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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.)
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Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00007What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 1?
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00008=================================
9
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +000010*XXX Release date: DD-MMM-2002 XXX*
11
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +000012Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +000013--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +000014
Just van Rossum3eb166b2002-11-29 20:47:40 +000015- Exposed the PyImport_FrozenModules variable in import.c through
16 imp.get_frozenmodules() and imp.set_frozenmodules(). This is
17 useful for freezing tools written in Python that use Python for
Just van Rossum6a8c5182002-12-01 21:43:13 +000018 bootstrapping the frozen application. (XXX: this feature will be
19 backed out if the zipfile import mechanism gets in before 2.3.a1.)
Just van Rossum3eb166b2002-11-29 20:47:40 +000020
Michael W. Hudson96bc3b42002-11-26 14:48:23 +000021- One can now assign to __bases__ and __name__ of new-style classes.
22
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +000023- dict() now accepts keyword arguments so that dict(one=1, two=2)
24 is the equivalent of {"one": 1, "two": 2}. Accordingly,
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +000025 the existing (but undocumented) 'items' keyword argument has
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +000026 been eliminated. This means that dict(items=someMapping) now has
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +000027 a different meaning than before.
28
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +000029- int() now returns a long object if the argument is outside the
30 integer range, so int("4"*1000), int(1e200) and int(1L<<1000) will
31 all return long objects instead of raising an OverflowError.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +000032
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +000033- Assignment to __class__ is disallowed if either the old or the new
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +000034 class is a statically allocated type object (such as defined by an
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +000035 extension module). This prevents anomalies like 2.__class__ = bool.
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +000036
37- New-style object creation and deallocation have been sped up
38 significantly; they are now faster than classic instance creation
39 and deallocation.
40
41- The __slots__ variable can now mention "private" names, and the
42 right thing will happen (e.g. __slots__ = ["__foo"]).
43
44- The built-ins slice() and buffer() are now callable types. The
45 types classobj (formerly class), code, function, instance, and
46 instancemethod (formerly instance-method), which have no built-in
47 names but are accessible through the types module, are now also
48 callable. The type dict-proxy is renamed to dictproxy.
49
50- Cycles going through the __class__ link of a new-style instance are
51 now detected by the garbage collector.
52
53- Classes using __slots__ are now properly garbage collected.
54 [SF bug 519621]
55
56- Tightened the __slots__ rules: a slot name must be a valid Python
57 identifier.
58
59- The constructor for the module type now requires a name argument and
60 takes an optional docstring argument. Previously, this constructor
61 ignored its arguments. As a consequence, deriving a class from a
62 module (not from the module type) is now illegal; previously this
63 created an unnamed module, just like invoking the module type did.
64 [SF bug 563060]
65
66- A new type object, 'basestring', is added. This is a common base type
67 for 'str' and 'unicode', and can be used instead of
68 types.StringTypes, e.g. to test whether something is "a string":
69 isinstance(x, basestring) is True for Unicode and 8-bit strings. This
70 is an abstract base class and cannot be instantiated directly.
71
72- Changed new-style class instantiation so that when C's __new__
73 method returns something that's not a C instance, its __init__ is
74 not called. [SF bug #537450]
75
76- Fixed super() to work correctly with class methods. [SF bug #535444]
77
78- If you try to pickle an instance of a class that has __slots__ but
79 doesn't define or override __getstate__, a TypeError is now raised.
80 This is done by adding a bozo __getstate__ to the class that always
81 raises TypeError. (Before, this would appear to be pickled, but the
82 state of the slots would be lost.)
83
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +000084Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +000085-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +000086
Marc-André Lemburg20b91352002-12-12 18:01:43 +000087- The _codecs support module for codecs.py was turned into a builtin
88 module to assure that at least the builtin codecs are available
89 to the Python parser for source code decoding according to PEP 263.
90
Walter Dörwaldd9a6ad32002-12-12 16:41:44 +000091- issubclass now supports a tuple as the second argument, just like
92 isinstance does. ``issubclass(X, (A, B))`` is equivalent to
93 ``issubclass(X, A) or issubclass(X, B)``.
94
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +000095- Thanks to Armin Rigo, the last known way to provoke a system crash
96 by cleverly arranging for a comparison function to mutate a list
97 during a list.sort() operation has been fixed. The effect of
98 attempting to mutate a list, or even to inspect its contents or
99 length, while a sort is in progress, is not defined by the language.
100 The C implementation of Python 2.3 attempts to detect mutations,
101 and raise ValueError if one occurs, but there's no guarantee that
102 all mutations will be caught, or that any will be caught across
103 releases or implementations.
104
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +0000105- Unicode file name processing for Windows (PEP 277) is implemented.
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +0000106 All platforms now have an os.path.supports_unicode_filenames attribute,
107 which is set to True on Windows NT/2000/XP, and False elsewhere.
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +0000108
Walter Dörwald3aeb6322002-09-02 13:14:32 +0000109- Codec error handling callbacks (PEP 293) are implemented.
110 Error handling in unicode.encode or str.decode can now be customized.
111
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +0000112- A subtle change to the semantics of the built-in function intern():
113 interned strings are no longer immortal. You must keep a reference
114 to the return value intern() around to get the benefit.
115
Guido van Rossumf808b892002-08-16 03:38:10 +0000116- Use of 'None' as a variable, argument or attribute name now
117 issues a SyntaxWarning. In the future, None may become a keyword.
118
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +0000119- SET_LINENO is gone. co_lnotab is now consulted to determine when to
120 call the trace function. C code that accessed f_lineno should call
121 PyCode_Addr2Line instead (f_lineno is still there, but not kept up
122 to date).
123
Guido van Rossum9be89462002-08-14 16:11:30 +0000124- There's a new warning category, FutureWarning. This is used to warn
125 about a number of situations where the value or sign of an integer
126 result will change in Python 2.4 as a result of PEP 237 (integer
127 unification). The warnings implement stage B0 mentioned in that
128 PEP. The warnings are about the following situations:
129
130 - Octal and hex literals without 'L' prefix in the inclusive range
131 [0x80000000..0xffffffff]; these are currently negative ints, but
132 in Python 2.4 they will be positive longs with the same bit
133 pattern.
134
135 - Left shifts on integer values that cause the outcome to lose
136 bits or have a different sign than the left operand. To be
137 precise: x<<n where this currently doesn't yield the same value
138 as long(x)<<n; in Python 2.4, the outcome will be long(x)<<n.
139
140 - Conversions from ints to string that show negative values as
141 unsigned ints in the inclusive range [0x80000000..0xffffffff];
142 this affects the functions hex() and oct(), and the string
143 formatting codes %u, %o, %x, and %X. In Python 2.4, these will
144 show signed values (e.g. hex(-1) currently returns "0xffffffff";
145 in Python 2.4 it will return "-0x1").
146
Skip Montanaro979c74b2002-09-03 21:25:14 +0000147 - The bits manipulated under the cover by sys.setcheckinterval() have
148 been changed. Both the check interval and the ticker used to be
149 per-thread values. They are now just a pair of global variables. In
150 addition, the default check interval was boosted from 10 to 100
Neal Norwitz7165af22002-09-05 21:42:24 +0000151 bytecode instructions. This may have some effect on systems that
152 relied on the old default value. In particular, in multi-threaded
153 applications which try to be highly responsive, response time will
154 increase by some (perhaps imperceptible) amount.
Skip Montanaro979c74b2002-09-03 21:25:14 +0000155
Tim Petersd64c1de2002-08-12 17:36:03 +0000156- When multiplying very large integers, a version of the so-called
157 Karatsuba algorithm is now used. This is most effective if the
158 inputs have roughly the same size. If they both have about N digits,
159 Karatsuba multiplication has O(N**1.58) runtime (the exponent is
160 log_base_2(3)) instead of the previous O(N**2). Measured results may
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +0000161 be better or worse than that, depending on platform quirks. Besides
162 the O() improvement in raw instruction count, the Karatsuba algorithm
163 appears to have much better cache behavior on extremely large integers
164 (starting in the ballpark of a million bits). Note that this is a
165 simple implementation, and there's no intent here to compete with,
166 e.g., GMP. It gives a very nice speedup when it applies, but a package
167 devoted to fast large-integer arithmetic should run circles around it.
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +0000168
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +0000169- u'%c' will now raise a ValueError in case the argument is an
170 integer outside the valid range of Unicode code point ordinals.
171
Guido van Rossumdeb09362002-08-09 17:16:30 +0000172- The tempfile module has been overhauled for enhanced security. The
173 mktemp() function is now deprecated; new, safe replacements are
174 mkstemp() (for files) and mkdtemp() (for directories), and the
175 higher-level functions NamedTemporaryFile() and TemporaryFile().
176 Use of some global variables in this module is also deprecated; the
177 new functions have keyword arguments to provide the same
178 functionality. All Lib, Tools and Demo modules that used the unsafe
179 interfaces have been updated to use the safe replacements. Thanks
180 to Zack Weinberg!
181
Guido van Rossumd81a9832002-08-09 15:57:34 +0000182- When x is an object whose class implements __mul__ and __rmul__,
183 1.0*x would correctly invoke __rmul__, but 1*x would erroneously
184 invoke __mul__. This was due to the sequence-repeat code in the int
185 type. This has been fixed now.
186
Barry Warsawd79f6832002-08-06 17:01:51 +0000187- Previously, "str1 in str2" required str1 to be a string of length 1.
188 This restriction has been relaxed to allow str1 to be a string of
189 any length. Thus "'el' in 'hello world'" returns True now.
190
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +0000191- File objects are now their own iterators. For a file f, iter(f) now
192 returns f (unless f is closed), and f.next() is similar to
193 f.readline() when EOF is not reached; however, f.next() uses a
194 readahead buffer that messes up the file position, so mixing
195 f.next() and f.readline() (or other methods) doesn't work right.
196 Calling f.seek() drops the readahead buffer, but other operations
197 don't. It so happens that this gives a nice additional speed boost
198 to "for line in file:"; the xreadlines method and corresponding
Guido van Rossumbffb2ef2002-08-09 17:17:07 +0000199 module are now obsolete. Thanks to Oren Tirosh!
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +0000200
Guido van Rossumde392d32002-08-05 14:17:20 +0000201- Encoding declarations (PEP 263, phase 1) have been implemented. A
202 comment of the form "# -*- coding: <encodingname> -*-" in the first
203 or second line of a Python source file indicates the encoding.
Martin v. Löwis00f1e3f2002-08-04 17:29:52 +0000204
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +0000205- list.sort() has a new implementation. While cross-platform results
206 may vary, and in data-dependent ways, this is much faster on many
207 kinds of partially ordered lists than the previous implementation,
208 and reported to be just as fast on randomly ordered lists on
209 several major platforms. This sort is also stable (if A==B and A
210 precedes B in the list at the start, A precedes B after the sort too),
211 although the language definition does not guarantee stability. A
212 potential drawback is that list.sort() may require temp space of
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +0000213 len(list)*2 bytes (``*4`` on a 64-bit machine). It's therefore possible
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +0000214 for list.sort() to raise MemoryError now, even if a comparison function
215 does not. See <http://www.python.org/sf/587076> for full details.
216
Guido van Rossum2d5389c2002-07-23 03:44:35 +0000217- All standard iterators now ensure that, once StopIteration has been
218 raised, all future calls to next() on the same iterator will also
219 raise StopIteration. There used to be various counterexamples to
220 this behavior, which could caused confusion or subtle program
221 breakage, without any benefits. (Note that this is still an
222 iterator's responsibility; the iterator framework does not enforce
223 this.)
224
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +0000225- Ctrl+C handling on Windows has been made more consistent with
226 other platforms. KeyboardInterrupt can now reliably be caught,
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +0000227 and Ctrl+C at an interactive prompt no longer terminates the
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +0000228 process under NT/2k/XP (it never did under Win9x). Ctrl+C will
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +0000229 interrupt time.sleep() in the main thread, and any child processes
230 created via the popen family (on win2k; we can't make win9x work
Mark Hammond8f3afc72002-08-10 06:26:31 +0000231 reliably) are also interrupted (as generally happens on for Linux/Unix.)
232 [SF bugs 231273, 439992 and 581232]
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +0000233
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +0000234- sys.getwindowsversion() has been added on Windows. This
235 returns a tuple with information about the version of Windows
236 currently running.
237
Raymond Hettinger5a04aec2002-06-25 00:25:30 +0000238- Slices and repetitions of buffer objects now consistently return
239 a string. Formerly, strings would be returned most of the time,
240 but a buffer object would be returned when the repetition count
241 was one or when the slice range was all inclusive.
242
Walter Dörwald3430d702002-06-17 10:43:59 +0000243- Unicode objects in sys.path are no longer ignored but treated
244 as directory names.
245
Neal Norwitz1f68fc72002-06-14 00:50:42 +0000246- Fixed string.startswith and string.endswith builtin methods
247 so they accept negative indices. [SF bug 493951]
248
Guido van Rossumc5fe5eb2002-06-12 03:45:21 +0000249- Fixed a bug with a continue inside a try block and a yield in the
250 finally clause. [SF bug 567538]
251
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +0000252- Most builtin sequences now support "extended slices", i.e. slices
Guido van Rossum2e82e712002-06-13 11:41:07 +0000253 with a third "stride" parameter. For example, "hello world"[::-1]
254 gives "dlrow olleh".
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +0000255
Neal Norwitzd68f5172002-05-29 15:54:55 +0000256- A new warning PendingDeprecationWarning was added to provide
257 direction on features which are in the process of being deprecated.
258 The warning will not be printed by default. To see the pending
259 deprecations, use -Walways::PendingDeprecationWarning::
260 as a command line option or warnings.filterwarnings() in code.
261
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +0000262- Deprecated features of xrange objects have been removed as
263 promised. The start, stop, and step attributes and the tolist()
264 method no longer exist. xrange repetition and slicing have been
265 removed.
266
Guido van Rossum7dab2422002-04-26 19:40:56 +0000267- New builtin function enumerate(x), from PEP 279. Example:
268 enumerate("abc") is an iterator returning (0,"a"), (1,"b"), (2,"c").
269 The argument can be an arbitrary iterable object.
270
Neil Schemenauer89e3ee02002-04-26 01:58:53 +0000271- The assert statement no longer tests __debug__ at runtime. This means
272 that assert statements cannot be disabled by assigning a false value
273 to __debug__.
274
Walter Dörwald068325e2002-04-15 13:36:47 +0000275- A method zfill() was added to str and unicode, that fills a numeric
276 string to the left with zeros. For example,
277 "+123".zfill(6) -> "+00123".
278
Guido van Rossum862fe3c2002-04-15 12:36:47 +0000279- Complex numbers supported divmod() and the // and % operators, but
280 these make no sense. Since this was documented, they're being
281 deprecated now.
282
Guido van Rossum26dd8302002-04-26 20:11:29 +0000283- String and unicode methods lstrip(), rstrip() and strip() now take
284 an optional argument that specifies the characters to strip. For
285 example, "Foo!!!?!?!?".rstrip("?!") -> "Foo".
Guido van Rossum49042042002-04-13 00:59:05 +0000286
Guido van Rossumc0d3f4e2002-11-27 13:10:40 +0000287- There's a new dictionary constructor (a class method of the dict
288 class), dict.fromkeys(iterable, value=None). It constructs a
289 dictionary with keys taken from the iterable and all values set to a
290 single value. It can be used for building sets and for removing
291 duplicates from sequences.
Raymond Hettingere33d3df2002-11-27 07:29:33 +0000292
Guido van Rossumc69343b2002-04-12 19:22:48 +0000293- Added a new dict method pop(key). This removes and returns the
294 value corresponding to key. [SF patch #539949]
295
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +0000296- A new built-in type, bool, has been added, as well as built-in
297 names for its two values, True and False. Comparisons and sundry
298 other operations that return a truth value have been changed to
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +0000299 return a bool instead. Read PEP 285 for an explanation of why this
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +0000300 is backward compatible.
301
Guido van Rossum95b62a62002-03-29 01:07:24 +0000302- Fixed two bugs reported as SF #535905: under certain conditions,
303 deallocating a deeply nested structure could cause a segfault in the
304 garbage collector, due to interaction with the "trashcan" code;
305 access to the current frame during destruction of a local variable
306 could access a pointer to freed memory.
307
Guido van Rossumfe0ca4a2002-06-18 21:20:13 +0000308- The optional object allocator ("pymalloc") has been enabled by
309 default. The recommended practice for memory allocation and
310 deallocation has been streamlined. A header file is included,
311 Misc/pymemcompat.h, which can be bundled with 3rd party extensions
312 and lets them use the same API with Python versions from 1.5.2
313 onwards.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +0000314
Martin v. Löwiscfeb3b62002-03-03 21:30:27 +0000315- PyErr_Display will provide file and line information for all exceptions
316 that have an attribute print_file_and_line, not just SyntaxErrors.
317
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +0000318- The UTF-8 codec will now encode and decode Unicode surrogates
319 correctly and without raising exceptions for unpaired ones.
320
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +0000321- Universal newlines (PEP 278) is implemented. Briefly, using 'U'
322 instead of 'r' when opening a text file for reading changes the line
323 ending convention so that any of '\r', '\r\n', and '\n' is
324 recognized (even mixed in one file); all three are converted to
325 '\n', the standard Python line end character.
326
Neal Norwitz649b7592002-01-01 19:07:13 +0000327- file.xreadlines() now raises a ValueError if the file is closed:
328 Previously, an xreadlines object was returned which would raise
329 a ValueError when the xreadlines.next() method was called.
330
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +0000331- sys.exit() inadvertently allowed more than one argument.
Neal Norwitz0c766a02002-03-27 13:03:09 +0000332 An exception will now be raised if more than one argument is used.
333
Gustavo Niemeyer17c5a332002-12-16 14:09:22 +0000334- Changed evaluation order of dictionary literals to conform to the
335 general left to right evaluation order rule. Now {f1(): f2()} will
336 evaluate f1 first.
Gustavo Niemeyer78429a62002-12-16 13:54:02 +0000337
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000338Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000339-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000340
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +0000341- _tkinter now returns Tcl objects, instead of strings. Objects which
342 have Python equivalents are converted to Python objects, other objects
343 are wrapped. This can be configured through the wantobjects method,
Martin v. Löwis8c8aa5d2002-11-26 21:39:48 +0000344 or Tkinter.wantobjects.
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +0000345
Andrew M. Kuchling50905d02002-11-26 12:31:09 +0000346- The PyBSDDB wrapper around the Sleepycat Berkeley DB library has been
Martin v. Löwisef546b32002-11-19 08:12:57 +0000347 added as the package bsddb. The traditional bsddb module is still
348 available in source code, but not built automatically anymore, and
349 is now named bsddb185.
350
Martin v. Löwis677bde22002-11-23 22:08:15 +0000351- unicodedata was updated to Unicode 3.2. It supports normalization
352 and names for Hangul syllables and CJK unified ideographs.
Martin v. Löwis7d41e292002-11-23 12:22:32 +0000353
Neal Norwitz94a83fd2002-11-02 17:46:24 +0000354- resource.getrlimit() now returns longs instead of ints.
355
Martin v. Löwis080689c2002-10-26 14:42:02 +0000356- readline now dynamically adjusts its input/output stream if
357 sys.stdin/stdout changes.
358
Guido van Rossumba602972002-10-01 18:18:58 +0000359- The _tkinter module (and hence Tkinter) has dropped support for
360 Tcl/Tk 8.0 and 8.1. Only Tcl/Tk versions 8.2, 8.3 and 8.4 are
361 supported.
362
Martin v. Löwis658009a2002-09-16 17:26:24 +0000363- cPickle.BadPickleGet is now a class.
364
Martin v. Löwisa19bfe02002-10-16 18:28:36 +0000365- The time stamps in os.stat_result are floating point numbers
366 after stat_float_times has been called.
Martin v. Löwis94717ed2002-09-09 14:24:16 +0000367
Neal Norwitzb5673922002-09-05 21:48:07 +0000368- If the size passed to mmap.mmap() is larger than the length of the
369 file on non-Windows platforms, a ValueError is raised. [SF bug 585792]
370
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +0000371- The xreadlines module is slated for obsolescence.
372
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +0000373- The strptime function in the time module is now always available (a
374 Python implementation is used when the C library doesn't define it).
375
Guido van Rossum9562bcf2002-06-14 21:31:18 +0000376- The 'new' module is no longer an extension, but a Python module that
377 only exists for backwards compatibility. Its contents are no longer
378 functions but callable type objects.
379
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +0000380- The bsddb.*open functions can now take 'None' as a filename.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +0000381 This will create a temporary in-memory bsddb that won't be
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +0000382 written to disk.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +0000383
Martin v. Löwis0cec0ff2002-07-28 16:33:45 +0000384- posix.lchown, posix.killpg, posix.mknod, and posix.getpgid have been
385 added where available.
Martin v. Löwis06a83e92002-04-14 10:19:44 +0000386
Martin v. Löwisf0a46682002-11-03 17:20:12 +0000387- The locale module now exposes the C library's gettext interface. It
388 also has a new function getpreferredencoding.
Martin v. Löwis2e64c342002-03-27 18:49:02 +0000389
Tim Petersfbf74f22002-03-14 19:06:01 +0000390- A security hole ("double free") was found in zlib-1.1.3, a popular
391 third party compression library used by some Python modules. The
392 hole was quickly plugged in zlib-1.1.4, and the Windows build of
393 Python now ships with zlib-1.1.4.
394
Martin v. Löwis688357e2002-04-08 21:28:20 +0000395- pwd, grp, and resource return enhanced tuples now, with symbolic
396 field names.
Martin v. Löwis29001ff2002-03-01 10:47:37 +0000397
Martin v. Löwis99866332002-03-01 10:27:01 +0000398- array.array is now a type object. A new format character
399 'u' indicates Py_UNICODE arrays. For those, .tounicode and
400 .fromunicode methods are available. Arrays now support __iadd__
401 and __imul__.
402
Neal Norwitze790eae2002-01-01 21:14:12 +0000403- dl now builds on every system that has dlfcn.h. Failure in case
Martin v. Löwis93227272002-01-01 20:18:30 +0000404 of sizeof(int)!=sizeof(long)!=sizeof(void*) is delayed until dl.open
405 is called.
406
Michael W. Hudson34f20ea2002-05-27 15:08:24 +0000407- signal.sigpending, signal.sigprocmask and signal.sigsuspend have
408 been added where available.
409
Skip Montanaro8e790e72002-09-03 13:25:17 +0000410- The sys module acquired a new attribute, api_version, which evaluates
411 to the value of the PYTHON_API_VERSION macro with which the
412 interpreter was compiled.
413
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +0000414- Fixed bug #470582: sre module would return a tuple (None, 'a', 'ab')
415 when applying the regular expression '^((a)c)?(ab)$' on 'ab'. It now
416 returns (None, None, 'ab'), as expected. Also fixed handling of
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +0000417 lastindex/lastgroup match attributes in similar cases. For example,
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +0000418 when running the expression r'(a)(b)?b' over 'ab', lastindex must be
419 1, not 2.
420
Gustavo Niemeyerc523b042002-11-07 03:28:56 +0000421- Fixed bug #581080: sre scanner was not checking the buffer limit
422 before increasing the current pointer. This was creating an infinite
423 loop in the search function, once the pointer exceeded the buffer
424 limit.
425
Thomas Heller95cb7e42002-11-07 16:23:55 +0000426- The os.fdopen function now enforces a file mode starting with the
427 letter 'r', 'w' or 'a', otherwise a ValueError is raised. This fixes
428 bug #623464.
429
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000430Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000431-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000432
Thomas Heller1b3b49d2002-12-12 19:13:44 +0000433- The distutils created windows installers now can run a
434 postinstallation script.
435
Martin v. Löwis4581cfa2002-11-22 08:23:09 +0000436- doctest.testmod can now be called without argument, which means to
437 test the current module.
438
Martin v. Löwisf86e8ef2002-11-22 08:08:44 +0000439- When cancelling a server that implemented threading with a keyboard
440 interrupt, the server would shut down but not terminate (waiting on
441 client threads). A new member variable, daemon_threads, was added to
442 the ThreadingMixIn class in SocketServer.py to make it explicit that
443 this behavior needs to be controlled.
444
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +0000445- A new module, optparse, provides a fancy alternative to getopt for
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +0000446 command line parsing. It is a slightly modified version of Greg
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +0000447 Ward's Optik package.
448
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +0000449- UserDict.py now defines a DictMixin class which defines all dictionary
450 methods for classes that already have a minimum mapping interface.
451 This greatly simplifies writing classes that need to be substitutable
452 for dictionaries (such as the shelve module).
453
454- shelve.py now subclasses from UserDict.DictMixin. Now shelve supports
455 all dictionary methods. This eases the transition to persistent
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +0000456 storage for scripts originally written with dictionaries in mind.
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +0000457
Skip Montanaro3bf99e32002-12-08 18:36:24 +0000458- shelve.open and the various classes in shelve.py now accept an optional
459 binary flag, which defaults to False. If True, the values stored in the
460 shelf are binary pickles.
461
Guido van Rossumfda06742002-11-13 16:29:18 +0000462- A new package, logging, implements the logging API defined by PEP
463 282. The code is written by Vinay Sajip.
464
Walter Dörwald4dbf1922002-11-06 16:53:44 +0000465- StreamReader, StreamReaderWriter and StreamRecoder in the codecs
466 modules are iterators now.
467
Tim Peters9288f952002-11-05 20:38:55 +0000468- gzip.py now handles files exceeding 2GB. Files over 4GB also work
469 now (provided the OS supports it, and Python is configured with large
470 file support), but in that case the underlying gzip file format can
471 record only the least-significant 32 bits of the file size, so that
472 some tools working with gzipped files may report an incorrect file
473 size.
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +0000474
Martin v. Löwis74b51ac2002-10-26 14:50:45 +0000475- xml.sax.saxutils.unescape has been added, to replace entity references
476 with their entity value.
477
Martin v. Löwis77ac4292002-10-15 15:11:13 +0000478- Queue.Queue.{put,get} now support an optional timeout argument.
479
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +0000480- Various features of Tk 8.4 are exposed in Tkinter.py. The multiple
481 option of tkFileDialog is exposed as function askopenfile{,name}s.
Martin v. Löwis2ec36272002-10-13 10:22:08 +0000482
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +0000483- Various configure methods of Tkinter have been stream-lined, so that
484 tag_configure, image_configure, window_configure now return a
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +0000485 dictionary when invoked with no argument.
Martin v. Löwis6ce13152002-10-10 14:36:13 +0000486
Guido van Rossum2b492b62002-10-09 21:40:48 +0000487- Importing the readline module now no longer has the side effect of
488 calling setlocale(LC_CTYPE, ""). The initial "C" locale, or
489 whatever locale is explicitly set by the user, is preserved. If you
490 want repr() of 8-bit strings in your preferred encoding to preserve
491 all printable characters of that encoding, you have to add the
492 following code to your $PYTHONSTARTUP file or to your application's
493 main():
494
495 import locale
496 locale.setlocale(locale.LC_CTYPE, "")
497
Martin v. Löwise9ce0b02002-10-07 13:23:24 +0000498- shutil.move was added. shutil.copytree now reports errors as an
499 exception at the end, instead of printing error messages.
500
Marc-André Lemburg97047e22002-10-04 11:55:21 +0000501- Encoding name normalization was generalized to not only
502 replace hyphens with underscores, but also all other non-alphanumeric
503 characters (with the exception of the dot which is used for Python
504 package names during lookup). The aliases.py mapping was updated
505 to the new standard.
506
Walter Dörwald5ccaf8f2002-09-06 16:15:58 +0000507- mimetypes has two new functions: guess_all_extensions() which
508 returns a list of all known extensions for a mime type, and
509 add_type() which adds one mapping between a mime type and
510 an extension to the database.
511
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +0000512- New module: sets, defines the class Set that implements a mutable
513 set type using the keys of a dict to represent the set. There's
514 also a class ImmutableSet which is useful when you need sets of sets
515 or when you need to use sets as dict keys, and a class BaseSet which
Raymond Hettingeref8b9c62002-12-09 08:56:06 +0000516 is the base class of the two.
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +0000517
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +0000518- Added operator.pow(a,b) which is equivalent to a**b.
519
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +0000520- Added random.sample(population,k) for random sampling without replacement.
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +0000521 Returns a k length list of unique elements chosen from the population.
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +0000522
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +0000523- random.randrange(-sys.maxint-1, sys.maxint) no longer raises
524 OverflowError. That is, it now accepts any combination of 'start'
525 and 'stop' arguments so long as each is in the range of Python's
526 bounded integers.
527
Guido van Rossum4a57c332002-08-02 18:05:20 +0000528- New "algorithms" module: heapq, implements a heap queue. Thanks to
529 Kevin O'Connor for the code and François Pinard for an entertaining
530 write-up explaining the theory and practical uses of heaps.
531
Marc-André Lemburg58e2ff22002-07-12 14:40:04 +0000532- New encoding for the Palm OS character set: palmos.
533
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +0000534- binascii.crc32() and the zipfile module had problems on some 64-bit
535 platforms. These have been fixed. On a platform with 8-byte C longs,
536 crc32() now returns a signed-extended 4-byte result, so that its value
537 as a Python int is equal to the value computed a 32-bit platform.
538
Martin v. Löwis7d650ca2002-06-30 15:05:00 +0000539- xml.dom.minidom.toxml and toprettyxml now take an optional encoding
540 argument.
541
Guido van Rossum9f7549b2002-06-10 21:39:42 +0000542- Some fixes in the copy module: when an object is copied through its
543 __reduce__ method, there was no check for a __setstate__ method on
544 the result [SF patch 565085]; deepcopy should treat instances of
545 custom metaclasses the same way it treats instances of type 'type'
546 [SF patch 560794].
547
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +0000548- Sockets now support timeout mode. After s.settimeout(T), where T is
549 a float expressing seconds, subsequent operations raise an exception
550 if they cannot be completed within T seconds. To disable timeout
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +0000551 mode, use s.settimeout(None). There's also a module function,
552 socket.setdefaulttimeout(T), which sets the default for all sockets
553 created henceforth.
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +0000554
555- getopt.gnu_getopt was added. This supports GNU-style option
556 processing, where options can be mixed with non-option arguments.
Martin v. Löwis446a25f2002-06-06 10:58:36 +0000557
Michael W. Hudsonb0dc1a32002-06-04 18:27:35 +0000558- Stop using strings for exceptions. String objects used for
559 exceptions are now classes deriving from Exception. The objects
560 changed were: Tkinter.TclError, bdb.BdbQuit, macpath.norm_error,
561 tabnanny.NannyNag, and xdrlib.Error.
Neal Norwitzb5b5a262002-06-04 17:14:07 +0000562
Walter Dörwald474458d2002-06-04 15:16:29 +0000563- Constants BOM_UTF8, BOM_UTF16, BOM_UTF16_LE, BOM_UTF16_BE,
564 BOM_UTF32, BOM_UTF32_LE and BOM_UTF32_BE that represent the Byte
565 Order Mark in UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 encodings for little and
566 big endian systems were added to the codecs module. The old names
567 BOM32_* and BOM64_* were off by a factor of 2.
568
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +0000569- Added conversion functions math.degrees() and math.radians().
Raymond Hettinger87f59ee2002-05-13 04:17:32 +0000570
Raymond Hettinger866964c2002-12-14 19:51:34 +0000571- math.log() now takes an optional argument: math.log(x[, base]).
572
Raymond Hettinger9b1df1d2002-05-12 06:07:21 +0000573- ftplib.retrlines() now tests for callback is None rather than testing
574 for False. Was causing an error when given a callback object which
575 was callable but also returned len() as zero. The change may
576 create new breakage if the caller relied on the undocumented behavior
577 and called with callback set to [] or some other False value not
578 identical to None.
579
Tim Peters46c04e12002-05-05 20:40:00 +0000580- random.gauss() uses a piece of hidden state used by nothing else,
581 and the .seed() and .whseed() methods failed to reset it. In other
582 words, setting the seed didn't completely determine the sequence of
583 results produced by random.gauss(). It does now. Programs repeatedly
584 mixing calls to a seed method with calls to gauss() may see different
585 results now.
586
Fred Drake7f781c92002-05-01 20:33:53 +0000587- The pickle.Pickler class grew a clear_memo() method to mimic that
588 provided by cPickle.Pickler.
589
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +0000590- difflib's SequenceMatcher class now does a dynamic analysis of
591 which elements are so frequent as to constitute noise. For
592 comparing files as sequences of lines, this generally works better
593 than the IS_LINE_JUNK function, and function ndiff's linejunk
594 argument defaults to None now as a result. A happy benefit is
595 that SequenceMatcher may run much faster now when applied
596 to large files with many duplicate lines (for example, C program
597 text with lots of repeated "}" and "return NULL;" lines).
598
Guido van Rossum256705b2002-04-23 13:29:43 +0000599- New Text.dump() method in Tkinter module.
600
Marc-André Lemburg1ec71ea2002-04-17 20:33:40 +0000601- New distutils commands for building packagers were added to
602 support pkgtool on Solaris and swinstall on HP-UX.
603
604- distutils now has a new abstract binary packager base class
605 command/bdist_packager, which simplifies writing packagers.
606 This will hopefully provide the missing bits to encourage
607 people to submit more packagers, e.g. for Debian, FreeBSD
608 and other systems.
609
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +0000610- The UTF-16, -LE and -BE stream readers now raise a
611 NotImplementedError for all calls to .readline(). Previously, they
612 used to just produce garbage or fail with an encoding error --
613 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 +0000614 work well with these.
615
Martin v. Löwis5c137c22002-03-18 12:44:08 +0000616- compileall now supports quiet operation.
617
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +0000618- The BaseHTTPServer now implements optional HTTP/1.1 persistent
Martin v. Löwis587c98c2002-03-17 18:37:22 +0000619 connections.
620
Marc-André Lemburga5d2b4c2002-02-16 18:23:30 +0000621- socket module: the SSL support was broken out of the main
622 _socket module C helper and placed into a new _ssl helper
623 which now gets imported by socket.py if available and working.
624
Marc-André Lemburg37aa5802002-02-10 21:42:47 +0000625- encodings package: added aliases for all supported IANA character
626 sets
627
Guido van Rossum606fe4e2001-12-28 20:57:14 +0000628- ftplib: to safeguard the user's privacy, anonymous login will use
629 "anonymous@" as default password, rather than the real user and host
630 name.
631
Fred Drake36736122002-01-10 13:50:31 +0000632- webbrowser: tightened up the command passed to os.system() so that
633 arbitrary shell code can't be executed because a bogus URL was
634 passed in.
635
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +0000636- gettext.translation has an optional fallback argument, and
Martin v. Löwisa55ffae2002-01-11 06:58:49 +0000637 gettext.find an optional all argument. Translations will now fallback
Martin v. Löwisd8996052002-11-21 21:45:32 +0000638 on a per-message basis. The module supports plural forms, by means
639 of gettext.[d]ngettext and Translation.[u]ngettext.
Martin v. Löwis1be64192002-01-11 06:33:28 +0000640
Martin v. Löwis9668b932002-01-12 11:27:42 +0000641- distutils bdist commands now offer a --skip-build option.
642
Walter Dörwaldb25c2b02002-03-21 10:38:40 +0000643- warnings.warn now accepts a Warning instance as first argument.
644
Fred Drakefed7e852002-04-04 19:36:15 +0000645- The xml.sax.expatreader.ExpatParser class will no longer create
646 circular references by using itself as the locator that gets passed
647 to the content handler implementation. [SF bug #535474]
648
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +0000649- The email.Parser.Parser class now properly parses strings regardless
650 of their line endings, which can be any of \r, \n, or \r\n (CR, LF,
651 or CRLF). Also, the Header class's constructor default arguments
652 has changed slightly so that an explicit maxlinelen value is always
653 honored.
654
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +0000655- distutils' build_ext command now links c++ extensions with the c++
656 compiler available in the Makefile or CXX environment variable, if
657 running under *nix.
658
659- New module bz2: provides a comprehensive interface for the bz2 compression
660 library. It implements a complete file interface, one-shot (de)compression
661 functions, and types for sequential (de)compression.
662
Barry Warsaw5d8d6182002-11-05 22:41:33 +0000663- New pdb command `pp' which is like `p' except that it pretty-prints
664 the value of its expression argument.
665
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +0000666- Now bdist_rpm distutils command understands a verify_script option in
667 the config file, including the contents of the referred filename in
668 the "%verifyscript" section of the rpm spec file.
669
Gustavo Niemeyer1456fde2002-11-25 17:25:04 +0000670- Fixed bug #495695: webbrowser module would run graphic browsers in a
671 unix environment even if DISPLAY was not set. Also, support for
672 skipstone browser was included.
673
Gustavo Niemeyerd5ae01a2002-12-16 13:11:57 +0000674- Fixed bug #636769: rexec would run unallowed code if subclasses of
675 strings were used as parameters for certain functions.
676
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000677Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000678-----------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000679
Martin v. Löwis0d1fdea2002-11-22 08:36:54 +0000680- pygettext.py now supports globbing on Windows, and accepts module
681 names in addition to accepting file names.
682
Guido van Rossum923e4ef2002-09-17 20:58:59 +0000683- The SGI demos (Demo/sgi) have been removed. Nobody thought they
684 were interesting any more. (The SGI library modules and extensions
685 are still there; it is believed that at least some of these are
686 still used and useful.)
687
Fred Drake40813b12002-08-05 15:24:19 +0000688- IDLE supports the new encoding declarations (PEP 263); it can also
689 deal with legacy 8-bit files if they use the locale's encoding. It
690 allows non-ASCII strings in the interactive shell and executes them
691 in the locale's encoding.
Martin v. Löwis98ce7b72002-08-05 15:11:26 +0000692
Marc-André Lemburg46260092002-04-04 16:17:11 +0000693- freeze.py now produces binaries which can import shared modules,
694 unlike before when this failed due to missing symbol exports in
695 the generated binary.
696
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000697Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000698-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000699
Martin v. Löwisdc461752002-11-06 21:59:33 +0000700- On Unix, IDLE is now installed automatically.
701
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +0000702- The fpectl module is not built by default; it's dangerous or useless
703 except in the hands of experts.
704
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +0000705- The public Python C API will generally be declared using PyAPI_FUNC
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +0000706 and PyAPI_DATA macros, while Python extension module init functions
707 will be declared with PyMODINIT_FUNC. DL_EXPORT/DL_IMPORT macros
708 are deprecated.
Neal Norwitz1389f3e2002-07-22 13:21:10 +0000709
Tim Petersc6a3ff62002-07-08 22:11:52 +0000710- A bug was fixed that could cause COUNT_ALLOCS builds to segfault, or
711 get into infinite loops, when a new-style class got garbage-collected.
712 Unfortunately, to avoid this, the way COUNT_ALLOCS works requires
713 that new-style classes be immortal in COUNT_ALLOCS builds. Note that
714 COUNT_ALLOCS is not enabled by default, in either release or debug
715 builds, and that new-style classes are immortal only in COUNT_ALLOCS
716 builds.
717
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +0000718- Compiling out the cyclic garbage collector is no longer an option.
719 The old symbol WITH_CYCLE_GC is now ignored, and Python.h arranges
720 that it's always defined (for the benefit of any extension modules
721 that may be conditionalizing on it). A bonus is that any extension
722 type participating in cyclic gc can choose to participate in the
723 Py_TRASHCAN mechanism now too; in the absence of cyclic gc, this used
724 to require editing the core to teach the trashcan mechanism about the
725 new type.
726
Martin v. Löwis0cec0ff2002-07-28 16:33:45 +0000727- According to Annex F of the current C standard,
Tim Peters1de41bf2002-07-03 03:31:20 +0000728
729 The Standard C macro HUGE_VAL and its float and long double analogs,
730 HUGE_VALF and HUGE_VALL, expand to expressions whose values are
731 positive infinities.
732
733 Python only uses the double HUGE_VAL, and only to #define its own symbol
734 Py_HUGE_VAL. Some platforms have incorrect definitions for HUGE_VAL.
735 pyport.h used to try to worm around that, but the workarounds triggered
736 other bugs on other platforms, so we gave up. If your platform defines
737 HUGE_VAL incorrectly, you'll need to #define Py_HUGE_VAL to something
738 that works on your platform. The only instance of this I'm sure about
739 is on an unknown subset of Cray systems, described here:
740
741 http://www.cray.com/swpubs/manuals/SN-2194_2.0/html-SN-2194_2.0/x3138.htm
742
743 Presumably 2.3a1 breaks such systems. If anyone uses such a system, help!
744
Martin v. Löwisa3fb4f72002-06-09 13:33:54 +0000745- The configure option --without-doc-strings can be used to remove the
746 doc strings from the builtin functions and modules; this reduces the
747 size of the executable.
748
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +0000749- The universal newlines option (PEP 278) is on by default. On Unix
750 it can be disabled by passing --without-universal-newlines to the
751 configure script. On other platforms, remove
752 WITH_UNIVERSAL_NEWLINES from pyconfig.h.
Tim Peters639295f2002-04-21 07:30:30 +0000753
Martin v. Löwis1142de32002-03-29 16:28:31 +0000754- On Unix, a shared libpython2.3.so can be created with --enable-shared.
755
Tim Peters8deda702002-03-30 10:06:07 +0000756- All uses of the CACHE_HASH, INTERN_STRINGS, and DONT_SHARE_SHORT_STRINGS
757 preprocessor symbols were eliminated. The internal decisions they
758 controlled stopped being experimental long ago.
Tim Peters1f7df352002-03-29 03:29:08 +0000759
Fred Drake7d28b732002-05-02 21:17:00 +0000760- The tools used to build the documentation now work under Cygwin as
761 well as Unix.
762
Skip Montanaro57454e52002-06-14 20:30:31 +0000763- The bsddb and dbm module builds have been changed to try and avoid version
764 skew problems and disable linkage with Berkeley DB 1.85 unless the
765 installer knows what s/he's doing. See the section on building these
766 modules in the README file for details.
767
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000768C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000769-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000770
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +0000771- PyNumber_Check() now returns true for string and unicode objects.
772 This is a result of these types having a partially defined
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +0000773 tp_as_number slot. (This is not a feature, but an indication that
Walter Dörwalda1a61f92002-11-19 21:20:25 +0000774 PyNumber_Check() is not very useful to determine numeric behavior.
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +0000775 It may be deprecated.)
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +0000776
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +0000777- The string object's layout has changed: the pointer member
778 ob_sinterned has been replaced by an int member ob_sstate. On some
779 platforms (e.g. most 64-bit systems) this may change the offset of
780 the ob_sval member, so as a precaution the API_VERSION has been
781 incremented. The apparently unused feature of "indirect interned
782 strings", supported by the ob_sinterned member, is gone. Interned
783 strings are now usually mortal; theres a new API,
784 PyString_InternImmortal() that creates immortal interned strings.
785 (The ob_sstate member can only take three values; however, while
786 making it a char saves a few bytes per string object on average, in
787 it also slowed things down a bit because ob_sval was no longer
788 aligned.)
789
Guido van Rossumfdb86482002-08-14 21:20:32 +0000790- The Py_InitModule*() functions now accept NULL for the 'methods'
791 argument. Modules without global functions are becoming more common
792 now that factories can be types rather than functions.
793
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +0000794- New C API PyUnicode_FromOrdinal() which exposes unichr() at C
795 level.
796
Thomas Heller085358a2002-07-29 14:27:41 +0000797- New functions PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErr() and
798 PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErrWithFilename(). Similar to
799 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErrWithFilename() and
800 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErr(), but they allow to specify
801 the exception type to raise. Available on Windows.
802
Tim Peters7c321a82002-07-09 02:57:01 +0000803- Py_FatalError() is now declared as taking a const char* argument. It
804 was previously declared without const. This should not affect working
805 code.
806
Martin v. Löwis01f94bd2002-05-08 08:44:21 +0000807- Added new macro PySequence_ITEM(o, i) that directly calls
808 sq_item without rechecking that o is a sequence and without
809 adjusting for negative indices.
810
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +0000811- PyRange_New() now raises ValueError if the fourth argument is not 1.
812 This is part of the removal of deprecated features of the xrange
813 object.
814
Guido van Rossum517c7d42002-04-26 02:49:14 +0000815- PyNumber_Coerce() and PyNumber_CoerceEx() now also invoke the type's
816 coercion if both arguments have the same type but this type has the
817 CHECKTYPES flag set. This is to better support proxies.
818
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +0000819- The type of tp_free has been changed from "``void (*)(PyObject *)``" to
820 "``void (*)(void *)``".
Neil Schemenauer9344b142002-04-12 23:00:08 +0000821
822- PyObject_Del, PyObject_GC_Del are now functions instead of macros.
823
Guido van Rossum0986d822002-04-08 01:38:42 +0000824- A type can now inherit its metatype from its base type. Previously,
825 when PyType_Ready() was called, if ob_type was found to be NULL, it
826 was always set to &PyType_Type; now it is set to base->ob_type,
827 where base is tp_base, defaulting to &PyObject_Type.
828
829- PyType_Ready() accidentally did not inherit tp_is_gc; now it does.
830
Neil Schemenauerc9abc1d2002-05-08 14:14:41 +0000831- The PyCore_* family of APIs have been removed.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +0000832
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +0000833- The "u#" parser marker will now pass through Unicode objects as-is
Marc-André Lemburg3e3eacb2002-01-09 16:21:27 +0000834 without going through the buffer API.
835
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000836- The enumerators of cmp_op have been renamed to use the prefix ``PyCmp_``.
Martin v. Löwis7198a522002-01-01 19:59:11 +0000837
Tim Peters10a3bb52001-12-25 19:07:38 +0000838- An old #define of ANY as void has been removed from pyport.h. This
839 hasn't been used since Python's pre-ANSI days, and the #define has
840 been marked as obsolete since then. SF bug 495548 says it created
841 conflicts with other packages, so keeping it around wasn't harmless.
842
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000843- Because Python's magic number scheme broke on January 1st, we decided
844 to stop Python development. Thanks for all the fish!
845
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +0000846- Some of us don't like fish, so we changed Python's magic number
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +0000847 scheme to a new one. See Python/import.c for details.
848
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000849New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000850-------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000851
Martin v. Löwis79acb9e2002-12-06 12:48:53 +0000852- OpenVMS is now supported.
853
Martin v. Löwisf90ae202002-06-11 06:22:31 +0000854- AtheOS is now supported.
855
Andrew MacIntyre161ad0e2002-08-04 07:25:58 +0000856- the EMX runtime environment on OS/2 is now supported.
857
Martin v. Löwisa6e97582002-01-01 18:41:33 +0000858- GNU/Hurd is now supported.
859
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000860Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000861-----
862
Fred Drake4dd0f7e2002-11-26 21:44:56 +0000863- The regrtest.py script's -u option now provides a way to say "allow
864 all resources except this one." For example, to allow everything
865 except bsddb, give the option '-uall,-bsddb'.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000866
867Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000868-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000869
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +0000870- The Windows distribution now ships with version 4.0.14 of the
871 Sleepycat Berkeley database library. This should be a huge
872 improvement over the previous Berkeley DB 1.85, which had many
873 bugs.
874 XXX What are the licensing issues here?
Tim Peters84c7a3f2002-11-23 18:48:06 +0000875 XXX If a user has a database created with a previous verion of
876 XXX Python, what must they do to convert it?
877 XXX I'm still not sure how to link this thing (see PCbuild/readme.txt).
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +0000878 XXX The version # is likely to change before 2.3a1.
Mark Hammondc3de0082002-12-03 06:16:08 +0000879
880- The Windows distribution now ships with a Secure Sockets Library (SLL)
881 module (_ssl.pyd)
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +0000882
Tim Peters857fb4c2002-11-14 23:31:58 +0000883- The Windows distribution now ships with Tcl/Tk version 8.4.1 (it
884 previously shipped with Tcl/Tk 8.3.2).
885
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +0000886- When Python is built under a Microsoft compiler, sys.version now
887 includes the compiler version number (_MSC_VER). For example, under
888 MSVC 6, sys.version constains the substring "MSC v.1200 ". 1200 is
889 the value of _MSC_VER under MSVC 6.
890
Tim Peters08e72952002-04-16 20:48:01 +0000891- Sometimes the uninstall executable (UNWISE.EXE) vanishes. One cause
892 of that has been fixed in the installer (disabled Wise's "delete in-
893 use files" uninstall option).
894
Guido van Rossum181e41a2002-04-06 00:23:25 +0000895- Fixed a bug in urllib's proxy handling in Windows. [SF bug #503031]
896
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +0000897- The installer now installs Start menu shortcuts under (the local
898 equivalent of) "All Users" when doing an Admin install.
899
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +0000900- file.truncate([newsize]) now works on Windows for all newsize values.
901 It used to fail if newsize didn't fit in 32 bits, reflecting a
902 limitation of MS _chsize (which is no longer used).
903
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +0000904- os.waitpid() is now implemented for Windows, and can be used to block
905 until a specified process exits. This is similar to, but not exactly
906 the same as, os.waitpid() on POSIX systems. If you're waiting for
907 a specific process whose pid was obtained from one of the spawn()
908 functions, the same Python os.waitpid() code works across platforms.
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +0000909 See the docs for details. The docs were changed to clarify that
910 spawn functions return, and waitpid requires, a process handle on
911 Windows (not the same thing as a Windows process id).
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +0000912
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +0000913- New tempfile.TemporaryFile implementation for Windows: this doesn't
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +0000914 need a TemporaryFileWrapper wrapper anymore, and should be immune
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +0000915 to a nasty problem: before 2.3, if you got a temp file on Windows, it
916 got wrapped in an object whose close() method first closed the
917 underlying file, then deleted the file. This usually worked fine.
918 However, the spawn family of functions on Windows create (at a low C
919 level) the same set of open files in the spawned process Q as were
920 open in the spawning process P. If a temp file f was among them, then
921 doing f.close() in P first closed P's C-level file handle on f, but Q's
922 C-level file handle on f remained open, so the attempt in P to delete f
923 blew up with a "Permission denied" error (Windows doesn't allow
924 deleting open files). This was surprising, subtle, and difficult to
925 work around.
926
927- The os module now exports all the symbolic constants usable with the
928 low-level os.open() on Windows: the new constants in 2.3 are
929 O_NOINHERIT, O_SHORT_LIVED, O_TEMPORARY, O_RANDOM and O_SEQUENTIAL.
930 The others were also available in 2.2: O_APPEND, O_BINARY, O_CREAT,
931 O_EXCL, O_RDONLY, O_RDWR, O_TEXT, O_TRUNC and O_WRONLY. Contrary
932 to Microsoft docs, O_SHORT_LIVED does not seem to imply O_TEMPORARY
933 (so specify both if you want both; note that neither is useful unless
934 specified with O_CREAT too).
935
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000936Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000937----
938
939Yet to be written.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000940
941
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +0000942What's New in Python 2.2 final?
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +0000943===============================
944
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000945*Release date: 21-Dec-2001*
946
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +0000947Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000948--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +0000949
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +0000950- pickle.py, cPickle: allow pickling instances of new-style classes
951 with a custom metaclass.
952
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +0000953Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000954-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +0000955
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +0000956- weakref proxy object: when comparing, unwrap both arguments if both
957 are proxies.
958
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +0000959Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000960-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +0000961
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +0000962- binascii.b2a_base64(): fix a potential buffer overrun when encoding
963 very short strings.
964
965- cPickle: the obscure "fast" mode was suspected of causing stack
966 overflows on the Mac. Hopefully fixed this by setting the recursion
967 limit much smaller. If the limit is too low (it only affects
968 performance), you can change it by defining PY_CPICKLE_FAST_LIMIT
969 when compiling cPickle.c (or in pyconfig.h).
970
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +0000971Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000972-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +0000973
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +0000974- dumbdbm.py: fixed a dumb old bug (the file didn't get synched at
975 close or delete time).
976
977- rfc822.py: fixed a bug where the address '<>' was converted to None
978 instead of an empty string (also fixes the email.Utils module).
979
980- xmlrpclib.py: version 1.0.0; uses precision for doubles.
981
982- test suite: the pickle and cPickle tests were not executing any code
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +0000983 when run from the standard regression test.
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +0000984
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +0000985Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000986-----------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +0000987
988Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000989-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +0000990
991C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000992-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +0000993
994New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000995-------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +0000996
997Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000998-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +0000999
1000Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001001-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001002
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00001003- distutils package: fixed broken Windows installers (bdist_wininst).
1004
1005- tempfile.py: prevent mysterious warnings when TemporaryFileWrapper
1006 instances are deleted at process exit time.
1007
1008- socket.py: prevent mysterious warnings when socket instances are
1009 deleted at process exit time.
1010
1011- posixmodule.c: fix a Windows crash with stat() of a filename ending
1012 in backslash.
1013
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001014Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001015----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001016
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00001017- The Carbon toolbox modules have been upgraded to Universal Headers
1018 3.4, and experimental CoreGraphics and CarbonEvents modules have
1019 been added. All only for framework-enabled MacOSX.
1020
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001021
Tim Peters6272dfd2001-12-13 19:34:00 +00001022What's New in Python 2.2c1?
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001023===========================
1024
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001025*Release date: 14-Dec-2001*
1026
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001027Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001028--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001029
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00001030- Guido's tutorial introduction to the new type/class features has
1031 been extensively updated. See
1032
1033 http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html
1034
1035 That remains the primary documentation in this area.
1036
Guido van Rossum33bab012001-12-05 22:45:48 +00001037- Fixed a leak: instance variables declared with __slots__ were never
1038 deleted!
1039
Guido van Rossum4b800852001-12-03 00:54:52 +00001040- The "delete attribute" method of descriptor objects is called
1041 __delete__, not __del__. In previous releases, it was mistakenly
1042 called __del__, which created an unfortunate overloading condition
1043 with finalizers. (The "get attribute" and "set attribute" methods
1044 are still called __get__ and __set__, respectively.)
1045
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00001046- Some subtle issues with the super built-in were fixed:
1047
1048 (a) When super itself is subclassed, its __get__ method would still
1049 return an instance of the base class (i.e., of super).
1050
1051 (b) super(C, C()).__class__ would return C rather than super. This
1052 is confusing. To fix this, I decided to change the semantics of
1053 super so that it only applies to code attributes, not to data
1054 attributes. After all, overriding data attributes is not
1055 supported anyway.
1056
1057 (c) The __get__ method didn't check whether the argument was an
1058 instance of the type used in creation of the super instance.
1059
Guido van Rossumcd7b7d62001-12-04 21:02:07 +00001060- Previously, hash() of an instance of a subclass of a mutable type
1061 (list or dictionary) would return some value, rather than raising
1062 TypeError. This has been fixed. Also, directly calling
1063 dict.__hash__ and list.__hash__ now raises the same TypeError
1064 (previously, these were the same as object.__hash__).
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00001065
Guido van Rossumd331cb52001-12-05 19:46:42 +00001066- New-style objects now support deleting their __dict__. This is for
1067 all intents and purposes equivalent to assigning a brand new empty
1068 dictionary, but saves space if the object is not used further.
1069
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001070Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001071-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001072
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00001073- -Qnew now works as documented in PEP 238: when -Qnew is passed on
1074 the command line, all occurrences of "/" use true division instead
1075 of classic division. See the PEP for details. Note that "all"
1076 means all instances in library and 3rd-party modules, as well as in
1077 your own code. As the PEP says, -Qnew is intended for use only in
1078 educational environments with control over the libraries in use.
Tim Petersbf72fe22001-12-11 21:43:14 +00001079 Note that test_coercion.py in the standard Python test suite fails
1080 under -Qnew; this is expected, and won't be repaired until true
1081 division becomes the default (in the meantime, test_coercion is
1082 testing the current rules).
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00001083
Fred Drake6c01e252001-12-14 17:08:12 +00001084- complex() now only allows the first argument to be a string
1085 argument, and raises TypeError if either the second arg is a string
1086 or if the second arg is specified when the first is a string.
1087
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001088Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001089-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001090
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00001091- gc.get_referents was renamed to gc.get_referrers.
1092
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001093Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001094-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001095
Tim Peters25059d32001-12-07 20:35:43 +00001096- Functions in the os.spawn() family now release the global interpreter
1097 lock around calling the platform spawn. They should always have done
1098 this, but did not before 2.2c1. Multithreaded programs calling
1099 an os.spawn function with P_WAIT will no longer block all Python threads
1100 until the spawned program completes. It's possible that some programs
1101 relies on blocking, although more likely by accident than by design.
1102
Martin v. Löwis3a89b2b2001-11-25 14:35:58 +00001103- webbrowser defaults to netscape.exe on OS/2 now.
1104
Martin v. Löwis652e1912001-11-25 14:50:56 +00001105- Tix.ResizeHandle exposes detach_widget, hide, and show.
1106
Martin v. Löwis714d2e22001-12-02 12:26:03 +00001107- The charset alias windows_1252 has been added.
1108
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00001109- types.StringTypes is a tuple containing the defined string types;
1110 usually this will be (str, unicode), but if Python was compiled
1111 without Unicode support it will be just (str,).
1112
1113- The pulldom and minidom modules were synchronized to PyXML.
1114
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001115Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001116-----------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001117
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00001118- A new script called Tools/scripts/google.py was added, which fires
1119 off a search on Google.
1120
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001121Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001122-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001123
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00001124- Note that release builds of Python should arrange to define the
1125 preprocessor symbol NDEBUG on the command line (or equivalent).
1126 In the 2.2 pre-release series we tried to define this by magic in
1127 Python.h instead, but it proved to cause problems for extension
1128 authors. The Unix, Windows and Mac builds now all define NDEBUG in
1129 release builds via cmdline (or equivalent) instead. Ports to
1130 other platforms should do likewise.
1131
Jack Jansen1999ef42001-12-06 21:47:20 +00001132- It is no longer necessary to use --with-suffix when building on a
1133 case-insensitive file system (such as Mac OS X HFS+). In the build
1134 directory an extension is used, but not in the installed python.
1135
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001136C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001137-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001138
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00001139- New function PyDict_MergeFromSeq2() exposes the builtin dict
1140 constructor's logic for updating a dictionary from an iterable object
1141 producing key-value pairs.
1142
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00001143- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() requires that the number of entries in
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00001144 the keyword list equal the number of argument specifiers. This
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00001145 wasn't checked correctly, and PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords could even
1146 dump core in some bad cases. This has been repaired. As a result,
1147 PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords may raise RuntimeError in bad cases that
1148 previously went unchallenged.
1149
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001150New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001151-------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001152
1153Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001154-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001155
1156Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001157-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001158
1159Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001160----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001161
Jack Jansenffa260f2001-12-06 21:14:00 +00001162- In unix-Python on Mac OS X (and darwin) sys.platform is now "darwin",
1163 without any trailing digits.
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001164
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00001165- Changed logic for finding python home in Mac OS X framework Pythons.
1166 Now sys.executable points to the executable again, in stead of to
1167 the shared library. The latter is used only for locating the python
1168 home.
1169
1170
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001171What's New in Python 2.2b2?
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001172===========================
1173
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001174*Release date: 16-Nov-2001*
1175
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001176Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001177--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001178
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00001179- Multiple inheritance mixing new-style and classic classes in the
1180 list of base classes is now allowed, so this works now:
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00001181
1182 class Classic: pass
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00001183 class Mixed(Classic, object): pass
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00001184
1185 The MRO (method resolution order) for each base class is respected
1186 according to its kind, but the MRO for the derived class is computed
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00001187 using new-style MRO rules if any base class is a new-style class.
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00001188 This needs to be documented.
1189
Tim Petersa427a2b2001-10-29 22:25:45 +00001190- The new builtin dictionary() constructor, and dictionary type, have
1191 been renamed to dict. This reflects a decade of common usage.
1192
Guido van Rossum3fc08d22001-11-15 20:33:10 +00001193- dict() now accepts an iterable object producing 2-sequences. For
1194 example, dict(d.items()) == d for any dictionary d. The argument,
1195 and the elements of the argument, can be any iterable objects.
1196
Guido van Rossum7ad2d1e2001-10-29 22:11:00 +00001197- New-style classes can now have a __del__ method, which is called
1198 when the instance is deleted (just like for classic classes).
1199
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00001200- Assignment to object.__dict__ is now possible, for objects that are
1201 instances of new-style classes that have a __dict__ (unless the base
1202 class forbids it).
1203
Guido van Rossumc8e56452001-10-22 00:43:43 +00001204- Methods of built-in types now properly check for keyword arguments
1205 (formerly these were silently ignored). The only built-in methods
1206 that take keyword arguments are __call__, __init__ and __new__.
1207
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00001208- The socket function has been converted to a type; see below.
1209
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001210Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001211-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001212
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00001213- Assignment to __debug__ raises SyntaxError at compile-time. This
1214 was promised when 2.1c1 was released as "What's New in Python 2.1c1"
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00001215 (see below) says.
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00001216
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00001217- Clarified the error messages for unsupported operands to an operator
1218 (like 1 + '').
1219
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001220Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001221-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001222
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00001223- mmap has a new keyword argument, "access", allowing a uniform way for
1224 both Windows and Unix users to create read-only, write-through and
1225 copy-on-write memory mappings. This was previously possible only on
1226 Unix. A new keyword argument was required to support this in a
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00001227 uniform way because the mmap() signatures had diverged across
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00001228 platforms. Thanks to Jay T Miller for repairing this!
1229
Tim Peters169ded02001-11-03 19:57:21 +00001230- By default, the gc.garbage list now contains only those instances in
1231 unreachable cycles that have __del__ methods; in 2.1 it contained all
1232 instances in unreachable cycles. "Instances" here has been generalized
1233 to include instances of both new-style and old-style classes.
1234
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00001235- The socket module defines a new method for socket objects,
1236 sendall(). This is like send() but may make multiple calls to
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00001237 send() until all data has been sent. Also, the socket function has
1238 been converted to a subclassable type, like list and tuple (etc.)
1239 before it; socket and SocketType are now the same thing.
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00001240
1241- Various bugfixes to the curses module. There is now a test suite
1242 for the curses module (you have to run it manually).
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00001243
Guido van Rossum692adf12001-10-30 03:03:03 +00001244- binascii.b2a_base64 no longer places an arbitrary restriction of 57
1245 bytes on its input.
1246
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001247Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001248-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001249
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00001250- tkFileDialog exposes a Directory class and askdirectory
Martin v. Löwis25ee87c2001-11-07 22:38:08 +00001251 convenience function.
1252
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00001253- Symbolic group names in regular expressions must be unique. For
1254 example, the regexp r'(?P<abc>)(?P<abc>)' is not allowed, because a
1255 single name can't mean both "group 1" and "group 2" simultaneously.
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00001256 Python 2.2 detects this error at regexp compilation time;
1257 previously, the error went undetected, and results were
1258 unpredictable. Also in sre, the pattern.split(), pattern.sub(), and
1259 pattern.subn() methods have been rewritten in C. Also, an
1260 experimental function/method finditer() has been added, which works
1261 like findall() but returns an iterator.
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00001262
Martin v. Löwisb7b32602001-11-02 23:48:20 +00001263- Tix exposes more commands through the classes DirSelectBox,
1264 DirSelectDialog, ListNoteBook, Meter, CheckList, and the
1265 methods tix_addbitmapdir, tix_cget, tix_configure, tix_filedialog,
1266 tix_getbitmap, tix_getimage, tix_option_get, and tix_resetoptions.
1267
Tim Peters98791af2001-10-23 01:59:54 +00001268- Traceback objects are now scanned by cyclic garbage collection, so
1269 cycles created by casual use of sys.exc_info() no longer cause
1270 permanent memory leaks (provided garbage collection is enabled).
1271
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00001272- os.extsep -- a new variable needed by the RISCOS support. It is the
1273 separator used by extensions, and is '.' on all platforms except
1274 RISCOS, where it is '/'. There is no need to use this variable
1275 unless you have a masochistic desire to port your code to RISCOS.
1276
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00001277- mimetypes.py has optional support for non-standard, but commonly
1278 found types. guess_type() and guess_extension() now accept an
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001279 optional 'strict' flag, defaulting to true, which controls whether
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00001280 recognize non-standard types or not. A few non-standard types we
1281 know about have been added. Also, when run as a script, there are
1282 new -l and -e options.
1283
1284- statcache is now deprecated.
1285
1286- email.Utils.formatdate() now produces the preferred RFC 2822 style
1287 dates with numeric timezones (it used to produce obsolete dates
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001288 hard coded to "GMT" timezone). An optional 'localtime' flag is
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00001289 added to produce dates in the local timezone, with daylight savings
1290 time properly taken into account.
1291
1292- In pickle and cPickle, instead of masking errors in load() by
1293 transforming them into SystemError, we let the original exception
1294 propagate out. Also, implement support for __safe_for_unpickling__
1295 in pickle, as it already was supported in cPickle.
1296
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001297Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001298-----------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001299
1300Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001301-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001302
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00001303- The dbm module is built using libdb1 if available. The bsddb module
1304 is built with libdb3 if available.
1305
1306- Misc/Makefile.pre.in has been removed by BDFL pronouncement.
1307
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001308C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001309-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001310
Tim Peters1fc240e2001-10-26 05:06:50 +00001311- New function PySequence_Fast_GET_SIZE() returns the size of a non-
1312 NULL result from PySequence_Fast(), more quickly than calling
1313 PySequence_Size().
1314
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00001315- New argument unpacking function PyArg_UnpackTuple() added.
1316
1317- New functions PyObject_CallFunctionObjArgs() and
1318 PyObject_CallMethodObjArgs() have been added to make it more
1319 convenient and efficient to call functions and methods from C.
1320
1321- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() no longer masks errors, so it's
1322 possible that this will propagate errors it didn't before.
1323
1324- New function PyObject_CheckReadBuffer(), which returns true if its
1325 argument supports the single-segment readable buffer interface.
1326
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001327New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001328-------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001329
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00001330- We've finally confirmed that this release builds on HP-UX 11.00,
1331 *with* threads, and passes the test suite.
1332
Tim Peters7a33d8b2001-11-05 02:51:07 +00001333- Thanks to a series of patches from Michael Muller, Python may build
1334 again under OS/2 Visual Age C++.
1335
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00001336- Updated RISCOS port by Dietmar Schwertberger.
1337
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001338Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001339-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001340
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00001341- Added a test script for the curses module. It isn't run automatically;
1342 regrtest.py must be run with '-u curses' to enable it.
1343
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001344Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001345-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001346
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00001347Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001348----
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00001349
1350- PythonScript has been moved to unsupported and is slated to be
1351 removed completely in the next release.
1352
1353- It should now be possible to build applets that work on both OS9 and
1354 OSX.
1355
1356- The core is now linked with CoreServices not Carbon; as a side
1357 result, default 8bit encoding on OSX is now ASCII.
1358
1359- Python should now build on OSX 10.1.1
1360
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001361
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00001362What's New in Python 2.2b1?
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00001363===========================
1364
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001365*Release date: 19-Oct-2001*
1366
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00001367Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001368--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00001369
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00001370- New-style classes are now always dynamic (except for built-in and
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00001371 extension types). There is no longer a performance penalty, and I
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00001372 no longer see another reason to keep this baggage around. One relic
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00001373 remains: the __dict__ of a new-style class is a read-only proxy; you
1374 must set the class's attribute to modify it. As a consequence, the
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00001375 __defined__ attribute of new-style types no longer exists, for lack
1376 of need: there is once again only one __dict__ (although in the
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00001377 future a __cache__ may be resurrected with a similar function, if I
1378 can prove that it actually speeds things up).
Guido van Rossum50fda3b2001-10-04 19:46:06 +00001379
Tim Peters1c9ca872001-10-04 06:43:12 +00001380- C.__doc__ now works as expected for new-style classes (in 2.2a4 it
1381 always returned None, even when there was a class docstring).
1382
1383- doctest now finds and runs docstrings attached to new-style classes,
1384 class methods, static methods, and properties.
1385
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00001386Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001387-----------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00001388
Guido van Rossuma8bcf802001-10-15 15:53:58 +00001389- A very subtle syntactical pitfall in list comprehensions was fixed.
1390 For example: [a+b for a in 'abc', for b in 'def']. The comma in
1391 this example is a mistake. Previously, this would silently let 'a'
1392 iterate over the singleton tuple ('abc',), yielding ['abcd', 'abce',
1393 'abcf'] rather than the intended ['ad', 'ae', 'af', 'bd', 'be',
1394 'bf', 'cd', 'ce', 'cf']. Now, this is flagged as a syntax error.
1395 Note that [a for a in <singleton>] is a convoluted way to say
1396 [<singleton>] anyway, so it's not like any expressiveness is lost.
1397
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00001398- getattr(obj, name, default) now only catches AttributeError, as
1399 documented, rather than returning the default value for all
1400 exceptions (which could mask bugs in a __getattr__ hook, for
1401 example).
1402
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00001403- Weak reference objects are now part of the core and offer a C API.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00001404 A bug which could allow a core dump when binary operations involved
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00001405 proxy reference has been fixed. weakref.ReferenceError is now a
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00001406 built-in exception.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00001407
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00001408- unicode(obj) now behaves more like str(obj), accepting arbitrary
1409 objects, and calling a __unicode__ method if it exists.
1410 unicode(obj, encoding) and unicode(obj, encoding, errors) still
Marc-André Lemburgb5507ec2001-10-19 12:02:29 +00001411 require an 8-bit string or character buffer argument.
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00001412
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00001413- isinstance() now allows any object as the first argument and a
1414 class, a type or something with a __bases__ tuple attribute for the
1415 second argument. The second argument may also be a tuple of a
1416 class, type, or something with __bases__, in which case isinstance()
1417 will return true if the first argument is an instance of any of the
1418 things contained in the second argument tuple. E.g.
1419
1420 isinstance(x, (A, B))
1421
1422 returns true if x is an instance of A or B.
1423
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00001424Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001425-----------------
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00001426
1427- thread.start_new_thread() now returns the thread ID (previously None).
1428
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00001429- binascii has now two quopri support functions, a2b_qp and b2a_qp.
1430
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00001431- readline now supports setting the startup_hook and the
1432 pre_event_hook, and adds the add_history() function.
Martin v. Löwis0daad592001-09-30 21:09:59 +00001433
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00001434- os and posix supports chroot(), setgroups() and unsetenv() where
1435 available. The stat(), fstat(), statvfs() and fstatvfs() functions
1436 now return "pseudo-sequences" -- the various fields can now be
1437 accessed as attributes (e.g. os.stat("/").st_mtime) but for
1438 backwards compatibility they also behave as a fixed-length sequence.
1439 Some platform-specific fields (e.g. st_rdev) are only accessible as
Guido van Rossum98bf58f2001-10-18 20:34:25 +00001440 attributes.
1441
1442- time: localtime(), gmtime() and strptime() now return a
1443 pseudo-sequence similar to the os.stat() return value, with
1444 attributes like tm_year etc.
Martin v. Löwis16628c92001-10-04 22:46:41 +00001445
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00001446- Decompression objects in the zlib module now accept an optional
1447 second parameter to decompress() that specifies the maximum amount
1448 of memory to use for the uncompressed data.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00001449
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00001450- optional SSL support in the socket module now exports OpenSSL
1451 functions RAND_add(), RAND_egd(), and RAND_status(). These calls
1452 are useful on platforms like Solaris where OpenSSL does not
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00001453 automatically seed its PRNG. Also, the keyfile and certfile
1454 arguments to socket.ssl() are now optional.
1455
1456- posixmodule (and by extension, the os module on POSIX platforms) now
1457 exports O_LARGEFILE, O_DIRECT, O_DIRECTORY, and O_NOFOLLOW.
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00001458
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00001459Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001460-------
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00001461
Tim Peters7402f792001-10-02 03:53:41 +00001462- doctest now excludes functions and classes not defined by the module
1463 being tested, thanks to Tim Hochberg.
1464
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00001465- HotShot, a new profiler implemented using a C-based callback, has
1466 been added. This substantially reduces the overhead of profiling,
1467 but it is still quite preliminary. Support modules and
1468 documentation will be added in upcoming releases (before 2.2 final).
1469
Guido van Rossumc4b09b42001-10-04 10:19:00 +00001470- profile now produces correct output in situations where an exception
1471 raised in Python is cleared by C code (e.g. hasattr()). This used
1472 to cause wrong output, including spurious claims of recursive
1473 functions and attribution of time spent to the wrong function.
1474
Tim Peters0a1fc4e2001-10-07 03:12:08 +00001475 The code and documentation for the derived OldProfile and HotProfile
1476 profiling classes was removed. The code hasn't worked for years (if
1477 you tried to use them, they raised exceptions). OldProfile
1478 intended to reproduce the behavior of the profiler Python used more
1479 than 7 years ago, and isn't interesting anymore. HotProfile intended
1480 to provide a faster profiler (but producing less information), and
1481 that's a worthy goal we intend to meet via a different approach (but
1482 without losing information).
1483
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00001484- Profile.calibrate() has a new implementation that should deliver
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00001485 a much better system-specific calibration constant. The constant can
1486 now be specified in an instance constructor, or as a Profile class or
1487 instance variable, instead of by editing profile.py's source code.
1488 Calibration must still be done manually (see the docs for the profile
1489 module).
1490
1491 Note that Profile.calibrate() must be overriden by subclasses.
1492 Improving the accuracy required exploiting detailed knowledge of
1493 profiler internals; the earlier method abstracted away the details
1494 and measured a simplified model instead, but consequently computed
1495 a constant too small by a factor of 2 on some modern machines.
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00001496
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00001497- quopri's encode and decode methods take an optional header parameter,
Jeremy Hylton6f543b62001-10-16 20:42:52 +00001498 which indicates whether output is intended for the header 'Q'
1499 encoding.
1500
Guido van Rossuma5343cc2001-10-18 18:02:07 +00001501- The SocketServer.ThreadingMixIn class now closes the request after
1502 finish_request() returns. (Not when it errors out though.)
1503
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001504- The nntplib module's NNTP.body() method has grown a 'file' argument
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00001505 to allow saving the message body to a file.
1506
1507- The email package has added a class email.Parser.HeaderParser which
1508 only parses headers and does not recurse into the message's body.
1509 Also, the module/class MIMEAudio has been added for representing
1510 audio data (contributed by Anthony Baxter).
1511
1512- ftplib should be able to handle files > 2GB.
1513
1514- ConfigParser.getboolean() now also interprets TRUE, FALSE, YES, NO,
1515 ON, and OFF.
1516
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00001517- xml.dom.minidom NodeList objects now support the length attribute
1518 and item() method as required by the DOM specifications.
1519
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00001520Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001521-----------
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00001522
1523- Demo/dns was removed. It no longer serves any purpose; a package
1524 derived from it is now maintained by Anthony Baxter, see
1525 http://PyDNS.SourceForge.net.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00001526
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00001527- The freeze tool has been made more robust, and two new options have
1528 been added: -X and -E.
1529
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00001530Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001531-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00001532
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00001533- configure will use CXX in LINKCC if CXX is used to build main() and
1534 the system requires to link a C++ main using the C++ compiler.
1535
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00001536C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001537-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00001538
Guido van Rossum6c4bce32001-10-18 19:20:25 +00001539- The documentation for the tp_compare slot is updated to require that
1540 the return value must be -1, 0, 1; an arbitrary number <0 or >0 is
1541 not correct. This is not yet enforced but will be enforced in
1542 Python 2.3; even later, we may use -2 to indicate errors and +2 for
1543 "NotImplemented". Right now, -1 should be used for an error return.
1544
Tim Petersd38b1c72001-09-30 05:09:37 +00001545- PyLong_AsLongLong() now accepts int (as well as long) arguments.
1546 Consequently, PyArg_ParseTuple's 'L' code also accepts int (as well
1547 as long) arguments.
1548
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00001549- PyThread_start_new_thread() now returns a long int giving the thread
1550 ID, if one can be calculated; it returns -1 for error, 0 if no
1551 thread ID is calculated (this is an incompatible change, but only
1552 the thread module used this API). This code has only really been
1553 tested on Linux and Windows; other platforms please beware (and
1554 report any bugs or strange behavior).
1555
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00001556- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() no longer accepts Unicode objects as
1557 input.
1558
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00001559New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001560-------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00001561
1562Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001563-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00001564
1565Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001566-------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00001567
Tim Peters04cf1d32001-10-09 22:39:40 +00001568- Installer: If you install IDLE, and don't disable file-extension
1569 registration, a new "Edit with IDLE" context (right-click) menu entry
1570 is created for .py and .pyw files.
1571
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00001572- The signal module now supports SIGBREAK on Windows, thanks to Steven
1573 Scott. Note that SIGBREAK is unique to Windows. The default SIGBREAK
1574 action remains to call Win32 ExitProcess(). This can be changed via
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00001575 signal.signal(). For example::
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00001576
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001577 # Make Ctrl+Break raise KeyboardInterrupt, like Python's default Ctrl+C
1578 # (SIGINT) behavior.
1579 import signal
1580 signal.signal(signal.SIGBREAK, signal.default_int_handler)
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00001581
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001582 try:
1583 while 1:
1584 pass
1585 except KeyboardInterrupt:
1586 # We get here on Ctrl+C or Ctrl+Break now; if we had not changed
1587 # SIGBREAK, only on Ctrl+C (and Ctrl+Break would terminate the
1588 # program without the possibility for any Python-level cleanup).
1589 print "Clean exit"
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00001590
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00001591
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00001592What's New in Python 2.2a4?
1593===========================
1594
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001595*Release date: 28-Sep-2001*
1596
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00001597Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001598--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00001599
1600- pydoc and inspect are now aware of new-style classes;
1601 e.g. help(list) at the interactive prompt now shows proper
1602 documentation for all operations on list objects.
1603
1604- Applications using Jim Fulton's ExtensionClass module can now safely
1605 be used with Python 2.2. In particular, Zope 2.4.1 now works with
1606 Python 2.2 (as well as with Python 2.1.1). The Demo/metaclass
1607 examples also work again. It is hoped that Gtk and Boost also work
1608 with 2.2a4 and beyond. (If you can confirm this, please write
1609 webmaster@python.org; if there are still problems, please open a bug
1610 report on SourceForge.)
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00001611
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00001612- property() now takes 4 keyword arguments: fget, fset, fdel and doc.
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00001613 These map to read-only attributes 'fget', 'fset', 'fdel', and '__doc__'
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00001614 in the constructed property object. fget, fset and fdel weren't
1615 discoverable from Python in 2.2a3. __doc__ is new, and allows to
1616 associate a docstring with a property.
1617
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00001618- Comparison overloading is now more completely implemented. For
1619 example, a str subclass instance can properly be compared to a str
1620 instance, and it can properly overload comparison. Ditto for most
1621 other built-in object types.
1622
1623- The repr() of new-style classes has changed; instead of <type
1624 'M.Foo'> a new-style class is now rendered as <class 'M.Foo'>,
1625 *except* for built-in types, which are still rendered as <type
1626 'Foo'> (to avoid upsetting existing code that might parse or
1627 otherwise rely on repr() of certain type objects).
1628
1629- The repr() of new-style objects is now always <Foo object at XXX>;
1630 previously, it was sometimes <Foo instance at XXX>.
1631
1632- For new-style classes, what was previously called __getattr__ is now
1633 called __getattribute__. This method, if defined, is called for
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00001634 *every* attribute access. A new __getattr__ hook more similar to the
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00001635 one in classic classes is defined which is called only if regular
1636 attribute access raises AttributeError; to catch *all* attribute
1637 access, you can use __getattribute__ (for new-style classes). If
1638 both are defined, __getattribute__ is called first, and if it raises
1639 AttributeError, __getattr__ is called.
1640
1641- The __class__ attribute of new-style objects can be assigned to.
1642 The new class must have the same C-level object layout as the old
1643 class.
1644
1645- The builtin file type can be subclassed now. In the usual pattern,
1646 "file" is the name of the builtin type, and file() is a new builtin
1647 constructor, with the same signature as the builtin open() function.
1648 file() is now the preferred way to open a file.
1649
1650- Previously, __new__ would only see sequential arguments passed to
1651 the type in a constructor call; __init__ would see both sequential
1652 and keyword arguments. This made no sense whatsoever any more, so
1653 now both __new__ and __init__ see all arguments.
1654
1655- Previously, hash() applied to an instance of a subclass of str or
1656 unicode always returned 0. This has been repaired.
1657
1658- Previously, an operation on an instance of a subclass of an
1659 immutable type (int, long, float, complex, tuple, str, unicode),
1660 where the subtype didn't override the operation (and so the
1661 operation was handled by the builtin type), could return that
1662 instance instead a value of the base type. For example, if s was of
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00001663 a str subclass type, s[:] returned s as-is. Now it returns a str
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00001664 with the same value as s.
1665
Barry Warsaw86fbaf82001-09-28 15:26:12 +00001666- Provisional support for pickling new-style objects has been added.
1667
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00001668Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001669----
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00001670
Tim Peters2c9aa5e2001-09-23 04:06:05 +00001671- file.writelines() now accepts any iterable object producing strings.
1672
Marc-André Lemburgaefd7662001-09-20 12:59:37 +00001673- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() now works very much like
1674 PyObject_Str(obj) in that it tries to use __str__/tp_str
1675 on the object if the object is not a string or buffer. This
1676 makes unicode() behave like str() when applied to non-string/buffer
1677 objects.
1678
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00001679- PyFile_WriteObject now passes Unicode objects to the file's write
1680 method. As a result, all file-like objects which may be the target
Martin v. Löwis2777c022001-09-19 13:47:32 +00001681 of a print statement must support Unicode objects, i.e. they must
1682 at least convert them into ASCII strings.
1683
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00001684- Thread scheduling on Solaris should be improved; it is no longer
1685 necessary to insert a small sleep at the start of a thread in order
1686 to let other runnable threads be scheduled.
1687
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00001688Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001689-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00001690
Marc-André Lemburgbf990172001-09-27 14:17:33 +00001691- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
1692 read character buffer compatible objects for their .write() methods.
1693 These objects are converted to strings and then handled as such
1694 by the instances.
1695
Barry Warsaw2f600732001-09-24 04:28:10 +00001696- The "email" package has been added. This is basically a port of the
1697 mimelib package <http://sf.net/projects/mimelib> with API changes
1698 and some implementations updated to use iterators and generators.
1699
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00001700- difflib.ndiff() and difflib.Differ.compare() are generators now. This
1701 restores the ability of Tools/scripts/ndiff.py to start producing output
1702 before the entire comparison is complete.
1703
Barry Warsaw58b072d2001-09-22 04:44:21 +00001704- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
1705 iteration just like file objects (i.e. their .readline() method is
1706 called for each iteration until it returns an empty string).
1707
Marc-André Lemburg494f2ae2001-09-19 11:33:31 +00001708- The codecs module has grown four new helper APIs to access
1709 builtin codecs: getencoder(), getdecoder(), getreader(),
1710 getwriter().
1711
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00001712- SimpleXMLRPCServer: a new module (based upon SimpleHTMLServer)
1713 simplifies writing XML RPC servers.
1714
Barry Warsaw647d5e82001-09-28 17:01:02 +00001715- os.path.realpath(): a new function that returns the absolute pathname
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00001716 after interpretation of symbolic links. On non-Unix systems, this
1717 is an alias for os.path.abspath().
1718
Tim Peters16a77ad2001-09-08 04:00:12 +00001719- operator.indexOf() (PySequence_Index() in the C API) now works with any
1720 iterable object.
1721
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00001722- smtplib now supports various authentication and security features of
1723 the SMTP protocol through the new login() and starttls() methods.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00001724
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00001725- hmac: a new module implementing keyed hashing for message
1726 authentication.
1727
1728- mimetypes now recognizes more extensions and file types. At the
1729 same time, some mappings not sanctioned by IANA were removed.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00001730
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00001731- The "compiler" package has been brought up to date to the state of
Guido van Rossumc9ed5dc2001-09-20 05:30:24 +00001732 Python 2.2 bytecode generation. It has also been promoted from a
1733 Tool to a standard library package. (Tools/compiler still exists as
1734 a sample driver.)
1735
Guido van Rossumc9ed5dc2001-09-20 05:30:24 +00001736Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001737-----
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00001738
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00001739Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001740-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00001741
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00001742- Large file support (LFS) is now automatic when the platform supports
1743 it; no more manual configuration tweaks are needed. On Linux, at
1744 least, it's possible to have a system whose C library supports large
1745 files but whose kernel doesn't; in this case, large file support is
1746 still enabled but doesn't do you any good unless you upgrade your
1747 kernel or share your Python executable with another system whose
1748 kernel has large file support.
1749
1750- The configure script now supplies plausible defaults in a
1751 cross-compilation environment. This doesn't mean that the supplied
1752 values are always correct, or that cross-compilation now works
1753 flawlessly -- but it's a first step (and it shuts up most of
1754 autoconf's warnings about AC_TRY_RUN).
1755
1756- The Unix build is now a bit less chatty, courtesy of the parser
1757 generator. The build is completely silent (except for errors) when
1758 using "make -s", thanks to a -q option to setup.py.
1759
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00001760C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001761-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00001762
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00001763- The "structmember" API now supports some new flag bits to deny read
1764 and/or write access to attributes in restricted execution mode.
1765
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00001766New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001767-------------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00001768
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00001769- Compaq's iPAQ handheld, running the "familiar" Linux distribution
1770 (http://familiar.handhelds.org).
1771
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00001772Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001773-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00001774
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00001775- The "classic" standard tests, which work by comparing stdout to
1776 an expected-output file under Lib/test/output/, no longer stop at
1777 the first mismatch. Instead the test is run to completion, and a
1778 variant of ndiff-style comparison is used to report all differences.
1779 This is much easier to understand than the previous style of reporting.
1780
1781- The unittest-based standard tests now use regrtest's test_main()
1782 convention, instead of running as a side-effect of merely being
1783 imported. This allows these tests to be run in more natural and
1784 flexible ways as unittests, outside the regrtest framework.
1785
1786- regrtest.py is much better integrated with unittest and doctest now,
1787 especially in regard to reporting errors.
1788
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00001789Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001790-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00001791
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00001792- Large file support now also works for files > 4GB, on filesystems
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00001793 that support it (NTFS under Windows 2000). See "What's New in
1794 Python 2.2a3" for more detail.
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00001795
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00001796
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00001797What's New in Python 2.2a3?
1798===========================
1799
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001800*Release Date: 07-Sep-2001*
1801
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00001802Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001803----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00001804
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00001805- Conversion of long to float now raises OverflowError if the long is too
1806 big to represent as a C double.
1807
Tim Peters32f453e2001-09-03 08:35:41 +00001808- The 3-argument builtin pow() no longer allows a third non-None argument
1809 if either of the first two arguments is a float, or if both are of
1810 integer types and the second argument is negative (in which latter case
1811 the arguments are converted to float, so this is really the same
1812 restriction).
1813
Tim Peters5d2b77c2001-09-03 05:47:38 +00001814- The builtin dir() now returns more information, and sometimes much
1815 more, generally naming all attributes of an object, and all attributes
1816 reachable from the object via its class, and from its class's base
1817 classes, and so on from them too. Example: in 2.2a2, dir([]) returned
1818 an empty list. In 2.2a3,
1819
1820 >>> dir([])
1821 ['__add__', '__class__', '__contains__', '__delattr__', '__delitem__',
1822 '__eq__', '__ge__', '__getattr__', '__getitem__', '__getslice__',
1823 '__gt__', '__hash__', '__iadd__', '__imul__', '__init__', '__le__',
1824 '__len__', '__lt__', '__mul__', '__ne__', '__new__', '__repr__',
1825 '__rmul__', '__setattr__', '__setitem__', '__setslice__', '__str__',
1826 'append', 'count', 'extend', 'index', 'insert', 'pop', 'remove',
1827 'reverse', 'sort']
1828
1829 dir(module) continues to return only the module's attributes, though.
1830
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00001831- Overflowing operations on plain ints now return a long int rather
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00001832 than raising OverflowError. This is a partial implementation of PEP
1833 237. You can use -Wdefault::OverflowWarning to enable a warning for
1834 this situation, and -Werror::OverflowWarning to revert to the old
1835 OverflowError exception.
1836
Guido van Rossum61c345f2001-09-04 03:26:15 +00001837- A new command line option, -Q<arg>, is added to control run-time
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00001838 warnings for the use of classic division. (See PEP 238.) Possible
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00001839 values are -Qold, -Qwarn, -Qwarnall, and -Qnew. The default is
1840 -Qold, meaning the / operator has its classic meaning and no
1841 warnings are issued. Using -Qwarn issues a run-time warning about
1842 all uses of classic division for int and long arguments; -Qwarnall
1843 also warns about classic division for float and complex arguments
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00001844 (for use with fixdiv.py).
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001845 [Note: the remainder of this item (preserved below) became
1846 obsolete in 2.2c1 -- -Qnew has global effect in 2.2] ::
1847
1848 Using -Qnew is questionable; it turns on new division by default, but
1849 only in the __main__ module. You can usefully combine -Qwarn or
1850 -Qwarnall and -Qnew: this gives the __main__ module new division, and
1851 warns about classic division everywhere else.
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00001852
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00001853- Many built-in types can now be subclassed. This applies to int,
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00001854 long, float, str, unicode, and tuple. (The types complex, list and
1855 dictionary can also be subclassed; this was introduced earlier.)
1856 Note that restrictions apply when subclassing immutable built-in
1857 types: you can only affect the value of the instance by overloading
1858 __new__. You can add mutable attributes, and the subclass instances
1859 will have a __dict__ attribute, but you cannot change the "value"
1860 (as implemented by the base class) of an immutable subclass instance
1861 once it is created.
1862
Guido van Rossumaaf80c82001-09-02 13:44:35 +00001863- The dictionary constructor now takes an optional argument, a
1864 mapping-like object, and initializes the dictionary from its
1865 (key, value) pairs.
1866
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00001867- A new built-in type, super, has been added. This facilitates making
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00001868 "cooperative super calls" in a multiple inheritance setting. For an
1869 explanation, see http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#cooperation
1870
Guido van Rossum8d7234d2001-09-06 22:02:58 +00001871- A new built-in type, property, has been added. This enables the
1872 creation of "properties". These are attributes implemented by
1873 getter and setter functions (or only one of these for read-only or
1874 write-only attributes), without the need to override __getattr__.
1875 See http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#property
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00001876
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00001877- The syntax of floating-point and imaginary literals has been
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00001878 liberalized, to allow leading zeroes. Examples of literals now
1879 legal that were SyntaxErrors before:
1880
1881 00.0 0e3 0100j 07.5 00000000000000000008.
1882
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00001883- An old tokenizer bug allowed floating point literals with an incomplete
Tim Petersc6d95812001-08-28 20:56:27 +00001884 exponent, such as 1e and 3.1e-. Such literals now raise SyntaxError.
1885
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00001886Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001887-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00001888
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00001889- telnetlib includes symbolic names for the options, and support for
Martin v. Löwis1da9c572002-11-04 09:56:00 +00001890 setting an option negotiation callback. It also supports processing
1891 of suboptions.
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00001892
Tim Petersa40c7932001-09-05 22:36:56 +00001893- The new C standard no longer requires that math libraries set errno to
1894 ERANGE on overflow. For platform libraries that exploit this new
1895 freedom, Python's overflow-checking was wholly broken. A new overflow-
1896 checking scheme attempts to repair that, but may not be reliable on all
1897 platforms (C doesn't seem to provide anything both useful and portable
1898 in this area anymore).
1899
Martin v. Löwis44f86962001-09-05 13:44:54 +00001900- Asynchronous timeout actions are available through the new class
1901 threading.Timer.
1902
Tim Peters78526162001-09-05 00:53:45 +00001903- math.log and math.log10 now return sensible results for even huge
1904 long arguments. For example, math.log10(10 ** 10000) ~= 10000.0.
1905
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00001906- A new function, imp.lock_held(), returns 1 when the import lock is
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00001907 currently held. See the docs for the imp module.
1908
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00001909- pickle, cPickle and marshal on 32-bit platforms can now correctly read
Tim Peters82112372001-08-29 02:28:42 +00001910 dumps containing ints written on platforms where Python ints are 8 bytes.
1911 When read on a box where Python ints are 4 bytes, such values are
1912 converted to Python longs.
1913
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00001914- In restricted execution mode (using the rexec module), unmarshalling
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00001915 code objects is no longer allowed. This plugs a security hole.
1916
Steve Purcell6091cd62001-09-06 16:05:17 +00001917- unittest.TestResult instances no longer store references to tracebacks
1918 generated by test failures. This prevents unexpected dangling references
1919 to objects that should be garbage collected between tests.
1920
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00001921Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001922-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00001923
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00001924- Tools/scripts/fixdiv.py has been added which can be used to fix
1925 division operators as per PEP 238.
1926
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00001927Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001928-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00001929
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00001930- If you are an adventurous person using Mac OS X you may want to look at
1931 Mac/OSX. There is a Makefile there that will build Python as a real Mac
1932 application, which can be used for experimenting with Carbon or Cocoa.
1933 Discussion of this on pythonmac-sig, please.
1934
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00001935C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001936-----
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00001937
1938- New function PyObject_Dir(obj), like Python __builtin__.dir(obj).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00001939
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00001940- Note that PyLong_AsDouble can fail! This has always been true, but no
1941 callers checked for it. It's more likely to fail now, because overflow
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00001942 errors are properly detected now. The proper way to check::
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00001943
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001944 double x = PyLong_AsDouble(some_long_object);
1945 if (x == -1.0 && PyErr_Occurred()) {
1946 /* The conversion failed. */
1947 }
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00001948
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00001949- The GC API has been changed. Extensions that use the old API will still
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00001950 compile but will not participate in GC. To upgrade an extension
1951 module:
1952
1953 - rename Py_TPFLAGS_GC to PyTPFLAGS_HAVE_GC
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00001954
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00001955 - use PyObject_GC_New or PyObject_GC_NewVar to allocate objects and
1956 PyObject_GC_Del to deallocate them
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00001957
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00001958 - rename PyObject_GC_Init to PyObject_GC_Track and PyObject_GC_Fini
1959 to PyObject_GC_UnTrack
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00001960
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00001961 - remove PyGC_HEAD_SIZE from object size calculations
1962
1963 - remove calls to PyObject_AS_GC and PyObject_FROM_GC
1964
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00001965- Two new functions: PyString_FromFormat() and PyString_FromFormatV().
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00001966 These can be used safely to construct string objects from a
1967 sprintf-style format string (similar to the format string supported
1968 by PyErr_Format()).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00001969
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00001970New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001971-------------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00001972
Tim Petersb7da0902001-09-02 23:01:43 +00001973- Stephen Hansen contributed patches sufficient to get a clean compile
1974 under Borland C (Windows), but he reports problems running it and ran
1975 out of time to complete the port. Volunteers? Expect a MemoryError
1976 when importing the types module; this is probably shallow, and
1977 causing later failures too.
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00001978
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00001979Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001980-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00001981
1982Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001983-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00001984
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00001985- Large file support is now enabled on Win32 platforms as well as on
1986 Win64. This means that, for example, you can use f.tell() and f.seek()
1987 to manipulate files larger than 2 gigabytes (provided you have enough
1988 disk space, and are using a Windows filesystem that supports large
Tim Peters9a9471c2001-09-11 23:18:51 +00001989 partitions). Windows filesystem limits: FAT has a 2GB (gigabyte)
1990 filesize limit, and large file support makes no difference there.
1991 FAT32's limit is 4GB, and files >= 2GB are easier to use from Python now.
1992 NTFS has no practical limit on file size, and files of any size can be
1993 used from Python now.
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00001994
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00001995- The w9xpopen hack is now used on Windows NT and 2000 too when COMPSPEC
Tim Peters402d5982001-08-27 06:37:48 +00001996 points to command.com (patch from Brian Quinlan).
1997
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00001998
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00001999What's New in Python 2.2a2?
2000===========================
2001
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002002*Release Date: 22-Aug-2001*
2003
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00002004Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002005-----
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00002006
Barry Warsaw18b2ecf2001-08-22 20:26:56 +00002007- Tim Peters developed a brand new Windows installer using Wise 8.1,
2008 generously donated to us by Wise Solutions.
2009
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00002010- configure supports a new option --enable-unicode, with the values
2011 ucs2 and ucs4 (new in 2.2a1). With --disable-unicode, the Unicode
2012 type and supporting code is completely removed from the interpreter.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00002013
Jack Jansen32ce0cd2001-08-21 19:28:20 +00002014- A new configure option --enable-framework builds a Mac OS X framework,
2015 which "make frameworkinstall" will install. This provides a starting
2016 point for more mac-like functionality, join pythonmac-sig@python.org
2017 if you are interested in helping.
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00002018
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00002019- The NeXT platform is no longer supported.
2020
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002021- The 'new' module is now statically linked.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00002022
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00002023Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002024-----
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00002025
2026- The new Tools/scripts/cleanfuture.py can be used to automatically
Andrew M. Kuchlingb0532092001-08-15 15:54:56 +00002027 edit out obsolete future statements from Python source code. See
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00002028 the module docstring for details.
2029
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00002030Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002031-----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00002032
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00002033- regrtest.py now knows which tests are expected to be skipped on some
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00002034 platforms, allowing to give clearer test result output. regrtest
2035 also has optional --use/-u switch to run normally disabled tests
2036 which require network access or consume significant disk resources.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00002037
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00002038- Several new tests in the standard test suite, with special thanks to
2039 Nick Mathewson.
2040
2041Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002042----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00002043
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00002044- The floor division operator // has been added as outlined in PEP
2045 238. The / operator still provides classic division (and will until
2046 Python 3.0) unless "from __future__ import division" is included, in
2047 which case the / operator will provide true division. The operator
2048 module provides truediv() and floordiv() functions. Augmented
2049 assignment variants are included, as are the equivalent overloadable
2050 methods and C API methods. See the PEP for a full discussion:
2051 <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0238.html>
2052
Tim Peters6cd6a822001-08-17 22:11:27 +00002053- Future statements are now effective in simulated interactive shells
2054 (like IDLE). This should "just work" by magic, but read Michael
2055 Hudson's "Future statements in simulated shells" PEP 264 for full
2056 details: <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0264.html>.
2057
Guido van Rossumf86ddd22001-08-17 21:21:04 +00002058- The type/class unification (PEP 252-253) was integrated into the
2059 trunk and is not so tentative any more (the exact specification of
2060 some features is still tentative). A lot of work has done on fixing
2061 bugs and adding robustness and features (performance still has to
2062 come a long way).
2063
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00002064- Warnings about a mismatch in the Python API during extension import
2065 now use the Python warning framework (which makes it possible to
2066 write filters for these warnings).
2067
Barry Warsaw9b3be7f2001-08-14 18:35:02 +00002068- A function's __dict__ (aka func_dict) will now always be a
2069 dictionary. It used to be possible to delete it or set it to None,
2070 but now both actions raise TypeErrors. It is still legal to set it
2071 to a dictionary object. Getting func.__dict__ before any attributes
2072 have been assigned now returns an empty dictionary instead of None.
2073
Guido van Rossum32aa5d22001-09-05 18:43:35 +00002074- A new command line option, -E, was added which disables the use of
2075 all environment variables, or at least those that are specifically
2076 significant to Python. Usually those have a name starting with
2077 "PYTHON". This was used to fix a problem where the tests fail if
2078 the user happens to have PYTHONHOME or PYTHONPATH pointing to an
2079 older distribution.
2080
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00002081Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002082-------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00002083
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00002084- New class Differ and new functions ndiff() and restore() in difflib.py.
2085 These package the algorithms used by the popular Tools/scripts/ndiff.py,
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00002086 for programmatic reuse.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00002087
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00002088- New function xml.sax.saxutils.quoteattr(): Quote an XML attribute
2089 value using the minimal quoting required for the value; more
2090 reliable than using xml.sax.saxutils.escape() for attribute values.
2091
2092- Readline completion support for cmd.Cmd was added.
2093
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00002094- Calling os.tempnam() or os.tmpnam() generate RuntimeWarnings.
2095
2096- Added function threading.BoundedSemaphore()
2097
2098- Added Ka-Ping Yee's cgitb.py module.
2099
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002100- The 'new' module now exposes the CO_xxx flags.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00002101
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00002102- The gc module offers the get_referents function.
2103
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00002104New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002105-------------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00002106
2107C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002108-----
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00002109
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00002110- Two new APIs PyOS_snprintf() and PyOS_vsnprintf() were added
2111 which provide a cross-platform implementations for the
2112 relatively new snprintf()/vsnprintf() C lib APIs. In contrast to
2113 the standard sprintf() and vsprintf() C lib APIs, these versions
2114 apply bounds checking on the used buffer which enhances protection
2115 against buffer overruns.
2116
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00002117- Unicode APIs now use name mangling to assure that mixing interpreters
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00002118 and extensions using different Unicode widths is rendered next to
2119 impossible. Trying to import an incompatible Unicode-aware extension
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00002120 will result in an ImportError. Unicode extensions writers must make
2121 sure to check the Unicode width compatibility in their extensions by
2122 using at least one of the mangled Unicode APIs in the extension.
2123
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00002124- Two new flags METH_NOARGS and METH_O are available in method definition
2125 tables to simplify implementation of methods with no arguments and a
2126 single untyped argument. Calling such methods is more efficient than
2127 calling corresponding METH_VARARGS methods. METH_OLDARGS is now
2128 deprecated.
2129
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00002130Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002131-------
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00002132
2133- "import module" now compiles module.pyw if it exists and nothing else
2134 relevant is found.
2135
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00002136
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00002137What's New in Python 2.2a1?
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00002138===========================
2139
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002140*Release date: 18-Jul-2001*
2141
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00002142Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002143----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00002144
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00002145- TENTATIVELY, a large amount of code implementing much of what's
2146 described in PEP 252 (Making Types Look More Like Classes) and PEP
2147 253 (Subtyping Built-in Types) was added. This will be released
2148 with Python 2.2a1. Documentation will be provided separately
2149 through http://www.python.org/2.2/. The purpose of releasing this
2150 with Python 2.2a1 is to test backwards compatibility. It is
2151 possible, though not likely, that a decision is made not to release
2152 this code as part of 2.2 final, if any serious backwards
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00002153 incompatibilities are found during alpha testing that cannot be
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00002154 repaired.
2155
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00002156- Generators were added; this is a new way to create an iterator (see
Tim Peters11a0d102001-07-17 18:48:00 +00002157 below) using what looks like a simple function containing one or
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00002158 more 'yield' statements. See PEP 255. Since this adds a new
2159 keyword to the language, this feature must be enabled by including a
2160 future statement: "from __future__ import generators" (see PEP 236).
2161 Generators will become a standard feature in a future release
2162 (probably 2.3). Without this future statement, 'yield' remains an
2163 ordinary identifier, but a warning is issued each time it is used.
2164 (These warnings currently don't conform to the warnings framework of
2165 PEP 230; we intend to fix this in 2.2a2.)
2166
Marc-André Lemburg12e74b32001-05-22 08:58:23 +00002167- The UTF-16 codec was modified to be more RFC compliant. It will now
2168 only remove BOM characters at the start of the string and then
2169 only if running in native mode (UTF-16-LE and -BE won't remove a
2170 leading BMO character).
2171
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00002172- Strings now have a new method .decode() to complement the already
2173 existing .encode() method. These two methods provide direct access
2174 to the corresponding decoders and encoders of the registered codecs.
2175
2176 To enhance the usability of the .encode() method, the special
2177 casing of Unicode object return values was dropped (Unicode objects
2178 were auto-magically converted to string using the default encoding).
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00002179
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00002180 Both methods will now return whatever the codec in charge of the
2181 requested encoding returns as object, e.g. Unicode codecs will
2182 return Unicode objects when decoding is requested ("äöü".decode("latin-1")
2183 will return u"äöü"). This enables codec writer to create codecs
2184 for various simple to use conversions.
2185
2186 New codecs were added to demonstrate these new features (the .encode()
2187 and .decode() columns indicate the type of the returned objects):
2188
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002189 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
2190 |Name | .encode() | .decode() | Description |
2191 +=========+===========+===========+=============================+
2192 |uu | string | string | UU codec (e.g. for email) |
2193 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
2194 |base64 | string | string | base64 codec |
2195 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
2196 |quopri | string | string | quoted-printable codec |
2197 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
2198 |zlib | string | string | zlib compression |
2199 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
2200 |hex | string | string | 2-byte hex codec |
2201 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
2202 |rot-13 | string | Unicode | ROT-13 Unicode charmap codec|
2203 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00002204
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00002205- Some operating systems now support the concept of a default Unicode
2206 encoding for file system operations. Notably, Windows supports 'mbcs'
2207 as the default. The Macintosh will also adopt this concept in the medium
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00002208 term, although the default encoding for that platform will be other than
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00002209 'mbcs'.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00002210
2211 On operating system that support non-ASCII filenames, it is common for
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00002212 functions that return filenames (such as os.listdir()) to return Python
2213 string objects pre-encoded using the default file system encoding for
2214 the platform. As this encoding is likely to be different from Python's
2215 default encoding, converting this name to a Unicode object before passing
2216 it back to the Operating System would result in a Unicode error, as Python
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00002217 would attempt to use its default encoding (generally ASCII) rather than
2218 the default encoding for the file system.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00002219
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00002220 In general, this change simply removes surprises when working with
2221 Unicode and the file system, making these operations work as you expect,
2222 increasing the transparency of Unicode objects in this context.
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00002223 See [????] for more details, including examples.
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00002224
Tim Peters61dff2b2001-05-08 15:43:37 +00002225- Float (and complex) literals in source code were evaluated to full
2226 precision only when running from a .py file; the same code loaded from a
2227 .pyc (or .pyo) file could suffer numeric differences starting at about the
2228 12th significant decimal digit. For example, on a machine with IEEE-754
2229 floating arithmetic,
2230
2231 x = 9007199254740992.0
2232 print long(x)
2233
2234 printed 9007199254740992 if run directly from .py, but 9007199254740000
2235 if from a compiled (.pyc or .pyo) file. This was due to marshal using
2236 str(float) instead of repr(float) when building code objects. marshal
2237 now uses repr(float) instead, which should reproduce floats to full
2238 machine precision (assuming the platform C float<->string I/O conversion
2239 functions are of good quality).
2240
2241 This may cause floating-point results to change in some cases, and
2242 usually for the better, but may also cause numerically unstable
2243 algorithms to break.
2244
Tim Peters2f228e72001-05-13 00:19:31 +00002245- The implementation of dicts suffers fewer collisions, which has speed
2246 benefits. However, the order in which dict entries appear in dict.keys(),
2247 dict.values() and dict.items() may differ from previous releases for a
2248 given dict. Nothing is defined about this order, so no program should
2249 rely on it. Nevertheless, it's easy to write test cases that rely on the
2250 order by accident, typically because of printing the str() or repr() of a
2251 dict to an "expected results" file. See Lib/test/test_support.py's new
2252 sortdict(dict) function for a simple way to display a dict in sorted
2253 order.
2254
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00002255- Many other small changes to dicts were made, resulting in faster
2256 operation along the most common code paths.
2257
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00002258- Dictionary objects now support the "in" operator: "x in dict" means
2259 the same as dict.has_key(x).
2260
Barry Warsaw51acc8d2001-06-26 20:12:50 +00002261- The update() method of dictionaries now accepts generic mapping
2262 objects. Specifically the argument object must support the .keys()
2263 and __getitem__() methods. This allows you to say, for example,
2264 {}.update(UserDict())
2265
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00002266- Iterators were added; this is a generalized way of providing values
2267 to a for loop. See PEP 234. There's a new built-in function iter()
2268 to return an iterator. There's a new protocol to get the next value
2269 from an iterator using the next() method (in Python) or the
2270 tp_iternext slot (in C). There's a new protocol to get iterators
2271 using the __iter__() method (in Python) or the tp_iter slot (in C).
2272 Iterating (i.e. a for loop) over a dictionary generates its keys.
2273 Iterating over a file generates its lines.
2274
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00002275- The following functions were generalized to work nicely with iterator
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00002276 arguments::
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002277
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00002278 map(), filter(), reduce(), zip()
Tim Peters8572b4f2001-05-06 01:05:02 +00002279 list(), tuple() (PySequence_Tuple() and PySequence_Fast() in C API)
2280 max(), min()
Tim Peters1af03e92001-05-26 19:37:54 +00002281 join() method of strings
2282 extend() method of lists
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00002283 'x in y' and 'x not in y' (PySequence_Contains() in C API)
2284 operator.countOf() (PySequence_Count() in C API)
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002285 right-hand side of assignment statements with multiple targets, such as ::
Tim Petersd6d010b2001-06-21 02:49:55 +00002286 x, y, z = some_iterable_object_returning_exactly_3_values
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00002287
Tim Petersd85e1022001-05-11 21:51:48 +00002288- Accessing module attributes is significantly faster (for example,
2289 random.random or os.path or yourPythonModule.yourAttribute).
2290
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00002291- Comparing dictionary objects via == and != is faster, and now works even
2292 if the keys and values don't support comparisons other than ==.
2293
Tim Peters95bf9392001-05-10 08:32:44 +00002294- Comparing dictionaries in ways other than == and != is slower: there were
2295 insecurities in the dict comparison implementation that could cause Python
2296 to crash if the element comparison routines for the dict keys and/or
2297 values mutated the dicts. Making the code bulletproof slowed it down.
2298
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00002299- Collisions in dicts are resolved via a new approach, which can help
2300 dramatically in bad cases. For example, looking up every key in a dict
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00002301 d with d.keys() == [i << 16 for i in range(20000)] is approximately 500x
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00002302 faster now. Thanks to Christian Tismer for pointing out the cause and
2303 the nature of an effective cure (last December! better late than never).
Tim Peters15d49292001-05-27 07:39:22 +00002304
Tim Peters52e155e2001-06-16 05:42:57 +00002305- repr() is much faster for large containers (dict, list, tuple).
2306
2307
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00002308Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002309-------
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00002310
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00002311- The constants ascii_letters, ascii_lowercase. and ascii_uppercase
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00002312 were added to the string module. These a locale-independent
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00002313 constants, unlike letters, lowercase, and uppercase. These are now
2314 use in appropriate locations in the standard library.
2315
Martin v. Löwisf0473d52001-07-18 16:17:16 +00002316- The flags used in dlopen calls can now be configured using
2317 sys.setdlopenflags and queried using sys.getdlopenflags.
2318
Guido van Rossumc7e4aca2001-07-12 11:54:37 +00002319- Fredrik Lundh's xmlrpclib is now a standard library module. This
2320 provides full client-side XML-RPC support. In addition,
2321 Demo/xmlrpc/ contains two server frameworks (one SocketServer-based,
2322 one asyncore-based). Thanks to Eric Raymond for the documentation.
2323
Guido van Rossum643d3912001-07-05 14:46:25 +00002324- The xrange() object is simplified: it no longer supports slicing,
2325 repetition, comparisons, efficient 'in' checking, the tolist()
2326 method, or the start, stop and step attributes. See PEP 260.
2327
Martin v. Löwisebf94db2001-06-06 06:25:40 +00002328- A new function fnmatch.filter to filter lists of file names was added.
2329
Barry Warsawffd674d2001-05-22 16:00:10 +00002330- calendar.py uses month and day names based on the current locale.
2331
Guido van Rossum2e0a6542001-05-15 02:14:44 +00002332- strop is now *really* obsolete (this was announced before with 1.6),
2333 and issues DeprecationWarning when used (except for the four items
2334 that are still imported into string.py).
2335
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00002336- Cookie.py now sorts key+value pairs by key in output strings.
2337
2338- pprint.isrecursive(object) didn't correctly identify recursive objects.
2339 Now it does.
2340
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00002341- pprint functions now much faster for large containers (tuple, list, dict).
2342
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00002343- New 'q' and 'Q' format codes in the struct module, corresponding to C
2344 types "long long" and "unsigned long long" (on Windows, __int64). In
2345 native mode, these can be used only when the platform C compiler supports
2346 these types (when HAVE_LONG_LONG is #define'd by the Python config
2347 process), and then they inherit the sizes and alignments of the C types.
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00002348 In standard mode, 'q' and 'Q' are supported on all platforms, and are
2349 8-byte integral types.
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00002350
Guido van Rossum83213cc2001-06-12 16:48:52 +00002351- The site module installs a new built-in function 'help' that invokes
2352 pydoc.help. It must be invoked as 'help()'; when invoked as 'help',
2353 it displays a message reminding the user to use 'help()' or
2354 'help(object)'.
2355
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00002356Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002357-----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00002358
2359- New test_mutants.py runs dict comparisons where the key and value
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00002360 comparison operators mutate the dicts randomly during comparison. This
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00002361 rapidly causes Python to crash under earlier releases (not for the faint
2362 of heart: it can also cause Win9x to freeze or reboot!).
2363
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00002364- New test_pprint.py verifies that pprint.isrecursive() and
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00002365 pprint.isreadable() return sensible results. Also verifies that simple
2366 cases produce correct output.
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00002367
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00002368C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002369-----
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00002370
2371- Removed the unused last_is_sticky argument from the internal
2372 _PyTuple_Resize(). If this affects you, you were cheating.
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002373
2374----
2375
2376**(For information about older versions, consult the HISTORY file.)**