blob: 976e019bfe960202aed8a4228e924012be9bd226 [file] [log] [blame]
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001+++++++++++
2Python News
3+++++++++++
4
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +00005(editors: check NEWS.help for information about editing NEWS using ReST.)
6
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +00007What's New in Python 2.5 alpha 1?
8=================================
9
Anthony Baxter12b6f6c2005-03-29 13:36:16 +000010*Release date: XX-XXX-2006*
11
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +000012Core and builtins
13-----------------
14
Anthony Baxter12b6f6c2005-03-29 13:36:16 +000015- Move exception finalisation later in the shutdown process - this
16 fixes the crash seen in bug #1165761
17
Raymond Hettinger96229b12005-03-11 06:49:40 +000018- Added two new builtins, any() and all().
19
Brett Cannon409d8f22005-03-05 06:47:57 +000020- Defining a class with empty parentheses is now allowed
21 (e.g., ``class C(): pass`` is no longer a syntax error)
22
Martin v. Löwis96d743e2005-03-03 23:00:26 +000023- Patch #1115086: Support PY_LONGLONG in structmember.
24
Raymond Hettingerb67cc802005-03-03 16:45:19 +000025- Bug #1155938: new style classes did not check that __init__() was
26 returning None.
27
Martin v. Löwis4bf108d2005-03-03 11:45:45 +000028- Patch #802188: Report characters after line continuation character
29 ('\') with a specific error message.
30
Martin v. Löwisff232d72005-03-03 09:24:38 +000031- Bug #723201: Raise a TypeError for passing bad objects to 'L' format.
32
Michael W. Hudson8e1afab2005-02-17 14:55:21 +000033- Bug #1124295: the __name__ attribute of file objects was
34 inadvertently made inaccessible in restricted mode.
35
Martin v. Löwis13a1fde2005-01-27 18:56:16 +000036- Bug #1074011: closing sys.std{out,err} now causes a flush() and
Martin v. Löwis8e3ca8a2005-01-23 09:41:49 +000037 an ferror() call.
38
Raymond Hettinger3b0c7c22004-12-03 08:30:39 +000039- min() and max() now support key= arguments with the same meaning as in
40 list.sort().
41
Raymond Hettingerc34f8672005-01-02 06:17:33 +000042- The peephole optimizer now performs simple constant folding in expressions:
43 (2+3) --> (5).
44
Raymond Hettingera422c342005-01-11 03:03:27 +000045- set and frozenset objects can now be marshalled. SF #1098985.
46
Michael W. Hudsonfaa76482005-01-31 17:09:25 +000047- Bug #1077106: Poor argument checking could cause memory corruption
48 in calls to os.read().
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +000049
Jeremy Hyltonab630502005-02-04 18:44:06 +000050- The parser did not complain about future statements in illegal
51 positions. It once again reports a syntax error if a future
52 statement occurs after anything other than a doc string.
53
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +000054Extension Modules
55-----------------
56
Raymond Hettinger4aec61e2005-03-18 21:20:23 +000057- collections.deque objects now support a remove() method.
58
Raymond Hettinger984f9bb2005-03-09 16:38:48 +000059- operator.itemgetter() and operator.attrgetter() now support retrieving
60 multiple fields. This provides direct support for sorting on multiple
61 keys (primary, secondary, etc).
62
Martin v. Löwisb60ae992005-03-08 09:10:29 +000063- os.access now supports Unicode path names on non-Win32 systems.
64
Martin v. Löwisfd78a6f2005-03-04 14:37:01 +000065- Patches #925152, #1118602: Avoid reading after the end of the buffer
66 in pyexpat.GetInputContext.
67
Martin v. Löwis7fe60c02005-03-03 11:22:44 +000068- Patches #749830, #1144555: allow UNIX mmap size to default to current
69 file size.
70
Raymond Hettinger9c323f82005-02-28 19:39:44 +000071- Added functional.partial(). See PEP309.
72
Martin v. Löwis9533e342005-02-27 20:33:25 +000073- Patch #1093585: raise a ValueError for negative history items in readline.
74 {remove_history,replace_history}
75
Fred Drake9c131f22005-01-23 15:16:08 +000076- The spwd module has been added, allowing access to the shadow password
77 database.
Martin v. Löwisc3001752005-01-23 09:27:24 +000078
Martin v. Löwisfe33d0b2005-01-16 08:57:39 +000079- stat_float_times is now True.
80
Raymond Hettingerb0900e62004-12-16 16:23:40 +000081- array.array objects are now picklable.
82
Raymond Hettingera6b45cc2004-12-07 07:05:57 +000083- the cPickle module no longer accepts the deprecated None option in the
84 args tuple returned by __reduce__().
85
Raymond Hettingerb2594052004-12-05 09:25:51 +000086- itertools.islice() now accepts None for the start and step arguments.
87 This allows islice() to work more readily with slices:
88 islice(s.start, s.stop, s.step)
89
Skip Montanaro0af3ade2005-01-13 04:12:31 +000090- datetime.datetime() now has a strptime class method which can be used to
91 create datetime object using a string and format.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +000092
93Library
94-------
95
Martin v. Löwis55f1bb82005-03-21 20:56:35 +000096- distutils.commands.upload was added to support uploading distribution
97 files to PyPI.
98
Raymond Hettinger267b8682005-03-27 10:47:39 +000099- decimal operator and comparison methods now return NotImplemented
100 instead of raising a TypeError when interacting with other types. This
101 allows other classes to implement __radd__ style methods and have them
102 work as expected.
103
Raymond Hettingerbea3f6f2005-03-15 04:59:17 +0000104- Bug #1163325: Decimal infinities failed to hash. Attempting to
105 hash a NaN raised an InvalidOperation instead of a TypeError.
106
Martin v. Löwis78be7df2005-03-05 12:47:42 +0000107- Patch #918101: Add tarfile open mode r|* for auto-detection of the
108 stream compression; add, for symmetry reasons, r:* as a synonym of r.
109
Martin v. Löwis00a73e72005-03-04 19:40:34 +0000110- Patch #1043890: Add extractall method to tarfile.
111
Martin v. Löwisc72dd382005-03-04 13:50:17 +0000112- Patch #1075887: Don't require MSVC in distutils if there is nothing
113 to build.
114
Martin v. Löwis637431b2005-03-03 23:12:42 +0000115- Patch #1103407: Properly deal with tarfile iterators when untarring
116 symbolic links on Windows.
117
Martin v. Löwisa4dac402005-03-03 11:39:45 +0000118- Patch #645894: Use getrusage for computing the time consumption in
119 profile.py if available.
120
Martin v. Löwisdf37c8c2005-03-03 11:08:03 +0000121- Patch #1046831: Use get_python_version where appropriate in sysconfig.py.
122
Martin v. Löwisc5574e82005-03-03 10:57:37 +0000123- Patch #1117454: Remove code to special-case cookies without values
124 in LWPCookieJar.
125
Martin v. Löwis4ea3ead2005-03-03 10:48:12 +0000126- Patch #1117339: Add cookielib special name tests.
127
Martin v. Löwise869eb12005-03-03 09:46:07 +0000128- Patch #1112812: Make bsddb/__init__.py more friendly for modulefinder.
129
Martin v. Löwisf2a8d632005-03-03 08:35:22 +0000130- Patch #1110248: SYNC_FLUSH the zlib buffer for GZipFile.flush.
131
Martin v. Löwisdf241532005-03-03 08:17:42 +0000132- Patch #1107973: Allow to iterate over the lines of a tarfile.ExFileObject.
133
Martin v. Löwis8ed338a2005-03-03 08:12:27 +0000134- Patch #1104111: Alter setup.py --help and --help-commands.
135
Martin v. Löwis4afe1542005-03-01 08:09:28 +0000136- Patch #1121234: Properly cleanup _exit and tkerror commands.
137
Martin v. Löwisc2a0ac22005-02-24 20:22:10 +0000138- Patch #1049151: xdrlib now unpacks booleans as True or False.
139
Raymond Hettingerbab41432005-02-05 01:31:19 +0000140- Fixed bug in a NameError bug in cookielib. Patch #1116583.
141
Guido van Rossumd0641422005-02-03 15:01:24 +0000142- Applied a security fix to SimpleXMLRPCserver (PSF-2005-001). This
143 disables recursive traversal through instance attributes, which can
144 be exploited in various ways.
145
Martin v. Löwis1d11de62005-01-29 13:29:23 +0000146- Bug #1110478: Revert os.environ.update to do putenv again.
147
Thomas Hellerd6c6e222005-01-20 19:20:16 +0000148- Bug #1103844: fix distutils.install.dump_dirs() with negated options.
149
Martin v. Löwis22b457e2005-01-16 08:40:58 +0000150- os.{SEEK_SET, SEEK_CUR, SEEK_END} have been added for convenience.
151
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000152- Enhancements to the csv module:
153
154 + Dialects are now validated by the underlying C code, better
155 reflecting it's capabilities, and improving it's compliance with
156 PEP 305.
157 + Dialect parameter parsing has been re-implemented to improve error
158 reporting.
159 + quotechar=None and quoting=QUOTE_NONE now work the way PEP 305
160 dictates.
161 + the parser now removes the escapechar prefix from escaped characters.
Andrew McNamara0f0599d2005-01-12 09:45:18 +0000162 + when quoting=QUOTE_NONNUMERIC, the writer now tests for numeric
Andrew McNamaraf69d94f2005-01-13 11:30:54 +0000163 types, rather than any object than can be represented as a numeric.
Andrew McNamara0f0599d2005-01-12 09:45:18 +0000164 + when quoting=QUOTE_NONNUMERIC, the reader now casts unquoted fields
165 to floats.
Andrew McNamaraf69d94f2005-01-13 11:30:54 +0000166 + reader now allows \r characters to be quoted (previously it only allowed
167 \n to be quoted).
Andrew McNamarac89f2842005-01-12 07:44:42 +0000168 + writer doublequote handling improved.
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000169 + Dialect classes passed to the module are no longer instantiated by
170 the module before being parsed (the former validation scheme required
171 this, but the mechanism was unreliable).
172 + The dialect registry now contains instances of the internal
173 C-coded dialect type, rather than references to python objects.
174 + the internal c-coded dialect type is now immutable.
175 + register_dialect now accepts the same keyword dialect specifications
176 as the reader and writer, allowing the user to register dialects
177 without first creating a dialect class.
178 + a configurable limit to the size of parsed fields has been added -
179 previously, an unmatched quote character could result in the entire
180 file being read into the field buffer before an error was reported.
Andrew McNamara31d88962005-01-12 03:45:10 +0000181 + A new module method csv.field_size_limit() has been added that sets
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000182 the parser field size limit (returning the former limit). The initial
183 limit is 128kB.
Andrew McNamara7f2053e2005-01-12 11:17:16 +0000184 + A line_num attribute has been added to the reader object, which tracks
185 the number of lines read from the source iterator. This is not
186 the same as the number of records returned, as records can span
187 multiple lines.
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000188 + reader and writer objects were not being registered with the cyclic-GC.
189 This has been fixed.
190
Brett Cannone6539c42005-01-08 02:43:53 +0000191- _DummyThread objects in the threading module now delete self.__block that is
192 inherited from _Thread since it uses up a lock allocated by 'thread'. The
193 lock primitives tend to be limited in number and thus should not be wasted on
194 a _DummyThread object. Fixes bug #1089632.
195
Raymond Hettinger97db05d2005-01-07 08:15:41 +0000196- The imghdr module now detects Exif files.
197
Raymond Hettinger6065d322004-12-20 23:51:53 +0000198- StringIO.truncate() now correctly adjusts the size attribute.
199 (Bug #951915).
200
Marc-André Lemburgbb4f1bd2004-12-10 21:58:14 +0000201- locale.py now uses an updated locale alias table (built using
202 Tools/i18n/makelocalealias.py, a tool to parse the X11 locale
203 alias file); the encoding lookup was enhanced to use Python's
204 encoding alias table
205
Raymond Hettinger3557f422004-12-07 12:02:02 +0000206- moved deprecated modules to Lib/lib-old: whrandom, tzparse, statcache.
207
Raymond Hettingera6b45cc2004-12-07 07:05:57 +0000208- the pickle module no longer accepts the deprecated None option in the
209 args tuple returned by __reduce__().
210
Brett Cannon84667c02004-12-07 03:25:18 +0000211- optparse now optionally imports gettext. This allows its use in setup.py.
212
Raymond Hettinger3489cad2004-12-05 05:20:42 +0000213- the pickle module no longer uses the deprecated bin parameter.
214
Raymond Hettinger1bc82f82004-12-05 03:58:17 +0000215- the shelve module no longer uses the deprecated binary parameter.
216
Raymond Hettinger6c92d762004-12-05 03:28:00 +0000217- the pstats module no longer uses the deprecated ignore() method.
218
Raymond Hettingerf3fa9462004-12-05 01:58:09 +0000219- the filecmp module no longer uses the deprecated use_statcache argument.
220
Raymond Hettinger664347b2004-12-04 21:21:53 +0000221- unittest.TestCase.run() and unittest.TestSuite.run() can now be successfully
222 extended or overridden by subclasses. Formerly, the subclassed method would
223 be ignored by the rest of the module. (Bug #1078905).
224
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000225- heapq.nsmallest() and heapq.nlargest() now support key= arguments with
Raymond Hettinger3b0c7c22004-12-03 08:30:39 +0000226 the same meaning as in list.sort().
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000227
Walter Dörwald36733692004-12-22 12:50:50 +0000228- Bug #1076985: ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` now calls ``read()`` only
229 once when a size argument is given. This prevents a buffer overflow in the
230 tokenizer with very long source lines.
231
Andrew M. Kuchling3b585b32004-12-28 20:10:48 +0000232- Bug #1083110: ``zlib.decompress.flush()`` would segfault if called immediately
233 after creating the object, without any intervening ``.decompress()`` calls.
234
Skip Montanaro05885812005-01-16 20:48:27 +0000235- The reconvert.quote function can now emit triple-quoted strings. The
236 reconvert module now has some simple documentation.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000237
Walter Dörwaldaf3b39a2005-02-18 13:22:43 +0000238- ``UserString.MutableString`` now supports negative indices in
239 ``__setitem__`` and ``__delitem__``
240
Greg Ward40407942005-03-05 02:53:17 +0000241- Bug #1149508: ``textwrap`` now handles hyphenated numbers (eg. "2004-03-05")
242 correctly.
243
244
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000245Build
246-----
247
Martin v. Löwise2713be2005-03-08 15:03:08 +0000248- Bug #1158607: Build with --disable-unicode again.
249
Brett Cannon46d96232005-02-16 00:07:19 +0000250- spwdmodule.c is built only if either HAVE_GETSPNAM or HAVE_HAVE_GETSPENT is
251 defined. Discovered as a result of not being able to build on OS X.
252
Brett Cannon516592f2004-12-07 00:42:59 +0000253- setup.py now uses the directories specified in LDFLAGS using the -L option
254 and in CPPFLAGS using the -I option for adding library and include
255 directories, respectively, for compiling extension modules against. This has
256 led to the core being compiled using the values in CPPFLAGS. It also removes
257 the need for the special-casing of both DarwinPorts and Fink for darwin since
258 the proper directories can be specified in LDFLAGS (``-L/sw/lib`` for Fink,
259 ``-L/opt/local/lib`` for DarwinPorts) and CPPFLAGS (``-I/sw/include`` for
260 Fink, ``-I/opt/local/include`` for DarwinPorts).
261
Brett Cannon43802422005-02-10 20:48:03 +0000262- Test in configure.in that checks for tzset no longer dependent on tm->tm_zone
263 to exist in the struct (not required by either ISO C nor the UNIX 2 spec).
264 Tests for sanity in tzname when HAVE_TZNAME defined were also defined.
265 Closes bug #1096244. Thanks Gregory Bond.
266
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000267
268C API
269-----
270
Raymond Hettinger66517482004-12-03 11:45:13 +0000271- Removed PyRange_New().
272
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000273
274Tests
275-----
276
Martin v. Löwis4d394df2005-01-23 09:19:22 +0000277- In test_os, st_?time is now truncated before comparing it with ST_?TIME.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000278
Brett Cannonced04e02005-02-13 22:53:22 +0000279
280Documentation
281-------------
282
283- Remove all latent references for "Macintosh" that referred to semantics for
284 Mac OS 9 and change to reflect the state for OS X.
285 Closes patch #1095802. Thanks Jack Jansen.
286
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000287Mac
288---
289
290
291
292Tools/Demos
293-----------
294
295
296
Anthony Baxtere2648ee2004-11-30 01:28:55 +0000297What's New in Python 2.4 final?
298===============================
Kurt B. Kaiser4c79a832004-11-23 18:06:08 +0000299
Anthony Baxtere2648ee2004-11-30 01:28:55 +0000300*Release date: 30-NOV-2004*
Kurt B. Kaiser4c79a832004-11-23 18:06:08 +0000301
302Core and builtins
303-----------------
304
305- Bug 875692: Improve signal handling, especially when using threads, by
306 forcing an early re-execution of PyEval_EvalFrame() "periodic" code when
307 things_to_do is not cleared by Py_MakePendingCalls().
308
309
Anthony Baxter4277ed82004-11-30 11:53:10 +0000310What's New in Python 2.4 (release candidate 1)
311==============================================
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000312
Anthony Baxter5cc727a2004-11-18 12:32:27 +0000313*Release date: 18-NOV-2004*
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000314
315Core and builtins
316-----------------
317
Tim Petersfb1ffb02004-11-08 04:30:21 +0000318- Bug 1061968: Fixes in 2.4a3 to address thread bug 1010677 reintroduced
319 the years-old thread shutdown race bug 225673. Numeric history lesson
320 aside, all bugs in all three reports are fixed now.
321
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000322
Skip Montanaro599bd5e2004-11-04 04:31:30 +0000323Library
324-------
325
326- Bug 1052242: If exceptions are raised by an atexit handler function an
327 attempt is made to execute the remaining handlers. The last exception
328 raised is re-raised.
329
Tim Peters50c6bdb2004-11-08 22:07:37 +0000330- ``doctest``'s new support for adding ``pdb.set_trace()`` calls to
331 doctests was broken in a dramatic but shallow way. Fixed.
332
Tim Petersbbc0d442004-11-13 16:18:32 +0000333- Bug 1065388: ``calendar``'s ``day_name``, ``day_abbr``, ``month_name``,
334 and ``month_abbr`` attributes emulate sequences of locale-correct
335 spellings of month and day names. Because the locale can change at
336 any time, the correct spelling is recomputed whenever one of these is
337 indexed. In the worst case, the index may be a slice object, so these
338 recomputed every day or month name each time they were indexed. This is
339 much slower than necessary in the usual case, when the index is just an
340 integer. In that case, only the single spelling needed is recomputed
341 now; and, when the index is a slice object, only the spellings needed
342 by the slice are recomputed now.
343
Tim Peters50c6bdb2004-11-08 22:07:37 +0000344- Patch 1061679: Added ``__all__`` to pickletools.py.
Tim Peters90cf2122004-11-06 23:45:48 +0000345
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000346Build
347-----
Skip Montanaro599bd5e2004-11-04 04:31:30 +0000348
Brett Cannon7d28e962004-11-07 01:19:00 +0000349- Bug 1034277 / Patch 1035255: Remove compilation of core against CoreServices
350 and CoreFoundation on OS X. Involved removing PyMac_GetAppletScriptFile()
351 which has no known users. Thanks Bob Ippolito.
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000352
353C API
354-----
355
Raymond Hettinger39e92ea2004-11-18 09:41:45 +0000356- The PyRange_New() function is deprecated.
357
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000358
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000359What's New in Python 2.4 beta 2?
360================================
361
Anthony Baxter9f41f3a2004-11-03 06:21:37 +0000362*Release date: 03-NOV-2004*
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000363
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000364License
365-------
366
367The Python Software Foundation changed the license under which Python
368is released, to remove Python version numbers. There were no other
369changes to the license. So, for example, wherever the license for
370Python 2.3 said "Python 2.3", the new license says "Python". The
371intent is to make it possible to refer to the PSF license in a more
372durable way. For example, some people say they're confused by that
373the Open Source Initiative's entry for the Python Software Foundation
374License::
375
376 http://www.opensource.org/licenses/PythonSoftFoundation.php
377
378says "Python 2.1.1" all over it, wondering whether it applies only
379to Python 2.1.1.
380
381The official name of the new license is the Python Software Foundation
382License Version 2.
383
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000384Core and builtins
385-----------------
386
Tim Petersead8b7a2004-10-30 23:09:22 +0000387- Bug #1055820 Cyclic garbage collection was not protecting against that
388 calling a live weakref to a piece of cyclic trash could resurrect an
389 insane mutation of the trash if any Python code ran during gc (via
390 running a dead object's __del__ method, running another callback on a
391 weakref to a dead object, or via any Python code run in any other thread
392 that managed to obtain the GIL while a __del__ or callback was running
393 in the thread doing gc). The most likely symptom was "impossible"
394 ``AttributeEror`` exceptions, appearing seemingly at random, on weakly
395 referenced objects. The cure was to clear all weakrefs to unreachable
396 objects before allowing any callbacks to run.
397
Raymond Hettinger561fbf12004-10-26 01:52:37 +0000398- Bug #1054139 _PyString_Resize() now invalidates its cached hash value.
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000399
400Extension Modules
401-----------------
402
Raymond Hettinger9047c8f2004-10-24 00:10:06 +0000403- Bug #1048870: the compiler now generates distinct code objects for
404 functions with identical bodies. This was producing confusing
405 traceback messages which pointed to the function where the code
406 object was first defined rather than the function being executed.
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000407
408Library
409-------
410
Barry Warsaw8c72eae2004-11-01 03:52:43 +0000411- Patch #1056967 changes the semantics of Template.safe_substitute() so that
412 no ValueError is raised on an 'invalid' match group. Now the delimiter is
413 returned.
414
Raymond Hettinger2ef7e6c2004-10-24 00:32:24 +0000415- Bug #1052503 pdb.runcall() was not passing along keyword arguments.
416
Raymond Hettingerc64aab82004-10-20 08:21:57 +0000417- Bug #902037: XML.sax.saxutils.prepare_input_source() now combines relative
418 paths with a base path before checking os.path.isfile().
419
Raymond Hettingere54e7262004-10-20 07:17:16 +0000420- The whichdb module can now be run from the command line.
421
Brett Cannon8abcc5d2004-10-18 01:37:57 +0000422- Bug #1045381: time.strptime() can now infer the date using %U or %W (week of
423 the year) when the day of the week and year are also specified.
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000424
Andrew M. Kuchling0d19bae2004-10-19 19:54:41 +0000425- Bug #1048816: fix bug in Ctrl-K at start of line in curses.textpad.Textbox
426
Andrew M. Kuchling66e80ba2004-10-20 11:56:15 +0000427- Bug #1017553: fix bug in tarfile.filemode()
428
Hye-Shik Chang33761492004-10-26 09:53:46 +0000429- Patch #737473: fix bug that old source code is shown in tracebacks even if
Hye-Shik Chang182ac852004-10-26 09:16:42 +0000430 the source code is updated and reloaded.
431
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000432Build
433-----
434
Hye-Shik Chang33761492004-10-26 09:53:46 +0000435- Patch #1044395: --enable-shared is allowed in FreeBSD also.
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000436
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000437What's New in Python 2.4 beta 1?
438================================
439
Anthony Baxter6a587c12004-10-15 08:07:21 +0000440*Release date: 15-OCT-2004*
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000441
442Core and builtins
443-----------------
444
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000445- Patch #975056: Restartable signals were not correctly disabled on
Anthony Baxtere4f8a482004-10-13 14:55:56 +0000446 BSD systems. Consistently use PyOS_setsig() instead of signal().
447
Tim Peters263091e2004-10-10 01:58:44 +0000448- The internal portable implementation of thread-local storage (TLS), used
449 by the ``PyGILState_Ensure()``/``PyGILState_Release()`` API, was not
450 thread-correct. This could lead to a variety of problems, up to and
451 including segfaults. See bug 1041645 for an example.
452
Raymond Hettingerdb29e0f2004-10-07 06:46:25 +0000453- Added a command line option, -m module, which searches sys.path for the
454 module and then runs it. (Contributed by Nick Coghlan.)
455
Raymond Hettinger2c31a052004-09-22 18:44:21 +0000456- The bytecode optimizer now folds tuples of constants into a single
457 constant.
458
Tim Peters307fa782004-09-23 08:06:40 +0000459- SF bug #513866: Float/long comparison anomaly. Prior to 2.4b1, when
460 an integer was compared to a float, the integer was coerced to a float.
461 That could yield spurious overflow errors (if the integer was very
462 large), and to anomalies such as
463 ``long(1e200)+1 == 1e200 == long(1e200)-1``. Coercion to float is no
464 longer performed, and cases like ``long(1e200)-1 < 1e200``,
465 ``long(1e200)+1 > 1e200`` and ``(1 << 20000) > 1e200`` are computed
466 correctly now.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000467
468Extension modules
469-----------------
470
Tim Peterscf8997f2004-10-01 02:13:16 +0000471- ``collections.deque`` objects didn't play quite right with garbage
472 collection, which could lead to a segfault in a release build, or
Raymond Hettingerdb29e0f2004-10-07 06:46:25 +0000473 an assert failure in a debug build. Also, added overflow checks,
474 better detection of mutation during iteration, and shielded deque
475 comparisons from unusual subclass overrides of the __iter__() method.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000476
477Library
478-------
Raymond Hettinger0318a932004-09-22 18:03:47 +0000479
Anthony Baxtera0240342004-10-14 10:02:08 +0000480- Patch 1046644: distutils build_ext grew two new options - --swig for
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000481 specifying the swig executable to use, and --swig-opts to specify
Anthony Baxtera0240342004-10-14 10:02:08 +0000482 options to pass to swig. --swig-opts="-c++" is the new way to spell
483 --swig-cpp.
484
Anthony Baxter22dcf662004-10-13 15:54:17 +0000485- Patch 983206: distutils now obeys environment variable LDSHARED, if
486 it is set.
487
Andrew M. Kuchling518d3932004-10-12 15:32:10 +0000488- Added Peter Astrand's subprocess.py module. See PEP 324 for details.
Fredrik Lundh5b3687d2004-10-12 15:26:28 +0000489
Brett Cannon4f35c712004-10-06 02:11:37 +0000490- time.strptime() now properly escapes timezones and all other locale-specific
491 strings for regex-specific symbols. Was breaking under Japanese Windows when
492 the timezone was specified as "Tokyo (standard time)".
493 Closes bug #1039270.
494
Barry Warsawbb113862004-10-03 03:16:19 +0000495- Updates for the email package:
Brett Cannon06a30b02004-10-22 06:22:54 +0000496
Barry Warsaw418de1f2004-10-11 14:32:47 +0000497 + email.Utils.formatdate() grew a 'usegmt' argument for HTTP support.
Barry Warsawbb113862004-10-03 03:16:19 +0000498 + All deprecated APIs that in email 2.x issued warnings have been removed:
499 _encoder argument to the MIMEText constructor, Message.add_payload(),
500 Utils.dump_address_pair(), Utils.decode(), Utils.encode()
501 + New deprecations: Generator.__call__(), Message.get_type(),
502 Message.get_main_type(), Message.get_subtype(), the 'strict' argument to
503 the Parser constructor. These will be removed in email 3.1.
504 + Support for Python earlier than 2.3 has been removed (see PEP 291).
505 + All defect classes have been renamed to end in 'Defect'.
506 + Some FeedParser fixes; also a MultipartInvariantViolationDefect will be
507 added to messages that claim to be multipart but really aren't.
508 + Updates to documentation.
509
Raymond Hettinger596ba4d2004-09-24 03:41:05 +0000510- re's findall() and finditer() functions now take an optional flags argument
511 just like the compile(), search(), and match() functions. Also, documented
512 the previously existing start and stop parameters for the findall() and
513 finditer() methods of regular expression objects.
514
Raymond Hettinger0318a932004-09-22 18:03:47 +0000515- rfc822 Messages now support iterating over the headers.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000516
Martin v. Löwisf3c56112004-09-18 09:08:52 +0000517- The (undocumented) tarfile.Tarfile.membernames has been removed;
518 applications should use the getmember function.
519
Martin v. Löwis39a31782004-09-18 09:03:49 +0000520- httplib now offers symbolic constants for the HTTP status codes.
521
Tim Peters528ca532004-09-16 01:30:50 +0000522- SF bug #1028306: Trying to compare a ``datetime.date`` to a
523 ``datetime.datetime`` mistakenly compared only the year, month and day.
524 Now it acts like a mixed-type comparison: ``False`` for ``==``,
525 ``True`` for ``!=``, and raises ``TypeError`` for other comparison
526 operators. Because datetime is a subclass of date, comparing only the
527 base class (date) members can still be done, if that's desired, by
528 forcing using of the approprate date method; e.g.,
529 ``a_date.__eq__(a_datetime)`` is true if and only if the year, month
530 and day members of ``a_date`` and ``a_datetime`` are equal.
531
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000532- bdist_rpm now supports command line options --force-arch,
533 {pre,post}-install, {pre,post}-uninstall, and
Martin v. Löwis23c48a12004-09-10 06:32:54 +0000534 {prep,build,install,clean,verify}-script.
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000535
Walter Dörwald69652032004-09-07 20:24:22 +0000536- SF patch #998993: The UTF-8 and the UTF-16 stateful decoders now support
537 decoding incomplete input (when the input stream is temporarily exhausted).
538 ``codecs.StreamReader`` now implements buffering, which enables proper
539 readline support for the UTF-16 decoders. ``codecs.StreamReader.read()``
540 has a new argument ``chars`` which specifies the number of characters to
541 return. ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` and
542 ``codecs.StreamReader.readlines()`` have a new argument ``keepends``.
543 Trailing "\n"s will be stripped from the lines if ``keepends`` is false.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000544
Tim Petersa80a2c82004-09-26 05:13:18 +0000545- The documentation for doctest is greatly expanded, and now covers all
546 the new public features (of which there are many).
547
Walter Dörwald5011d0c2004-09-13 08:53:15 +0000548- ``doctest.master`` was put back in, and ``doctest.testmod()`` once again
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000549 updates it. This isn't good, because every ``testmod()`` call
550 contributes to bloating the "hidden" state of ``doctest.master``, but
551 some old code apparently relies on it. For now, all we can do is
552 encourage people to stitch doctests together via doctest's unittest
Tim Petersa80a2c82004-09-26 05:13:18 +0000553 integration features instead.
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000554
Skip Montanaro82d0eec2004-09-14 17:58:31 +0000555- httplib now handles ipv6 address/port pairs.
556
David Goodger68a1abd2004-10-03 15:40:25 +0000557- SF bug #1017864: ConfigParser now correctly handles default keys,
558 processing them with ``ConfigParser.optionxform`` when supplied,
559 consistent with the handling of config file entries and runtime-set
560 options.
561
David Goodger1cbf2062004-10-03 15:55:09 +0000562- SF bug #997050: Document, test, & check for non-string values in
563 ConfigParser. Moved the new string-only restriction added in
564 rev. 1.65 to the SafeConfigParser class, leaving existing
565 ConfigParser & RawConfigParser behavior alone, and documented the
566 conditions under which non-string values work.
567
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000568Build
569-----
570
Brett Cannonbfef8692004-09-28 04:08:11 +0000571- Building on darwin now includes /opt/local/include and /opt/local/lib for
572 building extension modules. This is so as to include software installed as
573 a DarwinPorts port <http://darwinports.opendarwin.org/>
574
Tim Peters862f0592004-09-23 19:11:32 +0000575- pyport.h now defines a Py_IS_NAN macro. It works as-is when the
576 platform C computes true for ``x != x`` if and only if X is a NaN.
577 Other platforms can override the default definition with a platform-
578 specific spelling in that platform's pyconfig.h. You can also override
579 pyport.h's default Py_IS_INFINITY definition now.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000580
581C API
582-----
583
Tim Peters7f468f22004-10-11 02:40:51 +0000584- SF patch 1044089: New function ``PyEval_ThreadsInitialized()`` returns
585 non-zero if PyEval_InitThreads() has been called.
586
587- The undocumented and unused extern int ``_PyThread_Started`` was removed.
588
Tim Peters84705582004-10-10 02:47:33 +0000589- The C API calls ``PyInterpreterState_New()`` and ``PyThreadState_New()``
590 are two of the very few advertised as being safe to call without holding
591 the GIL. However, this wasn't true in a debug build, as bug 1041645
592 demonstrated. In a debug build, Python redirects the ``PyMem`` family
593 of calls to Python's small-object allocator, to get the benefit of
594 its extra debugging capabilities. But Python's small-object allocator
595 isn't threadsafe, relying on the GIL to avoid the expense of doing its
596 own locking. ``PyInterpreterState_New()`` and ``PyThreadState_New()``
597 call the platform ``malloc()`` directly now, regardless of build type.
598
Tim Peters307fa782004-09-23 08:06:40 +0000599- PyLong_AsUnsignedLong[Mask] now support int objects as well.
600
Walter Dörwald69652032004-09-07 20:24:22 +0000601- SF patch #998993: ``PyUnicode_DecodeUTF8Stateful`` and
602 ``PyUnicode_DecodeUTF16Stateful`` have been added, which implement stateful
603 decoding.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000604
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000605Tests
606-----
607
608- test__locale ported to unittest
609
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000610Mac
611---
612
Just van Rossumdd3c8372004-10-03 16:27:09 +0000613- ``plistlib`` now supports non-dict root objects. There is also a new
614 interface for reading and writing plist files: ``readPlist(pathOrFile)``
615 and ``writePlist(rootObject, pathOrFile)``
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000616
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000617Tools/Demos
618-----------
619
Tim Peters130e37f2004-10-03 19:03:19 +0000620- The text file comparison scripts ``ndiff.py`` and ``diff.py`` now
621 read the input files in universal-newline mode. This spares them
622 from consuming a great deal of time to deduce the useless result that,
623 e.g., a file with Windows line ends and a file with Linux line ends
624 have no lines in common.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000625
626
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000627What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 3?
628=================================
629
Anthony Baxtere13943a2004-09-02 16:37:15 +0000630*Release date: 02-SEP-2004*
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000631
632Core and builtins
633-----------------
634
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000635- SF patch #1007189: ``from ... import ...`` statements now allow the name
Anthony Baxter1a4ddae2004-08-31 10:07:13 +0000636 list to be surrounded by parentheses.
637
Tim Peters0973b992004-08-29 22:16:50 +0000638- Some speedups for long arithmetic, thanks to Trevor Perrin. Gradeschool
639 multiplication was sped a little by optimizing the C code. Gradeschool
640 squaring was sped by about a factor of 2, by exploiting that about half
641 the digit products are duplicates in a square. Because exponentiation
642 uses squaring often, this also speeds long power. For example, the time
643 to compute 17**1000000 dropped from about 14 seconds to 9 on my box due
644 to this much. The cutoff for Karatsuba multiplication was raised,
645 since gradeschool multiplication got quicker, and the cutoff was
Tim Peters47e52ee2004-08-30 02:44:38 +0000646 aggressively small regardless. The exponentiation algorithm was switched
647 from right-to-left to left-to-right, which is more efficient for small
648 bases. In addition, if the exponent is large, the algorithm now does
649 5 bits (instead of 1 bit) at a time. That cut the time to compute
650 17**1000000 on my box in half again, down to about 4.5 seconds.
Tim Peters0973b992004-08-29 22:16:50 +0000651
Tim Petersc8854432004-08-25 02:14:08 +0000652- OverflowWarning is no longer generated. PEP 237 scheduled this to
653 occur in Python 2.3, but since OverflowWarning was disabled by default,
654 nobody realized it was still being generated. On the chance that user
655 code is still using them, the Python builtin OverflowWarning, and
656 corresponding C API PyExc_OverflowWarning, will exist until Python 2.5.
657
Martin v. Löwis336e85f2004-08-19 11:31:58 +0000658- Py_InitializeEx has been added.
659
Brett Cannonadd33602004-08-15 07:21:25 +0000660- Fix the order of application of decorators. The proper order is bottom-up;
661 the first decorator listed is the last one called.
662
Neal Norwitzf0769532004-08-13 03:18:29 +0000663- SF patch #1005778. Fix a seg fault if the list size changed while
664 calling list.index(). This could happen if a rich comparison function
665 modified the list.
666
Michael W. Hudson5e897952004-08-12 18:12:44 +0000667- The ``func_name`` (a.k.a. ``__name__``) attribute of user-defined
668 functions is now writable.
669
Michael W. Hudson5523c252004-08-12 18:09:00 +0000670- code_new (a.k.a new.code()) now checks its arguments sufficiently
671 carefully that passing them on to PyCode_New() won't trigger calls
672 to Py_FatalError() or PyErr_BadInternalCall(). It is still the case
673 that the returned code object might be entirely insane.
674
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +0000675- Subclasses of string can no longer be interned. The semantics of
676 interning were not clear here -- a subclass could be mutable, for
677 example -- and had bugs. Explicitly interning a subclass of string
678 via intern() will raise a TypeError. Internal operations that attempt
679 to intern a string subclass will have no effect.
Jeremy Hylton4c989dd2004-08-07 19:20:05 +0000680
Tim Peters83b57352004-08-08 07:24:22 +0000681- Bug 1003935: xrange() could report bogus OverflowErrors. Documented
682 what xrange() intends, and repaired tests accordingly.
683
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000684Extension modules
685-----------------
686
Martin v. Löwise064b412004-08-29 16:34:40 +0000687- difflib now supports HTML side-by-side diff.
688
Martin v. Löwisdc3883f2004-08-29 15:46:35 +0000689- os.urandom has been added for systems that support sources of random
690 data.
691
Tim Peters037b3ee2004-08-21 06:55:43 +0000692- Patch 1012740: truncate() on a writeable cStringIO now resets the
693 position to the end of the stream. This is consistent with the original
694 StringIO module and avoids inadvertently resurrecting data that was
695 supposed to have been truncated away.
696
Dave Cole331708b2004-08-09 04:51:41 +0000697- Added socket.socketpair().
698
Dave Cole3203efb2004-08-26 00:37:31 +0000699- Added CurrentByteIndex, CurrentColumnNumber, CurrentLineNumber
700 members to xml.parsers.expat.XMLParser object.
701
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000702- The mpz, rotor, and xreadlines modules, all deprecated in earlier
Andrew M. Kuchling00873432004-08-31 13:50:43 +0000703 versions of Python, have now been removed.
704
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000705Library
706-------
707
Johannes Gijsbers4c11f602004-08-30 14:13:04 +0000708- Patch #934356: if a module defines __all__, believe that rather than using
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000709 heuristics for filtering out imported names.
Johannes Gijsbers4c11f602004-08-30 14:13:04 +0000710
Johannes Gijsbersae882f72004-08-30 10:19:56 +0000711- Patch #941486: added os.path.lexists(), which returns True for broken
712 symlinks, unlike os.path.exists().
713
Raymond Hettinger356a4592004-08-30 06:14:31 +0000714- the random module now uses os.urandom() for seeding if it is available.
715 Added a new generator based on os.urandom().
716
Martin v. Löwise064b412004-08-29 16:34:40 +0000717- difflib and diff.py can now generate HTML.
718
Martin v. Löwiscae9e672004-08-25 13:04:53 +0000719- bdist_rpm now includes version and release in the BuildRoot, and
720 replaces - by ``_`` in version and release.
Martin v. Löwiscf525242004-08-25 13:00:34 +0000721
Martin v. Löwis9f5c0c42004-08-25 11:37:43 +0000722- distutils build/build_scripts now has an -e option to specify the
723 path to the Python interpreter for installed scripts.
724
Barry Warsaw8bee7612004-08-25 02:22:30 +0000725- PEP 292 classes Template and SafeTemplate are added to the string module.
726
Martin v. Löwis75b9da42004-08-18 13:57:44 +0000727- tarfile now generates GNU tar files by default.
728
Martin v. Löwisdeacce22004-08-18 12:46:26 +0000729- HTTPResponse has now a getheaders method.
730
Johannes Gijsbersc473c992004-08-18 12:40:31 +0000731- Patch #1006219: let inspect.getsource handle '@' decorators. Thanks Simon
732 Percivall.
733
Martin v. Löwis318a12e2004-08-18 12:27:40 +0000734- logging.handlers.SMTPHandler.date_time has been removed;
735 the class now uses email.Utils.formatdate to generate the time stamp.
736
Martin v. Löwisfe84d172004-08-18 11:06:45 +0000737- A new function tkFont.nametofont was added to return an existing
738 font. The Font class constructor now has an additional exists argument
739 which, if True, requests to return/configure an existing font, rather
Tim Peters037b3ee2004-08-21 06:55:43 +0000740 than creating a new one.
Martin v. Löwisfe84d172004-08-18 11:06:45 +0000741
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +0000742- Updated the decimal package's min() and max() methods to match the
743 latest revision of the General Decimal Arithmetic Specification.
744 Quiet NaNs are ignored and equal values are sorted based on sign
745 and exponent.
746
747- The decimal package's Context.copy() method now returns deep copies.
748
749- Deprecated sys.exitfunc in favor of the atexit module. The sys.exitfunc
750 attribute will be kept around for backwards compatability and atexit
751 will just become the one preferred way to do it.
752
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +0000753- patch #675551: Add get_history_item and replace_history_item functions
754 to the readline module.
755
Johannes Gijsbers34c41202004-08-14 15:19:28 +0000756- bug #989672: pdb.doc and the help messages for the help_d and help_u methods
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +0000757 of the pdb.Pdb class gives have been corrected. d(own) goes to a newer
758 frame, u(p) to an older frame, not the other way around.
Johannes Gijsbers34c41202004-08-14 15:19:28 +0000759
Johannes Gijsbers4ec40642004-08-14 15:01:53 +0000760- bug #990669: os.path.realpath() will resolve symlinks before normalizing the
761 path, as normalizing the path may alter the meaning of the path if it
762 contains symlinks.
763
Johannes Gijsbers9d134b72004-08-14 14:03:03 +0000764- bug #851123: shutil.copyfile will raise an exception when trying to copy a
765 file onto a link to itself. Thanks Gregory Ball.
766
Brett Cannonb3de2e12004-08-13 18:46:24 +0000767- bug #570300: Fix inspect to resolve file locations using os.path.realpath()
768 so as to properly list all functions in a module when the module itself is
769 reached through a symlink. Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
770
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +0000771- doctest refactoring continued. See the docs for details. As part of
772 this effort, some old and little- (never?) used features are now
773 deprecated: the Tester class, the module is_private() function, and the
774 isprivate argument to testmod(). The Tester class supplied a feeble
775 "by hand" way to combine multiple doctests, if you knew exactly what
776 you were doing. The newer doctest features for unittest integration
777 already did a better job of that, are stronger now than ever, and the
778 new DocTestRunner class is a saner foundation if you want to do it by
779 hand. The "private name" filtering gimmick was a mistake from the
780 start, and testmod() changed long ago to ignore it by default. If
781 you want to filter out tests, the new DocTestFinder class can be used
782 to return a list of all doctests, and you can filter that list by
783 any computable criteria before passing it to a DocTestRunner instance.
784
Matthias Klose2e829c02004-08-15 17:04:33 +0000785- Bug #891637, patch #1005466: fix inspect.getargs() crash on def foo((bar)).
786
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000787Tools/Demos
788-----------
789
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +0000790- IDLE's shortcut keys for windows are now case insensitive so that
791 Control-V works the same as Control-v.
792
Matthias Klose2443d4a2004-08-16 12:10:12 +0000793- pygettext.py: Generate POT-Creation-Date header in ISO format.
794
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000795Build
796-----
797
Tim Peters47e52ee2004-08-30 02:44:38 +0000798- Backward incompatibility: longintrepr.h now triggers a compile-time
799 error if SHIFT (the number of bits in a Python long "digit") isn't
800 divisible by 5. This new requirement allows simple code for the new
801 5-bits-at-a-time long_pow() implementation. If necessary, the
802 restriction could be removed (by complicating long_pow(), or by
803 falling back to the 1-bit-at-a-time algorithm), but there are no
804 plans to do so.
805
Brett Cannoncc8a4f62004-08-26 01:44:07 +0000806- bug #991962: When building with --disable-toolbox-glue on Darwin no
807 attempt to build Mac-specific modules occurs.
808
Michael W. Hudson800ba232004-08-12 18:19:17 +0000809- The --with-tsc flag to configure to enable VM profiling with the
810 processor's timestamp counter now works on PPC platforms.
811
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +0000812- patch #1006629: Define _XOPEN_SOURCE to 500 on Solaris 8/9 to match
813 GCC's definition and avoid redefinition warnings.
814
Matthias Klosea2542be2004-08-16 11:35:51 +0000815- Detect pthreads support (provided by gnu pth pthread emulation) on
816 GNU/k*BSD systems.
817
Hye-Shik Chang3ba5bfc2004-08-19 17:52:37 +0000818- bug #1005737, #1007249: Fixed several build problems and warnings
819 found on old/legacy C compilers of HP-UX, IRIX and Tru64.
820
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000821C API
822-----
823
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +0000824..
825
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000826Documentation
827-------------
828
Neal Norwitz5268c392004-08-21 15:13:52 +0000829- patch #1005936, bug #1009373: fix index entries which contain
830 an underscore when viewed with Acrobat.
831
832- bug #990669: os.path.normpath may alter the meaning of a path if
833 it contains symbolic links. This has been documented in a comment
834 since 1992, but is now in the library reference as well.
Johannes Gijsbersb112d6e2004-08-14 14:41:32 +0000835
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000836New platforms
837-------------
838
Hye-Shik Changf64700a2004-08-18 15:13:41 +0000839- FreeBSD 6 is now supported.
840
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000841Tests
842-----
843
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +0000844..
845
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000846Windows
847-------
848
Tim Peters79b52b72004-08-12 18:37:10 +0000849- Boosted the stack reservation for python.exe and pythonw.exe from
850 the default 1MB to 2MB. Stack frames under VC 7.1 for 2.4 are enough
851 bigger than under VC 6.0 for 2.3.4 that deeply recursive progams
852 within the default sys.getrecursionlimit() default value of 1000 were
853 able to suffer undetected C stack overflows. The standard test program
854 test_compiler was one such program. If a Python process on Windows
855 "just vanishes" without a trace, and without an error message of any
856 kind, but with an exit code of 128, undetected stack overflow may be
857 the problem.
858
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000859Mac
860---
861
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +0000862..
863
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000864
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000865What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 2?
866=================================
867
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +0000868*Release date: 05-AUG-2004*
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000869
870Core and builtins
871-----------------
872
Raymond Hettinger52a21b82004-08-06 18:43:09 +0000873- Patch #980695: Implements efficient string concatenation for statements
874 of the form s=s+t and s+=t. This will vary across implementations.
875 Accordingly, the str.join() method is strongly preferred for performance
876 sensitive code.
877
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +0000878- PEP-0318, Function Decorators have been added to the language. These are
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +0000879 implemented using the Java-style @decorator syntax, like so::
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000880
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +0000881 @staticmethod
882 def foo(bar):
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000883
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +0000884 (The PEP needs to be updated to reflect the current state)
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +0000885
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +0000886- When importing a module M raises an exception, Python no longer leaves M
887 in sys.modules. Before 2.4a2 it did, and a subsequent import of M would
888 succeed, picking up a module object from sys.modules reflecting as much
889 of the initialization of M as completed before the exception was raised.
890 Subsequent imports got no indication that M was in a partially-
891 initialized state, and the importers could get into arbitrarily bad
892 trouble as a result (the M they got was in an unintended state,
893 arbitrarily far removed from M's author's intent). Now subsequent
894 imports of M will continue raising exceptions (but if, for example, the
895 source code for M is edited between import attempts, then perhaps later
896 attempts will succeed, or raise a different exception).
897
898 This can break existing code, but in such cases the code was probably
899 working before by accident. In the Python source, the only case of
900 breakage discovered was in a test accidentally relying on a damaged
901 module remaining in sys.modules. Cases are also known where tests
902 deliberately provoking import errors remove damaged modules from
903 sys.modules themselves, and such tests will break now if they do an
904 unconditional del sys.modules[M].
905
Marc-André Lemburgb314ce92004-07-23 16:14:57 +0000906- u'%s' % obj will now try obj.__unicode__() first and fallback to
907 obj.__str__() if no __unicode__ method can be found.
908
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +0000909- Patch #550732: Add PyArg_VaParseTupleAndKeywords(). Analogous to
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000910 PyArg_VaParse(). Both are now documented. Thanks Greg Chapman.
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +0000911
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000912- Allow string and unicode return types from .encode()/.decode()
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000913 methods on string and unicode objects. Added unicode.decode()
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000914 which was missing for no apparent reason.
915
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000916- An attempt to fix the mess that is Python's behaviour with
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000917 signal handlers and threads, complicated by readline's behaviour.
918 It's quite possible that there are still bugs here.
919
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000920- Added C macros Py_CLEAR and Py_VISIT to ease the implementation of
921 types that support garbage collection.
922
Raymond Hettinger76d962d2004-07-16 12:16:48 +0000923- Compiler now treats None as a constant.
924
Neil Schemenauer3a313e32004-07-19 16:29:17 +0000925- The type of values returned by __int__, __float__, __long__,
926 __oct__, and __hex__ are now checked. Returning an invalid type
927 will cause a TypeError to be raised. This matches the behavior of
928 Jython.
929
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +0000930- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in locale module.
931
Hye-Shik Changb5047fd2004-08-04 06:33:51 +0000932- Added a workaround for proper string operations in BSDs. str.split
933 and str.is* methods can now work correctly with UTF-8 locales.
934
Hye-Shik Changc81c6952004-08-04 17:40:38 +0000935- Bug #989185: unicode.iswide() and unicode.width() is dropped and
936 the East Asian Width support is moved to unicodedata extension
937 module.
Hye-Shik Change9ddfbb2004-08-04 07:38:35 +0000938
Hye-Shik Chang7df44b32004-08-04 17:36:41 +0000939- Patch #941229: The source code encoding in interactive mode
940 now refers sys.stdin.encoding not just ISO-8859-1 anymore. This
941 allows for non-latin-1 users to write unicode strings directly.
942
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000943Extension modules
944-----------------
945
Martin v. Löwis544f1192004-07-27 05:22:33 +0000946- cpickle now supports the same keyword arguments as pickle.
947
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000948Library
949-------
950
Marc-André Lemburgc759f072004-08-05 12:43:30 +0000951- Added new codecs and aliases for ISO_8859-11, ISO_8859-16 and
952 TIS-620
953
Tim Peters8485b562004-08-04 18:46:34 +0000954- Thanks to Edward Loper, doctest has been massively refactored, and
955 many new features were added. Full docs will appear later. For now
956 the doctest module comments and new test cases give good coverage.
957 The refactoring provides many hook points for customizing behavior
958 (such as how to report errors, and how to compare expected to actual
959 output). New features include a <BLANKLINE> marker for expected
960 output containing blank lines, options to produce unified or context
961 diffs when actual output doesn't match expectations, an option to
962 normalize whitespace before comparing, and an option to use an
963 ellipsis to signify "don't care" regions of output.
964
Martin v. Löwis1fa649f2004-08-03 18:45:31 +0000965- Tkinter now supports the wish -sync and -use options.
966
Fred Drakef901abd2004-08-03 17:58:55 +0000967- The following methods in time support passing of None: ctime(), gmtime(),
968 and localtime(). If None is provided, the current time is used (the
969 same as when the argument is omitted).
970 [SF bug 658254, patch 663482]
971
Martin v. Löwis9513e342004-08-03 14:36:32 +0000972- nntplib does now allow to ignore a .netrc file.
973
Martin v. Löwis65a79752004-08-03 12:59:55 +0000974- urllib2 now recognizes Basic authentication even if other authentication
975 schemes are offered.
976
Neal Norwitz0e67fd42004-08-01 22:48:06 +0000977- Bug #1001053. wave.open() now accepts unicode filenames.
978
Tim Peters5cfb05e2004-07-27 21:02:02 +0000979- gzip.GzipFile has a new fileno() method, to retrieve the handle of the
980 underlying file object (provided it has a fileno() method). This is
981 needed if you want to use os.fsync() on a GzipFile.
982
Martin v. Löwis7b9190b2004-07-27 05:07:19 +0000983- imaplib has two new methods: deleteacl and myrights.
984
Martin v. Löwiscc0f9322004-07-26 12:40:50 +0000985- nntplib has two new methods: description and descriptions. They
986 use a more RFC-compliant way of getting a newsgroup description.
987
Brett Cannon8b3d92a2004-07-21 02:21:58 +0000988- Bug #993394. Fix a possible red herring of KeyError in 'threading' being
989 raised during interpreter shutdown from a registered function with atexit
990 when dummy_threading is being used.
991
Neal Norwitza4f651a2004-07-20 22:07:44 +0000992- Bug #857297/Patch #916874. Fix an error when extracting a hard link
993 from a tarfile.
994
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +0000995- Patch #846659. Fix an error in tarfile.py when using
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +0000996 GNU longname/longlink creation.
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +0000997
Tim Peters90ee7eb2004-07-18 23:58:17 +0000998- The obsolete FCNTL.py has been deleted. The builtin fcntl module
999 has been available (on platforms that support fcntl) since Python
1000 1.5a3, and all FCNTL.py did is export fcntl's names, after generating
1001 a deprecation warning telling you to use fcntl directly.
1002
Hye-Shik Chang2bb146f2004-07-18 03:06:29 +00001003- Several new unicode codecs are added: big5hkscs, euc_jis_2004,
1004 iso2022_jp_2004, shift_jis_2004.
1005
Tim Peters5af0e412004-07-12 00:45:14 +00001006- Bug #788520. Queue.{get, get_nowait, put, put_nowait} have new
1007 implementations, exploiting Conditions (which didn't exist at the time
1008 Queue was introduced). A minor semantic change is that the Full and
1009 Empty exceptions raised by non-blocking calls now occur only if the
1010 queue truly was full or empty at the instant the queue was checked (of
1011 course the Queue may no longer be full or empty by the time a calling
1012 thread sees those exceptions, though). Before, the exceptions could
1013 also be raised if it was "merely inconvenient" for the implementation
1014 to determine the true state of the Queue (because the Queue was locked
1015 by some other method in progress).
1016
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001017- Bugs #979794 and #980117: difflib.get_grouped_opcodes() now handles the
1018 case of comparing two empty lists. This affected both context_diff() and
1019 unified_diff(),
Brett Cannond2c5b4b2004-07-10 23:54:07 +00001020
Brett Cannone6f8a892004-07-10 23:14:30 +00001021- Bug #980938: smtplib now prints debug output to sys.stderr.
1022
Brett Cannonf50299c2004-07-10 22:55:15 +00001023- Bug #930024: posixpath.realpath() now handles infinite loops in symlinks by
1024 returning the last point in the path that was not part of any loop. Thanks
1025 AM Kuchling.
1026
Brett Cannonbdc36272004-07-10 20:42:22 +00001027- Bug #980327: ntpath not handles compressing erroneous slashes between the
1028 drive letter and the rest of the path. Also clearly handles UNC addresses now
1029 as well. Thanks Paul Moore.
1030
Brett Cannone6751182004-07-10 19:13:42 +00001031- bug #679953: zipfile.py should now work for files over 2 GB. The packed data
1032 for file sizes (compressed and uncompressed) was being stored as signed
1033 instead of unsigned.
1034
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001035- decimal.py now only uses signals in the IBM spec. The other conditions are
Raymond Hettinger5aa478b2004-07-09 10:02:53 +00001036 no longer part of the public API.
1037
Marc-André Lemburg88fcca62004-07-10 16:16:06 +00001038- codecs module now has two new generic APIs: encode() and decode()
1039 which don't restrict the return types (unlike the unicode and
1040 string methods of the same name).
1041
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001042- Non-blocking SSL sockets work again; they were broken in Python 2.3.
Andrew M. Kuchling79d7e922004-07-10 21:21:55 +00001043 SF patch 945642.
1044
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001045- doctest unittest integration improvements:
1046
1047 o Improved the unitest test output for doctest-based unit tests
1048
1049 o Can now pass setUp and tearDown functions when creating
1050 DocTestSuites.
1051
1052- The threading module has a new class, local, for creating objects
1053 that provide thread-local data.
1054
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +00001055- Bug #990307: when keep_empty_values is True, cgi.parse_qsl()
1056 no longer returns spurious empty fields.
1057
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +00001058- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in gettext module.
1059
1060- Introduced in gettext module the l*gettext() family of functions,
1061 which return translation strings encoded in the preferred encoding,
1062 as informed by locale module's getpreferredencoding().
1063
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +00001064- optparse module (and tests) upgraded to Optik 1.5a1. Changes:
1065
1066 - Add expansion of default values in help text: the string
1067 "%default" in an option's help string is expanded to str() of
1068 that option's default value, or "none" if no default value.
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +00001069
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +00001070 - Bug #955889: option default values that happen to be strings are
1071 now processed in the same way as values from the command line; this
1072 allows generation of nicer help when using custom types. Can
1073 be disabled with parser.set_process_default_values(False).
1074
1075 - Bug #960515: don't crash when generating help for callback
1076 options that specify 'type', but not 'dest' or 'metavar'.
1077
1078 - Feature #815264: change the default help format for short options
1079 that take an argument from e.g. "-oARG" to "-o ARG"; add
1080 set_short_opt_delimiter() and set_long_opt_delimiter() methods to
1081 HelpFormatter to allow (slight) customization of the formatting.
1082
1083 - Patch #736940: internationalize Optik: all built-in user-
1084 targeted literal strings are passed through gettext.gettext(). (If
1085 you want translations (.po files), they're not included with Python
1086 -- you'll find them in the Optik source distribution from
1087 http://optik.sourceforge.net/ .)
1088
1089 - Bug #878453: respect $COLUMNS environment variable for
1090 wrapping help output.
1091
1092 - Feature #988122: expand "%prog" in the 'description' passed
1093 to OptionParser, just like in the 'usage' and 'version' strings.
1094 (This is *not* done in the 'description' passed to OptionGroup.)
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +00001095
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001096C API
1097-----
1098
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +00001099- PyImport_ExecCodeModule() and PyImport_ExecCodeModuleEx(): if an
1100 error occurs while loading the module, these now delete the module's
1101 entry from sys.modules. All ways of loading modules eventually call
1102 one of these, so this is an error-case change in semantics for all
1103 ways of loading modules. In rare cases, a module loader may wish
1104 to keep a module object in sys.modules despite that the module's
1105 code cannot be executed. In such cases, the module loader must
1106 arrange to reinsert the name and module object in sys.modules.
1107 PyImport_ReloadModule() has been changed to reinsert the original
1108 module object into sys.modules if the module reload fails, so that
1109 its visible semantics have not changed.
1110
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001111- A large pile of datetime field-extraction macros is now documented,
1112 thanks to Anthony Tuininga (patch #986010).
1113
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001114Documentation
1115-------------
1116
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +00001117- Improved the tutorial on creating types in C.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001118
1119 - point out the importance of reassigning data members before
Andrew M. Kuchling78d375f2004-08-07 14:00:39 +00001120 assigning their values
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001121
Andrew M. Kuchling28025ec2004-08-07 13:59:22 +00001122 - correct my misconception about return values from visitprocs. Sigh.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001123
1124 - mention the labor saving Py_VISIT and Py_CLEAR macros.
1125
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +00001126- Major rewrite of the math module docs, to address common confusions.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001127
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001128Tests
1129-----
1130
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +00001131- The test data files for the decimal test suite are now installed on
Anthony Baxterfd4984d2004-07-12 09:33:39 +00001132 platforms that use the Makefile.
1133
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +00001134- SF patch 995225: The test file testtar.tar accidentally contained
1135 CVS keywords (like $Id$), which could cause spurious failures in
1136 test_tarfile.py depending on how the test file was checked out.
1137
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001138
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001139What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 1?
1140=================================
1141
Anthony Baxter3210b362004-07-08 05:59:43 +00001142*Release date: 08-JUL-2004*
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001143
1144Core and builtins
1145-----------------
1146
Fred Drake0a4dd392004-07-02 18:57:45 +00001147- weakref.ref is now the type object also known as
1148 weakref.ReferenceType; it can be subclassed like any other new-style
1149 class. There's less per-entry overhead in WeakValueDictionary
1150 objects now (one object instead of three).
1151
Thomas Heller04c673b2004-07-02 08:56:20 +00001152- Bug #951851: Python crashed when reading import table of certain
1153 Windows DLLs.
1154
Raymond Hettinger66bd2332004-08-02 08:30:07 +00001155- Bug #215126. The locals argument to eval(), execfile(), and exec now
1156 accept any mapping type.
Raymond Hettinger214b1c32004-07-02 06:41:07 +00001157
Martin v. Löwisef82d2f2004-06-27 16:51:46 +00001158- marshal now shares interned strings. This change introduces
1159 a new .pyc magic.
1160
Anthony Baxter3ecdb252004-06-11 14:41:18 +00001161- Bug #966623. classes created with type() in an exec(, {}) don't
1162 have a __module__, but code in typeobject assumed it would always
1163 be there.
1164
Martin v. Löwis737ea822004-06-08 18:52:54 +00001165- Python no longer relies on the LC_NUMERIC locale setting to be
1166 the "C" locale; as a result, it no longer tries to prevent changing
1167 the LC_NUMERIC category.
1168
Tim Peters604c0132004-06-07 23:04:33 +00001169- Bug #952807: Unpickling pickled instances of subclasses of
1170 datetime.date, datetime.datetime and datetime.time could yield insane
1171 objects. Thanks to Jiwon Seo for a fix.
1172
Thomas Heller90a764c2004-06-07 15:12:44 +00001173- Bug #845802: Python crashes when __init__.py is a directory.
1174
Hye-Shik Changbc555e32004-06-03 11:10:58 +00001175- Unicode objects received two new methods: iswide() and width().
1176 These query East Asian width information, as specified in Unicode
1177 TR11.
Hye-Shik Chang974ed7c2004-06-02 16:49:17 +00001178
Raymond Hettinger41bd0222004-06-01 06:36:24 +00001179- Improved the tuple hashing algorithm to give fewer collisions in
1180 common cases. Fixes bug #942952.
1181
Raymond Hettinger354433a2004-05-19 08:20:33 +00001182- Implemented generator expressions (PEP 289). Coded by Jiwon Seo.
1183
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +00001184- Enabled the profiling of C extension functions (and builtins) - check
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001185 new documentation and modified profile and bdb modules for more details
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +00001186
Nicholas Bastinabce8a62004-03-21 20:24:07 +00001187- Set file.name to the object passed to open (instead of a new string)
1188
Nicholas Bastina7604bf2004-03-21 18:37:23 +00001189- Moved tracebackobject into traceback.h and renamed to PyTracebackObject
1190
Raymond Hettingerff5bc502004-03-21 15:12:00 +00001191- Optimized the byte coding for multiple assignments like "a,b=b,a" and
1192 "a,b,c=1,2,3". Improves their speed by 25% to 30%.
1193
Brett Cannon4f653312004-03-20 22:52:14 +00001194- Limit the nested depth of a tuple for the second argument to isinstance()
1195 and issubclass() to the recursion limit of the interpreter.
1196 Fixes bug #858016 .
1197
Raymond Hettingerade08ea2004-03-18 09:48:12 +00001198- Optimized dict iterators, creating separate types for each
1199 and having them reveal their length. Also optimized the
1200 methods: keys(), values(), and items().
1201
Raymond Hettingerdd80f762004-03-07 07:31:06 +00001202- Implemented a newcode opcode, LIST_APPEND, that simplifies
1203 the generated bytecode for list comprehensions and further
1204 improves their performance (about 35%).
1205
Michael W. Hudsond3b33b52004-02-19 19:35:22 +00001206- Implemented rich comparisons for floats, which seems to make
1207 comparisons involving NaNs somewhat less surprising when the
1208 underlying C compiler actually implements C99 semantics.
1209
Raymond Hettingerfa7b9d82004-02-15 04:06:39 +00001210- Optimized list.extend() to save memory and no longer create
1211 intermediate sequences. Also, extend() now pre-allocates the
1212 needed memory whenever the length of the iterable is known in
1213 advance -- this halves the time to extend the list.
1214
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001215- Optimized list resize operations to make fewer calls to the system
1216 realloc(). Significantly speeds up list appends, list pops,
Walter Dörwald09515af2005-03-18 10:28:24 +00001217 list comprehensions, and the list constructor (when the input iterable
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001218 length is not known).
1219
1220- Changed the internal list over-allocation scheme. For larger lists,
1221 overallocation ranged between 3% and 25%. Now, it is a constant 12%.
Raymond Hettingerab517d22004-02-14 18:34:46 +00001222 For smaller lists (n<8), overallocation was upto eight elements. Now,
1223 the overallocation is no more than three elements -- this improves space
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001224 utilization for applications that have large numbers of small lists.
1225
Raymond Hettinger0468e412004-05-05 05:37:53 +00001226- Most list bodies now get re-used rather than freed. Speeds up list
1227 instantiation and deletion by saving calls to malloc() and free().
1228
Raymond Hettinger31017ae2004-03-04 08:25:44 +00001229- The dict.update() method now accepts all the same argument forms
1230 as the dict() constructor. This now includes item lists and/or
1231 keyword arguments.
1232
Michael W. Hudsonecfeb7f2004-02-12 15:28:27 +00001233- Support for arbitrary objects supporting the read-only buffer
1234 interface as the co_code field of code objects (something that was
1235 only possible to create from C code) has been removed.
1236
Fred Drake228765b2004-02-06 04:15:22 +00001237- Made omitted callback and None equivalent for weakref.ref() and
1238 weakref.proxy(); the None case wasn't handled correctly in all
1239 cases.
1240
1241- Fixed problem where PyWeakref_NewRef() and PyWeakref_NewProxy()
1242 assumed that initial existing entries in an object's weakref list
1243 would not be removed while allocating a new weakref object. Since
1244 GC could be invoked at that time, however, that assumption was
1245 invalid. In a truly obscure case of GC being triggered during
1246 creation for a new weakref object for an referent which already
1247 has a weakref without a callback which is only referenced from
1248 cyclic trash, a memory error can occur. This consistently created a
1249 segfault in a debug build, but provided less predictable behavior in
1250 a release build.
1251
Hye-Shik Changff83c2b2004-02-02 13:39:01 +00001252- input() builtin function now respects compiler flags such as
1253 __future__ statements. SF patch 876178.
1254
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +00001255- Removed PendingDeprecationWarning from apply(). apply() remains
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +00001256 deprecated, but the nuisance warning will not be issued.
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +00001257
Tim Peters1d7323e2003-12-01 21:35:27 +00001258- At Python shutdown time (Py_Finalize()), 2.3 called cyclic garbage
1259 collection twice, both before and after tearing down modules. The
1260 call after tearing down modules has been disabled, because too much
1261 of Python has been torn down then for __del__ methods and weakref
1262 callbacks to execute sanely. The most common symptom was a sequence
1263 of uninformative messages on stderr when Python shut down, produced
1264 by threads trying to raise exceptions, but unable to report the nature
1265 of their problems because too much of the sys module had already been
1266 destroyed.
1267
Guido van Rossum6c9e1302003-11-29 23:52:13 +00001268- Removed FutureWarnings related to hex/oct literals and conversions
1269 and left shifts. (Thanks to Kalle Svensson for SF patch 849227.)
1270 This addresses most of the remaining semantic changes promised by
1271 PEP 237, except for repr() of a long, which still shows the trailing
1272 'L'. The PEP appears to promise warnings for operations that
1273 changed semantics compared to Python 2.3, but this is not
1274 implemented; we've suffered through enough warnings related to
1275 hex/oct literals and I think it's best to be silent now.
1276
Raymond Hettinger4f8f9762003-11-26 08:21:35 +00001277- For str and unicode objects, the ljust(), center(), and rjust()
1278 methods now accept an optional argument specifying a fill
1279 character other than a space.
1280
Guido van Rossumbaf0f8f2003-11-22 23:55:50 +00001281- When method objects have an attribute that can be satisfied either
1282 by the function object or by the method object, the function
1283 object's attribute usually wins. Christian Tismer pointed out that
1284 that this is really a mistake, because this only happens for special
1285 methods (like __reduce__) where the method object's version is
1286 really more appropriate than the function's attribute. So from now
1287 on, all method attributes will have precedence over function
1288 attributes with the same name.
1289
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +00001290- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 839548: if a weakref with a callback,
1291 its callback, and its weakly referenced object, all became part of
1292 cyclic garbage during a single run of garbage collection, the order
1293 in which they were torn down was unpredictable. It was possible for
1294 the callback to see partially-torn-down objects, leading to immediate
1295 segfaults, or, if the callback resurrected garbage objects, to
1296 resurrect insane objects that caused segfaults (or other surprises)
1297 later. In one sense this wasn't surprising, because Python's cyclic gc
1298 had no knowledge of Python's weakref objects. It does now. When
1299 weakrefs with callbacks become part of cyclic garbage now, those
1300 weakrefs are cleared first. The callbacks don't trigger then,
1301 preventing the problems. If you need callbacks to trigger, then just
1302 as when cyclic gc is not involved, you need to write your code so
1303 that weakref objects outlive the objects they weakly reference.
Raymond Hettingera690a992003-11-16 16:17:49 +00001304
Tim Petersadd09b42003-11-12 20:43:28 +00001305- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 840829: if cyclic garbage collection
1306 happened to occur during a weakref callback for a new-style class
1307 instance, subtle memory corruption was the result (in a release build;
1308 in a debug build, a segfault occurred reliably very soon after).
1309 This has been repaired.
1310
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +00001311- Compiler flags set in PYTHONSTARTUP are now active in __main__.
1312
1313- Added two builtin types, set() and frozenset().
1314
Raymond Hettinger85c20a42003-11-06 14:06:48 +00001315- Added a reversed() builtin function that returns a reverse iterator
1316 over a sequence.
1317
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +00001318- Added a sorted() builtin function that returns a new sorted list
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001319 from any iterable.
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +00001320
Martin v. Löwis01a74b22003-10-19 18:30:01 +00001321- CObjects are now mutable (on the C level) through PyCObject_SetVoidPtr.
1322
Raymond Hettinger42b1ba32003-10-16 03:41:09 +00001323- list.sort() now supports three keyword arguments: cmp, key, and reverse.
1324 The key argument can be a function of one argument that extracts a
1325 comparison key from the original record: mylist.sort(key=str.lower).
1326 The reverse argument is a boolean value and if True will change the
1327 sort order as if the comparison arguments were reversed. In addition,
1328 the documentation has been amended to provide a guarantee that all sorts
1329 starting with Py2.3 are guaranteed to be stable (the relative order of
1330 records with equal keys is unchanged).
1331
Marc-André Lemburgd7160f82003-09-22 11:14:40 +00001332- Added test whether wchar_t is signed or not. A signed wchar_t is not
1333 usable as internal unicode type base for Py_UNICODE since the
1334 unicode implementation assumes an unsigned type.
1335
Jeremy Hyltond8082792003-09-16 19:41:39 +00001336- Fixed a bug in the cache of length-one Unicode strings that could
1337 lead to a seg fault. The specific problem occurred when an earlier,
1338 non-fatal error left an uninitialized Unicode object in the
1339 freelist.
1340
Raymond Hettinger9bfe5332003-08-27 04:55:52 +00001341- The % formatting operator now supports '%F' which is equivalent to
1342 '%f'. This has always been documented but never implemented.
1343
Tim Peters465fa3d2003-08-15 01:16:37 +00001344- complex(obj) could leak a little memory if obj wasn't a string or
1345 number.
1346
Raymond Hettingereaef6152003-08-02 07:42:57 +00001347- zip() with no arguments now returns an empty list instead of raising
1348 a TypeError exception.
1349
Guido van Rossum02c58f82003-10-08 21:08:29 +00001350- obj.__contains__() now returns True/False instead of 1/0. SF patch
1351 820195.
1352
Armin Rigo2b3eb402003-10-28 12:05:48 +00001353- Python no longer tries to be smart about recursive comparisons.
1354 When comparing containers with cyclic references to themselves it
1355 will now just hit the recursion limit. See SF patch 825639.
1356
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001357- str and unicode builtin types now have an rsplit() method that is
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +00001358 same as split() except that it scans the string from the end
1359 working towards the beginning. See SF feature request 801847.
Hye-Shik Chang060ebed2003-12-15 18:51:19 +00001360
Jim Fulton8a1a5942004-02-08 04:21:26 +00001361- Fixed a bug in object.__reduce_ex__ when using protocol 2. Failure
1362 to clear the error when attempts to get the __getstate__ attribute
1363 fail caused intermittent errors and odd behavior.
1364
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001365- buffer objects based on other objects no longer cache a pointer to
1366 the data and the data length. Instead, the appropriate tp_as_buffer
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001367 method is called as necessary.
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001368
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001369- fixed: if a file is opened with an explicit buffer size >= 1, repeated
Andrew MacIntyre4e10ed32004-04-04 07:01:35 +00001370 close() calls would attempt to free() the buffer already free()ed on
1371 the first call.
1372
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001373
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001374Extension modules
1375-----------------
1376
Barry Warsaw11b91a02004-06-28 00:50:43 +00001377- Added socket.getservbyport(), and make the second argument in
1378 getservbyname() and getservbyport() optional.
1379
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +00001380- time module code that deals with input POSIX timestamps will now raise
1381 ValueError if more than a second is lost in precision when the
1382 timestamp is cast to the platform C time_t type. There's no chance
1383 that the platform will do anything sensible with the result in such
1384 cases. This includes ctime(), localtime() and gmtime(). Assorted
1385 fromtimestamp() and utcfromtimestamp() methods in the datetime module
1386 were also protected. Closes bugs #919012 and 975996.
Brett Cannonb46ed712004-06-19 20:50:47 +00001387
Martin v. Löwis77ca6c42004-06-03 12:47:26 +00001388- fcntl.ioctl now warns if the mutate flag is not specified.
1389
Martin v. Löwisd8948722004-06-02 09:57:56 +00001390- nt now properly allows to refer to UNC roots, e.g. in nt.stat().
1391
Raymond Hettinger027bb632004-05-31 03:09:25 +00001392- the weakref module now supports additional objects: array.array,
1393 sre.pattern_objects, file objects, and sockets.
1394
Raymond Hettingere2eda602004-04-04 08:51:41 +00001395- operator.isMappingType() and operator.isSequenceType() now give
1396 fewer false positives.
1397
Brett Cannon06c34792004-03-23 23:16:54 +00001398- socket.sslerror is now a subclass of socket.error . Also added
1399 socket.error to the socket module's C API.
1400
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001401- Bug #920575: A problem where the _locale module segfaults on
Hye-Shik Changc3a87b82004-03-21 19:34:30 +00001402 nl_langinfo(ERA) caused by GNU libc's illegal NULL return is fixed.
1403
Raymond Hettinger6e2ee862004-03-14 04:37:50 +00001404- array objects now support the copy module. Also, their resizing
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001405 scheme has been updated to match that used for list objects. This improves
Raymond Hettinger49f9bd12004-03-14 05:43:59 +00001406 the performance (speed and memory usage) of append() operations.
Raymond Hettinger6ab78cd2004-08-29 07:50:43 +00001407 Also, array.array() and array.extend() now accept any iterable argument
1408 for repeated appends without needing to create another temporary array.
Raymond Hettinger3aa82c02004-03-13 18:18:51 +00001409
Raymond Hettinger3e47f652004-03-08 18:22:35 +00001410- cStringIO.writelines() now accepts any iterable argument and writes
1411 the lines one at a time rather than joining them and writing once.
1412 Made a parallel change to StringIO.writelines(). Saves memory and
1413 makes suitable for use with generator expressions.
1414
Brett Cannond1080a32004-03-02 04:38:10 +00001415- time.strftime() now checks that the values in its time tuple argument
1416 are within the proper boundaries to prevent possible crashes from the
1417 platform's C library implementation of strftime(). Can possibly
1418 break code that uses values outside the range that didn't cause
1419 problems previously (such as sitting day of year to 0). Fixes bug
1420 #897625.
1421
Martin v. Löwis12af0482004-01-31 12:34:17 +00001422- The socket module now supports Bluetooth sockets, if the
1423 system has <bluetooth/bluetooth.h>
1424
Raymond Hettinger756b3f32004-01-29 06:37:52 +00001425- Added a collections module containing a new datatype, deque(),
1426 offering high-performance, thread-safe, memory friendly appends
1427 and pops on either side of the deque.
1428
1429- Several modules now take advantage of collections.deque() for
1430 improved performance: Queue, mutex, shlex, threading, and pydoc.
1431
Raymond Hettinger166958b2003-12-01 13:18:39 +00001432- The operator module has two new functions, attrgetter() and
1433 itemgetter() which are useful for creating fast data extractor
1434 functions for map(), list.sort(), itertools.groupby(), and
1435 other functions that expect a function argument.
1436
Martin v. Löwis94681fc2003-11-27 19:40:22 +00001437- socket.SHUT_{RD,WR,RDWR} was added.
1438
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +00001439- os.getsid was added.
1440
Guido van Rossum16b9fa82003-10-23 23:54:57 +00001441- The pwd module incorrectly advertised its struct type as
1442 struct_pwent; this has been renamed to struct_passwd. (The old name
1443 is still supported for backwards compatibility.)
1444
Fred Drakede050322003-10-21 15:41:59 +00001445- The xml.parsers.expat module now provides Expat 1.95.7.
1446
Martin v. Löwis3bbd6542003-10-03 13:57:37 +00001447- socket.IPPROTO_IPV6 was added.
1448
Martin v. Löwise7a97962003-09-20 16:08:33 +00001449- readline.clear_history was added.
1450
Brett Cannon62dba4c2003-09-10 19:37:42 +00001451- select.select() now accepts sequences for its first three arguments.
1452
Raymond Hettinger5475f232003-08-08 12:20:03 +00001453- cStringIO now supports the f.closed attribute.
1454
Anthony Baxter83f52912003-08-05 06:33:56 +00001455- The signal module now exposes SIGRTMIN and SIGRTMAX (if available).
1456
Andrew M. Kuchling69f31eb2003-08-13 23:11:04 +00001457- curses module now supports use_default_colors(). [patch #739124]
1458
Anthony Baxter5c68ef02003-10-04 08:04:04 +00001459- Bug #811028: ncurses.h breakage on FreeBSD/MacOS X
1460
1461- Bug #814613: INET_ADDRSTRLEN fix needed for all compilers on SGI
1462
Gustavo Niemeyerad3fc442003-10-17 22:13:16 +00001463- Implemented non-recursive SRE matching scheme (#757624).
1464
1465- Implemented (?(id/name)yes|no) support in SRE (#572936).
1466
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +00001467- random.seed() with no arguments or None uses time.time() as a default
1468 seed. Modified to match Py2.2 behavior and use fractional seconds so
1469 that successive runs are more likely to produce different sequences.
1470
1471- random.Random has a new method, getrandbits(k), which returns an int
1472 with k random bits. This method is now an optional part of the API
1473 for user defined generators. Any generator that defines genrandbits()
1474 can now use randrange() for ranges with a length >= 2**53. Formerly,
1475 randrange would return only even numbers for ranges that large (see
1476 SF bug #812202). Generators that do not define genrandbits() now
1477 issue a warning when randrange() is called with a range that large.
1478
Raymond Hettingerd25c1c62003-12-06 16:23:06 +00001479- itertools has a new function, groupby() for aggregating iterables
1480 into groups sharing the same key (as determined by a key function).
1481 It offers some of functionality of SQL's groupby keyword and of
1482 the Unix uniq filter.
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +00001483
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001484- itertools now has a new tee() function which produces two independent
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +00001485 iterators from a single iterable.
1486
1487- itertools.izip() with no arguments now returns an empty iterator instead
1488 of raising a TypeError exception.
1489
Gustavo Niemeyera6e436e2004-02-14 00:02:45 +00001490- Fixed #853061: allow BZ2Compressor.compress() to receive an empty string
1491 as parameter.
1492
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001493Library
1494-------
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001495
Guido van Rossum5124b4a2004-07-06 17:52:32 +00001496- Bug #981530: Fix UnboundLocalError in shutil.rmtree(). This affects
1497 the documented behavior: the function passed to the onerror()
1498 handler can now also be os.listdir.
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001499
Brett Cannon41d13f62004-07-03 03:54:54 +00001500- Bug #754449: threading.Thread objects no longer mask exceptions raised during
1501 interpreter shutdown with another exception from attempting to handle the
1502 original exception.
Brett Cannoncc4e9352004-07-03 03:52:35 +00001503
Raymond Hettinger21f9fce2004-07-10 16:11:03 +00001504- Added decimal.py per PEP 327.
Raymond Hettinger7c85fa42004-07-01 11:01:35 +00001505
Brett Cannon46d4ff22004-06-29 04:08:23 +00001506- Bug #981299: rsync is now a recognized protocol in urlparse that uses a
1507 "netloc" portion of a URL.
Brett Cannonfbac2942004-06-29 04:02:40 +00001508
Brett Cannon1c3fa182004-06-19 21:11:35 +00001509- Bug #919012: shutil.move() will not try to move a directory into itself.
1510 Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
1511
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +00001512- Bug #934282: pydoc.stripid() is now case-insensitive. Thanks Robin Becker.
1513
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +00001514- Bug #823209: cmath.log() now takes an optional base argument so that its
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +00001515 API matches math.log().
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +00001516
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001517- Bug #957381: distutils bdist_rpm no longer fails on recent RPM versions
Anthony Baxter1a4ddae2004-08-31 10:07:13 +00001518 that generate a -debuginfo.rpm
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001519
Martin v. Löwisbdec50f2004-06-08 08:29:33 +00001520- os.path.devnull has been added for all supported platforms.
1521
Hye-Shik Chang2400e932004-06-05 18:37:53 +00001522- Fixed #877165: distutils now picks the right C++ compiler command
1523 on cygwin and mingw32.
1524
Hye-Shik Chang39aef792004-06-05 13:30:56 +00001525- urllib.urlopen().readline() now handles HTTP/0.9 correctly.
1526
Brett Cannon0096e262004-06-05 01:12:51 +00001527- refactored site.py into functions. Also wrote regression tests for the
1528 module.
1529
Fred Drakeec6229e2004-06-25 23:02:59 +00001530- The distutils install command now supports the --home option and
1531 installation scheme for all platforms.
1532
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +00001533- asyncore.loop now has a repeat count parameter that defaults to
Michael W. Hudson7db865a2004-06-30 09:09:38 +00001534 looping forever.
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +00001535
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001536- The distutils sdist command now ignores all .svn directories, in
1537 addition to CVS and RCS directories. .svn directories hold
1538 administrative files for the Subversion source control system.
1539
Martin v. Löwis2a6ba902004-05-31 18:22:40 +00001540- Added a new module: cookielib. Automatic cookie handling for HTTP
1541 clients. Also, support for cookielib has been added to urllib2, so
1542 urllib2.urlopen() can transparently handle cookies.
1543
Raymond Hettinger059e1702004-05-19 19:56:44 +00001544- stringprep.py now uses built-in set() instead of sets.Set().
1545
Thomas Heller2e7c8322004-05-11 15:10:59 +00001546- Bug #876278: Unbounded recursion in modulefinder
1547
Martin v. Löwis456ab1d2004-05-06 01:54:36 +00001548- Bug #780300: Swap public and system ID in LexicalHandler.startDTD.
1549 Applications relying on the wrong order need to be corrected.
1550
Hye-Shik Chang0f5bf1e2004-04-20 21:11:11 +00001551- Bug #926075: Fixed a bug that returns a wrong pattern object
1552 for a string or unicode object in sre.compile() when a different
1553 type pattern with the same value exists.
1554
Skip Montanarod0c0c412004-04-07 16:03:02 +00001555- Added countcallers arg to trace.Trace class (--trackcalls command line arg
1556 when run from the command prompt).
1557
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +00001558- Fixed a caching bug in platform.platform() where the argument of 'terse' was
1559 not taken into consideration when caching value.
1560
Nicholas Bastin824b1b22004-03-23 18:44:39 +00001561- Added two new command-line arguments for profile (output file and
1562 default sort).
1563
Nicholas Bastin1eb4bfc2004-03-22 20:12:56 +00001564- Added global runctx function to profile module
1565
Martin v. Löwis347c30d2004-03-21 15:29:41 +00001566- Add hlist missing entryconfigure and entrycget methods.
1567
Hye-Shik Chang4a7ad1a2004-03-19 08:11:56 +00001568- The ptcp154 codec was added for Kazakh character set support.
1569
Martin v. Löwisa79449e2004-02-15 21:19:18 +00001570- Support non-anonymous ftp URLs in urllib2.
1571
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001572- The encodings package will now apply codec name aliases
Marc-André Lemburg57cb68f2004-01-20 18:24:34 +00001573 first before starting to try the import of the codec module.
1574 This simplifies overriding built-in codecs with external
1575 packages, e.g. the included CJK codecs with the JapaneseCodecs
1576 package, by adjusting the aliases dictionary in encodings.aliases
1577 accordingly.
1578
Barry Warsaw30ff12f2004-01-04 01:13:43 +00001579- base64 now supports RFC 3548 Base16, Base32, and Base64 encoding and
1580 decoding standards.
1581
Jeremy Hylton37c5f2a2003-12-14 05:29:45 +00001582- urllib2 now supports processors. A processor is a handler that
1583 implements an xxx_request or xxx_response method. These methods are
1584 called for all requests.
1585
Thomas Hellerc7501d52003-12-05 20:28:07 +00001586- distutils compilers now compile source files in the same order as
1587 they are passed to the compiler.
1588
Walter Dörwaldc8de4582003-12-03 20:26:05 +00001589- pprint.pprint() and pprint.pformat() now have additional parameters
1590 indent, width and depth.
1591
Walter Dörwald7a7ede52003-12-03 20:15:28 +00001592- Patch #750542: pprint now will pretty print subclasses of list, tuple
1593 and dict too, as long as they don't overwrite __repr__().
1594
Thomas Hellerb3105912003-11-28 19:42:56 +00001595- Bug #848614: distutils' msvccompiler fails to find the MSVC6
1596 compiler because of incomplete registry entries.
1597
Martin v. Löwisaf7dc8d2003-11-19 19:51:55 +00001598- httplib.HTTP.putrequest now offers to omit the implicit Accept-Encoding.
1599
Thomas Hellercf0005b2003-11-14 10:33:20 +00001600- Patch #841977: modulefinder didn't find extension modules in packages
1601
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +00001602- imaplib.IMAP4.thread was added.
1603
Guido van Rossum967b0632003-11-10 02:27:19 +00001604- Plugged a minor hole in tempfile.mktemp() due to the use of
1605 os.path.exists(), switched to using os.lstat() directly if possible.
1606
Raymond Hettinger0c410272004-01-05 10:13:35 +00001607- bisect.py and heapq.py now have underlying C implementations
Raymond Hettinger33ecffb2004-06-10 05:03:17 +00001608 for better performance.
1609
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001610- heapq.py has two new functions, nsmallest() and nlargest().
Raymond Hettingerb3af1812003-11-08 10:24:38 +00001611
Neil Schemenauerf607fc52003-11-05 23:03:00 +00001612- traceback.format_exc has been added (similar to print_exc but it returns
1613 a string).
1614
Martin v. Löwis45394c22003-10-31 13:49:36 +00001615- xmlrpclib.MultiCall has been added.
1616
Martin v. Löwis48440b72003-10-31 12:52:35 +00001617- poplib.POP3_SSL has been added.
1618
Martin v. Löwisd6625482003-10-12 17:37:01 +00001619- tmpfile.mkstemp now returns an absolute path even if dir is relative.
1620
Brett Cannon5d9ca4e2003-10-12 04:38:48 +00001621- urlparse is RFC 2396 compliant.
1622
Skip Montanarodef99342003-10-03 14:07:07 +00001623- The fieldnames argument to the csv module's DictReader constructor is now
1624 optional. If omitted, the first row of the file will be used as the
1625 list of fieldnames.
1626
Raymond Hettinger9a80c5d2003-09-23 20:21:01 +00001627- encodings.bz2_codec was added for access to bz2 compression
1628 using "a long string".encode('bz2')
1629
Guido van Rossum0e5a51d2003-09-22 15:03:11 +00001630- Various improvements to unittest.py, realigned with PyUnit CVS.
1631
Martin v. Löwisc6bb6c02003-09-20 15:52:21 +00001632- dircache now passes exceptions to the caller, instead of returning
1633 empty lists.
1634
Raymond Hettingerdeadbf52003-09-12 06:33:37 +00001635- The bsddb module and dbhash module now support the iterator and
1636 mapping protocols which make them more substitutable for dictionaries
1637 and shelves.
1638
Skip Montanaro3f7a9482003-09-06 19:52:12 +00001639- The csv module's DictReader and DictWriter classes now accept keyword
1640 arguments. This was an omission in the initial implementation.
1641
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +00001642- The email package handles some RFC 2231 parameters with missing
Barry Warsaw2f5bf172003-09-03 04:09:49 +00001643 CHARSET fields better. It also includes a patch to parameter
1644 parsing when semicolons appear inside quotes.
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +00001645
Raymond Hettinger6a180122003-08-17 08:34:09 +00001646- sets.py now runs under Py2.2. In addition, the argument restrictions
1647 for most set methods (but not the operators) have been relaxed to
Raymond Hettinger70b9f492003-11-19 15:52:14 +00001648 allow any iterable.
Raymond Hettingeree562fc2003-08-15 21:17:04 +00001649
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +00001650- _strptime.py now has a behind-the-scenes caching mechanism for the most
Brett Cannonb7150a22003-08-05 06:27:04 +00001651 recent TimeRE instance used along with the last five unique directive
1652 patterns. The overall module was also made more thread-safe.
1653
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +00001654- random.cunifvariate() and random.stdgamma() were deprecated in Py2.3
1655 and removed in Py2.4.
1656
Anthony Baxter92bee362003-11-04 14:35:49 +00001657- Bug #823328: urllib2.py's HTTP Digest Auth support works again.
1658
Hye-Shik Chang84a99312004-01-17 14:59:36 +00001659- Patch #873597: CJK codecs are imported into rank of default codecs.
1660
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001661Tools/Demos
1662-----------
1663
Skip Montanarod5a21fd2004-01-27 14:49:04 +00001664- A hotshotmain script was added to the Tools/scripts directory that
1665 makes it easy to run a script under control of the hotshot profiler.
1666
Skip Montanaro030f68a2003-10-28 16:24:00 +00001667- The db2pickle and pickle2db scripts can now dump/load gdbm files.
1668
Skip Montanaroe2b61e02004-03-03 17:42:08 +00001669- The file order on the command line of the pickle2db script was reversed.
1670 It is now [ picklefile ] dbfile. This provides better symmetry with
1671 db2pickle. The file arguments to both scripts are now source followed by
1672 destination in situations where both files are given.
1673
Skip Montanarofd4fa882003-09-10 19:04:13 +00001674- The pydoc script will display a link to the module documentation for
1675 modules determined to be part of the core distribution. The documentation
1676 base directory defaults to http://www.python.org/doc/current/lib/ but can
1677 be changed by setting the PYTHONDOCS environment variable.
1678
Raymond Hettingere41d4c82003-08-25 04:39:55 +00001679- texcheck.py now detects double word errors.
1680
Tim Peters1a3abcb2003-08-18 23:52:09 +00001681- md5sum.py mistakenly opened input files in text mode by default, a
1682 silent and dangerous change from previous releases. It once again
1683 opens input files in binary mode by default. The -t and -b flags
1684 remain for compatibility with the 2.3 release, but -b is the default
1685 now.
1686
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001687- py-electric-colon now works when pending-delete/delete-selection mode is
1688 in effect
1689
1690- py-help-at-point is no longer bound to the F1 key - it's still bound to
1691 C-c C-h
1692
Barry Warsaw6ec58ca2003-09-03 03:20:37 +00001693- Pynche was fixed to not crash when there is no ~/.pynche file and no
1694 -d option was given.
1695
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001696Build
1697-----
1698
Brett Cannonf6af76d2004-06-26 04:03:06 +00001699- Bug #978645: Modules/getpath.c now builds properly in --disable-framework
1700 build under OS X.
1701
Skip Montanaro56f6a4f2004-06-18 02:47:22 +00001702- Profiling using gprof is now available if Python is configured with
1703 --enable-profiling.
1704
Martin v. Löwisf30d60e2004-06-08 08:17:44 +00001705- Profiling the VM using the Pentium TSC is now possible if Python
1706 is configured --with-tsc.
1707
Martin v. Löwis642c8a12004-06-04 13:55:13 +00001708- In order to find libraries, setup.py now also looks in /lib64, for use
1709 on AMD64.
1710
Hye-Shik Chang54f94392004-04-14 07:55:31 +00001711- Bug #934635: Fixed a bug where the configure script couldn't detect
1712 getaddrinfo() properly if the KAME stack had SCTP support.
1713
Skip Montanaro7befb992004-02-10 16:50:21 +00001714- Support for missing ANSI C header files (limits.h, stddef.h, etc) was
1715 removed.
1716
Skip Montanarodb608052004-02-07 13:53:46 +00001717- Systems requiring the D4, D6 or D7 variants of pthreads are no longer
1718 supported (see PEP 11).
1719
1720- Universal newline support can no longer be disabled (see PEP 11).
1721
Skip Montanarocd1f7432004-01-17 14:22:44 +00001722- Support for DGUX, SunOS 4, IRIX 4 and Minix was removed (see PEP 11).
1723
1724- Support for systems requiring --with-dl-dld or --with-sgi-dl was removed
1725 (see PEP 11).
1726
1727- Tests for sizeof(char) were removed since ANSI C mandates that
1728 sizeof(char) must be 1.
1729
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001730C API
1731-----
1732
Tim Peters9ddf40b2004-06-20 22:41:32 +00001733- Thanks to Anthony Tuininga, the datetime module now supplies a C API
1734 containing type-check macros and constructors. See new docs in the
1735 Python/C API Reference Manual for details.
1736
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +00001737- Private function _PyTime_DoubleToTimet added, to convert a Python
1738 timestamp (C double) to platform time_t with some out-of-bounds
1739 checking. Declared in new header file timefuncs.h. It would be
1740 good to expose some other internal timemodule.c functions there.
1741
Martin v. Löwise440e472004-06-01 15:22:42 +00001742- New public functions PyEval_EvaluateFrame and PyGen_New to expose
1743 generator objects.
1744
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +00001745- New public functions Py_IncRef() and Py_DecRef(), exposing the
1746 functionality of the Py_XINCREF() and Py_XDECREF macros. Useful for
Thomas Hellercc10a852004-04-22 17:28:25 +00001747 runtime dynamic embedding of Python. See patch #938302, by Bob
1748 Ippolito.
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +00001749
Raymond Hettingerc1e4f9d2004-03-12 08:04:00 +00001750- Added a new macro, PySequence_Fast_ITEMS, which retrieves a fast sequence's
1751 underlying array of PyObject pointers. Useful for high speed looping.
1752
Raymond Hettinger8f5cdaa2003-12-13 11:26:12 +00001753- Created a new method flag, METH_COEXIST, which causes a method to be loaded
1754 even if already defined by a slot wrapper. This allows a __contains__
1755 method, for example, to co-exist with a defined sq_contains slot. This
1756 is helpful because the PyCFunction can take advantage of optimized calls
1757 whenever METH_O or METH_NOARGS flags are defined.
1758
Raymond Hettingerbc0f2ab2003-11-25 21:12:14 +00001759- Added a new function, PyDict_Contains(d, k) which is like
1760 PySequence_Contains() but is specific to dictionaries and executes
1761 about 10% faster.
1762
Brett Cannon26b3a7b2003-10-19 21:31:43 +00001763- Added three new macros: Py_RETURN_NONE, Py_RETURN_TRUE, and Py_RETURN_FALSE.
1764 Each return the singleton they mention after Py_INCREF()ing them.
1765
Raymond Hettingercb2da432003-10-12 18:24:34 +00001766- Added a new function, PyTuple_Pack(n, ...) for constructing tuples from a
1767 variable length argument list of Python objects without having to invoke
1768 the more complex machinery of Py_BuildValue(). PyTuple_Pack(3, a, b, c)
1769 is equivalent to Py_BuildValue("(OOO)", a, b, c).
1770
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001771Windows
1772-------
1773
Guido van Rossumfd25aca2003-11-30 22:10:15 +00001774- The _winreg module could segfault when reading very large registry
1775 values, due to unchecked alloca() calls (SF bug 851056). The fix is
1776 uses either PyMem_Malloc(n) or PyString_FromStringAndSize(NULL, n),
1777 as appropriate, followed by a size check.
1778
Tim Petersf1827cf2003-09-07 03:30:18 +00001779- file.truncate() could misbehave if the file was open for update
1780 (modes r+, rb+, w+, wb+), and the most recent file operation before
1781 the truncate() call was an input operation. SF bug 801631.
1782
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001783
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001784What's New in Python 2.3 final?
1785===============================
1786
1787*Release date: 29-Jul-2003*
1788
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001789IDLE
1790----
1791
Tim Peters36c1afc2003-07-29 17:22:57 +00001792- Bug 778400: IDLE hangs when selecting "Edit with IDLE" from explorer.
1793 This was unique to Windows, and was fixed by adding an -n switch to
1794 the command the Windows installer creates to execute "Edit with IDLE"
1795 context-menu actions.
1796
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001797- IDLE displays a new message upon startup: some "personal firewall"
1798 kinds of programs (for example, ZoneAlarm) open a dialog of their
1799 own when any program opens a socket. IDLE does use sockets, talking
1800 on the computer's internal loopback interface. This connection is not
1801 visible on any external interface and no data is sent to or received
1802 from the Internet. So, if you get such a dialog when opening IDLE,
1803 asking whether to let pythonw.exe talk to address 127.0.0.1, say yes,
1804 and rest assured no communication external to your machine is taking
1805 place. If you don't allow it, IDLE won't be able to start.
1806
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001807
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001808What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 2?
1809=============================================
1810
Tim Peters6560a252003-07-24 00:15:46 +00001811*Release date: 24-Jul-2003*
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001812
1813Core and builtins
1814-----------------
1815
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00001816- It is now possible to import from zipfiles containing additional
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001817 data bytes before the zip compatible archive. Zipfiles containing a
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00001818 comment at the end are still unsupported.
1819
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001820Extension modules
1821-----------------
1822
1823- A longstanding bug in the parser module's initialization could cause
1824 fatal internal refcount confusion when the module got initialized more
1825 than once. This has been fixed.
1826
Fred Drake01a43122003-07-21 17:17:10 +00001827- Fixed memory leak in pyexpat; using the parser's ParseFile() method
1828 with open files that aren't instances of the standard file type
1829 caused an instance of the bound .read() method to be leaked on every
1830 call.
1831
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001832- Fixed some leaks in the locale module.
1833
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001834Library
1835-------
1836
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001837- Lib/encodings/rot_13.py when used as a script, now more properly
1838 uses the first Python interpreter on your path.
1839
1840- Removed caching of TimeRE (and thus LocaleTime) in _strptime.py to
1841 fix a locale related bug in the test suite. Although another patch
1842 was needed to actually fix the problem, the cache code was not
1843 restored.
1844
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00001845IDLE
1846----
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001847
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00001848- Calltips patches.
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001849
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001850Build
1851-----
1852
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001853- For MacOSX, added -mno-fused-madd to BASECFLAGS to fix test_coercion
1854 on Panther (OSX 10.3).
1855
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001856C API
1857-----
1858
1859Windows
1860-------
1861
Tim Peters291f14e2003-07-22 02:50:01 +00001862- The tempfile module could do insane imports on Windows if PYTHONCASEOK
1863 was set, making temp file creation impossible. Repaired.
1864
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001865- Add a patch to workaround pthread_sigmask() bugs in Cygwin.
1866
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001867Mac
1868---
1869
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001870- Various fixes to pimp.
1871
1872- Scripts runs with pythonw no longer had full window manager access.
1873
1874- Don't force boot-disk-only install, for reasons unknown it causes
1875 more problems than it solves.
1876
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001877
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001878What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 1?
1879=============================================
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001880
Jeremy Hylton0ed18c22003-07-18 20:10:02 +00001881*Release date: 18-Jul-2003*
1882
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001883Core and builtins
1884-----------------
1885
Tim Peterse5e065b2003-07-06 18:36:54 +00001886- The new function sys.getcheckinterval() returns the last value set
1887 by sys.setcheckinterval().
1888
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001889- Several bugs in the symbol table phase of the compiler have been
1890 fixed. Errors could be lost and compilation could fail without
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001891 reporting an error. SF patch 763201.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001892
1893- The interpreter is now more robust about importing the warnings
1894 module. In an executable generated by freeze or similar programs,
1895 earlier versions of 2.3 would fail if the warnings module could
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001896 not be found on the file system. Fixes SF bug 771097.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001897
1898- A warning about assignments to module attributes that shadow
1899 builtins, present in earlier releases of 2.3, has been removed.
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001900
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001901- It is not possible to create subclasses of builtin types like str
1902 and tuple that define an itemsize. Earlier releases of Python 2.3
1903 allowed this by mistake, leading to crashes and other problems.
1904
1905- The thread_id is now initialized to 0 in a non-thread build. SF bug
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001906 770247.
1907
1908- SF bug 762891: "del p[key]" on proxy object no longer raises SystemError.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001909
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001910Extension modules
1911-----------------
1912
1913- weakref.proxy() can now handle "del obj[i]" for proxy objects
1914 defining __delitem__. Formerly, it generated a SystemError.
1915
1916- SSL no longer crashes the interpreter when the remote side disconnects.
1917
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001918- On Unix the mmap module can again be used to map device files.
1919
Brett Cannon20def8b2003-07-01 05:16:08 +00001920- time.strptime now exclusively uses the Python implementation
1921 contained within the _strptime module.
1922
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001923- The print slot of weakref proxy objects was removed, because it was
1924 not consistent with the object's repr slot.
1925
1926- The mmap module only checks file size for regular files, not
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001927 character or block devices. SF patch 708374.
1928
1929- The cPickle Pickler garbage collection support was fixed to traverse
1930 the find_class attribute, if present.
1931
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001932- There are several fixes for the bsddb3 wrapper module.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001933
1934 bsddb3 no longer crashes if an environment is closed before a cursor
1935 (SF bug 763298).
1936
1937 The DB and DBEnv set_get_returns_none function was extended to take
Barry Warsawd71a5512003-07-20 18:00:54 +00001938 a level instead of a boolean flag. The new level 2 means that in
1939 addition, cursor.set()/.get() methods return None instead of raising
1940 an exception.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001941
1942 A typo was fixed in DBCursor.join_item(), preventing a crash.
1943
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001944Library
1945-------
1946
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001947- distutils now supports MSVC 7.1
1948
Raymond Hettinger71adf7e2003-07-16 19:25:22 +00001949- doctest now examines all docstrings by default. Previously, it would
1950 skip over functions with private names (as indicated by the underscore
1951 naming convention). The old default created too much of a risk that
1952 user tests were being skipped inadvertently. Note, this change could
1953 break code in the unlikely case that someone had intentionally put
1954 failing tests in the docstrings of private functions. The breakage
1955 is easily fixable by specifying the old behavior when calling testmod()
1956 or Tester().
1957
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001958- There were several fixes to the way dumbdbms are closed. It's vital
1959 that a dumbdbm database be closed properly, else the on-disk data
1960 and directory files can be left in mutually inconsistent states.
1961 dumbdbm.py's _Database.__del__() method attempted to close the
1962 database properly, but a shutdown race in _Database._commit() could
1963 prevent this from working, so that a program trusting __del__() to
1964 get the on-disk files in synch could be badly surprised. The race
1965 has been repaired. A sync() method was also added so that shelve
1966 can guarantee data is written to disk.
Tim Peters7a6c7332003-07-13 17:21:10 +00001967
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001968 The close() method can now be called more than once without complaint.
Tim Petersd7472ec2003-07-13 02:22:03 +00001969
Tim Peters59aba122003-07-01 20:01:55 +00001970- The classes in threading.py are now new-style classes. That they
1971 weren't before was an oversight.
1972
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001973- The urllib2 digest authentication handlers now define the correct
1974 auth_header. The earlier versions would fail at runtime.
1975
Neal Norwitze7dfe212003-07-01 14:59:46 +00001976- SF bug 763023: fix uncaught ZeroDivisionError in difflib ratio methods
1977 when there are no lines.
1978
Neal Norwitz3c0f2c92003-07-01 21:12:47 +00001979- SF bug 763637: fix exception in Tkinter with after_cancel
1980 which could occur with Tk 8.4
1981
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001982- SF bug 770601: CGIHTTPServer.py now passes the entire environment
1983 to child processes.
1984
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001985- SF bug 765238: add filter to fnmatch's __all__.
1986
1987- SF bug 748201: make time.strptime() error messages more helpful.
1988
1989- SF patch 764470: Do not dump the args attribute of a Fault object in
1990 xmlrpclib.
1991
1992- SF patch 549151: urllib and urllib2 now redirect POSTs on 301
1993 responses.
1994
1995- SF patch 766650: The whichdb module was fixed to recognize dbm files
1996 generated by gdbm on OS/2 EMX.
1997
1998- SF bugs 763047 and 763052: fixes bug of timezone value being left as
1999 -1 when ``time.tzname[0] == time.tzname[1] and not time.daylight``
2000 is true when it should only when time.daylight is true.
2001
2002- SF bug 764548: re now allows subclasses of str and unicode to be
2003 used as patterns.
2004
2005- SF bug 763637: In Tkinter, change after_cancel() to handle tuples
2006 of varying sizes. Tk 8.4 returns a different number of values
2007 than Tk 8.3.
2008
2009- SF bug 763023: difflib.ratio() did not catch zero division.
2010
2011- The Queue module now has an __all__ attribute.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002012
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002013Tools/Demos
2014-----------
2015
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002016- See Lib/idlelib/NEWS.txt for IDLE news.
2017
Neal Norwitz592c4cc2003-07-01 04:14:28 +00002018- SF bug 753592: webchecker/wsgui now handles user supplied directories.
2019
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002020- The trace.py script has been removed. It is now in the standard library.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002021
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002022Build
2023-----
2024
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002025- Python now compiles with -fno-strict-aliasing if possible (SF bug 766696).
2026
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002027- The socket module compiles on IRIX 6.5.10.
2028
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002029- An irix64 system is treated the same way as an irix6 system (SF
2030 patch 764560).
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002031
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002032- Several definitions were missing on FreeBSD 5.x unless the
2033 __BSD_VISIBLE symbol was defined. configure now defines it as
2034 needed.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002035
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002036C API
2037-----
2038
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002039- Unicode objects now support mbcs as a built-in encoding, so the C
2040 API can use it without deferring to the encodings package.
2041
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002042Windows
2043-------
2044
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002045- The Windows implementation of PyThread_start_new_thread() never
2046 checked error returns from Windows functions correctly. As a result,
2047 it could claim to start a new thread even when the Microsoft
2048 _beginthread() function failed (due to "too many threads" -- this is
2049 on the order of thousands when it happens). In these cases, the
2050 Python exception ::
2051
2052 thread.error: can't start new thread
2053
2054 is raised now.
2055
2056- SF bug 766669: Prevent a GPF on interpreter exit when sockets are in
2057 use. The interpreter now calls WSACleanup() from Py_Finalize()
2058 instead of from DLL teardown.
2059
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002060Mac
2061---
2062
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002063- Bundlebuilder now inherits default values in the right way. It was
Walter Dörwald73a8a4b2003-07-30 12:14:02 +00002064 previously possible for app bundles to get a type of "BNDL" instead
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002065 of "APPL." Other improvements include, a --build-id option to
2066 specify the CFBundleIdentifier and using the --python option to set
2067 the executable in the bundle.
2068
2069- Fixed two bugs in MacOSX framework handling.
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002070
Jack Jansene0040412003-07-23 22:17:28 +00002071- pythonw did not allow user interaction in 2.3rc1, this has been fixed.
2072
2073- Python is now compiled with -mno-fused-madd, making all tests pass
2074 on Panther.
2075
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002076What's New in Python 2.3 beta 2?
2077================================
2078
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00002079*Release date: 29-Jun-2003*
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002080
2081Core and builtins
2082-----------------
2083
Barry Warsaw883f2232003-06-29 17:10:11 +00002084- A program can now set the environment variable PYTHONINSPECT to some
2085 string value in Python, and cause the interpreter to enter the
2086 interactive prompt at program exit, as if Python had been invoked
2087 with the -i option.
2088
Raymond Hettingerd05abde2003-06-17 05:05:49 +00002089- list.index() now accepts optional start and stop arguments. Similar
2090 changes were made to UserList.index(). SF feature request 754014.
2091
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002092- SF patch 751998 fixes an unwanted side effect of the previous fix
2093 for SF bug 742860 (the next item).
2094
Tim Peters50d8b8b2003-05-25 17:44:31 +00002095- SF bug 742860: "WeakKeyDictionary __delitem__ uses iterkeys". This
2096 wasn't threadsafe, was very inefficient (expected time O(len(dict))
2097 instead of O(1)), and could raise a spurious RuntimeError if another
2098 thread mutated the dict during __delitem__, or if a comparison function
2099 mutated it. It also neglected to raise KeyError when the key wasn't
2100 present; didn't raise TypeError when the key wasn't of a weakly
2101 referencable type; and broke various more-or-less obscure dict
2102 invariants by using a sequence of equality comparisons over the whole
2103 set of dict keys instead of computing the key's hash code to narrow
2104 the search to those keys with the same hash code. All of these are
2105 considered to be bugs. A new implementation of __delitem__ repairs all
2106 that, but note that fixing these bugs may change visible behavior in
2107 code relying (whether intentionally or accidentally) on old behavior.
Tim Peters886128f2003-05-25 01:45:11 +00002108
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002109- SF bug 734869: Fixed a compiler bug that caused a fatal error when
2110 compiling a list comprehension that contained another list comprehension
2111 embedded in a lambda expression.
2112
Tim Peterse87568d2003-05-24 20:18:24 +00002113- SF bug 705231: builtin pow() no longer lets the platform C pow()
2114 raise -1.0 to integer powers, because (at least) glibc gets it wrong
2115 in some cases. The result should be -1.0 if the power is odd and 1.0
2116 if the power is even, and any float with a sufficiently large exponent
2117 is (mathematically) an exact even integer.
2118
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002119- SF bug 759227: A new-style class that implements __nonzero__() must
2120 return a bool or int (but not an int subclass) from that method. This
2121 matches the restriction on classic classes.
2122
Martin v. Löwis5467d4c2003-05-10 07:10:12 +00002123- The encoding attribute has been added for file objects, and set to
2124 the terminal encoding on Unix and Windows.
2125
Tim Peters015dd822003-05-04 04:16:52 +00002126- The softspace attribute of file objects became read-only by oversight.
2127 It's writable again.
2128
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00002129- Reverted a 2.3 beta 1 change to iterators for subclasses of list and
2130 tuple. By default, the iterators now access data elements directly
2131 instead of going through __getitem__. If __getitem__ access is
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002132 preferred, then __iter__ can be overridden.
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00002133
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002134- SF bug 735247: The staticmethod and super types participate in
2135 garbage collection. Before this change, it was possible for leaks to
2136 occur in functions with non-global free variables that used these types.
2137
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002138Extension modules
2139-----------------
2140
Raymond Hettinger643bcec2003-06-29 03:29:42 +00002141- the socket module has a new exception, socket.timeout, to allow
2142 timeouts to be handled separately from other socket errors.
2143
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002144- SF bug 751276: cPickle has fixed to propagate exceptions raised in
2145 user code. In earlier versions, cPickle caught and ignored any
2146 exception when it performed operations that it expected to raise
2147 specific exceptions like AttributeError.
2148
2149- cPickle Pickler and Unpickler objects now participate in garbage
2150 collection.
2151
Tim Peterscda32b72003-06-15 23:13:35 +00002152- mimetools.choose_boundary() could return duplicate strings at times,
2153 especially likely on Windows. The strings returned are now guaranteed
2154 unique within a single program run.
2155
Brett Cannon4e64d782003-06-13 23:44:35 +00002156- thread.interrupt_main() raises KeyboardInterrupt in the main thread.
2157 dummy_thread has also been modified to try to simulate the behavior.
2158
Walter Dörwald9e46abe2003-05-18 03:15:10 +00002159- array.array.insert() now treats negative indices as being relative
2160 to the end of the array, just like list.insert() does. (SF bug #739313)
2161
Tim Petersb0c854d2003-05-17 15:57:00 +00002162- The datetime module classes datetime, time, and timedelta are now
2163 properly subclassable.
Tim Petersa98924a2003-05-17 05:55:19 +00002164
Martin v. Löwis28e9ce92003-05-09 08:19:48 +00002165- _tkinter.{get|set}busywaitinterval was added.
2166
Raymond Hettinger834f4632003-05-02 20:24:56 +00002167- itertools.islice() now accepts stop=None as documented.
2168 Fixes SF bug #730685.
2169
Skip Montanaro8c044d82003-05-06 20:42:37 +00002170- the bsddb185 module is built in one restricted instance -
2171 /usr/include/db.h exists and defines HASHVERSION to be 2. This is true
2172 for many BSD-derived systems.
2173
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002174
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002175Library
2176-------
2177
Tim Petersdb3756d2003-06-29 05:30:48 +00002178- Some happy doctest extensions from Jim Fulton have been added to
2179 doctest.py. These are already being used in Zope3. The two
2180 primary ones:
2181
2182 doctest.debug(module, name) extracts the doctests from the named object
2183 in the given module, puts them in a temp file, and starts pdb running
2184 on that file. This is great when a doctest fails.
2185
2186 doctest.DocTestSuite(module=None) returns a synthesized unittest
2187 TestSuite instance, to be run by the unittest framework, which
2188 runs all the doctests in the module. This allows writing tests in
2189 doctest style (which can be clearer and shorter than writing tests
2190 in unittest style), without losing unittest's powerful testing
2191 framework features (which doctest lacks).
2192
Tim Peters6ebe61f2003-06-27 20:48:05 +00002193- For compatibility with doctests created before 2.3, if an expected
2194 output block consists solely of "1" and the actual output block
2195 consists solely of "True", it's accepted as a match; similarly
2196 for "0" and "False". This is quite un-doctest-like, but is practical.
2197 The behavior can be disabled by passing the new doctest module
2198 constant DONT_ACCEPT_TRUE_FOR_1 to the new optionflags optional
2199 argument.
2200
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002201- ZipFile.testzip() now only traps BadZipfile exceptions. Previously,
2202 a bare except caught to much and reported all errors as a problem
2203 in the archive.
2204
2205- The logging module now has a new function, makeLogRecord() making
2206 LogHandler easier to interact with DatagramHandler and SocketHandler.
2207
Skip Montanaro364ca402003-06-17 12:58:31 +00002208- The cgitb module has been extended to support plain text display (SF patch
2209 569574).
2210
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002211- A brand new version of IDLE (from the IDLEfork project at
2212 SourceForge) is now included as Lib/idlelib. The old Tools/idle is
2213 no more.
2214
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002215- Added a new module: trace (documentation missing). This module used
2216 to be distributed in Tools/scripts. It uses sys.settrace() to trace
2217 code execution -- either function calls or individual lines. It can
2218 generate tracing output during execution or a post-mortem report of
2219 code coverage.
2220
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00002221- The threading module has new functions settrace() and setprofile()
2222 that cooperate with the functions of the same name in the sys
2223 module. A function registered with the threading module will
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002224 be used for all threads it creates. The new trace module uses this
2225 to provide tracing for code running in threads.
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00002226
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00002227- copy.py: applied SF patch 707900, fixing bug 702858, by Steven
2228 Taschuk. Copying a new-style class that had a reference to itself
2229 didn't work. (The same thing worked fine for old-style classes.)
Martin v. Löwisba8f5ff2003-06-14 07:10:06 +00002230 Builtin functions are now treated as atomic, fixing bug #746304.
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00002231
Raymond Hettingerc24d7672003-06-08 19:42:33 +00002232- difflib.py has two new functions: context_diff() and unified_diff().
2233
Guido van Rossumfa19f7c2003-05-16 01:46:51 +00002234- More fixes to urllib (SF 549151): (a) When redirecting, always use
2235 GET. This is common practice and more-or-less sanctioned by the
2236 HTTP standard. (b) Add a handler for 307 redirection, which becomes
2237 an error for POST, but a regular redirect for GET and HEAD
2238
Guido van Rossumbf1bef82003-05-13 18:01:19 +00002239- Added optional 'onerror' argument to os.walk(), to control error
2240 handling.
2241
Martin v. Löwise59e2ba2003-05-03 09:09:02 +00002242- inspect.is{method|data}descriptor was added, to allow pydoc display
2243 __doc__ of data descriptors.
2244
Skip Montanaro4a7751c2003-04-29 21:07:16 +00002245- Fixed socket speed loss caused by use of the _socketobject wrapper class
2246 in socket.py.
2247
Raymond Hettinger22952a32003-05-20 04:59:56 +00002248- timeit.py now checks the current directory for imports.
2249
Gustavo Niemeyer9556fba2003-06-07 17:53:08 +00002250- urllib2.py now knows how to order proxy classes, so the user doesn't
2251 have to insert it in front of other classes, nor do dirty tricks like
2252 inserting a "dummy" HTTPHandler after a ProxyHandler when building an
2253 opener with proxy support.
2254
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002255- Iterators have been added for dbm keys.
2256
2257- random.Random objects can now be pickled.
2258
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002259Tools/Demos
2260-----------
2261
Martin v. Löwisb8c084e2003-06-14 09:03:46 +00002262- pydoc now offers help on keywords and topics.
2263
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002264- Tools/idle is gone; long live Lib/idlelib.
2265
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00002266- diff.py prints file diffs in context, unified, or ndiff formats,
2267 providing a command line interface to difflib.py.
Raymond Hettinger2f3c74a2003-06-08 23:10:15 +00002268
Raymond Hettinger71e00332003-05-10 03:30:13 +00002269- texcheck.py is a new script for making a rough validation of Python LaTeX
2270 files.
2271
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002272Build
2273-----
2274
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002275- Setting DESTDIR during 'make install' now allows specifying a
Martin v. Löwis3b8ee082003-05-11 20:25:35 +00002276 different root directory.
2277
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002278C API
2279-----
2280
Tim Peters3cfe7542003-05-21 21:29:48 +00002281- PyType_Ready(): If a type declares that it participates in gc
2282 (Py_TPFLAGS_HAVE_GC), and its base class does not, and its base class's
2283 tp_free slot is the default _PyObject_Del, and type does not define
2284 a tp_free slot itself, _PyObject_GC_Del is assigned to type->tp_free.
2285 Previously _PyObject_Del was inherited, which could at best lead to a
2286 segfault. In addition, if even after this magic the type's tp_free
2287 slot is _PyObject_Del or NULL, and the type is a base type
2288 (Py_TPFLAGS_BASETYPE), TypeError is raised: since the type is a base
2289 type, its dealloc function must call type->tp_free, and since the type
2290 is gc'able, tp_free must not be NULL or _PyObject_Del.
2291
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002292- PyThreadState_SetAsyncExc(): A new API (deliberately accessible only
2293 from C) to interrupt a thread by sending it an exception. It is
2294 intentional that you have to write your own C extension to call it
2295 from Python.
2296
2297
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002298New platforms
2299-------------
2300
2301None this time.
2302
2303Tests
2304-----
2305
2306- test_imp rewritten so that it doesn't raise RuntimeError if run as a
2307 side effect of being imported ("import test.autotest").
2308
2309Windows
2310-------
2311
Tim Petersfaa697a2003-06-22 01:42:20 +00002312- The Windows installer ships with Tcl/Tk 8.4.3 (upgraded from 8.4.1).
2313
Tim Petersc4607da2003-05-08 18:13:59 +00002314- The installer always suggested that Python be installed on the C:
2315 drive, due to a hardcoded "C:" generated by the Wise installation
2316 wizard. People with machines where C: is not the system drive
2317 usually want Python installed on whichever drive is their system drive
2318 instead. We removed the hardcoded "C:", and two testers on machines
2319 where C: is not the system drive report that the installer now
2320 suggests their system drive. Note that you can always select the
2321 directory you want in the "Select Destination Directory" dialog --
2322 that's what it's for.
2323
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002324Mac
2325---
2326
Just van Rossum99bc1fc2003-05-09 15:01:25 +00002327- There's a new module called "autoGIL", which offers a mechanism to
2328 automatically release the Global Interpreter Lock when an event loop
2329 goes to sleep, allowing other threads to run. It's currently only
2330 supported on OSX, in the Mach-O version.
Jack Jansenf5e23ff2003-06-16 13:53:40 +00002331- The OSA modules now allow direct access to properties of the
2332 toplevel application class (in AppleScript terminology).
2333- The Package Manager can now update itself.
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002334
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002335SourceForge Bugs and Patches Applied
2336------------------------------------
2337
2338430160, 471893, 501716, 542562, 549151, 569574, 595837, 596434,
2339598163, 604210, 604716, 610332, 612627, 614770, 620190, 621891,
2340622042, 639139, 640236, 644345, 649742, 649742, 658233, 660022,
2341661318, 661676, 662807, 662923, 666219, 672855, 678325, 682347,
2342683486, 684981, 685773, 686254, 692776, 692959, 693094, 696777,
2343697989, 700827, 703666, 708495, 708604, 708901, 710733, 711902,
2344713722, 715782, 718286, 719359, 719367, 723136, 723831, 723962,
2345724588, 724767, 724767, 725942, 726150, 726446, 726869, 727051,
2346727719, 727719, 727805, 728277, 728563, 728656, 729096, 729103,
2347729293, 729297, 729300, 729317, 729395, 729622, 729817, 730170,
2348730296, 730594, 730685, 730826, 730963, 731209, 731403, 731504,
2349731514, 731626, 731635, 731643, 731644, 731644, 731689, 732124,
2350732143, 732234, 732284, 732284, 732479, 732761, 732783, 732951,
2351733667, 733781, 734118, 734231, 734869, 735051, 735293, 735527,
2352735613, 735694, 736962, 736962, 737970, 738066, 739313, 740055,
2353740234, 740301, 741806, 742126, 742741, 742860, 742860, 742911,
2354744041, 744104, 744238, 744687, 744877, 745055, 745478, 745525,
2355745620, 746012, 746304, 746366, 746801, 746953, 747348, 747667,
2356747954, 748846, 748849, 748973, 748975, 749191, 749210, 749759,
2357749831, 749911, 750008, 750092, 750542, 750595, 751038, 751107,
2358751276, 751451, 751916, 751941, 751956, 751998, 752671, 753451,
2359753602, 753617, 753845, 753925, 754014, 754340, 754447, 755031,
2360755087, 755147, 755245, 755683, 755987, 756032, 756996, 757058,
2361757229, 757818, 757821, 757822, 758112, 758910, 759227, 759889,
2362760257, 760703, 760792, 761104, 761337, 761519, 761830, 762455
2363
2364
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002365What's New in Python 2.3 beta 1?
2366================================
2367
Guido van Rossumfa1eddf2003-04-25 19:19:52 +00002368*Release date: 25-Apr-2003*
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002369
2370Core and builtins
2371-----------------
2372
Thomas Heller5eccabc2003-04-23 19:35:25 +00002373- New format codes B, H, I, k and K have been implemented for
2374 PyArg_ParseTuple and PyBuild_Value.
2375
Alex Martellia70b1912003-04-22 08:12:33 +00002376- New builtin function sum(seq, start=0) returns the sum of all the
2377 items in iterable object seq, plus start (items are normally numbers,
2378 and cannot be strings).
2379
Guido van Rossumaa86e352003-04-19 18:15:10 +00002380- bool() called without arguments now returns False rather than
2381 raising an exception. This is consistent with calling the
2382 constructors for the other builtin types -- called without argument
2383 they all return the false value of that type. (SF patch #724135)
2384
Guido van Rossumcf8d2852003-04-17 16:53:26 +00002385- In support of PEP 269 (making the pgen parser generator accessible
2386 from Python), some changes to the pgen code structure were made; a
2387 few files that used to be linked only with pgen are now linked with
2388 Python itself.
2389
Guido van Rossumc1f6e8c2003-04-16 21:13:23 +00002390- The repr() of a weakref object now shows the __name__ attribute of
2391 the referenced object, if it has one.
2392
Guido van Rossum76ba09f2003-04-16 19:40:58 +00002393- super() no longer ignores data descriptors, except __class__. See
2394 the thread started at
2395 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2003-April/034338.html
2396
Guido van Rossum3a3cca52003-04-14 20:58:14 +00002397- list.insert(i, x) now interprets negative i as it would be
2398 interpreted by slicing, so negative values count from the end of the
2399 list. This was the only place where such an interpretation was not
2400 placed on a list index.
2401
Guido van Rossumefbbb1c2003-04-11 18:43:06 +00002402- range() now works even if the arguments are longs with magnitude
2403 larger than sys.maxint, as long as the total length of the sequence
2404 fits. E.g., range(2**100, 2**101, 2**100) is the following list:
2405 [1267650600228229401496703205376L]. (SF patch #707427.)
2406
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002407- Some horridly obscure problems were fixed involving interaction
2408 between garbage collection and old-style classes with "ambitious"
2409 getattr hooks. If an old-style instance didn't have a __del__ method,
2410 but did have a __getattr__ hook, and the instance became reachable
2411 only from an unreachable cycle, and the hook resurrected or deleted
2412 unreachable objects when asked to resolve "__del__", anything up to
2413 a segfault could happen. That's been repaired.
2414
Raymond Hettingera3e1e4c2003-03-06 23:54:28 +00002415- dict.pop now takes an optional argument specifying a default
2416 value to return if the key is not in the dict. If a default is not
2417 given and the key is not found, a KeyError will still be raised.
2418 Parallel changes were made to UserDict.UserDict and UserDict.DictMixin.
2419 [SF patch #693753] (contributed by Michael Stone.)
2420
Martin v. Löwis73d538b2003-03-05 15:13:47 +00002421- sys.getfilesystemencoding() was added to expose
2422 Py_FileSystemDefaultEncoding.
Guido van Rossum46d3dc32003-03-01 03:20:41 +00002423
2424- New function sys.exc_clear() clears the current exception. This is
2425 rarely needed, but can sometimes be useful to release objects
2426 referenced by the traceback held in sys.exc_info()[2]. (SF patch
2427 #693195.)
2428
Neal Norwitzd5a65a72003-02-23 23:11:41 +00002429- On 64-bit systems, a dictionary could contain duplicate long/int keys
2430 if the key value was larger than 2**32. See SF bug #689659.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002431
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00002432- Fixed SF bug #663074. The codec system was using global static
Walter Dörwaldfa86bf52003-03-31 16:15:13 +00002433 variables to store internal data. As a result, any attempts to use the
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00002434 unicode system with multiple active interpreters, or successive
2435 interpreter executions, would fail.
2436
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00002437- "%c" % u"a" now returns a unicode string instead of raising a
Walter Dörwald44f527f2003-04-02 16:37:24 +00002438 TypeError. u"%c" % 0xffffffff now raises a OverflowError instead
Walter Dörwald1e469c52003-04-02 16:57:59 +00002439 of a ValueError to be consistent with "%c" % 256. See SF patch #710127.
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00002440
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002441Extension modules
2442-----------------
2443
Guido van Rossume7adda92003-04-25 05:52:37 +00002444- The socket module now provides the functions inet_pton and inet_ntop
2445 for converting between string and packed representation of IP
2446 addresses. There is also a new module variable, has_ipv6, which is
2447 True iff the current Python has IPv6 support. See SF patch #658327.
2448
Martin v. Löwisbfe175c2003-04-16 19:42:51 +00002449- Tkinter wrappers around Tcl variables now pass objects directly
2450 to Tcl, instead of first converting them to strings.
2451
Guido van Rossum41c99e72003-04-14 17:59:34 +00002452- The .*? pattern in the re module is now special-cased to avoid the
2453 recursion limit. (SF patch #720991 -- many thanks to Gary Herron
2454 and Greg Chapman.)
2455
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00002456- New function sys.call_tracing() allows pdb to debug code
2457 recursively.
2458
Tim Peters730f5532003-04-08 17:17:17 +00002459- New function gc.get_referents(obj) returns a list of objects
Tim Peters0f81ab62003-04-08 16:39:48 +00002460 directly referenced by obj. In effect, it exposes what the object's
2461 tp_traverse slot does, and can be helpful when debugging memory
2462 leaks.
2463
Martin v. Löwis7fb697b2003-04-03 04:49:12 +00002464- The iconv module has been removed from this release.
2465
Tim Petersd50ade62003-03-20 18:32:13 +00002466- The platform-independent routines for packing floats in IEEE formats
2467 (struct.pack's <f, >f, <d, and >d codes; pickle and cPickle's protocol 1
2468 pickling of floats) ignored that rounding can cause a carry to
2469 propagate. The worst consequence was that, in rare cases, <f and >f
2470 could produce strings that, when unpacked again, were a factor of 2
2471 away from the original float. This has been fixed. See SF bug
2472 #705836.
2473
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002474- New function time.tzset() provides access to the C library tzset()
Guido van Rossumd11b62e2003-03-14 21:51:36 +00002475 function, if supported. (SF patch #675422.)
2476
Neal Norwitz12e22172003-03-03 21:16:39 +00002477- Using createfilehandler, deletefilehandler, createtimerhandler functions
2478 on Tkinter.tkinter (_tkinter module) no longer crashes the interpreter.
2479 See SF bug #692416.
2480
Michael W. Hudsonf0089982003-03-03 12:29:42 +00002481- Modified the fcntl.ioctl() function to allow modification of a passed
2482 mutable buffer (for details see the reference documentation).
2483
Raymond Hettinger61fe64d2003-02-23 04:40:07 +00002484- Made user requested changes to the itertools module.
2485 Subsumed the times() function into repeat().
2486 Added chain() and cycle().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002487
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00002488- The rotor module is now deprecated; the encryption algorithm it uses
Andrew M. Kuchlingfb5f4852003-04-24 13:19:56 +00002489 is not believed to be secure, and including crypto code with Python
2490 has implications for exporting and importing it in various countries.
2491
Skip Montanaro89feabc2003-03-30 04:54:24 +00002492- The socket module now always uses the _socketobject wrapper class, even on
2493 platforms which have dup(2). The makefile() method is built directly
2494 on top of the socket without duplicating the file descriptor, allowing
2495 timeouts to work properly.
2496
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002497Library
2498-------
2499
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00002500- New generator function os.walk() is an easy-to-use alternative to
2501 os.path.walk(). See os module docs for details. os.path.walk()
2502 isn't deprecated at this time, but may become deprecated in a
2503 future release.
2504
Marc-André Lemburg246d8472003-04-24 11:36:11 +00002505- Added new module "platform" which provides a wide range of tools
2506 for querying platform dependent features.
2507
Andrew M. Kuchling4e42b312003-04-24 16:45:05 +00002508- netrc now allows ASCII punctuation characters in passwords.
Raymond Hettinger1d877862003-04-23 19:06:08 +00002509
Martin v. Löwis153c9e42003-04-19 20:59:03 +00002510- shelve now supports the optional writeback argument, and exposes
2511 pickle protocol versions.
2512
Guido van Rossuma2685402003-04-19 18:04:57 +00002513- Several methods of nntplib.NNTP have grown an optional file argument
2514 which specifies a file where to divert the command's output
2515 (already supported by the body() method). (SF patch #720468)
2516
Martin v. Löwis281b2c62003-04-18 21:04:39 +00002517- The self-documenting XML server library DocXMLRPCServer was added.
2518
Martin v. Löwis2548c732003-04-18 10:39:54 +00002519- Support for internationalized domain names has been added through
2520 the 'idna' and 'punycode' encodings, the 'stringprep' module, the
2521 'mkstringprep' tool, and enhancements to the socket and httplib
2522 modules.
2523
Walter Dörwald5688b7a2003-04-16 09:46:13 +00002524- htmlentitydefs has two new dictionaries: name2codepoint maps
2525 HTML entity names to Unicode codepoints (as integers).
2526 codepoint2name is the reverse mapping. See SF patch #722017.
2527
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00002528- pdb has a new command, "debug", which lets you step through
2529 arbitrary code from the debugger's (pdb) prompt.
2530
Raymond Hettingerc377cbf2003-04-04 22:56:42 +00002531- unittest.failUnlessEqual and its equivalent unittest.assertEqual now
2532 return 'not a == b' rather than 'a != b'. This gives the desired
2533 result for classes that define __eq__ without defining __ne__.
2534
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002535- sgmllib now supports SGML marked sections, in particular the
Martin v. Löwis3163a3b2003-03-30 14:25:40 +00002536 MS Office extensions.
2537
Raymond Hettinger42182eb2003-03-09 05:33:33 +00002538- The urllib module now offers support for the iterator protocol.
2539 SF patch 698520 contributed by Brett Cannon.
2540
Guido van Rossum9589a252003-03-06 01:56:12 +00002541- New module timeit provides a simple framework for timing the
2542 execution speed of expressions and statements.
2543
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002544- sets.Set objects now support mixed-type __eq__ and __ne__, instead
2545 of raising TypeError. If x is a Set object and y is a non-Set object,
2546 x == y is False, and x != y is True. This is akin to the change made
2547 for mixed-type comparisons of datetime objects in 2.3a2; more info
2548 about the rationale is in the NEWS entry for that. See also SF bug
2549 report <http://www.python.org/sf/693121>.
2550
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00002551- On Unix platforms, if os.listdir() is called with a Unicode argument,
2552 it now returns Unicode strings. (This behavior was added earlier
2553 to the Windows NT/2k/XP version of os.listdir().)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002554
Andrew M. Kuchling6f177d42003-02-28 22:09:33 +00002555- Distutils: both 'py_modules' and 'packages' keywords can now be specified
2556 in core.setup(). Previously you could supply one or the other, but
2557 not both of them. (SF patch #695090 from Bernhard Herzog)
2558
Skip Montanaro64a839e2003-03-20 23:36:55 +00002559- New csv package makes it easy to read/write CSV files.
2560
Gustavo Niemeyer68d8cef2003-04-17 21:31:33 +00002561- Module shlex has been extended to allow posix-like shell parsings,
2562 including a split() function for easy spliting of quoted strings and
2563 commands. An iterator interface was also implemented.
2564
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002565Tools/Demos
2566-----------
2567
Tim Peters21d7d4d2003-04-18 00:45:59 +00002568- New script combinerefs.py helps analyze new PYTHONDUMPREFS output.
2569 See the module docstring for details.
2570
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002571Build
2572-----
2573
Neal Norwitz35892b92003-02-23 23:45:35 +00002574- Fix problem building on OSF1 because the compiler only accepted
2575 preprocessor directives that start in column 1. (SF bug #691793.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002576
2577C API
2578-----
2579
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002580- Added PyGC_Collect(), equivalent to calling gc.collect().
2581
Guido van Rossum0fc8f002003-04-15 15:12:39 +00002582- PyThreadState_GetDict() was changed not to raise an exception or
2583 issue a fatal error when no current thread state is available. This
2584 makes it possible to print dictionaries when no thread is active.
2585
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002586- LONG_LONG was renamed to PY_LONG_LONG. Extensions that use this and
2587 need compatibility with previous versions can use this:
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00002588
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002589 #ifndef PY_LONG_LONG
2590 #define PY_LONG_LONG LONG_LONG
2591 #endif
Martin v. Löwisb9a0f912003-03-29 10:06:18 +00002592
Raymond Hettinger1da1dbf2003-03-17 19:46:11 +00002593- Added PyObject_SelfIter() to fill the tp_iter slot for the
Raymond Hettinger01538262003-03-17 08:24:35 +00002594 typical case where the method returns its self argument.
2595
Guido van Rossume5c691a2003-03-07 15:13:17 +00002596- The extended type structure used for heap types (new-style
2597 classes defined by Python code using a class statement) is now
2598 exported from object.h as PyHeapTypeObject. (SF patch #696193.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002599
2600New platforms
2601-------------
2602
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00002603None this time.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002604
2605Tests
2606-----
2607
Neal Norwitz55b61d22003-02-28 19:57:03 +00002608- test_timeout now requires -u network to be passed to regrtest to run.
2609 See SF bug #692988.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002610
2611Windows
2612-------
2613
Tim Peters11b23062003-04-23 02:39:17 +00002614- os.fsync() now exists on Windows, and calls the Microsoft _commit()
2615 function.
2616
Guido van Rossumf4050642003-04-09 19:39:06 +00002617- New function winsound.MessageBeep() wraps the Win32 API
2618 MessageBeep().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002619
2620Mac
2621---
2622
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00002623- os.listdir() now returns Unicode strings on MacOS X when called with
2624 a Unicode argument. See the general news item under "Library".
Just van Rossum46c97842003-02-25 21:42:15 +00002625
Jack Jansendeac2ac2003-02-24 11:04:17 +00002626- A new method MacOS.WMAvailable() returns true if it is safe to access
2627 the window manager, false otherwise.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002628
Jack Jansencf76be02003-03-24 12:13:54 +00002629- EasyDialogs dialogs are now movable-modal, and if the application is
2630 currently in the background they will ask to be moved to the foreground
2631 before displaying.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002632
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00002633- OSA Scripting support has improved a lot, and gensuitemodule.py can now
Jack Jansende354b72003-04-11 15:37:20 +00002634 be used by mere mortals. The documentation is now also more or less
2635 complete.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002636
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00002637- The IDE (in a framework build) now includes introductory documentation
2638 in Apple Help Viewer format.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002639
2640
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002641What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 2?
2642=================================
2643
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00002644*Release date: 19-Feb-2003*
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002645
2646Core and builtins
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00002647-----------------
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002648
Walter Dörwald2ffec022003-02-19 16:34:11 +00002649- Negative positions returned from PEP 293 error callbacks are now
2650 treated as being relative to the end of the input string. Positions
2651 that are out of bounds raise an IndexError.
2652
Guido van Rossum162e38c2003-02-19 15:25:10 +00002653- sys.path[0] (the directory from which the script is loaded) is now
2654 turned into an absolute pathname, unless it is the empty string.
2655 (SF patch #664376.)
2656
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00002657- Finally fixed the bug in compile() and exec where a string ending
2658 with an indented code block but no newline would raise SyntaxError.
2659 This would have been a four-line change in parsetok.c... Except
2660 codeop.py depends on this behavior, so a compilation flag had to be
2661 invented that causes the tokenizer to revert to the old behavior;
2662 this required extra changes to 2 .h files, 2 .c files, and 2 .py
Guido van Rossum1442dc12003-02-13 22:19:20 +00002663 files. (Fixes SF bug #501622.)
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00002664
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00002665- If a new-style class defines neither __new__ nor __init__, its
2666 constructor would ignore all arguments. This is changed now: the
2667 constructor refuses arguments in this case. This might break code
2668 that worked under Python 2.2. The simplest fix is to add a no-op
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002669 __init__: ``def __init__(self, *args, **kw): pass``.
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00002670
Guido van Rossum48035eb2003-02-12 17:05:26 +00002671- Through a bytecode optimizer bug (and I bet you didn't even know
2672 Python *had* a bytecode optimizer :-), "unsigned" hex/oct constants
2673 with a leading minus sign would come out with the wrong sign.
2674 ("Unsigned" hex/oct constants are those with a face value in the
2675 range sys.maxint+1 through sys.maxint*2+1, inclusive; these have
2676 always been interpreted as negative numbers through sign folding.)
2677 E.g. 0xffffffff is -1, and -(0xffffffff) is 1, but -0xffffffff would
2678 come out as -4294967295. This was the case in Python 2.2 through
2679 2.2.2 and 2.3a1, and in Python 2.4 it will once again have that
2680 value, but according to PEP 237 it really needs to be 1 now. This
2681 will be backported to Python 2.2.3 a well. (SF #660455)
2682
Guido van Rossum47710652003-02-12 20:48:22 +00002683- int(s, base) sometimes sign-folds hex and oct constants; it only
2684 does this when base is 0 and s.strip() starts with a '0'. When the
2685 sign is actually folded, as in int("0xffffffff", 0) on a 32-bit
2686 machine, which returns -1, a FutureWarning is now issued; in Python
2687 2.4, this will return 4294967295L, as do int("+0xffffffff", 0) and
2688 int("0xffffffff", 16) right now. (PEP 347)
2689
Guido van Rossuma89d10e2003-02-12 03:58:38 +00002690- super(X, x): x may now be a proxy for an X instance, i.e.
2691 issubclass(x.__class__, X) but not issubclass(type(x), X).
2692
Guido van Rossum03bc7d32003-02-12 03:32:58 +00002693- isinstance(x, X): if X is a new-style class, this is now equivalent
2694 to issubclass(type(x), X) or issubclass(x.__class__, X). Previously
2695 only type(x) was tested. (For classic classes this was already the
2696 case.)
2697
Just van Rossum73ffb4a2003-02-10 09:57:08 +00002698- compile(), eval() and the exec statement now fully support source code
2699 passed as unicode strings.
2700
Neal Norwitzde8b94c2003-02-10 02:12:43 +00002701- int subclasses can be initialized with longs if the value fits in an int.
2702 See SF bug #683467.
2703
Tim Petersbf2674b2003-02-02 07:51:32 +00002704- long(string, base) takes time linear in len(string) when base is a power
2705 of 2 now. It used to take time quadratic in len(string).
2706
Martin v. Löwis8afd7572003-01-25 22:46:11 +00002707- filter returns now Unicode results for Unicode arguments.
2708
Martin v. Löwisaf6a27a2003-01-03 19:16:14 +00002709- raw_input can now return Unicode objects.
2710
Skip Montanaro4abd5f02003-01-02 20:51:08 +00002711- List objects' sort() method now accepts None as the comparison function.
2712 Passing None is semantically identical to calling sort() with no
2713 arguments.
2714
Neal Norwitz1a997502003-01-13 20:13:12 +00002715- Fixed crash when printing a subclass of str and __str__ returned self.
2716 See SF bug #667147.
2717
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00002718- Fixed an invalid RuntimeWarning and an undetected error when trying
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00002719 to convert a long integer into a float which couldn't fit.
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00002720 See SF bug #676155.
2721
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00002722- Function objects now have a __module__ attribute that is bound to
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00002723 the name of the module in which the function was defined. This
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00002724 applies for C functions and methods as well as functions and methods
2725 defined in Python. This attribute is used by pickle.whichmodule(),
2726 which changes the behavior of whichmodule slightly. In Python 2.2
2727 whichmodule() returns "__main__" for functions that are not defined
2728 at the top-level of a module (examples: methods, nested functions).
2729 Now whichmodule() will return the proper module name.
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00002730
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002731Extension modules
2732-----------------
2733
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00002734- operator.isNumberType() now checks that the object has a nb_int or
2735 nb_float slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
2736 tp_as_number pointer.
2737
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00002738- The imp module now has ways to acquire and release the "import
2739 lock": imp.acquire_lock() and imp.release_lock(). Note: this is a
2740 reentrant lock, so releasing the lock only truly releases it when
2741 this is the last release_lock() call. You can check with
2742 imp.lock_held(). (SF bug #580952 and patch #683257.)
2743
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002744- Change to cPickle to match pickle.py (see below and PEP 307).
2745
Neal Norwitz9caf9c02003-02-10 01:54:06 +00002746- Fix some bugs in the parser module. SF bug #678518.
2747
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00002748- Thanks to Scott David Daniels, a subtle bug in how the zlib
Walter Dörwald28d81962003-02-03 20:53:14 +00002749 extension implemented flush() was fixed. Scott also rewrote the
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00002750 zlib test suite using the unittest module. (SF bug #640230 and
2751 patch #678531.)
2752
Raymond Hettinger96ef8112003-02-01 00:10:11 +00002753- Added an itertools module containing high speed, memory efficient
2754 looping constructs inspired by tools from Haskell and SML.
2755
Guido van Rossum99d4abf2003-01-27 22:22:50 +00002756- The SSL module now handles sockets with a timeout set correctly (SF
2757 patch #675750, fixing SF bug #675552).
2758
Barry Warsawf8ba39c2003-01-07 20:55:26 +00002759- os/posixmodule has grown the sysexits.h constants (EX_OK and friends).
2760
Guido van Rossum6d0d3652003-01-07 20:34:19 +00002761- Fixed broken threadstate swap in readline that could cause fatal
2762 errors when a readline hook was being invoked while a background
2763 thread was active. (SF bugs #660476 and #513033.)
2764
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002765- fcntl now exposes the strops.h I_* constants.
2766
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00002767- Fix a crash on Solaris that occurred when calling close() on
2768 an mmap'ed file which was already closed. (SF patch #665913)
2769
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002770- Fixed several serious bugs in the zipimport implementation.
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002771
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00002772- datetime changes:
2773
Guido van Rossum8b7a9a32003-04-14 22:01:58 +00002774 The date class is now properly subclassable. (SF bug #720908)
2775
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00002776 The datetime and datetimetz classes have been collapsed into a single
2777 datetime class, and likewise the time and timetz classes into a single
2778 time class. Previously, a datetimetz object with tzinfo=None acted
2779 exactly like a datetime object, and similarly for timetz. This wasn't
2780 enough of a difference to justify distinct classes, and life is simpler
2781 now.
2782
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00002783 today() and now() now round system timestamps to the closest
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002784 microsecond <http://www.python.org/sf/661086>. This repairs an
2785 irritation most likely seen on Windows systems.
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00002786
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00002787 In dt.astimezone(tz), if tz.utcoffset(dt) returns a duration,
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00002788 ValueError is raised if tz.dst(dt) returns None (2.3a1 treated it
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002789 as 0 instead, but a tzinfo subclass wishing to participate in
2790 time zone conversion has to take a stand on whether it supports
2791 DST; if you don't care about DST, then code dst() to return 0 minutes,
2792 meaning that DST is never in effect).
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00002793
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00002794 The tzinfo methods utcoffset() and dst() must return a timedelta object
2795 (or None) now. In 2.3a1 they could also return an int or long, but that
2796 was an unhelpfully redundant leftover from an earlier version wherein
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00002797 they couldn't return a timedelta. TOOWTDI.
2798
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00002799 The example tzinfo class for local time had a bug. It was replaced
2800 by a later example coded by Guido.
2801
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00002802 datetime.astimezone(tz) no longer raises an exception when the
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002803 input datetime has no UTC equivalent in tz. For typical "hybrid" time
2804 zones (a single tzinfo subclass modeling both standard and daylight
2805 time), this case can arise one hour per year, at the hour daylight time
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00002806 ends. See new docs for details. In short, the new behavior mimics
2807 the local wall clock's behavior of repeating an hour in local time.
2808
2809 dt.astimezone() can no longer be used to convert between naive and aware
2810 datetime objects. If you merely want to attach, or remove, a tzinfo
2811 object, without any conversion of date and time members, use
2812 dt.replace(tzinfo=whatever) instead, where "whatever" is None or a
2813 tzinfo subclass instance.
2814
2815 A new method tzinfo.fromutc(dt) can be overridden in tzinfo subclasses
2816 to give complete control over how a UTC time is to be converted to
2817 a local time. The default astimezone() implementation calls fromutc()
2818 as its last step, so a tzinfo subclass can affect that too by overriding
2819 fromutc(). It's expected that the default fromutc() implementation will
2820 be suitable as-is for "almost all" time zone subclasses, but the
2821 creativity of political time zone fiddling appears unbounded -- fromutc()
2822 allows the highly motivated to emulate any scheme expressible in Python.
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002823
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00002824 datetime.now(): The optional tzinfo argument was undocumented (that's
2825 repaired), and its name was changed to tz ("tzinfo" is overloaded enough
2826 already). With a tz argument, now(tz) used to return the local date
2827 and time, and attach tz to it, without any conversion of date and time
2828 members. This was less than useful. Now now(tz) returns the current
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002829 date and time as local time in tz's time zone, akin to ::
2830
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00002831 tz.fromutc(datetime.utcnow().replace(tzinfo=utc))
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002832
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00002833 where "utc" is an instance of a tzinfo subclass modeling UTC. Without
2834 a tz argument, now() continues to return the current local date and time,
2835 as a naive datetime object.
2836
Tim Peters2a44a8d2003-01-23 20:53:10 +00002837 datetime.fromtimestamp(): Like datetime.now() above, this had less than
2838 useful behavior when the optional tinzo argument was specified. See
2839 also SF bug report <http://www.python.org/sf/660872>.
2840
Tim Peters8d81a012003-01-24 22:36:34 +00002841 date and datetime comparison: In order to prevent comparison from
2842 falling back to the default compare-object-addresses strategy, these
2843 raised TypeError whenever they didn't understand the other object type.
2844 They still do, except when the other object has a "timetuple" attribute,
2845 in which case they return NotImplemented now. This gives other
2846 datetime objects (e.g., mxDateTime) a chance to intercept the
2847 comparison.
2848
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002849 date, time, datetime and timedelta comparison: When the exception
2850 for mixed-type comparisons in the last paragraph doesn't apply, if
2851 the comparison is == then False is returned, and if the comparison is
2852 != then True is returned. Because dict lookup and the "in" operator
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002853 only invoke __eq__, this allows, for example, ::
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002854
2855 if some_datetime in some_sequence:
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002856
2857 and ::
2858
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002859 some_dict[some_timedelta] = whatever
2860
2861 to work as expected, without raising TypeError just because the
2862 sequence is heterogeneous, or the dict has mixed-type keys. [This
2863 seems like a good idea to implement for all mixed-type comparisons
2864 that don't want to allow falling back to address comparison.]
2865
Tim Peters75a6e3b2003-01-04 18:17:36 +00002866 The constructors building a datetime from a timestamp could raise
2867 ValueError if the platform C localtime()/gmtime() inserted "leap
2868 seconds". Leap seconds are ignored now. On such platforms, it's
2869 possible to have timestamps that differ by a second, yet where
2870 datetimes constructed from them are equal.
2871
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00002872 The pickle format of date, time and datetime objects has changed
2873 completely. The undocumented pickler and unpickler functions no
Tim Petersb57f8f02003-02-01 02:54:15 +00002874 longer exist. The undocumented __setstate__() and __getstate__()
2875 methods no longer exist either.
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00002876
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002877Library
2878-------
2879
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002880- The logging module was updated slightly; the WARN level was renamed
2881 to WARNING, and the matching function/method warn() to warning().
2882
2883- The pickle and cPickle modules were updated with a new pickling
2884 protocol (documented by pickletools.py, see below) and several
2885 extensions to the pickle customization API (__reduce__, __setstate__
2886 etc.). The copy module now uses more of the pickle customization
2887 API to copy objects that don't implement __copy__ or __deepcopy__.
2888 See PEP 307 for details.
2889
2890- The distutils "register" command now uses http://www.python.org/pypi
2891 as the default repository. (See PEP 301.)
2892
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00002893- the platform dependent path related variables sep, altsep, extsep,
2894 pathsep, curdir, pardir and defpath are now defined in the platform
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00002895 dependent path modules (e.g. ntpath.py) rather than os.py, so these
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002896 variables are now available via os.path. They continue to be
2897 available from the os module.
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00002898 (see <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00002899
Tim Peters6ee04802003-02-05 18:29:34 +00002900- array.array was added to the types repr.py knows about (see
2901 <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
2902
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00002903- The new pickletools.py contains lots of documentation about pickle
2904 internals, and supplies some helpers for working with pickles, such as
2905 a symbolic pickle disassembler.
2906
Skip Montanaro9a7c96a2003-01-22 18:17:25 +00002907- Xmlrpclib.py now supports the builtin boolean type.
2908
Martin v. Löwis0c6774d2003-01-15 11:51:06 +00002909- py_compile has a new 'doraise' flag and a new PyCompileError
2910 exception.
2911
Martin v. Löwisd69663d2003-01-15 11:37:23 +00002912- SimpleXMLRPCServer now supports CGI through the CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler
2913 class.
2914
Guido van Rossum50e92232003-01-14 16:45:04 +00002915- The sets module now raises TypeError in __cmp__, to clarify that
2916 sets are not intended to be three-way-compared; the comparison
2917 operators are overloaded as subset/superset tests.
2918
Guido van Rossumcd0c0472003-01-07 23:03:05 +00002919- Bastion.py and rexec.py are disabled. These modules are not safe in
2920 Python 2.2. or 2.3.
2921
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002922- realpath is now exported when doing ``from poxixpath import *``.
Neal Norwitzbb0246a2003-01-03 18:12:28 +00002923 It is also exported for ntpath, macpath, and os2emxpath.
2924 See SF bug #659228.
2925
Neal Norwitzb9ef4ae2003-01-05 23:19:43 +00002926- New module tarfile from Lars Gustäbel provides a comprehensive interface
2927 to tar archive files with transparent gzip and bzip2 compression.
2928 See SF patch #651082.
2929
Neal Norwitz4f442372003-01-06 06:51:36 +00002930- urlparse can now parse imap:// URLs. See SF feature request #618024.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002931
Neal Norwitze931ed52003-01-10 23:24:32 +00002932- Tkinter.Canvas.scan_dragto() provides an optional parameter to support
2933 the gain value which is passed to Tk. SF bug# 602259.
2934
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00002935- Fix logging.handlers.SysLogHandler protocol when using UNIX domain sockets.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00002936 See SF patch #642974.
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00002937
Skip Montanaro12fe72e2003-02-25 17:46:20 +00002938- The dospath module was deleted. Use the ntpath module when manipulating
2939 DOS paths from other platforms.
2940
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002941Tools/Demos
2942-----------
2943
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00002944- Two new scripts (db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py) were added to the
2945 Tools/scripts directory to facilitate conversion from the old bsddb module
2946 to the new one. While the user-visible API of the new module is
2947 compatible with the old one, it's likely that the version of the
2948 underlying database library has changed. To convert from the old library,
2949 run the db2pickle.py script using the old version of Python to convert it
2950 to a pickle file. After upgrading Python, run the pickle2db.py script
2951 using the new version of Python to reconstitute your database. For
2952 example:
2953
Skip Montanaro621f0552003-02-03 15:48:10 +00002954 % python2.2 db2pickle.py -h some.db > some.pickle
2955 % python2.3 pickle2db.py -h some.db.new < some.pickle
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00002956
2957 Run the scripts without any args to get a usage message.
2958
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002959
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002960Build
2961-----
2962
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00002963- The audio driver tests (test_ossaudiodev.py and
2964 test_linuxaudiodev.py) are no longer run by default. This is
2965 because they don't always work, depending on your hardware and
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002966 software. To run these tests, you must use an invocation like ::
2967
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00002968 ./python Lib/test/regrtest.py -u audio test_ossaudiodev
2969
Skip Montanarodecc6a42003-01-01 20:07:49 +00002970- On systems which build using the configure script, compiler flags which
2971 used to be lumped together using the OPT flag have been split into two
2972 groups, OPT and BASECFLAGS. OPT is meant to carry just optimization- and
2973 debug-related flags like "-g" and "-O3". BASECFLAGS is meant to carry
2974 compiler flags that are required to get a clean compile. On some
2975 platforms (many Linux flavors in particular) BASECFLAGS will be empty by
2976 default. On others, such as Mac OS X and SCO, it will contain required
2977 flags. This change allows people building Python to override OPT without
2978 fear of clobbering compiler flags which are required to get a clean build.
2979
2980- On Darwin/Mac OS X platforms, /sw/lib and /sw/include are added to the
2981 relevant search lists in setup.py. This allows users building Python to
2982 take advantage of the many packages available from the fink project
2983 <http://fink.sf.net/>.
2984
2985- A new Makefile target, scriptsinstall, installs a number of useful scripts
2986 from the Tools/scripts directory.
2987
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002988C API
2989-----
2990
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002991- PyEval_GetFrame() is now declared to return a ``PyFrameObject *``
2992 instead of a plain ``PyObject *``. (SF patch #686601.)
Guido van Rossum6297a7a2003-02-19 15:53:17 +00002993
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00002994- PyNumber_Check() now checks that the object has a nb_int or nb_float
2995 slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
2996 tp_as_number pointer.
2997
Guido van Rossumeea47182003-02-11 20:39:59 +00002998- A C type that inherits from a base type that defines tp_as_buffer
2999 will now inherit the tp_as_buffer pointer if it doesn't define one.
3000 (SF #681367)
3001
Neil Schemenauer5042da62003-02-04 20:59:40 +00003002- The PyArg_Parse functions now issue a DeprecationWarning if a float
3003 argument is provided when an integer is specified (this affects the 'b',
3004 'B', 'h', 'H', 'i', and 'l' codes). Future versions of Python will
3005 raise a TypeError.
Neil Schemenauercd63e612003-01-24 22:15:53 +00003006
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003007Tests
3008-----
3009
Walter Dörwald11cfbd62003-03-26 16:03:16 +00003010- Several tests weren't being run from regrtest.py (test_timeout.py,
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003011 test_tarfile.py, test_netrc.py, test_multifile.py,
3012 test_importhooks.py and test_imp.py). Now they are. (Note to
3013 developers: please read Lib/test/README when creating a new test, to
3014 make sure to do it right! All tests need to use either unittest or
3015 pydoc.)
3016
3017- Added test_posix.py, a test suite for the posix module.
3018
3019- Added test_hexoct.py, a test suite for hex/oct constant folding.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003020
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003021Windows
3022-------
3023
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00003024- The timeout code for socket connect() didn't work right; this has
3025 now been fixed. test_timeout.py should pass (at least most of the
3026 time).
3027
Thomas Hellerdda583d2003-01-31 20:45:41 +00003028- distutils' msvccompiler class now passes the preprocessor options to
3029 the resource compiler. See SF patch #669198.
3030
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00003031- The bsddb module now ships with Sleepycat's 4.1.25.NC, the latest
3032 release without strong cryptography.
3033
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00003034- sys.path[0], if it contains a directory name, is now always an
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003035 absolute pathname. (SF patch #664376.)
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00003036
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00003037- The new logging package is now installed by the Windows installer. It
3038 wasn't in 2.3a1 due to oversight.
3039
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003040Mac
3041---
3042
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00003043- There are new dialogs EasyDialogs.AskFileForOpen, AskFileForSave
3044 and AskFolder. The old macfs.StandardGetFile and friends are deprecated.
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00003045
Jack Jansenc9296362003-02-06 23:10:45 +00003046- Most of the standard library now uses pathnames or FSRefs in preference
3047 of FSSpecs, and use the underlying Carbon.File and Carbon.Folder modules
3048 in stead of macfs. macfs will probably be deprecated in the future.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00003049
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00003050- Type Carbon.File.FSCatalogInfo and supporting methods have been implemented.
3051 This also makes macfs.FSSpec.SetDates() work again.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003052
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00003053- There is a new module pimp, the package install manager for Python, and
3054 accompanying applet PackageManager. These allow you to easily download
3055 and install pretested extension packages either in source or binary
3056 form. Only in MacPython-OSX.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003057
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00003058- Applets are now built with bundlebuilder in MacPython-OSX, which should make
Jack Jansen5d44b342003-02-18 23:32:47 +00003059 them more robust and also provides a path towards BuildApplication. The
3060 downside of this change is that applets can no longer be run from the
3061 Terminal window, this will hopefully be fixed in the 2.3b1.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003062
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003063
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003064What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 1?
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003065=================================
3066
Guido van Rossumae548862002-12-31 15:47:36 +00003067*Release date: 31-Dec-2002*
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003068
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003069Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003070--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00003071
Michael W. Hudson96bc3b42002-11-26 14:48:23 +00003072- One can now assign to __bases__ and __name__ of new-style classes.
3073
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00003074- dict() now accepts keyword arguments so that dict(one=1, two=2)
3075 is the equivalent of {"one": 1, "two": 2}. Accordingly,
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00003076 the existing (but undocumented) 'items' keyword argument has
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00003077 been eliminated. This means that dict(items=someMapping) now has
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00003078 a different meaning than before.
3079
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00003080- int() now returns a long object if the argument is outside the
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003081 integer range, so int("4" * 1000), int(1e200) and int(1L<<1000) will
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00003082 all return long objects instead of raising an OverflowError.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003083
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003084- Assignment to __class__ is disallowed if either the old or the new
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00003085 class is a statically allocated type object (such as defined by an
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003086 extension module). This prevents anomalies like 2.__class__ = bool.
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00003087
3088- New-style object creation and deallocation have been sped up
3089 significantly; they are now faster than classic instance creation
3090 and deallocation.
3091
3092- The __slots__ variable can now mention "private" names, and the
3093 right thing will happen (e.g. __slots__ = ["__foo"]).
3094
3095- The built-ins slice() and buffer() are now callable types. The
3096 types classobj (formerly class), code, function, instance, and
3097 instancemethod (formerly instance-method), which have no built-in
3098 names but are accessible through the types module, are now also
3099 callable. The type dict-proxy is renamed to dictproxy.
3100
3101- Cycles going through the __class__ link of a new-style instance are
3102 now detected by the garbage collector.
3103
3104- Classes using __slots__ are now properly garbage collected.
3105 [SF bug 519621]
3106
3107- Tightened the __slots__ rules: a slot name must be a valid Python
3108 identifier.
3109
3110- The constructor for the module type now requires a name argument and
3111 takes an optional docstring argument. Previously, this constructor
3112 ignored its arguments. As a consequence, deriving a class from a
3113 module (not from the module type) is now illegal; previously this
3114 created an unnamed module, just like invoking the module type did.
3115 [SF bug 563060]
3116
3117- A new type object, 'basestring', is added. This is a common base type
3118 for 'str' and 'unicode', and can be used instead of
3119 types.StringTypes, e.g. to test whether something is "a string":
3120 isinstance(x, basestring) is True for Unicode and 8-bit strings. This
3121 is an abstract base class and cannot be instantiated directly.
3122
3123- Changed new-style class instantiation so that when C's __new__
3124 method returns something that's not a C instance, its __init__ is
3125 not called. [SF bug #537450]
3126
3127- Fixed super() to work correctly with class methods. [SF bug #535444]
3128
3129- If you try to pickle an instance of a class that has __slots__ but
3130 doesn't define or override __getstate__, a TypeError is now raised.
3131 This is done by adding a bozo __getstate__ to the class that always
3132 raises TypeError. (Before, this would appear to be pickled, but the
3133 state of the slots would be lost.)
3134
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003135Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003136-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003137
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003138- Import from zipfiles is now supported. The name of a zipfile placed
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00003139 on sys.path causes the import statement to look for importable Python
3140 modules (with .py, pyc and .pyo extensions) and packages inside the
3141 zipfile. The zipfile import follows the specification (though not
3142 the sample implementation) of PEP 273. The semantics of __path__ are
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003143 compatible with those that have been implemented in Jython since
3144 Jython 2.1.
3145
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003146- PEP 302 has been accepted. Although it was initially developed to
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00003147 support zipimport, it offers a new, general import hook mechanism.
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00003148 Several new variables have been added to the sys module:
3149 sys.meta_path, sys.path_hooks, and sys.path_importer_cache; these
3150 make extending the import statement much more convenient than
3151 overriding the __import__ built-in function. For a description of
3152 these, see PEP 302.
3153
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003154- A frame object's f_lineno attribute can now be written to from a
3155 trace function to change which line will execute next. A command to
3156 exploit this from pdb has been added. [SF patch #643835]
3157
Marc-André Lemburg20b91352002-12-12 18:01:43 +00003158- The _codecs support module for codecs.py was turned into a builtin
3159 module to assure that at least the builtin codecs are available
3160 to the Python parser for source code decoding according to PEP 263.
3161
Walter Dörwaldd9a6ad32002-12-12 16:41:44 +00003162- issubclass now supports a tuple as the second argument, just like
3163 isinstance does. ``issubclass(X, (A, B))`` is equivalent to
3164 ``issubclass(X, A) or issubclass(X, B)``.
3165
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00003166- Thanks to Armin Rigo, the last known way to provoke a system crash
3167 by cleverly arranging for a comparison function to mutate a list
3168 during a list.sort() operation has been fixed. The effect of
3169 attempting to mutate a list, or even to inspect its contents or
3170 length, while a sort is in progress, is not defined by the language.
3171 The C implementation of Python 2.3 attempts to detect mutations,
3172 and raise ValueError if one occurs, but there's no guarantee that
3173 all mutations will be caught, or that any will be caught across
3174 releases or implementations.
3175
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00003176- Unicode file name processing for Windows (PEP 277) is implemented.
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00003177 All platforms now have an os.path.supports_unicode_filenames attribute,
3178 which is set to True on Windows NT/2000/XP, and False elsewhere.
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00003179
Walter Dörwald3aeb6322002-09-02 13:14:32 +00003180- Codec error handling callbacks (PEP 293) are implemented.
3181 Error handling in unicode.encode or str.decode can now be customized.
3182
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00003183- A subtle change to the semantics of the built-in function intern():
3184 interned strings are no longer immortal. You must keep a reference
3185 to the return value intern() around to get the benefit.
3186
Guido van Rossumf808b892002-08-16 03:38:10 +00003187- Use of 'None' as a variable, argument or attribute name now
3188 issues a SyntaxWarning. In the future, None may become a keyword.
3189
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00003190- SET_LINENO is gone. co_lnotab is now consulted to determine when to
3191 call the trace function. C code that accessed f_lineno should call
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003192 PyCode_Addr2Line instead (f_lineno is still there, but only kept up
3193 to date when there is a trace function set).
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00003194
Guido van Rossum9be89462002-08-14 16:11:30 +00003195- There's a new warning category, FutureWarning. This is used to warn
3196 about a number of situations where the value or sign of an integer
3197 result will change in Python 2.4 as a result of PEP 237 (integer
3198 unification). The warnings implement stage B0 mentioned in that
3199 PEP. The warnings are about the following situations:
3200
3201 - Octal and hex literals without 'L' prefix in the inclusive range
3202 [0x80000000..0xffffffff]; these are currently negative ints, but
3203 in Python 2.4 they will be positive longs with the same bit
3204 pattern.
3205
3206 - Left shifts on integer values that cause the outcome to lose
3207 bits or have a different sign than the left operand. To be
3208 precise: x<<n where this currently doesn't yield the same value
3209 as long(x)<<n; in Python 2.4, the outcome will be long(x)<<n.
3210
3211 - Conversions from ints to string that show negative values as
3212 unsigned ints in the inclusive range [0x80000000..0xffffffff];
3213 this affects the functions hex() and oct(), and the string
3214 formatting codes %u, %o, %x, and %X. In Python 2.4, these will
3215 show signed values (e.g. hex(-1) currently returns "0xffffffff";
3216 in Python 2.4 it will return "-0x1").
3217
Guido van Rossum9a2eda52002-12-31 02:12:42 +00003218- The bits manipulated under the cover by sys.setcheckinterval() have
3219 been changed. Both the check interval and the ticker used to be
3220 per-thread values. They are now just a pair of global variables.
3221 In addition, the default check interval was boosted from 10 to 100
3222 bytecode instructions. This may have some effect on systems that
3223 relied on the old default value. In particular, in multi-threaded
3224 applications which try to be highly responsive, response time will
3225 increase by some (perhaps imperceptible) amount.
Skip Montanaro979c74b2002-09-03 21:25:14 +00003226
Tim Petersd64c1de2002-08-12 17:36:03 +00003227- When multiplying very large integers, a version of the so-called
3228 Karatsuba algorithm is now used. This is most effective if the
3229 inputs have roughly the same size. If they both have about N digits,
3230 Karatsuba multiplication has O(N**1.58) runtime (the exponent is
3231 log_base_2(3)) instead of the previous O(N**2). Measured results may
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00003232 be better or worse than that, depending on platform quirks. Besides
3233 the O() improvement in raw instruction count, the Karatsuba algorithm
3234 appears to have much better cache behavior on extremely large integers
3235 (starting in the ballpark of a million bits). Note that this is a
3236 simple implementation, and there's no intent here to compete with,
3237 e.g., GMP. It gives a very nice speedup when it applies, but a package
3238 devoted to fast large-integer arithmetic should run circles around it.
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00003239
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00003240- u'%c' will now raise a ValueError in case the argument is an
3241 integer outside the valid range of Unicode code point ordinals.
3242
Guido van Rossumdeb09362002-08-09 17:16:30 +00003243- The tempfile module has been overhauled for enhanced security. The
3244 mktemp() function is now deprecated; new, safe replacements are
3245 mkstemp() (for files) and mkdtemp() (for directories), and the
3246 higher-level functions NamedTemporaryFile() and TemporaryFile().
3247 Use of some global variables in this module is also deprecated; the
3248 new functions have keyword arguments to provide the same
3249 functionality. All Lib, Tools and Demo modules that used the unsafe
3250 interfaces have been updated to use the safe replacements. Thanks
3251 to Zack Weinberg!
3252
Guido van Rossumd81a9832002-08-09 15:57:34 +00003253- When x is an object whose class implements __mul__ and __rmul__,
3254 1.0*x would correctly invoke __rmul__, but 1*x would erroneously
3255 invoke __mul__. This was due to the sequence-repeat code in the int
3256 type. This has been fixed now.
3257
Barry Warsawd79f6832002-08-06 17:01:51 +00003258- Previously, "str1 in str2" required str1 to be a string of length 1.
3259 This restriction has been relaxed to allow str1 to be a string of
3260 any length. Thus "'el' in 'hello world'" returns True now.
3261
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003262- File objects are now their own iterators. For a file f, iter(f) now
3263 returns f (unless f is closed), and f.next() is similar to
3264 f.readline() when EOF is not reached; however, f.next() uses a
3265 readahead buffer that messes up the file position, so mixing
3266 f.next() and f.readline() (or other methods) doesn't work right.
3267 Calling f.seek() drops the readahead buffer, but other operations
3268 don't. It so happens that this gives a nice additional speed boost
3269 to "for line in file:"; the xreadlines method and corresponding
Guido van Rossumbffb2ef2002-08-09 17:17:07 +00003270 module are now obsolete. Thanks to Oren Tirosh!
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003271
Guido van Rossumde392d32002-08-05 14:17:20 +00003272- Encoding declarations (PEP 263, phase 1) have been implemented. A
3273 comment of the form "# -*- coding: <encodingname> -*-" in the first
3274 or second line of a Python source file indicates the encoding.
Martin v. Löwis00f1e3f2002-08-04 17:29:52 +00003275
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003276- list.sort() has a new implementation. While cross-platform results
3277 may vary, and in data-dependent ways, this is much faster on many
3278 kinds of partially ordered lists than the previous implementation,
3279 and reported to be just as fast on randomly ordered lists on
3280 several major platforms. This sort is also stable (if A==B and A
3281 precedes B in the list at the start, A precedes B after the sort too),
3282 although the language definition does not guarantee stability. A
3283 potential drawback is that list.sort() may require temp space of
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003284 len(list)*2 bytes (``*4`` on a 64-bit machine). It's therefore possible
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003285 for list.sort() to raise MemoryError now, even if a comparison function
3286 does not. See <http://www.python.org/sf/587076> for full details.
3287
Guido van Rossum2d5389c2002-07-23 03:44:35 +00003288- All standard iterators now ensure that, once StopIteration has been
3289 raised, all future calls to next() on the same iterator will also
3290 raise StopIteration. There used to be various counterexamples to
3291 this behavior, which could caused confusion or subtle program
3292 breakage, without any benefits. (Note that this is still an
3293 iterator's responsibility; the iterator framework does not enforce
3294 this.)
3295
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003296- Ctrl+C handling on Windows has been made more consistent with
3297 other platforms. KeyboardInterrupt can now reliably be caught,
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003298 and Ctrl+C at an interactive prompt no longer terminates the
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003299 process under NT/2k/XP (it never did under Win9x). Ctrl+C will
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00003300 interrupt time.sleep() in the main thread, and any child processes
3301 created via the popen family (on win2k; we can't make win9x work
Mark Hammond8f3afc72002-08-10 06:26:31 +00003302 reliably) are also interrupted (as generally happens on for Linux/Unix.)
3303 [SF bugs 231273, 439992 and 581232]
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003304
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00003305- sys.getwindowsversion() has been added on Windows. This
3306 returns a tuple with information about the version of Windows
3307 currently running.
3308
Raymond Hettinger5a04aec2002-06-25 00:25:30 +00003309- Slices and repetitions of buffer objects now consistently return
3310 a string. Formerly, strings would be returned most of the time,
3311 but a buffer object would be returned when the repetition count
3312 was one or when the slice range was all inclusive.
3313
Walter Dörwald3430d702002-06-17 10:43:59 +00003314- Unicode objects in sys.path are no longer ignored but treated
3315 as directory names.
3316
Neal Norwitz1f68fc72002-06-14 00:50:42 +00003317- Fixed string.startswith and string.endswith builtin methods
3318 so they accept negative indices. [SF bug 493951]
3319
Guido van Rossumc5fe5eb2002-06-12 03:45:21 +00003320- Fixed a bug with a continue inside a try block and a yield in the
3321 finally clause. [SF bug 567538]
3322
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00003323- Most builtin sequences now support "extended slices", i.e. slices
Guido van Rossum2e82e712002-06-13 11:41:07 +00003324 with a third "stride" parameter. For example, "hello world"[::-1]
3325 gives "dlrow olleh".
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00003326
Neal Norwitzd68f5172002-05-29 15:54:55 +00003327- A new warning PendingDeprecationWarning was added to provide
3328 direction on features which are in the process of being deprecated.
3329 The warning will not be printed by default. To see the pending
3330 deprecations, use -Walways::PendingDeprecationWarning::
3331 as a command line option or warnings.filterwarnings() in code.
3332
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00003333- Deprecated features of xrange objects have been removed as
3334 promised. The start, stop, and step attributes and the tolist()
3335 method no longer exist. xrange repetition and slicing have been
3336 removed.
3337
Guido van Rossum7dab2422002-04-26 19:40:56 +00003338- New builtin function enumerate(x), from PEP 279. Example:
3339 enumerate("abc") is an iterator returning (0,"a"), (1,"b"), (2,"c").
3340 The argument can be an arbitrary iterable object.
3341
Neil Schemenauer89e3ee02002-04-26 01:58:53 +00003342- The assert statement no longer tests __debug__ at runtime. This means
3343 that assert statements cannot be disabled by assigning a false value
3344 to __debug__.
3345
Walter Dörwald068325e2002-04-15 13:36:47 +00003346- A method zfill() was added to str and unicode, that fills a numeric
3347 string to the left with zeros. For example,
3348 "+123".zfill(6) -> "+00123".
3349
Guido van Rossum862fe3c2002-04-15 12:36:47 +00003350- Complex numbers supported divmod() and the // and % operators, but
3351 these make no sense. Since this was documented, they're being
3352 deprecated now.
3353
Guido van Rossum26dd8302002-04-26 20:11:29 +00003354- String and unicode methods lstrip(), rstrip() and strip() now take
3355 an optional argument that specifies the characters to strip. For
3356 example, "Foo!!!?!?!?".rstrip("?!") -> "Foo".
Guido van Rossum49042042002-04-13 00:59:05 +00003357
Guido van Rossumc0d3f4e2002-11-27 13:10:40 +00003358- There's a new dictionary constructor (a class method of the dict
3359 class), dict.fromkeys(iterable, value=None). It constructs a
3360 dictionary with keys taken from the iterable and all values set to a
3361 single value. It can be used for building sets and for removing
3362 duplicates from sequences.
Raymond Hettingere33d3df2002-11-27 07:29:33 +00003363
Guido van Rossumc69343b2002-04-12 19:22:48 +00003364- Added a new dict method pop(key). This removes and returns the
3365 value corresponding to key. [SF patch #539949]
3366
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00003367- A new built-in type, bool, has been added, as well as built-in
3368 names for its two values, True and False. Comparisons and sundry
3369 other operations that return a truth value have been changed to
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003370 return a bool instead. Read PEP 285 for an explanation of why this
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00003371 is backward compatible.
3372
Guido van Rossum95b62a62002-03-29 01:07:24 +00003373- Fixed two bugs reported as SF #535905: under certain conditions,
3374 deallocating a deeply nested structure could cause a segfault in the
3375 garbage collector, due to interaction with the "trashcan" code;
3376 access to the current frame during destruction of a local variable
3377 could access a pointer to freed memory.
3378
Guido van Rossumfe0ca4a2002-06-18 21:20:13 +00003379- The optional object allocator ("pymalloc") has been enabled by
3380 default. The recommended practice for memory allocation and
3381 deallocation has been streamlined. A header file is included,
3382 Misc/pymemcompat.h, which can be bundled with 3rd party extensions
3383 and lets them use the same API with Python versions from 1.5.2
3384 onwards.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00003385
Martin v. Löwiscfeb3b62002-03-03 21:30:27 +00003386- PyErr_Display will provide file and line information for all exceptions
3387 that have an attribute print_file_and_line, not just SyntaxErrors.
3388
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00003389- The UTF-8 codec will now encode and decode Unicode surrogates
3390 correctly and without raising exceptions for unpaired ones.
3391
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00003392- Universal newlines (PEP 278) is implemented. Briefly, using 'U'
3393 instead of 'r' when opening a text file for reading changes the line
3394 ending convention so that any of '\r', '\r\n', and '\n' is
3395 recognized (even mixed in one file); all three are converted to
3396 '\n', the standard Python line end character.
3397
Neal Norwitz649b7592002-01-01 19:07:13 +00003398- file.xreadlines() now raises a ValueError if the file is closed:
3399 Previously, an xreadlines object was returned which would raise
3400 a ValueError when the xreadlines.next() method was called.
3401
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003402- sys.exit() inadvertently allowed more than one argument.
Neal Norwitz0c766a02002-03-27 13:03:09 +00003403 An exception will now be raised if more than one argument is used.
3404
Gustavo Niemeyer17c5a332002-12-16 14:09:22 +00003405- Changed evaluation order of dictionary literals to conform to the
3406 general left to right evaluation order rule. Now {f1(): f2()} will
3407 evaluate f1 first.
Gustavo Niemeyer78429a62002-12-16 13:54:02 +00003408
Gustavo Niemeyer786ddb22002-12-16 18:12:53 +00003409- Fixed bug #521782: when a file was in non-blocking mode, file.read()
3410 could silently lose data or wrongly throw an unknown error.
3411
Neil Schemenauerb983aa02002-12-30 20:22:23 +00003412- The sq_repeat, sq_inplace_repeat, sq_concat and sq_inplace_concat
3413 slots are now always tried after trying the corresponding nb_* slots.
3414 This fixes a number of minor bugs (see bug #624807).
3415
Neal Norwitz74a032e2003-01-10 23:29:48 +00003416- Fix problem with dynamic loading on 64-bit AIX (see bug #639945).
3417
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003418Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003419-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003420
Raymond Hettinger9543b342003-01-18 23:22:20 +00003421- Added three operators to the operator module:
3422 operator.pow(a,b) which is equivalent to: a**b.
3423 operator.is_(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is b.
3424 operator.is_not(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is not b.
3425
Martin v. Löwis24a880b2002-12-31 12:55:15 +00003426- posix.openpty now works on all systems that have /dev/ptmx.
3427
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003428- A module zipimport exists to support importing code from zip
3429 archives.
3430
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00003431- The new datetime module supplies classes for manipulating dates and
3432 times. The basic design came from the Zope "fishbowl process", and
3433 favors practical commercial applications over calendar esoterica. See
3434
3435 http://www.zope.org/Members/fdrake/DateTimeWiki/FrontPage
3436
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00003437- _tkinter now returns Tcl objects, instead of strings. Objects which
3438 have Python equivalents are converted to Python objects, other objects
3439 are wrapped. This can be configured through the wantobjects method,
Martin v. Löwis8c8aa5d2002-11-26 21:39:48 +00003440 or Tkinter.wantobjects.
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00003441
Barry Warsawc27f4bd2002-12-30 21:03:26 +00003442- The PyBSDDB wrapper around the Sleepycat Berkeley DB library has
3443 been added as the package bsddb. The traditional bsddb module is
3444 still available in source code, but not built automatically anymore,
3445 and is now named bsddb185. This supports Berkeley DB versions from
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00003446 3.0 to 4.1. For help converting your databases from the old module (which
3447 probably used an obsolete version of Berkeley DB) to the new module, see
3448 the db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py scripts described in the Tools/Demos
3449 section above.
Martin v. Löwisef546b32002-11-19 08:12:57 +00003450
Martin v. Löwis677bde22002-11-23 22:08:15 +00003451- unicodedata was updated to Unicode 3.2. It supports normalization
3452 and names for Hangul syllables and CJK unified ideographs.
Martin v. Löwis7d41e292002-11-23 12:22:32 +00003453
Neal Norwitz94a83fd2002-11-02 17:46:24 +00003454- resource.getrlimit() now returns longs instead of ints.
3455
Martin v. Löwis080689c2002-10-26 14:42:02 +00003456- readline now dynamically adjusts its input/output stream if
3457 sys.stdin/stdout changes.
3458
Guido van Rossumba602972002-10-01 18:18:58 +00003459- The _tkinter module (and hence Tkinter) has dropped support for
3460 Tcl/Tk 8.0 and 8.1. Only Tcl/Tk versions 8.2, 8.3 and 8.4 are
3461 supported.
3462
Martin v. Löwis658009a2002-09-16 17:26:24 +00003463- cPickle.BadPickleGet is now a class.
3464
Martin v. Löwisa19bfe02002-10-16 18:28:36 +00003465- The time stamps in os.stat_result are floating point numbers
3466 after stat_float_times has been called.
Martin v. Löwis94717ed2002-09-09 14:24:16 +00003467
Neal Norwitzb5673922002-09-05 21:48:07 +00003468- If the size passed to mmap.mmap() is larger than the length of the
3469 file on non-Windows platforms, a ValueError is raised. [SF bug 585792]
3470
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003471- The xreadlines module is slated for obsolescence.
3472
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00003473- The strptime function in the time module is now always available (a
3474 Python implementation is used when the C library doesn't define it).
3475
Guido van Rossum9562bcf2002-06-14 21:31:18 +00003476- The 'new' module is no longer an extension, but a Python module that
3477 only exists for backwards compatibility. Its contents are no longer
3478 functions but callable type objects.
3479
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003480- The bsddb.*open functions can now take 'None' as a filename.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00003481 This will create a temporary in-memory bsddb that won't be
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003482 written to disk.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00003483
Martin v. Löwisb96152c2002-12-31 13:20:15 +00003484- posix.getloadavg, posix.lchown, posix.killpg, posix.mknod, and
3485 posix.getpgid have been added where available.
Martin v. Löwis06a83e92002-04-14 10:19:44 +00003486
Martin v. Löwisf0a46682002-11-03 17:20:12 +00003487- The locale module now exposes the C library's gettext interface. It
3488 also has a new function getpreferredencoding.
Martin v. Löwis2e64c342002-03-27 18:49:02 +00003489
Tim Petersfbf74f22002-03-14 19:06:01 +00003490- A security hole ("double free") was found in zlib-1.1.3, a popular
3491 third party compression library used by some Python modules. The
3492 hole was quickly plugged in zlib-1.1.4, and the Windows build of
3493 Python now ships with zlib-1.1.4.
3494
Martin v. Löwis688357e2002-04-08 21:28:20 +00003495- pwd, grp, and resource return enhanced tuples now, with symbolic
3496 field names.
Martin v. Löwis29001ff2002-03-01 10:47:37 +00003497
Martin v. Löwis99866332002-03-01 10:27:01 +00003498- array.array is now a type object. A new format character
3499 'u' indicates Py_UNICODE arrays. For those, .tounicode and
3500 .fromunicode methods are available. Arrays now support __iadd__
3501 and __imul__.
3502
Neal Norwitze790eae2002-01-01 21:14:12 +00003503- dl now builds on every system that has dlfcn.h. Failure in case
Martin v. Löwis93227272002-01-01 20:18:30 +00003504 of sizeof(int)!=sizeof(long)!=sizeof(void*) is delayed until dl.open
3505 is called.
3506
Skip Montanaro8e790e72002-09-03 13:25:17 +00003507- The sys module acquired a new attribute, api_version, which evaluates
3508 to the value of the PYTHON_API_VERSION macro with which the
3509 interpreter was compiled.
3510
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00003511- Fixed bug #470582: sre module would return a tuple (None, 'a', 'ab')
3512 when applying the regular expression '^((a)c)?(ab)$' on 'ab'. It now
3513 returns (None, None, 'ab'), as expected. Also fixed handling of
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00003514 lastindex/lastgroup match attributes in similar cases. For example,
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00003515 when running the expression r'(a)(b)?b' over 'ab', lastindex must be
3516 1, not 2.
3517
Gustavo Niemeyerc523b042002-11-07 03:28:56 +00003518- Fixed bug #581080: sre scanner was not checking the buffer limit
3519 before increasing the current pointer. This was creating an infinite
3520 loop in the search function, once the pointer exceeded the buffer
3521 limit.
3522
Thomas Heller95cb7e42002-11-07 16:23:55 +00003523- The os.fdopen function now enforces a file mode starting with the
3524 letter 'r', 'w' or 'a', otherwise a ValueError is raised. This fixes
3525 bug #623464.
3526
Greg Ward6c58d462003-01-03 18:02:15 +00003527- The linuxaudiodev module is now deprecated; it is being replaced by
3528 ossaudiodev. The interface has been extended to cover a lot more of
3529 OSS (see www.opensound.com), including most DSP ioctls and the
3530 OSS mixer API. Documentation forthcoming in 2.3a2.
3531
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003532Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003533-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003534
Guido van Rossum747f8062003-01-03 16:33:49 +00003535- imaplib.py now supports SSL (Tino Lange and Piers Lauder).
3536
Just van Rossum5e156ad2002-12-31 16:38:01 +00003537- Freeze's modulefinder.py has been moved to the standard library;
3538 slightly improved so it will issue less false missing submodule
3539 reports (see sf path #643711 for details). Documentation will follow
3540 with Python 2.3a2.
3541
Martin v. Löwis96a60e42002-12-31 13:11:54 +00003542- os.path exposes getctime.
3543
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003544- unittest.py now has two additional methods called assertAlmostEqual()
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003545 and failIfAlmostEqual(). They implement an approximate comparison
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003546 by rounding the difference between the two arguments and comparing
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003547 the result to zero. Approximate comparison is essential for
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003548 unit tests of floating point results.
3549
Raymond Hettingere11b5102002-12-25 16:37:19 +00003550- calendar.py now depends on the new datetime module rather than
3551 the time module. As a result, the range of allowable dates
3552 has been increased.
3553
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003554- pdb has a new 'j(ump)' command to select the next line to be
3555 executed.
3556
Thomas Heller1b3b49d2002-12-12 19:13:44 +00003557- The distutils created windows installers now can run a
3558 postinstallation script.
3559
Martin v. Löwis4581cfa2002-11-22 08:23:09 +00003560- doctest.testmod can now be called without argument, which means to
3561 test the current module.
3562
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003563- When canceling a server that implemented threading with a keyboard
Martin v. Löwisf86e8ef2002-11-22 08:08:44 +00003564 interrupt, the server would shut down but not terminate (waiting on
3565 client threads). A new member variable, daemon_threads, was added to
3566 the ThreadingMixIn class in SocketServer.py to make it explicit that
3567 this behavior needs to be controlled.
3568
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00003569- A new module, optparse, provides a fancy alternative to getopt for
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003570 command line parsing. It is a slightly modified version of Greg
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00003571 Ward's Optik package.
3572
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00003573- UserDict.py now defines a DictMixin class which defines all dictionary
3574 methods for classes that already have a minimum mapping interface.
3575 This greatly simplifies writing classes that need to be substitutable
3576 for dictionaries (such as the shelve module).
3577
3578- shelve.py now subclasses from UserDict.DictMixin. Now shelve supports
3579 all dictionary methods. This eases the transition to persistent
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003580 storage for scripts originally written with dictionaries in mind.
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00003581
Skip Montanaro3bf99e32002-12-08 18:36:24 +00003582- shelve.open and the various classes in shelve.py now accept an optional
3583 binary flag, which defaults to False. If True, the values stored in the
3584 shelf are binary pickles.
3585
Guido van Rossumfda06742002-11-13 16:29:18 +00003586- A new package, logging, implements the logging API defined by PEP
3587 282. The code is written by Vinay Sajip.
3588
Walter Dörwald4dbf1922002-11-06 16:53:44 +00003589- StreamReader, StreamReaderWriter and StreamRecoder in the codecs
3590 modules are iterators now.
3591
Tim Peters9288f952002-11-05 20:38:55 +00003592- gzip.py now handles files exceeding 2GB. Files over 4GB also work
3593 now (provided the OS supports it, and Python is configured with large
3594 file support), but in that case the underlying gzip file format can
3595 record only the least-significant 32 bits of the file size, so that
3596 some tools working with gzipped files may report an incorrect file
3597 size.
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00003598
Martin v. Löwis74b51ac2002-10-26 14:50:45 +00003599- xml.sax.saxutils.unescape has been added, to replace entity references
3600 with their entity value.
3601
Martin v. Löwis77ac4292002-10-15 15:11:13 +00003602- Queue.Queue.{put,get} now support an optional timeout argument.
3603
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00003604- Various features of Tk 8.4 are exposed in Tkinter.py. The multiple
3605 option of tkFileDialog is exposed as function askopenfile{,name}s.
Martin v. Löwis2ec36272002-10-13 10:22:08 +00003606
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00003607- Various configure methods of Tkinter have been stream-lined, so that
3608 tag_configure, image_configure, window_configure now return a
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00003609 dictionary when invoked with no argument.
Martin v. Löwis6ce13152002-10-10 14:36:13 +00003610
Guido van Rossum2b492b62002-10-09 21:40:48 +00003611- Importing the readline module now no longer has the side effect of
3612 calling setlocale(LC_CTYPE, ""). The initial "C" locale, or
3613 whatever locale is explicitly set by the user, is preserved. If you
3614 want repr() of 8-bit strings in your preferred encoding to preserve
3615 all printable characters of that encoding, you have to add the
3616 following code to your $PYTHONSTARTUP file or to your application's
3617 main():
3618
3619 import locale
3620 locale.setlocale(locale.LC_CTYPE, "")
3621
Martin v. Löwise9ce0b02002-10-07 13:23:24 +00003622- shutil.move was added. shutil.copytree now reports errors as an
3623 exception at the end, instead of printing error messages.
3624
Marc-André Lemburg97047e22002-10-04 11:55:21 +00003625- Encoding name normalization was generalized to not only
3626 replace hyphens with underscores, but also all other non-alphanumeric
3627 characters (with the exception of the dot which is used for Python
3628 package names during lookup). The aliases.py mapping was updated
3629 to the new standard.
3630
Walter Dörwald5ccaf8f2002-09-06 16:15:58 +00003631- mimetypes has two new functions: guess_all_extensions() which
3632 returns a list of all known extensions for a mime type, and
3633 add_type() which adds one mapping between a mime type and
3634 an extension to the database.
3635
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00003636- New module: sets, defines the class Set that implements a mutable
3637 set type using the keys of a dict to represent the set. There's
3638 also a class ImmutableSet which is useful when you need sets of sets
3639 or when you need to use sets as dict keys, and a class BaseSet which
Raymond Hettingeref8b9c62002-12-09 08:56:06 +00003640 is the base class of the two.
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00003641
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00003642- Added random.sample(population,k) for random sampling without replacement.
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00003643 Returns a k length list of unique elements chosen from the population.
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00003644
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00003645- random.randrange(-sys.maxint-1, sys.maxint) no longer raises
3646 OverflowError. That is, it now accepts any combination of 'start'
3647 and 'stop' arguments so long as each is in the range of Python's
3648 bounded integers.
3649
Raymond Hettinger40f62172002-12-29 23:03:38 +00003650- Thanks to Raymond Hettinger, random.random() now uses a new core
3651 generator. The Mersenne Twister algorithm is implemented in C,
3652 threadsafe, faster than the previous generator, has an astronomically
3653 large period (2**19937-1), creates random floats to full 53-bit
3654 precision, and may be the most widely tested random number generator
3655 in existence.
3656
3657 The random.jumpahead(n) method has different semantics for the new
3658 generator. Instead of jumping n steps ahead, it uses n and the
3659 existing state to create a new state. This means that jumpahead()
3660 continues to support multi-threaded code needing generators of
3661 non-overlapping sequences. However, it will break code which relies
3662 on jumpahead moving a specific number of steps forward.
3663
3664 The attributes random.whseed and random.__whseed have no meaning for
3665 the new generator. Code using these attributes should switch to a
3666 new class, random.WichmannHill which is provided for backward
3667 compatibility and to make an alternate generator available.
3668
Guido van Rossum4a57c332002-08-02 18:05:20 +00003669- New "algorithms" module: heapq, implements a heap queue. Thanks to
3670 Kevin O'Connor for the code and François Pinard for an entertaining
3671 write-up explaining the theory and practical uses of heaps.
3672
Marc-André Lemburg58e2ff22002-07-12 14:40:04 +00003673- New encoding for the Palm OS character set: palmos.
3674
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00003675- binascii.crc32() and the zipfile module had problems on some 64-bit
3676 platforms. These have been fixed. On a platform with 8-byte C longs,
3677 crc32() now returns a signed-extended 4-byte result, so that its value
3678 as a Python int is equal to the value computed a 32-bit platform.
3679
Martin v. Löwis7d650ca2002-06-30 15:05:00 +00003680- xml.dom.minidom.toxml and toprettyxml now take an optional encoding
3681 argument.
3682
Guido van Rossum9f7549b2002-06-10 21:39:42 +00003683- Some fixes in the copy module: when an object is copied through its
3684 __reduce__ method, there was no check for a __setstate__ method on
3685 the result [SF patch 565085]; deepcopy should treat instances of
3686 custom metaclasses the same way it treats instances of type 'type'
3687 [SF patch 560794].
3688
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00003689- Sockets now support timeout mode. After s.settimeout(T), where T is
3690 a float expressing seconds, subsequent operations raise an exception
3691 if they cannot be completed within T seconds. To disable timeout
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00003692 mode, use s.settimeout(None). There's also a module function,
3693 socket.setdefaulttimeout(T), which sets the default for all sockets
3694 created henceforth.
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00003695
3696- getopt.gnu_getopt was added. This supports GNU-style option
3697 processing, where options can be mixed with non-option arguments.
Martin v. Löwis446a25f2002-06-06 10:58:36 +00003698
Michael W. Hudsonb0dc1a32002-06-04 18:27:35 +00003699- Stop using strings for exceptions. String objects used for
3700 exceptions are now classes deriving from Exception. The objects
3701 changed were: Tkinter.TclError, bdb.BdbQuit, macpath.norm_error,
3702 tabnanny.NannyNag, and xdrlib.Error.
Neal Norwitzb5b5a262002-06-04 17:14:07 +00003703
Walter Dörwald474458d2002-06-04 15:16:29 +00003704- Constants BOM_UTF8, BOM_UTF16, BOM_UTF16_LE, BOM_UTF16_BE,
3705 BOM_UTF32, BOM_UTF32_LE and BOM_UTF32_BE that represent the Byte
3706 Order Mark in UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 encodings for little and
3707 big endian systems were added to the codecs module. The old names
3708 BOM32_* and BOM64_* were off by a factor of 2.
3709
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00003710- Added conversion functions math.degrees() and math.radians().
Raymond Hettinger87f59ee2002-05-13 04:17:32 +00003711
Raymond Hettinger866964c2002-12-14 19:51:34 +00003712- math.log() now takes an optional argument: math.log(x[, base]).
3713
Raymond Hettinger9b1df1d2002-05-12 06:07:21 +00003714- ftplib.retrlines() now tests for callback is None rather than testing
3715 for False. Was causing an error when given a callback object which
3716 was callable but also returned len() as zero. The change may
3717 create new breakage if the caller relied on the undocumented behavior
3718 and called with callback set to [] or some other False value not
3719 identical to None.
3720
Tim Peters46c04e12002-05-05 20:40:00 +00003721- random.gauss() uses a piece of hidden state used by nothing else,
3722 and the .seed() and .whseed() methods failed to reset it. In other
3723 words, setting the seed didn't completely determine the sequence of
3724 results produced by random.gauss(). It does now. Programs repeatedly
3725 mixing calls to a seed method with calls to gauss() may see different
3726 results now.
3727
Fred Drake7f781c92002-05-01 20:33:53 +00003728- The pickle.Pickler class grew a clear_memo() method to mimic that
3729 provided by cPickle.Pickler.
3730
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003731- difflib's SequenceMatcher class now does a dynamic analysis of
3732 which elements are so frequent as to constitute noise. For
3733 comparing files as sequences of lines, this generally works better
3734 than the IS_LINE_JUNK function, and function ndiff's linejunk
3735 argument defaults to None now as a result. A happy benefit is
3736 that SequenceMatcher may run much faster now when applied
3737 to large files with many duplicate lines (for example, C program
3738 text with lots of repeated "}" and "return NULL;" lines).
3739
Guido van Rossum256705b2002-04-23 13:29:43 +00003740- New Text.dump() method in Tkinter module.
3741
Marc-André Lemburg1ec71ea2002-04-17 20:33:40 +00003742- New distutils commands for building packagers were added to
3743 support pkgtool on Solaris and swinstall on HP-UX.
3744
3745- distutils now has a new abstract binary packager base class
3746 command/bdist_packager, which simplifies writing packagers.
3747 This will hopefully provide the missing bits to encourage
3748 people to submit more packagers, e.g. for Debian, FreeBSD
3749 and other systems.
3750
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00003751- The UTF-16, -LE and -BE stream readers now raise a
3752 NotImplementedError for all calls to .readline(). Previously, they
3753 used to just produce garbage or fail with an encoding error --
3754 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 +00003755 work well with these.
3756
Martin v. Löwis5c137c22002-03-18 12:44:08 +00003757- compileall now supports quiet operation.
3758
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003759- The BaseHTTPServer now implements optional HTTP/1.1 persistent
Martin v. Löwis587c98c2002-03-17 18:37:22 +00003760 connections.
3761
Marc-André Lemburga5d2b4c2002-02-16 18:23:30 +00003762- socket module: the SSL support was broken out of the main
3763 _socket module C helper and placed into a new _ssl helper
3764 which now gets imported by socket.py if available and working.
3765
Marc-André Lemburg37aa5802002-02-10 21:42:47 +00003766- encodings package: added aliases for all supported IANA character
3767 sets
3768
Guido van Rossum606fe4e2001-12-28 20:57:14 +00003769- ftplib: to safeguard the user's privacy, anonymous login will use
3770 "anonymous@" as default password, rather than the real user and host
3771 name.
3772
Fred Drake36736122002-01-10 13:50:31 +00003773- webbrowser: tightened up the command passed to os.system() so that
3774 arbitrary shell code can't be executed because a bogus URL was
3775 passed in.
3776
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00003777- gettext.translation has an optional fallback argument, and
Martin v. Löwisa55ffae2002-01-11 06:58:49 +00003778 gettext.find an optional all argument. Translations will now fallback
Martin v. Löwisd8996052002-11-21 21:45:32 +00003779 on a per-message basis. The module supports plural forms, by means
3780 of gettext.[d]ngettext and Translation.[u]ngettext.
Martin v. Löwis1be64192002-01-11 06:33:28 +00003781
Martin v. Löwis9668b932002-01-12 11:27:42 +00003782- distutils bdist commands now offer a --skip-build option.
3783
Walter Dörwaldb25c2b02002-03-21 10:38:40 +00003784- warnings.warn now accepts a Warning instance as first argument.
3785
Fred Drakefed7e852002-04-04 19:36:15 +00003786- The xml.sax.expatreader.ExpatParser class will no longer create
3787 circular references by using itself as the locator that gets passed
3788 to the content handler implementation. [SF bug #535474]
3789
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00003790- The email.Parser.Parser class now properly parses strings regardless
3791 of their line endings, which can be any of \r, \n, or \r\n (CR, LF,
3792 or CRLF). Also, the Header class's constructor default arguments
3793 has changed slightly so that an explicit maxlinelen value is always
Barry Warsaw497e5c42002-12-30 19:27:08 +00003794 honored, and so unicode conversion error handling can be specified.
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00003795
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003796- distutils' build_ext command now links C++ extensions with the C++
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00003797 compiler available in the Makefile or CXX environment variable, if
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003798 running under \*nix.
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00003799
3800- New module bz2: provides a comprehensive interface for the bz2 compression
3801 library. It implements a complete file interface, one-shot (de)compression
3802 functions, and types for sequential (de)compression.
3803
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003804- New pdb command 'pp' which is like 'p' except that it pretty-prints
Barry Warsaw5d8d6182002-11-05 22:41:33 +00003805 the value of its expression argument.
3806
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00003807- Now bdist_rpm distutils command understands a verify_script option in
3808 the config file, including the contents of the referred filename in
3809 the "%verifyscript" section of the rpm spec file.
3810
Gustavo Niemeyer1456fde2002-11-25 17:25:04 +00003811- Fixed bug #495695: webbrowser module would run graphic browsers in a
3812 unix environment even if DISPLAY was not set. Also, support for
3813 skipstone browser was included.
3814
Gustavo Niemeyerd5ae01a2002-12-16 13:11:57 +00003815- Fixed bug #636769: rexec would run unallowed code if subclasses of
3816 strings were used as parameters for certain functions.
3817
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003818Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003819-----------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003820
Martin v. Löwis0d1fdea2002-11-22 08:36:54 +00003821- pygettext.py now supports globbing on Windows, and accepts module
3822 names in addition to accepting file names.
3823
Guido van Rossum923e4ef2002-09-17 20:58:59 +00003824- The SGI demos (Demo/sgi) have been removed. Nobody thought they
3825 were interesting any more. (The SGI library modules and extensions
3826 are still there; it is believed that at least some of these are
3827 still used and useful.)
3828
Fred Drake40813b12002-08-05 15:24:19 +00003829- IDLE supports the new encoding declarations (PEP 263); it can also
3830 deal with legacy 8-bit files if they use the locale's encoding. It
3831 allows non-ASCII strings in the interactive shell and executes them
3832 in the locale's encoding.
Martin v. Löwis98ce7b72002-08-05 15:11:26 +00003833
Marc-André Lemburg46260092002-04-04 16:17:11 +00003834- freeze.py now produces binaries which can import shared modules,
3835 unlike before when this failed due to missing symbol exports in
3836 the generated binary.
3837
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003838Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003839-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003840
Martin v. Löwisdc461752002-11-06 21:59:33 +00003841- On Unix, IDLE is now installed automatically.
3842
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00003843- The fpectl module is not built by default; it's dangerous or useless
3844 except in the hands of experts.
3845
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003846- The public Python C API will generally be declared using PyAPI_FUNC
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00003847 and PyAPI_DATA macros, while Python extension module init functions
3848 will be declared with PyMODINIT_FUNC. DL_EXPORT/DL_IMPORT macros
3849 are deprecated.
Neal Norwitz1389f3e2002-07-22 13:21:10 +00003850
Tim Petersc6a3ff62002-07-08 22:11:52 +00003851- A bug was fixed that could cause COUNT_ALLOCS builds to segfault, or
3852 get into infinite loops, when a new-style class got garbage-collected.
3853 Unfortunately, to avoid this, the way COUNT_ALLOCS works requires
3854 that new-style classes be immortal in COUNT_ALLOCS builds. Note that
3855 COUNT_ALLOCS is not enabled by default, in either release or debug
3856 builds, and that new-style classes are immortal only in COUNT_ALLOCS
3857 builds.
3858
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00003859- Compiling out the cyclic garbage collector is no longer an option.
3860 The old symbol WITH_CYCLE_GC is now ignored, and Python.h arranges
3861 that it's always defined (for the benefit of any extension modules
3862 that may be conditionalizing on it). A bonus is that any extension
3863 type participating in cyclic gc can choose to participate in the
3864 Py_TRASHCAN mechanism now too; in the absence of cyclic gc, this used
3865 to require editing the core to teach the trashcan mechanism about the
3866 new type.
3867
Martin v. Löwis0cec0ff2002-07-28 16:33:45 +00003868- According to Annex F of the current C standard,
Tim Peters1de41bf2002-07-03 03:31:20 +00003869
3870 The Standard C macro HUGE_VAL and its float and long double analogs,
3871 HUGE_VALF and HUGE_VALL, expand to expressions whose values are
3872 positive infinities.
3873
3874 Python only uses the double HUGE_VAL, and only to #define its own symbol
3875 Py_HUGE_VAL. Some platforms have incorrect definitions for HUGE_VAL.
3876 pyport.h used to try to worm around that, but the workarounds triggered
3877 other bugs on other platforms, so we gave up. If your platform defines
3878 HUGE_VAL incorrectly, you'll need to #define Py_HUGE_VAL to something
3879 that works on your platform. The only instance of this I'm sure about
3880 is on an unknown subset of Cray systems, described here:
3881
3882 http://www.cray.com/swpubs/manuals/SN-2194_2.0/html-SN-2194_2.0/x3138.htm
3883
3884 Presumably 2.3a1 breaks such systems. If anyone uses such a system, help!
3885
Martin v. Löwisa3fb4f72002-06-09 13:33:54 +00003886- The configure option --without-doc-strings can be used to remove the
3887 doc strings from the builtin functions and modules; this reduces the
3888 size of the executable.
3889
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00003890- The universal newlines option (PEP 278) is on by default. On Unix
3891 it can be disabled by passing --without-universal-newlines to the
3892 configure script. On other platforms, remove
3893 WITH_UNIVERSAL_NEWLINES from pyconfig.h.
Tim Peters639295f2002-04-21 07:30:30 +00003894
Martin v. Löwis1142de32002-03-29 16:28:31 +00003895- On Unix, a shared libpython2.3.so can be created with --enable-shared.
3896
Tim Peters8deda702002-03-30 10:06:07 +00003897- All uses of the CACHE_HASH, INTERN_STRINGS, and DONT_SHARE_SHORT_STRINGS
3898 preprocessor symbols were eliminated. The internal decisions they
3899 controlled stopped being experimental long ago.
Tim Peters1f7df352002-03-29 03:29:08 +00003900
Fred Drake7d28b732002-05-02 21:17:00 +00003901- The tools used to build the documentation now work under Cygwin as
3902 well as Unix.
3903
Skip Montanaro57454e52002-06-14 20:30:31 +00003904- The bsddb and dbm module builds have been changed to try and avoid version
3905 skew problems and disable linkage with Berkeley DB 1.85 unless the
3906 installer knows what s/he's doing. See the section on building these
3907 modules in the README file for details.
3908
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003909C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003910-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003911
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00003912- PyNumber_Check() now returns true for string and unicode objects.
3913 This is a result of these types having a partially defined
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00003914 tp_as_number slot. (This is not a feature, but an indication that
Walter Dörwalda1a61f92002-11-19 21:20:25 +00003915 PyNumber_Check() is not very useful to determine numeric behavior.
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00003916 It may be deprecated.)
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00003917
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00003918- The string object's layout has changed: the pointer member
3919 ob_sinterned has been replaced by an int member ob_sstate. On some
3920 platforms (e.g. most 64-bit systems) this may change the offset of
3921 the ob_sval member, so as a precaution the API_VERSION has been
3922 incremented. The apparently unused feature of "indirect interned
3923 strings", supported by the ob_sinterned member, is gone. Interned
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003924 strings are now usually mortal; there is a new API,
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00003925 PyString_InternImmortal() that creates immortal interned strings.
3926 (The ob_sstate member can only take three values; however, while
3927 making it a char saves a few bytes per string object on average, in
3928 it also slowed things down a bit because ob_sval was no longer
3929 aligned.)
3930
Guido van Rossumfdb86482002-08-14 21:20:32 +00003931- The Py_InitModule*() functions now accept NULL for the 'methods'
3932 argument. Modules without global functions are becoming more common
3933 now that factories can be types rather than functions.
3934
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00003935- New C API PyUnicode_FromOrdinal() which exposes unichr() at C
3936 level.
3937
Thomas Heller085358a2002-07-29 14:27:41 +00003938- New functions PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErr() and
3939 PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErrWithFilename(). Similar to
3940 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErrWithFilename() and
3941 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErr(), but they allow to specify
3942 the exception type to raise. Available on Windows.
3943
Tim Peters7c321a82002-07-09 02:57:01 +00003944- Py_FatalError() is now declared as taking a const char* argument. It
3945 was previously declared without const. This should not affect working
3946 code.
3947
Martin v. Löwis01f94bd2002-05-08 08:44:21 +00003948- Added new macro PySequence_ITEM(o, i) that directly calls
3949 sq_item without rechecking that o is a sequence and without
3950 adjusting for negative indices.
3951
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00003952- PyRange_New() now raises ValueError if the fourth argument is not 1.
3953 This is part of the removal of deprecated features of the xrange
3954 object.
3955
Guido van Rossum517c7d42002-04-26 02:49:14 +00003956- PyNumber_Coerce() and PyNumber_CoerceEx() now also invoke the type's
3957 coercion if both arguments have the same type but this type has the
3958 CHECKTYPES flag set. This is to better support proxies.
3959
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003960- The type of tp_free has been changed from "``void (*)(PyObject *)``" to
3961 "``void (*)(void *)``".
Neil Schemenauer9344b142002-04-12 23:00:08 +00003962
3963- PyObject_Del, PyObject_GC_Del are now functions instead of macros.
3964
Guido van Rossum0986d822002-04-08 01:38:42 +00003965- A type can now inherit its metatype from its base type. Previously,
3966 when PyType_Ready() was called, if ob_type was found to be NULL, it
3967 was always set to &PyType_Type; now it is set to base->ob_type,
3968 where base is tp_base, defaulting to &PyObject_Type.
3969
3970- PyType_Ready() accidentally did not inherit tp_is_gc; now it does.
3971
Neil Schemenauerc9abc1d2002-05-08 14:14:41 +00003972- The PyCore_* family of APIs have been removed.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00003973
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003974- The "u#" parser marker will now pass through Unicode objects as-is
Marc-André Lemburg3e3eacb2002-01-09 16:21:27 +00003975 without going through the buffer API.
3976
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003977- The enumerators of cmp_op have been renamed to use the prefix ``PyCmp_``.
Martin v. Löwis7198a522002-01-01 19:59:11 +00003978
Tim Peters10a3bb52001-12-25 19:07:38 +00003979- An old #define of ANY as void has been removed from pyport.h. This
3980 hasn't been used since Python's pre-ANSI days, and the #define has
3981 been marked as obsolete since then. SF bug 495548 says it created
3982 conflicts with other packages, so keeping it around wasn't harmless.
3983
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003984- Because Python's magic number scheme broke on January 1st, we decided
3985 to stop Python development. Thanks for all the fish!
3986
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00003987- Some of us don't like fish, so we changed Python's magic number
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00003988 scheme to a new one. See Python/import.c for details.
3989
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003990New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003991-------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003992
Martin v. Löwis79acb9e2002-12-06 12:48:53 +00003993- OpenVMS is now supported.
3994
Martin v. Löwisf90ae202002-06-11 06:22:31 +00003995- AtheOS is now supported.
3996
Andrew MacIntyre161ad0e2002-08-04 07:25:58 +00003997- the EMX runtime environment on OS/2 is now supported.
3998
Martin v. Löwisa6e97582002-01-01 18:41:33 +00003999- GNU/Hurd is now supported.
4000
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004001Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004002-----
4003
Fred Drake4dd0f7e2002-11-26 21:44:56 +00004004- The regrtest.py script's -u option now provides a way to say "allow
4005 all resources except this one." For example, to allow everything
4006 except bsddb, give the option '-uall,-bsddb'.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004007
4008Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004009-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004010
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00004011- The Windows distribution now ships with version 4.0.14 of the
4012 Sleepycat Berkeley database library. This should be a huge
4013 improvement over the previous Berkeley DB 1.85, which had many
4014 bugs.
4015 XXX What are the licensing issues here?
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004016 XXX If a user has a database created with a previous version of
Tim Peters84c7a3f2002-11-23 18:48:06 +00004017 XXX Python, what must they do to convert it?
4018 XXX I'm still not sure how to link this thing (see PCbuild/readme.txt).
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00004019 XXX The version # is likely to change before 2.3a1.
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00004020
4021- The Windows distribution now ships with a Secure Sockets Library (SLL)
Mark Hammondc3de0082002-12-03 06:16:08 +00004022 module (_ssl.pyd)
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00004023
Tim Peters857fb4c2002-11-14 23:31:58 +00004024- The Windows distribution now ships with Tcl/Tk version 8.4.1 (it
4025 previously shipped with Tcl/Tk 8.3.2).
4026
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00004027- When Python is built under a Microsoft compiler, sys.version now
4028 includes the compiler version number (_MSC_VER). For example, under
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004029 MSVC 6, sys.version contains the substring "MSC v.1200 ". 1200 is
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00004030 the value of _MSC_VER under MSVC 6.
4031
Tim Peters08e72952002-04-16 20:48:01 +00004032- Sometimes the uninstall executable (UNWISE.EXE) vanishes. One cause
4033 of that has been fixed in the installer (disabled Wise's "delete in-
4034 use files" uninstall option).
4035
Guido van Rossum181e41a2002-04-06 00:23:25 +00004036- Fixed a bug in urllib's proxy handling in Windows. [SF bug #503031]
4037
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00004038- The installer now installs Start menu shortcuts under (the local
4039 equivalent of) "All Users" when doing an Admin install.
4040
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00004041- file.truncate([newsize]) now works on Windows for all newsize values.
4042 It used to fail if newsize didn't fit in 32 bits, reflecting a
4043 limitation of MS _chsize (which is no longer used).
4044
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00004045- os.waitpid() is now implemented for Windows, and can be used to block
4046 until a specified process exits. This is similar to, but not exactly
4047 the same as, os.waitpid() on POSIX systems. If you're waiting for
4048 a specific process whose pid was obtained from one of the spawn()
4049 functions, the same Python os.waitpid() code works across platforms.
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00004050 See the docs for details. The docs were changed to clarify that
4051 spawn functions return, and waitpid requires, a process handle on
4052 Windows (not the same thing as a Windows process id).
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00004053
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00004054- New tempfile.TemporaryFile implementation for Windows: this doesn't
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004055 need a TemporaryFileWrapper wrapper anymore, and should be immune
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00004056 to a nasty problem: before 2.3, if you got a temp file on Windows, it
4057 got wrapped in an object whose close() method first closed the
4058 underlying file, then deleted the file. This usually worked fine.
4059 However, the spawn family of functions on Windows create (at a low C
4060 level) the same set of open files in the spawned process Q as were
4061 open in the spawning process P. If a temp file f was among them, then
4062 doing f.close() in P first closed P's C-level file handle on f, but Q's
4063 C-level file handle on f remained open, so the attempt in P to delete f
4064 blew up with a "Permission denied" error (Windows doesn't allow
4065 deleting open files). This was surprising, subtle, and difficult to
4066 work around.
4067
4068- The os module now exports all the symbolic constants usable with the
4069 low-level os.open() on Windows: the new constants in 2.3 are
4070 O_NOINHERIT, O_SHORT_LIVED, O_TEMPORARY, O_RANDOM and O_SEQUENTIAL.
4071 The others were also available in 2.2: O_APPEND, O_BINARY, O_CREAT,
4072 O_EXCL, O_RDONLY, O_RDWR, O_TEXT, O_TRUNC and O_WRONLY. Contrary
4073 to Microsoft docs, O_SHORT_LIVED does not seem to imply O_TEMPORARY
4074 (so specify both if you want both; note that neither is useful unless
4075 specified with O_CREAT too).
4076
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004077Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004078----
4079
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004080- Mac/Relnotes is gone, the release notes are now here.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004081
Just van Rossume1ebd802003-02-10 10:06:18 +00004082- Python (the OSX-only, unix-based version, not the OS9-compatible CFM
4083 version) now fully supports unicode strings as arguments to various file
4084 system calls, eg. open(), file(), os.stat() and os.listdir().
4085
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004086- The current naming convention for Python on the Macintosh is that MacPython
4087 refers to the unix-based OSX-only version, and MacPython-OS9 refers to the
4088 CFM-based version that runs on both OS9 and OSX.
4089
4090- All MacPython-OS9 functionality is now available in an OSX unix build,
4091 including the Carbon modules, the IDE, OSA support, etc. A lot of this
4092 will only work correctly in a framework build, though, because you cannot
4093 talk to the window manager unless your application is run from a .app
4094 bundle. There is a command line tool "pythonw" that runs your script
4095 with an interpreter living in such a .app bundle, this interpreter should
4096 be used to run any Python script using the window manager (including
4097 Tkinter or wxPython scripts).
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00004098
Jack Jansen8bb80db2002-12-30 22:42:43 +00004099- Most of Mac/Lib has moved to Lib/plat-mac, which is again used both in
4100 MacPython-OSX and MacPython-OS9. The only modules remaining in Mac/Lib
4101 are specifically for MacPython-OS9 (CFM support, preference resources, etc).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004102
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004103- A new utility PythonLauncher will start a Python interpreter when a .py or
4104 .pyw script is double-clicked in the Finder. By default .py scripts are
4105 run with a normal Python interpreter in a Terminal window and .pyw
4106 files are run with a window-aware pythonw interpreter without a Terminal
4107 window, but all this can be customized.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004108
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004109- MacPython-OS9 is now Carbon-only, so it runs on Mac OS 9 or Mac OS X and
4110 possibly on Mac OS 8.6 with the right CarbonLib installed, but not on earlier
4111 releases.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004112
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004113- Many tools such as BuildApplet.py and gensuitemodule.py now support a command
4114 line interface too.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004115
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004116- All the Carbon classes are now PEP253 compliant, meaning that you can
4117 subclass them from Python. Most of the attributes have gone, you should
4118 now use the accessor function call API, which is also what Apple's
4119 documentation uses. Some attributes such as grafport.visRgn are still
4120 available for convenience.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004121
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004122- New Carbon modules File (implementing the APIs in Files.h and Aliases.h)
4123 and Folder (APIs from Folders.h). The old macfs builtin module is
4124 gone, and replaced by a Python wrapper around the new modules.
4125
4126- Pathname handling should now be fully consistent: MacPython-OSX always uses
4127 unix pathnames and MacPython-OS9 always uses colon-separated Mac pathnames
4128 (also when running on Mac OS X).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004129
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004130- New Carbon modules Help and AH give access to the Carbon Help Manager.
4131 There are hooks in the IDE to allow accessing the Python documentation
4132 (and Apple's Carbon and Cocoa documentation) through the Help Viewer.
4133 See Mac/OSX/README for converting the Python documentation to a
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004134 Help Viewer compatible form and installing it.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004135
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004136- OSA support has been redesigned and the generated Python classes now
4137 mirror the inheritance defined by the underlying OSA classes.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004138
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004139- MacPython no longer maps both \r and \n to \n on input for any text file.
4140 This feature has been replaced by universal newline support (PEP278).
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00004141
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00004142- The default encoding for Python sourcefiles in MacPython-OS9 is no longer
Guido van Rossum16c85172003-02-20 01:52:48 +00004143 mac-roman (or whatever your local Mac encoding was) but "ascii", like on
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00004144 other platforms. If you really need sourcefiles with Mac characters in them
4145 you can change this in site.py.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004146
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00004147
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004148What's New in Python 2.2 final?
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004149===============================
4150
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004151*Release date: 21-Dec-2001*
4152
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004153Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004154--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004155
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004156- pickle.py, cPickle: allow pickling instances of new-style classes
4157 with a custom metaclass.
4158
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004159Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004160-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004161
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004162- weakref proxy object: when comparing, unwrap both arguments if both
4163 are proxies.
4164
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004165Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004166-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004167
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004168- binascii.b2a_base64(): fix a potential buffer overrun when encoding
4169 very short strings.
4170
4171- cPickle: the obscure "fast" mode was suspected of causing stack
4172 overflows on the Mac. Hopefully fixed this by setting the recursion
4173 limit much smaller. If the limit is too low (it only affects
4174 performance), you can change it by defining PY_CPICKLE_FAST_LIMIT
4175 when compiling cPickle.c (or in pyconfig.h).
4176
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004177Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004178-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004179
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004180- dumbdbm.py: fixed a dumb old bug (the file didn't get synched at
4181 close or delete time).
4182
4183- rfc822.py: fixed a bug where the address '<>' was converted to None
4184 instead of an empty string (also fixes the email.Utils module).
4185
4186- xmlrpclib.py: version 1.0.0; uses precision for doubles.
4187
4188- test suite: the pickle and cPickle tests were not executing any code
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004189 when run from the standard regression test.
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004190
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004191Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004192-----------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004193
4194Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004195-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004196
4197C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004198-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004199
4200New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004201-------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004202
4203Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004204-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004205
4206Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004207-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004208
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004209- distutils package: fixed broken Windows installers (bdist_wininst).
4210
4211- tempfile.py: prevent mysterious warnings when TemporaryFileWrapper
4212 instances are deleted at process exit time.
4213
4214- socket.py: prevent mysterious warnings when socket instances are
4215 deleted at process exit time.
4216
4217- posixmodule.c: fix a Windows crash with stat() of a filename ending
4218 in backslash.
4219
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004220Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004221----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004222
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004223- The Carbon toolbox modules have been upgraded to Universal Headers
4224 3.4, and experimental CoreGraphics and CarbonEvents modules have
4225 been added. All only for framework-enabled MacOSX.
4226
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004227
Tim Peters6272dfd2001-12-13 19:34:00 +00004228What's New in Python 2.2c1?
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004229===========================
4230
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004231*Release date: 14-Dec-2001*
4232
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004233Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004234--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004235
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004236- Guido's tutorial introduction to the new type/class features has
4237 been extensively updated. See
4238
4239 http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html
4240
4241 That remains the primary documentation in this area.
4242
Guido van Rossum33bab012001-12-05 22:45:48 +00004243- Fixed a leak: instance variables declared with __slots__ were never
4244 deleted!
4245
Guido van Rossum4b800852001-12-03 00:54:52 +00004246- The "delete attribute" method of descriptor objects is called
4247 __delete__, not __del__. In previous releases, it was mistakenly
4248 called __del__, which created an unfortunate overloading condition
4249 with finalizers. (The "get attribute" and "set attribute" methods
4250 are still called __get__ and __set__, respectively.)
4251
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00004252- Some subtle issues with the super built-in were fixed:
4253
4254 (a) When super itself is subclassed, its __get__ method would still
4255 return an instance of the base class (i.e., of super).
4256
4257 (b) super(C, C()).__class__ would return C rather than super. This
4258 is confusing. To fix this, I decided to change the semantics of
4259 super so that it only applies to code attributes, not to data
4260 attributes. After all, overriding data attributes is not
4261 supported anyway.
4262
4263 (c) The __get__ method didn't check whether the argument was an
4264 instance of the type used in creation of the super instance.
4265
Guido van Rossumcd7b7d62001-12-04 21:02:07 +00004266- Previously, hash() of an instance of a subclass of a mutable type
4267 (list or dictionary) would return some value, rather than raising
4268 TypeError. This has been fixed. Also, directly calling
4269 dict.__hash__ and list.__hash__ now raises the same TypeError
4270 (previously, these were the same as object.__hash__).
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00004271
Guido van Rossumd331cb52001-12-05 19:46:42 +00004272- New-style objects now support deleting their __dict__. This is for
4273 all intents and purposes equivalent to assigning a brand new empty
4274 dictionary, but saves space if the object is not used further.
4275
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004276Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004277-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004278
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004279- -Qnew now works as documented in PEP 238: when -Qnew is passed on
4280 the command line, all occurrences of "/" use true division instead
4281 of classic division. See the PEP for details. Note that "all"
4282 means all instances in library and 3rd-party modules, as well as in
4283 your own code. As the PEP says, -Qnew is intended for use only in
4284 educational environments with control over the libraries in use.
Tim Petersbf72fe22001-12-11 21:43:14 +00004285 Note that test_coercion.py in the standard Python test suite fails
4286 under -Qnew; this is expected, and won't be repaired until true
4287 division becomes the default (in the meantime, test_coercion is
4288 testing the current rules).
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004289
Fred Drake6c01e252001-12-14 17:08:12 +00004290- complex() now only allows the first argument to be a string
4291 argument, and raises TypeError if either the second arg is a string
4292 or if the second arg is specified when the first is a string.
4293
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004294Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004295-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004296
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00004297- gc.get_referents was renamed to gc.get_referrers.
4298
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004299Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004300-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004301
Tim Peters25059d32001-12-07 20:35:43 +00004302- Functions in the os.spawn() family now release the global interpreter
4303 lock around calling the platform spawn. They should always have done
4304 this, but did not before 2.2c1. Multithreaded programs calling
4305 an os.spawn function with P_WAIT will no longer block all Python threads
4306 until the spawned program completes. It's possible that some programs
4307 relies on blocking, although more likely by accident than by design.
4308
Martin v. Löwis3a89b2b2001-11-25 14:35:58 +00004309- webbrowser defaults to netscape.exe on OS/2 now.
4310
Martin v. Löwis652e1912001-11-25 14:50:56 +00004311- Tix.ResizeHandle exposes detach_widget, hide, and show.
4312
Martin v. Löwis714d2e22001-12-02 12:26:03 +00004313- The charset alias windows_1252 has been added.
4314
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004315- types.StringTypes is a tuple containing the defined string types;
4316 usually this will be (str, unicode), but if Python was compiled
4317 without Unicode support it will be just (str,).
4318
4319- The pulldom and minidom modules were synchronized to PyXML.
4320
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004321Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004322-----------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004323
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004324- A new script called Tools/scripts/google.py was added, which fires
4325 off a search on Google.
4326
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004327Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004328-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004329
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004330- Note that release builds of Python should arrange to define the
4331 preprocessor symbol NDEBUG on the command line (or equivalent).
4332 In the 2.2 pre-release series we tried to define this by magic in
4333 Python.h instead, but it proved to cause problems for extension
4334 authors. The Unix, Windows and Mac builds now all define NDEBUG in
4335 release builds via cmdline (or equivalent) instead. Ports to
4336 other platforms should do likewise.
4337
Jack Jansen1999ef42001-12-06 21:47:20 +00004338- It is no longer necessary to use --with-suffix when building on a
4339 case-insensitive file system (such as Mac OS X HFS+). In the build
4340 directory an extension is used, but not in the installed python.
4341
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004342C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004343-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004344
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00004345- New function PyDict_MergeFromSeq2() exposes the builtin dict
4346 constructor's logic for updating a dictionary from an iterable object
4347 producing key-value pairs.
4348
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00004349- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() requires that the number of entries in
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00004350 the keyword list equal the number of argument specifiers. This
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00004351 wasn't checked correctly, and PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords could even
4352 dump core in some bad cases. This has been repaired. As a result,
4353 PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords may raise RuntimeError in bad cases that
4354 previously went unchallenged.
4355
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004356New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004357-------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004358
4359Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004360-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004361
4362Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004363-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004364
4365Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004366----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004367
Jack Jansenffa260f2001-12-06 21:14:00 +00004368- In unix-Python on Mac OS X (and darwin) sys.platform is now "darwin",
4369 without any trailing digits.
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004370
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004371- Changed logic for finding python home in Mac OS X framework Pythons.
4372 Now sys.executable points to the executable again, in stead of to
4373 the shared library. The latter is used only for locating the python
4374 home.
4375
4376
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004377What's New in Python 2.2b2?
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004378===========================
4379
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004380*Release date: 16-Nov-2001*
4381
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004382Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004383--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004384
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00004385- Multiple inheritance mixing new-style and classic classes in the
4386 list of base classes is now allowed, so this works now:
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004387
4388 class Classic: pass
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00004389 class Mixed(Classic, object): pass
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004390
4391 The MRO (method resolution order) for each base class is respected
4392 according to its kind, but the MRO for the derived class is computed
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004393 using new-style MRO rules if any base class is a new-style class.
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004394 This needs to be documented.
4395
Tim Petersa427a2b2001-10-29 22:25:45 +00004396- The new builtin dictionary() constructor, and dictionary type, have
4397 been renamed to dict. This reflects a decade of common usage.
4398
Guido van Rossum3fc08d22001-11-15 20:33:10 +00004399- dict() now accepts an iterable object producing 2-sequences. For
4400 example, dict(d.items()) == d for any dictionary d. The argument,
4401 and the elements of the argument, can be any iterable objects.
4402
Guido van Rossum7ad2d1e2001-10-29 22:11:00 +00004403- New-style classes can now have a __del__ method, which is called
4404 when the instance is deleted (just like for classic classes).
4405
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004406- Assignment to object.__dict__ is now possible, for objects that are
4407 instances of new-style classes that have a __dict__ (unless the base
4408 class forbids it).
4409
Guido van Rossumc8e56452001-10-22 00:43:43 +00004410- Methods of built-in types now properly check for keyword arguments
4411 (formerly these were silently ignored). The only built-in methods
4412 that take keyword arguments are __call__, __init__ and __new__.
4413
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004414- The socket function has been converted to a type; see below.
4415
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004416Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004417-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004418
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00004419- Assignment to __debug__ raises SyntaxError at compile-time. This
4420 was promised when 2.1c1 was released as "What's New in Python 2.1c1"
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004421 (see below) says.
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00004422
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004423- Clarified the error messages for unsupported operands to an operator
4424 (like 1 + '').
4425
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004426Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004427-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004428
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004429- mmap has a new keyword argument, "access", allowing a uniform way for
4430 both Windows and Unix users to create read-only, write-through and
4431 copy-on-write memory mappings. This was previously possible only on
4432 Unix. A new keyword argument was required to support this in a
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004433 uniform way because the mmap() signatures had diverged across
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004434 platforms. Thanks to Jay T Miller for repairing this!
4435
Tim Peters169ded02001-11-03 19:57:21 +00004436- By default, the gc.garbage list now contains only those instances in
4437 unreachable cycles that have __del__ methods; in 2.1 it contained all
4438 instances in unreachable cycles. "Instances" here has been generalized
4439 to include instances of both new-style and old-style classes.
4440
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004441- The socket module defines a new method for socket objects,
4442 sendall(). This is like send() but may make multiple calls to
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004443 send() until all data has been sent. Also, the socket function has
4444 been converted to a subclassable type, like list and tuple (etc.)
4445 before it; socket and SocketType are now the same thing.
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004446
4447- Various bugfixes to the curses module. There is now a test suite
4448 for the curses module (you have to run it manually).
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00004449
Guido van Rossum692adf12001-10-30 03:03:03 +00004450- binascii.b2a_base64 no longer places an arbitrary restriction of 57
4451 bytes on its input.
4452
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004453Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004454-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004455
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004456- tkFileDialog exposes a Directory class and askdirectory
Martin v. Löwis25ee87c2001-11-07 22:38:08 +00004457 convenience function.
4458
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00004459- Symbolic group names in regular expressions must be unique. For
4460 example, the regexp r'(?P<abc>)(?P<abc>)' is not allowed, because a
4461 single name can't mean both "group 1" and "group 2" simultaneously.
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004462 Python 2.2 detects this error at regexp compilation time;
4463 previously, the error went undetected, and results were
4464 unpredictable. Also in sre, the pattern.split(), pattern.sub(), and
4465 pattern.subn() methods have been rewritten in C. Also, an
4466 experimental function/method finditer() has been added, which works
4467 like findall() but returns an iterator.
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00004468
Martin v. Löwisb7b32602001-11-02 23:48:20 +00004469- Tix exposes more commands through the classes DirSelectBox,
4470 DirSelectDialog, ListNoteBook, Meter, CheckList, and the
4471 methods tix_addbitmapdir, tix_cget, tix_configure, tix_filedialog,
4472 tix_getbitmap, tix_getimage, tix_option_get, and tix_resetoptions.
4473
Tim Peters98791af2001-10-23 01:59:54 +00004474- Traceback objects are now scanned by cyclic garbage collection, so
4475 cycles created by casual use of sys.exc_info() no longer cause
4476 permanent memory leaks (provided garbage collection is enabled).
4477
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00004478- os.extsep -- a new variable needed by the RISCOS support. It is the
4479 separator used by extensions, and is '.' on all platforms except
4480 RISCOS, where it is '/'. There is no need to use this variable
4481 unless you have a masochistic desire to port your code to RISCOS.
4482
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004483- mimetypes.py has optional support for non-standard, but commonly
4484 found types. guess_type() and guess_extension() now accept an
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004485 optional 'strict' flag, defaulting to true, which controls whether
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004486 recognize non-standard types or not. A few non-standard types we
4487 know about have been added. Also, when run as a script, there are
4488 new -l and -e options.
4489
4490- statcache is now deprecated.
4491
4492- email.Utils.formatdate() now produces the preferred RFC 2822 style
4493 dates with numeric timezones (it used to produce obsolete dates
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004494 hard coded to "GMT" timezone). An optional 'localtime' flag is
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004495 added to produce dates in the local timezone, with daylight savings
4496 time properly taken into account.
4497
4498- In pickle and cPickle, instead of masking errors in load() by
4499 transforming them into SystemError, we let the original exception
4500 propagate out. Also, implement support for __safe_for_unpickling__
4501 in pickle, as it already was supported in cPickle.
4502
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004503Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004504-----------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004505
4506Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004507-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004508
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004509- The dbm module is built using libdb1 if available. The bsddb module
4510 is built with libdb3 if available.
4511
4512- Misc/Makefile.pre.in has been removed by BDFL pronouncement.
4513
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004514C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004515-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004516
Tim Peters1fc240e2001-10-26 05:06:50 +00004517- New function PySequence_Fast_GET_SIZE() returns the size of a non-
4518 NULL result from PySequence_Fast(), more quickly than calling
4519 PySequence_Size().
4520
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004521- New argument unpacking function PyArg_UnpackTuple() added.
4522
4523- New functions PyObject_CallFunctionObjArgs() and
4524 PyObject_CallMethodObjArgs() have been added to make it more
4525 convenient and efficient to call functions and methods from C.
4526
4527- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() no longer masks errors, so it's
4528 possible that this will propagate errors it didn't before.
4529
4530- New function PyObject_CheckReadBuffer(), which returns true if its
4531 argument supports the single-segment readable buffer interface.
4532
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004533New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004534-------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004535
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004536- We've finally confirmed that this release builds on HP-UX 11.00,
4537 *with* threads, and passes the test suite.
4538
Tim Peters7a33d8b2001-11-05 02:51:07 +00004539- Thanks to a series of patches from Michael Muller, Python may build
4540 again under OS/2 Visual Age C++.
4541
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00004542- Updated RISCOS port by Dietmar Schwertberger.
4543
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004544Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004545-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004546
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00004547- Added a test script for the curses module. It isn't run automatically;
4548 regrtest.py must be run with '-u curses' to enable it.
4549
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004550Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004551-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004552
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004553Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004554----
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004555
4556- PythonScript has been moved to unsupported and is slated to be
4557 removed completely in the next release.
4558
4559- It should now be possible to build applets that work on both OS9 and
4560 OSX.
4561
4562- The core is now linked with CoreServices not Carbon; as a side
4563 result, default 8bit encoding on OSX is now ASCII.
4564
4565- Python should now build on OSX 10.1.1
4566
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004567
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004568What's New in Python 2.2b1?
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004569===========================
4570
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004571*Release date: 19-Oct-2001*
4572
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004573Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004574--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004575
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004576- New-style classes are now always dynamic (except for built-in and
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004577 extension types). There is no longer a performance penalty, and I
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004578 no longer see another reason to keep this baggage around. One relic
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004579 remains: the __dict__ of a new-style class is a read-only proxy; you
4580 must set the class's attribute to modify it. As a consequence, the
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004581 __defined__ attribute of new-style types no longer exists, for lack
4582 of need: there is once again only one __dict__ (although in the
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004583 future a __cache__ may be resurrected with a similar function, if I
4584 can prove that it actually speeds things up).
Guido van Rossum50fda3b2001-10-04 19:46:06 +00004585
Tim Peters1c9ca872001-10-04 06:43:12 +00004586- C.__doc__ now works as expected for new-style classes (in 2.2a4 it
4587 always returned None, even when there was a class docstring).
4588
4589- doctest now finds and runs docstrings attached to new-style classes,
4590 class methods, static methods, and properties.
4591
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004592Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004593-----------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004594
Guido van Rossuma8bcf802001-10-15 15:53:58 +00004595- A very subtle syntactical pitfall in list comprehensions was fixed.
4596 For example: [a+b for a in 'abc', for b in 'def']. The comma in
4597 this example is a mistake. Previously, this would silently let 'a'
4598 iterate over the singleton tuple ('abc',), yielding ['abcd', 'abce',
4599 'abcf'] rather than the intended ['ad', 'ae', 'af', 'bd', 'be',
4600 'bf', 'cd', 'ce', 'cf']. Now, this is flagged as a syntax error.
4601 Note that [a for a in <singleton>] is a convoluted way to say
4602 [<singleton>] anyway, so it's not like any expressiveness is lost.
4603
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004604- getattr(obj, name, default) now only catches AttributeError, as
4605 documented, rather than returning the default value for all
4606 exceptions (which could mask bugs in a __getattr__ hook, for
4607 example).
4608
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00004609- Weak reference objects are now part of the core and offer a C API.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00004610 A bug which could allow a core dump when binary operations involved
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00004611 proxy reference has been fixed. weakref.ReferenceError is now a
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004612 built-in exception.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00004613
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00004614- unicode(obj) now behaves more like str(obj), accepting arbitrary
4615 objects, and calling a __unicode__ method if it exists.
4616 unicode(obj, encoding) and unicode(obj, encoding, errors) still
Marc-André Lemburgb5507ec2001-10-19 12:02:29 +00004617 require an 8-bit string or character buffer argument.
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00004618
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004619- isinstance() now allows any object as the first argument and a
4620 class, a type or something with a __bases__ tuple attribute for the
4621 second argument. The second argument may also be a tuple of a
4622 class, type, or something with __bases__, in which case isinstance()
4623 will return true if the first argument is an instance of any of the
4624 things contained in the second argument tuple. E.g.
4625
4626 isinstance(x, (A, B))
4627
4628 returns true if x is an instance of A or B.
4629
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004630Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004631-----------------
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004632
4633- thread.start_new_thread() now returns the thread ID (previously None).
4634
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00004635- binascii has now two quopri support functions, a2b_qp and b2a_qp.
4636
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00004637- readline now supports setting the startup_hook and the
4638 pre_event_hook, and adds the add_history() function.
Martin v. Löwis0daad592001-09-30 21:09:59 +00004639
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00004640- os and posix supports chroot(), setgroups() and unsetenv() where
4641 available. The stat(), fstat(), statvfs() and fstatvfs() functions
4642 now return "pseudo-sequences" -- the various fields can now be
4643 accessed as attributes (e.g. os.stat("/").st_mtime) but for
4644 backwards compatibility they also behave as a fixed-length sequence.
4645 Some platform-specific fields (e.g. st_rdev) are only accessible as
Guido van Rossum98bf58f2001-10-18 20:34:25 +00004646 attributes.
4647
4648- time: localtime(), gmtime() and strptime() now return a
4649 pseudo-sequence similar to the os.stat() return value, with
4650 attributes like tm_year etc.
Martin v. Löwis16628c92001-10-04 22:46:41 +00004651
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004652- Decompression objects in the zlib module now accept an optional
4653 second parameter to decompress() that specifies the maximum amount
4654 of memory to use for the uncompressed data.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004655
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00004656- optional SSL support in the socket module now exports OpenSSL
4657 functions RAND_add(), RAND_egd(), and RAND_status(). These calls
4658 are useful on platforms like Solaris where OpenSSL does not
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004659 automatically seed its PRNG. Also, the keyfile and certfile
4660 arguments to socket.ssl() are now optional.
4661
4662- posixmodule (and by extension, the os module on POSIX platforms) now
4663 exports O_LARGEFILE, O_DIRECT, O_DIRECTORY, and O_NOFOLLOW.
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00004664
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004665Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004666-------
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00004667
Tim Peters7402f792001-10-02 03:53:41 +00004668- doctest now excludes functions and classes not defined by the module
4669 being tested, thanks to Tim Hochberg.
4670
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00004671- HotShot, a new profiler implemented using a C-based callback, has
4672 been added. This substantially reduces the overhead of profiling,
4673 but it is still quite preliminary. Support modules and
4674 documentation will be added in upcoming releases (before 2.2 final).
4675
Guido van Rossumc4b09b42001-10-04 10:19:00 +00004676- profile now produces correct output in situations where an exception
4677 raised in Python is cleared by C code (e.g. hasattr()). This used
4678 to cause wrong output, including spurious claims of recursive
4679 functions and attribution of time spent to the wrong function.
4680
Tim Peters0a1fc4e2001-10-07 03:12:08 +00004681 The code and documentation for the derived OldProfile and HotProfile
4682 profiling classes was removed. The code hasn't worked for years (if
4683 you tried to use them, they raised exceptions). OldProfile
4684 intended to reproduce the behavior of the profiler Python used more
4685 than 7 years ago, and isn't interesting anymore. HotProfile intended
4686 to provide a faster profiler (but producing less information), and
4687 that's a worthy goal we intend to meet via a different approach (but
4688 without losing information).
4689
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00004690- Profile.calibrate() has a new implementation that should deliver
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00004691 a much better system-specific calibration constant. The constant can
4692 now be specified in an instance constructor, or as a Profile class or
4693 instance variable, instead of by editing profile.py's source code.
4694 Calibration must still be done manually (see the docs for the profile
4695 module).
4696
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004697 Note that Profile.calibrate() must be overridden by subclasses.
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00004698 Improving the accuracy required exploiting detailed knowledge of
4699 profiler internals; the earlier method abstracted away the details
4700 and measured a simplified model instead, but consequently computed
4701 a constant too small by a factor of 2 on some modern machines.
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00004702
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00004703- quopri's encode and decode methods take an optional header parameter,
Jeremy Hylton6f543b62001-10-16 20:42:52 +00004704 which indicates whether output is intended for the header 'Q'
4705 encoding.
4706
Guido van Rossuma5343cc2001-10-18 18:02:07 +00004707- The SocketServer.ThreadingMixIn class now closes the request after
4708 finish_request() returns. (Not when it errors out though.)
4709
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004710- The nntplib module's NNTP.body() method has grown a 'file' argument
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004711 to allow saving the message body to a file.
4712
4713- The email package has added a class email.Parser.HeaderParser which
4714 only parses headers and does not recurse into the message's body.
4715 Also, the module/class MIMEAudio has been added for representing
4716 audio data (contributed by Anthony Baxter).
4717
4718- ftplib should be able to handle files > 2GB.
4719
4720- ConfigParser.getboolean() now also interprets TRUE, FALSE, YES, NO,
4721 ON, and OFF.
4722
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00004723- xml.dom.minidom NodeList objects now support the length attribute
4724 and item() method as required by the DOM specifications.
4725
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00004726Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004727-----------
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00004728
4729- Demo/dns was removed. It no longer serves any purpose; a package
4730 derived from it is now maintained by Anthony Baxter, see
4731 http://PyDNS.SourceForge.net.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004732
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004733- The freeze tool has been made more robust, and two new options have
4734 been added: -X and -E.
4735
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004736Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004737-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004738
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004739- configure will use CXX in LINKCC if CXX is used to build main() and
4740 the system requires to link a C++ main using the C++ compiler.
4741
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004742C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004743-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004744
Guido van Rossum6c4bce32001-10-18 19:20:25 +00004745- The documentation for the tp_compare slot is updated to require that
4746 the return value must be -1, 0, 1; an arbitrary number <0 or >0 is
4747 not correct. This is not yet enforced but will be enforced in
4748 Python 2.3; even later, we may use -2 to indicate errors and +2 for
4749 "NotImplemented". Right now, -1 should be used for an error return.
4750
Tim Petersd38b1c72001-09-30 05:09:37 +00004751- PyLong_AsLongLong() now accepts int (as well as long) arguments.
4752 Consequently, PyArg_ParseTuple's 'L' code also accepts int (as well
4753 as long) arguments.
4754
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00004755- PyThread_start_new_thread() now returns a long int giving the thread
4756 ID, if one can be calculated; it returns -1 for error, 0 if no
4757 thread ID is calculated (this is an incompatible change, but only
4758 the thread module used this API). This code has only really been
4759 tested on Linux and Windows; other platforms please beware (and
4760 report any bugs or strange behavior).
4761
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00004762- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() no longer accepts Unicode objects as
4763 input.
4764
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004765New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004766-------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004767
4768Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004769-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004770
4771Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004772-------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004773
Tim Peters04cf1d32001-10-09 22:39:40 +00004774- Installer: If you install IDLE, and don't disable file-extension
4775 registration, a new "Edit with IDLE" context (right-click) menu entry
4776 is created for .py and .pyw files.
4777
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004778- The signal module now supports SIGBREAK on Windows, thanks to Steven
4779 Scott. Note that SIGBREAK is unique to Windows. The default SIGBREAK
4780 action remains to call Win32 ExitProcess(). This can be changed via
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004781 signal.signal(). For example::
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004782
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004783 # Make Ctrl+Break raise KeyboardInterrupt, like Python's default Ctrl+C
4784 # (SIGINT) behavior.
4785 import signal
4786 signal.signal(signal.SIGBREAK, signal.default_int_handler)
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004787
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004788 try:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004789 while 1:
4790 pass
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004791 except KeyboardInterrupt:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004792 # We get here on Ctrl+C or Ctrl+Break now; if we had not changed
4793 # SIGBREAK, only on Ctrl+C (and Ctrl+Break would terminate the
4794 # program without the possibility for any Python-level cleanup).
4795 print "Clean exit"
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004796
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004797
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004798What's New in Python 2.2a4?
4799===========================
4800
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004801*Release date: 28-Sep-2001*
4802
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004803Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004804--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004805
4806- pydoc and inspect are now aware of new-style classes;
4807 e.g. help(list) at the interactive prompt now shows proper
4808 documentation for all operations on list objects.
4809
4810- Applications using Jim Fulton's ExtensionClass module can now safely
4811 be used with Python 2.2. In particular, Zope 2.4.1 now works with
4812 Python 2.2 (as well as with Python 2.1.1). The Demo/metaclass
4813 examples also work again. It is hoped that Gtk and Boost also work
4814 with 2.2a4 and beyond. (If you can confirm this, please write
4815 webmaster@python.org; if there are still problems, please open a bug
4816 report on SourceForge.)
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004817
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00004818- property() now takes 4 keyword arguments: fget, fset, fdel and doc.
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004819 These map to read-only attributes 'fget', 'fset', 'fdel', and '__doc__'
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00004820 in the constructed property object. fget, fset and fdel weren't
4821 discoverable from Python in 2.2a3. __doc__ is new, and allows to
4822 associate a docstring with a property.
4823
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004824- Comparison overloading is now more completely implemented. For
4825 example, a str subclass instance can properly be compared to a str
4826 instance, and it can properly overload comparison. Ditto for most
4827 other built-in object types.
4828
4829- The repr() of new-style classes has changed; instead of <type
4830 'M.Foo'> a new-style class is now rendered as <class 'M.Foo'>,
4831 *except* for built-in types, which are still rendered as <type
4832 'Foo'> (to avoid upsetting existing code that might parse or
4833 otherwise rely on repr() of certain type objects).
4834
4835- The repr() of new-style objects is now always <Foo object at XXX>;
4836 previously, it was sometimes <Foo instance at XXX>.
4837
4838- For new-style classes, what was previously called __getattr__ is now
4839 called __getattribute__. This method, if defined, is called for
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00004840 *every* attribute access. A new __getattr__ hook more similar to the
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004841 one in classic classes is defined which is called only if regular
4842 attribute access raises AttributeError; to catch *all* attribute
4843 access, you can use __getattribute__ (for new-style classes). If
4844 both are defined, __getattribute__ is called first, and if it raises
4845 AttributeError, __getattr__ is called.
4846
4847- The __class__ attribute of new-style objects can be assigned to.
4848 The new class must have the same C-level object layout as the old
4849 class.
4850
4851- The builtin file type can be subclassed now. In the usual pattern,
4852 "file" is the name of the builtin type, and file() is a new builtin
4853 constructor, with the same signature as the builtin open() function.
4854 file() is now the preferred way to open a file.
4855
4856- Previously, __new__ would only see sequential arguments passed to
4857 the type in a constructor call; __init__ would see both sequential
4858 and keyword arguments. This made no sense whatsoever any more, so
4859 now both __new__ and __init__ see all arguments.
4860
4861- Previously, hash() applied to an instance of a subclass of str or
4862 unicode always returned 0. This has been repaired.
4863
4864- Previously, an operation on an instance of a subclass of an
4865 immutable type (int, long, float, complex, tuple, str, unicode),
4866 where the subtype didn't override the operation (and so the
4867 operation was handled by the builtin type), could return that
4868 instance instead a value of the base type. For example, if s was of
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004869 a str subclass type, s[:] returned s as-is. Now it returns a str
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004870 with the same value as s.
4871
Barry Warsaw86fbaf82001-09-28 15:26:12 +00004872- Provisional support for pickling new-style objects has been added.
4873
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004874Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004875----
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004876
Tim Peters2c9aa5e2001-09-23 04:06:05 +00004877- file.writelines() now accepts any iterable object producing strings.
4878
Marc-André Lemburgaefd7662001-09-20 12:59:37 +00004879- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() now works very much like
4880 PyObject_Str(obj) in that it tries to use __str__/tp_str
4881 on the object if the object is not a string or buffer. This
4882 makes unicode() behave like str() when applied to non-string/buffer
4883 objects.
4884
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00004885- PyFile_WriteObject now passes Unicode objects to the file's write
4886 method. As a result, all file-like objects which may be the target
Martin v. Löwis2777c022001-09-19 13:47:32 +00004887 of a print statement must support Unicode objects, i.e. they must
4888 at least convert them into ASCII strings.
4889
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004890- Thread scheduling on Solaris should be improved; it is no longer
4891 necessary to insert a small sleep at the start of a thread in order
4892 to let other runnable threads be scheduled.
4893
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004894Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004895-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004896
Marc-André Lemburgbf990172001-09-27 14:17:33 +00004897- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
4898 read character buffer compatible objects for their .write() methods.
4899 These objects are converted to strings and then handled as such
4900 by the instances.
4901
Barry Warsaw2f600732001-09-24 04:28:10 +00004902- The "email" package has been added. This is basically a port of the
4903 mimelib package <http://sf.net/projects/mimelib> with API changes
4904 and some implementations updated to use iterators and generators.
4905
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00004906- difflib.ndiff() and difflib.Differ.compare() are generators now. This
4907 restores the ability of Tools/scripts/ndiff.py to start producing output
4908 before the entire comparison is complete.
4909
Barry Warsaw58b072d2001-09-22 04:44:21 +00004910- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
4911 iteration just like file objects (i.e. their .readline() method is
4912 called for each iteration until it returns an empty string).
4913
Marc-André Lemburg494f2ae2001-09-19 11:33:31 +00004914- The codecs module has grown four new helper APIs to access
4915 builtin codecs: getencoder(), getdecoder(), getreader(),
4916 getwriter().
4917
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004918- SimpleXMLRPCServer: a new module (based upon SimpleHTMLServer)
4919 simplifies writing XML RPC servers.
4920
Barry Warsaw647d5e82001-09-28 17:01:02 +00004921- os.path.realpath(): a new function that returns the absolute pathname
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004922 after interpretation of symbolic links. On non-Unix systems, this
4923 is an alias for os.path.abspath().
4924
Tim Peters16a77ad2001-09-08 04:00:12 +00004925- operator.indexOf() (PySequence_Index() in the C API) now works with any
4926 iterable object.
4927
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004928- smtplib now supports various authentication and security features of
4929 the SMTP protocol through the new login() and starttls() methods.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00004930
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004931- hmac: a new module implementing keyed hashing for message
4932 authentication.
4933
4934- mimetypes now recognizes more extensions and file types. At the
4935 same time, some mappings not sanctioned by IANA were removed.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00004936
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004937- The "compiler" package has been brought up to date to the state of
Guido van Rossumc9ed5dc2001-09-20 05:30:24 +00004938 Python 2.2 bytecode generation. It has also been promoted from a
4939 Tool to a standard library package. (Tools/compiler still exists as
4940 a sample driver.)
4941
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004942Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004943-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004944
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004945- Large file support (LFS) is now automatic when the platform supports
4946 it; no more manual configuration tweaks are needed. On Linux, at
4947 least, it's possible to have a system whose C library supports large
4948 files but whose kernel doesn't; in this case, large file support is
4949 still enabled but doesn't do you any good unless you upgrade your
4950 kernel or share your Python executable with another system whose
4951 kernel has large file support.
4952
4953- The configure script now supplies plausible defaults in a
4954 cross-compilation environment. This doesn't mean that the supplied
4955 values are always correct, or that cross-compilation now works
4956 flawlessly -- but it's a first step (and it shuts up most of
4957 autoconf's warnings about AC_TRY_RUN).
4958
4959- The Unix build is now a bit less chatty, courtesy of the parser
4960 generator. The build is completely silent (except for errors) when
4961 using "make -s", thanks to a -q option to setup.py.
4962
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004963C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004964-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004965
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004966- The "structmember" API now supports some new flag bits to deny read
4967 and/or write access to attributes in restricted execution mode.
4968
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004969New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004970-------------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004971
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004972- Compaq's iPAQ handheld, running the "familiar" Linux distribution
4973 (http://familiar.handhelds.org).
4974
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004975Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004976-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004977
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00004978- The "classic" standard tests, which work by comparing stdout to
4979 an expected-output file under Lib/test/output/, no longer stop at
4980 the first mismatch. Instead the test is run to completion, and a
4981 variant of ndiff-style comparison is used to report all differences.
4982 This is much easier to understand than the previous style of reporting.
4983
4984- The unittest-based standard tests now use regrtest's test_main()
4985 convention, instead of running as a side-effect of merely being
4986 imported. This allows these tests to be run in more natural and
4987 flexible ways as unittests, outside the regrtest framework.
4988
4989- regrtest.py is much better integrated with unittest and doctest now,
4990 especially in regard to reporting errors.
4991
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004992Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004993-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004994
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004995- Large file support now also works for files > 4GB, on filesystems
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00004996 that support it (NTFS under Windows 2000). See "What's New in
4997 Python 2.2a3" for more detail.
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004998
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004999
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005000What's New in Python 2.2a3?
5001===========================
5002
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005003*Release Date: 07-Sep-2001*
5004
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005005Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005006----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005007
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005008- Conversion of long to float now raises OverflowError if the long is too
5009 big to represent as a C double.
5010
Tim Peters32f453e2001-09-03 08:35:41 +00005011- The 3-argument builtin pow() no longer allows a third non-None argument
5012 if either of the first two arguments is a float, or if both are of
5013 integer types and the second argument is negative (in which latter case
5014 the arguments are converted to float, so this is really the same
5015 restriction).
5016
Tim Peters5d2b77c2001-09-03 05:47:38 +00005017- The builtin dir() now returns more information, and sometimes much
5018 more, generally naming all attributes of an object, and all attributes
5019 reachable from the object via its class, and from its class's base
5020 classes, and so on from them too. Example: in 2.2a2, dir([]) returned
5021 an empty list. In 2.2a3,
5022
5023 >>> dir([])
5024 ['__add__', '__class__', '__contains__', '__delattr__', '__delitem__',
5025 '__eq__', '__ge__', '__getattr__', '__getitem__', '__getslice__',
5026 '__gt__', '__hash__', '__iadd__', '__imul__', '__init__', '__le__',
5027 '__len__', '__lt__', '__mul__', '__ne__', '__new__', '__repr__',
5028 '__rmul__', '__setattr__', '__setitem__', '__setslice__', '__str__',
5029 'append', 'count', 'extend', 'index', 'insert', 'pop', 'remove',
5030 'reverse', 'sort']
5031
5032 dir(module) continues to return only the module's attributes, though.
5033
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005034- Overflowing operations on plain ints now return a long int rather
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005035 than raising OverflowError. This is a partial implementation of PEP
5036 237. You can use -Wdefault::OverflowWarning to enable a warning for
5037 this situation, and -Werror::OverflowWarning to revert to the old
5038 OverflowError exception.
5039
Guido van Rossum61c345f2001-09-04 03:26:15 +00005040- A new command line option, -Q<arg>, is added to control run-time
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005041 warnings for the use of classic division. (See PEP 238.) Possible
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00005042 values are -Qold, -Qwarn, -Qwarnall, and -Qnew. The default is
5043 -Qold, meaning the / operator has its classic meaning and no
5044 warnings are issued. Using -Qwarn issues a run-time warning about
5045 all uses of classic division for int and long arguments; -Qwarnall
5046 also warns about classic division for float and complex arguments
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00005047 (for use with fixdiv.py).
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005048 [Note: the remainder of this item (preserved below) became
5049 obsolete in 2.2c1 -- -Qnew has global effect in 2.2] ::
5050
5051 Using -Qnew is questionable; it turns on new division by default, but
5052 only in the __main__ module. You can usefully combine -Qwarn or
5053 -Qwarnall and -Qnew: this gives the __main__ module new division, and
5054 warns about classic division everywhere else.
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005055
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005056- Many built-in types can now be subclassed. This applies to int,
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005057 long, float, str, unicode, and tuple. (The types complex, list and
5058 dictionary can also be subclassed; this was introduced earlier.)
5059 Note that restrictions apply when subclassing immutable built-in
5060 types: you can only affect the value of the instance by overloading
5061 __new__. You can add mutable attributes, and the subclass instances
5062 will have a __dict__ attribute, but you cannot change the "value"
5063 (as implemented by the base class) of an immutable subclass instance
5064 once it is created.
5065
Guido van Rossumaaf80c82001-09-02 13:44:35 +00005066- The dictionary constructor now takes an optional argument, a
5067 mapping-like object, and initializes the dictionary from its
5068 (key, value) pairs.
5069
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005070- A new built-in type, super, has been added. This facilitates making
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005071 "cooperative super calls" in a multiple inheritance setting. For an
5072 explanation, see http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#cooperation
5073
Guido van Rossum8d7234d2001-09-06 22:02:58 +00005074- A new built-in type, property, has been added. This enables the
5075 creation of "properties". These are attributes implemented by
5076 getter and setter functions (or only one of these for read-only or
5077 write-only attributes), without the need to override __getattr__.
5078 See http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#property
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005079
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005080- The syntax of floating-point and imaginary literals has been
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005081 liberalized, to allow leading zeroes. Examples of literals now
5082 legal that were SyntaxErrors before:
5083
5084 00.0 0e3 0100j 07.5 00000000000000000008.
5085
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005086- An old tokenizer bug allowed floating point literals with an incomplete
Tim Petersc6d95812001-08-28 20:56:27 +00005087 exponent, such as 1e and 3.1e-. Such literals now raise SyntaxError.
5088
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005089Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005090-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005091
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00005092- telnetlib includes symbolic names for the options, and support for
Martin v. Löwis1da9c572002-11-04 09:56:00 +00005093 setting an option negotiation callback. It also supports processing
5094 of suboptions.
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00005095
Tim Petersa40c7932001-09-05 22:36:56 +00005096- The new C standard no longer requires that math libraries set errno to
5097 ERANGE on overflow. For platform libraries that exploit this new
5098 freedom, Python's overflow-checking was wholly broken. A new overflow-
5099 checking scheme attempts to repair that, but may not be reliable on all
5100 platforms (C doesn't seem to provide anything both useful and portable
5101 in this area anymore).
5102
Martin v. Löwis44f86962001-09-05 13:44:54 +00005103- Asynchronous timeout actions are available through the new class
5104 threading.Timer.
5105
Tim Peters78526162001-09-05 00:53:45 +00005106- math.log and math.log10 now return sensible results for even huge
5107 long arguments. For example, math.log10(10 ** 10000) ~= 10000.0.
5108
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005109- A new function, imp.lock_held(), returns 1 when the import lock is
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005110 currently held. See the docs for the imp module.
5111
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005112- pickle, cPickle and marshal on 32-bit platforms can now correctly read
Tim Peters82112372001-08-29 02:28:42 +00005113 dumps containing ints written on platforms where Python ints are 8 bytes.
5114 When read on a box where Python ints are 4 bytes, such values are
5115 converted to Python longs.
5116
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005117- In restricted execution mode (using the rexec module), unmarshalling
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005118 code objects is no longer allowed. This plugs a security hole.
5119
Steve Purcell6091cd62001-09-06 16:05:17 +00005120- unittest.TestResult instances no longer store references to tracebacks
5121 generated by test failures. This prevents unexpected dangling references
5122 to objects that should be garbage collected between tests.
5123
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005124Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005125-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005126
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00005127- Tools/scripts/fixdiv.py has been added which can be used to fix
5128 division operators as per PEP 238.
5129
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005130Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005131-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005132
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00005133- If you are an adventurous person using Mac OS X you may want to look at
5134 Mac/OSX. There is a Makefile there that will build Python as a real Mac
5135 application, which can be used for experimenting with Carbon or Cocoa.
5136 Discussion of this on pythonmac-sig, please.
5137
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00005138C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005139-----
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00005140
5141- New function PyObject_Dir(obj), like Python __builtin__.dir(obj).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005142
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005143- Note that PyLong_AsDouble can fail! This has always been true, but no
5144 callers checked for it. It's more likely to fail now, because overflow
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00005145 errors are properly detected now. The proper way to check::
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005146
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005147 double x = PyLong_AsDouble(some_long_object);
5148 if (x == -1.0 && PyErr_Occurred()) {
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00005149 /* The conversion failed. */
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005150 }
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005151
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005152- The GC API has been changed. Extensions that use the old API will still
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005153 compile but will not participate in GC. To upgrade an extension
5154 module:
5155
5156 - rename Py_TPFLAGS_GC to PyTPFLAGS_HAVE_GC
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005157
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005158 - use PyObject_GC_New or PyObject_GC_NewVar to allocate objects and
5159 PyObject_GC_Del to deallocate them
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005160
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005161 - rename PyObject_GC_Init to PyObject_GC_Track and PyObject_GC_Fini
5162 to PyObject_GC_UnTrack
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005163
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005164 - remove PyGC_HEAD_SIZE from object size calculations
5165
5166 - remove calls to PyObject_AS_GC and PyObject_FROM_GC
5167
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005168- Two new functions: PyString_FromFormat() and PyString_FromFormatV().
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005169 These can be used safely to construct string objects from a
5170 sprintf-style format string (similar to the format string supported
5171 by PyErr_Format()).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005172
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005173New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005174-------------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005175
Tim Petersb7da0902001-09-02 23:01:43 +00005176- Stephen Hansen contributed patches sufficient to get a clean compile
5177 under Borland C (Windows), but he reports problems running it and ran
5178 out of time to complete the port. Volunteers? Expect a MemoryError
5179 when importing the types module; this is probably shallow, and
5180 causing later failures too.
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005181
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005182Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005183-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005184
5185Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005186-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005187
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00005188- Large file support is now enabled on Win32 platforms as well as on
5189 Win64. This means that, for example, you can use f.tell() and f.seek()
5190 to manipulate files larger than 2 gigabytes (provided you have enough
5191 disk space, and are using a Windows filesystem that supports large
Tim Peters9a9471c2001-09-11 23:18:51 +00005192 partitions). Windows filesystem limits: FAT has a 2GB (gigabyte)
5193 filesize limit, and large file support makes no difference there.
5194 FAT32's limit is 4GB, and files >= 2GB are easier to use from Python now.
5195 NTFS has no practical limit on file size, and files of any size can be
5196 used from Python now.
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00005197
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005198- The w9xpopen hack is now used on Windows NT and 2000 too when COMPSPEC
Tim Peters402d5982001-08-27 06:37:48 +00005199 points to command.com (patch from Brian Quinlan).
5200
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005201
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005202What's New in Python 2.2a2?
5203===========================
5204
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005205*Release Date: 22-Aug-2001*
5206
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005207Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005208-----
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005209
Barry Warsaw18b2ecf2001-08-22 20:26:56 +00005210- Tim Peters developed a brand new Windows installer using Wise 8.1,
5211 generously donated to us by Wise Solutions.
5212
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005213- configure supports a new option --enable-unicode, with the values
5214 ucs2 and ucs4 (new in 2.2a1). With --disable-unicode, the Unicode
5215 type and supporting code is completely removed from the interpreter.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005216
Jack Jansen32ce0cd2001-08-21 19:28:20 +00005217- A new configure option --enable-framework builds a Mac OS X framework,
5218 which "make frameworkinstall" will install. This provides a starting
5219 point for more mac-like functionality, join pythonmac-sig@python.org
5220 if you are interested in helping.
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005221
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005222- The NeXT platform is no longer supported.
5223
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005224- The 'new' module is now statically linked.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005225
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005226Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005227-----
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005228
5229- The new Tools/scripts/cleanfuture.py can be used to automatically
Andrew M. Kuchlingb0532092001-08-15 15:54:56 +00005230 edit out obsolete future statements from Python source code. See
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005231 the module docstring for details.
5232
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005233Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005234-----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005235
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005236- regrtest.py now knows which tests are expected to be skipped on some
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005237 platforms, allowing to give clearer test result output. regrtest
5238 also has optional --use/-u switch to run normally disabled tests
5239 which require network access or consume significant disk resources.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005240
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005241- Several new tests in the standard test suite, with special thanks to
5242 Nick Mathewson.
5243
5244Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005245----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005246
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005247- The floor division operator // has been added as outlined in PEP
5248 238. The / operator still provides classic division (and will until
5249 Python 3.0) unless "from __future__ import division" is included, in
5250 which case the / operator will provide true division. The operator
5251 module provides truediv() and floordiv() functions. Augmented
5252 assignment variants are included, as are the equivalent overloadable
5253 methods and C API methods. See the PEP for a full discussion:
5254 <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0238.html>
5255
Tim Peters6cd6a822001-08-17 22:11:27 +00005256- Future statements are now effective in simulated interactive shells
5257 (like IDLE). This should "just work" by magic, but read Michael
5258 Hudson's "Future statements in simulated shells" PEP 264 for full
5259 details: <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0264.html>.
5260
Guido van Rossumf86ddd22001-08-17 21:21:04 +00005261- The type/class unification (PEP 252-253) was integrated into the
5262 trunk and is not so tentative any more (the exact specification of
5263 some features is still tentative). A lot of work has done on fixing
5264 bugs and adding robustness and features (performance still has to
5265 come a long way).
5266
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00005267- Warnings about a mismatch in the Python API during extension import
5268 now use the Python warning framework (which makes it possible to
5269 write filters for these warnings).
5270
Barry Warsaw9b3be7f2001-08-14 18:35:02 +00005271- A function's __dict__ (aka func_dict) will now always be a
5272 dictionary. It used to be possible to delete it or set it to None,
5273 but now both actions raise TypeErrors. It is still legal to set it
5274 to a dictionary object. Getting func.__dict__ before any attributes
5275 have been assigned now returns an empty dictionary instead of None.
5276
Guido van Rossum32aa5d22001-09-05 18:43:35 +00005277- A new command line option, -E, was added which disables the use of
5278 all environment variables, or at least those that are specifically
5279 significant to Python. Usually those have a name starting with
5280 "PYTHON". This was used to fix a problem where the tests fail if
5281 the user happens to have PYTHONHOME or PYTHONPATH pointing to an
5282 older distribution.
5283
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005284Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005285-------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005286
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005287- New class Differ and new functions ndiff() and restore() in difflib.py.
5288 These package the algorithms used by the popular Tools/scripts/ndiff.py,
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005289 for programmatic reuse.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005290
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005291- New function xml.sax.saxutils.quoteattr(): Quote an XML attribute
5292 value using the minimal quoting required for the value; more
5293 reliable than using xml.sax.saxutils.escape() for attribute values.
5294
5295- Readline completion support for cmd.Cmd was added.
5296
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005297- Calling os.tempnam() or os.tmpnam() generate RuntimeWarnings.
5298
5299- Added function threading.BoundedSemaphore()
5300
5301- Added Ka-Ping Yee's cgitb.py module.
5302
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005303- The 'new' module now exposes the CO_xxx flags.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005304
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00005305- The gc module offers the get_referents function.
5306
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005307New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005308-------------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005309
5310C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005311-----
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005312
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00005313- Two new APIs PyOS_snprintf() and PyOS_vsnprintf() were added
5314 which provide a cross-platform implementations for the
5315 relatively new snprintf()/vsnprintf() C lib APIs. In contrast to
5316 the standard sprintf() and vsprintf() C lib APIs, these versions
5317 apply bounds checking on the used buffer which enhances protection
5318 against buffer overruns.
5319
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00005320- Unicode APIs now use name mangling to assure that mixing interpreters
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005321 and extensions using different Unicode widths is rendered next to
5322 impossible. Trying to import an incompatible Unicode-aware extension
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00005323 will result in an ImportError. Unicode extensions writers must make
5324 sure to check the Unicode width compatibility in their extensions by
5325 using at least one of the mangled Unicode APIs in the extension.
5326
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005327- Two new flags METH_NOARGS and METH_O are available in method definition
5328 tables to simplify implementation of methods with no arguments and a
5329 single untyped argument. Calling such methods is more efficient than
5330 calling corresponding METH_VARARGS methods. METH_OLDARGS is now
5331 deprecated.
5332
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005333Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005334-------
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005335
5336- "import module" now compiles module.pyw if it exists and nothing else
5337 relevant is found.
5338
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005339
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005340What's New in Python 2.2a1?
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005341===========================
5342
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005343*Release date: 18-Jul-2001*
5344
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005345Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005346----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005347
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00005348- TENTATIVELY, a large amount of code implementing much of what's
5349 described in PEP 252 (Making Types Look More Like Classes) and PEP
5350 253 (Subtyping Built-in Types) was added. This will be released
5351 with Python 2.2a1. Documentation will be provided separately
5352 through http://www.python.org/2.2/. The purpose of releasing this
5353 with Python 2.2a1 is to test backwards compatibility. It is
5354 possible, though not likely, that a decision is made not to release
5355 this code as part of 2.2 final, if any serious backwards
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005356 incompatibilities are found during alpha testing that cannot be
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00005357 repaired.
5358
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005359- Generators were added; this is a new way to create an iterator (see
Tim Peters11a0d102001-07-17 18:48:00 +00005360 below) using what looks like a simple function containing one or
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005361 more 'yield' statements. See PEP 255. Since this adds a new
5362 keyword to the language, this feature must be enabled by including a
5363 future statement: "from __future__ import generators" (see PEP 236).
5364 Generators will become a standard feature in a future release
5365 (probably 2.3). Without this future statement, 'yield' remains an
5366 ordinary identifier, but a warning is issued each time it is used.
5367 (These warnings currently don't conform to the warnings framework of
5368 PEP 230; we intend to fix this in 2.2a2.)
5369
Marc-André Lemburg12e74b32001-05-22 08:58:23 +00005370- The UTF-16 codec was modified to be more RFC compliant. It will now
5371 only remove BOM characters at the start of the string and then
5372 only if running in native mode (UTF-16-LE and -BE won't remove a
5373 leading BMO character).
5374
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005375- Strings now have a new method .decode() to complement the already
5376 existing .encode() method. These two methods provide direct access
5377 to the corresponding decoders and encoders of the registered codecs.
5378
5379 To enhance the usability of the .encode() method, the special
5380 casing of Unicode object return values was dropped (Unicode objects
5381 were auto-magically converted to string using the default encoding).
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005382
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005383 Both methods will now return whatever the codec in charge of the
5384 requested encoding returns as object, e.g. Unicode codecs will
5385 return Unicode objects when decoding is requested ("äöü".decode("latin-1")
5386 will return u"äöü"). This enables codec writer to create codecs
5387 for various simple to use conversions.
5388
5389 New codecs were added to demonstrate these new features (the .encode()
5390 and .decode() columns indicate the type of the returned objects):
5391
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005392 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5393 |Name | .encode() | .decode() | Description |
5394 +=========+===========+===========+=============================+
5395 |uu | string | string | UU codec (e.g. for email) |
5396 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5397 |base64 | string | string | base64 codec |
5398 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5399 |quopri | string | string | quoted-printable codec |
5400 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5401 |zlib | string | string | zlib compression |
5402 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5403 |hex | string | string | 2-byte hex codec |
5404 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5405 |rot-13 | string | Unicode | ROT-13 Unicode charmap codec|
5406 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005407
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005408- Some operating systems now support the concept of a default Unicode
5409 encoding for file system operations. Notably, Windows supports 'mbcs'
5410 as the default. The Macintosh will also adopt this concept in the medium
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005411 term, although the default encoding for that platform will be other than
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005412 'mbcs'.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005413
5414 On operating system that support non-ASCII filenames, it is common for
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005415 functions that return filenames (such as os.listdir()) to return Python
5416 string objects pre-encoded using the default file system encoding for
5417 the platform. As this encoding is likely to be different from Python's
5418 default encoding, converting this name to a Unicode object before passing
5419 it back to the Operating System would result in a Unicode error, as Python
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005420 would attempt to use its default encoding (generally ASCII) rather than
5421 the default encoding for the file system.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005422
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005423 In general, this change simply removes surprises when working with
5424 Unicode and the file system, making these operations work as you expect,
5425 increasing the transparency of Unicode objects in this context.
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005426 See [????] for more details, including examples.
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005427
Tim Peters61dff2b2001-05-08 15:43:37 +00005428- Float (and complex) literals in source code were evaluated to full
5429 precision only when running from a .py file; the same code loaded from a
5430 .pyc (or .pyo) file could suffer numeric differences starting at about the
5431 12th significant decimal digit. For example, on a machine with IEEE-754
5432 floating arithmetic,
5433
5434 x = 9007199254740992.0
5435 print long(x)
5436
5437 printed 9007199254740992 if run directly from .py, but 9007199254740000
5438 if from a compiled (.pyc or .pyo) file. This was due to marshal using
5439 str(float) instead of repr(float) when building code objects. marshal
5440 now uses repr(float) instead, which should reproduce floats to full
5441 machine precision (assuming the platform C float<->string I/O conversion
5442 functions are of good quality).
5443
5444 This may cause floating-point results to change in some cases, and
5445 usually for the better, but may also cause numerically unstable
5446 algorithms to break.
5447
Tim Peters2f228e72001-05-13 00:19:31 +00005448- The implementation of dicts suffers fewer collisions, which has speed
5449 benefits. However, the order in which dict entries appear in dict.keys(),
5450 dict.values() and dict.items() may differ from previous releases for a
5451 given dict. Nothing is defined about this order, so no program should
5452 rely on it. Nevertheless, it's easy to write test cases that rely on the
5453 order by accident, typically because of printing the str() or repr() of a
5454 dict to an "expected results" file. See Lib/test/test_support.py's new
5455 sortdict(dict) function for a simple way to display a dict in sorted
5456 order.
5457
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005458- Many other small changes to dicts were made, resulting in faster
5459 operation along the most common code paths.
5460
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00005461- Dictionary objects now support the "in" operator: "x in dict" means
5462 the same as dict.has_key(x).
5463
Barry Warsaw51acc8d2001-06-26 20:12:50 +00005464- The update() method of dictionaries now accepts generic mapping
5465 objects. Specifically the argument object must support the .keys()
5466 and __getitem__() methods. This allows you to say, for example,
5467 {}.update(UserDict())
5468
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00005469- Iterators were added; this is a generalized way of providing values
5470 to a for loop. See PEP 234. There's a new built-in function iter()
5471 to return an iterator. There's a new protocol to get the next value
5472 from an iterator using the next() method (in Python) or the
5473 tp_iternext slot (in C). There's a new protocol to get iterators
5474 using the __iter__() method (in Python) or the tp_iter slot (in C).
5475 Iterating (i.e. a for loop) over a dictionary generates its keys.
5476 Iterating over a file generates its lines.
5477
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005478- The following functions were generalized to work nicely with iterator
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00005479 arguments::
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005480
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00005481 map(), filter(), reduce(), zip()
Tim Peters8572b4f2001-05-06 01:05:02 +00005482 list(), tuple() (PySequence_Tuple() and PySequence_Fast() in C API)
5483 max(), min()
Tim Peters1af03e92001-05-26 19:37:54 +00005484 join() method of strings
5485 extend() method of lists
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00005486 'x in y' and 'x not in y' (PySequence_Contains() in C API)
5487 operator.countOf() (PySequence_Count() in C API)
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005488 right-hand side of assignment statements with multiple targets, such as ::
Tim Petersd6d010b2001-06-21 02:49:55 +00005489 x, y, z = some_iterable_object_returning_exactly_3_values
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00005490
Tim Petersd85e1022001-05-11 21:51:48 +00005491- Accessing module attributes is significantly faster (for example,
5492 random.random or os.path or yourPythonModule.yourAttribute).
5493
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00005494- Comparing dictionary objects via == and != is faster, and now works even
5495 if the keys and values don't support comparisons other than ==.
5496
Tim Peters95bf9392001-05-10 08:32:44 +00005497- Comparing dictionaries in ways other than == and != is slower: there were
5498 insecurities in the dict comparison implementation that could cause Python
5499 to crash if the element comparison routines for the dict keys and/or
5500 values mutated the dicts. Making the code bulletproof slowed it down.
5501
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005502- Collisions in dicts are resolved via a new approach, which can help
5503 dramatically in bad cases. For example, looking up every key in a dict
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005504 d with d.keys() == [i << 16 for i in range(20000)] is approximately 500x
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005505 faster now. Thanks to Christian Tismer for pointing out the cause and
5506 the nature of an effective cure (last December! better late than never).
Tim Peters15d49292001-05-27 07:39:22 +00005507
Tim Peters52e155e2001-06-16 05:42:57 +00005508- repr() is much faster for large containers (dict, list, tuple).
5509
5510
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005511Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005512-------
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005513
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00005514- The constants ascii_letters, ascii_lowercase. and ascii_uppercase
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005515 were added to the string module. These a locale-independent
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00005516 constants, unlike letters, lowercase, and uppercase. These are now
5517 use in appropriate locations in the standard library.
5518
Martin v. Löwisf0473d52001-07-18 16:17:16 +00005519- The flags used in dlopen calls can now be configured using
5520 sys.setdlopenflags and queried using sys.getdlopenflags.
5521
Guido van Rossumc7e4aca2001-07-12 11:54:37 +00005522- Fredrik Lundh's xmlrpclib is now a standard library module. This
5523 provides full client-side XML-RPC support. In addition,
5524 Demo/xmlrpc/ contains two server frameworks (one SocketServer-based,
5525 one asyncore-based). Thanks to Eric Raymond for the documentation.
5526
Guido van Rossum643d3912001-07-05 14:46:25 +00005527- The xrange() object is simplified: it no longer supports slicing,
5528 repetition, comparisons, efficient 'in' checking, the tolist()
5529 method, or the start, stop and step attributes. See PEP 260.
5530
Martin v. Löwisebf94db2001-06-06 06:25:40 +00005531- A new function fnmatch.filter to filter lists of file names was added.
5532
Barry Warsawffd674d2001-05-22 16:00:10 +00005533- calendar.py uses month and day names based on the current locale.
5534
Guido van Rossum2e0a6542001-05-15 02:14:44 +00005535- strop is now *really* obsolete (this was announced before with 1.6),
5536 and issues DeprecationWarning when used (except for the four items
5537 that are still imported into string.py).
5538
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005539- Cookie.py now sorts key+value pairs by key in output strings.
5540
5541- pprint.isrecursive(object) didn't correctly identify recursive objects.
5542 Now it does.
5543
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00005544- pprint functions now much faster for large containers (tuple, list, dict).
5545
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00005546- New 'q' and 'Q' format codes in the struct module, corresponding to C
5547 types "long long" and "unsigned long long" (on Windows, __int64). In
5548 native mode, these can be used only when the platform C compiler supports
5549 these types (when HAVE_LONG_LONG is #define'd by the Python config
5550 process), and then they inherit the sizes and alignments of the C types.
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005551 In standard mode, 'q' and 'Q' are supported on all platforms, and are
5552 8-byte integral types.
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00005553
Guido van Rossum83213cc2001-06-12 16:48:52 +00005554- The site module installs a new built-in function 'help' that invokes
5555 pydoc.help. It must be invoked as 'help()'; when invoked as 'help',
5556 it displays a message reminding the user to use 'help()' or
5557 'help(object)'.
5558
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005559Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005560-----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005561
5562- New test_mutants.py runs dict comparisons where the key and value
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005563 comparison operators mutate the dicts randomly during comparison. This
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005564 rapidly causes Python to crash under earlier releases (not for the faint
5565 of heart: it can also cause Win9x to freeze or reboot!).
5566
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005567- New test_pprint.py verifies that pprint.isrecursive() and
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00005568 pprint.isreadable() return sensible results. Also verifies that simple
5569 cases produce correct output.
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005570
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00005571C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005572-----
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00005573
5574- Removed the unused last_is_sticky argument from the internal
5575 _PyTuple_Resize(). If this affects you, you were cheating.
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005576
5577----
5578
5579**(For information about older versions, consult the HISTORY file.)**