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Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001+++++++++++
2Python News
3+++++++++++
4
Skip Montanaro4a385832002-09-20 17:08:52 +00005(editors: check NEWS.help for information about editing NEWS using ReST.)
6
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00007What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 2?
8=================================
9
10*Release date: XX-XXX-2004*
11
12Core and builtins
13-----------------
14
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +000015- Patch #550732: Add PyArg_VaParseTupleAndKeywords(). Analogous to
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +000016 PyArg_VaParse(). Both are now documented. Thanks Greg Chapman.
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +000017
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +000018- Allow string and unicode return types from .encode()/.decode()
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +000019 methods on string and unicode objects. Added unicode.decode()
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +000020 which was missing for no apparent reason.
21
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +000022- An attempt to fix the mess that is Python's behaviour with
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +000023 signal handlers and threads, complicated by readline's behaviour.
24 It's quite possible that there are still bugs here.
25
26Extension modules
27-----------------
28
29Library
30-------
31
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +000032- Bugs #979794 and #980117: difflib.get_grouped_opcodes() now handles the
33 case of comparing two empty lists. This affected both context_diff() and
34 unified_diff(),
Brett Cannond2c5b4b2004-07-10 23:54:07 +000035
Brett Cannone6f8a892004-07-10 23:14:30 +000036- Bug #980938: smtplib now prints debug output to sys.stderr.
37
Brett Cannonf50299c2004-07-10 22:55:15 +000038- Bug #930024: posixpath.realpath() now handles infinite loops in symlinks by
39 returning the last point in the path that was not part of any loop. Thanks
40 AM Kuchling.
41
Brett Cannonbdc36272004-07-10 20:42:22 +000042- Bug #980327: ntpath not handles compressing erroneous slashes between the
43 drive letter and the rest of the path. Also clearly handles UNC addresses now
44 as well. Thanks Paul Moore.
45
Brett Cannone6751182004-07-10 19:13:42 +000046- bug #679953: zipfile.py should now work for files over 2 GB. The packed data
47 for file sizes (compressed and uncompressed) was being stored as signed
48 instead of unsigned.
49
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +000050- decimal.py now only uses signals in the IBM spec. The other conditions are
Raymond Hettinger5aa478b2004-07-09 10:02:53 +000051 no longer part of the public API.
52
Marc-André Lemburg88fcca62004-07-10 16:16:06 +000053- codecs module now has two new generic APIs: encode() and decode()
54 which don't restrict the return types (unlike the unicode and
55 string methods of the same name).
56
Andrew M. Kuchling64ed2982004-07-10 18:43:32 +000057- asyncore's dispatcher.set_reuse_addr() now works correctly on Windows.
58 SF patch 982681.
59
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +000060- Non-blocking SSL sockets work again; they were broken in Python 2.3.
Andrew M. Kuchling79d7e922004-07-10 21:21:55 +000061 SF patch 945642.
62
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +000063Tools/Demos
64-----------
65
66Build
67-----
68
69C API
70-----
71
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +000072- A large pile of datetime field-extraction macros is now documented,
73 thanks to Anthony Tuininga (patch #986010).
74
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +000075New platforms
76-------------
77
78Tests
79-----
80
81Windows
82-------
83
84Mac
85---
86
87
88
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +000089What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 1?
90=================================
91
Anthony Baxter3210b362004-07-08 05:59:43 +000092*Release date: 08-JUL-2004*
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +000093
94Core and builtins
95-----------------
96
Fred Drake0a4dd392004-07-02 18:57:45 +000097- weakref.ref is now the type object also known as
98 weakref.ReferenceType; it can be subclassed like any other new-style
99 class. There's less per-entry overhead in WeakValueDictionary
100 objects now (one object instead of three).
101
Thomas Heller04c673b2004-07-02 08:56:20 +0000102- Bug #951851: Python crashed when reading import table of certain
103 Windows DLLs.
104
Raymond Hettinger214b1c32004-07-02 06:41:07 +0000105- Bug #215126. The locals argument to eval() now accepts any mapping type.
106
Martin v. Löwisef82d2f2004-06-27 16:51:46 +0000107- marshal now shares interned strings. This change introduces
108 a new .pyc magic.
109
Anthony Baxter3ecdb252004-06-11 14:41:18 +0000110- Bug #966623. classes created with type() in an exec(, {}) don't
111 have a __module__, but code in typeobject assumed it would always
112 be there.
113
Martin v. Löwis737ea822004-06-08 18:52:54 +0000114- Python no longer relies on the LC_NUMERIC locale setting to be
115 the "C" locale; as a result, it no longer tries to prevent changing
116 the LC_NUMERIC category.
117
Tim Peters604c0132004-06-07 23:04:33 +0000118- Bug #952807: Unpickling pickled instances of subclasses of
119 datetime.date, datetime.datetime and datetime.time could yield insane
120 objects. Thanks to Jiwon Seo for a fix.
121
Thomas Heller90a764c2004-06-07 15:12:44 +0000122- Bug #845802: Python crashes when __init__.py is a directory.
123
Hye-Shik Changbc555e32004-06-03 11:10:58 +0000124- Unicode objects received two new methods: iswide() and width().
125 These query East Asian width information, as specified in Unicode
126 TR11.
Hye-Shik Chang974ed7c2004-06-02 16:49:17 +0000127
Raymond Hettinger41bd0222004-06-01 06:36:24 +0000128- Improved the tuple hashing algorithm to give fewer collisions in
129 common cases. Fixes bug #942952.
130
Raymond Hettinger354433a2004-05-19 08:20:33 +0000131- Implemented generator expressions (PEP 289). Coded by Jiwon Seo.
132
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +0000133- Enabled the profiling of C extension functions (and builtins) - check
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000134 new documentation and modified profile and bdb modules for more details
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +0000135
Nicholas Bastinabce8a62004-03-21 20:24:07 +0000136- Set file.name to the object passed to open (instead of a new string)
137
Nicholas Bastina7604bf2004-03-21 18:37:23 +0000138- Moved tracebackobject into traceback.h and renamed to PyTracebackObject
139
Raymond Hettingerff5bc502004-03-21 15:12:00 +0000140- Optimized the byte coding for multiple assignments like "a,b=b,a" and
141 "a,b,c=1,2,3". Improves their speed by 25% to 30%.
142
Brett Cannon4f653312004-03-20 22:52:14 +0000143- Limit the nested depth of a tuple for the second argument to isinstance()
144 and issubclass() to the recursion limit of the interpreter.
145 Fixes bug #858016 .
146
Raymond Hettingerade08ea2004-03-18 09:48:12 +0000147- Optimized dict iterators, creating separate types for each
148 and having them reveal their length. Also optimized the
149 methods: keys(), values(), and items().
150
Raymond Hettingerdd80f762004-03-07 07:31:06 +0000151- Implemented a newcode opcode, LIST_APPEND, that simplifies
152 the generated bytecode for list comprehensions and further
153 improves their performance (about 35%).
154
Michael W. Hudsond3b33b52004-02-19 19:35:22 +0000155- Implemented rich comparisons for floats, which seems to make
156 comparisons involving NaNs somewhat less surprising when the
157 underlying C compiler actually implements C99 semantics.
158
Raymond Hettingerfa7b9d82004-02-15 04:06:39 +0000159- Optimized list.extend() to save memory and no longer create
160 intermediate sequences. Also, extend() now pre-allocates the
161 needed memory whenever the length of the iterable is known in
162 advance -- this halves the time to extend the list.
163
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +0000164- Optimized list resize operations to make fewer calls to the system
165 realloc(). Significantly speeds up list appends, list pops,
166 list comprehensions, and the list contructor (when the input iterable
167 length is not known).
168
169- Changed the internal list over-allocation scheme. For larger lists,
170 overallocation ranged between 3% and 25%. Now, it is a constant 12%.
Raymond Hettingerab517d22004-02-14 18:34:46 +0000171 For smaller lists (n<8), overallocation was upto eight elements. Now,
172 the overallocation is no more than three elements -- this improves space
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +0000173 utilization for applications that have large numbers of small lists.
174
Raymond Hettinger0468e412004-05-05 05:37:53 +0000175- Most list bodies now get re-used rather than freed. Speeds up list
176 instantiation and deletion by saving calls to malloc() and free().
177
Raymond Hettinger31017ae2004-03-04 08:25:44 +0000178- The dict.update() method now accepts all the same argument forms
179 as the dict() constructor. This now includes item lists and/or
180 keyword arguments.
181
Michael W. Hudsonecfeb7f2004-02-12 15:28:27 +0000182- Support for arbitrary objects supporting the read-only buffer
183 interface as the co_code field of code objects (something that was
184 only possible to create from C code) has been removed.
185
Fred Drake228765b2004-02-06 04:15:22 +0000186- Made omitted callback and None equivalent for weakref.ref() and
187 weakref.proxy(); the None case wasn't handled correctly in all
188 cases.
189
190- Fixed problem where PyWeakref_NewRef() and PyWeakref_NewProxy()
191 assumed that initial existing entries in an object's weakref list
192 would not be removed while allocating a new weakref object. Since
193 GC could be invoked at that time, however, that assumption was
194 invalid. In a truly obscure case of GC being triggered during
195 creation for a new weakref object for an referent which already
196 has a weakref without a callback which is only referenced from
197 cyclic trash, a memory error can occur. This consistently created a
198 segfault in a debug build, but provided less predictable behavior in
199 a release build.
200
Hye-Shik Changff83c2b2004-02-02 13:39:01 +0000201- input() builtin function now respects compiler flags such as
202 __future__ statements. SF patch 876178.
203
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +0000204- Removed PendingDeprecationWarning from apply(). apply() remains
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +0000205 deprecated, but the nuisance warning will not be issued.
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +0000206
Tim Peters1d7323e2003-12-01 21:35:27 +0000207- At Python shutdown time (Py_Finalize()), 2.3 called cyclic garbage
208 collection twice, both before and after tearing down modules. The
209 call after tearing down modules has been disabled, because too much
210 of Python has been torn down then for __del__ methods and weakref
211 callbacks to execute sanely. The most common symptom was a sequence
212 of uninformative messages on stderr when Python shut down, produced
213 by threads trying to raise exceptions, but unable to report the nature
214 of their problems because too much of the sys module had already been
215 destroyed.
216
Guido van Rossum6c9e1302003-11-29 23:52:13 +0000217- Removed FutureWarnings related to hex/oct literals and conversions
218 and left shifts. (Thanks to Kalle Svensson for SF patch 849227.)
219 This addresses most of the remaining semantic changes promised by
220 PEP 237, except for repr() of a long, which still shows the trailing
221 'L'. The PEP appears to promise warnings for operations that
222 changed semantics compared to Python 2.3, but this is not
223 implemented; we've suffered through enough warnings related to
224 hex/oct literals and I think it's best to be silent now.
225
Raymond Hettinger4f8f9762003-11-26 08:21:35 +0000226- For str and unicode objects, the ljust(), center(), and rjust()
227 methods now accept an optional argument specifying a fill
228 character other than a space.
229
Guido van Rossumbaf0f8f2003-11-22 23:55:50 +0000230- When method objects have an attribute that can be satisfied either
231 by the function object or by the method object, the function
232 object's attribute usually wins. Christian Tismer pointed out that
233 that this is really a mistake, because this only happens for special
234 methods (like __reduce__) where the method object's version is
235 really more appropriate than the function's attribute. So from now
236 on, all method attributes will have precedence over function
237 attributes with the same name.
238
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +0000239- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 839548: if a weakref with a callback,
240 its callback, and its weakly referenced object, all became part of
241 cyclic garbage during a single run of garbage collection, the order
242 in which they were torn down was unpredictable. It was possible for
243 the callback to see partially-torn-down objects, leading to immediate
244 segfaults, or, if the callback resurrected garbage objects, to
245 resurrect insane objects that caused segfaults (or other surprises)
246 later. In one sense this wasn't surprising, because Python's cyclic gc
247 had no knowledge of Python's weakref objects. It does now. When
248 weakrefs with callbacks become part of cyclic garbage now, those
249 weakrefs are cleared first. The callbacks don't trigger then,
250 preventing the problems. If you need callbacks to trigger, then just
251 as when cyclic gc is not involved, you need to write your code so
252 that weakref objects outlive the objects they weakly reference.
Raymond Hettingera690a992003-11-16 16:17:49 +0000253
Tim Petersadd09b42003-11-12 20:43:28 +0000254- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 840829: if cyclic garbage collection
255 happened to occur during a weakref callback for a new-style class
256 instance, subtle memory corruption was the result (in a release build;
257 in a debug build, a segfault occurred reliably very soon after).
258 This has been repaired.
259
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +0000260- Compiler flags set in PYTHONSTARTUP are now active in __main__.
261
262- Added two builtin types, set() and frozenset().
263
Raymond Hettinger85c20a42003-11-06 14:06:48 +0000264- Added a reversed() builtin function that returns a reverse iterator
265 over a sequence.
266
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +0000267- Added a sorted() builtin function that returns a new sorted list
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +0000268 from any iterable.
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +0000269
Martin v. Löwis01a74b22003-10-19 18:30:01 +0000270- CObjects are now mutable (on the C level) through PyCObject_SetVoidPtr.
271
Raymond Hettinger42b1ba32003-10-16 03:41:09 +0000272- list.sort() now supports three keyword arguments: cmp, key, and reverse.
273 The key argument can be a function of one argument that extracts a
274 comparison key from the original record: mylist.sort(key=str.lower).
275 The reverse argument is a boolean value and if True will change the
276 sort order as if the comparison arguments were reversed. In addition,
277 the documentation has been amended to provide a guarantee that all sorts
278 starting with Py2.3 are guaranteed to be stable (the relative order of
279 records with equal keys is unchanged).
280
Marc-André Lemburgd7160f82003-09-22 11:14:40 +0000281- Added test whether wchar_t is signed or not. A signed wchar_t is not
282 usable as internal unicode type base for Py_UNICODE since the
283 unicode implementation assumes an unsigned type.
284
Jeremy Hyltond8082792003-09-16 19:41:39 +0000285- Fixed a bug in the cache of length-one Unicode strings that could
286 lead to a seg fault. The specific problem occurred when an earlier,
287 non-fatal error left an uninitialized Unicode object in the
288 freelist.
289
Raymond Hettinger9bfe5332003-08-27 04:55:52 +0000290- The % formatting operator now supports '%F' which is equivalent to
291 '%f'. This has always been documented but never implemented.
292
Tim Peters465fa3d2003-08-15 01:16:37 +0000293- complex(obj) could leak a little memory if obj wasn't a string or
294 number.
295
Raymond Hettingereaef6152003-08-02 07:42:57 +0000296- zip() with no arguments now returns an empty list instead of raising
297 a TypeError exception.
298
Guido van Rossum02c58f82003-10-08 21:08:29 +0000299- obj.__contains__() now returns True/False instead of 1/0. SF patch
300 820195.
301
Armin Rigo2b3eb402003-10-28 12:05:48 +0000302- Python no longer tries to be smart about recursive comparisons.
303 When comparing containers with cyclic references to themselves it
304 will now just hit the recursion limit. See SF patch 825639.
305
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000306- str and unicode builtin types now have an rsplit() method that is
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +0000307 same as split() except that it scans the string from the end
308 working towards the beginning. See SF feature request 801847.
Hye-Shik Chang060ebed2003-12-15 18:51:19 +0000309
Jim Fulton8a1a5942004-02-08 04:21:26 +0000310- Fixed a bug in object.__reduce_ex__ when using protocol 2. Failure
311 to clear the error when attempts to get the __getstate__ attribute
312 fail caused intermittent errors and odd behavior.
313
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +0000314- buffer objects based on other objects no longer cache a pointer to
315 the data and the data length. Instead, the appropriate tp_as_buffer
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +0000316 method is called as necessary.
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +0000317
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +0000318- fixed: if a file is opened with an explicit buffer size >= 1, repeated
Andrew MacIntyre4e10ed32004-04-04 07:01:35 +0000319 close() calls would attempt to free() the buffer already free()ed on
320 the first call.
321
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +0000322
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000323Extension modules
324-----------------
325
Barry Warsaw11b91a02004-06-28 00:50:43 +0000326- Added socket.getservbyport(), and make the second argument in
327 getservbyname() and getservbyport() optional.
328
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +0000329- time module code that deals with input POSIX timestamps will now raise
330 ValueError if more than a second is lost in precision when the
331 timestamp is cast to the platform C time_t type. There's no chance
332 that the platform will do anything sensible with the result in such
333 cases. This includes ctime(), localtime() and gmtime(). Assorted
334 fromtimestamp() and utcfromtimestamp() methods in the datetime module
335 were also protected. Closes bugs #919012 and 975996.
Brett Cannonb46ed712004-06-19 20:50:47 +0000336
Martin v. Löwis77ca6c42004-06-03 12:47:26 +0000337- fcntl.ioctl now warns if the mutate flag is not specified.
338
Martin v. Löwisd8948722004-06-02 09:57:56 +0000339- nt now properly allows to refer to UNC roots, e.g. in nt.stat().
340
Raymond Hettinger027bb632004-05-31 03:09:25 +0000341- the weakref module now supports additional objects: array.array,
342 sre.pattern_objects, file objects, and sockets.
343
Raymond Hettingere2eda602004-04-04 08:51:41 +0000344- operator.isMappingType() and operator.isSequenceType() now give
345 fewer false positives.
346
Brett Cannon06c34792004-03-23 23:16:54 +0000347- socket.sslerror is now a subclass of socket.error . Also added
348 socket.error to the socket module's C API.
349
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000350- Bug #920575: A problem where the _locale module segfaults on
Hye-Shik Changc3a87b82004-03-21 19:34:30 +0000351 nl_langinfo(ERA) caused by GNU libc's illegal NULL return is fixed.
352
Raymond Hettinger6e2ee862004-03-14 04:37:50 +0000353- array objects now support the copy module. Also, their resizing
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000354 scheme has been updated to match that used for list objects. This improves
Raymond Hettinger49f9bd12004-03-14 05:43:59 +0000355 the performance (speed and memory usage) of append() operations.
356 Also, array.extend() now accepts any iterable argument for repeated
357 appends without needing to create another temporary array.
Raymond Hettinger3aa82c02004-03-13 18:18:51 +0000358
Raymond Hettinger3e47f652004-03-08 18:22:35 +0000359- cStringIO.writelines() now accepts any iterable argument and writes
360 the lines one at a time rather than joining them and writing once.
361 Made a parallel change to StringIO.writelines(). Saves memory and
362 makes suitable for use with generator expressions.
363
Brett Cannond1080a32004-03-02 04:38:10 +0000364- time.strftime() now checks that the values in its time tuple argument
365 are within the proper boundaries to prevent possible crashes from the
366 platform's C library implementation of strftime(). Can possibly
367 break code that uses values outside the range that didn't cause
368 problems previously (such as sitting day of year to 0). Fixes bug
369 #897625.
370
Martin v. Löwis12af0482004-01-31 12:34:17 +0000371- The socket module now supports Bluetooth sockets, if the
372 system has <bluetooth/bluetooth.h>
373
Raymond Hettinger756b3f32004-01-29 06:37:52 +0000374- Added a collections module containing a new datatype, deque(),
375 offering high-performance, thread-safe, memory friendly appends
376 and pops on either side of the deque.
377
378- Several modules now take advantage of collections.deque() for
379 improved performance: Queue, mutex, shlex, threading, and pydoc.
380
Raymond Hettinger166958b2003-12-01 13:18:39 +0000381- The operator module has two new functions, attrgetter() and
382 itemgetter() which are useful for creating fast data extractor
383 functions for map(), list.sort(), itertools.groupby(), and
384 other functions that expect a function argument.
385
Martin v. Löwis94681fc2003-11-27 19:40:22 +0000386- socket.SHUT_{RD,WR,RDWR} was added.
387
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +0000388- os.getsid was added.
389
Guido van Rossum16b9fa82003-10-23 23:54:57 +0000390- The pwd module incorrectly advertised its struct type as
391 struct_pwent; this has been renamed to struct_passwd. (The old name
392 is still supported for backwards compatibility.)
393
Fred Drakede050322003-10-21 15:41:59 +0000394- The xml.parsers.expat module now provides Expat 1.95.7.
395
Martin v. Löwis3bbd6542003-10-03 13:57:37 +0000396- socket.IPPROTO_IPV6 was added.
397
Martin v. Löwise7a97962003-09-20 16:08:33 +0000398- readline.clear_history was added.
399
Brett Cannon62dba4c2003-09-10 19:37:42 +0000400- select.select() now accepts sequences for its first three arguments.
401
Raymond Hettinger5475f232003-08-08 12:20:03 +0000402- cStringIO now supports the f.closed attribute.
403
Anthony Baxter83f52912003-08-05 06:33:56 +0000404- The signal module now exposes SIGRTMIN and SIGRTMAX (if available).
405
Andrew M. Kuchling69f31eb2003-08-13 23:11:04 +0000406- curses module now supports use_default_colors(). [patch #739124]
407
Anthony Baxter5c68ef02003-10-04 08:04:04 +0000408- Bug #811028: ncurses.h breakage on FreeBSD/MacOS X
409
410- Bug #814613: INET_ADDRSTRLEN fix needed for all compilers on SGI
411
Gustavo Niemeyerad3fc442003-10-17 22:13:16 +0000412- Implemented non-recursive SRE matching scheme (#757624).
413
414- Implemented (?(id/name)yes|no) support in SRE (#572936).
415
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +0000416- random.seed() with no arguments or None uses time.time() as a default
417 seed. Modified to match Py2.2 behavior and use fractional seconds so
418 that successive runs are more likely to produce different sequences.
419
420- random.Random has a new method, getrandbits(k), which returns an int
421 with k random bits. This method is now an optional part of the API
422 for user defined generators. Any generator that defines genrandbits()
423 can now use randrange() for ranges with a length >= 2**53. Formerly,
424 randrange would return only even numbers for ranges that large (see
425 SF bug #812202). Generators that do not define genrandbits() now
426 issue a warning when randrange() is called with a range that large.
427
Raymond Hettingerd25c1c62003-12-06 16:23:06 +0000428- itertools has a new function, groupby() for aggregating iterables
429 into groups sharing the same key (as determined by a key function).
430 It offers some of functionality of SQL's groupby keyword and of
431 the Unix uniq filter.
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +0000432
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000433- itertools now has a new tee() function which produces two independent
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +0000434 iterators from a single iterable.
435
436- itertools.izip() with no arguments now returns an empty iterator instead
437 of raising a TypeError exception.
438
Gustavo Niemeyera6e436e2004-02-14 00:02:45 +0000439- Fixed #853061: allow BZ2Compressor.compress() to receive an empty string
440 as parameter.
441
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000442Library
443-------
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000444
Guido van Rossum5124b4a2004-07-06 17:52:32 +0000445- Bug #981530: Fix UnboundLocalError in shutil.rmtree(). This affects
446 the documented behavior: the function passed to the onerror()
447 handler can now also be os.listdir.
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000448
Brett Cannon41d13f62004-07-03 03:54:54 +0000449- Bug #754449: threading.Thread objects no longer mask exceptions raised during
450 interpreter shutdown with another exception from attempting to handle the
451 original exception.
Brett Cannoncc4e9352004-07-03 03:52:35 +0000452
Raymond Hettinger21f9fce2004-07-10 16:11:03 +0000453- Added decimal.py per PEP 327.
Raymond Hettinger7c85fa42004-07-01 11:01:35 +0000454
Brett Cannon46d4ff22004-06-29 04:08:23 +0000455- Bug #981299: rsync is now a recognized protocol in urlparse that uses a
456 "netloc" portion of a URL.
Brett Cannonfbac2942004-06-29 04:02:40 +0000457
Brett Cannon1c3fa182004-06-19 21:11:35 +0000458- Bug #919012: shutil.move() will not try to move a directory into itself.
459 Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
460
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +0000461- Bug #934282: pydoc.stripid() is now case-insensitive. Thanks Robin Becker.
462
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +0000463- Bug #823209: cmath.log() now takes an optional base argument so that its
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +0000464 API matches math.log().
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +0000465
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +0000466- Bug #957381: distutils bdist_rpm no longer fails on recent RPM versions
467 that generate a *-debuginfo.rpm.
468
Martin v. Löwisbdec50f2004-06-08 08:29:33 +0000469- os.path.devnull has been added for all supported platforms.
470
Hye-Shik Chang2400e932004-06-05 18:37:53 +0000471- Fixed #877165: distutils now picks the right C++ compiler command
472 on cygwin and mingw32.
473
Hye-Shik Chang39aef792004-06-05 13:30:56 +0000474- urllib.urlopen().readline() now handles HTTP/0.9 correctly.
475
Brett Cannon0096e262004-06-05 01:12:51 +0000476- refactored site.py into functions. Also wrote regression tests for the
477 module.
478
Fred Drakeec6229e2004-06-25 23:02:59 +0000479- The distutils install command now supports the --home option and
480 installation scheme for all platforms.
481
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +0000482- asyncore.loop now has a repeat count parameter that defaults to
Michael W. Hudson7db865a2004-06-30 09:09:38 +0000483 looping forever.
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +0000484
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +0000485- The distutils sdist command now ignores all .svn directories, in
486 addition to CVS and RCS directories. .svn directories hold
487 administrative files for the Subversion source control system.
488
Martin v. Löwis2a6ba902004-05-31 18:22:40 +0000489- Added a new module: cookielib. Automatic cookie handling for HTTP
490 clients. Also, support for cookielib has been added to urllib2, so
491 urllib2.urlopen() can transparently handle cookies.
492
Raymond Hettinger059e1702004-05-19 19:56:44 +0000493- stringprep.py now uses built-in set() instead of sets.Set().
494
Thomas Heller2e7c8322004-05-11 15:10:59 +0000495- Bug #876278: Unbounded recursion in modulefinder
496
Martin v. Löwis456ab1d2004-05-06 01:54:36 +0000497- Bug #780300: Swap public and system ID in LexicalHandler.startDTD.
498 Applications relying on the wrong order need to be corrected.
499
Hye-Shik Chang0f5bf1e2004-04-20 21:11:11 +0000500- Bug #926075: Fixed a bug that returns a wrong pattern object
501 for a string or unicode object in sre.compile() when a different
502 type pattern with the same value exists.
503
Skip Montanarod0c0c412004-04-07 16:03:02 +0000504- Added countcallers arg to trace.Trace class (--trackcalls command line arg
505 when run from the command prompt).
506
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +0000507- Fixed a caching bug in platform.platform() where the argument of 'terse' was
508 not taken into consideration when caching value.
509
Nicholas Bastin824b1b22004-03-23 18:44:39 +0000510- Added two new command-line arguments for profile (output file and
511 default sort).
512
Nicholas Bastin1eb4bfc2004-03-22 20:12:56 +0000513- Added global runctx function to profile module
514
Martin v. Löwis347c30d2004-03-21 15:29:41 +0000515- Add hlist missing entryconfigure and entrycget methods.
516
Hye-Shik Chang4a7ad1a2004-03-19 08:11:56 +0000517- The ptcp154 codec was added for Kazakh character set support.
518
Martin v. Löwisa79449e2004-02-15 21:19:18 +0000519- Support non-anonymous ftp URLs in urllib2.
520
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000521- The encodings package will now apply codec name aliases
Marc-André Lemburg57cb68f2004-01-20 18:24:34 +0000522 first before starting to try the import of the codec module.
523 This simplifies overriding built-in codecs with external
524 packages, e.g. the included CJK codecs with the JapaneseCodecs
525 package, by adjusting the aliases dictionary in encodings.aliases
526 accordingly.
527
Barry Warsaw30ff12f2004-01-04 01:13:43 +0000528- base64 now supports RFC 3548 Base16, Base32, and Base64 encoding and
529 decoding standards.
530
Jeremy Hylton37c5f2a2003-12-14 05:29:45 +0000531- urllib2 now supports processors. A processor is a handler that
532 implements an xxx_request or xxx_response method. These methods are
533 called for all requests.
534
Thomas Hellerc7501d52003-12-05 20:28:07 +0000535- distutils compilers now compile source files in the same order as
536 they are passed to the compiler.
537
Walter Dörwaldc8de4582003-12-03 20:26:05 +0000538- pprint.pprint() and pprint.pformat() now have additional parameters
539 indent, width and depth.
540
Walter Dörwald7a7ede52003-12-03 20:15:28 +0000541- Patch #750542: pprint now will pretty print subclasses of list, tuple
542 and dict too, as long as they don't overwrite __repr__().
543
Thomas Hellerb3105912003-11-28 19:42:56 +0000544- Bug #848614: distutils' msvccompiler fails to find the MSVC6
545 compiler because of incomplete registry entries.
546
Martin v. Löwisaf7dc8d2003-11-19 19:51:55 +0000547- httplib.HTTP.putrequest now offers to omit the implicit Accept-Encoding.
548
Thomas Hellercf0005b2003-11-14 10:33:20 +0000549- Patch #841977: modulefinder didn't find extension modules in packages
550
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +0000551- imaplib.IMAP4.thread was added.
552
Guido van Rossum967b0632003-11-10 02:27:19 +0000553- Plugged a minor hole in tempfile.mktemp() due to the use of
554 os.path.exists(), switched to using os.lstat() directly if possible.
555
Raymond Hettinger0c410272004-01-05 10:13:35 +0000556- bisect.py and heapq.py now have underlying C implementations
Raymond Hettinger33ecffb2004-06-10 05:03:17 +0000557 for better performance.
558
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +0000559- heapq.py has two new functions, nsmallest() and nlargest().
Raymond Hettingerb3af1812003-11-08 10:24:38 +0000560
Neil Schemenauerf607fc52003-11-05 23:03:00 +0000561- traceback.format_exc has been added (similar to print_exc but it returns
562 a string).
563
Martin v. Löwis45394c22003-10-31 13:49:36 +0000564- xmlrpclib.MultiCall has been added.
565
Martin v. Löwis48440b72003-10-31 12:52:35 +0000566- poplib.POP3_SSL has been added.
567
Martin v. Löwisd6625482003-10-12 17:37:01 +0000568- tmpfile.mkstemp now returns an absolute path even if dir is relative.
569
Brett Cannon5d9ca4e2003-10-12 04:38:48 +0000570- urlparse is RFC 2396 compliant.
571
Skip Montanarodef99342003-10-03 14:07:07 +0000572- The fieldnames argument to the csv module's DictReader constructor is now
573 optional. If omitted, the first row of the file will be used as the
574 list of fieldnames.
575
Raymond Hettinger9a80c5d2003-09-23 20:21:01 +0000576- encodings.bz2_codec was added for access to bz2 compression
577 using "a long string".encode('bz2')
578
Guido van Rossum0e5a51d2003-09-22 15:03:11 +0000579- Various improvements to unittest.py, realigned with PyUnit CVS.
580
Martin v. Löwisc6bb6c02003-09-20 15:52:21 +0000581- dircache now passes exceptions to the caller, instead of returning
582 empty lists.
583
Raymond Hettingerdeadbf52003-09-12 06:33:37 +0000584- The bsddb module and dbhash module now support the iterator and
585 mapping protocols which make them more substitutable for dictionaries
586 and shelves.
587
Skip Montanaro3f7a9482003-09-06 19:52:12 +0000588- The csv module's DictReader and DictWriter classes now accept keyword
589 arguments. This was an omission in the initial implementation.
590
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +0000591- The email package handles some RFC 2231 parameters with missing
Barry Warsaw2f5bf172003-09-03 04:09:49 +0000592 CHARSET fields better. It also includes a patch to parameter
593 parsing when semicolons appear inside quotes.
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +0000594
Raymond Hettinger6a180122003-08-17 08:34:09 +0000595- sets.py now runs under Py2.2. In addition, the argument restrictions
596 for most set methods (but not the operators) have been relaxed to
Raymond Hettinger70b9f492003-11-19 15:52:14 +0000597 allow any iterable.
Raymond Hettingeree562fc2003-08-15 21:17:04 +0000598
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +0000599- _strptime.py now has a behind-the-scenes caching mechanism for the most
Brett Cannonb7150a22003-08-05 06:27:04 +0000600 recent TimeRE instance used along with the last five unique directive
601 patterns. The overall module was also made more thread-safe.
602
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +0000603- random.cunifvariate() and random.stdgamma() were deprecated in Py2.3
604 and removed in Py2.4.
605
Anthony Baxter92bee362003-11-04 14:35:49 +0000606- Bug #823328: urllib2.py's HTTP Digest Auth support works again.
607
Hye-Shik Chang84a99312004-01-17 14:59:36 +0000608- Patch #873597: CJK codecs are imported into rank of default codecs.
609
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000610Tools/Demos
611-----------
612
Skip Montanarod5a21fd2004-01-27 14:49:04 +0000613- A hotshotmain script was added to the Tools/scripts directory that
614 makes it easy to run a script under control of the hotshot profiler.
615
Skip Montanaro030f68a2003-10-28 16:24:00 +0000616- The db2pickle and pickle2db scripts can now dump/load gdbm files.
617
Skip Montanaroe2b61e02004-03-03 17:42:08 +0000618- The file order on the command line of the pickle2db script was reversed.
619 It is now [ picklefile ] dbfile. This provides better symmetry with
620 db2pickle. The file arguments to both scripts are now source followed by
621 destination in situations where both files are given.
622
Skip Montanarofd4fa882003-09-10 19:04:13 +0000623- The pydoc script will display a link to the module documentation for
624 modules determined to be part of the core distribution. The documentation
625 base directory defaults to http://www.python.org/doc/current/lib/ but can
626 be changed by setting the PYTHONDOCS environment variable.
627
Raymond Hettingere41d4c82003-08-25 04:39:55 +0000628- texcheck.py now detects double word errors.
629
Tim Peters1a3abcb2003-08-18 23:52:09 +0000630- md5sum.py mistakenly opened input files in text mode by default, a
631 silent and dangerous change from previous releases. It once again
632 opens input files in binary mode by default. The -t and -b flags
633 remain for compatibility with the 2.3 release, but -b is the default
634 now.
635
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000636- py-electric-colon now works when pending-delete/delete-selection mode is
637 in effect
638
639- py-help-at-point is no longer bound to the F1 key - it's still bound to
640 C-c C-h
641
Barry Warsaw6ec58ca2003-09-03 03:20:37 +0000642- Pynche was fixed to not crash when there is no ~/.pynche file and no
643 -d option was given.
644
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000645Build
646-----
647
Brett Cannonf6af76d2004-06-26 04:03:06 +0000648- Bug #978645: Modules/getpath.c now builds properly in --disable-framework
649 build under OS X.
650
Skip Montanaro56f6a4f2004-06-18 02:47:22 +0000651- Profiling using gprof is now available if Python is configured with
652 --enable-profiling.
653
Martin v. Löwisf30d60e2004-06-08 08:17:44 +0000654- Profiling the VM using the Pentium TSC is now possible if Python
655 is configured --with-tsc.
656
Martin v. Löwis642c8a12004-06-04 13:55:13 +0000657- In order to find libraries, setup.py now also looks in /lib64, for use
658 on AMD64.
659
Hye-Shik Chang54f94392004-04-14 07:55:31 +0000660- Bug #934635: Fixed a bug where the configure script couldn't detect
661 getaddrinfo() properly if the KAME stack had SCTP support.
662
Skip Montanaro7befb992004-02-10 16:50:21 +0000663- Support for missing ANSI C header files (limits.h, stddef.h, etc) was
664 removed.
665
Skip Montanarodb608052004-02-07 13:53:46 +0000666- Systems requiring the D4, D6 or D7 variants of pthreads are no longer
667 supported (see PEP 11).
668
669- Universal newline support can no longer be disabled (see PEP 11).
670
Skip Montanarocd1f7432004-01-17 14:22:44 +0000671- Support for DGUX, SunOS 4, IRIX 4 and Minix was removed (see PEP 11).
672
673- Support for systems requiring --with-dl-dld or --with-sgi-dl was removed
674 (see PEP 11).
675
676- Tests for sizeof(char) were removed since ANSI C mandates that
677 sizeof(char) must be 1.
678
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000679C API
680-----
681
Tim Peters9ddf40b2004-06-20 22:41:32 +0000682- Thanks to Anthony Tuininga, the datetime module now supplies a C API
683 containing type-check macros and constructors. See new docs in the
684 Python/C API Reference Manual for details.
685
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +0000686- Private function _PyTime_DoubleToTimet added, to convert a Python
687 timestamp (C double) to platform time_t with some out-of-bounds
688 checking. Declared in new header file timefuncs.h. It would be
689 good to expose some other internal timemodule.c functions there.
690
Martin v. Löwise440e472004-06-01 15:22:42 +0000691- New public functions PyEval_EvaluateFrame and PyGen_New to expose
692 generator objects.
693
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +0000694- New public functions Py_IncRef() and Py_DecRef(), exposing the
695 functionality of the Py_XINCREF() and Py_XDECREF macros. Useful for
Thomas Hellercc10a852004-04-22 17:28:25 +0000696 runtime dynamic embedding of Python. See patch #938302, by Bob
697 Ippolito.
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +0000698
Raymond Hettingerc1e4f9d2004-03-12 08:04:00 +0000699- Added a new macro, PySequence_Fast_ITEMS, which retrieves a fast sequence's
700 underlying array of PyObject pointers. Useful for high speed looping.
701
Raymond Hettinger8f5cdaa2003-12-13 11:26:12 +0000702- Created a new method flag, METH_COEXIST, which causes a method to be loaded
703 even if already defined by a slot wrapper. This allows a __contains__
704 method, for example, to co-exist with a defined sq_contains slot. This
705 is helpful because the PyCFunction can take advantage of optimized calls
706 whenever METH_O or METH_NOARGS flags are defined.
707
Raymond Hettingerbc0f2ab2003-11-25 21:12:14 +0000708- Added a new function, PyDict_Contains(d, k) which is like
709 PySequence_Contains() but is specific to dictionaries and executes
710 about 10% faster.
711
Brett Cannon26b3a7b2003-10-19 21:31:43 +0000712- Added three new macros: Py_RETURN_NONE, Py_RETURN_TRUE, and Py_RETURN_FALSE.
713 Each return the singleton they mention after Py_INCREF()ing them.
714
Raymond Hettingercb2da432003-10-12 18:24:34 +0000715- Added a new function, PyTuple_Pack(n, ...) for constructing tuples from a
716 variable length argument list of Python objects without having to invoke
717 the more complex machinery of Py_BuildValue(). PyTuple_Pack(3, a, b, c)
718 is equivalent to Py_BuildValue("(OOO)", a, b, c).
719
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000720Windows
721-------
722
Guido van Rossumfd25aca2003-11-30 22:10:15 +0000723- The _winreg module could segfault when reading very large registry
724 values, due to unchecked alloca() calls (SF bug 851056). The fix is
725 uses either PyMem_Malloc(n) or PyString_FromStringAndSize(NULL, n),
726 as appropriate, followed by a size check.
727
Tim Petersf1827cf2003-09-07 03:30:18 +0000728- file.truncate() could misbehave if the file was open for update
729 (modes r+, rb+, w+, wb+), and the most recent file operation before
730 the truncate() call was an input operation. SF bug 801631.
731
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000732
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +0000733What's New in Python 2.3 final?
734===============================
735
736*Release date: 29-Jul-2003*
737
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +0000738IDLE
739----
740
Tim Peters36c1afc2003-07-29 17:22:57 +0000741- Bug 778400: IDLE hangs when selecting "Edit with IDLE" from explorer.
742 This was unique to Windows, and was fixed by adding an -n switch to
743 the command the Windows installer creates to execute "Edit with IDLE"
744 context-menu actions.
745
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +0000746- IDLE displays a new message upon startup: some "personal firewall"
747 kinds of programs (for example, ZoneAlarm) open a dialog of their
748 own when any program opens a socket. IDLE does use sockets, talking
749 on the computer's internal loopback interface. This connection is not
750 visible on any external interface and no data is sent to or received
751 from the Internet. So, if you get such a dialog when opening IDLE,
752 asking whether to let pythonw.exe talk to address 127.0.0.1, say yes,
753 and rest assured no communication external to your machine is taking
754 place. If you don't allow it, IDLE won't be able to start.
755
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +0000756
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000757What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 2?
758=============================================
759
Tim Peters6560a252003-07-24 00:15:46 +0000760*Release date: 24-Jul-2003*
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000761
762Core and builtins
763-----------------
764
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +0000765- It is now possible to import from zipfiles containing additional
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000766 data bytes before the zip compatible archive. Zipfiles containing a
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +0000767 comment at the end are still unsupported.
768
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000769Extension modules
770-----------------
771
772- A longstanding bug in the parser module's initialization could cause
773 fatal internal refcount confusion when the module got initialized more
774 than once. This has been fixed.
775
Fred Drake01a43122003-07-21 17:17:10 +0000776- Fixed memory leak in pyexpat; using the parser's ParseFile() method
777 with open files that aren't instances of the standard file type
778 caused an instance of the bound .read() method to be leaked on every
779 call.
780
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000781- Fixed some leaks in the locale module.
782
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000783Library
784-------
785
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000786- Lib/encodings/rot_13.py when used as a script, now more properly
787 uses the first Python interpreter on your path.
788
789- Removed caching of TimeRE (and thus LocaleTime) in _strptime.py to
790 fix a locale related bug in the test suite. Although another patch
791 was needed to actually fix the problem, the cache code was not
792 restored.
793
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +0000794IDLE
795----
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000796
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +0000797- Calltips patches.
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000798
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000799Build
800-----
801
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000802- For MacOSX, added -mno-fused-madd to BASECFLAGS to fix test_coercion
803 on Panther (OSX 10.3).
804
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000805C API
806-----
807
808Windows
809-------
810
Tim Peters291f14e2003-07-22 02:50:01 +0000811- The tempfile module could do insane imports on Windows if PYTHONCASEOK
812 was set, making temp file creation impossible. Repaired.
813
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000814- Add a patch to workaround pthread_sigmask() bugs in Cygwin.
815
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000816Mac
817---
818
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000819- Various fixes to pimp.
820
821- Scripts runs with pythonw no longer had full window manager access.
822
823- Don't force boot-disk-only install, for reasons unknown it causes
824 more problems than it solves.
825
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000826
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000827What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 1?
828=============================================
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000829
Jeremy Hylton0ed18c22003-07-18 20:10:02 +0000830*Release date: 18-Jul-2003*
831
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000832Core and builtins
833-----------------
834
Tim Peterse5e065b2003-07-06 18:36:54 +0000835- The new function sys.getcheckinterval() returns the last value set
836 by sys.setcheckinterval().
837
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000838- Several bugs in the symbol table phase of the compiler have been
839 fixed. Errors could be lost and compilation could fail without
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000840 reporting an error. SF patch 763201.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000841
842- The interpreter is now more robust about importing the warnings
843 module. In an executable generated by freeze or similar programs,
844 earlier versions of 2.3 would fail if the warnings module could
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000845 not be found on the file system. Fixes SF bug 771097.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000846
847- A warning about assignments to module attributes that shadow
848 builtins, present in earlier releases of 2.3, has been removed.
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000849
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000850- It is not possible to create subclasses of builtin types like str
851 and tuple that define an itemsize. Earlier releases of Python 2.3
852 allowed this by mistake, leading to crashes and other problems.
853
854- The thread_id is now initialized to 0 in a non-thread build. SF bug
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000855 770247.
856
857- SF bug 762891: "del p[key]" on proxy object no longer raises SystemError.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000858
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000859Extension modules
860-----------------
861
862- weakref.proxy() can now handle "del obj[i]" for proxy objects
863 defining __delitem__. Formerly, it generated a SystemError.
864
865- SSL no longer crashes the interpreter when the remote side disconnects.
866
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +0000867- On Unix the mmap module can again be used to map device files.
868
Brett Cannon20def8b2003-07-01 05:16:08 +0000869- time.strptime now exclusively uses the Python implementation
870 contained within the _strptime module.
871
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000872- The print slot of weakref proxy objects was removed, because it was
873 not consistent with the object's repr slot.
874
875- The mmap module only checks file size for regular files, not
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000876 character or block devices. SF patch 708374.
877
878- The cPickle Pickler garbage collection support was fixed to traverse
879 the find_class attribute, if present.
880
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000881- There are several fixes for the bsddb3 wrapper module.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000882
883 bsddb3 no longer crashes if an environment is closed before a cursor
884 (SF bug 763298).
885
886 The DB and DBEnv set_get_returns_none function was extended to take
Barry Warsawd71a5512003-07-20 18:00:54 +0000887 a level instead of a boolean flag. The new level 2 means that in
888 addition, cursor.set()/.get() methods return None instead of raising
889 an exception.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000890
891 A typo was fixed in DBCursor.join_item(), preventing a crash.
892
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000893Library
894-------
895
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000896- distutils now supports MSVC 7.1
897
Raymond Hettinger71adf7e2003-07-16 19:25:22 +0000898- doctest now examines all docstrings by default. Previously, it would
899 skip over functions with private names (as indicated by the underscore
900 naming convention). The old default created too much of a risk that
901 user tests were being skipped inadvertently. Note, this change could
902 break code in the unlikely case that someone had intentionally put
903 failing tests in the docstrings of private functions. The breakage
904 is easily fixable by specifying the old behavior when calling testmod()
905 or Tester().
906
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000907- There were several fixes to the way dumbdbms are closed. It's vital
908 that a dumbdbm database be closed properly, else the on-disk data
909 and directory files can be left in mutually inconsistent states.
910 dumbdbm.py's _Database.__del__() method attempted to close the
911 database properly, but a shutdown race in _Database._commit() could
912 prevent this from working, so that a program trusting __del__() to
913 get the on-disk files in synch could be badly surprised. The race
914 has been repaired. A sync() method was also added so that shelve
915 can guarantee data is written to disk.
Tim Peters7a6c7332003-07-13 17:21:10 +0000916
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000917 The close() method can now be called more than once without complaint.
Tim Petersd7472ec2003-07-13 02:22:03 +0000918
Tim Peters59aba122003-07-01 20:01:55 +0000919- The classes in threading.py are now new-style classes. That they
920 weren't before was an oversight.
921
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000922- The urllib2 digest authentication handlers now define the correct
923 auth_header. The earlier versions would fail at runtime.
924
Neal Norwitze7dfe212003-07-01 14:59:46 +0000925- SF bug 763023: fix uncaught ZeroDivisionError in difflib ratio methods
926 when there are no lines.
927
Neal Norwitz3c0f2c92003-07-01 21:12:47 +0000928- SF bug 763637: fix exception in Tkinter with after_cancel
929 which could occur with Tk 8.4
930
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000931- SF bug 770601: CGIHTTPServer.py now passes the entire environment
932 to child processes.
933
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000934- SF bug 765238: add filter to fnmatch's __all__.
935
936- SF bug 748201: make time.strptime() error messages more helpful.
937
938- SF patch 764470: Do not dump the args attribute of a Fault object in
939 xmlrpclib.
940
941- SF patch 549151: urllib and urllib2 now redirect POSTs on 301
942 responses.
943
944- SF patch 766650: The whichdb module was fixed to recognize dbm files
945 generated by gdbm on OS/2 EMX.
946
947- SF bugs 763047 and 763052: fixes bug of timezone value being left as
948 -1 when ``time.tzname[0] == time.tzname[1] and not time.daylight``
949 is true when it should only when time.daylight is true.
950
951- SF bug 764548: re now allows subclasses of str and unicode to be
952 used as patterns.
953
954- SF bug 763637: In Tkinter, change after_cancel() to handle tuples
955 of varying sizes. Tk 8.4 returns a different number of values
956 than Tk 8.3.
957
958- SF bug 763023: difflib.ratio() did not catch zero division.
959
960- The Queue module now has an __all__ attribute.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000961
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000962Tools/Demos
963-----------
964
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000965- See Lib/idlelib/NEWS.txt for IDLE news.
966
Neal Norwitz592c4cc2003-07-01 04:14:28 +0000967- SF bug 753592: webchecker/wsgui now handles user supplied directories.
968
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000969- The trace.py script has been removed. It is now in the standard library.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000970
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000971Build
972-----
973
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000974- Python now compiles with -fno-strict-aliasing if possible (SF bug 766696).
975
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000976- The socket module compiles on IRIX 6.5.10.
977
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000978- An irix64 system is treated the same way as an irix6 system (SF
979 patch 764560).
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000980
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000981- Several definitions were missing on FreeBSD 5.x unless the
982 __BSD_VISIBLE symbol was defined. configure now defines it as
983 needed.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000984
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000985C API
986-----
987
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000988- Unicode objects now support mbcs as a built-in encoding, so the C
989 API can use it without deferring to the encodings package.
990
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000991Windows
992-------
993
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000994- The Windows implementation of PyThread_start_new_thread() never
995 checked error returns from Windows functions correctly. As a result,
996 it could claim to start a new thread even when the Microsoft
997 _beginthread() function failed (due to "too many threads" -- this is
998 on the order of thousands when it happens). In these cases, the
999 Python exception ::
1000
1001 thread.error: can't start new thread
1002
1003 is raised now.
1004
1005- SF bug 766669: Prevent a GPF on interpreter exit when sockets are in
1006 use. The interpreter now calls WSACleanup() from Py_Finalize()
1007 instead of from DLL teardown.
1008
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001009Mac
1010---
1011
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001012- Bundlebuilder now inherits default values in the right way. It was
Walter Dörwald73a8a4b2003-07-30 12:14:02 +00001013 previously possible for app bundles to get a type of "BNDL" instead
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001014 of "APPL." Other improvements include, a --build-id option to
1015 specify the CFBundleIdentifier and using the --python option to set
1016 the executable in the bundle.
1017
1018- Fixed two bugs in MacOSX framework handling.
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001019
Jack Jansene0040412003-07-23 22:17:28 +00001020- pythonw did not allow user interaction in 2.3rc1, this has been fixed.
1021
1022- Python is now compiled with -mno-fused-madd, making all tests pass
1023 on Panther.
1024
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001025What's New in Python 2.3 beta 2?
1026================================
1027
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00001028*Release date: 29-Jun-2003*
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001029
1030Core and builtins
1031-----------------
1032
Barry Warsaw883f2232003-06-29 17:10:11 +00001033- A program can now set the environment variable PYTHONINSPECT to some
1034 string value in Python, and cause the interpreter to enter the
1035 interactive prompt at program exit, as if Python had been invoked
1036 with the -i option.
1037
Raymond Hettingerd05abde2003-06-17 05:05:49 +00001038- list.index() now accepts optional start and stop arguments. Similar
1039 changes were made to UserList.index(). SF feature request 754014.
1040
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00001041- SF patch 751998 fixes an unwanted side effect of the previous fix
1042 for SF bug 742860 (the next item).
1043
Tim Peters50d8b8b2003-05-25 17:44:31 +00001044- SF bug 742860: "WeakKeyDictionary __delitem__ uses iterkeys". This
1045 wasn't threadsafe, was very inefficient (expected time O(len(dict))
1046 instead of O(1)), and could raise a spurious RuntimeError if another
1047 thread mutated the dict during __delitem__, or if a comparison function
1048 mutated it. It also neglected to raise KeyError when the key wasn't
1049 present; didn't raise TypeError when the key wasn't of a weakly
1050 referencable type; and broke various more-or-less obscure dict
1051 invariants by using a sequence of equality comparisons over the whole
1052 set of dict keys instead of computing the key's hash code to narrow
1053 the search to those keys with the same hash code. All of these are
1054 considered to be bugs. A new implementation of __delitem__ repairs all
1055 that, but note that fixing these bugs may change visible behavior in
1056 code relying (whether intentionally or accidentally) on old behavior.
Tim Peters886128f2003-05-25 01:45:11 +00001057
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001058- SF bug 734869: Fixed a compiler bug that caused a fatal error when
1059 compiling a list comprehension that contained another list comprehension
1060 embedded in a lambda expression.
1061
Tim Peterse87568d2003-05-24 20:18:24 +00001062- SF bug 705231: builtin pow() no longer lets the platform C pow()
1063 raise -1.0 to integer powers, because (at least) glibc gets it wrong
1064 in some cases. The result should be -1.0 if the power is odd and 1.0
1065 if the power is even, and any float with a sufficiently large exponent
1066 is (mathematically) an exact even integer.
1067
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001068- SF bug 759227: A new-style class that implements __nonzero__() must
1069 return a bool or int (but not an int subclass) from that method. This
1070 matches the restriction on classic classes.
1071
Martin v. Löwis5467d4c2003-05-10 07:10:12 +00001072- The encoding attribute has been added for file objects, and set to
1073 the terminal encoding on Unix and Windows.
1074
Tim Peters015dd822003-05-04 04:16:52 +00001075- The softspace attribute of file objects became read-only by oversight.
1076 It's writable again.
1077
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00001078- Reverted a 2.3 beta 1 change to iterators for subclasses of list and
1079 tuple. By default, the iterators now access data elements directly
1080 instead of going through __getitem__. If __getitem__ access is
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001081 preferred, then __iter__ can be overridden.
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00001082
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001083- SF bug 735247: The staticmethod and super types participate in
1084 garbage collection. Before this change, it was possible for leaks to
1085 occur in functions with non-global free variables that used these types.
1086
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001087Extension modules
1088-----------------
1089
Raymond Hettinger643bcec2003-06-29 03:29:42 +00001090- the socket module has a new exception, socket.timeout, to allow
1091 timeouts to be handled separately from other socket errors.
1092
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001093- SF bug 751276: cPickle has fixed to propagate exceptions raised in
1094 user code. In earlier versions, cPickle caught and ignored any
1095 exception when it performed operations that it expected to raise
1096 specific exceptions like AttributeError.
1097
1098- cPickle Pickler and Unpickler objects now participate in garbage
1099 collection.
1100
Tim Peterscda32b72003-06-15 23:13:35 +00001101- mimetools.choose_boundary() could return duplicate strings at times,
1102 especially likely on Windows. The strings returned are now guaranteed
1103 unique within a single program run.
1104
Brett Cannon4e64d782003-06-13 23:44:35 +00001105- thread.interrupt_main() raises KeyboardInterrupt in the main thread.
1106 dummy_thread has also been modified to try to simulate the behavior.
1107
Walter Dörwald9e46abe2003-05-18 03:15:10 +00001108- array.array.insert() now treats negative indices as being relative
1109 to the end of the array, just like list.insert() does. (SF bug #739313)
1110
Tim Petersb0c854d2003-05-17 15:57:00 +00001111- The datetime module classes datetime, time, and timedelta are now
1112 properly subclassable.
Tim Petersa98924a2003-05-17 05:55:19 +00001113
Martin v. Löwis28e9ce92003-05-09 08:19:48 +00001114- _tkinter.{get|set}busywaitinterval was added.
1115
Raymond Hettinger834f4632003-05-02 20:24:56 +00001116- itertools.islice() now accepts stop=None as documented.
1117 Fixes SF bug #730685.
1118
Skip Montanaro8c044d82003-05-06 20:42:37 +00001119- the bsddb185 module is built in one restricted instance -
1120 /usr/include/db.h exists and defines HASHVERSION to be 2. This is true
1121 for many BSD-derived systems.
1122
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001123
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001124Library
1125-------
1126
Tim Petersdb3756d2003-06-29 05:30:48 +00001127- Some happy doctest extensions from Jim Fulton have been added to
1128 doctest.py. These are already being used in Zope3. The two
1129 primary ones:
1130
1131 doctest.debug(module, name) extracts the doctests from the named object
1132 in the given module, puts them in a temp file, and starts pdb running
1133 on that file. This is great when a doctest fails.
1134
1135 doctest.DocTestSuite(module=None) returns a synthesized unittest
1136 TestSuite instance, to be run by the unittest framework, which
1137 runs all the doctests in the module. This allows writing tests in
1138 doctest style (which can be clearer and shorter than writing tests
1139 in unittest style), without losing unittest's powerful testing
1140 framework features (which doctest lacks).
1141
Tim Peters6ebe61f2003-06-27 20:48:05 +00001142- For compatibility with doctests created before 2.3, if an expected
1143 output block consists solely of "1" and the actual output block
1144 consists solely of "True", it's accepted as a match; similarly
1145 for "0" and "False". This is quite un-doctest-like, but is practical.
1146 The behavior can be disabled by passing the new doctest module
1147 constant DONT_ACCEPT_TRUE_FOR_1 to the new optionflags optional
1148 argument.
1149
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001150- ZipFile.testzip() now only traps BadZipfile exceptions. Previously,
1151 a bare except caught to much and reported all errors as a problem
1152 in the archive.
1153
1154- The logging module now has a new function, makeLogRecord() making
1155 LogHandler easier to interact with DatagramHandler and SocketHandler.
1156
Skip Montanaro364ca402003-06-17 12:58:31 +00001157- The cgitb module has been extended to support plain text display (SF patch
1158 569574).
1159
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00001160- A brand new version of IDLE (from the IDLEfork project at
1161 SourceForge) is now included as Lib/idlelib. The old Tools/idle is
1162 no more.
1163
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001164- Added a new module: trace (documentation missing). This module used
1165 to be distributed in Tools/scripts. It uses sys.settrace() to trace
1166 code execution -- either function calls or individual lines. It can
1167 generate tracing output during execution or a post-mortem report of
1168 code coverage.
1169
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00001170- The threading module has new functions settrace() and setprofile()
1171 that cooperate with the functions of the same name in the sys
1172 module. A function registered with the threading module will
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001173 be used for all threads it creates. The new trace module uses this
1174 to provide tracing for code running in threads.
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00001175
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00001176- copy.py: applied SF patch 707900, fixing bug 702858, by Steven
1177 Taschuk. Copying a new-style class that had a reference to itself
1178 didn't work. (The same thing worked fine for old-style classes.)
Martin v. Löwisba8f5ff2003-06-14 07:10:06 +00001179 Builtin functions are now treated as atomic, fixing bug #746304.
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00001180
Raymond Hettingerc24d7672003-06-08 19:42:33 +00001181- difflib.py has two new functions: context_diff() and unified_diff().
1182
Guido van Rossumfa19f7c2003-05-16 01:46:51 +00001183- More fixes to urllib (SF 549151): (a) When redirecting, always use
1184 GET. This is common practice and more-or-less sanctioned by the
1185 HTTP standard. (b) Add a handler for 307 redirection, which becomes
1186 an error for POST, but a regular redirect for GET and HEAD
1187
Guido van Rossumbf1bef82003-05-13 18:01:19 +00001188- Added optional 'onerror' argument to os.walk(), to control error
1189 handling.
1190
Martin v. Löwise59e2ba2003-05-03 09:09:02 +00001191- inspect.is{method|data}descriptor was added, to allow pydoc display
1192 __doc__ of data descriptors.
1193
Skip Montanaro4a7751c2003-04-29 21:07:16 +00001194- Fixed socket speed loss caused by use of the _socketobject wrapper class
1195 in socket.py.
1196
Raymond Hettinger22952a32003-05-20 04:59:56 +00001197- timeit.py now checks the current directory for imports.
1198
Gustavo Niemeyer9556fba2003-06-07 17:53:08 +00001199- urllib2.py now knows how to order proxy classes, so the user doesn't
1200 have to insert it in front of other classes, nor do dirty tricks like
1201 inserting a "dummy" HTTPHandler after a ProxyHandler when building an
1202 opener with proxy support.
1203
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00001204- Iterators have been added for dbm keys.
1205
1206- random.Random objects can now be pickled.
1207
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001208Tools/Demos
1209-----------
1210
Martin v. Löwisb8c084e2003-06-14 09:03:46 +00001211- pydoc now offers help on keywords and topics.
1212
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00001213- Tools/idle is gone; long live Lib/idlelib.
1214
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00001215- diff.py prints file diffs in context, unified, or ndiff formats,
1216 providing a command line interface to difflib.py.
Raymond Hettinger2f3c74a2003-06-08 23:10:15 +00001217
Raymond Hettinger71e00332003-05-10 03:30:13 +00001218- texcheck.py is a new script for making a rough validation of Python LaTeX
1219 files.
1220
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001221Build
1222-----
1223
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001224- Setting DESTDIR during 'make install' now allows specifying a
Martin v. Löwis3b8ee082003-05-11 20:25:35 +00001225 different root directory.
1226
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001227C API
1228-----
1229
Tim Peters3cfe7542003-05-21 21:29:48 +00001230- PyType_Ready(): If a type declares that it participates in gc
1231 (Py_TPFLAGS_HAVE_GC), and its base class does not, and its base class's
1232 tp_free slot is the default _PyObject_Del, and type does not define
1233 a tp_free slot itself, _PyObject_GC_Del is assigned to type->tp_free.
1234 Previously _PyObject_Del was inherited, which could at best lead to a
1235 segfault. In addition, if even after this magic the type's tp_free
1236 slot is _PyObject_Del or NULL, and the type is a base type
1237 (Py_TPFLAGS_BASETYPE), TypeError is raised: since the type is a base
1238 type, its dealloc function must call type->tp_free, and since the type
1239 is gc'able, tp_free must not be NULL or _PyObject_Del.
1240
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00001241- PyThreadState_SetAsyncExc(): A new API (deliberately accessible only
1242 from C) to interrupt a thread by sending it an exception. It is
1243 intentional that you have to write your own C extension to call it
1244 from Python.
1245
1246
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001247New platforms
1248-------------
1249
1250None this time.
1251
1252Tests
1253-----
1254
1255- test_imp rewritten so that it doesn't raise RuntimeError if run as a
1256 side effect of being imported ("import test.autotest").
1257
1258Windows
1259-------
1260
Tim Petersfaa697a2003-06-22 01:42:20 +00001261- The Windows installer ships with Tcl/Tk 8.4.3 (upgraded from 8.4.1).
1262
Tim Petersc4607da2003-05-08 18:13:59 +00001263- The installer always suggested that Python be installed on the C:
1264 drive, due to a hardcoded "C:" generated by the Wise installation
1265 wizard. People with machines where C: is not the system drive
1266 usually want Python installed on whichever drive is their system drive
1267 instead. We removed the hardcoded "C:", and two testers on machines
1268 where C: is not the system drive report that the installer now
1269 suggests their system drive. Note that you can always select the
1270 directory you want in the "Select Destination Directory" dialog --
1271 that's what it's for.
1272
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001273Mac
1274---
1275
Just van Rossum99bc1fc2003-05-09 15:01:25 +00001276- There's a new module called "autoGIL", which offers a mechanism to
1277 automatically release the Global Interpreter Lock when an event loop
1278 goes to sleep, allowing other threads to run. It's currently only
1279 supported on OSX, in the Mach-O version.
Jack Jansenf5e23ff2003-06-16 13:53:40 +00001280- The OSA modules now allow direct access to properties of the
1281 toplevel application class (in AppleScript terminology).
1282- The Package Manager can now update itself.
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001283
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00001284SourceForge Bugs and Patches Applied
1285------------------------------------
1286
1287430160, 471893, 501716, 542562, 549151, 569574, 595837, 596434,
1288598163, 604210, 604716, 610332, 612627, 614770, 620190, 621891,
1289622042, 639139, 640236, 644345, 649742, 649742, 658233, 660022,
1290661318, 661676, 662807, 662923, 666219, 672855, 678325, 682347,
1291683486, 684981, 685773, 686254, 692776, 692959, 693094, 696777,
1292697989, 700827, 703666, 708495, 708604, 708901, 710733, 711902,
1293713722, 715782, 718286, 719359, 719367, 723136, 723831, 723962,
1294724588, 724767, 724767, 725942, 726150, 726446, 726869, 727051,
1295727719, 727719, 727805, 728277, 728563, 728656, 729096, 729103,
1296729293, 729297, 729300, 729317, 729395, 729622, 729817, 730170,
1297730296, 730594, 730685, 730826, 730963, 731209, 731403, 731504,
1298731514, 731626, 731635, 731643, 731644, 731644, 731689, 732124,
1299732143, 732234, 732284, 732284, 732479, 732761, 732783, 732951,
1300733667, 733781, 734118, 734231, 734869, 735051, 735293, 735527,
1301735613, 735694, 736962, 736962, 737970, 738066, 739313, 740055,
1302740234, 740301, 741806, 742126, 742741, 742860, 742860, 742911,
1303744041, 744104, 744238, 744687, 744877, 745055, 745478, 745525,
1304745620, 746012, 746304, 746366, 746801, 746953, 747348, 747667,
1305747954, 748846, 748849, 748973, 748975, 749191, 749210, 749759,
1306749831, 749911, 750008, 750092, 750542, 750595, 751038, 751107,
1307751276, 751451, 751916, 751941, 751956, 751998, 752671, 753451,
1308753602, 753617, 753845, 753925, 754014, 754340, 754447, 755031,
1309755087, 755147, 755245, 755683, 755987, 756032, 756996, 757058,
1310757229, 757818, 757821, 757822, 758112, 758910, 759227, 759889,
1311760257, 760703, 760792, 761104, 761337, 761519, 761830, 762455
1312
1313
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001314What's New in Python 2.3 beta 1?
1315================================
1316
Guido van Rossumfa1eddf2003-04-25 19:19:52 +00001317*Release date: 25-Apr-2003*
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001318
1319Core and builtins
1320-----------------
1321
Thomas Heller5eccabc2003-04-23 19:35:25 +00001322- New format codes B, H, I, k and K have been implemented for
1323 PyArg_ParseTuple and PyBuild_Value.
1324
Alex Martellia70b1912003-04-22 08:12:33 +00001325- New builtin function sum(seq, start=0) returns the sum of all the
1326 items in iterable object seq, plus start (items are normally numbers,
1327 and cannot be strings).
1328
Guido van Rossumaa86e352003-04-19 18:15:10 +00001329- bool() called without arguments now returns False rather than
1330 raising an exception. This is consistent with calling the
1331 constructors for the other builtin types -- called without argument
1332 they all return the false value of that type. (SF patch #724135)
1333
Guido van Rossumcf8d2852003-04-17 16:53:26 +00001334- In support of PEP 269 (making the pgen parser generator accessible
1335 from Python), some changes to the pgen code structure were made; a
1336 few files that used to be linked only with pgen are now linked with
1337 Python itself.
1338
Guido van Rossumc1f6e8c2003-04-16 21:13:23 +00001339- The repr() of a weakref object now shows the __name__ attribute of
1340 the referenced object, if it has one.
1341
Guido van Rossum76ba09f2003-04-16 19:40:58 +00001342- super() no longer ignores data descriptors, except __class__. See
1343 the thread started at
1344 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2003-April/034338.html
1345
Guido van Rossum3a3cca52003-04-14 20:58:14 +00001346- list.insert(i, x) now interprets negative i as it would be
1347 interpreted by slicing, so negative values count from the end of the
1348 list. This was the only place where such an interpretation was not
1349 placed on a list index.
1350
Guido van Rossumefbbb1c2003-04-11 18:43:06 +00001351- range() now works even if the arguments are longs with magnitude
1352 larger than sys.maxint, as long as the total length of the sequence
1353 fits. E.g., range(2**100, 2**101, 2**100) is the following list:
1354 [1267650600228229401496703205376L]. (SF patch #707427.)
1355
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001356- Some horridly obscure problems were fixed involving interaction
1357 between garbage collection and old-style classes with "ambitious"
1358 getattr hooks. If an old-style instance didn't have a __del__ method,
1359 but did have a __getattr__ hook, and the instance became reachable
1360 only from an unreachable cycle, and the hook resurrected or deleted
1361 unreachable objects when asked to resolve "__del__", anything up to
1362 a segfault could happen. That's been repaired.
1363
Raymond Hettingera3e1e4c2003-03-06 23:54:28 +00001364- dict.pop now takes an optional argument specifying a default
1365 value to return if the key is not in the dict. If a default is not
1366 given and the key is not found, a KeyError will still be raised.
1367 Parallel changes were made to UserDict.UserDict and UserDict.DictMixin.
1368 [SF patch #693753] (contributed by Michael Stone.)
1369
Martin v. Löwis73d538b2003-03-05 15:13:47 +00001370- sys.getfilesystemencoding() was added to expose
1371 Py_FileSystemDefaultEncoding.
Guido van Rossum46d3dc32003-03-01 03:20:41 +00001372
1373- New function sys.exc_clear() clears the current exception. This is
1374 rarely needed, but can sometimes be useful to release objects
1375 referenced by the traceback held in sys.exc_info()[2]. (SF patch
1376 #693195.)
1377
Neal Norwitzd5a65a72003-02-23 23:11:41 +00001378- On 64-bit systems, a dictionary could contain duplicate long/int keys
1379 if the key value was larger than 2**32. See SF bug #689659.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001380
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00001381- Fixed SF bug #663074. The codec system was using global static
Walter Dörwaldfa86bf52003-03-31 16:15:13 +00001382 variables to store internal data. As a result, any attempts to use the
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00001383 unicode system with multiple active interpreters, or successive
1384 interpreter executions, would fail.
1385
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00001386- "%c" % u"a" now returns a unicode string instead of raising a
Walter Dörwald44f527f2003-04-02 16:37:24 +00001387 TypeError. u"%c" % 0xffffffff now raises a OverflowError instead
Walter Dörwald1e469c52003-04-02 16:57:59 +00001388 of a ValueError to be consistent with "%c" % 256. See SF patch #710127.
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00001389
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001390Extension modules
1391-----------------
1392
Guido van Rossume7adda92003-04-25 05:52:37 +00001393- The socket module now provides the functions inet_pton and inet_ntop
1394 for converting between string and packed representation of IP
1395 addresses. There is also a new module variable, has_ipv6, which is
1396 True iff the current Python has IPv6 support. See SF patch #658327.
1397
Martin v. Löwisbfe175c2003-04-16 19:42:51 +00001398- Tkinter wrappers around Tcl variables now pass objects directly
1399 to Tcl, instead of first converting them to strings.
1400
Guido van Rossum41c99e72003-04-14 17:59:34 +00001401- The .*? pattern in the re module is now special-cased to avoid the
1402 recursion limit. (SF patch #720991 -- many thanks to Gary Herron
1403 and Greg Chapman.)
1404
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00001405- New function sys.call_tracing() allows pdb to debug code
1406 recursively.
1407
Tim Peters730f5532003-04-08 17:17:17 +00001408- New function gc.get_referents(obj) returns a list of objects
Tim Peters0f81ab62003-04-08 16:39:48 +00001409 directly referenced by obj. In effect, it exposes what the object's
1410 tp_traverse slot does, and can be helpful when debugging memory
1411 leaks.
1412
Martin v. Löwis7fb697b2003-04-03 04:49:12 +00001413- The iconv module has been removed from this release.
1414
Tim Petersd50ade62003-03-20 18:32:13 +00001415- The platform-independent routines for packing floats in IEEE formats
1416 (struct.pack's <f, >f, <d, and >d codes; pickle and cPickle's protocol 1
1417 pickling of floats) ignored that rounding can cause a carry to
1418 propagate. The worst consequence was that, in rare cases, <f and >f
1419 could produce strings that, when unpacked again, were a factor of 2
1420 away from the original float. This has been fixed. See SF bug
1421 #705836.
1422
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001423- New function time.tzset() provides access to the C library tzset()
Guido van Rossumd11b62e2003-03-14 21:51:36 +00001424 function, if supported. (SF patch #675422.)
1425
Neal Norwitz12e22172003-03-03 21:16:39 +00001426- Using createfilehandler, deletefilehandler, createtimerhandler functions
1427 on Tkinter.tkinter (_tkinter module) no longer crashes the interpreter.
1428 See SF bug #692416.
1429
Michael W. Hudsonf0089982003-03-03 12:29:42 +00001430- Modified the fcntl.ioctl() function to allow modification of a passed
1431 mutable buffer (for details see the reference documentation).
1432
Raymond Hettinger61fe64d2003-02-23 04:40:07 +00001433- Made user requested changes to the itertools module.
1434 Subsumed the times() function into repeat().
1435 Added chain() and cycle().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001436
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00001437- The rotor module is now deprecated; the encryption algorithm it uses
Andrew M. Kuchlingfb5f4852003-04-24 13:19:56 +00001438 is not believed to be secure, and including crypto code with Python
1439 has implications for exporting and importing it in various countries.
1440
Skip Montanaro89feabc2003-03-30 04:54:24 +00001441- The socket module now always uses the _socketobject wrapper class, even on
1442 platforms which have dup(2). The makefile() method is built directly
1443 on top of the socket without duplicating the file descriptor, allowing
1444 timeouts to work properly.
1445
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001446Library
1447-------
1448
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00001449- New generator function os.walk() is an easy-to-use alternative to
1450 os.path.walk(). See os module docs for details. os.path.walk()
1451 isn't deprecated at this time, but may become deprecated in a
1452 future release.
1453
Marc-André Lemburg246d8472003-04-24 11:36:11 +00001454- Added new module "platform" which provides a wide range of tools
1455 for querying platform dependent features.
1456
Andrew M. Kuchling4e42b312003-04-24 16:45:05 +00001457- netrc now allows ASCII punctuation characters in passwords.
Raymond Hettinger1d877862003-04-23 19:06:08 +00001458
Martin v. Löwis153c9e42003-04-19 20:59:03 +00001459- shelve now supports the optional writeback argument, and exposes
1460 pickle protocol versions.
1461
Guido van Rossuma2685402003-04-19 18:04:57 +00001462- Several methods of nntplib.NNTP have grown an optional file argument
1463 which specifies a file where to divert the command's output
1464 (already supported by the body() method). (SF patch #720468)
1465
Martin v. Löwis281b2c62003-04-18 21:04:39 +00001466- The self-documenting XML server library DocXMLRPCServer was added.
1467
Martin v. Löwis2548c732003-04-18 10:39:54 +00001468- Support for internationalized domain names has been added through
1469 the 'idna' and 'punycode' encodings, the 'stringprep' module, the
1470 'mkstringprep' tool, and enhancements to the socket and httplib
1471 modules.
1472
Walter Dörwald5688b7a2003-04-16 09:46:13 +00001473- htmlentitydefs has two new dictionaries: name2codepoint maps
1474 HTML entity names to Unicode codepoints (as integers).
1475 codepoint2name is the reverse mapping. See SF patch #722017.
1476
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00001477- pdb has a new command, "debug", which lets you step through
1478 arbitrary code from the debugger's (pdb) prompt.
1479
Raymond Hettingerc377cbf2003-04-04 22:56:42 +00001480- unittest.failUnlessEqual and its equivalent unittest.assertEqual now
1481 return 'not a == b' rather than 'a != b'. This gives the desired
1482 result for classes that define __eq__ without defining __ne__.
1483
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001484- sgmllib now supports SGML marked sections, in particular the
Martin v. Löwis3163a3b2003-03-30 14:25:40 +00001485 MS Office extensions.
1486
Raymond Hettinger42182eb2003-03-09 05:33:33 +00001487- The urllib module now offers support for the iterator protocol.
1488 SF patch 698520 contributed by Brett Cannon.
1489
Guido van Rossum9589a252003-03-06 01:56:12 +00001490- New module timeit provides a simple framework for timing the
1491 execution speed of expressions and statements.
1492
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001493- sets.Set objects now support mixed-type __eq__ and __ne__, instead
1494 of raising TypeError. If x is a Set object and y is a non-Set object,
1495 x == y is False, and x != y is True. This is akin to the change made
1496 for mixed-type comparisons of datetime objects in 2.3a2; more info
1497 about the rationale is in the NEWS entry for that. See also SF bug
1498 report <http://www.python.org/sf/693121>.
1499
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00001500- On Unix platforms, if os.listdir() is called with a Unicode argument,
1501 it now returns Unicode strings. (This behavior was added earlier
1502 to the Windows NT/2k/XP version of os.listdir().)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001503
Andrew M. Kuchling6f177d42003-02-28 22:09:33 +00001504- Distutils: both 'py_modules' and 'packages' keywords can now be specified
1505 in core.setup(). Previously you could supply one or the other, but
1506 not both of them. (SF patch #695090 from Bernhard Herzog)
1507
Skip Montanaro64a839e2003-03-20 23:36:55 +00001508- New csv package makes it easy to read/write CSV files.
1509
Gustavo Niemeyer68d8cef2003-04-17 21:31:33 +00001510- Module shlex has been extended to allow posix-like shell parsings,
1511 including a split() function for easy spliting of quoted strings and
1512 commands. An iterator interface was also implemented.
1513
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001514Tools/Demos
1515-----------
1516
Tim Peters21d7d4d2003-04-18 00:45:59 +00001517- New script combinerefs.py helps analyze new PYTHONDUMPREFS output.
1518 See the module docstring for details.
1519
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001520Build
1521-----
1522
Neal Norwitz35892b92003-02-23 23:45:35 +00001523- Fix problem building on OSF1 because the compiler only accepted
1524 preprocessor directives that start in column 1. (SF bug #691793.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001525
1526C API
1527-----
1528
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00001529- Added PyGC_Collect(), equivalent to calling gc.collect().
1530
Guido van Rossum0fc8f002003-04-15 15:12:39 +00001531- PyThreadState_GetDict() was changed not to raise an exception or
1532 issue a fatal error when no current thread state is available. This
1533 makes it possible to print dictionaries when no thread is active.
1534
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00001535- LONG_LONG was renamed to PY_LONG_LONG. Extensions that use this and
1536 need compatibility with previous versions can use this:
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00001537
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00001538 #ifndef PY_LONG_LONG
1539 #define PY_LONG_LONG LONG_LONG
1540 #endif
Martin v. Löwisb9a0f912003-03-29 10:06:18 +00001541
Raymond Hettinger1da1dbf2003-03-17 19:46:11 +00001542- Added PyObject_SelfIter() to fill the tp_iter slot for the
Raymond Hettinger01538262003-03-17 08:24:35 +00001543 typical case where the method returns its self argument.
1544
Guido van Rossume5c691a2003-03-07 15:13:17 +00001545- The extended type structure used for heap types (new-style
1546 classes defined by Python code using a class statement) is now
1547 exported from object.h as PyHeapTypeObject. (SF patch #696193.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001548
1549New platforms
1550-------------
1551
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00001552None this time.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001553
1554Tests
1555-----
1556
Neal Norwitz55b61d22003-02-28 19:57:03 +00001557- test_timeout now requires -u network to be passed to regrtest to run.
1558 See SF bug #692988.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001559
1560Windows
1561-------
1562
Tim Peters11b23062003-04-23 02:39:17 +00001563- os.fsync() now exists on Windows, and calls the Microsoft _commit()
1564 function.
1565
Guido van Rossumf4050642003-04-09 19:39:06 +00001566- New function winsound.MessageBeep() wraps the Win32 API
1567 MessageBeep().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001568
1569Mac
1570---
1571
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00001572- os.listdir() now returns Unicode strings on MacOS X when called with
1573 a Unicode argument. See the general news item under "Library".
Just van Rossum46c97842003-02-25 21:42:15 +00001574
Jack Jansendeac2ac2003-02-24 11:04:17 +00001575- A new method MacOS.WMAvailable() returns true if it is safe to access
1576 the window manager, false otherwise.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001577
Jack Jansencf76be02003-03-24 12:13:54 +00001578- EasyDialogs dialogs are now movable-modal, and if the application is
1579 currently in the background they will ask to be moved to the foreground
1580 before displaying.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001581
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00001582- OSA Scripting support has improved a lot, and gensuitemodule.py can now
Jack Jansende354b72003-04-11 15:37:20 +00001583 be used by mere mortals. The documentation is now also more or less
1584 complete.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001585
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00001586- The IDE (in a framework build) now includes introductory documentation
1587 in Apple Help Viewer format.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001588
1589
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001590What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 2?
1591=================================
1592
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00001593*Release date: 19-Feb-2003*
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001594
1595Core and builtins
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00001596-----------------
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001597
Walter Dörwald2ffec022003-02-19 16:34:11 +00001598- Negative positions returned from PEP 293 error callbacks are now
1599 treated as being relative to the end of the input string. Positions
1600 that are out of bounds raise an IndexError.
1601
Guido van Rossum162e38c2003-02-19 15:25:10 +00001602- sys.path[0] (the directory from which the script is loaded) is now
1603 turned into an absolute pathname, unless it is the empty string.
1604 (SF patch #664376.)
1605
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00001606- Finally fixed the bug in compile() and exec where a string ending
1607 with an indented code block but no newline would raise SyntaxError.
1608 This would have been a four-line change in parsetok.c... Except
1609 codeop.py depends on this behavior, so a compilation flag had to be
1610 invented that causes the tokenizer to revert to the old behavior;
1611 this required extra changes to 2 .h files, 2 .c files, and 2 .py
Guido van Rossum1442dc12003-02-13 22:19:20 +00001612 files. (Fixes SF bug #501622.)
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00001613
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00001614- If a new-style class defines neither __new__ nor __init__, its
1615 constructor would ignore all arguments. This is changed now: the
1616 constructor refuses arguments in this case. This might break code
1617 that worked under Python 2.2. The simplest fix is to add a no-op
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001618 __init__: ``def __init__(self, *args, **kw): pass``.
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00001619
Guido van Rossum48035eb2003-02-12 17:05:26 +00001620- Through a bytecode optimizer bug (and I bet you didn't even know
1621 Python *had* a bytecode optimizer :-), "unsigned" hex/oct constants
1622 with a leading minus sign would come out with the wrong sign.
1623 ("Unsigned" hex/oct constants are those with a face value in the
1624 range sys.maxint+1 through sys.maxint*2+1, inclusive; these have
1625 always been interpreted as negative numbers through sign folding.)
1626 E.g. 0xffffffff is -1, and -(0xffffffff) is 1, but -0xffffffff would
1627 come out as -4294967295. This was the case in Python 2.2 through
1628 2.2.2 and 2.3a1, and in Python 2.4 it will once again have that
1629 value, but according to PEP 237 it really needs to be 1 now. This
1630 will be backported to Python 2.2.3 a well. (SF #660455)
1631
Guido van Rossum47710652003-02-12 20:48:22 +00001632- int(s, base) sometimes sign-folds hex and oct constants; it only
1633 does this when base is 0 and s.strip() starts with a '0'. When the
1634 sign is actually folded, as in int("0xffffffff", 0) on a 32-bit
1635 machine, which returns -1, a FutureWarning is now issued; in Python
1636 2.4, this will return 4294967295L, as do int("+0xffffffff", 0) and
1637 int("0xffffffff", 16) right now. (PEP 347)
1638
Guido van Rossuma89d10e2003-02-12 03:58:38 +00001639- super(X, x): x may now be a proxy for an X instance, i.e.
1640 issubclass(x.__class__, X) but not issubclass(type(x), X).
1641
Guido van Rossum03bc7d32003-02-12 03:32:58 +00001642- isinstance(x, X): if X is a new-style class, this is now equivalent
1643 to issubclass(type(x), X) or issubclass(x.__class__, X). Previously
1644 only type(x) was tested. (For classic classes this was already the
1645 case.)
1646
Just van Rossum73ffb4a2003-02-10 09:57:08 +00001647- compile(), eval() and the exec statement now fully support source code
1648 passed as unicode strings.
1649
Neal Norwitzde8b94c2003-02-10 02:12:43 +00001650- int subclasses can be initialized with longs if the value fits in an int.
1651 See SF bug #683467.
1652
Tim Petersbf2674b2003-02-02 07:51:32 +00001653- long(string, base) takes time linear in len(string) when base is a power
1654 of 2 now. It used to take time quadratic in len(string).
1655
Martin v. Löwis8afd7572003-01-25 22:46:11 +00001656- filter returns now Unicode results for Unicode arguments.
1657
Martin v. Löwisaf6a27a2003-01-03 19:16:14 +00001658- raw_input can now return Unicode objects.
1659
Skip Montanaro4abd5f02003-01-02 20:51:08 +00001660- List objects' sort() method now accepts None as the comparison function.
1661 Passing None is semantically identical to calling sort() with no
1662 arguments.
1663
Neal Norwitz1a997502003-01-13 20:13:12 +00001664- Fixed crash when printing a subclass of str and __str__ returned self.
1665 See SF bug #667147.
1666
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00001667- Fixed an invalid RuntimeWarning and an undetected error when trying
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00001668 to convert a long integer into a float which couldn't fit.
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00001669 See SF bug #676155.
1670
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00001671- Function objects now have a __module__ attribute that is bound to
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00001672 the name of the module in which the function was defined. This
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00001673 applies for C functions and methods as well as functions and methods
1674 defined in Python. This attribute is used by pickle.whichmodule(),
1675 which changes the behavior of whichmodule slightly. In Python 2.2
1676 whichmodule() returns "__main__" for functions that are not defined
1677 at the top-level of a module (examples: methods, nested functions).
1678 Now whichmodule() will return the proper module name.
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00001679
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001680Extension modules
1681-----------------
1682
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00001683- operator.isNumberType() now checks that the object has a nb_int or
1684 nb_float slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
1685 tp_as_number pointer.
1686
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00001687- The imp module now has ways to acquire and release the "import
1688 lock": imp.acquire_lock() and imp.release_lock(). Note: this is a
1689 reentrant lock, so releasing the lock only truly releases it when
1690 this is the last release_lock() call. You can check with
1691 imp.lock_held(). (SF bug #580952 and patch #683257.)
1692
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001693- Change to cPickle to match pickle.py (see below and PEP 307).
1694
Neal Norwitz9caf9c02003-02-10 01:54:06 +00001695- Fix some bugs in the parser module. SF bug #678518.
1696
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00001697- Thanks to Scott David Daniels, a subtle bug in how the zlib
Walter Dörwald28d81962003-02-03 20:53:14 +00001698 extension implemented flush() was fixed. Scott also rewrote the
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00001699 zlib test suite using the unittest module. (SF bug #640230 and
1700 patch #678531.)
1701
Raymond Hettinger96ef8112003-02-01 00:10:11 +00001702- Added an itertools module containing high speed, memory efficient
1703 looping constructs inspired by tools from Haskell and SML.
1704
Guido van Rossum99d4abf2003-01-27 22:22:50 +00001705- The SSL module now handles sockets with a timeout set correctly (SF
1706 patch #675750, fixing SF bug #675552).
1707
Barry Warsawf8ba39c2003-01-07 20:55:26 +00001708- os/posixmodule has grown the sysexits.h constants (EX_OK and friends).
1709
Guido van Rossum6d0d3652003-01-07 20:34:19 +00001710- Fixed broken threadstate swap in readline that could cause fatal
1711 errors when a readline hook was being invoked while a background
1712 thread was active. (SF bugs #660476 and #513033.)
1713
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001714- fcntl now exposes the strops.h I_* constants.
1715
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00001716- Fix a crash on Solaris that occurred when calling close() on
1717 an mmap'ed file which was already closed. (SF patch #665913)
1718
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001719- Fixed several serious bugs in the zipimport implementation.
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001720
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00001721- datetime changes:
1722
Guido van Rossum8b7a9a32003-04-14 22:01:58 +00001723 The date class is now properly subclassable. (SF bug #720908)
1724
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00001725 The datetime and datetimetz classes have been collapsed into a single
1726 datetime class, and likewise the time and timetz classes into a single
1727 time class. Previously, a datetimetz object with tzinfo=None acted
1728 exactly like a datetime object, and similarly for timetz. This wasn't
1729 enough of a difference to justify distinct classes, and life is simpler
1730 now.
1731
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00001732 today() and now() now round system timestamps to the closest
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00001733 microsecond <http://www.python.org/sf/661086>. This repairs an
1734 irritation most likely seen on Windows systems.
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00001735
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00001736 In dt.astimezone(tz), if tz.utcoffset(dt) returns a duration,
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00001737 ValueError is raised if tz.dst(dt) returns None (2.3a1 treated it
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00001738 as 0 instead, but a tzinfo subclass wishing to participate in
1739 time zone conversion has to take a stand on whether it supports
1740 DST; if you don't care about DST, then code dst() to return 0 minutes,
1741 meaning that DST is never in effect).
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00001742
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00001743 The tzinfo methods utcoffset() and dst() must return a timedelta object
1744 (or None) now. In 2.3a1 they could also return an int or long, but that
1745 was an unhelpfully redundant leftover from an earlier version wherein
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00001746 they couldn't return a timedelta. TOOWTDI.
1747
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00001748 The example tzinfo class for local time had a bug. It was replaced
1749 by a later example coded by Guido.
1750
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00001751 datetime.astimezone(tz) no longer raises an exception when the
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00001752 input datetime has no UTC equivalent in tz. For typical "hybrid" time
1753 zones (a single tzinfo subclass modeling both standard and daylight
1754 time), this case can arise one hour per year, at the hour daylight time
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00001755 ends. See new docs for details. In short, the new behavior mimics
1756 the local wall clock's behavior of repeating an hour in local time.
1757
1758 dt.astimezone() can no longer be used to convert between naive and aware
1759 datetime objects. If you merely want to attach, or remove, a tzinfo
1760 object, without any conversion of date and time members, use
1761 dt.replace(tzinfo=whatever) instead, where "whatever" is None or a
1762 tzinfo subclass instance.
1763
1764 A new method tzinfo.fromutc(dt) can be overridden in tzinfo subclasses
1765 to give complete control over how a UTC time is to be converted to
1766 a local time. The default astimezone() implementation calls fromutc()
1767 as its last step, so a tzinfo subclass can affect that too by overriding
1768 fromutc(). It's expected that the default fromutc() implementation will
1769 be suitable as-is for "almost all" time zone subclasses, but the
1770 creativity of political time zone fiddling appears unbounded -- fromutc()
1771 allows the highly motivated to emulate any scheme expressible in Python.
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00001772
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00001773 datetime.now(): The optional tzinfo argument was undocumented (that's
1774 repaired), and its name was changed to tz ("tzinfo" is overloaded enough
1775 already). With a tz argument, now(tz) used to return the local date
1776 and time, and attach tz to it, without any conversion of date and time
1777 members. This was less than useful. Now now(tz) returns the current
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001778 date and time as local time in tz's time zone, akin to ::
1779
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00001780 tz.fromutc(datetime.utcnow().replace(tzinfo=utc))
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001781
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00001782 where "utc" is an instance of a tzinfo subclass modeling UTC. Without
1783 a tz argument, now() continues to return the current local date and time,
1784 as a naive datetime object.
1785
Tim Peters2a44a8d2003-01-23 20:53:10 +00001786 datetime.fromtimestamp(): Like datetime.now() above, this had less than
1787 useful behavior when the optional tinzo argument was specified. See
1788 also SF bug report <http://www.python.org/sf/660872>.
1789
Tim Peters8d81a012003-01-24 22:36:34 +00001790 date and datetime comparison: In order to prevent comparison from
1791 falling back to the default compare-object-addresses strategy, these
1792 raised TypeError whenever they didn't understand the other object type.
1793 They still do, except when the other object has a "timetuple" attribute,
1794 in which case they return NotImplemented now. This gives other
1795 datetime objects (e.g., mxDateTime) a chance to intercept the
1796 comparison.
1797
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00001798 date, time, datetime and timedelta comparison: When the exception
1799 for mixed-type comparisons in the last paragraph doesn't apply, if
1800 the comparison is == then False is returned, and if the comparison is
1801 != then True is returned. Because dict lookup and the "in" operator
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001802 only invoke __eq__, this allows, for example, ::
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00001803
1804 if some_datetime in some_sequence:
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001805
1806 and ::
1807
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00001808 some_dict[some_timedelta] = whatever
1809
1810 to work as expected, without raising TypeError just because the
1811 sequence is heterogeneous, or the dict has mixed-type keys. [This
1812 seems like a good idea to implement for all mixed-type comparisons
1813 that don't want to allow falling back to address comparison.]
1814
Tim Peters75a6e3b2003-01-04 18:17:36 +00001815 The constructors building a datetime from a timestamp could raise
1816 ValueError if the platform C localtime()/gmtime() inserted "leap
1817 seconds". Leap seconds are ignored now. On such platforms, it's
1818 possible to have timestamps that differ by a second, yet where
1819 datetimes constructed from them are equal.
1820
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00001821 The pickle format of date, time and datetime objects has changed
1822 completely. The undocumented pickler and unpickler functions no
Tim Petersb57f8f02003-02-01 02:54:15 +00001823 longer exist. The undocumented __setstate__() and __getstate__()
1824 methods no longer exist either.
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00001825
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001826Library
1827-------
1828
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001829- The logging module was updated slightly; the WARN level was renamed
1830 to WARNING, and the matching function/method warn() to warning().
1831
1832- The pickle and cPickle modules were updated with a new pickling
1833 protocol (documented by pickletools.py, see below) and several
1834 extensions to the pickle customization API (__reduce__, __setstate__
1835 etc.). The copy module now uses more of the pickle customization
1836 API to copy objects that don't implement __copy__ or __deepcopy__.
1837 See PEP 307 for details.
1838
1839- The distutils "register" command now uses http://www.python.org/pypi
1840 as the default repository. (See PEP 301.)
1841
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00001842- the platform dependent path related variables sep, altsep, extsep,
1843 pathsep, curdir, pardir and defpath are now defined in the platform
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00001844 dependent path modules (e.g. ntpath.py) rather than os.py, so these
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001845 variables are now available via os.path. They continue to be
1846 available from the os module.
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00001847 (see <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00001848
Tim Peters6ee04802003-02-05 18:29:34 +00001849- array.array was added to the types repr.py knows about (see
1850 <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
1851
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00001852- The new pickletools.py contains lots of documentation about pickle
1853 internals, and supplies some helpers for working with pickles, such as
1854 a symbolic pickle disassembler.
1855
Skip Montanaro9a7c96a2003-01-22 18:17:25 +00001856- Xmlrpclib.py now supports the builtin boolean type.
1857
Martin v. Löwis0c6774d2003-01-15 11:51:06 +00001858- py_compile has a new 'doraise' flag and a new PyCompileError
1859 exception.
1860
Martin v. Löwisd69663d2003-01-15 11:37:23 +00001861- SimpleXMLRPCServer now supports CGI through the CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler
1862 class.
1863
Guido van Rossum50e92232003-01-14 16:45:04 +00001864- The sets module now raises TypeError in __cmp__, to clarify that
1865 sets are not intended to be three-way-compared; the comparison
1866 operators are overloaded as subset/superset tests.
1867
Guido van Rossumcd0c0472003-01-07 23:03:05 +00001868- Bastion.py and rexec.py are disabled. These modules are not safe in
1869 Python 2.2. or 2.3.
1870
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001871- realpath is now exported when doing ``from poxixpath import *``.
Neal Norwitzbb0246a2003-01-03 18:12:28 +00001872 It is also exported for ntpath, macpath, and os2emxpath.
1873 See SF bug #659228.
1874
Neal Norwitzb9ef4ae2003-01-05 23:19:43 +00001875- New module tarfile from Lars Gustäbel provides a comprehensive interface
1876 to tar archive files with transparent gzip and bzip2 compression.
1877 See SF patch #651082.
1878
Neal Norwitz4f442372003-01-06 06:51:36 +00001879- urlparse can now parse imap:// URLs. See SF feature request #618024.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001880
Neal Norwitze931ed52003-01-10 23:24:32 +00001881- Tkinter.Canvas.scan_dragto() provides an optional parameter to support
1882 the gain value which is passed to Tk. SF bug# 602259.
1883
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00001884- Fix logging.handlers.SysLogHandler protocol when using UNIX domain sockets.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00001885 See SF patch #642974.
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00001886
Skip Montanaro12fe72e2003-02-25 17:46:20 +00001887- The dospath module was deleted. Use the ntpath module when manipulating
1888 DOS paths from other platforms.
1889
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001890Tools/Demos
1891-----------
1892
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00001893- Two new scripts (db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py) were added to the
1894 Tools/scripts directory to facilitate conversion from the old bsddb module
1895 to the new one. While the user-visible API of the new module is
1896 compatible with the old one, it's likely that the version of the
1897 underlying database library has changed. To convert from the old library,
1898 run the db2pickle.py script using the old version of Python to convert it
1899 to a pickle file. After upgrading Python, run the pickle2db.py script
1900 using the new version of Python to reconstitute your database. For
1901 example:
1902
Skip Montanaro621f0552003-02-03 15:48:10 +00001903 % python2.2 db2pickle.py -h some.db > some.pickle
1904 % python2.3 pickle2db.py -h some.db.new < some.pickle
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00001905
1906 Run the scripts without any args to get a usage message.
1907
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001908
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001909Build
1910-----
1911
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00001912- The audio driver tests (test_ossaudiodev.py and
1913 test_linuxaudiodev.py) are no longer run by default. This is
1914 because they don't always work, depending on your hardware and
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001915 software. To run these tests, you must use an invocation like ::
1916
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00001917 ./python Lib/test/regrtest.py -u audio test_ossaudiodev
1918
Skip Montanarodecc6a42003-01-01 20:07:49 +00001919- On systems which build using the configure script, compiler flags which
1920 used to be lumped together using the OPT flag have been split into two
1921 groups, OPT and BASECFLAGS. OPT is meant to carry just optimization- and
1922 debug-related flags like "-g" and "-O3". BASECFLAGS is meant to carry
1923 compiler flags that are required to get a clean compile. On some
1924 platforms (many Linux flavors in particular) BASECFLAGS will be empty by
1925 default. On others, such as Mac OS X and SCO, it will contain required
1926 flags. This change allows people building Python to override OPT without
1927 fear of clobbering compiler flags which are required to get a clean build.
1928
1929- On Darwin/Mac OS X platforms, /sw/lib and /sw/include are added to the
1930 relevant search lists in setup.py. This allows users building Python to
1931 take advantage of the many packages available from the fink project
1932 <http://fink.sf.net/>.
1933
1934- A new Makefile target, scriptsinstall, installs a number of useful scripts
1935 from the Tools/scripts directory.
1936
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001937C API
1938-----
1939
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001940- PyEval_GetFrame() is now declared to return a ``PyFrameObject *``
1941 instead of a plain ``PyObject *``. (SF patch #686601.)
Guido van Rossum6297a7a2003-02-19 15:53:17 +00001942
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00001943- PyNumber_Check() now checks that the object has a nb_int or nb_float
1944 slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
1945 tp_as_number pointer.
1946
Guido van Rossumeea47182003-02-11 20:39:59 +00001947- A C type that inherits from a base type that defines tp_as_buffer
1948 will now inherit the tp_as_buffer pointer if it doesn't define one.
1949 (SF #681367)
1950
Neil Schemenauer5042da62003-02-04 20:59:40 +00001951- The PyArg_Parse functions now issue a DeprecationWarning if a float
1952 argument is provided when an integer is specified (this affects the 'b',
1953 'B', 'h', 'H', 'i', and 'l' codes). Future versions of Python will
1954 raise a TypeError.
Neil Schemenauercd63e612003-01-24 22:15:53 +00001955
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001956Tests
1957-----
1958
Walter Dörwald11cfbd62003-03-26 16:03:16 +00001959- Several tests weren't being run from regrtest.py (test_timeout.py,
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001960 test_tarfile.py, test_netrc.py, test_multifile.py,
1961 test_importhooks.py and test_imp.py). Now they are. (Note to
1962 developers: please read Lib/test/README when creating a new test, to
1963 make sure to do it right! All tests need to use either unittest or
1964 pydoc.)
1965
1966- Added test_posix.py, a test suite for the posix module.
1967
1968- Added test_hexoct.py, a test suite for hex/oct constant folding.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001969
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001970Windows
1971-------
1972
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00001973- The timeout code for socket connect() didn't work right; this has
1974 now been fixed. test_timeout.py should pass (at least most of the
1975 time).
1976
Thomas Hellerdda583d2003-01-31 20:45:41 +00001977- distutils' msvccompiler class now passes the preprocessor options to
1978 the resource compiler. See SF patch #669198.
1979
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00001980- The bsddb module now ships with Sleepycat's 4.1.25.NC, the latest
1981 release without strong cryptography.
1982
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00001983- sys.path[0], if it contains a directory name, is now always an
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001984 absolute pathname. (SF patch #664376.)
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00001985
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00001986- The new logging package is now installed by the Windows installer. It
1987 wasn't in 2.3a1 due to oversight.
1988
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001989Mac
1990---
1991
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00001992- There are new dialogs EasyDialogs.AskFileForOpen, AskFileForSave
1993 and AskFolder. The old macfs.StandardGetFile and friends are deprecated.
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00001994
Jack Jansenc9296362003-02-06 23:10:45 +00001995- Most of the standard library now uses pathnames or FSRefs in preference
1996 of FSSpecs, and use the underlying Carbon.File and Carbon.Folder modules
1997 in stead of macfs. macfs will probably be deprecated in the future.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00001998
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00001999- Type Carbon.File.FSCatalogInfo and supporting methods have been implemented.
2000 This also makes macfs.FSSpec.SetDates() work again.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002001
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00002002- There is a new module pimp, the package install manager for Python, and
2003 accompanying applet PackageManager. These allow you to easily download
2004 and install pretested extension packages either in source or binary
2005 form. Only in MacPython-OSX.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002006
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00002007- Applets are now built with bundlebuilder in MacPython-OSX, which should make
Jack Jansen5d44b342003-02-18 23:32:47 +00002008 them more robust and also provides a path towards BuildApplication. The
2009 downside of this change is that applets can no longer be run from the
2010 Terminal window, this will hopefully be fixed in the 2.3b1.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002011
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002012
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002013What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 1?
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002014=================================
2015
Guido van Rossumae548862002-12-31 15:47:36 +00002016*Release date: 31-Dec-2002*
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002017
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002018Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002019--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00002020
Michael W. Hudson96bc3b42002-11-26 14:48:23 +00002021- One can now assign to __bases__ and __name__ of new-style classes.
2022
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00002023- dict() now accepts keyword arguments so that dict(one=1, two=2)
2024 is the equivalent of {"one": 1, "two": 2}. Accordingly,
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00002025 the existing (but undocumented) 'items' keyword argument has
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00002026 been eliminated. This means that dict(items=someMapping) now has
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00002027 a different meaning than before.
2028
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00002029- int() now returns a long object if the argument is outside the
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002030 integer range, so int("4" * 1000), int(1e200) and int(1L<<1000) will
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00002031 all return long objects instead of raising an OverflowError.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002032
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00002033- Assignment to __class__ is disallowed if either the old or the new
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00002034 class is a statically allocated type object (such as defined by an
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00002035 extension module). This prevents anomalies like 2.__class__ = bool.
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00002036
2037- New-style object creation and deallocation have been sped up
2038 significantly; they are now faster than classic instance creation
2039 and deallocation.
2040
2041- The __slots__ variable can now mention "private" names, and the
2042 right thing will happen (e.g. __slots__ = ["__foo"]).
2043
2044- The built-ins slice() and buffer() are now callable types. The
2045 types classobj (formerly class), code, function, instance, and
2046 instancemethod (formerly instance-method), which have no built-in
2047 names but are accessible through the types module, are now also
2048 callable. The type dict-proxy is renamed to dictproxy.
2049
2050- Cycles going through the __class__ link of a new-style instance are
2051 now detected by the garbage collector.
2052
2053- Classes using __slots__ are now properly garbage collected.
2054 [SF bug 519621]
2055
2056- Tightened the __slots__ rules: a slot name must be a valid Python
2057 identifier.
2058
2059- The constructor for the module type now requires a name argument and
2060 takes an optional docstring argument. Previously, this constructor
2061 ignored its arguments. As a consequence, deriving a class from a
2062 module (not from the module type) is now illegal; previously this
2063 created an unnamed module, just like invoking the module type did.
2064 [SF bug 563060]
2065
2066- A new type object, 'basestring', is added. This is a common base type
2067 for 'str' and 'unicode', and can be used instead of
2068 types.StringTypes, e.g. to test whether something is "a string":
2069 isinstance(x, basestring) is True for Unicode and 8-bit strings. This
2070 is an abstract base class and cannot be instantiated directly.
2071
2072- Changed new-style class instantiation so that when C's __new__
2073 method returns something that's not a C instance, its __init__ is
2074 not called. [SF bug #537450]
2075
2076- Fixed super() to work correctly with class methods. [SF bug #535444]
2077
2078- If you try to pickle an instance of a class that has __slots__ but
2079 doesn't define or override __getstate__, a TypeError is now raised.
2080 This is done by adding a bozo __getstate__ to the class that always
2081 raises TypeError. (Before, this would appear to be pickled, but the
2082 state of the slots would be lost.)
2083
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002084Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002085-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002086
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00002087- Import from zipfiles is now supported. The name of a zipfile placed
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00002088 on sys.path causes the import statement to look for importable Python
2089 modules (with .py, pyc and .pyo extensions) and packages inside the
2090 zipfile. The zipfile import follows the specification (though not
2091 the sample implementation) of PEP 273. The semantics of __path__ are
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00002092 compatible with those that have been implemented in Jython since
2093 Jython 2.1.
2094
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002095- PEP 302 has been accepted. Although it was initially developed to
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00002096 support zipimport, it offers a new, general import hook mechanism.
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00002097 Several new variables have been added to the sys module:
2098 sys.meta_path, sys.path_hooks, and sys.path_importer_cache; these
2099 make extending the import statement much more convenient than
2100 overriding the __import__ built-in function. For a description of
2101 these, see PEP 302.
2102
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00002103- A frame object's f_lineno attribute can now be written to from a
2104 trace function to change which line will execute next. A command to
2105 exploit this from pdb has been added. [SF patch #643835]
2106
Marc-André Lemburg20b91352002-12-12 18:01:43 +00002107- The _codecs support module for codecs.py was turned into a builtin
2108 module to assure that at least the builtin codecs are available
2109 to the Python parser for source code decoding according to PEP 263.
2110
Walter Dörwaldd9a6ad32002-12-12 16:41:44 +00002111- issubclass now supports a tuple as the second argument, just like
2112 isinstance does. ``issubclass(X, (A, B))`` is equivalent to
2113 ``issubclass(X, A) or issubclass(X, B)``.
2114
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00002115- Thanks to Armin Rigo, the last known way to provoke a system crash
2116 by cleverly arranging for a comparison function to mutate a list
2117 during a list.sort() operation has been fixed. The effect of
2118 attempting to mutate a list, or even to inspect its contents or
2119 length, while a sort is in progress, is not defined by the language.
2120 The C implementation of Python 2.3 attempts to detect mutations,
2121 and raise ValueError if one occurs, but there's no guarantee that
2122 all mutations will be caught, or that any will be caught across
2123 releases or implementations.
2124
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00002125- Unicode file name processing for Windows (PEP 277) is implemented.
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00002126 All platforms now have an os.path.supports_unicode_filenames attribute,
2127 which is set to True on Windows NT/2000/XP, and False elsewhere.
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00002128
Walter Dörwald3aeb6322002-09-02 13:14:32 +00002129- Codec error handling callbacks (PEP 293) are implemented.
2130 Error handling in unicode.encode or str.decode can now be customized.
2131
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00002132- A subtle change to the semantics of the built-in function intern():
2133 interned strings are no longer immortal. You must keep a reference
2134 to the return value intern() around to get the benefit.
2135
Guido van Rossumf808b892002-08-16 03:38:10 +00002136- Use of 'None' as a variable, argument or attribute name now
2137 issues a SyntaxWarning. In the future, None may become a keyword.
2138
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00002139- SET_LINENO is gone. co_lnotab is now consulted to determine when to
2140 call the trace function. C code that accessed f_lineno should call
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00002141 PyCode_Addr2Line instead (f_lineno is still there, but only kept up
2142 to date when there is a trace function set).
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00002143
Guido van Rossum9be89462002-08-14 16:11:30 +00002144- There's a new warning category, FutureWarning. This is used to warn
2145 about a number of situations where the value or sign of an integer
2146 result will change in Python 2.4 as a result of PEP 237 (integer
2147 unification). The warnings implement stage B0 mentioned in that
2148 PEP. The warnings are about the following situations:
2149
2150 - Octal and hex literals without 'L' prefix in the inclusive range
2151 [0x80000000..0xffffffff]; these are currently negative ints, but
2152 in Python 2.4 they will be positive longs with the same bit
2153 pattern.
2154
2155 - Left shifts on integer values that cause the outcome to lose
2156 bits or have a different sign than the left operand. To be
2157 precise: x<<n where this currently doesn't yield the same value
2158 as long(x)<<n; in Python 2.4, the outcome will be long(x)<<n.
2159
2160 - Conversions from ints to string that show negative values as
2161 unsigned ints in the inclusive range [0x80000000..0xffffffff];
2162 this affects the functions hex() and oct(), and the string
2163 formatting codes %u, %o, %x, and %X. In Python 2.4, these will
2164 show signed values (e.g. hex(-1) currently returns "0xffffffff";
2165 in Python 2.4 it will return "-0x1").
2166
Guido van Rossum9a2eda52002-12-31 02:12:42 +00002167- The bits manipulated under the cover by sys.setcheckinterval() have
2168 been changed. Both the check interval and the ticker used to be
2169 per-thread values. They are now just a pair of global variables.
2170 In addition, the default check interval was boosted from 10 to 100
2171 bytecode instructions. This may have some effect on systems that
2172 relied on the old default value. In particular, in multi-threaded
2173 applications which try to be highly responsive, response time will
2174 increase by some (perhaps imperceptible) amount.
Skip Montanaro979c74b2002-09-03 21:25:14 +00002175
Tim Petersd64c1de2002-08-12 17:36:03 +00002176- When multiplying very large integers, a version of the so-called
2177 Karatsuba algorithm is now used. This is most effective if the
2178 inputs have roughly the same size. If they both have about N digits,
2179 Karatsuba multiplication has O(N**1.58) runtime (the exponent is
2180 log_base_2(3)) instead of the previous O(N**2). Measured results may
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00002181 be better or worse than that, depending on platform quirks. Besides
2182 the O() improvement in raw instruction count, the Karatsuba algorithm
2183 appears to have much better cache behavior on extremely large integers
2184 (starting in the ballpark of a million bits). Note that this is a
2185 simple implementation, and there's no intent here to compete with,
2186 e.g., GMP. It gives a very nice speedup when it applies, but a package
2187 devoted to fast large-integer arithmetic should run circles around it.
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00002188
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00002189- u'%c' will now raise a ValueError in case the argument is an
2190 integer outside the valid range of Unicode code point ordinals.
2191
Guido van Rossumdeb09362002-08-09 17:16:30 +00002192- The tempfile module has been overhauled for enhanced security. The
2193 mktemp() function is now deprecated; new, safe replacements are
2194 mkstemp() (for files) and mkdtemp() (for directories), and the
2195 higher-level functions NamedTemporaryFile() and TemporaryFile().
2196 Use of some global variables in this module is also deprecated; the
2197 new functions have keyword arguments to provide the same
2198 functionality. All Lib, Tools and Demo modules that used the unsafe
2199 interfaces have been updated to use the safe replacements. Thanks
2200 to Zack Weinberg!
2201
Guido van Rossumd81a9832002-08-09 15:57:34 +00002202- When x is an object whose class implements __mul__ and __rmul__,
2203 1.0*x would correctly invoke __rmul__, but 1*x would erroneously
2204 invoke __mul__. This was due to the sequence-repeat code in the int
2205 type. This has been fixed now.
2206
Barry Warsawd79f6832002-08-06 17:01:51 +00002207- Previously, "str1 in str2" required str1 to be a string of length 1.
2208 This restriction has been relaxed to allow str1 to be a string of
2209 any length. Thus "'el' in 'hello world'" returns True now.
2210
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00002211- File objects are now their own iterators. For a file f, iter(f) now
2212 returns f (unless f is closed), and f.next() is similar to
2213 f.readline() when EOF is not reached; however, f.next() uses a
2214 readahead buffer that messes up the file position, so mixing
2215 f.next() and f.readline() (or other methods) doesn't work right.
2216 Calling f.seek() drops the readahead buffer, but other operations
2217 don't. It so happens that this gives a nice additional speed boost
2218 to "for line in file:"; the xreadlines method and corresponding
Guido van Rossumbffb2ef2002-08-09 17:17:07 +00002219 module are now obsolete. Thanks to Oren Tirosh!
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00002220
Guido van Rossumde392d32002-08-05 14:17:20 +00002221- Encoding declarations (PEP 263, phase 1) have been implemented. A
2222 comment of the form "# -*- coding: <encodingname> -*-" in the first
2223 or second line of a Python source file indicates the encoding.
Martin v. Löwis00f1e3f2002-08-04 17:29:52 +00002224
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00002225- list.sort() has a new implementation. While cross-platform results
2226 may vary, and in data-dependent ways, this is much faster on many
2227 kinds of partially ordered lists than the previous implementation,
2228 and reported to be just as fast on randomly ordered lists on
2229 several major platforms. This sort is also stable (if A==B and A
2230 precedes B in the list at the start, A precedes B after the sort too),
2231 although the language definition does not guarantee stability. A
2232 potential drawback is that list.sort() may require temp space of
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00002233 len(list)*2 bytes (``*4`` on a 64-bit machine). It's therefore possible
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00002234 for list.sort() to raise MemoryError now, even if a comparison function
2235 does not. See <http://www.python.org/sf/587076> for full details.
2236
Guido van Rossum2d5389c2002-07-23 03:44:35 +00002237- All standard iterators now ensure that, once StopIteration has been
2238 raised, all future calls to next() on the same iterator will also
2239 raise StopIteration. There used to be various counterexamples to
2240 this behavior, which could caused confusion or subtle program
2241 breakage, without any benefits. (Note that this is still an
2242 iterator's responsibility; the iterator framework does not enforce
2243 this.)
2244
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00002245- Ctrl+C handling on Windows has been made more consistent with
2246 other platforms. KeyboardInterrupt can now reliably be caught,
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00002247 and Ctrl+C at an interactive prompt no longer terminates the
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00002248 process under NT/2k/XP (it never did under Win9x). Ctrl+C will
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00002249 interrupt time.sleep() in the main thread, and any child processes
2250 created via the popen family (on win2k; we can't make win9x work
Mark Hammond8f3afc72002-08-10 06:26:31 +00002251 reliably) are also interrupted (as generally happens on for Linux/Unix.)
2252 [SF bugs 231273, 439992 and 581232]
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00002253
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00002254- sys.getwindowsversion() has been added on Windows. This
2255 returns a tuple with information about the version of Windows
2256 currently running.
2257
Raymond Hettinger5a04aec2002-06-25 00:25:30 +00002258- Slices and repetitions of buffer objects now consistently return
2259 a string. Formerly, strings would be returned most of the time,
2260 but a buffer object would be returned when the repetition count
2261 was one or when the slice range was all inclusive.
2262
Walter Dörwald3430d702002-06-17 10:43:59 +00002263- Unicode objects in sys.path are no longer ignored but treated
2264 as directory names.
2265
Neal Norwitz1f68fc72002-06-14 00:50:42 +00002266- Fixed string.startswith and string.endswith builtin methods
2267 so they accept negative indices. [SF bug 493951]
2268
Guido van Rossumc5fe5eb2002-06-12 03:45:21 +00002269- Fixed a bug with a continue inside a try block and a yield in the
2270 finally clause. [SF bug 567538]
2271
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00002272- Most builtin sequences now support "extended slices", i.e. slices
Guido van Rossum2e82e712002-06-13 11:41:07 +00002273 with a third "stride" parameter. For example, "hello world"[::-1]
2274 gives "dlrow olleh".
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00002275
Neal Norwitzd68f5172002-05-29 15:54:55 +00002276- A new warning PendingDeprecationWarning was added to provide
2277 direction on features which are in the process of being deprecated.
2278 The warning will not be printed by default. To see the pending
2279 deprecations, use -Walways::PendingDeprecationWarning::
2280 as a command line option or warnings.filterwarnings() in code.
2281
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00002282- Deprecated features of xrange objects have been removed as
2283 promised. The start, stop, and step attributes and the tolist()
2284 method no longer exist. xrange repetition and slicing have been
2285 removed.
2286
Guido van Rossum7dab2422002-04-26 19:40:56 +00002287- New builtin function enumerate(x), from PEP 279. Example:
2288 enumerate("abc") is an iterator returning (0,"a"), (1,"b"), (2,"c").
2289 The argument can be an arbitrary iterable object.
2290
Neil Schemenauer89e3ee02002-04-26 01:58:53 +00002291- The assert statement no longer tests __debug__ at runtime. This means
2292 that assert statements cannot be disabled by assigning a false value
2293 to __debug__.
2294
Walter Dörwald068325e2002-04-15 13:36:47 +00002295- A method zfill() was added to str and unicode, that fills a numeric
2296 string to the left with zeros. For example,
2297 "+123".zfill(6) -> "+00123".
2298
Guido van Rossum862fe3c2002-04-15 12:36:47 +00002299- Complex numbers supported divmod() and the // and % operators, but
2300 these make no sense. Since this was documented, they're being
2301 deprecated now.
2302
Guido van Rossum26dd8302002-04-26 20:11:29 +00002303- String and unicode methods lstrip(), rstrip() and strip() now take
2304 an optional argument that specifies the characters to strip. For
2305 example, "Foo!!!?!?!?".rstrip("?!") -> "Foo".
Guido van Rossum49042042002-04-13 00:59:05 +00002306
Guido van Rossumc0d3f4e2002-11-27 13:10:40 +00002307- There's a new dictionary constructor (a class method of the dict
2308 class), dict.fromkeys(iterable, value=None). It constructs a
2309 dictionary with keys taken from the iterable and all values set to a
2310 single value. It can be used for building sets and for removing
2311 duplicates from sequences.
Raymond Hettingere33d3df2002-11-27 07:29:33 +00002312
Guido van Rossumc69343b2002-04-12 19:22:48 +00002313- Added a new dict method pop(key). This removes and returns the
2314 value corresponding to key. [SF patch #539949]
2315
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00002316- A new built-in type, bool, has been added, as well as built-in
2317 names for its two values, True and False. Comparisons and sundry
2318 other operations that return a truth value have been changed to
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002319 return a bool instead. Read PEP 285 for an explanation of why this
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00002320 is backward compatible.
2321
Guido van Rossum95b62a62002-03-29 01:07:24 +00002322- Fixed two bugs reported as SF #535905: under certain conditions,
2323 deallocating a deeply nested structure could cause a segfault in the
2324 garbage collector, due to interaction with the "trashcan" code;
2325 access to the current frame during destruction of a local variable
2326 could access a pointer to freed memory.
2327
Guido van Rossumfe0ca4a2002-06-18 21:20:13 +00002328- The optional object allocator ("pymalloc") has been enabled by
2329 default. The recommended practice for memory allocation and
2330 deallocation has been streamlined. A header file is included,
2331 Misc/pymemcompat.h, which can be bundled with 3rd party extensions
2332 and lets them use the same API with Python versions from 1.5.2
2333 onwards.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00002334
Martin v. Löwiscfeb3b62002-03-03 21:30:27 +00002335- PyErr_Display will provide file and line information for all exceptions
2336 that have an attribute print_file_and_line, not just SyntaxErrors.
2337
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00002338- The UTF-8 codec will now encode and decode Unicode surrogates
2339 correctly and without raising exceptions for unpaired ones.
2340
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00002341- Universal newlines (PEP 278) is implemented. Briefly, using 'U'
2342 instead of 'r' when opening a text file for reading changes the line
2343 ending convention so that any of '\r', '\r\n', and '\n' is
2344 recognized (even mixed in one file); all three are converted to
2345 '\n', the standard Python line end character.
2346
Neal Norwitz649b7592002-01-01 19:07:13 +00002347- file.xreadlines() now raises a ValueError if the file is closed:
2348 Previously, an xreadlines object was returned which would raise
2349 a ValueError when the xreadlines.next() method was called.
2350
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002351- sys.exit() inadvertently allowed more than one argument.
Neal Norwitz0c766a02002-03-27 13:03:09 +00002352 An exception will now be raised if more than one argument is used.
2353
Gustavo Niemeyer17c5a332002-12-16 14:09:22 +00002354- Changed evaluation order of dictionary literals to conform to the
2355 general left to right evaluation order rule. Now {f1(): f2()} will
2356 evaluate f1 first.
Gustavo Niemeyer78429a62002-12-16 13:54:02 +00002357
Gustavo Niemeyer786ddb22002-12-16 18:12:53 +00002358- Fixed bug #521782: when a file was in non-blocking mode, file.read()
2359 could silently lose data or wrongly throw an unknown error.
2360
Neil Schemenauerb983aa02002-12-30 20:22:23 +00002361- The sq_repeat, sq_inplace_repeat, sq_concat and sq_inplace_concat
2362 slots are now always tried after trying the corresponding nb_* slots.
2363 This fixes a number of minor bugs (see bug #624807).
2364
Neal Norwitz74a032e2003-01-10 23:29:48 +00002365- Fix problem with dynamic loading on 64-bit AIX (see bug #639945).
2366
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002367Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002368-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002369
Raymond Hettinger9543b342003-01-18 23:22:20 +00002370- Added three operators to the operator module:
2371 operator.pow(a,b) which is equivalent to: a**b.
2372 operator.is_(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is b.
2373 operator.is_not(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is not b.
2374
Martin v. Löwis24a880b2002-12-31 12:55:15 +00002375- posix.openpty now works on all systems that have /dev/ptmx.
2376
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00002377- A module zipimport exists to support importing code from zip
2378 archives.
2379
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00002380- The new datetime module supplies classes for manipulating dates and
2381 times. The basic design came from the Zope "fishbowl process", and
2382 favors practical commercial applications over calendar esoterica. See
2383
2384 http://www.zope.org/Members/fdrake/DateTimeWiki/FrontPage
2385
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00002386- _tkinter now returns Tcl objects, instead of strings. Objects which
2387 have Python equivalents are converted to Python objects, other objects
2388 are wrapped. This can be configured through the wantobjects method,
Martin v. Löwis8c8aa5d2002-11-26 21:39:48 +00002389 or Tkinter.wantobjects.
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00002390
Barry Warsawc27f4bd2002-12-30 21:03:26 +00002391- The PyBSDDB wrapper around the Sleepycat Berkeley DB library has
2392 been added as the package bsddb. The traditional bsddb module is
2393 still available in source code, but not built automatically anymore,
2394 and is now named bsddb185. This supports Berkeley DB versions from
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00002395 3.0 to 4.1. For help converting your databases from the old module (which
2396 probably used an obsolete version of Berkeley DB) to the new module, see
2397 the db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py scripts described in the Tools/Demos
2398 section above.
Martin v. Löwisef546b32002-11-19 08:12:57 +00002399
Martin v. Löwis677bde22002-11-23 22:08:15 +00002400- unicodedata was updated to Unicode 3.2. It supports normalization
2401 and names for Hangul syllables and CJK unified ideographs.
Martin v. Löwis7d41e292002-11-23 12:22:32 +00002402
Neal Norwitz94a83fd2002-11-02 17:46:24 +00002403- resource.getrlimit() now returns longs instead of ints.
2404
Martin v. Löwis080689c2002-10-26 14:42:02 +00002405- readline now dynamically adjusts its input/output stream if
2406 sys.stdin/stdout changes.
2407
Guido van Rossumba602972002-10-01 18:18:58 +00002408- The _tkinter module (and hence Tkinter) has dropped support for
2409 Tcl/Tk 8.0 and 8.1. Only Tcl/Tk versions 8.2, 8.3 and 8.4 are
2410 supported.
2411
Martin v. Löwis658009a2002-09-16 17:26:24 +00002412- cPickle.BadPickleGet is now a class.
2413
Martin v. Löwisa19bfe02002-10-16 18:28:36 +00002414- The time stamps in os.stat_result are floating point numbers
2415 after stat_float_times has been called.
Martin v. Löwis94717ed2002-09-09 14:24:16 +00002416
Neal Norwitzb5673922002-09-05 21:48:07 +00002417- If the size passed to mmap.mmap() is larger than the length of the
2418 file on non-Windows platforms, a ValueError is raised. [SF bug 585792]
2419
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00002420- The xreadlines module is slated for obsolescence.
2421
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00002422- The strptime function in the time module is now always available (a
2423 Python implementation is used when the C library doesn't define it).
2424
Guido van Rossum9562bcf2002-06-14 21:31:18 +00002425- The 'new' module is no longer an extension, but a Python module that
2426 only exists for backwards compatibility. Its contents are no longer
2427 functions but callable type objects.
2428
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00002429- The bsddb.*open functions can now take 'None' as a filename.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00002430 This will create a temporary in-memory bsddb that won't be
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00002431 written to disk.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00002432
Martin v. Löwisb96152c2002-12-31 13:20:15 +00002433- posix.getloadavg, posix.lchown, posix.killpg, posix.mknod, and
2434 posix.getpgid have been added where available.
Martin v. Löwis06a83e92002-04-14 10:19:44 +00002435
Martin v. Löwisf0a46682002-11-03 17:20:12 +00002436- The locale module now exposes the C library's gettext interface. It
2437 also has a new function getpreferredencoding.
Martin v. Löwis2e64c342002-03-27 18:49:02 +00002438
Tim Petersfbf74f22002-03-14 19:06:01 +00002439- A security hole ("double free") was found in zlib-1.1.3, a popular
2440 third party compression library used by some Python modules. The
2441 hole was quickly plugged in zlib-1.1.4, and the Windows build of
2442 Python now ships with zlib-1.1.4.
2443
Martin v. Löwis688357e2002-04-08 21:28:20 +00002444- pwd, grp, and resource return enhanced tuples now, with symbolic
2445 field names.
Martin v. Löwis29001ff2002-03-01 10:47:37 +00002446
Martin v. Löwis99866332002-03-01 10:27:01 +00002447- array.array is now a type object. A new format character
2448 'u' indicates Py_UNICODE arrays. For those, .tounicode and
2449 .fromunicode methods are available. Arrays now support __iadd__
2450 and __imul__.
2451
Neal Norwitze790eae2002-01-01 21:14:12 +00002452- dl now builds on every system that has dlfcn.h. Failure in case
Martin v. Löwis93227272002-01-01 20:18:30 +00002453 of sizeof(int)!=sizeof(long)!=sizeof(void*) is delayed until dl.open
2454 is called.
2455
Skip Montanaro8e790e72002-09-03 13:25:17 +00002456- The sys module acquired a new attribute, api_version, which evaluates
2457 to the value of the PYTHON_API_VERSION macro with which the
2458 interpreter was compiled.
2459
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00002460- Fixed bug #470582: sre module would return a tuple (None, 'a', 'ab')
2461 when applying the regular expression '^((a)c)?(ab)$' on 'ab'. It now
2462 returns (None, None, 'ab'), as expected. Also fixed handling of
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00002463 lastindex/lastgroup match attributes in similar cases. For example,
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00002464 when running the expression r'(a)(b)?b' over 'ab', lastindex must be
2465 1, not 2.
2466
Gustavo Niemeyerc523b042002-11-07 03:28:56 +00002467- Fixed bug #581080: sre scanner was not checking the buffer limit
2468 before increasing the current pointer. This was creating an infinite
2469 loop in the search function, once the pointer exceeded the buffer
2470 limit.
2471
Thomas Heller95cb7e42002-11-07 16:23:55 +00002472- The os.fdopen function now enforces a file mode starting with the
2473 letter 'r', 'w' or 'a', otherwise a ValueError is raised. This fixes
2474 bug #623464.
2475
Greg Ward6c58d462003-01-03 18:02:15 +00002476- The linuxaudiodev module is now deprecated; it is being replaced by
2477 ossaudiodev. The interface has been extended to cover a lot more of
2478 OSS (see www.opensound.com), including most DSP ioctls and the
2479 OSS mixer API. Documentation forthcoming in 2.3a2.
2480
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002481Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002482-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002483
Guido van Rossum747f8062003-01-03 16:33:49 +00002484- imaplib.py now supports SSL (Tino Lange and Piers Lauder).
2485
Just van Rossum5e156ad2002-12-31 16:38:01 +00002486- Freeze's modulefinder.py has been moved to the standard library;
2487 slightly improved so it will issue less false missing submodule
2488 reports (see sf path #643711 for details). Documentation will follow
2489 with Python 2.3a2.
2490
Martin v. Löwis96a60e42002-12-31 13:11:54 +00002491- os.path exposes getctime.
2492
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002493- unittest.py now has two additional methods called assertAlmostEqual()
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002494 and failIfAlmostEqual(). They implement an approximate comparison
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002495 by rounding the difference between the two arguments and comparing
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002496 the result to zero. Approximate comparison is essential for
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002497 unit tests of floating point results.
2498
Raymond Hettingere11b5102002-12-25 16:37:19 +00002499- calendar.py now depends on the new datetime module rather than
2500 the time module. As a result, the range of allowable dates
2501 has been increased.
2502
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00002503- pdb has a new 'j(ump)' command to select the next line to be
2504 executed.
2505
Thomas Heller1b3b49d2002-12-12 19:13:44 +00002506- The distutils created windows installers now can run a
2507 postinstallation script.
2508
Martin v. Löwis4581cfa2002-11-22 08:23:09 +00002509- doctest.testmod can now be called without argument, which means to
2510 test the current module.
2511
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002512- When canceling a server that implemented threading with a keyboard
Martin v. Löwisf86e8ef2002-11-22 08:08:44 +00002513 interrupt, the server would shut down but not terminate (waiting on
2514 client threads). A new member variable, daemon_threads, was added to
2515 the ThreadingMixIn class in SocketServer.py to make it explicit that
2516 this behavior needs to be controlled.
2517
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00002518- A new module, optparse, provides a fancy alternative to getopt for
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00002519 command line parsing. It is a slightly modified version of Greg
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00002520 Ward's Optik package.
2521
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00002522- UserDict.py now defines a DictMixin class which defines all dictionary
2523 methods for classes that already have a minimum mapping interface.
2524 This greatly simplifies writing classes that need to be substitutable
2525 for dictionaries (such as the shelve module).
2526
2527- shelve.py now subclasses from UserDict.DictMixin. Now shelve supports
2528 all dictionary methods. This eases the transition to persistent
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00002529 storage for scripts originally written with dictionaries in mind.
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00002530
Skip Montanaro3bf99e32002-12-08 18:36:24 +00002531- shelve.open and the various classes in shelve.py now accept an optional
2532 binary flag, which defaults to False. If True, the values stored in the
2533 shelf are binary pickles.
2534
Guido van Rossumfda06742002-11-13 16:29:18 +00002535- A new package, logging, implements the logging API defined by PEP
2536 282. The code is written by Vinay Sajip.
2537
Walter Dörwald4dbf1922002-11-06 16:53:44 +00002538- StreamReader, StreamReaderWriter and StreamRecoder in the codecs
2539 modules are iterators now.
2540
Tim Peters9288f952002-11-05 20:38:55 +00002541- gzip.py now handles files exceeding 2GB. Files over 4GB also work
2542 now (provided the OS supports it, and Python is configured with large
2543 file support), but in that case the underlying gzip file format can
2544 record only the least-significant 32 bits of the file size, so that
2545 some tools working with gzipped files may report an incorrect file
2546 size.
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00002547
Martin v. Löwis74b51ac2002-10-26 14:50:45 +00002548- xml.sax.saxutils.unescape has been added, to replace entity references
2549 with their entity value.
2550
Martin v. Löwis77ac4292002-10-15 15:11:13 +00002551- Queue.Queue.{put,get} now support an optional timeout argument.
2552
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00002553- Various features of Tk 8.4 are exposed in Tkinter.py. The multiple
2554 option of tkFileDialog is exposed as function askopenfile{,name}s.
Martin v. Löwis2ec36272002-10-13 10:22:08 +00002555
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00002556- Various configure methods of Tkinter have been stream-lined, so that
2557 tag_configure, image_configure, window_configure now return a
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00002558 dictionary when invoked with no argument.
Martin v. Löwis6ce13152002-10-10 14:36:13 +00002559
Guido van Rossum2b492b62002-10-09 21:40:48 +00002560- Importing the readline module now no longer has the side effect of
2561 calling setlocale(LC_CTYPE, ""). The initial "C" locale, or
2562 whatever locale is explicitly set by the user, is preserved. If you
2563 want repr() of 8-bit strings in your preferred encoding to preserve
2564 all printable characters of that encoding, you have to add the
2565 following code to your $PYTHONSTARTUP file or to your application's
2566 main():
2567
2568 import locale
2569 locale.setlocale(locale.LC_CTYPE, "")
2570
Martin v. Löwise9ce0b02002-10-07 13:23:24 +00002571- shutil.move was added. shutil.copytree now reports errors as an
2572 exception at the end, instead of printing error messages.
2573
Marc-André Lemburg97047e22002-10-04 11:55:21 +00002574- Encoding name normalization was generalized to not only
2575 replace hyphens with underscores, but also all other non-alphanumeric
2576 characters (with the exception of the dot which is used for Python
2577 package names during lookup). The aliases.py mapping was updated
2578 to the new standard.
2579
Walter Dörwald5ccaf8f2002-09-06 16:15:58 +00002580- mimetypes has two new functions: guess_all_extensions() which
2581 returns a list of all known extensions for a mime type, and
2582 add_type() which adds one mapping between a mime type and
2583 an extension to the database.
2584
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00002585- New module: sets, defines the class Set that implements a mutable
2586 set type using the keys of a dict to represent the set. There's
2587 also a class ImmutableSet which is useful when you need sets of sets
2588 or when you need to use sets as dict keys, and a class BaseSet which
Raymond Hettingeref8b9c62002-12-09 08:56:06 +00002589 is the base class of the two.
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00002590
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00002591- Added random.sample(population,k) for random sampling without replacement.
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00002592 Returns a k length list of unique elements chosen from the population.
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00002593
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00002594- random.randrange(-sys.maxint-1, sys.maxint) no longer raises
2595 OverflowError. That is, it now accepts any combination of 'start'
2596 and 'stop' arguments so long as each is in the range of Python's
2597 bounded integers.
2598
Raymond Hettinger40f62172002-12-29 23:03:38 +00002599- Thanks to Raymond Hettinger, random.random() now uses a new core
2600 generator. The Mersenne Twister algorithm is implemented in C,
2601 threadsafe, faster than the previous generator, has an astronomically
2602 large period (2**19937-1), creates random floats to full 53-bit
2603 precision, and may be the most widely tested random number generator
2604 in existence.
2605
2606 The random.jumpahead(n) method has different semantics for the new
2607 generator. Instead of jumping n steps ahead, it uses n and the
2608 existing state to create a new state. This means that jumpahead()
2609 continues to support multi-threaded code needing generators of
2610 non-overlapping sequences. However, it will break code which relies
2611 on jumpahead moving a specific number of steps forward.
2612
2613 The attributes random.whseed and random.__whseed have no meaning for
2614 the new generator. Code using these attributes should switch to a
2615 new class, random.WichmannHill which is provided for backward
2616 compatibility and to make an alternate generator available.
2617
Guido van Rossum4a57c332002-08-02 18:05:20 +00002618- New "algorithms" module: heapq, implements a heap queue. Thanks to
2619 Kevin O'Connor for the code and François Pinard for an entertaining
2620 write-up explaining the theory and practical uses of heaps.
2621
Marc-André Lemburg58e2ff22002-07-12 14:40:04 +00002622- New encoding for the Palm OS character set: palmos.
2623
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00002624- binascii.crc32() and the zipfile module had problems on some 64-bit
2625 platforms. These have been fixed. On a platform with 8-byte C longs,
2626 crc32() now returns a signed-extended 4-byte result, so that its value
2627 as a Python int is equal to the value computed a 32-bit platform.
2628
Martin v. Löwis7d650ca2002-06-30 15:05:00 +00002629- xml.dom.minidom.toxml and toprettyxml now take an optional encoding
2630 argument.
2631
Guido van Rossum9f7549b2002-06-10 21:39:42 +00002632- Some fixes in the copy module: when an object is copied through its
2633 __reduce__ method, there was no check for a __setstate__ method on
2634 the result [SF patch 565085]; deepcopy should treat instances of
2635 custom metaclasses the same way it treats instances of type 'type'
2636 [SF patch 560794].
2637
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00002638- Sockets now support timeout mode. After s.settimeout(T), where T is
2639 a float expressing seconds, subsequent operations raise an exception
2640 if they cannot be completed within T seconds. To disable timeout
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00002641 mode, use s.settimeout(None). There's also a module function,
2642 socket.setdefaulttimeout(T), which sets the default for all sockets
2643 created henceforth.
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00002644
2645- getopt.gnu_getopt was added. This supports GNU-style option
2646 processing, where options can be mixed with non-option arguments.
Martin v. Löwis446a25f2002-06-06 10:58:36 +00002647
Michael W. Hudsonb0dc1a32002-06-04 18:27:35 +00002648- Stop using strings for exceptions. String objects used for
2649 exceptions are now classes deriving from Exception. The objects
2650 changed were: Tkinter.TclError, bdb.BdbQuit, macpath.norm_error,
2651 tabnanny.NannyNag, and xdrlib.Error.
Neal Norwitzb5b5a262002-06-04 17:14:07 +00002652
Walter Dörwald474458d2002-06-04 15:16:29 +00002653- Constants BOM_UTF8, BOM_UTF16, BOM_UTF16_LE, BOM_UTF16_BE,
2654 BOM_UTF32, BOM_UTF32_LE and BOM_UTF32_BE that represent the Byte
2655 Order Mark in UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 encodings for little and
2656 big endian systems were added to the codecs module. The old names
2657 BOM32_* and BOM64_* were off by a factor of 2.
2658
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00002659- Added conversion functions math.degrees() and math.radians().
Raymond Hettinger87f59ee2002-05-13 04:17:32 +00002660
Raymond Hettinger866964c2002-12-14 19:51:34 +00002661- math.log() now takes an optional argument: math.log(x[, base]).
2662
Raymond Hettinger9b1df1d2002-05-12 06:07:21 +00002663- ftplib.retrlines() now tests for callback is None rather than testing
2664 for False. Was causing an error when given a callback object which
2665 was callable but also returned len() as zero. The change may
2666 create new breakage if the caller relied on the undocumented behavior
2667 and called with callback set to [] or some other False value not
2668 identical to None.
2669
Tim Peters46c04e12002-05-05 20:40:00 +00002670- random.gauss() uses a piece of hidden state used by nothing else,
2671 and the .seed() and .whseed() methods failed to reset it. In other
2672 words, setting the seed didn't completely determine the sequence of
2673 results produced by random.gauss(). It does now. Programs repeatedly
2674 mixing calls to a seed method with calls to gauss() may see different
2675 results now.
2676
Fred Drake7f781c92002-05-01 20:33:53 +00002677- The pickle.Pickler class grew a clear_memo() method to mimic that
2678 provided by cPickle.Pickler.
2679
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00002680- difflib's SequenceMatcher class now does a dynamic analysis of
2681 which elements are so frequent as to constitute noise. For
2682 comparing files as sequences of lines, this generally works better
2683 than the IS_LINE_JUNK function, and function ndiff's linejunk
2684 argument defaults to None now as a result. A happy benefit is
2685 that SequenceMatcher may run much faster now when applied
2686 to large files with many duplicate lines (for example, C program
2687 text with lots of repeated "}" and "return NULL;" lines).
2688
Guido van Rossum256705b2002-04-23 13:29:43 +00002689- New Text.dump() method in Tkinter module.
2690
Marc-André Lemburg1ec71ea2002-04-17 20:33:40 +00002691- New distutils commands for building packagers were added to
2692 support pkgtool on Solaris and swinstall on HP-UX.
2693
2694- distutils now has a new abstract binary packager base class
2695 command/bdist_packager, which simplifies writing packagers.
2696 This will hopefully provide the missing bits to encourage
2697 people to submit more packagers, e.g. for Debian, FreeBSD
2698 and other systems.
2699
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00002700- The UTF-16, -LE and -BE stream readers now raise a
2701 NotImplementedError for all calls to .readline(). Previously, they
2702 used to just produce garbage or fail with an encoding error --
2703 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 +00002704 work well with these.
2705
Martin v. Löwis5c137c22002-03-18 12:44:08 +00002706- compileall now supports quiet operation.
2707
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002708- The BaseHTTPServer now implements optional HTTP/1.1 persistent
Martin v. Löwis587c98c2002-03-17 18:37:22 +00002709 connections.
2710
Marc-André Lemburga5d2b4c2002-02-16 18:23:30 +00002711- socket module: the SSL support was broken out of the main
2712 _socket module C helper and placed into a new _ssl helper
2713 which now gets imported by socket.py if available and working.
2714
Marc-André Lemburg37aa5802002-02-10 21:42:47 +00002715- encodings package: added aliases for all supported IANA character
2716 sets
2717
Guido van Rossum606fe4e2001-12-28 20:57:14 +00002718- ftplib: to safeguard the user's privacy, anonymous login will use
2719 "anonymous@" as default password, rather than the real user and host
2720 name.
2721
Fred Drake36736122002-01-10 13:50:31 +00002722- webbrowser: tightened up the command passed to os.system() so that
2723 arbitrary shell code can't be executed because a bogus URL was
2724 passed in.
2725
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00002726- gettext.translation has an optional fallback argument, and
Martin v. Löwisa55ffae2002-01-11 06:58:49 +00002727 gettext.find an optional all argument. Translations will now fallback
Martin v. Löwisd8996052002-11-21 21:45:32 +00002728 on a per-message basis. The module supports plural forms, by means
2729 of gettext.[d]ngettext and Translation.[u]ngettext.
Martin v. Löwis1be64192002-01-11 06:33:28 +00002730
Martin v. Löwis9668b932002-01-12 11:27:42 +00002731- distutils bdist commands now offer a --skip-build option.
2732
Walter Dörwaldb25c2b02002-03-21 10:38:40 +00002733- warnings.warn now accepts a Warning instance as first argument.
2734
Fred Drakefed7e852002-04-04 19:36:15 +00002735- The xml.sax.expatreader.ExpatParser class will no longer create
2736 circular references by using itself as the locator that gets passed
2737 to the content handler implementation. [SF bug #535474]
2738
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00002739- The email.Parser.Parser class now properly parses strings regardless
2740 of their line endings, which can be any of \r, \n, or \r\n (CR, LF,
2741 or CRLF). Also, the Header class's constructor default arguments
2742 has changed slightly so that an explicit maxlinelen value is always
Barry Warsaw497e5c42002-12-30 19:27:08 +00002743 honored, and so unicode conversion error handling can be specified.
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00002744
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002745- distutils' build_ext command now links C++ extensions with the C++
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00002746 compiler available in the Makefile or CXX environment variable, if
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002747 running under \*nix.
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00002748
2749- New module bz2: provides a comprehensive interface for the bz2 compression
2750 library. It implements a complete file interface, one-shot (de)compression
2751 functions, and types for sequential (de)compression.
2752
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002753- New pdb command 'pp' which is like 'p' except that it pretty-prints
Barry Warsaw5d8d6182002-11-05 22:41:33 +00002754 the value of its expression argument.
2755
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00002756- Now bdist_rpm distutils command understands a verify_script option in
2757 the config file, including the contents of the referred filename in
2758 the "%verifyscript" section of the rpm spec file.
2759
Gustavo Niemeyer1456fde2002-11-25 17:25:04 +00002760- Fixed bug #495695: webbrowser module would run graphic browsers in a
2761 unix environment even if DISPLAY was not set. Also, support for
2762 skipstone browser was included.
2763
Gustavo Niemeyerd5ae01a2002-12-16 13:11:57 +00002764- Fixed bug #636769: rexec would run unallowed code if subclasses of
2765 strings were used as parameters for certain functions.
2766
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002767Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002768-----------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002769
Martin v. Löwis0d1fdea2002-11-22 08:36:54 +00002770- pygettext.py now supports globbing on Windows, and accepts module
2771 names in addition to accepting file names.
2772
Guido van Rossum923e4ef2002-09-17 20:58:59 +00002773- The SGI demos (Demo/sgi) have been removed. Nobody thought they
2774 were interesting any more. (The SGI library modules and extensions
2775 are still there; it is believed that at least some of these are
2776 still used and useful.)
2777
Fred Drake40813b12002-08-05 15:24:19 +00002778- IDLE supports the new encoding declarations (PEP 263); it can also
2779 deal with legacy 8-bit files if they use the locale's encoding. It
2780 allows non-ASCII strings in the interactive shell and executes them
2781 in the locale's encoding.
Martin v. Löwis98ce7b72002-08-05 15:11:26 +00002782
Marc-André Lemburg46260092002-04-04 16:17:11 +00002783- freeze.py now produces binaries which can import shared modules,
2784 unlike before when this failed due to missing symbol exports in
2785 the generated binary.
2786
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002787Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002788-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002789
Martin v. Löwisdc461752002-11-06 21:59:33 +00002790- On Unix, IDLE is now installed automatically.
2791
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00002792- The fpectl module is not built by default; it's dangerous or useless
2793 except in the hands of experts.
2794
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00002795- The public Python C API will generally be declared using PyAPI_FUNC
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00002796 and PyAPI_DATA macros, while Python extension module init functions
2797 will be declared with PyMODINIT_FUNC. DL_EXPORT/DL_IMPORT macros
2798 are deprecated.
Neal Norwitz1389f3e2002-07-22 13:21:10 +00002799
Tim Petersc6a3ff62002-07-08 22:11:52 +00002800- A bug was fixed that could cause COUNT_ALLOCS builds to segfault, or
2801 get into infinite loops, when a new-style class got garbage-collected.
2802 Unfortunately, to avoid this, the way COUNT_ALLOCS works requires
2803 that new-style classes be immortal in COUNT_ALLOCS builds. Note that
2804 COUNT_ALLOCS is not enabled by default, in either release or debug
2805 builds, and that new-style classes are immortal only in COUNT_ALLOCS
2806 builds.
2807
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00002808- Compiling out the cyclic garbage collector is no longer an option.
2809 The old symbol WITH_CYCLE_GC is now ignored, and Python.h arranges
2810 that it's always defined (for the benefit of any extension modules
2811 that may be conditionalizing on it). A bonus is that any extension
2812 type participating in cyclic gc can choose to participate in the
2813 Py_TRASHCAN mechanism now too; in the absence of cyclic gc, this used
2814 to require editing the core to teach the trashcan mechanism about the
2815 new type.
2816
Martin v. Löwis0cec0ff2002-07-28 16:33:45 +00002817- According to Annex F of the current C standard,
Tim Peters1de41bf2002-07-03 03:31:20 +00002818
2819 The Standard C macro HUGE_VAL and its float and long double analogs,
2820 HUGE_VALF and HUGE_VALL, expand to expressions whose values are
2821 positive infinities.
2822
2823 Python only uses the double HUGE_VAL, and only to #define its own symbol
2824 Py_HUGE_VAL. Some platforms have incorrect definitions for HUGE_VAL.
2825 pyport.h used to try to worm around that, but the workarounds triggered
2826 other bugs on other platforms, so we gave up. If your platform defines
2827 HUGE_VAL incorrectly, you'll need to #define Py_HUGE_VAL to something
2828 that works on your platform. The only instance of this I'm sure about
2829 is on an unknown subset of Cray systems, described here:
2830
2831 http://www.cray.com/swpubs/manuals/SN-2194_2.0/html-SN-2194_2.0/x3138.htm
2832
2833 Presumably 2.3a1 breaks such systems. If anyone uses such a system, help!
2834
Martin v. Löwisa3fb4f72002-06-09 13:33:54 +00002835- The configure option --without-doc-strings can be used to remove the
2836 doc strings from the builtin functions and modules; this reduces the
2837 size of the executable.
2838
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00002839- The universal newlines option (PEP 278) is on by default. On Unix
2840 it can be disabled by passing --without-universal-newlines to the
2841 configure script. On other platforms, remove
2842 WITH_UNIVERSAL_NEWLINES from pyconfig.h.
Tim Peters639295f2002-04-21 07:30:30 +00002843
Martin v. Löwis1142de32002-03-29 16:28:31 +00002844- On Unix, a shared libpython2.3.so can be created with --enable-shared.
2845
Tim Peters8deda702002-03-30 10:06:07 +00002846- All uses of the CACHE_HASH, INTERN_STRINGS, and DONT_SHARE_SHORT_STRINGS
2847 preprocessor symbols were eliminated. The internal decisions they
2848 controlled stopped being experimental long ago.
Tim Peters1f7df352002-03-29 03:29:08 +00002849
Fred Drake7d28b732002-05-02 21:17:00 +00002850- The tools used to build the documentation now work under Cygwin as
2851 well as Unix.
2852
Skip Montanaro57454e52002-06-14 20:30:31 +00002853- The bsddb and dbm module builds have been changed to try and avoid version
2854 skew problems and disable linkage with Berkeley DB 1.85 unless the
2855 installer knows what s/he's doing. See the section on building these
2856 modules in the README file for details.
2857
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002858C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002859-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002860
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00002861- PyNumber_Check() now returns true for string and unicode objects.
2862 This is a result of these types having a partially defined
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00002863 tp_as_number slot. (This is not a feature, but an indication that
Walter Dörwalda1a61f92002-11-19 21:20:25 +00002864 PyNumber_Check() is not very useful to determine numeric behavior.
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00002865 It may be deprecated.)
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00002866
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00002867- The string object's layout has changed: the pointer member
2868 ob_sinterned has been replaced by an int member ob_sstate. On some
2869 platforms (e.g. most 64-bit systems) this may change the offset of
2870 the ob_sval member, so as a precaution the API_VERSION has been
2871 incremented. The apparently unused feature of "indirect interned
2872 strings", supported by the ob_sinterned member, is gone. Interned
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002873 strings are now usually mortal; there is a new API,
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00002874 PyString_InternImmortal() that creates immortal interned strings.
2875 (The ob_sstate member can only take three values; however, while
2876 making it a char saves a few bytes per string object on average, in
2877 it also slowed things down a bit because ob_sval was no longer
2878 aligned.)
2879
Guido van Rossumfdb86482002-08-14 21:20:32 +00002880- The Py_InitModule*() functions now accept NULL for the 'methods'
2881 argument. Modules without global functions are becoming more common
2882 now that factories can be types rather than functions.
2883
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00002884- New C API PyUnicode_FromOrdinal() which exposes unichr() at C
2885 level.
2886
Thomas Heller085358a2002-07-29 14:27:41 +00002887- New functions PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErr() and
2888 PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErrWithFilename(). Similar to
2889 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErrWithFilename() and
2890 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErr(), but they allow to specify
2891 the exception type to raise. Available on Windows.
2892
Tim Peters7c321a82002-07-09 02:57:01 +00002893- Py_FatalError() is now declared as taking a const char* argument. It
2894 was previously declared without const. This should not affect working
2895 code.
2896
Martin v. Löwis01f94bd2002-05-08 08:44:21 +00002897- Added new macro PySequence_ITEM(o, i) that directly calls
2898 sq_item without rechecking that o is a sequence and without
2899 adjusting for negative indices.
2900
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00002901- PyRange_New() now raises ValueError if the fourth argument is not 1.
2902 This is part of the removal of deprecated features of the xrange
2903 object.
2904
Guido van Rossum517c7d42002-04-26 02:49:14 +00002905- PyNumber_Coerce() and PyNumber_CoerceEx() now also invoke the type's
2906 coercion if both arguments have the same type but this type has the
2907 CHECKTYPES flag set. This is to better support proxies.
2908
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00002909- The type of tp_free has been changed from "``void (*)(PyObject *)``" to
2910 "``void (*)(void *)``".
Neil Schemenauer9344b142002-04-12 23:00:08 +00002911
2912- PyObject_Del, PyObject_GC_Del are now functions instead of macros.
2913
Guido van Rossum0986d822002-04-08 01:38:42 +00002914- A type can now inherit its metatype from its base type. Previously,
2915 when PyType_Ready() was called, if ob_type was found to be NULL, it
2916 was always set to &PyType_Type; now it is set to base->ob_type,
2917 where base is tp_base, defaulting to &PyObject_Type.
2918
2919- PyType_Ready() accidentally did not inherit tp_is_gc; now it does.
2920
Neil Schemenauerc9abc1d2002-05-08 14:14:41 +00002921- The PyCore_* family of APIs have been removed.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00002922
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002923- The "u#" parser marker will now pass through Unicode objects as-is
Marc-André Lemburg3e3eacb2002-01-09 16:21:27 +00002924 without going through the buffer API.
2925
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002926- The enumerators of cmp_op have been renamed to use the prefix ``PyCmp_``.
Martin v. Löwis7198a522002-01-01 19:59:11 +00002927
Tim Peters10a3bb52001-12-25 19:07:38 +00002928- An old #define of ANY as void has been removed from pyport.h. This
2929 hasn't been used since Python's pre-ANSI days, and the #define has
2930 been marked as obsolete since then. SF bug 495548 says it created
2931 conflicts with other packages, so keeping it around wasn't harmless.
2932
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002933- Because Python's magic number scheme broke on January 1st, we decided
2934 to stop Python development. Thanks for all the fish!
2935
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00002936- Some of us don't like fish, so we changed Python's magic number
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00002937 scheme to a new one. See Python/import.c for details.
2938
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002939New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002940-------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002941
Martin v. Löwis79acb9e2002-12-06 12:48:53 +00002942- OpenVMS is now supported.
2943
Martin v. Löwisf90ae202002-06-11 06:22:31 +00002944- AtheOS is now supported.
2945
Andrew MacIntyre161ad0e2002-08-04 07:25:58 +00002946- the EMX runtime environment on OS/2 is now supported.
2947
Martin v. Löwisa6e97582002-01-01 18:41:33 +00002948- GNU/Hurd is now supported.
2949
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002950Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002951-----
2952
Fred Drake4dd0f7e2002-11-26 21:44:56 +00002953- The regrtest.py script's -u option now provides a way to say "allow
2954 all resources except this one." For example, to allow everything
2955 except bsddb, give the option '-uall,-bsddb'.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002956
2957Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002958-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002959
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00002960- The Windows distribution now ships with version 4.0.14 of the
2961 Sleepycat Berkeley database library. This should be a huge
2962 improvement over the previous Berkeley DB 1.85, which had many
2963 bugs.
2964 XXX What are the licensing issues here?
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002965 XXX If a user has a database created with a previous version of
Tim Peters84c7a3f2002-11-23 18:48:06 +00002966 XXX Python, what must they do to convert it?
2967 XXX I'm still not sure how to link this thing (see PCbuild/readme.txt).
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00002968 XXX The version # is likely to change before 2.3a1.
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00002969
2970- The Windows distribution now ships with a Secure Sockets Library (SLL)
Mark Hammondc3de0082002-12-03 06:16:08 +00002971 module (_ssl.pyd)
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00002972
Tim Peters857fb4c2002-11-14 23:31:58 +00002973- The Windows distribution now ships with Tcl/Tk version 8.4.1 (it
2974 previously shipped with Tcl/Tk 8.3.2).
2975
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00002976- When Python is built under a Microsoft compiler, sys.version now
2977 includes the compiler version number (_MSC_VER). For example, under
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002978 MSVC 6, sys.version contains the substring "MSC v.1200 ". 1200 is
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00002979 the value of _MSC_VER under MSVC 6.
2980
Tim Peters08e72952002-04-16 20:48:01 +00002981- Sometimes the uninstall executable (UNWISE.EXE) vanishes. One cause
2982 of that has been fixed in the installer (disabled Wise's "delete in-
2983 use files" uninstall option).
2984
Guido van Rossum181e41a2002-04-06 00:23:25 +00002985- Fixed a bug in urllib's proxy handling in Windows. [SF bug #503031]
2986
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00002987- The installer now installs Start menu shortcuts under (the local
2988 equivalent of) "All Users" when doing an Admin install.
2989
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00002990- file.truncate([newsize]) now works on Windows for all newsize values.
2991 It used to fail if newsize didn't fit in 32 bits, reflecting a
2992 limitation of MS _chsize (which is no longer used).
2993
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00002994- os.waitpid() is now implemented for Windows, and can be used to block
2995 until a specified process exits. This is similar to, but not exactly
2996 the same as, os.waitpid() on POSIX systems. If you're waiting for
2997 a specific process whose pid was obtained from one of the spawn()
2998 functions, the same Python os.waitpid() code works across platforms.
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00002999 See the docs for details. The docs were changed to clarify that
3000 spawn functions return, and waitpid requires, a process handle on
3001 Windows (not the same thing as a Windows process id).
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00003002
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00003003- New tempfile.TemporaryFile implementation for Windows: this doesn't
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003004 need a TemporaryFileWrapper wrapper anymore, and should be immune
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00003005 to a nasty problem: before 2.3, if you got a temp file on Windows, it
3006 got wrapped in an object whose close() method first closed the
3007 underlying file, then deleted the file. This usually worked fine.
3008 However, the spawn family of functions on Windows create (at a low C
3009 level) the same set of open files in the spawned process Q as were
3010 open in the spawning process P. If a temp file f was among them, then
3011 doing f.close() in P first closed P's C-level file handle on f, but Q's
3012 C-level file handle on f remained open, so the attempt in P to delete f
3013 blew up with a "Permission denied" error (Windows doesn't allow
3014 deleting open files). This was surprising, subtle, and difficult to
3015 work around.
3016
3017- The os module now exports all the symbolic constants usable with the
3018 low-level os.open() on Windows: the new constants in 2.3 are
3019 O_NOINHERIT, O_SHORT_LIVED, O_TEMPORARY, O_RANDOM and O_SEQUENTIAL.
3020 The others were also available in 2.2: O_APPEND, O_BINARY, O_CREAT,
3021 O_EXCL, O_RDONLY, O_RDWR, O_TEXT, O_TRUNC and O_WRONLY. Contrary
3022 to Microsoft docs, O_SHORT_LIVED does not seem to imply O_TEMPORARY
3023 (so specify both if you want both; note that neither is useful unless
3024 specified with O_CREAT too).
3025
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003026Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003027----
3028
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003029- Mac/Relnotes is gone, the release notes are now here.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003030
Just van Rossume1ebd802003-02-10 10:06:18 +00003031- Python (the OSX-only, unix-based version, not the OS9-compatible CFM
3032 version) now fully supports unicode strings as arguments to various file
3033 system calls, eg. open(), file(), os.stat() and os.listdir().
3034
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003035- The current naming convention for Python on the Macintosh is that MacPython
3036 refers to the unix-based OSX-only version, and MacPython-OS9 refers to the
3037 CFM-based version that runs on both OS9 and OSX.
3038
3039- All MacPython-OS9 functionality is now available in an OSX unix build,
3040 including the Carbon modules, the IDE, OSA support, etc. A lot of this
3041 will only work correctly in a framework build, though, because you cannot
3042 talk to the window manager unless your application is run from a .app
3043 bundle. There is a command line tool "pythonw" that runs your script
3044 with an interpreter living in such a .app bundle, this interpreter should
3045 be used to run any Python script using the window manager (including
3046 Tkinter or wxPython scripts).
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00003047
Jack Jansen8bb80db2002-12-30 22:42:43 +00003048- Most of Mac/Lib has moved to Lib/plat-mac, which is again used both in
3049 MacPython-OSX and MacPython-OS9. The only modules remaining in Mac/Lib
3050 are specifically for MacPython-OS9 (CFM support, preference resources, etc).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003051
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003052- A new utility PythonLauncher will start a Python interpreter when a .py or
3053 .pyw script is double-clicked in the Finder. By default .py scripts are
3054 run with a normal Python interpreter in a Terminal window and .pyw
3055 files are run with a window-aware pythonw interpreter without a Terminal
3056 window, but all this can be customized.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003057
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003058- MacPython-OS9 is now Carbon-only, so it runs on Mac OS 9 or Mac OS X and
3059 possibly on Mac OS 8.6 with the right CarbonLib installed, but not on earlier
3060 releases.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003061
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003062- Many tools such as BuildApplet.py and gensuitemodule.py now support a command
3063 line interface too.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003064
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003065- All the Carbon classes are now PEP253 compliant, meaning that you can
3066 subclass them from Python. Most of the attributes have gone, you should
3067 now use the accessor function call API, which is also what Apple's
3068 documentation uses. Some attributes such as grafport.visRgn are still
3069 available for convenience.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003070
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003071- New Carbon modules File (implementing the APIs in Files.h and Aliases.h)
3072 and Folder (APIs from Folders.h). The old macfs builtin module is
3073 gone, and replaced by a Python wrapper around the new modules.
3074
3075- Pathname handling should now be fully consistent: MacPython-OSX always uses
3076 unix pathnames and MacPython-OS9 always uses colon-separated Mac pathnames
3077 (also when running on Mac OS X).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003078
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003079- New Carbon modules Help and AH give access to the Carbon Help Manager.
3080 There are hooks in the IDE to allow accessing the Python documentation
3081 (and Apple's Carbon and Cocoa documentation) through the Help Viewer.
3082 See Mac/OSX/README for converting the Python documentation to a
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003083 Help Viewer compatible form and installing it.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003084
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003085- OSA support has been redesigned and the generated Python classes now
3086 mirror the inheritance defined by the underlying OSA classes.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003087
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003088- MacPython no longer maps both \r and \n to \n on input for any text file.
3089 This feature has been replaced by universal newline support (PEP278).
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00003090
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00003091- The default encoding for Python sourcefiles in MacPython-OS9 is no longer
Guido van Rossum16c85172003-02-20 01:52:48 +00003092 mac-roman (or whatever your local Mac encoding was) but "ascii", like on
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00003093 other platforms. If you really need sourcefiles with Mac characters in them
3094 you can change this in site.py.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003095
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003096
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003097What's New in Python 2.2 final?
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003098===============================
3099
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003100*Release date: 21-Dec-2001*
3101
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003102Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003103--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003104
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003105- pickle.py, cPickle: allow pickling instances of new-style classes
3106 with a custom metaclass.
3107
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003108Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003109-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003110
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003111- weakref proxy object: when comparing, unwrap both arguments if both
3112 are proxies.
3113
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003114Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003115-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003116
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003117- binascii.b2a_base64(): fix a potential buffer overrun when encoding
3118 very short strings.
3119
3120- cPickle: the obscure "fast" mode was suspected of causing stack
3121 overflows on the Mac. Hopefully fixed this by setting the recursion
3122 limit much smaller. If the limit is too low (it only affects
3123 performance), you can change it by defining PY_CPICKLE_FAST_LIMIT
3124 when compiling cPickle.c (or in pyconfig.h).
3125
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003126Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003127-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003128
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003129- dumbdbm.py: fixed a dumb old bug (the file didn't get synched at
3130 close or delete time).
3131
3132- rfc822.py: fixed a bug where the address '<>' was converted to None
3133 instead of an empty string (also fixes the email.Utils module).
3134
3135- xmlrpclib.py: version 1.0.0; uses precision for doubles.
3136
3137- test suite: the pickle and cPickle tests were not executing any code
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003138 when run from the standard regression test.
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003139
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003140Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003141-----------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003142
3143Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003144-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003145
3146C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003147-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003148
3149New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003150-------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003151
3152Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003153-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003154
3155Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003156-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003157
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003158- distutils package: fixed broken Windows installers (bdist_wininst).
3159
3160- tempfile.py: prevent mysterious warnings when TemporaryFileWrapper
3161 instances are deleted at process exit time.
3162
3163- socket.py: prevent mysterious warnings when socket instances are
3164 deleted at process exit time.
3165
3166- posixmodule.c: fix a Windows crash with stat() of a filename ending
3167 in backslash.
3168
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003169Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003170----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003171
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003172- The Carbon toolbox modules have been upgraded to Universal Headers
3173 3.4, and experimental CoreGraphics and CarbonEvents modules have
3174 been added. All only for framework-enabled MacOSX.
3175
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003176
Tim Peters6272dfd2001-12-13 19:34:00 +00003177What's New in Python 2.2c1?
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003178===========================
3179
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003180*Release date: 14-Dec-2001*
3181
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003182Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003183--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003184
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003185- Guido's tutorial introduction to the new type/class features has
3186 been extensively updated. See
3187
3188 http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html
3189
3190 That remains the primary documentation in this area.
3191
Guido van Rossum33bab012001-12-05 22:45:48 +00003192- Fixed a leak: instance variables declared with __slots__ were never
3193 deleted!
3194
Guido van Rossum4b800852001-12-03 00:54:52 +00003195- The "delete attribute" method of descriptor objects is called
3196 __delete__, not __del__. In previous releases, it was mistakenly
3197 called __del__, which created an unfortunate overloading condition
3198 with finalizers. (The "get attribute" and "set attribute" methods
3199 are still called __get__ and __set__, respectively.)
3200
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00003201- Some subtle issues with the super built-in were fixed:
3202
3203 (a) When super itself is subclassed, its __get__ method would still
3204 return an instance of the base class (i.e., of super).
3205
3206 (b) super(C, C()).__class__ would return C rather than super. This
3207 is confusing. To fix this, I decided to change the semantics of
3208 super so that it only applies to code attributes, not to data
3209 attributes. After all, overriding data attributes is not
3210 supported anyway.
3211
3212 (c) The __get__ method didn't check whether the argument was an
3213 instance of the type used in creation of the super instance.
3214
Guido van Rossumcd7b7d62001-12-04 21:02:07 +00003215- Previously, hash() of an instance of a subclass of a mutable type
3216 (list or dictionary) would return some value, rather than raising
3217 TypeError. This has been fixed. Also, directly calling
3218 dict.__hash__ and list.__hash__ now raises the same TypeError
3219 (previously, these were the same as object.__hash__).
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00003220
Guido van Rossumd331cb52001-12-05 19:46:42 +00003221- New-style objects now support deleting their __dict__. This is for
3222 all intents and purposes equivalent to assigning a brand new empty
3223 dictionary, but saves space if the object is not used further.
3224
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003225Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003226-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003227
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00003228- -Qnew now works as documented in PEP 238: when -Qnew is passed on
3229 the command line, all occurrences of "/" use true division instead
3230 of classic division. See the PEP for details. Note that "all"
3231 means all instances in library and 3rd-party modules, as well as in
3232 your own code. As the PEP says, -Qnew is intended for use only in
3233 educational environments with control over the libraries in use.
Tim Petersbf72fe22001-12-11 21:43:14 +00003234 Note that test_coercion.py in the standard Python test suite fails
3235 under -Qnew; this is expected, and won't be repaired until true
3236 division becomes the default (in the meantime, test_coercion is
3237 testing the current rules).
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00003238
Fred Drake6c01e252001-12-14 17:08:12 +00003239- complex() now only allows the first argument to be a string
3240 argument, and raises TypeError if either the second arg is a string
3241 or if the second arg is specified when the first is a string.
3242
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003243Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003244-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003245
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00003246- gc.get_referents was renamed to gc.get_referrers.
3247
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003248Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003249-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003250
Tim Peters25059d32001-12-07 20:35:43 +00003251- Functions in the os.spawn() family now release the global interpreter
3252 lock around calling the platform spawn. They should always have done
3253 this, but did not before 2.2c1. Multithreaded programs calling
3254 an os.spawn function with P_WAIT will no longer block all Python threads
3255 until the spawned program completes. It's possible that some programs
3256 relies on blocking, although more likely by accident than by design.
3257
Martin v. Löwis3a89b2b2001-11-25 14:35:58 +00003258- webbrowser defaults to netscape.exe on OS/2 now.
3259
Martin v. Löwis652e1912001-11-25 14:50:56 +00003260- Tix.ResizeHandle exposes detach_widget, hide, and show.
3261
Martin v. Löwis714d2e22001-12-02 12:26:03 +00003262- The charset alias windows_1252 has been added.
3263
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003264- types.StringTypes is a tuple containing the defined string types;
3265 usually this will be (str, unicode), but if Python was compiled
3266 without Unicode support it will be just (str,).
3267
3268- The pulldom and minidom modules were synchronized to PyXML.
3269
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003270Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003271-----------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003272
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003273- A new script called Tools/scripts/google.py was added, which fires
3274 off a search on Google.
3275
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003276Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003277-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003278
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003279- Note that release builds of Python should arrange to define the
3280 preprocessor symbol NDEBUG on the command line (or equivalent).
3281 In the 2.2 pre-release series we tried to define this by magic in
3282 Python.h instead, but it proved to cause problems for extension
3283 authors. The Unix, Windows and Mac builds now all define NDEBUG in
3284 release builds via cmdline (or equivalent) instead. Ports to
3285 other platforms should do likewise.
3286
Jack Jansen1999ef42001-12-06 21:47:20 +00003287- It is no longer necessary to use --with-suffix when building on a
3288 case-insensitive file system (such as Mac OS X HFS+). In the build
3289 directory an extension is used, but not in the installed python.
3290
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003291C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003292-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003293
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00003294- New function PyDict_MergeFromSeq2() exposes the builtin dict
3295 constructor's logic for updating a dictionary from an iterable object
3296 producing key-value pairs.
3297
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00003298- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() requires that the number of entries in
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00003299 the keyword list equal the number of argument specifiers. This
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00003300 wasn't checked correctly, and PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords could even
3301 dump core in some bad cases. This has been repaired. As a result,
3302 PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords may raise RuntimeError in bad cases that
3303 previously went unchallenged.
3304
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003305New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003306-------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003307
3308Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003309-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003310
3311Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003312-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003313
3314Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003315----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003316
Jack Jansenffa260f2001-12-06 21:14:00 +00003317- In unix-Python on Mac OS X (and darwin) sys.platform is now "darwin",
3318 without any trailing digits.
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003319
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003320- Changed logic for finding python home in Mac OS X framework Pythons.
3321 Now sys.executable points to the executable again, in stead of to
3322 the shared library. The latter is used only for locating the python
3323 home.
3324
3325
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003326What's New in Python 2.2b2?
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003327===========================
3328
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003329*Release date: 16-Nov-2001*
3330
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003331Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003332--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003333
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00003334- Multiple inheritance mixing new-style and classic classes in the
3335 list of base classes is now allowed, so this works now:
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00003336
3337 class Classic: pass
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00003338 class Mixed(Classic, object): pass
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00003339
3340 The MRO (method resolution order) for each base class is respected
3341 according to its kind, but the MRO for the derived class is computed
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003342 using new-style MRO rules if any base class is a new-style class.
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00003343 This needs to be documented.
3344
Tim Petersa427a2b2001-10-29 22:25:45 +00003345- The new builtin dictionary() constructor, and dictionary type, have
3346 been renamed to dict. This reflects a decade of common usage.
3347
Guido van Rossum3fc08d22001-11-15 20:33:10 +00003348- dict() now accepts an iterable object producing 2-sequences. For
3349 example, dict(d.items()) == d for any dictionary d. The argument,
3350 and the elements of the argument, can be any iterable objects.
3351
Guido van Rossum7ad2d1e2001-10-29 22:11:00 +00003352- New-style classes can now have a __del__ method, which is called
3353 when the instance is deleted (just like for classic classes).
3354
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003355- Assignment to object.__dict__ is now possible, for objects that are
3356 instances of new-style classes that have a __dict__ (unless the base
3357 class forbids it).
3358
Guido van Rossumc8e56452001-10-22 00:43:43 +00003359- Methods of built-in types now properly check for keyword arguments
3360 (formerly these were silently ignored). The only built-in methods
3361 that take keyword arguments are __call__, __init__ and __new__.
3362
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00003363- The socket function has been converted to a type; see below.
3364
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003365Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003366-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003367
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00003368- Assignment to __debug__ raises SyntaxError at compile-time. This
3369 was promised when 2.1c1 was released as "What's New in Python 2.1c1"
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003370 (see below) says.
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00003371
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003372- Clarified the error messages for unsupported operands to an operator
3373 (like 1 + '').
3374
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003375Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003376-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003377
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00003378- mmap has a new keyword argument, "access", allowing a uniform way for
3379 both Windows and Unix users to create read-only, write-through and
3380 copy-on-write memory mappings. This was previously possible only on
3381 Unix. A new keyword argument was required to support this in a
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003382 uniform way because the mmap() signatures had diverged across
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00003383 platforms. Thanks to Jay T Miller for repairing this!
3384
Tim Peters169ded02001-11-03 19:57:21 +00003385- By default, the gc.garbage list now contains only those instances in
3386 unreachable cycles that have __del__ methods; in 2.1 it contained all
3387 instances in unreachable cycles. "Instances" here has been generalized
3388 to include instances of both new-style and old-style classes.
3389
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003390- The socket module defines a new method for socket objects,
3391 sendall(). This is like send() but may make multiple calls to
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00003392 send() until all data has been sent. Also, the socket function has
3393 been converted to a subclassable type, like list and tuple (etc.)
3394 before it; socket and SocketType are now the same thing.
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003395
3396- Various bugfixes to the curses module. There is now a test suite
3397 for the curses module (you have to run it manually).
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00003398
Guido van Rossum692adf12001-10-30 03:03:03 +00003399- binascii.b2a_base64 no longer places an arbitrary restriction of 57
3400 bytes on its input.
3401
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003402Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003403-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003404
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00003405- tkFileDialog exposes a Directory class and askdirectory
Martin v. Löwis25ee87c2001-11-07 22:38:08 +00003406 convenience function.
3407
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00003408- Symbolic group names in regular expressions must be unique. For
3409 example, the regexp r'(?P<abc>)(?P<abc>)' is not allowed, because a
3410 single name can't mean both "group 1" and "group 2" simultaneously.
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003411 Python 2.2 detects this error at regexp compilation time;
3412 previously, the error went undetected, and results were
3413 unpredictable. Also in sre, the pattern.split(), pattern.sub(), and
3414 pattern.subn() methods have been rewritten in C. Also, an
3415 experimental function/method finditer() has been added, which works
3416 like findall() but returns an iterator.
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00003417
Martin v. Löwisb7b32602001-11-02 23:48:20 +00003418- Tix exposes more commands through the classes DirSelectBox,
3419 DirSelectDialog, ListNoteBook, Meter, CheckList, and the
3420 methods tix_addbitmapdir, tix_cget, tix_configure, tix_filedialog,
3421 tix_getbitmap, tix_getimage, tix_option_get, and tix_resetoptions.
3422
Tim Peters98791af2001-10-23 01:59:54 +00003423- Traceback objects are now scanned by cyclic garbage collection, so
3424 cycles created by casual use of sys.exc_info() no longer cause
3425 permanent memory leaks (provided garbage collection is enabled).
3426
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00003427- os.extsep -- a new variable needed by the RISCOS support. It is the
3428 separator used by extensions, and is '.' on all platforms except
3429 RISCOS, where it is '/'. There is no need to use this variable
3430 unless you have a masochistic desire to port your code to RISCOS.
3431
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003432- mimetypes.py has optional support for non-standard, but commonly
3433 found types. guess_type() and guess_extension() now accept an
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003434 optional 'strict' flag, defaulting to true, which controls whether
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003435 recognize non-standard types or not. A few non-standard types we
3436 know about have been added. Also, when run as a script, there are
3437 new -l and -e options.
3438
3439- statcache is now deprecated.
3440
3441- email.Utils.formatdate() now produces the preferred RFC 2822 style
3442 dates with numeric timezones (it used to produce obsolete dates
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003443 hard coded to "GMT" timezone). An optional 'localtime' flag is
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003444 added to produce dates in the local timezone, with daylight savings
3445 time properly taken into account.
3446
3447- In pickle and cPickle, instead of masking errors in load() by
3448 transforming them into SystemError, we let the original exception
3449 propagate out. Also, implement support for __safe_for_unpickling__
3450 in pickle, as it already was supported in cPickle.
3451
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003452Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003453-----------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003454
3455Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003456-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003457
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003458- The dbm module is built using libdb1 if available. The bsddb module
3459 is built with libdb3 if available.
3460
3461- Misc/Makefile.pre.in has been removed by BDFL pronouncement.
3462
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003463C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003464-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003465
Tim Peters1fc240e2001-10-26 05:06:50 +00003466- New function PySequence_Fast_GET_SIZE() returns the size of a non-
3467 NULL result from PySequence_Fast(), more quickly than calling
3468 PySequence_Size().
3469
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003470- New argument unpacking function PyArg_UnpackTuple() added.
3471
3472- New functions PyObject_CallFunctionObjArgs() and
3473 PyObject_CallMethodObjArgs() have been added to make it more
3474 convenient and efficient to call functions and methods from C.
3475
3476- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() no longer masks errors, so it's
3477 possible that this will propagate errors it didn't before.
3478
3479- New function PyObject_CheckReadBuffer(), which returns true if its
3480 argument supports the single-segment readable buffer interface.
3481
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003482New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003483-------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003484
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00003485- We've finally confirmed that this release builds on HP-UX 11.00,
3486 *with* threads, and passes the test suite.
3487
Tim Peters7a33d8b2001-11-05 02:51:07 +00003488- Thanks to a series of patches from Michael Muller, Python may build
3489 again under OS/2 Visual Age C++.
3490
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00003491- Updated RISCOS port by Dietmar Schwertberger.
3492
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003493Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003494-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003495
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00003496- Added a test script for the curses module. It isn't run automatically;
3497 regrtest.py must be run with '-u curses' to enable it.
3498
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003499Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003500-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003501
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003502Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003503----
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003504
3505- PythonScript has been moved to unsupported and is slated to be
3506 removed completely in the next release.
3507
3508- It should now be possible to build applets that work on both OS9 and
3509 OSX.
3510
3511- The core is now linked with CoreServices not Carbon; as a side
3512 result, default 8bit encoding on OSX is now ASCII.
3513
3514- Python should now build on OSX 10.1.1
3515
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003516
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003517What's New in Python 2.2b1?
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003518===========================
3519
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003520*Release date: 19-Oct-2001*
3521
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003522Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003523--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003524
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00003525- New-style classes are now always dynamic (except for built-in and
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00003526 extension types). There is no longer a performance penalty, and I
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00003527 no longer see another reason to keep this baggage around. One relic
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00003528 remains: the __dict__ of a new-style class is a read-only proxy; you
3529 must set the class's attribute to modify it. As a consequence, the
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00003530 __defined__ attribute of new-style types no longer exists, for lack
3531 of need: there is once again only one __dict__ (although in the
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00003532 future a __cache__ may be resurrected with a similar function, if I
3533 can prove that it actually speeds things up).
Guido van Rossum50fda3b2001-10-04 19:46:06 +00003534
Tim Peters1c9ca872001-10-04 06:43:12 +00003535- C.__doc__ now works as expected for new-style classes (in 2.2a4 it
3536 always returned None, even when there was a class docstring).
3537
3538- doctest now finds and runs docstrings attached to new-style classes,
3539 class methods, static methods, and properties.
3540
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003541Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003542-----------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003543
Guido van Rossuma8bcf802001-10-15 15:53:58 +00003544- A very subtle syntactical pitfall in list comprehensions was fixed.
3545 For example: [a+b for a in 'abc', for b in 'def']. The comma in
3546 this example is a mistake. Previously, this would silently let 'a'
3547 iterate over the singleton tuple ('abc',), yielding ['abcd', 'abce',
3548 'abcf'] rather than the intended ['ad', 'ae', 'af', 'bd', 'be',
3549 'bf', 'cd', 'ce', 'cf']. Now, this is flagged as a syntax error.
3550 Note that [a for a in <singleton>] is a convoluted way to say
3551 [<singleton>] anyway, so it's not like any expressiveness is lost.
3552
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003553- getattr(obj, name, default) now only catches AttributeError, as
3554 documented, rather than returning the default value for all
3555 exceptions (which could mask bugs in a __getattr__ hook, for
3556 example).
3557
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00003558- Weak reference objects are now part of the core and offer a C API.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00003559 A bug which could allow a core dump when binary operations involved
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00003560 proxy reference has been fixed. weakref.ReferenceError is now a
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003561 built-in exception.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00003562
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00003563- unicode(obj) now behaves more like str(obj), accepting arbitrary
3564 objects, and calling a __unicode__ method if it exists.
3565 unicode(obj, encoding) and unicode(obj, encoding, errors) still
Marc-André Lemburgb5507ec2001-10-19 12:02:29 +00003566 require an 8-bit string or character buffer argument.
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00003567
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003568- isinstance() now allows any object as the first argument and a
3569 class, a type or something with a __bases__ tuple attribute for the
3570 second argument. The second argument may also be a tuple of a
3571 class, type, or something with __bases__, in which case isinstance()
3572 will return true if the first argument is an instance of any of the
3573 things contained in the second argument tuple. E.g.
3574
3575 isinstance(x, (A, B))
3576
3577 returns true if x is an instance of A or B.
3578
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003579Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003580-----------------
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003581
3582- thread.start_new_thread() now returns the thread ID (previously None).
3583
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00003584- binascii has now two quopri support functions, a2b_qp and b2a_qp.
3585
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00003586- readline now supports setting the startup_hook and the
3587 pre_event_hook, and adds the add_history() function.
Martin v. Löwis0daad592001-09-30 21:09:59 +00003588
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00003589- os and posix supports chroot(), setgroups() and unsetenv() where
3590 available. The stat(), fstat(), statvfs() and fstatvfs() functions
3591 now return "pseudo-sequences" -- the various fields can now be
3592 accessed as attributes (e.g. os.stat("/").st_mtime) but for
3593 backwards compatibility they also behave as a fixed-length sequence.
3594 Some platform-specific fields (e.g. st_rdev) are only accessible as
Guido van Rossum98bf58f2001-10-18 20:34:25 +00003595 attributes.
3596
3597- time: localtime(), gmtime() and strptime() now return a
3598 pseudo-sequence similar to the os.stat() return value, with
3599 attributes like tm_year etc.
Martin v. Löwis16628c92001-10-04 22:46:41 +00003600
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003601- Decompression objects in the zlib module now accept an optional
3602 second parameter to decompress() that specifies the maximum amount
3603 of memory to use for the uncompressed data.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003604
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00003605- optional SSL support in the socket module now exports OpenSSL
3606 functions RAND_add(), RAND_egd(), and RAND_status(). These calls
3607 are useful on platforms like Solaris where OpenSSL does not
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003608 automatically seed its PRNG. Also, the keyfile and certfile
3609 arguments to socket.ssl() are now optional.
3610
3611- posixmodule (and by extension, the os module on POSIX platforms) now
3612 exports O_LARGEFILE, O_DIRECT, O_DIRECTORY, and O_NOFOLLOW.
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00003613
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003614Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003615-------
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00003616
Tim Peters7402f792001-10-02 03:53:41 +00003617- doctest now excludes functions and classes not defined by the module
3618 being tested, thanks to Tim Hochberg.
3619
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00003620- HotShot, a new profiler implemented using a C-based callback, has
3621 been added. This substantially reduces the overhead of profiling,
3622 but it is still quite preliminary. Support modules and
3623 documentation will be added in upcoming releases (before 2.2 final).
3624
Guido van Rossumc4b09b42001-10-04 10:19:00 +00003625- profile now produces correct output in situations where an exception
3626 raised in Python is cleared by C code (e.g. hasattr()). This used
3627 to cause wrong output, including spurious claims of recursive
3628 functions and attribution of time spent to the wrong function.
3629
Tim Peters0a1fc4e2001-10-07 03:12:08 +00003630 The code and documentation for the derived OldProfile and HotProfile
3631 profiling classes was removed. The code hasn't worked for years (if
3632 you tried to use them, they raised exceptions). OldProfile
3633 intended to reproduce the behavior of the profiler Python used more
3634 than 7 years ago, and isn't interesting anymore. HotProfile intended
3635 to provide a faster profiler (but producing less information), and
3636 that's a worthy goal we intend to meet via a different approach (but
3637 without losing information).
3638
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00003639- Profile.calibrate() has a new implementation that should deliver
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00003640 a much better system-specific calibration constant. The constant can
3641 now be specified in an instance constructor, or as a Profile class or
3642 instance variable, instead of by editing profile.py's source code.
3643 Calibration must still be done manually (see the docs for the profile
3644 module).
3645
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003646 Note that Profile.calibrate() must be overridden by subclasses.
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00003647 Improving the accuracy required exploiting detailed knowledge of
3648 profiler internals; the earlier method abstracted away the details
3649 and measured a simplified model instead, but consequently computed
3650 a constant too small by a factor of 2 on some modern machines.
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00003651
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00003652- quopri's encode and decode methods take an optional header parameter,
Jeremy Hylton6f543b62001-10-16 20:42:52 +00003653 which indicates whether output is intended for the header 'Q'
3654 encoding.
3655
Guido van Rossuma5343cc2001-10-18 18:02:07 +00003656- The SocketServer.ThreadingMixIn class now closes the request after
3657 finish_request() returns. (Not when it errors out though.)
3658
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003659- The nntplib module's NNTP.body() method has grown a 'file' argument
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003660 to allow saving the message body to a file.
3661
3662- The email package has added a class email.Parser.HeaderParser which
3663 only parses headers and does not recurse into the message's body.
3664 Also, the module/class MIMEAudio has been added for representing
3665 audio data (contributed by Anthony Baxter).
3666
3667- ftplib should be able to handle files > 2GB.
3668
3669- ConfigParser.getboolean() now also interprets TRUE, FALSE, YES, NO,
3670 ON, and OFF.
3671
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00003672- xml.dom.minidom NodeList objects now support the length attribute
3673 and item() method as required by the DOM specifications.
3674
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00003675Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003676-----------
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00003677
3678- Demo/dns was removed. It no longer serves any purpose; a package
3679 derived from it is now maintained by Anthony Baxter, see
3680 http://PyDNS.SourceForge.net.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003681
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003682- The freeze tool has been made more robust, and two new options have
3683 been added: -X and -E.
3684
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003685Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003686-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003687
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003688- configure will use CXX in LINKCC if CXX is used to build main() and
3689 the system requires to link a C++ main using the C++ compiler.
3690
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003691C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003692-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003693
Guido van Rossum6c4bce32001-10-18 19:20:25 +00003694- The documentation for the tp_compare slot is updated to require that
3695 the return value must be -1, 0, 1; an arbitrary number <0 or >0 is
3696 not correct. This is not yet enforced but will be enforced in
3697 Python 2.3; even later, we may use -2 to indicate errors and +2 for
3698 "NotImplemented". Right now, -1 should be used for an error return.
3699
Tim Petersd38b1c72001-09-30 05:09:37 +00003700- PyLong_AsLongLong() now accepts int (as well as long) arguments.
3701 Consequently, PyArg_ParseTuple's 'L' code also accepts int (as well
3702 as long) arguments.
3703
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00003704- PyThread_start_new_thread() now returns a long int giving the thread
3705 ID, if one can be calculated; it returns -1 for error, 0 if no
3706 thread ID is calculated (this is an incompatible change, but only
3707 the thread module used this API). This code has only really been
3708 tested on Linux and Windows; other platforms please beware (and
3709 report any bugs or strange behavior).
3710
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00003711- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() no longer accepts Unicode objects as
3712 input.
3713
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003714New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003715-------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003716
3717Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003718-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003719
3720Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003721-------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003722
Tim Peters04cf1d32001-10-09 22:39:40 +00003723- Installer: If you install IDLE, and don't disable file-extension
3724 registration, a new "Edit with IDLE" context (right-click) menu entry
3725 is created for .py and .pyw files.
3726
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003727- The signal module now supports SIGBREAK on Windows, thanks to Steven
3728 Scott. Note that SIGBREAK is unique to Windows. The default SIGBREAK
3729 action remains to call Win32 ExitProcess(). This can be changed via
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003730 signal.signal(). For example::
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003731
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003732 # Make Ctrl+Break raise KeyboardInterrupt, like Python's default Ctrl+C
3733 # (SIGINT) behavior.
3734 import signal
3735 signal.signal(signal.SIGBREAK, signal.default_int_handler)
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003736
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003737 try:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003738 while 1:
3739 pass
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003740 except KeyboardInterrupt:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003741 # We get here on Ctrl+C or Ctrl+Break now; if we had not changed
3742 # SIGBREAK, only on Ctrl+C (and Ctrl+Break would terminate the
3743 # program without the possibility for any Python-level cleanup).
3744 print "Clean exit"
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003745
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003746
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003747What's New in Python 2.2a4?
3748===========================
3749
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003750*Release date: 28-Sep-2001*
3751
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003752Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003753--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003754
3755- pydoc and inspect are now aware of new-style classes;
3756 e.g. help(list) at the interactive prompt now shows proper
3757 documentation for all operations on list objects.
3758
3759- Applications using Jim Fulton's ExtensionClass module can now safely
3760 be used with Python 2.2. In particular, Zope 2.4.1 now works with
3761 Python 2.2 (as well as with Python 2.1.1). The Demo/metaclass
3762 examples also work again. It is hoped that Gtk and Boost also work
3763 with 2.2a4 and beyond. (If you can confirm this, please write
3764 webmaster@python.org; if there are still problems, please open a bug
3765 report on SourceForge.)
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003766
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00003767- property() now takes 4 keyword arguments: fget, fset, fdel and doc.
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003768 These map to read-only attributes 'fget', 'fset', 'fdel', and '__doc__'
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00003769 in the constructed property object. fget, fset and fdel weren't
3770 discoverable from Python in 2.2a3. __doc__ is new, and allows to
3771 associate a docstring with a property.
3772
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003773- Comparison overloading is now more completely implemented. For
3774 example, a str subclass instance can properly be compared to a str
3775 instance, and it can properly overload comparison. Ditto for most
3776 other built-in object types.
3777
3778- The repr() of new-style classes has changed; instead of <type
3779 'M.Foo'> a new-style class is now rendered as <class 'M.Foo'>,
3780 *except* for built-in types, which are still rendered as <type
3781 'Foo'> (to avoid upsetting existing code that might parse or
3782 otherwise rely on repr() of certain type objects).
3783
3784- The repr() of new-style objects is now always <Foo object at XXX>;
3785 previously, it was sometimes <Foo instance at XXX>.
3786
3787- For new-style classes, what was previously called __getattr__ is now
3788 called __getattribute__. This method, if defined, is called for
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00003789 *every* attribute access. A new __getattr__ hook more similar to the
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003790 one in classic classes is defined which is called only if regular
3791 attribute access raises AttributeError; to catch *all* attribute
3792 access, you can use __getattribute__ (for new-style classes). If
3793 both are defined, __getattribute__ is called first, and if it raises
3794 AttributeError, __getattr__ is called.
3795
3796- The __class__ attribute of new-style objects can be assigned to.
3797 The new class must have the same C-level object layout as the old
3798 class.
3799
3800- The builtin file type can be subclassed now. In the usual pattern,
3801 "file" is the name of the builtin type, and file() is a new builtin
3802 constructor, with the same signature as the builtin open() function.
3803 file() is now the preferred way to open a file.
3804
3805- Previously, __new__ would only see sequential arguments passed to
3806 the type in a constructor call; __init__ would see both sequential
3807 and keyword arguments. This made no sense whatsoever any more, so
3808 now both __new__ and __init__ see all arguments.
3809
3810- Previously, hash() applied to an instance of a subclass of str or
3811 unicode always returned 0. This has been repaired.
3812
3813- Previously, an operation on an instance of a subclass of an
3814 immutable type (int, long, float, complex, tuple, str, unicode),
3815 where the subtype didn't override the operation (and so the
3816 operation was handled by the builtin type), could return that
3817 instance instead a value of the base type. For example, if s was of
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003818 a str subclass type, s[:] returned s as-is. Now it returns a str
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003819 with the same value as s.
3820
Barry Warsaw86fbaf82001-09-28 15:26:12 +00003821- Provisional support for pickling new-style objects has been added.
3822
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003823Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003824----
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003825
Tim Peters2c9aa5e2001-09-23 04:06:05 +00003826- file.writelines() now accepts any iterable object producing strings.
3827
Marc-André Lemburgaefd7662001-09-20 12:59:37 +00003828- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() now works very much like
3829 PyObject_Str(obj) in that it tries to use __str__/tp_str
3830 on the object if the object is not a string or buffer. This
3831 makes unicode() behave like str() when applied to non-string/buffer
3832 objects.
3833
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00003834- PyFile_WriteObject now passes Unicode objects to the file's write
3835 method. As a result, all file-like objects which may be the target
Martin v. Löwis2777c022001-09-19 13:47:32 +00003836 of a print statement must support Unicode objects, i.e. they must
3837 at least convert them into ASCII strings.
3838
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003839- Thread scheduling on Solaris should be improved; it is no longer
3840 necessary to insert a small sleep at the start of a thread in order
3841 to let other runnable threads be scheduled.
3842
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003843Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003844-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003845
Marc-André Lemburgbf990172001-09-27 14:17:33 +00003846- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
3847 read character buffer compatible objects for their .write() methods.
3848 These objects are converted to strings and then handled as such
3849 by the instances.
3850
Barry Warsaw2f600732001-09-24 04:28:10 +00003851- The "email" package has been added. This is basically a port of the
3852 mimelib package <http://sf.net/projects/mimelib> with API changes
3853 and some implementations updated to use iterators and generators.
3854
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00003855- difflib.ndiff() and difflib.Differ.compare() are generators now. This
3856 restores the ability of Tools/scripts/ndiff.py to start producing output
3857 before the entire comparison is complete.
3858
Barry Warsaw58b072d2001-09-22 04:44:21 +00003859- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
3860 iteration just like file objects (i.e. their .readline() method is
3861 called for each iteration until it returns an empty string).
3862
Marc-André Lemburg494f2ae2001-09-19 11:33:31 +00003863- The codecs module has grown four new helper APIs to access
3864 builtin codecs: getencoder(), getdecoder(), getreader(),
3865 getwriter().
3866
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003867- SimpleXMLRPCServer: a new module (based upon SimpleHTMLServer)
3868 simplifies writing XML RPC servers.
3869
Barry Warsaw647d5e82001-09-28 17:01:02 +00003870- os.path.realpath(): a new function that returns the absolute pathname
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003871 after interpretation of symbolic links. On non-Unix systems, this
3872 is an alias for os.path.abspath().
3873
Tim Peters16a77ad2001-09-08 04:00:12 +00003874- operator.indexOf() (PySequence_Index() in the C API) now works with any
3875 iterable object.
3876
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003877- smtplib now supports various authentication and security features of
3878 the SMTP protocol through the new login() and starttls() methods.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00003879
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003880- hmac: a new module implementing keyed hashing for message
3881 authentication.
3882
3883- mimetypes now recognizes more extensions and file types. At the
3884 same time, some mappings not sanctioned by IANA were removed.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00003885
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003886- The "compiler" package has been brought up to date to the state of
Guido van Rossumc9ed5dc2001-09-20 05:30:24 +00003887 Python 2.2 bytecode generation. It has also been promoted from a
3888 Tool to a standard library package. (Tools/compiler still exists as
3889 a sample driver.)
3890
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003891Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003892-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003893
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003894- Large file support (LFS) is now automatic when the platform supports
3895 it; no more manual configuration tweaks are needed. On Linux, at
3896 least, it's possible to have a system whose C library supports large
3897 files but whose kernel doesn't; in this case, large file support is
3898 still enabled but doesn't do you any good unless you upgrade your
3899 kernel or share your Python executable with another system whose
3900 kernel has large file support.
3901
3902- The configure script now supplies plausible defaults in a
3903 cross-compilation environment. This doesn't mean that the supplied
3904 values are always correct, or that cross-compilation now works
3905 flawlessly -- but it's a first step (and it shuts up most of
3906 autoconf's warnings about AC_TRY_RUN).
3907
3908- The Unix build is now a bit less chatty, courtesy of the parser
3909 generator. The build is completely silent (except for errors) when
3910 using "make -s", thanks to a -q option to setup.py.
3911
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003912C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003913-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003914
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003915- The "structmember" API now supports some new flag bits to deny read
3916 and/or write access to attributes in restricted execution mode.
3917
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003918New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003919-------------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003920
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003921- Compaq's iPAQ handheld, running the "familiar" Linux distribution
3922 (http://familiar.handhelds.org).
3923
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003924Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003925-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003926
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00003927- The "classic" standard tests, which work by comparing stdout to
3928 an expected-output file under Lib/test/output/, no longer stop at
3929 the first mismatch. Instead the test is run to completion, and a
3930 variant of ndiff-style comparison is used to report all differences.
3931 This is much easier to understand than the previous style of reporting.
3932
3933- The unittest-based standard tests now use regrtest's test_main()
3934 convention, instead of running as a side-effect of merely being
3935 imported. This allows these tests to be run in more natural and
3936 flexible ways as unittests, outside the regrtest framework.
3937
3938- regrtest.py is much better integrated with unittest and doctest now,
3939 especially in regard to reporting errors.
3940
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003941Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003942-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003943
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003944- Large file support now also works for files > 4GB, on filesystems
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00003945 that support it (NTFS under Windows 2000). See "What's New in
3946 Python 2.2a3" for more detail.
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003947
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003948
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003949What's New in Python 2.2a3?
3950===========================
3951
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003952*Release Date: 07-Sep-2001*
3953
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003954Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003955----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003956
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00003957- Conversion of long to float now raises OverflowError if the long is too
3958 big to represent as a C double.
3959
Tim Peters32f453e2001-09-03 08:35:41 +00003960- The 3-argument builtin pow() no longer allows a third non-None argument
3961 if either of the first two arguments is a float, or if both are of
3962 integer types and the second argument is negative (in which latter case
3963 the arguments are converted to float, so this is really the same
3964 restriction).
3965
Tim Peters5d2b77c2001-09-03 05:47:38 +00003966- The builtin dir() now returns more information, and sometimes much
3967 more, generally naming all attributes of an object, and all attributes
3968 reachable from the object via its class, and from its class's base
3969 classes, and so on from them too. Example: in 2.2a2, dir([]) returned
3970 an empty list. In 2.2a3,
3971
3972 >>> dir([])
3973 ['__add__', '__class__', '__contains__', '__delattr__', '__delitem__',
3974 '__eq__', '__ge__', '__getattr__', '__getitem__', '__getslice__',
3975 '__gt__', '__hash__', '__iadd__', '__imul__', '__init__', '__le__',
3976 '__len__', '__lt__', '__mul__', '__ne__', '__new__', '__repr__',
3977 '__rmul__', '__setattr__', '__setitem__', '__setslice__', '__str__',
3978 'append', 'count', 'extend', 'index', 'insert', 'pop', 'remove',
3979 'reverse', 'sort']
3980
3981 dir(module) continues to return only the module's attributes, though.
3982
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003983- Overflowing operations on plain ints now return a long int rather
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003984 than raising OverflowError. This is a partial implementation of PEP
3985 237. You can use -Wdefault::OverflowWarning to enable a warning for
3986 this situation, and -Werror::OverflowWarning to revert to the old
3987 OverflowError exception.
3988
Guido van Rossum61c345f2001-09-04 03:26:15 +00003989- A new command line option, -Q<arg>, is added to control run-time
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003990 warnings for the use of classic division. (See PEP 238.) Possible
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00003991 values are -Qold, -Qwarn, -Qwarnall, and -Qnew. The default is
3992 -Qold, meaning the / operator has its classic meaning and no
3993 warnings are issued. Using -Qwarn issues a run-time warning about
3994 all uses of classic division for int and long arguments; -Qwarnall
3995 also warns about classic division for float and complex arguments
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00003996 (for use with fixdiv.py).
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003997 [Note: the remainder of this item (preserved below) became
3998 obsolete in 2.2c1 -- -Qnew has global effect in 2.2] ::
3999
4000 Using -Qnew is questionable; it turns on new division by default, but
4001 only in the __main__ module. You can usefully combine -Qwarn or
4002 -Qwarnall and -Qnew: this gives the __main__ module new division, and
4003 warns about classic division everywhere else.
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004004
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004005- Many built-in types can now be subclassed. This applies to int,
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004006 long, float, str, unicode, and tuple. (The types complex, list and
4007 dictionary can also be subclassed; this was introduced earlier.)
4008 Note that restrictions apply when subclassing immutable built-in
4009 types: you can only affect the value of the instance by overloading
4010 __new__. You can add mutable attributes, and the subclass instances
4011 will have a __dict__ attribute, but you cannot change the "value"
4012 (as implemented by the base class) of an immutable subclass instance
4013 once it is created.
4014
Guido van Rossumaaf80c82001-09-02 13:44:35 +00004015- The dictionary constructor now takes an optional argument, a
4016 mapping-like object, and initializes the dictionary from its
4017 (key, value) pairs.
4018
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004019- A new built-in type, super, has been added. This facilitates making
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004020 "cooperative super calls" in a multiple inheritance setting. For an
4021 explanation, see http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#cooperation
4022
Guido van Rossum8d7234d2001-09-06 22:02:58 +00004023- A new built-in type, property, has been added. This enables the
4024 creation of "properties". These are attributes implemented by
4025 getter and setter functions (or only one of these for read-only or
4026 write-only attributes), without the need to override __getattr__.
4027 See http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#property
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004028
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004029- The syntax of floating-point and imaginary literals has been
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004030 liberalized, to allow leading zeroes. Examples of literals now
4031 legal that were SyntaxErrors before:
4032
4033 00.0 0e3 0100j 07.5 00000000000000000008.
4034
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004035- An old tokenizer bug allowed floating point literals with an incomplete
Tim Petersc6d95812001-08-28 20:56:27 +00004036 exponent, such as 1e and 3.1e-. Such literals now raise SyntaxError.
4037
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004038Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004039-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004040
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00004041- telnetlib includes symbolic names for the options, and support for
Martin v. Löwis1da9c572002-11-04 09:56:00 +00004042 setting an option negotiation callback. It also supports processing
4043 of suboptions.
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00004044
Tim Petersa40c7932001-09-05 22:36:56 +00004045- The new C standard no longer requires that math libraries set errno to
4046 ERANGE on overflow. For platform libraries that exploit this new
4047 freedom, Python's overflow-checking was wholly broken. A new overflow-
4048 checking scheme attempts to repair that, but may not be reliable on all
4049 platforms (C doesn't seem to provide anything both useful and portable
4050 in this area anymore).
4051
Martin v. Löwis44f86962001-09-05 13:44:54 +00004052- Asynchronous timeout actions are available through the new class
4053 threading.Timer.
4054
Tim Peters78526162001-09-05 00:53:45 +00004055- math.log and math.log10 now return sensible results for even huge
4056 long arguments. For example, math.log10(10 ** 10000) ~= 10000.0.
4057
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004058- A new function, imp.lock_held(), returns 1 when the import lock is
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00004059 currently held. See the docs for the imp module.
4060
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004061- pickle, cPickle and marshal on 32-bit platforms can now correctly read
Tim Peters82112372001-08-29 02:28:42 +00004062 dumps containing ints written on platforms where Python ints are 8 bytes.
4063 When read on a box where Python ints are 4 bytes, such values are
4064 converted to Python longs.
4065
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004066- In restricted execution mode (using the rexec module), unmarshalling
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004067 code objects is no longer allowed. This plugs a security hole.
4068
Steve Purcell6091cd62001-09-06 16:05:17 +00004069- unittest.TestResult instances no longer store references to tracebacks
4070 generated by test failures. This prevents unexpected dangling references
4071 to objects that should be garbage collected between tests.
4072
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004073Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004074-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004075
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00004076- Tools/scripts/fixdiv.py has been added which can be used to fix
4077 division operators as per PEP 238.
4078
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004079Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004080-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004081
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00004082- If you are an adventurous person using Mac OS X you may want to look at
4083 Mac/OSX. There is a Makefile there that will build Python as a real Mac
4084 application, which can be used for experimenting with Carbon or Cocoa.
4085 Discussion of this on pythonmac-sig, please.
4086
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00004087C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004088-----
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00004089
4090- New function PyObject_Dir(obj), like Python __builtin__.dir(obj).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00004091
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004092- Note that PyLong_AsDouble can fail! This has always been true, but no
4093 callers checked for it. It's more likely to fail now, because overflow
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004094 errors are properly detected now. The proper way to check::
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004095
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004096 double x = PyLong_AsDouble(some_long_object);
4097 if (x == -1.0 && PyErr_Occurred()) {
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004098 /* The conversion failed. */
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004099 }
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004100
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004101- The GC API has been changed. Extensions that use the old API will still
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004102 compile but will not participate in GC. To upgrade an extension
4103 module:
4104
4105 - rename Py_TPFLAGS_GC to PyTPFLAGS_HAVE_GC
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004106
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004107 - use PyObject_GC_New or PyObject_GC_NewVar to allocate objects and
4108 PyObject_GC_Del to deallocate them
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004109
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004110 - rename PyObject_GC_Init to PyObject_GC_Track and PyObject_GC_Fini
4111 to PyObject_GC_UnTrack
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004112
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004113 - remove PyGC_HEAD_SIZE from object size calculations
4114
4115 - remove calls to PyObject_AS_GC and PyObject_FROM_GC
4116
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004117- Two new functions: PyString_FromFormat() and PyString_FromFormatV().
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004118 These can be used safely to construct string objects from a
4119 sprintf-style format string (similar to the format string supported
4120 by PyErr_Format()).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00004121
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004122New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004123-------------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004124
Tim Petersb7da0902001-09-02 23:01:43 +00004125- Stephen Hansen contributed patches sufficient to get a clean compile
4126 under Borland C (Windows), but he reports problems running it and ran
4127 out of time to complete the port. Volunteers? Expect a MemoryError
4128 when importing the types module; this is probably shallow, and
4129 causing later failures too.
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004130
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004131Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004132-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004133
4134Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004135-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004136
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00004137- Large file support is now enabled on Win32 platforms as well as on
4138 Win64. This means that, for example, you can use f.tell() and f.seek()
4139 to manipulate files larger than 2 gigabytes (provided you have enough
4140 disk space, and are using a Windows filesystem that supports large
Tim Peters9a9471c2001-09-11 23:18:51 +00004141 partitions). Windows filesystem limits: FAT has a 2GB (gigabyte)
4142 filesize limit, and large file support makes no difference there.
4143 FAT32's limit is 4GB, and files >= 2GB are easier to use from Python now.
4144 NTFS has no practical limit on file size, and files of any size can be
4145 used from Python now.
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00004146
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004147- The w9xpopen hack is now used on Windows NT and 2000 too when COMPSPEC
Tim Peters402d5982001-08-27 06:37:48 +00004148 points to command.com (patch from Brian Quinlan).
4149
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004150
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004151What's New in Python 2.2a2?
4152===========================
4153
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004154*Release Date: 22-Aug-2001*
4155
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004156Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004157-----
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004158
Barry Warsaw18b2ecf2001-08-22 20:26:56 +00004159- Tim Peters developed a brand new Windows installer using Wise 8.1,
4160 generously donated to us by Wise Solutions.
4161
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004162- configure supports a new option --enable-unicode, with the values
4163 ucs2 and ucs4 (new in 2.2a1). With --disable-unicode, the Unicode
4164 type and supporting code is completely removed from the interpreter.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004165
Jack Jansen32ce0cd2001-08-21 19:28:20 +00004166- A new configure option --enable-framework builds a Mac OS X framework,
4167 which "make frameworkinstall" will install. This provides a starting
4168 point for more mac-like functionality, join pythonmac-sig@python.org
4169 if you are interested in helping.
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004170
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004171- The NeXT platform is no longer supported.
4172
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004173- The 'new' module is now statically linked.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004174
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004175Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004176-----
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004177
4178- The new Tools/scripts/cleanfuture.py can be used to automatically
Andrew M. Kuchlingb0532092001-08-15 15:54:56 +00004179 edit out obsolete future statements from Python source code. See
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004180 the module docstring for details.
4181
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004182Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004183-----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004184
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004185- regrtest.py now knows which tests are expected to be skipped on some
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004186 platforms, allowing to give clearer test result output. regrtest
4187 also has optional --use/-u switch to run normally disabled tests
4188 which require network access or consume significant disk resources.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004189
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004190- Several new tests in the standard test suite, with special thanks to
4191 Nick Mathewson.
4192
4193Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004194----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004195
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004196- The floor division operator // has been added as outlined in PEP
4197 238. The / operator still provides classic division (and will until
4198 Python 3.0) unless "from __future__ import division" is included, in
4199 which case the / operator will provide true division. The operator
4200 module provides truediv() and floordiv() functions. Augmented
4201 assignment variants are included, as are the equivalent overloadable
4202 methods and C API methods. See the PEP for a full discussion:
4203 <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0238.html>
4204
Tim Peters6cd6a822001-08-17 22:11:27 +00004205- Future statements are now effective in simulated interactive shells
4206 (like IDLE). This should "just work" by magic, but read Michael
4207 Hudson's "Future statements in simulated shells" PEP 264 for full
4208 details: <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0264.html>.
4209
Guido van Rossumf86ddd22001-08-17 21:21:04 +00004210- The type/class unification (PEP 252-253) was integrated into the
4211 trunk and is not so tentative any more (the exact specification of
4212 some features is still tentative). A lot of work has done on fixing
4213 bugs and adding robustness and features (performance still has to
4214 come a long way).
4215
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00004216- Warnings about a mismatch in the Python API during extension import
4217 now use the Python warning framework (which makes it possible to
4218 write filters for these warnings).
4219
Barry Warsaw9b3be7f2001-08-14 18:35:02 +00004220- A function's __dict__ (aka func_dict) will now always be a
4221 dictionary. It used to be possible to delete it or set it to None,
4222 but now both actions raise TypeErrors. It is still legal to set it
4223 to a dictionary object. Getting func.__dict__ before any attributes
4224 have been assigned now returns an empty dictionary instead of None.
4225
Guido van Rossum32aa5d22001-09-05 18:43:35 +00004226- A new command line option, -E, was added which disables the use of
4227 all environment variables, or at least those that are specifically
4228 significant to Python. Usually those have a name starting with
4229 "PYTHON". This was used to fix a problem where the tests fail if
4230 the user happens to have PYTHONHOME or PYTHONPATH pointing to an
4231 older distribution.
4232
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004233Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004234-------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004235
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004236- New class Differ and new functions ndiff() and restore() in difflib.py.
4237 These package the algorithms used by the popular Tools/scripts/ndiff.py,
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004238 for programmatic reuse.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004239
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004240- New function xml.sax.saxutils.quoteattr(): Quote an XML attribute
4241 value using the minimal quoting required for the value; more
4242 reliable than using xml.sax.saxutils.escape() for attribute values.
4243
4244- Readline completion support for cmd.Cmd was added.
4245
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004246- Calling os.tempnam() or os.tmpnam() generate RuntimeWarnings.
4247
4248- Added function threading.BoundedSemaphore()
4249
4250- Added Ka-Ping Yee's cgitb.py module.
4251
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004252- The 'new' module now exposes the CO_xxx flags.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004253
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00004254- The gc module offers the get_referents function.
4255
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004256New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004257-------------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004258
4259C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004260-----
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004261
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00004262- Two new APIs PyOS_snprintf() and PyOS_vsnprintf() were added
4263 which provide a cross-platform implementations for the
4264 relatively new snprintf()/vsnprintf() C lib APIs. In contrast to
4265 the standard sprintf() and vsprintf() C lib APIs, these versions
4266 apply bounds checking on the used buffer which enhances protection
4267 against buffer overruns.
4268
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00004269- Unicode APIs now use name mangling to assure that mixing interpreters
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00004270 and extensions using different Unicode widths is rendered next to
4271 impossible. Trying to import an incompatible Unicode-aware extension
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00004272 will result in an ImportError. Unicode extensions writers must make
4273 sure to check the Unicode width compatibility in their extensions by
4274 using at least one of the mangled Unicode APIs in the extension.
4275
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004276- Two new flags METH_NOARGS and METH_O are available in method definition
4277 tables to simplify implementation of methods with no arguments and a
4278 single untyped argument. Calling such methods is more efficient than
4279 calling corresponding METH_VARARGS methods. METH_OLDARGS is now
4280 deprecated.
4281
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00004282Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004283-------
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00004284
4285- "import module" now compiles module.pyw if it exists and nothing else
4286 relevant is found.
4287
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004288
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00004289What's New in Python 2.2a1?
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004290===========================
4291
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004292*Release date: 18-Jul-2001*
4293
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004294Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004295----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004296
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00004297- TENTATIVELY, a large amount of code implementing much of what's
4298 described in PEP 252 (Making Types Look More Like Classes) and PEP
4299 253 (Subtyping Built-in Types) was added. This will be released
4300 with Python 2.2a1. Documentation will be provided separately
4301 through http://www.python.org/2.2/. The purpose of releasing this
4302 with Python 2.2a1 is to test backwards compatibility. It is
4303 possible, though not likely, that a decision is made not to release
4304 this code as part of 2.2 final, if any serious backwards
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004305 incompatibilities are found during alpha testing that cannot be
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00004306 repaired.
4307
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00004308- Generators were added; this is a new way to create an iterator (see
Tim Peters11a0d102001-07-17 18:48:00 +00004309 below) using what looks like a simple function containing one or
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00004310 more 'yield' statements. See PEP 255. Since this adds a new
4311 keyword to the language, this feature must be enabled by including a
4312 future statement: "from __future__ import generators" (see PEP 236).
4313 Generators will become a standard feature in a future release
4314 (probably 2.3). Without this future statement, 'yield' remains an
4315 ordinary identifier, but a warning is issued each time it is used.
4316 (These warnings currently don't conform to the warnings framework of
4317 PEP 230; we intend to fix this in 2.2a2.)
4318
Marc-André Lemburg12e74b32001-05-22 08:58:23 +00004319- The UTF-16 codec was modified to be more RFC compliant. It will now
4320 only remove BOM characters at the start of the string and then
4321 only if running in native mode (UTF-16-LE and -BE won't remove a
4322 leading BMO character).
4323
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00004324- Strings now have a new method .decode() to complement the already
4325 existing .encode() method. These two methods provide direct access
4326 to the corresponding decoders and encoders of the registered codecs.
4327
4328 To enhance the usability of the .encode() method, the special
4329 casing of Unicode object return values was dropped (Unicode objects
4330 were auto-magically converted to string using the default encoding).
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00004331
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00004332 Both methods will now return whatever the codec in charge of the
4333 requested encoding returns as object, e.g. Unicode codecs will
4334 return Unicode objects when decoding is requested ("äöü".decode("latin-1")
4335 will return u"äöü"). This enables codec writer to create codecs
4336 for various simple to use conversions.
4337
4338 New codecs were added to demonstrate these new features (the .encode()
4339 and .decode() columns indicate the type of the returned objects):
4340
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004341 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4342 |Name | .encode() | .decode() | Description |
4343 +=========+===========+===========+=============================+
4344 |uu | string | string | UU codec (e.g. for email) |
4345 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4346 |base64 | string | string | base64 codec |
4347 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4348 |quopri | string | string | quoted-printable codec |
4349 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4350 |zlib | string | string | zlib compression |
4351 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4352 |hex | string | string | 2-byte hex codec |
4353 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4354 |rot-13 | string | Unicode | ROT-13 Unicode charmap codec|
4355 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00004356
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004357- Some operating systems now support the concept of a default Unicode
4358 encoding for file system operations. Notably, Windows supports 'mbcs'
4359 as the default. The Macintosh will also adopt this concept in the medium
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00004360 term, although the default encoding for that platform will be other than
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004361 'mbcs'.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00004362
4363 On operating system that support non-ASCII filenames, it is common for
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004364 functions that return filenames (such as os.listdir()) to return Python
4365 string objects pre-encoded using the default file system encoding for
4366 the platform. As this encoding is likely to be different from Python's
4367 default encoding, converting this name to a Unicode object before passing
4368 it back to the Operating System would result in a Unicode error, as Python
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004369 would attempt to use its default encoding (generally ASCII) rather than
4370 the default encoding for the file system.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00004371
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004372 In general, this change simply removes surprises when working with
4373 Unicode and the file system, making these operations work as you expect,
4374 increasing the transparency of Unicode objects in this context.
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004375 See [????] for more details, including examples.
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004376
Tim Peters61dff2b2001-05-08 15:43:37 +00004377- Float (and complex) literals in source code were evaluated to full
4378 precision only when running from a .py file; the same code loaded from a
4379 .pyc (or .pyo) file could suffer numeric differences starting at about the
4380 12th significant decimal digit. For example, on a machine with IEEE-754
4381 floating arithmetic,
4382
4383 x = 9007199254740992.0
4384 print long(x)
4385
4386 printed 9007199254740992 if run directly from .py, but 9007199254740000
4387 if from a compiled (.pyc or .pyo) file. This was due to marshal using
4388 str(float) instead of repr(float) when building code objects. marshal
4389 now uses repr(float) instead, which should reproduce floats to full
4390 machine precision (assuming the platform C float<->string I/O conversion
4391 functions are of good quality).
4392
4393 This may cause floating-point results to change in some cases, and
4394 usually for the better, but may also cause numerically unstable
4395 algorithms to break.
4396
Tim Peters2f228e72001-05-13 00:19:31 +00004397- The implementation of dicts suffers fewer collisions, which has speed
4398 benefits. However, the order in which dict entries appear in dict.keys(),
4399 dict.values() and dict.items() may differ from previous releases for a
4400 given dict. Nothing is defined about this order, so no program should
4401 rely on it. Nevertheless, it's easy to write test cases that rely on the
4402 order by accident, typically because of printing the str() or repr() of a
4403 dict to an "expected results" file. See Lib/test/test_support.py's new
4404 sortdict(dict) function for a simple way to display a dict in sorted
4405 order.
4406
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00004407- Many other small changes to dicts were made, resulting in faster
4408 operation along the most common code paths.
4409
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00004410- Dictionary objects now support the "in" operator: "x in dict" means
4411 the same as dict.has_key(x).
4412
Barry Warsaw51acc8d2001-06-26 20:12:50 +00004413- The update() method of dictionaries now accepts generic mapping
4414 objects. Specifically the argument object must support the .keys()
4415 and __getitem__() methods. This allows you to say, for example,
4416 {}.update(UserDict())
4417
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00004418- Iterators were added; this is a generalized way of providing values
4419 to a for loop. See PEP 234. There's a new built-in function iter()
4420 to return an iterator. There's a new protocol to get the next value
4421 from an iterator using the next() method (in Python) or the
4422 tp_iternext slot (in C). There's a new protocol to get iterators
4423 using the __iter__() method (in Python) or the tp_iter slot (in C).
4424 Iterating (i.e. a for loop) over a dictionary generates its keys.
4425 Iterating over a file generates its lines.
4426
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004427- The following functions were generalized to work nicely with iterator
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004428 arguments::
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004429
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00004430 map(), filter(), reduce(), zip()
Tim Peters8572b4f2001-05-06 01:05:02 +00004431 list(), tuple() (PySequence_Tuple() and PySequence_Fast() in C API)
4432 max(), min()
Tim Peters1af03e92001-05-26 19:37:54 +00004433 join() method of strings
4434 extend() method of lists
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00004435 'x in y' and 'x not in y' (PySequence_Contains() in C API)
4436 operator.countOf() (PySequence_Count() in C API)
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004437 right-hand side of assignment statements with multiple targets, such as ::
Tim Petersd6d010b2001-06-21 02:49:55 +00004438 x, y, z = some_iterable_object_returning_exactly_3_values
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00004439
Tim Petersd85e1022001-05-11 21:51:48 +00004440- Accessing module attributes is significantly faster (for example,
4441 random.random or os.path or yourPythonModule.yourAttribute).
4442
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00004443- Comparing dictionary objects via == and != is faster, and now works even
4444 if the keys and values don't support comparisons other than ==.
4445
Tim Peters95bf9392001-05-10 08:32:44 +00004446- Comparing dictionaries in ways other than == and != is slower: there were
4447 insecurities in the dict comparison implementation that could cause Python
4448 to crash if the element comparison routines for the dict keys and/or
4449 values mutated the dicts. Making the code bulletproof slowed it down.
4450
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00004451- Collisions in dicts are resolved via a new approach, which can help
4452 dramatically in bad cases. For example, looking up every key in a dict
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00004453 d with d.keys() == [i << 16 for i in range(20000)] is approximately 500x
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00004454 faster now. Thanks to Christian Tismer for pointing out the cause and
4455 the nature of an effective cure (last December! better late than never).
Tim Peters15d49292001-05-27 07:39:22 +00004456
Tim Peters52e155e2001-06-16 05:42:57 +00004457- repr() is much faster for large containers (dict, list, tuple).
4458
4459
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004460Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004461-------
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004462
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00004463- The constants ascii_letters, ascii_lowercase. and ascii_uppercase
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004464 were added to the string module. These a locale-independent
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00004465 constants, unlike letters, lowercase, and uppercase. These are now
4466 use in appropriate locations in the standard library.
4467
Martin v. Löwisf0473d52001-07-18 16:17:16 +00004468- The flags used in dlopen calls can now be configured using
4469 sys.setdlopenflags and queried using sys.getdlopenflags.
4470
Guido van Rossumc7e4aca2001-07-12 11:54:37 +00004471- Fredrik Lundh's xmlrpclib is now a standard library module. This
4472 provides full client-side XML-RPC support. In addition,
4473 Demo/xmlrpc/ contains two server frameworks (one SocketServer-based,
4474 one asyncore-based). Thanks to Eric Raymond for the documentation.
4475
Guido van Rossum643d3912001-07-05 14:46:25 +00004476- The xrange() object is simplified: it no longer supports slicing,
4477 repetition, comparisons, efficient 'in' checking, the tolist()
4478 method, or the start, stop and step attributes. See PEP 260.
4479
Martin v. Löwisebf94db2001-06-06 06:25:40 +00004480- A new function fnmatch.filter to filter lists of file names was added.
4481
Barry Warsawffd674d2001-05-22 16:00:10 +00004482- calendar.py uses month and day names based on the current locale.
4483
Guido van Rossum2e0a6542001-05-15 02:14:44 +00004484- strop is now *really* obsolete (this was announced before with 1.6),
4485 and issues DeprecationWarning when used (except for the four items
4486 that are still imported into string.py).
4487
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004488- Cookie.py now sorts key+value pairs by key in output strings.
4489
4490- pprint.isrecursive(object) didn't correctly identify recursive objects.
4491 Now it does.
4492
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00004493- pprint functions now much faster for large containers (tuple, list, dict).
4494
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00004495- New 'q' and 'Q' format codes in the struct module, corresponding to C
4496 types "long long" and "unsigned long long" (on Windows, __int64). In
4497 native mode, these can be used only when the platform C compiler supports
4498 these types (when HAVE_LONG_LONG is #define'd by the Python config
4499 process), and then they inherit the sizes and alignments of the C types.
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00004500 In standard mode, 'q' and 'Q' are supported on all platforms, and are
4501 8-byte integral types.
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00004502
Guido van Rossum83213cc2001-06-12 16:48:52 +00004503- The site module installs a new built-in function 'help' that invokes
4504 pydoc.help. It must be invoked as 'help()'; when invoked as 'help',
4505 it displays a message reminding the user to use 'help()' or
4506 'help(object)'.
4507
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004508Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004509-----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004510
4511- New test_mutants.py runs dict comparisons where the key and value
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004512 comparison operators mutate the dicts randomly during comparison. This
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004513 rapidly causes Python to crash under earlier releases (not for the faint
4514 of heart: it can also cause Win9x to freeze or reboot!).
4515
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004516- New test_pprint.py verifies that pprint.isrecursive() and
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00004517 pprint.isreadable() return sensible results. Also verifies that simple
4518 cases produce correct output.
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004519
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00004520C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004521-----
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00004522
4523- Removed the unused last_is_sticky argument from the internal
4524 _PyTuple_Resize(). If this affects you, you were cheating.
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004525
4526----
4527
4528**(For information about older versions, consult the HISTORY file.)**