blob: 0a674d2cfb16441a4914c783a448d2a61b3bb031 [file] [log] [blame]
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001+++++++++++
2Python News
3+++++++++++
4
Skip Montanaro4a385832002-09-20 17:08:52 +00005(editors: check NEWS.help for information about editing NEWS using ReST.)
6
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00007What's New in Python 2.3 beta 1?
8================================
9
10*Release date: XX-XXX-2003*
11
12Core and builtins
13-----------------
14
Raymond Hettingera3e1e4c2003-03-06 23:54:28 +000015- dict.pop now takes an optional argument specifying a default
16 value to return if the key is not in the dict. If a default is not
17 given and the key is not found, a KeyError will still be raised.
18 Parallel changes were made to UserDict.UserDict and UserDict.DictMixin.
19 [SF patch #693753] (contributed by Michael Stone.)
20
Martin v. Löwis73d538b2003-03-05 15:13:47 +000021- sys.getfilesystemencoding() was added to expose
22 Py_FileSystemDefaultEncoding.
Guido van Rossum46d3dc32003-03-01 03:20:41 +000023
24- New function sys.exc_clear() clears the current exception. This is
25 rarely needed, but can sometimes be useful to release objects
26 referenced by the traceback held in sys.exc_info()[2]. (SF patch
27 #693195.)
28
Neal Norwitzd5a65a72003-02-23 23:11:41 +000029- On 64-bit systems, a dictionary could contain duplicate long/int keys
30 if the key value was larger than 2**32. See SF bug #689659.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +000031
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +000032- Fixed SF bug #663074. The codec system was using global static
33 variables to store internal data. As a result, any atempts to use the
34 unicode system with multiple active interpreters, or successive
35 interpreter executions, would fail.
36
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +000037Extension modules
38-----------------
39
Tim Petersd50ade62003-03-20 18:32:13 +000040- The platform-independent routines for packing floats in IEEE formats
41 (struct.pack's <f, >f, <d, and >d codes; pickle and cPickle's protocol 1
42 pickling of floats) ignored that rounding can cause a carry to
43 propagate. The worst consequence was that, in rare cases, <f and >f
44 could produce strings that, when unpacked again, were a factor of 2
45 away from the original float. This has been fixed. See SF bug
46 #705836.
47
Guido van Rossumd11b62e2003-03-14 21:51:36 +000048- New function time.tzset() provides access to the C library tzet()
49 function, if supported. (SF patch #675422.)
50
Neal Norwitz12e22172003-03-03 21:16:39 +000051- Using createfilehandler, deletefilehandler, createtimerhandler functions
52 on Tkinter.tkinter (_tkinter module) no longer crashes the interpreter.
53 See SF bug #692416.
54
Michael W. Hudsonf0089982003-03-03 12:29:42 +000055- Modified the fcntl.ioctl() function to allow modification of a passed
56 mutable buffer (for details see the reference documentation).
57
Raymond Hettinger61fe64d2003-02-23 04:40:07 +000058- Made user requested changes to the itertools module.
59 Subsumed the times() function into repeat().
60 Added chain() and cycle().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +000061
62Library
63-------
64
Raymond Hettinger42182eb2003-03-09 05:33:33 +000065- The urllib module now offers support for the iterator protocol.
66 SF patch 698520 contributed by Brett Cannon.
67
Guido van Rossum9589a252003-03-06 01:56:12 +000068- New module timeit provides a simple framework for timing the
69 execution speed of expressions and statements.
70
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +000071- sets.Set objects now support mixed-type __eq__ and __ne__, instead
72 of raising TypeError. If x is a Set object and y is a non-Set object,
73 x == y is False, and x != y is True. This is akin to the change made
74 for mixed-type comparisons of datetime objects in 2.3a2; more info
75 about the rationale is in the NEWS entry for that. See also SF bug
76 report <http://www.python.org/sf/693121>.
77
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +000078- On Unix platforms, if os.listdir() is called with a Unicode argument,
79 it now returns Unicode strings. (This behavior was added earlier
80 to the Windows NT/2k/XP version of os.listdir().)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +000081
Andrew M. Kuchling6f177d42003-02-28 22:09:33 +000082- Distutils: both 'py_modules' and 'packages' keywords can now be specified
83 in core.setup(). Previously you could supply one or the other, but
84 not both of them. (SF patch #695090 from Bernhard Herzog)
85
Skip Montanaro64a839e2003-03-20 23:36:55 +000086- New csv package makes it easy to read/write CSV files.
87
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +000088Tools/Demos
89-----------
90
91TBD
92
93Build
94-----
95
Neal Norwitz2c92c6e2003-02-28 17:24:00 +000096- Fix build problems when _iconv_codec failed. (SF bug #690012.)
97
Neal Norwitz35892b92003-02-23 23:45:35 +000098- Fix problem building on OSF1 because the compiler only accepted
99 preprocessor directives that start in column 1. (SF bug #691793.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000100
101C API
102-----
103
Raymond Hettinger1da1dbf2003-03-17 19:46:11 +0000104- Added PyObject_SelfIter() to fill the tp_iter slot for the
Raymond Hettinger01538262003-03-17 08:24:35 +0000105 typical case where the method returns its self argument.
106
Guido van Rossume5c691a2003-03-07 15:13:17 +0000107- The extended type structure used for heap types (new-style
108 classes defined by Python code using a class statement) is now
109 exported from object.h as PyHeapTypeObject. (SF patch #696193.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000110
111New platforms
112-------------
113
114TBD
115
116Tests
117-----
118
Neal Norwitz55b61d22003-02-28 19:57:03 +0000119- test_timeout now requires -u network to be passed to regrtest to run.
120 See SF bug #692988.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000121
122Windows
123-------
124
125TBD
126
127Mac
128---
129
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +0000130- os.listdir() now returns Unicode strings on MacOS X when called with
131 a Unicode argument. See the general news item under "Library".
Just van Rossum46c97842003-02-25 21:42:15 +0000132
Jack Jansendeac2ac2003-02-24 11:04:17 +0000133- A new method MacOS.WMAvailable() returns true if it is safe to access
134 the window manager, false otherwise.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +0000135
Jack Jansencf76be02003-03-24 12:13:54 +0000136- EasyDialogs dialogs are now movable-modal, and if the application is
137 currently in the background they will ask to be moved to the foreground
138 before displaying.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000139
140
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000141What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 2?
142=================================
143
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +0000144*Release date: 19-Feb-2003*
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000145
146Core and builtins
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +0000147-----------------
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000148
Walter Dörwald2ffec022003-02-19 16:34:11 +0000149- Negative positions returned from PEP 293 error callbacks are now
150 treated as being relative to the end of the input string. Positions
151 that are out of bounds raise an IndexError.
152
Guido van Rossum162e38c2003-02-19 15:25:10 +0000153- sys.path[0] (the directory from which the script is loaded) is now
154 turned into an absolute pathname, unless it is the empty string.
155 (SF patch #664376.)
156
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +0000157- Finally fixed the bug in compile() and exec where a string ending
158 with an indented code block but no newline would raise SyntaxError.
159 This would have been a four-line change in parsetok.c... Except
160 codeop.py depends on this behavior, so a compilation flag had to be
161 invented that causes the tokenizer to revert to the old behavior;
162 this required extra changes to 2 .h files, 2 .c files, and 2 .py
Guido van Rossum1442dc12003-02-13 22:19:20 +0000163 files. (Fixes SF bug #501622.)
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +0000164
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +0000165- If a new-style class defines neither __new__ nor __init__, its
166 constructor would ignore all arguments. This is changed now: the
167 constructor refuses arguments in this case. This might break code
168 that worked under Python 2.2. The simplest fix is to add a no-op
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +0000169 __init__: ``def __init__(self, *args, **kw): pass``.
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +0000170
Guido van Rossum48035eb2003-02-12 17:05:26 +0000171- Through a bytecode optimizer bug (and I bet you didn't even know
172 Python *had* a bytecode optimizer :-), "unsigned" hex/oct constants
173 with a leading minus sign would come out with the wrong sign.
174 ("Unsigned" hex/oct constants are those with a face value in the
175 range sys.maxint+1 through sys.maxint*2+1, inclusive; these have
176 always been interpreted as negative numbers through sign folding.)
177 E.g. 0xffffffff is -1, and -(0xffffffff) is 1, but -0xffffffff would
178 come out as -4294967295. This was the case in Python 2.2 through
179 2.2.2 and 2.3a1, and in Python 2.4 it will once again have that
180 value, but according to PEP 237 it really needs to be 1 now. This
181 will be backported to Python 2.2.3 a well. (SF #660455)
182
Guido van Rossum47710652003-02-12 20:48:22 +0000183- int(s, base) sometimes sign-folds hex and oct constants; it only
184 does this when base is 0 and s.strip() starts with a '0'. When the
185 sign is actually folded, as in int("0xffffffff", 0) on a 32-bit
186 machine, which returns -1, a FutureWarning is now issued; in Python
187 2.4, this will return 4294967295L, as do int("+0xffffffff", 0) and
188 int("0xffffffff", 16) right now. (PEP 347)
189
Guido van Rossuma89d10e2003-02-12 03:58:38 +0000190- super(X, x): x may now be a proxy for an X instance, i.e.
191 issubclass(x.__class__, X) but not issubclass(type(x), X).
192
Guido van Rossum03bc7d32003-02-12 03:32:58 +0000193- isinstance(x, X): if X is a new-style class, this is now equivalent
194 to issubclass(type(x), X) or issubclass(x.__class__, X). Previously
195 only type(x) was tested. (For classic classes this was already the
196 case.)
197
Just van Rossum73ffb4a2003-02-10 09:57:08 +0000198- compile(), eval() and the exec statement now fully support source code
199 passed as unicode strings.
200
Neal Norwitzde8b94c2003-02-10 02:12:43 +0000201- int subclasses can be initialized with longs if the value fits in an int.
202 See SF bug #683467.
203
Tim Petersbf2674b2003-02-02 07:51:32 +0000204- long(string, base) takes time linear in len(string) when base is a power
205 of 2 now. It used to take time quadratic in len(string).
206
Martin v. Löwis8afd7572003-01-25 22:46:11 +0000207- filter returns now Unicode results for Unicode arguments.
208
Martin v. Löwisaf6a27a2003-01-03 19:16:14 +0000209- raw_input can now return Unicode objects.
210
Skip Montanaro4abd5f02003-01-02 20:51:08 +0000211- List objects' sort() method now accepts None as the comparison function.
212 Passing None is semantically identical to calling sort() with no
213 arguments.
214
Neal Norwitz1a997502003-01-13 20:13:12 +0000215- Fixed crash when printing a subclass of str and __str__ returned self.
216 See SF bug #667147.
217
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +0000218- Fixed an invalid RuntimeWarning and an undetected error when trying
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +0000219 to convert a long integer into a float which couldn't fit.
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +0000220 See SF bug #676155.
221
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +0000222- Function objects now have a __module__ attribute that is bound to
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +0000223 the name of the module in which the function was defined. This
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +0000224 applies for C functions and methods as well as functions and methods
225 defined in Python. This attribute is used by pickle.whichmodule(),
226 which changes the behavior of whichmodule slightly. In Python 2.2
227 whichmodule() returns "__main__" for functions that are not defined
228 at the top-level of a module (examples: methods, nested functions).
229 Now whichmodule() will return the proper module name.
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +0000230
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000231Extension modules
232-----------------
233
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +0000234- operator.isNumberType() now checks that the object has a nb_int or
235 nb_float slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
236 tp_as_number pointer.
237
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +0000238- The imp module now has ways to acquire and release the "import
239 lock": imp.acquire_lock() and imp.release_lock(). Note: this is a
240 reentrant lock, so releasing the lock only truly releases it when
241 this is the last release_lock() call. You can check with
242 imp.lock_held(). (SF bug #580952 and patch #683257.)
243
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +0000244- Change to cPickle to match pickle.py (see below and PEP 307).
245
Neal Norwitz9caf9c02003-02-10 01:54:06 +0000246- Fix some bugs in the parser module. SF bug #678518.
247
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +0000248- Thanks to Scott David Daniels, a subtle bug in how the zlib
Walter Dörwald28d81962003-02-03 20:53:14 +0000249 extension implemented flush() was fixed. Scott also rewrote the
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +0000250 zlib test suite using the unittest module. (SF bug #640230 and
251 patch #678531.)
252
Raymond Hettinger96ef8112003-02-01 00:10:11 +0000253- Added an itertools module containing high speed, memory efficient
254 looping constructs inspired by tools from Haskell and SML.
255
Guido van Rossum99d4abf2003-01-27 22:22:50 +0000256- The SSL module now handles sockets with a timeout set correctly (SF
257 patch #675750, fixing SF bug #675552).
258
Martin v. Löwis9789aef2003-01-26 11:30:36 +0000259- A new module _iconv_codec has been added, to expose the iconv(3)
260 library.
261
Barry Warsawf8ba39c2003-01-07 20:55:26 +0000262- os/posixmodule has grown the sysexits.h constants (EX_OK and friends).
263
Guido van Rossum6d0d3652003-01-07 20:34:19 +0000264- Fixed broken threadstate swap in readline that could cause fatal
265 errors when a readline hook was being invoked while a background
266 thread was active. (SF bugs #660476 and #513033.)
267
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000268- fcntl now exposes the strops.h I_* constants.
269
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +0000270- Fix a crash on Solaris that occurred when calling close() on
271 an mmap'ed file which was already closed. (SF patch #665913)
272
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +0000273- Fixed several serious bugs in the zipimport implementation.
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +0000274
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +0000275- datetime changes:
276
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +0000277 The datetime and datetimetz classes have been collapsed into a single
278 datetime class, and likewise the time and timetz classes into a single
279 time class. Previously, a datetimetz object with tzinfo=None acted
280 exactly like a datetime object, and similarly for timetz. This wasn't
281 enough of a difference to justify distinct classes, and life is simpler
282 now.
283
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +0000284 today() and now() now round system timestamps to the closest
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +0000285 microsecond <http://www.python.org/sf/661086>. This repairs an
286 irritation most likely seen on Windows systems.
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +0000287
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +0000288 In dt.astimezone(tz), if tz.utcoffset(dt) returns a duration,
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +0000289 ValueError is raised if tz.dst(dt) returns None (2.3a1 treated it
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +0000290 as 0 instead, but a tzinfo subclass wishing to participate in
291 time zone conversion has to take a stand on whether it supports
292 DST; if you don't care about DST, then code dst() to return 0 minutes,
293 meaning that DST is never in effect).
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +0000294
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +0000295 The tzinfo methods utcoffset() and dst() must return a timedelta object
296 (or None) now. In 2.3a1 they could also return an int or long, but that
297 was an unhelpfully redundant leftover from an earlier version wherein
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +0000298 they couldn't return a timedelta. TOOWTDI.
299
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +0000300 The example tzinfo class for local time had a bug. It was replaced
301 by a later example coded by Guido.
302
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +0000303 datetime.astimezone(tz) no longer raises an exception when the
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +0000304 input datetime has no UTC equivalent in tz. For typical "hybrid" time
305 zones (a single tzinfo subclass modeling both standard and daylight
306 time), this case can arise one hour per year, at the hour daylight time
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +0000307 ends. See new docs for details. In short, the new behavior mimics
308 the local wall clock's behavior of repeating an hour in local time.
309
310 dt.astimezone() can no longer be used to convert between naive and aware
311 datetime objects. If you merely want to attach, or remove, a tzinfo
312 object, without any conversion of date and time members, use
313 dt.replace(tzinfo=whatever) instead, where "whatever" is None or a
314 tzinfo subclass instance.
315
316 A new method tzinfo.fromutc(dt) can be overridden in tzinfo subclasses
317 to give complete control over how a UTC time is to be converted to
318 a local time. The default astimezone() implementation calls fromutc()
319 as its last step, so a tzinfo subclass can affect that too by overriding
320 fromutc(). It's expected that the default fromutc() implementation will
321 be suitable as-is for "almost all" time zone subclasses, but the
322 creativity of political time zone fiddling appears unbounded -- fromutc()
323 allows the highly motivated to emulate any scheme expressible in Python.
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +0000324
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +0000325 datetime.now(): The optional tzinfo argument was undocumented (that's
326 repaired), and its name was changed to tz ("tzinfo" is overloaded enough
327 already). With a tz argument, now(tz) used to return the local date
328 and time, and attach tz to it, without any conversion of date and time
329 members. This was less than useful. Now now(tz) returns the current
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +0000330 date and time as local time in tz's time zone, akin to ::
331
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +0000332 tz.fromutc(datetime.utcnow().replace(tzinfo=utc))
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +0000333
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +0000334 where "utc" is an instance of a tzinfo subclass modeling UTC. Without
335 a tz argument, now() continues to return the current local date and time,
336 as a naive datetime object.
337
Tim Peters2a44a8d2003-01-23 20:53:10 +0000338 datetime.fromtimestamp(): Like datetime.now() above, this had less than
339 useful behavior when the optional tinzo argument was specified. See
340 also SF bug report <http://www.python.org/sf/660872>.
341
Tim Peters8d81a012003-01-24 22:36:34 +0000342 date and datetime comparison: In order to prevent comparison from
343 falling back to the default compare-object-addresses strategy, these
344 raised TypeError whenever they didn't understand the other object type.
345 They still do, except when the other object has a "timetuple" attribute,
346 in which case they return NotImplemented now. This gives other
347 datetime objects (e.g., mxDateTime) a chance to intercept the
348 comparison.
349
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +0000350 date, time, datetime and timedelta comparison: When the exception
351 for mixed-type comparisons in the last paragraph doesn't apply, if
352 the comparison is == then False is returned, and if the comparison is
353 != then True is returned. Because dict lookup and the "in" operator
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +0000354 only invoke __eq__, this allows, for example, ::
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +0000355
356 if some_datetime in some_sequence:
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +0000357
358 and ::
359
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +0000360 some_dict[some_timedelta] = whatever
361
362 to work as expected, without raising TypeError just because the
363 sequence is heterogeneous, or the dict has mixed-type keys. [This
364 seems like a good idea to implement for all mixed-type comparisons
365 that don't want to allow falling back to address comparison.]
366
Tim Peters75a6e3b2003-01-04 18:17:36 +0000367 The constructors building a datetime from a timestamp could raise
368 ValueError if the platform C localtime()/gmtime() inserted "leap
369 seconds". Leap seconds are ignored now. On such platforms, it's
370 possible to have timestamps that differ by a second, yet where
371 datetimes constructed from them are equal.
372
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +0000373 The pickle format of date, time and datetime objects has changed
374 completely. The undocumented pickler and unpickler functions no
Tim Petersb57f8f02003-02-01 02:54:15 +0000375 longer exist. The undocumented __setstate__() and __getstate__()
376 methods no longer exist either.
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +0000377
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000378Library
379-------
380
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +0000381- The logging module was updated slightly; the WARN level was renamed
382 to WARNING, and the matching function/method warn() to warning().
383
384- The pickle and cPickle modules were updated with a new pickling
385 protocol (documented by pickletools.py, see below) and several
386 extensions to the pickle customization API (__reduce__, __setstate__
387 etc.). The copy module now uses more of the pickle customization
388 API to copy objects that don't implement __copy__ or __deepcopy__.
389 See PEP 307 for details.
390
391- The distutils "register" command now uses http://www.python.org/pypi
392 as the default repository. (See PEP 301.)
393
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +0000394- the platform dependent path related variables sep, altsep, extsep,
395 pathsep, curdir, pardir and defpath are now defined in the platform
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +0000396 dependent path modules (e.g. ntpath.py) rather than os.py, so these
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +0000397 variables are now available via os.path. They continue to be
398 available from the os module.
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +0000399 (see <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +0000400
Tim Peters6ee04802003-02-05 18:29:34 +0000401- array.array was added to the types repr.py knows about (see
402 <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
403
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +0000404- The new pickletools.py contains lots of documentation about pickle
405 internals, and supplies some helpers for working with pickles, such as
406 a symbolic pickle disassembler.
407
Skip Montanaro9a7c96a2003-01-22 18:17:25 +0000408- Xmlrpclib.py now supports the builtin boolean type.
409
Martin v. Löwis0c6774d2003-01-15 11:51:06 +0000410- py_compile has a new 'doraise' flag and a new PyCompileError
411 exception.
412
Martin v. Löwisd69663d2003-01-15 11:37:23 +0000413- SimpleXMLRPCServer now supports CGI through the CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler
414 class.
415
Guido van Rossum50e92232003-01-14 16:45:04 +0000416- The sets module now raises TypeError in __cmp__, to clarify that
417 sets are not intended to be three-way-compared; the comparison
418 operators are overloaded as subset/superset tests.
419
Guido van Rossumcd0c0472003-01-07 23:03:05 +0000420- Bastion.py and rexec.py are disabled. These modules are not safe in
421 Python 2.2. or 2.3.
422
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +0000423- realpath is now exported when doing ``from poxixpath import *``.
Neal Norwitzbb0246a2003-01-03 18:12:28 +0000424 It is also exported for ntpath, macpath, and os2emxpath.
425 See SF bug #659228.
426
Neal Norwitzb9ef4ae2003-01-05 23:19:43 +0000427- New module tarfile from Lars Gustäbel provides a comprehensive interface
428 to tar archive files with transparent gzip and bzip2 compression.
429 See SF patch #651082.
430
Neal Norwitz4f442372003-01-06 06:51:36 +0000431- urlparse can now parse imap:// URLs. See SF feature request #618024.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +0000432
Neal Norwitze931ed52003-01-10 23:24:32 +0000433- Tkinter.Canvas.scan_dragto() provides an optional parameter to support
434 the gain value which is passed to Tk. SF bug# 602259.
435
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +0000436- Fix logging.handlers.SysLogHandler protocol when using UNIX domain sockets.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +0000437 See SF patch #642974.
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +0000438
Skip Montanaro12fe72e2003-02-25 17:46:20 +0000439- The dospath module was deleted. Use the ntpath module when manipulating
440 DOS paths from other platforms.
441
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000442Tools/Demos
443-----------
444
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +0000445- Two new scripts (db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py) were added to the
446 Tools/scripts directory to facilitate conversion from the old bsddb module
447 to the new one. While the user-visible API of the new module is
448 compatible with the old one, it's likely that the version of the
449 underlying database library has changed. To convert from the old library,
450 run the db2pickle.py script using the old version of Python to convert it
451 to a pickle file. After upgrading Python, run the pickle2db.py script
452 using the new version of Python to reconstitute your database. For
453 example:
454
Skip Montanaro621f0552003-02-03 15:48:10 +0000455 % python2.2 db2pickle.py -h some.db > some.pickle
456 % python2.3 pickle2db.py -h some.db.new < some.pickle
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +0000457
458 Run the scripts without any args to get a usage message.
459
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +0000460
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000461Build
462-----
463
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +0000464- The audio driver tests (test_ossaudiodev.py and
465 test_linuxaudiodev.py) are no longer run by default. This is
466 because they don't always work, depending on your hardware and
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +0000467 software. To run these tests, you must use an invocation like ::
468
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +0000469 ./python Lib/test/regrtest.py -u audio test_ossaudiodev
470
Skip Montanarodecc6a42003-01-01 20:07:49 +0000471- On systems which build using the configure script, compiler flags which
472 used to be lumped together using the OPT flag have been split into two
473 groups, OPT and BASECFLAGS. OPT is meant to carry just optimization- and
474 debug-related flags like "-g" and "-O3". BASECFLAGS is meant to carry
475 compiler flags that are required to get a clean compile. On some
476 platforms (many Linux flavors in particular) BASECFLAGS will be empty by
477 default. On others, such as Mac OS X and SCO, it will contain required
478 flags. This change allows people building Python to override OPT without
479 fear of clobbering compiler flags which are required to get a clean build.
480
481- On Darwin/Mac OS X platforms, /sw/lib and /sw/include are added to the
482 relevant search lists in setup.py. This allows users building Python to
483 take advantage of the many packages available from the fink project
484 <http://fink.sf.net/>.
485
486- A new Makefile target, scriptsinstall, installs a number of useful scripts
487 from the Tools/scripts directory.
488
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000489C API
490-----
491
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +0000492- PyEval_GetFrame() is now declared to return a ``PyFrameObject *``
493 instead of a plain ``PyObject *``. (SF patch #686601.)
Guido van Rossum6297a7a2003-02-19 15:53:17 +0000494
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +0000495- PyNumber_Check() now checks that the object has a nb_int or nb_float
496 slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
497 tp_as_number pointer.
498
Guido van Rossumeea47182003-02-11 20:39:59 +0000499- A C type that inherits from a base type that defines tp_as_buffer
500 will now inherit the tp_as_buffer pointer if it doesn't define one.
501 (SF #681367)
502
Neil Schemenauer5042da62003-02-04 20:59:40 +0000503- The PyArg_Parse functions now issue a DeprecationWarning if a float
504 argument is provided when an integer is specified (this affects the 'b',
505 'B', 'h', 'H', 'i', and 'l' codes). Future versions of Python will
506 raise a TypeError.
Neil Schemenauercd63e612003-01-24 22:15:53 +0000507
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000508Tests
509-----
510
Walter Dörwald11cfbd62003-03-26 16:03:16 +0000511- Several tests weren't being run from regrtest.py (test_timeout.py,
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +0000512 test_tarfile.py, test_netrc.py, test_multifile.py,
513 test_importhooks.py and test_imp.py). Now they are. (Note to
514 developers: please read Lib/test/README when creating a new test, to
515 make sure to do it right! All tests need to use either unittest or
516 pydoc.)
517
518- Added test_posix.py, a test suite for the posix module.
519
520- Added test_hexoct.py, a test suite for hex/oct constant folding.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +0000521
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000522Windows
523-------
524
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +0000525- The timeout code for socket connect() didn't work right; this has
526 now been fixed. test_timeout.py should pass (at least most of the
527 time).
528
Thomas Hellerdda583d2003-01-31 20:45:41 +0000529- distutils' msvccompiler class now passes the preprocessor options to
530 the resource compiler. See SF patch #669198.
531
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +0000532- The bsddb module now ships with Sleepycat's 4.1.25.NC, the latest
533 release without strong cryptography.
534
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +0000535- sys.path[0], if it contains a directory name, is now always an
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +0000536 absolute pathname. (SF patch #664376.)
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +0000537
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +0000538- The new logging package is now installed by the Windows installer. It
539 wasn't in 2.3a1 due to oversight.
540
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000541Mac
542---
543
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +0000544- There are new dialogs EasyDialogs.AskFileForOpen, AskFileForSave
545 and AskFolder. The old macfs.StandardGetFile and friends are deprecated.
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +0000546
Jack Jansenc9296362003-02-06 23:10:45 +0000547- Most of the standard library now uses pathnames or FSRefs in preference
548 of FSSpecs, and use the underlying Carbon.File and Carbon.Folder modules
549 in stead of macfs. macfs will probably be deprecated in the future.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +0000550
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +0000551- Type Carbon.File.FSCatalogInfo and supporting methods have been implemented.
552 This also makes macfs.FSSpec.SetDates() work again.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +0000553
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +0000554- There is a new module pimp, the package install manager for Python, and
555 accompanying applet PackageManager. These allow you to easily download
556 and install pretested extension packages either in source or binary
557 form. Only in MacPython-OSX.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +0000558
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +0000559- Applets are now built with bundlebuilder in MacPython-OSX, which should make
Jack Jansen5d44b342003-02-18 23:32:47 +0000560 them more robust and also provides a path towards BuildApplication. The
561 downside of this change is that applets can no longer be run from the
562 Terminal window, this will hopefully be fixed in the 2.3b1.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +0000563
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000564
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000565What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 1?
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000566=================================
567
Guido van Rossumae548862002-12-31 15:47:36 +0000568*Release date: 31-Dec-2002*
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000569
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000570Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000571--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +0000572
Michael W. Hudson96bc3b42002-11-26 14:48:23 +0000573- One can now assign to __bases__ and __name__ of new-style classes.
574
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +0000575- dict() now accepts keyword arguments so that dict(one=1, two=2)
576 is the equivalent of {"one": 1, "two": 2}. Accordingly,
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +0000577 the existing (but undocumented) 'items' keyword argument has
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +0000578 been eliminated. This means that dict(items=someMapping) now has
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +0000579 a different meaning than before.
580
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +0000581- int() now returns a long object if the argument is outside the
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +0000582 integer range, so int("4" * 1000), int(1e200) and int(1L<<1000) will
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +0000583 all return long objects instead of raising an OverflowError.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000584
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +0000585- Assignment to __class__ is disallowed if either the old or the new
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +0000586 class is a statically allocated type object (such as defined by an
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +0000587 extension module). This prevents anomalies like 2.__class__ = bool.
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +0000588
589- New-style object creation and deallocation have been sped up
590 significantly; they are now faster than classic instance creation
591 and deallocation.
592
593- The __slots__ variable can now mention "private" names, and the
594 right thing will happen (e.g. __slots__ = ["__foo"]).
595
596- The built-ins slice() and buffer() are now callable types. The
597 types classobj (formerly class), code, function, instance, and
598 instancemethod (formerly instance-method), which have no built-in
599 names but are accessible through the types module, are now also
600 callable. The type dict-proxy is renamed to dictproxy.
601
602- Cycles going through the __class__ link of a new-style instance are
603 now detected by the garbage collector.
604
605- Classes using __slots__ are now properly garbage collected.
606 [SF bug 519621]
607
608- Tightened the __slots__ rules: a slot name must be a valid Python
609 identifier.
610
611- The constructor for the module type now requires a name argument and
612 takes an optional docstring argument. Previously, this constructor
613 ignored its arguments. As a consequence, deriving a class from a
614 module (not from the module type) is now illegal; previously this
615 created an unnamed module, just like invoking the module type did.
616 [SF bug 563060]
617
618- A new type object, 'basestring', is added. This is a common base type
619 for 'str' and 'unicode', and can be used instead of
620 types.StringTypes, e.g. to test whether something is "a string":
621 isinstance(x, basestring) is True for Unicode and 8-bit strings. This
622 is an abstract base class and cannot be instantiated directly.
623
624- Changed new-style class instantiation so that when C's __new__
625 method returns something that's not a C instance, its __init__ is
626 not called. [SF bug #537450]
627
628- Fixed super() to work correctly with class methods. [SF bug #535444]
629
630- If you try to pickle an instance of a class that has __slots__ but
631 doesn't define or override __getstate__, a TypeError is now raised.
632 This is done by adding a bozo __getstate__ to the class that always
633 raises TypeError. (Before, this would appear to be pickled, but the
634 state of the slots would be lost.)
635
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000636Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000637-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000638
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +0000639- Import from zipfiles is now supported. The name of a zipfile placed
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +0000640 on sys.path causes the import statement to look for importable Python
641 modules (with .py, pyc and .pyo extensions) and packages inside the
642 zipfile. The zipfile import follows the specification (though not
643 the sample implementation) of PEP 273. The semantics of __path__ are
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +0000644 compatible with those that have been implemented in Jython since
645 Jython 2.1.
646
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +0000647- PEP 302 has been accepted. Although it was initially developed to
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +0000648 support zipimport, it offers a new, general import hook mechanism.
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +0000649 Several new variables have been added to the sys module:
650 sys.meta_path, sys.path_hooks, and sys.path_importer_cache; these
651 make extending the import statement much more convenient than
652 overriding the __import__ built-in function. For a description of
653 these, see PEP 302.
654
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +0000655- A frame object's f_lineno attribute can now be written to from a
656 trace function to change which line will execute next. A command to
657 exploit this from pdb has been added. [SF patch #643835]
658
Marc-André Lemburg20b91352002-12-12 18:01:43 +0000659- The _codecs support module for codecs.py was turned into a builtin
660 module to assure that at least the builtin codecs are available
661 to the Python parser for source code decoding according to PEP 263.
662
Walter Dörwaldd9a6ad32002-12-12 16:41:44 +0000663- issubclass now supports a tuple as the second argument, just like
664 isinstance does. ``issubclass(X, (A, B))`` is equivalent to
665 ``issubclass(X, A) or issubclass(X, B)``.
666
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +0000667- Thanks to Armin Rigo, the last known way to provoke a system crash
668 by cleverly arranging for a comparison function to mutate a list
669 during a list.sort() operation has been fixed. The effect of
670 attempting to mutate a list, or even to inspect its contents or
671 length, while a sort is in progress, is not defined by the language.
672 The C implementation of Python 2.3 attempts to detect mutations,
673 and raise ValueError if one occurs, but there's no guarantee that
674 all mutations will be caught, or that any will be caught across
675 releases or implementations.
676
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +0000677- Unicode file name processing for Windows (PEP 277) is implemented.
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +0000678 All platforms now have an os.path.supports_unicode_filenames attribute,
679 which is set to True on Windows NT/2000/XP, and False elsewhere.
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +0000680
Walter Dörwald3aeb6322002-09-02 13:14:32 +0000681- Codec error handling callbacks (PEP 293) are implemented.
682 Error handling in unicode.encode or str.decode can now be customized.
683
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +0000684- A subtle change to the semantics of the built-in function intern():
685 interned strings are no longer immortal. You must keep a reference
686 to the return value intern() around to get the benefit.
687
Guido van Rossumf808b892002-08-16 03:38:10 +0000688- Use of 'None' as a variable, argument or attribute name now
689 issues a SyntaxWarning. In the future, None may become a keyword.
690
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +0000691- SET_LINENO is gone. co_lnotab is now consulted to determine when to
692 call the trace function. C code that accessed f_lineno should call
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +0000693 PyCode_Addr2Line instead (f_lineno is still there, but only kept up
694 to date when there is a trace function set).
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +0000695
Guido van Rossum9be89462002-08-14 16:11:30 +0000696- There's a new warning category, FutureWarning. This is used to warn
697 about a number of situations where the value or sign of an integer
698 result will change in Python 2.4 as a result of PEP 237 (integer
699 unification). The warnings implement stage B0 mentioned in that
700 PEP. The warnings are about the following situations:
701
702 - Octal and hex literals without 'L' prefix in the inclusive range
703 [0x80000000..0xffffffff]; these are currently negative ints, but
704 in Python 2.4 they will be positive longs with the same bit
705 pattern.
706
707 - Left shifts on integer values that cause the outcome to lose
708 bits or have a different sign than the left operand. To be
709 precise: x<<n where this currently doesn't yield the same value
710 as long(x)<<n; in Python 2.4, the outcome will be long(x)<<n.
711
712 - Conversions from ints to string that show negative values as
713 unsigned ints in the inclusive range [0x80000000..0xffffffff];
714 this affects the functions hex() and oct(), and the string
715 formatting codes %u, %o, %x, and %X. In Python 2.4, these will
716 show signed values (e.g. hex(-1) currently returns "0xffffffff";
717 in Python 2.4 it will return "-0x1").
718
Guido van Rossum9a2eda52002-12-31 02:12:42 +0000719- The bits manipulated under the cover by sys.setcheckinterval() have
720 been changed. Both the check interval and the ticker used to be
721 per-thread values. They are now just a pair of global variables.
722 In addition, the default check interval was boosted from 10 to 100
723 bytecode instructions. This may have some effect on systems that
724 relied on the old default value. In particular, in multi-threaded
725 applications which try to be highly responsive, response time will
726 increase by some (perhaps imperceptible) amount.
Skip Montanaro979c74b2002-09-03 21:25:14 +0000727
Tim Petersd64c1de2002-08-12 17:36:03 +0000728- When multiplying very large integers, a version of the so-called
729 Karatsuba algorithm is now used. This is most effective if the
730 inputs have roughly the same size. If they both have about N digits,
731 Karatsuba multiplication has O(N**1.58) runtime (the exponent is
732 log_base_2(3)) instead of the previous O(N**2). Measured results may
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +0000733 be better or worse than that, depending on platform quirks. Besides
734 the O() improvement in raw instruction count, the Karatsuba algorithm
735 appears to have much better cache behavior on extremely large integers
736 (starting in the ballpark of a million bits). Note that this is a
737 simple implementation, and there's no intent here to compete with,
738 e.g., GMP. It gives a very nice speedup when it applies, but a package
739 devoted to fast large-integer arithmetic should run circles around it.
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +0000740
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +0000741- u'%c' will now raise a ValueError in case the argument is an
742 integer outside the valid range of Unicode code point ordinals.
743
Guido van Rossumdeb09362002-08-09 17:16:30 +0000744- The tempfile module has been overhauled for enhanced security. The
745 mktemp() function is now deprecated; new, safe replacements are
746 mkstemp() (for files) and mkdtemp() (for directories), and the
747 higher-level functions NamedTemporaryFile() and TemporaryFile().
748 Use of some global variables in this module is also deprecated; the
749 new functions have keyword arguments to provide the same
750 functionality. All Lib, Tools and Demo modules that used the unsafe
751 interfaces have been updated to use the safe replacements. Thanks
752 to Zack Weinberg!
753
Guido van Rossumd81a9832002-08-09 15:57:34 +0000754- When x is an object whose class implements __mul__ and __rmul__,
755 1.0*x would correctly invoke __rmul__, but 1*x would erroneously
756 invoke __mul__. This was due to the sequence-repeat code in the int
757 type. This has been fixed now.
758
Barry Warsawd79f6832002-08-06 17:01:51 +0000759- Previously, "str1 in str2" required str1 to be a string of length 1.
760 This restriction has been relaxed to allow str1 to be a string of
761 any length. Thus "'el' in 'hello world'" returns True now.
762
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +0000763- File objects are now their own iterators. For a file f, iter(f) now
764 returns f (unless f is closed), and f.next() is similar to
765 f.readline() when EOF is not reached; however, f.next() uses a
766 readahead buffer that messes up the file position, so mixing
767 f.next() and f.readline() (or other methods) doesn't work right.
768 Calling f.seek() drops the readahead buffer, but other operations
769 don't. It so happens that this gives a nice additional speed boost
770 to "for line in file:"; the xreadlines method and corresponding
Guido van Rossumbffb2ef2002-08-09 17:17:07 +0000771 module are now obsolete. Thanks to Oren Tirosh!
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +0000772
Guido van Rossumde392d32002-08-05 14:17:20 +0000773- Encoding declarations (PEP 263, phase 1) have been implemented. A
774 comment of the form "# -*- coding: <encodingname> -*-" in the first
775 or second line of a Python source file indicates the encoding.
Martin v. Löwis00f1e3f2002-08-04 17:29:52 +0000776
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +0000777- list.sort() has a new implementation. While cross-platform results
778 may vary, and in data-dependent ways, this is much faster on many
779 kinds of partially ordered lists than the previous implementation,
780 and reported to be just as fast on randomly ordered lists on
781 several major platforms. This sort is also stable (if A==B and A
782 precedes B in the list at the start, A precedes B after the sort too),
783 although the language definition does not guarantee stability. A
784 potential drawback is that list.sort() may require temp space of
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +0000785 len(list)*2 bytes (``*4`` on a 64-bit machine). It's therefore possible
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +0000786 for list.sort() to raise MemoryError now, even if a comparison function
787 does not. See <http://www.python.org/sf/587076> for full details.
788
Guido van Rossum2d5389c2002-07-23 03:44:35 +0000789- All standard iterators now ensure that, once StopIteration has been
790 raised, all future calls to next() on the same iterator will also
791 raise StopIteration. There used to be various counterexamples to
792 this behavior, which could caused confusion or subtle program
793 breakage, without any benefits. (Note that this is still an
794 iterator's responsibility; the iterator framework does not enforce
795 this.)
796
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +0000797- Ctrl+C handling on Windows has been made more consistent with
798 other platforms. KeyboardInterrupt can now reliably be caught,
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +0000799 and Ctrl+C at an interactive prompt no longer terminates the
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +0000800 process under NT/2k/XP (it never did under Win9x). Ctrl+C will
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +0000801 interrupt time.sleep() in the main thread, and any child processes
802 created via the popen family (on win2k; we can't make win9x work
Mark Hammond8f3afc72002-08-10 06:26:31 +0000803 reliably) are also interrupted (as generally happens on for Linux/Unix.)
804 [SF bugs 231273, 439992 and 581232]
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +0000805
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +0000806- sys.getwindowsversion() has been added on Windows. This
807 returns a tuple with information about the version of Windows
808 currently running.
809
Raymond Hettinger5a04aec2002-06-25 00:25:30 +0000810- Slices and repetitions of buffer objects now consistently return
811 a string. Formerly, strings would be returned most of the time,
812 but a buffer object would be returned when the repetition count
813 was one or when the slice range was all inclusive.
814
Walter Dörwald3430d702002-06-17 10:43:59 +0000815- Unicode objects in sys.path are no longer ignored but treated
816 as directory names.
817
Neal Norwitz1f68fc72002-06-14 00:50:42 +0000818- Fixed string.startswith and string.endswith builtin methods
819 so they accept negative indices. [SF bug 493951]
820
Guido van Rossumc5fe5eb2002-06-12 03:45:21 +0000821- Fixed a bug with a continue inside a try block and a yield in the
822 finally clause. [SF bug 567538]
823
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +0000824- Most builtin sequences now support "extended slices", i.e. slices
Guido van Rossum2e82e712002-06-13 11:41:07 +0000825 with a third "stride" parameter. For example, "hello world"[::-1]
826 gives "dlrow olleh".
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +0000827
Neal Norwitzd68f5172002-05-29 15:54:55 +0000828- A new warning PendingDeprecationWarning was added to provide
829 direction on features which are in the process of being deprecated.
830 The warning will not be printed by default. To see the pending
831 deprecations, use -Walways::PendingDeprecationWarning::
832 as a command line option or warnings.filterwarnings() in code.
833
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +0000834- Deprecated features of xrange objects have been removed as
835 promised. The start, stop, and step attributes and the tolist()
836 method no longer exist. xrange repetition and slicing have been
837 removed.
838
Guido van Rossum7dab2422002-04-26 19:40:56 +0000839- New builtin function enumerate(x), from PEP 279. Example:
840 enumerate("abc") is an iterator returning (0,"a"), (1,"b"), (2,"c").
841 The argument can be an arbitrary iterable object.
842
Neil Schemenauer89e3ee02002-04-26 01:58:53 +0000843- The assert statement no longer tests __debug__ at runtime. This means
844 that assert statements cannot be disabled by assigning a false value
845 to __debug__.
846
Walter Dörwald068325e2002-04-15 13:36:47 +0000847- A method zfill() was added to str and unicode, that fills a numeric
848 string to the left with zeros. For example,
849 "+123".zfill(6) -> "+00123".
850
Guido van Rossum862fe3c2002-04-15 12:36:47 +0000851- Complex numbers supported divmod() and the // and % operators, but
852 these make no sense. Since this was documented, they're being
853 deprecated now.
854
Guido van Rossum26dd8302002-04-26 20:11:29 +0000855- String and unicode methods lstrip(), rstrip() and strip() now take
856 an optional argument that specifies the characters to strip. For
857 example, "Foo!!!?!?!?".rstrip("?!") -> "Foo".
Guido van Rossum49042042002-04-13 00:59:05 +0000858
Guido van Rossumc0d3f4e2002-11-27 13:10:40 +0000859- There's a new dictionary constructor (a class method of the dict
860 class), dict.fromkeys(iterable, value=None). It constructs a
861 dictionary with keys taken from the iterable and all values set to a
862 single value. It can be used for building sets and for removing
863 duplicates from sequences.
Raymond Hettingere33d3df2002-11-27 07:29:33 +0000864
Guido van Rossumc69343b2002-04-12 19:22:48 +0000865- Added a new dict method pop(key). This removes and returns the
866 value corresponding to key. [SF patch #539949]
867
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +0000868- A new built-in type, bool, has been added, as well as built-in
869 names for its two values, True and False. Comparisons and sundry
870 other operations that return a truth value have been changed to
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +0000871 return a bool instead. Read PEP 285 for an explanation of why this
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +0000872 is backward compatible.
873
Guido van Rossum95b62a62002-03-29 01:07:24 +0000874- Fixed two bugs reported as SF #535905: under certain conditions,
875 deallocating a deeply nested structure could cause a segfault in the
876 garbage collector, due to interaction with the "trashcan" code;
877 access to the current frame during destruction of a local variable
878 could access a pointer to freed memory.
879
Guido van Rossumfe0ca4a2002-06-18 21:20:13 +0000880- The optional object allocator ("pymalloc") has been enabled by
881 default. The recommended practice for memory allocation and
882 deallocation has been streamlined. A header file is included,
883 Misc/pymemcompat.h, which can be bundled with 3rd party extensions
884 and lets them use the same API with Python versions from 1.5.2
885 onwards.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +0000886
Martin v. Löwiscfeb3b62002-03-03 21:30:27 +0000887- PyErr_Display will provide file and line information for all exceptions
888 that have an attribute print_file_and_line, not just SyntaxErrors.
889
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +0000890- The UTF-8 codec will now encode and decode Unicode surrogates
891 correctly and without raising exceptions for unpaired ones.
892
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +0000893- Universal newlines (PEP 278) is implemented. Briefly, using 'U'
894 instead of 'r' when opening a text file for reading changes the line
895 ending convention so that any of '\r', '\r\n', and '\n' is
896 recognized (even mixed in one file); all three are converted to
897 '\n', the standard Python line end character.
898
Neal Norwitz649b7592002-01-01 19:07:13 +0000899- file.xreadlines() now raises a ValueError if the file is closed:
900 Previously, an xreadlines object was returned which would raise
901 a ValueError when the xreadlines.next() method was called.
902
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +0000903- sys.exit() inadvertently allowed more than one argument.
Neal Norwitz0c766a02002-03-27 13:03:09 +0000904 An exception will now be raised if more than one argument is used.
905
Gustavo Niemeyer17c5a332002-12-16 14:09:22 +0000906- Changed evaluation order of dictionary literals to conform to the
907 general left to right evaluation order rule. Now {f1(): f2()} will
908 evaluate f1 first.
Gustavo Niemeyer78429a62002-12-16 13:54:02 +0000909
Gustavo Niemeyer786ddb22002-12-16 18:12:53 +0000910- Fixed bug #521782: when a file was in non-blocking mode, file.read()
911 could silently lose data or wrongly throw an unknown error.
912
Neil Schemenauerb983aa02002-12-30 20:22:23 +0000913- The sq_repeat, sq_inplace_repeat, sq_concat and sq_inplace_concat
914 slots are now always tried after trying the corresponding nb_* slots.
915 This fixes a number of minor bugs (see bug #624807).
916
Neal Norwitz74a032e2003-01-10 23:29:48 +0000917- Fix problem with dynamic loading on 64-bit AIX (see bug #639945).
918
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000919Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000920-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000921
Raymond Hettinger9543b342003-01-18 23:22:20 +0000922- Added three operators to the operator module:
923 operator.pow(a,b) which is equivalent to: a**b.
924 operator.is_(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is b.
925 operator.is_not(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is not b.
926
Martin v. Löwis24a880b2002-12-31 12:55:15 +0000927- posix.openpty now works on all systems that have /dev/ptmx.
928
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +0000929- A module zipimport exists to support importing code from zip
930 archives.
931
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +0000932- The new datetime module supplies classes for manipulating dates and
933 times. The basic design came from the Zope "fishbowl process", and
934 favors practical commercial applications over calendar esoterica. See
935
936 http://www.zope.org/Members/fdrake/DateTimeWiki/FrontPage
937
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +0000938- _tkinter now returns Tcl objects, instead of strings. Objects which
939 have Python equivalents are converted to Python objects, other objects
940 are wrapped. This can be configured through the wantobjects method,
Martin v. Löwis8c8aa5d2002-11-26 21:39:48 +0000941 or Tkinter.wantobjects.
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +0000942
Barry Warsawc27f4bd2002-12-30 21:03:26 +0000943- The PyBSDDB wrapper around the Sleepycat Berkeley DB library has
944 been added as the package bsddb. The traditional bsddb module is
945 still available in source code, but not built automatically anymore,
946 and is now named bsddb185. This supports Berkeley DB versions from
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +0000947 3.0 to 4.1. For help converting your databases from the old module (which
948 probably used an obsolete version of Berkeley DB) to the new module, see
949 the db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py scripts described in the Tools/Demos
950 section above.
Martin v. Löwisef546b32002-11-19 08:12:57 +0000951
Martin v. Löwis677bde22002-11-23 22:08:15 +0000952- unicodedata was updated to Unicode 3.2. It supports normalization
953 and names for Hangul syllables and CJK unified ideographs.
Martin v. Löwis7d41e292002-11-23 12:22:32 +0000954
Neal Norwitz94a83fd2002-11-02 17:46:24 +0000955- resource.getrlimit() now returns longs instead of ints.
956
Martin v. Löwis080689c2002-10-26 14:42:02 +0000957- readline now dynamically adjusts its input/output stream if
958 sys.stdin/stdout changes.
959
Guido van Rossumba602972002-10-01 18:18:58 +0000960- The _tkinter module (and hence Tkinter) has dropped support for
961 Tcl/Tk 8.0 and 8.1. Only Tcl/Tk versions 8.2, 8.3 and 8.4 are
962 supported.
963
Martin v. Löwis658009a2002-09-16 17:26:24 +0000964- cPickle.BadPickleGet is now a class.
965
Martin v. Löwisa19bfe02002-10-16 18:28:36 +0000966- The time stamps in os.stat_result are floating point numbers
967 after stat_float_times has been called.
Martin v. Löwis94717ed2002-09-09 14:24:16 +0000968
Neal Norwitzb5673922002-09-05 21:48:07 +0000969- If the size passed to mmap.mmap() is larger than the length of the
970 file on non-Windows platforms, a ValueError is raised. [SF bug 585792]
971
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +0000972- The xreadlines module is slated for obsolescence.
973
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +0000974- The strptime function in the time module is now always available (a
975 Python implementation is used when the C library doesn't define it).
976
Guido van Rossum9562bcf2002-06-14 21:31:18 +0000977- The 'new' module is no longer an extension, but a Python module that
978 only exists for backwards compatibility. Its contents are no longer
979 functions but callable type objects.
980
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +0000981- The bsddb.*open functions can now take 'None' as a filename.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +0000982 This will create a temporary in-memory bsddb that won't be
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +0000983 written to disk.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +0000984
Martin v. Löwisb96152c2002-12-31 13:20:15 +0000985- posix.getloadavg, posix.lchown, posix.killpg, posix.mknod, and
986 posix.getpgid have been added where available.
Martin v. Löwis06a83e92002-04-14 10:19:44 +0000987
Martin v. Löwisf0a46682002-11-03 17:20:12 +0000988- The locale module now exposes the C library's gettext interface. It
989 also has a new function getpreferredencoding.
Martin v. Löwis2e64c342002-03-27 18:49:02 +0000990
Tim Petersfbf74f22002-03-14 19:06:01 +0000991- A security hole ("double free") was found in zlib-1.1.3, a popular
992 third party compression library used by some Python modules. The
993 hole was quickly plugged in zlib-1.1.4, and the Windows build of
994 Python now ships with zlib-1.1.4.
995
Martin v. Löwis688357e2002-04-08 21:28:20 +0000996- pwd, grp, and resource return enhanced tuples now, with symbolic
997 field names.
Martin v. Löwis29001ff2002-03-01 10:47:37 +0000998
Martin v. Löwis99866332002-03-01 10:27:01 +0000999- array.array is now a type object. A new format character
1000 'u' indicates Py_UNICODE arrays. For those, .tounicode and
1001 .fromunicode methods are available. Arrays now support __iadd__
1002 and __imul__.
1003
Neal Norwitze790eae2002-01-01 21:14:12 +00001004- dl now builds on every system that has dlfcn.h. Failure in case
Martin v. Löwis93227272002-01-01 20:18:30 +00001005 of sizeof(int)!=sizeof(long)!=sizeof(void*) is delayed until dl.open
1006 is called.
1007
Skip Montanaro8e790e72002-09-03 13:25:17 +00001008- The sys module acquired a new attribute, api_version, which evaluates
1009 to the value of the PYTHON_API_VERSION macro with which the
1010 interpreter was compiled.
1011
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00001012- Fixed bug #470582: sre module would return a tuple (None, 'a', 'ab')
1013 when applying the regular expression '^((a)c)?(ab)$' on 'ab'. It now
1014 returns (None, None, 'ab'), as expected. Also fixed handling of
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00001015 lastindex/lastgroup match attributes in similar cases. For example,
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00001016 when running the expression r'(a)(b)?b' over 'ab', lastindex must be
1017 1, not 2.
1018
Gustavo Niemeyerc523b042002-11-07 03:28:56 +00001019- Fixed bug #581080: sre scanner was not checking the buffer limit
1020 before increasing the current pointer. This was creating an infinite
1021 loop in the search function, once the pointer exceeded the buffer
1022 limit.
1023
Thomas Heller95cb7e42002-11-07 16:23:55 +00001024- The os.fdopen function now enforces a file mode starting with the
1025 letter 'r', 'w' or 'a', otherwise a ValueError is raised. This fixes
1026 bug #623464.
1027
Greg Ward6c58d462003-01-03 18:02:15 +00001028- The linuxaudiodev module is now deprecated; it is being replaced by
1029 ossaudiodev. The interface has been extended to cover a lot more of
1030 OSS (see www.opensound.com), including most DSP ioctls and the
1031 OSS mixer API. Documentation forthcoming in 2.3a2.
1032
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001033Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001034-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001035
Guido van Rossum747f8062003-01-03 16:33:49 +00001036- imaplib.py now supports SSL (Tino Lange and Piers Lauder).
1037
Just van Rossum5e156ad2002-12-31 16:38:01 +00001038- Freeze's modulefinder.py has been moved to the standard library;
1039 slightly improved so it will issue less false missing submodule
1040 reports (see sf path #643711 for details). Documentation will follow
1041 with Python 2.3a2.
1042
Martin v. Löwis96a60e42002-12-31 13:11:54 +00001043- os.path exposes getctime.
1044
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001045- unittest.py now has two additional methods called assertAlmostEqual()
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001046 and failIfAlmostEqual(). They implement an approximate comparison
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001047 by rounding the difference between the two arguments and comparing
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001048 the result to zero. Approximate comparison is essential for
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001049 unit tests of floating point results.
1050
Raymond Hettingere11b5102002-12-25 16:37:19 +00001051- calendar.py now depends on the new datetime module rather than
1052 the time module. As a result, the range of allowable dates
1053 has been increased.
1054
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00001055- pdb has a new 'j(ump)' command to select the next line to be
1056 executed.
1057
Thomas Heller1b3b49d2002-12-12 19:13:44 +00001058- The distutils created windows installers now can run a
1059 postinstallation script.
1060
Martin v. Löwis4581cfa2002-11-22 08:23:09 +00001061- doctest.testmod can now be called without argument, which means to
1062 test the current module.
1063
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001064- When canceling a server that implemented threading with a keyboard
Martin v. Löwisf86e8ef2002-11-22 08:08:44 +00001065 interrupt, the server would shut down but not terminate (waiting on
1066 client threads). A new member variable, daemon_threads, was added to
1067 the ThreadingMixIn class in SocketServer.py to make it explicit that
1068 this behavior needs to be controlled.
1069
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00001070- A new module, optparse, provides a fancy alternative to getopt for
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00001071 command line parsing. It is a slightly modified version of Greg
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00001072 Ward's Optik package.
1073
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00001074- UserDict.py now defines a DictMixin class which defines all dictionary
1075 methods for classes that already have a minimum mapping interface.
1076 This greatly simplifies writing classes that need to be substitutable
1077 for dictionaries (such as the shelve module).
1078
1079- shelve.py now subclasses from UserDict.DictMixin. Now shelve supports
1080 all dictionary methods. This eases the transition to persistent
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00001081 storage for scripts originally written with dictionaries in mind.
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00001082
Skip Montanaro3bf99e32002-12-08 18:36:24 +00001083- shelve.open and the various classes in shelve.py now accept an optional
1084 binary flag, which defaults to False. If True, the values stored in the
1085 shelf are binary pickles.
1086
Guido van Rossumfda06742002-11-13 16:29:18 +00001087- A new package, logging, implements the logging API defined by PEP
1088 282. The code is written by Vinay Sajip.
1089
Walter Dörwald4dbf1922002-11-06 16:53:44 +00001090- StreamReader, StreamReaderWriter and StreamRecoder in the codecs
1091 modules are iterators now.
1092
Tim Peters9288f952002-11-05 20:38:55 +00001093- gzip.py now handles files exceeding 2GB. Files over 4GB also work
1094 now (provided the OS supports it, and Python is configured with large
1095 file support), but in that case the underlying gzip file format can
1096 record only the least-significant 32 bits of the file size, so that
1097 some tools working with gzipped files may report an incorrect file
1098 size.
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00001099
Martin v. Löwis74b51ac2002-10-26 14:50:45 +00001100- xml.sax.saxutils.unescape has been added, to replace entity references
1101 with their entity value.
1102
Martin v. Löwis77ac4292002-10-15 15:11:13 +00001103- Queue.Queue.{put,get} now support an optional timeout argument.
1104
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00001105- Various features of Tk 8.4 are exposed in Tkinter.py. The multiple
1106 option of tkFileDialog is exposed as function askopenfile{,name}s.
Martin v. Löwis2ec36272002-10-13 10:22:08 +00001107
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00001108- Various configure methods of Tkinter have been stream-lined, so that
1109 tag_configure, image_configure, window_configure now return a
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00001110 dictionary when invoked with no argument.
Martin v. Löwis6ce13152002-10-10 14:36:13 +00001111
Guido van Rossum2b492b62002-10-09 21:40:48 +00001112- Importing the readline module now no longer has the side effect of
1113 calling setlocale(LC_CTYPE, ""). The initial "C" locale, or
1114 whatever locale is explicitly set by the user, is preserved. If you
1115 want repr() of 8-bit strings in your preferred encoding to preserve
1116 all printable characters of that encoding, you have to add the
1117 following code to your $PYTHONSTARTUP file or to your application's
1118 main():
1119
1120 import locale
1121 locale.setlocale(locale.LC_CTYPE, "")
1122
Martin v. Löwise9ce0b02002-10-07 13:23:24 +00001123- shutil.move was added. shutil.copytree now reports errors as an
1124 exception at the end, instead of printing error messages.
1125
Marc-André Lemburg97047e22002-10-04 11:55:21 +00001126- Encoding name normalization was generalized to not only
1127 replace hyphens with underscores, but also all other non-alphanumeric
1128 characters (with the exception of the dot which is used for Python
1129 package names during lookup). The aliases.py mapping was updated
1130 to the new standard.
1131
Walter Dörwald5ccaf8f2002-09-06 16:15:58 +00001132- mimetypes has two new functions: guess_all_extensions() which
1133 returns a list of all known extensions for a mime type, and
1134 add_type() which adds one mapping between a mime type and
1135 an extension to the database.
1136
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00001137- New module: sets, defines the class Set that implements a mutable
1138 set type using the keys of a dict to represent the set. There's
1139 also a class ImmutableSet which is useful when you need sets of sets
1140 or when you need to use sets as dict keys, and a class BaseSet which
Raymond Hettingeref8b9c62002-12-09 08:56:06 +00001141 is the base class of the two.
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00001142
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00001143- Added random.sample(population,k) for random sampling without replacement.
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00001144 Returns a k length list of unique elements chosen from the population.
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00001145
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00001146- random.randrange(-sys.maxint-1, sys.maxint) no longer raises
1147 OverflowError. That is, it now accepts any combination of 'start'
1148 and 'stop' arguments so long as each is in the range of Python's
1149 bounded integers.
1150
Raymond Hettinger40f62172002-12-29 23:03:38 +00001151- Thanks to Raymond Hettinger, random.random() now uses a new core
1152 generator. The Mersenne Twister algorithm is implemented in C,
1153 threadsafe, faster than the previous generator, has an astronomically
1154 large period (2**19937-1), creates random floats to full 53-bit
1155 precision, and may be the most widely tested random number generator
1156 in existence.
1157
1158 The random.jumpahead(n) method has different semantics for the new
1159 generator. Instead of jumping n steps ahead, it uses n and the
1160 existing state to create a new state. This means that jumpahead()
1161 continues to support multi-threaded code needing generators of
1162 non-overlapping sequences. However, it will break code which relies
1163 on jumpahead moving a specific number of steps forward.
1164
1165 The attributes random.whseed and random.__whseed have no meaning for
1166 the new generator. Code using these attributes should switch to a
1167 new class, random.WichmannHill which is provided for backward
1168 compatibility and to make an alternate generator available.
1169
Guido van Rossum4a57c332002-08-02 18:05:20 +00001170- New "algorithms" module: heapq, implements a heap queue. Thanks to
1171 Kevin O'Connor for the code and François Pinard for an entertaining
1172 write-up explaining the theory and practical uses of heaps.
1173
Marc-André Lemburg58e2ff22002-07-12 14:40:04 +00001174- New encoding for the Palm OS character set: palmos.
1175
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00001176- binascii.crc32() and the zipfile module had problems on some 64-bit
1177 platforms. These have been fixed. On a platform with 8-byte C longs,
1178 crc32() now returns a signed-extended 4-byte result, so that its value
1179 as a Python int is equal to the value computed a 32-bit platform.
1180
Martin v. Löwis7d650ca2002-06-30 15:05:00 +00001181- xml.dom.minidom.toxml and toprettyxml now take an optional encoding
1182 argument.
1183
Guido van Rossum9f7549b2002-06-10 21:39:42 +00001184- Some fixes in the copy module: when an object is copied through its
1185 __reduce__ method, there was no check for a __setstate__ method on
1186 the result [SF patch 565085]; deepcopy should treat instances of
1187 custom metaclasses the same way it treats instances of type 'type'
1188 [SF patch 560794].
1189
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00001190- Sockets now support timeout mode. After s.settimeout(T), where T is
1191 a float expressing seconds, subsequent operations raise an exception
1192 if they cannot be completed within T seconds. To disable timeout
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00001193 mode, use s.settimeout(None). There's also a module function,
1194 socket.setdefaulttimeout(T), which sets the default for all sockets
1195 created henceforth.
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00001196
1197- getopt.gnu_getopt was added. This supports GNU-style option
1198 processing, where options can be mixed with non-option arguments.
Martin v. Löwis446a25f2002-06-06 10:58:36 +00001199
Michael W. Hudsonb0dc1a32002-06-04 18:27:35 +00001200- Stop using strings for exceptions. String objects used for
1201 exceptions are now classes deriving from Exception. The objects
1202 changed were: Tkinter.TclError, bdb.BdbQuit, macpath.norm_error,
1203 tabnanny.NannyNag, and xdrlib.Error.
Neal Norwitzb5b5a262002-06-04 17:14:07 +00001204
Walter Dörwald474458d2002-06-04 15:16:29 +00001205- Constants BOM_UTF8, BOM_UTF16, BOM_UTF16_LE, BOM_UTF16_BE,
1206 BOM_UTF32, BOM_UTF32_LE and BOM_UTF32_BE that represent the Byte
1207 Order Mark in UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 encodings for little and
1208 big endian systems were added to the codecs module. The old names
1209 BOM32_* and BOM64_* were off by a factor of 2.
1210
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00001211- Added conversion functions math.degrees() and math.radians().
Raymond Hettinger87f59ee2002-05-13 04:17:32 +00001212
Raymond Hettinger866964c2002-12-14 19:51:34 +00001213- math.log() now takes an optional argument: math.log(x[, base]).
1214
Raymond Hettinger9b1df1d2002-05-12 06:07:21 +00001215- ftplib.retrlines() now tests for callback is None rather than testing
1216 for False. Was causing an error when given a callback object which
1217 was callable but also returned len() as zero. The change may
1218 create new breakage if the caller relied on the undocumented behavior
1219 and called with callback set to [] or some other False value not
1220 identical to None.
1221
Tim Peters46c04e12002-05-05 20:40:00 +00001222- random.gauss() uses a piece of hidden state used by nothing else,
1223 and the .seed() and .whseed() methods failed to reset it. In other
1224 words, setting the seed didn't completely determine the sequence of
1225 results produced by random.gauss(). It does now. Programs repeatedly
1226 mixing calls to a seed method with calls to gauss() may see different
1227 results now.
1228
Fred Drake7f781c92002-05-01 20:33:53 +00001229- The pickle.Pickler class grew a clear_memo() method to mimic that
1230 provided by cPickle.Pickler.
1231
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00001232- difflib's SequenceMatcher class now does a dynamic analysis of
1233 which elements are so frequent as to constitute noise. For
1234 comparing files as sequences of lines, this generally works better
1235 than the IS_LINE_JUNK function, and function ndiff's linejunk
1236 argument defaults to None now as a result. A happy benefit is
1237 that SequenceMatcher may run much faster now when applied
1238 to large files with many duplicate lines (for example, C program
1239 text with lots of repeated "}" and "return NULL;" lines).
1240
Guido van Rossum256705b2002-04-23 13:29:43 +00001241- New Text.dump() method in Tkinter module.
1242
Marc-André Lemburg1ec71ea2002-04-17 20:33:40 +00001243- New distutils commands for building packagers were added to
1244 support pkgtool on Solaris and swinstall on HP-UX.
1245
1246- distutils now has a new abstract binary packager base class
1247 command/bdist_packager, which simplifies writing packagers.
1248 This will hopefully provide the missing bits to encourage
1249 people to submit more packagers, e.g. for Debian, FreeBSD
1250 and other systems.
1251
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00001252- The UTF-16, -LE and -BE stream readers now raise a
1253 NotImplementedError for all calls to .readline(). Previously, they
1254 used to just produce garbage or fail with an encoding error --
1255 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 +00001256 work well with these.
1257
Martin v. Löwis5c137c22002-03-18 12:44:08 +00001258- compileall now supports quiet operation.
1259
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00001260- The BaseHTTPServer now implements optional HTTP/1.1 persistent
Martin v. Löwis587c98c2002-03-17 18:37:22 +00001261 connections.
1262
Marc-André Lemburga5d2b4c2002-02-16 18:23:30 +00001263- socket module: the SSL support was broken out of the main
1264 _socket module C helper and placed into a new _ssl helper
1265 which now gets imported by socket.py if available and working.
1266
Marc-André Lemburg37aa5802002-02-10 21:42:47 +00001267- encodings package: added aliases for all supported IANA character
1268 sets
1269
Guido van Rossum606fe4e2001-12-28 20:57:14 +00001270- ftplib: to safeguard the user's privacy, anonymous login will use
1271 "anonymous@" as default password, rather than the real user and host
1272 name.
1273
Fred Drake36736122002-01-10 13:50:31 +00001274- webbrowser: tightened up the command passed to os.system() so that
1275 arbitrary shell code can't be executed because a bogus URL was
1276 passed in.
1277
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00001278- gettext.translation has an optional fallback argument, and
Martin v. Löwisa55ffae2002-01-11 06:58:49 +00001279 gettext.find an optional all argument. Translations will now fallback
Martin v. Löwisd8996052002-11-21 21:45:32 +00001280 on a per-message basis. The module supports plural forms, by means
1281 of gettext.[d]ngettext and Translation.[u]ngettext.
Martin v. Löwis1be64192002-01-11 06:33:28 +00001282
Martin v. Löwis9668b932002-01-12 11:27:42 +00001283- distutils bdist commands now offer a --skip-build option.
1284
Walter Dörwaldb25c2b02002-03-21 10:38:40 +00001285- warnings.warn now accepts a Warning instance as first argument.
1286
Fred Drakefed7e852002-04-04 19:36:15 +00001287- The xml.sax.expatreader.ExpatParser class will no longer create
1288 circular references by using itself as the locator that gets passed
1289 to the content handler implementation. [SF bug #535474]
1290
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00001291- The email.Parser.Parser class now properly parses strings regardless
1292 of their line endings, which can be any of \r, \n, or \r\n (CR, LF,
1293 or CRLF). Also, the Header class's constructor default arguments
1294 has changed slightly so that an explicit maxlinelen value is always
Barry Warsaw497e5c42002-12-30 19:27:08 +00001295 honored, and so unicode conversion error handling can be specified.
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00001296
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001297- distutils' build_ext command now links C++ extensions with the C++
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00001298 compiler available in the Makefile or CXX environment variable, if
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001299 running under \*nix.
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00001300
1301- New module bz2: provides a comprehensive interface for the bz2 compression
1302 library. It implements a complete file interface, one-shot (de)compression
1303 functions, and types for sequential (de)compression.
1304
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001305- New pdb command 'pp' which is like 'p' except that it pretty-prints
Barry Warsaw5d8d6182002-11-05 22:41:33 +00001306 the value of its expression argument.
1307
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00001308- Now bdist_rpm distutils command understands a verify_script option in
1309 the config file, including the contents of the referred filename in
1310 the "%verifyscript" section of the rpm spec file.
1311
Gustavo Niemeyer1456fde2002-11-25 17:25:04 +00001312- Fixed bug #495695: webbrowser module would run graphic browsers in a
1313 unix environment even if DISPLAY was not set. Also, support for
1314 skipstone browser was included.
1315
Gustavo Niemeyerd5ae01a2002-12-16 13:11:57 +00001316- Fixed bug #636769: rexec would run unallowed code if subclasses of
1317 strings were used as parameters for certain functions.
1318
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001319Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001320-----------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001321
Martin v. Löwis0d1fdea2002-11-22 08:36:54 +00001322- pygettext.py now supports globbing on Windows, and accepts module
1323 names in addition to accepting file names.
1324
Guido van Rossum923e4ef2002-09-17 20:58:59 +00001325- The SGI demos (Demo/sgi) have been removed. Nobody thought they
1326 were interesting any more. (The SGI library modules and extensions
1327 are still there; it is believed that at least some of these are
1328 still used and useful.)
1329
Fred Drake40813b12002-08-05 15:24:19 +00001330- IDLE supports the new encoding declarations (PEP 263); it can also
1331 deal with legacy 8-bit files if they use the locale's encoding. It
1332 allows non-ASCII strings in the interactive shell and executes them
1333 in the locale's encoding.
Martin v. Löwis98ce7b72002-08-05 15:11:26 +00001334
Marc-André Lemburg46260092002-04-04 16:17:11 +00001335- freeze.py now produces binaries which can import shared modules,
1336 unlike before when this failed due to missing symbol exports in
1337 the generated binary.
1338
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001339Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001340-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001341
Martin v. Löwisdc461752002-11-06 21:59:33 +00001342- On Unix, IDLE is now installed automatically.
1343
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00001344- The fpectl module is not built by default; it's dangerous or useless
1345 except in the hands of experts.
1346
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00001347- The public Python C API will generally be declared using PyAPI_FUNC
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00001348 and PyAPI_DATA macros, while Python extension module init functions
1349 will be declared with PyMODINIT_FUNC. DL_EXPORT/DL_IMPORT macros
1350 are deprecated.
Neal Norwitz1389f3e2002-07-22 13:21:10 +00001351
Tim Petersc6a3ff62002-07-08 22:11:52 +00001352- A bug was fixed that could cause COUNT_ALLOCS builds to segfault, or
1353 get into infinite loops, when a new-style class got garbage-collected.
1354 Unfortunately, to avoid this, the way COUNT_ALLOCS works requires
1355 that new-style classes be immortal in COUNT_ALLOCS builds. Note that
1356 COUNT_ALLOCS is not enabled by default, in either release or debug
1357 builds, and that new-style classes are immortal only in COUNT_ALLOCS
1358 builds.
1359
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00001360- Compiling out the cyclic garbage collector is no longer an option.
1361 The old symbol WITH_CYCLE_GC is now ignored, and Python.h arranges
1362 that it's always defined (for the benefit of any extension modules
1363 that may be conditionalizing on it). A bonus is that any extension
1364 type participating in cyclic gc can choose to participate in the
1365 Py_TRASHCAN mechanism now too; in the absence of cyclic gc, this used
1366 to require editing the core to teach the trashcan mechanism about the
1367 new type.
1368
Martin v. Löwis0cec0ff2002-07-28 16:33:45 +00001369- According to Annex F of the current C standard,
Tim Peters1de41bf2002-07-03 03:31:20 +00001370
1371 The Standard C macro HUGE_VAL and its float and long double analogs,
1372 HUGE_VALF and HUGE_VALL, expand to expressions whose values are
1373 positive infinities.
1374
1375 Python only uses the double HUGE_VAL, and only to #define its own symbol
1376 Py_HUGE_VAL. Some platforms have incorrect definitions for HUGE_VAL.
1377 pyport.h used to try to worm around that, but the workarounds triggered
1378 other bugs on other platforms, so we gave up. If your platform defines
1379 HUGE_VAL incorrectly, you'll need to #define Py_HUGE_VAL to something
1380 that works on your platform. The only instance of this I'm sure about
1381 is on an unknown subset of Cray systems, described here:
1382
1383 http://www.cray.com/swpubs/manuals/SN-2194_2.0/html-SN-2194_2.0/x3138.htm
1384
1385 Presumably 2.3a1 breaks such systems. If anyone uses such a system, help!
1386
Martin v. Löwisa3fb4f72002-06-09 13:33:54 +00001387- The configure option --without-doc-strings can be used to remove the
1388 doc strings from the builtin functions and modules; this reduces the
1389 size of the executable.
1390
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00001391- The universal newlines option (PEP 278) is on by default. On Unix
1392 it can be disabled by passing --without-universal-newlines to the
1393 configure script. On other platforms, remove
1394 WITH_UNIVERSAL_NEWLINES from pyconfig.h.
Tim Peters639295f2002-04-21 07:30:30 +00001395
Martin v. Löwis1142de32002-03-29 16:28:31 +00001396- On Unix, a shared libpython2.3.so can be created with --enable-shared.
1397
Tim Peters8deda702002-03-30 10:06:07 +00001398- All uses of the CACHE_HASH, INTERN_STRINGS, and DONT_SHARE_SHORT_STRINGS
1399 preprocessor symbols were eliminated. The internal decisions they
1400 controlled stopped being experimental long ago.
Tim Peters1f7df352002-03-29 03:29:08 +00001401
Fred Drake7d28b732002-05-02 21:17:00 +00001402- The tools used to build the documentation now work under Cygwin as
1403 well as Unix.
1404
Skip Montanaro57454e52002-06-14 20:30:31 +00001405- The bsddb and dbm module builds have been changed to try and avoid version
1406 skew problems and disable linkage with Berkeley DB 1.85 unless the
1407 installer knows what s/he's doing. See the section on building these
1408 modules in the README file for details.
1409
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001410C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001411-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001412
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00001413- PyNumber_Check() now returns true for string and unicode objects.
1414 This is a result of these types having a partially defined
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00001415 tp_as_number slot. (This is not a feature, but an indication that
Walter Dörwalda1a61f92002-11-19 21:20:25 +00001416 PyNumber_Check() is not very useful to determine numeric behavior.
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00001417 It may be deprecated.)
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00001418
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00001419- The string object's layout has changed: the pointer member
1420 ob_sinterned has been replaced by an int member ob_sstate. On some
1421 platforms (e.g. most 64-bit systems) this may change the offset of
1422 the ob_sval member, so as a precaution the API_VERSION has been
1423 incremented. The apparently unused feature of "indirect interned
1424 strings", supported by the ob_sinterned member, is gone. Interned
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001425 strings are now usually mortal; there is a new API,
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00001426 PyString_InternImmortal() that creates immortal interned strings.
1427 (The ob_sstate member can only take three values; however, while
1428 making it a char saves a few bytes per string object on average, in
1429 it also slowed things down a bit because ob_sval was no longer
1430 aligned.)
1431
Guido van Rossumfdb86482002-08-14 21:20:32 +00001432- The Py_InitModule*() functions now accept NULL for the 'methods'
1433 argument. Modules without global functions are becoming more common
1434 now that factories can be types rather than functions.
1435
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00001436- New C API PyUnicode_FromOrdinal() which exposes unichr() at C
1437 level.
1438
Thomas Heller085358a2002-07-29 14:27:41 +00001439- New functions PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErr() and
1440 PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErrWithFilename(). Similar to
1441 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErrWithFilename() and
1442 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErr(), but they allow to specify
1443 the exception type to raise. Available on Windows.
1444
Tim Peters7c321a82002-07-09 02:57:01 +00001445- Py_FatalError() is now declared as taking a const char* argument. It
1446 was previously declared without const. This should not affect working
1447 code.
1448
Martin v. Löwis01f94bd2002-05-08 08:44:21 +00001449- Added new macro PySequence_ITEM(o, i) that directly calls
1450 sq_item without rechecking that o is a sequence and without
1451 adjusting for negative indices.
1452
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00001453- PyRange_New() now raises ValueError if the fourth argument is not 1.
1454 This is part of the removal of deprecated features of the xrange
1455 object.
1456
Guido van Rossum517c7d42002-04-26 02:49:14 +00001457- PyNumber_Coerce() and PyNumber_CoerceEx() now also invoke the type's
1458 coercion if both arguments have the same type but this type has the
1459 CHECKTYPES flag set. This is to better support proxies.
1460
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00001461- The type of tp_free has been changed from "``void (*)(PyObject *)``" to
1462 "``void (*)(void *)``".
Neil Schemenauer9344b142002-04-12 23:00:08 +00001463
1464- PyObject_Del, PyObject_GC_Del are now functions instead of macros.
1465
Guido van Rossum0986d822002-04-08 01:38:42 +00001466- A type can now inherit its metatype from its base type. Previously,
1467 when PyType_Ready() was called, if ob_type was found to be NULL, it
1468 was always set to &PyType_Type; now it is set to base->ob_type,
1469 where base is tp_base, defaulting to &PyObject_Type.
1470
1471- PyType_Ready() accidentally did not inherit tp_is_gc; now it does.
1472
Neil Schemenauerc9abc1d2002-05-08 14:14:41 +00001473- The PyCore_* family of APIs have been removed.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00001474
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00001475- The "u#" parser marker will now pass through Unicode objects as-is
Marc-André Lemburg3e3eacb2002-01-09 16:21:27 +00001476 without going through the buffer API.
1477
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001478- The enumerators of cmp_op have been renamed to use the prefix ``PyCmp_``.
Martin v. Löwis7198a522002-01-01 19:59:11 +00001479
Tim Peters10a3bb52001-12-25 19:07:38 +00001480- An old #define of ANY as void has been removed from pyport.h. This
1481 hasn't been used since Python's pre-ANSI days, and the #define has
1482 been marked as obsolete since then. SF bug 495548 says it created
1483 conflicts with other packages, so keeping it around wasn't harmless.
1484
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001485- Because Python's magic number scheme broke on January 1st, we decided
1486 to stop Python development. Thanks for all the fish!
1487
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00001488- Some of us don't like fish, so we changed Python's magic number
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00001489 scheme to a new one. See Python/import.c for details.
1490
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001491New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001492-------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001493
Martin v. Löwis79acb9e2002-12-06 12:48:53 +00001494- OpenVMS is now supported.
1495
Martin v. Löwisf90ae202002-06-11 06:22:31 +00001496- AtheOS is now supported.
1497
Andrew MacIntyre161ad0e2002-08-04 07:25:58 +00001498- the EMX runtime environment on OS/2 is now supported.
1499
Martin v. Löwisa6e97582002-01-01 18:41:33 +00001500- GNU/Hurd is now supported.
1501
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001502Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001503-----
1504
Fred Drake4dd0f7e2002-11-26 21:44:56 +00001505- The regrtest.py script's -u option now provides a way to say "allow
1506 all resources except this one." For example, to allow everything
1507 except bsddb, give the option '-uall,-bsddb'.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001508
1509Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001510-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001511
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00001512- The Windows distribution now ships with version 4.0.14 of the
1513 Sleepycat Berkeley database library. This should be a huge
1514 improvement over the previous Berkeley DB 1.85, which had many
1515 bugs.
1516 XXX What are the licensing issues here?
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001517 XXX If a user has a database created with a previous version of
Tim Peters84c7a3f2002-11-23 18:48:06 +00001518 XXX Python, what must they do to convert it?
1519 XXX I'm still not sure how to link this thing (see PCbuild/readme.txt).
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00001520 XXX The version # is likely to change before 2.3a1.
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00001521
1522- The Windows distribution now ships with a Secure Sockets Library (SLL)
Mark Hammondc3de0082002-12-03 06:16:08 +00001523 module (_ssl.pyd)
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00001524
Tim Peters857fb4c2002-11-14 23:31:58 +00001525- The Windows distribution now ships with Tcl/Tk version 8.4.1 (it
1526 previously shipped with Tcl/Tk 8.3.2).
1527
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00001528- When Python is built under a Microsoft compiler, sys.version now
1529 includes the compiler version number (_MSC_VER). For example, under
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001530 MSVC 6, sys.version contains the substring "MSC v.1200 ". 1200 is
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00001531 the value of _MSC_VER under MSVC 6.
1532
Tim Peters08e72952002-04-16 20:48:01 +00001533- Sometimes the uninstall executable (UNWISE.EXE) vanishes. One cause
1534 of that has been fixed in the installer (disabled Wise's "delete in-
1535 use files" uninstall option).
1536
Guido van Rossum181e41a2002-04-06 00:23:25 +00001537- Fixed a bug in urllib's proxy handling in Windows. [SF bug #503031]
1538
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00001539- The installer now installs Start menu shortcuts under (the local
1540 equivalent of) "All Users" when doing an Admin install.
1541
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00001542- file.truncate([newsize]) now works on Windows for all newsize values.
1543 It used to fail if newsize didn't fit in 32 bits, reflecting a
1544 limitation of MS _chsize (which is no longer used).
1545
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00001546- os.waitpid() is now implemented for Windows, and can be used to block
1547 until a specified process exits. This is similar to, but not exactly
1548 the same as, os.waitpid() on POSIX systems. If you're waiting for
1549 a specific process whose pid was obtained from one of the spawn()
1550 functions, the same Python os.waitpid() code works across platforms.
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00001551 See the docs for details. The docs were changed to clarify that
1552 spawn functions return, and waitpid requires, a process handle on
1553 Windows (not the same thing as a Windows process id).
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00001554
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00001555- New tempfile.TemporaryFile implementation for Windows: this doesn't
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00001556 need a TemporaryFileWrapper wrapper anymore, and should be immune
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00001557 to a nasty problem: before 2.3, if you got a temp file on Windows, it
1558 got wrapped in an object whose close() method first closed the
1559 underlying file, then deleted the file. This usually worked fine.
1560 However, the spawn family of functions on Windows create (at a low C
1561 level) the same set of open files in the spawned process Q as were
1562 open in the spawning process P. If a temp file f was among them, then
1563 doing f.close() in P first closed P's C-level file handle on f, but Q's
1564 C-level file handle on f remained open, so the attempt in P to delete f
1565 blew up with a "Permission denied" error (Windows doesn't allow
1566 deleting open files). This was surprising, subtle, and difficult to
1567 work around.
1568
1569- The os module now exports all the symbolic constants usable with the
1570 low-level os.open() on Windows: the new constants in 2.3 are
1571 O_NOINHERIT, O_SHORT_LIVED, O_TEMPORARY, O_RANDOM and O_SEQUENTIAL.
1572 The others were also available in 2.2: O_APPEND, O_BINARY, O_CREAT,
1573 O_EXCL, O_RDONLY, O_RDWR, O_TEXT, O_TRUNC and O_WRONLY. Contrary
1574 to Microsoft docs, O_SHORT_LIVED does not seem to imply O_TEMPORARY
1575 (so specify both if you want both; note that neither is useful unless
1576 specified with O_CREAT too).
1577
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001578Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001579----
1580
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001581- Mac/Relnotes is gone, the release notes are now here.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001582
Just van Rossume1ebd802003-02-10 10:06:18 +00001583- Python (the OSX-only, unix-based version, not the OS9-compatible CFM
1584 version) now fully supports unicode strings as arguments to various file
1585 system calls, eg. open(), file(), os.stat() and os.listdir().
1586
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001587- The current naming convention for Python on the Macintosh is that MacPython
1588 refers to the unix-based OSX-only version, and MacPython-OS9 refers to the
1589 CFM-based version that runs on both OS9 and OSX.
1590
1591- All MacPython-OS9 functionality is now available in an OSX unix build,
1592 including the Carbon modules, the IDE, OSA support, etc. A lot of this
1593 will only work correctly in a framework build, though, because you cannot
1594 talk to the window manager unless your application is run from a .app
1595 bundle. There is a command line tool "pythonw" that runs your script
1596 with an interpreter living in such a .app bundle, this interpreter should
1597 be used to run any Python script using the window manager (including
1598 Tkinter or wxPython scripts).
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00001599
Jack Jansen8bb80db2002-12-30 22:42:43 +00001600- Most of Mac/Lib has moved to Lib/plat-mac, which is again used both in
1601 MacPython-OSX and MacPython-OS9. The only modules remaining in Mac/Lib
1602 are specifically for MacPython-OS9 (CFM support, preference resources, etc).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001603
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001604- A new utility PythonLauncher will start a Python interpreter when a .py or
1605 .pyw script is double-clicked in the Finder. By default .py scripts are
1606 run with a normal Python interpreter in a Terminal window and .pyw
1607 files are run with a window-aware pythonw interpreter without a Terminal
1608 window, but all this can be customized.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001609
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001610- MacPython-OS9 is now Carbon-only, so it runs on Mac OS 9 or Mac OS X and
1611 possibly on Mac OS 8.6 with the right CarbonLib installed, but not on earlier
1612 releases.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001613
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001614- Many tools such as BuildApplet.py and gensuitemodule.py now support a command
1615 line interface too.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001616
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001617- All the Carbon classes are now PEP253 compliant, meaning that you can
1618 subclass them from Python. Most of the attributes have gone, you should
1619 now use the accessor function call API, which is also what Apple's
1620 documentation uses. Some attributes such as grafport.visRgn are still
1621 available for convenience.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001622
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001623- New Carbon modules File (implementing the APIs in Files.h and Aliases.h)
1624 and Folder (APIs from Folders.h). The old macfs builtin module is
1625 gone, and replaced by a Python wrapper around the new modules.
1626
1627- Pathname handling should now be fully consistent: MacPython-OSX always uses
1628 unix pathnames and MacPython-OS9 always uses colon-separated Mac pathnames
1629 (also when running on Mac OS X).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001630
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001631- New Carbon modules Help and AH give access to the Carbon Help Manager.
1632 There are hooks in the IDE to allow accessing the Python documentation
1633 (and Apple's Carbon and Cocoa documentation) through the Help Viewer.
1634 See Mac/OSX/README for converting the Python documentation to a
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001635 Help Viewer compatible form and installing it.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001636
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001637- OSA support has been redesigned and the generated Python classes now
1638 mirror the inheritance defined by the underlying OSA classes.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001639
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001640- MacPython no longer maps both \r and \n to \n on input for any text file.
1641 This feature has been replaced by universal newline support (PEP278).
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00001642
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00001643- The default encoding for Python sourcefiles in MacPython-OS9 is no longer
Guido van Rossum16c85172003-02-20 01:52:48 +00001644 mac-roman (or whatever your local Mac encoding was) but "ascii", like on
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00001645 other platforms. If you really need sourcefiles with Mac characters in them
1646 you can change this in site.py.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001647
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001648
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001649What's New in Python 2.2 final?
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001650===============================
1651
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001652*Release date: 21-Dec-2001*
1653
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001654Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001655--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001656
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00001657- pickle.py, cPickle: allow pickling instances of new-style classes
1658 with a custom metaclass.
1659
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001660Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001661-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001662
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00001663- weakref proxy object: when comparing, unwrap both arguments if both
1664 are proxies.
1665
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001666Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001667-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001668
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00001669- binascii.b2a_base64(): fix a potential buffer overrun when encoding
1670 very short strings.
1671
1672- cPickle: the obscure "fast" mode was suspected of causing stack
1673 overflows on the Mac. Hopefully fixed this by setting the recursion
1674 limit much smaller. If the limit is too low (it only affects
1675 performance), you can change it by defining PY_CPICKLE_FAST_LIMIT
1676 when compiling cPickle.c (or in pyconfig.h).
1677
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001678Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001679-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001680
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00001681- dumbdbm.py: fixed a dumb old bug (the file didn't get synched at
1682 close or delete time).
1683
1684- rfc822.py: fixed a bug where the address '<>' was converted to None
1685 instead of an empty string (also fixes the email.Utils module).
1686
1687- xmlrpclib.py: version 1.0.0; uses precision for doubles.
1688
1689- test suite: the pickle and cPickle tests were not executing any code
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00001690 when run from the standard regression test.
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00001691
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001692Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001693-----------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001694
1695Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001696-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001697
1698C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001699-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001700
1701New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001702-------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001703
1704Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001705-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001706
1707Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001708-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001709
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00001710- distutils package: fixed broken Windows installers (bdist_wininst).
1711
1712- tempfile.py: prevent mysterious warnings when TemporaryFileWrapper
1713 instances are deleted at process exit time.
1714
1715- socket.py: prevent mysterious warnings when socket instances are
1716 deleted at process exit time.
1717
1718- posixmodule.c: fix a Windows crash with stat() of a filename ending
1719 in backslash.
1720
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001721Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001722----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001723
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00001724- The Carbon toolbox modules have been upgraded to Universal Headers
1725 3.4, and experimental CoreGraphics and CarbonEvents modules have
1726 been added. All only for framework-enabled MacOSX.
1727
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001728
Tim Peters6272dfd2001-12-13 19:34:00 +00001729What's New in Python 2.2c1?
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001730===========================
1731
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001732*Release date: 14-Dec-2001*
1733
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001734Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001735--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001736
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00001737- Guido's tutorial introduction to the new type/class features has
1738 been extensively updated. See
1739
1740 http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html
1741
1742 That remains the primary documentation in this area.
1743
Guido van Rossum33bab012001-12-05 22:45:48 +00001744- Fixed a leak: instance variables declared with __slots__ were never
1745 deleted!
1746
Guido van Rossum4b800852001-12-03 00:54:52 +00001747- The "delete attribute" method of descriptor objects is called
1748 __delete__, not __del__. In previous releases, it was mistakenly
1749 called __del__, which created an unfortunate overloading condition
1750 with finalizers. (The "get attribute" and "set attribute" methods
1751 are still called __get__ and __set__, respectively.)
1752
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00001753- Some subtle issues with the super built-in were fixed:
1754
1755 (a) When super itself is subclassed, its __get__ method would still
1756 return an instance of the base class (i.e., of super).
1757
1758 (b) super(C, C()).__class__ would return C rather than super. This
1759 is confusing. To fix this, I decided to change the semantics of
1760 super so that it only applies to code attributes, not to data
1761 attributes. After all, overriding data attributes is not
1762 supported anyway.
1763
1764 (c) The __get__ method didn't check whether the argument was an
1765 instance of the type used in creation of the super instance.
1766
Guido van Rossumcd7b7d62001-12-04 21:02:07 +00001767- Previously, hash() of an instance of a subclass of a mutable type
1768 (list or dictionary) would return some value, rather than raising
1769 TypeError. This has been fixed. Also, directly calling
1770 dict.__hash__ and list.__hash__ now raises the same TypeError
1771 (previously, these were the same as object.__hash__).
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00001772
Guido van Rossumd331cb52001-12-05 19:46:42 +00001773- New-style objects now support deleting their __dict__. This is for
1774 all intents and purposes equivalent to assigning a brand new empty
1775 dictionary, but saves space if the object is not used further.
1776
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001777Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001778-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001779
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00001780- -Qnew now works as documented in PEP 238: when -Qnew is passed on
1781 the command line, all occurrences of "/" use true division instead
1782 of classic division. See the PEP for details. Note that "all"
1783 means all instances in library and 3rd-party modules, as well as in
1784 your own code. As the PEP says, -Qnew is intended for use only in
1785 educational environments with control over the libraries in use.
Tim Petersbf72fe22001-12-11 21:43:14 +00001786 Note that test_coercion.py in the standard Python test suite fails
1787 under -Qnew; this is expected, and won't be repaired until true
1788 division becomes the default (in the meantime, test_coercion is
1789 testing the current rules).
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00001790
Fred Drake6c01e252001-12-14 17:08:12 +00001791- complex() now only allows the first argument to be a string
1792 argument, and raises TypeError if either the second arg is a string
1793 or if the second arg is specified when the first is a string.
1794
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001795Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001796-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001797
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00001798- gc.get_referents was renamed to gc.get_referrers.
1799
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001800Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001801-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001802
Tim Peters25059d32001-12-07 20:35:43 +00001803- Functions in the os.spawn() family now release the global interpreter
1804 lock around calling the platform spawn. They should always have done
1805 this, but did not before 2.2c1. Multithreaded programs calling
1806 an os.spawn function with P_WAIT will no longer block all Python threads
1807 until the spawned program completes. It's possible that some programs
1808 relies on blocking, although more likely by accident than by design.
1809
Martin v. Löwis3a89b2b2001-11-25 14:35:58 +00001810- webbrowser defaults to netscape.exe on OS/2 now.
1811
Martin v. Löwis652e1912001-11-25 14:50:56 +00001812- Tix.ResizeHandle exposes detach_widget, hide, and show.
1813
Martin v. Löwis714d2e22001-12-02 12:26:03 +00001814- The charset alias windows_1252 has been added.
1815
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00001816- types.StringTypes is a tuple containing the defined string types;
1817 usually this will be (str, unicode), but if Python was compiled
1818 without Unicode support it will be just (str,).
1819
1820- The pulldom and minidom modules were synchronized to PyXML.
1821
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001822Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001823-----------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001824
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00001825- A new script called Tools/scripts/google.py was added, which fires
1826 off a search on Google.
1827
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001828Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001829-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001830
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00001831- Note that release builds of Python should arrange to define the
1832 preprocessor symbol NDEBUG on the command line (or equivalent).
1833 In the 2.2 pre-release series we tried to define this by magic in
1834 Python.h instead, but it proved to cause problems for extension
1835 authors. The Unix, Windows and Mac builds now all define NDEBUG in
1836 release builds via cmdline (or equivalent) instead. Ports to
1837 other platforms should do likewise.
1838
Jack Jansen1999ef42001-12-06 21:47:20 +00001839- It is no longer necessary to use --with-suffix when building on a
1840 case-insensitive file system (such as Mac OS X HFS+). In the build
1841 directory an extension is used, but not in the installed python.
1842
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001843C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001844-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001845
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00001846- New function PyDict_MergeFromSeq2() exposes the builtin dict
1847 constructor's logic for updating a dictionary from an iterable object
1848 producing key-value pairs.
1849
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00001850- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() requires that the number of entries in
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00001851 the keyword list equal the number of argument specifiers. This
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00001852 wasn't checked correctly, and PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords could even
1853 dump core in some bad cases. This has been repaired. As a result,
1854 PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords may raise RuntimeError in bad cases that
1855 previously went unchallenged.
1856
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001857New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001858-------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001859
1860Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001861-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001862
1863Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001864-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001865
1866Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001867----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001868
Jack Jansenffa260f2001-12-06 21:14:00 +00001869- In unix-Python on Mac OS X (and darwin) sys.platform is now "darwin",
1870 without any trailing digits.
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001871
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00001872- Changed logic for finding python home in Mac OS X framework Pythons.
1873 Now sys.executable points to the executable again, in stead of to
1874 the shared library. The latter is used only for locating the python
1875 home.
1876
1877
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001878What's New in Python 2.2b2?
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001879===========================
1880
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001881*Release date: 16-Nov-2001*
1882
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001883Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001884--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001885
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00001886- Multiple inheritance mixing new-style and classic classes in the
1887 list of base classes is now allowed, so this works now:
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00001888
1889 class Classic: pass
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00001890 class Mixed(Classic, object): pass
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00001891
1892 The MRO (method resolution order) for each base class is respected
1893 according to its kind, but the MRO for the derived class is computed
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00001894 using new-style MRO rules if any base class is a new-style class.
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00001895 This needs to be documented.
1896
Tim Petersa427a2b2001-10-29 22:25:45 +00001897- The new builtin dictionary() constructor, and dictionary type, have
1898 been renamed to dict. This reflects a decade of common usage.
1899
Guido van Rossum3fc08d22001-11-15 20:33:10 +00001900- dict() now accepts an iterable object producing 2-sequences. For
1901 example, dict(d.items()) == d for any dictionary d. The argument,
1902 and the elements of the argument, can be any iterable objects.
1903
Guido van Rossum7ad2d1e2001-10-29 22:11:00 +00001904- New-style classes can now have a __del__ method, which is called
1905 when the instance is deleted (just like for classic classes).
1906
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00001907- Assignment to object.__dict__ is now possible, for objects that are
1908 instances of new-style classes that have a __dict__ (unless the base
1909 class forbids it).
1910
Guido van Rossumc8e56452001-10-22 00:43:43 +00001911- Methods of built-in types now properly check for keyword arguments
1912 (formerly these were silently ignored). The only built-in methods
1913 that take keyword arguments are __call__, __init__ and __new__.
1914
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00001915- The socket function has been converted to a type; see below.
1916
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001917Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001918-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001919
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00001920- Assignment to __debug__ raises SyntaxError at compile-time. This
1921 was promised when 2.1c1 was released as "What's New in Python 2.1c1"
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00001922 (see below) says.
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00001923
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00001924- Clarified the error messages for unsupported operands to an operator
1925 (like 1 + '').
1926
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001927Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001928-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001929
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00001930- mmap has a new keyword argument, "access", allowing a uniform way for
1931 both Windows and Unix users to create read-only, write-through and
1932 copy-on-write memory mappings. This was previously possible only on
1933 Unix. A new keyword argument was required to support this in a
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00001934 uniform way because the mmap() signatures had diverged across
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00001935 platforms. Thanks to Jay T Miller for repairing this!
1936
Tim Peters169ded02001-11-03 19:57:21 +00001937- By default, the gc.garbage list now contains only those instances in
1938 unreachable cycles that have __del__ methods; in 2.1 it contained all
1939 instances in unreachable cycles. "Instances" here has been generalized
1940 to include instances of both new-style and old-style classes.
1941
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00001942- The socket module defines a new method for socket objects,
1943 sendall(). This is like send() but may make multiple calls to
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00001944 send() until all data has been sent. Also, the socket function has
1945 been converted to a subclassable type, like list and tuple (etc.)
1946 before it; socket and SocketType are now the same thing.
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00001947
1948- Various bugfixes to the curses module. There is now a test suite
1949 for the curses module (you have to run it manually).
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00001950
Guido van Rossum692adf12001-10-30 03:03:03 +00001951- binascii.b2a_base64 no longer places an arbitrary restriction of 57
1952 bytes on its input.
1953
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001954Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001955-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001956
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00001957- tkFileDialog exposes a Directory class and askdirectory
Martin v. Löwis25ee87c2001-11-07 22:38:08 +00001958 convenience function.
1959
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00001960- Symbolic group names in regular expressions must be unique. For
1961 example, the regexp r'(?P<abc>)(?P<abc>)' is not allowed, because a
1962 single name can't mean both "group 1" and "group 2" simultaneously.
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00001963 Python 2.2 detects this error at regexp compilation time;
1964 previously, the error went undetected, and results were
1965 unpredictable. Also in sre, the pattern.split(), pattern.sub(), and
1966 pattern.subn() methods have been rewritten in C. Also, an
1967 experimental function/method finditer() has been added, which works
1968 like findall() but returns an iterator.
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00001969
Martin v. Löwisb7b32602001-11-02 23:48:20 +00001970- Tix exposes more commands through the classes DirSelectBox,
1971 DirSelectDialog, ListNoteBook, Meter, CheckList, and the
1972 methods tix_addbitmapdir, tix_cget, tix_configure, tix_filedialog,
1973 tix_getbitmap, tix_getimage, tix_option_get, and tix_resetoptions.
1974
Tim Peters98791af2001-10-23 01:59:54 +00001975- Traceback objects are now scanned by cyclic garbage collection, so
1976 cycles created by casual use of sys.exc_info() no longer cause
1977 permanent memory leaks (provided garbage collection is enabled).
1978
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00001979- os.extsep -- a new variable needed by the RISCOS support. It is the
1980 separator used by extensions, and is '.' on all platforms except
1981 RISCOS, where it is '/'. There is no need to use this variable
1982 unless you have a masochistic desire to port your code to RISCOS.
1983
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00001984- mimetypes.py has optional support for non-standard, but commonly
1985 found types. guess_type() and guess_extension() now accept an
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001986 optional 'strict' flag, defaulting to true, which controls whether
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00001987 recognize non-standard types or not. A few non-standard types we
1988 know about have been added. Also, when run as a script, there are
1989 new -l and -e options.
1990
1991- statcache is now deprecated.
1992
1993- email.Utils.formatdate() now produces the preferred RFC 2822 style
1994 dates with numeric timezones (it used to produce obsolete dates
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001995 hard coded to "GMT" timezone). An optional 'localtime' flag is
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00001996 added to produce dates in the local timezone, with daylight savings
1997 time properly taken into account.
1998
1999- In pickle and cPickle, instead of masking errors in load() by
2000 transforming them into SystemError, we let the original exception
2001 propagate out. Also, implement support for __safe_for_unpickling__
2002 in pickle, as it already was supported in cPickle.
2003
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002004Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002005-----------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002006
2007Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002008-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002009
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00002010- The dbm module is built using libdb1 if available. The bsddb module
2011 is built with libdb3 if available.
2012
2013- Misc/Makefile.pre.in has been removed by BDFL pronouncement.
2014
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002015C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002016-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002017
Tim Peters1fc240e2001-10-26 05:06:50 +00002018- New function PySequence_Fast_GET_SIZE() returns the size of a non-
2019 NULL result from PySequence_Fast(), more quickly than calling
2020 PySequence_Size().
2021
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00002022- New argument unpacking function PyArg_UnpackTuple() added.
2023
2024- New functions PyObject_CallFunctionObjArgs() and
2025 PyObject_CallMethodObjArgs() have been added to make it more
2026 convenient and efficient to call functions and methods from C.
2027
2028- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() no longer masks errors, so it's
2029 possible that this will propagate errors it didn't before.
2030
2031- New function PyObject_CheckReadBuffer(), which returns true if its
2032 argument supports the single-segment readable buffer interface.
2033
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002034New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002035-------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002036
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00002037- We've finally confirmed that this release builds on HP-UX 11.00,
2038 *with* threads, and passes the test suite.
2039
Tim Peters7a33d8b2001-11-05 02:51:07 +00002040- Thanks to a series of patches from Michael Muller, Python may build
2041 again under OS/2 Visual Age C++.
2042
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00002043- Updated RISCOS port by Dietmar Schwertberger.
2044
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002045Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002046-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002047
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00002048- Added a test script for the curses module. It isn't run automatically;
2049 regrtest.py must be run with '-u curses' to enable it.
2050
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002051Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002052-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002053
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00002054Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002055----
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00002056
2057- PythonScript has been moved to unsupported and is slated to be
2058 removed completely in the next release.
2059
2060- It should now be possible to build applets that work on both OS9 and
2061 OSX.
2062
2063- The core is now linked with CoreServices not Carbon; as a side
2064 result, default 8bit encoding on OSX is now ASCII.
2065
2066- Python should now build on OSX 10.1.1
2067
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002068
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002069What's New in Python 2.2b1?
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002070===========================
2071
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002072*Release date: 19-Oct-2001*
2073
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002074Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002075--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002076
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00002077- New-style classes are now always dynamic (except for built-in and
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00002078 extension types). There is no longer a performance penalty, and I
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00002079 no longer see another reason to keep this baggage around. One relic
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00002080 remains: the __dict__ of a new-style class is a read-only proxy; you
2081 must set the class's attribute to modify it. As a consequence, the
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00002082 __defined__ attribute of new-style types no longer exists, for lack
2083 of need: there is once again only one __dict__ (although in the
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00002084 future a __cache__ may be resurrected with a similar function, if I
2085 can prove that it actually speeds things up).
Guido van Rossum50fda3b2001-10-04 19:46:06 +00002086
Tim Peters1c9ca872001-10-04 06:43:12 +00002087- C.__doc__ now works as expected for new-style classes (in 2.2a4 it
2088 always returned None, even when there was a class docstring).
2089
2090- doctest now finds and runs docstrings attached to new-style classes,
2091 class methods, static methods, and properties.
2092
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00002093Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002094-----------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002095
Guido van Rossuma8bcf802001-10-15 15:53:58 +00002096- A very subtle syntactical pitfall in list comprehensions was fixed.
2097 For example: [a+b for a in 'abc', for b in 'def']. The comma in
2098 this example is a mistake. Previously, this would silently let 'a'
2099 iterate over the singleton tuple ('abc',), yielding ['abcd', 'abce',
2100 'abcf'] rather than the intended ['ad', 'ae', 'af', 'bd', 'be',
2101 'bf', 'cd', 'ce', 'cf']. Now, this is flagged as a syntax error.
2102 Note that [a for a in <singleton>] is a convoluted way to say
2103 [<singleton>] anyway, so it's not like any expressiveness is lost.
2104
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00002105- getattr(obj, name, default) now only catches AttributeError, as
2106 documented, rather than returning the default value for all
2107 exceptions (which could mask bugs in a __getattr__ hook, for
2108 example).
2109
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00002110- Weak reference objects are now part of the core and offer a C API.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00002111 A bug which could allow a core dump when binary operations involved
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00002112 proxy reference has been fixed. weakref.ReferenceError is now a
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00002113 built-in exception.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00002114
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00002115- unicode(obj) now behaves more like str(obj), accepting arbitrary
2116 objects, and calling a __unicode__ method if it exists.
2117 unicode(obj, encoding) and unicode(obj, encoding, errors) still
Marc-André Lemburgb5507ec2001-10-19 12:02:29 +00002118 require an 8-bit string or character buffer argument.
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00002119
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00002120- isinstance() now allows any object as the first argument and a
2121 class, a type or something with a __bases__ tuple attribute for the
2122 second argument. The second argument may also be a tuple of a
2123 class, type, or something with __bases__, in which case isinstance()
2124 will return true if the first argument is an instance of any of the
2125 things contained in the second argument tuple. E.g.
2126
2127 isinstance(x, (A, B))
2128
2129 returns true if x is an instance of A or B.
2130
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00002131Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002132-----------------
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00002133
2134- thread.start_new_thread() now returns the thread ID (previously None).
2135
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00002136- binascii has now two quopri support functions, a2b_qp and b2a_qp.
2137
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00002138- readline now supports setting the startup_hook and the
2139 pre_event_hook, and adds the add_history() function.
Martin v. Löwis0daad592001-09-30 21:09:59 +00002140
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00002141- os and posix supports chroot(), setgroups() and unsetenv() where
2142 available. The stat(), fstat(), statvfs() and fstatvfs() functions
2143 now return "pseudo-sequences" -- the various fields can now be
2144 accessed as attributes (e.g. os.stat("/").st_mtime) but for
2145 backwards compatibility they also behave as a fixed-length sequence.
2146 Some platform-specific fields (e.g. st_rdev) are only accessible as
Guido van Rossum98bf58f2001-10-18 20:34:25 +00002147 attributes.
2148
2149- time: localtime(), gmtime() and strptime() now return a
2150 pseudo-sequence similar to the os.stat() return value, with
2151 attributes like tm_year etc.
Martin v. Löwis16628c92001-10-04 22:46:41 +00002152
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00002153- Decompression objects in the zlib module now accept an optional
2154 second parameter to decompress() that specifies the maximum amount
2155 of memory to use for the uncompressed data.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002156
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00002157- optional SSL support in the socket module now exports OpenSSL
2158 functions RAND_add(), RAND_egd(), and RAND_status(). These calls
2159 are useful on platforms like Solaris where OpenSSL does not
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00002160 automatically seed its PRNG. Also, the keyfile and certfile
2161 arguments to socket.ssl() are now optional.
2162
2163- posixmodule (and by extension, the os module on POSIX platforms) now
2164 exports O_LARGEFILE, O_DIRECT, O_DIRECTORY, and O_NOFOLLOW.
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00002165
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00002166Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002167-------
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00002168
Tim Peters7402f792001-10-02 03:53:41 +00002169- doctest now excludes functions and classes not defined by the module
2170 being tested, thanks to Tim Hochberg.
2171
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00002172- HotShot, a new profiler implemented using a C-based callback, has
2173 been added. This substantially reduces the overhead of profiling,
2174 but it is still quite preliminary. Support modules and
2175 documentation will be added in upcoming releases (before 2.2 final).
2176
Guido van Rossumc4b09b42001-10-04 10:19:00 +00002177- profile now produces correct output in situations where an exception
2178 raised in Python is cleared by C code (e.g. hasattr()). This used
2179 to cause wrong output, including spurious claims of recursive
2180 functions and attribution of time spent to the wrong function.
2181
Tim Peters0a1fc4e2001-10-07 03:12:08 +00002182 The code and documentation for the derived OldProfile and HotProfile
2183 profiling classes was removed. The code hasn't worked for years (if
2184 you tried to use them, they raised exceptions). OldProfile
2185 intended to reproduce the behavior of the profiler Python used more
2186 than 7 years ago, and isn't interesting anymore. HotProfile intended
2187 to provide a faster profiler (but producing less information), and
2188 that's a worthy goal we intend to meet via a different approach (but
2189 without losing information).
2190
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00002191- Profile.calibrate() has a new implementation that should deliver
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00002192 a much better system-specific calibration constant. The constant can
2193 now be specified in an instance constructor, or as a Profile class or
2194 instance variable, instead of by editing profile.py's source code.
2195 Calibration must still be done manually (see the docs for the profile
2196 module).
2197
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002198 Note that Profile.calibrate() must be overridden by subclasses.
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00002199 Improving the accuracy required exploiting detailed knowledge of
2200 profiler internals; the earlier method abstracted away the details
2201 and measured a simplified model instead, but consequently computed
2202 a constant too small by a factor of 2 on some modern machines.
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00002203
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00002204- quopri's encode and decode methods take an optional header parameter,
Jeremy Hylton6f543b62001-10-16 20:42:52 +00002205 which indicates whether output is intended for the header 'Q'
2206 encoding.
2207
Guido van Rossuma5343cc2001-10-18 18:02:07 +00002208- The SocketServer.ThreadingMixIn class now closes the request after
2209 finish_request() returns. (Not when it errors out though.)
2210
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002211- The nntplib module's NNTP.body() method has grown a 'file' argument
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00002212 to allow saving the message body to a file.
2213
2214- The email package has added a class email.Parser.HeaderParser which
2215 only parses headers and does not recurse into the message's body.
2216 Also, the module/class MIMEAudio has been added for representing
2217 audio data (contributed by Anthony Baxter).
2218
2219- ftplib should be able to handle files > 2GB.
2220
2221- ConfigParser.getboolean() now also interprets TRUE, FALSE, YES, NO,
2222 ON, and OFF.
2223
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00002224- xml.dom.minidom NodeList objects now support the length attribute
2225 and item() method as required by the DOM specifications.
2226
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00002227Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002228-----------
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00002229
2230- Demo/dns was removed. It no longer serves any purpose; a package
2231 derived from it is now maintained by Anthony Baxter, see
2232 http://PyDNS.SourceForge.net.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002233
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00002234- The freeze tool has been made more robust, and two new options have
2235 been added: -X and -E.
2236
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002237Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002238-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002239
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00002240- configure will use CXX in LINKCC if CXX is used to build main() and
2241 the system requires to link a C++ main using the C++ compiler.
2242
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002243C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002244-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002245
Guido van Rossum6c4bce32001-10-18 19:20:25 +00002246- The documentation for the tp_compare slot is updated to require that
2247 the return value must be -1, 0, 1; an arbitrary number <0 or >0 is
2248 not correct. This is not yet enforced but will be enforced in
2249 Python 2.3; even later, we may use -2 to indicate errors and +2 for
2250 "NotImplemented". Right now, -1 should be used for an error return.
2251
Tim Petersd38b1c72001-09-30 05:09:37 +00002252- PyLong_AsLongLong() now accepts int (as well as long) arguments.
2253 Consequently, PyArg_ParseTuple's 'L' code also accepts int (as well
2254 as long) arguments.
2255
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00002256- PyThread_start_new_thread() now returns a long int giving the thread
2257 ID, if one can be calculated; it returns -1 for error, 0 if no
2258 thread ID is calculated (this is an incompatible change, but only
2259 the thread module used this API). This code has only really been
2260 tested on Linux and Windows; other platforms please beware (and
2261 report any bugs or strange behavior).
2262
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00002263- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() no longer accepts Unicode objects as
2264 input.
2265
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002266New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002267-------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002268
2269Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002270-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002271
2272Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002273-------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002274
Tim Peters04cf1d32001-10-09 22:39:40 +00002275- Installer: If you install IDLE, and don't disable file-extension
2276 registration, a new "Edit with IDLE" context (right-click) menu entry
2277 is created for .py and .pyw files.
2278
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00002279- The signal module now supports SIGBREAK on Windows, thanks to Steven
2280 Scott. Note that SIGBREAK is unique to Windows. The default SIGBREAK
2281 action remains to call Win32 ExitProcess(). This can be changed via
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00002282 signal.signal(). For example::
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00002283
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002284 # Make Ctrl+Break raise KeyboardInterrupt, like Python's default Ctrl+C
2285 # (SIGINT) behavior.
2286 import signal
2287 signal.signal(signal.SIGBREAK, signal.default_int_handler)
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00002288
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002289 try:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002290 while 1:
2291 pass
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002292 except KeyboardInterrupt:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002293 # We get here on Ctrl+C or Ctrl+Break now; if we had not changed
2294 # SIGBREAK, only on Ctrl+C (and Ctrl+Break would terminate the
2295 # program without the possibility for any Python-level cleanup).
2296 print "Clean exit"
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00002297
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002298
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002299What's New in Python 2.2a4?
2300===========================
2301
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002302*Release date: 28-Sep-2001*
2303
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00002304Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002305--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00002306
2307- pydoc and inspect are now aware of new-style classes;
2308 e.g. help(list) at the interactive prompt now shows proper
2309 documentation for all operations on list objects.
2310
2311- Applications using Jim Fulton's ExtensionClass module can now safely
2312 be used with Python 2.2. In particular, Zope 2.4.1 now works with
2313 Python 2.2 (as well as with Python 2.1.1). The Demo/metaclass
2314 examples also work again. It is hoped that Gtk and Boost also work
2315 with 2.2a4 and beyond. (If you can confirm this, please write
2316 webmaster@python.org; if there are still problems, please open a bug
2317 report on SourceForge.)
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002318
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00002319- property() now takes 4 keyword arguments: fget, fset, fdel and doc.
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002320 These map to read-only attributes 'fget', 'fset', 'fdel', and '__doc__'
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00002321 in the constructed property object. fget, fset and fdel weren't
2322 discoverable from Python in 2.2a3. __doc__ is new, and allows to
2323 associate a docstring with a property.
2324
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00002325- Comparison overloading is now more completely implemented. For
2326 example, a str subclass instance can properly be compared to a str
2327 instance, and it can properly overload comparison. Ditto for most
2328 other built-in object types.
2329
2330- The repr() of new-style classes has changed; instead of <type
2331 'M.Foo'> a new-style class is now rendered as <class 'M.Foo'>,
2332 *except* for built-in types, which are still rendered as <type
2333 'Foo'> (to avoid upsetting existing code that might parse or
2334 otherwise rely on repr() of certain type objects).
2335
2336- The repr() of new-style objects is now always <Foo object at XXX>;
2337 previously, it was sometimes <Foo instance at XXX>.
2338
2339- For new-style classes, what was previously called __getattr__ is now
2340 called __getattribute__. This method, if defined, is called for
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00002341 *every* attribute access. A new __getattr__ hook more similar to the
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00002342 one in classic classes is defined which is called only if regular
2343 attribute access raises AttributeError; to catch *all* attribute
2344 access, you can use __getattribute__ (for new-style classes). If
2345 both are defined, __getattribute__ is called first, and if it raises
2346 AttributeError, __getattr__ is called.
2347
2348- The __class__ attribute of new-style objects can be assigned to.
2349 The new class must have the same C-level object layout as the old
2350 class.
2351
2352- The builtin file type can be subclassed now. In the usual pattern,
2353 "file" is the name of the builtin type, and file() is a new builtin
2354 constructor, with the same signature as the builtin open() function.
2355 file() is now the preferred way to open a file.
2356
2357- Previously, __new__ would only see sequential arguments passed to
2358 the type in a constructor call; __init__ would see both sequential
2359 and keyword arguments. This made no sense whatsoever any more, so
2360 now both __new__ and __init__ see all arguments.
2361
2362- Previously, hash() applied to an instance of a subclass of str or
2363 unicode always returned 0. This has been repaired.
2364
2365- Previously, an operation on an instance of a subclass of an
2366 immutable type (int, long, float, complex, tuple, str, unicode),
2367 where the subtype didn't override the operation (and so the
2368 operation was handled by the builtin type), could return that
2369 instance instead a value of the base type. For example, if s was of
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002370 a str subclass type, s[:] returned s as-is. Now it returns a str
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00002371 with the same value as s.
2372
Barry Warsaw86fbaf82001-09-28 15:26:12 +00002373- Provisional support for pickling new-style objects has been added.
2374
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00002375Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002376----
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00002377
Tim Peters2c9aa5e2001-09-23 04:06:05 +00002378- file.writelines() now accepts any iterable object producing strings.
2379
Marc-André Lemburgaefd7662001-09-20 12:59:37 +00002380- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() now works very much like
2381 PyObject_Str(obj) in that it tries to use __str__/tp_str
2382 on the object if the object is not a string or buffer. This
2383 makes unicode() behave like str() when applied to non-string/buffer
2384 objects.
2385
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00002386- PyFile_WriteObject now passes Unicode objects to the file's write
2387 method. As a result, all file-like objects which may be the target
Martin v. Löwis2777c022001-09-19 13:47:32 +00002388 of a print statement must support Unicode objects, i.e. they must
2389 at least convert them into ASCII strings.
2390
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002391- Thread scheduling on Solaris should be improved; it is no longer
2392 necessary to insert a small sleep at the start of a thread in order
2393 to let other runnable threads be scheduled.
2394
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002395Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002396-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002397
Marc-André Lemburgbf990172001-09-27 14:17:33 +00002398- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
2399 read character buffer compatible objects for their .write() methods.
2400 These objects are converted to strings and then handled as such
2401 by the instances.
2402
Barry Warsaw2f600732001-09-24 04:28:10 +00002403- The "email" package has been added. This is basically a port of the
2404 mimelib package <http://sf.net/projects/mimelib> with API changes
2405 and some implementations updated to use iterators and generators.
2406
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00002407- difflib.ndiff() and difflib.Differ.compare() are generators now. This
2408 restores the ability of Tools/scripts/ndiff.py to start producing output
2409 before the entire comparison is complete.
2410
Barry Warsaw58b072d2001-09-22 04:44:21 +00002411- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
2412 iteration just like file objects (i.e. their .readline() method is
2413 called for each iteration until it returns an empty string).
2414
Marc-André Lemburg494f2ae2001-09-19 11:33:31 +00002415- The codecs module has grown four new helper APIs to access
2416 builtin codecs: getencoder(), getdecoder(), getreader(),
2417 getwriter().
2418
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002419- SimpleXMLRPCServer: a new module (based upon SimpleHTMLServer)
2420 simplifies writing XML RPC servers.
2421
Barry Warsaw647d5e82001-09-28 17:01:02 +00002422- os.path.realpath(): a new function that returns the absolute pathname
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002423 after interpretation of symbolic links. On non-Unix systems, this
2424 is an alias for os.path.abspath().
2425
Tim Peters16a77ad2001-09-08 04:00:12 +00002426- operator.indexOf() (PySequence_Index() in the C API) now works with any
2427 iterable object.
2428
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002429- smtplib now supports various authentication and security features of
2430 the SMTP protocol through the new login() and starttls() methods.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00002431
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002432- hmac: a new module implementing keyed hashing for message
2433 authentication.
2434
2435- mimetypes now recognizes more extensions and file types. At the
2436 same time, some mappings not sanctioned by IANA were removed.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00002437
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002438- The "compiler" package has been brought up to date to the state of
Guido van Rossumc9ed5dc2001-09-20 05:30:24 +00002439 Python 2.2 bytecode generation. It has also been promoted from a
2440 Tool to a standard library package. (Tools/compiler still exists as
2441 a sample driver.)
2442
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002443Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002444-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002445
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002446- Large file support (LFS) is now automatic when the platform supports
2447 it; no more manual configuration tweaks are needed. On Linux, at
2448 least, it's possible to have a system whose C library supports large
2449 files but whose kernel doesn't; in this case, large file support is
2450 still enabled but doesn't do you any good unless you upgrade your
2451 kernel or share your Python executable with another system whose
2452 kernel has large file support.
2453
2454- The configure script now supplies plausible defaults in a
2455 cross-compilation environment. This doesn't mean that the supplied
2456 values are always correct, or that cross-compilation now works
2457 flawlessly -- but it's a first step (and it shuts up most of
2458 autoconf's warnings about AC_TRY_RUN).
2459
2460- The Unix build is now a bit less chatty, courtesy of the parser
2461 generator. The build is completely silent (except for errors) when
2462 using "make -s", thanks to a -q option to setup.py.
2463
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002464C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002465-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002466
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002467- The "structmember" API now supports some new flag bits to deny read
2468 and/or write access to attributes in restricted execution mode.
2469
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002470New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002471-------------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002472
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002473- Compaq's iPAQ handheld, running the "familiar" Linux distribution
2474 (http://familiar.handhelds.org).
2475
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002476Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002477-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002478
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00002479- The "classic" standard tests, which work by comparing stdout to
2480 an expected-output file under Lib/test/output/, no longer stop at
2481 the first mismatch. Instead the test is run to completion, and a
2482 variant of ndiff-style comparison is used to report all differences.
2483 This is much easier to understand than the previous style of reporting.
2484
2485- The unittest-based standard tests now use regrtest's test_main()
2486 convention, instead of running as a side-effect of merely being
2487 imported. This allows these tests to be run in more natural and
2488 flexible ways as unittests, outside the regrtest framework.
2489
2490- regrtest.py is much better integrated with unittest and doctest now,
2491 especially in regard to reporting errors.
2492
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002493Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002494-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002495
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002496- Large file support now also works for files > 4GB, on filesystems
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00002497 that support it (NTFS under Windows 2000). See "What's New in
2498 Python 2.2a3" for more detail.
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002499
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002500
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002501What's New in Python 2.2a3?
2502===========================
2503
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002504*Release Date: 07-Sep-2001*
2505
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002506Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002507----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002508
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00002509- Conversion of long to float now raises OverflowError if the long is too
2510 big to represent as a C double.
2511
Tim Peters32f453e2001-09-03 08:35:41 +00002512- The 3-argument builtin pow() no longer allows a third non-None argument
2513 if either of the first two arguments is a float, or if both are of
2514 integer types and the second argument is negative (in which latter case
2515 the arguments are converted to float, so this is really the same
2516 restriction).
2517
Tim Peters5d2b77c2001-09-03 05:47:38 +00002518- The builtin dir() now returns more information, and sometimes much
2519 more, generally naming all attributes of an object, and all attributes
2520 reachable from the object via its class, and from its class's base
2521 classes, and so on from them too. Example: in 2.2a2, dir([]) returned
2522 an empty list. In 2.2a3,
2523
2524 >>> dir([])
2525 ['__add__', '__class__', '__contains__', '__delattr__', '__delitem__',
2526 '__eq__', '__ge__', '__getattr__', '__getitem__', '__getslice__',
2527 '__gt__', '__hash__', '__iadd__', '__imul__', '__init__', '__le__',
2528 '__len__', '__lt__', '__mul__', '__ne__', '__new__', '__repr__',
2529 '__rmul__', '__setattr__', '__setitem__', '__setslice__', '__str__',
2530 'append', 'count', 'extend', 'index', 'insert', 'pop', 'remove',
2531 'reverse', 'sort']
2532
2533 dir(module) continues to return only the module's attributes, though.
2534
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002535- Overflowing operations on plain ints now return a long int rather
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002536 than raising OverflowError. This is a partial implementation of PEP
2537 237. You can use -Wdefault::OverflowWarning to enable a warning for
2538 this situation, and -Werror::OverflowWarning to revert to the old
2539 OverflowError exception.
2540
Guido van Rossum61c345f2001-09-04 03:26:15 +00002541- A new command line option, -Q<arg>, is added to control run-time
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002542 warnings for the use of classic division. (See PEP 238.) Possible
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00002543 values are -Qold, -Qwarn, -Qwarnall, and -Qnew. The default is
2544 -Qold, meaning the / operator has its classic meaning and no
2545 warnings are issued. Using -Qwarn issues a run-time warning about
2546 all uses of classic division for int and long arguments; -Qwarnall
2547 also warns about classic division for float and complex arguments
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00002548 (for use with fixdiv.py).
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002549 [Note: the remainder of this item (preserved below) became
2550 obsolete in 2.2c1 -- -Qnew has global effect in 2.2] ::
2551
2552 Using -Qnew is questionable; it turns on new division by default, but
2553 only in the __main__ module. You can usefully combine -Qwarn or
2554 -Qwarnall and -Qnew: this gives the __main__ module new division, and
2555 warns about classic division everywhere else.
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002556
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002557- Many built-in types can now be subclassed. This applies to int,
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002558 long, float, str, unicode, and tuple. (The types complex, list and
2559 dictionary can also be subclassed; this was introduced earlier.)
2560 Note that restrictions apply when subclassing immutable built-in
2561 types: you can only affect the value of the instance by overloading
2562 __new__. You can add mutable attributes, and the subclass instances
2563 will have a __dict__ attribute, but you cannot change the "value"
2564 (as implemented by the base class) of an immutable subclass instance
2565 once it is created.
2566
Guido van Rossumaaf80c82001-09-02 13:44:35 +00002567- The dictionary constructor now takes an optional argument, a
2568 mapping-like object, and initializes the dictionary from its
2569 (key, value) pairs.
2570
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002571- A new built-in type, super, has been added. This facilitates making
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002572 "cooperative super calls" in a multiple inheritance setting. For an
2573 explanation, see http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#cooperation
2574
Guido van Rossum8d7234d2001-09-06 22:02:58 +00002575- A new built-in type, property, has been added. This enables the
2576 creation of "properties". These are attributes implemented by
2577 getter and setter functions (or only one of these for read-only or
2578 write-only attributes), without the need to override __getattr__.
2579 See http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#property
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002580
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002581- The syntax of floating-point and imaginary literals has been
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00002582 liberalized, to allow leading zeroes. Examples of literals now
2583 legal that were SyntaxErrors before:
2584
2585 00.0 0e3 0100j 07.5 00000000000000000008.
2586
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002587- An old tokenizer bug allowed floating point literals with an incomplete
Tim Petersc6d95812001-08-28 20:56:27 +00002588 exponent, such as 1e and 3.1e-. Such literals now raise SyntaxError.
2589
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002590Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002591-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002592
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00002593- telnetlib includes symbolic names for the options, and support for
Martin v. Löwis1da9c572002-11-04 09:56:00 +00002594 setting an option negotiation callback. It also supports processing
2595 of suboptions.
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00002596
Tim Petersa40c7932001-09-05 22:36:56 +00002597- The new C standard no longer requires that math libraries set errno to
2598 ERANGE on overflow. For platform libraries that exploit this new
2599 freedom, Python's overflow-checking was wholly broken. A new overflow-
2600 checking scheme attempts to repair that, but may not be reliable on all
2601 platforms (C doesn't seem to provide anything both useful and portable
2602 in this area anymore).
2603
Martin v. Löwis44f86962001-09-05 13:44:54 +00002604- Asynchronous timeout actions are available through the new class
2605 threading.Timer.
2606
Tim Peters78526162001-09-05 00:53:45 +00002607- math.log and math.log10 now return sensible results for even huge
2608 long arguments. For example, math.log10(10 ** 10000) ~= 10000.0.
2609
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002610- A new function, imp.lock_held(), returns 1 when the import lock is
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00002611 currently held. See the docs for the imp module.
2612
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002613- pickle, cPickle and marshal on 32-bit platforms can now correctly read
Tim Peters82112372001-08-29 02:28:42 +00002614 dumps containing ints written on platforms where Python ints are 8 bytes.
2615 When read on a box where Python ints are 4 bytes, such values are
2616 converted to Python longs.
2617
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002618- In restricted execution mode (using the rexec module), unmarshalling
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002619 code objects is no longer allowed. This plugs a security hole.
2620
Steve Purcell6091cd62001-09-06 16:05:17 +00002621- unittest.TestResult instances no longer store references to tracebacks
2622 generated by test failures. This prevents unexpected dangling references
2623 to objects that should be garbage collected between tests.
2624
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002625Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002626-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002627
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00002628- Tools/scripts/fixdiv.py has been added which can be used to fix
2629 division operators as per PEP 238.
2630
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002631Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002632-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002633
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00002634- If you are an adventurous person using Mac OS X you may want to look at
2635 Mac/OSX. There is a Makefile there that will build Python as a real Mac
2636 application, which can be used for experimenting with Carbon or Cocoa.
2637 Discussion of this on pythonmac-sig, please.
2638
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00002639C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002640-----
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00002641
2642- New function PyObject_Dir(obj), like Python __builtin__.dir(obj).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00002643
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00002644- Note that PyLong_AsDouble can fail! This has always been true, but no
2645 callers checked for it. It's more likely to fail now, because overflow
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00002646 errors are properly detected now. The proper way to check::
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00002647
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002648 double x = PyLong_AsDouble(some_long_object);
2649 if (x == -1.0 && PyErr_Occurred()) {
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002650 /* The conversion failed. */
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002651 }
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00002652
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002653- The GC API has been changed. Extensions that use the old API will still
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00002654 compile but will not participate in GC. To upgrade an extension
2655 module:
2656
2657 - rename Py_TPFLAGS_GC to PyTPFLAGS_HAVE_GC
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00002658
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00002659 - use PyObject_GC_New or PyObject_GC_NewVar to allocate objects and
2660 PyObject_GC_Del to deallocate them
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00002661
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00002662 - rename PyObject_GC_Init to PyObject_GC_Track and PyObject_GC_Fini
2663 to PyObject_GC_UnTrack
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00002664
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00002665 - remove PyGC_HEAD_SIZE from object size calculations
2666
2667 - remove calls to PyObject_AS_GC and PyObject_FROM_GC
2668
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002669- Two new functions: PyString_FromFormat() and PyString_FromFormatV().
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002670 These can be used safely to construct string objects from a
2671 sprintf-style format string (similar to the format string supported
2672 by PyErr_Format()).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00002673
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002674New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002675-------------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002676
Tim Petersb7da0902001-09-02 23:01:43 +00002677- Stephen Hansen contributed patches sufficient to get a clean compile
2678 under Borland C (Windows), but he reports problems running it and ran
2679 out of time to complete the port. Volunteers? Expect a MemoryError
2680 when importing the types module; this is probably shallow, and
2681 causing later failures too.
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002682
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002683Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002684-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002685
2686Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002687-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002688
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00002689- Large file support is now enabled on Win32 platforms as well as on
2690 Win64. This means that, for example, you can use f.tell() and f.seek()
2691 to manipulate files larger than 2 gigabytes (provided you have enough
2692 disk space, and are using a Windows filesystem that supports large
Tim Peters9a9471c2001-09-11 23:18:51 +00002693 partitions). Windows filesystem limits: FAT has a 2GB (gigabyte)
2694 filesize limit, and large file support makes no difference there.
2695 FAT32's limit is 4GB, and files >= 2GB are easier to use from Python now.
2696 NTFS has no practical limit on file size, and files of any size can be
2697 used from Python now.
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00002698
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002699- The w9xpopen hack is now used on Windows NT and 2000 too when COMPSPEC
Tim Peters402d5982001-08-27 06:37:48 +00002700 points to command.com (patch from Brian Quinlan).
2701
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002702
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00002703What's New in Python 2.2a2?
2704===========================
2705
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002706*Release Date: 22-Aug-2001*
2707
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00002708Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002709-----
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00002710
Barry Warsaw18b2ecf2001-08-22 20:26:56 +00002711- Tim Peters developed a brand new Windows installer using Wise 8.1,
2712 generously donated to us by Wise Solutions.
2713
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00002714- configure supports a new option --enable-unicode, with the values
2715 ucs2 and ucs4 (new in 2.2a1). With --disable-unicode, the Unicode
2716 type and supporting code is completely removed from the interpreter.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00002717
Jack Jansen32ce0cd2001-08-21 19:28:20 +00002718- A new configure option --enable-framework builds a Mac OS X framework,
2719 which "make frameworkinstall" will install. This provides a starting
2720 point for more mac-like functionality, join pythonmac-sig@python.org
2721 if you are interested in helping.
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00002722
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00002723- The NeXT platform is no longer supported.
2724
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002725- The 'new' module is now statically linked.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00002726
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00002727Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002728-----
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00002729
2730- The new Tools/scripts/cleanfuture.py can be used to automatically
Andrew M. Kuchlingb0532092001-08-15 15:54:56 +00002731 edit out obsolete future statements from Python source code. See
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00002732 the module docstring for details.
2733
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00002734Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002735-----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00002736
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00002737- regrtest.py now knows which tests are expected to be skipped on some
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00002738 platforms, allowing to give clearer test result output. regrtest
2739 also has optional --use/-u switch to run normally disabled tests
2740 which require network access or consume significant disk resources.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00002741
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00002742- Several new tests in the standard test suite, with special thanks to
2743 Nick Mathewson.
2744
2745Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002746----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00002747
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00002748- The floor division operator // has been added as outlined in PEP
2749 238. The / operator still provides classic division (and will until
2750 Python 3.0) unless "from __future__ import division" is included, in
2751 which case the / operator will provide true division. The operator
2752 module provides truediv() and floordiv() functions. Augmented
2753 assignment variants are included, as are the equivalent overloadable
2754 methods and C API methods. See the PEP for a full discussion:
2755 <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0238.html>
2756
Tim Peters6cd6a822001-08-17 22:11:27 +00002757- Future statements are now effective in simulated interactive shells
2758 (like IDLE). This should "just work" by magic, but read Michael
2759 Hudson's "Future statements in simulated shells" PEP 264 for full
2760 details: <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0264.html>.
2761
Guido van Rossumf86ddd22001-08-17 21:21:04 +00002762- The type/class unification (PEP 252-253) was integrated into the
2763 trunk and is not so tentative any more (the exact specification of
2764 some features is still tentative). A lot of work has done on fixing
2765 bugs and adding robustness and features (performance still has to
2766 come a long way).
2767
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00002768- Warnings about a mismatch in the Python API during extension import
2769 now use the Python warning framework (which makes it possible to
2770 write filters for these warnings).
2771
Barry Warsaw9b3be7f2001-08-14 18:35:02 +00002772- A function's __dict__ (aka func_dict) will now always be a
2773 dictionary. It used to be possible to delete it or set it to None,
2774 but now both actions raise TypeErrors. It is still legal to set it
2775 to a dictionary object. Getting func.__dict__ before any attributes
2776 have been assigned now returns an empty dictionary instead of None.
2777
Guido van Rossum32aa5d22001-09-05 18:43:35 +00002778- A new command line option, -E, was added which disables the use of
2779 all environment variables, or at least those that are specifically
2780 significant to Python. Usually those have a name starting with
2781 "PYTHON". This was used to fix a problem where the tests fail if
2782 the user happens to have PYTHONHOME or PYTHONPATH pointing to an
2783 older distribution.
2784
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00002785Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002786-------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00002787
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00002788- New class Differ and new functions ndiff() and restore() in difflib.py.
2789 These package the algorithms used by the popular Tools/scripts/ndiff.py,
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00002790 for programmatic reuse.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00002791
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00002792- New function xml.sax.saxutils.quoteattr(): Quote an XML attribute
2793 value using the minimal quoting required for the value; more
2794 reliable than using xml.sax.saxutils.escape() for attribute values.
2795
2796- Readline completion support for cmd.Cmd was added.
2797
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00002798- Calling os.tempnam() or os.tmpnam() generate RuntimeWarnings.
2799
2800- Added function threading.BoundedSemaphore()
2801
2802- Added Ka-Ping Yee's cgitb.py module.
2803
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002804- The 'new' module now exposes the CO_xxx flags.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00002805
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00002806- The gc module offers the get_referents function.
2807
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00002808New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002809-------------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00002810
2811C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002812-----
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00002813
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00002814- Two new APIs PyOS_snprintf() and PyOS_vsnprintf() were added
2815 which provide a cross-platform implementations for the
2816 relatively new snprintf()/vsnprintf() C lib APIs. In contrast to
2817 the standard sprintf() and vsprintf() C lib APIs, these versions
2818 apply bounds checking on the used buffer which enhances protection
2819 against buffer overruns.
2820
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00002821- Unicode APIs now use name mangling to assure that mixing interpreters
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00002822 and extensions using different Unicode widths is rendered next to
2823 impossible. Trying to import an incompatible Unicode-aware extension
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00002824 will result in an ImportError. Unicode extensions writers must make
2825 sure to check the Unicode width compatibility in their extensions by
2826 using at least one of the mangled Unicode APIs in the extension.
2827
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00002828- Two new flags METH_NOARGS and METH_O are available in method definition
2829 tables to simplify implementation of methods with no arguments and a
2830 single untyped argument. Calling such methods is more efficient than
2831 calling corresponding METH_VARARGS methods. METH_OLDARGS is now
2832 deprecated.
2833
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00002834Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002835-------
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00002836
2837- "import module" now compiles module.pyw if it exists and nothing else
2838 relevant is found.
2839
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00002840
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00002841What's New in Python 2.2a1?
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00002842===========================
2843
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002844*Release date: 18-Jul-2001*
2845
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00002846Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002847----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00002848
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00002849- TENTATIVELY, a large amount of code implementing much of what's
2850 described in PEP 252 (Making Types Look More Like Classes) and PEP
2851 253 (Subtyping Built-in Types) was added. This will be released
2852 with Python 2.2a1. Documentation will be provided separately
2853 through http://www.python.org/2.2/. The purpose of releasing this
2854 with Python 2.2a1 is to test backwards compatibility. It is
2855 possible, though not likely, that a decision is made not to release
2856 this code as part of 2.2 final, if any serious backwards
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00002857 incompatibilities are found during alpha testing that cannot be
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00002858 repaired.
2859
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00002860- Generators were added; this is a new way to create an iterator (see
Tim Peters11a0d102001-07-17 18:48:00 +00002861 below) using what looks like a simple function containing one or
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00002862 more 'yield' statements. See PEP 255. Since this adds a new
2863 keyword to the language, this feature must be enabled by including a
2864 future statement: "from __future__ import generators" (see PEP 236).
2865 Generators will become a standard feature in a future release
2866 (probably 2.3). Without this future statement, 'yield' remains an
2867 ordinary identifier, but a warning is issued each time it is used.
2868 (These warnings currently don't conform to the warnings framework of
2869 PEP 230; we intend to fix this in 2.2a2.)
2870
Marc-André Lemburg12e74b32001-05-22 08:58:23 +00002871- The UTF-16 codec was modified to be more RFC compliant. It will now
2872 only remove BOM characters at the start of the string and then
2873 only if running in native mode (UTF-16-LE and -BE won't remove a
2874 leading BMO character).
2875
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00002876- Strings now have a new method .decode() to complement the already
2877 existing .encode() method. These two methods provide direct access
2878 to the corresponding decoders and encoders of the registered codecs.
2879
2880 To enhance the usability of the .encode() method, the special
2881 casing of Unicode object return values was dropped (Unicode objects
2882 were auto-magically converted to string using the default encoding).
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00002883
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00002884 Both methods will now return whatever the codec in charge of the
2885 requested encoding returns as object, e.g. Unicode codecs will
2886 return Unicode objects when decoding is requested ("äöü".decode("latin-1")
2887 will return u"äöü"). This enables codec writer to create codecs
2888 for various simple to use conversions.
2889
2890 New codecs were added to demonstrate these new features (the .encode()
2891 and .decode() columns indicate the type of the returned objects):
2892
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002893 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
2894 |Name | .encode() | .decode() | Description |
2895 +=========+===========+===========+=============================+
2896 |uu | string | string | UU codec (e.g. for email) |
2897 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
2898 |base64 | string | string | base64 codec |
2899 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
2900 |quopri | string | string | quoted-printable codec |
2901 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
2902 |zlib | string | string | zlib compression |
2903 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
2904 |hex | string | string | 2-byte hex codec |
2905 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
2906 |rot-13 | string | Unicode | ROT-13 Unicode charmap codec|
2907 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00002908
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00002909- Some operating systems now support the concept of a default Unicode
2910 encoding for file system operations. Notably, Windows supports 'mbcs'
2911 as the default. The Macintosh will also adopt this concept in the medium
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00002912 term, although the default encoding for that platform will be other than
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00002913 'mbcs'.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00002914
2915 On operating system that support non-ASCII filenames, it is common for
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00002916 functions that return filenames (such as os.listdir()) to return Python
2917 string objects pre-encoded using the default file system encoding for
2918 the platform. As this encoding is likely to be different from Python's
2919 default encoding, converting this name to a Unicode object before passing
2920 it back to the Operating System would result in a Unicode error, as Python
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00002921 would attempt to use its default encoding (generally ASCII) rather than
2922 the default encoding for the file system.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00002923
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00002924 In general, this change simply removes surprises when working with
2925 Unicode and the file system, making these operations work as you expect,
2926 increasing the transparency of Unicode objects in this context.
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00002927 See [????] for more details, including examples.
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00002928
Tim Peters61dff2b2001-05-08 15:43:37 +00002929- Float (and complex) literals in source code were evaluated to full
2930 precision only when running from a .py file; the same code loaded from a
2931 .pyc (or .pyo) file could suffer numeric differences starting at about the
2932 12th significant decimal digit. For example, on a machine with IEEE-754
2933 floating arithmetic,
2934
2935 x = 9007199254740992.0
2936 print long(x)
2937
2938 printed 9007199254740992 if run directly from .py, but 9007199254740000
2939 if from a compiled (.pyc or .pyo) file. This was due to marshal using
2940 str(float) instead of repr(float) when building code objects. marshal
2941 now uses repr(float) instead, which should reproduce floats to full
2942 machine precision (assuming the platform C float<->string I/O conversion
2943 functions are of good quality).
2944
2945 This may cause floating-point results to change in some cases, and
2946 usually for the better, but may also cause numerically unstable
2947 algorithms to break.
2948
Tim Peters2f228e72001-05-13 00:19:31 +00002949- The implementation of dicts suffers fewer collisions, which has speed
2950 benefits. However, the order in which dict entries appear in dict.keys(),
2951 dict.values() and dict.items() may differ from previous releases for a
2952 given dict. Nothing is defined about this order, so no program should
2953 rely on it. Nevertheless, it's easy to write test cases that rely on the
2954 order by accident, typically because of printing the str() or repr() of a
2955 dict to an "expected results" file. See Lib/test/test_support.py's new
2956 sortdict(dict) function for a simple way to display a dict in sorted
2957 order.
2958
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00002959- Many other small changes to dicts were made, resulting in faster
2960 operation along the most common code paths.
2961
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00002962- Dictionary objects now support the "in" operator: "x in dict" means
2963 the same as dict.has_key(x).
2964
Barry Warsaw51acc8d2001-06-26 20:12:50 +00002965- The update() method of dictionaries now accepts generic mapping
2966 objects. Specifically the argument object must support the .keys()
2967 and __getitem__() methods. This allows you to say, for example,
2968 {}.update(UserDict())
2969
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00002970- Iterators were added; this is a generalized way of providing values
2971 to a for loop. See PEP 234. There's a new built-in function iter()
2972 to return an iterator. There's a new protocol to get the next value
2973 from an iterator using the next() method (in Python) or the
2974 tp_iternext slot (in C). There's a new protocol to get iterators
2975 using the __iter__() method (in Python) or the tp_iter slot (in C).
2976 Iterating (i.e. a for loop) over a dictionary generates its keys.
2977 Iterating over a file generates its lines.
2978
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00002979- The following functions were generalized to work nicely with iterator
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00002980 arguments::
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002981
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00002982 map(), filter(), reduce(), zip()
Tim Peters8572b4f2001-05-06 01:05:02 +00002983 list(), tuple() (PySequence_Tuple() and PySequence_Fast() in C API)
2984 max(), min()
Tim Peters1af03e92001-05-26 19:37:54 +00002985 join() method of strings
2986 extend() method of lists
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00002987 'x in y' and 'x not in y' (PySequence_Contains() in C API)
2988 operator.countOf() (PySequence_Count() in C API)
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002989 right-hand side of assignment statements with multiple targets, such as ::
Tim Petersd6d010b2001-06-21 02:49:55 +00002990 x, y, z = some_iterable_object_returning_exactly_3_values
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00002991
Tim Petersd85e1022001-05-11 21:51:48 +00002992- Accessing module attributes is significantly faster (for example,
2993 random.random or os.path or yourPythonModule.yourAttribute).
2994
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00002995- Comparing dictionary objects via == and != is faster, and now works even
2996 if the keys and values don't support comparisons other than ==.
2997
Tim Peters95bf9392001-05-10 08:32:44 +00002998- Comparing dictionaries in ways other than == and != is slower: there were
2999 insecurities in the dict comparison implementation that could cause Python
3000 to crash if the element comparison routines for the dict keys and/or
3001 values mutated the dicts. Making the code bulletproof slowed it down.
3002
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00003003- Collisions in dicts are resolved via a new approach, which can help
3004 dramatically in bad cases. For example, looking up every key in a dict
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00003005 d with d.keys() == [i << 16 for i in range(20000)] is approximately 500x
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00003006 faster now. Thanks to Christian Tismer for pointing out the cause and
3007 the nature of an effective cure (last December! better late than never).
Tim Peters15d49292001-05-27 07:39:22 +00003008
Tim Peters52e155e2001-06-16 05:42:57 +00003009- repr() is much faster for large containers (dict, list, tuple).
3010
3011
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003012Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003013-------
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003014
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00003015- The constants ascii_letters, ascii_lowercase. and ascii_uppercase
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003016 were added to the string module. These a locale-independent
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00003017 constants, unlike letters, lowercase, and uppercase. These are now
3018 use in appropriate locations in the standard library.
3019
Martin v. Löwisf0473d52001-07-18 16:17:16 +00003020- The flags used in dlopen calls can now be configured using
3021 sys.setdlopenflags and queried using sys.getdlopenflags.
3022
Guido van Rossumc7e4aca2001-07-12 11:54:37 +00003023- Fredrik Lundh's xmlrpclib is now a standard library module. This
3024 provides full client-side XML-RPC support. In addition,
3025 Demo/xmlrpc/ contains two server frameworks (one SocketServer-based,
3026 one asyncore-based). Thanks to Eric Raymond for the documentation.
3027
Guido van Rossum643d3912001-07-05 14:46:25 +00003028- The xrange() object is simplified: it no longer supports slicing,
3029 repetition, comparisons, efficient 'in' checking, the tolist()
3030 method, or the start, stop and step attributes. See PEP 260.
3031
Martin v. Löwisebf94db2001-06-06 06:25:40 +00003032- A new function fnmatch.filter to filter lists of file names was added.
3033
Barry Warsawffd674d2001-05-22 16:00:10 +00003034- calendar.py uses month and day names based on the current locale.
3035
Guido van Rossum2e0a6542001-05-15 02:14:44 +00003036- strop is now *really* obsolete (this was announced before with 1.6),
3037 and issues DeprecationWarning when used (except for the four items
3038 that are still imported into string.py).
3039
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003040- Cookie.py now sorts key+value pairs by key in output strings.
3041
3042- pprint.isrecursive(object) didn't correctly identify recursive objects.
3043 Now it does.
3044
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00003045- pprint functions now much faster for large containers (tuple, list, dict).
3046
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00003047- New 'q' and 'Q' format codes in the struct module, corresponding to C
3048 types "long long" and "unsigned long long" (on Windows, __int64). In
3049 native mode, these can be used only when the platform C compiler supports
3050 these types (when HAVE_LONG_LONG is #define'd by the Python config
3051 process), and then they inherit the sizes and alignments of the C types.
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00003052 In standard mode, 'q' and 'Q' are supported on all platforms, and are
3053 8-byte integral types.
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00003054
Guido van Rossum83213cc2001-06-12 16:48:52 +00003055- The site module installs a new built-in function 'help' that invokes
3056 pydoc.help. It must be invoked as 'help()'; when invoked as 'help',
3057 it displays a message reminding the user to use 'help()' or
3058 'help(object)'.
3059
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003060Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003061-----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003062
3063- New test_mutants.py runs dict comparisons where the key and value
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003064 comparison operators mutate the dicts randomly during comparison. This
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003065 rapidly causes Python to crash under earlier releases (not for the faint
3066 of heart: it can also cause Win9x to freeze or reboot!).
3067
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003068- New test_pprint.py verifies that pprint.isrecursive() and
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00003069 pprint.isreadable() return sensible results. Also verifies that simple
3070 cases produce correct output.
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003071
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00003072C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003073-----
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00003074
3075- Removed the unused last_is_sticky argument from the internal
3076 _PyTuple_Resize(). If this affects you, you were cheating.
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003077
3078----
3079
3080**(For information about older versions, consult the HISTORY file.)**