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Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001+++++++++++
2Python News
3+++++++++++
4
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +00005(editors: check NEWS.help for information about editing NEWS using ReST.)
6
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +00007What's New in Python 2.5 alpha 1?
8=================================
9
Anthony Baxter12b6f6c2005-03-29 13:36:16 +000010*Release date: XX-XXX-2006*
11
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +000012Core and builtins
13-----------------
14
Georg Brandlfa166682005-12-17 21:45:17 +000015- Implementation of PEP 341 - Unification of try/except and try/finally.
16 "except" clauses can now be written together with a "finally" clause in
Neal Norwitz11ca77e2005-12-17 22:24:12 +000017 one try statement instead of two nested ones. Patch #1355913.
Georg Brandlfa166682005-12-17 21:45:17 +000018
Hye-Shik Chang835b2432005-12-17 04:38:31 +000019- Bug #1379994: Builtin unicode_escape and raw_unicode_escape codec
20 now encodes backslash correctly.
21
Martin v. Löwisb45b3152005-11-28 17:34:23 +000022- Patch #1350409: Work around signal handling bug in Visual Studio 2005.
23
Georg Brandlf06e30a2005-11-24 15:37:42 +000024- Bug #1281408: Py_BuildValue now works correct even with unsigned longs
25 and long longs.
26
Neal Norwitz67715f02005-11-09 06:59:35 +000027- SF Bug #1350188, "setdlopenflags" leads to crash upon "import"
28 It was possible dlerror() returns a NULL pointer, use a default error
29 message in this case.
30
Marc-André Lemburga5bafc42005-10-23 13:43:40 +000031- Replaced most Unicode charmap codecs with new ones using the
32 new Unicode translate string feature in the builtin charmap
33 codec; the codecs were created from the mapping tables available
34 at ftp.unicode.org and contain a few updates (e.g. the Mac OS
35 encodings now include a mapping for the Apple logo)
36
Tim Peterse3547fd2005-12-16 23:13:57 +000037- Added a few more codecs for Mac OS encodings
Marc-André Lemburga5bafc42005-10-23 13:43:40 +000038
Neal Norwitzfed9b3e2005-10-21 06:32:02 +000039- Speed up some Unicode operations.
40
41- A new AST parser implementation was completed.
42
Neal Norwitzb6570f52005-10-21 06:26:10 +000043- SF bug #1167751: fix incorrect code being for generator expressions.
Neal Norwitz16af7342005-10-21 06:25:33 +000044 The following code now raises a SyntaxError: foo(a = i for i in range(10))
45
Neal Norwitz708e51a2005-10-03 04:48:15 +000046- SF Bug #976608: fix SystemError when mtime of an imported file is -1.
47
Neal Norwitz11bd1192005-10-03 00:54:56 +000048- SF Bug #887946: fix segfault when redirecting stdin from a directory.
49 Provide a warning when a directory is passed on the command line.
50
Neal Norwitz40d37812005-10-02 01:48:49 +000051- Fix segfault with invalid coding.
52
53- SF bug #772896: unknown encoding results in MemoryError.
54
Raymond Hettinger6b27cda2005-09-24 21:23:05 +000055- All iterators now have a Boolean value of true. Formerly, some iterators
56 supported a __len__() method which evaluated to False when the iterator
57 was empty.
58
Guido van Rossum630db602005-09-20 18:49:54 +000059- On 64-bit platforms, when __len__() returns a value that cannot be
60 represented as a C int, raise OverflowError.
61
Skip Montanarof8948ca2005-09-19 03:54:46 +000062- test__locale is skipped on OS X < 10.4 (only partial locale support is
Walter Dörwald6611a8b2005-10-09 19:28:35 +000063 present).
Skip Montanarof8948ca2005-09-19 03:54:46 +000064
Georg Brandl80bbf3f2005-09-14 19:38:29 +000065- SF bug #893549: parsing keyword arguments was broken with a few format
66 codes.
67
Guido van Rossum8ee3e5a2005-09-14 18:09:42 +000068- Changes donated by Elemental Security to make it work on AIX 5.3
69 with IBM's 64-bit compiler (SF patch #1284289). This also closes SF
70 bug #105470: test_pwd fails on 64bit system (Opteron).
71
Guido van Rossum539c6622005-09-14 17:49:54 +000072- Changes donated by Elemental Security to make it work on HP-UX 11 on
73 Itanium2 with HP's 64-bit compiler (SF patch #1225212).
74
Georg Brandl4550b8d2005-08-26 06:43:52 +000075- Disallow keyword arguments for type constructors that don't use them
Georg Brandl02c42872005-08-26 06:42:30 +000076 (fixes bug #1119418).
77
Martin v. Löwisd35edda2005-08-24 08:39:24 +000078- Forward UnicodeDecodeError into SyntaxError for source encoding errors.
79
Barry Warsawe2eca0b2005-08-15 18:14:19 +000080- SF bug #900092: When tracing (e.g. for hotshot), restore 'return' events for
81 exceptions that cause a function to exit.
82
Raymond Hettinger9f1a6792005-07-31 01:16:36 +000083- The implementation of set() and frozenset() was revised to use its
84 own internal data structure. Memory consumption is reduced by 1/3
85 and there are modest speed-ups as well. The API is unchanged.
86
Tim Petersde7990b2005-07-17 23:45:23 +000087- SF bug #1238681: freed pointer is used in longobject.c:long_pow().
88
Michael W. Hudson0edc7a02005-07-12 10:21:19 +000089- SF bug #1229429: PyObject_CallMethod failed to decrement some
90 reference counts in some error exit cases.
91
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +000092- SF bug #1185883: Python's small-object memory allocator took over
93 a block managed by the platform C library whenever a realloc specified
94 a small new size. However, there's no portable way to know then how
95 much of the address space following the pointer is valid, so no
96 portable way to copy data from the C-managed block into Python's
97 small-object space without risking a memory fault. Python's small-object
98 realloc now leaves such blocks under the control of the platform C
99 realloc.
100
Michael W. Hudsonb8963812005-07-05 15:21:58 +0000101- SF bug #1232517: An overflow error was not detected properly when
102 attempting to convert a large float to an int in os.utime().
103
Raymond Hettinger3296e692005-06-29 23:29:56 +0000104- SF bug #1224347: hex longs now print with lowercase letters just
105 like their int counterparts.
106
Michael W. Hudson188d4362005-06-20 16:52:57 +0000107- SF bug #1163563: the original fix for bug #1010677 ("thread Module
108 Breaks PyGILState_Ensure()") broke badly in the case of multiple
109 interpreter states; back out that fix and do a better job (see
110 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2005-June/054258.html
111 for a longer write-up of the problem).
112
Michael W. Hudsondf888462005-06-03 14:41:55 +0000113- SF patch #1180995: marshal now uses a binary format by default when
114 serializing floats.
115
Michael W. Hudsonda85a902005-06-01 11:34:22 +0000116- SF patch #1181301: on platforms that appear to use IEEE 754 floats,
117 the routines that promise to produce IEEE 754 binary representations
118 of floats now simply copy bytes around.
119
Skip Montanarobbf12ba2005-05-20 03:07:06 +0000120- bug #967182: disallow opening files with 'wU' or 'aU' as specified by PEP
121 278.
122
Brett Cannonc3647ac2005-04-26 03:45:26 +0000123- patch #1109424: int, long, float, complex, and unicode now check for the
124 proper magic slot for type conversions when subclassed. Previously the
125 magic slot was ignored during conversion. Semantics now match the way
126 subclasses of str always behaved. int/long/float, conversion of an instance
Walter Dörwald78a78b02005-09-01 12:04:29 +0000127 to the base class has been moved to the proper nb_* magic slot and out of
Brett Cannonc3647ac2005-04-26 03:45:26 +0000128 PyNumber_*().
129 Thanks Walter Dörwald.
130
Barry Warsawc8d907c2005-04-19 23:43:40 +0000131- Descriptors defined in C with a PyGetSetDef structure, where the setter is
132 NULL, now raise an AttributeError when attempting to set or delete the
133 attribute. Previously a TypeError was raised, but this was inconsistent
134 with the equivalent pure-Python implementation.
135
Michael W. Hudson774479c2005-04-18 08:46:17 +0000136- It is now safe to call PyGILState_Release() before
137 PyEval_InitThreads() (note that if there is reason to believe there
138 are multiple threads around you still must call PyEval_InitThreads()
139 before using the Python API; this fix is for extension modules that
140 have no way of knowing if Python is multi-threaded yet).
141
Michael W. Hudsone3afc592005-04-07 10:11:19 +0000142- Typing Ctrl-C whilst raw_input() was waiting in a build with threads
143 disabled caused a crash.
144
Michael W. Hudsonb330adf2005-03-31 09:35:44 +0000145- Bug #1165306: instancemethod_new allowed the creation of a method
146 with im_class == im_self == NULL, which caused a crash when called.
147
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000148- Move exception finalisation later in the shutdown process - this
Anthony Baxter12b6f6c2005-03-29 13:36:16 +0000149 fixes the crash seen in bug #1165761
150
Raymond Hettinger96229b12005-03-11 06:49:40 +0000151- Added two new builtins, any() and all().
152
Brett Cannon409d8f22005-03-05 06:47:57 +0000153- Defining a class with empty parentheses is now allowed
Brett Cannonf4189912005-04-09 02:30:16 +0000154 (e.g., ``class C(): pass`` is no longer a syntax error).
155 Patch #1176012 added support to the 'parser' module and 'compiler' package
156 (thanks to logistix for that added support).
Brett Cannon409d8f22005-03-05 06:47:57 +0000157
Martin v. Löwis96d743e2005-03-03 23:00:26 +0000158- Patch #1115086: Support PY_LONGLONG in structmember.
159
Raymond Hettingerb67cc802005-03-03 16:45:19 +0000160- Bug #1155938: new style classes did not check that __init__() was
161 returning None.
162
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000163- Patch #802188: Report characters after line continuation character
Martin v. Löwis4bf108d2005-03-03 11:45:45 +0000164 ('\') with a specific error message.
165
Martin v. Löwisff232d72005-03-03 09:24:38 +0000166- Bug #723201: Raise a TypeError for passing bad objects to 'L' format.
167
Michael W. Hudson8e1afab2005-02-17 14:55:21 +0000168- Bug #1124295: the __name__ attribute of file objects was
169 inadvertently made inaccessible in restricted mode.
170
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000171- Bug #1074011: closing sys.std{out,err} now causes a flush() and
Martin v. Löwis8e3ca8a2005-01-23 09:41:49 +0000172 an ferror() call.
173
Raymond Hettinger3b0c7c22004-12-03 08:30:39 +0000174- min() and max() now support key= arguments with the same meaning as in
175 list.sort().
176
Raymond Hettingerc34f8672005-01-02 06:17:33 +0000177- The peephole optimizer now performs simple constant folding in expressions:
178 (2+3) --> (5).
179
Raymond Hettingera422c342005-01-11 03:03:27 +0000180- set and frozenset objects can now be marshalled. SF #1098985.
181
Michael W. Hudsonfaa76482005-01-31 17:09:25 +0000182- Bug #1077106: Poor argument checking could cause memory corruption
183 in calls to os.read().
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000184
Jeremy Hyltonab630502005-02-04 18:44:06 +0000185- The parser did not complain about future statements in illegal
186 positions. It once again reports a syntax error if a future
187 statement occurs after anything other than a doc string.
188
Neil Schemenauercf52c072005-08-12 17:34:58 +0000189- Change the %s format specifier for str objects so that it returns a
190 unicode instance if the argument is not an instance of basestring and
191 calling __str__ on the argument returns a unicode instance.
192
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000193Extension Modules
194-----------------
195
Hye-Shik Changc5c57e62005-12-12 11:48:32 +0000196- Bug #1290333: Added a workaround for cjkcodecs' _codecs_cn build
197 problem on AIX.
198
Georg Brandla13c2442005-11-22 19:30:31 +0000199- Bug #869197: os.setgroups rejects long integer arguments
200
Neal Norwitz0f46bbf2005-11-03 05:00:25 +0000201- Bug #1346533, select.poll() doesn't raise an error if timeout > sys.maxint
202
Neal Norwitz7b631792005-11-02 05:26:07 +0000203- Bug #1344508, Fix UNIX mmap leaking file descriptors
204
Neal Norwitzf3396542005-10-28 05:52:22 +0000205- Patch #1338314, Bug #1336623: fix tarfile so it can extract
206 REGTYPE directories from tarfiles written by old programs.
207
Neal Norwitzfed9b3e2005-10-21 06:32:02 +0000208- Get bsddb module to build with BSD DB version 3.2
209
Neal Norwitz484d9a42005-09-30 04:46:49 +0000210- Patch #1309009, Fix segfault in pyexpat when the XML document is in latin_1,
211 but Python incorrectly assumes it is in UTF-8 format
212
Georg Brandle677adc2005-09-29 13:40:49 +0000213- Fix parse errors in the readline module when compiling without threads.
214
Hye-Shik Chang9ceebd52005-09-24 14:58:47 +0000215- Patch #1288833: Removed thread lock from socket.getaddrinfo on
216 FreeBSD 5.3 and later versions which got thread-safe getaddrinfo(3).
217
Michael W. Hudson10402a32005-09-22 09:19:01 +0000218- Patches #1298449 and #1298499: Add some missing checks for error
219 returns in cStringIO.c.
220
Neal Norwitz058bde12005-09-21 06:44:25 +0000221- Patch #1297028: fix segfault if call type on MultibyteCodec,
222 MultibyteStreamReader, or MultibyteStreamWriter
223
Neal Norwitzcfe7dd92005-09-19 06:49:27 +0000224- Fix memory leak in posix.access().
225
Martin v. Löwis8b291e22005-09-18 08:17:56 +0000226- Patch #1213831: Fix typo in unicodedata._getcode.
227
Georg Brandlfb1ef852005-09-14 20:53:32 +0000228- Bug #1007046: os.startfile() did not accept unicode strings encoded in
229 the file system encoding.
230
Georg Brandld2e3ba72005-08-26 08:34:00 +0000231- Patch #756021: Special-case socket.inet_aton('255.255.255.255') for
232 platforms that don't have inet_aton().
Georg Brandl02760f92005-08-25 13:10:41 +0000233
Georg Brandld2e3ba72005-08-26 08:34:00 +0000234- Bug #1215928: Fix bz2.BZ2File.seek() for 64-bit file offsets.
235
236- Bug #1191043: Fix bz2.BZ2File.(x)readlines for files containing one
Georg Brandl02760f92005-08-25 13:10:41 +0000237 line without newlines.
238
Georg Brandl38387b82005-08-24 07:17:40 +0000239- Bug #728515: mmap.resize() now resizes the file on Unix as it did
240 on Windows.
241
Walter Dörwalda05834e2005-10-09 19:38:21 +0000242- Patch #1180695: Add nanosecond stat resolution, and st_gen,
Martin v. Löwisebd9d5b2005-08-09 15:00:59 +0000243 st_birthtime for FreeBSD.
244
Michael W. Hudson8137bea2005-07-27 20:24:40 +0000245- Patch #1231069: The fcntl.ioctl function now uses the 'I' code for
246 the request code argument, which results in more C-like behaviour
247 for large or negative values.
248
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000249- Bug #1234979: For the argument of thread.Lock.acquire, the Windows
Andrew M. Kuchling88b85822005-08-23 00:57:07 +0000250 implementation treated all integer values except 1 as false.
Georg Brandlaf410b52005-07-08 22:26:13 +0000251
Georg Brandl6b95f1d2005-06-03 19:47:00 +0000252- Bug #1194181: bz2.BZ2File didn't handle mode 'U' correctly.
253
Hye-Shik Chang5f937a72005-06-02 13:09:30 +0000254- Patch #1212117: os.stat().st_flags is now accessible as a attribute
255 if available on the platform.
256
Skip Montanaro5ff14922005-05-16 02:42:22 +0000257- Patch #1103951: Expose O_SHLOCK and O_EXLOCK in the posix module if
258 available on the platform.
259
Michael W. Hudsonb330adf2005-03-31 09:35:44 +0000260- Bug #1166660: The readline module could segfault if hook functions
261 were set in a different thread than that which called readline.
262
Raymond Hettinger4aec61e2005-03-18 21:20:23 +0000263- collections.deque objects now support a remove() method.
264
Raymond Hettinger984f9bb2005-03-09 16:38:48 +0000265- operator.itemgetter() and operator.attrgetter() now support retrieving
266 multiple fields. This provides direct support for sorting on multiple
267 keys (primary, secondary, etc).
268
Martin v. Löwisb60ae992005-03-08 09:10:29 +0000269- os.access now supports Unicode path names on non-Win32 systems.
270
Martin v. Löwisfd78a6f2005-03-04 14:37:01 +0000271- Patches #925152, #1118602: Avoid reading after the end of the buffer
272 in pyexpat.GetInputContext.
273
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000274- Patches #749830, #1144555: allow UNIX mmap size to default to current
Martin v. Löwis7fe60c02005-03-03 11:22:44 +0000275 file size.
276
Raymond Hettinger9c323f82005-02-28 19:39:44 +0000277- Added functional.partial(). See PEP309.
278
Martin v. Löwis9533e342005-02-27 20:33:25 +0000279- Patch #1093585: raise a ValueError for negative history items in readline.
280 {remove_history,replace_history}
281
Fred Drake9c131f22005-01-23 15:16:08 +0000282- The spwd module has been added, allowing access to the shadow password
283 database.
Martin v. Löwisc3001752005-01-23 09:27:24 +0000284
Martin v. Löwisfe33d0b2005-01-16 08:57:39 +0000285- stat_float_times is now True.
286
Raymond Hettingerb0900e62004-12-16 16:23:40 +0000287- array.array objects are now picklable.
288
Raymond Hettingera6b45cc2004-12-07 07:05:57 +0000289- the cPickle module no longer accepts the deprecated None option in the
290 args tuple returned by __reduce__().
291
Raymond Hettingerb2594052004-12-05 09:25:51 +0000292- itertools.islice() now accepts None for the start and step arguments.
293 This allows islice() to work more readily with slices:
294 islice(s.start, s.stop, s.step)
295
Skip Montanaro0af3ade2005-01-13 04:12:31 +0000296- datetime.datetime() now has a strptime class method which can be used to
297 create datetime object using a string and format.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000298
299Library
300-------
301
Brett Cannon3cbd0382005-12-16 22:49:23 +0000302- Added the hashlib module. It provides secure hash functions for MD5 and
Tim Peterse3547fd2005-12-16 23:13:57 +0000303 SHA1, 224, 256, 384, and 512. Note that recent developments make the
304 historic MD5 and SHA1 unsuitable for cryptographic-strength applications.
305 In <http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2005-December/058850.html>
306 Ronald L. Rivest offered this advice for Python:
307
308 "The consensus of researchers in this area (at least as
309 expressed at the NIST Hash Function Workshop 10/31/05),
310 is that SHA-256 is a good choice for the time being, but
311 that research should continue, and other alternatives may
312 arise from this research. The larger SHA's also seem OK."
Brett Cannon3cbd0382005-12-16 22:49:23 +0000313
Fredrik Lundh7e0aef02005-12-12 18:54:55 +0000314- Added a subset of Fredrik Lundh's ElementTree package. Available
315 modules are xml.etree.ElementTree, xml.etree.ElementPath, and
316 xml.etree.ElementInclude, from ElementTree 1.2.6.
317
Martin v. Löwis307021f2005-11-27 16:59:04 +0000318- Patch #1162825: Support non-ASCII characters in IDLE window titles.
319
Georg Brandl1f663572005-11-26 16:50:44 +0000320- Bug #1365984: urllib now opens "data:" URLs again.
321
Brett Cannonad07ff22005-11-23 02:15:50 +0000322- Patch #1314396: prevent deadlock for threading.Thread.join() when an exception
323 is raised within the method itself on a previous call (e.g., passing in an
324 illegal argument)
325
Brett Cannon5d0bf942005-11-02 23:04:26 +0000326- Bug #1340337: change time.strptime() to always return ValueError when there
327 is an error in the format string.
328
Georg Brandle8f24432005-10-03 14:16:44 +0000329- Patch #754022: Greatly enhanced webbrowser.py (by Oleg Broytmann).
330
Walter Dörwalda05834e2005-10-09 19:38:21 +0000331- Bug #729103: pydoc.py: Fix docother() method to accept additional
Georg Brandl8b813db2005-10-01 16:32:31 +0000332 "parent" argument.
333
Georg Brandlaa935172005-09-29 20:49:16 +0000334- Patch #1300515: xdrlib.py: Fix pack_fstring() to really use null bytes
335 for padding.
336
Georg Brandl80ba8e82005-09-29 20:16:07 +0000337- Bug #1296004: httplib.py: Limit maximal amount of data read from the
338 socket to avoid a MemoryError on Windows.
339
Matthias Klosef3f231f2005-09-20 07:02:49 +0000340- Patch #1166948: locale.py: Prefer LC_ALL, LC_CTYPE and LANG over LANGUAGE
341 to get the correct encoding.
342
343- Patch #1166938: locale.py: Parse LANGUAGE as a colon separated list of
344 languages.
345
Martin v. Löwis4ed67382005-09-18 08:34:39 +0000346- Patch #1268314: Cache lines in StreamReader.readlines for performance.
347
Brett Cannona783d062005-09-15 02:34:56 +0000348- Bug #1290505: Fix clearing the regex cache for time.strptime().
349
Martin v. Löwis5dbdc592005-08-27 10:07:56 +0000350- Bug #1167128: Fix size of a symlink in a tarfile to be 0.
351
Georg Brandl5a650a22005-08-26 08:51:34 +0000352- Patch #810023: Fix off-by-one bug in urllib.urlretrieve reporthook
353 functionality.
354
Martin v. Löwis8b595142005-08-25 11:03:38 +0000355- Bug #1163178: Make IDNA return an empty string when the input is empty.
356
Georg Brandl532efab2005-08-24 22:34:21 +0000357- Patch #848017: Make Cookie more RFC-compliant. Use CRLF as default output
358 separator and do not output trailing semicola.
359
Georg Brandlb9256022005-08-24 18:46:39 +0000360- Patch #1062060: urllib.urlretrieve() now raises a new exception, named
361 ContentTooShortException, when the actually downloaded size does not
362 match the Content-Length header.
363
Martin v. Löwis0a5d4a22005-08-24 14:55:22 +0000364- Bug #1121494: distutils.dir_utils.mkpath now accepts Unicode strings.
365
Martin v. Löwis56066d22005-08-24 07:38:12 +0000366- Bug #1178484: Return complete lines from codec stream readers
367 even if there is an exception in later lines, resulting in
Walter Dörwalda05834e2005-10-09 19:38:21 +0000368 correct line numbers for decoding errors in source code.
Martin v. Löwis56066d22005-08-24 07:38:12 +0000369
Georg Brandl6d2b3462005-08-24 07:36:17 +0000370- Bug #1192315: Disallow negative arguments to clear() in pdb.
371
Martin v. Löwisb813c532005-08-07 20:51:04 +0000372- Patch #827386: Support absolute source paths in msvccompiler.py.
373
Georg Brandl649f8e72005-08-03 07:30:12 +0000374- Patch #1105730: Apply the new implementation of commonprefix in posixpath
375 to ntpath, macpath, os2emxpath and riscospath.
376
Guido van Rossum755149f2005-07-27 00:00:44 +0000377- Fix a problem in Tkinter introduced by SF patch #869468: delete bogus
378 __hasattr__ and __delattr__ methods on class Tk that were breaking
379 Tkdnd.
380
Georg Brandl5dbda752005-07-17 20:27:41 +0000381- Bug #1015140: disambiguated the term "article id" in nntplib docs and
382 docstrings to either "article number" or "message id".
383
Georg Brandla4a8b822005-07-15 09:13:21 +0000384- Bug #1238170: threading.Thread.__init__ no longer has "kwargs={}" as a
385 parameter, but uses the usual "kwargs=None".
386
Andrew M. Kuchling88b85822005-08-23 00:57:07 +0000387- textwrap now processes text chunks at O(n) speed instead of O(n**2).
Raymond Hettinger8bfa8932005-07-15 06:53:35 +0000388 Patch #1209527 (Contributed by Connelly).
389
Georg Brandl5c5fe2f2005-07-14 06:40:47 +0000390- urllib2 has now an attribute 'httpresponses' mapping from HTTP status code
391 to W3C name (404 -> 'Not Found'). RFE #1216944.
392
Georg Brandl9e43acf2005-07-04 17:16:07 +0000393- Bug #1177468: Don't cache the /dev/urandom file descriptor for os.urandom,
394 as this can cause problems with apps closing all file descriptors.
395
Georg Brandl5284b532005-06-26 22:54:58 +0000396- Bug #839151: Fix an attempt to access sys.argv in the warnings module
Andrew M. Kuchling88b85822005-08-23 00:57:07 +0000397 it can be missing in embedded interpreters
Georg Brandl5284b532005-06-26 22:54:58 +0000398
Georg Brandl2f210b62005-06-26 22:09:06 +0000399- Bug #1155638: Fix a bug which affected HTTP 0.9 responses in httplib.
400
Georg Brandlfbff1bc2005-06-26 21:36:25 +0000401- Bug #1100201: Cross-site scripting was possible on BaseHTTPServer via
402 error messages.
403
Georg Brandl379f99d2005-06-26 21:09:38 +0000404- Bug #1108948: Cookie.py produced invalid JavaScript code.
405
Raymond Hettingerda99d1c2005-06-21 07:43:58 +0000406- The tokenize module now detects and reports indentation errors.
407 Bug #1224621.
408
Raymond Hettinger68c04532005-06-10 11:05:19 +0000409- The tokenize module has a new untokenize() function to support a full
410 roundtrip from lexed tokens back to Python sourcecode. In addition,
411 the generate_tokens() function now accepts a callable argument that
412 terminates by raising StopIteration.
413
Georg Brandl9166e1a2005-06-04 09:20:03 +0000414- Bug #1196315: fix weakref.WeakValueDictionary constructor.
415
Georg Brandl268e61c2005-06-03 14:28:50 +0000416- Bug #1213894: os.path.realpath didn't resolve symlinks that were the first
417 component of the path.
418
Skip Montanaro174dd222005-05-14 20:54:16 +0000419- Patch #1120353: The xmlrpclib module provides better, more transparent,
420 support for datetime.{datetime,date,time} objects. With use_datetime set
421 to True, applications shouldn't have to fiddle with the DateTime wrapper
422 class at all.
423
Martin v. Löwis55f1bb82005-03-21 20:56:35 +0000424- distutils.commands.upload was added to support uploading distribution
425 files to PyPI.
426
Walter Dörwalda6e8a4a2005-03-31 13:57:38 +0000427- distutils.commands.register now encodes the data as UTF-8 before posting
428 them to PyPI.
429
Raymond Hettinger267b8682005-03-27 10:47:39 +0000430- decimal operator and comparison methods now return NotImplemented
431 instead of raising a TypeError when interacting with other types. This
432 allows other classes to implement __radd__ style methods and have them
433 work as expected.
434
Raymond Hettingerbea3f6f2005-03-15 04:59:17 +0000435- Bug #1163325: Decimal infinities failed to hash. Attempting to
436 hash a NaN raised an InvalidOperation instead of a TypeError.
437
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000438- Patch #918101: Add tarfile open mode r|* for auto-detection of the
Martin v. Löwis78be7df2005-03-05 12:47:42 +0000439 stream compression; add, for symmetry reasons, r:* as a synonym of r.
440
Martin v. Löwis00a73e72005-03-04 19:40:34 +0000441- Patch #1043890: Add extractall method to tarfile.
442
Martin v. Löwisc72dd382005-03-04 13:50:17 +0000443- Patch #1075887: Don't require MSVC in distutils if there is nothing
444 to build.
445
Martin v. Löwis637431b2005-03-03 23:12:42 +0000446- Patch #1103407: Properly deal with tarfile iterators when untarring
447 symbolic links on Windows.
448
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000449- Patch #645894: Use getrusage for computing the time consumption in
Martin v. Löwisa4dac402005-03-03 11:39:45 +0000450 profile.py if available.
451
Martin v. Löwisdf37c8c2005-03-03 11:08:03 +0000452- Patch #1046831: Use get_python_version where appropriate in sysconfig.py.
453
Martin v. Löwisc5574e82005-03-03 10:57:37 +0000454- Patch #1117454: Remove code to special-case cookies without values
455 in LWPCookieJar.
456
Martin v. Löwis4ea3ead2005-03-03 10:48:12 +0000457- Patch #1117339: Add cookielib special name tests.
458
Martin v. Löwise869eb12005-03-03 09:46:07 +0000459- Patch #1112812: Make bsddb/__init__.py more friendly for modulefinder.
460
Martin v. Löwisf2a8d632005-03-03 08:35:22 +0000461- Patch #1110248: SYNC_FLUSH the zlib buffer for GZipFile.flush.
462
Martin v. Löwisdf241532005-03-03 08:17:42 +0000463- Patch #1107973: Allow to iterate over the lines of a tarfile.ExFileObject.
464
Martin v. Löwis8ed338a2005-03-03 08:12:27 +0000465- Patch #1104111: Alter setup.py --help and --help-commands.
466
Martin v. Löwis4afe1542005-03-01 08:09:28 +0000467- Patch #1121234: Properly cleanup _exit and tkerror commands.
468
Martin v. Löwisc2a0ac22005-02-24 20:22:10 +0000469- Patch #1049151: xdrlib now unpacks booleans as True or False.
470
Raymond Hettingerbab41432005-02-05 01:31:19 +0000471- Fixed bug in a NameError bug in cookielib. Patch #1116583.
472
Guido van Rossumd0641422005-02-03 15:01:24 +0000473- Applied a security fix to SimpleXMLRPCserver (PSF-2005-001). This
474 disables recursive traversal through instance attributes, which can
475 be exploited in various ways.
476
Tim Peterse3547fd2005-12-16 23:13:57 +0000477- Bug #1222790: in SimpleXMLRPCServer, set the reuse-address and close-on-exec
Andrew M. Kuchling3a976052005-12-04 15:07:41 +0000478 flags on the HTTP listening socket.
479
Andrew M. Kuchlinge63fde72005-12-04 15:36:57 +0000480- Bug #792570: SimpleXMLRPCServer had problems if the request grew too large.
481 Fixed by reading the HTTP body in chunks instead of one big socket.read().
482
Tim Peterse3547fd2005-12-16 23:13:57 +0000483- Patches #893642, #1039083: add allow_none, encoding arguments to constructors of
Andrew M. Kuchling10a16de2005-12-04 16:34:40 +0000484 SimpleXMLRPCServer and CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler.
485
Martin v. Löwis1d11de62005-01-29 13:29:23 +0000486- Bug #1110478: Revert os.environ.update to do putenv again.
487
Thomas Hellerd6c6e222005-01-20 19:20:16 +0000488- Bug #1103844: fix distutils.install.dump_dirs() with negated options.
489
Martin v. Löwis22b457e2005-01-16 08:40:58 +0000490- os.{SEEK_SET, SEEK_CUR, SEEK_END} have been added for convenience.
491
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000492- Enhancements to the csv module:
493
494 + Dialects are now validated by the underlying C code, better
Georg Brandl7eb4b7d2005-07-22 21:49:32 +0000495 reflecting its capabilities, and improving its compliance with
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000496 PEP 305.
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000497 + Dialect parameter parsing has been re-implemented to improve error
498 reporting.
499 + quotechar=None and quoting=QUOTE_NONE now work the way PEP 305
500 dictates.
501 + the parser now removes the escapechar prefix from escaped characters.
Andrew McNamara0f0599d2005-01-12 09:45:18 +0000502 + when quoting=QUOTE_NONNUMERIC, the writer now tests for numeric
Andrew McNamaraf69d94f2005-01-13 11:30:54 +0000503 types, rather than any object than can be represented as a numeric.
Andrew McNamara0f0599d2005-01-12 09:45:18 +0000504 + when quoting=QUOTE_NONNUMERIC, the reader now casts unquoted fields
505 to floats.
Andrew McNamaraf69d94f2005-01-13 11:30:54 +0000506 + reader now allows \r characters to be quoted (previously it only allowed
507 \n to be quoted).
Andrew McNamarac89f2842005-01-12 07:44:42 +0000508 + writer doublequote handling improved.
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000509 + Dialect classes passed to the module are no longer instantiated by
510 the module before being parsed (the former validation scheme required
511 this, but the mechanism was unreliable).
512 + The dialect registry now contains instances of the internal
513 C-coded dialect type, rather than references to python objects.
514 + the internal c-coded dialect type is now immutable.
515 + register_dialect now accepts the same keyword dialect specifications
516 as the reader and writer, allowing the user to register dialects
517 without first creating a dialect class.
518 + a configurable limit to the size of parsed fields has been added -
519 previously, an unmatched quote character could result in the entire
520 file being read into the field buffer before an error was reported.
Andrew McNamara31d88962005-01-12 03:45:10 +0000521 + A new module method csv.field_size_limit() has been added that sets
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000522 the parser field size limit (returning the former limit). The initial
523 limit is 128kB.
Andrew McNamara7f2053e2005-01-12 11:17:16 +0000524 + A line_num attribute has been added to the reader object, which tracks
525 the number of lines read from the source iterator. This is not
526 the same as the number of records returned, as records can span
527 multiple lines.
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000528 + reader and writer objects were not being registered with the cyclic-GC.
529 This has been fixed.
530
Brett Cannone6539c42005-01-08 02:43:53 +0000531- _DummyThread objects in the threading module now delete self.__block that is
532 inherited from _Thread since it uses up a lock allocated by 'thread'. The
533 lock primitives tend to be limited in number and thus should not be wasted on
534 a _DummyThread object. Fixes bug #1089632.
535
Raymond Hettinger97db05d2005-01-07 08:15:41 +0000536- The imghdr module now detects Exif files.
537
Raymond Hettinger6065d322004-12-20 23:51:53 +0000538- StringIO.truncate() now correctly adjusts the size attribute.
539 (Bug #951915).
540
Marc-André Lemburgbb4f1bd2004-12-10 21:58:14 +0000541- locale.py now uses an updated locale alias table (built using
542 Tools/i18n/makelocalealias.py, a tool to parse the X11 locale
543 alias file); the encoding lookup was enhanced to use Python's
Andrew M. Kuchling88b85822005-08-23 00:57:07 +0000544 encoding alias table.
Marc-André Lemburgbb4f1bd2004-12-10 21:58:14 +0000545
Raymond Hettinger3557f422004-12-07 12:02:02 +0000546- moved deprecated modules to Lib/lib-old: whrandom, tzparse, statcache.
547
Raymond Hettingera6b45cc2004-12-07 07:05:57 +0000548- the pickle module no longer accepts the deprecated None option in the
549 args tuple returned by __reduce__().
550
Brett Cannon84667c02004-12-07 03:25:18 +0000551- optparse now optionally imports gettext. This allows its use in setup.py.
552
Raymond Hettinger3489cad2004-12-05 05:20:42 +0000553- the pickle module no longer uses the deprecated bin parameter.
554
Raymond Hettinger1bc82f82004-12-05 03:58:17 +0000555- the shelve module no longer uses the deprecated binary parameter.
556
Raymond Hettinger6c92d762004-12-05 03:28:00 +0000557- the pstats module no longer uses the deprecated ignore() method.
558
Raymond Hettingerf3fa9462004-12-05 01:58:09 +0000559- the filecmp module no longer uses the deprecated use_statcache argument.
560
Raymond Hettinger664347b2004-12-04 21:21:53 +0000561- unittest.TestCase.run() and unittest.TestSuite.run() can now be successfully
562 extended or overridden by subclasses. Formerly, the subclassed method would
563 be ignored by the rest of the module. (Bug #1078905).
564
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000565- heapq.nsmallest() and heapq.nlargest() now support key= arguments with
Raymond Hettinger3b0c7c22004-12-03 08:30:39 +0000566 the same meaning as in list.sort().
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000567
Walter Dörwald36733692004-12-22 12:50:50 +0000568- Bug #1076985: ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` now calls ``read()`` only
569 once when a size argument is given. This prevents a buffer overflow in the
570 tokenizer with very long source lines.
571
Andrew M. Kuchling3b585b32004-12-28 20:10:48 +0000572- Bug #1083110: ``zlib.decompress.flush()`` would segfault if called immediately
573 after creating the object, without any intervening ``.decompress()`` calls.
574
Skip Montanaro05885812005-01-16 20:48:27 +0000575- The reconvert.quote function can now emit triple-quoted strings. The
576 reconvert module now has some simple documentation.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000577
Walter Dörwaldaf3b39a2005-02-18 13:22:43 +0000578- ``UserString.MutableString`` now supports negative indices in
579 ``__setitem__`` and ``__delitem__``
580
Greg Ward40407942005-03-05 02:53:17 +0000581- Bug #1149508: ``textwrap`` now handles hyphenated numbers (eg. "2004-03-05")
582 correctly.
583
Walter Dörwaldbc8e6422005-04-21 21:32:03 +0000584- Partial fixes for SF bugs #1163244 and #1175396: If a chunk read by
585 ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` has a trailing "\r", read one more
586 character even if the user has passed a size parameter to get a proper
587 line ending. Remove the special handling of a "\r\n" that has been split
588 between two lines.
589
Walter Dörwalda47d1c02005-08-30 10:23:14 +0000590- Bug #1251300: On UCS-4 builds the "unicode-internal" codec will now complain
591 about illegal code points. The codec now supports PEP 293 style error
592 handlers.
593
Walter Dörwald78a78b02005-09-01 12:04:29 +0000594- Bug #1235646: ``codecs.StreamRecoder.next()`` now reencodes the data it reads
Walter Dörwaldc5238b82005-09-01 11:56:53 +0000595 from the input stream, so that the output is a byte string in the correct
596 encoding instead of a unicode string.
Greg Ward40407942005-03-05 02:53:17 +0000597
Gustavo Niemeyer6fa0c5a2005-09-14 08:54:39 +0000598- Bug #1202493: Fixing SRE parser to handle '{}' as perl does, rather than
599 considering it exactly like a '*'.
600
Walter Dörwald007f8df2005-10-09 19:42:27 +0000601- Bug #1245379: Add "unicode-1-1-utf-7" as an alias for "utf-7" to
602 ``encodings.aliases``.
Gustavo Niemeyer6fa0c5a2005-09-14 08:54:39 +0000603
Walter Dörwald09f0dd52005-11-21 19:10:07 +0000604- ` uu.encode()`` and ``uu.decode()`` now support unicode filenames.
605
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000606Build
607-----
608
Martin v. Löwis147fbe52005-08-07 21:09:30 +0000609- Bug #1189330: configure did not correctly determine the necessary
610 value of LINKCC if python was built with GCC 4.0.
611
Trent Mick8321b422005-07-26 02:29:21 +0000612- Upgrade Windows build to zlib 1.2.3 which eliminates a potential security
613 vulnerability in zlib 1.2.1 and 1.2.2.
614
Brett Cannon08cd5982005-04-24 22:26:38 +0000615- EXTRA_CFLAGS has been introduced as an environment variable to hold compiler
616 flags that change binary compatibility. Changes were also made to
617 distutils.sysconfig to also use the environment variable when used during
Martin v. Löwisd7c795e2005-04-25 07:14:03 +0000618 compilation of the interpreter and of C extensions through distutils.
Brett Cannon08cd5982005-04-24 22:26:38 +0000619
Bob Ippolitoed233462005-03-29 13:47:59 +0000620- SF patch 1171735: Darwin 8's headers are anal about POSIX compliance,
621 and linking has changed (prebinding is now deprecated, and libcc_dynamic
622 no longer exists). This configure patch makes things right.
623
Martin v. Löwise2713be2005-03-08 15:03:08 +0000624- Bug #1158607: Build with --disable-unicode again.
625
Brett Cannon46d96232005-02-16 00:07:19 +0000626- spwdmodule.c is built only if either HAVE_GETSPNAM or HAVE_HAVE_GETSPENT is
627 defined. Discovered as a result of not being able to build on OS X.
628
Brett Cannon516592f2004-12-07 00:42:59 +0000629- setup.py now uses the directories specified in LDFLAGS using the -L option
630 and in CPPFLAGS using the -I option for adding library and include
631 directories, respectively, for compiling extension modules against. This has
632 led to the core being compiled using the values in CPPFLAGS. It also removes
633 the need for the special-casing of both DarwinPorts and Fink for darwin since
634 the proper directories can be specified in LDFLAGS (``-L/sw/lib`` for Fink,
635 ``-L/opt/local/lib`` for DarwinPorts) and CPPFLAGS (``-I/sw/include`` for
636 Fink, ``-I/opt/local/include`` for DarwinPorts).
637
Brett Cannon43802422005-02-10 20:48:03 +0000638- Test in configure.in that checks for tzset no longer dependent on tm->tm_zone
639 to exist in the struct (not required by either ISO C nor the UNIX 2 spec).
640 Tests for sanity in tzname when HAVE_TZNAME defined were also defined.
641 Closes bug #1096244. Thanks Gregory Bond.
642
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000643
644C API
645-----
646
Raymond Hettingerbeb31012005-08-16 03:47:52 +0000647- Added a C API for set and frozenset objects.
648
Raymond Hettinger66517482004-12-03 11:45:13 +0000649- Removed PyRange_New().
650
Walter Dörwaldd1c1e102005-10-06 20:29:57 +0000651- Patch #1313939: PyUnicode_DecodeCharmap() accepts a unicode string as the
652 mapping argument now. This string is used as a mapping table. Byte values
653 greater than the length of the string and 0xFFFE are treated as undefined
654 mappings.
655
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000656
657Tests
658-----
659
Martin v. Löwis4d394df2005-01-23 09:19:22 +0000660- In test_os, st_?time is now truncated before comparing it with ST_?TIME.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000661
Hye-Shik Changaaa2f1d2005-12-10 17:44:27 +0000662- Patch #1276356: New resource "urlfetch" is implemented. This enables
663 even impatient people to run tests that require remote files.
664
Brett Cannonced04e02005-02-13 22:53:22 +0000665
666Documentation
667-------------
668
Georg Brandl32252422005-09-14 20:42:00 +0000669- Bug #1274828: Document os.path.splitunc().
670
Georg Brandl79c122f2005-08-24 07:31:33 +0000671- Bug #1190204: Clarify which directories are searched by site.py.
672
Georg Brandl6f2bbd32005-08-24 07:26:55 +0000673- Bug #1193849: Clarify os.path.expanduser() documentation.
674
Georg Brandlf13c4ba2005-08-02 10:28:08 +0000675- Bug #1243192: re.UNICODE and re.LOCALE affect \d, \D, \s and \S.
676
Georg Brandl150db732005-07-18 08:53:17 +0000677- Bug #755617: Document the effects of os.chown() on Windows.
678
Georg Brandl379f99d2005-06-26 21:09:38 +0000679- Patch #1180012: The documentation for modulefinder is now in the library reference.
680
681- Patch #1213031: Document that os.chown() accepts argument values of -1.
682
683- Bug #1190563: Document os.waitpid() return value with WNOHANG flag.
684
685- Bug #1175022: Correct the example code for property().
686
Georg Brandl40c71652005-06-25 21:08:46 +0000687- Document the IterableUserDict class in the UserDict module.
688 Closes bug #1166582.
689
Brett Cannonced04e02005-02-13 22:53:22 +0000690- Remove all latent references for "Macintosh" that referred to semantics for
691 Mac OS 9 and change to reflect the state for OS X.
692 Closes patch #1095802. Thanks Jack Jansen.
693
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000694Mac
695---
696
697
Hye-Shik Chang4e422812005-07-17 02:36:59 +0000698New platforms
699-------------
700
701- FreeBSD 7 support is added.
702
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000703
704Tools/Demos
705-----------
706
Georg Brandl56897312005-08-24 18:32:30 +0000707- Added two new files to Tools/scripts: pysource.py, which recursively
708 finds Python source files, and findnocoding.py, which finds Python
709 source files that need an encoding declaration.
710 Patch #784089, credits to Oleg Broytmann.
711
Georg Brandl379f99d2005-06-26 21:09:38 +0000712- Bug #1072853: pindent.py used an uninitialized variable.
713
Martin v. Löwisab9ec162005-04-09 10:53:34 +0000714- Patch #1177597: Correct Complex.__init__.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000715
716
Anthony Baxtere2648ee2004-11-30 01:28:55 +0000717What's New in Python 2.4 final?
718===============================
Kurt B. Kaiser4c79a832004-11-23 18:06:08 +0000719
Anthony Baxtere2648ee2004-11-30 01:28:55 +0000720*Release date: 30-NOV-2004*
Kurt B. Kaiser4c79a832004-11-23 18:06:08 +0000721
722Core and builtins
723-----------------
724
725- Bug 875692: Improve signal handling, especially when using threads, by
726 forcing an early re-execution of PyEval_EvalFrame() "periodic" code when
727 things_to_do is not cleared by Py_MakePendingCalls().
728
729
Anthony Baxter4277ed82004-11-30 11:53:10 +0000730What's New in Python 2.4 (release candidate 1)
731==============================================
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000732
Anthony Baxter5cc727a2004-11-18 12:32:27 +0000733*Release date: 18-NOV-2004*
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000734
735Core and builtins
736-----------------
737
Tim Petersfb1ffb02004-11-08 04:30:21 +0000738- Bug 1061968: Fixes in 2.4a3 to address thread bug 1010677 reintroduced
739 the years-old thread shutdown race bug 225673. Numeric history lesson
740 aside, all bugs in all three reports are fixed now.
741
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000742
Skip Montanaro599bd5e2004-11-04 04:31:30 +0000743Library
744-------
745
746- Bug 1052242: If exceptions are raised by an atexit handler function an
747 attempt is made to execute the remaining handlers. The last exception
748 raised is re-raised.
749
Tim Peters50c6bdb2004-11-08 22:07:37 +0000750- ``doctest``'s new support for adding ``pdb.set_trace()`` calls to
751 doctests was broken in a dramatic but shallow way. Fixed.
752
Tim Petersbbc0d442004-11-13 16:18:32 +0000753- Bug 1065388: ``calendar``'s ``day_name``, ``day_abbr``, ``month_name``,
754 and ``month_abbr`` attributes emulate sequences of locale-correct
755 spellings of month and day names. Because the locale can change at
756 any time, the correct spelling is recomputed whenever one of these is
757 indexed. In the worst case, the index may be a slice object, so these
758 recomputed every day or month name each time they were indexed. This is
759 much slower than necessary in the usual case, when the index is just an
760 integer. In that case, only the single spelling needed is recomputed
761 now; and, when the index is a slice object, only the spellings needed
762 by the slice are recomputed now.
763
Tim Peters50c6bdb2004-11-08 22:07:37 +0000764- Patch 1061679: Added ``__all__`` to pickletools.py.
Tim Peters90cf2122004-11-06 23:45:48 +0000765
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000766Build
767-----
Skip Montanaro599bd5e2004-11-04 04:31:30 +0000768
Brett Cannon7d28e962004-11-07 01:19:00 +0000769- Bug 1034277 / Patch 1035255: Remove compilation of core against CoreServices
770 and CoreFoundation on OS X. Involved removing PyMac_GetAppletScriptFile()
771 which has no known users. Thanks Bob Ippolito.
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000772
773C API
774-----
775
Raymond Hettinger39e92ea2004-11-18 09:41:45 +0000776- The PyRange_New() function is deprecated.
777
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000778
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000779What's New in Python 2.4 beta 2?
780================================
781
Anthony Baxter9f41f3a2004-11-03 06:21:37 +0000782*Release date: 03-NOV-2004*
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000783
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000784License
785-------
786
787The Python Software Foundation changed the license under which Python
788is released, to remove Python version numbers. There were no other
789changes to the license. So, for example, wherever the license for
790Python 2.3 said "Python 2.3", the new license says "Python". The
791intent is to make it possible to refer to the PSF license in a more
792durable way. For example, some people say they're confused by that
793the Open Source Initiative's entry for the Python Software Foundation
794License::
795
796 http://www.opensource.org/licenses/PythonSoftFoundation.php
797
798says "Python 2.1.1" all over it, wondering whether it applies only
799to Python 2.1.1.
800
801The official name of the new license is the Python Software Foundation
802License Version 2.
803
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000804Core and builtins
805-----------------
806
Tim Petersead8b7a2004-10-30 23:09:22 +0000807- Bug #1055820 Cyclic garbage collection was not protecting against that
808 calling a live weakref to a piece of cyclic trash could resurrect an
809 insane mutation of the trash if any Python code ran during gc (via
810 running a dead object's __del__ method, running another callback on a
811 weakref to a dead object, or via any Python code run in any other thread
812 that managed to obtain the GIL while a __del__ or callback was running
813 in the thread doing gc). The most likely symptom was "impossible"
Andrew M. Kuchlingb2a739d2005-11-22 15:14:44 +0000814 ``AttributeError`` exceptions, appearing seemingly at random, on weakly
Tim Petersead8b7a2004-10-30 23:09:22 +0000815 referenced objects. The cure was to clear all weakrefs to unreachable
816 objects before allowing any callbacks to run.
817
Raymond Hettinger561fbf12004-10-26 01:52:37 +0000818- Bug #1054139 _PyString_Resize() now invalidates its cached hash value.
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000819
820Extension Modules
821-----------------
822
Raymond Hettinger9047c8f2004-10-24 00:10:06 +0000823- Bug #1048870: the compiler now generates distinct code objects for
824 functions with identical bodies. This was producing confusing
825 traceback messages which pointed to the function where the code
826 object was first defined rather than the function being executed.
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000827
828Library
829-------
830
Barry Warsaw8c72eae2004-11-01 03:52:43 +0000831- Patch #1056967 changes the semantics of Template.safe_substitute() so that
832 no ValueError is raised on an 'invalid' match group. Now the delimiter is
833 returned.
834
Raymond Hettinger2ef7e6c2004-10-24 00:32:24 +0000835- Bug #1052503 pdb.runcall() was not passing along keyword arguments.
836
Raymond Hettingerc64aab82004-10-20 08:21:57 +0000837- Bug #902037: XML.sax.saxutils.prepare_input_source() now combines relative
838 paths with a base path before checking os.path.isfile().
839
Raymond Hettingere54e7262004-10-20 07:17:16 +0000840- The whichdb module can now be run from the command line.
841
Brett Cannon8abcc5d2004-10-18 01:37:57 +0000842- Bug #1045381: time.strptime() can now infer the date using %U or %W (week of
843 the year) when the day of the week and year are also specified.
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000844
Andrew M. Kuchling0d19bae2004-10-19 19:54:41 +0000845- Bug #1048816: fix bug in Ctrl-K at start of line in curses.textpad.Textbox
846
Andrew M. Kuchling66e80ba2004-10-20 11:56:15 +0000847- Bug #1017553: fix bug in tarfile.filemode()
848
Hye-Shik Chang33761492004-10-26 09:53:46 +0000849- Patch #737473: fix bug that old source code is shown in tracebacks even if
Hye-Shik Chang182ac852004-10-26 09:16:42 +0000850 the source code is updated and reloaded.
851
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000852Build
853-----
854
Hye-Shik Chang33761492004-10-26 09:53:46 +0000855- Patch #1044395: --enable-shared is allowed in FreeBSD also.
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000856
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000857What's New in Python 2.4 beta 1?
858================================
859
Anthony Baxter6a587c12004-10-15 08:07:21 +0000860*Release date: 15-OCT-2004*
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000861
862Core and builtins
863-----------------
864
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000865- Patch #975056: Restartable signals were not correctly disabled on
Anthony Baxtere4f8a482004-10-13 14:55:56 +0000866 BSD systems. Consistently use PyOS_setsig() instead of signal().
867
Tim Peters263091e2004-10-10 01:58:44 +0000868- The internal portable implementation of thread-local storage (TLS), used
869 by the ``PyGILState_Ensure()``/``PyGILState_Release()`` API, was not
870 thread-correct. This could lead to a variety of problems, up to and
871 including segfaults. See bug 1041645 for an example.
872
Raymond Hettingerdb29e0f2004-10-07 06:46:25 +0000873- Added a command line option, -m module, which searches sys.path for the
874 module and then runs it. (Contributed by Nick Coghlan.)
875
Raymond Hettinger2c31a052004-09-22 18:44:21 +0000876- The bytecode optimizer now folds tuples of constants into a single
877 constant.
878
Tim Peters307fa782004-09-23 08:06:40 +0000879- SF bug #513866: Float/long comparison anomaly. Prior to 2.4b1, when
880 an integer was compared to a float, the integer was coerced to a float.
881 That could yield spurious overflow errors (if the integer was very
882 large), and to anomalies such as
883 ``long(1e200)+1 == 1e200 == long(1e200)-1``. Coercion to float is no
884 longer performed, and cases like ``long(1e200)-1 < 1e200``,
885 ``long(1e200)+1 > 1e200`` and ``(1 << 20000) > 1e200`` are computed
886 correctly now.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000887
888Extension modules
889-----------------
890
Tim Peterscf8997f2004-10-01 02:13:16 +0000891- ``collections.deque`` objects didn't play quite right with garbage
892 collection, which could lead to a segfault in a release build, or
Raymond Hettingerdb29e0f2004-10-07 06:46:25 +0000893 an assert failure in a debug build. Also, added overflow checks,
894 better detection of mutation during iteration, and shielded deque
895 comparisons from unusual subclass overrides of the __iter__() method.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000896
897Library
898-------
Raymond Hettinger0318a932004-09-22 18:03:47 +0000899
Anthony Baxtera0240342004-10-14 10:02:08 +0000900- Patch 1046644: distutils build_ext grew two new options - --swig for
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000901 specifying the swig executable to use, and --swig-opts to specify
Anthony Baxtera0240342004-10-14 10:02:08 +0000902 options to pass to swig. --swig-opts="-c++" is the new way to spell
903 --swig-cpp.
904
Anthony Baxter22dcf662004-10-13 15:54:17 +0000905- Patch 983206: distutils now obeys environment variable LDSHARED, if
906 it is set.
907
Andrew M. Kuchling518d3932004-10-12 15:32:10 +0000908- Added Peter Astrand's subprocess.py module. See PEP 324 for details.
Fredrik Lundh5b3687d2004-10-12 15:26:28 +0000909
Brett Cannon4f35c712004-10-06 02:11:37 +0000910- time.strptime() now properly escapes timezones and all other locale-specific
911 strings for regex-specific symbols. Was breaking under Japanese Windows when
912 the timezone was specified as "Tokyo (standard time)".
913 Closes bug #1039270.
914
Barry Warsawbb113862004-10-03 03:16:19 +0000915- Updates for the email package:
Brett Cannon06a30b02004-10-22 06:22:54 +0000916
Barry Warsaw418de1f2004-10-11 14:32:47 +0000917 + email.Utils.formatdate() grew a 'usegmt' argument for HTTP support.
Barry Warsawbb113862004-10-03 03:16:19 +0000918 + All deprecated APIs that in email 2.x issued warnings have been removed:
919 _encoder argument to the MIMEText constructor, Message.add_payload(),
920 Utils.dump_address_pair(), Utils.decode(), Utils.encode()
921 + New deprecations: Generator.__call__(), Message.get_type(),
922 Message.get_main_type(), Message.get_subtype(), the 'strict' argument to
923 the Parser constructor. These will be removed in email 3.1.
924 + Support for Python earlier than 2.3 has been removed (see PEP 291).
925 + All defect classes have been renamed to end in 'Defect'.
926 + Some FeedParser fixes; also a MultipartInvariantViolationDefect will be
927 added to messages that claim to be multipart but really aren't.
928 + Updates to documentation.
929
Raymond Hettinger596ba4d2004-09-24 03:41:05 +0000930- re's findall() and finditer() functions now take an optional flags argument
931 just like the compile(), search(), and match() functions. Also, documented
932 the previously existing start and stop parameters for the findall() and
933 finditer() methods of regular expression objects.
934
Raymond Hettinger0318a932004-09-22 18:03:47 +0000935- rfc822 Messages now support iterating over the headers.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000936
Martin v. Löwisf3c56112004-09-18 09:08:52 +0000937- The (undocumented) tarfile.Tarfile.membernames has been removed;
938 applications should use the getmember function.
939
Martin v. Löwis39a31782004-09-18 09:03:49 +0000940- httplib now offers symbolic constants for the HTTP status codes.
941
Tim Peters528ca532004-09-16 01:30:50 +0000942- SF bug #1028306: Trying to compare a ``datetime.date`` to a
943 ``datetime.datetime`` mistakenly compared only the year, month and day.
944 Now it acts like a mixed-type comparison: ``False`` for ``==``,
945 ``True`` for ``!=``, and raises ``TypeError`` for other comparison
946 operators. Because datetime is a subclass of date, comparing only the
947 base class (date) members can still be done, if that's desired, by
948 forcing using of the approprate date method; e.g.,
949 ``a_date.__eq__(a_datetime)`` is true if and only if the year, month
950 and day members of ``a_date`` and ``a_datetime`` are equal.
951
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000952- bdist_rpm now supports command line options --force-arch,
953 {pre,post}-install, {pre,post}-uninstall, and
Martin v. Löwis23c48a12004-09-10 06:32:54 +0000954 {prep,build,install,clean,verify}-script.
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000955
Walter Dörwald69652032004-09-07 20:24:22 +0000956- SF patch #998993: The UTF-8 and the UTF-16 stateful decoders now support
957 decoding incomplete input (when the input stream is temporarily exhausted).
958 ``codecs.StreamReader`` now implements buffering, which enables proper
959 readline support for the UTF-16 decoders. ``codecs.StreamReader.read()``
960 has a new argument ``chars`` which specifies the number of characters to
961 return. ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` and
962 ``codecs.StreamReader.readlines()`` have a new argument ``keepends``.
963 Trailing "\n"s will be stripped from the lines if ``keepends`` is false.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000964
Tim Petersa80a2c82004-09-26 05:13:18 +0000965- The documentation for doctest is greatly expanded, and now covers all
966 the new public features (of which there are many).
967
Walter Dörwald5011d0c2004-09-13 08:53:15 +0000968- ``doctest.master`` was put back in, and ``doctest.testmod()`` once again
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000969 updates it. This isn't good, because every ``testmod()`` call
970 contributes to bloating the "hidden" state of ``doctest.master``, but
971 some old code apparently relies on it. For now, all we can do is
972 encourage people to stitch doctests together via doctest's unittest
Tim Petersa80a2c82004-09-26 05:13:18 +0000973 integration features instead.
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000974
Skip Montanaro82d0eec2004-09-14 17:58:31 +0000975- httplib now handles ipv6 address/port pairs.
976
David Goodger68a1abd2004-10-03 15:40:25 +0000977- SF bug #1017864: ConfigParser now correctly handles default keys,
978 processing them with ``ConfigParser.optionxform`` when supplied,
979 consistent with the handling of config file entries and runtime-set
980 options.
981
David Goodger1cbf2062004-10-03 15:55:09 +0000982- SF bug #997050: Document, test, & check for non-string values in
983 ConfigParser. Moved the new string-only restriction added in
984 rev. 1.65 to the SafeConfigParser class, leaving existing
985 ConfigParser & RawConfigParser behavior alone, and documented the
986 conditions under which non-string values work.
987
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000988Build
989-----
990
Brett Cannonbfef8692004-09-28 04:08:11 +0000991- Building on darwin now includes /opt/local/include and /opt/local/lib for
992 building extension modules. This is so as to include software installed as
993 a DarwinPorts port <http://darwinports.opendarwin.org/>
994
Tim Peters862f0592004-09-23 19:11:32 +0000995- pyport.h now defines a Py_IS_NAN macro. It works as-is when the
996 platform C computes true for ``x != x`` if and only if X is a NaN.
997 Other platforms can override the default definition with a platform-
998 specific spelling in that platform's pyconfig.h. You can also override
999 pyport.h's default Py_IS_INFINITY definition now.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001000
1001C API
1002-----
1003
Tim Peters7f468f22004-10-11 02:40:51 +00001004- SF patch 1044089: New function ``PyEval_ThreadsInitialized()`` returns
1005 non-zero if PyEval_InitThreads() has been called.
1006
1007- The undocumented and unused extern int ``_PyThread_Started`` was removed.
1008
Tim Peters84705582004-10-10 02:47:33 +00001009- The C API calls ``PyInterpreterState_New()`` and ``PyThreadState_New()``
1010 are two of the very few advertised as being safe to call without holding
1011 the GIL. However, this wasn't true in a debug build, as bug 1041645
1012 demonstrated. In a debug build, Python redirects the ``PyMem`` family
1013 of calls to Python's small-object allocator, to get the benefit of
1014 its extra debugging capabilities. But Python's small-object allocator
1015 isn't threadsafe, relying on the GIL to avoid the expense of doing its
1016 own locking. ``PyInterpreterState_New()`` and ``PyThreadState_New()``
1017 call the platform ``malloc()`` directly now, regardless of build type.
1018
Tim Peters307fa782004-09-23 08:06:40 +00001019- PyLong_AsUnsignedLong[Mask] now support int objects as well.
1020
Walter Dörwald69652032004-09-07 20:24:22 +00001021- SF patch #998993: ``PyUnicode_DecodeUTF8Stateful`` and
1022 ``PyUnicode_DecodeUTF16Stateful`` have been added, which implement stateful
1023 decoding.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001024
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001025Tests
1026-----
1027
1028- test__locale ported to unittest
1029
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001030Mac
1031---
1032
Just van Rossumdd3c8372004-10-03 16:27:09 +00001033- ``plistlib`` now supports non-dict root objects. There is also a new
1034 interface for reading and writing plist files: ``readPlist(pathOrFile)``
1035 and ``writePlist(rootObject, pathOrFile)``
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001036
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001037Tools/Demos
1038-----------
1039
Tim Peters130e37f2004-10-03 19:03:19 +00001040- The text file comparison scripts ``ndiff.py`` and ``diff.py`` now
1041 read the input files in universal-newline mode. This spares them
1042 from consuming a great deal of time to deduce the useless result that,
1043 e.g., a file with Windows line ends and a file with Linux line ends
1044 have no lines in common.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001045
1046
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001047What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 3?
1048=================================
1049
Anthony Baxtere13943a2004-09-02 16:37:15 +00001050*Release date: 02-SEP-2004*
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001051
1052Core and builtins
1053-----------------
1054
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001055- SF patch #1007189: ``from ... import ...`` statements now allow the name
Anthony Baxter1a4ddae2004-08-31 10:07:13 +00001056 list to be surrounded by parentheses.
1057
Tim Peters0973b992004-08-29 22:16:50 +00001058- Some speedups for long arithmetic, thanks to Trevor Perrin. Gradeschool
1059 multiplication was sped a little by optimizing the C code. Gradeschool
1060 squaring was sped by about a factor of 2, by exploiting that about half
1061 the digit products are duplicates in a square. Because exponentiation
1062 uses squaring often, this also speeds long power. For example, the time
1063 to compute 17**1000000 dropped from about 14 seconds to 9 on my box due
1064 to this much. The cutoff for Karatsuba multiplication was raised,
1065 since gradeschool multiplication got quicker, and the cutoff was
Tim Peters47e52ee2004-08-30 02:44:38 +00001066 aggressively small regardless. The exponentiation algorithm was switched
1067 from right-to-left to left-to-right, which is more efficient for small
1068 bases. In addition, if the exponent is large, the algorithm now does
1069 5 bits (instead of 1 bit) at a time. That cut the time to compute
1070 17**1000000 on my box in half again, down to about 4.5 seconds.
Tim Peters0973b992004-08-29 22:16:50 +00001071
Tim Petersc8854432004-08-25 02:14:08 +00001072- OverflowWarning is no longer generated. PEP 237 scheduled this to
1073 occur in Python 2.3, but since OverflowWarning was disabled by default,
1074 nobody realized it was still being generated. On the chance that user
1075 code is still using them, the Python builtin OverflowWarning, and
1076 corresponding C API PyExc_OverflowWarning, will exist until Python 2.5.
1077
Martin v. Löwis336e85f2004-08-19 11:31:58 +00001078- Py_InitializeEx has been added.
1079
Brett Cannonadd33602004-08-15 07:21:25 +00001080- Fix the order of application of decorators. The proper order is bottom-up;
1081 the first decorator listed is the last one called.
1082
Neal Norwitzf0769532004-08-13 03:18:29 +00001083- SF patch #1005778. Fix a seg fault if the list size changed while
1084 calling list.index(). This could happen if a rich comparison function
1085 modified the list.
1086
Michael W. Hudson5e897952004-08-12 18:12:44 +00001087- The ``func_name`` (a.k.a. ``__name__``) attribute of user-defined
1088 functions is now writable.
1089
Michael W. Hudson5523c252004-08-12 18:09:00 +00001090- code_new (a.k.a new.code()) now checks its arguments sufficiently
1091 carefully that passing them on to PyCode_New() won't trigger calls
1092 to Py_FatalError() or PyErr_BadInternalCall(). It is still the case
1093 that the returned code object might be entirely insane.
1094
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +00001095- Subclasses of string can no longer be interned. The semantics of
1096 interning were not clear here -- a subclass could be mutable, for
1097 example -- and had bugs. Explicitly interning a subclass of string
1098 via intern() will raise a TypeError. Internal operations that attempt
1099 to intern a string subclass will have no effect.
Jeremy Hylton4c989dd2004-08-07 19:20:05 +00001100
Tim Peters83b57352004-08-08 07:24:22 +00001101- Bug 1003935: xrange() could report bogus OverflowErrors. Documented
1102 what xrange() intends, and repaired tests accordingly.
1103
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001104Extension modules
1105-----------------
1106
Martin v. Löwise064b412004-08-29 16:34:40 +00001107- difflib now supports HTML side-by-side diff.
1108
Martin v. Löwisdc3883f2004-08-29 15:46:35 +00001109- os.urandom has been added for systems that support sources of random
1110 data.
1111
Tim Peters037b3ee2004-08-21 06:55:43 +00001112- Patch 1012740: truncate() on a writeable cStringIO now resets the
1113 position to the end of the stream. This is consistent with the original
1114 StringIO module and avoids inadvertently resurrecting data that was
1115 supposed to have been truncated away.
1116
Dave Cole331708b2004-08-09 04:51:41 +00001117- Added socket.socketpair().
1118
Dave Cole3203efb2004-08-26 00:37:31 +00001119- Added CurrentByteIndex, CurrentColumnNumber, CurrentLineNumber
1120 members to xml.parsers.expat.XMLParser object.
1121
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001122- The mpz, rotor, and xreadlines modules, all deprecated in earlier
Andrew M. Kuchling00873432004-08-31 13:50:43 +00001123 versions of Python, have now been removed.
1124
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001125Library
1126-------
1127
Johannes Gijsbers4c11f602004-08-30 14:13:04 +00001128- Patch #934356: if a module defines __all__, believe that rather than using
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001129 heuristics for filtering out imported names.
Johannes Gijsbers4c11f602004-08-30 14:13:04 +00001130
Johannes Gijsbersae882f72004-08-30 10:19:56 +00001131- Patch #941486: added os.path.lexists(), which returns True for broken
1132 symlinks, unlike os.path.exists().
1133
Raymond Hettinger356a4592004-08-30 06:14:31 +00001134- the random module now uses os.urandom() for seeding if it is available.
1135 Added a new generator based on os.urandom().
1136
Martin v. Löwise064b412004-08-29 16:34:40 +00001137- difflib and diff.py can now generate HTML.
1138
Martin v. Löwiscae9e672004-08-25 13:04:53 +00001139- bdist_rpm now includes version and release in the BuildRoot, and
1140 replaces - by ``_`` in version and release.
Martin v. Löwiscf525242004-08-25 13:00:34 +00001141
Martin v. Löwis9f5c0c42004-08-25 11:37:43 +00001142- distutils build/build_scripts now has an -e option to specify the
1143 path to the Python interpreter for installed scripts.
1144
Barry Warsaw8bee7612004-08-25 02:22:30 +00001145- PEP 292 classes Template and SafeTemplate are added to the string module.
1146
Martin v. Löwis75b9da42004-08-18 13:57:44 +00001147- tarfile now generates GNU tar files by default.
1148
Martin v. Löwisdeacce22004-08-18 12:46:26 +00001149- HTTPResponse has now a getheaders method.
1150
Johannes Gijsbersc473c992004-08-18 12:40:31 +00001151- Patch #1006219: let inspect.getsource handle '@' decorators. Thanks Simon
1152 Percivall.
1153
Martin v. Löwis318a12e2004-08-18 12:27:40 +00001154- logging.handlers.SMTPHandler.date_time has been removed;
1155 the class now uses email.Utils.formatdate to generate the time stamp.
1156
Martin v. Löwisfe84d172004-08-18 11:06:45 +00001157- A new function tkFont.nametofont was added to return an existing
1158 font. The Font class constructor now has an additional exists argument
1159 which, if True, requests to return/configure an existing font, rather
Tim Peters037b3ee2004-08-21 06:55:43 +00001160 than creating a new one.
Martin v. Löwisfe84d172004-08-18 11:06:45 +00001161
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +00001162- Updated the decimal package's min() and max() methods to match the
1163 latest revision of the General Decimal Arithmetic Specification.
1164 Quiet NaNs are ignored and equal values are sorted based on sign
1165 and exponent.
1166
1167- The decimal package's Context.copy() method now returns deep copies.
1168
1169- Deprecated sys.exitfunc in favor of the atexit module. The sys.exitfunc
Georg Brandl08c02db2005-07-22 18:39:19 +00001170 attribute will be kept around for backwards compatibility and atexit
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +00001171 will just become the one preferred way to do it.
1172
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +00001173- patch #675551: Add get_history_item and replace_history_item functions
1174 to the readline module.
1175
Johannes Gijsbers34c41202004-08-14 15:19:28 +00001176- bug #989672: pdb.doc and the help messages for the help_d and help_u methods
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +00001177 of the pdb.Pdb class gives have been corrected. d(own) goes to a newer
1178 frame, u(p) to an older frame, not the other way around.
Johannes Gijsbers34c41202004-08-14 15:19:28 +00001179
Johannes Gijsbers4ec40642004-08-14 15:01:53 +00001180- bug #990669: os.path.realpath() will resolve symlinks before normalizing the
1181 path, as normalizing the path may alter the meaning of the path if it
1182 contains symlinks.
1183
Johannes Gijsbers9d134b72004-08-14 14:03:03 +00001184- bug #851123: shutil.copyfile will raise an exception when trying to copy a
1185 file onto a link to itself. Thanks Gregory Ball.
1186
Brett Cannonb3de2e12004-08-13 18:46:24 +00001187- bug #570300: Fix inspect to resolve file locations using os.path.realpath()
1188 so as to properly list all functions in a module when the module itself is
1189 reached through a symlink. Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
1190
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +00001191- doctest refactoring continued. See the docs for details. As part of
1192 this effort, some old and little- (never?) used features are now
1193 deprecated: the Tester class, the module is_private() function, and the
1194 isprivate argument to testmod(). The Tester class supplied a feeble
1195 "by hand" way to combine multiple doctests, if you knew exactly what
1196 you were doing. The newer doctest features for unittest integration
1197 already did a better job of that, are stronger now than ever, and the
1198 new DocTestRunner class is a saner foundation if you want to do it by
1199 hand. The "private name" filtering gimmick was a mistake from the
1200 start, and testmod() changed long ago to ignore it by default. If
1201 you want to filter out tests, the new DocTestFinder class can be used
1202 to return a list of all doctests, and you can filter that list by
1203 any computable criteria before passing it to a DocTestRunner instance.
1204
Matthias Klose2e829c02004-08-15 17:04:33 +00001205- Bug #891637, patch #1005466: fix inspect.getargs() crash on def foo((bar)).
1206
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001207Tools/Demos
1208-----------
1209
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +00001210- IDLE's shortcut keys for windows are now case insensitive so that
1211 Control-V works the same as Control-v.
1212
Matthias Klose2443d4a2004-08-16 12:10:12 +00001213- pygettext.py: Generate POT-Creation-Date header in ISO format.
1214
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001215Build
1216-----
1217
Tim Peters47e52ee2004-08-30 02:44:38 +00001218- Backward incompatibility: longintrepr.h now triggers a compile-time
1219 error if SHIFT (the number of bits in a Python long "digit") isn't
1220 divisible by 5. This new requirement allows simple code for the new
1221 5-bits-at-a-time long_pow() implementation. If necessary, the
1222 restriction could be removed (by complicating long_pow(), or by
1223 falling back to the 1-bit-at-a-time algorithm), but there are no
1224 plans to do so.
1225
Brett Cannoncc8a4f62004-08-26 01:44:07 +00001226- bug #991962: When building with --disable-toolbox-glue on Darwin no
1227 attempt to build Mac-specific modules occurs.
1228
Michael W. Hudson800ba232004-08-12 18:19:17 +00001229- The --with-tsc flag to configure to enable VM profiling with the
1230 processor's timestamp counter now works on PPC platforms.
1231
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +00001232- patch #1006629: Define _XOPEN_SOURCE to 500 on Solaris 8/9 to match
1233 GCC's definition and avoid redefinition warnings.
1234
Matthias Klosea2542be2004-08-16 11:35:51 +00001235- Detect pthreads support (provided by gnu pth pthread emulation) on
1236 GNU/k*BSD systems.
1237
Hye-Shik Chang3ba5bfc2004-08-19 17:52:37 +00001238- bug #1005737, #1007249: Fixed several build problems and warnings
1239 found on old/legacy C compilers of HP-UX, IRIX and Tru64.
1240
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001241C API
1242-----
1243
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +00001244..
1245
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001246Documentation
1247-------------
1248
Neal Norwitz5268c392004-08-21 15:13:52 +00001249- patch #1005936, bug #1009373: fix index entries which contain
1250 an underscore when viewed with Acrobat.
1251
1252- bug #990669: os.path.normpath may alter the meaning of a path if
1253 it contains symbolic links. This has been documented in a comment
1254 since 1992, but is now in the library reference as well.
Johannes Gijsbersb112d6e2004-08-14 14:41:32 +00001255
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001256New platforms
1257-------------
1258
Hye-Shik Changf64700a2004-08-18 15:13:41 +00001259- FreeBSD 6 is now supported.
1260
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001261Tests
1262-----
1263
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +00001264..
1265
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001266Windows
1267-------
1268
Tim Peters79b52b72004-08-12 18:37:10 +00001269- Boosted the stack reservation for python.exe and pythonw.exe from
1270 the default 1MB to 2MB. Stack frames under VC 7.1 for 2.4 are enough
1271 bigger than under VC 6.0 for 2.3.4 that deeply recursive progams
1272 within the default sys.getrecursionlimit() default value of 1000 were
1273 able to suffer undetected C stack overflows. The standard test program
1274 test_compiler was one such program. If a Python process on Windows
1275 "just vanishes" without a trace, and without an error message of any
1276 kind, but with an exit code of 128, undetected stack overflow may be
1277 the problem.
1278
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001279Mac
1280---
1281
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +00001282..
1283
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001284
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001285What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 2?
1286=================================
1287
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +00001288*Release date: 05-AUG-2004*
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001289
1290Core and builtins
1291-----------------
1292
Raymond Hettinger52a21b82004-08-06 18:43:09 +00001293- Patch #980695: Implements efficient string concatenation for statements
1294 of the form s=s+t and s+=t. This will vary across implementations.
1295 Accordingly, the str.join() method is strongly preferred for performance
1296 sensitive code.
1297
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +00001298- PEP-0318, Function Decorators have been added to the language. These are
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +00001299 implemented using the Java-style @decorator syntax, like so::
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001300
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +00001301 @staticmethod
1302 def foo(bar):
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001303
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +00001304 (The PEP needs to be updated to reflect the current state)
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +00001305
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +00001306- When importing a module M raises an exception, Python no longer leaves M
1307 in sys.modules. Before 2.4a2 it did, and a subsequent import of M would
1308 succeed, picking up a module object from sys.modules reflecting as much
1309 of the initialization of M as completed before the exception was raised.
1310 Subsequent imports got no indication that M was in a partially-
1311 initialized state, and the importers could get into arbitrarily bad
1312 trouble as a result (the M they got was in an unintended state,
1313 arbitrarily far removed from M's author's intent). Now subsequent
1314 imports of M will continue raising exceptions (but if, for example, the
1315 source code for M is edited between import attempts, then perhaps later
1316 attempts will succeed, or raise a different exception).
1317
1318 This can break existing code, but in such cases the code was probably
1319 working before by accident. In the Python source, the only case of
1320 breakage discovered was in a test accidentally relying on a damaged
1321 module remaining in sys.modules. Cases are also known where tests
1322 deliberately provoking import errors remove damaged modules from
1323 sys.modules themselves, and such tests will break now if they do an
1324 unconditional del sys.modules[M].
1325
Marc-André Lemburgb314ce92004-07-23 16:14:57 +00001326- u'%s' % obj will now try obj.__unicode__() first and fallback to
1327 obj.__str__() if no __unicode__ method can be found.
1328
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +00001329- Patch #550732: Add PyArg_VaParseTupleAndKeywords(). Analogous to
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001330 PyArg_VaParse(). Both are now documented. Thanks Greg Chapman.
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +00001331
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001332- Allow string and unicode return types from .encode()/.decode()
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001333 methods on string and unicode objects. Added unicode.decode()
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001334 which was missing for no apparent reason.
1335
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001336- An attempt to fix the mess that is Python's behaviour with
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001337 signal handlers and threads, complicated by readline's behaviour.
1338 It's quite possible that there are still bugs here.
1339
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001340- Added C macros Py_CLEAR and Py_VISIT to ease the implementation of
1341 types that support garbage collection.
1342
Raymond Hettinger76d962d2004-07-16 12:16:48 +00001343- Compiler now treats None as a constant.
1344
Neil Schemenauer3a313e32004-07-19 16:29:17 +00001345- The type of values returned by __int__, __float__, __long__,
1346 __oct__, and __hex__ are now checked. Returning an invalid type
1347 will cause a TypeError to be raised. This matches the behavior of
1348 Jython.
1349
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +00001350- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in locale module.
1351
Hye-Shik Changb5047fd2004-08-04 06:33:51 +00001352- Added a workaround for proper string operations in BSDs. str.split
1353 and str.is* methods can now work correctly with UTF-8 locales.
1354
Hye-Shik Changc81c6952004-08-04 17:40:38 +00001355- Bug #989185: unicode.iswide() and unicode.width() is dropped and
1356 the East Asian Width support is moved to unicodedata extension
1357 module.
Hye-Shik Change9ddfbb2004-08-04 07:38:35 +00001358
Hye-Shik Chang7df44b32004-08-04 17:36:41 +00001359- Patch #941229: The source code encoding in interactive mode
1360 now refers sys.stdin.encoding not just ISO-8859-1 anymore. This
1361 allows for non-latin-1 users to write unicode strings directly.
1362
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001363Extension modules
1364-----------------
1365
Martin v. Löwis544f1192004-07-27 05:22:33 +00001366- cpickle now supports the same keyword arguments as pickle.
1367
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001368Library
1369-------
1370
Marc-André Lemburgc759f072004-08-05 12:43:30 +00001371- Added new codecs and aliases for ISO_8859-11, ISO_8859-16 and
1372 TIS-620
1373
Tim Peters8485b562004-08-04 18:46:34 +00001374- Thanks to Edward Loper, doctest has been massively refactored, and
1375 many new features were added. Full docs will appear later. For now
1376 the doctest module comments and new test cases give good coverage.
1377 The refactoring provides many hook points for customizing behavior
1378 (such as how to report errors, and how to compare expected to actual
1379 output). New features include a <BLANKLINE> marker for expected
1380 output containing blank lines, options to produce unified or context
1381 diffs when actual output doesn't match expectations, an option to
1382 normalize whitespace before comparing, and an option to use an
1383 ellipsis to signify "don't care" regions of output.
1384
Martin v. Löwis1fa649f2004-08-03 18:45:31 +00001385- Tkinter now supports the wish -sync and -use options.
1386
Fred Drakef901abd2004-08-03 17:58:55 +00001387- The following methods in time support passing of None: ctime(), gmtime(),
1388 and localtime(). If None is provided, the current time is used (the
1389 same as when the argument is omitted).
1390 [SF bug 658254, patch 663482]
1391
Martin v. Löwis9513e342004-08-03 14:36:32 +00001392- nntplib does now allow to ignore a .netrc file.
1393
Martin v. Löwis65a79752004-08-03 12:59:55 +00001394- urllib2 now recognizes Basic authentication even if other authentication
1395 schemes are offered.
1396
Neal Norwitz0e67fd42004-08-01 22:48:06 +00001397- Bug #1001053. wave.open() now accepts unicode filenames.
1398
Tim Peters5cfb05e2004-07-27 21:02:02 +00001399- gzip.GzipFile has a new fileno() method, to retrieve the handle of the
1400 underlying file object (provided it has a fileno() method). This is
1401 needed if you want to use os.fsync() on a GzipFile.
1402
Martin v. Löwis7b9190b2004-07-27 05:07:19 +00001403- imaplib has two new methods: deleteacl and myrights.
1404
Martin v. Löwiscc0f9322004-07-26 12:40:50 +00001405- nntplib has two new methods: description and descriptions. They
1406 use a more RFC-compliant way of getting a newsgroup description.
1407
Brett Cannon8b3d92a2004-07-21 02:21:58 +00001408- Bug #993394. Fix a possible red herring of KeyError in 'threading' being
1409 raised during interpreter shutdown from a registered function with atexit
1410 when dummy_threading is being used.
1411
Neal Norwitza4f651a2004-07-20 22:07:44 +00001412- Bug #857297/Patch #916874. Fix an error when extracting a hard link
1413 from a tarfile.
1414
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +00001415- Patch #846659. Fix an error in tarfile.py when using
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +00001416 GNU longname/longlink creation.
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +00001417
Tim Peters90ee7eb2004-07-18 23:58:17 +00001418- The obsolete FCNTL.py has been deleted. The builtin fcntl module
1419 has been available (on platforms that support fcntl) since Python
1420 1.5a3, and all FCNTL.py did is export fcntl's names, after generating
1421 a deprecation warning telling you to use fcntl directly.
1422
Hye-Shik Chang2bb146f2004-07-18 03:06:29 +00001423- Several new unicode codecs are added: big5hkscs, euc_jis_2004,
1424 iso2022_jp_2004, shift_jis_2004.
1425
Tim Peters5af0e412004-07-12 00:45:14 +00001426- Bug #788520. Queue.{get, get_nowait, put, put_nowait} have new
1427 implementations, exploiting Conditions (which didn't exist at the time
1428 Queue was introduced). A minor semantic change is that the Full and
1429 Empty exceptions raised by non-blocking calls now occur only if the
1430 queue truly was full or empty at the instant the queue was checked (of
1431 course the Queue may no longer be full or empty by the time a calling
1432 thread sees those exceptions, though). Before, the exceptions could
1433 also be raised if it was "merely inconvenient" for the implementation
1434 to determine the true state of the Queue (because the Queue was locked
1435 by some other method in progress).
1436
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001437- Bugs #979794 and #980117: difflib.get_grouped_opcodes() now handles the
1438 case of comparing two empty lists. This affected both context_diff() and
1439 unified_diff(),
Brett Cannond2c5b4b2004-07-10 23:54:07 +00001440
Brett Cannone6f8a892004-07-10 23:14:30 +00001441- Bug #980938: smtplib now prints debug output to sys.stderr.
1442
Brett Cannonf50299c2004-07-10 22:55:15 +00001443- Bug #930024: posixpath.realpath() now handles infinite loops in symlinks by
1444 returning the last point in the path that was not part of any loop. Thanks
1445 AM Kuchling.
1446
Brett Cannonbdc36272004-07-10 20:42:22 +00001447- Bug #980327: ntpath not handles compressing erroneous slashes between the
1448 drive letter and the rest of the path. Also clearly handles UNC addresses now
1449 as well. Thanks Paul Moore.
1450
Brett Cannone6751182004-07-10 19:13:42 +00001451- bug #679953: zipfile.py should now work for files over 2 GB. The packed data
1452 for file sizes (compressed and uncompressed) was being stored as signed
1453 instead of unsigned.
1454
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001455- decimal.py now only uses signals in the IBM spec. The other conditions are
Raymond Hettinger5aa478b2004-07-09 10:02:53 +00001456 no longer part of the public API.
1457
Marc-André Lemburg88fcca62004-07-10 16:16:06 +00001458- codecs module now has two new generic APIs: encode() and decode()
1459 which don't restrict the return types (unlike the unicode and
1460 string methods of the same name).
1461
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001462- Non-blocking SSL sockets work again; they were broken in Python 2.3.
Andrew M. Kuchling79d7e922004-07-10 21:21:55 +00001463 SF patch 945642.
1464
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001465- doctest unittest integration improvements:
1466
1467 o Improved the unitest test output for doctest-based unit tests
1468
1469 o Can now pass setUp and tearDown functions when creating
1470 DocTestSuites.
1471
1472- The threading module has a new class, local, for creating objects
1473 that provide thread-local data.
1474
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +00001475- Bug #990307: when keep_empty_values is True, cgi.parse_qsl()
1476 no longer returns spurious empty fields.
1477
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +00001478- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in gettext module.
1479
1480- Introduced in gettext module the l*gettext() family of functions,
1481 which return translation strings encoded in the preferred encoding,
1482 as informed by locale module's getpreferredencoding().
1483
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +00001484- optparse module (and tests) upgraded to Optik 1.5a1. Changes:
1485
1486 - Add expansion of default values in help text: the string
1487 "%default" in an option's help string is expanded to str() of
1488 that option's default value, or "none" if no default value.
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +00001489
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +00001490 - Bug #955889: option default values that happen to be strings are
1491 now processed in the same way as values from the command line; this
1492 allows generation of nicer help when using custom types. Can
1493 be disabled with parser.set_process_default_values(False).
1494
1495 - Bug #960515: don't crash when generating help for callback
1496 options that specify 'type', but not 'dest' or 'metavar'.
1497
1498 - Feature #815264: change the default help format for short options
1499 that take an argument from e.g. "-oARG" to "-o ARG"; add
1500 set_short_opt_delimiter() and set_long_opt_delimiter() methods to
1501 HelpFormatter to allow (slight) customization of the formatting.
1502
1503 - Patch #736940: internationalize Optik: all built-in user-
1504 targeted literal strings are passed through gettext.gettext(). (If
1505 you want translations (.po files), they're not included with Python
1506 -- you'll find them in the Optik source distribution from
1507 http://optik.sourceforge.net/ .)
1508
1509 - Bug #878453: respect $COLUMNS environment variable for
1510 wrapping help output.
1511
1512 - Feature #988122: expand "%prog" in the 'description' passed
1513 to OptionParser, just like in the 'usage' and 'version' strings.
1514 (This is *not* done in the 'description' passed to OptionGroup.)
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +00001515
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001516C API
1517-----
1518
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +00001519- PyImport_ExecCodeModule() and PyImport_ExecCodeModuleEx(): if an
1520 error occurs while loading the module, these now delete the module's
1521 entry from sys.modules. All ways of loading modules eventually call
1522 one of these, so this is an error-case change in semantics for all
1523 ways of loading modules. In rare cases, a module loader may wish
1524 to keep a module object in sys.modules despite that the module's
1525 code cannot be executed. In such cases, the module loader must
1526 arrange to reinsert the name and module object in sys.modules.
1527 PyImport_ReloadModule() has been changed to reinsert the original
1528 module object into sys.modules if the module reload fails, so that
1529 its visible semantics have not changed.
1530
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001531- A large pile of datetime field-extraction macros is now documented,
1532 thanks to Anthony Tuininga (patch #986010).
1533
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001534Documentation
1535-------------
1536
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +00001537- Improved the tutorial on creating types in C.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001538
1539 - point out the importance of reassigning data members before
Andrew M. Kuchling78d375f2004-08-07 14:00:39 +00001540 assigning their values
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001541
Andrew M. Kuchling28025ec2004-08-07 13:59:22 +00001542 - correct my misconception about return values from visitprocs. Sigh.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001543
1544 - mention the labor saving Py_VISIT and Py_CLEAR macros.
1545
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +00001546- Major rewrite of the math module docs, to address common confusions.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001547
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001548Tests
1549-----
1550
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +00001551- The test data files for the decimal test suite are now installed on
Anthony Baxterfd4984d2004-07-12 09:33:39 +00001552 platforms that use the Makefile.
1553
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +00001554- SF patch 995225: The test file testtar.tar accidentally contained
1555 CVS keywords (like $Id$), which could cause spurious failures in
1556 test_tarfile.py depending on how the test file was checked out.
1557
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001558
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001559What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 1?
1560=================================
1561
Anthony Baxter3210b362004-07-08 05:59:43 +00001562*Release date: 08-JUL-2004*
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001563
1564Core and builtins
1565-----------------
1566
Fred Drake0a4dd392004-07-02 18:57:45 +00001567- weakref.ref is now the type object also known as
1568 weakref.ReferenceType; it can be subclassed like any other new-style
1569 class. There's less per-entry overhead in WeakValueDictionary
1570 objects now (one object instead of three).
1571
Thomas Heller04c673b2004-07-02 08:56:20 +00001572- Bug #951851: Python crashed when reading import table of certain
1573 Windows DLLs.
1574
Raymond Hettinger66bd2332004-08-02 08:30:07 +00001575- Bug #215126. The locals argument to eval(), execfile(), and exec now
1576 accept any mapping type.
Raymond Hettinger214b1c32004-07-02 06:41:07 +00001577
Martin v. Löwisef82d2f2004-06-27 16:51:46 +00001578- marshal now shares interned strings. This change introduces
1579 a new .pyc magic.
1580
Anthony Baxter3ecdb252004-06-11 14:41:18 +00001581- Bug #966623. classes created with type() in an exec(, {}) don't
1582 have a __module__, but code in typeobject assumed it would always
1583 be there.
1584
Martin v. Löwis737ea822004-06-08 18:52:54 +00001585- Python no longer relies on the LC_NUMERIC locale setting to be
1586 the "C" locale; as a result, it no longer tries to prevent changing
1587 the LC_NUMERIC category.
1588
Tim Peters604c0132004-06-07 23:04:33 +00001589- Bug #952807: Unpickling pickled instances of subclasses of
1590 datetime.date, datetime.datetime and datetime.time could yield insane
1591 objects. Thanks to Jiwon Seo for a fix.
1592
Thomas Heller90a764c2004-06-07 15:12:44 +00001593- Bug #845802: Python crashes when __init__.py is a directory.
1594
Hye-Shik Changbc555e32004-06-03 11:10:58 +00001595- Unicode objects received two new methods: iswide() and width().
1596 These query East Asian width information, as specified in Unicode
1597 TR11.
Hye-Shik Chang974ed7c2004-06-02 16:49:17 +00001598
Raymond Hettinger41bd0222004-06-01 06:36:24 +00001599- Improved the tuple hashing algorithm to give fewer collisions in
1600 common cases. Fixes bug #942952.
1601
Raymond Hettinger354433a2004-05-19 08:20:33 +00001602- Implemented generator expressions (PEP 289). Coded by Jiwon Seo.
1603
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +00001604- Enabled the profiling of C extension functions (and builtins) - check
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001605 new documentation and modified profile and bdb modules for more details
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +00001606
Nicholas Bastinabce8a62004-03-21 20:24:07 +00001607- Set file.name to the object passed to open (instead of a new string)
1608
Nicholas Bastina7604bf2004-03-21 18:37:23 +00001609- Moved tracebackobject into traceback.h and renamed to PyTracebackObject
1610
Raymond Hettingerff5bc502004-03-21 15:12:00 +00001611- Optimized the byte coding for multiple assignments like "a,b=b,a" and
1612 "a,b,c=1,2,3". Improves their speed by 25% to 30%.
1613
Brett Cannon4f653312004-03-20 22:52:14 +00001614- Limit the nested depth of a tuple for the second argument to isinstance()
1615 and issubclass() to the recursion limit of the interpreter.
1616 Fixes bug #858016 .
1617
Raymond Hettingerade08ea2004-03-18 09:48:12 +00001618- Optimized dict iterators, creating separate types for each
1619 and having them reveal their length. Also optimized the
1620 methods: keys(), values(), and items().
1621
Raymond Hettingerdd80f762004-03-07 07:31:06 +00001622- Implemented a newcode opcode, LIST_APPEND, that simplifies
1623 the generated bytecode for list comprehensions and further
1624 improves their performance (about 35%).
1625
Michael W. Hudsond3b33b52004-02-19 19:35:22 +00001626- Implemented rich comparisons for floats, which seems to make
1627 comparisons involving NaNs somewhat less surprising when the
1628 underlying C compiler actually implements C99 semantics.
1629
Raymond Hettingerfa7b9d82004-02-15 04:06:39 +00001630- Optimized list.extend() to save memory and no longer create
1631 intermediate sequences. Also, extend() now pre-allocates the
1632 needed memory whenever the length of the iterable is known in
1633 advance -- this halves the time to extend the list.
1634
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001635- Optimized list resize operations to make fewer calls to the system
1636 realloc(). Significantly speeds up list appends, list pops,
Walter Dörwald09515af2005-03-18 10:28:24 +00001637 list comprehensions, and the list constructor (when the input iterable
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001638 length is not known).
1639
1640- Changed the internal list over-allocation scheme. For larger lists,
1641 overallocation ranged between 3% and 25%. Now, it is a constant 12%.
Raymond Hettingerab517d22004-02-14 18:34:46 +00001642 For smaller lists (n<8), overallocation was upto eight elements. Now,
1643 the overallocation is no more than three elements -- this improves space
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001644 utilization for applications that have large numbers of small lists.
1645
Raymond Hettinger0468e412004-05-05 05:37:53 +00001646- Most list bodies now get re-used rather than freed. Speeds up list
1647 instantiation and deletion by saving calls to malloc() and free().
1648
Raymond Hettinger31017ae2004-03-04 08:25:44 +00001649- The dict.update() method now accepts all the same argument forms
1650 as the dict() constructor. This now includes item lists and/or
1651 keyword arguments.
1652
Michael W. Hudsonecfeb7f2004-02-12 15:28:27 +00001653- Support for arbitrary objects supporting the read-only buffer
1654 interface as the co_code field of code objects (something that was
1655 only possible to create from C code) has been removed.
1656
Fred Drake228765b2004-02-06 04:15:22 +00001657- Made omitted callback and None equivalent for weakref.ref() and
1658 weakref.proxy(); the None case wasn't handled correctly in all
1659 cases.
1660
1661- Fixed problem where PyWeakref_NewRef() and PyWeakref_NewProxy()
1662 assumed that initial existing entries in an object's weakref list
1663 would not be removed while allocating a new weakref object. Since
1664 GC could be invoked at that time, however, that assumption was
1665 invalid. In a truly obscure case of GC being triggered during
1666 creation for a new weakref object for an referent which already
1667 has a weakref without a callback which is only referenced from
1668 cyclic trash, a memory error can occur. This consistently created a
1669 segfault in a debug build, but provided less predictable behavior in
1670 a release build.
1671
Hye-Shik Changff83c2b2004-02-02 13:39:01 +00001672- input() builtin function now respects compiler flags such as
1673 __future__ statements. SF patch 876178.
1674
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +00001675- Removed PendingDeprecationWarning from apply(). apply() remains
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +00001676 deprecated, but the nuisance warning will not be issued.
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +00001677
Tim Peters1d7323e2003-12-01 21:35:27 +00001678- At Python shutdown time (Py_Finalize()), 2.3 called cyclic garbage
1679 collection twice, both before and after tearing down modules. The
1680 call after tearing down modules has been disabled, because too much
1681 of Python has been torn down then for __del__ methods and weakref
1682 callbacks to execute sanely. The most common symptom was a sequence
1683 of uninformative messages on stderr when Python shut down, produced
1684 by threads trying to raise exceptions, but unable to report the nature
1685 of their problems because too much of the sys module had already been
1686 destroyed.
1687
Guido van Rossum6c9e1302003-11-29 23:52:13 +00001688- Removed FutureWarnings related to hex/oct literals and conversions
1689 and left shifts. (Thanks to Kalle Svensson for SF patch 849227.)
1690 This addresses most of the remaining semantic changes promised by
1691 PEP 237, except for repr() of a long, which still shows the trailing
1692 'L'. The PEP appears to promise warnings for operations that
1693 changed semantics compared to Python 2.3, but this is not
1694 implemented; we've suffered through enough warnings related to
1695 hex/oct literals and I think it's best to be silent now.
1696
Raymond Hettinger4f8f9762003-11-26 08:21:35 +00001697- For str and unicode objects, the ljust(), center(), and rjust()
1698 methods now accept an optional argument specifying a fill
1699 character other than a space.
1700
Guido van Rossumbaf0f8f2003-11-22 23:55:50 +00001701- When method objects have an attribute that can be satisfied either
1702 by the function object or by the method object, the function
1703 object's attribute usually wins. Christian Tismer pointed out that
1704 that this is really a mistake, because this only happens for special
1705 methods (like __reduce__) where the method object's version is
1706 really more appropriate than the function's attribute. So from now
1707 on, all method attributes will have precedence over function
1708 attributes with the same name.
1709
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +00001710- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 839548: if a weakref with a callback,
1711 its callback, and its weakly referenced object, all became part of
1712 cyclic garbage during a single run of garbage collection, the order
1713 in which they were torn down was unpredictable. It was possible for
1714 the callback to see partially-torn-down objects, leading to immediate
1715 segfaults, or, if the callback resurrected garbage objects, to
1716 resurrect insane objects that caused segfaults (or other surprises)
1717 later. In one sense this wasn't surprising, because Python's cyclic gc
1718 had no knowledge of Python's weakref objects. It does now. When
1719 weakrefs with callbacks become part of cyclic garbage now, those
1720 weakrefs are cleared first. The callbacks don't trigger then,
1721 preventing the problems. If you need callbacks to trigger, then just
1722 as when cyclic gc is not involved, you need to write your code so
1723 that weakref objects outlive the objects they weakly reference.
Raymond Hettingera690a992003-11-16 16:17:49 +00001724
Tim Petersadd09b42003-11-12 20:43:28 +00001725- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 840829: if cyclic garbage collection
1726 happened to occur during a weakref callback for a new-style class
1727 instance, subtle memory corruption was the result (in a release build;
1728 in a debug build, a segfault occurred reliably very soon after).
1729 This has been repaired.
1730
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +00001731- Compiler flags set in PYTHONSTARTUP are now active in __main__.
1732
1733- Added two builtin types, set() and frozenset().
1734
Raymond Hettinger85c20a42003-11-06 14:06:48 +00001735- Added a reversed() builtin function that returns a reverse iterator
1736 over a sequence.
1737
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +00001738- Added a sorted() builtin function that returns a new sorted list
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001739 from any iterable.
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +00001740
Martin v. Löwis01a74b22003-10-19 18:30:01 +00001741- CObjects are now mutable (on the C level) through PyCObject_SetVoidPtr.
1742
Raymond Hettinger42b1ba32003-10-16 03:41:09 +00001743- list.sort() now supports three keyword arguments: cmp, key, and reverse.
1744 The key argument can be a function of one argument that extracts a
1745 comparison key from the original record: mylist.sort(key=str.lower).
1746 The reverse argument is a boolean value and if True will change the
1747 sort order as if the comparison arguments were reversed. In addition,
1748 the documentation has been amended to provide a guarantee that all sorts
1749 starting with Py2.3 are guaranteed to be stable (the relative order of
1750 records with equal keys is unchanged).
1751
Marc-André Lemburgd7160f82003-09-22 11:14:40 +00001752- Added test whether wchar_t is signed or not. A signed wchar_t is not
1753 usable as internal unicode type base for Py_UNICODE since the
1754 unicode implementation assumes an unsigned type.
1755
Jeremy Hyltond8082792003-09-16 19:41:39 +00001756- Fixed a bug in the cache of length-one Unicode strings that could
1757 lead to a seg fault. The specific problem occurred when an earlier,
1758 non-fatal error left an uninitialized Unicode object in the
1759 freelist.
1760
Raymond Hettinger9bfe5332003-08-27 04:55:52 +00001761- The % formatting operator now supports '%F' which is equivalent to
1762 '%f'. This has always been documented but never implemented.
1763
Tim Peters465fa3d2003-08-15 01:16:37 +00001764- complex(obj) could leak a little memory if obj wasn't a string or
1765 number.
1766
Raymond Hettingereaef6152003-08-02 07:42:57 +00001767- zip() with no arguments now returns an empty list instead of raising
1768 a TypeError exception.
1769
Guido van Rossum02c58f82003-10-08 21:08:29 +00001770- obj.__contains__() now returns True/False instead of 1/0. SF patch
1771 820195.
1772
Armin Rigo2b3eb402003-10-28 12:05:48 +00001773- Python no longer tries to be smart about recursive comparisons.
1774 When comparing containers with cyclic references to themselves it
1775 will now just hit the recursion limit. See SF patch 825639.
1776
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001777- str and unicode builtin types now have an rsplit() method that is
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +00001778 same as split() except that it scans the string from the end
1779 working towards the beginning. See SF feature request 801847.
Hye-Shik Chang060ebed2003-12-15 18:51:19 +00001780
Jim Fulton8a1a5942004-02-08 04:21:26 +00001781- Fixed a bug in object.__reduce_ex__ when using protocol 2. Failure
1782 to clear the error when attempts to get the __getstate__ attribute
1783 fail caused intermittent errors and odd behavior.
1784
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001785- buffer objects based on other objects no longer cache a pointer to
1786 the data and the data length. Instead, the appropriate tp_as_buffer
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001787 method is called as necessary.
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001788
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001789- fixed: if a file is opened with an explicit buffer size >= 1, repeated
Andrew MacIntyre4e10ed32004-04-04 07:01:35 +00001790 close() calls would attempt to free() the buffer already free()ed on
1791 the first call.
1792
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001793
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001794Extension modules
1795-----------------
1796
Barry Warsaw11b91a02004-06-28 00:50:43 +00001797- Added socket.getservbyport(), and make the second argument in
1798 getservbyname() and getservbyport() optional.
1799
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +00001800- time module code that deals with input POSIX timestamps will now raise
1801 ValueError if more than a second is lost in precision when the
1802 timestamp is cast to the platform C time_t type. There's no chance
1803 that the platform will do anything sensible with the result in such
1804 cases. This includes ctime(), localtime() and gmtime(). Assorted
1805 fromtimestamp() and utcfromtimestamp() methods in the datetime module
1806 were also protected. Closes bugs #919012 and 975996.
Brett Cannonb46ed712004-06-19 20:50:47 +00001807
Martin v. Löwis77ca6c42004-06-03 12:47:26 +00001808- fcntl.ioctl now warns if the mutate flag is not specified.
1809
Martin v. Löwisd8948722004-06-02 09:57:56 +00001810- nt now properly allows to refer to UNC roots, e.g. in nt.stat().
1811
Raymond Hettinger027bb632004-05-31 03:09:25 +00001812- the weakref module now supports additional objects: array.array,
1813 sre.pattern_objects, file objects, and sockets.
1814
Raymond Hettingere2eda602004-04-04 08:51:41 +00001815- operator.isMappingType() and operator.isSequenceType() now give
1816 fewer false positives.
1817
Brett Cannon06c34792004-03-23 23:16:54 +00001818- socket.sslerror is now a subclass of socket.error . Also added
1819 socket.error to the socket module's C API.
1820
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001821- Bug #920575: A problem where the _locale module segfaults on
Hye-Shik Changc3a87b82004-03-21 19:34:30 +00001822 nl_langinfo(ERA) caused by GNU libc's illegal NULL return is fixed.
1823
Raymond Hettinger6e2ee862004-03-14 04:37:50 +00001824- array objects now support the copy module. Also, their resizing
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001825 scheme has been updated to match that used for list objects. This improves
Raymond Hettinger49f9bd12004-03-14 05:43:59 +00001826 the performance (speed and memory usage) of append() operations.
Raymond Hettinger6ab78cd2004-08-29 07:50:43 +00001827 Also, array.array() and array.extend() now accept any iterable argument
1828 for repeated appends without needing to create another temporary array.
Raymond Hettinger3aa82c02004-03-13 18:18:51 +00001829
Raymond Hettinger3e47f652004-03-08 18:22:35 +00001830- cStringIO.writelines() now accepts any iterable argument and writes
1831 the lines one at a time rather than joining them and writing once.
1832 Made a parallel change to StringIO.writelines(). Saves memory and
1833 makes suitable for use with generator expressions.
1834
Brett Cannond1080a32004-03-02 04:38:10 +00001835- time.strftime() now checks that the values in its time tuple argument
1836 are within the proper boundaries to prevent possible crashes from the
1837 platform's C library implementation of strftime(). Can possibly
1838 break code that uses values outside the range that didn't cause
1839 problems previously (such as sitting day of year to 0). Fixes bug
1840 #897625.
1841
Martin v. Löwis12af0482004-01-31 12:34:17 +00001842- The socket module now supports Bluetooth sockets, if the
1843 system has <bluetooth/bluetooth.h>
1844
Raymond Hettinger756b3f32004-01-29 06:37:52 +00001845- Added a collections module containing a new datatype, deque(),
1846 offering high-performance, thread-safe, memory friendly appends
1847 and pops on either side of the deque.
1848
1849- Several modules now take advantage of collections.deque() for
1850 improved performance: Queue, mutex, shlex, threading, and pydoc.
1851
Raymond Hettinger166958b2003-12-01 13:18:39 +00001852- The operator module has two new functions, attrgetter() and
1853 itemgetter() which are useful for creating fast data extractor
1854 functions for map(), list.sort(), itertools.groupby(), and
1855 other functions that expect a function argument.
1856
Martin v. Löwis94681fc2003-11-27 19:40:22 +00001857- socket.SHUT_{RD,WR,RDWR} was added.
1858
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +00001859- os.getsid was added.
1860
Guido van Rossum16b9fa82003-10-23 23:54:57 +00001861- The pwd module incorrectly advertised its struct type as
1862 struct_pwent; this has been renamed to struct_passwd. (The old name
1863 is still supported for backwards compatibility.)
1864
Fred Drakede050322003-10-21 15:41:59 +00001865- The xml.parsers.expat module now provides Expat 1.95.7.
1866
Martin v. Löwis3bbd6542003-10-03 13:57:37 +00001867- socket.IPPROTO_IPV6 was added.
1868
Martin v. Löwise7a97962003-09-20 16:08:33 +00001869- readline.clear_history was added.
1870
Brett Cannon62dba4c2003-09-10 19:37:42 +00001871- select.select() now accepts sequences for its first three arguments.
1872
Raymond Hettinger5475f232003-08-08 12:20:03 +00001873- cStringIO now supports the f.closed attribute.
1874
Anthony Baxter83f52912003-08-05 06:33:56 +00001875- The signal module now exposes SIGRTMIN and SIGRTMAX (if available).
1876
Andrew M. Kuchling69f31eb2003-08-13 23:11:04 +00001877- curses module now supports use_default_colors(). [patch #739124]
1878
Anthony Baxter5c68ef02003-10-04 08:04:04 +00001879- Bug #811028: ncurses.h breakage on FreeBSD/MacOS X
1880
1881- Bug #814613: INET_ADDRSTRLEN fix needed for all compilers on SGI
1882
Gustavo Niemeyerad3fc442003-10-17 22:13:16 +00001883- Implemented non-recursive SRE matching scheme (#757624).
1884
1885- Implemented (?(id/name)yes|no) support in SRE (#572936).
1886
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +00001887- random.seed() with no arguments or None uses time.time() as a default
1888 seed. Modified to match Py2.2 behavior and use fractional seconds so
1889 that successive runs are more likely to produce different sequences.
1890
1891- random.Random has a new method, getrandbits(k), which returns an int
1892 with k random bits. This method is now an optional part of the API
1893 for user defined generators. Any generator that defines genrandbits()
1894 can now use randrange() for ranges with a length >= 2**53. Formerly,
1895 randrange would return only even numbers for ranges that large (see
1896 SF bug #812202). Generators that do not define genrandbits() now
1897 issue a warning when randrange() is called with a range that large.
1898
Raymond Hettingerd25c1c62003-12-06 16:23:06 +00001899- itertools has a new function, groupby() for aggregating iterables
1900 into groups sharing the same key (as determined by a key function).
1901 It offers some of functionality of SQL's groupby keyword and of
1902 the Unix uniq filter.
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +00001903
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001904- itertools now has a new tee() function which produces two independent
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +00001905 iterators from a single iterable.
1906
1907- itertools.izip() with no arguments now returns an empty iterator instead
1908 of raising a TypeError exception.
1909
Gustavo Niemeyera6e436e2004-02-14 00:02:45 +00001910- Fixed #853061: allow BZ2Compressor.compress() to receive an empty string
1911 as parameter.
1912
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001913Library
1914-------
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001915
Georg Brandlf0de6a12005-08-22 18:02:59 +00001916- Bug #1266283: The new function "lexists" is now in os.path.__all__.
1917
Guido van Rossum5124b4a2004-07-06 17:52:32 +00001918- Bug #981530: Fix UnboundLocalError in shutil.rmtree(). This affects
1919 the documented behavior: the function passed to the onerror()
1920 handler can now also be os.listdir.
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001921
Brett Cannon41d13f62004-07-03 03:54:54 +00001922- Bug #754449: threading.Thread objects no longer mask exceptions raised during
1923 interpreter shutdown with another exception from attempting to handle the
1924 original exception.
Brett Cannoncc4e9352004-07-03 03:52:35 +00001925
Raymond Hettinger21f9fce2004-07-10 16:11:03 +00001926- Added decimal.py per PEP 327.
Raymond Hettinger7c85fa42004-07-01 11:01:35 +00001927
Brett Cannon46d4ff22004-06-29 04:08:23 +00001928- Bug #981299: rsync is now a recognized protocol in urlparse that uses a
1929 "netloc" portion of a URL.
Brett Cannonfbac2942004-06-29 04:02:40 +00001930
Brett Cannon1c3fa182004-06-19 21:11:35 +00001931- Bug #919012: shutil.move() will not try to move a directory into itself.
1932 Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
1933
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +00001934- Bug #934282: pydoc.stripid() is now case-insensitive. Thanks Robin Becker.
1935
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +00001936- Bug #823209: cmath.log() now takes an optional base argument so that its
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +00001937 API matches math.log().
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +00001938
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001939- Bug #957381: distutils bdist_rpm no longer fails on recent RPM versions
Anthony Baxter1a4ddae2004-08-31 10:07:13 +00001940 that generate a -debuginfo.rpm
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001941
Martin v. Löwisbdec50f2004-06-08 08:29:33 +00001942- os.path.devnull has been added for all supported platforms.
1943
Hye-Shik Chang2400e932004-06-05 18:37:53 +00001944- Fixed #877165: distutils now picks the right C++ compiler command
1945 on cygwin and mingw32.
1946
Hye-Shik Chang39aef792004-06-05 13:30:56 +00001947- urllib.urlopen().readline() now handles HTTP/0.9 correctly.
1948
Brett Cannon0096e262004-06-05 01:12:51 +00001949- refactored site.py into functions. Also wrote regression tests for the
1950 module.
1951
Fred Drakeec6229e2004-06-25 23:02:59 +00001952- The distutils install command now supports the --home option and
1953 installation scheme for all platforms.
1954
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +00001955- asyncore.loop now has a repeat count parameter that defaults to
Michael W. Hudson7db865a2004-06-30 09:09:38 +00001956 looping forever.
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +00001957
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001958- The distutils sdist command now ignores all .svn directories, in
1959 addition to CVS and RCS directories. .svn directories hold
1960 administrative files for the Subversion source control system.
1961
Martin v. Löwis2a6ba902004-05-31 18:22:40 +00001962- Added a new module: cookielib. Automatic cookie handling for HTTP
1963 clients. Also, support for cookielib has been added to urllib2, so
1964 urllib2.urlopen() can transparently handle cookies.
1965
Raymond Hettinger059e1702004-05-19 19:56:44 +00001966- stringprep.py now uses built-in set() instead of sets.Set().
1967
Thomas Heller2e7c8322004-05-11 15:10:59 +00001968- Bug #876278: Unbounded recursion in modulefinder
1969
Martin v. Löwis456ab1d2004-05-06 01:54:36 +00001970- Bug #780300: Swap public and system ID in LexicalHandler.startDTD.
1971 Applications relying on the wrong order need to be corrected.
1972
Hye-Shik Chang0f5bf1e2004-04-20 21:11:11 +00001973- Bug #926075: Fixed a bug that returns a wrong pattern object
1974 for a string or unicode object in sre.compile() when a different
1975 type pattern with the same value exists.
1976
Skip Montanarod0c0c412004-04-07 16:03:02 +00001977- Added countcallers arg to trace.Trace class (--trackcalls command line arg
1978 when run from the command prompt).
1979
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +00001980- Fixed a caching bug in platform.platform() where the argument of 'terse' was
1981 not taken into consideration when caching value.
1982
Nicholas Bastin824b1b22004-03-23 18:44:39 +00001983- Added two new command-line arguments for profile (output file and
1984 default sort).
1985
Nicholas Bastin1eb4bfc2004-03-22 20:12:56 +00001986- Added global runctx function to profile module
1987
Martin v. Löwis347c30d2004-03-21 15:29:41 +00001988- Add hlist missing entryconfigure and entrycget methods.
1989
Hye-Shik Chang4a7ad1a2004-03-19 08:11:56 +00001990- The ptcp154 codec was added for Kazakh character set support.
1991
Martin v. Löwisa79449e2004-02-15 21:19:18 +00001992- Support non-anonymous ftp URLs in urllib2.
1993
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001994- The encodings package will now apply codec name aliases
Marc-André Lemburg57cb68f2004-01-20 18:24:34 +00001995 first before starting to try the import of the codec module.
1996 This simplifies overriding built-in codecs with external
1997 packages, e.g. the included CJK codecs with the JapaneseCodecs
1998 package, by adjusting the aliases dictionary in encodings.aliases
1999 accordingly.
2000
Barry Warsaw30ff12f2004-01-04 01:13:43 +00002001- base64 now supports RFC 3548 Base16, Base32, and Base64 encoding and
2002 decoding standards.
2003
Jeremy Hylton37c5f2a2003-12-14 05:29:45 +00002004- urllib2 now supports processors. A processor is a handler that
2005 implements an xxx_request or xxx_response method. These methods are
2006 called for all requests.
2007
Thomas Hellerc7501d52003-12-05 20:28:07 +00002008- distutils compilers now compile source files in the same order as
2009 they are passed to the compiler.
2010
Walter Dörwaldc8de4582003-12-03 20:26:05 +00002011- pprint.pprint() and pprint.pformat() now have additional parameters
2012 indent, width and depth.
2013
Walter Dörwald7a7ede52003-12-03 20:15:28 +00002014- Patch #750542: pprint now will pretty print subclasses of list, tuple
2015 and dict too, as long as they don't overwrite __repr__().
2016
Thomas Hellerb3105912003-11-28 19:42:56 +00002017- Bug #848614: distutils' msvccompiler fails to find the MSVC6
2018 compiler because of incomplete registry entries.
2019
Martin v. Löwisaf7dc8d2003-11-19 19:51:55 +00002020- httplib.HTTP.putrequest now offers to omit the implicit Accept-Encoding.
2021
Thomas Hellercf0005b2003-11-14 10:33:20 +00002022- Patch #841977: modulefinder didn't find extension modules in packages
2023
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +00002024- imaplib.IMAP4.thread was added.
2025
Guido van Rossum967b0632003-11-10 02:27:19 +00002026- Plugged a minor hole in tempfile.mktemp() due to the use of
2027 os.path.exists(), switched to using os.lstat() directly if possible.
2028
Raymond Hettinger0c410272004-01-05 10:13:35 +00002029- bisect.py and heapq.py now have underlying C implementations
Raymond Hettinger33ecffb2004-06-10 05:03:17 +00002030 for better performance.
2031
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00002032- heapq.py has two new functions, nsmallest() and nlargest().
Raymond Hettingerb3af1812003-11-08 10:24:38 +00002033
Neil Schemenauerf607fc52003-11-05 23:03:00 +00002034- traceback.format_exc has been added (similar to print_exc but it returns
2035 a string).
2036
Martin v. Löwis45394c22003-10-31 13:49:36 +00002037- xmlrpclib.MultiCall has been added.
2038
Martin v. Löwis48440b72003-10-31 12:52:35 +00002039- poplib.POP3_SSL has been added.
2040
Martin v. Löwisd6625482003-10-12 17:37:01 +00002041- tmpfile.mkstemp now returns an absolute path even if dir is relative.
2042
Brett Cannon5d9ca4e2003-10-12 04:38:48 +00002043- urlparse is RFC 2396 compliant.
2044
Skip Montanarodef99342003-10-03 14:07:07 +00002045- The fieldnames argument to the csv module's DictReader constructor is now
2046 optional. If omitted, the first row of the file will be used as the
2047 list of fieldnames.
2048
Raymond Hettinger9a80c5d2003-09-23 20:21:01 +00002049- encodings.bz2_codec was added for access to bz2 compression
2050 using "a long string".encode('bz2')
2051
Guido van Rossum0e5a51d2003-09-22 15:03:11 +00002052- Various improvements to unittest.py, realigned with PyUnit CVS.
2053
Martin v. Löwisc6bb6c02003-09-20 15:52:21 +00002054- dircache now passes exceptions to the caller, instead of returning
2055 empty lists.
2056
Raymond Hettingerdeadbf52003-09-12 06:33:37 +00002057- The bsddb module and dbhash module now support the iterator and
2058 mapping protocols which make them more substitutable for dictionaries
2059 and shelves.
2060
Skip Montanaro3f7a9482003-09-06 19:52:12 +00002061- The csv module's DictReader and DictWriter classes now accept keyword
2062 arguments. This was an omission in the initial implementation.
2063
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +00002064- The email package handles some RFC 2231 parameters with missing
Barry Warsaw2f5bf172003-09-03 04:09:49 +00002065 CHARSET fields better. It also includes a patch to parameter
2066 parsing when semicolons appear inside quotes.
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +00002067
Raymond Hettinger6a180122003-08-17 08:34:09 +00002068- sets.py now runs under Py2.2. In addition, the argument restrictions
2069 for most set methods (but not the operators) have been relaxed to
Raymond Hettinger70b9f492003-11-19 15:52:14 +00002070 allow any iterable.
Raymond Hettingeree562fc2003-08-15 21:17:04 +00002071
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +00002072- _strptime.py now has a behind-the-scenes caching mechanism for the most
Brett Cannonb7150a22003-08-05 06:27:04 +00002073 recent TimeRE instance used along with the last five unique directive
2074 patterns. The overall module was also made more thread-safe.
2075
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +00002076- random.cunifvariate() and random.stdgamma() were deprecated in Py2.3
2077 and removed in Py2.4.
2078
Anthony Baxter92bee362003-11-04 14:35:49 +00002079- Bug #823328: urllib2.py's HTTP Digest Auth support works again.
2080
Hye-Shik Chang84a99312004-01-17 14:59:36 +00002081- Patch #873597: CJK codecs are imported into rank of default codecs.
2082
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002083Tools/Demos
2084-----------
2085
Skip Montanarod5a21fd2004-01-27 14:49:04 +00002086- A hotshotmain script was added to the Tools/scripts directory that
2087 makes it easy to run a script under control of the hotshot profiler.
2088
Skip Montanaro030f68a2003-10-28 16:24:00 +00002089- The db2pickle and pickle2db scripts can now dump/load gdbm files.
2090
Skip Montanaroe2b61e02004-03-03 17:42:08 +00002091- The file order on the command line of the pickle2db script was reversed.
2092 It is now [ picklefile ] dbfile. This provides better symmetry with
2093 db2pickle. The file arguments to both scripts are now source followed by
2094 destination in situations where both files are given.
2095
Skip Montanarofd4fa882003-09-10 19:04:13 +00002096- The pydoc script will display a link to the module documentation for
2097 modules determined to be part of the core distribution. The documentation
2098 base directory defaults to http://www.python.org/doc/current/lib/ but can
2099 be changed by setting the PYTHONDOCS environment variable.
2100
Raymond Hettingere41d4c82003-08-25 04:39:55 +00002101- texcheck.py now detects double word errors.
2102
Tim Peters1a3abcb2003-08-18 23:52:09 +00002103- md5sum.py mistakenly opened input files in text mode by default, a
2104 silent and dangerous change from previous releases. It once again
2105 opens input files in binary mode by default. The -t and -b flags
2106 remain for compatibility with the 2.3 release, but -b is the default
2107 now.
2108
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002109- py-electric-colon now works when pending-delete/delete-selection mode is
2110 in effect
2111
2112- py-help-at-point is no longer bound to the F1 key - it's still bound to
2113 C-c C-h
2114
Barry Warsaw6ec58ca2003-09-03 03:20:37 +00002115- Pynche was fixed to not crash when there is no ~/.pynche file and no
2116 -d option was given.
2117
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002118Build
2119-----
2120
Brett Cannonf6af76d2004-06-26 04:03:06 +00002121- Bug #978645: Modules/getpath.c now builds properly in --disable-framework
2122 build under OS X.
2123
Skip Montanaro56f6a4f2004-06-18 02:47:22 +00002124- Profiling using gprof is now available if Python is configured with
2125 --enable-profiling.
2126
Martin v. Löwisf30d60e2004-06-08 08:17:44 +00002127- Profiling the VM using the Pentium TSC is now possible if Python
2128 is configured --with-tsc.
2129
Martin v. Löwis642c8a12004-06-04 13:55:13 +00002130- In order to find libraries, setup.py now also looks in /lib64, for use
2131 on AMD64.
2132
Hye-Shik Chang54f94392004-04-14 07:55:31 +00002133- Bug #934635: Fixed a bug where the configure script couldn't detect
2134 getaddrinfo() properly if the KAME stack had SCTP support.
2135
Skip Montanaro7befb992004-02-10 16:50:21 +00002136- Support for missing ANSI C header files (limits.h, stddef.h, etc) was
2137 removed.
2138
Skip Montanarodb608052004-02-07 13:53:46 +00002139- Systems requiring the D4, D6 or D7 variants of pthreads are no longer
2140 supported (see PEP 11).
2141
2142- Universal newline support can no longer be disabled (see PEP 11).
2143
Skip Montanarocd1f7432004-01-17 14:22:44 +00002144- Support for DGUX, SunOS 4, IRIX 4 and Minix was removed (see PEP 11).
2145
2146- Support for systems requiring --with-dl-dld or --with-sgi-dl was removed
2147 (see PEP 11).
2148
2149- Tests for sizeof(char) were removed since ANSI C mandates that
2150 sizeof(char) must be 1.
2151
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002152C API
2153-----
2154
Tim Peters9ddf40b2004-06-20 22:41:32 +00002155- Thanks to Anthony Tuininga, the datetime module now supplies a C API
2156 containing type-check macros and constructors. See new docs in the
2157 Python/C API Reference Manual for details.
2158
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +00002159- Private function _PyTime_DoubleToTimet added, to convert a Python
2160 timestamp (C double) to platform time_t with some out-of-bounds
2161 checking. Declared in new header file timefuncs.h. It would be
2162 good to expose some other internal timemodule.c functions there.
2163
Martin v. Löwise440e472004-06-01 15:22:42 +00002164- New public functions PyEval_EvaluateFrame and PyGen_New to expose
2165 generator objects.
2166
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +00002167- New public functions Py_IncRef() and Py_DecRef(), exposing the
2168 functionality of the Py_XINCREF() and Py_XDECREF macros. Useful for
Thomas Hellercc10a852004-04-22 17:28:25 +00002169 runtime dynamic embedding of Python. See patch #938302, by Bob
2170 Ippolito.
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +00002171
Raymond Hettingerc1e4f9d2004-03-12 08:04:00 +00002172- Added a new macro, PySequence_Fast_ITEMS, which retrieves a fast sequence's
2173 underlying array of PyObject pointers. Useful for high speed looping.
2174
Raymond Hettinger8f5cdaa2003-12-13 11:26:12 +00002175- Created a new method flag, METH_COEXIST, which causes a method to be loaded
2176 even if already defined by a slot wrapper. This allows a __contains__
2177 method, for example, to co-exist with a defined sq_contains slot. This
2178 is helpful because the PyCFunction can take advantage of optimized calls
2179 whenever METH_O or METH_NOARGS flags are defined.
2180
Raymond Hettingerbc0f2ab2003-11-25 21:12:14 +00002181- Added a new function, PyDict_Contains(d, k) which is like
2182 PySequence_Contains() but is specific to dictionaries and executes
2183 about 10% faster.
2184
Brett Cannon26b3a7b2003-10-19 21:31:43 +00002185- Added three new macros: Py_RETURN_NONE, Py_RETURN_TRUE, and Py_RETURN_FALSE.
2186 Each return the singleton they mention after Py_INCREF()ing them.
2187
Raymond Hettingercb2da432003-10-12 18:24:34 +00002188- Added a new function, PyTuple_Pack(n, ...) for constructing tuples from a
2189 variable length argument list of Python objects without having to invoke
2190 the more complex machinery of Py_BuildValue(). PyTuple_Pack(3, a, b, c)
2191 is equivalent to Py_BuildValue("(OOO)", a, b, c).
2192
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002193Windows
2194-------
2195
Guido van Rossumfd25aca2003-11-30 22:10:15 +00002196- The _winreg module could segfault when reading very large registry
2197 values, due to unchecked alloca() calls (SF bug 851056). The fix is
2198 uses either PyMem_Malloc(n) or PyString_FromStringAndSize(NULL, n),
2199 as appropriate, followed by a size check.
2200
Tim Petersf1827cf2003-09-07 03:30:18 +00002201- file.truncate() could misbehave if the file was open for update
2202 (modes r+, rb+, w+, wb+), and the most recent file operation before
2203 the truncate() call was an input operation. SF bug 801631.
2204
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002205
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00002206What's New in Python 2.3 final?
2207===============================
2208
2209*Release date: 29-Jul-2003*
2210
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00002211IDLE
2212----
2213
Tim Peters36c1afc2003-07-29 17:22:57 +00002214- Bug 778400: IDLE hangs when selecting "Edit with IDLE" from explorer.
2215 This was unique to Windows, and was fixed by adding an -n switch to
2216 the command the Windows installer creates to execute "Edit with IDLE"
2217 context-menu actions.
2218
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00002219- IDLE displays a new message upon startup: some "personal firewall"
2220 kinds of programs (for example, ZoneAlarm) open a dialog of their
2221 own when any program opens a socket. IDLE does use sockets, talking
2222 on the computer's internal loopback interface. This connection is not
2223 visible on any external interface and no data is sent to or received
2224 from the Internet. So, if you get such a dialog when opening IDLE,
2225 asking whether to let pythonw.exe talk to address 127.0.0.1, say yes,
2226 and rest assured no communication external to your machine is taking
2227 place. If you don't allow it, IDLE won't be able to start.
2228
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00002229
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002230What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 2?
2231=============================================
2232
Tim Peters6560a252003-07-24 00:15:46 +00002233*Release date: 24-Jul-2003*
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002234
2235Core and builtins
2236-----------------
2237
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00002238- It is now possible to import from zipfiles containing additional
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002239 data bytes before the zip compatible archive. Zipfiles containing a
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00002240 comment at the end are still unsupported.
2241
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002242Extension modules
2243-----------------
2244
2245- A longstanding bug in the parser module's initialization could cause
2246 fatal internal refcount confusion when the module got initialized more
2247 than once. This has been fixed.
2248
Fred Drake01a43122003-07-21 17:17:10 +00002249- Fixed memory leak in pyexpat; using the parser's ParseFile() method
2250 with open files that aren't instances of the standard file type
2251 caused an instance of the bound .read() method to be leaked on every
2252 call.
2253
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002254- Fixed some leaks in the locale module.
2255
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002256Library
2257-------
2258
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002259- Lib/encodings/rot_13.py when used as a script, now more properly
2260 uses the first Python interpreter on your path.
2261
2262- Removed caching of TimeRE (and thus LocaleTime) in _strptime.py to
2263 fix a locale related bug in the test suite. Although another patch
2264 was needed to actually fix the problem, the cache code was not
2265 restored.
2266
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00002267IDLE
2268----
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002269
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00002270- Calltips patches.
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002271
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002272Build
2273-----
2274
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002275- For MacOSX, added -mno-fused-madd to BASECFLAGS to fix test_coercion
2276 on Panther (OSX 10.3).
2277
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002278C API
2279-----
2280
2281Windows
2282-------
2283
Tim Peters291f14e2003-07-22 02:50:01 +00002284- The tempfile module could do insane imports on Windows if PYTHONCASEOK
2285 was set, making temp file creation impossible. Repaired.
2286
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002287- Add a patch to workaround pthread_sigmask() bugs in Cygwin.
2288
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002289Mac
2290---
2291
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002292- Various fixes to pimp.
2293
2294- Scripts runs with pythonw no longer had full window manager access.
2295
2296- Don't force boot-disk-only install, for reasons unknown it causes
2297 more problems than it solves.
2298
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002299
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002300What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 1?
2301=============================================
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002302
Jeremy Hylton0ed18c22003-07-18 20:10:02 +00002303*Release date: 18-Jul-2003*
2304
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002305Core and builtins
2306-----------------
2307
Tim Peterse5e065b2003-07-06 18:36:54 +00002308- The new function sys.getcheckinterval() returns the last value set
2309 by sys.setcheckinterval().
2310
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002311- Several bugs in the symbol table phase of the compiler have been
2312 fixed. Errors could be lost and compilation could fail without
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002313 reporting an error. SF patch 763201.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002314
2315- The interpreter is now more robust about importing the warnings
2316 module. In an executable generated by freeze or similar programs,
2317 earlier versions of 2.3 would fail if the warnings module could
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002318 not be found on the file system. Fixes SF bug 771097.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002319
2320- A warning about assignments to module attributes that shadow
2321 builtins, present in earlier releases of 2.3, has been removed.
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002322
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002323- It is not possible to create subclasses of builtin types like str
2324 and tuple that define an itemsize. Earlier releases of Python 2.3
2325 allowed this by mistake, leading to crashes and other problems.
2326
2327- The thread_id is now initialized to 0 in a non-thread build. SF bug
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002328 770247.
2329
2330- SF bug 762891: "del p[key]" on proxy object no longer raises SystemError.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002331
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002332Extension modules
2333-----------------
2334
2335- weakref.proxy() can now handle "del obj[i]" for proxy objects
2336 defining __delitem__. Formerly, it generated a SystemError.
2337
2338- SSL no longer crashes the interpreter when the remote side disconnects.
2339
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002340- On Unix the mmap module can again be used to map device files.
2341
Brett Cannon20def8b2003-07-01 05:16:08 +00002342- time.strptime now exclusively uses the Python implementation
2343 contained within the _strptime module.
2344
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002345- The print slot of weakref proxy objects was removed, because it was
2346 not consistent with the object's repr slot.
2347
2348- The mmap module only checks file size for regular files, not
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002349 character or block devices. SF patch 708374.
2350
2351- The cPickle Pickler garbage collection support was fixed to traverse
2352 the find_class attribute, if present.
2353
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002354- There are several fixes for the bsddb3 wrapper module.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002355
2356 bsddb3 no longer crashes if an environment is closed before a cursor
2357 (SF bug 763298).
2358
2359 The DB and DBEnv set_get_returns_none function was extended to take
Barry Warsawd71a5512003-07-20 18:00:54 +00002360 a level instead of a boolean flag. The new level 2 means that in
2361 addition, cursor.set()/.get() methods return None instead of raising
2362 an exception.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002363
2364 A typo was fixed in DBCursor.join_item(), preventing a crash.
2365
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002366Library
2367-------
2368
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002369- distutils now supports MSVC 7.1
2370
Raymond Hettinger71adf7e2003-07-16 19:25:22 +00002371- doctest now examines all docstrings by default. Previously, it would
2372 skip over functions with private names (as indicated by the underscore
2373 naming convention). The old default created too much of a risk that
2374 user tests were being skipped inadvertently. Note, this change could
2375 break code in the unlikely case that someone had intentionally put
2376 failing tests in the docstrings of private functions. The breakage
2377 is easily fixable by specifying the old behavior when calling testmod()
2378 or Tester().
2379
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002380- There were several fixes to the way dumbdbms are closed. It's vital
2381 that a dumbdbm database be closed properly, else the on-disk data
2382 and directory files can be left in mutually inconsistent states.
2383 dumbdbm.py's _Database.__del__() method attempted to close the
2384 database properly, but a shutdown race in _Database._commit() could
2385 prevent this from working, so that a program trusting __del__() to
2386 get the on-disk files in synch could be badly surprised. The race
2387 has been repaired. A sync() method was also added so that shelve
2388 can guarantee data is written to disk.
Tim Peters7a6c7332003-07-13 17:21:10 +00002389
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002390 The close() method can now be called more than once without complaint.
Tim Petersd7472ec2003-07-13 02:22:03 +00002391
Tim Peters59aba122003-07-01 20:01:55 +00002392- The classes in threading.py are now new-style classes. That they
2393 weren't before was an oversight.
2394
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002395- The urllib2 digest authentication handlers now define the correct
2396 auth_header. The earlier versions would fail at runtime.
2397
Neal Norwitze7dfe212003-07-01 14:59:46 +00002398- SF bug 763023: fix uncaught ZeroDivisionError in difflib ratio methods
2399 when there are no lines.
2400
Neal Norwitz3c0f2c92003-07-01 21:12:47 +00002401- SF bug 763637: fix exception in Tkinter with after_cancel
2402 which could occur with Tk 8.4
2403
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002404- SF bug 770601: CGIHTTPServer.py now passes the entire environment
2405 to child processes.
2406
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002407- SF bug 765238: add filter to fnmatch's __all__.
2408
2409- SF bug 748201: make time.strptime() error messages more helpful.
2410
2411- SF patch 764470: Do not dump the args attribute of a Fault object in
2412 xmlrpclib.
2413
2414- SF patch 549151: urllib and urllib2 now redirect POSTs on 301
2415 responses.
2416
2417- SF patch 766650: The whichdb module was fixed to recognize dbm files
2418 generated by gdbm on OS/2 EMX.
2419
2420- SF bugs 763047 and 763052: fixes bug of timezone value being left as
2421 -1 when ``time.tzname[0] == time.tzname[1] and not time.daylight``
2422 is true when it should only when time.daylight is true.
2423
2424- SF bug 764548: re now allows subclasses of str and unicode to be
2425 used as patterns.
2426
2427- SF bug 763637: In Tkinter, change after_cancel() to handle tuples
2428 of varying sizes. Tk 8.4 returns a different number of values
2429 than Tk 8.3.
2430
2431- SF bug 763023: difflib.ratio() did not catch zero division.
2432
2433- The Queue module now has an __all__ attribute.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002434
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002435Tools/Demos
2436-----------
2437
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002438- See Lib/idlelib/NEWS.txt for IDLE news.
2439
Neal Norwitz592c4cc2003-07-01 04:14:28 +00002440- SF bug 753592: webchecker/wsgui now handles user supplied directories.
2441
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002442- The trace.py script has been removed. It is now in the standard library.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002443
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002444Build
2445-----
2446
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002447- Python now compiles with -fno-strict-aliasing if possible (SF bug 766696).
2448
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002449- The socket module compiles on IRIX 6.5.10.
2450
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002451- An irix64 system is treated the same way as an irix6 system (SF
2452 patch 764560).
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002453
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002454- Several definitions were missing on FreeBSD 5.x unless the
2455 __BSD_VISIBLE symbol was defined. configure now defines it as
2456 needed.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002457
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002458C API
2459-----
2460
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002461- Unicode objects now support mbcs as a built-in encoding, so the C
2462 API can use it without deferring to the encodings package.
2463
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002464Windows
2465-------
2466
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002467- The Windows implementation of PyThread_start_new_thread() never
2468 checked error returns from Windows functions correctly. As a result,
2469 it could claim to start a new thread even when the Microsoft
2470 _beginthread() function failed (due to "too many threads" -- this is
2471 on the order of thousands when it happens). In these cases, the
2472 Python exception ::
2473
2474 thread.error: can't start new thread
2475
2476 is raised now.
2477
2478- SF bug 766669: Prevent a GPF on interpreter exit when sockets are in
2479 use. The interpreter now calls WSACleanup() from Py_Finalize()
2480 instead of from DLL teardown.
2481
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002482Mac
2483---
2484
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002485- Bundlebuilder now inherits default values in the right way. It was
Walter Dörwald73a8a4b2003-07-30 12:14:02 +00002486 previously possible for app bundles to get a type of "BNDL" instead
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002487 of "APPL." Other improvements include, a --build-id option to
2488 specify the CFBundleIdentifier and using the --python option to set
2489 the executable in the bundle.
2490
2491- Fixed two bugs in MacOSX framework handling.
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002492
Jack Jansene0040412003-07-23 22:17:28 +00002493- pythonw did not allow user interaction in 2.3rc1, this has been fixed.
2494
2495- Python is now compiled with -mno-fused-madd, making all tests pass
2496 on Panther.
2497
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002498What's New in Python 2.3 beta 2?
2499================================
2500
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00002501*Release date: 29-Jun-2003*
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002502
2503Core and builtins
2504-----------------
2505
Barry Warsaw883f2232003-06-29 17:10:11 +00002506- A program can now set the environment variable PYTHONINSPECT to some
2507 string value in Python, and cause the interpreter to enter the
2508 interactive prompt at program exit, as if Python had been invoked
2509 with the -i option.
2510
Raymond Hettingerd05abde2003-06-17 05:05:49 +00002511- list.index() now accepts optional start and stop arguments. Similar
2512 changes were made to UserList.index(). SF feature request 754014.
2513
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002514- SF patch 751998 fixes an unwanted side effect of the previous fix
2515 for SF bug 742860 (the next item).
2516
Tim Peters50d8b8b2003-05-25 17:44:31 +00002517- SF bug 742860: "WeakKeyDictionary __delitem__ uses iterkeys". This
2518 wasn't threadsafe, was very inefficient (expected time O(len(dict))
2519 instead of O(1)), and could raise a spurious RuntimeError if another
2520 thread mutated the dict during __delitem__, or if a comparison function
2521 mutated it. It also neglected to raise KeyError when the key wasn't
2522 present; didn't raise TypeError when the key wasn't of a weakly
2523 referencable type; and broke various more-or-less obscure dict
2524 invariants by using a sequence of equality comparisons over the whole
2525 set of dict keys instead of computing the key's hash code to narrow
2526 the search to those keys with the same hash code. All of these are
2527 considered to be bugs. A new implementation of __delitem__ repairs all
2528 that, but note that fixing these bugs may change visible behavior in
2529 code relying (whether intentionally or accidentally) on old behavior.
Tim Peters886128f2003-05-25 01:45:11 +00002530
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002531- SF bug 734869: Fixed a compiler bug that caused a fatal error when
2532 compiling a list comprehension that contained another list comprehension
2533 embedded in a lambda expression.
2534
Tim Peterse87568d2003-05-24 20:18:24 +00002535- SF bug 705231: builtin pow() no longer lets the platform C pow()
2536 raise -1.0 to integer powers, because (at least) glibc gets it wrong
2537 in some cases. The result should be -1.0 if the power is odd and 1.0
2538 if the power is even, and any float with a sufficiently large exponent
2539 is (mathematically) an exact even integer.
2540
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002541- SF bug 759227: A new-style class that implements __nonzero__() must
2542 return a bool or int (but not an int subclass) from that method. This
2543 matches the restriction on classic classes.
2544
Martin v. Löwis5467d4c2003-05-10 07:10:12 +00002545- The encoding attribute has been added for file objects, and set to
2546 the terminal encoding on Unix and Windows.
2547
Tim Peters015dd822003-05-04 04:16:52 +00002548- The softspace attribute of file objects became read-only by oversight.
2549 It's writable again.
2550
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00002551- Reverted a 2.3 beta 1 change to iterators for subclasses of list and
2552 tuple. By default, the iterators now access data elements directly
2553 instead of going through __getitem__. If __getitem__ access is
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002554 preferred, then __iter__ can be overridden.
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00002555
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002556- SF bug 735247: The staticmethod and super types participate in
2557 garbage collection. Before this change, it was possible for leaks to
2558 occur in functions with non-global free variables that used these types.
2559
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002560Extension modules
2561-----------------
2562
Raymond Hettinger643bcec2003-06-29 03:29:42 +00002563- the socket module has a new exception, socket.timeout, to allow
2564 timeouts to be handled separately from other socket errors.
2565
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002566- SF bug 751276: cPickle has fixed to propagate exceptions raised in
2567 user code. In earlier versions, cPickle caught and ignored any
2568 exception when it performed operations that it expected to raise
2569 specific exceptions like AttributeError.
2570
2571- cPickle Pickler and Unpickler objects now participate in garbage
2572 collection.
2573
Tim Peterscda32b72003-06-15 23:13:35 +00002574- mimetools.choose_boundary() could return duplicate strings at times,
2575 especially likely on Windows. The strings returned are now guaranteed
2576 unique within a single program run.
2577
Brett Cannon4e64d782003-06-13 23:44:35 +00002578- thread.interrupt_main() raises KeyboardInterrupt in the main thread.
2579 dummy_thread has also been modified to try to simulate the behavior.
2580
Walter Dörwald9e46abe2003-05-18 03:15:10 +00002581- array.array.insert() now treats negative indices as being relative
2582 to the end of the array, just like list.insert() does. (SF bug #739313)
2583
Tim Petersb0c854d2003-05-17 15:57:00 +00002584- The datetime module classes datetime, time, and timedelta are now
2585 properly subclassable.
Tim Petersa98924a2003-05-17 05:55:19 +00002586
Martin v. Löwis28e9ce92003-05-09 08:19:48 +00002587- _tkinter.{get|set}busywaitinterval was added.
2588
Raymond Hettinger834f4632003-05-02 20:24:56 +00002589- itertools.islice() now accepts stop=None as documented.
2590 Fixes SF bug #730685.
2591
Skip Montanaro8c044d82003-05-06 20:42:37 +00002592- the bsddb185 module is built in one restricted instance -
2593 /usr/include/db.h exists and defines HASHVERSION to be 2. This is true
2594 for many BSD-derived systems.
2595
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002596
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002597Library
2598-------
2599
Tim Petersdb3756d2003-06-29 05:30:48 +00002600- Some happy doctest extensions from Jim Fulton have been added to
2601 doctest.py. These are already being used in Zope3. The two
2602 primary ones:
2603
2604 doctest.debug(module, name) extracts the doctests from the named object
2605 in the given module, puts them in a temp file, and starts pdb running
2606 on that file. This is great when a doctest fails.
2607
2608 doctest.DocTestSuite(module=None) returns a synthesized unittest
2609 TestSuite instance, to be run by the unittest framework, which
2610 runs all the doctests in the module. This allows writing tests in
2611 doctest style (which can be clearer and shorter than writing tests
2612 in unittest style), without losing unittest's powerful testing
2613 framework features (which doctest lacks).
2614
Tim Peters6ebe61f2003-06-27 20:48:05 +00002615- For compatibility with doctests created before 2.3, if an expected
2616 output block consists solely of "1" and the actual output block
2617 consists solely of "True", it's accepted as a match; similarly
2618 for "0" and "False". This is quite un-doctest-like, but is practical.
2619 The behavior can be disabled by passing the new doctest module
2620 constant DONT_ACCEPT_TRUE_FOR_1 to the new optionflags optional
2621 argument.
2622
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002623- ZipFile.testzip() now only traps BadZipfile exceptions. Previously,
2624 a bare except caught to much and reported all errors as a problem
2625 in the archive.
2626
2627- The logging module now has a new function, makeLogRecord() making
2628 LogHandler easier to interact with DatagramHandler and SocketHandler.
2629
Skip Montanaro364ca402003-06-17 12:58:31 +00002630- The cgitb module has been extended to support plain text display (SF patch
2631 569574).
2632
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002633- A brand new version of IDLE (from the IDLEfork project at
2634 SourceForge) is now included as Lib/idlelib. The old Tools/idle is
2635 no more.
2636
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002637- Added a new module: trace (documentation missing). This module used
2638 to be distributed in Tools/scripts. It uses sys.settrace() to trace
2639 code execution -- either function calls or individual lines. It can
2640 generate tracing output during execution or a post-mortem report of
2641 code coverage.
2642
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00002643- The threading module has new functions settrace() and setprofile()
2644 that cooperate with the functions of the same name in the sys
2645 module. A function registered with the threading module will
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002646 be used for all threads it creates. The new trace module uses this
2647 to provide tracing for code running in threads.
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00002648
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00002649- copy.py: applied SF patch 707900, fixing bug 702858, by Steven
2650 Taschuk. Copying a new-style class that had a reference to itself
2651 didn't work. (The same thing worked fine for old-style classes.)
Martin v. Löwisba8f5ff2003-06-14 07:10:06 +00002652 Builtin functions are now treated as atomic, fixing bug #746304.
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00002653
Raymond Hettingerc24d7672003-06-08 19:42:33 +00002654- difflib.py has two new functions: context_diff() and unified_diff().
2655
Guido van Rossumfa19f7c2003-05-16 01:46:51 +00002656- More fixes to urllib (SF 549151): (a) When redirecting, always use
2657 GET. This is common practice and more-or-less sanctioned by the
2658 HTTP standard. (b) Add a handler for 307 redirection, which becomes
2659 an error for POST, but a regular redirect for GET and HEAD
2660
Guido van Rossumbf1bef82003-05-13 18:01:19 +00002661- Added optional 'onerror' argument to os.walk(), to control error
2662 handling.
2663
Martin v. Löwise59e2ba2003-05-03 09:09:02 +00002664- inspect.is{method|data}descriptor was added, to allow pydoc display
2665 __doc__ of data descriptors.
2666
Skip Montanaro4a7751c2003-04-29 21:07:16 +00002667- Fixed socket speed loss caused by use of the _socketobject wrapper class
2668 in socket.py.
2669
Raymond Hettinger22952a32003-05-20 04:59:56 +00002670- timeit.py now checks the current directory for imports.
2671
Gustavo Niemeyer9556fba2003-06-07 17:53:08 +00002672- urllib2.py now knows how to order proxy classes, so the user doesn't
2673 have to insert it in front of other classes, nor do dirty tricks like
2674 inserting a "dummy" HTTPHandler after a ProxyHandler when building an
2675 opener with proxy support.
2676
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002677- Iterators have been added for dbm keys.
2678
2679- random.Random objects can now be pickled.
2680
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002681Tools/Demos
2682-----------
2683
Martin v. Löwisb8c084e2003-06-14 09:03:46 +00002684- pydoc now offers help on keywords and topics.
2685
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002686- Tools/idle is gone; long live Lib/idlelib.
2687
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00002688- diff.py prints file diffs in context, unified, or ndiff formats,
2689 providing a command line interface to difflib.py.
Raymond Hettinger2f3c74a2003-06-08 23:10:15 +00002690
Raymond Hettinger71e00332003-05-10 03:30:13 +00002691- texcheck.py is a new script for making a rough validation of Python LaTeX
2692 files.
2693
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002694Build
2695-----
2696
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002697- Setting DESTDIR during 'make install' now allows specifying a
Martin v. Löwis3b8ee082003-05-11 20:25:35 +00002698 different root directory.
2699
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002700C API
2701-----
2702
Tim Peters3cfe7542003-05-21 21:29:48 +00002703- PyType_Ready(): If a type declares that it participates in gc
2704 (Py_TPFLAGS_HAVE_GC), and its base class does not, and its base class's
2705 tp_free slot is the default _PyObject_Del, and type does not define
2706 a tp_free slot itself, _PyObject_GC_Del is assigned to type->tp_free.
2707 Previously _PyObject_Del was inherited, which could at best lead to a
2708 segfault. In addition, if even after this magic the type's tp_free
2709 slot is _PyObject_Del or NULL, and the type is a base type
2710 (Py_TPFLAGS_BASETYPE), TypeError is raised: since the type is a base
2711 type, its dealloc function must call type->tp_free, and since the type
2712 is gc'able, tp_free must not be NULL or _PyObject_Del.
2713
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002714- PyThreadState_SetAsyncExc(): A new API (deliberately accessible only
2715 from C) to interrupt a thread by sending it an exception. It is
2716 intentional that you have to write your own C extension to call it
2717 from Python.
2718
2719
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002720New platforms
2721-------------
2722
2723None this time.
2724
2725Tests
2726-----
2727
2728- test_imp rewritten so that it doesn't raise RuntimeError if run as a
2729 side effect of being imported ("import test.autotest").
2730
2731Windows
2732-------
2733
Tim Petersfaa697a2003-06-22 01:42:20 +00002734- The Windows installer ships with Tcl/Tk 8.4.3 (upgraded from 8.4.1).
2735
Tim Petersc4607da2003-05-08 18:13:59 +00002736- The installer always suggested that Python be installed on the C:
2737 drive, due to a hardcoded "C:" generated by the Wise installation
2738 wizard. People with machines where C: is not the system drive
2739 usually want Python installed on whichever drive is their system drive
2740 instead. We removed the hardcoded "C:", and two testers on machines
2741 where C: is not the system drive report that the installer now
2742 suggests their system drive. Note that you can always select the
2743 directory you want in the "Select Destination Directory" dialog --
2744 that's what it's for.
2745
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002746Mac
2747---
2748
Just van Rossum99bc1fc2003-05-09 15:01:25 +00002749- There's a new module called "autoGIL", which offers a mechanism to
2750 automatically release the Global Interpreter Lock when an event loop
2751 goes to sleep, allowing other threads to run. It's currently only
2752 supported on OSX, in the Mach-O version.
Jack Jansenf5e23ff2003-06-16 13:53:40 +00002753- The OSA modules now allow direct access to properties of the
2754 toplevel application class (in AppleScript terminology).
2755- The Package Manager can now update itself.
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002756
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002757SourceForge Bugs and Patches Applied
2758------------------------------------
2759
2760430160, 471893, 501716, 542562, 549151, 569574, 595837, 596434,
2761598163, 604210, 604716, 610332, 612627, 614770, 620190, 621891,
2762622042, 639139, 640236, 644345, 649742, 649742, 658233, 660022,
2763661318, 661676, 662807, 662923, 666219, 672855, 678325, 682347,
2764683486, 684981, 685773, 686254, 692776, 692959, 693094, 696777,
2765697989, 700827, 703666, 708495, 708604, 708901, 710733, 711902,
2766713722, 715782, 718286, 719359, 719367, 723136, 723831, 723962,
2767724588, 724767, 724767, 725942, 726150, 726446, 726869, 727051,
2768727719, 727719, 727805, 728277, 728563, 728656, 729096, 729103,
2769729293, 729297, 729300, 729317, 729395, 729622, 729817, 730170,
2770730296, 730594, 730685, 730826, 730963, 731209, 731403, 731504,
2771731514, 731626, 731635, 731643, 731644, 731644, 731689, 732124,
2772732143, 732234, 732284, 732284, 732479, 732761, 732783, 732951,
2773733667, 733781, 734118, 734231, 734869, 735051, 735293, 735527,
2774735613, 735694, 736962, 736962, 737970, 738066, 739313, 740055,
2775740234, 740301, 741806, 742126, 742741, 742860, 742860, 742911,
2776744041, 744104, 744238, 744687, 744877, 745055, 745478, 745525,
2777745620, 746012, 746304, 746366, 746801, 746953, 747348, 747667,
2778747954, 748846, 748849, 748973, 748975, 749191, 749210, 749759,
2779749831, 749911, 750008, 750092, 750542, 750595, 751038, 751107,
2780751276, 751451, 751916, 751941, 751956, 751998, 752671, 753451,
2781753602, 753617, 753845, 753925, 754014, 754340, 754447, 755031,
2782755087, 755147, 755245, 755683, 755987, 756032, 756996, 757058,
2783757229, 757818, 757821, 757822, 758112, 758910, 759227, 759889,
2784760257, 760703, 760792, 761104, 761337, 761519, 761830, 762455
2785
2786
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002787What's New in Python 2.3 beta 1?
2788================================
2789
Guido van Rossumfa1eddf2003-04-25 19:19:52 +00002790*Release date: 25-Apr-2003*
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002791
2792Core and builtins
2793-----------------
2794
Thomas Heller5eccabc2003-04-23 19:35:25 +00002795- New format codes B, H, I, k and K have been implemented for
2796 PyArg_ParseTuple and PyBuild_Value.
2797
Alex Martellia70b1912003-04-22 08:12:33 +00002798- New builtin function sum(seq, start=0) returns the sum of all the
2799 items in iterable object seq, plus start (items are normally numbers,
2800 and cannot be strings).
2801
Guido van Rossumaa86e352003-04-19 18:15:10 +00002802- bool() called without arguments now returns False rather than
2803 raising an exception. This is consistent with calling the
2804 constructors for the other builtin types -- called without argument
2805 they all return the false value of that type. (SF patch #724135)
2806
Guido van Rossumcf8d2852003-04-17 16:53:26 +00002807- In support of PEP 269 (making the pgen parser generator accessible
2808 from Python), some changes to the pgen code structure were made; a
2809 few files that used to be linked only with pgen are now linked with
2810 Python itself.
2811
Guido van Rossumc1f6e8c2003-04-16 21:13:23 +00002812- The repr() of a weakref object now shows the __name__ attribute of
2813 the referenced object, if it has one.
2814
Guido van Rossum76ba09f2003-04-16 19:40:58 +00002815- super() no longer ignores data descriptors, except __class__. See
2816 the thread started at
2817 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2003-April/034338.html
2818
Guido van Rossum3a3cca52003-04-14 20:58:14 +00002819- list.insert(i, x) now interprets negative i as it would be
2820 interpreted by slicing, so negative values count from the end of the
2821 list. This was the only place where such an interpretation was not
2822 placed on a list index.
2823
Guido van Rossumefbbb1c2003-04-11 18:43:06 +00002824- range() now works even if the arguments are longs with magnitude
2825 larger than sys.maxint, as long as the total length of the sequence
2826 fits. E.g., range(2**100, 2**101, 2**100) is the following list:
2827 [1267650600228229401496703205376L]. (SF patch #707427.)
2828
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002829- Some horridly obscure problems were fixed involving interaction
2830 between garbage collection and old-style classes with "ambitious"
2831 getattr hooks. If an old-style instance didn't have a __del__ method,
2832 but did have a __getattr__ hook, and the instance became reachable
2833 only from an unreachable cycle, and the hook resurrected or deleted
2834 unreachable objects when asked to resolve "__del__", anything up to
2835 a segfault could happen. That's been repaired.
2836
Raymond Hettingera3e1e4c2003-03-06 23:54:28 +00002837- dict.pop now takes an optional argument specifying a default
2838 value to return if the key is not in the dict. If a default is not
2839 given and the key is not found, a KeyError will still be raised.
2840 Parallel changes were made to UserDict.UserDict and UserDict.DictMixin.
2841 [SF patch #693753] (contributed by Michael Stone.)
2842
Martin v. Löwis73d538b2003-03-05 15:13:47 +00002843- sys.getfilesystemencoding() was added to expose
2844 Py_FileSystemDefaultEncoding.
Guido van Rossum46d3dc32003-03-01 03:20:41 +00002845
2846- New function sys.exc_clear() clears the current exception. This is
2847 rarely needed, but can sometimes be useful to release objects
2848 referenced by the traceback held in sys.exc_info()[2]. (SF patch
2849 #693195.)
2850
Neal Norwitzd5a65a72003-02-23 23:11:41 +00002851- On 64-bit systems, a dictionary could contain duplicate long/int keys
2852 if the key value was larger than 2**32. See SF bug #689659.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002853
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00002854- Fixed SF bug #663074. The codec system was using global static
Walter Dörwaldfa86bf52003-03-31 16:15:13 +00002855 variables to store internal data. As a result, any attempts to use the
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00002856 unicode system with multiple active interpreters, or successive
2857 interpreter executions, would fail.
2858
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00002859- "%c" % u"a" now returns a unicode string instead of raising a
Walter Dörwald44f527f2003-04-02 16:37:24 +00002860 TypeError. u"%c" % 0xffffffff now raises a OverflowError instead
Walter Dörwald1e469c52003-04-02 16:57:59 +00002861 of a ValueError to be consistent with "%c" % 256. See SF patch #710127.
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00002862
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002863Extension modules
2864-----------------
2865
Guido van Rossume7adda92003-04-25 05:52:37 +00002866- The socket module now provides the functions inet_pton and inet_ntop
2867 for converting between string and packed representation of IP
2868 addresses. There is also a new module variable, has_ipv6, which is
2869 True iff the current Python has IPv6 support. See SF patch #658327.
2870
Martin v. Löwisbfe175c2003-04-16 19:42:51 +00002871- Tkinter wrappers around Tcl variables now pass objects directly
2872 to Tcl, instead of first converting them to strings.
2873
Guido van Rossum41c99e72003-04-14 17:59:34 +00002874- The .*? pattern in the re module is now special-cased to avoid the
2875 recursion limit. (SF patch #720991 -- many thanks to Gary Herron
2876 and Greg Chapman.)
2877
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00002878- New function sys.call_tracing() allows pdb to debug code
2879 recursively.
2880
Tim Peters730f5532003-04-08 17:17:17 +00002881- New function gc.get_referents(obj) returns a list of objects
Tim Peters0f81ab62003-04-08 16:39:48 +00002882 directly referenced by obj. In effect, it exposes what the object's
2883 tp_traverse slot does, and can be helpful when debugging memory
2884 leaks.
2885
Martin v. Löwis7fb697b2003-04-03 04:49:12 +00002886- The iconv module has been removed from this release.
2887
Tim Petersd50ade62003-03-20 18:32:13 +00002888- The platform-independent routines for packing floats in IEEE formats
2889 (struct.pack's <f, >f, <d, and >d codes; pickle and cPickle's protocol 1
2890 pickling of floats) ignored that rounding can cause a carry to
2891 propagate. The worst consequence was that, in rare cases, <f and >f
2892 could produce strings that, when unpacked again, were a factor of 2
2893 away from the original float. This has been fixed. See SF bug
2894 #705836.
2895
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002896- New function time.tzset() provides access to the C library tzset()
Guido van Rossumd11b62e2003-03-14 21:51:36 +00002897 function, if supported. (SF patch #675422.)
2898
Neal Norwitz12e22172003-03-03 21:16:39 +00002899- Using createfilehandler, deletefilehandler, createtimerhandler functions
2900 on Tkinter.tkinter (_tkinter module) no longer crashes the interpreter.
2901 See SF bug #692416.
2902
Michael W. Hudsonf0089982003-03-03 12:29:42 +00002903- Modified the fcntl.ioctl() function to allow modification of a passed
2904 mutable buffer (for details see the reference documentation).
2905
Raymond Hettinger61fe64d2003-02-23 04:40:07 +00002906- Made user requested changes to the itertools module.
2907 Subsumed the times() function into repeat().
2908 Added chain() and cycle().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002909
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00002910- The rotor module is now deprecated; the encryption algorithm it uses
Andrew M. Kuchlingfb5f4852003-04-24 13:19:56 +00002911 is not believed to be secure, and including crypto code with Python
2912 has implications for exporting and importing it in various countries.
2913
Skip Montanaro89feabc2003-03-30 04:54:24 +00002914- The socket module now always uses the _socketobject wrapper class, even on
2915 platforms which have dup(2). The makefile() method is built directly
2916 on top of the socket without duplicating the file descriptor, allowing
2917 timeouts to work properly.
2918
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002919Library
2920-------
2921
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00002922- New generator function os.walk() is an easy-to-use alternative to
2923 os.path.walk(). See os module docs for details. os.path.walk()
2924 isn't deprecated at this time, but may become deprecated in a
2925 future release.
2926
Marc-André Lemburg246d8472003-04-24 11:36:11 +00002927- Added new module "platform" which provides a wide range of tools
2928 for querying platform dependent features.
2929
Andrew M. Kuchling4e42b312003-04-24 16:45:05 +00002930- netrc now allows ASCII punctuation characters in passwords.
Raymond Hettinger1d877862003-04-23 19:06:08 +00002931
Martin v. Löwis153c9e42003-04-19 20:59:03 +00002932- shelve now supports the optional writeback argument, and exposes
2933 pickle protocol versions.
2934
Guido van Rossuma2685402003-04-19 18:04:57 +00002935- Several methods of nntplib.NNTP have grown an optional file argument
2936 which specifies a file where to divert the command's output
2937 (already supported by the body() method). (SF patch #720468)
2938
Martin v. Löwis281b2c62003-04-18 21:04:39 +00002939- The self-documenting XML server library DocXMLRPCServer was added.
2940
Martin v. Löwis2548c732003-04-18 10:39:54 +00002941- Support for internationalized domain names has been added through
2942 the 'idna' and 'punycode' encodings, the 'stringprep' module, the
2943 'mkstringprep' tool, and enhancements to the socket and httplib
2944 modules.
2945
Walter Dörwald5688b7a2003-04-16 09:46:13 +00002946- htmlentitydefs has two new dictionaries: name2codepoint maps
2947 HTML entity names to Unicode codepoints (as integers).
2948 codepoint2name is the reverse mapping. See SF patch #722017.
2949
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00002950- pdb has a new command, "debug", which lets you step through
2951 arbitrary code from the debugger's (pdb) prompt.
2952
Raymond Hettingerc377cbf2003-04-04 22:56:42 +00002953- unittest.failUnlessEqual and its equivalent unittest.assertEqual now
2954 return 'not a == b' rather than 'a != b'. This gives the desired
2955 result for classes that define __eq__ without defining __ne__.
2956
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002957- sgmllib now supports SGML marked sections, in particular the
Martin v. Löwis3163a3b2003-03-30 14:25:40 +00002958 MS Office extensions.
2959
Raymond Hettinger42182eb2003-03-09 05:33:33 +00002960- The urllib module now offers support for the iterator protocol.
2961 SF patch 698520 contributed by Brett Cannon.
2962
Guido van Rossum9589a252003-03-06 01:56:12 +00002963- New module timeit provides a simple framework for timing the
2964 execution speed of expressions and statements.
2965
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002966- sets.Set objects now support mixed-type __eq__ and __ne__, instead
2967 of raising TypeError. If x is a Set object and y is a non-Set object,
2968 x == y is False, and x != y is True. This is akin to the change made
2969 for mixed-type comparisons of datetime objects in 2.3a2; more info
2970 about the rationale is in the NEWS entry for that. See also SF bug
2971 report <http://www.python.org/sf/693121>.
2972
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00002973- On Unix platforms, if os.listdir() is called with a Unicode argument,
2974 it now returns Unicode strings. (This behavior was added earlier
2975 to the Windows NT/2k/XP version of os.listdir().)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002976
Andrew M. Kuchling6f177d42003-02-28 22:09:33 +00002977- Distutils: both 'py_modules' and 'packages' keywords can now be specified
2978 in core.setup(). Previously you could supply one or the other, but
2979 not both of them. (SF patch #695090 from Bernhard Herzog)
2980
Skip Montanaro64a839e2003-03-20 23:36:55 +00002981- New csv package makes it easy to read/write CSV files.
2982
Gustavo Niemeyer68d8cef2003-04-17 21:31:33 +00002983- Module shlex has been extended to allow posix-like shell parsings,
2984 including a split() function for easy spliting of quoted strings and
2985 commands. An iterator interface was also implemented.
2986
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002987Tools/Demos
2988-----------
2989
Tim Peters21d7d4d2003-04-18 00:45:59 +00002990- New script combinerefs.py helps analyze new PYTHONDUMPREFS output.
2991 See the module docstring for details.
2992
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002993Build
2994-----
2995
Neal Norwitz35892b92003-02-23 23:45:35 +00002996- Fix problem building on OSF1 because the compiler only accepted
2997 preprocessor directives that start in column 1. (SF bug #691793.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002998
2999C API
3000-----
3001
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00003002- Added PyGC_Collect(), equivalent to calling gc.collect().
3003
Guido van Rossum0fc8f002003-04-15 15:12:39 +00003004- PyThreadState_GetDict() was changed not to raise an exception or
3005 issue a fatal error when no current thread state is available. This
3006 makes it possible to print dictionaries when no thread is active.
3007
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00003008- LONG_LONG was renamed to PY_LONG_LONG. Extensions that use this and
3009 need compatibility with previous versions can use this:
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00003010
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00003011 #ifndef PY_LONG_LONG
3012 #define PY_LONG_LONG LONG_LONG
3013 #endif
Martin v. Löwisb9a0f912003-03-29 10:06:18 +00003014
Raymond Hettinger1da1dbf2003-03-17 19:46:11 +00003015- Added PyObject_SelfIter() to fill the tp_iter slot for the
Raymond Hettinger01538262003-03-17 08:24:35 +00003016 typical case where the method returns its self argument.
3017
Guido van Rossume5c691a2003-03-07 15:13:17 +00003018- The extended type structure used for heap types (new-style
3019 classes defined by Python code using a class statement) is now
3020 exported from object.h as PyHeapTypeObject. (SF patch #696193.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003021
3022New platforms
3023-------------
3024
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00003025None this time.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003026
3027Tests
3028-----
3029
Neal Norwitz55b61d22003-02-28 19:57:03 +00003030- test_timeout now requires -u network to be passed to regrtest to run.
3031 See SF bug #692988.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003032
3033Windows
3034-------
3035
Tim Peters11b23062003-04-23 02:39:17 +00003036- os.fsync() now exists on Windows, and calls the Microsoft _commit()
3037 function.
3038
Guido van Rossumf4050642003-04-09 19:39:06 +00003039- New function winsound.MessageBeep() wraps the Win32 API
3040 MessageBeep().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003041
3042Mac
3043---
3044
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00003045- os.listdir() now returns Unicode strings on MacOS X when called with
3046 a Unicode argument. See the general news item under "Library".
Just van Rossum46c97842003-02-25 21:42:15 +00003047
Jack Jansendeac2ac2003-02-24 11:04:17 +00003048- A new method MacOS.WMAvailable() returns true if it is safe to access
3049 the window manager, false otherwise.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003050
Jack Jansencf76be02003-03-24 12:13:54 +00003051- EasyDialogs dialogs are now movable-modal, and if the application is
3052 currently in the background they will ask to be moved to the foreground
3053 before displaying.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00003054
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00003055- OSA Scripting support has improved a lot, and gensuitemodule.py can now
Jack Jansende354b72003-04-11 15:37:20 +00003056 be used by mere mortals. The documentation is now also more or less
3057 complete.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00003058
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00003059- The IDE (in a framework build) now includes introductory documentation
3060 in Apple Help Viewer format.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003061
3062
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003063What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 2?
3064=================================
3065
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00003066*Release date: 19-Feb-2003*
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003067
3068Core and builtins
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00003069-----------------
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003070
Walter Dörwald2ffec022003-02-19 16:34:11 +00003071- Negative positions returned from PEP 293 error callbacks are now
3072 treated as being relative to the end of the input string. Positions
3073 that are out of bounds raise an IndexError.
3074
Guido van Rossum162e38c2003-02-19 15:25:10 +00003075- sys.path[0] (the directory from which the script is loaded) is now
3076 turned into an absolute pathname, unless it is the empty string.
3077 (SF patch #664376.)
3078
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00003079- Finally fixed the bug in compile() and exec where a string ending
3080 with an indented code block but no newline would raise SyntaxError.
3081 This would have been a four-line change in parsetok.c... Except
3082 codeop.py depends on this behavior, so a compilation flag had to be
3083 invented that causes the tokenizer to revert to the old behavior;
3084 this required extra changes to 2 .h files, 2 .c files, and 2 .py
Guido van Rossum1442dc12003-02-13 22:19:20 +00003085 files. (Fixes SF bug #501622.)
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00003086
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00003087- If a new-style class defines neither __new__ nor __init__, its
3088 constructor would ignore all arguments. This is changed now: the
3089 constructor refuses arguments in this case. This might break code
3090 that worked under Python 2.2. The simplest fix is to add a no-op
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003091 __init__: ``def __init__(self, *args, **kw): pass``.
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00003092
Guido van Rossum48035eb2003-02-12 17:05:26 +00003093- Through a bytecode optimizer bug (and I bet you didn't even know
3094 Python *had* a bytecode optimizer :-), "unsigned" hex/oct constants
3095 with a leading minus sign would come out with the wrong sign.
3096 ("Unsigned" hex/oct constants are those with a face value in the
3097 range sys.maxint+1 through sys.maxint*2+1, inclusive; these have
3098 always been interpreted as negative numbers through sign folding.)
3099 E.g. 0xffffffff is -1, and -(0xffffffff) is 1, but -0xffffffff would
3100 come out as -4294967295. This was the case in Python 2.2 through
3101 2.2.2 and 2.3a1, and in Python 2.4 it will once again have that
3102 value, but according to PEP 237 it really needs to be 1 now. This
3103 will be backported to Python 2.2.3 a well. (SF #660455)
3104
Guido van Rossum47710652003-02-12 20:48:22 +00003105- int(s, base) sometimes sign-folds hex and oct constants; it only
3106 does this when base is 0 and s.strip() starts with a '0'. When the
3107 sign is actually folded, as in int("0xffffffff", 0) on a 32-bit
3108 machine, which returns -1, a FutureWarning is now issued; in Python
3109 2.4, this will return 4294967295L, as do int("+0xffffffff", 0) and
3110 int("0xffffffff", 16) right now. (PEP 347)
3111
Guido van Rossuma89d10e2003-02-12 03:58:38 +00003112- super(X, x): x may now be a proxy for an X instance, i.e.
3113 issubclass(x.__class__, X) but not issubclass(type(x), X).
3114
Guido van Rossum03bc7d32003-02-12 03:32:58 +00003115- isinstance(x, X): if X is a new-style class, this is now equivalent
3116 to issubclass(type(x), X) or issubclass(x.__class__, X). Previously
3117 only type(x) was tested. (For classic classes this was already the
3118 case.)
3119
Just van Rossum73ffb4a2003-02-10 09:57:08 +00003120- compile(), eval() and the exec statement now fully support source code
3121 passed as unicode strings.
3122
Neal Norwitzde8b94c2003-02-10 02:12:43 +00003123- int subclasses can be initialized with longs if the value fits in an int.
3124 See SF bug #683467.
3125
Tim Petersbf2674b2003-02-02 07:51:32 +00003126- long(string, base) takes time linear in len(string) when base is a power
3127 of 2 now. It used to take time quadratic in len(string).
3128
Martin v. Löwis8afd7572003-01-25 22:46:11 +00003129- filter returns now Unicode results for Unicode arguments.
3130
Martin v. Löwisaf6a27a2003-01-03 19:16:14 +00003131- raw_input can now return Unicode objects.
3132
Skip Montanaro4abd5f02003-01-02 20:51:08 +00003133- List objects' sort() method now accepts None as the comparison function.
3134 Passing None is semantically identical to calling sort() with no
3135 arguments.
3136
Neal Norwitz1a997502003-01-13 20:13:12 +00003137- Fixed crash when printing a subclass of str and __str__ returned self.
3138 See SF bug #667147.
3139
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00003140- Fixed an invalid RuntimeWarning and an undetected error when trying
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00003141 to convert a long integer into a float which couldn't fit.
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00003142 See SF bug #676155.
3143
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00003144- Function objects now have a __module__ attribute that is bound to
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00003145 the name of the module in which the function was defined. This
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00003146 applies for C functions and methods as well as functions and methods
3147 defined in Python. This attribute is used by pickle.whichmodule(),
3148 which changes the behavior of whichmodule slightly. In Python 2.2
3149 whichmodule() returns "__main__" for functions that are not defined
3150 at the top-level of a module (examples: methods, nested functions).
3151 Now whichmodule() will return the proper module name.
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00003152
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003153Extension modules
3154-----------------
3155
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00003156- operator.isNumberType() now checks that the object has a nb_int or
3157 nb_float slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
3158 tp_as_number pointer.
3159
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00003160- The imp module now has ways to acquire and release the "import
3161 lock": imp.acquire_lock() and imp.release_lock(). Note: this is a
3162 reentrant lock, so releasing the lock only truly releases it when
3163 this is the last release_lock() call. You can check with
3164 imp.lock_held(). (SF bug #580952 and patch #683257.)
3165
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003166- Change to cPickle to match pickle.py (see below and PEP 307).
3167
Neal Norwitz9caf9c02003-02-10 01:54:06 +00003168- Fix some bugs in the parser module. SF bug #678518.
3169
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00003170- Thanks to Scott David Daniels, a subtle bug in how the zlib
Walter Dörwald28d81962003-02-03 20:53:14 +00003171 extension implemented flush() was fixed. Scott also rewrote the
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00003172 zlib test suite using the unittest module. (SF bug #640230 and
3173 patch #678531.)
3174
Raymond Hettinger96ef8112003-02-01 00:10:11 +00003175- Added an itertools module containing high speed, memory efficient
3176 looping constructs inspired by tools from Haskell and SML.
3177
Guido van Rossum99d4abf2003-01-27 22:22:50 +00003178- The SSL module now handles sockets with a timeout set correctly (SF
3179 patch #675750, fixing SF bug #675552).
3180
Barry Warsawf8ba39c2003-01-07 20:55:26 +00003181- os/posixmodule has grown the sysexits.h constants (EX_OK and friends).
3182
Guido van Rossum6d0d3652003-01-07 20:34:19 +00003183- Fixed broken threadstate swap in readline that could cause fatal
3184 errors when a readline hook was being invoked while a background
3185 thread was active. (SF bugs #660476 and #513033.)
3186
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003187- fcntl now exposes the strops.h I_* constants.
3188
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00003189- Fix a crash on Solaris that occurred when calling close() on
3190 an mmap'ed file which was already closed. (SF patch #665913)
3191
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003192- Fixed several serious bugs in the zipimport implementation.
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003193
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00003194- datetime changes:
3195
Guido van Rossum8b7a9a32003-04-14 22:01:58 +00003196 The date class is now properly subclassable. (SF bug #720908)
3197
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00003198 The datetime and datetimetz classes have been collapsed into a single
3199 datetime class, and likewise the time and timetz classes into a single
3200 time class. Previously, a datetimetz object with tzinfo=None acted
3201 exactly like a datetime object, and similarly for timetz. This wasn't
3202 enough of a difference to justify distinct classes, and life is simpler
3203 now.
3204
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00003205 today() and now() now round system timestamps to the closest
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00003206 microsecond <http://www.python.org/sf/661086>. This repairs an
3207 irritation most likely seen on Windows systems.
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00003208
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00003209 In dt.astimezone(tz), if tz.utcoffset(dt) returns a duration,
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00003210 ValueError is raised if tz.dst(dt) returns None (2.3a1 treated it
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00003211 as 0 instead, but a tzinfo subclass wishing to participate in
3212 time zone conversion has to take a stand on whether it supports
3213 DST; if you don't care about DST, then code dst() to return 0 minutes,
3214 meaning that DST is never in effect).
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00003215
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00003216 The tzinfo methods utcoffset() and dst() must return a timedelta object
3217 (or None) now. In 2.3a1 they could also return an int or long, but that
3218 was an unhelpfully redundant leftover from an earlier version wherein
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00003219 they couldn't return a timedelta. TOOWTDI.
3220
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00003221 The example tzinfo class for local time had a bug. It was replaced
3222 by a later example coded by Guido.
3223
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00003224 datetime.astimezone(tz) no longer raises an exception when the
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00003225 input datetime has no UTC equivalent in tz. For typical "hybrid" time
3226 zones (a single tzinfo subclass modeling both standard and daylight
3227 time), this case can arise one hour per year, at the hour daylight time
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00003228 ends. See new docs for details. In short, the new behavior mimics
3229 the local wall clock's behavior of repeating an hour in local time.
3230
3231 dt.astimezone() can no longer be used to convert between naive and aware
3232 datetime objects. If you merely want to attach, or remove, a tzinfo
3233 object, without any conversion of date and time members, use
3234 dt.replace(tzinfo=whatever) instead, where "whatever" is None or a
3235 tzinfo subclass instance.
3236
3237 A new method tzinfo.fromutc(dt) can be overridden in tzinfo subclasses
3238 to give complete control over how a UTC time is to be converted to
3239 a local time. The default astimezone() implementation calls fromutc()
3240 as its last step, so a tzinfo subclass can affect that too by overriding
3241 fromutc(). It's expected that the default fromutc() implementation will
3242 be suitable as-is for "almost all" time zone subclasses, but the
3243 creativity of political time zone fiddling appears unbounded -- fromutc()
3244 allows the highly motivated to emulate any scheme expressible in Python.
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00003245
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00003246 datetime.now(): The optional tzinfo argument was undocumented (that's
3247 repaired), and its name was changed to tz ("tzinfo" is overloaded enough
3248 already). With a tz argument, now(tz) used to return the local date
3249 and time, and attach tz to it, without any conversion of date and time
3250 members. This was less than useful. Now now(tz) returns the current
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003251 date and time as local time in tz's time zone, akin to ::
3252
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00003253 tz.fromutc(datetime.utcnow().replace(tzinfo=utc))
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003254
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00003255 where "utc" is an instance of a tzinfo subclass modeling UTC. Without
3256 a tz argument, now() continues to return the current local date and time,
3257 as a naive datetime object.
3258
Tim Peters2a44a8d2003-01-23 20:53:10 +00003259 datetime.fromtimestamp(): Like datetime.now() above, this had less than
3260 useful behavior when the optional tinzo argument was specified. See
3261 also SF bug report <http://www.python.org/sf/660872>.
3262
Tim Peters8d81a012003-01-24 22:36:34 +00003263 date and datetime comparison: In order to prevent comparison from
3264 falling back to the default compare-object-addresses strategy, these
3265 raised TypeError whenever they didn't understand the other object type.
3266 They still do, except when the other object has a "timetuple" attribute,
3267 in which case they return NotImplemented now. This gives other
3268 datetime objects (e.g., mxDateTime) a chance to intercept the
3269 comparison.
3270
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00003271 date, time, datetime and timedelta comparison: When the exception
3272 for mixed-type comparisons in the last paragraph doesn't apply, if
3273 the comparison is == then False is returned, and if the comparison is
3274 != then True is returned. Because dict lookup and the "in" operator
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003275 only invoke __eq__, this allows, for example, ::
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00003276
3277 if some_datetime in some_sequence:
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003278
3279 and ::
3280
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00003281 some_dict[some_timedelta] = whatever
3282
3283 to work as expected, without raising TypeError just because the
3284 sequence is heterogeneous, or the dict has mixed-type keys. [This
3285 seems like a good idea to implement for all mixed-type comparisons
3286 that don't want to allow falling back to address comparison.]
3287
Tim Peters75a6e3b2003-01-04 18:17:36 +00003288 The constructors building a datetime from a timestamp could raise
3289 ValueError if the platform C localtime()/gmtime() inserted "leap
3290 seconds". Leap seconds are ignored now. On such platforms, it's
3291 possible to have timestamps that differ by a second, yet where
3292 datetimes constructed from them are equal.
3293
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00003294 The pickle format of date, time and datetime objects has changed
3295 completely. The undocumented pickler and unpickler functions no
Tim Petersb57f8f02003-02-01 02:54:15 +00003296 longer exist. The undocumented __setstate__() and __getstate__()
3297 methods no longer exist either.
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00003298
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003299Library
3300-------
3301
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003302- The logging module was updated slightly; the WARN level was renamed
3303 to WARNING, and the matching function/method warn() to warning().
3304
3305- The pickle and cPickle modules were updated with a new pickling
3306 protocol (documented by pickletools.py, see below) and several
3307 extensions to the pickle customization API (__reduce__, __setstate__
3308 etc.). The copy module now uses more of the pickle customization
3309 API to copy objects that don't implement __copy__ or __deepcopy__.
3310 See PEP 307 for details.
3311
3312- The distutils "register" command now uses http://www.python.org/pypi
3313 as the default repository. (See PEP 301.)
3314
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00003315- the platform dependent path related variables sep, altsep, extsep,
3316 pathsep, curdir, pardir and defpath are now defined in the platform
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00003317 dependent path modules (e.g. ntpath.py) rather than os.py, so these
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003318 variables are now available via os.path. They continue to be
3319 available from the os module.
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00003320 (see <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00003321
Tim Peters6ee04802003-02-05 18:29:34 +00003322- array.array was added to the types repr.py knows about (see
3323 <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
3324
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00003325- The new pickletools.py contains lots of documentation about pickle
3326 internals, and supplies some helpers for working with pickles, such as
3327 a symbolic pickle disassembler.
3328
Skip Montanaro9a7c96a2003-01-22 18:17:25 +00003329- Xmlrpclib.py now supports the builtin boolean type.
3330
Martin v. Löwis0c6774d2003-01-15 11:51:06 +00003331- py_compile has a new 'doraise' flag and a new PyCompileError
3332 exception.
3333
Martin v. Löwisd69663d2003-01-15 11:37:23 +00003334- SimpleXMLRPCServer now supports CGI through the CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler
3335 class.
3336
Guido van Rossum50e92232003-01-14 16:45:04 +00003337- The sets module now raises TypeError in __cmp__, to clarify that
3338 sets are not intended to be three-way-compared; the comparison
3339 operators are overloaded as subset/superset tests.
3340
Guido van Rossumcd0c0472003-01-07 23:03:05 +00003341- Bastion.py and rexec.py are disabled. These modules are not safe in
3342 Python 2.2. or 2.3.
3343
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003344- realpath is now exported when doing ``from poxixpath import *``.
Neal Norwitzbb0246a2003-01-03 18:12:28 +00003345 It is also exported for ntpath, macpath, and os2emxpath.
3346 See SF bug #659228.
3347
Neal Norwitzb9ef4ae2003-01-05 23:19:43 +00003348- New module tarfile from Lars Gustäbel provides a comprehensive interface
3349 to tar archive files with transparent gzip and bzip2 compression.
3350 See SF patch #651082.
3351
Neal Norwitz4f442372003-01-06 06:51:36 +00003352- urlparse can now parse imap:// URLs. See SF feature request #618024.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003353
Neal Norwitze931ed52003-01-10 23:24:32 +00003354- Tkinter.Canvas.scan_dragto() provides an optional parameter to support
3355 the gain value which is passed to Tk. SF bug# 602259.
3356
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00003357- Fix logging.handlers.SysLogHandler protocol when using UNIX domain sockets.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00003358 See SF patch #642974.
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00003359
Skip Montanaro12fe72e2003-02-25 17:46:20 +00003360- The dospath module was deleted. Use the ntpath module when manipulating
3361 DOS paths from other platforms.
3362
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003363Tools/Demos
3364-----------
3365
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00003366- Two new scripts (db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py) were added to the
3367 Tools/scripts directory to facilitate conversion from the old bsddb module
3368 to the new one. While the user-visible API of the new module is
3369 compatible with the old one, it's likely that the version of the
3370 underlying database library has changed. To convert from the old library,
3371 run the db2pickle.py script using the old version of Python to convert it
3372 to a pickle file. After upgrading Python, run the pickle2db.py script
3373 using the new version of Python to reconstitute your database. For
3374 example:
3375
Skip Montanaro621f0552003-02-03 15:48:10 +00003376 % python2.2 db2pickle.py -h some.db > some.pickle
3377 % python2.3 pickle2db.py -h some.db.new < some.pickle
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00003378
3379 Run the scripts without any args to get a usage message.
3380
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003381
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003382Build
3383-----
3384
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00003385- The audio driver tests (test_ossaudiodev.py and
3386 test_linuxaudiodev.py) are no longer run by default. This is
3387 because they don't always work, depending on your hardware and
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003388 software. To run these tests, you must use an invocation like ::
3389
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00003390 ./python Lib/test/regrtest.py -u audio test_ossaudiodev
3391
Skip Montanarodecc6a42003-01-01 20:07:49 +00003392- On systems which build using the configure script, compiler flags which
3393 used to be lumped together using the OPT flag have been split into two
3394 groups, OPT and BASECFLAGS. OPT is meant to carry just optimization- and
3395 debug-related flags like "-g" and "-O3". BASECFLAGS is meant to carry
3396 compiler flags that are required to get a clean compile. On some
3397 platforms (many Linux flavors in particular) BASECFLAGS will be empty by
3398 default. On others, such as Mac OS X and SCO, it will contain required
3399 flags. This change allows people building Python to override OPT without
3400 fear of clobbering compiler flags which are required to get a clean build.
3401
3402- On Darwin/Mac OS X platforms, /sw/lib and /sw/include are added to the
3403 relevant search lists in setup.py. This allows users building Python to
3404 take advantage of the many packages available from the fink project
3405 <http://fink.sf.net/>.
3406
3407- A new Makefile target, scriptsinstall, installs a number of useful scripts
3408 from the Tools/scripts directory.
3409
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003410C API
3411-----
3412
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003413- PyEval_GetFrame() is now declared to return a ``PyFrameObject *``
3414 instead of a plain ``PyObject *``. (SF patch #686601.)
Guido van Rossum6297a7a2003-02-19 15:53:17 +00003415
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00003416- PyNumber_Check() now checks that the object has a nb_int or nb_float
3417 slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
3418 tp_as_number pointer.
3419
Guido van Rossumeea47182003-02-11 20:39:59 +00003420- A C type that inherits from a base type that defines tp_as_buffer
3421 will now inherit the tp_as_buffer pointer if it doesn't define one.
3422 (SF #681367)
3423
Neil Schemenauer5042da62003-02-04 20:59:40 +00003424- The PyArg_Parse functions now issue a DeprecationWarning if a float
3425 argument is provided when an integer is specified (this affects the 'b',
3426 'B', 'h', 'H', 'i', and 'l' codes). Future versions of Python will
3427 raise a TypeError.
Neil Schemenauercd63e612003-01-24 22:15:53 +00003428
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003429Tests
3430-----
3431
Walter Dörwald11cfbd62003-03-26 16:03:16 +00003432- Several tests weren't being run from regrtest.py (test_timeout.py,
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003433 test_tarfile.py, test_netrc.py, test_multifile.py,
3434 test_importhooks.py and test_imp.py). Now they are. (Note to
3435 developers: please read Lib/test/README when creating a new test, to
3436 make sure to do it right! All tests need to use either unittest or
3437 pydoc.)
3438
3439- Added test_posix.py, a test suite for the posix module.
3440
3441- Added test_hexoct.py, a test suite for hex/oct constant folding.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003442
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003443Windows
3444-------
3445
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00003446- The timeout code for socket connect() didn't work right; this has
3447 now been fixed. test_timeout.py should pass (at least most of the
3448 time).
3449
Thomas Hellerdda583d2003-01-31 20:45:41 +00003450- distutils' msvccompiler class now passes the preprocessor options to
3451 the resource compiler. See SF patch #669198.
3452
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00003453- The bsddb module now ships with Sleepycat's 4.1.25.NC, the latest
3454 release without strong cryptography.
3455
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00003456- sys.path[0], if it contains a directory name, is now always an
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003457 absolute pathname. (SF patch #664376.)
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00003458
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00003459- The new logging package is now installed by the Windows installer. It
3460 wasn't in 2.3a1 due to oversight.
3461
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003462Mac
3463---
3464
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00003465- There are new dialogs EasyDialogs.AskFileForOpen, AskFileForSave
3466 and AskFolder. The old macfs.StandardGetFile and friends are deprecated.
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00003467
Jack Jansenc9296362003-02-06 23:10:45 +00003468- Most of the standard library now uses pathnames or FSRefs in preference
3469 of FSSpecs, and use the underlying Carbon.File and Carbon.Folder modules
3470 in stead of macfs. macfs will probably be deprecated in the future.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00003471
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00003472- Type Carbon.File.FSCatalogInfo and supporting methods have been implemented.
3473 This also makes macfs.FSSpec.SetDates() work again.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003474
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00003475- There is a new module pimp, the package install manager for Python, and
3476 accompanying applet PackageManager. These allow you to easily download
3477 and install pretested extension packages either in source or binary
3478 form. Only in MacPython-OSX.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003479
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00003480- Applets are now built with bundlebuilder in MacPython-OSX, which should make
Jack Jansen5d44b342003-02-18 23:32:47 +00003481 them more robust and also provides a path towards BuildApplication. The
3482 downside of this change is that applets can no longer be run from the
3483 Terminal window, this will hopefully be fixed in the 2.3b1.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003484
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003485
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003486What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 1?
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003487=================================
3488
Guido van Rossumae548862002-12-31 15:47:36 +00003489*Release date: 31-Dec-2002*
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003490
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003491Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003492--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00003493
Michael W. Hudson96bc3b42002-11-26 14:48:23 +00003494- One can now assign to __bases__ and __name__ of new-style classes.
3495
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00003496- dict() now accepts keyword arguments so that dict(one=1, two=2)
3497 is the equivalent of {"one": 1, "two": 2}. Accordingly,
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00003498 the existing (but undocumented) 'items' keyword argument has
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00003499 been eliminated. This means that dict(items=someMapping) now has
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00003500 a different meaning than before.
3501
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00003502- int() now returns a long object if the argument is outside the
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003503 integer range, so int("4" * 1000), int(1e200) and int(1L<<1000) will
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00003504 all return long objects instead of raising an OverflowError.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003505
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003506- Assignment to __class__ is disallowed if either the old or the new
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00003507 class is a statically allocated type object (such as defined by an
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003508 extension module). This prevents anomalies like 2.__class__ = bool.
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00003509
3510- New-style object creation and deallocation have been sped up
3511 significantly; they are now faster than classic instance creation
3512 and deallocation.
3513
3514- The __slots__ variable can now mention "private" names, and the
3515 right thing will happen (e.g. __slots__ = ["__foo"]).
3516
3517- The built-ins slice() and buffer() are now callable types. The
3518 types classobj (formerly class), code, function, instance, and
3519 instancemethod (formerly instance-method), which have no built-in
3520 names but are accessible through the types module, are now also
3521 callable. The type dict-proxy is renamed to dictproxy.
3522
3523- Cycles going through the __class__ link of a new-style instance are
3524 now detected by the garbage collector.
3525
3526- Classes using __slots__ are now properly garbage collected.
3527 [SF bug 519621]
3528
3529- Tightened the __slots__ rules: a slot name must be a valid Python
3530 identifier.
3531
3532- The constructor for the module type now requires a name argument and
3533 takes an optional docstring argument. Previously, this constructor
3534 ignored its arguments. As a consequence, deriving a class from a
3535 module (not from the module type) is now illegal; previously this
3536 created an unnamed module, just like invoking the module type did.
3537 [SF bug 563060]
3538
3539- A new type object, 'basestring', is added. This is a common base type
3540 for 'str' and 'unicode', and can be used instead of
3541 types.StringTypes, e.g. to test whether something is "a string":
3542 isinstance(x, basestring) is True for Unicode and 8-bit strings. This
3543 is an abstract base class and cannot be instantiated directly.
3544
3545- Changed new-style class instantiation so that when C's __new__
3546 method returns something that's not a C instance, its __init__ is
3547 not called. [SF bug #537450]
3548
3549- Fixed super() to work correctly with class methods. [SF bug #535444]
3550
3551- If you try to pickle an instance of a class that has __slots__ but
3552 doesn't define or override __getstate__, a TypeError is now raised.
3553 This is done by adding a bozo __getstate__ to the class that always
3554 raises TypeError. (Before, this would appear to be pickled, but the
3555 state of the slots would be lost.)
3556
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003557Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003558-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003559
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003560- Import from zipfiles is now supported. The name of a zipfile placed
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00003561 on sys.path causes the import statement to look for importable Python
3562 modules (with .py, pyc and .pyo extensions) and packages inside the
3563 zipfile. The zipfile import follows the specification (though not
3564 the sample implementation) of PEP 273. The semantics of __path__ are
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003565 compatible with those that have been implemented in Jython since
3566 Jython 2.1.
3567
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003568- PEP 302 has been accepted. Although it was initially developed to
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00003569 support zipimport, it offers a new, general import hook mechanism.
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00003570 Several new variables have been added to the sys module:
3571 sys.meta_path, sys.path_hooks, and sys.path_importer_cache; these
3572 make extending the import statement much more convenient than
3573 overriding the __import__ built-in function. For a description of
3574 these, see PEP 302.
3575
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003576- A frame object's f_lineno attribute can now be written to from a
3577 trace function to change which line will execute next. A command to
3578 exploit this from pdb has been added. [SF patch #643835]
3579
Marc-André Lemburg20b91352002-12-12 18:01:43 +00003580- The _codecs support module for codecs.py was turned into a builtin
3581 module to assure that at least the builtin codecs are available
3582 to the Python parser for source code decoding according to PEP 263.
3583
Walter Dörwaldd9a6ad32002-12-12 16:41:44 +00003584- issubclass now supports a tuple as the second argument, just like
3585 isinstance does. ``issubclass(X, (A, B))`` is equivalent to
3586 ``issubclass(X, A) or issubclass(X, B)``.
3587
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00003588- Thanks to Armin Rigo, the last known way to provoke a system crash
3589 by cleverly arranging for a comparison function to mutate a list
3590 during a list.sort() operation has been fixed. The effect of
3591 attempting to mutate a list, or even to inspect its contents or
3592 length, while a sort is in progress, is not defined by the language.
3593 The C implementation of Python 2.3 attempts to detect mutations,
3594 and raise ValueError if one occurs, but there's no guarantee that
3595 all mutations will be caught, or that any will be caught across
3596 releases or implementations.
3597
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00003598- Unicode file name processing for Windows (PEP 277) is implemented.
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00003599 All platforms now have an os.path.supports_unicode_filenames attribute,
3600 which is set to True on Windows NT/2000/XP, and False elsewhere.
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00003601
Walter Dörwald3aeb6322002-09-02 13:14:32 +00003602- Codec error handling callbacks (PEP 293) are implemented.
3603 Error handling in unicode.encode or str.decode can now be customized.
3604
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00003605- A subtle change to the semantics of the built-in function intern():
3606 interned strings are no longer immortal. You must keep a reference
3607 to the return value intern() around to get the benefit.
3608
Guido van Rossumf808b892002-08-16 03:38:10 +00003609- Use of 'None' as a variable, argument or attribute name now
3610 issues a SyntaxWarning. In the future, None may become a keyword.
3611
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00003612- SET_LINENO is gone. co_lnotab is now consulted to determine when to
3613 call the trace function. C code that accessed f_lineno should call
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003614 PyCode_Addr2Line instead (f_lineno is still there, but only kept up
3615 to date when there is a trace function set).
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00003616
Guido van Rossum9be89462002-08-14 16:11:30 +00003617- There's a new warning category, FutureWarning. This is used to warn
3618 about a number of situations where the value or sign of an integer
3619 result will change in Python 2.4 as a result of PEP 237 (integer
3620 unification). The warnings implement stage B0 mentioned in that
3621 PEP. The warnings are about the following situations:
3622
3623 - Octal and hex literals without 'L' prefix in the inclusive range
3624 [0x80000000..0xffffffff]; these are currently negative ints, but
3625 in Python 2.4 they will be positive longs with the same bit
3626 pattern.
3627
3628 - Left shifts on integer values that cause the outcome to lose
3629 bits or have a different sign than the left operand. To be
3630 precise: x<<n where this currently doesn't yield the same value
3631 as long(x)<<n; in Python 2.4, the outcome will be long(x)<<n.
3632
3633 - Conversions from ints to string that show negative values as
3634 unsigned ints in the inclusive range [0x80000000..0xffffffff];
3635 this affects the functions hex() and oct(), and the string
3636 formatting codes %u, %o, %x, and %X. In Python 2.4, these will
3637 show signed values (e.g. hex(-1) currently returns "0xffffffff";
3638 in Python 2.4 it will return "-0x1").
3639
Guido van Rossum9a2eda52002-12-31 02:12:42 +00003640- The bits manipulated under the cover by sys.setcheckinterval() have
3641 been changed. Both the check interval and the ticker used to be
3642 per-thread values. They are now just a pair of global variables.
3643 In addition, the default check interval was boosted from 10 to 100
3644 bytecode instructions. This may have some effect on systems that
3645 relied on the old default value. In particular, in multi-threaded
3646 applications which try to be highly responsive, response time will
3647 increase by some (perhaps imperceptible) amount.
Skip Montanaro979c74b2002-09-03 21:25:14 +00003648
Tim Petersd64c1de2002-08-12 17:36:03 +00003649- When multiplying very large integers, a version of the so-called
3650 Karatsuba algorithm is now used. This is most effective if the
3651 inputs have roughly the same size. If they both have about N digits,
3652 Karatsuba multiplication has O(N**1.58) runtime (the exponent is
3653 log_base_2(3)) instead of the previous O(N**2). Measured results may
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00003654 be better or worse than that, depending on platform quirks. Besides
3655 the O() improvement in raw instruction count, the Karatsuba algorithm
3656 appears to have much better cache behavior on extremely large integers
3657 (starting in the ballpark of a million bits). Note that this is a
3658 simple implementation, and there's no intent here to compete with,
3659 e.g., GMP. It gives a very nice speedup when it applies, but a package
3660 devoted to fast large-integer arithmetic should run circles around it.
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00003661
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00003662- u'%c' will now raise a ValueError in case the argument is an
3663 integer outside the valid range of Unicode code point ordinals.
3664
Guido van Rossumdeb09362002-08-09 17:16:30 +00003665- The tempfile module has been overhauled for enhanced security. The
3666 mktemp() function is now deprecated; new, safe replacements are
3667 mkstemp() (for files) and mkdtemp() (for directories), and the
3668 higher-level functions NamedTemporaryFile() and TemporaryFile().
3669 Use of some global variables in this module is also deprecated; the
3670 new functions have keyword arguments to provide the same
3671 functionality. All Lib, Tools and Demo modules that used the unsafe
3672 interfaces have been updated to use the safe replacements. Thanks
3673 to Zack Weinberg!
3674
Guido van Rossumd81a9832002-08-09 15:57:34 +00003675- When x is an object whose class implements __mul__ and __rmul__,
3676 1.0*x would correctly invoke __rmul__, but 1*x would erroneously
3677 invoke __mul__. This was due to the sequence-repeat code in the int
3678 type. This has been fixed now.
3679
Barry Warsawd79f6832002-08-06 17:01:51 +00003680- Previously, "str1 in str2" required str1 to be a string of length 1.
3681 This restriction has been relaxed to allow str1 to be a string of
3682 any length. Thus "'el' in 'hello world'" returns True now.
3683
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003684- File objects are now their own iterators. For a file f, iter(f) now
3685 returns f (unless f is closed), and f.next() is similar to
3686 f.readline() when EOF is not reached; however, f.next() uses a
3687 readahead buffer that messes up the file position, so mixing
3688 f.next() and f.readline() (or other methods) doesn't work right.
3689 Calling f.seek() drops the readahead buffer, but other operations
3690 don't. It so happens that this gives a nice additional speed boost
3691 to "for line in file:"; the xreadlines method and corresponding
Guido van Rossumbffb2ef2002-08-09 17:17:07 +00003692 module are now obsolete. Thanks to Oren Tirosh!
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003693
Guido van Rossumde392d32002-08-05 14:17:20 +00003694- Encoding declarations (PEP 263, phase 1) have been implemented. A
3695 comment of the form "# -*- coding: <encodingname> -*-" in the first
3696 or second line of a Python source file indicates the encoding.
Martin v. Löwis00f1e3f2002-08-04 17:29:52 +00003697
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003698- list.sort() has a new implementation. While cross-platform results
3699 may vary, and in data-dependent ways, this is much faster on many
3700 kinds of partially ordered lists than the previous implementation,
3701 and reported to be just as fast on randomly ordered lists on
3702 several major platforms. This sort is also stable (if A==B and A
3703 precedes B in the list at the start, A precedes B after the sort too),
3704 although the language definition does not guarantee stability. A
3705 potential drawback is that list.sort() may require temp space of
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003706 len(list)*2 bytes (``*4`` on a 64-bit machine). It's therefore possible
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003707 for list.sort() to raise MemoryError now, even if a comparison function
3708 does not. See <http://www.python.org/sf/587076> for full details.
3709
Guido van Rossum2d5389c2002-07-23 03:44:35 +00003710- All standard iterators now ensure that, once StopIteration has been
3711 raised, all future calls to next() on the same iterator will also
3712 raise StopIteration. There used to be various counterexamples to
3713 this behavior, which could caused confusion or subtle program
3714 breakage, without any benefits. (Note that this is still an
3715 iterator's responsibility; the iterator framework does not enforce
3716 this.)
3717
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003718- Ctrl+C handling on Windows has been made more consistent with
3719 other platforms. KeyboardInterrupt can now reliably be caught,
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003720 and Ctrl+C at an interactive prompt no longer terminates the
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003721 process under NT/2k/XP (it never did under Win9x). Ctrl+C will
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00003722 interrupt time.sleep() in the main thread, and any child processes
3723 created via the popen family (on win2k; we can't make win9x work
Mark Hammond8f3afc72002-08-10 06:26:31 +00003724 reliably) are also interrupted (as generally happens on for Linux/Unix.)
3725 [SF bugs 231273, 439992 and 581232]
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003726
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00003727- sys.getwindowsversion() has been added on Windows. This
3728 returns a tuple with information about the version of Windows
3729 currently running.
3730
Raymond Hettinger5a04aec2002-06-25 00:25:30 +00003731- Slices and repetitions of buffer objects now consistently return
3732 a string. Formerly, strings would be returned most of the time,
3733 but a buffer object would be returned when the repetition count
3734 was one or when the slice range was all inclusive.
3735
Walter Dörwald3430d702002-06-17 10:43:59 +00003736- Unicode objects in sys.path are no longer ignored but treated
3737 as directory names.
3738
Neal Norwitz1f68fc72002-06-14 00:50:42 +00003739- Fixed string.startswith and string.endswith builtin methods
3740 so they accept negative indices. [SF bug 493951]
3741
Guido van Rossumc5fe5eb2002-06-12 03:45:21 +00003742- Fixed a bug with a continue inside a try block and a yield in the
3743 finally clause. [SF bug 567538]
3744
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00003745- Most builtin sequences now support "extended slices", i.e. slices
Guido van Rossum2e82e712002-06-13 11:41:07 +00003746 with a third "stride" parameter. For example, "hello world"[::-1]
3747 gives "dlrow olleh".
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00003748
Neal Norwitzd68f5172002-05-29 15:54:55 +00003749- A new warning PendingDeprecationWarning was added to provide
3750 direction on features which are in the process of being deprecated.
3751 The warning will not be printed by default. To see the pending
3752 deprecations, use -Walways::PendingDeprecationWarning::
3753 as a command line option or warnings.filterwarnings() in code.
3754
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00003755- Deprecated features of xrange objects have been removed as
3756 promised. The start, stop, and step attributes and the tolist()
3757 method no longer exist. xrange repetition and slicing have been
3758 removed.
3759
Guido van Rossum7dab2422002-04-26 19:40:56 +00003760- New builtin function enumerate(x), from PEP 279. Example:
3761 enumerate("abc") is an iterator returning (0,"a"), (1,"b"), (2,"c").
3762 The argument can be an arbitrary iterable object.
3763
Neil Schemenauer89e3ee02002-04-26 01:58:53 +00003764- The assert statement no longer tests __debug__ at runtime. This means
3765 that assert statements cannot be disabled by assigning a false value
3766 to __debug__.
3767
Walter Dörwald068325e2002-04-15 13:36:47 +00003768- A method zfill() was added to str and unicode, that fills a numeric
3769 string to the left with zeros. For example,
3770 "+123".zfill(6) -> "+00123".
3771
Guido van Rossum862fe3c2002-04-15 12:36:47 +00003772- Complex numbers supported divmod() and the // and % operators, but
3773 these make no sense. Since this was documented, they're being
3774 deprecated now.
3775
Guido van Rossum26dd8302002-04-26 20:11:29 +00003776- String and unicode methods lstrip(), rstrip() and strip() now take
3777 an optional argument that specifies the characters to strip. For
3778 example, "Foo!!!?!?!?".rstrip("?!") -> "Foo".
Guido van Rossum49042042002-04-13 00:59:05 +00003779
Guido van Rossumc0d3f4e2002-11-27 13:10:40 +00003780- There's a new dictionary constructor (a class method of the dict
3781 class), dict.fromkeys(iterable, value=None). It constructs a
3782 dictionary with keys taken from the iterable and all values set to a
3783 single value. It can be used for building sets and for removing
3784 duplicates from sequences.
Raymond Hettingere33d3df2002-11-27 07:29:33 +00003785
Guido van Rossumc69343b2002-04-12 19:22:48 +00003786- Added a new dict method pop(key). This removes and returns the
3787 value corresponding to key. [SF patch #539949]
3788
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00003789- A new built-in type, bool, has been added, as well as built-in
3790 names for its two values, True and False. Comparisons and sundry
3791 other operations that return a truth value have been changed to
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003792 return a bool instead. Read PEP 285 for an explanation of why this
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00003793 is backward compatible.
3794
Guido van Rossum95b62a62002-03-29 01:07:24 +00003795- Fixed two bugs reported as SF #535905: under certain conditions,
3796 deallocating a deeply nested structure could cause a segfault in the
3797 garbage collector, due to interaction with the "trashcan" code;
3798 access to the current frame during destruction of a local variable
3799 could access a pointer to freed memory.
3800
Guido van Rossumfe0ca4a2002-06-18 21:20:13 +00003801- The optional object allocator ("pymalloc") has been enabled by
3802 default. The recommended practice for memory allocation and
3803 deallocation has been streamlined. A header file is included,
3804 Misc/pymemcompat.h, which can be bundled with 3rd party extensions
3805 and lets them use the same API with Python versions from 1.5.2
3806 onwards.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00003807
Martin v. Löwiscfeb3b62002-03-03 21:30:27 +00003808- PyErr_Display will provide file and line information for all exceptions
3809 that have an attribute print_file_and_line, not just SyntaxErrors.
3810
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00003811- The UTF-8 codec will now encode and decode Unicode surrogates
3812 correctly and without raising exceptions for unpaired ones.
3813
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00003814- Universal newlines (PEP 278) is implemented. Briefly, using 'U'
3815 instead of 'r' when opening a text file for reading changes the line
3816 ending convention so that any of '\r', '\r\n', and '\n' is
3817 recognized (even mixed in one file); all three are converted to
3818 '\n', the standard Python line end character.
3819
Neal Norwitz649b7592002-01-01 19:07:13 +00003820- file.xreadlines() now raises a ValueError if the file is closed:
3821 Previously, an xreadlines object was returned which would raise
3822 a ValueError when the xreadlines.next() method was called.
3823
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003824- sys.exit() inadvertently allowed more than one argument.
Neal Norwitz0c766a02002-03-27 13:03:09 +00003825 An exception will now be raised if more than one argument is used.
3826
Gustavo Niemeyer17c5a332002-12-16 14:09:22 +00003827- Changed evaluation order of dictionary literals to conform to the
3828 general left to right evaluation order rule. Now {f1(): f2()} will
3829 evaluate f1 first.
Gustavo Niemeyer78429a62002-12-16 13:54:02 +00003830
Gustavo Niemeyer786ddb22002-12-16 18:12:53 +00003831- Fixed bug #521782: when a file was in non-blocking mode, file.read()
3832 could silently lose data or wrongly throw an unknown error.
3833
Neil Schemenauerb983aa02002-12-30 20:22:23 +00003834- The sq_repeat, sq_inplace_repeat, sq_concat and sq_inplace_concat
3835 slots are now always tried after trying the corresponding nb_* slots.
3836 This fixes a number of minor bugs (see bug #624807).
3837
Neal Norwitz74a032e2003-01-10 23:29:48 +00003838- Fix problem with dynamic loading on 64-bit AIX (see bug #639945).
3839
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003840Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003841-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003842
Raymond Hettinger9543b342003-01-18 23:22:20 +00003843- Added three operators to the operator module:
3844 operator.pow(a,b) which is equivalent to: a**b.
3845 operator.is_(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is b.
3846 operator.is_not(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is not b.
3847
Martin v. Löwis24a880b2002-12-31 12:55:15 +00003848- posix.openpty now works on all systems that have /dev/ptmx.
3849
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003850- A module zipimport exists to support importing code from zip
3851 archives.
3852
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00003853- The new datetime module supplies classes for manipulating dates and
3854 times. The basic design came from the Zope "fishbowl process", and
3855 favors practical commercial applications over calendar esoterica. See
3856
3857 http://www.zope.org/Members/fdrake/DateTimeWiki/FrontPage
3858
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00003859- _tkinter now returns Tcl objects, instead of strings. Objects which
3860 have Python equivalents are converted to Python objects, other objects
3861 are wrapped. This can be configured through the wantobjects method,
Martin v. Löwis8c8aa5d2002-11-26 21:39:48 +00003862 or Tkinter.wantobjects.
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00003863
Barry Warsawc27f4bd2002-12-30 21:03:26 +00003864- The PyBSDDB wrapper around the Sleepycat Berkeley DB library has
3865 been added as the package bsddb. The traditional bsddb module is
3866 still available in source code, but not built automatically anymore,
3867 and is now named bsddb185. This supports Berkeley DB versions from
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00003868 3.0 to 4.1. For help converting your databases from the old module (which
3869 probably used an obsolete version of Berkeley DB) to the new module, see
3870 the db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py scripts described in the Tools/Demos
3871 section above.
Martin v. Löwisef546b32002-11-19 08:12:57 +00003872
Martin v. Löwis677bde22002-11-23 22:08:15 +00003873- unicodedata was updated to Unicode 3.2. It supports normalization
3874 and names for Hangul syllables and CJK unified ideographs.
Martin v. Löwis7d41e292002-11-23 12:22:32 +00003875
Neal Norwitz94a83fd2002-11-02 17:46:24 +00003876- resource.getrlimit() now returns longs instead of ints.
3877
Martin v. Löwis080689c2002-10-26 14:42:02 +00003878- readline now dynamically adjusts its input/output stream if
3879 sys.stdin/stdout changes.
3880
Guido van Rossumba602972002-10-01 18:18:58 +00003881- The _tkinter module (and hence Tkinter) has dropped support for
3882 Tcl/Tk 8.0 and 8.1. Only Tcl/Tk versions 8.2, 8.3 and 8.4 are
3883 supported.
3884
Martin v. Löwis658009a2002-09-16 17:26:24 +00003885- cPickle.BadPickleGet is now a class.
3886
Martin v. Löwisa19bfe02002-10-16 18:28:36 +00003887- The time stamps in os.stat_result are floating point numbers
3888 after stat_float_times has been called.
Martin v. Löwis94717ed2002-09-09 14:24:16 +00003889
Neal Norwitzb5673922002-09-05 21:48:07 +00003890- If the size passed to mmap.mmap() is larger than the length of the
3891 file on non-Windows platforms, a ValueError is raised. [SF bug 585792]
3892
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003893- The xreadlines module is slated for obsolescence.
3894
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00003895- The strptime function in the time module is now always available (a
3896 Python implementation is used when the C library doesn't define it).
3897
Guido van Rossum9562bcf2002-06-14 21:31:18 +00003898- The 'new' module is no longer an extension, but a Python module that
3899 only exists for backwards compatibility. Its contents are no longer
3900 functions but callable type objects.
3901
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003902- The bsddb.*open functions can now take 'None' as a filename.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00003903 This will create a temporary in-memory bsddb that won't be
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003904 written to disk.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00003905
Martin v. Löwisb96152c2002-12-31 13:20:15 +00003906- posix.getloadavg, posix.lchown, posix.killpg, posix.mknod, and
3907 posix.getpgid have been added where available.
Martin v. Löwis06a83e92002-04-14 10:19:44 +00003908
Martin v. Löwisf0a46682002-11-03 17:20:12 +00003909- The locale module now exposes the C library's gettext interface. It
3910 also has a new function getpreferredencoding.
Martin v. Löwis2e64c342002-03-27 18:49:02 +00003911
Tim Petersfbf74f22002-03-14 19:06:01 +00003912- A security hole ("double free") was found in zlib-1.1.3, a popular
3913 third party compression library used by some Python modules. The
3914 hole was quickly plugged in zlib-1.1.4, and the Windows build of
3915 Python now ships with zlib-1.1.4.
3916
Martin v. Löwis688357e2002-04-08 21:28:20 +00003917- pwd, grp, and resource return enhanced tuples now, with symbolic
3918 field names.
Martin v. Löwis29001ff2002-03-01 10:47:37 +00003919
Martin v. Löwis99866332002-03-01 10:27:01 +00003920- array.array is now a type object. A new format character
3921 'u' indicates Py_UNICODE arrays. For those, .tounicode and
3922 .fromunicode methods are available. Arrays now support __iadd__
3923 and __imul__.
3924
Neal Norwitze790eae2002-01-01 21:14:12 +00003925- dl now builds on every system that has dlfcn.h. Failure in case
Martin v. Löwis93227272002-01-01 20:18:30 +00003926 of sizeof(int)!=sizeof(long)!=sizeof(void*) is delayed until dl.open
3927 is called.
3928
Skip Montanaro8e790e72002-09-03 13:25:17 +00003929- The sys module acquired a new attribute, api_version, which evaluates
3930 to the value of the PYTHON_API_VERSION macro with which the
3931 interpreter was compiled.
3932
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00003933- Fixed bug #470582: sre module would return a tuple (None, 'a', 'ab')
3934 when applying the regular expression '^((a)c)?(ab)$' on 'ab'. It now
3935 returns (None, None, 'ab'), as expected. Also fixed handling of
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00003936 lastindex/lastgroup match attributes in similar cases. For example,
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00003937 when running the expression r'(a)(b)?b' over 'ab', lastindex must be
3938 1, not 2.
3939
Gustavo Niemeyerc523b042002-11-07 03:28:56 +00003940- Fixed bug #581080: sre scanner was not checking the buffer limit
3941 before increasing the current pointer. This was creating an infinite
3942 loop in the search function, once the pointer exceeded the buffer
3943 limit.
3944
Thomas Heller95cb7e42002-11-07 16:23:55 +00003945- The os.fdopen function now enforces a file mode starting with the
3946 letter 'r', 'w' or 'a', otherwise a ValueError is raised. This fixes
3947 bug #623464.
3948
Greg Ward6c58d462003-01-03 18:02:15 +00003949- The linuxaudiodev module is now deprecated; it is being replaced by
3950 ossaudiodev. The interface has been extended to cover a lot more of
3951 OSS (see www.opensound.com), including most DSP ioctls and the
3952 OSS mixer API. Documentation forthcoming in 2.3a2.
3953
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003954Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003955-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003956
Guido van Rossum747f8062003-01-03 16:33:49 +00003957- imaplib.py now supports SSL (Tino Lange and Piers Lauder).
3958
Just van Rossum5e156ad2002-12-31 16:38:01 +00003959- Freeze's modulefinder.py has been moved to the standard library;
3960 slightly improved so it will issue less false missing submodule
3961 reports (see sf path #643711 for details). Documentation will follow
3962 with Python 2.3a2.
3963
Martin v. Löwis96a60e42002-12-31 13:11:54 +00003964- os.path exposes getctime.
3965
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003966- unittest.py now has two additional methods called assertAlmostEqual()
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003967 and failIfAlmostEqual(). They implement an approximate comparison
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003968 by rounding the difference between the two arguments and comparing
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003969 the result to zero. Approximate comparison is essential for
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003970 unit tests of floating point results.
3971
Raymond Hettingere11b5102002-12-25 16:37:19 +00003972- calendar.py now depends on the new datetime module rather than
3973 the time module. As a result, the range of allowable dates
3974 has been increased.
3975
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003976- pdb has a new 'j(ump)' command to select the next line to be
3977 executed.
3978
Thomas Heller1b3b49d2002-12-12 19:13:44 +00003979- The distutils created windows installers now can run a
3980 postinstallation script.
3981
Martin v. Löwis4581cfa2002-11-22 08:23:09 +00003982- doctest.testmod can now be called without argument, which means to
3983 test the current module.
3984
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003985- When canceling a server that implemented threading with a keyboard
Martin v. Löwisf86e8ef2002-11-22 08:08:44 +00003986 interrupt, the server would shut down but not terminate (waiting on
3987 client threads). A new member variable, daemon_threads, was added to
3988 the ThreadingMixIn class in SocketServer.py to make it explicit that
3989 this behavior needs to be controlled.
3990
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00003991- A new module, optparse, provides a fancy alternative to getopt for
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003992 command line parsing. It is a slightly modified version of Greg
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00003993 Ward's Optik package.
3994
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00003995- UserDict.py now defines a DictMixin class which defines all dictionary
3996 methods for classes that already have a minimum mapping interface.
3997 This greatly simplifies writing classes that need to be substitutable
3998 for dictionaries (such as the shelve module).
3999
4000- shelve.py now subclasses from UserDict.DictMixin. Now shelve supports
4001 all dictionary methods. This eases the transition to persistent
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00004002 storage for scripts originally written with dictionaries in mind.
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00004003
Skip Montanaro3bf99e32002-12-08 18:36:24 +00004004- shelve.open and the various classes in shelve.py now accept an optional
4005 binary flag, which defaults to False. If True, the values stored in the
4006 shelf are binary pickles.
4007
Guido van Rossumfda06742002-11-13 16:29:18 +00004008- A new package, logging, implements the logging API defined by PEP
4009 282. The code is written by Vinay Sajip.
4010
Walter Dörwald4dbf1922002-11-06 16:53:44 +00004011- StreamReader, StreamReaderWriter and StreamRecoder in the codecs
4012 modules are iterators now.
4013
Tim Peters9288f952002-11-05 20:38:55 +00004014- gzip.py now handles files exceeding 2GB. Files over 4GB also work
4015 now (provided the OS supports it, and Python is configured with large
4016 file support), but in that case the underlying gzip file format can
4017 record only the least-significant 32 bits of the file size, so that
4018 some tools working with gzipped files may report an incorrect file
4019 size.
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00004020
Martin v. Löwis74b51ac2002-10-26 14:50:45 +00004021- xml.sax.saxutils.unescape has been added, to replace entity references
4022 with their entity value.
4023
Martin v. Löwis77ac4292002-10-15 15:11:13 +00004024- Queue.Queue.{put,get} now support an optional timeout argument.
4025
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00004026- Various features of Tk 8.4 are exposed in Tkinter.py. The multiple
4027 option of tkFileDialog is exposed as function askopenfile{,name}s.
Martin v. Löwis2ec36272002-10-13 10:22:08 +00004028
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00004029- Various configure methods of Tkinter have been stream-lined, so that
4030 tag_configure, image_configure, window_configure now return a
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00004031 dictionary when invoked with no argument.
Martin v. Löwis6ce13152002-10-10 14:36:13 +00004032
Guido van Rossum2b492b62002-10-09 21:40:48 +00004033- Importing the readline module now no longer has the side effect of
4034 calling setlocale(LC_CTYPE, ""). The initial "C" locale, or
4035 whatever locale is explicitly set by the user, is preserved. If you
4036 want repr() of 8-bit strings in your preferred encoding to preserve
4037 all printable characters of that encoding, you have to add the
4038 following code to your $PYTHONSTARTUP file or to your application's
4039 main():
4040
4041 import locale
4042 locale.setlocale(locale.LC_CTYPE, "")
4043
Martin v. Löwise9ce0b02002-10-07 13:23:24 +00004044- shutil.move was added. shutil.copytree now reports errors as an
4045 exception at the end, instead of printing error messages.
4046
Marc-André Lemburg97047e22002-10-04 11:55:21 +00004047- Encoding name normalization was generalized to not only
4048 replace hyphens with underscores, but also all other non-alphanumeric
4049 characters (with the exception of the dot which is used for Python
4050 package names during lookup). The aliases.py mapping was updated
4051 to the new standard.
4052
Walter Dörwald5ccaf8f2002-09-06 16:15:58 +00004053- mimetypes has two new functions: guess_all_extensions() which
4054 returns a list of all known extensions for a mime type, and
4055 add_type() which adds one mapping between a mime type and
4056 an extension to the database.
4057
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00004058- New module: sets, defines the class Set that implements a mutable
4059 set type using the keys of a dict to represent the set. There's
4060 also a class ImmutableSet which is useful when you need sets of sets
4061 or when you need to use sets as dict keys, and a class BaseSet which
Raymond Hettingeref8b9c62002-12-09 08:56:06 +00004062 is the base class of the two.
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00004063
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00004064- Added random.sample(population,k) for random sampling without replacement.
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00004065 Returns a k length list of unique elements chosen from the population.
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00004066
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00004067- random.randrange(-sys.maxint-1, sys.maxint) no longer raises
4068 OverflowError. That is, it now accepts any combination of 'start'
4069 and 'stop' arguments so long as each is in the range of Python's
4070 bounded integers.
4071
Raymond Hettinger40f62172002-12-29 23:03:38 +00004072- Thanks to Raymond Hettinger, random.random() now uses a new core
4073 generator. The Mersenne Twister algorithm is implemented in C,
4074 threadsafe, faster than the previous generator, has an astronomically
4075 large period (2**19937-1), creates random floats to full 53-bit
4076 precision, and may be the most widely tested random number generator
4077 in existence.
4078
4079 The random.jumpahead(n) method has different semantics for the new
4080 generator. Instead of jumping n steps ahead, it uses n and the
4081 existing state to create a new state. This means that jumpahead()
4082 continues to support multi-threaded code needing generators of
4083 non-overlapping sequences. However, it will break code which relies
4084 on jumpahead moving a specific number of steps forward.
4085
4086 The attributes random.whseed and random.__whseed have no meaning for
4087 the new generator. Code using these attributes should switch to a
4088 new class, random.WichmannHill which is provided for backward
4089 compatibility and to make an alternate generator available.
4090
Guido van Rossum4a57c332002-08-02 18:05:20 +00004091- New "algorithms" module: heapq, implements a heap queue. Thanks to
4092 Kevin O'Connor for the code and François Pinard for an entertaining
4093 write-up explaining the theory and practical uses of heaps.
4094
Marc-André Lemburg58e2ff22002-07-12 14:40:04 +00004095- New encoding for the Palm OS character set: palmos.
4096
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00004097- binascii.crc32() and the zipfile module had problems on some 64-bit
4098 platforms. These have been fixed. On a platform with 8-byte C longs,
4099 crc32() now returns a signed-extended 4-byte result, so that its value
4100 as a Python int is equal to the value computed a 32-bit platform.
4101
Martin v. Löwis7d650ca2002-06-30 15:05:00 +00004102- xml.dom.minidom.toxml and toprettyxml now take an optional encoding
4103 argument.
4104
Guido van Rossum9f7549b2002-06-10 21:39:42 +00004105- Some fixes in the copy module: when an object is copied through its
4106 __reduce__ method, there was no check for a __setstate__ method on
4107 the result [SF patch 565085]; deepcopy should treat instances of
4108 custom metaclasses the same way it treats instances of type 'type'
4109 [SF patch 560794].
4110
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00004111- Sockets now support timeout mode. After s.settimeout(T), where T is
4112 a float expressing seconds, subsequent operations raise an exception
4113 if they cannot be completed within T seconds. To disable timeout
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00004114 mode, use s.settimeout(None). There's also a module function,
4115 socket.setdefaulttimeout(T), which sets the default for all sockets
4116 created henceforth.
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00004117
4118- getopt.gnu_getopt was added. This supports GNU-style option
4119 processing, where options can be mixed with non-option arguments.
Martin v. Löwis446a25f2002-06-06 10:58:36 +00004120
Michael W. Hudsonb0dc1a32002-06-04 18:27:35 +00004121- Stop using strings for exceptions. String objects used for
4122 exceptions are now classes deriving from Exception. The objects
4123 changed were: Tkinter.TclError, bdb.BdbQuit, macpath.norm_error,
4124 tabnanny.NannyNag, and xdrlib.Error.
Neal Norwitzb5b5a262002-06-04 17:14:07 +00004125
Walter Dörwald474458d2002-06-04 15:16:29 +00004126- Constants BOM_UTF8, BOM_UTF16, BOM_UTF16_LE, BOM_UTF16_BE,
4127 BOM_UTF32, BOM_UTF32_LE and BOM_UTF32_BE that represent the Byte
4128 Order Mark in UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 encodings for little and
4129 big endian systems were added to the codecs module. The old names
4130 BOM32_* and BOM64_* were off by a factor of 2.
4131
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00004132- Added conversion functions math.degrees() and math.radians().
Raymond Hettinger87f59ee2002-05-13 04:17:32 +00004133
Raymond Hettinger866964c2002-12-14 19:51:34 +00004134- math.log() now takes an optional argument: math.log(x[, base]).
4135
Raymond Hettinger9b1df1d2002-05-12 06:07:21 +00004136- ftplib.retrlines() now tests for callback is None rather than testing
4137 for False. Was causing an error when given a callback object which
4138 was callable but also returned len() as zero. The change may
4139 create new breakage if the caller relied on the undocumented behavior
4140 and called with callback set to [] or some other False value not
4141 identical to None.
4142
Tim Peters46c04e12002-05-05 20:40:00 +00004143- random.gauss() uses a piece of hidden state used by nothing else,
4144 and the .seed() and .whseed() methods failed to reset it. In other
4145 words, setting the seed didn't completely determine the sequence of
4146 results produced by random.gauss(). It does now. Programs repeatedly
4147 mixing calls to a seed method with calls to gauss() may see different
4148 results now.
4149
Fred Drake7f781c92002-05-01 20:33:53 +00004150- The pickle.Pickler class grew a clear_memo() method to mimic that
4151 provided by cPickle.Pickler.
4152
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00004153- difflib's SequenceMatcher class now does a dynamic analysis of
4154 which elements are so frequent as to constitute noise. For
4155 comparing files as sequences of lines, this generally works better
4156 than the IS_LINE_JUNK function, and function ndiff's linejunk
4157 argument defaults to None now as a result. A happy benefit is
4158 that SequenceMatcher may run much faster now when applied
4159 to large files with many duplicate lines (for example, C program
4160 text with lots of repeated "}" and "return NULL;" lines).
4161
Guido van Rossum256705b2002-04-23 13:29:43 +00004162- New Text.dump() method in Tkinter module.
4163
Marc-André Lemburg1ec71ea2002-04-17 20:33:40 +00004164- New distutils commands for building packagers were added to
4165 support pkgtool on Solaris and swinstall on HP-UX.
4166
4167- distutils now has a new abstract binary packager base class
4168 command/bdist_packager, which simplifies writing packagers.
4169 This will hopefully provide the missing bits to encourage
4170 people to submit more packagers, e.g. for Debian, FreeBSD
4171 and other systems.
4172
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00004173- The UTF-16, -LE and -BE stream readers now raise a
4174 NotImplementedError for all calls to .readline(). Previously, they
4175 used to just produce garbage or fail with an encoding error --
4176 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 +00004177 work well with these.
4178
Martin v. Löwis5c137c22002-03-18 12:44:08 +00004179- compileall now supports quiet operation.
4180
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004181- The BaseHTTPServer now implements optional HTTP/1.1 persistent
Martin v. Löwis587c98c2002-03-17 18:37:22 +00004182 connections.
4183
Marc-André Lemburga5d2b4c2002-02-16 18:23:30 +00004184- socket module: the SSL support was broken out of the main
4185 _socket module C helper and placed into a new _ssl helper
4186 which now gets imported by socket.py if available and working.
4187
Marc-André Lemburg37aa5802002-02-10 21:42:47 +00004188- encodings package: added aliases for all supported IANA character
4189 sets
4190
Guido van Rossum606fe4e2001-12-28 20:57:14 +00004191- ftplib: to safeguard the user's privacy, anonymous login will use
4192 "anonymous@" as default password, rather than the real user and host
4193 name.
4194
Fred Drake36736122002-01-10 13:50:31 +00004195- webbrowser: tightened up the command passed to os.system() so that
4196 arbitrary shell code can't be executed because a bogus URL was
4197 passed in.
4198
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00004199- gettext.translation has an optional fallback argument, and
Martin v. Löwisa55ffae2002-01-11 06:58:49 +00004200 gettext.find an optional all argument. Translations will now fallback
Martin v. Löwisd8996052002-11-21 21:45:32 +00004201 on a per-message basis. The module supports plural forms, by means
4202 of gettext.[d]ngettext and Translation.[u]ngettext.
Martin v. Löwis1be64192002-01-11 06:33:28 +00004203
Martin v. Löwis9668b932002-01-12 11:27:42 +00004204- distutils bdist commands now offer a --skip-build option.
4205
Walter Dörwaldb25c2b02002-03-21 10:38:40 +00004206- warnings.warn now accepts a Warning instance as first argument.
4207
Fred Drakefed7e852002-04-04 19:36:15 +00004208- The xml.sax.expatreader.ExpatParser class will no longer create
4209 circular references by using itself as the locator that gets passed
4210 to the content handler implementation. [SF bug #535474]
4211
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00004212- The email.Parser.Parser class now properly parses strings regardless
4213 of their line endings, which can be any of \r, \n, or \r\n (CR, LF,
4214 or CRLF). Also, the Header class's constructor default arguments
4215 has changed slightly so that an explicit maxlinelen value is always
Barry Warsaw497e5c42002-12-30 19:27:08 +00004216 honored, and so unicode conversion error handling can be specified.
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00004217
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00004218- distutils' build_ext command now links C++ extensions with the C++
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00004219 compiler available in the Makefile or CXX environment variable, if
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00004220 running under \*nix.
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00004221
4222- New module bz2: provides a comprehensive interface for the bz2 compression
4223 library. It implements a complete file interface, one-shot (de)compression
4224 functions, and types for sequential (de)compression.
4225
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00004226- New pdb command 'pp' which is like 'p' except that it pretty-prints
Barry Warsaw5d8d6182002-11-05 22:41:33 +00004227 the value of its expression argument.
4228
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00004229- Now bdist_rpm distutils command understands a verify_script option in
4230 the config file, including the contents of the referred filename in
4231 the "%verifyscript" section of the rpm spec file.
4232
Gustavo Niemeyer1456fde2002-11-25 17:25:04 +00004233- Fixed bug #495695: webbrowser module would run graphic browsers in a
4234 unix environment even if DISPLAY was not set. Also, support for
4235 skipstone browser was included.
4236
Gustavo Niemeyerd5ae01a2002-12-16 13:11:57 +00004237- Fixed bug #636769: rexec would run unallowed code if subclasses of
4238 strings were used as parameters for certain functions.
4239
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004240Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004241-----------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004242
Martin v. Löwis0d1fdea2002-11-22 08:36:54 +00004243- pygettext.py now supports globbing on Windows, and accepts module
4244 names in addition to accepting file names.
4245
Guido van Rossum923e4ef2002-09-17 20:58:59 +00004246- The SGI demos (Demo/sgi) have been removed. Nobody thought they
4247 were interesting any more. (The SGI library modules and extensions
4248 are still there; it is believed that at least some of these are
4249 still used and useful.)
4250
Fred Drake40813b12002-08-05 15:24:19 +00004251- IDLE supports the new encoding declarations (PEP 263); it can also
4252 deal with legacy 8-bit files if they use the locale's encoding. It
4253 allows non-ASCII strings in the interactive shell and executes them
4254 in the locale's encoding.
Martin v. Löwis98ce7b72002-08-05 15:11:26 +00004255
Marc-André Lemburg46260092002-04-04 16:17:11 +00004256- freeze.py now produces binaries which can import shared modules,
4257 unlike before when this failed due to missing symbol exports in
4258 the generated binary.
4259
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004260Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004261-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004262
Martin v. Löwisdc461752002-11-06 21:59:33 +00004263- On Unix, IDLE is now installed automatically.
4264
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00004265- The fpectl module is not built by default; it's dangerous or useless
4266 except in the hands of experts.
4267
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00004268- The public Python C API will generally be declared using PyAPI_FUNC
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00004269 and PyAPI_DATA macros, while Python extension module init functions
4270 will be declared with PyMODINIT_FUNC. DL_EXPORT/DL_IMPORT macros
4271 are deprecated.
Neal Norwitz1389f3e2002-07-22 13:21:10 +00004272
Tim Petersc6a3ff62002-07-08 22:11:52 +00004273- A bug was fixed that could cause COUNT_ALLOCS builds to segfault, or
4274 get into infinite loops, when a new-style class got garbage-collected.
4275 Unfortunately, to avoid this, the way COUNT_ALLOCS works requires
4276 that new-style classes be immortal in COUNT_ALLOCS builds. Note that
4277 COUNT_ALLOCS is not enabled by default, in either release or debug
4278 builds, and that new-style classes are immortal only in COUNT_ALLOCS
4279 builds.
4280
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00004281- Compiling out the cyclic garbage collector is no longer an option.
4282 The old symbol WITH_CYCLE_GC is now ignored, and Python.h arranges
4283 that it's always defined (for the benefit of any extension modules
4284 that may be conditionalizing on it). A bonus is that any extension
4285 type participating in cyclic gc can choose to participate in the
4286 Py_TRASHCAN mechanism now too; in the absence of cyclic gc, this used
4287 to require editing the core to teach the trashcan mechanism about the
4288 new type.
4289
Martin v. Löwis0cec0ff2002-07-28 16:33:45 +00004290- According to Annex F of the current C standard,
Tim Peters1de41bf2002-07-03 03:31:20 +00004291
4292 The Standard C macro HUGE_VAL and its float and long double analogs,
4293 HUGE_VALF and HUGE_VALL, expand to expressions whose values are
4294 positive infinities.
4295
4296 Python only uses the double HUGE_VAL, and only to #define its own symbol
4297 Py_HUGE_VAL. Some platforms have incorrect definitions for HUGE_VAL.
4298 pyport.h used to try to worm around that, but the workarounds triggered
4299 other bugs on other platforms, so we gave up. If your platform defines
4300 HUGE_VAL incorrectly, you'll need to #define Py_HUGE_VAL to something
4301 that works on your platform. The only instance of this I'm sure about
4302 is on an unknown subset of Cray systems, described here:
4303
4304 http://www.cray.com/swpubs/manuals/SN-2194_2.0/html-SN-2194_2.0/x3138.htm
4305
4306 Presumably 2.3a1 breaks such systems. If anyone uses such a system, help!
4307
Martin v. Löwisa3fb4f72002-06-09 13:33:54 +00004308- The configure option --without-doc-strings can be used to remove the
4309 doc strings from the builtin functions and modules; this reduces the
4310 size of the executable.
4311
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00004312- The universal newlines option (PEP 278) is on by default. On Unix
4313 it can be disabled by passing --without-universal-newlines to the
4314 configure script. On other platforms, remove
4315 WITH_UNIVERSAL_NEWLINES from pyconfig.h.
Tim Peters639295f2002-04-21 07:30:30 +00004316
Martin v. Löwis1142de32002-03-29 16:28:31 +00004317- On Unix, a shared libpython2.3.so can be created with --enable-shared.
4318
Tim Peters8deda702002-03-30 10:06:07 +00004319- All uses of the CACHE_HASH, INTERN_STRINGS, and DONT_SHARE_SHORT_STRINGS
4320 preprocessor symbols were eliminated. The internal decisions they
4321 controlled stopped being experimental long ago.
Tim Peters1f7df352002-03-29 03:29:08 +00004322
Fred Drake7d28b732002-05-02 21:17:00 +00004323- The tools used to build the documentation now work under Cygwin as
4324 well as Unix.
4325
Skip Montanaro57454e52002-06-14 20:30:31 +00004326- The bsddb and dbm module builds have been changed to try and avoid version
4327 skew problems and disable linkage with Berkeley DB 1.85 unless the
4328 installer knows what s/he's doing. See the section on building these
4329 modules in the README file for details.
4330
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004331C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004332-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004333
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00004334- PyNumber_Check() now returns true for string and unicode objects.
4335 This is a result of these types having a partially defined
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00004336 tp_as_number slot. (This is not a feature, but an indication that
Walter Dörwalda1a61f92002-11-19 21:20:25 +00004337 PyNumber_Check() is not very useful to determine numeric behavior.
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00004338 It may be deprecated.)
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00004339
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00004340- The string object's layout has changed: the pointer member
4341 ob_sinterned has been replaced by an int member ob_sstate. On some
4342 platforms (e.g. most 64-bit systems) this may change the offset of
4343 the ob_sval member, so as a precaution the API_VERSION has been
4344 incremented. The apparently unused feature of "indirect interned
4345 strings", supported by the ob_sinterned member, is gone. Interned
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004346 strings are now usually mortal; there is a new API,
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00004347 PyString_InternImmortal() that creates immortal interned strings.
4348 (The ob_sstate member can only take three values; however, while
4349 making it a char saves a few bytes per string object on average, in
4350 it also slowed things down a bit because ob_sval was no longer
4351 aligned.)
4352
Guido van Rossumfdb86482002-08-14 21:20:32 +00004353- The Py_InitModule*() functions now accept NULL for the 'methods'
4354 argument. Modules without global functions are becoming more common
4355 now that factories can be types rather than functions.
4356
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00004357- New C API PyUnicode_FromOrdinal() which exposes unichr() at C
4358 level.
4359
Thomas Heller085358a2002-07-29 14:27:41 +00004360- New functions PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErr() and
4361 PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErrWithFilename(). Similar to
4362 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErrWithFilename() and
4363 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErr(), but they allow to specify
4364 the exception type to raise. Available on Windows.
4365
Tim Peters7c321a82002-07-09 02:57:01 +00004366- Py_FatalError() is now declared as taking a const char* argument. It
4367 was previously declared without const. This should not affect working
4368 code.
4369
Martin v. Löwis01f94bd2002-05-08 08:44:21 +00004370- Added new macro PySequence_ITEM(o, i) that directly calls
4371 sq_item without rechecking that o is a sequence and without
4372 adjusting for negative indices.
4373
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00004374- PyRange_New() now raises ValueError if the fourth argument is not 1.
4375 This is part of the removal of deprecated features of the xrange
4376 object.
4377
Guido van Rossum517c7d42002-04-26 02:49:14 +00004378- PyNumber_Coerce() and PyNumber_CoerceEx() now also invoke the type's
4379 coercion if both arguments have the same type but this type has the
4380 CHECKTYPES flag set. This is to better support proxies.
4381
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004382- The type of tp_free has been changed from "``void (*)(PyObject *)``" to
4383 "``void (*)(void *)``".
Neil Schemenauer9344b142002-04-12 23:00:08 +00004384
4385- PyObject_Del, PyObject_GC_Del are now functions instead of macros.
4386
Guido van Rossum0986d822002-04-08 01:38:42 +00004387- A type can now inherit its metatype from its base type. Previously,
4388 when PyType_Ready() was called, if ob_type was found to be NULL, it
4389 was always set to &PyType_Type; now it is set to base->ob_type,
4390 where base is tp_base, defaulting to &PyObject_Type.
4391
4392- PyType_Ready() accidentally did not inherit tp_is_gc; now it does.
4393
Neil Schemenauerc9abc1d2002-05-08 14:14:41 +00004394- The PyCore_* family of APIs have been removed.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00004395
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004396- The "u#" parser marker will now pass through Unicode objects as-is
Marc-André Lemburg3e3eacb2002-01-09 16:21:27 +00004397 without going through the buffer API.
4398
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004399- The enumerators of cmp_op have been renamed to use the prefix ``PyCmp_``.
Martin v. Löwis7198a522002-01-01 19:59:11 +00004400
Tim Peters10a3bb52001-12-25 19:07:38 +00004401- An old #define of ANY as void has been removed from pyport.h. This
4402 hasn't been used since Python's pre-ANSI days, and the #define has
4403 been marked as obsolete since then. SF bug 495548 says it created
4404 conflicts with other packages, so keeping it around wasn't harmless.
4405
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004406- Because Python's magic number scheme broke on January 1st, we decided
4407 to stop Python development. Thanks for all the fish!
4408
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00004409- Some of us don't like fish, so we changed Python's magic number
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00004410 scheme to a new one. See Python/import.c for details.
4411
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004412New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004413-------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004414
Martin v. Löwis79acb9e2002-12-06 12:48:53 +00004415- OpenVMS is now supported.
4416
Martin v. Löwisf90ae202002-06-11 06:22:31 +00004417- AtheOS is now supported.
4418
Andrew MacIntyre161ad0e2002-08-04 07:25:58 +00004419- the EMX runtime environment on OS/2 is now supported.
4420
Martin v. Löwisa6e97582002-01-01 18:41:33 +00004421- GNU/Hurd is now supported.
4422
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004423Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004424-----
4425
Fred Drake4dd0f7e2002-11-26 21:44:56 +00004426- The regrtest.py script's -u option now provides a way to say "allow
4427 all resources except this one." For example, to allow everything
4428 except bsddb, give the option '-uall,-bsddb'.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004429
4430Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004431-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004432
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00004433- The Windows distribution now ships with version 4.0.14 of the
4434 Sleepycat Berkeley database library. This should be a huge
4435 improvement over the previous Berkeley DB 1.85, which had many
4436 bugs.
4437 XXX What are the licensing issues here?
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004438 XXX If a user has a database created with a previous version of
Tim Peters84c7a3f2002-11-23 18:48:06 +00004439 XXX Python, what must they do to convert it?
4440 XXX I'm still not sure how to link this thing (see PCbuild/readme.txt).
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00004441 XXX The version # is likely to change before 2.3a1.
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00004442
4443- The Windows distribution now ships with a Secure Sockets Library (SLL)
Mark Hammondc3de0082002-12-03 06:16:08 +00004444 module (_ssl.pyd)
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00004445
Tim Peters857fb4c2002-11-14 23:31:58 +00004446- The Windows distribution now ships with Tcl/Tk version 8.4.1 (it
4447 previously shipped with Tcl/Tk 8.3.2).
4448
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00004449- When Python is built under a Microsoft compiler, sys.version now
4450 includes the compiler version number (_MSC_VER). For example, under
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004451 MSVC 6, sys.version contains the substring "MSC v.1200 ". 1200 is
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00004452 the value of _MSC_VER under MSVC 6.
4453
Tim Peters08e72952002-04-16 20:48:01 +00004454- Sometimes the uninstall executable (UNWISE.EXE) vanishes. One cause
4455 of that has been fixed in the installer (disabled Wise's "delete in-
4456 use files" uninstall option).
4457
Guido van Rossum181e41a2002-04-06 00:23:25 +00004458- Fixed a bug in urllib's proxy handling in Windows. [SF bug #503031]
4459
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00004460- The installer now installs Start menu shortcuts under (the local
4461 equivalent of) "All Users" when doing an Admin install.
4462
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00004463- file.truncate([newsize]) now works on Windows for all newsize values.
4464 It used to fail if newsize didn't fit in 32 bits, reflecting a
4465 limitation of MS _chsize (which is no longer used).
4466
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00004467- os.waitpid() is now implemented for Windows, and can be used to block
4468 until a specified process exits. This is similar to, but not exactly
4469 the same as, os.waitpid() on POSIX systems. If you're waiting for
4470 a specific process whose pid was obtained from one of the spawn()
4471 functions, the same Python os.waitpid() code works across platforms.
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00004472 See the docs for details. The docs were changed to clarify that
4473 spawn functions return, and waitpid requires, a process handle on
4474 Windows (not the same thing as a Windows process id).
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00004475
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00004476- New tempfile.TemporaryFile implementation for Windows: this doesn't
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004477 need a TemporaryFileWrapper wrapper anymore, and should be immune
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00004478 to a nasty problem: before 2.3, if you got a temp file on Windows, it
4479 got wrapped in an object whose close() method first closed the
4480 underlying file, then deleted the file. This usually worked fine.
4481 However, the spawn family of functions on Windows create (at a low C
4482 level) the same set of open files in the spawned process Q as were
4483 open in the spawning process P. If a temp file f was among them, then
4484 doing f.close() in P first closed P's C-level file handle on f, but Q's
4485 C-level file handle on f remained open, so the attempt in P to delete f
4486 blew up with a "Permission denied" error (Windows doesn't allow
4487 deleting open files). This was surprising, subtle, and difficult to
4488 work around.
4489
4490- The os module now exports all the symbolic constants usable with the
4491 low-level os.open() on Windows: the new constants in 2.3 are
4492 O_NOINHERIT, O_SHORT_LIVED, O_TEMPORARY, O_RANDOM and O_SEQUENTIAL.
4493 The others were also available in 2.2: O_APPEND, O_BINARY, O_CREAT,
4494 O_EXCL, O_RDONLY, O_RDWR, O_TEXT, O_TRUNC and O_WRONLY. Contrary
4495 to Microsoft docs, O_SHORT_LIVED does not seem to imply O_TEMPORARY
4496 (so specify both if you want both; note that neither is useful unless
4497 specified with O_CREAT too).
4498
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004499Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004500----
4501
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004502- Mac/Relnotes is gone, the release notes are now here.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004503
Just van Rossume1ebd802003-02-10 10:06:18 +00004504- Python (the OSX-only, unix-based version, not the OS9-compatible CFM
4505 version) now fully supports unicode strings as arguments to various file
4506 system calls, eg. open(), file(), os.stat() and os.listdir().
4507
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004508- The current naming convention for Python on the Macintosh is that MacPython
4509 refers to the unix-based OSX-only version, and MacPython-OS9 refers to the
4510 CFM-based version that runs on both OS9 and OSX.
4511
4512- All MacPython-OS9 functionality is now available in an OSX unix build,
4513 including the Carbon modules, the IDE, OSA support, etc. A lot of this
4514 will only work correctly in a framework build, though, because you cannot
4515 talk to the window manager unless your application is run from a .app
4516 bundle. There is a command line tool "pythonw" that runs your script
4517 with an interpreter living in such a .app bundle, this interpreter should
4518 be used to run any Python script using the window manager (including
4519 Tkinter or wxPython scripts).
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00004520
Jack Jansen8bb80db2002-12-30 22:42:43 +00004521- Most of Mac/Lib has moved to Lib/plat-mac, which is again used both in
4522 MacPython-OSX and MacPython-OS9. The only modules remaining in Mac/Lib
4523 are specifically for MacPython-OS9 (CFM support, preference resources, etc).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004524
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004525- A new utility PythonLauncher will start a Python interpreter when a .py or
4526 .pyw script is double-clicked in the Finder. By default .py scripts are
4527 run with a normal Python interpreter in a Terminal window and .pyw
4528 files are run with a window-aware pythonw interpreter without a Terminal
4529 window, but all this can be customized.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004530
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004531- MacPython-OS9 is now Carbon-only, so it runs on Mac OS 9 or Mac OS X and
4532 possibly on Mac OS 8.6 with the right CarbonLib installed, but not on earlier
4533 releases.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004534
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004535- Many tools such as BuildApplet.py and gensuitemodule.py now support a command
4536 line interface too.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004537
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004538- All the Carbon classes are now PEP253 compliant, meaning that you can
4539 subclass them from Python. Most of the attributes have gone, you should
4540 now use the accessor function call API, which is also what Apple's
4541 documentation uses. Some attributes such as grafport.visRgn are still
4542 available for convenience.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004543
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004544- New Carbon modules File (implementing the APIs in Files.h and Aliases.h)
4545 and Folder (APIs from Folders.h). The old macfs builtin module is
4546 gone, and replaced by a Python wrapper around the new modules.
4547
4548- Pathname handling should now be fully consistent: MacPython-OSX always uses
4549 unix pathnames and MacPython-OS9 always uses colon-separated Mac pathnames
4550 (also when running on Mac OS X).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004551
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004552- New Carbon modules Help and AH give access to the Carbon Help Manager.
4553 There are hooks in the IDE to allow accessing the Python documentation
4554 (and Apple's Carbon and Cocoa documentation) through the Help Viewer.
4555 See Mac/OSX/README for converting the Python documentation to a
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004556 Help Viewer compatible form and installing it.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004557
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004558- OSA support has been redesigned and the generated Python classes now
4559 mirror the inheritance defined by the underlying OSA classes.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004560
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004561- MacPython no longer maps both \r and \n to \n on input for any text file.
4562 This feature has been replaced by universal newline support (PEP278).
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00004563
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00004564- The default encoding for Python sourcefiles in MacPython-OS9 is no longer
Guido van Rossum16c85172003-02-20 01:52:48 +00004565 mac-roman (or whatever your local Mac encoding was) but "ascii", like on
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00004566 other platforms. If you really need sourcefiles with Mac characters in them
4567 you can change this in site.py.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004568
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00004569
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004570What's New in Python 2.2 final?
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004571===============================
4572
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004573*Release date: 21-Dec-2001*
4574
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004575Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004576--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004577
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004578- pickle.py, cPickle: allow pickling instances of new-style classes
4579 with a custom metaclass.
4580
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004581Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004582-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004583
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004584- weakref proxy object: when comparing, unwrap both arguments if both
4585 are proxies.
4586
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004587Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004588-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004589
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004590- binascii.b2a_base64(): fix a potential buffer overrun when encoding
4591 very short strings.
4592
4593- cPickle: the obscure "fast" mode was suspected of causing stack
4594 overflows on the Mac. Hopefully fixed this by setting the recursion
4595 limit much smaller. If the limit is too low (it only affects
4596 performance), you can change it by defining PY_CPICKLE_FAST_LIMIT
4597 when compiling cPickle.c (or in pyconfig.h).
4598
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004599Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004600-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004601
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004602- dumbdbm.py: fixed a dumb old bug (the file didn't get synched at
4603 close or delete time).
4604
4605- rfc822.py: fixed a bug where the address '<>' was converted to None
4606 instead of an empty string (also fixes the email.Utils module).
4607
4608- xmlrpclib.py: version 1.0.0; uses precision for doubles.
4609
4610- test suite: the pickle and cPickle tests were not executing any code
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004611 when run from the standard regression test.
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004612
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004613Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004614-----------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004615
4616Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004617-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004618
4619C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004620-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004621
4622New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004623-------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004624
4625Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004626-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004627
4628Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004629-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004630
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004631- distutils package: fixed broken Windows installers (bdist_wininst).
4632
4633- tempfile.py: prevent mysterious warnings when TemporaryFileWrapper
4634 instances are deleted at process exit time.
4635
4636- socket.py: prevent mysterious warnings when socket instances are
4637 deleted at process exit time.
4638
4639- posixmodule.c: fix a Windows crash with stat() of a filename ending
4640 in backslash.
4641
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004642Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004643----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004644
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004645- The Carbon toolbox modules have been upgraded to Universal Headers
4646 3.4, and experimental CoreGraphics and CarbonEvents modules have
4647 been added. All only for framework-enabled MacOSX.
4648
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004649
Tim Peters6272dfd2001-12-13 19:34:00 +00004650What's New in Python 2.2c1?
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004651===========================
4652
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004653*Release date: 14-Dec-2001*
4654
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004655Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004656--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004657
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004658- Guido's tutorial introduction to the new type/class features has
4659 been extensively updated. See
4660
4661 http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html
4662
4663 That remains the primary documentation in this area.
4664
Guido van Rossum33bab012001-12-05 22:45:48 +00004665- Fixed a leak: instance variables declared with __slots__ were never
4666 deleted!
4667
Guido van Rossum4b800852001-12-03 00:54:52 +00004668- The "delete attribute" method of descriptor objects is called
4669 __delete__, not __del__. In previous releases, it was mistakenly
4670 called __del__, which created an unfortunate overloading condition
4671 with finalizers. (The "get attribute" and "set attribute" methods
4672 are still called __get__ and __set__, respectively.)
4673
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00004674- Some subtle issues with the super built-in were fixed:
4675
4676 (a) When super itself is subclassed, its __get__ method would still
4677 return an instance of the base class (i.e., of super).
4678
4679 (b) super(C, C()).__class__ would return C rather than super. This
4680 is confusing. To fix this, I decided to change the semantics of
4681 super so that it only applies to code attributes, not to data
4682 attributes. After all, overriding data attributes is not
4683 supported anyway.
4684
4685 (c) The __get__ method didn't check whether the argument was an
4686 instance of the type used in creation of the super instance.
4687
Guido van Rossumcd7b7d62001-12-04 21:02:07 +00004688- Previously, hash() of an instance of a subclass of a mutable type
4689 (list or dictionary) would return some value, rather than raising
4690 TypeError. This has been fixed. Also, directly calling
4691 dict.__hash__ and list.__hash__ now raises the same TypeError
4692 (previously, these were the same as object.__hash__).
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00004693
Guido van Rossumd331cb52001-12-05 19:46:42 +00004694- New-style objects now support deleting their __dict__. This is for
4695 all intents and purposes equivalent to assigning a brand new empty
4696 dictionary, but saves space if the object is not used further.
4697
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004698Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004699-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004700
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004701- -Qnew now works as documented in PEP 238: when -Qnew is passed on
4702 the command line, all occurrences of "/" use true division instead
4703 of classic division. See the PEP for details. Note that "all"
4704 means all instances in library and 3rd-party modules, as well as in
4705 your own code. As the PEP says, -Qnew is intended for use only in
4706 educational environments with control over the libraries in use.
Tim Petersbf72fe22001-12-11 21:43:14 +00004707 Note that test_coercion.py in the standard Python test suite fails
4708 under -Qnew; this is expected, and won't be repaired until true
4709 division becomes the default (in the meantime, test_coercion is
4710 testing the current rules).
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004711
Fred Drake6c01e252001-12-14 17:08:12 +00004712- complex() now only allows the first argument to be a string
4713 argument, and raises TypeError if either the second arg is a string
4714 or if the second arg is specified when the first is a string.
4715
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004716Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004717-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004718
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00004719- gc.get_referents was renamed to gc.get_referrers.
4720
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004721Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004722-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004723
Tim Peters25059d32001-12-07 20:35:43 +00004724- Functions in the os.spawn() family now release the global interpreter
4725 lock around calling the platform spawn. They should always have done
4726 this, but did not before 2.2c1. Multithreaded programs calling
4727 an os.spawn function with P_WAIT will no longer block all Python threads
4728 until the spawned program completes. It's possible that some programs
4729 relies on blocking, although more likely by accident than by design.
4730
Martin v. Löwis3a89b2b2001-11-25 14:35:58 +00004731- webbrowser defaults to netscape.exe on OS/2 now.
4732
Martin v. Löwis652e1912001-11-25 14:50:56 +00004733- Tix.ResizeHandle exposes detach_widget, hide, and show.
4734
Martin v. Löwis714d2e22001-12-02 12:26:03 +00004735- The charset alias windows_1252 has been added.
4736
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004737- types.StringTypes is a tuple containing the defined string types;
4738 usually this will be (str, unicode), but if Python was compiled
4739 without Unicode support it will be just (str,).
4740
4741- The pulldom and minidom modules were synchronized to PyXML.
4742
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004743Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004744-----------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004745
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004746- A new script called Tools/scripts/google.py was added, which fires
4747 off a search on Google.
4748
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004749Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004750-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004751
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004752- Note that release builds of Python should arrange to define the
4753 preprocessor symbol NDEBUG on the command line (or equivalent).
4754 In the 2.2 pre-release series we tried to define this by magic in
4755 Python.h instead, but it proved to cause problems for extension
4756 authors. The Unix, Windows and Mac builds now all define NDEBUG in
4757 release builds via cmdline (or equivalent) instead. Ports to
4758 other platforms should do likewise.
4759
Jack Jansen1999ef42001-12-06 21:47:20 +00004760- It is no longer necessary to use --with-suffix when building on a
4761 case-insensitive file system (such as Mac OS X HFS+). In the build
4762 directory an extension is used, but not in the installed python.
4763
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004764C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004765-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004766
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00004767- New function PyDict_MergeFromSeq2() exposes the builtin dict
4768 constructor's logic for updating a dictionary from an iterable object
4769 producing key-value pairs.
4770
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00004771- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() requires that the number of entries in
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00004772 the keyword list equal the number of argument specifiers. This
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00004773 wasn't checked correctly, and PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords could even
4774 dump core in some bad cases. This has been repaired. As a result,
4775 PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords may raise RuntimeError in bad cases that
4776 previously went unchallenged.
4777
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004778New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004779-------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004780
4781Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004782-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004783
4784Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004785-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004786
4787Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004788----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004789
Jack Jansenffa260f2001-12-06 21:14:00 +00004790- In unix-Python on Mac OS X (and darwin) sys.platform is now "darwin",
4791 without any trailing digits.
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004792
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004793- Changed logic for finding python home in Mac OS X framework Pythons.
4794 Now sys.executable points to the executable again, in stead of to
4795 the shared library. The latter is used only for locating the python
4796 home.
4797
4798
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004799What's New in Python 2.2b2?
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004800===========================
4801
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004802*Release date: 16-Nov-2001*
4803
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004804Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004805--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004806
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00004807- Multiple inheritance mixing new-style and classic classes in the
4808 list of base classes is now allowed, so this works now:
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004809
4810 class Classic: pass
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00004811 class Mixed(Classic, object): pass
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004812
4813 The MRO (method resolution order) for each base class is respected
4814 according to its kind, but the MRO for the derived class is computed
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004815 using new-style MRO rules if any base class is a new-style class.
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004816 This needs to be documented.
4817
Tim Petersa427a2b2001-10-29 22:25:45 +00004818- The new builtin dictionary() constructor, and dictionary type, have
4819 been renamed to dict. This reflects a decade of common usage.
4820
Guido van Rossum3fc08d22001-11-15 20:33:10 +00004821- dict() now accepts an iterable object producing 2-sequences. For
4822 example, dict(d.items()) == d for any dictionary d. The argument,
4823 and the elements of the argument, can be any iterable objects.
4824
Guido van Rossum7ad2d1e2001-10-29 22:11:00 +00004825- New-style classes can now have a __del__ method, which is called
4826 when the instance is deleted (just like for classic classes).
4827
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004828- Assignment to object.__dict__ is now possible, for objects that are
4829 instances of new-style classes that have a __dict__ (unless the base
4830 class forbids it).
4831
Guido van Rossumc8e56452001-10-22 00:43:43 +00004832- Methods of built-in types now properly check for keyword arguments
4833 (formerly these were silently ignored). The only built-in methods
4834 that take keyword arguments are __call__, __init__ and __new__.
4835
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004836- The socket function has been converted to a type; see below.
4837
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004838Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004839-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004840
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00004841- Assignment to __debug__ raises SyntaxError at compile-time. This
4842 was promised when 2.1c1 was released as "What's New in Python 2.1c1"
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004843 (see below) says.
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00004844
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004845- Clarified the error messages for unsupported operands to an operator
4846 (like 1 + '').
4847
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004848Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004849-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004850
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004851- mmap has a new keyword argument, "access", allowing a uniform way for
4852 both Windows and Unix users to create read-only, write-through and
4853 copy-on-write memory mappings. This was previously possible only on
4854 Unix. A new keyword argument was required to support this in a
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004855 uniform way because the mmap() signatures had diverged across
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004856 platforms. Thanks to Jay T Miller for repairing this!
4857
Tim Peters169ded02001-11-03 19:57:21 +00004858- By default, the gc.garbage list now contains only those instances in
4859 unreachable cycles that have __del__ methods; in 2.1 it contained all
4860 instances in unreachable cycles. "Instances" here has been generalized
4861 to include instances of both new-style and old-style classes.
4862
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004863- The socket module defines a new method for socket objects,
4864 sendall(). This is like send() but may make multiple calls to
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004865 send() until all data has been sent. Also, the socket function has
4866 been converted to a subclassable type, like list and tuple (etc.)
4867 before it; socket and SocketType are now the same thing.
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004868
4869- Various bugfixes to the curses module. There is now a test suite
4870 for the curses module (you have to run it manually).
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00004871
Guido van Rossum692adf12001-10-30 03:03:03 +00004872- binascii.b2a_base64 no longer places an arbitrary restriction of 57
4873 bytes on its input.
4874
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004875Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004876-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004877
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004878- tkFileDialog exposes a Directory class and askdirectory
Martin v. Löwis25ee87c2001-11-07 22:38:08 +00004879 convenience function.
4880
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00004881- Symbolic group names in regular expressions must be unique. For
4882 example, the regexp r'(?P<abc>)(?P<abc>)' is not allowed, because a
4883 single name can't mean both "group 1" and "group 2" simultaneously.
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004884 Python 2.2 detects this error at regexp compilation time;
4885 previously, the error went undetected, and results were
4886 unpredictable. Also in sre, the pattern.split(), pattern.sub(), and
4887 pattern.subn() methods have been rewritten in C. Also, an
4888 experimental function/method finditer() has been added, which works
4889 like findall() but returns an iterator.
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00004890
Martin v. Löwisb7b32602001-11-02 23:48:20 +00004891- Tix exposes more commands through the classes DirSelectBox,
4892 DirSelectDialog, ListNoteBook, Meter, CheckList, and the
4893 methods tix_addbitmapdir, tix_cget, tix_configure, tix_filedialog,
4894 tix_getbitmap, tix_getimage, tix_option_get, and tix_resetoptions.
4895
Tim Peters98791af2001-10-23 01:59:54 +00004896- Traceback objects are now scanned by cyclic garbage collection, so
4897 cycles created by casual use of sys.exc_info() no longer cause
4898 permanent memory leaks (provided garbage collection is enabled).
4899
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00004900- os.extsep -- a new variable needed by the RISCOS support. It is the
4901 separator used by extensions, and is '.' on all platforms except
4902 RISCOS, where it is '/'. There is no need to use this variable
4903 unless you have a masochistic desire to port your code to RISCOS.
4904
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004905- mimetypes.py has optional support for non-standard, but commonly
4906 found types. guess_type() and guess_extension() now accept an
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004907 optional 'strict' flag, defaulting to true, which controls whether
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004908 recognize non-standard types or not. A few non-standard types we
4909 know about have been added. Also, when run as a script, there are
4910 new -l and -e options.
4911
4912- statcache is now deprecated.
4913
4914- email.Utils.formatdate() now produces the preferred RFC 2822 style
4915 dates with numeric timezones (it used to produce obsolete dates
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004916 hard coded to "GMT" timezone). An optional 'localtime' flag is
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004917 added to produce dates in the local timezone, with daylight savings
4918 time properly taken into account.
4919
4920- In pickle and cPickle, instead of masking errors in load() by
4921 transforming them into SystemError, we let the original exception
4922 propagate out. Also, implement support for __safe_for_unpickling__
4923 in pickle, as it already was supported in cPickle.
4924
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004925Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004926-----------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004927
4928Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004929-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004930
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004931- The dbm module is built using libdb1 if available. The bsddb module
4932 is built with libdb3 if available.
4933
4934- Misc/Makefile.pre.in has been removed by BDFL pronouncement.
4935
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004936C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004937-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004938
Tim Peters1fc240e2001-10-26 05:06:50 +00004939- New function PySequence_Fast_GET_SIZE() returns the size of a non-
4940 NULL result from PySequence_Fast(), more quickly than calling
4941 PySequence_Size().
4942
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004943- New argument unpacking function PyArg_UnpackTuple() added.
4944
4945- New functions PyObject_CallFunctionObjArgs() and
4946 PyObject_CallMethodObjArgs() have been added to make it more
4947 convenient and efficient to call functions and methods from C.
4948
4949- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() no longer masks errors, so it's
4950 possible that this will propagate errors it didn't before.
4951
4952- New function PyObject_CheckReadBuffer(), which returns true if its
4953 argument supports the single-segment readable buffer interface.
4954
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004955New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004956-------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004957
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004958- We've finally confirmed that this release builds on HP-UX 11.00,
4959 *with* threads, and passes the test suite.
4960
Tim Peters7a33d8b2001-11-05 02:51:07 +00004961- Thanks to a series of patches from Michael Muller, Python may build
4962 again under OS/2 Visual Age C++.
4963
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00004964- Updated RISCOS port by Dietmar Schwertberger.
4965
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004966Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004967-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004968
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00004969- Added a test script for the curses module. It isn't run automatically;
4970 regrtest.py must be run with '-u curses' to enable it.
4971
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004972Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004973-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004974
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004975Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004976----
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004977
4978- PythonScript has been moved to unsupported and is slated to be
4979 removed completely in the next release.
4980
4981- It should now be possible to build applets that work on both OS9 and
4982 OSX.
4983
4984- The core is now linked with CoreServices not Carbon; as a side
4985 result, default 8bit encoding on OSX is now ASCII.
4986
4987- Python should now build on OSX 10.1.1
4988
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004989
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004990What's New in Python 2.2b1?
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004991===========================
4992
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004993*Release date: 19-Oct-2001*
4994
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004995Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004996--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004997
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004998- New-style classes are now always dynamic (except for built-in and
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004999 extension types). There is no longer a performance penalty, and I
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00005000 no longer see another reason to keep this baggage around. One relic
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00005001 remains: the __dict__ of a new-style class is a read-only proxy; you
5002 must set the class's attribute to modify it. As a consequence, the
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00005003 __defined__ attribute of new-style types no longer exists, for lack
5004 of need: there is once again only one __dict__ (although in the
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00005005 future a __cache__ may be resurrected with a similar function, if I
5006 can prove that it actually speeds things up).
Guido van Rossum50fda3b2001-10-04 19:46:06 +00005007
Tim Peters1c9ca872001-10-04 06:43:12 +00005008- C.__doc__ now works as expected for new-style classes (in 2.2a4 it
5009 always returned None, even when there was a class docstring).
5010
5011- doctest now finds and runs docstrings attached to new-style classes,
5012 class methods, static methods, and properties.
5013
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00005014Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005015-----------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005016
Guido van Rossuma8bcf802001-10-15 15:53:58 +00005017- A very subtle syntactical pitfall in list comprehensions was fixed.
5018 For example: [a+b for a in 'abc', for b in 'def']. The comma in
5019 this example is a mistake. Previously, this would silently let 'a'
5020 iterate over the singleton tuple ('abc',), yielding ['abcd', 'abce',
5021 'abcf'] rather than the intended ['ad', 'ae', 'af', 'bd', 'be',
5022 'bf', 'cd', 'ce', 'cf']. Now, this is flagged as a syntax error.
5023 Note that [a for a in <singleton>] is a convoluted way to say
5024 [<singleton>] anyway, so it's not like any expressiveness is lost.
5025
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00005026- getattr(obj, name, default) now only catches AttributeError, as
5027 documented, rather than returning the default value for all
5028 exceptions (which could mask bugs in a __getattr__ hook, for
5029 example).
5030
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00005031- Weak reference objects are now part of the core and offer a C API.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00005032 A bug which could allow a core dump when binary operations involved
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00005033 proxy reference has been fixed. weakref.ReferenceError is now a
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00005034 built-in exception.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00005035
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00005036- unicode(obj) now behaves more like str(obj), accepting arbitrary
5037 objects, and calling a __unicode__ method if it exists.
5038 unicode(obj, encoding) and unicode(obj, encoding, errors) still
Marc-André Lemburgb5507ec2001-10-19 12:02:29 +00005039 require an 8-bit string or character buffer argument.
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00005040
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00005041- isinstance() now allows any object as the first argument and a
5042 class, a type or something with a __bases__ tuple attribute for the
5043 second argument. The second argument may also be a tuple of a
5044 class, type, or something with __bases__, in which case isinstance()
5045 will return true if the first argument is an instance of any of the
5046 things contained in the second argument tuple. E.g.
5047
5048 isinstance(x, (A, B))
5049
5050 returns true if x is an instance of A or B.
5051
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00005052Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005053-----------------
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00005054
5055- thread.start_new_thread() now returns the thread ID (previously None).
5056
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00005057- binascii has now two quopri support functions, a2b_qp and b2a_qp.
5058
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00005059- readline now supports setting the startup_hook and the
5060 pre_event_hook, and adds the add_history() function.
Martin v. Löwis0daad592001-09-30 21:09:59 +00005061
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00005062- os and posix supports chroot(), setgroups() and unsetenv() where
5063 available. The stat(), fstat(), statvfs() and fstatvfs() functions
5064 now return "pseudo-sequences" -- the various fields can now be
5065 accessed as attributes (e.g. os.stat("/").st_mtime) but for
5066 backwards compatibility they also behave as a fixed-length sequence.
5067 Some platform-specific fields (e.g. st_rdev) are only accessible as
Guido van Rossum98bf58f2001-10-18 20:34:25 +00005068 attributes.
5069
5070- time: localtime(), gmtime() and strptime() now return a
5071 pseudo-sequence similar to the os.stat() return value, with
5072 attributes like tm_year etc.
Martin v. Löwis16628c92001-10-04 22:46:41 +00005073
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00005074- Decompression objects in the zlib module now accept an optional
5075 second parameter to decompress() that specifies the maximum amount
5076 of memory to use for the uncompressed data.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005077
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00005078- optional SSL support in the socket module now exports OpenSSL
5079 functions RAND_add(), RAND_egd(), and RAND_status(). These calls
5080 are useful on platforms like Solaris where OpenSSL does not
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00005081 automatically seed its PRNG. Also, the keyfile and certfile
5082 arguments to socket.ssl() are now optional.
5083
5084- posixmodule (and by extension, the os module on POSIX platforms) now
5085 exports O_LARGEFILE, O_DIRECT, O_DIRECTORY, and O_NOFOLLOW.
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00005086
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00005087Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005088-------
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00005089
Tim Peters7402f792001-10-02 03:53:41 +00005090- doctest now excludes functions and classes not defined by the module
5091 being tested, thanks to Tim Hochberg.
5092
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00005093- HotShot, a new profiler implemented using a C-based callback, has
5094 been added. This substantially reduces the overhead of profiling,
5095 but it is still quite preliminary. Support modules and
5096 documentation will be added in upcoming releases (before 2.2 final).
5097
Guido van Rossumc4b09b42001-10-04 10:19:00 +00005098- profile now produces correct output in situations where an exception
5099 raised in Python is cleared by C code (e.g. hasattr()). This used
5100 to cause wrong output, including spurious claims of recursive
5101 functions and attribution of time spent to the wrong function.
5102
Tim Peters0a1fc4e2001-10-07 03:12:08 +00005103 The code and documentation for the derived OldProfile and HotProfile
5104 profiling classes was removed. The code hasn't worked for years (if
5105 you tried to use them, they raised exceptions). OldProfile
5106 intended to reproduce the behavior of the profiler Python used more
5107 than 7 years ago, and isn't interesting anymore. HotProfile intended
5108 to provide a faster profiler (but producing less information), and
5109 that's a worthy goal we intend to meet via a different approach (but
5110 without losing information).
5111
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00005112- Profile.calibrate() has a new implementation that should deliver
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00005113 a much better system-specific calibration constant. The constant can
5114 now be specified in an instance constructor, or as a Profile class or
5115 instance variable, instead of by editing profile.py's source code.
5116 Calibration must still be done manually (see the docs for the profile
5117 module).
5118
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00005119 Note that Profile.calibrate() must be overridden by subclasses.
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00005120 Improving the accuracy required exploiting detailed knowledge of
5121 profiler internals; the earlier method abstracted away the details
5122 and measured a simplified model instead, but consequently computed
5123 a constant too small by a factor of 2 on some modern machines.
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00005124
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00005125- quopri's encode and decode methods take an optional header parameter,
Jeremy Hylton6f543b62001-10-16 20:42:52 +00005126 which indicates whether output is intended for the header 'Q'
5127 encoding.
5128
Guido van Rossuma5343cc2001-10-18 18:02:07 +00005129- The SocketServer.ThreadingMixIn class now closes the request after
5130 finish_request() returns. (Not when it errors out though.)
5131
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005132- The nntplib module's NNTP.body() method has grown a 'file' argument
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00005133 to allow saving the message body to a file.
5134
5135- The email package has added a class email.Parser.HeaderParser which
5136 only parses headers and does not recurse into the message's body.
5137 Also, the module/class MIMEAudio has been added for representing
5138 audio data (contributed by Anthony Baxter).
5139
5140- ftplib should be able to handle files > 2GB.
5141
5142- ConfigParser.getboolean() now also interprets TRUE, FALSE, YES, NO,
5143 ON, and OFF.
5144
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00005145- xml.dom.minidom NodeList objects now support the length attribute
5146 and item() method as required by the DOM specifications.
5147
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00005148Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005149-----------
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00005150
5151- Demo/dns was removed. It no longer serves any purpose; a package
5152 derived from it is now maintained by Anthony Baxter, see
5153 http://PyDNS.SourceForge.net.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005154
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00005155- The freeze tool has been made more robust, and two new options have
5156 been added: -X and -E.
5157
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005158Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005159-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005160
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00005161- configure will use CXX in LINKCC if CXX is used to build main() and
5162 the system requires to link a C++ main using the C++ compiler.
5163
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005164C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005165-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005166
Guido van Rossum6c4bce32001-10-18 19:20:25 +00005167- The documentation for the tp_compare slot is updated to require that
5168 the return value must be -1, 0, 1; an arbitrary number <0 or >0 is
5169 not correct. This is not yet enforced but will be enforced in
5170 Python 2.3; even later, we may use -2 to indicate errors and +2 for
5171 "NotImplemented". Right now, -1 should be used for an error return.
5172
Tim Petersd38b1c72001-09-30 05:09:37 +00005173- PyLong_AsLongLong() now accepts int (as well as long) arguments.
5174 Consequently, PyArg_ParseTuple's 'L' code also accepts int (as well
5175 as long) arguments.
5176
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00005177- PyThread_start_new_thread() now returns a long int giving the thread
5178 ID, if one can be calculated; it returns -1 for error, 0 if no
5179 thread ID is calculated (this is an incompatible change, but only
5180 the thread module used this API). This code has only really been
5181 tested on Linux and Windows; other platforms please beware (and
5182 report any bugs or strange behavior).
5183
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00005184- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() no longer accepts Unicode objects as
5185 input.
5186
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005187New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005188-------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005189
5190Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005191-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005192
5193Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005194-------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005195
Tim Peters04cf1d32001-10-09 22:39:40 +00005196- Installer: If you install IDLE, and don't disable file-extension
5197 registration, a new "Edit with IDLE" context (right-click) menu entry
5198 is created for .py and .pyw files.
5199
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00005200- The signal module now supports SIGBREAK on Windows, thanks to Steven
5201 Scott. Note that SIGBREAK is unique to Windows. The default SIGBREAK
5202 action remains to call Win32 ExitProcess(). This can be changed via
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00005203 signal.signal(). For example::
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00005204
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005205 # Make Ctrl+Break raise KeyboardInterrupt, like Python's default Ctrl+C
5206 # (SIGINT) behavior.
5207 import signal
5208 signal.signal(signal.SIGBREAK, signal.default_int_handler)
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00005209
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005210 try:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00005211 while 1:
5212 pass
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005213 except KeyboardInterrupt:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00005214 # We get here on Ctrl+C or Ctrl+Break now; if we had not changed
5215 # SIGBREAK, only on Ctrl+C (and Ctrl+Break would terminate the
5216 # program without the possibility for any Python-level cleanup).
5217 print "Clean exit"
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00005218
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005219
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005220What's New in Python 2.2a4?
5221===========================
5222
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005223*Release date: 28-Sep-2001*
5224
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005225Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005226--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005227
5228- pydoc and inspect are now aware of new-style classes;
5229 e.g. help(list) at the interactive prompt now shows proper
5230 documentation for all operations on list objects.
5231
5232- Applications using Jim Fulton's ExtensionClass module can now safely
5233 be used with Python 2.2. In particular, Zope 2.4.1 now works with
5234 Python 2.2 (as well as with Python 2.1.1). The Demo/metaclass
5235 examples also work again. It is hoped that Gtk and Boost also work
5236 with 2.2a4 and beyond. (If you can confirm this, please write
5237 webmaster@python.org; if there are still problems, please open a bug
5238 report on SourceForge.)
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005239
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00005240- property() now takes 4 keyword arguments: fget, fset, fdel and doc.
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00005241 These map to read-only attributes 'fget', 'fset', 'fdel', and '__doc__'
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00005242 in the constructed property object. fget, fset and fdel weren't
5243 discoverable from Python in 2.2a3. __doc__ is new, and allows to
5244 associate a docstring with a property.
5245
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005246- Comparison overloading is now more completely implemented. For
5247 example, a str subclass instance can properly be compared to a str
5248 instance, and it can properly overload comparison. Ditto for most
5249 other built-in object types.
5250
5251- The repr() of new-style classes has changed; instead of <type
5252 'M.Foo'> a new-style class is now rendered as <class 'M.Foo'>,
5253 *except* for built-in types, which are still rendered as <type
5254 'Foo'> (to avoid upsetting existing code that might parse or
5255 otherwise rely on repr() of certain type objects).
5256
5257- The repr() of new-style objects is now always <Foo object at XXX>;
5258 previously, it was sometimes <Foo instance at XXX>.
5259
5260- For new-style classes, what was previously called __getattr__ is now
5261 called __getattribute__. This method, if defined, is called for
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00005262 *every* attribute access. A new __getattr__ hook more similar to the
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005263 one in classic classes is defined which is called only if regular
5264 attribute access raises AttributeError; to catch *all* attribute
5265 access, you can use __getattribute__ (for new-style classes). If
5266 both are defined, __getattribute__ is called first, and if it raises
5267 AttributeError, __getattr__ is called.
5268
5269- The __class__ attribute of new-style objects can be assigned to.
5270 The new class must have the same C-level object layout as the old
5271 class.
5272
5273- The builtin file type can be subclassed now. In the usual pattern,
5274 "file" is the name of the builtin type, and file() is a new builtin
5275 constructor, with the same signature as the builtin open() function.
5276 file() is now the preferred way to open a file.
5277
5278- Previously, __new__ would only see sequential arguments passed to
5279 the type in a constructor call; __init__ would see both sequential
5280 and keyword arguments. This made no sense whatsoever any more, so
5281 now both __new__ and __init__ see all arguments.
5282
5283- Previously, hash() applied to an instance of a subclass of str or
5284 unicode always returned 0. This has been repaired.
5285
5286- Previously, an operation on an instance of a subclass of an
5287 immutable type (int, long, float, complex, tuple, str, unicode),
5288 where the subtype didn't override the operation (and so the
5289 operation was handled by the builtin type), could return that
5290 instance instead a value of the base type. For example, if s was of
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00005291 a str subclass type, s[:] returned s as-is. Now it returns a str
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005292 with the same value as s.
5293
Barry Warsaw86fbaf82001-09-28 15:26:12 +00005294- Provisional support for pickling new-style objects has been added.
5295
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005296Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005297----
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005298
Tim Peters2c9aa5e2001-09-23 04:06:05 +00005299- file.writelines() now accepts any iterable object producing strings.
5300
Marc-André Lemburgaefd7662001-09-20 12:59:37 +00005301- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() now works very much like
5302 PyObject_Str(obj) in that it tries to use __str__/tp_str
5303 on the object if the object is not a string or buffer. This
5304 makes unicode() behave like str() when applied to non-string/buffer
5305 objects.
5306
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00005307- PyFile_WriteObject now passes Unicode objects to the file's write
5308 method. As a result, all file-like objects which may be the target
Martin v. Löwis2777c022001-09-19 13:47:32 +00005309 of a print statement must support Unicode objects, i.e. they must
5310 at least convert them into ASCII strings.
5311
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005312- Thread scheduling on Solaris should be improved; it is no longer
5313 necessary to insert a small sleep at the start of a thread in order
5314 to let other runnable threads be scheduled.
5315
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005316Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005317-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005318
Marc-André Lemburgbf990172001-09-27 14:17:33 +00005319- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
5320 read character buffer compatible objects for their .write() methods.
5321 These objects are converted to strings and then handled as such
5322 by the instances.
5323
Barry Warsaw2f600732001-09-24 04:28:10 +00005324- The "email" package has been added. This is basically a port of the
5325 mimelib package <http://sf.net/projects/mimelib> with API changes
5326 and some implementations updated to use iterators and generators.
5327
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00005328- difflib.ndiff() and difflib.Differ.compare() are generators now. This
5329 restores the ability of Tools/scripts/ndiff.py to start producing output
5330 before the entire comparison is complete.
5331
Barry Warsaw58b072d2001-09-22 04:44:21 +00005332- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
5333 iteration just like file objects (i.e. their .readline() method is
5334 called for each iteration until it returns an empty string).
5335
Marc-André Lemburg494f2ae2001-09-19 11:33:31 +00005336- The codecs module has grown four new helper APIs to access
5337 builtin codecs: getencoder(), getdecoder(), getreader(),
5338 getwriter().
5339
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005340- SimpleXMLRPCServer: a new module (based upon SimpleHTMLServer)
5341 simplifies writing XML RPC servers.
5342
Barry Warsaw647d5e82001-09-28 17:01:02 +00005343- os.path.realpath(): a new function that returns the absolute pathname
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005344 after interpretation of symbolic links. On non-Unix systems, this
5345 is an alias for os.path.abspath().
5346
Tim Peters16a77ad2001-09-08 04:00:12 +00005347- operator.indexOf() (PySequence_Index() in the C API) now works with any
5348 iterable object.
5349
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005350- smtplib now supports various authentication and security features of
5351 the SMTP protocol through the new login() and starttls() methods.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00005352
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005353- hmac: a new module implementing keyed hashing for message
5354 authentication.
5355
5356- mimetypes now recognizes more extensions and file types. At the
5357 same time, some mappings not sanctioned by IANA were removed.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00005358
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005359- The "compiler" package has been brought up to date to the state of
Guido van Rossumc9ed5dc2001-09-20 05:30:24 +00005360 Python 2.2 bytecode generation. It has also been promoted from a
5361 Tool to a standard library package. (Tools/compiler still exists as
5362 a sample driver.)
5363
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005364Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005365-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005366
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005367- Large file support (LFS) is now automatic when the platform supports
5368 it; no more manual configuration tweaks are needed. On Linux, at
5369 least, it's possible to have a system whose C library supports large
5370 files but whose kernel doesn't; in this case, large file support is
5371 still enabled but doesn't do you any good unless you upgrade your
5372 kernel or share your Python executable with another system whose
5373 kernel has large file support.
5374
5375- The configure script now supplies plausible defaults in a
5376 cross-compilation environment. This doesn't mean that the supplied
5377 values are always correct, or that cross-compilation now works
5378 flawlessly -- but it's a first step (and it shuts up most of
5379 autoconf's warnings about AC_TRY_RUN).
5380
5381- The Unix build is now a bit less chatty, courtesy of the parser
5382 generator. The build is completely silent (except for errors) when
5383 using "make -s", thanks to a -q option to setup.py.
5384
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005385C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005386-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005387
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005388- The "structmember" API now supports some new flag bits to deny read
5389 and/or write access to attributes in restricted execution mode.
5390
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005391New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005392-------------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005393
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005394- Compaq's iPAQ handheld, running the "familiar" Linux distribution
5395 (http://familiar.handhelds.org).
5396
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005397Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005398-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005399
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00005400- The "classic" standard tests, which work by comparing stdout to
5401 an expected-output file under Lib/test/output/, no longer stop at
5402 the first mismatch. Instead the test is run to completion, and a
5403 variant of ndiff-style comparison is used to report all differences.
5404 This is much easier to understand than the previous style of reporting.
5405
5406- The unittest-based standard tests now use regrtest's test_main()
5407 convention, instead of running as a side-effect of merely being
5408 imported. This allows these tests to be run in more natural and
5409 flexible ways as unittests, outside the regrtest framework.
5410
5411- regrtest.py is much better integrated with unittest and doctest now,
5412 especially in regard to reporting errors.
5413
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005414Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005415-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005416
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005417- Large file support now also works for files > 4GB, on filesystems
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00005418 that support it (NTFS under Windows 2000). See "What's New in
5419 Python 2.2a3" for more detail.
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005420
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005421
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005422What's New in Python 2.2a3?
5423===========================
5424
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005425*Release Date: 07-Sep-2001*
5426
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005427Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005428----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005429
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005430- Conversion of long to float now raises OverflowError if the long is too
5431 big to represent as a C double.
5432
Tim Peters32f453e2001-09-03 08:35:41 +00005433- The 3-argument builtin pow() no longer allows a third non-None argument
5434 if either of the first two arguments is a float, or if both are of
5435 integer types and the second argument is negative (in which latter case
5436 the arguments are converted to float, so this is really the same
5437 restriction).
5438
Tim Peters5d2b77c2001-09-03 05:47:38 +00005439- The builtin dir() now returns more information, and sometimes much
5440 more, generally naming all attributes of an object, and all attributes
5441 reachable from the object via its class, and from its class's base
5442 classes, and so on from them too. Example: in 2.2a2, dir([]) returned
5443 an empty list. In 2.2a3,
5444
5445 >>> dir([])
5446 ['__add__', '__class__', '__contains__', '__delattr__', '__delitem__',
5447 '__eq__', '__ge__', '__getattr__', '__getitem__', '__getslice__',
5448 '__gt__', '__hash__', '__iadd__', '__imul__', '__init__', '__le__',
5449 '__len__', '__lt__', '__mul__', '__ne__', '__new__', '__repr__',
5450 '__rmul__', '__setattr__', '__setitem__', '__setslice__', '__str__',
5451 'append', 'count', 'extend', 'index', 'insert', 'pop', 'remove',
5452 'reverse', 'sort']
5453
5454 dir(module) continues to return only the module's attributes, though.
5455
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005456- Overflowing operations on plain ints now return a long int rather
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005457 than raising OverflowError. This is a partial implementation of PEP
5458 237. You can use -Wdefault::OverflowWarning to enable a warning for
5459 this situation, and -Werror::OverflowWarning to revert to the old
5460 OverflowError exception.
5461
Guido van Rossum61c345f2001-09-04 03:26:15 +00005462- A new command line option, -Q<arg>, is added to control run-time
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005463 warnings for the use of classic division. (See PEP 238.) Possible
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00005464 values are -Qold, -Qwarn, -Qwarnall, and -Qnew. The default is
5465 -Qold, meaning the / operator has its classic meaning and no
5466 warnings are issued. Using -Qwarn issues a run-time warning about
5467 all uses of classic division for int and long arguments; -Qwarnall
5468 also warns about classic division for float and complex arguments
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00005469 (for use with fixdiv.py).
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005470 [Note: the remainder of this item (preserved below) became
5471 obsolete in 2.2c1 -- -Qnew has global effect in 2.2] ::
5472
5473 Using -Qnew is questionable; it turns on new division by default, but
5474 only in the __main__ module. You can usefully combine -Qwarn or
5475 -Qwarnall and -Qnew: this gives the __main__ module new division, and
5476 warns about classic division everywhere else.
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005477
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005478- Many built-in types can now be subclassed. This applies to int,
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005479 long, float, str, unicode, and tuple. (The types complex, list and
5480 dictionary can also be subclassed; this was introduced earlier.)
5481 Note that restrictions apply when subclassing immutable built-in
5482 types: you can only affect the value of the instance by overloading
5483 __new__. You can add mutable attributes, and the subclass instances
5484 will have a __dict__ attribute, but you cannot change the "value"
5485 (as implemented by the base class) of an immutable subclass instance
5486 once it is created.
5487
Guido van Rossumaaf80c82001-09-02 13:44:35 +00005488- The dictionary constructor now takes an optional argument, a
5489 mapping-like object, and initializes the dictionary from its
5490 (key, value) pairs.
5491
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005492- A new built-in type, super, has been added. This facilitates making
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005493 "cooperative super calls" in a multiple inheritance setting. For an
5494 explanation, see http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#cooperation
5495
Guido van Rossum8d7234d2001-09-06 22:02:58 +00005496- A new built-in type, property, has been added. This enables the
5497 creation of "properties". These are attributes implemented by
5498 getter and setter functions (or only one of these for read-only or
5499 write-only attributes), without the need to override __getattr__.
5500 See http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#property
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005501
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005502- The syntax of floating-point and imaginary literals has been
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005503 liberalized, to allow leading zeroes. Examples of literals now
5504 legal that were SyntaxErrors before:
5505
5506 00.0 0e3 0100j 07.5 00000000000000000008.
5507
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005508- An old tokenizer bug allowed floating point literals with an incomplete
Tim Petersc6d95812001-08-28 20:56:27 +00005509 exponent, such as 1e and 3.1e-. Such literals now raise SyntaxError.
5510
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005511Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005512-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005513
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00005514- telnetlib includes symbolic names for the options, and support for
Martin v. Löwis1da9c572002-11-04 09:56:00 +00005515 setting an option negotiation callback. It also supports processing
5516 of suboptions.
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00005517
Tim Petersa40c7932001-09-05 22:36:56 +00005518- The new C standard no longer requires that math libraries set errno to
5519 ERANGE on overflow. For platform libraries that exploit this new
5520 freedom, Python's overflow-checking was wholly broken. A new overflow-
5521 checking scheme attempts to repair that, but may not be reliable on all
5522 platforms (C doesn't seem to provide anything both useful and portable
5523 in this area anymore).
5524
Martin v. Löwis44f86962001-09-05 13:44:54 +00005525- Asynchronous timeout actions are available through the new class
5526 threading.Timer.
5527
Tim Peters78526162001-09-05 00:53:45 +00005528- math.log and math.log10 now return sensible results for even huge
5529 long arguments. For example, math.log10(10 ** 10000) ~= 10000.0.
5530
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005531- A new function, imp.lock_held(), returns 1 when the import lock is
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005532 currently held. See the docs for the imp module.
5533
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005534- pickle, cPickle and marshal on 32-bit platforms can now correctly read
Tim Peters82112372001-08-29 02:28:42 +00005535 dumps containing ints written on platforms where Python ints are 8 bytes.
5536 When read on a box where Python ints are 4 bytes, such values are
5537 converted to Python longs.
5538
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005539- In restricted execution mode (using the rexec module), unmarshalling
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005540 code objects is no longer allowed. This plugs a security hole.
5541
Steve Purcell6091cd62001-09-06 16:05:17 +00005542- unittest.TestResult instances no longer store references to tracebacks
5543 generated by test failures. This prevents unexpected dangling references
5544 to objects that should be garbage collected between tests.
5545
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005546Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005547-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005548
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00005549- Tools/scripts/fixdiv.py has been added which can be used to fix
5550 division operators as per PEP 238.
5551
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005552Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005553-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005554
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00005555- If you are an adventurous person using Mac OS X you may want to look at
5556 Mac/OSX. There is a Makefile there that will build Python as a real Mac
5557 application, which can be used for experimenting with Carbon or Cocoa.
5558 Discussion of this on pythonmac-sig, please.
5559
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00005560C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005561-----
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00005562
5563- New function PyObject_Dir(obj), like Python __builtin__.dir(obj).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005564
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005565- Note that PyLong_AsDouble can fail! This has always been true, but no
5566 callers checked for it. It's more likely to fail now, because overflow
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00005567 errors are properly detected now. The proper way to check::
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005568
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005569 double x = PyLong_AsDouble(some_long_object);
5570 if (x == -1.0 && PyErr_Occurred()) {
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00005571 /* The conversion failed. */
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005572 }
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005573
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005574- The GC API has been changed. Extensions that use the old API will still
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005575 compile but will not participate in GC. To upgrade an extension
5576 module:
5577
5578 - rename Py_TPFLAGS_GC to PyTPFLAGS_HAVE_GC
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005579
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005580 - use PyObject_GC_New or PyObject_GC_NewVar to allocate objects and
5581 PyObject_GC_Del to deallocate them
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005582
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005583 - rename PyObject_GC_Init to PyObject_GC_Track and PyObject_GC_Fini
5584 to PyObject_GC_UnTrack
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005585
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005586 - remove PyGC_HEAD_SIZE from object size calculations
5587
5588 - remove calls to PyObject_AS_GC and PyObject_FROM_GC
5589
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005590- Two new functions: PyString_FromFormat() and PyString_FromFormatV().
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005591 These can be used safely to construct string objects from a
5592 sprintf-style format string (similar to the format string supported
5593 by PyErr_Format()).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005594
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005595New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005596-------------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005597
Tim Petersb7da0902001-09-02 23:01:43 +00005598- Stephen Hansen contributed patches sufficient to get a clean compile
5599 under Borland C (Windows), but he reports problems running it and ran
5600 out of time to complete the port. Volunteers? Expect a MemoryError
5601 when importing the types module; this is probably shallow, and
5602 causing later failures too.
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005603
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005604Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005605-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005606
5607Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005608-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005609
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00005610- Large file support is now enabled on Win32 platforms as well as on
5611 Win64. This means that, for example, you can use f.tell() and f.seek()
5612 to manipulate files larger than 2 gigabytes (provided you have enough
5613 disk space, and are using a Windows filesystem that supports large
Tim Peters9a9471c2001-09-11 23:18:51 +00005614 partitions). Windows filesystem limits: FAT has a 2GB (gigabyte)
5615 filesize limit, and large file support makes no difference there.
5616 FAT32's limit is 4GB, and files >= 2GB are easier to use from Python now.
5617 NTFS has no practical limit on file size, and files of any size can be
5618 used from Python now.
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00005619
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005620- The w9xpopen hack is now used on Windows NT and 2000 too when COMPSPEC
Tim Peters402d5982001-08-27 06:37:48 +00005621 points to command.com (patch from Brian Quinlan).
5622
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005623
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005624What's New in Python 2.2a2?
5625===========================
5626
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005627*Release Date: 22-Aug-2001*
5628
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005629Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005630-----
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005631
Barry Warsaw18b2ecf2001-08-22 20:26:56 +00005632- Tim Peters developed a brand new Windows installer using Wise 8.1,
5633 generously donated to us by Wise Solutions.
5634
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005635- configure supports a new option --enable-unicode, with the values
5636 ucs2 and ucs4 (new in 2.2a1). With --disable-unicode, the Unicode
5637 type and supporting code is completely removed from the interpreter.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005638
Jack Jansen32ce0cd2001-08-21 19:28:20 +00005639- A new configure option --enable-framework builds a Mac OS X framework,
5640 which "make frameworkinstall" will install. This provides a starting
5641 point for more mac-like functionality, join pythonmac-sig@python.org
5642 if you are interested in helping.
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005643
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005644- The NeXT platform is no longer supported.
5645
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005646- The 'new' module is now statically linked.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005647
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005648Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005649-----
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005650
5651- The new Tools/scripts/cleanfuture.py can be used to automatically
Andrew M. Kuchlingb0532092001-08-15 15:54:56 +00005652 edit out obsolete future statements from Python source code. See
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005653 the module docstring for details.
5654
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005655Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005656-----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005657
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005658- regrtest.py now knows which tests are expected to be skipped on some
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005659 platforms, allowing to give clearer test result output. regrtest
5660 also has optional --use/-u switch to run normally disabled tests
5661 which require network access or consume significant disk resources.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005662
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005663- Several new tests in the standard test suite, with special thanks to
5664 Nick Mathewson.
5665
5666Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005667----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005668
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005669- The floor division operator // has been added as outlined in PEP
5670 238. The / operator still provides classic division (and will until
5671 Python 3.0) unless "from __future__ import division" is included, in
5672 which case the / operator will provide true division. The operator
5673 module provides truediv() and floordiv() functions. Augmented
5674 assignment variants are included, as are the equivalent overloadable
5675 methods and C API methods. See the PEP for a full discussion:
5676 <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0238.html>
5677
Tim Peters6cd6a822001-08-17 22:11:27 +00005678- Future statements are now effective in simulated interactive shells
5679 (like IDLE). This should "just work" by magic, but read Michael
5680 Hudson's "Future statements in simulated shells" PEP 264 for full
5681 details: <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0264.html>.
5682
Guido van Rossumf86ddd22001-08-17 21:21:04 +00005683- The type/class unification (PEP 252-253) was integrated into the
5684 trunk and is not so tentative any more (the exact specification of
5685 some features is still tentative). A lot of work has done on fixing
5686 bugs and adding robustness and features (performance still has to
5687 come a long way).
5688
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00005689- Warnings about a mismatch in the Python API during extension import
5690 now use the Python warning framework (which makes it possible to
5691 write filters for these warnings).
5692
Barry Warsaw9b3be7f2001-08-14 18:35:02 +00005693- A function's __dict__ (aka func_dict) will now always be a
5694 dictionary. It used to be possible to delete it or set it to None,
5695 but now both actions raise TypeErrors. It is still legal to set it
5696 to a dictionary object. Getting func.__dict__ before any attributes
5697 have been assigned now returns an empty dictionary instead of None.
5698
Guido van Rossum32aa5d22001-09-05 18:43:35 +00005699- A new command line option, -E, was added which disables the use of
5700 all environment variables, or at least those that are specifically
5701 significant to Python. Usually those have a name starting with
5702 "PYTHON". This was used to fix a problem where the tests fail if
5703 the user happens to have PYTHONHOME or PYTHONPATH pointing to an
5704 older distribution.
5705
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005706Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005707-------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005708
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005709- New class Differ and new functions ndiff() and restore() in difflib.py.
5710 These package the algorithms used by the popular Tools/scripts/ndiff.py,
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005711 for programmatic reuse.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005712
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005713- New function xml.sax.saxutils.quoteattr(): Quote an XML attribute
5714 value using the minimal quoting required for the value; more
5715 reliable than using xml.sax.saxutils.escape() for attribute values.
5716
5717- Readline completion support for cmd.Cmd was added.
5718
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005719- Calling os.tempnam() or os.tmpnam() generate RuntimeWarnings.
5720
5721- Added function threading.BoundedSemaphore()
5722
5723- Added Ka-Ping Yee's cgitb.py module.
5724
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005725- The 'new' module now exposes the CO_xxx flags.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005726
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00005727- The gc module offers the get_referents function.
5728
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005729New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005730-------------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005731
5732C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005733-----
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005734
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00005735- Two new APIs PyOS_snprintf() and PyOS_vsnprintf() were added
5736 which provide a cross-platform implementations for the
5737 relatively new snprintf()/vsnprintf() C lib APIs. In contrast to
5738 the standard sprintf() and vsprintf() C lib APIs, these versions
5739 apply bounds checking on the used buffer which enhances protection
5740 against buffer overruns.
5741
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00005742- Unicode APIs now use name mangling to assure that mixing interpreters
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005743 and extensions using different Unicode widths is rendered next to
5744 impossible. Trying to import an incompatible Unicode-aware extension
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00005745 will result in an ImportError. Unicode extensions writers must make
5746 sure to check the Unicode width compatibility in their extensions by
5747 using at least one of the mangled Unicode APIs in the extension.
5748
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005749- Two new flags METH_NOARGS and METH_O are available in method definition
5750 tables to simplify implementation of methods with no arguments and a
5751 single untyped argument. Calling such methods is more efficient than
5752 calling corresponding METH_VARARGS methods. METH_OLDARGS is now
5753 deprecated.
5754
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005755Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005756-------
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005757
5758- "import module" now compiles module.pyw if it exists and nothing else
5759 relevant is found.
5760
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005761
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005762What's New in Python 2.2a1?
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005763===========================
5764
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005765*Release date: 18-Jul-2001*
5766
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005767Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005768----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005769
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00005770- TENTATIVELY, a large amount of code implementing much of what's
5771 described in PEP 252 (Making Types Look More Like Classes) and PEP
5772 253 (Subtyping Built-in Types) was added. This will be released
5773 with Python 2.2a1. Documentation will be provided separately
5774 through http://www.python.org/2.2/. The purpose of releasing this
5775 with Python 2.2a1 is to test backwards compatibility. It is
5776 possible, though not likely, that a decision is made not to release
5777 this code as part of 2.2 final, if any serious backwards
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005778 incompatibilities are found during alpha testing that cannot be
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00005779 repaired.
5780
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005781- Generators were added; this is a new way to create an iterator (see
Tim Peters11a0d102001-07-17 18:48:00 +00005782 below) using what looks like a simple function containing one or
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005783 more 'yield' statements. See PEP 255. Since this adds a new
5784 keyword to the language, this feature must be enabled by including a
5785 future statement: "from __future__ import generators" (see PEP 236).
5786 Generators will become a standard feature in a future release
5787 (probably 2.3). Without this future statement, 'yield' remains an
5788 ordinary identifier, but a warning is issued each time it is used.
5789 (These warnings currently don't conform to the warnings framework of
5790 PEP 230; we intend to fix this in 2.2a2.)
5791
Marc-André Lemburg12e74b32001-05-22 08:58:23 +00005792- The UTF-16 codec was modified to be more RFC compliant. It will now
5793 only remove BOM characters at the start of the string and then
5794 only if running in native mode (UTF-16-LE and -BE won't remove a
5795 leading BMO character).
5796
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005797- Strings now have a new method .decode() to complement the already
5798 existing .encode() method. These two methods provide direct access
5799 to the corresponding decoders and encoders of the registered codecs.
5800
5801 To enhance the usability of the .encode() method, the special
5802 casing of Unicode object return values was dropped (Unicode objects
5803 were auto-magically converted to string using the default encoding).
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005804
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005805 Both methods will now return whatever the codec in charge of the
5806 requested encoding returns as object, e.g. Unicode codecs will
5807 return Unicode objects when decoding is requested ("äöü".decode("latin-1")
5808 will return u"äöü"). This enables codec writer to create codecs
5809 for various simple to use conversions.
5810
5811 New codecs were added to demonstrate these new features (the .encode()
5812 and .decode() columns indicate the type of the returned objects):
5813
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005814 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5815 |Name | .encode() | .decode() | Description |
5816 +=========+===========+===========+=============================+
5817 |uu | string | string | UU codec (e.g. for email) |
5818 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5819 |base64 | string | string | base64 codec |
5820 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5821 |quopri | string | string | quoted-printable codec |
5822 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5823 |zlib | string | string | zlib compression |
5824 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5825 |hex | string | string | 2-byte hex codec |
5826 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5827 |rot-13 | string | Unicode | ROT-13 Unicode charmap codec|
5828 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005829
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005830- Some operating systems now support the concept of a default Unicode
5831 encoding for file system operations. Notably, Windows supports 'mbcs'
5832 as the default. The Macintosh will also adopt this concept in the medium
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005833 term, although the default encoding for that platform will be other than
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005834 'mbcs'.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005835
5836 On operating system that support non-ASCII filenames, it is common for
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005837 functions that return filenames (such as os.listdir()) to return Python
5838 string objects pre-encoded using the default file system encoding for
5839 the platform. As this encoding is likely to be different from Python's
5840 default encoding, converting this name to a Unicode object before passing
5841 it back to the Operating System would result in a Unicode error, as Python
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005842 would attempt to use its default encoding (generally ASCII) rather than
5843 the default encoding for the file system.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005844
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005845 In general, this change simply removes surprises when working with
5846 Unicode and the file system, making these operations work as you expect,
5847 increasing the transparency of Unicode objects in this context.
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005848 See [????] for more details, including examples.
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005849
Tim Peters61dff2b2001-05-08 15:43:37 +00005850- Float (and complex) literals in source code were evaluated to full
5851 precision only when running from a .py file; the same code loaded from a
5852 .pyc (or .pyo) file could suffer numeric differences starting at about the
5853 12th significant decimal digit. For example, on a machine with IEEE-754
5854 floating arithmetic,
5855
5856 x = 9007199254740992.0
5857 print long(x)
5858
5859 printed 9007199254740992 if run directly from .py, but 9007199254740000
5860 if from a compiled (.pyc or .pyo) file. This was due to marshal using
5861 str(float) instead of repr(float) when building code objects. marshal
5862 now uses repr(float) instead, which should reproduce floats to full
5863 machine precision (assuming the platform C float<->string I/O conversion
5864 functions are of good quality).
5865
5866 This may cause floating-point results to change in some cases, and
5867 usually for the better, but may also cause numerically unstable
5868 algorithms to break.
5869
Tim Peters2f228e72001-05-13 00:19:31 +00005870- The implementation of dicts suffers fewer collisions, which has speed
5871 benefits. However, the order in which dict entries appear in dict.keys(),
5872 dict.values() and dict.items() may differ from previous releases for a
5873 given dict. Nothing is defined about this order, so no program should
5874 rely on it. Nevertheless, it's easy to write test cases that rely on the
5875 order by accident, typically because of printing the str() or repr() of a
5876 dict to an "expected results" file. See Lib/test/test_support.py's new
5877 sortdict(dict) function for a simple way to display a dict in sorted
5878 order.
5879
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005880- Many other small changes to dicts were made, resulting in faster
5881 operation along the most common code paths.
5882
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00005883- Dictionary objects now support the "in" operator: "x in dict" means
5884 the same as dict.has_key(x).
5885
Barry Warsaw51acc8d2001-06-26 20:12:50 +00005886- The update() method of dictionaries now accepts generic mapping
5887 objects. Specifically the argument object must support the .keys()
5888 and __getitem__() methods. This allows you to say, for example,
5889 {}.update(UserDict())
5890
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00005891- Iterators were added; this is a generalized way of providing values
5892 to a for loop. See PEP 234. There's a new built-in function iter()
5893 to return an iterator. There's a new protocol to get the next value
5894 from an iterator using the next() method (in Python) or the
5895 tp_iternext slot (in C). There's a new protocol to get iterators
5896 using the __iter__() method (in Python) or the tp_iter slot (in C).
5897 Iterating (i.e. a for loop) over a dictionary generates its keys.
5898 Iterating over a file generates its lines.
5899
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005900- The following functions were generalized to work nicely with iterator
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00005901 arguments::
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005902
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00005903 map(), filter(), reduce(), zip()
Tim Peters8572b4f2001-05-06 01:05:02 +00005904 list(), tuple() (PySequence_Tuple() and PySequence_Fast() in C API)
5905 max(), min()
Tim Peters1af03e92001-05-26 19:37:54 +00005906 join() method of strings
5907 extend() method of lists
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00005908 'x in y' and 'x not in y' (PySequence_Contains() in C API)
5909 operator.countOf() (PySequence_Count() in C API)
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005910 right-hand side of assignment statements with multiple targets, such as ::
Tim Petersd6d010b2001-06-21 02:49:55 +00005911 x, y, z = some_iterable_object_returning_exactly_3_values
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00005912
Tim Petersd85e1022001-05-11 21:51:48 +00005913- Accessing module attributes is significantly faster (for example,
5914 random.random or os.path or yourPythonModule.yourAttribute).
5915
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00005916- Comparing dictionary objects via == and != is faster, and now works even
5917 if the keys and values don't support comparisons other than ==.
5918
Tim Peters95bf9392001-05-10 08:32:44 +00005919- Comparing dictionaries in ways other than == and != is slower: there were
5920 insecurities in the dict comparison implementation that could cause Python
5921 to crash if the element comparison routines for the dict keys and/or
5922 values mutated the dicts. Making the code bulletproof slowed it down.
5923
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005924- Collisions in dicts are resolved via a new approach, which can help
5925 dramatically in bad cases. For example, looking up every key in a dict
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005926 d with d.keys() == [i << 16 for i in range(20000)] is approximately 500x
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005927 faster now. Thanks to Christian Tismer for pointing out the cause and
5928 the nature of an effective cure (last December! better late than never).
Tim Peters15d49292001-05-27 07:39:22 +00005929
Tim Peters52e155e2001-06-16 05:42:57 +00005930- repr() is much faster for large containers (dict, list, tuple).
5931
5932
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005933Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005934-------
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005935
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00005936- The constants ascii_letters, ascii_lowercase. and ascii_uppercase
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005937 were added to the string module. These a locale-independent
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00005938 constants, unlike letters, lowercase, and uppercase. These are now
5939 use in appropriate locations in the standard library.
5940
Martin v. Löwisf0473d52001-07-18 16:17:16 +00005941- The flags used in dlopen calls can now be configured using
5942 sys.setdlopenflags and queried using sys.getdlopenflags.
5943
Guido van Rossumc7e4aca2001-07-12 11:54:37 +00005944- Fredrik Lundh's xmlrpclib is now a standard library module. This
5945 provides full client-side XML-RPC support. In addition,
5946 Demo/xmlrpc/ contains two server frameworks (one SocketServer-based,
5947 one asyncore-based). Thanks to Eric Raymond for the documentation.
5948
Guido van Rossum643d3912001-07-05 14:46:25 +00005949- The xrange() object is simplified: it no longer supports slicing,
5950 repetition, comparisons, efficient 'in' checking, the tolist()
5951 method, or the start, stop and step attributes. See PEP 260.
5952
Martin v. Löwisebf94db2001-06-06 06:25:40 +00005953- A new function fnmatch.filter to filter lists of file names was added.
5954
Barry Warsawffd674d2001-05-22 16:00:10 +00005955- calendar.py uses month and day names based on the current locale.
5956
Guido van Rossum2e0a6542001-05-15 02:14:44 +00005957- strop is now *really* obsolete (this was announced before with 1.6),
5958 and issues DeprecationWarning when used (except for the four items
5959 that are still imported into string.py).
5960
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005961- Cookie.py now sorts key+value pairs by key in output strings.
5962
5963- pprint.isrecursive(object) didn't correctly identify recursive objects.
5964 Now it does.
5965
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00005966- pprint functions now much faster for large containers (tuple, list, dict).
5967
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00005968- New 'q' and 'Q' format codes in the struct module, corresponding to C
5969 types "long long" and "unsigned long long" (on Windows, __int64). In
5970 native mode, these can be used only when the platform C compiler supports
5971 these types (when HAVE_LONG_LONG is #define'd by the Python config
5972 process), and then they inherit the sizes and alignments of the C types.
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005973 In standard mode, 'q' and 'Q' are supported on all platforms, and are
5974 8-byte integral types.
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00005975
Guido van Rossum83213cc2001-06-12 16:48:52 +00005976- The site module installs a new built-in function 'help' that invokes
5977 pydoc.help. It must be invoked as 'help()'; when invoked as 'help',
5978 it displays a message reminding the user to use 'help()' or
5979 'help(object)'.
5980
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005981Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005982-----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005983
5984- New test_mutants.py runs dict comparisons where the key and value
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005985 comparison operators mutate the dicts randomly during comparison. This
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005986 rapidly causes Python to crash under earlier releases (not for the faint
5987 of heart: it can also cause Win9x to freeze or reboot!).
5988
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005989- New test_pprint.py verifies that pprint.isrecursive() and
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00005990 pprint.isreadable() return sensible results. Also verifies that simple
5991 cases produce correct output.
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005992
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00005993C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005994-----
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00005995
5996- Removed the unused last_is_sticky argument from the internal
5997 _PyTuple_Resize(). If this affects you, you were cheating.
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005998
5999----
6000
6001**(For information about older versions, consult the HISTORY file.)**