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Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001+++++++++++
2Python News
3+++++++++++
4
Skip Montanaro4a385832002-09-20 17:08:52 +00005(editors: check NEWS.help for information about editing NEWS using ReST.)
6
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00007What's New in Python 2.4 beta 1?
8================================
9
10*Release date: XXXX-XX-XX*
11
12Core and builtins
13-----------------
14
Raymond Hettinger2c31a052004-09-22 18:44:21 +000015- The bytecode optimizer now folds tuples of constants into a single
16 constant.
17
Tim Peters307fa782004-09-23 08:06:40 +000018- SF bug #513866: Float/long comparison anomaly. Prior to 2.4b1, when
19 an integer was compared to a float, the integer was coerced to a float.
20 That could yield spurious overflow errors (if the integer was very
21 large), and to anomalies such as
22 ``long(1e200)+1 == 1e200 == long(1e200)-1``. Coercion to float is no
23 longer performed, and cases like ``long(1e200)-1 < 1e200``,
24 ``long(1e200)+1 > 1e200`` and ``(1 << 20000) > 1e200`` are computed
25 correctly now.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +000026
27Extension modules
28-----------------
29
Tim Peterscf8997f2004-10-01 02:13:16 +000030- ``collections.deque`` objects didn't play quite right with garbage
31 collection, which could lead to a segfault in a release build, or
32 an assert failure in a debug build.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +000033
34Library
35-------
Raymond Hettinger0318a932004-09-22 18:03:47 +000036
Barry Warsawbb113862004-10-03 03:16:19 +000037- Updates for the email package:
38 + All deprecated APIs that in email 2.x issued warnings have been removed:
39 _encoder argument to the MIMEText constructor, Message.add_payload(),
40 Utils.dump_address_pair(), Utils.decode(), Utils.encode()
41 + New deprecations: Generator.__call__(), Message.get_type(),
42 Message.get_main_type(), Message.get_subtype(), the 'strict' argument to
43 the Parser constructor. These will be removed in email 3.1.
44 + Support for Python earlier than 2.3 has been removed (see PEP 291).
45 + All defect classes have been renamed to end in 'Defect'.
46 + Some FeedParser fixes; also a MultipartInvariantViolationDefect will be
47 added to messages that claim to be multipart but really aren't.
48 + Updates to documentation.
49
Raymond Hettinger596ba4d2004-09-24 03:41:05 +000050- re's findall() and finditer() functions now take an optional flags argument
51 just like the compile(), search(), and match() functions. Also, documented
52 the previously existing start and stop parameters for the findall() and
53 finditer() methods of regular expression objects.
54
Raymond Hettinger0318a932004-09-22 18:03:47 +000055- rfc822 Messages now support iterating over the headers.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +000056
Martin v. Löwisf3c56112004-09-18 09:08:52 +000057- The (undocumented) tarfile.Tarfile.membernames has been removed;
58 applications should use the getmember function.
59
Martin v. Löwis39a31782004-09-18 09:03:49 +000060- httplib now offers symbolic constants for the HTTP status codes.
61
Tim Peters528ca532004-09-16 01:30:50 +000062- SF bug #1028306: Trying to compare a ``datetime.date`` to a
63 ``datetime.datetime`` mistakenly compared only the year, month and day.
64 Now it acts like a mixed-type comparison: ``False`` for ``==``,
65 ``True`` for ``!=``, and raises ``TypeError`` for other comparison
66 operators. Because datetime is a subclass of date, comparing only the
67 base class (date) members can still be done, if that's desired, by
68 forcing using of the approprate date method; e.g.,
69 ``a_date.__eq__(a_datetime)`` is true if and only if the year, month
70 and day members of ``a_date`` and ``a_datetime`` are equal.
71
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +000072- bdist_rpm now supports command line options --force-arch,
73 {pre,post}-install, {pre,post}-uninstall, and
Martin v. Löwis23c48a12004-09-10 06:32:54 +000074 {prep,build,install,clean,verify}-script.
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +000075
Walter Dörwald69652032004-09-07 20:24:22 +000076- SF patch #998993: The UTF-8 and the UTF-16 stateful decoders now support
77 decoding incomplete input (when the input stream is temporarily exhausted).
78 ``codecs.StreamReader`` now implements buffering, which enables proper
79 readline support for the UTF-16 decoders. ``codecs.StreamReader.read()``
80 has a new argument ``chars`` which specifies the number of characters to
81 return. ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` and
82 ``codecs.StreamReader.readlines()`` have a new argument ``keepends``.
83 Trailing "\n"s will be stripped from the lines if ``keepends`` is false.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +000084
Tim Petersa80a2c82004-09-26 05:13:18 +000085- The documentation for doctest is greatly expanded, and now covers all
86 the new public features (of which there are many).
87
Walter Dörwald5011d0c2004-09-13 08:53:15 +000088- ``doctest.master`` was put back in, and ``doctest.testmod()`` once again
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +000089 updates it. This isn't good, because every ``testmod()`` call
90 contributes to bloating the "hidden" state of ``doctest.master``, but
91 some old code apparently relies on it. For now, all we can do is
92 encourage people to stitch doctests together via doctest's unittest
Tim Petersa80a2c82004-09-26 05:13:18 +000093 integration features instead.
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +000094
Skip Montanaro82d0eec2004-09-14 17:58:31 +000095- httplib now handles ipv6 address/port pairs.
96
David Goodger68a1abd2004-10-03 15:40:25 +000097- SF bug #1017864: ConfigParser now correctly handles default keys,
98 processing them with ``ConfigParser.optionxform`` when supplied,
99 consistent with the handling of config file entries and runtime-set
100 options.
101
David Goodger1cbf2062004-10-03 15:55:09 +0000102- SF bug #997050: Document, test, & check for non-string values in
103 ConfigParser. Moved the new string-only restriction added in
104 rev. 1.65 to the SafeConfigParser class, leaving existing
105 ConfigParser & RawConfigParser behavior alone, and documented the
106 conditions under which non-string values work.
107
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000108Build
109-----
110
Brett Cannonbfef8692004-09-28 04:08:11 +0000111- Building on darwin now includes /opt/local/include and /opt/local/lib for
112 building extension modules. This is so as to include software installed as
113 a DarwinPorts port <http://darwinports.opendarwin.org/>
114
Tim Peters862f0592004-09-23 19:11:32 +0000115- pyport.h now defines a Py_IS_NAN macro. It works as-is when the
116 platform C computes true for ``x != x`` if and only if X is a NaN.
117 Other platforms can override the default definition with a platform-
118 specific spelling in that platform's pyconfig.h. You can also override
119 pyport.h's default Py_IS_INFINITY definition now.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000120
121C API
122-----
123
Tim Peters307fa782004-09-23 08:06:40 +0000124- PyLong_AsUnsignedLong[Mask] now support int objects as well.
125
Walter Dörwald69652032004-09-07 20:24:22 +0000126- SF patch #998993: ``PyUnicode_DecodeUTF8Stateful`` and
127 ``PyUnicode_DecodeUTF16Stateful`` have been added, which implement stateful
128 decoding.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000129
130Documentation
131-------------
132
133...
134
135Tests
136-----
137
138- test__locale ported to unittest
139
140Windows
141-------
142
143...
144
145Mac
146---
147
Just van Rossumdd3c8372004-10-03 16:27:09 +0000148- ``plistlib`` now supports non-dict root objects. There is also a new
149 interface for reading and writing plist files: ``readPlist(pathOrFile)``
150 and ``writePlist(rootObject, pathOrFile)``
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000151
152New platforms
153-------------
154
155...
156
157Tools/Demos
158-----------
159
Tim Peters130e37f2004-10-03 19:03:19 +0000160- The text file comparison scripts ``ndiff.py`` and ``diff.py`` now
161 read the input files in universal-newline mode. This spares them
162 from consuming a great deal of time to deduce the useless result that,
163 e.g., a file with Windows line ends and a file with Linux line ends
164 have no lines in common.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000165
166
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000167What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 3?
168=================================
169
Anthony Baxtere13943a2004-09-02 16:37:15 +0000170*Release date: 02-SEP-2004*
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000171
172Core and builtins
173-----------------
174
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000175- SF patch #1007189: ``from ... import ...`` statements now allow the name
Anthony Baxter1a4ddae2004-08-31 10:07:13 +0000176 list to be surrounded by parentheses.
177
Tim Peters0973b992004-08-29 22:16:50 +0000178- Some speedups for long arithmetic, thanks to Trevor Perrin. Gradeschool
179 multiplication was sped a little by optimizing the C code. Gradeschool
180 squaring was sped by about a factor of 2, by exploiting that about half
181 the digit products are duplicates in a square. Because exponentiation
182 uses squaring often, this also speeds long power. For example, the time
183 to compute 17**1000000 dropped from about 14 seconds to 9 on my box due
184 to this much. The cutoff for Karatsuba multiplication was raised,
185 since gradeschool multiplication got quicker, and the cutoff was
Tim Peters47e52ee2004-08-30 02:44:38 +0000186 aggressively small regardless. The exponentiation algorithm was switched
187 from right-to-left to left-to-right, which is more efficient for small
188 bases. In addition, if the exponent is large, the algorithm now does
189 5 bits (instead of 1 bit) at a time. That cut the time to compute
190 17**1000000 on my box in half again, down to about 4.5 seconds.
Tim Peters0973b992004-08-29 22:16:50 +0000191
Tim Petersc8854432004-08-25 02:14:08 +0000192- OverflowWarning is no longer generated. PEP 237 scheduled this to
193 occur in Python 2.3, but since OverflowWarning was disabled by default,
194 nobody realized it was still being generated. On the chance that user
195 code is still using them, the Python builtin OverflowWarning, and
196 corresponding C API PyExc_OverflowWarning, will exist until Python 2.5.
197
Martin v. Löwis336e85f2004-08-19 11:31:58 +0000198- Py_InitializeEx has been added.
199
Brett Cannonadd33602004-08-15 07:21:25 +0000200- Fix the order of application of decorators. The proper order is bottom-up;
201 the first decorator listed is the last one called.
202
Neal Norwitzf0769532004-08-13 03:18:29 +0000203- SF patch #1005778. Fix a seg fault if the list size changed while
204 calling list.index(). This could happen if a rich comparison function
205 modified the list.
206
Michael W. Hudson5e897952004-08-12 18:12:44 +0000207- The ``func_name`` (a.k.a. ``__name__``) attribute of user-defined
208 functions is now writable.
209
Michael W. Hudson5523c252004-08-12 18:09:00 +0000210- code_new (a.k.a new.code()) now checks its arguments sufficiently
211 carefully that passing them on to PyCode_New() won't trigger calls
212 to Py_FatalError() or PyErr_BadInternalCall(). It is still the case
213 that the returned code object might be entirely insane.
214
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +0000215- Subclasses of string can no longer be interned. The semantics of
216 interning were not clear here -- a subclass could be mutable, for
217 example -- and had bugs. Explicitly interning a subclass of string
218 via intern() will raise a TypeError. Internal operations that attempt
219 to intern a string subclass will have no effect.
Jeremy Hylton4c989dd2004-08-07 19:20:05 +0000220
Tim Peters83b57352004-08-08 07:24:22 +0000221- Bug 1003935: xrange() could report bogus OverflowErrors. Documented
222 what xrange() intends, and repaired tests accordingly.
223
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000224Extension modules
225-----------------
226
Martin v. Löwise064b412004-08-29 16:34:40 +0000227- difflib now supports HTML side-by-side diff.
228
Martin v. Löwisdc3883f2004-08-29 15:46:35 +0000229- os.urandom has been added for systems that support sources of random
230 data.
231
Tim Peters037b3ee2004-08-21 06:55:43 +0000232- Patch 1012740: truncate() on a writeable cStringIO now resets the
233 position to the end of the stream. This is consistent with the original
234 StringIO module and avoids inadvertently resurrecting data that was
235 supposed to have been truncated away.
236
Dave Cole331708b2004-08-09 04:51:41 +0000237- Added socket.socketpair().
238
Dave Cole3203efb2004-08-26 00:37:31 +0000239- Added CurrentByteIndex, CurrentColumnNumber, CurrentLineNumber
240 members to xml.parsers.expat.XMLParser object.
241
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000242- The mpz, rotor, and xreadlines modules, all deprecated in earlier
Andrew M. Kuchling00873432004-08-31 13:50:43 +0000243 versions of Python, have now been removed.
244
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000245Library
246-------
247
Johannes Gijsbers4c11f602004-08-30 14:13:04 +0000248- Patch #934356: if a module defines __all__, believe that rather than using
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000249 heuristics for filtering out imported names.
Johannes Gijsbers4c11f602004-08-30 14:13:04 +0000250
Johannes Gijsbersae882f72004-08-30 10:19:56 +0000251- Patch #941486: added os.path.lexists(), which returns True for broken
252 symlinks, unlike os.path.exists().
253
Raymond Hettinger356a4592004-08-30 06:14:31 +0000254- the random module now uses os.urandom() for seeding if it is available.
255 Added a new generator based on os.urandom().
256
Martin v. Löwise064b412004-08-29 16:34:40 +0000257- difflib and diff.py can now generate HTML.
258
Martin v. Löwiscae9e672004-08-25 13:04:53 +0000259- bdist_rpm now includes version and release in the BuildRoot, and
260 replaces - by ``_`` in version and release.
Martin v. Löwiscf525242004-08-25 13:00:34 +0000261
Martin v. Löwis9f5c0c42004-08-25 11:37:43 +0000262- distutils build/build_scripts now has an -e option to specify the
263 path to the Python interpreter for installed scripts.
264
Barry Warsaw8bee7612004-08-25 02:22:30 +0000265- PEP 292 classes Template and SafeTemplate are added to the string module.
266
Martin v. Löwis75b9da42004-08-18 13:57:44 +0000267- tarfile now generates GNU tar files by default.
268
Martin v. Löwisdeacce22004-08-18 12:46:26 +0000269- HTTPResponse has now a getheaders method.
270
Johannes Gijsbersc473c992004-08-18 12:40:31 +0000271- Patch #1006219: let inspect.getsource handle '@' decorators. Thanks Simon
272 Percivall.
273
Martin v. Löwis318a12e2004-08-18 12:27:40 +0000274- logging.handlers.SMTPHandler.date_time has been removed;
275 the class now uses email.Utils.formatdate to generate the time stamp.
276
Martin v. Löwisfe84d172004-08-18 11:06:45 +0000277- A new function tkFont.nametofont was added to return an existing
278 font. The Font class constructor now has an additional exists argument
279 which, if True, requests to return/configure an existing font, rather
Tim Peters037b3ee2004-08-21 06:55:43 +0000280 than creating a new one.
Martin v. Löwisfe84d172004-08-18 11:06:45 +0000281
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +0000282- Updated the decimal package's min() and max() methods to match the
283 latest revision of the General Decimal Arithmetic Specification.
284 Quiet NaNs are ignored and equal values are sorted based on sign
285 and exponent.
286
287- The decimal package's Context.copy() method now returns deep copies.
288
289- Deprecated sys.exitfunc in favor of the atexit module. The sys.exitfunc
290 attribute will be kept around for backwards compatability and atexit
291 will just become the one preferred way to do it.
292
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +0000293- patch #675551: Add get_history_item and replace_history_item functions
294 to the readline module.
295
Johannes Gijsbers34c41202004-08-14 15:19:28 +0000296- bug #989672: pdb.doc and the help messages for the help_d and help_u methods
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +0000297 of the pdb.Pdb class gives have been corrected. d(own) goes to a newer
298 frame, u(p) to an older frame, not the other way around.
Johannes Gijsbers34c41202004-08-14 15:19:28 +0000299
Johannes Gijsbers4ec40642004-08-14 15:01:53 +0000300- bug #990669: os.path.realpath() will resolve symlinks before normalizing the
301 path, as normalizing the path may alter the meaning of the path if it
302 contains symlinks.
303
Johannes Gijsbers9d134b72004-08-14 14:03:03 +0000304- bug #851123: shutil.copyfile will raise an exception when trying to copy a
305 file onto a link to itself. Thanks Gregory Ball.
306
Brett Cannonb3de2e12004-08-13 18:46:24 +0000307- bug #570300: Fix inspect to resolve file locations using os.path.realpath()
308 so as to properly list all functions in a module when the module itself is
309 reached through a symlink. Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
310
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +0000311- doctest refactoring continued. See the docs for details. As part of
312 this effort, some old and little- (never?) used features are now
313 deprecated: the Tester class, the module is_private() function, and the
314 isprivate argument to testmod(). The Tester class supplied a feeble
315 "by hand" way to combine multiple doctests, if you knew exactly what
316 you were doing. The newer doctest features for unittest integration
317 already did a better job of that, are stronger now than ever, and the
318 new DocTestRunner class is a saner foundation if you want to do it by
319 hand. The "private name" filtering gimmick was a mistake from the
320 start, and testmod() changed long ago to ignore it by default. If
321 you want to filter out tests, the new DocTestFinder class can be used
322 to return a list of all doctests, and you can filter that list by
323 any computable criteria before passing it to a DocTestRunner instance.
324
Matthias Klose2e829c02004-08-15 17:04:33 +0000325- Bug #891637, patch #1005466: fix inspect.getargs() crash on def foo((bar)).
326
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000327Tools/Demos
328-----------
329
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +0000330- IDLE's shortcut keys for windows are now case insensitive so that
331 Control-V works the same as Control-v.
332
Matthias Klose2443d4a2004-08-16 12:10:12 +0000333- pygettext.py: Generate POT-Creation-Date header in ISO format.
334
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000335Build
336-----
337
Tim Peters47e52ee2004-08-30 02:44:38 +0000338- Backward incompatibility: longintrepr.h now triggers a compile-time
339 error if SHIFT (the number of bits in a Python long "digit") isn't
340 divisible by 5. This new requirement allows simple code for the new
341 5-bits-at-a-time long_pow() implementation. If necessary, the
342 restriction could be removed (by complicating long_pow(), or by
343 falling back to the 1-bit-at-a-time algorithm), but there are no
344 plans to do so.
345
Brett Cannoncc8a4f62004-08-26 01:44:07 +0000346- bug #991962: When building with --disable-toolbox-glue on Darwin no
347 attempt to build Mac-specific modules occurs.
348
Michael W. Hudson800ba232004-08-12 18:19:17 +0000349- The --with-tsc flag to configure to enable VM profiling with the
350 processor's timestamp counter now works on PPC platforms.
351
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +0000352- patch #1006629: Define _XOPEN_SOURCE to 500 on Solaris 8/9 to match
353 GCC's definition and avoid redefinition warnings.
354
Matthias Klosea2542be2004-08-16 11:35:51 +0000355- Detect pthreads support (provided by gnu pth pthread emulation) on
356 GNU/k*BSD systems.
357
Hye-Shik Chang3ba5bfc2004-08-19 17:52:37 +0000358- bug #1005737, #1007249: Fixed several build problems and warnings
359 found on old/legacy C compilers of HP-UX, IRIX and Tru64.
360
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000361C API
362-----
363
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +0000364..
365
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000366Documentation
367-------------
368
Neal Norwitz5268c392004-08-21 15:13:52 +0000369- patch #1005936, bug #1009373: fix index entries which contain
370 an underscore when viewed with Acrobat.
371
372- bug #990669: os.path.normpath may alter the meaning of a path if
373 it contains symbolic links. This has been documented in a comment
374 since 1992, but is now in the library reference as well.
Johannes Gijsbersb112d6e2004-08-14 14:41:32 +0000375
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000376New platforms
377-------------
378
Hye-Shik Changf64700a2004-08-18 15:13:41 +0000379- FreeBSD 6 is now supported.
380
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000381Tests
382-----
383
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +0000384..
385
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000386Windows
387-------
388
Tim Peters79b52b72004-08-12 18:37:10 +0000389- Boosted the stack reservation for python.exe and pythonw.exe from
390 the default 1MB to 2MB. Stack frames under VC 7.1 for 2.4 are enough
391 bigger than under VC 6.0 for 2.3.4 that deeply recursive progams
392 within the default sys.getrecursionlimit() default value of 1000 were
393 able to suffer undetected C stack overflows. The standard test program
394 test_compiler was one such program. If a Python process on Windows
395 "just vanishes" without a trace, and without an error message of any
396 kind, but with an exit code of 128, undetected stack overflow may be
397 the problem.
398
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000399Mac
400---
401
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +0000402..
403
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000404
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000405What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 2?
406=================================
407
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +0000408*Release date: 05-AUG-2004*
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000409
410Core and builtins
411-----------------
412
Raymond Hettinger52a21b82004-08-06 18:43:09 +0000413- Patch #980695: Implements efficient string concatenation for statements
414 of the form s=s+t and s+=t. This will vary across implementations.
415 Accordingly, the str.join() method is strongly preferred for performance
416 sensitive code.
417
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +0000418- PEP-0318, Function Decorators have been added to the language. These are
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +0000419 implemented using the Java-style @decorator syntax, like so::
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000420
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +0000421 @staticmethod
422 def foo(bar):
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000423
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +0000424 (The PEP needs to be updated to reflect the current state)
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +0000425
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +0000426- When importing a module M raises an exception, Python no longer leaves M
427 in sys.modules. Before 2.4a2 it did, and a subsequent import of M would
428 succeed, picking up a module object from sys.modules reflecting as much
429 of the initialization of M as completed before the exception was raised.
430 Subsequent imports got no indication that M was in a partially-
431 initialized state, and the importers could get into arbitrarily bad
432 trouble as a result (the M they got was in an unintended state,
433 arbitrarily far removed from M's author's intent). Now subsequent
434 imports of M will continue raising exceptions (but if, for example, the
435 source code for M is edited between import attempts, then perhaps later
436 attempts will succeed, or raise a different exception).
437
438 This can break existing code, but in such cases the code was probably
439 working before by accident. In the Python source, the only case of
440 breakage discovered was in a test accidentally relying on a damaged
441 module remaining in sys.modules. Cases are also known where tests
442 deliberately provoking import errors remove damaged modules from
443 sys.modules themselves, and such tests will break now if they do an
444 unconditional del sys.modules[M].
445
Marc-André Lemburgb314ce92004-07-23 16:14:57 +0000446- u'%s' % obj will now try obj.__unicode__() first and fallback to
447 obj.__str__() if no __unicode__ method can be found.
448
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +0000449- Patch #550732: Add PyArg_VaParseTupleAndKeywords(). Analogous to
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000450 PyArg_VaParse(). Both are now documented. Thanks Greg Chapman.
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +0000451
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000452- Allow string and unicode return types from .encode()/.decode()
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000453 methods on string and unicode objects. Added unicode.decode()
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000454 which was missing for no apparent reason.
455
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000456- An attempt to fix the mess that is Python's behaviour with
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000457 signal handlers and threads, complicated by readline's behaviour.
458 It's quite possible that there are still bugs here.
459
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000460- Added C macros Py_CLEAR and Py_VISIT to ease the implementation of
461 types that support garbage collection.
462
Raymond Hettinger76d962d2004-07-16 12:16:48 +0000463- Compiler now treats None as a constant.
464
Neil Schemenauer3a313e32004-07-19 16:29:17 +0000465- The type of values returned by __int__, __float__, __long__,
466 __oct__, and __hex__ are now checked. Returning an invalid type
467 will cause a TypeError to be raised. This matches the behavior of
468 Jython.
469
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +0000470- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in locale module.
471
Hye-Shik Changb5047fd2004-08-04 06:33:51 +0000472- Added a workaround for proper string operations in BSDs. str.split
473 and str.is* methods can now work correctly with UTF-8 locales.
474
Hye-Shik Changc81c6952004-08-04 17:40:38 +0000475- Bug #989185: unicode.iswide() and unicode.width() is dropped and
476 the East Asian Width support is moved to unicodedata extension
477 module.
Hye-Shik Change9ddfbb2004-08-04 07:38:35 +0000478
Hye-Shik Chang7df44b32004-08-04 17:36:41 +0000479- Patch #941229: The source code encoding in interactive mode
480 now refers sys.stdin.encoding not just ISO-8859-1 anymore. This
481 allows for non-latin-1 users to write unicode strings directly.
482
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000483Extension modules
484-----------------
485
Martin v. Löwis544f1192004-07-27 05:22:33 +0000486- cpickle now supports the same keyword arguments as pickle.
487
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000488Library
489-------
490
Marc-André Lemburgc759f072004-08-05 12:43:30 +0000491- Added new codecs and aliases for ISO_8859-11, ISO_8859-16 and
492 TIS-620
493
Tim Peters8485b562004-08-04 18:46:34 +0000494- Thanks to Edward Loper, doctest has been massively refactored, and
495 many new features were added. Full docs will appear later. For now
496 the doctest module comments and new test cases give good coverage.
497 The refactoring provides many hook points for customizing behavior
498 (such as how to report errors, and how to compare expected to actual
499 output). New features include a <BLANKLINE> marker for expected
500 output containing blank lines, options to produce unified or context
501 diffs when actual output doesn't match expectations, an option to
502 normalize whitespace before comparing, and an option to use an
503 ellipsis to signify "don't care" regions of output.
504
Martin v. Löwis1fa649f2004-08-03 18:45:31 +0000505- Tkinter now supports the wish -sync and -use options.
506
Fred Drakef901abd2004-08-03 17:58:55 +0000507- The following methods in time support passing of None: ctime(), gmtime(),
508 and localtime(). If None is provided, the current time is used (the
509 same as when the argument is omitted).
510 [SF bug 658254, patch 663482]
511
Martin v. Löwis9513e342004-08-03 14:36:32 +0000512- nntplib does now allow to ignore a .netrc file.
513
Martin v. Löwis65a79752004-08-03 12:59:55 +0000514- urllib2 now recognizes Basic authentication even if other authentication
515 schemes are offered.
516
Neal Norwitz0e67fd42004-08-01 22:48:06 +0000517- Bug #1001053. wave.open() now accepts unicode filenames.
518
Tim Peters5cfb05e2004-07-27 21:02:02 +0000519- gzip.GzipFile has a new fileno() method, to retrieve the handle of the
520 underlying file object (provided it has a fileno() method). This is
521 needed if you want to use os.fsync() on a GzipFile.
522
Martin v. Löwis7b9190b2004-07-27 05:07:19 +0000523- imaplib has two new methods: deleteacl and myrights.
524
Martin v. Löwiscc0f9322004-07-26 12:40:50 +0000525- nntplib has two new methods: description and descriptions. They
526 use a more RFC-compliant way of getting a newsgroup description.
527
Brett Cannon8b3d92a2004-07-21 02:21:58 +0000528- Bug #993394. Fix a possible red herring of KeyError in 'threading' being
529 raised during interpreter shutdown from a registered function with atexit
530 when dummy_threading is being used.
531
Neal Norwitza4f651a2004-07-20 22:07:44 +0000532- Bug #857297/Patch #916874. Fix an error when extracting a hard link
533 from a tarfile.
534
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +0000535- Patch #846659. Fix an error in tarfile.py when using
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +0000536 GNU longname/longlink creation.
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +0000537
Tim Peters90ee7eb2004-07-18 23:58:17 +0000538- The obsolete FCNTL.py has been deleted. The builtin fcntl module
539 has been available (on platforms that support fcntl) since Python
540 1.5a3, and all FCNTL.py did is export fcntl's names, after generating
541 a deprecation warning telling you to use fcntl directly.
542
Hye-Shik Chang2bb146f2004-07-18 03:06:29 +0000543- Several new unicode codecs are added: big5hkscs, euc_jis_2004,
544 iso2022_jp_2004, shift_jis_2004.
545
Tim Peters5af0e412004-07-12 00:45:14 +0000546- Bug #788520. Queue.{get, get_nowait, put, put_nowait} have new
547 implementations, exploiting Conditions (which didn't exist at the time
548 Queue was introduced). A minor semantic change is that the Full and
549 Empty exceptions raised by non-blocking calls now occur only if the
550 queue truly was full or empty at the instant the queue was checked (of
551 course the Queue may no longer be full or empty by the time a calling
552 thread sees those exceptions, though). Before, the exceptions could
553 also be raised if it was "merely inconvenient" for the implementation
554 to determine the true state of the Queue (because the Queue was locked
555 by some other method in progress).
556
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000557- Bugs #979794 and #980117: difflib.get_grouped_opcodes() now handles the
558 case of comparing two empty lists. This affected both context_diff() and
559 unified_diff(),
Brett Cannond2c5b4b2004-07-10 23:54:07 +0000560
Brett Cannone6f8a892004-07-10 23:14:30 +0000561- Bug #980938: smtplib now prints debug output to sys.stderr.
562
Brett Cannonf50299c2004-07-10 22:55:15 +0000563- Bug #930024: posixpath.realpath() now handles infinite loops in symlinks by
564 returning the last point in the path that was not part of any loop. Thanks
565 AM Kuchling.
566
Brett Cannonbdc36272004-07-10 20:42:22 +0000567- Bug #980327: ntpath not handles compressing erroneous slashes between the
568 drive letter and the rest of the path. Also clearly handles UNC addresses now
569 as well. Thanks Paul Moore.
570
Brett Cannone6751182004-07-10 19:13:42 +0000571- bug #679953: zipfile.py should now work for files over 2 GB. The packed data
572 for file sizes (compressed and uncompressed) was being stored as signed
573 instead of unsigned.
574
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000575- decimal.py now only uses signals in the IBM spec. The other conditions are
Raymond Hettinger5aa478b2004-07-09 10:02:53 +0000576 no longer part of the public API.
577
Marc-André Lemburg88fcca62004-07-10 16:16:06 +0000578- codecs module now has two new generic APIs: encode() and decode()
579 which don't restrict the return types (unlike the unicode and
580 string methods of the same name).
581
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000582- Non-blocking SSL sockets work again; they were broken in Python 2.3.
Andrew M. Kuchling79d7e922004-07-10 21:21:55 +0000583 SF patch 945642.
584
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000585- doctest unittest integration improvements:
586
587 o Improved the unitest test output for doctest-based unit tests
588
589 o Can now pass setUp and tearDown functions when creating
590 DocTestSuites.
591
592- The threading module has a new class, local, for creating objects
593 that provide thread-local data.
594
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +0000595- Bug #990307: when keep_empty_values is True, cgi.parse_qsl()
596 no longer returns spurious empty fields.
597
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +0000598- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in gettext module.
599
600- Introduced in gettext module the l*gettext() family of functions,
601 which return translation strings encoded in the preferred encoding,
602 as informed by locale module's getpreferredencoding().
603
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +0000604- optparse module (and tests) upgraded to Optik 1.5a1. Changes:
605
606 - Add expansion of default values in help text: the string
607 "%default" in an option's help string is expanded to str() of
608 that option's default value, or "none" if no default value.
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +0000609
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +0000610 - Bug #955889: option default values that happen to be strings are
611 now processed in the same way as values from the command line; this
612 allows generation of nicer help when using custom types. Can
613 be disabled with parser.set_process_default_values(False).
614
615 - Bug #960515: don't crash when generating help for callback
616 options that specify 'type', but not 'dest' or 'metavar'.
617
618 - Feature #815264: change the default help format for short options
619 that take an argument from e.g. "-oARG" to "-o ARG"; add
620 set_short_opt_delimiter() and set_long_opt_delimiter() methods to
621 HelpFormatter to allow (slight) customization of the formatting.
622
623 - Patch #736940: internationalize Optik: all built-in user-
624 targeted literal strings are passed through gettext.gettext(). (If
625 you want translations (.po files), they're not included with Python
626 -- you'll find them in the Optik source distribution from
627 http://optik.sourceforge.net/ .)
628
629 - Bug #878453: respect $COLUMNS environment variable for
630 wrapping help output.
631
632 - Feature #988122: expand "%prog" in the 'description' passed
633 to OptionParser, just like in the 'usage' and 'version' strings.
634 (This is *not* done in the 'description' passed to OptionGroup.)
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +0000635
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000636C API
637-----
638
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +0000639- PyImport_ExecCodeModule() and PyImport_ExecCodeModuleEx(): if an
640 error occurs while loading the module, these now delete the module's
641 entry from sys.modules. All ways of loading modules eventually call
642 one of these, so this is an error-case change in semantics for all
643 ways of loading modules. In rare cases, a module loader may wish
644 to keep a module object in sys.modules despite that the module's
645 code cannot be executed. In such cases, the module loader must
646 arrange to reinsert the name and module object in sys.modules.
647 PyImport_ReloadModule() has been changed to reinsert the original
648 module object into sys.modules if the module reload fails, so that
649 its visible semantics have not changed.
650
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000651- A large pile of datetime field-extraction macros is now documented,
652 thanks to Anthony Tuininga (patch #986010).
653
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000654Documentation
655-------------
656
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +0000657- Improved the tutorial on creating types in C.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000658
659 - point out the importance of reassigning data members before
Andrew M. Kuchling78d375f2004-08-07 14:00:39 +0000660 assigning their values
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000661
Andrew M. Kuchling28025ec2004-08-07 13:59:22 +0000662 - correct my misconception about return values from visitprocs. Sigh.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000663
664 - mention the labor saving Py_VISIT and Py_CLEAR macros.
665
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +0000666- Major rewrite of the math module docs, to address common confusions.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000667
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000668Tests
669-----
670
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +0000671- The test data files for the decimal test suite are now installed on
Anthony Baxterfd4984d2004-07-12 09:33:39 +0000672 platforms that use the Makefile.
673
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +0000674- SF patch 995225: The test file testtar.tar accidentally contained
675 CVS keywords (like $Id$), which could cause spurious failures in
676 test_tarfile.py depending on how the test file was checked out.
677
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000678
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000679What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 1?
680=================================
681
Anthony Baxter3210b362004-07-08 05:59:43 +0000682*Release date: 08-JUL-2004*
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000683
684Core and builtins
685-----------------
686
Fred Drake0a4dd392004-07-02 18:57:45 +0000687- weakref.ref is now the type object also known as
688 weakref.ReferenceType; it can be subclassed like any other new-style
689 class. There's less per-entry overhead in WeakValueDictionary
690 objects now (one object instead of three).
691
Thomas Heller04c673b2004-07-02 08:56:20 +0000692- Bug #951851: Python crashed when reading import table of certain
693 Windows DLLs.
694
Raymond Hettinger66bd2332004-08-02 08:30:07 +0000695- Bug #215126. The locals argument to eval(), execfile(), and exec now
696 accept any mapping type.
Raymond Hettinger214b1c32004-07-02 06:41:07 +0000697
Martin v. Löwisef82d2f2004-06-27 16:51:46 +0000698- marshal now shares interned strings. This change introduces
699 a new .pyc magic.
700
Anthony Baxter3ecdb252004-06-11 14:41:18 +0000701- Bug #966623. classes created with type() in an exec(, {}) don't
702 have a __module__, but code in typeobject assumed it would always
703 be there.
704
Martin v. Löwis737ea822004-06-08 18:52:54 +0000705- Python no longer relies on the LC_NUMERIC locale setting to be
706 the "C" locale; as a result, it no longer tries to prevent changing
707 the LC_NUMERIC category.
708
Tim Peters604c0132004-06-07 23:04:33 +0000709- Bug #952807: Unpickling pickled instances of subclasses of
710 datetime.date, datetime.datetime and datetime.time could yield insane
711 objects. Thanks to Jiwon Seo for a fix.
712
Thomas Heller90a764c2004-06-07 15:12:44 +0000713- Bug #845802: Python crashes when __init__.py is a directory.
714
Hye-Shik Changbc555e32004-06-03 11:10:58 +0000715- Unicode objects received two new methods: iswide() and width().
716 These query East Asian width information, as specified in Unicode
717 TR11.
Hye-Shik Chang974ed7c2004-06-02 16:49:17 +0000718
Raymond Hettinger41bd0222004-06-01 06:36:24 +0000719- Improved the tuple hashing algorithm to give fewer collisions in
720 common cases. Fixes bug #942952.
721
Raymond Hettinger354433a2004-05-19 08:20:33 +0000722- Implemented generator expressions (PEP 289). Coded by Jiwon Seo.
723
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +0000724- Enabled the profiling of C extension functions (and builtins) - check
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000725 new documentation and modified profile and bdb modules for more details
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +0000726
Nicholas Bastinabce8a62004-03-21 20:24:07 +0000727- Set file.name to the object passed to open (instead of a new string)
728
Nicholas Bastina7604bf2004-03-21 18:37:23 +0000729- Moved tracebackobject into traceback.h and renamed to PyTracebackObject
730
Raymond Hettingerff5bc502004-03-21 15:12:00 +0000731- Optimized the byte coding for multiple assignments like "a,b=b,a" and
732 "a,b,c=1,2,3". Improves their speed by 25% to 30%.
733
Brett Cannon4f653312004-03-20 22:52:14 +0000734- Limit the nested depth of a tuple for the second argument to isinstance()
735 and issubclass() to the recursion limit of the interpreter.
736 Fixes bug #858016 .
737
Raymond Hettingerade08ea2004-03-18 09:48:12 +0000738- Optimized dict iterators, creating separate types for each
739 and having them reveal their length. Also optimized the
740 methods: keys(), values(), and items().
741
Raymond Hettingerdd80f762004-03-07 07:31:06 +0000742- Implemented a newcode opcode, LIST_APPEND, that simplifies
743 the generated bytecode for list comprehensions and further
744 improves their performance (about 35%).
745
Michael W. Hudsond3b33b52004-02-19 19:35:22 +0000746- Implemented rich comparisons for floats, which seems to make
747 comparisons involving NaNs somewhat less surprising when the
748 underlying C compiler actually implements C99 semantics.
749
Raymond Hettingerfa7b9d82004-02-15 04:06:39 +0000750- Optimized list.extend() to save memory and no longer create
751 intermediate sequences. Also, extend() now pre-allocates the
752 needed memory whenever the length of the iterable is known in
753 advance -- this halves the time to extend the list.
754
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +0000755- Optimized list resize operations to make fewer calls to the system
756 realloc(). Significantly speeds up list appends, list pops,
757 list comprehensions, and the list contructor (when the input iterable
758 length is not known).
759
760- Changed the internal list over-allocation scheme. For larger lists,
761 overallocation ranged between 3% and 25%. Now, it is a constant 12%.
Raymond Hettingerab517d22004-02-14 18:34:46 +0000762 For smaller lists (n<8), overallocation was upto eight elements. Now,
763 the overallocation is no more than three elements -- this improves space
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +0000764 utilization for applications that have large numbers of small lists.
765
Raymond Hettinger0468e412004-05-05 05:37:53 +0000766- Most list bodies now get re-used rather than freed. Speeds up list
767 instantiation and deletion by saving calls to malloc() and free().
768
Raymond Hettinger31017ae2004-03-04 08:25:44 +0000769- The dict.update() method now accepts all the same argument forms
770 as the dict() constructor. This now includes item lists and/or
771 keyword arguments.
772
Michael W. Hudsonecfeb7f2004-02-12 15:28:27 +0000773- Support for arbitrary objects supporting the read-only buffer
774 interface as the co_code field of code objects (something that was
775 only possible to create from C code) has been removed.
776
Fred Drake228765b2004-02-06 04:15:22 +0000777- Made omitted callback and None equivalent for weakref.ref() and
778 weakref.proxy(); the None case wasn't handled correctly in all
779 cases.
780
781- Fixed problem where PyWeakref_NewRef() and PyWeakref_NewProxy()
782 assumed that initial existing entries in an object's weakref list
783 would not be removed while allocating a new weakref object. Since
784 GC could be invoked at that time, however, that assumption was
785 invalid. In a truly obscure case of GC being triggered during
786 creation for a new weakref object for an referent which already
787 has a weakref without a callback which is only referenced from
788 cyclic trash, a memory error can occur. This consistently created a
789 segfault in a debug build, but provided less predictable behavior in
790 a release build.
791
Hye-Shik Changff83c2b2004-02-02 13:39:01 +0000792- input() builtin function now respects compiler flags such as
793 __future__ statements. SF patch 876178.
794
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +0000795- Removed PendingDeprecationWarning from apply(). apply() remains
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +0000796 deprecated, but the nuisance warning will not be issued.
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +0000797
Tim Peters1d7323e2003-12-01 21:35:27 +0000798- At Python shutdown time (Py_Finalize()), 2.3 called cyclic garbage
799 collection twice, both before and after tearing down modules. The
800 call after tearing down modules has been disabled, because too much
801 of Python has been torn down then for __del__ methods and weakref
802 callbacks to execute sanely. The most common symptom was a sequence
803 of uninformative messages on stderr when Python shut down, produced
804 by threads trying to raise exceptions, but unable to report the nature
805 of their problems because too much of the sys module had already been
806 destroyed.
807
Guido van Rossum6c9e1302003-11-29 23:52:13 +0000808- Removed FutureWarnings related to hex/oct literals and conversions
809 and left shifts. (Thanks to Kalle Svensson for SF patch 849227.)
810 This addresses most of the remaining semantic changes promised by
811 PEP 237, except for repr() of a long, which still shows the trailing
812 'L'. The PEP appears to promise warnings for operations that
813 changed semantics compared to Python 2.3, but this is not
814 implemented; we've suffered through enough warnings related to
815 hex/oct literals and I think it's best to be silent now.
816
Raymond Hettinger4f8f9762003-11-26 08:21:35 +0000817- For str and unicode objects, the ljust(), center(), and rjust()
818 methods now accept an optional argument specifying a fill
819 character other than a space.
820
Guido van Rossumbaf0f8f2003-11-22 23:55:50 +0000821- When method objects have an attribute that can be satisfied either
822 by the function object or by the method object, the function
823 object's attribute usually wins. Christian Tismer pointed out that
824 that this is really a mistake, because this only happens for special
825 methods (like __reduce__) where the method object's version is
826 really more appropriate than the function's attribute. So from now
827 on, all method attributes will have precedence over function
828 attributes with the same name.
829
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +0000830- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 839548: if a weakref with a callback,
831 its callback, and its weakly referenced object, all became part of
832 cyclic garbage during a single run of garbage collection, the order
833 in which they were torn down was unpredictable. It was possible for
834 the callback to see partially-torn-down objects, leading to immediate
835 segfaults, or, if the callback resurrected garbage objects, to
836 resurrect insane objects that caused segfaults (or other surprises)
837 later. In one sense this wasn't surprising, because Python's cyclic gc
838 had no knowledge of Python's weakref objects. It does now. When
839 weakrefs with callbacks become part of cyclic garbage now, those
840 weakrefs are cleared first. The callbacks don't trigger then,
841 preventing the problems. If you need callbacks to trigger, then just
842 as when cyclic gc is not involved, you need to write your code so
843 that weakref objects outlive the objects they weakly reference.
Raymond Hettingera690a992003-11-16 16:17:49 +0000844
Tim Petersadd09b42003-11-12 20:43:28 +0000845- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 840829: if cyclic garbage collection
846 happened to occur during a weakref callback for a new-style class
847 instance, subtle memory corruption was the result (in a release build;
848 in a debug build, a segfault occurred reliably very soon after).
849 This has been repaired.
850
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +0000851- Compiler flags set in PYTHONSTARTUP are now active in __main__.
852
853- Added two builtin types, set() and frozenset().
854
Raymond Hettinger85c20a42003-11-06 14:06:48 +0000855- Added a reversed() builtin function that returns a reverse iterator
856 over a sequence.
857
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +0000858- Added a sorted() builtin function that returns a new sorted list
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +0000859 from any iterable.
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +0000860
Martin v. Löwis01a74b22003-10-19 18:30:01 +0000861- CObjects are now mutable (on the C level) through PyCObject_SetVoidPtr.
862
Raymond Hettinger42b1ba32003-10-16 03:41:09 +0000863- list.sort() now supports three keyword arguments: cmp, key, and reverse.
864 The key argument can be a function of one argument that extracts a
865 comparison key from the original record: mylist.sort(key=str.lower).
866 The reverse argument is a boolean value and if True will change the
867 sort order as if the comparison arguments were reversed. In addition,
868 the documentation has been amended to provide a guarantee that all sorts
869 starting with Py2.3 are guaranteed to be stable (the relative order of
870 records with equal keys is unchanged).
871
Marc-André Lemburgd7160f82003-09-22 11:14:40 +0000872- Added test whether wchar_t is signed or not. A signed wchar_t is not
873 usable as internal unicode type base for Py_UNICODE since the
874 unicode implementation assumes an unsigned type.
875
Jeremy Hyltond8082792003-09-16 19:41:39 +0000876- Fixed a bug in the cache of length-one Unicode strings that could
877 lead to a seg fault. The specific problem occurred when an earlier,
878 non-fatal error left an uninitialized Unicode object in the
879 freelist.
880
Raymond Hettinger9bfe5332003-08-27 04:55:52 +0000881- The % formatting operator now supports '%F' which is equivalent to
882 '%f'. This has always been documented but never implemented.
883
Tim Peters465fa3d2003-08-15 01:16:37 +0000884- complex(obj) could leak a little memory if obj wasn't a string or
885 number.
886
Raymond Hettingereaef6152003-08-02 07:42:57 +0000887- zip() with no arguments now returns an empty list instead of raising
888 a TypeError exception.
889
Guido van Rossum02c58f82003-10-08 21:08:29 +0000890- obj.__contains__() now returns True/False instead of 1/0. SF patch
891 820195.
892
Armin Rigo2b3eb402003-10-28 12:05:48 +0000893- Python no longer tries to be smart about recursive comparisons.
894 When comparing containers with cyclic references to themselves it
895 will now just hit the recursion limit. See SF patch 825639.
896
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000897- str and unicode builtin types now have an rsplit() method that is
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +0000898 same as split() except that it scans the string from the end
899 working towards the beginning. See SF feature request 801847.
Hye-Shik Chang060ebed2003-12-15 18:51:19 +0000900
Jim Fulton8a1a5942004-02-08 04:21:26 +0000901- Fixed a bug in object.__reduce_ex__ when using protocol 2. Failure
902 to clear the error when attempts to get the __getstate__ attribute
903 fail caused intermittent errors and odd behavior.
904
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +0000905- buffer objects based on other objects no longer cache a pointer to
906 the data and the data length. Instead, the appropriate tp_as_buffer
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +0000907 method is called as necessary.
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +0000908
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +0000909- fixed: if a file is opened with an explicit buffer size >= 1, repeated
Andrew MacIntyre4e10ed32004-04-04 07:01:35 +0000910 close() calls would attempt to free() the buffer already free()ed on
911 the first call.
912
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +0000913
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000914Extension modules
915-----------------
916
Barry Warsaw11b91a02004-06-28 00:50:43 +0000917- Added socket.getservbyport(), and make the second argument in
918 getservbyname() and getservbyport() optional.
919
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +0000920- time module code that deals with input POSIX timestamps will now raise
921 ValueError if more than a second is lost in precision when the
922 timestamp is cast to the platform C time_t type. There's no chance
923 that the platform will do anything sensible with the result in such
924 cases. This includes ctime(), localtime() and gmtime(). Assorted
925 fromtimestamp() and utcfromtimestamp() methods in the datetime module
926 were also protected. Closes bugs #919012 and 975996.
Brett Cannonb46ed712004-06-19 20:50:47 +0000927
Martin v. Löwis77ca6c42004-06-03 12:47:26 +0000928- fcntl.ioctl now warns if the mutate flag is not specified.
929
Martin v. Löwisd8948722004-06-02 09:57:56 +0000930- nt now properly allows to refer to UNC roots, e.g. in nt.stat().
931
Raymond Hettinger027bb632004-05-31 03:09:25 +0000932- the weakref module now supports additional objects: array.array,
933 sre.pattern_objects, file objects, and sockets.
934
Raymond Hettingere2eda602004-04-04 08:51:41 +0000935- operator.isMappingType() and operator.isSequenceType() now give
936 fewer false positives.
937
Brett Cannon06c34792004-03-23 23:16:54 +0000938- socket.sslerror is now a subclass of socket.error . Also added
939 socket.error to the socket module's C API.
940
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000941- Bug #920575: A problem where the _locale module segfaults on
Hye-Shik Changc3a87b82004-03-21 19:34:30 +0000942 nl_langinfo(ERA) caused by GNU libc's illegal NULL return is fixed.
943
Raymond Hettinger6e2ee862004-03-14 04:37:50 +0000944- array objects now support the copy module. Also, their resizing
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000945 scheme has been updated to match that used for list objects. This improves
Raymond Hettinger49f9bd12004-03-14 05:43:59 +0000946 the performance (speed and memory usage) of append() operations.
Raymond Hettinger6ab78cd2004-08-29 07:50:43 +0000947 Also, array.array() and array.extend() now accept any iterable argument
948 for repeated appends without needing to create another temporary array.
Raymond Hettinger3aa82c02004-03-13 18:18:51 +0000949
Raymond Hettinger3e47f652004-03-08 18:22:35 +0000950- cStringIO.writelines() now accepts any iterable argument and writes
951 the lines one at a time rather than joining them and writing once.
952 Made a parallel change to StringIO.writelines(). Saves memory and
953 makes suitable for use with generator expressions.
954
Brett Cannond1080a32004-03-02 04:38:10 +0000955- time.strftime() now checks that the values in its time tuple argument
956 are within the proper boundaries to prevent possible crashes from the
957 platform's C library implementation of strftime(). Can possibly
958 break code that uses values outside the range that didn't cause
959 problems previously (such as sitting day of year to 0). Fixes bug
960 #897625.
961
Martin v. Löwis12af0482004-01-31 12:34:17 +0000962- The socket module now supports Bluetooth sockets, if the
963 system has <bluetooth/bluetooth.h>
964
Raymond Hettinger756b3f32004-01-29 06:37:52 +0000965- Added a collections module containing a new datatype, deque(),
966 offering high-performance, thread-safe, memory friendly appends
967 and pops on either side of the deque.
968
969- Several modules now take advantage of collections.deque() for
970 improved performance: Queue, mutex, shlex, threading, and pydoc.
971
Raymond Hettinger166958b2003-12-01 13:18:39 +0000972- The operator module has two new functions, attrgetter() and
973 itemgetter() which are useful for creating fast data extractor
974 functions for map(), list.sort(), itertools.groupby(), and
975 other functions that expect a function argument.
976
Martin v. Löwis94681fc2003-11-27 19:40:22 +0000977- socket.SHUT_{RD,WR,RDWR} was added.
978
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +0000979- os.getsid was added.
980
Guido van Rossum16b9fa82003-10-23 23:54:57 +0000981- The pwd module incorrectly advertised its struct type as
982 struct_pwent; this has been renamed to struct_passwd. (The old name
983 is still supported for backwards compatibility.)
984
Fred Drakede050322003-10-21 15:41:59 +0000985- The xml.parsers.expat module now provides Expat 1.95.7.
986
Martin v. Löwis3bbd6542003-10-03 13:57:37 +0000987- socket.IPPROTO_IPV6 was added.
988
Martin v. Löwise7a97962003-09-20 16:08:33 +0000989- readline.clear_history was added.
990
Brett Cannon62dba4c2003-09-10 19:37:42 +0000991- select.select() now accepts sequences for its first three arguments.
992
Raymond Hettinger5475f232003-08-08 12:20:03 +0000993- cStringIO now supports the f.closed attribute.
994
Anthony Baxter83f52912003-08-05 06:33:56 +0000995- The signal module now exposes SIGRTMIN and SIGRTMAX (if available).
996
Andrew M. Kuchling69f31eb2003-08-13 23:11:04 +0000997- curses module now supports use_default_colors(). [patch #739124]
998
Anthony Baxter5c68ef02003-10-04 08:04:04 +0000999- Bug #811028: ncurses.h breakage on FreeBSD/MacOS X
1000
1001- Bug #814613: INET_ADDRSTRLEN fix needed for all compilers on SGI
1002
Gustavo Niemeyerad3fc442003-10-17 22:13:16 +00001003- Implemented non-recursive SRE matching scheme (#757624).
1004
1005- Implemented (?(id/name)yes|no) support in SRE (#572936).
1006
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +00001007- random.seed() with no arguments or None uses time.time() as a default
1008 seed. Modified to match Py2.2 behavior and use fractional seconds so
1009 that successive runs are more likely to produce different sequences.
1010
1011- random.Random has a new method, getrandbits(k), which returns an int
1012 with k random bits. This method is now an optional part of the API
1013 for user defined generators. Any generator that defines genrandbits()
1014 can now use randrange() for ranges with a length >= 2**53. Formerly,
1015 randrange would return only even numbers for ranges that large (see
1016 SF bug #812202). Generators that do not define genrandbits() now
1017 issue a warning when randrange() is called with a range that large.
1018
Raymond Hettingerd25c1c62003-12-06 16:23:06 +00001019- itertools has a new function, groupby() for aggregating iterables
1020 into groups sharing the same key (as determined by a key function).
1021 It offers some of functionality of SQL's groupby keyword and of
1022 the Unix uniq filter.
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +00001023
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001024- itertools now has a new tee() function which produces two independent
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +00001025 iterators from a single iterable.
1026
1027- itertools.izip() with no arguments now returns an empty iterator instead
1028 of raising a TypeError exception.
1029
Gustavo Niemeyera6e436e2004-02-14 00:02:45 +00001030- Fixed #853061: allow BZ2Compressor.compress() to receive an empty string
1031 as parameter.
1032
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001033Library
1034-------
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001035
Guido van Rossum5124b4a2004-07-06 17:52:32 +00001036- Bug #981530: Fix UnboundLocalError in shutil.rmtree(). This affects
1037 the documented behavior: the function passed to the onerror()
1038 handler can now also be os.listdir.
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001039
Brett Cannon41d13f62004-07-03 03:54:54 +00001040- Bug #754449: threading.Thread objects no longer mask exceptions raised during
1041 interpreter shutdown with another exception from attempting to handle the
1042 original exception.
Brett Cannoncc4e9352004-07-03 03:52:35 +00001043
Raymond Hettinger21f9fce2004-07-10 16:11:03 +00001044- Added decimal.py per PEP 327.
Raymond Hettinger7c85fa42004-07-01 11:01:35 +00001045
Brett Cannon46d4ff22004-06-29 04:08:23 +00001046- Bug #981299: rsync is now a recognized protocol in urlparse that uses a
1047 "netloc" portion of a URL.
Brett Cannonfbac2942004-06-29 04:02:40 +00001048
Brett Cannon1c3fa182004-06-19 21:11:35 +00001049- Bug #919012: shutil.move() will not try to move a directory into itself.
1050 Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
1051
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +00001052- Bug #934282: pydoc.stripid() is now case-insensitive. Thanks Robin Becker.
1053
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +00001054- Bug #823209: cmath.log() now takes an optional base argument so that its
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +00001055 API matches math.log().
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +00001056
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001057- Bug #957381: distutils bdist_rpm no longer fails on recent RPM versions
Anthony Baxter1a4ddae2004-08-31 10:07:13 +00001058 that generate a -debuginfo.rpm
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001059
Martin v. Löwisbdec50f2004-06-08 08:29:33 +00001060- os.path.devnull has been added for all supported platforms.
1061
Hye-Shik Chang2400e932004-06-05 18:37:53 +00001062- Fixed #877165: distutils now picks the right C++ compiler command
1063 on cygwin and mingw32.
1064
Hye-Shik Chang39aef792004-06-05 13:30:56 +00001065- urllib.urlopen().readline() now handles HTTP/0.9 correctly.
1066
Brett Cannon0096e262004-06-05 01:12:51 +00001067- refactored site.py into functions. Also wrote regression tests for the
1068 module.
1069
Fred Drakeec6229e2004-06-25 23:02:59 +00001070- The distutils install command now supports the --home option and
1071 installation scheme for all platforms.
1072
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +00001073- asyncore.loop now has a repeat count parameter that defaults to
Michael W. Hudson7db865a2004-06-30 09:09:38 +00001074 looping forever.
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +00001075
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001076- The distutils sdist command now ignores all .svn directories, in
1077 addition to CVS and RCS directories. .svn directories hold
1078 administrative files for the Subversion source control system.
1079
Martin v. Löwis2a6ba902004-05-31 18:22:40 +00001080- Added a new module: cookielib. Automatic cookie handling for HTTP
1081 clients. Also, support for cookielib has been added to urllib2, so
1082 urllib2.urlopen() can transparently handle cookies.
1083
Raymond Hettinger059e1702004-05-19 19:56:44 +00001084- stringprep.py now uses built-in set() instead of sets.Set().
1085
Thomas Heller2e7c8322004-05-11 15:10:59 +00001086- Bug #876278: Unbounded recursion in modulefinder
1087
Martin v. Löwis456ab1d2004-05-06 01:54:36 +00001088- Bug #780300: Swap public and system ID in LexicalHandler.startDTD.
1089 Applications relying on the wrong order need to be corrected.
1090
Hye-Shik Chang0f5bf1e2004-04-20 21:11:11 +00001091- Bug #926075: Fixed a bug that returns a wrong pattern object
1092 for a string or unicode object in sre.compile() when a different
1093 type pattern with the same value exists.
1094
Skip Montanarod0c0c412004-04-07 16:03:02 +00001095- Added countcallers arg to trace.Trace class (--trackcalls command line arg
1096 when run from the command prompt).
1097
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +00001098- Fixed a caching bug in platform.platform() where the argument of 'terse' was
1099 not taken into consideration when caching value.
1100
Nicholas Bastin824b1b22004-03-23 18:44:39 +00001101- Added two new command-line arguments for profile (output file and
1102 default sort).
1103
Nicholas Bastin1eb4bfc2004-03-22 20:12:56 +00001104- Added global runctx function to profile module
1105
Martin v. Löwis347c30d2004-03-21 15:29:41 +00001106- Add hlist missing entryconfigure and entrycget methods.
1107
Hye-Shik Chang4a7ad1a2004-03-19 08:11:56 +00001108- The ptcp154 codec was added for Kazakh character set support.
1109
Martin v. Löwisa79449e2004-02-15 21:19:18 +00001110- Support non-anonymous ftp URLs in urllib2.
1111
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001112- The encodings package will now apply codec name aliases
Marc-André Lemburg57cb68f2004-01-20 18:24:34 +00001113 first before starting to try the import of the codec module.
1114 This simplifies overriding built-in codecs with external
1115 packages, e.g. the included CJK codecs with the JapaneseCodecs
1116 package, by adjusting the aliases dictionary in encodings.aliases
1117 accordingly.
1118
Barry Warsaw30ff12f2004-01-04 01:13:43 +00001119- base64 now supports RFC 3548 Base16, Base32, and Base64 encoding and
1120 decoding standards.
1121
Jeremy Hylton37c5f2a2003-12-14 05:29:45 +00001122- urllib2 now supports processors. A processor is a handler that
1123 implements an xxx_request or xxx_response method. These methods are
1124 called for all requests.
1125
Thomas Hellerc7501d52003-12-05 20:28:07 +00001126- distutils compilers now compile source files in the same order as
1127 they are passed to the compiler.
1128
Walter Dörwaldc8de4582003-12-03 20:26:05 +00001129- pprint.pprint() and pprint.pformat() now have additional parameters
1130 indent, width and depth.
1131
Walter Dörwald7a7ede52003-12-03 20:15:28 +00001132- Patch #750542: pprint now will pretty print subclasses of list, tuple
1133 and dict too, as long as they don't overwrite __repr__().
1134
Thomas Hellerb3105912003-11-28 19:42:56 +00001135- Bug #848614: distutils' msvccompiler fails to find the MSVC6
1136 compiler because of incomplete registry entries.
1137
Martin v. Löwisaf7dc8d2003-11-19 19:51:55 +00001138- httplib.HTTP.putrequest now offers to omit the implicit Accept-Encoding.
1139
Thomas Hellercf0005b2003-11-14 10:33:20 +00001140- Patch #841977: modulefinder didn't find extension modules in packages
1141
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +00001142- imaplib.IMAP4.thread was added.
1143
Guido van Rossum967b0632003-11-10 02:27:19 +00001144- Plugged a minor hole in tempfile.mktemp() due to the use of
1145 os.path.exists(), switched to using os.lstat() directly if possible.
1146
Raymond Hettinger0c410272004-01-05 10:13:35 +00001147- bisect.py and heapq.py now have underlying C implementations
Raymond Hettinger33ecffb2004-06-10 05:03:17 +00001148 for better performance.
1149
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001150- heapq.py has two new functions, nsmallest() and nlargest().
Raymond Hettingerb3af1812003-11-08 10:24:38 +00001151
Neil Schemenauerf607fc52003-11-05 23:03:00 +00001152- traceback.format_exc has been added (similar to print_exc but it returns
1153 a string).
1154
Martin v. Löwis45394c22003-10-31 13:49:36 +00001155- xmlrpclib.MultiCall has been added.
1156
Martin v. Löwis48440b72003-10-31 12:52:35 +00001157- poplib.POP3_SSL has been added.
1158
Martin v. Löwisd6625482003-10-12 17:37:01 +00001159- tmpfile.mkstemp now returns an absolute path even if dir is relative.
1160
Brett Cannon5d9ca4e2003-10-12 04:38:48 +00001161- urlparse is RFC 2396 compliant.
1162
Skip Montanarodef99342003-10-03 14:07:07 +00001163- The fieldnames argument to the csv module's DictReader constructor is now
1164 optional. If omitted, the first row of the file will be used as the
1165 list of fieldnames.
1166
Raymond Hettinger9a80c5d2003-09-23 20:21:01 +00001167- encodings.bz2_codec was added for access to bz2 compression
1168 using "a long string".encode('bz2')
1169
Guido van Rossum0e5a51d2003-09-22 15:03:11 +00001170- Various improvements to unittest.py, realigned with PyUnit CVS.
1171
Martin v. Löwisc6bb6c02003-09-20 15:52:21 +00001172- dircache now passes exceptions to the caller, instead of returning
1173 empty lists.
1174
Raymond Hettingerdeadbf52003-09-12 06:33:37 +00001175- The bsddb module and dbhash module now support the iterator and
1176 mapping protocols which make them more substitutable for dictionaries
1177 and shelves.
1178
Skip Montanaro3f7a9482003-09-06 19:52:12 +00001179- The csv module's DictReader and DictWriter classes now accept keyword
1180 arguments. This was an omission in the initial implementation.
1181
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +00001182- The email package handles some RFC 2231 parameters with missing
Barry Warsaw2f5bf172003-09-03 04:09:49 +00001183 CHARSET fields better. It also includes a patch to parameter
1184 parsing when semicolons appear inside quotes.
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +00001185
Raymond Hettinger6a180122003-08-17 08:34:09 +00001186- sets.py now runs under Py2.2. In addition, the argument restrictions
1187 for most set methods (but not the operators) have been relaxed to
Raymond Hettinger70b9f492003-11-19 15:52:14 +00001188 allow any iterable.
Raymond Hettingeree562fc2003-08-15 21:17:04 +00001189
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +00001190- _strptime.py now has a behind-the-scenes caching mechanism for the most
Brett Cannonb7150a22003-08-05 06:27:04 +00001191 recent TimeRE instance used along with the last five unique directive
1192 patterns. The overall module was also made more thread-safe.
1193
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +00001194- random.cunifvariate() and random.stdgamma() were deprecated in Py2.3
1195 and removed in Py2.4.
1196
Anthony Baxter92bee362003-11-04 14:35:49 +00001197- Bug #823328: urllib2.py's HTTP Digest Auth support works again.
1198
Hye-Shik Chang84a99312004-01-17 14:59:36 +00001199- Patch #873597: CJK codecs are imported into rank of default codecs.
1200
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001201Tools/Demos
1202-----------
1203
Skip Montanarod5a21fd2004-01-27 14:49:04 +00001204- A hotshotmain script was added to the Tools/scripts directory that
1205 makes it easy to run a script under control of the hotshot profiler.
1206
Skip Montanaro030f68a2003-10-28 16:24:00 +00001207- The db2pickle and pickle2db scripts can now dump/load gdbm files.
1208
Skip Montanaroe2b61e02004-03-03 17:42:08 +00001209- The file order on the command line of the pickle2db script was reversed.
1210 It is now [ picklefile ] dbfile. This provides better symmetry with
1211 db2pickle. The file arguments to both scripts are now source followed by
1212 destination in situations where both files are given.
1213
Skip Montanarofd4fa882003-09-10 19:04:13 +00001214- The pydoc script will display a link to the module documentation for
1215 modules determined to be part of the core distribution. The documentation
1216 base directory defaults to http://www.python.org/doc/current/lib/ but can
1217 be changed by setting the PYTHONDOCS environment variable.
1218
Raymond Hettingere41d4c82003-08-25 04:39:55 +00001219- texcheck.py now detects double word errors.
1220
Tim Peters1a3abcb2003-08-18 23:52:09 +00001221- md5sum.py mistakenly opened input files in text mode by default, a
1222 silent and dangerous change from previous releases. It once again
1223 opens input files in binary mode by default. The -t and -b flags
1224 remain for compatibility with the 2.3 release, but -b is the default
1225 now.
1226
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001227- py-electric-colon now works when pending-delete/delete-selection mode is
1228 in effect
1229
1230- py-help-at-point is no longer bound to the F1 key - it's still bound to
1231 C-c C-h
1232
Barry Warsaw6ec58ca2003-09-03 03:20:37 +00001233- Pynche was fixed to not crash when there is no ~/.pynche file and no
1234 -d option was given.
1235
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001236Build
1237-----
1238
Brett Cannonf6af76d2004-06-26 04:03:06 +00001239- Bug #978645: Modules/getpath.c now builds properly in --disable-framework
1240 build under OS X.
1241
Skip Montanaro56f6a4f2004-06-18 02:47:22 +00001242- Profiling using gprof is now available if Python is configured with
1243 --enable-profiling.
1244
Martin v. Löwisf30d60e2004-06-08 08:17:44 +00001245- Profiling the VM using the Pentium TSC is now possible if Python
1246 is configured --with-tsc.
1247
Martin v. Löwis642c8a12004-06-04 13:55:13 +00001248- In order to find libraries, setup.py now also looks in /lib64, for use
1249 on AMD64.
1250
Hye-Shik Chang54f94392004-04-14 07:55:31 +00001251- Bug #934635: Fixed a bug where the configure script couldn't detect
1252 getaddrinfo() properly if the KAME stack had SCTP support.
1253
Skip Montanaro7befb992004-02-10 16:50:21 +00001254- Support for missing ANSI C header files (limits.h, stddef.h, etc) was
1255 removed.
1256
Skip Montanarodb608052004-02-07 13:53:46 +00001257- Systems requiring the D4, D6 or D7 variants of pthreads are no longer
1258 supported (see PEP 11).
1259
1260- Universal newline support can no longer be disabled (see PEP 11).
1261
Skip Montanarocd1f7432004-01-17 14:22:44 +00001262- Support for DGUX, SunOS 4, IRIX 4 and Minix was removed (see PEP 11).
1263
1264- Support for systems requiring --with-dl-dld or --with-sgi-dl was removed
1265 (see PEP 11).
1266
1267- Tests for sizeof(char) were removed since ANSI C mandates that
1268 sizeof(char) must be 1.
1269
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001270C API
1271-----
1272
Tim Peters9ddf40b2004-06-20 22:41:32 +00001273- Thanks to Anthony Tuininga, the datetime module now supplies a C API
1274 containing type-check macros and constructors. See new docs in the
1275 Python/C API Reference Manual for details.
1276
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +00001277- Private function _PyTime_DoubleToTimet added, to convert a Python
1278 timestamp (C double) to platform time_t with some out-of-bounds
1279 checking. Declared in new header file timefuncs.h. It would be
1280 good to expose some other internal timemodule.c functions there.
1281
Martin v. Löwise440e472004-06-01 15:22:42 +00001282- New public functions PyEval_EvaluateFrame and PyGen_New to expose
1283 generator objects.
1284
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +00001285- New public functions Py_IncRef() and Py_DecRef(), exposing the
1286 functionality of the Py_XINCREF() and Py_XDECREF macros. Useful for
Thomas Hellercc10a852004-04-22 17:28:25 +00001287 runtime dynamic embedding of Python. See patch #938302, by Bob
1288 Ippolito.
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +00001289
Raymond Hettingerc1e4f9d2004-03-12 08:04:00 +00001290- Added a new macro, PySequence_Fast_ITEMS, which retrieves a fast sequence's
1291 underlying array of PyObject pointers. Useful for high speed looping.
1292
Raymond Hettinger8f5cdaa2003-12-13 11:26:12 +00001293- Created a new method flag, METH_COEXIST, which causes a method to be loaded
1294 even if already defined by a slot wrapper. This allows a __contains__
1295 method, for example, to co-exist with a defined sq_contains slot. This
1296 is helpful because the PyCFunction can take advantage of optimized calls
1297 whenever METH_O or METH_NOARGS flags are defined.
1298
Raymond Hettingerbc0f2ab2003-11-25 21:12:14 +00001299- Added a new function, PyDict_Contains(d, k) which is like
1300 PySequence_Contains() but is specific to dictionaries and executes
1301 about 10% faster.
1302
Brett Cannon26b3a7b2003-10-19 21:31:43 +00001303- Added three new macros: Py_RETURN_NONE, Py_RETURN_TRUE, and Py_RETURN_FALSE.
1304 Each return the singleton they mention after Py_INCREF()ing them.
1305
Raymond Hettingercb2da432003-10-12 18:24:34 +00001306- Added a new function, PyTuple_Pack(n, ...) for constructing tuples from a
1307 variable length argument list of Python objects without having to invoke
1308 the more complex machinery of Py_BuildValue(). PyTuple_Pack(3, a, b, c)
1309 is equivalent to Py_BuildValue("(OOO)", a, b, c).
1310
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001311Windows
1312-------
1313
Guido van Rossumfd25aca2003-11-30 22:10:15 +00001314- The _winreg module could segfault when reading very large registry
1315 values, due to unchecked alloca() calls (SF bug 851056). The fix is
1316 uses either PyMem_Malloc(n) or PyString_FromStringAndSize(NULL, n),
1317 as appropriate, followed by a size check.
1318
Tim Petersf1827cf2003-09-07 03:30:18 +00001319- file.truncate() could misbehave if the file was open for update
1320 (modes r+, rb+, w+, wb+), and the most recent file operation before
1321 the truncate() call was an input operation. SF bug 801631.
1322
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001323
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001324What's New in Python 2.3 final?
1325===============================
1326
1327*Release date: 29-Jul-2003*
1328
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001329IDLE
1330----
1331
Tim Peters36c1afc2003-07-29 17:22:57 +00001332- Bug 778400: IDLE hangs when selecting "Edit with IDLE" from explorer.
1333 This was unique to Windows, and was fixed by adding an -n switch to
1334 the command the Windows installer creates to execute "Edit with IDLE"
1335 context-menu actions.
1336
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001337- IDLE displays a new message upon startup: some "personal firewall"
1338 kinds of programs (for example, ZoneAlarm) open a dialog of their
1339 own when any program opens a socket. IDLE does use sockets, talking
1340 on the computer's internal loopback interface. This connection is not
1341 visible on any external interface and no data is sent to or received
1342 from the Internet. So, if you get such a dialog when opening IDLE,
1343 asking whether to let pythonw.exe talk to address 127.0.0.1, say yes,
1344 and rest assured no communication external to your machine is taking
1345 place. If you don't allow it, IDLE won't be able to start.
1346
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001347
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001348What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 2?
1349=============================================
1350
Tim Peters6560a252003-07-24 00:15:46 +00001351*Release date: 24-Jul-2003*
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001352
1353Core and builtins
1354-----------------
1355
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00001356- It is now possible to import from zipfiles containing additional
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001357 data bytes before the zip compatible archive. Zipfiles containing a
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00001358 comment at the end are still unsupported.
1359
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001360Extension modules
1361-----------------
1362
1363- A longstanding bug in the parser module's initialization could cause
1364 fatal internal refcount confusion when the module got initialized more
1365 than once. This has been fixed.
1366
Fred Drake01a43122003-07-21 17:17:10 +00001367- Fixed memory leak in pyexpat; using the parser's ParseFile() method
1368 with open files that aren't instances of the standard file type
1369 caused an instance of the bound .read() method to be leaked on every
1370 call.
1371
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001372- Fixed some leaks in the locale module.
1373
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001374Library
1375-------
1376
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001377- Lib/encodings/rot_13.py when used as a script, now more properly
1378 uses the first Python interpreter on your path.
1379
1380- Removed caching of TimeRE (and thus LocaleTime) in _strptime.py to
1381 fix a locale related bug in the test suite. Although another patch
1382 was needed to actually fix the problem, the cache code was not
1383 restored.
1384
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00001385IDLE
1386----
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001387
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00001388- Calltips patches.
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001389
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001390Build
1391-----
1392
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001393- For MacOSX, added -mno-fused-madd to BASECFLAGS to fix test_coercion
1394 on Panther (OSX 10.3).
1395
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001396C API
1397-----
1398
1399Windows
1400-------
1401
Tim Peters291f14e2003-07-22 02:50:01 +00001402- The tempfile module could do insane imports on Windows if PYTHONCASEOK
1403 was set, making temp file creation impossible. Repaired.
1404
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001405- Add a patch to workaround pthread_sigmask() bugs in Cygwin.
1406
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001407Mac
1408---
1409
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001410- Various fixes to pimp.
1411
1412- Scripts runs with pythonw no longer had full window manager access.
1413
1414- Don't force boot-disk-only install, for reasons unknown it causes
1415 more problems than it solves.
1416
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001417
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001418What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 1?
1419=============================================
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001420
Jeremy Hylton0ed18c22003-07-18 20:10:02 +00001421*Release date: 18-Jul-2003*
1422
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001423Core and builtins
1424-----------------
1425
Tim Peterse5e065b2003-07-06 18:36:54 +00001426- The new function sys.getcheckinterval() returns the last value set
1427 by sys.setcheckinterval().
1428
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001429- Several bugs in the symbol table phase of the compiler have been
1430 fixed. Errors could be lost and compilation could fail without
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001431 reporting an error. SF patch 763201.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001432
1433- The interpreter is now more robust about importing the warnings
1434 module. In an executable generated by freeze or similar programs,
1435 earlier versions of 2.3 would fail if the warnings module could
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001436 not be found on the file system. Fixes SF bug 771097.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001437
1438- A warning about assignments to module attributes that shadow
1439 builtins, present in earlier releases of 2.3, has been removed.
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001440
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001441- It is not possible to create subclasses of builtin types like str
1442 and tuple that define an itemsize. Earlier releases of Python 2.3
1443 allowed this by mistake, leading to crashes and other problems.
1444
1445- The thread_id is now initialized to 0 in a non-thread build. SF bug
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001446 770247.
1447
1448- SF bug 762891: "del p[key]" on proxy object no longer raises SystemError.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001449
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001450Extension modules
1451-----------------
1452
1453- weakref.proxy() can now handle "del obj[i]" for proxy objects
1454 defining __delitem__. Formerly, it generated a SystemError.
1455
1456- SSL no longer crashes the interpreter when the remote side disconnects.
1457
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001458- On Unix the mmap module can again be used to map device files.
1459
Brett Cannon20def8b2003-07-01 05:16:08 +00001460- time.strptime now exclusively uses the Python implementation
1461 contained within the _strptime module.
1462
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001463- The print slot of weakref proxy objects was removed, because it was
1464 not consistent with the object's repr slot.
1465
1466- The mmap module only checks file size for regular files, not
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001467 character or block devices. SF patch 708374.
1468
1469- The cPickle Pickler garbage collection support was fixed to traverse
1470 the find_class attribute, if present.
1471
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001472- There are several fixes for the bsddb3 wrapper module.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001473
1474 bsddb3 no longer crashes if an environment is closed before a cursor
1475 (SF bug 763298).
1476
1477 The DB and DBEnv set_get_returns_none function was extended to take
Barry Warsawd71a5512003-07-20 18:00:54 +00001478 a level instead of a boolean flag. The new level 2 means that in
1479 addition, cursor.set()/.get() methods return None instead of raising
1480 an exception.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001481
1482 A typo was fixed in DBCursor.join_item(), preventing a crash.
1483
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001484Library
1485-------
1486
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001487- distutils now supports MSVC 7.1
1488
Raymond Hettinger71adf7e2003-07-16 19:25:22 +00001489- doctest now examines all docstrings by default. Previously, it would
1490 skip over functions with private names (as indicated by the underscore
1491 naming convention). The old default created too much of a risk that
1492 user tests were being skipped inadvertently. Note, this change could
1493 break code in the unlikely case that someone had intentionally put
1494 failing tests in the docstrings of private functions. The breakage
1495 is easily fixable by specifying the old behavior when calling testmod()
1496 or Tester().
1497
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001498- There were several fixes to the way dumbdbms are closed. It's vital
1499 that a dumbdbm database be closed properly, else the on-disk data
1500 and directory files can be left in mutually inconsistent states.
1501 dumbdbm.py's _Database.__del__() method attempted to close the
1502 database properly, but a shutdown race in _Database._commit() could
1503 prevent this from working, so that a program trusting __del__() to
1504 get the on-disk files in synch could be badly surprised. The race
1505 has been repaired. A sync() method was also added so that shelve
1506 can guarantee data is written to disk.
Tim Peters7a6c7332003-07-13 17:21:10 +00001507
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001508 The close() method can now be called more than once without complaint.
Tim Petersd7472ec2003-07-13 02:22:03 +00001509
Tim Peters59aba122003-07-01 20:01:55 +00001510- The classes in threading.py are now new-style classes. That they
1511 weren't before was an oversight.
1512
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001513- The urllib2 digest authentication handlers now define the correct
1514 auth_header. The earlier versions would fail at runtime.
1515
Neal Norwitze7dfe212003-07-01 14:59:46 +00001516- SF bug 763023: fix uncaught ZeroDivisionError in difflib ratio methods
1517 when there are no lines.
1518
Neal Norwitz3c0f2c92003-07-01 21:12:47 +00001519- SF bug 763637: fix exception in Tkinter with after_cancel
1520 which could occur with Tk 8.4
1521
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001522- SF bug 770601: CGIHTTPServer.py now passes the entire environment
1523 to child processes.
1524
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001525- SF bug 765238: add filter to fnmatch's __all__.
1526
1527- SF bug 748201: make time.strptime() error messages more helpful.
1528
1529- SF patch 764470: Do not dump the args attribute of a Fault object in
1530 xmlrpclib.
1531
1532- SF patch 549151: urllib and urllib2 now redirect POSTs on 301
1533 responses.
1534
1535- SF patch 766650: The whichdb module was fixed to recognize dbm files
1536 generated by gdbm on OS/2 EMX.
1537
1538- SF bugs 763047 and 763052: fixes bug of timezone value being left as
1539 -1 when ``time.tzname[0] == time.tzname[1] and not time.daylight``
1540 is true when it should only when time.daylight is true.
1541
1542- SF bug 764548: re now allows subclasses of str and unicode to be
1543 used as patterns.
1544
1545- SF bug 763637: In Tkinter, change after_cancel() to handle tuples
1546 of varying sizes. Tk 8.4 returns a different number of values
1547 than Tk 8.3.
1548
1549- SF bug 763023: difflib.ratio() did not catch zero division.
1550
1551- The Queue module now has an __all__ attribute.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001552
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001553Tools/Demos
1554-----------
1555
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001556- See Lib/idlelib/NEWS.txt for IDLE news.
1557
Neal Norwitz592c4cc2003-07-01 04:14:28 +00001558- SF bug 753592: webchecker/wsgui now handles user supplied directories.
1559
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001560- The trace.py script has been removed. It is now in the standard library.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001561
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001562Build
1563-----
1564
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001565- Python now compiles with -fno-strict-aliasing if possible (SF bug 766696).
1566
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001567- The socket module compiles on IRIX 6.5.10.
1568
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001569- An irix64 system is treated the same way as an irix6 system (SF
1570 patch 764560).
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001571
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001572- Several definitions were missing on FreeBSD 5.x unless the
1573 __BSD_VISIBLE symbol was defined. configure now defines it as
1574 needed.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001575
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001576C API
1577-----
1578
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001579- Unicode objects now support mbcs as a built-in encoding, so the C
1580 API can use it without deferring to the encodings package.
1581
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001582Windows
1583-------
1584
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001585- The Windows implementation of PyThread_start_new_thread() never
1586 checked error returns from Windows functions correctly. As a result,
1587 it could claim to start a new thread even when the Microsoft
1588 _beginthread() function failed (due to "too many threads" -- this is
1589 on the order of thousands when it happens). In these cases, the
1590 Python exception ::
1591
1592 thread.error: can't start new thread
1593
1594 is raised now.
1595
1596- SF bug 766669: Prevent a GPF on interpreter exit when sockets are in
1597 use. The interpreter now calls WSACleanup() from Py_Finalize()
1598 instead of from DLL teardown.
1599
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001600Mac
1601---
1602
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001603- Bundlebuilder now inherits default values in the right way. It was
Walter Dörwald73a8a4b2003-07-30 12:14:02 +00001604 previously possible for app bundles to get a type of "BNDL" instead
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001605 of "APPL." Other improvements include, a --build-id option to
1606 specify the CFBundleIdentifier and using the --python option to set
1607 the executable in the bundle.
1608
1609- Fixed two bugs in MacOSX framework handling.
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001610
Jack Jansene0040412003-07-23 22:17:28 +00001611- pythonw did not allow user interaction in 2.3rc1, this has been fixed.
1612
1613- Python is now compiled with -mno-fused-madd, making all tests pass
1614 on Panther.
1615
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001616What's New in Python 2.3 beta 2?
1617================================
1618
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00001619*Release date: 29-Jun-2003*
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001620
1621Core and builtins
1622-----------------
1623
Barry Warsaw883f2232003-06-29 17:10:11 +00001624- A program can now set the environment variable PYTHONINSPECT to some
1625 string value in Python, and cause the interpreter to enter the
1626 interactive prompt at program exit, as if Python had been invoked
1627 with the -i option.
1628
Raymond Hettingerd05abde2003-06-17 05:05:49 +00001629- list.index() now accepts optional start and stop arguments. Similar
1630 changes were made to UserList.index(). SF feature request 754014.
1631
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00001632- SF patch 751998 fixes an unwanted side effect of the previous fix
1633 for SF bug 742860 (the next item).
1634
Tim Peters50d8b8b2003-05-25 17:44:31 +00001635- SF bug 742860: "WeakKeyDictionary __delitem__ uses iterkeys". This
1636 wasn't threadsafe, was very inefficient (expected time O(len(dict))
1637 instead of O(1)), and could raise a spurious RuntimeError if another
1638 thread mutated the dict during __delitem__, or if a comparison function
1639 mutated it. It also neglected to raise KeyError when the key wasn't
1640 present; didn't raise TypeError when the key wasn't of a weakly
1641 referencable type; and broke various more-or-less obscure dict
1642 invariants by using a sequence of equality comparisons over the whole
1643 set of dict keys instead of computing the key's hash code to narrow
1644 the search to those keys with the same hash code. All of these are
1645 considered to be bugs. A new implementation of __delitem__ repairs all
1646 that, but note that fixing these bugs may change visible behavior in
1647 code relying (whether intentionally or accidentally) on old behavior.
Tim Peters886128f2003-05-25 01:45:11 +00001648
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001649- SF bug 734869: Fixed a compiler bug that caused a fatal error when
1650 compiling a list comprehension that contained another list comprehension
1651 embedded in a lambda expression.
1652
Tim Peterse87568d2003-05-24 20:18:24 +00001653- SF bug 705231: builtin pow() no longer lets the platform C pow()
1654 raise -1.0 to integer powers, because (at least) glibc gets it wrong
1655 in some cases. The result should be -1.0 if the power is odd and 1.0
1656 if the power is even, and any float with a sufficiently large exponent
1657 is (mathematically) an exact even integer.
1658
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001659- SF bug 759227: A new-style class that implements __nonzero__() must
1660 return a bool or int (but not an int subclass) from that method. This
1661 matches the restriction on classic classes.
1662
Martin v. Löwis5467d4c2003-05-10 07:10:12 +00001663- The encoding attribute has been added for file objects, and set to
1664 the terminal encoding on Unix and Windows.
1665
Tim Peters015dd822003-05-04 04:16:52 +00001666- The softspace attribute of file objects became read-only by oversight.
1667 It's writable again.
1668
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00001669- Reverted a 2.3 beta 1 change to iterators for subclasses of list and
1670 tuple. By default, the iterators now access data elements directly
1671 instead of going through __getitem__. If __getitem__ access is
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001672 preferred, then __iter__ can be overridden.
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00001673
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001674- SF bug 735247: The staticmethod and super types participate in
1675 garbage collection. Before this change, it was possible for leaks to
1676 occur in functions with non-global free variables that used these types.
1677
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001678Extension modules
1679-----------------
1680
Raymond Hettinger643bcec2003-06-29 03:29:42 +00001681- the socket module has a new exception, socket.timeout, to allow
1682 timeouts to be handled separately from other socket errors.
1683
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001684- SF bug 751276: cPickle has fixed to propagate exceptions raised in
1685 user code. In earlier versions, cPickle caught and ignored any
1686 exception when it performed operations that it expected to raise
1687 specific exceptions like AttributeError.
1688
1689- cPickle Pickler and Unpickler objects now participate in garbage
1690 collection.
1691
Tim Peterscda32b72003-06-15 23:13:35 +00001692- mimetools.choose_boundary() could return duplicate strings at times,
1693 especially likely on Windows. The strings returned are now guaranteed
1694 unique within a single program run.
1695
Brett Cannon4e64d782003-06-13 23:44:35 +00001696- thread.interrupt_main() raises KeyboardInterrupt in the main thread.
1697 dummy_thread has also been modified to try to simulate the behavior.
1698
Walter Dörwald9e46abe2003-05-18 03:15:10 +00001699- array.array.insert() now treats negative indices as being relative
1700 to the end of the array, just like list.insert() does. (SF bug #739313)
1701
Tim Petersb0c854d2003-05-17 15:57:00 +00001702- The datetime module classes datetime, time, and timedelta are now
1703 properly subclassable.
Tim Petersa98924a2003-05-17 05:55:19 +00001704
Martin v. Löwis28e9ce92003-05-09 08:19:48 +00001705- _tkinter.{get|set}busywaitinterval was added.
1706
Raymond Hettinger834f4632003-05-02 20:24:56 +00001707- itertools.islice() now accepts stop=None as documented.
1708 Fixes SF bug #730685.
1709
Skip Montanaro8c044d82003-05-06 20:42:37 +00001710- the bsddb185 module is built in one restricted instance -
1711 /usr/include/db.h exists and defines HASHVERSION to be 2. This is true
1712 for many BSD-derived systems.
1713
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001714
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001715Library
1716-------
1717
Tim Petersdb3756d2003-06-29 05:30:48 +00001718- Some happy doctest extensions from Jim Fulton have been added to
1719 doctest.py. These are already being used in Zope3. The two
1720 primary ones:
1721
1722 doctest.debug(module, name) extracts the doctests from the named object
1723 in the given module, puts them in a temp file, and starts pdb running
1724 on that file. This is great when a doctest fails.
1725
1726 doctest.DocTestSuite(module=None) returns a synthesized unittest
1727 TestSuite instance, to be run by the unittest framework, which
1728 runs all the doctests in the module. This allows writing tests in
1729 doctest style (which can be clearer and shorter than writing tests
1730 in unittest style), without losing unittest's powerful testing
1731 framework features (which doctest lacks).
1732
Tim Peters6ebe61f2003-06-27 20:48:05 +00001733- For compatibility with doctests created before 2.3, if an expected
1734 output block consists solely of "1" and the actual output block
1735 consists solely of "True", it's accepted as a match; similarly
1736 for "0" and "False". This is quite un-doctest-like, but is practical.
1737 The behavior can be disabled by passing the new doctest module
1738 constant DONT_ACCEPT_TRUE_FOR_1 to the new optionflags optional
1739 argument.
1740
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001741- ZipFile.testzip() now only traps BadZipfile exceptions. Previously,
1742 a bare except caught to much and reported all errors as a problem
1743 in the archive.
1744
1745- The logging module now has a new function, makeLogRecord() making
1746 LogHandler easier to interact with DatagramHandler and SocketHandler.
1747
Skip Montanaro364ca402003-06-17 12:58:31 +00001748- The cgitb module has been extended to support plain text display (SF patch
1749 569574).
1750
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00001751- A brand new version of IDLE (from the IDLEfork project at
1752 SourceForge) is now included as Lib/idlelib. The old Tools/idle is
1753 no more.
1754
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001755- Added a new module: trace (documentation missing). This module used
1756 to be distributed in Tools/scripts. It uses sys.settrace() to trace
1757 code execution -- either function calls or individual lines. It can
1758 generate tracing output during execution or a post-mortem report of
1759 code coverage.
1760
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00001761- The threading module has new functions settrace() and setprofile()
1762 that cooperate with the functions of the same name in the sys
1763 module. A function registered with the threading module will
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001764 be used for all threads it creates. The new trace module uses this
1765 to provide tracing for code running in threads.
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00001766
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00001767- copy.py: applied SF patch 707900, fixing bug 702858, by Steven
1768 Taschuk. Copying a new-style class that had a reference to itself
1769 didn't work. (The same thing worked fine for old-style classes.)
Martin v. Löwisba8f5ff2003-06-14 07:10:06 +00001770 Builtin functions are now treated as atomic, fixing bug #746304.
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00001771
Raymond Hettingerc24d7672003-06-08 19:42:33 +00001772- difflib.py has two new functions: context_diff() and unified_diff().
1773
Guido van Rossumfa19f7c2003-05-16 01:46:51 +00001774- More fixes to urllib (SF 549151): (a) When redirecting, always use
1775 GET. This is common practice and more-or-less sanctioned by the
1776 HTTP standard. (b) Add a handler for 307 redirection, which becomes
1777 an error for POST, but a regular redirect for GET and HEAD
1778
Guido van Rossumbf1bef82003-05-13 18:01:19 +00001779- Added optional 'onerror' argument to os.walk(), to control error
1780 handling.
1781
Martin v. Löwise59e2ba2003-05-03 09:09:02 +00001782- inspect.is{method|data}descriptor was added, to allow pydoc display
1783 __doc__ of data descriptors.
1784
Skip Montanaro4a7751c2003-04-29 21:07:16 +00001785- Fixed socket speed loss caused by use of the _socketobject wrapper class
1786 in socket.py.
1787
Raymond Hettinger22952a32003-05-20 04:59:56 +00001788- timeit.py now checks the current directory for imports.
1789
Gustavo Niemeyer9556fba2003-06-07 17:53:08 +00001790- urllib2.py now knows how to order proxy classes, so the user doesn't
1791 have to insert it in front of other classes, nor do dirty tricks like
1792 inserting a "dummy" HTTPHandler after a ProxyHandler when building an
1793 opener with proxy support.
1794
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00001795- Iterators have been added for dbm keys.
1796
1797- random.Random objects can now be pickled.
1798
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001799Tools/Demos
1800-----------
1801
Martin v. Löwisb8c084e2003-06-14 09:03:46 +00001802- pydoc now offers help on keywords and topics.
1803
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00001804- Tools/idle is gone; long live Lib/idlelib.
1805
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00001806- diff.py prints file diffs in context, unified, or ndiff formats,
1807 providing a command line interface to difflib.py.
Raymond Hettinger2f3c74a2003-06-08 23:10:15 +00001808
Raymond Hettinger71e00332003-05-10 03:30:13 +00001809- texcheck.py is a new script for making a rough validation of Python LaTeX
1810 files.
1811
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001812Build
1813-----
1814
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001815- Setting DESTDIR during 'make install' now allows specifying a
Martin v. Löwis3b8ee082003-05-11 20:25:35 +00001816 different root directory.
1817
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001818C API
1819-----
1820
Tim Peters3cfe7542003-05-21 21:29:48 +00001821- PyType_Ready(): If a type declares that it participates in gc
1822 (Py_TPFLAGS_HAVE_GC), and its base class does not, and its base class's
1823 tp_free slot is the default _PyObject_Del, and type does not define
1824 a tp_free slot itself, _PyObject_GC_Del is assigned to type->tp_free.
1825 Previously _PyObject_Del was inherited, which could at best lead to a
1826 segfault. In addition, if even after this magic the type's tp_free
1827 slot is _PyObject_Del or NULL, and the type is a base type
1828 (Py_TPFLAGS_BASETYPE), TypeError is raised: since the type is a base
1829 type, its dealloc function must call type->tp_free, and since the type
1830 is gc'able, tp_free must not be NULL or _PyObject_Del.
1831
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00001832- PyThreadState_SetAsyncExc(): A new API (deliberately accessible only
1833 from C) to interrupt a thread by sending it an exception. It is
1834 intentional that you have to write your own C extension to call it
1835 from Python.
1836
1837
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001838New platforms
1839-------------
1840
1841None this time.
1842
1843Tests
1844-----
1845
1846- test_imp rewritten so that it doesn't raise RuntimeError if run as a
1847 side effect of being imported ("import test.autotest").
1848
1849Windows
1850-------
1851
Tim Petersfaa697a2003-06-22 01:42:20 +00001852- The Windows installer ships with Tcl/Tk 8.4.3 (upgraded from 8.4.1).
1853
Tim Petersc4607da2003-05-08 18:13:59 +00001854- The installer always suggested that Python be installed on the C:
1855 drive, due to a hardcoded "C:" generated by the Wise installation
1856 wizard. People with machines where C: is not the system drive
1857 usually want Python installed on whichever drive is their system drive
1858 instead. We removed the hardcoded "C:", and two testers on machines
1859 where C: is not the system drive report that the installer now
1860 suggests their system drive. Note that you can always select the
1861 directory you want in the "Select Destination Directory" dialog --
1862 that's what it's for.
1863
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001864Mac
1865---
1866
Just van Rossum99bc1fc2003-05-09 15:01:25 +00001867- There's a new module called "autoGIL", which offers a mechanism to
1868 automatically release the Global Interpreter Lock when an event loop
1869 goes to sleep, allowing other threads to run. It's currently only
1870 supported on OSX, in the Mach-O version.
Jack Jansenf5e23ff2003-06-16 13:53:40 +00001871- The OSA modules now allow direct access to properties of the
1872 toplevel application class (in AppleScript terminology).
1873- The Package Manager can now update itself.
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001874
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00001875SourceForge Bugs and Patches Applied
1876------------------------------------
1877
1878430160, 471893, 501716, 542562, 549151, 569574, 595837, 596434,
1879598163, 604210, 604716, 610332, 612627, 614770, 620190, 621891,
1880622042, 639139, 640236, 644345, 649742, 649742, 658233, 660022,
1881661318, 661676, 662807, 662923, 666219, 672855, 678325, 682347,
1882683486, 684981, 685773, 686254, 692776, 692959, 693094, 696777,
1883697989, 700827, 703666, 708495, 708604, 708901, 710733, 711902,
1884713722, 715782, 718286, 719359, 719367, 723136, 723831, 723962,
1885724588, 724767, 724767, 725942, 726150, 726446, 726869, 727051,
1886727719, 727719, 727805, 728277, 728563, 728656, 729096, 729103,
1887729293, 729297, 729300, 729317, 729395, 729622, 729817, 730170,
1888730296, 730594, 730685, 730826, 730963, 731209, 731403, 731504,
1889731514, 731626, 731635, 731643, 731644, 731644, 731689, 732124,
1890732143, 732234, 732284, 732284, 732479, 732761, 732783, 732951,
1891733667, 733781, 734118, 734231, 734869, 735051, 735293, 735527,
1892735613, 735694, 736962, 736962, 737970, 738066, 739313, 740055,
1893740234, 740301, 741806, 742126, 742741, 742860, 742860, 742911,
1894744041, 744104, 744238, 744687, 744877, 745055, 745478, 745525,
1895745620, 746012, 746304, 746366, 746801, 746953, 747348, 747667,
1896747954, 748846, 748849, 748973, 748975, 749191, 749210, 749759,
1897749831, 749911, 750008, 750092, 750542, 750595, 751038, 751107,
1898751276, 751451, 751916, 751941, 751956, 751998, 752671, 753451,
1899753602, 753617, 753845, 753925, 754014, 754340, 754447, 755031,
1900755087, 755147, 755245, 755683, 755987, 756032, 756996, 757058,
1901757229, 757818, 757821, 757822, 758112, 758910, 759227, 759889,
1902760257, 760703, 760792, 761104, 761337, 761519, 761830, 762455
1903
1904
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001905What's New in Python 2.3 beta 1?
1906================================
1907
Guido van Rossumfa1eddf2003-04-25 19:19:52 +00001908*Release date: 25-Apr-2003*
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001909
1910Core and builtins
1911-----------------
1912
Thomas Heller5eccabc2003-04-23 19:35:25 +00001913- New format codes B, H, I, k and K have been implemented for
1914 PyArg_ParseTuple and PyBuild_Value.
1915
Alex Martellia70b1912003-04-22 08:12:33 +00001916- New builtin function sum(seq, start=0) returns the sum of all the
1917 items in iterable object seq, plus start (items are normally numbers,
1918 and cannot be strings).
1919
Guido van Rossumaa86e352003-04-19 18:15:10 +00001920- bool() called without arguments now returns False rather than
1921 raising an exception. This is consistent with calling the
1922 constructors for the other builtin types -- called without argument
1923 they all return the false value of that type. (SF patch #724135)
1924
Guido van Rossumcf8d2852003-04-17 16:53:26 +00001925- In support of PEP 269 (making the pgen parser generator accessible
1926 from Python), some changes to the pgen code structure were made; a
1927 few files that used to be linked only with pgen are now linked with
1928 Python itself.
1929
Guido van Rossumc1f6e8c2003-04-16 21:13:23 +00001930- The repr() of a weakref object now shows the __name__ attribute of
1931 the referenced object, if it has one.
1932
Guido van Rossum76ba09f2003-04-16 19:40:58 +00001933- super() no longer ignores data descriptors, except __class__. See
1934 the thread started at
1935 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2003-April/034338.html
1936
Guido van Rossum3a3cca52003-04-14 20:58:14 +00001937- list.insert(i, x) now interprets negative i as it would be
1938 interpreted by slicing, so negative values count from the end of the
1939 list. This was the only place where such an interpretation was not
1940 placed on a list index.
1941
Guido van Rossumefbbb1c2003-04-11 18:43:06 +00001942- range() now works even if the arguments are longs with magnitude
1943 larger than sys.maxint, as long as the total length of the sequence
1944 fits. E.g., range(2**100, 2**101, 2**100) is the following list:
1945 [1267650600228229401496703205376L]. (SF patch #707427.)
1946
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001947- Some horridly obscure problems were fixed involving interaction
1948 between garbage collection and old-style classes with "ambitious"
1949 getattr hooks. If an old-style instance didn't have a __del__ method,
1950 but did have a __getattr__ hook, and the instance became reachable
1951 only from an unreachable cycle, and the hook resurrected or deleted
1952 unreachable objects when asked to resolve "__del__", anything up to
1953 a segfault could happen. That's been repaired.
1954
Raymond Hettingera3e1e4c2003-03-06 23:54:28 +00001955- dict.pop now takes an optional argument specifying a default
1956 value to return if the key is not in the dict. If a default is not
1957 given and the key is not found, a KeyError will still be raised.
1958 Parallel changes were made to UserDict.UserDict and UserDict.DictMixin.
1959 [SF patch #693753] (contributed by Michael Stone.)
1960
Martin v. Löwis73d538b2003-03-05 15:13:47 +00001961- sys.getfilesystemencoding() was added to expose
1962 Py_FileSystemDefaultEncoding.
Guido van Rossum46d3dc32003-03-01 03:20:41 +00001963
1964- New function sys.exc_clear() clears the current exception. This is
1965 rarely needed, but can sometimes be useful to release objects
1966 referenced by the traceback held in sys.exc_info()[2]. (SF patch
1967 #693195.)
1968
Neal Norwitzd5a65a72003-02-23 23:11:41 +00001969- On 64-bit systems, a dictionary could contain duplicate long/int keys
1970 if the key value was larger than 2**32. See SF bug #689659.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001971
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00001972- Fixed SF bug #663074. The codec system was using global static
Walter Dörwaldfa86bf52003-03-31 16:15:13 +00001973 variables to store internal data. As a result, any attempts to use the
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00001974 unicode system with multiple active interpreters, or successive
1975 interpreter executions, would fail.
1976
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00001977- "%c" % u"a" now returns a unicode string instead of raising a
Walter Dörwald44f527f2003-04-02 16:37:24 +00001978 TypeError. u"%c" % 0xffffffff now raises a OverflowError instead
Walter Dörwald1e469c52003-04-02 16:57:59 +00001979 of a ValueError to be consistent with "%c" % 256. See SF patch #710127.
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00001980
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001981Extension modules
1982-----------------
1983
Guido van Rossume7adda92003-04-25 05:52:37 +00001984- The socket module now provides the functions inet_pton and inet_ntop
1985 for converting between string and packed representation of IP
1986 addresses. There is also a new module variable, has_ipv6, which is
1987 True iff the current Python has IPv6 support. See SF patch #658327.
1988
Martin v. Löwisbfe175c2003-04-16 19:42:51 +00001989- Tkinter wrappers around Tcl variables now pass objects directly
1990 to Tcl, instead of first converting them to strings.
1991
Guido van Rossum41c99e72003-04-14 17:59:34 +00001992- The .*? pattern in the re module is now special-cased to avoid the
1993 recursion limit. (SF patch #720991 -- many thanks to Gary Herron
1994 and Greg Chapman.)
1995
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00001996- New function sys.call_tracing() allows pdb to debug code
1997 recursively.
1998
Tim Peters730f5532003-04-08 17:17:17 +00001999- New function gc.get_referents(obj) returns a list of objects
Tim Peters0f81ab62003-04-08 16:39:48 +00002000 directly referenced by obj. In effect, it exposes what the object's
2001 tp_traverse slot does, and can be helpful when debugging memory
2002 leaks.
2003
Martin v. Löwis7fb697b2003-04-03 04:49:12 +00002004- The iconv module has been removed from this release.
2005
Tim Petersd50ade62003-03-20 18:32:13 +00002006- The platform-independent routines for packing floats in IEEE formats
2007 (struct.pack's <f, >f, <d, and >d codes; pickle and cPickle's protocol 1
2008 pickling of floats) ignored that rounding can cause a carry to
2009 propagate. The worst consequence was that, in rare cases, <f and >f
2010 could produce strings that, when unpacked again, were a factor of 2
2011 away from the original float. This has been fixed. See SF bug
2012 #705836.
2013
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002014- New function time.tzset() provides access to the C library tzset()
Guido van Rossumd11b62e2003-03-14 21:51:36 +00002015 function, if supported. (SF patch #675422.)
2016
Neal Norwitz12e22172003-03-03 21:16:39 +00002017- Using createfilehandler, deletefilehandler, createtimerhandler functions
2018 on Tkinter.tkinter (_tkinter module) no longer crashes the interpreter.
2019 See SF bug #692416.
2020
Michael W. Hudsonf0089982003-03-03 12:29:42 +00002021- Modified the fcntl.ioctl() function to allow modification of a passed
2022 mutable buffer (for details see the reference documentation).
2023
Raymond Hettinger61fe64d2003-02-23 04:40:07 +00002024- Made user requested changes to the itertools module.
2025 Subsumed the times() function into repeat().
2026 Added chain() and cycle().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002027
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00002028- The rotor module is now deprecated; the encryption algorithm it uses
Andrew M. Kuchlingfb5f4852003-04-24 13:19:56 +00002029 is not believed to be secure, and including crypto code with Python
2030 has implications for exporting and importing it in various countries.
2031
Skip Montanaro89feabc2003-03-30 04:54:24 +00002032- The socket module now always uses the _socketobject wrapper class, even on
2033 platforms which have dup(2). The makefile() method is built directly
2034 on top of the socket without duplicating the file descriptor, allowing
2035 timeouts to work properly.
2036
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002037Library
2038-------
2039
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00002040- New generator function os.walk() is an easy-to-use alternative to
2041 os.path.walk(). See os module docs for details. os.path.walk()
2042 isn't deprecated at this time, but may become deprecated in a
2043 future release.
2044
Marc-André Lemburg246d8472003-04-24 11:36:11 +00002045- Added new module "platform" which provides a wide range of tools
2046 for querying platform dependent features.
2047
Andrew M. Kuchling4e42b312003-04-24 16:45:05 +00002048- netrc now allows ASCII punctuation characters in passwords.
Raymond Hettinger1d877862003-04-23 19:06:08 +00002049
Martin v. Löwis153c9e42003-04-19 20:59:03 +00002050- shelve now supports the optional writeback argument, and exposes
2051 pickle protocol versions.
2052
Guido van Rossuma2685402003-04-19 18:04:57 +00002053- Several methods of nntplib.NNTP have grown an optional file argument
2054 which specifies a file where to divert the command's output
2055 (already supported by the body() method). (SF patch #720468)
2056
Martin v. Löwis281b2c62003-04-18 21:04:39 +00002057- The self-documenting XML server library DocXMLRPCServer was added.
2058
Martin v. Löwis2548c732003-04-18 10:39:54 +00002059- Support for internationalized domain names has been added through
2060 the 'idna' and 'punycode' encodings, the 'stringprep' module, the
2061 'mkstringprep' tool, and enhancements to the socket and httplib
2062 modules.
2063
Walter Dörwald5688b7a2003-04-16 09:46:13 +00002064- htmlentitydefs has two new dictionaries: name2codepoint maps
2065 HTML entity names to Unicode codepoints (as integers).
2066 codepoint2name is the reverse mapping. See SF patch #722017.
2067
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00002068- pdb has a new command, "debug", which lets you step through
2069 arbitrary code from the debugger's (pdb) prompt.
2070
Raymond Hettingerc377cbf2003-04-04 22:56:42 +00002071- unittest.failUnlessEqual and its equivalent unittest.assertEqual now
2072 return 'not a == b' rather than 'a != b'. This gives the desired
2073 result for classes that define __eq__ without defining __ne__.
2074
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002075- sgmllib now supports SGML marked sections, in particular the
Martin v. Löwis3163a3b2003-03-30 14:25:40 +00002076 MS Office extensions.
2077
Raymond Hettinger42182eb2003-03-09 05:33:33 +00002078- The urllib module now offers support for the iterator protocol.
2079 SF patch 698520 contributed by Brett Cannon.
2080
Guido van Rossum9589a252003-03-06 01:56:12 +00002081- New module timeit provides a simple framework for timing the
2082 execution speed of expressions and statements.
2083
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002084- sets.Set objects now support mixed-type __eq__ and __ne__, instead
2085 of raising TypeError. If x is a Set object and y is a non-Set object,
2086 x == y is False, and x != y is True. This is akin to the change made
2087 for mixed-type comparisons of datetime objects in 2.3a2; more info
2088 about the rationale is in the NEWS entry for that. See also SF bug
2089 report <http://www.python.org/sf/693121>.
2090
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00002091- On Unix platforms, if os.listdir() is called with a Unicode argument,
2092 it now returns Unicode strings. (This behavior was added earlier
2093 to the Windows NT/2k/XP version of os.listdir().)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002094
Andrew M. Kuchling6f177d42003-02-28 22:09:33 +00002095- Distutils: both 'py_modules' and 'packages' keywords can now be specified
2096 in core.setup(). Previously you could supply one or the other, but
2097 not both of them. (SF patch #695090 from Bernhard Herzog)
2098
Skip Montanaro64a839e2003-03-20 23:36:55 +00002099- New csv package makes it easy to read/write CSV files.
2100
Gustavo Niemeyer68d8cef2003-04-17 21:31:33 +00002101- Module shlex has been extended to allow posix-like shell parsings,
2102 including a split() function for easy spliting of quoted strings and
2103 commands. An iterator interface was also implemented.
2104
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002105Tools/Demos
2106-----------
2107
Tim Peters21d7d4d2003-04-18 00:45:59 +00002108- New script combinerefs.py helps analyze new PYTHONDUMPREFS output.
2109 See the module docstring for details.
2110
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002111Build
2112-----
2113
Neal Norwitz35892b92003-02-23 23:45:35 +00002114- Fix problem building on OSF1 because the compiler only accepted
2115 preprocessor directives that start in column 1. (SF bug #691793.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002116
2117C API
2118-----
2119
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002120- Added PyGC_Collect(), equivalent to calling gc.collect().
2121
Guido van Rossum0fc8f002003-04-15 15:12:39 +00002122- PyThreadState_GetDict() was changed not to raise an exception or
2123 issue a fatal error when no current thread state is available. This
2124 makes it possible to print dictionaries when no thread is active.
2125
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002126- LONG_LONG was renamed to PY_LONG_LONG. Extensions that use this and
2127 need compatibility with previous versions can use this:
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00002128
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002129 #ifndef PY_LONG_LONG
2130 #define PY_LONG_LONG LONG_LONG
2131 #endif
Martin v. Löwisb9a0f912003-03-29 10:06:18 +00002132
Raymond Hettinger1da1dbf2003-03-17 19:46:11 +00002133- Added PyObject_SelfIter() to fill the tp_iter slot for the
Raymond Hettinger01538262003-03-17 08:24:35 +00002134 typical case where the method returns its self argument.
2135
Guido van Rossume5c691a2003-03-07 15:13:17 +00002136- The extended type structure used for heap types (new-style
2137 classes defined by Python code using a class statement) is now
2138 exported from object.h as PyHeapTypeObject. (SF patch #696193.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002139
2140New platforms
2141-------------
2142
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00002143None this time.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002144
2145Tests
2146-----
2147
Neal Norwitz55b61d22003-02-28 19:57:03 +00002148- test_timeout now requires -u network to be passed to regrtest to run.
2149 See SF bug #692988.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002150
2151Windows
2152-------
2153
Tim Peters11b23062003-04-23 02:39:17 +00002154- os.fsync() now exists on Windows, and calls the Microsoft _commit()
2155 function.
2156
Guido van Rossumf4050642003-04-09 19:39:06 +00002157- New function winsound.MessageBeep() wraps the Win32 API
2158 MessageBeep().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002159
2160Mac
2161---
2162
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00002163- os.listdir() now returns Unicode strings on MacOS X when called with
2164 a Unicode argument. See the general news item under "Library".
Just van Rossum46c97842003-02-25 21:42:15 +00002165
Jack Jansendeac2ac2003-02-24 11:04:17 +00002166- A new method MacOS.WMAvailable() returns true if it is safe to access
2167 the window manager, false otherwise.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002168
Jack Jansencf76be02003-03-24 12:13:54 +00002169- EasyDialogs dialogs are now movable-modal, and if the application is
2170 currently in the background they will ask to be moved to the foreground
2171 before displaying.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002172
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00002173- OSA Scripting support has improved a lot, and gensuitemodule.py can now
Jack Jansende354b72003-04-11 15:37:20 +00002174 be used by mere mortals. The documentation is now also more or less
2175 complete.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002176
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00002177- The IDE (in a framework build) now includes introductory documentation
2178 in Apple Help Viewer format.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002179
2180
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002181What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 2?
2182=================================
2183
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00002184*Release date: 19-Feb-2003*
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002185
2186Core and builtins
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00002187-----------------
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002188
Walter Dörwald2ffec022003-02-19 16:34:11 +00002189- Negative positions returned from PEP 293 error callbacks are now
2190 treated as being relative to the end of the input string. Positions
2191 that are out of bounds raise an IndexError.
2192
Guido van Rossum162e38c2003-02-19 15:25:10 +00002193- sys.path[0] (the directory from which the script is loaded) is now
2194 turned into an absolute pathname, unless it is the empty string.
2195 (SF patch #664376.)
2196
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00002197- Finally fixed the bug in compile() and exec where a string ending
2198 with an indented code block but no newline would raise SyntaxError.
2199 This would have been a four-line change in parsetok.c... Except
2200 codeop.py depends on this behavior, so a compilation flag had to be
2201 invented that causes the tokenizer to revert to the old behavior;
2202 this required extra changes to 2 .h files, 2 .c files, and 2 .py
Guido van Rossum1442dc12003-02-13 22:19:20 +00002203 files. (Fixes SF bug #501622.)
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00002204
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00002205- If a new-style class defines neither __new__ nor __init__, its
2206 constructor would ignore all arguments. This is changed now: the
2207 constructor refuses arguments in this case. This might break code
2208 that worked under Python 2.2. The simplest fix is to add a no-op
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002209 __init__: ``def __init__(self, *args, **kw): pass``.
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00002210
Guido van Rossum48035eb2003-02-12 17:05:26 +00002211- Through a bytecode optimizer bug (and I bet you didn't even know
2212 Python *had* a bytecode optimizer :-), "unsigned" hex/oct constants
2213 with a leading minus sign would come out with the wrong sign.
2214 ("Unsigned" hex/oct constants are those with a face value in the
2215 range sys.maxint+1 through sys.maxint*2+1, inclusive; these have
2216 always been interpreted as negative numbers through sign folding.)
2217 E.g. 0xffffffff is -1, and -(0xffffffff) is 1, but -0xffffffff would
2218 come out as -4294967295. This was the case in Python 2.2 through
2219 2.2.2 and 2.3a1, and in Python 2.4 it will once again have that
2220 value, but according to PEP 237 it really needs to be 1 now. This
2221 will be backported to Python 2.2.3 a well. (SF #660455)
2222
Guido van Rossum47710652003-02-12 20:48:22 +00002223- int(s, base) sometimes sign-folds hex and oct constants; it only
2224 does this when base is 0 and s.strip() starts with a '0'. When the
2225 sign is actually folded, as in int("0xffffffff", 0) on a 32-bit
2226 machine, which returns -1, a FutureWarning is now issued; in Python
2227 2.4, this will return 4294967295L, as do int("+0xffffffff", 0) and
2228 int("0xffffffff", 16) right now. (PEP 347)
2229
Guido van Rossuma89d10e2003-02-12 03:58:38 +00002230- super(X, x): x may now be a proxy for an X instance, i.e.
2231 issubclass(x.__class__, X) but not issubclass(type(x), X).
2232
Guido van Rossum03bc7d32003-02-12 03:32:58 +00002233- isinstance(x, X): if X is a new-style class, this is now equivalent
2234 to issubclass(type(x), X) or issubclass(x.__class__, X). Previously
2235 only type(x) was tested. (For classic classes this was already the
2236 case.)
2237
Just van Rossum73ffb4a2003-02-10 09:57:08 +00002238- compile(), eval() and the exec statement now fully support source code
2239 passed as unicode strings.
2240
Neal Norwitzde8b94c2003-02-10 02:12:43 +00002241- int subclasses can be initialized with longs if the value fits in an int.
2242 See SF bug #683467.
2243
Tim Petersbf2674b2003-02-02 07:51:32 +00002244- long(string, base) takes time linear in len(string) when base is a power
2245 of 2 now. It used to take time quadratic in len(string).
2246
Martin v. Löwis8afd7572003-01-25 22:46:11 +00002247- filter returns now Unicode results for Unicode arguments.
2248
Martin v. Löwisaf6a27a2003-01-03 19:16:14 +00002249- raw_input can now return Unicode objects.
2250
Skip Montanaro4abd5f02003-01-02 20:51:08 +00002251- List objects' sort() method now accepts None as the comparison function.
2252 Passing None is semantically identical to calling sort() with no
2253 arguments.
2254
Neal Norwitz1a997502003-01-13 20:13:12 +00002255- Fixed crash when printing a subclass of str and __str__ returned self.
2256 See SF bug #667147.
2257
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00002258- Fixed an invalid RuntimeWarning and an undetected error when trying
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00002259 to convert a long integer into a float which couldn't fit.
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00002260 See SF bug #676155.
2261
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00002262- Function objects now have a __module__ attribute that is bound to
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00002263 the name of the module in which the function was defined. This
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00002264 applies for C functions and methods as well as functions and methods
2265 defined in Python. This attribute is used by pickle.whichmodule(),
2266 which changes the behavior of whichmodule slightly. In Python 2.2
2267 whichmodule() returns "__main__" for functions that are not defined
2268 at the top-level of a module (examples: methods, nested functions).
2269 Now whichmodule() will return the proper module name.
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00002270
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002271Extension modules
2272-----------------
2273
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00002274- operator.isNumberType() now checks that the object has a nb_int or
2275 nb_float slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
2276 tp_as_number pointer.
2277
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00002278- The imp module now has ways to acquire and release the "import
2279 lock": imp.acquire_lock() and imp.release_lock(). Note: this is a
2280 reentrant lock, so releasing the lock only truly releases it when
2281 this is the last release_lock() call. You can check with
2282 imp.lock_held(). (SF bug #580952 and patch #683257.)
2283
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002284- Change to cPickle to match pickle.py (see below and PEP 307).
2285
Neal Norwitz9caf9c02003-02-10 01:54:06 +00002286- Fix some bugs in the parser module. SF bug #678518.
2287
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00002288- Thanks to Scott David Daniels, a subtle bug in how the zlib
Walter Dörwald28d81962003-02-03 20:53:14 +00002289 extension implemented flush() was fixed. Scott also rewrote the
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00002290 zlib test suite using the unittest module. (SF bug #640230 and
2291 patch #678531.)
2292
Raymond Hettinger96ef8112003-02-01 00:10:11 +00002293- Added an itertools module containing high speed, memory efficient
2294 looping constructs inspired by tools from Haskell and SML.
2295
Guido van Rossum99d4abf2003-01-27 22:22:50 +00002296- The SSL module now handles sockets with a timeout set correctly (SF
2297 patch #675750, fixing SF bug #675552).
2298
Barry Warsawf8ba39c2003-01-07 20:55:26 +00002299- os/posixmodule has grown the sysexits.h constants (EX_OK and friends).
2300
Guido van Rossum6d0d3652003-01-07 20:34:19 +00002301- Fixed broken threadstate swap in readline that could cause fatal
2302 errors when a readline hook was being invoked while a background
2303 thread was active. (SF bugs #660476 and #513033.)
2304
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002305- fcntl now exposes the strops.h I_* constants.
2306
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00002307- Fix a crash on Solaris that occurred when calling close() on
2308 an mmap'ed file which was already closed. (SF patch #665913)
2309
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002310- Fixed several serious bugs in the zipimport implementation.
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002311
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00002312- datetime changes:
2313
Guido van Rossum8b7a9a32003-04-14 22:01:58 +00002314 The date class is now properly subclassable. (SF bug #720908)
2315
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00002316 The datetime and datetimetz classes have been collapsed into a single
2317 datetime class, and likewise the time and timetz classes into a single
2318 time class. Previously, a datetimetz object with tzinfo=None acted
2319 exactly like a datetime object, and similarly for timetz. This wasn't
2320 enough of a difference to justify distinct classes, and life is simpler
2321 now.
2322
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00002323 today() and now() now round system timestamps to the closest
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002324 microsecond <http://www.python.org/sf/661086>. This repairs an
2325 irritation most likely seen on Windows systems.
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00002326
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00002327 In dt.astimezone(tz), if tz.utcoffset(dt) returns a duration,
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00002328 ValueError is raised if tz.dst(dt) returns None (2.3a1 treated it
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002329 as 0 instead, but a tzinfo subclass wishing to participate in
2330 time zone conversion has to take a stand on whether it supports
2331 DST; if you don't care about DST, then code dst() to return 0 minutes,
2332 meaning that DST is never in effect).
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00002333
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00002334 The tzinfo methods utcoffset() and dst() must return a timedelta object
2335 (or None) now. In 2.3a1 they could also return an int or long, but that
2336 was an unhelpfully redundant leftover from an earlier version wherein
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00002337 they couldn't return a timedelta. TOOWTDI.
2338
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00002339 The example tzinfo class for local time had a bug. It was replaced
2340 by a later example coded by Guido.
2341
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00002342 datetime.astimezone(tz) no longer raises an exception when the
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002343 input datetime has no UTC equivalent in tz. For typical "hybrid" time
2344 zones (a single tzinfo subclass modeling both standard and daylight
2345 time), this case can arise one hour per year, at the hour daylight time
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00002346 ends. See new docs for details. In short, the new behavior mimics
2347 the local wall clock's behavior of repeating an hour in local time.
2348
2349 dt.astimezone() can no longer be used to convert between naive and aware
2350 datetime objects. If you merely want to attach, or remove, a tzinfo
2351 object, without any conversion of date and time members, use
2352 dt.replace(tzinfo=whatever) instead, where "whatever" is None or a
2353 tzinfo subclass instance.
2354
2355 A new method tzinfo.fromutc(dt) can be overridden in tzinfo subclasses
2356 to give complete control over how a UTC time is to be converted to
2357 a local time. The default astimezone() implementation calls fromutc()
2358 as its last step, so a tzinfo subclass can affect that too by overriding
2359 fromutc(). It's expected that the default fromutc() implementation will
2360 be suitable as-is for "almost all" time zone subclasses, but the
2361 creativity of political time zone fiddling appears unbounded -- fromutc()
2362 allows the highly motivated to emulate any scheme expressible in Python.
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002363
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00002364 datetime.now(): The optional tzinfo argument was undocumented (that's
2365 repaired), and its name was changed to tz ("tzinfo" is overloaded enough
2366 already). With a tz argument, now(tz) used to return the local date
2367 and time, and attach tz to it, without any conversion of date and time
2368 members. This was less than useful. Now now(tz) returns the current
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002369 date and time as local time in tz's time zone, akin to ::
2370
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00002371 tz.fromutc(datetime.utcnow().replace(tzinfo=utc))
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002372
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00002373 where "utc" is an instance of a tzinfo subclass modeling UTC. Without
2374 a tz argument, now() continues to return the current local date and time,
2375 as a naive datetime object.
2376
Tim Peters2a44a8d2003-01-23 20:53:10 +00002377 datetime.fromtimestamp(): Like datetime.now() above, this had less than
2378 useful behavior when the optional tinzo argument was specified. See
2379 also SF bug report <http://www.python.org/sf/660872>.
2380
Tim Peters8d81a012003-01-24 22:36:34 +00002381 date and datetime comparison: In order to prevent comparison from
2382 falling back to the default compare-object-addresses strategy, these
2383 raised TypeError whenever they didn't understand the other object type.
2384 They still do, except when the other object has a "timetuple" attribute,
2385 in which case they return NotImplemented now. This gives other
2386 datetime objects (e.g., mxDateTime) a chance to intercept the
2387 comparison.
2388
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002389 date, time, datetime and timedelta comparison: When the exception
2390 for mixed-type comparisons in the last paragraph doesn't apply, if
2391 the comparison is == then False is returned, and if the comparison is
2392 != then True is returned. Because dict lookup and the "in" operator
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002393 only invoke __eq__, this allows, for example, ::
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002394
2395 if some_datetime in some_sequence:
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002396
2397 and ::
2398
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002399 some_dict[some_timedelta] = whatever
2400
2401 to work as expected, without raising TypeError just because the
2402 sequence is heterogeneous, or the dict has mixed-type keys. [This
2403 seems like a good idea to implement for all mixed-type comparisons
2404 that don't want to allow falling back to address comparison.]
2405
Tim Peters75a6e3b2003-01-04 18:17:36 +00002406 The constructors building a datetime from a timestamp could raise
2407 ValueError if the platform C localtime()/gmtime() inserted "leap
2408 seconds". Leap seconds are ignored now. On such platforms, it's
2409 possible to have timestamps that differ by a second, yet where
2410 datetimes constructed from them are equal.
2411
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00002412 The pickle format of date, time and datetime objects has changed
2413 completely. The undocumented pickler and unpickler functions no
Tim Petersb57f8f02003-02-01 02:54:15 +00002414 longer exist. The undocumented __setstate__() and __getstate__()
2415 methods no longer exist either.
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00002416
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002417Library
2418-------
2419
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002420- The logging module was updated slightly; the WARN level was renamed
2421 to WARNING, and the matching function/method warn() to warning().
2422
2423- The pickle and cPickle modules were updated with a new pickling
2424 protocol (documented by pickletools.py, see below) and several
2425 extensions to the pickle customization API (__reduce__, __setstate__
2426 etc.). The copy module now uses more of the pickle customization
2427 API to copy objects that don't implement __copy__ or __deepcopy__.
2428 See PEP 307 for details.
2429
2430- The distutils "register" command now uses http://www.python.org/pypi
2431 as the default repository. (See PEP 301.)
2432
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00002433- the platform dependent path related variables sep, altsep, extsep,
2434 pathsep, curdir, pardir and defpath are now defined in the platform
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00002435 dependent path modules (e.g. ntpath.py) rather than os.py, so these
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002436 variables are now available via os.path. They continue to be
2437 available from the os module.
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00002438 (see <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00002439
Tim Peters6ee04802003-02-05 18:29:34 +00002440- array.array was added to the types repr.py knows about (see
2441 <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
2442
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00002443- The new pickletools.py contains lots of documentation about pickle
2444 internals, and supplies some helpers for working with pickles, such as
2445 a symbolic pickle disassembler.
2446
Skip Montanaro9a7c96a2003-01-22 18:17:25 +00002447- Xmlrpclib.py now supports the builtin boolean type.
2448
Martin v. Löwis0c6774d2003-01-15 11:51:06 +00002449- py_compile has a new 'doraise' flag and a new PyCompileError
2450 exception.
2451
Martin v. Löwisd69663d2003-01-15 11:37:23 +00002452- SimpleXMLRPCServer now supports CGI through the CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler
2453 class.
2454
Guido van Rossum50e92232003-01-14 16:45:04 +00002455- The sets module now raises TypeError in __cmp__, to clarify that
2456 sets are not intended to be three-way-compared; the comparison
2457 operators are overloaded as subset/superset tests.
2458
Guido van Rossumcd0c0472003-01-07 23:03:05 +00002459- Bastion.py and rexec.py are disabled. These modules are not safe in
2460 Python 2.2. or 2.3.
2461
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002462- realpath is now exported when doing ``from poxixpath import *``.
Neal Norwitzbb0246a2003-01-03 18:12:28 +00002463 It is also exported for ntpath, macpath, and os2emxpath.
2464 See SF bug #659228.
2465
Neal Norwitzb9ef4ae2003-01-05 23:19:43 +00002466- New module tarfile from Lars Gustäbel provides a comprehensive interface
2467 to tar archive files with transparent gzip and bzip2 compression.
2468 See SF patch #651082.
2469
Neal Norwitz4f442372003-01-06 06:51:36 +00002470- urlparse can now parse imap:// URLs. See SF feature request #618024.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002471
Neal Norwitze931ed52003-01-10 23:24:32 +00002472- Tkinter.Canvas.scan_dragto() provides an optional parameter to support
2473 the gain value which is passed to Tk. SF bug# 602259.
2474
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00002475- Fix logging.handlers.SysLogHandler protocol when using UNIX domain sockets.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00002476 See SF patch #642974.
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00002477
Skip Montanaro12fe72e2003-02-25 17:46:20 +00002478- The dospath module was deleted. Use the ntpath module when manipulating
2479 DOS paths from other platforms.
2480
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002481Tools/Demos
2482-----------
2483
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00002484- Two new scripts (db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py) were added to the
2485 Tools/scripts directory to facilitate conversion from the old bsddb module
2486 to the new one. While the user-visible API of the new module is
2487 compatible with the old one, it's likely that the version of the
2488 underlying database library has changed. To convert from the old library,
2489 run the db2pickle.py script using the old version of Python to convert it
2490 to a pickle file. After upgrading Python, run the pickle2db.py script
2491 using the new version of Python to reconstitute your database. For
2492 example:
2493
Skip Montanaro621f0552003-02-03 15:48:10 +00002494 % python2.2 db2pickle.py -h some.db > some.pickle
2495 % python2.3 pickle2db.py -h some.db.new < some.pickle
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00002496
2497 Run the scripts without any args to get a usage message.
2498
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002499
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002500Build
2501-----
2502
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00002503- The audio driver tests (test_ossaudiodev.py and
2504 test_linuxaudiodev.py) are no longer run by default. This is
2505 because they don't always work, depending on your hardware and
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002506 software. To run these tests, you must use an invocation like ::
2507
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00002508 ./python Lib/test/regrtest.py -u audio test_ossaudiodev
2509
Skip Montanarodecc6a42003-01-01 20:07:49 +00002510- On systems which build using the configure script, compiler flags which
2511 used to be lumped together using the OPT flag have been split into two
2512 groups, OPT and BASECFLAGS. OPT is meant to carry just optimization- and
2513 debug-related flags like "-g" and "-O3". BASECFLAGS is meant to carry
2514 compiler flags that are required to get a clean compile. On some
2515 platforms (many Linux flavors in particular) BASECFLAGS will be empty by
2516 default. On others, such as Mac OS X and SCO, it will contain required
2517 flags. This change allows people building Python to override OPT without
2518 fear of clobbering compiler flags which are required to get a clean build.
2519
2520- On Darwin/Mac OS X platforms, /sw/lib and /sw/include are added to the
2521 relevant search lists in setup.py. This allows users building Python to
2522 take advantage of the many packages available from the fink project
2523 <http://fink.sf.net/>.
2524
2525- A new Makefile target, scriptsinstall, installs a number of useful scripts
2526 from the Tools/scripts directory.
2527
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002528C API
2529-----
2530
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002531- PyEval_GetFrame() is now declared to return a ``PyFrameObject *``
2532 instead of a plain ``PyObject *``. (SF patch #686601.)
Guido van Rossum6297a7a2003-02-19 15:53:17 +00002533
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00002534- PyNumber_Check() now checks that the object has a nb_int or nb_float
2535 slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
2536 tp_as_number pointer.
2537
Guido van Rossumeea47182003-02-11 20:39:59 +00002538- A C type that inherits from a base type that defines tp_as_buffer
2539 will now inherit the tp_as_buffer pointer if it doesn't define one.
2540 (SF #681367)
2541
Neil Schemenauer5042da62003-02-04 20:59:40 +00002542- The PyArg_Parse functions now issue a DeprecationWarning if a float
2543 argument is provided when an integer is specified (this affects the 'b',
2544 'B', 'h', 'H', 'i', and 'l' codes). Future versions of Python will
2545 raise a TypeError.
Neil Schemenauercd63e612003-01-24 22:15:53 +00002546
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002547Tests
2548-----
2549
Walter Dörwald11cfbd62003-03-26 16:03:16 +00002550- Several tests weren't being run from regrtest.py (test_timeout.py,
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002551 test_tarfile.py, test_netrc.py, test_multifile.py,
2552 test_importhooks.py and test_imp.py). Now they are. (Note to
2553 developers: please read Lib/test/README when creating a new test, to
2554 make sure to do it right! All tests need to use either unittest or
2555 pydoc.)
2556
2557- Added test_posix.py, a test suite for the posix module.
2558
2559- Added test_hexoct.py, a test suite for hex/oct constant folding.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002560
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002561Windows
2562-------
2563
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00002564- The timeout code for socket connect() didn't work right; this has
2565 now been fixed. test_timeout.py should pass (at least most of the
2566 time).
2567
Thomas Hellerdda583d2003-01-31 20:45:41 +00002568- distutils' msvccompiler class now passes the preprocessor options to
2569 the resource compiler. See SF patch #669198.
2570
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00002571- The bsddb module now ships with Sleepycat's 4.1.25.NC, the latest
2572 release without strong cryptography.
2573
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00002574- sys.path[0], if it contains a directory name, is now always an
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002575 absolute pathname. (SF patch #664376.)
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00002576
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00002577- The new logging package is now installed by the Windows installer. It
2578 wasn't in 2.3a1 due to oversight.
2579
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002580Mac
2581---
2582
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00002583- There are new dialogs EasyDialogs.AskFileForOpen, AskFileForSave
2584 and AskFolder. The old macfs.StandardGetFile and friends are deprecated.
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002585
Jack Jansenc9296362003-02-06 23:10:45 +00002586- Most of the standard library now uses pathnames or FSRefs in preference
2587 of FSSpecs, and use the underlying Carbon.File and Carbon.Folder modules
2588 in stead of macfs. macfs will probably be deprecated in the future.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00002589
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00002590- Type Carbon.File.FSCatalogInfo and supporting methods have been implemented.
2591 This also makes macfs.FSSpec.SetDates() work again.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002592
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00002593- There is a new module pimp, the package install manager for Python, and
2594 accompanying applet PackageManager. These allow you to easily download
2595 and install pretested extension packages either in source or binary
2596 form. Only in MacPython-OSX.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002597
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00002598- Applets are now built with bundlebuilder in MacPython-OSX, which should make
Jack Jansen5d44b342003-02-18 23:32:47 +00002599 them more robust and also provides a path towards BuildApplication. The
2600 downside of this change is that applets can no longer be run from the
2601 Terminal window, this will hopefully be fixed in the 2.3b1.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002602
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002603
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002604What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 1?
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002605=================================
2606
Guido van Rossumae548862002-12-31 15:47:36 +00002607*Release date: 31-Dec-2002*
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002608
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002609Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002610--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00002611
Michael W. Hudson96bc3b42002-11-26 14:48:23 +00002612- One can now assign to __bases__ and __name__ of new-style classes.
2613
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00002614- dict() now accepts keyword arguments so that dict(one=1, two=2)
2615 is the equivalent of {"one": 1, "two": 2}. Accordingly,
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00002616 the existing (but undocumented) 'items' keyword argument has
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00002617 been eliminated. This means that dict(items=someMapping) now has
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00002618 a different meaning than before.
2619
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00002620- int() now returns a long object if the argument is outside the
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002621 integer range, so int("4" * 1000), int(1e200) and int(1L<<1000) will
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00002622 all return long objects instead of raising an OverflowError.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002623
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00002624- Assignment to __class__ is disallowed if either the old or the new
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00002625 class is a statically allocated type object (such as defined by an
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00002626 extension module). This prevents anomalies like 2.__class__ = bool.
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00002627
2628- New-style object creation and deallocation have been sped up
2629 significantly; they are now faster than classic instance creation
2630 and deallocation.
2631
2632- The __slots__ variable can now mention "private" names, and the
2633 right thing will happen (e.g. __slots__ = ["__foo"]).
2634
2635- The built-ins slice() and buffer() are now callable types. The
2636 types classobj (formerly class), code, function, instance, and
2637 instancemethod (formerly instance-method), which have no built-in
2638 names but are accessible through the types module, are now also
2639 callable. The type dict-proxy is renamed to dictproxy.
2640
2641- Cycles going through the __class__ link of a new-style instance are
2642 now detected by the garbage collector.
2643
2644- Classes using __slots__ are now properly garbage collected.
2645 [SF bug 519621]
2646
2647- Tightened the __slots__ rules: a slot name must be a valid Python
2648 identifier.
2649
2650- The constructor for the module type now requires a name argument and
2651 takes an optional docstring argument. Previously, this constructor
2652 ignored its arguments. As a consequence, deriving a class from a
2653 module (not from the module type) is now illegal; previously this
2654 created an unnamed module, just like invoking the module type did.
2655 [SF bug 563060]
2656
2657- A new type object, 'basestring', is added. This is a common base type
2658 for 'str' and 'unicode', and can be used instead of
2659 types.StringTypes, e.g. to test whether something is "a string":
2660 isinstance(x, basestring) is True for Unicode and 8-bit strings. This
2661 is an abstract base class and cannot be instantiated directly.
2662
2663- Changed new-style class instantiation so that when C's __new__
2664 method returns something that's not a C instance, its __init__ is
2665 not called. [SF bug #537450]
2666
2667- Fixed super() to work correctly with class methods. [SF bug #535444]
2668
2669- If you try to pickle an instance of a class that has __slots__ but
2670 doesn't define or override __getstate__, a TypeError is now raised.
2671 This is done by adding a bozo __getstate__ to the class that always
2672 raises TypeError. (Before, this would appear to be pickled, but the
2673 state of the slots would be lost.)
2674
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002675Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002676-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002677
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00002678- Import from zipfiles is now supported. The name of a zipfile placed
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00002679 on sys.path causes the import statement to look for importable Python
2680 modules (with .py, pyc and .pyo extensions) and packages inside the
2681 zipfile. The zipfile import follows the specification (though not
2682 the sample implementation) of PEP 273. The semantics of __path__ are
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00002683 compatible with those that have been implemented in Jython since
2684 Jython 2.1.
2685
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002686- PEP 302 has been accepted. Although it was initially developed to
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00002687 support zipimport, it offers a new, general import hook mechanism.
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00002688 Several new variables have been added to the sys module:
2689 sys.meta_path, sys.path_hooks, and sys.path_importer_cache; these
2690 make extending the import statement much more convenient than
2691 overriding the __import__ built-in function. For a description of
2692 these, see PEP 302.
2693
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00002694- A frame object's f_lineno attribute can now be written to from a
2695 trace function to change which line will execute next. A command to
2696 exploit this from pdb has been added. [SF patch #643835]
2697
Marc-André Lemburg20b91352002-12-12 18:01:43 +00002698- The _codecs support module for codecs.py was turned into a builtin
2699 module to assure that at least the builtin codecs are available
2700 to the Python parser for source code decoding according to PEP 263.
2701
Walter Dörwaldd9a6ad32002-12-12 16:41:44 +00002702- issubclass now supports a tuple as the second argument, just like
2703 isinstance does. ``issubclass(X, (A, B))`` is equivalent to
2704 ``issubclass(X, A) or issubclass(X, B)``.
2705
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00002706- Thanks to Armin Rigo, the last known way to provoke a system crash
2707 by cleverly arranging for a comparison function to mutate a list
2708 during a list.sort() operation has been fixed. The effect of
2709 attempting to mutate a list, or even to inspect its contents or
2710 length, while a sort is in progress, is not defined by the language.
2711 The C implementation of Python 2.3 attempts to detect mutations,
2712 and raise ValueError if one occurs, but there's no guarantee that
2713 all mutations will be caught, or that any will be caught across
2714 releases or implementations.
2715
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00002716- Unicode file name processing for Windows (PEP 277) is implemented.
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00002717 All platforms now have an os.path.supports_unicode_filenames attribute,
2718 which is set to True on Windows NT/2000/XP, and False elsewhere.
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00002719
Walter Dörwald3aeb6322002-09-02 13:14:32 +00002720- Codec error handling callbacks (PEP 293) are implemented.
2721 Error handling in unicode.encode or str.decode can now be customized.
2722
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00002723- A subtle change to the semantics of the built-in function intern():
2724 interned strings are no longer immortal. You must keep a reference
2725 to the return value intern() around to get the benefit.
2726
Guido van Rossumf808b892002-08-16 03:38:10 +00002727- Use of 'None' as a variable, argument or attribute name now
2728 issues a SyntaxWarning. In the future, None may become a keyword.
2729
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00002730- SET_LINENO is gone. co_lnotab is now consulted to determine when to
2731 call the trace function. C code that accessed f_lineno should call
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00002732 PyCode_Addr2Line instead (f_lineno is still there, but only kept up
2733 to date when there is a trace function set).
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00002734
Guido van Rossum9be89462002-08-14 16:11:30 +00002735- There's a new warning category, FutureWarning. This is used to warn
2736 about a number of situations where the value or sign of an integer
2737 result will change in Python 2.4 as a result of PEP 237 (integer
2738 unification). The warnings implement stage B0 mentioned in that
2739 PEP. The warnings are about the following situations:
2740
2741 - Octal and hex literals without 'L' prefix in the inclusive range
2742 [0x80000000..0xffffffff]; these are currently negative ints, but
2743 in Python 2.4 they will be positive longs with the same bit
2744 pattern.
2745
2746 - Left shifts on integer values that cause the outcome to lose
2747 bits or have a different sign than the left operand. To be
2748 precise: x<<n where this currently doesn't yield the same value
2749 as long(x)<<n; in Python 2.4, the outcome will be long(x)<<n.
2750
2751 - Conversions from ints to string that show negative values as
2752 unsigned ints in the inclusive range [0x80000000..0xffffffff];
2753 this affects the functions hex() and oct(), and the string
2754 formatting codes %u, %o, %x, and %X. In Python 2.4, these will
2755 show signed values (e.g. hex(-1) currently returns "0xffffffff";
2756 in Python 2.4 it will return "-0x1").
2757
Guido van Rossum9a2eda52002-12-31 02:12:42 +00002758- The bits manipulated under the cover by sys.setcheckinterval() have
2759 been changed. Both the check interval and the ticker used to be
2760 per-thread values. They are now just a pair of global variables.
2761 In addition, the default check interval was boosted from 10 to 100
2762 bytecode instructions. This may have some effect on systems that
2763 relied on the old default value. In particular, in multi-threaded
2764 applications which try to be highly responsive, response time will
2765 increase by some (perhaps imperceptible) amount.
Skip Montanaro979c74b2002-09-03 21:25:14 +00002766
Tim Petersd64c1de2002-08-12 17:36:03 +00002767- When multiplying very large integers, a version of the so-called
2768 Karatsuba algorithm is now used. This is most effective if the
2769 inputs have roughly the same size. If they both have about N digits,
2770 Karatsuba multiplication has O(N**1.58) runtime (the exponent is
2771 log_base_2(3)) instead of the previous O(N**2). Measured results may
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00002772 be better or worse than that, depending on platform quirks. Besides
2773 the O() improvement in raw instruction count, the Karatsuba algorithm
2774 appears to have much better cache behavior on extremely large integers
2775 (starting in the ballpark of a million bits). Note that this is a
2776 simple implementation, and there's no intent here to compete with,
2777 e.g., GMP. It gives a very nice speedup when it applies, but a package
2778 devoted to fast large-integer arithmetic should run circles around it.
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00002779
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00002780- u'%c' will now raise a ValueError in case the argument is an
2781 integer outside the valid range of Unicode code point ordinals.
2782
Guido van Rossumdeb09362002-08-09 17:16:30 +00002783- The tempfile module has been overhauled for enhanced security. The
2784 mktemp() function is now deprecated; new, safe replacements are
2785 mkstemp() (for files) and mkdtemp() (for directories), and the
2786 higher-level functions NamedTemporaryFile() and TemporaryFile().
2787 Use of some global variables in this module is also deprecated; the
2788 new functions have keyword arguments to provide the same
2789 functionality. All Lib, Tools and Demo modules that used the unsafe
2790 interfaces have been updated to use the safe replacements. Thanks
2791 to Zack Weinberg!
2792
Guido van Rossumd81a9832002-08-09 15:57:34 +00002793- When x is an object whose class implements __mul__ and __rmul__,
2794 1.0*x would correctly invoke __rmul__, but 1*x would erroneously
2795 invoke __mul__. This was due to the sequence-repeat code in the int
2796 type. This has been fixed now.
2797
Barry Warsawd79f6832002-08-06 17:01:51 +00002798- Previously, "str1 in str2" required str1 to be a string of length 1.
2799 This restriction has been relaxed to allow str1 to be a string of
2800 any length. Thus "'el' in 'hello world'" returns True now.
2801
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00002802- File objects are now their own iterators. For a file f, iter(f) now
2803 returns f (unless f is closed), and f.next() is similar to
2804 f.readline() when EOF is not reached; however, f.next() uses a
2805 readahead buffer that messes up the file position, so mixing
2806 f.next() and f.readline() (or other methods) doesn't work right.
2807 Calling f.seek() drops the readahead buffer, but other operations
2808 don't. It so happens that this gives a nice additional speed boost
2809 to "for line in file:"; the xreadlines method and corresponding
Guido van Rossumbffb2ef2002-08-09 17:17:07 +00002810 module are now obsolete. Thanks to Oren Tirosh!
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00002811
Guido van Rossumde392d32002-08-05 14:17:20 +00002812- Encoding declarations (PEP 263, phase 1) have been implemented. A
2813 comment of the form "# -*- coding: <encodingname> -*-" in the first
2814 or second line of a Python source file indicates the encoding.
Martin v. Löwis00f1e3f2002-08-04 17:29:52 +00002815
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00002816- list.sort() has a new implementation. While cross-platform results
2817 may vary, and in data-dependent ways, this is much faster on many
2818 kinds of partially ordered lists than the previous implementation,
2819 and reported to be just as fast on randomly ordered lists on
2820 several major platforms. This sort is also stable (if A==B and A
2821 precedes B in the list at the start, A precedes B after the sort too),
2822 although the language definition does not guarantee stability. A
2823 potential drawback is that list.sort() may require temp space of
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00002824 len(list)*2 bytes (``*4`` on a 64-bit machine). It's therefore possible
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00002825 for list.sort() to raise MemoryError now, even if a comparison function
2826 does not. See <http://www.python.org/sf/587076> for full details.
2827
Guido van Rossum2d5389c2002-07-23 03:44:35 +00002828- All standard iterators now ensure that, once StopIteration has been
2829 raised, all future calls to next() on the same iterator will also
2830 raise StopIteration. There used to be various counterexamples to
2831 this behavior, which could caused confusion or subtle program
2832 breakage, without any benefits. (Note that this is still an
2833 iterator's responsibility; the iterator framework does not enforce
2834 this.)
2835
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00002836- Ctrl+C handling on Windows has been made more consistent with
2837 other platforms. KeyboardInterrupt can now reliably be caught,
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00002838 and Ctrl+C at an interactive prompt no longer terminates the
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00002839 process under NT/2k/XP (it never did under Win9x). Ctrl+C will
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00002840 interrupt time.sleep() in the main thread, and any child processes
2841 created via the popen family (on win2k; we can't make win9x work
Mark Hammond8f3afc72002-08-10 06:26:31 +00002842 reliably) are also interrupted (as generally happens on for Linux/Unix.)
2843 [SF bugs 231273, 439992 and 581232]
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00002844
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00002845- sys.getwindowsversion() has been added on Windows. This
2846 returns a tuple with information about the version of Windows
2847 currently running.
2848
Raymond Hettinger5a04aec2002-06-25 00:25:30 +00002849- Slices and repetitions of buffer objects now consistently return
2850 a string. Formerly, strings would be returned most of the time,
2851 but a buffer object would be returned when the repetition count
2852 was one or when the slice range was all inclusive.
2853
Walter Dörwald3430d702002-06-17 10:43:59 +00002854- Unicode objects in sys.path are no longer ignored but treated
2855 as directory names.
2856
Neal Norwitz1f68fc72002-06-14 00:50:42 +00002857- Fixed string.startswith and string.endswith builtin methods
2858 so they accept negative indices. [SF bug 493951]
2859
Guido van Rossumc5fe5eb2002-06-12 03:45:21 +00002860- Fixed a bug with a continue inside a try block and a yield in the
2861 finally clause. [SF bug 567538]
2862
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00002863- Most builtin sequences now support "extended slices", i.e. slices
Guido van Rossum2e82e712002-06-13 11:41:07 +00002864 with a third "stride" parameter. For example, "hello world"[::-1]
2865 gives "dlrow olleh".
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00002866
Neal Norwitzd68f5172002-05-29 15:54:55 +00002867- A new warning PendingDeprecationWarning was added to provide
2868 direction on features which are in the process of being deprecated.
2869 The warning will not be printed by default. To see the pending
2870 deprecations, use -Walways::PendingDeprecationWarning::
2871 as a command line option or warnings.filterwarnings() in code.
2872
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00002873- Deprecated features of xrange objects have been removed as
2874 promised. The start, stop, and step attributes and the tolist()
2875 method no longer exist. xrange repetition and slicing have been
2876 removed.
2877
Guido van Rossum7dab2422002-04-26 19:40:56 +00002878- New builtin function enumerate(x), from PEP 279. Example:
2879 enumerate("abc") is an iterator returning (0,"a"), (1,"b"), (2,"c").
2880 The argument can be an arbitrary iterable object.
2881
Neil Schemenauer89e3ee02002-04-26 01:58:53 +00002882- The assert statement no longer tests __debug__ at runtime. This means
2883 that assert statements cannot be disabled by assigning a false value
2884 to __debug__.
2885
Walter Dörwald068325e2002-04-15 13:36:47 +00002886- A method zfill() was added to str and unicode, that fills a numeric
2887 string to the left with zeros. For example,
2888 "+123".zfill(6) -> "+00123".
2889
Guido van Rossum862fe3c2002-04-15 12:36:47 +00002890- Complex numbers supported divmod() and the // and % operators, but
2891 these make no sense. Since this was documented, they're being
2892 deprecated now.
2893
Guido van Rossum26dd8302002-04-26 20:11:29 +00002894- String and unicode methods lstrip(), rstrip() and strip() now take
2895 an optional argument that specifies the characters to strip. For
2896 example, "Foo!!!?!?!?".rstrip("?!") -> "Foo".
Guido van Rossum49042042002-04-13 00:59:05 +00002897
Guido van Rossumc0d3f4e2002-11-27 13:10:40 +00002898- There's a new dictionary constructor (a class method of the dict
2899 class), dict.fromkeys(iterable, value=None). It constructs a
2900 dictionary with keys taken from the iterable and all values set to a
2901 single value. It can be used for building sets and for removing
2902 duplicates from sequences.
Raymond Hettingere33d3df2002-11-27 07:29:33 +00002903
Guido van Rossumc69343b2002-04-12 19:22:48 +00002904- Added a new dict method pop(key). This removes and returns the
2905 value corresponding to key. [SF patch #539949]
2906
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00002907- A new built-in type, bool, has been added, as well as built-in
2908 names for its two values, True and False. Comparisons and sundry
2909 other operations that return a truth value have been changed to
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002910 return a bool instead. Read PEP 285 for an explanation of why this
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00002911 is backward compatible.
2912
Guido van Rossum95b62a62002-03-29 01:07:24 +00002913- Fixed two bugs reported as SF #535905: under certain conditions,
2914 deallocating a deeply nested structure could cause a segfault in the
2915 garbage collector, due to interaction with the "trashcan" code;
2916 access to the current frame during destruction of a local variable
2917 could access a pointer to freed memory.
2918
Guido van Rossumfe0ca4a2002-06-18 21:20:13 +00002919- The optional object allocator ("pymalloc") has been enabled by
2920 default. The recommended practice for memory allocation and
2921 deallocation has been streamlined. A header file is included,
2922 Misc/pymemcompat.h, which can be bundled with 3rd party extensions
2923 and lets them use the same API with Python versions from 1.5.2
2924 onwards.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00002925
Martin v. Löwiscfeb3b62002-03-03 21:30:27 +00002926- PyErr_Display will provide file and line information for all exceptions
2927 that have an attribute print_file_and_line, not just SyntaxErrors.
2928
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00002929- The UTF-8 codec will now encode and decode Unicode surrogates
2930 correctly and without raising exceptions for unpaired ones.
2931
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00002932- Universal newlines (PEP 278) is implemented. Briefly, using 'U'
2933 instead of 'r' when opening a text file for reading changes the line
2934 ending convention so that any of '\r', '\r\n', and '\n' is
2935 recognized (even mixed in one file); all three are converted to
2936 '\n', the standard Python line end character.
2937
Neal Norwitz649b7592002-01-01 19:07:13 +00002938- file.xreadlines() now raises a ValueError if the file is closed:
2939 Previously, an xreadlines object was returned which would raise
2940 a ValueError when the xreadlines.next() method was called.
2941
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002942- sys.exit() inadvertently allowed more than one argument.
Neal Norwitz0c766a02002-03-27 13:03:09 +00002943 An exception will now be raised if more than one argument is used.
2944
Gustavo Niemeyer17c5a332002-12-16 14:09:22 +00002945- Changed evaluation order of dictionary literals to conform to the
2946 general left to right evaluation order rule. Now {f1(): f2()} will
2947 evaluate f1 first.
Gustavo Niemeyer78429a62002-12-16 13:54:02 +00002948
Gustavo Niemeyer786ddb22002-12-16 18:12:53 +00002949- Fixed bug #521782: when a file was in non-blocking mode, file.read()
2950 could silently lose data or wrongly throw an unknown error.
2951
Neil Schemenauerb983aa02002-12-30 20:22:23 +00002952- The sq_repeat, sq_inplace_repeat, sq_concat and sq_inplace_concat
2953 slots are now always tried after trying the corresponding nb_* slots.
2954 This fixes a number of minor bugs (see bug #624807).
2955
Neal Norwitz74a032e2003-01-10 23:29:48 +00002956- Fix problem with dynamic loading on 64-bit AIX (see bug #639945).
2957
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002958Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002959-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002960
Raymond Hettinger9543b342003-01-18 23:22:20 +00002961- Added three operators to the operator module:
2962 operator.pow(a,b) which is equivalent to: a**b.
2963 operator.is_(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is b.
2964 operator.is_not(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is not b.
2965
Martin v. Löwis24a880b2002-12-31 12:55:15 +00002966- posix.openpty now works on all systems that have /dev/ptmx.
2967
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00002968- A module zipimport exists to support importing code from zip
2969 archives.
2970
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00002971- The new datetime module supplies classes for manipulating dates and
2972 times. The basic design came from the Zope "fishbowl process", and
2973 favors practical commercial applications over calendar esoterica. See
2974
2975 http://www.zope.org/Members/fdrake/DateTimeWiki/FrontPage
2976
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00002977- _tkinter now returns Tcl objects, instead of strings. Objects which
2978 have Python equivalents are converted to Python objects, other objects
2979 are wrapped. This can be configured through the wantobjects method,
Martin v. Löwis8c8aa5d2002-11-26 21:39:48 +00002980 or Tkinter.wantobjects.
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00002981
Barry Warsawc27f4bd2002-12-30 21:03:26 +00002982- The PyBSDDB wrapper around the Sleepycat Berkeley DB library has
2983 been added as the package bsddb. The traditional bsddb module is
2984 still available in source code, but not built automatically anymore,
2985 and is now named bsddb185. This supports Berkeley DB versions from
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00002986 3.0 to 4.1. For help converting your databases from the old module (which
2987 probably used an obsolete version of Berkeley DB) to the new module, see
2988 the db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py scripts described in the Tools/Demos
2989 section above.
Martin v. Löwisef546b32002-11-19 08:12:57 +00002990
Martin v. Löwis677bde22002-11-23 22:08:15 +00002991- unicodedata was updated to Unicode 3.2. It supports normalization
2992 and names for Hangul syllables and CJK unified ideographs.
Martin v. Löwis7d41e292002-11-23 12:22:32 +00002993
Neal Norwitz94a83fd2002-11-02 17:46:24 +00002994- resource.getrlimit() now returns longs instead of ints.
2995
Martin v. Löwis080689c2002-10-26 14:42:02 +00002996- readline now dynamically adjusts its input/output stream if
2997 sys.stdin/stdout changes.
2998
Guido van Rossumba602972002-10-01 18:18:58 +00002999- The _tkinter module (and hence Tkinter) has dropped support for
3000 Tcl/Tk 8.0 and 8.1. Only Tcl/Tk versions 8.2, 8.3 and 8.4 are
3001 supported.
3002
Martin v. Löwis658009a2002-09-16 17:26:24 +00003003- cPickle.BadPickleGet is now a class.
3004
Martin v. Löwisa19bfe02002-10-16 18:28:36 +00003005- The time stamps in os.stat_result are floating point numbers
3006 after stat_float_times has been called.
Martin v. Löwis94717ed2002-09-09 14:24:16 +00003007
Neal Norwitzb5673922002-09-05 21:48:07 +00003008- If the size passed to mmap.mmap() is larger than the length of the
3009 file on non-Windows platforms, a ValueError is raised. [SF bug 585792]
3010
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003011- The xreadlines module is slated for obsolescence.
3012
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00003013- The strptime function in the time module is now always available (a
3014 Python implementation is used when the C library doesn't define it).
3015
Guido van Rossum9562bcf2002-06-14 21:31:18 +00003016- The 'new' module is no longer an extension, but a Python module that
3017 only exists for backwards compatibility. Its contents are no longer
3018 functions but callable type objects.
3019
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003020- The bsddb.*open functions can now take 'None' as a filename.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00003021 This will create a temporary in-memory bsddb that won't be
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003022 written to disk.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00003023
Martin v. Löwisb96152c2002-12-31 13:20:15 +00003024- posix.getloadavg, posix.lchown, posix.killpg, posix.mknod, and
3025 posix.getpgid have been added where available.
Martin v. Löwis06a83e92002-04-14 10:19:44 +00003026
Martin v. Löwisf0a46682002-11-03 17:20:12 +00003027- The locale module now exposes the C library's gettext interface. It
3028 also has a new function getpreferredencoding.
Martin v. Löwis2e64c342002-03-27 18:49:02 +00003029
Tim Petersfbf74f22002-03-14 19:06:01 +00003030- A security hole ("double free") was found in zlib-1.1.3, a popular
3031 third party compression library used by some Python modules. The
3032 hole was quickly plugged in zlib-1.1.4, and the Windows build of
3033 Python now ships with zlib-1.1.4.
3034
Martin v. Löwis688357e2002-04-08 21:28:20 +00003035- pwd, grp, and resource return enhanced tuples now, with symbolic
3036 field names.
Martin v. Löwis29001ff2002-03-01 10:47:37 +00003037
Martin v. Löwis99866332002-03-01 10:27:01 +00003038- array.array is now a type object. A new format character
3039 'u' indicates Py_UNICODE arrays. For those, .tounicode and
3040 .fromunicode methods are available. Arrays now support __iadd__
3041 and __imul__.
3042
Neal Norwitze790eae2002-01-01 21:14:12 +00003043- dl now builds on every system that has dlfcn.h. Failure in case
Martin v. Löwis93227272002-01-01 20:18:30 +00003044 of sizeof(int)!=sizeof(long)!=sizeof(void*) is delayed until dl.open
3045 is called.
3046
Skip Montanaro8e790e72002-09-03 13:25:17 +00003047- The sys module acquired a new attribute, api_version, which evaluates
3048 to the value of the PYTHON_API_VERSION macro with which the
3049 interpreter was compiled.
3050
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00003051- Fixed bug #470582: sre module would return a tuple (None, 'a', 'ab')
3052 when applying the regular expression '^((a)c)?(ab)$' on 'ab'. It now
3053 returns (None, None, 'ab'), as expected. Also fixed handling of
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00003054 lastindex/lastgroup match attributes in similar cases. For example,
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00003055 when running the expression r'(a)(b)?b' over 'ab', lastindex must be
3056 1, not 2.
3057
Gustavo Niemeyerc523b042002-11-07 03:28:56 +00003058- Fixed bug #581080: sre scanner was not checking the buffer limit
3059 before increasing the current pointer. This was creating an infinite
3060 loop in the search function, once the pointer exceeded the buffer
3061 limit.
3062
Thomas Heller95cb7e42002-11-07 16:23:55 +00003063- The os.fdopen function now enforces a file mode starting with the
3064 letter 'r', 'w' or 'a', otherwise a ValueError is raised. This fixes
3065 bug #623464.
3066
Greg Ward6c58d462003-01-03 18:02:15 +00003067- The linuxaudiodev module is now deprecated; it is being replaced by
3068 ossaudiodev. The interface has been extended to cover a lot more of
3069 OSS (see www.opensound.com), including most DSP ioctls and the
3070 OSS mixer API. Documentation forthcoming in 2.3a2.
3071
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003072Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003073-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003074
Guido van Rossum747f8062003-01-03 16:33:49 +00003075- imaplib.py now supports SSL (Tino Lange and Piers Lauder).
3076
Just van Rossum5e156ad2002-12-31 16:38:01 +00003077- Freeze's modulefinder.py has been moved to the standard library;
3078 slightly improved so it will issue less false missing submodule
3079 reports (see sf path #643711 for details). Documentation will follow
3080 with Python 2.3a2.
3081
Martin v. Löwis96a60e42002-12-31 13:11:54 +00003082- os.path exposes getctime.
3083
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003084- unittest.py now has two additional methods called assertAlmostEqual()
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003085 and failIfAlmostEqual(). They implement an approximate comparison
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003086 by rounding the difference between the two arguments and comparing
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003087 the result to zero. Approximate comparison is essential for
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003088 unit tests of floating point results.
3089
Raymond Hettingere11b5102002-12-25 16:37:19 +00003090- calendar.py now depends on the new datetime module rather than
3091 the time module. As a result, the range of allowable dates
3092 has been increased.
3093
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003094- pdb has a new 'j(ump)' command to select the next line to be
3095 executed.
3096
Thomas Heller1b3b49d2002-12-12 19:13:44 +00003097- The distutils created windows installers now can run a
3098 postinstallation script.
3099
Martin v. Löwis4581cfa2002-11-22 08:23:09 +00003100- doctest.testmod can now be called without argument, which means to
3101 test the current module.
3102
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003103- When canceling a server that implemented threading with a keyboard
Martin v. Löwisf86e8ef2002-11-22 08:08:44 +00003104 interrupt, the server would shut down but not terminate (waiting on
3105 client threads). A new member variable, daemon_threads, was added to
3106 the ThreadingMixIn class in SocketServer.py to make it explicit that
3107 this behavior needs to be controlled.
3108
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00003109- A new module, optparse, provides a fancy alternative to getopt for
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003110 command line parsing. It is a slightly modified version of Greg
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00003111 Ward's Optik package.
3112
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00003113- UserDict.py now defines a DictMixin class which defines all dictionary
3114 methods for classes that already have a minimum mapping interface.
3115 This greatly simplifies writing classes that need to be substitutable
3116 for dictionaries (such as the shelve module).
3117
3118- shelve.py now subclasses from UserDict.DictMixin. Now shelve supports
3119 all dictionary methods. This eases the transition to persistent
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003120 storage for scripts originally written with dictionaries in mind.
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00003121
Skip Montanaro3bf99e32002-12-08 18:36:24 +00003122- shelve.open and the various classes in shelve.py now accept an optional
3123 binary flag, which defaults to False. If True, the values stored in the
3124 shelf are binary pickles.
3125
Guido van Rossumfda06742002-11-13 16:29:18 +00003126- A new package, logging, implements the logging API defined by PEP
3127 282. The code is written by Vinay Sajip.
3128
Walter Dörwald4dbf1922002-11-06 16:53:44 +00003129- StreamReader, StreamReaderWriter and StreamRecoder in the codecs
3130 modules are iterators now.
3131
Tim Peters9288f952002-11-05 20:38:55 +00003132- gzip.py now handles files exceeding 2GB. Files over 4GB also work
3133 now (provided the OS supports it, and Python is configured with large
3134 file support), but in that case the underlying gzip file format can
3135 record only the least-significant 32 bits of the file size, so that
3136 some tools working with gzipped files may report an incorrect file
3137 size.
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00003138
Martin v. Löwis74b51ac2002-10-26 14:50:45 +00003139- xml.sax.saxutils.unescape has been added, to replace entity references
3140 with their entity value.
3141
Martin v. Löwis77ac4292002-10-15 15:11:13 +00003142- Queue.Queue.{put,get} now support an optional timeout argument.
3143
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00003144- Various features of Tk 8.4 are exposed in Tkinter.py. The multiple
3145 option of tkFileDialog is exposed as function askopenfile{,name}s.
Martin v. Löwis2ec36272002-10-13 10:22:08 +00003146
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00003147- Various configure methods of Tkinter have been stream-lined, so that
3148 tag_configure, image_configure, window_configure now return a
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00003149 dictionary when invoked with no argument.
Martin v. Löwis6ce13152002-10-10 14:36:13 +00003150
Guido van Rossum2b492b62002-10-09 21:40:48 +00003151- Importing the readline module now no longer has the side effect of
3152 calling setlocale(LC_CTYPE, ""). The initial "C" locale, or
3153 whatever locale is explicitly set by the user, is preserved. If you
3154 want repr() of 8-bit strings in your preferred encoding to preserve
3155 all printable characters of that encoding, you have to add the
3156 following code to your $PYTHONSTARTUP file or to your application's
3157 main():
3158
3159 import locale
3160 locale.setlocale(locale.LC_CTYPE, "")
3161
Martin v. Löwise9ce0b02002-10-07 13:23:24 +00003162- shutil.move was added. shutil.copytree now reports errors as an
3163 exception at the end, instead of printing error messages.
3164
Marc-André Lemburg97047e22002-10-04 11:55:21 +00003165- Encoding name normalization was generalized to not only
3166 replace hyphens with underscores, but also all other non-alphanumeric
3167 characters (with the exception of the dot which is used for Python
3168 package names during lookup). The aliases.py mapping was updated
3169 to the new standard.
3170
Walter Dörwald5ccaf8f2002-09-06 16:15:58 +00003171- mimetypes has two new functions: guess_all_extensions() which
3172 returns a list of all known extensions for a mime type, and
3173 add_type() which adds one mapping between a mime type and
3174 an extension to the database.
3175
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00003176- New module: sets, defines the class Set that implements a mutable
3177 set type using the keys of a dict to represent the set. There's
3178 also a class ImmutableSet which is useful when you need sets of sets
3179 or when you need to use sets as dict keys, and a class BaseSet which
Raymond Hettingeref8b9c62002-12-09 08:56:06 +00003180 is the base class of the two.
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00003181
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00003182- Added random.sample(population,k) for random sampling without replacement.
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00003183 Returns a k length list of unique elements chosen from the population.
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00003184
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00003185- random.randrange(-sys.maxint-1, sys.maxint) no longer raises
3186 OverflowError. That is, it now accepts any combination of 'start'
3187 and 'stop' arguments so long as each is in the range of Python's
3188 bounded integers.
3189
Raymond Hettinger40f62172002-12-29 23:03:38 +00003190- Thanks to Raymond Hettinger, random.random() now uses a new core
3191 generator. The Mersenne Twister algorithm is implemented in C,
3192 threadsafe, faster than the previous generator, has an astronomically
3193 large period (2**19937-1), creates random floats to full 53-bit
3194 precision, and may be the most widely tested random number generator
3195 in existence.
3196
3197 The random.jumpahead(n) method has different semantics for the new
3198 generator. Instead of jumping n steps ahead, it uses n and the
3199 existing state to create a new state. This means that jumpahead()
3200 continues to support multi-threaded code needing generators of
3201 non-overlapping sequences. However, it will break code which relies
3202 on jumpahead moving a specific number of steps forward.
3203
3204 The attributes random.whseed and random.__whseed have no meaning for
3205 the new generator. Code using these attributes should switch to a
3206 new class, random.WichmannHill which is provided for backward
3207 compatibility and to make an alternate generator available.
3208
Guido van Rossum4a57c332002-08-02 18:05:20 +00003209- New "algorithms" module: heapq, implements a heap queue. Thanks to
3210 Kevin O'Connor for the code and François Pinard for an entertaining
3211 write-up explaining the theory and practical uses of heaps.
3212
Marc-André Lemburg58e2ff22002-07-12 14:40:04 +00003213- New encoding for the Palm OS character set: palmos.
3214
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00003215- binascii.crc32() and the zipfile module had problems on some 64-bit
3216 platforms. These have been fixed. On a platform with 8-byte C longs,
3217 crc32() now returns a signed-extended 4-byte result, so that its value
3218 as a Python int is equal to the value computed a 32-bit platform.
3219
Martin v. Löwis7d650ca2002-06-30 15:05:00 +00003220- xml.dom.minidom.toxml and toprettyxml now take an optional encoding
3221 argument.
3222
Guido van Rossum9f7549b2002-06-10 21:39:42 +00003223- Some fixes in the copy module: when an object is copied through its
3224 __reduce__ method, there was no check for a __setstate__ method on
3225 the result [SF patch 565085]; deepcopy should treat instances of
3226 custom metaclasses the same way it treats instances of type 'type'
3227 [SF patch 560794].
3228
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00003229- Sockets now support timeout mode. After s.settimeout(T), where T is
3230 a float expressing seconds, subsequent operations raise an exception
3231 if they cannot be completed within T seconds. To disable timeout
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00003232 mode, use s.settimeout(None). There's also a module function,
3233 socket.setdefaulttimeout(T), which sets the default for all sockets
3234 created henceforth.
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00003235
3236- getopt.gnu_getopt was added. This supports GNU-style option
3237 processing, where options can be mixed with non-option arguments.
Martin v. Löwis446a25f2002-06-06 10:58:36 +00003238
Michael W. Hudsonb0dc1a32002-06-04 18:27:35 +00003239- Stop using strings for exceptions. String objects used for
3240 exceptions are now classes deriving from Exception. The objects
3241 changed were: Tkinter.TclError, bdb.BdbQuit, macpath.norm_error,
3242 tabnanny.NannyNag, and xdrlib.Error.
Neal Norwitzb5b5a262002-06-04 17:14:07 +00003243
Walter Dörwald474458d2002-06-04 15:16:29 +00003244- Constants BOM_UTF8, BOM_UTF16, BOM_UTF16_LE, BOM_UTF16_BE,
3245 BOM_UTF32, BOM_UTF32_LE and BOM_UTF32_BE that represent the Byte
3246 Order Mark in UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 encodings for little and
3247 big endian systems were added to the codecs module. The old names
3248 BOM32_* and BOM64_* were off by a factor of 2.
3249
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00003250- Added conversion functions math.degrees() and math.radians().
Raymond Hettinger87f59ee2002-05-13 04:17:32 +00003251
Raymond Hettinger866964c2002-12-14 19:51:34 +00003252- math.log() now takes an optional argument: math.log(x[, base]).
3253
Raymond Hettinger9b1df1d2002-05-12 06:07:21 +00003254- ftplib.retrlines() now tests for callback is None rather than testing
3255 for False. Was causing an error when given a callback object which
3256 was callable but also returned len() as zero. The change may
3257 create new breakage if the caller relied on the undocumented behavior
3258 and called with callback set to [] or some other False value not
3259 identical to None.
3260
Tim Peters46c04e12002-05-05 20:40:00 +00003261- random.gauss() uses a piece of hidden state used by nothing else,
3262 and the .seed() and .whseed() methods failed to reset it. In other
3263 words, setting the seed didn't completely determine the sequence of
3264 results produced by random.gauss(). It does now. Programs repeatedly
3265 mixing calls to a seed method with calls to gauss() may see different
3266 results now.
3267
Fred Drake7f781c92002-05-01 20:33:53 +00003268- The pickle.Pickler class grew a clear_memo() method to mimic that
3269 provided by cPickle.Pickler.
3270
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003271- difflib's SequenceMatcher class now does a dynamic analysis of
3272 which elements are so frequent as to constitute noise. For
3273 comparing files as sequences of lines, this generally works better
3274 than the IS_LINE_JUNK function, and function ndiff's linejunk
3275 argument defaults to None now as a result. A happy benefit is
3276 that SequenceMatcher may run much faster now when applied
3277 to large files with many duplicate lines (for example, C program
3278 text with lots of repeated "}" and "return NULL;" lines).
3279
Guido van Rossum256705b2002-04-23 13:29:43 +00003280- New Text.dump() method in Tkinter module.
3281
Marc-André Lemburg1ec71ea2002-04-17 20:33:40 +00003282- New distutils commands for building packagers were added to
3283 support pkgtool on Solaris and swinstall on HP-UX.
3284
3285- distutils now has a new abstract binary packager base class
3286 command/bdist_packager, which simplifies writing packagers.
3287 This will hopefully provide the missing bits to encourage
3288 people to submit more packagers, e.g. for Debian, FreeBSD
3289 and other systems.
3290
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00003291- The UTF-16, -LE and -BE stream readers now raise a
3292 NotImplementedError for all calls to .readline(). Previously, they
3293 used to just produce garbage or fail with an encoding error --
3294 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 +00003295 work well with these.
3296
Martin v. Löwis5c137c22002-03-18 12:44:08 +00003297- compileall now supports quiet operation.
3298
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003299- The BaseHTTPServer now implements optional HTTP/1.1 persistent
Martin v. Löwis587c98c2002-03-17 18:37:22 +00003300 connections.
3301
Marc-André Lemburga5d2b4c2002-02-16 18:23:30 +00003302- socket module: the SSL support was broken out of the main
3303 _socket module C helper and placed into a new _ssl helper
3304 which now gets imported by socket.py if available and working.
3305
Marc-André Lemburg37aa5802002-02-10 21:42:47 +00003306- encodings package: added aliases for all supported IANA character
3307 sets
3308
Guido van Rossum606fe4e2001-12-28 20:57:14 +00003309- ftplib: to safeguard the user's privacy, anonymous login will use
3310 "anonymous@" as default password, rather than the real user and host
3311 name.
3312
Fred Drake36736122002-01-10 13:50:31 +00003313- webbrowser: tightened up the command passed to os.system() so that
3314 arbitrary shell code can't be executed because a bogus URL was
3315 passed in.
3316
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00003317- gettext.translation has an optional fallback argument, and
Martin v. Löwisa55ffae2002-01-11 06:58:49 +00003318 gettext.find an optional all argument. Translations will now fallback
Martin v. Löwisd8996052002-11-21 21:45:32 +00003319 on a per-message basis. The module supports plural forms, by means
3320 of gettext.[d]ngettext and Translation.[u]ngettext.
Martin v. Löwis1be64192002-01-11 06:33:28 +00003321
Martin v. Löwis9668b932002-01-12 11:27:42 +00003322- distutils bdist commands now offer a --skip-build option.
3323
Walter Dörwaldb25c2b02002-03-21 10:38:40 +00003324- warnings.warn now accepts a Warning instance as first argument.
3325
Fred Drakefed7e852002-04-04 19:36:15 +00003326- The xml.sax.expatreader.ExpatParser class will no longer create
3327 circular references by using itself as the locator that gets passed
3328 to the content handler implementation. [SF bug #535474]
3329
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00003330- The email.Parser.Parser class now properly parses strings regardless
3331 of their line endings, which can be any of \r, \n, or \r\n (CR, LF,
3332 or CRLF). Also, the Header class's constructor default arguments
3333 has changed slightly so that an explicit maxlinelen value is always
Barry Warsaw497e5c42002-12-30 19:27:08 +00003334 honored, and so unicode conversion error handling can be specified.
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00003335
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003336- distutils' build_ext command now links C++ extensions with the C++
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00003337 compiler available in the Makefile or CXX environment variable, if
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003338 running under \*nix.
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00003339
3340- New module bz2: provides a comprehensive interface for the bz2 compression
3341 library. It implements a complete file interface, one-shot (de)compression
3342 functions, and types for sequential (de)compression.
3343
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003344- New pdb command 'pp' which is like 'p' except that it pretty-prints
Barry Warsaw5d8d6182002-11-05 22:41:33 +00003345 the value of its expression argument.
3346
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00003347- Now bdist_rpm distutils command understands a verify_script option in
3348 the config file, including the contents of the referred filename in
3349 the "%verifyscript" section of the rpm spec file.
3350
Gustavo Niemeyer1456fde2002-11-25 17:25:04 +00003351- Fixed bug #495695: webbrowser module would run graphic browsers in a
3352 unix environment even if DISPLAY was not set. Also, support for
3353 skipstone browser was included.
3354
Gustavo Niemeyerd5ae01a2002-12-16 13:11:57 +00003355- Fixed bug #636769: rexec would run unallowed code if subclasses of
3356 strings were used as parameters for certain functions.
3357
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003358Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003359-----------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003360
Martin v. Löwis0d1fdea2002-11-22 08:36:54 +00003361- pygettext.py now supports globbing on Windows, and accepts module
3362 names in addition to accepting file names.
3363
Guido van Rossum923e4ef2002-09-17 20:58:59 +00003364- The SGI demos (Demo/sgi) have been removed. Nobody thought they
3365 were interesting any more. (The SGI library modules and extensions
3366 are still there; it is believed that at least some of these are
3367 still used and useful.)
3368
Fred Drake40813b12002-08-05 15:24:19 +00003369- IDLE supports the new encoding declarations (PEP 263); it can also
3370 deal with legacy 8-bit files if they use the locale's encoding. It
3371 allows non-ASCII strings in the interactive shell and executes them
3372 in the locale's encoding.
Martin v. Löwis98ce7b72002-08-05 15:11:26 +00003373
Marc-André Lemburg46260092002-04-04 16:17:11 +00003374- freeze.py now produces binaries which can import shared modules,
3375 unlike before when this failed due to missing symbol exports in
3376 the generated binary.
3377
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003378Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003379-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003380
Martin v. Löwisdc461752002-11-06 21:59:33 +00003381- On Unix, IDLE is now installed automatically.
3382
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00003383- The fpectl module is not built by default; it's dangerous or useless
3384 except in the hands of experts.
3385
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003386- The public Python C API will generally be declared using PyAPI_FUNC
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00003387 and PyAPI_DATA macros, while Python extension module init functions
3388 will be declared with PyMODINIT_FUNC. DL_EXPORT/DL_IMPORT macros
3389 are deprecated.
Neal Norwitz1389f3e2002-07-22 13:21:10 +00003390
Tim Petersc6a3ff62002-07-08 22:11:52 +00003391- A bug was fixed that could cause COUNT_ALLOCS builds to segfault, or
3392 get into infinite loops, when a new-style class got garbage-collected.
3393 Unfortunately, to avoid this, the way COUNT_ALLOCS works requires
3394 that new-style classes be immortal in COUNT_ALLOCS builds. Note that
3395 COUNT_ALLOCS is not enabled by default, in either release or debug
3396 builds, and that new-style classes are immortal only in COUNT_ALLOCS
3397 builds.
3398
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00003399- Compiling out the cyclic garbage collector is no longer an option.
3400 The old symbol WITH_CYCLE_GC is now ignored, and Python.h arranges
3401 that it's always defined (for the benefit of any extension modules
3402 that may be conditionalizing on it). A bonus is that any extension
3403 type participating in cyclic gc can choose to participate in the
3404 Py_TRASHCAN mechanism now too; in the absence of cyclic gc, this used
3405 to require editing the core to teach the trashcan mechanism about the
3406 new type.
3407
Martin v. Löwis0cec0ff2002-07-28 16:33:45 +00003408- According to Annex F of the current C standard,
Tim Peters1de41bf2002-07-03 03:31:20 +00003409
3410 The Standard C macro HUGE_VAL and its float and long double analogs,
3411 HUGE_VALF and HUGE_VALL, expand to expressions whose values are
3412 positive infinities.
3413
3414 Python only uses the double HUGE_VAL, and only to #define its own symbol
3415 Py_HUGE_VAL. Some platforms have incorrect definitions for HUGE_VAL.
3416 pyport.h used to try to worm around that, but the workarounds triggered
3417 other bugs on other platforms, so we gave up. If your platform defines
3418 HUGE_VAL incorrectly, you'll need to #define Py_HUGE_VAL to something
3419 that works on your platform. The only instance of this I'm sure about
3420 is on an unknown subset of Cray systems, described here:
3421
3422 http://www.cray.com/swpubs/manuals/SN-2194_2.0/html-SN-2194_2.0/x3138.htm
3423
3424 Presumably 2.3a1 breaks such systems. If anyone uses such a system, help!
3425
Martin v. Löwisa3fb4f72002-06-09 13:33:54 +00003426- The configure option --without-doc-strings can be used to remove the
3427 doc strings from the builtin functions and modules; this reduces the
3428 size of the executable.
3429
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00003430- The universal newlines option (PEP 278) is on by default. On Unix
3431 it can be disabled by passing --without-universal-newlines to the
3432 configure script. On other platforms, remove
3433 WITH_UNIVERSAL_NEWLINES from pyconfig.h.
Tim Peters639295f2002-04-21 07:30:30 +00003434
Martin v. Löwis1142de32002-03-29 16:28:31 +00003435- On Unix, a shared libpython2.3.so can be created with --enable-shared.
3436
Tim Peters8deda702002-03-30 10:06:07 +00003437- All uses of the CACHE_HASH, INTERN_STRINGS, and DONT_SHARE_SHORT_STRINGS
3438 preprocessor symbols were eliminated. The internal decisions they
3439 controlled stopped being experimental long ago.
Tim Peters1f7df352002-03-29 03:29:08 +00003440
Fred Drake7d28b732002-05-02 21:17:00 +00003441- The tools used to build the documentation now work under Cygwin as
3442 well as Unix.
3443
Skip Montanaro57454e52002-06-14 20:30:31 +00003444- The bsddb and dbm module builds have been changed to try and avoid version
3445 skew problems and disable linkage with Berkeley DB 1.85 unless the
3446 installer knows what s/he's doing. See the section on building these
3447 modules in the README file for details.
3448
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003449C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003450-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003451
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00003452- PyNumber_Check() now returns true for string and unicode objects.
3453 This is a result of these types having a partially defined
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00003454 tp_as_number slot. (This is not a feature, but an indication that
Walter Dörwalda1a61f92002-11-19 21:20:25 +00003455 PyNumber_Check() is not very useful to determine numeric behavior.
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00003456 It may be deprecated.)
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00003457
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00003458- The string object's layout has changed: the pointer member
3459 ob_sinterned has been replaced by an int member ob_sstate. On some
3460 platforms (e.g. most 64-bit systems) this may change the offset of
3461 the ob_sval member, so as a precaution the API_VERSION has been
3462 incremented. The apparently unused feature of "indirect interned
3463 strings", supported by the ob_sinterned member, is gone. Interned
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003464 strings are now usually mortal; there is a new API,
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00003465 PyString_InternImmortal() that creates immortal interned strings.
3466 (The ob_sstate member can only take three values; however, while
3467 making it a char saves a few bytes per string object on average, in
3468 it also slowed things down a bit because ob_sval was no longer
3469 aligned.)
3470
Guido van Rossumfdb86482002-08-14 21:20:32 +00003471- The Py_InitModule*() functions now accept NULL for the 'methods'
3472 argument. Modules without global functions are becoming more common
3473 now that factories can be types rather than functions.
3474
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00003475- New C API PyUnicode_FromOrdinal() which exposes unichr() at C
3476 level.
3477
Thomas Heller085358a2002-07-29 14:27:41 +00003478- New functions PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErr() and
3479 PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErrWithFilename(). Similar to
3480 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErrWithFilename() and
3481 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErr(), but they allow to specify
3482 the exception type to raise. Available on Windows.
3483
Tim Peters7c321a82002-07-09 02:57:01 +00003484- Py_FatalError() is now declared as taking a const char* argument. It
3485 was previously declared without const. This should not affect working
3486 code.
3487
Martin v. Löwis01f94bd2002-05-08 08:44:21 +00003488- Added new macro PySequence_ITEM(o, i) that directly calls
3489 sq_item without rechecking that o is a sequence and without
3490 adjusting for negative indices.
3491
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00003492- PyRange_New() now raises ValueError if the fourth argument is not 1.
3493 This is part of the removal of deprecated features of the xrange
3494 object.
3495
Guido van Rossum517c7d42002-04-26 02:49:14 +00003496- PyNumber_Coerce() and PyNumber_CoerceEx() now also invoke the type's
3497 coercion if both arguments have the same type but this type has the
3498 CHECKTYPES flag set. This is to better support proxies.
3499
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003500- The type of tp_free has been changed from "``void (*)(PyObject *)``" to
3501 "``void (*)(void *)``".
Neil Schemenauer9344b142002-04-12 23:00:08 +00003502
3503- PyObject_Del, PyObject_GC_Del are now functions instead of macros.
3504
Guido van Rossum0986d822002-04-08 01:38:42 +00003505- A type can now inherit its metatype from its base type. Previously,
3506 when PyType_Ready() was called, if ob_type was found to be NULL, it
3507 was always set to &PyType_Type; now it is set to base->ob_type,
3508 where base is tp_base, defaulting to &PyObject_Type.
3509
3510- PyType_Ready() accidentally did not inherit tp_is_gc; now it does.
3511
Neil Schemenauerc9abc1d2002-05-08 14:14:41 +00003512- The PyCore_* family of APIs have been removed.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00003513
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003514- The "u#" parser marker will now pass through Unicode objects as-is
Marc-André Lemburg3e3eacb2002-01-09 16:21:27 +00003515 without going through the buffer API.
3516
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003517- The enumerators of cmp_op have been renamed to use the prefix ``PyCmp_``.
Martin v. Löwis7198a522002-01-01 19:59:11 +00003518
Tim Peters10a3bb52001-12-25 19:07:38 +00003519- An old #define of ANY as void has been removed from pyport.h. This
3520 hasn't been used since Python's pre-ANSI days, and the #define has
3521 been marked as obsolete since then. SF bug 495548 says it created
3522 conflicts with other packages, so keeping it around wasn't harmless.
3523
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003524- Because Python's magic number scheme broke on January 1st, we decided
3525 to stop Python development. Thanks for all the fish!
3526
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00003527- Some of us don't like fish, so we changed Python's magic number
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00003528 scheme to a new one. See Python/import.c for details.
3529
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003530New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003531-------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003532
Martin v. Löwis79acb9e2002-12-06 12:48:53 +00003533- OpenVMS is now supported.
3534
Martin v. Löwisf90ae202002-06-11 06:22:31 +00003535- AtheOS is now supported.
3536
Andrew MacIntyre161ad0e2002-08-04 07:25:58 +00003537- the EMX runtime environment on OS/2 is now supported.
3538
Martin v. Löwisa6e97582002-01-01 18:41:33 +00003539- GNU/Hurd is now supported.
3540
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003541Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003542-----
3543
Fred Drake4dd0f7e2002-11-26 21:44:56 +00003544- The regrtest.py script's -u option now provides a way to say "allow
3545 all resources except this one." For example, to allow everything
3546 except bsddb, give the option '-uall,-bsddb'.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003547
3548Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003549-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003550
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00003551- The Windows distribution now ships with version 4.0.14 of the
3552 Sleepycat Berkeley database library. This should be a huge
3553 improvement over the previous Berkeley DB 1.85, which had many
3554 bugs.
3555 XXX What are the licensing issues here?
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003556 XXX If a user has a database created with a previous version of
Tim Peters84c7a3f2002-11-23 18:48:06 +00003557 XXX Python, what must they do to convert it?
3558 XXX I'm still not sure how to link this thing (see PCbuild/readme.txt).
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00003559 XXX The version # is likely to change before 2.3a1.
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00003560
3561- The Windows distribution now ships with a Secure Sockets Library (SLL)
Mark Hammondc3de0082002-12-03 06:16:08 +00003562 module (_ssl.pyd)
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00003563
Tim Peters857fb4c2002-11-14 23:31:58 +00003564- The Windows distribution now ships with Tcl/Tk version 8.4.1 (it
3565 previously shipped with Tcl/Tk 8.3.2).
3566
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00003567- When Python is built under a Microsoft compiler, sys.version now
3568 includes the compiler version number (_MSC_VER). For example, under
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003569 MSVC 6, sys.version contains the substring "MSC v.1200 ". 1200 is
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00003570 the value of _MSC_VER under MSVC 6.
3571
Tim Peters08e72952002-04-16 20:48:01 +00003572- Sometimes the uninstall executable (UNWISE.EXE) vanishes. One cause
3573 of that has been fixed in the installer (disabled Wise's "delete in-
3574 use files" uninstall option).
3575
Guido van Rossum181e41a2002-04-06 00:23:25 +00003576- Fixed a bug in urllib's proxy handling in Windows. [SF bug #503031]
3577
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00003578- The installer now installs Start menu shortcuts under (the local
3579 equivalent of) "All Users" when doing an Admin install.
3580
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00003581- file.truncate([newsize]) now works on Windows for all newsize values.
3582 It used to fail if newsize didn't fit in 32 bits, reflecting a
3583 limitation of MS _chsize (which is no longer used).
3584
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00003585- os.waitpid() is now implemented for Windows, and can be used to block
3586 until a specified process exits. This is similar to, but not exactly
3587 the same as, os.waitpid() on POSIX systems. If you're waiting for
3588 a specific process whose pid was obtained from one of the spawn()
3589 functions, the same Python os.waitpid() code works across platforms.
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00003590 See the docs for details. The docs were changed to clarify that
3591 spawn functions return, and waitpid requires, a process handle on
3592 Windows (not the same thing as a Windows process id).
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00003593
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00003594- New tempfile.TemporaryFile implementation for Windows: this doesn't
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003595 need a TemporaryFileWrapper wrapper anymore, and should be immune
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00003596 to a nasty problem: before 2.3, if you got a temp file on Windows, it
3597 got wrapped in an object whose close() method first closed the
3598 underlying file, then deleted the file. This usually worked fine.
3599 However, the spawn family of functions on Windows create (at a low C
3600 level) the same set of open files in the spawned process Q as were
3601 open in the spawning process P. If a temp file f was among them, then
3602 doing f.close() in P first closed P's C-level file handle on f, but Q's
3603 C-level file handle on f remained open, so the attempt in P to delete f
3604 blew up with a "Permission denied" error (Windows doesn't allow
3605 deleting open files). This was surprising, subtle, and difficult to
3606 work around.
3607
3608- The os module now exports all the symbolic constants usable with the
3609 low-level os.open() on Windows: the new constants in 2.3 are
3610 O_NOINHERIT, O_SHORT_LIVED, O_TEMPORARY, O_RANDOM and O_SEQUENTIAL.
3611 The others were also available in 2.2: O_APPEND, O_BINARY, O_CREAT,
3612 O_EXCL, O_RDONLY, O_RDWR, O_TEXT, O_TRUNC and O_WRONLY. Contrary
3613 to Microsoft docs, O_SHORT_LIVED does not seem to imply O_TEMPORARY
3614 (so specify both if you want both; note that neither is useful unless
3615 specified with O_CREAT too).
3616
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003617Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003618----
3619
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003620- Mac/Relnotes is gone, the release notes are now here.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003621
Just van Rossume1ebd802003-02-10 10:06:18 +00003622- Python (the OSX-only, unix-based version, not the OS9-compatible CFM
3623 version) now fully supports unicode strings as arguments to various file
3624 system calls, eg. open(), file(), os.stat() and os.listdir().
3625
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003626- The current naming convention for Python on the Macintosh is that MacPython
3627 refers to the unix-based OSX-only version, and MacPython-OS9 refers to the
3628 CFM-based version that runs on both OS9 and OSX.
3629
3630- All MacPython-OS9 functionality is now available in an OSX unix build,
3631 including the Carbon modules, the IDE, OSA support, etc. A lot of this
3632 will only work correctly in a framework build, though, because you cannot
3633 talk to the window manager unless your application is run from a .app
3634 bundle. There is a command line tool "pythonw" that runs your script
3635 with an interpreter living in such a .app bundle, this interpreter should
3636 be used to run any Python script using the window manager (including
3637 Tkinter or wxPython scripts).
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00003638
Jack Jansen8bb80db2002-12-30 22:42:43 +00003639- Most of Mac/Lib has moved to Lib/plat-mac, which is again used both in
3640 MacPython-OSX and MacPython-OS9. The only modules remaining in Mac/Lib
3641 are specifically for MacPython-OS9 (CFM support, preference resources, etc).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003642
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003643- A new utility PythonLauncher will start a Python interpreter when a .py or
3644 .pyw script is double-clicked in the Finder. By default .py scripts are
3645 run with a normal Python interpreter in a Terminal window and .pyw
3646 files are run with a window-aware pythonw interpreter without a Terminal
3647 window, but all this can be customized.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003648
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003649- MacPython-OS9 is now Carbon-only, so it runs on Mac OS 9 or Mac OS X and
3650 possibly on Mac OS 8.6 with the right CarbonLib installed, but not on earlier
3651 releases.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003652
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003653- Many tools such as BuildApplet.py and gensuitemodule.py now support a command
3654 line interface too.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003655
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003656- All the Carbon classes are now PEP253 compliant, meaning that you can
3657 subclass them from Python. Most of the attributes have gone, you should
3658 now use the accessor function call API, which is also what Apple's
3659 documentation uses. Some attributes such as grafport.visRgn are still
3660 available for convenience.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003661
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003662- New Carbon modules File (implementing the APIs in Files.h and Aliases.h)
3663 and Folder (APIs from Folders.h). The old macfs builtin module is
3664 gone, and replaced by a Python wrapper around the new modules.
3665
3666- Pathname handling should now be fully consistent: MacPython-OSX always uses
3667 unix pathnames and MacPython-OS9 always uses colon-separated Mac pathnames
3668 (also when running on Mac OS X).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003669
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003670- New Carbon modules Help and AH give access to the Carbon Help Manager.
3671 There are hooks in the IDE to allow accessing the Python documentation
3672 (and Apple's Carbon and Cocoa documentation) through the Help Viewer.
3673 See Mac/OSX/README for converting the Python documentation to a
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003674 Help Viewer compatible form and installing it.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003675
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003676- OSA support has been redesigned and the generated Python classes now
3677 mirror the inheritance defined by the underlying OSA classes.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003678
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003679- MacPython no longer maps both \r and \n to \n on input for any text file.
3680 This feature has been replaced by universal newline support (PEP278).
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00003681
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00003682- The default encoding for Python sourcefiles in MacPython-OS9 is no longer
Guido van Rossum16c85172003-02-20 01:52:48 +00003683 mac-roman (or whatever your local Mac encoding was) but "ascii", like on
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00003684 other platforms. If you really need sourcefiles with Mac characters in them
3685 you can change this in site.py.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003686
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003687
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003688What's New in Python 2.2 final?
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003689===============================
3690
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003691*Release date: 21-Dec-2001*
3692
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003693Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003694--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003695
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003696- pickle.py, cPickle: allow pickling instances of new-style classes
3697 with a custom metaclass.
3698
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003699Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003700-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003701
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003702- weakref proxy object: when comparing, unwrap both arguments if both
3703 are proxies.
3704
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003705Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003706-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003707
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003708- binascii.b2a_base64(): fix a potential buffer overrun when encoding
3709 very short strings.
3710
3711- cPickle: the obscure "fast" mode was suspected of causing stack
3712 overflows on the Mac. Hopefully fixed this by setting the recursion
3713 limit much smaller. If the limit is too low (it only affects
3714 performance), you can change it by defining PY_CPICKLE_FAST_LIMIT
3715 when compiling cPickle.c (or in pyconfig.h).
3716
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003717Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003718-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003719
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003720- dumbdbm.py: fixed a dumb old bug (the file didn't get synched at
3721 close or delete time).
3722
3723- rfc822.py: fixed a bug where the address '<>' was converted to None
3724 instead of an empty string (also fixes the email.Utils module).
3725
3726- xmlrpclib.py: version 1.0.0; uses precision for doubles.
3727
3728- test suite: the pickle and cPickle tests were not executing any code
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003729 when run from the standard regression test.
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003730
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003731Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003732-----------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003733
3734Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003735-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003736
3737C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003738-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003739
3740New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003741-------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003742
3743Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003744-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003745
3746Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003747-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003748
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003749- distutils package: fixed broken Windows installers (bdist_wininst).
3750
3751- tempfile.py: prevent mysterious warnings when TemporaryFileWrapper
3752 instances are deleted at process exit time.
3753
3754- socket.py: prevent mysterious warnings when socket instances are
3755 deleted at process exit time.
3756
3757- posixmodule.c: fix a Windows crash with stat() of a filename ending
3758 in backslash.
3759
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003760Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003761----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003762
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003763- The Carbon toolbox modules have been upgraded to Universal Headers
3764 3.4, and experimental CoreGraphics and CarbonEvents modules have
3765 been added. All only for framework-enabled MacOSX.
3766
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003767
Tim Peters6272dfd2001-12-13 19:34:00 +00003768What's New in Python 2.2c1?
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003769===========================
3770
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003771*Release date: 14-Dec-2001*
3772
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003773Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003774--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003775
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003776- Guido's tutorial introduction to the new type/class features has
3777 been extensively updated. See
3778
3779 http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html
3780
3781 That remains the primary documentation in this area.
3782
Guido van Rossum33bab012001-12-05 22:45:48 +00003783- Fixed a leak: instance variables declared with __slots__ were never
3784 deleted!
3785
Guido van Rossum4b800852001-12-03 00:54:52 +00003786- The "delete attribute" method of descriptor objects is called
3787 __delete__, not __del__. In previous releases, it was mistakenly
3788 called __del__, which created an unfortunate overloading condition
3789 with finalizers. (The "get attribute" and "set attribute" methods
3790 are still called __get__ and __set__, respectively.)
3791
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00003792- Some subtle issues with the super built-in were fixed:
3793
3794 (a) When super itself is subclassed, its __get__ method would still
3795 return an instance of the base class (i.e., of super).
3796
3797 (b) super(C, C()).__class__ would return C rather than super. This
3798 is confusing. To fix this, I decided to change the semantics of
3799 super so that it only applies to code attributes, not to data
3800 attributes. After all, overriding data attributes is not
3801 supported anyway.
3802
3803 (c) The __get__ method didn't check whether the argument was an
3804 instance of the type used in creation of the super instance.
3805
Guido van Rossumcd7b7d62001-12-04 21:02:07 +00003806- Previously, hash() of an instance of a subclass of a mutable type
3807 (list or dictionary) would return some value, rather than raising
3808 TypeError. This has been fixed. Also, directly calling
3809 dict.__hash__ and list.__hash__ now raises the same TypeError
3810 (previously, these were the same as object.__hash__).
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00003811
Guido van Rossumd331cb52001-12-05 19:46:42 +00003812- New-style objects now support deleting their __dict__. This is for
3813 all intents and purposes equivalent to assigning a brand new empty
3814 dictionary, but saves space if the object is not used further.
3815
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003816Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003817-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003818
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00003819- -Qnew now works as documented in PEP 238: when -Qnew is passed on
3820 the command line, all occurrences of "/" use true division instead
3821 of classic division. See the PEP for details. Note that "all"
3822 means all instances in library and 3rd-party modules, as well as in
3823 your own code. As the PEP says, -Qnew is intended for use only in
3824 educational environments with control over the libraries in use.
Tim Petersbf72fe22001-12-11 21:43:14 +00003825 Note that test_coercion.py in the standard Python test suite fails
3826 under -Qnew; this is expected, and won't be repaired until true
3827 division becomes the default (in the meantime, test_coercion is
3828 testing the current rules).
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00003829
Fred Drake6c01e252001-12-14 17:08:12 +00003830- complex() now only allows the first argument to be a string
3831 argument, and raises TypeError if either the second arg is a string
3832 or if the second arg is specified when the first is a string.
3833
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003834Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003835-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003836
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00003837- gc.get_referents was renamed to gc.get_referrers.
3838
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003839Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003840-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003841
Tim Peters25059d32001-12-07 20:35:43 +00003842- Functions in the os.spawn() family now release the global interpreter
3843 lock around calling the platform spawn. They should always have done
3844 this, but did not before 2.2c1. Multithreaded programs calling
3845 an os.spawn function with P_WAIT will no longer block all Python threads
3846 until the spawned program completes. It's possible that some programs
3847 relies on blocking, although more likely by accident than by design.
3848
Martin v. Löwis3a89b2b2001-11-25 14:35:58 +00003849- webbrowser defaults to netscape.exe on OS/2 now.
3850
Martin v. Löwis652e1912001-11-25 14:50:56 +00003851- Tix.ResizeHandle exposes detach_widget, hide, and show.
3852
Martin v. Löwis714d2e22001-12-02 12:26:03 +00003853- The charset alias windows_1252 has been added.
3854
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003855- types.StringTypes is a tuple containing the defined string types;
3856 usually this will be (str, unicode), but if Python was compiled
3857 without Unicode support it will be just (str,).
3858
3859- The pulldom and minidom modules were synchronized to PyXML.
3860
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003861Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003862-----------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003863
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003864- A new script called Tools/scripts/google.py was added, which fires
3865 off a search on Google.
3866
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003867Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003868-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003869
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003870- Note that release builds of Python should arrange to define the
3871 preprocessor symbol NDEBUG on the command line (or equivalent).
3872 In the 2.2 pre-release series we tried to define this by magic in
3873 Python.h instead, but it proved to cause problems for extension
3874 authors. The Unix, Windows and Mac builds now all define NDEBUG in
3875 release builds via cmdline (or equivalent) instead. Ports to
3876 other platforms should do likewise.
3877
Jack Jansen1999ef42001-12-06 21:47:20 +00003878- It is no longer necessary to use --with-suffix when building on a
3879 case-insensitive file system (such as Mac OS X HFS+). In the build
3880 directory an extension is used, but not in the installed python.
3881
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003882C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003883-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003884
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00003885- New function PyDict_MergeFromSeq2() exposes the builtin dict
3886 constructor's logic for updating a dictionary from an iterable object
3887 producing key-value pairs.
3888
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00003889- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() requires that the number of entries in
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00003890 the keyword list equal the number of argument specifiers. This
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00003891 wasn't checked correctly, and PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords could even
3892 dump core in some bad cases. This has been repaired. As a result,
3893 PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords may raise RuntimeError in bad cases that
3894 previously went unchallenged.
3895
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003896New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003897-------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003898
3899Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003900-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003901
3902Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003903-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003904
3905Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003906----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003907
Jack Jansenffa260f2001-12-06 21:14:00 +00003908- In unix-Python on Mac OS X (and darwin) sys.platform is now "darwin",
3909 without any trailing digits.
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003910
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003911- Changed logic for finding python home in Mac OS X framework Pythons.
3912 Now sys.executable points to the executable again, in stead of to
3913 the shared library. The latter is used only for locating the python
3914 home.
3915
3916
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003917What's New in Python 2.2b2?
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003918===========================
3919
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003920*Release date: 16-Nov-2001*
3921
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003922Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003923--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003924
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00003925- Multiple inheritance mixing new-style and classic classes in the
3926 list of base classes is now allowed, so this works now:
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00003927
3928 class Classic: pass
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00003929 class Mixed(Classic, object): pass
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00003930
3931 The MRO (method resolution order) for each base class is respected
3932 according to its kind, but the MRO for the derived class is computed
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003933 using new-style MRO rules if any base class is a new-style class.
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00003934 This needs to be documented.
3935
Tim Petersa427a2b2001-10-29 22:25:45 +00003936- The new builtin dictionary() constructor, and dictionary type, have
3937 been renamed to dict. This reflects a decade of common usage.
3938
Guido van Rossum3fc08d22001-11-15 20:33:10 +00003939- dict() now accepts an iterable object producing 2-sequences. For
3940 example, dict(d.items()) == d for any dictionary d. The argument,
3941 and the elements of the argument, can be any iterable objects.
3942
Guido van Rossum7ad2d1e2001-10-29 22:11:00 +00003943- New-style classes can now have a __del__ method, which is called
3944 when the instance is deleted (just like for classic classes).
3945
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003946- Assignment to object.__dict__ is now possible, for objects that are
3947 instances of new-style classes that have a __dict__ (unless the base
3948 class forbids it).
3949
Guido van Rossumc8e56452001-10-22 00:43:43 +00003950- Methods of built-in types now properly check for keyword arguments
3951 (formerly these were silently ignored). The only built-in methods
3952 that take keyword arguments are __call__, __init__ and __new__.
3953
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00003954- The socket function has been converted to a type; see below.
3955
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003956Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003957-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003958
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00003959- Assignment to __debug__ raises SyntaxError at compile-time. This
3960 was promised when 2.1c1 was released as "What's New in Python 2.1c1"
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003961 (see below) says.
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00003962
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003963- Clarified the error messages for unsupported operands to an operator
3964 (like 1 + '').
3965
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003966Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003967-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003968
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00003969- mmap has a new keyword argument, "access", allowing a uniform way for
3970 both Windows and Unix users to create read-only, write-through and
3971 copy-on-write memory mappings. This was previously possible only on
3972 Unix. A new keyword argument was required to support this in a
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003973 uniform way because the mmap() signatures had diverged across
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00003974 platforms. Thanks to Jay T Miller for repairing this!
3975
Tim Peters169ded02001-11-03 19:57:21 +00003976- By default, the gc.garbage list now contains only those instances in
3977 unreachable cycles that have __del__ methods; in 2.1 it contained all
3978 instances in unreachable cycles. "Instances" here has been generalized
3979 to include instances of both new-style and old-style classes.
3980
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003981- The socket module defines a new method for socket objects,
3982 sendall(). This is like send() but may make multiple calls to
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00003983 send() until all data has been sent. Also, the socket function has
3984 been converted to a subclassable type, like list and tuple (etc.)
3985 before it; socket and SocketType are now the same thing.
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003986
3987- Various bugfixes to the curses module. There is now a test suite
3988 for the curses module (you have to run it manually).
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00003989
Guido van Rossum692adf12001-10-30 03:03:03 +00003990- binascii.b2a_base64 no longer places an arbitrary restriction of 57
3991 bytes on its input.
3992
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003993Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003994-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003995
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00003996- tkFileDialog exposes a Directory class and askdirectory
Martin v. Löwis25ee87c2001-11-07 22:38:08 +00003997 convenience function.
3998
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00003999- Symbolic group names in regular expressions must be unique. For
4000 example, the regexp r'(?P<abc>)(?P<abc>)' is not allowed, because a
4001 single name can't mean both "group 1" and "group 2" simultaneously.
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004002 Python 2.2 detects this error at regexp compilation time;
4003 previously, the error went undetected, and results were
4004 unpredictable. Also in sre, the pattern.split(), pattern.sub(), and
4005 pattern.subn() methods have been rewritten in C. Also, an
4006 experimental function/method finditer() has been added, which works
4007 like findall() but returns an iterator.
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00004008
Martin v. Löwisb7b32602001-11-02 23:48:20 +00004009- Tix exposes more commands through the classes DirSelectBox,
4010 DirSelectDialog, ListNoteBook, Meter, CheckList, and the
4011 methods tix_addbitmapdir, tix_cget, tix_configure, tix_filedialog,
4012 tix_getbitmap, tix_getimage, tix_option_get, and tix_resetoptions.
4013
Tim Peters98791af2001-10-23 01:59:54 +00004014- Traceback objects are now scanned by cyclic garbage collection, so
4015 cycles created by casual use of sys.exc_info() no longer cause
4016 permanent memory leaks (provided garbage collection is enabled).
4017
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00004018- os.extsep -- a new variable needed by the RISCOS support. It is the
4019 separator used by extensions, and is '.' on all platforms except
4020 RISCOS, where it is '/'. There is no need to use this variable
4021 unless you have a masochistic desire to port your code to RISCOS.
4022
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004023- mimetypes.py has optional support for non-standard, but commonly
4024 found types. guess_type() and guess_extension() now accept an
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004025 optional 'strict' flag, defaulting to true, which controls whether
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004026 recognize non-standard types or not. A few non-standard types we
4027 know about have been added. Also, when run as a script, there are
4028 new -l and -e options.
4029
4030- statcache is now deprecated.
4031
4032- email.Utils.formatdate() now produces the preferred RFC 2822 style
4033 dates with numeric timezones (it used to produce obsolete dates
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004034 hard coded to "GMT" timezone). An optional 'localtime' flag is
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004035 added to produce dates in the local timezone, with daylight savings
4036 time properly taken into account.
4037
4038- In pickle and cPickle, instead of masking errors in load() by
4039 transforming them into SystemError, we let the original exception
4040 propagate out. Also, implement support for __safe_for_unpickling__
4041 in pickle, as it already was supported in cPickle.
4042
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004043Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004044-----------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004045
4046Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004047-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004048
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004049- The dbm module is built using libdb1 if available. The bsddb module
4050 is built with libdb3 if available.
4051
4052- Misc/Makefile.pre.in has been removed by BDFL pronouncement.
4053
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004054C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004055-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004056
Tim Peters1fc240e2001-10-26 05:06:50 +00004057- New function PySequence_Fast_GET_SIZE() returns the size of a non-
4058 NULL result from PySequence_Fast(), more quickly than calling
4059 PySequence_Size().
4060
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004061- New argument unpacking function PyArg_UnpackTuple() added.
4062
4063- New functions PyObject_CallFunctionObjArgs() and
4064 PyObject_CallMethodObjArgs() have been added to make it more
4065 convenient and efficient to call functions and methods from C.
4066
4067- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() no longer masks errors, so it's
4068 possible that this will propagate errors it didn't before.
4069
4070- New function PyObject_CheckReadBuffer(), which returns true if its
4071 argument supports the single-segment readable buffer interface.
4072
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004073New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004074-------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004075
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004076- We've finally confirmed that this release builds on HP-UX 11.00,
4077 *with* threads, and passes the test suite.
4078
Tim Peters7a33d8b2001-11-05 02:51:07 +00004079- Thanks to a series of patches from Michael Muller, Python may build
4080 again under OS/2 Visual Age C++.
4081
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00004082- Updated RISCOS port by Dietmar Schwertberger.
4083
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004084Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004085-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004086
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00004087- Added a test script for the curses module. It isn't run automatically;
4088 regrtest.py must be run with '-u curses' to enable it.
4089
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004090Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004091-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004092
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004093Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004094----
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004095
4096- PythonScript has been moved to unsupported and is slated to be
4097 removed completely in the next release.
4098
4099- It should now be possible to build applets that work on both OS9 and
4100 OSX.
4101
4102- The core is now linked with CoreServices not Carbon; as a side
4103 result, default 8bit encoding on OSX is now ASCII.
4104
4105- Python should now build on OSX 10.1.1
4106
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004107
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004108What's New in Python 2.2b1?
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004109===========================
4110
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004111*Release date: 19-Oct-2001*
4112
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004113Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004114--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004115
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004116- New-style classes are now always dynamic (except for built-in and
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004117 extension types). There is no longer a performance penalty, and I
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004118 no longer see another reason to keep this baggage around. One relic
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004119 remains: the __dict__ of a new-style class is a read-only proxy; you
4120 must set the class's attribute to modify it. As a consequence, the
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004121 __defined__ attribute of new-style types no longer exists, for lack
4122 of need: there is once again only one __dict__ (although in the
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004123 future a __cache__ may be resurrected with a similar function, if I
4124 can prove that it actually speeds things up).
Guido van Rossum50fda3b2001-10-04 19:46:06 +00004125
Tim Peters1c9ca872001-10-04 06:43:12 +00004126- C.__doc__ now works as expected for new-style classes (in 2.2a4 it
4127 always returned None, even when there was a class docstring).
4128
4129- doctest now finds and runs docstrings attached to new-style classes,
4130 class methods, static methods, and properties.
4131
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004132Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004133-----------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004134
Guido van Rossuma8bcf802001-10-15 15:53:58 +00004135- A very subtle syntactical pitfall in list comprehensions was fixed.
4136 For example: [a+b for a in 'abc', for b in 'def']. The comma in
4137 this example is a mistake. Previously, this would silently let 'a'
4138 iterate over the singleton tuple ('abc',), yielding ['abcd', 'abce',
4139 'abcf'] rather than the intended ['ad', 'ae', 'af', 'bd', 'be',
4140 'bf', 'cd', 'ce', 'cf']. Now, this is flagged as a syntax error.
4141 Note that [a for a in <singleton>] is a convoluted way to say
4142 [<singleton>] anyway, so it's not like any expressiveness is lost.
4143
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004144- getattr(obj, name, default) now only catches AttributeError, as
4145 documented, rather than returning the default value for all
4146 exceptions (which could mask bugs in a __getattr__ hook, for
4147 example).
4148
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00004149- Weak reference objects are now part of the core and offer a C API.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00004150 A bug which could allow a core dump when binary operations involved
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00004151 proxy reference has been fixed. weakref.ReferenceError is now a
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004152 built-in exception.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00004153
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00004154- unicode(obj) now behaves more like str(obj), accepting arbitrary
4155 objects, and calling a __unicode__ method if it exists.
4156 unicode(obj, encoding) and unicode(obj, encoding, errors) still
Marc-André Lemburgb5507ec2001-10-19 12:02:29 +00004157 require an 8-bit string or character buffer argument.
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00004158
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004159- isinstance() now allows any object as the first argument and a
4160 class, a type or something with a __bases__ tuple attribute for the
4161 second argument. The second argument may also be a tuple of a
4162 class, type, or something with __bases__, in which case isinstance()
4163 will return true if the first argument is an instance of any of the
4164 things contained in the second argument tuple. E.g.
4165
4166 isinstance(x, (A, B))
4167
4168 returns true if x is an instance of A or B.
4169
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004170Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004171-----------------
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004172
4173- thread.start_new_thread() now returns the thread ID (previously None).
4174
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00004175- binascii has now two quopri support functions, a2b_qp and b2a_qp.
4176
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00004177- readline now supports setting the startup_hook and the
4178 pre_event_hook, and adds the add_history() function.
Martin v. Löwis0daad592001-09-30 21:09:59 +00004179
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00004180- os and posix supports chroot(), setgroups() and unsetenv() where
4181 available. The stat(), fstat(), statvfs() and fstatvfs() functions
4182 now return "pseudo-sequences" -- the various fields can now be
4183 accessed as attributes (e.g. os.stat("/").st_mtime) but for
4184 backwards compatibility they also behave as a fixed-length sequence.
4185 Some platform-specific fields (e.g. st_rdev) are only accessible as
Guido van Rossum98bf58f2001-10-18 20:34:25 +00004186 attributes.
4187
4188- time: localtime(), gmtime() and strptime() now return a
4189 pseudo-sequence similar to the os.stat() return value, with
4190 attributes like tm_year etc.
Martin v. Löwis16628c92001-10-04 22:46:41 +00004191
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004192- Decompression objects in the zlib module now accept an optional
4193 second parameter to decompress() that specifies the maximum amount
4194 of memory to use for the uncompressed data.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004195
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00004196- optional SSL support in the socket module now exports OpenSSL
4197 functions RAND_add(), RAND_egd(), and RAND_status(). These calls
4198 are useful on platforms like Solaris where OpenSSL does not
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004199 automatically seed its PRNG. Also, the keyfile and certfile
4200 arguments to socket.ssl() are now optional.
4201
4202- posixmodule (and by extension, the os module on POSIX platforms) now
4203 exports O_LARGEFILE, O_DIRECT, O_DIRECTORY, and O_NOFOLLOW.
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00004204
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004205Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004206-------
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00004207
Tim Peters7402f792001-10-02 03:53:41 +00004208- doctest now excludes functions and classes not defined by the module
4209 being tested, thanks to Tim Hochberg.
4210
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00004211- HotShot, a new profiler implemented using a C-based callback, has
4212 been added. This substantially reduces the overhead of profiling,
4213 but it is still quite preliminary. Support modules and
4214 documentation will be added in upcoming releases (before 2.2 final).
4215
Guido van Rossumc4b09b42001-10-04 10:19:00 +00004216- profile now produces correct output in situations where an exception
4217 raised in Python is cleared by C code (e.g. hasattr()). This used
4218 to cause wrong output, including spurious claims of recursive
4219 functions and attribution of time spent to the wrong function.
4220
Tim Peters0a1fc4e2001-10-07 03:12:08 +00004221 The code and documentation for the derived OldProfile and HotProfile
4222 profiling classes was removed. The code hasn't worked for years (if
4223 you tried to use them, they raised exceptions). OldProfile
4224 intended to reproduce the behavior of the profiler Python used more
4225 than 7 years ago, and isn't interesting anymore. HotProfile intended
4226 to provide a faster profiler (but producing less information), and
4227 that's a worthy goal we intend to meet via a different approach (but
4228 without losing information).
4229
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00004230- Profile.calibrate() has a new implementation that should deliver
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00004231 a much better system-specific calibration constant. The constant can
4232 now be specified in an instance constructor, or as a Profile class or
4233 instance variable, instead of by editing profile.py's source code.
4234 Calibration must still be done manually (see the docs for the profile
4235 module).
4236
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004237 Note that Profile.calibrate() must be overridden by subclasses.
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00004238 Improving the accuracy required exploiting detailed knowledge of
4239 profiler internals; the earlier method abstracted away the details
4240 and measured a simplified model instead, but consequently computed
4241 a constant too small by a factor of 2 on some modern machines.
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00004242
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00004243- quopri's encode and decode methods take an optional header parameter,
Jeremy Hylton6f543b62001-10-16 20:42:52 +00004244 which indicates whether output is intended for the header 'Q'
4245 encoding.
4246
Guido van Rossuma5343cc2001-10-18 18:02:07 +00004247- The SocketServer.ThreadingMixIn class now closes the request after
4248 finish_request() returns. (Not when it errors out though.)
4249
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004250- The nntplib module's NNTP.body() method has grown a 'file' argument
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004251 to allow saving the message body to a file.
4252
4253- The email package has added a class email.Parser.HeaderParser which
4254 only parses headers and does not recurse into the message's body.
4255 Also, the module/class MIMEAudio has been added for representing
4256 audio data (contributed by Anthony Baxter).
4257
4258- ftplib should be able to handle files > 2GB.
4259
4260- ConfigParser.getboolean() now also interprets TRUE, FALSE, YES, NO,
4261 ON, and OFF.
4262
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00004263- xml.dom.minidom NodeList objects now support the length attribute
4264 and item() method as required by the DOM specifications.
4265
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00004266Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004267-----------
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00004268
4269- Demo/dns was removed. It no longer serves any purpose; a package
4270 derived from it is now maintained by Anthony Baxter, see
4271 http://PyDNS.SourceForge.net.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004272
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004273- The freeze tool has been made more robust, and two new options have
4274 been added: -X and -E.
4275
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004276Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004277-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004278
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004279- configure will use CXX in LINKCC if CXX is used to build main() and
4280 the system requires to link a C++ main using the C++ compiler.
4281
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004282C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004283-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004284
Guido van Rossum6c4bce32001-10-18 19:20:25 +00004285- The documentation for the tp_compare slot is updated to require that
4286 the return value must be -1, 0, 1; an arbitrary number <0 or >0 is
4287 not correct. This is not yet enforced but will be enforced in
4288 Python 2.3; even later, we may use -2 to indicate errors and +2 for
4289 "NotImplemented". Right now, -1 should be used for an error return.
4290
Tim Petersd38b1c72001-09-30 05:09:37 +00004291- PyLong_AsLongLong() now accepts int (as well as long) arguments.
4292 Consequently, PyArg_ParseTuple's 'L' code also accepts int (as well
4293 as long) arguments.
4294
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00004295- PyThread_start_new_thread() now returns a long int giving the thread
4296 ID, if one can be calculated; it returns -1 for error, 0 if no
4297 thread ID is calculated (this is an incompatible change, but only
4298 the thread module used this API). This code has only really been
4299 tested on Linux and Windows; other platforms please beware (and
4300 report any bugs or strange behavior).
4301
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00004302- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() no longer accepts Unicode objects as
4303 input.
4304
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004305New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004306-------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004307
4308Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004309-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004310
4311Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004312-------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004313
Tim Peters04cf1d32001-10-09 22:39:40 +00004314- Installer: If you install IDLE, and don't disable file-extension
4315 registration, a new "Edit with IDLE" context (right-click) menu entry
4316 is created for .py and .pyw files.
4317
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004318- The signal module now supports SIGBREAK on Windows, thanks to Steven
4319 Scott. Note that SIGBREAK is unique to Windows. The default SIGBREAK
4320 action remains to call Win32 ExitProcess(). This can be changed via
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004321 signal.signal(). For example::
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004322
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004323 # Make Ctrl+Break raise KeyboardInterrupt, like Python's default Ctrl+C
4324 # (SIGINT) behavior.
4325 import signal
4326 signal.signal(signal.SIGBREAK, signal.default_int_handler)
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004327
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004328 try:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004329 while 1:
4330 pass
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004331 except KeyboardInterrupt:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004332 # We get here on Ctrl+C or Ctrl+Break now; if we had not changed
4333 # SIGBREAK, only on Ctrl+C (and Ctrl+Break would terminate the
4334 # program without the possibility for any Python-level cleanup).
4335 print "Clean exit"
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004336
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004337
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004338What's New in Python 2.2a4?
4339===========================
4340
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004341*Release date: 28-Sep-2001*
4342
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004343Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004344--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004345
4346- pydoc and inspect are now aware of new-style classes;
4347 e.g. help(list) at the interactive prompt now shows proper
4348 documentation for all operations on list objects.
4349
4350- Applications using Jim Fulton's ExtensionClass module can now safely
4351 be used with Python 2.2. In particular, Zope 2.4.1 now works with
4352 Python 2.2 (as well as with Python 2.1.1). The Demo/metaclass
4353 examples also work again. It is hoped that Gtk and Boost also work
4354 with 2.2a4 and beyond. (If you can confirm this, please write
4355 webmaster@python.org; if there are still problems, please open a bug
4356 report on SourceForge.)
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004357
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00004358- property() now takes 4 keyword arguments: fget, fset, fdel and doc.
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004359 These map to read-only attributes 'fget', 'fset', 'fdel', and '__doc__'
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00004360 in the constructed property object. fget, fset and fdel weren't
4361 discoverable from Python in 2.2a3. __doc__ is new, and allows to
4362 associate a docstring with a property.
4363
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004364- Comparison overloading is now more completely implemented. For
4365 example, a str subclass instance can properly be compared to a str
4366 instance, and it can properly overload comparison. Ditto for most
4367 other built-in object types.
4368
4369- The repr() of new-style classes has changed; instead of <type
4370 'M.Foo'> a new-style class is now rendered as <class 'M.Foo'>,
4371 *except* for built-in types, which are still rendered as <type
4372 'Foo'> (to avoid upsetting existing code that might parse or
4373 otherwise rely on repr() of certain type objects).
4374
4375- The repr() of new-style objects is now always <Foo object at XXX>;
4376 previously, it was sometimes <Foo instance at XXX>.
4377
4378- For new-style classes, what was previously called __getattr__ is now
4379 called __getattribute__. This method, if defined, is called for
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00004380 *every* attribute access. A new __getattr__ hook more similar to the
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004381 one in classic classes is defined which is called only if regular
4382 attribute access raises AttributeError; to catch *all* attribute
4383 access, you can use __getattribute__ (for new-style classes). If
4384 both are defined, __getattribute__ is called first, and if it raises
4385 AttributeError, __getattr__ is called.
4386
4387- The __class__ attribute of new-style objects can be assigned to.
4388 The new class must have the same C-level object layout as the old
4389 class.
4390
4391- The builtin file type can be subclassed now. In the usual pattern,
4392 "file" is the name of the builtin type, and file() is a new builtin
4393 constructor, with the same signature as the builtin open() function.
4394 file() is now the preferred way to open a file.
4395
4396- Previously, __new__ would only see sequential arguments passed to
4397 the type in a constructor call; __init__ would see both sequential
4398 and keyword arguments. This made no sense whatsoever any more, so
4399 now both __new__ and __init__ see all arguments.
4400
4401- Previously, hash() applied to an instance of a subclass of str or
4402 unicode always returned 0. This has been repaired.
4403
4404- Previously, an operation on an instance of a subclass of an
4405 immutable type (int, long, float, complex, tuple, str, unicode),
4406 where the subtype didn't override the operation (and so the
4407 operation was handled by the builtin type), could return that
4408 instance instead a value of the base type. For example, if s was of
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004409 a str subclass type, s[:] returned s as-is. Now it returns a str
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004410 with the same value as s.
4411
Barry Warsaw86fbaf82001-09-28 15:26:12 +00004412- Provisional support for pickling new-style objects has been added.
4413
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004414Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004415----
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004416
Tim Peters2c9aa5e2001-09-23 04:06:05 +00004417- file.writelines() now accepts any iterable object producing strings.
4418
Marc-André Lemburgaefd7662001-09-20 12:59:37 +00004419- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() now works very much like
4420 PyObject_Str(obj) in that it tries to use __str__/tp_str
4421 on the object if the object is not a string or buffer. This
4422 makes unicode() behave like str() when applied to non-string/buffer
4423 objects.
4424
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00004425- PyFile_WriteObject now passes Unicode objects to the file's write
4426 method. As a result, all file-like objects which may be the target
Martin v. Löwis2777c022001-09-19 13:47:32 +00004427 of a print statement must support Unicode objects, i.e. they must
4428 at least convert them into ASCII strings.
4429
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004430- Thread scheduling on Solaris should be improved; it is no longer
4431 necessary to insert a small sleep at the start of a thread in order
4432 to let other runnable threads be scheduled.
4433
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004434Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004435-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004436
Marc-André Lemburgbf990172001-09-27 14:17:33 +00004437- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
4438 read character buffer compatible objects for their .write() methods.
4439 These objects are converted to strings and then handled as such
4440 by the instances.
4441
Barry Warsaw2f600732001-09-24 04:28:10 +00004442- The "email" package has been added. This is basically a port of the
4443 mimelib package <http://sf.net/projects/mimelib> with API changes
4444 and some implementations updated to use iterators and generators.
4445
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00004446- difflib.ndiff() and difflib.Differ.compare() are generators now. This
4447 restores the ability of Tools/scripts/ndiff.py to start producing output
4448 before the entire comparison is complete.
4449
Barry Warsaw58b072d2001-09-22 04:44:21 +00004450- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
4451 iteration just like file objects (i.e. their .readline() method is
4452 called for each iteration until it returns an empty string).
4453
Marc-André Lemburg494f2ae2001-09-19 11:33:31 +00004454- The codecs module has grown four new helper APIs to access
4455 builtin codecs: getencoder(), getdecoder(), getreader(),
4456 getwriter().
4457
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004458- SimpleXMLRPCServer: a new module (based upon SimpleHTMLServer)
4459 simplifies writing XML RPC servers.
4460
Barry Warsaw647d5e82001-09-28 17:01:02 +00004461- os.path.realpath(): a new function that returns the absolute pathname
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004462 after interpretation of symbolic links. On non-Unix systems, this
4463 is an alias for os.path.abspath().
4464
Tim Peters16a77ad2001-09-08 04:00:12 +00004465- operator.indexOf() (PySequence_Index() in the C API) now works with any
4466 iterable object.
4467
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004468- smtplib now supports various authentication and security features of
4469 the SMTP protocol through the new login() and starttls() methods.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00004470
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004471- hmac: a new module implementing keyed hashing for message
4472 authentication.
4473
4474- mimetypes now recognizes more extensions and file types. At the
4475 same time, some mappings not sanctioned by IANA were removed.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00004476
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004477- The "compiler" package has been brought up to date to the state of
Guido van Rossumc9ed5dc2001-09-20 05:30:24 +00004478 Python 2.2 bytecode generation. It has also been promoted from a
4479 Tool to a standard library package. (Tools/compiler still exists as
4480 a sample driver.)
4481
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004482Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004483-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004484
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004485- Large file support (LFS) is now automatic when the platform supports
4486 it; no more manual configuration tweaks are needed. On Linux, at
4487 least, it's possible to have a system whose C library supports large
4488 files but whose kernel doesn't; in this case, large file support is
4489 still enabled but doesn't do you any good unless you upgrade your
4490 kernel or share your Python executable with another system whose
4491 kernel has large file support.
4492
4493- The configure script now supplies plausible defaults in a
4494 cross-compilation environment. This doesn't mean that the supplied
4495 values are always correct, or that cross-compilation now works
4496 flawlessly -- but it's a first step (and it shuts up most of
4497 autoconf's warnings about AC_TRY_RUN).
4498
4499- The Unix build is now a bit less chatty, courtesy of the parser
4500 generator. The build is completely silent (except for errors) when
4501 using "make -s", thanks to a -q option to setup.py.
4502
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004503C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004504-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004505
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004506- The "structmember" API now supports some new flag bits to deny read
4507 and/or write access to attributes in restricted execution mode.
4508
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004509New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004510-------------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004511
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004512- Compaq's iPAQ handheld, running the "familiar" Linux distribution
4513 (http://familiar.handhelds.org).
4514
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004515Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004516-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004517
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00004518- The "classic" standard tests, which work by comparing stdout to
4519 an expected-output file under Lib/test/output/, no longer stop at
4520 the first mismatch. Instead the test is run to completion, and a
4521 variant of ndiff-style comparison is used to report all differences.
4522 This is much easier to understand than the previous style of reporting.
4523
4524- The unittest-based standard tests now use regrtest's test_main()
4525 convention, instead of running as a side-effect of merely being
4526 imported. This allows these tests to be run in more natural and
4527 flexible ways as unittests, outside the regrtest framework.
4528
4529- regrtest.py is much better integrated with unittest and doctest now,
4530 especially in regard to reporting errors.
4531
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004532Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004533-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004534
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004535- Large file support now also works for files > 4GB, on filesystems
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00004536 that support it (NTFS under Windows 2000). See "What's New in
4537 Python 2.2a3" for more detail.
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004538
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004539
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004540What's New in Python 2.2a3?
4541===========================
4542
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004543*Release Date: 07-Sep-2001*
4544
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004545Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004546----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004547
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004548- Conversion of long to float now raises OverflowError if the long is too
4549 big to represent as a C double.
4550
Tim Peters32f453e2001-09-03 08:35:41 +00004551- The 3-argument builtin pow() no longer allows a third non-None argument
4552 if either of the first two arguments is a float, or if both are of
4553 integer types and the second argument is negative (in which latter case
4554 the arguments are converted to float, so this is really the same
4555 restriction).
4556
Tim Peters5d2b77c2001-09-03 05:47:38 +00004557- The builtin dir() now returns more information, and sometimes much
4558 more, generally naming all attributes of an object, and all attributes
4559 reachable from the object via its class, and from its class's base
4560 classes, and so on from them too. Example: in 2.2a2, dir([]) returned
4561 an empty list. In 2.2a3,
4562
4563 >>> dir([])
4564 ['__add__', '__class__', '__contains__', '__delattr__', '__delitem__',
4565 '__eq__', '__ge__', '__getattr__', '__getitem__', '__getslice__',
4566 '__gt__', '__hash__', '__iadd__', '__imul__', '__init__', '__le__',
4567 '__len__', '__lt__', '__mul__', '__ne__', '__new__', '__repr__',
4568 '__rmul__', '__setattr__', '__setitem__', '__setslice__', '__str__',
4569 'append', 'count', 'extend', 'index', 'insert', 'pop', 'remove',
4570 'reverse', 'sort']
4571
4572 dir(module) continues to return only the module's attributes, though.
4573
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004574- Overflowing operations on plain ints now return a long int rather
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004575 than raising OverflowError. This is a partial implementation of PEP
4576 237. You can use -Wdefault::OverflowWarning to enable a warning for
4577 this situation, and -Werror::OverflowWarning to revert to the old
4578 OverflowError exception.
4579
Guido van Rossum61c345f2001-09-04 03:26:15 +00004580- A new command line option, -Q<arg>, is added to control run-time
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004581 warnings for the use of classic division. (See PEP 238.) Possible
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00004582 values are -Qold, -Qwarn, -Qwarnall, and -Qnew. The default is
4583 -Qold, meaning the / operator has its classic meaning and no
4584 warnings are issued. Using -Qwarn issues a run-time warning about
4585 all uses of classic division for int and long arguments; -Qwarnall
4586 also warns about classic division for float and complex arguments
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004587 (for use with fixdiv.py).
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004588 [Note: the remainder of this item (preserved below) became
4589 obsolete in 2.2c1 -- -Qnew has global effect in 2.2] ::
4590
4591 Using -Qnew is questionable; it turns on new division by default, but
4592 only in the __main__ module. You can usefully combine -Qwarn or
4593 -Qwarnall and -Qnew: this gives the __main__ module new division, and
4594 warns about classic division everywhere else.
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004595
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004596- Many built-in types can now be subclassed. This applies to int,
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004597 long, float, str, unicode, and tuple. (The types complex, list and
4598 dictionary can also be subclassed; this was introduced earlier.)
4599 Note that restrictions apply when subclassing immutable built-in
4600 types: you can only affect the value of the instance by overloading
4601 __new__. You can add mutable attributes, and the subclass instances
4602 will have a __dict__ attribute, but you cannot change the "value"
4603 (as implemented by the base class) of an immutable subclass instance
4604 once it is created.
4605
Guido van Rossumaaf80c82001-09-02 13:44:35 +00004606- The dictionary constructor now takes an optional argument, a
4607 mapping-like object, and initializes the dictionary from its
4608 (key, value) pairs.
4609
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004610- A new built-in type, super, has been added. This facilitates making
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004611 "cooperative super calls" in a multiple inheritance setting. For an
4612 explanation, see http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#cooperation
4613
Guido van Rossum8d7234d2001-09-06 22:02:58 +00004614- A new built-in type, property, has been added. This enables the
4615 creation of "properties". These are attributes implemented by
4616 getter and setter functions (or only one of these for read-only or
4617 write-only attributes), without the need to override __getattr__.
4618 See http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#property
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004619
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004620- The syntax of floating-point and imaginary literals has been
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004621 liberalized, to allow leading zeroes. Examples of literals now
4622 legal that were SyntaxErrors before:
4623
4624 00.0 0e3 0100j 07.5 00000000000000000008.
4625
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004626- An old tokenizer bug allowed floating point literals with an incomplete
Tim Petersc6d95812001-08-28 20:56:27 +00004627 exponent, such as 1e and 3.1e-. Such literals now raise SyntaxError.
4628
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004629Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004630-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004631
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00004632- telnetlib includes symbolic names for the options, and support for
Martin v. Löwis1da9c572002-11-04 09:56:00 +00004633 setting an option negotiation callback. It also supports processing
4634 of suboptions.
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00004635
Tim Petersa40c7932001-09-05 22:36:56 +00004636- The new C standard no longer requires that math libraries set errno to
4637 ERANGE on overflow. For platform libraries that exploit this new
4638 freedom, Python's overflow-checking was wholly broken. A new overflow-
4639 checking scheme attempts to repair that, but may not be reliable on all
4640 platforms (C doesn't seem to provide anything both useful and portable
4641 in this area anymore).
4642
Martin v. Löwis44f86962001-09-05 13:44:54 +00004643- Asynchronous timeout actions are available through the new class
4644 threading.Timer.
4645
Tim Peters78526162001-09-05 00:53:45 +00004646- math.log and math.log10 now return sensible results for even huge
4647 long arguments. For example, math.log10(10 ** 10000) ~= 10000.0.
4648
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004649- A new function, imp.lock_held(), returns 1 when the import lock is
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00004650 currently held. See the docs for the imp module.
4651
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004652- pickle, cPickle and marshal on 32-bit platforms can now correctly read
Tim Peters82112372001-08-29 02:28:42 +00004653 dumps containing ints written on platforms where Python ints are 8 bytes.
4654 When read on a box where Python ints are 4 bytes, such values are
4655 converted to Python longs.
4656
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004657- In restricted execution mode (using the rexec module), unmarshalling
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004658 code objects is no longer allowed. This plugs a security hole.
4659
Steve Purcell6091cd62001-09-06 16:05:17 +00004660- unittest.TestResult instances no longer store references to tracebacks
4661 generated by test failures. This prevents unexpected dangling references
4662 to objects that should be garbage collected between tests.
4663
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004664Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004665-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004666
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00004667- Tools/scripts/fixdiv.py has been added which can be used to fix
4668 division operators as per PEP 238.
4669
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004670Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004671-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004672
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00004673- If you are an adventurous person using Mac OS X you may want to look at
4674 Mac/OSX. There is a Makefile there that will build Python as a real Mac
4675 application, which can be used for experimenting with Carbon or Cocoa.
4676 Discussion of this on pythonmac-sig, please.
4677
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00004678C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004679-----
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00004680
4681- New function PyObject_Dir(obj), like Python __builtin__.dir(obj).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00004682
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004683- Note that PyLong_AsDouble can fail! This has always been true, but no
4684 callers checked for it. It's more likely to fail now, because overflow
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004685 errors are properly detected now. The proper way to check::
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004686
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004687 double x = PyLong_AsDouble(some_long_object);
4688 if (x == -1.0 && PyErr_Occurred()) {
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004689 /* The conversion failed. */
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004690 }
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004691
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004692- The GC API has been changed. Extensions that use the old API will still
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004693 compile but will not participate in GC. To upgrade an extension
4694 module:
4695
4696 - rename Py_TPFLAGS_GC to PyTPFLAGS_HAVE_GC
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004697
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004698 - use PyObject_GC_New or PyObject_GC_NewVar to allocate objects and
4699 PyObject_GC_Del to deallocate them
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004700
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004701 - rename PyObject_GC_Init to PyObject_GC_Track and PyObject_GC_Fini
4702 to PyObject_GC_UnTrack
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004703
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004704 - remove PyGC_HEAD_SIZE from object size calculations
4705
4706 - remove calls to PyObject_AS_GC and PyObject_FROM_GC
4707
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004708- Two new functions: PyString_FromFormat() and PyString_FromFormatV().
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004709 These can be used safely to construct string objects from a
4710 sprintf-style format string (similar to the format string supported
4711 by PyErr_Format()).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00004712
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004713New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004714-------------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004715
Tim Petersb7da0902001-09-02 23:01:43 +00004716- Stephen Hansen contributed patches sufficient to get a clean compile
4717 under Borland C (Windows), but he reports problems running it and ran
4718 out of time to complete the port. Volunteers? Expect a MemoryError
4719 when importing the types module; this is probably shallow, and
4720 causing later failures too.
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004721
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004722Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004723-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004724
4725Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004726-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004727
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00004728- Large file support is now enabled on Win32 platforms as well as on
4729 Win64. This means that, for example, you can use f.tell() and f.seek()
4730 to manipulate files larger than 2 gigabytes (provided you have enough
4731 disk space, and are using a Windows filesystem that supports large
Tim Peters9a9471c2001-09-11 23:18:51 +00004732 partitions). Windows filesystem limits: FAT has a 2GB (gigabyte)
4733 filesize limit, and large file support makes no difference there.
4734 FAT32's limit is 4GB, and files >= 2GB are easier to use from Python now.
4735 NTFS has no practical limit on file size, and files of any size can be
4736 used from Python now.
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00004737
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004738- The w9xpopen hack is now used on Windows NT and 2000 too when COMPSPEC
Tim Peters402d5982001-08-27 06:37:48 +00004739 points to command.com (patch from Brian Quinlan).
4740
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004741
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004742What's New in Python 2.2a2?
4743===========================
4744
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004745*Release Date: 22-Aug-2001*
4746
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004747Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004748-----
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004749
Barry Warsaw18b2ecf2001-08-22 20:26:56 +00004750- Tim Peters developed a brand new Windows installer using Wise 8.1,
4751 generously donated to us by Wise Solutions.
4752
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004753- configure supports a new option --enable-unicode, with the values
4754 ucs2 and ucs4 (new in 2.2a1). With --disable-unicode, the Unicode
4755 type and supporting code is completely removed from the interpreter.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004756
Jack Jansen32ce0cd2001-08-21 19:28:20 +00004757- A new configure option --enable-framework builds a Mac OS X framework,
4758 which "make frameworkinstall" will install. This provides a starting
4759 point for more mac-like functionality, join pythonmac-sig@python.org
4760 if you are interested in helping.
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004761
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004762- The NeXT platform is no longer supported.
4763
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004764- The 'new' module is now statically linked.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004765
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004766Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004767-----
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004768
4769- The new Tools/scripts/cleanfuture.py can be used to automatically
Andrew M. Kuchlingb0532092001-08-15 15:54:56 +00004770 edit out obsolete future statements from Python source code. See
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004771 the module docstring for details.
4772
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004773Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004774-----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004775
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004776- regrtest.py now knows which tests are expected to be skipped on some
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004777 platforms, allowing to give clearer test result output. regrtest
4778 also has optional --use/-u switch to run normally disabled tests
4779 which require network access or consume significant disk resources.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004780
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004781- Several new tests in the standard test suite, with special thanks to
4782 Nick Mathewson.
4783
4784Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004785----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004786
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004787- The floor division operator // has been added as outlined in PEP
4788 238. The / operator still provides classic division (and will until
4789 Python 3.0) unless "from __future__ import division" is included, in
4790 which case the / operator will provide true division. The operator
4791 module provides truediv() and floordiv() functions. Augmented
4792 assignment variants are included, as are the equivalent overloadable
4793 methods and C API methods. See the PEP for a full discussion:
4794 <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0238.html>
4795
Tim Peters6cd6a822001-08-17 22:11:27 +00004796- Future statements are now effective in simulated interactive shells
4797 (like IDLE). This should "just work" by magic, but read Michael
4798 Hudson's "Future statements in simulated shells" PEP 264 for full
4799 details: <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0264.html>.
4800
Guido van Rossumf86ddd22001-08-17 21:21:04 +00004801- The type/class unification (PEP 252-253) was integrated into the
4802 trunk and is not so tentative any more (the exact specification of
4803 some features is still tentative). A lot of work has done on fixing
4804 bugs and adding robustness and features (performance still has to
4805 come a long way).
4806
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00004807- Warnings about a mismatch in the Python API during extension import
4808 now use the Python warning framework (which makes it possible to
4809 write filters for these warnings).
4810
Barry Warsaw9b3be7f2001-08-14 18:35:02 +00004811- A function's __dict__ (aka func_dict) will now always be a
4812 dictionary. It used to be possible to delete it or set it to None,
4813 but now both actions raise TypeErrors. It is still legal to set it
4814 to a dictionary object. Getting func.__dict__ before any attributes
4815 have been assigned now returns an empty dictionary instead of None.
4816
Guido van Rossum32aa5d22001-09-05 18:43:35 +00004817- A new command line option, -E, was added which disables the use of
4818 all environment variables, or at least those that are specifically
4819 significant to Python. Usually those have a name starting with
4820 "PYTHON". This was used to fix a problem where the tests fail if
4821 the user happens to have PYTHONHOME or PYTHONPATH pointing to an
4822 older distribution.
4823
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004824Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004825-------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004826
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004827- New class Differ and new functions ndiff() and restore() in difflib.py.
4828 These package the algorithms used by the popular Tools/scripts/ndiff.py,
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004829 for programmatic reuse.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004830
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004831- New function xml.sax.saxutils.quoteattr(): Quote an XML attribute
4832 value using the minimal quoting required for the value; more
4833 reliable than using xml.sax.saxutils.escape() for attribute values.
4834
4835- Readline completion support for cmd.Cmd was added.
4836
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004837- Calling os.tempnam() or os.tmpnam() generate RuntimeWarnings.
4838
4839- Added function threading.BoundedSemaphore()
4840
4841- Added Ka-Ping Yee's cgitb.py module.
4842
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004843- The 'new' module now exposes the CO_xxx flags.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004844
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00004845- The gc module offers the get_referents function.
4846
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004847New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004848-------------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004849
4850C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004851-----
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004852
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00004853- Two new APIs PyOS_snprintf() and PyOS_vsnprintf() were added
4854 which provide a cross-platform implementations for the
4855 relatively new snprintf()/vsnprintf() C lib APIs. In contrast to
4856 the standard sprintf() and vsprintf() C lib APIs, these versions
4857 apply bounds checking on the used buffer which enhances protection
4858 against buffer overruns.
4859
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00004860- Unicode APIs now use name mangling to assure that mixing interpreters
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00004861 and extensions using different Unicode widths is rendered next to
4862 impossible. Trying to import an incompatible Unicode-aware extension
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00004863 will result in an ImportError. Unicode extensions writers must make
4864 sure to check the Unicode width compatibility in their extensions by
4865 using at least one of the mangled Unicode APIs in the extension.
4866
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004867- Two new flags METH_NOARGS and METH_O are available in method definition
4868 tables to simplify implementation of methods with no arguments and a
4869 single untyped argument. Calling such methods is more efficient than
4870 calling corresponding METH_VARARGS methods. METH_OLDARGS is now
4871 deprecated.
4872
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00004873Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004874-------
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00004875
4876- "import module" now compiles module.pyw if it exists and nothing else
4877 relevant is found.
4878
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004879
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00004880What's New in Python 2.2a1?
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004881===========================
4882
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004883*Release date: 18-Jul-2001*
4884
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004885Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004886----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004887
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00004888- TENTATIVELY, a large amount of code implementing much of what's
4889 described in PEP 252 (Making Types Look More Like Classes) and PEP
4890 253 (Subtyping Built-in Types) was added. This will be released
4891 with Python 2.2a1. Documentation will be provided separately
4892 through http://www.python.org/2.2/. The purpose of releasing this
4893 with Python 2.2a1 is to test backwards compatibility. It is
4894 possible, though not likely, that a decision is made not to release
4895 this code as part of 2.2 final, if any serious backwards
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004896 incompatibilities are found during alpha testing that cannot be
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00004897 repaired.
4898
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00004899- Generators were added; this is a new way to create an iterator (see
Tim Peters11a0d102001-07-17 18:48:00 +00004900 below) using what looks like a simple function containing one or
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00004901 more 'yield' statements. See PEP 255. Since this adds a new
4902 keyword to the language, this feature must be enabled by including a
4903 future statement: "from __future__ import generators" (see PEP 236).
4904 Generators will become a standard feature in a future release
4905 (probably 2.3). Without this future statement, 'yield' remains an
4906 ordinary identifier, but a warning is issued each time it is used.
4907 (These warnings currently don't conform to the warnings framework of
4908 PEP 230; we intend to fix this in 2.2a2.)
4909
Marc-André Lemburg12e74b32001-05-22 08:58:23 +00004910- The UTF-16 codec was modified to be more RFC compliant. It will now
4911 only remove BOM characters at the start of the string and then
4912 only if running in native mode (UTF-16-LE and -BE won't remove a
4913 leading BMO character).
4914
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00004915- Strings now have a new method .decode() to complement the already
4916 existing .encode() method. These two methods provide direct access
4917 to the corresponding decoders and encoders of the registered codecs.
4918
4919 To enhance the usability of the .encode() method, the special
4920 casing of Unicode object return values was dropped (Unicode objects
4921 were auto-magically converted to string using the default encoding).
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00004922
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00004923 Both methods will now return whatever the codec in charge of the
4924 requested encoding returns as object, e.g. Unicode codecs will
4925 return Unicode objects when decoding is requested ("äöü".decode("latin-1")
4926 will return u"äöü"). This enables codec writer to create codecs
4927 for various simple to use conversions.
4928
4929 New codecs were added to demonstrate these new features (the .encode()
4930 and .decode() columns indicate the type of the returned objects):
4931
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004932 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4933 |Name | .encode() | .decode() | Description |
4934 +=========+===========+===========+=============================+
4935 |uu | string | string | UU codec (e.g. for email) |
4936 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4937 |base64 | string | string | base64 codec |
4938 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4939 |quopri | string | string | quoted-printable codec |
4940 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4941 |zlib | string | string | zlib compression |
4942 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4943 |hex | string | string | 2-byte hex codec |
4944 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4945 |rot-13 | string | Unicode | ROT-13 Unicode charmap codec|
4946 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00004947
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004948- Some operating systems now support the concept of a default Unicode
4949 encoding for file system operations. Notably, Windows supports 'mbcs'
4950 as the default. The Macintosh will also adopt this concept in the medium
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00004951 term, although the default encoding for that platform will be other than
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004952 'mbcs'.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00004953
4954 On operating system that support non-ASCII filenames, it is common for
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004955 functions that return filenames (such as os.listdir()) to return Python
4956 string objects pre-encoded using the default file system encoding for
4957 the platform. As this encoding is likely to be different from Python's
4958 default encoding, converting this name to a Unicode object before passing
4959 it back to the Operating System would result in a Unicode error, as Python
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004960 would attempt to use its default encoding (generally ASCII) rather than
4961 the default encoding for the file system.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00004962
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004963 In general, this change simply removes surprises when working with
4964 Unicode and the file system, making these operations work as you expect,
4965 increasing the transparency of Unicode objects in this context.
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004966 See [????] for more details, including examples.
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004967
Tim Peters61dff2b2001-05-08 15:43:37 +00004968- Float (and complex) literals in source code were evaluated to full
4969 precision only when running from a .py file; the same code loaded from a
4970 .pyc (or .pyo) file could suffer numeric differences starting at about the
4971 12th significant decimal digit. For example, on a machine with IEEE-754
4972 floating arithmetic,
4973
4974 x = 9007199254740992.0
4975 print long(x)
4976
4977 printed 9007199254740992 if run directly from .py, but 9007199254740000
4978 if from a compiled (.pyc or .pyo) file. This was due to marshal using
4979 str(float) instead of repr(float) when building code objects. marshal
4980 now uses repr(float) instead, which should reproduce floats to full
4981 machine precision (assuming the platform C float<->string I/O conversion
4982 functions are of good quality).
4983
4984 This may cause floating-point results to change in some cases, and
4985 usually for the better, but may also cause numerically unstable
4986 algorithms to break.
4987
Tim Peters2f228e72001-05-13 00:19:31 +00004988- The implementation of dicts suffers fewer collisions, which has speed
4989 benefits. However, the order in which dict entries appear in dict.keys(),
4990 dict.values() and dict.items() may differ from previous releases for a
4991 given dict. Nothing is defined about this order, so no program should
4992 rely on it. Nevertheless, it's easy to write test cases that rely on the
4993 order by accident, typically because of printing the str() or repr() of a
4994 dict to an "expected results" file. See Lib/test/test_support.py's new
4995 sortdict(dict) function for a simple way to display a dict in sorted
4996 order.
4997
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00004998- Many other small changes to dicts were made, resulting in faster
4999 operation along the most common code paths.
5000
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00005001- Dictionary objects now support the "in" operator: "x in dict" means
5002 the same as dict.has_key(x).
5003
Barry Warsaw51acc8d2001-06-26 20:12:50 +00005004- The update() method of dictionaries now accepts generic mapping
5005 objects. Specifically the argument object must support the .keys()
5006 and __getitem__() methods. This allows you to say, for example,
5007 {}.update(UserDict())
5008
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00005009- Iterators were added; this is a generalized way of providing values
5010 to a for loop. See PEP 234. There's a new built-in function iter()
5011 to return an iterator. There's a new protocol to get the next value
5012 from an iterator using the next() method (in Python) or the
5013 tp_iternext slot (in C). There's a new protocol to get iterators
5014 using the __iter__() method (in Python) or the tp_iter slot (in C).
5015 Iterating (i.e. a for loop) over a dictionary generates its keys.
5016 Iterating over a file generates its lines.
5017
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005018- The following functions were generalized to work nicely with iterator
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00005019 arguments::
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005020
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00005021 map(), filter(), reduce(), zip()
Tim Peters8572b4f2001-05-06 01:05:02 +00005022 list(), tuple() (PySequence_Tuple() and PySequence_Fast() in C API)
5023 max(), min()
Tim Peters1af03e92001-05-26 19:37:54 +00005024 join() method of strings
5025 extend() method of lists
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00005026 'x in y' and 'x not in y' (PySequence_Contains() in C API)
5027 operator.countOf() (PySequence_Count() in C API)
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005028 right-hand side of assignment statements with multiple targets, such as ::
Tim Petersd6d010b2001-06-21 02:49:55 +00005029 x, y, z = some_iterable_object_returning_exactly_3_values
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00005030
Tim Petersd85e1022001-05-11 21:51:48 +00005031- Accessing module attributes is significantly faster (for example,
5032 random.random or os.path or yourPythonModule.yourAttribute).
5033
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00005034- Comparing dictionary objects via == and != is faster, and now works even
5035 if the keys and values don't support comparisons other than ==.
5036
Tim Peters95bf9392001-05-10 08:32:44 +00005037- Comparing dictionaries in ways other than == and != is slower: there were
5038 insecurities in the dict comparison implementation that could cause Python
5039 to crash if the element comparison routines for the dict keys and/or
5040 values mutated the dicts. Making the code bulletproof slowed it down.
5041
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005042- Collisions in dicts are resolved via a new approach, which can help
5043 dramatically in bad cases. For example, looking up every key in a dict
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005044 d with d.keys() == [i << 16 for i in range(20000)] is approximately 500x
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005045 faster now. Thanks to Christian Tismer for pointing out the cause and
5046 the nature of an effective cure (last December! better late than never).
Tim Peters15d49292001-05-27 07:39:22 +00005047
Tim Peters52e155e2001-06-16 05:42:57 +00005048- repr() is much faster for large containers (dict, list, tuple).
5049
5050
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005051Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005052-------
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005053
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00005054- The constants ascii_letters, ascii_lowercase. and ascii_uppercase
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005055 were added to the string module. These a locale-independent
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00005056 constants, unlike letters, lowercase, and uppercase. These are now
5057 use in appropriate locations in the standard library.
5058
Martin v. Löwisf0473d52001-07-18 16:17:16 +00005059- The flags used in dlopen calls can now be configured using
5060 sys.setdlopenflags and queried using sys.getdlopenflags.
5061
Guido van Rossumc7e4aca2001-07-12 11:54:37 +00005062- Fredrik Lundh's xmlrpclib is now a standard library module. This
5063 provides full client-side XML-RPC support. In addition,
5064 Demo/xmlrpc/ contains two server frameworks (one SocketServer-based,
5065 one asyncore-based). Thanks to Eric Raymond for the documentation.
5066
Guido van Rossum643d3912001-07-05 14:46:25 +00005067- The xrange() object is simplified: it no longer supports slicing,
5068 repetition, comparisons, efficient 'in' checking, the tolist()
5069 method, or the start, stop and step attributes. See PEP 260.
5070
Martin v. Löwisebf94db2001-06-06 06:25:40 +00005071- A new function fnmatch.filter to filter lists of file names was added.
5072
Barry Warsawffd674d2001-05-22 16:00:10 +00005073- calendar.py uses month and day names based on the current locale.
5074
Guido van Rossum2e0a6542001-05-15 02:14:44 +00005075- strop is now *really* obsolete (this was announced before with 1.6),
5076 and issues DeprecationWarning when used (except for the four items
5077 that are still imported into string.py).
5078
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005079- Cookie.py now sorts key+value pairs by key in output strings.
5080
5081- pprint.isrecursive(object) didn't correctly identify recursive objects.
5082 Now it does.
5083
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00005084- pprint functions now much faster for large containers (tuple, list, dict).
5085
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00005086- New 'q' and 'Q' format codes in the struct module, corresponding to C
5087 types "long long" and "unsigned long long" (on Windows, __int64). In
5088 native mode, these can be used only when the platform C compiler supports
5089 these types (when HAVE_LONG_LONG is #define'd by the Python config
5090 process), and then they inherit the sizes and alignments of the C types.
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005091 In standard mode, 'q' and 'Q' are supported on all platforms, and are
5092 8-byte integral types.
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00005093
Guido van Rossum83213cc2001-06-12 16:48:52 +00005094- The site module installs a new built-in function 'help' that invokes
5095 pydoc.help. It must be invoked as 'help()'; when invoked as 'help',
5096 it displays a message reminding the user to use 'help()' or
5097 'help(object)'.
5098
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005099Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005100-----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005101
5102- New test_mutants.py runs dict comparisons where the key and value
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005103 comparison operators mutate the dicts randomly during comparison. This
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005104 rapidly causes Python to crash under earlier releases (not for the faint
5105 of heart: it can also cause Win9x to freeze or reboot!).
5106
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005107- New test_pprint.py verifies that pprint.isrecursive() and
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00005108 pprint.isreadable() return sensible results. Also verifies that simple
5109 cases produce correct output.
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005110
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00005111C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005112-----
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00005113
5114- Removed the unused last_is_sticky argument from the internal
5115 _PyTuple_Resize(). If this affects you, you were cheating.
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005116
5117----
5118
5119**(For information about older versions, consult the HISTORY file.)**