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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
Brett Cannonb46ed712004-06-19 20:50:47 +0000231- time module code that deals with time_t timestamps will now raise a
232 ValueError if more than a second is lost in precision from time_t being less
233 precise than a double. Closes bug #919012.
234
Martin v. Löwis77ca6c42004-06-03 12:47:26 +0000235- fcntl.ioctl now warns if the mutate flag is not specified.
236
Martin v. Löwisd8948722004-06-02 09:57:56 +0000237- nt now properly allows to refer to UNC roots, e.g. in nt.stat().
238
Raymond Hettinger027bb632004-05-31 03:09:25 +0000239- the weakref module now supports additional objects: array.array,
240 sre.pattern_objects, file objects, and sockets.
241
Raymond Hettingere2eda602004-04-04 08:51:41 +0000242- operator.isMappingType() and operator.isSequenceType() now give
243 fewer false positives.
244
Brett Cannon06c34792004-03-23 23:16:54 +0000245- socket.sslerror is now a subclass of socket.error . Also added
246 socket.error to the socket module's C API.
247
Hye-Shik Changc3a87b82004-03-21 19:34:30 +0000248- Bug #920575: A problem that _locale module segfaults on
249 nl_langinfo(ERA) caused by GNU libc's illegal NULL return is fixed.
250
Raymond Hettinger6e2ee862004-03-14 04:37:50 +0000251- array objects now support the copy module. Also, their resizing
252 scheme has been updated the same as for list objects. The improves
Raymond Hettinger49f9bd12004-03-14 05:43:59 +0000253 the performance (speed and memory usage) of append() operations.
254 Also, array.extend() now accepts any iterable argument for repeated
255 appends without needing to create another temporary array.
Raymond Hettinger3aa82c02004-03-13 18:18:51 +0000256
Raymond Hettinger3e47f652004-03-08 18:22:35 +0000257- cStringIO.writelines() now accepts any iterable argument and writes
258 the lines one at a time rather than joining them and writing once.
259 Made a parallel change to StringIO.writelines(). Saves memory and
260 makes suitable for use with generator expressions.
261
Brett Cannond1080a32004-03-02 04:38:10 +0000262- time.strftime() now checks that the values in its time tuple argument
263 are within the proper boundaries to prevent possible crashes from the
264 platform's C library implementation of strftime(). Can possibly
265 break code that uses values outside the range that didn't cause
266 problems previously (such as sitting day of year to 0). Fixes bug
267 #897625.
268
Martin v. Löwis12af0482004-01-31 12:34:17 +0000269- The socket module now supports Bluetooth sockets, if the
270 system has <bluetooth/bluetooth.h>
271
Raymond Hettinger756b3f32004-01-29 06:37:52 +0000272- Added a collections module containing a new datatype, deque(),
273 offering high-performance, thread-safe, memory friendly appends
274 and pops on either side of the deque.
275
276- Several modules now take advantage of collections.deque() for
277 improved performance: Queue, mutex, shlex, threading, and pydoc.
278
Raymond Hettinger166958b2003-12-01 13:18:39 +0000279- The operator module has two new functions, attrgetter() and
280 itemgetter() which are useful for creating fast data extractor
281 functions for map(), list.sort(), itertools.groupby(), and
282 other functions that expect a function argument.
283
Martin v. Löwis94681fc2003-11-27 19:40:22 +0000284- socket.SHUT_{RD,WR,RDWR} was added.
285
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +0000286- os.getsid was added.
287
Guido van Rossum16b9fa82003-10-23 23:54:57 +0000288- The pwd module incorrectly advertised its struct type as
289 struct_pwent; this has been renamed to struct_passwd. (The old name
290 is still supported for backwards compatibility.)
291
Fred Drakede050322003-10-21 15:41:59 +0000292- The xml.parsers.expat module now provides Expat 1.95.7.
293
Martin v. Löwis3bbd6542003-10-03 13:57:37 +0000294- socket.IPPROTO_IPV6 was added.
295
Martin v. Löwise7a97962003-09-20 16:08:33 +0000296- readline.clear_history was added.
297
Brett Cannon62dba4c2003-09-10 19:37:42 +0000298- select.select() now accepts sequences for its first three arguments.
299
Raymond Hettinger5475f232003-08-08 12:20:03 +0000300- cStringIO now supports the f.closed attribute.
301
Anthony Baxter83f52912003-08-05 06:33:56 +0000302- The signal module now exposes SIGRTMIN and SIGRTMAX (if available).
303
Andrew M. Kuchling69f31eb2003-08-13 23:11:04 +0000304- curses module now supports use_default_colors(). [patch #739124]
305
Anthony Baxter5c68ef02003-10-04 08:04:04 +0000306- Bug #811028: ncurses.h breakage on FreeBSD/MacOS X
307
308- Bug #814613: INET_ADDRSTRLEN fix needed for all compilers on SGI
309
Gustavo Niemeyerad3fc442003-10-17 22:13:16 +0000310- Implemented non-recursive SRE matching scheme (#757624).
311
312- Implemented (?(id/name)yes|no) support in SRE (#572936).
313
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +0000314- random.seed() with no arguments or None uses time.time() as a default
315 seed. Modified to match Py2.2 behavior and use fractional seconds so
316 that successive runs are more likely to produce different sequences.
317
318- random.Random has a new method, getrandbits(k), which returns an int
319 with k random bits. This method is now an optional part of the API
320 for user defined generators. Any generator that defines genrandbits()
321 can now use randrange() for ranges with a length >= 2**53. Formerly,
322 randrange would return only even numbers for ranges that large (see
323 SF bug #812202). Generators that do not define genrandbits() now
324 issue a warning when randrange() is called with a range that large.
325
Raymond Hettingerd25c1c62003-12-06 16:23:06 +0000326- itertools has a new function, groupby() for aggregating iterables
327 into groups sharing the same key (as determined by a key function).
328 It offers some of functionality of SQL's groupby keyword and of
329 the Unix uniq filter.
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +0000330
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +0000331- itertools now has a new function, tee() which produces two independent
332 iterators from a single iterable.
333
334- itertools.izip() with no arguments now returns an empty iterator instead
335 of raising a TypeError exception.
336
Gustavo Niemeyera6e436e2004-02-14 00:02:45 +0000337- Fixed #853061: allow BZ2Compressor.compress() to receive an empty string
338 as parameter.
339
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000340Library
341-------
342
Brett Cannon1c3fa182004-06-19 21:11:35 +0000343- Bug #919012: shutil.move() will not try to move a directory into itself.
344 Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
345
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +0000346- Bug #934282: pydoc.stripid() is now case-insensitive. Thanks Robin Becker.
347
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +0000348- Bug #823209: cmath.log() now takes an optional base argument so that its
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +0000349 API matches math.log().
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +0000350
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +0000351- Bug #957381: distutils bdist_rpm no longer fails on recent RPM versions
352 that generate a *-debuginfo.rpm.
353
Martin v. Löwisbdec50f2004-06-08 08:29:33 +0000354- os.path.devnull has been added for all supported platforms.
355
Hye-Shik Chang2400e932004-06-05 18:37:53 +0000356- Fixed #877165: distutils now picks the right C++ compiler command
357 on cygwin and mingw32.
358
Hye-Shik Chang39aef792004-06-05 13:30:56 +0000359- urllib.urlopen().readline() now handles HTTP/0.9 correctly.
360
Brett Cannon0096e262004-06-05 01:12:51 +0000361- refactored site.py into functions. Also wrote regression tests for the
362 module.
363
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +0000364- The distutils sdist command now ignores all .svn directories, in
365 addition to CVS and RCS directories. .svn directories hold
366 administrative files for the Subversion source control system.
367
Martin v. Löwis2a6ba902004-05-31 18:22:40 +0000368- Added a new module: cookielib. Automatic cookie handling for HTTP
369 clients. Also, support for cookielib has been added to urllib2, so
370 urllib2.urlopen() can transparently handle cookies.
371
Raymond Hettinger059e1702004-05-19 19:56:44 +0000372- stringprep.py now uses built-in set() instead of sets.Set().
373
Thomas Heller2e7c8322004-05-11 15:10:59 +0000374- Bug #876278: Unbounded recursion in modulefinder
375
Martin v. Löwis456ab1d2004-05-06 01:54:36 +0000376- Bug #780300: Swap public and system ID in LexicalHandler.startDTD.
377 Applications relying on the wrong order need to be corrected.
378
Hye-Shik Chang0f5bf1e2004-04-20 21:11:11 +0000379- Bug #926075: Fixed a bug that returns a wrong pattern object
380 for a string or unicode object in sre.compile() when a different
381 type pattern with the same value exists.
382
Skip Montanarod0c0c412004-04-07 16:03:02 +0000383- Added countcallers arg to trace.Trace class (--trackcalls command line arg
384 when run from the command prompt).
385
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +0000386- Fixed a caching bug in platform.platform() where the argument of 'terse' was
387 not taken into consideration when caching value.
388
Nicholas Bastin824b1b22004-03-23 18:44:39 +0000389- Added two new command-line arguments for profile (output file and
390 default sort).
391
Nicholas Bastin1eb4bfc2004-03-22 20:12:56 +0000392- Added global runctx function to profile module
393
Martin v. Löwis347c30d2004-03-21 15:29:41 +0000394- Add hlist missing entryconfigure and entrycget methods.
395
Hye-Shik Chang4a7ad1a2004-03-19 08:11:56 +0000396- The ptcp154 codec was added for Kazakh character set support.
397
Martin v. Löwisa79449e2004-02-15 21:19:18 +0000398- Support non-anonymous ftp URLs in urllib2.
399
Marc-André Lemburg57cb68f2004-01-20 18:24:34 +0000400- The encodings package will now applies codec name aliases
401 first before starting to try the import of the codec module.
402 This simplifies overriding built-in codecs with external
403 packages, e.g. the included CJK codecs with the JapaneseCodecs
404 package, by adjusting the aliases dictionary in encodings.aliases
405 accordingly.
406
Barry Warsaw30ff12f2004-01-04 01:13:43 +0000407- base64 now supports RFC 3548 Base16, Base32, and Base64 encoding and
408 decoding standards.
409
Jeremy Hylton37c5f2a2003-12-14 05:29:45 +0000410- urllib2 now supports processors. A processor is a handler that
411 implements an xxx_request or xxx_response method. These methods are
412 called for all requests.
413
Thomas Hellerc7501d52003-12-05 20:28:07 +0000414- distutils compilers now compile source files in the same order as
415 they are passed to the compiler.
416
Walter Dörwaldc8de4582003-12-03 20:26:05 +0000417- pprint.pprint() and pprint.pformat() now have additional parameters
418 indent, width and depth.
419
Walter Dörwald7a7ede52003-12-03 20:15:28 +0000420- Patch #750542: pprint now will pretty print subclasses of list, tuple
421 and dict too, as long as they don't overwrite __repr__().
422
Thomas Hellerb3105912003-11-28 19:42:56 +0000423- Bug #848614: distutils' msvccompiler fails to find the MSVC6
424 compiler because of incomplete registry entries.
425
Martin v. Löwisaf7dc8d2003-11-19 19:51:55 +0000426- httplib.HTTP.putrequest now offers to omit the implicit Accept-Encoding.
427
Thomas Hellercf0005b2003-11-14 10:33:20 +0000428- Patch #841977: modulefinder didn't find extension modules in packages
429
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +0000430- imaplib.IMAP4.thread was added.
431
Guido van Rossum967b0632003-11-10 02:27:19 +0000432- Plugged a minor hole in tempfile.mktemp() due to the use of
433 os.path.exists(), switched to using os.lstat() directly if possible.
434
Raymond Hettinger0c410272004-01-05 10:13:35 +0000435- bisect.py and heapq.py now have underlying C implementations
Raymond Hettinger33ecffb2004-06-10 05:03:17 +0000436 for better performance.
437
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +0000438- heapq.py has two new functions, nsmallest() and nlargest().
Raymond Hettingerb3af1812003-11-08 10:24:38 +0000439
Neil Schemenauerf607fc52003-11-05 23:03:00 +0000440- traceback.format_exc has been added (similar to print_exc but it returns
441 a string).
442
Martin v. Löwis45394c22003-10-31 13:49:36 +0000443- xmlrpclib.MultiCall has been added.
444
Martin v. Löwis48440b72003-10-31 12:52:35 +0000445- poplib.POP3_SSL has been added.
446
Martin v. Löwisd6625482003-10-12 17:37:01 +0000447- tmpfile.mkstemp now returns an absolute path even if dir is relative.
448
Brett Cannon5d9ca4e2003-10-12 04:38:48 +0000449- urlparse is RFC 2396 compliant.
450
Skip Montanarodef99342003-10-03 14:07:07 +0000451- The fieldnames argument to the csv module's DictReader constructor is now
452 optional. If omitted, the first row of the file will be used as the
453 list of fieldnames.
454
Raymond Hettinger9a80c5d2003-09-23 20:21:01 +0000455- encodings.bz2_codec was added for access to bz2 compression
456 using "a long string".encode('bz2')
457
Guido van Rossum0e5a51d2003-09-22 15:03:11 +0000458- Various improvements to unittest.py, realigned with PyUnit CVS.
459
Martin v. Löwisc6bb6c02003-09-20 15:52:21 +0000460- dircache now passes exceptions to the caller, instead of returning
461 empty lists.
462
Raymond Hettingerdeadbf52003-09-12 06:33:37 +0000463- The bsddb module and dbhash module now support the iterator and
464 mapping protocols which make them more substitutable for dictionaries
465 and shelves.
466
Skip Montanaro3f7a9482003-09-06 19:52:12 +0000467- The csv module's DictReader and DictWriter classes now accept keyword
468 arguments. This was an omission in the initial implementation.
469
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +0000470- The email package handles some RFC 2231 parameters with missing
Barry Warsaw2f5bf172003-09-03 04:09:49 +0000471 CHARSET fields better. It also includes a patch to parameter
472 parsing when semicolons appear inside quotes.
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +0000473
Raymond Hettinger6a180122003-08-17 08:34:09 +0000474- sets.py now runs under Py2.2. In addition, the argument restrictions
475 for most set methods (but not the operators) have been relaxed to
Raymond Hettinger70b9f492003-11-19 15:52:14 +0000476 allow any iterable.
Raymond Hettingeree562fc2003-08-15 21:17:04 +0000477
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +0000478- _strptime.py now has a behind-the-scenes caching mechanism for the most
Brett Cannonb7150a22003-08-05 06:27:04 +0000479 recent TimeRE instance used along with the last five unique directive
480 patterns. The overall module was also made more thread-safe.
481
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +0000482- random.cunifvariate() and random.stdgamma() were deprecated in Py2.3
483 and removed in Py2.4.
484
Anthony Baxter92bee362003-11-04 14:35:49 +0000485- Bug #823328: urllib2.py's HTTP Digest Auth support works again.
486
Hye-Shik Chang84a99312004-01-17 14:59:36 +0000487- Patch #873597: CJK codecs are imported into rank of default codecs.
488
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000489Tools/Demos
490-----------
491
Skip Montanarod5a21fd2004-01-27 14:49:04 +0000492- A hotshotmain script was added to the Tools/scripts directory that
493 makes it easy to run a script under control of the hotshot profiler.
494
Skip Montanaro030f68a2003-10-28 16:24:00 +0000495- The db2pickle and pickle2db scripts can now dump/load gdbm files.
496
Skip Montanaroe2b61e02004-03-03 17:42:08 +0000497- The file order on the command line of the pickle2db script was reversed.
498 It is now [ picklefile ] dbfile. This provides better symmetry with
499 db2pickle. The file arguments to both scripts are now source followed by
500 destination in situations where both files are given.
501
Skip Montanarofd4fa882003-09-10 19:04:13 +0000502- The pydoc script will display a link to the module documentation for
503 modules determined to be part of the core distribution. The documentation
504 base directory defaults to http://www.python.org/doc/current/lib/ but can
505 be changed by setting the PYTHONDOCS environment variable.
506
Raymond Hettingere41d4c82003-08-25 04:39:55 +0000507- texcheck.py now detects double word errors.
508
Tim Peters1a3abcb2003-08-18 23:52:09 +0000509- md5sum.py mistakenly opened input files in text mode by default, a
510 silent and dangerous change from previous releases. It once again
511 opens input files in binary mode by default. The -t and -b flags
512 remain for compatibility with the 2.3 release, but -b is the default
513 now.
514
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000515- py-electric-colon now works when pending-delete/delete-selection mode is
516 in effect
517
518- py-help-at-point is no longer bound to the F1 key - it's still bound to
519 C-c C-h
520
Barry Warsaw6ec58ca2003-09-03 03:20:37 +0000521- Pynche was fixed to not crash when there is no ~/.pynche file and no
522 -d option was given.
523
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000524Build
525-----
526
Skip Montanaro56f6a4f2004-06-18 02:47:22 +0000527- Profiling using gprof is now available if Python is configured with
528 --enable-profiling.
529
Martin v. Löwisf30d60e2004-06-08 08:17:44 +0000530- Profiling the VM using the Pentium TSC is now possible if Python
531 is configured --with-tsc.
532
Martin v. Löwis642c8a12004-06-04 13:55:13 +0000533- In order to find libraries, setup.py now also looks in /lib64, for use
534 on AMD64.
535
Hye-Shik Chang54f94392004-04-14 07:55:31 +0000536- Bug #934635: Fixed a bug where the configure script couldn't detect
537 getaddrinfo() properly if the KAME stack had SCTP support.
538
Skip Montanaro7befb992004-02-10 16:50:21 +0000539- Support for missing ANSI C header files (limits.h, stddef.h, etc) was
540 removed.
541
Skip Montanarodb608052004-02-07 13:53:46 +0000542- Systems requiring the D4, D6 or D7 variants of pthreads are no longer
543 supported (see PEP 11).
544
545- Universal newline support can no longer be disabled (see PEP 11).
546
Skip Montanarocd1f7432004-01-17 14:22:44 +0000547- Support for DGUX, SunOS 4, IRIX 4 and Minix was removed (see PEP 11).
548
549- Support for systems requiring --with-dl-dld or --with-sgi-dl was removed
550 (see PEP 11).
551
552- Tests for sizeof(char) were removed since ANSI C mandates that
553 sizeof(char) must be 1.
554
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000555C API
556-----
557
Martin v. Löwise440e472004-06-01 15:22:42 +0000558- New public functions PyEval_EvaluateFrame and PyGen_New to expose
559 generator objects.
560
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +0000561- New public functions Py_IncRef() and Py_DecRef(), exposing the
562 functionality of the Py_XINCREF() and Py_XDECREF macros. Useful for
Thomas Hellercc10a852004-04-22 17:28:25 +0000563 runtime dynamic embedding of Python. See patch #938302, by Bob
564 Ippolito.
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +0000565
Raymond Hettingerc1e4f9d2004-03-12 08:04:00 +0000566- Added a new macro, PySequence_Fast_ITEMS, which retrieves a fast sequence's
567 underlying array of PyObject pointers. Useful for high speed looping.
568
Raymond Hettinger8f5cdaa2003-12-13 11:26:12 +0000569- Created a new method flag, METH_COEXIST, which causes a method to be loaded
570 even if already defined by a slot wrapper. This allows a __contains__
571 method, for example, to co-exist with a defined sq_contains slot. This
572 is helpful because the PyCFunction can take advantage of optimized calls
573 whenever METH_O or METH_NOARGS flags are defined.
574
Raymond Hettingerbc0f2ab2003-11-25 21:12:14 +0000575- Added a new function, PyDict_Contains(d, k) which is like
576 PySequence_Contains() but is specific to dictionaries and executes
577 about 10% faster.
578
Brett Cannon26b3a7b2003-10-19 21:31:43 +0000579- Added three new macros: Py_RETURN_NONE, Py_RETURN_TRUE, and Py_RETURN_FALSE.
580 Each return the singleton they mention after Py_INCREF()ing them.
581
Raymond Hettingercb2da432003-10-12 18:24:34 +0000582- Added a new function, PyTuple_Pack(n, ...) for constructing tuples from a
583 variable length argument list of Python objects without having to invoke
584 the more complex machinery of Py_BuildValue(). PyTuple_Pack(3, a, b, c)
585 is equivalent to Py_BuildValue("(OOO)", a, b, c).
586
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000587New platforms
588-------------
589
590Tests
591-----
592
593Windows
594-------
595
Guido van Rossumfd25aca2003-11-30 22:10:15 +0000596- The _winreg module could segfault when reading very large registry
597 values, due to unchecked alloca() calls (SF bug 851056). The fix is
598 uses either PyMem_Malloc(n) or PyString_FromStringAndSize(NULL, n),
599 as appropriate, followed by a size check.
600
Tim Petersf1827cf2003-09-07 03:30:18 +0000601- file.truncate() could misbehave if the file was open for update
602 (modes r+, rb+, w+, wb+), and the most recent file operation before
603 the truncate() call was an input operation. SF bug 801631.
604
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000605Mac
606----
607
608
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +0000609What's New in Python 2.3 final?
610===============================
611
612*Release date: 29-Jul-2003*
613
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +0000614IDLE
615----
616
Tim Peters36c1afc2003-07-29 17:22:57 +0000617- Bug 778400: IDLE hangs when selecting "Edit with IDLE" from explorer.
618 This was unique to Windows, and was fixed by adding an -n switch to
619 the command the Windows installer creates to execute "Edit with IDLE"
620 context-menu actions.
621
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +0000622- IDLE displays a new message upon startup: some "personal firewall"
623 kinds of programs (for example, ZoneAlarm) open a dialog of their
624 own when any program opens a socket. IDLE does use sockets, talking
625 on the computer's internal loopback interface. This connection is not
626 visible on any external interface and no data is sent to or received
627 from the Internet. So, if you get such a dialog when opening IDLE,
628 asking whether to let pythonw.exe talk to address 127.0.0.1, say yes,
629 and rest assured no communication external to your machine is taking
630 place. If you don't allow it, IDLE won't be able to start.
631
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +0000632
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000633What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 2?
634=============================================
635
Tim Peters6560a252003-07-24 00:15:46 +0000636*Release date: 24-Jul-2003*
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000637
638Core and builtins
639-----------------
640
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +0000641- It is now possible to import from zipfiles containing additional
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000642 data bytes before the zip compatible archive. Zipfiles containing a
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +0000643 comment at the end are still unsupported.
644
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000645Extension modules
646-----------------
647
648- A longstanding bug in the parser module's initialization could cause
649 fatal internal refcount confusion when the module got initialized more
650 than once. This has been fixed.
651
Fred Drake01a43122003-07-21 17:17:10 +0000652- Fixed memory leak in pyexpat; using the parser's ParseFile() method
653 with open files that aren't instances of the standard file type
654 caused an instance of the bound .read() method to be leaked on every
655 call.
656
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000657- Fixed some leaks in the locale module.
658
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000659Library
660-------
661
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000662- Lib/encodings/rot_13.py when used as a script, now more properly
663 uses the first Python interpreter on your path.
664
665- Removed caching of TimeRE (and thus LocaleTime) in _strptime.py to
666 fix a locale related bug in the test suite. Although another patch
667 was needed to actually fix the problem, the cache code was not
668 restored.
669
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +0000670IDLE
671----
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000672
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +0000673- Calltips patches.
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000674
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000675Build
676-----
677
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000678- For MacOSX, added -mno-fused-madd to BASECFLAGS to fix test_coercion
679 on Panther (OSX 10.3).
680
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000681C API
682-----
683
684Windows
685-------
686
Tim Peters291f14e2003-07-22 02:50:01 +0000687- The tempfile module could do insane imports on Windows if PYTHONCASEOK
688 was set, making temp file creation impossible. Repaired.
689
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000690- Add a patch to workaround pthread_sigmask() bugs in Cygwin.
691
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000692Mac
693---
694
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000695- Various fixes to pimp.
696
697- Scripts runs with pythonw no longer had full window manager access.
698
699- Don't force boot-disk-only install, for reasons unknown it causes
700 more problems than it solves.
701
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000702
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000703What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 1?
704=============================================
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000705
Jeremy Hylton0ed18c22003-07-18 20:10:02 +0000706*Release date: 18-Jul-2003*
707
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000708Core and builtins
709-----------------
710
Tim Peterse5e065b2003-07-06 18:36:54 +0000711- The new function sys.getcheckinterval() returns the last value set
712 by sys.setcheckinterval().
713
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000714- Several bugs in the symbol table phase of the compiler have been
715 fixed. Errors could be lost and compilation could fail without
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000716 reporting an error. SF patch 763201.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000717
718- The interpreter is now more robust about importing the warnings
719 module. In an executable generated by freeze or similar programs,
720 earlier versions of 2.3 would fail if the warnings module could
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000721 not be found on the file system. Fixes SF bug 771097.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000722
723- A warning about assignments to module attributes that shadow
724 builtins, present in earlier releases of 2.3, has been removed.
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000725
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000726- It is not possible to create subclasses of builtin types like str
727 and tuple that define an itemsize. Earlier releases of Python 2.3
728 allowed this by mistake, leading to crashes and other problems.
729
730- The thread_id is now initialized to 0 in a non-thread build. SF bug
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000731 770247.
732
733- SF bug 762891: "del p[key]" on proxy object no longer raises SystemError.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000734
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000735Extension modules
736-----------------
737
738- weakref.proxy() can now handle "del obj[i]" for proxy objects
739 defining __delitem__. Formerly, it generated a SystemError.
740
741- SSL no longer crashes the interpreter when the remote side disconnects.
742
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +0000743- On Unix the mmap module can again be used to map device files.
744
Brett Cannon20def8b2003-07-01 05:16:08 +0000745- time.strptime now exclusively uses the Python implementation
746 contained within the _strptime module.
747
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000748- The print slot of weakref proxy objects was removed, because it was
749 not consistent with the object's repr slot.
750
751- The mmap module only checks file size for regular files, not
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000752 character or block devices. SF patch 708374.
753
754- The cPickle Pickler garbage collection support was fixed to traverse
755 the find_class attribute, if present.
756
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000757- There are several fixes for the bsddb3 wrapper module.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000758
759 bsddb3 no longer crashes if an environment is closed before a cursor
760 (SF bug 763298).
761
762 The DB and DBEnv set_get_returns_none function was extended to take
Barry Warsawd71a5512003-07-20 18:00:54 +0000763 a level instead of a boolean flag. The new level 2 means that in
764 addition, cursor.set()/.get() methods return None instead of raising
765 an exception.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000766
767 A typo was fixed in DBCursor.join_item(), preventing a crash.
768
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000769Library
770-------
771
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000772- distutils now supports MSVC 7.1
773
Raymond Hettinger71adf7e2003-07-16 19:25:22 +0000774- doctest now examines all docstrings by default. Previously, it would
775 skip over functions with private names (as indicated by the underscore
776 naming convention). The old default created too much of a risk that
777 user tests were being skipped inadvertently. Note, this change could
778 break code in the unlikely case that someone had intentionally put
779 failing tests in the docstrings of private functions. The breakage
780 is easily fixable by specifying the old behavior when calling testmod()
781 or Tester().
782
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000783- There were several fixes to the way dumbdbms are closed. It's vital
784 that a dumbdbm database be closed properly, else the on-disk data
785 and directory files can be left in mutually inconsistent states.
786 dumbdbm.py's _Database.__del__() method attempted to close the
787 database properly, but a shutdown race in _Database._commit() could
788 prevent this from working, so that a program trusting __del__() to
789 get the on-disk files in synch could be badly surprised. The race
790 has been repaired. A sync() method was also added so that shelve
791 can guarantee data is written to disk.
Tim Peters7a6c7332003-07-13 17:21:10 +0000792
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000793 The close() method can now be called more than once without complaint.
Tim Petersd7472ec2003-07-13 02:22:03 +0000794
Tim Peters59aba122003-07-01 20:01:55 +0000795- The classes in threading.py are now new-style classes. That they
796 weren't before was an oversight.
797
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000798- The urllib2 digest authentication handlers now define the correct
799 auth_header. The earlier versions would fail at runtime.
800
Neal Norwitze7dfe212003-07-01 14:59:46 +0000801- SF bug 763023: fix uncaught ZeroDivisionError in difflib ratio methods
802 when there are no lines.
803
Neal Norwitz3c0f2c92003-07-01 21:12:47 +0000804- SF bug 763637: fix exception in Tkinter with after_cancel
805 which could occur with Tk 8.4
806
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000807- SF bug 770601: CGIHTTPServer.py now passes the entire environment
808 to child processes.
809
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000810- SF bug 765238: add filter to fnmatch's __all__.
811
812- SF bug 748201: make time.strptime() error messages more helpful.
813
814- SF patch 764470: Do not dump the args attribute of a Fault object in
815 xmlrpclib.
816
817- SF patch 549151: urllib and urllib2 now redirect POSTs on 301
818 responses.
819
820- SF patch 766650: The whichdb module was fixed to recognize dbm files
821 generated by gdbm on OS/2 EMX.
822
823- SF bugs 763047 and 763052: fixes bug of timezone value being left as
824 -1 when ``time.tzname[0] == time.tzname[1] and not time.daylight``
825 is true when it should only when time.daylight is true.
826
827- SF bug 764548: re now allows subclasses of str and unicode to be
828 used as patterns.
829
830- SF bug 763637: In Tkinter, change after_cancel() to handle tuples
831 of varying sizes. Tk 8.4 returns a different number of values
832 than Tk 8.3.
833
834- SF bug 763023: difflib.ratio() did not catch zero division.
835
836- The Queue module now has an __all__ attribute.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000837
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000838Tools/Demos
839-----------
840
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000841- See Lib/idlelib/NEWS.txt for IDLE news.
842
Neal Norwitz592c4cc2003-07-01 04:14:28 +0000843- SF bug 753592: webchecker/wsgui now handles user supplied directories.
844
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000845- The trace.py script has been removed. It is now in the standard library.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000846
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000847Build
848-----
849
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000850- Python now compiles with -fno-strict-aliasing if possible (SF bug 766696).
851
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000852- The socket module compiles on IRIX 6.5.10.
853
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000854- An irix64 system is treated the same way as an irix6 system (SF
855 patch 764560).
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000856
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000857- Several definitions were missing on FreeBSD 5.x unless the
858 __BSD_VISIBLE symbol was defined. configure now defines it as
859 needed.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000860
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000861C API
862-----
863
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000864- Unicode objects now support mbcs as a built-in encoding, so the C
865 API can use it without deferring to the encodings package.
866
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000867Windows
868-------
869
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000870- The Windows implementation of PyThread_start_new_thread() never
871 checked error returns from Windows functions correctly. As a result,
872 it could claim to start a new thread even when the Microsoft
873 _beginthread() function failed (due to "too many threads" -- this is
874 on the order of thousands when it happens). In these cases, the
875 Python exception ::
876
877 thread.error: can't start new thread
878
879 is raised now.
880
881- SF bug 766669: Prevent a GPF on interpreter exit when sockets are in
882 use. The interpreter now calls WSACleanup() from Py_Finalize()
883 instead of from DLL teardown.
884
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000885Mac
886---
887
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000888- Bundlebuilder now inherits default values in the right way. It was
Walter Dörwald73a8a4b2003-07-30 12:14:02 +0000889 previously possible for app bundles to get a type of "BNDL" instead
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000890 of "APPL." Other improvements include, a --build-id option to
891 specify the CFBundleIdentifier and using the --python option to set
892 the executable in the bundle.
893
894- Fixed two bugs in MacOSX framework handling.
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000895
Jack Jansene0040412003-07-23 22:17:28 +0000896- pythonw did not allow user interaction in 2.3rc1, this has been fixed.
897
898- Python is now compiled with -mno-fused-madd, making all tests pass
899 on Panther.
900
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000901What's New in Python 2.3 beta 2?
902================================
903
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +0000904*Release date: 29-Jun-2003*
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000905
906Core and builtins
907-----------------
908
Barry Warsaw883f2232003-06-29 17:10:11 +0000909- A program can now set the environment variable PYTHONINSPECT to some
910 string value in Python, and cause the interpreter to enter the
911 interactive prompt at program exit, as if Python had been invoked
912 with the -i option.
913
Raymond Hettingerd05abde2003-06-17 05:05:49 +0000914- list.index() now accepts optional start and stop arguments. Similar
915 changes were made to UserList.index(). SF feature request 754014.
916
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +0000917- SF patch 751998 fixes an unwanted side effect of the previous fix
918 for SF bug 742860 (the next item).
919
Tim Peters50d8b8b2003-05-25 17:44:31 +0000920- SF bug 742860: "WeakKeyDictionary __delitem__ uses iterkeys". This
921 wasn't threadsafe, was very inefficient (expected time O(len(dict))
922 instead of O(1)), and could raise a spurious RuntimeError if another
923 thread mutated the dict during __delitem__, or if a comparison function
924 mutated it. It also neglected to raise KeyError when the key wasn't
925 present; didn't raise TypeError when the key wasn't of a weakly
926 referencable type; and broke various more-or-less obscure dict
927 invariants by using a sequence of equality comparisons over the whole
928 set of dict keys instead of computing the key's hash code to narrow
929 the search to those keys with the same hash code. All of these are
930 considered to be bugs. A new implementation of __delitem__ repairs all
931 that, but note that fixing these bugs may change visible behavior in
932 code relying (whether intentionally or accidentally) on old behavior.
Tim Peters886128f2003-05-25 01:45:11 +0000933
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000934- SF bug 734869: Fixed a compiler bug that caused a fatal error when
935 compiling a list comprehension that contained another list comprehension
936 embedded in a lambda expression.
937
Tim Peterse87568d2003-05-24 20:18:24 +0000938- SF bug 705231: builtin pow() no longer lets the platform C pow()
939 raise -1.0 to integer powers, because (at least) glibc gets it wrong
940 in some cases. The result should be -1.0 if the power is odd and 1.0
941 if the power is even, and any float with a sufficiently large exponent
942 is (mathematically) an exact even integer.
943
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000944- SF bug 759227: A new-style class that implements __nonzero__() must
945 return a bool or int (but not an int subclass) from that method. This
946 matches the restriction on classic classes.
947
Martin v. Löwis5467d4c2003-05-10 07:10:12 +0000948- The encoding attribute has been added for file objects, and set to
949 the terminal encoding on Unix and Windows.
950
Tim Peters015dd822003-05-04 04:16:52 +0000951- The softspace attribute of file objects became read-only by oversight.
952 It's writable again.
953
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +0000954- Reverted a 2.3 beta 1 change to iterators for subclasses of list and
955 tuple. By default, the iterators now access data elements directly
956 instead of going through __getitem__. If __getitem__ access is
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +0000957 preferred, then __iter__ can be overridden.
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +0000958
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000959- SF bug 735247: The staticmethod and super types participate in
960 garbage collection. Before this change, it was possible for leaks to
961 occur in functions with non-global free variables that used these types.
962
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000963Extension modules
964-----------------
965
Raymond Hettinger643bcec2003-06-29 03:29:42 +0000966- the socket module has a new exception, socket.timeout, to allow
967 timeouts to be handled separately from other socket errors.
968
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000969- SF bug 751276: cPickle has fixed to propagate exceptions raised in
970 user code. In earlier versions, cPickle caught and ignored any
971 exception when it performed operations that it expected to raise
972 specific exceptions like AttributeError.
973
974- cPickle Pickler and Unpickler objects now participate in garbage
975 collection.
976
Tim Peterscda32b72003-06-15 23:13:35 +0000977- mimetools.choose_boundary() could return duplicate strings at times,
978 especially likely on Windows. The strings returned are now guaranteed
979 unique within a single program run.
980
Brett Cannon4e64d782003-06-13 23:44:35 +0000981- thread.interrupt_main() raises KeyboardInterrupt in the main thread.
982 dummy_thread has also been modified to try to simulate the behavior.
983
Walter Dörwald9e46abe2003-05-18 03:15:10 +0000984- array.array.insert() now treats negative indices as being relative
985 to the end of the array, just like list.insert() does. (SF bug #739313)
986
Tim Petersb0c854d2003-05-17 15:57:00 +0000987- The datetime module classes datetime, time, and timedelta are now
988 properly subclassable.
Tim Petersa98924a2003-05-17 05:55:19 +0000989
Martin v. Löwis28e9ce92003-05-09 08:19:48 +0000990- _tkinter.{get|set}busywaitinterval was added.
991
Raymond Hettinger834f4632003-05-02 20:24:56 +0000992- itertools.islice() now accepts stop=None as documented.
993 Fixes SF bug #730685.
994
Skip Montanaro8c044d82003-05-06 20:42:37 +0000995- the bsddb185 module is built in one restricted instance -
996 /usr/include/db.h exists and defines HASHVERSION to be 2. This is true
997 for many BSD-derived systems.
998
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000999
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001000Library
1001-------
1002
Tim Petersdb3756d2003-06-29 05:30:48 +00001003- Some happy doctest extensions from Jim Fulton have been added to
1004 doctest.py. These are already being used in Zope3. The two
1005 primary ones:
1006
1007 doctest.debug(module, name) extracts the doctests from the named object
1008 in the given module, puts them in a temp file, and starts pdb running
1009 on that file. This is great when a doctest fails.
1010
1011 doctest.DocTestSuite(module=None) returns a synthesized unittest
1012 TestSuite instance, to be run by the unittest framework, which
1013 runs all the doctests in the module. This allows writing tests in
1014 doctest style (which can be clearer and shorter than writing tests
1015 in unittest style), without losing unittest's powerful testing
1016 framework features (which doctest lacks).
1017
Tim Peters6ebe61f2003-06-27 20:48:05 +00001018- For compatibility with doctests created before 2.3, if an expected
1019 output block consists solely of "1" and the actual output block
1020 consists solely of "True", it's accepted as a match; similarly
1021 for "0" and "False". This is quite un-doctest-like, but is practical.
1022 The behavior can be disabled by passing the new doctest module
1023 constant DONT_ACCEPT_TRUE_FOR_1 to the new optionflags optional
1024 argument.
1025
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001026- ZipFile.testzip() now only traps BadZipfile exceptions. Previously,
1027 a bare except caught to much and reported all errors as a problem
1028 in the archive.
1029
1030- The logging module now has a new function, makeLogRecord() making
1031 LogHandler easier to interact with DatagramHandler and SocketHandler.
1032
Skip Montanaro364ca402003-06-17 12:58:31 +00001033- The cgitb module has been extended to support plain text display (SF patch
1034 569574).
1035
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00001036- A brand new version of IDLE (from the IDLEfork project at
1037 SourceForge) is now included as Lib/idlelib. The old Tools/idle is
1038 no more.
1039
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001040- Added a new module: trace (documentation missing). This module used
1041 to be distributed in Tools/scripts. It uses sys.settrace() to trace
1042 code execution -- either function calls or individual lines. It can
1043 generate tracing output during execution or a post-mortem report of
1044 code coverage.
1045
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00001046- The threading module has new functions settrace() and setprofile()
1047 that cooperate with the functions of the same name in the sys
1048 module. A function registered with the threading module will
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001049 be used for all threads it creates. The new trace module uses this
1050 to provide tracing for code running in threads.
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00001051
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00001052- copy.py: applied SF patch 707900, fixing bug 702858, by Steven
1053 Taschuk. Copying a new-style class that had a reference to itself
1054 didn't work. (The same thing worked fine for old-style classes.)
Martin v. Löwisba8f5ff2003-06-14 07:10:06 +00001055 Builtin functions are now treated as atomic, fixing bug #746304.
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00001056
Raymond Hettingerc24d7672003-06-08 19:42:33 +00001057- difflib.py has two new functions: context_diff() and unified_diff().
1058
Guido van Rossumfa19f7c2003-05-16 01:46:51 +00001059- More fixes to urllib (SF 549151): (a) When redirecting, always use
1060 GET. This is common practice and more-or-less sanctioned by the
1061 HTTP standard. (b) Add a handler for 307 redirection, which becomes
1062 an error for POST, but a regular redirect for GET and HEAD
1063
Guido van Rossumbf1bef82003-05-13 18:01:19 +00001064- Added optional 'onerror' argument to os.walk(), to control error
1065 handling.
1066
Martin v. Löwise59e2ba2003-05-03 09:09:02 +00001067- inspect.is{method|data}descriptor was added, to allow pydoc display
1068 __doc__ of data descriptors.
1069
Skip Montanaro4a7751c2003-04-29 21:07:16 +00001070- Fixed socket speed loss caused by use of the _socketobject wrapper class
1071 in socket.py.
1072
Raymond Hettinger22952a32003-05-20 04:59:56 +00001073- timeit.py now checks the current directory for imports.
1074
Gustavo Niemeyer9556fba2003-06-07 17:53:08 +00001075- urllib2.py now knows how to order proxy classes, so the user doesn't
1076 have to insert it in front of other classes, nor do dirty tricks like
1077 inserting a "dummy" HTTPHandler after a ProxyHandler when building an
1078 opener with proxy support.
1079
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00001080- Iterators have been added for dbm keys.
1081
1082- random.Random objects can now be pickled.
1083
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001084Tools/Demos
1085-----------
1086
Martin v. Löwisb8c084e2003-06-14 09:03:46 +00001087- pydoc now offers help on keywords and topics.
1088
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00001089- Tools/idle is gone; long live Lib/idlelib.
1090
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00001091- diff.py prints file diffs in context, unified, or ndiff formats,
1092 providing a command line interface to difflib.py.
Raymond Hettinger2f3c74a2003-06-08 23:10:15 +00001093
Raymond Hettinger71e00332003-05-10 03:30:13 +00001094- texcheck.py is a new script for making a rough validation of Python LaTeX
1095 files.
1096
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001097Build
1098-----
1099
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001100- Setting DESTDIR during 'make install' now allows specifying a
Martin v. Löwis3b8ee082003-05-11 20:25:35 +00001101 different root directory.
1102
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001103C API
1104-----
1105
Tim Peters3cfe7542003-05-21 21:29:48 +00001106- PyType_Ready(): If a type declares that it participates in gc
1107 (Py_TPFLAGS_HAVE_GC), and its base class does not, and its base class's
1108 tp_free slot is the default _PyObject_Del, and type does not define
1109 a tp_free slot itself, _PyObject_GC_Del is assigned to type->tp_free.
1110 Previously _PyObject_Del was inherited, which could at best lead to a
1111 segfault. In addition, if even after this magic the type's tp_free
1112 slot is _PyObject_Del or NULL, and the type is a base type
1113 (Py_TPFLAGS_BASETYPE), TypeError is raised: since the type is a base
1114 type, its dealloc function must call type->tp_free, and since the type
1115 is gc'able, tp_free must not be NULL or _PyObject_Del.
1116
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00001117- PyThreadState_SetAsyncExc(): A new API (deliberately accessible only
1118 from C) to interrupt a thread by sending it an exception. It is
1119 intentional that you have to write your own C extension to call it
1120 from Python.
1121
1122
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001123New platforms
1124-------------
1125
1126None this time.
1127
1128Tests
1129-----
1130
1131- test_imp rewritten so that it doesn't raise RuntimeError if run as a
1132 side effect of being imported ("import test.autotest").
1133
1134Windows
1135-------
1136
Tim Petersfaa697a2003-06-22 01:42:20 +00001137- The Windows installer ships with Tcl/Tk 8.4.3 (upgraded from 8.4.1).
1138
Tim Petersc4607da2003-05-08 18:13:59 +00001139- The installer always suggested that Python be installed on the C:
1140 drive, due to a hardcoded "C:" generated by the Wise installation
1141 wizard. People with machines where C: is not the system drive
1142 usually want Python installed on whichever drive is their system drive
1143 instead. We removed the hardcoded "C:", and two testers on machines
1144 where C: is not the system drive report that the installer now
1145 suggests their system drive. Note that you can always select the
1146 directory you want in the "Select Destination Directory" dialog --
1147 that's what it's for.
1148
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001149Mac
1150---
1151
Just van Rossum99bc1fc2003-05-09 15:01:25 +00001152- There's a new module called "autoGIL", which offers a mechanism to
1153 automatically release the Global Interpreter Lock when an event loop
1154 goes to sleep, allowing other threads to run. It's currently only
1155 supported on OSX, in the Mach-O version.
Jack Jansenf5e23ff2003-06-16 13:53:40 +00001156- The OSA modules now allow direct access to properties of the
1157 toplevel application class (in AppleScript terminology).
1158- The Package Manager can now update itself.
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001159
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00001160SourceForge Bugs and Patches Applied
1161------------------------------------
1162
1163430160, 471893, 501716, 542562, 549151, 569574, 595837, 596434,
1164598163, 604210, 604716, 610332, 612627, 614770, 620190, 621891,
1165622042, 639139, 640236, 644345, 649742, 649742, 658233, 660022,
1166661318, 661676, 662807, 662923, 666219, 672855, 678325, 682347,
1167683486, 684981, 685773, 686254, 692776, 692959, 693094, 696777,
1168697989, 700827, 703666, 708495, 708604, 708901, 710733, 711902,
1169713722, 715782, 718286, 719359, 719367, 723136, 723831, 723962,
1170724588, 724767, 724767, 725942, 726150, 726446, 726869, 727051,
1171727719, 727719, 727805, 728277, 728563, 728656, 729096, 729103,
1172729293, 729297, 729300, 729317, 729395, 729622, 729817, 730170,
1173730296, 730594, 730685, 730826, 730963, 731209, 731403, 731504,
1174731514, 731626, 731635, 731643, 731644, 731644, 731689, 732124,
1175732143, 732234, 732284, 732284, 732479, 732761, 732783, 732951,
1176733667, 733781, 734118, 734231, 734869, 735051, 735293, 735527,
1177735613, 735694, 736962, 736962, 737970, 738066, 739313, 740055,
1178740234, 740301, 741806, 742126, 742741, 742860, 742860, 742911,
1179744041, 744104, 744238, 744687, 744877, 745055, 745478, 745525,
1180745620, 746012, 746304, 746366, 746801, 746953, 747348, 747667,
1181747954, 748846, 748849, 748973, 748975, 749191, 749210, 749759,
1182749831, 749911, 750008, 750092, 750542, 750595, 751038, 751107,
1183751276, 751451, 751916, 751941, 751956, 751998, 752671, 753451,
1184753602, 753617, 753845, 753925, 754014, 754340, 754447, 755031,
1185755087, 755147, 755245, 755683, 755987, 756032, 756996, 757058,
1186757229, 757818, 757821, 757822, 758112, 758910, 759227, 759889,
1187760257, 760703, 760792, 761104, 761337, 761519, 761830, 762455
1188
1189
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001190What's New in Python 2.3 beta 1?
1191================================
1192
Guido van Rossumfa1eddf2003-04-25 19:19:52 +00001193*Release date: 25-Apr-2003*
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001194
1195Core and builtins
1196-----------------
1197
Thomas Heller5eccabc2003-04-23 19:35:25 +00001198- New format codes B, H, I, k and K have been implemented for
1199 PyArg_ParseTuple and PyBuild_Value.
1200
Alex Martellia70b1912003-04-22 08:12:33 +00001201- New builtin function sum(seq, start=0) returns the sum of all the
1202 items in iterable object seq, plus start (items are normally numbers,
1203 and cannot be strings).
1204
Guido van Rossumaa86e352003-04-19 18:15:10 +00001205- bool() called without arguments now returns False rather than
1206 raising an exception. This is consistent with calling the
1207 constructors for the other builtin types -- called without argument
1208 they all return the false value of that type. (SF patch #724135)
1209
Guido van Rossumcf8d2852003-04-17 16:53:26 +00001210- In support of PEP 269 (making the pgen parser generator accessible
1211 from Python), some changes to the pgen code structure were made; a
1212 few files that used to be linked only with pgen are now linked with
1213 Python itself.
1214
Guido van Rossumc1f6e8c2003-04-16 21:13:23 +00001215- The repr() of a weakref object now shows the __name__ attribute of
1216 the referenced object, if it has one.
1217
Guido van Rossum76ba09f2003-04-16 19:40:58 +00001218- super() no longer ignores data descriptors, except __class__. See
1219 the thread started at
1220 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2003-April/034338.html
1221
Guido van Rossum3a3cca52003-04-14 20:58:14 +00001222- list.insert(i, x) now interprets negative i as it would be
1223 interpreted by slicing, so negative values count from the end of the
1224 list. This was the only place where such an interpretation was not
1225 placed on a list index.
1226
Guido van Rossumefbbb1c2003-04-11 18:43:06 +00001227- range() now works even if the arguments are longs with magnitude
1228 larger than sys.maxint, as long as the total length of the sequence
1229 fits. E.g., range(2**100, 2**101, 2**100) is the following list:
1230 [1267650600228229401496703205376L]. (SF patch #707427.)
1231
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001232- Some horridly obscure problems were fixed involving interaction
1233 between garbage collection and old-style classes with "ambitious"
1234 getattr hooks. If an old-style instance didn't have a __del__ method,
1235 but did have a __getattr__ hook, and the instance became reachable
1236 only from an unreachable cycle, and the hook resurrected or deleted
1237 unreachable objects when asked to resolve "__del__", anything up to
1238 a segfault could happen. That's been repaired.
1239
Raymond Hettingera3e1e4c2003-03-06 23:54:28 +00001240- dict.pop now takes an optional argument specifying a default
1241 value to return if the key is not in the dict. If a default is not
1242 given and the key is not found, a KeyError will still be raised.
1243 Parallel changes were made to UserDict.UserDict and UserDict.DictMixin.
1244 [SF patch #693753] (contributed by Michael Stone.)
1245
Martin v. Löwis73d538b2003-03-05 15:13:47 +00001246- sys.getfilesystemencoding() was added to expose
1247 Py_FileSystemDefaultEncoding.
Guido van Rossum46d3dc32003-03-01 03:20:41 +00001248
1249- New function sys.exc_clear() clears the current exception. This is
1250 rarely needed, but can sometimes be useful to release objects
1251 referenced by the traceback held in sys.exc_info()[2]. (SF patch
1252 #693195.)
1253
Neal Norwitzd5a65a72003-02-23 23:11:41 +00001254- On 64-bit systems, a dictionary could contain duplicate long/int keys
1255 if the key value was larger than 2**32. See SF bug #689659.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001256
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00001257- Fixed SF bug #663074. The codec system was using global static
Walter Dörwaldfa86bf52003-03-31 16:15:13 +00001258 variables to store internal data. As a result, any attempts to use the
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00001259 unicode system with multiple active interpreters, or successive
1260 interpreter executions, would fail.
1261
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00001262- "%c" % u"a" now returns a unicode string instead of raising a
Walter Dörwald44f527f2003-04-02 16:37:24 +00001263 TypeError. u"%c" % 0xffffffff now raises a OverflowError instead
Walter Dörwald1e469c52003-04-02 16:57:59 +00001264 of a ValueError to be consistent with "%c" % 256. See SF patch #710127.
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00001265
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001266Extension modules
1267-----------------
1268
Guido van Rossume7adda92003-04-25 05:52:37 +00001269- The socket module now provides the functions inet_pton and inet_ntop
1270 for converting between string and packed representation of IP
1271 addresses. There is also a new module variable, has_ipv6, which is
1272 True iff the current Python has IPv6 support. See SF patch #658327.
1273
Martin v. Löwisbfe175c2003-04-16 19:42:51 +00001274- Tkinter wrappers around Tcl variables now pass objects directly
1275 to Tcl, instead of first converting them to strings.
1276
Guido van Rossum41c99e72003-04-14 17:59:34 +00001277- The .*? pattern in the re module is now special-cased to avoid the
1278 recursion limit. (SF patch #720991 -- many thanks to Gary Herron
1279 and Greg Chapman.)
1280
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00001281- New function sys.call_tracing() allows pdb to debug code
1282 recursively.
1283
Tim Peters730f5532003-04-08 17:17:17 +00001284- New function gc.get_referents(obj) returns a list of objects
Tim Peters0f81ab62003-04-08 16:39:48 +00001285 directly referenced by obj. In effect, it exposes what the object's
1286 tp_traverse slot does, and can be helpful when debugging memory
1287 leaks.
1288
Martin v. Löwis7fb697b2003-04-03 04:49:12 +00001289- The iconv module has been removed from this release.
1290
Tim Petersd50ade62003-03-20 18:32:13 +00001291- The platform-independent routines for packing floats in IEEE formats
1292 (struct.pack's <f, >f, <d, and >d codes; pickle and cPickle's protocol 1
1293 pickling of floats) ignored that rounding can cause a carry to
1294 propagate. The worst consequence was that, in rare cases, <f and >f
1295 could produce strings that, when unpacked again, were a factor of 2
1296 away from the original float. This has been fixed. See SF bug
1297 #705836.
1298
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001299- New function time.tzset() provides access to the C library tzset()
Guido van Rossumd11b62e2003-03-14 21:51:36 +00001300 function, if supported. (SF patch #675422.)
1301
Neal Norwitz12e22172003-03-03 21:16:39 +00001302- Using createfilehandler, deletefilehandler, createtimerhandler functions
1303 on Tkinter.tkinter (_tkinter module) no longer crashes the interpreter.
1304 See SF bug #692416.
1305
Michael W. Hudsonf0089982003-03-03 12:29:42 +00001306- Modified the fcntl.ioctl() function to allow modification of a passed
1307 mutable buffer (for details see the reference documentation).
1308
Raymond Hettinger61fe64d2003-02-23 04:40:07 +00001309- Made user requested changes to the itertools module.
1310 Subsumed the times() function into repeat().
1311 Added chain() and cycle().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001312
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00001313- The rotor module is now deprecated; the encryption algorithm it uses
Andrew M. Kuchlingfb5f4852003-04-24 13:19:56 +00001314 is not believed to be secure, and including crypto code with Python
1315 has implications for exporting and importing it in various countries.
1316
Skip Montanaro89feabc2003-03-30 04:54:24 +00001317- The socket module now always uses the _socketobject wrapper class, even on
1318 platforms which have dup(2). The makefile() method is built directly
1319 on top of the socket without duplicating the file descriptor, allowing
1320 timeouts to work properly.
1321
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001322Library
1323-------
1324
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00001325- New generator function os.walk() is an easy-to-use alternative to
1326 os.path.walk(). See os module docs for details. os.path.walk()
1327 isn't deprecated at this time, but may become deprecated in a
1328 future release.
1329
Marc-André Lemburg246d8472003-04-24 11:36:11 +00001330- Added new module "platform" which provides a wide range of tools
1331 for querying platform dependent features.
1332
Andrew M. Kuchling4e42b312003-04-24 16:45:05 +00001333- netrc now allows ASCII punctuation characters in passwords.
Raymond Hettinger1d877862003-04-23 19:06:08 +00001334
Martin v. Löwis153c9e42003-04-19 20:59:03 +00001335- shelve now supports the optional writeback argument, and exposes
1336 pickle protocol versions.
1337
Guido van Rossuma2685402003-04-19 18:04:57 +00001338- Several methods of nntplib.NNTP have grown an optional file argument
1339 which specifies a file where to divert the command's output
1340 (already supported by the body() method). (SF patch #720468)
1341
Martin v. Löwis281b2c62003-04-18 21:04:39 +00001342- The self-documenting XML server library DocXMLRPCServer was added.
1343
Martin v. Löwis2548c732003-04-18 10:39:54 +00001344- Support for internationalized domain names has been added through
1345 the 'idna' and 'punycode' encodings, the 'stringprep' module, the
1346 'mkstringprep' tool, and enhancements to the socket and httplib
1347 modules.
1348
Walter Dörwald5688b7a2003-04-16 09:46:13 +00001349- htmlentitydefs has two new dictionaries: name2codepoint maps
1350 HTML entity names to Unicode codepoints (as integers).
1351 codepoint2name is the reverse mapping. See SF patch #722017.
1352
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00001353- pdb has a new command, "debug", which lets you step through
1354 arbitrary code from the debugger's (pdb) prompt.
1355
Raymond Hettingerc377cbf2003-04-04 22:56:42 +00001356- unittest.failUnlessEqual and its equivalent unittest.assertEqual now
1357 return 'not a == b' rather than 'a != b'. This gives the desired
1358 result for classes that define __eq__ without defining __ne__.
1359
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001360- sgmllib now supports SGML marked sections, in particular the
Martin v. Löwis3163a3b2003-03-30 14:25:40 +00001361 MS Office extensions.
1362
Raymond Hettinger42182eb2003-03-09 05:33:33 +00001363- The urllib module now offers support for the iterator protocol.
1364 SF patch 698520 contributed by Brett Cannon.
1365
Guido van Rossum9589a252003-03-06 01:56:12 +00001366- New module timeit provides a simple framework for timing the
1367 execution speed of expressions and statements.
1368
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001369- sets.Set objects now support mixed-type __eq__ and __ne__, instead
1370 of raising TypeError. If x is a Set object and y is a non-Set object,
1371 x == y is False, and x != y is True. This is akin to the change made
1372 for mixed-type comparisons of datetime objects in 2.3a2; more info
1373 about the rationale is in the NEWS entry for that. See also SF bug
1374 report <http://www.python.org/sf/693121>.
1375
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00001376- On Unix platforms, if os.listdir() is called with a Unicode argument,
1377 it now returns Unicode strings. (This behavior was added earlier
1378 to the Windows NT/2k/XP version of os.listdir().)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001379
Andrew M. Kuchling6f177d42003-02-28 22:09:33 +00001380- Distutils: both 'py_modules' and 'packages' keywords can now be specified
1381 in core.setup(). Previously you could supply one or the other, but
1382 not both of them. (SF patch #695090 from Bernhard Herzog)
1383
Skip Montanaro64a839e2003-03-20 23:36:55 +00001384- New csv package makes it easy to read/write CSV files.
1385
Gustavo Niemeyer68d8cef2003-04-17 21:31:33 +00001386- Module shlex has been extended to allow posix-like shell parsings,
1387 including a split() function for easy spliting of quoted strings and
1388 commands. An iterator interface was also implemented.
1389
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001390Tools/Demos
1391-----------
1392
Tim Peters21d7d4d2003-04-18 00:45:59 +00001393- New script combinerefs.py helps analyze new PYTHONDUMPREFS output.
1394 See the module docstring for details.
1395
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001396Build
1397-----
1398
Neal Norwitz35892b92003-02-23 23:45:35 +00001399- Fix problem building on OSF1 because the compiler only accepted
1400 preprocessor directives that start in column 1. (SF bug #691793.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001401
1402C API
1403-----
1404
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00001405- Added PyGC_Collect(), equivalent to calling gc.collect().
1406
Guido van Rossum0fc8f002003-04-15 15:12:39 +00001407- PyThreadState_GetDict() was changed not to raise an exception or
1408 issue a fatal error when no current thread state is available. This
1409 makes it possible to print dictionaries when no thread is active.
1410
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00001411- LONG_LONG was renamed to PY_LONG_LONG. Extensions that use this and
1412 need compatibility with previous versions can use this:
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00001413
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00001414 #ifndef PY_LONG_LONG
1415 #define PY_LONG_LONG LONG_LONG
1416 #endif
Martin v. Löwisb9a0f912003-03-29 10:06:18 +00001417
Raymond Hettinger1da1dbf2003-03-17 19:46:11 +00001418- Added PyObject_SelfIter() to fill the tp_iter slot for the
Raymond Hettinger01538262003-03-17 08:24:35 +00001419 typical case where the method returns its self argument.
1420
Guido van Rossume5c691a2003-03-07 15:13:17 +00001421- The extended type structure used for heap types (new-style
1422 classes defined by Python code using a class statement) is now
1423 exported from object.h as PyHeapTypeObject. (SF patch #696193.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001424
1425New platforms
1426-------------
1427
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00001428None this time.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001429
1430Tests
1431-----
1432
Neal Norwitz55b61d22003-02-28 19:57:03 +00001433- test_timeout now requires -u network to be passed to regrtest to run.
1434 See SF bug #692988.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001435
1436Windows
1437-------
1438
Tim Peters11b23062003-04-23 02:39:17 +00001439- os.fsync() now exists on Windows, and calls the Microsoft _commit()
1440 function.
1441
Guido van Rossumf4050642003-04-09 19:39:06 +00001442- New function winsound.MessageBeep() wraps the Win32 API
1443 MessageBeep().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001444
1445Mac
1446---
1447
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00001448- os.listdir() now returns Unicode strings on MacOS X when called with
1449 a Unicode argument. See the general news item under "Library".
Just van Rossum46c97842003-02-25 21:42:15 +00001450
Jack Jansendeac2ac2003-02-24 11:04:17 +00001451- A new method MacOS.WMAvailable() returns true if it is safe to access
1452 the window manager, false otherwise.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001453
Jack Jansencf76be02003-03-24 12:13:54 +00001454- EasyDialogs dialogs are now movable-modal, and if the application is
1455 currently in the background they will ask to be moved to the foreground
1456 before displaying.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001457
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00001458- OSA Scripting support has improved a lot, and gensuitemodule.py can now
Jack Jansende354b72003-04-11 15:37:20 +00001459 be used by mere mortals. The documentation is now also more or less
1460 complete.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001461
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00001462- The IDE (in a framework build) now includes introductory documentation
1463 in Apple Help Viewer format.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001464
1465
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001466What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 2?
1467=================================
1468
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00001469*Release date: 19-Feb-2003*
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001470
1471Core and builtins
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00001472-----------------
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001473
Walter Dörwald2ffec022003-02-19 16:34:11 +00001474- Negative positions returned from PEP 293 error callbacks are now
1475 treated as being relative to the end of the input string. Positions
1476 that are out of bounds raise an IndexError.
1477
Guido van Rossum162e38c2003-02-19 15:25:10 +00001478- sys.path[0] (the directory from which the script is loaded) is now
1479 turned into an absolute pathname, unless it is the empty string.
1480 (SF patch #664376.)
1481
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00001482- Finally fixed the bug in compile() and exec where a string ending
1483 with an indented code block but no newline would raise SyntaxError.
1484 This would have been a four-line change in parsetok.c... Except
1485 codeop.py depends on this behavior, so a compilation flag had to be
1486 invented that causes the tokenizer to revert to the old behavior;
1487 this required extra changes to 2 .h files, 2 .c files, and 2 .py
Guido van Rossum1442dc12003-02-13 22:19:20 +00001488 files. (Fixes SF bug #501622.)
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00001489
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00001490- If a new-style class defines neither __new__ nor __init__, its
1491 constructor would ignore all arguments. This is changed now: the
1492 constructor refuses arguments in this case. This might break code
1493 that worked under Python 2.2. The simplest fix is to add a no-op
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001494 __init__: ``def __init__(self, *args, **kw): pass``.
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00001495
Guido van Rossum48035eb2003-02-12 17:05:26 +00001496- Through a bytecode optimizer bug (and I bet you didn't even know
1497 Python *had* a bytecode optimizer :-), "unsigned" hex/oct constants
1498 with a leading minus sign would come out with the wrong sign.
1499 ("Unsigned" hex/oct constants are those with a face value in the
1500 range sys.maxint+1 through sys.maxint*2+1, inclusive; these have
1501 always been interpreted as negative numbers through sign folding.)
1502 E.g. 0xffffffff is -1, and -(0xffffffff) is 1, but -0xffffffff would
1503 come out as -4294967295. This was the case in Python 2.2 through
1504 2.2.2 and 2.3a1, and in Python 2.4 it will once again have that
1505 value, but according to PEP 237 it really needs to be 1 now. This
1506 will be backported to Python 2.2.3 a well. (SF #660455)
1507
Guido van Rossum47710652003-02-12 20:48:22 +00001508- int(s, base) sometimes sign-folds hex and oct constants; it only
1509 does this when base is 0 and s.strip() starts with a '0'. When the
1510 sign is actually folded, as in int("0xffffffff", 0) on a 32-bit
1511 machine, which returns -1, a FutureWarning is now issued; in Python
1512 2.4, this will return 4294967295L, as do int("+0xffffffff", 0) and
1513 int("0xffffffff", 16) right now. (PEP 347)
1514
Guido van Rossuma89d10e2003-02-12 03:58:38 +00001515- super(X, x): x may now be a proxy for an X instance, i.e.
1516 issubclass(x.__class__, X) but not issubclass(type(x), X).
1517
Guido van Rossum03bc7d32003-02-12 03:32:58 +00001518- isinstance(x, X): if X is a new-style class, this is now equivalent
1519 to issubclass(type(x), X) or issubclass(x.__class__, X). Previously
1520 only type(x) was tested. (For classic classes this was already the
1521 case.)
1522
Just van Rossum73ffb4a2003-02-10 09:57:08 +00001523- compile(), eval() and the exec statement now fully support source code
1524 passed as unicode strings.
1525
Neal Norwitzde8b94c2003-02-10 02:12:43 +00001526- int subclasses can be initialized with longs if the value fits in an int.
1527 See SF bug #683467.
1528
Tim Petersbf2674b2003-02-02 07:51:32 +00001529- long(string, base) takes time linear in len(string) when base is a power
1530 of 2 now. It used to take time quadratic in len(string).
1531
Martin v. Löwis8afd7572003-01-25 22:46:11 +00001532- filter returns now Unicode results for Unicode arguments.
1533
Martin v. Löwisaf6a27a2003-01-03 19:16:14 +00001534- raw_input can now return Unicode objects.
1535
Skip Montanaro4abd5f02003-01-02 20:51:08 +00001536- List objects' sort() method now accepts None as the comparison function.
1537 Passing None is semantically identical to calling sort() with no
1538 arguments.
1539
Neal Norwitz1a997502003-01-13 20:13:12 +00001540- Fixed crash when printing a subclass of str and __str__ returned self.
1541 See SF bug #667147.
1542
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00001543- Fixed an invalid RuntimeWarning and an undetected error when trying
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00001544 to convert a long integer into a float which couldn't fit.
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00001545 See SF bug #676155.
1546
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00001547- Function objects now have a __module__ attribute that is bound to
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00001548 the name of the module in which the function was defined. This
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00001549 applies for C functions and methods as well as functions and methods
1550 defined in Python. This attribute is used by pickle.whichmodule(),
1551 which changes the behavior of whichmodule slightly. In Python 2.2
1552 whichmodule() returns "__main__" for functions that are not defined
1553 at the top-level of a module (examples: methods, nested functions).
1554 Now whichmodule() will return the proper module name.
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00001555
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001556Extension modules
1557-----------------
1558
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00001559- operator.isNumberType() now checks that the object has a nb_int or
1560 nb_float slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
1561 tp_as_number pointer.
1562
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00001563- The imp module now has ways to acquire and release the "import
1564 lock": imp.acquire_lock() and imp.release_lock(). Note: this is a
1565 reentrant lock, so releasing the lock only truly releases it when
1566 this is the last release_lock() call. You can check with
1567 imp.lock_held(). (SF bug #580952 and patch #683257.)
1568
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001569- Change to cPickle to match pickle.py (see below and PEP 307).
1570
Neal Norwitz9caf9c02003-02-10 01:54:06 +00001571- Fix some bugs in the parser module. SF bug #678518.
1572
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00001573- Thanks to Scott David Daniels, a subtle bug in how the zlib
Walter Dörwald28d81962003-02-03 20:53:14 +00001574 extension implemented flush() was fixed. Scott also rewrote the
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00001575 zlib test suite using the unittest module. (SF bug #640230 and
1576 patch #678531.)
1577
Raymond Hettinger96ef8112003-02-01 00:10:11 +00001578- Added an itertools module containing high speed, memory efficient
1579 looping constructs inspired by tools from Haskell and SML.
1580
Guido van Rossum99d4abf2003-01-27 22:22:50 +00001581- The SSL module now handles sockets with a timeout set correctly (SF
1582 patch #675750, fixing SF bug #675552).
1583
Barry Warsawf8ba39c2003-01-07 20:55:26 +00001584- os/posixmodule has grown the sysexits.h constants (EX_OK and friends).
1585
Guido van Rossum6d0d3652003-01-07 20:34:19 +00001586- Fixed broken threadstate swap in readline that could cause fatal
1587 errors when a readline hook was being invoked while a background
1588 thread was active. (SF bugs #660476 and #513033.)
1589
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001590- fcntl now exposes the strops.h I_* constants.
1591
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00001592- Fix a crash on Solaris that occurred when calling close() on
1593 an mmap'ed file which was already closed. (SF patch #665913)
1594
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001595- Fixed several serious bugs in the zipimport implementation.
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001596
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00001597- datetime changes:
1598
Guido van Rossum8b7a9a32003-04-14 22:01:58 +00001599 The date class is now properly subclassable. (SF bug #720908)
1600
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00001601 The datetime and datetimetz classes have been collapsed into a single
1602 datetime class, and likewise the time and timetz classes into a single
1603 time class. Previously, a datetimetz object with tzinfo=None acted
1604 exactly like a datetime object, and similarly for timetz. This wasn't
1605 enough of a difference to justify distinct classes, and life is simpler
1606 now.
1607
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00001608 today() and now() now round system timestamps to the closest
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00001609 microsecond <http://www.python.org/sf/661086>. This repairs an
1610 irritation most likely seen on Windows systems.
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00001611
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00001612 In dt.astimezone(tz), if tz.utcoffset(dt) returns a duration,
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00001613 ValueError is raised if tz.dst(dt) returns None (2.3a1 treated it
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00001614 as 0 instead, but a tzinfo subclass wishing to participate in
1615 time zone conversion has to take a stand on whether it supports
1616 DST; if you don't care about DST, then code dst() to return 0 minutes,
1617 meaning that DST is never in effect).
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00001618
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00001619 The tzinfo methods utcoffset() and dst() must return a timedelta object
1620 (or None) now. In 2.3a1 they could also return an int or long, but that
1621 was an unhelpfully redundant leftover from an earlier version wherein
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00001622 they couldn't return a timedelta. TOOWTDI.
1623
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00001624 The example tzinfo class for local time had a bug. It was replaced
1625 by a later example coded by Guido.
1626
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00001627 datetime.astimezone(tz) no longer raises an exception when the
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00001628 input datetime has no UTC equivalent in tz. For typical "hybrid" time
1629 zones (a single tzinfo subclass modeling both standard and daylight
1630 time), this case can arise one hour per year, at the hour daylight time
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00001631 ends. See new docs for details. In short, the new behavior mimics
1632 the local wall clock's behavior of repeating an hour in local time.
1633
1634 dt.astimezone() can no longer be used to convert between naive and aware
1635 datetime objects. If you merely want to attach, or remove, a tzinfo
1636 object, without any conversion of date and time members, use
1637 dt.replace(tzinfo=whatever) instead, where "whatever" is None or a
1638 tzinfo subclass instance.
1639
1640 A new method tzinfo.fromutc(dt) can be overridden in tzinfo subclasses
1641 to give complete control over how a UTC time is to be converted to
1642 a local time. The default astimezone() implementation calls fromutc()
1643 as its last step, so a tzinfo subclass can affect that too by overriding
1644 fromutc(). It's expected that the default fromutc() implementation will
1645 be suitable as-is for "almost all" time zone subclasses, but the
1646 creativity of political time zone fiddling appears unbounded -- fromutc()
1647 allows the highly motivated to emulate any scheme expressible in Python.
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00001648
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00001649 datetime.now(): The optional tzinfo argument was undocumented (that's
1650 repaired), and its name was changed to tz ("tzinfo" is overloaded enough
1651 already). With a tz argument, now(tz) used to return the local date
1652 and time, and attach tz to it, without any conversion of date and time
1653 members. This was less than useful. Now now(tz) returns the current
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001654 date and time as local time in tz's time zone, akin to ::
1655
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00001656 tz.fromutc(datetime.utcnow().replace(tzinfo=utc))
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001657
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00001658 where "utc" is an instance of a tzinfo subclass modeling UTC. Without
1659 a tz argument, now() continues to return the current local date and time,
1660 as a naive datetime object.
1661
Tim Peters2a44a8d2003-01-23 20:53:10 +00001662 datetime.fromtimestamp(): Like datetime.now() above, this had less than
1663 useful behavior when the optional tinzo argument was specified. See
1664 also SF bug report <http://www.python.org/sf/660872>.
1665
Tim Peters8d81a012003-01-24 22:36:34 +00001666 date and datetime comparison: In order to prevent comparison from
1667 falling back to the default compare-object-addresses strategy, these
1668 raised TypeError whenever they didn't understand the other object type.
1669 They still do, except when the other object has a "timetuple" attribute,
1670 in which case they return NotImplemented now. This gives other
1671 datetime objects (e.g., mxDateTime) a chance to intercept the
1672 comparison.
1673
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00001674 date, time, datetime and timedelta comparison: When the exception
1675 for mixed-type comparisons in the last paragraph doesn't apply, if
1676 the comparison is == then False is returned, and if the comparison is
1677 != then True is returned. Because dict lookup and the "in" operator
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001678 only invoke __eq__, this allows, for example, ::
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00001679
1680 if some_datetime in some_sequence:
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001681
1682 and ::
1683
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00001684 some_dict[some_timedelta] = whatever
1685
1686 to work as expected, without raising TypeError just because the
1687 sequence is heterogeneous, or the dict has mixed-type keys. [This
1688 seems like a good idea to implement for all mixed-type comparisons
1689 that don't want to allow falling back to address comparison.]
1690
Tim Peters75a6e3b2003-01-04 18:17:36 +00001691 The constructors building a datetime from a timestamp could raise
1692 ValueError if the platform C localtime()/gmtime() inserted "leap
1693 seconds". Leap seconds are ignored now. On such platforms, it's
1694 possible to have timestamps that differ by a second, yet where
1695 datetimes constructed from them are equal.
1696
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00001697 The pickle format of date, time and datetime objects has changed
1698 completely. The undocumented pickler and unpickler functions no
Tim Petersb57f8f02003-02-01 02:54:15 +00001699 longer exist. The undocumented __setstate__() and __getstate__()
1700 methods no longer exist either.
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00001701
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001702Library
1703-------
1704
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001705- The logging module was updated slightly; the WARN level was renamed
1706 to WARNING, and the matching function/method warn() to warning().
1707
1708- The pickle and cPickle modules were updated with a new pickling
1709 protocol (documented by pickletools.py, see below) and several
1710 extensions to the pickle customization API (__reduce__, __setstate__
1711 etc.). The copy module now uses more of the pickle customization
1712 API to copy objects that don't implement __copy__ or __deepcopy__.
1713 See PEP 307 for details.
1714
1715- The distutils "register" command now uses http://www.python.org/pypi
1716 as the default repository. (See PEP 301.)
1717
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00001718- the platform dependent path related variables sep, altsep, extsep,
1719 pathsep, curdir, pardir and defpath are now defined in the platform
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00001720 dependent path modules (e.g. ntpath.py) rather than os.py, so these
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001721 variables are now available via os.path. They continue to be
1722 available from the os module.
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00001723 (see <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00001724
Tim Peters6ee04802003-02-05 18:29:34 +00001725- array.array was added to the types repr.py knows about (see
1726 <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
1727
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00001728- The new pickletools.py contains lots of documentation about pickle
1729 internals, and supplies some helpers for working with pickles, such as
1730 a symbolic pickle disassembler.
1731
Skip Montanaro9a7c96a2003-01-22 18:17:25 +00001732- Xmlrpclib.py now supports the builtin boolean type.
1733
Martin v. Löwis0c6774d2003-01-15 11:51:06 +00001734- py_compile has a new 'doraise' flag and a new PyCompileError
1735 exception.
1736
Martin v. Löwisd69663d2003-01-15 11:37:23 +00001737- SimpleXMLRPCServer now supports CGI through the CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler
1738 class.
1739
Guido van Rossum50e92232003-01-14 16:45:04 +00001740- The sets module now raises TypeError in __cmp__, to clarify that
1741 sets are not intended to be three-way-compared; the comparison
1742 operators are overloaded as subset/superset tests.
1743
Guido van Rossumcd0c0472003-01-07 23:03:05 +00001744- Bastion.py and rexec.py are disabled. These modules are not safe in
1745 Python 2.2. or 2.3.
1746
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001747- realpath is now exported when doing ``from poxixpath import *``.
Neal Norwitzbb0246a2003-01-03 18:12:28 +00001748 It is also exported for ntpath, macpath, and os2emxpath.
1749 See SF bug #659228.
1750
Neal Norwitzb9ef4ae2003-01-05 23:19:43 +00001751- New module tarfile from Lars Gustäbel provides a comprehensive interface
1752 to tar archive files with transparent gzip and bzip2 compression.
1753 See SF patch #651082.
1754
Neal Norwitz4f442372003-01-06 06:51:36 +00001755- urlparse can now parse imap:// URLs. See SF feature request #618024.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001756
Neal Norwitze931ed52003-01-10 23:24:32 +00001757- Tkinter.Canvas.scan_dragto() provides an optional parameter to support
1758 the gain value which is passed to Tk. SF bug# 602259.
1759
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00001760- Fix logging.handlers.SysLogHandler protocol when using UNIX domain sockets.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00001761 See SF patch #642974.
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00001762
Skip Montanaro12fe72e2003-02-25 17:46:20 +00001763- The dospath module was deleted. Use the ntpath module when manipulating
1764 DOS paths from other platforms.
1765
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001766Tools/Demos
1767-----------
1768
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00001769- Two new scripts (db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py) were added to the
1770 Tools/scripts directory to facilitate conversion from the old bsddb module
1771 to the new one. While the user-visible API of the new module is
1772 compatible with the old one, it's likely that the version of the
1773 underlying database library has changed. To convert from the old library,
1774 run the db2pickle.py script using the old version of Python to convert it
1775 to a pickle file. After upgrading Python, run the pickle2db.py script
1776 using the new version of Python to reconstitute your database. For
1777 example:
1778
Skip Montanaro621f0552003-02-03 15:48:10 +00001779 % python2.2 db2pickle.py -h some.db > some.pickle
1780 % python2.3 pickle2db.py -h some.db.new < some.pickle
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00001781
1782 Run the scripts without any args to get a usage message.
1783
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001784
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001785Build
1786-----
1787
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00001788- The audio driver tests (test_ossaudiodev.py and
1789 test_linuxaudiodev.py) are no longer run by default. This is
1790 because they don't always work, depending on your hardware and
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001791 software. To run these tests, you must use an invocation like ::
1792
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00001793 ./python Lib/test/regrtest.py -u audio test_ossaudiodev
1794
Skip Montanarodecc6a42003-01-01 20:07:49 +00001795- On systems which build using the configure script, compiler flags which
1796 used to be lumped together using the OPT flag have been split into two
1797 groups, OPT and BASECFLAGS. OPT is meant to carry just optimization- and
1798 debug-related flags like "-g" and "-O3". BASECFLAGS is meant to carry
1799 compiler flags that are required to get a clean compile. On some
1800 platforms (many Linux flavors in particular) BASECFLAGS will be empty by
1801 default. On others, such as Mac OS X and SCO, it will contain required
1802 flags. This change allows people building Python to override OPT without
1803 fear of clobbering compiler flags which are required to get a clean build.
1804
1805- On Darwin/Mac OS X platforms, /sw/lib and /sw/include are added to the
1806 relevant search lists in setup.py. This allows users building Python to
1807 take advantage of the many packages available from the fink project
1808 <http://fink.sf.net/>.
1809
1810- A new Makefile target, scriptsinstall, installs a number of useful scripts
1811 from the Tools/scripts directory.
1812
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001813C API
1814-----
1815
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001816- PyEval_GetFrame() is now declared to return a ``PyFrameObject *``
1817 instead of a plain ``PyObject *``. (SF patch #686601.)
Guido van Rossum6297a7a2003-02-19 15:53:17 +00001818
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00001819- PyNumber_Check() now checks that the object has a nb_int or nb_float
1820 slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
1821 tp_as_number pointer.
1822
Guido van Rossumeea47182003-02-11 20:39:59 +00001823- A C type that inherits from a base type that defines tp_as_buffer
1824 will now inherit the tp_as_buffer pointer if it doesn't define one.
1825 (SF #681367)
1826
Neil Schemenauer5042da62003-02-04 20:59:40 +00001827- The PyArg_Parse functions now issue a DeprecationWarning if a float
1828 argument is provided when an integer is specified (this affects the 'b',
1829 'B', 'h', 'H', 'i', and 'l' codes). Future versions of Python will
1830 raise a TypeError.
Neil Schemenauercd63e612003-01-24 22:15:53 +00001831
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001832Tests
1833-----
1834
Walter Dörwald11cfbd62003-03-26 16:03:16 +00001835- Several tests weren't being run from regrtest.py (test_timeout.py,
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001836 test_tarfile.py, test_netrc.py, test_multifile.py,
1837 test_importhooks.py and test_imp.py). Now they are. (Note to
1838 developers: please read Lib/test/README when creating a new test, to
1839 make sure to do it right! All tests need to use either unittest or
1840 pydoc.)
1841
1842- Added test_posix.py, a test suite for the posix module.
1843
1844- Added test_hexoct.py, a test suite for hex/oct constant folding.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001845
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001846Windows
1847-------
1848
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00001849- The timeout code for socket connect() didn't work right; this has
1850 now been fixed. test_timeout.py should pass (at least most of the
1851 time).
1852
Thomas Hellerdda583d2003-01-31 20:45:41 +00001853- distutils' msvccompiler class now passes the preprocessor options to
1854 the resource compiler. See SF patch #669198.
1855
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00001856- The bsddb module now ships with Sleepycat's 4.1.25.NC, the latest
1857 release without strong cryptography.
1858
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00001859- sys.path[0], if it contains a directory name, is now always an
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001860 absolute pathname. (SF patch #664376.)
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00001861
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00001862- The new logging package is now installed by the Windows installer. It
1863 wasn't in 2.3a1 due to oversight.
1864
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001865Mac
1866---
1867
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00001868- There are new dialogs EasyDialogs.AskFileForOpen, AskFileForSave
1869 and AskFolder. The old macfs.StandardGetFile and friends are deprecated.
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00001870
Jack Jansenc9296362003-02-06 23:10:45 +00001871- Most of the standard library now uses pathnames or FSRefs in preference
1872 of FSSpecs, and use the underlying Carbon.File and Carbon.Folder modules
1873 in stead of macfs. macfs will probably be deprecated in the future.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00001874
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00001875- Type Carbon.File.FSCatalogInfo and supporting methods have been implemented.
1876 This also makes macfs.FSSpec.SetDates() work again.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001877
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00001878- There is a new module pimp, the package install manager for Python, and
1879 accompanying applet PackageManager. These allow you to easily download
1880 and install pretested extension packages either in source or binary
1881 form. Only in MacPython-OSX.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001882
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00001883- Applets are now built with bundlebuilder in MacPython-OSX, which should make
Jack Jansen5d44b342003-02-18 23:32:47 +00001884 them more robust and also provides a path towards BuildApplication. The
1885 downside of this change is that applets can no longer be run from the
1886 Terminal window, this will hopefully be fixed in the 2.3b1.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001887
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001888
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001889What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 1?
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001890=================================
1891
Guido van Rossumae548862002-12-31 15:47:36 +00001892*Release date: 31-Dec-2002*
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001893
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001894Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001895--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00001896
Michael W. Hudson96bc3b42002-11-26 14:48:23 +00001897- One can now assign to __bases__ and __name__ of new-style classes.
1898
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00001899- dict() now accepts keyword arguments so that dict(one=1, two=2)
1900 is the equivalent of {"one": 1, "two": 2}. Accordingly,
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00001901 the existing (but undocumented) 'items' keyword argument has
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00001902 been eliminated. This means that dict(items=someMapping) now has
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00001903 a different meaning than before.
1904
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00001905- int() now returns a long object if the argument is outside the
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001906 integer range, so int("4" * 1000), int(1e200) and int(1L<<1000) will
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00001907 all return long objects instead of raising an OverflowError.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001908
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00001909- Assignment to __class__ is disallowed if either the old or the new
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00001910 class is a statically allocated type object (such as defined by an
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00001911 extension module). This prevents anomalies like 2.__class__ = bool.
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00001912
1913- New-style object creation and deallocation have been sped up
1914 significantly; they are now faster than classic instance creation
1915 and deallocation.
1916
1917- The __slots__ variable can now mention "private" names, and the
1918 right thing will happen (e.g. __slots__ = ["__foo"]).
1919
1920- The built-ins slice() and buffer() are now callable types. The
1921 types classobj (formerly class), code, function, instance, and
1922 instancemethod (formerly instance-method), which have no built-in
1923 names but are accessible through the types module, are now also
1924 callable. The type dict-proxy is renamed to dictproxy.
1925
1926- Cycles going through the __class__ link of a new-style instance are
1927 now detected by the garbage collector.
1928
1929- Classes using __slots__ are now properly garbage collected.
1930 [SF bug 519621]
1931
1932- Tightened the __slots__ rules: a slot name must be a valid Python
1933 identifier.
1934
1935- The constructor for the module type now requires a name argument and
1936 takes an optional docstring argument. Previously, this constructor
1937 ignored its arguments. As a consequence, deriving a class from a
1938 module (not from the module type) is now illegal; previously this
1939 created an unnamed module, just like invoking the module type did.
1940 [SF bug 563060]
1941
1942- A new type object, 'basestring', is added. This is a common base type
1943 for 'str' and 'unicode', and can be used instead of
1944 types.StringTypes, e.g. to test whether something is "a string":
1945 isinstance(x, basestring) is True for Unicode and 8-bit strings. This
1946 is an abstract base class and cannot be instantiated directly.
1947
1948- Changed new-style class instantiation so that when C's __new__
1949 method returns something that's not a C instance, its __init__ is
1950 not called. [SF bug #537450]
1951
1952- Fixed super() to work correctly with class methods. [SF bug #535444]
1953
1954- If you try to pickle an instance of a class that has __slots__ but
1955 doesn't define or override __getstate__, a TypeError is now raised.
1956 This is done by adding a bozo __getstate__ to the class that always
1957 raises TypeError. (Before, this would appear to be pickled, but the
1958 state of the slots would be lost.)
1959
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001960Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001961-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001962
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00001963- Import from zipfiles is now supported. The name of a zipfile placed
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00001964 on sys.path causes the import statement to look for importable Python
1965 modules (with .py, pyc and .pyo extensions) and packages inside the
1966 zipfile. The zipfile import follows the specification (though not
1967 the sample implementation) of PEP 273. The semantics of __path__ are
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00001968 compatible with those that have been implemented in Jython since
1969 Jython 2.1.
1970
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001971- PEP 302 has been accepted. Although it was initially developed to
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00001972 support zipimport, it offers a new, general import hook mechanism.
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00001973 Several new variables have been added to the sys module:
1974 sys.meta_path, sys.path_hooks, and sys.path_importer_cache; these
1975 make extending the import statement much more convenient than
1976 overriding the __import__ built-in function. For a description of
1977 these, see PEP 302.
1978
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00001979- A frame object's f_lineno attribute can now be written to from a
1980 trace function to change which line will execute next. A command to
1981 exploit this from pdb has been added. [SF patch #643835]
1982
Marc-André Lemburg20b91352002-12-12 18:01:43 +00001983- The _codecs support module for codecs.py was turned into a builtin
1984 module to assure that at least the builtin codecs are available
1985 to the Python parser for source code decoding according to PEP 263.
1986
Walter Dörwaldd9a6ad32002-12-12 16:41:44 +00001987- issubclass now supports a tuple as the second argument, just like
1988 isinstance does. ``issubclass(X, (A, B))`` is equivalent to
1989 ``issubclass(X, A) or issubclass(X, B)``.
1990
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00001991- Thanks to Armin Rigo, the last known way to provoke a system crash
1992 by cleverly arranging for a comparison function to mutate a list
1993 during a list.sort() operation has been fixed. The effect of
1994 attempting to mutate a list, or even to inspect its contents or
1995 length, while a sort is in progress, is not defined by the language.
1996 The C implementation of Python 2.3 attempts to detect mutations,
1997 and raise ValueError if one occurs, but there's no guarantee that
1998 all mutations will be caught, or that any will be caught across
1999 releases or implementations.
2000
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00002001- Unicode file name processing for Windows (PEP 277) is implemented.
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00002002 All platforms now have an os.path.supports_unicode_filenames attribute,
2003 which is set to True on Windows NT/2000/XP, and False elsewhere.
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00002004
Walter Dörwald3aeb6322002-09-02 13:14:32 +00002005- Codec error handling callbacks (PEP 293) are implemented.
2006 Error handling in unicode.encode or str.decode can now be customized.
2007
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00002008- A subtle change to the semantics of the built-in function intern():
2009 interned strings are no longer immortal. You must keep a reference
2010 to the return value intern() around to get the benefit.
2011
Guido van Rossumf808b892002-08-16 03:38:10 +00002012- Use of 'None' as a variable, argument or attribute name now
2013 issues a SyntaxWarning. In the future, None may become a keyword.
2014
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00002015- SET_LINENO is gone. co_lnotab is now consulted to determine when to
2016 call the trace function. C code that accessed f_lineno should call
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00002017 PyCode_Addr2Line instead (f_lineno is still there, but only kept up
2018 to date when there is a trace function set).
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00002019
Guido van Rossum9be89462002-08-14 16:11:30 +00002020- There's a new warning category, FutureWarning. This is used to warn
2021 about a number of situations where the value or sign of an integer
2022 result will change in Python 2.4 as a result of PEP 237 (integer
2023 unification). The warnings implement stage B0 mentioned in that
2024 PEP. The warnings are about the following situations:
2025
2026 - Octal and hex literals without 'L' prefix in the inclusive range
2027 [0x80000000..0xffffffff]; these are currently negative ints, but
2028 in Python 2.4 they will be positive longs with the same bit
2029 pattern.
2030
2031 - Left shifts on integer values that cause the outcome to lose
2032 bits or have a different sign than the left operand. To be
2033 precise: x<<n where this currently doesn't yield the same value
2034 as long(x)<<n; in Python 2.4, the outcome will be long(x)<<n.
2035
2036 - Conversions from ints to string that show negative values as
2037 unsigned ints in the inclusive range [0x80000000..0xffffffff];
2038 this affects the functions hex() and oct(), and the string
2039 formatting codes %u, %o, %x, and %X. In Python 2.4, these will
2040 show signed values (e.g. hex(-1) currently returns "0xffffffff";
2041 in Python 2.4 it will return "-0x1").
2042
Guido van Rossum9a2eda52002-12-31 02:12:42 +00002043- The bits manipulated under the cover by sys.setcheckinterval() have
2044 been changed. Both the check interval and the ticker used to be
2045 per-thread values. They are now just a pair of global variables.
2046 In addition, the default check interval was boosted from 10 to 100
2047 bytecode instructions. This may have some effect on systems that
2048 relied on the old default value. In particular, in multi-threaded
2049 applications which try to be highly responsive, response time will
2050 increase by some (perhaps imperceptible) amount.
Skip Montanaro979c74b2002-09-03 21:25:14 +00002051
Tim Petersd64c1de2002-08-12 17:36:03 +00002052- When multiplying very large integers, a version of the so-called
2053 Karatsuba algorithm is now used. This is most effective if the
2054 inputs have roughly the same size. If they both have about N digits,
2055 Karatsuba multiplication has O(N**1.58) runtime (the exponent is
2056 log_base_2(3)) instead of the previous O(N**2). Measured results may
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00002057 be better or worse than that, depending on platform quirks. Besides
2058 the O() improvement in raw instruction count, the Karatsuba algorithm
2059 appears to have much better cache behavior on extremely large integers
2060 (starting in the ballpark of a million bits). Note that this is a
2061 simple implementation, and there's no intent here to compete with,
2062 e.g., GMP. It gives a very nice speedup when it applies, but a package
2063 devoted to fast large-integer arithmetic should run circles around it.
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00002064
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00002065- u'%c' will now raise a ValueError in case the argument is an
2066 integer outside the valid range of Unicode code point ordinals.
2067
Guido van Rossumdeb09362002-08-09 17:16:30 +00002068- The tempfile module has been overhauled for enhanced security. The
2069 mktemp() function is now deprecated; new, safe replacements are
2070 mkstemp() (for files) and mkdtemp() (for directories), and the
2071 higher-level functions NamedTemporaryFile() and TemporaryFile().
2072 Use of some global variables in this module is also deprecated; the
2073 new functions have keyword arguments to provide the same
2074 functionality. All Lib, Tools and Demo modules that used the unsafe
2075 interfaces have been updated to use the safe replacements. Thanks
2076 to Zack Weinberg!
2077
Guido van Rossumd81a9832002-08-09 15:57:34 +00002078- When x is an object whose class implements __mul__ and __rmul__,
2079 1.0*x would correctly invoke __rmul__, but 1*x would erroneously
2080 invoke __mul__. This was due to the sequence-repeat code in the int
2081 type. This has been fixed now.
2082
Barry Warsawd79f6832002-08-06 17:01:51 +00002083- Previously, "str1 in str2" required str1 to be a string of length 1.
2084 This restriction has been relaxed to allow str1 to be a string of
2085 any length. Thus "'el' in 'hello world'" returns True now.
2086
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00002087- File objects are now their own iterators. For a file f, iter(f) now
2088 returns f (unless f is closed), and f.next() is similar to
2089 f.readline() when EOF is not reached; however, f.next() uses a
2090 readahead buffer that messes up the file position, so mixing
2091 f.next() and f.readline() (or other methods) doesn't work right.
2092 Calling f.seek() drops the readahead buffer, but other operations
2093 don't. It so happens that this gives a nice additional speed boost
2094 to "for line in file:"; the xreadlines method and corresponding
Guido van Rossumbffb2ef2002-08-09 17:17:07 +00002095 module are now obsolete. Thanks to Oren Tirosh!
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00002096
Guido van Rossumde392d32002-08-05 14:17:20 +00002097- Encoding declarations (PEP 263, phase 1) have been implemented. A
2098 comment of the form "# -*- coding: <encodingname> -*-" in the first
2099 or second line of a Python source file indicates the encoding.
Martin v. Löwis00f1e3f2002-08-04 17:29:52 +00002100
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00002101- list.sort() has a new implementation. While cross-platform results
2102 may vary, and in data-dependent ways, this is much faster on many
2103 kinds of partially ordered lists than the previous implementation,
2104 and reported to be just as fast on randomly ordered lists on
2105 several major platforms. This sort is also stable (if A==B and A
2106 precedes B in the list at the start, A precedes B after the sort too),
2107 although the language definition does not guarantee stability. A
2108 potential drawback is that list.sort() may require temp space of
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00002109 len(list)*2 bytes (``*4`` on a 64-bit machine). It's therefore possible
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00002110 for list.sort() to raise MemoryError now, even if a comparison function
2111 does not. See <http://www.python.org/sf/587076> for full details.
2112
Guido van Rossum2d5389c2002-07-23 03:44:35 +00002113- All standard iterators now ensure that, once StopIteration has been
2114 raised, all future calls to next() on the same iterator will also
2115 raise StopIteration. There used to be various counterexamples to
2116 this behavior, which could caused confusion or subtle program
2117 breakage, without any benefits. (Note that this is still an
2118 iterator's responsibility; the iterator framework does not enforce
2119 this.)
2120
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00002121- Ctrl+C handling on Windows has been made more consistent with
2122 other platforms. KeyboardInterrupt can now reliably be caught,
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00002123 and Ctrl+C at an interactive prompt no longer terminates the
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00002124 process under NT/2k/XP (it never did under Win9x). Ctrl+C will
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00002125 interrupt time.sleep() in the main thread, and any child processes
2126 created via the popen family (on win2k; we can't make win9x work
Mark Hammond8f3afc72002-08-10 06:26:31 +00002127 reliably) are also interrupted (as generally happens on for Linux/Unix.)
2128 [SF bugs 231273, 439992 and 581232]
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00002129
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00002130- sys.getwindowsversion() has been added on Windows. This
2131 returns a tuple with information about the version of Windows
2132 currently running.
2133
Raymond Hettinger5a04aec2002-06-25 00:25:30 +00002134- Slices and repetitions of buffer objects now consistently return
2135 a string. Formerly, strings would be returned most of the time,
2136 but a buffer object would be returned when the repetition count
2137 was one or when the slice range was all inclusive.
2138
Walter Dörwald3430d702002-06-17 10:43:59 +00002139- Unicode objects in sys.path are no longer ignored but treated
2140 as directory names.
2141
Neal Norwitz1f68fc72002-06-14 00:50:42 +00002142- Fixed string.startswith and string.endswith builtin methods
2143 so they accept negative indices. [SF bug 493951]
2144
Guido van Rossumc5fe5eb2002-06-12 03:45:21 +00002145- Fixed a bug with a continue inside a try block and a yield in the
2146 finally clause. [SF bug 567538]
2147
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00002148- Most builtin sequences now support "extended slices", i.e. slices
Guido van Rossum2e82e712002-06-13 11:41:07 +00002149 with a third "stride" parameter. For example, "hello world"[::-1]
2150 gives "dlrow olleh".
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00002151
Neal Norwitzd68f5172002-05-29 15:54:55 +00002152- A new warning PendingDeprecationWarning was added to provide
2153 direction on features which are in the process of being deprecated.
2154 The warning will not be printed by default. To see the pending
2155 deprecations, use -Walways::PendingDeprecationWarning::
2156 as a command line option or warnings.filterwarnings() in code.
2157
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00002158- Deprecated features of xrange objects have been removed as
2159 promised. The start, stop, and step attributes and the tolist()
2160 method no longer exist. xrange repetition and slicing have been
2161 removed.
2162
Guido van Rossum7dab2422002-04-26 19:40:56 +00002163- New builtin function enumerate(x), from PEP 279. Example:
2164 enumerate("abc") is an iterator returning (0,"a"), (1,"b"), (2,"c").
2165 The argument can be an arbitrary iterable object.
2166
Neil Schemenauer89e3ee02002-04-26 01:58:53 +00002167- The assert statement no longer tests __debug__ at runtime. This means
2168 that assert statements cannot be disabled by assigning a false value
2169 to __debug__.
2170
Walter Dörwald068325e2002-04-15 13:36:47 +00002171- A method zfill() was added to str and unicode, that fills a numeric
2172 string to the left with zeros. For example,
2173 "+123".zfill(6) -> "+00123".
2174
Guido van Rossum862fe3c2002-04-15 12:36:47 +00002175- Complex numbers supported divmod() and the // and % operators, but
2176 these make no sense. Since this was documented, they're being
2177 deprecated now.
2178
Guido van Rossum26dd8302002-04-26 20:11:29 +00002179- String and unicode methods lstrip(), rstrip() and strip() now take
2180 an optional argument that specifies the characters to strip. For
2181 example, "Foo!!!?!?!?".rstrip("?!") -> "Foo".
Guido van Rossum49042042002-04-13 00:59:05 +00002182
Guido van Rossumc0d3f4e2002-11-27 13:10:40 +00002183- There's a new dictionary constructor (a class method of the dict
2184 class), dict.fromkeys(iterable, value=None). It constructs a
2185 dictionary with keys taken from the iterable and all values set to a
2186 single value. It can be used for building sets and for removing
2187 duplicates from sequences.
Raymond Hettingere33d3df2002-11-27 07:29:33 +00002188
Guido van Rossumc69343b2002-04-12 19:22:48 +00002189- Added a new dict method pop(key). This removes and returns the
2190 value corresponding to key. [SF patch #539949]
2191
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00002192- A new built-in type, bool, has been added, as well as built-in
2193 names for its two values, True and False. Comparisons and sundry
2194 other operations that return a truth value have been changed to
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002195 return a bool instead. Read PEP 285 for an explanation of why this
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00002196 is backward compatible.
2197
Guido van Rossum95b62a62002-03-29 01:07:24 +00002198- Fixed two bugs reported as SF #535905: under certain conditions,
2199 deallocating a deeply nested structure could cause a segfault in the
2200 garbage collector, due to interaction with the "trashcan" code;
2201 access to the current frame during destruction of a local variable
2202 could access a pointer to freed memory.
2203
Guido van Rossumfe0ca4a2002-06-18 21:20:13 +00002204- The optional object allocator ("pymalloc") has been enabled by
2205 default. The recommended practice for memory allocation and
2206 deallocation has been streamlined. A header file is included,
2207 Misc/pymemcompat.h, which can be bundled with 3rd party extensions
2208 and lets them use the same API with Python versions from 1.5.2
2209 onwards.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00002210
Martin v. Löwiscfeb3b62002-03-03 21:30:27 +00002211- PyErr_Display will provide file and line information for all exceptions
2212 that have an attribute print_file_and_line, not just SyntaxErrors.
2213
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00002214- The UTF-8 codec will now encode and decode Unicode surrogates
2215 correctly and without raising exceptions for unpaired ones.
2216
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00002217- Universal newlines (PEP 278) is implemented. Briefly, using 'U'
2218 instead of 'r' when opening a text file for reading changes the line
2219 ending convention so that any of '\r', '\r\n', and '\n' is
2220 recognized (even mixed in one file); all three are converted to
2221 '\n', the standard Python line end character.
2222
Neal Norwitz649b7592002-01-01 19:07:13 +00002223- file.xreadlines() now raises a ValueError if the file is closed:
2224 Previously, an xreadlines object was returned which would raise
2225 a ValueError when the xreadlines.next() method was called.
2226
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002227- sys.exit() inadvertently allowed more than one argument.
Neal Norwitz0c766a02002-03-27 13:03:09 +00002228 An exception will now be raised if more than one argument is used.
2229
Gustavo Niemeyer17c5a332002-12-16 14:09:22 +00002230- Changed evaluation order of dictionary literals to conform to the
2231 general left to right evaluation order rule. Now {f1(): f2()} will
2232 evaluate f1 first.
Gustavo Niemeyer78429a62002-12-16 13:54:02 +00002233
Gustavo Niemeyer786ddb22002-12-16 18:12:53 +00002234- Fixed bug #521782: when a file was in non-blocking mode, file.read()
2235 could silently lose data or wrongly throw an unknown error.
2236
Neil Schemenauerb983aa02002-12-30 20:22:23 +00002237- The sq_repeat, sq_inplace_repeat, sq_concat and sq_inplace_concat
2238 slots are now always tried after trying the corresponding nb_* slots.
2239 This fixes a number of minor bugs (see bug #624807).
2240
Neal Norwitz74a032e2003-01-10 23:29:48 +00002241- Fix problem with dynamic loading on 64-bit AIX (see bug #639945).
2242
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002243Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002244-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002245
Raymond Hettinger9543b342003-01-18 23:22:20 +00002246- Added three operators to the operator module:
2247 operator.pow(a,b) which is equivalent to: a**b.
2248 operator.is_(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is b.
2249 operator.is_not(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is not b.
2250
Martin v. Löwis24a880b2002-12-31 12:55:15 +00002251- posix.openpty now works on all systems that have /dev/ptmx.
2252
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00002253- A module zipimport exists to support importing code from zip
2254 archives.
2255
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00002256- The new datetime module supplies classes for manipulating dates and
2257 times. The basic design came from the Zope "fishbowl process", and
2258 favors practical commercial applications over calendar esoterica. See
2259
2260 http://www.zope.org/Members/fdrake/DateTimeWiki/FrontPage
2261
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00002262- _tkinter now returns Tcl objects, instead of strings. Objects which
2263 have Python equivalents are converted to Python objects, other objects
2264 are wrapped. This can be configured through the wantobjects method,
Martin v. Löwis8c8aa5d2002-11-26 21:39:48 +00002265 or Tkinter.wantobjects.
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00002266
Barry Warsawc27f4bd2002-12-30 21:03:26 +00002267- The PyBSDDB wrapper around the Sleepycat Berkeley DB library has
2268 been added as the package bsddb. The traditional bsddb module is
2269 still available in source code, but not built automatically anymore,
2270 and is now named bsddb185. This supports Berkeley DB versions from
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00002271 3.0 to 4.1. For help converting your databases from the old module (which
2272 probably used an obsolete version of Berkeley DB) to the new module, see
2273 the db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py scripts described in the Tools/Demos
2274 section above.
Martin v. Löwisef546b32002-11-19 08:12:57 +00002275
Martin v. Löwis677bde22002-11-23 22:08:15 +00002276- unicodedata was updated to Unicode 3.2. It supports normalization
2277 and names for Hangul syllables and CJK unified ideographs.
Martin v. Löwis7d41e292002-11-23 12:22:32 +00002278
Neal Norwitz94a83fd2002-11-02 17:46:24 +00002279- resource.getrlimit() now returns longs instead of ints.
2280
Martin v. Löwis080689c2002-10-26 14:42:02 +00002281- readline now dynamically adjusts its input/output stream if
2282 sys.stdin/stdout changes.
2283
Guido van Rossumba602972002-10-01 18:18:58 +00002284- The _tkinter module (and hence Tkinter) has dropped support for
2285 Tcl/Tk 8.0 and 8.1. Only Tcl/Tk versions 8.2, 8.3 and 8.4 are
2286 supported.
2287
Martin v. Löwis658009a2002-09-16 17:26:24 +00002288- cPickle.BadPickleGet is now a class.
2289
Martin v. Löwisa19bfe02002-10-16 18:28:36 +00002290- The time stamps in os.stat_result are floating point numbers
2291 after stat_float_times has been called.
Martin v. Löwis94717ed2002-09-09 14:24:16 +00002292
Neal Norwitzb5673922002-09-05 21:48:07 +00002293- If the size passed to mmap.mmap() is larger than the length of the
2294 file on non-Windows platforms, a ValueError is raised. [SF bug 585792]
2295
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00002296- The xreadlines module is slated for obsolescence.
2297
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00002298- The strptime function in the time module is now always available (a
2299 Python implementation is used when the C library doesn't define it).
2300
Guido van Rossum9562bcf2002-06-14 21:31:18 +00002301- The 'new' module is no longer an extension, but a Python module that
2302 only exists for backwards compatibility. Its contents are no longer
2303 functions but callable type objects.
2304
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00002305- The bsddb.*open functions can now take 'None' as a filename.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00002306 This will create a temporary in-memory bsddb that won't be
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00002307 written to disk.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00002308
Martin v. Löwisb96152c2002-12-31 13:20:15 +00002309- posix.getloadavg, posix.lchown, posix.killpg, posix.mknod, and
2310 posix.getpgid have been added where available.
Martin v. Löwis06a83e92002-04-14 10:19:44 +00002311
Martin v. Löwisf0a46682002-11-03 17:20:12 +00002312- The locale module now exposes the C library's gettext interface. It
2313 also has a new function getpreferredencoding.
Martin v. Löwis2e64c342002-03-27 18:49:02 +00002314
Tim Petersfbf74f22002-03-14 19:06:01 +00002315- A security hole ("double free") was found in zlib-1.1.3, a popular
2316 third party compression library used by some Python modules. The
2317 hole was quickly plugged in zlib-1.1.4, and the Windows build of
2318 Python now ships with zlib-1.1.4.
2319
Martin v. Löwis688357e2002-04-08 21:28:20 +00002320- pwd, grp, and resource return enhanced tuples now, with symbolic
2321 field names.
Martin v. Löwis29001ff2002-03-01 10:47:37 +00002322
Martin v. Löwis99866332002-03-01 10:27:01 +00002323- array.array is now a type object. A new format character
2324 'u' indicates Py_UNICODE arrays. For those, .tounicode and
2325 .fromunicode methods are available. Arrays now support __iadd__
2326 and __imul__.
2327
Neal Norwitze790eae2002-01-01 21:14:12 +00002328- dl now builds on every system that has dlfcn.h. Failure in case
Martin v. Löwis93227272002-01-01 20:18:30 +00002329 of sizeof(int)!=sizeof(long)!=sizeof(void*) is delayed until dl.open
2330 is called.
2331
Skip Montanaro8e790e72002-09-03 13:25:17 +00002332- The sys module acquired a new attribute, api_version, which evaluates
2333 to the value of the PYTHON_API_VERSION macro with which the
2334 interpreter was compiled.
2335
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00002336- Fixed bug #470582: sre module would return a tuple (None, 'a', 'ab')
2337 when applying the regular expression '^((a)c)?(ab)$' on 'ab'. It now
2338 returns (None, None, 'ab'), as expected. Also fixed handling of
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00002339 lastindex/lastgroup match attributes in similar cases. For example,
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00002340 when running the expression r'(a)(b)?b' over 'ab', lastindex must be
2341 1, not 2.
2342
Gustavo Niemeyerc523b042002-11-07 03:28:56 +00002343- Fixed bug #581080: sre scanner was not checking the buffer limit
2344 before increasing the current pointer. This was creating an infinite
2345 loop in the search function, once the pointer exceeded the buffer
2346 limit.
2347
Thomas Heller95cb7e42002-11-07 16:23:55 +00002348- The os.fdopen function now enforces a file mode starting with the
2349 letter 'r', 'w' or 'a', otherwise a ValueError is raised. This fixes
2350 bug #623464.
2351
Greg Ward6c58d462003-01-03 18:02:15 +00002352- The linuxaudiodev module is now deprecated; it is being replaced by
2353 ossaudiodev. The interface has been extended to cover a lot more of
2354 OSS (see www.opensound.com), including most DSP ioctls and the
2355 OSS mixer API. Documentation forthcoming in 2.3a2.
2356
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002357Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002358-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002359
Guido van Rossum747f8062003-01-03 16:33:49 +00002360- imaplib.py now supports SSL (Tino Lange and Piers Lauder).
2361
Just van Rossum5e156ad2002-12-31 16:38:01 +00002362- Freeze's modulefinder.py has been moved to the standard library;
2363 slightly improved so it will issue less false missing submodule
2364 reports (see sf path #643711 for details). Documentation will follow
2365 with Python 2.3a2.
2366
Martin v. Löwis96a60e42002-12-31 13:11:54 +00002367- os.path exposes getctime.
2368
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002369- unittest.py now has two additional methods called assertAlmostEqual()
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002370 and failIfAlmostEqual(). They implement an approximate comparison
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002371 by rounding the difference between the two arguments and comparing
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002372 the result to zero. Approximate comparison is essential for
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002373 unit tests of floating point results.
2374
Raymond Hettingere11b5102002-12-25 16:37:19 +00002375- calendar.py now depends on the new datetime module rather than
2376 the time module. As a result, the range of allowable dates
2377 has been increased.
2378
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00002379- pdb has a new 'j(ump)' command to select the next line to be
2380 executed.
2381
Thomas Heller1b3b49d2002-12-12 19:13:44 +00002382- The distutils created windows installers now can run a
2383 postinstallation script.
2384
Martin v. Löwis4581cfa2002-11-22 08:23:09 +00002385- doctest.testmod can now be called without argument, which means to
2386 test the current module.
2387
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002388- When canceling a server that implemented threading with a keyboard
Martin v. Löwisf86e8ef2002-11-22 08:08:44 +00002389 interrupt, the server would shut down but not terminate (waiting on
2390 client threads). A new member variable, daemon_threads, was added to
2391 the ThreadingMixIn class in SocketServer.py to make it explicit that
2392 this behavior needs to be controlled.
2393
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00002394- A new module, optparse, provides a fancy alternative to getopt for
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00002395 command line parsing. It is a slightly modified version of Greg
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00002396 Ward's Optik package.
2397
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00002398- UserDict.py now defines a DictMixin class which defines all dictionary
2399 methods for classes that already have a minimum mapping interface.
2400 This greatly simplifies writing classes that need to be substitutable
2401 for dictionaries (such as the shelve module).
2402
2403- shelve.py now subclasses from UserDict.DictMixin. Now shelve supports
2404 all dictionary methods. This eases the transition to persistent
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00002405 storage for scripts originally written with dictionaries in mind.
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00002406
Skip Montanaro3bf99e32002-12-08 18:36:24 +00002407- shelve.open and the various classes in shelve.py now accept an optional
2408 binary flag, which defaults to False. If True, the values stored in the
2409 shelf are binary pickles.
2410
Guido van Rossumfda06742002-11-13 16:29:18 +00002411- A new package, logging, implements the logging API defined by PEP
2412 282. The code is written by Vinay Sajip.
2413
Walter Dörwald4dbf1922002-11-06 16:53:44 +00002414- StreamReader, StreamReaderWriter and StreamRecoder in the codecs
2415 modules are iterators now.
2416
Tim Peters9288f952002-11-05 20:38:55 +00002417- gzip.py now handles files exceeding 2GB. Files over 4GB also work
2418 now (provided the OS supports it, and Python is configured with large
2419 file support), but in that case the underlying gzip file format can
2420 record only the least-significant 32 bits of the file size, so that
2421 some tools working with gzipped files may report an incorrect file
2422 size.
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00002423
Martin v. Löwis74b51ac2002-10-26 14:50:45 +00002424- xml.sax.saxutils.unescape has been added, to replace entity references
2425 with their entity value.
2426
Martin v. Löwis77ac4292002-10-15 15:11:13 +00002427- Queue.Queue.{put,get} now support an optional timeout argument.
2428
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00002429- Various features of Tk 8.4 are exposed in Tkinter.py. The multiple
2430 option of tkFileDialog is exposed as function askopenfile{,name}s.
Martin v. Löwis2ec36272002-10-13 10:22:08 +00002431
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00002432- Various configure methods of Tkinter have been stream-lined, so that
2433 tag_configure, image_configure, window_configure now return a
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00002434 dictionary when invoked with no argument.
Martin v. Löwis6ce13152002-10-10 14:36:13 +00002435
Guido van Rossum2b492b62002-10-09 21:40:48 +00002436- Importing the readline module now no longer has the side effect of
2437 calling setlocale(LC_CTYPE, ""). The initial "C" locale, or
2438 whatever locale is explicitly set by the user, is preserved. If you
2439 want repr() of 8-bit strings in your preferred encoding to preserve
2440 all printable characters of that encoding, you have to add the
2441 following code to your $PYTHONSTARTUP file or to your application's
2442 main():
2443
2444 import locale
2445 locale.setlocale(locale.LC_CTYPE, "")
2446
Martin v. Löwise9ce0b02002-10-07 13:23:24 +00002447- shutil.move was added. shutil.copytree now reports errors as an
2448 exception at the end, instead of printing error messages.
2449
Marc-André Lemburg97047e22002-10-04 11:55:21 +00002450- Encoding name normalization was generalized to not only
2451 replace hyphens with underscores, but also all other non-alphanumeric
2452 characters (with the exception of the dot which is used for Python
2453 package names during lookup). The aliases.py mapping was updated
2454 to the new standard.
2455
Walter Dörwald5ccaf8f2002-09-06 16:15:58 +00002456- mimetypes has two new functions: guess_all_extensions() which
2457 returns a list of all known extensions for a mime type, and
2458 add_type() which adds one mapping between a mime type and
2459 an extension to the database.
2460
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00002461- New module: sets, defines the class Set that implements a mutable
2462 set type using the keys of a dict to represent the set. There's
2463 also a class ImmutableSet which is useful when you need sets of sets
2464 or when you need to use sets as dict keys, and a class BaseSet which
Raymond Hettingeref8b9c62002-12-09 08:56:06 +00002465 is the base class of the two.
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00002466
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00002467- Added random.sample(population,k) for random sampling without replacement.
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00002468 Returns a k length list of unique elements chosen from the population.
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00002469
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00002470- random.randrange(-sys.maxint-1, sys.maxint) no longer raises
2471 OverflowError. That is, it now accepts any combination of 'start'
2472 and 'stop' arguments so long as each is in the range of Python's
2473 bounded integers.
2474
Raymond Hettinger40f62172002-12-29 23:03:38 +00002475- Thanks to Raymond Hettinger, random.random() now uses a new core
2476 generator. The Mersenne Twister algorithm is implemented in C,
2477 threadsafe, faster than the previous generator, has an astronomically
2478 large period (2**19937-1), creates random floats to full 53-bit
2479 precision, and may be the most widely tested random number generator
2480 in existence.
2481
2482 The random.jumpahead(n) method has different semantics for the new
2483 generator. Instead of jumping n steps ahead, it uses n and the
2484 existing state to create a new state. This means that jumpahead()
2485 continues to support multi-threaded code needing generators of
2486 non-overlapping sequences. However, it will break code which relies
2487 on jumpahead moving a specific number of steps forward.
2488
2489 The attributes random.whseed and random.__whseed have no meaning for
2490 the new generator. Code using these attributes should switch to a
2491 new class, random.WichmannHill which is provided for backward
2492 compatibility and to make an alternate generator available.
2493
Guido van Rossum4a57c332002-08-02 18:05:20 +00002494- New "algorithms" module: heapq, implements a heap queue. Thanks to
2495 Kevin O'Connor for the code and François Pinard for an entertaining
2496 write-up explaining the theory and practical uses of heaps.
2497
Marc-André Lemburg58e2ff22002-07-12 14:40:04 +00002498- New encoding for the Palm OS character set: palmos.
2499
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00002500- binascii.crc32() and the zipfile module had problems on some 64-bit
2501 platforms. These have been fixed. On a platform with 8-byte C longs,
2502 crc32() now returns a signed-extended 4-byte result, so that its value
2503 as a Python int is equal to the value computed a 32-bit platform.
2504
Martin v. Löwis7d650ca2002-06-30 15:05:00 +00002505- xml.dom.minidom.toxml and toprettyxml now take an optional encoding
2506 argument.
2507
Guido van Rossum9f7549b2002-06-10 21:39:42 +00002508- Some fixes in the copy module: when an object is copied through its
2509 __reduce__ method, there was no check for a __setstate__ method on
2510 the result [SF patch 565085]; deepcopy should treat instances of
2511 custom metaclasses the same way it treats instances of type 'type'
2512 [SF patch 560794].
2513
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00002514- Sockets now support timeout mode. After s.settimeout(T), where T is
2515 a float expressing seconds, subsequent operations raise an exception
2516 if they cannot be completed within T seconds. To disable timeout
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00002517 mode, use s.settimeout(None). There's also a module function,
2518 socket.setdefaulttimeout(T), which sets the default for all sockets
2519 created henceforth.
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00002520
2521- getopt.gnu_getopt was added. This supports GNU-style option
2522 processing, where options can be mixed with non-option arguments.
Martin v. Löwis446a25f2002-06-06 10:58:36 +00002523
Michael W. Hudsonb0dc1a32002-06-04 18:27:35 +00002524- Stop using strings for exceptions. String objects used for
2525 exceptions are now classes deriving from Exception. The objects
2526 changed were: Tkinter.TclError, bdb.BdbQuit, macpath.norm_error,
2527 tabnanny.NannyNag, and xdrlib.Error.
Neal Norwitzb5b5a262002-06-04 17:14:07 +00002528
Walter Dörwald474458d2002-06-04 15:16:29 +00002529- Constants BOM_UTF8, BOM_UTF16, BOM_UTF16_LE, BOM_UTF16_BE,
2530 BOM_UTF32, BOM_UTF32_LE and BOM_UTF32_BE that represent the Byte
2531 Order Mark in UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 encodings for little and
2532 big endian systems were added to the codecs module. The old names
2533 BOM32_* and BOM64_* were off by a factor of 2.
2534
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00002535- Added conversion functions math.degrees() and math.radians().
Raymond Hettinger87f59ee2002-05-13 04:17:32 +00002536
Raymond Hettinger866964c2002-12-14 19:51:34 +00002537- math.log() now takes an optional argument: math.log(x[, base]).
2538
Raymond Hettinger9b1df1d2002-05-12 06:07:21 +00002539- ftplib.retrlines() now tests for callback is None rather than testing
2540 for False. Was causing an error when given a callback object which
2541 was callable but also returned len() as zero. The change may
2542 create new breakage if the caller relied on the undocumented behavior
2543 and called with callback set to [] or some other False value not
2544 identical to None.
2545
Tim Peters46c04e12002-05-05 20:40:00 +00002546- random.gauss() uses a piece of hidden state used by nothing else,
2547 and the .seed() and .whseed() methods failed to reset it. In other
2548 words, setting the seed didn't completely determine the sequence of
2549 results produced by random.gauss(). It does now. Programs repeatedly
2550 mixing calls to a seed method with calls to gauss() may see different
2551 results now.
2552
Fred Drake7f781c92002-05-01 20:33:53 +00002553- The pickle.Pickler class grew a clear_memo() method to mimic that
2554 provided by cPickle.Pickler.
2555
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00002556- difflib's SequenceMatcher class now does a dynamic analysis of
2557 which elements are so frequent as to constitute noise. For
2558 comparing files as sequences of lines, this generally works better
2559 than the IS_LINE_JUNK function, and function ndiff's linejunk
2560 argument defaults to None now as a result. A happy benefit is
2561 that SequenceMatcher may run much faster now when applied
2562 to large files with many duplicate lines (for example, C program
2563 text with lots of repeated "}" and "return NULL;" lines).
2564
Guido van Rossum256705b2002-04-23 13:29:43 +00002565- New Text.dump() method in Tkinter module.
2566
Marc-André Lemburg1ec71ea2002-04-17 20:33:40 +00002567- New distutils commands for building packagers were added to
2568 support pkgtool on Solaris and swinstall on HP-UX.
2569
2570- distutils now has a new abstract binary packager base class
2571 command/bdist_packager, which simplifies writing packagers.
2572 This will hopefully provide the missing bits to encourage
2573 people to submit more packagers, e.g. for Debian, FreeBSD
2574 and other systems.
2575
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00002576- The UTF-16, -LE and -BE stream readers now raise a
2577 NotImplementedError for all calls to .readline(). Previously, they
2578 used to just produce garbage or fail with an encoding error --
2579 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 +00002580 work well with these.
2581
Martin v. Löwis5c137c22002-03-18 12:44:08 +00002582- compileall now supports quiet operation.
2583
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002584- The BaseHTTPServer now implements optional HTTP/1.1 persistent
Martin v. Löwis587c98c2002-03-17 18:37:22 +00002585 connections.
2586
Marc-André Lemburga5d2b4c2002-02-16 18:23:30 +00002587- socket module: the SSL support was broken out of the main
2588 _socket module C helper and placed into a new _ssl helper
2589 which now gets imported by socket.py if available and working.
2590
Marc-André Lemburg37aa5802002-02-10 21:42:47 +00002591- encodings package: added aliases for all supported IANA character
2592 sets
2593
Guido van Rossum606fe4e2001-12-28 20:57:14 +00002594- ftplib: to safeguard the user's privacy, anonymous login will use
2595 "anonymous@" as default password, rather than the real user and host
2596 name.
2597
Fred Drake36736122002-01-10 13:50:31 +00002598- webbrowser: tightened up the command passed to os.system() so that
2599 arbitrary shell code can't be executed because a bogus URL was
2600 passed in.
2601
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00002602- gettext.translation has an optional fallback argument, and
Martin v. Löwisa55ffae2002-01-11 06:58:49 +00002603 gettext.find an optional all argument. Translations will now fallback
Martin v. Löwisd8996052002-11-21 21:45:32 +00002604 on a per-message basis. The module supports plural forms, by means
2605 of gettext.[d]ngettext and Translation.[u]ngettext.
Martin v. Löwis1be64192002-01-11 06:33:28 +00002606
Martin v. Löwis9668b932002-01-12 11:27:42 +00002607- distutils bdist commands now offer a --skip-build option.
2608
Walter Dörwaldb25c2b02002-03-21 10:38:40 +00002609- warnings.warn now accepts a Warning instance as first argument.
2610
Fred Drakefed7e852002-04-04 19:36:15 +00002611- The xml.sax.expatreader.ExpatParser class will no longer create
2612 circular references by using itself as the locator that gets passed
2613 to the content handler implementation. [SF bug #535474]
2614
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00002615- The email.Parser.Parser class now properly parses strings regardless
2616 of their line endings, which can be any of \r, \n, or \r\n (CR, LF,
2617 or CRLF). Also, the Header class's constructor default arguments
2618 has changed slightly so that an explicit maxlinelen value is always
Barry Warsaw497e5c42002-12-30 19:27:08 +00002619 honored, and so unicode conversion error handling can be specified.
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00002620
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002621- distutils' build_ext command now links C++ extensions with the C++
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00002622 compiler available in the Makefile or CXX environment variable, if
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002623 running under \*nix.
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00002624
2625- New module bz2: provides a comprehensive interface for the bz2 compression
2626 library. It implements a complete file interface, one-shot (de)compression
2627 functions, and types for sequential (de)compression.
2628
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002629- New pdb command 'pp' which is like 'p' except that it pretty-prints
Barry Warsaw5d8d6182002-11-05 22:41:33 +00002630 the value of its expression argument.
2631
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00002632- Now bdist_rpm distutils command understands a verify_script option in
2633 the config file, including the contents of the referred filename in
2634 the "%verifyscript" section of the rpm spec file.
2635
Gustavo Niemeyer1456fde2002-11-25 17:25:04 +00002636- Fixed bug #495695: webbrowser module would run graphic browsers in a
2637 unix environment even if DISPLAY was not set. Also, support for
2638 skipstone browser was included.
2639
Gustavo Niemeyerd5ae01a2002-12-16 13:11:57 +00002640- Fixed bug #636769: rexec would run unallowed code if subclasses of
2641 strings were used as parameters for certain functions.
2642
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002643Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002644-----------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002645
Martin v. Löwis0d1fdea2002-11-22 08:36:54 +00002646- pygettext.py now supports globbing on Windows, and accepts module
2647 names in addition to accepting file names.
2648
Guido van Rossum923e4ef2002-09-17 20:58:59 +00002649- The SGI demos (Demo/sgi) have been removed. Nobody thought they
2650 were interesting any more. (The SGI library modules and extensions
2651 are still there; it is believed that at least some of these are
2652 still used and useful.)
2653
Fred Drake40813b12002-08-05 15:24:19 +00002654- IDLE supports the new encoding declarations (PEP 263); it can also
2655 deal with legacy 8-bit files if they use the locale's encoding. It
2656 allows non-ASCII strings in the interactive shell and executes them
2657 in the locale's encoding.
Martin v. Löwis98ce7b72002-08-05 15:11:26 +00002658
Marc-André Lemburg46260092002-04-04 16:17:11 +00002659- freeze.py now produces binaries which can import shared modules,
2660 unlike before when this failed due to missing symbol exports in
2661 the generated binary.
2662
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002663Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002664-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002665
Martin v. Löwisdc461752002-11-06 21:59:33 +00002666- On Unix, IDLE is now installed automatically.
2667
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00002668- The fpectl module is not built by default; it's dangerous or useless
2669 except in the hands of experts.
2670
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00002671- The public Python C API will generally be declared using PyAPI_FUNC
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00002672 and PyAPI_DATA macros, while Python extension module init functions
2673 will be declared with PyMODINIT_FUNC. DL_EXPORT/DL_IMPORT macros
2674 are deprecated.
Neal Norwitz1389f3e2002-07-22 13:21:10 +00002675
Tim Petersc6a3ff62002-07-08 22:11:52 +00002676- A bug was fixed that could cause COUNT_ALLOCS builds to segfault, or
2677 get into infinite loops, when a new-style class got garbage-collected.
2678 Unfortunately, to avoid this, the way COUNT_ALLOCS works requires
2679 that new-style classes be immortal in COUNT_ALLOCS builds. Note that
2680 COUNT_ALLOCS is not enabled by default, in either release or debug
2681 builds, and that new-style classes are immortal only in COUNT_ALLOCS
2682 builds.
2683
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00002684- Compiling out the cyclic garbage collector is no longer an option.
2685 The old symbol WITH_CYCLE_GC is now ignored, and Python.h arranges
2686 that it's always defined (for the benefit of any extension modules
2687 that may be conditionalizing on it). A bonus is that any extension
2688 type participating in cyclic gc can choose to participate in the
2689 Py_TRASHCAN mechanism now too; in the absence of cyclic gc, this used
2690 to require editing the core to teach the trashcan mechanism about the
2691 new type.
2692
Martin v. Löwis0cec0ff2002-07-28 16:33:45 +00002693- According to Annex F of the current C standard,
Tim Peters1de41bf2002-07-03 03:31:20 +00002694
2695 The Standard C macro HUGE_VAL and its float and long double analogs,
2696 HUGE_VALF and HUGE_VALL, expand to expressions whose values are
2697 positive infinities.
2698
2699 Python only uses the double HUGE_VAL, and only to #define its own symbol
2700 Py_HUGE_VAL. Some platforms have incorrect definitions for HUGE_VAL.
2701 pyport.h used to try to worm around that, but the workarounds triggered
2702 other bugs on other platforms, so we gave up. If your platform defines
2703 HUGE_VAL incorrectly, you'll need to #define Py_HUGE_VAL to something
2704 that works on your platform. The only instance of this I'm sure about
2705 is on an unknown subset of Cray systems, described here:
2706
2707 http://www.cray.com/swpubs/manuals/SN-2194_2.0/html-SN-2194_2.0/x3138.htm
2708
2709 Presumably 2.3a1 breaks such systems. If anyone uses such a system, help!
2710
Martin v. Löwisa3fb4f72002-06-09 13:33:54 +00002711- The configure option --without-doc-strings can be used to remove the
2712 doc strings from the builtin functions and modules; this reduces the
2713 size of the executable.
2714
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00002715- The universal newlines option (PEP 278) is on by default. On Unix
2716 it can be disabled by passing --without-universal-newlines to the
2717 configure script. On other platforms, remove
2718 WITH_UNIVERSAL_NEWLINES from pyconfig.h.
Tim Peters639295f2002-04-21 07:30:30 +00002719
Martin v. Löwis1142de32002-03-29 16:28:31 +00002720- On Unix, a shared libpython2.3.so can be created with --enable-shared.
2721
Tim Peters8deda702002-03-30 10:06:07 +00002722- All uses of the CACHE_HASH, INTERN_STRINGS, and DONT_SHARE_SHORT_STRINGS
2723 preprocessor symbols were eliminated. The internal decisions they
2724 controlled stopped being experimental long ago.
Tim Peters1f7df352002-03-29 03:29:08 +00002725
Fred Drake7d28b732002-05-02 21:17:00 +00002726- The tools used to build the documentation now work under Cygwin as
2727 well as Unix.
2728
Skip Montanaro57454e52002-06-14 20:30:31 +00002729- The bsddb and dbm module builds have been changed to try and avoid version
2730 skew problems and disable linkage with Berkeley DB 1.85 unless the
2731 installer knows what s/he's doing. See the section on building these
2732 modules in the README file for details.
2733
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002734C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002735-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002736
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00002737- PyNumber_Check() now returns true for string and unicode objects.
2738 This is a result of these types having a partially defined
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00002739 tp_as_number slot. (This is not a feature, but an indication that
Walter Dörwalda1a61f92002-11-19 21:20:25 +00002740 PyNumber_Check() is not very useful to determine numeric behavior.
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00002741 It may be deprecated.)
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00002742
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00002743- The string object's layout has changed: the pointer member
2744 ob_sinterned has been replaced by an int member ob_sstate. On some
2745 platforms (e.g. most 64-bit systems) this may change the offset of
2746 the ob_sval member, so as a precaution the API_VERSION has been
2747 incremented. The apparently unused feature of "indirect interned
2748 strings", supported by the ob_sinterned member, is gone. Interned
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002749 strings are now usually mortal; there is a new API,
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00002750 PyString_InternImmortal() that creates immortal interned strings.
2751 (The ob_sstate member can only take three values; however, while
2752 making it a char saves a few bytes per string object on average, in
2753 it also slowed things down a bit because ob_sval was no longer
2754 aligned.)
2755
Guido van Rossumfdb86482002-08-14 21:20:32 +00002756- The Py_InitModule*() functions now accept NULL for the 'methods'
2757 argument. Modules without global functions are becoming more common
2758 now that factories can be types rather than functions.
2759
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00002760- New C API PyUnicode_FromOrdinal() which exposes unichr() at C
2761 level.
2762
Thomas Heller085358a2002-07-29 14:27:41 +00002763- New functions PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErr() and
2764 PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErrWithFilename(). Similar to
2765 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErrWithFilename() and
2766 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErr(), but they allow to specify
2767 the exception type to raise. Available on Windows.
2768
Tim Peters7c321a82002-07-09 02:57:01 +00002769- Py_FatalError() is now declared as taking a const char* argument. It
2770 was previously declared without const. This should not affect working
2771 code.
2772
Martin v. Löwis01f94bd2002-05-08 08:44:21 +00002773- Added new macro PySequence_ITEM(o, i) that directly calls
2774 sq_item without rechecking that o is a sequence and without
2775 adjusting for negative indices.
2776
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00002777- PyRange_New() now raises ValueError if the fourth argument is not 1.
2778 This is part of the removal of deprecated features of the xrange
2779 object.
2780
Guido van Rossum517c7d42002-04-26 02:49:14 +00002781- PyNumber_Coerce() and PyNumber_CoerceEx() now also invoke the type's
2782 coercion if both arguments have the same type but this type has the
2783 CHECKTYPES flag set. This is to better support proxies.
2784
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00002785- The type of tp_free has been changed from "``void (*)(PyObject *)``" to
2786 "``void (*)(void *)``".
Neil Schemenauer9344b142002-04-12 23:00:08 +00002787
2788- PyObject_Del, PyObject_GC_Del are now functions instead of macros.
2789
Guido van Rossum0986d822002-04-08 01:38:42 +00002790- A type can now inherit its metatype from its base type. Previously,
2791 when PyType_Ready() was called, if ob_type was found to be NULL, it
2792 was always set to &PyType_Type; now it is set to base->ob_type,
2793 where base is tp_base, defaulting to &PyObject_Type.
2794
2795- PyType_Ready() accidentally did not inherit tp_is_gc; now it does.
2796
Neil Schemenauerc9abc1d2002-05-08 14:14:41 +00002797- The PyCore_* family of APIs have been removed.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00002798
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002799- The "u#" parser marker will now pass through Unicode objects as-is
Marc-André Lemburg3e3eacb2002-01-09 16:21:27 +00002800 without going through the buffer API.
2801
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002802- The enumerators of cmp_op have been renamed to use the prefix ``PyCmp_``.
Martin v. Löwis7198a522002-01-01 19:59:11 +00002803
Tim Peters10a3bb52001-12-25 19:07:38 +00002804- An old #define of ANY as void has been removed from pyport.h. This
2805 hasn't been used since Python's pre-ANSI days, and the #define has
2806 been marked as obsolete since then. SF bug 495548 says it created
2807 conflicts with other packages, so keeping it around wasn't harmless.
2808
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002809- Because Python's magic number scheme broke on January 1st, we decided
2810 to stop Python development. Thanks for all the fish!
2811
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00002812- Some of us don't like fish, so we changed Python's magic number
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00002813 scheme to a new one. See Python/import.c for details.
2814
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002815New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002816-------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002817
Martin v. Löwis79acb9e2002-12-06 12:48:53 +00002818- OpenVMS is now supported.
2819
Martin v. Löwisf90ae202002-06-11 06:22:31 +00002820- AtheOS is now supported.
2821
Andrew MacIntyre161ad0e2002-08-04 07:25:58 +00002822- the EMX runtime environment on OS/2 is now supported.
2823
Martin v. Löwisa6e97582002-01-01 18:41:33 +00002824- GNU/Hurd is now supported.
2825
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002826Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002827-----
2828
Fred Drake4dd0f7e2002-11-26 21:44:56 +00002829- The regrtest.py script's -u option now provides a way to say "allow
2830 all resources except this one." For example, to allow everything
2831 except bsddb, give the option '-uall,-bsddb'.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002832
2833Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002834-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002835
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00002836- The Windows distribution now ships with version 4.0.14 of the
2837 Sleepycat Berkeley database library. This should be a huge
2838 improvement over the previous Berkeley DB 1.85, which had many
2839 bugs.
2840 XXX What are the licensing issues here?
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002841 XXX If a user has a database created with a previous version of
Tim Peters84c7a3f2002-11-23 18:48:06 +00002842 XXX Python, what must they do to convert it?
2843 XXX I'm still not sure how to link this thing (see PCbuild/readme.txt).
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00002844 XXX The version # is likely to change before 2.3a1.
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00002845
2846- The Windows distribution now ships with a Secure Sockets Library (SLL)
Mark Hammondc3de0082002-12-03 06:16:08 +00002847 module (_ssl.pyd)
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00002848
Tim Peters857fb4c2002-11-14 23:31:58 +00002849- The Windows distribution now ships with Tcl/Tk version 8.4.1 (it
2850 previously shipped with Tcl/Tk 8.3.2).
2851
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00002852- When Python is built under a Microsoft compiler, sys.version now
2853 includes the compiler version number (_MSC_VER). For example, under
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002854 MSVC 6, sys.version contains the substring "MSC v.1200 ". 1200 is
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00002855 the value of _MSC_VER under MSVC 6.
2856
Tim Peters08e72952002-04-16 20:48:01 +00002857- Sometimes the uninstall executable (UNWISE.EXE) vanishes. One cause
2858 of that has been fixed in the installer (disabled Wise's "delete in-
2859 use files" uninstall option).
2860
Guido van Rossum181e41a2002-04-06 00:23:25 +00002861- Fixed a bug in urllib's proxy handling in Windows. [SF bug #503031]
2862
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00002863- The installer now installs Start menu shortcuts under (the local
2864 equivalent of) "All Users" when doing an Admin install.
2865
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00002866- file.truncate([newsize]) now works on Windows for all newsize values.
2867 It used to fail if newsize didn't fit in 32 bits, reflecting a
2868 limitation of MS _chsize (which is no longer used).
2869
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00002870- os.waitpid() is now implemented for Windows, and can be used to block
2871 until a specified process exits. This is similar to, but not exactly
2872 the same as, os.waitpid() on POSIX systems. If you're waiting for
2873 a specific process whose pid was obtained from one of the spawn()
2874 functions, the same Python os.waitpid() code works across platforms.
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00002875 See the docs for details. The docs were changed to clarify that
2876 spawn functions return, and waitpid requires, a process handle on
2877 Windows (not the same thing as a Windows process id).
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00002878
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00002879- New tempfile.TemporaryFile implementation for Windows: this doesn't
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002880 need a TemporaryFileWrapper wrapper anymore, and should be immune
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00002881 to a nasty problem: before 2.3, if you got a temp file on Windows, it
2882 got wrapped in an object whose close() method first closed the
2883 underlying file, then deleted the file. This usually worked fine.
2884 However, the spawn family of functions on Windows create (at a low C
2885 level) the same set of open files in the spawned process Q as were
2886 open in the spawning process P. If a temp file f was among them, then
2887 doing f.close() in P first closed P's C-level file handle on f, but Q's
2888 C-level file handle on f remained open, so the attempt in P to delete f
2889 blew up with a "Permission denied" error (Windows doesn't allow
2890 deleting open files). This was surprising, subtle, and difficult to
2891 work around.
2892
2893- The os module now exports all the symbolic constants usable with the
2894 low-level os.open() on Windows: the new constants in 2.3 are
2895 O_NOINHERIT, O_SHORT_LIVED, O_TEMPORARY, O_RANDOM and O_SEQUENTIAL.
2896 The others were also available in 2.2: O_APPEND, O_BINARY, O_CREAT,
2897 O_EXCL, O_RDONLY, O_RDWR, O_TEXT, O_TRUNC and O_WRONLY. Contrary
2898 to Microsoft docs, O_SHORT_LIVED does not seem to imply O_TEMPORARY
2899 (so specify both if you want both; note that neither is useful unless
2900 specified with O_CREAT too).
2901
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002902Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002903----
2904
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002905- Mac/Relnotes is gone, the release notes are now here.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002906
Just van Rossume1ebd802003-02-10 10:06:18 +00002907- Python (the OSX-only, unix-based version, not the OS9-compatible CFM
2908 version) now fully supports unicode strings as arguments to various file
2909 system calls, eg. open(), file(), os.stat() and os.listdir().
2910
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002911- The current naming convention for Python on the Macintosh is that MacPython
2912 refers to the unix-based OSX-only version, and MacPython-OS9 refers to the
2913 CFM-based version that runs on both OS9 and OSX.
2914
2915- All MacPython-OS9 functionality is now available in an OSX unix build,
2916 including the Carbon modules, the IDE, OSA support, etc. A lot of this
2917 will only work correctly in a framework build, though, because you cannot
2918 talk to the window manager unless your application is run from a .app
2919 bundle. There is a command line tool "pythonw" that runs your script
2920 with an interpreter living in such a .app bundle, this interpreter should
2921 be used to run any Python script using the window manager (including
2922 Tkinter or wxPython scripts).
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00002923
Jack Jansen8bb80db2002-12-30 22:42:43 +00002924- Most of Mac/Lib has moved to Lib/plat-mac, which is again used both in
2925 MacPython-OSX and MacPython-OS9. The only modules remaining in Mac/Lib
2926 are specifically for MacPython-OS9 (CFM support, preference resources, etc).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002927
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002928- A new utility PythonLauncher will start a Python interpreter when a .py or
2929 .pyw script is double-clicked in the Finder. By default .py scripts are
2930 run with a normal Python interpreter in a Terminal window and .pyw
2931 files are run with a window-aware pythonw interpreter without a Terminal
2932 window, but all this can be customized.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002933
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002934- MacPython-OS9 is now Carbon-only, so it runs on Mac OS 9 or Mac OS X and
2935 possibly on Mac OS 8.6 with the right CarbonLib installed, but not on earlier
2936 releases.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002937
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002938- Many tools such as BuildApplet.py and gensuitemodule.py now support a command
2939 line interface too.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002940
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002941- All the Carbon classes are now PEP253 compliant, meaning that you can
2942 subclass them from Python. Most of the attributes have gone, you should
2943 now use the accessor function call API, which is also what Apple's
2944 documentation uses. Some attributes such as grafport.visRgn are still
2945 available for convenience.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002946
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002947- New Carbon modules File (implementing the APIs in Files.h and Aliases.h)
2948 and Folder (APIs from Folders.h). The old macfs builtin module is
2949 gone, and replaced by a Python wrapper around the new modules.
2950
2951- Pathname handling should now be fully consistent: MacPython-OSX always uses
2952 unix pathnames and MacPython-OS9 always uses colon-separated Mac pathnames
2953 (also when running on Mac OS X).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002954
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002955- New Carbon modules Help and AH give access to the Carbon Help Manager.
2956 There are hooks in the IDE to allow accessing the Python documentation
2957 (and Apple's Carbon and Cocoa documentation) through the Help Viewer.
2958 See Mac/OSX/README for converting the Python documentation to a
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002959 Help Viewer compatible form and installing it.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002960
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002961- OSA support has been redesigned and the generated Python classes now
2962 mirror the inheritance defined by the underlying OSA classes.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002963
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002964- MacPython no longer maps both \r and \n to \n on input for any text file.
2965 This feature has been replaced by universal newline support (PEP278).
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00002966
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00002967- The default encoding for Python sourcefiles in MacPython-OS9 is no longer
Guido van Rossum16c85172003-02-20 01:52:48 +00002968 mac-roman (or whatever your local Mac encoding was) but "ascii", like on
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00002969 other platforms. If you really need sourcefiles with Mac characters in them
2970 you can change this in site.py.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002971
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002972
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002973What's New in Python 2.2 final?
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002974===============================
2975
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002976*Release date: 21-Dec-2001*
2977
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002978Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002979--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002980
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002981- pickle.py, cPickle: allow pickling instances of new-style classes
2982 with a custom metaclass.
2983
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002984Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002985-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002986
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002987- weakref proxy object: when comparing, unwrap both arguments if both
2988 are proxies.
2989
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002990Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002991-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002992
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002993- binascii.b2a_base64(): fix a potential buffer overrun when encoding
2994 very short strings.
2995
2996- cPickle: the obscure "fast" mode was suspected of causing stack
2997 overflows on the Mac. Hopefully fixed this by setting the recursion
2998 limit much smaller. If the limit is too low (it only affects
2999 performance), you can change it by defining PY_CPICKLE_FAST_LIMIT
3000 when compiling cPickle.c (or in pyconfig.h).
3001
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003002Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003003-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003004
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003005- dumbdbm.py: fixed a dumb old bug (the file didn't get synched at
3006 close or delete time).
3007
3008- rfc822.py: fixed a bug where the address '<>' was converted to None
3009 instead of an empty string (also fixes the email.Utils module).
3010
3011- xmlrpclib.py: version 1.0.0; uses precision for doubles.
3012
3013- test suite: the pickle and cPickle tests were not executing any code
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003014 when run from the standard regression test.
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003015
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003016Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003017-----------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003018
3019Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003020-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003021
3022C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003023-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003024
3025New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003026-------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003027
3028Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003029-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003030
3031Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003032-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003033
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003034- distutils package: fixed broken Windows installers (bdist_wininst).
3035
3036- tempfile.py: prevent mysterious warnings when TemporaryFileWrapper
3037 instances are deleted at process exit time.
3038
3039- socket.py: prevent mysterious warnings when socket instances are
3040 deleted at process exit time.
3041
3042- posixmodule.c: fix a Windows crash with stat() of a filename ending
3043 in backslash.
3044
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003045Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003046----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003047
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003048- The Carbon toolbox modules have been upgraded to Universal Headers
3049 3.4, and experimental CoreGraphics and CarbonEvents modules have
3050 been added. All only for framework-enabled MacOSX.
3051
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003052
Tim Peters6272dfd2001-12-13 19:34:00 +00003053What's New in Python 2.2c1?
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003054===========================
3055
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003056*Release date: 14-Dec-2001*
3057
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003058Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003059--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003060
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003061- Guido's tutorial introduction to the new type/class features has
3062 been extensively updated. See
3063
3064 http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html
3065
3066 That remains the primary documentation in this area.
3067
Guido van Rossum33bab012001-12-05 22:45:48 +00003068- Fixed a leak: instance variables declared with __slots__ were never
3069 deleted!
3070
Guido van Rossum4b800852001-12-03 00:54:52 +00003071- The "delete attribute" method of descriptor objects is called
3072 __delete__, not __del__. In previous releases, it was mistakenly
3073 called __del__, which created an unfortunate overloading condition
3074 with finalizers. (The "get attribute" and "set attribute" methods
3075 are still called __get__ and __set__, respectively.)
3076
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00003077- Some subtle issues with the super built-in were fixed:
3078
3079 (a) When super itself is subclassed, its __get__ method would still
3080 return an instance of the base class (i.e., of super).
3081
3082 (b) super(C, C()).__class__ would return C rather than super. This
3083 is confusing. To fix this, I decided to change the semantics of
3084 super so that it only applies to code attributes, not to data
3085 attributes. After all, overriding data attributes is not
3086 supported anyway.
3087
3088 (c) The __get__ method didn't check whether the argument was an
3089 instance of the type used in creation of the super instance.
3090
Guido van Rossumcd7b7d62001-12-04 21:02:07 +00003091- Previously, hash() of an instance of a subclass of a mutable type
3092 (list or dictionary) would return some value, rather than raising
3093 TypeError. This has been fixed. Also, directly calling
3094 dict.__hash__ and list.__hash__ now raises the same TypeError
3095 (previously, these were the same as object.__hash__).
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00003096
Guido van Rossumd331cb52001-12-05 19:46:42 +00003097- New-style objects now support deleting their __dict__. This is for
3098 all intents and purposes equivalent to assigning a brand new empty
3099 dictionary, but saves space if the object is not used further.
3100
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003101Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003102-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003103
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00003104- -Qnew now works as documented in PEP 238: when -Qnew is passed on
3105 the command line, all occurrences of "/" use true division instead
3106 of classic division. See the PEP for details. Note that "all"
3107 means all instances in library and 3rd-party modules, as well as in
3108 your own code. As the PEP says, -Qnew is intended for use only in
3109 educational environments with control over the libraries in use.
Tim Petersbf72fe22001-12-11 21:43:14 +00003110 Note that test_coercion.py in the standard Python test suite fails
3111 under -Qnew; this is expected, and won't be repaired until true
3112 division becomes the default (in the meantime, test_coercion is
3113 testing the current rules).
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00003114
Fred Drake6c01e252001-12-14 17:08:12 +00003115- complex() now only allows the first argument to be a string
3116 argument, and raises TypeError if either the second arg is a string
3117 or if the second arg is specified when the first is a string.
3118
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003119Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003120-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003121
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00003122- gc.get_referents was renamed to gc.get_referrers.
3123
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003124Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003125-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003126
Tim Peters25059d32001-12-07 20:35:43 +00003127- Functions in the os.spawn() family now release the global interpreter
3128 lock around calling the platform spawn. They should always have done
3129 this, but did not before 2.2c1. Multithreaded programs calling
3130 an os.spawn function with P_WAIT will no longer block all Python threads
3131 until the spawned program completes. It's possible that some programs
3132 relies on blocking, although more likely by accident than by design.
3133
Martin v. Löwis3a89b2b2001-11-25 14:35:58 +00003134- webbrowser defaults to netscape.exe on OS/2 now.
3135
Martin v. Löwis652e1912001-11-25 14:50:56 +00003136- Tix.ResizeHandle exposes detach_widget, hide, and show.
3137
Martin v. Löwis714d2e22001-12-02 12:26:03 +00003138- The charset alias windows_1252 has been added.
3139
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003140- types.StringTypes is a tuple containing the defined string types;
3141 usually this will be (str, unicode), but if Python was compiled
3142 without Unicode support it will be just (str,).
3143
3144- The pulldom and minidom modules were synchronized to PyXML.
3145
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003146Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003147-----------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003148
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003149- A new script called Tools/scripts/google.py was added, which fires
3150 off a search on Google.
3151
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003152Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003153-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003154
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003155- Note that release builds of Python should arrange to define the
3156 preprocessor symbol NDEBUG on the command line (or equivalent).
3157 In the 2.2 pre-release series we tried to define this by magic in
3158 Python.h instead, but it proved to cause problems for extension
3159 authors. The Unix, Windows and Mac builds now all define NDEBUG in
3160 release builds via cmdline (or equivalent) instead. Ports to
3161 other platforms should do likewise.
3162
Jack Jansen1999ef42001-12-06 21:47:20 +00003163- It is no longer necessary to use --with-suffix when building on a
3164 case-insensitive file system (such as Mac OS X HFS+). In the build
3165 directory an extension is used, but not in the installed python.
3166
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003167C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003168-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003169
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00003170- New function PyDict_MergeFromSeq2() exposes the builtin dict
3171 constructor's logic for updating a dictionary from an iterable object
3172 producing key-value pairs.
3173
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00003174- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() requires that the number of entries in
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00003175 the keyword list equal the number of argument specifiers. This
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00003176 wasn't checked correctly, and PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords could even
3177 dump core in some bad cases. This has been repaired. As a result,
3178 PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords may raise RuntimeError in bad cases that
3179 previously went unchallenged.
3180
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003181New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003182-------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003183
3184Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003185-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003186
3187Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003188-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003189
3190Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003191----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003192
Jack Jansenffa260f2001-12-06 21:14:00 +00003193- In unix-Python on Mac OS X (and darwin) sys.platform is now "darwin",
3194 without any trailing digits.
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003195
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003196- Changed logic for finding python home in Mac OS X framework Pythons.
3197 Now sys.executable points to the executable again, in stead of to
3198 the shared library. The latter is used only for locating the python
3199 home.
3200
3201
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003202What's New in Python 2.2b2?
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003203===========================
3204
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003205*Release date: 16-Nov-2001*
3206
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003207Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003208--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003209
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00003210- Multiple inheritance mixing new-style and classic classes in the
3211 list of base classes is now allowed, so this works now:
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00003212
3213 class Classic: pass
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00003214 class Mixed(Classic, object): pass
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00003215
3216 The MRO (method resolution order) for each base class is respected
3217 according to its kind, but the MRO for the derived class is computed
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003218 using new-style MRO rules if any base class is a new-style class.
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00003219 This needs to be documented.
3220
Tim Petersa427a2b2001-10-29 22:25:45 +00003221- The new builtin dictionary() constructor, and dictionary type, have
3222 been renamed to dict. This reflects a decade of common usage.
3223
Guido van Rossum3fc08d22001-11-15 20:33:10 +00003224- dict() now accepts an iterable object producing 2-sequences. For
3225 example, dict(d.items()) == d for any dictionary d. The argument,
3226 and the elements of the argument, can be any iterable objects.
3227
Guido van Rossum7ad2d1e2001-10-29 22:11:00 +00003228- New-style classes can now have a __del__ method, which is called
3229 when the instance is deleted (just like for classic classes).
3230
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003231- Assignment to object.__dict__ is now possible, for objects that are
3232 instances of new-style classes that have a __dict__ (unless the base
3233 class forbids it).
3234
Guido van Rossumc8e56452001-10-22 00:43:43 +00003235- Methods of built-in types now properly check for keyword arguments
3236 (formerly these were silently ignored). The only built-in methods
3237 that take keyword arguments are __call__, __init__ and __new__.
3238
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00003239- The socket function has been converted to a type; see below.
3240
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003241Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003242-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003243
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00003244- Assignment to __debug__ raises SyntaxError at compile-time. This
3245 was promised when 2.1c1 was released as "What's New in Python 2.1c1"
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003246 (see below) says.
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00003247
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003248- Clarified the error messages for unsupported operands to an operator
3249 (like 1 + '').
3250
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003251Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003252-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003253
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00003254- mmap has a new keyword argument, "access", allowing a uniform way for
3255 both Windows and Unix users to create read-only, write-through and
3256 copy-on-write memory mappings. This was previously possible only on
3257 Unix. A new keyword argument was required to support this in a
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003258 uniform way because the mmap() signatures had diverged across
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00003259 platforms. Thanks to Jay T Miller for repairing this!
3260
Tim Peters169ded02001-11-03 19:57:21 +00003261- By default, the gc.garbage list now contains only those instances in
3262 unreachable cycles that have __del__ methods; in 2.1 it contained all
3263 instances in unreachable cycles. "Instances" here has been generalized
3264 to include instances of both new-style and old-style classes.
3265
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003266- The socket module defines a new method for socket objects,
3267 sendall(). This is like send() but may make multiple calls to
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00003268 send() until all data has been sent. Also, the socket function has
3269 been converted to a subclassable type, like list and tuple (etc.)
3270 before it; socket and SocketType are now the same thing.
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003271
3272- Various bugfixes to the curses module. There is now a test suite
3273 for the curses module (you have to run it manually).
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00003274
Guido van Rossum692adf12001-10-30 03:03:03 +00003275- binascii.b2a_base64 no longer places an arbitrary restriction of 57
3276 bytes on its input.
3277
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003278Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003279-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003280
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00003281- tkFileDialog exposes a Directory class and askdirectory
Martin v. Löwis25ee87c2001-11-07 22:38:08 +00003282 convenience function.
3283
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00003284- Symbolic group names in regular expressions must be unique. For
3285 example, the regexp r'(?P<abc>)(?P<abc>)' is not allowed, because a
3286 single name can't mean both "group 1" and "group 2" simultaneously.
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003287 Python 2.2 detects this error at regexp compilation time;
3288 previously, the error went undetected, and results were
3289 unpredictable. Also in sre, the pattern.split(), pattern.sub(), and
3290 pattern.subn() methods have been rewritten in C. Also, an
3291 experimental function/method finditer() has been added, which works
3292 like findall() but returns an iterator.
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00003293
Martin v. Löwisb7b32602001-11-02 23:48:20 +00003294- Tix exposes more commands through the classes DirSelectBox,
3295 DirSelectDialog, ListNoteBook, Meter, CheckList, and the
3296 methods tix_addbitmapdir, tix_cget, tix_configure, tix_filedialog,
3297 tix_getbitmap, tix_getimage, tix_option_get, and tix_resetoptions.
3298
Tim Peters98791af2001-10-23 01:59:54 +00003299- Traceback objects are now scanned by cyclic garbage collection, so
3300 cycles created by casual use of sys.exc_info() no longer cause
3301 permanent memory leaks (provided garbage collection is enabled).
3302
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00003303- os.extsep -- a new variable needed by the RISCOS support. It is the
3304 separator used by extensions, and is '.' on all platforms except
3305 RISCOS, where it is '/'. There is no need to use this variable
3306 unless you have a masochistic desire to port your code to RISCOS.
3307
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003308- mimetypes.py has optional support for non-standard, but commonly
3309 found types. guess_type() and guess_extension() now accept an
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003310 optional 'strict' flag, defaulting to true, which controls whether
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003311 recognize non-standard types or not. A few non-standard types we
3312 know about have been added. Also, when run as a script, there are
3313 new -l and -e options.
3314
3315- statcache is now deprecated.
3316
3317- email.Utils.formatdate() now produces the preferred RFC 2822 style
3318 dates with numeric timezones (it used to produce obsolete dates
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003319 hard coded to "GMT" timezone). An optional 'localtime' flag is
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003320 added to produce dates in the local timezone, with daylight savings
3321 time properly taken into account.
3322
3323- In pickle and cPickle, instead of masking errors in load() by
3324 transforming them into SystemError, we let the original exception
3325 propagate out. Also, implement support for __safe_for_unpickling__
3326 in pickle, as it already was supported in cPickle.
3327
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003328Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003329-----------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003330
3331Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003332-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003333
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003334- The dbm module is built using libdb1 if available. The bsddb module
3335 is built with libdb3 if available.
3336
3337- Misc/Makefile.pre.in has been removed by BDFL pronouncement.
3338
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003339C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003340-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003341
Tim Peters1fc240e2001-10-26 05:06:50 +00003342- New function PySequence_Fast_GET_SIZE() returns the size of a non-
3343 NULL result from PySequence_Fast(), more quickly than calling
3344 PySequence_Size().
3345
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003346- New argument unpacking function PyArg_UnpackTuple() added.
3347
3348- New functions PyObject_CallFunctionObjArgs() and
3349 PyObject_CallMethodObjArgs() have been added to make it more
3350 convenient and efficient to call functions and methods from C.
3351
3352- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() no longer masks errors, so it's
3353 possible that this will propagate errors it didn't before.
3354
3355- New function PyObject_CheckReadBuffer(), which returns true if its
3356 argument supports the single-segment readable buffer interface.
3357
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003358New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003359-------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003360
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00003361- We've finally confirmed that this release builds on HP-UX 11.00,
3362 *with* threads, and passes the test suite.
3363
Tim Peters7a33d8b2001-11-05 02:51:07 +00003364- Thanks to a series of patches from Michael Muller, Python may build
3365 again under OS/2 Visual Age C++.
3366
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00003367- Updated RISCOS port by Dietmar Schwertberger.
3368
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003369Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003370-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003371
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00003372- Added a test script for the curses module. It isn't run automatically;
3373 regrtest.py must be run with '-u curses' to enable it.
3374
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003375Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003376-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003377
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003378Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003379----
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003380
3381- PythonScript has been moved to unsupported and is slated to be
3382 removed completely in the next release.
3383
3384- It should now be possible to build applets that work on both OS9 and
3385 OSX.
3386
3387- The core is now linked with CoreServices not Carbon; as a side
3388 result, default 8bit encoding on OSX is now ASCII.
3389
3390- Python should now build on OSX 10.1.1
3391
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003392
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003393What's New in Python 2.2b1?
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003394===========================
3395
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003396*Release date: 19-Oct-2001*
3397
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003398Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003399--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003400
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00003401- New-style classes are now always dynamic (except for built-in and
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00003402 extension types). There is no longer a performance penalty, and I
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00003403 no longer see another reason to keep this baggage around. One relic
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00003404 remains: the __dict__ of a new-style class is a read-only proxy; you
3405 must set the class's attribute to modify it. As a consequence, the
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00003406 __defined__ attribute of new-style types no longer exists, for lack
3407 of need: there is once again only one __dict__ (although in the
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00003408 future a __cache__ may be resurrected with a similar function, if I
3409 can prove that it actually speeds things up).
Guido van Rossum50fda3b2001-10-04 19:46:06 +00003410
Tim Peters1c9ca872001-10-04 06:43:12 +00003411- C.__doc__ now works as expected for new-style classes (in 2.2a4 it
3412 always returned None, even when there was a class docstring).
3413
3414- doctest now finds and runs docstrings attached to new-style classes,
3415 class methods, static methods, and properties.
3416
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003417Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003418-----------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003419
Guido van Rossuma8bcf802001-10-15 15:53:58 +00003420- A very subtle syntactical pitfall in list comprehensions was fixed.
3421 For example: [a+b for a in 'abc', for b in 'def']. The comma in
3422 this example is a mistake. Previously, this would silently let 'a'
3423 iterate over the singleton tuple ('abc',), yielding ['abcd', 'abce',
3424 'abcf'] rather than the intended ['ad', 'ae', 'af', 'bd', 'be',
3425 'bf', 'cd', 'ce', 'cf']. Now, this is flagged as a syntax error.
3426 Note that [a for a in <singleton>] is a convoluted way to say
3427 [<singleton>] anyway, so it's not like any expressiveness is lost.
3428
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003429- getattr(obj, name, default) now only catches AttributeError, as
3430 documented, rather than returning the default value for all
3431 exceptions (which could mask bugs in a __getattr__ hook, for
3432 example).
3433
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00003434- Weak reference objects are now part of the core and offer a C API.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00003435 A bug which could allow a core dump when binary operations involved
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00003436 proxy reference has been fixed. weakref.ReferenceError is now a
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003437 built-in exception.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00003438
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00003439- unicode(obj) now behaves more like str(obj), accepting arbitrary
3440 objects, and calling a __unicode__ method if it exists.
3441 unicode(obj, encoding) and unicode(obj, encoding, errors) still
Marc-André Lemburgb5507ec2001-10-19 12:02:29 +00003442 require an 8-bit string or character buffer argument.
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00003443
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003444- isinstance() now allows any object as the first argument and a
3445 class, a type or something with a __bases__ tuple attribute for the
3446 second argument. The second argument may also be a tuple of a
3447 class, type, or something with __bases__, in which case isinstance()
3448 will return true if the first argument is an instance of any of the
3449 things contained in the second argument tuple. E.g.
3450
3451 isinstance(x, (A, B))
3452
3453 returns true if x is an instance of A or B.
3454
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003455Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003456-----------------
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003457
3458- thread.start_new_thread() now returns the thread ID (previously None).
3459
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00003460- binascii has now two quopri support functions, a2b_qp and b2a_qp.
3461
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00003462- readline now supports setting the startup_hook and the
3463 pre_event_hook, and adds the add_history() function.
Martin v. Löwis0daad592001-09-30 21:09:59 +00003464
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00003465- os and posix supports chroot(), setgroups() and unsetenv() where
3466 available. The stat(), fstat(), statvfs() and fstatvfs() functions
3467 now return "pseudo-sequences" -- the various fields can now be
3468 accessed as attributes (e.g. os.stat("/").st_mtime) but for
3469 backwards compatibility they also behave as a fixed-length sequence.
3470 Some platform-specific fields (e.g. st_rdev) are only accessible as
Guido van Rossum98bf58f2001-10-18 20:34:25 +00003471 attributes.
3472
3473- time: localtime(), gmtime() and strptime() now return a
3474 pseudo-sequence similar to the os.stat() return value, with
3475 attributes like tm_year etc.
Martin v. Löwis16628c92001-10-04 22:46:41 +00003476
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003477- Decompression objects in the zlib module now accept an optional
3478 second parameter to decompress() that specifies the maximum amount
3479 of memory to use for the uncompressed data.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003480
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00003481- optional SSL support in the socket module now exports OpenSSL
3482 functions RAND_add(), RAND_egd(), and RAND_status(). These calls
3483 are useful on platforms like Solaris where OpenSSL does not
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003484 automatically seed its PRNG. Also, the keyfile and certfile
3485 arguments to socket.ssl() are now optional.
3486
3487- posixmodule (and by extension, the os module on POSIX platforms) now
3488 exports O_LARGEFILE, O_DIRECT, O_DIRECTORY, and O_NOFOLLOW.
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00003489
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003490Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003491-------
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00003492
Tim Peters7402f792001-10-02 03:53:41 +00003493- doctest now excludes functions and classes not defined by the module
3494 being tested, thanks to Tim Hochberg.
3495
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00003496- HotShot, a new profiler implemented using a C-based callback, has
3497 been added. This substantially reduces the overhead of profiling,
3498 but it is still quite preliminary. Support modules and
3499 documentation will be added in upcoming releases (before 2.2 final).
3500
Guido van Rossumc4b09b42001-10-04 10:19:00 +00003501- profile now produces correct output in situations where an exception
3502 raised in Python is cleared by C code (e.g. hasattr()). This used
3503 to cause wrong output, including spurious claims of recursive
3504 functions and attribution of time spent to the wrong function.
3505
Tim Peters0a1fc4e2001-10-07 03:12:08 +00003506 The code and documentation for the derived OldProfile and HotProfile
3507 profiling classes was removed. The code hasn't worked for years (if
3508 you tried to use them, they raised exceptions). OldProfile
3509 intended to reproduce the behavior of the profiler Python used more
3510 than 7 years ago, and isn't interesting anymore. HotProfile intended
3511 to provide a faster profiler (but producing less information), and
3512 that's a worthy goal we intend to meet via a different approach (but
3513 without losing information).
3514
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00003515- Profile.calibrate() has a new implementation that should deliver
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00003516 a much better system-specific calibration constant. The constant can
3517 now be specified in an instance constructor, or as a Profile class or
3518 instance variable, instead of by editing profile.py's source code.
3519 Calibration must still be done manually (see the docs for the profile
3520 module).
3521
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003522 Note that Profile.calibrate() must be overridden by subclasses.
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00003523 Improving the accuracy required exploiting detailed knowledge of
3524 profiler internals; the earlier method abstracted away the details
3525 and measured a simplified model instead, but consequently computed
3526 a constant too small by a factor of 2 on some modern machines.
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00003527
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00003528- quopri's encode and decode methods take an optional header parameter,
Jeremy Hylton6f543b62001-10-16 20:42:52 +00003529 which indicates whether output is intended for the header 'Q'
3530 encoding.
3531
Guido van Rossuma5343cc2001-10-18 18:02:07 +00003532- The SocketServer.ThreadingMixIn class now closes the request after
3533 finish_request() returns. (Not when it errors out though.)
3534
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003535- The nntplib module's NNTP.body() method has grown a 'file' argument
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003536 to allow saving the message body to a file.
3537
3538- The email package has added a class email.Parser.HeaderParser which
3539 only parses headers and does not recurse into the message's body.
3540 Also, the module/class MIMEAudio has been added for representing
3541 audio data (contributed by Anthony Baxter).
3542
3543- ftplib should be able to handle files > 2GB.
3544
3545- ConfigParser.getboolean() now also interprets TRUE, FALSE, YES, NO,
3546 ON, and OFF.
3547
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00003548- xml.dom.minidom NodeList objects now support the length attribute
3549 and item() method as required by the DOM specifications.
3550
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00003551Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003552-----------
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00003553
3554- Demo/dns was removed. It no longer serves any purpose; a package
3555 derived from it is now maintained by Anthony Baxter, see
3556 http://PyDNS.SourceForge.net.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003557
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003558- The freeze tool has been made more robust, and two new options have
3559 been added: -X and -E.
3560
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003561Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003562-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003563
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003564- configure will use CXX in LINKCC if CXX is used to build main() and
3565 the system requires to link a C++ main using the C++ compiler.
3566
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003567C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003568-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003569
Guido van Rossum6c4bce32001-10-18 19:20:25 +00003570- The documentation for the tp_compare slot is updated to require that
3571 the return value must be -1, 0, 1; an arbitrary number <0 or >0 is
3572 not correct. This is not yet enforced but will be enforced in
3573 Python 2.3; even later, we may use -2 to indicate errors and +2 for
3574 "NotImplemented". Right now, -1 should be used for an error return.
3575
Tim Petersd38b1c72001-09-30 05:09:37 +00003576- PyLong_AsLongLong() now accepts int (as well as long) arguments.
3577 Consequently, PyArg_ParseTuple's 'L' code also accepts int (as well
3578 as long) arguments.
3579
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00003580- PyThread_start_new_thread() now returns a long int giving the thread
3581 ID, if one can be calculated; it returns -1 for error, 0 if no
3582 thread ID is calculated (this is an incompatible change, but only
3583 the thread module used this API). This code has only really been
3584 tested on Linux and Windows; other platforms please beware (and
3585 report any bugs or strange behavior).
3586
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00003587- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() no longer accepts Unicode objects as
3588 input.
3589
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003590New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003591-------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003592
3593Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003594-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003595
3596Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003597-------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003598
Tim Peters04cf1d32001-10-09 22:39:40 +00003599- Installer: If you install IDLE, and don't disable file-extension
3600 registration, a new "Edit with IDLE" context (right-click) menu entry
3601 is created for .py and .pyw files.
3602
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003603- The signal module now supports SIGBREAK on Windows, thanks to Steven
3604 Scott. Note that SIGBREAK is unique to Windows. The default SIGBREAK
3605 action remains to call Win32 ExitProcess(). This can be changed via
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003606 signal.signal(). For example::
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003607
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003608 # Make Ctrl+Break raise KeyboardInterrupt, like Python's default Ctrl+C
3609 # (SIGINT) behavior.
3610 import signal
3611 signal.signal(signal.SIGBREAK, signal.default_int_handler)
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003612
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003613 try:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003614 while 1:
3615 pass
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003616 except KeyboardInterrupt:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003617 # We get here on Ctrl+C or Ctrl+Break now; if we had not changed
3618 # SIGBREAK, only on Ctrl+C (and Ctrl+Break would terminate the
3619 # program without the possibility for any Python-level cleanup).
3620 print "Clean exit"
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003621
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003622
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003623What's New in Python 2.2a4?
3624===========================
3625
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003626*Release date: 28-Sep-2001*
3627
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003628Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003629--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003630
3631- pydoc and inspect are now aware of new-style classes;
3632 e.g. help(list) at the interactive prompt now shows proper
3633 documentation for all operations on list objects.
3634
3635- Applications using Jim Fulton's ExtensionClass module can now safely
3636 be used with Python 2.2. In particular, Zope 2.4.1 now works with
3637 Python 2.2 (as well as with Python 2.1.1). The Demo/metaclass
3638 examples also work again. It is hoped that Gtk and Boost also work
3639 with 2.2a4 and beyond. (If you can confirm this, please write
3640 webmaster@python.org; if there are still problems, please open a bug
3641 report on SourceForge.)
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003642
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00003643- property() now takes 4 keyword arguments: fget, fset, fdel and doc.
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003644 These map to read-only attributes 'fget', 'fset', 'fdel', and '__doc__'
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00003645 in the constructed property object. fget, fset and fdel weren't
3646 discoverable from Python in 2.2a3. __doc__ is new, and allows to
3647 associate a docstring with a property.
3648
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003649- Comparison overloading is now more completely implemented. For
3650 example, a str subclass instance can properly be compared to a str
3651 instance, and it can properly overload comparison. Ditto for most
3652 other built-in object types.
3653
3654- The repr() of new-style classes has changed; instead of <type
3655 'M.Foo'> a new-style class is now rendered as <class 'M.Foo'>,
3656 *except* for built-in types, which are still rendered as <type
3657 'Foo'> (to avoid upsetting existing code that might parse or
3658 otherwise rely on repr() of certain type objects).
3659
3660- The repr() of new-style objects is now always <Foo object at XXX>;
3661 previously, it was sometimes <Foo instance at XXX>.
3662
3663- For new-style classes, what was previously called __getattr__ is now
3664 called __getattribute__. This method, if defined, is called for
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00003665 *every* attribute access. A new __getattr__ hook more similar to the
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003666 one in classic classes is defined which is called only if regular
3667 attribute access raises AttributeError; to catch *all* attribute
3668 access, you can use __getattribute__ (for new-style classes). If
3669 both are defined, __getattribute__ is called first, and if it raises
3670 AttributeError, __getattr__ is called.
3671
3672- The __class__ attribute of new-style objects can be assigned to.
3673 The new class must have the same C-level object layout as the old
3674 class.
3675
3676- The builtin file type can be subclassed now. In the usual pattern,
3677 "file" is the name of the builtin type, and file() is a new builtin
3678 constructor, with the same signature as the builtin open() function.
3679 file() is now the preferred way to open a file.
3680
3681- Previously, __new__ would only see sequential arguments passed to
3682 the type in a constructor call; __init__ would see both sequential
3683 and keyword arguments. This made no sense whatsoever any more, so
3684 now both __new__ and __init__ see all arguments.
3685
3686- Previously, hash() applied to an instance of a subclass of str or
3687 unicode always returned 0. This has been repaired.
3688
3689- Previously, an operation on an instance of a subclass of an
3690 immutable type (int, long, float, complex, tuple, str, unicode),
3691 where the subtype didn't override the operation (and so the
3692 operation was handled by the builtin type), could return that
3693 instance instead a value of the base type. For example, if s was of
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003694 a str subclass type, s[:] returned s as-is. Now it returns a str
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003695 with the same value as s.
3696
Barry Warsaw86fbaf82001-09-28 15:26:12 +00003697- Provisional support for pickling new-style objects has been added.
3698
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003699Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003700----
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003701
Tim Peters2c9aa5e2001-09-23 04:06:05 +00003702- file.writelines() now accepts any iterable object producing strings.
3703
Marc-André Lemburgaefd7662001-09-20 12:59:37 +00003704- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() now works very much like
3705 PyObject_Str(obj) in that it tries to use __str__/tp_str
3706 on the object if the object is not a string or buffer. This
3707 makes unicode() behave like str() when applied to non-string/buffer
3708 objects.
3709
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00003710- PyFile_WriteObject now passes Unicode objects to the file's write
3711 method. As a result, all file-like objects which may be the target
Martin v. Löwis2777c022001-09-19 13:47:32 +00003712 of a print statement must support Unicode objects, i.e. they must
3713 at least convert them into ASCII strings.
3714
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003715- Thread scheduling on Solaris should be improved; it is no longer
3716 necessary to insert a small sleep at the start of a thread in order
3717 to let other runnable threads be scheduled.
3718
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003719Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003720-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003721
Marc-André Lemburgbf990172001-09-27 14:17:33 +00003722- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
3723 read character buffer compatible objects for their .write() methods.
3724 These objects are converted to strings and then handled as such
3725 by the instances.
3726
Barry Warsaw2f600732001-09-24 04:28:10 +00003727- The "email" package has been added. This is basically a port of the
3728 mimelib package <http://sf.net/projects/mimelib> with API changes
3729 and some implementations updated to use iterators and generators.
3730
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00003731- difflib.ndiff() and difflib.Differ.compare() are generators now. This
3732 restores the ability of Tools/scripts/ndiff.py to start producing output
3733 before the entire comparison is complete.
3734
Barry Warsaw58b072d2001-09-22 04:44:21 +00003735- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
3736 iteration just like file objects (i.e. their .readline() method is
3737 called for each iteration until it returns an empty string).
3738
Marc-André Lemburg494f2ae2001-09-19 11:33:31 +00003739- The codecs module has grown four new helper APIs to access
3740 builtin codecs: getencoder(), getdecoder(), getreader(),
3741 getwriter().
3742
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003743- SimpleXMLRPCServer: a new module (based upon SimpleHTMLServer)
3744 simplifies writing XML RPC servers.
3745
Barry Warsaw647d5e82001-09-28 17:01:02 +00003746- os.path.realpath(): a new function that returns the absolute pathname
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003747 after interpretation of symbolic links. On non-Unix systems, this
3748 is an alias for os.path.abspath().
3749
Tim Peters16a77ad2001-09-08 04:00:12 +00003750- operator.indexOf() (PySequence_Index() in the C API) now works with any
3751 iterable object.
3752
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003753- smtplib now supports various authentication and security features of
3754 the SMTP protocol through the new login() and starttls() methods.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00003755
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003756- hmac: a new module implementing keyed hashing for message
3757 authentication.
3758
3759- mimetypes now recognizes more extensions and file types. At the
3760 same time, some mappings not sanctioned by IANA were removed.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00003761
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003762- The "compiler" package has been brought up to date to the state of
Guido van Rossumc9ed5dc2001-09-20 05:30:24 +00003763 Python 2.2 bytecode generation. It has also been promoted from a
3764 Tool to a standard library package. (Tools/compiler still exists as
3765 a sample driver.)
3766
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003767Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003768-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003769
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003770- Large file support (LFS) is now automatic when the platform supports
3771 it; no more manual configuration tweaks are needed. On Linux, at
3772 least, it's possible to have a system whose C library supports large
3773 files but whose kernel doesn't; in this case, large file support is
3774 still enabled but doesn't do you any good unless you upgrade your
3775 kernel or share your Python executable with another system whose
3776 kernel has large file support.
3777
3778- The configure script now supplies plausible defaults in a
3779 cross-compilation environment. This doesn't mean that the supplied
3780 values are always correct, or that cross-compilation now works
3781 flawlessly -- but it's a first step (and it shuts up most of
3782 autoconf's warnings about AC_TRY_RUN).
3783
3784- The Unix build is now a bit less chatty, courtesy of the parser
3785 generator. The build is completely silent (except for errors) when
3786 using "make -s", thanks to a -q option to setup.py.
3787
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003788C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003789-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003790
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003791- The "structmember" API now supports some new flag bits to deny read
3792 and/or write access to attributes in restricted execution mode.
3793
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003794New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003795-------------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003796
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003797- Compaq's iPAQ handheld, running the "familiar" Linux distribution
3798 (http://familiar.handhelds.org).
3799
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003800Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003801-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003802
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00003803- The "classic" standard tests, which work by comparing stdout to
3804 an expected-output file under Lib/test/output/, no longer stop at
3805 the first mismatch. Instead the test is run to completion, and a
3806 variant of ndiff-style comparison is used to report all differences.
3807 This is much easier to understand than the previous style of reporting.
3808
3809- The unittest-based standard tests now use regrtest's test_main()
3810 convention, instead of running as a side-effect of merely being
3811 imported. This allows these tests to be run in more natural and
3812 flexible ways as unittests, outside the regrtest framework.
3813
3814- regrtest.py is much better integrated with unittest and doctest now,
3815 especially in regard to reporting errors.
3816
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003817Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003818-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003819
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003820- Large file support now also works for files > 4GB, on filesystems
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00003821 that support it (NTFS under Windows 2000). See "What's New in
3822 Python 2.2a3" for more detail.
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003823
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003824
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003825What's New in Python 2.2a3?
3826===========================
3827
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003828*Release Date: 07-Sep-2001*
3829
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003830Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003831----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003832
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00003833- Conversion of long to float now raises OverflowError if the long is too
3834 big to represent as a C double.
3835
Tim Peters32f453e2001-09-03 08:35:41 +00003836- The 3-argument builtin pow() no longer allows a third non-None argument
3837 if either of the first two arguments is a float, or if both are of
3838 integer types and the second argument is negative (in which latter case
3839 the arguments are converted to float, so this is really the same
3840 restriction).
3841
Tim Peters5d2b77c2001-09-03 05:47:38 +00003842- The builtin dir() now returns more information, and sometimes much
3843 more, generally naming all attributes of an object, and all attributes
3844 reachable from the object via its class, and from its class's base
3845 classes, and so on from them too. Example: in 2.2a2, dir([]) returned
3846 an empty list. In 2.2a3,
3847
3848 >>> dir([])
3849 ['__add__', '__class__', '__contains__', '__delattr__', '__delitem__',
3850 '__eq__', '__ge__', '__getattr__', '__getitem__', '__getslice__',
3851 '__gt__', '__hash__', '__iadd__', '__imul__', '__init__', '__le__',
3852 '__len__', '__lt__', '__mul__', '__ne__', '__new__', '__repr__',
3853 '__rmul__', '__setattr__', '__setitem__', '__setslice__', '__str__',
3854 'append', 'count', 'extend', 'index', 'insert', 'pop', 'remove',
3855 'reverse', 'sort']
3856
3857 dir(module) continues to return only the module's attributes, though.
3858
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003859- Overflowing operations on plain ints now return a long int rather
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003860 than raising OverflowError. This is a partial implementation of PEP
3861 237. You can use -Wdefault::OverflowWarning to enable a warning for
3862 this situation, and -Werror::OverflowWarning to revert to the old
3863 OverflowError exception.
3864
Guido van Rossum61c345f2001-09-04 03:26:15 +00003865- A new command line option, -Q<arg>, is added to control run-time
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003866 warnings for the use of classic division. (See PEP 238.) Possible
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00003867 values are -Qold, -Qwarn, -Qwarnall, and -Qnew. The default is
3868 -Qold, meaning the / operator has its classic meaning and no
3869 warnings are issued. Using -Qwarn issues a run-time warning about
3870 all uses of classic division for int and long arguments; -Qwarnall
3871 also warns about classic division for float and complex arguments
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00003872 (for use with fixdiv.py).
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003873 [Note: the remainder of this item (preserved below) became
3874 obsolete in 2.2c1 -- -Qnew has global effect in 2.2] ::
3875
3876 Using -Qnew is questionable; it turns on new division by default, but
3877 only in the __main__ module. You can usefully combine -Qwarn or
3878 -Qwarnall and -Qnew: this gives the __main__ module new division, and
3879 warns about classic division everywhere else.
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003880
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003881- Many built-in types can now be subclassed. This applies to int,
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003882 long, float, str, unicode, and tuple. (The types complex, list and
3883 dictionary can also be subclassed; this was introduced earlier.)
3884 Note that restrictions apply when subclassing immutable built-in
3885 types: you can only affect the value of the instance by overloading
3886 __new__. You can add mutable attributes, and the subclass instances
3887 will have a __dict__ attribute, but you cannot change the "value"
3888 (as implemented by the base class) of an immutable subclass instance
3889 once it is created.
3890
Guido van Rossumaaf80c82001-09-02 13:44:35 +00003891- The dictionary constructor now takes an optional argument, a
3892 mapping-like object, and initializes the dictionary from its
3893 (key, value) pairs.
3894
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003895- A new built-in type, super, has been added. This facilitates making
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003896 "cooperative super calls" in a multiple inheritance setting. For an
3897 explanation, see http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#cooperation
3898
Guido van Rossum8d7234d2001-09-06 22:02:58 +00003899- A new built-in type, property, has been added. This enables the
3900 creation of "properties". These are attributes implemented by
3901 getter and setter functions (or only one of these for read-only or
3902 write-only attributes), without the need to override __getattr__.
3903 See http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#property
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003904
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003905- The syntax of floating-point and imaginary literals has been
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00003906 liberalized, to allow leading zeroes. Examples of literals now
3907 legal that were SyntaxErrors before:
3908
3909 00.0 0e3 0100j 07.5 00000000000000000008.
3910
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003911- An old tokenizer bug allowed floating point literals with an incomplete
Tim Petersc6d95812001-08-28 20:56:27 +00003912 exponent, such as 1e and 3.1e-. Such literals now raise SyntaxError.
3913
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003914Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003915-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003916
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00003917- telnetlib includes symbolic names for the options, and support for
Martin v. Löwis1da9c572002-11-04 09:56:00 +00003918 setting an option negotiation callback. It also supports processing
3919 of suboptions.
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00003920
Tim Petersa40c7932001-09-05 22:36:56 +00003921- The new C standard no longer requires that math libraries set errno to
3922 ERANGE on overflow. For platform libraries that exploit this new
3923 freedom, Python's overflow-checking was wholly broken. A new overflow-
3924 checking scheme attempts to repair that, but may not be reliable on all
3925 platforms (C doesn't seem to provide anything both useful and portable
3926 in this area anymore).
3927
Martin v. Löwis44f86962001-09-05 13:44:54 +00003928- Asynchronous timeout actions are available through the new class
3929 threading.Timer.
3930
Tim Peters78526162001-09-05 00:53:45 +00003931- math.log and math.log10 now return sensible results for even huge
3932 long arguments. For example, math.log10(10 ** 10000) ~= 10000.0.
3933
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003934- A new function, imp.lock_held(), returns 1 when the import lock is
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00003935 currently held. See the docs for the imp module.
3936
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003937- pickle, cPickle and marshal on 32-bit platforms can now correctly read
Tim Peters82112372001-08-29 02:28:42 +00003938 dumps containing ints written on platforms where Python ints are 8 bytes.
3939 When read on a box where Python ints are 4 bytes, such values are
3940 converted to Python longs.
3941
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003942- In restricted execution mode (using the rexec module), unmarshalling
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003943 code objects is no longer allowed. This plugs a security hole.
3944
Steve Purcell6091cd62001-09-06 16:05:17 +00003945- unittest.TestResult instances no longer store references to tracebacks
3946 generated by test failures. This prevents unexpected dangling references
3947 to objects that should be garbage collected between tests.
3948
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003949Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003950-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003951
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00003952- Tools/scripts/fixdiv.py has been added which can be used to fix
3953 division operators as per PEP 238.
3954
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003955Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003956-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003957
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00003958- If you are an adventurous person using Mac OS X you may want to look at
3959 Mac/OSX. There is a Makefile there that will build Python as a real Mac
3960 application, which can be used for experimenting with Carbon or Cocoa.
3961 Discussion of this on pythonmac-sig, please.
3962
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00003963C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003964-----
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00003965
3966- New function PyObject_Dir(obj), like Python __builtin__.dir(obj).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00003967
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00003968- Note that PyLong_AsDouble can fail! This has always been true, but no
3969 callers checked for it. It's more likely to fail now, because overflow
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003970 errors are properly detected now. The proper way to check::
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00003971
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003972 double x = PyLong_AsDouble(some_long_object);
3973 if (x == -1.0 && PyErr_Occurred()) {
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003974 /* The conversion failed. */
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003975 }
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00003976
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003977- The GC API has been changed. Extensions that use the old API will still
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00003978 compile but will not participate in GC. To upgrade an extension
3979 module:
3980
3981 - rename Py_TPFLAGS_GC to PyTPFLAGS_HAVE_GC
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00003982
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00003983 - use PyObject_GC_New or PyObject_GC_NewVar to allocate objects and
3984 PyObject_GC_Del to deallocate them
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00003985
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00003986 - rename PyObject_GC_Init to PyObject_GC_Track and PyObject_GC_Fini
3987 to PyObject_GC_UnTrack
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00003988
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00003989 - remove PyGC_HEAD_SIZE from object size calculations
3990
3991 - remove calls to PyObject_AS_GC and PyObject_FROM_GC
3992
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003993- Two new functions: PyString_FromFormat() and PyString_FromFormatV().
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003994 These can be used safely to construct string objects from a
3995 sprintf-style format string (similar to the format string supported
3996 by PyErr_Format()).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00003997
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003998New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003999-------------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004000
Tim Petersb7da0902001-09-02 23:01:43 +00004001- Stephen Hansen contributed patches sufficient to get a clean compile
4002 under Borland C (Windows), but he reports problems running it and ran
4003 out of time to complete the port. Volunteers? Expect a MemoryError
4004 when importing the types module; this is probably shallow, and
4005 causing later failures too.
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004006
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004007Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004008-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004009
4010Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004011-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004012
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00004013- Large file support is now enabled on Win32 platforms as well as on
4014 Win64. This means that, for example, you can use f.tell() and f.seek()
4015 to manipulate files larger than 2 gigabytes (provided you have enough
4016 disk space, and are using a Windows filesystem that supports large
Tim Peters9a9471c2001-09-11 23:18:51 +00004017 partitions). Windows filesystem limits: FAT has a 2GB (gigabyte)
4018 filesize limit, and large file support makes no difference there.
4019 FAT32's limit is 4GB, and files >= 2GB are easier to use from Python now.
4020 NTFS has no practical limit on file size, and files of any size can be
4021 used from Python now.
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00004022
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004023- The w9xpopen hack is now used on Windows NT and 2000 too when COMPSPEC
Tim Peters402d5982001-08-27 06:37:48 +00004024 points to command.com (patch from Brian Quinlan).
4025
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004026
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004027What's New in Python 2.2a2?
4028===========================
4029
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004030*Release Date: 22-Aug-2001*
4031
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004032Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004033-----
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004034
Barry Warsaw18b2ecf2001-08-22 20:26:56 +00004035- Tim Peters developed a brand new Windows installer using Wise 8.1,
4036 generously donated to us by Wise Solutions.
4037
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004038- configure supports a new option --enable-unicode, with the values
4039 ucs2 and ucs4 (new in 2.2a1). With --disable-unicode, the Unicode
4040 type and supporting code is completely removed from the interpreter.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004041
Jack Jansen32ce0cd2001-08-21 19:28:20 +00004042- A new configure option --enable-framework builds a Mac OS X framework,
4043 which "make frameworkinstall" will install. This provides a starting
4044 point for more mac-like functionality, join pythonmac-sig@python.org
4045 if you are interested in helping.
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004046
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004047- The NeXT platform is no longer supported.
4048
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004049- The 'new' module is now statically linked.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004050
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004051Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004052-----
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004053
4054- The new Tools/scripts/cleanfuture.py can be used to automatically
Andrew M. Kuchlingb0532092001-08-15 15:54:56 +00004055 edit out obsolete future statements from Python source code. See
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004056 the module docstring for details.
4057
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004058Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004059-----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004060
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004061- regrtest.py now knows which tests are expected to be skipped on some
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004062 platforms, allowing to give clearer test result output. regrtest
4063 also has optional --use/-u switch to run normally disabled tests
4064 which require network access or consume significant disk resources.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004065
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004066- Several new tests in the standard test suite, with special thanks to
4067 Nick Mathewson.
4068
4069Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004070----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004071
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004072- The floor division operator // has been added as outlined in PEP
4073 238. The / operator still provides classic division (and will until
4074 Python 3.0) unless "from __future__ import division" is included, in
4075 which case the / operator will provide true division. The operator
4076 module provides truediv() and floordiv() functions. Augmented
4077 assignment variants are included, as are the equivalent overloadable
4078 methods and C API methods. See the PEP for a full discussion:
4079 <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0238.html>
4080
Tim Peters6cd6a822001-08-17 22:11:27 +00004081- Future statements are now effective in simulated interactive shells
4082 (like IDLE). This should "just work" by magic, but read Michael
4083 Hudson's "Future statements in simulated shells" PEP 264 for full
4084 details: <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0264.html>.
4085
Guido van Rossumf86ddd22001-08-17 21:21:04 +00004086- The type/class unification (PEP 252-253) was integrated into the
4087 trunk and is not so tentative any more (the exact specification of
4088 some features is still tentative). A lot of work has done on fixing
4089 bugs and adding robustness and features (performance still has to
4090 come a long way).
4091
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00004092- Warnings about a mismatch in the Python API during extension import
4093 now use the Python warning framework (which makes it possible to
4094 write filters for these warnings).
4095
Barry Warsaw9b3be7f2001-08-14 18:35:02 +00004096- A function's __dict__ (aka func_dict) will now always be a
4097 dictionary. It used to be possible to delete it or set it to None,
4098 but now both actions raise TypeErrors. It is still legal to set it
4099 to a dictionary object. Getting func.__dict__ before any attributes
4100 have been assigned now returns an empty dictionary instead of None.
4101
Guido van Rossum32aa5d22001-09-05 18:43:35 +00004102- A new command line option, -E, was added which disables the use of
4103 all environment variables, or at least those that are specifically
4104 significant to Python. Usually those have a name starting with
4105 "PYTHON". This was used to fix a problem where the tests fail if
4106 the user happens to have PYTHONHOME or PYTHONPATH pointing to an
4107 older distribution.
4108
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004109Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004110-------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004111
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004112- New class Differ and new functions ndiff() and restore() in difflib.py.
4113 These package the algorithms used by the popular Tools/scripts/ndiff.py,
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004114 for programmatic reuse.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004115
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004116- New function xml.sax.saxutils.quoteattr(): Quote an XML attribute
4117 value using the minimal quoting required for the value; more
4118 reliable than using xml.sax.saxutils.escape() for attribute values.
4119
4120- Readline completion support for cmd.Cmd was added.
4121
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004122- Calling os.tempnam() or os.tmpnam() generate RuntimeWarnings.
4123
4124- Added function threading.BoundedSemaphore()
4125
4126- Added Ka-Ping Yee's cgitb.py module.
4127
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004128- The 'new' module now exposes the CO_xxx flags.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004129
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00004130- The gc module offers the get_referents function.
4131
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004132New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004133-------------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004134
4135C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004136-----
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004137
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00004138- Two new APIs PyOS_snprintf() and PyOS_vsnprintf() were added
4139 which provide a cross-platform implementations for the
4140 relatively new snprintf()/vsnprintf() C lib APIs. In contrast to
4141 the standard sprintf() and vsprintf() C lib APIs, these versions
4142 apply bounds checking on the used buffer which enhances protection
4143 against buffer overruns.
4144
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00004145- Unicode APIs now use name mangling to assure that mixing interpreters
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00004146 and extensions using different Unicode widths is rendered next to
4147 impossible. Trying to import an incompatible Unicode-aware extension
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00004148 will result in an ImportError. Unicode extensions writers must make
4149 sure to check the Unicode width compatibility in their extensions by
4150 using at least one of the mangled Unicode APIs in the extension.
4151
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004152- Two new flags METH_NOARGS and METH_O are available in method definition
4153 tables to simplify implementation of methods with no arguments and a
4154 single untyped argument. Calling such methods is more efficient than
4155 calling corresponding METH_VARARGS methods. METH_OLDARGS is now
4156 deprecated.
4157
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00004158Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004159-------
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00004160
4161- "import module" now compiles module.pyw if it exists and nothing else
4162 relevant is found.
4163
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004164
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00004165What's New in Python 2.2a1?
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004166===========================
4167
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004168*Release date: 18-Jul-2001*
4169
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004170Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004171----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004172
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00004173- TENTATIVELY, a large amount of code implementing much of what's
4174 described in PEP 252 (Making Types Look More Like Classes) and PEP
4175 253 (Subtyping Built-in Types) was added. This will be released
4176 with Python 2.2a1. Documentation will be provided separately
4177 through http://www.python.org/2.2/. The purpose of releasing this
4178 with Python 2.2a1 is to test backwards compatibility. It is
4179 possible, though not likely, that a decision is made not to release
4180 this code as part of 2.2 final, if any serious backwards
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004181 incompatibilities are found during alpha testing that cannot be
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00004182 repaired.
4183
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00004184- Generators were added; this is a new way to create an iterator (see
Tim Peters11a0d102001-07-17 18:48:00 +00004185 below) using what looks like a simple function containing one or
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00004186 more 'yield' statements. See PEP 255. Since this adds a new
4187 keyword to the language, this feature must be enabled by including a
4188 future statement: "from __future__ import generators" (see PEP 236).
4189 Generators will become a standard feature in a future release
4190 (probably 2.3). Without this future statement, 'yield' remains an
4191 ordinary identifier, but a warning is issued each time it is used.
4192 (These warnings currently don't conform to the warnings framework of
4193 PEP 230; we intend to fix this in 2.2a2.)
4194
Marc-André Lemburg12e74b32001-05-22 08:58:23 +00004195- The UTF-16 codec was modified to be more RFC compliant. It will now
4196 only remove BOM characters at the start of the string and then
4197 only if running in native mode (UTF-16-LE and -BE won't remove a
4198 leading BMO character).
4199
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00004200- Strings now have a new method .decode() to complement the already
4201 existing .encode() method. These two methods provide direct access
4202 to the corresponding decoders and encoders of the registered codecs.
4203
4204 To enhance the usability of the .encode() method, the special
4205 casing of Unicode object return values was dropped (Unicode objects
4206 were auto-magically converted to string using the default encoding).
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00004207
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00004208 Both methods will now return whatever the codec in charge of the
4209 requested encoding returns as object, e.g. Unicode codecs will
4210 return Unicode objects when decoding is requested ("äöü".decode("latin-1")
4211 will return u"äöü"). This enables codec writer to create codecs
4212 for various simple to use conversions.
4213
4214 New codecs were added to demonstrate these new features (the .encode()
4215 and .decode() columns indicate the type of the returned objects):
4216
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004217 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4218 |Name | .encode() | .decode() | Description |
4219 +=========+===========+===========+=============================+
4220 |uu | string | string | UU codec (e.g. for email) |
4221 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4222 |base64 | string | string | base64 codec |
4223 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4224 |quopri | string | string | quoted-printable codec |
4225 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4226 |zlib | string | string | zlib compression |
4227 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4228 |hex | string | string | 2-byte hex codec |
4229 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4230 |rot-13 | string | Unicode | ROT-13 Unicode charmap codec|
4231 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00004232
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004233- Some operating systems now support the concept of a default Unicode
4234 encoding for file system operations. Notably, Windows supports 'mbcs'
4235 as the default. The Macintosh will also adopt this concept in the medium
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00004236 term, although the default encoding for that platform will be other than
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004237 'mbcs'.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00004238
4239 On operating system that support non-ASCII filenames, it is common for
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004240 functions that return filenames (such as os.listdir()) to return Python
4241 string objects pre-encoded using the default file system encoding for
4242 the platform. As this encoding is likely to be different from Python's
4243 default encoding, converting this name to a Unicode object before passing
4244 it back to the Operating System would result in a Unicode error, as Python
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004245 would attempt to use its default encoding (generally ASCII) rather than
4246 the default encoding for the file system.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00004247
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004248 In general, this change simply removes surprises when working with
4249 Unicode and the file system, making these operations work as you expect,
4250 increasing the transparency of Unicode objects in this context.
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004251 See [????] for more details, including examples.
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004252
Tim Peters61dff2b2001-05-08 15:43:37 +00004253- Float (and complex) literals in source code were evaluated to full
4254 precision only when running from a .py file; the same code loaded from a
4255 .pyc (or .pyo) file could suffer numeric differences starting at about the
4256 12th significant decimal digit. For example, on a machine with IEEE-754
4257 floating arithmetic,
4258
4259 x = 9007199254740992.0
4260 print long(x)
4261
4262 printed 9007199254740992 if run directly from .py, but 9007199254740000
4263 if from a compiled (.pyc or .pyo) file. This was due to marshal using
4264 str(float) instead of repr(float) when building code objects. marshal
4265 now uses repr(float) instead, which should reproduce floats to full
4266 machine precision (assuming the platform C float<->string I/O conversion
4267 functions are of good quality).
4268
4269 This may cause floating-point results to change in some cases, and
4270 usually for the better, but may also cause numerically unstable
4271 algorithms to break.
4272
Tim Peters2f228e72001-05-13 00:19:31 +00004273- The implementation of dicts suffers fewer collisions, which has speed
4274 benefits. However, the order in which dict entries appear in dict.keys(),
4275 dict.values() and dict.items() may differ from previous releases for a
4276 given dict. Nothing is defined about this order, so no program should
4277 rely on it. Nevertheless, it's easy to write test cases that rely on the
4278 order by accident, typically because of printing the str() or repr() of a
4279 dict to an "expected results" file. See Lib/test/test_support.py's new
4280 sortdict(dict) function for a simple way to display a dict in sorted
4281 order.
4282
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00004283- Many other small changes to dicts were made, resulting in faster
4284 operation along the most common code paths.
4285
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00004286- Dictionary objects now support the "in" operator: "x in dict" means
4287 the same as dict.has_key(x).
4288
Barry Warsaw51acc8d2001-06-26 20:12:50 +00004289- The update() method of dictionaries now accepts generic mapping
4290 objects. Specifically the argument object must support the .keys()
4291 and __getitem__() methods. This allows you to say, for example,
4292 {}.update(UserDict())
4293
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00004294- Iterators were added; this is a generalized way of providing values
4295 to a for loop. See PEP 234. There's a new built-in function iter()
4296 to return an iterator. There's a new protocol to get the next value
4297 from an iterator using the next() method (in Python) or the
4298 tp_iternext slot (in C). There's a new protocol to get iterators
4299 using the __iter__() method (in Python) or the tp_iter slot (in C).
4300 Iterating (i.e. a for loop) over a dictionary generates its keys.
4301 Iterating over a file generates its lines.
4302
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004303- The following functions were generalized to work nicely with iterator
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004304 arguments::
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004305
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00004306 map(), filter(), reduce(), zip()
Tim Peters8572b4f2001-05-06 01:05:02 +00004307 list(), tuple() (PySequence_Tuple() and PySequence_Fast() in C API)
4308 max(), min()
Tim Peters1af03e92001-05-26 19:37:54 +00004309 join() method of strings
4310 extend() method of lists
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00004311 'x in y' and 'x not in y' (PySequence_Contains() in C API)
4312 operator.countOf() (PySequence_Count() in C API)
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004313 right-hand side of assignment statements with multiple targets, such as ::
Tim Petersd6d010b2001-06-21 02:49:55 +00004314 x, y, z = some_iterable_object_returning_exactly_3_values
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00004315
Tim Petersd85e1022001-05-11 21:51:48 +00004316- Accessing module attributes is significantly faster (for example,
4317 random.random or os.path or yourPythonModule.yourAttribute).
4318
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00004319- Comparing dictionary objects via == and != is faster, and now works even
4320 if the keys and values don't support comparisons other than ==.
4321
Tim Peters95bf9392001-05-10 08:32:44 +00004322- Comparing dictionaries in ways other than == and != is slower: there were
4323 insecurities in the dict comparison implementation that could cause Python
4324 to crash if the element comparison routines for the dict keys and/or
4325 values mutated the dicts. Making the code bulletproof slowed it down.
4326
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00004327- Collisions in dicts are resolved via a new approach, which can help
4328 dramatically in bad cases. For example, looking up every key in a dict
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00004329 d with d.keys() == [i << 16 for i in range(20000)] is approximately 500x
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00004330 faster now. Thanks to Christian Tismer for pointing out the cause and
4331 the nature of an effective cure (last December! better late than never).
Tim Peters15d49292001-05-27 07:39:22 +00004332
Tim Peters52e155e2001-06-16 05:42:57 +00004333- repr() is much faster for large containers (dict, list, tuple).
4334
4335
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004336Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004337-------
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004338
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00004339- The constants ascii_letters, ascii_lowercase. and ascii_uppercase
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004340 were added to the string module. These a locale-independent
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00004341 constants, unlike letters, lowercase, and uppercase. These are now
4342 use in appropriate locations in the standard library.
4343
Martin v. Löwisf0473d52001-07-18 16:17:16 +00004344- The flags used in dlopen calls can now be configured using
4345 sys.setdlopenflags and queried using sys.getdlopenflags.
4346
Guido van Rossumc7e4aca2001-07-12 11:54:37 +00004347- Fredrik Lundh's xmlrpclib is now a standard library module. This
4348 provides full client-side XML-RPC support. In addition,
4349 Demo/xmlrpc/ contains two server frameworks (one SocketServer-based,
4350 one asyncore-based). Thanks to Eric Raymond for the documentation.
4351
Guido van Rossum643d3912001-07-05 14:46:25 +00004352- The xrange() object is simplified: it no longer supports slicing,
4353 repetition, comparisons, efficient 'in' checking, the tolist()
4354 method, or the start, stop and step attributes. See PEP 260.
4355
Martin v. Löwisebf94db2001-06-06 06:25:40 +00004356- A new function fnmatch.filter to filter lists of file names was added.
4357
Barry Warsawffd674d2001-05-22 16:00:10 +00004358- calendar.py uses month and day names based on the current locale.
4359
Guido van Rossum2e0a6542001-05-15 02:14:44 +00004360- strop is now *really* obsolete (this was announced before with 1.6),
4361 and issues DeprecationWarning when used (except for the four items
4362 that are still imported into string.py).
4363
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004364- Cookie.py now sorts key+value pairs by key in output strings.
4365
4366- pprint.isrecursive(object) didn't correctly identify recursive objects.
4367 Now it does.
4368
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00004369- pprint functions now much faster for large containers (tuple, list, dict).
4370
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00004371- New 'q' and 'Q' format codes in the struct module, corresponding to C
4372 types "long long" and "unsigned long long" (on Windows, __int64). In
4373 native mode, these can be used only when the platform C compiler supports
4374 these types (when HAVE_LONG_LONG is #define'd by the Python config
4375 process), and then they inherit the sizes and alignments of the C types.
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00004376 In standard mode, 'q' and 'Q' are supported on all platforms, and are
4377 8-byte integral types.
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00004378
Guido van Rossum83213cc2001-06-12 16:48:52 +00004379- The site module installs a new built-in function 'help' that invokes
4380 pydoc.help. It must be invoked as 'help()'; when invoked as 'help',
4381 it displays a message reminding the user to use 'help()' or
4382 'help(object)'.
4383
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004384Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004385-----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004386
4387- New test_mutants.py runs dict comparisons where the key and value
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004388 comparison operators mutate the dicts randomly during comparison. This
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004389 rapidly causes Python to crash under earlier releases (not for the faint
4390 of heart: it can also cause Win9x to freeze or reboot!).
4391
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004392- New test_pprint.py verifies that pprint.isrecursive() and
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00004393 pprint.isreadable() return sensible results. Also verifies that simple
4394 cases produce correct output.
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004395
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00004396C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004397-----
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00004398
4399- Removed the unused last_is_sticky argument from the internal
4400 _PyTuple_Resize(). If this affects you, you were cheating.
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004401
4402----
4403
4404**(For information about older versions, consult the HISTORY file.)**