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Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001+++++++++++
2Python News
3+++++++++++
4
Skip Montanaro4a385832002-09-20 17:08:52 +00005(editors: check NEWS.help for information about editing NEWS using ReST.)
6
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00007What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 1?
8=================================
9
10*Release date: DD-MMM-YYYY*
11
12Core and builtins
13-----------------
14
Anthony Baxter3ecdb252004-06-11 14:41:18 +000015- Bug #966623. classes created with type() in an exec(, {}) don't
16 have a __module__, but code in typeobject assumed it would always
17 be there.
18
Martin v. Löwis737ea822004-06-08 18:52:54 +000019- Python no longer relies on the LC_NUMERIC locale setting to be
20 the "C" locale; as a result, it no longer tries to prevent changing
21 the LC_NUMERIC category.
22
Tim Peters604c0132004-06-07 23:04:33 +000023- Bug #952807: Unpickling pickled instances of subclasses of
24 datetime.date, datetime.datetime and datetime.time could yield insane
25 objects. Thanks to Jiwon Seo for a fix.
26
Thomas Heller90a764c2004-06-07 15:12:44 +000027- Bug #845802: Python crashes when __init__.py is a directory.
28
Hye-Shik Changbc555e32004-06-03 11:10:58 +000029- Unicode objects received two new methods: iswide() and width().
30 These query East Asian width information, as specified in Unicode
31 TR11.
Hye-Shik Chang974ed7c2004-06-02 16:49:17 +000032
Raymond Hettinger41bd0222004-06-01 06:36:24 +000033- Improved the tuple hashing algorithm to give fewer collisions in
34 common cases. Fixes bug #942952.
35
Raymond Hettinger354433a2004-05-19 08:20:33 +000036- Implemented generator expressions (PEP 289). Coded by Jiwon Seo.
37
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +000038- Enabled the profiling of C extension functions (and builtins) - check
39 new documentation and modified profiler and bdb modules for more details
40
Nicholas Bastinabce8a62004-03-21 20:24:07 +000041- Set file.name to the object passed to open (instead of a new string)
42
Nicholas Bastina7604bf2004-03-21 18:37:23 +000043- Moved tracebackobject into traceback.h and renamed to PyTracebackObject
44
Raymond Hettingerff5bc502004-03-21 15:12:00 +000045- Optimized the byte coding for multiple assignments like "a,b=b,a" and
46 "a,b,c=1,2,3". Improves their speed by 25% to 30%.
47
Brett Cannon4f653312004-03-20 22:52:14 +000048- Limit the nested depth of a tuple for the second argument to isinstance()
49 and issubclass() to the recursion limit of the interpreter.
50 Fixes bug #858016 .
51
Raymond Hettingerade08ea2004-03-18 09:48:12 +000052- Optimized dict iterators, creating separate types for each
53 and having them reveal their length. Also optimized the
54 methods: keys(), values(), and items().
55
Raymond Hettingerdd80f762004-03-07 07:31:06 +000056- Implemented a newcode opcode, LIST_APPEND, that simplifies
57 the generated bytecode for list comprehensions and further
58 improves their performance (about 35%).
59
Michael W. Hudsond3b33b52004-02-19 19:35:22 +000060- Implemented rich comparisons for floats, which seems to make
61 comparisons involving NaNs somewhat less surprising when the
62 underlying C compiler actually implements C99 semantics.
63
Raymond Hettingerfa7b9d82004-02-15 04:06:39 +000064- Optimized list.extend() to save memory and no longer create
65 intermediate sequences. Also, extend() now pre-allocates the
66 needed memory whenever the length of the iterable is known in
67 advance -- this halves the time to extend the list.
68
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +000069- Optimized list resize operations to make fewer calls to the system
70 realloc(). Significantly speeds up list appends, list pops,
71 list comprehensions, and the list contructor (when the input iterable
72 length is not known).
73
74- Changed the internal list over-allocation scheme. For larger lists,
75 overallocation ranged between 3% and 25%. Now, it is a constant 12%.
Raymond Hettingerab517d22004-02-14 18:34:46 +000076 For smaller lists (n<8), overallocation was upto eight elements. Now,
77 the overallocation is no more than three elements -- this improves space
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +000078 utilization for applications that have large numbers of small lists.
79
Raymond Hettinger0468e412004-05-05 05:37:53 +000080- Most list bodies now get re-used rather than freed. Speeds up list
81 instantiation and deletion by saving calls to malloc() and free().
82
Raymond Hettinger31017ae2004-03-04 08:25:44 +000083- The dict.update() method now accepts all the same argument forms
84 as the dict() constructor. This now includes item lists and/or
85 keyword arguments.
86
Michael W. Hudsonecfeb7f2004-02-12 15:28:27 +000087- Support for arbitrary objects supporting the read-only buffer
88 interface as the co_code field of code objects (something that was
89 only possible to create from C code) has been removed.
90
Fred Drake228765b2004-02-06 04:15:22 +000091- Made omitted callback and None equivalent for weakref.ref() and
92 weakref.proxy(); the None case wasn't handled correctly in all
93 cases.
94
95- Fixed problem where PyWeakref_NewRef() and PyWeakref_NewProxy()
96 assumed that initial existing entries in an object's weakref list
97 would not be removed while allocating a new weakref object. Since
98 GC could be invoked at that time, however, that assumption was
99 invalid. In a truly obscure case of GC being triggered during
100 creation for a new weakref object for an referent which already
101 has a weakref without a callback which is only referenced from
102 cyclic trash, a memory error can occur. This consistently created a
103 segfault in a debug build, but provided less predictable behavior in
104 a release build.
105
Hye-Shik Changff83c2b2004-02-02 13:39:01 +0000106- input() builtin function now respects compiler flags such as
107 __future__ statements. SF patch 876178.
108
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +0000109- Removed PendingDeprecationWarning from apply(). apply() remains
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +0000110 deprecated, but the nuisance warning will not be issued.
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +0000111
Tim Peters1d7323e2003-12-01 21:35:27 +0000112- At Python shutdown time (Py_Finalize()), 2.3 called cyclic garbage
113 collection twice, both before and after tearing down modules. The
114 call after tearing down modules has been disabled, because too much
115 of Python has been torn down then for __del__ methods and weakref
116 callbacks to execute sanely. The most common symptom was a sequence
117 of uninformative messages on stderr when Python shut down, produced
118 by threads trying to raise exceptions, but unable to report the nature
119 of their problems because too much of the sys module had already been
120 destroyed.
121
Guido van Rossum6c9e1302003-11-29 23:52:13 +0000122- Removed FutureWarnings related to hex/oct literals and conversions
123 and left shifts. (Thanks to Kalle Svensson for SF patch 849227.)
124 This addresses most of the remaining semantic changes promised by
125 PEP 237, except for repr() of a long, which still shows the trailing
126 'L'. The PEP appears to promise warnings for operations that
127 changed semantics compared to Python 2.3, but this is not
128 implemented; we've suffered through enough warnings related to
129 hex/oct literals and I think it's best to be silent now.
130
Raymond Hettinger4f8f9762003-11-26 08:21:35 +0000131- For str and unicode objects, the ljust(), center(), and rjust()
132 methods now accept an optional argument specifying a fill
133 character other than a space.
134
Guido van Rossumbaf0f8f2003-11-22 23:55:50 +0000135- When method objects have an attribute that can be satisfied either
136 by the function object or by the method object, the function
137 object's attribute usually wins. Christian Tismer pointed out that
138 that this is really a mistake, because this only happens for special
139 methods (like __reduce__) where the method object's version is
140 really more appropriate than the function's attribute. So from now
141 on, all method attributes will have precedence over function
142 attributes with the same name.
143
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +0000144- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 839548: if a weakref with a callback,
145 its callback, and its weakly referenced object, all became part of
146 cyclic garbage during a single run of garbage collection, the order
147 in which they were torn down was unpredictable. It was possible for
148 the callback to see partially-torn-down objects, leading to immediate
149 segfaults, or, if the callback resurrected garbage objects, to
150 resurrect insane objects that caused segfaults (or other surprises)
151 later. In one sense this wasn't surprising, because Python's cyclic gc
152 had no knowledge of Python's weakref objects. It does now. When
153 weakrefs with callbacks become part of cyclic garbage now, those
154 weakrefs are cleared first. The callbacks don't trigger then,
155 preventing the problems. If you need callbacks to trigger, then just
156 as when cyclic gc is not involved, you need to write your code so
157 that weakref objects outlive the objects they weakly reference.
Raymond Hettingera690a992003-11-16 16:17:49 +0000158
Tim Petersadd09b42003-11-12 20:43:28 +0000159- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 840829: if cyclic garbage collection
160 happened to occur during a weakref callback for a new-style class
161 instance, subtle memory corruption was the result (in a release build;
162 in a debug build, a segfault occurred reliably very soon after).
163 This has been repaired.
164
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +0000165- Compiler flags set in PYTHONSTARTUP are now active in __main__.
166
167- Added two builtin types, set() and frozenset().
168
Raymond Hettinger85c20a42003-11-06 14:06:48 +0000169- Added a reversed() builtin function that returns a reverse iterator
170 over a sequence.
171
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +0000172- Added a sorted() builtin function that returns a new sorted list
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +0000173 from any iterable.
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +0000174
Martin v. Löwis01a74b22003-10-19 18:30:01 +0000175- CObjects are now mutable (on the C level) through PyCObject_SetVoidPtr.
176
Raymond Hettinger42b1ba32003-10-16 03:41:09 +0000177- list.sort() now supports three keyword arguments: cmp, key, and reverse.
178 The key argument can be a function of one argument that extracts a
179 comparison key from the original record: mylist.sort(key=str.lower).
180 The reverse argument is a boolean value and if True will change the
181 sort order as if the comparison arguments were reversed. In addition,
182 the documentation has been amended to provide a guarantee that all sorts
183 starting with Py2.3 are guaranteed to be stable (the relative order of
184 records with equal keys is unchanged).
185
Marc-André Lemburgd7160f82003-09-22 11:14:40 +0000186- Added test whether wchar_t is signed or not. A signed wchar_t is not
187 usable as internal unicode type base for Py_UNICODE since the
188 unicode implementation assumes an unsigned type.
189
Jeremy Hyltond8082792003-09-16 19:41:39 +0000190- Fixed a bug in the cache of length-one Unicode strings that could
191 lead to a seg fault. The specific problem occurred when an earlier,
192 non-fatal error left an uninitialized Unicode object in the
193 freelist.
194
Raymond Hettinger9bfe5332003-08-27 04:55:52 +0000195- The % formatting operator now supports '%F' which is equivalent to
196 '%f'. This has always been documented but never implemented.
197
Tim Peters465fa3d2003-08-15 01:16:37 +0000198- complex(obj) could leak a little memory if obj wasn't a string or
199 number.
200
Raymond Hettingereaef6152003-08-02 07:42:57 +0000201- zip() with no arguments now returns an empty list instead of raising
202 a TypeError exception.
203
Guido van Rossum02c58f82003-10-08 21:08:29 +0000204- obj.__contains__() now returns True/False instead of 1/0. SF patch
205 820195.
206
Armin Rigo2b3eb402003-10-28 12:05:48 +0000207- Python no longer tries to be smart about recursive comparisons.
208 When comparing containers with cyclic references to themselves it
209 will now just hit the recursion limit. See SF patch 825639.
210
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +0000211- str and unicode builtin types now have rsplit() method that is
212 same as split() except that it scans the string from the end
213 working towards the beginning. See SF feature request 801847.
Hye-Shik Chang060ebed2003-12-15 18:51:19 +0000214
Jim Fulton8a1a5942004-02-08 04:21:26 +0000215- Fixed a bug in object.__reduce_ex__ when using protocol 2. Failure
216 to clear the error when attempts to get the __getstate__ attribute
217 fail caused intermittent errors and odd behavior.
218
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +0000219- buffer objects based on other objects no longer cache a pointer to
220 the data and the data length. Instead, the appropriate tp_as_buffer
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +0000221 method is called as necessary.
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +0000222
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +0000223- fixed: if a file is opened with an explicit buffer size >= 1, repeated
Andrew MacIntyre4e10ed32004-04-04 07:01:35 +0000224 close() calls would attempt to free() the buffer already free()ed on
225 the first call.
226
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +0000227
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000228Extension modules
229-----------------
230
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +0000231- time module code that deals with input POSIX timestamps will now raise
232 ValueError if more than a second is lost in precision when the
233 timestamp is cast to the platform C time_t type. There's no chance
234 that the platform will do anything sensible with the result in such
235 cases. This includes ctime(), localtime() and gmtime(). Assorted
236 fromtimestamp() and utcfromtimestamp() methods in the datetime module
237 were also protected. Closes bugs #919012 and 975996.
Brett Cannonb46ed712004-06-19 20:50:47 +0000238
Martin v. Löwis77ca6c42004-06-03 12:47:26 +0000239- fcntl.ioctl now warns if the mutate flag is not specified.
240
Martin v. Löwisd8948722004-06-02 09:57:56 +0000241- nt now properly allows to refer to UNC roots, e.g. in nt.stat().
242
Raymond Hettinger027bb632004-05-31 03:09:25 +0000243- the weakref module now supports additional objects: array.array,
244 sre.pattern_objects, file objects, and sockets.
245
Raymond Hettingere2eda602004-04-04 08:51:41 +0000246- operator.isMappingType() and operator.isSequenceType() now give
247 fewer false positives.
248
Brett Cannon06c34792004-03-23 23:16:54 +0000249- socket.sslerror is now a subclass of socket.error . Also added
250 socket.error to the socket module's C API.
251
Hye-Shik Changc3a87b82004-03-21 19:34:30 +0000252- Bug #920575: A problem that _locale module segfaults on
253 nl_langinfo(ERA) caused by GNU libc's illegal NULL return is fixed.
254
Raymond Hettinger6e2ee862004-03-14 04:37:50 +0000255- array objects now support the copy module. Also, their resizing
256 scheme has been updated the same as for list objects. The improves
Raymond Hettinger49f9bd12004-03-14 05:43:59 +0000257 the performance (speed and memory usage) of append() operations.
258 Also, array.extend() now accepts any iterable argument for repeated
259 appends without needing to create another temporary array.
Raymond Hettinger3aa82c02004-03-13 18:18:51 +0000260
Raymond Hettinger3e47f652004-03-08 18:22:35 +0000261- cStringIO.writelines() now accepts any iterable argument and writes
262 the lines one at a time rather than joining them and writing once.
263 Made a parallel change to StringIO.writelines(). Saves memory and
264 makes suitable for use with generator expressions.
265
Brett Cannond1080a32004-03-02 04:38:10 +0000266- time.strftime() now checks that the values in its time tuple argument
267 are within the proper boundaries to prevent possible crashes from the
268 platform's C library implementation of strftime(). Can possibly
269 break code that uses values outside the range that didn't cause
270 problems previously (such as sitting day of year to 0). Fixes bug
271 #897625.
272
Martin v. Löwis12af0482004-01-31 12:34:17 +0000273- The socket module now supports Bluetooth sockets, if the
274 system has <bluetooth/bluetooth.h>
275
Raymond Hettinger756b3f32004-01-29 06:37:52 +0000276- Added a collections module containing a new datatype, deque(),
277 offering high-performance, thread-safe, memory friendly appends
278 and pops on either side of the deque.
279
280- Several modules now take advantage of collections.deque() for
281 improved performance: Queue, mutex, shlex, threading, and pydoc.
282
Raymond Hettinger166958b2003-12-01 13:18:39 +0000283- The operator module has two new functions, attrgetter() and
284 itemgetter() which are useful for creating fast data extractor
285 functions for map(), list.sort(), itertools.groupby(), and
286 other functions that expect a function argument.
287
Martin v. Löwis94681fc2003-11-27 19:40:22 +0000288- socket.SHUT_{RD,WR,RDWR} was added.
289
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +0000290- os.getsid was added.
291
Guido van Rossum16b9fa82003-10-23 23:54:57 +0000292- The pwd module incorrectly advertised its struct type as
293 struct_pwent; this has been renamed to struct_passwd. (The old name
294 is still supported for backwards compatibility.)
295
Fred Drakede050322003-10-21 15:41:59 +0000296- The xml.parsers.expat module now provides Expat 1.95.7.
297
Martin v. Löwis3bbd6542003-10-03 13:57:37 +0000298- socket.IPPROTO_IPV6 was added.
299
Martin v. Löwise7a97962003-09-20 16:08:33 +0000300- readline.clear_history was added.
301
Brett Cannon62dba4c2003-09-10 19:37:42 +0000302- select.select() now accepts sequences for its first three arguments.
303
Raymond Hettinger5475f232003-08-08 12:20:03 +0000304- cStringIO now supports the f.closed attribute.
305
Anthony Baxter83f52912003-08-05 06:33:56 +0000306- The signal module now exposes SIGRTMIN and SIGRTMAX (if available).
307
Andrew M. Kuchling69f31eb2003-08-13 23:11:04 +0000308- curses module now supports use_default_colors(). [patch #739124]
309
Anthony Baxter5c68ef02003-10-04 08:04:04 +0000310- Bug #811028: ncurses.h breakage on FreeBSD/MacOS X
311
312- Bug #814613: INET_ADDRSTRLEN fix needed for all compilers on SGI
313
Gustavo Niemeyerad3fc442003-10-17 22:13:16 +0000314- Implemented non-recursive SRE matching scheme (#757624).
315
316- Implemented (?(id/name)yes|no) support in SRE (#572936).
317
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +0000318- random.seed() with no arguments or None uses time.time() as a default
319 seed. Modified to match Py2.2 behavior and use fractional seconds so
320 that successive runs are more likely to produce different sequences.
321
322- random.Random has a new method, getrandbits(k), which returns an int
323 with k random bits. This method is now an optional part of the API
324 for user defined generators. Any generator that defines genrandbits()
325 can now use randrange() for ranges with a length >= 2**53. Formerly,
326 randrange would return only even numbers for ranges that large (see
327 SF bug #812202). Generators that do not define genrandbits() now
328 issue a warning when randrange() is called with a range that large.
329
Raymond Hettingerd25c1c62003-12-06 16:23:06 +0000330- itertools has a new function, groupby() for aggregating iterables
331 into groups sharing the same key (as determined by a key function).
332 It offers some of functionality of SQL's groupby keyword and of
333 the Unix uniq filter.
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +0000334
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +0000335- itertools now has a new function, tee() which produces two independent
336 iterators from a single iterable.
337
338- itertools.izip() with no arguments now returns an empty iterator instead
339 of raising a TypeError exception.
340
Gustavo Niemeyera6e436e2004-02-14 00:02:45 +0000341- Fixed #853061: allow BZ2Compressor.compress() to receive an empty string
342 as parameter.
343
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000344Library
345-------
346
Brett Cannon1c3fa182004-06-19 21:11:35 +0000347- Bug #919012: shutil.move() will not try to move a directory into itself.
348 Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
349
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +0000350- Bug #934282: pydoc.stripid() is now case-insensitive. Thanks Robin Becker.
351
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +0000352- Bug #823209: cmath.log() now takes an optional base argument so that its
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +0000353 API matches math.log().
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +0000354
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +0000355- Bug #957381: distutils bdist_rpm no longer fails on recent RPM versions
356 that generate a *-debuginfo.rpm.
357
Martin v. Löwisbdec50f2004-06-08 08:29:33 +0000358- os.path.devnull has been added for all supported platforms.
359
Hye-Shik Chang2400e932004-06-05 18:37:53 +0000360- Fixed #877165: distutils now picks the right C++ compiler command
361 on cygwin and mingw32.
362
Hye-Shik Chang39aef792004-06-05 13:30:56 +0000363- urllib.urlopen().readline() now handles HTTP/0.9 correctly.
364
Brett Cannon0096e262004-06-05 01:12:51 +0000365- refactored site.py into functions. Also wrote regression tests for the
366 module.
367
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +0000368- The distutils sdist command now ignores all .svn directories, in
369 addition to CVS and RCS directories. .svn directories hold
370 administrative files for the Subversion source control system.
371
Martin v. Löwis2a6ba902004-05-31 18:22:40 +0000372- Added a new module: cookielib. Automatic cookie handling for HTTP
373 clients. Also, support for cookielib has been added to urllib2, so
374 urllib2.urlopen() can transparently handle cookies.
375
Raymond Hettinger059e1702004-05-19 19:56:44 +0000376- stringprep.py now uses built-in set() instead of sets.Set().
377
Thomas Heller2e7c8322004-05-11 15:10:59 +0000378- Bug #876278: Unbounded recursion in modulefinder
379
Martin v. Löwis456ab1d2004-05-06 01:54:36 +0000380- Bug #780300: Swap public and system ID in LexicalHandler.startDTD.
381 Applications relying on the wrong order need to be corrected.
382
Hye-Shik Chang0f5bf1e2004-04-20 21:11:11 +0000383- Bug #926075: Fixed a bug that returns a wrong pattern object
384 for a string or unicode object in sre.compile() when a different
385 type pattern with the same value exists.
386
Skip Montanarod0c0c412004-04-07 16:03:02 +0000387- Added countcallers arg to trace.Trace class (--trackcalls command line arg
388 when run from the command prompt).
389
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +0000390- Fixed a caching bug in platform.platform() where the argument of 'terse' was
391 not taken into consideration when caching value.
392
Nicholas Bastin824b1b22004-03-23 18:44:39 +0000393- Added two new command-line arguments for profile (output file and
394 default sort).
395
Nicholas Bastin1eb4bfc2004-03-22 20:12:56 +0000396- Added global runctx function to profile module
397
Martin v. Löwis347c30d2004-03-21 15:29:41 +0000398- Add hlist missing entryconfigure and entrycget methods.
399
Hye-Shik Chang4a7ad1a2004-03-19 08:11:56 +0000400- The ptcp154 codec was added for Kazakh character set support.
401
Martin v. Löwisa79449e2004-02-15 21:19:18 +0000402- Support non-anonymous ftp URLs in urllib2.
403
Marc-André Lemburg57cb68f2004-01-20 18:24:34 +0000404- The encodings package will now applies codec name aliases
405 first before starting to try the import of the codec module.
406 This simplifies overriding built-in codecs with external
407 packages, e.g. the included CJK codecs with the JapaneseCodecs
408 package, by adjusting the aliases dictionary in encodings.aliases
409 accordingly.
410
Barry Warsaw30ff12f2004-01-04 01:13:43 +0000411- base64 now supports RFC 3548 Base16, Base32, and Base64 encoding and
412 decoding standards.
413
Jeremy Hylton37c5f2a2003-12-14 05:29:45 +0000414- urllib2 now supports processors. A processor is a handler that
415 implements an xxx_request or xxx_response method. These methods are
416 called for all requests.
417
Thomas Hellerc7501d52003-12-05 20:28:07 +0000418- distutils compilers now compile source files in the same order as
419 they are passed to the compiler.
420
Walter Dörwaldc8de4582003-12-03 20:26:05 +0000421- pprint.pprint() and pprint.pformat() now have additional parameters
422 indent, width and depth.
423
Walter Dörwald7a7ede52003-12-03 20:15:28 +0000424- Patch #750542: pprint now will pretty print subclasses of list, tuple
425 and dict too, as long as they don't overwrite __repr__().
426
Thomas Hellerb3105912003-11-28 19:42:56 +0000427- Bug #848614: distutils' msvccompiler fails to find the MSVC6
428 compiler because of incomplete registry entries.
429
Martin v. Löwisaf7dc8d2003-11-19 19:51:55 +0000430- httplib.HTTP.putrequest now offers to omit the implicit Accept-Encoding.
431
Thomas Hellercf0005b2003-11-14 10:33:20 +0000432- Patch #841977: modulefinder didn't find extension modules in packages
433
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +0000434- imaplib.IMAP4.thread was added.
435
Guido van Rossum967b0632003-11-10 02:27:19 +0000436- Plugged a minor hole in tempfile.mktemp() due to the use of
437 os.path.exists(), switched to using os.lstat() directly if possible.
438
Raymond Hettinger0c410272004-01-05 10:13:35 +0000439- bisect.py and heapq.py now have underlying C implementations
Raymond Hettinger33ecffb2004-06-10 05:03:17 +0000440 for better performance.
441
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +0000442- heapq.py has two new functions, nsmallest() and nlargest().
Raymond Hettingerb3af1812003-11-08 10:24:38 +0000443
Neil Schemenauerf607fc52003-11-05 23:03:00 +0000444- traceback.format_exc has been added (similar to print_exc but it returns
445 a string).
446
Martin v. Löwis45394c22003-10-31 13:49:36 +0000447- xmlrpclib.MultiCall has been added.
448
Martin v. Löwis48440b72003-10-31 12:52:35 +0000449- poplib.POP3_SSL has been added.
450
Martin v. Löwisd6625482003-10-12 17:37:01 +0000451- tmpfile.mkstemp now returns an absolute path even if dir is relative.
452
Brett Cannon5d9ca4e2003-10-12 04:38:48 +0000453- urlparse is RFC 2396 compliant.
454
Skip Montanarodef99342003-10-03 14:07:07 +0000455- The fieldnames argument to the csv module's DictReader constructor is now
456 optional. If omitted, the first row of the file will be used as the
457 list of fieldnames.
458
Raymond Hettinger9a80c5d2003-09-23 20:21:01 +0000459- encodings.bz2_codec was added for access to bz2 compression
460 using "a long string".encode('bz2')
461
Guido van Rossum0e5a51d2003-09-22 15:03:11 +0000462- Various improvements to unittest.py, realigned with PyUnit CVS.
463
Martin v. Löwisc6bb6c02003-09-20 15:52:21 +0000464- dircache now passes exceptions to the caller, instead of returning
465 empty lists.
466
Raymond Hettingerdeadbf52003-09-12 06:33:37 +0000467- The bsddb module and dbhash module now support the iterator and
468 mapping protocols which make them more substitutable for dictionaries
469 and shelves.
470
Skip Montanaro3f7a9482003-09-06 19:52:12 +0000471- The csv module's DictReader and DictWriter classes now accept keyword
472 arguments. This was an omission in the initial implementation.
473
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +0000474- The email package handles some RFC 2231 parameters with missing
Barry Warsaw2f5bf172003-09-03 04:09:49 +0000475 CHARSET fields better. It also includes a patch to parameter
476 parsing when semicolons appear inside quotes.
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +0000477
Raymond Hettinger6a180122003-08-17 08:34:09 +0000478- sets.py now runs under Py2.2. In addition, the argument restrictions
479 for most set methods (but not the operators) have been relaxed to
Raymond Hettinger70b9f492003-11-19 15:52:14 +0000480 allow any iterable.
Raymond Hettingeree562fc2003-08-15 21:17:04 +0000481
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +0000482- _strptime.py now has a behind-the-scenes caching mechanism for the most
Brett Cannonb7150a22003-08-05 06:27:04 +0000483 recent TimeRE instance used along with the last five unique directive
484 patterns. The overall module was also made more thread-safe.
485
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +0000486- random.cunifvariate() and random.stdgamma() were deprecated in Py2.3
487 and removed in Py2.4.
488
Anthony Baxter92bee362003-11-04 14:35:49 +0000489- Bug #823328: urllib2.py's HTTP Digest Auth support works again.
490
Hye-Shik Chang84a99312004-01-17 14:59:36 +0000491- Patch #873597: CJK codecs are imported into rank of default codecs.
492
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000493Tools/Demos
494-----------
495
Skip Montanarod5a21fd2004-01-27 14:49:04 +0000496- A hotshotmain script was added to the Tools/scripts directory that
497 makes it easy to run a script under control of the hotshot profiler.
498
Skip Montanaro030f68a2003-10-28 16:24:00 +0000499- The db2pickle and pickle2db scripts can now dump/load gdbm files.
500
Skip Montanaroe2b61e02004-03-03 17:42:08 +0000501- The file order on the command line of the pickle2db script was reversed.
502 It is now [ picklefile ] dbfile. This provides better symmetry with
503 db2pickle. The file arguments to both scripts are now source followed by
504 destination in situations where both files are given.
505
Skip Montanarofd4fa882003-09-10 19:04:13 +0000506- The pydoc script will display a link to the module documentation for
507 modules determined to be part of the core distribution. The documentation
508 base directory defaults to http://www.python.org/doc/current/lib/ but can
509 be changed by setting the PYTHONDOCS environment variable.
510
Raymond Hettingere41d4c82003-08-25 04:39:55 +0000511- texcheck.py now detects double word errors.
512
Tim Peters1a3abcb2003-08-18 23:52:09 +0000513- md5sum.py mistakenly opened input files in text mode by default, a
514 silent and dangerous change from previous releases. It once again
515 opens input files in binary mode by default. The -t and -b flags
516 remain for compatibility with the 2.3 release, but -b is the default
517 now.
518
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000519- py-electric-colon now works when pending-delete/delete-selection mode is
520 in effect
521
522- py-help-at-point is no longer bound to the F1 key - it's still bound to
523 C-c C-h
524
Barry Warsaw6ec58ca2003-09-03 03:20:37 +0000525- Pynche was fixed to not crash when there is no ~/.pynche file and no
526 -d option was given.
527
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000528Build
529-----
530
Skip Montanaro56f6a4f2004-06-18 02:47:22 +0000531- Profiling using gprof is now available if Python is configured with
532 --enable-profiling.
533
Martin v. Löwisf30d60e2004-06-08 08:17:44 +0000534- Profiling the VM using the Pentium TSC is now possible if Python
535 is configured --with-tsc.
536
Martin v. Löwis642c8a12004-06-04 13:55:13 +0000537- In order to find libraries, setup.py now also looks in /lib64, for use
538 on AMD64.
539
Hye-Shik Chang54f94392004-04-14 07:55:31 +0000540- Bug #934635: Fixed a bug where the configure script couldn't detect
541 getaddrinfo() properly if the KAME stack had SCTP support.
542
Skip Montanaro7befb992004-02-10 16:50:21 +0000543- Support for missing ANSI C header files (limits.h, stddef.h, etc) was
544 removed.
545
Skip Montanarodb608052004-02-07 13:53:46 +0000546- Systems requiring the D4, D6 or D7 variants of pthreads are no longer
547 supported (see PEP 11).
548
549- Universal newline support can no longer be disabled (see PEP 11).
550
Skip Montanarocd1f7432004-01-17 14:22:44 +0000551- Support for DGUX, SunOS 4, IRIX 4 and Minix was removed (see PEP 11).
552
553- Support for systems requiring --with-dl-dld or --with-sgi-dl was removed
554 (see PEP 11).
555
556- Tests for sizeof(char) were removed since ANSI C mandates that
557 sizeof(char) must be 1.
558
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000559C API
560-----
561
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +0000562- Private function _PyTime_DoubleToTimet added, to convert a Python
563 timestamp (C double) to platform time_t with some out-of-bounds
564 checking. Declared in new header file timefuncs.h. It would be
565 good to expose some other internal timemodule.c functions there.
566
Martin v. Löwise440e472004-06-01 15:22:42 +0000567- New public functions PyEval_EvaluateFrame and PyGen_New to expose
568 generator objects.
569
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +0000570- New public functions Py_IncRef() and Py_DecRef(), exposing the
571 functionality of the Py_XINCREF() and Py_XDECREF macros. Useful for
Thomas Hellercc10a852004-04-22 17:28:25 +0000572 runtime dynamic embedding of Python. See patch #938302, by Bob
573 Ippolito.
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +0000574
Raymond Hettingerc1e4f9d2004-03-12 08:04:00 +0000575- Added a new macro, PySequence_Fast_ITEMS, which retrieves a fast sequence's
576 underlying array of PyObject pointers. Useful for high speed looping.
577
Raymond Hettinger8f5cdaa2003-12-13 11:26:12 +0000578- Created a new method flag, METH_COEXIST, which causes a method to be loaded
579 even if already defined by a slot wrapper. This allows a __contains__
580 method, for example, to co-exist with a defined sq_contains slot. This
581 is helpful because the PyCFunction can take advantage of optimized calls
582 whenever METH_O or METH_NOARGS flags are defined.
583
Raymond Hettingerbc0f2ab2003-11-25 21:12:14 +0000584- Added a new function, PyDict_Contains(d, k) which is like
585 PySequence_Contains() but is specific to dictionaries and executes
586 about 10% faster.
587
Brett Cannon26b3a7b2003-10-19 21:31:43 +0000588- Added three new macros: Py_RETURN_NONE, Py_RETURN_TRUE, and Py_RETURN_FALSE.
589 Each return the singleton they mention after Py_INCREF()ing them.
590
Raymond Hettingercb2da432003-10-12 18:24:34 +0000591- Added a new function, PyTuple_Pack(n, ...) for constructing tuples from a
592 variable length argument list of Python objects without having to invoke
593 the more complex machinery of Py_BuildValue(). PyTuple_Pack(3, a, b, c)
594 is equivalent to Py_BuildValue("(OOO)", a, b, c).
595
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000596New platforms
597-------------
598
599Tests
600-----
601
602Windows
603-------
604
Guido van Rossumfd25aca2003-11-30 22:10:15 +0000605- The _winreg module could segfault when reading very large registry
606 values, due to unchecked alloca() calls (SF bug 851056). The fix is
607 uses either PyMem_Malloc(n) or PyString_FromStringAndSize(NULL, n),
608 as appropriate, followed by a size check.
609
Tim Petersf1827cf2003-09-07 03:30:18 +0000610- file.truncate() could misbehave if the file was open for update
611 (modes r+, rb+, w+, wb+), and the most recent file operation before
612 the truncate() call was an input operation. SF bug 801631.
613
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000614Mac
615----
616
617
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +0000618What's New in Python 2.3 final?
619===============================
620
621*Release date: 29-Jul-2003*
622
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +0000623IDLE
624----
625
Tim Peters36c1afc2003-07-29 17:22:57 +0000626- Bug 778400: IDLE hangs when selecting "Edit with IDLE" from explorer.
627 This was unique to Windows, and was fixed by adding an -n switch to
628 the command the Windows installer creates to execute "Edit with IDLE"
629 context-menu actions.
630
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +0000631- IDLE displays a new message upon startup: some "personal firewall"
632 kinds of programs (for example, ZoneAlarm) open a dialog of their
633 own when any program opens a socket. IDLE does use sockets, talking
634 on the computer's internal loopback interface. This connection is not
635 visible on any external interface and no data is sent to or received
636 from the Internet. So, if you get such a dialog when opening IDLE,
637 asking whether to let pythonw.exe talk to address 127.0.0.1, say yes,
638 and rest assured no communication external to your machine is taking
639 place. If you don't allow it, IDLE won't be able to start.
640
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +0000641
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000642What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 2?
643=============================================
644
Tim Peters6560a252003-07-24 00:15:46 +0000645*Release date: 24-Jul-2003*
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000646
647Core and builtins
648-----------------
649
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +0000650- It is now possible to import from zipfiles containing additional
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000651 data bytes before the zip compatible archive. Zipfiles containing a
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +0000652 comment at the end are still unsupported.
653
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000654Extension modules
655-----------------
656
657- A longstanding bug in the parser module's initialization could cause
658 fatal internal refcount confusion when the module got initialized more
659 than once. This has been fixed.
660
Fred Drake01a43122003-07-21 17:17:10 +0000661- Fixed memory leak in pyexpat; using the parser's ParseFile() method
662 with open files that aren't instances of the standard file type
663 caused an instance of the bound .read() method to be leaked on every
664 call.
665
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000666- Fixed some leaks in the locale module.
667
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000668Library
669-------
670
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000671- Lib/encodings/rot_13.py when used as a script, now more properly
672 uses the first Python interpreter on your path.
673
674- Removed caching of TimeRE (and thus LocaleTime) in _strptime.py to
675 fix a locale related bug in the test suite. Although another patch
676 was needed to actually fix the problem, the cache code was not
677 restored.
678
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +0000679IDLE
680----
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000681
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +0000682- Calltips patches.
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000683
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000684Build
685-----
686
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000687- For MacOSX, added -mno-fused-madd to BASECFLAGS to fix test_coercion
688 on Panther (OSX 10.3).
689
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000690C API
691-----
692
693Windows
694-------
695
Tim Peters291f14e2003-07-22 02:50:01 +0000696- The tempfile module could do insane imports on Windows if PYTHONCASEOK
697 was set, making temp file creation impossible. Repaired.
698
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000699- Add a patch to workaround pthread_sigmask() bugs in Cygwin.
700
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000701Mac
702---
703
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000704- Various fixes to pimp.
705
706- Scripts runs with pythonw no longer had full window manager access.
707
708- Don't force boot-disk-only install, for reasons unknown it causes
709 more problems than it solves.
710
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000711
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000712What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 1?
713=============================================
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000714
Jeremy Hylton0ed18c22003-07-18 20:10:02 +0000715*Release date: 18-Jul-2003*
716
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000717Core and builtins
718-----------------
719
Tim Peterse5e065b2003-07-06 18:36:54 +0000720- The new function sys.getcheckinterval() returns the last value set
721 by sys.setcheckinterval().
722
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000723- Several bugs in the symbol table phase of the compiler have been
724 fixed. Errors could be lost and compilation could fail without
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000725 reporting an error. SF patch 763201.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000726
727- The interpreter is now more robust about importing the warnings
728 module. In an executable generated by freeze or similar programs,
729 earlier versions of 2.3 would fail if the warnings module could
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000730 not be found on the file system. Fixes SF bug 771097.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000731
732- A warning about assignments to module attributes that shadow
733 builtins, present in earlier releases of 2.3, has been removed.
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000734
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000735- It is not possible to create subclasses of builtin types like str
736 and tuple that define an itemsize. Earlier releases of Python 2.3
737 allowed this by mistake, leading to crashes and other problems.
738
739- The thread_id is now initialized to 0 in a non-thread build. SF bug
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000740 770247.
741
742- SF bug 762891: "del p[key]" on proxy object no longer raises SystemError.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000743
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000744Extension modules
745-----------------
746
747- weakref.proxy() can now handle "del obj[i]" for proxy objects
748 defining __delitem__. Formerly, it generated a SystemError.
749
750- SSL no longer crashes the interpreter when the remote side disconnects.
751
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +0000752- On Unix the mmap module can again be used to map device files.
753
Brett Cannon20def8b2003-07-01 05:16:08 +0000754- time.strptime now exclusively uses the Python implementation
755 contained within the _strptime module.
756
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000757- The print slot of weakref proxy objects was removed, because it was
758 not consistent with the object's repr slot.
759
760- The mmap module only checks file size for regular files, not
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000761 character or block devices. SF patch 708374.
762
763- The cPickle Pickler garbage collection support was fixed to traverse
764 the find_class attribute, if present.
765
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000766- There are several fixes for the bsddb3 wrapper module.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000767
768 bsddb3 no longer crashes if an environment is closed before a cursor
769 (SF bug 763298).
770
771 The DB and DBEnv set_get_returns_none function was extended to take
Barry Warsawd71a5512003-07-20 18:00:54 +0000772 a level instead of a boolean flag. The new level 2 means that in
773 addition, cursor.set()/.get() methods return None instead of raising
774 an exception.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000775
776 A typo was fixed in DBCursor.join_item(), preventing a crash.
777
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000778Library
779-------
780
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000781- distutils now supports MSVC 7.1
782
Raymond Hettinger71adf7e2003-07-16 19:25:22 +0000783- doctest now examines all docstrings by default. Previously, it would
784 skip over functions with private names (as indicated by the underscore
785 naming convention). The old default created too much of a risk that
786 user tests were being skipped inadvertently. Note, this change could
787 break code in the unlikely case that someone had intentionally put
788 failing tests in the docstrings of private functions. The breakage
789 is easily fixable by specifying the old behavior when calling testmod()
790 or Tester().
791
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000792- There were several fixes to the way dumbdbms are closed. It's vital
793 that a dumbdbm database be closed properly, else the on-disk data
794 and directory files can be left in mutually inconsistent states.
795 dumbdbm.py's _Database.__del__() method attempted to close the
796 database properly, but a shutdown race in _Database._commit() could
797 prevent this from working, so that a program trusting __del__() to
798 get the on-disk files in synch could be badly surprised. The race
799 has been repaired. A sync() method was also added so that shelve
800 can guarantee data is written to disk.
Tim Peters7a6c7332003-07-13 17:21:10 +0000801
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000802 The close() method can now be called more than once without complaint.
Tim Petersd7472ec2003-07-13 02:22:03 +0000803
Tim Peters59aba122003-07-01 20:01:55 +0000804- The classes in threading.py are now new-style classes. That they
805 weren't before was an oversight.
806
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000807- The urllib2 digest authentication handlers now define the correct
808 auth_header. The earlier versions would fail at runtime.
809
Neal Norwitze7dfe212003-07-01 14:59:46 +0000810- SF bug 763023: fix uncaught ZeroDivisionError in difflib ratio methods
811 when there are no lines.
812
Neal Norwitz3c0f2c92003-07-01 21:12:47 +0000813- SF bug 763637: fix exception in Tkinter with after_cancel
814 which could occur with Tk 8.4
815
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000816- SF bug 770601: CGIHTTPServer.py now passes the entire environment
817 to child processes.
818
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000819- SF bug 765238: add filter to fnmatch's __all__.
820
821- SF bug 748201: make time.strptime() error messages more helpful.
822
823- SF patch 764470: Do not dump the args attribute of a Fault object in
824 xmlrpclib.
825
826- SF patch 549151: urllib and urllib2 now redirect POSTs on 301
827 responses.
828
829- SF patch 766650: The whichdb module was fixed to recognize dbm files
830 generated by gdbm on OS/2 EMX.
831
832- SF bugs 763047 and 763052: fixes bug of timezone value being left as
833 -1 when ``time.tzname[0] == time.tzname[1] and not time.daylight``
834 is true when it should only when time.daylight is true.
835
836- SF bug 764548: re now allows subclasses of str and unicode to be
837 used as patterns.
838
839- SF bug 763637: In Tkinter, change after_cancel() to handle tuples
840 of varying sizes. Tk 8.4 returns a different number of values
841 than Tk 8.3.
842
843- SF bug 763023: difflib.ratio() did not catch zero division.
844
845- The Queue module now has an __all__ attribute.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000846
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000847Tools/Demos
848-----------
849
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000850- See Lib/idlelib/NEWS.txt for IDLE news.
851
Neal Norwitz592c4cc2003-07-01 04:14:28 +0000852- SF bug 753592: webchecker/wsgui now handles user supplied directories.
853
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000854- The trace.py script has been removed. It is now in the standard library.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000855
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000856Build
857-----
858
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000859- Python now compiles with -fno-strict-aliasing if possible (SF bug 766696).
860
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000861- The socket module compiles on IRIX 6.5.10.
862
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000863- An irix64 system is treated the same way as an irix6 system (SF
864 patch 764560).
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000865
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000866- Several definitions were missing on FreeBSD 5.x unless the
867 __BSD_VISIBLE symbol was defined. configure now defines it as
868 needed.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000869
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000870C API
871-----
872
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000873- Unicode objects now support mbcs as a built-in encoding, so the C
874 API can use it without deferring to the encodings package.
875
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000876Windows
877-------
878
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000879- The Windows implementation of PyThread_start_new_thread() never
880 checked error returns from Windows functions correctly. As a result,
881 it could claim to start a new thread even when the Microsoft
882 _beginthread() function failed (due to "too many threads" -- this is
883 on the order of thousands when it happens). In these cases, the
884 Python exception ::
885
886 thread.error: can't start new thread
887
888 is raised now.
889
890- SF bug 766669: Prevent a GPF on interpreter exit when sockets are in
891 use. The interpreter now calls WSACleanup() from Py_Finalize()
892 instead of from DLL teardown.
893
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000894Mac
895---
896
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000897- Bundlebuilder now inherits default values in the right way. It was
Walter Dörwald73a8a4b2003-07-30 12:14:02 +0000898 previously possible for app bundles to get a type of "BNDL" instead
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000899 of "APPL." Other improvements include, a --build-id option to
900 specify the CFBundleIdentifier and using the --python option to set
901 the executable in the bundle.
902
903- Fixed two bugs in MacOSX framework handling.
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000904
Jack Jansene0040412003-07-23 22:17:28 +0000905- pythonw did not allow user interaction in 2.3rc1, this has been fixed.
906
907- Python is now compiled with -mno-fused-madd, making all tests pass
908 on Panther.
909
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000910What's New in Python 2.3 beta 2?
911================================
912
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +0000913*Release date: 29-Jun-2003*
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000914
915Core and builtins
916-----------------
917
Barry Warsaw883f2232003-06-29 17:10:11 +0000918- A program can now set the environment variable PYTHONINSPECT to some
919 string value in Python, and cause the interpreter to enter the
920 interactive prompt at program exit, as if Python had been invoked
921 with the -i option.
922
Raymond Hettingerd05abde2003-06-17 05:05:49 +0000923- list.index() now accepts optional start and stop arguments. Similar
924 changes were made to UserList.index(). SF feature request 754014.
925
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +0000926- SF patch 751998 fixes an unwanted side effect of the previous fix
927 for SF bug 742860 (the next item).
928
Tim Peters50d8b8b2003-05-25 17:44:31 +0000929- SF bug 742860: "WeakKeyDictionary __delitem__ uses iterkeys". This
930 wasn't threadsafe, was very inefficient (expected time O(len(dict))
931 instead of O(1)), and could raise a spurious RuntimeError if another
932 thread mutated the dict during __delitem__, or if a comparison function
933 mutated it. It also neglected to raise KeyError when the key wasn't
934 present; didn't raise TypeError when the key wasn't of a weakly
935 referencable type; and broke various more-or-less obscure dict
936 invariants by using a sequence of equality comparisons over the whole
937 set of dict keys instead of computing the key's hash code to narrow
938 the search to those keys with the same hash code. All of these are
939 considered to be bugs. A new implementation of __delitem__ repairs all
940 that, but note that fixing these bugs may change visible behavior in
941 code relying (whether intentionally or accidentally) on old behavior.
Tim Peters886128f2003-05-25 01:45:11 +0000942
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000943- SF bug 734869: Fixed a compiler bug that caused a fatal error when
944 compiling a list comprehension that contained another list comprehension
945 embedded in a lambda expression.
946
Tim Peterse87568d2003-05-24 20:18:24 +0000947- SF bug 705231: builtin pow() no longer lets the platform C pow()
948 raise -1.0 to integer powers, because (at least) glibc gets it wrong
949 in some cases. The result should be -1.0 if the power is odd and 1.0
950 if the power is even, and any float with a sufficiently large exponent
951 is (mathematically) an exact even integer.
952
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000953- SF bug 759227: A new-style class that implements __nonzero__() must
954 return a bool or int (but not an int subclass) from that method. This
955 matches the restriction on classic classes.
956
Martin v. Löwis5467d4c2003-05-10 07:10:12 +0000957- The encoding attribute has been added for file objects, and set to
958 the terminal encoding on Unix and Windows.
959
Tim Peters015dd822003-05-04 04:16:52 +0000960- The softspace attribute of file objects became read-only by oversight.
961 It's writable again.
962
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +0000963- Reverted a 2.3 beta 1 change to iterators for subclasses of list and
964 tuple. By default, the iterators now access data elements directly
965 instead of going through __getitem__. If __getitem__ access is
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +0000966 preferred, then __iter__ can be overridden.
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +0000967
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000968- SF bug 735247: The staticmethod and super types participate in
969 garbage collection. Before this change, it was possible for leaks to
970 occur in functions with non-global free variables that used these types.
971
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000972Extension modules
973-----------------
974
Raymond Hettinger643bcec2003-06-29 03:29:42 +0000975- the socket module has a new exception, socket.timeout, to allow
976 timeouts to be handled separately from other socket errors.
977
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000978- SF bug 751276: cPickle has fixed to propagate exceptions raised in
979 user code. In earlier versions, cPickle caught and ignored any
980 exception when it performed operations that it expected to raise
981 specific exceptions like AttributeError.
982
983- cPickle Pickler and Unpickler objects now participate in garbage
984 collection.
985
Tim Peterscda32b72003-06-15 23:13:35 +0000986- mimetools.choose_boundary() could return duplicate strings at times,
987 especially likely on Windows. The strings returned are now guaranteed
988 unique within a single program run.
989
Brett Cannon4e64d782003-06-13 23:44:35 +0000990- thread.interrupt_main() raises KeyboardInterrupt in the main thread.
991 dummy_thread has also been modified to try to simulate the behavior.
992
Walter Dörwald9e46abe2003-05-18 03:15:10 +0000993- array.array.insert() now treats negative indices as being relative
994 to the end of the array, just like list.insert() does. (SF bug #739313)
995
Tim Petersb0c854d2003-05-17 15:57:00 +0000996- The datetime module classes datetime, time, and timedelta are now
997 properly subclassable.
Tim Petersa98924a2003-05-17 05:55:19 +0000998
Martin v. Löwis28e9ce92003-05-09 08:19:48 +0000999- _tkinter.{get|set}busywaitinterval was added.
1000
Raymond Hettinger834f4632003-05-02 20:24:56 +00001001- itertools.islice() now accepts stop=None as documented.
1002 Fixes SF bug #730685.
1003
Skip Montanaro8c044d82003-05-06 20:42:37 +00001004- the bsddb185 module is built in one restricted instance -
1005 /usr/include/db.h exists and defines HASHVERSION to be 2. This is true
1006 for many BSD-derived systems.
1007
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001008
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001009Library
1010-------
1011
Tim Petersdb3756d2003-06-29 05:30:48 +00001012- Some happy doctest extensions from Jim Fulton have been added to
1013 doctest.py. These are already being used in Zope3. The two
1014 primary ones:
1015
1016 doctest.debug(module, name) extracts the doctests from the named object
1017 in the given module, puts them in a temp file, and starts pdb running
1018 on that file. This is great when a doctest fails.
1019
1020 doctest.DocTestSuite(module=None) returns a synthesized unittest
1021 TestSuite instance, to be run by the unittest framework, which
1022 runs all the doctests in the module. This allows writing tests in
1023 doctest style (which can be clearer and shorter than writing tests
1024 in unittest style), without losing unittest's powerful testing
1025 framework features (which doctest lacks).
1026
Tim Peters6ebe61f2003-06-27 20:48:05 +00001027- For compatibility with doctests created before 2.3, if an expected
1028 output block consists solely of "1" and the actual output block
1029 consists solely of "True", it's accepted as a match; similarly
1030 for "0" and "False". This is quite un-doctest-like, but is practical.
1031 The behavior can be disabled by passing the new doctest module
1032 constant DONT_ACCEPT_TRUE_FOR_1 to the new optionflags optional
1033 argument.
1034
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001035- ZipFile.testzip() now only traps BadZipfile exceptions. Previously,
1036 a bare except caught to much and reported all errors as a problem
1037 in the archive.
1038
1039- The logging module now has a new function, makeLogRecord() making
1040 LogHandler easier to interact with DatagramHandler and SocketHandler.
1041
Skip Montanaro364ca402003-06-17 12:58:31 +00001042- The cgitb module has been extended to support plain text display (SF patch
1043 569574).
1044
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00001045- A brand new version of IDLE (from the IDLEfork project at
1046 SourceForge) is now included as Lib/idlelib. The old Tools/idle is
1047 no more.
1048
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001049- Added a new module: trace (documentation missing). This module used
1050 to be distributed in Tools/scripts. It uses sys.settrace() to trace
1051 code execution -- either function calls or individual lines. It can
1052 generate tracing output during execution or a post-mortem report of
1053 code coverage.
1054
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00001055- The threading module has new functions settrace() and setprofile()
1056 that cooperate with the functions of the same name in the sys
1057 module. A function registered with the threading module will
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001058 be used for all threads it creates. The new trace module uses this
1059 to provide tracing for code running in threads.
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00001060
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00001061- copy.py: applied SF patch 707900, fixing bug 702858, by Steven
1062 Taschuk. Copying a new-style class that had a reference to itself
1063 didn't work. (The same thing worked fine for old-style classes.)
Martin v. Löwisba8f5ff2003-06-14 07:10:06 +00001064 Builtin functions are now treated as atomic, fixing bug #746304.
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00001065
Raymond Hettingerc24d7672003-06-08 19:42:33 +00001066- difflib.py has two new functions: context_diff() and unified_diff().
1067
Guido van Rossumfa19f7c2003-05-16 01:46:51 +00001068- More fixes to urllib (SF 549151): (a) When redirecting, always use
1069 GET. This is common practice and more-or-less sanctioned by the
1070 HTTP standard. (b) Add a handler for 307 redirection, which becomes
1071 an error for POST, but a regular redirect for GET and HEAD
1072
Guido van Rossumbf1bef82003-05-13 18:01:19 +00001073- Added optional 'onerror' argument to os.walk(), to control error
1074 handling.
1075
Martin v. Löwise59e2ba2003-05-03 09:09:02 +00001076- inspect.is{method|data}descriptor was added, to allow pydoc display
1077 __doc__ of data descriptors.
1078
Skip Montanaro4a7751c2003-04-29 21:07:16 +00001079- Fixed socket speed loss caused by use of the _socketobject wrapper class
1080 in socket.py.
1081
Raymond Hettinger22952a32003-05-20 04:59:56 +00001082- timeit.py now checks the current directory for imports.
1083
Gustavo Niemeyer9556fba2003-06-07 17:53:08 +00001084- urllib2.py now knows how to order proxy classes, so the user doesn't
1085 have to insert it in front of other classes, nor do dirty tricks like
1086 inserting a "dummy" HTTPHandler after a ProxyHandler when building an
1087 opener with proxy support.
1088
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00001089- Iterators have been added for dbm keys.
1090
1091- random.Random objects can now be pickled.
1092
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001093Tools/Demos
1094-----------
1095
Martin v. Löwisb8c084e2003-06-14 09:03:46 +00001096- pydoc now offers help on keywords and topics.
1097
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00001098- Tools/idle is gone; long live Lib/idlelib.
1099
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00001100- diff.py prints file diffs in context, unified, or ndiff formats,
1101 providing a command line interface to difflib.py.
Raymond Hettinger2f3c74a2003-06-08 23:10:15 +00001102
Raymond Hettinger71e00332003-05-10 03:30:13 +00001103- texcheck.py is a new script for making a rough validation of Python LaTeX
1104 files.
1105
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001106Build
1107-----
1108
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001109- Setting DESTDIR during 'make install' now allows specifying a
Martin v. Löwis3b8ee082003-05-11 20:25:35 +00001110 different root directory.
1111
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001112C API
1113-----
1114
Tim Peters3cfe7542003-05-21 21:29:48 +00001115- PyType_Ready(): If a type declares that it participates in gc
1116 (Py_TPFLAGS_HAVE_GC), and its base class does not, and its base class's
1117 tp_free slot is the default _PyObject_Del, and type does not define
1118 a tp_free slot itself, _PyObject_GC_Del is assigned to type->tp_free.
1119 Previously _PyObject_Del was inherited, which could at best lead to a
1120 segfault. In addition, if even after this magic the type's tp_free
1121 slot is _PyObject_Del or NULL, and the type is a base type
1122 (Py_TPFLAGS_BASETYPE), TypeError is raised: since the type is a base
1123 type, its dealloc function must call type->tp_free, and since the type
1124 is gc'able, tp_free must not be NULL or _PyObject_Del.
1125
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00001126- PyThreadState_SetAsyncExc(): A new API (deliberately accessible only
1127 from C) to interrupt a thread by sending it an exception. It is
1128 intentional that you have to write your own C extension to call it
1129 from Python.
1130
1131
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001132New platforms
1133-------------
1134
1135None this time.
1136
1137Tests
1138-----
1139
1140- test_imp rewritten so that it doesn't raise RuntimeError if run as a
1141 side effect of being imported ("import test.autotest").
1142
1143Windows
1144-------
1145
Tim Petersfaa697a2003-06-22 01:42:20 +00001146- The Windows installer ships with Tcl/Tk 8.4.3 (upgraded from 8.4.1).
1147
Tim Petersc4607da2003-05-08 18:13:59 +00001148- The installer always suggested that Python be installed on the C:
1149 drive, due to a hardcoded "C:" generated by the Wise installation
1150 wizard. People with machines where C: is not the system drive
1151 usually want Python installed on whichever drive is their system drive
1152 instead. We removed the hardcoded "C:", and two testers on machines
1153 where C: is not the system drive report that the installer now
1154 suggests their system drive. Note that you can always select the
1155 directory you want in the "Select Destination Directory" dialog --
1156 that's what it's for.
1157
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001158Mac
1159---
1160
Just van Rossum99bc1fc2003-05-09 15:01:25 +00001161- There's a new module called "autoGIL", which offers a mechanism to
1162 automatically release the Global Interpreter Lock when an event loop
1163 goes to sleep, allowing other threads to run. It's currently only
1164 supported on OSX, in the Mach-O version.
Jack Jansenf5e23ff2003-06-16 13:53:40 +00001165- The OSA modules now allow direct access to properties of the
1166 toplevel application class (in AppleScript terminology).
1167- The Package Manager can now update itself.
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001168
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00001169SourceForge Bugs and Patches Applied
1170------------------------------------
1171
1172430160, 471893, 501716, 542562, 549151, 569574, 595837, 596434,
1173598163, 604210, 604716, 610332, 612627, 614770, 620190, 621891,
1174622042, 639139, 640236, 644345, 649742, 649742, 658233, 660022,
1175661318, 661676, 662807, 662923, 666219, 672855, 678325, 682347,
1176683486, 684981, 685773, 686254, 692776, 692959, 693094, 696777,
1177697989, 700827, 703666, 708495, 708604, 708901, 710733, 711902,
1178713722, 715782, 718286, 719359, 719367, 723136, 723831, 723962,
1179724588, 724767, 724767, 725942, 726150, 726446, 726869, 727051,
1180727719, 727719, 727805, 728277, 728563, 728656, 729096, 729103,
1181729293, 729297, 729300, 729317, 729395, 729622, 729817, 730170,
1182730296, 730594, 730685, 730826, 730963, 731209, 731403, 731504,
1183731514, 731626, 731635, 731643, 731644, 731644, 731689, 732124,
1184732143, 732234, 732284, 732284, 732479, 732761, 732783, 732951,
1185733667, 733781, 734118, 734231, 734869, 735051, 735293, 735527,
1186735613, 735694, 736962, 736962, 737970, 738066, 739313, 740055,
1187740234, 740301, 741806, 742126, 742741, 742860, 742860, 742911,
1188744041, 744104, 744238, 744687, 744877, 745055, 745478, 745525,
1189745620, 746012, 746304, 746366, 746801, 746953, 747348, 747667,
1190747954, 748846, 748849, 748973, 748975, 749191, 749210, 749759,
1191749831, 749911, 750008, 750092, 750542, 750595, 751038, 751107,
1192751276, 751451, 751916, 751941, 751956, 751998, 752671, 753451,
1193753602, 753617, 753845, 753925, 754014, 754340, 754447, 755031,
1194755087, 755147, 755245, 755683, 755987, 756032, 756996, 757058,
1195757229, 757818, 757821, 757822, 758112, 758910, 759227, 759889,
1196760257, 760703, 760792, 761104, 761337, 761519, 761830, 762455
1197
1198
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001199What's New in Python 2.3 beta 1?
1200================================
1201
Guido van Rossumfa1eddf2003-04-25 19:19:52 +00001202*Release date: 25-Apr-2003*
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001203
1204Core and builtins
1205-----------------
1206
Thomas Heller5eccabc2003-04-23 19:35:25 +00001207- New format codes B, H, I, k and K have been implemented for
1208 PyArg_ParseTuple and PyBuild_Value.
1209
Alex Martellia70b1912003-04-22 08:12:33 +00001210- New builtin function sum(seq, start=0) returns the sum of all the
1211 items in iterable object seq, plus start (items are normally numbers,
1212 and cannot be strings).
1213
Guido van Rossumaa86e352003-04-19 18:15:10 +00001214- bool() called without arguments now returns False rather than
1215 raising an exception. This is consistent with calling the
1216 constructors for the other builtin types -- called without argument
1217 they all return the false value of that type. (SF patch #724135)
1218
Guido van Rossumcf8d2852003-04-17 16:53:26 +00001219- In support of PEP 269 (making the pgen parser generator accessible
1220 from Python), some changes to the pgen code structure were made; a
1221 few files that used to be linked only with pgen are now linked with
1222 Python itself.
1223
Guido van Rossumc1f6e8c2003-04-16 21:13:23 +00001224- The repr() of a weakref object now shows the __name__ attribute of
1225 the referenced object, if it has one.
1226
Guido van Rossum76ba09f2003-04-16 19:40:58 +00001227- super() no longer ignores data descriptors, except __class__. See
1228 the thread started at
1229 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2003-April/034338.html
1230
Guido van Rossum3a3cca52003-04-14 20:58:14 +00001231- list.insert(i, x) now interprets negative i as it would be
1232 interpreted by slicing, so negative values count from the end of the
1233 list. This was the only place where such an interpretation was not
1234 placed on a list index.
1235
Guido van Rossumefbbb1c2003-04-11 18:43:06 +00001236- range() now works even if the arguments are longs with magnitude
1237 larger than sys.maxint, as long as the total length of the sequence
1238 fits. E.g., range(2**100, 2**101, 2**100) is the following list:
1239 [1267650600228229401496703205376L]. (SF patch #707427.)
1240
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001241- Some horridly obscure problems were fixed involving interaction
1242 between garbage collection and old-style classes with "ambitious"
1243 getattr hooks. If an old-style instance didn't have a __del__ method,
1244 but did have a __getattr__ hook, and the instance became reachable
1245 only from an unreachable cycle, and the hook resurrected or deleted
1246 unreachable objects when asked to resolve "__del__", anything up to
1247 a segfault could happen. That's been repaired.
1248
Raymond Hettingera3e1e4c2003-03-06 23:54:28 +00001249- dict.pop now takes an optional argument specifying a default
1250 value to return if the key is not in the dict. If a default is not
1251 given and the key is not found, a KeyError will still be raised.
1252 Parallel changes were made to UserDict.UserDict and UserDict.DictMixin.
1253 [SF patch #693753] (contributed by Michael Stone.)
1254
Martin v. Löwis73d538b2003-03-05 15:13:47 +00001255- sys.getfilesystemencoding() was added to expose
1256 Py_FileSystemDefaultEncoding.
Guido van Rossum46d3dc32003-03-01 03:20:41 +00001257
1258- New function sys.exc_clear() clears the current exception. This is
1259 rarely needed, but can sometimes be useful to release objects
1260 referenced by the traceback held in sys.exc_info()[2]. (SF patch
1261 #693195.)
1262
Neal Norwitzd5a65a72003-02-23 23:11:41 +00001263- On 64-bit systems, a dictionary could contain duplicate long/int keys
1264 if the key value was larger than 2**32. See SF bug #689659.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001265
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00001266- Fixed SF bug #663074. The codec system was using global static
Walter Dörwaldfa86bf52003-03-31 16:15:13 +00001267 variables to store internal data. As a result, any attempts to use the
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00001268 unicode system with multiple active interpreters, or successive
1269 interpreter executions, would fail.
1270
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00001271- "%c" % u"a" now returns a unicode string instead of raising a
Walter Dörwald44f527f2003-04-02 16:37:24 +00001272 TypeError. u"%c" % 0xffffffff now raises a OverflowError instead
Walter Dörwald1e469c52003-04-02 16:57:59 +00001273 of a ValueError to be consistent with "%c" % 256. See SF patch #710127.
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00001274
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001275Extension modules
1276-----------------
1277
Guido van Rossume7adda92003-04-25 05:52:37 +00001278- The socket module now provides the functions inet_pton and inet_ntop
1279 for converting between string and packed representation of IP
1280 addresses. There is also a new module variable, has_ipv6, which is
1281 True iff the current Python has IPv6 support. See SF patch #658327.
1282
Martin v. Löwisbfe175c2003-04-16 19:42:51 +00001283- Tkinter wrappers around Tcl variables now pass objects directly
1284 to Tcl, instead of first converting them to strings.
1285
Guido van Rossum41c99e72003-04-14 17:59:34 +00001286- The .*? pattern in the re module is now special-cased to avoid the
1287 recursion limit. (SF patch #720991 -- many thanks to Gary Herron
1288 and Greg Chapman.)
1289
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00001290- New function sys.call_tracing() allows pdb to debug code
1291 recursively.
1292
Tim Peters730f5532003-04-08 17:17:17 +00001293- New function gc.get_referents(obj) returns a list of objects
Tim Peters0f81ab62003-04-08 16:39:48 +00001294 directly referenced by obj. In effect, it exposes what the object's
1295 tp_traverse slot does, and can be helpful when debugging memory
1296 leaks.
1297
Martin v. Löwis7fb697b2003-04-03 04:49:12 +00001298- The iconv module has been removed from this release.
1299
Tim Petersd50ade62003-03-20 18:32:13 +00001300- The platform-independent routines for packing floats in IEEE formats
1301 (struct.pack's <f, >f, <d, and >d codes; pickle and cPickle's protocol 1
1302 pickling of floats) ignored that rounding can cause a carry to
1303 propagate. The worst consequence was that, in rare cases, <f and >f
1304 could produce strings that, when unpacked again, were a factor of 2
1305 away from the original float. This has been fixed. See SF bug
1306 #705836.
1307
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001308- New function time.tzset() provides access to the C library tzset()
Guido van Rossumd11b62e2003-03-14 21:51:36 +00001309 function, if supported. (SF patch #675422.)
1310
Neal Norwitz12e22172003-03-03 21:16:39 +00001311- Using createfilehandler, deletefilehandler, createtimerhandler functions
1312 on Tkinter.tkinter (_tkinter module) no longer crashes the interpreter.
1313 See SF bug #692416.
1314
Michael W. Hudsonf0089982003-03-03 12:29:42 +00001315- Modified the fcntl.ioctl() function to allow modification of a passed
1316 mutable buffer (for details see the reference documentation).
1317
Raymond Hettinger61fe64d2003-02-23 04:40:07 +00001318- Made user requested changes to the itertools module.
1319 Subsumed the times() function into repeat().
1320 Added chain() and cycle().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001321
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00001322- The rotor module is now deprecated; the encryption algorithm it uses
Andrew M. Kuchlingfb5f4852003-04-24 13:19:56 +00001323 is not believed to be secure, and including crypto code with Python
1324 has implications for exporting and importing it in various countries.
1325
Skip Montanaro89feabc2003-03-30 04:54:24 +00001326- The socket module now always uses the _socketobject wrapper class, even on
1327 platforms which have dup(2). The makefile() method is built directly
1328 on top of the socket without duplicating the file descriptor, allowing
1329 timeouts to work properly.
1330
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001331Library
1332-------
1333
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00001334- New generator function os.walk() is an easy-to-use alternative to
1335 os.path.walk(). See os module docs for details. os.path.walk()
1336 isn't deprecated at this time, but may become deprecated in a
1337 future release.
1338
Marc-André Lemburg246d8472003-04-24 11:36:11 +00001339- Added new module "platform" which provides a wide range of tools
1340 for querying platform dependent features.
1341
Andrew M. Kuchling4e42b312003-04-24 16:45:05 +00001342- netrc now allows ASCII punctuation characters in passwords.
Raymond Hettinger1d877862003-04-23 19:06:08 +00001343
Martin v. Löwis153c9e42003-04-19 20:59:03 +00001344- shelve now supports the optional writeback argument, and exposes
1345 pickle protocol versions.
1346
Guido van Rossuma2685402003-04-19 18:04:57 +00001347- Several methods of nntplib.NNTP have grown an optional file argument
1348 which specifies a file where to divert the command's output
1349 (already supported by the body() method). (SF patch #720468)
1350
Martin v. Löwis281b2c62003-04-18 21:04:39 +00001351- The self-documenting XML server library DocXMLRPCServer was added.
1352
Martin v. Löwis2548c732003-04-18 10:39:54 +00001353- Support for internationalized domain names has been added through
1354 the 'idna' and 'punycode' encodings, the 'stringprep' module, the
1355 'mkstringprep' tool, and enhancements to the socket and httplib
1356 modules.
1357
Walter Dörwald5688b7a2003-04-16 09:46:13 +00001358- htmlentitydefs has two new dictionaries: name2codepoint maps
1359 HTML entity names to Unicode codepoints (as integers).
1360 codepoint2name is the reverse mapping. See SF patch #722017.
1361
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00001362- pdb has a new command, "debug", which lets you step through
1363 arbitrary code from the debugger's (pdb) prompt.
1364
Raymond Hettingerc377cbf2003-04-04 22:56:42 +00001365- unittest.failUnlessEqual and its equivalent unittest.assertEqual now
1366 return 'not a == b' rather than 'a != b'. This gives the desired
1367 result for classes that define __eq__ without defining __ne__.
1368
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001369- sgmllib now supports SGML marked sections, in particular the
Martin v. Löwis3163a3b2003-03-30 14:25:40 +00001370 MS Office extensions.
1371
Raymond Hettinger42182eb2003-03-09 05:33:33 +00001372- The urllib module now offers support for the iterator protocol.
1373 SF patch 698520 contributed by Brett Cannon.
1374
Guido van Rossum9589a252003-03-06 01:56:12 +00001375- New module timeit provides a simple framework for timing the
1376 execution speed of expressions and statements.
1377
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001378- sets.Set objects now support mixed-type __eq__ and __ne__, instead
1379 of raising TypeError. If x is a Set object and y is a non-Set object,
1380 x == y is False, and x != y is True. This is akin to the change made
1381 for mixed-type comparisons of datetime objects in 2.3a2; more info
1382 about the rationale is in the NEWS entry for that. See also SF bug
1383 report <http://www.python.org/sf/693121>.
1384
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00001385- On Unix platforms, if os.listdir() is called with a Unicode argument,
1386 it now returns Unicode strings. (This behavior was added earlier
1387 to the Windows NT/2k/XP version of os.listdir().)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001388
Andrew M. Kuchling6f177d42003-02-28 22:09:33 +00001389- Distutils: both 'py_modules' and 'packages' keywords can now be specified
1390 in core.setup(). Previously you could supply one or the other, but
1391 not both of them. (SF patch #695090 from Bernhard Herzog)
1392
Skip Montanaro64a839e2003-03-20 23:36:55 +00001393- New csv package makes it easy to read/write CSV files.
1394
Gustavo Niemeyer68d8cef2003-04-17 21:31:33 +00001395- Module shlex has been extended to allow posix-like shell parsings,
1396 including a split() function for easy spliting of quoted strings and
1397 commands. An iterator interface was also implemented.
1398
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001399Tools/Demos
1400-----------
1401
Tim Peters21d7d4d2003-04-18 00:45:59 +00001402- New script combinerefs.py helps analyze new PYTHONDUMPREFS output.
1403 See the module docstring for details.
1404
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001405Build
1406-----
1407
Neal Norwitz35892b92003-02-23 23:45:35 +00001408- Fix problem building on OSF1 because the compiler only accepted
1409 preprocessor directives that start in column 1. (SF bug #691793.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001410
1411C API
1412-----
1413
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00001414- Added PyGC_Collect(), equivalent to calling gc.collect().
1415
Guido van Rossum0fc8f002003-04-15 15:12:39 +00001416- PyThreadState_GetDict() was changed not to raise an exception or
1417 issue a fatal error when no current thread state is available. This
1418 makes it possible to print dictionaries when no thread is active.
1419
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00001420- LONG_LONG was renamed to PY_LONG_LONG. Extensions that use this and
1421 need compatibility with previous versions can use this:
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00001422
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00001423 #ifndef PY_LONG_LONG
1424 #define PY_LONG_LONG LONG_LONG
1425 #endif
Martin v. Löwisb9a0f912003-03-29 10:06:18 +00001426
Raymond Hettinger1da1dbf2003-03-17 19:46:11 +00001427- Added PyObject_SelfIter() to fill the tp_iter slot for the
Raymond Hettinger01538262003-03-17 08:24:35 +00001428 typical case where the method returns its self argument.
1429
Guido van Rossume5c691a2003-03-07 15:13:17 +00001430- The extended type structure used for heap types (new-style
1431 classes defined by Python code using a class statement) is now
1432 exported from object.h as PyHeapTypeObject. (SF patch #696193.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001433
1434New platforms
1435-------------
1436
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00001437None this time.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001438
1439Tests
1440-----
1441
Neal Norwitz55b61d22003-02-28 19:57:03 +00001442- test_timeout now requires -u network to be passed to regrtest to run.
1443 See SF bug #692988.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001444
1445Windows
1446-------
1447
Tim Peters11b23062003-04-23 02:39:17 +00001448- os.fsync() now exists on Windows, and calls the Microsoft _commit()
1449 function.
1450
Guido van Rossumf4050642003-04-09 19:39:06 +00001451- New function winsound.MessageBeep() wraps the Win32 API
1452 MessageBeep().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001453
1454Mac
1455---
1456
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00001457- os.listdir() now returns Unicode strings on MacOS X when called with
1458 a Unicode argument. See the general news item under "Library".
Just van Rossum46c97842003-02-25 21:42:15 +00001459
Jack Jansendeac2ac2003-02-24 11:04:17 +00001460- A new method MacOS.WMAvailable() returns true if it is safe to access
1461 the window manager, false otherwise.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001462
Jack Jansencf76be02003-03-24 12:13:54 +00001463- EasyDialogs dialogs are now movable-modal, and if the application is
1464 currently in the background they will ask to be moved to the foreground
1465 before displaying.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001466
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00001467- OSA Scripting support has improved a lot, and gensuitemodule.py can now
Jack Jansende354b72003-04-11 15:37:20 +00001468 be used by mere mortals. The documentation is now also more or less
1469 complete.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001470
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00001471- The IDE (in a framework build) now includes introductory documentation
1472 in Apple Help Viewer format.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001473
1474
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001475What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 2?
1476=================================
1477
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00001478*Release date: 19-Feb-2003*
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001479
1480Core and builtins
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00001481-----------------
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001482
Walter Dörwald2ffec022003-02-19 16:34:11 +00001483- Negative positions returned from PEP 293 error callbacks are now
1484 treated as being relative to the end of the input string. Positions
1485 that are out of bounds raise an IndexError.
1486
Guido van Rossum162e38c2003-02-19 15:25:10 +00001487- sys.path[0] (the directory from which the script is loaded) is now
1488 turned into an absolute pathname, unless it is the empty string.
1489 (SF patch #664376.)
1490
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00001491- Finally fixed the bug in compile() and exec where a string ending
1492 with an indented code block but no newline would raise SyntaxError.
1493 This would have been a four-line change in parsetok.c... Except
1494 codeop.py depends on this behavior, so a compilation flag had to be
1495 invented that causes the tokenizer to revert to the old behavior;
1496 this required extra changes to 2 .h files, 2 .c files, and 2 .py
Guido van Rossum1442dc12003-02-13 22:19:20 +00001497 files. (Fixes SF bug #501622.)
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00001498
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00001499- If a new-style class defines neither __new__ nor __init__, its
1500 constructor would ignore all arguments. This is changed now: the
1501 constructor refuses arguments in this case. This might break code
1502 that worked under Python 2.2. The simplest fix is to add a no-op
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001503 __init__: ``def __init__(self, *args, **kw): pass``.
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00001504
Guido van Rossum48035eb2003-02-12 17:05:26 +00001505- Through a bytecode optimizer bug (and I bet you didn't even know
1506 Python *had* a bytecode optimizer :-), "unsigned" hex/oct constants
1507 with a leading minus sign would come out with the wrong sign.
1508 ("Unsigned" hex/oct constants are those with a face value in the
1509 range sys.maxint+1 through sys.maxint*2+1, inclusive; these have
1510 always been interpreted as negative numbers through sign folding.)
1511 E.g. 0xffffffff is -1, and -(0xffffffff) is 1, but -0xffffffff would
1512 come out as -4294967295. This was the case in Python 2.2 through
1513 2.2.2 and 2.3a1, and in Python 2.4 it will once again have that
1514 value, but according to PEP 237 it really needs to be 1 now. This
1515 will be backported to Python 2.2.3 a well. (SF #660455)
1516
Guido van Rossum47710652003-02-12 20:48:22 +00001517- int(s, base) sometimes sign-folds hex and oct constants; it only
1518 does this when base is 0 and s.strip() starts with a '0'. When the
1519 sign is actually folded, as in int("0xffffffff", 0) on a 32-bit
1520 machine, which returns -1, a FutureWarning is now issued; in Python
1521 2.4, this will return 4294967295L, as do int("+0xffffffff", 0) and
1522 int("0xffffffff", 16) right now. (PEP 347)
1523
Guido van Rossuma89d10e2003-02-12 03:58:38 +00001524- super(X, x): x may now be a proxy for an X instance, i.e.
1525 issubclass(x.__class__, X) but not issubclass(type(x), X).
1526
Guido van Rossum03bc7d32003-02-12 03:32:58 +00001527- isinstance(x, X): if X is a new-style class, this is now equivalent
1528 to issubclass(type(x), X) or issubclass(x.__class__, X). Previously
1529 only type(x) was tested. (For classic classes this was already the
1530 case.)
1531
Just van Rossum73ffb4a2003-02-10 09:57:08 +00001532- compile(), eval() and the exec statement now fully support source code
1533 passed as unicode strings.
1534
Neal Norwitzde8b94c2003-02-10 02:12:43 +00001535- int subclasses can be initialized with longs if the value fits in an int.
1536 See SF bug #683467.
1537
Tim Petersbf2674b2003-02-02 07:51:32 +00001538- long(string, base) takes time linear in len(string) when base is a power
1539 of 2 now. It used to take time quadratic in len(string).
1540
Martin v. Löwis8afd7572003-01-25 22:46:11 +00001541- filter returns now Unicode results for Unicode arguments.
1542
Martin v. Löwisaf6a27a2003-01-03 19:16:14 +00001543- raw_input can now return Unicode objects.
1544
Skip Montanaro4abd5f02003-01-02 20:51:08 +00001545- List objects' sort() method now accepts None as the comparison function.
1546 Passing None is semantically identical to calling sort() with no
1547 arguments.
1548
Neal Norwitz1a997502003-01-13 20:13:12 +00001549- Fixed crash when printing a subclass of str and __str__ returned self.
1550 See SF bug #667147.
1551
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00001552- Fixed an invalid RuntimeWarning and an undetected error when trying
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00001553 to convert a long integer into a float which couldn't fit.
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00001554 See SF bug #676155.
1555
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00001556- Function objects now have a __module__ attribute that is bound to
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00001557 the name of the module in which the function was defined. This
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00001558 applies for C functions and methods as well as functions and methods
1559 defined in Python. This attribute is used by pickle.whichmodule(),
1560 which changes the behavior of whichmodule slightly. In Python 2.2
1561 whichmodule() returns "__main__" for functions that are not defined
1562 at the top-level of a module (examples: methods, nested functions).
1563 Now whichmodule() will return the proper module name.
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00001564
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001565Extension modules
1566-----------------
1567
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00001568- operator.isNumberType() now checks that the object has a nb_int or
1569 nb_float slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
1570 tp_as_number pointer.
1571
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00001572- The imp module now has ways to acquire and release the "import
1573 lock": imp.acquire_lock() and imp.release_lock(). Note: this is a
1574 reentrant lock, so releasing the lock only truly releases it when
1575 this is the last release_lock() call. You can check with
1576 imp.lock_held(). (SF bug #580952 and patch #683257.)
1577
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001578- Change to cPickle to match pickle.py (see below and PEP 307).
1579
Neal Norwitz9caf9c02003-02-10 01:54:06 +00001580- Fix some bugs in the parser module. SF bug #678518.
1581
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00001582- Thanks to Scott David Daniels, a subtle bug in how the zlib
Walter Dörwald28d81962003-02-03 20:53:14 +00001583 extension implemented flush() was fixed. Scott also rewrote the
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00001584 zlib test suite using the unittest module. (SF bug #640230 and
1585 patch #678531.)
1586
Raymond Hettinger96ef8112003-02-01 00:10:11 +00001587- Added an itertools module containing high speed, memory efficient
1588 looping constructs inspired by tools from Haskell and SML.
1589
Guido van Rossum99d4abf2003-01-27 22:22:50 +00001590- The SSL module now handles sockets with a timeout set correctly (SF
1591 patch #675750, fixing SF bug #675552).
1592
Barry Warsawf8ba39c2003-01-07 20:55:26 +00001593- os/posixmodule has grown the sysexits.h constants (EX_OK and friends).
1594
Guido van Rossum6d0d3652003-01-07 20:34:19 +00001595- Fixed broken threadstate swap in readline that could cause fatal
1596 errors when a readline hook was being invoked while a background
1597 thread was active. (SF bugs #660476 and #513033.)
1598
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001599- fcntl now exposes the strops.h I_* constants.
1600
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00001601- Fix a crash on Solaris that occurred when calling close() on
1602 an mmap'ed file which was already closed. (SF patch #665913)
1603
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001604- Fixed several serious bugs in the zipimport implementation.
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001605
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00001606- datetime changes:
1607
Guido van Rossum8b7a9a32003-04-14 22:01:58 +00001608 The date class is now properly subclassable. (SF bug #720908)
1609
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00001610 The datetime and datetimetz classes have been collapsed into a single
1611 datetime class, and likewise the time and timetz classes into a single
1612 time class. Previously, a datetimetz object with tzinfo=None acted
1613 exactly like a datetime object, and similarly for timetz. This wasn't
1614 enough of a difference to justify distinct classes, and life is simpler
1615 now.
1616
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00001617 today() and now() now round system timestamps to the closest
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00001618 microsecond <http://www.python.org/sf/661086>. This repairs an
1619 irritation most likely seen on Windows systems.
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00001620
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00001621 In dt.astimezone(tz), if tz.utcoffset(dt) returns a duration,
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00001622 ValueError is raised if tz.dst(dt) returns None (2.3a1 treated it
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00001623 as 0 instead, but a tzinfo subclass wishing to participate in
1624 time zone conversion has to take a stand on whether it supports
1625 DST; if you don't care about DST, then code dst() to return 0 minutes,
1626 meaning that DST is never in effect).
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00001627
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00001628 The tzinfo methods utcoffset() and dst() must return a timedelta object
1629 (or None) now. In 2.3a1 they could also return an int or long, but that
1630 was an unhelpfully redundant leftover from an earlier version wherein
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00001631 they couldn't return a timedelta. TOOWTDI.
1632
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00001633 The example tzinfo class for local time had a bug. It was replaced
1634 by a later example coded by Guido.
1635
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00001636 datetime.astimezone(tz) no longer raises an exception when the
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00001637 input datetime has no UTC equivalent in tz. For typical "hybrid" time
1638 zones (a single tzinfo subclass modeling both standard and daylight
1639 time), this case can arise one hour per year, at the hour daylight time
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00001640 ends. See new docs for details. In short, the new behavior mimics
1641 the local wall clock's behavior of repeating an hour in local time.
1642
1643 dt.astimezone() can no longer be used to convert between naive and aware
1644 datetime objects. If you merely want to attach, or remove, a tzinfo
1645 object, without any conversion of date and time members, use
1646 dt.replace(tzinfo=whatever) instead, where "whatever" is None or a
1647 tzinfo subclass instance.
1648
1649 A new method tzinfo.fromutc(dt) can be overridden in tzinfo subclasses
1650 to give complete control over how a UTC time is to be converted to
1651 a local time. The default astimezone() implementation calls fromutc()
1652 as its last step, so a tzinfo subclass can affect that too by overriding
1653 fromutc(). It's expected that the default fromutc() implementation will
1654 be suitable as-is for "almost all" time zone subclasses, but the
1655 creativity of political time zone fiddling appears unbounded -- fromutc()
1656 allows the highly motivated to emulate any scheme expressible in Python.
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00001657
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00001658 datetime.now(): The optional tzinfo argument was undocumented (that's
1659 repaired), and its name was changed to tz ("tzinfo" is overloaded enough
1660 already). With a tz argument, now(tz) used to return the local date
1661 and time, and attach tz to it, without any conversion of date and time
1662 members. This was less than useful. Now now(tz) returns the current
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001663 date and time as local time in tz's time zone, akin to ::
1664
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00001665 tz.fromutc(datetime.utcnow().replace(tzinfo=utc))
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001666
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00001667 where "utc" is an instance of a tzinfo subclass modeling UTC. Without
1668 a tz argument, now() continues to return the current local date and time,
1669 as a naive datetime object.
1670
Tim Peters2a44a8d2003-01-23 20:53:10 +00001671 datetime.fromtimestamp(): Like datetime.now() above, this had less than
1672 useful behavior when the optional tinzo argument was specified. See
1673 also SF bug report <http://www.python.org/sf/660872>.
1674
Tim Peters8d81a012003-01-24 22:36:34 +00001675 date and datetime comparison: In order to prevent comparison from
1676 falling back to the default compare-object-addresses strategy, these
1677 raised TypeError whenever they didn't understand the other object type.
1678 They still do, except when the other object has a "timetuple" attribute,
1679 in which case they return NotImplemented now. This gives other
1680 datetime objects (e.g., mxDateTime) a chance to intercept the
1681 comparison.
1682
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00001683 date, time, datetime and timedelta comparison: When the exception
1684 for mixed-type comparisons in the last paragraph doesn't apply, if
1685 the comparison is == then False is returned, and if the comparison is
1686 != then True is returned. Because dict lookup and the "in" operator
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001687 only invoke __eq__, this allows, for example, ::
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00001688
1689 if some_datetime in some_sequence:
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001690
1691 and ::
1692
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00001693 some_dict[some_timedelta] = whatever
1694
1695 to work as expected, without raising TypeError just because the
1696 sequence is heterogeneous, or the dict has mixed-type keys. [This
1697 seems like a good idea to implement for all mixed-type comparisons
1698 that don't want to allow falling back to address comparison.]
1699
Tim Peters75a6e3b2003-01-04 18:17:36 +00001700 The constructors building a datetime from a timestamp could raise
1701 ValueError if the platform C localtime()/gmtime() inserted "leap
1702 seconds". Leap seconds are ignored now. On such platforms, it's
1703 possible to have timestamps that differ by a second, yet where
1704 datetimes constructed from them are equal.
1705
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00001706 The pickle format of date, time and datetime objects has changed
1707 completely. The undocumented pickler and unpickler functions no
Tim Petersb57f8f02003-02-01 02:54:15 +00001708 longer exist. The undocumented __setstate__() and __getstate__()
1709 methods no longer exist either.
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00001710
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001711Library
1712-------
1713
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001714- The logging module was updated slightly; the WARN level was renamed
1715 to WARNING, and the matching function/method warn() to warning().
1716
1717- The pickle and cPickle modules were updated with a new pickling
1718 protocol (documented by pickletools.py, see below) and several
1719 extensions to the pickle customization API (__reduce__, __setstate__
1720 etc.). The copy module now uses more of the pickle customization
1721 API to copy objects that don't implement __copy__ or __deepcopy__.
1722 See PEP 307 for details.
1723
1724- The distutils "register" command now uses http://www.python.org/pypi
1725 as the default repository. (See PEP 301.)
1726
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00001727- the platform dependent path related variables sep, altsep, extsep,
1728 pathsep, curdir, pardir and defpath are now defined in the platform
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00001729 dependent path modules (e.g. ntpath.py) rather than os.py, so these
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001730 variables are now available via os.path. They continue to be
1731 available from the os module.
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00001732 (see <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00001733
Tim Peters6ee04802003-02-05 18:29:34 +00001734- array.array was added to the types repr.py knows about (see
1735 <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
1736
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00001737- The new pickletools.py contains lots of documentation about pickle
1738 internals, and supplies some helpers for working with pickles, such as
1739 a symbolic pickle disassembler.
1740
Skip Montanaro9a7c96a2003-01-22 18:17:25 +00001741- Xmlrpclib.py now supports the builtin boolean type.
1742
Martin v. Löwis0c6774d2003-01-15 11:51:06 +00001743- py_compile has a new 'doraise' flag and a new PyCompileError
1744 exception.
1745
Martin v. Löwisd69663d2003-01-15 11:37:23 +00001746- SimpleXMLRPCServer now supports CGI through the CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler
1747 class.
1748
Guido van Rossum50e92232003-01-14 16:45:04 +00001749- The sets module now raises TypeError in __cmp__, to clarify that
1750 sets are not intended to be three-way-compared; the comparison
1751 operators are overloaded as subset/superset tests.
1752
Guido van Rossumcd0c0472003-01-07 23:03:05 +00001753- Bastion.py and rexec.py are disabled. These modules are not safe in
1754 Python 2.2. or 2.3.
1755
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001756- realpath is now exported when doing ``from poxixpath import *``.
Neal Norwitzbb0246a2003-01-03 18:12:28 +00001757 It is also exported for ntpath, macpath, and os2emxpath.
1758 See SF bug #659228.
1759
Neal Norwitzb9ef4ae2003-01-05 23:19:43 +00001760- New module tarfile from Lars Gustäbel provides a comprehensive interface
1761 to tar archive files with transparent gzip and bzip2 compression.
1762 See SF patch #651082.
1763
Neal Norwitz4f442372003-01-06 06:51:36 +00001764- urlparse can now parse imap:// URLs. See SF feature request #618024.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001765
Neal Norwitze931ed52003-01-10 23:24:32 +00001766- Tkinter.Canvas.scan_dragto() provides an optional parameter to support
1767 the gain value which is passed to Tk. SF bug# 602259.
1768
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00001769- Fix logging.handlers.SysLogHandler protocol when using UNIX domain sockets.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00001770 See SF patch #642974.
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00001771
Skip Montanaro12fe72e2003-02-25 17:46:20 +00001772- The dospath module was deleted. Use the ntpath module when manipulating
1773 DOS paths from other platforms.
1774
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001775Tools/Demos
1776-----------
1777
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00001778- Two new scripts (db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py) were added to the
1779 Tools/scripts directory to facilitate conversion from the old bsddb module
1780 to the new one. While the user-visible API of the new module is
1781 compatible with the old one, it's likely that the version of the
1782 underlying database library has changed. To convert from the old library,
1783 run the db2pickle.py script using the old version of Python to convert it
1784 to a pickle file. After upgrading Python, run the pickle2db.py script
1785 using the new version of Python to reconstitute your database. For
1786 example:
1787
Skip Montanaro621f0552003-02-03 15:48:10 +00001788 % python2.2 db2pickle.py -h some.db > some.pickle
1789 % python2.3 pickle2db.py -h some.db.new < some.pickle
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00001790
1791 Run the scripts without any args to get a usage message.
1792
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001793
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001794Build
1795-----
1796
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00001797- The audio driver tests (test_ossaudiodev.py and
1798 test_linuxaudiodev.py) are no longer run by default. This is
1799 because they don't always work, depending on your hardware and
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001800 software. To run these tests, you must use an invocation like ::
1801
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00001802 ./python Lib/test/regrtest.py -u audio test_ossaudiodev
1803
Skip Montanarodecc6a42003-01-01 20:07:49 +00001804- On systems which build using the configure script, compiler flags which
1805 used to be lumped together using the OPT flag have been split into two
1806 groups, OPT and BASECFLAGS. OPT is meant to carry just optimization- and
1807 debug-related flags like "-g" and "-O3". BASECFLAGS is meant to carry
1808 compiler flags that are required to get a clean compile. On some
1809 platforms (many Linux flavors in particular) BASECFLAGS will be empty by
1810 default. On others, such as Mac OS X and SCO, it will contain required
1811 flags. This change allows people building Python to override OPT without
1812 fear of clobbering compiler flags which are required to get a clean build.
1813
1814- On Darwin/Mac OS X platforms, /sw/lib and /sw/include are added to the
1815 relevant search lists in setup.py. This allows users building Python to
1816 take advantage of the many packages available from the fink project
1817 <http://fink.sf.net/>.
1818
1819- A new Makefile target, scriptsinstall, installs a number of useful scripts
1820 from the Tools/scripts directory.
1821
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001822C API
1823-----
1824
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001825- PyEval_GetFrame() is now declared to return a ``PyFrameObject *``
1826 instead of a plain ``PyObject *``. (SF patch #686601.)
Guido van Rossum6297a7a2003-02-19 15:53:17 +00001827
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00001828- PyNumber_Check() now checks that the object has a nb_int or nb_float
1829 slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
1830 tp_as_number pointer.
1831
Guido van Rossumeea47182003-02-11 20:39:59 +00001832- A C type that inherits from a base type that defines tp_as_buffer
1833 will now inherit the tp_as_buffer pointer if it doesn't define one.
1834 (SF #681367)
1835
Neil Schemenauer5042da62003-02-04 20:59:40 +00001836- The PyArg_Parse functions now issue a DeprecationWarning if a float
1837 argument is provided when an integer is specified (this affects the 'b',
1838 'B', 'h', 'H', 'i', and 'l' codes). Future versions of Python will
1839 raise a TypeError.
Neil Schemenauercd63e612003-01-24 22:15:53 +00001840
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001841Tests
1842-----
1843
Walter Dörwald11cfbd62003-03-26 16:03:16 +00001844- Several tests weren't being run from regrtest.py (test_timeout.py,
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001845 test_tarfile.py, test_netrc.py, test_multifile.py,
1846 test_importhooks.py and test_imp.py). Now they are. (Note to
1847 developers: please read Lib/test/README when creating a new test, to
1848 make sure to do it right! All tests need to use either unittest or
1849 pydoc.)
1850
1851- Added test_posix.py, a test suite for the posix module.
1852
1853- Added test_hexoct.py, a test suite for hex/oct constant folding.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001854
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001855Windows
1856-------
1857
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00001858- The timeout code for socket connect() didn't work right; this has
1859 now been fixed. test_timeout.py should pass (at least most of the
1860 time).
1861
Thomas Hellerdda583d2003-01-31 20:45:41 +00001862- distutils' msvccompiler class now passes the preprocessor options to
1863 the resource compiler. See SF patch #669198.
1864
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00001865- The bsddb module now ships with Sleepycat's 4.1.25.NC, the latest
1866 release without strong cryptography.
1867
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00001868- sys.path[0], if it contains a directory name, is now always an
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001869 absolute pathname. (SF patch #664376.)
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00001870
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00001871- The new logging package is now installed by the Windows installer. It
1872 wasn't in 2.3a1 due to oversight.
1873
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001874Mac
1875---
1876
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00001877- There are new dialogs EasyDialogs.AskFileForOpen, AskFileForSave
1878 and AskFolder. The old macfs.StandardGetFile and friends are deprecated.
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00001879
Jack Jansenc9296362003-02-06 23:10:45 +00001880- Most of the standard library now uses pathnames or FSRefs in preference
1881 of FSSpecs, and use the underlying Carbon.File and Carbon.Folder modules
1882 in stead of macfs. macfs will probably be deprecated in the future.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00001883
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00001884- Type Carbon.File.FSCatalogInfo and supporting methods have been implemented.
1885 This also makes macfs.FSSpec.SetDates() work again.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001886
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00001887- There is a new module pimp, the package install manager for Python, and
1888 accompanying applet PackageManager. These allow you to easily download
1889 and install pretested extension packages either in source or binary
1890 form. Only in MacPython-OSX.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001891
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00001892- Applets are now built with bundlebuilder in MacPython-OSX, which should make
Jack Jansen5d44b342003-02-18 23:32:47 +00001893 them more robust and also provides a path towards BuildApplication. The
1894 downside of this change is that applets can no longer be run from the
1895 Terminal window, this will hopefully be fixed in the 2.3b1.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001896
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001897
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001898What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 1?
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001899=================================
1900
Guido van Rossumae548862002-12-31 15:47:36 +00001901*Release date: 31-Dec-2002*
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001902
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001903Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001904--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00001905
Michael W. Hudson96bc3b42002-11-26 14:48:23 +00001906- One can now assign to __bases__ and __name__ of new-style classes.
1907
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00001908- dict() now accepts keyword arguments so that dict(one=1, two=2)
1909 is the equivalent of {"one": 1, "two": 2}. Accordingly,
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00001910 the existing (but undocumented) 'items' keyword argument has
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00001911 been eliminated. This means that dict(items=someMapping) now has
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00001912 a different meaning than before.
1913
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00001914- int() now returns a long object if the argument is outside the
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001915 integer range, so int("4" * 1000), int(1e200) and int(1L<<1000) will
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00001916 all return long objects instead of raising an OverflowError.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001917
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00001918- Assignment to __class__ is disallowed if either the old or the new
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00001919 class is a statically allocated type object (such as defined by an
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00001920 extension module). This prevents anomalies like 2.__class__ = bool.
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00001921
1922- New-style object creation and deallocation have been sped up
1923 significantly; they are now faster than classic instance creation
1924 and deallocation.
1925
1926- The __slots__ variable can now mention "private" names, and the
1927 right thing will happen (e.g. __slots__ = ["__foo"]).
1928
1929- The built-ins slice() and buffer() are now callable types. The
1930 types classobj (formerly class), code, function, instance, and
1931 instancemethod (formerly instance-method), which have no built-in
1932 names but are accessible through the types module, are now also
1933 callable. The type dict-proxy is renamed to dictproxy.
1934
1935- Cycles going through the __class__ link of a new-style instance are
1936 now detected by the garbage collector.
1937
1938- Classes using __slots__ are now properly garbage collected.
1939 [SF bug 519621]
1940
1941- Tightened the __slots__ rules: a slot name must be a valid Python
1942 identifier.
1943
1944- The constructor for the module type now requires a name argument and
1945 takes an optional docstring argument. Previously, this constructor
1946 ignored its arguments. As a consequence, deriving a class from a
1947 module (not from the module type) is now illegal; previously this
1948 created an unnamed module, just like invoking the module type did.
1949 [SF bug 563060]
1950
1951- A new type object, 'basestring', is added. This is a common base type
1952 for 'str' and 'unicode', and can be used instead of
1953 types.StringTypes, e.g. to test whether something is "a string":
1954 isinstance(x, basestring) is True for Unicode and 8-bit strings. This
1955 is an abstract base class and cannot be instantiated directly.
1956
1957- Changed new-style class instantiation so that when C's __new__
1958 method returns something that's not a C instance, its __init__ is
1959 not called. [SF bug #537450]
1960
1961- Fixed super() to work correctly with class methods. [SF bug #535444]
1962
1963- If you try to pickle an instance of a class that has __slots__ but
1964 doesn't define or override __getstate__, a TypeError is now raised.
1965 This is done by adding a bozo __getstate__ to the class that always
1966 raises TypeError. (Before, this would appear to be pickled, but the
1967 state of the slots would be lost.)
1968
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001969Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001970-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001971
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00001972- Import from zipfiles is now supported. The name of a zipfile placed
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00001973 on sys.path causes the import statement to look for importable Python
1974 modules (with .py, pyc and .pyo extensions) and packages inside the
1975 zipfile. The zipfile import follows the specification (though not
1976 the sample implementation) of PEP 273. The semantics of __path__ are
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00001977 compatible with those that have been implemented in Jython since
1978 Jython 2.1.
1979
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001980- PEP 302 has been accepted. Although it was initially developed to
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00001981 support zipimport, it offers a new, general import hook mechanism.
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00001982 Several new variables have been added to the sys module:
1983 sys.meta_path, sys.path_hooks, and sys.path_importer_cache; these
1984 make extending the import statement much more convenient than
1985 overriding the __import__ built-in function. For a description of
1986 these, see PEP 302.
1987
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00001988- A frame object's f_lineno attribute can now be written to from a
1989 trace function to change which line will execute next. A command to
1990 exploit this from pdb has been added. [SF patch #643835]
1991
Marc-André Lemburg20b91352002-12-12 18:01:43 +00001992- The _codecs support module for codecs.py was turned into a builtin
1993 module to assure that at least the builtin codecs are available
1994 to the Python parser for source code decoding according to PEP 263.
1995
Walter Dörwaldd9a6ad32002-12-12 16:41:44 +00001996- issubclass now supports a tuple as the second argument, just like
1997 isinstance does. ``issubclass(X, (A, B))`` is equivalent to
1998 ``issubclass(X, A) or issubclass(X, B)``.
1999
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00002000- Thanks to Armin Rigo, the last known way to provoke a system crash
2001 by cleverly arranging for a comparison function to mutate a list
2002 during a list.sort() operation has been fixed. The effect of
2003 attempting to mutate a list, or even to inspect its contents or
2004 length, while a sort is in progress, is not defined by the language.
2005 The C implementation of Python 2.3 attempts to detect mutations,
2006 and raise ValueError if one occurs, but there's no guarantee that
2007 all mutations will be caught, or that any will be caught across
2008 releases or implementations.
2009
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00002010- Unicode file name processing for Windows (PEP 277) is implemented.
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00002011 All platforms now have an os.path.supports_unicode_filenames attribute,
2012 which is set to True on Windows NT/2000/XP, and False elsewhere.
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00002013
Walter Dörwald3aeb6322002-09-02 13:14:32 +00002014- Codec error handling callbacks (PEP 293) are implemented.
2015 Error handling in unicode.encode or str.decode can now be customized.
2016
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00002017- A subtle change to the semantics of the built-in function intern():
2018 interned strings are no longer immortal. You must keep a reference
2019 to the return value intern() around to get the benefit.
2020
Guido van Rossumf808b892002-08-16 03:38:10 +00002021- Use of 'None' as a variable, argument or attribute name now
2022 issues a SyntaxWarning. In the future, None may become a keyword.
2023
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00002024- SET_LINENO is gone. co_lnotab is now consulted to determine when to
2025 call the trace function. C code that accessed f_lineno should call
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00002026 PyCode_Addr2Line instead (f_lineno is still there, but only kept up
2027 to date when there is a trace function set).
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00002028
Guido van Rossum9be89462002-08-14 16:11:30 +00002029- There's a new warning category, FutureWarning. This is used to warn
2030 about a number of situations where the value or sign of an integer
2031 result will change in Python 2.4 as a result of PEP 237 (integer
2032 unification). The warnings implement stage B0 mentioned in that
2033 PEP. The warnings are about the following situations:
2034
2035 - Octal and hex literals without 'L' prefix in the inclusive range
2036 [0x80000000..0xffffffff]; these are currently negative ints, but
2037 in Python 2.4 they will be positive longs with the same bit
2038 pattern.
2039
2040 - Left shifts on integer values that cause the outcome to lose
2041 bits or have a different sign than the left operand. To be
2042 precise: x<<n where this currently doesn't yield the same value
2043 as long(x)<<n; in Python 2.4, the outcome will be long(x)<<n.
2044
2045 - Conversions from ints to string that show negative values as
2046 unsigned ints in the inclusive range [0x80000000..0xffffffff];
2047 this affects the functions hex() and oct(), and the string
2048 formatting codes %u, %o, %x, and %X. In Python 2.4, these will
2049 show signed values (e.g. hex(-1) currently returns "0xffffffff";
2050 in Python 2.4 it will return "-0x1").
2051
Guido van Rossum9a2eda52002-12-31 02:12:42 +00002052- The bits manipulated under the cover by sys.setcheckinterval() have
2053 been changed. Both the check interval and the ticker used to be
2054 per-thread values. They are now just a pair of global variables.
2055 In addition, the default check interval was boosted from 10 to 100
2056 bytecode instructions. This may have some effect on systems that
2057 relied on the old default value. In particular, in multi-threaded
2058 applications which try to be highly responsive, response time will
2059 increase by some (perhaps imperceptible) amount.
Skip Montanaro979c74b2002-09-03 21:25:14 +00002060
Tim Petersd64c1de2002-08-12 17:36:03 +00002061- When multiplying very large integers, a version of the so-called
2062 Karatsuba algorithm is now used. This is most effective if the
2063 inputs have roughly the same size. If they both have about N digits,
2064 Karatsuba multiplication has O(N**1.58) runtime (the exponent is
2065 log_base_2(3)) instead of the previous O(N**2). Measured results may
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00002066 be better or worse than that, depending on platform quirks. Besides
2067 the O() improvement in raw instruction count, the Karatsuba algorithm
2068 appears to have much better cache behavior on extremely large integers
2069 (starting in the ballpark of a million bits). Note that this is a
2070 simple implementation, and there's no intent here to compete with,
2071 e.g., GMP. It gives a very nice speedup when it applies, but a package
2072 devoted to fast large-integer arithmetic should run circles around it.
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00002073
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00002074- u'%c' will now raise a ValueError in case the argument is an
2075 integer outside the valid range of Unicode code point ordinals.
2076
Guido van Rossumdeb09362002-08-09 17:16:30 +00002077- The tempfile module has been overhauled for enhanced security. The
2078 mktemp() function is now deprecated; new, safe replacements are
2079 mkstemp() (for files) and mkdtemp() (for directories), and the
2080 higher-level functions NamedTemporaryFile() and TemporaryFile().
2081 Use of some global variables in this module is also deprecated; the
2082 new functions have keyword arguments to provide the same
2083 functionality. All Lib, Tools and Demo modules that used the unsafe
2084 interfaces have been updated to use the safe replacements. Thanks
2085 to Zack Weinberg!
2086
Guido van Rossumd81a9832002-08-09 15:57:34 +00002087- When x is an object whose class implements __mul__ and __rmul__,
2088 1.0*x would correctly invoke __rmul__, but 1*x would erroneously
2089 invoke __mul__. This was due to the sequence-repeat code in the int
2090 type. This has been fixed now.
2091
Barry Warsawd79f6832002-08-06 17:01:51 +00002092- Previously, "str1 in str2" required str1 to be a string of length 1.
2093 This restriction has been relaxed to allow str1 to be a string of
2094 any length. Thus "'el' in 'hello world'" returns True now.
2095
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00002096- File objects are now their own iterators. For a file f, iter(f) now
2097 returns f (unless f is closed), and f.next() is similar to
2098 f.readline() when EOF is not reached; however, f.next() uses a
2099 readahead buffer that messes up the file position, so mixing
2100 f.next() and f.readline() (or other methods) doesn't work right.
2101 Calling f.seek() drops the readahead buffer, but other operations
2102 don't. It so happens that this gives a nice additional speed boost
2103 to "for line in file:"; the xreadlines method and corresponding
Guido van Rossumbffb2ef2002-08-09 17:17:07 +00002104 module are now obsolete. Thanks to Oren Tirosh!
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00002105
Guido van Rossumde392d32002-08-05 14:17:20 +00002106- Encoding declarations (PEP 263, phase 1) have been implemented. A
2107 comment of the form "# -*- coding: <encodingname> -*-" in the first
2108 or second line of a Python source file indicates the encoding.
Martin v. Löwis00f1e3f2002-08-04 17:29:52 +00002109
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00002110- list.sort() has a new implementation. While cross-platform results
2111 may vary, and in data-dependent ways, this is much faster on many
2112 kinds of partially ordered lists than the previous implementation,
2113 and reported to be just as fast on randomly ordered lists on
2114 several major platforms. This sort is also stable (if A==B and A
2115 precedes B in the list at the start, A precedes B after the sort too),
2116 although the language definition does not guarantee stability. A
2117 potential drawback is that list.sort() may require temp space of
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00002118 len(list)*2 bytes (``*4`` on a 64-bit machine). It's therefore possible
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00002119 for list.sort() to raise MemoryError now, even if a comparison function
2120 does not. See <http://www.python.org/sf/587076> for full details.
2121
Guido van Rossum2d5389c2002-07-23 03:44:35 +00002122- All standard iterators now ensure that, once StopIteration has been
2123 raised, all future calls to next() on the same iterator will also
2124 raise StopIteration. There used to be various counterexamples to
2125 this behavior, which could caused confusion or subtle program
2126 breakage, without any benefits. (Note that this is still an
2127 iterator's responsibility; the iterator framework does not enforce
2128 this.)
2129
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00002130- Ctrl+C handling on Windows has been made more consistent with
2131 other platforms. KeyboardInterrupt can now reliably be caught,
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00002132 and Ctrl+C at an interactive prompt no longer terminates the
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00002133 process under NT/2k/XP (it never did under Win9x). Ctrl+C will
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00002134 interrupt time.sleep() in the main thread, and any child processes
2135 created via the popen family (on win2k; we can't make win9x work
Mark Hammond8f3afc72002-08-10 06:26:31 +00002136 reliably) are also interrupted (as generally happens on for Linux/Unix.)
2137 [SF bugs 231273, 439992 and 581232]
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00002138
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00002139- sys.getwindowsversion() has been added on Windows. This
2140 returns a tuple with information about the version of Windows
2141 currently running.
2142
Raymond Hettinger5a04aec2002-06-25 00:25:30 +00002143- Slices and repetitions of buffer objects now consistently return
2144 a string. Formerly, strings would be returned most of the time,
2145 but a buffer object would be returned when the repetition count
2146 was one or when the slice range was all inclusive.
2147
Walter Dörwald3430d702002-06-17 10:43:59 +00002148- Unicode objects in sys.path are no longer ignored but treated
2149 as directory names.
2150
Neal Norwitz1f68fc72002-06-14 00:50:42 +00002151- Fixed string.startswith and string.endswith builtin methods
2152 so they accept negative indices. [SF bug 493951]
2153
Guido van Rossumc5fe5eb2002-06-12 03:45:21 +00002154- Fixed a bug with a continue inside a try block and a yield in the
2155 finally clause. [SF bug 567538]
2156
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00002157- Most builtin sequences now support "extended slices", i.e. slices
Guido van Rossum2e82e712002-06-13 11:41:07 +00002158 with a third "stride" parameter. For example, "hello world"[::-1]
2159 gives "dlrow olleh".
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00002160
Neal Norwitzd68f5172002-05-29 15:54:55 +00002161- A new warning PendingDeprecationWarning was added to provide
2162 direction on features which are in the process of being deprecated.
2163 The warning will not be printed by default. To see the pending
2164 deprecations, use -Walways::PendingDeprecationWarning::
2165 as a command line option or warnings.filterwarnings() in code.
2166
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00002167- Deprecated features of xrange objects have been removed as
2168 promised. The start, stop, and step attributes and the tolist()
2169 method no longer exist. xrange repetition and slicing have been
2170 removed.
2171
Guido van Rossum7dab2422002-04-26 19:40:56 +00002172- New builtin function enumerate(x), from PEP 279. Example:
2173 enumerate("abc") is an iterator returning (0,"a"), (1,"b"), (2,"c").
2174 The argument can be an arbitrary iterable object.
2175
Neil Schemenauer89e3ee02002-04-26 01:58:53 +00002176- The assert statement no longer tests __debug__ at runtime. This means
2177 that assert statements cannot be disabled by assigning a false value
2178 to __debug__.
2179
Walter Dörwald068325e2002-04-15 13:36:47 +00002180- A method zfill() was added to str and unicode, that fills a numeric
2181 string to the left with zeros. For example,
2182 "+123".zfill(6) -> "+00123".
2183
Guido van Rossum862fe3c2002-04-15 12:36:47 +00002184- Complex numbers supported divmod() and the // and % operators, but
2185 these make no sense. Since this was documented, they're being
2186 deprecated now.
2187
Guido van Rossum26dd8302002-04-26 20:11:29 +00002188- String and unicode methods lstrip(), rstrip() and strip() now take
2189 an optional argument that specifies the characters to strip. For
2190 example, "Foo!!!?!?!?".rstrip("?!") -> "Foo".
Guido van Rossum49042042002-04-13 00:59:05 +00002191
Guido van Rossumc0d3f4e2002-11-27 13:10:40 +00002192- There's a new dictionary constructor (a class method of the dict
2193 class), dict.fromkeys(iterable, value=None). It constructs a
2194 dictionary with keys taken from the iterable and all values set to a
2195 single value. It can be used for building sets and for removing
2196 duplicates from sequences.
Raymond Hettingere33d3df2002-11-27 07:29:33 +00002197
Guido van Rossumc69343b2002-04-12 19:22:48 +00002198- Added a new dict method pop(key). This removes and returns the
2199 value corresponding to key. [SF patch #539949]
2200
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00002201- A new built-in type, bool, has been added, as well as built-in
2202 names for its two values, True and False. Comparisons and sundry
2203 other operations that return a truth value have been changed to
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002204 return a bool instead. Read PEP 285 for an explanation of why this
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00002205 is backward compatible.
2206
Guido van Rossum95b62a62002-03-29 01:07:24 +00002207- Fixed two bugs reported as SF #535905: under certain conditions,
2208 deallocating a deeply nested structure could cause a segfault in the
2209 garbage collector, due to interaction with the "trashcan" code;
2210 access to the current frame during destruction of a local variable
2211 could access a pointer to freed memory.
2212
Guido van Rossumfe0ca4a2002-06-18 21:20:13 +00002213- The optional object allocator ("pymalloc") has been enabled by
2214 default. The recommended practice for memory allocation and
2215 deallocation has been streamlined. A header file is included,
2216 Misc/pymemcompat.h, which can be bundled with 3rd party extensions
2217 and lets them use the same API with Python versions from 1.5.2
2218 onwards.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00002219
Martin v. Löwiscfeb3b62002-03-03 21:30:27 +00002220- PyErr_Display will provide file and line information for all exceptions
2221 that have an attribute print_file_and_line, not just SyntaxErrors.
2222
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00002223- The UTF-8 codec will now encode and decode Unicode surrogates
2224 correctly and without raising exceptions for unpaired ones.
2225
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00002226- Universal newlines (PEP 278) is implemented. Briefly, using 'U'
2227 instead of 'r' when opening a text file for reading changes the line
2228 ending convention so that any of '\r', '\r\n', and '\n' is
2229 recognized (even mixed in one file); all three are converted to
2230 '\n', the standard Python line end character.
2231
Neal Norwitz649b7592002-01-01 19:07:13 +00002232- file.xreadlines() now raises a ValueError if the file is closed:
2233 Previously, an xreadlines object was returned which would raise
2234 a ValueError when the xreadlines.next() method was called.
2235
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002236- sys.exit() inadvertently allowed more than one argument.
Neal Norwitz0c766a02002-03-27 13:03:09 +00002237 An exception will now be raised if more than one argument is used.
2238
Gustavo Niemeyer17c5a332002-12-16 14:09:22 +00002239- Changed evaluation order of dictionary literals to conform to the
2240 general left to right evaluation order rule. Now {f1(): f2()} will
2241 evaluate f1 first.
Gustavo Niemeyer78429a62002-12-16 13:54:02 +00002242
Gustavo Niemeyer786ddb22002-12-16 18:12:53 +00002243- Fixed bug #521782: when a file was in non-blocking mode, file.read()
2244 could silently lose data or wrongly throw an unknown error.
2245
Neil Schemenauerb983aa02002-12-30 20:22:23 +00002246- The sq_repeat, sq_inplace_repeat, sq_concat and sq_inplace_concat
2247 slots are now always tried after trying the corresponding nb_* slots.
2248 This fixes a number of minor bugs (see bug #624807).
2249
Neal Norwitz74a032e2003-01-10 23:29:48 +00002250- Fix problem with dynamic loading on 64-bit AIX (see bug #639945).
2251
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002252Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002253-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002254
Raymond Hettinger9543b342003-01-18 23:22:20 +00002255- Added three operators to the operator module:
2256 operator.pow(a,b) which is equivalent to: a**b.
2257 operator.is_(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is b.
2258 operator.is_not(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is not b.
2259
Martin v. Löwis24a880b2002-12-31 12:55:15 +00002260- posix.openpty now works on all systems that have /dev/ptmx.
2261
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00002262- A module zipimport exists to support importing code from zip
2263 archives.
2264
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00002265- The new datetime module supplies classes for manipulating dates and
2266 times. The basic design came from the Zope "fishbowl process", and
2267 favors practical commercial applications over calendar esoterica. See
2268
2269 http://www.zope.org/Members/fdrake/DateTimeWiki/FrontPage
2270
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00002271- _tkinter now returns Tcl objects, instead of strings. Objects which
2272 have Python equivalents are converted to Python objects, other objects
2273 are wrapped. This can be configured through the wantobjects method,
Martin v. Löwis8c8aa5d2002-11-26 21:39:48 +00002274 or Tkinter.wantobjects.
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00002275
Barry Warsawc27f4bd2002-12-30 21:03:26 +00002276- The PyBSDDB wrapper around the Sleepycat Berkeley DB library has
2277 been added as the package bsddb. The traditional bsddb module is
2278 still available in source code, but not built automatically anymore,
2279 and is now named bsddb185. This supports Berkeley DB versions from
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00002280 3.0 to 4.1. For help converting your databases from the old module (which
2281 probably used an obsolete version of Berkeley DB) to the new module, see
2282 the db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py scripts described in the Tools/Demos
2283 section above.
Martin v. Löwisef546b32002-11-19 08:12:57 +00002284
Martin v. Löwis677bde22002-11-23 22:08:15 +00002285- unicodedata was updated to Unicode 3.2. It supports normalization
2286 and names for Hangul syllables and CJK unified ideographs.
Martin v. Löwis7d41e292002-11-23 12:22:32 +00002287
Neal Norwitz94a83fd2002-11-02 17:46:24 +00002288- resource.getrlimit() now returns longs instead of ints.
2289
Martin v. Löwis080689c2002-10-26 14:42:02 +00002290- readline now dynamically adjusts its input/output stream if
2291 sys.stdin/stdout changes.
2292
Guido van Rossumba602972002-10-01 18:18:58 +00002293- The _tkinter module (and hence Tkinter) has dropped support for
2294 Tcl/Tk 8.0 and 8.1. Only Tcl/Tk versions 8.2, 8.3 and 8.4 are
2295 supported.
2296
Martin v. Löwis658009a2002-09-16 17:26:24 +00002297- cPickle.BadPickleGet is now a class.
2298
Martin v. Löwisa19bfe02002-10-16 18:28:36 +00002299- The time stamps in os.stat_result are floating point numbers
2300 after stat_float_times has been called.
Martin v. Löwis94717ed2002-09-09 14:24:16 +00002301
Neal Norwitzb5673922002-09-05 21:48:07 +00002302- If the size passed to mmap.mmap() is larger than the length of the
2303 file on non-Windows platforms, a ValueError is raised. [SF bug 585792]
2304
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00002305- The xreadlines module is slated for obsolescence.
2306
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00002307- The strptime function in the time module is now always available (a
2308 Python implementation is used when the C library doesn't define it).
2309
Guido van Rossum9562bcf2002-06-14 21:31:18 +00002310- The 'new' module is no longer an extension, but a Python module that
2311 only exists for backwards compatibility. Its contents are no longer
2312 functions but callable type objects.
2313
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00002314- The bsddb.*open functions can now take 'None' as a filename.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00002315 This will create a temporary in-memory bsddb that won't be
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00002316 written to disk.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00002317
Martin v. Löwisb96152c2002-12-31 13:20:15 +00002318- posix.getloadavg, posix.lchown, posix.killpg, posix.mknod, and
2319 posix.getpgid have been added where available.
Martin v. Löwis06a83e92002-04-14 10:19:44 +00002320
Martin v. Löwisf0a46682002-11-03 17:20:12 +00002321- The locale module now exposes the C library's gettext interface. It
2322 also has a new function getpreferredencoding.
Martin v. Löwis2e64c342002-03-27 18:49:02 +00002323
Tim Petersfbf74f22002-03-14 19:06:01 +00002324- A security hole ("double free") was found in zlib-1.1.3, a popular
2325 third party compression library used by some Python modules. The
2326 hole was quickly plugged in zlib-1.1.4, and the Windows build of
2327 Python now ships with zlib-1.1.4.
2328
Martin v. Löwis688357e2002-04-08 21:28:20 +00002329- pwd, grp, and resource return enhanced tuples now, with symbolic
2330 field names.
Martin v. Löwis29001ff2002-03-01 10:47:37 +00002331
Martin v. Löwis99866332002-03-01 10:27:01 +00002332- array.array is now a type object. A new format character
2333 'u' indicates Py_UNICODE arrays. For those, .tounicode and
2334 .fromunicode methods are available. Arrays now support __iadd__
2335 and __imul__.
2336
Neal Norwitze790eae2002-01-01 21:14:12 +00002337- dl now builds on every system that has dlfcn.h. Failure in case
Martin v. Löwis93227272002-01-01 20:18:30 +00002338 of sizeof(int)!=sizeof(long)!=sizeof(void*) is delayed until dl.open
2339 is called.
2340
Skip Montanaro8e790e72002-09-03 13:25:17 +00002341- The sys module acquired a new attribute, api_version, which evaluates
2342 to the value of the PYTHON_API_VERSION macro with which the
2343 interpreter was compiled.
2344
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00002345- Fixed bug #470582: sre module would return a tuple (None, 'a', 'ab')
2346 when applying the regular expression '^((a)c)?(ab)$' on 'ab'. It now
2347 returns (None, None, 'ab'), as expected. Also fixed handling of
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00002348 lastindex/lastgroup match attributes in similar cases. For example,
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00002349 when running the expression r'(a)(b)?b' over 'ab', lastindex must be
2350 1, not 2.
2351
Gustavo Niemeyerc523b042002-11-07 03:28:56 +00002352- Fixed bug #581080: sre scanner was not checking the buffer limit
2353 before increasing the current pointer. This was creating an infinite
2354 loop in the search function, once the pointer exceeded the buffer
2355 limit.
2356
Thomas Heller95cb7e42002-11-07 16:23:55 +00002357- The os.fdopen function now enforces a file mode starting with the
2358 letter 'r', 'w' or 'a', otherwise a ValueError is raised. This fixes
2359 bug #623464.
2360
Greg Ward6c58d462003-01-03 18:02:15 +00002361- The linuxaudiodev module is now deprecated; it is being replaced by
2362 ossaudiodev. The interface has been extended to cover a lot more of
2363 OSS (see www.opensound.com), including most DSP ioctls and the
2364 OSS mixer API. Documentation forthcoming in 2.3a2.
2365
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002366Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002367-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002368
Guido van Rossum747f8062003-01-03 16:33:49 +00002369- imaplib.py now supports SSL (Tino Lange and Piers Lauder).
2370
Just van Rossum5e156ad2002-12-31 16:38:01 +00002371- Freeze's modulefinder.py has been moved to the standard library;
2372 slightly improved so it will issue less false missing submodule
2373 reports (see sf path #643711 for details). Documentation will follow
2374 with Python 2.3a2.
2375
Martin v. Löwis96a60e42002-12-31 13:11:54 +00002376- os.path exposes getctime.
2377
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002378- unittest.py now has two additional methods called assertAlmostEqual()
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002379 and failIfAlmostEqual(). They implement an approximate comparison
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002380 by rounding the difference between the two arguments and comparing
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002381 the result to zero. Approximate comparison is essential for
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002382 unit tests of floating point results.
2383
Raymond Hettingere11b5102002-12-25 16:37:19 +00002384- calendar.py now depends on the new datetime module rather than
2385 the time module. As a result, the range of allowable dates
2386 has been increased.
2387
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00002388- pdb has a new 'j(ump)' command to select the next line to be
2389 executed.
2390
Thomas Heller1b3b49d2002-12-12 19:13:44 +00002391- The distutils created windows installers now can run a
2392 postinstallation script.
2393
Martin v. Löwis4581cfa2002-11-22 08:23:09 +00002394- doctest.testmod can now be called without argument, which means to
2395 test the current module.
2396
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002397- When canceling a server that implemented threading with a keyboard
Martin v. Löwisf86e8ef2002-11-22 08:08:44 +00002398 interrupt, the server would shut down but not terminate (waiting on
2399 client threads). A new member variable, daemon_threads, was added to
2400 the ThreadingMixIn class in SocketServer.py to make it explicit that
2401 this behavior needs to be controlled.
2402
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00002403- A new module, optparse, provides a fancy alternative to getopt for
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00002404 command line parsing. It is a slightly modified version of Greg
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00002405 Ward's Optik package.
2406
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00002407- UserDict.py now defines a DictMixin class which defines all dictionary
2408 methods for classes that already have a minimum mapping interface.
2409 This greatly simplifies writing classes that need to be substitutable
2410 for dictionaries (such as the shelve module).
2411
2412- shelve.py now subclasses from UserDict.DictMixin. Now shelve supports
2413 all dictionary methods. This eases the transition to persistent
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00002414 storage for scripts originally written with dictionaries in mind.
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00002415
Skip Montanaro3bf99e32002-12-08 18:36:24 +00002416- shelve.open and the various classes in shelve.py now accept an optional
2417 binary flag, which defaults to False. If True, the values stored in the
2418 shelf are binary pickles.
2419
Guido van Rossumfda06742002-11-13 16:29:18 +00002420- A new package, logging, implements the logging API defined by PEP
2421 282. The code is written by Vinay Sajip.
2422
Walter Dörwald4dbf1922002-11-06 16:53:44 +00002423- StreamReader, StreamReaderWriter and StreamRecoder in the codecs
2424 modules are iterators now.
2425
Tim Peters9288f952002-11-05 20:38:55 +00002426- gzip.py now handles files exceeding 2GB. Files over 4GB also work
2427 now (provided the OS supports it, and Python is configured with large
2428 file support), but in that case the underlying gzip file format can
2429 record only the least-significant 32 bits of the file size, so that
2430 some tools working with gzipped files may report an incorrect file
2431 size.
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00002432
Martin v. Löwis74b51ac2002-10-26 14:50:45 +00002433- xml.sax.saxutils.unescape has been added, to replace entity references
2434 with their entity value.
2435
Martin v. Löwis77ac4292002-10-15 15:11:13 +00002436- Queue.Queue.{put,get} now support an optional timeout argument.
2437
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00002438- Various features of Tk 8.4 are exposed in Tkinter.py. The multiple
2439 option of tkFileDialog is exposed as function askopenfile{,name}s.
Martin v. Löwis2ec36272002-10-13 10:22:08 +00002440
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00002441- Various configure methods of Tkinter have been stream-lined, so that
2442 tag_configure, image_configure, window_configure now return a
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00002443 dictionary when invoked with no argument.
Martin v. Löwis6ce13152002-10-10 14:36:13 +00002444
Guido van Rossum2b492b62002-10-09 21:40:48 +00002445- Importing the readline module now no longer has the side effect of
2446 calling setlocale(LC_CTYPE, ""). The initial "C" locale, or
2447 whatever locale is explicitly set by the user, is preserved. If you
2448 want repr() of 8-bit strings in your preferred encoding to preserve
2449 all printable characters of that encoding, you have to add the
2450 following code to your $PYTHONSTARTUP file or to your application's
2451 main():
2452
2453 import locale
2454 locale.setlocale(locale.LC_CTYPE, "")
2455
Martin v. Löwise9ce0b02002-10-07 13:23:24 +00002456- shutil.move was added. shutil.copytree now reports errors as an
2457 exception at the end, instead of printing error messages.
2458
Marc-André Lemburg97047e22002-10-04 11:55:21 +00002459- Encoding name normalization was generalized to not only
2460 replace hyphens with underscores, but also all other non-alphanumeric
2461 characters (with the exception of the dot which is used for Python
2462 package names during lookup). The aliases.py mapping was updated
2463 to the new standard.
2464
Walter Dörwald5ccaf8f2002-09-06 16:15:58 +00002465- mimetypes has two new functions: guess_all_extensions() which
2466 returns a list of all known extensions for a mime type, and
2467 add_type() which adds one mapping between a mime type and
2468 an extension to the database.
2469
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00002470- New module: sets, defines the class Set that implements a mutable
2471 set type using the keys of a dict to represent the set. There's
2472 also a class ImmutableSet which is useful when you need sets of sets
2473 or when you need to use sets as dict keys, and a class BaseSet which
Raymond Hettingeref8b9c62002-12-09 08:56:06 +00002474 is the base class of the two.
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00002475
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00002476- Added random.sample(population,k) for random sampling without replacement.
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00002477 Returns a k length list of unique elements chosen from the population.
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00002478
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00002479- random.randrange(-sys.maxint-1, sys.maxint) no longer raises
2480 OverflowError. That is, it now accepts any combination of 'start'
2481 and 'stop' arguments so long as each is in the range of Python's
2482 bounded integers.
2483
Raymond Hettinger40f62172002-12-29 23:03:38 +00002484- Thanks to Raymond Hettinger, random.random() now uses a new core
2485 generator. The Mersenne Twister algorithm is implemented in C,
2486 threadsafe, faster than the previous generator, has an astronomically
2487 large period (2**19937-1), creates random floats to full 53-bit
2488 precision, and may be the most widely tested random number generator
2489 in existence.
2490
2491 The random.jumpahead(n) method has different semantics for the new
2492 generator. Instead of jumping n steps ahead, it uses n and the
2493 existing state to create a new state. This means that jumpahead()
2494 continues to support multi-threaded code needing generators of
2495 non-overlapping sequences. However, it will break code which relies
2496 on jumpahead moving a specific number of steps forward.
2497
2498 The attributes random.whseed and random.__whseed have no meaning for
2499 the new generator. Code using these attributes should switch to a
2500 new class, random.WichmannHill which is provided for backward
2501 compatibility and to make an alternate generator available.
2502
Guido van Rossum4a57c332002-08-02 18:05:20 +00002503- New "algorithms" module: heapq, implements a heap queue. Thanks to
2504 Kevin O'Connor for the code and François Pinard for an entertaining
2505 write-up explaining the theory and practical uses of heaps.
2506
Marc-André Lemburg58e2ff22002-07-12 14:40:04 +00002507- New encoding for the Palm OS character set: palmos.
2508
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00002509- binascii.crc32() and the zipfile module had problems on some 64-bit
2510 platforms. These have been fixed. On a platform with 8-byte C longs,
2511 crc32() now returns a signed-extended 4-byte result, so that its value
2512 as a Python int is equal to the value computed a 32-bit platform.
2513
Martin v. Löwis7d650ca2002-06-30 15:05:00 +00002514- xml.dom.minidom.toxml and toprettyxml now take an optional encoding
2515 argument.
2516
Guido van Rossum9f7549b2002-06-10 21:39:42 +00002517- Some fixes in the copy module: when an object is copied through its
2518 __reduce__ method, there was no check for a __setstate__ method on
2519 the result [SF patch 565085]; deepcopy should treat instances of
2520 custom metaclasses the same way it treats instances of type 'type'
2521 [SF patch 560794].
2522
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00002523- Sockets now support timeout mode. After s.settimeout(T), where T is
2524 a float expressing seconds, subsequent operations raise an exception
2525 if they cannot be completed within T seconds. To disable timeout
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00002526 mode, use s.settimeout(None). There's also a module function,
2527 socket.setdefaulttimeout(T), which sets the default for all sockets
2528 created henceforth.
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00002529
2530- getopt.gnu_getopt was added. This supports GNU-style option
2531 processing, where options can be mixed with non-option arguments.
Martin v. Löwis446a25f2002-06-06 10:58:36 +00002532
Michael W. Hudsonb0dc1a32002-06-04 18:27:35 +00002533- Stop using strings for exceptions. String objects used for
2534 exceptions are now classes deriving from Exception. The objects
2535 changed were: Tkinter.TclError, bdb.BdbQuit, macpath.norm_error,
2536 tabnanny.NannyNag, and xdrlib.Error.
Neal Norwitzb5b5a262002-06-04 17:14:07 +00002537
Walter Dörwald474458d2002-06-04 15:16:29 +00002538- Constants BOM_UTF8, BOM_UTF16, BOM_UTF16_LE, BOM_UTF16_BE,
2539 BOM_UTF32, BOM_UTF32_LE and BOM_UTF32_BE that represent the Byte
2540 Order Mark in UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 encodings for little and
2541 big endian systems were added to the codecs module. The old names
2542 BOM32_* and BOM64_* were off by a factor of 2.
2543
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00002544- Added conversion functions math.degrees() and math.radians().
Raymond Hettinger87f59ee2002-05-13 04:17:32 +00002545
Raymond Hettinger866964c2002-12-14 19:51:34 +00002546- math.log() now takes an optional argument: math.log(x[, base]).
2547
Raymond Hettinger9b1df1d2002-05-12 06:07:21 +00002548- ftplib.retrlines() now tests for callback is None rather than testing
2549 for False. Was causing an error when given a callback object which
2550 was callable but also returned len() as zero. The change may
2551 create new breakage if the caller relied on the undocumented behavior
2552 and called with callback set to [] or some other False value not
2553 identical to None.
2554
Tim Peters46c04e12002-05-05 20:40:00 +00002555- random.gauss() uses a piece of hidden state used by nothing else,
2556 and the .seed() and .whseed() methods failed to reset it. In other
2557 words, setting the seed didn't completely determine the sequence of
2558 results produced by random.gauss(). It does now. Programs repeatedly
2559 mixing calls to a seed method with calls to gauss() may see different
2560 results now.
2561
Fred Drake7f781c92002-05-01 20:33:53 +00002562- The pickle.Pickler class grew a clear_memo() method to mimic that
2563 provided by cPickle.Pickler.
2564
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00002565- difflib's SequenceMatcher class now does a dynamic analysis of
2566 which elements are so frequent as to constitute noise. For
2567 comparing files as sequences of lines, this generally works better
2568 than the IS_LINE_JUNK function, and function ndiff's linejunk
2569 argument defaults to None now as a result. A happy benefit is
2570 that SequenceMatcher may run much faster now when applied
2571 to large files with many duplicate lines (for example, C program
2572 text with lots of repeated "}" and "return NULL;" lines).
2573
Guido van Rossum256705b2002-04-23 13:29:43 +00002574- New Text.dump() method in Tkinter module.
2575
Marc-André Lemburg1ec71ea2002-04-17 20:33:40 +00002576- New distutils commands for building packagers were added to
2577 support pkgtool on Solaris and swinstall on HP-UX.
2578
2579- distutils now has a new abstract binary packager base class
2580 command/bdist_packager, which simplifies writing packagers.
2581 This will hopefully provide the missing bits to encourage
2582 people to submit more packagers, e.g. for Debian, FreeBSD
2583 and other systems.
2584
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00002585- The UTF-16, -LE and -BE stream readers now raise a
2586 NotImplementedError for all calls to .readline(). Previously, they
2587 used to just produce garbage or fail with an encoding error --
2588 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 +00002589 work well with these.
2590
Martin v. Löwis5c137c22002-03-18 12:44:08 +00002591- compileall now supports quiet operation.
2592
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002593- The BaseHTTPServer now implements optional HTTP/1.1 persistent
Martin v. Löwis587c98c2002-03-17 18:37:22 +00002594 connections.
2595
Marc-André Lemburga5d2b4c2002-02-16 18:23:30 +00002596- socket module: the SSL support was broken out of the main
2597 _socket module C helper and placed into a new _ssl helper
2598 which now gets imported by socket.py if available and working.
2599
Marc-André Lemburg37aa5802002-02-10 21:42:47 +00002600- encodings package: added aliases for all supported IANA character
2601 sets
2602
Guido van Rossum606fe4e2001-12-28 20:57:14 +00002603- ftplib: to safeguard the user's privacy, anonymous login will use
2604 "anonymous@" as default password, rather than the real user and host
2605 name.
2606
Fred Drake36736122002-01-10 13:50:31 +00002607- webbrowser: tightened up the command passed to os.system() so that
2608 arbitrary shell code can't be executed because a bogus URL was
2609 passed in.
2610
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00002611- gettext.translation has an optional fallback argument, and
Martin v. Löwisa55ffae2002-01-11 06:58:49 +00002612 gettext.find an optional all argument. Translations will now fallback
Martin v. Löwisd8996052002-11-21 21:45:32 +00002613 on a per-message basis. The module supports plural forms, by means
2614 of gettext.[d]ngettext and Translation.[u]ngettext.
Martin v. Löwis1be64192002-01-11 06:33:28 +00002615
Martin v. Löwis9668b932002-01-12 11:27:42 +00002616- distutils bdist commands now offer a --skip-build option.
2617
Walter Dörwaldb25c2b02002-03-21 10:38:40 +00002618- warnings.warn now accepts a Warning instance as first argument.
2619
Fred Drakefed7e852002-04-04 19:36:15 +00002620- The xml.sax.expatreader.ExpatParser class will no longer create
2621 circular references by using itself as the locator that gets passed
2622 to the content handler implementation. [SF bug #535474]
2623
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00002624- The email.Parser.Parser class now properly parses strings regardless
2625 of their line endings, which can be any of \r, \n, or \r\n (CR, LF,
2626 or CRLF). Also, the Header class's constructor default arguments
2627 has changed slightly so that an explicit maxlinelen value is always
Barry Warsaw497e5c42002-12-30 19:27:08 +00002628 honored, and so unicode conversion error handling can be specified.
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00002629
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002630- distutils' build_ext command now links C++ extensions with the C++
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00002631 compiler available in the Makefile or CXX environment variable, if
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002632 running under \*nix.
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00002633
2634- New module bz2: provides a comprehensive interface for the bz2 compression
2635 library. It implements a complete file interface, one-shot (de)compression
2636 functions, and types for sequential (de)compression.
2637
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002638- New pdb command 'pp' which is like 'p' except that it pretty-prints
Barry Warsaw5d8d6182002-11-05 22:41:33 +00002639 the value of its expression argument.
2640
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00002641- Now bdist_rpm distutils command understands a verify_script option in
2642 the config file, including the contents of the referred filename in
2643 the "%verifyscript" section of the rpm spec file.
2644
Gustavo Niemeyer1456fde2002-11-25 17:25:04 +00002645- Fixed bug #495695: webbrowser module would run graphic browsers in a
2646 unix environment even if DISPLAY was not set. Also, support for
2647 skipstone browser was included.
2648
Gustavo Niemeyerd5ae01a2002-12-16 13:11:57 +00002649- Fixed bug #636769: rexec would run unallowed code if subclasses of
2650 strings were used as parameters for certain functions.
2651
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002652Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002653-----------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002654
Martin v. Löwis0d1fdea2002-11-22 08:36:54 +00002655- pygettext.py now supports globbing on Windows, and accepts module
2656 names in addition to accepting file names.
2657
Guido van Rossum923e4ef2002-09-17 20:58:59 +00002658- The SGI demos (Demo/sgi) have been removed. Nobody thought they
2659 were interesting any more. (The SGI library modules and extensions
2660 are still there; it is believed that at least some of these are
2661 still used and useful.)
2662
Fred Drake40813b12002-08-05 15:24:19 +00002663- IDLE supports the new encoding declarations (PEP 263); it can also
2664 deal with legacy 8-bit files if they use the locale's encoding. It
2665 allows non-ASCII strings in the interactive shell and executes them
2666 in the locale's encoding.
Martin v. Löwis98ce7b72002-08-05 15:11:26 +00002667
Marc-André Lemburg46260092002-04-04 16:17:11 +00002668- freeze.py now produces binaries which can import shared modules,
2669 unlike before when this failed due to missing symbol exports in
2670 the generated binary.
2671
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002672Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002673-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002674
Martin v. Löwisdc461752002-11-06 21:59:33 +00002675- On Unix, IDLE is now installed automatically.
2676
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00002677- The fpectl module is not built by default; it's dangerous or useless
2678 except in the hands of experts.
2679
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00002680- The public Python C API will generally be declared using PyAPI_FUNC
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00002681 and PyAPI_DATA macros, while Python extension module init functions
2682 will be declared with PyMODINIT_FUNC. DL_EXPORT/DL_IMPORT macros
2683 are deprecated.
Neal Norwitz1389f3e2002-07-22 13:21:10 +00002684
Tim Petersc6a3ff62002-07-08 22:11:52 +00002685- A bug was fixed that could cause COUNT_ALLOCS builds to segfault, or
2686 get into infinite loops, when a new-style class got garbage-collected.
2687 Unfortunately, to avoid this, the way COUNT_ALLOCS works requires
2688 that new-style classes be immortal in COUNT_ALLOCS builds. Note that
2689 COUNT_ALLOCS is not enabled by default, in either release or debug
2690 builds, and that new-style classes are immortal only in COUNT_ALLOCS
2691 builds.
2692
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00002693- Compiling out the cyclic garbage collector is no longer an option.
2694 The old symbol WITH_CYCLE_GC is now ignored, and Python.h arranges
2695 that it's always defined (for the benefit of any extension modules
2696 that may be conditionalizing on it). A bonus is that any extension
2697 type participating in cyclic gc can choose to participate in the
2698 Py_TRASHCAN mechanism now too; in the absence of cyclic gc, this used
2699 to require editing the core to teach the trashcan mechanism about the
2700 new type.
2701
Martin v. Löwis0cec0ff2002-07-28 16:33:45 +00002702- According to Annex F of the current C standard,
Tim Peters1de41bf2002-07-03 03:31:20 +00002703
2704 The Standard C macro HUGE_VAL and its float and long double analogs,
2705 HUGE_VALF and HUGE_VALL, expand to expressions whose values are
2706 positive infinities.
2707
2708 Python only uses the double HUGE_VAL, and only to #define its own symbol
2709 Py_HUGE_VAL. Some platforms have incorrect definitions for HUGE_VAL.
2710 pyport.h used to try to worm around that, but the workarounds triggered
2711 other bugs on other platforms, so we gave up. If your platform defines
2712 HUGE_VAL incorrectly, you'll need to #define Py_HUGE_VAL to something
2713 that works on your platform. The only instance of this I'm sure about
2714 is on an unknown subset of Cray systems, described here:
2715
2716 http://www.cray.com/swpubs/manuals/SN-2194_2.0/html-SN-2194_2.0/x3138.htm
2717
2718 Presumably 2.3a1 breaks such systems. If anyone uses such a system, help!
2719
Martin v. Löwisa3fb4f72002-06-09 13:33:54 +00002720- The configure option --without-doc-strings can be used to remove the
2721 doc strings from the builtin functions and modules; this reduces the
2722 size of the executable.
2723
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00002724- The universal newlines option (PEP 278) is on by default. On Unix
2725 it can be disabled by passing --without-universal-newlines to the
2726 configure script. On other platforms, remove
2727 WITH_UNIVERSAL_NEWLINES from pyconfig.h.
Tim Peters639295f2002-04-21 07:30:30 +00002728
Martin v. Löwis1142de32002-03-29 16:28:31 +00002729- On Unix, a shared libpython2.3.so can be created with --enable-shared.
2730
Tim Peters8deda702002-03-30 10:06:07 +00002731- All uses of the CACHE_HASH, INTERN_STRINGS, and DONT_SHARE_SHORT_STRINGS
2732 preprocessor symbols were eliminated. The internal decisions they
2733 controlled stopped being experimental long ago.
Tim Peters1f7df352002-03-29 03:29:08 +00002734
Fred Drake7d28b732002-05-02 21:17:00 +00002735- The tools used to build the documentation now work under Cygwin as
2736 well as Unix.
2737
Skip Montanaro57454e52002-06-14 20:30:31 +00002738- The bsddb and dbm module builds have been changed to try and avoid version
2739 skew problems and disable linkage with Berkeley DB 1.85 unless the
2740 installer knows what s/he's doing. See the section on building these
2741 modules in the README file for details.
2742
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002743C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002744-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002745
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00002746- PyNumber_Check() now returns true for string and unicode objects.
2747 This is a result of these types having a partially defined
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00002748 tp_as_number slot. (This is not a feature, but an indication that
Walter Dörwalda1a61f92002-11-19 21:20:25 +00002749 PyNumber_Check() is not very useful to determine numeric behavior.
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00002750 It may be deprecated.)
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00002751
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00002752- The string object's layout has changed: the pointer member
2753 ob_sinterned has been replaced by an int member ob_sstate. On some
2754 platforms (e.g. most 64-bit systems) this may change the offset of
2755 the ob_sval member, so as a precaution the API_VERSION has been
2756 incremented. The apparently unused feature of "indirect interned
2757 strings", supported by the ob_sinterned member, is gone. Interned
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002758 strings are now usually mortal; there is a new API,
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00002759 PyString_InternImmortal() that creates immortal interned strings.
2760 (The ob_sstate member can only take three values; however, while
2761 making it a char saves a few bytes per string object on average, in
2762 it also slowed things down a bit because ob_sval was no longer
2763 aligned.)
2764
Guido van Rossumfdb86482002-08-14 21:20:32 +00002765- The Py_InitModule*() functions now accept NULL for the 'methods'
2766 argument. Modules without global functions are becoming more common
2767 now that factories can be types rather than functions.
2768
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00002769- New C API PyUnicode_FromOrdinal() which exposes unichr() at C
2770 level.
2771
Thomas Heller085358a2002-07-29 14:27:41 +00002772- New functions PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErr() and
2773 PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErrWithFilename(). Similar to
2774 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErrWithFilename() and
2775 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErr(), but they allow to specify
2776 the exception type to raise. Available on Windows.
2777
Tim Peters7c321a82002-07-09 02:57:01 +00002778- Py_FatalError() is now declared as taking a const char* argument. It
2779 was previously declared without const. This should not affect working
2780 code.
2781
Martin v. Löwis01f94bd2002-05-08 08:44:21 +00002782- Added new macro PySequence_ITEM(o, i) that directly calls
2783 sq_item without rechecking that o is a sequence and without
2784 adjusting for negative indices.
2785
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00002786- PyRange_New() now raises ValueError if the fourth argument is not 1.
2787 This is part of the removal of deprecated features of the xrange
2788 object.
2789
Guido van Rossum517c7d42002-04-26 02:49:14 +00002790- PyNumber_Coerce() and PyNumber_CoerceEx() now also invoke the type's
2791 coercion if both arguments have the same type but this type has the
2792 CHECKTYPES flag set. This is to better support proxies.
2793
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00002794- The type of tp_free has been changed from "``void (*)(PyObject *)``" to
2795 "``void (*)(void *)``".
Neil Schemenauer9344b142002-04-12 23:00:08 +00002796
2797- PyObject_Del, PyObject_GC_Del are now functions instead of macros.
2798
Guido van Rossum0986d822002-04-08 01:38:42 +00002799- A type can now inherit its metatype from its base type. Previously,
2800 when PyType_Ready() was called, if ob_type was found to be NULL, it
2801 was always set to &PyType_Type; now it is set to base->ob_type,
2802 where base is tp_base, defaulting to &PyObject_Type.
2803
2804- PyType_Ready() accidentally did not inherit tp_is_gc; now it does.
2805
Neil Schemenauerc9abc1d2002-05-08 14:14:41 +00002806- The PyCore_* family of APIs have been removed.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00002807
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002808- The "u#" parser marker will now pass through Unicode objects as-is
Marc-André Lemburg3e3eacb2002-01-09 16:21:27 +00002809 without going through the buffer API.
2810
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002811- The enumerators of cmp_op have been renamed to use the prefix ``PyCmp_``.
Martin v. Löwis7198a522002-01-01 19:59:11 +00002812
Tim Peters10a3bb52001-12-25 19:07:38 +00002813- An old #define of ANY as void has been removed from pyport.h. This
2814 hasn't been used since Python's pre-ANSI days, and the #define has
2815 been marked as obsolete since then. SF bug 495548 says it created
2816 conflicts with other packages, so keeping it around wasn't harmless.
2817
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002818- Because Python's magic number scheme broke on January 1st, we decided
2819 to stop Python development. Thanks for all the fish!
2820
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00002821- Some of us don't like fish, so we changed Python's magic number
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00002822 scheme to a new one. See Python/import.c for details.
2823
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002824New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002825-------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002826
Martin v. Löwis79acb9e2002-12-06 12:48:53 +00002827- OpenVMS is now supported.
2828
Martin v. Löwisf90ae202002-06-11 06:22:31 +00002829- AtheOS is now supported.
2830
Andrew MacIntyre161ad0e2002-08-04 07:25:58 +00002831- the EMX runtime environment on OS/2 is now supported.
2832
Martin v. Löwisa6e97582002-01-01 18:41:33 +00002833- GNU/Hurd is now supported.
2834
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002835Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002836-----
2837
Fred Drake4dd0f7e2002-11-26 21:44:56 +00002838- The regrtest.py script's -u option now provides a way to say "allow
2839 all resources except this one." For example, to allow everything
2840 except bsddb, give the option '-uall,-bsddb'.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002841
2842Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002843-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002844
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00002845- The Windows distribution now ships with version 4.0.14 of the
2846 Sleepycat Berkeley database library. This should be a huge
2847 improvement over the previous Berkeley DB 1.85, which had many
2848 bugs.
2849 XXX What are the licensing issues here?
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002850 XXX If a user has a database created with a previous version of
Tim Peters84c7a3f2002-11-23 18:48:06 +00002851 XXX Python, what must they do to convert it?
2852 XXX I'm still not sure how to link this thing (see PCbuild/readme.txt).
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00002853 XXX The version # is likely to change before 2.3a1.
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00002854
2855- The Windows distribution now ships with a Secure Sockets Library (SLL)
Mark Hammondc3de0082002-12-03 06:16:08 +00002856 module (_ssl.pyd)
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00002857
Tim Peters857fb4c2002-11-14 23:31:58 +00002858- The Windows distribution now ships with Tcl/Tk version 8.4.1 (it
2859 previously shipped with Tcl/Tk 8.3.2).
2860
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00002861- When Python is built under a Microsoft compiler, sys.version now
2862 includes the compiler version number (_MSC_VER). For example, under
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002863 MSVC 6, sys.version contains the substring "MSC v.1200 ". 1200 is
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00002864 the value of _MSC_VER under MSVC 6.
2865
Tim Peters08e72952002-04-16 20:48:01 +00002866- Sometimes the uninstall executable (UNWISE.EXE) vanishes. One cause
2867 of that has been fixed in the installer (disabled Wise's "delete in-
2868 use files" uninstall option).
2869
Guido van Rossum181e41a2002-04-06 00:23:25 +00002870- Fixed a bug in urllib's proxy handling in Windows. [SF bug #503031]
2871
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00002872- The installer now installs Start menu shortcuts under (the local
2873 equivalent of) "All Users" when doing an Admin install.
2874
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00002875- file.truncate([newsize]) now works on Windows for all newsize values.
2876 It used to fail if newsize didn't fit in 32 bits, reflecting a
2877 limitation of MS _chsize (which is no longer used).
2878
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00002879- os.waitpid() is now implemented for Windows, and can be used to block
2880 until a specified process exits. This is similar to, but not exactly
2881 the same as, os.waitpid() on POSIX systems. If you're waiting for
2882 a specific process whose pid was obtained from one of the spawn()
2883 functions, the same Python os.waitpid() code works across platforms.
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00002884 See the docs for details. The docs were changed to clarify that
2885 spawn functions return, and waitpid requires, a process handle on
2886 Windows (not the same thing as a Windows process id).
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00002887
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00002888- New tempfile.TemporaryFile implementation for Windows: this doesn't
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002889 need a TemporaryFileWrapper wrapper anymore, and should be immune
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00002890 to a nasty problem: before 2.3, if you got a temp file on Windows, it
2891 got wrapped in an object whose close() method first closed the
2892 underlying file, then deleted the file. This usually worked fine.
2893 However, the spawn family of functions on Windows create (at a low C
2894 level) the same set of open files in the spawned process Q as were
2895 open in the spawning process P. If a temp file f was among them, then
2896 doing f.close() in P first closed P's C-level file handle on f, but Q's
2897 C-level file handle on f remained open, so the attempt in P to delete f
2898 blew up with a "Permission denied" error (Windows doesn't allow
2899 deleting open files). This was surprising, subtle, and difficult to
2900 work around.
2901
2902- The os module now exports all the symbolic constants usable with the
2903 low-level os.open() on Windows: the new constants in 2.3 are
2904 O_NOINHERIT, O_SHORT_LIVED, O_TEMPORARY, O_RANDOM and O_SEQUENTIAL.
2905 The others were also available in 2.2: O_APPEND, O_BINARY, O_CREAT,
2906 O_EXCL, O_RDONLY, O_RDWR, O_TEXT, O_TRUNC and O_WRONLY. Contrary
2907 to Microsoft docs, O_SHORT_LIVED does not seem to imply O_TEMPORARY
2908 (so specify both if you want both; note that neither is useful unless
2909 specified with O_CREAT too).
2910
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002911Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002912----
2913
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002914- Mac/Relnotes is gone, the release notes are now here.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002915
Just van Rossume1ebd802003-02-10 10:06:18 +00002916- Python (the OSX-only, unix-based version, not the OS9-compatible CFM
2917 version) now fully supports unicode strings as arguments to various file
2918 system calls, eg. open(), file(), os.stat() and os.listdir().
2919
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002920- The current naming convention for Python on the Macintosh is that MacPython
2921 refers to the unix-based OSX-only version, and MacPython-OS9 refers to the
2922 CFM-based version that runs on both OS9 and OSX.
2923
2924- All MacPython-OS9 functionality is now available in an OSX unix build,
2925 including the Carbon modules, the IDE, OSA support, etc. A lot of this
2926 will only work correctly in a framework build, though, because you cannot
2927 talk to the window manager unless your application is run from a .app
2928 bundle. There is a command line tool "pythonw" that runs your script
2929 with an interpreter living in such a .app bundle, this interpreter should
2930 be used to run any Python script using the window manager (including
2931 Tkinter or wxPython scripts).
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00002932
Jack Jansen8bb80db2002-12-30 22:42:43 +00002933- Most of Mac/Lib has moved to Lib/plat-mac, which is again used both in
2934 MacPython-OSX and MacPython-OS9. The only modules remaining in Mac/Lib
2935 are specifically for MacPython-OS9 (CFM support, preference resources, etc).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002936
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002937- A new utility PythonLauncher will start a Python interpreter when a .py or
2938 .pyw script is double-clicked in the Finder. By default .py scripts are
2939 run with a normal Python interpreter in a Terminal window and .pyw
2940 files are run with a window-aware pythonw interpreter without a Terminal
2941 window, but all this can be customized.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002942
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002943- MacPython-OS9 is now Carbon-only, so it runs on Mac OS 9 or Mac OS X and
2944 possibly on Mac OS 8.6 with the right CarbonLib installed, but not on earlier
2945 releases.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002946
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002947- Many tools such as BuildApplet.py and gensuitemodule.py now support a command
2948 line interface too.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002949
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002950- All the Carbon classes are now PEP253 compliant, meaning that you can
2951 subclass them from Python. Most of the attributes have gone, you should
2952 now use the accessor function call API, which is also what Apple's
2953 documentation uses. Some attributes such as grafport.visRgn are still
2954 available for convenience.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002955
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002956- New Carbon modules File (implementing the APIs in Files.h and Aliases.h)
2957 and Folder (APIs from Folders.h). The old macfs builtin module is
2958 gone, and replaced by a Python wrapper around the new modules.
2959
2960- Pathname handling should now be fully consistent: MacPython-OSX always uses
2961 unix pathnames and MacPython-OS9 always uses colon-separated Mac pathnames
2962 (also when running on Mac OS X).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002963
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002964- New Carbon modules Help and AH give access to the Carbon Help Manager.
2965 There are hooks in the IDE to allow accessing the Python documentation
2966 (and Apple's Carbon and Cocoa documentation) through the Help Viewer.
2967 See Mac/OSX/README for converting the Python documentation to a
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002968 Help Viewer compatible form and installing it.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002969
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002970- OSA support has been redesigned and the generated Python classes now
2971 mirror the inheritance defined by the underlying OSA classes.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002972
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002973- MacPython no longer maps both \r and \n to \n on input for any text file.
2974 This feature has been replaced by universal newline support (PEP278).
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00002975
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00002976- The default encoding for Python sourcefiles in MacPython-OS9 is no longer
Guido van Rossum16c85172003-02-20 01:52:48 +00002977 mac-roman (or whatever your local Mac encoding was) but "ascii", like on
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00002978 other platforms. If you really need sourcefiles with Mac characters in them
2979 you can change this in site.py.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002980
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002981
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002982What's New in Python 2.2 final?
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002983===============================
2984
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002985*Release date: 21-Dec-2001*
2986
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002987Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002988--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002989
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002990- pickle.py, cPickle: allow pickling instances of new-style classes
2991 with a custom metaclass.
2992
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002993Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002994-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002995
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002996- weakref proxy object: when comparing, unwrap both arguments if both
2997 are proxies.
2998
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002999Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003000-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003001
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003002- binascii.b2a_base64(): fix a potential buffer overrun when encoding
3003 very short strings.
3004
3005- cPickle: the obscure "fast" mode was suspected of causing stack
3006 overflows on the Mac. Hopefully fixed this by setting the recursion
3007 limit much smaller. If the limit is too low (it only affects
3008 performance), you can change it by defining PY_CPICKLE_FAST_LIMIT
3009 when compiling cPickle.c (or in pyconfig.h).
3010
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003011Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003012-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003013
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003014- dumbdbm.py: fixed a dumb old bug (the file didn't get synched at
3015 close or delete time).
3016
3017- rfc822.py: fixed a bug where the address '<>' was converted to None
3018 instead of an empty string (also fixes the email.Utils module).
3019
3020- xmlrpclib.py: version 1.0.0; uses precision for doubles.
3021
3022- test suite: the pickle and cPickle tests were not executing any code
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003023 when run from the standard regression test.
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003024
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003025Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003026-----------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003027
3028Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003029-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003030
3031C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003032-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003033
3034New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003035-------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003036
3037Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003038-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003039
3040Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003041-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003042
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003043- distutils package: fixed broken Windows installers (bdist_wininst).
3044
3045- tempfile.py: prevent mysterious warnings when TemporaryFileWrapper
3046 instances are deleted at process exit time.
3047
3048- socket.py: prevent mysterious warnings when socket instances are
3049 deleted at process exit time.
3050
3051- posixmodule.c: fix a Windows crash with stat() of a filename ending
3052 in backslash.
3053
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003054Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003055----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003056
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003057- The Carbon toolbox modules have been upgraded to Universal Headers
3058 3.4, and experimental CoreGraphics and CarbonEvents modules have
3059 been added. All only for framework-enabled MacOSX.
3060
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003061
Tim Peters6272dfd2001-12-13 19:34:00 +00003062What's New in Python 2.2c1?
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003063===========================
3064
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003065*Release date: 14-Dec-2001*
3066
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003067Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003068--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003069
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003070- Guido's tutorial introduction to the new type/class features has
3071 been extensively updated. See
3072
3073 http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html
3074
3075 That remains the primary documentation in this area.
3076
Guido van Rossum33bab012001-12-05 22:45:48 +00003077- Fixed a leak: instance variables declared with __slots__ were never
3078 deleted!
3079
Guido van Rossum4b800852001-12-03 00:54:52 +00003080- The "delete attribute" method of descriptor objects is called
3081 __delete__, not __del__. In previous releases, it was mistakenly
3082 called __del__, which created an unfortunate overloading condition
3083 with finalizers. (The "get attribute" and "set attribute" methods
3084 are still called __get__ and __set__, respectively.)
3085
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00003086- Some subtle issues with the super built-in were fixed:
3087
3088 (a) When super itself is subclassed, its __get__ method would still
3089 return an instance of the base class (i.e., of super).
3090
3091 (b) super(C, C()).__class__ would return C rather than super. This
3092 is confusing. To fix this, I decided to change the semantics of
3093 super so that it only applies to code attributes, not to data
3094 attributes. After all, overriding data attributes is not
3095 supported anyway.
3096
3097 (c) The __get__ method didn't check whether the argument was an
3098 instance of the type used in creation of the super instance.
3099
Guido van Rossumcd7b7d62001-12-04 21:02:07 +00003100- Previously, hash() of an instance of a subclass of a mutable type
3101 (list or dictionary) would return some value, rather than raising
3102 TypeError. This has been fixed. Also, directly calling
3103 dict.__hash__ and list.__hash__ now raises the same TypeError
3104 (previously, these were the same as object.__hash__).
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00003105
Guido van Rossumd331cb52001-12-05 19:46:42 +00003106- New-style objects now support deleting their __dict__. This is for
3107 all intents and purposes equivalent to assigning a brand new empty
3108 dictionary, but saves space if the object is not used further.
3109
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003110Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003111-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003112
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00003113- -Qnew now works as documented in PEP 238: when -Qnew is passed on
3114 the command line, all occurrences of "/" use true division instead
3115 of classic division. See the PEP for details. Note that "all"
3116 means all instances in library and 3rd-party modules, as well as in
3117 your own code. As the PEP says, -Qnew is intended for use only in
3118 educational environments with control over the libraries in use.
Tim Petersbf72fe22001-12-11 21:43:14 +00003119 Note that test_coercion.py in the standard Python test suite fails
3120 under -Qnew; this is expected, and won't be repaired until true
3121 division becomes the default (in the meantime, test_coercion is
3122 testing the current rules).
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00003123
Fred Drake6c01e252001-12-14 17:08:12 +00003124- complex() now only allows the first argument to be a string
3125 argument, and raises TypeError if either the second arg is a string
3126 or if the second arg is specified when the first is a string.
3127
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003128Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003129-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003130
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00003131- gc.get_referents was renamed to gc.get_referrers.
3132
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003133Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003134-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003135
Tim Peters25059d32001-12-07 20:35:43 +00003136- Functions in the os.spawn() family now release the global interpreter
3137 lock around calling the platform spawn. They should always have done
3138 this, but did not before 2.2c1. Multithreaded programs calling
3139 an os.spawn function with P_WAIT will no longer block all Python threads
3140 until the spawned program completes. It's possible that some programs
3141 relies on blocking, although more likely by accident than by design.
3142
Martin v. Löwis3a89b2b2001-11-25 14:35:58 +00003143- webbrowser defaults to netscape.exe on OS/2 now.
3144
Martin v. Löwis652e1912001-11-25 14:50:56 +00003145- Tix.ResizeHandle exposes detach_widget, hide, and show.
3146
Martin v. Löwis714d2e22001-12-02 12:26:03 +00003147- The charset alias windows_1252 has been added.
3148
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003149- types.StringTypes is a tuple containing the defined string types;
3150 usually this will be (str, unicode), but if Python was compiled
3151 without Unicode support it will be just (str,).
3152
3153- The pulldom and minidom modules were synchronized to PyXML.
3154
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003155Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003156-----------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003157
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003158- A new script called Tools/scripts/google.py was added, which fires
3159 off a search on Google.
3160
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003161Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003162-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003163
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003164- Note that release builds of Python should arrange to define the
3165 preprocessor symbol NDEBUG on the command line (or equivalent).
3166 In the 2.2 pre-release series we tried to define this by magic in
3167 Python.h instead, but it proved to cause problems for extension
3168 authors. The Unix, Windows and Mac builds now all define NDEBUG in
3169 release builds via cmdline (or equivalent) instead. Ports to
3170 other platforms should do likewise.
3171
Jack Jansen1999ef42001-12-06 21:47:20 +00003172- It is no longer necessary to use --with-suffix when building on a
3173 case-insensitive file system (such as Mac OS X HFS+). In the build
3174 directory an extension is used, but not in the installed python.
3175
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003176C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003177-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003178
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00003179- New function PyDict_MergeFromSeq2() exposes the builtin dict
3180 constructor's logic for updating a dictionary from an iterable object
3181 producing key-value pairs.
3182
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00003183- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() requires that the number of entries in
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00003184 the keyword list equal the number of argument specifiers. This
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00003185 wasn't checked correctly, and PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords could even
3186 dump core in some bad cases. This has been repaired. As a result,
3187 PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords may raise RuntimeError in bad cases that
3188 previously went unchallenged.
3189
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003190New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003191-------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003192
3193Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003194-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003195
3196Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003197-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003198
3199Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003200----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003201
Jack Jansenffa260f2001-12-06 21:14:00 +00003202- In unix-Python on Mac OS X (and darwin) sys.platform is now "darwin",
3203 without any trailing digits.
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003204
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003205- Changed logic for finding python home in Mac OS X framework Pythons.
3206 Now sys.executable points to the executable again, in stead of to
3207 the shared library. The latter is used only for locating the python
3208 home.
3209
3210
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003211What's New in Python 2.2b2?
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003212===========================
3213
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003214*Release date: 16-Nov-2001*
3215
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003216Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003217--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003218
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00003219- Multiple inheritance mixing new-style and classic classes in the
3220 list of base classes is now allowed, so this works now:
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00003221
3222 class Classic: pass
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00003223 class Mixed(Classic, object): pass
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00003224
3225 The MRO (method resolution order) for each base class is respected
3226 according to its kind, but the MRO for the derived class is computed
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003227 using new-style MRO rules if any base class is a new-style class.
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00003228 This needs to be documented.
3229
Tim Petersa427a2b2001-10-29 22:25:45 +00003230- The new builtin dictionary() constructor, and dictionary type, have
3231 been renamed to dict. This reflects a decade of common usage.
3232
Guido van Rossum3fc08d22001-11-15 20:33:10 +00003233- dict() now accepts an iterable object producing 2-sequences. For
3234 example, dict(d.items()) == d for any dictionary d. The argument,
3235 and the elements of the argument, can be any iterable objects.
3236
Guido van Rossum7ad2d1e2001-10-29 22:11:00 +00003237- New-style classes can now have a __del__ method, which is called
3238 when the instance is deleted (just like for classic classes).
3239
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003240- Assignment to object.__dict__ is now possible, for objects that are
3241 instances of new-style classes that have a __dict__ (unless the base
3242 class forbids it).
3243
Guido van Rossumc8e56452001-10-22 00:43:43 +00003244- Methods of built-in types now properly check for keyword arguments
3245 (formerly these were silently ignored). The only built-in methods
3246 that take keyword arguments are __call__, __init__ and __new__.
3247
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00003248- The socket function has been converted to a type; see below.
3249
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003250Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003251-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003252
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00003253- Assignment to __debug__ raises SyntaxError at compile-time. This
3254 was promised when 2.1c1 was released as "What's New in Python 2.1c1"
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003255 (see below) says.
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00003256
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003257- Clarified the error messages for unsupported operands to an operator
3258 (like 1 + '').
3259
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003260Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003261-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003262
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00003263- mmap has a new keyword argument, "access", allowing a uniform way for
3264 both Windows and Unix users to create read-only, write-through and
3265 copy-on-write memory mappings. This was previously possible only on
3266 Unix. A new keyword argument was required to support this in a
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003267 uniform way because the mmap() signatures had diverged across
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00003268 platforms. Thanks to Jay T Miller for repairing this!
3269
Tim Peters169ded02001-11-03 19:57:21 +00003270- By default, the gc.garbage list now contains only those instances in
3271 unreachable cycles that have __del__ methods; in 2.1 it contained all
3272 instances in unreachable cycles. "Instances" here has been generalized
3273 to include instances of both new-style and old-style classes.
3274
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003275- The socket module defines a new method for socket objects,
3276 sendall(). This is like send() but may make multiple calls to
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00003277 send() until all data has been sent. Also, the socket function has
3278 been converted to a subclassable type, like list and tuple (etc.)
3279 before it; socket and SocketType are now the same thing.
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003280
3281- Various bugfixes to the curses module. There is now a test suite
3282 for the curses module (you have to run it manually).
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00003283
Guido van Rossum692adf12001-10-30 03:03:03 +00003284- binascii.b2a_base64 no longer places an arbitrary restriction of 57
3285 bytes on its input.
3286
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003287Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003288-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003289
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00003290- tkFileDialog exposes a Directory class and askdirectory
Martin v. Löwis25ee87c2001-11-07 22:38:08 +00003291 convenience function.
3292
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00003293- Symbolic group names in regular expressions must be unique. For
3294 example, the regexp r'(?P<abc>)(?P<abc>)' is not allowed, because a
3295 single name can't mean both "group 1" and "group 2" simultaneously.
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003296 Python 2.2 detects this error at regexp compilation time;
3297 previously, the error went undetected, and results were
3298 unpredictable. Also in sre, the pattern.split(), pattern.sub(), and
3299 pattern.subn() methods have been rewritten in C. Also, an
3300 experimental function/method finditer() has been added, which works
3301 like findall() but returns an iterator.
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00003302
Martin v. Löwisb7b32602001-11-02 23:48:20 +00003303- Tix exposes more commands through the classes DirSelectBox,
3304 DirSelectDialog, ListNoteBook, Meter, CheckList, and the
3305 methods tix_addbitmapdir, tix_cget, tix_configure, tix_filedialog,
3306 tix_getbitmap, tix_getimage, tix_option_get, and tix_resetoptions.
3307
Tim Peters98791af2001-10-23 01:59:54 +00003308- Traceback objects are now scanned by cyclic garbage collection, so
3309 cycles created by casual use of sys.exc_info() no longer cause
3310 permanent memory leaks (provided garbage collection is enabled).
3311
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00003312- os.extsep -- a new variable needed by the RISCOS support. It is the
3313 separator used by extensions, and is '.' on all platforms except
3314 RISCOS, where it is '/'. There is no need to use this variable
3315 unless you have a masochistic desire to port your code to RISCOS.
3316
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003317- mimetypes.py has optional support for non-standard, but commonly
3318 found types. guess_type() and guess_extension() now accept an
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003319 optional 'strict' flag, defaulting to true, which controls whether
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003320 recognize non-standard types or not. A few non-standard types we
3321 know about have been added. Also, when run as a script, there are
3322 new -l and -e options.
3323
3324- statcache is now deprecated.
3325
3326- email.Utils.formatdate() now produces the preferred RFC 2822 style
3327 dates with numeric timezones (it used to produce obsolete dates
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003328 hard coded to "GMT" timezone). An optional 'localtime' flag is
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003329 added to produce dates in the local timezone, with daylight savings
3330 time properly taken into account.
3331
3332- In pickle and cPickle, instead of masking errors in load() by
3333 transforming them into SystemError, we let the original exception
3334 propagate out. Also, implement support for __safe_for_unpickling__
3335 in pickle, as it already was supported in cPickle.
3336
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003337Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003338-----------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003339
3340Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003341-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003342
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003343- The dbm module is built using libdb1 if available. The bsddb module
3344 is built with libdb3 if available.
3345
3346- Misc/Makefile.pre.in has been removed by BDFL pronouncement.
3347
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003348C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003349-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003350
Tim Peters1fc240e2001-10-26 05:06:50 +00003351- New function PySequence_Fast_GET_SIZE() returns the size of a non-
3352 NULL result from PySequence_Fast(), more quickly than calling
3353 PySequence_Size().
3354
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003355- New argument unpacking function PyArg_UnpackTuple() added.
3356
3357- New functions PyObject_CallFunctionObjArgs() and
3358 PyObject_CallMethodObjArgs() have been added to make it more
3359 convenient and efficient to call functions and methods from C.
3360
3361- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() no longer masks errors, so it's
3362 possible that this will propagate errors it didn't before.
3363
3364- New function PyObject_CheckReadBuffer(), which returns true if its
3365 argument supports the single-segment readable buffer interface.
3366
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003367New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003368-------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003369
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00003370- We've finally confirmed that this release builds on HP-UX 11.00,
3371 *with* threads, and passes the test suite.
3372
Tim Peters7a33d8b2001-11-05 02:51:07 +00003373- Thanks to a series of patches from Michael Muller, Python may build
3374 again under OS/2 Visual Age C++.
3375
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00003376- Updated RISCOS port by Dietmar Schwertberger.
3377
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003378Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003379-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003380
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00003381- Added a test script for the curses module. It isn't run automatically;
3382 regrtest.py must be run with '-u curses' to enable it.
3383
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003384Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003385-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003386
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003387Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003388----
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003389
3390- PythonScript has been moved to unsupported and is slated to be
3391 removed completely in the next release.
3392
3393- It should now be possible to build applets that work on both OS9 and
3394 OSX.
3395
3396- The core is now linked with CoreServices not Carbon; as a side
3397 result, default 8bit encoding on OSX is now ASCII.
3398
3399- Python should now build on OSX 10.1.1
3400
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003401
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003402What's New in Python 2.2b1?
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003403===========================
3404
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003405*Release date: 19-Oct-2001*
3406
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003407Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003408--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003409
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00003410- New-style classes are now always dynamic (except for built-in and
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00003411 extension types). There is no longer a performance penalty, and I
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00003412 no longer see another reason to keep this baggage around. One relic
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00003413 remains: the __dict__ of a new-style class is a read-only proxy; you
3414 must set the class's attribute to modify it. As a consequence, the
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00003415 __defined__ attribute of new-style types no longer exists, for lack
3416 of need: there is once again only one __dict__ (although in the
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00003417 future a __cache__ may be resurrected with a similar function, if I
3418 can prove that it actually speeds things up).
Guido van Rossum50fda3b2001-10-04 19:46:06 +00003419
Tim Peters1c9ca872001-10-04 06:43:12 +00003420- C.__doc__ now works as expected for new-style classes (in 2.2a4 it
3421 always returned None, even when there was a class docstring).
3422
3423- doctest now finds and runs docstrings attached to new-style classes,
3424 class methods, static methods, and properties.
3425
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003426Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003427-----------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003428
Guido van Rossuma8bcf802001-10-15 15:53:58 +00003429- A very subtle syntactical pitfall in list comprehensions was fixed.
3430 For example: [a+b for a in 'abc', for b in 'def']. The comma in
3431 this example is a mistake. Previously, this would silently let 'a'
3432 iterate over the singleton tuple ('abc',), yielding ['abcd', 'abce',
3433 'abcf'] rather than the intended ['ad', 'ae', 'af', 'bd', 'be',
3434 'bf', 'cd', 'ce', 'cf']. Now, this is flagged as a syntax error.
3435 Note that [a for a in <singleton>] is a convoluted way to say
3436 [<singleton>] anyway, so it's not like any expressiveness is lost.
3437
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003438- getattr(obj, name, default) now only catches AttributeError, as
3439 documented, rather than returning the default value for all
3440 exceptions (which could mask bugs in a __getattr__ hook, for
3441 example).
3442
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00003443- Weak reference objects are now part of the core and offer a C API.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00003444 A bug which could allow a core dump when binary operations involved
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00003445 proxy reference has been fixed. weakref.ReferenceError is now a
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003446 built-in exception.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00003447
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00003448- unicode(obj) now behaves more like str(obj), accepting arbitrary
3449 objects, and calling a __unicode__ method if it exists.
3450 unicode(obj, encoding) and unicode(obj, encoding, errors) still
Marc-André Lemburgb5507ec2001-10-19 12:02:29 +00003451 require an 8-bit string or character buffer argument.
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00003452
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003453- isinstance() now allows any object as the first argument and a
3454 class, a type or something with a __bases__ tuple attribute for the
3455 second argument. The second argument may also be a tuple of a
3456 class, type, or something with __bases__, in which case isinstance()
3457 will return true if the first argument is an instance of any of the
3458 things contained in the second argument tuple. E.g.
3459
3460 isinstance(x, (A, B))
3461
3462 returns true if x is an instance of A or B.
3463
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003464Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003465-----------------
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003466
3467- thread.start_new_thread() now returns the thread ID (previously None).
3468
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00003469- binascii has now two quopri support functions, a2b_qp and b2a_qp.
3470
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00003471- readline now supports setting the startup_hook and the
3472 pre_event_hook, and adds the add_history() function.
Martin v. Löwis0daad592001-09-30 21:09:59 +00003473
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00003474- os and posix supports chroot(), setgroups() and unsetenv() where
3475 available. The stat(), fstat(), statvfs() and fstatvfs() functions
3476 now return "pseudo-sequences" -- the various fields can now be
3477 accessed as attributes (e.g. os.stat("/").st_mtime) but for
3478 backwards compatibility they also behave as a fixed-length sequence.
3479 Some platform-specific fields (e.g. st_rdev) are only accessible as
Guido van Rossum98bf58f2001-10-18 20:34:25 +00003480 attributes.
3481
3482- time: localtime(), gmtime() and strptime() now return a
3483 pseudo-sequence similar to the os.stat() return value, with
3484 attributes like tm_year etc.
Martin v. Löwis16628c92001-10-04 22:46:41 +00003485
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003486- Decompression objects in the zlib module now accept an optional
3487 second parameter to decompress() that specifies the maximum amount
3488 of memory to use for the uncompressed data.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003489
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00003490- optional SSL support in the socket module now exports OpenSSL
3491 functions RAND_add(), RAND_egd(), and RAND_status(). These calls
3492 are useful on platforms like Solaris where OpenSSL does not
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003493 automatically seed its PRNG. Also, the keyfile and certfile
3494 arguments to socket.ssl() are now optional.
3495
3496- posixmodule (and by extension, the os module on POSIX platforms) now
3497 exports O_LARGEFILE, O_DIRECT, O_DIRECTORY, and O_NOFOLLOW.
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00003498
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003499Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003500-------
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00003501
Tim Peters7402f792001-10-02 03:53:41 +00003502- doctest now excludes functions and classes not defined by the module
3503 being tested, thanks to Tim Hochberg.
3504
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00003505- HotShot, a new profiler implemented using a C-based callback, has
3506 been added. This substantially reduces the overhead of profiling,
3507 but it is still quite preliminary. Support modules and
3508 documentation will be added in upcoming releases (before 2.2 final).
3509
Guido van Rossumc4b09b42001-10-04 10:19:00 +00003510- profile now produces correct output in situations where an exception
3511 raised in Python is cleared by C code (e.g. hasattr()). This used
3512 to cause wrong output, including spurious claims of recursive
3513 functions and attribution of time spent to the wrong function.
3514
Tim Peters0a1fc4e2001-10-07 03:12:08 +00003515 The code and documentation for the derived OldProfile and HotProfile
3516 profiling classes was removed. The code hasn't worked for years (if
3517 you tried to use them, they raised exceptions). OldProfile
3518 intended to reproduce the behavior of the profiler Python used more
3519 than 7 years ago, and isn't interesting anymore. HotProfile intended
3520 to provide a faster profiler (but producing less information), and
3521 that's a worthy goal we intend to meet via a different approach (but
3522 without losing information).
3523
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00003524- Profile.calibrate() has a new implementation that should deliver
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00003525 a much better system-specific calibration constant. The constant can
3526 now be specified in an instance constructor, or as a Profile class or
3527 instance variable, instead of by editing profile.py's source code.
3528 Calibration must still be done manually (see the docs for the profile
3529 module).
3530
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003531 Note that Profile.calibrate() must be overridden by subclasses.
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00003532 Improving the accuracy required exploiting detailed knowledge of
3533 profiler internals; the earlier method abstracted away the details
3534 and measured a simplified model instead, but consequently computed
3535 a constant too small by a factor of 2 on some modern machines.
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00003536
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00003537- quopri's encode and decode methods take an optional header parameter,
Jeremy Hylton6f543b62001-10-16 20:42:52 +00003538 which indicates whether output is intended for the header 'Q'
3539 encoding.
3540
Guido van Rossuma5343cc2001-10-18 18:02:07 +00003541- The SocketServer.ThreadingMixIn class now closes the request after
3542 finish_request() returns. (Not when it errors out though.)
3543
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003544- The nntplib module's NNTP.body() method has grown a 'file' argument
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003545 to allow saving the message body to a file.
3546
3547- The email package has added a class email.Parser.HeaderParser which
3548 only parses headers and does not recurse into the message's body.
3549 Also, the module/class MIMEAudio has been added for representing
3550 audio data (contributed by Anthony Baxter).
3551
3552- ftplib should be able to handle files > 2GB.
3553
3554- ConfigParser.getboolean() now also interprets TRUE, FALSE, YES, NO,
3555 ON, and OFF.
3556
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00003557- xml.dom.minidom NodeList objects now support the length attribute
3558 and item() method as required by the DOM specifications.
3559
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00003560Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003561-----------
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00003562
3563- Demo/dns was removed. It no longer serves any purpose; a package
3564 derived from it is now maintained by Anthony Baxter, see
3565 http://PyDNS.SourceForge.net.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003566
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003567- The freeze tool has been made more robust, and two new options have
3568 been added: -X and -E.
3569
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003570Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003571-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003572
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003573- configure will use CXX in LINKCC if CXX is used to build main() and
3574 the system requires to link a C++ main using the C++ compiler.
3575
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003576C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003577-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003578
Guido van Rossum6c4bce32001-10-18 19:20:25 +00003579- The documentation for the tp_compare slot is updated to require that
3580 the return value must be -1, 0, 1; an arbitrary number <0 or >0 is
3581 not correct. This is not yet enforced but will be enforced in
3582 Python 2.3; even later, we may use -2 to indicate errors and +2 for
3583 "NotImplemented". Right now, -1 should be used for an error return.
3584
Tim Petersd38b1c72001-09-30 05:09:37 +00003585- PyLong_AsLongLong() now accepts int (as well as long) arguments.
3586 Consequently, PyArg_ParseTuple's 'L' code also accepts int (as well
3587 as long) arguments.
3588
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00003589- PyThread_start_new_thread() now returns a long int giving the thread
3590 ID, if one can be calculated; it returns -1 for error, 0 if no
3591 thread ID is calculated (this is an incompatible change, but only
3592 the thread module used this API). This code has only really been
3593 tested on Linux and Windows; other platforms please beware (and
3594 report any bugs or strange behavior).
3595
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00003596- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() no longer accepts Unicode objects as
3597 input.
3598
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003599New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003600-------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003601
3602Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003603-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003604
3605Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003606-------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003607
Tim Peters04cf1d32001-10-09 22:39:40 +00003608- Installer: If you install IDLE, and don't disable file-extension
3609 registration, a new "Edit with IDLE" context (right-click) menu entry
3610 is created for .py and .pyw files.
3611
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003612- The signal module now supports SIGBREAK on Windows, thanks to Steven
3613 Scott. Note that SIGBREAK is unique to Windows. The default SIGBREAK
3614 action remains to call Win32 ExitProcess(). This can be changed via
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003615 signal.signal(). For example::
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003616
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003617 # Make Ctrl+Break raise KeyboardInterrupt, like Python's default Ctrl+C
3618 # (SIGINT) behavior.
3619 import signal
3620 signal.signal(signal.SIGBREAK, signal.default_int_handler)
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003621
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003622 try:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003623 while 1:
3624 pass
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003625 except KeyboardInterrupt:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003626 # We get here on Ctrl+C or Ctrl+Break now; if we had not changed
3627 # SIGBREAK, only on Ctrl+C (and Ctrl+Break would terminate the
3628 # program without the possibility for any Python-level cleanup).
3629 print "Clean exit"
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003630
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003631
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003632What's New in Python 2.2a4?
3633===========================
3634
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003635*Release date: 28-Sep-2001*
3636
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003637Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003638--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003639
3640- pydoc and inspect are now aware of new-style classes;
3641 e.g. help(list) at the interactive prompt now shows proper
3642 documentation for all operations on list objects.
3643
3644- Applications using Jim Fulton's ExtensionClass module can now safely
3645 be used with Python 2.2. In particular, Zope 2.4.1 now works with
3646 Python 2.2 (as well as with Python 2.1.1). The Demo/metaclass
3647 examples also work again. It is hoped that Gtk and Boost also work
3648 with 2.2a4 and beyond. (If you can confirm this, please write
3649 webmaster@python.org; if there are still problems, please open a bug
3650 report on SourceForge.)
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003651
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00003652- property() now takes 4 keyword arguments: fget, fset, fdel and doc.
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003653 These map to read-only attributes 'fget', 'fset', 'fdel', and '__doc__'
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00003654 in the constructed property object. fget, fset and fdel weren't
3655 discoverable from Python in 2.2a3. __doc__ is new, and allows to
3656 associate a docstring with a property.
3657
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003658- Comparison overloading is now more completely implemented. For
3659 example, a str subclass instance can properly be compared to a str
3660 instance, and it can properly overload comparison. Ditto for most
3661 other built-in object types.
3662
3663- The repr() of new-style classes has changed; instead of <type
3664 'M.Foo'> a new-style class is now rendered as <class 'M.Foo'>,
3665 *except* for built-in types, which are still rendered as <type
3666 'Foo'> (to avoid upsetting existing code that might parse or
3667 otherwise rely on repr() of certain type objects).
3668
3669- The repr() of new-style objects is now always <Foo object at XXX>;
3670 previously, it was sometimes <Foo instance at XXX>.
3671
3672- For new-style classes, what was previously called __getattr__ is now
3673 called __getattribute__. This method, if defined, is called for
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00003674 *every* attribute access. A new __getattr__ hook more similar to the
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003675 one in classic classes is defined which is called only if regular
3676 attribute access raises AttributeError; to catch *all* attribute
3677 access, you can use __getattribute__ (for new-style classes). If
3678 both are defined, __getattribute__ is called first, and if it raises
3679 AttributeError, __getattr__ is called.
3680
3681- The __class__ attribute of new-style objects can be assigned to.
3682 The new class must have the same C-level object layout as the old
3683 class.
3684
3685- The builtin file type can be subclassed now. In the usual pattern,
3686 "file" is the name of the builtin type, and file() is a new builtin
3687 constructor, with the same signature as the builtin open() function.
3688 file() is now the preferred way to open a file.
3689
3690- Previously, __new__ would only see sequential arguments passed to
3691 the type in a constructor call; __init__ would see both sequential
3692 and keyword arguments. This made no sense whatsoever any more, so
3693 now both __new__ and __init__ see all arguments.
3694
3695- Previously, hash() applied to an instance of a subclass of str or
3696 unicode always returned 0. This has been repaired.
3697
3698- Previously, an operation on an instance of a subclass of an
3699 immutable type (int, long, float, complex, tuple, str, unicode),
3700 where the subtype didn't override the operation (and so the
3701 operation was handled by the builtin type), could return that
3702 instance instead a value of the base type. For example, if s was of
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003703 a str subclass type, s[:] returned s as-is. Now it returns a str
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003704 with the same value as s.
3705
Barry Warsaw86fbaf82001-09-28 15:26:12 +00003706- Provisional support for pickling new-style objects has been added.
3707
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003708Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003709----
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003710
Tim Peters2c9aa5e2001-09-23 04:06:05 +00003711- file.writelines() now accepts any iterable object producing strings.
3712
Marc-André Lemburgaefd7662001-09-20 12:59:37 +00003713- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() now works very much like
3714 PyObject_Str(obj) in that it tries to use __str__/tp_str
3715 on the object if the object is not a string or buffer. This
3716 makes unicode() behave like str() when applied to non-string/buffer
3717 objects.
3718
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00003719- PyFile_WriteObject now passes Unicode objects to the file's write
3720 method. As a result, all file-like objects which may be the target
Martin v. Löwis2777c022001-09-19 13:47:32 +00003721 of a print statement must support Unicode objects, i.e. they must
3722 at least convert them into ASCII strings.
3723
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003724- Thread scheduling on Solaris should be improved; it is no longer
3725 necessary to insert a small sleep at the start of a thread in order
3726 to let other runnable threads be scheduled.
3727
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003728Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003729-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003730
Marc-André Lemburgbf990172001-09-27 14:17:33 +00003731- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
3732 read character buffer compatible objects for their .write() methods.
3733 These objects are converted to strings and then handled as such
3734 by the instances.
3735
Barry Warsaw2f600732001-09-24 04:28:10 +00003736- The "email" package has been added. This is basically a port of the
3737 mimelib package <http://sf.net/projects/mimelib> with API changes
3738 and some implementations updated to use iterators and generators.
3739
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00003740- difflib.ndiff() and difflib.Differ.compare() are generators now. This
3741 restores the ability of Tools/scripts/ndiff.py to start producing output
3742 before the entire comparison is complete.
3743
Barry Warsaw58b072d2001-09-22 04:44:21 +00003744- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
3745 iteration just like file objects (i.e. their .readline() method is
3746 called for each iteration until it returns an empty string).
3747
Marc-André Lemburg494f2ae2001-09-19 11:33:31 +00003748- The codecs module has grown four new helper APIs to access
3749 builtin codecs: getencoder(), getdecoder(), getreader(),
3750 getwriter().
3751
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003752- SimpleXMLRPCServer: a new module (based upon SimpleHTMLServer)
3753 simplifies writing XML RPC servers.
3754
Barry Warsaw647d5e82001-09-28 17:01:02 +00003755- os.path.realpath(): a new function that returns the absolute pathname
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003756 after interpretation of symbolic links. On non-Unix systems, this
3757 is an alias for os.path.abspath().
3758
Tim Peters16a77ad2001-09-08 04:00:12 +00003759- operator.indexOf() (PySequence_Index() in the C API) now works with any
3760 iterable object.
3761
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003762- smtplib now supports various authentication and security features of
3763 the SMTP protocol through the new login() and starttls() methods.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00003764
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003765- hmac: a new module implementing keyed hashing for message
3766 authentication.
3767
3768- mimetypes now recognizes more extensions and file types. At the
3769 same time, some mappings not sanctioned by IANA were removed.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00003770
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003771- The "compiler" package has been brought up to date to the state of
Guido van Rossumc9ed5dc2001-09-20 05:30:24 +00003772 Python 2.2 bytecode generation. It has also been promoted from a
3773 Tool to a standard library package. (Tools/compiler still exists as
3774 a sample driver.)
3775
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003776Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003777-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003778
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003779- Large file support (LFS) is now automatic when the platform supports
3780 it; no more manual configuration tweaks are needed. On Linux, at
3781 least, it's possible to have a system whose C library supports large
3782 files but whose kernel doesn't; in this case, large file support is
3783 still enabled but doesn't do you any good unless you upgrade your
3784 kernel or share your Python executable with another system whose
3785 kernel has large file support.
3786
3787- The configure script now supplies plausible defaults in a
3788 cross-compilation environment. This doesn't mean that the supplied
3789 values are always correct, or that cross-compilation now works
3790 flawlessly -- but it's a first step (and it shuts up most of
3791 autoconf's warnings about AC_TRY_RUN).
3792
3793- The Unix build is now a bit less chatty, courtesy of the parser
3794 generator. The build is completely silent (except for errors) when
3795 using "make -s", thanks to a -q option to setup.py.
3796
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003797C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003798-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003799
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003800- The "structmember" API now supports some new flag bits to deny read
3801 and/or write access to attributes in restricted execution mode.
3802
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003803New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003804-------------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003805
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003806- Compaq's iPAQ handheld, running the "familiar" Linux distribution
3807 (http://familiar.handhelds.org).
3808
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003809Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003810-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003811
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00003812- The "classic" standard tests, which work by comparing stdout to
3813 an expected-output file under Lib/test/output/, no longer stop at
3814 the first mismatch. Instead the test is run to completion, and a
3815 variant of ndiff-style comparison is used to report all differences.
3816 This is much easier to understand than the previous style of reporting.
3817
3818- The unittest-based standard tests now use regrtest's test_main()
3819 convention, instead of running as a side-effect of merely being
3820 imported. This allows these tests to be run in more natural and
3821 flexible ways as unittests, outside the regrtest framework.
3822
3823- regrtest.py is much better integrated with unittest and doctest now,
3824 especially in regard to reporting errors.
3825
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003826Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003827-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003828
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003829- Large file support now also works for files > 4GB, on filesystems
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00003830 that support it (NTFS under Windows 2000). See "What's New in
3831 Python 2.2a3" for more detail.
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003832
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003833
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003834What's New in Python 2.2a3?
3835===========================
3836
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003837*Release Date: 07-Sep-2001*
3838
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003839Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003840----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003841
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00003842- Conversion of long to float now raises OverflowError if the long is too
3843 big to represent as a C double.
3844
Tim Peters32f453e2001-09-03 08:35:41 +00003845- The 3-argument builtin pow() no longer allows a third non-None argument
3846 if either of the first two arguments is a float, or if both are of
3847 integer types and the second argument is negative (in which latter case
3848 the arguments are converted to float, so this is really the same
3849 restriction).
3850
Tim Peters5d2b77c2001-09-03 05:47:38 +00003851- The builtin dir() now returns more information, and sometimes much
3852 more, generally naming all attributes of an object, and all attributes
3853 reachable from the object via its class, and from its class's base
3854 classes, and so on from them too. Example: in 2.2a2, dir([]) returned
3855 an empty list. In 2.2a3,
3856
3857 >>> dir([])
3858 ['__add__', '__class__', '__contains__', '__delattr__', '__delitem__',
3859 '__eq__', '__ge__', '__getattr__', '__getitem__', '__getslice__',
3860 '__gt__', '__hash__', '__iadd__', '__imul__', '__init__', '__le__',
3861 '__len__', '__lt__', '__mul__', '__ne__', '__new__', '__repr__',
3862 '__rmul__', '__setattr__', '__setitem__', '__setslice__', '__str__',
3863 'append', 'count', 'extend', 'index', 'insert', 'pop', 'remove',
3864 'reverse', 'sort']
3865
3866 dir(module) continues to return only the module's attributes, though.
3867
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003868- Overflowing operations on plain ints now return a long int rather
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003869 than raising OverflowError. This is a partial implementation of PEP
3870 237. You can use -Wdefault::OverflowWarning to enable a warning for
3871 this situation, and -Werror::OverflowWarning to revert to the old
3872 OverflowError exception.
3873
Guido van Rossum61c345f2001-09-04 03:26:15 +00003874- A new command line option, -Q<arg>, is added to control run-time
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003875 warnings for the use of classic division. (See PEP 238.) Possible
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00003876 values are -Qold, -Qwarn, -Qwarnall, and -Qnew. The default is
3877 -Qold, meaning the / operator has its classic meaning and no
3878 warnings are issued. Using -Qwarn issues a run-time warning about
3879 all uses of classic division for int and long arguments; -Qwarnall
3880 also warns about classic division for float and complex arguments
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00003881 (for use with fixdiv.py).
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003882 [Note: the remainder of this item (preserved below) became
3883 obsolete in 2.2c1 -- -Qnew has global effect in 2.2] ::
3884
3885 Using -Qnew is questionable; it turns on new division by default, but
3886 only in the __main__ module. You can usefully combine -Qwarn or
3887 -Qwarnall and -Qnew: this gives the __main__ module new division, and
3888 warns about classic division everywhere else.
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003889
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003890- Many built-in types can now be subclassed. This applies to int,
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003891 long, float, str, unicode, and tuple. (The types complex, list and
3892 dictionary can also be subclassed; this was introduced earlier.)
3893 Note that restrictions apply when subclassing immutable built-in
3894 types: you can only affect the value of the instance by overloading
3895 __new__. You can add mutable attributes, and the subclass instances
3896 will have a __dict__ attribute, but you cannot change the "value"
3897 (as implemented by the base class) of an immutable subclass instance
3898 once it is created.
3899
Guido van Rossumaaf80c82001-09-02 13:44:35 +00003900- The dictionary constructor now takes an optional argument, a
3901 mapping-like object, and initializes the dictionary from its
3902 (key, value) pairs.
3903
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003904- A new built-in type, super, has been added. This facilitates making
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003905 "cooperative super calls" in a multiple inheritance setting. For an
3906 explanation, see http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#cooperation
3907
Guido van Rossum8d7234d2001-09-06 22:02:58 +00003908- A new built-in type, property, has been added. This enables the
3909 creation of "properties". These are attributes implemented by
3910 getter and setter functions (or only one of these for read-only or
3911 write-only attributes), without the need to override __getattr__.
3912 See http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#property
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003913
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003914- The syntax of floating-point and imaginary literals has been
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00003915 liberalized, to allow leading zeroes. Examples of literals now
3916 legal that were SyntaxErrors before:
3917
3918 00.0 0e3 0100j 07.5 00000000000000000008.
3919
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003920- An old tokenizer bug allowed floating point literals with an incomplete
Tim Petersc6d95812001-08-28 20:56:27 +00003921 exponent, such as 1e and 3.1e-. Such literals now raise SyntaxError.
3922
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003923Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003924-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003925
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00003926- telnetlib includes symbolic names for the options, and support for
Martin v. Löwis1da9c572002-11-04 09:56:00 +00003927 setting an option negotiation callback. It also supports processing
3928 of suboptions.
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00003929
Tim Petersa40c7932001-09-05 22:36:56 +00003930- The new C standard no longer requires that math libraries set errno to
3931 ERANGE on overflow. For platform libraries that exploit this new
3932 freedom, Python's overflow-checking was wholly broken. A new overflow-
3933 checking scheme attempts to repair that, but may not be reliable on all
3934 platforms (C doesn't seem to provide anything both useful and portable
3935 in this area anymore).
3936
Martin v. Löwis44f86962001-09-05 13:44:54 +00003937- Asynchronous timeout actions are available through the new class
3938 threading.Timer.
3939
Tim Peters78526162001-09-05 00:53:45 +00003940- math.log and math.log10 now return sensible results for even huge
3941 long arguments. For example, math.log10(10 ** 10000) ~= 10000.0.
3942
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003943- A new function, imp.lock_held(), returns 1 when the import lock is
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00003944 currently held. See the docs for the imp module.
3945
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003946- pickle, cPickle and marshal on 32-bit platforms can now correctly read
Tim Peters82112372001-08-29 02:28:42 +00003947 dumps containing ints written on platforms where Python ints are 8 bytes.
3948 When read on a box where Python ints are 4 bytes, such values are
3949 converted to Python longs.
3950
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003951- In restricted execution mode (using the rexec module), unmarshalling
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003952 code objects is no longer allowed. This plugs a security hole.
3953
Steve Purcell6091cd62001-09-06 16:05:17 +00003954- unittest.TestResult instances no longer store references to tracebacks
3955 generated by test failures. This prevents unexpected dangling references
3956 to objects that should be garbage collected between tests.
3957
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003958Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003959-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003960
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00003961- Tools/scripts/fixdiv.py has been added which can be used to fix
3962 division operators as per PEP 238.
3963
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003964Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003965-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003966
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00003967- If you are an adventurous person using Mac OS X you may want to look at
3968 Mac/OSX. There is a Makefile there that will build Python as a real Mac
3969 application, which can be used for experimenting with Carbon or Cocoa.
3970 Discussion of this on pythonmac-sig, please.
3971
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00003972C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003973-----
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00003974
3975- New function PyObject_Dir(obj), like Python __builtin__.dir(obj).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00003976
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00003977- Note that PyLong_AsDouble can fail! This has always been true, but no
3978 callers checked for it. It's more likely to fail now, because overflow
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003979 errors are properly detected now. The proper way to check::
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00003980
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003981 double x = PyLong_AsDouble(some_long_object);
3982 if (x == -1.0 && PyErr_Occurred()) {
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003983 /* The conversion failed. */
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003984 }
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00003985
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003986- The GC API has been changed. Extensions that use the old API will still
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00003987 compile but will not participate in GC. To upgrade an extension
3988 module:
3989
3990 - rename Py_TPFLAGS_GC to PyTPFLAGS_HAVE_GC
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00003991
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00003992 - use PyObject_GC_New or PyObject_GC_NewVar to allocate objects and
3993 PyObject_GC_Del to deallocate them
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00003994
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00003995 - rename PyObject_GC_Init to PyObject_GC_Track and PyObject_GC_Fini
3996 to PyObject_GC_UnTrack
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00003997
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00003998 - remove PyGC_HEAD_SIZE from object size calculations
3999
4000 - remove calls to PyObject_AS_GC and PyObject_FROM_GC
4001
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004002- Two new functions: PyString_FromFormat() and PyString_FromFormatV().
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004003 These can be used safely to construct string objects from a
4004 sprintf-style format string (similar to the format string supported
4005 by PyErr_Format()).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00004006
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004007New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004008-------------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004009
Tim Petersb7da0902001-09-02 23:01:43 +00004010- Stephen Hansen contributed patches sufficient to get a clean compile
4011 under Borland C (Windows), but he reports problems running it and ran
4012 out of time to complete the port. Volunteers? Expect a MemoryError
4013 when importing the types module; this is probably shallow, and
4014 causing later failures too.
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004015
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004016Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004017-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004018
4019Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004020-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004021
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00004022- Large file support is now enabled on Win32 platforms as well as on
4023 Win64. This means that, for example, you can use f.tell() and f.seek()
4024 to manipulate files larger than 2 gigabytes (provided you have enough
4025 disk space, and are using a Windows filesystem that supports large
Tim Peters9a9471c2001-09-11 23:18:51 +00004026 partitions). Windows filesystem limits: FAT has a 2GB (gigabyte)
4027 filesize limit, and large file support makes no difference there.
4028 FAT32's limit is 4GB, and files >= 2GB are easier to use from Python now.
4029 NTFS has no practical limit on file size, and files of any size can be
4030 used from Python now.
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00004031
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004032- The w9xpopen hack is now used on Windows NT and 2000 too when COMPSPEC
Tim Peters402d5982001-08-27 06:37:48 +00004033 points to command.com (patch from Brian Quinlan).
4034
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004035
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004036What's New in Python 2.2a2?
4037===========================
4038
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004039*Release Date: 22-Aug-2001*
4040
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004041Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004042-----
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004043
Barry Warsaw18b2ecf2001-08-22 20:26:56 +00004044- Tim Peters developed a brand new Windows installer using Wise 8.1,
4045 generously donated to us by Wise Solutions.
4046
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004047- configure supports a new option --enable-unicode, with the values
4048 ucs2 and ucs4 (new in 2.2a1). With --disable-unicode, the Unicode
4049 type and supporting code is completely removed from the interpreter.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004050
Jack Jansen32ce0cd2001-08-21 19:28:20 +00004051- A new configure option --enable-framework builds a Mac OS X framework,
4052 which "make frameworkinstall" will install. This provides a starting
4053 point for more mac-like functionality, join pythonmac-sig@python.org
4054 if you are interested in helping.
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004055
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004056- The NeXT platform is no longer supported.
4057
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004058- The 'new' module is now statically linked.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004059
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004060Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004061-----
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004062
4063- The new Tools/scripts/cleanfuture.py can be used to automatically
Andrew M. Kuchlingb0532092001-08-15 15:54:56 +00004064 edit out obsolete future statements from Python source code. See
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004065 the module docstring for details.
4066
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004067Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004068-----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004069
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004070- regrtest.py now knows which tests are expected to be skipped on some
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004071 platforms, allowing to give clearer test result output. regrtest
4072 also has optional --use/-u switch to run normally disabled tests
4073 which require network access or consume significant disk resources.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004074
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004075- Several new tests in the standard test suite, with special thanks to
4076 Nick Mathewson.
4077
4078Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004079----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004080
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004081- The floor division operator // has been added as outlined in PEP
4082 238. The / operator still provides classic division (and will until
4083 Python 3.0) unless "from __future__ import division" is included, in
4084 which case the / operator will provide true division. The operator
4085 module provides truediv() and floordiv() functions. Augmented
4086 assignment variants are included, as are the equivalent overloadable
4087 methods and C API methods. See the PEP for a full discussion:
4088 <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0238.html>
4089
Tim Peters6cd6a822001-08-17 22:11:27 +00004090- Future statements are now effective in simulated interactive shells
4091 (like IDLE). This should "just work" by magic, but read Michael
4092 Hudson's "Future statements in simulated shells" PEP 264 for full
4093 details: <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0264.html>.
4094
Guido van Rossumf86ddd22001-08-17 21:21:04 +00004095- The type/class unification (PEP 252-253) was integrated into the
4096 trunk and is not so tentative any more (the exact specification of
4097 some features is still tentative). A lot of work has done on fixing
4098 bugs and adding robustness and features (performance still has to
4099 come a long way).
4100
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00004101- Warnings about a mismatch in the Python API during extension import
4102 now use the Python warning framework (which makes it possible to
4103 write filters for these warnings).
4104
Barry Warsaw9b3be7f2001-08-14 18:35:02 +00004105- A function's __dict__ (aka func_dict) will now always be a
4106 dictionary. It used to be possible to delete it or set it to None,
4107 but now both actions raise TypeErrors. It is still legal to set it
4108 to a dictionary object. Getting func.__dict__ before any attributes
4109 have been assigned now returns an empty dictionary instead of None.
4110
Guido van Rossum32aa5d22001-09-05 18:43:35 +00004111- A new command line option, -E, was added which disables the use of
4112 all environment variables, or at least those that are specifically
4113 significant to Python. Usually those have a name starting with
4114 "PYTHON". This was used to fix a problem where the tests fail if
4115 the user happens to have PYTHONHOME or PYTHONPATH pointing to an
4116 older distribution.
4117
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004118Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004119-------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004120
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004121- New class Differ and new functions ndiff() and restore() in difflib.py.
4122 These package the algorithms used by the popular Tools/scripts/ndiff.py,
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004123 for programmatic reuse.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004124
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004125- New function xml.sax.saxutils.quoteattr(): Quote an XML attribute
4126 value using the minimal quoting required for the value; more
4127 reliable than using xml.sax.saxutils.escape() for attribute values.
4128
4129- Readline completion support for cmd.Cmd was added.
4130
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004131- Calling os.tempnam() or os.tmpnam() generate RuntimeWarnings.
4132
4133- Added function threading.BoundedSemaphore()
4134
4135- Added Ka-Ping Yee's cgitb.py module.
4136
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004137- The 'new' module now exposes the CO_xxx flags.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004138
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00004139- The gc module offers the get_referents function.
4140
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004141New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004142-------------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004143
4144C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004145-----
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004146
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00004147- Two new APIs PyOS_snprintf() and PyOS_vsnprintf() were added
4148 which provide a cross-platform implementations for the
4149 relatively new snprintf()/vsnprintf() C lib APIs. In contrast to
4150 the standard sprintf() and vsprintf() C lib APIs, these versions
4151 apply bounds checking on the used buffer which enhances protection
4152 against buffer overruns.
4153
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00004154- Unicode APIs now use name mangling to assure that mixing interpreters
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00004155 and extensions using different Unicode widths is rendered next to
4156 impossible. Trying to import an incompatible Unicode-aware extension
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00004157 will result in an ImportError. Unicode extensions writers must make
4158 sure to check the Unicode width compatibility in their extensions by
4159 using at least one of the mangled Unicode APIs in the extension.
4160
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004161- Two new flags METH_NOARGS and METH_O are available in method definition
4162 tables to simplify implementation of methods with no arguments and a
4163 single untyped argument. Calling such methods is more efficient than
4164 calling corresponding METH_VARARGS methods. METH_OLDARGS is now
4165 deprecated.
4166
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00004167Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004168-------
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00004169
4170- "import module" now compiles module.pyw if it exists and nothing else
4171 relevant is found.
4172
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004173
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00004174What's New in Python 2.2a1?
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004175===========================
4176
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004177*Release date: 18-Jul-2001*
4178
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004179Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004180----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004181
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00004182- TENTATIVELY, a large amount of code implementing much of what's
4183 described in PEP 252 (Making Types Look More Like Classes) and PEP
4184 253 (Subtyping Built-in Types) was added. This will be released
4185 with Python 2.2a1. Documentation will be provided separately
4186 through http://www.python.org/2.2/. The purpose of releasing this
4187 with Python 2.2a1 is to test backwards compatibility. It is
4188 possible, though not likely, that a decision is made not to release
4189 this code as part of 2.2 final, if any serious backwards
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004190 incompatibilities are found during alpha testing that cannot be
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00004191 repaired.
4192
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00004193- Generators were added; this is a new way to create an iterator (see
Tim Peters11a0d102001-07-17 18:48:00 +00004194 below) using what looks like a simple function containing one or
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00004195 more 'yield' statements. See PEP 255. Since this adds a new
4196 keyword to the language, this feature must be enabled by including a
4197 future statement: "from __future__ import generators" (see PEP 236).
4198 Generators will become a standard feature in a future release
4199 (probably 2.3). Without this future statement, 'yield' remains an
4200 ordinary identifier, but a warning is issued each time it is used.
4201 (These warnings currently don't conform to the warnings framework of
4202 PEP 230; we intend to fix this in 2.2a2.)
4203
Marc-André Lemburg12e74b32001-05-22 08:58:23 +00004204- The UTF-16 codec was modified to be more RFC compliant. It will now
4205 only remove BOM characters at the start of the string and then
4206 only if running in native mode (UTF-16-LE and -BE won't remove a
4207 leading BMO character).
4208
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00004209- Strings now have a new method .decode() to complement the already
4210 existing .encode() method. These two methods provide direct access
4211 to the corresponding decoders and encoders of the registered codecs.
4212
4213 To enhance the usability of the .encode() method, the special
4214 casing of Unicode object return values was dropped (Unicode objects
4215 were auto-magically converted to string using the default encoding).
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00004216
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00004217 Both methods will now return whatever the codec in charge of the
4218 requested encoding returns as object, e.g. Unicode codecs will
4219 return Unicode objects when decoding is requested ("äöü".decode("latin-1")
4220 will return u"äöü"). This enables codec writer to create codecs
4221 for various simple to use conversions.
4222
4223 New codecs were added to demonstrate these new features (the .encode()
4224 and .decode() columns indicate the type of the returned objects):
4225
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004226 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4227 |Name | .encode() | .decode() | Description |
4228 +=========+===========+===========+=============================+
4229 |uu | string | string | UU codec (e.g. for email) |
4230 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4231 |base64 | string | string | base64 codec |
4232 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4233 |quopri | string | string | quoted-printable codec |
4234 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4235 |zlib | string | string | zlib compression |
4236 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4237 |hex | string | string | 2-byte hex codec |
4238 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4239 |rot-13 | string | Unicode | ROT-13 Unicode charmap codec|
4240 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00004241
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004242- Some operating systems now support the concept of a default Unicode
4243 encoding for file system operations. Notably, Windows supports 'mbcs'
4244 as the default. The Macintosh will also adopt this concept in the medium
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00004245 term, although the default encoding for that platform will be other than
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004246 'mbcs'.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00004247
4248 On operating system that support non-ASCII filenames, it is common for
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004249 functions that return filenames (such as os.listdir()) to return Python
4250 string objects pre-encoded using the default file system encoding for
4251 the platform. As this encoding is likely to be different from Python's
4252 default encoding, converting this name to a Unicode object before passing
4253 it back to the Operating System would result in a Unicode error, as Python
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004254 would attempt to use its default encoding (generally ASCII) rather than
4255 the default encoding for the file system.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00004256
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004257 In general, this change simply removes surprises when working with
4258 Unicode and the file system, making these operations work as you expect,
4259 increasing the transparency of Unicode objects in this context.
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004260 See [????] for more details, including examples.
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004261
Tim Peters61dff2b2001-05-08 15:43:37 +00004262- Float (and complex) literals in source code were evaluated to full
4263 precision only when running from a .py file; the same code loaded from a
4264 .pyc (or .pyo) file could suffer numeric differences starting at about the
4265 12th significant decimal digit. For example, on a machine with IEEE-754
4266 floating arithmetic,
4267
4268 x = 9007199254740992.0
4269 print long(x)
4270
4271 printed 9007199254740992 if run directly from .py, but 9007199254740000
4272 if from a compiled (.pyc or .pyo) file. This was due to marshal using
4273 str(float) instead of repr(float) when building code objects. marshal
4274 now uses repr(float) instead, which should reproduce floats to full
4275 machine precision (assuming the platform C float<->string I/O conversion
4276 functions are of good quality).
4277
4278 This may cause floating-point results to change in some cases, and
4279 usually for the better, but may also cause numerically unstable
4280 algorithms to break.
4281
Tim Peters2f228e72001-05-13 00:19:31 +00004282- The implementation of dicts suffers fewer collisions, which has speed
4283 benefits. However, the order in which dict entries appear in dict.keys(),
4284 dict.values() and dict.items() may differ from previous releases for a
4285 given dict. Nothing is defined about this order, so no program should
4286 rely on it. Nevertheless, it's easy to write test cases that rely on the
4287 order by accident, typically because of printing the str() or repr() of a
4288 dict to an "expected results" file. See Lib/test/test_support.py's new
4289 sortdict(dict) function for a simple way to display a dict in sorted
4290 order.
4291
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00004292- Many other small changes to dicts were made, resulting in faster
4293 operation along the most common code paths.
4294
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00004295- Dictionary objects now support the "in" operator: "x in dict" means
4296 the same as dict.has_key(x).
4297
Barry Warsaw51acc8d2001-06-26 20:12:50 +00004298- The update() method of dictionaries now accepts generic mapping
4299 objects. Specifically the argument object must support the .keys()
4300 and __getitem__() methods. This allows you to say, for example,
4301 {}.update(UserDict())
4302
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00004303- Iterators were added; this is a generalized way of providing values
4304 to a for loop. See PEP 234. There's a new built-in function iter()
4305 to return an iterator. There's a new protocol to get the next value
4306 from an iterator using the next() method (in Python) or the
4307 tp_iternext slot (in C). There's a new protocol to get iterators
4308 using the __iter__() method (in Python) or the tp_iter slot (in C).
4309 Iterating (i.e. a for loop) over a dictionary generates its keys.
4310 Iterating over a file generates its lines.
4311
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004312- The following functions were generalized to work nicely with iterator
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004313 arguments::
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004314
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00004315 map(), filter(), reduce(), zip()
Tim Peters8572b4f2001-05-06 01:05:02 +00004316 list(), tuple() (PySequence_Tuple() and PySequence_Fast() in C API)
4317 max(), min()
Tim Peters1af03e92001-05-26 19:37:54 +00004318 join() method of strings
4319 extend() method of lists
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00004320 'x in y' and 'x not in y' (PySequence_Contains() in C API)
4321 operator.countOf() (PySequence_Count() in C API)
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004322 right-hand side of assignment statements with multiple targets, such as ::
Tim Petersd6d010b2001-06-21 02:49:55 +00004323 x, y, z = some_iterable_object_returning_exactly_3_values
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00004324
Tim Petersd85e1022001-05-11 21:51:48 +00004325- Accessing module attributes is significantly faster (for example,
4326 random.random or os.path or yourPythonModule.yourAttribute).
4327
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00004328- Comparing dictionary objects via == and != is faster, and now works even
4329 if the keys and values don't support comparisons other than ==.
4330
Tim Peters95bf9392001-05-10 08:32:44 +00004331- Comparing dictionaries in ways other than == and != is slower: there were
4332 insecurities in the dict comparison implementation that could cause Python
4333 to crash if the element comparison routines for the dict keys and/or
4334 values mutated the dicts. Making the code bulletproof slowed it down.
4335
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00004336- Collisions in dicts are resolved via a new approach, which can help
4337 dramatically in bad cases. For example, looking up every key in a dict
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00004338 d with d.keys() == [i << 16 for i in range(20000)] is approximately 500x
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00004339 faster now. Thanks to Christian Tismer for pointing out the cause and
4340 the nature of an effective cure (last December! better late than never).
Tim Peters15d49292001-05-27 07:39:22 +00004341
Tim Peters52e155e2001-06-16 05:42:57 +00004342- repr() is much faster for large containers (dict, list, tuple).
4343
4344
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004345Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004346-------
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004347
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00004348- The constants ascii_letters, ascii_lowercase. and ascii_uppercase
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004349 were added to the string module. These a locale-independent
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00004350 constants, unlike letters, lowercase, and uppercase. These are now
4351 use in appropriate locations in the standard library.
4352
Martin v. Löwisf0473d52001-07-18 16:17:16 +00004353- The flags used in dlopen calls can now be configured using
4354 sys.setdlopenflags and queried using sys.getdlopenflags.
4355
Guido van Rossumc7e4aca2001-07-12 11:54:37 +00004356- Fredrik Lundh's xmlrpclib is now a standard library module. This
4357 provides full client-side XML-RPC support. In addition,
4358 Demo/xmlrpc/ contains two server frameworks (one SocketServer-based,
4359 one asyncore-based). Thanks to Eric Raymond for the documentation.
4360
Guido van Rossum643d3912001-07-05 14:46:25 +00004361- The xrange() object is simplified: it no longer supports slicing,
4362 repetition, comparisons, efficient 'in' checking, the tolist()
4363 method, or the start, stop and step attributes. See PEP 260.
4364
Martin v. Löwisebf94db2001-06-06 06:25:40 +00004365- A new function fnmatch.filter to filter lists of file names was added.
4366
Barry Warsawffd674d2001-05-22 16:00:10 +00004367- calendar.py uses month and day names based on the current locale.
4368
Guido van Rossum2e0a6542001-05-15 02:14:44 +00004369- strop is now *really* obsolete (this was announced before with 1.6),
4370 and issues DeprecationWarning when used (except for the four items
4371 that are still imported into string.py).
4372
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004373- Cookie.py now sorts key+value pairs by key in output strings.
4374
4375- pprint.isrecursive(object) didn't correctly identify recursive objects.
4376 Now it does.
4377
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00004378- pprint functions now much faster for large containers (tuple, list, dict).
4379
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00004380- New 'q' and 'Q' format codes in the struct module, corresponding to C
4381 types "long long" and "unsigned long long" (on Windows, __int64). In
4382 native mode, these can be used only when the platform C compiler supports
4383 these types (when HAVE_LONG_LONG is #define'd by the Python config
4384 process), and then they inherit the sizes and alignments of the C types.
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00004385 In standard mode, 'q' and 'Q' are supported on all platforms, and are
4386 8-byte integral types.
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00004387
Guido van Rossum83213cc2001-06-12 16:48:52 +00004388- The site module installs a new built-in function 'help' that invokes
4389 pydoc.help. It must be invoked as 'help()'; when invoked as 'help',
4390 it displays a message reminding the user to use 'help()' or
4391 'help(object)'.
4392
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004393Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004394-----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004395
4396- New test_mutants.py runs dict comparisons where the key and value
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004397 comparison operators mutate the dicts randomly during comparison. This
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004398 rapidly causes Python to crash under earlier releases (not for the faint
4399 of heart: it can also cause Win9x to freeze or reboot!).
4400
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004401- New test_pprint.py verifies that pprint.isrecursive() and
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00004402 pprint.isreadable() return sensible results. Also verifies that simple
4403 cases produce correct output.
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004404
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00004405C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004406-----
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00004407
4408- Removed the unused last_is_sticky argument from the internal
4409 _PyTuple_Resize(). If this affects you, you were cheating.
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004410
4411----
4412
4413**(For information about older versions, consult the HISTORY file.)**