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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
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00007What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 1?
8=================================
9
10*Release date: DD-MMM-YYYY*
11
12Core and builtins
13-----------------
14
Guido van Rossum6c9e1302003-11-29 23:52:13 +000015- Removed FutureWarnings related to hex/oct literals and conversions
16 and left shifts. (Thanks to Kalle Svensson for SF patch 849227.)
17 This addresses most of the remaining semantic changes promised by
18 PEP 237, except for repr() of a long, which still shows the trailing
19 'L'. The PEP appears to promise warnings for operations that
20 changed semantics compared to Python 2.3, but this is not
21 implemented; we've suffered through enough warnings related to
22 hex/oct literals and I think it's best to be silent now.
23
Raymond Hettinger4f8f9762003-11-26 08:21:35 +000024- For str and unicode objects, the ljust(), center(), and rjust()
25 methods now accept an optional argument specifying a fill
26 character other than a space.
27
Guido van Rossumbaf0f8f2003-11-22 23:55:50 +000028- When method objects have an attribute that can be satisfied either
29 by the function object or by the method object, the function
30 object's attribute usually wins. Christian Tismer pointed out that
31 that this is really a mistake, because this only happens for special
32 methods (like __reduce__) where the method object's version is
33 really more appropriate than the function's attribute. So from now
34 on, all method attributes will have precedence over function
35 attributes with the same name.
36
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +000037- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 839548: if a weakref with a callback,
38 its callback, and its weakly referenced object, all became part of
39 cyclic garbage during a single run of garbage collection, the order
40 in which they were torn down was unpredictable. It was possible for
41 the callback to see partially-torn-down objects, leading to immediate
42 segfaults, or, if the callback resurrected garbage objects, to
43 resurrect insane objects that caused segfaults (or other surprises)
44 later. In one sense this wasn't surprising, because Python's cyclic gc
45 had no knowledge of Python's weakref objects. It does now. When
46 weakrefs with callbacks become part of cyclic garbage now, those
47 weakrefs are cleared first. The callbacks don't trigger then,
48 preventing the problems. If you need callbacks to trigger, then just
49 as when cyclic gc is not involved, you need to write your code so
50 that weakref objects outlive the objects they weakly reference.
Raymond Hettingera690a992003-11-16 16:17:49 +000051
Tim Petersadd09b42003-11-12 20:43:28 +000052- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 840829: if cyclic garbage collection
53 happened to occur during a weakref callback for a new-style class
54 instance, subtle memory corruption was the result (in a release build;
55 in a debug build, a segfault occurred reliably very soon after).
56 This has been repaired.
57
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +000058- Compiler flags set in PYTHONSTARTUP are now active in __main__.
59
60- Added two builtin types, set() and frozenset().
61
Raymond Hettinger85c20a42003-11-06 14:06:48 +000062- Added a reversed() builtin function that returns a reverse iterator
63 over a sequence.
64
Martin v. Löwis01a74b22003-10-19 18:30:01 +000065- CObjects are now mutable (on the C level) through PyCObject_SetVoidPtr.
66
Raymond Hettinger42b1ba32003-10-16 03:41:09 +000067- list.sort() now supports three keyword arguments: cmp, key, and reverse.
68 The key argument can be a function of one argument that extracts a
69 comparison key from the original record: mylist.sort(key=str.lower).
70 The reverse argument is a boolean value and if True will change the
71 sort order as if the comparison arguments were reversed. In addition,
72 the documentation has been amended to provide a guarantee that all sorts
73 starting with Py2.3 are guaranteed to be stable (the relative order of
74 records with equal keys is unchanged).
75
Raymond Hettinger0a9b9da2003-10-29 06:54:43 +000076- Added a list.sorted() classmethod that returns a new sorted list
77 from any iterable.
Alex Martellidd666452003-10-25 13:02:57 +000078
Marc-André Lemburgd7160f82003-09-22 11:14:40 +000079- Added test whether wchar_t is signed or not. A signed wchar_t is not
80 usable as internal unicode type base for Py_UNICODE since the
81 unicode implementation assumes an unsigned type.
82
Jeremy Hyltond8082792003-09-16 19:41:39 +000083- Fixed a bug in the cache of length-one Unicode strings that could
84 lead to a seg fault. The specific problem occurred when an earlier,
85 non-fatal error left an uninitialized Unicode object in the
86 freelist.
87
Raymond Hettinger9bfe5332003-08-27 04:55:52 +000088- The % formatting operator now supports '%F' which is equivalent to
89 '%f'. This has always been documented but never implemented.
90
Tim Peters465fa3d2003-08-15 01:16:37 +000091- complex(obj) could leak a little memory if obj wasn't a string or
92 number.
93
Raymond Hettingereaef6152003-08-02 07:42:57 +000094- zip() with no arguments now returns an empty list instead of raising
95 a TypeError exception.
96
Guido van Rossum02c58f82003-10-08 21:08:29 +000097- obj.__contains__() now returns True/False instead of 1/0. SF patch
98 820195.
99
Armin Rigo2b3eb402003-10-28 12:05:48 +0000100- Python no longer tries to be smart about recursive comparisons.
101 When comparing containers with cyclic references to themselves it
102 will now just hit the recursion limit. See SF patch 825639.
103
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000104Extension modules
105-----------------
106
Raymond Hettinger166958b2003-12-01 13:18:39 +0000107- The operator module has two new functions, attrgetter() and
108 itemgetter() which are useful for creating fast data extractor
109 functions for map(), list.sort(), itertools.groupby(), and
110 other functions that expect a function argument.
111
Martin v. Löwis94681fc2003-11-27 19:40:22 +0000112- socket.SHUT_{RD,WR,RDWR} was added.
113
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +0000114- os.getsid was added.
115
Guido van Rossum16b9fa82003-10-23 23:54:57 +0000116- The pwd module incorrectly advertised its struct type as
117 struct_pwent; this has been renamed to struct_passwd. (The old name
118 is still supported for backwards compatibility.)
119
Fred Drakede050322003-10-21 15:41:59 +0000120- The xml.parsers.expat module now provides Expat 1.95.7.
121
Martin v. Löwis3bbd6542003-10-03 13:57:37 +0000122- socket.IPPROTO_IPV6 was added.
123
Martin v. Löwise7a97962003-09-20 16:08:33 +0000124- readline.clear_history was added.
125
Brett Cannon62dba4c2003-09-10 19:37:42 +0000126- select.select() now accepts sequences for its first three arguments.
127
Raymond Hettinger5475f232003-08-08 12:20:03 +0000128- cStringIO now supports the f.closed attribute.
129
Anthony Baxter83f52912003-08-05 06:33:56 +0000130- The signal module now exposes SIGRTMIN and SIGRTMAX (if available).
131
Andrew M. Kuchling69f31eb2003-08-13 23:11:04 +0000132- curses module now supports use_default_colors(). [patch #739124]
133
Anthony Baxter5c68ef02003-10-04 08:04:04 +0000134- Bug #811028: ncurses.h breakage on FreeBSD/MacOS X
135
136- Bug #814613: INET_ADDRSTRLEN fix needed for all compilers on SGI
137
Gustavo Niemeyerad3fc442003-10-17 22:13:16 +0000138- Implemented non-recursive SRE matching scheme (#757624).
139
140- Implemented (?(id/name)yes|no) support in SRE (#572936).
141
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +0000142- random.seed() with no arguments or None uses time.time() as a default
143 seed. Modified to match Py2.2 behavior and use fractional seconds so
144 that successive runs are more likely to produce different sequences.
145
146- random.Random has a new method, getrandbits(k), which returns an int
147 with k random bits. This method is now an optional part of the API
148 for user defined generators. Any generator that defines genrandbits()
149 can now use randrange() for ranges with a length >= 2**53. Formerly,
150 randrange would return only even numbers for ranges that large (see
151 SF bug #812202). Generators that do not define genrandbits() now
152 issue a warning when randrange() is called with a range that large.
153
154- itertools now has a new function, tee() which produces two independent
155 iterators from a single iterable.
156
157- itertools.izip() with no arguments now returns an empty iterator instead
158 of raising a TypeError exception.
159
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000160Library
161-------
162
Thomas Hellerb3105912003-11-28 19:42:56 +0000163- Bug #848614: distutils' msvccompiler fails to find the MSVC6
164 compiler because of incomplete registry entries.
165
Martin v. Löwisaf7dc8d2003-11-19 19:51:55 +0000166- httplib.HTTP.putrequest now offers to omit the implicit Accept-Encoding.
167
Thomas Hellercf0005b2003-11-14 10:33:20 +0000168- Patch #841977: modulefinder didn't find extension modules in packages
169
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +0000170- imaplib.IMAP4.thread was added.
171
Guido van Rossum967b0632003-11-10 02:27:19 +0000172- Plugged a minor hole in tempfile.mktemp() due to the use of
173 os.path.exists(), switched to using os.lstat() directly if possible.
174
Raymond Hettingerb3af1812003-11-08 10:24:38 +0000175- heapq.py has been converted to C for improved performance
176
Neil Schemenauerf607fc52003-11-05 23:03:00 +0000177- traceback.format_exc has been added (similar to print_exc but it returns
178 a string).
179
Martin v. Löwis45394c22003-10-31 13:49:36 +0000180- xmlrpclib.MultiCall has been added.
181
Martin v. Löwis48440b72003-10-31 12:52:35 +0000182- poplib.POP3_SSL has been added.
183
Martin v. Löwisd6625482003-10-12 17:37:01 +0000184- tmpfile.mkstemp now returns an absolute path even if dir is relative.
185
Brett Cannon5d9ca4e2003-10-12 04:38:48 +0000186- urlparse is RFC 2396 compliant.
187
Skip Montanarodef99342003-10-03 14:07:07 +0000188- The fieldnames argument to the csv module's DictReader constructor is now
189 optional. If omitted, the first row of the file will be used as the
190 list of fieldnames.
191
Raymond Hettinger9a80c5d2003-09-23 20:21:01 +0000192- encodings.bz2_codec was added for access to bz2 compression
193 using "a long string".encode('bz2')
194
Guido van Rossum0e5a51d2003-09-22 15:03:11 +0000195- Various improvements to unittest.py, realigned with PyUnit CVS.
196
Martin v. Löwisc6bb6c02003-09-20 15:52:21 +0000197- dircache now passes exceptions to the caller, instead of returning
198 empty lists.
199
Raymond Hettingerdeadbf52003-09-12 06:33:37 +0000200- The bsddb module and dbhash module now support the iterator and
201 mapping protocols which make them more substitutable for dictionaries
202 and shelves.
203
Skip Montanaro3f7a9482003-09-06 19:52:12 +0000204- The csv module's DictReader and DictWriter classes now accept keyword
205 arguments. This was an omission in the initial implementation.
206
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +0000207- The email package handles some RFC 2231 parameters with missing
Barry Warsaw2f5bf172003-09-03 04:09:49 +0000208 CHARSET fields better. It also includes a patch to parameter
209 parsing when semicolons appear inside quotes.
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +0000210
Raymond Hettinger6a180122003-08-17 08:34:09 +0000211- sets.py now runs under Py2.2. In addition, the argument restrictions
212 for most set methods (but not the operators) have been relaxed to
Raymond Hettinger70b9f492003-11-19 15:52:14 +0000213 allow any iterable.
Raymond Hettingeree562fc2003-08-15 21:17:04 +0000214
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +0000215- _strptime.py now has a behind-the-scenes caching mechanism for the most
Brett Cannonb7150a22003-08-05 06:27:04 +0000216 recent TimeRE instance used along with the last five unique directive
217 patterns. The overall module was also made more thread-safe.
218
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +0000219- random.cunifvariate() and random.stdgamma() were deprecated in Py2.3
220 and removed in Py2.4.
221
Anthony Baxter92bee362003-11-04 14:35:49 +0000222- Bug #823328: urllib2.py's HTTP Digest Auth support works again.
223
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000224Tools/Demos
225-----------
226
Skip Montanaro030f68a2003-10-28 16:24:00 +0000227- The db2pickle and pickle2db scripts can now dump/load gdbm files.
228
Skip Montanarofd4fa882003-09-10 19:04:13 +0000229- The pydoc script will display a link to the module documentation for
230 modules determined to be part of the core distribution. The documentation
231 base directory defaults to http://www.python.org/doc/current/lib/ but can
232 be changed by setting the PYTHONDOCS environment variable.
233
Raymond Hettingere41d4c82003-08-25 04:39:55 +0000234- texcheck.py now detects double word errors.
235
Tim Peters1a3abcb2003-08-18 23:52:09 +0000236- md5sum.py mistakenly opened input files in text mode by default, a
237 silent and dangerous change from previous releases. It once again
238 opens input files in binary mode by default. The -t and -b flags
239 remain for compatibility with the 2.3 release, but -b is the default
240 now.
241
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000242- py-electric-colon now works when pending-delete/delete-selection mode is
243 in effect
244
245- py-help-at-point is no longer bound to the F1 key - it's still bound to
246 C-c C-h
247
Barry Warsaw6ec58ca2003-09-03 03:20:37 +0000248- Pynche was fixed to not crash when there is no ~/.pynche file and no
249 -d option was given.
250
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000251Build
252-----
253
254C API
255-----
256
Raymond Hettingerbc0f2ab2003-11-25 21:12:14 +0000257- Added a new function, PyDict_Contains(d, k) which is like
258 PySequence_Contains() but is specific to dictionaries and executes
259 about 10% faster.
260
Brett Cannon26b3a7b2003-10-19 21:31:43 +0000261- Added three new macros: Py_RETURN_NONE, Py_RETURN_TRUE, and Py_RETURN_FALSE.
262 Each return the singleton they mention after Py_INCREF()ing them.
263
Raymond Hettingercb2da432003-10-12 18:24:34 +0000264- Added a new function, PyTuple_Pack(n, ...) for constructing tuples from a
265 variable length argument list of Python objects without having to invoke
266 the more complex machinery of Py_BuildValue(). PyTuple_Pack(3, a, b, c)
267 is equivalent to Py_BuildValue("(OOO)", a, b, c).
268
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000269New platforms
270-------------
271
272Tests
273-----
274
275Windows
276-------
277
Guido van Rossumfd25aca2003-11-30 22:10:15 +0000278- The _winreg module could segfault when reading very large registry
279 values, due to unchecked alloca() calls (SF bug 851056). The fix is
280 uses either PyMem_Malloc(n) or PyString_FromStringAndSize(NULL, n),
281 as appropriate, followed by a size check.
282
Tim Petersf1827cf2003-09-07 03:30:18 +0000283- file.truncate() could misbehave if the file was open for update
284 (modes r+, rb+, w+, wb+), and the most recent file operation before
285 the truncate() call was an input operation. SF bug 801631.
286
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000287Mac
288----
289
290
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +0000291What's New in Python 2.3 final?
292===============================
293
294*Release date: 29-Jul-2003*
295
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +0000296IDLE
297----
298
Tim Peters36c1afc2003-07-29 17:22:57 +0000299- Bug 778400: IDLE hangs when selecting "Edit with IDLE" from explorer.
300 This was unique to Windows, and was fixed by adding an -n switch to
301 the command the Windows installer creates to execute "Edit with IDLE"
302 context-menu actions.
303
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +0000304- IDLE displays a new message upon startup: some "personal firewall"
305 kinds of programs (for example, ZoneAlarm) open a dialog of their
306 own when any program opens a socket. IDLE does use sockets, talking
307 on the computer's internal loopback interface. This connection is not
308 visible on any external interface and no data is sent to or received
309 from the Internet. So, if you get such a dialog when opening IDLE,
310 asking whether to let pythonw.exe talk to address 127.0.0.1, say yes,
311 and rest assured no communication external to your machine is taking
312 place. If you don't allow it, IDLE won't be able to start.
313
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +0000314
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000315What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 2?
316=============================================
317
Tim Peters6560a252003-07-24 00:15:46 +0000318*Release date: 24-Jul-2003*
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000319
320Core and builtins
321-----------------
322
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +0000323- It is now possible to import from zipfiles containing additional
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000324 data bytes before the zip compatible archive. Zipfiles containing a
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +0000325 comment at the end are still unsupported.
326
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000327Extension modules
328-----------------
329
330- A longstanding bug in the parser module's initialization could cause
331 fatal internal refcount confusion when the module got initialized more
332 than once. This has been fixed.
333
Fred Drake01a43122003-07-21 17:17:10 +0000334- Fixed memory leak in pyexpat; using the parser's ParseFile() method
335 with open files that aren't instances of the standard file type
336 caused an instance of the bound .read() method to be leaked on every
337 call.
338
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000339- Fixed some leaks in the locale module.
340
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000341Library
342-------
343
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000344- Lib/encodings/rot_13.py when used as a script, now more properly
345 uses the first Python interpreter on your path.
346
347- Removed caching of TimeRE (and thus LocaleTime) in _strptime.py to
348 fix a locale related bug in the test suite. Although another patch
349 was needed to actually fix the problem, the cache code was not
350 restored.
351
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +0000352IDLE
353----
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000354
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +0000355- Calltips patches.
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000356
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000357Build
358-----
359
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000360- For MacOSX, added -mno-fused-madd to BASECFLAGS to fix test_coercion
361 on Panther (OSX 10.3).
362
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000363C API
364-----
365
366Windows
367-------
368
Tim Peters291f14e2003-07-22 02:50:01 +0000369- The tempfile module could do insane imports on Windows if PYTHONCASEOK
370 was set, making temp file creation impossible. Repaired.
371
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000372- Add a patch to workaround pthread_sigmask() bugs in Cygwin.
373
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000374Mac
375---
376
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000377- Various fixes to pimp.
378
379- Scripts runs with pythonw no longer had full window manager access.
380
381- Don't force boot-disk-only install, for reasons unknown it causes
382 more problems than it solves.
383
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000384
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000385What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 1?
386=============================================
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000387
Jeremy Hylton0ed18c22003-07-18 20:10:02 +0000388*Release date: 18-Jul-2003*
389
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000390Core and builtins
391-----------------
392
Tim Peterse5e065b2003-07-06 18:36:54 +0000393- The new function sys.getcheckinterval() returns the last value set
394 by sys.setcheckinterval().
395
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000396- Several bugs in the symbol table phase of the compiler have been
397 fixed. Errors could be lost and compilation could fail without
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000398 reporting an error. SF patch 763201.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000399
400- The interpreter is now more robust about importing the warnings
401 module. In an executable generated by freeze or similar programs,
402 earlier versions of 2.3 would fail if the warnings module could
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000403 not be found on the file system. Fixes SF bug 771097.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000404
405- A warning about assignments to module attributes that shadow
406 builtins, present in earlier releases of 2.3, has been removed.
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000407
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000408- It is not possible to create subclasses of builtin types like str
409 and tuple that define an itemsize. Earlier releases of Python 2.3
410 allowed this by mistake, leading to crashes and other problems.
411
412- The thread_id is now initialized to 0 in a non-thread build. SF bug
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000413 770247.
414
415- SF bug 762891: "del p[key]" on proxy object no longer raises SystemError.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000416
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000417Extension modules
418-----------------
419
420- weakref.proxy() can now handle "del obj[i]" for proxy objects
421 defining __delitem__. Formerly, it generated a SystemError.
422
423- SSL no longer crashes the interpreter when the remote side disconnects.
424
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +0000425- On Unix the mmap module can again be used to map device files.
426
Brett Cannon20def8b2003-07-01 05:16:08 +0000427- time.strptime now exclusively uses the Python implementation
428 contained within the _strptime module.
429
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000430- The print slot of weakref proxy objects was removed, because it was
431 not consistent with the object's repr slot.
432
433- The mmap module only checks file size for regular files, not
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000434 character or block devices. SF patch 708374.
435
436- The cPickle Pickler garbage collection support was fixed to traverse
437 the find_class attribute, if present.
438
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000439- There are several fixes for the bsddb3 wrapper module.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000440
441 bsddb3 no longer crashes if an environment is closed before a cursor
442 (SF bug 763298).
443
444 The DB and DBEnv set_get_returns_none function was extended to take
Barry Warsawd71a5512003-07-20 18:00:54 +0000445 a level instead of a boolean flag. The new level 2 means that in
446 addition, cursor.set()/.get() methods return None instead of raising
447 an exception.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000448
449 A typo was fixed in DBCursor.join_item(), preventing a crash.
450
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000451Library
452-------
453
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000454- distutils now supports MSVC 7.1
455
Raymond Hettinger71adf7e2003-07-16 19:25:22 +0000456- doctest now examines all docstrings by default. Previously, it would
457 skip over functions with private names (as indicated by the underscore
458 naming convention). The old default created too much of a risk that
459 user tests were being skipped inadvertently. Note, this change could
460 break code in the unlikely case that someone had intentionally put
461 failing tests in the docstrings of private functions. The breakage
462 is easily fixable by specifying the old behavior when calling testmod()
463 or Tester().
464
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000465- There were several fixes to the way dumbdbms are closed. It's vital
466 that a dumbdbm database be closed properly, else the on-disk data
467 and directory files can be left in mutually inconsistent states.
468 dumbdbm.py's _Database.__del__() method attempted to close the
469 database properly, but a shutdown race in _Database._commit() could
470 prevent this from working, so that a program trusting __del__() to
471 get the on-disk files in synch could be badly surprised. The race
472 has been repaired. A sync() method was also added so that shelve
473 can guarantee data is written to disk.
Tim Peters7a6c7332003-07-13 17:21:10 +0000474
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000475 The close() method can now be called more than once without complaint.
Tim Petersd7472ec2003-07-13 02:22:03 +0000476
Tim Peters59aba122003-07-01 20:01:55 +0000477- The classes in threading.py are now new-style classes. That they
478 weren't before was an oversight.
479
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000480- The urllib2 digest authentication handlers now define the correct
481 auth_header. The earlier versions would fail at runtime.
482
Neal Norwitze7dfe212003-07-01 14:59:46 +0000483- SF bug 763023: fix uncaught ZeroDivisionError in difflib ratio methods
484 when there are no lines.
485
Neal Norwitz3c0f2c92003-07-01 21:12:47 +0000486- SF bug 763637: fix exception in Tkinter with after_cancel
487 which could occur with Tk 8.4
488
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000489- SF bug 770601: CGIHTTPServer.py now passes the entire environment
490 to child processes.
491
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000492- SF bug 765238: add filter to fnmatch's __all__.
493
494- SF bug 748201: make time.strptime() error messages more helpful.
495
496- SF patch 764470: Do not dump the args attribute of a Fault object in
497 xmlrpclib.
498
499- SF patch 549151: urllib and urllib2 now redirect POSTs on 301
500 responses.
501
502- SF patch 766650: The whichdb module was fixed to recognize dbm files
503 generated by gdbm on OS/2 EMX.
504
505- SF bugs 763047 and 763052: fixes bug of timezone value being left as
506 -1 when ``time.tzname[0] == time.tzname[1] and not time.daylight``
507 is true when it should only when time.daylight is true.
508
509- SF bug 764548: re now allows subclasses of str and unicode to be
510 used as patterns.
511
512- SF bug 763637: In Tkinter, change after_cancel() to handle tuples
513 of varying sizes. Tk 8.4 returns a different number of values
514 than Tk 8.3.
515
516- SF bug 763023: difflib.ratio() did not catch zero division.
517
518- The Queue module now has an __all__ attribute.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000519
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000520Tools/Demos
521-----------
522
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000523- See Lib/idlelib/NEWS.txt for IDLE news.
524
Neal Norwitz592c4cc2003-07-01 04:14:28 +0000525- SF bug 753592: webchecker/wsgui now handles user supplied directories.
526
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000527- The trace.py script has been removed. It is now in the standard library.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000528
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000529Build
530-----
531
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000532- Python now compiles with -fno-strict-aliasing if possible (SF bug 766696).
533
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000534- The socket module compiles on IRIX 6.5.10.
535
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000536- An irix64 system is treated the same way as an irix6 system (SF
537 patch 764560).
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000538
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000539- Several definitions were missing on FreeBSD 5.x unless the
540 __BSD_VISIBLE symbol was defined. configure now defines it as
541 needed.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000542
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000543C API
544-----
545
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000546- Unicode objects now support mbcs as a built-in encoding, so the C
547 API can use it without deferring to the encodings package.
548
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000549Windows
550-------
551
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000552- The Windows implementation of PyThread_start_new_thread() never
553 checked error returns from Windows functions correctly. As a result,
554 it could claim to start a new thread even when the Microsoft
555 _beginthread() function failed (due to "too many threads" -- this is
556 on the order of thousands when it happens). In these cases, the
557 Python exception ::
558
559 thread.error: can't start new thread
560
561 is raised now.
562
563- SF bug 766669: Prevent a GPF on interpreter exit when sockets are in
564 use. The interpreter now calls WSACleanup() from Py_Finalize()
565 instead of from DLL teardown.
566
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000567Mac
568---
569
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000570- Bundlebuilder now inherits default values in the right way. It was
Walter Dörwald73a8a4b2003-07-30 12:14:02 +0000571 previously possible for app bundles to get a type of "BNDL" instead
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000572 of "APPL." Other improvements include, a --build-id option to
573 specify the CFBundleIdentifier and using the --python option to set
574 the executable in the bundle.
575
576- Fixed two bugs in MacOSX framework handling.
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000577
Jack Jansene0040412003-07-23 22:17:28 +0000578- pythonw did not allow user interaction in 2.3rc1, this has been fixed.
579
580- Python is now compiled with -mno-fused-madd, making all tests pass
581 on Panther.
582
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000583What's New in Python 2.3 beta 2?
584================================
585
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +0000586*Release date: 29-Jun-2003*
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000587
588Core and builtins
589-----------------
590
Barry Warsaw883f2232003-06-29 17:10:11 +0000591- A program can now set the environment variable PYTHONINSPECT to some
592 string value in Python, and cause the interpreter to enter the
593 interactive prompt at program exit, as if Python had been invoked
594 with the -i option.
595
Raymond Hettingerd05abde2003-06-17 05:05:49 +0000596- list.index() now accepts optional start and stop arguments. Similar
597 changes were made to UserList.index(). SF feature request 754014.
598
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +0000599- SF patch 751998 fixes an unwanted side effect of the previous fix
600 for SF bug 742860 (the next item).
601
Tim Peters50d8b8b2003-05-25 17:44:31 +0000602- SF bug 742860: "WeakKeyDictionary __delitem__ uses iterkeys". This
603 wasn't threadsafe, was very inefficient (expected time O(len(dict))
604 instead of O(1)), and could raise a spurious RuntimeError if another
605 thread mutated the dict during __delitem__, or if a comparison function
606 mutated it. It also neglected to raise KeyError when the key wasn't
607 present; didn't raise TypeError when the key wasn't of a weakly
608 referencable type; and broke various more-or-less obscure dict
609 invariants by using a sequence of equality comparisons over the whole
610 set of dict keys instead of computing the key's hash code to narrow
611 the search to those keys with the same hash code. All of these are
612 considered to be bugs. A new implementation of __delitem__ repairs all
613 that, but note that fixing these bugs may change visible behavior in
614 code relying (whether intentionally or accidentally) on old behavior.
Tim Peters886128f2003-05-25 01:45:11 +0000615
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000616- SF bug 734869: Fixed a compiler bug that caused a fatal error when
617 compiling a list comprehension that contained another list comprehension
618 embedded in a lambda expression.
619
Tim Peterse87568d2003-05-24 20:18:24 +0000620- SF bug 705231: builtin pow() no longer lets the platform C pow()
621 raise -1.0 to integer powers, because (at least) glibc gets it wrong
622 in some cases. The result should be -1.0 if the power is odd and 1.0
623 if the power is even, and any float with a sufficiently large exponent
624 is (mathematically) an exact even integer.
625
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000626- SF bug 759227: A new-style class that implements __nonzero__() must
627 return a bool or int (but not an int subclass) from that method. This
628 matches the restriction on classic classes.
629
Martin v. Löwis5467d4c2003-05-10 07:10:12 +0000630- The encoding attribute has been added for file objects, and set to
631 the terminal encoding on Unix and Windows.
632
Tim Peters015dd822003-05-04 04:16:52 +0000633- The softspace attribute of file objects became read-only by oversight.
634 It's writable again.
635
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +0000636- Reverted a 2.3 beta 1 change to iterators for subclasses of list and
637 tuple. By default, the iterators now access data elements directly
638 instead of going through __getitem__. If __getitem__ access is
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +0000639 preferred, then __iter__ can be overridden.
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +0000640
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000641- SF bug 735247: The staticmethod and super types participate in
642 garbage collection. Before this change, it was possible for leaks to
643 occur in functions with non-global free variables that used these types.
644
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000645Extension modules
646-----------------
647
Raymond Hettinger643bcec2003-06-29 03:29:42 +0000648- the socket module has a new exception, socket.timeout, to allow
649 timeouts to be handled separately from other socket errors.
650
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000651- SF bug 751276: cPickle has fixed to propagate exceptions raised in
652 user code. In earlier versions, cPickle caught and ignored any
653 exception when it performed operations that it expected to raise
654 specific exceptions like AttributeError.
655
656- cPickle Pickler and Unpickler objects now participate in garbage
657 collection.
658
Tim Peterscda32b72003-06-15 23:13:35 +0000659- mimetools.choose_boundary() could return duplicate strings at times,
660 especially likely on Windows. The strings returned are now guaranteed
661 unique within a single program run.
662
Brett Cannon4e64d782003-06-13 23:44:35 +0000663- thread.interrupt_main() raises KeyboardInterrupt in the main thread.
664 dummy_thread has also been modified to try to simulate the behavior.
665
Walter Dörwald9e46abe2003-05-18 03:15:10 +0000666- array.array.insert() now treats negative indices as being relative
667 to the end of the array, just like list.insert() does. (SF bug #739313)
668
Tim Petersb0c854d2003-05-17 15:57:00 +0000669- The datetime module classes datetime, time, and timedelta are now
670 properly subclassable.
Tim Petersa98924a2003-05-17 05:55:19 +0000671
Martin v. Löwis28e9ce92003-05-09 08:19:48 +0000672- _tkinter.{get|set}busywaitinterval was added.
673
Raymond Hettinger834f4632003-05-02 20:24:56 +0000674- itertools.islice() now accepts stop=None as documented.
675 Fixes SF bug #730685.
676
Skip Montanaro8c044d82003-05-06 20:42:37 +0000677- the bsddb185 module is built in one restricted instance -
678 /usr/include/db.h exists and defines HASHVERSION to be 2. This is true
679 for many BSD-derived systems.
680
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000681
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000682Library
683-------
684
Tim Petersdb3756d2003-06-29 05:30:48 +0000685- Some happy doctest extensions from Jim Fulton have been added to
686 doctest.py. These are already being used in Zope3. The two
687 primary ones:
688
689 doctest.debug(module, name) extracts the doctests from the named object
690 in the given module, puts them in a temp file, and starts pdb running
691 on that file. This is great when a doctest fails.
692
693 doctest.DocTestSuite(module=None) returns a synthesized unittest
694 TestSuite instance, to be run by the unittest framework, which
695 runs all the doctests in the module. This allows writing tests in
696 doctest style (which can be clearer and shorter than writing tests
697 in unittest style), without losing unittest's powerful testing
698 framework features (which doctest lacks).
699
Tim Peters6ebe61f2003-06-27 20:48:05 +0000700- For compatibility with doctests created before 2.3, if an expected
701 output block consists solely of "1" and the actual output block
702 consists solely of "True", it's accepted as a match; similarly
703 for "0" and "False". This is quite un-doctest-like, but is practical.
704 The behavior can be disabled by passing the new doctest module
705 constant DONT_ACCEPT_TRUE_FOR_1 to the new optionflags optional
706 argument.
707
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000708- ZipFile.testzip() now only traps BadZipfile exceptions. Previously,
709 a bare except caught to much and reported all errors as a problem
710 in the archive.
711
712- The logging module now has a new function, makeLogRecord() making
713 LogHandler easier to interact with DatagramHandler and SocketHandler.
714
Skip Montanaro364ca402003-06-17 12:58:31 +0000715- The cgitb module has been extended to support plain text display (SF patch
716 569574).
717
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +0000718- A brand new version of IDLE (from the IDLEfork project at
719 SourceForge) is now included as Lib/idlelib. The old Tools/idle is
720 no more.
721
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000722- Added a new module: trace (documentation missing). This module used
723 to be distributed in Tools/scripts. It uses sys.settrace() to trace
724 code execution -- either function calls or individual lines. It can
725 generate tracing output during execution or a post-mortem report of
726 code coverage.
727
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +0000728- The threading module has new functions settrace() and setprofile()
729 that cooperate with the functions of the same name in the sys
730 module. A function registered with the threading module will
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000731 be used for all threads it creates. The new trace module uses this
732 to provide tracing for code running in threads.
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +0000733
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +0000734- copy.py: applied SF patch 707900, fixing bug 702858, by Steven
735 Taschuk. Copying a new-style class that had a reference to itself
736 didn't work. (The same thing worked fine for old-style classes.)
Martin v. Löwisba8f5ff2003-06-14 07:10:06 +0000737 Builtin functions are now treated as atomic, fixing bug #746304.
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +0000738
Raymond Hettingerc24d7672003-06-08 19:42:33 +0000739- difflib.py has two new functions: context_diff() and unified_diff().
740
Guido van Rossumfa19f7c2003-05-16 01:46:51 +0000741- More fixes to urllib (SF 549151): (a) When redirecting, always use
742 GET. This is common practice and more-or-less sanctioned by the
743 HTTP standard. (b) Add a handler for 307 redirection, which becomes
744 an error for POST, but a regular redirect for GET and HEAD
745
Guido van Rossumbf1bef82003-05-13 18:01:19 +0000746- Added optional 'onerror' argument to os.walk(), to control error
747 handling.
748
Martin v. Löwise59e2ba2003-05-03 09:09:02 +0000749- inspect.is{method|data}descriptor was added, to allow pydoc display
750 __doc__ of data descriptors.
751
Skip Montanaro4a7751c2003-04-29 21:07:16 +0000752- Fixed socket speed loss caused by use of the _socketobject wrapper class
753 in socket.py.
754
Raymond Hettinger22952a32003-05-20 04:59:56 +0000755- timeit.py now checks the current directory for imports.
756
Gustavo Niemeyer9556fba2003-06-07 17:53:08 +0000757- urllib2.py now knows how to order proxy classes, so the user doesn't
758 have to insert it in front of other classes, nor do dirty tricks like
759 inserting a "dummy" HTTPHandler after a ProxyHandler when building an
760 opener with proxy support.
761
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +0000762- Iterators have been added for dbm keys.
763
764- random.Random objects can now be pickled.
765
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000766Tools/Demos
767-----------
768
Martin v. Löwisb8c084e2003-06-14 09:03:46 +0000769- pydoc now offers help on keywords and topics.
770
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +0000771- Tools/idle is gone; long live Lib/idlelib.
772
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +0000773- diff.py prints file diffs in context, unified, or ndiff formats,
774 providing a command line interface to difflib.py.
Raymond Hettinger2f3c74a2003-06-08 23:10:15 +0000775
Raymond Hettinger71e00332003-05-10 03:30:13 +0000776- texcheck.py is a new script for making a rough validation of Python LaTeX
777 files.
778
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000779Build
780-----
781
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +0000782- Setting DESTDIR during 'make install' now allows specifying a
Martin v. Löwis3b8ee082003-05-11 20:25:35 +0000783 different root directory.
784
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000785C API
786-----
787
Tim Peters3cfe7542003-05-21 21:29:48 +0000788- PyType_Ready(): If a type declares that it participates in gc
789 (Py_TPFLAGS_HAVE_GC), and its base class does not, and its base class's
790 tp_free slot is the default _PyObject_Del, and type does not define
791 a tp_free slot itself, _PyObject_GC_Del is assigned to type->tp_free.
792 Previously _PyObject_Del was inherited, which could at best lead to a
793 segfault. In addition, if even after this magic the type's tp_free
794 slot is _PyObject_Del or NULL, and the type is a base type
795 (Py_TPFLAGS_BASETYPE), TypeError is raised: since the type is a base
796 type, its dealloc function must call type->tp_free, and since the type
797 is gc'able, tp_free must not be NULL or _PyObject_Del.
798
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +0000799- PyThreadState_SetAsyncExc(): A new API (deliberately accessible only
800 from C) to interrupt a thread by sending it an exception. It is
801 intentional that you have to write your own C extension to call it
802 from Python.
803
804
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000805New platforms
806-------------
807
808None this time.
809
810Tests
811-----
812
813- test_imp rewritten so that it doesn't raise RuntimeError if run as a
814 side effect of being imported ("import test.autotest").
815
816Windows
817-------
818
Tim Petersfaa697a2003-06-22 01:42:20 +0000819- The Windows installer ships with Tcl/Tk 8.4.3 (upgraded from 8.4.1).
820
Tim Petersc4607da2003-05-08 18:13:59 +0000821- The installer always suggested that Python be installed on the C:
822 drive, due to a hardcoded "C:" generated by the Wise installation
823 wizard. People with machines where C: is not the system drive
824 usually want Python installed on whichever drive is their system drive
825 instead. We removed the hardcoded "C:", and two testers on machines
826 where C: is not the system drive report that the installer now
827 suggests their system drive. Note that you can always select the
828 directory you want in the "Select Destination Directory" dialog --
829 that's what it's for.
830
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000831Mac
832---
833
Just van Rossum99bc1fc2003-05-09 15:01:25 +0000834- There's a new module called "autoGIL", which offers a mechanism to
835 automatically release the Global Interpreter Lock when an event loop
836 goes to sleep, allowing other threads to run. It's currently only
837 supported on OSX, in the Mach-O version.
Jack Jansenf5e23ff2003-06-16 13:53:40 +0000838- The OSA modules now allow direct access to properties of the
839 toplevel application class (in AppleScript terminology).
840- The Package Manager can now update itself.
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000841
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +0000842SourceForge Bugs and Patches Applied
843------------------------------------
844
845430160, 471893, 501716, 542562, 549151, 569574, 595837, 596434,
846598163, 604210, 604716, 610332, 612627, 614770, 620190, 621891,
847622042, 639139, 640236, 644345, 649742, 649742, 658233, 660022,
848661318, 661676, 662807, 662923, 666219, 672855, 678325, 682347,
849683486, 684981, 685773, 686254, 692776, 692959, 693094, 696777,
850697989, 700827, 703666, 708495, 708604, 708901, 710733, 711902,
851713722, 715782, 718286, 719359, 719367, 723136, 723831, 723962,
852724588, 724767, 724767, 725942, 726150, 726446, 726869, 727051,
853727719, 727719, 727805, 728277, 728563, 728656, 729096, 729103,
854729293, 729297, 729300, 729317, 729395, 729622, 729817, 730170,
855730296, 730594, 730685, 730826, 730963, 731209, 731403, 731504,
856731514, 731626, 731635, 731643, 731644, 731644, 731689, 732124,
857732143, 732234, 732284, 732284, 732479, 732761, 732783, 732951,
858733667, 733781, 734118, 734231, 734869, 735051, 735293, 735527,
859735613, 735694, 736962, 736962, 737970, 738066, 739313, 740055,
860740234, 740301, 741806, 742126, 742741, 742860, 742860, 742911,
861744041, 744104, 744238, 744687, 744877, 745055, 745478, 745525,
862745620, 746012, 746304, 746366, 746801, 746953, 747348, 747667,
863747954, 748846, 748849, 748973, 748975, 749191, 749210, 749759,
864749831, 749911, 750008, 750092, 750542, 750595, 751038, 751107,
865751276, 751451, 751916, 751941, 751956, 751998, 752671, 753451,
866753602, 753617, 753845, 753925, 754014, 754340, 754447, 755031,
867755087, 755147, 755245, 755683, 755987, 756032, 756996, 757058,
868757229, 757818, 757821, 757822, 758112, 758910, 759227, 759889,
869760257, 760703, 760792, 761104, 761337, 761519, 761830, 762455
870
871
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000872What's New in Python 2.3 beta 1?
873================================
874
Guido van Rossumfa1eddf2003-04-25 19:19:52 +0000875*Release date: 25-Apr-2003*
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000876
877Core and builtins
878-----------------
879
Thomas Heller5eccabc2003-04-23 19:35:25 +0000880- New format codes B, H, I, k and K have been implemented for
881 PyArg_ParseTuple and PyBuild_Value.
882
Alex Martellia70b1912003-04-22 08:12:33 +0000883- New builtin function sum(seq, start=0) returns the sum of all the
884 items in iterable object seq, plus start (items are normally numbers,
885 and cannot be strings).
886
Guido van Rossumaa86e352003-04-19 18:15:10 +0000887- bool() called without arguments now returns False rather than
888 raising an exception. This is consistent with calling the
889 constructors for the other builtin types -- called without argument
890 they all return the false value of that type. (SF patch #724135)
891
Guido van Rossumcf8d2852003-04-17 16:53:26 +0000892- In support of PEP 269 (making the pgen parser generator accessible
893 from Python), some changes to the pgen code structure were made; a
894 few files that used to be linked only with pgen are now linked with
895 Python itself.
896
Guido van Rossumc1f6e8c2003-04-16 21:13:23 +0000897- The repr() of a weakref object now shows the __name__ attribute of
898 the referenced object, if it has one.
899
Guido van Rossum76ba09f2003-04-16 19:40:58 +0000900- super() no longer ignores data descriptors, except __class__. See
901 the thread started at
902 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2003-April/034338.html
903
Guido van Rossum3a3cca52003-04-14 20:58:14 +0000904- list.insert(i, x) now interprets negative i as it would be
905 interpreted by slicing, so negative values count from the end of the
906 list. This was the only place where such an interpretation was not
907 placed on a list index.
908
Guido van Rossumefbbb1c2003-04-11 18:43:06 +0000909- range() now works even if the arguments are longs with magnitude
910 larger than sys.maxint, as long as the total length of the sequence
911 fits. E.g., range(2**100, 2**101, 2**100) is the following list:
912 [1267650600228229401496703205376L]. (SF patch #707427.)
913
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +0000914- Some horridly obscure problems were fixed involving interaction
915 between garbage collection and old-style classes with "ambitious"
916 getattr hooks. If an old-style instance didn't have a __del__ method,
917 but did have a __getattr__ hook, and the instance became reachable
918 only from an unreachable cycle, and the hook resurrected or deleted
919 unreachable objects when asked to resolve "__del__", anything up to
920 a segfault could happen. That's been repaired.
921
Raymond Hettingera3e1e4c2003-03-06 23:54:28 +0000922- dict.pop now takes an optional argument specifying a default
923 value to return if the key is not in the dict. If a default is not
924 given and the key is not found, a KeyError will still be raised.
925 Parallel changes were made to UserDict.UserDict and UserDict.DictMixin.
926 [SF patch #693753] (contributed by Michael Stone.)
927
Martin v. Löwis73d538b2003-03-05 15:13:47 +0000928- sys.getfilesystemencoding() was added to expose
929 Py_FileSystemDefaultEncoding.
Guido van Rossum46d3dc32003-03-01 03:20:41 +0000930
931- New function sys.exc_clear() clears the current exception. This is
932 rarely needed, but can sometimes be useful to release objects
933 referenced by the traceback held in sys.exc_info()[2]. (SF patch
934 #693195.)
935
Neal Norwitzd5a65a72003-02-23 23:11:41 +0000936- On 64-bit systems, a dictionary could contain duplicate long/int keys
937 if the key value was larger than 2**32. See SF bug #689659.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000938
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +0000939- Fixed SF bug #663074. The codec system was using global static
Walter Dörwaldfa86bf52003-03-31 16:15:13 +0000940 variables to store internal data. As a result, any attempts to use the
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +0000941 unicode system with multiple active interpreters, or successive
942 interpreter executions, would fail.
943
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +0000944- "%c" % u"a" now returns a unicode string instead of raising a
Walter Dörwald44f527f2003-04-02 16:37:24 +0000945 TypeError. u"%c" % 0xffffffff now raises a OverflowError instead
Walter Dörwald1e469c52003-04-02 16:57:59 +0000946 of a ValueError to be consistent with "%c" % 256. See SF patch #710127.
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +0000947
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000948Extension modules
949-----------------
950
Guido van Rossume7adda92003-04-25 05:52:37 +0000951- The socket module now provides the functions inet_pton and inet_ntop
952 for converting between string and packed representation of IP
953 addresses. There is also a new module variable, has_ipv6, which is
954 True iff the current Python has IPv6 support. See SF patch #658327.
955
Martin v. Löwisbfe175c2003-04-16 19:42:51 +0000956- Tkinter wrappers around Tcl variables now pass objects directly
957 to Tcl, instead of first converting them to strings.
958
Guido van Rossum41c99e72003-04-14 17:59:34 +0000959- The .*? pattern in the re module is now special-cased to avoid the
960 recursion limit. (SF patch #720991 -- many thanks to Gary Herron
961 and Greg Chapman.)
962
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +0000963- New function sys.call_tracing() allows pdb to debug code
964 recursively.
965
Tim Peters730f5532003-04-08 17:17:17 +0000966- New function gc.get_referents(obj) returns a list of objects
Tim Peters0f81ab62003-04-08 16:39:48 +0000967 directly referenced by obj. In effect, it exposes what the object's
968 tp_traverse slot does, and can be helpful when debugging memory
969 leaks.
970
Martin v. Löwis7fb697b2003-04-03 04:49:12 +0000971- The iconv module has been removed from this release.
972
Tim Petersd50ade62003-03-20 18:32:13 +0000973- The platform-independent routines for packing floats in IEEE formats
974 (struct.pack's <f, >f, <d, and >d codes; pickle and cPickle's protocol 1
975 pickling of floats) ignored that rounding can cause a carry to
976 propagate. The worst consequence was that, in rare cases, <f and >f
977 could produce strings that, when unpacked again, were a factor of 2
978 away from the original float. This has been fixed. See SF bug
979 #705836.
980
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +0000981- New function time.tzset() provides access to the C library tzset()
Guido van Rossumd11b62e2003-03-14 21:51:36 +0000982 function, if supported. (SF patch #675422.)
983
Neal Norwitz12e22172003-03-03 21:16:39 +0000984- Using createfilehandler, deletefilehandler, createtimerhandler functions
985 on Tkinter.tkinter (_tkinter module) no longer crashes the interpreter.
986 See SF bug #692416.
987
Michael W. Hudsonf0089982003-03-03 12:29:42 +0000988- Modified the fcntl.ioctl() function to allow modification of a passed
989 mutable buffer (for details see the reference documentation).
990
Raymond Hettinger61fe64d2003-02-23 04:40:07 +0000991- Made user requested changes to the itertools module.
992 Subsumed the times() function into repeat().
993 Added chain() and cycle().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000994
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +0000995- The rotor module is now deprecated; the encryption algorithm it uses
Andrew M. Kuchlingfb5f4852003-04-24 13:19:56 +0000996 is not believed to be secure, and including crypto code with Python
997 has implications for exporting and importing it in various countries.
998
Skip Montanaro89feabc2003-03-30 04:54:24 +0000999- The socket module now always uses the _socketobject wrapper class, even on
1000 platforms which have dup(2). The makefile() method is built directly
1001 on top of the socket without duplicating the file descriptor, allowing
1002 timeouts to work properly.
1003
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001004Library
1005-------
1006
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00001007- New generator function os.walk() is an easy-to-use alternative to
1008 os.path.walk(). See os module docs for details. os.path.walk()
1009 isn't deprecated at this time, but may become deprecated in a
1010 future release.
1011
Marc-André Lemburg246d8472003-04-24 11:36:11 +00001012- Added new module "platform" which provides a wide range of tools
1013 for querying platform dependent features.
1014
Andrew M. Kuchling4e42b312003-04-24 16:45:05 +00001015- netrc now allows ASCII punctuation characters in passwords.
Raymond Hettinger1d877862003-04-23 19:06:08 +00001016
Martin v. Löwis153c9e42003-04-19 20:59:03 +00001017- shelve now supports the optional writeback argument, and exposes
1018 pickle protocol versions.
1019
Guido van Rossuma2685402003-04-19 18:04:57 +00001020- Several methods of nntplib.NNTP have grown an optional file argument
1021 which specifies a file where to divert the command's output
1022 (already supported by the body() method). (SF patch #720468)
1023
Martin v. Löwis281b2c62003-04-18 21:04:39 +00001024- The self-documenting XML server library DocXMLRPCServer was added.
1025
Martin v. Löwis2548c732003-04-18 10:39:54 +00001026- Support for internationalized domain names has been added through
1027 the 'idna' and 'punycode' encodings, the 'stringprep' module, the
1028 'mkstringprep' tool, and enhancements to the socket and httplib
1029 modules.
1030
Walter Dörwald5688b7a2003-04-16 09:46:13 +00001031- htmlentitydefs has two new dictionaries: name2codepoint maps
1032 HTML entity names to Unicode codepoints (as integers).
1033 codepoint2name is the reverse mapping. See SF patch #722017.
1034
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00001035- pdb has a new command, "debug", which lets you step through
1036 arbitrary code from the debugger's (pdb) prompt.
1037
Raymond Hettingerc377cbf2003-04-04 22:56:42 +00001038- unittest.failUnlessEqual and its equivalent unittest.assertEqual now
1039 return 'not a == b' rather than 'a != b'. This gives the desired
1040 result for classes that define __eq__ without defining __ne__.
1041
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001042- sgmllib now supports SGML marked sections, in particular the
Martin v. Löwis3163a3b2003-03-30 14:25:40 +00001043 MS Office extensions.
1044
Raymond Hettinger42182eb2003-03-09 05:33:33 +00001045- The urllib module now offers support for the iterator protocol.
1046 SF patch 698520 contributed by Brett Cannon.
1047
Guido van Rossum9589a252003-03-06 01:56:12 +00001048- New module timeit provides a simple framework for timing the
1049 execution speed of expressions and statements.
1050
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001051- sets.Set objects now support mixed-type __eq__ and __ne__, instead
1052 of raising TypeError. If x is a Set object and y is a non-Set object,
1053 x == y is False, and x != y is True. This is akin to the change made
1054 for mixed-type comparisons of datetime objects in 2.3a2; more info
1055 about the rationale is in the NEWS entry for that. See also SF bug
1056 report <http://www.python.org/sf/693121>.
1057
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00001058- On Unix platforms, if os.listdir() is called with a Unicode argument,
1059 it now returns Unicode strings. (This behavior was added earlier
1060 to the Windows NT/2k/XP version of os.listdir().)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001061
Andrew M. Kuchling6f177d42003-02-28 22:09:33 +00001062- Distutils: both 'py_modules' and 'packages' keywords can now be specified
1063 in core.setup(). Previously you could supply one or the other, but
1064 not both of them. (SF patch #695090 from Bernhard Herzog)
1065
Skip Montanaro64a839e2003-03-20 23:36:55 +00001066- New csv package makes it easy to read/write CSV files.
1067
Gustavo Niemeyer68d8cef2003-04-17 21:31:33 +00001068- Module shlex has been extended to allow posix-like shell parsings,
1069 including a split() function for easy spliting of quoted strings and
1070 commands. An iterator interface was also implemented.
1071
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001072Tools/Demos
1073-----------
1074
Tim Peters21d7d4d2003-04-18 00:45:59 +00001075- New script combinerefs.py helps analyze new PYTHONDUMPREFS output.
1076 See the module docstring for details.
1077
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001078Build
1079-----
1080
Neal Norwitz35892b92003-02-23 23:45:35 +00001081- Fix problem building on OSF1 because the compiler only accepted
1082 preprocessor directives that start in column 1. (SF bug #691793.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001083
1084C API
1085-----
1086
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00001087- Added PyGC_Collect(), equivalent to calling gc.collect().
1088
Guido van Rossum0fc8f002003-04-15 15:12:39 +00001089- PyThreadState_GetDict() was changed not to raise an exception or
1090 issue a fatal error when no current thread state is available. This
1091 makes it possible to print dictionaries when no thread is active.
1092
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00001093- LONG_LONG was renamed to PY_LONG_LONG. Extensions that use this and
1094 need compatibility with previous versions can use this:
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00001095
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00001096 #ifndef PY_LONG_LONG
1097 #define PY_LONG_LONG LONG_LONG
1098 #endif
Martin v. Löwisb9a0f912003-03-29 10:06:18 +00001099
Raymond Hettinger1da1dbf2003-03-17 19:46:11 +00001100- Added PyObject_SelfIter() to fill the tp_iter slot for the
Raymond Hettinger01538262003-03-17 08:24:35 +00001101 typical case where the method returns its self argument.
1102
Guido van Rossume5c691a2003-03-07 15:13:17 +00001103- The extended type structure used for heap types (new-style
1104 classes defined by Python code using a class statement) is now
1105 exported from object.h as PyHeapTypeObject. (SF patch #696193.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001106
1107New platforms
1108-------------
1109
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00001110None this time.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001111
1112Tests
1113-----
1114
Neal Norwitz55b61d22003-02-28 19:57:03 +00001115- test_timeout now requires -u network to be passed to regrtest to run.
1116 See SF bug #692988.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001117
1118Windows
1119-------
1120
Tim Peters11b23062003-04-23 02:39:17 +00001121- os.fsync() now exists on Windows, and calls the Microsoft _commit()
1122 function.
1123
Guido van Rossumf4050642003-04-09 19:39:06 +00001124- New function winsound.MessageBeep() wraps the Win32 API
1125 MessageBeep().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001126
1127Mac
1128---
1129
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00001130- os.listdir() now returns Unicode strings on MacOS X when called with
1131 a Unicode argument. See the general news item under "Library".
Just van Rossum46c97842003-02-25 21:42:15 +00001132
Jack Jansendeac2ac2003-02-24 11:04:17 +00001133- A new method MacOS.WMAvailable() returns true if it is safe to access
1134 the window manager, false otherwise.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001135
Jack Jansencf76be02003-03-24 12:13:54 +00001136- EasyDialogs dialogs are now movable-modal, and if the application is
1137 currently in the background they will ask to be moved to the foreground
1138 before displaying.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001139
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00001140- OSA Scripting support has improved a lot, and gensuitemodule.py can now
Jack Jansende354b72003-04-11 15:37:20 +00001141 be used by mere mortals. The documentation is now also more or less
1142 complete.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001143
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00001144- The IDE (in a framework build) now includes introductory documentation
1145 in Apple Help Viewer format.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001146
1147
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001148What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 2?
1149=================================
1150
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00001151*Release date: 19-Feb-2003*
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001152
1153Core and builtins
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00001154-----------------
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001155
Walter Dörwald2ffec022003-02-19 16:34:11 +00001156- Negative positions returned from PEP 293 error callbacks are now
1157 treated as being relative to the end of the input string. Positions
1158 that are out of bounds raise an IndexError.
1159
Guido van Rossum162e38c2003-02-19 15:25:10 +00001160- sys.path[0] (the directory from which the script is loaded) is now
1161 turned into an absolute pathname, unless it is the empty string.
1162 (SF patch #664376.)
1163
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00001164- Finally fixed the bug in compile() and exec where a string ending
1165 with an indented code block but no newline would raise SyntaxError.
1166 This would have been a four-line change in parsetok.c... Except
1167 codeop.py depends on this behavior, so a compilation flag had to be
1168 invented that causes the tokenizer to revert to the old behavior;
1169 this required extra changes to 2 .h files, 2 .c files, and 2 .py
Guido van Rossum1442dc12003-02-13 22:19:20 +00001170 files. (Fixes SF bug #501622.)
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00001171
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00001172- If a new-style class defines neither __new__ nor __init__, its
1173 constructor would ignore all arguments. This is changed now: the
1174 constructor refuses arguments in this case. This might break code
1175 that worked under Python 2.2. The simplest fix is to add a no-op
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001176 __init__: ``def __init__(self, *args, **kw): pass``.
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00001177
Guido van Rossum48035eb2003-02-12 17:05:26 +00001178- Through a bytecode optimizer bug (and I bet you didn't even know
1179 Python *had* a bytecode optimizer :-), "unsigned" hex/oct constants
1180 with a leading minus sign would come out with the wrong sign.
1181 ("Unsigned" hex/oct constants are those with a face value in the
1182 range sys.maxint+1 through sys.maxint*2+1, inclusive; these have
1183 always been interpreted as negative numbers through sign folding.)
1184 E.g. 0xffffffff is -1, and -(0xffffffff) is 1, but -0xffffffff would
1185 come out as -4294967295. This was the case in Python 2.2 through
1186 2.2.2 and 2.3a1, and in Python 2.4 it will once again have that
1187 value, but according to PEP 237 it really needs to be 1 now. This
1188 will be backported to Python 2.2.3 a well. (SF #660455)
1189
Guido van Rossum47710652003-02-12 20:48:22 +00001190- int(s, base) sometimes sign-folds hex and oct constants; it only
1191 does this when base is 0 and s.strip() starts with a '0'. When the
1192 sign is actually folded, as in int("0xffffffff", 0) on a 32-bit
1193 machine, which returns -1, a FutureWarning is now issued; in Python
1194 2.4, this will return 4294967295L, as do int("+0xffffffff", 0) and
1195 int("0xffffffff", 16) right now. (PEP 347)
1196
Guido van Rossuma89d10e2003-02-12 03:58:38 +00001197- super(X, x): x may now be a proxy for an X instance, i.e.
1198 issubclass(x.__class__, X) but not issubclass(type(x), X).
1199
Guido van Rossum03bc7d32003-02-12 03:32:58 +00001200- isinstance(x, X): if X is a new-style class, this is now equivalent
1201 to issubclass(type(x), X) or issubclass(x.__class__, X). Previously
1202 only type(x) was tested. (For classic classes this was already the
1203 case.)
1204
Just van Rossum73ffb4a2003-02-10 09:57:08 +00001205- compile(), eval() and the exec statement now fully support source code
1206 passed as unicode strings.
1207
Neal Norwitzde8b94c2003-02-10 02:12:43 +00001208- int subclasses can be initialized with longs if the value fits in an int.
1209 See SF bug #683467.
1210
Tim Petersbf2674b2003-02-02 07:51:32 +00001211- long(string, base) takes time linear in len(string) when base is a power
1212 of 2 now. It used to take time quadratic in len(string).
1213
Martin v. Löwis8afd7572003-01-25 22:46:11 +00001214- filter returns now Unicode results for Unicode arguments.
1215
Martin v. Löwisaf6a27a2003-01-03 19:16:14 +00001216- raw_input can now return Unicode objects.
1217
Skip Montanaro4abd5f02003-01-02 20:51:08 +00001218- List objects' sort() method now accepts None as the comparison function.
1219 Passing None is semantically identical to calling sort() with no
1220 arguments.
1221
Neal Norwitz1a997502003-01-13 20:13:12 +00001222- Fixed crash when printing a subclass of str and __str__ returned self.
1223 See SF bug #667147.
1224
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00001225- Fixed an invalid RuntimeWarning and an undetected error when trying
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00001226 to convert a long integer into a float which couldn't fit.
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00001227 See SF bug #676155.
1228
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00001229- Function objects now have a __module__ attribute that is bound to
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00001230 the name of the module in which the function was defined. This
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00001231 applies for C functions and methods as well as functions and methods
1232 defined in Python. This attribute is used by pickle.whichmodule(),
1233 which changes the behavior of whichmodule slightly. In Python 2.2
1234 whichmodule() returns "__main__" for functions that are not defined
1235 at the top-level of a module (examples: methods, nested functions).
1236 Now whichmodule() will return the proper module name.
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00001237
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001238Extension modules
1239-----------------
1240
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00001241- operator.isNumberType() now checks that the object has a nb_int or
1242 nb_float slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
1243 tp_as_number pointer.
1244
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00001245- The imp module now has ways to acquire and release the "import
1246 lock": imp.acquire_lock() and imp.release_lock(). Note: this is a
1247 reentrant lock, so releasing the lock only truly releases it when
1248 this is the last release_lock() call. You can check with
1249 imp.lock_held(). (SF bug #580952 and patch #683257.)
1250
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001251- Change to cPickle to match pickle.py (see below and PEP 307).
1252
Neal Norwitz9caf9c02003-02-10 01:54:06 +00001253- Fix some bugs in the parser module. SF bug #678518.
1254
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00001255- Thanks to Scott David Daniels, a subtle bug in how the zlib
Walter Dörwald28d81962003-02-03 20:53:14 +00001256 extension implemented flush() was fixed. Scott also rewrote the
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00001257 zlib test suite using the unittest module. (SF bug #640230 and
1258 patch #678531.)
1259
Raymond Hettinger96ef8112003-02-01 00:10:11 +00001260- Added an itertools module containing high speed, memory efficient
1261 looping constructs inspired by tools from Haskell and SML.
1262
Guido van Rossum99d4abf2003-01-27 22:22:50 +00001263- The SSL module now handles sockets with a timeout set correctly (SF
1264 patch #675750, fixing SF bug #675552).
1265
Barry Warsawf8ba39c2003-01-07 20:55:26 +00001266- os/posixmodule has grown the sysexits.h constants (EX_OK and friends).
1267
Guido van Rossum6d0d3652003-01-07 20:34:19 +00001268- Fixed broken threadstate swap in readline that could cause fatal
1269 errors when a readline hook was being invoked while a background
1270 thread was active. (SF bugs #660476 and #513033.)
1271
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001272- fcntl now exposes the strops.h I_* constants.
1273
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00001274- Fix a crash on Solaris that occurred when calling close() on
1275 an mmap'ed file which was already closed. (SF patch #665913)
1276
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001277- Fixed several serious bugs in the zipimport implementation.
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001278
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00001279- datetime changes:
1280
Guido van Rossum8b7a9a32003-04-14 22:01:58 +00001281 The date class is now properly subclassable. (SF bug #720908)
1282
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00001283 The datetime and datetimetz classes have been collapsed into a single
1284 datetime class, and likewise the time and timetz classes into a single
1285 time class. Previously, a datetimetz object with tzinfo=None acted
1286 exactly like a datetime object, and similarly for timetz. This wasn't
1287 enough of a difference to justify distinct classes, and life is simpler
1288 now.
1289
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00001290 today() and now() now round system timestamps to the closest
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00001291 microsecond <http://www.python.org/sf/661086>. This repairs an
1292 irritation most likely seen on Windows systems.
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00001293
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00001294 In dt.astimezone(tz), if tz.utcoffset(dt) returns a duration,
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00001295 ValueError is raised if tz.dst(dt) returns None (2.3a1 treated it
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00001296 as 0 instead, but a tzinfo subclass wishing to participate in
1297 time zone conversion has to take a stand on whether it supports
1298 DST; if you don't care about DST, then code dst() to return 0 minutes,
1299 meaning that DST is never in effect).
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00001300
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00001301 The tzinfo methods utcoffset() and dst() must return a timedelta object
1302 (or None) now. In 2.3a1 they could also return an int or long, but that
1303 was an unhelpfully redundant leftover from an earlier version wherein
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00001304 they couldn't return a timedelta. TOOWTDI.
1305
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00001306 The example tzinfo class for local time had a bug. It was replaced
1307 by a later example coded by Guido.
1308
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00001309 datetime.astimezone(tz) no longer raises an exception when the
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00001310 input datetime has no UTC equivalent in tz. For typical "hybrid" time
1311 zones (a single tzinfo subclass modeling both standard and daylight
1312 time), this case can arise one hour per year, at the hour daylight time
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00001313 ends. See new docs for details. In short, the new behavior mimics
1314 the local wall clock's behavior of repeating an hour in local time.
1315
1316 dt.astimezone() can no longer be used to convert between naive and aware
1317 datetime objects. If you merely want to attach, or remove, a tzinfo
1318 object, without any conversion of date and time members, use
1319 dt.replace(tzinfo=whatever) instead, where "whatever" is None or a
1320 tzinfo subclass instance.
1321
1322 A new method tzinfo.fromutc(dt) can be overridden in tzinfo subclasses
1323 to give complete control over how a UTC time is to be converted to
1324 a local time. The default astimezone() implementation calls fromutc()
1325 as its last step, so a tzinfo subclass can affect that too by overriding
1326 fromutc(). It's expected that the default fromutc() implementation will
1327 be suitable as-is for "almost all" time zone subclasses, but the
1328 creativity of political time zone fiddling appears unbounded -- fromutc()
1329 allows the highly motivated to emulate any scheme expressible in Python.
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00001330
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00001331 datetime.now(): The optional tzinfo argument was undocumented (that's
1332 repaired), and its name was changed to tz ("tzinfo" is overloaded enough
1333 already). With a tz argument, now(tz) used to return the local date
1334 and time, and attach tz to it, without any conversion of date and time
1335 members. This was less than useful. Now now(tz) returns the current
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001336 date and time as local time in tz's time zone, akin to ::
1337
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00001338 tz.fromutc(datetime.utcnow().replace(tzinfo=utc))
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001339
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00001340 where "utc" is an instance of a tzinfo subclass modeling UTC. Without
1341 a tz argument, now() continues to return the current local date and time,
1342 as a naive datetime object.
1343
Tim Peters2a44a8d2003-01-23 20:53:10 +00001344 datetime.fromtimestamp(): Like datetime.now() above, this had less than
1345 useful behavior when the optional tinzo argument was specified. See
1346 also SF bug report <http://www.python.org/sf/660872>.
1347
Tim Peters8d81a012003-01-24 22:36:34 +00001348 date and datetime comparison: In order to prevent comparison from
1349 falling back to the default compare-object-addresses strategy, these
1350 raised TypeError whenever they didn't understand the other object type.
1351 They still do, except when the other object has a "timetuple" attribute,
1352 in which case they return NotImplemented now. This gives other
1353 datetime objects (e.g., mxDateTime) a chance to intercept the
1354 comparison.
1355
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00001356 date, time, datetime and timedelta comparison: When the exception
1357 for mixed-type comparisons in the last paragraph doesn't apply, if
1358 the comparison is == then False is returned, and if the comparison is
1359 != then True is returned. Because dict lookup and the "in" operator
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001360 only invoke __eq__, this allows, for example, ::
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00001361
1362 if some_datetime in some_sequence:
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001363
1364 and ::
1365
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00001366 some_dict[some_timedelta] = whatever
1367
1368 to work as expected, without raising TypeError just because the
1369 sequence is heterogeneous, or the dict has mixed-type keys. [This
1370 seems like a good idea to implement for all mixed-type comparisons
1371 that don't want to allow falling back to address comparison.]
1372
Tim Peters75a6e3b2003-01-04 18:17:36 +00001373 The constructors building a datetime from a timestamp could raise
1374 ValueError if the platform C localtime()/gmtime() inserted "leap
1375 seconds". Leap seconds are ignored now. On such platforms, it's
1376 possible to have timestamps that differ by a second, yet where
1377 datetimes constructed from them are equal.
1378
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00001379 The pickle format of date, time and datetime objects has changed
1380 completely. The undocumented pickler and unpickler functions no
Tim Petersb57f8f02003-02-01 02:54:15 +00001381 longer exist. The undocumented __setstate__() and __getstate__()
1382 methods no longer exist either.
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00001383
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001384Library
1385-------
1386
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001387- The logging module was updated slightly; the WARN level was renamed
1388 to WARNING, and the matching function/method warn() to warning().
1389
1390- The pickle and cPickle modules were updated with a new pickling
1391 protocol (documented by pickletools.py, see below) and several
1392 extensions to the pickle customization API (__reduce__, __setstate__
1393 etc.). The copy module now uses more of the pickle customization
1394 API to copy objects that don't implement __copy__ or __deepcopy__.
1395 See PEP 307 for details.
1396
1397- The distutils "register" command now uses http://www.python.org/pypi
1398 as the default repository. (See PEP 301.)
1399
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00001400- the platform dependent path related variables sep, altsep, extsep,
1401 pathsep, curdir, pardir and defpath are now defined in the platform
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00001402 dependent path modules (e.g. ntpath.py) rather than os.py, so these
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001403 variables are now available via os.path. They continue to be
1404 available from the os module.
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00001405 (see <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00001406
Tim Peters6ee04802003-02-05 18:29:34 +00001407- array.array was added to the types repr.py knows about (see
1408 <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
1409
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00001410- The new pickletools.py contains lots of documentation about pickle
1411 internals, and supplies some helpers for working with pickles, such as
1412 a symbolic pickle disassembler.
1413
Skip Montanaro9a7c96a2003-01-22 18:17:25 +00001414- Xmlrpclib.py now supports the builtin boolean type.
1415
Martin v. Löwis0c6774d2003-01-15 11:51:06 +00001416- py_compile has a new 'doraise' flag and a new PyCompileError
1417 exception.
1418
Martin v. Löwisd69663d2003-01-15 11:37:23 +00001419- SimpleXMLRPCServer now supports CGI through the CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler
1420 class.
1421
Guido van Rossum50e92232003-01-14 16:45:04 +00001422- The sets module now raises TypeError in __cmp__, to clarify that
1423 sets are not intended to be three-way-compared; the comparison
1424 operators are overloaded as subset/superset tests.
1425
Guido van Rossumcd0c0472003-01-07 23:03:05 +00001426- Bastion.py and rexec.py are disabled. These modules are not safe in
1427 Python 2.2. or 2.3.
1428
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001429- realpath is now exported when doing ``from poxixpath import *``.
Neal Norwitzbb0246a2003-01-03 18:12:28 +00001430 It is also exported for ntpath, macpath, and os2emxpath.
1431 See SF bug #659228.
1432
Neal Norwitzb9ef4ae2003-01-05 23:19:43 +00001433- New module tarfile from Lars Gustäbel provides a comprehensive interface
1434 to tar archive files with transparent gzip and bzip2 compression.
1435 See SF patch #651082.
1436
Neal Norwitz4f442372003-01-06 06:51:36 +00001437- urlparse can now parse imap:// URLs. See SF feature request #618024.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001438
Neal Norwitze931ed52003-01-10 23:24:32 +00001439- Tkinter.Canvas.scan_dragto() provides an optional parameter to support
1440 the gain value which is passed to Tk. SF bug# 602259.
1441
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00001442- Fix logging.handlers.SysLogHandler protocol when using UNIX domain sockets.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00001443 See SF patch #642974.
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00001444
Skip Montanaro12fe72e2003-02-25 17:46:20 +00001445- The dospath module was deleted. Use the ntpath module when manipulating
1446 DOS paths from other platforms.
1447
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001448Tools/Demos
1449-----------
1450
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00001451- Two new scripts (db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py) were added to the
1452 Tools/scripts directory to facilitate conversion from the old bsddb module
1453 to the new one. While the user-visible API of the new module is
1454 compatible with the old one, it's likely that the version of the
1455 underlying database library has changed. To convert from the old library,
1456 run the db2pickle.py script using the old version of Python to convert it
1457 to a pickle file. After upgrading Python, run the pickle2db.py script
1458 using the new version of Python to reconstitute your database. For
1459 example:
1460
Skip Montanaro621f0552003-02-03 15:48:10 +00001461 % python2.2 db2pickle.py -h some.db > some.pickle
1462 % python2.3 pickle2db.py -h some.db.new < some.pickle
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00001463
1464 Run the scripts without any args to get a usage message.
1465
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001466
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001467Build
1468-----
1469
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00001470- The audio driver tests (test_ossaudiodev.py and
1471 test_linuxaudiodev.py) are no longer run by default. This is
1472 because they don't always work, depending on your hardware and
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001473 software. To run these tests, you must use an invocation like ::
1474
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00001475 ./python Lib/test/regrtest.py -u audio test_ossaudiodev
1476
Skip Montanarodecc6a42003-01-01 20:07:49 +00001477- On systems which build using the configure script, compiler flags which
1478 used to be lumped together using the OPT flag have been split into two
1479 groups, OPT and BASECFLAGS. OPT is meant to carry just optimization- and
1480 debug-related flags like "-g" and "-O3". BASECFLAGS is meant to carry
1481 compiler flags that are required to get a clean compile. On some
1482 platforms (many Linux flavors in particular) BASECFLAGS will be empty by
1483 default. On others, such as Mac OS X and SCO, it will contain required
1484 flags. This change allows people building Python to override OPT without
1485 fear of clobbering compiler flags which are required to get a clean build.
1486
1487- On Darwin/Mac OS X platforms, /sw/lib and /sw/include are added to the
1488 relevant search lists in setup.py. This allows users building Python to
1489 take advantage of the many packages available from the fink project
1490 <http://fink.sf.net/>.
1491
1492- A new Makefile target, scriptsinstall, installs a number of useful scripts
1493 from the Tools/scripts directory.
1494
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001495C API
1496-----
1497
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001498- PyEval_GetFrame() is now declared to return a ``PyFrameObject *``
1499 instead of a plain ``PyObject *``. (SF patch #686601.)
Guido van Rossum6297a7a2003-02-19 15:53:17 +00001500
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00001501- PyNumber_Check() now checks that the object has a nb_int or nb_float
1502 slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
1503 tp_as_number pointer.
1504
Guido van Rossumeea47182003-02-11 20:39:59 +00001505- A C type that inherits from a base type that defines tp_as_buffer
1506 will now inherit the tp_as_buffer pointer if it doesn't define one.
1507 (SF #681367)
1508
Neil Schemenauer5042da62003-02-04 20:59:40 +00001509- The PyArg_Parse functions now issue a DeprecationWarning if a float
1510 argument is provided when an integer is specified (this affects the 'b',
1511 'B', 'h', 'H', 'i', and 'l' codes). Future versions of Python will
1512 raise a TypeError.
Neil Schemenauercd63e612003-01-24 22:15:53 +00001513
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001514Tests
1515-----
1516
Walter Dörwald11cfbd62003-03-26 16:03:16 +00001517- Several tests weren't being run from regrtest.py (test_timeout.py,
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001518 test_tarfile.py, test_netrc.py, test_multifile.py,
1519 test_importhooks.py and test_imp.py). Now they are. (Note to
1520 developers: please read Lib/test/README when creating a new test, to
1521 make sure to do it right! All tests need to use either unittest or
1522 pydoc.)
1523
1524- Added test_posix.py, a test suite for the posix module.
1525
1526- Added test_hexoct.py, a test suite for hex/oct constant folding.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001527
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001528Windows
1529-------
1530
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00001531- The timeout code for socket connect() didn't work right; this has
1532 now been fixed. test_timeout.py should pass (at least most of the
1533 time).
1534
Thomas Hellerdda583d2003-01-31 20:45:41 +00001535- distutils' msvccompiler class now passes the preprocessor options to
1536 the resource compiler. See SF patch #669198.
1537
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00001538- The bsddb module now ships with Sleepycat's 4.1.25.NC, the latest
1539 release without strong cryptography.
1540
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00001541- sys.path[0], if it contains a directory name, is now always an
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001542 absolute pathname. (SF patch #664376.)
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00001543
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00001544- The new logging package is now installed by the Windows installer. It
1545 wasn't in 2.3a1 due to oversight.
1546
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001547Mac
1548---
1549
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00001550- There are new dialogs EasyDialogs.AskFileForOpen, AskFileForSave
1551 and AskFolder. The old macfs.StandardGetFile and friends are deprecated.
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00001552
Jack Jansenc9296362003-02-06 23:10:45 +00001553- Most of the standard library now uses pathnames or FSRefs in preference
1554 of FSSpecs, and use the underlying Carbon.File and Carbon.Folder modules
1555 in stead of macfs. macfs will probably be deprecated in the future.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00001556
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00001557- Type Carbon.File.FSCatalogInfo and supporting methods have been implemented.
1558 This also makes macfs.FSSpec.SetDates() work again.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001559
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00001560- There is a new module pimp, the package install manager for Python, and
1561 accompanying applet PackageManager. These allow you to easily download
1562 and install pretested extension packages either in source or binary
1563 form. Only in MacPython-OSX.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001564
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00001565- Applets are now built with bundlebuilder in MacPython-OSX, which should make
Jack Jansen5d44b342003-02-18 23:32:47 +00001566 them more robust and also provides a path towards BuildApplication. The
1567 downside of this change is that applets can no longer be run from the
1568 Terminal window, this will hopefully be fixed in the 2.3b1.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001569
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001570
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001571What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 1?
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001572=================================
1573
Guido van Rossumae548862002-12-31 15:47:36 +00001574*Release date: 31-Dec-2002*
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001575
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001576Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001577--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00001578
Michael W. Hudson96bc3b42002-11-26 14:48:23 +00001579- One can now assign to __bases__ and __name__ of new-style classes.
1580
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00001581- dict() now accepts keyword arguments so that dict(one=1, two=2)
1582 is the equivalent of {"one": 1, "two": 2}. Accordingly,
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00001583 the existing (but undocumented) 'items' keyword argument has
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00001584 been eliminated. This means that dict(items=someMapping) now has
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00001585 a different meaning than before.
1586
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00001587- int() now returns a long object if the argument is outside the
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001588 integer range, so int("4" * 1000), int(1e200) and int(1L<<1000) will
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00001589 all return long objects instead of raising an OverflowError.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001590
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00001591- Assignment to __class__ is disallowed if either the old or the new
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00001592 class is a statically allocated type object (such as defined by an
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00001593 extension module). This prevents anomalies like 2.__class__ = bool.
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00001594
1595- New-style object creation and deallocation have been sped up
1596 significantly; they are now faster than classic instance creation
1597 and deallocation.
1598
1599- The __slots__ variable can now mention "private" names, and the
1600 right thing will happen (e.g. __slots__ = ["__foo"]).
1601
1602- The built-ins slice() and buffer() are now callable types. The
1603 types classobj (formerly class), code, function, instance, and
1604 instancemethod (formerly instance-method), which have no built-in
1605 names but are accessible through the types module, are now also
1606 callable. The type dict-proxy is renamed to dictproxy.
1607
1608- Cycles going through the __class__ link of a new-style instance are
1609 now detected by the garbage collector.
1610
1611- Classes using __slots__ are now properly garbage collected.
1612 [SF bug 519621]
1613
1614- Tightened the __slots__ rules: a slot name must be a valid Python
1615 identifier.
1616
1617- The constructor for the module type now requires a name argument and
1618 takes an optional docstring argument. Previously, this constructor
1619 ignored its arguments. As a consequence, deriving a class from a
1620 module (not from the module type) is now illegal; previously this
1621 created an unnamed module, just like invoking the module type did.
1622 [SF bug 563060]
1623
1624- A new type object, 'basestring', is added. This is a common base type
1625 for 'str' and 'unicode', and can be used instead of
1626 types.StringTypes, e.g. to test whether something is "a string":
1627 isinstance(x, basestring) is True for Unicode and 8-bit strings. This
1628 is an abstract base class and cannot be instantiated directly.
1629
1630- Changed new-style class instantiation so that when C's __new__
1631 method returns something that's not a C instance, its __init__ is
1632 not called. [SF bug #537450]
1633
1634- Fixed super() to work correctly with class methods. [SF bug #535444]
1635
1636- If you try to pickle an instance of a class that has __slots__ but
1637 doesn't define or override __getstate__, a TypeError is now raised.
1638 This is done by adding a bozo __getstate__ to the class that always
1639 raises TypeError. (Before, this would appear to be pickled, but the
1640 state of the slots would be lost.)
1641
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001642Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001643-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001644
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00001645- Import from zipfiles is now supported. The name of a zipfile placed
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00001646 on sys.path causes the import statement to look for importable Python
1647 modules (with .py, pyc and .pyo extensions) and packages inside the
1648 zipfile. The zipfile import follows the specification (though not
1649 the sample implementation) of PEP 273. The semantics of __path__ are
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00001650 compatible with those that have been implemented in Jython since
1651 Jython 2.1.
1652
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001653- PEP 302 has been accepted. Although it was initially developed to
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00001654 support zipimport, it offers a new, general import hook mechanism.
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00001655 Several new variables have been added to the sys module:
1656 sys.meta_path, sys.path_hooks, and sys.path_importer_cache; these
1657 make extending the import statement much more convenient than
1658 overriding the __import__ built-in function. For a description of
1659 these, see PEP 302.
1660
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00001661- A frame object's f_lineno attribute can now be written to from a
1662 trace function to change which line will execute next. A command to
1663 exploit this from pdb has been added. [SF patch #643835]
1664
Marc-André Lemburg20b91352002-12-12 18:01:43 +00001665- The _codecs support module for codecs.py was turned into a builtin
1666 module to assure that at least the builtin codecs are available
1667 to the Python parser for source code decoding according to PEP 263.
1668
Walter Dörwaldd9a6ad32002-12-12 16:41:44 +00001669- issubclass now supports a tuple as the second argument, just like
1670 isinstance does. ``issubclass(X, (A, B))`` is equivalent to
1671 ``issubclass(X, A) or issubclass(X, B)``.
1672
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00001673- Thanks to Armin Rigo, the last known way to provoke a system crash
1674 by cleverly arranging for a comparison function to mutate a list
1675 during a list.sort() operation has been fixed. The effect of
1676 attempting to mutate a list, or even to inspect its contents or
1677 length, while a sort is in progress, is not defined by the language.
1678 The C implementation of Python 2.3 attempts to detect mutations,
1679 and raise ValueError if one occurs, but there's no guarantee that
1680 all mutations will be caught, or that any will be caught across
1681 releases or implementations.
1682
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00001683- Unicode file name processing for Windows (PEP 277) is implemented.
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00001684 All platforms now have an os.path.supports_unicode_filenames attribute,
1685 which is set to True on Windows NT/2000/XP, and False elsewhere.
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00001686
Walter Dörwald3aeb6322002-09-02 13:14:32 +00001687- Codec error handling callbacks (PEP 293) are implemented.
1688 Error handling in unicode.encode or str.decode can now be customized.
1689
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00001690- A subtle change to the semantics of the built-in function intern():
1691 interned strings are no longer immortal. You must keep a reference
1692 to the return value intern() around to get the benefit.
1693
Guido van Rossumf808b892002-08-16 03:38:10 +00001694- Use of 'None' as a variable, argument or attribute name now
1695 issues a SyntaxWarning. In the future, None may become a keyword.
1696
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00001697- SET_LINENO is gone. co_lnotab is now consulted to determine when to
1698 call the trace function. C code that accessed f_lineno should call
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00001699 PyCode_Addr2Line instead (f_lineno is still there, but only kept up
1700 to date when there is a trace function set).
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00001701
Guido van Rossum9be89462002-08-14 16:11:30 +00001702- There's a new warning category, FutureWarning. This is used to warn
1703 about a number of situations where the value or sign of an integer
1704 result will change in Python 2.4 as a result of PEP 237 (integer
1705 unification). The warnings implement stage B0 mentioned in that
1706 PEP. The warnings are about the following situations:
1707
1708 - Octal and hex literals without 'L' prefix in the inclusive range
1709 [0x80000000..0xffffffff]; these are currently negative ints, but
1710 in Python 2.4 they will be positive longs with the same bit
1711 pattern.
1712
1713 - Left shifts on integer values that cause the outcome to lose
1714 bits or have a different sign than the left operand. To be
1715 precise: x<<n where this currently doesn't yield the same value
1716 as long(x)<<n; in Python 2.4, the outcome will be long(x)<<n.
1717
1718 - Conversions from ints to string that show negative values as
1719 unsigned ints in the inclusive range [0x80000000..0xffffffff];
1720 this affects the functions hex() and oct(), and the string
1721 formatting codes %u, %o, %x, and %X. In Python 2.4, these will
1722 show signed values (e.g. hex(-1) currently returns "0xffffffff";
1723 in Python 2.4 it will return "-0x1").
1724
Guido van Rossum9a2eda52002-12-31 02:12:42 +00001725- The bits manipulated under the cover by sys.setcheckinterval() have
1726 been changed. Both the check interval and the ticker used to be
1727 per-thread values. They are now just a pair of global variables.
1728 In addition, the default check interval was boosted from 10 to 100
1729 bytecode instructions. This may have some effect on systems that
1730 relied on the old default value. In particular, in multi-threaded
1731 applications which try to be highly responsive, response time will
1732 increase by some (perhaps imperceptible) amount.
Skip Montanaro979c74b2002-09-03 21:25:14 +00001733
Tim Petersd64c1de2002-08-12 17:36:03 +00001734- When multiplying very large integers, a version of the so-called
1735 Karatsuba algorithm is now used. This is most effective if the
1736 inputs have roughly the same size. If they both have about N digits,
1737 Karatsuba multiplication has O(N**1.58) runtime (the exponent is
1738 log_base_2(3)) instead of the previous O(N**2). Measured results may
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00001739 be better or worse than that, depending on platform quirks. Besides
1740 the O() improvement in raw instruction count, the Karatsuba algorithm
1741 appears to have much better cache behavior on extremely large integers
1742 (starting in the ballpark of a million bits). Note that this is a
1743 simple implementation, and there's no intent here to compete with,
1744 e.g., GMP. It gives a very nice speedup when it applies, but a package
1745 devoted to fast large-integer arithmetic should run circles around it.
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00001746
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00001747- u'%c' will now raise a ValueError in case the argument is an
1748 integer outside the valid range of Unicode code point ordinals.
1749
Guido van Rossumdeb09362002-08-09 17:16:30 +00001750- The tempfile module has been overhauled for enhanced security. The
1751 mktemp() function is now deprecated; new, safe replacements are
1752 mkstemp() (for files) and mkdtemp() (for directories), and the
1753 higher-level functions NamedTemporaryFile() and TemporaryFile().
1754 Use of some global variables in this module is also deprecated; the
1755 new functions have keyword arguments to provide the same
1756 functionality. All Lib, Tools and Demo modules that used the unsafe
1757 interfaces have been updated to use the safe replacements. Thanks
1758 to Zack Weinberg!
1759
Guido van Rossumd81a9832002-08-09 15:57:34 +00001760- When x is an object whose class implements __mul__ and __rmul__,
1761 1.0*x would correctly invoke __rmul__, but 1*x would erroneously
1762 invoke __mul__. This was due to the sequence-repeat code in the int
1763 type. This has been fixed now.
1764
Barry Warsawd79f6832002-08-06 17:01:51 +00001765- Previously, "str1 in str2" required str1 to be a string of length 1.
1766 This restriction has been relaxed to allow str1 to be a string of
1767 any length. Thus "'el' in 'hello world'" returns True now.
1768
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00001769- File objects are now their own iterators. For a file f, iter(f) now
1770 returns f (unless f is closed), and f.next() is similar to
1771 f.readline() when EOF is not reached; however, f.next() uses a
1772 readahead buffer that messes up the file position, so mixing
1773 f.next() and f.readline() (or other methods) doesn't work right.
1774 Calling f.seek() drops the readahead buffer, but other operations
1775 don't. It so happens that this gives a nice additional speed boost
1776 to "for line in file:"; the xreadlines method and corresponding
Guido van Rossumbffb2ef2002-08-09 17:17:07 +00001777 module are now obsolete. Thanks to Oren Tirosh!
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00001778
Guido van Rossumde392d32002-08-05 14:17:20 +00001779- Encoding declarations (PEP 263, phase 1) have been implemented. A
1780 comment of the form "# -*- coding: <encodingname> -*-" in the first
1781 or second line of a Python source file indicates the encoding.
Martin v. Löwis00f1e3f2002-08-04 17:29:52 +00001782
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00001783- list.sort() has a new implementation. While cross-platform results
1784 may vary, and in data-dependent ways, this is much faster on many
1785 kinds of partially ordered lists than the previous implementation,
1786 and reported to be just as fast on randomly ordered lists on
1787 several major platforms. This sort is also stable (if A==B and A
1788 precedes B in the list at the start, A precedes B after the sort too),
1789 although the language definition does not guarantee stability. A
1790 potential drawback is that list.sort() may require temp space of
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00001791 len(list)*2 bytes (``*4`` on a 64-bit machine). It's therefore possible
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00001792 for list.sort() to raise MemoryError now, even if a comparison function
1793 does not. See <http://www.python.org/sf/587076> for full details.
1794
Guido van Rossum2d5389c2002-07-23 03:44:35 +00001795- All standard iterators now ensure that, once StopIteration has been
1796 raised, all future calls to next() on the same iterator will also
1797 raise StopIteration. There used to be various counterexamples to
1798 this behavior, which could caused confusion or subtle program
1799 breakage, without any benefits. (Note that this is still an
1800 iterator's responsibility; the iterator framework does not enforce
1801 this.)
1802
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00001803- Ctrl+C handling on Windows has been made more consistent with
1804 other platforms. KeyboardInterrupt can now reliably be caught,
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00001805 and Ctrl+C at an interactive prompt no longer terminates the
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00001806 process under NT/2k/XP (it never did under Win9x). Ctrl+C will
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00001807 interrupt time.sleep() in the main thread, and any child processes
1808 created via the popen family (on win2k; we can't make win9x work
Mark Hammond8f3afc72002-08-10 06:26:31 +00001809 reliably) are also interrupted (as generally happens on for Linux/Unix.)
1810 [SF bugs 231273, 439992 and 581232]
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00001811
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00001812- sys.getwindowsversion() has been added on Windows. This
1813 returns a tuple with information about the version of Windows
1814 currently running.
1815
Raymond Hettinger5a04aec2002-06-25 00:25:30 +00001816- Slices and repetitions of buffer objects now consistently return
1817 a string. Formerly, strings would be returned most of the time,
1818 but a buffer object would be returned when the repetition count
1819 was one or when the slice range was all inclusive.
1820
Walter Dörwald3430d702002-06-17 10:43:59 +00001821- Unicode objects in sys.path are no longer ignored but treated
1822 as directory names.
1823
Neal Norwitz1f68fc72002-06-14 00:50:42 +00001824- Fixed string.startswith and string.endswith builtin methods
1825 so they accept negative indices. [SF bug 493951]
1826
Guido van Rossumc5fe5eb2002-06-12 03:45:21 +00001827- Fixed a bug with a continue inside a try block and a yield in the
1828 finally clause. [SF bug 567538]
1829
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00001830- Most builtin sequences now support "extended slices", i.e. slices
Guido van Rossum2e82e712002-06-13 11:41:07 +00001831 with a third "stride" parameter. For example, "hello world"[::-1]
1832 gives "dlrow olleh".
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00001833
Neal Norwitzd68f5172002-05-29 15:54:55 +00001834- A new warning PendingDeprecationWarning was added to provide
1835 direction on features which are in the process of being deprecated.
1836 The warning will not be printed by default. To see the pending
1837 deprecations, use -Walways::PendingDeprecationWarning::
1838 as a command line option or warnings.filterwarnings() in code.
1839
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00001840- Deprecated features of xrange objects have been removed as
1841 promised. The start, stop, and step attributes and the tolist()
1842 method no longer exist. xrange repetition and slicing have been
1843 removed.
1844
Guido van Rossum7dab2422002-04-26 19:40:56 +00001845- New builtin function enumerate(x), from PEP 279. Example:
1846 enumerate("abc") is an iterator returning (0,"a"), (1,"b"), (2,"c").
1847 The argument can be an arbitrary iterable object.
1848
Neil Schemenauer89e3ee02002-04-26 01:58:53 +00001849- The assert statement no longer tests __debug__ at runtime. This means
1850 that assert statements cannot be disabled by assigning a false value
1851 to __debug__.
1852
Walter Dörwald068325e2002-04-15 13:36:47 +00001853- A method zfill() was added to str and unicode, that fills a numeric
1854 string to the left with zeros. For example,
1855 "+123".zfill(6) -> "+00123".
1856
Guido van Rossum862fe3c2002-04-15 12:36:47 +00001857- Complex numbers supported divmod() and the // and % operators, but
1858 these make no sense. Since this was documented, they're being
1859 deprecated now.
1860
Guido van Rossum26dd8302002-04-26 20:11:29 +00001861- String and unicode methods lstrip(), rstrip() and strip() now take
1862 an optional argument that specifies the characters to strip. For
1863 example, "Foo!!!?!?!?".rstrip("?!") -> "Foo".
Guido van Rossum49042042002-04-13 00:59:05 +00001864
Guido van Rossumc0d3f4e2002-11-27 13:10:40 +00001865- There's a new dictionary constructor (a class method of the dict
1866 class), dict.fromkeys(iterable, value=None). It constructs a
1867 dictionary with keys taken from the iterable and all values set to a
1868 single value. It can be used for building sets and for removing
1869 duplicates from sequences.
Raymond Hettingere33d3df2002-11-27 07:29:33 +00001870
Guido van Rossumc69343b2002-04-12 19:22:48 +00001871- Added a new dict method pop(key). This removes and returns the
1872 value corresponding to key. [SF patch #539949]
1873
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00001874- A new built-in type, bool, has been added, as well as built-in
1875 names for its two values, True and False. Comparisons and sundry
1876 other operations that return a truth value have been changed to
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00001877 return a bool instead. Read PEP 285 for an explanation of why this
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00001878 is backward compatible.
1879
Guido van Rossum95b62a62002-03-29 01:07:24 +00001880- Fixed two bugs reported as SF #535905: under certain conditions,
1881 deallocating a deeply nested structure could cause a segfault in the
1882 garbage collector, due to interaction with the "trashcan" code;
1883 access to the current frame during destruction of a local variable
1884 could access a pointer to freed memory.
1885
Guido van Rossumfe0ca4a2002-06-18 21:20:13 +00001886- The optional object allocator ("pymalloc") has been enabled by
1887 default. The recommended practice for memory allocation and
1888 deallocation has been streamlined. A header file is included,
1889 Misc/pymemcompat.h, which can be bundled with 3rd party extensions
1890 and lets them use the same API with Python versions from 1.5.2
1891 onwards.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00001892
Martin v. Löwiscfeb3b62002-03-03 21:30:27 +00001893- PyErr_Display will provide file and line information for all exceptions
1894 that have an attribute print_file_and_line, not just SyntaxErrors.
1895
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00001896- The UTF-8 codec will now encode and decode Unicode surrogates
1897 correctly and without raising exceptions for unpaired ones.
1898
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00001899- Universal newlines (PEP 278) is implemented. Briefly, using 'U'
1900 instead of 'r' when opening a text file for reading changes the line
1901 ending convention so that any of '\r', '\r\n', and '\n' is
1902 recognized (even mixed in one file); all three are converted to
1903 '\n', the standard Python line end character.
1904
Neal Norwitz649b7592002-01-01 19:07:13 +00001905- file.xreadlines() now raises a ValueError if the file is closed:
1906 Previously, an xreadlines object was returned which would raise
1907 a ValueError when the xreadlines.next() method was called.
1908
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00001909- sys.exit() inadvertently allowed more than one argument.
Neal Norwitz0c766a02002-03-27 13:03:09 +00001910 An exception will now be raised if more than one argument is used.
1911
Gustavo Niemeyer17c5a332002-12-16 14:09:22 +00001912- Changed evaluation order of dictionary literals to conform to the
1913 general left to right evaluation order rule. Now {f1(): f2()} will
1914 evaluate f1 first.
Gustavo Niemeyer78429a62002-12-16 13:54:02 +00001915
Gustavo Niemeyer786ddb22002-12-16 18:12:53 +00001916- Fixed bug #521782: when a file was in non-blocking mode, file.read()
1917 could silently lose data or wrongly throw an unknown error.
1918
Neil Schemenauerb983aa02002-12-30 20:22:23 +00001919- The sq_repeat, sq_inplace_repeat, sq_concat and sq_inplace_concat
1920 slots are now always tried after trying the corresponding nb_* slots.
1921 This fixes a number of minor bugs (see bug #624807).
1922
Neal Norwitz74a032e2003-01-10 23:29:48 +00001923- Fix problem with dynamic loading on 64-bit AIX (see bug #639945).
1924
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001925Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001926-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001927
Raymond Hettinger9543b342003-01-18 23:22:20 +00001928- Added three operators to the operator module:
1929 operator.pow(a,b) which is equivalent to: a**b.
1930 operator.is_(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is b.
1931 operator.is_not(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is not b.
1932
Martin v. Löwis24a880b2002-12-31 12:55:15 +00001933- posix.openpty now works on all systems that have /dev/ptmx.
1934
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00001935- A module zipimport exists to support importing code from zip
1936 archives.
1937
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00001938- The new datetime module supplies classes for manipulating dates and
1939 times. The basic design came from the Zope "fishbowl process", and
1940 favors practical commercial applications over calendar esoterica. See
1941
1942 http://www.zope.org/Members/fdrake/DateTimeWiki/FrontPage
1943
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00001944- _tkinter now returns Tcl objects, instead of strings. Objects which
1945 have Python equivalents are converted to Python objects, other objects
1946 are wrapped. This can be configured through the wantobjects method,
Martin v. Löwis8c8aa5d2002-11-26 21:39:48 +00001947 or Tkinter.wantobjects.
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00001948
Barry Warsawc27f4bd2002-12-30 21:03:26 +00001949- The PyBSDDB wrapper around the Sleepycat Berkeley DB library has
1950 been added as the package bsddb. The traditional bsddb module is
1951 still available in source code, but not built automatically anymore,
1952 and is now named bsddb185. This supports Berkeley DB versions from
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00001953 3.0 to 4.1. For help converting your databases from the old module (which
1954 probably used an obsolete version of Berkeley DB) to the new module, see
1955 the db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py scripts described in the Tools/Demos
1956 section above.
Martin v. Löwisef546b32002-11-19 08:12:57 +00001957
Martin v. Löwis677bde22002-11-23 22:08:15 +00001958- unicodedata was updated to Unicode 3.2. It supports normalization
1959 and names for Hangul syllables and CJK unified ideographs.
Martin v. Löwis7d41e292002-11-23 12:22:32 +00001960
Neal Norwitz94a83fd2002-11-02 17:46:24 +00001961- resource.getrlimit() now returns longs instead of ints.
1962
Martin v. Löwis080689c2002-10-26 14:42:02 +00001963- readline now dynamically adjusts its input/output stream if
1964 sys.stdin/stdout changes.
1965
Guido van Rossumba602972002-10-01 18:18:58 +00001966- The _tkinter module (and hence Tkinter) has dropped support for
1967 Tcl/Tk 8.0 and 8.1. Only Tcl/Tk versions 8.2, 8.3 and 8.4 are
1968 supported.
1969
Martin v. Löwis658009a2002-09-16 17:26:24 +00001970- cPickle.BadPickleGet is now a class.
1971
Martin v. Löwisa19bfe02002-10-16 18:28:36 +00001972- The time stamps in os.stat_result are floating point numbers
1973 after stat_float_times has been called.
Martin v. Löwis94717ed2002-09-09 14:24:16 +00001974
Neal Norwitzb5673922002-09-05 21:48:07 +00001975- If the size passed to mmap.mmap() is larger than the length of the
1976 file on non-Windows platforms, a ValueError is raised. [SF bug 585792]
1977
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00001978- The xreadlines module is slated for obsolescence.
1979
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00001980- The strptime function in the time module is now always available (a
1981 Python implementation is used when the C library doesn't define it).
1982
Guido van Rossum9562bcf2002-06-14 21:31:18 +00001983- The 'new' module is no longer an extension, but a Python module that
1984 only exists for backwards compatibility. Its contents are no longer
1985 functions but callable type objects.
1986
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00001987- The bsddb.*open functions can now take 'None' as a filename.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00001988 This will create a temporary in-memory bsddb that won't be
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00001989 written to disk.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00001990
Martin v. Löwisb96152c2002-12-31 13:20:15 +00001991- posix.getloadavg, posix.lchown, posix.killpg, posix.mknod, and
1992 posix.getpgid have been added where available.
Martin v. Löwis06a83e92002-04-14 10:19:44 +00001993
Martin v. Löwisf0a46682002-11-03 17:20:12 +00001994- The locale module now exposes the C library's gettext interface. It
1995 also has a new function getpreferredencoding.
Martin v. Löwis2e64c342002-03-27 18:49:02 +00001996
Tim Petersfbf74f22002-03-14 19:06:01 +00001997- A security hole ("double free") was found in zlib-1.1.3, a popular
1998 third party compression library used by some Python modules. The
1999 hole was quickly plugged in zlib-1.1.4, and the Windows build of
2000 Python now ships with zlib-1.1.4.
2001
Martin v. Löwis688357e2002-04-08 21:28:20 +00002002- pwd, grp, and resource return enhanced tuples now, with symbolic
2003 field names.
Martin v. Löwis29001ff2002-03-01 10:47:37 +00002004
Martin v. Löwis99866332002-03-01 10:27:01 +00002005- array.array is now a type object. A new format character
2006 'u' indicates Py_UNICODE arrays. For those, .tounicode and
2007 .fromunicode methods are available. Arrays now support __iadd__
2008 and __imul__.
2009
Neal Norwitze790eae2002-01-01 21:14:12 +00002010- dl now builds on every system that has dlfcn.h. Failure in case
Martin v. Löwis93227272002-01-01 20:18:30 +00002011 of sizeof(int)!=sizeof(long)!=sizeof(void*) is delayed until dl.open
2012 is called.
2013
Skip Montanaro8e790e72002-09-03 13:25:17 +00002014- The sys module acquired a new attribute, api_version, which evaluates
2015 to the value of the PYTHON_API_VERSION macro with which the
2016 interpreter was compiled.
2017
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00002018- Fixed bug #470582: sre module would return a tuple (None, 'a', 'ab')
2019 when applying the regular expression '^((a)c)?(ab)$' on 'ab'. It now
2020 returns (None, None, 'ab'), as expected. Also fixed handling of
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00002021 lastindex/lastgroup match attributes in similar cases. For example,
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00002022 when running the expression r'(a)(b)?b' over 'ab', lastindex must be
2023 1, not 2.
2024
Gustavo Niemeyerc523b042002-11-07 03:28:56 +00002025- Fixed bug #581080: sre scanner was not checking the buffer limit
2026 before increasing the current pointer. This was creating an infinite
2027 loop in the search function, once the pointer exceeded the buffer
2028 limit.
2029
Thomas Heller95cb7e42002-11-07 16:23:55 +00002030- The os.fdopen function now enforces a file mode starting with the
2031 letter 'r', 'w' or 'a', otherwise a ValueError is raised. This fixes
2032 bug #623464.
2033
Greg Ward6c58d462003-01-03 18:02:15 +00002034- The linuxaudiodev module is now deprecated; it is being replaced by
2035 ossaudiodev. The interface has been extended to cover a lot more of
2036 OSS (see www.opensound.com), including most DSP ioctls and the
2037 OSS mixer API. Documentation forthcoming in 2.3a2.
2038
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002039Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002040-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002041
Guido van Rossum747f8062003-01-03 16:33:49 +00002042- imaplib.py now supports SSL (Tino Lange and Piers Lauder).
2043
Just van Rossum5e156ad2002-12-31 16:38:01 +00002044- Freeze's modulefinder.py has been moved to the standard library;
2045 slightly improved so it will issue less false missing submodule
2046 reports (see sf path #643711 for details). Documentation will follow
2047 with Python 2.3a2.
2048
Martin v. Löwis96a60e42002-12-31 13:11:54 +00002049- os.path exposes getctime.
2050
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002051- unittest.py now has two additional methods called assertAlmostEqual()
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002052 and failIfAlmostEqual(). They implement an approximate comparison
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002053 by rounding the difference between the two arguments and comparing
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002054 the result to zero. Approximate comparison is essential for
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002055 unit tests of floating point results.
2056
Raymond Hettingere11b5102002-12-25 16:37:19 +00002057- calendar.py now depends on the new datetime module rather than
2058 the time module. As a result, the range of allowable dates
2059 has been increased.
2060
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00002061- pdb has a new 'j(ump)' command to select the next line to be
2062 executed.
2063
Thomas Heller1b3b49d2002-12-12 19:13:44 +00002064- The distutils created windows installers now can run a
2065 postinstallation script.
2066
Martin v. Löwis4581cfa2002-11-22 08:23:09 +00002067- doctest.testmod can now be called without argument, which means to
2068 test the current module.
2069
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002070- When canceling a server that implemented threading with a keyboard
Martin v. Löwisf86e8ef2002-11-22 08:08:44 +00002071 interrupt, the server would shut down but not terminate (waiting on
2072 client threads). A new member variable, daemon_threads, was added to
2073 the ThreadingMixIn class in SocketServer.py to make it explicit that
2074 this behavior needs to be controlled.
2075
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00002076- A new module, optparse, provides a fancy alternative to getopt for
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00002077 command line parsing. It is a slightly modified version of Greg
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00002078 Ward's Optik package.
2079
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00002080- UserDict.py now defines a DictMixin class which defines all dictionary
2081 methods for classes that already have a minimum mapping interface.
2082 This greatly simplifies writing classes that need to be substitutable
2083 for dictionaries (such as the shelve module).
2084
2085- shelve.py now subclasses from UserDict.DictMixin. Now shelve supports
2086 all dictionary methods. This eases the transition to persistent
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00002087 storage for scripts originally written with dictionaries in mind.
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00002088
Skip Montanaro3bf99e32002-12-08 18:36:24 +00002089- shelve.open and the various classes in shelve.py now accept an optional
2090 binary flag, which defaults to False. If True, the values stored in the
2091 shelf are binary pickles.
2092
Guido van Rossumfda06742002-11-13 16:29:18 +00002093- A new package, logging, implements the logging API defined by PEP
2094 282. The code is written by Vinay Sajip.
2095
Walter Dörwald4dbf1922002-11-06 16:53:44 +00002096- StreamReader, StreamReaderWriter and StreamRecoder in the codecs
2097 modules are iterators now.
2098
Tim Peters9288f952002-11-05 20:38:55 +00002099- gzip.py now handles files exceeding 2GB. Files over 4GB also work
2100 now (provided the OS supports it, and Python is configured with large
2101 file support), but in that case the underlying gzip file format can
2102 record only the least-significant 32 bits of the file size, so that
2103 some tools working with gzipped files may report an incorrect file
2104 size.
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00002105
Martin v. Löwis74b51ac2002-10-26 14:50:45 +00002106- xml.sax.saxutils.unescape has been added, to replace entity references
2107 with their entity value.
2108
Martin v. Löwis77ac4292002-10-15 15:11:13 +00002109- Queue.Queue.{put,get} now support an optional timeout argument.
2110
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00002111- Various features of Tk 8.4 are exposed in Tkinter.py. The multiple
2112 option of tkFileDialog is exposed as function askopenfile{,name}s.
Martin v. Löwis2ec36272002-10-13 10:22:08 +00002113
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00002114- Various configure methods of Tkinter have been stream-lined, so that
2115 tag_configure, image_configure, window_configure now return a
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00002116 dictionary when invoked with no argument.
Martin v. Löwis6ce13152002-10-10 14:36:13 +00002117
Guido van Rossum2b492b62002-10-09 21:40:48 +00002118- Importing the readline module now no longer has the side effect of
2119 calling setlocale(LC_CTYPE, ""). The initial "C" locale, or
2120 whatever locale is explicitly set by the user, is preserved. If you
2121 want repr() of 8-bit strings in your preferred encoding to preserve
2122 all printable characters of that encoding, you have to add the
2123 following code to your $PYTHONSTARTUP file or to your application's
2124 main():
2125
2126 import locale
2127 locale.setlocale(locale.LC_CTYPE, "")
2128
Martin v. Löwise9ce0b02002-10-07 13:23:24 +00002129- shutil.move was added. shutil.copytree now reports errors as an
2130 exception at the end, instead of printing error messages.
2131
Marc-André Lemburg97047e22002-10-04 11:55:21 +00002132- Encoding name normalization was generalized to not only
2133 replace hyphens with underscores, but also all other non-alphanumeric
2134 characters (with the exception of the dot which is used for Python
2135 package names during lookup). The aliases.py mapping was updated
2136 to the new standard.
2137
Walter Dörwald5ccaf8f2002-09-06 16:15:58 +00002138- mimetypes has two new functions: guess_all_extensions() which
2139 returns a list of all known extensions for a mime type, and
2140 add_type() which adds one mapping between a mime type and
2141 an extension to the database.
2142
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00002143- New module: sets, defines the class Set that implements a mutable
2144 set type using the keys of a dict to represent the set. There's
2145 also a class ImmutableSet which is useful when you need sets of sets
2146 or when you need to use sets as dict keys, and a class BaseSet which
Raymond Hettingeref8b9c62002-12-09 08:56:06 +00002147 is the base class of the two.
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00002148
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00002149- Added random.sample(population,k) for random sampling without replacement.
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00002150 Returns a k length list of unique elements chosen from the population.
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00002151
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00002152- random.randrange(-sys.maxint-1, sys.maxint) no longer raises
2153 OverflowError. That is, it now accepts any combination of 'start'
2154 and 'stop' arguments so long as each is in the range of Python's
2155 bounded integers.
2156
Raymond Hettinger40f62172002-12-29 23:03:38 +00002157- Thanks to Raymond Hettinger, random.random() now uses a new core
2158 generator. The Mersenne Twister algorithm is implemented in C,
2159 threadsafe, faster than the previous generator, has an astronomically
2160 large period (2**19937-1), creates random floats to full 53-bit
2161 precision, and may be the most widely tested random number generator
2162 in existence.
2163
2164 The random.jumpahead(n) method has different semantics for the new
2165 generator. Instead of jumping n steps ahead, it uses n and the
2166 existing state to create a new state. This means that jumpahead()
2167 continues to support multi-threaded code needing generators of
2168 non-overlapping sequences. However, it will break code which relies
2169 on jumpahead moving a specific number of steps forward.
2170
2171 The attributes random.whseed and random.__whseed have no meaning for
2172 the new generator. Code using these attributes should switch to a
2173 new class, random.WichmannHill which is provided for backward
2174 compatibility and to make an alternate generator available.
2175
Guido van Rossum4a57c332002-08-02 18:05:20 +00002176- New "algorithms" module: heapq, implements a heap queue. Thanks to
2177 Kevin O'Connor for the code and François Pinard for an entertaining
2178 write-up explaining the theory and practical uses of heaps.
2179
Marc-André Lemburg58e2ff22002-07-12 14:40:04 +00002180- New encoding for the Palm OS character set: palmos.
2181
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00002182- binascii.crc32() and the zipfile module had problems on some 64-bit
2183 platforms. These have been fixed. On a platform with 8-byte C longs,
2184 crc32() now returns a signed-extended 4-byte result, so that its value
2185 as a Python int is equal to the value computed a 32-bit platform.
2186
Martin v. Löwis7d650ca2002-06-30 15:05:00 +00002187- xml.dom.minidom.toxml and toprettyxml now take an optional encoding
2188 argument.
2189
Guido van Rossum9f7549b2002-06-10 21:39:42 +00002190- Some fixes in the copy module: when an object is copied through its
2191 __reduce__ method, there was no check for a __setstate__ method on
2192 the result [SF patch 565085]; deepcopy should treat instances of
2193 custom metaclasses the same way it treats instances of type 'type'
2194 [SF patch 560794].
2195
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00002196- Sockets now support timeout mode. After s.settimeout(T), where T is
2197 a float expressing seconds, subsequent operations raise an exception
2198 if they cannot be completed within T seconds. To disable timeout
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00002199 mode, use s.settimeout(None). There's also a module function,
2200 socket.setdefaulttimeout(T), which sets the default for all sockets
2201 created henceforth.
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00002202
2203- getopt.gnu_getopt was added. This supports GNU-style option
2204 processing, where options can be mixed with non-option arguments.
Martin v. Löwis446a25f2002-06-06 10:58:36 +00002205
Michael W. Hudsonb0dc1a32002-06-04 18:27:35 +00002206- Stop using strings for exceptions. String objects used for
2207 exceptions are now classes deriving from Exception. The objects
2208 changed were: Tkinter.TclError, bdb.BdbQuit, macpath.norm_error,
2209 tabnanny.NannyNag, and xdrlib.Error.
Neal Norwitzb5b5a262002-06-04 17:14:07 +00002210
Walter Dörwald474458d2002-06-04 15:16:29 +00002211- Constants BOM_UTF8, BOM_UTF16, BOM_UTF16_LE, BOM_UTF16_BE,
2212 BOM_UTF32, BOM_UTF32_LE and BOM_UTF32_BE that represent the Byte
2213 Order Mark in UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 encodings for little and
2214 big endian systems were added to the codecs module. The old names
2215 BOM32_* and BOM64_* were off by a factor of 2.
2216
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00002217- Added conversion functions math.degrees() and math.radians().
Raymond Hettinger87f59ee2002-05-13 04:17:32 +00002218
Raymond Hettinger866964c2002-12-14 19:51:34 +00002219- math.log() now takes an optional argument: math.log(x[, base]).
2220
Raymond Hettinger9b1df1d2002-05-12 06:07:21 +00002221- ftplib.retrlines() now tests for callback is None rather than testing
2222 for False. Was causing an error when given a callback object which
2223 was callable but also returned len() as zero. The change may
2224 create new breakage if the caller relied on the undocumented behavior
2225 and called with callback set to [] or some other False value not
2226 identical to None.
2227
Tim Peters46c04e12002-05-05 20:40:00 +00002228- random.gauss() uses a piece of hidden state used by nothing else,
2229 and the .seed() and .whseed() methods failed to reset it. In other
2230 words, setting the seed didn't completely determine the sequence of
2231 results produced by random.gauss(). It does now. Programs repeatedly
2232 mixing calls to a seed method with calls to gauss() may see different
2233 results now.
2234
Fred Drake7f781c92002-05-01 20:33:53 +00002235- The pickle.Pickler class grew a clear_memo() method to mimic that
2236 provided by cPickle.Pickler.
2237
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00002238- difflib's SequenceMatcher class now does a dynamic analysis of
2239 which elements are so frequent as to constitute noise. For
2240 comparing files as sequences of lines, this generally works better
2241 than the IS_LINE_JUNK function, and function ndiff's linejunk
2242 argument defaults to None now as a result. A happy benefit is
2243 that SequenceMatcher may run much faster now when applied
2244 to large files with many duplicate lines (for example, C program
2245 text with lots of repeated "}" and "return NULL;" lines).
2246
Guido van Rossum256705b2002-04-23 13:29:43 +00002247- New Text.dump() method in Tkinter module.
2248
Marc-André Lemburg1ec71ea2002-04-17 20:33:40 +00002249- New distutils commands for building packagers were added to
2250 support pkgtool on Solaris and swinstall on HP-UX.
2251
2252- distutils now has a new abstract binary packager base class
2253 command/bdist_packager, which simplifies writing packagers.
2254 This will hopefully provide the missing bits to encourage
2255 people to submit more packagers, e.g. for Debian, FreeBSD
2256 and other systems.
2257
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00002258- The UTF-16, -LE and -BE stream readers now raise a
2259 NotImplementedError for all calls to .readline(). Previously, they
2260 used to just produce garbage or fail with an encoding error --
2261 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 +00002262 work well with these.
2263
Martin v. Löwis5c137c22002-03-18 12:44:08 +00002264- compileall now supports quiet operation.
2265
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002266- The BaseHTTPServer now implements optional HTTP/1.1 persistent
Martin v. Löwis587c98c2002-03-17 18:37:22 +00002267 connections.
2268
Marc-André Lemburga5d2b4c2002-02-16 18:23:30 +00002269- socket module: the SSL support was broken out of the main
2270 _socket module C helper and placed into a new _ssl helper
2271 which now gets imported by socket.py if available and working.
2272
Marc-André Lemburg37aa5802002-02-10 21:42:47 +00002273- encodings package: added aliases for all supported IANA character
2274 sets
2275
Guido van Rossum606fe4e2001-12-28 20:57:14 +00002276- ftplib: to safeguard the user's privacy, anonymous login will use
2277 "anonymous@" as default password, rather than the real user and host
2278 name.
2279
Fred Drake36736122002-01-10 13:50:31 +00002280- webbrowser: tightened up the command passed to os.system() so that
2281 arbitrary shell code can't be executed because a bogus URL was
2282 passed in.
2283
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00002284- gettext.translation has an optional fallback argument, and
Martin v. Löwisa55ffae2002-01-11 06:58:49 +00002285 gettext.find an optional all argument. Translations will now fallback
Martin v. Löwisd8996052002-11-21 21:45:32 +00002286 on a per-message basis. The module supports plural forms, by means
2287 of gettext.[d]ngettext and Translation.[u]ngettext.
Martin v. Löwis1be64192002-01-11 06:33:28 +00002288
Martin v. Löwis9668b932002-01-12 11:27:42 +00002289- distutils bdist commands now offer a --skip-build option.
2290
Walter Dörwaldb25c2b02002-03-21 10:38:40 +00002291- warnings.warn now accepts a Warning instance as first argument.
2292
Fred Drakefed7e852002-04-04 19:36:15 +00002293- The xml.sax.expatreader.ExpatParser class will no longer create
2294 circular references by using itself as the locator that gets passed
2295 to the content handler implementation. [SF bug #535474]
2296
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00002297- The email.Parser.Parser class now properly parses strings regardless
2298 of their line endings, which can be any of \r, \n, or \r\n (CR, LF,
2299 or CRLF). Also, the Header class's constructor default arguments
2300 has changed slightly so that an explicit maxlinelen value is always
Barry Warsaw497e5c42002-12-30 19:27:08 +00002301 honored, and so unicode conversion error handling can be specified.
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00002302
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002303- distutils' build_ext command now links C++ extensions with the C++
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00002304 compiler available in the Makefile or CXX environment variable, if
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002305 running under \*nix.
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00002306
2307- New module bz2: provides a comprehensive interface for the bz2 compression
2308 library. It implements a complete file interface, one-shot (de)compression
2309 functions, and types for sequential (de)compression.
2310
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002311- New pdb command 'pp' which is like 'p' except that it pretty-prints
Barry Warsaw5d8d6182002-11-05 22:41:33 +00002312 the value of its expression argument.
2313
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00002314- Now bdist_rpm distutils command understands a verify_script option in
2315 the config file, including the contents of the referred filename in
2316 the "%verifyscript" section of the rpm spec file.
2317
Gustavo Niemeyer1456fde2002-11-25 17:25:04 +00002318- Fixed bug #495695: webbrowser module would run graphic browsers in a
2319 unix environment even if DISPLAY was not set. Also, support for
2320 skipstone browser was included.
2321
Gustavo Niemeyerd5ae01a2002-12-16 13:11:57 +00002322- Fixed bug #636769: rexec would run unallowed code if subclasses of
2323 strings were used as parameters for certain functions.
2324
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002325Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002326-----------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002327
Martin v. Löwis0d1fdea2002-11-22 08:36:54 +00002328- pygettext.py now supports globbing on Windows, and accepts module
2329 names in addition to accepting file names.
2330
Guido van Rossum923e4ef2002-09-17 20:58:59 +00002331- The SGI demos (Demo/sgi) have been removed. Nobody thought they
2332 were interesting any more. (The SGI library modules and extensions
2333 are still there; it is believed that at least some of these are
2334 still used and useful.)
2335
Fred Drake40813b12002-08-05 15:24:19 +00002336- IDLE supports the new encoding declarations (PEP 263); it can also
2337 deal with legacy 8-bit files if they use the locale's encoding. It
2338 allows non-ASCII strings in the interactive shell and executes them
2339 in the locale's encoding.
Martin v. Löwis98ce7b72002-08-05 15:11:26 +00002340
Marc-André Lemburg46260092002-04-04 16:17:11 +00002341- freeze.py now produces binaries which can import shared modules,
2342 unlike before when this failed due to missing symbol exports in
2343 the generated binary.
2344
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002345Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002346-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002347
Martin v. Löwisdc461752002-11-06 21:59:33 +00002348- On Unix, IDLE is now installed automatically.
2349
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00002350- The fpectl module is not built by default; it's dangerous or useless
2351 except in the hands of experts.
2352
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00002353- The public Python C API will generally be declared using PyAPI_FUNC
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00002354 and PyAPI_DATA macros, while Python extension module init functions
2355 will be declared with PyMODINIT_FUNC. DL_EXPORT/DL_IMPORT macros
2356 are deprecated.
Neal Norwitz1389f3e2002-07-22 13:21:10 +00002357
Tim Petersc6a3ff62002-07-08 22:11:52 +00002358- A bug was fixed that could cause COUNT_ALLOCS builds to segfault, or
2359 get into infinite loops, when a new-style class got garbage-collected.
2360 Unfortunately, to avoid this, the way COUNT_ALLOCS works requires
2361 that new-style classes be immortal in COUNT_ALLOCS builds. Note that
2362 COUNT_ALLOCS is not enabled by default, in either release or debug
2363 builds, and that new-style classes are immortal only in COUNT_ALLOCS
2364 builds.
2365
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00002366- Compiling out the cyclic garbage collector is no longer an option.
2367 The old symbol WITH_CYCLE_GC is now ignored, and Python.h arranges
2368 that it's always defined (for the benefit of any extension modules
2369 that may be conditionalizing on it). A bonus is that any extension
2370 type participating in cyclic gc can choose to participate in the
2371 Py_TRASHCAN mechanism now too; in the absence of cyclic gc, this used
2372 to require editing the core to teach the trashcan mechanism about the
2373 new type.
2374
Martin v. Löwis0cec0ff2002-07-28 16:33:45 +00002375- According to Annex F of the current C standard,
Tim Peters1de41bf2002-07-03 03:31:20 +00002376
2377 The Standard C macro HUGE_VAL and its float and long double analogs,
2378 HUGE_VALF and HUGE_VALL, expand to expressions whose values are
2379 positive infinities.
2380
2381 Python only uses the double HUGE_VAL, and only to #define its own symbol
2382 Py_HUGE_VAL. Some platforms have incorrect definitions for HUGE_VAL.
2383 pyport.h used to try to worm around that, but the workarounds triggered
2384 other bugs on other platforms, so we gave up. If your platform defines
2385 HUGE_VAL incorrectly, you'll need to #define Py_HUGE_VAL to something
2386 that works on your platform. The only instance of this I'm sure about
2387 is on an unknown subset of Cray systems, described here:
2388
2389 http://www.cray.com/swpubs/manuals/SN-2194_2.0/html-SN-2194_2.0/x3138.htm
2390
2391 Presumably 2.3a1 breaks such systems. If anyone uses such a system, help!
2392
Martin v. Löwisa3fb4f72002-06-09 13:33:54 +00002393- The configure option --without-doc-strings can be used to remove the
2394 doc strings from the builtin functions and modules; this reduces the
2395 size of the executable.
2396
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00002397- The universal newlines option (PEP 278) is on by default. On Unix
2398 it can be disabled by passing --without-universal-newlines to the
2399 configure script. On other platforms, remove
2400 WITH_UNIVERSAL_NEWLINES from pyconfig.h.
Tim Peters639295f2002-04-21 07:30:30 +00002401
Martin v. Löwis1142de32002-03-29 16:28:31 +00002402- On Unix, a shared libpython2.3.so can be created with --enable-shared.
2403
Tim Peters8deda702002-03-30 10:06:07 +00002404- All uses of the CACHE_HASH, INTERN_STRINGS, and DONT_SHARE_SHORT_STRINGS
2405 preprocessor symbols were eliminated. The internal decisions they
2406 controlled stopped being experimental long ago.
Tim Peters1f7df352002-03-29 03:29:08 +00002407
Fred Drake7d28b732002-05-02 21:17:00 +00002408- The tools used to build the documentation now work under Cygwin as
2409 well as Unix.
2410
Skip Montanaro57454e52002-06-14 20:30:31 +00002411- The bsddb and dbm module builds have been changed to try and avoid version
2412 skew problems and disable linkage with Berkeley DB 1.85 unless the
2413 installer knows what s/he's doing. See the section on building these
2414 modules in the README file for details.
2415
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002416C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002417-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002418
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00002419- PyNumber_Check() now returns true for string and unicode objects.
2420 This is a result of these types having a partially defined
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00002421 tp_as_number slot. (This is not a feature, but an indication that
Walter Dörwalda1a61f92002-11-19 21:20:25 +00002422 PyNumber_Check() is not very useful to determine numeric behavior.
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00002423 It may be deprecated.)
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00002424
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00002425- The string object's layout has changed: the pointer member
2426 ob_sinterned has been replaced by an int member ob_sstate. On some
2427 platforms (e.g. most 64-bit systems) this may change the offset of
2428 the ob_sval member, so as a precaution the API_VERSION has been
2429 incremented. The apparently unused feature of "indirect interned
2430 strings", supported by the ob_sinterned member, is gone. Interned
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002431 strings are now usually mortal; there is a new API,
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00002432 PyString_InternImmortal() that creates immortal interned strings.
2433 (The ob_sstate member can only take three values; however, while
2434 making it a char saves a few bytes per string object on average, in
2435 it also slowed things down a bit because ob_sval was no longer
2436 aligned.)
2437
Guido van Rossumfdb86482002-08-14 21:20:32 +00002438- The Py_InitModule*() functions now accept NULL for the 'methods'
2439 argument. Modules without global functions are becoming more common
2440 now that factories can be types rather than functions.
2441
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00002442- New C API PyUnicode_FromOrdinal() which exposes unichr() at C
2443 level.
2444
Thomas Heller085358a2002-07-29 14:27:41 +00002445- New functions PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErr() and
2446 PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErrWithFilename(). Similar to
2447 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErrWithFilename() and
2448 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErr(), but they allow to specify
2449 the exception type to raise. Available on Windows.
2450
Tim Peters7c321a82002-07-09 02:57:01 +00002451- Py_FatalError() is now declared as taking a const char* argument. It
2452 was previously declared without const. This should not affect working
2453 code.
2454
Martin v. Löwis01f94bd2002-05-08 08:44:21 +00002455- Added new macro PySequence_ITEM(o, i) that directly calls
2456 sq_item without rechecking that o is a sequence and without
2457 adjusting for negative indices.
2458
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00002459- PyRange_New() now raises ValueError if the fourth argument is not 1.
2460 This is part of the removal of deprecated features of the xrange
2461 object.
2462
Guido van Rossum517c7d42002-04-26 02:49:14 +00002463- PyNumber_Coerce() and PyNumber_CoerceEx() now also invoke the type's
2464 coercion if both arguments have the same type but this type has the
2465 CHECKTYPES flag set. This is to better support proxies.
2466
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00002467- The type of tp_free has been changed from "``void (*)(PyObject *)``" to
2468 "``void (*)(void *)``".
Neil Schemenauer9344b142002-04-12 23:00:08 +00002469
2470- PyObject_Del, PyObject_GC_Del are now functions instead of macros.
2471
Guido van Rossum0986d822002-04-08 01:38:42 +00002472- A type can now inherit its metatype from its base type. Previously,
2473 when PyType_Ready() was called, if ob_type was found to be NULL, it
2474 was always set to &PyType_Type; now it is set to base->ob_type,
2475 where base is tp_base, defaulting to &PyObject_Type.
2476
2477- PyType_Ready() accidentally did not inherit tp_is_gc; now it does.
2478
Neil Schemenauerc9abc1d2002-05-08 14:14:41 +00002479- The PyCore_* family of APIs have been removed.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00002480
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002481- The "u#" parser marker will now pass through Unicode objects as-is
Marc-André Lemburg3e3eacb2002-01-09 16:21:27 +00002482 without going through the buffer API.
2483
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002484- The enumerators of cmp_op have been renamed to use the prefix ``PyCmp_``.
Martin v. Löwis7198a522002-01-01 19:59:11 +00002485
Tim Peters10a3bb52001-12-25 19:07:38 +00002486- An old #define of ANY as void has been removed from pyport.h. This
2487 hasn't been used since Python's pre-ANSI days, and the #define has
2488 been marked as obsolete since then. SF bug 495548 says it created
2489 conflicts with other packages, so keeping it around wasn't harmless.
2490
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002491- Because Python's magic number scheme broke on January 1st, we decided
2492 to stop Python development. Thanks for all the fish!
2493
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00002494- Some of us don't like fish, so we changed Python's magic number
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00002495 scheme to a new one. See Python/import.c for details.
2496
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002497New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002498-------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002499
Martin v. Löwis79acb9e2002-12-06 12:48:53 +00002500- OpenVMS is now supported.
2501
Martin v. Löwisf90ae202002-06-11 06:22:31 +00002502- AtheOS is now supported.
2503
Andrew MacIntyre161ad0e2002-08-04 07:25:58 +00002504- the EMX runtime environment on OS/2 is now supported.
2505
Martin v. Löwisa6e97582002-01-01 18:41:33 +00002506- GNU/Hurd is now supported.
2507
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002508Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002509-----
2510
Fred Drake4dd0f7e2002-11-26 21:44:56 +00002511- The regrtest.py script's -u option now provides a way to say "allow
2512 all resources except this one." For example, to allow everything
2513 except bsddb, give the option '-uall,-bsddb'.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002514
2515Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002516-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002517
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00002518- The Windows distribution now ships with version 4.0.14 of the
2519 Sleepycat Berkeley database library. This should be a huge
2520 improvement over the previous Berkeley DB 1.85, which had many
2521 bugs.
2522 XXX What are the licensing issues here?
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002523 XXX If a user has a database created with a previous version of
Tim Peters84c7a3f2002-11-23 18:48:06 +00002524 XXX Python, what must they do to convert it?
2525 XXX I'm still not sure how to link this thing (see PCbuild/readme.txt).
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00002526 XXX The version # is likely to change before 2.3a1.
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00002527
2528- The Windows distribution now ships with a Secure Sockets Library (SLL)
Mark Hammondc3de0082002-12-03 06:16:08 +00002529 module (_ssl.pyd)
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00002530
Tim Peters857fb4c2002-11-14 23:31:58 +00002531- The Windows distribution now ships with Tcl/Tk version 8.4.1 (it
2532 previously shipped with Tcl/Tk 8.3.2).
2533
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00002534- When Python is built under a Microsoft compiler, sys.version now
2535 includes the compiler version number (_MSC_VER). For example, under
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002536 MSVC 6, sys.version contains the substring "MSC v.1200 ". 1200 is
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00002537 the value of _MSC_VER under MSVC 6.
2538
Tim Peters08e72952002-04-16 20:48:01 +00002539- Sometimes the uninstall executable (UNWISE.EXE) vanishes. One cause
2540 of that has been fixed in the installer (disabled Wise's "delete in-
2541 use files" uninstall option).
2542
Guido van Rossum181e41a2002-04-06 00:23:25 +00002543- Fixed a bug in urllib's proxy handling in Windows. [SF bug #503031]
2544
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00002545- The installer now installs Start menu shortcuts under (the local
2546 equivalent of) "All Users" when doing an Admin install.
2547
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00002548- file.truncate([newsize]) now works on Windows for all newsize values.
2549 It used to fail if newsize didn't fit in 32 bits, reflecting a
2550 limitation of MS _chsize (which is no longer used).
2551
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00002552- os.waitpid() is now implemented for Windows, and can be used to block
2553 until a specified process exits. This is similar to, but not exactly
2554 the same as, os.waitpid() on POSIX systems. If you're waiting for
2555 a specific process whose pid was obtained from one of the spawn()
2556 functions, the same Python os.waitpid() code works across platforms.
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00002557 See the docs for details. The docs were changed to clarify that
2558 spawn functions return, and waitpid requires, a process handle on
2559 Windows (not the same thing as a Windows process id).
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00002560
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00002561- New tempfile.TemporaryFile implementation for Windows: this doesn't
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002562 need a TemporaryFileWrapper wrapper anymore, and should be immune
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00002563 to a nasty problem: before 2.3, if you got a temp file on Windows, it
2564 got wrapped in an object whose close() method first closed the
2565 underlying file, then deleted the file. This usually worked fine.
2566 However, the spawn family of functions on Windows create (at a low C
2567 level) the same set of open files in the spawned process Q as were
2568 open in the spawning process P. If a temp file f was among them, then
2569 doing f.close() in P first closed P's C-level file handle on f, but Q's
2570 C-level file handle on f remained open, so the attempt in P to delete f
2571 blew up with a "Permission denied" error (Windows doesn't allow
2572 deleting open files). This was surprising, subtle, and difficult to
2573 work around.
2574
2575- The os module now exports all the symbolic constants usable with the
2576 low-level os.open() on Windows: the new constants in 2.3 are
2577 O_NOINHERIT, O_SHORT_LIVED, O_TEMPORARY, O_RANDOM and O_SEQUENTIAL.
2578 The others were also available in 2.2: O_APPEND, O_BINARY, O_CREAT,
2579 O_EXCL, O_RDONLY, O_RDWR, O_TEXT, O_TRUNC and O_WRONLY. Contrary
2580 to Microsoft docs, O_SHORT_LIVED does not seem to imply O_TEMPORARY
2581 (so specify both if you want both; note that neither is useful unless
2582 specified with O_CREAT too).
2583
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002584Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002585----
2586
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002587- Mac/Relnotes is gone, the release notes are now here.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002588
Just van Rossume1ebd802003-02-10 10:06:18 +00002589- Python (the OSX-only, unix-based version, not the OS9-compatible CFM
2590 version) now fully supports unicode strings as arguments to various file
2591 system calls, eg. open(), file(), os.stat() and os.listdir().
2592
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002593- The current naming convention for Python on the Macintosh is that MacPython
2594 refers to the unix-based OSX-only version, and MacPython-OS9 refers to the
2595 CFM-based version that runs on both OS9 and OSX.
2596
2597- All MacPython-OS9 functionality is now available in an OSX unix build,
2598 including the Carbon modules, the IDE, OSA support, etc. A lot of this
2599 will only work correctly in a framework build, though, because you cannot
2600 talk to the window manager unless your application is run from a .app
2601 bundle. There is a command line tool "pythonw" that runs your script
2602 with an interpreter living in such a .app bundle, this interpreter should
2603 be used to run any Python script using the window manager (including
2604 Tkinter or wxPython scripts).
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00002605
Jack Jansen8bb80db2002-12-30 22:42:43 +00002606- Most of Mac/Lib has moved to Lib/plat-mac, which is again used both in
2607 MacPython-OSX and MacPython-OS9. The only modules remaining in Mac/Lib
2608 are specifically for MacPython-OS9 (CFM support, preference resources, etc).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002609
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002610- A new utility PythonLauncher will start a Python interpreter when a .py or
2611 .pyw script is double-clicked in the Finder. By default .py scripts are
2612 run with a normal Python interpreter in a Terminal window and .pyw
2613 files are run with a window-aware pythonw interpreter without a Terminal
2614 window, but all this can be customized.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002615
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002616- MacPython-OS9 is now Carbon-only, so it runs on Mac OS 9 or Mac OS X and
2617 possibly on Mac OS 8.6 with the right CarbonLib installed, but not on earlier
2618 releases.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002619
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002620- Many tools such as BuildApplet.py and gensuitemodule.py now support a command
2621 line interface too.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002622
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002623- All the Carbon classes are now PEP253 compliant, meaning that you can
2624 subclass them from Python. Most of the attributes have gone, you should
2625 now use the accessor function call API, which is also what Apple's
2626 documentation uses. Some attributes such as grafport.visRgn are still
2627 available for convenience.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002628
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002629- New Carbon modules File (implementing the APIs in Files.h and Aliases.h)
2630 and Folder (APIs from Folders.h). The old macfs builtin module is
2631 gone, and replaced by a Python wrapper around the new modules.
2632
2633- Pathname handling should now be fully consistent: MacPython-OSX always uses
2634 unix pathnames and MacPython-OS9 always uses colon-separated Mac pathnames
2635 (also when running on Mac OS X).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002636
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002637- New Carbon modules Help and AH give access to the Carbon Help Manager.
2638 There are hooks in the IDE to allow accessing the Python documentation
2639 (and Apple's Carbon and Cocoa documentation) through the Help Viewer.
2640 See Mac/OSX/README for converting the Python documentation to a
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002641 Help Viewer compatible form and installing it.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002642
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002643- OSA support has been redesigned and the generated Python classes now
2644 mirror the inheritance defined by the underlying OSA classes.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002645
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002646- MacPython no longer maps both \r and \n to \n on input for any text file.
2647 This feature has been replaced by universal newline support (PEP278).
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00002648
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00002649- The default encoding for Python sourcefiles in MacPython-OS9 is no longer
Guido van Rossum16c85172003-02-20 01:52:48 +00002650 mac-roman (or whatever your local Mac encoding was) but "ascii", like on
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00002651 other platforms. If you really need sourcefiles with Mac characters in them
2652 you can change this in site.py.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002653
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002654
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002655What's New in Python 2.2 final?
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002656===============================
2657
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002658*Release date: 21-Dec-2001*
2659
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002660Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002661--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002662
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002663- pickle.py, cPickle: allow pickling instances of new-style classes
2664 with a custom metaclass.
2665
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002666Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002667-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002668
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002669- weakref proxy object: when comparing, unwrap both arguments if both
2670 are proxies.
2671
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002672Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002673-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002674
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002675- binascii.b2a_base64(): fix a potential buffer overrun when encoding
2676 very short strings.
2677
2678- cPickle: the obscure "fast" mode was suspected of causing stack
2679 overflows on the Mac. Hopefully fixed this by setting the recursion
2680 limit much smaller. If the limit is too low (it only affects
2681 performance), you can change it by defining PY_CPICKLE_FAST_LIMIT
2682 when compiling cPickle.c (or in pyconfig.h).
2683
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002684Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002685-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002686
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002687- dumbdbm.py: fixed a dumb old bug (the file didn't get synched at
2688 close or delete time).
2689
2690- rfc822.py: fixed a bug where the address '<>' was converted to None
2691 instead of an empty string (also fixes the email.Utils module).
2692
2693- xmlrpclib.py: version 1.0.0; uses precision for doubles.
2694
2695- test suite: the pickle and cPickle tests were not executing any code
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002696 when run from the standard regression test.
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002697
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002698Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002699-----------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002700
2701Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002702-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002703
2704C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002705-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002706
2707New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002708-------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002709
2710Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002711-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002712
2713Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002714-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002715
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002716- distutils package: fixed broken Windows installers (bdist_wininst).
2717
2718- tempfile.py: prevent mysterious warnings when TemporaryFileWrapper
2719 instances are deleted at process exit time.
2720
2721- socket.py: prevent mysterious warnings when socket instances are
2722 deleted at process exit time.
2723
2724- posixmodule.c: fix a Windows crash with stat() of a filename ending
2725 in backslash.
2726
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002727Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002728----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002729
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002730- The Carbon toolbox modules have been upgraded to Universal Headers
2731 3.4, and experimental CoreGraphics and CarbonEvents modules have
2732 been added. All only for framework-enabled MacOSX.
2733
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002734
Tim Peters6272dfd2001-12-13 19:34:00 +00002735What's New in Python 2.2c1?
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002736===========================
2737
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002738*Release date: 14-Dec-2001*
2739
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002740Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002741--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002742
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00002743- Guido's tutorial introduction to the new type/class features has
2744 been extensively updated. See
2745
2746 http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html
2747
2748 That remains the primary documentation in this area.
2749
Guido van Rossum33bab012001-12-05 22:45:48 +00002750- Fixed a leak: instance variables declared with __slots__ were never
2751 deleted!
2752
Guido van Rossum4b800852001-12-03 00:54:52 +00002753- The "delete attribute" method of descriptor objects is called
2754 __delete__, not __del__. In previous releases, it was mistakenly
2755 called __del__, which created an unfortunate overloading condition
2756 with finalizers. (The "get attribute" and "set attribute" methods
2757 are still called __get__ and __set__, respectively.)
2758
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00002759- Some subtle issues with the super built-in were fixed:
2760
2761 (a) When super itself is subclassed, its __get__ method would still
2762 return an instance of the base class (i.e., of super).
2763
2764 (b) super(C, C()).__class__ would return C rather than super. This
2765 is confusing. To fix this, I decided to change the semantics of
2766 super so that it only applies to code attributes, not to data
2767 attributes. After all, overriding data attributes is not
2768 supported anyway.
2769
2770 (c) The __get__ method didn't check whether the argument was an
2771 instance of the type used in creation of the super instance.
2772
Guido van Rossumcd7b7d62001-12-04 21:02:07 +00002773- Previously, hash() of an instance of a subclass of a mutable type
2774 (list or dictionary) would return some value, rather than raising
2775 TypeError. This has been fixed. Also, directly calling
2776 dict.__hash__ and list.__hash__ now raises the same TypeError
2777 (previously, these were the same as object.__hash__).
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00002778
Guido van Rossumd331cb52001-12-05 19:46:42 +00002779- New-style objects now support deleting their __dict__. This is for
2780 all intents and purposes equivalent to assigning a brand new empty
2781 dictionary, but saves space if the object is not used further.
2782
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002783Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002784-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002785
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00002786- -Qnew now works as documented in PEP 238: when -Qnew is passed on
2787 the command line, all occurrences of "/" use true division instead
2788 of classic division. See the PEP for details. Note that "all"
2789 means all instances in library and 3rd-party modules, as well as in
2790 your own code. As the PEP says, -Qnew is intended for use only in
2791 educational environments with control over the libraries in use.
Tim Petersbf72fe22001-12-11 21:43:14 +00002792 Note that test_coercion.py in the standard Python test suite fails
2793 under -Qnew; this is expected, and won't be repaired until true
2794 division becomes the default (in the meantime, test_coercion is
2795 testing the current rules).
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00002796
Fred Drake6c01e252001-12-14 17:08:12 +00002797- complex() now only allows the first argument to be a string
2798 argument, and raises TypeError if either the second arg is a string
2799 or if the second arg is specified when the first is a string.
2800
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002801Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002802-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002803
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00002804- gc.get_referents was renamed to gc.get_referrers.
2805
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002806Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002807-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002808
Tim Peters25059d32001-12-07 20:35:43 +00002809- Functions in the os.spawn() family now release the global interpreter
2810 lock around calling the platform spawn. They should always have done
2811 this, but did not before 2.2c1. Multithreaded programs calling
2812 an os.spawn function with P_WAIT will no longer block all Python threads
2813 until the spawned program completes. It's possible that some programs
2814 relies on blocking, although more likely by accident than by design.
2815
Martin v. Löwis3a89b2b2001-11-25 14:35:58 +00002816- webbrowser defaults to netscape.exe on OS/2 now.
2817
Martin v. Löwis652e1912001-11-25 14:50:56 +00002818- Tix.ResizeHandle exposes detach_widget, hide, and show.
2819
Martin v. Löwis714d2e22001-12-02 12:26:03 +00002820- The charset alias windows_1252 has been added.
2821
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00002822- types.StringTypes is a tuple containing the defined string types;
2823 usually this will be (str, unicode), but if Python was compiled
2824 without Unicode support it will be just (str,).
2825
2826- The pulldom and minidom modules were synchronized to PyXML.
2827
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002828Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002829-----------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002830
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00002831- A new script called Tools/scripts/google.py was added, which fires
2832 off a search on Google.
2833
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002834Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002835-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002836
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00002837- Note that release builds of Python should arrange to define the
2838 preprocessor symbol NDEBUG on the command line (or equivalent).
2839 In the 2.2 pre-release series we tried to define this by magic in
2840 Python.h instead, but it proved to cause problems for extension
2841 authors. The Unix, Windows and Mac builds now all define NDEBUG in
2842 release builds via cmdline (or equivalent) instead. Ports to
2843 other platforms should do likewise.
2844
Jack Jansen1999ef42001-12-06 21:47:20 +00002845- It is no longer necessary to use --with-suffix when building on a
2846 case-insensitive file system (such as Mac OS X HFS+). In the build
2847 directory an extension is used, but not in the installed python.
2848
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002849C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002850-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002851
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00002852- New function PyDict_MergeFromSeq2() exposes the builtin dict
2853 constructor's logic for updating a dictionary from an iterable object
2854 producing key-value pairs.
2855
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00002856- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() requires that the number of entries in
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00002857 the keyword list equal the number of argument specifiers. This
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00002858 wasn't checked correctly, and PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords could even
2859 dump core in some bad cases. This has been repaired. As a result,
2860 PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords may raise RuntimeError in bad cases that
2861 previously went unchallenged.
2862
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002863New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002864-------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002865
2866Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002867-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002868
2869Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002870-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002871
2872Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002873----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002874
Jack Jansenffa260f2001-12-06 21:14:00 +00002875- In unix-Python on Mac OS X (and darwin) sys.platform is now "darwin",
2876 without any trailing digits.
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002877
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00002878- Changed logic for finding python home in Mac OS X framework Pythons.
2879 Now sys.executable points to the executable again, in stead of to
2880 the shared library. The latter is used only for locating the python
2881 home.
2882
2883
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002884What's New in Python 2.2b2?
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002885===========================
2886
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002887*Release date: 16-Nov-2001*
2888
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002889Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002890--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002891
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00002892- Multiple inheritance mixing new-style and classic classes in the
2893 list of base classes is now allowed, so this works now:
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00002894
2895 class Classic: pass
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00002896 class Mixed(Classic, object): pass
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00002897
2898 The MRO (method resolution order) for each base class is respected
2899 according to its kind, but the MRO for the derived class is computed
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002900 using new-style MRO rules if any base class is a new-style class.
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00002901 This needs to be documented.
2902
Tim Petersa427a2b2001-10-29 22:25:45 +00002903- The new builtin dictionary() constructor, and dictionary type, have
2904 been renamed to dict. This reflects a decade of common usage.
2905
Guido van Rossum3fc08d22001-11-15 20:33:10 +00002906- dict() now accepts an iterable object producing 2-sequences. For
2907 example, dict(d.items()) == d for any dictionary d. The argument,
2908 and the elements of the argument, can be any iterable objects.
2909
Guido van Rossum7ad2d1e2001-10-29 22:11:00 +00002910- New-style classes can now have a __del__ method, which is called
2911 when the instance is deleted (just like for classic classes).
2912
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00002913- Assignment to object.__dict__ is now possible, for objects that are
2914 instances of new-style classes that have a __dict__ (unless the base
2915 class forbids it).
2916
Guido van Rossumc8e56452001-10-22 00:43:43 +00002917- Methods of built-in types now properly check for keyword arguments
2918 (formerly these were silently ignored). The only built-in methods
2919 that take keyword arguments are __call__, __init__ and __new__.
2920
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00002921- The socket function has been converted to a type; see below.
2922
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002923Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002924-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002925
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00002926- Assignment to __debug__ raises SyntaxError at compile-time. This
2927 was promised when 2.1c1 was released as "What's New in Python 2.1c1"
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00002928 (see below) says.
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00002929
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00002930- Clarified the error messages for unsupported operands to an operator
2931 (like 1 + '').
2932
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002933Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002934-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002935
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00002936- mmap has a new keyword argument, "access", allowing a uniform way for
2937 both Windows and Unix users to create read-only, write-through and
2938 copy-on-write memory mappings. This was previously possible only on
2939 Unix. A new keyword argument was required to support this in a
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002940 uniform way because the mmap() signatures had diverged across
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00002941 platforms. Thanks to Jay T Miller for repairing this!
2942
Tim Peters169ded02001-11-03 19:57:21 +00002943- By default, the gc.garbage list now contains only those instances in
2944 unreachable cycles that have __del__ methods; in 2.1 it contained all
2945 instances in unreachable cycles. "Instances" here has been generalized
2946 to include instances of both new-style and old-style classes.
2947
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00002948- The socket module defines a new method for socket objects,
2949 sendall(). This is like send() but may make multiple calls to
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00002950 send() until all data has been sent. Also, the socket function has
2951 been converted to a subclassable type, like list and tuple (etc.)
2952 before it; socket and SocketType are now the same thing.
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00002953
2954- Various bugfixes to the curses module. There is now a test suite
2955 for the curses module (you have to run it manually).
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00002956
Guido van Rossum692adf12001-10-30 03:03:03 +00002957- binascii.b2a_base64 no longer places an arbitrary restriction of 57
2958 bytes on its input.
2959
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002960Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002961-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002962
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00002963- tkFileDialog exposes a Directory class and askdirectory
Martin v. Löwis25ee87c2001-11-07 22:38:08 +00002964 convenience function.
2965
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00002966- Symbolic group names in regular expressions must be unique. For
2967 example, the regexp r'(?P<abc>)(?P<abc>)' is not allowed, because a
2968 single name can't mean both "group 1" and "group 2" simultaneously.
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00002969 Python 2.2 detects this error at regexp compilation time;
2970 previously, the error went undetected, and results were
2971 unpredictable. Also in sre, the pattern.split(), pattern.sub(), and
2972 pattern.subn() methods have been rewritten in C. Also, an
2973 experimental function/method finditer() has been added, which works
2974 like findall() but returns an iterator.
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00002975
Martin v. Löwisb7b32602001-11-02 23:48:20 +00002976- Tix exposes more commands through the classes DirSelectBox,
2977 DirSelectDialog, ListNoteBook, Meter, CheckList, and the
2978 methods tix_addbitmapdir, tix_cget, tix_configure, tix_filedialog,
2979 tix_getbitmap, tix_getimage, tix_option_get, and tix_resetoptions.
2980
Tim Peters98791af2001-10-23 01:59:54 +00002981- Traceback objects are now scanned by cyclic garbage collection, so
2982 cycles created by casual use of sys.exc_info() no longer cause
2983 permanent memory leaks (provided garbage collection is enabled).
2984
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00002985- os.extsep -- a new variable needed by the RISCOS support. It is the
2986 separator used by extensions, and is '.' on all platforms except
2987 RISCOS, where it is '/'. There is no need to use this variable
2988 unless you have a masochistic desire to port your code to RISCOS.
2989
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00002990- mimetypes.py has optional support for non-standard, but commonly
2991 found types. guess_type() and guess_extension() now accept an
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002992 optional 'strict' flag, defaulting to true, which controls whether
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00002993 recognize non-standard types or not. A few non-standard types we
2994 know about have been added. Also, when run as a script, there are
2995 new -l and -e options.
2996
2997- statcache is now deprecated.
2998
2999- email.Utils.formatdate() now produces the preferred RFC 2822 style
3000 dates with numeric timezones (it used to produce obsolete dates
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003001 hard coded to "GMT" timezone). An optional 'localtime' flag is
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003002 added to produce dates in the local timezone, with daylight savings
3003 time properly taken into account.
3004
3005- In pickle and cPickle, instead of masking errors in load() by
3006 transforming them into SystemError, we let the original exception
3007 propagate out. Also, implement support for __safe_for_unpickling__
3008 in pickle, as it already was supported in cPickle.
3009
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003010Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003011-----------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003012
3013Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003014-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003015
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003016- The dbm module is built using libdb1 if available. The bsddb module
3017 is built with libdb3 if available.
3018
3019- Misc/Makefile.pre.in has been removed by BDFL pronouncement.
3020
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003021C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003022-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003023
Tim Peters1fc240e2001-10-26 05:06:50 +00003024- New function PySequence_Fast_GET_SIZE() returns the size of a non-
3025 NULL result from PySequence_Fast(), more quickly than calling
3026 PySequence_Size().
3027
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003028- New argument unpacking function PyArg_UnpackTuple() added.
3029
3030- New functions PyObject_CallFunctionObjArgs() and
3031 PyObject_CallMethodObjArgs() have been added to make it more
3032 convenient and efficient to call functions and methods from C.
3033
3034- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() no longer masks errors, so it's
3035 possible that this will propagate errors it didn't before.
3036
3037- New function PyObject_CheckReadBuffer(), which returns true if its
3038 argument supports the single-segment readable buffer interface.
3039
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003040New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003041-------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003042
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00003043- We've finally confirmed that this release builds on HP-UX 11.00,
3044 *with* threads, and passes the test suite.
3045
Tim Peters7a33d8b2001-11-05 02:51:07 +00003046- Thanks to a series of patches from Michael Muller, Python may build
3047 again under OS/2 Visual Age C++.
3048
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00003049- Updated RISCOS port by Dietmar Schwertberger.
3050
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003051Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003052-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003053
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00003054- Added a test script for the curses module. It isn't run automatically;
3055 regrtest.py must be run with '-u curses' to enable it.
3056
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003057Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003058-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003059
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003060Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003061----
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003062
3063- PythonScript has been moved to unsupported and is slated to be
3064 removed completely in the next release.
3065
3066- It should now be possible to build applets that work on both OS9 and
3067 OSX.
3068
3069- The core is now linked with CoreServices not Carbon; as a side
3070 result, default 8bit encoding on OSX is now ASCII.
3071
3072- Python should now build on OSX 10.1.1
3073
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003074
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003075What's New in Python 2.2b1?
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003076===========================
3077
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003078*Release date: 19-Oct-2001*
3079
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003080Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003081--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003082
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00003083- New-style classes are now always dynamic (except for built-in and
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00003084 extension types). There is no longer a performance penalty, and I
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00003085 no longer see another reason to keep this baggage around. One relic
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00003086 remains: the __dict__ of a new-style class is a read-only proxy; you
3087 must set the class's attribute to modify it. As a consequence, the
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00003088 __defined__ attribute of new-style types no longer exists, for lack
3089 of need: there is once again only one __dict__ (although in the
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00003090 future a __cache__ may be resurrected with a similar function, if I
3091 can prove that it actually speeds things up).
Guido van Rossum50fda3b2001-10-04 19:46:06 +00003092
Tim Peters1c9ca872001-10-04 06:43:12 +00003093- C.__doc__ now works as expected for new-style classes (in 2.2a4 it
3094 always returned None, even when there was a class docstring).
3095
3096- doctest now finds and runs docstrings attached to new-style classes,
3097 class methods, static methods, and properties.
3098
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003099Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003100-----------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003101
Guido van Rossuma8bcf802001-10-15 15:53:58 +00003102- A very subtle syntactical pitfall in list comprehensions was fixed.
3103 For example: [a+b for a in 'abc', for b in 'def']. The comma in
3104 this example is a mistake. Previously, this would silently let 'a'
3105 iterate over the singleton tuple ('abc',), yielding ['abcd', 'abce',
3106 'abcf'] rather than the intended ['ad', 'ae', 'af', 'bd', 'be',
3107 'bf', 'cd', 'ce', 'cf']. Now, this is flagged as a syntax error.
3108 Note that [a for a in <singleton>] is a convoluted way to say
3109 [<singleton>] anyway, so it's not like any expressiveness is lost.
3110
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003111- getattr(obj, name, default) now only catches AttributeError, as
3112 documented, rather than returning the default value for all
3113 exceptions (which could mask bugs in a __getattr__ hook, for
3114 example).
3115
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00003116- Weak reference objects are now part of the core and offer a C API.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00003117 A bug which could allow a core dump when binary operations involved
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00003118 proxy reference has been fixed. weakref.ReferenceError is now a
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003119 built-in exception.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00003120
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00003121- unicode(obj) now behaves more like str(obj), accepting arbitrary
3122 objects, and calling a __unicode__ method if it exists.
3123 unicode(obj, encoding) and unicode(obj, encoding, errors) still
Marc-André Lemburgb5507ec2001-10-19 12:02:29 +00003124 require an 8-bit string or character buffer argument.
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00003125
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003126- isinstance() now allows any object as the first argument and a
3127 class, a type or something with a __bases__ tuple attribute for the
3128 second argument. The second argument may also be a tuple of a
3129 class, type, or something with __bases__, in which case isinstance()
3130 will return true if the first argument is an instance of any of the
3131 things contained in the second argument tuple. E.g.
3132
3133 isinstance(x, (A, B))
3134
3135 returns true if x is an instance of A or B.
3136
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003137Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003138-----------------
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003139
3140- thread.start_new_thread() now returns the thread ID (previously None).
3141
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00003142- binascii has now two quopri support functions, a2b_qp and b2a_qp.
3143
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00003144- readline now supports setting the startup_hook and the
3145 pre_event_hook, and adds the add_history() function.
Martin v. Löwis0daad592001-09-30 21:09:59 +00003146
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00003147- os and posix supports chroot(), setgroups() and unsetenv() where
3148 available. The stat(), fstat(), statvfs() and fstatvfs() functions
3149 now return "pseudo-sequences" -- the various fields can now be
3150 accessed as attributes (e.g. os.stat("/").st_mtime) but for
3151 backwards compatibility they also behave as a fixed-length sequence.
3152 Some platform-specific fields (e.g. st_rdev) are only accessible as
Guido van Rossum98bf58f2001-10-18 20:34:25 +00003153 attributes.
3154
3155- time: localtime(), gmtime() and strptime() now return a
3156 pseudo-sequence similar to the os.stat() return value, with
3157 attributes like tm_year etc.
Martin v. Löwis16628c92001-10-04 22:46:41 +00003158
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003159- Decompression objects in the zlib module now accept an optional
3160 second parameter to decompress() that specifies the maximum amount
3161 of memory to use for the uncompressed data.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003162
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00003163- optional SSL support in the socket module now exports OpenSSL
3164 functions RAND_add(), RAND_egd(), and RAND_status(). These calls
3165 are useful on platforms like Solaris where OpenSSL does not
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003166 automatically seed its PRNG. Also, the keyfile and certfile
3167 arguments to socket.ssl() are now optional.
3168
3169- posixmodule (and by extension, the os module on POSIX platforms) now
3170 exports O_LARGEFILE, O_DIRECT, O_DIRECTORY, and O_NOFOLLOW.
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00003171
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003172Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003173-------
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00003174
Tim Peters7402f792001-10-02 03:53:41 +00003175- doctest now excludes functions and classes not defined by the module
3176 being tested, thanks to Tim Hochberg.
3177
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00003178- HotShot, a new profiler implemented using a C-based callback, has
3179 been added. This substantially reduces the overhead of profiling,
3180 but it is still quite preliminary. Support modules and
3181 documentation will be added in upcoming releases (before 2.2 final).
3182
Guido van Rossumc4b09b42001-10-04 10:19:00 +00003183- profile now produces correct output in situations where an exception
3184 raised in Python is cleared by C code (e.g. hasattr()). This used
3185 to cause wrong output, including spurious claims of recursive
3186 functions and attribution of time spent to the wrong function.
3187
Tim Peters0a1fc4e2001-10-07 03:12:08 +00003188 The code and documentation for the derived OldProfile and HotProfile
3189 profiling classes was removed. The code hasn't worked for years (if
3190 you tried to use them, they raised exceptions). OldProfile
3191 intended to reproduce the behavior of the profiler Python used more
3192 than 7 years ago, and isn't interesting anymore. HotProfile intended
3193 to provide a faster profiler (but producing less information), and
3194 that's a worthy goal we intend to meet via a different approach (but
3195 without losing information).
3196
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00003197- Profile.calibrate() has a new implementation that should deliver
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00003198 a much better system-specific calibration constant. The constant can
3199 now be specified in an instance constructor, or as a Profile class or
3200 instance variable, instead of by editing profile.py's source code.
3201 Calibration must still be done manually (see the docs for the profile
3202 module).
3203
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003204 Note that Profile.calibrate() must be overridden by subclasses.
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00003205 Improving the accuracy required exploiting detailed knowledge of
3206 profiler internals; the earlier method abstracted away the details
3207 and measured a simplified model instead, but consequently computed
3208 a constant too small by a factor of 2 on some modern machines.
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00003209
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00003210- quopri's encode and decode methods take an optional header parameter,
Jeremy Hylton6f543b62001-10-16 20:42:52 +00003211 which indicates whether output is intended for the header 'Q'
3212 encoding.
3213
Guido van Rossuma5343cc2001-10-18 18:02:07 +00003214- The SocketServer.ThreadingMixIn class now closes the request after
3215 finish_request() returns. (Not when it errors out though.)
3216
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003217- The nntplib module's NNTP.body() method has grown a 'file' argument
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003218 to allow saving the message body to a file.
3219
3220- The email package has added a class email.Parser.HeaderParser which
3221 only parses headers and does not recurse into the message's body.
3222 Also, the module/class MIMEAudio has been added for representing
3223 audio data (contributed by Anthony Baxter).
3224
3225- ftplib should be able to handle files > 2GB.
3226
3227- ConfigParser.getboolean() now also interprets TRUE, FALSE, YES, NO,
3228 ON, and OFF.
3229
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00003230- xml.dom.minidom NodeList objects now support the length attribute
3231 and item() method as required by the DOM specifications.
3232
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00003233Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003234-----------
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00003235
3236- Demo/dns was removed. It no longer serves any purpose; a package
3237 derived from it is now maintained by Anthony Baxter, see
3238 http://PyDNS.SourceForge.net.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003239
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003240- The freeze tool has been made more robust, and two new options have
3241 been added: -X and -E.
3242
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003243Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003244-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003245
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003246- configure will use CXX in LINKCC if CXX is used to build main() and
3247 the system requires to link a C++ main using the C++ compiler.
3248
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003249C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003250-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003251
Guido van Rossum6c4bce32001-10-18 19:20:25 +00003252- The documentation for the tp_compare slot is updated to require that
3253 the return value must be -1, 0, 1; an arbitrary number <0 or >0 is
3254 not correct. This is not yet enforced but will be enforced in
3255 Python 2.3; even later, we may use -2 to indicate errors and +2 for
3256 "NotImplemented". Right now, -1 should be used for an error return.
3257
Tim Petersd38b1c72001-09-30 05:09:37 +00003258- PyLong_AsLongLong() now accepts int (as well as long) arguments.
3259 Consequently, PyArg_ParseTuple's 'L' code also accepts int (as well
3260 as long) arguments.
3261
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00003262- PyThread_start_new_thread() now returns a long int giving the thread
3263 ID, if one can be calculated; it returns -1 for error, 0 if no
3264 thread ID is calculated (this is an incompatible change, but only
3265 the thread module used this API). This code has only really been
3266 tested on Linux and Windows; other platforms please beware (and
3267 report any bugs or strange behavior).
3268
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00003269- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() no longer accepts Unicode objects as
3270 input.
3271
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003272New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003273-------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003274
3275Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003276-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003277
3278Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003279-------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003280
Tim Peters04cf1d32001-10-09 22:39:40 +00003281- Installer: If you install IDLE, and don't disable file-extension
3282 registration, a new "Edit with IDLE" context (right-click) menu entry
3283 is created for .py and .pyw files.
3284
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003285- The signal module now supports SIGBREAK on Windows, thanks to Steven
3286 Scott. Note that SIGBREAK is unique to Windows. The default SIGBREAK
3287 action remains to call Win32 ExitProcess(). This can be changed via
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003288 signal.signal(). For example::
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003289
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003290 # Make Ctrl+Break raise KeyboardInterrupt, like Python's default Ctrl+C
3291 # (SIGINT) behavior.
3292 import signal
3293 signal.signal(signal.SIGBREAK, signal.default_int_handler)
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003294
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003295 try:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003296 while 1:
3297 pass
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003298 except KeyboardInterrupt:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003299 # We get here on Ctrl+C or Ctrl+Break now; if we had not changed
3300 # SIGBREAK, only on Ctrl+C (and Ctrl+Break would terminate the
3301 # program without the possibility for any Python-level cleanup).
3302 print "Clean exit"
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003303
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003304
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003305What's New in Python 2.2a4?
3306===========================
3307
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003308*Release date: 28-Sep-2001*
3309
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003310Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003311--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003312
3313- pydoc and inspect are now aware of new-style classes;
3314 e.g. help(list) at the interactive prompt now shows proper
3315 documentation for all operations on list objects.
3316
3317- Applications using Jim Fulton's ExtensionClass module can now safely
3318 be used with Python 2.2. In particular, Zope 2.4.1 now works with
3319 Python 2.2 (as well as with Python 2.1.1). The Demo/metaclass
3320 examples also work again. It is hoped that Gtk and Boost also work
3321 with 2.2a4 and beyond. (If you can confirm this, please write
3322 webmaster@python.org; if there are still problems, please open a bug
3323 report on SourceForge.)
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003324
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00003325- property() now takes 4 keyword arguments: fget, fset, fdel and doc.
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003326 These map to read-only attributes 'fget', 'fset', 'fdel', and '__doc__'
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00003327 in the constructed property object. fget, fset and fdel weren't
3328 discoverable from Python in 2.2a3. __doc__ is new, and allows to
3329 associate a docstring with a property.
3330
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003331- Comparison overloading is now more completely implemented. For
3332 example, a str subclass instance can properly be compared to a str
3333 instance, and it can properly overload comparison. Ditto for most
3334 other built-in object types.
3335
3336- The repr() of new-style classes has changed; instead of <type
3337 'M.Foo'> a new-style class is now rendered as <class 'M.Foo'>,
3338 *except* for built-in types, which are still rendered as <type
3339 'Foo'> (to avoid upsetting existing code that might parse or
3340 otherwise rely on repr() of certain type objects).
3341
3342- The repr() of new-style objects is now always <Foo object at XXX>;
3343 previously, it was sometimes <Foo instance at XXX>.
3344
3345- For new-style classes, what was previously called __getattr__ is now
3346 called __getattribute__. This method, if defined, is called for
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00003347 *every* attribute access. A new __getattr__ hook more similar to the
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003348 one in classic classes is defined which is called only if regular
3349 attribute access raises AttributeError; to catch *all* attribute
3350 access, you can use __getattribute__ (for new-style classes). If
3351 both are defined, __getattribute__ is called first, and if it raises
3352 AttributeError, __getattr__ is called.
3353
3354- The __class__ attribute of new-style objects can be assigned to.
3355 The new class must have the same C-level object layout as the old
3356 class.
3357
3358- The builtin file type can be subclassed now. In the usual pattern,
3359 "file" is the name of the builtin type, and file() is a new builtin
3360 constructor, with the same signature as the builtin open() function.
3361 file() is now the preferred way to open a file.
3362
3363- Previously, __new__ would only see sequential arguments passed to
3364 the type in a constructor call; __init__ would see both sequential
3365 and keyword arguments. This made no sense whatsoever any more, so
3366 now both __new__ and __init__ see all arguments.
3367
3368- Previously, hash() applied to an instance of a subclass of str or
3369 unicode always returned 0. This has been repaired.
3370
3371- Previously, an operation on an instance of a subclass of an
3372 immutable type (int, long, float, complex, tuple, str, unicode),
3373 where the subtype didn't override the operation (and so the
3374 operation was handled by the builtin type), could return that
3375 instance instead a value of the base type. For example, if s was of
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003376 a str subclass type, s[:] returned s as-is. Now it returns a str
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003377 with the same value as s.
3378
Barry Warsaw86fbaf82001-09-28 15:26:12 +00003379- Provisional support for pickling new-style objects has been added.
3380
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003381Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003382----
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003383
Tim Peters2c9aa5e2001-09-23 04:06:05 +00003384- file.writelines() now accepts any iterable object producing strings.
3385
Marc-André Lemburgaefd7662001-09-20 12:59:37 +00003386- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() now works very much like
3387 PyObject_Str(obj) in that it tries to use __str__/tp_str
3388 on the object if the object is not a string or buffer. This
3389 makes unicode() behave like str() when applied to non-string/buffer
3390 objects.
3391
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00003392- PyFile_WriteObject now passes Unicode objects to the file's write
3393 method. As a result, all file-like objects which may be the target
Martin v. Löwis2777c022001-09-19 13:47:32 +00003394 of a print statement must support Unicode objects, i.e. they must
3395 at least convert them into ASCII strings.
3396
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003397- Thread scheduling on Solaris should be improved; it is no longer
3398 necessary to insert a small sleep at the start of a thread in order
3399 to let other runnable threads be scheduled.
3400
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003401Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003402-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003403
Marc-André Lemburgbf990172001-09-27 14:17:33 +00003404- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
3405 read character buffer compatible objects for their .write() methods.
3406 These objects are converted to strings and then handled as such
3407 by the instances.
3408
Barry Warsaw2f600732001-09-24 04:28:10 +00003409- The "email" package has been added. This is basically a port of the
3410 mimelib package <http://sf.net/projects/mimelib> with API changes
3411 and some implementations updated to use iterators and generators.
3412
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00003413- difflib.ndiff() and difflib.Differ.compare() are generators now. This
3414 restores the ability of Tools/scripts/ndiff.py to start producing output
3415 before the entire comparison is complete.
3416
Barry Warsaw58b072d2001-09-22 04:44:21 +00003417- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
3418 iteration just like file objects (i.e. their .readline() method is
3419 called for each iteration until it returns an empty string).
3420
Marc-André Lemburg494f2ae2001-09-19 11:33:31 +00003421- The codecs module has grown four new helper APIs to access
3422 builtin codecs: getencoder(), getdecoder(), getreader(),
3423 getwriter().
3424
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003425- SimpleXMLRPCServer: a new module (based upon SimpleHTMLServer)
3426 simplifies writing XML RPC servers.
3427
Barry Warsaw647d5e82001-09-28 17:01:02 +00003428- os.path.realpath(): a new function that returns the absolute pathname
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003429 after interpretation of symbolic links. On non-Unix systems, this
3430 is an alias for os.path.abspath().
3431
Tim Peters16a77ad2001-09-08 04:00:12 +00003432- operator.indexOf() (PySequence_Index() in the C API) now works with any
3433 iterable object.
3434
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003435- smtplib now supports various authentication and security features of
3436 the SMTP protocol through the new login() and starttls() methods.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00003437
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003438- hmac: a new module implementing keyed hashing for message
3439 authentication.
3440
3441- mimetypes now recognizes more extensions and file types. At the
3442 same time, some mappings not sanctioned by IANA were removed.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00003443
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003444- The "compiler" package has been brought up to date to the state of
Guido van Rossumc9ed5dc2001-09-20 05:30:24 +00003445 Python 2.2 bytecode generation. It has also been promoted from a
3446 Tool to a standard library package. (Tools/compiler still exists as
3447 a sample driver.)
3448
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003449Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003450-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003451
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003452- Large file support (LFS) is now automatic when the platform supports
3453 it; no more manual configuration tweaks are needed. On Linux, at
3454 least, it's possible to have a system whose C library supports large
3455 files but whose kernel doesn't; in this case, large file support is
3456 still enabled but doesn't do you any good unless you upgrade your
3457 kernel or share your Python executable with another system whose
3458 kernel has large file support.
3459
3460- The configure script now supplies plausible defaults in a
3461 cross-compilation environment. This doesn't mean that the supplied
3462 values are always correct, or that cross-compilation now works
3463 flawlessly -- but it's a first step (and it shuts up most of
3464 autoconf's warnings about AC_TRY_RUN).
3465
3466- The Unix build is now a bit less chatty, courtesy of the parser
3467 generator. The build is completely silent (except for errors) when
3468 using "make -s", thanks to a -q option to setup.py.
3469
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003470C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003471-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003472
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003473- The "structmember" API now supports some new flag bits to deny read
3474 and/or write access to attributes in restricted execution mode.
3475
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003476New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003477-------------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003478
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003479- Compaq's iPAQ handheld, running the "familiar" Linux distribution
3480 (http://familiar.handhelds.org).
3481
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003482Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003483-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003484
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00003485- The "classic" standard tests, which work by comparing stdout to
3486 an expected-output file under Lib/test/output/, no longer stop at
3487 the first mismatch. Instead the test is run to completion, and a
3488 variant of ndiff-style comparison is used to report all differences.
3489 This is much easier to understand than the previous style of reporting.
3490
3491- The unittest-based standard tests now use regrtest's test_main()
3492 convention, instead of running as a side-effect of merely being
3493 imported. This allows these tests to be run in more natural and
3494 flexible ways as unittests, outside the regrtest framework.
3495
3496- regrtest.py is much better integrated with unittest and doctest now,
3497 especially in regard to reporting errors.
3498
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003499Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003500-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003501
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003502- Large file support now also works for files > 4GB, on filesystems
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00003503 that support it (NTFS under Windows 2000). See "What's New in
3504 Python 2.2a3" for more detail.
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003505
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003506
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003507What's New in Python 2.2a3?
3508===========================
3509
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003510*Release Date: 07-Sep-2001*
3511
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003512Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003513----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003514
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00003515- Conversion of long to float now raises OverflowError if the long is too
3516 big to represent as a C double.
3517
Tim Peters32f453e2001-09-03 08:35:41 +00003518- The 3-argument builtin pow() no longer allows a third non-None argument
3519 if either of the first two arguments is a float, or if both are of
3520 integer types and the second argument is negative (in which latter case
3521 the arguments are converted to float, so this is really the same
3522 restriction).
3523
Tim Peters5d2b77c2001-09-03 05:47:38 +00003524- The builtin dir() now returns more information, and sometimes much
3525 more, generally naming all attributes of an object, and all attributes
3526 reachable from the object via its class, and from its class's base
3527 classes, and so on from them too. Example: in 2.2a2, dir([]) returned
3528 an empty list. In 2.2a3,
3529
3530 >>> dir([])
3531 ['__add__', '__class__', '__contains__', '__delattr__', '__delitem__',
3532 '__eq__', '__ge__', '__getattr__', '__getitem__', '__getslice__',
3533 '__gt__', '__hash__', '__iadd__', '__imul__', '__init__', '__le__',
3534 '__len__', '__lt__', '__mul__', '__ne__', '__new__', '__repr__',
3535 '__rmul__', '__setattr__', '__setitem__', '__setslice__', '__str__',
3536 'append', 'count', 'extend', 'index', 'insert', 'pop', 'remove',
3537 'reverse', 'sort']
3538
3539 dir(module) continues to return only the module's attributes, though.
3540
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003541- Overflowing operations on plain ints now return a long int rather
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003542 than raising OverflowError. This is a partial implementation of PEP
3543 237. You can use -Wdefault::OverflowWarning to enable a warning for
3544 this situation, and -Werror::OverflowWarning to revert to the old
3545 OverflowError exception.
3546
Guido van Rossum61c345f2001-09-04 03:26:15 +00003547- A new command line option, -Q<arg>, is added to control run-time
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003548 warnings for the use of classic division. (See PEP 238.) Possible
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00003549 values are -Qold, -Qwarn, -Qwarnall, and -Qnew. The default is
3550 -Qold, meaning the / operator has its classic meaning and no
3551 warnings are issued. Using -Qwarn issues a run-time warning about
3552 all uses of classic division for int and long arguments; -Qwarnall
3553 also warns about classic division for float and complex arguments
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00003554 (for use with fixdiv.py).
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003555 [Note: the remainder of this item (preserved below) became
3556 obsolete in 2.2c1 -- -Qnew has global effect in 2.2] ::
3557
3558 Using -Qnew is questionable; it turns on new division by default, but
3559 only in the __main__ module. You can usefully combine -Qwarn or
3560 -Qwarnall and -Qnew: this gives the __main__ module new division, and
3561 warns about classic division everywhere else.
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003562
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003563- Many built-in types can now be subclassed. This applies to int,
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003564 long, float, str, unicode, and tuple. (The types complex, list and
3565 dictionary can also be subclassed; this was introduced earlier.)
3566 Note that restrictions apply when subclassing immutable built-in
3567 types: you can only affect the value of the instance by overloading
3568 __new__. You can add mutable attributes, and the subclass instances
3569 will have a __dict__ attribute, but you cannot change the "value"
3570 (as implemented by the base class) of an immutable subclass instance
3571 once it is created.
3572
Guido van Rossumaaf80c82001-09-02 13:44:35 +00003573- The dictionary constructor now takes an optional argument, a
3574 mapping-like object, and initializes the dictionary from its
3575 (key, value) pairs.
3576
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003577- A new built-in type, super, has been added. This facilitates making
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003578 "cooperative super calls" in a multiple inheritance setting. For an
3579 explanation, see http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#cooperation
3580
Guido van Rossum8d7234d2001-09-06 22:02:58 +00003581- A new built-in type, property, has been added. This enables the
3582 creation of "properties". These are attributes implemented by
3583 getter and setter functions (or only one of these for read-only or
3584 write-only attributes), without the need to override __getattr__.
3585 See http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#property
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003586
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003587- The syntax of floating-point and imaginary literals has been
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00003588 liberalized, to allow leading zeroes. Examples of literals now
3589 legal that were SyntaxErrors before:
3590
3591 00.0 0e3 0100j 07.5 00000000000000000008.
3592
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003593- An old tokenizer bug allowed floating point literals with an incomplete
Tim Petersc6d95812001-08-28 20:56:27 +00003594 exponent, such as 1e and 3.1e-. Such literals now raise SyntaxError.
3595
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003596Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003597-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003598
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00003599- telnetlib includes symbolic names for the options, and support for
Martin v. Löwis1da9c572002-11-04 09:56:00 +00003600 setting an option negotiation callback. It also supports processing
3601 of suboptions.
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00003602
Tim Petersa40c7932001-09-05 22:36:56 +00003603- The new C standard no longer requires that math libraries set errno to
3604 ERANGE on overflow. For platform libraries that exploit this new
3605 freedom, Python's overflow-checking was wholly broken. A new overflow-
3606 checking scheme attempts to repair that, but may not be reliable on all
3607 platforms (C doesn't seem to provide anything both useful and portable
3608 in this area anymore).
3609
Martin v. Löwis44f86962001-09-05 13:44:54 +00003610- Asynchronous timeout actions are available through the new class
3611 threading.Timer.
3612
Tim Peters78526162001-09-05 00:53:45 +00003613- math.log and math.log10 now return sensible results for even huge
3614 long arguments. For example, math.log10(10 ** 10000) ~= 10000.0.
3615
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003616- A new function, imp.lock_held(), returns 1 when the import lock is
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00003617 currently held. See the docs for the imp module.
3618
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003619- pickle, cPickle and marshal on 32-bit platforms can now correctly read
Tim Peters82112372001-08-29 02:28:42 +00003620 dumps containing ints written on platforms where Python ints are 8 bytes.
3621 When read on a box where Python ints are 4 bytes, such values are
3622 converted to Python longs.
3623
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003624- In restricted execution mode (using the rexec module), unmarshalling
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003625 code objects is no longer allowed. This plugs a security hole.
3626
Steve Purcell6091cd62001-09-06 16:05:17 +00003627- unittest.TestResult instances no longer store references to tracebacks
3628 generated by test failures. This prevents unexpected dangling references
3629 to objects that should be garbage collected between tests.
3630
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003631Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003632-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003633
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00003634- Tools/scripts/fixdiv.py has been added which can be used to fix
3635 division operators as per PEP 238.
3636
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003637Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003638-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003639
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00003640- If you are an adventurous person using Mac OS X you may want to look at
3641 Mac/OSX. There is a Makefile there that will build Python as a real Mac
3642 application, which can be used for experimenting with Carbon or Cocoa.
3643 Discussion of this on pythonmac-sig, please.
3644
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00003645C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003646-----
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00003647
3648- New function PyObject_Dir(obj), like Python __builtin__.dir(obj).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00003649
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00003650- Note that PyLong_AsDouble can fail! This has always been true, but no
3651 callers checked for it. It's more likely to fail now, because overflow
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003652 errors are properly detected now. The proper way to check::
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00003653
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003654 double x = PyLong_AsDouble(some_long_object);
3655 if (x == -1.0 && PyErr_Occurred()) {
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003656 /* The conversion failed. */
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003657 }
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00003658
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003659- The GC API has been changed. Extensions that use the old API will still
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00003660 compile but will not participate in GC. To upgrade an extension
3661 module:
3662
3663 - rename Py_TPFLAGS_GC to PyTPFLAGS_HAVE_GC
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00003664
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00003665 - use PyObject_GC_New or PyObject_GC_NewVar to allocate objects and
3666 PyObject_GC_Del to deallocate them
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00003667
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00003668 - rename PyObject_GC_Init to PyObject_GC_Track and PyObject_GC_Fini
3669 to PyObject_GC_UnTrack
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00003670
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00003671 - remove PyGC_HEAD_SIZE from object size calculations
3672
3673 - remove calls to PyObject_AS_GC and PyObject_FROM_GC
3674
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003675- Two new functions: PyString_FromFormat() and PyString_FromFormatV().
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003676 These can be used safely to construct string objects from a
3677 sprintf-style format string (similar to the format string supported
3678 by PyErr_Format()).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00003679
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003680New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003681-------------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003682
Tim Petersb7da0902001-09-02 23:01:43 +00003683- Stephen Hansen contributed patches sufficient to get a clean compile
3684 under Borland C (Windows), but he reports problems running it and ran
3685 out of time to complete the port. Volunteers? Expect a MemoryError
3686 when importing the types module; this is probably shallow, and
3687 causing later failures too.
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003688
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003689Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003690-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003691
3692Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003693-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003694
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00003695- Large file support is now enabled on Win32 platforms as well as on
3696 Win64. This means that, for example, you can use f.tell() and f.seek()
3697 to manipulate files larger than 2 gigabytes (provided you have enough
3698 disk space, and are using a Windows filesystem that supports large
Tim Peters9a9471c2001-09-11 23:18:51 +00003699 partitions). Windows filesystem limits: FAT has a 2GB (gigabyte)
3700 filesize limit, and large file support makes no difference there.
3701 FAT32's limit is 4GB, and files >= 2GB are easier to use from Python now.
3702 NTFS has no practical limit on file size, and files of any size can be
3703 used from Python now.
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00003704
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003705- The w9xpopen hack is now used on Windows NT and 2000 too when COMPSPEC
Tim Peters402d5982001-08-27 06:37:48 +00003706 points to command.com (patch from Brian Quinlan).
3707
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003708
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00003709What's New in Python 2.2a2?
3710===========================
3711
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003712*Release Date: 22-Aug-2001*
3713
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00003714Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003715-----
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00003716
Barry Warsaw18b2ecf2001-08-22 20:26:56 +00003717- Tim Peters developed a brand new Windows installer using Wise 8.1,
3718 generously donated to us by Wise Solutions.
3719
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00003720- configure supports a new option --enable-unicode, with the values
3721 ucs2 and ucs4 (new in 2.2a1). With --disable-unicode, the Unicode
3722 type and supporting code is completely removed from the interpreter.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00003723
Jack Jansen32ce0cd2001-08-21 19:28:20 +00003724- A new configure option --enable-framework builds a Mac OS X framework,
3725 which "make frameworkinstall" will install. This provides a starting
3726 point for more mac-like functionality, join pythonmac-sig@python.org
3727 if you are interested in helping.
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00003728
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00003729- The NeXT platform is no longer supported.
3730
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003731- The 'new' module is now statically linked.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00003732
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00003733Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003734-----
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00003735
3736- The new Tools/scripts/cleanfuture.py can be used to automatically
Andrew M. Kuchlingb0532092001-08-15 15:54:56 +00003737 edit out obsolete future statements from Python source code. See
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00003738 the module docstring for details.
3739
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00003740Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003741-----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00003742
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00003743- regrtest.py now knows which tests are expected to be skipped on some
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00003744 platforms, allowing to give clearer test result output. regrtest
3745 also has optional --use/-u switch to run normally disabled tests
3746 which require network access or consume significant disk resources.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00003747
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00003748- Several new tests in the standard test suite, with special thanks to
3749 Nick Mathewson.
3750
3751Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003752----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00003753
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00003754- The floor division operator // has been added as outlined in PEP
3755 238. The / operator still provides classic division (and will until
3756 Python 3.0) unless "from __future__ import division" is included, in
3757 which case the / operator will provide true division. The operator
3758 module provides truediv() and floordiv() functions. Augmented
3759 assignment variants are included, as are the equivalent overloadable
3760 methods and C API methods. See the PEP for a full discussion:
3761 <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0238.html>
3762
Tim Peters6cd6a822001-08-17 22:11:27 +00003763- Future statements are now effective in simulated interactive shells
3764 (like IDLE). This should "just work" by magic, but read Michael
3765 Hudson's "Future statements in simulated shells" PEP 264 for full
3766 details: <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0264.html>.
3767
Guido van Rossumf86ddd22001-08-17 21:21:04 +00003768- The type/class unification (PEP 252-253) was integrated into the
3769 trunk and is not so tentative any more (the exact specification of
3770 some features is still tentative). A lot of work has done on fixing
3771 bugs and adding robustness and features (performance still has to
3772 come a long way).
3773
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00003774- Warnings about a mismatch in the Python API during extension import
3775 now use the Python warning framework (which makes it possible to
3776 write filters for these warnings).
3777
Barry Warsaw9b3be7f2001-08-14 18:35:02 +00003778- A function's __dict__ (aka func_dict) will now always be a
3779 dictionary. It used to be possible to delete it or set it to None,
3780 but now both actions raise TypeErrors. It is still legal to set it
3781 to a dictionary object. Getting func.__dict__ before any attributes
3782 have been assigned now returns an empty dictionary instead of None.
3783
Guido van Rossum32aa5d22001-09-05 18:43:35 +00003784- A new command line option, -E, was added which disables the use of
3785 all environment variables, or at least those that are specifically
3786 significant to Python. Usually those have a name starting with
3787 "PYTHON". This was used to fix a problem where the tests fail if
3788 the user happens to have PYTHONHOME or PYTHONPATH pointing to an
3789 older distribution.
3790
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00003791Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003792-------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00003793
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00003794- New class Differ and new functions ndiff() and restore() in difflib.py.
3795 These package the algorithms used by the popular Tools/scripts/ndiff.py,
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00003796 for programmatic reuse.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00003797
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00003798- New function xml.sax.saxutils.quoteattr(): Quote an XML attribute
3799 value using the minimal quoting required for the value; more
3800 reliable than using xml.sax.saxutils.escape() for attribute values.
3801
3802- Readline completion support for cmd.Cmd was added.
3803
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00003804- Calling os.tempnam() or os.tmpnam() generate RuntimeWarnings.
3805
3806- Added function threading.BoundedSemaphore()
3807
3808- Added Ka-Ping Yee's cgitb.py module.
3809
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003810- The 'new' module now exposes the CO_xxx flags.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00003811
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00003812- The gc module offers the get_referents function.
3813
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00003814New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003815-------------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00003816
3817C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003818-----
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00003819
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00003820- Two new APIs PyOS_snprintf() and PyOS_vsnprintf() were added
3821 which provide a cross-platform implementations for the
3822 relatively new snprintf()/vsnprintf() C lib APIs. In contrast to
3823 the standard sprintf() and vsprintf() C lib APIs, these versions
3824 apply bounds checking on the used buffer which enhances protection
3825 against buffer overruns.
3826
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00003827- Unicode APIs now use name mangling to assure that mixing interpreters
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00003828 and extensions using different Unicode widths is rendered next to
3829 impossible. Trying to import an incompatible Unicode-aware extension
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00003830 will result in an ImportError. Unicode extensions writers must make
3831 sure to check the Unicode width compatibility in their extensions by
3832 using at least one of the mangled Unicode APIs in the extension.
3833
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00003834- Two new flags METH_NOARGS and METH_O are available in method definition
3835 tables to simplify implementation of methods with no arguments and a
3836 single untyped argument. Calling such methods is more efficient than
3837 calling corresponding METH_VARARGS methods. METH_OLDARGS is now
3838 deprecated.
3839
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00003840Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003841-------
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00003842
3843- "import module" now compiles module.pyw if it exists and nothing else
3844 relevant is found.
3845
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00003846
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00003847What's New in Python 2.2a1?
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00003848===========================
3849
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003850*Release date: 18-Jul-2001*
3851
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00003852Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003853----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003854
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00003855- TENTATIVELY, a large amount of code implementing much of what's
3856 described in PEP 252 (Making Types Look More Like Classes) and PEP
3857 253 (Subtyping Built-in Types) was added. This will be released
3858 with Python 2.2a1. Documentation will be provided separately
3859 through http://www.python.org/2.2/. The purpose of releasing this
3860 with Python 2.2a1 is to test backwards compatibility. It is
3861 possible, though not likely, that a decision is made not to release
3862 this code as part of 2.2 final, if any serious backwards
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003863 incompatibilities are found during alpha testing that cannot be
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00003864 repaired.
3865
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00003866- Generators were added; this is a new way to create an iterator (see
Tim Peters11a0d102001-07-17 18:48:00 +00003867 below) using what looks like a simple function containing one or
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00003868 more 'yield' statements. See PEP 255. Since this adds a new
3869 keyword to the language, this feature must be enabled by including a
3870 future statement: "from __future__ import generators" (see PEP 236).
3871 Generators will become a standard feature in a future release
3872 (probably 2.3). Without this future statement, 'yield' remains an
3873 ordinary identifier, but a warning is issued each time it is used.
3874 (These warnings currently don't conform to the warnings framework of
3875 PEP 230; we intend to fix this in 2.2a2.)
3876
Marc-André Lemburg12e74b32001-05-22 08:58:23 +00003877- The UTF-16 codec was modified to be more RFC compliant. It will now
3878 only remove BOM characters at the start of the string and then
3879 only if running in native mode (UTF-16-LE and -BE won't remove a
3880 leading BMO character).
3881
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00003882- Strings now have a new method .decode() to complement the already
3883 existing .encode() method. These two methods provide direct access
3884 to the corresponding decoders and encoders of the registered codecs.
3885
3886 To enhance the usability of the .encode() method, the special
3887 casing of Unicode object return values was dropped (Unicode objects
3888 were auto-magically converted to string using the default encoding).
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00003889
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00003890 Both methods will now return whatever the codec in charge of the
3891 requested encoding returns as object, e.g. Unicode codecs will
3892 return Unicode objects when decoding is requested ("äöü".decode("latin-1")
3893 will return u"äöü"). This enables codec writer to create codecs
3894 for various simple to use conversions.
3895
3896 New codecs were added to demonstrate these new features (the .encode()
3897 and .decode() columns indicate the type of the returned objects):
3898
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003899 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
3900 |Name | .encode() | .decode() | Description |
3901 +=========+===========+===========+=============================+
3902 |uu | string | string | UU codec (e.g. for email) |
3903 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
3904 |base64 | string | string | base64 codec |
3905 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
3906 |quopri | string | string | quoted-printable codec |
3907 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
3908 |zlib | string | string | zlib compression |
3909 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
3910 |hex | string | string | 2-byte hex codec |
3911 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
3912 |rot-13 | string | Unicode | ROT-13 Unicode charmap codec|
3913 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00003914
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00003915- Some operating systems now support the concept of a default Unicode
3916 encoding for file system operations. Notably, Windows supports 'mbcs'
3917 as the default. The Macintosh will also adopt this concept in the medium
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00003918 term, although the default encoding for that platform will be other than
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00003919 'mbcs'.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00003920
3921 On operating system that support non-ASCII filenames, it is common for
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00003922 functions that return filenames (such as os.listdir()) to return Python
3923 string objects pre-encoded using the default file system encoding for
3924 the platform. As this encoding is likely to be different from Python's
3925 default encoding, converting this name to a Unicode object before passing
3926 it back to the Operating System would result in a Unicode error, as Python
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003927 would attempt to use its default encoding (generally ASCII) rather than
3928 the default encoding for the file system.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00003929
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003930 In general, this change simply removes surprises when working with
3931 Unicode and the file system, making these operations work as you expect,
3932 increasing the transparency of Unicode objects in this context.
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00003933 See [????] for more details, including examples.
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00003934
Tim Peters61dff2b2001-05-08 15:43:37 +00003935- Float (and complex) literals in source code were evaluated to full
3936 precision only when running from a .py file; the same code loaded from a
3937 .pyc (or .pyo) file could suffer numeric differences starting at about the
3938 12th significant decimal digit. For example, on a machine with IEEE-754
3939 floating arithmetic,
3940
3941 x = 9007199254740992.0
3942 print long(x)
3943
3944 printed 9007199254740992 if run directly from .py, but 9007199254740000
3945 if from a compiled (.pyc or .pyo) file. This was due to marshal using
3946 str(float) instead of repr(float) when building code objects. marshal
3947 now uses repr(float) instead, which should reproduce floats to full
3948 machine precision (assuming the platform C float<->string I/O conversion
3949 functions are of good quality).
3950
3951 This may cause floating-point results to change in some cases, and
3952 usually for the better, but may also cause numerically unstable
3953 algorithms to break.
3954
Tim Peters2f228e72001-05-13 00:19:31 +00003955- The implementation of dicts suffers fewer collisions, which has speed
3956 benefits. However, the order in which dict entries appear in dict.keys(),
3957 dict.values() and dict.items() may differ from previous releases for a
3958 given dict. Nothing is defined about this order, so no program should
3959 rely on it. Nevertheless, it's easy to write test cases that rely on the
3960 order by accident, typically because of printing the str() or repr() of a
3961 dict to an "expected results" file. See Lib/test/test_support.py's new
3962 sortdict(dict) function for a simple way to display a dict in sorted
3963 order.
3964
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00003965- Many other small changes to dicts were made, resulting in faster
3966 operation along the most common code paths.
3967
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00003968- Dictionary objects now support the "in" operator: "x in dict" means
3969 the same as dict.has_key(x).
3970
Barry Warsaw51acc8d2001-06-26 20:12:50 +00003971- The update() method of dictionaries now accepts generic mapping
3972 objects. Specifically the argument object must support the .keys()
3973 and __getitem__() methods. This allows you to say, for example,
3974 {}.update(UserDict())
3975
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00003976- Iterators were added; this is a generalized way of providing values
3977 to a for loop. See PEP 234. There's a new built-in function iter()
3978 to return an iterator. There's a new protocol to get the next value
3979 from an iterator using the next() method (in Python) or the
3980 tp_iternext slot (in C). There's a new protocol to get iterators
3981 using the __iter__() method (in Python) or the tp_iter slot (in C).
3982 Iterating (i.e. a for loop) over a dictionary generates its keys.
3983 Iterating over a file generates its lines.
3984
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00003985- The following functions were generalized to work nicely with iterator
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003986 arguments::
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003987
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00003988 map(), filter(), reduce(), zip()
Tim Peters8572b4f2001-05-06 01:05:02 +00003989 list(), tuple() (PySequence_Tuple() and PySequence_Fast() in C API)
3990 max(), min()
Tim Peters1af03e92001-05-26 19:37:54 +00003991 join() method of strings
3992 extend() method of lists
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00003993 'x in y' and 'x not in y' (PySequence_Contains() in C API)
3994 operator.countOf() (PySequence_Count() in C API)
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003995 right-hand side of assignment statements with multiple targets, such as ::
Tim Petersd6d010b2001-06-21 02:49:55 +00003996 x, y, z = some_iterable_object_returning_exactly_3_values
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00003997
Tim Petersd85e1022001-05-11 21:51:48 +00003998- Accessing module attributes is significantly faster (for example,
3999 random.random or os.path or yourPythonModule.yourAttribute).
4000
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00004001- Comparing dictionary objects via == and != is faster, and now works even
4002 if the keys and values don't support comparisons other than ==.
4003
Tim Peters95bf9392001-05-10 08:32:44 +00004004- Comparing dictionaries in ways other than == and != is slower: there were
4005 insecurities in the dict comparison implementation that could cause Python
4006 to crash if the element comparison routines for the dict keys and/or
4007 values mutated the dicts. Making the code bulletproof slowed it down.
4008
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00004009- Collisions in dicts are resolved via a new approach, which can help
4010 dramatically in bad cases. For example, looking up every key in a dict
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00004011 d with d.keys() == [i << 16 for i in range(20000)] is approximately 500x
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00004012 faster now. Thanks to Christian Tismer for pointing out the cause and
4013 the nature of an effective cure (last December! better late than never).
Tim Peters15d49292001-05-27 07:39:22 +00004014
Tim Peters52e155e2001-06-16 05:42:57 +00004015- repr() is much faster for large containers (dict, list, tuple).
4016
4017
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004018Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004019-------
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004020
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00004021- The constants ascii_letters, ascii_lowercase. and ascii_uppercase
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004022 were added to the string module. These a locale-independent
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00004023 constants, unlike letters, lowercase, and uppercase. These are now
4024 use in appropriate locations in the standard library.
4025
Martin v. Löwisf0473d52001-07-18 16:17:16 +00004026- The flags used in dlopen calls can now be configured using
4027 sys.setdlopenflags and queried using sys.getdlopenflags.
4028
Guido van Rossumc7e4aca2001-07-12 11:54:37 +00004029- Fredrik Lundh's xmlrpclib is now a standard library module. This
4030 provides full client-side XML-RPC support. In addition,
4031 Demo/xmlrpc/ contains two server frameworks (one SocketServer-based,
4032 one asyncore-based). Thanks to Eric Raymond for the documentation.
4033
Guido van Rossum643d3912001-07-05 14:46:25 +00004034- The xrange() object is simplified: it no longer supports slicing,
4035 repetition, comparisons, efficient 'in' checking, the tolist()
4036 method, or the start, stop and step attributes. See PEP 260.
4037
Martin v. Löwisebf94db2001-06-06 06:25:40 +00004038- A new function fnmatch.filter to filter lists of file names was added.
4039
Barry Warsawffd674d2001-05-22 16:00:10 +00004040- calendar.py uses month and day names based on the current locale.
4041
Guido van Rossum2e0a6542001-05-15 02:14:44 +00004042- strop is now *really* obsolete (this was announced before with 1.6),
4043 and issues DeprecationWarning when used (except for the four items
4044 that are still imported into string.py).
4045
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004046- Cookie.py now sorts key+value pairs by key in output strings.
4047
4048- pprint.isrecursive(object) didn't correctly identify recursive objects.
4049 Now it does.
4050
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00004051- pprint functions now much faster for large containers (tuple, list, dict).
4052
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00004053- New 'q' and 'Q' format codes in the struct module, corresponding to C
4054 types "long long" and "unsigned long long" (on Windows, __int64). In
4055 native mode, these can be used only when the platform C compiler supports
4056 these types (when HAVE_LONG_LONG is #define'd by the Python config
4057 process), and then they inherit the sizes and alignments of the C types.
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00004058 In standard mode, 'q' and 'Q' are supported on all platforms, and are
4059 8-byte integral types.
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00004060
Guido van Rossum83213cc2001-06-12 16:48:52 +00004061- The site module installs a new built-in function 'help' that invokes
4062 pydoc.help. It must be invoked as 'help()'; when invoked as 'help',
4063 it displays a message reminding the user to use 'help()' or
4064 'help(object)'.
4065
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004066Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004067-----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004068
4069- New test_mutants.py runs dict comparisons where the key and value
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004070 comparison operators mutate the dicts randomly during comparison. This
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004071 rapidly causes Python to crash under earlier releases (not for the faint
4072 of heart: it can also cause Win9x to freeze or reboot!).
4073
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004074- New test_pprint.py verifies that pprint.isrecursive() and
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00004075 pprint.isreadable() return sensible results. Also verifies that simple
4076 cases produce correct output.
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004077
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00004078C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004079-----
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00004080
4081- Removed the unused last_is_sticky argument from the internal
4082 _PyTuple_Resize(). If this affects you, you were cheating.
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004083
4084----
4085
4086**(For information about older versions, consult the HISTORY file.)**