1464 the generated binary.
1465
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001466Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001467-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001468
Martin v. Löwisdc461752002-11-06 21:59:33 +00001469- On Unix, IDLE is now installed automatically.
1470
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00001471- The fpectl module is not built by default; it's dangerous or useless
1472 except in the hands of experts.
1473
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00001474- The public Python C API will generally be declared using PyAPI_FUNC
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00001475 and PyAPI_DATA macros, while Python extension module init functions
1476 will be declared with PyMODINIT_FUNC. DL_EXPORT/DL_IMPORT macros
1477 are deprecated.
Neal Norwitz1389f3e2002-07-22 13:21:10 +00001478
Tim Petersc6a3ff62002-07-08 22:11:52 +00001479- A bug was fixed that could cause COUNT_ALLOCS builds to segfault, or
1480 get into infinite loops, when a new-style class got garbage-collected.
1481 Unfortunately, to avoid this, the way COUNT_ALLOCS works requires
1482 that new-style classes be immortal in COUNT_ALLOCS builds. Note that
1483 COUNT_ALLOCS is not enabled by default, in either release or debug
1484 builds, and that new-style classes are immortal only in COUNT_ALLOCS
1485 builds.
1486
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00001487- Compiling out the cyclic garbage collector is no longer an option.
1488 The old symbol WITH_CYCLE_GC is now ignored, and Python.h arranges
1489 that it's always defined (for the benefit of any extension modules
1490 that may be conditionalizing on it). A bonus is that any extension
1491 type participating in cyclic gc can choose to participate in the
1492 Py_TRASHCAN mechanism now too; in the absence of cyclic gc, this used
1493 to require editing the core to teach the trashcan mechanism about the
1494 new type.
1495
Martin v. Löwis0cec0ff2002-07-28 16:33:45 +00001496- According to Annex F of the current C standard,
Tim Peters1de41bf2002-07-03 03:31:20 +00001497
1498 The Standard C macro HUGE_VAL and its float and long double analogs,
1499 HUGE_VALF and HUGE_VALL, expand to expressions whose values are
1500 positive infinities.
1501
1502 Python only uses the double HUGE_VAL, and only to #define its own symbol
1503 Py_HUGE_VAL. Some platforms have incorrect definitions for HUGE_VAL.
1504 pyport.h used to try to worm around that, but the workarounds triggered
1505 other bugs on other platforms, so we gave up. If your platform defines
1506 HUGE_VAL incorrectly, you'll need to #define Py_HUGE_VAL to something
1507 that works on your platform. The only instance of this I'm sure about
1508 is on an unknown subset of Cray systems, described here:
1509
1510 http://www.cray.com/swpubs/manuals/SN-2194_2.0/html-SN-2194_2.0/x3138.htm
1511
1512 Presumably 2.3a1 breaks such systems. If anyone uses such a system, help!
1513
Martin v. Löwisa3fb4f72002-06-09 13:33:54 +00001514- The configure option --without-doc-strings can be used to remove the
1515 doc strings from the builtin functions and modules; this reduces the
1516 size of the executable.
1517
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00001518- The universal newlines option (PEP 278) is on by default. On Unix
1519 it can be disabled by passing --without-universal-newlines to the
1520 configure script. On other platforms, remove
1521 WITH_UNIVERSAL_NEWLINES from pyconfig.h.
Tim Peters639295f2002-04-21 07:30:30 +00001522
Martin v. Löwis1142de32002-03-29 16:28:31 +00001523- On Unix, a shared libpython2.3.so can be created with --enable-shared.
1524
Tim Peters8deda702002-03-30 10:06:07 +00001525- All uses of the CACHE_HASH, INTERN_STRINGS, and DONT_SHARE_SHORT_STRINGS
1526 preprocessor symbols were eliminated. The internal decisions they
1527 controlled stopped being experimental long ago.
Tim Peters1f7df352002-03-29 03:29:08 +00001528
Fred Drake7d28b732002-05-02 21:17:00 +00001529- The tools used to build the documentation now work under Cygwin as
1530 well as Unix.
1531
Skip Montanaro57454e52002-06-14 20:30:31 +00001532- The bsddb and dbm module builds have been changed to try and avoid version
1533 skew problems and disable linkage with Berkeley DB 1.85 unless the
1534 installer knows what s/he's doing. See the section on building these
1535 modules in the README file for details.
1536
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001537C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001538-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001539
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00001540- PyNumber_Check() now returns true for string and unicode objects.
1541 This is a result of these types having a partially defined
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00001542 tp_as_number slot. (This is not a feature, but an indication that
Walter Dörwalda1a61f92002-11-19 21:20:25 +00001543 PyNumber_Check() is not very useful to determine numeric behavior.
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00001544 It may be deprecated.)
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00001545
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00001546- The string object's layout has changed: the pointer member
1547 ob_sinterned has been replaced by an int member ob_sstate. On some
1548 platforms (e.g. most 64-bit systems) this may change the offset of
1549 the ob_sval member, so as a precaution the API_VERSION has been
1550 incremented. The apparently unused feature of "indirect interned
1551 strings", supported by the ob_sinterned member, is gone. Interned
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001552 strings are now usually mortal; there is a new API,
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00001553 PyString_InternImmortal() that creates immortal interned strings.
1554 (The ob_sstate member can only take three values; however, while
1555 making it a char saves a few bytes per string object on average, in
1556 it also slowed things down a bit because ob_sval was no longer
1557 aligned.)
1558
Guido van Rossumfdb86482002-08-14 21:20:32 +00001559- The Py_InitModule*() functions now accept NULL for the 'methods'
1560 argument. Modules without global functions are becoming more common
1561 now that factories can be types rather than functions.
1562
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00001563- New C API PyUnicode_FromOrdinal() which exposes unichr() at C
1564 level.
1565
Thomas Heller085358a2002-07-29 14:27:41 +00001566- New functions PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErr() and
1567 PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErrWithFilename(). Similar to
1568 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErrWithFilename() and
1569 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErr(), but they allow to specify
1570 the exception type to raise. Available on Windows.
1571
Tim Peters7c321a82002-07-09 02:57:01 +00001572- Py_FatalError() is now declared as taking a const char* argument. It
1573 was previously declared without const. This should not affect working
1574 code.
1575
Martin v. Löwis01f94bd2002-05-08 08:44:21 +00001576- Added new macro PySequence_ITEM(o, i) that directly calls
1577 sq_item without rechecking that o is a sequence and without
1578 adjusting for negative indices.
1579
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00001580- PyRange_New() now raises ValueError if the fourth argument is not 1.
1581 This is part of the removal of deprecated features of the xrange
1582 object.
1583
Guido van Rossum517c7d42002-04-26 02:49:14 +00001584- PyNumber_Coerce() and PyNumber_CoerceEx() now also invoke the type's
1585 coercion if both arguments have the same type but this type has the
1586 CHECKTYPES flag set. This is to better support proxies.
1587
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00001588- The type of tp_free has been changed from "``void (*)(PyObject *)``" to
1589 "``void (*)(void *)``".
Neil Schemenauer9344b142002-04-12 23:00:08 +00001590
1591- PyObject_Del, PyObject_GC_Del are now functions instead of macros.
1592
Guido van Rossum0986d822002-04-08 01:38:42 +00001593- A type can now inherit its metatype from its base type. Previously,
1594 when PyType_Ready() was called, if ob_type was found to be NULL, it
1595 was always set to &PyType_Type; now it is set to base->ob_type,
1596 where base is tp_base, defaulting to &PyObject_Type.
1597
1598- PyType_Ready() accidentally did not inherit tp_is_gc; now it does.
1599
Neil Schemenauerc9abc1d2002-05-08 14:14:41 +00001600- The PyCore_* family of APIs have been removed.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00001601
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00001602- The "u#" parser marker will now pass through Unicode objects as-is
Marc-André Lemburg3e3eacb2002-01-09 16:21:27 +00001603 without going through the buffer API.
1604
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001605- The enumerators of cmp_op have been renamed to use the prefix ``PyCmp_``.
Martin v. Löwis7198a522002-01-01 19:59:11 +00001606
Tim Peters10a3bb52001-12-25 19:07:38 +00001607- An old #define of ANY as void has been removed from pyport.h. This
1608 hasn't been used since Python's pre-ANSI days, and the #define has
1609 been marked as obsolete since then. SF bug 495548 says it created
1610 conflicts with other packages, so keeping it around wasn't harmless.
1611
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001612- Because Python's magic number scheme broke on January 1st, we decided
1613 to stop Python development. Thanks for all the fish!
1614
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00001615- Some of us don't like fish, so we changed Python's magic number
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00001616 scheme to a new one. See Python/import.c for details.
1617
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001618New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001619-------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001620
Martin v. Löwis79acb9e2002-12-06 12:48:53 +00001621- OpenVMS is now supported.
1622
Martin v. Löwisf90ae202002-06-11 06:22:31 +00001623- AtheOS is now supported.
1624
Andrew MacIntyre161ad0e2002-08-04 07:25:58 +00001625- the EMX runtime environment on OS/2 is now supported.
1626
Martin v. Löwisa6e97582002-01-01 18:41:33 +00001627- GNU/Hurd is now supported.
1628
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001629Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001630-----
1631
Fred Drake4dd0f7e2002-11-26 21:44:56 +00001632- The regrtest.py script's -u option now provides a way to say "allow
1633 all resources except this one." For example, to allow everything
1634 except bsddb, give the option '-uall,-bsddb'.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001635
1636Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001637-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001638
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00001639- The Windows distribution now ships with version 4.0.14 of the
1640 Sleepycat Berkeley database library. This should be a huge
1641 improvement over the previous Berkeley DB 1.85, which had many
1642 bugs.
1643 XXX What are the licensing issues here?
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001644 XXX If a user has a database created with a previous version of
Tim Peters84c7a3f2002-11-23 18:48:06 +00001645 XXX Python, what must they do to convert it?
1646 XXX I'm still not sure how to link this thing (see PCbuild/readme.txt).
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00001647 XXX The version # is likely to change before 2.3a1.
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00001648
1649- The Windows distribution now ships with a Secure Sockets Library (SLL)
Mark Hammondc3de0082002-12-03 06:16:08 +00001650 module (_ssl.pyd)
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00001651
Tim Peters857fb4c2002-11-14 23:31:58 +00001652- The Windows distribution now ships with Tcl/Tk version 8.4.1 (it
1653 previously shipped with Tcl/Tk 8.3.2).
1654
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00001655- When Python is built under a Microsoft compiler, sys.version now
1656 includes the compiler version number (_MSC_VER). For example, under
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001657 MSVC 6, sys.version contains the substring "MSC v.1200 ". 1200 is
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00001658 the value of _MSC_VER under MSVC 6.
1659
Tim Peters08e72952002-04-16 20:48:01 +00001660- Sometimes the uninstall executable (UNWISE.EXE) vanishes. One cause
1661 of that has been fixed in the installer (disabled Wise's "delete in-
1662 use files" uninstall option).
1663
Guido van Rossum181e41a2002-04-06 00:23:25 +00001664- Fixed a bug in urllib's proxy handling in Windows. [SF bug #503031]
1665
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00001666- The installer now installs Start menu shortcuts under (the local
1667 equivalent of) "All Users" when doing an Admin install.
1668
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00001669- file.truncate([newsize]) now works on Windows for all newsize values.
1670 It used to fail if newsize didn't fit in 32 bits, reflecting a
1671 limitation of MS _chsize (which is no longer used).
1672
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00001673- os.waitpid() is now implemented for Windows, and can be used to block
1674 until a specified process exits. This is similar to, but not exactly
1675 the same as, os.waitpid() on POSIX systems. If you're waiting for
1676 a specific process whose pid was obtained from one of the spawn()
1677 functions, the same Python os.waitpid() code works across platforms.
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00001678 See the docs for details. The docs were changed to clarify that
1679 spawn functions return, and waitpid requires, a process handle on
1680 Windows (not the same thing as a Windows process id).
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00001681
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00001682- New tempfile.TemporaryFile implementation for Windows: this doesn't
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00001683 need a TemporaryFileWrapper wrapper anymore, and should be immune
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00001684 to a nasty problem: before 2.3, if you got a temp file on Windows, it
1685 got wrapped in an object whose close() method first closed the
1686 underlying file, then deleted the file. This usually worked fine.
1687 However, the spawn family of functions on Windows create (at a low C
1688 level) the same set of open files in the spawned process Q as were
1689 open in the spawning process P. If a temp file f was among them, then
1690 doing f.close() in P first closed P's C-level file handle on f, but Q's
1691 C-level file handle on f remained open, so the attempt in P to delete f
1692 blew up with a "Permission denied" error (Windows doesn't allow
1693 deleting open files). This was surprising, subtle, and difficult to
1694 work around.
1695
1696- The os module now exports all the symbolic constants usable with the
1697 low-level os.open() on Windows: the new constants in 2.3 are
1698 O_NOINHERIT, O_SHORT_LIVED, O_TEMPORARY, O_RANDOM and O_SEQUENTIAL.
1699 The others were also available in 2.2: O_APPEND, O_BINARY, O_CREAT,
1700 O_EXCL, O_RDONLY, O_RDWR, O_TEXT, O_TRUNC and O_WRONLY. Contrary
1701 to Microsoft docs, O_SHORT_LIVED does not seem to imply O_TEMPORARY
1702 (so specify both if you want both; note that neither is useful unless
1703 specified with O_CREAT too).
1704
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001705Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001706----
1707
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001708- Mac/Relnotes is gone, the release notes are now here.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001709
Just van Rossume1ebd802003-02-10 10:06:18 +00001710- Python (the OSX-only, unix-based version, not the OS9-compatible CFM
1711 version) now fully supports unicode strings as arguments to various file
1712 system calls, eg. open(), file(), os.stat() and os.listdir().
1713
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001714- The current naming convention for Python on the Macintosh is that MacPython
1715 refers to the unix-based OSX-only version, and MacPython-OS9 refers to the
1716 CFM-based version that runs on both OS9 and OSX.
1717
1718- All MacPython-OS9 functionality is now available in an OSX unix build,
1719 including the Carbon modules, the IDE, OSA support, etc. A lot of this
1720 will only work correctly in a framework build, though, because you cannot
1721 talk to the window manager unless your application is run from a .app
1722 bundle. There is a command line tool "pythonw" that runs your script
1723 with an interpreter living in such a .app bundle, this interpreter should
1724 be used to run any Python script using the window manager (including
1725 Tkinter or wxPython scripts).
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00001726
Jack Jansen8bb80db2002-12-30 22:42:43 +00001727- Most of Mac/Lib has moved to Lib/plat-mac, which is again used both in
1728 MacPython-OSX and MacPython-OS9. The only modules remaining in Mac/Lib
1729 are specifically for MacPython-OS9 (CFM support, preference resources, etc).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001730
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001731- A new utility PythonLauncher will start a Python interpreter when a .py or
1732 .pyw script is double-clicked in the Finder. By default .py scripts are
1733 run with a normal Python interpreter in a Terminal window and .pyw
1734 files are run with a window-aware pythonw interpreter without a Terminal
1735 window, but all this can be customized.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001736
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001737- MacPython-OS9 is now Carbon-only, so it runs on Mac OS 9 or Mac OS X and
1738 possibly on Mac OS 8.6 with the right CarbonLib installed, but not on earlier
1739 releases.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001740
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001741- Many tools such as BuildApplet.py and gensuitemodule.py now support a command
1742 line interface too.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001743
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001744- All the Carbon classes are now PEP253 compliant, meaning that you can
1745 subclass them from Python. Most of the attributes have gone, you should
1746 now use the accessor function call API, which is also what Apple's
1747 documentation uses. Some attributes such as grafport.visRgn are still
1748 available for convenience.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001749
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001750- New Carbon modules File (implementing the APIs in Files.h and Aliases.h)
1751 and Folder (APIs from Folders.h). The old macfs builtin module is
1752 gone, and replaced by a Python wrapper around the new modules.
1753
1754- Pathname handling should now be fully consistent: MacPython-OSX always uses
1755 unix pathnames and MacPython-OS9 always uses colon-separated Mac pathnames
1756 (also when running on Mac OS X).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001757
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001758- New Carbon modules Help and AH give access to the Carbon Help Manager.
1759 There are hooks in the IDE to allow accessing the Python documentation
1760 (and Apple's Carbon and Cocoa documentation) through the Help Viewer.
1761 See Mac/OSX/README for converting the Python documentation to a
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001762 Help Viewer compatible form and installing it.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001763
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001764- OSA support has been redesigned and the generated Python classes now
1765 mirror the inheritance defined by the underlying OSA classes.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001766
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001767- MacPython no longer maps both \r and \n to \n on input for any text file.
1768 This feature has been replaced by universal newline support (PEP278).
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00001769
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00001770- The default encoding for Python sourcefiles in MacPython-OS9 is no longer
Guido van Rossum16c85172003-02-20 01:52:48 +00001771 mac-roman (or whatever your local Mac encoding was) but "ascii", like on
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00001772 other platforms. If you really need sourcefiles with Mac characters in them
1773 you can change this in site.py.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001774
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001775
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001776What's New in Python 2.2 final?
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001777===============================
1778
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001779*Release date: 21-Dec-2001*
1780
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001781Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001782--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001783
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00001784- pickle.py, cPickle: allow pickling instances of new-style classes
1785 with a custom metaclass.
1786
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001787Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001788-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001789
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00001790- weakref proxy object: when comparing, unwrap both arguments if both
1791 are proxies.
1792
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001793Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001794-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001795
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00001796- binascii.b2a_base64(): fix a potential buffer overrun when encoding
1797 very short strings.
1798
1799- cPickle: the obscure "fast" mode was suspected of causing stack
1800 overflows on the Mac. Hopefully fixed this by setting the recursion
1801 limit much smaller. If the limit is too low (it only affects
1802 performance), you can change it by defining PY_CPICKLE_FAST_LIMIT
1803 when compiling cPickle.c (or in pyconfig.h).
1804
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001805Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001806-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001807
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00001808- dumbdbm.py: fixed a dumb old bug (the file didn't get synched at
1809 close or delete time).
1810
1811- rfc822.py: fixed a bug where the address '<>' was converted to None
1812 instead of an empty string (also fixes the email.Utils module).
1813
1814- xmlrpclib.py: version 1.0.0; uses precision for doubles.
1815
1816- test suite: the pickle and cPickle tests were not executing any code
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00001817 when run from the standard regression test.
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00001818
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001819Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001820-----------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001821
1822Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001823-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001824
1825C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001826-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001827
1828New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001829-------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001830
1831Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001832-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001833
1834Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001835-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001836
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00001837- distutils package: fixed broken Windows installers (bdist_wininst).
1838
1839- tempfile.py: prevent mysterious warnings when TemporaryFileWrapper
1840 instances are deleted at process exit time.
1841
1842- socket.py: prevent mysterious warnings when socket instances are
1843 deleted at process exit time.
1844
1845- posixmodule.c: fix a Windows crash with stat() of a filename ending
1846 in backslash.
1847
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001848Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001849----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001850
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00001851- The Carbon toolbox modules have been upgraded to Universal Headers
1852 3.4, and experimental CoreGraphics and CarbonEvents modules have
1853 been added. All only for framework-enabled MacOSX.
1854
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001855
Tim Peters6272dfd2001-12-13 19:34:00 +00001856What's New in Python 2.2c1?
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001857===========================
1858
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001859*Release date: 14-Dec-2001*
1860
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001861Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001862--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001863
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00001864- Guido's tutorial introduction to the new type/class features has
1865 been extensively updated. See
1866
1867 http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html
1868
1869 That remains the primary documentation in this area.
1870
Guido van Rossum33bab012001-12-05 22:45:48 +00001871- Fixed a leak: instance variables declared with __slots__ were never
1872 deleted!
1873
Guido van Rossum4b800852001-12-03 00:54:52 +00001874- The "delete attribute" method of descriptor objects is called
1875 __delete__, not __del__. In previous releases, it was mistakenly
1876 called __del__, which created an unfortunate overloading condition
1877 with finalizers. (The "get attribute" and "set attribute" methods
1878 are still called __get__ and __set__, respectively.)
1879
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00001880- Some subtle issues with the super built-in were fixed:
1881
1882 (a) When super itself is subclassed, its __get__ method would still
1883 return an instance of the base class (i.e., of super).
1884
1885 (b) super(C, C()).__class__ would return C rather than super. This
1886 is confusing. To fix this, I decided to change the semantics of
1887 super so that it only applies to code attributes, not to data
1888 attributes. After all, overriding data attributes is not
1889 supported anyway.
1890
1891 (c) The __get__ method didn't check whether the argument was an
1892 instance of the type used in creation of the super instance.
1893
Guido van Rossumcd7b7d62001-12-04 21:02:07 +00001894- Previously, hash() of an instance of a subclass of a mutable type
1895 (list or dictionary) would return some value, rather than raising
1896 TypeError. This has been fixed. Also, directly calling
1897 dict.__hash__ and list.__hash__ now raises the same TypeError
1898 (previously, these were the same as object.__hash__).
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00001899
Guido van Rossumd331cb52001-12-05 19:46:42 +00001900- New-style objects now support deleting their __dict__. This is for
1901 all intents and purposes equivalent to assigning a brand new empty
1902 dictionary, but saves space if the object is not used further.
1903
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001904Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001905-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001906
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00001907- -Qnew now works as documented in PEP 238: when -Qnew is passed on
1908 the command line, all occurrences of "/" use true division instead
1909 of classic division. See the PEP for details. Note that "all"
1910 means all instances in library and 3rd-party modules, as well as in
1911 your own code. As the PEP says, -Qnew is intended for use only in
1912 educational environments with control over the libraries in use.
Tim Petersbf72fe22001-12-11 21:43:14 +00001913 Note that test_coercion.py in the standard Python test suite fails
1914 under -Qnew; this is expected, and won't be repaired until true
1915 division becomes the default (in the meantime, test_coercion is
1916 testing the current rules).
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00001917
Fred Drake6c01e252001-12-14 17:08:12 +00001918- complex() now only allows the first argument to be a string
1919 argument, and raises TypeError if either the second arg is a string
1920 or if the second arg is specified when the first is a string.
1921
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001922Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001923-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001924
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00001925- gc.get_referents was renamed to gc.get_referrers.
1926
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001927Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001928-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001929
Tim Peters25059d32001-12-07 20:35:43 +00001930- Functions in the os.spawn() family now release the global interpreter
1931 lock around calling the platform spawn. They should always have done
1932 this, but did not before 2.2c1. Multithreaded programs calling
1933 an os.spawn function with P_WAIT will no longer block all Python threads
1934 until the spawned program completes. It's possible that some programs
1935 relies on blocking, although more likely by accident than by design.
1936
Martin v. Löwis3a89b2b2001-11-25 14:35:58 +00001937- webbrowser defaults to netscape.exe on OS/2 now.
1938
Martin v. Löwis652e1912001-11-25 14:50:56 +00001939- Tix.ResizeHandle exposes detach_widget, hide, and show.
1940
Martin v. Löwis714d2e22001-12-02 12:26:03 +00001941- The charset alias windows_1252 has been added.
1942
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00001943- types.StringTypes is a tuple containing the defined string types;
1944 usually this will be (str, unicode), but if Python was compiled
1945 without Unicode support it will be just (str,).
1946
1947- The pulldom and minidom modules were synchronized to PyXML.
1948
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001949Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001950-----------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001951
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00001952- A new script called Tools/scripts/google.py was added, which fires
1953 off a search on Google.
1954
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001955Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001956-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001957
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00001958- Note that release builds of Python should arrange to define the
1959 preprocessor symbol NDEBUG on the command line (or equivalent).
1960 In the 2.2 pre-release series we tried to define this by magic in
1961 Python.h instead, but it proved to cause problems for extension
1962 authors. The Unix, Windows and Mac builds now all define NDEBUG in
1963 release builds via cmdline (or equivalent) instead. Ports to
1964 other platforms should do likewise.
1965
Jack Jansen1999ef42001-12-06 21:47:20 +00001966- It is no longer necessary to use --with-suffix when building on a
1967 case-insensitive file system (such as Mac OS X HFS+). In the build
1968 directory an extension is used, but not in the installed python.
1969
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001970C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001971-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001972
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00001973- New function PyDict_MergeFromSeq2() exposes the builtin dict
1974 constructor's logic for updating a dictionary from an iterable object
1975 producing key-value pairs.
1976
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00001977- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() requires that the number of entries in
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00001978 the keyword list equal the number of argument specifiers. This
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00001979 wasn't checked correctly, and PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords could even
1980 dump core in some bad cases. This has been repaired. As a result,
1981 PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords may raise RuntimeError in bad cases that
1982 previously went unchallenged.
1983
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001984New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001985-------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001986
1987Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001988-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001989
1990Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001991-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001992
1993Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001994----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001995
Jack Jansenffa260f2001-12-06 21:14:00 +00001996- In unix-Python on Mac OS X (and darwin) sys.platform is now "darwin",
1997 without any trailing digits.
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001998
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00001999- Changed logic for finding python home in Mac OS X framework Pythons.
2000 Now sys.executable points to the executable again, in stead of to
2001 the shared library. The latter is used only for locating the python
2002 home.
2003
2004
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002005What's New in Python 2.2b2?
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002006===========================
2007
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002008*Release date: 16-Nov-2001*
2009
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002010Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002011--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002012
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00002013- Multiple inheritance mixing new-style and classic classes in the
2014 list of base classes is now allowed, so this works now:
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00002015
2016 class Classic: pass
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00002017 class Mixed(Classic, object): pass
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00002018
2019 The MRO (method resolution order) for each base class is respected
2020 according to its kind, but the MRO for the derived class is computed
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002021 using new-style MRO rules if any base class is a new-style class.
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00002022 This needs to be documented.
2023
Tim Petersa427a2b2001-10-29 22:25:45 +00002024- The new builtin dictionary() constructor, and dictionary type, have
2025 been renamed to dict. This reflects a decade of common usage.
2026
Guido van Rossum3fc08d22001-11-15 20:33:10 +00002027- dict() now accepts an iterable object producing 2-sequences. For
2028 example, dict(d.items()) == d for any dictionary d. The argument,
2029 and the elements of the argument, can be any iterable objects.
2030
Guido van Rossum7ad2d1e2001-10-29 22:11:00 +00002031- New-style classes can now have a __del__ method, which is called
2032 when the instance is deleted (just like for classic classes).
2033
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00002034- Assignment to object.__dict__ is now possible, for objects that are
2035 instances of new-style classes that have a __dict__ (unless the base
2036 class forbids it).
2037
Guido van Rossumc8e56452001-10-22 00:43:43 +00002038- Methods of built-in types now properly check for keyword arguments
2039 (formerly these were silently ignored). The only built-in methods
2040 that take keyword arguments are __call__, __init__ and __new__.
2041
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00002042- The socket function has been converted to a type; see below.
2043
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002044Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002045-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002046
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00002047- Assignment to __debug__ raises SyntaxError at compile-time. This
2048 was promised when 2.1c1 was released as "What's New in Python 2.1c1"
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00002049 (see below) says.
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00002050
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00002051- Clarified the error messages for unsupported operands to an operator
2052 (like 1 + '').
2053
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002054Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002055-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002056
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00002057- mmap has a new keyword argument, "access", allowing a uniform way for
2058 both Windows and Unix users to create read-only, write-through and
2059 copy-on-write memory mappings. This was previously possible only on
2060 Unix. A new keyword argument was required to support this in a
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002061 uniform way because the mmap() signatures had diverged across
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00002062 platforms. Thanks to Jay T Miller for repairing this!
2063
Tim Peters169ded02001-11-03 19:57:21 +00002064- By default, the gc.garbage list now contains only those instances in
2065 unreachable cycles that have __del__ methods; in 2.1 it contained all
2066 instances in unreachable cycles. "Instances" here has been generalized
2067 to include instances of both new-style and old-style classes.
2068
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00002069- The socket module defines a new method for socket objects,
2070 sendall(). This is like send() but may make multiple calls to
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00002071 send() until all data has been sent. Also, the socket function has
2072 been converted to a subclassable type, like list and tuple (etc.)
2073 before it; socket and SocketType are now the same thing.
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00002074
2075- Various bugfixes to the curses module. There is now a test suite
2076 for the curses module (you have to run it manually).
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00002077
Guido van Rossum692adf12001-10-30 03:03:03 +00002078- binascii.b2a_base64 no longer places an arbitrary restriction of 57
2079 bytes on its input.
2080
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002081Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002082-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002083
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00002084- tkFileDialog exposes a Directory class and askdirectory
Martin v. Löwis25ee87c2001-11-07 22:38:08 +00002085 convenience function.
2086
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00002087- Symbolic group names in regular expressions must be unique. For
2088 example, the regexp r'(?P<abc>)(?P<abc>)' is not allowed, because a
2089 single name can't mean both "group 1" and "group 2" simultaneously.
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00002090 Python 2.2 detects this error at regexp compilation time;
2091 previously, the error went undetected, and results were
2092 unpredictable. Also in sre, the pattern.split(), pattern.sub(), and
2093 pattern.subn() methods have been rewritten in C. Also, an
2094 experimental function/method finditer() has been added, which works
2095 like findall() but returns an iterator.
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00002096
Martin v. Löwisb7b32602001-11-02 23:48:20 +00002097- Tix exposes more commands through the classes DirSelectBox,
2098 DirSelectDialog, ListNoteBook, Meter, CheckList, and the
2099 methods tix_addbitmapdir, tix_cget, tix_configure, tix_filedialog,
2100 tix_getbitmap, tix_getimage, tix_option_get, and tix_resetoptions.
2101
Tim Peters98791af2001-10-23 01:59:54 +00002102- Traceback objects are now scanned by cyclic garbage collection, so
2103 cycles created by casual use of sys.exc_info() no longer cause
2104 permanent memory leaks (provided garbage collection is enabled).
2105
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00002106- os.extsep -- a new variable needed by the RISCOS support. It is the
2107 separator used by extensions, and is '.' on all platforms except
2108 RISCOS, where it is '/'. There is no need to use this variable
2109 unless you have a masochistic desire to port your code to RISCOS.
2110
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00002111- mimetypes.py has optional support for non-standard, but commonly
2112 found types. guess_type() and guess_extension() now accept an
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002113 optional 'strict' flag, defaulting to true, which controls whether
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00002114 recognize non-standard types or not. A few non-standard types we
2115 know about have been added. Also, when run as a script, there are
2116 new -l and -e options.
2117
2118- statcache is now deprecated.
2119
2120- email.Utils.formatdate() now produces the preferred RFC 2822 style
2121 dates with numeric timezones (it used to produce obsolete dates
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002122 hard coded to "GMT" timezone). An optional 'localtime' flag is
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00002123 added to produce dates in the local timezone, with daylight savings
2124 time properly taken into account.
2125
2126- In pickle and cPickle, instead of masking errors in load() by
2127 transforming them into SystemError, we let the original exception
2128 propagate out. Also, implement support for __safe_for_unpickling__
2129 in pickle, as it already was supported in cPickle.
2130
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002131Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002132-----------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002133
2134Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002135-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002136
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00002137- The dbm module is built using libdb1 if available. The bsddb module
2138 is built with libdb3 if available.
2139
2140- Misc/Makefile.pre.in has been removed by BDFL pronouncement.
2141
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002142C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002143-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002144
Tim Peters1fc240e2001-10-26 05:06:50 +00002145- New function PySequence_Fast_GET_SIZE() returns the size of a non-
2146 NULL result from PySequence_Fast(), more quickly than calling
2147 PySequence_Size().
2148
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00002149- New argument unpacking function PyArg_UnpackTuple() added.
2150
2151- New functions PyObject_CallFunctionObjArgs() and
2152 PyObject_CallMethodObjArgs() have been added to make it more
2153 convenient and efficient to call functions and methods from C.
2154
2155- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() no longer masks errors, so it's
2156 possible that this will propagate errors it didn't before.
2157
2158- New function PyObject_CheckReadBuffer(), which returns true if its
2159 argument supports the single-segment readable buffer interface.
2160
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002161New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002162-------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002163
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00002164- We've finally confirmed that this release builds on HP-UX 11.00,
2165 *with* threads, and passes the test suite.
2166
Tim Peters7a33d8b2001-11-05 02:51:07 +00002167- Thanks to a series of patches from Michael Muller, Python may build
2168 again under OS/2 Visual Age C++.
2169
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00002170- Updated RISCOS port by Dietmar Schwertberger.
2171
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002172Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002173-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002174
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00002175- Added a test script for the curses module. It isn't run automatically;
2176 regrtest.py must be run with '-u curses' to enable it.
2177
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002178Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002179-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002180
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00002181Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002182----
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00002183
2184- PythonScript has been moved to unsupported and is slated to be
2185 removed completely in the next release.
2186
2187- It should now be possible to build applets that work on both OS9 and
2188 OSX.
2189
2190- The core is now linked with CoreServices not Carbon; as a side
2191 result, default 8bit encoding on OSX is now ASCII.
2192
2193- Python should now build on OSX 10.1.1
2194
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002195
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002196What's New in Python 2.2b1?
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002197===========================
2198
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002199*Release date: 19-Oct-2001*
2200
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002201Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002202--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002203
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00002204- New-style classes are now always dynamic (except for built-in and
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00002205 extension types). There is no longer a performance penalty, and I
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00002206 no longer see another reason to keep this baggage around. One relic
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00002207 remains: the __dict__ of a new-style class is a read-only proxy; you
2208 must set the class's attribute to modify it. As a consequence, the
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00002209 __defined__ attribute of new-style types no longer exists, for lack
2210 of need: there is once again only one __dict__ (although in the
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00002211 future a __cache__ may be resurrected with a similar function, if I
2212 can prove that it actually speeds things up).
Guido van Rossum50fda3b2001-10-04 19:46:06 +00002213
Tim Peters1c9ca872001-10-04 06:43:12 +00002214- C.__doc__ now works as expected for new-style classes (in 2.2a4 it
2215 always returned None, even when there was a class docstring).
2216
2217- doctest now finds and runs docstrings attached to new-style classes,
2218 class methods, static methods, and properties.
2219
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00002220Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002221-----------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002222
Guido van Rossuma8bcf802001-10-15 15:53:58 +00002223- A very subtle syntactical pitfall in list comprehensions was fixed.
2224 For example: [a+b for a in 'abc', for b in 'def']. The comma in
2225 this example is a mistake. Previously, this would silently let 'a'
2226 iterate over the singleton tuple ('abc',), yielding ['abcd', 'abce',
2227 'abcf'] rather than the intended ['ad', 'ae', 'af', 'bd', 'be',
2228 'bf', 'cd', 'ce', 'cf']. Now, this is flagged as a syntax error.
2229 Note that [a for a in <singleton>] is a convoluted way to say
2230 [<singleton>] anyway, so it's not like any expressiveness is lost.
2231
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00002232- getattr(obj, name, default) now only catches AttributeError, as
2233 documented, rather than returning the default value for all
2234 exceptions (which could mask bugs in a __getattr__ hook, for
2235 example).
2236
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00002237- Weak reference objects are now part of the core and offer a C API.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00002238 A bug which could allow a core dump when binary operations involved
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00002239 proxy reference has been fixed. weakref.ReferenceError is now a
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00002240 built-in exception.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00002241
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00002242- unicode(obj) now behaves more like str(obj), accepting arbitrary
2243 objects, and calling a __unicode__ method if it exists.
2244 unicode(obj, encoding) and unicode(obj, encoding, errors) still
Marc-André Lemburgb5507ec2001-10-19 12:02:29 +00002245 require an 8-bit string or character buffer argument.
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00002246
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00002247- isinstance() now allows any object as the first argument and a
2248 class, a type or something with a __bases__ tuple attribute for the
2249 second argument. The second argument may also be a tuple of a
2250 class, type, or something with __bases__, in which case isinstance()
2251 will return true if the first argument is an instance of any of the
2252 things contained in the second argument tuple. E.g.
2253
2254 isinstance(x, (A, B))
2255
2256 returns true if x is an instance of A or B.
2257
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00002258Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002259-----------------
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00002260
2261- thread.start_new_thread() now returns the thread ID (previously None).
2262
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00002263- binascii has now two quopri support functions, a2b_qp and b2a_qp.
2264
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00002265- readline now supports setting the startup_hook and the
2266 pre_event_hook, and adds the add_history() function.
Martin v. Löwis0daad592001-09-30 21:09:59 +00002267
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00002268- os and posix supports chroot(), setgroups() and unsetenv() where
2269 available. The stat(), fstat(), statvfs() and fstatvfs() functions
2270 now return "pseudo-sequences" -- the various fields can now be
2271 accessed as attributes (e.g. os.stat("/").st_mtime) but for
2272 backwards compatibility they also behave as a fixed-length sequence.
2273 Some platform-specific fields (e.g. st_rdev) are only accessible as
Guido van Rossum98bf58f2001-10-18 20:34:25 +00002274 attributes.
2275
2276- time: localtime(), gmtime() and strptime() now return a
2277 pseudo-sequence similar to the os.stat() return value, with
2278 attributes like tm_year etc.
Martin v. Löwis16628c92001-10-04 22:46:41 +00002279
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00002280- Decompression objects in the zlib module now accept an optional
2281 second parameter to decompress() that specifies the maximum amount
2282 of memory to use for the uncompressed data.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002283
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00002284- optional SSL support in the socket module now exports OpenSSL
2285 functions RAND_add(), RAND_egd(), and RAND_status(). These calls
2286 are useful on platforms like Solaris where OpenSSL does not
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00002287 automatically seed its PRNG. Also, the keyfile and certfile
2288 arguments to socket.ssl() are now optional.
2289
2290- posixmodule (and by extension, the os module on POSIX platforms) now
2291 exports O_LARGEFILE, O_DIRECT, O_DIRECTORY, and O_NOFOLLOW.
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00002292
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00002293Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002294-------
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00002295
Tim Peters7402f792001-10-02 03:53:41 +00002296- doctest now excludes functions and classes not defined by the module
2297 being tested, thanks to Tim Hochberg.
2298
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00002299- HotShot, a new profiler implemented using a C-based callback, has
2300 been added. This substantially reduces the overhead of profiling,
2301 but it is still quite preliminary. Support modules and
2302 documentation will be added in upcoming releases (before 2.2 final).
2303
Guido van Rossumc4b09b42001-10-04 10:19:00 +00002304- profile now produces correct output in situations where an exception
2305 raised in Python is cleared by C code (e.g. hasattr()). This used
2306 to cause wrong output, including spurious claims of recursive
2307 functions and attribution of time spent to the wrong function.
2308
Tim Peters0a1fc4e2001-10-07 03:12:08 +00002309 The code and documentation for the derived OldProfile and HotProfile
2310 profiling classes was removed. The code hasn't worked for years (if
2311 you tried to use them, they raised exceptions). OldProfile
2312 intended to reproduce the behavior of the profiler Python used more
2313 than 7 years ago, and isn't interesting anymore. HotProfile intended
2314 to provide a faster profiler (but producing less information), and
2315 that's a worthy goal we intend to meet via a different approach (but
2316 without losing information).
2317
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00002318- Profile.calibrate() has a new implementation that should deliver
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00002319 a much better system-specific calibration constant. The constant can
2320 now be specified in an instance constructor, or as a Profile class or
2321 instance variable, instead of by editing profile.py's source code.
2322 Calibration must still be done manually (see the docs for the profile
2323 module).
2324
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002325 Note that Profile.calibrate() must be overridden by subclasses.
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00002326 Improving the accuracy required exploiting detailed knowledge of
2327 profiler internals; the earlier method abstracted away the details
2328 and measured a simplified model instead, but consequently computed
2329 a constant too small by a factor of 2 on some modern machines.
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00002330
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00002331- quopri's encode and decode methods take an optional header parameter,
Jeremy Hylton6f543b62001-10-16 20:42:52 +00002332 which indicates whether output is intended for the header 'Q'
2333 encoding.
2334
Guido van Rossuma5343cc2001-10-18 18:02:07 +00002335- The SocketServer.ThreadingMixIn class now closes the request after
2336 finish_request() returns. (Not when it errors out though.)
2337
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002338- The nntplib module's NNTP.body() method has grown a 'file' argument
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00002339 to allow saving the message body to a file.
2340
2341- The email package has added a class email.Parser.HeaderParser which
2342 only parses headers and does not recurse into the message's body.
2343 Also, the module/class MIMEAudio has been added for representing
2344 audio data (contributed by Anthony Baxter).
2345
2346- ftplib should be able to handle files > 2GB.
2347
2348- ConfigParser.getboolean() now also interprets TRUE, FALSE, YES, NO,
2349 ON, and OFF.
2350
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00002351- xml.dom.minidom NodeList objects now support the length attribute
2352 and item() method as required by the DOM specifications.
2353
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00002354Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002355-----------
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00002356
2357- Demo/dns was removed. It no longer serves any purpose; a package
2358 derived from it is now maintained by Anthony Baxter, see
2359 http://PyDNS.SourceForge.net.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002360
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00002361- The freeze tool has been made more robust, and two new options have
2362 been added: -X and -E.
2363
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002364Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002365-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002366
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00002367- configure will use CXX in LINKCC if CXX is used to build main() and
2368 the system requires to link a C++ main using the C++ compiler.
2369
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002370C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002371-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002372
Guido van Rossum6c4bce32001-10-18 19:20:25 +00002373- The documentation for the tp_compare slot is updated to require that
2374 the return value must be -1, 0, 1; an arbitrary number <0 or >0 is
2375 not correct. This is not yet enforced but will be enforced in
2376 Python 2.3; even later, we may use -2 to indicate errors and +2 for
2377 "NotImplemented". Right now, -1 should be used for an error return.
2378
Tim Petersd38b1c72001-09-30 05:09:37 +00002379- PyLong_AsLongLong() now accepts int (as well as long) arguments.
2380 Consequently, PyArg_ParseTuple's 'L' code also accepts int (as well
2381 as long) arguments.
2382
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00002383- PyThread_start_new_thread() now returns a long int giving the thread
2384 ID, if one can be calculated; it returns -1 for error, 0 if no
2385 thread ID is calculated (this is an incompatible change, but only
2386 the thread module used this API). This code has only really been
2387 tested on Linux and Windows; other platforms please beware (and
2388 report any bugs or strange behavior).
2389
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00002390- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() no longer accepts Unicode objects as
2391 input.
2392
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002393New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002394-------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002395
2396Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002397-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002398
2399Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002400-------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002401
Tim Peters04cf1d32001-10-09 22:39:40 +00002402- Installer: If you install IDLE, and don't disable file-extension
2403 registration, a new "Edit with IDLE" context (right-click) menu entry
2404 is created for .py and .pyw files.
2405
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00002406- The signal module now supports SIGBREAK on Windows, thanks to Steven
2407 Scott. Note that SIGBREAK is unique to Windows. The default SIGBREAK
2408 action remains to call Win32 ExitProcess(). This can be changed via
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00002409 signal.signal(). For example::
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00002410
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002411 # Make Ctrl+Break raise KeyboardInterrupt, like Python's default Ctrl+C
2412 # (SIGINT) behavior.
2413 import signal
2414 signal.signal(signal.SIGBREAK, signal.default_int_handler)
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00002415
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002416 try:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002417 while 1:
2418 pass
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002419 except KeyboardInterrupt:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002420 # We get here on Ctrl+C or Ctrl+Break now; if we had not changed
2421 # SIGBREAK, only on Ctrl+C (and Ctrl+Break would terminate the
2422 # program without the possibility for any Python-level cleanup).
2423 print "Clean exit"
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00002424
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002425
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002426What's New in Python 2.2a4?
2427===========================
2428
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002429*Release date: 28-Sep-2001*
2430
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00002431Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002432--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00002433
2434- pydoc and inspect are now aware of new-style classes;
2435 e.g. help(list) at the interactive prompt now shows proper
2436 documentation for all operations on list objects.
2437
2438- Applications using Jim Fulton's ExtensionClass module can now safely
2439 be used with Python 2.2. In particular, Zope 2.4.1 now works with
2440 Python 2.2 (as well as with Python 2.1.1). The Demo/metaclass
2441 examples also work again. It is hoped that Gtk and Boost also work
2442 with 2.2a4 and beyond. (If you can confirm this, please write
2443 webmaster@python.org; if there are still problems, please open a bug
2444 report on SourceForge.)
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002445
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00002446- property() now takes 4 keyword arguments: fget, fset, fdel and doc.
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002447 These map to read-only attributes 'fget', 'fset', 'fdel', and '__doc__'
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00002448 in the constructed property object. fget, fset and fdel weren't
2449 discoverable from Python in 2.2a3. __doc__ is new, and allows to
2450 associate a docstring with a property.
2451
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00002452- Comparison overloading is now more completely implemented. For
2453 example, a str subclass instance can properly be compared to a str
2454 instance, and it can properly overload comparison. Ditto for most
2455 other built-in object types.
2456
2457- The repr() of new-style classes has changed; instead of <type
2458 'M.Foo'> a new-style class is now rendered as <class 'M.Foo'>,
2459 *except* for built-in types, which are still rendered as <type
2460 'Foo'> (to avoid upsetting existing code that might parse or
2461 otherwise rely on repr() of certain type objects).
2462
2463- The repr() of new-style objects is now always <Foo object at XXX>;
2464 previously, it was sometimes <Foo instance at XXX>.
2465
2466- For new-style classes, what was previously called __getattr__ is now
2467 called __getattribute__. This method, if defined, is called for
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00002468 *every* attribute access. A new __getattr__ hook more similar to the
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00002469 one in classic classes is defined which is called only if regular
2470 attribute access raises AttributeError; to catch *all* attribute
2471 access, you can use __getattribute__ (for new-style classes). If
2472 both are defined, __getattribute__ is called first, and if it raises
2473 AttributeError, __getattr__ is called.
2474
2475- The __class__ attribute of new-style objects can be assigned to.
2476 The new class must have the same C-level object layout as the old
2477 class.
2478
2479- The builtin file type can be subclassed now. In the usual pattern,
2480 "file" is the name of the builtin type, and file() is a new builtin
2481 constructor, with the same signature as the builtin open() function.
2482 file() is now the preferred way to open a file.
2483
2484- Previously, __new__ would only see sequential arguments passed to
2485 the type in a constructor call; __init__ would see both sequential
2486 and keyword arguments. This made no sense whatsoever any more, so
2487 now both __new__ and __init__ see all arguments.
2488
2489- Previously, hash() applied to an instance of a subclass of str or
2490 unicode always returned 0. This has been repaired.
2491
2492- Previously, an operation on an instance of a subclass of an
2493 immutable type (int, long, float, complex, tuple, str, unicode),
2494 where the subtype didn't override the operation (and so the
2495 operation was handled by the builtin type), could return that
2496 instance instead a value of the base type. For example, if s was of
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002497 a str subclass type, s[:] returned s as-is. Now it returns a str
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00002498 with the same value as s.
2499
Barry Warsaw86fbaf82001-09-28 15:26:12 +00002500- Provisional support for pickling new-style objects has been added.
2501
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00002502Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002503----
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00002504
Tim Peters2c9aa5e2001-09-23 04:06:05 +00002505- file.writelines() now accepts any iterable object producing strings.
2506
Marc-André Lemburgaefd7662001-09-20 12:59:37 +00002507- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() now works very much like
2508 PyObject_Str(obj) in that it tries to use __str__/tp_str
2509 on the object if the object is not a string or buffer. This
2510 makes unicode() behave like str() when applied to non-string/buffer
2511 objects.
2512
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00002513- PyFile_WriteObject now passes Unicode objects to the file's write
2514 method. As a result, all file-like objects which may be the target
Martin v. Löwis2777c022001-09-19 13:47:32 +00002515 of a print statement must support Unicode objects, i.e. they must
2516 at least convert them into ASCII strings.
2517
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002518- Thread scheduling on Solaris should be improved; it is no longer
2519 necessary to insert a small sleep at the start of a thread in order
2520 to let other runnable threads be scheduled.
2521
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002522Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002523-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002524
Marc-André Lemburgbf990172001-09-27 14:17:33 +00002525- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
2526 read character buffer compatible objects for their .write() methods.
2527 These objects are converted to strings and then handled as such
2528 by the instances.
2529
Barry Warsaw2f600732001-09-24 04:28:10 +00002530- The "email" package has been added. This is basically a port of the
2531 mimelib package <http://sf.net/projects/mimelib> with API changes
2532 and some implementations updated to use iterators and generators.
2533
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00002534- difflib.ndiff() and difflib.Differ.compare() are generators now. This
2535 restores the ability of Tools/scripts/ndiff.py to start producing output
2536 before the entire comparison is complete.
2537
Barry Warsaw58b072d2001-09-22 04:44:21 +00002538- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
2539 iteration just like file objects (i.e. their .readline() method is
2540 called for each iteration until it returns an empty string).
2541
Marc-André Lemburg494f2ae2001-09-19 11:33:31 +00002542- The codecs module has grown four new helper APIs to access
2543 builtin codecs: getencoder(), getdecoder(), getreader(),
2544 getwriter().
2545
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002546- SimpleXMLRPCServer: a new module (based upon SimpleHTMLServer)
2547 simplifies writing XML RPC servers.
2548
Barry Warsaw647d5e82001-09-28 17:01:02 +00002549- os.path.realpath(): a new function that returns the absolute pathname
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002550 after interpretation of symbolic links. On non-Unix systems, this
2551 is an alias for os.path.abspath().
2552
Tim Peters16a77ad2001-09-08 04:00:12 +00002553- operator.indexOf() (PySequence_Index() in the C API) now works with any
2554 iterable object.
2555
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002556- smtplib now supports various authentication and security features of
2557 the SMTP protocol through the new login() and starttls() methods.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00002558
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002559- hmac: a new module implementing keyed hashing for message
2560 authentication.
2561
2562- mimetypes now recognizes more extensions and file types. At the
2563 same time, some mappings not sanctioned by IANA were removed.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00002564
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002565- The "compiler" package has been brought up to date to the state of
Guido van Rossumc9ed5dc2001-09-20 05:30:24 +00002566 Python 2.2 bytecode generation. It has also been promoted from a
2567 Tool to a standard library package. (Tools/compiler still exists as
2568 a sample driver.)
2569
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002570Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002571-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002572
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002573- Large file support (LFS) is now automatic when the platform supports
2574 it; no more manual configuration tweaks are needed. On Linux, at
2575 least, it's possible to have a system whose C library supports large
2576 files but whose kernel doesn't; in this case, large file support is
2577 still enabled but doesn't do you any good unless you upgrade your
2578 kernel or share your Python executable with another system whose
2579 kernel has large file support.
2580
2581- The configure script now supplies plausible defaults in a
2582 cross-compilation environment. This doesn't mean that the supplied
2583 values are always correct, or that cross-compilation now works
2584 flawlessly -- but it's a first step (and it shuts up most of
2585 autoconf's warnings about AC_TRY_RUN).
2586
2587- The Unix build is now a bit less chatty, courtesy of the parser
2588 generator. The build is completely silent (except for errors) when
2589 using "make -s", thanks to a -q option to setup.py.
2590
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002591C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002592-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002593
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002594- The "structmember" API now supports some new flag bits to deny read
2595 and/or write access to attributes in restricted execution mode.
2596
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002597New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002598-------------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002599
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002600- Compaq's iPAQ handheld, running the "familiar" Linux distribution
2601 (http://familiar.handhelds.org).
2602
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002603Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002604-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002605
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00002606- The "classic" standard tests, which work by comparing stdout to
2607 an expected-output file under Lib/test/output/, no longer stop at
2608 the first mismatch. Instead the test is run to completion, and a
2609 variant of ndiff-style comparison is used to report all differences.
2610 This is much easier to understand than the previous style of reporting.
2611
2612- The unittest-based standard tests now use regrtest's test_main()
2613 convention, instead of running as a side-effect of merely being
2614 imported. This allows these tests to be run in more natural and
2615 flexible ways as unittests, outside the regrtest framework.
2616
2617- regrtest.py is much better integrated with unittest and doctest now,
2618 especially in regard to reporting errors.
2619
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002620Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002621-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002622
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002623- Large file support now also works for files > 4GB, on filesystems
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00002624 that support it (NTFS under Windows 2000). See "What's New in
2625 Python 2.2a3" for more detail.
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002626
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002627
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002628What's New in Python 2.2a3?
2629===========================
2630
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002631*Release Date: 07-Sep-2001*
2632
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002633Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002634----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002635
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00002636- Conversion of long to float now raises OverflowError if the long is too
2637 big to represent as a C double.
2638
Tim Peters32f453e2001-09-03 08:35:41 +00002639- The 3-argument builtin pow() no longer allows a third non-None argument
2640 if either of the first two arguments is a float, or if both are of
2641 integer types and the second argument is negative (in which latter case
2642 the arguments are converted to float, so this is really the same
2643 restriction).
2644
Tim Peters5d2b77c2001-09-03 05:47:38 +00002645- The builtin dir() now returns more information, and sometimes much
2646 more, generally naming all attributes of an object, and all attributes
2647 reachable from the object via its class, and from its class's base
2648 classes, and so on from them too. Example: in 2.2a2, dir([]) returned
2649 an empty list. In 2.2a3,
2650
2651 >>> dir([])
2652 ['__add__', '__class__', '__contains__', '__delattr__', '__delitem__',
2653 '__eq__', '__ge__', '__getattr__', '__getitem__', '__getslice__',
2654 '__gt__', '__hash__', '__iadd__', '__imul__', '__init__', '__le__',
2655 '__len__', '__lt__', '__mul__', '__ne__', '__new__', '__repr__',
2656 '__rmul__', '__setattr__', '__setitem__', '__setslice__', '__str__',
2657 'append', 'count', 'extend', 'index', 'insert', 'pop', 'remove',
2658 'reverse', 'sort']
2659
2660 dir(module) continues to return only the module's attributes, though.
2661
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002662- Overflowing operations on plain ints now return a long int rather
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002663 than raising OverflowError. This is a partial implementation of PEP
2664 237. You can use -Wdefault::OverflowWarning to enable a warning for
2665 this situation, and -Werror::OverflowWarning to revert to the old
2666 OverflowError exception.
2667
Guido van Rossum61c345f2001-09-04 03:26:15 +00002668- A new command line option, -Q<arg>, is added to control run-time
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002669 warnings for the use of classic division. (See PEP 238.) Possible
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00002670 values are -Qold, -Qwarn, -Qwarnall, and -Qnew. The default is
2671 -Qold, meaning the / operator has its classic meaning and no
2672 warnings are issued. Using -Qwarn issues a run-time warning about
2673 all uses of classic division for int and long arguments; -Qwarnall
2674 also warns about classic division for float and complex arguments
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00002675 (for use with fixdiv.py).
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002676 [Note: the remainder of this item (preserved below) became
2677 obsolete in 2.2c1 -- -Qnew has global effect in 2.2] ::
2678
2679 Using -Qnew is questionable; it turns on new division by default, but
2680 only in the __main__ module. You can usefully combine -Qwarn or
2681 -Qwarnall and -Qnew: this gives the __main__ module new division, and
2682 warns about classic division everywhere else.
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002683
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002684- Many built-in types can now be subclassed. This applies to int,
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002685 long, float, str, unicode, and tuple. (The types complex, list and
2686 dictionary can also be subclassed; this was introduced earlier.)
2687 Note that restrictions apply when subclassing immutable built-in
2688 types: you can only affect the value of the instance by overloading
2689 __new__. You can add mutable attributes, and the subclass instances
2690 will have a __dict__ attribute, but you cannot change the "value"
2691 (as implemented by the base class) of an immutable subclass instance
2692 once it is created.
2693
Guido van Rossumaaf80c82001-09-02 13:44:35 +00002694- The dictionary constructor now takes an optional argument, a
2695 mapping-like object, and initializes the dictionary from its
2696 (key, value) pairs.
2697
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002698- A new built-in type, super, has been added. This facilitates making
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002699 "cooperative super calls" in a multiple inheritance setting. For an
2700 explanation, see http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#cooperation
2701
Guido van Rossum8d7234d2001-09-06 22:02:58 +00002702- A new built-in type, property, has been added. This enables the
2703 creation of "properties". These are attributes implemented by
2704 getter and setter functions (or only one of these for read-only or
2705 write-only attributes), without the need to override __getattr__.
2706 See http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#property
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002707
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002708- The syntax of floating-point and imaginary literals has been
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00002709 liberalized, to allow leading zeroes. Examples of literals now
2710 legal that were SyntaxErrors before:
2711
2712 00.0 0e3 0100j 07.5 00000000000000000008.
2713
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002714- An old tokenizer bug allowed floating point literals with an incomplete
Tim Petersc6d95812001-08-28 20:56:27 +00002715 exponent, such as 1e and 3.1e-. Such literals now raise SyntaxError.
2716
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002717Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002718-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002719
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00002720- telnetlib includes symbolic names for the options, and support for
Martin v. Löwis1da9c572002-11-04 09:56:00 +00002721 setting an option negotiation callback. It also supports processing
2722 of suboptions.
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00002723
Tim Petersa40c7932001-09-05 22:36:56 +00002724- The new C standard no longer requires that math libraries set errno to
2725 ERANGE on overflow. For platform libraries that exploit this new
2726 freedom, Python's overflow-checking was wholly broken. A new overflow-
2727 checking scheme attempts to repair that, but may not be reliable on all
2728 platforms (C doesn't seem to provide anything both useful and portable
2729 in this area anymore).
2730
Martin v. Löwis44f86962001-09-05 13:44:54 +00002731- Asynchronous timeout actions are available through the new class
2732 threading.Timer.
2733
Tim Peters78526162001-09-05 00:53:45 +00002734- math.log and math.log10 now return sensible results for even huge
2735 long arguments. For example, math.log10(10 ** 10000) ~= 10000.0.
2736
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002737- A new function, imp.lock_held(), returns 1 when the import lock is
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00002738 currently held. See the docs for the imp module.
2739
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002740- pickle, cPickle and marshal on 32-bit platforms can now correctly read
Tim Peters82112372001-08-29 02:28:42 +00002741 dumps containing ints written on platforms where Python ints are 8 bytes.
2742 When read on a box where Python ints are 4 bytes, such values are
2743 converted to Python longs.
2744
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002745- In restricted execution mode (using the rexec module), unmarshalling
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002746 code objects is no longer allowed. This plugs a security hole.
2747
Steve Purcell6091cd62001-09-06 16:05:17 +00002748- unittest.TestResult instances no longer store references to tracebacks
2749 generated by test failures. This prevents unexpected dangling references
2750 to objects that should be garbage collected between tests.
2751
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002752Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002753-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002754
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00002755- Tools/scripts/fixdiv.py has been added which can be used to fix
2756 division operators as per PEP 238.
2757
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002758Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002759-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002760
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00002761- If you are an adventurous person using Mac OS X you may want to look at
2762 Mac/OSX. There is a Makefile there that will build Python as a real Mac
2763 application, which can be used for experimenting with Carbon or Cocoa.
2764 Discussion of this on pythonmac-sig, please.
2765
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00002766C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002767-----
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00002768
2769- New function PyObject_Dir(obj), like Python __builtin__.dir(obj).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00002770
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00002771- Note that PyLong_AsDouble can fail! This has always been true, but no
2772 callers checked for it. It's more likely to fail now, because overflow
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00002773 errors are properly detected now. The proper way to check::
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00002774
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002775 double x = PyLong_AsDouble(some_long_object);
2776 if (x == -1.0 && PyErr_Occurred()) {
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002777 /* The conversion failed. */
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002778 }
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00002779
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002780- The GC API has been changed. Extensions that use the old API will still
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00002781 compile but will not participate in GC. To upgrade an extension
2782 module:
2783
2784 - rename Py_TPFLAGS_GC to PyTPFLAGS_HAVE_GC
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00002785
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00002786 - use PyObject_GC_New or PyObject_GC_NewVar to allocate objects and
2787 PyObject_GC_Del to deallocate them
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00002788
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00002789 - rename PyObject_GC_Init to PyObject_GC_Track and PyObject_GC_Fini
2790 to PyObject_GC_UnTrack
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00002791
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00002792 - remove PyGC_HEAD_SIZE from object size calculations
2793
2794 - remove calls to PyObject_AS_GC and PyObject_FROM_GC
2795
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002796- Two new functions: PyString_FromFormat() and PyString_FromFormatV().
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002797 These can be used safely to construct string objects from a
2798 sprintf-style format string (similar to the format string supported
2799 by PyErr_Format()).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00002800
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002801New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002802-------------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002803
Tim Petersb7da0902001-09-02 23:01:43 +00002804- Stephen Hansen contributed patches sufficient to get a clean compile
2805 under Borland C (Windows), but he reports problems running it and ran
2806 out of time to complete the port. Volunteers? Expect a MemoryError
2807 when importing the types module; this is probably shallow, and
2808 causing later failures too.
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002809
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002810Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002811-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002812
2813Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002814-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002815
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00002816- Large file support is now enabled on Win32 platforms as well as on
2817 Win64. This means that, for example, you can use f.tell() and f.seek()
2818 to manipulate files larger than 2 gigabytes (provided you have enough
2819 disk space, and are using a Windows filesystem that supports large
Tim Peters9a9471c2001-09-11 23:18:51 +00002820 partitions). Windows filesystem limits: FAT has a 2GB (gigabyte)
2821 filesize limit, and large file support makes no difference there.
2822 FAT32's limit is 4GB, and files >= 2GB are easier to use from Python now.
2823 NTFS has no practical limit on file size, and files of any size can be
2824 used from Python now.
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00002825
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002826- The w9xpopen hack is now used on Windows NT and 2000 too when COMPSPEC
Tim Peters402d5982001-08-27 06:37:48 +00002827 points to command.com (patch from Brian Quinlan).
2828
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002829
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00002830What's New in Python 2.2a2?
2831===========================
2832
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002833*Release Date: 22-Aug-2001*
2834
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00002835Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002836-----
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00002837
Barry Warsaw18b2ecf2001-08-22 20:26:56 +00002838- Tim Peters developed a brand new Windows installer using Wise 8.1,
2839 generously donated to us by Wise Solutions.
2840
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00002841- configure supports a new option --enable-unicode, with the values
2842 ucs2 and ucs4 (new in 2.2a1). With --disable-unicode, the Unicode
2843 type and supporting code is completely removed from the interpreter.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00002844
Jack Jansen32ce0cd2001-08-21 19:28:20 +00002845- A new configure option --enable-framework builds a Mac OS X framework,
2846 which "make frameworkinstall" will install. This provides a starting
2847 point for more mac-like functionality, join pythonmac-sig@python.org
2848 if you are interested in helping.
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00002849
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00002850- The NeXT platform is no longer supported.
2851
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002852- The 'new' module is now statically linked.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00002853
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00002854Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002855-----
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00002856
2857- The new Tools/scripts/cleanfuture.py can be used to automatically
Andrew M. Kuchlingb0532092001-08-15 15:54:56 +00002858 edit out obsolete future statements from Python source code. See
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00002859 the module docstring for details.
2860
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00002861Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002862-----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00002863
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00002864- regrtest.py now knows which tests are expected to be skipped on some
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00002865 platforms, allowing to give clearer test result output. regrtest
2866 also has optional --use/-u switch to run normally disabled tests
2867 which require network access or consume significant disk resources.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00002868
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00002869- Several new tests in the standard test suite, with special thanks to
2870 Nick Mathewson.
2871
2872Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002873----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00002874
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00002875- The floor division operator // has been added as outlined in PEP
2876 238. The / operator still provides classic division (and will until
2877 Python 3.0) unless "from __future__ import division" is included, in
2878 which case the / operator will provide true division. The operator
2879 module provides truediv() and floordiv() functions. Augmented
2880 assignment variants are included, as are the equivalent overloadable
2881 methods and C API methods. See the PEP for a full discussion:
2882 <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0238.html>
2883
Tim Peters6cd6a822001-08-17 22:11:27 +00002884- Future statements are now effective in simulated interactive shells
2885 (like IDLE). This should "just work" by magic, but read Michael
2886 Hudson's "Future statements in simulated shells" PEP 264 for full
2887 details: <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0264.html>.
2888
Guido van Rossumf86ddd22001-08-17 21:21:04 +00002889- The type/class unification (PEP 252-253) was integrated into the
2890 trunk and is not so tentative any more (the exact specification of
2891 some features is still tentative). A lot of work has done on fixing
2892 bugs and adding robustness and features (performance still has to
2893 come a long way).
2894
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00002895- Warnings about a mismatch in the Python API during extension import
2896 now use the Python warning framework (which makes it possible to
2897 write filters for these warnings).
2898
Barry Warsaw9b3be7f2001-08-14 18:35:02 +00002899- A function's __dict__ (aka func_dict) will now always be a
2900 dictionary. It used to be possible to delete it or set it to None,
2901 but now both actions raise TypeErrors. It is still legal to set it
2902 to a dictionary object. Getting func.__dict__ before any attributes
2903 have been assigned now returns an empty dictionary instead of None.
2904
Guido van Rossum32aa5d22001-09-05 18:43:35 +00002905- A new command line option, -E, was added which disables the use of
2906 all environment variables, or at least those that are specifically
2907 significant to Python. Usually those have a name starting with
2908 "PYTHON". This was used to fix a problem where the tests fail if
2909 the user happens to have PYTHONHOME or PYTHONPATH pointing to an
2910 older distribution.
2911
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00002912Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002913-------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00002914
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00002915- New class Differ and new functions ndiff() and restore() in difflib.py.
2916 These package the algorithms used by the popular Tools/scripts/ndiff.py,
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00002917 for programmatic reuse.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00002918
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00002919- New function xml.sax.saxutils.quoteattr(): Quote an XML attribute
2920 value using the minimal quoting required for the value; more
2921 reliable than using xml.sax.saxutils.escape() for attribute values.
2922
2923- Readline completion support for cmd.Cmd was added.
2924
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00002925- Calling os.tempnam() or os.tmpnam() generate RuntimeWarnings.
2926
2927- Added function threading.BoundedSemaphore()
2928
2929- Added Ka-Ping Yee's cgitb.py module.
2930
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002931- The 'new' module now exposes the CO_xxx flags.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00002932
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00002933- The gc module offers the get_referents function.
2934
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00002935New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002936-------------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00002937
2938C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002939-----
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00002940
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00002941- Two new APIs PyOS_snprintf() and PyOS_vsnprintf() were added
2942 which provide a cross-platform implementations for the
2943 relatively new snprintf()/vsnprintf() C lib APIs. In contrast to
2944 the standard sprintf() and vsprintf() C lib APIs, these versions
2945 apply bounds checking on the used buffer which enhances protection
2946 against buffer overruns.
2947
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00002948- Unicode APIs now use name mangling to assure that mixing interpreters
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00002949 and extensions using different Unicode widths is rendered next to
2950 impossible. Trying to import an incompatible Unicode-aware extension
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00002951 will result in an ImportError. Unicode extensions writers must make
2952 sure to check the Unicode width compatibility in their extensions by
2953 using at least one of the mangled Unicode APIs in the extension.
2954
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00002955- Two new flags METH_NOARGS and METH_O are available in method definition
2956 tables to simplify implementation of methods with no arguments and a
2957 single untyped argument. Calling such methods is more efficient than
2958 calling corresponding METH_VARARGS methods. METH_OLDARGS is now
2959 deprecated.
2960
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00002961Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002962-------
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00002963
2964- "import module" now compiles module.pyw if it exists and nothing else
2965 relevant is found.
2966
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00002967
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00002968What's New in Python 2.2a1?
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00002969===========================
2970
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002971*Release date: 18-Jul-2001*
2972
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00002973Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002974----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00002975
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00002976- TENTATIVELY, a large amount of code implementing much of what's
2977 described in PEP 252 (Making Types Look More Like Classes) and PEP
2978 253 (Subtyping Built-in Types) was added. This will be released
2979 with Python 2.2a1. Documentation will be provided separately
2980 through http://www.python.org/2.2/. The purpose of releasing this
2981 with Python 2.2a1 is to test backwards compatibility. It is
2982 possible, though not likely, that a decision is made not to release
2983 this code as part of 2.2 final, if any serious backwards
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00002984 incompatibilities are found during alpha testing that cannot be
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00002985 repaired.
2986
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00002987- Generators were added; this is a new way to create an iterator (see
Tim Peters11a0d102001-07-17 18:48:00 +00002988 below) using what looks like a simple function containing one or
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00002989 more 'yield' statements. See PEP 255. Since this adds a new
2990 keyword to the language, this feature must be enabled by including a
2991 future statement: "from __future__ import generators" (see PEP 236).
2992 Generators will become a standard feature in a future release
2993 (probably 2.3). Without this future statement, 'yield' remains an
2994 ordinary identifier, but a warning is issued each time it is used.
2995 (These warnings currently don't conform to the warnings framework of
2996 PEP 230; we intend to fix this in 2.2a2.)
2997
Marc-André Lemburg12e74b32001-05-22 08:58:23 +00002998- The UTF-16 codec was modified to be more RFC compliant. It will now
2999 only remove BOM characters at the start of the string and then
3000 only if running in native mode (UTF-16-LE and -BE won't remove a
3001 leading BMO character).
3002
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00003003- Strings now have a new method .decode() to complement the already
3004 existing .encode() method. These two methods provide direct access
3005 to the corresponding decoders and encoders of the registered codecs.
3006
3007 To enhance the usability of the .encode() method, the special
3008 casing of Unicode object return values was dropped (Unicode objects
3009 were auto-magically converted to string using the default encoding).
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00003010
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00003011 Both methods will now return whatever the codec in charge of the
3012 requested encoding returns as object, e.g. Unicode codecs will
3013 return Unicode objects when decoding is requested ("äöü".decode("latin-1")
3014 will return u"äöü"). This enables codec writer to create codecs
3015 for various simple to use conversions.
3016
3017 New codecs were added to demonstrate these new features (the .encode()
3018 and .decode() columns indicate the type of the returned objects):
3019
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003020 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
3021 |Name | .encode() | .decode() | Description |
3022 +=========+===========+===========+=============================+
3023 |uu | string | string | UU codec (e.g. for email) |
3024 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
3025 |base64 | string | string | base64 codec |
3026 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
3027 |quopri | string | string | quoted-printable codec |
3028 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
3029 |zlib | string | string | zlib compression |
3030 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
3031 |hex | string | string | 2-byte hex codec |
3032 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
3033 |rot-13 | string | Unicode | ROT-13 Unicode charmap codec|
3034 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00003035
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00003036- Some operating systems now support the concept of a default Unicode
3037 encoding for file system operations. Notably, Windows supports 'mbcs'
3038 as the default. The Macintosh will also adopt this concept in the medium
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00003039 term, although the default encoding for that platform will be other than
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00003040 'mbcs'.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00003041
3042 On operating system that support non-ASCII filenames, it is common for
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00003043 functions that return filenames (such as os.listdir()) to return Python
3044 string objects pre-encoded using the default file system encoding for
3045 the platform. As this encoding is likely to be different from Python's
3046 default encoding, converting this name to a Unicode object before passing
3047 it back to the Operating System would result in a Unicode error, as Python
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003048 would attempt to use its default encoding (generally ASCII) rather than
3049 the default encoding for the file system.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00003050
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003051 In general, this change simply removes surprises when working with
3052 Unicode and the file system, making these operations work as you expect,
3053 increasing the transparency of Unicode objects in this context.
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00003054 See [????] for more details, including examples.
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00003055
Tim Peters61dff2b2001-05-08 15:43:37 +00003056- Float (and complex) literals in source code were evaluated to full
3057 precision only when running from a .py file; the same code loaded from a
3058 .pyc (or .pyo) file could suffer numeric differences starting at about the
3059 12th significant decimal digit. For example, on a machine with IEEE-754
3060 floating arithmetic,
3061
3062 x = 9007199254740992.0
3063 print long(x)
3064
3065 printed 9007199254740992 if run directly from .py, but 9007199254740000
3066 if from a compiled (.pyc or .pyo) file. This was due to marshal using
3067 str(float) instead of repr(float) when building code objects. marshal
3068 now uses repr(float) instead, which should reproduce floats to full
3069 machine precision (assuming the platform C float<->string I/O conversion
3070 functions are of good quality).
3071
3072 This may cause floating-point results to change in some cases, and
3073 usually for the better, but may also cause numerically unstable
3074 algorithms to break.
3075
Tim Peters2f228e72001-05-13 00:19:31 +00003076- The implementation of dicts suffers fewer collisions, which has speed
3077 benefits. However, the order in which dict entries appear in dict.keys(),
3078 dict.values() and dict.items() may differ from previous releases for a
3079 given dict. Nothing is defined about this order, so no program should
3080 rely on it. Nevertheless, it's easy to write test cases that rely on the
3081 order by accident, typically because of printing the str() or repr() of a
3082 dict to an "expected results" file. See Lib/test/test_support.py's new
3083 sortdict(dict) function for a simple way to display a dict in sorted
3084 order.
3085
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00003086- Many other small changes to dicts were made, resulting in faster
3087 operation along the most common code paths.
3088
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00003089- Dictionary objects now support the "in" operator: "x in dict" means
3090 the same as dict.has_key(x).
3091
Barry Warsaw51acc8d2001-06-26 20:12:50 +00003092- The update() method of dictionaries now accepts generic mapping
3093 objects. Specifically the argument object must support the .keys()
3094 and __getitem__() methods. This allows you to say, for example,
3095 {}.update(UserDict())
3096
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00003097- Iterators were added; this is a generalized way of providing values
3098 to a for loop. See PEP 234. There's a new built-in function iter()
3099 to return an iterator. There's a new protocol to get the next value
3100 from an iterator using the next() method (in Python) or the
3101 tp_iternext slot (in C). There's a new protocol to get iterators
3102 using the __iter__() method (in Python) or the tp_iter slot (in C).
3103 Iterating (i.e. a for loop) over a dictionary generates its keys.
3104 Iterating over a file generates its lines.
3105
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00003106- The following functions were generalized to work nicely with iterator
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003107 arguments::
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003108
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00003109 map(), filter(), reduce(), zip()
Tim Peters8572b4f2001-05-06 01:05:02 +00003110 list(), tuple() (PySequence_Tuple() and PySequence_Fast() in C API)
3111 max(), min()
Tim Peters1af03e92001-05-26 19:37:54 +00003112 join() method of strings
3113 extend() method of lists
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00003114 'x in y' and 'x not in y' (PySequence_Contains() in C API)
3115 operator.countOf() (PySequence_Count() in C API)
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003116 right-hand side of assignment statements with multiple targets, such as ::
Tim Petersd6d010b2001-06-21 02:49:55 +00003117 x, y, z = some_iterable_object_returning_exactly_3_values
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00003118
Tim Petersd85e1022001-05-11 21:51:48 +00003119- Accessing module attributes is significantly faster (for example,
3120 random.random or os.path or yourPythonModule.yourAttribute).
3121
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00003122- Comparing dictionary objects via == and != is faster, and now works even
3123 if the keys and values don't support comparisons other than ==.
3124
Tim Peters95bf9392001-05-10 08:32:44 +00003125- Comparing dictionaries in ways other than == and != is slower: there were
3126 insecurities in the dict comparison implementation that could cause Python
3127 to crash if the element comparison routines for the dict keys and/or
3128 values mutated the dicts. Making the code bulletproof slowed it down.
3129
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00003130- Collisions in dicts are resolved via a new approach, which can help
3131 dramatically in bad cases. For example, looking up every key in a dict
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00003132 d with d.keys() == [i << 16 for i in range(20000)] is approximately 500x
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00003133 faster now. Thanks to Christian Tismer for pointing out the cause and
3134 the nature of an effective cure (last December! better late than never).
Tim Peters15d49292001-05-27 07:39:22 +00003135
Tim Peters52e155e2001-06-16 05:42:57 +00003136- repr() is much faster for large containers (dict, list, tuple).
3137
3138
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003139Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003140-------
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003141
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00003142- The constants ascii_letters, ascii_lowercase. and ascii_uppercase
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003143 were added to the string module. These a locale-independent
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00003144 constants, unlike letters, lowercase, and uppercase. These are now
3145 use in appropriate locations in the standard library.
3146
Martin v. Löwisf0473d52001-07-18 16:17:16 +00003147- The flags used in dlopen calls can now be configured using
3148 sys.setdlopenflags and queried using sys.getdlopenflags.
3149
Guido van Rossumc7e4aca2001-07-12 11:54:37 +00003150- Fredrik Lundh's xmlrpclib is now a standard library module. This
3151 provides full client-side XML-RPC support. In addition,
3152 Demo/xmlrpc/ contains two server frameworks (one SocketServer-based,
3153 one asyncore-based). Thanks to Eric Raymond for the documentation.
3154
Guido van Rossum643d3912001-07-05 14:46:25 +00003155- The xrange() object is simplified: it no longer supports slicing,
3156 repetition, comparisons, efficient 'in' checking, the tolist()
3157 method, or the start, stop and step attributes. See PEP 260.
3158
Martin v. Löwisebf94db2001-06-06 06:25:40 +00003159- A new function fnmatch.filter to filter lists of file names was added.
3160
Barry Warsawffd674d2001-05-22 16:00:10 +00003161- calendar.py uses month and day names based on the current locale.
3162
Guido van Rossum2e0a6542001-05-15 02:14:44 +00003163- strop is now *really* obsolete (this was announced before with 1.6),
3164 and issues DeprecationWarning when used (except for the four items
3165 that are still imported into string.py).
3166
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003167- Cookie.py now sorts key+value pairs by key in output strings.
3168
3169- pprint.isrecursive(object) didn't correctly identify recursive objects.
3170 Now it does.
3171
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00003172- pprint functions now much faster for large containers (tuple, list, dict).
3173
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00003174- New 'q' and 'Q' format codes in the struct module, corresponding to C
3175 types "long long" and "unsigned long long" (on Windows, __int64). In
3176 native mode, these can be used only when the platform C compiler supports
3177 these types (when HAVE_LONG_LONG is #define'd by the Python config
3178 process), and then they inherit the sizes and alignments of the C types.
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00003179 In standard mode, 'q' and 'Q' are supported on all platforms, and are
3180 8-byte integral types.
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00003181
Guido van Rossum83213cc2001-06-12 16:48:52 +00003182- The site module installs a new built-in function 'help' that invokes
3183 pydoc.help. It must be invoked as 'help()'; when invoked as 'help',
3184 it displays a message reminding the user to use 'help()' or
3185 'help(object)'.
3186
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003187Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003188-----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003189
3190- New test_mutants.py runs dict comparisons where the key and value
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003191 comparison operators mutate the dicts randomly during comparison. This
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003192 rapidly causes Python to crash under earlier releases (not for the faint
3193 of heart: it can also cause Win9x to freeze or reboot!).
3194
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003195- New test_pprint.py verifies that pprint.isrecursive() and
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00003196 pprint.isreadable() return sensible results. Also verifies that simple
3197 cases produce correct output.
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003198
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00003199C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003200-----
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00003201
3202- Removed the unused last_is_sticky argument from the internal
3203 _PyTuple_Resize(). If this affects you, you were cheating.
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003204
3205----
3206
3207**(For information about older versions, consult the HISTORY file.)**