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Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001+++++++++++
2Python News
3+++++++++++
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Skip Montanaro4a385832002-09-20 17:08:52 +00005(editors: check NEWS.help for information about editing NEWS using ReST.)
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Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00007What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 1?
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00008=================================
9
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +000010*XXX Release date: DD-MMM-2002 XXX*
11
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +000012Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +000013--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +000014
Just van Rossum3eb166b2002-11-29 20:47:40 +000015- Exposed the PyImport_FrozenModules variable in import.c through
16 imp.get_frozenmodules() and imp.set_frozenmodules(). This is
17 useful for freezing tools written in Python that use Python for
Just van Rossum6a8c5182002-12-01 21:43:13 +000018 bootstrapping the frozen application. (XXX: this feature will be
19 backed out if the zipfile import mechanism gets in before 2.3.a1.)
Just van Rossum3eb166b2002-11-29 20:47:40 +000020
Michael W. Hudson96bc3b42002-11-26 14:48:23 +000021- One can now assign to __bases__ and __name__ of new-style classes.
22
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +000023- dict() now accepts keyword arguments so that dict(one=1, two=2)
24 is the equivalent of {"one": 1, "two": 2}. Accordingly,
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +000025 the existing (but undocumented) 'items' keyword argument has
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +000026 been eliminated. This means that dict(items=someMapping) now has
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +000027 a different meaning than before.
28
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +000029- int() now returns a long object if the argument is outside the
30 integer range, so int("4"*1000), int(1e200) and int(1L<<1000) will
31 all return long objects instead of raising an OverflowError.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +000032
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +000033- Assignment to __class__ is disallowed if either the old or the new
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +000034 class is a statically allocated type object (such as defined by an
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +000035 extension module). This prevents anomalies like 2.__class__ = bool.
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +000036
37- New-style object creation and deallocation have been sped up
38 significantly; they are now faster than classic instance creation
39 and deallocation.
40
41- The __slots__ variable can now mention "private" names, and the
42 right thing will happen (e.g. __slots__ = ["__foo"]).
43
44- The built-ins slice() and buffer() are now callable types. The
45 types classobj (formerly class), code, function, instance, and
46 instancemethod (formerly instance-method), which have no built-in
47 names but are accessible through the types module, are now also
48 callable. The type dict-proxy is renamed to dictproxy.
49
50- Cycles going through the __class__ link of a new-style instance are
51 now detected by the garbage collector.
52
53- Classes using __slots__ are now properly garbage collected.
54 [SF bug 519621]
55
56- Tightened the __slots__ rules: a slot name must be a valid Python
57 identifier.
58
59- The constructor for the module type now requires a name argument and
60 takes an optional docstring argument. Previously, this constructor
61 ignored its arguments. As a consequence, deriving a class from a
62 module (not from the module type) is now illegal; previously this
63 created an unnamed module, just like invoking the module type did.
64 [SF bug 563060]
65
66- A new type object, 'basestring', is added. This is a common base type
67 for 'str' and 'unicode', and can be used instead of
68 types.StringTypes, e.g. to test whether something is "a string":
69 isinstance(x, basestring) is True for Unicode and 8-bit strings. This
70 is an abstract base class and cannot be instantiated directly.
71
72- Changed new-style class instantiation so that when C's __new__
73 method returns something that's not a C instance, its __init__ is
74 not called. [SF bug #537450]
75
76- Fixed super() to work correctly with class methods. [SF bug #535444]
77
78- If you try to pickle an instance of a class that has __slots__ but
79 doesn't define or override __getstate__, a TypeError is now raised.
80 This is done by adding a bozo __getstate__ to the class that always
81 raises TypeError. (Before, this would appear to be pickled, but the
82 state of the slots would be lost.)
83
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +000084Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +000085-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +000086
Marc-André Lemburg20b91352002-12-12 18:01:43 +000087- The _codecs support module for codecs.py was turned into a builtin
88 module to assure that at least the builtin codecs are available
89 to the Python parser for source code decoding according to PEP 263.
90
Walter Dörwaldd9a6ad32002-12-12 16:41:44 +000091- issubclass now supports a tuple as the second argument, just like
92 isinstance does. ``issubclass(X, (A, B))`` is equivalent to
93 ``issubclass(X, A) or issubclass(X, B)``.
94
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +000095- Thanks to Armin Rigo, the last known way to provoke a system crash
96 by cleverly arranging for a comparison function to mutate a list
97 during a list.sort() operation has been fixed. The effect of
98 attempting to mutate a list, or even to inspect its contents or
99 length, while a sort is in progress, is not defined by the language.
100 The C implementation of Python 2.3 attempts to detect mutations,
101 and raise ValueError if one occurs, but there's no guarantee that
102 all mutations will be caught, or that any will be caught across
103 releases or implementations.
104
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +0000105- Unicode file name processing for Windows (PEP 277) is implemented.
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +0000106 All platforms now have an os.path.supports_unicode_filenames attribute,
107 which is set to True on Windows NT/2000/XP, and False elsewhere.
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +0000108
Walter Dörwald3aeb6322002-09-02 13:14:32 +0000109- Codec error handling callbacks (PEP 293) are implemented.
110 Error handling in unicode.encode or str.decode can now be customized.
111
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +0000112- A subtle change to the semantics of the built-in function intern():
113 interned strings are no longer immortal. You must keep a reference
114 to the return value intern() around to get the benefit.
115
Guido van Rossumf808b892002-08-16 03:38:10 +0000116- Use of 'None' as a variable, argument or attribute name now
117 issues a SyntaxWarning. In the future, None may become a keyword.
118
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +0000119- SET_LINENO is gone. co_lnotab is now consulted to determine when to
120 call the trace function. C code that accessed f_lineno should call
121 PyCode_Addr2Line instead (f_lineno is still there, but not kept up
122 to date).
123
Guido van Rossum9be89462002-08-14 16:11:30 +0000124- There's a new warning category, FutureWarning. This is used to warn
125 about a number of situations where the value or sign of an integer
126 result will change in Python 2.4 as a result of PEP 237 (integer
127 unification). The warnings implement stage B0 mentioned in that
128 PEP. The warnings are about the following situations:
129
130 - Octal and hex literals without 'L' prefix in the inclusive range
131 [0x80000000..0xffffffff]; these are currently negative ints, but
132 in Python 2.4 they will be positive longs with the same bit
133 pattern.
134
135 - Left shifts on integer values that cause the outcome to lose
136 bits or have a different sign than the left operand. To be
137 precise: x<<n where this currently doesn't yield the same value
138 as long(x)<<n; in Python 2.4, the outcome will be long(x)<<n.
139
140 - Conversions from ints to string that show negative values as
141 unsigned ints in the inclusive range [0x80000000..0xffffffff];
142 this affects the functions hex() and oct(), and the string
143 formatting codes %u, %o, %x, and %X. In Python 2.4, these will
144 show signed values (e.g. hex(-1) currently returns "0xffffffff";
145 in Python 2.4 it will return "-0x1").
146
Skip Montanaro979c74b2002-09-03 21:25:14 +0000147 - The bits manipulated under the cover by sys.setcheckinterval() have
148 been changed. Both the check interval and the ticker used to be
149 per-thread values. They are now just a pair of global variables. In
150 addition, the default check interval was boosted from 10 to 100
Neal Norwitz7165af22002-09-05 21:42:24 +0000151 bytecode instructions. This may have some effect on systems that
152 relied on the old default value. In particular, in multi-threaded
153 applications which try to be highly responsive, response time will
154 increase by some (perhaps imperceptible) amount.
Skip Montanaro979c74b2002-09-03 21:25:14 +0000155
Tim Petersd64c1de2002-08-12 17:36:03 +0000156- When multiplying very large integers, a version of the so-called
157 Karatsuba algorithm is now used. This is most effective if the
158 inputs have roughly the same size. If they both have about N digits,
159 Karatsuba multiplication has O(N**1.58) runtime (the exponent is
160 log_base_2(3)) instead of the previous O(N**2). Measured results may
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +0000161 be better or worse than that, depending on platform quirks. Besides
162 the O() improvement in raw instruction count, the Karatsuba algorithm
163 appears to have much better cache behavior on extremely large integers
164 (starting in the ballpark of a million bits). Note that this is a
165 simple implementation, and there's no intent here to compete with,
166 e.g., GMP. It gives a very nice speedup when it applies, but a package
167 devoted to fast large-integer arithmetic should run circles around it.
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +0000168
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +0000169- u'%c' will now raise a ValueError in case the argument is an
170 integer outside the valid range of Unicode code point ordinals.
171
Guido van Rossumdeb09362002-08-09 17:16:30 +0000172- The tempfile module has been overhauled for enhanced security. The
173 mktemp() function is now deprecated; new, safe replacements are
174 mkstemp() (for files) and mkdtemp() (for directories), and the
175 higher-level functions NamedTemporaryFile() and TemporaryFile().
176 Use of some global variables in this module is also deprecated; the
177 new functions have keyword arguments to provide the same
178 functionality. All Lib, Tools and Demo modules that used the unsafe
179 interfaces have been updated to use the safe replacements. Thanks
180 to Zack Weinberg!
181
Guido van Rossumd81a9832002-08-09 15:57:34 +0000182- When x is an object whose class implements __mul__ and __rmul__,
183 1.0*x would correctly invoke __rmul__, but 1*x would erroneously
184 invoke __mul__. This was due to the sequence-repeat code in the int
185 type. This has been fixed now.
186
Barry Warsawd79f6832002-08-06 17:01:51 +0000187- Previously, "str1 in str2" required str1 to be a string of length 1.
188 This restriction has been relaxed to allow str1 to be a string of
189 any length. Thus "'el' in 'hello world'" returns True now.
190
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +0000191- File objects are now their own iterators. For a file f, iter(f) now
192 returns f (unless f is closed), and f.next() is similar to
193 f.readline() when EOF is not reached; however, f.next() uses a
194 readahead buffer that messes up the file position, so mixing
195 f.next() and f.readline() (or other methods) doesn't work right.
196 Calling f.seek() drops the readahead buffer, but other operations
197 don't. It so happens that this gives a nice additional speed boost
198 to "for line in file:"; the xreadlines method and corresponding
Guido van Rossumbffb2ef2002-08-09 17:17:07 +0000199 module are now obsolete. Thanks to Oren Tirosh!
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +0000200
Guido van Rossumde392d32002-08-05 14:17:20 +0000201- Encoding declarations (PEP 263, phase 1) have been implemented. A
202 comment of the form "# -*- coding: <encodingname> -*-" in the first
203 or second line of a Python source file indicates the encoding.
Martin v. Löwis00f1e3f2002-08-04 17:29:52 +0000204
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +0000205- list.sort() has a new implementation. While cross-platform results
206 may vary, and in data-dependent ways, this is much faster on many
207 kinds of partially ordered lists than the previous implementation,
208 and reported to be just as fast on randomly ordered lists on
209 several major platforms. This sort is also stable (if A==B and A
210 precedes B in the list at the start, A precedes B after the sort too),
211 although the language definition does not guarantee stability. A
212 potential drawback is that list.sort() may require temp space of
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +0000213 len(list)*2 bytes (``*4`` on a 64-bit machine). It's therefore possible
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +0000214 for list.sort() to raise MemoryError now, even if a comparison function
215 does not. See <http://www.python.org/sf/587076> for full details.
216
Guido van Rossum2d5389c2002-07-23 03:44:35 +0000217- All standard iterators now ensure that, once StopIteration has been
218 raised, all future calls to next() on the same iterator will also
219 raise StopIteration. There used to be various counterexamples to
220 this behavior, which could caused confusion or subtle program
221 breakage, without any benefits. (Note that this is still an
222 iterator's responsibility; the iterator framework does not enforce
223 this.)
224
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +0000225- Ctrl+C handling on Windows has been made more consistent with
226 other platforms. KeyboardInterrupt can now reliably be caught,
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +0000227 and Ctrl+C at an interactive prompt no longer terminates the
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +0000228 process under NT/2k/XP (it never did under Win9x). Ctrl+C will
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +0000229 interrupt time.sleep() in the main thread, and any child processes
230 created via the popen family (on win2k; we can't make win9x work
Mark Hammond8f3afc72002-08-10 06:26:31 +0000231 reliably) are also interrupted (as generally happens on for Linux/Unix.)
232 [SF bugs 231273, 439992 and 581232]
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +0000233
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +0000234- sys.getwindowsversion() has been added on Windows. This
235 returns a tuple with information about the version of Windows
236 currently running.
237
Raymond Hettinger5a04aec2002-06-25 00:25:30 +0000238- Slices and repetitions of buffer objects now consistently return
239 a string. Formerly, strings would be returned most of the time,
240 but a buffer object would be returned when the repetition count
241 was one or when the slice range was all inclusive.
242
Walter Dörwald3430d702002-06-17 10:43:59 +0000243- Unicode objects in sys.path are no longer ignored but treated
244 as directory names.
245
Neal Norwitz1f68fc72002-06-14 00:50:42 +0000246- Fixed string.startswith and string.endswith builtin methods
247 so they accept negative indices. [SF bug 493951]
248
Guido van Rossumc5fe5eb2002-06-12 03:45:21 +0000249- Fixed a bug with a continue inside a try block and a yield in the
250 finally clause. [SF bug 567538]
251
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +0000252- Most builtin sequences now support "extended slices", i.e. slices
Guido van Rossum2e82e712002-06-13 11:41:07 +0000253 with a third "stride" parameter. For example, "hello world"[::-1]
254 gives "dlrow olleh".
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +0000255
Neal Norwitzd68f5172002-05-29 15:54:55 +0000256- A new warning PendingDeprecationWarning was added to provide
257 direction on features which are in the process of being deprecated.
258 The warning will not be printed by default. To see the pending
259 deprecations, use -Walways::PendingDeprecationWarning::
260 as a command line option or warnings.filterwarnings() in code.
261
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +0000262- Deprecated features of xrange objects have been removed as
263 promised. The start, stop, and step attributes and the tolist()
264 method no longer exist. xrange repetition and slicing have been
265 removed.
266
Guido van Rossum7dab2422002-04-26 19:40:56 +0000267- New builtin function enumerate(x), from PEP 279. Example:
268 enumerate("abc") is an iterator returning (0,"a"), (1,"b"), (2,"c").
269 The argument can be an arbitrary iterable object.
270
Neil Schemenauer89e3ee02002-04-26 01:58:53 +0000271- The assert statement no longer tests __debug__ at runtime. This means
272 that assert statements cannot be disabled by assigning a false value
273 to __debug__.
274
Walter Dörwald068325e2002-04-15 13:36:47 +0000275- A method zfill() was added to str and unicode, that fills a numeric
276 string to the left with zeros. For example,
277 "+123".zfill(6) -> "+00123".
278
Guido van Rossum862fe3c2002-04-15 12:36:47 +0000279- Complex numbers supported divmod() and the // and % operators, but
280 these make no sense. Since this was documented, they're being
281 deprecated now.
282
Guido van Rossum26dd8302002-04-26 20:11:29 +0000283- String and unicode methods lstrip(), rstrip() and strip() now take
284 an optional argument that specifies the characters to strip. For
285 example, "Foo!!!?!?!?".rstrip("?!") -> "Foo".
Guido van Rossum49042042002-04-13 00:59:05 +0000286
Guido van Rossumc0d3f4e2002-11-27 13:10:40 +0000287- There's a new dictionary constructor (a class method of the dict
288 class), dict.fromkeys(iterable, value=None). It constructs a
289 dictionary with keys taken from the iterable and all values set to a
290 single value. It can be used for building sets and for removing
291 duplicates from sequences.
Raymond Hettingere33d3df2002-11-27 07:29:33 +0000292
Guido van Rossumc69343b2002-04-12 19:22:48 +0000293- Added a new dict method pop(key). This removes and returns the
294 value corresponding to key. [SF patch #539949]
295
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +0000296- A new built-in type, bool, has been added, as well as built-in
297 names for its two values, True and False. Comparisons and sundry
298 other operations that return a truth value have been changed to
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +0000299 return a bool instead. Read PEP 285 for an explanation of why this
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +0000300 is backward compatible.
301
Guido van Rossum95b62a62002-03-29 01:07:24 +0000302- Fixed two bugs reported as SF #535905: under certain conditions,
303 deallocating a deeply nested structure could cause a segfault in the
304 garbage collector, due to interaction with the "trashcan" code;
305 access to the current frame during destruction of a local variable
306 could access a pointer to freed memory.
307
Guido van Rossumfe0ca4a2002-06-18 21:20:13 +0000308- The optional object allocator ("pymalloc") has been enabled by
309 default. The recommended practice for memory allocation and
310 deallocation has been streamlined. A header file is included,
311 Misc/pymemcompat.h, which can be bundled with 3rd party extensions
312 and lets them use the same API with Python versions from 1.5.2
313 onwards.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +0000314
Martin v. Löwiscfeb3b62002-03-03 21:30:27 +0000315- PyErr_Display will provide file and line information for all exceptions
316 that have an attribute print_file_and_line, not just SyntaxErrors.
317
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +0000318- The UTF-8 codec will now encode and decode Unicode surrogates
319 correctly and without raising exceptions for unpaired ones.
320
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +0000321- Universal newlines (PEP 278) is implemented. Briefly, using 'U'
322 instead of 'r' when opening a text file for reading changes the line
323 ending convention so that any of '\r', '\r\n', and '\n' is
324 recognized (even mixed in one file); all three are converted to
325 '\n', the standard Python line end character.
326
Neal Norwitz649b7592002-01-01 19:07:13 +0000327- file.xreadlines() now raises a ValueError if the file is closed:
328 Previously, an xreadlines object was returned which would raise
329 a ValueError when the xreadlines.next() method was called.
330
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +0000331- sys.exit() inadvertently allowed more than one argument.
Neal Norwitz0c766a02002-03-27 13:03:09 +0000332 An exception will now be raised if more than one argument is used.
333
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000334Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000335-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000336
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +0000337- _tkinter now returns Tcl objects, instead of strings. Objects which
338 have Python equivalents are converted to Python objects, other objects
339 are wrapped. This can be configured through the wantobjects method,
Martin v. Löwis8c8aa5d2002-11-26 21:39:48 +0000340 or Tkinter.wantobjects.
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +0000341
Andrew M. Kuchling50905d02002-11-26 12:31:09 +0000342- The PyBSDDB wrapper around the Sleepycat Berkeley DB library has been
Martin v. Löwisef546b32002-11-19 08:12:57 +0000343 added as the package bsddb. The traditional bsddb module is still
344 available in source code, but not built automatically anymore, and
345 is now named bsddb185.
346
Martin v. Löwis677bde22002-11-23 22:08:15 +0000347- unicodedata was updated to Unicode 3.2. It supports normalization
348 and names for Hangul syllables and CJK unified ideographs.
Martin v. Löwis7d41e292002-11-23 12:22:32 +0000349
Neal Norwitz94a83fd2002-11-02 17:46:24 +0000350- resource.getrlimit() now returns longs instead of ints.
351
Martin v. Löwis080689c2002-10-26 14:42:02 +0000352- readline now dynamically adjusts its input/output stream if
353 sys.stdin/stdout changes.
354
Guido van Rossumba602972002-10-01 18:18:58 +0000355- The _tkinter module (and hence Tkinter) has dropped support for
356 Tcl/Tk 8.0 and 8.1. Only Tcl/Tk versions 8.2, 8.3 and 8.4 are
357 supported.
358
Martin v. Löwis658009a2002-09-16 17:26:24 +0000359- cPickle.BadPickleGet is now a class.
360
Martin v. Löwisa19bfe02002-10-16 18:28:36 +0000361- The time stamps in os.stat_result are floating point numbers
362 after stat_float_times has been called.
Martin v. Löwis94717ed2002-09-09 14:24:16 +0000363
Neal Norwitzb5673922002-09-05 21:48:07 +0000364- If the size passed to mmap.mmap() is larger than the length of the
365 file on non-Windows platforms, a ValueError is raised. [SF bug 585792]
366
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +0000367- The xreadlines module is slated for obsolescence.
368
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +0000369- The strptime function in the time module is now always available (a
370 Python implementation is used when the C library doesn't define it).
371
Guido van Rossum9562bcf2002-06-14 21:31:18 +0000372- The 'new' module is no longer an extension, but a Python module that
373 only exists for backwards compatibility. Its contents are no longer
374 functions but callable type objects.
375
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +0000376- The bsddb.*open functions can now take 'None' as a filename.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +0000377 This will create a temporary in-memory bsddb that won't be
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +0000378 written to disk.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +0000379
Martin v. Löwis0cec0ff2002-07-28 16:33:45 +0000380- posix.lchown, posix.killpg, posix.mknod, and posix.getpgid have been
381 added where available.
Martin v. Löwis06a83e92002-04-14 10:19:44 +0000382
Martin v. Löwisf0a46682002-11-03 17:20:12 +0000383- The locale module now exposes the C library's gettext interface. It
384 also has a new function getpreferredencoding.
Martin v. Löwis2e64c342002-03-27 18:49:02 +0000385
Tim Petersfbf74f22002-03-14 19:06:01 +0000386- A security hole ("double free") was found in zlib-1.1.3, a popular
387 third party compression library used by some Python modules. The
388 hole was quickly plugged in zlib-1.1.4, and the Windows build of
389 Python now ships with zlib-1.1.4.
390
Martin v. Löwis688357e2002-04-08 21:28:20 +0000391- pwd, grp, and resource return enhanced tuples now, with symbolic
392 field names.
Martin v. Löwis29001ff2002-03-01 10:47:37 +0000393
Martin v. Löwis99866332002-03-01 10:27:01 +0000394- array.array is now a type object. A new format character
395 'u' indicates Py_UNICODE arrays. For those, .tounicode and
396 .fromunicode methods are available. Arrays now support __iadd__
397 and __imul__.
398
Neal Norwitze790eae2002-01-01 21:14:12 +0000399- dl now builds on every system that has dlfcn.h. Failure in case
Martin v. Löwis93227272002-01-01 20:18:30 +0000400 of sizeof(int)!=sizeof(long)!=sizeof(void*) is delayed until dl.open
401 is called.
402
Michael W. Hudson34f20ea2002-05-27 15:08:24 +0000403- signal.sigpending, signal.sigprocmask and signal.sigsuspend have
404 been added where available.
405
Skip Montanaro8e790e72002-09-03 13:25:17 +0000406- The sys module acquired a new attribute, api_version, which evaluates
407 to the value of the PYTHON_API_VERSION macro with which the
408 interpreter was compiled.
409
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +0000410- Fixed bug #470582: sre module would return a tuple (None, 'a', 'ab')
411 when applying the regular expression '^((a)c)?(ab)$' on 'ab'. It now
412 returns (None, None, 'ab'), as expected. Also fixed handling of
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +0000413 lastindex/lastgroup match attributes in similar cases. For example,
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +0000414 when running the expression r'(a)(b)?b' over 'ab', lastindex must be
415 1, not 2.
416
Gustavo Niemeyerc523b042002-11-07 03:28:56 +0000417- Fixed bug #581080: sre scanner was not checking the buffer limit
418 before increasing the current pointer. This was creating an infinite
419 loop in the search function, once the pointer exceeded the buffer
420 limit.
421
Thomas Heller95cb7e42002-11-07 16:23:55 +0000422- The os.fdopen function now enforces a file mode starting with the
423 letter 'r', 'w' or 'a', otherwise a ValueError is raised. This fixes
424 bug #623464.
425
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000426Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000427-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000428
Martin v. Löwis4581cfa2002-11-22 08:23:09 +0000429- doctest.testmod can now be called without argument, which means to
430 test the current module.
431
Martin v. Löwisf86e8ef2002-11-22 08:08:44 +0000432- When cancelling a server that implemented threading with a keyboard
433 interrupt, the server would shut down but not terminate (waiting on
434 client threads). A new member variable, daemon_threads, was added to
435 the ThreadingMixIn class in SocketServer.py to make it explicit that
436 this behavior needs to be controlled.
437
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +0000438- A new module, optparse, provides a fancy alternative to getopt for
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +0000439 command line parsing. It is a slightly modified version of Greg
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +0000440 Ward's Optik package.
441
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +0000442- UserDict.py now defines a DictMixin class which defines all dictionary
443 methods for classes that already have a minimum mapping interface.
444 This greatly simplifies writing classes that need to be substitutable
445 for dictionaries (such as the shelve module).
446
447- shelve.py now subclasses from UserDict.DictMixin. Now shelve supports
448 all dictionary methods. This eases the transition to persistent
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +0000449 storage for scripts originally written with dictionaries in mind.
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +0000450
Skip Montanaro3bf99e32002-12-08 18:36:24 +0000451- shelve.open and the various classes in shelve.py now accept an optional
452 binary flag, which defaults to False. If True, the values stored in the
453 shelf are binary pickles.
454
Guido van Rossumfda06742002-11-13 16:29:18 +0000455- A new package, logging, implements the logging API defined by PEP
456 282. The code is written by Vinay Sajip.
457
Walter Dörwald4dbf1922002-11-06 16:53:44 +0000458- StreamReader, StreamReaderWriter and StreamRecoder in the codecs
459 modules are iterators now.
460
Tim Peters9288f952002-11-05 20:38:55 +0000461- gzip.py now handles files exceeding 2GB. Files over 4GB also work
462 now (provided the OS supports it, and Python is configured with large
463 file support), but in that case the underlying gzip file format can
464 record only the least-significant 32 bits of the file size, so that
465 some tools working with gzipped files may report an incorrect file
466 size.
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +0000467
Martin v. Löwis74b51ac2002-10-26 14:50:45 +0000468- xml.sax.saxutils.unescape has been added, to replace entity references
469 with their entity value.
470
Martin v. Löwis77ac4292002-10-15 15:11:13 +0000471- Queue.Queue.{put,get} now support an optional timeout argument.
472
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +0000473- Various features of Tk 8.4 are exposed in Tkinter.py. The multiple
474 option of tkFileDialog is exposed as function askopenfile{,name}s.
Martin v. Löwis2ec36272002-10-13 10:22:08 +0000475
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +0000476- Various configure methods of Tkinter have been stream-lined, so that
477 tag_configure, image_configure, window_configure now return a
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +0000478 dictionary when invoked with no argument.
Martin v. Löwis6ce13152002-10-10 14:36:13 +0000479
Guido van Rossum2b492b62002-10-09 21:40:48 +0000480- Importing the readline module now no longer has the side effect of
481 calling setlocale(LC_CTYPE, ""). The initial "C" locale, or
482 whatever locale is explicitly set by the user, is preserved. If you
483 want repr() of 8-bit strings in your preferred encoding to preserve
484 all printable characters of that encoding, you have to add the
485 following code to your $PYTHONSTARTUP file or to your application's
486 main():
487
488 import locale
489 locale.setlocale(locale.LC_CTYPE, "")
490
Martin v. Löwise9ce0b02002-10-07 13:23:24 +0000491- shutil.move was added. shutil.copytree now reports errors as an
492 exception at the end, instead of printing error messages.
493
Marc-André Lemburg97047e22002-10-04 11:55:21 +0000494- Encoding name normalization was generalized to not only
495 replace hyphens with underscores, but also all other non-alphanumeric
496 characters (with the exception of the dot which is used for Python
497 package names during lookup). The aliases.py mapping was updated
498 to the new standard.
499
Walter Dörwald5ccaf8f2002-09-06 16:15:58 +0000500- mimetypes has two new functions: guess_all_extensions() which
501 returns a list of all known extensions for a mime type, and
502 add_type() which adds one mapping between a mime type and
503 an extension to the database.
504
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +0000505- New module: sets, defines the class Set that implements a mutable
506 set type using the keys of a dict to represent the set. There's
507 also a class ImmutableSet which is useful when you need sets of sets
508 or when you need to use sets as dict keys, and a class BaseSet which
Raymond Hettingeref8b9c62002-12-09 08:56:06 +0000509 is the base class of the two.
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +0000510
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +0000511- Added operator.pow(a,b) which is equivalent to a**b.
512
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +0000513- Added random.sample(population,k) for random sampling without replacement.
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +0000514 Returns a k length list of unique elements chosen from the population.
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +0000515
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +0000516- random.randrange(-sys.maxint-1, sys.maxint) no longer raises
517 OverflowError. That is, it now accepts any combination of 'start'
518 and 'stop' arguments so long as each is in the range of Python's
519 bounded integers.
520
Guido van Rossum4a57c332002-08-02 18:05:20 +0000521- New "algorithms" module: heapq, implements a heap queue. Thanks to
522 Kevin O'Connor for the code and François Pinard for an entertaining
523 write-up explaining the theory and practical uses of heaps.
524
Marc-André Lemburg58e2ff22002-07-12 14:40:04 +0000525- New encoding for the Palm OS character set: palmos.
526
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +0000527- binascii.crc32() and the zipfile module had problems on some 64-bit
528 platforms. These have been fixed. On a platform with 8-byte C longs,
529 crc32() now returns a signed-extended 4-byte result, so that its value
530 as a Python int is equal to the value computed a 32-bit platform.
531
Martin v. Löwis7d650ca2002-06-30 15:05:00 +0000532- xml.dom.minidom.toxml and toprettyxml now take an optional encoding
533 argument.
534
Guido van Rossum9f7549b2002-06-10 21:39:42 +0000535- Some fixes in the copy module: when an object is copied through its
536 __reduce__ method, there was no check for a __setstate__ method on
537 the result [SF patch 565085]; deepcopy should treat instances of
538 custom metaclasses the same way it treats instances of type 'type'
539 [SF patch 560794].
540
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +0000541- Sockets now support timeout mode. After s.settimeout(T), where T is
542 a float expressing seconds, subsequent operations raise an exception
543 if they cannot be completed within T seconds. To disable timeout
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +0000544 mode, use s.settimeout(None). There's also a module function,
545 socket.setdefaulttimeout(T), which sets the default for all sockets
546 created henceforth.
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +0000547
548- getopt.gnu_getopt was added. This supports GNU-style option
549 processing, where options can be mixed with non-option arguments.
Martin v. Löwis446a25f2002-06-06 10:58:36 +0000550
Michael W. Hudsonb0dc1a32002-06-04 18:27:35 +0000551- Stop using strings for exceptions. String objects used for
552 exceptions are now classes deriving from Exception. The objects
553 changed were: Tkinter.TclError, bdb.BdbQuit, macpath.norm_error,
554 tabnanny.NannyNag, and xdrlib.Error.
Neal Norwitzb5b5a262002-06-04 17:14:07 +0000555
Walter Dörwald474458d2002-06-04 15:16:29 +0000556- Constants BOM_UTF8, BOM_UTF16, BOM_UTF16_LE, BOM_UTF16_BE,
557 BOM_UTF32, BOM_UTF32_LE and BOM_UTF32_BE that represent the Byte
558 Order Mark in UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 encodings for little and
559 big endian systems were added to the codecs module. The old names
560 BOM32_* and BOM64_* were off by a factor of 2.
561
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +0000562- Added conversion functions math.degrees() and math.radians().
Raymond Hettinger87f59ee2002-05-13 04:17:32 +0000563
Raymond Hettinger9b1df1d2002-05-12 06:07:21 +0000564- ftplib.retrlines() now tests for callback is None rather than testing
565 for False. Was causing an error when given a callback object which
566 was callable but also returned len() as zero. The change may
567 create new breakage if the caller relied on the undocumented behavior
568 and called with callback set to [] or some other False value not
569 identical to None.
570
Tim Peters46c04e12002-05-05 20:40:00 +0000571- random.gauss() uses a piece of hidden state used by nothing else,
572 and the .seed() and .whseed() methods failed to reset it. In other
573 words, setting the seed didn't completely determine the sequence of
574 results produced by random.gauss(). It does now. Programs repeatedly
575 mixing calls to a seed method with calls to gauss() may see different
576 results now.
577
Fred Drake7f781c92002-05-01 20:33:53 +0000578- The pickle.Pickler class grew a clear_memo() method to mimic that
579 provided by cPickle.Pickler.
580
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +0000581- difflib's SequenceMatcher class now does a dynamic analysis of
582 which elements are so frequent as to constitute noise. For
583 comparing files as sequences of lines, this generally works better
584 than the IS_LINE_JUNK function, and function ndiff's linejunk
585 argument defaults to None now as a result. A happy benefit is
586 that SequenceMatcher may run much faster now when applied
587 to large files with many duplicate lines (for example, C program
588 text with lots of repeated "}" and "return NULL;" lines).
589
Guido van Rossum256705b2002-04-23 13:29:43 +0000590- New Text.dump() method in Tkinter module.
591
Marc-André Lemburg1ec71ea2002-04-17 20:33:40 +0000592- New distutils commands for building packagers were added to
593 support pkgtool on Solaris and swinstall on HP-UX.
594
595- distutils now has a new abstract binary packager base class
596 command/bdist_packager, which simplifies writing packagers.
597 This will hopefully provide the missing bits to encourage
598 people to submit more packagers, e.g. for Debian, FreeBSD
599 and other systems.
600
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +0000601- The UTF-16, -LE and -BE stream readers now raise a
602 NotImplementedError for all calls to .readline(). Previously, they
603 used to just produce garbage or fail with an encoding error --
604 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 +0000605 work well with these.
606
Martin v. Löwis5c137c22002-03-18 12:44:08 +0000607- compileall now supports quiet operation.
608
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +0000609- The BaseHTTPServer now implements optional HTTP/1.1 persistent
Martin v. Löwis587c98c2002-03-17 18:37:22 +0000610 connections.
611
Marc-André Lemburga5d2b4c2002-02-16 18:23:30 +0000612- socket module: the SSL support was broken out of the main
613 _socket module C helper and placed into a new _ssl helper
614 which now gets imported by socket.py if available and working.
615
Marc-André Lemburg37aa5802002-02-10 21:42:47 +0000616- encodings package: added aliases for all supported IANA character
617 sets
618
Guido van Rossum606fe4e2001-12-28 20:57:14 +0000619- ftplib: to safeguard the user's privacy, anonymous login will use
620 "anonymous@" as default password, rather than the real user and host
621 name.
622
Fred Drake36736122002-01-10 13:50:31 +0000623- webbrowser: tightened up the command passed to os.system() so that
624 arbitrary shell code can't be executed because a bogus URL was
625 passed in.
626
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +0000627- gettext.translation has an optional fallback argument, and
Martin v. Löwisa55ffae2002-01-11 06:58:49 +0000628 gettext.find an optional all argument. Translations will now fallback
Martin v. Löwisd8996052002-11-21 21:45:32 +0000629 on a per-message basis. The module supports plural forms, by means
630 of gettext.[d]ngettext and Translation.[u]ngettext.
Martin v. Löwis1be64192002-01-11 06:33:28 +0000631
Martin v. Löwis9668b932002-01-12 11:27:42 +0000632- distutils bdist commands now offer a --skip-build option.
633
Walter Dörwaldb25c2b02002-03-21 10:38:40 +0000634- warnings.warn now accepts a Warning instance as first argument.
635
Fred Drakefed7e852002-04-04 19:36:15 +0000636- The xml.sax.expatreader.ExpatParser class will no longer create
637 circular references by using itself as the locator that gets passed
638 to the content handler implementation. [SF bug #535474]
639
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +0000640- The email.Parser.Parser class now properly parses strings regardless
641 of their line endings, which can be any of \r, \n, or \r\n (CR, LF,
642 or CRLF). Also, the Header class's constructor default arguments
643 has changed slightly so that an explicit maxlinelen value is always
644 honored.
645
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +0000646- distutils' build_ext command now links c++ extensions with the c++
647 compiler available in the Makefile or CXX environment variable, if
648 running under *nix.
649
650- New module bz2: provides a comprehensive interface for the bz2 compression
651 library. It implements a complete file interface, one-shot (de)compression
652 functions, and types for sequential (de)compression.
653
Barry Warsaw5d8d6182002-11-05 22:41:33 +0000654- New pdb command `pp' which is like `p' except that it pretty-prints
655 the value of its expression argument.
656
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +0000657- Now bdist_rpm distutils command understands a verify_script option in
658 the config file, including the contents of the referred filename in
659 the "%verifyscript" section of the rpm spec file.
660
Gustavo Niemeyer1456fde2002-11-25 17:25:04 +0000661- Fixed bug #495695: webbrowser module would run graphic browsers in a
662 unix environment even if DISPLAY was not set. Also, support for
663 skipstone browser was included.
664
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000665Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000666-----------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000667
Martin v. Löwis0d1fdea2002-11-22 08:36:54 +0000668- pygettext.py now supports globbing on Windows, and accepts module
669 names in addition to accepting file names.
670
Guido van Rossum923e4ef2002-09-17 20:58:59 +0000671- The SGI demos (Demo/sgi) have been removed. Nobody thought they
672 were interesting any more. (The SGI library modules and extensions
673 are still there; it is believed that at least some of these are
674 still used and useful.)
675
Fred Drake40813b12002-08-05 15:24:19 +0000676- IDLE supports the new encoding declarations (PEP 263); it can also
677 deal with legacy 8-bit files if they use the locale's encoding. It
678 allows non-ASCII strings in the interactive shell and executes them
679 in the locale's encoding.
Martin v. Löwis98ce7b72002-08-05 15:11:26 +0000680
Marc-André Lemburg46260092002-04-04 16:17:11 +0000681- freeze.py now produces binaries which can import shared modules,
682 unlike before when this failed due to missing symbol exports in
683 the generated binary.
684
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000685Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000686-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000687
Martin v. Löwisdc461752002-11-06 21:59:33 +0000688- On Unix, IDLE is now installed automatically.
689
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +0000690- The fpectl module is not built by default; it's dangerous or useless
691 except in the hands of experts.
692
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +0000693- The public Python C API will generally be declared using PyAPI_FUNC
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +0000694 and PyAPI_DATA macros, while Python extension module init functions
695 will be declared with PyMODINIT_FUNC. DL_EXPORT/DL_IMPORT macros
696 are deprecated.
Neal Norwitz1389f3e2002-07-22 13:21:10 +0000697
Tim Petersc6a3ff62002-07-08 22:11:52 +0000698- A bug was fixed that could cause COUNT_ALLOCS builds to segfault, or
699 get into infinite loops, when a new-style class got garbage-collected.
700 Unfortunately, to avoid this, the way COUNT_ALLOCS works requires
701 that new-style classes be immortal in COUNT_ALLOCS builds. Note that
702 COUNT_ALLOCS is not enabled by default, in either release or debug
703 builds, and that new-style classes are immortal only in COUNT_ALLOCS
704 builds.
705
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +0000706- Compiling out the cyclic garbage collector is no longer an option.
707 The old symbol WITH_CYCLE_GC is now ignored, and Python.h arranges
708 that it's always defined (for the benefit of any extension modules
709 that may be conditionalizing on it). A bonus is that any extension
710 type participating in cyclic gc can choose to participate in the
711 Py_TRASHCAN mechanism now too; in the absence of cyclic gc, this used
712 to require editing the core to teach the trashcan mechanism about the
713 new type.
714
Martin v. Löwis0cec0ff2002-07-28 16:33:45 +0000715- According to Annex F of the current C standard,
Tim Peters1de41bf2002-07-03 03:31:20 +0000716
717 The Standard C macro HUGE_VAL and its float and long double analogs,
718 HUGE_VALF and HUGE_VALL, expand to expressions whose values are
719 positive infinities.
720
721 Python only uses the double HUGE_VAL, and only to #define its own symbol
722 Py_HUGE_VAL. Some platforms have incorrect definitions for HUGE_VAL.
723 pyport.h used to try to worm around that, but the workarounds triggered
724 other bugs on other platforms, so we gave up. If your platform defines
725 HUGE_VAL incorrectly, you'll need to #define Py_HUGE_VAL to something
726 that works on your platform. The only instance of this I'm sure about
727 is on an unknown subset of Cray systems, described here:
728
729 http://www.cray.com/swpubs/manuals/SN-2194_2.0/html-SN-2194_2.0/x3138.htm
730
731 Presumably 2.3a1 breaks such systems. If anyone uses such a system, help!
732
Martin v. Löwisa3fb4f72002-06-09 13:33:54 +0000733- The configure option --without-doc-strings can be used to remove the
734 doc strings from the builtin functions and modules; this reduces the
735 size of the executable.
736
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +0000737- The universal newlines option (PEP 278) is on by default. On Unix
738 it can be disabled by passing --without-universal-newlines to the
739 configure script. On other platforms, remove
740 WITH_UNIVERSAL_NEWLINES from pyconfig.h.
Tim Peters639295f2002-04-21 07:30:30 +0000741
Martin v. Löwis1142de32002-03-29 16:28:31 +0000742- On Unix, a shared libpython2.3.so can be created with --enable-shared.
743
Tim Peters8deda702002-03-30 10:06:07 +0000744- All uses of the CACHE_HASH, INTERN_STRINGS, and DONT_SHARE_SHORT_STRINGS
745 preprocessor symbols were eliminated. The internal decisions they
746 controlled stopped being experimental long ago.
Tim Peters1f7df352002-03-29 03:29:08 +0000747
Fred Drake7d28b732002-05-02 21:17:00 +0000748- The tools used to build the documentation now work under Cygwin as
749 well as Unix.
750
Skip Montanaro57454e52002-06-14 20:30:31 +0000751- The bsddb and dbm module builds have been changed to try and avoid version
752 skew problems and disable linkage with Berkeley DB 1.85 unless the
753 installer knows what s/he's doing. See the section on building these
754 modules in the README file for details.
755
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000756C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000757-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000758
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +0000759- PyNumber_Check() now returns true for string and unicode objects.
760 This is a result of these types having a partially defined
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +0000761 tp_as_number slot. (This is not a feature, but an indication that
Walter Dörwalda1a61f92002-11-19 21:20:25 +0000762 PyNumber_Check() is not very useful to determine numeric behavior.
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +0000763 It may be deprecated.)
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +0000764
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +0000765- The string object's layout has changed: the pointer member
766 ob_sinterned has been replaced by an int member ob_sstate. On some
767 platforms (e.g. most 64-bit systems) this may change the offset of
768 the ob_sval member, so as a precaution the API_VERSION has been
769 incremented. The apparently unused feature of "indirect interned
770 strings", supported by the ob_sinterned member, is gone. Interned
771 strings are now usually mortal; theres a new API,
772 PyString_InternImmortal() that creates immortal interned strings.
773 (The ob_sstate member can only take three values; however, while
774 making it a char saves a few bytes per string object on average, in
775 it also slowed things down a bit because ob_sval was no longer
776 aligned.)
777
Guido van Rossumfdb86482002-08-14 21:20:32 +0000778- The Py_InitModule*() functions now accept NULL for the 'methods'
779 argument. Modules without global functions are becoming more common
780 now that factories can be types rather than functions.
781
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +0000782- New C API PyUnicode_FromOrdinal() which exposes unichr() at C
783 level.
784
Thomas Heller085358a2002-07-29 14:27:41 +0000785- New functions PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErr() and
786 PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErrWithFilename(). Similar to
787 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErrWithFilename() and
788 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErr(), but they allow to specify
789 the exception type to raise. Available on Windows.
790
Tim Peters7c321a82002-07-09 02:57:01 +0000791- Py_FatalError() is now declared as taking a const char* argument. It
792 was previously declared without const. This should not affect working
793 code.
794
Martin v. Löwis01f94bd2002-05-08 08:44:21 +0000795- Added new macro PySequence_ITEM(o, i) that directly calls
796 sq_item without rechecking that o is a sequence and without
797 adjusting for negative indices.
798
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +0000799- PyRange_New() now raises ValueError if the fourth argument is not 1.
800 This is part of the removal of deprecated features of the xrange
801 object.
802
Guido van Rossum517c7d42002-04-26 02:49:14 +0000803- PyNumber_Coerce() and PyNumber_CoerceEx() now also invoke the type's
804 coercion if both arguments have the same type but this type has the
805 CHECKTYPES flag set. This is to better support proxies.
806
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +0000807- The type of tp_free has been changed from "``void (*)(PyObject *)``" to
808 "``void (*)(void *)``".
Neil Schemenauer9344b142002-04-12 23:00:08 +0000809
810- PyObject_Del, PyObject_GC_Del are now functions instead of macros.
811
Guido van Rossum0986d822002-04-08 01:38:42 +0000812- A type can now inherit its metatype from its base type. Previously,
813 when PyType_Ready() was called, if ob_type was found to be NULL, it
814 was always set to &PyType_Type; now it is set to base->ob_type,
815 where base is tp_base, defaulting to &PyObject_Type.
816
817- PyType_Ready() accidentally did not inherit tp_is_gc; now it does.
818
Neil Schemenauerc9abc1d2002-05-08 14:14:41 +0000819- The PyCore_* family of APIs have been removed.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +0000820
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +0000821- The "u#" parser marker will now pass through Unicode objects as-is
Marc-André Lemburg3e3eacb2002-01-09 16:21:27 +0000822 without going through the buffer API.
823
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000824- The enumerators of cmp_op have been renamed to use the prefix ``PyCmp_``.
Martin v. Löwis7198a522002-01-01 19:59:11 +0000825
Tim Peters10a3bb52001-12-25 19:07:38 +0000826- An old #define of ANY as void has been removed from pyport.h. This
827 hasn't been used since Python's pre-ANSI days, and the #define has
828 been marked as obsolete since then. SF bug 495548 says it created
829 conflicts with other packages, so keeping it around wasn't harmless.
830
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000831- Because Python's magic number scheme broke on January 1st, we decided
832 to stop Python development. Thanks for all the fish!
833
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +0000834- Some of us don't like fish, so we changed Python's magic number
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +0000835 scheme to a new one. See Python/import.c for details.
836
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000837New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000838-------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000839
Martin v. Löwis79acb9e2002-12-06 12:48:53 +0000840- OpenVMS is now supported.
841
Martin v. Löwisf90ae202002-06-11 06:22:31 +0000842- AtheOS is now supported.
843
Andrew MacIntyre161ad0e2002-08-04 07:25:58 +0000844- the EMX runtime environment on OS/2 is now supported.
845
Martin v. Löwisa6e97582002-01-01 18:41:33 +0000846- GNU/Hurd is now supported.
847
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000848Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000849-----
850
Fred Drake4dd0f7e2002-11-26 21:44:56 +0000851- The regrtest.py script's -u option now provides a way to say "allow
852 all resources except this one." For example, to allow everything
853 except bsddb, give the option '-uall,-bsddb'.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000854
855Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000856-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000857
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +0000858- The Windows distribution now ships with version 4.0.14 of the
859 Sleepycat Berkeley database library. This should be a huge
860 improvement over the previous Berkeley DB 1.85, which had many
861 bugs.
862 XXX What are the licensing issues here?
Tim Peters84c7a3f2002-11-23 18:48:06 +0000863 XXX If a user has a database created with a previous verion of
864 XXX Python, what must they do to convert it?
865 XXX I'm still not sure how to link this thing (see PCbuild/readme.txt).
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +0000866 XXX The version # is likely to change before 2.3a1.
Mark Hammondc3de0082002-12-03 06:16:08 +0000867
868- The Windows distribution now ships with a Secure Sockets Library (SLL)
869 module (_ssl.pyd)
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +0000870
Tim Peters857fb4c2002-11-14 23:31:58 +0000871- The Windows distribution now ships with Tcl/Tk version 8.4.1 (it
872 previously shipped with Tcl/Tk 8.3.2).
873
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +0000874- When Python is built under a Microsoft compiler, sys.version now
875 includes the compiler version number (_MSC_VER). For example, under
876 MSVC 6, sys.version constains the substring "MSC v.1200 ". 1200 is
877 the value of _MSC_VER under MSVC 6.
878
Tim Peters08e72952002-04-16 20:48:01 +0000879- Sometimes the uninstall executable (UNWISE.EXE) vanishes. One cause
880 of that has been fixed in the installer (disabled Wise's "delete in-
881 use files" uninstall option).
882
Guido van Rossum181e41a2002-04-06 00:23:25 +0000883- Fixed a bug in urllib's proxy handling in Windows. [SF bug #503031]
884
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +0000885- The installer now installs Start menu shortcuts under (the local
886 equivalent of) "All Users" when doing an Admin install.
887
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +0000888- file.truncate([newsize]) now works on Windows for all newsize values.
889 It used to fail if newsize didn't fit in 32 bits, reflecting a
890 limitation of MS _chsize (which is no longer used).
891
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +0000892- os.waitpid() is now implemented for Windows, and can be used to block
893 until a specified process exits. This is similar to, but not exactly
894 the same as, os.waitpid() on POSIX systems. If you're waiting for
895 a specific process whose pid was obtained from one of the spawn()
896 functions, the same Python os.waitpid() code works across platforms.
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +0000897 See the docs for details. The docs were changed to clarify that
898 spawn functions return, and waitpid requires, a process handle on
899 Windows (not the same thing as a Windows process id).
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +0000900
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +0000901- New tempfile.TemporaryFile implementation for Windows: this doesn't
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +0000902 need a TemporaryFileWrapper wrapper anymore, and should be immune
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +0000903 to a nasty problem: before 2.3, if you got a temp file on Windows, it
904 got wrapped in an object whose close() method first closed the
905 underlying file, then deleted the file. This usually worked fine.
906 However, the spawn family of functions on Windows create (at a low C
907 level) the same set of open files in the spawned process Q as were
908 open in the spawning process P. If a temp file f was among them, then
909 doing f.close() in P first closed P's C-level file handle on f, but Q's
910 C-level file handle on f remained open, so the attempt in P to delete f
911 blew up with a "Permission denied" error (Windows doesn't allow
912 deleting open files). This was surprising, subtle, and difficult to
913 work around.
914
915- The os module now exports all the symbolic constants usable with the
916 low-level os.open() on Windows: the new constants in 2.3 are
917 O_NOINHERIT, O_SHORT_LIVED, O_TEMPORARY, O_RANDOM and O_SEQUENTIAL.
918 The others were also available in 2.2: O_APPEND, O_BINARY, O_CREAT,
919 O_EXCL, O_RDONLY, O_RDWR, O_TEXT, O_TRUNC and O_WRONLY. Contrary
920 to Microsoft docs, O_SHORT_LIVED does not seem to imply O_TEMPORARY
921 (so specify both if you want both; note that neither is useful unless
922 specified with O_CREAT too).
923
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000924Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000925----
926
927Yet to be written.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000928
929
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +0000930What's New in Python 2.2 final?
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +0000931===============================
932
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000933*Release date: 21-Dec-2001*
934
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +0000935Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000936--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +0000937
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +0000938- pickle.py, cPickle: allow pickling instances of new-style classes
939 with a custom metaclass.
940
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +0000941Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000942-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +0000943
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +0000944- weakref proxy object: when comparing, unwrap both arguments if both
945 are proxies.
946
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +0000947Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000948-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +0000949
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +0000950- binascii.b2a_base64(): fix a potential buffer overrun when encoding
951 very short strings.
952
953- cPickle: the obscure "fast" mode was suspected of causing stack
954 overflows on the Mac. Hopefully fixed this by setting the recursion
955 limit much smaller. If the limit is too low (it only affects
956 performance), you can change it by defining PY_CPICKLE_FAST_LIMIT
957 when compiling cPickle.c (or in pyconfig.h).
958
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +0000959Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000960-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +0000961
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +0000962- dumbdbm.py: fixed a dumb old bug (the file didn't get synched at
963 close or delete time).
964
965- rfc822.py: fixed a bug where the address '<>' was converted to None
966 instead of an empty string (also fixes the email.Utils module).
967
968- xmlrpclib.py: version 1.0.0; uses precision for doubles.
969
970- test suite: the pickle and cPickle tests were not executing any code
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +0000971 when run from the standard regression test.
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +0000972
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +0000973Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000974-----------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +0000975
976Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000977-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +0000978
979C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000980-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +0000981
982New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000983-------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +0000984
985Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000986-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +0000987
988Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000989-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +0000990
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +0000991- distutils package: fixed broken Windows installers (bdist_wininst).
992
993- tempfile.py: prevent mysterious warnings when TemporaryFileWrapper
994 instances are deleted at process exit time.
995
996- socket.py: prevent mysterious warnings when socket instances are
997 deleted at process exit time.
998
999- posixmodule.c: fix a Windows crash with stat() of a filename ending
1000 in backslash.
1001
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001002Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001003----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001004
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00001005- The Carbon toolbox modules have been upgraded to Universal Headers
1006 3.4, and experimental CoreGraphics and CarbonEvents modules have
1007 been added. All only for framework-enabled MacOSX.
1008
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001009
Tim Peters6272dfd2001-12-13 19:34:00 +00001010What's New in Python 2.2c1?
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001011===========================
1012
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001013*Release date: 14-Dec-2001*
1014
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001015Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001016--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001017
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00001018- Guido's tutorial introduction to the new type/class features has
1019 been extensively updated. See
1020
1021 http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html
1022
1023 That remains the primary documentation in this area.
1024
Guido van Rossum33bab012001-12-05 22:45:48 +00001025- Fixed a leak: instance variables declared with __slots__ were never
1026 deleted!
1027
Guido van Rossum4b800852001-12-03 00:54:52 +00001028- The "delete attribute" method of descriptor objects is called
1029 __delete__, not __del__. In previous releases, it was mistakenly
1030 called __del__, which created an unfortunate overloading condition
1031 with finalizers. (The "get attribute" and "set attribute" methods
1032 are still called __get__ and __set__, respectively.)
1033
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00001034- Some subtle issues with the super built-in were fixed:
1035
1036 (a) When super itself is subclassed, its __get__ method would still
1037 return an instance of the base class (i.e., of super).
1038
1039 (b) super(C, C()).__class__ would return C rather than super. This
1040 is confusing. To fix this, I decided to change the semantics of
1041 super so that it only applies to code attributes, not to data
1042 attributes. After all, overriding data attributes is not
1043 supported anyway.
1044
1045 (c) The __get__ method didn't check whether the argument was an
1046 instance of the type used in creation of the super instance.
1047
Guido van Rossumcd7b7d62001-12-04 21:02:07 +00001048- Previously, hash() of an instance of a subclass of a mutable type
1049 (list or dictionary) would return some value, rather than raising
1050 TypeError. This has been fixed. Also, directly calling
1051 dict.__hash__ and list.__hash__ now raises the same TypeError
1052 (previously, these were the same as object.__hash__).
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00001053
Guido van Rossumd331cb52001-12-05 19:46:42 +00001054- New-style objects now support deleting their __dict__. This is for
1055 all intents and purposes equivalent to assigning a brand new empty
1056 dictionary, but saves space if the object is not used further.
1057
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001058Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001059-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001060
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00001061- -Qnew now works as documented in PEP 238: when -Qnew is passed on
1062 the command line, all occurrences of "/" use true division instead
1063 of classic division. See the PEP for details. Note that "all"
1064 means all instances in library and 3rd-party modules, as well as in
1065 your own code. As the PEP says, -Qnew is intended for use only in
1066 educational environments with control over the libraries in use.
Tim Petersbf72fe22001-12-11 21:43:14 +00001067 Note that test_coercion.py in the standard Python test suite fails
1068 under -Qnew; this is expected, and won't be repaired until true
1069 division becomes the default (in the meantime, test_coercion is
1070 testing the current rules).
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00001071
Fred Drake6c01e252001-12-14 17:08:12 +00001072- complex() now only allows the first argument to be a string
1073 argument, and raises TypeError if either the second arg is a string
1074 or if the second arg is specified when the first is a string.
1075
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001076Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001077-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001078
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00001079- gc.get_referents was renamed to gc.get_referrers.
1080
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001081Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001082-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001083
Tim Peters25059d32001-12-07 20:35:43 +00001084- Functions in the os.spawn() family now release the global interpreter
1085 lock around calling the platform spawn. They should always have done
1086 this, but did not before 2.2c1. Multithreaded programs calling
1087 an os.spawn function with P_WAIT will no longer block all Python threads
1088 until the spawned program completes. It's possible that some programs
1089 relies on blocking, although more likely by accident than by design.
1090
Martin v. Löwis3a89b2b2001-11-25 14:35:58 +00001091- webbrowser defaults to netscape.exe on OS/2 now.
1092
Martin v. Löwis652e1912001-11-25 14:50:56 +00001093- Tix.ResizeHandle exposes detach_widget, hide, and show.
1094
Martin v. Löwis714d2e22001-12-02 12:26:03 +00001095- The charset alias windows_1252 has been added.
1096
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00001097- types.StringTypes is a tuple containing the defined string types;
1098 usually this will be (str, unicode), but if Python was compiled
1099 without Unicode support it will be just (str,).
1100
1101- The pulldom and minidom modules were synchronized to PyXML.
1102
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001103Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001104-----------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001105
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00001106- A new script called Tools/scripts/google.py was added, which fires
1107 off a search on Google.
1108
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001109Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001110-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001111
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00001112- Note that release builds of Python should arrange to define the
1113 preprocessor symbol NDEBUG on the command line (or equivalent).
1114 In the 2.2 pre-release series we tried to define this by magic in
1115 Python.h instead, but it proved to cause problems for extension
1116 authors. The Unix, Windows and Mac builds now all define NDEBUG in
1117 release builds via cmdline (or equivalent) instead. Ports to
1118 other platforms should do likewise.
1119
Jack Jansen1999ef42001-12-06 21:47:20 +00001120- It is no longer necessary to use --with-suffix when building on a
1121 case-insensitive file system (such as Mac OS X HFS+). In the build
1122 directory an extension is used, but not in the installed python.
1123
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001124C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001125-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001126
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00001127- New function PyDict_MergeFromSeq2() exposes the builtin dict
1128 constructor's logic for updating a dictionary from an iterable object
1129 producing key-value pairs.
1130
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00001131- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() requires that the number of entries in
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00001132 the keyword list equal the number of argument specifiers. This
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00001133 wasn't checked correctly, and PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords could even
1134 dump core in some bad cases. This has been repaired. As a result,
1135 PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords may raise RuntimeError in bad cases that
1136 previously went unchallenged.
1137
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001138New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001139-------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001140
1141Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001142-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001143
1144Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001145-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001146
1147Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001148----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001149
Jack Jansenffa260f2001-12-06 21:14:00 +00001150- In unix-Python on Mac OS X (and darwin) sys.platform is now "darwin",
1151 without any trailing digits.
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001152
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00001153- Changed logic for finding python home in Mac OS X framework Pythons.
1154 Now sys.executable points to the executable again, in stead of to
1155 the shared library. The latter is used only for locating the python
1156 home.
1157
1158
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001159What's New in Python 2.2b2?
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001160===========================
1161
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001162*Release date: 16-Nov-2001*
1163
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001164Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001165--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001166
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00001167- Multiple inheritance mixing new-style and classic classes in the
1168 list of base classes is now allowed, so this works now:
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00001169
1170 class Classic: pass
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00001171 class Mixed(Classic, object): pass
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00001172
1173 The MRO (method resolution order) for each base class is respected
1174 according to its kind, but the MRO for the derived class is computed
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00001175 using new-style MRO rules if any base class is a new-style class.
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00001176 This needs to be documented.
1177
Tim Petersa427a2b2001-10-29 22:25:45 +00001178- The new builtin dictionary() constructor, and dictionary type, have
1179 been renamed to dict. This reflects a decade of common usage.
1180
Guido van Rossum3fc08d22001-11-15 20:33:10 +00001181- dict() now accepts an iterable object producing 2-sequences. For
1182 example, dict(d.items()) == d for any dictionary d. The argument,
1183 and the elements of the argument, can be any iterable objects.
1184
Guido van Rossum7ad2d1e2001-10-29 22:11:00 +00001185- New-style classes can now have a __del__ method, which is called
1186 when the instance is deleted (just like for classic classes).
1187
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00001188- Assignment to object.__dict__ is now possible, for objects that are
1189 instances of new-style classes that have a __dict__ (unless the base
1190 class forbids it).
1191
Guido van Rossumc8e56452001-10-22 00:43:43 +00001192- Methods of built-in types now properly check for keyword arguments
1193 (formerly these were silently ignored). The only built-in methods
1194 that take keyword arguments are __call__, __init__ and __new__.
1195
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00001196- The socket function has been converted to a type; see below.
1197
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001198Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001199-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001200
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00001201- Assignment to __debug__ raises SyntaxError at compile-time. This
1202 was promised when 2.1c1 was released as "What's New in Python 2.1c1"
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00001203 (see below) says.
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00001204
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00001205- Clarified the error messages for unsupported operands to an operator
1206 (like 1 + '').
1207
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001208Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001209-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001210
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00001211- mmap has a new keyword argument, "access", allowing a uniform way for
1212 both Windows and Unix users to create read-only, write-through and
1213 copy-on-write memory mappings. This was previously possible only on
1214 Unix. A new keyword argument was required to support this in a
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00001215 uniform way because the mmap() signatures had diverged across
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00001216 platforms. Thanks to Jay T Miller for repairing this!
1217
Tim Peters169ded02001-11-03 19:57:21 +00001218- By default, the gc.garbage list now contains only those instances in
1219 unreachable cycles that have __del__ methods; in 2.1 it contained all
1220 instances in unreachable cycles. "Instances" here has been generalized
1221 to include instances of both new-style and old-style classes.
1222
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00001223- The socket module defines a new method for socket objects,
1224 sendall(). This is like send() but may make multiple calls to
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00001225 send() until all data has been sent. Also, the socket function has
1226 been converted to a subclassable type, like list and tuple (etc.)
1227 before it; socket and SocketType are now the same thing.
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00001228
1229- Various bugfixes to the curses module. There is now a test suite
1230 for the curses module (you have to run it manually).
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00001231
Guido van Rossum692adf12001-10-30 03:03:03 +00001232- binascii.b2a_base64 no longer places an arbitrary restriction of 57
1233 bytes on its input.
1234
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001235Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001236-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001237
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00001238- tkFileDialog exposes a Directory class and askdirectory
Martin v. Löwis25ee87c2001-11-07 22:38:08 +00001239 convenience function.
1240
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00001241- Symbolic group names in regular expressions must be unique. For
1242 example, the regexp r'(?P<abc>)(?P<abc>)' is not allowed, because a
1243 single name can't mean both "group 1" and "group 2" simultaneously.
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00001244 Python 2.2 detects this error at regexp compilation time;
1245 previously, the error went undetected, and results were
1246 unpredictable. Also in sre, the pattern.split(), pattern.sub(), and
1247 pattern.subn() methods have been rewritten in C. Also, an
1248 experimental function/method finditer() has been added, which works
1249 like findall() but returns an iterator.
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00001250
Martin v. Löwisb7b32602001-11-02 23:48:20 +00001251- Tix exposes more commands through the classes DirSelectBox,
1252 DirSelectDialog, ListNoteBook, Meter, CheckList, and the
1253 methods tix_addbitmapdir, tix_cget, tix_configure, tix_filedialog,
1254 tix_getbitmap, tix_getimage, tix_option_get, and tix_resetoptions.
1255
Tim Peters98791af2001-10-23 01:59:54 +00001256- Traceback objects are now scanned by cyclic garbage collection, so
1257 cycles created by casual use of sys.exc_info() no longer cause
1258 permanent memory leaks (provided garbage collection is enabled).
1259
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00001260- os.extsep -- a new variable needed by the RISCOS support. It is the
1261 separator used by extensions, and is '.' on all platforms except
1262 RISCOS, where it is '/'. There is no need to use this variable
1263 unless you have a masochistic desire to port your code to RISCOS.
1264
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00001265- mimetypes.py has optional support for non-standard, but commonly
1266 found types. guess_type() and guess_extension() now accept an
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001267 optional 'strict' flag, defaulting to true, which controls whether
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00001268 recognize non-standard types or not. A few non-standard types we
1269 know about have been added. Also, when run as a script, there are
1270 new -l and -e options.
1271
1272- statcache is now deprecated.
1273
1274- email.Utils.formatdate() now produces the preferred RFC 2822 style
1275 dates with numeric timezones (it used to produce obsolete dates
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001276 hard coded to "GMT" timezone). An optional 'localtime' flag is
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00001277 added to produce dates in the local timezone, with daylight savings
1278 time properly taken into account.
1279
1280- In pickle and cPickle, instead of masking errors in load() by
1281 transforming them into SystemError, we let the original exception
1282 propagate out. Also, implement support for __safe_for_unpickling__
1283 in pickle, as it already was supported in cPickle.
1284
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001285Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001286-----------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001287
1288Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001289-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001290
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00001291- The dbm module is built using libdb1 if available. The bsddb module
1292 is built with libdb3 if available.
1293
1294- Misc/Makefile.pre.in has been removed by BDFL pronouncement.
1295
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001296C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001297-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001298
Tim Peters1fc240e2001-10-26 05:06:50 +00001299- New function PySequence_Fast_GET_SIZE() returns the size of a non-
1300 NULL result from PySequence_Fast(), more quickly than calling
1301 PySequence_Size().
1302
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00001303- New argument unpacking function PyArg_UnpackTuple() added.
1304
1305- New functions PyObject_CallFunctionObjArgs() and
1306 PyObject_CallMethodObjArgs() have been added to make it more
1307 convenient and efficient to call functions and methods from C.
1308
1309- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() no longer masks errors, so it's
1310 possible that this will propagate errors it didn't before.
1311
1312- New function PyObject_CheckReadBuffer(), which returns true if its
1313 argument supports the single-segment readable buffer interface.
1314
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001315New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001316-------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001317
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00001318- We've finally confirmed that this release builds on HP-UX 11.00,
1319 *with* threads, and passes the test suite.
1320
Tim Peters7a33d8b2001-11-05 02:51:07 +00001321- Thanks to a series of patches from Michael Muller, Python may build
1322 again under OS/2 Visual Age C++.
1323
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00001324- Updated RISCOS port by Dietmar Schwertberger.
1325
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001326Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001327-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001328
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00001329- Added a test script for the curses module. It isn't run automatically;
1330 regrtest.py must be run with '-u curses' to enable it.
1331
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001332Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001333-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001334
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00001335Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001336----
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00001337
1338- PythonScript has been moved to unsupported and is slated to be
1339 removed completely in the next release.
1340
1341- It should now be possible to build applets that work on both OS9 and
1342 OSX.
1343
1344- The core is now linked with CoreServices not Carbon; as a side
1345 result, default 8bit encoding on OSX is now ASCII.
1346
1347- Python should now build on OSX 10.1.1
1348
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001349
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00001350What's New in Python 2.2b1?
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00001351===========================
1352
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001353*Release date: 19-Oct-2001*
1354
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00001355Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001356--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00001357
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00001358- New-style classes are now always dynamic (except for built-in and
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00001359 extension types). There is no longer a performance penalty, and I
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00001360 no longer see another reason to keep this baggage around. One relic
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00001361 remains: the __dict__ of a new-style class is a read-only proxy; you
1362 must set the class's attribute to modify it. As a consequence, the
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00001363 __defined__ attribute of new-style types no longer exists, for lack
1364 of need: there is once again only one __dict__ (although in the
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00001365 future a __cache__ may be resurrected with a similar function, if I
1366 can prove that it actually speeds things up).
Guido van Rossum50fda3b2001-10-04 19:46:06 +00001367
Tim Peters1c9ca872001-10-04 06:43:12 +00001368- C.__doc__ now works as expected for new-style classes (in 2.2a4 it
1369 always returned None, even when there was a class docstring).
1370
1371- doctest now finds and runs docstrings attached to new-style classes,
1372 class methods, static methods, and properties.
1373
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00001374Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001375-----------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00001376
Guido van Rossuma8bcf802001-10-15 15:53:58 +00001377- A very subtle syntactical pitfall in list comprehensions was fixed.
1378 For example: [a+b for a in 'abc', for b in 'def']. The comma in
1379 this example is a mistake. Previously, this would silently let 'a'
1380 iterate over the singleton tuple ('abc',), yielding ['abcd', 'abce',
1381 'abcf'] rather than the intended ['ad', 'ae', 'af', 'bd', 'be',
1382 'bf', 'cd', 'ce', 'cf']. Now, this is flagged as a syntax error.
1383 Note that [a for a in <singleton>] is a convoluted way to say
1384 [<singleton>] anyway, so it's not like any expressiveness is lost.
1385
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00001386- getattr(obj, name, default) now only catches AttributeError, as
1387 documented, rather than returning the default value for all
1388 exceptions (which could mask bugs in a __getattr__ hook, for
1389 example).
1390
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00001391- Weak reference objects are now part of the core and offer a C API.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00001392 A bug which could allow a core dump when binary operations involved
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00001393 proxy reference has been fixed. weakref.ReferenceError is now a
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00001394 built-in exception.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00001395
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00001396- unicode(obj) now behaves more like str(obj), accepting arbitrary
1397 objects, and calling a __unicode__ method if it exists.
1398 unicode(obj, encoding) and unicode(obj, encoding, errors) still
Marc-André Lemburgb5507ec2001-10-19 12:02:29 +00001399 require an 8-bit string or character buffer argument.
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00001400
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00001401- isinstance() now allows any object as the first argument and a
1402 class, a type or something with a __bases__ tuple attribute for the
1403 second argument. The second argument may also be a tuple of a
1404 class, type, or something with __bases__, in which case isinstance()
1405 will return true if the first argument is an instance of any of the
1406 things contained in the second argument tuple. E.g.
1407
1408 isinstance(x, (A, B))
1409
1410 returns true if x is an instance of A or B.
1411
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00001412Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001413-----------------
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00001414
1415- thread.start_new_thread() now returns the thread ID (previously None).
1416
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00001417- binascii has now two quopri support functions, a2b_qp and b2a_qp.
1418
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00001419- readline now supports setting the startup_hook and the
1420 pre_event_hook, and adds the add_history() function.
Martin v. Löwis0daad592001-09-30 21:09:59 +00001421
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00001422- os and posix supports chroot(), setgroups() and unsetenv() where
1423 available. The stat(), fstat(), statvfs() and fstatvfs() functions
1424 now return "pseudo-sequences" -- the various fields can now be
1425 accessed as attributes (e.g. os.stat("/").st_mtime) but for
1426 backwards compatibility they also behave as a fixed-length sequence.
1427 Some platform-specific fields (e.g. st_rdev) are only accessible as
Guido van Rossum98bf58f2001-10-18 20:34:25 +00001428 attributes.
1429
1430- time: localtime(), gmtime() and strptime() now return a
1431 pseudo-sequence similar to the os.stat() return value, with
1432 attributes like tm_year etc.
Martin v. Löwis16628c92001-10-04 22:46:41 +00001433
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00001434- Decompression objects in the zlib module now accept an optional
1435 second parameter to decompress() that specifies the maximum amount
1436 of memory to use for the uncompressed data.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00001437
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00001438- optional SSL support in the socket module now exports OpenSSL
1439 functions RAND_add(), RAND_egd(), and RAND_status(). These calls
1440 are useful on platforms like Solaris where OpenSSL does not
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00001441 automatically seed its PRNG. Also, the keyfile and certfile
1442 arguments to socket.ssl() are now optional.
1443
1444- posixmodule (and by extension, the os module on POSIX platforms) now
1445 exports O_LARGEFILE, O_DIRECT, O_DIRECTORY, and O_NOFOLLOW.
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00001446
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00001447Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001448-------
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00001449
Tim Peters7402f792001-10-02 03:53:41 +00001450- doctest now excludes functions and classes not defined by the module
1451 being tested, thanks to Tim Hochberg.
1452
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00001453- HotShot, a new profiler implemented using a C-based callback, has
1454 been added. This substantially reduces the overhead of profiling,
1455 but it is still quite preliminary. Support modules and
1456 documentation will be added in upcoming releases (before 2.2 final).
1457
Guido van Rossumc4b09b42001-10-04 10:19:00 +00001458- profile now produces correct output in situations where an exception
1459 raised in Python is cleared by C code (e.g. hasattr()). This used
1460 to cause wrong output, including spurious claims of recursive
1461 functions and attribution of time spent to the wrong function.
1462
Tim Peters0a1fc4e2001-10-07 03:12:08 +00001463 The code and documentation for the derived OldProfile and HotProfile
1464 profiling classes was removed. The code hasn't worked for years (if
1465 you tried to use them, they raised exceptions). OldProfile
1466 intended to reproduce the behavior of the profiler Python used more
1467 than 7 years ago, and isn't interesting anymore. HotProfile intended
1468 to provide a faster profiler (but producing less information), and
1469 that's a worthy goal we intend to meet via a different approach (but
1470 without losing information).
1471
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00001472- Profile.calibrate() has a new implementation that should deliver
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00001473 a much better system-specific calibration constant. The constant can
1474 now be specified in an instance constructor, or as a Profile class or
1475 instance variable, instead of by editing profile.py's source code.
1476 Calibration must still be done manually (see the docs for the profile
1477 module).
1478
1479 Note that Profile.calibrate() must be overriden by subclasses.
1480 Improving the accuracy required exploiting detailed knowledge of
1481 profiler internals; the earlier method abstracted away the details
1482 and measured a simplified model instead, but consequently computed
1483 a constant too small by a factor of 2 on some modern machines.
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00001484
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00001485- quopri's encode and decode methods take an optional header parameter,
Jeremy Hylton6f543b62001-10-16 20:42:52 +00001486 which indicates whether output is intended for the header 'Q'
1487 encoding.
1488
Guido van Rossuma5343cc2001-10-18 18:02:07 +00001489- The SocketServer.ThreadingMixIn class now closes the request after
1490 finish_request() returns. (Not when it errors out though.)
1491
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001492- The nntplib module's NNTP.body() method has grown a 'file' argument
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00001493 to allow saving the message body to a file.
1494
1495- The email package has added a class email.Parser.HeaderParser which
1496 only parses headers and does not recurse into the message's body.
1497 Also, the module/class MIMEAudio has been added for representing
1498 audio data (contributed by Anthony Baxter).
1499
1500- ftplib should be able to handle files > 2GB.
1501
1502- ConfigParser.getboolean() now also interprets TRUE, FALSE, YES, NO,
1503 ON, and OFF.
1504
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00001505- xml.dom.minidom NodeList objects now support the length attribute
1506 and item() method as required by the DOM specifications.
1507
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00001508Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001509-----------
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00001510
1511- Demo/dns was removed. It no longer serves any purpose; a package
1512 derived from it is now maintained by Anthony Baxter, see
1513 http://PyDNS.SourceForge.net.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00001514
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00001515- The freeze tool has been made more robust, and two new options have
1516 been added: -X and -E.
1517
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00001518Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001519-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00001520
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00001521- configure will use CXX in LINKCC if CXX is used to build main() and
1522 the system requires to link a C++ main using the C++ compiler.
1523
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00001524C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001525-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00001526
Guido van Rossum6c4bce32001-10-18 19:20:25 +00001527- The documentation for the tp_compare slot is updated to require that
1528 the return value must be -1, 0, 1; an arbitrary number <0 or >0 is
1529 not correct. This is not yet enforced but will be enforced in
1530 Python 2.3; even later, we may use -2 to indicate errors and +2 for
1531 "NotImplemented". Right now, -1 should be used for an error return.
1532
Tim Petersd38b1c72001-09-30 05:09:37 +00001533- PyLong_AsLongLong() now accepts int (as well as long) arguments.
1534 Consequently, PyArg_ParseTuple's 'L' code also accepts int (as well
1535 as long) arguments.
1536
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00001537- PyThread_start_new_thread() now returns a long int giving the thread
1538 ID, if one can be calculated; it returns -1 for error, 0 if no
1539 thread ID is calculated (this is an incompatible change, but only
1540 the thread module used this API). This code has only really been
1541 tested on Linux and Windows; other platforms please beware (and
1542 report any bugs or strange behavior).
1543
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00001544- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() no longer accepts Unicode objects as
1545 input.
1546
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00001547New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001548-------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00001549
1550Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001551-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00001552
1553Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001554-------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00001555
Tim Peters04cf1d32001-10-09 22:39:40 +00001556- Installer: If you install IDLE, and don't disable file-extension
1557 registration, a new "Edit with IDLE" context (right-click) menu entry
1558 is created for .py and .pyw files.
1559
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00001560- The signal module now supports SIGBREAK on Windows, thanks to Steven
1561 Scott. Note that SIGBREAK is unique to Windows. The default SIGBREAK
1562 action remains to call Win32 ExitProcess(). This can be changed via
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00001563 signal.signal(). For example::
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00001564
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001565 # Make Ctrl+Break raise KeyboardInterrupt, like Python's default Ctrl+C
1566 # (SIGINT) behavior.
1567 import signal
1568 signal.signal(signal.SIGBREAK, signal.default_int_handler)
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00001569
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001570 try:
1571 while 1:
1572 pass
1573 except KeyboardInterrupt:
1574 # We get here on Ctrl+C or Ctrl+Break now; if we had not changed
1575 # SIGBREAK, only on Ctrl+C (and Ctrl+Break would terminate the
1576 # program without the possibility for any Python-level cleanup).
1577 print "Clean exit"
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00001578
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00001579
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00001580What's New in Python 2.2a4?
1581===========================
1582
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001583*Release date: 28-Sep-2001*
1584
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00001585Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001586--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00001587
1588- pydoc and inspect are now aware of new-style classes;
1589 e.g. help(list) at the interactive prompt now shows proper
1590 documentation for all operations on list objects.
1591
1592- Applications using Jim Fulton's ExtensionClass module can now safely
1593 be used with Python 2.2. In particular, Zope 2.4.1 now works with
1594 Python 2.2 (as well as with Python 2.1.1). The Demo/metaclass
1595 examples also work again. It is hoped that Gtk and Boost also work
1596 with 2.2a4 and beyond. (If you can confirm this, please write
1597 webmaster@python.org; if there are still problems, please open a bug
1598 report on SourceForge.)
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00001599
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00001600- property() now takes 4 keyword arguments: fget, fset, fdel and doc.
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00001601 These map to read-only attributes 'fget', 'fset', 'fdel', and '__doc__'
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00001602 in the constructed property object. fget, fset and fdel weren't
1603 discoverable from Python in 2.2a3. __doc__ is new, and allows to
1604 associate a docstring with a property.
1605
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00001606- Comparison overloading is now more completely implemented. For
1607 example, a str subclass instance can properly be compared to a str
1608 instance, and it can properly overload comparison. Ditto for most
1609 other built-in object types.
1610
1611- The repr() of new-style classes has changed; instead of <type
1612 'M.Foo'> a new-style class is now rendered as <class 'M.Foo'>,
1613 *except* for built-in types, which are still rendered as <type
1614 'Foo'> (to avoid upsetting existing code that might parse or
1615 otherwise rely on repr() of certain type objects).
1616
1617- The repr() of new-style objects is now always <Foo object at XXX>;
1618 previously, it was sometimes <Foo instance at XXX>.
1619
1620- For new-style classes, what was previously called __getattr__ is now
1621 called __getattribute__. This method, if defined, is called for
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00001622 *every* attribute access. A new __getattr__ hook more similar to the
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00001623 one in classic classes is defined which is called only if regular
1624 attribute access raises AttributeError; to catch *all* attribute
1625 access, you can use __getattribute__ (for new-style classes). If
1626 both are defined, __getattribute__ is called first, and if it raises
1627 AttributeError, __getattr__ is called.
1628
1629- The __class__ attribute of new-style objects can be assigned to.
1630 The new class must have the same C-level object layout as the old
1631 class.
1632
1633- The builtin file type can be subclassed now. In the usual pattern,
1634 "file" is the name of the builtin type, and file() is a new builtin
1635 constructor, with the same signature as the builtin open() function.
1636 file() is now the preferred way to open a file.
1637
1638- Previously, __new__ would only see sequential arguments passed to
1639 the type in a constructor call; __init__ would see both sequential
1640 and keyword arguments. This made no sense whatsoever any more, so
1641 now both __new__ and __init__ see all arguments.
1642
1643- Previously, hash() applied to an instance of a subclass of str or
1644 unicode always returned 0. This has been repaired.
1645
1646- Previously, an operation on an instance of a subclass of an
1647 immutable type (int, long, float, complex, tuple, str, unicode),
1648 where the subtype didn't override the operation (and so the
1649 operation was handled by the builtin type), could return that
1650 instance instead a value of the base type. For example, if s was of
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00001651 a str subclass type, s[:] returned s as-is. Now it returns a str
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00001652 with the same value as s.
1653
Barry Warsaw86fbaf82001-09-28 15:26:12 +00001654- Provisional support for pickling new-style objects has been added.
1655
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00001656Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001657----
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00001658
Tim Peters2c9aa5e2001-09-23 04:06:05 +00001659- file.writelines() now accepts any iterable object producing strings.
1660
Marc-André Lemburgaefd7662001-09-20 12:59:37 +00001661- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() now works very much like
1662 PyObject_Str(obj) in that it tries to use __str__/tp_str
1663 on the object if the object is not a string or buffer. This
1664 makes unicode() behave like str() when applied to non-string/buffer
1665 objects.
1666
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00001667- PyFile_WriteObject now passes Unicode objects to the file's write
1668 method. As a result, all file-like objects which may be the target
Martin v. Löwis2777c022001-09-19 13:47:32 +00001669 of a print statement must support Unicode objects, i.e. they must
1670 at least convert them into ASCII strings.
1671
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00001672- Thread scheduling on Solaris should be improved; it is no longer
1673 necessary to insert a small sleep at the start of a thread in order
1674 to let other runnable threads be scheduled.
1675
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00001676Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001677-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00001678
Marc-André Lemburgbf990172001-09-27 14:17:33 +00001679- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
1680 read character buffer compatible objects for their .write() methods.
1681 These objects are converted to strings and then handled as such
1682 by the instances.
1683
Barry Warsaw2f600732001-09-24 04:28:10 +00001684- The "email" package has been added. This is basically a port of the
1685 mimelib package <http://sf.net/projects/mimelib> with API changes
1686 and some implementations updated to use iterators and generators.
1687
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00001688- difflib.ndiff() and difflib.Differ.compare() are generators now. This
1689 restores the ability of Tools/scripts/ndiff.py to start producing output
1690 before the entire comparison is complete.
1691
Barry Warsaw58b072d2001-09-22 04:44:21 +00001692- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
1693 iteration just like file objects (i.e. their .readline() method is
1694 called for each iteration until it returns an empty string).
1695
Marc-André Lemburg494f2ae2001-09-19 11:33:31 +00001696- The codecs module has grown four new helper APIs to access
1697 builtin codecs: getencoder(), getdecoder(), getreader(),
1698 getwriter().
1699
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00001700- SimpleXMLRPCServer: a new module (based upon SimpleHTMLServer)
1701 simplifies writing XML RPC servers.
1702
Barry Warsaw647d5e82001-09-28 17:01:02 +00001703- os.path.realpath(): a new function that returns the absolute pathname
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00001704 after interpretation of symbolic links. On non-Unix systems, this
1705 is an alias for os.path.abspath().
1706
Tim Peters16a77ad2001-09-08 04:00:12 +00001707- operator.indexOf() (PySequence_Index() in the C API) now works with any
1708 iterable object.
1709
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00001710- smtplib now supports various authentication and security features of
1711 the SMTP protocol through the new login() and starttls() methods.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00001712
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00001713- hmac: a new module implementing keyed hashing for message
1714 authentication.
1715
1716- mimetypes now recognizes more extensions and file types. At the
1717 same time, some mappings not sanctioned by IANA were removed.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00001718
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00001719- The "compiler" package has been brought up to date to the state of
Guido van Rossumc9ed5dc2001-09-20 05:30:24 +00001720 Python 2.2 bytecode generation. It has also been promoted from a
1721 Tool to a standard library package. (Tools/compiler still exists as
1722 a sample driver.)
1723
Guido van Rossumc9ed5dc2001-09-20 05:30:24 +00001724Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001725-----
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00001726
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00001727Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001728-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00001729
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00001730- Large file support (LFS) is now automatic when the platform supports
1731 it; no more manual configuration tweaks are needed. On Linux, at
1732 least, it's possible to have a system whose C library supports large
1733 files but whose kernel doesn't; in this case, large file support is
1734 still enabled but doesn't do you any good unless you upgrade your
1735 kernel or share your Python executable with another system whose
1736 kernel has large file support.
1737
1738- The configure script now supplies plausible defaults in a
1739 cross-compilation environment. This doesn't mean that the supplied
1740 values are always correct, or that cross-compilation now works
1741 flawlessly -- but it's a first step (and it shuts up most of
1742 autoconf's warnings about AC_TRY_RUN).
1743
1744- The Unix build is now a bit less chatty, courtesy of the parser
1745 generator. The build is completely silent (except for errors) when
1746 using "make -s", thanks to a -q option to setup.py.
1747
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00001748C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001749-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00001750
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00001751- The "structmember" API now supports some new flag bits to deny read
1752 and/or write access to attributes in restricted execution mode.
1753
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00001754New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001755-------------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00001756
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00001757- Compaq's iPAQ handheld, running the "familiar" Linux distribution
1758 (http://familiar.handhelds.org).
1759
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00001760Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001761-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00001762
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00001763- The "classic" standard tests, which work by comparing stdout to
1764 an expected-output file under Lib/test/output/, no longer stop at
1765 the first mismatch. Instead the test is run to completion, and a
1766 variant of ndiff-style comparison is used to report all differences.
1767 This is much easier to understand than the previous style of reporting.
1768
1769- The unittest-based standard tests now use regrtest's test_main()
1770 convention, instead of running as a side-effect of merely being
1771 imported. This allows these tests to be run in more natural and
1772 flexible ways as unittests, outside the regrtest framework.
1773
1774- regrtest.py is much better integrated with unittest and doctest now,
1775 especially in regard to reporting errors.
1776
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00001777Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001778-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00001779
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00001780- Large file support now also works for files > 4GB, on filesystems
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00001781 that support it (NTFS under Windows 2000). See "What's New in
1782 Python 2.2a3" for more detail.
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00001783
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00001784
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00001785What's New in Python 2.2a3?
1786===========================
1787
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001788*Release Date: 07-Sep-2001*
1789
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00001790Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001791----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00001792
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00001793- Conversion of long to float now raises OverflowError if the long is too
1794 big to represent as a C double.
1795
Tim Peters32f453e2001-09-03 08:35:41 +00001796- The 3-argument builtin pow() no longer allows a third non-None argument
1797 if either of the first two arguments is a float, or if both are of
1798 integer types and the second argument is negative (in which latter case
1799 the arguments are converted to float, so this is really the same
1800 restriction).
1801
Tim Peters5d2b77c2001-09-03 05:47:38 +00001802- The builtin dir() now returns more information, and sometimes much
1803 more, generally naming all attributes of an object, and all attributes
1804 reachable from the object via its class, and from its class's base
1805 classes, and so on from them too. Example: in 2.2a2, dir([]) returned
1806 an empty list. In 2.2a3,
1807
1808 >>> dir([])
1809 ['__add__', '__class__', '__contains__', '__delattr__', '__delitem__',
1810 '__eq__', '__ge__', '__getattr__', '__getitem__', '__getslice__',
1811 '__gt__', '__hash__', '__iadd__', '__imul__', '__init__', '__le__',
1812 '__len__', '__lt__', '__mul__', '__ne__', '__new__', '__repr__',
1813 '__rmul__', '__setattr__', '__setitem__', '__setslice__', '__str__',
1814 'append', 'count', 'extend', 'index', 'insert', 'pop', 'remove',
1815 'reverse', 'sort']
1816
1817 dir(module) continues to return only the module's attributes, though.
1818
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00001819- Overflowing operations on plain ints now return a long int rather
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00001820 than raising OverflowError. This is a partial implementation of PEP
1821 237. You can use -Wdefault::OverflowWarning to enable a warning for
1822 this situation, and -Werror::OverflowWarning to revert to the old
1823 OverflowError exception.
1824
Guido van Rossum61c345f2001-09-04 03:26:15 +00001825- A new command line option, -Q<arg>, is added to control run-time
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00001826 warnings for the use of classic division. (See PEP 238.) Possible
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00001827 values are -Qold, -Qwarn, -Qwarnall, and -Qnew. The default is
1828 -Qold, meaning the / operator has its classic meaning and no
1829 warnings are issued. Using -Qwarn issues a run-time warning about
1830 all uses of classic division for int and long arguments; -Qwarnall
1831 also warns about classic division for float and complex arguments
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00001832 (for use with fixdiv.py).
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001833 [Note: the remainder of this item (preserved below) became
1834 obsolete in 2.2c1 -- -Qnew has global effect in 2.2] ::
1835
1836 Using -Qnew is questionable; it turns on new division by default, but
1837 only in the __main__ module. You can usefully combine -Qwarn or
1838 -Qwarnall and -Qnew: this gives the __main__ module new division, and
1839 warns about classic division everywhere else.
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00001840
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00001841- Many built-in types can now be subclassed. This applies to int,
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00001842 long, float, str, unicode, and tuple. (The types complex, list and
1843 dictionary can also be subclassed; this was introduced earlier.)
1844 Note that restrictions apply when subclassing immutable built-in
1845 types: you can only affect the value of the instance by overloading
1846 __new__. You can add mutable attributes, and the subclass instances
1847 will have a __dict__ attribute, but you cannot change the "value"
1848 (as implemented by the base class) of an immutable subclass instance
1849 once it is created.
1850
Guido van Rossumaaf80c82001-09-02 13:44:35 +00001851- The dictionary constructor now takes an optional argument, a
1852 mapping-like object, and initializes the dictionary from its
1853 (key, value) pairs.
1854
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00001855- A new built-in type, super, has been added. This facilitates making
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00001856 "cooperative super calls" in a multiple inheritance setting. For an
1857 explanation, see http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#cooperation
1858
Guido van Rossum8d7234d2001-09-06 22:02:58 +00001859- A new built-in type, property, has been added. This enables the
1860 creation of "properties". These are attributes implemented by
1861 getter and setter functions (or only one of these for read-only or
1862 write-only attributes), without the need to override __getattr__.
1863 See http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#property
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00001864
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00001865- The syntax of floating-point and imaginary literals has been
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00001866 liberalized, to allow leading zeroes. Examples of literals now
1867 legal that were SyntaxErrors before:
1868
1869 00.0 0e3 0100j 07.5 00000000000000000008.
1870
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00001871- An old tokenizer bug allowed floating point literals with an incomplete
Tim Petersc6d95812001-08-28 20:56:27 +00001872 exponent, such as 1e and 3.1e-. Such literals now raise SyntaxError.
1873
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00001874Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001875-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00001876
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00001877- telnetlib includes symbolic names for the options, and support for
Martin v. Löwis1da9c572002-11-04 09:56:00 +00001878 setting an option negotiation callback. It also supports processing
1879 of suboptions.
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00001880
Tim Petersa40c7932001-09-05 22:36:56 +00001881- The new C standard no longer requires that math libraries set errno to
1882 ERANGE on overflow. For platform libraries that exploit this new
1883 freedom, Python's overflow-checking was wholly broken. A new overflow-
1884 checking scheme attempts to repair that, but may not be reliable on all
1885 platforms (C doesn't seem to provide anything both useful and portable
1886 in this area anymore).
1887
Martin v. Löwis44f86962001-09-05 13:44:54 +00001888- Asynchronous timeout actions are available through the new class
1889 threading.Timer.
1890
Tim Peters78526162001-09-05 00:53:45 +00001891- math.log and math.log10 now return sensible results for even huge
1892 long arguments. For example, math.log10(10 ** 10000) ~= 10000.0.
1893
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00001894- A new function, imp.lock_held(), returns 1 when the import lock is
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00001895 currently held. See the docs for the imp module.
1896
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00001897- pickle, cPickle and marshal on 32-bit platforms can now correctly read
Tim Peters82112372001-08-29 02:28:42 +00001898 dumps containing ints written on platforms where Python ints are 8 bytes.
1899 When read on a box where Python ints are 4 bytes, such values are
1900 converted to Python longs.
1901
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00001902- In restricted execution mode (using the rexec module), unmarshalling
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00001903 code objects is no longer allowed. This plugs a security hole.
1904
Steve Purcell6091cd62001-09-06 16:05:17 +00001905- unittest.TestResult instances no longer store references to tracebacks
1906 generated by test failures. This prevents unexpected dangling references
1907 to objects that should be garbage collected between tests.
1908
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00001909Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001910-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00001911
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00001912- Tools/scripts/fixdiv.py has been added which can be used to fix
1913 division operators as per PEP 238.
1914
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00001915Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001916-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00001917
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00001918- If you are an adventurous person using Mac OS X you may want to look at
1919 Mac/OSX. There is a Makefile there that will build Python as a real Mac
1920 application, which can be used for experimenting with Carbon or Cocoa.
1921 Discussion of this on pythonmac-sig, please.
1922
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00001923C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001924-----
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00001925
1926- New function PyObject_Dir(obj), like Python __builtin__.dir(obj).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00001927
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00001928- Note that PyLong_AsDouble can fail! This has always been true, but no
1929 callers checked for it. It's more likely to fail now, because overflow
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00001930 errors are properly detected now. The proper way to check::
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00001931
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001932 double x = PyLong_AsDouble(some_long_object);
1933 if (x == -1.0 && PyErr_Occurred()) {
1934 /* The conversion failed. */
1935 }
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00001936
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00001937- The GC API has been changed. Extensions that use the old API will still
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00001938 compile but will not participate in GC. To upgrade an extension
1939 module:
1940
1941 - rename Py_TPFLAGS_GC to PyTPFLAGS_HAVE_GC
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00001942
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00001943 - use PyObject_GC_New or PyObject_GC_NewVar to allocate objects and
1944 PyObject_GC_Del to deallocate them
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00001945
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00001946 - rename PyObject_GC_Init to PyObject_GC_Track and PyObject_GC_Fini
1947 to PyObject_GC_UnTrack
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00001948
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00001949 - remove PyGC_HEAD_SIZE from object size calculations
1950
1951 - remove calls to PyObject_AS_GC and PyObject_FROM_GC
1952
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00001953- Two new functions: PyString_FromFormat() and PyString_FromFormatV().
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00001954 These can be used safely to construct string objects from a
1955 sprintf-style format string (similar to the format string supported
1956 by PyErr_Format()).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00001957
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00001958New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001959-------------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00001960
Tim Petersb7da0902001-09-02 23:01:43 +00001961- Stephen Hansen contributed patches sufficient to get a clean compile
1962 under Borland C (Windows), but he reports problems running it and ran
1963 out of time to complete the port. Volunteers? Expect a MemoryError
1964 when importing the types module; this is probably shallow, and
1965 causing later failures too.
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00001966
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00001967Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001968-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00001969
1970Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001971-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00001972
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00001973- Large file support is now enabled on Win32 platforms as well as on
1974 Win64. This means that, for example, you can use f.tell() and f.seek()
1975 to manipulate files larger than 2 gigabytes (provided you have enough
1976 disk space, and are using a Windows filesystem that supports large
Tim Peters9a9471c2001-09-11 23:18:51 +00001977 partitions). Windows filesystem limits: FAT has a 2GB (gigabyte)
1978 filesize limit, and large file support makes no difference there.
1979 FAT32's limit is 4GB, and files >= 2GB are easier to use from Python now.
1980 NTFS has no practical limit on file size, and files of any size can be
1981 used from Python now.
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00001982
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00001983- The w9xpopen hack is now used on Windows NT and 2000 too when COMPSPEC
Tim Peters402d5982001-08-27 06:37:48 +00001984 points to command.com (patch from Brian Quinlan).
1985
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00001986
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00001987What's New in Python 2.2a2?
1988===========================
1989
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001990*Release Date: 22-Aug-2001*
1991
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00001992Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001993-----
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00001994
Barry Warsaw18b2ecf2001-08-22 20:26:56 +00001995- Tim Peters developed a brand new Windows installer using Wise 8.1,
1996 generously donated to us by Wise Solutions.
1997
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00001998- configure supports a new option --enable-unicode, with the values
1999 ucs2 and ucs4 (new in 2.2a1). With --disable-unicode, the Unicode
2000 type and supporting code is completely removed from the interpreter.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00002001
Jack Jansen32ce0cd2001-08-21 19:28:20 +00002002- A new configure option --enable-framework builds a Mac OS X framework,
2003 which "make frameworkinstall" will install. This provides a starting
2004 point for more mac-like functionality, join pythonmac-sig@python.org
2005 if you are interested in helping.
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00002006
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00002007- The NeXT platform is no longer supported.
2008
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002009- The 'new' module is now statically linked.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00002010
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00002011Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002012-----
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00002013
2014- The new Tools/scripts/cleanfuture.py can be used to automatically
Andrew M. Kuchlingb0532092001-08-15 15:54:56 +00002015 edit out obsolete future statements from Python source code. See
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00002016 the module docstring for details.
2017
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00002018Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002019-----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00002020
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00002021- regrtest.py now knows which tests are expected to be skipped on some
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00002022 platforms, allowing to give clearer test result output. regrtest
2023 also has optional --use/-u switch to run normally disabled tests
2024 which require network access or consume significant disk resources.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00002025
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00002026- Several new tests in the standard test suite, with special thanks to
2027 Nick Mathewson.
2028
2029Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002030----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00002031
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00002032- The floor division operator // has been added as outlined in PEP
2033 238. The / operator still provides classic division (and will until
2034 Python 3.0) unless "from __future__ import division" is included, in
2035 which case the / operator will provide true division. The operator
2036 module provides truediv() and floordiv() functions. Augmented
2037 assignment variants are included, as are the equivalent overloadable
2038 methods and C API methods. See the PEP for a full discussion:
2039 <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0238.html>
2040
Tim Peters6cd6a822001-08-17 22:11:27 +00002041- Future statements are now effective in simulated interactive shells
2042 (like IDLE). This should "just work" by magic, but read Michael
2043 Hudson's "Future statements in simulated shells" PEP 264 for full
2044 details: <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0264.html>.
2045
Guido van Rossumf86ddd22001-08-17 21:21:04 +00002046- The type/class unification (PEP 252-253) was integrated into the
2047 trunk and is not so tentative any more (the exact specification of
2048 some features is still tentative). A lot of work has done on fixing
2049 bugs and adding robustness and features (performance still has to
2050 come a long way).
2051
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00002052- Warnings about a mismatch in the Python API during extension import
2053 now use the Python warning framework (which makes it possible to
2054 write filters for these warnings).
2055
Barry Warsaw9b3be7f2001-08-14 18:35:02 +00002056- A function's __dict__ (aka func_dict) will now always be a
2057 dictionary. It used to be possible to delete it or set it to None,
2058 but now both actions raise TypeErrors. It is still legal to set it
2059 to a dictionary object. Getting func.__dict__ before any attributes
2060 have been assigned now returns an empty dictionary instead of None.
2061
Guido van Rossum32aa5d22001-09-05 18:43:35 +00002062- A new command line option, -E, was added which disables the use of
2063 all environment variables, or at least those that are specifically
2064 significant to Python. Usually those have a name starting with
2065 "PYTHON". This was used to fix a problem where the tests fail if
2066 the user happens to have PYTHONHOME or PYTHONPATH pointing to an
2067 older distribution.
2068
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00002069Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002070-------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00002071
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00002072- New class Differ and new functions ndiff() and restore() in difflib.py.
2073 These package the algorithms used by the popular Tools/scripts/ndiff.py,
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00002074 for programmatic reuse.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00002075
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00002076- New function xml.sax.saxutils.quoteattr(): Quote an XML attribute
2077 value using the minimal quoting required for the value; more
2078 reliable than using xml.sax.saxutils.escape() for attribute values.
2079
2080- Readline completion support for cmd.Cmd was added.
2081
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00002082- Calling os.tempnam() or os.tmpnam() generate RuntimeWarnings.
2083
2084- Added function threading.BoundedSemaphore()
2085
2086- Added Ka-Ping Yee's cgitb.py module.
2087
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002088- The 'new' module now exposes the CO_xxx flags.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00002089
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00002090- The gc module offers the get_referents function.
2091
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00002092New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002093-------------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00002094
2095C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002096-----
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00002097
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00002098- Two new APIs PyOS_snprintf() and PyOS_vsnprintf() were added
2099 which provide a cross-platform implementations for the
2100 relatively new snprintf()/vsnprintf() C lib APIs. In contrast to
2101 the standard sprintf() and vsprintf() C lib APIs, these versions
2102 apply bounds checking on the used buffer which enhances protection
2103 against buffer overruns.
2104
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00002105- Unicode APIs now use name mangling to assure that mixing interpreters
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00002106 and extensions using different Unicode widths is rendered next to
2107 impossible. Trying to import an incompatible Unicode-aware extension
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00002108 will result in an ImportError. Unicode extensions writers must make
2109 sure to check the Unicode width compatibility in their extensions by
2110 using at least one of the mangled Unicode APIs in the extension.
2111
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00002112- Two new flags METH_NOARGS and METH_O are available in method definition
2113 tables to simplify implementation of methods with no arguments and a
2114 single untyped argument. Calling such methods is more efficient than
2115 calling corresponding METH_VARARGS methods. METH_OLDARGS is now
2116 deprecated.
2117
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00002118Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002119-------
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00002120
2121- "import module" now compiles module.pyw if it exists and nothing else
2122 relevant is found.
2123
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00002124
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00002125What's New in Python 2.2a1?
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00002126===========================
2127
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002128*Release date: 18-Jul-2001*
2129
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00002130Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002131----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00002132
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00002133- TENTATIVELY, a large amount of code implementing much of what's
2134 described in PEP 252 (Making Types Look More Like Classes) and PEP
2135 253 (Subtyping Built-in Types) was added. This will be released
2136 with Python 2.2a1. Documentation will be provided separately
2137 through http://www.python.org/2.2/. The purpose of releasing this
2138 with Python 2.2a1 is to test backwards compatibility. It is
2139 possible, though not likely, that a decision is made not to release
2140 this code as part of 2.2 final, if any serious backwards
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00002141 incompatibilities are found during alpha testing that cannot be
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00002142 repaired.
2143
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00002144- Generators were added; this is a new way to create an iterator (see
Tim Peters11a0d102001-07-17 18:48:00 +00002145 below) using what looks like a simple function containing one or
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00002146 more 'yield' statements. See PEP 255. Since this adds a new
2147 keyword to the language, this feature must be enabled by including a
2148 future statement: "from __future__ import generators" (see PEP 236).
2149 Generators will become a standard feature in a future release
2150 (probably 2.3). Without this future statement, 'yield' remains an
2151 ordinary identifier, but a warning is issued each time it is used.
2152 (These warnings currently don't conform to the warnings framework of
2153 PEP 230; we intend to fix this in 2.2a2.)
2154
Marc-André Lemburg12e74b32001-05-22 08:58:23 +00002155- The UTF-16 codec was modified to be more RFC compliant. It will now
2156 only remove BOM characters at the start of the string and then
2157 only if running in native mode (UTF-16-LE and -BE won't remove a
2158 leading BMO character).
2159
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00002160- Strings now have a new method .decode() to complement the already
2161 existing .encode() method. These two methods provide direct access
2162 to the corresponding decoders and encoders of the registered codecs.
2163
2164 To enhance the usability of the .encode() method, the special
2165 casing of Unicode object return values was dropped (Unicode objects
2166 were auto-magically converted to string using the default encoding).
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00002167
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00002168 Both methods will now return whatever the codec in charge of the
2169 requested encoding returns as object, e.g. Unicode codecs will
2170 return Unicode objects when decoding is requested ("äöü".decode("latin-1")
2171 will return u"äöü"). This enables codec writer to create codecs
2172 for various simple to use conversions.
2173
2174 New codecs were added to demonstrate these new features (the .encode()
2175 and .decode() columns indicate the type of the returned objects):
2176
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002177 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
2178 |Name | .encode() | .decode() | Description |
2179 +=========+===========+===========+=============================+
2180 |uu | string | string | UU codec (e.g. for email) |
2181 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
2182 |base64 | string | string | base64 codec |
2183 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
2184 |quopri | string | string | quoted-printable codec |
2185 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
2186 |zlib | string | string | zlib compression |
2187 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
2188 |hex | string | string | 2-byte hex codec |
2189 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
2190 |rot-13 | string | Unicode | ROT-13 Unicode charmap codec|
2191 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00002192
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00002193- Some operating systems now support the concept of a default Unicode
2194 encoding for file system operations. Notably, Windows supports 'mbcs'
2195 as the default. The Macintosh will also adopt this concept in the medium
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00002196 term, although the default encoding for that platform will be other than
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00002197 'mbcs'.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00002198
2199 On operating system that support non-ASCII filenames, it is common for
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00002200 functions that return filenames (such as os.listdir()) to return Python
2201 string objects pre-encoded using the default file system encoding for
2202 the platform. As this encoding is likely to be different from Python's
2203 default encoding, converting this name to a Unicode object before passing
2204 it back to the Operating System would result in a Unicode error, as Python
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00002205 would attempt to use its default encoding (generally ASCII) rather than
2206 the default encoding for the file system.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00002207
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00002208 In general, this change simply removes surprises when working with
2209 Unicode and the file system, making these operations work as you expect,
2210 increasing the transparency of Unicode objects in this context.
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00002211 See [????] for more details, including examples.
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00002212
Tim Peters61dff2b2001-05-08 15:43:37 +00002213- Float (and complex) literals in source code were evaluated to full
2214 precision only when running from a .py file; the same code loaded from a
2215 .pyc (or .pyo) file could suffer numeric differences starting at about the
2216 12th significant decimal digit. For example, on a machine with IEEE-754
2217 floating arithmetic,
2218
2219 x = 9007199254740992.0
2220 print long(x)
2221
2222 printed 9007199254740992 if run directly from .py, but 9007199254740000
2223 if from a compiled (.pyc or .pyo) file. This was due to marshal using
2224 str(float) instead of repr(float) when building code objects. marshal
2225 now uses repr(float) instead, which should reproduce floats to full
2226 machine precision (assuming the platform C float<->string I/O conversion
2227 functions are of good quality).
2228
2229 This may cause floating-point results to change in some cases, and
2230 usually for the better, but may also cause numerically unstable
2231 algorithms to break.
2232
Tim Peters2f228e72001-05-13 00:19:31 +00002233- The implementation of dicts suffers fewer collisions, which has speed
2234 benefits. However, the order in which dict entries appear in dict.keys(),
2235 dict.values() and dict.items() may differ from previous releases for a
2236 given dict. Nothing is defined about this order, so no program should
2237 rely on it. Nevertheless, it's easy to write test cases that rely on the
2238 order by accident, typically because of printing the str() or repr() of a
2239 dict to an "expected results" file. See Lib/test/test_support.py's new
2240 sortdict(dict) function for a simple way to display a dict in sorted
2241 order.
2242
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00002243- Many other small changes to dicts were made, resulting in faster
2244 operation along the most common code paths.
2245
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00002246- Dictionary objects now support the "in" operator: "x in dict" means
2247 the same as dict.has_key(x).
2248
Barry Warsaw51acc8d2001-06-26 20:12:50 +00002249- The update() method of dictionaries now accepts generic mapping
2250 objects. Specifically the argument object must support the .keys()
2251 and __getitem__() methods. This allows you to say, for example,
2252 {}.update(UserDict())
2253
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00002254- Iterators were added; this is a generalized way of providing values
2255 to a for loop. See PEP 234. There's a new built-in function iter()
2256 to return an iterator. There's a new protocol to get the next value
2257 from an iterator using the next() method (in Python) or the
2258 tp_iternext slot (in C). There's a new protocol to get iterators
2259 using the __iter__() method (in Python) or the tp_iter slot (in C).
2260 Iterating (i.e. a for loop) over a dictionary generates its keys.
2261 Iterating over a file generates its lines.
2262
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00002263- The following functions were generalized to work nicely with iterator
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00002264 arguments::
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002265
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00002266 map(), filter(), reduce(), zip()
Tim Peters8572b4f2001-05-06 01:05:02 +00002267 list(), tuple() (PySequence_Tuple() and PySequence_Fast() in C API)
2268 max(), min()
Tim Peters1af03e92001-05-26 19:37:54 +00002269 join() method of strings
2270 extend() method of lists
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00002271 'x in y' and 'x not in y' (PySequence_Contains() in C API)
2272 operator.countOf() (PySequence_Count() in C API)
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002273 right-hand side of assignment statements with multiple targets, such as ::
Tim Petersd6d010b2001-06-21 02:49:55 +00002274 x, y, z = some_iterable_object_returning_exactly_3_values
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00002275
Tim Petersd85e1022001-05-11 21:51:48 +00002276- Accessing module attributes is significantly faster (for example,
2277 random.random or os.path or yourPythonModule.yourAttribute).
2278
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00002279- Comparing dictionary objects via == and != is faster, and now works even
2280 if the keys and values don't support comparisons other than ==.
2281
Tim Peters95bf9392001-05-10 08:32:44 +00002282- Comparing dictionaries in ways other than == and != is slower: there were
2283 insecurities in the dict comparison implementation that could cause Python
2284 to crash if the element comparison routines for the dict keys and/or
2285 values mutated the dicts. Making the code bulletproof slowed it down.
2286
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00002287- Collisions in dicts are resolved via a new approach, which can help
2288 dramatically in bad cases. For example, looking up every key in a dict
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00002289 d with d.keys() == [i << 16 for i in range(20000)] is approximately 500x
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00002290 faster now. Thanks to Christian Tismer for pointing out the cause and
2291 the nature of an effective cure (last December! better late than never).
Tim Peters15d49292001-05-27 07:39:22 +00002292
Tim Peters52e155e2001-06-16 05:42:57 +00002293- repr() is much faster for large containers (dict, list, tuple).
2294
2295
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00002296Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002297-------
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00002298
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00002299- The constants ascii_letters, ascii_lowercase. and ascii_uppercase
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00002300 were added to the string module. These a locale-independent
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00002301 constants, unlike letters, lowercase, and uppercase. These are now
2302 use in appropriate locations in the standard library.
2303
Martin v. Löwisf0473d52001-07-18 16:17:16 +00002304- The flags used in dlopen calls can now be configured using
2305 sys.setdlopenflags and queried using sys.getdlopenflags.
2306
Guido van Rossumc7e4aca2001-07-12 11:54:37 +00002307- Fredrik Lundh's xmlrpclib is now a standard library module. This
2308 provides full client-side XML-RPC support. In addition,
2309 Demo/xmlrpc/ contains two server frameworks (one SocketServer-based,
2310 one asyncore-based). Thanks to Eric Raymond for the documentation.
2311
Guido van Rossum643d3912001-07-05 14:46:25 +00002312- The xrange() object is simplified: it no longer supports slicing,
2313 repetition, comparisons, efficient 'in' checking, the tolist()
2314 method, or the start, stop and step attributes. See PEP 260.
2315
Martin v. Löwisebf94db2001-06-06 06:25:40 +00002316- A new function fnmatch.filter to filter lists of file names was added.
2317
Barry Warsawffd674d2001-05-22 16:00:10 +00002318- calendar.py uses month and day names based on the current locale.
2319
Guido van Rossum2e0a6542001-05-15 02:14:44 +00002320- strop is now *really* obsolete (this was announced before with 1.6),
2321 and issues DeprecationWarning when used (except for the four items
2322 that are still imported into string.py).
2323
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00002324- Cookie.py now sorts key+value pairs by key in output strings.
2325
2326- pprint.isrecursive(object) didn't correctly identify recursive objects.
2327 Now it does.
2328
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00002329- pprint functions now much faster for large containers (tuple, list, dict).
2330
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00002331- New 'q' and 'Q' format codes in the struct module, corresponding to C
2332 types "long long" and "unsigned long long" (on Windows, __int64). In
2333 native mode, these can be used only when the platform C compiler supports
2334 these types (when HAVE_LONG_LONG is #define'd by the Python config
2335 process), and then they inherit the sizes and alignments of the C types.
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00002336 In standard mode, 'q' and 'Q' are supported on all platforms, and are
2337 8-byte integral types.
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00002338
Guido van Rossum83213cc2001-06-12 16:48:52 +00002339- The site module installs a new built-in function 'help' that invokes
2340 pydoc.help. It must be invoked as 'help()'; when invoked as 'help',
2341 it displays a message reminding the user to use 'help()' or
2342 'help(object)'.
2343
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00002344Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002345-----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00002346
2347- New test_mutants.py runs dict comparisons where the key and value
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00002348 comparison operators mutate the dicts randomly during comparison. This
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00002349 rapidly causes Python to crash under earlier releases (not for the faint
2350 of heart: it can also cause Win9x to freeze or reboot!).
2351
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00002352- New test_pprint.py verifies that pprint.isrecursive() and
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00002353 pprint.isreadable() return sensible results. Also verifies that simple
2354 cases produce correct output.
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00002355
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00002356C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002357-----
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00002358
2359- Removed the unused last_is_sticky argument from the internal
2360 _PyTuple_Resize(). If this affects you, you were cheating.
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002361
2362----
2363
2364**(For information about older versions, consult the HISTORY file.)**