blob: 80f7dc79333ce227761c0d521ccdaf2b74f604e5 [file] [log] [blame]
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001+++++++++++
2Python News
3+++++++++++
4
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +00005(editors: check NEWS.help for information about editing NEWS using ReST.)
6
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +00007What's New in Python 2.5 alpha 1?
8=================================
9
Anthony Baxter12b6f6c2005-03-29 13:36:16 +000010*Release date: XX-XXX-2006*
11
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +000012Core and builtins
13-----------------
14
Michael W. Hudson188d4362005-06-20 16:52:57 +000015- SF bug #1163563: the original fix for bug #1010677 ("thread Module
16 Breaks PyGILState_Ensure()") broke badly in the case of multiple
17 interpreter states; back out that fix and do a better job (see
18 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2005-June/054258.html
19 for a longer write-up of the problem).
20
Michael W. Hudsondf888462005-06-03 14:41:55 +000021- SF patch #1180995: marshal now uses a binary format by default when
22 serializing floats.
23
Michael W. Hudsonda85a902005-06-01 11:34:22 +000024- SF patch #1181301: on platforms that appear to use IEEE 754 floats,
25 the routines that promise to produce IEEE 754 binary representations
26 of floats now simply copy bytes around.
27
Skip Montanarobbf12ba2005-05-20 03:07:06 +000028- bug #967182: disallow opening files with 'wU' or 'aU' as specified by PEP
29 278.
30
Brett Cannonc3647ac2005-04-26 03:45:26 +000031- patch #1109424: int, long, float, complex, and unicode now check for the
32 proper magic slot for type conversions when subclassed. Previously the
33 magic slot was ignored during conversion. Semantics now match the way
34 subclasses of str always behaved. int/long/float, conversion of an instance
35 to the base class has been moved the prroper nb_* magic slot and out of
36 PyNumber_*().
37 Thanks Walter Dörwald.
38
Barry Warsawc8d907c2005-04-19 23:43:40 +000039- Descriptors defined in C with a PyGetSetDef structure, where the setter is
40 NULL, now raise an AttributeError when attempting to set or delete the
41 attribute. Previously a TypeError was raised, but this was inconsistent
42 with the equivalent pure-Python implementation.
43
Michael W. Hudson774479c2005-04-18 08:46:17 +000044- It is now safe to call PyGILState_Release() before
45 PyEval_InitThreads() (note that if there is reason to believe there
46 are multiple threads around you still must call PyEval_InitThreads()
47 before using the Python API; this fix is for extension modules that
48 have no way of knowing if Python is multi-threaded yet).
49
Michael W. Hudsone3afc592005-04-07 10:11:19 +000050- Typing Ctrl-C whilst raw_input() was waiting in a build with threads
51 disabled caused a crash.
52
Michael W. Hudsonb330adf2005-03-31 09:35:44 +000053- Bug #1165306: instancemethod_new allowed the creation of a method
54 with im_class == im_self == NULL, which caused a crash when called.
55
Anthony Baxter12b6f6c2005-03-29 13:36:16 +000056- Move exception finalisation later in the shutdown process - this
57 fixes the crash seen in bug #1165761
58
Raymond Hettinger96229b12005-03-11 06:49:40 +000059- Added two new builtins, any() and all().
60
Brett Cannon409d8f22005-03-05 06:47:57 +000061- Defining a class with empty parentheses is now allowed
Brett Cannonf4189912005-04-09 02:30:16 +000062 (e.g., ``class C(): pass`` is no longer a syntax error).
63 Patch #1176012 added support to the 'parser' module and 'compiler' package
64 (thanks to logistix for that added support).
Brett Cannon409d8f22005-03-05 06:47:57 +000065
Martin v. Löwis96d743e2005-03-03 23:00:26 +000066- Patch #1115086: Support PY_LONGLONG in structmember.
67
Raymond Hettingerb67cc802005-03-03 16:45:19 +000068- Bug #1155938: new style classes did not check that __init__() was
69 returning None.
70
Martin v. Löwis4bf108d2005-03-03 11:45:45 +000071- Patch #802188: Report characters after line continuation character
72 ('\') with a specific error message.
73
Martin v. Löwisff232d72005-03-03 09:24:38 +000074- Bug #723201: Raise a TypeError for passing bad objects to 'L' format.
75
Michael W. Hudson8e1afab2005-02-17 14:55:21 +000076- Bug #1124295: the __name__ attribute of file objects was
77 inadvertently made inaccessible in restricted mode.
78
Martin v. Löwis13a1fde2005-01-27 18:56:16 +000079- Bug #1074011: closing sys.std{out,err} now causes a flush() and
Martin v. Löwis8e3ca8a2005-01-23 09:41:49 +000080 an ferror() call.
81
Raymond Hettinger3b0c7c22004-12-03 08:30:39 +000082- min() and max() now support key= arguments with the same meaning as in
83 list.sort().
84
Raymond Hettingerc34f8672005-01-02 06:17:33 +000085- The peephole optimizer now performs simple constant folding in expressions:
86 (2+3) --> (5).
87
Raymond Hettingera422c342005-01-11 03:03:27 +000088- set and frozenset objects can now be marshalled. SF #1098985.
89
Michael W. Hudsonfaa76482005-01-31 17:09:25 +000090- Bug #1077106: Poor argument checking could cause memory corruption
91 in calls to os.read().
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +000092
Jeremy Hyltonab630502005-02-04 18:44:06 +000093- The parser did not complain about future statements in illegal
94 positions. It once again reports a syntax error if a future
95 statement occurs after anything other than a doc string.
96
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +000097Extension Modules
98-----------------
99
Georg Brandl6b95f1d2005-06-03 19:47:00 +0000100- Bug #1194181: bz2.BZ2File didn't handle mode 'U' correctly.
101
Hye-Shik Chang5f937a72005-06-02 13:09:30 +0000102- Patch #1212117: os.stat().st_flags is now accessible as a attribute
103 if available on the platform.
104
Skip Montanaro5ff14922005-05-16 02:42:22 +0000105- Patch #1103951: Expose O_SHLOCK and O_EXLOCK in the posix module if
106 available on the platform.
107
Michael W. Hudsonb330adf2005-03-31 09:35:44 +0000108- Bug #1166660: The readline module could segfault if hook functions
109 were set in a different thread than that which called readline.
110
Raymond Hettinger4aec61e2005-03-18 21:20:23 +0000111- collections.deque objects now support a remove() method.
112
Raymond Hettinger984f9bb2005-03-09 16:38:48 +0000113- operator.itemgetter() and operator.attrgetter() now support retrieving
114 multiple fields. This provides direct support for sorting on multiple
115 keys (primary, secondary, etc).
116
Martin v. Löwisb60ae992005-03-08 09:10:29 +0000117- os.access now supports Unicode path names on non-Win32 systems.
118
Martin v. Löwisfd78a6f2005-03-04 14:37:01 +0000119- Patches #925152, #1118602: Avoid reading after the end of the buffer
120 in pyexpat.GetInputContext.
121
Martin v. Löwis7fe60c02005-03-03 11:22:44 +0000122- Patches #749830, #1144555: allow UNIX mmap size to default to current
123 file size.
124
Raymond Hettinger9c323f82005-02-28 19:39:44 +0000125- Added functional.partial(). See PEP309.
126
Martin v. Löwis9533e342005-02-27 20:33:25 +0000127- Patch #1093585: raise a ValueError for negative history items in readline.
128 {remove_history,replace_history}
129
Fred Drake9c131f22005-01-23 15:16:08 +0000130- The spwd module has been added, allowing access to the shadow password
131 database.
Martin v. Löwisc3001752005-01-23 09:27:24 +0000132
Martin v. Löwisfe33d0b2005-01-16 08:57:39 +0000133- stat_float_times is now True.
134
Raymond Hettingerb0900e62004-12-16 16:23:40 +0000135- array.array objects are now picklable.
136
Raymond Hettingera6b45cc2004-12-07 07:05:57 +0000137- the cPickle module no longer accepts the deprecated None option in the
138 args tuple returned by __reduce__().
139
Raymond Hettingerb2594052004-12-05 09:25:51 +0000140- itertools.islice() now accepts None for the start and step arguments.
141 This allows islice() to work more readily with slices:
142 islice(s.start, s.stop, s.step)
143
Skip Montanaro0af3ade2005-01-13 04:12:31 +0000144- datetime.datetime() now has a strptime class method which can be used to
145 create datetime object using a string and format.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000146
147Library
148-------
149
Raymond Hettinger68c04532005-06-10 11:05:19 +0000150- The tokenize module has a new untokenize() function to support a full
151 roundtrip from lexed tokens back to Python sourcecode. In addition,
152 the generate_tokens() function now accepts a callable argument that
153 terminates by raising StopIteration.
154
Georg Brandl9166e1a2005-06-04 09:20:03 +0000155- Bug #1196315: fix weakref.WeakValueDictionary constructor.
156
Georg Brandl268e61c2005-06-03 14:28:50 +0000157- Bug #1213894: os.path.realpath didn't resolve symlinks that were the first
158 component of the path.
159
Skip Montanaro174dd222005-05-14 20:54:16 +0000160- Patch #1120353: The xmlrpclib module provides better, more transparent,
161 support for datetime.{datetime,date,time} objects. With use_datetime set
162 to True, applications shouldn't have to fiddle with the DateTime wrapper
163 class at all.
164
Martin v. Löwis55f1bb82005-03-21 20:56:35 +0000165- distutils.commands.upload was added to support uploading distribution
166 files to PyPI.
167
Walter Dörwalda6e8a4a2005-03-31 13:57:38 +0000168- distutils.commands.register now encodes the data as UTF-8 before posting
169 them to PyPI.
170
Raymond Hettinger267b8682005-03-27 10:47:39 +0000171- decimal operator and comparison methods now return NotImplemented
172 instead of raising a TypeError when interacting with other types. This
173 allows other classes to implement __radd__ style methods and have them
174 work as expected.
175
Raymond Hettingerbea3f6f2005-03-15 04:59:17 +0000176- Bug #1163325: Decimal infinities failed to hash. Attempting to
177 hash a NaN raised an InvalidOperation instead of a TypeError.
178
Martin v. Löwis78be7df2005-03-05 12:47:42 +0000179- Patch #918101: Add tarfile open mode r|* for auto-detection of the
180 stream compression; add, for symmetry reasons, r:* as a synonym of r.
181
Martin v. Löwis00a73e72005-03-04 19:40:34 +0000182- Patch #1043890: Add extractall method to tarfile.
183
Martin v. Löwisc72dd382005-03-04 13:50:17 +0000184- Patch #1075887: Don't require MSVC in distutils if there is nothing
185 to build.
186
Martin v. Löwis637431b2005-03-03 23:12:42 +0000187- Patch #1103407: Properly deal with tarfile iterators when untarring
188 symbolic links on Windows.
189
Martin v. Löwisa4dac402005-03-03 11:39:45 +0000190- Patch #645894: Use getrusage for computing the time consumption in
191 profile.py if available.
192
Martin v. Löwisdf37c8c2005-03-03 11:08:03 +0000193- Patch #1046831: Use get_python_version where appropriate in sysconfig.py.
194
Martin v. Löwisc5574e82005-03-03 10:57:37 +0000195- Patch #1117454: Remove code to special-case cookies without values
196 in LWPCookieJar.
197
Martin v. Löwis4ea3ead2005-03-03 10:48:12 +0000198- Patch #1117339: Add cookielib special name tests.
199
Martin v. Löwise869eb12005-03-03 09:46:07 +0000200- Patch #1112812: Make bsddb/__init__.py more friendly for modulefinder.
201
Martin v. Löwisf2a8d632005-03-03 08:35:22 +0000202- Patch #1110248: SYNC_FLUSH the zlib buffer for GZipFile.flush.
203
Martin v. Löwisdf241532005-03-03 08:17:42 +0000204- Patch #1107973: Allow to iterate over the lines of a tarfile.ExFileObject.
205
Martin v. Löwis8ed338a2005-03-03 08:12:27 +0000206- Patch #1104111: Alter setup.py --help and --help-commands.
207
Martin v. Löwis4afe1542005-03-01 08:09:28 +0000208- Patch #1121234: Properly cleanup _exit and tkerror commands.
209
Martin v. Löwisc2a0ac22005-02-24 20:22:10 +0000210- Patch #1049151: xdrlib now unpacks booleans as True or False.
211
Raymond Hettingerbab41432005-02-05 01:31:19 +0000212- Fixed bug in a NameError bug in cookielib. Patch #1116583.
213
Guido van Rossumd0641422005-02-03 15:01:24 +0000214- Applied a security fix to SimpleXMLRPCserver (PSF-2005-001). This
215 disables recursive traversal through instance attributes, which can
216 be exploited in various ways.
217
Martin v. Löwis1d11de62005-01-29 13:29:23 +0000218- Bug #1110478: Revert os.environ.update to do putenv again.
219
Thomas Hellerd6c6e222005-01-20 19:20:16 +0000220- Bug #1103844: fix distutils.install.dump_dirs() with negated options.
221
Martin v. Löwis22b457e2005-01-16 08:40:58 +0000222- os.{SEEK_SET, SEEK_CUR, SEEK_END} have been added for convenience.
223
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000224- Enhancements to the csv module:
225
226 + Dialects are now validated by the underlying C code, better
227 reflecting it's capabilities, and improving it's compliance with
228 PEP 305.
229 + Dialect parameter parsing has been re-implemented to improve error
230 reporting.
231 + quotechar=None and quoting=QUOTE_NONE now work the way PEP 305
232 dictates.
233 + the parser now removes the escapechar prefix from escaped characters.
Andrew McNamara0f0599d2005-01-12 09:45:18 +0000234 + when quoting=QUOTE_NONNUMERIC, the writer now tests for numeric
Andrew McNamaraf69d94f2005-01-13 11:30:54 +0000235 types, rather than any object than can be represented as a numeric.
Andrew McNamara0f0599d2005-01-12 09:45:18 +0000236 + when quoting=QUOTE_NONNUMERIC, the reader now casts unquoted fields
237 to floats.
Andrew McNamaraf69d94f2005-01-13 11:30:54 +0000238 + reader now allows \r characters to be quoted (previously it only allowed
239 \n to be quoted).
Andrew McNamarac89f2842005-01-12 07:44:42 +0000240 + writer doublequote handling improved.
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000241 + Dialect classes passed to the module are no longer instantiated by
242 the module before being parsed (the former validation scheme required
243 this, but the mechanism was unreliable).
244 + The dialect registry now contains instances of the internal
245 C-coded dialect type, rather than references to python objects.
246 + the internal c-coded dialect type is now immutable.
247 + register_dialect now accepts the same keyword dialect specifications
248 as the reader and writer, allowing the user to register dialects
249 without first creating a dialect class.
250 + a configurable limit to the size of parsed fields has been added -
251 previously, an unmatched quote character could result in the entire
252 file being read into the field buffer before an error was reported.
Andrew McNamara31d88962005-01-12 03:45:10 +0000253 + A new module method csv.field_size_limit() has been added that sets
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000254 the parser field size limit (returning the former limit). The initial
255 limit is 128kB.
Andrew McNamara7f2053e2005-01-12 11:17:16 +0000256 + A line_num attribute has been added to the reader object, which tracks
257 the number of lines read from the source iterator. This is not
258 the same as the number of records returned, as records can span
259 multiple lines.
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000260 + reader and writer objects were not being registered with the cyclic-GC.
261 This has been fixed.
262
Brett Cannone6539c42005-01-08 02:43:53 +0000263- _DummyThread objects in the threading module now delete self.__block that is
264 inherited from _Thread since it uses up a lock allocated by 'thread'. The
265 lock primitives tend to be limited in number and thus should not be wasted on
266 a _DummyThread object. Fixes bug #1089632.
267
Raymond Hettinger97db05d2005-01-07 08:15:41 +0000268- The imghdr module now detects Exif files.
269
Raymond Hettinger6065d322004-12-20 23:51:53 +0000270- StringIO.truncate() now correctly adjusts the size attribute.
271 (Bug #951915).
272
Marc-André Lemburgbb4f1bd2004-12-10 21:58:14 +0000273- locale.py now uses an updated locale alias table (built using
274 Tools/i18n/makelocalealias.py, a tool to parse the X11 locale
275 alias file); the encoding lookup was enhanced to use Python's
276 encoding alias table
277
Raymond Hettinger3557f422004-12-07 12:02:02 +0000278- moved deprecated modules to Lib/lib-old: whrandom, tzparse, statcache.
279
Raymond Hettingera6b45cc2004-12-07 07:05:57 +0000280- the pickle module no longer accepts the deprecated None option in the
281 args tuple returned by __reduce__().
282
Brett Cannon84667c02004-12-07 03:25:18 +0000283- optparse now optionally imports gettext. This allows its use in setup.py.
284
Raymond Hettinger3489cad2004-12-05 05:20:42 +0000285- the pickle module no longer uses the deprecated bin parameter.
286
Raymond Hettinger1bc82f82004-12-05 03:58:17 +0000287- the shelve module no longer uses the deprecated binary parameter.
288
Raymond Hettinger6c92d762004-12-05 03:28:00 +0000289- the pstats module no longer uses the deprecated ignore() method.
290
Raymond Hettingerf3fa9462004-12-05 01:58:09 +0000291- the filecmp module no longer uses the deprecated use_statcache argument.
292
Raymond Hettinger664347b2004-12-04 21:21:53 +0000293- unittest.TestCase.run() and unittest.TestSuite.run() can now be successfully
294 extended or overridden by subclasses. Formerly, the subclassed method would
295 be ignored by the rest of the module. (Bug #1078905).
296
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000297- heapq.nsmallest() and heapq.nlargest() now support key= arguments with
Raymond Hettinger3b0c7c22004-12-03 08:30:39 +0000298 the same meaning as in list.sort().
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000299
Walter Dörwald36733692004-12-22 12:50:50 +0000300- Bug #1076985: ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` now calls ``read()`` only
301 once when a size argument is given. This prevents a buffer overflow in the
302 tokenizer with very long source lines.
303
Andrew M. Kuchling3b585b32004-12-28 20:10:48 +0000304- Bug #1083110: ``zlib.decompress.flush()`` would segfault if called immediately
305 after creating the object, without any intervening ``.decompress()`` calls.
306
Skip Montanaro05885812005-01-16 20:48:27 +0000307- The reconvert.quote function can now emit triple-quoted strings. The
308 reconvert module now has some simple documentation.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000309
Walter Dörwaldaf3b39a2005-02-18 13:22:43 +0000310- ``UserString.MutableString`` now supports negative indices in
311 ``__setitem__`` and ``__delitem__``
312
Greg Ward40407942005-03-05 02:53:17 +0000313- Bug #1149508: ``textwrap`` now handles hyphenated numbers (eg. "2004-03-05")
314 correctly.
315
Walter Dörwaldbc8e6422005-04-21 21:32:03 +0000316- Partial fixes for SF bugs #1163244 and #1175396: If a chunk read by
317 ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` has a trailing "\r", read one more
318 character even if the user has passed a size parameter to get a proper
319 line ending. Remove the special handling of a "\r\n" that has been split
320 between two lines.
321
Greg Ward40407942005-03-05 02:53:17 +0000322
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000323Build
324-----
325
Brett Cannon08cd5982005-04-24 22:26:38 +0000326- EXTRA_CFLAGS has been introduced as an environment variable to hold compiler
327 flags that change binary compatibility. Changes were also made to
328 distutils.sysconfig to also use the environment variable when used during
Martin v. Löwisd7c795e2005-04-25 07:14:03 +0000329 compilation of the interpreter and of C extensions through distutils.
Brett Cannon08cd5982005-04-24 22:26:38 +0000330
Bob Ippolitoed233462005-03-29 13:47:59 +0000331- SF patch 1171735: Darwin 8's headers are anal about POSIX compliance,
332 and linking has changed (prebinding is now deprecated, and libcc_dynamic
333 no longer exists). This configure patch makes things right.
334
Martin v. Löwise2713be2005-03-08 15:03:08 +0000335- Bug #1158607: Build with --disable-unicode again.
336
Brett Cannon46d96232005-02-16 00:07:19 +0000337- spwdmodule.c is built only if either HAVE_GETSPNAM or HAVE_HAVE_GETSPENT is
338 defined. Discovered as a result of not being able to build on OS X.
339
Brett Cannon516592f2004-12-07 00:42:59 +0000340- setup.py now uses the directories specified in LDFLAGS using the -L option
341 and in CPPFLAGS using the -I option for adding library and include
342 directories, respectively, for compiling extension modules against. This has
343 led to the core being compiled using the values in CPPFLAGS. It also removes
344 the need for the special-casing of both DarwinPorts and Fink for darwin since
345 the proper directories can be specified in LDFLAGS (``-L/sw/lib`` for Fink,
346 ``-L/opt/local/lib`` for DarwinPorts) and CPPFLAGS (``-I/sw/include`` for
347 Fink, ``-I/opt/local/include`` for DarwinPorts).
348
Brett Cannon43802422005-02-10 20:48:03 +0000349- Test in configure.in that checks for tzset no longer dependent on tm->tm_zone
350 to exist in the struct (not required by either ISO C nor the UNIX 2 spec).
351 Tests for sanity in tzname when HAVE_TZNAME defined were also defined.
352 Closes bug #1096244. Thanks Gregory Bond.
353
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000354
355C API
356-----
357
Raymond Hettinger66517482004-12-03 11:45:13 +0000358- Removed PyRange_New().
359
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000360
361Tests
362-----
363
Martin v. Löwis4d394df2005-01-23 09:19:22 +0000364- In test_os, st_?time is now truncated before comparing it with ST_?TIME.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000365
Brett Cannonced04e02005-02-13 22:53:22 +0000366
367Documentation
368-------------
369
370- Remove all latent references for "Macintosh" that referred to semantics for
371 Mac OS 9 and change to reflect the state for OS X.
372 Closes patch #1095802. Thanks Jack Jansen.
373
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000374Mac
375---
376
377
378
379Tools/Demos
380-----------
381
Martin v. Löwisab9ec162005-04-09 10:53:34 +0000382- Patch #1177597: Correct Complex.__init__.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000383
384
Anthony Baxtere2648ee2004-11-30 01:28:55 +0000385What's New in Python 2.4 final?
386===============================
Kurt B. Kaiser4c79a832004-11-23 18:06:08 +0000387
Anthony Baxtere2648ee2004-11-30 01:28:55 +0000388*Release date: 30-NOV-2004*
Kurt B. Kaiser4c79a832004-11-23 18:06:08 +0000389
390Core and builtins
391-----------------
392
393- Bug 875692: Improve signal handling, especially when using threads, by
394 forcing an early re-execution of PyEval_EvalFrame() "periodic" code when
395 things_to_do is not cleared by Py_MakePendingCalls().
396
397
Anthony Baxter4277ed82004-11-30 11:53:10 +0000398What's New in Python 2.4 (release candidate 1)
399==============================================
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000400
Anthony Baxter5cc727a2004-11-18 12:32:27 +0000401*Release date: 18-NOV-2004*
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000402
403Core and builtins
404-----------------
405
Tim Petersfb1ffb02004-11-08 04:30:21 +0000406- Bug 1061968: Fixes in 2.4a3 to address thread bug 1010677 reintroduced
407 the years-old thread shutdown race bug 225673. Numeric history lesson
408 aside, all bugs in all three reports are fixed now.
409
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000410
Skip Montanaro599bd5e2004-11-04 04:31:30 +0000411Library
412-------
413
414- Bug 1052242: If exceptions are raised by an atexit handler function an
415 attempt is made to execute the remaining handlers. The last exception
416 raised is re-raised.
417
Tim Peters50c6bdb2004-11-08 22:07:37 +0000418- ``doctest``'s new support for adding ``pdb.set_trace()`` calls to
419 doctests was broken in a dramatic but shallow way. Fixed.
420
Tim Petersbbc0d442004-11-13 16:18:32 +0000421- Bug 1065388: ``calendar``'s ``day_name``, ``day_abbr``, ``month_name``,
422 and ``month_abbr`` attributes emulate sequences of locale-correct
423 spellings of month and day names. Because the locale can change at
424 any time, the correct spelling is recomputed whenever one of these is
425 indexed. In the worst case, the index may be a slice object, so these
426 recomputed every day or month name each time they were indexed. This is
427 much slower than necessary in the usual case, when the index is just an
428 integer. In that case, only the single spelling needed is recomputed
429 now; and, when the index is a slice object, only the spellings needed
430 by the slice are recomputed now.
431
Tim Peters50c6bdb2004-11-08 22:07:37 +0000432- Patch 1061679: Added ``__all__`` to pickletools.py.
Tim Peters90cf2122004-11-06 23:45:48 +0000433
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000434Build
435-----
Skip Montanaro599bd5e2004-11-04 04:31:30 +0000436
Brett Cannon7d28e962004-11-07 01:19:00 +0000437- Bug 1034277 / Patch 1035255: Remove compilation of core against CoreServices
438 and CoreFoundation on OS X. Involved removing PyMac_GetAppletScriptFile()
439 which has no known users. Thanks Bob Ippolito.
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000440
441C API
442-----
443
Raymond Hettinger39e92ea2004-11-18 09:41:45 +0000444- The PyRange_New() function is deprecated.
445
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000446
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000447What's New in Python 2.4 beta 2?
448================================
449
Anthony Baxter9f41f3a2004-11-03 06:21:37 +0000450*Release date: 03-NOV-2004*
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000451
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000452License
453-------
454
455The Python Software Foundation changed the license under which Python
456is released, to remove Python version numbers. There were no other
457changes to the license. So, for example, wherever the license for
458Python 2.3 said "Python 2.3", the new license says "Python". The
459intent is to make it possible to refer to the PSF license in a more
460durable way. For example, some people say they're confused by that
461the Open Source Initiative's entry for the Python Software Foundation
462License::
463
464 http://www.opensource.org/licenses/PythonSoftFoundation.php
465
466says "Python 2.1.1" all over it, wondering whether it applies only
467to Python 2.1.1.
468
469The official name of the new license is the Python Software Foundation
470License Version 2.
471
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000472Core and builtins
473-----------------
474
Tim Petersead8b7a2004-10-30 23:09:22 +0000475- Bug #1055820 Cyclic garbage collection was not protecting against that
476 calling a live weakref to a piece of cyclic trash could resurrect an
477 insane mutation of the trash if any Python code ran during gc (via
478 running a dead object's __del__ method, running another callback on a
479 weakref to a dead object, or via any Python code run in any other thread
480 that managed to obtain the GIL while a __del__ or callback was running
481 in the thread doing gc). The most likely symptom was "impossible"
482 ``AttributeEror`` exceptions, appearing seemingly at random, on weakly
483 referenced objects. The cure was to clear all weakrefs to unreachable
484 objects before allowing any callbacks to run.
485
Raymond Hettinger561fbf12004-10-26 01:52:37 +0000486- Bug #1054139 _PyString_Resize() now invalidates its cached hash value.
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000487
488Extension Modules
489-----------------
490
Raymond Hettinger9047c8f2004-10-24 00:10:06 +0000491- Bug #1048870: the compiler now generates distinct code objects for
492 functions with identical bodies. This was producing confusing
493 traceback messages which pointed to the function where the code
494 object was first defined rather than the function being executed.
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000495
496Library
497-------
498
Barry Warsaw8c72eae2004-11-01 03:52:43 +0000499- Patch #1056967 changes the semantics of Template.safe_substitute() so that
500 no ValueError is raised on an 'invalid' match group. Now the delimiter is
501 returned.
502
Raymond Hettinger2ef7e6c2004-10-24 00:32:24 +0000503- Bug #1052503 pdb.runcall() was not passing along keyword arguments.
504
Raymond Hettingerc64aab82004-10-20 08:21:57 +0000505- Bug #902037: XML.sax.saxutils.prepare_input_source() now combines relative
506 paths with a base path before checking os.path.isfile().
507
Raymond Hettingere54e7262004-10-20 07:17:16 +0000508- The whichdb module can now be run from the command line.
509
Brett Cannon8abcc5d2004-10-18 01:37:57 +0000510- Bug #1045381: time.strptime() can now infer the date using %U or %W (week of
511 the year) when the day of the week and year are also specified.
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000512
Andrew M. Kuchling0d19bae2004-10-19 19:54:41 +0000513- Bug #1048816: fix bug in Ctrl-K at start of line in curses.textpad.Textbox
514
Andrew M. Kuchling66e80ba2004-10-20 11:56:15 +0000515- Bug #1017553: fix bug in tarfile.filemode()
516
Hye-Shik Chang33761492004-10-26 09:53:46 +0000517- Patch #737473: fix bug that old source code is shown in tracebacks even if
Hye-Shik Chang182ac852004-10-26 09:16:42 +0000518 the source code is updated and reloaded.
519
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000520Build
521-----
522
Hye-Shik Chang33761492004-10-26 09:53:46 +0000523- Patch #1044395: --enable-shared is allowed in FreeBSD also.
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000524
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000525What's New in Python 2.4 beta 1?
526================================
527
Anthony Baxter6a587c12004-10-15 08:07:21 +0000528*Release date: 15-OCT-2004*
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000529
530Core and builtins
531-----------------
532
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000533- Patch #975056: Restartable signals were not correctly disabled on
Anthony Baxtere4f8a482004-10-13 14:55:56 +0000534 BSD systems. Consistently use PyOS_setsig() instead of signal().
535
Tim Peters263091e2004-10-10 01:58:44 +0000536- The internal portable implementation of thread-local storage (TLS), used
537 by the ``PyGILState_Ensure()``/``PyGILState_Release()`` API, was not
538 thread-correct. This could lead to a variety of problems, up to and
539 including segfaults. See bug 1041645 for an example.
540
Raymond Hettingerdb29e0f2004-10-07 06:46:25 +0000541- Added a command line option, -m module, which searches sys.path for the
542 module and then runs it. (Contributed by Nick Coghlan.)
543
Raymond Hettinger2c31a052004-09-22 18:44:21 +0000544- The bytecode optimizer now folds tuples of constants into a single
545 constant.
546
Tim Peters307fa782004-09-23 08:06:40 +0000547- SF bug #513866: Float/long comparison anomaly. Prior to 2.4b1, when
548 an integer was compared to a float, the integer was coerced to a float.
549 That could yield spurious overflow errors (if the integer was very
550 large), and to anomalies such as
551 ``long(1e200)+1 == 1e200 == long(1e200)-1``. Coercion to float is no
552 longer performed, and cases like ``long(1e200)-1 < 1e200``,
553 ``long(1e200)+1 > 1e200`` and ``(1 << 20000) > 1e200`` are computed
554 correctly now.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000555
556Extension modules
557-----------------
558
Tim Peterscf8997f2004-10-01 02:13:16 +0000559- ``collections.deque`` objects didn't play quite right with garbage
560 collection, which could lead to a segfault in a release build, or
Raymond Hettingerdb29e0f2004-10-07 06:46:25 +0000561 an assert failure in a debug build. Also, added overflow checks,
562 better detection of mutation during iteration, and shielded deque
563 comparisons from unusual subclass overrides of the __iter__() method.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000564
565Library
566-------
Raymond Hettinger0318a932004-09-22 18:03:47 +0000567
Anthony Baxtera0240342004-10-14 10:02:08 +0000568- Patch 1046644: distutils build_ext grew two new options - --swig for
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000569 specifying the swig executable to use, and --swig-opts to specify
Anthony Baxtera0240342004-10-14 10:02:08 +0000570 options to pass to swig. --swig-opts="-c++" is the new way to spell
571 --swig-cpp.
572
Anthony Baxter22dcf662004-10-13 15:54:17 +0000573- Patch 983206: distutils now obeys environment variable LDSHARED, if
574 it is set.
575
Andrew M. Kuchling518d3932004-10-12 15:32:10 +0000576- Added Peter Astrand's subprocess.py module. See PEP 324 for details.
Fredrik Lundh5b3687d2004-10-12 15:26:28 +0000577
Brett Cannon4f35c712004-10-06 02:11:37 +0000578- time.strptime() now properly escapes timezones and all other locale-specific
579 strings for regex-specific symbols. Was breaking under Japanese Windows when
580 the timezone was specified as "Tokyo (standard time)".
581 Closes bug #1039270.
582
Barry Warsawbb113862004-10-03 03:16:19 +0000583- Updates for the email package:
Brett Cannon06a30b02004-10-22 06:22:54 +0000584
Barry Warsaw418de1f2004-10-11 14:32:47 +0000585 + email.Utils.formatdate() grew a 'usegmt' argument for HTTP support.
Barry Warsawbb113862004-10-03 03:16:19 +0000586 + All deprecated APIs that in email 2.x issued warnings have been removed:
587 _encoder argument to the MIMEText constructor, Message.add_payload(),
588 Utils.dump_address_pair(), Utils.decode(), Utils.encode()
589 + New deprecations: Generator.__call__(), Message.get_type(),
590 Message.get_main_type(), Message.get_subtype(), the 'strict' argument to
591 the Parser constructor. These will be removed in email 3.1.
592 + Support for Python earlier than 2.3 has been removed (see PEP 291).
593 + All defect classes have been renamed to end in 'Defect'.
594 + Some FeedParser fixes; also a MultipartInvariantViolationDefect will be
595 added to messages that claim to be multipart but really aren't.
596 + Updates to documentation.
597
Raymond Hettinger596ba4d2004-09-24 03:41:05 +0000598- re's findall() and finditer() functions now take an optional flags argument
599 just like the compile(), search(), and match() functions. Also, documented
600 the previously existing start and stop parameters for the findall() and
601 finditer() methods of regular expression objects.
602
Raymond Hettinger0318a932004-09-22 18:03:47 +0000603- rfc822 Messages now support iterating over the headers.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000604
Martin v. Löwisf3c56112004-09-18 09:08:52 +0000605- The (undocumented) tarfile.Tarfile.membernames has been removed;
606 applications should use the getmember function.
607
Martin v. Löwis39a31782004-09-18 09:03:49 +0000608- httplib now offers symbolic constants for the HTTP status codes.
609
Tim Peters528ca532004-09-16 01:30:50 +0000610- SF bug #1028306: Trying to compare a ``datetime.date`` to a
611 ``datetime.datetime`` mistakenly compared only the year, month and day.
612 Now it acts like a mixed-type comparison: ``False`` for ``==``,
613 ``True`` for ``!=``, and raises ``TypeError`` for other comparison
614 operators. Because datetime is a subclass of date, comparing only the
615 base class (date) members can still be done, if that's desired, by
616 forcing using of the approprate date method; e.g.,
617 ``a_date.__eq__(a_datetime)`` is true if and only if the year, month
618 and day members of ``a_date`` and ``a_datetime`` are equal.
619
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000620- bdist_rpm now supports command line options --force-arch,
621 {pre,post}-install, {pre,post}-uninstall, and
Martin v. Löwis23c48a12004-09-10 06:32:54 +0000622 {prep,build,install,clean,verify}-script.
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000623
Walter Dörwald69652032004-09-07 20:24:22 +0000624- SF patch #998993: The UTF-8 and the UTF-16 stateful decoders now support
625 decoding incomplete input (when the input stream is temporarily exhausted).
626 ``codecs.StreamReader`` now implements buffering, which enables proper
627 readline support for the UTF-16 decoders. ``codecs.StreamReader.read()``
628 has a new argument ``chars`` which specifies the number of characters to
629 return. ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` and
630 ``codecs.StreamReader.readlines()`` have a new argument ``keepends``.
631 Trailing "\n"s will be stripped from the lines if ``keepends`` is false.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000632
Tim Petersa80a2c82004-09-26 05:13:18 +0000633- The documentation for doctest is greatly expanded, and now covers all
634 the new public features (of which there are many).
635
Walter Dörwald5011d0c2004-09-13 08:53:15 +0000636- ``doctest.master`` was put back in, and ``doctest.testmod()`` once again
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000637 updates it. This isn't good, because every ``testmod()`` call
638 contributes to bloating the "hidden" state of ``doctest.master``, but
639 some old code apparently relies on it. For now, all we can do is
640 encourage people to stitch doctests together via doctest's unittest
Tim Petersa80a2c82004-09-26 05:13:18 +0000641 integration features instead.
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000642
Skip Montanaro82d0eec2004-09-14 17:58:31 +0000643- httplib now handles ipv6 address/port pairs.
644
David Goodger68a1abd2004-10-03 15:40:25 +0000645- SF bug #1017864: ConfigParser now correctly handles default keys,
646 processing them with ``ConfigParser.optionxform`` when supplied,
647 consistent with the handling of config file entries and runtime-set
648 options.
649
David Goodger1cbf2062004-10-03 15:55:09 +0000650- SF bug #997050: Document, test, & check for non-string values in
651 ConfigParser. Moved the new string-only restriction added in
652 rev. 1.65 to the SafeConfigParser class, leaving existing
653 ConfigParser & RawConfigParser behavior alone, and documented the
654 conditions under which non-string values work.
655
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000656Build
657-----
658
Brett Cannonbfef8692004-09-28 04:08:11 +0000659- Building on darwin now includes /opt/local/include and /opt/local/lib for
660 building extension modules. This is so as to include software installed as
661 a DarwinPorts port <http://darwinports.opendarwin.org/>
662
Tim Peters862f0592004-09-23 19:11:32 +0000663- pyport.h now defines a Py_IS_NAN macro. It works as-is when the
664 platform C computes true for ``x != x`` if and only if X is a NaN.
665 Other platforms can override the default definition with a platform-
666 specific spelling in that platform's pyconfig.h. You can also override
667 pyport.h's default Py_IS_INFINITY definition now.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000668
669C API
670-----
671
Tim Peters7f468f22004-10-11 02:40:51 +0000672- SF patch 1044089: New function ``PyEval_ThreadsInitialized()`` returns
673 non-zero if PyEval_InitThreads() has been called.
674
675- The undocumented and unused extern int ``_PyThread_Started`` was removed.
676
Tim Peters84705582004-10-10 02:47:33 +0000677- The C API calls ``PyInterpreterState_New()`` and ``PyThreadState_New()``
678 are two of the very few advertised as being safe to call without holding
679 the GIL. However, this wasn't true in a debug build, as bug 1041645
680 demonstrated. In a debug build, Python redirects the ``PyMem`` family
681 of calls to Python's small-object allocator, to get the benefit of
682 its extra debugging capabilities. But Python's small-object allocator
683 isn't threadsafe, relying on the GIL to avoid the expense of doing its
684 own locking. ``PyInterpreterState_New()`` and ``PyThreadState_New()``
685 call the platform ``malloc()`` directly now, regardless of build type.
686
Tim Peters307fa782004-09-23 08:06:40 +0000687- PyLong_AsUnsignedLong[Mask] now support int objects as well.
688
Walter Dörwald69652032004-09-07 20:24:22 +0000689- SF patch #998993: ``PyUnicode_DecodeUTF8Stateful`` and
690 ``PyUnicode_DecodeUTF16Stateful`` have been added, which implement stateful
691 decoding.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000692
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000693Tests
694-----
695
696- test__locale ported to unittest
697
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000698Mac
699---
700
Just van Rossumdd3c8372004-10-03 16:27:09 +0000701- ``plistlib`` now supports non-dict root objects. There is also a new
702 interface for reading and writing plist files: ``readPlist(pathOrFile)``
703 and ``writePlist(rootObject, pathOrFile)``
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000704
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000705Tools/Demos
706-----------
707
Tim Peters130e37f2004-10-03 19:03:19 +0000708- The text file comparison scripts ``ndiff.py`` and ``diff.py`` now
709 read the input files in universal-newline mode. This spares them
710 from consuming a great deal of time to deduce the useless result that,
711 e.g., a file with Windows line ends and a file with Linux line ends
712 have no lines in common.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000713
714
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000715What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 3?
716=================================
717
Anthony Baxtere13943a2004-09-02 16:37:15 +0000718*Release date: 02-SEP-2004*
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000719
720Core and builtins
721-----------------
722
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000723- SF patch #1007189: ``from ... import ...`` statements now allow the name
Anthony Baxter1a4ddae2004-08-31 10:07:13 +0000724 list to be surrounded by parentheses.
725
Tim Peters0973b992004-08-29 22:16:50 +0000726- Some speedups for long arithmetic, thanks to Trevor Perrin. Gradeschool
727 multiplication was sped a little by optimizing the C code. Gradeschool
728 squaring was sped by about a factor of 2, by exploiting that about half
729 the digit products are duplicates in a square. Because exponentiation
730 uses squaring often, this also speeds long power. For example, the time
731 to compute 17**1000000 dropped from about 14 seconds to 9 on my box due
732 to this much. The cutoff for Karatsuba multiplication was raised,
733 since gradeschool multiplication got quicker, and the cutoff was
Tim Peters47e52ee2004-08-30 02:44:38 +0000734 aggressively small regardless. The exponentiation algorithm was switched
735 from right-to-left to left-to-right, which is more efficient for small
736 bases. In addition, if the exponent is large, the algorithm now does
737 5 bits (instead of 1 bit) at a time. That cut the time to compute
738 17**1000000 on my box in half again, down to about 4.5 seconds.
Tim Peters0973b992004-08-29 22:16:50 +0000739
Tim Petersc8854432004-08-25 02:14:08 +0000740- OverflowWarning is no longer generated. PEP 237 scheduled this to
741 occur in Python 2.3, but since OverflowWarning was disabled by default,
742 nobody realized it was still being generated. On the chance that user
743 code is still using them, the Python builtin OverflowWarning, and
744 corresponding C API PyExc_OverflowWarning, will exist until Python 2.5.
745
Martin v. Löwis336e85f2004-08-19 11:31:58 +0000746- Py_InitializeEx has been added.
747
Brett Cannonadd33602004-08-15 07:21:25 +0000748- Fix the order of application of decorators. The proper order is bottom-up;
749 the first decorator listed is the last one called.
750
Neal Norwitzf0769532004-08-13 03:18:29 +0000751- SF patch #1005778. Fix a seg fault if the list size changed while
752 calling list.index(). This could happen if a rich comparison function
753 modified the list.
754
Michael W. Hudson5e897952004-08-12 18:12:44 +0000755- The ``func_name`` (a.k.a. ``__name__``) attribute of user-defined
756 functions is now writable.
757
Michael W. Hudson5523c252004-08-12 18:09:00 +0000758- code_new (a.k.a new.code()) now checks its arguments sufficiently
759 carefully that passing them on to PyCode_New() won't trigger calls
760 to Py_FatalError() or PyErr_BadInternalCall(). It is still the case
761 that the returned code object might be entirely insane.
762
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +0000763- Subclasses of string can no longer be interned. The semantics of
764 interning were not clear here -- a subclass could be mutable, for
765 example -- and had bugs. Explicitly interning a subclass of string
766 via intern() will raise a TypeError. Internal operations that attempt
767 to intern a string subclass will have no effect.
Jeremy Hylton4c989dd2004-08-07 19:20:05 +0000768
Tim Peters83b57352004-08-08 07:24:22 +0000769- Bug 1003935: xrange() could report bogus OverflowErrors. Documented
770 what xrange() intends, and repaired tests accordingly.
771
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000772Extension modules
773-----------------
774
Martin v. Löwise064b412004-08-29 16:34:40 +0000775- difflib now supports HTML side-by-side diff.
776
Martin v. Löwisdc3883f2004-08-29 15:46:35 +0000777- os.urandom has been added for systems that support sources of random
778 data.
779
Tim Peters037b3ee2004-08-21 06:55:43 +0000780- Patch 1012740: truncate() on a writeable cStringIO now resets the
781 position to the end of the stream. This is consistent with the original
782 StringIO module and avoids inadvertently resurrecting data that was
783 supposed to have been truncated away.
784
Dave Cole331708b2004-08-09 04:51:41 +0000785- Added socket.socketpair().
786
Dave Cole3203efb2004-08-26 00:37:31 +0000787- Added CurrentByteIndex, CurrentColumnNumber, CurrentLineNumber
788 members to xml.parsers.expat.XMLParser object.
789
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000790- The mpz, rotor, and xreadlines modules, all deprecated in earlier
Andrew M. Kuchling00873432004-08-31 13:50:43 +0000791 versions of Python, have now been removed.
792
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000793Library
794-------
795
Johannes Gijsbers4c11f602004-08-30 14:13:04 +0000796- Patch #934356: if a module defines __all__, believe that rather than using
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000797 heuristics for filtering out imported names.
Johannes Gijsbers4c11f602004-08-30 14:13:04 +0000798
Johannes Gijsbersae882f72004-08-30 10:19:56 +0000799- Patch #941486: added os.path.lexists(), which returns True for broken
800 symlinks, unlike os.path.exists().
801
Raymond Hettinger356a4592004-08-30 06:14:31 +0000802- the random module now uses os.urandom() for seeding if it is available.
803 Added a new generator based on os.urandom().
804
Martin v. Löwise064b412004-08-29 16:34:40 +0000805- difflib and diff.py can now generate HTML.
806
Martin v. Löwiscae9e672004-08-25 13:04:53 +0000807- bdist_rpm now includes version and release in the BuildRoot, and
808 replaces - by ``_`` in version and release.
Martin v. Löwiscf525242004-08-25 13:00:34 +0000809
Martin v. Löwis9f5c0c42004-08-25 11:37:43 +0000810- distutils build/build_scripts now has an -e option to specify the
811 path to the Python interpreter for installed scripts.
812
Barry Warsaw8bee7612004-08-25 02:22:30 +0000813- PEP 292 classes Template and SafeTemplate are added to the string module.
814
Martin v. Löwis75b9da42004-08-18 13:57:44 +0000815- tarfile now generates GNU tar files by default.
816
Martin v. Löwisdeacce22004-08-18 12:46:26 +0000817- HTTPResponse has now a getheaders method.
818
Johannes Gijsbersc473c992004-08-18 12:40:31 +0000819- Patch #1006219: let inspect.getsource handle '@' decorators. Thanks Simon
820 Percivall.
821
Martin v. Löwis318a12e2004-08-18 12:27:40 +0000822- logging.handlers.SMTPHandler.date_time has been removed;
823 the class now uses email.Utils.formatdate to generate the time stamp.
824
Martin v. Löwisfe84d172004-08-18 11:06:45 +0000825- A new function tkFont.nametofont was added to return an existing
826 font. The Font class constructor now has an additional exists argument
827 which, if True, requests to return/configure an existing font, rather
Tim Peters037b3ee2004-08-21 06:55:43 +0000828 than creating a new one.
Martin v. Löwisfe84d172004-08-18 11:06:45 +0000829
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +0000830- Updated the decimal package's min() and max() methods to match the
831 latest revision of the General Decimal Arithmetic Specification.
832 Quiet NaNs are ignored and equal values are sorted based on sign
833 and exponent.
834
835- The decimal package's Context.copy() method now returns deep copies.
836
837- Deprecated sys.exitfunc in favor of the atexit module. The sys.exitfunc
838 attribute will be kept around for backwards compatability and atexit
839 will just become the one preferred way to do it.
840
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +0000841- patch #675551: Add get_history_item and replace_history_item functions
842 to the readline module.
843
Johannes Gijsbers34c41202004-08-14 15:19:28 +0000844- bug #989672: pdb.doc and the help messages for the help_d and help_u methods
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +0000845 of the pdb.Pdb class gives have been corrected. d(own) goes to a newer
846 frame, u(p) to an older frame, not the other way around.
Johannes Gijsbers34c41202004-08-14 15:19:28 +0000847
Johannes Gijsbers4ec40642004-08-14 15:01:53 +0000848- bug #990669: os.path.realpath() will resolve symlinks before normalizing the
849 path, as normalizing the path may alter the meaning of the path if it
850 contains symlinks.
851
Johannes Gijsbers9d134b72004-08-14 14:03:03 +0000852- bug #851123: shutil.copyfile will raise an exception when trying to copy a
853 file onto a link to itself. Thanks Gregory Ball.
854
Brett Cannonb3de2e12004-08-13 18:46:24 +0000855- bug #570300: Fix inspect to resolve file locations using os.path.realpath()
856 so as to properly list all functions in a module when the module itself is
857 reached through a symlink. Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
858
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +0000859- doctest refactoring continued. See the docs for details. As part of
860 this effort, some old and little- (never?) used features are now
861 deprecated: the Tester class, the module is_private() function, and the
862 isprivate argument to testmod(). The Tester class supplied a feeble
863 "by hand" way to combine multiple doctests, if you knew exactly what
864 you were doing. The newer doctest features for unittest integration
865 already did a better job of that, are stronger now than ever, and the
866 new DocTestRunner class is a saner foundation if you want to do it by
867 hand. The "private name" filtering gimmick was a mistake from the
868 start, and testmod() changed long ago to ignore it by default. If
869 you want to filter out tests, the new DocTestFinder class can be used
870 to return a list of all doctests, and you can filter that list by
871 any computable criteria before passing it to a DocTestRunner instance.
872
Matthias Klose2e829c02004-08-15 17:04:33 +0000873- Bug #891637, patch #1005466: fix inspect.getargs() crash on def foo((bar)).
874
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000875Tools/Demos
876-----------
877
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +0000878- IDLE's shortcut keys for windows are now case insensitive so that
879 Control-V works the same as Control-v.
880
Matthias Klose2443d4a2004-08-16 12:10:12 +0000881- pygettext.py: Generate POT-Creation-Date header in ISO format.
882
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000883Build
884-----
885
Tim Peters47e52ee2004-08-30 02:44:38 +0000886- Backward incompatibility: longintrepr.h now triggers a compile-time
887 error if SHIFT (the number of bits in a Python long "digit") isn't
888 divisible by 5. This new requirement allows simple code for the new
889 5-bits-at-a-time long_pow() implementation. If necessary, the
890 restriction could be removed (by complicating long_pow(), or by
891 falling back to the 1-bit-at-a-time algorithm), but there are no
892 plans to do so.
893
Brett Cannoncc8a4f62004-08-26 01:44:07 +0000894- bug #991962: When building with --disable-toolbox-glue on Darwin no
895 attempt to build Mac-specific modules occurs.
896
Michael W. Hudson800ba232004-08-12 18:19:17 +0000897- The --with-tsc flag to configure to enable VM profiling with the
898 processor's timestamp counter now works on PPC platforms.
899
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +0000900- patch #1006629: Define _XOPEN_SOURCE to 500 on Solaris 8/9 to match
901 GCC's definition and avoid redefinition warnings.
902
Matthias Klosea2542be2004-08-16 11:35:51 +0000903- Detect pthreads support (provided by gnu pth pthread emulation) on
904 GNU/k*BSD systems.
905
Hye-Shik Chang3ba5bfc2004-08-19 17:52:37 +0000906- bug #1005737, #1007249: Fixed several build problems and warnings
907 found on old/legacy C compilers of HP-UX, IRIX and Tru64.
908
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000909C API
910-----
911
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +0000912..
913
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000914Documentation
915-------------
916
Neal Norwitz5268c392004-08-21 15:13:52 +0000917- patch #1005936, bug #1009373: fix index entries which contain
918 an underscore when viewed with Acrobat.
919
920- bug #990669: os.path.normpath may alter the meaning of a path if
921 it contains symbolic links. This has been documented in a comment
922 since 1992, but is now in the library reference as well.
Johannes Gijsbersb112d6e2004-08-14 14:41:32 +0000923
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000924New platforms
925-------------
926
Hye-Shik Changf64700a2004-08-18 15:13:41 +0000927- FreeBSD 6 is now supported.
928
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000929Tests
930-----
931
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +0000932..
933
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000934Windows
935-------
936
Tim Peters79b52b72004-08-12 18:37:10 +0000937- Boosted the stack reservation for python.exe and pythonw.exe from
938 the default 1MB to 2MB. Stack frames under VC 7.1 for 2.4 are enough
939 bigger than under VC 6.0 for 2.3.4 that deeply recursive progams
940 within the default sys.getrecursionlimit() default value of 1000 were
941 able to suffer undetected C stack overflows. The standard test program
942 test_compiler was one such program. If a Python process on Windows
943 "just vanishes" without a trace, and without an error message of any
944 kind, but with an exit code of 128, undetected stack overflow may be
945 the problem.
946
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000947Mac
948---
949
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +0000950..
951
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000952
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000953What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 2?
954=================================
955
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +0000956*Release date: 05-AUG-2004*
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000957
958Core and builtins
959-----------------
960
Raymond Hettinger52a21b82004-08-06 18:43:09 +0000961- Patch #980695: Implements efficient string concatenation for statements
962 of the form s=s+t and s+=t. This will vary across implementations.
963 Accordingly, the str.join() method is strongly preferred for performance
964 sensitive code.
965
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +0000966- PEP-0318, Function Decorators have been added to the language. These are
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +0000967 implemented using the Java-style @decorator syntax, like so::
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000968
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +0000969 @staticmethod
970 def foo(bar):
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000971
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +0000972 (The PEP needs to be updated to reflect the current state)
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +0000973
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +0000974- When importing a module M raises an exception, Python no longer leaves M
975 in sys.modules. Before 2.4a2 it did, and a subsequent import of M would
976 succeed, picking up a module object from sys.modules reflecting as much
977 of the initialization of M as completed before the exception was raised.
978 Subsequent imports got no indication that M was in a partially-
979 initialized state, and the importers could get into arbitrarily bad
980 trouble as a result (the M they got was in an unintended state,
981 arbitrarily far removed from M's author's intent). Now subsequent
982 imports of M will continue raising exceptions (but if, for example, the
983 source code for M is edited between import attempts, then perhaps later
984 attempts will succeed, or raise a different exception).
985
986 This can break existing code, but in such cases the code was probably
987 working before by accident. In the Python source, the only case of
988 breakage discovered was in a test accidentally relying on a damaged
989 module remaining in sys.modules. Cases are also known where tests
990 deliberately provoking import errors remove damaged modules from
991 sys.modules themselves, and such tests will break now if they do an
992 unconditional del sys.modules[M].
993
Marc-André Lemburgb314ce92004-07-23 16:14:57 +0000994- u'%s' % obj will now try obj.__unicode__() first and fallback to
995 obj.__str__() if no __unicode__ method can be found.
996
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +0000997- Patch #550732: Add PyArg_VaParseTupleAndKeywords(). Analogous to
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000998 PyArg_VaParse(). Both are now documented. Thanks Greg Chapman.
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +0000999
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001000- Allow string and unicode return types from .encode()/.decode()
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001001 methods on string and unicode objects. Added unicode.decode()
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001002 which was missing for no apparent reason.
1003
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001004- An attempt to fix the mess that is Python's behaviour with
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001005 signal handlers and threads, complicated by readline's behaviour.
1006 It's quite possible that there are still bugs here.
1007
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001008- Added C macros Py_CLEAR and Py_VISIT to ease the implementation of
1009 types that support garbage collection.
1010
Raymond Hettinger76d962d2004-07-16 12:16:48 +00001011- Compiler now treats None as a constant.
1012
Neil Schemenauer3a313e32004-07-19 16:29:17 +00001013- The type of values returned by __int__, __float__, __long__,
1014 __oct__, and __hex__ are now checked. Returning an invalid type
1015 will cause a TypeError to be raised. This matches the behavior of
1016 Jython.
1017
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +00001018- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in locale module.
1019
Hye-Shik Changb5047fd2004-08-04 06:33:51 +00001020- Added a workaround for proper string operations in BSDs. str.split
1021 and str.is* methods can now work correctly with UTF-8 locales.
1022
Hye-Shik Changc81c6952004-08-04 17:40:38 +00001023- Bug #989185: unicode.iswide() and unicode.width() is dropped and
1024 the East Asian Width support is moved to unicodedata extension
1025 module.
Hye-Shik Change9ddfbb2004-08-04 07:38:35 +00001026
Hye-Shik Chang7df44b32004-08-04 17:36:41 +00001027- Patch #941229: The source code encoding in interactive mode
1028 now refers sys.stdin.encoding not just ISO-8859-1 anymore. This
1029 allows for non-latin-1 users to write unicode strings directly.
1030
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001031Extension modules
1032-----------------
1033
Martin v. Löwis544f1192004-07-27 05:22:33 +00001034- cpickle now supports the same keyword arguments as pickle.
1035
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001036Library
1037-------
1038
Marc-André Lemburgc759f072004-08-05 12:43:30 +00001039- Added new codecs and aliases for ISO_8859-11, ISO_8859-16 and
1040 TIS-620
1041
Tim Peters8485b562004-08-04 18:46:34 +00001042- Thanks to Edward Loper, doctest has been massively refactored, and
1043 many new features were added. Full docs will appear later. For now
1044 the doctest module comments and new test cases give good coverage.
1045 The refactoring provides many hook points for customizing behavior
1046 (such as how to report errors, and how to compare expected to actual
1047 output). New features include a <BLANKLINE> marker for expected
1048 output containing blank lines, options to produce unified or context
1049 diffs when actual output doesn't match expectations, an option to
1050 normalize whitespace before comparing, and an option to use an
1051 ellipsis to signify "don't care" regions of output.
1052
Martin v. Löwis1fa649f2004-08-03 18:45:31 +00001053- Tkinter now supports the wish -sync and -use options.
1054
Fred Drakef901abd2004-08-03 17:58:55 +00001055- The following methods in time support passing of None: ctime(), gmtime(),
1056 and localtime(). If None is provided, the current time is used (the
1057 same as when the argument is omitted).
1058 [SF bug 658254, patch 663482]
1059
Martin v. Löwis9513e342004-08-03 14:36:32 +00001060- nntplib does now allow to ignore a .netrc file.
1061
Martin v. Löwis65a79752004-08-03 12:59:55 +00001062- urllib2 now recognizes Basic authentication even if other authentication
1063 schemes are offered.
1064
Neal Norwitz0e67fd42004-08-01 22:48:06 +00001065- Bug #1001053. wave.open() now accepts unicode filenames.
1066
Tim Peters5cfb05e2004-07-27 21:02:02 +00001067- gzip.GzipFile has a new fileno() method, to retrieve the handle of the
1068 underlying file object (provided it has a fileno() method). This is
1069 needed if you want to use os.fsync() on a GzipFile.
1070
Martin v. Löwis7b9190b2004-07-27 05:07:19 +00001071- imaplib has two new methods: deleteacl and myrights.
1072
Martin v. Löwiscc0f9322004-07-26 12:40:50 +00001073- nntplib has two new methods: description and descriptions. They
1074 use a more RFC-compliant way of getting a newsgroup description.
1075
Brett Cannon8b3d92a2004-07-21 02:21:58 +00001076- Bug #993394. Fix a possible red herring of KeyError in 'threading' being
1077 raised during interpreter shutdown from a registered function with atexit
1078 when dummy_threading is being used.
1079
Neal Norwitza4f651a2004-07-20 22:07:44 +00001080- Bug #857297/Patch #916874. Fix an error when extracting a hard link
1081 from a tarfile.
1082
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +00001083- Patch #846659. Fix an error in tarfile.py when using
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +00001084 GNU longname/longlink creation.
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +00001085
Tim Peters90ee7eb2004-07-18 23:58:17 +00001086- The obsolete FCNTL.py has been deleted. The builtin fcntl module
1087 has been available (on platforms that support fcntl) since Python
1088 1.5a3, and all FCNTL.py did is export fcntl's names, after generating
1089 a deprecation warning telling you to use fcntl directly.
1090
Hye-Shik Chang2bb146f2004-07-18 03:06:29 +00001091- Several new unicode codecs are added: big5hkscs, euc_jis_2004,
1092 iso2022_jp_2004, shift_jis_2004.
1093
Tim Peters5af0e412004-07-12 00:45:14 +00001094- Bug #788520. Queue.{get, get_nowait, put, put_nowait} have new
1095 implementations, exploiting Conditions (which didn't exist at the time
1096 Queue was introduced). A minor semantic change is that the Full and
1097 Empty exceptions raised by non-blocking calls now occur only if the
1098 queue truly was full or empty at the instant the queue was checked (of
1099 course the Queue may no longer be full or empty by the time a calling
1100 thread sees those exceptions, though). Before, the exceptions could
1101 also be raised if it was "merely inconvenient" for the implementation
1102 to determine the true state of the Queue (because the Queue was locked
1103 by some other method in progress).
1104
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001105- Bugs #979794 and #980117: difflib.get_grouped_opcodes() now handles the
1106 case of comparing two empty lists. This affected both context_diff() and
1107 unified_diff(),
Brett Cannond2c5b4b2004-07-10 23:54:07 +00001108
Brett Cannone6f8a892004-07-10 23:14:30 +00001109- Bug #980938: smtplib now prints debug output to sys.stderr.
1110
Brett Cannonf50299c2004-07-10 22:55:15 +00001111- Bug #930024: posixpath.realpath() now handles infinite loops in symlinks by
1112 returning the last point in the path that was not part of any loop. Thanks
1113 AM Kuchling.
1114
Brett Cannonbdc36272004-07-10 20:42:22 +00001115- Bug #980327: ntpath not handles compressing erroneous slashes between the
1116 drive letter and the rest of the path. Also clearly handles UNC addresses now
1117 as well. Thanks Paul Moore.
1118
Brett Cannone6751182004-07-10 19:13:42 +00001119- bug #679953: zipfile.py should now work for files over 2 GB. The packed data
1120 for file sizes (compressed and uncompressed) was being stored as signed
1121 instead of unsigned.
1122
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001123- decimal.py now only uses signals in the IBM spec. The other conditions are
Raymond Hettinger5aa478b2004-07-09 10:02:53 +00001124 no longer part of the public API.
1125
Marc-André Lemburg88fcca62004-07-10 16:16:06 +00001126- codecs module now has two new generic APIs: encode() and decode()
1127 which don't restrict the return types (unlike the unicode and
1128 string methods of the same name).
1129
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001130- Non-blocking SSL sockets work again; they were broken in Python 2.3.
Andrew M. Kuchling79d7e922004-07-10 21:21:55 +00001131 SF patch 945642.
1132
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001133- doctest unittest integration improvements:
1134
1135 o Improved the unitest test output for doctest-based unit tests
1136
1137 o Can now pass setUp and tearDown functions when creating
1138 DocTestSuites.
1139
1140- The threading module has a new class, local, for creating objects
1141 that provide thread-local data.
1142
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +00001143- Bug #990307: when keep_empty_values is True, cgi.parse_qsl()
1144 no longer returns spurious empty fields.
1145
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +00001146- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in gettext module.
1147
1148- Introduced in gettext module the l*gettext() family of functions,
1149 which return translation strings encoded in the preferred encoding,
1150 as informed by locale module's getpreferredencoding().
1151
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +00001152- optparse module (and tests) upgraded to Optik 1.5a1. Changes:
1153
1154 - Add expansion of default values in help text: the string
1155 "%default" in an option's help string is expanded to str() of
1156 that option's default value, or "none" if no default value.
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +00001157
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +00001158 - Bug #955889: option default values that happen to be strings are
1159 now processed in the same way as values from the command line; this
1160 allows generation of nicer help when using custom types. Can
1161 be disabled with parser.set_process_default_values(False).
1162
1163 - Bug #960515: don't crash when generating help for callback
1164 options that specify 'type', but not 'dest' or 'metavar'.
1165
1166 - Feature #815264: change the default help format for short options
1167 that take an argument from e.g. "-oARG" to "-o ARG"; add
1168 set_short_opt_delimiter() and set_long_opt_delimiter() methods to
1169 HelpFormatter to allow (slight) customization of the formatting.
1170
1171 - Patch #736940: internationalize Optik: all built-in user-
1172 targeted literal strings are passed through gettext.gettext(). (If
1173 you want translations (.po files), they're not included with Python
1174 -- you'll find them in the Optik source distribution from
1175 http://optik.sourceforge.net/ .)
1176
1177 - Bug #878453: respect $COLUMNS environment variable for
1178 wrapping help output.
1179
1180 - Feature #988122: expand "%prog" in the 'description' passed
1181 to OptionParser, just like in the 'usage' and 'version' strings.
1182 (This is *not* done in the 'description' passed to OptionGroup.)
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +00001183
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001184C API
1185-----
1186
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +00001187- PyImport_ExecCodeModule() and PyImport_ExecCodeModuleEx(): if an
1188 error occurs while loading the module, these now delete the module's
1189 entry from sys.modules. All ways of loading modules eventually call
1190 one of these, so this is an error-case change in semantics for all
1191 ways of loading modules. In rare cases, a module loader may wish
1192 to keep a module object in sys.modules despite that the module's
1193 code cannot be executed. In such cases, the module loader must
1194 arrange to reinsert the name and module object in sys.modules.
1195 PyImport_ReloadModule() has been changed to reinsert the original
1196 module object into sys.modules if the module reload fails, so that
1197 its visible semantics have not changed.
1198
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001199- A large pile of datetime field-extraction macros is now documented,
1200 thanks to Anthony Tuininga (patch #986010).
1201
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001202Documentation
1203-------------
1204
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +00001205- Improved the tutorial on creating types in C.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001206
1207 - point out the importance of reassigning data members before
Andrew M. Kuchling78d375f2004-08-07 14:00:39 +00001208 assigning their values
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001209
Andrew M. Kuchling28025ec2004-08-07 13:59:22 +00001210 - correct my misconception about return values from visitprocs. Sigh.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001211
1212 - mention the labor saving Py_VISIT and Py_CLEAR macros.
1213
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +00001214- Major rewrite of the math module docs, to address common confusions.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001215
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001216Tests
1217-----
1218
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +00001219- The test data files for the decimal test suite are now installed on
Anthony Baxterfd4984d2004-07-12 09:33:39 +00001220 platforms that use the Makefile.
1221
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +00001222- SF patch 995225: The test file testtar.tar accidentally contained
1223 CVS keywords (like $Id$), which could cause spurious failures in
1224 test_tarfile.py depending on how the test file was checked out.
1225
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001226
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001227What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 1?
1228=================================
1229
Anthony Baxter3210b362004-07-08 05:59:43 +00001230*Release date: 08-JUL-2004*
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001231
1232Core and builtins
1233-----------------
1234
Fred Drake0a4dd392004-07-02 18:57:45 +00001235- weakref.ref is now the type object also known as
1236 weakref.ReferenceType; it can be subclassed like any other new-style
1237 class. There's less per-entry overhead in WeakValueDictionary
1238 objects now (one object instead of three).
1239
Thomas Heller04c673b2004-07-02 08:56:20 +00001240- Bug #951851: Python crashed when reading import table of certain
1241 Windows DLLs.
1242
Raymond Hettinger66bd2332004-08-02 08:30:07 +00001243- Bug #215126. The locals argument to eval(), execfile(), and exec now
1244 accept any mapping type.
Raymond Hettinger214b1c32004-07-02 06:41:07 +00001245
Martin v. Löwisef82d2f2004-06-27 16:51:46 +00001246- marshal now shares interned strings. This change introduces
1247 a new .pyc magic.
1248
Anthony Baxter3ecdb252004-06-11 14:41:18 +00001249- Bug #966623. classes created with type() in an exec(, {}) don't
1250 have a __module__, but code in typeobject assumed it would always
1251 be there.
1252
Martin v. Löwis737ea822004-06-08 18:52:54 +00001253- Python no longer relies on the LC_NUMERIC locale setting to be
1254 the "C" locale; as a result, it no longer tries to prevent changing
1255 the LC_NUMERIC category.
1256
Tim Peters604c0132004-06-07 23:04:33 +00001257- Bug #952807: Unpickling pickled instances of subclasses of
1258 datetime.date, datetime.datetime and datetime.time could yield insane
1259 objects. Thanks to Jiwon Seo for a fix.
1260
Thomas Heller90a764c2004-06-07 15:12:44 +00001261- Bug #845802: Python crashes when __init__.py is a directory.
1262
Hye-Shik Changbc555e32004-06-03 11:10:58 +00001263- Unicode objects received two new methods: iswide() and width().
1264 These query East Asian width information, as specified in Unicode
1265 TR11.
Hye-Shik Chang974ed7c2004-06-02 16:49:17 +00001266
Raymond Hettinger41bd0222004-06-01 06:36:24 +00001267- Improved the tuple hashing algorithm to give fewer collisions in
1268 common cases. Fixes bug #942952.
1269
Raymond Hettinger354433a2004-05-19 08:20:33 +00001270- Implemented generator expressions (PEP 289). Coded by Jiwon Seo.
1271
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +00001272- Enabled the profiling of C extension functions (and builtins) - check
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001273 new documentation and modified profile and bdb modules for more details
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +00001274
Nicholas Bastinabce8a62004-03-21 20:24:07 +00001275- Set file.name to the object passed to open (instead of a new string)
1276
Nicholas Bastina7604bf2004-03-21 18:37:23 +00001277- Moved tracebackobject into traceback.h and renamed to PyTracebackObject
1278
Raymond Hettingerff5bc502004-03-21 15:12:00 +00001279- Optimized the byte coding for multiple assignments like "a,b=b,a" and
1280 "a,b,c=1,2,3". Improves their speed by 25% to 30%.
1281
Brett Cannon4f653312004-03-20 22:52:14 +00001282- Limit the nested depth of a tuple for the second argument to isinstance()
1283 and issubclass() to the recursion limit of the interpreter.
1284 Fixes bug #858016 .
1285
Raymond Hettingerade08ea2004-03-18 09:48:12 +00001286- Optimized dict iterators, creating separate types for each
1287 and having them reveal their length. Also optimized the
1288 methods: keys(), values(), and items().
1289
Raymond Hettingerdd80f762004-03-07 07:31:06 +00001290- Implemented a newcode opcode, LIST_APPEND, that simplifies
1291 the generated bytecode for list comprehensions and further
1292 improves their performance (about 35%).
1293
Michael W. Hudsond3b33b52004-02-19 19:35:22 +00001294- Implemented rich comparisons for floats, which seems to make
1295 comparisons involving NaNs somewhat less surprising when the
1296 underlying C compiler actually implements C99 semantics.
1297
Raymond Hettingerfa7b9d82004-02-15 04:06:39 +00001298- Optimized list.extend() to save memory and no longer create
1299 intermediate sequences. Also, extend() now pre-allocates the
1300 needed memory whenever the length of the iterable is known in
1301 advance -- this halves the time to extend the list.
1302
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001303- Optimized list resize operations to make fewer calls to the system
1304 realloc(). Significantly speeds up list appends, list pops,
Walter Dörwald09515af2005-03-18 10:28:24 +00001305 list comprehensions, and the list constructor (when the input iterable
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001306 length is not known).
1307
1308- Changed the internal list over-allocation scheme. For larger lists,
1309 overallocation ranged between 3% and 25%. Now, it is a constant 12%.
Raymond Hettingerab517d22004-02-14 18:34:46 +00001310 For smaller lists (n<8), overallocation was upto eight elements. Now,
1311 the overallocation is no more than three elements -- this improves space
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001312 utilization for applications that have large numbers of small lists.
1313
Raymond Hettinger0468e412004-05-05 05:37:53 +00001314- Most list bodies now get re-used rather than freed. Speeds up list
1315 instantiation and deletion by saving calls to malloc() and free().
1316
Raymond Hettinger31017ae2004-03-04 08:25:44 +00001317- The dict.update() method now accepts all the same argument forms
1318 as the dict() constructor. This now includes item lists and/or
1319 keyword arguments.
1320
Michael W. Hudsonecfeb7f2004-02-12 15:28:27 +00001321- Support for arbitrary objects supporting the read-only buffer
1322 interface as the co_code field of code objects (something that was
1323 only possible to create from C code) has been removed.
1324
Fred Drake228765b2004-02-06 04:15:22 +00001325- Made omitted callback and None equivalent for weakref.ref() and
1326 weakref.proxy(); the None case wasn't handled correctly in all
1327 cases.
1328
1329- Fixed problem where PyWeakref_NewRef() and PyWeakref_NewProxy()
1330 assumed that initial existing entries in an object's weakref list
1331 would not be removed while allocating a new weakref object. Since
1332 GC could be invoked at that time, however, that assumption was
1333 invalid. In a truly obscure case of GC being triggered during
1334 creation for a new weakref object for an referent which already
1335 has a weakref without a callback which is only referenced from
1336 cyclic trash, a memory error can occur. This consistently created a
1337 segfault in a debug build, but provided less predictable behavior in
1338 a release build.
1339
Hye-Shik Changff83c2b2004-02-02 13:39:01 +00001340- input() builtin function now respects compiler flags such as
1341 __future__ statements. SF patch 876178.
1342
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +00001343- Removed PendingDeprecationWarning from apply(). apply() remains
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +00001344 deprecated, but the nuisance warning will not be issued.
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +00001345
Tim Peters1d7323e2003-12-01 21:35:27 +00001346- At Python shutdown time (Py_Finalize()), 2.3 called cyclic garbage
1347 collection twice, both before and after tearing down modules. The
1348 call after tearing down modules has been disabled, because too much
1349 of Python has been torn down then for __del__ methods and weakref
1350 callbacks to execute sanely. The most common symptom was a sequence
1351 of uninformative messages on stderr when Python shut down, produced
1352 by threads trying to raise exceptions, but unable to report the nature
1353 of their problems because too much of the sys module had already been
1354 destroyed.
1355
Guido van Rossum6c9e1302003-11-29 23:52:13 +00001356- Removed FutureWarnings related to hex/oct literals and conversions
1357 and left shifts. (Thanks to Kalle Svensson for SF patch 849227.)
1358 This addresses most of the remaining semantic changes promised by
1359 PEP 237, except for repr() of a long, which still shows the trailing
1360 'L'. The PEP appears to promise warnings for operations that
1361 changed semantics compared to Python 2.3, but this is not
1362 implemented; we've suffered through enough warnings related to
1363 hex/oct literals and I think it's best to be silent now.
1364
Raymond Hettinger4f8f9762003-11-26 08:21:35 +00001365- For str and unicode objects, the ljust(), center(), and rjust()
1366 methods now accept an optional argument specifying a fill
1367 character other than a space.
1368
Guido van Rossumbaf0f8f2003-11-22 23:55:50 +00001369- When method objects have an attribute that can be satisfied either
1370 by the function object or by the method object, the function
1371 object's attribute usually wins. Christian Tismer pointed out that
1372 that this is really a mistake, because this only happens for special
1373 methods (like __reduce__) where the method object's version is
1374 really more appropriate than the function's attribute. So from now
1375 on, all method attributes will have precedence over function
1376 attributes with the same name.
1377
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +00001378- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 839548: if a weakref with a callback,
1379 its callback, and its weakly referenced object, all became part of
1380 cyclic garbage during a single run of garbage collection, the order
1381 in which they were torn down was unpredictable. It was possible for
1382 the callback to see partially-torn-down objects, leading to immediate
1383 segfaults, or, if the callback resurrected garbage objects, to
1384 resurrect insane objects that caused segfaults (or other surprises)
1385 later. In one sense this wasn't surprising, because Python's cyclic gc
1386 had no knowledge of Python's weakref objects. It does now. When
1387 weakrefs with callbacks become part of cyclic garbage now, those
1388 weakrefs are cleared first. The callbacks don't trigger then,
1389 preventing the problems. If you need callbacks to trigger, then just
1390 as when cyclic gc is not involved, you need to write your code so
1391 that weakref objects outlive the objects they weakly reference.
Raymond Hettingera690a992003-11-16 16:17:49 +00001392
Tim Petersadd09b42003-11-12 20:43:28 +00001393- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 840829: if cyclic garbage collection
1394 happened to occur during a weakref callback for a new-style class
1395 instance, subtle memory corruption was the result (in a release build;
1396 in a debug build, a segfault occurred reliably very soon after).
1397 This has been repaired.
1398
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +00001399- Compiler flags set in PYTHONSTARTUP are now active in __main__.
1400
1401- Added two builtin types, set() and frozenset().
1402
Raymond Hettinger85c20a42003-11-06 14:06:48 +00001403- Added a reversed() builtin function that returns a reverse iterator
1404 over a sequence.
1405
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +00001406- Added a sorted() builtin function that returns a new sorted list
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001407 from any iterable.
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +00001408
Martin v. Löwis01a74b22003-10-19 18:30:01 +00001409- CObjects are now mutable (on the C level) through PyCObject_SetVoidPtr.
1410
Raymond Hettinger42b1ba32003-10-16 03:41:09 +00001411- list.sort() now supports three keyword arguments: cmp, key, and reverse.
1412 The key argument can be a function of one argument that extracts a
1413 comparison key from the original record: mylist.sort(key=str.lower).
1414 The reverse argument is a boolean value and if True will change the
1415 sort order as if the comparison arguments were reversed. In addition,
1416 the documentation has been amended to provide a guarantee that all sorts
1417 starting with Py2.3 are guaranteed to be stable (the relative order of
1418 records with equal keys is unchanged).
1419
Marc-André Lemburgd7160f82003-09-22 11:14:40 +00001420- Added test whether wchar_t is signed or not. A signed wchar_t is not
1421 usable as internal unicode type base for Py_UNICODE since the
1422 unicode implementation assumes an unsigned type.
1423
Jeremy Hyltond8082792003-09-16 19:41:39 +00001424- Fixed a bug in the cache of length-one Unicode strings that could
1425 lead to a seg fault. The specific problem occurred when an earlier,
1426 non-fatal error left an uninitialized Unicode object in the
1427 freelist.
1428
Raymond Hettinger9bfe5332003-08-27 04:55:52 +00001429- The % formatting operator now supports '%F' which is equivalent to
1430 '%f'. This has always been documented but never implemented.
1431
Tim Peters465fa3d2003-08-15 01:16:37 +00001432- complex(obj) could leak a little memory if obj wasn't a string or
1433 number.
1434
Raymond Hettingereaef6152003-08-02 07:42:57 +00001435- zip() with no arguments now returns an empty list instead of raising
1436 a TypeError exception.
1437
Guido van Rossum02c58f82003-10-08 21:08:29 +00001438- obj.__contains__() now returns True/False instead of 1/0. SF patch
1439 820195.
1440
Armin Rigo2b3eb402003-10-28 12:05:48 +00001441- Python no longer tries to be smart about recursive comparisons.
1442 When comparing containers with cyclic references to themselves it
1443 will now just hit the recursion limit. See SF patch 825639.
1444
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001445- str and unicode builtin types now have an rsplit() method that is
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +00001446 same as split() except that it scans the string from the end
1447 working towards the beginning. See SF feature request 801847.
Hye-Shik Chang060ebed2003-12-15 18:51:19 +00001448
Jim Fulton8a1a5942004-02-08 04:21:26 +00001449- Fixed a bug in object.__reduce_ex__ when using protocol 2. Failure
1450 to clear the error when attempts to get the __getstate__ attribute
1451 fail caused intermittent errors and odd behavior.
1452
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001453- buffer objects based on other objects no longer cache a pointer to
1454 the data and the data length. Instead, the appropriate tp_as_buffer
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001455 method is called as necessary.
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001456
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001457- fixed: if a file is opened with an explicit buffer size >= 1, repeated
Andrew MacIntyre4e10ed32004-04-04 07:01:35 +00001458 close() calls would attempt to free() the buffer already free()ed on
1459 the first call.
1460
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001461
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001462Extension modules
1463-----------------
1464
Barry Warsaw11b91a02004-06-28 00:50:43 +00001465- Added socket.getservbyport(), and make the second argument in
1466 getservbyname() and getservbyport() optional.
1467
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +00001468- time module code that deals with input POSIX timestamps will now raise
1469 ValueError if more than a second is lost in precision when the
1470 timestamp is cast to the platform C time_t type. There's no chance
1471 that the platform will do anything sensible with the result in such
1472 cases. This includes ctime(), localtime() and gmtime(). Assorted
1473 fromtimestamp() and utcfromtimestamp() methods in the datetime module
1474 were also protected. Closes bugs #919012 and 975996.
Brett Cannonb46ed712004-06-19 20:50:47 +00001475
Martin v. Löwis77ca6c42004-06-03 12:47:26 +00001476- fcntl.ioctl now warns if the mutate flag is not specified.
1477
Martin v. Löwisd8948722004-06-02 09:57:56 +00001478- nt now properly allows to refer to UNC roots, e.g. in nt.stat().
1479
Raymond Hettinger027bb632004-05-31 03:09:25 +00001480- the weakref module now supports additional objects: array.array,
1481 sre.pattern_objects, file objects, and sockets.
1482
Raymond Hettingere2eda602004-04-04 08:51:41 +00001483- operator.isMappingType() and operator.isSequenceType() now give
1484 fewer false positives.
1485
Brett Cannon06c34792004-03-23 23:16:54 +00001486- socket.sslerror is now a subclass of socket.error . Also added
1487 socket.error to the socket module's C API.
1488
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001489- Bug #920575: A problem where the _locale module segfaults on
Hye-Shik Changc3a87b82004-03-21 19:34:30 +00001490 nl_langinfo(ERA) caused by GNU libc's illegal NULL return is fixed.
1491
Raymond Hettinger6e2ee862004-03-14 04:37:50 +00001492- array objects now support the copy module. Also, their resizing
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001493 scheme has been updated to match that used for list objects. This improves
Raymond Hettinger49f9bd12004-03-14 05:43:59 +00001494 the performance (speed and memory usage) of append() operations.
Raymond Hettinger6ab78cd2004-08-29 07:50:43 +00001495 Also, array.array() and array.extend() now accept any iterable argument
1496 for repeated appends without needing to create another temporary array.
Raymond Hettinger3aa82c02004-03-13 18:18:51 +00001497
Raymond Hettinger3e47f652004-03-08 18:22:35 +00001498- cStringIO.writelines() now accepts any iterable argument and writes
1499 the lines one at a time rather than joining them and writing once.
1500 Made a parallel change to StringIO.writelines(). Saves memory and
1501 makes suitable for use with generator expressions.
1502
Brett Cannond1080a32004-03-02 04:38:10 +00001503- time.strftime() now checks that the values in its time tuple argument
1504 are within the proper boundaries to prevent possible crashes from the
1505 platform's C library implementation of strftime(). Can possibly
1506 break code that uses values outside the range that didn't cause
1507 problems previously (such as sitting day of year to 0). Fixes bug
1508 #897625.
1509
Martin v. Löwis12af0482004-01-31 12:34:17 +00001510- The socket module now supports Bluetooth sockets, if the
1511 system has <bluetooth/bluetooth.h>
1512
Raymond Hettinger756b3f32004-01-29 06:37:52 +00001513- Added a collections module containing a new datatype, deque(),
1514 offering high-performance, thread-safe, memory friendly appends
1515 and pops on either side of the deque.
1516
1517- Several modules now take advantage of collections.deque() for
1518 improved performance: Queue, mutex, shlex, threading, and pydoc.
1519
Raymond Hettinger166958b2003-12-01 13:18:39 +00001520- The operator module has two new functions, attrgetter() and
1521 itemgetter() which are useful for creating fast data extractor
1522 functions for map(), list.sort(), itertools.groupby(), and
1523 other functions that expect a function argument.
1524
Martin v. Löwis94681fc2003-11-27 19:40:22 +00001525- socket.SHUT_{RD,WR,RDWR} was added.
1526
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +00001527- os.getsid was added.
1528
Guido van Rossum16b9fa82003-10-23 23:54:57 +00001529- The pwd module incorrectly advertised its struct type as
1530 struct_pwent; this has been renamed to struct_passwd. (The old name
1531 is still supported for backwards compatibility.)
1532
Fred Drakede050322003-10-21 15:41:59 +00001533- The xml.parsers.expat module now provides Expat 1.95.7.
1534
Martin v. Löwis3bbd6542003-10-03 13:57:37 +00001535- socket.IPPROTO_IPV6 was added.
1536
Martin v. Löwise7a97962003-09-20 16:08:33 +00001537- readline.clear_history was added.
1538
Brett Cannon62dba4c2003-09-10 19:37:42 +00001539- select.select() now accepts sequences for its first three arguments.
1540
Raymond Hettinger5475f232003-08-08 12:20:03 +00001541- cStringIO now supports the f.closed attribute.
1542
Anthony Baxter83f52912003-08-05 06:33:56 +00001543- The signal module now exposes SIGRTMIN and SIGRTMAX (if available).
1544
Andrew M. Kuchling69f31eb2003-08-13 23:11:04 +00001545- curses module now supports use_default_colors(). [patch #739124]
1546
Anthony Baxter5c68ef02003-10-04 08:04:04 +00001547- Bug #811028: ncurses.h breakage on FreeBSD/MacOS X
1548
1549- Bug #814613: INET_ADDRSTRLEN fix needed for all compilers on SGI
1550
Gustavo Niemeyerad3fc442003-10-17 22:13:16 +00001551- Implemented non-recursive SRE matching scheme (#757624).
1552
1553- Implemented (?(id/name)yes|no) support in SRE (#572936).
1554
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +00001555- random.seed() with no arguments or None uses time.time() as a default
1556 seed. Modified to match Py2.2 behavior and use fractional seconds so
1557 that successive runs are more likely to produce different sequences.
1558
1559- random.Random has a new method, getrandbits(k), which returns an int
1560 with k random bits. This method is now an optional part of the API
1561 for user defined generators. Any generator that defines genrandbits()
1562 can now use randrange() for ranges with a length >= 2**53. Formerly,
1563 randrange would return only even numbers for ranges that large (see
1564 SF bug #812202). Generators that do not define genrandbits() now
1565 issue a warning when randrange() is called with a range that large.
1566
Raymond Hettingerd25c1c62003-12-06 16:23:06 +00001567- itertools has a new function, groupby() for aggregating iterables
1568 into groups sharing the same key (as determined by a key function).
1569 It offers some of functionality of SQL's groupby keyword and of
1570 the Unix uniq filter.
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +00001571
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001572- itertools now has a new tee() function which produces two independent
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +00001573 iterators from a single iterable.
1574
1575- itertools.izip() with no arguments now returns an empty iterator instead
1576 of raising a TypeError exception.
1577
Gustavo Niemeyera6e436e2004-02-14 00:02:45 +00001578- Fixed #853061: allow BZ2Compressor.compress() to receive an empty string
1579 as parameter.
1580
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001581Library
1582-------
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001583
Guido van Rossum5124b4a2004-07-06 17:52:32 +00001584- Bug #981530: Fix UnboundLocalError in shutil.rmtree(). This affects
1585 the documented behavior: the function passed to the onerror()
1586 handler can now also be os.listdir.
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001587
Brett Cannon41d13f62004-07-03 03:54:54 +00001588- Bug #754449: threading.Thread objects no longer mask exceptions raised during
1589 interpreter shutdown with another exception from attempting to handle the
1590 original exception.
Brett Cannoncc4e9352004-07-03 03:52:35 +00001591
Raymond Hettinger21f9fce2004-07-10 16:11:03 +00001592- Added decimal.py per PEP 327.
Raymond Hettinger7c85fa42004-07-01 11:01:35 +00001593
Brett Cannon46d4ff22004-06-29 04:08:23 +00001594- Bug #981299: rsync is now a recognized protocol in urlparse that uses a
1595 "netloc" portion of a URL.
Brett Cannonfbac2942004-06-29 04:02:40 +00001596
Brett Cannon1c3fa182004-06-19 21:11:35 +00001597- Bug #919012: shutil.move() will not try to move a directory into itself.
1598 Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
1599
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +00001600- Bug #934282: pydoc.stripid() is now case-insensitive. Thanks Robin Becker.
1601
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +00001602- Bug #823209: cmath.log() now takes an optional base argument so that its
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +00001603 API matches math.log().
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +00001604
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001605- Bug #957381: distutils bdist_rpm no longer fails on recent RPM versions
Anthony Baxter1a4ddae2004-08-31 10:07:13 +00001606 that generate a -debuginfo.rpm
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001607
Martin v. Löwisbdec50f2004-06-08 08:29:33 +00001608- os.path.devnull has been added for all supported platforms.
1609
Hye-Shik Chang2400e932004-06-05 18:37:53 +00001610- Fixed #877165: distutils now picks the right C++ compiler command
1611 on cygwin and mingw32.
1612
Hye-Shik Chang39aef792004-06-05 13:30:56 +00001613- urllib.urlopen().readline() now handles HTTP/0.9 correctly.
1614
Brett Cannon0096e262004-06-05 01:12:51 +00001615- refactored site.py into functions. Also wrote regression tests for the
1616 module.
1617
Fred Drakeec6229e2004-06-25 23:02:59 +00001618- The distutils install command now supports the --home option and
1619 installation scheme for all platforms.
1620
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +00001621- asyncore.loop now has a repeat count parameter that defaults to
Michael W. Hudson7db865a2004-06-30 09:09:38 +00001622 looping forever.
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +00001623
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001624- The distutils sdist command now ignores all .svn directories, in
1625 addition to CVS and RCS directories. .svn directories hold
1626 administrative files for the Subversion source control system.
1627
Martin v. Löwis2a6ba902004-05-31 18:22:40 +00001628- Added a new module: cookielib. Automatic cookie handling for HTTP
1629 clients. Also, support for cookielib has been added to urllib2, so
1630 urllib2.urlopen() can transparently handle cookies.
1631
Raymond Hettinger059e1702004-05-19 19:56:44 +00001632- stringprep.py now uses built-in set() instead of sets.Set().
1633
Thomas Heller2e7c8322004-05-11 15:10:59 +00001634- Bug #876278: Unbounded recursion in modulefinder
1635
Martin v. Löwis456ab1d2004-05-06 01:54:36 +00001636- Bug #780300: Swap public and system ID in LexicalHandler.startDTD.
1637 Applications relying on the wrong order need to be corrected.
1638
Hye-Shik Chang0f5bf1e2004-04-20 21:11:11 +00001639- Bug #926075: Fixed a bug that returns a wrong pattern object
1640 for a string or unicode object in sre.compile() when a different
1641 type pattern with the same value exists.
1642
Skip Montanarod0c0c412004-04-07 16:03:02 +00001643- Added countcallers arg to trace.Trace class (--trackcalls command line arg
1644 when run from the command prompt).
1645
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +00001646- Fixed a caching bug in platform.platform() where the argument of 'terse' was
1647 not taken into consideration when caching value.
1648
Nicholas Bastin824b1b22004-03-23 18:44:39 +00001649- Added two new command-line arguments for profile (output file and
1650 default sort).
1651
Nicholas Bastin1eb4bfc2004-03-22 20:12:56 +00001652- Added global runctx function to profile module
1653
Martin v. Löwis347c30d2004-03-21 15:29:41 +00001654- Add hlist missing entryconfigure and entrycget methods.
1655
Hye-Shik Chang4a7ad1a2004-03-19 08:11:56 +00001656- The ptcp154 codec was added for Kazakh character set support.
1657
Martin v. Löwisa79449e2004-02-15 21:19:18 +00001658- Support non-anonymous ftp URLs in urllib2.
1659
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001660- The encodings package will now apply codec name aliases
Marc-André Lemburg57cb68f2004-01-20 18:24:34 +00001661 first before starting to try the import of the codec module.
1662 This simplifies overriding built-in codecs with external
1663 packages, e.g. the included CJK codecs with the JapaneseCodecs
1664 package, by adjusting the aliases dictionary in encodings.aliases
1665 accordingly.
1666
Barry Warsaw30ff12f2004-01-04 01:13:43 +00001667- base64 now supports RFC 3548 Base16, Base32, and Base64 encoding and
1668 decoding standards.
1669
Jeremy Hylton37c5f2a2003-12-14 05:29:45 +00001670- urllib2 now supports processors. A processor is a handler that
1671 implements an xxx_request or xxx_response method. These methods are
1672 called for all requests.
1673
Thomas Hellerc7501d52003-12-05 20:28:07 +00001674- distutils compilers now compile source files in the same order as
1675 they are passed to the compiler.
1676
Walter Dörwaldc8de4582003-12-03 20:26:05 +00001677- pprint.pprint() and pprint.pformat() now have additional parameters
1678 indent, width and depth.
1679
Walter Dörwald7a7ede52003-12-03 20:15:28 +00001680- Patch #750542: pprint now will pretty print subclasses of list, tuple
1681 and dict too, as long as they don't overwrite __repr__().
1682
Thomas Hellerb3105912003-11-28 19:42:56 +00001683- Bug #848614: distutils' msvccompiler fails to find the MSVC6
1684 compiler because of incomplete registry entries.
1685
Martin v. Löwisaf7dc8d2003-11-19 19:51:55 +00001686- httplib.HTTP.putrequest now offers to omit the implicit Accept-Encoding.
1687
Thomas Hellercf0005b2003-11-14 10:33:20 +00001688- Patch #841977: modulefinder didn't find extension modules in packages
1689
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +00001690- imaplib.IMAP4.thread was added.
1691
Guido van Rossum967b0632003-11-10 02:27:19 +00001692- Plugged a minor hole in tempfile.mktemp() due to the use of
1693 os.path.exists(), switched to using os.lstat() directly if possible.
1694
Raymond Hettinger0c410272004-01-05 10:13:35 +00001695- bisect.py and heapq.py now have underlying C implementations
Raymond Hettinger33ecffb2004-06-10 05:03:17 +00001696 for better performance.
1697
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001698- heapq.py has two new functions, nsmallest() and nlargest().
Raymond Hettingerb3af1812003-11-08 10:24:38 +00001699
Neil Schemenauerf607fc52003-11-05 23:03:00 +00001700- traceback.format_exc has been added (similar to print_exc but it returns
1701 a string).
1702
Martin v. Löwis45394c22003-10-31 13:49:36 +00001703- xmlrpclib.MultiCall has been added.
1704
Martin v. Löwis48440b72003-10-31 12:52:35 +00001705- poplib.POP3_SSL has been added.
1706
Martin v. Löwisd6625482003-10-12 17:37:01 +00001707- tmpfile.mkstemp now returns an absolute path even if dir is relative.
1708
Brett Cannon5d9ca4e2003-10-12 04:38:48 +00001709- urlparse is RFC 2396 compliant.
1710
Skip Montanarodef99342003-10-03 14:07:07 +00001711- The fieldnames argument to the csv module's DictReader constructor is now
1712 optional. If omitted, the first row of the file will be used as the
1713 list of fieldnames.
1714
Raymond Hettinger9a80c5d2003-09-23 20:21:01 +00001715- encodings.bz2_codec was added for access to bz2 compression
1716 using "a long string".encode('bz2')
1717
Guido van Rossum0e5a51d2003-09-22 15:03:11 +00001718- Various improvements to unittest.py, realigned with PyUnit CVS.
1719
Martin v. Löwisc6bb6c02003-09-20 15:52:21 +00001720- dircache now passes exceptions to the caller, instead of returning
1721 empty lists.
1722
Raymond Hettingerdeadbf52003-09-12 06:33:37 +00001723- The bsddb module and dbhash module now support the iterator and
1724 mapping protocols which make them more substitutable for dictionaries
1725 and shelves.
1726
Skip Montanaro3f7a9482003-09-06 19:52:12 +00001727- The csv module's DictReader and DictWriter classes now accept keyword
1728 arguments. This was an omission in the initial implementation.
1729
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +00001730- The email package handles some RFC 2231 parameters with missing
Barry Warsaw2f5bf172003-09-03 04:09:49 +00001731 CHARSET fields better. It also includes a patch to parameter
1732 parsing when semicolons appear inside quotes.
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +00001733
Raymond Hettinger6a180122003-08-17 08:34:09 +00001734- sets.py now runs under Py2.2. In addition, the argument restrictions
1735 for most set methods (but not the operators) have been relaxed to
Raymond Hettinger70b9f492003-11-19 15:52:14 +00001736 allow any iterable.
Raymond Hettingeree562fc2003-08-15 21:17:04 +00001737
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +00001738- _strptime.py now has a behind-the-scenes caching mechanism for the most
Brett Cannonb7150a22003-08-05 06:27:04 +00001739 recent TimeRE instance used along with the last five unique directive
1740 patterns. The overall module was also made more thread-safe.
1741
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +00001742- random.cunifvariate() and random.stdgamma() were deprecated in Py2.3
1743 and removed in Py2.4.
1744
Anthony Baxter92bee362003-11-04 14:35:49 +00001745- Bug #823328: urllib2.py's HTTP Digest Auth support works again.
1746
Hye-Shik Chang84a99312004-01-17 14:59:36 +00001747- Patch #873597: CJK codecs are imported into rank of default codecs.
1748
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001749Tools/Demos
1750-----------
1751
Skip Montanarod5a21fd2004-01-27 14:49:04 +00001752- A hotshotmain script was added to the Tools/scripts directory that
1753 makes it easy to run a script under control of the hotshot profiler.
1754
Skip Montanaro030f68a2003-10-28 16:24:00 +00001755- The db2pickle and pickle2db scripts can now dump/load gdbm files.
1756
Skip Montanaroe2b61e02004-03-03 17:42:08 +00001757- The file order on the command line of the pickle2db script was reversed.
1758 It is now [ picklefile ] dbfile. This provides better symmetry with
1759 db2pickle. The file arguments to both scripts are now source followed by
1760 destination in situations where both files are given.
1761
Skip Montanarofd4fa882003-09-10 19:04:13 +00001762- The pydoc script will display a link to the module documentation for
1763 modules determined to be part of the core distribution. The documentation
1764 base directory defaults to http://www.python.org/doc/current/lib/ but can
1765 be changed by setting the PYTHONDOCS environment variable.
1766
Raymond Hettingere41d4c82003-08-25 04:39:55 +00001767- texcheck.py now detects double word errors.
1768
Tim Peters1a3abcb2003-08-18 23:52:09 +00001769- md5sum.py mistakenly opened input files in text mode by default, a
1770 silent and dangerous change from previous releases. It once again
1771 opens input files in binary mode by default. The -t and -b flags
1772 remain for compatibility with the 2.3 release, but -b is the default
1773 now.
1774
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001775- py-electric-colon now works when pending-delete/delete-selection mode is
1776 in effect
1777
1778- py-help-at-point is no longer bound to the F1 key - it's still bound to
1779 C-c C-h
1780
Barry Warsaw6ec58ca2003-09-03 03:20:37 +00001781- Pynche was fixed to not crash when there is no ~/.pynche file and no
1782 -d option was given.
1783
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001784Build
1785-----
1786
Brett Cannonf6af76d2004-06-26 04:03:06 +00001787- Bug #978645: Modules/getpath.c now builds properly in --disable-framework
1788 build under OS X.
1789
Skip Montanaro56f6a4f2004-06-18 02:47:22 +00001790- Profiling using gprof is now available if Python is configured with
1791 --enable-profiling.
1792
Martin v. Löwisf30d60e2004-06-08 08:17:44 +00001793- Profiling the VM using the Pentium TSC is now possible if Python
1794 is configured --with-tsc.
1795
Martin v. Löwis642c8a12004-06-04 13:55:13 +00001796- In order to find libraries, setup.py now also looks in /lib64, for use
1797 on AMD64.
1798
Hye-Shik Chang54f94392004-04-14 07:55:31 +00001799- Bug #934635: Fixed a bug where the configure script couldn't detect
1800 getaddrinfo() properly if the KAME stack had SCTP support.
1801
Skip Montanaro7befb992004-02-10 16:50:21 +00001802- Support for missing ANSI C header files (limits.h, stddef.h, etc) was
1803 removed.
1804
Skip Montanarodb608052004-02-07 13:53:46 +00001805- Systems requiring the D4, D6 or D7 variants of pthreads are no longer
1806 supported (see PEP 11).
1807
1808- Universal newline support can no longer be disabled (see PEP 11).
1809
Skip Montanarocd1f7432004-01-17 14:22:44 +00001810- Support for DGUX, SunOS 4, IRIX 4 and Minix was removed (see PEP 11).
1811
1812- Support for systems requiring --with-dl-dld or --with-sgi-dl was removed
1813 (see PEP 11).
1814
1815- Tests for sizeof(char) were removed since ANSI C mandates that
1816 sizeof(char) must be 1.
1817
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001818C API
1819-----
1820
Tim Peters9ddf40b2004-06-20 22:41:32 +00001821- Thanks to Anthony Tuininga, the datetime module now supplies a C API
1822 containing type-check macros and constructors. See new docs in the
1823 Python/C API Reference Manual for details.
1824
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +00001825- Private function _PyTime_DoubleToTimet added, to convert a Python
1826 timestamp (C double) to platform time_t with some out-of-bounds
1827 checking. Declared in new header file timefuncs.h. It would be
1828 good to expose some other internal timemodule.c functions there.
1829
Martin v. Löwise440e472004-06-01 15:22:42 +00001830- New public functions PyEval_EvaluateFrame and PyGen_New to expose
1831 generator objects.
1832
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +00001833- New public functions Py_IncRef() and Py_DecRef(), exposing the
1834 functionality of the Py_XINCREF() and Py_XDECREF macros. Useful for
Thomas Hellercc10a852004-04-22 17:28:25 +00001835 runtime dynamic embedding of Python. See patch #938302, by Bob
1836 Ippolito.
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +00001837
Raymond Hettingerc1e4f9d2004-03-12 08:04:00 +00001838- Added a new macro, PySequence_Fast_ITEMS, which retrieves a fast sequence's
1839 underlying array of PyObject pointers. Useful for high speed looping.
1840
Raymond Hettinger8f5cdaa2003-12-13 11:26:12 +00001841- Created a new method flag, METH_COEXIST, which causes a method to be loaded
1842 even if already defined by a slot wrapper. This allows a __contains__
1843 method, for example, to co-exist with a defined sq_contains slot. This
1844 is helpful because the PyCFunction can take advantage of optimized calls
1845 whenever METH_O or METH_NOARGS flags are defined.
1846
Raymond Hettingerbc0f2ab2003-11-25 21:12:14 +00001847- Added a new function, PyDict_Contains(d, k) which is like
1848 PySequence_Contains() but is specific to dictionaries and executes
1849 about 10% faster.
1850
Brett Cannon26b3a7b2003-10-19 21:31:43 +00001851- Added three new macros: Py_RETURN_NONE, Py_RETURN_TRUE, and Py_RETURN_FALSE.
1852 Each return the singleton they mention after Py_INCREF()ing them.
1853
Raymond Hettingercb2da432003-10-12 18:24:34 +00001854- Added a new function, PyTuple_Pack(n, ...) for constructing tuples from a
1855 variable length argument list of Python objects without having to invoke
1856 the more complex machinery of Py_BuildValue(). PyTuple_Pack(3, a, b, c)
1857 is equivalent to Py_BuildValue("(OOO)", a, b, c).
1858
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001859Windows
1860-------
1861
Guido van Rossumfd25aca2003-11-30 22:10:15 +00001862- The _winreg module could segfault when reading very large registry
1863 values, due to unchecked alloca() calls (SF bug 851056). The fix is
1864 uses either PyMem_Malloc(n) or PyString_FromStringAndSize(NULL, n),
1865 as appropriate, followed by a size check.
1866
Tim Petersf1827cf2003-09-07 03:30:18 +00001867- file.truncate() could misbehave if the file was open for update
1868 (modes r+, rb+, w+, wb+), and the most recent file operation before
1869 the truncate() call was an input operation. SF bug 801631.
1870
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001871
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001872What's New in Python 2.3 final?
1873===============================
1874
1875*Release date: 29-Jul-2003*
1876
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001877IDLE
1878----
1879
Tim Peters36c1afc2003-07-29 17:22:57 +00001880- Bug 778400: IDLE hangs when selecting "Edit with IDLE" from explorer.
1881 This was unique to Windows, and was fixed by adding an -n switch to
1882 the command the Windows installer creates to execute "Edit with IDLE"
1883 context-menu actions.
1884
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001885- IDLE displays a new message upon startup: some "personal firewall"
1886 kinds of programs (for example, ZoneAlarm) open a dialog of their
1887 own when any program opens a socket. IDLE does use sockets, talking
1888 on the computer's internal loopback interface. This connection is not
1889 visible on any external interface and no data is sent to or received
1890 from the Internet. So, if you get such a dialog when opening IDLE,
1891 asking whether to let pythonw.exe talk to address 127.0.0.1, say yes,
1892 and rest assured no communication external to your machine is taking
1893 place. If you don't allow it, IDLE won't be able to start.
1894
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001895
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001896What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 2?
1897=============================================
1898
Tim Peters6560a252003-07-24 00:15:46 +00001899*Release date: 24-Jul-2003*
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001900
1901Core and builtins
1902-----------------
1903
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00001904- It is now possible to import from zipfiles containing additional
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001905 data bytes before the zip compatible archive. Zipfiles containing a
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00001906 comment at the end are still unsupported.
1907
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001908Extension modules
1909-----------------
1910
1911- A longstanding bug in the parser module's initialization could cause
1912 fatal internal refcount confusion when the module got initialized more
1913 than once. This has been fixed.
1914
Fred Drake01a43122003-07-21 17:17:10 +00001915- Fixed memory leak in pyexpat; using the parser's ParseFile() method
1916 with open files that aren't instances of the standard file type
1917 caused an instance of the bound .read() method to be leaked on every
1918 call.
1919
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001920- Fixed some leaks in the locale module.
1921
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001922Library
1923-------
1924
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001925- Lib/encodings/rot_13.py when used as a script, now more properly
1926 uses the first Python interpreter on your path.
1927
1928- Removed caching of TimeRE (and thus LocaleTime) in _strptime.py to
1929 fix a locale related bug in the test suite. Although another patch
1930 was needed to actually fix the problem, the cache code was not
1931 restored.
1932
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00001933IDLE
1934----
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001935
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00001936- Calltips patches.
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001937
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001938Build
1939-----
1940
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001941- For MacOSX, added -mno-fused-madd to BASECFLAGS to fix test_coercion
1942 on Panther (OSX 10.3).
1943
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001944C API
1945-----
1946
1947Windows
1948-------
1949
Tim Peters291f14e2003-07-22 02:50:01 +00001950- The tempfile module could do insane imports on Windows if PYTHONCASEOK
1951 was set, making temp file creation impossible. Repaired.
1952
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001953- Add a patch to workaround pthread_sigmask() bugs in Cygwin.
1954
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001955Mac
1956---
1957
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001958- Various fixes to pimp.
1959
1960- Scripts runs with pythonw no longer had full window manager access.
1961
1962- Don't force boot-disk-only install, for reasons unknown it causes
1963 more problems than it solves.
1964
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001965
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001966What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 1?
1967=============================================
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001968
Jeremy Hylton0ed18c22003-07-18 20:10:02 +00001969*Release date: 18-Jul-2003*
1970
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001971Core and builtins
1972-----------------
1973
Tim Peterse5e065b2003-07-06 18:36:54 +00001974- The new function sys.getcheckinterval() returns the last value set
1975 by sys.setcheckinterval().
1976
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001977- Several bugs in the symbol table phase of the compiler have been
1978 fixed. Errors could be lost and compilation could fail without
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001979 reporting an error. SF patch 763201.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001980
1981- The interpreter is now more robust about importing the warnings
1982 module. In an executable generated by freeze or similar programs,
1983 earlier versions of 2.3 would fail if the warnings module could
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001984 not be found on the file system. Fixes SF bug 771097.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001985
1986- A warning about assignments to module attributes that shadow
1987 builtins, present in earlier releases of 2.3, has been removed.
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001988
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001989- It is not possible to create subclasses of builtin types like str
1990 and tuple that define an itemsize. Earlier releases of Python 2.3
1991 allowed this by mistake, leading to crashes and other problems.
1992
1993- The thread_id is now initialized to 0 in a non-thread build. SF bug
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001994 770247.
1995
1996- SF bug 762891: "del p[key]" on proxy object no longer raises SystemError.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001997
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001998Extension modules
1999-----------------
2000
2001- weakref.proxy() can now handle "del obj[i]" for proxy objects
2002 defining __delitem__. Formerly, it generated a SystemError.
2003
2004- SSL no longer crashes the interpreter when the remote side disconnects.
2005
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002006- On Unix the mmap module can again be used to map device files.
2007
Brett Cannon20def8b2003-07-01 05:16:08 +00002008- time.strptime now exclusively uses the Python implementation
2009 contained within the _strptime module.
2010
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002011- The print slot of weakref proxy objects was removed, because it was
2012 not consistent with the object's repr slot.
2013
2014- The mmap module only checks file size for regular files, not
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002015 character or block devices. SF patch 708374.
2016
2017- The cPickle Pickler garbage collection support was fixed to traverse
2018 the find_class attribute, if present.
2019
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002020- There are several fixes for the bsddb3 wrapper module.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002021
2022 bsddb3 no longer crashes if an environment is closed before a cursor
2023 (SF bug 763298).
2024
2025 The DB and DBEnv set_get_returns_none function was extended to take
Barry Warsawd71a5512003-07-20 18:00:54 +00002026 a level instead of a boolean flag. The new level 2 means that in
2027 addition, cursor.set()/.get() methods return None instead of raising
2028 an exception.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002029
2030 A typo was fixed in DBCursor.join_item(), preventing a crash.
2031
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002032Library
2033-------
2034
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002035- distutils now supports MSVC 7.1
2036
Raymond Hettinger71adf7e2003-07-16 19:25:22 +00002037- doctest now examines all docstrings by default. Previously, it would
2038 skip over functions with private names (as indicated by the underscore
2039 naming convention). The old default created too much of a risk that
2040 user tests were being skipped inadvertently. Note, this change could
2041 break code in the unlikely case that someone had intentionally put
2042 failing tests in the docstrings of private functions. The breakage
2043 is easily fixable by specifying the old behavior when calling testmod()
2044 or Tester().
2045
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002046- There were several fixes to the way dumbdbms are closed. It's vital
2047 that a dumbdbm database be closed properly, else the on-disk data
2048 and directory files can be left in mutually inconsistent states.
2049 dumbdbm.py's _Database.__del__() method attempted to close the
2050 database properly, but a shutdown race in _Database._commit() could
2051 prevent this from working, so that a program trusting __del__() to
2052 get the on-disk files in synch could be badly surprised. The race
2053 has been repaired. A sync() method was also added so that shelve
2054 can guarantee data is written to disk.
Tim Peters7a6c7332003-07-13 17:21:10 +00002055
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002056 The close() method can now be called more than once without complaint.
Tim Petersd7472ec2003-07-13 02:22:03 +00002057
Tim Peters59aba122003-07-01 20:01:55 +00002058- The classes in threading.py are now new-style classes. That they
2059 weren't before was an oversight.
2060
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002061- The urllib2 digest authentication handlers now define the correct
2062 auth_header. The earlier versions would fail at runtime.
2063
Neal Norwitze7dfe212003-07-01 14:59:46 +00002064- SF bug 763023: fix uncaught ZeroDivisionError in difflib ratio methods
2065 when there are no lines.
2066
Neal Norwitz3c0f2c92003-07-01 21:12:47 +00002067- SF bug 763637: fix exception in Tkinter with after_cancel
2068 which could occur with Tk 8.4
2069
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002070- SF bug 770601: CGIHTTPServer.py now passes the entire environment
2071 to child processes.
2072
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002073- SF bug 765238: add filter to fnmatch's __all__.
2074
2075- SF bug 748201: make time.strptime() error messages more helpful.
2076
2077- SF patch 764470: Do not dump the args attribute of a Fault object in
2078 xmlrpclib.
2079
2080- SF patch 549151: urllib and urllib2 now redirect POSTs on 301
2081 responses.
2082
2083- SF patch 766650: The whichdb module was fixed to recognize dbm files
2084 generated by gdbm on OS/2 EMX.
2085
2086- SF bugs 763047 and 763052: fixes bug of timezone value being left as
2087 -1 when ``time.tzname[0] == time.tzname[1] and not time.daylight``
2088 is true when it should only when time.daylight is true.
2089
2090- SF bug 764548: re now allows subclasses of str and unicode to be
2091 used as patterns.
2092
2093- SF bug 763637: In Tkinter, change after_cancel() to handle tuples
2094 of varying sizes. Tk 8.4 returns a different number of values
2095 than Tk 8.3.
2096
2097- SF bug 763023: difflib.ratio() did not catch zero division.
2098
2099- The Queue module now has an __all__ attribute.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002100
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002101Tools/Demos
2102-----------
2103
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002104- See Lib/idlelib/NEWS.txt for IDLE news.
2105
Neal Norwitz592c4cc2003-07-01 04:14:28 +00002106- SF bug 753592: webchecker/wsgui now handles user supplied directories.
2107
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002108- The trace.py script has been removed. It is now in the standard library.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002109
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002110Build
2111-----
2112
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002113- Python now compiles with -fno-strict-aliasing if possible (SF bug 766696).
2114
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002115- The socket module compiles on IRIX 6.5.10.
2116
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002117- An irix64 system is treated the same way as an irix6 system (SF
2118 patch 764560).
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002119
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002120- Several definitions were missing on FreeBSD 5.x unless the
2121 __BSD_VISIBLE symbol was defined. configure now defines it as
2122 needed.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002123
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002124C API
2125-----
2126
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002127- Unicode objects now support mbcs as a built-in encoding, so the C
2128 API can use it without deferring to the encodings package.
2129
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002130Windows
2131-------
2132
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002133- The Windows implementation of PyThread_start_new_thread() never
2134 checked error returns from Windows functions correctly. As a result,
2135 it could claim to start a new thread even when the Microsoft
2136 _beginthread() function failed (due to "too many threads" -- this is
2137 on the order of thousands when it happens). In these cases, the
2138 Python exception ::
2139
2140 thread.error: can't start new thread
2141
2142 is raised now.
2143
2144- SF bug 766669: Prevent a GPF on interpreter exit when sockets are in
2145 use. The interpreter now calls WSACleanup() from Py_Finalize()
2146 instead of from DLL teardown.
2147
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002148Mac
2149---
2150
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002151- Bundlebuilder now inherits default values in the right way. It was
Walter Dörwald73a8a4b2003-07-30 12:14:02 +00002152 previously possible for app bundles to get a type of "BNDL" instead
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002153 of "APPL." Other improvements include, a --build-id option to
2154 specify the CFBundleIdentifier and using the --python option to set
2155 the executable in the bundle.
2156
2157- Fixed two bugs in MacOSX framework handling.
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002158
Jack Jansene0040412003-07-23 22:17:28 +00002159- pythonw did not allow user interaction in 2.3rc1, this has been fixed.
2160
2161- Python is now compiled with -mno-fused-madd, making all tests pass
2162 on Panther.
2163
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002164What's New in Python 2.3 beta 2?
2165================================
2166
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00002167*Release date: 29-Jun-2003*
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002168
2169Core and builtins
2170-----------------
2171
Barry Warsaw883f2232003-06-29 17:10:11 +00002172- A program can now set the environment variable PYTHONINSPECT to some
2173 string value in Python, and cause the interpreter to enter the
2174 interactive prompt at program exit, as if Python had been invoked
2175 with the -i option.
2176
Raymond Hettingerd05abde2003-06-17 05:05:49 +00002177- list.index() now accepts optional start and stop arguments. Similar
2178 changes were made to UserList.index(). SF feature request 754014.
2179
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002180- SF patch 751998 fixes an unwanted side effect of the previous fix
2181 for SF bug 742860 (the next item).
2182
Tim Peters50d8b8b2003-05-25 17:44:31 +00002183- SF bug 742860: "WeakKeyDictionary __delitem__ uses iterkeys". This
2184 wasn't threadsafe, was very inefficient (expected time O(len(dict))
2185 instead of O(1)), and could raise a spurious RuntimeError if another
2186 thread mutated the dict during __delitem__, or if a comparison function
2187 mutated it. It also neglected to raise KeyError when the key wasn't
2188 present; didn't raise TypeError when the key wasn't of a weakly
2189 referencable type; and broke various more-or-less obscure dict
2190 invariants by using a sequence of equality comparisons over the whole
2191 set of dict keys instead of computing the key's hash code to narrow
2192 the search to those keys with the same hash code. All of these are
2193 considered to be bugs. A new implementation of __delitem__ repairs all
2194 that, but note that fixing these bugs may change visible behavior in
2195 code relying (whether intentionally or accidentally) on old behavior.
Tim Peters886128f2003-05-25 01:45:11 +00002196
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002197- SF bug 734869: Fixed a compiler bug that caused a fatal error when
2198 compiling a list comprehension that contained another list comprehension
2199 embedded in a lambda expression.
2200
Tim Peterse87568d2003-05-24 20:18:24 +00002201- SF bug 705231: builtin pow() no longer lets the platform C pow()
2202 raise -1.0 to integer powers, because (at least) glibc gets it wrong
2203 in some cases. The result should be -1.0 if the power is odd and 1.0
2204 if the power is even, and any float with a sufficiently large exponent
2205 is (mathematically) an exact even integer.
2206
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002207- SF bug 759227: A new-style class that implements __nonzero__() must
2208 return a bool or int (but not an int subclass) from that method. This
2209 matches the restriction on classic classes.
2210
Martin v. Löwis5467d4c2003-05-10 07:10:12 +00002211- The encoding attribute has been added for file objects, and set to
2212 the terminal encoding on Unix and Windows.
2213
Tim Peters015dd822003-05-04 04:16:52 +00002214- The softspace attribute of file objects became read-only by oversight.
2215 It's writable again.
2216
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00002217- Reverted a 2.3 beta 1 change to iterators for subclasses of list and
2218 tuple. By default, the iterators now access data elements directly
2219 instead of going through __getitem__. If __getitem__ access is
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002220 preferred, then __iter__ can be overridden.
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00002221
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002222- SF bug 735247: The staticmethod and super types participate in
2223 garbage collection. Before this change, it was possible for leaks to
2224 occur in functions with non-global free variables that used these types.
2225
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002226Extension modules
2227-----------------
2228
Raymond Hettinger643bcec2003-06-29 03:29:42 +00002229- the socket module has a new exception, socket.timeout, to allow
2230 timeouts to be handled separately from other socket errors.
2231
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002232- SF bug 751276: cPickle has fixed to propagate exceptions raised in
2233 user code. In earlier versions, cPickle caught and ignored any
2234 exception when it performed operations that it expected to raise
2235 specific exceptions like AttributeError.
2236
2237- cPickle Pickler and Unpickler objects now participate in garbage
2238 collection.
2239
Tim Peterscda32b72003-06-15 23:13:35 +00002240- mimetools.choose_boundary() could return duplicate strings at times,
2241 especially likely on Windows. The strings returned are now guaranteed
2242 unique within a single program run.
2243
Brett Cannon4e64d782003-06-13 23:44:35 +00002244- thread.interrupt_main() raises KeyboardInterrupt in the main thread.
2245 dummy_thread has also been modified to try to simulate the behavior.
2246
Walter Dörwald9e46abe2003-05-18 03:15:10 +00002247- array.array.insert() now treats negative indices as being relative
2248 to the end of the array, just like list.insert() does. (SF bug #739313)
2249
Tim Petersb0c854d2003-05-17 15:57:00 +00002250- The datetime module classes datetime, time, and timedelta are now
2251 properly subclassable.
Tim Petersa98924a2003-05-17 05:55:19 +00002252
Martin v. Löwis28e9ce92003-05-09 08:19:48 +00002253- _tkinter.{get|set}busywaitinterval was added.
2254
Raymond Hettinger834f4632003-05-02 20:24:56 +00002255- itertools.islice() now accepts stop=None as documented.
2256 Fixes SF bug #730685.
2257
Skip Montanaro8c044d82003-05-06 20:42:37 +00002258- the bsddb185 module is built in one restricted instance -
2259 /usr/include/db.h exists and defines HASHVERSION to be 2. This is true
2260 for many BSD-derived systems.
2261
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002262
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002263Library
2264-------
2265
Tim Petersdb3756d2003-06-29 05:30:48 +00002266- Some happy doctest extensions from Jim Fulton have been added to
2267 doctest.py. These are already being used in Zope3. The two
2268 primary ones:
2269
2270 doctest.debug(module, name) extracts the doctests from the named object
2271 in the given module, puts them in a temp file, and starts pdb running
2272 on that file. This is great when a doctest fails.
2273
2274 doctest.DocTestSuite(module=None) returns a synthesized unittest
2275 TestSuite instance, to be run by the unittest framework, which
2276 runs all the doctests in the module. This allows writing tests in
2277 doctest style (which can be clearer and shorter than writing tests
2278 in unittest style), without losing unittest's powerful testing
2279 framework features (which doctest lacks).
2280
Tim Peters6ebe61f2003-06-27 20:48:05 +00002281- For compatibility with doctests created before 2.3, if an expected
2282 output block consists solely of "1" and the actual output block
2283 consists solely of "True", it's accepted as a match; similarly
2284 for "0" and "False". This is quite un-doctest-like, but is practical.
2285 The behavior can be disabled by passing the new doctest module
2286 constant DONT_ACCEPT_TRUE_FOR_1 to the new optionflags optional
2287 argument.
2288
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002289- ZipFile.testzip() now only traps BadZipfile exceptions. Previously,
2290 a bare except caught to much and reported all errors as a problem
2291 in the archive.
2292
2293- The logging module now has a new function, makeLogRecord() making
2294 LogHandler easier to interact with DatagramHandler and SocketHandler.
2295
Skip Montanaro364ca402003-06-17 12:58:31 +00002296- The cgitb module has been extended to support plain text display (SF patch
2297 569574).
2298
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002299- A brand new version of IDLE (from the IDLEfork project at
2300 SourceForge) is now included as Lib/idlelib. The old Tools/idle is
2301 no more.
2302
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002303- Added a new module: trace (documentation missing). This module used
2304 to be distributed in Tools/scripts. It uses sys.settrace() to trace
2305 code execution -- either function calls or individual lines. It can
2306 generate tracing output during execution or a post-mortem report of
2307 code coverage.
2308
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00002309- The threading module has new functions settrace() and setprofile()
2310 that cooperate with the functions of the same name in the sys
2311 module. A function registered with the threading module will
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002312 be used for all threads it creates. The new trace module uses this
2313 to provide tracing for code running in threads.
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00002314
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00002315- copy.py: applied SF patch 707900, fixing bug 702858, by Steven
2316 Taschuk. Copying a new-style class that had a reference to itself
2317 didn't work. (The same thing worked fine for old-style classes.)
Martin v. Löwisba8f5ff2003-06-14 07:10:06 +00002318 Builtin functions are now treated as atomic, fixing bug #746304.
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00002319
Raymond Hettingerc24d7672003-06-08 19:42:33 +00002320- difflib.py has two new functions: context_diff() and unified_diff().
2321
Guido van Rossumfa19f7c2003-05-16 01:46:51 +00002322- More fixes to urllib (SF 549151): (a) When redirecting, always use
2323 GET. This is common practice and more-or-less sanctioned by the
2324 HTTP standard. (b) Add a handler for 307 redirection, which becomes
2325 an error for POST, but a regular redirect for GET and HEAD
2326
Guido van Rossumbf1bef82003-05-13 18:01:19 +00002327- Added optional 'onerror' argument to os.walk(), to control error
2328 handling.
2329
Martin v. Löwise59e2ba2003-05-03 09:09:02 +00002330- inspect.is{method|data}descriptor was added, to allow pydoc display
2331 __doc__ of data descriptors.
2332
Skip Montanaro4a7751c2003-04-29 21:07:16 +00002333- Fixed socket speed loss caused by use of the _socketobject wrapper class
2334 in socket.py.
2335
Raymond Hettinger22952a32003-05-20 04:59:56 +00002336- timeit.py now checks the current directory for imports.
2337
Gustavo Niemeyer9556fba2003-06-07 17:53:08 +00002338- urllib2.py now knows how to order proxy classes, so the user doesn't
2339 have to insert it in front of other classes, nor do dirty tricks like
2340 inserting a "dummy" HTTPHandler after a ProxyHandler when building an
2341 opener with proxy support.
2342
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002343- Iterators have been added for dbm keys.
2344
2345- random.Random objects can now be pickled.
2346
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002347Tools/Demos
2348-----------
2349
Martin v. Löwisb8c084e2003-06-14 09:03:46 +00002350- pydoc now offers help on keywords and topics.
2351
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002352- Tools/idle is gone; long live Lib/idlelib.
2353
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00002354- diff.py prints file diffs in context, unified, or ndiff formats,
2355 providing a command line interface to difflib.py.
Raymond Hettinger2f3c74a2003-06-08 23:10:15 +00002356
Raymond Hettinger71e00332003-05-10 03:30:13 +00002357- texcheck.py is a new script for making a rough validation of Python LaTeX
2358 files.
2359
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002360Build
2361-----
2362
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002363- Setting DESTDIR during 'make install' now allows specifying a
Martin v. Löwis3b8ee082003-05-11 20:25:35 +00002364 different root directory.
2365
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002366C API
2367-----
2368
Tim Peters3cfe7542003-05-21 21:29:48 +00002369- PyType_Ready(): If a type declares that it participates in gc
2370 (Py_TPFLAGS_HAVE_GC), and its base class does not, and its base class's
2371 tp_free slot is the default _PyObject_Del, and type does not define
2372 a tp_free slot itself, _PyObject_GC_Del is assigned to type->tp_free.
2373 Previously _PyObject_Del was inherited, which could at best lead to a
2374 segfault. In addition, if even after this magic the type's tp_free
2375 slot is _PyObject_Del or NULL, and the type is a base type
2376 (Py_TPFLAGS_BASETYPE), TypeError is raised: since the type is a base
2377 type, its dealloc function must call type->tp_free, and since the type
2378 is gc'able, tp_free must not be NULL or _PyObject_Del.
2379
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002380- PyThreadState_SetAsyncExc(): A new API (deliberately accessible only
2381 from C) to interrupt a thread by sending it an exception. It is
2382 intentional that you have to write your own C extension to call it
2383 from Python.
2384
2385
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002386New platforms
2387-------------
2388
2389None this time.
2390
2391Tests
2392-----
2393
2394- test_imp rewritten so that it doesn't raise RuntimeError if run as a
2395 side effect of being imported ("import test.autotest").
2396
2397Windows
2398-------
2399
Tim Petersfaa697a2003-06-22 01:42:20 +00002400- The Windows installer ships with Tcl/Tk 8.4.3 (upgraded from 8.4.1).
2401
Tim Petersc4607da2003-05-08 18:13:59 +00002402- The installer always suggested that Python be installed on the C:
2403 drive, due to a hardcoded "C:" generated by the Wise installation
2404 wizard. People with machines where C: is not the system drive
2405 usually want Python installed on whichever drive is their system drive
2406 instead. We removed the hardcoded "C:", and two testers on machines
2407 where C: is not the system drive report that the installer now
2408 suggests their system drive. Note that you can always select the
2409 directory you want in the "Select Destination Directory" dialog --
2410 that's what it's for.
2411
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002412Mac
2413---
2414
Just van Rossum99bc1fc2003-05-09 15:01:25 +00002415- There's a new module called "autoGIL", which offers a mechanism to
2416 automatically release the Global Interpreter Lock when an event loop
2417 goes to sleep, allowing other threads to run. It's currently only
2418 supported on OSX, in the Mach-O version.
Jack Jansenf5e23ff2003-06-16 13:53:40 +00002419- The OSA modules now allow direct access to properties of the
2420 toplevel application class (in AppleScript terminology).
2421- The Package Manager can now update itself.
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002422
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002423SourceForge Bugs and Patches Applied
2424------------------------------------
2425
2426430160, 471893, 501716, 542562, 549151, 569574, 595837, 596434,
2427598163, 604210, 604716, 610332, 612627, 614770, 620190, 621891,
2428622042, 639139, 640236, 644345, 649742, 649742, 658233, 660022,
2429661318, 661676, 662807, 662923, 666219, 672855, 678325, 682347,
2430683486, 684981, 685773, 686254, 692776, 692959, 693094, 696777,
2431697989, 700827, 703666, 708495, 708604, 708901, 710733, 711902,
2432713722, 715782, 718286, 719359, 719367, 723136, 723831, 723962,
2433724588, 724767, 724767, 725942, 726150, 726446, 726869, 727051,
2434727719, 727719, 727805, 728277, 728563, 728656, 729096, 729103,
2435729293, 729297, 729300, 729317, 729395, 729622, 729817, 730170,
2436730296, 730594, 730685, 730826, 730963, 731209, 731403, 731504,
2437731514, 731626, 731635, 731643, 731644, 731644, 731689, 732124,
2438732143, 732234, 732284, 732284, 732479, 732761, 732783, 732951,
2439733667, 733781, 734118, 734231, 734869, 735051, 735293, 735527,
2440735613, 735694, 736962, 736962, 737970, 738066, 739313, 740055,
2441740234, 740301, 741806, 742126, 742741, 742860, 742860, 742911,
2442744041, 744104, 744238, 744687, 744877, 745055, 745478, 745525,
2443745620, 746012, 746304, 746366, 746801, 746953, 747348, 747667,
2444747954, 748846, 748849, 748973, 748975, 749191, 749210, 749759,
2445749831, 749911, 750008, 750092, 750542, 750595, 751038, 751107,
2446751276, 751451, 751916, 751941, 751956, 751998, 752671, 753451,
2447753602, 753617, 753845, 753925, 754014, 754340, 754447, 755031,
2448755087, 755147, 755245, 755683, 755987, 756032, 756996, 757058,
2449757229, 757818, 757821, 757822, 758112, 758910, 759227, 759889,
2450760257, 760703, 760792, 761104, 761337, 761519, 761830, 762455
2451
2452
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002453What's New in Python 2.3 beta 1?
2454================================
2455
Guido van Rossumfa1eddf2003-04-25 19:19:52 +00002456*Release date: 25-Apr-2003*
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002457
2458Core and builtins
2459-----------------
2460
Thomas Heller5eccabc2003-04-23 19:35:25 +00002461- New format codes B, H, I, k and K have been implemented for
2462 PyArg_ParseTuple and PyBuild_Value.
2463
Alex Martellia70b1912003-04-22 08:12:33 +00002464- New builtin function sum(seq, start=0) returns the sum of all the
2465 items in iterable object seq, plus start (items are normally numbers,
2466 and cannot be strings).
2467
Guido van Rossumaa86e352003-04-19 18:15:10 +00002468- bool() called without arguments now returns False rather than
2469 raising an exception. This is consistent with calling the
2470 constructors for the other builtin types -- called without argument
2471 they all return the false value of that type. (SF patch #724135)
2472
Guido van Rossumcf8d2852003-04-17 16:53:26 +00002473- In support of PEP 269 (making the pgen parser generator accessible
2474 from Python), some changes to the pgen code structure were made; a
2475 few files that used to be linked only with pgen are now linked with
2476 Python itself.
2477
Guido van Rossumc1f6e8c2003-04-16 21:13:23 +00002478- The repr() of a weakref object now shows the __name__ attribute of
2479 the referenced object, if it has one.
2480
Guido van Rossum76ba09f2003-04-16 19:40:58 +00002481- super() no longer ignores data descriptors, except __class__. See
2482 the thread started at
2483 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2003-April/034338.html
2484
Guido van Rossum3a3cca52003-04-14 20:58:14 +00002485- list.insert(i, x) now interprets negative i as it would be
2486 interpreted by slicing, so negative values count from the end of the
2487 list. This was the only place where such an interpretation was not
2488 placed on a list index.
2489
Guido van Rossumefbbb1c2003-04-11 18:43:06 +00002490- range() now works even if the arguments are longs with magnitude
2491 larger than sys.maxint, as long as the total length of the sequence
2492 fits. E.g., range(2**100, 2**101, 2**100) is the following list:
2493 [1267650600228229401496703205376L]. (SF patch #707427.)
2494
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002495- Some horridly obscure problems were fixed involving interaction
2496 between garbage collection and old-style classes with "ambitious"
2497 getattr hooks. If an old-style instance didn't have a __del__ method,
2498 but did have a __getattr__ hook, and the instance became reachable
2499 only from an unreachable cycle, and the hook resurrected or deleted
2500 unreachable objects when asked to resolve "__del__", anything up to
2501 a segfault could happen. That's been repaired.
2502
Raymond Hettingera3e1e4c2003-03-06 23:54:28 +00002503- dict.pop now takes an optional argument specifying a default
2504 value to return if the key is not in the dict. If a default is not
2505 given and the key is not found, a KeyError will still be raised.
2506 Parallel changes were made to UserDict.UserDict and UserDict.DictMixin.
2507 [SF patch #693753] (contributed by Michael Stone.)
2508
Martin v. Löwis73d538b2003-03-05 15:13:47 +00002509- sys.getfilesystemencoding() was added to expose
2510 Py_FileSystemDefaultEncoding.
Guido van Rossum46d3dc32003-03-01 03:20:41 +00002511
2512- New function sys.exc_clear() clears the current exception. This is
2513 rarely needed, but can sometimes be useful to release objects
2514 referenced by the traceback held in sys.exc_info()[2]. (SF patch
2515 #693195.)
2516
Neal Norwitzd5a65a72003-02-23 23:11:41 +00002517- On 64-bit systems, a dictionary could contain duplicate long/int keys
2518 if the key value was larger than 2**32. See SF bug #689659.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002519
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00002520- Fixed SF bug #663074. The codec system was using global static
Walter Dörwaldfa86bf52003-03-31 16:15:13 +00002521 variables to store internal data. As a result, any attempts to use the
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00002522 unicode system with multiple active interpreters, or successive
2523 interpreter executions, would fail.
2524
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00002525- "%c" % u"a" now returns a unicode string instead of raising a
Walter Dörwald44f527f2003-04-02 16:37:24 +00002526 TypeError. u"%c" % 0xffffffff now raises a OverflowError instead
Walter Dörwald1e469c52003-04-02 16:57:59 +00002527 of a ValueError to be consistent with "%c" % 256. See SF patch #710127.
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00002528
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002529Extension modules
2530-----------------
2531
Guido van Rossume7adda92003-04-25 05:52:37 +00002532- The socket module now provides the functions inet_pton and inet_ntop
2533 for converting between string and packed representation of IP
2534 addresses. There is also a new module variable, has_ipv6, which is
2535 True iff the current Python has IPv6 support. See SF patch #658327.
2536
Martin v. Löwisbfe175c2003-04-16 19:42:51 +00002537- Tkinter wrappers around Tcl variables now pass objects directly
2538 to Tcl, instead of first converting them to strings.
2539
Guido van Rossum41c99e72003-04-14 17:59:34 +00002540- The .*? pattern in the re module is now special-cased to avoid the
2541 recursion limit. (SF patch #720991 -- many thanks to Gary Herron
2542 and Greg Chapman.)
2543
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00002544- New function sys.call_tracing() allows pdb to debug code
2545 recursively.
2546
Tim Peters730f5532003-04-08 17:17:17 +00002547- New function gc.get_referents(obj) returns a list of objects
Tim Peters0f81ab62003-04-08 16:39:48 +00002548 directly referenced by obj. In effect, it exposes what the object's
2549 tp_traverse slot does, and can be helpful when debugging memory
2550 leaks.
2551
Martin v. Löwis7fb697b2003-04-03 04:49:12 +00002552- The iconv module has been removed from this release.
2553
Tim Petersd50ade62003-03-20 18:32:13 +00002554- The platform-independent routines for packing floats in IEEE formats
2555 (struct.pack's <f, >f, <d, and >d codes; pickle and cPickle's protocol 1
2556 pickling of floats) ignored that rounding can cause a carry to
2557 propagate. The worst consequence was that, in rare cases, <f and >f
2558 could produce strings that, when unpacked again, were a factor of 2
2559 away from the original float. This has been fixed. See SF bug
2560 #705836.
2561
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002562- New function time.tzset() provides access to the C library tzset()
Guido van Rossumd11b62e2003-03-14 21:51:36 +00002563 function, if supported. (SF patch #675422.)
2564
Neal Norwitz12e22172003-03-03 21:16:39 +00002565- Using createfilehandler, deletefilehandler, createtimerhandler functions
2566 on Tkinter.tkinter (_tkinter module) no longer crashes the interpreter.
2567 See SF bug #692416.
2568
Michael W. Hudsonf0089982003-03-03 12:29:42 +00002569- Modified the fcntl.ioctl() function to allow modification of a passed
2570 mutable buffer (for details see the reference documentation).
2571
Raymond Hettinger61fe64d2003-02-23 04:40:07 +00002572- Made user requested changes to the itertools module.
2573 Subsumed the times() function into repeat().
2574 Added chain() and cycle().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002575
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00002576- The rotor module is now deprecated; the encryption algorithm it uses
Andrew M. Kuchlingfb5f4852003-04-24 13:19:56 +00002577 is not believed to be secure, and including crypto code with Python
2578 has implications for exporting and importing it in various countries.
2579
Skip Montanaro89feabc2003-03-30 04:54:24 +00002580- The socket module now always uses the _socketobject wrapper class, even on
2581 platforms which have dup(2). The makefile() method is built directly
2582 on top of the socket without duplicating the file descriptor, allowing
2583 timeouts to work properly.
2584
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002585Library
2586-------
2587
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00002588- New generator function os.walk() is an easy-to-use alternative to
2589 os.path.walk(). See os module docs for details. os.path.walk()
2590 isn't deprecated at this time, but may become deprecated in a
2591 future release.
2592
Marc-André Lemburg246d8472003-04-24 11:36:11 +00002593- Added new module "platform" which provides a wide range of tools
2594 for querying platform dependent features.
2595
Andrew M. Kuchling4e42b312003-04-24 16:45:05 +00002596- netrc now allows ASCII punctuation characters in passwords.
Raymond Hettinger1d877862003-04-23 19:06:08 +00002597
Martin v. Löwis153c9e42003-04-19 20:59:03 +00002598- shelve now supports the optional writeback argument, and exposes
2599 pickle protocol versions.
2600
Guido van Rossuma2685402003-04-19 18:04:57 +00002601- Several methods of nntplib.NNTP have grown an optional file argument
2602 which specifies a file where to divert the command's output
2603 (already supported by the body() method). (SF patch #720468)
2604
Martin v. Löwis281b2c62003-04-18 21:04:39 +00002605- The self-documenting XML server library DocXMLRPCServer was added.
2606
Martin v. Löwis2548c732003-04-18 10:39:54 +00002607- Support for internationalized domain names has been added through
2608 the 'idna' and 'punycode' encodings, the 'stringprep' module, the
2609 'mkstringprep' tool, and enhancements to the socket and httplib
2610 modules.
2611
Walter Dörwald5688b7a2003-04-16 09:46:13 +00002612- htmlentitydefs has two new dictionaries: name2codepoint maps
2613 HTML entity names to Unicode codepoints (as integers).
2614 codepoint2name is the reverse mapping. See SF patch #722017.
2615
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00002616- pdb has a new command, "debug", which lets you step through
2617 arbitrary code from the debugger's (pdb) prompt.
2618
Raymond Hettingerc377cbf2003-04-04 22:56:42 +00002619- unittest.failUnlessEqual and its equivalent unittest.assertEqual now
2620 return 'not a == b' rather than 'a != b'. This gives the desired
2621 result for classes that define __eq__ without defining __ne__.
2622
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002623- sgmllib now supports SGML marked sections, in particular the
Martin v. Löwis3163a3b2003-03-30 14:25:40 +00002624 MS Office extensions.
2625
Raymond Hettinger42182eb2003-03-09 05:33:33 +00002626- The urllib module now offers support for the iterator protocol.
2627 SF patch 698520 contributed by Brett Cannon.
2628
Guido van Rossum9589a252003-03-06 01:56:12 +00002629- New module timeit provides a simple framework for timing the
2630 execution speed of expressions and statements.
2631
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002632- sets.Set objects now support mixed-type __eq__ and __ne__, instead
2633 of raising TypeError. If x is a Set object and y is a non-Set object,
2634 x == y is False, and x != y is True. This is akin to the change made
2635 for mixed-type comparisons of datetime objects in 2.3a2; more info
2636 about the rationale is in the NEWS entry for that. See also SF bug
2637 report <http://www.python.org/sf/693121>.
2638
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00002639- On Unix platforms, if os.listdir() is called with a Unicode argument,
2640 it now returns Unicode strings. (This behavior was added earlier
2641 to the Windows NT/2k/XP version of os.listdir().)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002642
Andrew M. Kuchling6f177d42003-02-28 22:09:33 +00002643- Distutils: both 'py_modules' and 'packages' keywords can now be specified
2644 in core.setup(). Previously you could supply one or the other, but
2645 not both of them. (SF patch #695090 from Bernhard Herzog)
2646
Skip Montanaro64a839e2003-03-20 23:36:55 +00002647- New csv package makes it easy to read/write CSV files.
2648
Gustavo Niemeyer68d8cef2003-04-17 21:31:33 +00002649- Module shlex has been extended to allow posix-like shell parsings,
2650 including a split() function for easy spliting of quoted strings and
2651 commands. An iterator interface was also implemented.
2652
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002653Tools/Demos
2654-----------
2655
Tim Peters21d7d4d2003-04-18 00:45:59 +00002656- New script combinerefs.py helps analyze new PYTHONDUMPREFS output.
2657 See the module docstring for details.
2658
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002659Build
2660-----
2661
Neal Norwitz35892b92003-02-23 23:45:35 +00002662- Fix problem building on OSF1 because the compiler only accepted
2663 preprocessor directives that start in column 1. (SF bug #691793.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002664
2665C API
2666-----
2667
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002668- Added PyGC_Collect(), equivalent to calling gc.collect().
2669
Guido van Rossum0fc8f002003-04-15 15:12:39 +00002670- PyThreadState_GetDict() was changed not to raise an exception or
2671 issue a fatal error when no current thread state is available. This
2672 makes it possible to print dictionaries when no thread is active.
2673
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002674- LONG_LONG was renamed to PY_LONG_LONG. Extensions that use this and
2675 need compatibility with previous versions can use this:
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00002676
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002677 #ifndef PY_LONG_LONG
2678 #define PY_LONG_LONG LONG_LONG
2679 #endif
Martin v. Löwisb9a0f912003-03-29 10:06:18 +00002680
Raymond Hettinger1da1dbf2003-03-17 19:46:11 +00002681- Added PyObject_SelfIter() to fill the tp_iter slot for the
Raymond Hettinger01538262003-03-17 08:24:35 +00002682 typical case where the method returns its self argument.
2683
Guido van Rossume5c691a2003-03-07 15:13:17 +00002684- The extended type structure used for heap types (new-style
2685 classes defined by Python code using a class statement) is now
2686 exported from object.h as PyHeapTypeObject. (SF patch #696193.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002687
2688New platforms
2689-------------
2690
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00002691None this time.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002692
2693Tests
2694-----
2695
Neal Norwitz55b61d22003-02-28 19:57:03 +00002696- test_timeout now requires -u network to be passed to regrtest to run.
2697 See SF bug #692988.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002698
2699Windows
2700-------
2701
Tim Peters11b23062003-04-23 02:39:17 +00002702- os.fsync() now exists on Windows, and calls the Microsoft _commit()
2703 function.
2704
Guido van Rossumf4050642003-04-09 19:39:06 +00002705- New function winsound.MessageBeep() wraps the Win32 API
2706 MessageBeep().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002707
2708Mac
2709---
2710
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00002711- os.listdir() now returns Unicode strings on MacOS X when called with
2712 a Unicode argument. See the general news item under "Library".
Just van Rossum46c97842003-02-25 21:42:15 +00002713
Jack Jansendeac2ac2003-02-24 11:04:17 +00002714- A new method MacOS.WMAvailable() returns true if it is safe to access
2715 the window manager, false otherwise.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002716
Jack Jansencf76be02003-03-24 12:13:54 +00002717- EasyDialogs dialogs are now movable-modal, and if the application is
2718 currently in the background they will ask to be moved to the foreground
2719 before displaying.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002720
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00002721- OSA Scripting support has improved a lot, and gensuitemodule.py can now
Jack Jansende354b72003-04-11 15:37:20 +00002722 be used by mere mortals. The documentation is now also more or less
2723 complete.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002724
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00002725- The IDE (in a framework build) now includes introductory documentation
2726 in Apple Help Viewer format.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002727
2728
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002729What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 2?
2730=================================
2731
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00002732*Release date: 19-Feb-2003*
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002733
2734Core and builtins
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00002735-----------------
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002736
Walter Dörwald2ffec022003-02-19 16:34:11 +00002737- Negative positions returned from PEP 293 error callbacks are now
2738 treated as being relative to the end of the input string. Positions
2739 that are out of bounds raise an IndexError.
2740
Guido van Rossum162e38c2003-02-19 15:25:10 +00002741- sys.path[0] (the directory from which the script is loaded) is now
2742 turned into an absolute pathname, unless it is the empty string.
2743 (SF patch #664376.)
2744
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00002745- Finally fixed the bug in compile() and exec where a string ending
2746 with an indented code block but no newline would raise SyntaxError.
2747 This would have been a four-line change in parsetok.c... Except
2748 codeop.py depends on this behavior, so a compilation flag had to be
2749 invented that causes the tokenizer to revert to the old behavior;
2750 this required extra changes to 2 .h files, 2 .c files, and 2 .py
Guido van Rossum1442dc12003-02-13 22:19:20 +00002751 files. (Fixes SF bug #501622.)
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00002752
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00002753- If a new-style class defines neither __new__ nor __init__, its
2754 constructor would ignore all arguments. This is changed now: the
2755 constructor refuses arguments in this case. This might break code
2756 that worked under Python 2.2. The simplest fix is to add a no-op
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002757 __init__: ``def __init__(self, *args, **kw): pass``.
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00002758
Guido van Rossum48035eb2003-02-12 17:05:26 +00002759- Through a bytecode optimizer bug (and I bet you didn't even know
2760 Python *had* a bytecode optimizer :-), "unsigned" hex/oct constants
2761 with a leading minus sign would come out with the wrong sign.
2762 ("Unsigned" hex/oct constants are those with a face value in the
2763 range sys.maxint+1 through sys.maxint*2+1, inclusive; these have
2764 always been interpreted as negative numbers through sign folding.)
2765 E.g. 0xffffffff is -1, and -(0xffffffff) is 1, but -0xffffffff would
2766 come out as -4294967295. This was the case in Python 2.2 through
2767 2.2.2 and 2.3a1, and in Python 2.4 it will once again have that
2768 value, but according to PEP 237 it really needs to be 1 now. This
2769 will be backported to Python 2.2.3 a well. (SF #660455)
2770
Guido van Rossum47710652003-02-12 20:48:22 +00002771- int(s, base) sometimes sign-folds hex and oct constants; it only
2772 does this when base is 0 and s.strip() starts with a '0'. When the
2773 sign is actually folded, as in int("0xffffffff", 0) on a 32-bit
2774 machine, which returns -1, a FutureWarning is now issued; in Python
2775 2.4, this will return 4294967295L, as do int("+0xffffffff", 0) and
2776 int("0xffffffff", 16) right now. (PEP 347)
2777
Guido van Rossuma89d10e2003-02-12 03:58:38 +00002778- super(X, x): x may now be a proxy for an X instance, i.e.
2779 issubclass(x.__class__, X) but not issubclass(type(x), X).
2780
Guido van Rossum03bc7d32003-02-12 03:32:58 +00002781- isinstance(x, X): if X is a new-style class, this is now equivalent
2782 to issubclass(type(x), X) or issubclass(x.__class__, X). Previously
2783 only type(x) was tested. (For classic classes this was already the
2784 case.)
2785
Just van Rossum73ffb4a2003-02-10 09:57:08 +00002786- compile(), eval() and the exec statement now fully support source code
2787 passed as unicode strings.
2788
Neal Norwitzde8b94c2003-02-10 02:12:43 +00002789- int subclasses can be initialized with longs if the value fits in an int.
2790 See SF bug #683467.
2791
Tim Petersbf2674b2003-02-02 07:51:32 +00002792- long(string, base) takes time linear in len(string) when base is a power
2793 of 2 now. It used to take time quadratic in len(string).
2794
Martin v. Löwis8afd7572003-01-25 22:46:11 +00002795- filter returns now Unicode results for Unicode arguments.
2796
Martin v. Löwisaf6a27a2003-01-03 19:16:14 +00002797- raw_input can now return Unicode objects.
2798
Skip Montanaro4abd5f02003-01-02 20:51:08 +00002799- List objects' sort() method now accepts None as the comparison function.
2800 Passing None is semantically identical to calling sort() with no
2801 arguments.
2802
Neal Norwitz1a997502003-01-13 20:13:12 +00002803- Fixed crash when printing a subclass of str and __str__ returned self.
2804 See SF bug #667147.
2805
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00002806- Fixed an invalid RuntimeWarning and an undetected error when trying
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00002807 to convert a long integer into a float which couldn't fit.
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00002808 See SF bug #676155.
2809
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00002810- Function objects now have a __module__ attribute that is bound to
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00002811 the name of the module in which the function was defined. This
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00002812 applies for C functions and methods as well as functions and methods
2813 defined in Python. This attribute is used by pickle.whichmodule(),
2814 which changes the behavior of whichmodule slightly. In Python 2.2
2815 whichmodule() returns "__main__" for functions that are not defined
2816 at the top-level of a module (examples: methods, nested functions).
2817 Now whichmodule() will return the proper module name.
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00002818
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002819Extension modules
2820-----------------
2821
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00002822- operator.isNumberType() now checks that the object has a nb_int or
2823 nb_float slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
2824 tp_as_number pointer.
2825
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00002826- The imp module now has ways to acquire and release the "import
2827 lock": imp.acquire_lock() and imp.release_lock(). Note: this is a
2828 reentrant lock, so releasing the lock only truly releases it when
2829 this is the last release_lock() call. You can check with
2830 imp.lock_held(). (SF bug #580952 and patch #683257.)
2831
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002832- Change to cPickle to match pickle.py (see below and PEP 307).
2833
Neal Norwitz9caf9c02003-02-10 01:54:06 +00002834- Fix some bugs in the parser module. SF bug #678518.
2835
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00002836- Thanks to Scott David Daniels, a subtle bug in how the zlib
Walter Dörwald28d81962003-02-03 20:53:14 +00002837 extension implemented flush() was fixed. Scott also rewrote the
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00002838 zlib test suite using the unittest module. (SF bug #640230 and
2839 patch #678531.)
2840
Raymond Hettinger96ef8112003-02-01 00:10:11 +00002841- Added an itertools module containing high speed, memory efficient
2842 looping constructs inspired by tools from Haskell and SML.
2843
Guido van Rossum99d4abf2003-01-27 22:22:50 +00002844- The SSL module now handles sockets with a timeout set correctly (SF
2845 patch #675750, fixing SF bug #675552).
2846
Barry Warsawf8ba39c2003-01-07 20:55:26 +00002847- os/posixmodule has grown the sysexits.h constants (EX_OK and friends).
2848
Guido van Rossum6d0d3652003-01-07 20:34:19 +00002849- Fixed broken threadstate swap in readline that could cause fatal
2850 errors when a readline hook was being invoked while a background
2851 thread was active. (SF bugs #660476 and #513033.)
2852
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002853- fcntl now exposes the strops.h I_* constants.
2854
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00002855- Fix a crash on Solaris that occurred when calling close() on
2856 an mmap'ed file which was already closed. (SF patch #665913)
2857
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002858- Fixed several serious bugs in the zipimport implementation.
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002859
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00002860- datetime changes:
2861
Guido van Rossum8b7a9a32003-04-14 22:01:58 +00002862 The date class is now properly subclassable. (SF bug #720908)
2863
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00002864 The datetime and datetimetz classes have been collapsed into a single
2865 datetime class, and likewise the time and timetz classes into a single
2866 time class. Previously, a datetimetz object with tzinfo=None acted
2867 exactly like a datetime object, and similarly for timetz. This wasn't
2868 enough of a difference to justify distinct classes, and life is simpler
2869 now.
2870
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00002871 today() and now() now round system timestamps to the closest
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002872 microsecond <http://www.python.org/sf/661086>. This repairs an
2873 irritation most likely seen on Windows systems.
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00002874
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00002875 In dt.astimezone(tz), if tz.utcoffset(dt) returns a duration,
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00002876 ValueError is raised if tz.dst(dt) returns None (2.3a1 treated it
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002877 as 0 instead, but a tzinfo subclass wishing to participate in
2878 time zone conversion has to take a stand on whether it supports
2879 DST; if you don't care about DST, then code dst() to return 0 minutes,
2880 meaning that DST is never in effect).
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00002881
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00002882 The tzinfo methods utcoffset() and dst() must return a timedelta object
2883 (or None) now. In 2.3a1 they could also return an int or long, but that
2884 was an unhelpfully redundant leftover from an earlier version wherein
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00002885 they couldn't return a timedelta. TOOWTDI.
2886
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00002887 The example tzinfo class for local time had a bug. It was replaced
2888 by a later example coded by Guido.
2889
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00002890 datetime.astimezone(tz) no longer raises an exception when the
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002891 input datetime has no UTC equivalent in tz. For typical "hybrid" time
2892 zones (a single tzinfo subclass modeling both standard and daylight
2893 time), this case can arise one hour per year, at the hour daylight time
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00002894 ends. See new docs for details. In short, the new behavior mimics
2895 the local wall clock's behavior of repeating an hour in local time.
2896
2897 dt.astimezone() can no longer be used to convert between naive and aware
2898 datetime objects. If you merely want to attach, or remove, a tzinfo
2899 object, without any conversion of date and time members, use
2900 dt.replace(tzinfo=whatever) instead, where "whatever" is None or a
2901 tzinfo subclass instance.
2902
2903 A new method tzinfo.fromutc(dt) can be overridden in tzinfo subclasses
2904 to give complete control over how a UTC time is to be converted to
2905 a local time. The default astimezone() implementation calls fromutc()
2906 as its last step, so a tzinfo subclass can affect that too by overriding
2907 fromutc(). It's expected that the default fromutc() implementation will
2908 be suitable as-is for "almost all" time zone subclasses, but the
2909 creativity of political time zone fiddling appears unbounded -- fromutc()
2910 allows the highly motivated to emulate any scheme expressible in Python.
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002911
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00002912 datetime.now(): The optional tzinfo argument was undocumented (that's
2913 repaired), and its name was changed to tz ("tzinfo" is overloaded enough
2914 already). With a tz argument, now(tz) used to return the local date
2915 and time, and attach tz to it, without any conversion of date and time
2916 members. This was less than useful. Now now(tz) returns the current
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002917 date and time as local time in tz's time zone, akin to ::
2918
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00002919 tz.fromutc(datetime.utcnow().replace(tzinfo=utc))
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002920
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00002921 where "utc" is an instance of a tzinfo subclass modeling UTC. Without
2922 a tz argument, now() continues to return the current local date and time,
2923 as a naive datetime object.
2924
Tim Peters2a44a8d2003-01-23 20:53:10 +00002925 datetime.fromtimestamp(): Like datetime.now() above, this had less than
2926 useful behavior when the optional tinzo argument was specified. See
2927 also SF bug report <http://www.python.org/sf/660872>.
2928
Tim Peters8d81a012003-01-24 22:36:34 +00002929 date and datetime comparison: In order to prevent comparison from
2930 falling back to the default compare-object-addresses strategy, these
2931 raised TypeError whenever they didn't understand the other object type.
2932 They still do, except when the other object has a "timetuple" attribute,
2933 in which case they return NotImplemented now. This gives other
2934 datetime objects (e.g., mxDateTime) a chance to intercept the
2935 comparison.
2936
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002937 date, time, datetime and timedelta comparison: When the exception
2938 for mixed-type comparisons in the last paragraph doesn't apply, if
2939 the comparison is == then False is returned, and if the comparison is
2940 != then True is returned. Because dict lookup and the "in" operator
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002941 only invoke __eq__, this allows, for example, ::
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002942
2943 if some_datetime in some_sequence:
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002944
2945 and ::
2946
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002947 some_dict[some_timedelta] = whatever
2948
2949 to work as expected, without raising TypeError just because the
2950 sequence is heterogeneous, or the dict has mixed-type keys. [This
2951 seems like a good idea to implement for all mixed-type comparisons
2952 that don't want to allow falling back to address comparison.]
2953
Tim Peters75a6e3b2003-01-04 18:17:36 +00002954 The constructors building a datetime from a timestamp could raise
2955 ValueError if the platform C localtime()/gmtime() inserted "leap
2956 seconds". Leap seconds are ignored now. On such platforms, it's
2957 possible to have timestamps that differ by a second, yet where
2958 datetimes constructed from them are equal.
2959
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00002960 The pickle format of date, time and datetime objects has changed
2961 completely. The undocumented pickler and unpickler functions no
Tim Petersb57f8f02003-02-01 02:54:15 +00002962 longer exist. The undocumented __setstate__() and __getstate__()
2963 methods no longer exist either.
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00002964
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002965Library
2966-------
2967
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002968- The logging module was updated slightly; the WARN level was renamed
2969 to WARNING, and the matching function/method warn() to warning().
2970
2971- The pickle and cPickle modules were updated with a new pickling
2972 protocol (documented by pickletools.py, see below) and several
2973 extensions to the pickle customization API (__reduce__, __setstate__
2974 etc.). The copy module now uses more of the pickle customization
2975 API to copy objects that don't implement __copy__ or __deepcopy__.
2976 See PEP 307 for details.
2977
2978- The distutils "register" command now uses http://www.python.org/pypi
2979 as the default repository. (See PEP 301.)
2980
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00002981- the platform dependent path related variables sep, altsep, extsep,
2982 pathsep, curdir, pardir and defpath are now defined in the platform
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00002983 dependent path modules (e.g. ntpath.py) rather than os.py, so these
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002984 variables are now available via os.path. They continue to be
2985 available from the os module.
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00002986 (see <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00002987
Tim Peters6ee04802003-02-05 18:29:34 +00002988- array.array was added to the types repr.py knows about (see
2989 <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
2990
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00002991- The new pickletools.py contains lots of documentation about pickle
2992 internals, and supplies some helpers for working with pickles, such as
2993 a symbolic pickle disassembler.
2994
Skip Montanaro9a7c96a2003-01-22 18:17:25 +00002995- Xmlrpclib.py now supports the builtin boolean type.
2996
Martin v. Löwis0c6774d2003-01-15 11:51:06 +00002997- py_compile has a new 'doraise' flag and a new PyCompileError
2998 exception.
2999
Martin v. Löwisd69663d2003-01-15 11:37:23 +00003000- SimpleXMLRPCServer now supports CGI through the CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler
3001 class.
3002
Guido van Rossum50e92232003-01-14 16:45:04 +00003003- The sets module now raises TypeError in __cmp__, to clarify that
3004 sets are not intended to be three-way-compared; the comparison
3005 operators are overloaded as subset/superset tests.
3006
Guido van Rossumcd0c0472003-01-07 23:03:05 +00003007- Bastion.py and rexec.py are disabled. These modules are not safe in
3008 Python 2.2. or 2.3.
3009
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003010- realpath is now exported when doing ``from poxixpath import *``.
Neal Norwitzbb0246a2003-01-03 18:12:28 +00003011 It is also exported for ntpath, macpath, and os2emxpath.
3012 See SF bug #659228.
3013
Neal Norwitzb9ef4ae2003-01-05 23:19:43 +00003014- New module tarfile from Lars Gustäbel provides a comprehensive interface
3015 to tar archive files with transparent gzip and bzip2 compression.
3016 See SF patch #651082.
3017
Neal Norwitz4f442372003-01-06 06:51:36 +00003018- urlparse can now parse imap:// URLs. See SF feature request #618024.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003019
Neal Norwitze931ed52003-01-10 23:24:32 +00003020- Tkinter.Canvas.scan_dragto() provides an optional parameter to support
3021 the gain value which is passed to Tk. SF bug# 602259.
3022
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00003023- Fix logging.handlers.SysLogHandler protocol when using UNIX domain sockets.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00003024 See SF patch #642974.
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00003025
Skip Montanaro12fe72e2003-02-25 17:46:20 +00003026- The dospath module was deleted. Use the ntpath module when manipulating
3027 DOS paths from other platforms.
3028
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003029Tools/Demos
3030-----------
3031
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00003032- Two new scripts (db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py) were added to the
3033 Tools/scripts directory to facilitate conversion from the old bsddb module
3034 to the new one. While the user-visible API of the new module is
3035 compatible with the old one, it's likely that the version of the
3036 underlying database library has changed. To convert from the old library,
3037 run the db2pickle.py script using the old version of Python to convert it
3038 to a pickle file. After upgrading Python, run the pickle2db.py script
3039 using the new version of Python to reconstitute your database. For
3040 example:
3041
Skip Montanaro621f0552003-02-03 15:48:10 +00003042 % python2.2 db2pickle.py -h some.db > some.pickle
3043 % python2.3 pickle2db.py -h some.db.new < some.pickle
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00003044
3045 Run the scripts without any args to get a usage message.
3046
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003047
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003048Build
3049-----
3050
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00003051- The audio driver tests (test_ossaudiodev.py and
3052 test_linuxaudiodev.py) are no longer run by default. This is
3053 because they don't always work, depending on your hardware and
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003054 software. To run these tests, you must use an invocation like ::
3055
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00003056 ./python Lib/test/regrtest.py -u audio test_ossaudiodev
3057
Skip Montanarodecc6a42003-01-01 20:07:49 +00003058- On systems which build using the configure script, compiler flags which
3059 used to be lumped together using the OPT flag have been split into two
3060 groups, OPT and BASECFLAGS. OPT is meant to carry just optimization- and
3061 debug-related flags like "-g" and "-O3". BASECFLAGS is meant to carry
3062 compiler flags that are required to get a clean compile. On some
3063 platforms (many Linux flavors in particular) BASECFLAGS will be empty by
3064 default. On others, such as Mac OS X and SCO, it will contain required
3065 flags. This change allows people building Python to override OPT without
3066 fear of clobbering compiler flags which are required to get a clean build.
3067
3068- On Darwin/Mac OS X platforms, /sw/lib and /sw/include are added to the
3069 relevant search lists in setup.py. This allows users building Python to
3070 take advantage of the many packages available from the fink project
3071 <http://fink.sf.net/>.
3072
3073- A new Makefile target, scriptsinstall, installs a number of useful scripts
3074 from the Tools/scripts directory.
3075
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003076C API
3077-----
3078
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003079- PyEval_GetFrame() is now declared to return a ``PyFrameObject *``
3080 instead of a plain ``PyObject *``. (SF patch #686601.)
Guido van Rossum6297a7a2003-02-19 15:53:17 +00003081
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00003082- PyNumber_Check() now checks that the object has a nb_int or nb_float
3083 slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
3084 tp_as_number pointer.
3085
Guido van Rossumeea47182003-02-11 20:39:59 +00003086- A C type that inherits from a base type that defines tp_as_buffer
3087 will now inherit the tp_as_buffer pointer if it doesn't define one.
3088 (SF #681367)
3089
Neil Schemenauer5042da62003-02-04 20:59:40 +00003090- The PyArg_Parse functions now issue a DeprecationWarning if a float
3091 argument is provided when an integer is specified (this affects the 'b',
3092 'B', 'h', 'H', 'i', and 'l' codes). Future versions of Python will
3093 raise a TypeError.
Neil Schemenauercd63e612003-01-24 22:15:53 +00003094
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003095Tests
3096-----
3097
Walter Dörwald11cfbd62003-03-26 16:03:16 +00003098- Several tests weren't being run from regrtest.py (test_timeout.py,
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003099 test_tarfile.py, test_netrc.py, test_multifile.py,
3100 test_importhooks.py and test_imp.py). Now they are. (Note to
3101 developers: please read Lib/test/README when creating a new test, to
3102 make sure to do it right! All tests need to use either unittest or
3103 pydoc.)
3104
3105- Added test_posix.py, a test suite for the posix module.
3106
3107- Added test_hexoct.py, a test suite for hex/oct constant folding.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003108
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003109Windows
3110-------
3111
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00003112- The timeout code for socket connect() didn't work right; this has
3113 now been fixed. test_timeout.py should pass (at least most of the
3114 time).
3115
Thomas Hellerdda583d2003-01-31 20:45:41 +00003116- distutils' msvccompiler class now passes the preprocessor options to
3117 the resource compiler. See SF patch #669198.
3118
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00003119- The bsddb module now ships with Sleepycat's 4.1.25.NC, the latest
3120 release without strong cryptography.
3121
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00003122- sys.path[0], if it contains a directory name, is now always an
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003123 absolute pathname. (SF patch #664376.)
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00003124
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00003125- The new logging package is now installed by the Windows installer. It
3126 wasn't in 2.3a1 due to oversight.
3127
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003128Mac
3129---
3130
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00003131- There are new dialogs EasyDialogs.AskFileForOpen, AskFileForSave
3132 and AskFolder. The old macfs.StandardGetFile and friends are deprecated.
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00003133
Jack Jansenc9296362003-02-06 23:10:45 +00003134- Most of the standard library now uses pathnames or FSRefs in preference
3135 of FSSpecs, and use the underlying Carbon.File and Carbon.Folder modules
3136 in stead of macfs. macfs will probably be deprecated in the future.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00003137
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00003138- Type Carbon.File.FSCatalogInfo and supporting methods have been implemented.
3139 This also makes macfs.FSSpec.SetDates() work again.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003140
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00003141- There is a new module pimp, the package install manager for Python, and
3142 accompanying applet PackageManager. These allow you to easily download
3143 and install pretested extension packages either in source or binary
3144 form. Only in MacPython-OSX.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003145
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00003146- Applets are now built with bundlebuilder in MacPython-OSX, which should make
Jack Jansen5d44b342003-02-18 23:32:47 +00003147 them more robust and also provides a path towards BuildApplication. The
3148 downside of this change is that applets can no longer be run from the
3149 Terminal window, this will hopefully be fixed in the 2.3b1.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003150
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003151
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003152What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 1?
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003153=================================
3154
Guido van Rossumae548862002-12-31 15:47:36 +00003155*Release date: 31-Dec-2002*
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003156
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003157Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003158--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00003159
Michael W. Hudson96bc3b42002-11-26 14:48:23 +00003160- One can now assign to __bases__ and __name__ of new-style classes.
3161
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00003162- dict() now accepts keyword arguments so that dict(one=1, two=2)
3163 is the equivalent of {"one": 1, "two": 2}. Accordingly,
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00003164 the existing (but undocumented) 'items' keyword argument has
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00003165 been eliminated. This means that dict(items=someMapping) now has
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00003166 a different meaning than before.
3167
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00003168- int() now returns a long object if the argument is outside the
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003169 integer range, so int("4" * 1000), int(1e200) and int(1L<<1000) will
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00003170 all return long objects instead of raising an OverflowError.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003171
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003172- Assignment to __class__ is disallowed if either the old or the new
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00003173 class is a statically allocated type object (such as defined by an
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003174 extension module). This prevents anomalies like 2.__class__ = bool.
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00003175
3176- New-style object creation and deallocation have been sped up
3177 significantly; they are now faster than classic instance creation
3178 and deallocation.
3179
3180- The __slots__ variable can now mention "private" names, and the
3181 right thing will happen (e.g. __slots__ = ["__foo"]).
3182
3183- The built-ins slice() and buffer() are now callable types. The
3184 types classobj (formerly class), code, function, instance, and
3185 instancemethod (formerly instance-method), which have no built-in
3186 names but are accessible through the types module, are now also
3187 callable. The type dict-proxy is renamed to dictproxy.
3188
3189- Cycles going through the __class__ link of a new-style instance are
3190 now detected by the garbage collector.
3191
3192- Classes using __slots__ are now properly garbage collected.
3193 [SF bug 519621]
3194
3195- Tightened the __slots__ rules: a slot name must be a valid Python
3196 identifier.
3197
3198- The constructor for the module type now requires a name argument and
3199 takes an optional docstring argument. Previously, this constructor
3200 ignored its arguments. As a consequence, deriving a class from a
3201 module (not from the module type) is now illegal; previously this
3202 created an unnamed module, just like invoking the module type did.
3203 [SF bug 563060]
3204
3205- A new type object, 'basestring', is added. This is a common base type
3206 for 'str' and 'unicode', and can be used instead of
3207 types.StringTypes, e.g. to test whether something is "a string":
3208 isinstance(x, basestring) is True for Unicode and 8-bit strings. This
3209 is an abstract base class and cannot be instantiated directly.
3210
3211- Changed new-style class instantiation so that when C's __new__
3212 method returns something that's not a C instance, its __init__ is
3213 not called. [SF bug #537450]
3214
3215- Fixed super() to work correctly with class methods. [SF bug #535444]
3216
3217- If you try to pickle an instance of a class that has __slots__ but
3218 doesn't define or override __getstate__, a TypeError is now raised.
3219 This is done by adding a bozo __getstate__ to the class that always
3220 raises TypeError. (Before, this would appear to be pickled, but the
3221 state of the slots would be lost.)
3222
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003223Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003224-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003225
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003226- Import from zipfiles is now supported. The name of a zipfile placed
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00003227 on sys.path causes the import statement to look for importable Python
3228 modules (with .py, pyc and .pyo extensions) and packages inside the
3229 zipfile. The zipfile import follows the specification (though not
3230 the sample implementation) of PEP 273. The semantics of __path__ are
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003231 compatible with those that have been implemented in Jython since
3232 Jython 2.1.
3233
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003234- PEP 302 has been accepted. Although it was initially developed to
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00003235 support zipimport, it offers a new, general import hook mechanism.
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00003236 Several new variables have been added to the sys module:
3237 sys.meta_path, sys.path_hooks, and sys.path_importer_cache; these
3238 make extending the import statement much more convenient than
3239 overriding the __import__ built-in function. For a description of
3240 these, see PEP 302.
3241
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003242- A frame object's f_lineno attribute can now be written to from a
3243 trace function to change which line will execute next. A command to
3244 exploit this from pdb has been added. [SF patch #643835]
3245
Marc-André Lemburg20b91352002-12-12 18:01:43 +00003246- The _codecs support module for codecs.py was turned into a builtin
3247 module to assure that at least the builtin codecs are available
3248 to the Python parser for source code decoding according to PEP 263.
3249
Walter Dörwaldd9a6ad32002-12-12 16:41:44 +00003250- issubclass now supports a tuple as the second argument, just like
3251 isinstance does. ``issubclass(X, (A, B))`` is equivalent to
3252 ``issubclass(X, A) or issubclass(X, B)``.
3253
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00003254- Thanks to Armin Rigo, the last known way to provoke a system crash
3255 by cleverly arranging for a comparison function to mutate a list
3256 during a list.sort() operation has been fixed. The effect of
3257 attempting to mutate a list, or even to inspect its contents or
3258 length, while a sort is in progress, is not defined by the language.
3259 The C implementation of Python 2.3 attempts to detect mutations,
3260 and raise ValueError if one occurs, but there's no guarantee that
3261 all mutations will be caught, or that any will be caught across
3262 releases or implementations.
3263
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00003264- Unicode file name processing for Windows (PEP 277) is implemented.
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00003265 All platforms now have an os.path.supports_unicode_filenames attribute,
3266 which is set to True on Windows NT/2000/XP, and False elsewhere.
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00003267
Walter Dörwald3aeb6322002-09-02 13:14:32 +00003268- Codec error handling callbacks (PEP 293) are implemented.
3269 Error handling in unicode.encode or str.decode can now be customized.
3270
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00003271- A subtle change to the semantics of the built-in function intern():
3272 interned strings are no longer immortal. You must keep a reference
3273 to the return value intern() around to get the benefit.
3274
Guido van Rossumf808b892002-08-16 03:38:10 +00003275- Use of 'None' as a variable, argument or attribute name now
3276 issues a SyntaxWarning. In the future, None may become a keyword.
3277
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00003278- SET_LINENO is gone. co_lnotab is now consulted to determine when to
3279 call the trace function. C code that accessed f_lineno should call
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003280 PyCode_Addr2Line instead (f_lineno is still there, but only kept up
3281 to date when there is a trace function set).
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00003282
Guido van Rossum9be89462002-08-14 16:11:30 +00003283- There's a new warning category, FutureWarning. This is used to warn
3284 about a number of situations where the value or sign of an integer
3285 result will change in Python 2.4 as a result of PEP 237 (integer
3286 unification). The warnings implement stage B0 mentioned in that
3287 PEP. The warnings are about the following situations:
3288
3289 - Octal and hex literals without 'L' prefix in the inclusive range
3290 [0x80000000..0xffffffff]; these are currently negative ints, but
3291 in Python 2.4 they will be positive longs with the same bit
3292 pattern.
3293
3294 - Left shifts on integer values that cause the outcome to lose
3295 bits or have a different sign than the left operand. To be
3296 precise: x<<n where this currently doesn't yield the same value
3297 as long(x)<<n; in Python 2.4, the outcome will be long(x)<<n.
3298
3299 - Conversions from ints to string that show negative values as
3300 unsigned ints in the inclusive range [0x80000000..0xffffffff];
3301 this affects the functions hex() and oct(), and the string
3302 formatting codes %u, %o, %x, and %X. In Python 2.4, these will
3303 show signed values (e.g. hex(-1) currently returns "0xffffffff";
3304 in Python 2.4 it will return "-0x1").
3305
Guido van Rossum9a2eda52002-12-31 02:12:42 +00003306- The bits manipulated under the cover by sys.setcheckinterval() have
3307 been changed. Both the check interval and the ticker used to be
3308 per-thread values. They are now just a pair of global variables.
3309 In addition, the default check interval was boosted from 10 to 100
3310 bytecode instructions. This may have some effect on systems that
3311 relied on the old default value. In particular, in multi-threaded
3312 applications which try to be highly responsive, response time will
3313 increase by some (perhaps imperceptible) amount.
Skip Montanaro979c74b2002-09-03 21:25:14 +00003314
Tim Petersd64c1de2002-08-12 17:36:03 +00003315- When multiplying very large integers, a version of the so-called
3316 Karatsuba algorithm is now used. This is most effective if the
3317 inputs have roughly the same size. If they both have about N digits,
3318 Karatsuba multiplication has O(N**1.58) runtime (the exponent is
3319 log_base_2(3)) instead of the previous O(N**2). Measured results may
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00003320 be better or worse than that, depending on platform quirks. Besides
3321 the O() improvement in raw instruction count, the Karatsuba algorithm
3322 appears to have much better cache behavior on extremely large integers
3323 (starting in the ballpark of a million bits). Note that this is a
3324 simple implementation, and there's no intent here to compete with,
3325 e.g., GMP. It gives a very nice speedup when it applies, but a package
3326 devoted to fast large-integer arithmetic should run circles around it.
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00003327
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00003328- u'%c' will now raise a ValueError in case the argument is an
3329 integer outside the valid range of Unicode code point ordinals.
3330
Guido van Rossumdeb09362002-08-09 17:16:30 +00003331- The tempfile module has been overhauled for enhanced security. The
3332 mktemp() function is now deprecated; new, safe replacements are
3333 mkstemp() (for files) and mkdtemp() (for directories), and the
3334 higher-level functions NamedTemporaryFile() and TemporaryFile().
3335 Use of some global variables in this module is also deprecated; the
3336 new functions have keyword arguments to provide the same
3337 functionality. All Lib, Tools and Demo modules that used the unsafe
3338 interfaces have been updated to use the safe replacements. Thanks
3339 to Zack Weinberg!
3340
Guido van Rossumd81a9832002-08-09 15:57:34 +00003341- When x is an object whose class implements __mul__ and __rmul__,
3342 1.0*x would correctly invoke __rmul__, but 1*x would erroneously
3343 invoke __mul__. This was due to the sequence-repeat code in the int
3344 type. This has been fixed now.
3345
Barry Warsawd79f6832002-08-06 17:01:51 +00003346- Previously, "str1 in str2" required str1 to be a string of length 1.
3347 This restriction has been relaxed to allow str1 to be a string of
3348 any length. Thus "'el' in 'hello world'" returns True now.
3349
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003350- File objects are now their own iterators. For a file f, iter(f) now
3351 returns f (unless f is closed), and f.next() is similar to
3352 f.readline() when EOF is not reached; however, f.next() uses a
3353 readahead buffer that messes up the file position, so mixing
3354 f.next() and f.readline() (or other methods) doesn't work right.
3355 Calling f.seek() drops the readahead buffer, but other operations
3356 don't. It so happens that this gives a nice additional speed boost
3357 to "for line in file:"; the xreadlines method and corresponding
Guido van Rossumbffb2ef2002-08-09 17:17:07 +00003358 module are now obsolete. Thanks to Oren Tirosh!
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003359
Guido van Rossumde392d32002-08-05 14:17:20 +00003360- Encoding declarations (PEP 263, phase 1) have been implemented. A
3361 comment of the form "# -*- coding: <encodingname> -*-" in the first
3362 or second line of a Python source file indicates the encoding.
Martin v. Löwis00f1e3f2002-08-04 17:29:52 +00003363
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003364- list.sort() has a new implementation. While cross-platform results
3365 may vary, and in data-dependent ways, this is much faster on many
3366 kinds of partially ordered lists than the previous implementation,
3367 and reported to be just as fast on randomly ordered lists on
3368 several major platforms. This sort is also stable (if A==B and A
3369 precedes B in the list at the start, A precedes B after the sort too),
3370 although the language definition does not guarantee stability. A
3371 potential drawback is that list.sort() may require temp space of
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003372 len(list)*2 bytes (``*4`` on a 64-bit machine). It's therefore possible
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003373 for list.sort() to raise MemoryError now, even if a comparison function
3374 does not. See <http://www.python.org/sf/587076> for full details.
3375
Guido van Rossum2d5389c2002-07-23 03:44:35 +00003376- All standard iterators now ensure that, once StopIteration has been
3377 raised, all future calls to next() on the same iterator will also
3378 raise StopIteration. There used to be various counterexamples to
3379 this behavior, which could caused confusion or subtle program
3380 breakage, without any benefits. (Note that this is still an
3381 iterator's responsibility; the iterator framework does not enforce
3382 this.)
3383
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003384- Ctrl+C handling on Windows has been made more consistent with
3385 other platforms. KeyboardInterrupt can now reliably be caught,
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003386 and Ctrl+C at an interactive prompt no longer terminates the
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003387 process under NT/2k/XP (it never did under Win9x). Ctrl+C will
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00003388 interrupt time.sleep() in the main thread, and any child processes
3389 created via the popen family (on win2k; we can't make win9x work
Mark Hammond8f3afc72002-08-10 06:26:31 +00003390 reliably) are also interrupted (as generally happens on for Linux/Unix.)
3391 [SF bugs 231273, 439992 and 581232]
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003392
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00003393- sys.getwindowsversion() has been added on Windows. This
3394 returns a tuple with information about the version of Windows
3395 currently running.
3396
Raymond Hettinger5a04aec2002-06-25 00:25:30 +00003397- Slices and repetitions of buffer objects now consistently return
3398 a string. Formerly, strings would be returned most of the time,
3399 but a buffer object would be returned when the repetition count
3400 was one or when the slice range was all inclusive.
3401
Walter Dörwald3430d702002-06-17 10:43:59 +00003402- Unicode objects in sys.path are no longer ignored but treated
3403 as directory names.
3404
Neal Norwitz1f68fc72002-06-14 00:50:42 +00003405- Fixed string.startswith and string.endswith builtin methods
3406 so they accept negative indices. [SF bug 493951]
3407
Guido van Rossumc5fe5eb2002-06-12 03:45:21 +00003408- Fixed a bug with a continue inside a try block and a yield in the
3409 finally clause. [SF bug 567538]
3410
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00003411- Most builtin sequences now support "extended slices", i.e. slices
Guido van Rossum2e82e712002-06-13 11:41:07 +00003412 with a third "stride" parameter. For example, "hello world"[::-1]
3413 gives "dlrow olleh".
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00003414
Neal Norwitzd68f5172002-05-29 15:54:55 +00003415- A new warning PendingDeprecationWarning was added to provide
3416 direction on features which are in the process of being deprecated.
3417 The warning will not be printed by default. To see the pending
3418 deprecations, use -Walways::PendingDeprecationWarning::
3419 as a command line option or warnings.filterwarnings() in code.
3420
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00003421- Deprecated features of xrange objects have been removed as
3422 promised. The start, stop, and step attributes and the tolist()
3423 method no longer exist. xrange repetition and slicing have been
3424 removed.
3425
Guido van Rossum7dab2422002-04-26 19:40:56 +00003426- New builtin function enumerate(x), from PEP 279. Example:
3427 enumerate("abc") is an iterator returning (0,"a"), (1,"b"), (2,"c").
3428 The argument can be an arbitrary iterable object.
3429
Neil Schemenauer89e3ee02002-04-26 01:58:53 +00003430- The assert statement no longer tests __debug__ at runtime. This means
3431 that assert statements cannot be disabled by assigning a false value
3432 to __debug__.
3433
Walter Dörwald068325e2002-04-15 13:36:47 +00003434- A method zfill() was added to str and unicode, that fills a numeric
3435 string to the left with zeros. For example,
3436 "+123".zfill(6) -> "+00123".
3437
Guido van Rossum862fe3c2002-04-15 12:36:47 +00003438- Complex numbers supported divmod() and the // and % operators, but
3439 these make no sense. Since this was documented, they're being
3440 deprecated now.
3441
Guido van Rossum26dd8302002-04-26 20:11:29 +00003442- String and unicode methods lstrip(), rstrip() and strip() now take
3443 an optional argument that specifies the characters to strip. For
3444 example, "Foo!!!?!?!?".rstrip("?!") -> "Foo".
Guido van Rossum49042042002-04-13 00:59:05 +00003445
Guido van Rossumc0d3f4e2002-11-27 13:10:40 +00003446- There's a new dictionary constructor (a class method of the dict
3447 class), dict.fromkeys(iterable, value=None). It constructs a
3448 dictionary with keys taken from the iterable and all values set to a
3449 single value. It can be used for building sets and for removing
3450 duplicates from sequences.
Raymond Hettingere33d3df2002-11-27 07:29:33 +00003451
Guido van Rossumc69343b2002-04-12 19:22:48 +00003452- Added a new dict method pop(key). This removes and returns the
3453 value corresponding to key. [SF patch #539949]
3454
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00003455- A new built-in type, bool, has been added, as well as built-in
3456 names for its two values, True and False. Comparisons and sundry
3457 other operations that return a truth value have been changed to
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003458 return a bool instead. Read PEP 285 for an explanation of why this
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00003459 is backward compatible.
3460
Guido van Rossum95b62a62002-03-29 01:07:24 +00003461- Fixed two bugs reported as SF #535905: under certain conditions,
3462 deallocating a deeply nested structure could cause a segfault in the
3463 garbage collector, due to interaction with the "trashcan" code;
3464 access to the current frame during destruction of a local variable
3465 could access a pointer to freed memory.
3466
Guido van Rossumfe0ca4a2002-06-18 21:20:13 +00003467- The optional object allocator ("pymalloc") has been enabled by
3468 default. The recommended practice for memory allocation and
3469 deallocation has been streamlined. A header file is included,
3470 Misc/pymemcompat.h, which can be bundled with 3rd party extensions
3471 and lets them use the same API with Python versions from 1.5.2
3472 onwards.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00003473
Martin v. Löwiscfeb3b62002-03-03 21:30:27 +00003474- PyErr_Display will provide file and line information for all exceptions
3475 that have an attribute print_file_and_line, not just SyntaxErrors.
3476
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00003477- The UTF-8 codec will now encode and decode Unicode surrogates
3478 correctly and without raising exceptions for unpaired ones.
3479
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00003480- Universal newlines (PEP 278) is implemented. Briefly, using 'U'
3481 instead of 'r' when opening a text file for reading changes the line
3482 ending convention so that any of '\r', '\r\n', and '\n' is
3483 recognized (even mixed in one file); all three are converted to
3484 '\n', the standard Python line end character.
3485
Neal Norwitz649b7592002-01-01 19:07:13 +00003486- file.xreadlines() now raises a ValueError if the file is closed:
3487 Previously, an xreadlines object was returned which would raise
3488 a ValueError when the xreadlines.next() method was called.
3489
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003490- sys.exit() inadvertently allowed more than one argument.
Neal Norwitz0c766a02002-03-27 13:03:09 +00003491 An exception will now be raised if more than one argument is used.
3492
Gustavo Niemeyer17c5a332002-12-16 14:09:22 +00003493- Changed evaluation order of dictionary literals to conform to the
3494 general left to right evaluation order rule. Now {f1(): f2()} will
3495 evaluate f1 first.
Gustavo Niemeyer78429a62002-12-16 13:54:02 +00003496
Gustavo Niemeyer786ddb22002-12-16 18:12:53 +00003497- Fixed bug #521782: when a file was in non-blocking mode, file.read()
3498 could silently lose data or wrongly throw an unknown error.
3499
Neil Schemenauerb983aa02002-12-30 20:22:23 +00003500- The sq_repeat, sq_inplace_repeat, sq_concat and sq_inplace_concat
3501 slots are now always tried after trying the corresponding nb_* slots.
3502 This fixes a number of minor bugs (see bug #624807).
3503
Neal Norwitz74a032e2003-01-10 23:29:48 +00003504- Fix problem with dynamic loading on 64-bit AIX (see bug #639945).
3505
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003506Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003507-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003508
Raymond Hettinger9543b342003-01-18 23:22:20 +00003509- Added three operators to the operator module:
3510 operator.pow(a,b) which is equivalent to: a**b.
3511 operator.is_(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is b.
3512 operator.is_not(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is not b.
3513
Martin v. Löwis24a880b2002-12-31 12:55:15 +00003514- posix.openpty now works on all systems that have /dev/ptmx.
3515
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003516- A module zipimport exists to support importing code from zip
3517 archives.
3518
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00003519- The new datetime module supplies classes for manipulating dates and
3520 times. The basic design came from the Zope "fishbowl process", and
3521 favors practical commercial applications over calendar esoterica. See
3522
3523 http://www.zope.org/Members/fdrake/DateTimeWiki/FrontPage
3524
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00003525- _tkinter now returns Tcl objects, instead of strings. Objects which
3526 have Python equivalents are converted to Python objects, other objects
3527 are wrapped. This can be configured through the wantobjects method,
Martin v. Löwis8c8aa5d2002-11-26 21:39:48 +00003528 or Tkinter.wantobjects.
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00003529
Barry Warsawc27f4bd2002-12-30 21:03:26 +00003530- The PyBSDDB wrapper around the Sleepycat Berkeley DB library has
3531 been added as the package bsddb. The traditional bsddb module is
3532 still available in source code, but not built automatically anymore,
3533 and is now named bsddb185. This supports Berkeley DB versions from
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00003534 3.0 to 4.1. For help converting your databases from the old module (which
3535 probably used an obsolete version of Berkeley DB) to the new module, see
3536 the db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py scripts described in the Tools/Demos
3537 section above.
Martin v. Löwisef546b32002-11-19 08:12:57 +00003538
Martin v. Löwis677bde22002-11-23 22:08:15 +00003539- unicodedata was updated to Unicode 3.2. It supports normalization
3540 and names for Hangul syllables and CJK unified ideographs.
Martin v. Löwis7d41e292002-11-23 12:22:32 +00003541
Neal Norwitz94a83fd2002-11-02 17:46:24 +00003542- resource.getrlimit() now returns longs instead of ints.
3543
Martin v. Löwis080689c2002-10-26 14:42:02 +00003544- readline now dynamically adjusts its input/output stream if
3545 sys.stdin/stdout changes.
3546
Guido van Rossumba602972002-10-01 18:18:58 +00003547- The _tkinter module (and hence Tkinter) has dropped support for
3548 Tcl/Tk 8.0 and 8.1. Only Tcl/Tk versions 8.2, 8.3 and 8.4 are
3549 supported.
3550
Martin v. Löwis658009a2002-09-16 17:26:24 +00003551- cPickle.BadPickleGet is now a class.
3552
Martin v. Löwisa19bfe02002-10-16 18:28:36 +00003553- The time stamps in os.stat_result are floating point numbers
3554 after stat_float_times has been called.
Martin v. Löwis94717ed2002-09-09 14:24:16 +00003555
Neal Norwitzb5673922002-09-05 21:48:07 +00003556- If the size passed to mmap.mmap() is larger than the length of the
3557 file on non-Windows platforms, a ValueError is raised. [SF bug 585792]
3558
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003559- The xreadlines module is slated for obsolescence.
3560
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00003561- The strptime function in the time module is now always available (a
3562 Python implementation is used when the C library doesn't define it).
3563
Guido van Rossum9562bcf2002-06-14 21:31:18 +00003564- The 'new' module is no longer an extension, but a Python module that
3565 only exists for backwards compatibility. Its contents are no longer
3566 functions but callable type objects.
3567
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003568- The bsddb.*open functions can now take 'None' as a filename.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00003569 This will create a temporary in-memory bsddb that won't be
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003570 written to disk.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00003571
Martin v. Löwisb96152c2002-12-31 13:20:15 +00003572- posix.getloadavg, posix.lchown, posix.killpg, posix.mknod, and
3573 posix.getpgid have been added where available.
Martin v. Löwis06a83e92002-04-14 10:19:44 +00003574
Martin v. Löwisf0a46682002-11-03 17:20:12 +00003575- The locale module now exposes the C library's gettext interface. It
3576 also has a new function getpreferredencoding.
Martin v. Löwis2e64c342002-03-27 18:49:02 +00003577
Tim Petersfbf74f22002-03-14 19:06:01 +00003578- A security hole ("double free") was found in zlib-1.1.3, a popular
3579 third party compression library used by some Python modules. The
3580 hole was quickly plugged in zlib-1.1.4, and the Windows build of
3581 Python now ships with zlib-1.1.4.
3582
Martin v. Löwis688357e2002-04-08 21:28:20 +00003583- pwd, grp, and resource return enhanced tuples now, with symbolic
3584 field names.
Martin v. Löwis29001ff2002-03-01 10:47:37 +00003585
Martin v. Löwis99866332002-03-01 10:27:01 +00003586- array.array is now a type object. A new format character
3587 'u' indicates Py_UNICODE arrays. For those, .tounicode and
3588 .fromunicode methods are available. Arrays now support __iadd__
3589 and __imul__.
3590
Neal Norwitze790eae2002-01-01 21:14:12 +00003591- dl now builds on every system that has dlfcn.h. Failure in case
Martin v. Löwis93227272002-01-01 20:18:30 +00003592 of sizeof(int)!=sizeof(long)!=sizeof(void*) is delayed until dl.open
3593 is called.
3594
Skip Montanaro8e790e72002-09-03 13:25:17 +00003595- The sys module acquired a new attribute, api_version, which evaluates
3596 to the value of the PYTHON_API_VERSION macro with which the
3597 interpreter was compiled.
3598
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00003599- Fixed bug #470582: sre module would return a tuple (None, 'a', 'ab')
3600 when applying the regular expression '^((a)c)?(ab)$' on 'ab'. It now
3601 returns (None, None, 'ab'), as expected. Also fixed handling of
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00003602 lastindex/lastgroup match attributes in similar cases. For example,
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00003603 when running the expression r'(a)(b)?b' over 'ab', lastindex must be
3604 1, not 2.
3605
Gustavo Niemeyerc523b042002-11-07 03:28:56 +00003606- Fixed bug #581080: sre scanner was not checking the buffer limit
3607 before increasing the current pointer. This was creating an infinite
3608 loop in the search function, once the pointer exceeded the buffer
3609 limit.
3610
Thomas Heller95cb7e42002-11-07 16:23:55 +00003611- The os.fdopen function now enforces a file mode starting with the
3612 letter 'r', 'w' or 'a', otherwise a ValueError is raised. This fixes
3613 bug #623464.
3614
Greg Ward6c58d462003-01-03 18:02:15 +00003615- The linuxaudiodev module is now deprecated; it is being replaced by
3616 ossaudiodev. The interface has been extended to cover a lot more of
3617 OSS (see www.opensound.com), including most DSP ioctls and the
3618 OSS mixer API. Documentation forthcoming in 2.3a2.
3619
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003620Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003621-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003622
Guido van Rossum747f8062003-01-03 16:33:49 +00003623- imaplib.py now supports SSL (Tino Lange and Piers Lauder).
3624
Just van Rossum5e156ad2002-12-31 16:38:01 +00003625- Freeze's modulefinder.py has been moved to the standard library;
3626 slightly improved so it will issue less false missing submodule
3627 reports (see sf path #643711 for details). Documentation will follow
3628 with Python 2.3a2.
3629
Martin v. Löwis96a60e42002-12-31 13:11:54 +00003630- os.path exposes getctime.
3631
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003632- unittest.py now has two additional methods called assertAlmostEqual()
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003633 and failIfAlmostEqual(). They implement an approximate comparison
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003634 by rounding the difference between the two arguments and comparing
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003635 the result to zero. Approximate comparison is essential for
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003636 unit tests of floating point results.
3637
Raymond Hettingere11b5102002-12-25 16:37:19 +00003638- calendar.py now depends on the new datetime module rather than
3639 the time module. As a result, the range of allowable dates
3640 has been increased.
3641
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003642- pdb has a new 'j(ump)' command to select the next line to be
3643 executed.
3644
Thomas Heller1b3b49d2002-12-12 19:13:44 +00003645- The distutils created windows installers now can run a
3646 postinstallation script.
3647
Martin v. Löwis4581cfa2002-11-22 08:23:09 +00003648- doctest.testmod can now be called without argument, which means to
3649 test the current module.
3650
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003651- When canceling a server that implemented threading with a keyboard
Martin v. Löwisf86e8ef2002-11-22 08:08:44 +00003652 interrupt, the server would shut down but not terminate (waiting on
3653 client threads). A new member variable, daemon_threads, was added to
3654 the ThreadingMixIn class in SocketServer.py to make it explicit that
3655 this behavior needs to be controlled.
3656
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00003657- A new module, optparse, provides a fancy alternative to getopt for
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003658 command line parsing. It is a slightly modified version of Greg
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00003659 Ward's Optik package.
3660
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00003661- UserDict.py now defines a DictMixin class which defines all dictionary
3662 methods for classes that already have a minimum mapping interface.
3663 This greatly simplifies writing classes that need to be substitutable
3664 for dictionaries (such as the shelve module).
3665
3666- shelve.py now subclasses from UserDict.DictMixin. Now shelve supports
3667 all dictionary methods. This eases the transition to persistent
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003668 storage for scripts originally written with dictionaries in mind.
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00003669
Skip Montanaro3bf99e32002-12-08 18:36:24 +00003670- shelve.open and the various classes in shelve.py now accept an optional
3671 binary flag, which defaults to False. If True, the values stored in the
3672 shelf are binary pickles.
3673
Guido van Rossumfda06742002-11-13 16:29:18 +00003674- A new package, logging, implements the logging API defined by PEP
3675 282. The code is written by Vinay Sajip.
3676
Walter Dörwald4dbf1922002-11-06 16:53:44 +00003677- StreamReader, StreamReaderWriter and StreamRecoder in the codecs
3678 modules are iterators now.
3679
Tim Peters9288f952002-11-05 20:38:55 +00003680- gzip.py now handles files exceeding 2GB. Files over 4GB also work
3681 now (provided the OS supports it, and Python is configured with large
3682 file support), but in that case the underlying gzip file format can
3683 record only the least-significant 32 bits of the file size, so that
3684 some tools working with gzipped files may report an incorrect file
3685 size.
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00003686
Martin v. Löwis74b51ac2002-10-26 14:50:45 +00003687- xml.sax.saxutils.unescape has been added, to replace entity references
3688 with their entity value.
3689
Martin v. Löwis77ac4292002-10-15 15:11:13 +00003690- Queue.Queue.{put,get} now support an optional timeout argument.
3691
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00003692- Various features of Tk 8.4 are exposed in Tkinter.py. The multiple
3693 option of tkFileDialog is exposed as function askopenfile{,name}s.
Martin v. Löwis2ec36272002-10-13 10:22:08 +00003694
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00003695- Various configure methods of Tkinter have been stream-lined, so that
3696 tag_configure, image_configure, window_configure now return a
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00003697 dictionary when invoked with no argument.
Martin v. Löwis6ce13152002-10-10 14:36:13 +00003698
Guido van Rossum2b492b62002-10-09 21:40:48 +00003699- Importing the readline module now no longer has the side effect of
3700 calling setlocale(LC_CTYPE, ""). The initial "C" locale, or
3701 whatever locale is explicitly set by the user, is preserved. If you
3702 want repr() of 8-bit strings in your preferred encoding to preserve
3703 all printable characters of that encoding, you have to add the
3704 following code to your $PYTHONSTARTUP file or to your application's
3705 main():
3706
3707 import locale
3708 locale.setlocale(locale.LC_CTYPE, "")
3709
Martin v. Löwise9ce0b02002-10-07 13:23:24 +00003710- shutil.move was added. shutil.copytree now reports errors as an
3711 exception at the end, instead of printing error messages.
3712
Marc-André Lemburg97047e22002-10-04 11:55:21 +00003713- Encoding name normalization was generalized to not only
3714 replace hyphens with underscores, but also all other non-alphanumeric
3715 characters (with the exception of the dot which is used for Python
3716 package names during lookup). The aliases.py mapping was updated
3717 to the new standard.
3718
Walter Dörwald5ccaf8f2002-09-06 16:15:58 +00003719- mimetypes has two new functions: guess_all_extensions() which
3720 returns a list of all known extensions for a mime type, and
3721 add_type() which adds one mapping between a mime type and
3722 an extension to the database.
3723
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00003724- New module: sets, defines the class Set that implements a mutable
3725 set type using the keys of a dict to represent the set. There's
3726 also a class ImmutableSet which is useful when you need sets of sets
3727 or when you need to use sets as dict keys, and a class BaseSet which
Raymond Hettingeref8b9c62002-12-09 08:56:06 +00003728 is the base class of the two.
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00003729
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00003730- Added random.sample(population,k) for random sampling without replacement.
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00003731 Returns a k length list of unique elements chosen from the population.
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00003732
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00003733- random.randrange(-sys.maxint-1, sys.maxint) no longer raises
3734 OverflowError. That is, it now accepts any combination of 'start'
3735 and 'stop' arguments so long as each is in the range of Python's
3736 bounded integers.
3737
Raymond Hettinger40f62172002-12-29 23:03:38 +00003738- Thanks to Raymond Hettinger, random.random() now uses a new core
3739 generator. The Mersenne Twister algorithm is implemented in C,
3740 threadsafe, faster than the previous generator, has an astronomically
3741 large period (2**19937-1), creates random floats to full 53-bit
3742 precision, and may be the most widely tested random number generator
3743 in existence.
3744
3745 The random.jumpahead(n) method has different semantics for the new
3746 generator. Instead of jumping n steps ahead, it uses n and the
3747 existing state to create a new state. This means that jumpahead()
3748 continues to support multi-threaded code needing generators of
3749 non-overlapping sequences. However, it will break code which relies
3750 on jumpahead moving a specific number of steps forward.
3751
3752 The attributes random.whseed and random.__whseed have no meaning for
3753 the new generator. Code using these attributes should switch to a
3754 new class, random.WichmannHill which is provided for backward
3755 compatibility and to make an alternate generator available.
3756
Guido van Rossum4a57c332002-08-02 18:05:20 +00003757- New "algorithms" module: heapq, implements a heap queue. Thanks to
3758 Kevin O'Connor for the code and François Pinard for an entertaining
3759 write-up explaining the theory and practical uses of heaps.
3760
Marc-André Lemburg58e2ff22002-07-12 14:40:04 +00003761- New encoding for the Palm OS character set: palmos.
3762
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00003763- binascii.crc32() and the zipfile module had problems on some 64-bit
3764 platforms. These have been fixed. On a platform with 8-byte C longs,
3765 crc32() now returns a signed-extended 4-byte result, so that its value
3766 as a Python int is equal to the value computed a 32-bit platform.
3767
Martin v. Löwis7d650ca2002-06-30 15:05:00 +00003768- xml.dom.minidom.toxml and toprettyxml now take an optional encoding
3769 argument.
3770
Guido van Rossum9f7549b2002-06-10 21:39:42 +00003771- Some fixes in the copy module: when an object is copied through its
3772 __reduce__ method, there was no check for a __setstate__ method on
3773 the result [SF patch 565085]; deepcopy should treat instances of
3774 custom metaclasses the same way it treats instances of type 'type'
3775 [SF patch 560794].
3776
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00003777- Sockets now support timeout mode. After s.settimeout(T), where T is
3778 a float expressing seconds, subsequent operations raise an exception
3779 if they cannot be completed within T seconds. To disable timeout
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00003780 mode, use s.settimeout(None). There's also a module function,
3781 socket.setdefaulttimeout(T), which sets the default for all sockets
3782 created henceforth.
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00003783
3784- getopt.gnu_getopt was added. This supports GNU-style option
3785 processing, where options can be mixed with non-option arguments.
Martin v. Löwis446a25f2002-06-06 10:58:36 +00003786
Michael W. Hudsonb0dc1a32002-06-04 18:27:35 +00003787- Stop using strings for exceptions. String objects used for
3788 exceptions are now classes deriving from Exception. The objects
3789 changed were: Tkinter.TclError, bdb.BdbQuit, macpath.norm_error,
3790 tabnanny.NannyNag, and xdrlib.Error.
Neal Norwitzb5b5a262002-06-04 17:14:07 +00003791
Walter Dörwald474458d2002-06-04 15:16:29 +00003792- Constants BOM_UTF8, BOM_UTF16, BOM_UTF16_LE, BOM_UTF16_BE,
3793 BOM_UTF32, BOM_UTF32_LE and BOM_UTF32_BE that represent the Byte
3794 Order Mark in UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 encodings for little and
3795 big endian systems were added to the codecs module. The old names
3796 BOM32_* and BOM64_* were off by a factor of 2.
3797
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00003798- Added conversion functions math.degrees() and math.radians().
Raymond Hettinger87f59ee2002-05-13 04:17:32 +00003799
Raymond Hettinger866964c2002-12-14 19:51:34 +00003800- math.log() now takes an optional argument: math.log(x[, base]).
3801
Raymond Hettinger9b1df1d2002-05-12 06:07:21 +00003802- ftplib.retrlines() now tests for callback is None rather than testing
3803 for False. Was causing an error when given a callback object which
3804 was callable but also returned len() as zero. The change may
3805 create new breakage if the caller relied on the undocumented behavior
3806 and called with callback set to [] or some other False value not
3807 identical to None.
3808
Tim Peters46c04e12002-05-05 20:40:00 +00003809- random.gauss() uses a piece of hidden state used by nothing else,
3810 and the .seed() and .whseed() methods failed to reset it. In other
3811 words, setting the seed didn't completely determine the sequence of
3812 results produced by random.gauss(). It does now. Programs repeatedly
3813 mixing calls to a seed method with calls to gauss() may see different
3814 results now.
3815
Fred Drake7f781c92002-05-01 20:33:53 +00003816- The pickle.Pickler class grew a clear_memo() method to mimic that
3817 provided by cPickle.Pickler.
3818
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003819- difflib's SequenceMatcher class now does a dynamic analysis of
3820 which elements are so frequent as to constitute noise. For
3821 comparing files as sequences of lines, this generally works better
3822 than the IS_LINE_JUNK function, and function ndiff's linejunk
3823 argument defaults to None now as a result. A happy benefit is
3824 that SequenceMatcher may run much faster now when applied
3825 to large files with many duplicate lines (for example, C program
3826 text with lots of repeated "}" and "return NULL;" lines).
3827
Guido van Rossum256705b2002-04-23 13:29:43 +00003828- New Text.dump() method in Tkinter module.
3829
Marc-André Lemburg1ec71ea2002-04-17 20:33:40 +00003830- New distutils commands for building packagers were added to
3831 support pkgtool on Solaris and swinstall on HP-UX.
3832
3833- distutils now has a new abstract binary packager base class
3834 command/bdist_packager, which simplifies writing packagers.
3835 This will hopefully provide the missing bits to encourage
3836 people to submit more packagers, e.g. for Debian, FreeBSD
3837 and other systems.
3838
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00003839- The UTF-16, -LE and -BE stream readers now raise a
3840 NotImplementedError for all calls to .readline(). Previously, they
3841 used to just produce garbage or fail with an encoding error --
3842 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 +00003843 work well with these.
3844
Martin v. Löwis5c137c22002-03-18 12:44:08 +00003845- compileall now supports quiet operation.
3846
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003847- The BaseHTTPServer now implements optional HTTP/1.1 persistent
Martin v. Löwis587c98c2002-03-17 18:37:22 +00003848 connections.
3849
Marc-André Lemburga5d2b4c2002-02-16 18:23:30 +00003850- socket module: the SSL support was broken out of the main
3851 _socket module C helper and placed into a new _ssl helper
3852 which now gets imported by socket.py if available and working.
3853
Marc-André Lemburg37aa5802002-02-10 21:42:47 +00003854- encodings package: added aliases for all supported IANA character
3855 sets
3856
Guido van Rossum606fe4e2001-12-28 20:57:14 +00003857- ftplib: to safeguard the user's privacy, anonymous login will use
3858 "anonymous@" as default password, rather than the real user and host
3859 name.
3860
Fred Drake36736122002-01-10 13:50:31 +00003861- webbrowser: tightened up the command passed to os.system() so that
3862 arbitrary shell code can't be executed because a bogus URL was
3863 passed in.
3864
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00003865- gettext.translation has an optional fallback argument, and
Martin v. Löwisa55ffae2002-01-11 06:58:49 +00003866 gettext.find an optional all argument. Translations will now fallback
Martin v. Löwisd8996052002-11-21 21:45:32 +00003867 on a per-message basis. The module supports plural forms, by means
3868 of gettext.[d]ngettext and Translation.[u]ngettext.
Martin v. Löwis1be64192002-01-11 06:33:28 +00003869
Martin v. Löwis9668b932002-01-12 11:27:42 +00003870- distutils bdist commands now offer a --skip-build option.
3871
Walter Dörwaldb25c2b02002-03-21 10:38:40 +00003872- warnings.warn now accepts a Warning instance as first argument.
3873
Fred Drakefed7e852002-04-04 19:36:15 +00003874- The xml.sax.expatreader.ExpatParser class will no longer create
3875 circular references by using itself as the locator that gets passed
3876 to the content handler implementation. [SF bug #535474]
3877
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00003878- The email.Parser.Parser class now properly parses strings regardless
3879 of their line endings, which can be any of \r, \n, or \r\n (CR, LF,
3880 or CRLF). Also, the Header class's constructor default arguments
3881 has changed slightly so that an explicit maxlinelen value is always
Barry Warsaw497e5c42002-12-30 19:27:08 +00003882 honored, and so unicode conversion error handling can be specified.
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00003883
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003884- distutils' build_ext command now links C++ extensions with the C++
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00003885 compiler available in the Makefile or CXX environment variable, if
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003886 running under \*nix.
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00003887
3888- New module bz2: provides a comprehensive interface for the bz2 compression
3889 library. It implements a complete file interface, one-shot (de)compression
3890 functions, and types for sequential (de)compression.
3891
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003892- New pdb command 'pp' which is like 'p' except that it pretty-prints
Barry Warsaw5d8d6182002-11-05 22:41:33 +00003893 the value of its expression argument.
3894
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00003895- Now bdist_rpm distutils command understands a verify_script option in
3896 the config file, including the contents of the referred filename in
3897 the "%verifyscript" section of the rpm spec file.
3898
Gustavo Niemeyer1456fde2002-11-25 17:25:04 +00003899- Fixed bug #495695: webbrowser module would run graphic browsers in a
3900 unix environment even if DISPLAY was not set. Also, support for
3901 skipstone browser was included.
3902
Gustavo Niemeyerd5ae01a2002-12-16 13:11:57 +00003903- Fixed bug #636769: rexec would run unallowed code if subclasses of
3904 strings were used as parameters for certain functions.
3905
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003906Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003907-----------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003908
Martin v. Löwis0d1fdea2002-11-22 08:36:54 +00003909- pygettext.py now supports globbing on Windows, and accepts module
3910 names in addition to accepting file names.
3911
Guido van Rossum923e4ef2002-09-17 20:58:59 +00003912- The SGI demos (Demo/sgi) have been removed. Nobody thought they
3913 were interesting any more. (The SGI library modules and extensions
3914 are still there; it is believed that at least some of these are
3915 still used and useful.)
3916
Fred Drake40813b12002-08-05 15:24:19 +00003917- IDLE supports the new encoding declarations (PEP 263); it can also
3918 deal with legacy 8-bit files if they use the locale's encoding. It
3919 allows non-ASCII strings in the interactive shell and executes them
3920 in the locale's encoding.
Martin v. Löwis98ce7b72002-08-05 15:11:26 +00003921
Marc-André Lemburg46260092002-04-04 16:17:11 +00003922- freeze.py now produces binaries which can import shared modules,
3923 unlike before when this failed due to missing symbol exports in
3924 the generated binary.
3925
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003926Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003927-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003928
Martin v. Löwisdc461752002-11-06 21:59:33 +00003929- On Unix, IDLE is now installed automatically.
3930
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00003931- The fpectl module is not built by default; it's dangerous or useless
3932 except in the hands of experts.
3933
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003934- The public Python C API will generally be declared using PyAPI_FUNC
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00003935 and PyAPI_DATA macros, while Python extension module init functions
3936 will be declared with PyMODINIT_FUNC. DL_EXPORT/DL_IMPORT macros
3937 are deprecated.
Neal Norwitz1389f3e2002-07-22 13:21:10 +00003938
Tim Petersc6a3ff62002-07-08 22:11:52 +00003939- A bug was fixed that could cause COUNT_ALLOCS builds to segfault, or
3940 get into infinite loops, when a new-style class got garbage-collected.
3941 Unfortunately, to avoid this, the way COUNT_ALLOCS works requires
3942 that new-style classes be immortal in COUNT_ALLOCS builds. Note that
3943 COUNT_ALLOCS is not enabled by default, in either release or debug
3944 builds, and that new-style classes are immortal only in COUNT_ALLOCS
3945 builds.
3946
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00003947- Compiling out the cyclic garbage collector is no longer an option.
3948 The old symbol WITH_CYCLE_GC is now ignored, and Python.h arranges
3949 that it's always defined (for the benefit of any extension modules
3950 that may be conditionalizing on it). A bonus is that any extension
3951 type participating in cyclic gc can choose to participate in the
3952 Py_TRASHCAN mechanism now too; in the absence of cyclic gc, this used
3953 to require editing the core to teach the trashcan mechanism about the
3954 new type.
3955
Martin v. Löwis0cec0ff2002-07-28 16:33:45 +00003956- According to Annex F of the current C standard,
Tim Peters1de41bf2002-07-03 03:31:20 +00003957
3958 The Standard C macro HUGE_VAL and its float and long double analogs,
3959 HUGE_VALF and HUGE_VALL, expand to expressions whose values are
3960 positive infinities.
3961
3962 Python only uses the double HUGE_VAL, and only to #define its own symbol
3963 Py_HUGE_VAL. Some platforms have incorrect definitions for HUGE_VAL.
3964 pyport.h used to try to worm around that, but the workarounds triggered
3965 other bugs on other platforms, so we gave up. If your platform defines
3966 HUGE_VAL incorrectly, you'll need to #define Py_HUGE_VAL to something
3967 that works on your platform. The only instance of this I'm sure about
3968 is on an unknown subset of Cray systems, described here:
3969
3970 http://www.cray.com/swpubs/manuals/SN-2194_2.0/html-SN-2194_2.0/x3138.htm
3971
3972 Presumably 2.3a1 breaks such systems. If anyone uses such a system, help!
3973
Martin v. Löwisa3fb4f72002-06-09 13:33:54 +00003974- The configure option --without-doc-strings can be used to remove the
3975 doc strings from the builtin functions and modules; this reduces the
3976 size of the executable.
3977
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00003978- The universal newlines option (PEP 278) is on by default. On Unix
3979 it can be disabled by passing --without-universal-newlines to the
3980 configure script. On other platforms, remove
3981 WITH_UNIVERSAL_NEWLINES from pyconfig.h.
Tim Peters639295f2002-04-21 07:30:30 +00003982
Martin v. Löwis1142de32002-03-29 16:28:31 +00003983- On Unix, a shared libpython2.3.so can be created with --enable-shared.
3984
Tim Peters8deda702002-03-30 10:06:07 +00003985- All uses of the CACHE_HASH, INTERN_STRINGS, and DONT_SHARE_SHORT_STRINGS
3986 preprocessor symbols were eliminated. The internal decisions they
3987 controlled stopped being experimental long ago.
Tim Peters1f7df352002-03-29 03:29:08 +00003988
Fred Drake7d28b732002-05-02 21:17:00 +00003989- The tools used to build the documentation now work under Cygwin as
3990 well as Unix.
3991
Skip Montanaro57454e52002-06-14 20:30:31 +00003992- The bsddb and dbm module builds have been changed to try and avoid version
3993 skew problems and disable linkage with Berkeley DB 1.85 unless the
3994 installer knows what s/he's doing. See the section on building these
3995 modules in the README file for details.
3996
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003997C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003998-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003999
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00004000- PyNumber_Check() now returns true for string and unicode objects.
4001 This is a result of these types having a partially defined
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00004002 tp_as_number slot. (This is not a feature, but an indication that
Walter Dörwalda1a61f92002-11-19 21:20:25 +00004003 PyNumber_Check() is not very useful to determine numeric behavior.
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00004004 It may be deprecated.)
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00004005
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00004006- The string object's layout has changed: the pointer member
4007 ob_sinterned has been replaced by an int member ob_sstate. On some
4008 platforms (e.g. most 64-bit systems) this may change the offset of
4009 the ob_sval member, so as a precaution the API_VERSION has been
4010 incremented. The apparently unused feature of "indirect interned
4011 strings", supported by the ob_sinterned member, is gone. Interned
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004012 strings are now usually mortal; there is a new API,
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00004013 PyString_InternImmortal() that creates immortal interned strings.
4014 (The ob_sstate member can only take three values; however, while
4015 making it a char saves a few bytes per string object on average, in
4016 it also slowed things down a bit because ob_sval was no longer
4017 aligned.)
4018
Guido van Rossumfdb86482002-08-14 21:20:32 +00004019- The Py_InitModule*() functions now accept NULL for the 'methods'
4020 argument. Modules without global functions are becoming more common
4021 now that factories can be types rather than functions.
4022
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00004023- New C API PyUnicode_FromOrdinal() which exposes unichr() at C
4024 level.
4025
Thomas Heller085358a2002-07-29 14:27:41 +00004026- New functions PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErr() and
4027 PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErrWithFilename(). Similar to
4028 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErrWithFilename() and
4029 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErr(), but they allow to specify
4030 the exception type to raise. Available on Windows.
4031
Tim Peters7c321a82002-07-09 02:57:01 +00004032- Py_FatalError() is now declared as taking a const char* argument. It
4033 was previously declared without const. This should not affect working
4034 code.
4035
Martin v. Löwis01f94bd2002-05-08 08:44:21 +00004036- Added new macro PySequence_ITEM(o, i) that directly calls
4037 sq_item without rechecking that o is a sequence and without
4038 adjusting for negative indices.
4039
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00004040- PyRange_New() now raises ValueError if the fourth argument is not 1.
4041 This is part of the removal of deprecated features of the xrange
4042 object.
4043
Guido van Rossum517c7d42002-04-26 02:49:14 +00004044- PyNumber_Coerce() and PyNumber_CoerceEx() now also invoke the type's
4045 coercion if both arguments have the same type but this type has the
4046 CHECKTYPES flag set. This is to better support proxies.
4047
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004048- The type of tp_free has been changed from "``void (*)(PyObject *)``" to
4049 "``void (*)(void *)``".
Neil Schemenauer9344b142002-04-12 23:00:08 +00004050
4051- PyObject_Del, PyObject_GC_Del are now functions instead of macros.
4052
Guido van Rossum0986d822002-04-08 01:38:42 +00004053- A type can now inherit its metatype from its base type. Previously,
4054 when PyType_Ready() was called, if ob_type was found to be NULL, it
4055 was always set to &PyType_Type; now it is set to base->ob_type,
4056 where base is tp_base, defaulting to &PyObject_Type.
4057
4058- PyType_Ready() accidentally did not inherit tp_is_gc; now it does.
4059
Neil Schemenauerc9abc1d2002-05-08 14:14:41 +00004060- The PyCore_* family of APIs have been removed.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00004061
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004062- The "u#" parser marker will now pass through Unicode objects as-is
Marc-André Lemburg3e3eacb2002-01-09 16:21:27 +00004063 without going through the buffer API.
4064
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004065- The enumerators of cmp_op have been renamed to use the prefix ``PyCmp_``.
Martin v. Löwis7198a522002-01-01 19:59:11 +00004066
Tim Peters10a3bb52001-12-25 19:07:38 +00004067- An old #define of ANY as void has been removed from pyport.h. This
4068 hasn't been used since Python's pre-ANSI days, and the #define has
4069 been marked as obsolete since then. SF bug 495548 says it created
4070 conflicts with other packages, so keeping it around wasn't harmless.
4071
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004072- Because Python's magic number scheme broke on January 1st, we decided
4073 to stop Python development. Thanks for all the fish!
4074
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00004075- Some of us don't like fish, so we changed Python's magic number
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00004076 scheme to a new one. See Python/import.c for details.
4077
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004078New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004079-------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004080
Martin v. Löwis79acb9e2002-12-06 12:48:53 +00004081- OpenVMS is now supported.
4082
Martin v. Löwisf90ae202002-06-11 06:22:31 +00004083- AtheOS is now supported.
4084
Andrew MacIntyre161ad0e2002-08-04 07:25:58 +00004085- the EMX runtime environment on OS/2 is now supported.
4086
Martin v. Löwisa6e97582002-01-01 18:41:33 +00004087- GNU/Hurd is now supported.
4088
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004089Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004090-----
4091
Fred Drake4dd0f7e2002-11-26 21:44:56 +00004092- The regrtest.py script's -u option now provides a way to say "allow
4093 all resources except this one." For example, to allow everything
4094 except bsddb, give the option '-uall,-bsddb'.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004095
4096Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004097-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004098
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00004099- The Windows distribution now ships with version 4.0.14 of the
4100 Sleepycat Berkeley database library. This should be a huge
4101 improvement over the previous Berkeley DB 1.85, which had many
4102 bugs.
4103 XXX What are the licensing issues here?
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004104 XXX If a user has a database created with a previous version of
Tim Peters84c7a3f2002-11-23 18:48:06 +00004105 XXX Python, what must they do to convert it?
4106 XXX I'm still not sure how to link this thing (see PCbuild/readme.txt).
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00004107 XXX The version # is likely to change before 2.3a1.
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00004108
4109- The Windows distribution now ships with a Secure Sockets Library (SLL)
Mark Hammondc3de0082002-12-03 06:16:08 +00004110 module (_ssl.pyd)
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00004111
Tim Peters857fb4c2002-11-14 23:31:58 +00004112- The Windows distribution now ships with Tcl/Tk version 8.4.1 (it
4113 previously shipped with Tcl/Tk 8.3.2).
4114
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00004115- When Python is built under a Microsoft compiler, sys.version now
4116 includes the compiler version number (_MSC_VER). For example, under
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004117 MSVC 6, sys.version contains the substring "MSC v.1200 ". 1200 is
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00004118 the value of _MSC_VER under MSVC 6.
4119
Tim Peters08e72952002-04-16 20:48:01 +00004120- Sometimes the uninstall executable (UNWISE.EXE) vanishes. One cause
4121 of that has been fixed in the installer (disabled Wise's "delete in-
4122 use files" uninstall option).
4123
Guido van Rossum181e41a2002-04-06 00:23:25 +00004124- Fixed a bug in urllib's proxy handling in Windows. [SF bug #503031]
4125
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00004126- The installer now installs Start menu shortcuts under (the local
4127 equivalent of) "All Users" when doing an Admin install.
4128
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00004129- file.truncate([newsize]) now works on Windows for all newsize values.
4130 It used to fail if newsize didn't fit in 32 bits, reflecting a
4131 limitation of MS _chsize (which is no longer used).
4132
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00004133- os.waitpid() is now implemented for Windows, and can be used to block
4134 until a specified process exits. This is similar to, but not exactly
4135 the same as, os.waitpid() on POSIX systems. If you're waiting for
4136 a specific process whose pid was obtained from one of the spawn()
4137 functions, the same Python os.waitpid() code works across platforms.
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00004138 See the docs for details. The docs were changed to clarify that
4139 spawn functions return, and waitpid requires, a process handle on
4140 Windows (not the same thing as a Windows process id).
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00004141
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00004142- New tempfile.TemporaryFile implementation for Windows: this doesn't
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004143 need a TemporaryFileWrapper wrapper anymore, and should be immune
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00004144 to a nasty problem: before 2.3, if you got a temp file on Windows, it
4145 got wrapped in an object whose close() method first closed the
4146 underlying file, then deleted the file. This usually worked fine.
4147 However, the spawn family of functions on Windows create (at a low C
4148 level) the same set of open files in the spawned process Q as were
4149 open in the spawning process P. If a temp file f was among them, then
4150 doing f.close() in P first closed P's C-level file handle on f, but Q's
4151 C-level file handle on f remained open, so the attempt in P to delete f
4152 blew up with a "Permission denied" error (Windows doesn't allow
4153 deleting open files). This was surprising, subtle, and difficult to
4154 work around.
4155
4156- The os module now exports all the symbolic constants usable with the
4157 low-level os.open() on Windows: the new constants in 2.3 are
4158 O_NOINHERIT, O_SHORT_LIVED, O_TEMPORARY, O_RANDOM and O_SEQUENTIAL.
4159 The others were also available in 2.2: O_APPEND, O_BINARY, O_CREAT,
4160 O_EXCL, O_RDONLY, O_RDWR, O_TEXT, O_TRUNC and O_WRONLY. Contrary
4161 to Microsoft docs, O_SHORT_LIVED does not seem to imply O_TEMPORARY
4162 (so specify both if you want both; note that neither is useful unless
4163 specified with O_CREAT too).
4164
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004165Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004166----
4167
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004168- Mac/Relnotes is gone, the release notes are now here.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004169
Just van Rossume1ebd802003-02-10 10:06:18 +00004170- Python (the OSX-only, unix-based version, not the OS9-compatible CFM
4171 version) now fully supports unicode strings as arguments to various file
4172 system calls, eg. open(), file(), os.stat() and os.listdir().
4173
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004174- The current naming convention for Python on the Macintosh is that MacPython
4175 refers to the unix-based OSX-only version, and MacPython-OS9 refers to the
4176 CFM-based version that runs on both OS9 and OSX.
4177
4178- All MacPython-OS9 functionality is now available in an OSX unix build,
4179 including the Carbon modules, the IDE, OSA support, etc. A lot of this
4180 will only work correctly in a framework build, though, because you cannot
4181 talk to the window manager unless your application is run from a .app
4182 bundle. There is a command line tool "pythonw" that runs your script
4183 with an interpreter living in such a .app bundle, this interpreter should
4184 be used to run any Python script using the window manager (including
4185 Tkinter or wxPython scripts).
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00004186
Jack Jansen8bb80db2002-12-30 22:42:43 +00004187- Most of Mac/Lib has moved to Lib/plat-mac, which is again used both in
4188 MacPython-OSX and MacPython-OS9. The only modules remaining in Mac/Lib
4189 are specifically for MacPython-OS9 (CFM support, preference resources, etc).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004190
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004191- A new utility PythonLauncher will start a Python interpreter when a .py or
4192 .pyw script is double-clicked in the Finder. By default .py scripts are
4193 run with a normal Python interpreter in a Terminal window and .pyw
4194 files are run with a window-aware pythonw interpreter without a Terminal
4195 window, but all this can be customized.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004196
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004197- MacPython-OS9 is now Carbon-only, so it runs on Mac OS 9 or Mac OS X and
4198 possibly on Mac OS 8.6 with the right CarbonLib installed, but not on earlier
4199 releases.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004200
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004201- Many tools such as BuildApplet.py and gensuitemodule.py now support a command
4202 line interface too.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004203
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004204- All the Carbon classes are now PEP253 compliant, meaning that you can
4205 subclass them from Python. Most of the attributes have gone, you should
4206 now use the accessor function call API, which is also what Apple's
4207 documentation uses. Some attributes such as grafport.visRgn are still
4208 available for convenience.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004209
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004210- New Carbon modules File (implementing the APIs in Files.h and Aliases.h)
4211 and Folder (APIs from Folders.h). The old macfs builtin module is
4212 gone, and replaced by a Python wrapper around the new modules.
4213
4214- Pathname handling should now be fully consistent: MacPython-OSX always uses
4215 unix pathnames and MacPython-OS9 always uses colon-separated Mac pathnames
4216 (also when running on Mac OS X).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004217
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004218- New Carbon modules Help and AH give access to the Carbon Help Manager.
4219 There are hooks in the IDE to allow accessing the Python documentation
4220 (and Apple's Carbon and Cocoa documentation) through the Help Viewer.
4221 See Mac/OSX/README for converting the Python documentation to a
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004222 Help Viewer compatible form and installing it.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004223
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004224- OSA support has been redesigned and the generated Python classes now
4225 mirror the inheritance defined by the underlying OSA classes.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004226
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004227- MacPython no longer maps both \r and \n to \n on input for any text file.
4228 This feature has been replaced by universal newline support (PEP278).
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00004229
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00004230- The default encoding for Python sourcefiles in MacPython-OS9 is no longer
Guido van Rossum16c85172003-02-20 01:52:48 +00004231 mac-roman (or whatever your local Mac encoding was) but "ascii", like on
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00004232 other platforms. If you really need sourcefiles with Mac characters in them
4233 you can change this in site.py.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004234
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00004235
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004236What's New in Python 2.2 final?
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004237===============================
4238
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004239*Release date: 21-Dec-2001*
4240
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004241Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004242--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004243
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004244- pickle.py, cPickle: allow pickling instances of new-style classes
4245 with a custom metaclass.
4246
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004247Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004248-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004249
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004250- weakref proxy object: when comparing, unwrap both arguments if both
4251 are proxies.
4252
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004253Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004254-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004255
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004256- binascii.b2a_base64(): fix a potential buffer overrun when encoding
4257 very short strings.
4258
4259- cPickle: the obscure "fast" mode was suspected of causing stack
4260 overflows on the Mac. Hopefully fixed this by setting the recursion
4261 limit much smaller. If the limit is too low (it only affects
4262 performance), you can change it by defining PY_CPICKLE_FAST_LIMIT
4263 when compiling cPickle.c (or in pyconfig.h).
4264
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004265Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004266-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004267
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004268- dumbdbm.py: fixed a dumb old bug (the file didn't get synched at
4269 close or delete time).
4270
4271- rfc822.py: fixed a bug where the address '<>' was converted to None
4272 instead of an empty string (also fixes the email.Utils module).
4273
4274- xmlrpclib.py: version 1.0.0; uses precision for doubles.
4275
4276- test suite: the pickle and cPickle tests were not executing any code
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004277 when run from the standard regression test.
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004278
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004279Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004280-----------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004281
4282Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004283-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004284
4285C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004286-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004287
4288New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004289-------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004290
4291Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004292-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004293
4294Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004295-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004296
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004297- distutils package: fixed broken Windows installers (bdist_wininst).
4298
4299- tempfile.py: prevent mysterious warnings when TemporaryFileWrapper
4300 instances are deleted at process exit time.
4301
4302- socket.py: prevent mysterious warnings when socket instances are
4303 deleted at process exit time.
4304
4305- posixmodule.c: fix a Windows crash with stat() of a filename ending
4306 in backslash.
4307
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004308Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004309----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004310
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004311- The Carbon toolbox modules have been upgraded to Universal Headers
4312 3.4, and experimental CoreGraphics and CarbonEvents modules have
4313 been added. All only for framework-enabled MacOSX.
4314
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004315
Tim Peters6272dfd2001-12-13 19:34:00 +00004316What's New in Python 2.2c1?
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004317===========================
4318
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004319*Release date: 14-Dec-2001*
4320
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004321Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004322--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004323
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004324- Guido's tutorial introduction to the new type/class features has
4325 been extensively updated. See
4326
4327 http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html
4328
4329 That remains the primary documentation in this area.
4330
Guido van Rossum33bab012001-12-05 22:45:48 +00004331- Fixed a leak: instance variables declared with __slots__ were never
4332 deleted!
4333
Guido van Rossum4b800852001-12-03 00:54:52 +00004334- The "delete attribute" method of descriptor objects is called
4335 __delete__, not __del__. In previous releases, it was mistakenly
4336 called __del__, which created an unfortunate overloading condition
4337 with finalizers. (The "get attribute" and "set attribute" methods
4338 are still called __get__ and __set__, respectively.)
4339
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00004340- Some subtle issues with the super built-in were fixed:
4341
4342 (a) When super itself is subclassed, its __get__ method would still
4343 return an instance of the base class (i.e., of super).
4344
4345 (b) super(C, C()).__class__ would return C rather than super. This
4346 is confusing. To fix this, I decided to change the semantics of
4347 super so that it only applies to code attributes, not to data
4348 attributes. After all, overriding data attributes is not
4349 supported anyway.
4350
4351 (c) The __get__ method didn't check whether the argument was an
4352 instance of the type used in creation of the super instance.
4353
Guido van Rossumcd7b7d62001-12-04 21:02:07 +00004354- Previously, hash() of an instance of a subclass of a mutable type
4355 (list or dictionary) would return some value, rather than raising
4356 TypeError. This has been fixed. Also, directly calling
4357 dict.__hash__ and list.__hash__ now raises the same TypeError
4358 (previously, these were the same as object.__hash__).
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00004359
Guido van Rossumd331cb52001-12-05 19:46:42 +00004360- New-style objects now support deleting their __dict__. This is for
4361 all intents and purposes equivalent to assigning a brand new empty
4362 dictionary, but saves space if the object is not used further.
4363
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004364Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004365-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004366
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004367- -Qnew now works as documented in PEP 238: when -Qnew is passed on
4368 the command line, all occurrences of "/" use true division instead
4369 of classic division. See the PEP for details. Note that "all"
4370 means all instances in library and 3rd-party modules, as well as in
4371 your own code. As the PEP says, -Qnew is intended for use only in
4372 educational environments with control over the libraries in use.
Tim Petersbf72fe22001-12-11 21:43:14 +00004373 Note that test_coercion.py in the standard Python test suite fails
4374 under -Qnew; this is expected, and won't be repaired until true
4375 division becomes the default (in the meantime, test_coercion is
4376 testing the current rules).
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004377
Fred Drake6c01e252001-12-14 17:08:12 +00004378- complex() now only allows the first argument to be a string
4379 argument, and raises TypeError if either the second arg is a string
4380 or if the second arg is specified when the first is a string.
4381
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004382Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004383-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004384
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00004385- gc.get_referents was renamed to gc.get_referrers.
4386
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004387Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004388-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004389
Tim Peters25059d32001-12-07 20:35:43 +00004390- Functions in the os.spawn() family now release the global interpreter
4391 lock around calling the platform spawn. They should always have done
4392 this, but did not before 2.2c1. Multithreaded programs calling
4393 an os.spawn function with P_WAIT will no longer block all Python threads
4394 until the spawned program completes. It's possible that some programs
4395 relies on blocking, although more likely by accident than by design.
4396
Martin v. Löwis3a89b2b2001-11-25 14:35:58 +00004397- webbrowser defaults to netscape.exe on OS/2 now.
4398
Martin v. Löwis652e1912001-11-25 14:50:56 +00004399- Tix.ResizeHandle exposes detach_widget, hide, and show.
4400
Martin v. Löwis714d2e22001-12-02 12:26:03 +00004401- The charset alias windows_1252 has been added.
4402
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004403- types.StringTypes is a tuple containing the defined string types;
4404 usually this will be (str, unicode), but if Python was compiled
4405 without Unicode support it will be just (str,).
4406
4407- The pulldom and minidom modules were synchronized to PyXML.
4408
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004409Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004410-----------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004411
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004412- A new script called Tools/scripts/google.py was added, which fires
4413 off a search on Google.
4414
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004415Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004416-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004417
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004418- Note that release builds of Python should arrange to define the
4419 preprocessor symbol NDEBUG on the command line (or equivalent).
4420 In the 2.2 pre-release series we tried to define this by magic in
4421 Python.h instead, but it proved to cause problems for extension
4422 authors. The Unix, Windows and Mac builds now all define NDEBUG in
4423 release builds via cmdline (or equivalent) instead. Ports to
4424 other platforms should do likewise.
4425
Jack Jansen1999ef42001-12-06 21:47:20 +00004426- It is no longer necessary to use --with-suffix when building on a
4427 case-insensitive file system (such as Mac OS X HFS+). In the build
4428 directory an extension is used, but not in the installed python.
4429
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004430C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004431-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004432
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00004433- New function PyDict_MergeFromSeq2() exposes the builtin dict
4434 constructor's logic for updating a dictionary from an iterable object
4435 producing key-value pairs.
4436
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00004437- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() requires that the number of entries in
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00004438 the keyword list equal the number of argument specifiers. This
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00004439 wasn't checked correctly, and PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords could even
4440 dump core in some bad cases. This has been repaired. As a result,
4441 PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords may raise RuntimeError in bad cases that
4442 previously went unchallenged.
4443
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004444New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004445-------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004446
4447Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004448-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004449
4450Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004451-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004452
4453Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004454----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004455
Jack Jansenffa260f2001-12-06 21:14:00 +00004456- In unix-Python on Mac OS X (and darwin) sys.platform is now "darwin",
4457 without any trailing digits.
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004458
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004459- Changed logic for finding python home in Mac OS X framework Pythons.
4460 Now sys.executable points to the executable again, in stead of to
4461 the shared library. The latter is used only for locating the python
4462 home.
4463
4464
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004465What's New in Python 2.2b2?
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004466===========================
4467
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004468*Release date: 16-Nov-2001*
4469
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004470Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004471--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004472
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00004473- Multiple inheritance mixing new-style and classic classes in the
4474 list of base classes is now allowed, so this works now:
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004475
4476 class Classic: pass
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00004477 class Mixed(Classic, object): pass
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004478
4479 The MRO (method resolution order) for each base class is respected
4480 according to its kind, but the MRO for the derived class is computed
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004481 using new-style MRO rules if any base class is a new-style class.
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004482 This needs to be documented.
4483
Tim Petersa427a2b2001-10-29 22:25:45 +00004484- The new builtin dictionary() constructor, and dictionary type, have
4485 been renamed to dict. This reflects a decade of common usage.
4486
Guido van Rossum3fc08d22001-11-15 20:33:10 +00004487- dict() now accepts an iterable object producing 2-sequences. For
4488 example, dict(d.items()) == d for any dictionary d. The argument,
4489 and the elements of the argument, can be any iterable objects.
4490
Guido van Rossum7ad2d1e2001-10-29 22:11:00 +00004491- New-style classes can now have a __del__ method, which is called
4492 when the instance is deleted (just like for classic classes).
4493
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004494- Assignment to object.__dict__ is now possible, for objects that are
4495 instances of new-style classes that have a __dict__ (unless the base
4496 class forbids it).
4497
Guido van Rossumc8e56452001-10-22 00:43:43 +00004498- Methods of built-in types now properly check for keyword arguments
4499 (formerly these were silently ignored). The only built-in methods
4500 that take keyword arguments are __call__, __init__ and __new__.
4501
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004502- The socket function has been converted to a type; see below.
4503
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004504Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004505-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004506
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00004507- Assignment to __debug__ raises SyntaxError at compile-time. This
4508 was promised when 2.1c1 was released as "What's New in Python 2.1c1"
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004509 (see below) says.
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00004510
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004511- Clarified the error messages for unsupported operands to an operator
4512 (like 1 + '').
4513
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004514Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004515-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004516
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004517- mmap has a new keyword argument, "access", allowing a uniform way for
4518 both Windows and Unix users to create read-only, write-through and
4519 copy-on-write memory mappings. This was previously possible only on
4520 Unix. A new keyword argument was required to support this in a
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004521 uniform way because the mmap() signatures had diverged across
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004522 platforms. Thanks to Jay T Miller for repairing this!
4523
Tim Peters169ded02001-11-03 19:57:21 +00004524- By default, the gc.garbage list now contains only those instances in
4525 unreachable cycles that have __del__ methods; in 2.1 it contained all
4526 instances in unreachable cycles. "Instances" here has been generalized
4527 to include instances of both new-style and old-style classes.
4528
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004529- The socket module defines a new method for socket objects,
4530 sendall(). This is like send() but may make multiple calls to
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004531 send() until all data has been sent. Also, the socket function has
4532 been converted to a subclassable type, like list and tuple (etc.)
4533 before it; socket and SocketType are now the same thing.
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004534
4535- Various bugfixes to the curses module. There is now a test suite
4536 for the curses module (you have to run it manually).
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00004537
Guido van Rossum692adf12001-10-30 03:03:03 +00004538- binascii.b2a_base64 no longer places an arbitrary restriction of 57
4539 bytes on its input.
4540
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004541Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004542-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004543
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004544- tkFileDialog exposes a Directory class and askdirectory
Martin v. Löwis25ee87c2001-11-07 22:38:08 +00004545 convenience function.
4546
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00004547- Symbolic group names in regular expressions must be unique. For
4548 example, the regexp r'(?P<abc>)(?P<abc>)' is not allowed, because a
4549 single name can't mean both "group 1" and "group 2" simultaneously.
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004550 Python 2.2 detects this error at regexp compilation time;
4551 previously, the error went undetected, and results were
4552 unpredictable. Also in sre, the pattern.split(), pattern.sub(), and
4553 pattern.subn() methods have been rewritten in C. Also, an
4554 experimental function/method finditer() has been added, which works
4555 like findall() but returns an iterator.
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00004556
Martin v. Löwisb7b32602001-11-02 23:48:20 +00004557- Tix exposes more commands through the classes DirSelectBox,
4558 DirSelectDialog, ListNoteBook, Meter, CheckList, and the
4559 methods tix_addbitmapdir, tix_cget, tix_configure, tix_filedialog,
4560 tix_getbitmap, tix_getimage, tix_option_get, and tix_resetoptions.
4561
Tim Peters98791af2001-10-23 01:59:54 +00004562- Traceback objects are now scanned by cyclic garbage collection, so
4563 cycles created by casual use of sys.exc_info() no longer cause
4564 permanent memory leaks (provided garbage collection is enabled).
4565
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00004566- os.extsep -- a new variable needed by the RISCOS support. It is the
4567 separator used by extensions, and is '.' on all platforms except
4568 RISCOS, where it is '/'. There is no need to use this variable
4569 unless you have a masochistic desire to port your code to RISCOS.
4570
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004571- mimetypes.py has optional support for non-standard, but commonly
4572 found types. guess_type() and guess_extension() now accept an
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004573 optional 'strict' flag, defaulting to true, which controls whether
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004574 recognize non-standard types or not. A few non-standard types we
4575 know about have been added. Also, when run as a script, there are
4576 new -l and -e options.
4577
4578- statcache is now deprecated.
4579
4580- email.Utils.formatdate() now produces the preferred RFC 2822 style
4581 dates with numeric timezones (it used to produce obsolete dates
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004582 hard coded to "GMT" timezone). An optional 'localtime' flag is
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004583 added to produce dates in the local timezone, with daylight savings
4584 time properly taken into account.
4585
4586- In pickle and cPickle, instead of masking errors in load() by
4587 transforming them into SystemError, we let the original exception
4588 propagate out. Also, implement support for __safe_for_unpickling__
4589 in pickle, as it already was supported in cPickle.
4590
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004591Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004592-----------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004593
4594Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004595-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004596
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004597- The dbm module is built using libdb1 if available. The bsddb module
4598 is built with libdb3 if available.
4599
4600- Misc/Makefile.pre.in has been removed by BDFL pronouncement.
4601
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004602C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004603-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004604
Tim Peters1fc240e2001-10-26 05:06:50 +00004605- New function PySequence_Fast_GET_SIZE() returns the size of a non-
4606 NULL result from PySequence_Fast(), more quickly than calling
4607 PySequence_Size().
4608
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004609- New argument unpacking function PyArg_UnpackTuple() added.
4610
4611- New functions PyObject_CallFunctionObjArgs() and
4612 PyObject_CallMethodObjArgs() have been added to make it more
4613 convenient and efficient to call functions and methods from C.
4614
4615- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() no longer masks errors, so it's
4616 possible that this will propagate errors it didn't before.
4617
4618- New function PyObject_CheckReadBuffer(), which returns true if its
4619 argument supports the single-segment readable buffer interface.
4620
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004621New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004622-------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004623
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004624- We've finally confirmed that this release builds on HP-UX 11.00,
4625 *with* threads, and passes the test suite.
4626
Tim Peters7a33d8b2001-11-05 02:51:07 +00004627- Thanks to a series of patches from Michael Muller, Python may build
4628 again under OS/2 Visual Age C++.
4629
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00004630- Updated RISCOS port by Dietmar Schwertberger.
4631
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004632Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004633-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004634
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00004635- Added a test script for the curses module. It isn't run automatically;
4636 regrtest.py must be run with '-u curses' to enable it.
4637
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004638Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004639-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004640
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004641Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004642----
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004643
4644- PythonScript has been moved to unsupported and is slated to be
4645 removed completely in the next release.
4646
4647- It should now be possible to build applets that work on both OS9 and
4648 OSX.
4649
4650- The core is now linked with CoreServices not Carbon; as a side
4651 result, default 8bit encoding on OSX is now ASCII.
4652
4653- Python should now build on OSX 10.1.1
4654
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004655
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004656What's New in Python 2.2b1?
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004657===========================
4658
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004659*Release date: 19-Oct-2001*
4660
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004661Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004662--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004663
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004664- New-style classes are now always dynamic (except for built-in and
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004665 extension types). There is no longer a performance penalty, and I
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004666 no longer see another reason to keep this baggage around. One relic
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004667 remains: the __dict__ of a new-style class is a read-only proxy; you
4668 must set the class's attribute to modify it. As a consequence, the
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004669 __defined__ attribute of new-style types no longer exists, for lack
4670 of need: there is once again only one __dict__ (although in the
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004671 future a __cache__ may be resurrected with a similar function, if I
4672 can prove that it actually speeds things up).
Guido van Rossum50fda3b2001-10-04 19:46:06 +00004673
Tim Peters1c9ca872001-10-04 06:43:12 +00004674- C.__doc__ now works as expected for new-style classes (in 2.2a4 it
4675 always returned None, even when there was a class docstring).
4676
4677- doctest now finds and runs docstrings attached to new-style classes,
4678 class methods, static methods, and properties.
4679
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004680Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004681-----------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004682
Guido van Rossuma8bcf802001-10-15 15:53:58 +00004683- A very subtle syntactical pitfall in list comprehensions was fixed.
4684 For example: [a+b for a in 'abc', for b in 'def']. The comma in
4685 this example is a mistake. Previously, this would silently let 'a'
4686 iterate over the singleton tuple ('abc',), yielding ['abcd', 'abce',
4687 'abcf'] rather than the intended ['ad', 'ae', 'af', 'bd', 'be',
4688 'bf', 'cd', 'ce', 'cf']. Now, this is flagged as a syntax error.
4689 Note that [a for a in <singleton>] is a convoluted way to say
4690 [<singleton>] anyway, so it's not like any expressiveness is lost.
4691
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004692- getattr(obj, name, default) now only catches AttributeError, as
4693 documented, rather than returning the default value for all
4694 exceptions (which could mask bugs in a __getattr__ hook, for
4695 example).
4696
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00004697- Weak reference objects are now part of the core and offer a C API.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00004698 A bug which could allow a core dump when binary operations involved
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00004699 proxy reference has been fixed. weakref.ReferenceError is now a
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004700 built-in exception.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00004701
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00004702- unicode(obj) now behaves more like str(obj), accepting arbitrary
4703 objects, and calling a __unicode__ method if it exists.
4704 unicode(obj, encoding) and unicode(obj, encoding, errors) still
Marc-André Lemburgb5507ec2001-10-19 12:02:29 +00004705 require an 8-bit string or character buffer argument.
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00004706
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004707- isinstance() now allows any object as the first argument and a
4708 class, a type or something with a __bases__ tuple attribute for the
4709 second argument. The second argument may also be a tuple of a
4710 class, type, or something with __bases__, in which case isinstance()
4711 will return true if the first argument is an instance of any of the
4712 things contained in the second argument tuple. E.g.
4713
4714 isinstance(x, (A, B))
4715
4716 returns true if x is an instance of A or B.
4717
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004718Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004719-----------------
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004720
4721- thread.start_new_thread() now returns the thread ID (previously None).
4722
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00004723- binascii has now two quopri support functions, a2b_qp and b2a_qp.
4724
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00004725- readline now supports setting the startup_hook and the
4726 pre_event_hook, and adds the add_history() function.
Martin v. Löwis0daad592001-09-30 21:09:59 +00004727
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00004728- os and posix supports chroot(), setgroups() and unsetenv() where
4729 available. The stat(), fstat(), statvfs() and fstatvfs() functions
4730 now return "pseudo-sequences" -- the various fields can now be
4731 accessed as attributes (e.g. os.stat("/").st_mtime) but for
4732 backwards compatibility they also behave as a fixed-length sequence.
4733 Some platform-specific fields (e.g. st_rdev) are only accessible as
Guido van Rossum98bf58f2001-10-18 20:34:25 +00004734 attributes.
4735
4736- time: localtime(), gmtime() and strptime() now return a
4737 pseudo-sequence similar to the os.stat() return value, with
4738 attributes like tm_year etc.
Martin v. Löwis16628c92001-10-04 22:46:41 +00004739
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004740- Decompression objects in the zlib module now accept an optional
4741 second parameter to decompress() that specifies the maximum amount
4742 of memory to use for the uncompressed data.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004743
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00004744- optional SSL support in the socket module now exports OpenSSL
4745 functions RAND_add(), RAND_egd(), and RAND_status(). These calls
4746 are useful on platforms like Solaris where OpenSSL does not
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004747 automatically seed its PRNG. Also, the keyfile and certfile
4748 arguments to socket.ssl() are now optional.
4749
4750- posixmodule (and by extension, the os module on POSIX platforms) now
4751 exports O_LARGEFILE, O_DIRECT, O_DIRECTORY, and O_NOFOLLOW.
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00004752
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004753Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004754-------
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00004755
Tim Peters7402f792001-10-02 03:53:41 +00004756- doctest now excludes functions and classes not defined by the module
4757 being tested, thanks to Tim Hochberg.
4758
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00004759- HotShot, a new profiler implemented using a C-based callback, has
4760 been added. This substantially reduces the overhead of profiling,
4761 but it is still quite preliminary. Support modules and
4762 documentation will be added in upcoming releases (before 2.2 final).
4763
Guido van Rossumc4b09b42001-10-04 10:19:00 +00004764- profile now produces correct output in situations where an exception
4765 raised in Python is cleared by C code (e.g. hasattr()). This used
4766 to cause wrong output, including spurious claims of recursive
4767 functions and attribution of time spent to the wrong function.
4768
Tim Peters0a1fc4e2001-10-07 03:12:08 +00004769 The code and documentation for the derived OldProfile and HotProfile
4770 profiling classes was removed. The code hasn't worked for years (if
4771 you tried to use them, they raised exceptions). OldProfile
4772 intended to reproduce the behavior of the profiler Python used more
4773 than 7 years ago, and isn't interesting anymore. HotProfile intended
4774 to provide a faster profiler (but producing less information), and
4775 that's a worthy goal we intend to meet via a different approach (but
4776 without losing information).
4777
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00004778- Profile.calibrate() has a new implementation that should deliver
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00004779 a much better system-specific calibration constant. The constant can
4780 now be specified in an instance constructor, or as a Profile class or
4781 instance variable, instead of by editing profile.py's source code.
4782 Calibration must still be done manually (see the docs for the profile
4783 module).
4784
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004785 Note that Profile.calibrate() must be overridden by subclasses.
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00004786 Improving the accuracy required exploiting detailed knowledge of
4787 profiler internals; the earlier method abstracted away the details
4788 and measured a simplified model instead, but consequently computed
4789 a constant too small by a factor of 2 on some modern machines.
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00004790
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00004791- quopri's encode and decode methods take an optional header parameter,
Jeremy Hylton6f543b62001-10-16 20:42:52 +00004792 which indicates whether output is intended for the header 'Q'
4793 encoding.
4794
Guido van Rossuma5343cc2001-10-18 18:02:07 +00004795- The SocketServer.ThreadingMixIn class now closes the request after
4796 finish_request() returns. (Not when it errors out though.)
4797
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004798- The nntplib module's NNTP.body() method has grown a 'file' argument
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004799 to allow saving the message body to a file.
4800
4801- The email package has added a class email.Parser.HeaderParser which
4802 only parses headers and does not recurse into the message's body.
4803 Also, the module/class MIMEAudio has been added for representing
4804 audio data (contributed by Anthony Baxter).
4805
4806- ftplib should be able to handle files > 2GB.
4807
4808- ConfigParser.getboolean() now also interprets TRUE, FALSE, YES, NO,
4809 ON, and OFF.
4810
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00004811- xml.dom.minidom NodeList objects now support the length attribute
4812 and item() method as required by the DOM specifications.
4813
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00004814Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004815-----------
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00004816
4817- Demo/dns was removed. It no longer serves any purpose; a package
4818 derived from it is now maintained by Anthony Baxter, see
4819 http://PyDNS.SourceForge.net.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004820
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004821- The freeze tool has been made more robust, and two new options have
4822 been added: -X and -E.
4823
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004824Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004825-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004826
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004827- configure will use CXX in LINKCC if CXX is used to build main() and
4828 the system requires to link a C++ main using the C++ compiler.
4829
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004830C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004831-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004832
Guido van Rossum6c4bce32001-10-18 19:20:25 +00004833- The documentation for the tp_compare slot is updated to require that
4834 the return value must be -1, 0, 1; an arbitrary number <0 or >0 is
4835 not correct. This is not yet enforced but will be enforced in
4836 Python 2.3; even later, we may use -2 to indicate errors and +2 for
4837 "NotImplemented". Right now, -1 should be used for an error return.
4838
Tim Petersd38b1c72001-09-30 05:09:37 +00004839- PyLong_AsLongLong() now accepts int (as well as long) arguments.
4840 Consequently, PyArg_ParseTuple's 'L' code also accepts int (as well
4841 as long) arguments.
4842
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00004843- PyThread_start_new_thread() now returns a long int giving the thread
4844 ID, if one can be calculated; it returns -1 for error, 0 if no
4845 thread ID is calculated (this is an incompatible change, but only
4846 the thread module used this API). This code has only really been
4847 tested on Linux and Windows; other platforms please beware (and
4848 report any bugs or strange behavior).
4849
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00004850- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() no longer accepts Unicode objects as
4851 input.
4852
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004853New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004854-------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004855
4856Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004857-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004858
4859Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004860-------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004861
Tim Peters04cf1d32001-10-09 22:39:40 +00004862- Installer: If you install IDLE, and don't disable file-extension
4863 registration, a new "Edit with IDLE" context (right-click) menu entry
4864 is created for .py and .pyw files.
4865
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004866- The signal module now supports SIGBREAK on Windows, thanks to Steven
4867 Scott. Note that SIGBREAK is unique to Windows. The default SIGBREAK
4868 action remains to call Win32 ExitProcess(). This can be changed via
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004869 signal.signal(). For example::
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004870
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004871 # Make Ctrl+Break raise KeyboardInterrupt, like Python's default Ctrl+C
4872 # (SIGINT) behavior.
4873 import signal
4874 signal.signal(signal.SIGBREAK, signal.default_int_handler)
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004875
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004876 try:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004877 while 1:
4878 pass
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004879 except KeyboardInterrupt:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004880 # We get here on Ctrl+C or Ctrl+Break now; if we had not changed
4881 # SIGBREAK, only on Ctrl+C (and Ctrl+Break would terminate the
4882 # program without the possibility for any Python-level cleanup).
4883 print "Clean exit"
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004884
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004885
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004886What's New in Python 2.2a4?
4887===========================
4888
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004889*Release date: 28-Sep-2001*
4890
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004891Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004892--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004893
4894- pydoc and inspect are now aware of new-style classes;
4895 e.g. help(list) at the interactive prompt now shows proper
4896 documentation for all operations on list objects.
4897
4898- Applications using Jim Fulton's ExtensionClass module can now safely
4899 be used with Python 2.2. In particular, Zope 2.4.1 now works with
4900 Python 2.2 (as well as with Python 2.1.1). The Demo/metaclass
4901 examples also work again. It is hoped that Gtk and Boost also work
4902 with 2.2a4 and beyond. (If you can confirm this, please write
4903 webmaster@python.org; if there are still problems, please open a bug
4904 report on SourceForge.)
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004905
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00004906- property() now takes 4 keyword arguments: fget, fset, fdel and doc.
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004907 These map to read-only attributes 'fget', 'fset', 'fdel', and '__doc__'
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00004908 in the constructed property object. fget, fset and fdel weren't
4909 discoverable from Python in 2.2a3. __doc__ is new, and allows to
4910 associate a docstring with a property.
4911
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004912- Comparison overloading is now more completely implemented. For
4913 example, a str subclass instance can properly be compared to a str
4914 instance, and it can properly overload comparison. Ditto for most
4915 other built-in object types.
4916
4917- The repr() of new-style classes has changed; instead of <type
4918 'M.Foo'> a new-style class is now rendered as <class 'M.Foo'>,
4919 *except* for built-in types, which are still rendered as <type
4920 'Foo'> (to avoid upsetting existing code that might parse or
4921 otherwise rely on repr() of certain type objects).
4922
4923- The repr() of new-style objects is now always <Foo object at XXX>;
4924 previously, it was sometimes <Foo instance at XXX>.
4925
4926- For new-style classes, what was previously called __getattr__ is now
4927 called __getattribute__. This method, if defined, is called for
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00004928 *every* attribute access. A new __getattr__ hook more similar to the
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004929 one in classic classes is defined which is called only if regular
4930 attribute access raises AttributeError; to catch *all* attribute
4931 access, you can use __getattribute__ (for new-style classes). If
4932 both are defined, __getattribute__ is called first, and if it raises
4933 AttributeError, __getattr__ is called.
4934
4935- The __class__ attribute of new-style objects can be assigned to.
4936 The new class must have the same C-level object layout as the old
4937 class.
4938
4939- The builtin file type can be subclassed now. In the usual pattern,
4940 "file" is the name of the builtin type, and file() is a new builtin
4941 constructor, with the same signature as the builtin open() function.
4942 file() is now the preferred way to open a file.
4943
4944- Previously, __new__ would only see sequential arguments passed to
4945 the type in a constructor call; __init__ would see both sequential
4946 and keyword arguments. This made no sense whatsoever any more, so
4947 now both __new__ and __init__ see all arguments.
4948
4949- Previously, hash() applied to an instance of a subclass of str or
4950 unicode always returned 0. This has been repaired.
4951
4952- Previously, an operation on an instance of a subclass of an
4953 immutable type (int, long, float, complex, tuple, str, unicode),
4954 where the subtype didn't override the operation (and so the
4955 operation was handled by the builtin type), could return that
4956 instance instead a value of the base type. For example, if s was of
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004957 a str subclass type, s[:] returned s as-is. Now it returns a str
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004958 with the same value as s.
4959
Barry Warsaw86fbaf82001-09-28 15:26:12 +00004960- Provisional support for pickling new-style objects has been added.
4961
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004962Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004963----
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004964
Tim Peters2c9aa5e2001-09-23 04:06:05 +00004965- file.writelines() now accepts any iterable object producing strings.
4966
Marc-André Lemburgaefd7662001-09-20 12:59:37 +00004967- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() now works very much like
4968 PyObject_Str(obj) in that it tries to use __str__/tp_str
4969 on the object if the object is not a string or buffer. This
4970 makes unicode() behave like str() when applied to non-string/buffer
4971 objects.
4972
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00004973- PyFile_WriteObject now passes Unicode objects to the file's write
4974 method. As a result, all file-like objects which may be the target
Martin v. Löwis2777c022001-09-19 13:47:32 +00004975 of a print statement must support Unicode objects, i.e. they must
4976 at least convert them into ASCII strings.
4977
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004978- Thread scheduling on Solaris should be improved; it is no longer
4979 necessary to insert a small sleep at the start of a thread in order
4980 to let other runnable threads be scheduled.
4981
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004982Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004983-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004984
Marc-André Lemburgbf990172001-09-27 14:17:33 +00004985- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
4986 read character buffer compatible objects for their .write() methods.
4987 These objects are converted to strings and then handled as such
4988 by the instances.
4989
Barry Warsaw2f600732001-09-24 04:28:10 +00004990- The "email" package has been added. This is basically a port of the
4991 mimelib package <http://sf.net/projects/mimelib> with API changes
4992 and some implementations updated to use iterators and generators.
4993
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00004994- difflib.ndiff() and difflib.Differ.compare() are generators now. This
4995 restores the ability of Tools/scripts/ndiff.py to start producing output
4996 before the entire comparison is complete.
4997
Barry Warsaw58b072d2001-09-22 04:44:21 +00004998- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
4999 iteration just like file objects (i.e. their .readline() method is
5000 called for each iteration until it returns an empty string).
5001
Marc-André Lemburg494f2ae2001-09-19 11:33:31 +00005002- The codecs module has grown four new helper APIs to access
5003 builtin codecs: getencoder(), getdecoder(), getreader(),
5004 getwriter().
5005
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005006- SimpleXMLRPCServer: a new module (based upon SimpleHTMLServer)
5007 simplifies writing XML RPC servers.
5008
Barry Warsaw647d5e82001-09-28 17:01:02 +00005009- os.path.realpath(): a new function that returns the absolute pathname
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005010 after interpretation of symbolic links. On non-Unix systems, this
5011 is an alias for os.path.abspath().
5012
Tim Peters16a77ad2001-09-08 04:00:12 +00005013- operator.indexOf() (PySequence_Index() in the C API) now works with any
5014 iterable object.
5015
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005016- smtplib now supports various authentication and security features of
5017 the SMTP protocol through the new login() and starttls() methods.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00005018
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005019- hmac: a new module implementing keyed hashing for message
5020 authentication.
5021
5022- mimetypes now recognizes more extensions and file types. At the
5023 same time, some mappings not sanctioned by IANA were removed.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00005024
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005025- The "compiler" package has been brought up to date to the state of
Guido van Rossumc9ed5dc2001-09-20 05:30:24 +00005026 Python 2.2 bytecode generation. It has also been promoted from a
5027 Tool to a standard library package. (Tools/compiler still exists as
5028 a sample driver.)
5029
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005030Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005031-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005032
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005033- Large file support (LFS) is now automatic when the platform supports
5034 it; no more manual configuration tweaks are needed. On Linux, at
5035 least, it's possible to have a system whose C library supports large
5036 files but whose kernel doesn't; in this case, large file support is
5037 still enabled but doesn't do you any good unless you upgrade your
5038 kernel or share your Python executable with another system whose
5039 kernel has large file support.
5040
5041- The configure script now supplies plausible defaults in a
5042 cross-compilation environment. This doesn't mean that the supplied
5043 values are always correct, or that cross-compilation now works
5044 flawlessly -- but it's a first step (and it shuts up most of
5045 autoconf's warnings about AC_TRY_RUN).
5046
5047- The Unix build is now a bit less chatty, courtesy of the parser
5048 generator. The build is completely silent (except for errors) when
5049 using "make -s", thanks to a -q option to setup.py.
5050
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005051C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005052-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005053
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005054- The "structmember" API now supports some new flag bits to deny read
5055 and/or write access to attributes in restricted execution mode.
5056
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005057New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005058-------------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005059
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005060- Compaq's iPAQ handheld, running the "familiar" Linux distribution
5061 (http://familiar.handhelds.org).
5062
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005063Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005064-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005065
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00005066- The "classic" standard tests, which work by comparing stdout to
5067 an expected-output file under Lib/test/output/, no longer stop at
5068 the first mismatch. Instead the test is run to completion, and a
5069 variant of ndiff-style comparison is used to report all differences.
5070 This is much easier to understand than the previous style of reporting.
5071
5072- The unittest-based standard tests now use regrtest's test_main()
5073 convention, instead of running as a side-effect of merely being
5074 imported. This allows these tests to be run in more natural and
5075 flexible ways as unittests, outside the regrtest framework.
5076
5077- regrtest.py is much better integrated with unittest and doctest now,
5078 especially in regard to reporting errors.
5079
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005080Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005081-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005082
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005083- Large file support now also works for files > 4GB, on filesystems
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00005084 that support it (NTFS under Windows 2000). See "What's New in
5085 Python 2.2a3" for more detail.
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005086
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005087
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005088What's New in Python 2.2a3?
5089===========================
5090
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005091*Release Date: 07-Sep-2001*
5092
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005093Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005094----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005095
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005096- Conversion of long to float now raises OverflowError if the long is too
5097 big to represent as a C double.
5098
Tim Peters32f453e2001-09-03 08:35:41 +00005099- The 3-argument builtin pow() no longer allows a third non-None argument
5100 if either of the first two arguments is a float, or if both are of
5101 integer types and the second argument is negative (in which latter case
5102 the arguments are converted to float, so this is really the same
5103 restriction).
5104
Tim Peters5d2b77c2001-09-03 05:47:38 +00005105- The builtin dir() now returns more information, and sometimes much
5106 more, generally naming all attributes of an object, and all attributes
5107 reachable from the object via its class, and from its class's base
5108 classes, and so on from them too. Example: in 2.2a2, dir([]) returned
5109 an empty list. In 2.2a3,
5110
5111 >>> dir([])
5112 ['__add__', '__class__', '__contains__', '__delattr__', '__delitem__',
5113 '__eq__', '__ge__', '__getattr__', '__getitem__', '__getslice__',
5114 '__gt__', '__hash__', '__iadd__', '__imul__', '__init__', '__le__',
5115 '__len__', '__lt__', '__mul__', '__ne__', '__new__', '__repr__',
5116 '__rmul__', '__setattr__', '__setitem__', '__setslice__', '__str__',
5117 'append', 'count', 'extend', 'index', 'insert', 'pop', 'remove',
5118 'reverse', 'sort']
5119
5120 dir(module) continues to return only the module's attributes, though.
5121
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005122- Overflowing operations on plain ints now return a long int rather
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005123 than raising OverflowError. This is a partial implementation of PEP
5124 237. You can use -Wdefault::OverflowWarning to enable a warning for
5125 this situation, and -Werror::OverflowWarning to revert to the old
5126 OverflowError exception.
5127
Guido van Rossum61c345f2001-09-04 03:26:15 +00005128- A new command line option, -Q<arg>, is added to control run-time
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005129 warnings for the use of classic division. (See PEP 238.) Possible
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00005130 values are -Qold, -Qwarn, -Qwarnall, and -Qnew. The default is
5131 -Qold, meaning the / operator has its classic meaning and no
5132 warnings are issued. Using -Qwarn issues a run-time warning about
5133 all uses of classic division for int and long arguments; -Qwarnall
5134 also warns about classic division for float and complex arguments
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00005135 (for use with fixdiv.py).
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005136 [Note: the remainder of this item (preserved below) became
5137 obsolete in 2.2c1 -- -Qnew has global effect in 2.2] ::
5138
5139 Using -Qnew is questionable; it turns on new division by default, but
5140 only in the __main__ module. You can usefully combine -Qwarn or
5141 -Qwarnall and -Qnew: this gives the __main__ module new division, and
5142 warns about classic division everywhere else.
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005143
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005144- Many built-in types can now be subclassed. This applies to int,
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005145 long, float, str, unicode, and tuple. (The types complex, list and
5146 dictionary can also be subclassed; this was introduced earlier.)
5147 Note that restrictions apply when subclassing immutable built-in
5148 types: you can only affect the value of the instance by overloading
5149 __new__. You can add mutable attributes, and the subclass instances
5150 will have a __dict__ attribute, but you cannot change the "value"
5151 (as implemented by the base class) of an immutable subclass instance
5152 once it is created.
5153
Guido van Rossumaaf80c82001-09-02 13:44:35 +00005154- The dictionary constructor now takes an optional argument, a
5155 mapping-like object, and initializes the dictionary from its
5156 (key, value) pairs.
5157
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005158- A new built-in type, super, has been added. This facilitates making
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005159 "cooperative super calls" in a multiple inheritance setting. For an
5160 explanation, see http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#cooperation
5161
Guido van Rossum8d7234d2001-09-06 22:02:58 +00005162- A new built-in type, property, has been added. This enables the
5163 creation of "properties". These are attributes implemented by
5164 getter and setter functions (or only one of these for read-only or
5165 write-only attributes), without the need to override __getattr__.
5166 See http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#property
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005167
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005168- The syntax of floating-point and imaginary literals has been
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005169 liberalized, to allow leading zeroes. Examples of literals now
5170 legal that were SyntaxErrors before:
5171
5172 00.0 0e3 0100j 07.5 00000000000000000008.
5173
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005174- An old tokenizer bug allowed floating point literals with an incomplete
Tim Petersc6d95812001-08-28 20:56:27 +00005175 exponent, such as 1e and 3.1e-. Such literals now raise SyntaxError.
5176
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005177Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005178-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005179
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00005180- telnetlib includes symbolic names for the options, and support for
Martin v. Löwis1da9c572002-11-04 09:56:00 +00005181 setting an option negotiation callback. It also supports processing
5182 of suboptions.
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00005183
Tim Petersa40c7932001-09-05 22:36:56 +00005184- The new C standard no longer requires that math libraries set errno to
5185 ERANGE on overflow. For platform libraries that exploit this new
5186 freedom, Python's overflow-checking was wholly broken. A new overflow-
5187 checking scheme attempts to repair that, but may not be reliable on all
5188 platforms (C doesn't seem to provide anything both useful and portable
5189 in this area anymore).
5190
Martin v. Löwis44f86962001-09-05 13:44:54 +00005191- Asynchronous timeout actions are available through the new class
5192 threading.Timer.
5193
Tim Peters78526162001-09-05 00:53:45 +00005194- math.log and math.log10 now return sensible results for even huge
5195 long arguments. For example, math.log10(10 ** 10000) ~= 10000.0.
5196
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005197- A new function, imp.lock_held(), returns 1 when the import lock is
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005198 currently held. See the docs for the imp module.
5199
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005200- pickle, cPickle and marshal on 32-bit platforms can now correctly read
Tim Peters82112372001-08-29 02:28:42 +00005201 dumps containing ints written on platforms where Python ints are 8 bytes.
5202 When read on a box where Python ints are 4 bytes, such values are
5203 converted to Python longs.
5204
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005205- In restricted execution mode (using the rexec module), unmarshalling
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005206 code objects is no longer allowed. This plugs a security hole.
5207
Steve Purcell6091cd62001-09-06 16:05:17 +00005208- unittest.TestResult instances no longer store references to tracebacks
5209 generated by test failures. This prevents unexpected dangling references
5210 to objects that should be garbage collected between tests.
5211
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005212Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005213-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005214
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00005215- Tools/scripts/fixdiv.py has been added which can be used to fix
5216 division operators as per PEP 238.
5217
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005218Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005219-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005220
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00005221- If you are an adventurous person using Mac OS X you may want to look at
5222 Mac/OSX. There is a Makefile there that will build Python as a real Mac
5223 application, which can be used for experimenting with Carbon or Cocoa.
5224 Discussion of this on pythonmac-sig, please.
5225
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00005226C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005227-----
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00005228
5229- New function PyObject_Dir(obj), like Python __builtin__.dir(obj).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005230
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005231- Note that PyLong_AsDouble can fail! This has always been true, but no
5232 callers checked for it. It's more likely to fail now, because overflow
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00005233 errors are properly detected now. The proper way to check::
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005234
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005235 double x = PyLong_AsDouble(some_long_object);
5236 if (x == -1.0 && PyErr_Occurred()) {
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00005237 /* The conversion failed. */
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005238 }
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005239
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005240- The GC API has been changed. Extensions that use the old API will still
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005241 compile but will not participate in GC. To upgrade an extension
5242 module:
5243
5244 - rename Py_TPFLAGS_GC to PyTPFLAGS_HAVE_GC
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005245
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005246 - use PyObject_GC_New or PyObject_GC_NewVar to allocate objects and
5247 PyObject_GC_Del to deallocate them
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005248
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005249 - rename PyObject_GC_Init to PyObject_GC_Track and PyObject_GC_Fini
5250 to PyObject_GC_UnTrack
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005251
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005252 - remove PyGC_HEAD_SIZE from object size calculations
5253
5254 - remove calls to PyObject_AS_GC and PyObject_FROM_GC
5255
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005256- Two new functions: PyString_FromFormat() and PyString_FromFormatV().
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005257 These can be used safely to construct string objects from a
5258 sprintf-style format string (similar to the format string supported
5259 by PyErr_Format()).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005260
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005261New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005262-------------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005263
Tim Petersb7da0902001-09-02 23:01:43 +00005264- Stephen Hansen contributed patches sufficient to get a clean compile
5265 under Borland C (Windows), but he reports problems running it and ran
5266 out of time to complete the port. Volunteers? Expect a MemoryError
5267 when importing the types module; this is probably shallow, and
5268 causing later failures too.
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005269
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005270Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005271-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005272
5273Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005274-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005275
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00005276- Large file support is now enabled on Win32 platforms as well as on
5277 Win64. This means that, for example, you can use f.tell() and f.seek()
5278 to manipulate files larger than 2 gigabytes (provided you have enough
5279 disk space, and are using a Windows filesystem that supports large
Tim Peters9a9471c2001-09-11 23:18:51 +00005280 partitions). Windows filesystem limits: FAT has a 2GB (gigabyte)
5281 filesize limit, and large file support makes no difference there.
5282 FAT32's limit is 4GB, and files >= 2GB are easier to use from Python now.
5283 NTFS has no practical limit on file size, and files of any size can be
5284 used from Python now.
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00005285
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005286- The w9xpopen hack is now used on Windows NT and 2000 too when COMPSPEC
Tim Peters402d5982001-08-27 06:37:48 +00005287 points to command.com (patch from Brian Quinlan).
5288
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005289
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005290What's New in Python 2.2a2?
5291===========================
5292
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005293*Release Date: 22-Aug-2001*
5294
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005295Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005296-----
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005297
Barry Warsaw18b2ecf2001-08-22 20:26:56 +00005298- Tim Peters developed a brand new Windows installer using Wise 8.1,
5299 generously donated to us by Wise Solutions.
5300
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005301- configure supports a new option --enable-unicode, with the values
5302 ucs2 and ucs4 (new in 2.2a1). With --disable-unicode, the Unicode
5303 type and supporting code is completely removed from the interpreter.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005304
Jack Jansen32ce0cd2001-08-21 19:28:20 +00005305- A new configure option --enable-framework builds a Mac OS X framework,
5306 which "make frameworkinstall" will install. This provides a starting
5307 point for more mac-like functionality, join pythonmac-sig@python.org
5308 if you are interested in helping.
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005309
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005310- The NeXT platform is no longer supported.
5311
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005312- The 'new' module is now statically linked.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005313
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005314Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005315-----
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005316
5317- The new Tools/scripts/cleanfuture.py can be used to automatically
Andrew M. Kuchlingb0532092001-08-15 15:54:56 +00005318 edit out obsolete future statements from Python source code. See
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005319 the module docstring for details.
5320
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005321Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005322-----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005323
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005324- regrtest.py now knows which tests are expected to be skipped on some
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005325 platforms, allowing to give clearer test result output. regrtest
5326 also has optional --use/-u switch to run normally disabled tests
5327 which require network access or consume significant disk resources.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005328
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005329- Several new tests in the standard test suite, with special thanks to
5330 Nick Mathewson.
5331
5332Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005333----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005334
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005335- The floor division operator // has been added as outlined in PEP
5336 238. The / operator still provides classic division (and will until
5337 Python 3.0) unless "from __future__ import division" is included, in
5338 which case the / operator will provide true division. The operator
5339 module provides truediv() and floordiv() functions. Augmented
5340 assignment variants are included, as are the equivalent overloadable
5341 methods and C API methods. See the PEP for a full discussion:
5342 <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0238.html>
5343
Tim Peters6cd6a822001-08-17 22:11:27 +00005344- Future statements are now effective in simulated interactive shells
5345 (like IDLE). This should "just work" by magic, but read Michael
5346 Hudson's "Future statements in simulated shells" PEP 264 for full
5347 details: <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0264.html>.
5348
Guido van Rossumf86ddd22001-08-17 21:21:04 +00005349- The type/class unification (PEP 252-253) was integrated into the
5350 trunk and is not so tentative any more (the exact specification of
5351 some features is still tentative). A lot of work has done on fixing
5352 bugs and adding robustness and features (performance still has to
5353 come a long way).
5354
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00005355- Warnings about a mismatch in the Python API during extension import
5356 now use the Python warning framework (which makes it possible to
5357 write filters for these warnings).
5358
Barry Warsaw9b3be7f2001-08-14 18:35:02 +00005359- A function's __dict__ (aka func_dict) will now always be a
5360 dictionary. It used to be possible to delete it or set it to None,
5361 but now both actions raise TypeErrors. It is still legal to set it
5362 to a dictionary object. Getting func.__dict__ before any attributes
5363 have been assigned now returns an empty dictionary instead of None.
5364
Guido van Rossum32aa5d22001-09-05 18:43:35 +00005365- A new command line option, -E, was added which disables the use of
5366 all environment variables, or at least those that are specifically
5367 significant to Python. Usually those have a name starting with
5368 "PYTHON". This was used to fix a problem where the tests fail if
5369 the user happens to have PYTHONHOME or PYTHONPATH pointing to an
5370 older distribution.
5371
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005372Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005373-------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005374
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005375- New class Differ and new functions ndiff() and restore() in difflib.py.
5376 These package the algorithms used by the popular Tools/scripts/ndiff.py,
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005377 for programmatic reuse.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005378
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005379- New function xml.sax.saxutils.quoteattr(): Quote an XML attribute
5380 value using the minimal quoting required for the value; more
5381 reliable than using xml.sax.saxutils.escape() for attribute values.
5382
5383- Readline completion support for cmd.Cmd was added.
5384
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005385- Calling os.tempnam() or os.tmpnam() generate RuntimeWarnings.
5386
5387- Added function threading.BoundedSemaphore()
5388
5389- Added Ka-Ping Yee's cgitb.py module.
5390
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005391- The 'new' module now exposes the CO_xxx flags.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005392
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00005393- The gc module offers the get_referents function.
5394
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005395New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005396-------------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005397
5398C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005399-----
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005400
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00005401- Two new APIs PyOS_snprintf() and PyOS_vsnprintf() were added
5402 which provide a cross-platform implementations for the
5403 relatively new snprintf()/vsnprintf() C lib APIs. In contrast to
5404 the standard sprintf() and vsprintf() C lib APIs, these versions
5405 apply bounds checking on the used buffer which enhances protection
5406 against buffer overruns.
5407
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00005408- Unicode APIs now use name mangling to assure that mixing interpreters
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005409 and extensions using different Unicode widths is rendered next to
5410 impossible. Trying to import an incompatible Unicode-aware extension
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00005411 will result in an ImportError. Unicode extensions writers must make
5412 sure to check the Unicode width compatibility in their extensions by
5413 using at least one of the mangled Unicode APIs in the extension.
5414
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005415- Two new flags METH_NOARGS and METH_O are available in method definition
5416 tables to simplify implementation of methods with no arguments and a
5417 single untyped argument. Calling such methods is more efficient than
5418 calling corresponding METH_VARARGS methods. METH_OLDARGS is now
5419 deprecated.
5420
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005421Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005422-------
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005423
5424- "import module" now compiles module.pyw if it exists and nothing else
5425 relevant is found.
5426
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005427
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005428What's New in Python 2.2a1?
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005429===========================
5430
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005431*Release date: 18-Jul-2001*
5432
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005433Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005434----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005435
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00005436- TENTATIVELY, a large amount of code implementing much of what's
5437 described in PEP 252 (Making Types Look More Like Classes) and PEP
5438 253 (Subtyping Built-in Types) was added. This will be released
5439 with Python 2.2a1. Documentation will be provided separately
5440 through http://www.python.org/2.2/. The purpose of releasing this
5441 with Python 2.2a1 is to test backwards compatibility. It is
5442 possible, though not likely, that a decision is made not to release
5443 this code as part of 2.2 final, if any serious backwards
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005444 incompatibilities are found during alpha testing that cannot be
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00005445 repaired.
5446
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005447- Generators were added; this is a new way to create an iterator (see
Tim Peters11a0d102001-07-17 18:48:00 +00005448 below) using what looks like a simple function containing one or
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005449 more 'yield' statements. See PEP 255. Since this adds a new
5450 keyword to the language, this feature must be enabled by including a
5451 future statement: "from __future__ import generators" (see PEP 236).
5452 Generators will become a standard feature in a future release
5453 (probably 2.3). Without this future statement, 'yield' remains an
5454 ordinary identifier, but a warning is issued each time it is used.
5455 (These warnings currently don't conform to the warnings framework of
5456 PEP 230; we intend to fix this in 2.2a2.)
5457
Marc-André Lemburg12e74b32001-05-22 08:58:23 +00005458- The UTF-16 codec was modified to be more RFC compliant. It will now
5459 only remove BOM characters at the start of the string and then
5460 only if running in native mode (UTF-16-LE and -BE won't remove a
5461 leading BMO character).
5462
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005463- Strings now have a new method .decode() to complement the already
5464 existing .encode() method. These two methods provide direct access
5465 to the corresponding decoders and encoders of the registered codecs.
5466
5467 To enhance the usability of the .encode() method, the special
5468 casing of Unicode object return values was dropped (Unicode objects
5469 were auto-magically converted to string using the default encoding).
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005470
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005471 Both methods will now return whatever the codec in charge of the
5472 requested encoding returns as object, e.g. Unicode codecs will
5473 return Unicode objects when decoding is requested ("äöü".decode("latin-1")
5474 will return u"äöü"). This enables codec writer to create codecs
5475 for various simple to use conversions.
5476
5477 New codecs were added to demonstrate these new features (the .encode()
5478 and .decode() columns indicate the type of the returned objects):
5479
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005480 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5481 |Name | .encode() | .decode() | Description |
5482 +=========+===========+===========+=============================+
5483 |uu | string | string | UU codec (e.g. for email) |
5484 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5485 |base64 | string | string | base64 codec |
5486 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5487 |quopri | string | string | quoted-printable codec |
5488 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5489 |zlib | string | string | zlib compression |
5490 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5491 |hex | string | string | 2-byte hex codec |
5492 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5493 |rot-13 | string | Unicode | ROT-13 Unicode charmap codec|
5494 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005495
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005496- Some operating systems now support the concept of a default Unicode
5497 encoding for file system operations. Notably, Windows supports 'mbcs'
5498 as the default. The Macintosh will also adopt this concept in the medium
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005499 term, although the default encoding for that platform will be other than
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005500 'mbcs'.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005501
5502 On operating system that support non-ASCII filenames, it is common for
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005503 functions that return filenames (such as os.listdir()) to return Python
5504 string objects pre-encoded using the default file system encoding for
5505 the platform. As this encoding is likely to be different from Python's
5506 default encoding, converting this name to a Unicode object before passing
5507 it back to the Operating System would result in a Unicode error, as Python
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005508 would attempt to use its default encoding (generally ASCII) rather than
5509 the default encoding for the file system.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005510
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005511 In general, this change simply removes surprises when working with
5512 Unicode and the file system, making these operations work as you expect,
5513 increasing the transparency of Unicode objects in this context.
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005514 See [????] for more details, including examples.
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005515
Tim Peters61dff2b2001-05-08 15:43:37 +00005516- Float (and complex) literals in source code were evaluated to full
5517 precision only when running from a .py file; the same code loaded from a
5518 .pyc (or .pyo) file could suffer numeric differences starting at about the
5519 12th significant decimal digit. For example, on a machine with IEEE-754
5520 floating arithmetic,
5521
5522 x = 9007199254740992.0
5523 print long(x)
5524
5525 printed 9007199254740992 if run directly from .py, but 9007199254740000
5526 if from a compiled (.pyc or .pyo) file. This was due to marshal using
5527 str(float) instead of repr(float) when building code objects. marshal
5528 now uses repr(float) instead, which should reproduce floats to full
5529 machine precision (assuming the platform C float<->string I/O conversion
5530 functions are of good quality).
5531
5532 This may cause floating-point results to change in some cases, and
5533 usually for the better, but may also cause numerically unstable
5534 algorithms to break.
5535
Tim Peters2f228e72001-05-13 00:19:31 +00005536- The implementation of dicts suffers fewer collisions, which has speed
5537 benefits. However, the order in which dict entries appear in dict.keys(),
5538 dict.values() and dict.items() may differ from previous releases for a
5539 given dict. Nothing is defined about this order, so no program should
5540 rely on it. Nevertheless, it's easy to write test cases that rely on the
5541 order by accident, typically because of printing the str() or repr() of a
5542 dict to an "expected results" file. See Lib/test/test_support.py's new
5543 sortdict(dict) function for a simple way to display a dict in sorted
5544 order.
5545
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005546- Many other small changes to dicts were made, resulting in faster
5547 operation along the most common code paths.
5548
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00005549- Dictionary objects now support the "in" operator: "x in dict" means
5550 the same as dict.has_key(x).
5551
Barry Warsaw51acc8d2001-06-26 20:12:50 +00005552- The update() method of dictionaries now accepts generic mapping
5553 objects. Specifically the argument object must support the .keys()
5554 and __getitem__() methods. This allows you to say, for example,
5555 {}.update(UserDict())
5556
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00005557- Iterators were added; this is a generalized way of providing values
5558 to a for loop. See PEP 234. There's a new built-in function iter()
5559 to return an iterator. There's a new protocol to get the next value
5560 from an iterator using the next() method (in Python) or the
5561 tp_iternext slot (in C). There's a new protocol to get iterators
5562 using the __iter__() method (in Python) or the tp_iter slot (in C).
5563 Iterating (i.e. a for loop) over a dictionary generates its keys.
5564 Iterating over a file generates its lines.
5565
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005566- The following functions were generalized to work nicely with iterator
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00005567 arguments::
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005568
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00005569 map(), filter(), reduce(), zip()
Tim Peters8572b4f2001-05-06 01:05:02 +00005570 list(), tuple() (PySequence_Tuple() and PySequence_Fast() in C API)
5571 max(), min()
Tim Peters1af03e92001-05-26 19:37:54 +00005572 join() method of strings
5573 extend() method of lists
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00005574 'x in y' and 'x not in y' (PySequence_Contains() in C API)
5575 operator.countOf() (PySequence_Count() in C API)
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005576 right-hand side of assignment statements with multiple targets, such as ::
Tim Petersd6d010b2001-06-21 02:49:55 +00005577 x, y, z = some_iterable_object_returning_exactly_3_values
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00005578
Tim Petersd85e1022001-05-11 21:51:48 +00005579- Accessing module attributes is significantly faster (for example,
5580 random.random or os.path or yourPythonModule.yourAttribute).
5581
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00005582- Comparing dictionary objects via == and != is faster, and now works even
5583 if the keys and values don't support comparisons other than ==.
5584
Tim Peters95bf9392001-05-10 08:32:44 +00005585- Comparing dictionaries in ways other than == and != is slower: there were
5586 insecurities in the dict comparison implementation that could cause Python
5587 to crash if the element comparison routines for the dict keys and/or
5588 values mutated the dicts. Making the code bulletproof slowed it down.
5589
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005590- Collisions in dicts are resolved via a new approach, which can help
5591 dramatically in bad cases. For example, looking up every key in a dict
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005592 d with d.keys() == [i << 16 for i in range(20000)] is approximately 500x
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005593 faster now. Thanks to Christian Tismer for pointing out the cause and
5594 the nature of an effective cure (last December! better late than never).
Tim Peters15d49292001-05-27 07:39:22 +00005595
Tim Peters52e155e2001-06-16 05:42:57 +00005596- repr() is much faster for large containers (dict, list, tuple).
5597
5598
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005599Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005600-------
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005601
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00005602- The constants ascii_letters, ascii_lowercase. and ascii_uppercase
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005603 were added to the string module. These a locale-independent
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00005604 constants, unlike letters, lowercase, and uppercase. These are now
5605 use in appropriate locations in the standard library.
5606
Martin v. Löwisf0473d52001-07-18 16:17:16 +00005607- The flags used in dlopen calls can now be configured using
5608 sys.setdlopenflags and queried using sys.getdlopenflags.
5609
Guido van Rossumc7e4aca2001-07-12 11:54:37 +00005610- Fredrik Lundh's xmlrpclib is now a standard library module. This
5611 provides full client-side XML-RPC support. In addition,
5612 Demo/xmlrpc/ contains two server frameworks (one SocketServer-based,
5613 one asyncore-based). Thanks to Eric Raymond for the documentation.
5614
Guido van Rossum643d3912001-07-05 14:46:25 +00005615- The xrange() object is simplified: it no longer supports slicing,
5616 repetition, comparisons, efficient 'in' checking, the tolist()
5617 method, or the start, stop and step attributes. See PEP 260.
5618
Martin v. Löwisebf94db2001-06-06 06:25:40 +00005619- A new function fnmatch.filter to filter lists of file names was added.
5620
Barry Warsawffd674d2001-05-22 16:00:10 +00005621- calendar.py uses month and day names based on the current locale.
5622
Guido van Rossum2e0a6542001-05-15 02:14:44 +00005623- strop is now *really* obsolete (this was announced before with 1.6),
5624 and issues DeprecationWarning when used (except for the four items
5625 that are still imported into string.py).
5626
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005627- Cookie.py now sorts key+value pairs by key in output strings.
5628
5629- pprint.isrecursive(object) didn't correctly identify recursive objects.
5630 Now it does.
5631
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00005632- pprint functions now much faster for large containers (tuple, list, dict).
5633
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00005634- New 'q' and 'Q' format codes in the struct module, corresponding to C
5635 types "long long" and "unsigned long long" (on Windows, __int64). In
5636 native mode, these can be used only when the platform C compiler supports
5637 these types (when HAVE_LONG_LONG is #define'd by the Python config
5638 process), and then they inherit the sizes and alignments of the C types.
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005639 In standard mode, 'q' and 'Q' are supported on all platforms, and are
5640 8-byte integral types.
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00005641
Guido van Rossum83213cc2001-06-12 16:48:52 +00005642- The site module installs a new built-in function 'help' that invokes
5643 pydoc.help. It must be invoked as 'help()'; when invoked as 'help',
5644 it displays a message reminding the user to use 'help()' or
5645 'help(object)'.
5646
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005647Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005648-----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005649
5650- New test_mutants.py runs dict comparisons where the key and value
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005651 comparison operators mutate the dicts randomly during comparison. This
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005652 rapidly causes Python to crash under earlier releases (not for the faint
5653 of heart: it can also cause Win9x to freeze or reboot!).
5654
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005655- New test_pprint.py verifies that pprint.isrecursive() and
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00005656 pprint.isreadable() return sensible results. Also verifies that simple
5657 cases produce correct output.
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005658
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00005659C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005660-----
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00005661
5662- Removed the unused last_is_sticky argument from the internal
5663 _PyTuple_Resize(). If this affects you, you were cheating.
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005664
5665----
5666
5667**(For information about older versions, consult the HISTORY file.)**