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Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001+++++++++++
2Python News
3+++++++++++
4
Skip Montanaro4a385832002-09-20 17:08:52 +00005(editors: check NEWS.help for information about editing NEWS using ReST.)
6
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00007What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 1?
8=================================
9
10*Release date: DD-MMM-YYYY*
11
12Core and builtins
13-----------------
14
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +000015- Enabled the profiling of C extension functions (and builtins) - check
16 new documentation and modified profiler and bdb modules for more details
17
Nicholas Bastinabce8a62004-03-21 20:24:07 +000018- Set file.name to the object passed to open (instead of a new string)
19
Nicholas Bastina7604bf2004-03-21 18:37:23 +000020- Moved tracebackobject into traceback.h and renamed to PyTracebackObject
21
Raymond Hettingerff5bc502004-03-21 15:12:00 +000022- Optimized the byte coding for multiple assignments like "a,b=b,a" and
23 "a,b,c=1,2,3". Improves their speed by 25% to 30%.
24
Brett Cannon4f653312004-03-20 22:52:14 +000025- Limit the nested depth of a tuple for the second argument to isinstance()
26 and issubclass() to the recursion limit of the interpreter.
27 Fixes bug #858016 .
28
Raymond Hettingerade08ea2004-03-18 09:48:12 +000029- Optimized dict iterators, creating separate types for each
30 and having them reveal their length. Also optimized the
31 methods: keys(), values(), and items().
32
Raymond Hettingerdd80f762004-03-07 07:31:06 +000033- Implemented a newcode opcode, LIST_APPEND, that simplifies
34 the generated bytecode for list comprehensions and further
35 improves their performance (about 35%).
36
Michael W. Hudsond3b33b52004-02-19 19:35:22 +000037- Implemented rich comparisons for floats, which seems to make
38 comparisons involving NaNs somewhat less surprising when the
39 underlying C compiler actually implements C99 semantics.
40
Raymond Hettingerfa7b9d82004-02-15 04:06:39 +000041- Optimized list.extend() to save memory and no longer create
42 intermediate sequences. Also, extend() now pre-allocates the
43 needed memory whenever the length of the iterable is known in
44 advance -- this halves the time to extend the list.
45
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +000046- Optimized list resize operations to make fewer calls to the system
47 realloc(). Significantly speeds up list appends, list pops,
48 list comprehensions, and the list contructor (when the input iterable
49 length is not known).
50
51- Changed the internal list over-allocation scheme. For larger lists,
52 overallocation ranged between 3% and 25%. Now, it is a constant 12%.
Raymond Hettingerab517d22004-02-14 18:34:46 +000053 For smaller lists (n<8), overallocation was upto eight elements. Now,
54 the overallocation is no more than three elements -- this improves space
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +000055 utilization for applications that have large numbers of small lists.
56
Raymond Hettinger31017ae2004-03-04 08:25:44 +000057- The dict.update() method now accepts all the same argument forms
58 as the dict() constructor. This now includes item lists and/or
59 keyword arguments.
60
Michael W. Hudsonecfeb7f2004-02-12 15:28:27 +000061- Support for arbitrary objects supporting the read-only buffer
62 interface as the co_code field of code objects (something that was
63 only possible to create from C code) has been removed.
64
Fred Drake228765b2004-02-06 04:15:22 +000065- Made omitted callback and None equivalent for weakref.ref() and
66 weakref.proxy(); the None case wasn't handled correctly in all
67 cases.
68
69- Fixed problem where PyWeakref_NewRef() and PyWeakref_NewProxy()
70 assumed that initial existing entries in an object's weakref list
71 would not be removed while allocating a new weakref object. Since
72 GC could be invoked at that time, however, that assumption was
73 invalid. In a truly obscure case of GC being triggered during
74 creation for a new weakref object for an referent which already
75 has a weakref without a callback which is only referenced from
76 cyclic trash, a memory error can occur. This consistently created a
77 segfault in a debug build, but provided less predictable behavior in
78 a release build.
79
Hye-Shik Changff83c2b2004-02-02 13:39:01 +000080- input() builtin function now respects compiler flags such as
81 __future__ statements. SF patch 876178.
82
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +000083- Removed PendingDeprecationWarning from apply(). apply() remains
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +000084 deprecated, but the nuisance warning will not be issued.
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +000085
Tim Peters1d7323e2003-12-01 21:35:27 +000086- At Python shutdown time (Py_Finalize()), 2.3 called cyclic garbage
87 collection twice, both before and after tearing down modules. The
88 call after tearing down modules has been disabled, because too much
89 of Python has been torn down then for __del__ methods and weakref
90 callbacks to execute sanely. The most common symptom was a sequence
91 of uninformative messages on stderr when Python shut down, produced
92 by threads trying to raise exceptions, but unable to report the nature
93 of their problems because too much of the sys module had already been
94 destroyed.
95
Guido van Rossum6c9e1302003-11-29 23:52:13 +000096- Removed FutureWarnings related to hex/oct literals and conversions
97 and left shifts. (Thanks to Kalle Svensson for SF patch 849227.)
98 This addresses most of the remaining semantic changes promised by
99 PEP 237, except for repr() of a long, which still shows the trailing
100 'L'. The PEP appears to promise warnings for operations that
101 changed semantics compared to Python 2.3, but this is not
102 implemented; we've suffered through enough warnings related to
103 hex/oct literals and I think it's best to be silent now.
104
Raymond Hettinger4f8f9762003-11-26 08:21:35 +0000105- For str and unicode objects, the ljust(), center(), and rjust()
106 methods now accept an optional argument specifying a fill
107 character other than a space.
108
Guido van Rossumbaf0f8f2003-11-22 23:55:50 +0000109- When method objects have an attribute that can be satisfied either
110 by the function object or by the method object, the function
111 object's attribute usually wins. Christian Tismer pointed out that
112 that this is really a mistake, because this only happens for special
113 methods (like __reduce__) where the method object's version is
114 really more appropriate than the function's attribute. So from now
115 on, all method attributes will have precedence over function
116 attributes with the same name.
117
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +0000118- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 839548: if a weakref with a callback,
119 its callback, and its weakly referenced object, all became part of
120 cyclic garbage during a single run of garbage collection, the order
121 in which they were torn down was unpredictable. It was possible for
122 the callback to see partially-torn-down objects, leading to immediate
123 segfaults, or, if the callback resurrected garbage objects, to
124 resurrect insane objects that caused segfaults (or other surprises)
125 later. In one sense this wasn't surprising, because Python's cyclic gc
126 had no knowledge of Python's weakref objects. It does now. When
127 weakrefs with callbacks become part of cyclic garbage now, those
128 weakrefs are cleared first. The callbacks don't trigger then,
129 preventing the problems. If you need callbacks to trigger, then just
130 as when cyclic gc is not involved, you need to write your code so
131 that weakref objects outlive the objects they weakly reference.
Raymond Hettingera690a992003-11-16 16:17:49 +0000132
Tim Petersadd09b42003-11-12 20:43:28 +0000133- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 840829: if cyclic garbage collection
134 happened to occur during a weakref callback for a new-style class
135 instance, subtle memory corruption was the result (in a release build;
136 in a debug build, a segfault occurred reliably very soon after).
137 This has been repaired.
138
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +0000139- Compiler flags set in PYTHONSTARTUP are now active in __main__.
140
141- Added two builtin types, set() and frozenset().
142
Raymond Hettinger85c20a42003-11-06 14:06:48 +0000143- Added a reversed() builtin function that returns a reverse iterator
144 over a sequence.
145
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +0000146- Added a sorted() builtin function that returns a new sorted list
147 from any iterable.
148
Martin v. Löwis01a74b22003-10-19 18:30:01 +0000149- CObjects are now mutable (on the C level) through PyCObject_SetVoidPtr.
150
Raymond Hettinger42b1ba32003-10-16 03:41:09 +0000151- list.sort() now supports three keyword arguments: cmp, key, and reverse.
152 The key argument can be a function of one argument that extracts a
153 comparison key from the original record: mylist.sort(key=str.lower).
154 The reverse argument is a boolean value and if True will change the
155 sort order as if the comparison arguments were reversed. In addition,
156 the documentation has been amended to provide a guarantee that all sorts
157 starting with Py2.3 are guaranteed to be stable (the relative order of
158 records with equal keys is unchanged).
159
Marc-André Lemburgd7160f82003-09-22 11:14:40 +0000160- Added test whether wchar_t is signed or not. A signed wchar_t is not
161 usable as internal unicode type base for Py_UNICODE since the
162 unicode implementation assumes an unsigned type.
163
Jeremy Hyltond8082792003-09-16 19:41:39 +0000164- Fixed a bug in the cache of length-one Unicode strings that could
165 lead to a seg fault. The specific problem occurred when an earlier,
166 non-fatal error left an uninitialized Unicode object in the
167 freelist.
168
Raymond Hettinger9bfe5332003-08-27 04:55:52 +0000169- The % formatting operator now supports '%F' which is equivalent to
170 '%f'. This has always been documented but never implemented.
171
Tim Peters465fa3d2003-08-15 01:16:37 +0000172- complex(obj) could leak a little memory if obj wasn't a string or
173 number.
174
Raymond Hettingereaef6152003-08-02 07:42:57 +0000175- zip() with no arguments now returns an empty list instead of raising
176 a TypeError exception.
177
Guido van Rossum02c58f82003-10-08 21:08:29 +0000178- obj.__contains__() now returns True/False instead of 1/0. SF patch
179 820195.
180
Armin Rigo2b3eb402003-10-28 12:05:48 +0000181- Python no longer tries to be smart about recursive comparisons.
182 When comparing containers with cyclic references to themselves it
183 will now just hit the recursion limit. See SF patch 825639.
184
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +0000185- str and unicode builtin types now have rsplit() method that is
186 same as split() except that it scans the string from the end
187 working towards the beginning. See SF feature request 801847.
Hye-Shik Chang060ebed2003-12-15 18:51:19 +0000188
Jim Fulton8a1a5942004-02-08 04:21:26 +0000189- Fixed a bug in object.__reduce_ex__ when using protocol 2. Failure
190 to clear the error when attempts to get the __getstate__ attribute
191 fail caused intermittent errors and odd behavior.
192
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +0000193- buffer objects based on other objects no longer cache a pointer to
194 the data and the data length. Instead, the appropriate tp_as_buffer
195 method is called as necessary.
196
197
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000198Extension modules
199-----------------
200
Brett Cannon06c34792004-03-23 23:16:54 +0000201- socket.sslerror is now a subclass of socket.error . Also added
202 socket.error to the socket module's C API.
203
Hye-Shik Changc3a87b82004-03-21 19:34:30 +0000204- Bug #920575: A problem that _locale module segfaults on
205 nl_langinfo(ERA) caused by GNU libc's illegal NULL return is fixed.
206
Raymond Hettinger6e2ee862004-03-14 04:37:50 +0000207- array objects now support the copy module. Also, their resizing
208 scheme has been updated the same as for list objects. The improves
Raymond Hettinger49f9bd12004-03-14 05:43:59 +0000209 the performance (speed and memory usage) of append() operations.
210 Also, array.extend() now accepts any iterable argument for repeated
211 appends without needing to create another temporary array.
Raymond Hettinger3aa82c02004-03-13 18:18:51 +0000212
Raymond Hettinger3e47f652004-03-08 18:22:35 +0000213- cStringIO.writelines() now accepts any iterable argument and writes
214 the lines one at a time rather than joining them and writing once.
215 Made a parallel change to StringIO.writelines(). Saves memory and
216 makes suitable for use with generator expressions.
217
Brett Cannond1080a32004-03-02 04:38:10 +0000218- time.strftime() now checks that the values in its time tuple argument
219 are within the proper boundaries to prevent possible crashes from the
220 platform's C library implementation of strftime(). Can possibly
221 break code that uses values outside the range that didn't cause
222 problems previously (such as sitting day of year to 0). Fixes bug
223 #897625.
224
Martin v. Löwis12af0482004-01-31 12:34:17 +0000225- The socket module now supports Bluetooth sockets, if the
226 system has <bluetooth/bluetooth.h>
227
Raymond Hettinger756b3f32004-01-29 06:37:52 +0000228- Added a collections module containing a new datatype, deque(),
229 offering high-performance, thread-safe, memory friendly appends
230 and pops on either side of the deque.
231
232- Several modules now take advantage of collections.deque() for
233 improved performance: Queue, mutex, shlex, threading, and pydoc.
234
Raymond Hettinger166958b2003-12-01 13:18:39 +0000235- The operator module has two new functions, attrgetter() and
236 itemgetter() which are useful for creating fast data extractor
237 functions for map(), list.sort(), itertools.groupby(), and
238 other functions that expect a function argument.
239
Martin v. Löwis94681fc2003-11-27 19:40:22 +0000240- socket.SHUT_{RD,WR,RDWR} was added.
241
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +0000242- os.getsid was added.
243
Guido van Rossum16b9fa82003-10-23 23:54:57 +0000244- The pwd module incorrectly advertised its struct type as
245 struct_pwent; this has been renamed to struct_passwd. (The old name
246 is still supported for backwards compatibility.)
247
Fred Drakede050322003-10-21 15:41:59 +0000248- The xml.parsers.expat module now provides Expat 1.95.7.
249
Martin v. Löwis3bbd6542003-10-03 13:57:37 +0000250- socket.IPPROTO_IPV6 was added.
251
Martin v. Löwise7a97962003-09-20 16:08:33 +0000252- readline.clear_history was added.
253
Brett Cannon62dba4c2003-09-10 19:37:42 +0000254- select.select() now accepts sequences for its first three arguments.
255
Raymond Hettinger5475f232003-08-08 12:20:03 +0000256- cStringIO now supports the f.closed attribute.
257
Anthony Baxter83f52912003-08-05 06:33:56 +0000258- The signal module now exposes SIGRTMIN and SIGRTMAX (if available).
259
Andrew M. Kuchling69f31eb2003-08-13 23:11:04 +0000260- curses module now supports use_default_colors(). [patch #739124]
261
Anthony Baxter5c68ef02003-10-04 08:04:04 +0000262- Bug #811028: ncurses.h breakage on FreeBSD/MacOS X
263
264- Bug #814613: INET_ADDRSTRLEN fix needed for all compilers on SGI
265
Gustavo Niemeyerad3fc442003-10-17 22:13:16 +0000266- Implemented non-recursive SRE matching scheme (#757624).
267
268- Implemented (?(id/name)yes|no) support in SRE (#572936).
269
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +0000270- random.seed() with no arguments or None uses time.time() as a default
271 seed. Modified to match Py2.2 behavior and use fractional seconds so
272 that successive runs are more likely to produce different sequences.
273
274- random.Random has a new method, getrandbits(k), which returns an int
275 with k random bits. This method is now an optional part of the API
276 for user defined generators. Any generator that defines genrandbits()
277 can now use randrange() for ranges with a length >= 2**53. Formerly,
278 randrange would return only even numbers for ranges that large (see
279 SF bug #812202). Generators that do not define genrandbits() now
280 issue a warning when randrange() is called with a range that large.
281
Raymond Hettingerd25c1c62003-12-06 16:23:06 +0000282- itertools has a new function, groupby() for aggregating iterables
283 into groups sharing the same key (as determined by a key function).
284 It offers some of functionality of SQL's groupby keyword and of
285 the Unix uniq filter.
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +0000286
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +0000287- itertools now has a new function, tee() which produces two independent
288 iterators from a single iterable.
289
290- itertools.izip() with no arguments now returns an empty iterator instead
291 of raising a TypeError exception.
292
Gustavo Niemeyera6e436e2004-02-14 00:02:45 +0000293- Fixed #853061: allow BZ2Compressor.compress() to receive an empty string
294 as parameter.
295
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000296Library
297-------
298
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +0000299- Fixed a caching bug in platform.platform() where the argument of 'terse' was
300 not taken into consideration when caching value.
301
Nicholas Bastin824b1b22004-03-23 18:44:39 +0000302- Added two new command-line arguments for profile (output file and
303 default sort).
304
Nicholas Bastin1eb4bfc2004-03-22 20:12:56 +0000305- Added global runctx function to profile module
306
Martin v. Löwis347c30d2004-03-21 15:29:41 +0000307- Add hlist missing entryconfigure and entrycget methods.
308
Hye-Shik Chang4a7ad1a2004-03-19 08:11:56 +0000309- The ptcp154 codec was added for Kazakh character set support.
310
Martin v. Löwisa79449e2004-02-15 21:19:18 +0000311- Support non-anonymous ftp URLs in urllib2.
312
Marc-André Lemburg57cb68f2004-01-20 18:24:34 +0000313- The encodings package will now applies codec name aliases
314 first before starting to try the import of the codec module.
315 This simplifies overriding built-in codecs with external
316 packages, e.g. the included CJK codecs with the JapaneseCodecs
317 package, by adjusting the aliases dictionary in encodings.aliases
318 accordingly.
319
Barry Warsaw30ff12f2004-01-04 01:13:43 +0000320- base64 now supports RFC 3548 Base16, Base32, and Base64 encoding and
321 decoding standards.
322
Jeremy Hylton37c5f2a2003-12-14 05:29:45 +0000323- urllib2 now supports processors. A processor is a handler that
324 implements an xxx_request or xxx_response method. These methods are
325 called for all requests.
326
Thomas Hellerc7501d52003-12-05 20:28:07 +0000327- distutils compilers now compile source files in the same order as
328 they are passed to the compiler.
329
Walter Dörwaldc8de4582003-12-03 20:26:05 +0000330- pprint.pprint() and pprint.pformat() now have additional parameters
331 indent, width and depth.
332
Walter Dörwald7a7ede52003-12-03 20:15:28 +0000333- Patch #750542: pprint now will pretty print subclasses of list, tuple
334 and dict too, as long as they don't overwrite __repr__().
335
Thomas Hellerb3105912003-11-28 19:42:56 +0000336- Bug #848614: distutils' msvccompiler fails to find the MSVC6
337 compiler because of incomplete registry entries.
338
Martin v. Löwisaf7dc8d2003-11-19 19:51:55 +0000339- httplib.HTTP.putrequest now offers to omit the implicit Accept-Encoding.
340
Thomas Hellercf0005b2003-11-14 10:33:20 +0000341- Patch #841977: modulefinder didn't find extension modules in packages
342
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +0000343- imaplib.IMAP4.thread was added.
344
Guido van Rossum967b0632003-11-10 02:27:19 +0000345- Plugged a minor hole in tempfile.mktemp() due to the use of
346 os.path.exists(), switched to using os.lstat() directly if possible.
347
Raymond Hettinger0c410272004-01-05 10:13:35 +0000348- bisect.py and heapq.py now have underlying C implementations
349 for better performance
Raymond Hettingerb3af1812003-11-08 10:24:38 +0000350
Neil Schemenauerf607fc52003-11-05 23:03:00 +0000351- traceback.format_exc has been added (similar to print_exc but it returns
352 a string).
353
Martin v. Löwis45394c22003-10-31 13:49:36 +0000354- xmlrpclib.MultiCall has been added.
355
Martin v. Löwis48440b72003-10-31 12:52:35 +0000356- poplib.POP3_SSL has been added.
357
Martin v. Löwisd6625482003-10-12 17:37:01 +0000358- tmpfile.mkstemp now returns an absolute path even if dir is relative.
359
Brett Cannon5d9ca4e2003-10-12 04:38:48 +0000360- urlparse is RFC 2396 compliant.
361
Skip Montanarodef99342003-10-03 14:07:07 +0000362- The fieldnames argument to the csv module's DictReader constructor is now
363 optional. If omitted, the first row of the file will be used as the
364 list of fieldnames.
365
Raymond Hettinger9a80c5d2003-09-23 20:21:01 +0000366- encodings.bz2_codec was added for access to bz2 compression
367 using "a long string".encode('bz2')
368
Guido van Rossum0e5a51d2003-09-22 15:03:11 +0000369- Various improvements to unittest.py, realigned with PyUnit CVS.
370
Martin v. Löwisc6bb6c02003-09-20 15:52:21 +0000371- dircache now passes exceptions to the caller, instead of returning
372 empty lists.
373
Raymond Hettingerdeadbf52003-09-12 06:33:37 +0000374- The bsddb module and dbhash module now support the iterator and
375 mapping protocols which make them more substitutable for dictionaries
376 and shelves.
377
Skip Montanaro3f7a9482003-09-06 19:52:12 +0000378- The csv module's DictReader and DictWriter classes now accept keyword
379 arguments. This was an omission in the initial implementation.
380
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +0000381- The email package handles some RFC 2231 parameters with missing
Barry Warsaw2f5bf172003-09-03 04:09:49 +0000382 CHARSET fields better. It also includes a patch to parameter
383 parsing when semicolons appear inside quotes.
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +0000384
Raymond Hettinger6a180122003-08-17 08:34:09 +0000385- sets.py now runs under Py2.2. In addition, the argument restrictions
386 for most set methods (but not the operators) have been relaxed to
Raymond Hettinger70b9f492003-11-19 15:52:14 +0000387 allow any iterable.
Raymond Hettingeree562fc2003-08-15 21:17:04 +0000388
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +0000389- _strptime.py now has a behind-the-scenes caching mechanism for the most
Brett Cannonb7150a22003-08-05 06:27:04 +0000390 recent TimeRE instance used along with the last five unique directive
391 patterns. The overall module was also made more thread-safe.
392
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +0000393- random.cunifvariate() and random.stdgamma() were deprecated in Py2.3
394 and removed in Py2.4.
395
Anthony Baxter92bee362003-11-04 14:35:49 +0000396- Bug #823328: urllib2.py's HTTP Digest Auth support works again.
397
Hye-Shik Chang84a99312004-01-17 14:59:36 +0000398- Patch #873597: CJK codecs are imported into rank of default codecs.
399
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000400Tools/Demos
401-----------
402
Skip Montanarod5a21fd2004-01-27 14:49:04 +0000403- A hotshotmain script was added to the Tools/scripts directory that
404 makes it easy to run a script under control of the hotshot profiler.
405
Skip Montanaro030f68a2003-10-28 16:24:00 +0000406- The db2pickle and pickle2db scripts can now dump/load gdbm files.
407
Skip Montanaroe2b61e02004-03-03 17:42:08 +0000408- The file order on the command line of the pickle2db script was reversed.
409 It is now [ picklefile ] dbfile. This provides better symmetry with
410 db2pickle. The file arguments to both scripts are now source followed by
411 destination in situations where both files are given.
412
Skip Montanarofd4fa882003-09-10 19:04:13 +0000413- The pydoc script will display a link to the module documentation for
414 modules determined to be part of the core distribution. The documentation
415 base directory defaults to http://www.python.org/doc/current/lib/ but can
416 be changed by setting the PYTHONDOCS environment variable.
417
Raymond Hettingere41d4c82003-08-25 04:39:55 +0000418- texcheck.py now detects double word errors.
419
Tim Peters1a3abcb2003-08-18 23:52:09 +0000420- md5sum.py mistakenly opened input files in text mode by default, a
421 silent and dangerous change from previous releases. It once again
422 opens input files in binary mode by default. The -t and -b flags
423 remain for compatibility with the 2.3 release, but -b is the default
424 now.
425
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000426- py-electric-colon now works when pending-delete/delete-selection mode is
427 in effect
428
429- py-help-at-point is no longer bound to the F1 key - it's still bound to
430 C-c C-h
431
Barry Warsaw6ec58ca2003-09-03 03:20:37 +0000432- Pynche was fixed to not crash when there is no ~/.pynche file and no
433 -d option was given.
434
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000435Build
436-----
437
Skip Montanaro7befb992004-02-10 16:50:21 +0000438- Support for missing ANSI C header files (limits.h, stddef.h, etc) was
439 removed.
440
Skip Montanarodb608052004-02-07 13:53:46 +0000441- Systems requiring the D4, D6 or D7 variants of pthreads are no longer
442 supported (see PEP 11).
443
444- Universal newline support can no longer be disabled (see PEP 11).
445
Skip Montanarocd1f7432004-01-17 14:22:44 +0000446- Support for DGUX, SunOS 4, IRIX 4 and Minix was removed (see PEP 11).
447
448- Support for systems requiring --with-dl-dld or --with-sgi-dl was removed
449 (see PEP 11).
450
451- Tests for sizeof(char) were removed since ANSI C mandates that
452 sizeof(char) must be 1.
453
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000454C API
455-----
456
Raymond Hettingerc1e4f9d2004-03-12 08:04:00 +0000457- Added a new macro, PySequence_Fast_ITEMS, which retrieves a fast sequence's
458 underlying array of PyObject pointers. Useful for high speed looping.
459
Raymond Hettinger8f5cdaa2003-12-13 11:26:12 +0000460- Created a new method flag, METH_COEXIST, which causes a method to be loaded
461 even if already defined by a slot wrapper. This allows a __contains__
462 method, for example, to co-exist with a defined sq_contains slot. This
463 is helpful because the PyCFunction can take advantage of optimized calls
464 whenever METH_O or METH_NOARGS flags are defined.
465
Raymond Hettingerbc0f2ab2003-11-25 21:12:14 +0000466- Added a new function, PyDict_Contains(d, k) which is like
467 PySequence_Contains() but is specific to dictionaries and executes
468 about 10% faster.
469
Brett Cannon26b3a7b2003-10-19 21:31:43 +0000470- Added three new macros: Py_RETURN_NONE, Py_RETURN_TRUE, and Py_RETURN_FALSE.
471 Each return the singleton they mention after Py_INCREF()ing them.
472
Raymond Hettingercb2da432003-10-12 18:24:34 +0000473- Added a new function, PyTuple_Pack(n, ...) for constructing tuples from a
474 variable length argument list of Python objects without having to invoke
475 the more complex machinery of Py_BuildValue(). PyTuple_Pack(3, a, b, c)
476 is equivalent to Py_BuildValue("(OOO)", a, b, c).
477
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000478New platforms
479-------------
480
481Tests
482-----
483
484Windows
485-------
486
Guido van Rossumfd25aca2003-11-30 22:10:15 +0000487- The _winreg module could segfault when reading very large registry
488 values, due to unchecked alloca() calls (SF bug 851056). The fix is
489 uses either PyMem_Malloc(n) or PyString_FromStringAndSize(NULL, n),
490 as appropriate, followed by a size check.
491
Tim Petersf1827cf2003-09-07 03:30:18 +0000492- file.truncate() could misbehave if the file was open for update
493 (modes r+, rb+, w+, wb+), and the most recent file operation before
494 the truncate() call was an input operation. SF bug 801631.
495
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000496Mac
497----
498
499
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +0000500What's New in Python 2.3 final?
501===============================
502
503*Release date: 29-Jul-2003*
504
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +0000505IDLE
506----
507
Tim Peters36c1afc2003-07-29 17:22:57 +0000508- Bug 778400: IDLE hangs when selecting "Edit with IDLE" from explorer.
509 This was unique to Windows, and was fixed by adding an -n switch to
510 the command the Windows installer creates to execute "Edit with IDLE"
511 context-menu actions.
512
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +0000513- IDLE displays a new message upon startup: some "personal firewall"
514 kinds of programs (for example, ZoneAlarm) open a dialog of their
515 own when any program opens a socket. IDLE does use sockets, talking
516 on the computer's internal loopback interface. This connection is not
517 visible on any external interface and no data is sent to or received
518 from the Internet. So, if you get such a dialog when opening IDLE,
519 asking whether to let pythonw.exe talk to address 127.0.0.1, say yes,
520 and rest assured no communication external to your machine is taking
521 place. If you don't allow it, IDLE won't be able to start.
522
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +0000523
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000524What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 2?
525=============================================
526
Tim Peters6560a252003-07-24 00:15:46 +0000527*Release date: 24-Jul-2003*
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000528
529Core and builtins
530-----------------
531
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +0000532- It is now possible to import from zipfiles containing additional
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000533 data bytes before the zip compatible archive. Zipfiles containing a
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +0000534 comment at the end are still unsupported.
535
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000536Extension modules
537-----------------
538
539- A longstanding bug in the parser module's initialization could cause
540 fatal internal refcount confusion when the module got initialized more
541 than once. This has been fixed.
542
Fred Drake01a43122003-07-21 17:17:10 +0000543- Fixed memory leak in pyexpat; using the parser's ParseFile() method
544 with open files that aren't instances of the standard file type
545 caused an instance of the bound .read() method to be leaked on every
546 call.
547
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000548- Fixed some leaks in the locale module.
549
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000550Library
551-------
552
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000553- Lib/encodings/rot_13.py when used as a script, now more properly
554 uses the first Python interpreter on your path.
555
556- Removed caching of TimeRE (and thus LocaleTime) in _strptime.py to
557 fix a locale related bug in the test suite. Although another patch
558 was needed to actually fix the problem, the cache code was not
559 restored.
560
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +0000561IDLE
562----
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000563
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +0000564- Calltips patches.
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000565
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000566Build
567-----
568
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000569- For MacOSX, added -mno-fused-madd to BASECFLAGS to fix test_coercion
570 on Panther (OSX 10.3).
571
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000572C API
573-----
574
575Windows
576-------
577
Tim Peters291f14e2003-07-22 02:50:01 +0000578- The tempfile module could do insane imports on Windows if PYTHONCASEOK
579 was set, making temp file creation impossible. Repaired.
580
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000581- Add a patch to workaround pthread_sigmask() bugs in Cygwin.
582
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000583Mac
584---
585
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000586- Various fixes to pimp.
587
588- Scripts runs with pythonw no longer had full window manager access.
589
590- Don't force boot-disk-only install, for reasons unknown it causes
591 more problems than it solves.
592
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000593
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000594What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 1?
595=============================================
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000596
Jeremy Hylton0ed18c22003-07-18 20:10:02 +0000597*Release date: 18-Jul-2003*
598
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000599Core and builtins
600-----------------
601
Tim Peterse5e065b2003-07-06 18:36:54 +0000602- The new function sys.getcheckinterval() returns the last value set
603 by sys.setcheckinterval().
604
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000605- Several bugs in the symbol table phase of the compiler have been
606 fixed. Errors could be lost and compilation could fail without
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000607 reporting an error. SF patch 763201.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000608
609- The interpreter is now more robust about importing the warnings
610 module. In an executable generated by freeze or similar programs,
611 earlier versions of 2.3 would fail if the warnings module could
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000612 not be found on the file system. Fixes SF bug 771097.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000613
614- A warning about assignments to module attributes that shadow
615 builtins, present in earlier releases of 2.3, has been removed.
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000616
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000617- It is not possible to create subclasses of builtin types like str
618 and tuple that define an itemsize. Earlier releases of Python 2.3
619 allowed this by mistake, leading to crashes and other problems.
620
621- The thread_id is now initialized to 0 in a non-thread build. SF bug
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000622 770247.
623
624- SF bug 762891: "del p[key]" on proxy object no longer raises SystemError.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000625
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000626Extension modules
627-----------------
628
629- weakref.proxy() can now handle "del obj[i]" for proxy objects
630 defining __delitem__. Formerly, it generated a SystemError.
631
632- SSL no longer crashes the interpreter when the remote side disconnects.
633
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +0000634- On Unix the mmap module can again be used to map device files.
635
Brett Cannon20def8b2003-07-01 05:16:08 +0000636- time.strptime now exclusively uses the Python implementation
637 contained within the _strptime module.
638
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000639- The print slot of weakref proxy objects was removed, because it was
640 not consistent with the object's repr slot.
641
642- The mmap module only checks file size for regular files, not
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000643 character or block devices. SF patch 708374.
644
645- The cPickle Pickler garbage collection support was fixed to traverse
646 the find_class attribute, if present.
647
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000648- There are several fixes for the bsddb3 wrapper module.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000649
650 bsddb3 no longer crashes if an environment is closed before a cursor
651 (SF bug 763298).
652
653 The DB and DBEnv set_get_returns_none function was extended to take
Barry Warsawd71a5512003-07-20 18:00:54 +0000654 a level instead of a boolean flag. The new level 2 means that in
655 addition, cursor.set()/.get() methods return None instead of raising
656 an exception.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000657
658 A typo was fixed in DBCursor.join_item(), preventing a crash.
659
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000660Library
661-------
662
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000663- distutils now supports MSVC 7.1
664
Raymond Hettinger71adf7e2003-07-16 19:25:22 +0000665- doctest now examines all docstrings by default. Previously, it would
666 skip over functions with private names (as indicated by the underscore
667 naming convention). The old default created too much of a risk that
668 user tests were being skipped inadvertently. Note, this change could
669 break code in the unlikely case that someone had intentionally put
670 failing tests in the docstrings of private functions. The breakage
671 is easily fixable by specifying the old behavior when calling testmod()
672 or Tester().
673
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000674- There were several fixes to the way dumbdbms are closed. It's vital
675 that a dumbdbm database be closed properly, else the on-disk data
676 and directory files can be left in mutually inconsistent states.
677 dumbdbm.py's _Database.__del__() method attempted to close the
678 database properly, but a shutdown race in _Database._commit() could
679 prevent this from working, so that a program trusting __del__() to
680 get the on-disk files in synch could be badly surprised. The race
681 has been repaired. A sync() method was also added so that shelve
682 can guarantee data is written to disk.
Tim Peters7a6c7332003-07-13 17:21:10 +0000683
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000684 The close() method can now be called more than once without complaint.
Tim Petersd7472ec2003-07-13 02:22:03 +0000685
Tim Peters59aba122003-07-01 20:01:55 +0000686- The classes in threading.py are now new-style classes. That they
687 weren't before was an oversight.
688
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000689- The urllib2 digest authentication handlers now define the correct
690 auth_header. The earlier versions would fail at runtime.
691
Neal Norwitze7dfe212003-07-01 14:59:46 +0000692- SF bug 763023: fix uncaught ZeroDivisionError in difflib ratio methods
693 when there are no lines.
694
Neal Norwitz3c0f2c92003-07-01 21:12:47 +0000695- SF bug 763637: fix exception in Tkinter with after_cancel
696 which could occur with Tk 8.4
697
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000698- SF bug 770601: CGIHTTPServer.py now passes the entire environment
699 to child processes.
700
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000701- SF bug 765238: add filter to fnmatch's __all__.
702
703- SF bug 748201: make time.strptime() error messages more helpful.
704
705- SF patch 764470: Do not dump the args attribute of a Fault object in
706 xmlrpclib.
707
708- SF patch 549151: urllib and urllib2 now redirect POSTs on 301
709 responses.
710
711- SF patch 766650: The whichdb module was fixed to recognize dbm files
712 generated by gdbm on OS/2 EMX.
713
714- SF bugs 763047 and 763052: fixes bug of timezone value being left as
715 -1 when ``time.tzname[0] == time.tzname[1] and not time.daylight``
716 is true when it should only when time.daylight is true.
717
718- SF bug 764548: re now allows subclasses of str and unicode to be
719 used as patterns.
720
721- SF bug 763637: In Tkinter, change after_cancel() to handle tuples
722 of varying sizes. Tk 8.4 returns a different number of values
723 than Tk 8.3.
724
725- SF bug 763023: difflib.ratio() did not catch zero division.
726
727- The Queue module now has an __all__ attribute.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000728
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000729Tools/Demos
730-----------
731
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000732- See Lib/idlelib/NEWS.txt for IDLE news.
733
Neal Norwitz592c4cc2003-07-01 04:14:28 +0000734- SF bug 753592: webchecker/wsgui now handles user supplied directories.
735
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000736- The trace.py script has been removed. It is now in the standard library.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000737
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000738Build
739-----
740
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000741- Python now compiles with -fno-strict-aliasing if possible (SF bug 766696).
742
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000743- The socket module compiles on IRIX 6.5.10.
744
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000745- An irix64 system is treated the same way as an irix6 system (SF
746 patch 764560).
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000747
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000748- Several definitions were missing on FreeBSD 5.x unless the
749 __BSD_VISIBLE symbol was defined. configure now defines it as
750 needed.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000751
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000752C API
753-----
754
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000755- Unicode objects now support mbcs as a built-in encoding, so the C
756 API can use it without deferring to the encodings package.
757
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000758Windows
759-------
760
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000761- The Windows implementation of PyThread_start_new_thread() never
762 checked error returns from Windows functions correctly. As a result,
763 it could claim to start a new thread even when the Microsoft
764 _beginthread() function failed (due to "too many threads" -- this is
765 on the order of thousands when it happens). In these cases, the
766 Python exception ::
767
768 thread.error: can't start new thread
769
770 is raised now.
771
772- SF bug 766669: Prevent a GPF on interpreter exit when sockets are in
773 use. The interpreter now calls WSACleanup() from Py_Finalize()
774 instead of from DLL teardown.
775
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000776Mac
777---
778
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000779- Bundlebuilder now inherits default values in the right way. It was
Walter Dörwald73a8a4b2003-07-30 12:14:02 +0000780 previously possible for app bundles to get a type of "BNDL" instead
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000781 of "APPL." Other improvements include, a --build-id option to
782 specify the CFBundleIdentifier and using the --python option to set
783 the executable in the bundle.
784
785- Fixed two bugs in MacOSX framework handling.
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000786
Jack Jansene0040412003-07-23 22:17:28 +0000787- pythonw did not allow user interaction in 2.3rc1, this has been fixed.
788
789- Python is now compiled with -mno-fused-madd, making all tests pass
790 on Panther.
791
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000792What's New in Python 2.3 beta 2?
793================================
794
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +0000795*Release date: 29-Jun-2003*
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000796
797Core and builtins
798-----------------
799
Barry Warsaw883f2232003-06-29 17:10:11 +0000800- A program can now set the environment variable PYTHONINSPECT to some
801 string value in Python, and cause the interpreter to enter the
802 interactive prompt at program exit, as if Python had been invoked
803 with the -i option.
804
Raymond Hettingerd05abde2003-06-17 05:05:49 +0000805- list.index() now accepts optional start and stop arguments. Similar
806 changes were made to UserList.index(). SF feature request 754014.
807
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +0000808- SF patch 751998 fixes an unwanted side effect of the previous fix
809 for SF bug 742860 (the next item).
810
Tim Peters50d8b8b2003-05-25 17:44:31 +0000811- SF bug 742860: "WeakKeyDictionary __delitem__ uses iterkeys". This
812 wasn't threadsafe, was very inefficient (expected time O(len(dict))
813 instead of O(1)), and could raise a spurious RuntimeError if another
814 thread mutated the dict during __delitem__, or if a comparison function
815 mutated it. It also neglected to raise KeyError when the key wasn't
816 present; didn't raise TypeError when the key wasn't of a weakly
817 referencable type; and broke various more-or-less obscure dict
818 invariants by using a sequence of equality comparisons over the whole
819 set of dict keys instead of computing the key's hash code to narrow
820 the search to those keys with the same hash code. All of these are
821 considered to be bugs. A new implementation of __delitem__ repairs all
822 that, but note that fixing these bugs may change visible behavior in
823 code relying (whether intentionally or accidentally) on old behavior.
Tim Peters886128f2003-05-25 01:45:11 +0000824
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000825- SF bug 734869: Fixed a compiler bug that caused a fatal error when
826 compiling a list comprehension that contained another list comprehension
827 embedded in a lambda expression.
828
Tim Peterse87568d2003-05-24 20:18:24 +0000829- SF bug 705231: builtin pow() no longer lets the platform C pow()
830 raise -1.0 to integer powers, because (at least) glibc gets it wrong
831 in some cases. The result should be -1.0 if the power is odd and 1.0
832 if the power is even, and any float with a sufficiently large exponent
833 is (mathematically) an exact even integer.
834
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000835- SF bug 759227: A new-style class that implements __nonzero__() must
836 return a bool or int (but not an int subclass) from that method. This
837 matches the restriction on classic classes.
838
Martin v. Löwis5467d4c2003-05-10 07:10:12 +0000839- The encoding attribute has been added for file objects, and set to
840 the terminal encoding on Unix and Windows.
841
Tim Peters015dd822003-05-04 04:16:52 +0000842- The softspace attribute of file objects became read-only by oversight.
843 It's writable again.
844
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +0000845- Reverted a 2.3 beta 1 change to iterators for subclasses of list and
846 tuple. By default, the iterators now access data elements directly
847 instead of going through __getitem__. If __getitem__ access is
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +0000848 preferred, then __iter__ can be overridden.
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +0000849
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000850- SF bug 735247: The staticmethod and super types participate in
851 garbage collection. Before this change, it was possible for leaks to
852 occur in functions with non-global free variables that used these types.
853
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000854Extension modules
855-----------------
856
Raymond Hettinger643bcec2003-06-29 03:29:42 +0000857- the socket module has a new exception, socket.timeout, to allow
858 timeouts to be handled separately from other socket errors.
859
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000860- SF bug 751276: cPickle has fixed to propagate exceptions raised in
861 user code. In earlier versions, cPickle caught and ignored any
862 exception when it performed operations that it expected to raise
863 specific exceptions like AttributeError.
864
865- cPickle Pickler and Unpickler objects now participate in garbage
866 collection.
867
Tim Peterscda32b72003-06-15 23:13:35 +0000868- mimetools.choose_boundary() could return duplicate strings at times,
869 especially likely on Windows. The strings returned are now guaranteed
870 unique within a single program run.
871
Brett Cannon4e64d782003-06-13 23:44:35 +0000872- thread.interrupt_main() raises KeyboardInterrupt in the main thread.
873 dummy_thread has also been modified to try to simulate the behavior.
874
Walter Dörwald9e46abe2003-05-18 03:15:10 +0000875- array.array.insert() now treats negative indices as being relative
876 to the end of the array, just like list.insert() does. (SF bug #739313)
877
Tim Petersb0c854d2003-05-17 15:57:00 +0000878- The datetime module classes datetime, time, and timedelta are now
879 properly subclassable.
Tim Petersa98924a2003-05-17 05:55:19 +0000880
Martin v. Löwis28e9ce92003-05-09 08:19:48 +0000881- _tkinter.{get|set}busywaitinterval was added.
882
Raymond Hettinger834f4632003-05-02 20:24:56 +0000883- itertools.islice() now accepts stop=None as documented.
884 Fixes SF bug #730685.
885
Skip Montanaro8c044d82003-05-06 20:42:37 +0000886- the bsddb185 module is built in one restricted instance -
887 /usr/include/db.h exists and defines HASHVERSION to be 2. This is true
888 for many BSD-derived systems.
889
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000890
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000891Library
892-------
893
Tim Petersdb3756d2003-06-29 05:30:48 +0000894- Some happy doctest extensions from Jim Fulton have been added to
895 doctest.py. These are already being used in Zope3. The two
896 primary ones:
897
898 doctest.debug(module, name) extracts the doctests from the named object
899 in the given module, puts them in a temp file, and starts pdb running
900 on that file. This is great when a doctest fails.
901
902 doctest.DocTestSuite(module=None) returns a synthesized unittest
903 TestSuite instance, to be run by the unittest framework, which
904 runs all the doctests in the module. This allows writing tests in
905 doctest style (which can be clearer and shorter than writing tests
906 in unittest style), without losing unittest's powerful testing
907 framework features (which doctest lacks).
908
Tim Peters6ebe61f2003-06-27 20:48:05 +0000909- For compatibility with doctests created before 2.3, if an expected
910 output block consists solely of "1" and the actual output block
911 consists solely of "True", it's accepted as a match; similarly
912 for "0" and "False". This is quite un-doctest-like, but is practical.
913 The behavior can be disabled by passing the new doctest module
914 constant DONT_ACCEPT_TRUE_FOR_1 to the new optionflags optional
915 argument.
916
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000917- ZipFile.testzip() now only traps BadZipfile exceptions. Previously,
918 a bare except caught to much and reported all errors as a problem
919 in the archive.
920
921- The logging module now has a new function, makeLogRecord() making
922 LogHandler easier to interact with DatagramHandler and SocketHandler.
923
Skip Montanaro364ca402003-06-17 12:58:31 +0000924- The cgitb module has been extended to support plain text display (SF patch
925 569574).
926
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +0000927- A brand new version of IDLE (from the IDLEfork project at
928 SourceForge) is now included as Lib/idlelib. The old Tools/idle is
929 no more.
930
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000931- Added a new module: trace (documentation missing). This module used
932 to be distributed in Tools/scripts. It uses sys.settrace() to trace
933 code execution -- either function calls or individual lines. It can
934 generate tracing output during execution or a post-mortem report of
935 code coverage.
936
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +0000937- The threading module has new functions settrace() and setprofile()
938 that cooperate with the functions of the same name in the sys
939 module. A function registered with the threading module will
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000940 be used for all threads it creates. The new trace module uses this
941 to provide tracing for code running in threads.
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +0000942
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +0000943- copy.py: applied SF patch 707900, fixing bug 702858, by Steven
944 Taschuk. Copying a new-style class that had a reference to itself
945 didn't work. (The same thing worked fine for old-style classes.)
Martin v. Löwisba8f5ff2003-06-14 07:10:06 +0000946 Builtin functions are now treated as atomic, fixing bug #746304.
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +0000947
Raymond Hettingerc24d7672003-06-08 19:42:33 +0000948- difflib.py has two new functions: context_diff() and unified_diff().
949
Guido van Rossumfa19f7c2003-05-16 01:46:51 +0000950- More fixes to urllib (SF 549151): (a) When redirecting, always use
951 GET. This is common practice and more-or-less sanctioned by the
952 HTTP standard. (b) Add a handler for 307 redirection, which becomes
953 an error for POST, but a regular redirect for GET and HEAD
954
Guido van Rossumbf1bef82003-05-13 18:01:19 +0000955- Added optional 'onerror' argument to os.walk(), to control error
956 handling.
957
Martin v. Löwise59e2ba2003-05-03 09:09:02 +0000958- inspect.is{method|data}descriptor was added, to allow pydoc display
959 __doc__ of data descriptors.
960
Skip Montanaro4a7751c2003-04-29 21:07:16 +0000961- Fixed socket speed loss caused by use of the _socketobject wrapper class
962 in socket.py.
963
Raymond Hettinger22952a32003-05-20 04:59:56 +0000964- timeit.py now checks the current directory for imports.
965
Gustavo Niemeyer9556fba2003-06-07 17:53:08 +0000966- urllib2.py now knows how to order proxy classes, so the user doesn't
967 have to insert it in front of other classes, nor do dirty tricks like
968 inserting a "dummy" HTTPHandler after a ProxyHandler when building an
969 opener with proxy support.
970
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +0000971- Iterators have been added for dbm keys.
972
973- random.Random objects can now be pickled.
974
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000975Tools/Demos
976-----------
977
Martin v. Löwisb8c084e2003-06-14 09:03:46 +0000978- pydoc now offers help on keywords and topics.
979
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +0000980- Tools/idle is gone; long live Lib/idlelib.
981
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +0000982- diff.py prints file diffs in context, unified, or ndiff formats,
983 providing a command line interface to difflib.py.
Raymond Hettinger2f3c74a2003-06-08 23:10:15 +0000984
Raymond Hettinger71e00332003-05-10 03:30:13 +0000985- texcheck.py is a new script for making a rough validation of Python LaTeX
986 files.
987
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000988Build
989-----
990
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +0000991- Setting DESTDIR during 'make install' now allows specifying a
Martin v. Löwis3b8ee082003-05-11 20:25:35 +0000992 different root directory.
993
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000994C API
995-----
996
Tim Peters3cfe7542003-05-21 21:29:48 +0000997- PyType_Ready(): If a type declares that it participates in gc
998 (Py_TPFLAGS_HAVE_GC), and its base class does not, and its base class's
999 tp_free slot is the default _PyObject_Del, and type does not define
1000 a tp_free slot itself, _PyObject_GC_Del is assigned to type->tp_free.
1001 Previously _PyObject_Del was inherited, which could at best lead to a
1002 segfault. In addition, if even after this magic the type's tp_free
1003 slot is _PyObject_Del or NULL, and the type is a base type
1004 (Py_TPFLAGS_BASETYPE), TypeError is raised: since the type is a base
1005 type, its dealloc function must call type->tp_free, and since the type
1006 is gc'able, tp_free must not be NULL or _PyObject_Del.
1007
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00001008- PyThreadState_SetAsyncExc(): A new API (deliberately accessible only
1009 from C) to interrupt a thread by sending it an exception. It is
1010 intentional that you have to write your own C extension to call it
1011 from Python.
1012
1013
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001014New platforms
1015-------------
1016
1017None this time.
1018
1019Tests
1020-----
1021
1022- test_imp rewritten so that it doesn't raise RuntimeError if run as a
1023 side effect of being imported ("import test.autotest").
1024
1025Windows
1026-------
1027
Tim Petersfaa697a2003-06-22 01:42:20 +00001028- The Windows installer ships with Tcl/Tk 8.4.3 (upgraded from 8.4.1).
1029
Tim Petersc4607da2003-05-08 18:13:59 +00001030- The installer always suggested that Python be installed on the C:
1031 drive, due to a hardcoded "C:" generated by the Wise installation
1032 wizard. People with machines where C: is not the system drive
1033 usually want Python installed on whichever drive is their system drive
1034 instead. We removed the hardcoded "C:", and two testers on machines
1035 where C: is not the system drive report that the installer now
1036 suggests their system drive. Note that you can always select the
1037 directory you want in the "Select Destination Directory" dialog --
1038 that's what it's for.
1039
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001040Mac
1041---
1042
Just van Rossum99bc1fc2003-05-09 15:01:25 +00001043- There's a new module called "autoGIL", which offers a mechanism to
1044 automatically release the Global Interpreter Lock when an event loop
1045 goes to sleep, allowing other threads to run. It's currently only
1046 supported on OSX, in the Mach-O version.
Jack Jansenf5e23ff2003-06-16 13:53:40 +00001047- The OSA modules now allow direct access to properties of the
1048 toplevel application class (in AppleScript terminology).
1049- The Package Manager can now update itself.
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001050
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00001051SourceForge Bugs and Patches Applied
1052------------------------------------
1053
1054430160, 471893, 501716, 542562, 549151, 569574, 595837, 596434,
1055598163, 604210, 604716, 610332, 612627, 614770, 620190, 621891,
1056622042, 639139, 640236, 644345, 649742, 649742, 658233, 660022,
1057661318, 661676, 662807, 662923, 666219, 672855, 678325, 682347,
1058683486, 684981, 685773, 686254, 692776, 692959, 693094, 696777,
1059697989, 700827, 703666, 708495, 708604, 708901, 710733, 711902,
1060713722, 715782, 718286, 719359, 719367, 723136, 723831, 723962,
1061724588, 724767, 724767, 725942, 726150, 726446, 726869, 727051,
1062727719, 727719, 727805, 728277, 728563, 728656, 729096, 729103,
1063729293, 729297, 729300, 729317, 729395, 729622, 729817, 730170,
1064730296, 730594, 730685, 730826, 730963, 731209, 731403, 731504,
1065731514, 731626, 731635, 731643, 731644, 731644, 731689, 732124,
1066732143, 732234, 732284, 732284, 732479, 732761, 732783, 732951,
1067733667, 733781, 734118, 734231, 734869, 735051, 735293, 735527,
1068735613, 735694, 736962, 736962, 737970, 738066, 739313, 740055,
1069740234, 740301, 741806, 742126, 742741, 742860, 742860, 742911,
1070744041, 744104, 744238, 744687, 744877, 745055, 745478, 745525,
1071745620, 746012, 746304, 746366, 746801, 746953, 747348, 747667,
1072747954, 748846, 748849, 748973, 748975, 749191, 749210, 749759,
1073749831, 749911, 750008, 750092, 750542, 750595, 751038, 751107,
1074751276, 751451, 751916, 751941, 751956, 751998, 752671, 753451,
1075753602, 753617, 753845, 753925, 754014, 754340, 754447, 755031,
1076755087, 755147, 755245, 755683, 755987, 756032, 756996, 757058,
1077757229, 757818, 757821, 757822, 758112, 758910, 759227, 759889,
1078760257, 760703, 760792, 761104, 761337, 761519, 761830, 762455
1079
1080
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001081What's New in Python 2.3 beta 1?
1082================================
1083
Guido van Rossumfa1eddf2003-04-25 19:19:52 +00001084*Release date: 25-Apr-2003*
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001085
1086Core and builtins
1087-----------------
1088
Thomas Heller5eccabc2003-04-23 19:35:25 +00001089- New format codes B, H, I, k and K have been implemented for
1090 PyArg_ParseTuple and PyBuild_Value.
1091
Alex Martellia70b1912003-04-22 08:12:33 +00001092- New builtin function sum(seq, start=0) returns the sum of all the
1093 items in iterable object seq, plus start (items are normally numbers,
1094 and cannot be strings).
1095
Guido van Rossumaa86e352003-04-19 18:15:10 +00001096- bool() called without arguments now returns False rather than
1097 raising an exception. This is consistent with calling the
1098 constructors for the other builtin types -- called without argument
1099 they all return the false value of that type. (SF patch #724135)
1100
Guido van Rossumcf8d2852003-04-17 16:53:26 +00001101- In support of PEP 269 (making the pgen parser generator accessible
1102 from Python), some changes to the pgen code structure were made; a
1103 few files that used to be linked only with pgen are now linked with
1104 Python itself.
1105
Guido van Rossumc1f6e8c2003-04-16 21:13:23 +00001106- The repr() of a weakref object now shows the __name__ attribute of
1107 the referenced object, if it has one.
1108
Guido van Rossum76ba09f2003-04-16 19:40:58 +00001109- super() no longer ignores data descriptors, except __class__. See
1110 the thread started at
1111 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2003-April/034338.html
1112
Guido van Rossum3a3cca52003-04-14 20:58:14 +00001113- list.insert(i, x) now interprets negative i as it would be
1114 interpreted by slicing, so negative values count from the end of the
1115 list. This was the only place where such an interpretation was not
1116 placed on a list index.
1117
Guido van Rossumefbbb1c2003-04-11 18:43:06 +00001118- range() now works even if the arguments are longs with magnitude
1119 larger than sys.maxint, as long as the total length of the sequence
1120 fits. E.g., range(2**100, 2**101, 2**100) is the following list:
1121 [1267650600228229401496703205376L]. (SF patch #707427.)
1122
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001123- Some horridly obscure problems were fixed involving interaction
1124 between garbage collection and old-style classes with "ambitious"
1125 getattr hooks. If an old-style instance didn't have a __del__ method,
1126 but did have a __getattr__ hook, and the instance became reachable
1127 only from an unreachable cycle, and the hook resurrected or deleted
1128 unreachable objects when asked to resolve "__del__", anything up to
1129 a segfault could happen. That's been repaired.
1130
Raymond Hettingera3e1e4c2003-03-06 23:54:28 +00001131- dict.pop now takes an optional argument specifying a default
1132 value to return if the key is not in the dict. If a default is not
1133 given and the key is not found, a KeyError will still be raised.
1134 Parallel changes were made to UserDict.UserDict and UserDict.DictMixin.
1135 [SF patch #693753] (contributed by Michael Stone.)
1136
Martin v. Löwis73d538b2003-03-05 15:13:47 +00001137- sys.getfilesystemencoding() was added to expose
1138 Py_FileSystemDefaultEncoding.
Guido van Rossum46d3dc32003-03-01 03:20:41 +00001139
1140- New function sys.exc_clear() clears the current exception. This is
1141 rarely needed, but can sometimes be useful to release objects
1142 referenced by the traceback held in sys.exc_info()[2]. (SF patch
1143 #693195.)
1144
Neal Norwitzd5a65a72003-02-23 23:11:41 +00001145- On 64-bit systems, a dictionary could contain duplicate long/int keys
1146 if the key value was larger than 2**32. See SF bug #689659.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001147
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00001148- Fixed SF bug #663074. The codec system was using global static
Walter Dörwaldfa86bf52003-03-31 16:15:13 +00001149 variables to store internal data. As a result, any attempts to use the
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00001150 unicode system with multiple active interpreters, or successive
1151 interpreter executions, would fail.
1152
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00001153- "%c" % u"a" now returns a unicode string instead of raising a
Walter Dörwald44f527f2003-04-02 16:37:24 +00001154 TypeError. u"%c" % 0xffffffff now raises a OverflowError instead
Walter Dörwald1e469c52003-04-02 16:57:59 +00001155 of a ValueError to be consistent with "%c" % 256. See SF patch #710127.
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00001156
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001157Extension modules
1158-----------------
1159
Guido van Rossume7adda92003-04-25 05:52:37 +00001160- The socket module now provides the functions inet_pton and inet_ntop
1161 for converting between string and packed representation of IP
1162 addresses. There is also a new module variable, has_ipv6, which is
1163 True iff the current Python has IPv6 support. See SF patch #658327.
1164
Martin v. Löwisbfe175c2003-04-16 19:42:51 +00001165- Tkinter wrappers around Tcl variables now pass objects directly
1166 to Tcl, instead of first converting them to strings.
1167
Guido van Rossum41c99e72003-04-14 17:59:34 +00001168- The .*? pattern in the re module is now special-cased to avoid the
1169 recursion limit. (SF patch #720991 -- many thanks to Gary Herron
1170 and Greg Chapman.)
1171
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00001172- New function sys.call_tracing() allows pdb to debug code
1173 recursively.
1174
Tim Peters730f5532003-04-08 17:17:17 +00001175- New function gc.get_referents(obj) returns a list of objects
Tim Peters0f81ab62003-04-08 16:39:48 +00001176 directly referenced by obj. In effect, it exposes what the object's
1177 tp_traverse slot does, and can be helpful when debugging memory
1178 leaks.
1179
Martin v. Löwis7fb697b2003-04-03 04:49:12 +00001180- The iconv module has been removed from this release.
1181
Tim Petersd50ade62003-03-20 18:32:13 +00001182- The platform-independent routines for packing floats in IEEE formats
1183 (struct.pack's <f, >f, <d, and >d codes; pickle and cPickle's protocol 1
1184 pickling of floats) ignored that rounding can cause a carry to
1185 propagate. The worst consequence was that, in rare cases, <f and >f
1186 could produce strings that, when unpacked again, were a factor of 2
1187 away from the original float. This has been fixed. See SF bug
1188 #705836.
1189
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001190- New function time.tzset() provides access to the C library tzset()
Guido van Rossumd11b62e2003-03-14 21:51:36 +00001191 function, if supported. (SF patch #675422.)
1192
Neal Norwitz12e22172003-03-03 21:16:39 +00001193- Using createfilehandler, deletefilehandler, createtimerhandler functions
1194 on Tkinter.tkinter (_tkinter module) no longer crashes the interpreter.
1195 See SF bug #692416.
1196
Michael W. Hudsonf0089982003-03-03 12:29:42 +00001197- Modified the fcntl.ioctl() function to allow modification of a passed
1198 mutable buffer (for details see the reference documentation).
1199
Raymond Hettinger61fe64d2003-02-23 04:40:07 +00001200- Made user requested changes to the itertools module.
1201 Subsumed the times() function into repeat().
1202 Added chain() and cycle().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001203
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00001204- The rotor module is now deprecated; the encryption algorithm it uses
Andrew M. Kuchlingfb5f4852003-04-24 13:19:56 +00001205 is not believed to be secure, and including crypto code with Python
1206 has implications for exporting and importing it in various countries.
1207
Skip Montanaro89feabc2003-03-30 04:54:24 +00001208- The socket module now always uses the _socketobject wrapper class, even on
1209 platforms which have dup(2). The makefile() method is built directly
1210 on top of the socket without duplicating the file descriptor, allowing
1211 timeouts to work properly.
1212
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001213Library
1214-------
1215
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00001216- New generator function os.walk() is an easy-to-use alternative to
1217 os.path.walk(). See os module docs for details. os.path.walk()
1218 isn't deprecated at this time, but may become deprecated in a
1219 future release.
1220
Marc-André Lemburg246d8472003-04-24 11:36:11 +00001221- Added new module "platform" which provides a wide range of tools
1222 for querying platform dependent features.
1223
Andrew M. Kuchling4e42b312003-04-24 16:45:05 +00001224- netrc now allows ASCII punctuation characters in passwords.
Raymond Hettinger1d877862003-04-23 19:06:08 +00001225
Martin v. Löwis153c9e42003-04-19 20:59:03 +00001226- shelve now supports the optional writeback argument, and exposes
1227 pickle protocol versions.
1228
Guido van Rossuma2685402003-04-19 18:04:57 +00001229- Several methods of nntplib.NNTP have grown an optional file argument
1230 which specifies a file where to divert the command's output
1231 (already supported by the body() method). (SF patch #720468)
1232
Martin v. Löwis281b2c62003-04-18 21:04:39 +00001233- The self-documenting XML server library DocXMLRPCServer was added.
1234
Martin v. Löwis2548c732003-04-18 10:39:54 +00001235- Support for internationalized domain names has been added through
1236 the 'idna' and 'punycode' encodings, the 'stringprep' module, the
1237 'mkstringprep' tool, and enhancements to the socket and httplib
1238 modules.
1239
Walter Dörwald5688b7a2003-04-16 09:46:13 +00001240- htmlentitydefs has two new dictionaries: name2codepoint maps
1241 HTML entity names to Unicode codepoints (as integers).
1242 codepoint2name is the reverse mapping. See SF patch #722017.
1243
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00001244- pdb has a new command, "debug", which lets you step through
1245 arbitrary code from the debugger's (pdb) prompt.
1246
Raymond Hettingerc377cbf2003-04-04 22:56:42 +00001247- unittest.failUnlessEqual and its equivalent unittest.assertEqual now
1248 return 'not a == b' rather than 'a != b'. This gives the desired
1249 result for classes that define __eq__ without defining __ne__.
1250
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001251- sgmllib now supports SGML marked sections, in particular the
Martin v. Löwis3163a3b2003-03-30 14:25:40 +00001252 MS Office extensions.
1253
Raymond Hettinger42182eb2003-03-09 05:33:33 +00001254- The urllib module now offers support for the iterator protocol.
1255 SF patch 698520 contributed by Brett Cannon.
1256
Guido van Rossum9589a252003-03-06 01:56:12 +00001257- New module timeit provides a simple framework for timing the
1258 execution speed of expressions and statements.
1259
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001260- sets.Set objects now support mixed-type __eq__ and __ne__, instead
1261 of raising TypeError. If x is a Set object and y is a non-Set object,
1262 x == y is False, and x != y is True. This is akin to the change made
1263 for mixed-type comparisons of datetime objects in 2.3a2; more info
1264 about the rationale is in the NEWS entry for that. See also SF bug
1265 report <http://www.python.org/sf/693121>.
1266
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00001267- On Unix platforms, if os.listdir() is called with a Unicode argument,
1268 it now returns Unicode strings. (This behavior was added earlier
1269 to the Windows NT/2k/XP version of os.listdir().)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001270
Andrew M. Kuchling6f177d42003-02-28 22:09:33 +00001271- Distutils: both 'py_modules' and 'packages' keywords can now be specified
1272 in core.setup(). Previously you could supply one or the other, but
1273 not both of them. (SF patch #695090 from Bernhard Herzog)
1274
Skip Montanaro64a839e2003-03-20 23:36:55 +00001275- New csv package makes it easy to read/write CSV files.
1276
Gustavo Niemeyer68d8cef2003-04-17 21:31:33 +00001277- Module shlex has been extended to allow posix-like shell parsings,
1278 including a split() function for easy spliting of quoted strings and
1279 commands. An iterator interface was also implemented.
1280
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001281Tools/Demos
1282-----------
1283
Tim Peters21d7d4d2003-04-18 00:45:59 +00001284- New script combinerefs.py helps analyze new PYTHONDUMPREFS output.
1285 See the module docstring for details.
1286
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001287Build
1288-----
1289
Neal Norwitz35892b92003-02-23 23:45:35 +00001290- Fix problem building on OSF1 because the compiler only accepted
1291 preprocessor directives that start in column 1. (SF bug #691793.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001292
1293C API
1294-----
1295
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00001296- Added PyGC_Collect(), equivalent to calling gc.collect().
1297
Guido van Rossum0fc8f002003-04-15 15:12:39 +00001298- PyThreadState_GetDict() was changed not to raise an exception or
1299 issue a fatal error when no current thread state is available. This
1300 makes it possible to print dictionaries when no thread is active.
1301
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00001302- LONG_LONG was renamed to PY_LONG_LONG. Extensions that use this and
1303 need compatibility with previous versions can use this:
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00001304
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00001305 #ifndef PY_LONG_LONG
1306 #define PY_LONG_LONG LONG_LONG
1307 #endif
Martin v. Löwisb9a0f912003-03-29 10:06:18 +00001308
Raymond Hettinger1da1dbf2003-03-17 19:46:11 +00001309- Added PyObject_SelfIter() to fill the tp_iter slot for the
Raymond Hettinger01538262003-03-17 08:24:35 +00001310 typical case where the method returns its self argument.
1311
Guido van Rossume5c691a2003-03-07 15:13:17 +00001312- The extended type structure used for heap types (new-style
1313 classes defined by Python code using a class statement) is now
1314 exported from object.h as PyHeapTypeObject. (SF patch #696193.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001315
1316New platforms
1317-------------
1318
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00001319None this time.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001320
1321Tests
1322-----
1323
Neal Norwitz55b61d22003-02-28 19:57:03 +00001324- test_timeout now requires -u network to be passed to regrtest to run.
1325 See SF bug #692988.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001326
1327Windows
1328-------
1329
Tim Peters11b23062003-04-23 02:39:17 +00001330- os.fsync() now exists on Windows, and calls the Microsoft _commit()
1331 function.
1332
Guido van Rossumf4050642003-04-09 19:39:06 +00001333- New function winsound.MessageBeep() wraps the Win32 API
1334 MessageBeep().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001335
1336Mac
1337---
1338
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00001339- os.listdir() now returns Unicode strings on MacOS X when called with
1340 a Unicode argument. See the general news item under "Library".
Just van Rossum46c97842003-02-25 21:42:15 +00001341
Jack Jansendeac2ac2003-02-24 11:04:17 +00001342- A new method MacOS.WMAvailable() returns true if it is safe to access
1343 the window manager, false otherwise.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001344
Jack Jansencf76be02003-03-24 12:13:54 +00001345- EasyDialogs dialogs are now movable-modal, and if the application is
1346 currently in the background they will ask to be moved to the foreground
1347 before displaying.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001348
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00001349- OSA Scripting support has improved a lot, and gensuitemodule.py can now
Jack Jansende354b72003-04-11 15:37:20 +00001350 be used by mere mortals. The documentation is now also more or less
1351 complete.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001352
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00001353- The IDE (in a framework build) now includes introductory documentation
1354 in Apple Help Viewer format.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001355
1356
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001357What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 2?
1358=================================
1359
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00001360*Release date: 19-Feb-2003*
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001361
1362Core and builtins
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00001363-----------------
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001364
Walter Dörwald2ffec022003-02-19 16:34:11 +00001365- Negative positions returned from PEP 293 error callbacks are now
1366 treated as being relative to the end of the input string. Positions
1367 that are out of bounds raise an IndexError.
1368
Guido van Rossum162e38c2003-02-19 15:25:10 +00001369- sys.path[0] (the directory from which the script is loaded) is now
1370 turned into an absolute pathname, unless it is the empty string.
1371 (SF patch #664376.)
1372
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00001373- Finally fixed the bug in compile() and exec where a string ending
1374 with an indented code block but no newline would raise SyntaxError.
1375 This would have been a four-line change in parsetok.c... Except
1376 codeop.py depends on this behavior, so a compilation flag had to be
1377 invented that causes the tokenizer to revert to the old behavior;
1378 this required extra changes to 2 .h files, 2 .c files, and 2 .py
Guido van Rossum1442dc12003-02-13 22:19:20 +00001379 files. (Fixes SF bug #501622.)
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00001380
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00001381- If a new-style class defines neither __new__ nor __init__, its
1382 constructor would ignore all arguments. This is changed now: the
1383 constructor refuses arguments in this case. This might break code
1384 that worked under Python 2.2. The simplest fix is to add a no-op
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001385 __init__: ``def __init__(self, *args, **kw): pass``.
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00001386
Guido van Rossum48035eb2003-02-12 17:05:26 +00001387- Through a bytecode optimizer bug (and I bet you didn't even know
1388 Python *had* a bytecode optimizer :-), "unsigned" hex/oct constants
1389 with a leading minus sign would come out with the wrong sign.
1390 ("Unsigned" hex/oct constants are those with a face value in the
1391 range sys.maxint+1 through sys.maxint*2+1, inclusive; these have
1392 always been interpreted as negative numbers through sign folding.)
1393 E.g. 0xffffffff is -1, and -(0xffffffff) is 1, but -0xffffffff would
1394 come out as -4294967295. This was the case in Python 2.2 through
1395 2.2.2 and 2.3a1, and in Python 2.4 it will once again have that
1396 value, but according to PEP 237 it really needs to be 1 now. This
1397 will be backported to Python 2.2.3 a well. (SF #660455)
1398
Guido van Rossum47710652003-02-12 20:48:22 +00001399- int(s, base) sometimes sign-folds hex and oct constants; it only
1400 does this when base is 0 and s.strip() starts with a '0'. When the
1401 sign is actually folded, as in int("0xffffffff", 0) on a 32-bit
1402 machine, which returns -1, a FutureWarning is now issued; in Python
1403 2.4, this will return 4294967295L, as do int("+0xffffffff", 0) and
1404 int("0xffffffff", 16) right now. (PEP 347)
1405
Guido van Rossuma89d10e2003-02-12 03:58:38 +00001406- super(X, x): x may now be a proxy for an X instance, i.e.
1407 issubclass(x.__class__, X) but not issubclass(type(x), X).
1408
Guido van Rossum03bc7d32003-02-12 03:32:58 +00001409- isinstance(x, X): if X is a new-style class, this is now equivalent
1410 to issubclass(type(x), X) or issubclass(x.__class__, X). Previously
1411 only type(x) was tested. (For classic classes this was already the
1412 case.)
1413
Just van Rossum73ffb4a2003-02-10 09:57:08 +00001414- compile(), eval() and the exec statement now fully support source code
1415 passed as unicode strings.
1416
Neal Norwitzde8b94c2003-02-10 02:12:43 +00001417- int subclasses can be initialized with longs if the value fits in an int.
1418 See SF bug #683467.
1419
Tim Petersbf2674b2003-02-02 07:51:32 +00001420- long(string, base) takes time linear in len(string) when base is a power
1421 of 2 now. It used to take time quadratic in len(string).
1422
Martin v. Löwis8afd7572003-01-25 22:46:11 +00001423- filter returns now Unicode results for Unicode arguments.
1424
Martin v. Löwisaf6a27a2003-01-03 19:16:14 +00001425- raw_input can now return Unicode objects.
1426
Skip Montanaro4abd5f02003-01-02 20:51:08 +00001427- List objects' sort() method now accepts None as the comparison function.
1428 Passing None is semantically identical to calling sort() with no
1429 arguments.
1430
Neal Norwitz1a997502003-01-13 20:13:12 +00001431- Fixed crash when printing a subclass of str and __str__ returned self.
1432 See SF bug #667147.
1433
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00001434- Fixed an invalid RuntimeWarning and an undetected error when trying
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00001435 to convert a long integer into a float which couldn't fit.
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00001436 See SF bug #676155.
1437
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00001438- Function objects now have a __module__ attribute that is bound to
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00001439 the name of the module in which the function was defined. This
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00001440 applies for C functions and methods as well as functions and methods
1441 defined in Python. This attribute is used by pickle.whichmodule(),
1442 which changes the behavior of whichmodule slightly. In Python 2.2
1443 whichmodule() returns "__main__" for functions that are not defined
1444 at the top-level of a module (examples: methods, nested functions).
1445 Now whichmodule() will return the proper module name.
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00001446
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001447Extension modules
1448-----------------
1449
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00001450- operator.isNumberType() now checks that the object has a nb_int or
1451 nb_float slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
1452 tp_as_number pointer.
1453
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00001454- The imp module now has ways to acquire and release the "import
1455 lock": imp.acquire_lock() and imp.release_lock(). Note: this is a
1456 reentrant lock, so releasing the lock only truly releases it when
1457 this is the last release_lock() call. You can check with
1458 imp.lock_held(). (SF bug #580952 and patch #683257.)
1459
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001460- Change to cPickle to match pickle.py (see below and PEP 307).
1461
Neal Norwitz9caf9c02003-02-10 01:54:06 +00001462- Fix some bugs in the parser module. SF bug #678518.
1463
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00001464- Thanks to Scott David Daniels, a subtle bug in how the zlib
Walter Dörwald28d81962003-02-03 20:53:14 +00001465 extension implemented flush() was fixed. Scott also rewrote the
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00001466 zlib test suite using the unittest module. (SF bug #640230 and
1467 patch #678531.)
1468
Raymond Hettinger96ef8112003-02-01 00:10:11 +00001469- Added an itertools module containing high speed, memory efficient
1470 looping constructs inspired by tools from Haskell and SML.
1471
Guido van Rossum99d4abf2003-01-27 22:22:50 +00001472- The SSL module now handles sockets with a timeout set correctly (SF
1473 patch #675750, fixing SF bug #675552).
1474
Barry Warsawf8ba39c2003-01-07 20:55:26 +00001475- os/posixmodule has grown the sysexits.h constants (EX_OK and friends).
1476
Guido van Rossum6d0d3652003-01-07 20:34:19 +00001477- Fixed broken threadstate swap in readline that could cause fatal
1478 errors when a readline hook was being invoked while a background
1479 thread was active. (SF bugs #660476 and #513033.)
1480
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001481- fcntl now exposes the strops.h I_* constants.
1482
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00001483- Fix a crash on Solaris that occurred when calling close() on
1484 an mmap'ed file which was already closed. (SF patch #665913)
1485
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001486- Fixed several serious bugs in the zipimport implementation.
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001487
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00001488- datetime changes:
1489
Guido van Rossum8b7a9a32003-04-14 22:01:58 +00001490 The date class is now properly subclassable. (SF bug #720908)
1491
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00001492 The datetime and datetimetz classes have been collapsed into a single
1493 datetime class, and likewise the time and timetz classes into a single
1494 time class. Previously, a datetimetz object with tzinfo=None acted
1495 exactly like a datetime object, and similarly for timetz. This wasn't
1496 enough of a difference to justify distinct classes, and life is simpler
1497 now.
1498
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00001499 today() and now() now round system timestamps to the closest
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00001500 microsecond <http://www.python.org/sf/661086>. This repairs an
1501 irritation most likely seen on Windows systems.
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00001502
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00001503 In dt.astimezone(tz), if tz.utcoffset(dt) returns a duration,
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00001504 ValueError is raised if tz.dst(dt) returns None (2.3a1 treated it
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00001505 as 0 instead, but a tzinfo subclass wishing to participate in
1506 time zone conversion has to take a stand on whether it supports
1507 DST; if you don't care about DST, then code dst() to return 0 minutes,
1508 meaning that DST is never in effect).
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00001509
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00001510 The tzinfo methods utcoffset() and dst() must return a timedelta object
1511 (or None) now. In 2.3a1 they could also return an int or long, but that
1512 was an unhelpfully redundant leftover from an earlier version wherein
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00001513 they couldn't return a timedelta. TOOWTDI.
1514
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00001515 The example tzinfo class for local time had a bug. It was replaced
1516 by a later example coded by Guido.
1517
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00001518 datetime.astimezone(tz) no longer raises an exception when the
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00001519 input datetime has no UTC equivalent in tz. For typical "hybrid" time
1520 zones (a single tzinfo subclass modeling both standard and daylight
1521 time), this case can arise one hour per year, at the hour daylight time
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00001522 ends. See new docs for details. In short, the new behavior mimics
1523 the local wall clock's behavior of repeating an hour in local time.
1524
1525 dt.astimezone() can no longer be used to convert between naive and aware
1526 datetime objects. If you merely want to attach, or remove, a tzinfo
1527 object, without any conversion of date and time members, use
1528 dt.replace(tzinfo=whatever) instead, where "whatever" is None or a
1529 tzinfo subclass instance.
1530
1531 A new method tzinfo.fromutc(dt) can be overridden in tzinfo subclasses
1532 to give complete control over how a UTC time is to be converted to
1533 a local time. The default astimezone() implementation calls fromutc()
1534 as its last step, so a tzinfo subclass can affect that too by overriding
1535 fromutc(). It's expected that the default fromutc() implementation will
1536 be suitable as-is for "almost all" time zone subclasses, but the
1537 creativity of political time zone fiddling appears unbounded -- fromutc()
1538 allows the highly motivated to emulate any scheme expressible in Python.
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00001539
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00001540 datetime.now(): The optional tzinfo argument was undocumented (that's
1541 repaired), and its name was changed to tz ("tzinfo" is overloaded enough
1542 already). With a tz argument, now(tz) used to return the local date
1543 and time, and attach tz to it, without any conversion of date and time
1544 members. This was less than useful. Now now(tz) returns the current
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001545 date and time as local time in tz's time zone, akin to ::
1546
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00001547 tz.fromutc(datetime.utcnow().replace(tzinfo=utc))
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001548
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00001549 where "utc" is an instance of a tzinfo subclass modeling UTC. Without
1550 a tz argument, now() continues to return the current local date and time,
1551 as a naive datetime object.
1552
Tim Peters2a44a8d2003-01-23 20:53:10 +00001553 datetime.fromtimestamp(): Like datetime.now() above, this had less than
1554 useful behavior when the optional tinzo argument was specified. See
1555 also SF bug report <http://www.python.org/sf/660872>.
1556
Tim Peters8d81a012003-01-24 22:36:34 +00001557 date and datetime comparison: In order to prevent comparison from
1558 falling back to the default compare-object-addresses strategy, these
1559 raised TypeError whenever they didn't understand the other object type.
1560 They still do, except when the other object has a "timetuple" attribute,
1561 in which case they return NotImplemented now. This gives other
1562 datetime objects (e.g., mxDateTime) a chance to intercept the
1563 comparison.
1564
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00001565 date, time, datetime and timedelta comparison: When the exception
1566 for mixed-type comparisons in the last paragraph doesn't apply, if
1567 the comparison is == then False is returned, and if the comparison is
1568 != then True is returned. Because dict lookup and the "in" operator
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001569 only invoke __eq__, this allows, for example, ::
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00001570
1571 if some_datetime in some_sequence:
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001572
1573 and ::
1574
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00001575 some_dict[some_timedelta] = whatever
1576
1577 to work as expected, without raising TypeError just because the
1578 sequence is heterogeneous, or the dict has mixed-type keys. [This
1579 seems like a good idea to implement for all mixed-type comparisons
1580 that don't want to allow falling back to address comparison.]
1581
Tim Peters75a6e3b2003-01-04 18:17:36 +00001582 The constructors building a datetime from a timestamp could raise
1583 ValueError if the platform C localtime()/gmtime() inserted "leap
1584 seconds". Leap seconds are ignored now. On such platforms, it's
1585 possible to have timestamps that differ by a second, yet where
1586 datetimes constructed from them are equal.
1587
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00001588 The pickle format of date, time and datetime objects has changed
1589 completely. The undocumented pickler and unpickler functions no
Tim Petersb57f8f02003-02-01 02:54:15 +00001590 longer exist. The undocumented __setstate__() and __getstate__()
1591 methods no longer exist either.
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00001592
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001593Library
1594-------
1595
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001596- The logging module was updated slightly; the WARN level was renamed
1597 to WARNING, and the matching function/method warn() to warning().
1598
1599- The pickle and cPickle modules were updated with a new pickling
1600 protocol (documented by pickletools.py, see below) and several
1601 extensions to the pickle customization API (__reduce__, __setstate__
1602 etc.). The copy module now uses more of the pickle customization
1603 API to copy objects that don't implement __copy__ or __deepcopy__.
1604 See PEP 307 for details.
1605
1606- The distutils "register" command now uses http://www.python.org/pypi
1607 as the default repository. (See PEP 301.)
1608
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00001609- the platform dependent path related variables sep, altsep, extsep,
1610 pathsep, curdir, pardir and defpath are now defined in the platform
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00001611 dependent path modules (e.g. ntpath.py) rather than os.py, so these
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001612 variables are now available via os.path. They continue to be
1613 available from the os module.
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00001614 (see <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00001615
Tim Peters6ee04802003-02-05 18:29:34 +00001616- array.array was added to the types repr.py knows about (see
1617 <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
1618
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00001619- The new pickletools.py contains lots of documentation about pickle
1620 internals, and supplies some helpers for working with pickles, such as
1621 a symbolic pickle disassembler.
1622
Skip Montanaro9a7c96a2003-01-22 18:17:25 +00001623- Xmlrpclib.py now supports the builtin boolean type.
1624
Martin v. Löwis0c6774d2003-01-15 11:51:06 +00001625- py_compile has a new 'doraise' flag and a new PyCompileError
1626 exception.
1627
Martin v. Löwisd69663d2003-01-15 11:37:23 +00001628- SimpleXMLRPCServer now supports CGI through the CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler
1629 class.
1630
Guido van Rossum50e92232003-01-14 16:45:04 +00001631- The sets module now raises TypeError in __cmp__, to clarify that
1632 sets are not intended to be three-way-compared; the comparison
1633 operators are overloaded as subset/superset tests.
1634
Guido van Rossumcd0c0472003-01-07 23:03:05 +00001635- Bastion.py and rexec.py are disabled. These modules are not safe in
1636 Python 2.2. or 2.3.
1637
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001638- realpath is now exported when doing ``from poxixpath import *``.
Neal Norwitzbb0246a2003-01-03 18:12:28 +00001639 It is also exported for ntpath, macpath, and os2emxpath.
1640 See SF bug #659228.
1641
Neal Norwitzb9ef4ae2003-01-05 23:19:43 +00001642- New module tarfile from Lars Gustäbel provides a comprehensive interface
1643 to tar archive files with transparent gzip and bzip2 compression.
1644 See SF patch #651082.
1645
Neal Norwitz4f442372003-01-06 06:51:36 +00001646- urlparse can now parse imap:// URLs. See SF feature request #618024.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001647
Neal Norwitze931ed52003-01-10 23:24:32 +00001648- Tkinter.Canvas.scan_dragto() provides an optional parameter to support
1649 the gain value which is passed to Tk. SF bug# 602259.
1650
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00001651- Fix logging.handlers.SysLogHandler protocol when using UNIX domain sockets.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00001652 See SF patch #642974.
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00001653
Skip Montanaro12fe72e2003-02-25 17:46:20 +00001654- The dospath module was deleted. Use the ntpath module when manipulating
1655 DOS paths from other platforms.
1656
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001657Tools/Demos
1658-----------
1659
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00001660- Two new scripts (db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py) were added to the
1661 Tools/scripts directory to facilitate conversion from the old bsddb module
1662 to the new one. While the user-visible API of the new module is
1663 compatible with the old one, it's likely that the version of the
1664 underlying database library has changed. To convert from the old library,
1665 run the db2pickle.py script using the old version of Python to convert it
1666 to a pickle file. After upgrading Python, run the pickle2db.py script
1667 using the new version of Python to reconstitute your database. For
1668 example:
1669
Skip Montanaro621f0552003-02-03 15:48:10 +00001670 % python2.2 db2pickle.py -h some.db > some.pickle
1671 % python2.3 pickle2db.py -h some.db.new < some.pickle
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00001672
1673 Run the scripts without any args to get a usage message.
1674
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001675
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001676Build
1677-----
1678
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00001679- The audio driver tests (test_ossaudiodev.py and
1680 test_linuxaudiodev.py) are no longer run by default. This is
1681 because they don't always work, depending on your hardware and
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001682 software. To run these tests, you must use an invocation like ::
1683
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00001684 ./python Lib/test/regrtest.py -u audio test_ossaudiodev
1685
Skip Montanarodecc6a42003-01-01 20:07:49 +00001686- On systems which build using the configure script, compiler flags which
1687 used to be lumped together using the OPT flag have been split into two
1688 groups, OPT and BASECFLAGS. OPT is meant to carry just optimization- and
1689 debug-related flags like "-g" and "-O3". BASECFLAGS is meant to carry
1690 compiler flags that are required to get a clean compile. On some
1691 platforms (many Linux flavors in particular) BASECFLAGS will be empty by
1692 default. On others, such as Mac OS X and SCO, it will contain required
1693 flags. This change allows people building Python to override OPT without
1694 fear of clobbering compiler flags which are required to get a clean build.
1695
1696- On Darwin/Mac OS X platforms, /sw/lib and /sw/include are added to the
1697 relevant search lists in setup.py. This allows users building Python to
1698 take advantage of the many packages available from the fink project
1699 <http://fink.sf.net/>.
1700
1701- A new Makefile target, scriptsinstall, installs a number of useful scripts
1702 from the Tools/scripts directory.
1703
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001704C API
1705-----
1706
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001707- PyEval_GetFrame() is now declared to return a ``PyFrameObject *``
1708 instead of a plain ``PyObject *``. (SF patch #686601.)
Guido van Rossum6297a7a2003-02-19 15:53:17 +00001709
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00001710- PyNumber_Check() now checks that the object has a nb_int or nb_float
1711 slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
1712 tp_as_number pointer.
1713
Guido van Rossumeea47182003-02-11 20:39:59 +00001714- A C type that inherits from a base type that defines tp_as_buffer
1715 will now inherit the tp_as_buffer pointer if it doesn't define one.
1716 (SF #681367)
1717
Neil Schemenauer5042da62003-02-04 20:59:40 +00001718- The PyArg_Parse functions now issue a DeprecationWarning if a float
1719 argument is provided when an integer is specified (this affects the 'b',
1720 'B', 'h', 'H', 'i', and 'l' codes). Future versions of Python will
1721 raise a TypeError.
Neil Schemenauercd63e612003-01-24 22:15:53 +00001722
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001723Tests
1724-----
1725
Walter Dörwald11cfbd62003-03-26 16:03:16 +00001726- Several tests weren't being run from regrtest.py (test_timeout.py,
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001727 test_tarfile.py, test_netrc.py, test_multifile.py,
1728 test_importhooks.py and test_imp.py). Now they are. (Note to
1729 developers: please read Lib/test/README when creating a new test, to
1730 make sure to do it right! All tests need to use either unittest or
1731 pydoc.)
1732
1733- Added test_posix.py, a test suite for the posix module.
1734
1735- Added test_hexoct.py, a test suite for hex/oct constant folding.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001736
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001737Windows
1738-------
1739
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00001740- The timeout code for socket connect() didn't work right; this has
1741 now been fixed. test_timeout.py should pass (at least most of the
1742 time).
1743
Thomas Hellerdda583d2003-01-31 20:45:41 +00001744- distutils' msvccompiler class now passes the preprocessor options to
1745 the resource compiler. See SF patch #669198.
1746
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00001747- The bsddb module now ships with Sleepycat's 4.1.25.NC, the latest
1748 release without strong cryptography.
1749
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00001750- sys.path[0], if it contains a directory name, is now always an
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001751 absolute pathname. (SF patch #664376.)
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00001752
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00001753- The new logging package is now installed by the Windows installer. It
1754 wasn't in 2.3a1 due to oversight.
1755
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001756Mac
1757---
1758
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00001759- There are new dialogs EasyDialogs.AskFileForOpen, AskFileForSave
1760 and AskFolder. The old macfs.StandardGetFile and friends are deprecated.
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00001761
Jack Jansenc9296362003-02-06 23:10:45 +00001762- Most of the standard library now uses pathnames or FSRefs in preference
1763 of FSSpecs, and use the underlying Carbon.File and Carbon.Folder modules
1764 in stead of macfs. macfs will probably be deprecated in the future.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00001765
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00001766- Type Carbon.File.FSCatalogInfo and supporting methods have been implemented.
1767 This also makes macfs.FSSpec.SetDates() work again.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001768
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00001769- There is a new module pimp, the package install manager for Python, and
1770 accompanying applet PackageManager. These allow you to easily download
1771 and install pretested extension packages either in source or binary
1772 form. Only in MacPython-OSX.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001773
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00001774- Applets are now built with bundlebuilder in MacPython-OSX, which should make
Jack Jansen5d44b342003-02-18 23:32:47 +00001775 them more robust and also provides a path towards BuildApplication. The
1776 downside of this change is that applets can no longer be run from the
1777 Terminal window, this will hopefully be fixed in the 2.3b1.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001778
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001779
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001780What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 1?
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001781=================================
1782
Guido van Rossumae548862002-12-31 15:47:36 +00001783*Release date: 31-Dec-2002*
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001784
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001785Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001786--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00001787
Michael W. Hudson96bc3b42002-11-26 14:48:23 +00001788- One can now assign to __bases__ and __name__ of new-style classes.
1789
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00001790- dict() now accepts keyword arguments so that dict(one=1, two=2)
1791 is the equivalent of {"one": 1, "two": 2}. Accordingly,
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00001792 the existing (but undocumented) 'items' keyword argument has
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00001793 been eliminated. This means that dict(items=someMapping) now has
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00001794 a different meaning than before.
1795
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00001796- int() now returns a long object if the argument is outside the
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001797 integer range, so int("4" * 1000), int(1e200) and int(1L<<1000) will
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00001798 all return long objects instead of raising an OverflowError.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001799
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00001800- Assignment to __class__ is disallowed if either the old or the new
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00001801 class is a statically allocated type object (such as defined by an
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00001802 extension module). This prevents anomalies like 2.__class__ = bool.
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00001803
1804- New-style object creation and deallocation have been sped up
1805 significantly; they are now faster than classic instance creation
1806 and deallocation.
1807
1808- The __slots__ variable can now mention "private" names, and the
1809 right thing will happen (e.g. __slots__ = ["__foo"]).
1810
1811- The built-ins slice() and buffer() are now callable types. The
1812 types classobj (formerly class), code, function, instance, and
1813 instancemethod (formerly instance-method), which have no built-in
1814 names but are accessible through the types module, are now also
1815 callable. The type dict-proxy is renamed to dictproxy.
1816
1817- Cycles going through the __class__ link of a new-style instance are
1818 now detected by the garbage collector.
1819
1820- Classes using __slots__ are now properly garbage collected.
1821 [SF bug 519621]
1822
1823- Tightened the __slots__ rules: a slot name must be a valid Python
1824 identifier.
1825
1826- The constructor for the module type now requires a name argument and
1827 takes an optional docstring argument. Previously, this constructor
1828 ignored its arguments. As a consequence, deriving a class from a
1829 module (not from the module type) is now illegal; previously this
1830 created an unnamed module, just like invoking the module type did.
1831 [SF bug 563060]
1832
1833- A new type object, 'basestring', is added. This is a common base type
1834 for 'str' and 'unicode', and can be used instead of
1835 types.StringTypes, e.g. to test whether something is "a string":
1836 isinstance(x, basestring) is True for Unicode and 8-bit strings. This
1837 is an abstract base class and cannot be instantiated directly.
1838
1839- Changed new-style class instantiation so that when C's __new__
1840 method returns something that's not a C instance, its __init__ is
1841 not called. [SF bug #537450]
1842
1843- Fixed super() to work correctly with class methods. [SF bug #535444]
1844
1845- If you try to pickle an instance of a class that has __slots__ but
1846 doesn't define or override __getstate__, a TypeError is now raised.
1847 This is done by adding a bozo __getstate__ to the class that always
1848 raises TypeError. (Before, this would appear to be pickled, but the
1849 state of the slots would be lost.)
1850
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001851Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001852-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001853
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00001854- Import from zipfiles is now supported. The name of a zipfile placed
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00001855 on sys.path causes the import statement to look for importable Python
1856 modules (with .py, pyc and .pyo extensions) and packages inside the
1857 zipfile. The zipfile import follows the specification (though not
1858 the sample implementation) of PEP 273. The semantics of __path__ are
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00001859 compatible with those that have been implemented in Jython since
1860 Jython 2.1.
1861
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001862- PEP 302 has been accepted. Although it was initially developed to
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00001863 support zipimport, it offers a new, general import hook mechanism.
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00001864 Several new variables have been added to the sys module:
1865 sys.meta_path, sys.path_hooks, and sys.path_importer_cache; these
1866 make extending the import statement much more convenient than
1867 overriding the __import__ built-in function. For a description of
1868 these, see PEP 302.
1869
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00001870- A frame object's f_lineno attribute can now be written to from a
1871 trace function to change which line will execute next. A command to
1872 exploit this from pdb has been added. [SF patch #643835]
1873
Marc-André Lemburg20b91352002-12-12 18:01:43 +00001874- The _codecs support module for codecs.py was turned into a builtin
1875 module to assure that at least the builtin codecs are available
1876 to the Python parser for source code decoding according to PEP 263.
1877
Walter Dörwaldd9a6ad32002-12-12 16:41:44 +00001878- issubclass now supports a tuple as the second argument, just like
1879 isinstance does. ``issubclass(X, (A, B))`` is equivalent to
1880 ``issubclass(X, A) or issubclass(X, B)``.
1881
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00001882- Thanks to Armin Rigo, the last known way to provoke a system crash
1883 by cleverly arranging for a comparison function to mutate a list
1884 during a list.sort() operation has been fixed. The effect of
1885 attempting to mutate a list, or even to inspect its contents or
1886 length, while a sort is in progress, is not defined by the language.
1887 The C implementation of Python 2.3 attempts to detect mutations,
1888 and raise ValueError if one occurs, but there's no guarantee that
1889 all mutations will be caught, or that any will be caught across
1890 releases or implementations.
1891
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00001892- Unicode file name processing for Windows (PEP 277) is implemented.
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00001893 All platforms now have an os.path.supports_unicode_filenames attribute,
1894 which is set to True on Windows NT/2000/XP, and False elsewhere.
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00001895
Walter Dörwald3aeb6322002-09-02 13:14:32 +00001896- Codec error handling callbacks (PEP 293) are implemented.
1897 Error handling in unicode.encode or str.decode can now be customized.
1898
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00001899- A subtle change to the semantics of the built-in function intern():
1900 interned strings are no longer immortal. You must keep a reference
1901 to the return value intern() around to get the benefit.
1902
Guido van Rossumf808b892002-08-16 03:38:10 +00001903- Use of 'None' as a variable, argument or attribute name now
1904 issues a SyntaxWarning. In the future, None may become a keyword.
1905
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00001906- SET_LINENO is gone. co_lnotab is now consulted to determine when to
1907 call the trace function. C code that accessed f_lineno should call
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00001908 PyCode_Addr2Line instead (f_lineno is still there, but only kept up
1909 to date when there is a trace function set).
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00001910
Guido van Rossum9be89462002-08-14 16:11:30 +00001911- There's a new warning category, FutureWarning. This is used to warn
1912 about a number of situations where the value or sign of an integer
1913 result will change in Python 2.4 as a result of PEP 237 (integer
1914 unification). The warnings implement stage B0 mentioned in that
1915 PEP. The warnings are about the following situations:
1916
1917 - Octal and hex literals without 'L' prefix in the inclusive range
1918 [0x80000000..0xffffffff]; these are currently negative ints, but
1919 in Python 2.4 they will be positive longs with the same bit
1920 pattern.
1921
1922 - Left shifts on integer values that cause the outcome to lose
1923 bits or have a different sign than the left operand. To be
1924 precise: x<<n where this currently doesn't yield the same value
1925 as long(x)<<n; in Python 2.4, the outcome will be long(x)<<n.
1926
1927 - Conversions from ints to string that show negative values as
1928 unsigned ints in the inclusive range [0x80000000..0xffffffff];
1929 this affects the functions hex() and oct(), and the string
1930 formatting codes %u, %o, %x, and %X. In Python 2.4, these will
1931 show signed values (e.g. hex(-1) currently returns "0xffffffff";
1932 in Python 2.4 it will return "-0x1").
1933
Guido van Rossum9a2eda52002-12-31 02:12:42 +00001934- The bits manipulated under the cover by sys.setcheckinterval() have
1935 been changed. Both the check interval and the ticker used to be
1936 per-thread values. They are now just a pair of global variables.
1937 In addition, the default check interval was boosted from 10 to 100
1938 bytecode instructions. This may have some effect on systems that
1939 relied on the old default value. In particular, in multi-threaded
1940 applications which try to be highly responsive, response time will
1941 increase by some (perhaps imperceptible) amount.
Skip Montanaro979c74b2002-09-03 21:25:14 +00001942
Tim Petersd64c1de2002-08-12 17:36:03 +00001943- When multiplying very large integers, a version of the so-called
1944 Karatsuba algorithm is now used. This is most effective if the
1945 inputs have roughly the same size. If they both have about N digits,
1946 Karatsuba multiplication has O(N**1.58) runtime (the exponent is
1947 log_base_2(3)) instead of the previous O(N**2). Measured results may
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00001948 be better or worse than that, depending on platform quirks. Besides
1949 the O() improvement in raw instruction count, the Karatsuba algorithm
1950 appears to have much better cache behavior on extremely large integers
1951 (starting in the ballpark of a million bits). Note that this is a
1952 simple implementation, and there's no intent here to compete with,
1953 e.g., GMP. It gives a very nice speedup when it applies, but a package
1954 devoted to fast large-integer arithmetic should run circles around it.
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00001955
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00001956- u'%c' will now raise a ValueError in case the argument is an
1957 integer outside the valid range of Unicode code point ordinals.
1958
Guido van Rossumdeb09362002-08-09 17:16:30 +00001959- The tempfile module has been overhauled for enhanced security. The
1960 mktemp() function is now deprecated; new, safe replacements are
1961 mkstemp() (for files) and mkdtemp() (for directories), and the
1962 higher-level functions NamedTemporaryFile() and TemporaryFile().
1963 Use of some global variables in this module is also deprecated; the
1964 new functions have keyword arguments to provide the same
1965 functionality. All Lib, Tools and Demo modules that used the unsafe
1966 interfaces have been updated to use the safe replacements. Thanks
1967 to Zack Weinberg!
1968
Guido van Rossumd81a9832002-08-09 15:57:34 +00001969- When x is an object whose class implements __mul__ and __rmul__,
1970 1.0*x would correctly invoke __rmul__, but 1*x would erroneously
1971 invoke __mul__. This was due to the sequence-repeat code in the int
1972 type. This has been fixed now.
1973
Barry Warsawd79f6832002-08-06 17:01:51 +00001974- Previously, "str1 in str2" required str1 to be a string of length 1.
1975 This restriction has been relaxed to allow str1 to be a string of
1976 any length. Thus "'el' in 'hello world'" returns True now.
1977
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00001978- File objects are now their own iterators. For a file f, iter(f) now
1979 returns f (unless f is closed), and f.next() is similar to
1980 f.readline() when EOF is not reached; however, f.next() uses a
1981 readahead buffer that messes up the file position, so mixing
1982 f.next() and f.readline() (or other methods) doesn't work right.
1983 Calling f.seek() drops the readahead buffer, but other operations
1984 don't. It so happens that this gives a nice additional speed boost
1985 to "for line in file:"; the xreadlines method and corresponding
Guido van Rossumbffb2ef2002-08-09 17:17:07 +00001986 module are now obsolete. Thanks to Oren Tirosh!
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00001987
Guido van Rossumde392d32002-08-05 14:17:20 +00001988- Encoding declarations (PEP 263, phase 1) have been implemented. A
1989 comment of the form "# -*- coding: <encodingname> -*-" in the first
1990 or second line of a Python source file indicates the encoding.
Martin v. Löwis00f1e3f2002-08-04 17:29:52 +00001991
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00001992- list.sort() has a new implementation. While cross-platform results
1993 may vary, and in data-dependent ways, this is much faster on many
1994 kinds of partially ordered lists than the previous implementation,
1995 and reported to be just as fast on randomly ordered lists on
1996 several major platforms. This sort is also stable (if A==B and A
1997 precedes B in the list at the start, A precedes B after the sort too),
1998 although the language definition does not guarantee stability. A
1999 potential drawback is that list.sort() may require temp space of
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00002000 len(list)*2 bytes (``*4`` on a 64-bit machine). It's therefore possible
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00002001 for list.sort() to raise MemoryError now, even if a comparison function
2002 does not. See <http://www.python.org/sf/587076> for full details.
2003
Guido van Rossum2d5389c2002-07-23 03:44:35 +00002004- All standard iterators now ensure that, once StopIteration has been
2005 raised, all future calls to next() on the same iterator will also
2006 raise StopIteration. There used to be various counterexamples to
2007 this behavior, which could caused confusion or subtle program
2008 breakage, without any benefits. (Note that this is still an
2009 iterator's responsibility; the iterator framework does not enforce
2010 this.)
2011
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00002012- Ctrl+C handling on Windows has been made more consistent with
2013 other platforms. KeyboardInterrupt can now reliably be caught,
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00002014 and Ctrl+C at an interactive prompt no longer terminates the
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00002015 process under NT/2k/XP (it never did under Win9x). Ctrl+C will
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00002016 interrupt time.sleep() in the main thread, and any child processes
2017 created via the popen family (on win2k; we can't make win9x work
Mark Hammond8f3afc72002-08-10 06:26:31 +00002018 reliably) are also interrupted (as generally happens on for Linux/Unix.)
2019 [SF bugs 231273, 439992 and 581232]
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00002020
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00002021- sys.getwindowsversion() has been added on Windows. This
2022 returns a tuple with information about the version of Windows
2023 currently running.
2024
Raymond Hettinger5a04aec2002-06-25 00:25:30 +00002025- Slices and repetitions of buffer objects now consistently return
2026 a string. Formerly, strings would be returned most of the time,
2027 but a buffer object would be returned when the repetition count
2028 was one or when the slice range was all inclusive.
2029
Walter Dörwald3430d702002-06-17 10:43:59 +00002030- Unicode objects in sys.path are no longer ignored but treated
2031 as directory names.
2032
Neal Norwitz1f68fc72002-06-14 00:50:42 +00002033- Fixed string.startswith and string.endswith builtin methods
2034 so they accept negative indices. [SF bug 493951]
2035
Guido van Rossumc5fe5eb2002-06-12 03:45:21 +00002036- Fixed a bug with a continue inside a try block and a yield in the
2037 finally clause. [SF bug 567538]
2038
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00002039- Most builtin sequences now support "extended slices", i.e. slices
Guido van Rossum2e82e712002-06-13 11:41:07 +00002040 with a third "stride" parameter. For example, "hello world"[::-1]
2041 gives "dlrow olleh".
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00002042
Neal Norwitzd68f5172002-05-29 15:54:55 +00002043- A new warning PendingDeprecationWarning was added to provide
2044 direction on features which are in the process of being deprecated.
2045 The warning will not be printed by default. To see the pending
2046 deprecations, use -Walways::PendingDeprecationWarning::
2047 as a command line option or warnings.filterwarnings() in code.
2048
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00002049- Deprecated features of xrange objects have been removed as
2050 promised. The start, stop, and step attributes and the tolist()
2051 method no longer exist. xrange repetition and slicing have been
2052 removed.
2053
Guido van Rossum7dab2422002-04-26 19:40:56 +00002054- New builtin function enumerate(x), from PEP 279. Example:
2055 enumerate("abc") is an iterator returning (0,"a"), (1,"b"), (2,"c").
2056 The argument can be an arbitrary iterable object.
2057
Neil Schemenauer89e3ee02002-04-26 01:58:53 +00002058- The assert statement no longer tests __debug__ at runtime. This means
2059 that assert statements cannot be disabled by assigning a false value
2060 to __debug__.
2061
Walter Dörwald068325e2002-04-15 13:36:47 +00002062- A method zfill() was added to str and unicode, that fills a numeric
2063 string to the left with zeros. For example,
2064 "+123".zfill(6) -> "+00123".
2065
Guido van Rossum862fe3c2002-04-15 12:36:47 +00002066- Complex numbers supported divmod() and the // and % operators, but
2067 these make no sense. Since this was documented, they're being
2068 deprecated now.
2069
Guido van Rossum26dd8302002-04-26 20:11:29 +00002070- String and unicode methods lstrip(), rstrip() and strip() now take
2071 an optional argument that specifies the characters to strip. For
2072 example, "Foo!!!?!?!?".rstrip("?!") -> "Foo".
Guido van Rossum49042042002-04-13 00:59:05 +00002073
Guido van Rossumc0d3f4e2002-11-27 13:10:40 +00002074- There's a new dictionary constructor (a class method of the dict
2075 class), dict.fromkeys(iterable, value=None). It constructs a
2076 dictionary with keys taken from the iterable and all values set to a
2077 single value. It can be used for building sets and for removing
2078 duplicates from sequences.
Raymond Hettingere33d3df2002-11-27 07:29:33 +00002079
Guido van Rossumc69343b2002-04-12 19:22:48 +00002080- Added a new dict method pop(key). This removes and returns the
2081 value corresponding to key. [SF patch #539949]
2082
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00002083- A new built-in type, bool, has been added, as well as built-in
2084 names for its two values, True and False. Comparisons and sundry
2085 other operations that return a truth value have been changed to
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002086 return a bool instead. Read PEP 285 for an explanation of why this
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00002087 is backward compatible.
2088
Guido van Rossum95b62a62002-03-29 01:07:24 +00002089- Fixed two bugs reported as SF #535905: under certain conditions,
2090 deallocating a deeply nested structure could cause a segfault in the
2091 garbage collector, due to interaction with the "trashcan" code;
2092 access to the current frame during destruction of a local variable
2093 could access a pointer to freed memory.
2094
Guido van Rossumfe0ca4a2002-06-18 21:20:13 +00002095- The optional object allocator ("pymalloc") has been enabled by
2096 default. The recommended practice for memory allocation and
2097 deallocation has been streamlined. A header file is included,
2098 Misc/pymemcompat.h, which can be bundled with 3rd party extensions
2099 and lets them use the same API with Python versions from 1.5.2
2100 onwards.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00002101
Martin v. Löwiscfeb3b62002-03-03 21:30:27 +00002102- PyErr_Display will provide file and line information for all exceptions
2103 that have an attribute print_file_and_line, not just SyntaxErrors.
2104
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00002105- The UTF-8 codec will now encode and decode Unicode surrogates
2106 correctly and without raising exceptions for unpaired ones.
2107
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00002108- Universal newlines (PEP 278) is implemented. Briefly, using 'U'
2109 instead of 'r' when opening a text file for reading changes the line
2110 ending convention so that any of '\r', '\r\n', and '\n' is
2111 recognized (even mixed in one file); all three are converted to
2112 '\n', the standard Python line end character.
2113
Neal Norwitz649b7592002-01-01 19:07:13 +00002114- file.xreadlines() now raises a ValueError if the file is closed:
2115 Previously, an xreadlines object was returned which would raise
2116 a ValueError when the xreadlines.next() method was called.
2117
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002118- sys.exit() inadvertently allowed more than one argument.
Neal Norwitz0c766a02002-03-27 13:03:09 +00002119 An exception will now be raised if more than one argument is used.
2120
Gustavo Niemeyer17c5a332002-12-16 14:09:22 +00002121- Changed evaluation order of dictionary literals to conform to the
2122 general left to right evaluation order rule. Now {f1(): f2()} will
2123 evaluate f1 first.
Gustavo Niemeyer78429a62002-12-16 13:54:02 +00002124
Gustavo Niemeyer786ddb22002-12-16 18:12:53 +00002125- Fixed bug #521782: when a file was in non-blocking mode, file.read()
2126 could silently lose data or wrongly throw an unknown error.
2127
Neil Schemenauerb983aa02002-12-30 20:22:23 +00002128- The sq_repeat, sq_inplace_repeat, sq_concat and sq_inplace_concat
2129 slots are now always tried after trying the corresponding nb_* slots.
2130 This fixes a number of minor bugs (see bug #624807).
2131
Neal Norwitz74a032e2003-01-10 23:29:48 +00002132- Fix problem with dynamic loading on 64-bit AIX (see bug #639945).
2133
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002134Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002135-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002136
Raymond Hettinger9543b342003-01-18 23:22:20 +00002137- Added three operators to the operator module:
2138 operator.pow(a,b) which is equivalent to: a**b.
2139 operator.is_(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is b.
2140 operator.is_not(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is not b.
2141
Martin v. Löwis24a880b2002-12-31 12:55:15 +00002142- posix.openpty now works on all systems that have /dev/ptmx.
2143
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00002144- A module zipimport exists to support importing code from zip
2145 archives.
2146
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00002147- The new datetime module supplies classes for manipulating dates and
2148 times. The basic design came from the Zope "fishbowl process", and
2149 favors practical commercial applications over calendar esoterica. See
2150
2151 http://www.zope.org/Members/fdrake/DateTimeWiki/FrontPage
2152
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00002153- _tkinter now returns Tcl objects, instead of strings. Objects which
2154 have Python equivalents are converted to Python objects, other objects
2155 are wrapped. This can be configured through the wantobjects method,
Martin v. Löwis8c8aa5d2002-11-26 21:39:48 +00002156 or Tkinter.wantobjects.
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00002157
Barry Warsawc27f4bd2002-12-30 21:03:26 +00002158- The PyBSDDB wrapper around the Sleepycat Berkeley DB library has
2159 been added as the package bsddb. The traditional bsddb module is
2160 still available in source code, but not built automatically anymore,
2161 and is now named bsddb185. This supports Berkeley DB versions from
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00002162 3.0 to 4.1. For help converting your databases from the old module (which
2163 probably used an obsolete version of Berkeley DB) to the new module, see
2164 the db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py scripts described in the Tools/Demos
2165 section above.
Martin v. Löwisef546b32002-11-19 08:12:57 +00002166
Martin v. Löwis677bde22002-11-23 22:08:15 +00002167- unicodedata was updated to Unicode 3.2. It supports normalization
2168 and names for Hangul syllables and CJK unified ideographs.
Martin v. Löwis7d41e292002-11-23 12:22:32 +00002169
Neal Norwitz94a83fd2002-11-02 17:46:24 +00002170- resource.getrlimit() now returns longs instead of ints.
2171
Martin v. Löwis080689c2002-10-26 14:42:02 +00002172- readline now dynamically adjusts its input/output stream if
2173 sys.stdin/stdout changes.
2174
Guido van Rossumba602972002-10-01 18:18:58 +00002175- The _tkinter module (and hence Tkinter) has dropped support for
2176 Tcl/Tk 8.0 and 8.1. Only Tcl/Tk versions 8.2, 8.3 and 8.4 are
2177 supported.
2178
Martin v. Löwis658009a2002-09-16 17:26:24 +00002179- cPickle.BadPickleGet is now a class.
2180
Martin v. Löwisa19bfe02002-10-16 18:28:36 +00002181- The time stamps in os.stat_result are floating point numbers
2182 after stat_float_times has been called.
Martin v. Löwis94717ed2002-09-09 14:24:16 +00002183
Neal Norwitzb5673922002-09-05 21:48:07 +00002184- If the size passed to mmap.mmap() is larger than the length of the
2185 file on non-Windows platforms, a ValueError is raised. [SF bug 585792]
2186
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00002187- The xreadlines module is slated for obsolescence.
2188
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00002189- The strptime function in the time module is now always available (a
2190 Python implementation is used when the C library doesn't define it).
2191
Guido van Rossum9562bcf2002-06-14 21:31:18 +00002192- The 'new' module is no longer an extension, but a Python module that
2193 only exists for backwards compatibility. Its contents are no longer
2194 functions but callable type objects.
2195
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00002196- The bsddb.*open functions can now take 'None' as a filename.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00002197 This will create a temporary in-memory bsddb that won't be
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00002198 written to disk.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00002199
Martin v. Löwisb96152c2002-12-31 13:20:15 +00002200- posix.getloadavg, posix.lchown, posix.killpg, posix.mknod, and
2201 posix.getpgid have been added where available.
Martin v. Löwis06a83e92002-04-14 10:19:44 +00002202
Martin v. Löwisf0a46682002-11-03 17:20:12 +00002203- The locale module now exposes the C library's gettext interface. It
2204 also has a new function getpreferredencoding.
Martin v. Löwis2e64c342002-03-27 18:49:02 +00002205
Tim Petersfbf74f22002-03-14 19:06:01 +00002206- A security hole ("double free") was found in zlib-1.1.3, a popular
2207 third party compression library used by some Python modules. The
2208 hole was quickly plugged in zlib-1.1.4, and the Windows build of
2209 Python now ships with zlib-1.1.4.
2210
Martin v. Löwis688357e2002-04-08 21:28:20 +00002211- pwd, grp, and resource return enhanced tuples now, with symbolic
2212 field names.
Martin v. Löwis29001ff2002-03-01 10:47:37 +00002213
Martin v. Löwis99866332002-03-01 10:27:01 +00002214- array.array is now a type object. A new format character
2215 'u' indicates Py_UNICODE arrays. For those, .tounicode and
2216 .fromunicode methods are available. Arrays now support __iadd__
2217 and __imul__.
2218
Neal Norwitze790eae2002-01-01 21:14:12 +00002219- dl now builds on every system that has dlfcn.h. Failure in case
Martin v. Löwis93227272002-01-01 20:18:30 +00002220 of sizeof(int)!=sizeof(long)!=sizeof(void*) is delayed until dl.open
2221 is called.
2222
Skip Montanaro8e790e72002-09-03 13:25:17 +00002223- The sys module acquired a new attribute, api_version, which evaluates
2224 to the value of the PYTHON_API_VERSION macro with which the
2225 interpreter was compiled.
2226
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00002227- Fixed bug #470582: sre module would return a tuple (None, 'a', 'ab')
2228 when applying the regular expression '^((a)c)?(ab)$' on 'ab'. It now
2229 returns (None, None, 'ab'), as expected. Also fixed handling of
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00002230 lastindex/lastgroup match attributes in similar cases. For example,
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00002231 when running the expression r'(a)(b)?b' over 'ab', lastindex must be
2232 1, not 2.
2233
Gustavo Niemeyerc523b042002-11-07 03:28:56 +00002234- Fixed bug #581080: sre scanner was not checking the buffer limit
2235 before increasing the current pointer. This was creating an infinite
2236 loop in the search function, once the pointer exceeded the buffer
2237 limit.
2238
Thomas Heller95cb7e42002-11-07 16:23:55 +00002239- The os.fdopen function now enforces a file mode starting with the
2240 letter 'r', 'w' or 'a', otherwise a ValueError is raised. This fixes
2241 bug #623464.
2242
Greg Ward6c58d462003-01-03 18:02:15 +00002243- The linuxaudiodev module is now deprecated; it is being replaced by
2244 ossaudiodev. The interface has been extended to cover a lot more of
2245 OSS (see www.opensound.com), including most DSP ioctls and the
2246 OSS mixer API. Documentation forthcoming in 2.3a2.
2247
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002248Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002249-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002250
Guido van Rossum747f8062003-01-03 16:33:49 +00002251- imaplib.py now supports SSL (Tino Lange and Piers Lauder).
2252
Just van Rossum5e156ad2002-12-31 16:38:01 +00002253- Freeze's modulefinder.py has been moved to the standard library;
2254 slightly improved so it will issue less false missing submodule
2255 reports (see sf path #643711 for details). Documentation will follow
2256 with Python 2.3a2.
2257
Martin v. Löwis96a60e42002-12-31 13:11:54 +00002258- os.path exposes getctime.
2259
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002260- unittest.py now has two additional methods called assertAlmostEqual()
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002261 and failIfAlmostEqual(). They implement an approximate comparison
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002262 by rounding the difference between the two arguments and comparing
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002263 the result to zero. Approximate comparison is essential for
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002264 unit tests of floating point results.
2265
Raymond Hettingere11b5102002-12-25 16:37:19 +00002266- calendar.py now depends on the new datetime module rather than
2267 the time module. As a result, the range of allowable dates
2268 has been increased.
2269
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00002270- pdb has a new 'j(ump)' command to select the next line to be
2271 executed.
2272
Thomas Heller1b3b49d2002-12-12 19:13:44 +00002273- The distutils created windows installers now can run a
2274 postinstallation script.
2275
Martin v. Löwis4581cfa2002-11-22 08:23:09 +00002276- doctest.testmod can now be called without argument, which means to
2277 test the current module.
2278
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002279- When canceling a server that implemented threading with a keyboard
Martin v. Löwisf86e8ef2002-11-22 08:08:44 +00002280 interrupt, the server would shut down but not terminate (waiting on
2281 client threads). A new member variable, daemon_threads, was added to
2282 the ThreadingMixIn class in SocketServer.py to make it explicit that
2283 this behavior needs to be controlled.
2284
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00002285- A new module, optparse, provides a fancy alternative to getopt for
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00002286 command line parsing. It is a slightly modified version of Greg
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00002287 Ward's Optik package.
2288
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00002289- UserDict.py now defines a DictMixin class which defines all dictionary
2290 methods for classes that already have a minimum mapping interface.
2291 This greatly simplifies writing classes that need to be substitutable
2292 for dictionaries (such as the shelve module).
2293
2294- shelve.py now subclasses from UserDict.DictMixin. Now shelve supports
2295 all dictionary methods. This eases the transition to persistent
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00002296 storage for scripts originally written with dictionaries in mind.
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00002297
Skip Montanaro3bf99e32002-12-08 18:36:24 +00002298- shelve.open and the various classes in shelve.py now accept an optional
2299 binary flag, which defaults to False. If True, the values stored in the
2300 shelf are binary pickles.
2301
Guido van Rossumfda06742002-11-13 16:29:18 +00002302- A new package, logging, implements the logging API defined by PEP
2303 282. The code is written by Vinay Sajip.
2304
Walter Dörwald4dbf1922002-11-06 16:53:44 +00002305- StreamReader, StreamReaderWriter and StreamRecoder in the codecs
2306 modules are iterators now.
2307
Tim Peters9288f952002-11-05 20:38:55 +00002308- gzip.py now handles files exceeding 2GB. Files over 4GB also work
2309 now (provided the OS supports it, and Python is configured with large
2310 file support), but in that case the underlying gzip file format can
2311 record only the least-significant 32 bits of the file size, so that
2312 some tools working with gzipped files may report an incorrect file
2313 size.
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00002314
Martin v. Löwis74b51ac2002-10-26 14:50:45 +00002315- xml.sax.saxutils.unescape has been added, to replace entity references
2316 with their entity value.
2317
Martin v. Löwis77ac4292002-10-15 15:11:13 +00002318- Queue.Queue.{put,get} now support an optional timeout argument.
2319
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00002320- Various features of Tk 8.4 are exposed in Tkinter.py. The multiple
2321 option of tkFileDialog is exposed as function askopenfile{,name}s.
Martin v. Löwis2ec36272002-10-13 10:22:08 +00002322
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00002323- Various configure methods of Tkinter have been stream-lined, so that
2324 tag_configure, image_configure, window_configure now return a
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00002325 dictionary when invoked with no argument.
Martin v. Löwis6ce13152002-10-10 14:36:13 +00002326
Guido van Rossum2b492b62002-10-09 21:40:48 +00002327- Importing the readline module now no longer has the side effect of
2328 calling setlocale(LC_CTYPE, ""). The initial "C" locale, or
2329 whatever locale is explicitly set by the user, is preserved. If you
2330 want repr() of 8-bit strings in your preferred encoding to preserve
2331 all printable characters of that encoding, you have to add the
2332 following code to your $PYTHONSTARTUP file or to your application's
2333 main():
2334
2335 import locale
2336 locale.setlocale(locale.LC_CTYPE, "")
2337
Martin v. Löwise9ce0b02002-10-07 13:23:24 +00002338- shutil.move was added. shutil.copytree now reports errors as an
2339 exception at the end, instead of printing error messages.
2340
Marc-André Lemburg97047e22002-10-04 11:55:21 +00002341- Encoding name normalization was generalized to not only
2342 replace hyphens with underscores, but also all other non-alphanumeric
2343 characters (with the exception of the dot which is used for Python
2344 package names during lookup). The aliases.py mapping was updated
2345 to the new standard.
2346
Walter Dörwald5ccaf8f2002-09-06 16:15:58 +00002347- mimetypes has two new functions: guess_all_extensions() which
2348 returns a list of all known extensions for a mime type, and
2349 add_type() which adds one mapping between a mime type and
2350 an extension to the database.
2351
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00002352- New module: sets, defines the class Set that implements a mutable
2353 set type using the keys of a dict to represent the set. There's
2354 also a class ImmutableSet which is useful when you need sets of sets
2355 or when you need to use sets as dict keys, and a class BaseSet which
Raymond Hettingeref8b9c62002-12-09 08:56:06 +00002356 is the base class of the two.
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00002357
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00002358- Added random.sample(population,k) for random sampling without replacement.
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00002359 Returns a k length list of unique elements chosen from the population.
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00002360
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00002361- random.randrange(-sys.maxint-1, sys.maxint) no longer raises
2362 OverflowError. That is, it now accepts any combination of 'start'
2363 and 'stop' arguments so long as each is in the range of Python's
2364 bounded integers.
2365
Raymond Hettinger40f62172002-12-29 23:03:38 +00002366- Thanks to Raymond Hettinger, random.random() now uses a new core
2367 generator. The Mersenne Twister algorithm is implemented in C,
2368 threadsafe, faster than the previous generator, has an astronomically
2369 large period (2**19937-1), creates random floats to full 53-bit
2370 precision, and may be the most widely tested random number generator
2371 in existence.
2372
2373 The random.jumpahead(n) method has different semantics for the new
2374 generator. Instead of jumping n steps ahead, it uses n and the
2375 existing state to create a new state. This means that jumpahead()
2376 continues to support multi-threaded code needing generators of
2377 non-overlapping sequences. However, it will break code which relies
2378 on jumpahead moving a specific number of steps forward.
2379
2380 The attributes random.whseed and random.__whseed have no meaning for
2381 the new generator. Code using these attributes should switch to a
2382 new class, random.WichmannHill which is provided for backward
2383 compatibility and to make an alternate generator available.
2384
Guido van Rossum4a57c332002-08-02 18:05:20 +00002385- New "algorithms" module: heapq, implements a heap queue. Thanks to
2386 Kevin O'Connor for the code and François Pinard for an entertaining
2387 write-up explaining the theory and practical uses of heaps.
2388
Marc-André Lemburg58e2ff22002-07-12 14:40:04 +00002389- New encoding for the Palm OS character set: palmos.
2390
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00002391- binascii.crc32() and the zipfile module had problems on some 64-bit
2392 platforms. These have been fixed. On a platform with 8-byte C longs,
2393 crc32() now returns a signed-extended 4-byte result, so that its value
2394 as a Python int is equal to the value computed a 32-bit platform.
2395
Martin v. Löwis7d650ca2002-06-30 15:05:00 +00002396- xml.dom.minidom.toxml and toprettyxml now take an optional encoding
2397 argument.
2398
Guido van Rossum9f7549b2002-06-10 21:39:42 +00002399- Some fixes in the copy module: when an object is copied through its
2400 __reduce__ method, there was no check for a __setstate__ method on
2401 the result [SF patch 565085]; deepcopy should treat instances of
2402 custom metaclasses the same way it treats instances of type 'type'
2403 [SF patch 560794].
2404
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00002405- Sockets now support timeout mode. After s.settimeout(T), where T is
2406 a float expressing seconds, subsequent operations raise an exception
2407 if they cannot be completed within T seconds. To disable timeout
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00002408 mode, use s.settimeout(None). There's also a module function,
2409 socket.setdefaulttimeout(T), which sets the default for all sockets
2410 created henceforth.
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00002411
2412- getopt.gnu_getopt was added. This supports GNU-style option
2413 processing, where options can be mixed with non-option arguments.
Martin v. Löwis446a25f2002-06-06 10:58:36 +00002414
Michael W. Hudsonb0dc1a32002-06-04 18:27:35 +00002415- Stop using strings for exceptions. String objects used for
2416 exceptions are now classes deriving from Exception. The objects
2417 changed were: Tkinter.TclError, bdb.BdbQuit, macpath.norm_error,
2418 tabnanny.NannyNag, and xdrlib.Error.
Neal Norwitzb5b5a262002-06-04 17:14:07 +00002419
Walter Dörwald474458d2002-06-04 15:16:29 +00002420- Constants BOM_UTF8, BOM_UTF16, BOM_UTF16_LE, BOM_UTF16_BE,
2421 BOM_UTF32, BOM_UTF32_LE and BOM_UTF32_BE that represent the Byte
2422 Order Mark in UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 encodings for little and
2423 big endian systems were added to the codecs module. The old names
2424 BOM32_* and BOM64_* were off by a factor of 2.
2425
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00002426- Added conversion functions math.degrees() and math.radians().
Raymond Hettinger87f59ee2002-05-13 04:17:32 +00002427
Raymond Hettinger866964c2002-12-14 19:51:34 +00002428- math.log() now takes an optional argument: math.log(x[, base]).
2429
Raymond Hettinger9b1df1d2002-05-12 06:07:21 +00002430- ftplib.retrlines() now tests for callback is None rather than testing
2431 for False. Was causing an error when given a callback object which
2432 was callable but also returned len() as zero. The change may
2433 create new breakage if the caller relied on the undocumented behavior
2434 and called with callback set to [] or some other False value not
2435 identical to None.
2436
Tim Peters46c04e12002-05-05 20:40:00 +00002437- random.gauss() uses a piece of hidden state used by nothing else,
2438 and the .seed() and .whseed() methods failed to reset it. In other
2439 words, setting the seed didn't completely determine the sequence of
2440 results produced by random.gauss(). It does now. Programs repeatedly
2441 mixing calls to a seed method with calls to gauss() may see different
2442 results now.
2443
Fred Drake7f781c92002-05-01 20:33:53 +00002444- The pickle.Pickler class grew a clear_memo() method to mimic that
2445 provided by cPickle.Pickler.
2446
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00002447- difflib's SequenceMatcher class now does a dynamic analysis of
2448 which elements are so frequent as to constitute noise. For
2449 comparing files as sequences of lines, this generally works better
2450 than the IS_LINE_JUNK function, and function ndiff's linejunk
2451 argument defaults to None now as a result. A happy benefit is
2452 that SequenceMatcher may run much faster now when applied
2453 to large files with many duplicate lines (for example, C program
2454 text with lots of repeated "}" and "return NULL;" lines).
2455
Guido van Rossum256705b2002-04-23 13:29:43 +00002456- New Text.dump() method in Tkinter module.
2457
Marc-André Lemburg1ec71ea2002-04-17 20:33:40 +00002458- New distutils commands for building packagers were added to
2459 support pkgtool on Solaris and swinstall on HP-UX.
2460
2461- distutils now has a new abstract binary packager base class
2462 command/bdist_packager, which simplifies writing packagers.
2463 This will hopefully provide the missing bits to encourage
2464 people to submit more packagers, e.g. for Debian, FreeBSD
2465 and other systems.
2466
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00002467- The UTF-16, -LE and -BE stream readers now raise a
2468 NotImplementedError for all calls to .readline(). Previously, they
2469 used to just produce garbage or fail with an encoding error --
2470 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 +00002471 work well with these.
2472
Martin v. Löwis5c137c22002-03-18 12:44:08 +00002473- compileall now supports quiet operation.
2474
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002475- The BaseHTTPServer now implements optional HTTP/1.1 persistent
Martin v. Löwis587c98c2002-03-17 18:37:22 +00002476 connections.
2477
Marc-André Lemburga5d2b4c2002-02-16 18:23:30 +00002478- socket module: the SSL support was broken out of the main
2479 _socket module C helper and placed into a new _ssl helper
2480 which now gets imported by socket.py if available and working.
2481
Marc-André Lemburg37aa5802002-02-10 21:42:47 +00002482- encodings package: added aliases for all supported IANA character
2483 sets
2484
Guido van Rossum606fe4e2001-12-28 20:57:14 +00002485- ftplib: to safeguard the user's privacy, anonymous login will use
2486 "anonymous@" as default password, rather than the real user and host
2487 name.
2488
Fred Drake36736122002-01-10 13:50:31 +00002489- webbrowser: tightened up the command passed to os.system() so that
2490 arbitrary shell code can't be executed because a bogus URL was
2491 passed in.
2492
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00002493- gettext.translation has an optional fallback argument, and
Martin v. Löwisa55ffae2002-01-11 06:58:49 +00002494 gettext.find an optional all argument. Translations will now fallback
Martin v. Löwisd8996052002-11-21 21:45:32 +00002495 on a per-message basis. The module supports plural forms, by means
2496 of gettext.[d]ngettext and Translation.[u]ngettext.
Martin v. Löwis1be64192002-01-11 06:33:28 +00002497
Martin v. Löwis9668b932002-01-12 11:27:42 +00002498- distutils bdist commands now offer a --skip-build option.
2499
Walter Dörwaldb25c2b02002-03-21 10:38:40 +00002500- warnings.warn now accepts a Warning instance as first argument.
2501
Fred Drakefed7e852002-04-04 19:36:15 +00002502- The xml.sax.expatreader.ExpatParser class will no longer create
2503 circular references by using itself as the locator that gets passed
2504 to the content handler implementation. [SF bug #535474]
2505
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00002506- The email.Parser.Parser class now properly parses strings regardless
2507 of their line endings, which can be any of \r, \n, or \r\n (CR, LF,
2508 or CRLF). Also, the Header class's constructor default arguments
2509 has changed slightly so that an explicit maxlinelen value is always
Barry Warsaw497e5c42002-12-30 19:27:08 +00002510 honored, and so unicode conversion error handling can be specified.
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00002511
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002512- distutils' build_ext command now links C++ extensions with the C++
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00002513 compiler available in the Makefile or CXX environment variable, if
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002514 running under \*nix.
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00002515
2516- New module bz2: provides a comprehensive interface for the bz2 compression
2517 library. It implements a complete file interface, one-shot (de)compression
2518 functions, and types for sequential (de)compression.
2519
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002520- New pdb command 'pp' which is like 'p' except that it pretty-prints
Barry Warsaw5d8d6182002-11-05 22:41:33 +00002521 the value of its expression argument.
2522
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00002523- Now bdist_rpm distutils command understands a verify_script option in
2524 the config file, including the contents of the referred filename in
2525 the "%verifyscript" section of the rpm spec file.
2526
Gustavo Niemeyer1456fde2002-11-25 17:25:04 +00002527- Fixed bug #495695: webbrowser module would run graphic browsers in a
2528 unix environment even if DISPLAY was not set. Also, support for
2529 skipstone browser was included.
2530
Gustavo Niemeyerd5ae01a2002-12-16 13:11:57 +00002531- Fixed bug #636769: rexec would run unallowed code if subclasses of
2532 strings were used as parameters for certain functions.
2533
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002534Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002535-----------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002536
Martin v. Löwis0d1fdea2002-11-22 08:36:54 +00002537- pygettext.py now supports globbing on Windows, and accepts module
2538 names in addition to accepting file names.
2539
Guido van Rossum923e4ef2002-09-17 20:58:59 +00002540- The SGI demos (Demo/sgi) have been removed. Nobody thought they
2541 were interesting any more. (The SGI library modules and extensions
2542 are still there; it is believed that at least some of these are
2543 still used and useful.)
2544
Fred Drake40813b12002-08-05 15:24:19 +00002545- IDLE supports the new encoding declarations (PEP 263); it can also
2546 deal with legacy 8-bit files if they use the locale's encoding. It
2547 allows non-ASCII strings in the interactive shell and executes them
2548 in the locale's encoding.
Martin v. Löwis98ce7b72002-08-05 15:11:26 +00002549
Marc-André Lemburg46260092002-04-04 16:17:11 +00002550- freeze.py now produces binaries which can import shared modules,
2551 unlike before when this failed due to missing symbol exports in
2552 the generated binary.
2553
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002554Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002555-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002556
Martin v. Löwisdc461752002-11-06 21:59:33 +00002557- On Unix, IDLE is now installed automatically.
2558
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00002559- The fpectl module is not built by default; it's dangerous or useless
2560 except in the hands of experts.
2561
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00002562- The public Python C API will generally be declared using PyAPI_FUNC
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00002563 and PyAPI_DATA macros, while Python extension module init functions
2564 will be declared with PyMODINIT_FUNC. DL_EXPORT/DL_IMPORT macros
2565 are deprecated.
Neal Norwitz1389f3e2002-07-22 13:21:10 +00002566
Tim Petersc6a3ff62002-07-08 22:11:52 +00002567- A bug was fixed that could cause COUNT_ALLOCS builds to segfault, or
2568 get into infinite loops, when a new-style class got garbage-collected.
2569 Unfortunately, to avoid this, the way COUNT_ALLOCS works requires
2570 that new-style classes be immortal in COUNT_ALLOCS builds. Note that
2571 COUNT_ALLOCS is not enabled by default, in either release or debug
2572 builds, and that new-style classes are immortal only in COUNT_ALLOCS
2573 builds.
2574
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00002575- Compiling out the cyclic garbage collector is no longer an option.
2576 The old symbol WITH_CYCLE_GC is now ignored, and Python.h arranges
2577 that it's always defined (for the benefit of any extension modules
2578 that may be conditionalizing on it). A bonus is that any extension
2579 type participating in cyclic gc can choose to participate in the
2580 Py_TRASHCAN mechanism now too; in the absence of cyclic gc, this used
2581 to require editing the core to teach the trashcan mechanism about the
2582 new type.
2583
Martin v. Löwis0cec0ff2002-07-28 16:33:45 +00002584- According to Annex F of the current C standard,
Tim Peters1de41bf2002-07-03 03:31:20 +00002585
2586 The Standard C macro HUGE_VAL and its float and long double analogs,
2587 HUGE_VALF and HUGE_VALL, expand to expressions whose values are
2588 positive infinities.
2589
2590 Python only uses the double HUGE_VAL, and only to #define its own symbol
2591 Py_HUGE_VAL. Some platforms have incorrect definitions for HUGE_VAL.
2592 pyport.h used to try to worm around that, but the workarounds triggered
2593 other bugs on other platforms, so we gave up. If your platform defines
2594 HUGE_VAL incorrectly, you'll need to #define Py_HUGE_VAL to something
2595 that works on your platform. The only instance of this I'm sure about
2596 is on an unknown subset of Cray systems, described here:
2597
2598 http://www.cray.com/swpubs/manuals/SN-2194_2.0/html-SN-2194_2.0/x3138.htm
2599
2600 Presumably 2.3a1 breaks such systems. If anyone uses such a system, help!
2601
Martin v. Löwisa3fb4f72002-06-09 13:33:54 +00002602- The configure option --without-doc-strings can be used to remove the
2603 doc strings from the builtin functions and modules; this reduces the
2604 size of the executable.
2605
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00002606- The universal newlines option (PEP 278) is on by default. On Unix
2607 it can be disabled by passing --without-universal-newlines to the
2608 configure script. On other platforms, remove
2609 WITH_UNIVERSAL_NEWLINES from pyconfig.h.
Tim Peters639295f2002-04-21 07:30:30 +00002610
Martin v. Löwis1142de32002-03-29 16:28:31 +00002611- On Unix, a shared libpython2.3.so can be created with --enable-shared.
2612
Tim Peters8deda702002-03-30 10:06:07 +00002613- All uses of the CACHE_HASH, INTERN_STRINGS, and DONT_SHARE_SHORT_STRINGS
2614 preprocessor symbols were eliminated. The internal decisions they
2615 controlled stopped being experimental long ago.
Tim Peters1f7df352002-03-29 03:29:08 +00002616
Fred Drake7d28b732002-05-02 21:17:00 +00002617- The tools used to build the documentation now work under Cygwin as
2618 well as Unix.
2619
Skip Montanaro57454e52002-06-14 20:30:31 +00002620- The bsddb and dbm module builds have been changed to try and avoid version
2621 skew problems and disable linkage with Berkeley DB 1.85 unless the
2622 installer knows what s/he's doing. See the section on building these
2623 modules in the README file for details.
2624
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002625C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002626-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002627
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00002628- PyNumber_Check() now returns true for string and unicode objects.
2629 This is a result of these types having a partially defined
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00002630 tp_as_number slot. (This is not a feature, but an indication that
Walter Dörwalda1a61f92002-11-19 21:20:25 +00002631 PyNumber_Check() is not very useful to determine numeric behavior.
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00002632 It may be deprecated.)
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00002633
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00002634- The string object's layout has changed: the pointer member
2635 ob_sinterned has been replaced by an int member ob_sstate. On some
2636 platforms (e.g. most 64-bit systems) this may change the offset of
2637 the ob_sval member, so as a precaution the API_VERSION has been
2638 incremented. The apparently unused feature of "indirect interned
2639 strings", supported by the ob_sinterned member, is gone. Interned
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002640 strings are now usually mortal; there is a new API,
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00002641 PyString_InternImmortal() that creates immortal interned strings.
2642 (The ob_sstate member can only take three values; however, while
2643 making it a char saves a few bytes per string object on average, in
2644 it also slowed things down a bit because ob_sval was no longer
2645 aligned.)
2646
Guido van Rossumfdb86482002-08-14 21:20:32 +00002647- The Py_InitModule*() functions now accept NULL for the 'methods'
2648 argument. Modules without global functions are becoming more common
2649 now that factories can be types rather than functions.
2650
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00002651- New C API PyUnicode_FromOrdinal() which exposes unichr() at C
2652 level.
2653
Thomas Heller085358a2002-07-29 14:27:41 +00002654- New functions PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErr() and
2655 PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErrWithFilename(). Similar to
2656 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErrWithFilename() and
2657 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErr(), but they allow to specify
2658 the exception type to raise. Available on Windows.
2659
Tim Peters7c321a82002-07-09 02:57:01 +00002660- Py_FatalError() is now declared as taking a const char* argument. It
2661 was previously declared without const. This should not affect working
2662 code.
2663
Martin v. Löwis01f94bd2002-05-08 08:44:21 +00002664- Added new macro PySequence_ITEM(o, i) that directly calls
2665 sq_item without rechecking that o is a sequence and without
2666 adjusting for negative indices.
2667
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00002668- PyRange_New() now raises ValueError if the fourth argument is not 1.
2669 This is part of the removal of deprecated features of the xrange
2670 object.
2671
Guido van Rossum517c7d42002-04-26 02:49:14 +00002672- PyNumber_Coerce() and PyNumber_CoerceEx() now also invoke the type's
2673 coercion if both arguments have the same type but this type has the
2674 CHECKTYPES flag set. This is to better support proxies.
2675
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00002676- The type of tp_free has been changed from "``void (*)(PyObject *)``" to
2677 "``void (*)(void *)``".
Neil Schemenauer9344b142002-04-12 23:00:08 +00002678
2679- PyObject_Del, PyObject_GC_Del are now functions instead of macros.
2680
Guido van Rossum0986d822002-04-08 01:38:42 +00002681- A type can now inherit its metatype from its base type. Previously,
2682 when PyType_Ready() was called, if ob_type was found to be NULL, it
2683 was always set to &PyType_Type; now it is set to base->ob_type,
2684 where base is tp_base, defaulting to &PyObject_Type.
2685
2686- PyType_Ready() accidentally did not inherit tp_is_gc; now it does.
2687
Neil Schemenauerc9abc1d2002-05-08 14:14:41 +00002688- The PyCore_* family of APIs have been removed.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00002689
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002690- The "u#" parser marker will now pass through Unicode objects as-is
Marc-André Lemburg3e3eacb2002-01-09 16:21:27 +00002691 without going through the buffer API.
2692
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002693- The enumerators of cmp_op have been renamed to use the prefix ``PyCmp_``.
Martin v. Löwis7198a522002-01-01 19:59:11 +00002694
Tim Peters10a3bb52001-12-25 19:07:38 +00002695- An old #define of ANY as void has been removed from pyport.h. This
2696 hasn't been used since Python's pre-ANSI days, and the #define has
2697 been marked as obsolete since then. SF bug 495548 says it created
2698 conflicts with other packages, so keeping it around wasn't harmless.
2699
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002700- Because Python's magic number scheme broke on January 1st, we decided
2701 to stop Python development. Thanks for all the fish!
2702
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00002703- Some of us don't like fish, so we changed Python's magic number
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00002704 scheme to a new one. See Python/import.c for details.
2705
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002706New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002707-------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002708
Martin v. Löwis79acb9e2002-12-06 12:48:53 +00002709- OpenVMS is now supported.
2710
Martin v. Löwisf90ae202002-06-11 06:22:31 +00002711- AtheOS is now supported.
2712
Andrew MacIntyre161ad0e2002-08-04 07:25:58 +00002713- the EMX runtime environment on OS/2 is now supported.
2714
Martin v. Löwisa6e97582002-01-01 18:41:33 +00002715- GNU/Hurd is now supported.
2716
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002717Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002718-----
2719
Fred Drake4dd0f7e2002-11-26 21:44:56 +00002720- The regrtest.py script's -u option now provides a way to say "allow
2721 all resources except this one." For example, to allow everything
2722 except bsddb, give the option '-uall,-bsddb'.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002723
2724Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002725-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002726
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00002727- The Windows distribution now ships with version 4.0.14 of the
2728 Sleepycat Berkeley database library. This should be a huge
2729 improvement over the previous Berkeley DB 1.85, which had many
2730 bugs.
2731 XXX What are the licensing issues here?
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002732 XXX If a user has a database created with a previous version of
Tim Peters84c7a3f2002-11-23 18:48:06 +00002733 XXX Python, what must they do to convert it?
2734 XXX I'm still not sure how to link this thing (see PCbuild/readme.txt).
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00002735 XXX The version # is likely to change before 2.3a1.
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00002736
2737- The Windows distribution now ships with a Secure Sockets Library (SLL)
Mark Hammondc3de0082002-12-03 06:16:08 +00002738 module (_ssl.pyd)
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00002739
Tim Peters857fb4c2002-11-14 23:31:58 +00002740- The Windows distribution now ships with Tcl/Tk version 8.4.1 (it
2741 previously shipped with Tcl/Tk 8.3.2).
2742
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00002743- When Python is built under a Microsoft compiler, sys.version now
2744 includes the compiler version number (_MSC_VER). For example, under
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002745 MSVC 6, sys.version contains the substring "MSC v.1200 ". 1200 is
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00002746 the value of _MSC_VER under MSVC 6.
2747
Tim Peters08e72952002-04-16 20:48:01 +00002748- Sometimes the uninstall executable (UNWISE.EXE) vanishes. One cause
2749 of that has been fixed in the installer (disabled Wise's "delete in-
2750 use files" uninstall option).
2751
Guido van Rossum181e41a2002-04-06 00:23:25 +00002752- Fixed a bug in urllib's proxy handling in Windows. [SF bug #503031]
2753
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00002754- The installer now installs Start menu shortcuts under (the local
2755 equivalent of) "All Users" when doing an Admin install.
2756
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00002757- file.truncate([newsize]) now works on Windows for all newsize values.
2758 It used to fail if newsize didn't fit in 32 bits, reflecting a
2759 limitation of MS _chsize (which is no longer used).
2760
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00002761- os.waitpid() is now implemented for Windows, and can be used to block
2762 until a specified process exits. This is similar to, but not exactly
2763 the same as, os.waitpid() on POSIX systems. If you're waiting for
2764 a specific process whose pid was obtained from one of the spawn()
2765 functions, the same Python os.waitpid() code works across platforms.
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00002766 See the docs for details. The docs were changed to clarify that
2767 spawn functions return, and waitpid requires, a process handle on
2768 Windows (not the same thing as a Windows process id).
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00002769
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00002770- New tempfile.TemporaryFile implementation for Windows: this doesn't
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002771 need a TemporaryFileWrapper wrapper anymore, and should be immune
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00002772 to a nasty problem: before 2.3, if you got a temp file on Windows, it
2773 got wrapped in an object whose close() method first closed the
2774 underlying file, then deleted the file. This usually worked fine.
2775 However, the spawn family of functions on Windows create (at a low C
2776 level) the same set of open files in the spawned process Q as were
2777 open in the spawning process P. If a temp file f was among them, then
2778 doing f.close() in P first closed P's C-level file handle on f, but Q's
2779 C-level file handle on f remained open, so the attempt in P to delete f
2780 blew up with a "Permission denied" error (Windows doesn't allow
2781 deleting open files). This was surprising, subtle, and difficult to
2782 work around.
2783
2784- The os module now exports all the symbolic constants usable with the
2785 low-level os.open() on Windows: the new constants in 2.3 are
2786 O_NOINHERIT, O_SHORT_LIVED, O_TEMPORARY, O_RANDOM and O_SEQUENTIAL.
2787 The others were also available in 2.2: O_APPEND, O_BINARY, O_CREAT,
2788 O_EXCL, O_RDONLY, O_RDWR, O_TEXT, O_TRUNC and O_WRONLY. Contrary
2789 to Microsoft docs, O_SHORT_LIVED does not seem to imply O_TEMPORARY
2790 (so specify both if you want both; note that neither is useful unless
2791 specified with O_CREAT too).
2792
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002793Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002794----
2795
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002796- Mac/Relnotes is gone, the release notes are now here.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002797
Just van Rossume1ebd802003-02-10 10:06:18 +00002798- Python (the OSX-only, unix-based version, not the OS9-compatible CFM
2799 version) now fully supports unicode strings as arguments to various file
2800 system calls, eg. open(), file(), os.stat() and os.listdir().
2801
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002802- The current naming convention for Python on the Macintosh is that MacPython
2803 refers to the unix-based OSX-only version, and MacPython-OS9 refers to the
2804 CFM-based version that runs on both OS9 and OSX.
2805
2806- All MacPython-OS9 functionality is now available in an OSX unix build,
2807 including the Carbon modules, the IDE, OSA support, etc. A lot of this
2808 will only work correctly in a framework build, though, because you cannot
2809 talk to the window manager unless your application is run from a .app
2810 bundle. There is a command line tool "pythonw" that runs your script
2811 with an interpreter living in such a .app bundle, this interpreter should
2812 be used to run any Python script using the window manager (including
2813 Tkinter or wxPython scripts).
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00002814
Jack Jansen8bb80db2002-12-30 22:42:43 +00002815- Most of Mac/Lib has moved to Lib/plat-mac, which is again used both in
2816 MacPython-OSX and MacPython-OS9. The only modules remaining in Mac/Lib
2817 are specifically for MacPython-OS9 (CFM support, preference resources, etc).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002818
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002819- A new utility PythonLauncher will start a Python interpreter when a .py or
2820 .pyw script is double-clicked in the Finder. By default .py scripts are
2821 run with a normal Python interpreter in a Terminal window and .pyw
2822 files are run with a window-aware pythonw interpreter without a Terminal
2823 window, but all this can be customized.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002824
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002825- MacPython-OS9 is now Carbon-only, so it runs on Mac OS 9 or Mac OS X and
2826 possibly on Mac OS 8.6 with the right CarbonLib installed, but not on earlier
2827 releases.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002828
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002829- Many tools such as BuildApplet.py and gensuitemodule.py now support a command
2830 line interface too.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002831
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002832- All the Carbon classes are now PEP253 compliant, meaning that you can
2833 subclass them from Python. Most of the attributes have gone, you should
2834 now use the accessor function call API, which is also what Apple's
2835 documentation uses. Some attributes such as grafport.visRgn are still
2836 available for convenience.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002837
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002838- New Carbon modules File (implementing the APIs in Files.h and Aliases.h)
2839 and Folder (APIs from Folders.h). The old macfs builtin module is
2840 gone, and replaced by a Python wrapper around the new modules.
2841
2842- Pathname handling should now be fully consistent: MacPython-OSX always uses
2843 unix pathnames and MacPython-OS9 always uses colon-separated Mac pathnames
2844 (also when running on Mac OS X).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002845
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002846- New Carbon modules Help and AH give access to the Carbon Help Manager.
2847 There are hooks in the IDE to allow accessing the Python documentation
2848 (and Apple's Carbon and Cocoa documentation) through the Help Viewer.
2849 See Mac/OSX/README for converting the Python documentation to a
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002850 Help Viewer compatible form and installing it.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002851
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002852- OSA support has been redesigned and the generated Python classes now
2853 mirror the inheritance defined by the underlying OSA classes.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002854
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002855- MacPython no longer maps both \r and \n to \n on input for any text file.
2856 This feature has been replaced by universal newline support (PEP278).
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00002857
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00002858- The default encoding for Python sourcefiles in MacPython-OS9 is no longer
Guido van Rossum16c85172003-02-20 01:52:48 +00002859 mac-roman (or whatever your local Mac encoding was) but "ascii", like on
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00002860 other platforms. If you really need sourcefiles with Mac characters in them
2861 you can change this in site.py.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002862
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002863
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002864What's New in Python 2.2 final?
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002865===============================
2866
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002867*Release date: 21-Dec-2001*
2868
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002869Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002870--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002871
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002872- pickle.py, cPickle: allow pickling instances of new-style classes
2873 with a custom metaclass.
2874
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002875Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002876-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002877
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002878- weakref proxy object: when comparing, unwrap both arguments if both
2879 are proxies.
2880
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002881Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002882-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002883
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002884- binascii.b2a_base64(): fix a potential buffer overrun when encoding
2885 very short strings.
2886
2887- cPickle: the obscure "fast" mode was suspected of causing stack
2888 overflows on the Mac. Hopefully fixed this by setting the recursion
2889 limit much smaller. If the limit is too low (it only affects
2890 performance), you can change it by defining PY_CPICKLE_FAST_LIMIT
2891 when compiling cPickle.c (or in pyconfig.h).
2892
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002893Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002894-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002895
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002896- dumbdbm.py: fixed a dumb old bug (the file didn't get synched at
2897 close or delete time).
2898
2899- rfc822.py: fixed a bug where the address '<>' was converted to None
2900 instead of an empty string (also fixes the email.Utils module).
2901
2902- xmlrpclib.py: version 1.0.0; uses precision for doubles.
2903
2904- test suite: the pickle and cPickle tests were not executing any code
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002905 when run from the standard regression test.
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002906
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002907Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002908-----------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002909
2910Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002911-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002912
2913C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002914-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002915
2916New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002917-------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002918
2919Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002920-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002921
2922Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002923-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002924
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002925- distutils package: fixed broken Windows installers (bdist_wininst).
2926
2927- tempfile.py: prevent mysterious warnings when TemporaryFileWrapper
2928 instances are deleted at process exit time.
2929
2930- socket.py: prevent mysterious warnings when socket instances are
2931 deleted at process exit time.
2932
2933- posixmodule.c: fix a Windows crash with stat() of a filename ending
2934 in backslash.
2935
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002936Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002937----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002938
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002939- The Carbon toolbox modules have been upgraded to Universal Headers
2940 3.4, and experimental CoreGraphics and CarbonEvents modules have
2941 been added. All only for framework-enabled MacOSX.
2942
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002943
Tim Peters6272dfd2001-12-13 19:34:00 +00002944What's New in Python 2.2c1?
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002945===========================
2946
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002947*Release date: 14-Dec-2001*
2948
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002949Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002950--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002951
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00002952- Guido's tutorial introduction to the new type/class features has
2953 been extensively updated. See
2954
2955 http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html
2956
2957 That remains the primary documentation in this area.
2958
Guido van Rossum33bab012001-12-05 22:45:48 +00002959- Fixed a leak: instance variables declared with __slots__ were never
2960 deleted!
2961
Guido van Rossum4b800852001-12-03 00:54:52 +00002962- The "delete attribute" method of descriptor objects is called
2963 __delete__, not __del__. In previous releases, it was mistakenly
2964 called __del__, which created an unfortunate overloading condition
2965 with finalizers. (The "get attribute" and "set attribute" methods
2966 are still called __get__ and __set__, respectively.)
2967
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00002968- Some subtle issues with the super built-in were fixed:
2969
2970 (a) When super itself is subclassed, its __get__ method would still
2971 return an instance of the base class (i.e., of super).
2972
2973 (b) super(C, C()).__class__ would return C rather than super. This
2974 is confusing. To fix this, I decided to change the semantics of
2975 super so that it only applies to code attributes, not to data
2976 attributes. After all, overriding data attributes is not
2977 supported anyway.
2978
2979 (c) The __get__ method didn't check whether the argument was an
2980 instance of the type used in creation of the super instance.
2981
Guido van Rossumcd7b7d62001-12-04 21:02:07 +00002982- Previously, hash() of an instance of a subclass of a mutable type
2983 (list or dictionary) would return some value, rather than raising
2984 TypeError. This has been fixed. Also, directly calling
2985 dict.__hash__ and list.__hash__ now raises the same TypeError
2986 (previously, these were the same as object.__hash__).
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00002987
Guido van Rossumd331cb52001-12-05 19:46:42 +00002988- New-style objects now support deleting their __dict__. This is for
2989 all intents and purposes equivalent to assigning a brand new empty
2990 dictionary, but saves space if the object is not used further.
2991
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002992Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002993-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002994
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00002995- -Qnew now works as documented in PEP 238: when -Qnew is passed on
2996 the command line, all occurrences of "/" use true division instead
2997 of classic division. See the PEP for details. Note that "all"
2998 means all instances in library and 3rd-party modules, as well as in
2999 your own code. As the PEP says, -Qnew is intended for use only in
3000 educational environments with control over the libraries in use.
Tim Petersbf72fe22001-12-11 21:43:14 +00003001 Note that test_coercion.py in the standard Python test suite fails
3002 under -Qnew; this is expected, and won't be repaired until true
3003 division becomes the default (in the meantime, test_coercion is
3004 testing the current rules).
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00003005
Fred Drake6c01e252001-12-14 17:08:12 +00003006- complex() now only allows the first argument to be a string
3007 argument, and raises TypeError if either the second arg is a string
3008 or if the second arg is specified when the first is a string.
3009
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003010Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003011-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003012
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00003013- gc.get_referents was renamed to gc.get_referrers.
3014
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003015Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003016-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003017
Tim Peters25059d32001-12-07 20:35:43 +00003018- Functions in the os.spawn() family now release the global interpreter
3019 lock around calling the platform spawn. They should always have done
3020 this, but did not before 2.2c1. Multithreaded programs calling
3021 an os.spawn function with P_WAIT will no longer block all Python threads
3022 until the spawned program completes. It's possible that some programs
3023 relies on blocking, although more likely by accident than by design.
3024
Martin v. Löwis3a89b2b2001-11-25 14:35:58 +00003025- webbrowser defaults to netscape.exe on OS/2 now.
3026
Martin v. Löwis652e1912001-11-25 14:50:56 +00003027- Tix.ResizeHandle exposes detach_widget, hide, and show.
3028
Martin v. Löwis714d2e22001-12-02 12:26:03 +00003029- The charset alias windows_1252 has been added.
3030
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003031- types.StringTypes is a tuple containing the defined string types;
3032 usually this will be (str, unicode), but if Python was compiled
3033 without Unicode support it will be just (str,).
3034
3035- The pulldom and minidom modules were synchronized to PyXML.
3036
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003037Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003038-----------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003039
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003040- A new script called Tools/scripts/google.py was added, which fires
3041 off a search on Google.
3042
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003043Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003044-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003045
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003046- Note that release builds of Python should arrange to define the
3047 preprocessor symbol NDEBUG on the command line (or equivalent).
3048 In the 2.2 pre-release series we tried to define this by magic in
3049 Python.h instead, but it proved to cause problems for extension
3050 authors. The Unix, Windows and Mac builds now all define NDEBUG in
3051 release builds via cmdline (or equivalent) instead. Ports to
3052 other platforms should do likewise.
3053
Jack Jansen1999ef42001-12-06 21:47:20 +00003054- It is no longer necessary to use --with-suffix when building on a
3055 case-insensitive file system (such as Mac OS X HFS+). In the build
3056 directory an extension is used, but not in the installed python.
3057
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003058C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003059-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003060
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00003061- New function PyDict_MergeFromSeq2() exposes the builtin dict
3062 constructor's logic for updating a dictionary from an iterable object
3063 producing key-value pairs.
3064
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00003065- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() requires that the number of entries in
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00003066 the keyword list equal the number of argument specifiers. This
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00003067 wasn't checked correctly, and PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords could even
3068 dump core in some bad cases. This has been repaired. As a result,
3069 PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords may raise RuntimeError in bad cases that
3070 previously went unchallenged.
3071
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003072New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003073-------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003074
3075Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003076-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003077
3078Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003079-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003080
3081Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003082----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003083
Jack Jansenffa260f2001-12-06 21:14:00 +00003084- In unix-Python on Mac OS X (and darwin) sys.platform is now "darwin",
3085 without any trailing digits.
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003086
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003087- Changed logic for finding python home in Mac OS X framework Pythons.
3088 Now sys.executable points to the executable again, in stead of to
3089 the shared library. The latter is used only for locating the python
3090 home.
3091
3092
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003093What's New in Python 2.2b2?
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003094===========================
3095
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003096*Release date: 16-Nov-2001*
3097
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003098Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003099--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003100
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00003101- Multiple inheritance mixing new-style and classic classes in the
3102 list of base classes is now allowed, so this works now:
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00003103
3104 class Classic: pass
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00003105 class Mixed(Classic, object): pass
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00003106
3107 The MRO (method resolution order) for each base class is respected
3108 according to its kind, but the MRO for the derived class is computed
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003109 using new-style MRO rules if any base class is a new-style class.
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00003110 This needs to be documented.
3111
Tim Petersa427a2b2001-10-29 22:25:45 +00003112- The new builtin dictionary() constructor, and dictionary type, have
3113 been renamed to dict. This reflects a decade of common usage.
3114
Guido van Rossum3fc08d22001-11-15 20:33:10 +00003115- dict() now accepts an iterable object producing 2-sequences. For
3116 example, dict(d.items()) == d for any dictionary d. The argument,
3117 and the elements of the argument, can be any iterable objects.
3118
Guido van Rossum7ad2d1e2001-10-29 22:11:00 +00003119- New-style classes can now have a __del__ method, which is called
3120 when the instance is deleted (just like for classic classes).
3121
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003122- Assignment to object.__dict__ is now possible, for objects that are
3123 instances of new-style classes that have a __dict__ (unless the base
3124 class forbids it).
3125
Guido van Rossumc8e56452001-10-22 00:43:43 +00003126- Methods of built-in types now properly check for keyword arguments
3127 (formerly these were silently ignored). The only built-in methods
3128 that take keyword arguments are __call__, __init__ and __new__.
3129
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00003130- The socket function has been converted to a type; see below.
3131
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003132Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003133-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003134
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00003135- Assignment to __debug__ raises SyntaxError at compile-time. This
3136 was promised when 2.1c1 was released as "What's New in Python 2.1c1"
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003137 (see below) says.
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00003138
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003139- Clarified the error messages for unsupported operands to an operator
3140 (like 1 + '').
3141
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003142Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003143-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003144
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00003145- mmap has a new keyword argument, "access", allowing a uniform way for
3146 both Windows and Unix users to create read-only, write-through and
3147 copy-on-write memory mappings. This was previously possible only on
3148 Unix. A new keyword argument was required to support this in a
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003149 uniform way because the mmap() signatures had diverged across
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00003150 platforms. Thanks to Jay T Miller for repairing this!
3151
Tim Peters169ded02001-11-03 19:57:21 +00003152- By default, the gc.garbage list now contains only those instances in
3153 unreachable cycles that have __del__ methods; in 2.1 it contained all
3154 instances in unreachable cycles. "Instances" here has been generalized
3155 to include instances of both new-style and old-style classes.
3156
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003157- The socket module defines a new method for socket objects,
3158 sendall(). This is like send() but may make multiple calls to
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00003159 send() until all data has been sent. Also, the socket function has
3160 been converted to a subclassable type, like list and tuple (etc.)
3161 before it; socket and SocketType are now the same thing.
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003162
3163- Various bugfixes to the curses module. There is now a test suite
3164 for the curses module (you have to run it manually).
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00003165
Guido van Rossum692adf12001-10-30 03:03:03 +00003166- binascii.b2a_base64 no longer places an arbitrary restriction of 57
3167 bytes on its input.
3168
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003169Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003170-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003171
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00003172- tkFileDialog exposes a Directory class and askdirectory
Martin v. Löwis25ee87c2001-11-07 22:38:08 +00003173 convenience function.
3174
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00003175- Symbolic group names in regular expressions must be unique. For
3176 example, the regexp r'(?P<abc>)(?P<abc>)' is not allowed, because a
3177 single name can't mean both "group 1" and "group 2" simultaneously.
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003178 Python 2.2 detects this error at regexp compilation time;
3179 previously, the error went undetected, and results were
3180 unpredictable. Also in sre, the pattern.split(), pattern.sub(), and
3181 pattern.subn() methods have been rewritten in C. Also, an
3182 experimental function/method finditer() has been added, which works
3183 like findall() but returns an iterator.
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00003184
Martin v. Löwisb7b32602001-11-02 23:48:20 +00003185- Tix exposes more commands through the classes DirSelectBox,
3186 DirSelectDialog, ListNoteBook, Meter, CheckList, and the
3187 methods tix_addbitmapdir, tix_cget, tix_configure, tix_filedialog,
3188 tix_getbitmap, tix_getimage, tix_option_get, and tix_resetoptions.
3189
Tim Peters98791af2001-10-23 01:59:54 +00003190- Traceback objects are now scanned by cyclic garbage collection, so
3191 cycles created by casual use of sys.exc_info() no longer cause
3192 permanent memory leaks (provided garbage collection is enabled).
3193
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00003194- os.extsep -- a new variable needed by the RISCOS support. It is the
3195 separator used by extensions, and is '.' on all platforms except
3196 RISCOS, where it is '/'. There is no need to use this variable
3197 unless you have a masochistic desire to port your code to RISCOS.
3198
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003199- mimetypes.py has optional support for non-standard, but commonly
3200 found types. guess_type() and guess_extension() now accept an
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003201 optional 'strict' flag, defaulting to true, which controls whether
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003202 recognize non-standard types or not. A few non-standard types we
3203 know about have been added. Also, when run as a script, there are
3204 new -l and -e options.
3205
3206- statcache is now deprecated.
3207
3208- email.Utils.formatdate() now produces the preferred RFC 2822 style
3209 dates with numeric timezones (it used to produce obsolete dates
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003210 hard coded to "GMT" timezone). An optional 'localtime' flag is
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003211 added to produce dates in the local timezone, with daylight savings
3212 time properly taken into account.
3213
3214- In pickle and cPickle, instead of masking errors in load() by
3215 transforming them into SystemError, we let the original exception
3216 propagate out. Also, implement support for __safe_for_unpickling__
3217 in pickle, as it already was supported in cPickle.
3218
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003219Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003220-----------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003221
3222Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003223-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003224
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003225- The dbm module is built using libdb1 if available. The bsddb module
3226 is built with libdb3 if available.
3227
3228- Misc/Makefile.pre.in has been removed by BDFL pronouncement.
3229
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003230C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003231-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003232
Tim Peters1fc240e2001-10-26 05:06:50 +00003233- New function PySequence_Fast_GET_SIZE() returns the size of a non-
3234 NULL result from PySequence_Fast(), more quickly than calling
3235 PySequence_Size().
3236
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003237- New argument unpacking function PyArg_UnpackTuple() added.
3238
3239- New functions PyObject_CallFunctionObjArgs() and
3240 PyObject_CallMethodObjArgs() have been added to make it more
3241 convenient and efficient to call functions and methods from C.
3242
3243- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() no longer masks errors, so it's
3244 possible that this will propagate errors it didn't before.
3245
3246- New function PyObject_CheckReadBuffer(), which returns true if its
3247 argument supports the single-segment readable buffer interface.
3248
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003249New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003250-------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003251
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00003252- We've finally confirmed that this release builds on HP-UX 11.00,
3253 *with* threads, and passes the test suite.
3254
Tim Peters7a33d8b2001-11-05 02:51:07 +00003255- Thanks to a series of patches from Michael Muller, Python may build
3256 again under OS/2 Visual Age C++.
3257
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00003258- Updated RISCOS port by Dietmar Schwertberger.
3259
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003260Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003261-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003262
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00003263- Added a test script for the curses module. It isn't run automatically;
3264 regrtest.py must be run with '-u curses' to enable it.
3265
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003266Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003267-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003268
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003269Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003270----
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003271
3272- PythonScript has been moved to unsupported and is slated to be
3273 removed completely in the next release.
3274
3275- It should now be possible to build applets that work on both OS9 and
3276 OSX.
3277
3278- The core is now linked with CoreServices not Carbon; as a side
3279 result, default 8bit encoding on OSX is now ASCII.
3280
3281- Python should now build on OSX 10.1.1
3282
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003283
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003284What's New in Python 2.2b1?
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003285===========================
3286
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003287*Release date: 19-Oct-2001*
3288
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003289Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003290--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003291
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00003292- New-style classes are now always dynamic (except for built-in and
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00003293 extension types). There is no longer a performance penalty, and I
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00003294 no longer see another reason to keep this baggage around. One relic
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00003295 remains: the __dict__ of a new-style class is a read-only proxy; you
3296 must set the class's attribute to modify it. As a consequence, the
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00003297 __defined__ attribute of new-style types no longer exists, for lack
3298 of need: there is once again only one __dict__ (although in the
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00003299 future a __cache__ may be resurrected with a similar function, if I
3300 can prove that it actually speeds things up).
Guido van Rossum50fda3b2001-10-04 19:46:06 +00003301
Tim Peters1c9ca872001-10-04 06:43:12 +00003302- C.__doc__ now works as expected for new-style classes (in 2.2a4 it
3303 always returned None, even when there was a class docstring).
3304
3305- doctest now finds and runs docstrings attached to new-style classes,
3306 class methods, static methods, and properties.
3307
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003308Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003309-----------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003310
Guido van Rossuma8bcf802001-10-15 15:53:58 +00003311- A very subtle syntactical pitfall in list comprehensions was fixed.
3312 For example: [a+b for a in 'abc', for b in 'def']. The comma in
3313 this example is a mistake. Previously, this would silently let 'a'
3314 iterate over the singleton tuple ('abc',), yielding ['abcd', 'abce',
3315 'abcf'] rather than the intended ['ad', 'ae', 'af', 'bd', 'be',
3316 'bf', 'cd', 'ce', 'cf']. Now, this is flagged as a syntax error.
3317 Note that [a for a in <singleton>] is a convoluted way to say
3318 [<singleton>] anyway, so it's not like any expressiveness is lost.
3319
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003320- getattr(obj, name, default) now only catches AttributeError, as
3321 documented, rather than returning the default value for all
3322 exceptions (which could mask bugs in a __getattr__ hook, for
3323 example).
3324
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00003325- Weak reference objects are now part of the core and offer a C API.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00003326 A bug which could allow a core dump when binary operations involved
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00003327 proxy reference has been fixed. weakref.ReferenceError is now a
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003328 built-in exception.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00003329
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00003330- unicode(obj) now behaves more like str(obj), accepting arbitrary
3331 objects, and calling a __unicode__ method if it exists.
3332 unicode(obj, encoding) and unicode(obj, encoding, errors) still
Marc-André Lemburgb5507ec2001-10-19 12:02:29 +00003333 require an 8-bit string or character buffer argument.
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00003334
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003335- isinstance() now allows any object as the first argument and a
3336 class, a type or something with a __bases__ tuple attribute for the
3337 second argument. The second argument may also be a tuple of a
3338 class, type, or something with __bases__, in which case isinstance()
3339 will return true if the first argument is an instance of any of the
3340 things contained in the second argument tuple. E.g.
3341
3342 isinstance(x, (A, B))
3343
3344 returns true if x is an instance of A or B.
3345
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003346Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003347-----------------
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003348
3349- thread.start_new_thread() now returns the thread ID (previously None).
3350
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00003351- binascii has now two quopri support functions, a2b_qp and b2a_qp.
3352
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00003353- readline now supports setting the startup_hook and the
3354 pre_event_hook, and adds the add_history() function.
Martin v. Löwis0daad592001-09-30 21:09:59 +00003355
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00003356- os and posix supports chroot(), setgroups() and unsetenv() where
3357 available. The stat(), fstat(), statvfs() and fstatvfs() functions
3358 now return "pseudo-sequences" -- the various fields can now be
3359 accessed as attributes (e.g. os.stat("/").st_mtime) but for
3360 backwards compatibility they also behave as a fixed-length sequence.
3361 Some platform-specific fields (e.g. st_rdev) are only accessible as
Guido van Rossum98bf58f2001-10-18 20:34:25 +00003362 attributes.
3363
3364- time: localtime(), gmtime() and strptime() now return a
3365 pseudo-sequence similar to the os.stat() return value, with
3366 attributes like tm_year etc.
Martin v. Löwis16628c92001-10-04 22:46:41 +00003367
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003368- Decompression objects in the zlib module now accept an optional
3369 second parameter to decompress() that specifies the maximum amount
3370 of memory to use for the uncompressed data.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003371
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00003372- optional SSL support in the socket module now exports OpenSSL
3373 functions RAND_add(), RAND_egd(), and RAND_status(). These calls
3374 are useful on platforms like Solaris where OpenSSL does not
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003375 automatically seed its PRNG. Also, the keyfile and certfile
3376 arguments to socket.ssl() are now optional.
3377
3378- posixmodule (and by extension, the os module on POSIX platforms) now
3379 exports O_LARGEFILE, O_DIRECT, O_DIRECTORY, and O_NOFOLLOW.
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00003380
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003381Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003382-------
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00003383
Tim Peters7402f792001-10-02 03:53:41 +00003384- doctest now excludes functions and classes not defined by the module
3385 being tested, thanks to Tim Hochberg.
3386
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00003387- HotShot, a new profiler implemented using a C-based callback, has
3388 been added. This substantially reduces the overhead of profiling,
3389 but it is still quite preliminary. Support modules and
3390 documentation will be added in upcoming releases (before 2.2 final).
3391
Guido van Rossumc4b09b42001-10-04 10:19:00 +00003392- profile now produces correct output in situations where an exception
3393 raised in Python is cleared by C code (e.g. hasattr()). This used
3394 to cause wrong output, including spurious claims of recursive
3395 functions and attribution of time spent to the wrong function.
3396
Tim Peters0a1fc4e2001-10-07 03:12:08 +00003397 The code and documentation for the derived OldProfile and HotProfile
3398 profiling classes was removed. The code hasn't worked for years (if
3399 you tried to use them, they raised exceptions). OldProfile
3400 intended to reproduce the behavior of the profiler Python used more
3401 than 7 years ago, and isn't interesting anymore. HotProfile intended
3402 to provide a faster profiler (but producing less information), and
3403 that's a worthy goal we intend to meet via a different approach (but
3404 without losing information).
3405
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00003406- Profile.calibrate() has a new implementation that should deliver
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00003407 a much better system-specific calibration constant. The constant can
3408 now be specified in an instance constructor, or as a Profile class or
3409 instance variable, instead of by editing profile.py's source code.
3410 Calibration must still be done manually (see the docs for the profile
3411 module).
3412
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003413 Note that Profile.calibrate() must be overridden by subclasses.
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00003414 Improving the accuracy required exploiting detailed knowledge of
3415 profiler internals; the earlier method abstracted away the details
3416 and measured a simplified model instead, but consequently computed
3417 a constant too small by a factor of 2 on some modern machines.
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00003418
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00003419- quopri's encode and decode methods take an optional header parameter,
Jeremy Hylton6f543b62001-10-16 20:42:52 +00003420 which indicates whether output is intended for the header 'Q'
3421 encoding.
3422
Guido van Rossuma5343cc2001-10-18 18:02:07 +00003423- The SocketServer.ThreadingMixIn class now closes the request after
3424 finish_request() returns. (Not when it errors out though.)
3425
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003426- The nntplib module's NNTP.body() method has grown a 'file' argument
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003427 to allow saving the message body to a file.
3428
3429- The email package has added a class email.Parser.HeaderParser which
3430 only parses headers and does not recurse into the message's body.
3431 Also, the module/class MIMEAudio has been added for representing
3432 audio data (contributed by Anthony Baxter).
3433
3434- ftplib should be able to handle files > 2GB.
3435
3436- ConfigParser.getboolean() now also interprets TRUE, FALSE, YES, NO,
3437 ON, and OFF.
3438
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00003439- xml.dom.minidom NodeList objects now support the length attribute
3440 and item() method as required by the DOM specifications.
3441
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00003442Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003443-----------
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00003444
3445- Demo/dns was removed. It no longer serves any purpose; a package
3446 derived from it is now maintained by Anthony Baxter, see
3447 http://PyDNS.SourceForge.net.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003448
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003449- The freeze tool has been made more robust, and two new options have
3450 been added: -X and -E.
3451
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003452Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003453-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003454
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003455- configure will use CXX in LINKCC if CXX is used to build main() and
3456 the system requires to link a C++ main using the C++ compiler.
3457
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003458C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003459-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003460
Guido van Rossum6c4bce32001-10-18 19:20:25 +00003461- The documentation for the tp_compare slot is updated to require that
3462 the return value must be -1, 0, 1; an arbitrary number <0 or >0 is
3463 not correct. This is not yet enforced but will be enforced in
3464 Python 2.3; even later, we may use -2 to indicate errors and +2 for
3465 "NotImplemented". Right now, -1 should be used for an error return.
3466
Tim Petersd38b1c72001-09-30 05:09:37 +00003467- PyLong_AsLongLong() now accepts int (as well as long) arguments.
3468 Consequently, PyArg_ParseTuple's 'L' code also accepts int (as well
3469 as long) arguments.
3470
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00003471- PyThread_start_new_thread() now returns a long int giving the thread
3472 ID, if one can be calculated; it returns -1 for error, 0 if no
3473 thread ID is calculated (this is an incompatible change, but only
3474 the thread module used this API). This code has only really been
3475 tested on Linux and Windows; other platforms please beware (and
3476 report any bugs or strange behavior).
3477
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00003478- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() no longer accepts Unicode objects as
3479 input.
3480
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003481New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003482-------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003483
3484Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003485-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003486
3487Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003488-------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003489
Tim Peters04cf1d32001-10-09 22:39:40 +00003490- Installer: If you install IDLE, and don't disable file-extension
3491 registration, a new "Edit with IDLE" context (right-click) menu entry
3492 is created for .py and .pyw files.
3493
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003494- The signal module now supports SIGBREAK on Windows, thanks to Steven
3495 Scott. Note that SIGBREAK is unique to Windows. The default SIGBREAK
3496 action remains to call Win32 ExitProcess(). This can be changed via
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003497 signal.signal(). For example::
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003498
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003499 # Make Ctrl+Break raise KeyboardInterrupt, like Python's default Ctrl+C
3500 # (SIGINT) behavior.
3501 import signal
3502 signal.signal(signal.SIGBREAK, signal.default_int_handler)
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003503
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003504 try:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003505 while 1:
3506 pass
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003507 except KeyboardInterrupt:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003508 # We get here on Ctrl+C or Ctrl+Break now; if we had not changed
3509 # SIGBREAK, only on Ctrl+C (and Ctrl+Break would terminate the
3510 # program without the possibility for any Python-level cleanup).
3511 print "Clean exit"
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003512
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003513
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003514What's New in Python 2.2a4?
3515===========================
3516
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003517*Release date: 28-Sep-2001*
3518
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003519Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003520--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003521
3522- pydoc and inspect are now aware of new-style classes;
3523 e.g. help(list) at the interactive prompt now shows proper
3524 documentation for all operations on list objects.
3525
3526- Applications using Jim Fulton's ExtensionClass module can now safely
3527 be used with Python 2.2. In particular, Zope 2.4.1 now works with
3528 Python 2.2 (as well as with Python 2.1.1). The Demo/metaclass
3529 examples also work again. It is hoped that Gtk and Boost also work
3530 with 2.2a4 and beyond. (If you can confirm this, please write
3531 webmaster@python.org; if there are still problems, please open a bug
3532 report on SourceForge.)
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003533
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00003534- property() now takes 4 keyword arguments: fget, fset, fdel and doc.
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003535 These map to read-only attributes 'fget', 'fset', 'fdel', and '__doc__'
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00003536 in the constructed property object. fget, fset and fdel weren't
3537 discoverable from Python in 2.2a3. __doc__ is new, and allows to
3538 associate a docstring with a property.
3539
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003540- Comparison overloading is now more completely implemented. For
3541 example, a str subclass instance can properly be compared to a str
3542 instance, and it can properly overload comparison. Ditto for most
3543 other built-in object types.
3544
3545- The repr() of new-style classes has changed; instead of <type
3546 'M.Foo'> a new-style class is now rendered as <class 'M.Foo'>,
3547 *except* for built-in types, which are still rendered as <type
3548 'Foo'> (to avoid upsetting existing code that might parse or
3549 otherwise rely on repr() of certain type objects).
3550
3551- The repr() of new-style objects is now always <Foo object at XXX>;
3552 previously, it was sometimes <Foo instance at XXX>.
3553
3554- For new-style classes, what was previously called __getattr__ is now
3555 called __getattribute__. This method, if defined, is called for
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00003556 *every* attribute access. A new __getattr__ hook more similar to the
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003557 one in classic classes is defined which is called only if regular
3558 attribute access raises AttributeError; to catch *all* attribute
3559 access, you can use __getattribute__ (for new-style classes). If
3560 both are defined, __getattribute__ is called first, and if it raises
3561 AttributeError, __getattr__ is called.
3562
3563- The __class__ attribute of new-style objects can be assigned to.
3564 The new class must have the same C-level object layout as the old
3565 class.
3566
3567- The builtin file type can be subclassed now. In the usual pattern,
3568 "file" is the name of the builtin type, and file() is a new builtin
3569 constructor, with the same signature as the builtin open() function.
3570 file() is now the preferred way to open a file.
3571
3572- Previously, __new__ would only see sequential arguments passed to
3573 the type in a constructor call; __init__ would see both sequential
3574 and keyword arguments. This made no sense whatsoever any more, so
3575 now both __new__ and __init__ see all arguments.
3576
3577- Previously, hash() applied to an instance of a subclass of str or
3578 unicode always returned 0. This has been repaired.
3579
3580- Previously, an operation on an instance of a subclass of an
3581 immutable type (int, long, float, complex, tuple, str, unicode),
3582 where the subtype didn't override the operation (and so the
3583 operation was handled by the builtin type), could return that
3584 instance instead a value of the base type. For example, if s was of
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003585 a str subclass type, s[:] returned s as-is. Now it returns a str
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003586 with the same value as s.
3587
Barry Warsaw86fbaf82001-09-28 15:26:12 +00003588- Provisional support for pickling new-style objects has been added.
3589
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003590Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003591----
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003592
Tim Peters2c9aa5e2001-09-23 04:06:05 +00003593- file.writelines() now accepts any iterable object producing strings.
3594
Marc-André Lemburgaefd7662001-09-20 12:59:37 +00003595- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() now works very much like
3596 PyObject_Str(obj) in that it tries to use __str__/tp_str
3597 on the object if the object is not a string or buffer. This
3598 makes unicode() behave like str() when applied to non-string/buffer
3599 objects.
3600
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00003601- PyFile_WriteObject now passes Unicode objects to the file's write
3602 method. As a result, all file-like objects which may be the target
Martin v. Löwis2777c022001-09-19 13:47:32 +00003603 of a print statement must support Unicode objects, i.e. they must
3604 at least convert them into ASCII strings.
3605
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003606- Thread scheduling on Solaris should be improved; it is no longer
3607 necessary to insert a small sleep at the start of a thread in order
3608 to let other runnable threads be scheduled.
3609
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003610Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003611-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003612
Marc-André Lemburgbf990172001-09-27 14:17:33 +00003613- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
3614 read character buffer compatible objects for their .write() methods.
3615 These objects are converted to strings and then handled as such
3616 by the instances.
3617
Barry Warsaw2f600732001-09-24 04:28:10 +00003618- The "email" package has been added. This is basically a port of the
3619 mimelib package <http://sf.net/projects/mimelib> with API changes
3620 and some implementations updated to use iterators and generators.
3621
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00003622- difflib.ndiff() and difflib.Differ.compare() are generators now. This
3623 restores the ability of Tools/scripts/ndiff.py to start producing output
3624 before the entire comparison is complete.
3625
Barry Warsaw58b072d2001-09-22 04:44:21 +00003626- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
3627 iteration just like file objects (i.e. their .readline() method is
3628 called for each iteration until it returns an empty string).
3629
Marc-André Lemburg494f2ae2001-09-19 11:33:31 +00003630- The codecs module has grown four new helper APIs to access
3631 builtin codecs: getencoder(), getdecoder(), getreader(),
3632 getwriter().
3633
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003634- SimpleXMLRPCServer: a new module (based upon SimpleHTMLServer)
3635 simplifies writing XML RPC servers.
3636
Barry Warsaw647d5e82001-09-28 17:01:02 +00003637- os.path.realpath(): a new function that returns the absolute pathname
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003638 after interpretation of symbolic links. On non-Unix systems, this
3639 is an alias for os.path.abspath().
3640
Tim Peters16a77ad2001-09-08 04:00:12 +00003641- operator.indexOf() (PySequence_Index() in the C API) now works with any
3642 iterable object.
3643
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003644- smtplib now supports various authentication and security features of
3645 the SMTP protocol through the new login() and starttls() methods.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00003646
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003647- hmac: a new module implementing keyed hashing for message
3648 authentication.
3649
3650- mimetypes now recognizes more extensions and file types. At the
3651 same time, some mappings not sanctioned by IANA were removed.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00003652
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003653- The "compiler" package has been brought up to date to the state of
Guido van Rossumc9ed5dc2001-09-20 05:30:24 +00003654 Python 2.2 bytecode generation. It has also been promoted from a
3655 Tool to a standard library package. (Tools/compiler still exists as
3656 a sample driver.)
3657
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003658Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003659-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003660
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003661- Large file support (LFS) is now automatic when the platform supports
3662 it; no more manual configuration tweaks are needed. On Linux, at
3663 least, it's possible to have a system whose C library supports large
3664 files but whose kernel doesn't; in this case, large file support is
3665 still enabled but doesn't do you any good unless you upgrade your
3666 kernel or share your Python executable with another system whose
3667 kernel has large file support.
3668
3669- The configure script now supplies plausible defaults in a
3670 cross-compilation environment. This doesn't mean that the supplied
3671 values are always correct, or that cross-compilation now works
3672 flawlessly -- but it's a first step (and it shuts up most of
3673 autoconf's warnings about AC_TRY_RUN).
3674
3675- The Unix build is now a bit less chatty, courtesy of the parser
3676 generator. The build is completely silent (except for errors) when
3677 using "make -s", thanks to a -q option to setup.py.
3678
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003679C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003680-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003681
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003682- The "structmember" API now supports some new flag bits to deny read
3683 and/or write access to attributes in restricted execution mode.
3684
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003685New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003686-------------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003687
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003688- Compaq's iPAQ handheld, running the "familiar" Linux distribution
3689 (http://familiar.handhelds.org).
3690
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003691Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003692-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003693
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00003694- The "classic" standard tests, which work by comparing stdout to
3695 an expected-output file under Lib/test/output/, no longer stop at
3696 the first mismatch. Instead the test is run to completion, and a
3697 variant of ndiff-style comparison is used to report all differences.
3698 This is much easier to understand than the previous style of reporting.
3699
3700- The unittest-based standard tests now use regrtest's test_main()
3701 convention, instead of running as a side-effect of merely being
3702 imported. This allows these tests to be run in more natural and
3703 flexible ways as unittests, outside the regrtest framework.
3704
3705- regrtest.py is much better integrated with unittest and doctest now,
3706 especially in regard to reporting errors.
3707
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003708Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003709-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003710
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003711- Large file support now also works for files > 4GB, on filesystems
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00003712 that support it (NTFS under Windows 2000). See "What's New in
3713 Python 2.2a3" for more detail.
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003714
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003715
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003716What's New in Python 2.2a3?
3717===========================
3718
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003719*Release Date: 07-Sep-2001*
3720
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003721Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003722----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003723
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00003724- Conversion of long to float now raises OverflowError if the long is too
3725 big to represent as a C double.
3726
Tim Peters32f453e2001-09-03 08:35:41 +00003727- The 3-argument builtin pow() no longer allows a third non-None argument
3728 if either of the first two arguments is a float, or if both are of
3729 integer types and the second argument is negative (in which latter case
3730 the arguments are converted to float, so this is really the same
3731 restriction).
3732
Tim Peters5d2b77c2001-09-03 05:47:38 +00003733- The builtin dir() now returns more information, and sometimes much
3734 more, generally naming all attributes of an object, and all attributes
3735 reachable from the object via its class, and from its class's base
3736 classes, and so on from them too. Example: in 2.2a2, dir([]) returned
3737 an empty list. In 2.2a3,
3738
3739 >>> dir([])
3740 ['__add__', '__class__', '__contains__', '__delattr__', '__delitem__',
3741 '__eq__', '__ge__', '__getattr__', '__getitem__', '__getslice__',
3742 '__gt__', '__hash__', '__iadd__', '__imul__', '__init__', '__le__',
3743 '__len__', '__lt__', '__mul__', '__ne__', '__new__', '__repr__',
3744 '__rmul__', '__setattr__', '__setitem__', '__setslice__', '__str__',
3745 'append', 'count', 'extend', 'index', 'insert', 'pop', 'remove',
3746 'reverse', 'sort']
3747
3748 dir(module) continues to return only the module's attributes, though.
3749
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003750- Overflowing operations on plain ints now return a long int rather
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003751 than raising OverflowError. This is a partial implementation of PEP
3752 237. You can use -Wdefault::OverflowWarning to enable a warning for
3753 this situation, and -Werror::OverflowWarning to revert to the old
3754 OverflowError exception.
3755
Guido van Rossum61c345f2001-09-04 03:26:15 +00003756- A new command line option, -Q<arg>, is added to control run-time
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003757 warnings for the use of classic division. (See PEP 238.) Possible
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00003758 values are -Qold, -Qwarn, -Qwarnall, and -Qnew. The default is
3759 -Qold, meaning the / operator has its classic meaning and no
3760 warnings are issued. Using -Qwarn issues a run-time warning about
3761 all uses of classic division for int and long arguments; -Qwarnall
3762 also warns about classic division for float and complex arguments
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00003763 (for use with fixdiv.py).
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003764 [Note: the remainder of this item (preserved below) became
3765 obsolete in 2.2c1 -- -Qnew has global effect in 2.2] ::
3766
3767 Using -Qnew is questionable; it turns on new division by default, but
3768 only in the __main__ module. You can usefully combine -Qwarn or
3769 -Qwarnall and -Qnew: this gives the __main__ module new division, and
3770 warns about classic division everywhere else.
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003771
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003772- Many built-in types can now be subclassed. This applies to int,
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003773 long, float, str, unicode, and tuple. (The types complex, list and
3774 dictionary can also be subclassed; this was introduced earlier.)
3775 Note that restrictions apply when subclassing immutable built-in
3776 types: you can only affect the value of the instance by overloading
3777 __new__. You can add mutable attributes, and the subclass instances
3778 will have a __dict__ attribute, but you cannot change the "value"
3779 (as implemented by the base class) of an immutable subclass instance
3780 once it is created.
3781
Guido van Rossumaaf80c82001-09-02 13:44:35 +00003782- The dictionary constructor now takes an optional argument, a
3783 mapping-like object, and initializes the dictionary from its
3784 (key, value) pairs.
3785
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003786- A new built-in type, super, has been added. This facilitates making
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003787 "cooperative super calls" in a multiple inheritance setting. For an
3788 explanation, see http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#cooperation
3789
Guido van Rossum8d7234d2001-09-06 22:02:58 +00003790- A new built-in type, property, has been added. This enables the
3791 creation of "properties". These are attributes implemented by
3792 getter and setter functions (or only one of these for read-only or
3793 write-only attributes), without the need to override __getattr__.
3794 See http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#property
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003795
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003796- The syntax of floating-point and imaginary literals has been
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00003797 liberalized, to allow leading zeroes. Examples of literals now
3798 legal that were SyntaxErrors before:
3799
3800 00.0 0e3 0100j 07.5 00000000000000000008.
3801
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003802- An old tokenizer bug allowed floating point literals with an incomplete
Tim Petersc6d95812001-08-28 20:56:27 +00003803 exponent, such as 1e and 3.1e-. Such literals now raise SyntaxError.
3804
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003805Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003806-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003807
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00003808- telnetlib includes symbolic names for the options, and support for
Martin v. Löwis1da9c572002-11-04 09:56:00 +00003809 setting an option negotiation callback. It also supports processing
3810 of suboptions.
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00003811
Tim Petersa40c7932001-09-05 22:36:56 +00003812- The new C standard no longer requires that math libraries set errno to
3813 ERANGE on overflow. For platform libraries that exploit this new
3814 freedom, Python's overflow-checking was wholly broken. A new overflow-
3815 checking scheme attempts to repair that, but may not be reliable on all
3816 platforms (C doesn't seem to provide anything both useful and portable
3817 in this area anymore).
3818
Martin v. Löwis44f86962001-09-05 13:44:54 +00003819- Asynchronous timeout actions are available through the new class
3820 threading.Timer.
3821
Tim Peters78526162001-09-05 00:53:45 +00003822- math.log and math.log10 now return sensible results for even huge
3823 long arguments. For example, math.log10(10 ** 10000) ~= 10000.0.
3824
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003825- A new function, imp.lock_held(), returns 1 when the import lock is
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00003826 currently held. See the docs for the imp module.
3827
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003828- pickle, cPickle and marshal on 32-bit platforms can now correctly read
Tim Peters82112372001-08-29 02:28:42 +00003829 dumps containing ints written on platforms where Python ints are 8 bytes.
3830 When read on a box where Python ints are 4 bytes, such values are
3831 converted to Python longs.
3832
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003833- In restricted execution mode (using the rexec module), unmarshalling
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003834 code objects is no longer allowed. This plugs a security hole.
3835
Steve Purcell6091cd62001-09-06 16:05:17 +00003836- unittest.TestResult instances no longer store references to tracebacks
3837 generated by test failures. This prevents unexpected dangling references
3838 to objects that should be garbage collected between tests.
3839
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003840Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003841-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003842
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00003843- Tools/scripts/fixdiv.py has been added which can be used to fix
3844 division operators as per PEP 238.
3845
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003846Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003847-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003848
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00003849- If you are an adventurous person using Mac OS X you may want to look at
3850 Mac/OSX. There is a Makefile there that will build Python as a real Mac
3851 application, which can be used for experimenting with Carbon or Cocoa.
3852 Discussion of this on pythonmac-sig, please.
3853
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00003854C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003855-----
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00003856
3857- New function PyObject_Dir(obj), like Python __builtin__.dir(obj).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00003858
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00003859- Note that PyLong_AsDouble can fail! This has always been true, but no
3860 callers checked for it. It's more likely to fail now, because overflow
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003861 errors are properly detected now. The proper way to check::
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00003862
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003863 double x = PyLong_AsDouble(some_long_object);
3864 if (x == -1.0 && PyErr_Occurred()) {
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003865 /* The conversion failed. */
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003866 }
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00003867
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003868- The GC API has been changed. Extensions that use the old API will still
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00003869 compile but will not participate in GC. To upgrade an extension
3870 module:
3871
3872 - rename Py_TPFLAGS_GC to PyTPFLAGS_HAVE_GC
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00003873
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00003874 - use PyObject_GC_New or PyObject_GC_NewVar to allocate objects and
3875 PyObject_GC_Del to deallocate them
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00003876
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00003877 - rename PyObject_GC_Init to PyObject_GC_Track and PyObject_GC_Fini
3878 to PyObject_GC_UnTrack
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00003879
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00003880 - remove PyGC_HEAD_SIZE from object size calculations
3881
3882 - remove calls to PyObject_AS_GC and PyObject_FROM_GC
3883
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003884- Two new functions: PyString_FromFormat() and PyString_FromFormatV().
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003885 These can be used safely to construct string objects from a
3886 sprintf-style format string (similar to the format string supported
3887 by PyErr_Format()).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00003888
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003889New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003890-------------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003891
Tim Petersb7da0902001-09-02 23:01:43 +00003892- Stephen Hansen contributed patches sufficient to get a clean compile
3893 under Borland C (Windows), but he reports problems running it and ran
3894 out of time to complete the port. Volunteers? Expect a MemoryError
3895 when importing the types module; this is probably shallow, and
3896 causing later failures too.
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003897
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003898Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003899-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003900
3901Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003902-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003903
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00003904- Large file support is now enabled on Win32 platforms as well as on
3905 Win64. This means that, for example, you can use f.tell() and f.seek()
3906 to manipulate files larger than 2 gigabytes (provided you have enough
3907 disk space, and are using a Windows filesystem that supports large
Tim Peters9a9471c2001-09-11 23:18:51 +00003908 partitions). Windows filesystem limits: FAT has a 2GB (gigabyte)
3909 filesize limit, and large file support makes no difference there.
3910 FAT32's limit is 4GB, and files >= 2GB are easier to use from Python now.
3911 NTFS has no practical limit on file size, and files of any size can be
3912 used from Python now.
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00003913
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003914- The w9xpopen hack is now used on Windows NT and 2000 too when COMPSPEC
Tim Peters402d5982001-08-27 06:37:48 +00003915 points to command.com (patch from Brian Quinlan).
3916
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003917
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00003918What's New in Python 2.2a2?
3919===========================
3920
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003921*Release Date: 22-Aug-2001*
3922
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00003923Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003924-----
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00003925
Barry Warsaw18b2ecf2001-08-22 20:26:56 +00003926- Tim Peters developed a brand new Windows installer using Wise 8.1,
3927 generously donated to us by Wise Solutions.
3928
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00003929- configure supports a new option --enable-unicode, with the values
3930 ucs2 and ucs4 (new in 2.2a1). With --disable-unicode, the Unicode
3931 type and supporting code is completely removed from the interpreter.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00003932
Jack Jansen32ce0cd2001-08-21 19:28:20 +00003933- A new configure option --enable-framework builds a Mac OS X framework,
3934 which "make frameworkinstall" will install. This provides a starting
3935 point for more mac-like functionality, join pythonmac-sig@python.org
3936 if you are interested in helping.
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00003937
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00003938- The NeXT platform is no longer supported.
3939
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003940- The 'new' module is now statically linked.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00003941
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00003942Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003943-----
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00003944
3945- The new Tools/scripts/cleanfuture.py can be used to automatically
Andrew M. Kuchlingb0532092001-08-15 15:54:56 +00003946 edit out obsolete future statements from Python source code. See
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00003947 the module docstring for details.
3948
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00003949Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003950-----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00003951
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00003952- regrtest.py now knows which tests are expected to be skipped on some
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00003953 platforms, allowing to give clearer test result output. regrtest
3954 also has optional --use/-u switch to run normally disabled tests
3955 which require network access or consume significant disk resources.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00003956
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00003957- Several new tests in the standard test suite, with special thanks to
3958 Nick Mathewson.
3959
3960Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003961----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00003962
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00003963- The floor division operator // has been added as outlined in PEP
3964 238. The / operator still provides classic division (and will until
3965 Python 3.0) unless "from __future__ import division" is included, in
3966 which case the / operator will provide true division. The operator
3967 module provides truediv() and floordiv() functions. Augmented
3968 assignment variants are included, as are the equivalent overloadable
3969 methods and C API methods. See the PEP for a full discussion:
3970 <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0238.html>
3971
Tim Peters6cd6a822001-08-17 22:11:27 +00003972- Future statements are now effective in simulated interactive shells
3973 (like IDLE). This should "just work" by magic, but read Michael
3974 Hudson's "Future statements in simulated shells" PEP 264 for full
3975 details: <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0264.html>.
3976
Guido van Rossumf86ddd22001-08-17 21:21:04 +00003977- The type/class unification (PEP 252-253) was integrated into the
3978 trunk and is not so tentative any more (the exact specification of
3979 some features is still tentative). A lot of work has done on fixing
3980 bugs and adding robustness and features (performance still has to
3981 come a long way).
3982
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00003983- Warnings about a mismatch in the Python API during extension import
3984 now use the Python warning framework (which makes it possible to
3985 write filters for these warnings).
3986
Barry Warsaw9b3be7f2001-08-14 18:35:02 +00003987- A function's __dict__ (aka func_dict) will now always be a
3988 dictionary. It used to be possible to delete it or set it to None,
3989 but now both actions raise TypeErrors. It is still legal to set it
3990 to a dictionary object. Getting func.__dict__ before any attributes
3991 have been assigned now returns an empty dictionary instead of None.
3992
Guido van Rossum32aa5d22001-09-05 18:43:35 +00003993- A new command line option, -E, was added which disables the use of
3994 all environment variables, or at least those that are specifically
3995 significant to Python. Usually those have a name starting with
3996 "PYTHON". This was used to fix a problem where the tests fail if
3997 the user happens to have PYTHONHOME or PYTHONPATH pointing to an
3998 older distribution.
3999
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004000Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004001-------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004002
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004003- New class Differ and new functions ndiff() and restore() in difflib.py.
4004 These package the algorithms used by the popular Tools/scripts/ndiff.py,
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004005 for programmatic reuse.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004006
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004007- New function xml.sax.saxutils.quoteattr(): Quote an XML attribute
4008 value using the minimal quoting required for the value; more
4009 reliable than using xml.sax.saxutils.escape() for attribute values.
4010
4011- Readline completion support for cmd.Cmd was added.
4012
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004013- Calling os.tempnam() or os.tmpnam() generate RuntimeWarnings.
4014
4015- Added function threading.BoundedSemaphore()
4016
4017- Added Ka-Ping Yee's cgitb.py module.
4018
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004019- The 'new' module now exposes the CO_xxx flags.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004020
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00004021- The gc module offers the get_referents function.
4022
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004023New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004024-------------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004025
4026C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004027-----
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004028
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00004029- Two new APIs PyOS_snprintf() and PyOS_vsnprintf() were added
4030 which provide a cross-platform implementations for the
4031 relatively new snprintf()/vsnprintf() C lib APIs. In contrast to
4032 the standard sprintf() and vsprintf() C lib APIs, these versions
4033 apply bounds checking on the used buffer which enhances protection
4034 against buffer overruns.
4035
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00004036- Unicode APIs now use name mangling to assure that mixing interpreters
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00004037 and extensions using different Unicode widths is rendered next to
4038 impossible. Trying to import an incompatible Unicode-aware extension
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00004039 will result in an ImportError. Unicode extensions writers must make
4040 sure to check the Unicode width compatibility in their extensions by
4041 using at least one of the mangled Unicode APIs in the extension.
4042
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004043- Two new flags METH_NOARGS and METH_O are available in method definition
4044 tables to simplify implementation of methods with no arguments and a
4045 single untyped argument. Calling such methods is more efficient than
4046 calling corresponding METH_VARARGS methods. METH_OLDARGS is now
4047 deprecated.
4048
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00004049Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004050-------
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00004051
4052- "import module" now compiles module.pyw if it exists and nothing else
4053 relevant is found.
4054
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004055
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00004056What's New in Python 2.2a1?
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004057===========================
4058
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004059*Release date: 18-Jul-2001*
4060
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004061Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004062----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004063
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00004064- TENTATIVELY, a large amount of code implementing much of what's
4065 described in PEP 252 (Making Types Look More Like Classes) and PEP
4066 253 (Subtyping Built-in Types) was added. This will be released
4067 with Python 2.2a1. Documentation will be provided separately
4068 through http://www.python.org/2.2/. The purpose of releasing this
4069 with Python 2.2a1 is to test backwards compatibility. It is
4070 possible, though not likely, that a decision is made not to release
4071 this code as part of 2.2 final, if any serious backwards
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004072 incompatibilities are found during alpha testing that cannot be
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00004073 repaired.
4074
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00004075- Generators were added; this is a new way to create an iterator (see
Tim Peters11a0d102001-07-17 18:48:00 +00004076 below) using what looks like a simple function containing one or
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00004077 more 'yield' statements. See PEP 255. Since this adds a new
4078 keyword to the language, this feature must be enabled by including a
4079 future statement: "from __future__ import generators" (see PEP 236).
4080 Generators will become a standard feature in a future release
4081 (probably 2.3). Without this future statement, 'yield' remains an
4082 ordinary identifier, but a warning is issued each time it is used.
4083 (These warnings currently don't conform to the warnings framework of
4084 PEP 230; we intend to fix this in 2.2a2.)
4085
Marc-André Lemburg12e74b32001-05-22 08:58:23 +00004086- The UTF-16 codec was modified to be more RFC compliant. It will now
4087 only remove BOM characters at the start of the string and then
4088 only if running in native mode (UTF-16-LE and -BE won't remove a
4089 leading BMO character).
4090
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00004091- Strings now have a new method .decode() to complement the already
4092 existing .encode() method. These two methods provide direct access
4093 to the corresponding decoders and encoders of the registered codecs.
4094
4095 To enhance the usability of the .encode() method, the special
4096 casing of Unicode object return values was dropped (Unicode objects
4097 were auto-magically converted to string using the default encoding).
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00004098
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00004099 Both methods will now return whatever the codec in charge of the
4100 requested encoding returns as object, e.g. Unicode codecs will
4101 return Unicode objects when decoding is requested ("äöü".decode("latin-1")
4102 will return u"äöü"). This enables codec writer to create codecs
4103 for various simple to use conversions.
4104
4105 New codecs were added to demonstrate these new features (the .encode()
4106 and .decode() columns indicate the type of the returned objects):
4107
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004108 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4109 |Name | .encode() | .decode() | Description |
4110 +=========+===========+===========+=============================+
4111 |uu | string | string | UU codec (e.g. for email) |
4112 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4113 |base64 | string | string | base64 codec |
4114 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4115 |quopri | string | string | quoted-printable codec |
4116 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4117 |zlib | string | string | zlib compression |
4118 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4119 |hex | string | string | 2-byte hex codec |
4120 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4121 |rot-13 | string | Unicode | ROT-13 Unicode charmap codec|
4122 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00004123
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004124- Some operating systems now support the concept of a default Unicode
4125 encoding for file system operations. Notably, Windows supports 'mbcs'
4126 as the default. The Macintosh will also adopt this concept in the medium
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00004127 term, although the default encoding for that platform will be other than
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004128 'mbcs'.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00004129
4130 On operating system that support non-ASCII filenames, it is common for
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004131 functions that return filenames (such as os.listdir()) to return Python
4132 string objects pre-encoded using the default file system encoding for
4133 the platform. As this encoding is likely to be different from Python's
4134 default encoding, converting this name to a Unicode object before passing
4135 it back to the Operating System would result in a Unicode error, as Python
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004136 would attempt to use its default encoding (generally ASCII) rather than
4137 the default encoding for the file system.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00004138
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004139 In general, this change simply removes surprises when working with
4140 Unicode and the file system, making these operations work as you expect,
4141 increasing the transparency of Unicode objects in this context.
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004142 See [????] for more details, including examples.
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004143
Tim Peters61dff2b2001-05-08 15:43:37 +00004144- Float (and complex) literals in source code were evaluated to full
4145 precision only when running from a .py file; the same code loaded from a
4146 .pyc (or .pyo) file could suffer numeric differences starting at about the
4147 12th significant decimal digit. For example, on a machine with IEEE-754
4148 floating arithmetic,
4149
4150 x = 9007199254740992.0
4151 print long(x)
4152
4153 printed 9007199254740992 if run directly from .py, but 9007199254740000
4154 if from a compiled (.pyc or .pyo) file. This was due to marshal using
4155 str(float) instead of repr(float) when building code objects. marshal
4156 now uses repr(float) instead, which should reproduce floats to full
4157 machine precision (assuming the platform C float<->string I/O conversion
4158 functions are of good quality).
4159
4160 This may cause floating-point results to change in some cases, and
4161 usually for the better, but may also cause numerically unstable
4162 algorithms to break.
4163
Tim Peters2f228e72001-05-13 00:19:31 +00004164- The implementation of dicts suffers fewer collisions, which has speed
4165 benefits. However, the order in which dict entries appear in dict.keys(),
4166 dict.values() and dict.items() may differ from previous releases for a
4167 given dict. Nothing is defined about this order, so no program should
4168 rely on it. Nevertheless, it's easy to write test cases that rely on the
4169 order by accident, typically because of printing the str() or repr() of a
4170 dict to an "expected results" file. See Lib/test/test_support.py's new
4171 sortdict(dict) function for a simple way to display a dict in sorted
4172 order.
4173
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00004174- Many other small changes to dicts were made, resulting in faster
4175 operation along the most common code paths.
4176
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00004177- Dictionary objects now support the "in" operator: "x in dict" means
4178 the same as dict.has_key(x).
4179
Barry Warsaw51acc8d2001-06-26 20:12:50 +00004180- The update() method of dictionaries now accepts generic mapping
4181 objects. Specifically the argument object must support the .keys()
4182 and __getitem__() methods. This allows you to say, for example,
4183 {}.update(UserDict())
4184
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00004185- Iterators were added; this is a generalized way of providing values
4186 to a for loop. See PEP 234. There's a new built-in function iter()
4187 to return an iterator. There's a new protocol to get the next value
4188 from an iterator using the next() method (in Python) or the
4189 tp_iternext slot (in C). There's a new protocol to get iterators
4190 using the __iter__() method (in Python) or the tp_iter slot (in C).
4191 Iterating (i.e. a for loop) over a dictionary generates its keys.
4192 Iterating over a file generates its lines.
4193
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004194- The following functions were generalized to work nicely with iterator
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004195 arguments::
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004196
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00004197 map(), filter(), reduce(), zip()
Tim Peters8572b4f2001-05-06 01:05:02 +00004198 list(), tuple() (PySequence_Tuple() and PySequence_Fast() in C API)
4199 max(), min()
Tim Peters1af03e92001-05-26 19:37:54 +00004200 join() method of strings
4201 extend() method of lists
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00004202 'x in y' and 'x not in y' (PySequence_Contains() in C API)
4203 operator.countOf() (PySequence_Count() in C API)
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004204 right-hand side of assignment statements with multiple targets, such as ::
Tim Petersd6d010b2001-06-21 02:49:55 +00004205 x, y, z = some_iterable_object_returning_exactly_3_values
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00004206
Tim Petersd85e1022001-05-11 21:51:48 +00004207- Accessing module attributes is significantly faster (for example,
4208 random.random or os.path or yourPythonModule.yourAttribute).
4209
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00004210- Comparing dictionary objects via == and != is faster, and now works even
4211 if the keys and values don't support comparisons other than ==.
4212
Tim Peters95bf9392001-05-10 08:32:44 +00004213- Comparing dictionaries in ways other than == and != is slower: there were
4214 insecurities in the dict comparison implementation that could cause Python
4215 to crash if the element comparison routines for the dict keys and/or
4216 values mutated the dicts. Making the code bulletproof slowed it down.
4217
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00004218- Collisions in dicts are resolved via a new approach, which can help
4219 dramatically in bad cases. For example, looking up every key in a dict
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00004220 d with d.keys() == [i << 16 for i in range(20000)] is approximately 500x
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00004221 faster now. Thanks to Christian Tismer for pointing out the cause and
4222 the nature of an effective cure (last December! better late than never).
Tim Peters15d49292001-05-27 07:39:22 +00004223
Tim Peters52e155e2001-06-16 05:42:57 +00004224- repr() is much faster for large containers (dict, list, tuple).
4225
4226
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004227Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004228-------
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004229
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00004230- The constants ascii_letters, ascii_lowercase. and ascii_uppercase
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004231 were added to the string module. These a locale-independent
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00004232 constants, unlike letters, lowercase, and uppercase. These are now
4233 use in appropriate locations in the standard library.
4234
Martin v. Löwisf0473d52001-07-18 16:17:16 +00004235- The flags used in dlopen calls can now be configured using
4236 sys.setdlopenflags and queried using sys.getdlopenflags.
4237
Guido van Rossumc7e4aca2001-07-12 11:54:37 +00004238- Fredrik Lundh's xmlrpclib is now a standard library module. This
4239 provides full client-side XML-RPC support. In addition,
4240 Demo/xmlrpc/ contains two server frameworks (one SocketServer-based,
4241 one asyncore-based). Thanks to Eric Raymond for the documentation.
4242
Guido van Rossum643d3912001-07-05 14:46:25 +00004243- The xrange() object is simplified: it no longer supports slicing,
4244 repetition, comparisons, efficient 'in' checking, the tolist()
4245 method, or the start, stop and step attributes. See PEP 260.
4246
Martin v. Löwisebf94db2001-06-06 06:25:40 +00004247- A new function fnmatch.filter to filter lists of file names was added.
4248
Barry Warsawffd674d2001-05-22 16:00:10 +00004249- calendar.py uses month and day names based on the current locale.
4250
Guido van Rossum2e0a6542001-05-15 02:14:44 +00004251- strop is now *really* obsolete (this was announced before with 1.6),
4252 and issues DeprecationWarning when used (except for the four items
4253 that are still imported into string.py).
4254
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004255- Cookie.py now sorts key+value pairs by key in output strings.
4256
4257- pprint.isrecursive(object) didn't correctly identify recursive objects.
4258 Now it does.
4259
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00004260- pprint functions now much faster for large containers (tuple, list, dict).
4261
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00004262- New 'q' and 'Q' format codes in the struct module, corresponding to C
4263 types "long long" and "unsigned long long" (on Windows, __int64). In
4264 native mode, these can be used only when the platform C compiler supports
4265 these types (when HAVE_LONG_LONG is #define'd by the Python config
4266 process), and then they inherit the sizes and alignments of the C types.
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00004267 In standard mode, 'q' and 'Q' are supported on all platforms, and are
4268 8-byte integral types.
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00004269
Guido van Rossum83213cc2001-06-12 16:48:52 +00004270- The site module installs a new built-in function 'help' that invokes
4271 pydoc.help. It must be invoked as 'help()'; when invoked as 'help',
4272 it displays a message reminding the user to use 'help()' or
4273 'help(object)'.
4274
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004275Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004276-----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004277
4278- New test_mutants.py runs dict comparisons where the key and value
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004279 comparison operators mutate the dicts randomly during comparison. This
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004280 rapidly causes Python to crash under earlier releases (not for the faint
4281 of heart: it can also cause Win9x to freeze or reboot!).
4282
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004283- New test_pprint.py verifies that pprint.isrecursive() and
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00004284 pprint.isreadable() return sensible results. Also verifies that simple
4285 cases produce correct output.
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004286
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00004287C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004288-----
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00004289
4290- Removed the unused last_is_sticky argument from the internal
4291 _PyTuple_Resize(). If this affects you, you were cheating.
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004292
4293----
4294
4295**(For information about older versions, consult the HISTORY file.)**