blob: 634f661fbc4df47b451662678b2c8cadd1383e8c [file] [log] [blame]
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
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00007What's New in Python 2.4 beta 1?
8================================
9
10*Release date: XXXX-XX-XX*
11
12Core and builtins
13-----------------
14
Raymond Hettinger2c31a052004-09-22 18:44:21 +000015- The bytecode optimizer now folds tuples of constants into a single
16 constant.
17
Tim Peters307fa782004-09-23 08:06:40 +000018- SF bug #513866: Float/long comparison anomaly. Prior to 2.4b1, when
19 an integer was compared to a float, the integer was coerced to a float.
20 That could yield spurious overflow errors (if the integer was very
21 large), and to anomalies such as
22 ``long(1e200)+1 == 1e200 == long(1e200)-1``. Coercion to float is no
23 longer performed, and cases like ``long(1e200)-1 < 1e200``,
24 ``long(1e200)+1 > 1e200`` and ``(1 << 20000) > 1e200`` are computed
25 correctly now.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +000026
27Extension modules
28-----------------
29
Tim Peterscf8997f2004-10-01 02:13:16 +000030- ``collections.deque`` objects didn't play quite right with garbage
31 collection, which could lead to a segfault in a release build, or
32 an assert failure in a debug build.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +000033
34Library
35-------
Raymond Hettinger0318a932004-09-22 18:03:47 +000036
Barry Warsawbb113862004-10-03 03:16:19 +000037- Updates for the email package:
38 + All deprecated APIs that in email 2.x issued warnings have been removed:
39 _encoder argument to the MIMEText constructor, Message.add_payload(),
40 Utils.dump_address_pair(), Utils.decode(), Utils.encode()
41 + New deprecations: Generator.__call__(), Message.get_type(),
42 Message.get_main_type(), Message.get_subtype(), the 'strict' argument to
43 the Parser constructor. These will be removed in email 3.1.
44 + Support for Python earlier than 2.3 has been removed (see PEP 291).
45 + All defect classes have been renamed to end in 'Defect'.
46 + Some FeedParser fixes; also a MultipartInvariantViolationDefect will be
47 added to messages that claim to be multipart but really aren't.
48 + Updates to documentation.
49
Raymond Hettinger596ba4d2004-09-24 03:41:05 +000050- re's findall() and finditer() functions now take an optional flags argument
51 just like the compile(), search(), and match() functions. Also, documented
52 the previously existing start and stop parameters for the findall() and
53 finditer() methods of regular expression objects.
54
Raymond Hettinger0318a932004-09-22 18:03:47 +000055- rfc822 Messages now support iterating over the headers.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +000056
Martin v. Löwisf3c56112004-09-18 09:08:52 +000057- The (undocumented) tarfile.Tarfile.membernames has been removed;
58 applications should use the getmember function.
59
Martin v. Löwis39a31782004-09-18 09:03:49 +000060- httplib now offers symbolic constants for the HTTP status codes.
61
Tim Peters528ca532004-09-16 01:30:50 +000062- SF bug #1028306: Trying to compare a ``datetime.date`` to a
63 ``datetime.datetime`` mistakenly compared only the year, month and day.
64 Now it acts like a mixed-type comparison: ``False`` for ``==``,
65 ``True`` for ``!=``, and raises ``TypeError`` for other comparison
66 operators. Because datetime is a subclass of date, comparing only the
67 base class (date) members can still be done, if that's desired, by
68 forcing using of the approprate date method; e.g.,
69 ``a_date.__eq__(a_datetime)`` is true if and only if the year, month
70 and day members of ``a_date`` and ``a_datetime`` are equal.
71
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +000072- bdist_rpm now supports command line options --force-arch,
73 {pre,post}-install, {pre,post}-uninstall, and
Martin v. Löwis23c48a12004-09-10 06:32:54 +000074 {prep,build,install,clean,verify}-script.
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +000075
Walter Dörwald69652032004-09-07 20:24:22 +000076- SF patch #998993: The UTF-8 and the UTF-16 stateful decoders now support
77 decoding incomplete input (when the input stream is temporarily exhausted).
78 ``codecs.StreamReader`` now implements buffering, which enables proper
79 readline support for the UTF-16 decoders. ``codecs.StreamReader.read()``
80 has a new argument ``chars`` which specifies the number of characters to
81 return. ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` and
82 ``codecs.StreamReader.readlines()`` have a new argument ``keepends``.
83 Trailing "\n"s will be stripped from the lines if ``keepends`` is false.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +000084
Tim Petersa80a2c82004-09-26 05:13:18 +000085- The documentation for doctest is greatly expanded, and now covers all
86 the new public features (of which there are many).
87
Walter Dörwald5011d0c2004-09-13 08:53:15 +000088- ``doctest.master`` was put back in, and ``doctest.testmod()`` once again
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +000089 updates it. This isn't good, because every ``testmod()`` call
90 contributes to bloating the "hidden" state of ``doctest.master``, but
91 some old code apparently relies on it. For now, all we can do is
92 encourage people to stitch doctests together via doctest's unittest
Tim Petersa80a2c82004-09-26 05:13:18 +000093 integration features instead.
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +000094
Skip Montanaro82d0eec2004-09-14 17:58:31 +000095- httplib now handles ipv6 address/port pairs.
96
David Goodger68a1abd2004-10-03 15:40:25 +000097- SF bug #1017864: ConfigParser now correctly handles default keys,
98 processing them with ``ConfigParser.optionxform`` when supplied,
99 consistent with the handling of config file entries and runtime-set
100 options.
101
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000102Build
103-----
104
Brett Cannonbfef8692004-09-28 04:08:11 +0000105- Building on darwin now includes /opt/local/include and /opt/local/lib for
106 building extension modules. This is so as to include software installed as
107 a DarwinPorts port <http://darwinports.opendarwin.org/>
108
Tim Peters862f0592004-09-23 19:11:32 +0000109- pyport.h now defines a Py_IS_NAN macro. It works as-is when the
110 platform C computes true for ``x != x`` if and only if X is a NaN.
111 Other platforms can override the default definition with a platform-
112 specific spelling in that platform's pyconfig.h. You can also override
113 pyport.h's default Py_IS_INFINITY definition now.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000114
115C API
116-----
117
Tim Peters307fa782004-09-23 08:06:40 +0000118- PyLong_AsUnsignedLong[Mask] now support int objects as well.
119
Walter Dörwald69652032004-09-07 20:24:22 +0000120- SF patch #998993: ``PyUnicode_DecodeUTF8Stateful`` and
121 ``PyUnicode_DecodeUTF16Stateful`` have been added, which implement stateful
122 decoding.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000123
124Documentation
125-------------
126
127...
128
129Tests
130-----
131
132- test__locale ported to unittest
133
134Windows
135-------
136
137...
138
139Mac
140---
141
142...
143
144New platforms
145-------------
146
147...
148
149Tools/Demos
150-----------
151
152...
153
154
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000155What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 3?
156=================================
157
Anthony Baxtere13943a2004-09-02 16:37:15 +0000158*Release date: 02-SEP-2004*
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000159
160Core and builtins
161-----------------
162
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000163- SF patch #1007189: ``from ... import ...`` statements now allow the name
Anthony Baxter1a4ddae2004-08-31 10:07:13 +0000164 list to be surrounded by parentheses.
165
Tim Peters0973b992004-08-29 22:16:50 +0000166- Some speedups for long arithmetic, thanks to Trevor Perrin. Gradeschool
167 multiplication was sped a little by optimizing the C code. Gradeschool
168 squaring was sped by about a factor of 2, by exploiting that about half
169 the digit products are duplicates in a square. Because exponentiation
170 uses squaring often, this also speeds long power. For example, the time
171 to compute 17**1000000 dropped from about 14 seconds to 9 on my box due
172 to this much. The cutoff for Karatsuba multiplication was raised,
173 since gradeschool multiplication got quicker, and the cutoff was
Tim Peters47e52ee2004-08-30 02:44:38 +0000174 aggressively small regardless. The exponentiation algorithm was switched
175 from right-to-left to left-to-right, which is more efficient for small
176 bases. In addition, if the exponent is large, the algorithm now does
177 5 bits (instead of 1 bit) at a time. That cut the time to compute
178 17**1000000 on my box in half again, down to about 4.5 seconds.
Tim Peters0973b992004-08-29 22:16:50 +0000179
Tim Petersc8854432004-08-25 02:14:08 +0000180- OverflowWarning is no longer generated. PEP 237 scheduled this to
181 occur in Python 2.3, but since OverflowWarning was disabled by default,
182 nobody realized it was still being generated. On the chance that user
183 code is still using them, the Python builtin OverflowWarning, and
184 corresponding C API PyExc_OverflowWarning, will exist until Python 2.5.
185
Martin v. Löwis336e85f2004-08-19 11:31:58 +0000186- Py_InitializeEx has been added.
187
Brett Cannonadd33602004-08-15 07:21:25 +0000188- Fix the order of application of decorators. The proper order is bottom-up;
189 the first decorator listed is the last one called.
190
Neal Norwitzf0769532004-08-13 03:18:29 +0000191- SF patch #1005778. Fix a seg fault if the list size changed while
192 calling list.index(). This could happen if a rich comparison function
193 modified the list.
194
Michael W. Hudson5e897952004-08-12 18:12:44 +0000195- The ``func_name`` (a.k.a. ``__name__``) attribute of user-defined
196 functions is now writable.
197
Michael W. Hudson5523c252004-08-12 18:09:00 +0000198- code_new (a.k.a new.code()) now checks its arguments sufficiently
199 carefully that passing them on to PyCode_New() won't trigger calls
200 to Py_FatalError() or PyErr_BadInternalCall(). It is still the case
201 that the returned code object might be entirely insane.
202
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +0000203- Subclasses of string can no longer be interned. The semantics of
204 interning were not clear here -- a subclass could be mutable, for
205 example -- and had bugs. Explicitly interning a subclass of string
206 via intern() will raise a TypeError. Internal operations that attempt
207 to intern a string subclass will have no effect.
Jeremy Hylton4c989dd2004-08-07 19:20:05 +0000208
Tim Peters83b57352004-08-08 07:24:22 +0000209- Bug 1003935: xrange() could report bogus OverflowErrors. Documented
210 what xrange() intends, and repaired tests accordingly.
211
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000212Extension modules
213-----------------
214
Martin v. Löwise064b412004-08-29 16:34:40 +0000215- difflib now supports HTML side-by-side diff.
216
Martin v. Löwisdc3883f2004-08-29 15:46:35 +0000217- os.urandom has been added for systems that support sources of random
218 data.
219
Tim Peters037b3ee2004-08-21 06:55:43 +0000220- Patch 1012740: truncate() on a writeable cStringIO now resets the
221 position to the end of the stream. This is consistent with the original
222 StringIO module and avoids inadvertently resurrecting data that was
223 supposed to have been truncated away.
224
Dave Cole331708b2004-08-09 04:51:41 +0000225- Added socket.socketpair().
226
Dave Cole3203efb2004-08-26 00:37:31 +0000227- Added CurrentByteIndex, CurrentColumnNumber, CurrentLineNumber
228 members to xml.parsers.expat.XMLParser object.
229
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000230- The mpz, rotor, and xreadlines modules, all deprecated in earlier
Andrew M. Kuchling00873432004-08-31 13:50:43 +0000231 versions of Python, have now been removed.
232
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000233Library
234-------
235
Johannes Gijsbers4c11f602004-08-30 14:13:04 +0000236- Patch #934356: if a module defines __all__, believe that rather than using
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000237 heuristics for filtering out imported names.
Johannes Gijsbers4c11f602004-08-30 14:13:04 +0000238
Johannes Gijsbersae882f72004-08-30 10:19:56 +0000239- Patch #941486: added os.path.lexists(), which returns True for broken
240 symlinks, unlike os.path.exists().
241
Raymond Hettinger356a4592004-08-30 06:14:31 +0000242- the random module now uses os.urandom() for seeding if it is available.
243 Added a new generator based on os.urandom().
244
Martin v. Löwise064b412004-08-29 16:34:40 +0000245- difflib and diff.py can now generate HTML.
246
Martin v. Löwiscae9e672004-08-25 13:04:53 +0000247- bdist_rpm now includes version and release in the BuildRoot, and
248 replaces - by ``_`` in version and release.
Martin v. Löwiscf525242004-08-25 13:00:34 +0000249
Martin v. Löwis9f5c0c42004-08-25 11:37:43 +0000250- distutils build/build_scripts now has an -e option to specify the
251 path to the Python interpreter for installed scripts.
252
Barry Warsaw8bee7612004-08-25 02:22:30 +0000253- PEP 292 classes Template and SafeTemplate are added to the string module.
254
Martin v. Löwis75b9da42004-08-18 13:57:44 +0000255- tarfile now generates GNU tar files by default.
256
Martin v. Löwisdeacce22004-08-18 12:46:26 +0000257- HTTPResponse has now a getheaders method.
258
Johannes Gijsbersc473c992004-08-18 12:40:31 +0000259- Patch #1006219: let inspect.getsource handle '@' decorators. Thanks Simon
260 Percivall.
261
Martin v. Löwis318a12e2004-08-18 12:27:40 +0000262- logging.handlers.SMTPHandler.date_time has been removed;
263 the class now uses email.Utils.formatdate to generate the time stamp.
264
Martin v. Löwisfe84d172004-08-18 11:06:45 +0000265- A new function tkFont.nametofont was added to return an existing
266 font. The Font class constructor now has an additional exists argument
267 which, if True, requests to return/configure an existing font, rather
Tim Peters037b3ee2004-08-21 06:55:43 +0000268 than creating a new one.
Martin v. Löwisfe84d172004-08-18 11:06:45 +0000269
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +0000270- Updated the decimal package's min() and max() methods to match the
271 latest revision of the General Decimal Arithmetic Specification.
272 Quiet NaNs are ignored and equal values are sorted based on sign
273 and exponent.
274
275- The decimal package's Context.copy() method now returns deep copies.
276
277- Deprecated sys.exitfunc in favor of the atexit module. The sys.exitfunc
278 attribute will be kept around for backwards compatability and atexit
279 will just become the one preferred way to do it.
280
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +0000281- patch #675551: Add get_history_item and replace_history_item functions
282 to the readline module.
283
Johannes Gijsbers34c41202004-08-14 15:19:28 +0000284- bug #989672: pdb.doc and the help messages for the help_d and help_u methods
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +0000285 of the pdb.Pdb class gives have been corrected. d(own) goes to a newer
286 frame, u(p) to an older frame, not the other way around.
Johannes Gijsbers34c41202004-08-14 15:19:28 +0000287
Johannes Gijsbers4ec40642004-08-14 15:01:53 +0000288- bug #990669: os.path.realpath() will resolve symlinks before normalizing the
289 path, as normalizing the path may alter the meaning of the path if it
290 contains symlinks.
291
Johannes Gijsbers9d134b72004-08-14 14:03:03 +0000292- bug #851123: shutil.copyfile will raise an exception when trying to copy a
293 file onto a link to itself. Thanks Gregory Ball.
294
Brett Cannonb3de2e12004-08-13 18:46:24 +0000295- bug #570300: Fix inspect to resolve file locations using os.path.realpath()
296 so as to properly list all functions in a module when the module itself is
297 reached through a symlink. Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
298
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +0000299- doctest refactoring continued. See the docs for details. As part of
300 this effort, some old and little- (never?) used features are now
301 deprecated: the Tester class, the module is_private() function, and the
302 isprivate argument to testmod(). The Tester class supplied a feeble
303 "by hand" way to combine multiple doctests, if you knew exactly what
304 you were doing. The newer doctest features for unittest integration
305 already did a better job of that, are stronger now than ever, and the
306 new DocTestRunner class is a saner foundation if you want to do it by
307 hand. The "private name" filtering gimmick was a mistake from the
308 start, and testmod() changed long ago to ignore it by default. If
309 you want to filter out tests, the new DocTestFinder class can be used
310 to return a list of all doctests, and you can filter that list by
311 any computable criteria before passing it to a DocTestRunner instance.
312
Matthias Klose2e829c02004-08-15 17:04:33 +0000313- Bug #891637, patch #1005466: fix inspect.getargs() crash on def foo((bar)).
314
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000315Tools/Demos
316-----------
317
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +0000318- IDLE's shortcut keys for windows are now case insensitive so that
319 Control-V works the same as Control-v.
320
Matthias Klose2443d4a2004-08-16 12:10:12 +0000321- pygettext.py: Generate POT-Creation-Date header in ISO format.
322
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000323Build
324-----
325
Tim Peters47e52ee2004-08-30 02:44:38 +0000326- Backward incompatibility: longintrepr.h now triggers a compile-time
327 error if SHIFT (the number of bits in a Python long "digit") isn't
328 divisible by 5. This new requirement allows simple code for the new
329 5-bits-at-a-time long_pow() implementation. If necessary, the
330 restriction could be removed (by complicating long_pow(), or by
331 falling back to the 1-bit-at-a-time algorithm), but there are no
332 plans to do so.
333
Brett Cannoncc8a4f62004-08-26 01:44:07 +0000334- bug #991962: When building with --disable-toolbox-glue on Darwin no
335 attempt to build Mac-specific modules occurs.
336
Michael W. Hudson800ba232004-08-12 18:19:17 +0000337- The --with-tsc flag to configure to enable VM profiling with the
338 processor's timestamp counter now works on PPC platforms.
339
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +0000340- patch #1006629: Define _XOPEN_SOURCE to 500 on Solaris 8/9 to match
341 GCC's definition and avoid redefinition warnings.
342
Matthias Klosea2542be2004-08-16 11:35:51 +0000343- Detect pthreads support (provided by gnu pth pthread emulation) on
344 GNU/k*BSD systems.
345
Hye-Shik Chang3ba5bfc2004-08-19 17:52:37 +0000346- bug #1005737, #1007249: Fixed several build problems and warnings
347 found on old/legacy C compilers of HP-UX, IRIX and Tru64.
348
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000349C API
350-----
351
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +0000352..
353
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000354Documentation
355-------------
356
Neal Norwitz5268c392004-08-21 15:13:52 +0000357- patch #1005936, bug #1009373: fix index entries which contain
358 an underscore when viewed with Acrobat.
359
360- bug #990669: os.path.normpath may alter the meaning of a path if
361 it contains symbolic links. This has been documented in a comment
362 since 1992, but is now in the library reference as well.
Johannes Gijsbersb112d6e2004-08-14 14:41:32 +0000363
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000364New platforms
365-------------
366
Hye-Shik Changf64700a2004-08-18 15:13:41 +0000367- FreeBSD 6 is now supported.
368
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000369Tests
370-----
371
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +0000372..
373
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000374Windows
375-------
376
Tim Peters79b52b72004-08-12 18:37:10 +0000377- Boosted the stack reservation for python.exe and pythonw.exe from
378 the default 1MB to 2MB. Stack frames under VC 7.1 for 2.4 are enough
379 bigger than under VC 6.0 for 2.3.4 that deeply recursive progams
380 within the default sys.getrecursionlimit() default value of 1000 were
381 able to suffer undetected C stack overflows. The standard test program
382 test_compiler was one such program. If a Python process on Windows
383 "just vanishes" without a trace, and without an error message of any
384 kind, but with an exit code of 128, undetected stack overflow may be
385 the problem.
386
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000387Mac
388---
389
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +0000390..
391
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000392
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000393What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 2?
394=================================
395
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +0000396*Release date: 05-AUG-2004*
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000397
398Core and builtins
399-----------------
400
Raymond Hettinger52a21b82004-08-06 18:43:09 +0000401- Patch #980695: Implements efficient string concatenation for statements
402 of the form s=s+t and s+=t. This will vary across implementations.
403 Accordingly, the str.join() method is strongly preferred for performance
404 sensitive code.
405
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +0000406- PEP-0318, Function Decorators have been added to the language. These are
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +0000407 implemented using the Java-style @decorator syntax, like so::
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000408
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +0000409 @staticmethod
410 def foo(bar):
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000411
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +0000412 (The PEP needs to be updated to reflect the current state)
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +0000413
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +0000414- When importing a module M raises an exception, Python no longer leaves M
415 in sys.modules. Before 2.4a2 it did, and a subsequent import of M would
416 succeed, picking up a module object from sys.modules reflecting as much
417 of the initialization of M as completed before the exception was raised.
418 Subsequent imports got no indication that M was in a partially-
419 initialized state, and the importers could get into arbitrarily bad
420 trouble as a result (the M they got was in an unintended state,
421 arbitrarily far removed from M's author's intent). Now subsequent
422 imports of M will continue raising exceptions (but if, for example, the
423 source code for M is edited between import attempts, then perhaps later
424 attempts will succeed, or raise a different exception).
425
426 This can break existing code, but in such cases the code was probably
427 working before by accident. In the Python source, the only case of
428 breakage discovered was in a test accidentally relying on a damaged
429 module remaining in sys.modules. Cases are also known where tests
430 deliberately provoking import errors remove damaged modules from
431 sys.modules themselves, and such tests will break now if they do an
432 unconditional del sys.modules[M].
433
Marc-André Lemburgb314ce92004-07-23 16:14:57 +0000434- u'%s' % obj will now try obj.__unicode__() first and fallback to
435 obj.__str__() if no __unicode__ method can be found.
436
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +0000437- Patch #550732: Add PyArg_VaParseTupleAndKeywords(). Analogous to
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000438 PyArg_VaParse(). Both are now documented. Thanks Greg Chapman.
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +0000439
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000440- Allow string and unicode return types from .encode()/.decode()
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000441 methods on string and unicode objects. Added unicode.decode()
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000442 which was missing for no apparent reason.
443
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000444- An attempt to fix the mess that is Python's behaviour with
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000445 signal handlers and threads, complicated by readline's behaviour.
446 It's quite possible that there are still bugs here.
447
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000448- Added C macros Py_CLEAR and Py_VISIT to ease the implementation of
449 types that support garbage collection.
450
Raymond Hettinger76d962d2004-07-16 12:16:48 +0000451- Compiler now treats None as a constant.
452
Neil Schemenauer3a313e32004-07-19 16:29:17 +0000453- The type of values returned by __int__, __float__, __long__,
454 __oct__, and __hex__ are now checked. Returning an invalid type
455 will cause a TypeError to be raised. This matches the behavior of
456 Jython.
457
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +0000458- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in locale module.
459
Hye-Shik Changb5047fd2004-08-04 06:33:51 +0000460- Added a workaround for proper string operations in BSDs. str.split
461 and str.is* methods can now work correctly with UTF-8 locales.
462
Hye-Shik Changc81c6952004-08-04 17:40:38 +0000463- Bug #989185: unicode.iswide() and unicode.width() is dropped and
464 the East Asian Width support is moved to unicodedata extension
465 module.
Hye-Shik Change9ddfbb2004-08-04 07:38:35 +0000466
Hye-Shik Chang7df44b32004-08-04 17:36:41 +0000467- Patch #941229: The source code encoding in interactive mode
468 now refers sys.stdin.encoding not just ISO-8859-1 anymore. This
469 allows for non-latin-1 users to write unicode strings directly.
470
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000471Extension modules
472-----------------
473
Martin v. Löwis544f1192004-07-27 05:22:33 +0000474- cpickle now supports the same keyword arguments as pickle.
475
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000476Library
477-------
478
Marc-André Lemburgc759f072004-08-05 12:43:30 +0000479- Added new codecs and aliases for ISO_8859-11, ISO_8859-16 and
480 TIS-620
481
Tim Peters8485b562004-08-04 18:46:34 +0000482- Thanks to Edward Loper, doctest has been massively refactored, and
483 many new features were added. Full docs will appear later. For now
484 the doctest module comments and new test cases give good coverage.
485 The refactoring provides many hook points for customizing behavior
486 (such as how to report errors, and how to compare expected to actual
487 output). New features include a <BLANKLINE> marker for expected
488 output containing blank lines, options to produce unified or context
489 diffs when actual output doesn't match expectations, an option to
490 normalize whitespace before comparing, and an option to use an
491 ellipsis to signify "don't care" regions of output.
492
Martin v. Löwis1fa649f2004-08-03 18:45:31 +0000493- Tkinter now supports the wish -sync and -use options.
494
Fred Drakef901abd2004-08-03 17:58:55 +0000495- The following methods in time support passing of None: ctime(), gmtime(),
496 and localtime(). If None is provided, the current time is used (the
497 same as when the argument is omitted).
498 [SF bug 658254, patch 663482]
499
Martin v. Löwis9513e342004-08-03 14:36:32 +0000500- nntplib does now allow to ignore a .netrc file.
501
Martin v. Löwis65a79752004-08-03 12:59:55 +0000502- urllib2 now recognizes Basic authentication even if other authentication
503 schemes are offered.
504
Neal Norwitz0e67fd42004-08-01 22:48:06 +0000505- Bug #1001053. wave.open() now accepts unicode filenames.
506
Tim Peters5cfb05e2004-07-27 21:02:02 +0000507- gzip.GzipFile has a new fileno() method, to retrieve the handle of the
508 underlying file object (provided it has a fileno() method). This is
509 needed if you want to use os.fsync() on a GzipFile.
510
Martin v. Löwis7b9190b2004-07-27 05:07:19 +0000511- imaplib has two new methods: deleteacl and myrights.
512
Martin v. Löwiscc0f9322004-07-26 12:40:50 +0000513- nntplib has two new methods: description and descriptions. They
514 use a more RFC-compliant way of getting a newsgroup description.
515
Brett Cannon8b3d92a2004-07-21 02:21:58 +0000516- Bug #993394. Fix a possible red herring of KeyError in 'threading' being
517 raised during interpreter shutdown from a registered function with atexit
518 when dummy_threading is being used.
519
Neal Norwitza4f651a2004-07-20 22:07:44 +0000520- Bug #857297/Patch #916874. Fix an error when extracting a hard link
521 from a tarfile.
522
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +0000523- Patch #846659. Fix an error in tarfile.py when using
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +0000524 GNU longname/longlink creation.
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +0000525
Tim Peters90ee7eb2004-07-18 23:58:17 +0000526- The obsolete FCNTL.py has been deleted. The builtin fcntl module
527 has been available (on platforms that support fcntl) since Python
528 1.5a3, and all FCNTL.py did is export fcntl's names, after generating
529 a deprecation warning telling you to use fcntl directly.
530
Hye-Shik Chang2bb146f2004-07-18 03:06:29 +0000531- Several new unicode codecs are added: big5hkscs, euc_jis_2004,
532 iso2022_jp_2004, shift_jis_2004.
533
Tim Peters5af0e412004-07-12 00:45:14 +0000534- Bug #788520. Queue.{get, get_nowait, put, put_nowait} have new
535 implementations, exploiting Conditions (which didn't exist at the time
536 Queue was introduced). A minor semantic change is that the Full and
537 Empty exceptions raised by non-blocking calls now occur only if the
538 queue truly was full or empty at the instant the queue was checked (of
539 course the Queue may no longer be full or empty by the time a calling
540 thread sees those exceptions, though). Before, the exceptions could
541 also be raised if it was "merely inconvenient" for the implementation
542 to determine the true state of the Queue (because the Queue was locked
543 by some other method in progress).
544
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000545- Bugs #979794 and #980117: difflib.get_grouped_opcodes() now handles the
546 case of comparing two empty lists. This affected both context_diff() and
547 unified_diff(),
Brett Cannond2c5b4b2004-07-10 23:54:07 +0000548
Brett Cannone6f8a892004-07-10 23:14:30 +0000549- Bug #980938: smtplib now prints debug output to sys.stderr.
550
Brett Cannonf50299c2004-07-10 22:55:15 +0000551- Bug #930024: posixpath.realpath() now handles infinite loops in symlinks by
552 returning the last point in the path that was not part of any loop. Thanks
553 AM Kuchling.
554
Brett Cannonbdc36272004-07-10 20:42:22 +0000555- Bug #980327: ntpath not handles compressing erroneous slashes between the
556 drive letter and the rest of the path. Also clearly handles UNC addresses now
557 as well. Thanks Paul Moore.
558
Brett Cannone6751182004-07-10 19:13:42 +0000559- bug #679953: zipfile.py should now work for files over 2 GB. The packed data
560 for file sizes (compressed and uncompressed) was being stored as signed
561 instead of unsigned.
562
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000563- decimal.py now only uses signals in the IBM spec. The other conditions are
Raymond Hettinger5aa478b2004-07-09 10:02:53 +0000564 no longer part of the public API.
565
Marc-André Lemburg88fcca62004-07-10 16:16:06 +0000566- codecs module now has two new generic APIs: encode() and decode()
567 which don't restrict the return types (unlike the unicode and
568 string methods of the same name).
569
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000570- Non-blocking SSL sockets work again; they were broken in Python 2.3.
Andrew M. Kuchling79d7e922004-07-10 21:21:55 +0000571 SF patch 945642.
572
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000573- doctest unittest integration improvements:
574
575 o Improved the unitest test output for doctest-based unit tests
576
577 o Can now pass setUp and tearDown functions when creating
578 DocTestSuites.
579
580- The threading module has a new class, local, for creating objects
581 that provide thread-local data.
582
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +0000583- Bug #990307: when keep_empty_values is True, cgi.parse_qsl()
584 no longer returns spurious empty fields.
585
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +0000586- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in gettext module.
587
588- Introduced in gettext module the l*gettext() family of functions,
589 which return translation strings encoded in the preferred encoding,
590 as informed by locale module's getpreferredencoding().
591
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +0000592- optparse module (and tests) upgraded to Optik 1.5a1. Changes:
593
594 - Add expansion of default values in help text: the string
595 "%default" in an option's help string is expanded to str() of
596 that option's default value, or "none" if no default value.
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +0000597
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +0000598 - Bug #955889: option default values that happen to be strings are
599 now processed in the same way as values from the command line; this
600 allows generation of nicer help when using custom types. Can
601 be disabled with parser.set_process_default_values(False).
602
603 - Bug #960515: don't crash when generating help for callback
604 options that specify 'type', but not 'dest' or 'metavar'.
605
606 - Feature #815264: change the default help format for short options
607 that take an argument from e.g. "-oARG" to "-o ARG"; add
608 set_short_opt_delimiter() and set_long_opt_delimiter() methods to
609 HelpFormatter to allow (slight) customization of the formatting.
610
611 - Patch #736940: internationalize Optik: all built-in user-
612 targeted literal strings are passed through gettext.gettext(). (If
613 you want translations (.po files), they're not included with Python
614 -- you'll find them in the Optik source distribution from
615 http://optik.sourceforge.net/ .)
616
617 - Bug #878453: respect $COLUMNS environment variable for
618 wrapping help output.
619
620 - Feature #988122: expand "%prog" in the 'description' passed
621 to OptionParser, just like in the 'usage' and 'version' strings.
622 (This is *not* done in the 'description' passed to OptionGroup.)
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +0000623
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000624C API
625-----
626
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +0000627- PyImport_ExecCodeModule() and PyImport_ExecCodeModuleEx(): if an
628 error occurs while loading the module, these now delete the module's
629 entry from sys.modules. All ways of loading modules eventually call
630 one of these, so this is an error-case change in semantics for all
631 ways of loading modules. In rare cases, a module loader may wish
632 to keep a module object in sys.modules despite that the module's
633 code cannot be executed. In such cases, the module loader must
634 arrange to reinsert the name and module object in sys.modules.
635 PyImport_ReloadModule() has been changed to reinsert the original
636 module object into sys.modules if the module reload fails, so that
637 its visible semantics have not changed.
638
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000639- A large pile of datetime field-extraction macros is now documented,
640 thanks to Anthony Tuininga (patch #986010).
641
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000642Documentation
643-------------
644
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +0000645- Improved the tutorial on creating types in C.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000646
647 - point out the importance of reassigning data members before
Andrew M. Kuchling78d375f2004-08-07 14:00:39 +0000648 assigning their values
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000649
Andrew M. Kuchling28025ec2004-08-07 13:59:22 +0000650 - correct my misconception about return values from visitprocs. Sigh.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000651
652 - mention the labor saving Py_VISIT and Py_CLEAR macros.
653
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +0000654- Major rewrite of the math module docs, to address common confusions.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000655
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000656Tests
657-----
658
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +0000659- The test data files for the decimal test suite are now installed on
Anthony Baxterfd4984d2004-07-12 09:33:39 +0000660 platforms that use the Makefile.
661
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +0000662- SF patch 995225: The test file testtar.tar accidentally contained
663 CVS keywords (like $Id$), which could cause spurious failures in
664 test_tarfile.py depending on how the test file was checked out.
665
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000666
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000667What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 1?
668=================================
669
Anthony Baxter3210b362004-07-08 05:59:43 +0000670*Release date: 08-JUL-2004*
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000671
672Core and builtins
673-----------------
674
Fred Drake0a4dd392004-07-02 18:57:45 +0000675- weakref.ref is now the type object also known as
676 weakref.ReferenceType; it can be subclassed like any other new-style
677 class. There's less per-entry overhead in WeakValueDictionary
678 objects now (one object instead of three).
679
Thomas Heller04c673b2004-07-02 08:56:20 +0000680- Bug #951851: Python crashed when reading import table of certain
681 Windows DLLs.
682
Raymond Hettinger66bd2332004-08-02 08:30:07 +0000683- Bug #215126. The locals argument to eval(), execfile(), and exec now
684 accept any mapping type.
Raymond Hettinger214b1c32004-07-02 06:41:07 +0000685
Martin v. Löwisef82d2f2004-06-27 16:51:46 +0000686- marshal now shares interned strings. This change introduces
687 a new .pyc magic.
688
Anthony Baxter3ecdb252004-06-11 14:41:18 +0000689- Bug #966623. classes created with type() in an exec(, {}) don't
690 have a __module__, but code in typeobject assumed it would always
691 be there.
692
Martin v. Löwis737ea822004-06-08 18:52:54 +0000693- Python no longer relies on the LC_NUMERIC locale setting to be
694 the "C" locale; as a result, it no longer tries to prevent changing
695 the LC_NUMERIC category.
696
Tim Peters604c0132004-06-07 23:04:33 +0000697- Bug #952807: Unpickling pickled instances of subclasses of
698 datetime.date, datetime.datetime and datetime.time could yield insane
699 objects. Thanks to Jiwon Seo for a fix.
700
Thomas Heller90a764c2004-06-07 15:12:44 +0000701- Bug #845802: Python crashes when __init__.py is a directory.
702
Hye-Shik Changbc555e32004-06-03 11:10:58 +0000703- Unicode objects received two new methods: iswide() and width().
704 These query East Asian width information, as specified in Unicode
705 TR11.
Hye-Shik Chang974ed7c2004-06-02 16:49:17 +0000706
Raymond Hettinger41bd0222004-06-01 06:36:24 +0000707- Improved the tuple hashing algorithm to give fewer collisions in
708 common cases. Fixes bug #942952.
709
Raymond Hettinger354433a2004-05-19 08:20:33 +0000710- Implemented generator expressions (PEP 289). Coded by Jiwon Seo.
711
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +0000712- Enabled the profiling of C extension functions (and builtins) - check
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000713 new documentation and modified profile and bdb modules for more details
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +0000714
Nicholas Bastinabce8a62004-03-21 20:24:07 +0000715- Set file.name to the object passed to open (instead of a new string)
716
Nicholas Bastina7604bf2004-03-21 18:37:23 +0000717- Moved tracebackobject into traceback.h and renamed to PyTracebackObject
718
Raymond Hettingerff5bc502004-03-21 15:12:00 +0000719- Optimized the byte coding for multiple assignments like "a,b=b,a" and
720 "a,b,c=1,2,3". Improves their speed by 25% to 30%.
721
Brett Cannon4f653312004-03-20 22:52:14 +0000722- Limit the nested depth of a tuple for the second argument to isinstance()
723 and issubclass() to the recursion limit of the interpreter.
724 Fixes bug #858016 .
725
Raymond Hettingerade08ea2004-03-18 09:48:12 +0000726- Optimized dict iterators, creating separate types for each
727 and having them reveal their length. Also optimized the
728 methods: keys(), values(), and items().
729
Raymond Hettingerdd80f762004-03-07 07:31:06 +0000730- Implemented a newcode opcode, LIST_APPEND, that simplifies
731 the generated bytecode for list comprehensions and further
732 improves their performance (about 35%).
733
Michael W. Hudsond3b33b52004-02-19 19:35:22 +0000734- Implemented rich comparisons for floats, which seems to make
735 comparisons involving NaNs somewhat less surprising when the
736 underlying C compiler actually implements C99 semantics.
737
Raymond Hettingerfa7b9d82004-02-15 04:06:39 +0000738- Optimized list.extend() to save memory and no longer create
739 intermediate sequences. Also, extend() now pre-allocates the
740 needed memory whenever the length of the iterable is known in
741 advance -- this halves the time to extend the list.
742
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +0000743- Optimized list resize operations to make fewer calls to the system
744 realloc(). Significantly speeds up list appends, list pops,
745 list comprehensions, and the list contructor (when the input iterable
746 length is not known).
747
748- Changed the internal list over-allocation scheme. For larger lists,
749 overallocation ranged between 3% and 25%. Now, it is a constant 12%.
Raymond Hettingerab517d22004-02-14 18:34:46 +0000750 For smaller lists (n<8), overallocation was upto eight elements. Now,
751 the overallocation is no more than three elements -- this improves space
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +0000752 utilization for applications that have large numbers of small lists.
753
Raymond Hettinger0468e412004-05-05 05:37:53 +0000754- Most list bodies now get re-used rather than freed. Speeds up list
755 instantiation and deletion by saving calls to malloc() and free().
756
Raymond Hettinger31017ae2004-03-04 08:25:44 +0000757- The dict.update() method now accepts all the same argument forms
758 as the dict() constructor. This now includes item lists and/or
759 keyword arguments.
760
Michael W. Hudsonecfeb7f2004-02-12 15:28:27 +0000761- Support for arbitrary objects supporting the read-only buffer
762 interface as the co_code field of code objects (something that was
763 only possible to create from C code) has been removed.
764
Fred Drake228765b2004-02-06 04:15:22 +0000765- Made omitted callback and None equivalent for weakref.ref() and
766 weakref.proxy(); the None case wasn't handled correctly in all
767 cases.
768
769- Fixed problem where PyWeakref_NewRef() and PyWeakref_NewProxy()
770 assumed that initial existing entries in an object's weakref list
771 would not be removed while allocating a new weakref object. Since
772 GC could be invoked at that time, however, that assumption was
773 invalid. In a truly obscure case of GC being triggered during
774 creation for a new weakref object for an referent which already
775 has a weakref without a callback which is only referenced from
776 cyclic trash, a memory error can occur. This consistently created a
777 segfault in a debug build, but provided less predictable behavior in
778 a release build.
779
Hye-Shik Changff83c2b2004-02-02 13:39:01 +0000780- input() builtin function now respects compiler flags such as
781 __future__ statements. SF patch 876178.
782
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +0000783- Removed PendingDeprecationWarning from apply(). apply() remains
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +0000784 deprecated, but the nuisance warning will not be issued.
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +0000785
Tim Peters1d7323e2003-12-01 21:35:27 +0000786- At Python shutdown time (Py_Finalize()), 2.3 called cyclic garbage
787 collection twice, both before and after tearing down modules. The
788 call after tearing down modules has been disabled, because too much
789 of Python has been torn down then for __del__ methods and weakref
790 callbacks to execute sanely. The most common symptom was a sequence
791 of uninformative messages on stderr when Python shut down, produced
792 by threads trying to raise exceptions, but unable to report the nature
793 of their problems because too much of the sys module had already been
794 destroyed.
795
Guido van Rossum6c9e1302003-11-29 23:52:13 +0000796- Removed FutureWarnings related to hex/oct literals and conversions
797 and left shifts. (Thanks to Kalle Svensson for SF patch 849227.)
798 This addresses most of the remaining semantic changes promised by
799 PEP 237, except for repr() of a long, which still shows the trailing
800 'L'. The PEP appears to promise warnings for operations that
801 changed semantics compared to Python 2.3, but this is not
802 implemented; we've suffered through enough warnings related to
803 hex/oct literals and I think it's best to be silent now.
804
Raymond Hettinger4f8f9762003-11-26 08:21:35 +0000805- For str and unicode objects, the ljust(), center(), and rjust()
806 methods now accept an optional argument specifying a fill
807 character other than a space.
808
Guido van Rossumbaf0f8f2003-11-22 23:55:50 +0000809- When method objects have an attribute that can be satisfied either
810 by the function object or by the method object, the function
811 object's attribute usually wins. Christian Tismer pointed out that
812 that this is really a mistake, because this only happens for special
813 methods (like __reduce__) where the method object's version is
814 really more appropriate than the function's attribute. So from now
815 on, all method attributes will have precedence over function
816 attributes with the same name.
817
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +0000818- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 839548: if a weakref with a callback,
819 its callback, and its weakly referenced object, all became part of
820 cyclic garbage during a single run of garbage collection, the order
821 in which they were torn down was unpredictable. It was possible for
822 the callback to see partially-torn-down objects, leading to immediate
823 segfaults, or, if the callback resurrected garbage objects, to
824 resurrect insane objects that caused segfaults (or other surprises)
825 later. In one sense this wasn't surprising, because Python's cyclic gc
826 had no knowledge of Python's weakref objects. It does now. When
827 weakrefs with callbacks become part of cyclic garbage now, those
828 weakrefs are cleared first. The callbacks don't trigger then,
829 preventing the problems. If you need callbacks to trigger, then just
830 as when cyclic gc is not involved, you need to write your code so
831 that weakref objects outlive the objects they weakly reference.
Raymond Hettingera690a992003-11-16 16:17:49 +0000832
Tim Petersadd09b42003-11-12 20:43:28 +0000833- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 840829: if cyclic garbage collection
834 happened to occur during a weakref callback for a new-style class
835 instance, subtle memory corruption was the result (in a release build;
836 in a debug build, a segfault occurred reliably very soon after).
837 This has been repaired.
838
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +0000839- Compiler flags set in PYTHONSTARTUP are now active in __main__.
840
841- Added two builtin types, set() and frozenset().
842
Raymond Hettinger85c20a42003-11-06 14:06:48 +0000843- Added a reversed() builtin function that returns a reverse iterator
844 over a sequence.
845
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +0000846- Added a sorted() builtin function that returns a new sorted list
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +0000847 from any iterable.
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +0000848
Martin v. Löwis01a74b22003-10-19 18:30:01 +0000849- CObjects are now mutable (on the C level) through PyCObject_SetVoidPtr.
850
Raymond Hettinger42b1ba32003-10-16 03:41:09 +0000851- list.sort() now supports three keyword arguments: cmp, key, and reverse.
852 The key argument can be a function of one argument that extracts a
853 comparison key from the original record: mylist.sort(key=str.lower).
854 The reverse argument is a boolean value and if True will change the
855 sort order as if the comparison arguments were reversed. In addition,
856 the documentation has been amended to provide a guarantee that all sorts
857 starting with Py2.3 are guaranteed to be stable (the relative order of
858 records with equal keys is unchanged).
859
Marc-André Lemburgd7160f82003-09-22 11:14:40 +0000860- Added test whether wchar_t is signed or not. A signed wchar_t is not
861 usable as internal unicode type base for Py_UNICODE since the
862 unicode implementation assumes an unsigned type.
863
Jeremy Hyltond8082792003-09-16 19:41:39 +0000864- Fixed a bug in the cache of length-one Unicode strings that could
865 lead to a seg fault. The specific problem occurred when an earlier,
866 non-fatal error left an uninitialized Unicode object in the
867 freelist.
868
Raymond Hettinger9bfe5332003-08-27 04:55:52 +0000869- The % formatting operator now supports '%F' which is equivalent to
870 '%f'. This has always been documented but never implemented.
871
Tim Peters465fa3d2003-08-15 01:16:37 +0000872- complex(obj) could leak a little memory if obj wasn't a string or
873 number.
874
Raymond Hettingereaef6152003-08-02 07:42:57 +0000875- zip() with no arguments now returns an empty list instead of raising
876 a TypeError exception.
877
Guido van Rossum02c58f82003-10-08 21:08:29 +0000878- obj.__contains__() now returns True/False instead of 1/0. SF patch
879 820195.
880
Armin Rigo2b3eb402003-10-28 12:05:48 +0000881- Python no longer tries to be smart about recursive comparisons.
882 When comparing containers with cyclic references to themselves it
883 will now just hit the recursion limit. See SF patch 825639.
884
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000885- str and unicode builtin types now have an rsplit() method that is
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +0000886 same as split() except that it scans the string from the end
887 working towards the beginning. See SF feature request 801847.
Hye-Shik Chang060ebed2003-12-15 18:51:19 +0000888
Jim Fulton8a1a5942004-02-08 04:21:26 +0000889- Fixed a bug in object.__reduce_ex__ when using protocol 2. Failure
890 to clear the error when attempts to get the __getstate__ attribute
891 fail caused intermittent errors and odd behavior.
892
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +0000893- buffer objects based on other objects no longer cache a pointer to
894 the data and the data length. Instead, the appropriate tp_as_buffer
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +0000895 method is called as necessary.
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +0000896
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +0000897- fixed: if a file is opened with an explicit buffer size >= 1, repeated
Andrew MacIntyre4e10ed32004-04-04 07:01:35 +0000898 close() calls would attempt to free() the buffer already free()ed on
899 the first call.
900
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +0000901
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000902Extension modules
903-----------------
904
Barry Warsaw11b91a02004-06-28 00:50:43 +0000905- Added socket.getservbyport(), and make the second argument in
906 getservbyname() and getservbyport() optional.
907
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +0000908- time module code that deals with input POSIX timestamps will now raise
909 ValueError if more than a second is lost in precision when the
910 timestamp is cast to the platform C time_t type. There's no chance
911 that the platform will do anything sensible with the result in such
912 cases. This includes ctime(), localtime() and gmtime(). Assorted
913 fromtimestamp() and utcfromtimestamp() methods in the datetime module
914 were also protected. Closes bugs #919012 and 975996.
Brett Cannonb46ed712004-06-19 20:50:47 +0000915
Martin v. Löwis77ca6c42004-06-03 12:47:26 +0000916- fcntl.ioctl now warns if the mutate flag is not specified.
917
Martin v. Löwisd8948722004-06-02 09:57:56 +0000918- nt now properly allows to refer to UNC roots, e.g. in nt.stat().
919
Raymond Hettinger027bb632004-05-31 03:09:25 +0000920- the weakref module now supports additional objects: array.array,
921 sre.pattern_objects, file objects, and sockets.
922
Raymond Hettingere2eda602004-04-04 08:51:41 +0000923- operator.isMappingType() and operator.isSequenceType() now give
924 fewer false positives.
925
Brett Cannon06c34792004-03-23 23:16:54 +0000926- socket.sslerror is now a subclass of socket.error . Also added
927 socket.error to the socket module's C API.
928
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000929- Bug #920575: A problem where the _locale module segfaults on
Hye-Shik Changc3a87b82004-03-21 19:34:30 +0000930 nl_langinfo(ERA) caused by GNU libc's illegal NULL return is fixed.
931
Raymond Hettinger6e2ee862004-03-14 04:37:50 +0000932- array objects now support the copy module. Also, their resizing
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000933 scheme has been updated to match that used for list objects. This improves
Raymond Hettinger49f9bd12004-03-14 05:43:59 +0000934 the performance (speed and memory usage) of append() operations.
Raymond Hettinger6ab78cd2004-08-29 07:50:43 +0000935 Also, array.array() and array.extend() now accept any iterable argument
936 for repeated appends without needing to create another temporary array.
Raymond Hettinger3aa82c02004-03-13 18:18:51 +0000937
Raymond Hettinger3e47f652004-03-08 18:22:35 +0000938- cStringIO.writelines() now accepts any iterable argument and writes
939 the lines one at a time rather than joining them and writing once.
940 Made a parallel change to StringIO.writelines(). Saves memory and
941 makes suitable for use with generator expressions.
942
Brett Cannond1080a32004-03-02 04:38:10 +0000943- time.strftime() now checks that the values in its time tuple argument
944 are within the proper boundaries to prevent possible crashes from the
945 platform's C library implementation of strftime(). Can possibly
946 break code that uses values outside the range that didn't cause
947 problems previously (such as sitting day of year to 0). Fixes bug
948 #897625.
949
Martin v. Löwis12af0482004-01-31 12:34:17 +0000950- The socket module now supports Bluetooth sockets, if the
951 system has <bluetooth/bluetooth.h>
952
Raymond Hettinger756b3f32004-01-29 06:37:52 +0000953- Added a collections module containing a new datatype, deque(),
954 offering high-performance, thread-safe, memory friendly appends
955 and pops on either side of the deque.
956
957- Several modules now take advantage of collections.deque() for
958 improved performance: Queue, mutex, shlex, threading, and pydoc.
959
Raymond Hettinger166958b2003-12-01 13:18:39 +0000960- The operator module has two new functions, attrgetter() and
961 itemgetter() which are useful for creating fast data extractor
962 functions for map(), list.sort(), itertools.groupby(), and
963 other functions that expect a function argument.
964
Martin v. Löwis94681fc2003-11-27 19:40:22 +0000965- socket.SHUT_{RD,WR,RDWR} was added.
966
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +0000967- os.getsid was added.
968
Guido van Rossum16b9fa82003-10-23 23:54:57 +0000969- The pwd module incorrectly advertised its struct type as
970 struct_pwent; this has been renamed to struct_passwd. (The old name
971 is still supported for backwards compatibility.)
972
Fred Drakede050322003-10-21 15:41:59 +0000973- The xml.parsers.expat module now provides Expat 1.95.7.
974
Martin v. Löwis3bbd6542003-10-03 13:57:37 +0000975- socket.IPPROTO_IPV6 was added.
976
Martin v. Löwise7a97962003-09-20 16:08:33 +0000977- readline.clear_history was added.
978
Brett Cannon62dba4c2003-09-10 19:37:42 +0000979- select.select() now accepts sequences for its first three arguments.
980
Raymond Hettinger5475f232003-08-08 12:20:03 +0000981- cStringIO now supports the f.closed attribute.
982
Anthony Baxter83f52912003-08-05 06:33:56 +0000983- The signal module now exposes SIGRTMIN and SIGRTMAX (if available).
984
Andrew M. Kuchling69f31eb2003-08-13 23:11:04 +0000985- curses module now supports use_default_colors(). [patch #739124]
986
Anthony Baxter5c68ef02003-10-04 08:04:04 +0000987- Bug #811028: ncurses.h breakage on FreeBSD/MacOS X
988
989- Bug #814613: INET_ADDRSTRLEN fix needed for all compilers on SGI
990
Gustavo Niemeyerad3fc442003-10-17 22:13:16 +0000991- Implemented non-recursive SRE matching scheme (#757624).
992
993- Implemented (?(id/name)yes|no) support in SRE (#572936).
994
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +0000995- random.seed() with no arguments or None uses time.time() as a default
996 seed. Modified to match Py2.2 behavior and use fractional seconds so
997 that successive runs are more likely to produce different sequences.
998
999- random.Random has a new method, getrandbits(k), which returns an int
1000 with k random bits. This method is now an optional part of the API
1001 for user defined generators. Any generator that defines genrandbits()
1002 can now use randrange() for ranges with a length >= 2**53. Formerly,
1003 randrange would return only even numbers for ranges that large (see
1004 SF bug #812202). Generators that do not define genrandbits() now
1005 issue a warning when randrange() is called with a range that large.
1006
Raymond Hettingerd25c1c62003-12-06 16:23:06 +00001007- itertools has a new function, groupby() for aggregating iterables
1008 into groups sharing the same key (as determined by a key function).
1009 It offers some of functionality of SQL's groupby keyword and of
1010 the Unix uniq filter.
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +00001011
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001012- itertools now has a new tee() function which produces two independent
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +00001013 iterators from a single iterable.
1014
1015- itertools.izip() with no arguments now returns an empty iterator instead
1016 of raising a TypeError exception.
1017
Gustavo Niemeyera6e436e2004-02-14 00:02:45 +00001018- Fixed #853061: allow BZ2Compressor.compress() to receive an empty string
1019 as parameter.
1020
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001021Library
1022-------
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001023
Guido van Rossum5124b4a2004-07-06 17:52:32 +00001024- Bug #981530: Fix UnboundLocalError in shutil.rmtree(). This affects
1025 the documented behavior: the function passed to the onerror()
1026 handler can now also be os.listdir.
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001027
Brett Cannon41d13f62004-07-03 03:54:54 +00001028- Bug #754449: threading.Thread objects no longer mask exceptions raised during
1029 interpreter shutdown with another exception from attempting to handle the
1030 original exception.
Brett Cannoncc4e9352004-07-03 03:52:35 +00001031
Raymond Hettinger21f9fce2004-07-10 16:11:03 +00001032- Added decimal.py per PEP 327.
Raymond Hettinger7c85fa42004-07-01 11:01:35 +00001033
Brett Cannon46d4ff22004-06-29 04:08:23 +00001034- Bug #981299: rsync is now a recognized protocol in urlparse that uses a
1035 "netloc" portion of a URL.
Brett Cannonfbac2942004-06-29 04:02:40 +00001036
Brett Cannon1c3fa182004-06-19 21:11:35 +00001037- Bug #919012: shutil.move() will not try to move a directory into itself.
1038 Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
1039
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +00001040- Bug #934282: pydoc.stripid() is now case-insensitive. Thanks Robin Becker.
1041
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +00001042- Bug #823209: cmath.log() now takes an optional base argument so that its
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +00001043 API matches math.log().
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +00001044
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001045- Bug #957381: distutils bdist_rpm no longer fails on recent RPM versions
Anthony Baxter1a4ddae2004-08-31 10:07:13 +00001046 that generate a -debuginfo.rpm
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001047
Martin v. Löwisbdec50f2004-06-08 08:29:33 +00001048- os.path.devnull has been added for all supported platforms.
1049
Hye-Shik Chang2400e932004-06-05 18:37:53 +00001050- Fixed #877165: distutils now picks the right C++ compiler command
1051 on cygwin and mingw32.
1052
Hye-Shik Chang39aef792004-06-05 13:30:56 +00001053- urllib.urlopen().readline() now handles HTTP/0.9 correctly.
1054
Brett Cannon0096e262004-06-05 01:12:51 +00001055- refactored site.py into functions. Also wrote regression tests for the
1056 module.
1057
Fred Drakeec6229e2004-06-25 23:02:59 +00001058- The distutils install command now supports the --home option and
1059 installation scheme for all platforms.
1060
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +00001061- asyncore.loop now has a repeat count parameter that defaults to
Michael W. Hudson7db865a2004-06-30 09:09:38 +00001062 looping forever.
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +00001063
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001064- The distutils sdist command now ignores all .svn directories, in
1065 addition to CVS and RCS directories. .svn directories hold
1066 administrative files for the Subversion source control system.
1067
Martin v. Löwis2a6ba902004-05-31 18:22:40 +00001068- Added a new module: cookielib. Automatic cookie handling for HTTP
1069 clients. Also, support for cookielib has been added to urllib2, so
1070 urllib2.urlopen() can transparently handle cookies.
1071
Raymond Hettinger059e1702004-05-19 19:56:44 +00001072- stringprep.py now uses built-in set() instead of sets.Set().
1073
Thomas Heller2e7c8322004-05-11 15:10:59 +00001074- Bug #876278: Unbounded recursion in modulefinder
1075
Martin v. Löwis456ab1d2004-05-06 01:54:36 +00001076- Bug #780300: Swap public and system ID in LexicalHandler.startDTD.
1077 Applications relying on the wrong order need to be corrected.
1078
Hye-Shik Chang0f5bf1e2004-04-20 21:11:11 +00001079- Bug #926075: Fixed a bug that returns a wrong pattern object
1080 for a string or unicode object in sre.compile() when a different
1081 type pattern with the same value exists.
1082
Skip Montanarod0c0c412004-04-07 16:03:02 +00001083- Added countcallers arg to trace.Trace class (--trackcalls command line arg
1084 when run from the command prompt).
1085
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +00001086- Fixed a caching bug in platform.platform() where the argument of 'terse' was
1087 not taken into consideration when caching value.
1088
Nicholas Bastin824b1b22004-03-23 18:44:39 +00001089- Added two new command-line arguments for profile (output file and
1090 default sort).
1091
Nicholas Bastin1eb4bfc2004-03-22 20:12:56 +00001092- Added global runctx function to profile module
1093
Martin v. Löwis347c30d2004-03-21 15:29:41 +00001094- Add hlist missing entryconfigure and entrycget methods.
1095
Hye-Shik Chang4a7ad1a2004-03-19 08:11:56 +00001096- The ptcp154 codec was added for Kazakh character set support.
1097
Martin v. Löwisa79449e2004-02-15 21:19:18 +00001098- Support non-anonymous ftp URLs in urllib2.
1099
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001100- The encodings package will now apply codec name aliases
Marc-André Lemburg57cb68f2004-01-20 18:24:34 +00001101 first before starting to try the import of the codec module.
1102 This simplifies overriding built-in codecs with external
1103 packages, e.g. the included CJK codecs with the JapaneseCodecs
1104 package, by adjusting the aliases dictionary in encodings.aliases
1105 accordingly.
1106
Barry Warsaw30ff12f2004-01-04 01:13:43 +00001107- base64 now supports RFC 3548 Base16, Base32, and Base64 encoding and
1108 decoding standards.
1109
Jeremy Hylton37c5f2a2003-12-14 05:29:45 +00001110- urllib2 now supports processors. A processor is a handler that
1111 implements an xxx_request or xxx_response method. These methods are
1112 called for all requests.
1113
Thomas Hellerc7501d52003-12-05 20:28:07 +00001114- distutils compilers now compile source files in the same order as
1115 they are passed to the compiler.
1116
Walter Dörwaldc8de4582003-12-03 20:26:05 +00001117- pprint.pprint() and pprint.pformat() now have additional parameters
1118 indent, width and depth.
1119
Walter Dörwald7a7ede52003-12-03 20:15:28 +00001120- Patch #750542: pprint now will pretty print subclasses of list, tuple
1121 and dict too, as long as they don't overwrite __repr__().
1122
Thomas Hellerb3105912003-11-28 19:42:56 +00001123- Bug #848614: distutils' msvccompiler fails to find the MSVC6
1124 compiler because of incomplete registry entries.
1125
Martin v. Löwisaf7dc8d2003-11-19 19:51:55 +00001126- httplib.HTTP.putrequest now offers to omit the implicit Accept-Encoding.
1127
Thomas Hellercf0005b2003-11-14 10:33:20 +00001128- Patch #841977: modulefinder didn't find extension modules in packages
1129
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +00001130- imaplib.IMAP4.thread was added.
1131
Guido van Rossum967b0632003-11-10 02:27:19 +00001132- Plugged a minor hole in tempfile.mktemp() due to the use of
1133 os.path.exists(), switched to using os.lstat() directly if possible.
1134
Raymond Hettinger0c410272004-01-05 10:13:35 +00001135- bisect.py and heapq.py now have underlying C implementations
Raymond Hettinger33ecffb2004-06-10 05:03:17 +00001136 for better performance.
1137
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001138- heapq.py has two new functions, nsmallest() and nlargest().
Raymond Hettingerb3af1812003-11-08 10:24:38 +00001139
Neil Schemenauerf607fc52003-11-05 23:03:00 +00001140- traceback.format_exc has been added (similar to print_exc but it returns
1141 a string).
1142
Martin v. Löwis45394c22003-10-31 13:49:36 +00001143- xmlrpclib.MultiCall has been added.
1144
Martin v. Löwis48440b72003-10-31 12:52:35 +00001145- poplib.POP3_SSL has been added.
1146
Martin v. Löwisd6625482003-10-12 17:37:01 +00001147- tmpfile.mkstemp now returns an absolute path even if dir is relative.
1148
Brett Cannon5d9ca4e2003-10-12 04:38:48 +00001149- urlparse is RFC 2396 compliant.
1150
Skip Montanarodef99342003-10-03 14:07:07 +00001151- The fieldnames argument to the csv module's DictReader constructor is now
1152 optional. If omitted, the first row of the file will be used as the
1153 list of fieldnames.
1154
Raymond Hettinger9a80c5d2003-09-23 20:21:01 +00001155- encodings.bz2_codec was added for access to bz2 compression
1156 using "a long string".encode('bz2')
1157
Guido van Rossum0e5a51d2003-09-22 15:03:11 +00001158- Various improvements to unittest.py, realigned with PyUnit CVS.
1159
Martin v. Löwisc6bb6c02003-09-20 15:52:21 +00001160- dircache now passes exceptions to the caller, instead of returning
1161 empty lists.
1162
Raymond Hettingerdeadbf52003-09-12 06:33:37 +00001163- The bsddb module and dbhash module now support the iterator and
1164 mapping protocols which make them more substitutable for dictionaries
1165 and shelves.
1166
Skip Montanaro3f7a9482003-09-06 19:52:12 +00001167- The csv module's DictReader and DictWriter classes now accept keyword
1168 arguments. This was an omission in the initial implementation.
1169
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +00001170- The email package handles some RFC 2231 parameters with missing
Barry Warsaw2f5bf172003-09-03 04:09:49 +00001171 CHARSET fields better. It also includes a patch to parameter
1172 parsing when semicolons appear inside quotes.
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +00001173
Raymond Hettinger6a180122003-08-17 08:34:09 +00001174- sets.py now runs under Py2.2. In addition, the argument restrictions
1175 for most set methods (but not the operators) have been relaxed to
Raymond Hettinger70b9f492003-11-19 15:52:14 +00001176 allow any iterable.
Raymond Hettingeree562fc2003-08-15 21:17:04 +00001177
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +00001178- _strptime.py now has a behind-the-scenes caching mechanism for the most
Brett Cannonb7150a22003-08-05 06:27:04 +00001179 recent TimeRE instance used along with the last five unique directive
1180 patterns. The overall module was also made more thread-safe.
1181
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +00001182- random.cunifvariate() and random.stdgamma() were deprecated in Py2.3
1183 and removed in Py2.4.
1184
Anthony Baxter92bee362003-11-04 14:35:49 +00001185- Bug #823328: urllib2.py's HTTP Digest Auth support works again.
1186
Hye-Shik Chang84a99312004-01-17 14:59:36 +00001187- Patch #873597: CJK codecs are imported into rank of default codecs.
1188
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001189Tools/Demos
1190-----------
1191
Skip Montanarod5a21fd2004-01-27 14:49:04 +00001192- A hotshotmain script was added to the Tools/scripts directory that
1193 makes it easy to run a script under control of the hotshot profiler.
1194
Skip Montanaro030f68a2003-10-28 16:24:00 +00001195- The db2pickle and pickle2db scripts can now dump/load gdbm files.
1196
Skip Montanaroe2b61e02004-03-03 17:42:08 +00001197- The file order on the command line of the pickle2db script was reversed.
1198 It is now [ picklefile ] dbfile. This provides better symmetry with
1199 db2pickle. The file arguments to both scripts are now source followed by
1200 destination in situations where both files are given.
1201
Skip Montanarofd4fa882003-09-10 19:04:13 +00001202- The pydoc script will display a link to the module documentation for
1203 modules determined to be part of the core distribution. The documentation
1204 base directory defaults to http://www.python.org/doc/current/lib/ but can
1205 be changed by setting the PYTHONDOCS environment variable.
1206
Raymond Hettingere41d4c82003-08-25 04:39:55 +00001207- texcheck.py now detects double word errors.
1208
Tim Peters1a3abcb2003-08-18 23:52:09 +00001209- md5sum.py mistakenly opened input files in text mode by default, a
1210 silent and dangerous change from previous releases. It once again
1211 opens input files in binary mode by default. The -t and -b flags
1212 remain for compatibility with the 2.3 release, but -b is the default
1213 now.
1214
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001215- py-electric-colon now works when pending-delete/delete-selection mode is
1216 in effect
1217
1218- py-help-at-point is no longer bound to the F1 key - it's still bound to
1219 C-c C-h
1220
Barry Warsaw6ec58ca2003-09-03 03:20:37 +00001221- Pynche was fixed to not crash when there is no ~/.pynche file and no
1222 -d option was given.
1223
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001224Build
1225-----
1226
Brett Cannonf6af76d2004-06-26 04:03:06 +00001227- Bug #978645: Modules/getpath.c now builds properly in --disable-framework
1228 build under OS X.
1229
Skip Montanaro56f6a4f2004-06-18 02:47:22 +00001230- Profiling using gprof is now available if Python is configured with
1231 --enable-profiling.
1232
Martin v. Löwisf30d60e2004-06-08 08:17:44 +00001233- Profiling the VM using the Pentium TSC is now possible if Python
1234 is configured --with-tsc.
1235
Martin v. Löwis642c8a12004-06-04 13:55:13 +00001236- In order to find libraries, setup.py now also looks in /lib64, for use
1237 on AMD64.
1238
Hye-Shik Chang54f94392004-04-14 07:55:31 +00001239- Bug #934635: Fixed a bug where the configure script couldn't detect
1240 getaddrinfo() properly if the KAME stack had SCTP support.
1241
Skip Montanaro7befb992004-02-10 16:50:21 +00001242- Support for missing ANSI C header files (limits.h, stddef.h, etc) was
1243 removed.
1244
Skip Montanarodb608052004-02-07 13:53:46 +00001245- Systems requiring the D4, D6 or D7 variants of pthreads are no longer
1246 supported (see PEP 11).
1247
1248- Universal newline support can no longer be disabled (see PEP 11).
1249
Skip Montanarocd1f7432004-01-17 14:22:44 +00001250- Support for DGUX, SunOS 4, IRIX 4 and Minix was removed (see PEP 11).
1251
1252- Support for systems requiring --with-dl-dld or --with-sgi-dl was removed
1253 (see PEP 11).
1254
1255- Tests for sizeof(char) were removed since ANSI C mandates that
1256 sizeof(char) must be 1.
1257
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001258C API
1259-----
1260
Tim Peters9ddf40b2004-06-20 22:41:32 +00001261- Thanks to Anthony Tuininga, the datetime module now supplies a C API
1262 containing type-check macros and constructors. See new docs in the
1263 Python/C API Reference Manual for details.
1264
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +00001265- Private function _PyTime_DoubleToTimet added, to convert a Python
1266 timestamp (C double) to platform time_t with some out-of-bounds
1267 checking. Declared in new header file timefuncs.h. It would be
1268 good to expose some other internal timemodule.c functions there.
1269
Martin v. Löwise440e472004-06-01 15:22:42 +00001270- New public functions PyEval_EvaluateFrame and PyGen_New to expose
1271 generator objects.
1272
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +00001273- New public functions Py_IncRef() and Py_DecRef(), exposing the
1274 functionality of the Py_XINCREF() and Py_XDECREF macros. Useful for
Thomas Hellercc10a852004-04-22 17:28:25 +00001275 runtime dynamic embedding of Python. See patch #938302, by Bob
1276 Ippolito.
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +00001277
Raymond Hettingerc1e4f9d2004-03-12 08:04:00 +00001278- Added a new macro, PySequence_Fast_ITEMS, which retrieves a fast sequence's
1279 underlying array of PyObject pointers. Useful for high speed looping.
1280
Raymond Hettinger8f5cdaa2003-12-13 11:26:12 +00001281- Created a new method flag, METH_COEXIST, which causes a method to be loaded
1282 even if already defined by a slot wrapper. This allows a __contains__
1283 method, for example, to co-exist with a defined sq_contains slot. This
1284 is helpful because the PyCFunction can take advantage of optimized calls
1285 whenever METH_O or METH_NOARGS flags are defined.
1286
Raymond Hettingerbc0f2ab2003-11-25 21:12:14 +00001287- Added a new function, PyDict_Contains(d, k) which is like
1288 PySequence_Contains() but is specific to dictionaries and executes
1289 about 10% faster.
1290
Brett Cannon26b3a7b2003-10-19 21:31:43 +00001291- Added three new macros: Py_RETURN_NONE, Py_RETURN_TRUE, and Py_RETURN_FALSE.
1292 Each return the singleton they mention after Py_INCREF()ing them.
1293
Raymond Hettingercb2da432003-10-12 18:24:34 +00001294- Added a new function, PyTuple_Pack(n, ...) for constructing tuples from a
1295 variable length argument list of Python objects without having to invoke
1296 the more complex machinery of Py_BuildValue(). PyTuple_Pack(3, a, b, c)
1297 is equivalent to Py_BuildValue("(OOO)", a, b, c).
1298
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001299Windows
1300-------
1301
Guido van Rossumfd25aca2003-11-30 22:10:15 +00001302- The _winreg module could segfault when reading very large registry
1303 values, due to unchecked alloca() calls (SF bug 851056). The fix is
1304 uses either PyMem_Malloc(n) or PyString_FromStringAndSize(NULL, n),
1305 as appropriate, followed by a size check.
1306
Tim Petersf1827cf2003-09-07 03:30:18 +00001307- file.truncate() could misbehave if the file was open for update
1308 (modes r+, rb+, w+, wb+), and the most recent file operation before
1309 the truncate() call was an input operation. SF bug 801631.
1310
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001311
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001312What's New in Python 2.3 final?
1313===============================
1314
1315*Release date: 29-Jul-2003*
1316
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001317IDLE
1318----
1319
Tim Peters36c1afc2003-07-29 17:22:57 +00001320- Bug 778400: IDLE hangs when selecting "Edit with IDLE" from explorer.
1321 This was unique to Windows, and was fixed by adding an -n switch to
1322 the command the Windows installer creates to execute "Edit with IDLE"
1323 context-menu actions.
1324
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001325- IDLE displays a new message upon startup: some "personal firewall"
1326 kinds of programs (for example, ZoneAlarm) open a dialog of their
1327 own when any program opens a socket. IDLE does use sockets, talking
1328 on the computer's internal loopback interface. This connection is not
1329 visible on any external interface and no data is sent to or received
1330 from the Internet. So, if you get such a dialog when opening IDLE,
1331 asking whether to let pythonw.exe talk to address 127.0.0.1, say yes,
1332 and rest assured no communication external to your machine is taking
1333 place. If you don't allow it, IDLE won't be able to start.
1334
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001335
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001336What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 2?
1337=============================================
1338
Tim Peters6560a252003-07-24 00:15:46 +00001339*Release date: 24-Jul-2003*
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001340
1341Core and builtins
1342-----------------
1343
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00001344- It is now possible to import from zipfiles containing additional
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001345 data bytes before the zip compatible archive. Zipfiles containing a
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00001346 comment at the end are still unsupported.
1347
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001348Extension modules
1349-----------------
1350
1351- A longstanding bug in the parser module's initialization could cause
1352 fatal internal refcount confusion when the module got initialized more
1353 than once. This has been fixed.
1354
Fred Drake01a43122003-07-21 17:17:10 +00001355- Fixed memory leak in pyexpat; using the parser's ParseFile() method
1356 with open files that aren't instances of the standard file type
1357 caused an instance of the bound .read() method to be leaked on every
1358 call.
1359
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001360- Fixed some leaks in the locale module.
1361
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001362Library
1363-------
1364
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001365- Lib/encodings/rot_13.py when used as a script, now more properly
1366 uses the first Python interpreter on your path.
1367
1368- Removed caching of TimeRE (and thus LocaleTime) in _strptime.py to
1369 fix a locale related bug in the test suite. Although another patch
1370 was needed to actually fix the problem, the cache code was not
1371 restored.
1372
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00001373IDLE
1374----
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001375
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00001376- Calltips patches.
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001377
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001378Build
1379-----
1380
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001381- For MacOSX, added -mno-fused-madd to BASECFLAGS to fix test_coercion
1382 on Panther (OSX 10.3).
1383
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001384C API
1385-----
1386
1387Windows
1388-------
1389
Tim Peters291f14e2003-07-22 02:50:01 +00001390- The tempfile module could do insane imports on Windows if PYTHONCASEOK
1391 was set, making temp file creation impossible. Repaired.
1392
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001393- Add a patch to workaround pthread_sigmask() bugs in Cygwin.
1394
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001395Mac
1396---
1397
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001398- Various fixes to pimp.
1399
1400- Scripts runs with pythonw no longer had full window manager access.
1401
1402- Don't force boot-disk-only install, for reasons unknown it causes
1403 more problems than it solves.
1404
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001405
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001406What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 1?
1407=============================================
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001408
Jeremy Hylton0ed18c22003-07-18 20:10:02 +00001409*Release date: 18-Jul-2003*
1410
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001411Core and builtins
1412-----------------
1413
Tim Peterse5e065b2003-07-06 18:36:54 +00001414- The new function sys.getcheckinterval() returns the last value set
1415 by sys.setcheckinterval().
1416
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001417- Several bugs in the symbol table phase of the compiler have been
1418 fixed. Errors could be lost and compilation could fail without
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001419 reporting an error. SF patch 763201.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001420
1421- The interpreter is now more robust about importing the warnings
1422 module. In an executable generated by freeze or similar programs,
1423 earlier versions of 2.3 would fail if the warnings module could
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001424 not be found on the file system. Fixes SF bug 771097.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001425
1426- A warning about assignments to module attributes that shadow
1427 builtins, present in earlier releases of 2.3, has been removed.
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001428
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001429- It is not possible to create subclasses of builtin types like str
1430 and tuple that define an itemsize. Earlier releases of Python 2.3
1431 allowed this by mistake, leading to crashes and other problems.
1432
1433- The thread_id is now initialized to 0 in a non-thread build. SF bug
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001434 770247.
1435
1436- SF bug 762891: "del p[key]" on proxy object no longer raises SystemError.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001437
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001438Extension modules
1439-----------------
1440
1441- weakref.proxy() can now handle "del obj[i]" for proxy objects
1442 defining __delitem__. Formerly, it generated a SystemError.
1443
1444- SSL no longer crashes the interpreter when the remote side disconnects.
1445
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001446- On Unix the mmap module can again be used to map device files.
1447
Brett Cannon20def8b2003-07-01 05:16:08 +00001448- time.strptime now exclusively uses the Python implementation
1449 contained within the _strptime module.
1450
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001451- The print slot of weakref proxy objects was removed, because it was
1452 not consistent with the object's repr slot.
1453
1454- The mmap module only checks file size for regular files, not
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001455 character or block devices. SF patch 708374.
1456
1457- The cPickle Pickler garbage collection support was fixed to traverse
1458 the find_class attribute, if present.
1459
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001460- There are several fixes for the bsddb3 wrapper module.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001461
1462 bsddb3 no longer crashes if an environment is closed before a cursor
1463 (SF bug 763298).
1464
1465 The DB and DBEnv set_get_returns_none function was extended to take
Barry Warsawd71a5512003-07-20 18:00:54 +00001466 a level instead of a boolean flag. The new level 2 means that in
1467 addition, cursor.set()/.get() methods return None instead of raising
1468 an exception.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001469
1470 A typo was fixed in DBCursor.join_item(), preventing a crash.
1471
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001472Library
1473-------
1474
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001475- distutils now supports MSVC 7.1
1476
Raymond Hettinger71adf7e2003-07-16 19:25:22 +00001477- doctest now examines all docstrings by default. Previously, it would
1478 skip over functions with private names (as indicated by the underscore
1479 naming convention). The old default created too much of a risk that
1480 user tests were being skipped inadvertently. Note, this change could
1481 break code in the unlikely case that someone had intentionally put
1482 failing tests in the docstrings of private functions. The breakage
1483 is easily fixable by specifying the old behavior when calling testmod()
1484 or Tester().
1485
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001486- There were several fixes to the way dumbdbms are closed. It's vital
1487 that a dumbdbm database be closed properly, else the on-disk data
1488 and directory files can be left in mutually inconsistent states.
1489 dumbdbm.py's _Database.__del__() method attempted to close the
1490 database properly, but a shutdown race in _Database._commit() could
1491 prevent this from working, so that a program trusting __del__() to
1492 get the on-disk files in synch could be badly surprised. The race
1493 has been repaired. A sync() method was also added so that shelve
1494 can guarantee data is written to disk.
Tim Peters7a6c7332003-07-13 17:21:10 +00001495
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001496 The close() method can now be called more than once without complaint.
Tim Petersd7472ec2003-07-13 02:22:03 +00001497
Tim Peters59aba122003-07-01 20:01:55 +00001498- The classes in threading.py are now new-style classes. That they
1499 weren't before was an oversight.
1500
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001501- The urllib2 digest authentication handlers now define the correct
1502 auth_header. The earlier versions would fail at runtime.
1503
Neal Norwitze7dfe212003-07-01 14:59:46 +00001504- SF bug 763023: fix uncaught ZeroDivisionError in difflib ratio methods
1505 when there are no lines.
1506
Neal Norwitz3c0f2c92003-07-01 21:12:47 +00001507- SF bug 763637: fix exception in Tkinter with after_cancel
1508 which could occur with Tk 8.4
1509
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001510- SF bug 770601: CGIHTTPServer.py now passes the entire environment
1511 to child processes.
1512
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001513- SF bug 765238: add filter to fnmatch's __all__.
1514
1515- SF bug 748201: make time.strptime() error messages more helpful.
1516
1517- SF patch 764470: Do not dump the args attribute of a Fault object in
1518 xmlrpclib.
1519
1520- SF patch 549151: urllib and urllib2 now redirect POSTs on 301
1521 responses.
1522
1523- SF patch 766650: The whichdb module was fixed to recognize dbm files
1524 generated by gdbm on OS/2 EMX.
1525
1526- SF bugs 763047 and 763052: fixes bug of timezone value being left as
1527 -1 when ``time.tzname[0] == time.tzname[1] and not time.daylight``
1528 is true when it should only when time.daylight is true.
1529
1530- SF bug 764548: re now allows subclasses of str and unicode to be
1531 used as patterns.
1532
1533- SF bug 763637: In Tkinter, change after_cancel() to handle tuples
1534 of varying sizes. Tk 8.4 returns a different number of values
1535 than Tk 8.3.
1536
1537- SF bug 763023: difflib.ratio() did not catch zero division.
1538
1539- The Queue module now has an __all__ attribute.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001540
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001541Tools/Demos
1542-----------
1543
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001544- See Lib/idlelib/NEWS.txt for IDLE news.
1545
Neal Norwitz592c4cc2003-07-01 04:14:28 +00001546- SF bug 753592: webchecker/wsgui now handles user supplied directories.
1547
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001548- The trace.py script has been removed. It is now in the standard library.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001549
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001550Build
1551-----
1552
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001553- Python now compiles with -fno-strict-aliasing if possible (SF bug 766696).
1554
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001555- The socket module compiles on IRIX 6.5.10.
1556
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001557- An irix64 system is treated the same way as an irix6 system (SF
1558 patch 764560).
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001559
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001560- Several definitions were missing on FreeBSD 5.x unless the
1561 __BSD_VISIBLE symbol was defined. configure now defines it as
1562 needed.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001563
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001564C API
1565-----
1566
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001567- Unicode objects now support mbcs as a built-in encoding, so the C
1568 API can use it without deferring to the encodings package.
1569
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001570Windows
1571-------
1572
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001573- The Windows implementation of PyThread_start_new_thread() never
1574 checked error returns from Windows functions correctly. As a result,
1575 it could claim to start a new thread even when the Microsoft
1576 _beginthread() function failed (due to "too many threads" -- this is
1577 on the order of thousands when it happens). In these cases, the
1578 Python exception ::
1579
1580 thread.error: can't start new thread
1581
1582 is raised now.
1583
1584- SF bug 766669: Prevent a GPF on interpreter exit when sockets are in
1585 use. The interpreter now calls WSACleanup() from Py_Finalize()
1586 instead of from DLL teardown.
1587
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001588Mac
1589---
1590
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001591- Bundlebuilder now inherits default values in the right way. It was
Walter Dörwald73a8a4b2003-07-30 12:14:02 +00001592 previously possible for app bundles to get a type of "BNDL" instead
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001593 of "APPL." Other improvements include, a --build-id option to
1594 specify the CFBundleIdentifier and using the --python option to set
1595 the executable in the bundle.
1596
1597- Fixed two bugs in MacOSX framework handling.
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001598
Jack Jansene0040412003-07-23 22:17:28 +00001599- pythonw did not allow user interaction in 2.3rc1, this has been fixed.
1600
1601- Python is now compiled with -mno-fused-madd, making all tests pass
1602 on Panther.
1603
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001604What's New in Python 2.3 beta 2?
1605================================
1606
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00001607*Release date: 29-Jun-2003*
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001608
1609Core and builtins
1610-----------------
1611
Barry Warsaw883f2232003-06-29 17:10:11 +00001612- A program can now set the environment variable PYTHONINSPECT to some
1613 string value in Python, and cause the interpreter to enter the
1614 interactive prompt at program exit, as if Python had been invoked
1615 with the -i option.
1616
Raymond Hettingerd05abde2003-06-17 05:05:49 +00001617- list.index() now accepts optional start and stop arguments. Similar
1618 changes were made to UserList.index(). SF feature request 754014.
1619
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00001620- SF patch 751998 fixes an unwanted side effect of the previous fix
1621 for SF bug 742860 (the next item).
1622
Tim Peters50d8b8b2003-05-25 17:44:31 +00001623- SF bug 742860: "WeakKeyDictionary __delitem__ uses iterkeys". This
1624 wasn't threadsafe, was very inefficient (expected time O(len(dict))
1625 instead of O(1)), and could raise a spurious RuntimeError if another
1626 thread mutated the dict during __delitem__, or if a comparison function
1627 mutated it. It also neglected to raise KeyError when the key wasn't
1628 present; didn't raise TypeError when the key wasn't of a weakly
1629 referencable type; and broke various more-or-less obscure dict
1630 invariants by using a sequence of equality comparisons over the whole
1631 set of dict keys instead of computing the key's hash code to narrow
1632 the search to those keys with the same hash code. All of these are
1633 considered to be bugs. A new implementation of __delitem__ repairs all
1634 that, but note that fixing these bugs may change visible behavior in
1635 code relying (whether intentionally or accidentally) on old behavior.
Tim Peters886128f2003-05-25 01:45:11 +00001636
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001637- SF bug 734869: Fixed a compiler bug that caused a fatal error when
1638 compiling a list comprehension that contained another list comprehension
1639 embedded in a lambda expression.
1640
Tim Peterse87568d2003-05-24 20:18:24 +00001641- SF bug 705231: builtin pow() no longer lets the platform C pow()
1642 raise -1.0 to integer powers, because (at least) glibc gets it wrong
1643 in some cases. The result should be -1.0 if the power is odd and 1.0
1644 if the power is even, and any float with a sufficiently large exponent
1645 is (mathematically) an exact even integer.
1646
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001647- SF bug 759227: A new-style class that implements __nonzero__() must
1648 return a bool or int (but not an int subclass) from that method. This
1649 matches the restriction on classic classes.
1650
Martin v. Löwis5467d4c2003-05-10 07:10:12 +00001651- The encoding attribute has been added for file objects, and set to
1652 the terminal encoding on Unix and Windows.
1653
Tim Peters015dd822003-05-04 04:16:52 +00001654- The softspace attribute of file objects became read-only by oversight.
1655 It's writable again.
1656
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00001657- Reverted a 2.3 beta 1 change to iterators for subclasses of list and
1658 tuple. By default, the iterators now access data elements directly
1659 instead of going through __getitem__. If __getitem__ access is
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001660 preferred, then __iter__ can be overridden.
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00001661
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001662- SF bug 735247: The staticmethod and super types participate in
1663 garbage collection. Before this change, it was possible for leaks to
1664 occur in functions with non-global free variables that used these types.
1665
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001666Extension modules
1667-----------------
1668
Raymond Hettinger643bcec2003-06-29 03:29:42 +00001669- the socket module has a new exception, socket.timeout, to allow
1670 timeouts to be handled separately from other socket errors.
1671
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001672- SF bug 751276: cPickle has fixed to propagate exceptions raised in
1673 user code. In earlier versions, cPickle caught and ignored any
1674 exception when it performed operations that it expected to raise
1675 specific exceptions like AttributeError.
1676
1677- cPickle Pickler and Unpickler objects now participate in garbage
1678 collection.
1679
Tim Peterscda32b72003-06-15 23:13:35 +00001680- mimetools.choose_boundary() could return duplicate strings at times,
1681 especially likely on Windows. The strings returned are now guaranteed
1682 unique within a single program run.
1683
Brett Cannon4e64d782003-06-13 23:44:35 +00001684- thread.interrupt_main() raises KeyboardInterrupt in the main thread.
1685 dummy_thread has also been modified to try to simulate the behavior.
1686
Walter Dörwald9e46abe2003-05-18 03:15:10 +00001687- array.array.insert() now treats negative indices as being relative
1688 to the end of the array, just like list.insert() does. (SF bug #739313)
1689
Tim Petersb0c854d2003-05-17 15:57:00 +00001690- The datetime module classes datetime, time, and timedelta are now
1691 properly subclassable.
Tim Petersa98924a2003-05-17 05:55:19 +00001692
Martin v. Löwis28e9ce92003-05-09 08:19:48 +00001693- _tkinter.{get|set}busywaitinterval was added.
1694
Raymond Hettinger834f4632003-05-02 20:24:56 +00001695- itertools.islice() now accepts stop=None as documented.
1696 Fixes SF bug #730685.
1697
Skip Montanaro8c044d82003-05-06 20:42:37 +00001698- the bsddb185 module is built in one restricted instance -
1699 /usr/include/db.h exists and defines HASHVERSION to be 2. This is true
1700 for many BSD-derived systems.
1701
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001702
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001703Library
1704-------
1705
Tim Petersdb3756d2003-06-29 05:30:48 +00001706- Some happy doctest extensions from Jim Fulton have been added to
1707 doctest.py. These are already being used in Zope3. The two
1708 primary ones:
1709
1710 doctest.debug(module, name) extracts the doctests from the named object
1711 in the given module, puts them in a temp file, and starts pdb running
1712 on that file. This is great when a doctest fails.
1713
1714 doctest.DocTestSuite(module=None) returns a synthesized unittest
1715 TestSuite instance, to be run by the unittest framework, which
1716 runs all the doctests in the module. This allows writing tests in
1717 doctest style (which can be clearer and shorter than writing tests
1718 in unittest style), without losing unittest's powerful testing
1719 framework features (which doctest lacks).
1720
Tim Peters6ebe61f2003-06-27 20:48:05 +00001721- For compatibility with doctests created before 2.3, if an expected
1722 output block consists solely of "1" and the actual output block
1723 consists solely of "True", it's accepted as a match; similarly
1724 for "0" and "False". This is quite un-doctest-like, but is practical.
1725 The behavior can be disabled by passing the new doctest module
1726 constant DONT_ACCEPT_TRUE_FOR_1 to the new optionflags optional
1727 argument.
1728
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001729- ZipFile.testzip() now only traps BadZipfile exceptions. Previously,
1730 a bare except caught to much and reported all errors as a problem
1731 in the archive.
1732
1733- The logging module now has a new function, makeLogRecord() making
1734 LogHandler easier to interact with DatagramHandler and SocketHandler.
1735
Skip Montanaro364ca402003-06-17 12:58:31 +00001736- The cgitb module has been extended to support plain text display (SF patch
1737 569574).
1738
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00001739- A brand new version of IDLE (from the IDLEfork project at
1740 SourceForge) is now included as Lib/idlelib. The old Tools/idle is
1741 no more.
1742
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001743- Added a new module: trace (documentation missing). This module used
1744 to be distributed in Tools/scripts. It uses sys.settrace() to trace
1745 code execution -- either function calls or individual lines. It can
1746 generate tracing output during execution or a post-mortem report of
1747 code coverage.
1748
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00001749- The threading module has new functions settrace() and setprofile()
1750 that cooperate with the functions of the same name in the sys
1751 module. A function registered with the threading module will
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001752 be used for all threads it creates. The new trace module uses this
1753 to provide tracing for code running in threads.
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00001754
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00001755- copy.py: applied SF patch 707900, fixing bug 702858, by Steven
1756 Taschuk. Copying a new-style class that had a reference to itself
1757 didn't work. (The same thing worked fine for old-style classes.)
Martin v. Löwisba8f5ff2003-06-14 07:10:06 +00001758 Builtin functions are now treated as atomic, fixing bug #746304.
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00001759
Raymond Hettingerc24d7672003-06-08 19:42:33 +00001760- difflib.py has two new functions: context_diff() and unified_diff().
1761
Guido van Rossumfa19f7c2003-05-16 01:46:51 +00001762- More fixes to urllib (SF 549151): (a) When redirecting, always use
1763 GET. This is common practice and more-or-less sanctioned by the
1764 HTTP standard. (b) Add a handler for 307 redirection, which becomes
1765 an error for POST, but a regular redirect for GET and HEAD
1766
Guido van Rossumbf1bef82003-05-13 18:01:19 +00001767- Added optional 'onerror' argument to os.walk(), to control error
1768 handling.
1769
Martin v. Löwise59e2ba2003-05-03 09:09:02 +00001770- inspect.is{method|data}descriptor was added, to allow pydoc display
1771 __doc__ of data descriptors.
1772
Skip Montanaro4a7751c2003-04-29 21:07:16 +00001773- Fixed socket speed loss caused by use of the _socketobject wrapper class
1774 in socket.py.
1775
Raymond Hettinger22952a32003-05-20 04:59:56 +00001776- timeit.py now checks the current directory for imports.
1777
Gustavo Niemeyer9556fba2003-06-07 17:53:08 +00001778- urllib2.py now knows how to order proxy classes, so the user doesn't
1779 have to insert it in front of other classes, nor do dirty tricks like
1780 inserting a "dummy" HTTPHandler after a ProxyHandler when building an
1781 opener with proxy support.
1782
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00001783- Iterators have been added for dbm keys.
1784
1785- random.Random objects can now be pickled.
1786
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001787Tools/Demos
1788-----------
1789
Martin v. Löwisb8c084e2003-06-14 09:03:46 +00001790- pydoc now offers help on keywords and topics.
1791
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00001792- Tools/idle is gone; long live Lib/idlelib.
1793
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00001794- diff.py prints file diffs in context, unified, or ndiff formats,
1795 providing a command line interface to difflib.py.
Raymond Hettinger2f3c74a2003-06-08 23:10:15 +00001796
Raymond Hettinger71e00332003-05-10 03:30:13 +00001797- texcheck.py is a new script for making a rough validation of Python LaTeX
1798 files.
1799
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001800Build
1801-----
1802
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001803- Setting DESTDIR during 'make install' now allows specifying a
Martin v. Löwis3b8ee082003-05-11 20:25:35 +00001804 different root directory.
1805
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001806C API
1807-----
1808
Tim Peters3cfe7542003-05-21 21:29:48 +00001809- PyType_Ready(): If a type declares that it participates in gc
1810 (Py_TPFLAGS_HAVE_GC), and its base class does not, and its base class's
1811 tp_free slot is the default _PyObject_Del, and type does not define
1812 a tp_free slot itself, _PyObject_GC_Del is assigned to type->tp_free.
1813 Previously _PyObject_Del was inherited, which could at best lead to a
1814 segfault. In addition, if even after this magic the type's tp_free
1815 slot is _PyObject_Del or NULL, and the type is a base type
1816 (Py_TPFLAGS_BASETYPE), TypeError is raised: since the type is a base
1817 type, its dealloc function must call type->tp_free, and since the type
1818 is gc'able, tp_free must not be NULL or _PyObject_Del.
1819
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00001820- PyThreadState_SetAsyncExc(): A new API (deliberately accessible only
1821 from C) to interrupt a thread by sending it an exception. It is
1822 intentional that you have to write your own C extension to call it
1823 from Python.
1824
1825
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001826New platforms
1827-------------
1828
1829None this time.
1830
1831Tests
1832-----
1833
1834- test_imp rewritten so that it doesn't raise RuntimeError if run as a
1835 side effect of being imported ("import test.autotest").
1836
1837Windows
1838-------
1839
Tim Petersfaa697a2003-06-22 01:42:20 +00001840- The Windows installer ships with Tcl/Tk 8.4.3 (upgraded from 8.4.1).
1841
Tim Petersc4607da2003-05-08 18:13:59 +00001842- The installer always suggested that Python be installed on the C:
1843 drive, due to a hardcoded "C:" generated by the Wise installation
1844 wizard. People with machines where C: is not the system drive
1845 usually want Python installed on whichever drive is their system drive
1846 instead. We removed the hardcoded "C:", and two testers on machines
1847 where C: is not the system drive report that the installer now
1848 suggests their system drive. Note that you can always select the
1849 directory you want in the "Select Destination Directory" dialog --
1850 that's what it's for.
1851
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001852Mac
1853---
1854
Just van Rossum99bc1fc2003-05-09 15:01:25 +00001855- There's a new module called "autoGIL", which offers a mechanism to
1856 automatically release the Global Interpreter Lock when an event loop
1857 goes to sleep, allowing other threads to run. It's currently only
1858 supported on OSX, in the Mach-O version.
Jack Jansenf5e23ff2003-06-16 13:53:40 +00001859- The OSA modules now allow direct access to properties of the
1860 toplevel application class (in AppleScript terminology).
1861- The Package Manager can now update itself.
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001862
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00001863SourceForge Bugs and Patches Applied
1864------------------------------------
1865
1866430160, 471893, 501716, 542562, 549151, 569574, 595837, 596434,
1867598163, 604210, 604716, 610332, 612627, 614770, 620190, 621891,
1868622042, 639139, 640236, 644345, 649742, 649742, 658233, 660022,
1869661318, 661676, 662807, 662923, 666219, 672855, 678325, 682347,
1870683486, 684981, 685773, 686254, 692776, 692959, 693094, 696777,
1871697989, 700827, 703666, 708495, 708604, 708901, 710733, 711902,
1872713722, 715782, 718286, 719359, 719367, 723136, 723831, 723962,
1873724588, 724767, 724767, 725942, 726150, 726446, 726869, 727051,
1874727719, 727719, 727805, 728277, 728563, 728656, 729096, 729103,
1875729293, 729297, 729300, 729317, 729395, 729622, 729817, 730170,
1876730296, 730594, 730685, 730826, 730963, 731209, 731403, 731504,
1877731514, 731626, 731635, 731643, 731644, 731644, 731689, 732124,
1878732143, 732234, 732284, 732284, 732479, 732761, 732783, 732951,
1879733667, 733781, 734118, 734231, 734869, 735051, 735293, 735527,
1880735613, 735694, 736962, 736962, 737970, 738066, 739313, 740055,
1881740234, 740301, 741806, 742126, 742741, 742860, 742860, 742911,
1882744041, 744104, 744238, 744687, 744877, 745055, 745478, 745525,
1883745620, 746012, 746304, 746366, 746801, 746953, 747348, 747667,
1884747954, 748846, 748849, 748973, 748975, 749191, 749210, 749759,
1885749831, 749911, 750008, 750092, 750542, 750595, 751038, 751107,
1886751276, 751451, 751916, 751941, 751956, 751998, 752671, 753451,
1887753602, 753617, 753845, 753925, 754014, 754340, 754447, 755031,
1888755087, 755147, 755245, 755683, 755987, 756032, 756996, 757058,
1889757229, 757818, 757821, 757822, 758112, 758910, 759227, 759889,
1890760257, 760703, 760792, 761104, 761337, 761519, 761830, 762455
1891
1892
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001893What's New in Python 2.3 beta 1?
1894================================
1895
Guido van Rossumfa1eddf2003-04-25 19:19:52 +00001896*Release date: 25-Apr-2003*
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001897
1898Core and builtins
1899-----------------
1900
Thomas Heller5eccabc2003-04-23 19:35:25 +00001901- New format codes B, H, I, k and K have been implemented for
1902 PyArg_ParseTuple and PyBuild_Value.
1903
Alex Martellia70b1912003-04-22 08:12:33 +00001904- New builtin function sum(seq, start=0) returns the sum of all the
1905 items in iterable object seq, plus start (items are normally numbers,
1906 and cannot be strings).
1907
Guido van Rossumaa86e352003-04-19 18:15:10 +00001908- bool() called without arguments now returns False rather than
1909 raising an exception. This is consistent with calling the
1910 constructors for the other builtin types -- called without argument
1911 they all return the false value of that type. (SF patch #724135)
1912
Guido van Rossumcf8d2852003-04-17 16:53:26 +00001913- In support of PEP 269 (making the pgen parser generator accessible
1914 from Python), some changes to the pgen code structure were made; a
1915 few files that used to be linked only with pgen are now linked with
1916 Python itself.
1917
Guido van Rossumc1f6e8c2003-04-16 21:13:23 +00001918- The repr() of a weakref object now shows the __name__ attribute of
1919 the referenced object, if it has one.
1920
Guido van Rossum76ba09f2003-04-16 19:40:58 +00001921- super() no longer ignores data descriptors, except __class__. See
1922 the thread started at
1923 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2003-April/034338.html
1924
Guido van Rossum3a3cca52003-04-14 20:58:14 +00001925- list.insert(i, x) now interprets negative i as it would be
1926 interpreted by slicing, so negative values count from the end of the
1927 list. This was the only place where such an interpretation was not
1928 placed on a list index.
1929
Guido van Rossumefbbb1c2003-04-11 18:43:06 +00001930- range() now works even if the arguments are longs with magnitude
1931 larger than sys.maxint, as long as the total length of the sequence
1932 fits. E.g., range(2**100, 2**101, 2**100) is the following list:
1933 [1267650600228229401496703205376L]. (SF patch #707427.)
1934
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001935- Some horridly obscure problems were fixed involving interaction
1936 between garbage collection and old-style classes with "ambitious"
1937 getattr hooks. If an old-style instance didn't have a __del__ method,
1938 but did have a __getattr__ hook, and the instance became reachable
1939 only from an unreachable cycle, and the hook resurrected or deleted
1940 unreachable objects when asked to resolve "__del__", anything up to
1941 a segfault could happen. That's been repaired.
1942
Raymond Hettingera3e1e4c2003-03-06 23:54:28 +00001943- dict.pop now takes an optional argument specifying a default
1944 value to return if the key is not in the dict. If a default is not
1945 given and the key is not found, a KeyError will still be raised.
1946 Parallel changes were made to UserDict.UserDict and UserDict.DictMixin.
1947 [SF patch #693753] (contributed by Michael Stone.)
1948
Martin v. Löwis73d538b2003-03-05 15:13:47 +00001949- sys.getfilesystemencoding() was added to expose
1950 Py_FileSystemDefaultEncoding.
Guido van Rossum46d3dc32003-03-01 03:20:41 +00001951
1952- New function sys.exc_clear() clears the current exception. This is
1953 rarely needed, but can sometimes be useful to release objects
1954 referenced by the traceback held in sys.exc_info()[2]. (SF patch
1955 #693195.)
1956
Neal Norwitzd5a65a72003-02-23 23:11:41 +00001957- On 64-bit systems, a dictionary could contain duplicate long/int keys
1958 if the key value was larger than 2**32. See SF bug #689659.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001959
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00001960- Fixed SF bug #663074. The codec system was using global static
Walter Dörwaldfa86bf52003-03-31 16:15:13 +00001961 variables to store internal data. As a result, any attempts to use the
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00001962 unicode system with multiple active interpreters, or successive
1963 interpreter executions, would fail.
1964
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00001965- "%c" % u"a" now returns a unicode string instead of raising a
Walter Dörwald44f527f2003-04-02 16:37:24 +00001966 TypeError. u"%c" % 0xffffffff now raises a OverflowError instead
Walter Dörwald1e469c52003-04-02 16:57:59 +00001967 of a ValueError to be consistent with "%c" % 256. See SF patch #710127.
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00001968
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001969Extension modules
1970-----------------
1971
Guido van Rossume7adda92003-04-25 05:52:37 +00001972- The socket module now provides the functions inet_pton and inet_ntop
1973 for converting between string and packed representation of IP
1974 addresses. There is also a new module variable, has_ipv6, which is
1975 True iff the current Python has IPv6 support. See SF patch #658327.
1976
Martin v. Löwisbfe175c2003-04-16 19:42:51 +00001977- Tkinter wrappers around Tcl variables now pass objects directly
1978 to Tcl, instead of first converting them to strings.
1979
Guido van Rossum41c99e72003-04-14 17:59:34 +00001980- The .*? pattern in the re module is now special-cased to avoid the
1981 recursion limit. (SF patch #720991 -- many thanks to Gary Herron
1982 and Greg Chapman.)
1983
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00001984- New function sys.call_tracing() allows pdb to debug code
1985 recursively.
1986
Tim Peters730f5532003-04-08 17:17:17 +00001987- New function gc.get_referents(obj) returns a list of objects
Tim Peters0f81ab62003-04-08 16:39:48 +00001988 directly referenced by obj. In effect, it exposes what the object's
1989 tp_traverse slot does, and can be helpful when debugging memory
1990 leaks.
1991
Martin v. Löwis7fb697b2003-04-03 04:49:12 +00001992- The iconv module has been removed from this release.
1993
Tim Petersd50ade62003-03-20 18:32:13 +00001994- The platform-independent routines for packing floats in IEEE formats
1995 (struct.pack's <f, >f, <d, and >d codes; pickle and cPickle's protocol 1
1996 pickling of floats) ignored that rounding can cause a carry to
1997 propagate. The worst consequence was that, in rare cases, <f and >f
1998 could produce strings that, when unpacked again, were a factor of 2
1999 away from the original float. This has been fixed. See SF bug
2000 #705836.
2001
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002002- New function time.tzset() provides access to the C library tzset()
Guido van Rossumd11b62e2003-03-14 21:51:36 +00002003 function, if supported. (SF patch #675422.)
2004
Neal Norwitz12e22172003-03-03 21:16:39 +00002005- Using createfilehandler, deletefilehandler, createtimerhandler functions
2006 on Tkinter.tkinter (_tkinter module) no longer crashes the interpreter.
2007 See SF bug #692416.
2008
Michael W. Hudsonf0089982003-03-03 12:29:42 +00002009- Modified the fcntl.ioctl() function to allow modification of a passed
2010 mutable buffer (for details see the reference documentation).
2011
Raymond Hettinger61fe64d2003-02-23 04:40:07 +00002012- Made user requested changes to the itertools module.
2013 Subsumed the times() function into repeat().
2014 Added chain() and cycle().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002015
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00002016- The rotor module is now deprecated; the encryption algorithm it uses
Andrew M. Kuchlingfb5f4852003-04-24 13:19:56 +00002017 is not believed to be secure, and including crypto code with Python
2018 has implications for exporting and importing it in various countries.
2019
Skip Montanaro89feabc2003-03-30 04:54:24 +00002020- The socket module now always uses the _socketobject wrapper class, even on
2021 platforms which have dup(2). The makefile() method is built directly
2022 on top of the socket without duplicating the file descriptor, allowing
2023 timeouts to work properly.
2024
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002025Library
2026-------
2027
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00002028- New generator function os.walk() is an easy-to-use alternative to
2029 os.path.walk(). See os module docs for details. os.path.walk()
2030 isn't deprecated at this time, but may become deprecated in a
2031 future release.
2032
Marc-André Lemburg246d8472003-04-24 11:36:11 +00002033- Added new module "platform" which provides a wide range of tools
2034 for querying platform dependent features.
2035
Andrew M. Kuchling4e42b312003-04-24 16:45:05 +00002036- netrc now allows ASCII punctuation characters in passwords.
Raymond Hettinger1d877862003-04-23 19:06:08 +00002037
Martin v. Löwis153c9e42003-04-19 20:59:03 +00002038- shelve now supports the optional writeback argument, and exposes
2039 pickle protocol versions.
2040
Guido van Rossuma2685402003-04-19 18:04:57 +00002041- Several methods of nntplib.NNTP have grown an optional file argument
2042 which specifies a file where to divert the command's output
2043 (already supported by the body() method). (SF patch #720468)
2044
Martin v. Löwis281b2c62003-04-18 21:04:39 +00002045- The self-documenting XML server library DocXMLRPCServer was added.
2046
Martin v. Löwis2548c732003-04-18 10:39:54 +00002047- Support for internationalized domain names has been added through
2048 the 'idna' and 'punycode' encodings, the 'stringprep' module, the
2049 'mkstringprep' tool, and enhancements to the socket and httplib
2050 modules.
2051
Walter Dörwald5688b7a2003-04-16 09:46:13 +00002052- htmlentitydefs has two new dictionaries: name2codepoint maps
2053 HTML entity names to Unicode codepoints (as integers).
2054 codepoint2name is the reverse mapping. See SF patch #722017.
2055
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00002056- pdb has a new command, "debug", which lets you step through
2057 arbitrary code from the debugger's (pdb) prompt.
2058
Raymond Hettingerc377cbf2003-04-04 22:56:42 +00002059- unittest.failUnlessEqual and its equivalent unittest.assertEqual now
2060 return 'not a == b' rather than 'a != b'. This gives the desired
2061 result for classes that define __eq__ without defining __ne__.
2062
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002063- sgmllib now supports SGML marked sections, in particular the
Martin v. Löwis3163a3b2003-03-30 14:25:40 +00002064 MS Office extensions.
2065
Raymond Hettinger42182eb2003-03-09 05:33:33 +00002066- The urllib module now offers support for the iterator protocol.
2067 SF patch 698520 contributed by Brett Cannon.
2068
Guido van Rossum9589a252003-03-06 01:56:12 +00002069- New module timeit provides a simple framework for timing the
2070 execution speed of expressions and statements.
2071
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002072- sets.Set objects now support mixed-type __eq__ and __ne__, instead
2073 of raising TypeError. If x is a Set object and y is a non-Set object,
2074 x == y is False, and x != y is True. This is akin to the change made
2075 for mixed-type comparisons of datetime objects in 2.3a2; more info
2076 about the rationale is in the NEWS entry for that. See also SF bug
2077 report <http://www.python.org/sf/693121>.
2078
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00002079- On Unix platforms, if os.listdir() is called with a Unicode argument,
2080 it now returns Unicode strings. (This behavior was added earlier
2081 to the Windows NT/2k/XP version of os.listdir().)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002082
Andrew M. Kuchling6f177d42003-02-28 22:09:33 +00002083- Distutils: both 'py_modules' and 'packages' keywords can now be specified
2084 in core.setup(). Previously you could supply one or the other, but
2085 not both of them. (SF patch #695090 from Bernhard Herzog)
2086
Skip Montanaro64a839e2003-03-20 23:36:55 +00002087- New csv package makes it easy to read/write CSV files.
2088
Gustavo Niemeyer68d8cef2003-04-17 21:31:33 +00002089- Module shlex has been extended to allow posix-like shell parsings,
2090 including a split() function for easy spliting of quoted strings and
2091 commands. An iterator interface was also implemented.
2092
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002093Tools/Demos
2094-----------
2095
Tim Peters21d7d4d2003-04-18 00:45:59 +00002096- New script combinerefs.py helps analyze new PYTHONDUMPREFS output.
2097 See the module docstring for details.
2098
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002099Build
2100-----
2101
Neal Norwitz35892b92003-02-23 23:45:35 +00002102- Fix problem building on OSF1 because the compiler only accepted
2103 preprocessor directives that start in column 1. (SF bug #691793.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002104
2105C API
2106-----
2107
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002108- Added PyGC_Collect(), equivalent to calling gc.collect().
2109
Guido van Rossum0fc8f002003-04-15 15:12:39 +00002110- PyThreadState_GetDict() was changed not to raise an exception or
2111 issue a fatal error when no current thread state is available. This
2112 makes it possible to print dictionaries when no thread is active.
2113
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002114- LONG_LONG was renamed to PY_LONG_LONG. Extensions that use this and
2115 need compatibility with previous versions can use this:
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00002116
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002117 #ifndef PY_LONG_LONG
2118 #define PY_LONG_LONG LONG_LONG
2119 #endif
Martin v. Löwisb9a0f912003-03-29 10:06:18 +00002120
Raymond Hettinger1da1dbf2003-03-17 19:46:11 +00002121- Added PyObject_SelfIter() to fill the tp_iter slot for the
Raymond Hettinger01538262003-03-17 08:24:35 +00002122 typical case where the method returns its self argument.
2123
Guido van Rossume5c691a2003-03-07 15:13:17 +00002124- The extended type structure used for heap types (new-style
2125 classes defined by Python code using a class statement) is now
2126 exported from object.h as PyHeapTypeObject. (SF patch #696193.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002127
2128New platforms
2129-------------
2130
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00002131None this time.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002132
2133Tests
2134-----
2135
Neal Norwitz55b61d22003-02-28 19:57:03 +00002136- test_timeout now requires -u network to be passed to regrtest to run.
2137 See SF bug #692988.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002138
2139Windows
2140-------
2141
Tim Peters11b23062003-04-23 02:39:17 +00002142- os.fsync() now exists on Windows, and calls the Microsoft _commit()
2143 function.
2144
Guido van Rossumf4050642003-04-09 19:39:06 +00002145- New function winsound.MessageBeep() wraps the Win32 API
2146 MessageBeep().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002147
2148Mac
2149---
2150
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00002151- os.listdir() now returns Unicode strings on MacOS X when called with
2152 a Unicode argument. See the general news item under "Library".
Just van Rossum46c97842003-02-25 21:42:15 +00002153
Jack Jansendeac2ac2003-02-24 11:04:17 +00002154- A new method MacOS.WMAvailable() returns true if it is safe to access
2155 the window manager, false otherwise.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002156
Jack Jansencf76be02003-03-24 12:13:54 +00002157- EasyDialogs dialogs are now movable-modal, and if the application is
2158 currently in the background they will ask to be moved to the foreground
2159 before displaying.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002160
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00002161- OSA Scripting support has improved a lot, and gensuitemodule.py can now
Jack Jansende354b72003-04-11 15:37:20 +00002162 be used by mere mortals. The documentation is now also more or less
2163 complete.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002164
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00002165- The IDE (in a framework build) now includes introductory documentation
2166 in Apple Help Viewer format.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002167
2168
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002169What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 2?
2170=================================
2171
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00002172*Release date: 19-Feb-2003*
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002173
2174Core and builtins
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00002175-----------------
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002176
Walter Dörwald2ffec022003-02-19 16:34:11 +00002177- Negative positions returned from PEP 293 error callbacks are now
2178 treated as being relative to the end of the input string. Positions
2179 that are out of bounds raise an IndexError.
2180
Guido van Rossum162e38c2003-02-19 15:25:10 +00002181- sys.path[0] (the directory from which the script is loaded) is now
2182 turned into an absolute pathname, unless it is the empty string.
2183 (SF patch #664376.)
2184
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00002185- Finally fixed the bug in compile() and exec where a string ending
2186 with an indented code block but no newline would raise SyntaxError.
2187 This would have been a four-line change in parsetok.c... Except
2188 codeop.py depends on this behavior, so a compilation flag had to be
2189 invented that causes the tokenizer to revert to the old behavior;
2190 this required extra changes to 2 .h files, 2 .c files, and 2 .py
Guido van Rossum1442dc12003-02-13 22:19:20 +00002191 files. (Fixes SF bug #501622.)
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00002192
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00002193- If a new-style class defines neither __new__ nor __init__, its
2194 constructor would ignore all arguments. This is changed now: the
2195 constructor refuses arguments in this case. This might break code
2196 that worked under Python 2.2. The simplest fix is to add a no-op
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002197 __init__: ``def __init__(self, *args, **kw): pass``.
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00002198
Guido van Rossum48035eb2003-02-12 17:05:26 +00002199- Through a bytecode optimizer bug (and I bet you didn't even know
2200 Python *had* a bytecode optimizer :-), "unsigned" hex/oct constants
2201 with a leading minus sign would come out with the wrong sign.
2202 ("Unsigned" hex/oct constants are those with a face value in the
2203 range sys.maxint+1 through sys.maxint*2+1, inclusive; these have
2204 always been interpreted as negative numbers through sign folding.)
2205 E.g. 0xffffffff is -1, and -(0xffffffff) is 1, but -0xffffffff would
2206 come out as -4294967295. This was the case in Python 2.2 through
2207 2.2.2 and 2.3a1, and in Python 2.4 it will once again have that
2208 value, but according to PEP 237 it really needs to be 1 now. This
2209 will be backported to Python 2.2.3 a well. (SF #660455)
2210
Guido van Rossum47710652003-02-12 20:48:22 +00002211- int(s, base) sometimes sign-folds hex and oct constants; it only
2212 does this when base is 0 and s.strip() starts with a '0'. When the
2213 sign is actually folded, as in int("0xffffffff", 0) on a 32-bit
2214 machine, which returns -1, a FutureWarning is now issued; in Python
2215 2.4, this will return 4294967295L, as do int("+0xffffffff", 0) and
2216 int("0xffffffff", 16) right now. (PEP 347)
2217
Guido van Rossuma89d10e2003-02-12 03:58:38 +00002218- super(X, x): x may now be a proxy for an X instance, i.e.
2219 issubclass(x.__class__, X) but not issubclass(type(x), X).
2220
Guido van Rossum03bc7d32003-02-12 03:32:58 +00002221- isinstance(x, X): if X is a new-style class, this is now equivalent
2222 to issubclass(type(x), X) or issubclass(x.__class__, X). Previously
2223 only type(x) was tested. (For classic classes this was already the
2224 case.)
2225
Just van Rossum73ffb4a2003-02-10 09:57:08 +00002226- compile(), eval() and the exec statement now fully support source code
2227 passed as unicode strings.
2228
Neal Norwitzde8b94c2003-02-10 02:12:43 +00002229- int subclasses can be initialized with longs if the value fits in an int.
2230 See SF bug #683467.
2231
Tim Petersbf2674b2003-02-02 07:51:32 +00002232- long(string, base) takes time linear in len(string) when base is a power
2233 of 2 now. It used to take time quadratic in len(string).
2234
Martin v. Löwis8afd7572003-01-25 22:46:11 +00002235- filter returns now Unicode results for Unicode arguments.
2236
Martin v. Löwisaf6a27a2003-01-03 19:16:14 +00002237- raw_input can now return Unicode objects.
2238
Skip Montanaro4abd5f02003-01-02 20:51:08 +00002239- List objects' sort() method now accepts None as the comparison function.
2240 Passing None is semantically identical to calling sort() with no
2241 arguments.
2242
Neal Norwitz1a997502003-01-13 20:13:12 +00002243- Fixed crash when printing a subclass of str and __str__ returned self.
2244 See SF bug #667147.
2245
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00002246- Fixed an invalid RuntimeWarning and an undetected error when trying
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00002247 to convert a long integer into a float which couldn't fit.
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00002248 See SF bug #676155.
2249
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00002250- Function objects now have a __module__ attribute that is bound to
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00002251 the name of the module in which the function was defined. This
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00002252 applies for C functions and methods as well as functions and methods
2253 defined in Python. This attribute is used by pickle.whichmodule(),
2254 which changes the behavior of whichmodule slightly. In Python 2.2
2255 whichmodule() returns "__main__" for functions that are not defined
2256 at the top-level of a module (examples: methods, nested functions).
2257 Now whichmodule() will return the proper module name.
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00002258
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002259Extension modules
2260-----------------
2261
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00002262- operator.isNumberType() now checks that the object has a nb_int or
2263 nb_float slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
2264 tp_as_number pointer.
2265
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00002266- The imp module now has ways to acquire and release the "import
2267 lock": imp.acquire_lock() and imp.release_lock(). Note: this is a
2268 reentrant lock, so releasing the lock only truly releases it when
2269 this is the last release_lock() call. You can check with
2270 imp.lock_held(). (SF bug #580952 and patch #683257.)
2271
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002272- Change to cPickle to match pickle.py (see below and PEP 307).
2273
Neal Norwitz9caf9c02003-02-10 01:54:06 +00002274- Fix some bugs in the parser module. SF bug #678518.
2275
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00002276- Thanks to Scott David Daniels, a subtle bug in how the zlib
Walter Dörwald28d81962003-02-03 20:53:14 +00002277 extension implemented flush() was fixed. Scott also rewrote the
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00002278 zlib test suite using the unittest module. (SF bug #640230 and
2279 patch #678531.)
2280
Raymond Hettinger96ef8112003-02-01 00:10:11 +00002281- Added an itertools module containing high speed, memory efficient
2282 looping constructs inspired by tools from Haskell and SML.
2283
Guido van Rossum99d4abf2003-01-27 22:22:50 +00002284- The SSL module now handles sockets with a timeout set correctly (SF
2285 patch #675750, fixing SF bug #675552).
2286
Barry Warsawf8ba39c2003-01-07 20:55:26 +00002287- os/posixmodule has grown the sysexits.h constants (EX_OK and friends).
2288
Guido van Rossum6d0d3652003-01-07 20:34:19 +00002289- Fixed broken threadstate swap in readline that could cause fatal
2290 errors when a readline hook was being invoked while a background
2291 thread was active. (SF bugs #660476 and #513033.)
2292
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002293- fcntl now exposes the strops.h I_* constants.
2294
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00002295- Fix a crash on Solaris that occurred when calling close() on
2296 an mmap'ed file which was already closed. (SF patch #665913)
2297
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002298- Fixed several serious bugs in the zipimport implementation.
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002299
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00002300- datetime changes:
2301
Guido van Rossum8b7a9a32003-04-14 22:01:58 +00002302 The date class is now properly subclassable. (SF bug #720908)
2303
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00002304 The datetime and datetimetz classes have been collapsed into a single
2305 datetime class, and likewise the time and timetz classes into a single
2306 time class. Previously, a datetimetz object with tzinfo=None acted
2307 exactly like a datetime object, and similarly for timetz. This wasn't
2308 enough of a difference to justify distinct classes, and life is simpler
2309 now.
2310
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00002311 today() and now() now round system timestamps to the closest
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002312 microsecond <http://www.python.org/sf/661086>. This repairs an
2313 irritation most likely seen on Windows systems.
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00002314
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00002315 In dt.astimezone(tz), if tz.utcoffset(dt) returns a duration,
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00002316 ValueError is raised if tz.dst(dt) returns None (2.3a1 treated it
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002317 as 0 instead, but a tzinfo subclass wishing to participate in
2318 time zone conversion has to take a stand on whether it supports
2319 DST; if you don't care about DST, then code dst() to return 0 minutes,
2320 meaning that DST is never in effect).
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00002321
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00002322 The tzinfo methods utcoffset() and dst() must return a timedelta object
2323 (or None) now. In 2.3a1 they could also return an int or long, but that
2324 was an unhelpfully redundant leftover from an earlier version wherein
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00002325 they couldn't return a timedelta. TOOWTDI.
2326
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00002327 The example tzinfo class for local time had a bug. It was replaced
2328 by a later example coded by Guido.
2329
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00002330 datetime.astimezone(tz) no longer raises an exception when the
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002331 input datetime has no UTC equivalent in tz. For typical "hybrid" time
2332 zones (a single tzinfo subclass modeling both standard and daylight
2333 time), this case can arise one hour per year, at the hour daylight time
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00002334 ends. See new docs for details. In short, the new behavior mimics
2335 the local wall clock's behavior of repeating an hour in local time.
2336
2337 dt.astimezone() can no longer be used to convert between naive and aware
2338 datetime objects. If you merely want to attach, or remove, a tzinfo
2339 object, without any conversion of date and time members, use
2340 dt.replace(tzinfo=whatever) instead, where "whatever" is None or a
2341 tzinfo subclass instance.
2342
2343 A new method tzinfo.fromutc(dt) can be overridden in tzinfo subclasses
2344 to give complete control over how a UTC time is to be converted to
2345 a local time. The default astimezone() implementation calls fromutc()
2346 as its last step, so a tzinfo subclass can affect that too by overriding
2347 fromutc(). It's expected that the default fromutc() implementation will
2348 be suitable as-is for "almost all" time zone subclasses, but the
2349 creativity of political time zone fiddling appears unbounded -- fromutc()
2350 allows the highly motivated to emulate any scheme expressible in Python.
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002351
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00002352 datetime.now(): The optional tzinfo argument was undocumented (that's
2353 repaired), and its name was changed to tz ("tzinfo" is overloaded enough
2354 already). With a tz argument, now(tz) used to return the local date
2355 and time, and attach tz to it, without any conversion of date and time
2356 members. This was less than useful. Now now(tz) returns the current
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002357 date and time as local time in tz's time zone, akin to ::
2358
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00002359 tz.fromutc(datetime.utcnow().replace(tzinfo=utc))
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002360
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00002361 where "utc" is an instance of a tzinfo subclass modeling UTC. Without
2362 a tz argument, now() continues to return the current local date and time,
2363 as a naive datetime object.
2364
Tim Peters2a44a8d2003-01-23 20:53:10 +00002365 datetime.fromtimestamp(): Like datetime.now() above, this had less than
2366 useful behavior when the optional tinzo argument was specified. See
2367 also SF bug report <http://www.python.org/sf/660872>.
2368
Tim Peters8d81a012003-01-24 22:36:34 +00002369 date and datetime comparison: In order to prevent comparison from
2370 falling back to the default compare-object-addresses strategy, these
2371 raised TypeError whenever they didn't understand the other object type.
2372 They still do, except when the other object has a "timetuple" attribute,
2373 in which case they return NotImplemented now. This gives other
2374 datetime objects (e.g., mxDateTime) a chance to intercept the
2375 comparison.
2376
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002377 date, time, datetime and timedelta comparison: When the exception
2378 for mixed-type comparisons in the last paragraph doesn't apply, if
2379 the comparison is == then False is returned, and if the comparison is
2380 != then True is returned. Because dict lookup and the "in" operator
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002381 only invoke __eq__, this allows, for example, ::
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002382
2383 if some_datetime in some_sequence:
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002384
2385 and ::
2386
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002387 some_dict[some_timedelta] = whatever
2388
2389 to work as expected, without raising TypeError just because the
2390 sequence is heterogeneous, or the dict has mixed-type keys. [This
2391 seems like a good idea to implement for all mixed-type comparisons
2392 that don't want to allow falling back to address comparison.]
2393
Tim Peters75a6e3b2003-01-04 18:17:36 +00002394 The constructors building a datetime from a timestamp could raise
2395 ValueError if the platform C localtime()/gmtime() inserted "leap
2396 seconds". Leap seconds are ignored now. On such platforms, it's
2397 possible to have timestamps that differ by a second, yet where
2398 datetimes constructed from them are equal.
2399
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00002400 The pickle format of date, time and datetime objects has changed
2401 completely. The undocumented pickler and unpickler functions no
Tim Petersb57f8f02003-02-01 02:54:15 +00002402 longer exist. The undocumented __setstate__() and __getstate__()
2403 methods no longer exist either.
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00002404
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002405Library
2406-------
2407
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002408- The logging module was updated slightly; the WARN level was renamed
2409 to WARNING, and the matching function/method warn() to warning().
2410
2411- The pickle and cPickle modules were updated with a new pickling
2412 protocol (documented by pickletools.py, see below) and several
2413 extensions to the pickle customization API (__reduce__, __setstate__
2414 etc.). The copy module now uses more of the pickle customization
2415 API to copy objects that don't implement __copy__ or __deepcopy__.
2416 See PEP 307 for details.
2417
2418- The distutils "register" command now uses http://www.python.org/pypi
2419 as the default repository. (See PEP 301.)
2420
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00002421- the platform dependent path related variables sep, altsep, extsep,
2422 pathsep, curdir, pardir and defpath are now defined in the platform
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00002423 dependent path modules (e.g. ntpath.py) rather than os.py, so these
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002424 variables are now available via os.path. They continue to be
2425 available from the os module.
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00002426 (see <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00002427
Tim Peters6ee04802003-02-05 18:29:34 +00002428- array.array was added to the types repr.py knows about (see
2429 <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
2430
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00002431- The new pickletools.py contains lots of documentation about pickle
2432 internals, and supplies some helpers for working with pickles, such as
2433 a symbolic pickle disassembler.
2434
Skip Montanaro9a7c96a2003-01-22 18:17:25 +00002435- Xmlrpclib.py now supports the builtin boolean type.
2436
Martin v. Löwis0c6774d2003-01-15 11:51:06 +00002437- py_compile has a new 'doraise' flag and a new PyCompileError
2438 exception.
2439
Martin v. Löwisd69663d2003-01-15 11:37:23 +00002440- SimpleXMLRPCServer now supports CGI through the CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler
2441 class.
2442
Guido van Rossum50e92232003-01-14 16:45:04 +00002443- The sets module now raises TypeError in __cmp__, to clarify that
2444 sets are not intended to be three-way-compared; the comparison
2445 operators are overloaded as subset/superset tests.
2446
Guido van Rossumcd0c0472003-01-07 23:03:05 +00002447- Bastion.py and rexec.py are disabled. These modules are not safe in
2448 Python 2.2. or 2.3.
2449
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002450- realpath is now exported when doing ``from poxixpath import *``.
Neal Norwitzbb0246a2003-01-03 18:12:28 +00002451 It is also exported for ntpath, macpath, and os2emxpath.
2452 See SF bug #659228.
2453
Neal Norwitzb9ef4ae2003-01-05 23:19:43 +00002454- New module tarfile from Lars Gustäbel provides a comprehensive interface
2455 to tar archive files with transparent gzip and bzip2 compression.
2456 See SF patch #651082.
2457
Neal Norwitz4f442372003-01-06 06:51:36 +00002458- urlparse can now parse imap:// URLs. See SF feature request #618024.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002459
Neal Norwitze931ed52003-01-10 23:24:32 +00002460- Tkinter.Canvas.scan_dragto() provides an optional parameter to support
2461 the gain value which is passed to Tk. SF bug# 602259.
2462
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00002463- Fix logging.handlers.SysLogHandler protocol when using UNIX domain sockets.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00002464 See SF patch #642974.
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00002465
Skip Montanaro12fe72e2003-02-25 17:46:20 +00002466- The dospath module was deleted. Use the ntpath module when manipulating
2467 DOS paths from other platforms.
2468
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002469Tools/Demos
2470-----------
2471
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00002472- Two new scripts (db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py) were added to the
2473 Tools/scripts directory to facilitate conversion from the old bsddb module
2474 to the new one. While the user-visible API of the new module is
2475 compatible with the old one, it's likely that the version of the
2476 underlying database library has changed. To convert from the old library,
2477 run the db2pickle.py script using the old version of Python to convert it
2478 to a pickle file. After upgrading Python, run the pickle2db.py script
2479 using the new version of Python to reconstitute your database. For
2480 example:
2481
Skip Montanaro621f0552003-02-03 15:48:10 +00002482 % python2.2 db2pickle.py -h some.db > some.pickle
2483 % python2.3 pickle2db.py -h some.db.new < some.pickle
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00002484
2485 Run the scripts without any args to get a usage message.
2486
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002487
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002488Build
2489-----
2490
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00002491- The audio driver tests (test_ossaudiodev.py and
2492 test_linuxaudiodev.py) are no longer run by default. This is
2493 because they don't always work, depending on your hardware and
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002494 software. To run these tests, you must use an invocation like ::
2495
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00002496 ./python Lib/test/regrtest.py -u audio test_ossaudiodev
2497
Skip Montanarodecc6a42003-01-01 20:07:49 +00002498- On systems which build using the configure script, compiler flags which
2499 used to be lumped together using the OPT flag have been split into two
2500 groups, OPT and BASECFLAGS. OPT is meant to carry just optimization- and
2501 debug-related flags like "-g" and "-O3". BASECFLAGS is meant to carry
2502 compiler flags that are required to get a clean compile. On some
2503 platforms (many Linux flavors in particular) BASECFLAGS will be empty by
2504 default. On others, such as Mac OS X and SCO, it will contain required
2505 flags. This change allows people building Python to override OPT without
2506 fear of clobbering compiler flags which are required to get a clean build.
2507
2508- On Darwin/Mac OS X platforms, /sw/lib and /sw/include are added to the
2509 relevant search lists in setup.py. This allows users building Python to
2510 take advantage of the many packages available from the fink project
2511 <http://fink.sf.net/>.
2512
2513- A new Makefile target, scriptsinstall, installs a number of useful scripts
2514 from the Tools/scripts directory.
2515
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002516C API
2517-----
2518
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002519- PyEval_GetFrame() is now declared to return a ``PyFrameObject *``
2520 instead of a plain ``PyObject *``. (SF patch #686601.)
Guido van Rossum6297a7a2003-02-19 15:53:17 +00002521
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00002522- PyNumber_Check() now checks that the object has a nb_int or nb_float
2523 slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
2524 tp_as_number pointer.
2525
Guido van Rossumeea47182003-02-11 20:39:59 +00002526- A C type that inherits from a base type that defines tp_as_buffer
2527 will now inherit the tp_as_buffer pointer if it doesn't define one.
2528 (SF #681367)
2529
Neil Schemenauer5042da62003-02-04 20:59:40 +00002530- The PyArg_Parse functions now issue a DeprecationWarning if a float
2531 argument is provided when an integer is specified (this affects the 'b',
2532 'B', 'h', 'H', 'i', and 'l' codes). Future versions of Python will
2533 raise a TypeError.
Neil Schemenauercd63e612003-01-24 22:15:53 +00002534
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002535Tests
2536-----
2537
Walter Dörwald11cfbd62003-03-26 16:03:16 +00002538- Several tests weren't being run from regrtest.py (test_timeout.py,
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002539 test_tarfile.py, test_netrc.py, test_multifile.py,
2540 test_importhooks.py and test_imp.py). Now they are. (Note to
2541 developers: please read Lib/test/README when creating a new test, to
2542 make sure to do it right! All tests need to use either unittest or
2543 pydoc.)
2544
2545- Added test_posix.py, a test suite for the posix module.
2546
2547- Added test_hexoct.py, a test suite for hex/oct constant folding.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002548
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002549Windows
2550-------
2551
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00002552- The timeout code for socket connect() didn't work right; this has
2553 now been fixed. test_timeout.py should pass (at least most of the
2554 time).
2555
Thomas Hellerdda583d2003-01-31 20:45:41 +00002556- distutils' msvccompiler class now passes the preprocessor options to
2557 the resource compiler. See SF patch #669198.
2558
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00002559- The bsddb module now ships with Sleepycat's 4.1.25.NC, the latest
2560 release without strong cryptography.
2561
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00002562- sys.path[0], if it contains a directory name, is now always an
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002563 absolute pathname. (SF patch #664376.)
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00002564
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00002565- The new logging package is now installed by the Windows installer. It
2566 wasn't in 2.3a1 due to oversight.
2567
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002568Mac
2569---
2570
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00002571- There are new dialogs EasyDialogs.AskFileForOpen, AskFileForSave
2572 and AskFolder. The old macfs.StandardGetFile and friends are deprecated.
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002573
Jack Jansenc9296362003-02-06 23:10:45 +00002574- Most of the standard library now uses pathnames or FSRefs in preference
2575 of FSSpecs, and use the underlying Carbon.File and Carbon.Folder modules
2576 in stead of macfs. macfs will probably be deprecated in the future.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00002577
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00002578- Type Carbon.File.FSCatalogInfo and supporting methods have been implemented.
2579 This also makes macfs.FSSpec.SetDates() work again.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002580
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00002581- There is a new module pimp, the package install manager for Python, and
2582 accompanying applet PackageManager. These allow you to easily download
2583 and install pretested extension packages either in source or binary
2584 form. Only in MacPython-OSX.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002585
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00002586- Applets are now built with bundlebuilder in MacPython-OSX, which should make
Jack Jansen5d44b342003-02-18 23:32:47 +00002587 them more robust and also provides a path towards BuildApplication. The
2588 downside of this change is that applets can no longer be run from the
2589 Terminal window, this will hopefully be fixed in the 2.3b1.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002590
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002591
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002592What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 1?
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002593=================================
2594
Guido van Rossumae548862002-12-31 15:47:36 +00002595*Release date: 31-Dec-2002*
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002596
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002597Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002598--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00002599
Michael W. Hudson96bc3b42002-11-26 14:48:23 +00002600- One can now assign to __bases__ and __name__ of new-style classes.
2601
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00002602- dict() now accepts keyword arguments so that dict(one=1, two=2)
2603 is the equivalent of {"one": 1, "two": 2}. Accordingly,
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00002604 the existing (but undocumented) 'items' keyword argument has
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00002605 been eliminated. This means that dict(items=someMapping) now has
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00002606 a different meaning than before.
2607
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00002608- int() now returns a long object if the argument is outside the
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002609 integer range, so int("4" * 1000), int(1e200) and int(1L<<1000) will
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00002610 all return long objects instead of raising an OverflowError.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002611
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00002612- Assignment to __class__ is disallowed if either the old or the new
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00002613 class is a statically allocated type object (such as defined by an
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00002614 extension module). This prevents anomalies like 2.__class__ = bool.
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00002615
2616- New-style object creation and deallocation have been sped up
2617 significantly; they are now faster than classic instance creation
2618 and deallocation.
2619
2620- The __slots__ variable can now mention "private" names, and the
2621 right thing will happen (e.g. __slots__ = ["__foo"]).
2622
2623- The built-ins slice() and buffer() are now callable types. The
2624 types classobj (formerly class), code, function, instance, and
2625 instancemethod (formerly instance-method), which have no built-in
2626 names but are accessible through the types module, are now also
2627 callable. The type dict-proxy is renamed to dictproxy.
2628
2629- Cycles going through the __class__ link of a new-style instance are
2630 now detected by the garbage collector.
2631
2632- Classes using __slots__ are now properly garbage collected.
2633 [SF bug 519621]
2634
2635- Tightened the __slots__ rules: a slot name must be a valid Python
2636 identifier.
2637
2638- The constructor for the module type now requires a name argument and
2639 takes an optional docstring argument. Previously, this constructor
2640 ignored its arguments. As a consequence, deriving a class from a
2641 module (not from the module type) is now illegal; previously this
2642 created an unnamed module, just like invoking the module type did.
2643 [SF bug 563060]
2644
2645- A new type object, 'basestring', is added. This is a common base type
2646 for 'str' and 'unicode', and can be used instead of
2647 types.StringTypes, e.g. to test whether something is "a string":
2648 isinstance(x, basestring) is True for Unicode and 8-bit strings. This
2649 is an abstract base class and cannot be instantiated directly.
2650
2651- Changed new-style class instantiation so that when C's __new__
2652 method returns something that's not a C instance, its __init__ is
2653 not called. [SF bug #537450]
2654
2655- Fixed super() to work correctly with class methods. [SF bug #535444]
2656
2657- If you try to pickle an instance of a class that has __slots__ but
2658 doesn't define or override __getstate__, a TypeError is now raised.
2659 This is done by adding a bozo __getstate__ to the class that always
2660 raises TypeError. (Before, this would appear to be pickled, but the
2661 state of the slots would be lost.)
2662
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002663Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002664-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002665
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00002666- Import from zipfiles is now supported. The name of a zipfile placed
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00002667 on sys.path causes the import statement to look for importable Python
2668 modules (with .py, pyc and .pyo extensions) and packages inside the
2669 zipfile. The zipfile import follows the specification (though not
2670 the sample implementation) of PEP 273. The semantics of __path__ are
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00002671 compatible with those that have been implemented in Jython since
2672 Jython 2.1.
2673
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002674- PEP 302 has been accepted. Although it was initially developed to
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00002675 support zipimport, it offers a new, general import hook mechanism.
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00002676 Several new variables have been added to the sys module:
2677 sys.meta_path, sys.path_hooks, and sys.path_importer_cache; these
2678 make extending the import statement much more convenient than
2679 overriding the __import__ built-in function. For a description of
2680 these, see PEP 302.
2681
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00002682- A frame object's f_lineno attribute can now be written to from a
2683 trace function to change which line will execute next. A command to
2684 exploit this from pdb has been added. [SF patch #643835]
2685
Marc-André Lemburg20b91352002-12-12 18:01:43 +00002686- The _codecs support module for codecs.py was turned into a builtin
2687 module to assure that at least the builtin codecs are available
2688 to the Python parser for source code decoding according to PEP 263.
2689
Walter Dörwaldd9a6ad32002-12-12 16:41:44 +00002690- issubclass now supports a tuple as the second argument, just like
2691 isinstance does. ``issubclass(X, (A, B))`` is equivalent to
2692 ``issubclass(X, A) or issubclass(X, B)``.
2693
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00002694- Thanks to Armin Rigo, the last known way to provoke a system crash
2695 by cleverly arranging for a comparison function to mutate a list
2696 during a list.sort() operation has been fixed. The effect of
2697 attempting to mutate a list, or even to inspect its contents or
2698 length, while a sort is in progress, is not defined by the language.
2699 The C implementation of Python 2.3 attempts to detect mutations,
2700 and raise ValueError if one occurs, but there's no guarantee that
2701 all mutations will be caught, or that any will be caught across
2702 releases or implementations.
2703
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00002704- Unicode file name processing for Windows (PEP 277) is implemented.
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00002705 All platforms now have an os.path.supports_unicode_filenames attribute,
2706 which is set to True on Windows NT/2000/XP, and False elsewhere.
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00002707
Walter Dörwald3aeb6322002-09-02 13:14:32 +00002708- Codec error handling callbacks (PEP 293) are implemented.
2709 Error handling in unicode.encode or str.decode can now be customized.
2710
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00002711- A subtle change to the semantics of the built-in function intern():
2712 interned strings are no longer immortal. You must keep a reference
2713 to the return value intern() around to get the benefit.
2714
Guido van Rossumf808b892002-08-16 03:38:10 +00002715- Use of 'None' as a variable, argument or attribute name now
2716 issues a SyntaxWarning. In the future, None may become a keyword.
2717
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00002718- SET_LINENO is gone. co_lnotab is now consulted to determine when to
2719 call the trace function. C code that accessed f_lineno should call
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00002720 PyCode_Addr2Line instead (f_lineno is still there, but only kept up
2721 to date when there is a trace function set).
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00002722
Guido van Rossum9be89462002-08-14 16:11:30 +00002723- There's a new warning category, FutureWarning. This is used to warn
2724 about a number of situations where the value or sign of an integer
2725 result will change in Python 2.4 as a result of PEP 237 (integer
2726 unification). The warnings implement stage B0 mentioned in that
2727 PEP. The warnings are about the following situations:
2728
2729 - Octal and hex literals without 'L' prefix in the inclusive range
2730 [0x80000000..0xffffffff]; these are currently negative ints, but
2731 in Python 2.4 they will be positive longs with the same bit
2732 pattern.
2733
2734 - Left shifts on integer values that cause the outcome to lose
2735 bits or have a different sign than the left operand. To be
2736 precise: x<<n where this currently doesn't yield the same value
2737 as long(x)<<n; in Python 2.4, the outcome will be long(x)<<n.
2738
2739 - Conversions from ints to string that show negative values as
2740 unsigned ints in the inclusive range [0x80000000..0xffffffff];
2741 this affects the functions hex() and oct(), and the string
2742 formatting codes %u, %o, %x, and %X. In Python 2.4, these will
2743 show signed values (e.g. hex(-1) currently returns "0xffffffff";
2744 in Python 2.4 it will return "-0x1").
2745
Guido van Rossum9a2eda52002-12-31 02:12:42 +00002746- The bits manipulated under the cover by sys.setcheckinterval() have
2747 been changed. Both the check interval and the ticker used to be
2748 per-thread values. They are now just a pair of global variables.
2749 In addition, the default check interval was boosted from 10 to 100
2750 bytecode instructions. This may have some effect on systems that
2751 relied on the old default value. In particular, in multi-threaded
2752 applications which try to be highly responsive, response time will
2753 increase by some (perhaps imperceptible) amount.
Skip Montanaro979c74b2002-09-03 21:25:14 +00002754
Tim Petersd64c1de2002-08-12 17:36:03 +00002755- When multiplying very large integers, a version of the so-called
2756 Karatsuba algorithm is now used. This is most effective if the
2757 inputs have roughly the same size. If they both have about N digits,
2758 Karatsuba multiplication has O(N**1.58) runtime (the exponent is
2759 log_base_2(3)) instead of the previous O(N**2). Measured results may
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00002760 be better or worse than that, depending on platform quirks. Besides
2761 the O() improvement in raw instruction count, the Karatsuba algorithm
2762 appears to have much better cache behavior on extremely large integers
2763 (starting in the ballpark of a million bits). Note that this is a
2764 simple implementation, and there's no intent here to compete with,
2765 e.g., GMP. It gives a very nice speedup when it applies, but a package
2766 devoted to fast large-integer arithmetic should run circles around it.
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00002767
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00002768- u'%c' will now raise a ValueError in case the argument is an
2769 integer outside the valid range of Unicode code point ordinals.
2770
Guido van Rossumdeb09362002-08-09 17:16:30 +00002771- The tempfile module has been overhauled for enhanced security. The
2772 mktemp() function is now deprecated; new, safe replacements are
2773 mkstemp() (for files) and mkdtemp() (for directories), and the
2774 higher-level functions NamedTemporaryFile() and TemporaryFile().
2775 Use of some global variables in this module is also deprecated; the
2776 new functions have keyword arguments to provide the same
2777 functionality. All Lib, Tools and Demo modules that used the unsafe
2778 interfaces have been updated to use the safe replacements. Thanks
2779 to Zack Weinberg!
2780
Guido van Rossumd81a9832002-08-09 15:57:34 +00002781- When x is an object whose class implements __mul__ and __rmul__,
2782 1.0*x would correctly invoke __rmul__, but 1*x would erroneously
2783 invoke __mul__. This was due to the sequence-repeat code in the int
2784 type. This has been fixed now.
2785
Barry Warsawd79f6832002-08-06 17:01:51 +00002786- Previously, "str1 in str2" required str1 to be a string of length 1.
2787 This restriction has been relaxed to allow str1 to be a string of
2788 any length. Thus "'el' in 'hello world'" returns True now.
2789
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00002790- File objects are now their own iterators. For a file f, iter(f) now
2791 returns f (unless f is closed), and f.next() is similar to
2792 f.readline() when EOF is not reached; however, f.next() uses a
2793 readahead buffer that messes up the file position, so mixing
2794 f.next() and f.readline() (or other methods) doesn't work right.
2795 Calling f.seek() drops the readahead buffer, but other operations
2796 don't. It so happens that this gives a nice additional speed boost
2797 to "for line in file:"; the xreadlines method and corresponding
Guido van Rossumbffb2ef2002-08-09 17:17:07 +00002798 module are now obsolete. Thanks to Oren Tirosh!
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00002799
Guido van Rossumde392d32002-08-05 14:17:20 +00002800- Encoding declarations (PEP 263, phase 1) have been implemented. A
2801 comment of the form "# -*- coding: <encodingname> -*-" in the first
2802 or second line of a Python source file indicates the encoding.
Martin v. Löwis00f1e3f2002-08-04 17:29:52 +00002803
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00002804- list.sort() has a new implementation. While cross-platform results
2805 may vary, and in data-dependent ways, this is much faster on many
2806 kinds of partially ordered lists than the previous implementation,
2807 and reported to be just as fast on randomly ordered lists on
2808 several major platforms. This sort is also stable (if A==B and A
2809 precedes B in the list at the start, A precedes B after the sort too),
2810 although the language definition does not guarantee stability. A
2811 potential drawback is that list.sort() may require temp space of
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00002812 len(list)*2 bytes (``*4`` on a 64-bit machine). It's therefore possible
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00002813 for list.sort() to raise MemoryError now, even if a comparison function
2814 does not. See <http://www.python.org/sf/587076> for full details.
2815
Guido van Rossum2d5389c2002-07-23 03:44:35 +00002816- All standard iterators now ensure that, once StopIteration has been
2817 raised, all future calls to next() on the same iterator will also
2818 raise StopIteration. There used to be various counterexamples to
2819 this behavior, which could caused confusion or subtle program
2820 breakage, without any benefits. (Note that this is still an
2821 iterator's responsibility; the iterator framework does not enforce
2822 this.)
2823
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00002824- Ctrl+C handling on Windows has been made more consistent with
2825 other platforms. KeyboardInterrupt can now reliably be caught,
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00002826 and Ctrl+C at an interactive prompt no longer terminates the
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00002827 process under NT/2k/XP (it never did under Win9x). Ctrl+C will
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00002828 interrupt time.sleep() in the main thread, and any child processes
2829 created via the popen family (on win2k; we can't make win9x work
Mark Hammond8f3afc72002-08-10 06:26:31 +00002830 reliably) are also interrupted (as generally happens on for Linux/Unix.)
2831 [SF bugs 231273, 439992 and 581232]
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00002832
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00002833- sys.getwindowsversion() has been added on Windows. This
2834 returns a tuple with information about the version of Windows
2835 currently running.
2836
Raymond Hettinger5a04aec2002-06-25 00:25:30 +00002837- Slices and repetitions of buffer objects now consistently return
2838 a string. Formerly, strings would be returned most of the time,
2839 but a buffer object would be returned when the repetition count
2840 was one or when the slice range was all inclusive.
2841
Walter Dörwald3430d702002-06-17 10:43:59 +00002842- Unicode objects in sys.path are no longer ignored but treated
2843 as directory names.
2844
Neal Norwitz1f68fc72002-06-14 00:50:42 +00002845- Fixed string.startswith and string.endswith builtin methods
2846 so they accept negative indices. [SF bug 493951]
2847
Guido van Rossumc5fe5eb2002-06-12 03:45:21 +00002848- Fixed a bug with a continue inside a try block and a yield in the
2849 finally clause. [SF bug 567538]
2850
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00002851- Most builtin sequences now support "extended slices", i.e. slices
Guido van Rossum2e82e712002-06-13 11:41:07 +00002852 with a third "stride" parameter. For example, "hello world"[::-1]
2853 gives "dlrow olleh".
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00002854
Neal Norwitzd68f5172002-05-29 15:54:55 +00002855- A new warning PendingDeprecationWarning was added to provide
2856 direction on features which are in the process of being deprecated.
2857 The warning will not be printed by default. To see the pending
2858 deprecations, use -Walways::PendingDeprecationWarning::
2859 as a command line option or warnings.filterwarnings() in code.
2860
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00002861- Deprecated features of xrange objects have been removed as
2862 promised. The start, stop, and step attributes and the tolist()
2863 method no longer exist. xrange repetition and slicing have been
2864 removed.
2865
Guido van Rossum7dab2422002-04-26 19:40:56 +00002866- New builtin function enumerate(x), from PEP 279. Example:
2867 enumerate("abc") is an iterator returning (0,"a"), (1,"b"), (2,"c").
2868 The argument can be an arbitrary iterable object.
2869
Neil Schemenauer89e3ee02002-04-26 01:58:53 +00002870- The assert statement no longer tests __debug__ at runtime. This means
2871 that assert statements cannot be disabled by assigning a false value
2872 to __debug__.
2873
Walter Dörwald068325e2002-04-15 13:36:47 +00002874- A method zfill() was added to str and unicode, that fills a numeric
2875 string to the left with zeros. For example,
2876 "+123".zfill(6) -> "+00123".
2877
Guido van Rossum862fe3c2002-04-15 12:36:47 +00002878- Complex numbers supported divmod() and the // and % operators, but
2879 these make no sense. Since this was documented, they're being
2880 deprecated now.
2881
Guido van Rossum26dd8302002-04-26 20:11:29 +00002882- String and unicode methods lstrip(), rstrip() and strip() now take
2883 an optional argument that specifies the characters to strip. For
2884 example, "Foo!!!?!?!?".rstrip("?!") -> "Foo".
Guido van Rossum49042042002-04-13 00:59:05 +00002885
Guido van Rossumc0d3f4e2002-11-27 13:10:40 +00002886- There's a new dictionary constructor (a class method of the dict
2887 class), dict.fromkeys(iterable, value=None). It constructs a
2888 dictionary with keys taken from the iterable and all values set to a
2889 single value. It can be used for building sets and for removing
2890 duplicates from sequences.
Raymond Hettingere33d3df2002-11-27 07:29:33 +00002891
Guido van Rossumc69343b2002-04-12 19:22:48 +00002892- Added a new dict method pop(key). This removes and returns the
2893 value corresponding to key. [SF patch #539949]
2894
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00002895- A new built-in type, bool, has been added, as well as built-in
2896 names for its two values, True and False. Comparisons and sundry
2897 other operations that return a truth value have been changed to
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002898 return a bool instead. Read PEP 285 for an explanation of why this
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00002899 is backward compatible.
2900
Guido van Rossum95b62a62002-03-29 01:07:24 +00002901- Fixed two bugs reported as SF #535905: under certain conditions,
2902 deallocating a deeply nested structure could cause a segfault in the
2903 garbage collector, due to interaction with the "trashcan" code;
2904 access to the current frame during destruction of a local variable
2905 could access a pointer to freed memory.
2906
Guido van Rossumfe0ca4a2002-06-18 21:20:13 +00002907- The optional object allocator ("pymalloc") has been enabled by
2908 default. The recommended practice for memory allocation and
2909 deallocation has been streamlined. A header file is included,
2910 Misc/pymemcompat.h, which can be bundled with 3rd party extensions
2911 and lets them use the same API with Python versions from 1.5.2
2912 onwards.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00002913
Martin v. Löwiscfeb3b62002-03-03 21:30:27 +00002914- PyErr_Display will provide file and line information for all exceptions
2915 that have an attribute print_file_and_line, not just SyntaxErrors.
2916
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00002917- The UTF-8 codec will now encode and decode Unicode surrogates
2918 correctly and without raising exceptions for unpaired ones.
2919
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00002920- Universal newlines (PEP 278) is implemented. Briefly, using 'U'
2921 instead of 'r' when opening a text file for reading changes the line
2922 ending convention so that any of '\r', '\r\n', and '\n' is
2923 recognized (even mixed in one file); all three are converted to
2924 '\n', the standard Python line end character.
2925
Neal Norwitz649b7592002-01-01 19:07:13 +00002926- file.xreadlines() now raises a ValueError if the file is closed:
2927 Previously, an xreadlines object was returned which would raise
2928 a ValueError when the xreadlines.next() method was called.
2929
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002930- sys.exit() inadvertently allowed more than one argument.
Neal Norwitz0c766a02002-03-27 13:03:09 +00002931 An exception will now be raised if more than one argument is used.
2932
Gustavo Niemeyer17c5a332002-12-16 14:09:22 +00002933- Changed evaluation order of dictionary literals to conform to the
2934 general left to right evaluation order rule. Now {f1(): f2()} will
2935 evaluate f1 first.
Gustavo Niemeyer78429a62002-12-16 13:54:02 +00002936
Gustavo Niemeyer786ddb22002-12-16 18:12:53 +00002937- Fixed bug #521782: when a file was in non-blocking mode, file.read()
2938 could silently lose data or wrongly throw an unknown error.
2939
Neil Schemenauerb983aa02002-12-30 20:22:23 +00002940- The sq_repeat, sq_inplace_repeat, sq_concat and sq_inplace_concat
2941 slots are now always tried after trying the corresponding nb_* slots.
2942 This fixes a number of minor bugs (see bug #624807).
2943
Neal Norwitz74a032e2003-01-10 23:29:48 +00002944- Fix problem with dynamic loading on 64-bit AIX (see bug #639945).
2945
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002946Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002947-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002948
Raymond Hettinger9543b342003-01-18 23:22:20 +00002949- Added three operators to the operator module:
2950 operator.pow(a,b) which is equivalent to: a**b.
2951 operator.is_(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is b.
2952 operator.is_not(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is not b.
2953
Martin v. Löwis24a880b2002-12-31 12:55:15 +00002954- posix.openpty now works on all systems that have /dev/ptmx.
2955
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00002956- A module zipimport exists to support importing code from zip
2957 archives.
2958
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00002959- The new datetime module supplies classes for manipulating dates and
2960 times. The basic design came from the Zope "fishbowl process", and
2961 favors practical commercial applications over calendar esoterica. See
2962
2963 http://www.zope.org/Members/fdrake/DateTimeWiki/FrontPage
2964
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00002965- _tkinter now returns Tcl objects, instead of strings. Objects which
2966 have Python equivalents are converted to Python objects, other objects
2967 are wrapped. This can be configured through the wantobjects method,
Martin v. Löwis8c8aa5d2002-11-26 21:39:48 +00002968 or Tkinter.wantobjects.
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00002969
Barry Warsawc27f4bd2002-12-30 21:03:26 +00002970- The PyBSDDB wrapper around the Sleepycat Berkeley DB library has
2971 been added as the package bsddb. The traditional bsddb module is
2972 still available in source code, but not built automatically anymore,
2973 and is now named bsddb185. This supports Berkeley DB versions from
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00002974 3.0 to 4.1. For help converting your databases from the old module (which
2975 probably used an obsolete version of Berkeley DB) to the new module, see
2976 the db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py scripts described in the Tools/Demos
2977 section above.
Martin v. Löwisef546b32002-11-19 08:12:57 +00002978
Martin v. Löwis677bde22002-11-23 22:08:15 +00002979- unicodedata was updated to Unicode 3.2. It supports normalization
2980 and names for Hangul syllables and CJK unified ideographs.
Martin v. Löwis7d41e292002-11-23 12:22:32 +00002981
Neal Norwitz94a83fd2002-11-02 17:46:24 +00002982- resource.getrlimit() now returns longs instead of ints.
2983
Martin v. Löwis080689c2002-10-26 14:42:02 +00002984- readline now dynamically adjusts its input/output stream if
2985 sys.stdin/stdout changes.
2986
Guido van Rossumba602972002-10-01 18:18:58 +00002987- The _tkinter module (and hence Tkinter) has dropped support for
2988 Tcl/Tk 8.0 and 8.1. Only Tcl/Tk versions 8.2, 8.3 and 8.4 are
2989 supported.
2990
Martin v. Löwis658009a2002-09-16 17:26:24 +00002991- cPickle.BadPickleGet is now a class.
2992
Martin v. Löwisa19bfe02002-10-16 18:28:36 +00002993- The time stamps in os.stat_result are floating point numbers
2994 after stat_float_times has been called.
Martin v. Löwis94717ed2002-09-09 14:24:16 +00002995
Neal Norwitzb5673922002-09-05 21:48:07 +00002996- If the size passed to mmap.mmap() is larger than the length of the
2997 file on non-Windows platforms, a ValueError is raised. [SF bug 585792]
2998
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00002999- The xreadlines module is slated for obsolescence.
3000
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00003001- The strptime function in the time module is now always available (a
3002 Python implementation is used when the C library doesn't define it).
3003
Guido van Rossum9562bcf2002-06-14 21:31:18 +00003004- The 'new' module is no longer an extension, but a Python module that
3005 only exists for backwards compatibility. Its contents are no longer
3006 functions but callable type objects.
3007
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003008- The bsddb.*open functions can now take 'None' as a filename.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00003009 This will create a temporary in-memory bsddb that won't be
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003010 written to disk.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00003011
Martin v. Löwisb96152c2002-12-31 13:20:15 +00003012- posix.getloadavg, posix.lchown, posix.killpg, posix.mknod, and
3013 posix.getpgid have been added where available.
Martin v. Löwis06a83e92002-04-14 10:19:44 +00003014
Martin v. Löwisf0a46682002-11-03 17:20:12 +00003015- The locale module now exposes the C library's gettext interface. It
3016 also has a new function getpreferredencoding.
Martin v. Löwis2e64c342002-03-27 18:49:02 +00003017
Tim Petersfbf74f22002-03-14 19:06:01 +00003018- A security hole ("double free") was found in zlib-1.1.3, a popular
3019 third party compression library used by some Python modules. The
3020 hole was quickly plugged in zlib-1.1.4, and the Windows build of
3021 Python now ships with zlib-1.1.4.
3022
Martin v. Löwis688357e2002-04-08 21:28:20 +00003023- pwd, grp, and resource return enhanced tuples now, with symbolic
3024 field names.
Martin v. Löwis29001ff2002-03-01 10:47:37 +00003025
Martin v. Löwis99866332002-03-01 10:27:01 +00003026- array.array is now a type object. A new format character
3027 'u' indicates Py_UNICODE arrays. For those, .tounicode and
3028 .fromunicode methods are available. Arrays now support __iadd__
3029 and __imul__.
3030
Neal Norwitze790eae2002-01-01 21:14:12 +00003031- dl now builds on every system that has dlfcn.h. Failure in case
Martin v. Löwis93227272002-01-01 20:18:30 +00003032 of sizeof(int)!=sizeof(long)!=sizeof(void*) is delayed until dl.open
3033 is called.
3034
Skip Montanaro8e790e72002-09-03 13:25:17 +00003035- The sys module acquired a new attribute, api_version, which evaluates
3036 to the value of the PYTHON_API_VERSION macro with which the
3037 interpreter was compiled.
3038
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00003039- Fixed bug #470582: sre module would return a tuple (None, 'a', 'ab')
3040 when applying the regular expression '^((a)c)?(ab)$' on 'ab'. It now
3041 returns (None, None, 'ab'), as expected. Also fixed handling of
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00003042 lastindex/lastgroup match attributes in similar cases. For example,
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00003043 when running the expression r'(a)(b)?b' over 'ab', lastindex must be
3044 1, not 2.
3045
Gustavo Niemeyerc523b042002-11-07 03:28:56 +00003046- Fixed bug #581080: sre scanner was not checking the buffer limit
3047 before increasing the current pointer. This was creating an infinite
3048 loop in the search function, once the pointer exceeded the buffer
3049 limit.
3050
Thomas Heller95cb7e42002-11-07 16:23:55 +00003051- The os.fdopen function now enforces a file mode starting with the
3052 letter 'r', 'w' or 'a', otherwise a ValueError is raised. This fixes
3053 bug #623464.
3054
Greg Ward6c58d462003-01-03 18:02:15 +00003055- The linuxaudiodev module is now deprecated; it is being replaced by
3056 ossaudiodev. The interface has been extended to cover a lot more of
3057 OSS (see www.opensound.com), including most DSP ioctls and the
3058 OSS mixer API. Documentation forthcoming in 2.3a2.
3059
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003060Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003061-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003062
Guido van Rossum747f8062003-01-03 16:33:49 +00003063- imaplib.py now supports SSL (Tino Lange and Piers Lauder).
3064
Just van Rossum5e156ad2002-12-31 16:38:01 +00003065- Freeze's modulefinder.py has been moved to the standard library;
3066 slightly improved so it will issue less false missing submodule
3067 reports (see sf path #643711 for details). Documentation will follow
3068 with Python 2.3a2.
3069
Martin v. Löwis96a60e42002-12-31 13:11:54 +00003070- os.path exposes getctime.
3071
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003072- unittest.py now has two additional methods called assertAlmostEqual()
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003073 and failIfAlmostEqual(). They implement an approximate comparison
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003074 by rounding the difference between the two arguments and comparing
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003075 the result to zero. Approximate comparison is essential for
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003076 unit tests of floating point results.
3077
Raymond Hettingere11b5102002-12-25 16:37:19 +00003078- calendar.py now depends on the new datetime module rather than
3079 the time module. As a result, the range of allowable dates
3080 has been increased.
3081
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003082- pdb has a new 'j(ump)' command to select the next line to be
3083 executed.
3084
Thomas Heller1b3b49d2002-12-12 19:13:44 +00003085- The distutils created windows installers now can run a
3086 postinstallation script.
3087
Martin v. Löwis4581cfa2002-11-22 08:23:09 +00003088- doctest.testmod can now be called without argument, which means to
3089 test the current module.
3090
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003091- When canceling a server that implemented threading with a keyboard
Martin v. Löwisf86e8ef2002-11-22 08:08:44 +00003092 interrupt, the server would shut down but not terminate (waiting on
3093 client threads). A new member variable, daemon_threads, was added to
3094 the ThreadingMixIn class in SocketServer.py to make it explicit that
3095 this behavior needs to be controlled.
3096
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00003097- A new module, optparse, provides a fancy alternative to getopt for
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003098 command line parsing. It is a slightly modified version of Greg
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00003099 Ward's Optik package.
3100
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00003101- UserDict.py now defines a DictMixin class which defines all dictionary
3102 methods for classes that already have a minimum mapping interface.
3103 This greatly simplifies writing classes that need to be substitutable
3104 for dictionaries (such as the shelve module).
3105
3106- shelve.py now subclasses from UserDict.DictMixin. Now shelve supports
3107 all dictionary methods. This eases the transition to persistent
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003108 storage for scripts originally written with dictionaries in mind.
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00003109
Skip Montanaro3bf99e32002-12-08 18:36:24 +00003110- shelve.open and the various classes in shelve.py now accept an optional
3111 binary flag, which defaults to False. If True, the values stored in the
3112 shelf are binary pickles.
3113
Guido van Rossumfda06742002-11-13 16:29:18 +00003114- A new package, logging, implements the logging API defined by PEP
3115 282. The code is written by Vinay Sajip.
3116
Walter Dörwald4dbf1922002-11-06 16:53:44 +00003117- StreamReader, StreamReaderWriter and StreamRecoder in the codecs
3118 modules are iterators now.
3119
Tim Peters9288f952002-11-05 20:38:55 +00003120- gzip.py now handles files exceeding 2GB. Files over 4GB also work
3121 now (provided the OS supports it, and Python is configured with large
3122 file support), but in that case the underlying gzip file format can
3123 record only the least-significant 32 bits of the file size, so that
3124 some tools working with gzipped files may report an incorrect file
3125 size.
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00003126
Martin v. Löwis74b51ac2002-10-26 14:50:45 +00003127- xml.sax.saxutils.unescape has been added, to replace entity references
3128 with their entity value.
3129
Martin v. Löwis77ac4292002-10-15 15:11:13 +00003130- Queue.Queue.{put,get} now support an optional timeout argument.
3131
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00003132- Various features of Tk 8.4 are exposed in Tkinter.py. The multiple
3133 option of tkFileDialog is exposed as function askopenfile{,name}s.
Martin v. Löwis2ec36272002-10-13 10:22:08 +00003134
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00003135- Various configure methods of Tkinter have been stream-lined, so that
3136 tag_configure, image_configure, window_configure now return a
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00003137 dictionary when invoked with no argument.
Martin v. Löwis6ce13152002-10-10 14:36:13 +00003138
Guido van Rossum2b492b62002-10-09 21:40:48 +00003139- Importing the readline module now no longer has the side effect of
3140 calling setlocale(LC_CTYPE, ""). The initial "C" locale, or
3141 whatever locale is explicitly set by the user, is preserved. If you
3142 want repr() of 8-bit strings in your preferred encoding to preserve
3143 all printable characters of that encoding, you have to add the
3144 following code to your $PYTHONSTARTUP file or to your application's
3145 main():
3146
3147 import locale
3148 locale.setlocale(locale.LC_CTYPE, "")
3149
Martin v. Löwise9ce0b02002-10-07 13:23:24 +00003150- shutil.move was added. shutil.copytree now reports errors as an
3151 exception at the end, instead of printing error messages.
3152
Marc-André Lemburg97047e22002-10-04 11:55:21 +00003153- Encoding name normalization was generalized to not only
3154 replace hyphens with underscores, but also all other non-alphanumeric
3155 characters (with the exception of the dot which is used for Python
3156 package names during lookup). The aliases.py mapping was updated
3157 to the new standard.
3158
Walter Dörwald5ccaf8f2002-09-06 16:15:58 +00003159- mimetypes has two new functions: guess_all_extensions() which
3160 returns a list of all known extensions for a mime type, and
3161 add_type() which adds one mapping between a mime type and
3162 an extension to the database.
3163
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00003164- New module: sets, defines the class Set that implements a mutable
3165 set type using the keys of a dict to represent the set. There's
3166 also a class ImmutableSet which is useful when you need sets of sets
3167 or when you need to use sets as dict keys, and a class BaseSet which
Raymond Hettingeref8b9c62002-12-09 08:56:06 +00003168 is the base class of the two.
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00003169
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00003170- Added random.sample(population,k) for random sampling without replacement.
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00003171 Returns a k length list of unique elements chosen from the population.
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00003172
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00003173- random.randrange(-sys.maxint-1, sys.maxint) no longer raises
3174 OverflowError. That is, it now accepts any combination of 'start'
3175 and 'stop' arguments so long as each is in the range of Python's
3176 bounded integers.
3177
Raymond Hettinger40f62172002-12-29 23:03:38 +00003178- Thanks to Raymond Hettinger, random.random() now uses a new core
3179 generator. The Mersenne Twister algorithm is implemented in C,
3180 threadsafe, faster than the previous generator, has an astronomically
3181 large period (2**19937-1), creates random floats to full 53-bit
3182 precision, and may be the most widely tested random number generator
3183 in existence.
3184
3185 The random.jumpahead(n) method has different semantics for the new
3186 generator. Instead of jumping n steps ahead, it uses n and the
3187 existing state to create a new state. This means that jumpahead()
3188 continues to support multi-threaded code needing generators of
3189 non-overlapping sequences. However, it will break code which relies
3190 on jumpahead moving a specific number of steps forward.
3191
3192 The attributes random.whseed and random.__whseed have no meaning for
3193 the new generator. Code using these attributes should switch to a
3194 new class, random.WichmannHill which is provided for backward
3195 compatibility and to make an alternate generator available.
3196
Guido van Rossum4a57c332002-08-02 18:05:20 +00003197- New "algorithms" module: heapq, implements a heap queue. Thanks to
3198 Kevin O'Connor for the code and François Pinard for an entertaining
3199 write-up explaining the theory and practical uses of heaps.
3200
Marc-André Lemburg58e2ff22002-07-12 14:40:04 +00003201- New encoding for the Palm OS character set: palmos.
3202
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00003203- binascii.crc32() and the zipfile module had problems on some 64-bit
3204 platforms. These have been fixed. On a platform with 8-byte C longs,
3205 crc32() now returns a signed-extended 4-byte result, so that its value
3206 as a Python int is equal to the value computed a 32-bit platform.
3207
Martin v. Löwis7d650ca2002-06-30 15:05:00 +00003208- xml.dom.minidom.toxml and toprettyxml now take an optional encoding
3209 argument.
3210
Guido van Rossum9f7549b2002-06-10 21:39:42 +00003211- Some fixes in the copy module: when an object is copied through its
3212 __reduce__ method, there was no check for a __setstate__ method on
3213 the result [SF patch 565085]; deepcopy should treat instances of
3214 custom metaclasses the same way it treats instances of type 'type'
3215 [SF patch 560794].
3216
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00003217- Sockets now support timeout mode. After s.settimeout(T), where T is
3218 a float expressing seconds, subsequent operations raise an exception
3219 if they cannot be completed within T seconds. To disable timeout
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00003220 mode, use s.settimeout(None). There's also a module function,
3221 socket.setdefaulttimeout(T), which sets the default for all sockets
3222 created henceforth.
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00003223
3224- getopt.gnu_getopt was added. This supports GNU-style option
3225 processing, where options can be mixed with non-option arguments.
Martin v. Löwis446a25f2002-06-06 10:58:36 +00003226
Michael W. Hudsonb0dc1a32002-06-04 18:27:35 +00003227- Stop using strings for exceptions. String objects used for
3228 exceptions are now classes deriving from Exception. The objects
3229 changed were: Tkinter.TclError, bdb.BdbQuit, macpath.norm_error,
3230 tabnanny.NannyNag, and xdrlib.Error.
Neal Norwitzb5b5a262002-06-04 17:14:07 +00003231
Walter Dörwald474458d2002-06-04 15:16:29 +00003232- Constants BOM_UTF8, BOM_UTF16, BOM_UTF16_LE, BOM_UTF16_BE,
3233 BOM_UTF32, BOM_UTF32_LE and BOM_UTF32_BE that represent the Byte
3234 Order Mark in UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 encodings for little and
3235 big endian systems were added to the codecs module. The old names
3236 BOM32_* and BOM64_* were off by a factor of 2.
3237
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00003238- Added conversion functions math.degrees() and math.radians().
Raymond Hettinger87f59ee2002-05-13 04:17:32 +00003239
Raymond Hettinger866964c2002-12-14 19:51:34 +00003240- math.log() now takes an optional argument: math.log(x[, base]).
3241
Raymond Hettinger9b1df1d2002-05-12 06:07:21 +00003242- ftplib.retrlines() now tests for callback is None rather than testing
3243 for False. Was causing an error when given a callback object which
3244 was callable but also returned len() as zero. The change may
3245 create new breakage if the caller relied on the undocumented behavior
3246 and called with callback set to [] or some other False value not
3247 identical to None.
3248
Tim Peters46c04e12002-05-05 20:40:00 +00003249- random.gauss() uses a piece of hidden state used by nothing else,
3250 and the .seed() and .whseed() methods failed to reset it. In other
3251 words, setting the seed didn't completely determine the sequence of
3252 results produced by random.gauss(). It does now. Programs repeatedly
3253 mixing calls to a seed method with calls to gauss() may see different
3254 results now.
3255
Fred Drake7f781c92002-05-01 20:33:53 +00003256- The pickle.Pickler class grew a clear_memo() method to mimic that
3257 provided by cPickle.Pickler.
3258
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003259- difflib's SequenceMatcher class now does a dynamic analysis of
3260 which elements are so frequent as to constitute noise. For
3261 comparing files as sequences of lines, this generally works better
3262 than the IS_LINE_JUNK function, and function ndiff's linejunk
3263 argument defaults to None now as a result. A happy benefit is
3264 that SequenceMatcher may run much faster now when applied
3265 to large files with many duplicate lines (for example, C program
3266 text with lots of repeated "}" and "return NULL;" lines).
3267
Guido van Rossum256705b2002-04-23 13:29:43 +00003268- New Text.dump() method in Tkinter module.
3269
Marc-André Lemburg1ec71ea2002-04-17 20:33:40 +00003270- New distutils commands for building packagers were added to
3271 support pkgtool on Solaris and swinstall on HP-UX.
3272
3273- distutils now has a new abstract binary packager base class
3274 command/bdist_packager, which simplifies writing packagers.
3275 This will hopefully provide the missing bits to encourage
3276 people to submit more packagers, e.g. for Debian, FreeBSD
3277 and other systems.
3278
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00003279- The UTF-16, -LE and -BE stream readers now raise a
3280 NotImplementedError for all calls to .readline(). Previously, they
3281 used to just produce garbage or fail with an encoding error --
3282 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 +00003283 work well with these.
3284
Martin v. Löwis5c137c22002-03-18 12:44:08 +00003285- compileall now supports quiet operation.
3286
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003287- The BaseHTTPServer now implements optional HTTP/1.1 persistent
Martin v. Löwis587c98c2002-03-17 18:37:22 +00003288 connections.
3289
Marc-André Lemburga5d2b4c2002-02-16 18:23:30 +00003290- socket module: the SSL support was broken out of the main
3291 _socket module C helper and placed into a new _ssl helper
3292 which now gets imported by socket.py if available and working.
3293
Marc-André Lemburg37aa5802002-02-10 21:42:47 +00003294- encodings package: added aliases for all supported IANA character
3295 sets
3296
Guido van Rossum606fe4e2001-12-28 20:57:14 +00003297- ftplib: to safeguard the user's privacy, anonymous login will use
3298 "anonymous@" as default password, rather than the real user and host
3299 name.
3300
Fred Drake36736122002-01-10 13:50:31 +00003301- webbrowser: tightened up the command passed to os.system() so that
3302 arbitrary shell code can't be executed because a bogus URL was
3303 passed in.
3304
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00003305- gettext.translation has an optional fallback argument, and
Martin v. Löwisa55ffae2002-01-11 06:58:49 +00003306 gettext.find an optional all argument. Translations will now fallback
Martin v. Löwisd8996052002-11-21 21:45:32 +00003307 on a per-message basis. The module supports plural forms, by means
3308 of gettext.[d]ngettext and Translation.[u]ngettext.
Martin v. Löwis1be64192002-01-11 06:33:28 +00003309
Martin v. Löwis9668b932002-01-12 11:27:42 +00003310- distutils bdist commands now offer a --skip-build option.
3311
Walter Dörwaldb25c2b02002-03-21 10:38:40 +00003312- warnings.warn now accepts a Warning instance as first argument.
3313
Fred Drakefed7e852002-04-04 19:36:15 +00003314- The xml.sax.expatreader.ExpatParser class will no longer create
3315 circular references by using itself as the locator that gets passed
3316 to the content handler implementation. [SF bug #535474]
3317
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00003318- The email.Parser.Parser class now properly parses strings regardless
3319 of their line endings, which can be any of \r, \n, or \r\n (CR, LF,
3320 or CRLF). Also, the Header class's constructor default arguments
3321 has changed slightly so that an explicit maxlinelen value is always
Barry Warsaw497e5c42002-12-30 19:27:08 +00003322 honored, and so unicode conversion error handling can be specified.
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00003323
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003324- distutils' build_ext command now links C++ extensions with the C++
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00003325 compiler available in the Makefile or CXX environment variable, if
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003326 running under \*nix.
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00003327
3328- New module bz2: provides a comprehensive interface for the bz2 compression
3329 library. It implements a complete file interface, one-shot (de)compression
3330 functions, and types for sequential (de)compression.
3331
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003332- New pdb command 'pp' which is like 'p' except that it pretty-prints
Barry Warsaw5d8d6182002-11-05 22:41:33 +00003333 the value of its expression argument.
3334
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00003335- Now bdist_rpm distutils command understands a verify_script option in
3336 the config file, including the contents of the referred filename in
3337 the "%verifyscript" section of the rpm spec file.
3338
Gustavo Niemeyer1456fde2002-11-25 17:25:04 +00003339- Fixed bug #495695: webbrowser module would run graphic browsers in a
3340 unix environment even if DISPLAY was not set. Also, support for
3341 skipstone browser was included.
3342
Gustavo Niemeyerd5ae01a2002-12-16 13:11:57 +00003343- Fixed bug #636769: rexec would run unallowed code if subclasses of
3344 strings were used as parameters for certain functions.
3345
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003346Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003347-----------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003348
Martin v. Löwis0d1fdea2002-11-22 08:36:54 +00003349- pygettext.py now supports globbing on Windows, and accepts module
3350 names in addition to accepting file names.
3351
Guido van Rossum923e4ef2002-09-17 20:58:59 +00003352- The SGI demos (Demo/sgi) have been removed. Nobody thought they
3353 were interesting any more. (The SGI library modules and extensions
3354 are still there; it is believed that at least some of these are
3355 still used and useful.)
3356
Fred Drake40813b12002-08-05 15:24:19 +00003357- IDLE supports the new encoding declarations (PEP 263); it can also
3358 deal with legacy 8-bit files if they use the locale's encoding. It
3359 allows non-ASCII strings in the interactive shell and executes them
3360 in the locale's encoding.
Martin v. Löwis98ce7b72002-08-05 15:11:26 +00003361
Marc-André Lemburg46260092002-04-04 16:17:11 +00003362- freeze.py now produces binaries which can import shared modules,
3363 unlike before when this failed due to missing symbol exports in
3364 the generated binary.
3365
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003366Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003367-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003368
Martin v. Löwisdc461752002-11-06 21:59:33 +00003369- On Unix, IDLE is now installed automatically.
3370
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00003371- The fpectl module is not built by default; it's dangerous or useless
3372 except in the hands of experts.
3373
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003374- The public Python C API will generally be declared using PyAPI_FUNC
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00003375 and PyAPI_DATA macros, while Python extension module init functions
3376 will be declared with PyMODINIT_FUNC. DL_EXPORT/DL_IMPORT macros
3377 are deprecated.
Neal Norwitz1389f3e2002-07-22 13:21:10 +00003378
Tim Petersc6a3ff62002-07-08 22:11:52 +00003379- A bug was fixed that could cause COUNT_ALLOCS builds to segfault, or
3380 get into infinite loops, when a new-style class got garbage-collected.
3381 Unfortunately, to avoid this, the way COUNT_ALLOCS works requires
3382 that new-style classes be immortal in COUNT_ALLOCS builds. Note that
3383 COUNT_ALLOCS is not enabled by default, in either release or debug
3384 builds, and that new-style classes are immortal only in COUNT_ALLOCS
3385 builds.
3386
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00003387- Compiling out the cyclic garbage collector is no longer an option.
3388 The old symbol WITH_CYCLE_GC is now ignored, and Python.h arranges
3389 that it's always defined (for the benefit of any extension modules
3390 that may be conditionalizing on it). A bonus is that any extension
3391 type participating in cyclic gc can choose to participate in the
3392 Py_TRASHCAN mechanism now too; in the absence of cyclic gc, this used
3393 to require editing the core to teach the trashcan mechanism about the
3394 new type.
3395
Martin v. Löwis0cec0ff2002-07-28 16:33:45 +00003396- According to Annex F of the current C standard,
Tim Peters1de41bf2002-07-03 03:31:20 +00003397
3398 The Standard C macro HUGE_VAL and its float and long double analogs,
3399 HUGE_VALF and HUGE_VALL, expand to expressions whose values are
3400 positive infinities.
3401
3402 Python only uses the double HUGE_VAL, and only to #define its own symbol
3403 Py_HUGE_VAL. Some platforms have incorrect definitions for HUGE_VAL.
3404 pyport.h used to try to worm around that, but the workarounds triggered
3405 other bugs on other platforms, so we gave up. If your platform defines
3406 HUGE_VAL incorrectly, you'll need to #define Py_HUGE_VAL to something
3407 that works on your platform. The only instance of this I'm sure about
3408 is on an unknown subset of Cray systems, described here:
3409
3410 http://www.cray.com/swpubs/manuals/SN-2194_2.0/html-SN-2194_2.0/x3138.htm
3411
3412 Presumably 2.3a1 breaks such systems. If anyone uses such a system, help!
3413
Martin v. Löwisa3fb4f72002-06-09 13:33:54 +00003414- The configure option --without-doc-strings can be used to remove the
3415 doc strings from the builtin functions and modules; this reduces the
3416 size of the executable.
3417
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00003418- The universal newlines option (PEP 278) is on by default. On Unix
3419 it can be disabled by passing --without-universal-newlines to the
3420 configure script. On other platforms, remove
3421 WITH_UNIVERSAL_NEWLINES from pyconfig.h.
Tim Peters639295f2002-04-21 07:30:30 +00003422
Martin v. Löwis1142de32002-03-29 16:28:31 +00003423- On Unix, a shared libpython2.3.so can be created with --enable-shared.
3424
Tim Peters8deda702002-03-30 10:06:07 +00003425- All uses of the CACHE_HASH, INTERN_STRINGS, and DONT_SHARE_SHORT_STRINGS
3426 preprocessor symbols were eliminated. The internal decisions they
3427 controlled stopped being experimental long ago.
Tim Peters1f7df352002-03-29 03:29:08 +00003428
Fred Drake7d28b732002-05-02 21:17:00 +00003429- The tools used to build the documentation now work under Cygwin as
3430 well as Unix.
3431
Skip Montanaro57454e52002-06-14 20:30:31 +00003432- The bsddb and dbm module builds have been changed to try and avoid version
3433 skew problems and disable linkage with Berkeley DB 1.85 unless the
3434 installer knows what s/he's doing. See the section on building these
3435 modules in the README file for details.
3436
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003437C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003438-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003439
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00003440- PyNumber_Check() now returns true for string and unicode objects.
3441 This is a result of these types having a partially defined
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00003442 tp_as_number slot. (This is not a feature, but an indication that
Walter Dörwalda1a61f92002-11-19 21:20:25 +00003443 PyNumber_Check() is not very useful to determine numeric behavior.
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00003444 It may be deprecated.)
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00003445
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00003446- The string object's layout has changed: the pointer member
3447 ob_sinterned has been replaced by an int member ob_sstate. On some
3448 platforms (e.g. most 64-bit systems) this may change the offset of
3449 the ob_sval member, so as a precaution the API_VERSION has been
3450 incremented. The apparently unused feature of "indirect interned
3451 strings", supported by the ob_sinterned member, is gone. Interned
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003452 strings are now usually mortal; there is a new API,
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00003453 PyString_InternImmortal() that creates immortal interned strings.
3454 (The ob_sstate member can only take three values; however, while
3455 making it a char saves a few bytes per string object on average, in
3456 it also slowed things down a bit because ob_sval was no longer
3457 aligned.)
3458
Guido van Rossumfdb86482002-08-14 21:20:32 +00003459- The Py_InitModule*() functions now accept NULL for the 'methods'
3460 argument. Modules without global functions are becoming more common
3461 now that factories can be types rather than functions.
3462
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00003463- New C API PyUnicode_FromOrdinal() which exposes unichr() at C
3464 level.
3465
Thomas Heller085358a2002-07-29 14:27:41 +00003466- New functions PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErr() and
3467 PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErrWithFilename(). Similar to
3468 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErrWithFilename() and
3469 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErr(), but they allow to specify
3470 the exception type to raise. Available on Windows.
3471
Tim Peters7c321a82002-07-09 02:57:01 +00003472- Py_FatalError() is now declared as taking a const char* argument. It
3473 was previously declared without const. This should not affect working
3474 code.
3475
Martin v. Löwis01f94bd2002-05-08 08:44:21 +00003476- Added new macro PySequence_ITEM(o, i) that directly calls
3477 sq_item without rechecking that o is a sequence and without
3478 adjusting for negative indices.
3479
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00003480- PyRange_New() now raises ValueError if the fourth argument is not 1.
3481 This is part of the removal of deprecated features of the xrange
3482 object.
3483
Guido van Rossum517c7d42002-04-26 02:49:14 +00003484- PyNumber_Coerce() and PyNumber_CoerceEx() now also invoke the type's
3485 coercion if both arguments have the same type but this type has the
3486 CHECKTYPES flag set. This is to better support proxies.
3487
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003488- The type of tp_free has been changed from "``void (*)(PyObject *)``" to
3489 "``void (*)(void *)``".
Neil Schemenauer9344b142002-04-12 23:00:08 +00003490
3491- PyObject_Del, PyObject_GC_Del are now functions instead of macros.
3492
Guido van Rossum0986d822002-04-08 01:38:42 +00003493- A type can now inherit its metatype from its base type. Previously,
3494 when PyType_Ready() was called, if ob_type was found to be NULL, it
3495 was always set to &PyType_Type; now it is set to base->ob_type,
3496 where base is tp_base, defaulting to &PyObject_Type.
3497
3498- PyType_Ready() accidentally did not inherit tp_is_gc; now it does.
3499
Neil Schemenauerc9abc1d2002-05-08 14:14:41 +00003500- The PyCore_* family of APIs have been removed.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00003501
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003502- The "u#" parser marker will now pass through Unicode objects as-is
Marc-André Lemburg3e3eacb2002-01-09 16:21:27 +00003503 without going through the buffer API.
3504
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003505- The enumerators of cmp_op have been renamed to use the prefix ``PyCmp_``.
Martin v. Löwis7198a522002-01-01 19:59:11 +00003506
Tim Peters10a3bb52001-12-25 19:07:38 +00003507- An old #define of ANY as void has been removed from pyport.h. This
3508 hasn't been used since Python's pre-ANSI days, and the #define has
3509 been marked as obsolete since then. SF bug 495548 says it created
3510 conflicts with other packages, so keeping it around wasn't harmless.
3511
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003512- Because Python's magic number scheme broke on January 1st, we decided
3513 to stop Python development. Thanks for all the fish!
3514
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00003515- Some of us don't like fish, so we changed Python's magic number
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00003516 scheme to a new one. See Python/import.c for details.
3517
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003518New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003519-------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003520
Martin v. Löwis79acb9e2002-12-06 12:48:53 +00003521- OpenVMS is now supported.
3522
Martin v. Löwisf90ae202002-06-11 06:22:31 +00003523- AtheOS is now supported.
3524
Andrew MacIntyre161ad0e2002-08-04 07:25:58 +00003525- the EMX runtime environment on OS/2 is now supported.
3526
Martin v. Löwisa6e97582002-01-01 18:41:33 +00003527- GNU/Hurd is now supported.
3528
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003529Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003530-----
3531
Fred Drake4dd0f7e2002-11-26 21:44:56 +00003532- The regrtest.py script's -u option now provides a way to say "allow
3533 all resources except this one." For example, to allow everything
3534 except bsddb, give the option '-uall,-bsddb'.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003535
3536Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003537-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003538
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00003539- The Windows distribution now ships with version 4.0.14 of the
3540 Sleepycat Berkeley database library. This should be a huge
3541 improvement over the previous Berkeley DB 1.85, which had many
3542 bugs.
3543 XXX What are the licensing issues here?
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003544 XXX If a user has a database created with a previous version of
Tim Peters84c7a3f2002-11-23 18:48:06 +00003545 XXX Python, what must they do to convert it?
3546 XXX I'm still not sure how to link this thing (see PCbuild/readme.txt).
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00003547 XXX The version # is likely to change before 2.3a1.
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00003548
3549- The Windows distribution now ships with a Secure Sockets Library (SLL)
Mark Hammondc3de0082002-12-03 06:16:08 +00003550 module (_ssl.pyd)
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00003551
Tim Peters857fb4c2002-11-14 23:31:58 +00003552- The Windows distribution now ships with Tcl/Tk version 8.4.1 (it
3553 previously shipped with Tcl/Tk 8.3.2).
3554
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00003555- When Python is built under a Microsoft compiler, sys.version now
3556 includes the compiler version number (_MSC_VER). For example, under
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003557 MSVC 6, sys.version contains the substring "MSC v.1200 ". 1200 is
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00003558 the value of _MSC_VER under MSVC 6.
3559
Tim Peters08e72952002-04-16 20:48:01 +00003560- Sometimes the uninstall executable (UNWISE.EXE) vanishes. One cause
3561 of that has been fixed in the installer (disabled Wise's "delete in-
3562 use files" uninstall option).
3563
Guido van Rossum181e41a2002-04-06 00:23:25 +00003564- Fixed a bug in urllib's proxy handling in Windows. [SF bug #503031]
3565
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00003566- The installer now installs Start menu shortcuts under (the local
3567 equivalent of) "All Users" when doing an Admin install.
3568
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00003569- file.truncate([newsize]) now works on Windows for all newsize values.
3570 It used to fail if newsize didn't fit in 32 bits, reflecting a
3571 limitation of MS _chsize (which is no longer used).
3572
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00003573- os.waitpid() is now implemented for Windows, and can be used to block
3574 until a specified process exits. This is similar to, but not exactly
3575 the same as, os.waitpid() on POSIX systems. If you're waiting for
3576 a specific process whose pid was obtained from one of the spawn()
3577 functions, the same Python os.waitpid() code works across platforms.
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00003578 See the docs for details. The docs were changed to clarify that
3579 spawn functions return, and waitpid requires, a process handle on
3580 Windows (not the same thing as a Windows process id).
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00003581
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00003582- New tempfile.TemporaryFile implementation for Windows: this doesn't
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003583 need a TemporaryFileWrapper wrapper anymore, and should be immune
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00003584 to a nasty problem: before 2.3, if you got a temp file on Windows, it
3585 got wrapped in an object whose close() method first closed the
3586 underlying file, then deleted the file. This usually worked fine.
3587 However, the spawn family of functions on Windows create (at a low C
3588 level) the same set of open files in the spawned process Q as were
3589 open in the spawning process P. If a temp file f was among them, then
3590 doing f.close() in P first closed P's C-level file handle on f, but Q's
3591 C-level file handle on f remained open, so the attempt in P to delete f
3592 blew up with a "Permission denied" error (Windows doesn't allow
3593 deleting open files). This was surprising, subtle, and difficult to
3594 work around.
3595
3596- The os module now exports all the symbolic constants usable with the
3597 low-level os.open() on Windows: the new constants in 2.3 are
3598 O_NOINHERIT, O_SHORT_LIVED, O_TEMPORARY, O_RANDOM and O_SEQUENTIAL.
3599 The others were also available in 2.2: O_APPEND, O_BINARY, O_CREAT,
3600 O_EXCL, O_RDONLY, O_RDWR, O_TEXT, O_TRUNC and O_WRONLY. Contrary
3601 to Microsoft docs, O_SHORT_LIVED does not seem to imply O_TEMPORARY
3602 (so specify both if you want both; note that neither is useful unless
3603 specified with O_CREAT too).
3604
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003605Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003606----
3607
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003608- Mac/Relnotes is gone, the release notes are now here.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003609
Just van Rossume1ebd802003-02-10 10:06:18 +00003610- Python (the OSX-only, unix-based version, not the OS9-compatible CFM
3611 version) now fully supports unicode strings as arguments to various file
3612 system calls, eg. open(), file(), os.stat() and os.listdir().
3613
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003614- The current naming convention for Python on the Macintosh is that MacPython
3615 refers to the unix-based OSX-only version, and MacPython-OS9 refers to the
3616 CFM-based version that runs on both OS9 and OSX.
3617
3618- All MacPython-OS9 functionality is now available in an OSX unix build,
3619 including the Carbon modules, the IDE, OSA support, etc. A lot of this
3620 will only work correctly in a framework build, though, because you cannot
3621 talk to the window manager unless your application is run from a .app
3622 bundle. There is a command line tool "pythonw" that runs your script
3623 with an interpreter living in such a .app bundle, this interpreter should
3624 be used to run any Python script using the window manager (including
3625 Tkinter or wxPython scripts).
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00003626
Jack Jansen8bb80db2002-12-30 22:42:43 +00003627- Most of Mac/Lib has moved to Lib/plat-mac, which is again used both in
3628 MacPython-OSX and MacPython-OS9. The only modules remaining in Mac/Lib
3629 are specifically for MacPython-OS9 (CFM support, preference resources, etc).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003630
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003631- A new utility PythonLauncher will start a Python interpreter when a .py or
3632 .pyw script is double-clicked in the Finder. By default .py scripts are
3633 run with a normal Python interpreter in a Terminal window and .pyw
3634 files are run with a window-aware pythonw interpreter without a Terminal
3635 window, but all this can be customized.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003636
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003637- MacPython-OS9 is now Carbon-only, so it runs on Mac OS 9 or Mac OS X and
3638 possibly on Mac OS 8.6 with the right CarbonLib installed, but not on earlier
3639 releases.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003640
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003641- Many tools such as BuildApplet.py and gensuitemodule.py now support a command
3642 line interface too.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003643
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003644- All the Carbon classes are now PEP253 compliant, meaning that you can
3645 subclass them from Python. Most of the attributes have gone, you should
3646 now use the accessor function call API, which is also what Apple's
3647 documentation uses. Some attributes such as grafport.visRgn are still
3648 available for convenience.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003649
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003650- New Carbon modules File (implementing the APIs in Files.h and Aliases.h)
3651 and Folder (APIs from Folders.h). The old macfs builtin module is
3652 gone, and replaced by a Python wrapper around the new modules.
3653
3654- Pathname handling should now be fully consistent: MacPython-OSX always uses
3655 unix pathnames and MacPython-OS9 always uses colon-separated Mac pathnames
3656 (also when running on Mac OS X).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003657
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003658- New Carbon modules Help and AH give access to the Carbon Help Manager.
3659 There are hooks in the IDE to allow accessing the Python documentation
3660 (and Apple's Carbon and Cocoa documentation) through the Help Viewer.
3661 See Mac/OSX/README for converting the Python documentation to a
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003662 Help Viewer compatible form and installing it.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003663
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003664- OSA support has been redesigned and the generated Python classes now
3665 mirror the inheritance defined by the underlying OSA classes.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003666
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003667- MacPython no longer maps both \r and \n to \n on input for any text file.
3668 This feature has been replaced by universal newline support (PEP278).
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00003669
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00003670- The default encoding for Python sourcefiles in MacPython-OS9 is no longer
Guido van Rossum16c85172003-02-20 01:52:48 +00003671 mac-roman (or whatever your local Mac encoding was) but "ascii", like on
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00003672 other platforms. If you really need sourcefiles with Mac characters in them
3673 you can change this in site.py.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003674
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003675
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003676What's New in Python 2.2 final?
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003677===============================
3678
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003679*Release date: 21-Dec-2001*
3680
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003681Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003682--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003683
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003684- pickle.py, cPickle: allow pickling instances of new-style classes
3685 with a custom metaclass.
3686
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003687Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003688-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003689
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003690- weakref proxy object: when comparing, unwrap both arguments if both
3691 are proxies.
3692
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003693Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003694-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003695
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003696- binascii.b2a_base64(): fix a potential buffer overrun when encoding
3697 very short strings.
3698
3699- cPickle: the obscure "fast" mode was suspected of causing stack
3700 overflows on the Mac. Hopefully fixed this by setting the recursion
3701 limit much smaller. If the limit is too low (it only affects
3702 performance), you can change it by defining PY_CPICKLE_FAST_LIMIT
3703 when compiling cPickle.c (or in pyconfig.h).
3704
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003705Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003706-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003707
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003708- dumbdbm.py: fixed a dumb old bug (the file didn't get synched at
3709 close or delete time).
3710
3711- rfc822.py: fixed a bug where the address '<>' was converted to None
3712 instead of an empty string (also fixes the email.Utils module).
3713
3714- xmlrpclib.py: version 1.0.0; uses precision for doubles.
3715
3716- test suite: the pickle and cPickle tests were not executing any code
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003717 when run from the standard regression test.
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003718
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003719Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003720-----------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003721
3722Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003723-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003724
3725C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003726-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003727
3728New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003729-------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003730
3731Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003732-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003733
3734Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003735-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003736
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003737- distutils package: fixed broken Windows installers (bdist_wininst).
3738
3739- tempfile.py: prevent mysterious warnings when TemporaryFileWrapper
3740 instances are deleted at process exit time.
3741
3742- socket.py: prevent mysterious warnings when socket instances are
3743 deleted at process exit time.
3744
3745- posixmodule.c: fix a Windows crash with stat() of a filename ending
3746 in backslash.
3747
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003748Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003749----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003750
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003751- The Carbon toolbox modules have been upgraded to Universal Headers
3752 3.4, and experimental CoreGraphics and CarbonEvents modules have
3753 been added. All only for framework-enabled MacOSX.
3754
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003755
Tim Peters6272dfd2001-12-13 19:34:00 +00003756What's New in Python 2.2c1?
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003757===========================
3758
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003759*Release date: 14-Dec-2001*
3760
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003761Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003762--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003763
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003764- Guido's tutorial introduction to the new type/class features has
3765 been extensively updated. See
3766
3767 http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html
3768
3769 That remains the primary documentation in this area.
3770
Guido van Rossum33bab012001-12-05 22:45:48 +00003771- Fixed a leak: instance variables declared with __slots__ were never
3772 deleted!
3773
Guido van Rossum4b800852001-12-03 00:54:52 +00003774- The "delete attribute" method of descriptor objects is called
3775 __delete__, not __del__. In previous releases, it was mistakenly
3776 called __del__, which created an unfortunate overloading condition
3777 with finalizers. (The "get attribute" and "set attribute" methods
3778 are still called __get__ and __set__, respectively.)
3779
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00003780- Some subtle issues with the super built-in were fixed:
3781
3782 (a) When super itself is subclassed, its __get__ method would still
3783 return an instance of the base class (i.e., of super).
3784
3785 (b) super(C, C()).__class__ would return C rather than super. This
3786 is confusing. To fix this, I decided to change the semantics of
3787 super so that it only applies to code attributes, not to data
3788 attributes. After all, overriding data attributes is not
3789 supported anyway.
3790
3791 (c) The __get__ method didn't check whether the argument was an
3792 instance of the type used in creation of the super instance.
3793
Guido van Rossumcd7b7d62001-12-04 21:02:07 +00003794- Previously, hash() of an instance of a subclass of a mutable type
3795 (list or dictionary) would return some value, rather than raising
3796 TypeError. This has been fixed. Also, directly calling
3797 dict.__hash__ and list.__hash__ now raises the same TypeError
3798 (previously, these were the same as object.__hash__).
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00003799
Guido van Rossumd331cb52001-12-05 19:46:42 +00003800- New-style objects now support deleting their __dict__. This is for
3801 all intents and purposes equivalent to assigning a brand new empty
3802 dictionary, but saves space if the object is not used further.
3803
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003804Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003805-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003806
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00003807- -Qnew now works as documented in PEP 238: when -Qnew is passed on
3808 the command line, all occurrences of "/" use true division instead
3809 of classic division. See the PEP for details. Note that "all"
3810 means all instances in library and 3rd-party modules, as well as in
3811 your own code. As the PEP says, -Qnew is intended for use only in
3812 educational environments with control over the libraries in use.
Tim Petersbf72fe22001-12-11 21:43:14 +00003813 Note that test_coercion.py in the standard Python test suite fails
3814 under -Qnew; this is expected, and won't be repaired until true
3815 division becomes the default (in the meantime, test_coercion is
3816 testing the current rules).
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00003817
Fred Drake6c01e252001-12-14 17:08:12 +00003818- complex() now only allows the first argument to be a string
3819 argument, and raises TypeError if either the second arg is a string
3820 or if the second arg is specified when the first is a string.
3821
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003822Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003823-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003824
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00003825- gc.get_referents was renamed to gc.get_referrers.
3826
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003827Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003828-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003829
Tim Peters25059d32001-12-07 20:35:43 +00003830- Functions in the os.spawn() family now release the global interpreter
3831 lock around calling the platform spawn. They should always have done
3832 this, but did not before 2.2c1. Multithreaded programs calling
3833 an os.spawn function with P_WAIT will no longer block all Python threads
3834 until the spawned program completes. It's possible that some programs
3835 relies on blocking, although more likely by accident than by design.
3836
Martin v. Löwis3a89b2b2001-11-25 14:35:58 +00003837- webbrowser defaults to netscape.exe on OS/2 now.
3838
Martin v. Löwis652e1912001-11-25 14:50:56 +00003839- Tix.ResizeHandle exposes detach_widget, hide, and show.
3840
Martin v. Löwis714d2e22001-12-02 12:26:03 +00003841- The charset alias windows_1252 has been added.
3842
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003843- types.StringTypes is a tuple containing the defined string types;
3844 usually this will be (str, unicode), but if Python was compiled
3845 without Unicode support it will be just (str,).
3846
3847- The pulldom and minidom modules were synchronized to PyXML.
3848
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003849Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003850-----------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003851
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003852- A new script called Tools/scripts/google.py was added, which fires
3853 off a search on Google.
3854
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003855Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003856-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003857
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003858- Note that release builds of Python should arrange to define the
3859 preprocessor symbol NDEBUG on the command line (or equivalent).
3860 In the 2.2 pre-release series we tried to define this by magic in
3861 Python.h instead, but it proved to cause problems for extension
3862 authors. The Unix, Windows and Mac builds now all define NDEBUG in
3863 release builds via cmdline (or equivalent) instead. Ports to
3864 other platforms should do likewise.
3865
Jack Jansen1999ef42001-12-06 21:47:20 +00003866- It is no longer necessary to use --with-suffix when building on a
3867 case-insensitive file system (such as Mac OS X HFS+). In the build
3868 directory an extension is used, but not in the installed python.
3869
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003870C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003871-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003872
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00003873- New function PyDict_MergeFromSeq2() exposes the builtin dict
3874 constructor's logic for updating a dictionary from an iterable object
3875 producing key-value pairs.
3876
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00003877- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() requires that the number of entries in
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00003878 the keyword list equal the number of argument specifiers. This
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00003879 wasn't checked correctly, and PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords could even
3880 dump core in some bad cases. This has been repaired. As a result,
3881 PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords may raise RuntimeError in bad cases that
3882 previously went unchallenged.
3883
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003884New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003885-------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003886
3887Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003888-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003889
3890Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003891-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003892
3893Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003894----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003895
Jack Jansenffa260f2001-12-06 21:14:00 +00003896- In unix-Python on Mac OS X (and darwin) sys.platform is now "darwin",
3897 without any trailing digits.
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003898
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003899- Changed logic for finding python home in Mac OS X framework Pythons.
3900 Now sys.executable points to the executable again, in stead of to
3901 the shared library. The latter is used only for locating the python
3902 home.
3903
3904
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003905What's New in Python 2.2b2?
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003906===========================
3907
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003908*Release date: 16-Nov-2001*
3909
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003910Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003911--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003912
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00003913- Multiple inheritance mixing new-style and classic classes in the
3914 list of base classes is now allowed, so this works now:
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00003915
3916 class Classic: pass
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00003917 class Mixed(Classic, object): pass
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00003918
3919 The MRO (method resolution order) for each base class is respected
3920 according to its kind, but the MRO for the derived class is computed
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003921 using new-style MRO rules if any base class is a new-style class.
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00003922 This needs to be documented.
3923
Tim Petersa427a2b2001-10-29 22:25:45 +00003924- The new builtin dictionary() constructor, and dictionary type, have
3925 been renamed to dict. This reflects a decade of common usage.
3926
Guido van Rossum3fc08d22001-11-15 20:33:10 +00003927- dict() now accepts an iterable object producing 2-sequences. For
3928 example, dict(d.items()) == d for any dictionary d. The argument,
3929 and the elements of the argument, can be any iterable objects.
3930
Guido van Rossum7ad2d1e2001-10-29 22:11:00 +00003931- New-style classes can now have a __del__ method, which is called
3932 when the instance is deleted (just like for classic classes).
3933
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003934- Assignment to object.__dict__ is now possible, for objects that are
3935 instances of new-style classes that have a __dict__ (unless the base
3936 class forbids it).
3937
Guido van Rossumc8e56452001-10-22 00:43:43 +00003938- Methods of built-in types now properly check for keyword arguments
3939 (formerly these were silently ignored). The only built-in methods
3940 that take keyword arguments are __call__, __init__ and __new__.
3941
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00003942- The socket function has been converted to a type; see below.
3943
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003944Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003945-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003946
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00003947- Assignment to __debug__ raises SyntaxError at compile-time. This
3948 was promised when 2.1c1 was released as "What's New in Python 2.1c1"
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003949 (see below) says.
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00003950
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003951- Clarified the error messages for unsupported operands to an operator
3952 (like 1 + '').
3953
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003954Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003955-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003956
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00003957- mmap has a new keyword argument, "access", allowing a uniform way for
3958 both Windows and Unix users to create read-only, write-through and
3959 copy-on-write memory mappings. This was previously possible only on
3960 Unix. A new keyword argument was required to support this in a
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003961 uniform way because the mmap() signatures had diverged across
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00003962 platforms. Thanks to Jay T Miller for repairing this!
3963
Tim Peters169ded02001-11-03 19:57:21 +00003964- By default, the gc.garbage list now contains only those instances in
3965 unreachable cycles that have __del__ methods; in 2.1 it contained all
3966 instances in unreachable cycles. "Instances" here has been generalized
3967 to include instances of both new-style and old-style classes.
3968
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003969- The socket module defines a new method for socket objects,
3970 sendall(). This is like send() but may make multiple calls to
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00003971 send() until all data has been sent. Also, the socket function has
3972 been converted to a subclassable type, like list and tuple (etc.)
3973 before it; socket and SocketType are now the same thing.
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003974
3975- Various bugfixes to the curses module. There is now a test suite
3976 for the curses module (you have to run it manually).
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00003977
Guido van Rossum692adf12001-10-30 03:03:03 +00003978- binascii.b2a_base64 no longer places an arbitrary restriction of 57
3979 bytes on its input.
3980
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003981Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003982-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003983
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00003984- tkFileDialog exposes a Directory class and askdirectory
Martin v. Löwis25ee87c2001-11-07 22:38:08 +00003985 convenience function.
3986
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00003987- Symbolic group names in regular expressions must be unique. For
3988 example, the regexp r'(?P<abc>)(?P<abc>)' is not allowed, because a
3989 single name can't mean both "group 1" and "group 2" simultaneously.
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003990 Python 2.2 detects this error at regexp compilation time;
3991 previously, the error went undetected, and results were
3992 unpredictable. Also in sre, the pattern.split(), pattern.sub(), and
3993 pattern.subn() methods have been rewritten in C. Also, an
3994 experimental function/method finditer() has been added, which works
3995 like findall() but returns an iterator.
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00003996
Martin v. Löwisb7b32602001-11-02 23:48:20 +00003997- Tix exposes more commands through the classes DirSelectBox,
3998 DirSelectDialog, ListNoteBook, Meter, CheckList, and the
3999 methods tix_addbitmapdir, tix_cget, tix_configure, tix_filedialog,
4000 tix_getbitmap, tix_getimage, tix_option_get, and tix_resetoptions.
4001
Tim Peters98791af2001-10-23 01:59:54 +00004002- Traceback objects are now scanned by cyclic garbage collection, so
4003 cycles created by casual use of sys.exc_info() no longer cause
4004 permanent memory leaks (provided garbage collection is enabled).
4005
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00004006- os.extsep -- a new variable needed by the RISCOS support. It is the
4007 separator used by extensions, and is '.' on all platforms except
4008 RISCOS, where it is '/'. There is no need to use this variable
4009 unless you have a masochistic desire to port your code to RISCOS.
4010
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004011- mimetypes.py has optional support for non-standard, but commonly
4012 found types. guess_type() and guess_extension() now accept an
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004013 optional 'strict' flag, defaulting to true, which controls whether
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004014 recognize non-standard types or not. A few non-standard types we
4015 know about have been added. Also, when run as a script, there are
4016 new -l and -e options.
4017
4018- statcache is now deprecated.
4019
4020- email.Utils.formatdate() now produces the preferred RFC 2822 style
4021 dates with numeric timezones (it used to produce obsolete dates
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004022 hard coded to "GMT" timezone). An optional 'localtime' flag is
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004023 added to produce dates in the local timezone, with daylight savings
4024 time properly taken into account.
4025
4026- In pickle and cPickle, instead of masking errors in load() by
4027 transforming them into SystemError, we let the original exception
4028 propagate out. Also, implement support for __safe_for_unpickling__
4029 in pickle, as it already was supported in cPickle.
4030
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004031Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004032-----------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004033
4034Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004035-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004036
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004037- The dbm module is built using libdb1 if available. The bsddb module
4038 is built with libdb3 if available.
4039
4040- Misc/Makefile.pre.in has been removed by BDFL pronouncement.
4041
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004042C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004043-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004044
Tim Peters1fc240e2001-10-26 05:06:50 +00004045- New function PySequence_Fast_GET_SIZE() returns the size of a non-
4046 NULL result from PySequence_Fast(), more quickly than calling
4047 PySequence_Size().
4048
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004049- New argument unpacking function PyArg_UnpackTuple() added.
4050
4051- New functions PyObject_CallFunctionObjArgs() and
4052 PyObject_CallMethodObjArgs() have been added to make it more
4053 convenient and efficient to call functions and methods from C.
4054
4055- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() no longer masks errors, so it's
4056 possible that this will propagate errors it didn't before.
4057
4058- New function PyObject_CheckReadBuffer(), which returns true if its
4059 argument supports the single-segment readable buffer interface.
4060
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004061New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004062-------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004063
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004064- We've finally confirmed that this release builds on HP-UX 11.00,
4065 *with* threads, and passes the test suite.
4066
Tim Peters7a33d8b2001-11-05 02:51:07 +00004067- Thanks to a series of patches from Michael Muller, Python may build
4068 again under OS/2 Visual Age C++.
4069
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00004070- Updated RISCOS port by Dietmar Schwertberger.
4071
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004072Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004073-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004074
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00004075- Added a test script for the curses module. It isn't run automatically;
4076 regrtest.py must be run with '-u curses' to enable it.
4077
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004078Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004079-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004080
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004081Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004082----
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004083
4084- PythonScript has been moved to unsupported and is slated to be
4085 removed completely in the next release.
4086
4087- It should now be possible to build applets that work on both OS9 and
4088 OSX.
4089
4090- The core is now linked with CoreServices not Carbon; as a side
4091 result, default 8bit encoding on OSX is now ASCII.
4092
4093- Python should now build on OSX 10.1.1
4094
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004095
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004096What's New in Python 2.2b1?
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004097===========================
4098
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004099*Release date: 19-Oct-2001*
4100
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004101Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004102--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004103
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004104- New-style classes are now always dynamic (except for built-in and
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004105 extension types). There is no longer a performance penalty, and I
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004106 no longer see another reason to keep this baggage around. One relic
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004107 remains: the __dict__ of a new-style class is a read-only proxy; you
4108 must set the class's attribute to modify it. As a consequence, the
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004109 __defined__ attribute of new-style types no longer exists, for lack
4110 of need: there is once again only one __dict__ (although in the
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004111 future a __cache__ may be resurrected with a similar function, if I
4112 can prove that it actually speeds things up).
Guido van Rossum50fda3b2001-10-04 19:46:06 +00004113
Tim Peters1c9ca872001-10-04 06:43:12 +00004114- C.__doc__ now works as expected for new-style classes (in 2.2a4 it
4115 always returned None, even when there was a class docstring).
4116
4117- doctest now finds and runs docstrings attached to new-style classes,
4118 class methods, static methods, and properties.
4119
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004120Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004121-----------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004122
Guido van Rossuma8bcf802001-10-15 15:53:58 +00004123- A very subtle syntactical pitfall in list comprehensions was fixed.
4124 For example: [a+b for a in 'abc', for b in 'def']. The comma in
4125 this example is a mistake. Previously, this would silently let 'a'
4126 iterate over the singleton tuple ('abc',), yielding ['abcd', 'abce',
4127 'abcf'] rather than the intended ['ad', 'ae', 'af', 'bd', 'be',
4128 'bf', 'cd', 'ce', 'cf']. Now, this is flagged as a syntax error.
4129 Note that [a for a in <singleton>] is a convoluted way to say
4130 [<singleton>] anyway, so it's not like any expressiveness is lost.
4131
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004132- getattr(obj, name, default) now only catches AttributeError, as
4133 documented, rather than returning the default value for all
4134 exceptions (which could mask bugs in a __getattr__ hook, for
4135 example).
4136
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00004137- Weak reference objects are now part of the core and offer a C API.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00004138 A bug which could allow a core dump when binary operations involved
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00004139 proxy reference has been fixed. weakref.ReferenceError is now a
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004140 built-in exception.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00004141
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00004142- unicode(obj) now behaves more like str(obj), accepting arbitrary
4143 objects, and calling a __unicode__ method if it exists.
4144 unicode(obj, encoding) and unicode(obj, encoding, errors) still
Marc-André Lemburgb5507ec2001-10-19 12:02:29 +00004145 require an 8-bit string or character buffer argument.
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00004146
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004147- isinstance() now allows any object as the first argument and a
4148 class, a type or something with a __bases__ tuple attribute for the
4149 second argument. The second argument may also be a tuple of a
4150 class, type, or something with __bases__, in which case isinstance()
4151 will return true if the first argument is an instance of any of the
4152 things contained in the second argument tuple. E.g.
4153
4154 isinstance(x, (A, B))
4155
4156 returns true if x is an instance of A or B.
4157
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004158Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004159-----------------
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004160
4161- thread.start_new_thread() now returns the thread ID (previously None).
4162
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00004163- binascii has now two quopri support functions, a2b_qp and b2a_qp.
4164
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00004165- readline now supports setting the startup_hook and the
4166 pre_event_hook, and adds the add_history() function.
Martin v. Löwis0daad592001-09-30 21:09:59 +00004167
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00004168- os and posix supports chroot(), setgroups() and unsetenv() where
4169 available. The stat(), fstat(), statvfs() and fstatvfs() functions
4170 now return "pseudo-sequences" -- the various fields can now be
4171 accessed as attributes (e.g. os.stat("/").st_mtime) but for
4172 backwards compatibility they also behave as a fixed-length sequence.
4173 Some platform-specific fields (e.g. st_rdev) are only accessible as
Guido van Rossum98bf58f2001-10-18 20:34:25 +00004174 attributes.
4175
4176- time: localtime(), gmtime() and strptime() now return a
4177 pseudo-sequence similar to the os.stat() return value, with
4178 attributes like tm_year etc.
Martin v. Löwis16628c92001-10-04 22:46:41 +00004179
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004180- Decompression objects in the zlib module now accept an optional
4181 second parameter to decompress() that specifies the maximum amount
4182 of memory to use for the uncompressed data.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004183
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00004184- optional SSL support in the socket module now exports OpenSSL
4185 functions RAND_add(), RAND_egd(), and RAND_status(). These calls
4186 are useful on platforms like Solaris where OpenSSL does not
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004187 automatically seed its PRNG. Also, the keyfile and certfile
4188 arguments to socket.ssl() are now optional.
4189
4190- posixmodule (and by extension, the os module on POSIX platforms) now
4191 exports O_LARGEFILE, O_DIRECT, O_DIRECTORY, and O_NOFOLLOW.
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00004192
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004193Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004194-------
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00004195
Tim Peters7402f792001-10-02 03:53:41 +00004196- doctest now excludes functions and classes not defined by the module
4197 being tested, thanks to Tim Hochberg.
4198
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00004199- HotShot, a new profiler implemented using a C-based callback, has
4200 been added. This substantially reduces the overhead of profiling,
4201 but it is still quite preliminary. Support modules and
4202 documentation will be added in upcoming releases (before 2.2 final).
4203
Guido van Rossumc4b09b42001-10-04 10:19:00 +00004204- profile now produces correct output in situations where an exception
4205 raised in Python is cleared by C code (e.g. hasattr()). This used
4206 to cause wrong output, including spurious claims of recursive
4207 functions and attribution of time spent to the wrong function.
4208
Tim Peters0a1fc4e2001-10-07 03:12:08 +00004209 The code and documentation for the derived OldProfile and HotProfile
4210 profiling classes was removed. The code hasn't worked for years (if
4211 you tried to use them, they raised exceptions). OldProfile
4212 intended to reproduce the behavior of the profiler Python used more
4213 than 7 years ago, and isn't interesting anymore. HotProfile intended
4214 to provide a faster profiler (but producing less information), and
4215 that's a worthy goal we intend to meet via a different approach (but
4216 without losing information).
4217
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00004218- Profile.calibrate() has a new implementation that should deliver
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00004219 a much better system-specific calibration constant. The constant can
4220 now be specified in an instance constructor, or as a Profile class or
4221 instance variable, instead of by editing profile.py's source code.
4222 Calibration must still be done manually (see the docs for the profile
4223 module).
4224
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004225 Note that Profile.calibrate() must be overridden by subclasses.
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00004226 Improving the accuracy required exploiting detailed knowledge of
4227 profiler internals; the earlier method abstracted away the details
4228 and measured a simplified model instead, but consequently computed
4229 a constant too small by a factor of 2 on some modern machines.
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00004230
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00004231- quopri's encode and decode methods take an optional header parameter,
Jeremy Hylton6f543b62001-10-16 20:42:52 +00004232 which indicates whether output is intended for the header 'Q'
4233 encoding.
4234
Guido van Rossuma5343cc2001-10-18 18:02:07 +00004235- The SocketServer.ThreadingMixIn class now closes the request after
4236 finish_request() returns. (Not when it errors out though.)
4237
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004238- The nntplib module's NNTP.body() method has grown a 'file' argument
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004239 to allow saving the message body to a file.
4240
4241- The email package has added a class email.Parser.HeaderParser which
4242 only parses headers and does not recurse into the message's body.
4243 Also, the module/class MIMEAudio has been added for representing
4244 audio data (contributed by Anthony Baxter).
4245
4246- ftplib should be able to handle files > 2GB.
4247
4248- ConfigParser.getboolean() now also interprets TRUE, FALSE, YES, NO,
4249 ON, and OFF.
4250
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00004251- xml.dom.minidom NodeList objects now support the length attribute
4252 and item() method as required by the DOM specifications.
4253
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00004254Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004255-----------
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00004256
4257- Demo/dns was removed. It no longer serves any purpose; a package
4258 derived from it is now maintained by Anthony Baxter, see
4259 http://PyDNS.SourceForge.net.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004260
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004261- The freeze tool has been made more robust, and two new options have
4262 been added: -X and -E.
4263
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004264Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004265-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004266
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004267- configure will use CXX in LINKCC if CXX is used to build main() and
4268 the system requires to link a C++ main using the C++ compiler.
4269
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004270C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004271-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004272
Guido van Rossum6c4bce32001-10-18 19:20:25 +00004273- The documentation for the tp_compare slot is updated to require that
4274 the return value must be -1, 0, 1; an arbitrary number <0 or >0 is
4275 not correct. This is not yet enforced but will be enforced in
4276 Python 2.3; even later, we may use -2 to indicate errors and +2 for
4277 "NotImplemented". Right now, -1 should be used for an error return.
4278
Tim Petersd38b1c72001-09-30 05:09:37 +00004279- PyLong_AsLongLong() now accepts int (as well as long) arguments.
4280 Consequently, PyArg_ParseTuple's 'L' code also accepts int (as well
4281 as long) arguments.
4282
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00004283- PyThread_start_new_thread() now returns a long int giving the thread
4284 ID, if one can be calculated; it returns -1 for error, 0 if no
4285 thread ID is calculated (this is an incompatible change, but only
4286 the thread module used this API). This code has only really been
4287 tested on Linux and Windows; other platforms please beware (and
4288 report any bugs or strange behavior).
4289
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00004290- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() no longer accepts Unicode objects as
4291 input.
4292
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004293New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004294-------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004295
4296Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004297-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004298
4299Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004300-------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004301
Tim Peters04cf1d32001-10-09 22:39:40 +00004302- Installer: If you install IDLE, and don't disable file-extension
4303 registration, a new "Edit with IDLE" context (right-click) menu entry
4304 is created for .py and .pyw files.
4305
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004306- The signal module now supports SIGBREAK on Windows, thanks to Steven
4307 Scott. Note that SIGBREAK is unique to Windows. The default SIGBREAK
4308 action remains to call Win32 ExitProcess(). This can be changed via
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004309 signal.signal(). For example::
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004310
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004311 # Make Ctrl+Break raise KeyboardInterrupt, like Python's default Ctrl+C
4312 # (SIGINT) behavior.
4313 import signal
4314 signal.signal(signal.SIGBREAK, signal.default_int_handler)
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004315
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004316 try:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004317 while 1:
4318 pass
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004319 except KeyboardInterrupt:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004320 # We get here on Ctrl+C or Ctrl+Break now; if we had not changed
4321 # SIGBREAK, only on Ctrl+C (and Ctrl+Break would terminate the
4322 # program without the possibility for any Python-level cleanup).
4323 print "Clean exit"
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004324
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004325
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004326What's New in Python 2.2a4?
4327===========================
4328
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004329*Release date: 28-Sep-2001*
4330
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004331Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004332--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004333
4334- pydoc and inspect are now aware of new-style classes;
4335 e.g. help(list) at the interactive prompt now shows proper
4336 documentation for all operations on list objects.
4337
4338- Applications using Jim Fulton's ExtensionClass module can now safely
4339 be used with Python 2.2. In particular, Zope 2.4.1 now works with
4340 Python 2.2 (as well as with Python 2.1.1). The Demo/metaclass
4341 examples also work again. It is hoped that Gtk and Boost also work
4342 with 2.2a4 and beyond. (If you can confirm this, please write
4343 webmaster@python.org; if there are still problems, please open a bug
4344 report on SourceForge.)
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004345
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00004346- property() now takes 4 keyword arguments: fget, fset, fdel and doc.
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004347 These map to read-only attributes 'fget', 'fset', 'fdel', and '__doc__'
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00004348 in the constructed property object. fget, fset and fdel weren't
4349 discoverable from Python in 2.2a3. __doc__ is new, and allows to
4350 associate a docstring with a property.
4351
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004352- Comparison overloading is now more completely implemented. For
4353 example, a str subclass instance can properly be compared to a str
4354 instance, and it can properly overload comparison. Ditto for most
4355 other built-in object types.
4356
4357- The repr() of new-style classes has changed; instead of <type
4358 'M.Foo'> a new-style class is now rendered as <class 'M.Foo'>,
4359 *except* for built-in types, which are still rendered as <type
4360 'Foo'> (to avoid upsetting existing code that might parse or
4361 otherwise rely on repr() of certain type objects).
4362
4363- The repr() of new-style objects is now always <Foo object at XXX>;
4364 previously, it was sometimes <Foo instance at XXX>.
4365
4366- For new-style classes, what was previously called __getattr__ is now
4367 called __getattribute__. This method, if defined, is called for
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00004368 *every* attribute access. A new __getattr__ hook more similar to the
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004369 one in classic classes is defined which is called only if regular
4370 attribute access raises AttributeError; to catch *all* attribute
4371 access, you can use __getattribute__ (for new-style classes). If
4372 both are defined, __getattribute__ is called first, and if it raises
4373 AttributeError, __getattr__ is called.
4374
4375- The __class__ attribute of new-style objects can be assigned to.
4376 The new class must have the same C-level object layout as the old
4377 class.
4378
4379- The builtin file type can be subclassed now. In the usual pattern,
4380 "file" is the name of the builtin type, and file() is a new builtin
4381 constructor, with the same signature as the builtin open() function.
4382 file() is now the preferred way to open a file.
4383
4384- Previously, __new__ would only see sequential arguments passed to
4385 the type in a constructor call; __init__ would see both sequential
4386 and keyword arguments. This made no sense whatsoever any more, so
4387 now both __new__ and __init__ see all arguments.
4388
4389- Previously, hash() applied to an instance of a subclass of str or
4390 unicode always returned 0. This has been repaired.
4391
4392- Previously, an operation on an instance of a subclass of an
4393 immutable type (int, long, float, complex, tuple, str, unicode),
4394 where the subtype didn't override the operation (and so the
4395 operation was handled by the builtin type), could return that
4396 instance instead a value of the base type. For example, if s was of
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004397 a str subclass type, s[:] returned s as-is. Now it returns a str
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004398 with the same value as s.
4399
Barry Warsaw86fbaf82001-09-28 15:26:12 +00004400- Provisional support for pickling new-style objects has been added.
4401
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004402Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004403----
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004404
Tim Peters2c9aa5e2001-09-23 04:06:05 +00004405- file.writelines() now accepts any iterable object producing strings.
4406
Marc-André Lemburgaefd7662001-09-20 12:59:37 +00004407- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() now works very much like
4408 PyObject_Str(obj) in that it tries to use __str__/tp_str
4409 on the object if the object is not a string or buffer. This
4410 makes unicode() behave like str() when applied to non-string/buffer
4411 objects.
4412
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00004413- PyFile_WriteObject now passes Unicode objects to the file's write
4414 method. As a result, all file-like objects which may be the target
Martin v. Löwis2777c022001-09-19 13:47:32 +00004415 of a print statement must support Unicode objects, i.e. they must
4416 at least convert them into ASCII strings.
4417
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004418- Thread scheduling on Solaris should be improved; it is no longer
4419 necessary to insert a small sleep at the start of a thread in order
4420 to let other runnable threads be scheduled.
4421
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004422Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004423-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004424
Marc-André Lemburgbf990172001-09-27 14:17:33 +00004425- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
4426 read character buffer compatible objects for their .write() methods.
4427 These objects are converted to strings and then handled as such
4428 by the instances.
4429
Barry Warsaw2f600732001-09-24 04:28:10 +00004430- The "email" package has been added. This is basically a port of the
4431 mimelib package <http://sf.net/projects/mimelib> with API changes
4432 and some implementations updated to use iterators and generators.
4433
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00004434- difflib.ndiff() and difflib.Differ.compare() are generators now. This
4435 restores the ability of Tools/scripts/ndiff.py to start producing output
4436 before the entire comparison is complete.
4437
Barry Warsaw58b072d2001-09-22 04:44:21 +00004438- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
4439 iteration just like file objects (i.e. their .readline() method is
4440 called for each iteration until it returns an empty string).
4441
Marc-André Lemburg494f2ae2001-09-19 11:33:31 +00004442- The codecs module has grown four new helper APIs to access
4443 builtin codecs: getencoder(), getdecoder(), getreader(),
4444 getwriter().
4445
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004446- SimpleXMLRPCServer: a new module (based upon SimpleHTMLServer)
4447 simplifies writing XML RPC servers.
4448
Barry Warsaw647d5e82001-09-28 17:01:02 +00004449- os.path.realpath(): a new function that returns the absolute pathname
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004450 after interpretation of symbolic links. On non-Unix systems, this
4451 is an alias for os.path.abspath().
4452
Tim Peters16a77ad2001-09-08 04:00:12 +00004453- operator.indexOf() (PySequence_Index() in the C API) now works with any
4454 iterable object.
4455
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004456- smtplib now supports various authentication and security features of
4457 the SMTP protocol through the new login() and starttls() methods.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00004458
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004459- hmac: a new module implementing keyed hashing for message
4460 authentication.
4461
4462- mimetypes now recognizes more extensions and file types. At the
4463 same time, some mappings not sanctioned by IANA were removed.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00004464
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004465- The "compiler" package has been brought up to date to the state of
Guido van Rossumc9ed5dc2001-09-20 05:30:24 +00004466 Python 2.2 bytecode generation. It has also been promoted from a
4467 Tool to a standard library package. (Tools/compiler still exists as
4468 a sample driver.)
4469
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004470Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004471-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004472
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004473- Large file support (LFS) is now automatic when the platform supports
4474 it; no more manual configuration tweaks are needed. On Linux, at
4475 least, it's possible to have a system whose C library supports large
4476 files but whose kernel doesn't; in this case, large file support is
4477 still enabled but doesn't do you any good unless you upgrade your
4478 kernel or share your Python executable with another system whose
4479 kernel has large file support.
4480
4481- The configure script now supplies plausible defaults in a
4482 cross-compilation environment. This doesn't mean that the supplied
4483 values are always correct, or that cross-compilation now works
4484 flawlessly -- but it's a first step (and it shuts up most of
4485 autoconf's warnings about AC_TRY_RUN).
4486
4487- The Unix build is now a bit less chatty, courtesy of the parser
4488 generator. The build is completely silent (except for errors) when
4489 using "make -s", thanks to a -q option to setup.py.
4490
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004491C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004492-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004493
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004494- The "structmember" API now supports some new flag bits to deny read
4495 and/or write access to attributes in restricted execution mode.
4496
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004497New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004498-------------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004499
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004500- Compaq's iPAQ handheld, running the "familiar" Linux distribution
4501 (http://familiar.handhelds.org).
4502
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004503Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004504-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004505
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00004506- The "classic" standard tests, which work by comparing stdout to
4507 an expected-output file under Lib/test/output/, no longer stop at
4508 the first mismatch. Instead the test is run to completion, and a
4509 variant of ndiff-style comparison is used to report all differences.
4510 This is much easier to understand than the previous style of reporting.
4511
4512- The unittest-based standard tests now use regrtest's test_main()
4513 convention, instead of running as a side-effect of merely being
4514 imported. This allows these tests to be run in more natural and
4515 flexible ways as unittests, outside the regrtest framework.
4516
4517- regrtest.py is much better integrated with unittest and doctest now,
4518 especially in regard to reporting errors.
4519
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004520Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004521-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004522
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004523- Large file support now also works for files > 4GB, on filesystems
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00004524 that support it (NTFS under Windows 2000). See "What's New in
4525 Python 2.2a3" for more detail.
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004526
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004527
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004528What's New in Python 2.2a3?
4529===========================
4530
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004531*Release Date: 07-Sep-2001*
4532
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004533Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004534----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004535
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004536- Conversion of long to float now raises OverflowError if the long is too
4537 big to represent as a C double.
4538
Tim Peters32f453e2001-09-03 08:35:41 +00004539- The 3-argument builtin pow() no longer allows a third non-None argument
4540 if either of the first two arguments is a float, or if both are of
4541 integer types and the second argument is negative (in which latter case
4542 the arguments are converted to float, so this is really the same
4543 restriction).
4544
Tim Peters5d2b77c2001-09-03 05:47:38 +00004545- The builtin dir() now returns more information, and sometimes much
4546 more, generally naming all attributes of an object, and all attributes
4547 reachable from the object via its class, and from its class's base
4548 classes, and so on from them too. Example: in 2.2a2, dir([]) returned
4549 an empty list. In 2.2a3,
4550
4551 >>> dir([])
4552 ['__add__', '__class__', '__contains__', '__delattr__', '__delitem__',
4553 '__eq__', '__ge__', '__getattr__', '__getitem__', '__getslice__',
4554 '__gt__', '__hash__', '__iadd__', '__imul__', '__init__', '__le__',
4555 '__len__', '__lt__', '__mul__', '__ne__', '__new__', '__repr__',
4556 '__rmul__', '__setattr__', '__setitem__', '__setslice__', '__str__',
4557 'append', 'count', 'extend', 'index', 'insert', 'pop', 'remove',
4558 'reverse', 'sort']
4559
4560 dir(module) continues to return only the module's attributes, though.
4561
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004562- Overflowing operations on plain ints now return a long int rather
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004563 than raising OverflowError. This is a partial implementation of PEP
4564 237. You can use -Wdefault::OverflowWarning to enable a warning for
4565 this situation, and -Werror::OverflowWarning to revert to the old
4566 OverflowError exception.
4567
Guido van Rossum61c345f2001-09-04 03:26:15 +00004568- A new command line option, -Q<arg>, is added to control run-time
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004569 warnings for the use of classic division. (See PEP 238.) Possible
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00004570 values are -Qold, -Qwarn, -Qwarnall, and -Qnew. The default is
4571 -Qold, meaning the / operator has its classic meaning and no
4572 warnings are issued. Using -Qwarn issues a run-time warning about
4573 all uses of classic division for int and long arguments; -Qwarnall
4574 also warns about classic division for float and complex arguments
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004575 (for use with fixdiv.py).
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004576 [Note: the remainder of this item (preserved below) became
4577 obsolete in 2.2c1 -- -Qnew has global effect in 2.2] ::
4578
4579 Using -Qnew is questionable; it turns on new division by default, but
4580 only in the __main__ module. You can usefully combine -Qwarn or
4581 -Qwarnall and -Qnew: this gives the __main__ module new division, and
4582 warns about classic division everywhere else.
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004583
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004584- Many built-in types can now be subclassed. This applies to int,
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004585 long, float, str, unicode, and tuple. (The types complex, list and
4586 dictionary can also be subclassed; this was introduced earlier.)
4587 Note that restrictions apply when subclassing immutable built-in
4588 types: you can only affect the value of the instance by overloading
4589 __new__. You can add mutable attributes, and the subclass instances
4590 will have a __dict__ attribute, but you cannot change the "value"
4591 (as implemented by the base class) of an immutable subclass instance
4592 once it is created.
4593
Guido van Rossumaaf80c82001-09-02 13:44:35 +00004594- The dictionary constructor now takes an optional argument, a
4595 mapping-like object, and initializes the dictionary from its
4596 (key, value) pairs.
4597
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004598- A new built-in type, super, has been added. This facilitates making
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004599 "cooperative super calls" in a multiple inheritance setting. For an
4600 explanation, see http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#cooperation
4601
Guido van Rossum8d7234d2001-09-06 22:02:58 +00004602- A new built-in type, property, has been added. This enables the
4603 creation of "properties". These are attributes implemented by
4604 getter and setter functions (or only one of these for read-only or
4605 write-only attributes), without the need to override __getattr__.
4606 See http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#property
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004607
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004608- The syntax of floating-point and imaginary literals has been
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004609 liberalized, to allow leading zeroes. Examples of literals now
4610 legal that were SyntaxErrors before:
4611
4612 00.0 0e3 0100j 07.5 00000000000000000008.
4613
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004614- An old tokenizer bug allowed floating point literals with an incomplete
Tim Petersc6d95812001-08-28 20:56:27 +00004615 exponent, such as 1e and 3.1e-. Such literals now raise SyntaxError.
4616
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004617Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004618-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004619
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00004620- telnetlib includes symbolic names for the options, and support for
Martin v. Löwis1da9c572002-11-04 09:56:00 +00004621 setting an option negotiation callback. It also supports processing
4622 of suboptions.
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00004623
Tim Petersa40c7932001-09-05 22:36:56 +00004624- The new C standard no longer requires that math libraries set errno to
4625 ERANGE on overflow. For platform libraries that exploit this new
4626 freedom, Python's overflow-checking was wholly broken. A new overflow-
4627 checking scheme attempts to repair that, but may not be reliable on all
4628 platforms (C doesn't seem to provide anything both useful and portable
4629 in this area anymore).
4630
Martin v. Löwis44f86962001-09-05 13:44:54 +00004631- Asynchronous timeout actions are available through the new class
4632 threading.Timer.
4633
Tim Peters78526162001-09-05 00:53:45 +00004634- math.log and math.log10 now return sensible results for even huge
4635 long arguments. For example, math.log10(10 ** 10000) ~= 10000.0.
4636
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004637- A new function, imp.lock_held(), returns 1 when the import lock is
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00004638 currently held. See the docs for the imp module.
4639
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004640- pickle, cPickle and marshal on 32-bit platforms can now correctly read
Tim Peters82112372001-08-29 02:28:42 +00004641 dumps containing ints written on platforms where Python ints are 8 bytes.
4642 When read on a box where Python ints are 4 bytes, such values are
4643 converted to Python longs.
4644
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004645- In restricted execution mode (using the rexec module), unmarshalling
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004646 code objects is no longer allowed. This plugs a security hole.
4647
Steve Purcell6091cd62001-09-06 16:05:17 +00004648- unittest.TestResult instances no longer store references to tracebacks
4649 generated by test failures. This prevents unexpected dangling references
4650 to objects that should be garbage collected between tests.
4651
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004652Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004653-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004654
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00004655- Tools/scripts/fixdiv.py has been added which can be used to fix
4656 division operators as per PEP 238.
4657
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004658Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004659-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004660
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00004661- If you are an adventurous person using Mac OS X you may want to look at
4662 Mac/OSX. There is a Makefile there that will build Python as a real Mac
4663 application, which can be used for experimenting with Carbon or Cocoa.
4664 Discussion of this on pythonmac-sig, please.
4665
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00004666C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004667-----
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00004668
4669- New function PyObject_Dir(obj), like Python __builtin__.dir(obj).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00004670
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004671- Note that PyLong_AsDouble can fail! This has always been true, but no
4672 callers checked for it. It's more likely to fail now, because overflow
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004673 errors are properly detected now. The proper way to check::
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004674
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004675 double x = PyLong_AsDouble(some_long_object);
4676 if (x == -1.0 && PyErr_Occurred()) {
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004677 /* The conversion failed. */
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004678 }
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004679
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004680- The GC API has been changed. Extensions that use the old API will still
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004681 compile but will not participate in GC. To upgrade an extension
4682 module:
4683
4684 - rename Py_TPFLAGS_GC to PyTPFLAGS_HAVE_GC
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004685
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004686 - use PyObject_GC_New or PyObject_GC_NewVar to allocate objects and
4687 PyObject_GC_Del to deallocate them
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004688
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004689 - rename PyObject_GC_Init to PyObject_GC_Track and PyObject_GC_Fini
4690 to PyObject_GC_UnTrack
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004691
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004692 - remove PyGC_HEAD_SIZE from object size calculations
4693
4694 - remove calls to PyObject_AS_GC and PyObject_FROM_GC
4695
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004696- Two new functions: PyString_FromFormat() and PyString_FromFormatV().
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004697 These can be used safely to construct string objects from a
4698 sprintf-style format string (similar to the format string supported
4699 by PyErr_Format()).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00004700
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004701New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004702-------------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004703
Tim Petersb7da0902001-09-02 23:01:43 +00004704- Stephen Hansen contributed patches sufficient to get a clean compile
4705 under Borland C (Windows), but he reports problems running it and ran
4706 out of time to complete the port. Volunteers? Expect a MemoryError
4707 when importing the types module; this is probably shallow, and
4708 causing later failures too.
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004709
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004710Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004711-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004712
4713Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004714-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004715
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00004716- Large file support is now enabled on Win32 platforms as well as on
4717 Win64. This means that, for example, you can use f.tell() and f.seek()
4718 to manipulate files larger than 2 gigabytes (provided you have enough
4719 disk space, and are using a Windows filesystem that supports large
Tim Peters9a9471c2001-09-11 23:18:51 +00004720 partitions). Windows filesystem limits: FAT has a 2GB (gigabyte)
4721 filesize limit, and large file support makes no difference there.
4722 FAT32's limit is 4GB, and files >= 2GB are easier to use from Python now.
4723 NTFS has no practical limit on file size, and files of any size can be
4724 used from Python now.
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00004725
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004726- The w9xpopen hack is now used on Windows NT and 2000 too when COMPSPEC
Tim Peters402d5982001-08-27 06:37:48 +00004727 points to command.com (patch from Brian Quinlan).
4728
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004729
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004730What's New in Python 2.2a2?
4731===========================
4732
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004733*Release Date: 22-Aug-2001*
4734
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004735Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004736-----
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004737
Barry Warsaw18b2ecf2001-08-22 20:26:56 +00004738- Tim Peters developed a brand new Windows installer using Wise 8.1,
4739 generously donated to us by Wise Solutions.
4740
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004741- configure supports a new option --enable-unicode, with the values
4742 ucs2 and ucs4 (new in 2.2a1). With --disable-unicode, the Unicode
4743 type and supporting code is completely removed from the interpreter.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004744
Jack Jansen32ce0cd2001-08-21 19:28:20 +00004745- A new configure option --enable-framework builds a Mac OS X framework,
4746 which "make frameworkinstall" will install. This provides a starting
4747 point for more mac-like functionality, join pythonmac-sig@python.org
4748 if you are interested in helping.
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004749
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004750- The NeXT platform is no longer supported.
4751
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004752- The 'new' module is now statically linked.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004753
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004754Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004755-----
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004756
4757- The new Tools/scripts/cleanfuture.py can be used to automatically
Andrew M. Kuchlingb0532092001-08-15 15:54:56 +00004758 edit out obsolete future statements from Python source code. See
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004759 the module docstring for details.
4760
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004761Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004762-----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004763
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004764- regrtest.py now knows which tests are expected to be skipped on some
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004765 platforms, allowing to give clearer test result output. regrtest
4766 also has optional --use/-u switch to run normally disabled tests
4767 which require network access or consume significant disk resources.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004768
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004769- Several new tests in the standard test suite, with special thanks to
4770 Nick Mathewson.
4771
4772Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004773----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004774
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004775- The floor division operator // has been added as outlined in PEP
4776 238. The / operator still provides classic division (and will until
4777 Python 3.0) unless "from __future__ import division" is included, in
4778 which case the / operator will provide true division. The operator
4779 module provides truediv() and floordiv() functions. Augmented
4780 assignment variants are included, as are the equivalent overloadable
4781 methods and C API methods. See the PEP for a full discussion:
4782 <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0238.html>
4783
Tim Peters6cd6a822001-08-17 22:11:27 +00004784- Future statements are now effective in simulated interactive shells
4785 (like IDLE). This should "just work" by magic, but read Michael
4786 Hudson's "Future statements in simulated shells" PEP 264 for full
4787 details: <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0264.html>.
4788
Guido van Rossumf86ddd22001-08-17 21:21:04 +00004789- The type/class unification (PEP 252-253) was integrated into the
4790 trunk and is not so tentative any more (the exact specification of
4791 some features is still tentative). A lot of work has done on fixing
4792 bugs and adding robustness and features (performance still has to
4793 come a long way).
4794
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00004795- Warnings about a mismatch in the Python API during extension import
4796 now use the Python warning framework (which makes it possible to
4797 write filters for these warnings).
4798
Barry Warsaw9b3be7f2001-08-14 18:35:02 +00004799- A function's __dict__ (aka func_dict) will now always be a
4800 dictionary. It used to be possible to delete it or set it to None,
4801 but now both actions raise TypeErrors. It is still legal to set it
4802 to a dictionary object. Getting func.__dict__ before any attributes
4803 have been assigned now returns an empty dictionary instead of None.
4804
Guido van Rossum32aa5d22001-09-05 18:43:35 +00004805- A new command line option, -E, was added which disables the use of
4806 all environment variables, or at least those that are specifically
4807 significant to Python. Usually those have a name starting with
4808 "PYTHON". This was used to fix a problem where the tests fail if
4809 the user happens to have PYTHONHOME or PYTHONPATH pointing to an
4810 older distribution.
4811
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004812Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004813-------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004814
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004815- New class Differ and new functions ndiff() and restore() in difflib.py.
4816 These package the algorithms used by the popular Tools/scripts/ndiff.py,
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004817 for programmatic reuse.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004818
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004819- New function xml.sax.saxutils.quoteattr(): Quote an XML attribute
4820 value using the minimal quoting required for the value; more
4821 reliable than using xml.sax.saxutils.escape() for attribute values.
4822
4823- Readline completion support for cmd.Cmd was added.
4824
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004825- Calling os.tempnam() or os.tmpnam() generate RuntimeWarnings.
4826
4827- Added function threading.BoundedSemaphore()
4828
4829- Added Ka-Ping Yee's cgitb.py module.
4830
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004831- The 'new' module now exposes the CO_xxx flags.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004832
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00004833- The gc module offers the get_referents function.
4834
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004835New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004836-------------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004837
4838C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004839-----
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004840
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00004841- Two new APIs PyOS_snprintf() and PyOS_vsnprintf() were added
4842 which provide a cross-platform implementations for the
4843 relatively new snprintf()/vsnprintf() C lib APIs. In contrast to
4844 the standard sprintf() and vsprintf() C lib APIs, these versions
4845 apply bounds checking on the used buffer which enhances protection
4846 against buffer overruns.
4847
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00004848- Unicode APIs now use name mangling to assure that mixing interpreters
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00004849 and extensions using different Unicode widths is rendered next to
4850 impossible. Trying to import an incompatible Unicode-aware extension
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00004851 will result in an ImportError. Unicode extensions writers must make
4852 sure to check the Unicode width compatibility in their extensions by
4853 using at least one of the mangled Unicode APIs in the extension.
4854
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004855- Two new flags METH_NOARGS and METH_O are available in method definition
4856 tables to simplify implementation of methods with no arguments and a
4857 single untyped argument. Calling such methods is more efficient than
4858 calling corresponding METH_VARARGS methods. METH_OLDARGS is now
4859 deprecated.
4860
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00004861Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004862-------
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00004863
4864- "import module" now compiles module.pyw if it exists and nothing else
4865 relevant is found.
4866
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004867
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00004868What's New in Python 2.2a1?
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004869===========================
4870
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004871*Release date: 18-Jul-2001*
4872
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004873Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004874----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004875
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00004876- TENTATIVELY, a large amount of code implementing much of what's
4877 described in PEP 252 (Making Types Look More Like Classes) and PEP
4878 253 (Subtyping Built-in Types) was added. This will be released
4879 with Python 2.2a1. Documentation will be provided separately
4880 through http://www.python.org/2.2/. The purpose of releasing this
4881 with Python 2.2a1 is to test backwards compatibility. It is
4882 possible, though not likely, that a decision is made not to release
4883 this code as part of 2.2 final, if any serious backwards
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004884 incompatibilities are found during alpha testing that cannot be
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00004885 repaired.
4886
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00004887- Generators were added; this is a new way to create an iterator (see
Tim Peters11a0d102001-07-17 18:48:00 +00004888 below) using what looks like a simple function containing one or
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00004889 more 'yield' statements. See PEP 255. Since this adds a new
4890 keyword to the language, this feature must be enabled by including a
4891 future statement: "from __future__ import generators" (see PEP 236).
4892 Generators will become a standard feature in a future release
4893 (probably 2.3). Without this future statement, 'yield' remains an
4894 ordinary identifier, but a warning is issued each time it is used.
4895 (These warnings currently don't conform to the warnings framework of
4896 PEP 230; we intend to fix this in 2.2a2.)
4897
Marc-André Lemburg12e74b32001-05-22 08:58:23 +00004898- The UTF-16 codec was modified to be more RFC compliant. It will now
4899 only remove BOM characters at the start of the string and then
4900 only if running in native mode (UTF-16-LE and -BE won't remove a
4901 leading BMO character).
4902
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00004903- Strings now have a new method .decode() to complement the already
4904 existing .encode() method. These two methods provide direct access
4905 to the corresponding decoders and encoders of the registered codecs.
4906
4907 To enhance the usability of the .encode() method, the special
4908 casing of Unicode object return values was dropped (Unicode objects
4909 were auto-magically converted to string using the default encoding).
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00004910
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00004911 Both methods will now return whatever the codec in charge of the
4912 requested encoding returns as object, e.g. Unicode codecs will
4913 return Unicode objects when decoding is requested ("äöü".decode("latin-1")
4914 will return u"äöü"). This enables codec writer to create codecs
4915 for various simple to use conversions.
4916
4917 New codecs were added to demonstrate these new features (the .encode()
4918 and .decode() columns indicate the type of the returned objects):
4919
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004920 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4921 |Name | .encode() | .decode() | Description |
4922 +=========+===========+===========+=============================+
4923 |uu | string | string | UU codec (e.g. for email) |
4924 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4925 |base64 | string | string | base64 codec |
4926 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4927 |quopri | string | string | quoted-printable codec |
4928 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4929 |zlib | string | string | zlib compression |
4930 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4931 |hex | string | string | 2-byte hex codec |
4932 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4933 |rot-13 | string | Unicode | ROT-13 Unicode charmap codec|
4934 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00004935
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004936- Some operating systems now support the concept of a default Unicode
4937 encoding for file system operations. Notably, Windows supports 'mbcs'
4938 as the default. The Macintosh will also adopt this concept in the medium
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00004939 term, although the default encoding for that platform will be other than
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004940 'mbcs'.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00004941
4942 On operating system that support non-ASCII filenames, it is common for
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004943 functions that return filenames (such as os.listdir()) to return Python
4944 string objects pre-encoded using the default file system encoding for
4945 the platform. As this encoding is likely to be different from Python's
4946 default encoding, converting this name to a Unicode object before passing
4947 it back to the Operating System would result in a Unicode error, as Python
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004948 would attempt to use its default encoding (generally ASCII) rather than
4949 the default encoding for the file system.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00004950
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004951 In general, this change simply removes surprises when working with
4952 Unicode and the file system, making these operations work as you expect,
4953 increasing the transparency of Unicode objects in this context.
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004954 See [????] for more details, including examples.
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004955
Tim Peters61dff2b2001-05-08 15:43:37 +00004956- Float (and complex) literals in source code were evaluated to full
4957 precision only when running from a .py file; the same code loaded from a
4958 .pyc (or .pyo) file could suffer numeric differences starting at about the
4959 12th significant decimal digit. For example, on a machine with IEEE-754
4960 floating arithmetic,
4961
4962 x = 9007199254740992.0
4963 print long(x)
4964
4965 printed 9007199254740992 if run directly from .py, but 9007199254740000
4966 if from a compiled (.pyc or .pyo) file. This was due to marshal using
4967 str(float) instead of repr(float) when building code objects. marshal
4968 now uses repr(float) instead, which should reproduce floats to full
4969 machine precision (assuming the platform C float<->string I/O conversion
4970 functions are of good quality).
4971
4972 This may cause floating-point results to change in some cases, and
4973 usually for the better, but may also cause numerically unstable
4974 algorithms to break.
4975
Tim Peters2f228e72001-05-13 00:19:31 +00004976- The implementation of dicts suffers fewer collisions, which has speed
4977 benefits. However, the order in which dict entries appear in dict.keys(),
4978 dict.values() and dict.items() may differ from previous releases for a
4979 given dict. Nothing is defined about this order, so no program should
4980 rely on it. Nevertheless, it's easy to write test cases that rely on the
4981 order by accident, typically because of printing the str() or repr() of a
4982 dict to an "expected results" file. See Lib/test/test_support.py's new
4983 sortdict(dict) function for a simple way to display a dict in sorted
4984 order.
4985
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00004986- Many other small changes to dicts were made, resulting in faster
4987 operation along the most common code paths.
4988
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00004989- Dictionary objects now support the "in" operator: "x in dict" means
4990 the same as dict.has_key(x).
4991
Barry Warsaw51acc8d2001-06-26 20:12:50 +00004992- The update() method of dictionaries now accepts generic mapping
4993 objects. Specifically the argument object must support the .keys()
4994 and __getitem__() methods. This allows you to say, for example,
4995 {}.update(UserDict())
4996
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00004997- Iterators were added; this is a generalized way of providing values
4998 to a for loop. See PEP 234. There's a new built-in function iter()
4999 to return an iterator. There's a new protocol to get the next value
5000 from an iterator using the next() method (in Python) or the
5001 tp_iternext slot (in C). There's a new protocol to get iterators
5002 using the __iter__() method (in Python) or the tp_iter slot (in C).
5003 Iterating (i.e. a for loop) over a dictionary generates its keys.
5004 Iterating over a file generates its lines.
5005
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005006- The following functions were generalized to work nicely with iterator
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00005007 arguments::
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005008
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00005009 map(), filter(), reduce(), zip()
Tim Peters8572b4f2001-05-06 01:05:02 +00005010 list(), tuple() (PySequence_Tuple() and PySequence_Fast() in C API)
5011 max(), min()
Tim Peters1af03e92001-05-26 19:37:54 +00005012 join() method of strings
5013 extend() method of lists
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00005014 'x in y' and 'x not in y' (PySequence_Contains() in C API)
5015 operator.countOf() (PySequence_Count() in C API)
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005016 right-hand side of assignment statements with multiple targets, such as ::
Tim Petersd6d010b2001-06-21 02:49:55 +00005017 x, y, z = some_iterable_object_returning_exactly_3_values
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00005018
Tim Petersd85e1022001-05-11 21:51:48 +00005019- Accessing module attributes is significantly faster (for example,
5020 random.random or os.path or yourPythonModule.yourAttribute).
5021
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00005022- Comparing dictionary objects via == and != is faster, and now works even
5023 if the keys and values don't support comparisons other than ==.
5024
Tim Peters95bf9392001-05-10 08:32:44 +00005025- Comparing dictionaries in ways other than == and != is slower: there were
5026 insecurities in the dict comparison implementation that could cause Python
5027 to crash if the element comparison routines for the dict keys and/or
5028 values mutated the dicts. Making the code bulletproof slowed it down.
5029
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005030- Collisions in dicts are resolved via a new approach, which can help
5031 dramatically in bad cases. For example, looking up every key in a dict
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005032 d with d.keys() == [i << 16 for i in range(20000)] is approximately 500x
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005033 faster now. Thanks to Christian Tismer for pointing out the cause and
5034 the nature of an effective cure (last December! better late than never).
Tim Peters15d49292001-05-27 07:39:22 +00005035
Tim Peters52e155e2001-06-16 05:42:57 +00005036- repr() is much faster for large containers (dict, list, tuple).
5037
5038
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005039Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005040-------
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005041
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00005042- The constants ascii_letters, ascii_lowercase. and ascii_uppercase
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005043 were added to the string module. These a locale-independent
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00005044 constants, unlike letters, lowercase, and uppercase. These are now
5045 use in appropriate locations in the standard library.
5046
Martin v. Löwisf0473d52001-07-18 16:17:16 +00005047- The flags used in dlopen calls can now be configured using
5048 sys.setdlopenflags and queried using sys.getdlopenflags.
5049
Guido van Rossumc7e4aca2001-07-12 11:54:37 +00005050- Fredrik Lundh's xmlrpclib is now a standard library module. This
5051 provides full client-side XML-RPC support. In addition,
5052 Demo/xmlrpc/ contains two server frameworks (one SocketServer-based,
5053 one asyncore-based). Thanks to Eric Raymond for the documentation.
5054
Guido van Rossum643d3912001-07-05 14:46:25 +00005055- The xrange() object is simplified: it no longer supports slicing,
5056 repetition, comparisons, efficient 'in' checking, the tolist()
5057 method, or the start, stop and step attributes. See PEP 260.
5058
Martin v. Löwisebf94db2001-06-06 06:25:40 +00005059- A new function fnmatch.filter to filter lists of file names was added.
5060
Barry Warsawffd674d2001-05-22 16:00:10 +00005061- calendar.py uses month and day names based on the current locale.
5062
Guido van Rossum2e0a6542001-05-15 02:14:44 +00005063- strop is now *really* obsolete (this was announced before with 1.6),
5064 and issues DeprecationWarning when used (except for the four items
5065 that are still imported into string.py).
5066
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005067- Cookie.py now sorts key+value pairs by key in output strings.
5068
5069- pprint.isrecursive(object) didn't correctly identify recursive objects.
5070 Now it does.
5071
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00005072- pprint functions now much faster for large containers (tuple, list, dict).
5073
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00005074- New 'q' and 'Q' format codes in the struct module, corresponding to C
5075 types "long long" and "unsigned long long" (on Windows, __int64). In
5076 native mode, these can be used only when the platform C compiler supports
5077 these types (when HAVE_LONG_LONG is #define'd by the Python config
5078 process), and then they inherit the sizes and alignments of the C types.
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005079 In standard mode, 'q' and 'Q' are supported on all platforms, and are
5080 8-byte integral types.
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00005081
Guido van Rossum83213cc2001-06-12 16:48:52 +00005082- The site module installs a new built-in function 'help' that invokes
5083 pydoc.help. It must be invoked as 'help()'; when invoked as 'help',
5084 it displays a message reminding the user to use 'help()' or
5085 'help(object)'.
5086
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005087Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005088-----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005089
5090- New test_mutants.py runs dict comparisons where the key and value
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005091 comparison operators mutate the dicts randomly during comparison. This
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005092 rapidly causes Python to crash under earlier releases (not for the faint
5093 of heart: it can also cause Win9x to freeze or reboot!).
5094
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005095- New test_pprint.py verifies that pprint.isrecursive() and
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00005096 pprint.isreadable() return sensible results. Also verifies that simple
5097 cases produce correct output.
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005098
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00005099C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005100-----
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00005101
5102- Removed the unused last_is_sticky argument from the internal
5103 _PyTuple_Resize(). If this affects you, you were cheating.
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005104
5105----
5106
5107**(For information about older versions, consult the HISTORY file.)**