blob: 7a40c521f4aed714aaba843d2762f8085a119535 [file] [log] [blame]
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001+++++++++++
2Python News
3+++++++++++
4
Skip Montanaro4a385832002-09-20 17:08:52 +00005(editors: check NEWS.help for information about editing NEWS using ReST.)
6
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00007What's New in Python 2.3 beta 1?
8================================
9
10*Release date: XX-XXX-2003*
11
12Core and builtins
13-----------------
14
Guido van Rossumcf8d2852003-04-17 16:53:26 +000015- In support of PEP 269 (making the pgen parser generator accessible
16 from Python), some changes to the pgen code structure were made; a
17 few files that used to be linked only with pgen are now linked with
18 Python itself.
19
Guido van Rossumc1f6e8c2003-04-16 21:13:23 +000020- The repr() of a weakref object now shows the __name__ attribute of
21 the referenced object, if it has one.
22
Guido van Rossum76ba09f2003-04-16 19:40:58 +000023- super() no longer ignores data descriptors, except __class__. See
24 the thread started at
25 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2003-April/034338.html
26
Guido van Rossum3a3cca52003-04-14 20:58:14 +000027- list.insert(i, x) now interprets negative i as it would be
28 interpreted by slicing, so negative values count from the end of the
29 list. This was the only place where such an interpretation was not
30 placed on a list index.
31
Guido van Rossumefbbb1c2003-04-11 18:43:06 +000032- range() now works even if the arguments are longs with magnitude
33 larger than sys.maxint, as long as the total length of the sequence
34 fits. E.g., range(2**100, 2**101, 2**100) is the following list:
35 [1267650600228229401496703205376L]. (SF patch #707427.)
36
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +000037- Some horridly obscure problems were fixed involving interaction
38 between garbage collection and old-style classes with "ambitious"
39 getattr hooks. If an old-style instance didn't have a __del__ method,
40 but did have a __getattr__ hook, and the instance became reachable
41 only from an unreachable cycle, and the hook resurrected or deleted
42 unreachable objects when asked to resolve "__del__", anything up to
43 a segfault could happen. That's been repaired.
44
Raymond Hettingera3e1e4c2003-03-06 23:54:28 +000045- dict.pop now takes an optional argument specifying a default
46 value to return if the key is not in the dict. If a default is not
47 given and the key is not found, a KeyError will still be raised.
48 Parallel changes were made to UserDict.UserDict and UserDict.DictMixin.
49 [SF patch #693753] (contributed by Michael Stone.)
50
Martin v. Löwis73d538b2003-03-05 15:13:47 +000051- sys.getfilesystemencoding() was added to expose
52 Py_FileSystemDefaultEncoding.
Guido van Rossum46d3dc32003-03-01 03:20:41 +000053
54- New function sys.exc_clear() clears the current exception. This is
55 rarely needed, but can sometimes be useful to release objects
56 referenced by the traceback held in sys.exc_info()[2]. (SF patch
57 #693195.)
58
Neal Norwitzd5a65a72003-02-23 23:11:41 +000059- On 64-bit systems, a dictionary could contain duplicate long/int keys
60 if the key value was larger than 2**32. See SF bug #689659.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +000061
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +000062- Fixed SF bug #663074. The codec system was using global static
Walter Dörwaldfa86bf52003-03-31 16:15:13 +000063 variables to store internal data. As a result, any attempts to use the
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +000064 unicode system with multiple active interpreters, or successive
65 interpreter executions, would fail.
66
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +000067- "%c" % u"a" now returns a unicode string instead of raising a
Walter Dörwald44f527f2003-04-02 16:37:24 +000068 TypeError. u"%c" % 0xffffffff now raises a OverflowError instead
Walter Dörwald1e469c52003-04-02 16:57:59 +000069 of a ValueError to be consistent with "%c" % 256. See SF patch #710127.
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +000070
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +000071Extension modules
72-----------------
73
Martin v. Löwisbfe175c2003-04-16 19:42:51 +000074- Tkinter wrappers around Tcl variables now pass objects directly
75 to Tcl, instead of first converting them to strings.
76
Guido van Rossum41c99e72003-04-14 17:59:34 +000077- The .*? pattern in the re module is now special-cased to avoid the
78 recursion limit. (SF patch #720991 -- many thanks to Gary Herron
79 and Greg Chapman.)
80
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +000081- New function sys.call_tracing() allows pdb to debug code
82 recursively.
83
Tim Peters730f5532003-04-08 17:17:17 +000084- New function gc.get_referents(obj) returns a list of objects
Tim Peters0f81ab62003-04-08 16:39:48 +000085 directly referenced by obj. In effect, it exposes what the object's
86 tp_traverse slot does, and can be helpful when debugging memory
87 leaks.
88
Martin v. Löwis7fb697b2003-04-03 04:49:12 +000089- The iconv module has been removed from this release.
90
Tim Petersd50ade62003-03-20 18:32:13 +000091- The platform-independent routines for packing floats in IEEE formats
92 (struct.pack's <f, >f, <d, and >d codes; pickle and cPickle's protocol 1
93 pickling of floats) ignored that rounding can cause a carry to
94 propagate. The worst consequence was that, in rare cases, <f and >f
95 could produce strings that, when unpacked again, were a factor of 2
96 away from the original float. This has been fixed. See SF bug
97 #705836.
98
Guido van Rossumd11b62e2003-03-14 21:51:36 +000099- New function time.tzset() provides access to the C library tzet()
100 function, if supported. (SF patch #675422.)
101
Neal Norwitz12e22172003-03-03 21:16:39 +0000102- Using createfilehandler, deletefilehandler, createtimerhandler functions
103 on Tkinter.tkinter (_tkinter module) no longer crashes the interpreter.
104 See SF bug #692416.
105
Michael W. Hudsonf0089982003-03-03 12:29:42 +0000106- Modified the fcntl.ioctl() function to allow modification of a passed
107 mutable buffer (for details see the reference documentation).
108
Raymond Hettinger61fe64d2003-02-23 04:40:07 +0000109- Made user requested changes to the itertools module.
110 Subsumed the times() function into repeat().
111 Added chain() and cycle().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000112
Skip Montanaro89feabc2003-03-30 04:54:24 +0000113- The socket module now always uses the _socketobject wrapper class, even on
114 platforms which have dup(2). The makefile() method is built directly
115 on top of the socket without duplicating the file descriptor, allowing
116 timeouts to work properly.
117
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000118Library
119-------
120
Walter Dörwald5688b7a2003-04-16 09:46:13 +0000121- htmlentitydefs has two new dictionaries: name2codepoint maps
122 HTML entity names to Unicode codepoints (as integers).
123 codepoint2name is the reverse mapping. See SF patch #722017.
124
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +0000125- pdb has a new command, "debug", which lets you step through
126 arbitrary code from the debugger's (pdb) prompt.
127
Raymond Hettingerc377cbf2003-04-04 22:56:42 +0000128- unittest.failUnlessEqual and its equivalent unittest.assertEqual now
129 return 'not a == b' rather than 'a != b'. This gives the desired
130 result for classes that define __eq__ without defining __ne__.
131
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +0000132- sgmllib now supports SGML marked sections, in particular the
Martin v. Löwis3163a3b2003-03-30 14:25:40 +0000133 MS Office extensions.
134
Raymond Hettinger42182eb2003-03-09 05:33:33 +0000135- The urllib module now offers support for the iterator protocol.
136 SF patch 698520 contributed by Brett Cannon.
137
Guido van Rossum9589a252003-03-06 01:56:12 +0000138- New module timeit provides a simple framework for timing the
139 execution speed of expressions and statements.
140
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +0000141- sets.Set objects now support mixed-type __eq__ and __ne__, instead
142 of raising TypeError. If x is a Set object and y is a non-Set object,
143 x == y is False, and x != y is True. This is akin to the change made
144 for mixed-type comparisons of datetime objects in 2.3a2; more info
145 about the rationale is in the NEWS entry for that. See also SF bug
146 report <http://www.python.org/sf/693121>.
147
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +0000148- On Unix platforms, if os.listdir() is called with a Unicode argument,
149 it now returns Unicode strings. (This behavior was added earlier
150 to the Windows NT/2k/XP version of os.listdir().)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000151
Andrew M. Kuchling6f177d42003-02-28 22:09:33 +0000152- Distutils: both 'py_modules' and 'packages' keywords can now be specified
153 in core.setup(). Previously you could supply one or the other, but
154 not both of them. (SF patch #695090 from Bernhard Herzog)
155
Skip Montanaro64a839e2003-03-20 23:36:55 +0000156- New csv package makes it easy to read/write CSV files.
157
Gustavo Niemeyer68d8cef2003-04-17 21:31:33 +0000158- Module shlex has been extended to allow posix-like shell parsings,
159 including a split() function for easy spliting of quoted strings and
160 commands. An iterator interface was also implemented.
161
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000162Tools/Demos
163-----------
164
165TBD
166
167Build
168-----
169
Neal Norwitz35892b92003-02-23 23:45:35 +0000170- Fix problem building on OSF1 because the compiler only accepted
171 preprocessor directives that start in column 1. (SF bug #691793.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000172
173C API
174-----
175
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +0000176- Added PyGC_Collect(), equivalent to calling gc.collect().
177
Guido van Rossum0fc8f002003-04-15 15:12:39 +0000178- PyThreadState_GetDict() was changed not to raise an exception or
179 issue a fatal error when no current thread state is available. This
180 makes it possible to print dictionaries when no thread is active.
181
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +0000182- LONG_LONG was renamed to PY_LONG_LONG. Extensions that use this and
183 need compatibility with previous versions can use this:
184 #ifndef PY_LONG_LONG
185 #define PY_LONG_LONG LONG_LONG
186 #endif
Martin v. Löwisb9a0f912003-03-29 10:06:18 +0000187
Raymond Hettinger1da1dbf2003-03-17 19:46:11 +0000188- Added PyObject_SelfIter() to fill the tp_iter slot for the
Raymond Hettinger01538262003-03-17 08:24:35 +0000189 typical case where the method returns its self argument.
190
Guido van Rossume5c691a2003-03-07 15:13:17 +0000191- The extended type structure used for heap types (new-style
192 classes defined by Python code using a class statement) is now
193 exported from object.h as PyHeapTypeObject. (SF patch #696193.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000194
195New platforms
196-------------
197
198TBD
199
200Tests
201-----
202
Neal Norwitz55b61d22003-02-28 19:57:03 +0000203- test_timeout now requires -u network to be passed to regrtest to run.
204 See SF bug #692988.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000205
206Windows
207-------
208
Guido van Rossumf4050642003-04-09 19:39:06 +0000209- New function winsound.MessageBeep() wraps the Win32 API
210 MessageBeep().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000211
212Mac
213---
214
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +0000215- os.listdir() now returns Unicode strings on MacOS X when called with
216 a Unicode argument. See the general news item under "Library".
Just van Rossum46c97842003-02-25 21:42:15 +0000217
Jack Jansendeac2ac2003-02-24 11:04:17 +0000218- A new method MacOS.WMAvailable() returns true if it is safe to access
219 the window manager, false otherwise.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +0000220
Jack Jansencf76be02003-03-24 12:13:54 +0000221- EasyDialogs dialogs are now movable-modal, and if the application is
222 currently in the background they will ask to be moved to the foreground
223 before displaying.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +0000224
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +0000225- OSA Scripting support has improved a lot, and gensuitemodule.py can now
Jack Jansende354b72003-04-11 15:37:20 +0000226 be used by mere mortals. The documentation is now also more or less
227 complete.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +0000228
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +0000229- The IDE (in a framework build) now includes introductory documentation
230 in Apple Help Viewer format.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000231
232
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000233What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 2?
234=================================
235
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +0000236*Release date: 19-Feb-2003*
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000237
238Core and builtins
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +0000239-----------------
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000240
Walter Dörwald2ffec022003-02-19 16:34:11 +0000241- Negative positions returned from PEP 293 error callbacks are now
242 treated as being relative to the end of the input string. Positions
243 that are out of bounds raise an IndexError.
244
Guido van Rossum162e38c2003-02-19 15:25:10 +0000245- sys.path[0] (the directory from which the script is loaded) is now
246 turned into an absolute pathname, unless it is the empty string.
247 (SF patch #664376.)
248
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +0000249- Finally fixed the bug in compile() and exec where a string ending
250 with an indented code block but no newline would raise SyntaxError.
251 This would have been a four-line change in parsetok.c... Except
252 codeop.py depends on this behavior, so a compilation flag had to be
253 invented that causes the tokenizer to revert to the old behavior;
254 this required extra changes to 2 .h files, 2 .c files, and 2 .py
Guido van Rossum1442dc12003-02-13 22:19:20 +0000255 files. (Fixes SF bug #501622.)
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +0000256
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +0000257- If a new-style class defines neither __new__ nor __init__, its
258 constructor would ignore all arguments. This is changed now: the
259 constructor refuses arguments in this case. This might break code
260 that worked under Python 2.2. The simplest fix is to add a no-op
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +0000261 __init__: ``def __init__(self, *args, **kw): pass``.
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +0000262
Guido van Rossum48035eb2003-02-12 17:05:26 +0000263- Through a bytecode optimizer bug (and I bet you didn't even know
264 Python *had* a bytecode optimizer :-), "unsigned" hex/oct constants
265 with a leading minus sign would come out with the wrong sign.
266 ("Unsigned" hex/oct constants are those with a face value in the
267 range sys.maxint+1 through sys.maxint*2+1, inclusive; these have
268 always been interpreted as negative numbers through sign folding.)
269 E.g. 0xffffffff is -1, and -(0xffffffff) is 1, but -0xffffffff would
270 come out as -4294967295. This was the case in Python 2.2 through
271 2.2.2 and 2.3a1, and in Python 2.4 it will once again have that
272 value, but according to PEP 237 it really needs to be 1 now. This
273 will be backported to Python 2.2.3 a well. (SF #660455)
274
Guido van Rossum47710652003-02-12 20:48:22 +0000275- int(s, base) sometimes sign-folds hex and oct constants; it only
276 does this when base is 0 and s.strip() starts with a '0'. When the
277 sign is actually folded, as in int("0xffffffff", 0) on a 32-bit
278 machine, which returns -1, a FutureWarning is now issued; in Python
279 2.4, this will return 4294967295L, as do int("+0xffffffff", 0) and
280 int("0xffffffff", 16) right now. (PEP 347)
281
Guido van Rossuma89d10e2003-02-12 03:58:38 +0000282- super(X, x): x may now be a proxy for an X instance, i.e.
283 issubclass(x.__class__, X) but not issubclass(type(x), X).
284
Guido van Rossum03bc7d32003-02-12 03:32:58 +0000285- isinstance(x, X): if X is a new-style class, this is now equivalent
286 to issubclass(type(x), X) or issubclass(x.__class__, X). Previously
287 only type(x) was tested. (For classic classes this was already the
288 case.)
289
Just van Rossum73ffb4a2003-02-10 09:57:08 +0000290- compile(), eval() and the exec statement now fully support source code
291 passed as unicode strings.
292
Neal Norwitzde8b94c2003-02-10 02:12:43 +0000293- int subclasses can be initialized with longs if the value fits in an int.
294 See SF bug #683467.
295
Tim Petersbf2674b2003-02-02 07:51:32 +0000296- long(string, base) takes time linear in len(string) when base is a power
297 of 2 now. It used to take time quadratic in len(string).
298
Martin v. Löwis8afd7572003-01-25 22:46:11 +0000299- filter returns now Unicode results for Unicode arguments.
300
Martin v. Löwisaf6a27a2003-01-03 19:16:14 +0000301- raw_input can now return Unicode objects.
302
Skip Montanaro4abd5f02003-01-02 20:51:08 +0000303- List objects' sort() method now accepts None as the comparison function.
304 Passing None is semantically identical to calling sort() with no
305 arguments.
306
Neal Norwitz1a997502003-01-13 20:13:12 +0000307- Fixed crash when printing a subclass of str and __str__ returned self.
308 See SF bug #667147.
309
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +0000310- Fixed an invalid RuntimeWarning and an undetected error when trying
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +0000311 to convert a long integer into a float which couldn't fit.
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +0000312 See SF bug #676155.
313
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +0000314- Function objects now have a __module__ attribute that is bound to
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +0000315 the name of the module in which the function was defined. This
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +0000316 applies for C functions and methods as well as functions and methods
317 defined in Python. This attribute is used by pickle.whichmodule(),
318 which changes the behavior of whichmodule slightly. In Python 2.2
319 whichmodule() returns "__main__" for functions that are not defined
320 at the top-level of a module (examples: methods, nested functions).
321 Now whichmodule() will return the proper module name.
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +0000322
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000323Extension modules
324-----------------
325
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +0000326- operator.isNumberType() now checks that the object has a nb_int or
327 nb_float slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
328 tp_as_number pointer.
329
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +0000330- The imp module now has ways to acquire and release the "import
331 lock": imp.acquire_lock() and imp.release_lock(). Note: this is a
332 reentrant lock, so releasing the lock only truly releases it when
333 this is the last release_lock() call. You can check with
334 imp.lock_held(). (SF bug #580952 and patch #683257.)
335
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +0000336- Change to cPickle to match pickle.py (see below and PEP 307).
337
Neal Norwitz9caf9c02003-02-10 01:54:06 +0000338- Fix some bugs in the parser module. SF bug #678518.
339
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +0000340- Thanks to Scott David Daniels, a subtle bug in how the zlib
Walter Dörwald28d81962003-02-03 20:53:14 +0000341 extension implemented flush() was fixed. Scott also rewrote the
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +0000342 zlib test suite using the unittest module. (SF bug #640230 and
343 patch #678531.)
344
Raymond Hettinger96ef8112003-02-01 00:10:11 +0000345- Added an itertools module containing high speed, memory efficient
346 looping constructs inspired by tools from Haskell and SML.
347
Guido van Rossum99d4abf2003-01-27 22:22:50 +0000348- The SSL module now handles sockets with a timeout set correctly (SF
349 patch #675750, fixing SF bug #675552).
350
Barry Warsawf8ba39c2003-01-07 20:55:26 +0000351- os/posixmodule has grown the sysexits.h constants (EX_OK and friends).
352
Guido van Rossum6d0d3652003-01-07 20:34:19 +0000353- Fixed broken threadstate swap in readline that could cause fatal
354 errors when a readline hook was being invoked while a background
355 thread was active. (SF bugs #660476 and #513033.)
356
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000357- fcntl now exposes the strops.h I_* constants.
358
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +0000359- Fix a crash on Solaris that occurred when calling close() on
360 an mmap'ed file which was already closed. (SF patch #665913)
361
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +0000362- Fixed several serious bugs in the zipimport implementation.
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +0000363
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +0000364- datetime changes:
365
Guido van Rossum8b7a9a32003-04-14 22:01:58 +0000366 The date class is now properly subclassable. (SF bug #720908)
367
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +0000368 The datetime and datetimetz classes have been collapsed into a single
369 datetime class, and likewise the time and timetz classes into a single
370 time class. Previously, a datetimetz object with tzinfo=None acted
371 exactly like a datetime object, and similarly for timetz. This wasn't
372 enough of a difference to justify distinct classes, and life is simpler
373 now.
374
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +0000375 today() and now() now round system timestamps to the closest
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +0000376 microsecond <http://www.python.org/sf/661086>. This repairs an
377 irritation most likely seen on Windows systems.
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +0000378
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +0000379 In dt.astimezone(tz), if tz.utcoffset(dt) returns a duration,
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +0000380 ValueError is raised if tz.dst(dt) returns None (2.3a1 treated it
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +0000381 as 0 instead, but a tzinfo subclass wishing to participate in
382 time zone conversion has to take a stand on whether it supports
383 DST; if you don't care about DST, then code dst() to return 0 minutes,
384 meaning that DST is never in effect).
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +0000385
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +0000386 The tzinfo methods utcoffset() and dst() must return a timedelta object
387 (or None) now. In 2.3a1 they could also return an int or long, but that
388 was an unhelpfully redundant leftover from an earlier version wherein
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +0000389 they couldn't return a timedelta. TOOWTDI.
390
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +0000391 The example tzinfo class for local time had a bug. It was replaced
392 by a later example coded by Guido.
393
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +0000394 datetime.astimezone(tz) no longer raises an exception when the
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +0000395 input datetime has no UTC equivalent in tz. For typical "hybrid" time
396 zones (a single tzinfo subclass modeling both standard and daylight
397 time), this case can arise one hour per year, at the hour daylight time
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +0000398 ends. See new docs for details. In short, the new behavior mimics
399 the local wall clock's behavior of repeating an hour in local time.
400
401 dt.astimezone() can no longer be used to convert between naive and aware
402 datetime objects. If you merely want to attach, or remove, a tzinfo
403 object, without any conversion of date and time members, use
404 dt.replace(tzinfo=whatever) instead, where "whatever" is None or a
405 tzinfo subclass instance.
406
407 A new method tzinfo.fromutc(dt) can be overridden in tzinfo subclasses
408 to give complete control over how a UTC time is to be converted to
409 a local time. The default astimezone() implementation calls fromutc()
410 as its last step, so a tzinfo subclass can affect that too by overriding
411 fromutc(). It's expected that the default fromutc() implementation will
412 be suitable as-is for "almost all" time zone subclasses, but the
413 creativity of political time zone fiddling appears unbounded -- fromutc()
414 allows the highly motivated to emulate any scheme expressible in Python.
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +0000415
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +0000416 datetime.now(): The optional tzinfo argument was undocumented (that's
417 repaired), and its name was changed to tz ("tzinfo" is overloaded enough
418 already). With a tz argument, now(tz) used to return the local date
419 and time, and attach tz to it, without any conversion of date and time
420 members. This was less than useful. Now now(tz) returns the current
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +0000421 date and time as local time in tz's time zone, akin to ::
422
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +0000423 tz.fromutc(datetime.utcnow().replace(tzinfo=utc))
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +0000424
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +0000425 where "utc" is an instance of a tzinfo subclass modeling UTC. Without
426 a tz argument, now() continues to return the current local date and time,
427 as a naive datetime object.
428
Tim Peters2a44a8d2003-01-23 20:53:10 +0000429 datetime.fromtimestamp(): Like datetime.now() above, this had less than
430 useful behavior when the optional tinzo argument was specified. See
431 also SF bug report <http://www.python.org/sf/660872>.
432
Tim Peters8d81a012003-01-24 22:36:34 +0000433 date and datetime comparison: In order to prevent comparison from
434 falling back to the default compare-object-addresses strategy, these
435 raised TypeError whenever they didn't understand the other object type.
436 They still do, except when the other object has a "timetuple" attribute,
437 in which case they return NotImplemented now. This gives other
438 datetime objects (e.g., mxDateTime) a chance to intercept the
439 comparison.
440
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +0000441 date, time, datetime and timedelta comparison: When the exception
442 for mixed-type comparisons in the last paragraph doesn't apply, if
443 the comparison is == then False is returned, and if the comparison is
444 != then True is returned. Because dict lookup and the "in" operator
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +0000445 only invoke __eq__, this allows, for example, ::
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +0000446
447 if some_datetime in some_sequence:
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +0000448
449 and ::
450
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +0000451 some_dict[some_timedelta] = whatever
452
453 to work as expected, without raising TypeError just because the
454 sequence is heterogeneous, or the dict has mixed-type keys. [This
455 seems like a good idea to implement for all mixed-type comparisons
456 that don't want to allow falling back to address comparison.]
457
Tim Peters75a6e3b2003-01-04 18:17:36 +0000458 The constructors building a datetime from a timestamp could raise
459 ValueError if the platform C localtime()/gmtime() inserted "leap
460 seconds". Leap seconds are ignored now. On such platforms, it's
461 possible to have timestamps that differ by a second, yet where
462 datetimes constructed from them are equal.
463
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +0000464 The pickle format of date, time and datetime objects has changed
465 completely. The undocumented pickler and unpickler functions no
Tim Petersb57f8f02003-02-01 02:54:15 +0000466 longer exist. The undocumented __setstate__() and __getstate__()
467 methods no longer exist either.
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +0000468
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000469Library
470-------
471
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +0000472- The logging module was updated slightly; the WARN level was renamed
473 to WARNING, and the matching function/method warn() to warning().
474
475- The pickle and cPickle modules were updated with a new pickling
476 protocol (documented by pickletools.py, see below) and several
477 extensions to the pickle customization API (__reduce__, __setstate__
478 etc.). The copy module now uses more of the pickle customization
479 API to copy objects that don't implement __copy__ or __deepcopy__.
480 See PEP 307 for details.
481
482- The distutils "register" command now uses http://www.python.org/pypi
483 as the default repository. (See PEP 301.)
484
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +0000485- the platform dependent path related variables sep, altsep, extsep,
486 pathsep, curdir, pardir and defpath are now defined in the platform
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +0000487 dependent path modules (e.g. ntpath.py) rather than os.py, so these
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +0000488 variables are now available via os.path. They continue to be
489 available from the os module.
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +0000490 (see <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +0000491
Tim Peters6ee04802003-02-05 18:29:34 +0000492- array.array was added to the types repr.py knows about (see
493 <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
494
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +0000495- The new pickletools.py contains lots of documentation about pickle
496 internals, and supplies some helpers for working with pickles, such as
497 a symbolic pickle disassembler.
498
Skip Montanaro9a7c96a2003-01-22 18:17:25 +0000499- Xmlrpclib.py now supports the builtin boolean type.
500
Martin v. Löwis0c6774d2003-01-15 11:51:06 +0000501- py_compile has a new 'doraise' flag and a new PyCompileError
502 exception.
503
Martin v. Löwisd69663d2003-01-15 11:37:23 +0000504- SimpleXMLRPCServer now supports CGI through the CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler
505 class.
506
Guido van Rossum50e92232003-01-14 16:45:04 +0000507- The sets module now raises TypeError in __cmp__, to clarify that
508 sets are not intended to be three-way-compared; the comparison
509 operators are overloaded as subset/superset tests.
510
Guido van Rossumcd0c0472003-01-07 23:03:05 +0000511- Bastion.py and rexec.py are disabled. These modules are not safe in
512 Python 2.2. or 2.3.
513
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +0000514- realpath is now exported when doing ``from poxixpath import *``.
Neal Norwitzbb0246a2003-01-03 18:12:28 +0000515 It is also exported for ntpath, macpath, and os2emxpath.
516 See SF bug #659228.
517
Neal Norwitzb9ef4ae2003-01-05 23:19:43 +0000518- New module tarfile from Lars Gustäbel provides a comprehensive interface
519 to tar archive files with transparent gzip and bzip2 compression.
520 See SF patch #651082.
521
Neal Norwitz4f442372003-01-06 06:51:36 +0000522- urlparse can now parse imap:// URLs. See SF feature request #618024.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +0000523
Neal Norwitze931ed52003-01-10 23:24:32 +0000524- Tkinter.Canvas.scan_dragto() provides an optional parameter to support
525 the gain value which is passed to Tk. SF bug# 602259.
526
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +0000527- Fix logging.handlers.SysLogHandler protocol when using UNIX domain sockets.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +0000528 See SF patch #642974.
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +0000529
Skip Montanaro12fe72e2003-02-25 17:46:20 +0000530- The dospath module was deleted. Use the ntpath module when manipulating
531 DOS paths from other platforms.
532
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000533Tools/Demos
534-----------
535
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +0000536- Two new scripts (db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py) were added to the
537 Tools/scripts directory to facilitate conversion from the old bsddb module
538 to the new one. While the user-visible API of the new module is
539 compatible with the old one, it's likely that the version of the
540 underlying database library has changed. To convert from the old library,
541 run the db2pickle.py script using the old version of Python to convert it
542 to a pickle file. After upgrading Python, run the pickle2db.py script
543 using the new version of Python to reconstitute your database. For
544 example:
545
Skip Montanaro621f0552003-02-03 15:48:10 +0000546 % python2.2 db2pickle.py -h some.db > some.pickle
547 % python2.3 pickle2db.py -h some.db.new < some.pickle
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +0000548
549 Run the scripts without any args to get a usage message.
550
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +0000551
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000552Build
553-----
554
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +0000555- The audio driver tests (test_ossaudiodev.py and
556 test_linuxaudiodev.py) are no longer run by default. This is
557 because they don't always work, depending on your hardware and
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +0000558 software. To run these tests, you must use an invocation like ::
559
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +0000560 ./python Lib/test/regrtest.py -u audio test_ossaudiodev
561
Skip Montanarodecc6a42003-01-01 20:07:49 +0000562- On systems which build using the configure script, compiler flags which
563 used to be lumped together using the OPT flag have been split into two
564 groups, OPT and BASECFLAGS. OPT is meant to carry just optimization- and
565 debug-related flags like "-g" and "-O3". BASECFLAGS is meant to carry
566 compiler flags that are required to get a clean compile. On some
567 platforms (many Linux flavors in particular) BASECFLAGS will be empty by
568 default. On others, such as Mac OS X and SCO, it will contain required
569 flags. This change allows people building Python to override OPT without
570 fear of clobbering compiler flags which are required to get a clean build.
571
572- On Darwin/Mac OS X platforms, /sw/lib and /sw/include are added to the
573 relevant search lists in setup.py. This allows users building Python to
574 take advantage of the many packages available from the fink project
575 <http://fink.sf.net/>.
576
577- A new Makefile target, scriptsinstall, installs a number of useful scripts
578 from the Tools/scripts directory.
579
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000580C API
581-----
582
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +0000583- PyEval_GetFrame() is now declared to return a ``PyFrameObject *``
584 instead of a plain ``PyObject *``. (SF patch #686601.)
Guido van Rossum6297a7a2003-02-19 15:53:17 +0000585
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +0000586- PyNumber_Check() now checks that the object has a nb_int or nb_float
587 slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
588 tp_as_number pointer.
589
Guido van Rossumeea47182003-02-11 20:39:59 +0000590- A C type that inherits from a base type that defines tp_as_buffer
591 will now inherit the tp_as_buffer pointer if it doesn't define one.
592 (SF #681367)
593
Neil Schemenauer5042da62003-02-04 20:59:40 +0000594- The PyArg_Parse functions now issue a DeprecationWarning if a float
595 argument is provided when an integer is specified (this affects the 'b',
596 'B', 'h', 'H', 'i', and 'l' codes). Future versions of Python will
597 raise a TypeError.
Neil Schemenauercd63e612003-01-24 22:15:53 +0000598
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000599Tests
600-----
601
Walter Dörwald11cfbd62003-03-26 16:03:16 +0000602- Several tests weren't being run from regrtest.py (test_timeout.py,
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +0000603 test_tarfile.py, test_netrc.py, test_multifile.py,
604 test_importhooks.py and test_imp.py). Now they are. (Note to
605 developers: please read Lib/test/README when creating a new test, to
606 make sure to do it right! All tests need to use either unittest or
607 pydoc.)
608
609- Added test_posix.py, a test suite for the posix module.
610
611- Added test_hexoct.py, a test suite for hex/oct constant folding.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +0000612
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000613Windows
614-------
615
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +0000616- The timeout code for socket connect() didn't work right; this has
617 now been fixed. test_timeout.py should pass (at least most of the
618 time).
619
Thomas Hellerdda583d2003-01-31 20:45:41 +0000620- distutils' msvccompiler class now passes the preprocessor options to
621 the resource compiler. See SF patch #669198.
622
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +0000623- The bsddb module now ships with Sleepycat's 4.1.25.NC, the latest
624 release without strong cryptography.
625
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +0000626- sys.path[0], if it contains a directory name, is now always an
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +0000627 absolute pathname. (SF patch #664376.)
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +0000628
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +0000629- The new logging package is now installed by the Windows installer. It
630 wasn't in 2.3a1 due to oversight.
631
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000632Mac
633---
634
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +0000635- There are new dialogs EasyDialogs.AskFileForOpen, AskFileForSave
636 and AskFolder. The old macfs.StandardGetFile and friends are deprecated.
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +0000637
Jack Jansenc9296362003-02-06 23:10:45 +0000638- Most of the standard library now uses pathnames or FSRefs in preference
639 of FSSpecs, and use the underlying Carbon.File and Carbon.Folder modules
640 in stead of macfs. macfs will probably be deprecated in the future.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +0000641
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +0000642- Type Carbon.File.FSCatalogInfo and supporting methods have been implemented.
643 This also makes macfs.FSSpec.SetDates() work again.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +0000644
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +0000645- There is a new module pimp, the package install manager for Python, and
646 accompanying applet PackageManager. These allow you to easily download
647 and install pretested extension packages either in source or binary
648 form. Only in MacPython-OSX.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +0000649
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +0000650- Applets are now built with bundlebuilder in MacPython-OSX, which should make
Jack Jansen5d44b342003-02-18 23:32:47 +0000651 them more robust and also provides a path towards BuildApplication. The
652 downside of this change is that applets can no longer be run from the
653 Terminal window, this will hopefully be fixed in the 2.3b1.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +0000654
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000655
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000656What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 1?
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000657=================================
658
Guido van Rossumae548862002-12-31 15:47:36 +0000659*Release date: 31-Dec-2002*
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000660
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000661Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000662--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +0000663
Michael W. Hudson96bc3b42002-11-26 14:48:23 +0000664- One can now assign to __bases__ and __name__ of new-style classes.
665
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +0000666- dict() now accepts keyword arguments so that dict(one=1, two=2)
667 is the equivalent of {"one": 1, "two": 2}. Accordingly,
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +0000668 the existing (but undocumented) 'items' keyword argument has
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +0000669 been eliminated. This means that dict(items=someMapping) now has
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +0000670 a different meaning than before.
671
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +0000672- int() now returns a long object if the argument is outside the
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +0000673 integer range, so int("4" * 1000), int(1e200) and int(1L<<1000) will
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +0000674 all return long objects instead of raising an OverflowError.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000675
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +0000676- Assignment to __class__ is disallowed if either the old or the new
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +0000677 class is a statically allocated type object (such as defined by an
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +0000678 extension module). This prevents anomalies like 2.__class__ = bool.
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +0000679
680- New-style object creation and deallocation have been sped up
681 significantly; they are now faster than classic instance creation
682 and deallocation.
683
684- The __slots__ variable can now mention "private" names, and the
685 right thing will happen (e.g. __slots__ = ["__foo"]).
686
687- The built-ins slice() and buffer() are now callable types. The
688 types classobj (formerly class), code, function, instance, and
689 instancemethod (formerly instance-method), which have no built-in
690 names but are accessible through the types module, are now also
691 callable. The type dict-proxy is renamed to dictproxy.
692
693- Cycles going through the __class__ link of a new-style instance are
694 now detected by the garbage collector.
695
696- Classes using __slots__ are now properly garbage collected.
697 [SF bug 519621]
698
699- Tightened the __slots__ rules: a slot name must be a valid Python
700 identifier.
701
702- The constructor for the module type now requires a name argument and
703 takes an optional docstring argument. Previously, this constructor
704 ignored its arguments. As a consequence, deriving a class from a
705 module (not from the module type) is now illegal; previously this
706 created an unnamed module, just like invoking the module type did.
707 [SF bug 563060]
708
709- A new type object, 'basestring', is added. This is a common base type
710 for 'str' and 'unicode', and can be used instead of
711 types.StringTypes, e.g. to test whether something is "a string":
712 isinstance(x, basestring) is True for Unicode and 8-bit strings. This
713 is an abstract base class and cannot be instantiated directly.
714
715- Changed new-style class instantiation so that when C's __new__
716 method returns something that's not a C instance, its __init__ is
717 not called. [SF bug #537450]
718
719- Fixed super() to work correctly with class methods. [SF bug #535444]
720
721- If you try to pickle an instance of a class that has __slots__ but
722 doesn't define or override __getstate__, a TypeError is now raised.
723 This is done by adding a bozo __getstate__ to the class that always
724 raises TypeError. (Before, this would appear to be pickled, but the
725 state of the slots would be lost.)
726
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000727Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000728-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000729
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +0000730- Import from zipfiles is now supported. The name of a zipfile placed
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +0000731 on sys.path causes the import statement to look for importable Python
732 modules (with .py, pyc and .pyo extensions) and packages inside the
733 zipfile. The zipfile import follows the specification (though not
734 the sample implementation) of PEP 273. The semantics of __path__ are
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +0000735 compatible with those that have been implemented in Jython since
736 Jython 2.1.
737
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +0000738- PEP 302 has been accepted. Although it was initially developed to
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +0000739 support zipimport, it offers a new, general import hook mechanism.
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +0000740 Several new variables have been added to the sys module:
741 sys.meta_path, sys.path_hooks, and sys.path_importer_cache; these
742 make extending the import statement much more convenient than
743 overriding the __import__ built-in function. For a description of
744 these, see PEP 302.
745
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +0000746- A frame object's f_lineno attribute can now be written to from a
747 trace function to change which line will execute next. A command to
748 exploit this from pdb has been added. [SF patch #643835]
749
Marc-André Lemburg20b91352002-12-12 18:01:43 +0000750- The _codecs support module for codecs.py was turned into a builtin
751 module to assure that at least the builtin codecs are available
752 to the Python parser for source code decoding according to PEP 263.
753
Walter Dörwaldd9a6ad32002-12-12 16:41:44 +0000754- issubclass now supports a tuple as the second argument, just like
755 isinstance does. ``issubclass(X, (A, B))`` is equivalent to
756 ``issubclass(X, A) or issubclass(X, B)``.
757
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +0000758- Thanks to Armin Rigo, the last known way to provoke a system crash
759 by cleverly arranging for a comparison function to mutate a list
760 during a list.sort() operation has been fixed. The effect of
761 attempting to mutate a list, or even to inspect its contents or
762 length, while a sort is in progress, is not defined by the language.
763 The C implementation of Python 2.3 attempts to detect mutations,
764 and raise ValueError if one occurs, but there's no guarantee that
765 all mutations will be caught, or that any will be caught across
766 releases or implementations.
767
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +0000768- Unicode file name processing for Windows (PEP 277) is implemented.
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +0000769 All platforms now have an os.path.supports_unicode_filenames attribute,
770 which is set to True on Windows NT/2000/XP, and False elsewhere.
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +0000771
Walter Dörwald3aeb6322002-09-02 13:14:32 +0000772- Codec error handling callbacks (PEP 293) are implemented.
773 Error handling in unicode.encode or str.decode can now be customized.
774
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +0000775- A subtle change to the semantics of the built-in function intern():
776 interned strings are no longer immortal. You must keep a reference
777 to the return value intern() around to get the benefit.
778
Guido van Rossumf808b892002-08-16 03:38:10 +0000779- Use of 'None' as a variable, argument or attribute name now
780 issues a SyntaxWarning. In the future, None may become a keyword.
781
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +0000782- SET_LINENO is gone. co_lnotab is now consulted to determine when to
783 call the trace function. C code that accessed f_lineno should call
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +0000784 PyCode_Addr2Line instead (f_lineno is still there, but only kept up
785 to date when there is a trace function set).
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +0000786
Guido van Rossum9be89462002-08-14 16:11:30 +0000787- There's a new warning category, FutureWarning. This is used to warn
788 about a number of situations where the value or sign of an integer
789 result will change in Python 2.4 as a result of PEP 237 (integer
790 unification). The warnings implement stage B0 mentioned in that
791 PEP. The warnings are about the following situations:
792
793 - Octal and hex literals without 'L' prefix in the inclusive range
794 [0x80000000..0xffffffff]; these are currently negative ints, but
795 in Python 2.4 they will be positive longs with the same bit
796 pattern.
797
798 - Left shifts on integer values that cause the outcome to lose
799 bits or have a different sign than the left operand. To be
800 precise: x<<n where this currently doesn't yield the same value
801 as long(x)<<n; in Python 2.4, the outcome will be long(x)<<n.
802
803 - Conversions from ints to string that show negative values as
804 unsigned ints in the inclusive range [0x80000000..0xffffffff];
805 this affects the functions hex() and oct(), and the string
806 formatting codes %u, %o, %x, and %X. In Python 2.4, these will
807 show signed values (e.g. hex(-1) currently returns "0xffffffff";
808 in Python 2.4 it will return "-0x1").
809
Guido van Rossum9a2eda52002-12-31 02:12:42 +0000810- The bits manipulated under the cover by sys.setcheckinterval() have
811 been changed. Both the check interval and the ticker used to be
812 per-thread values. They are now just a pair of global variables.
813 In addition, the default check interval was boosted from 10 to 100
814 bytecode instructions. This may have some effect on systems that
815 relied on the old default value. In particular, in multi-threaded
816 applications which try to be highly responsive, response time will
817 increase by some (perhaps imperceptible) amount.
Skip Montanaro979c74b2002-09-03 21:25:14 +0000818
Tim Petersd64c1de2002-08-12 17:36:03 +0000819- When multiplying very large integers, a version of the so-called
820 Karatsuba algorithm is now used. This is most effective if the
821 inputs have roughly the same size. If they both have about N digits,
822 Karatsuba multiplication has O(N**1.58) runtime (the exponent is
823 log_base_2(3)) instead of the previous O(N**2). Measured results may
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +0000824 be better or worse than that, depending on platform quirks. Besides
825 the O() improvement in raw instruction count, the Karatsuba algorithm
826 appears to have much better cache behavior on extremely large integers
827 (starting in the ballpark of a million bits). Note that this is a
828 simple implementation, and there's no intent here to compete with,
829 e.g., GMP. It gives a very nice speedup when it applies, but a package
830 devoted to fast large-integer arithmetic should run circles around it.
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +0000831
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +0000832- u'%c' will now raise a ValueError in case the argument is an
833 integer outside the valid range of Unicode code point ordinals.
834
Guido van Rossumdeb09362002-08-09 17:16:30 +0000835- The tempfile module has been overhauled for enhanced security. The
836 mktemp() function is now deprecated; new, safe replacements are
837 mkstemp() (for files) and mkdtemp() (for directories), and the
838 higher-level functions NamedTemporaryFile() and TemporaryFile().
839 Use of some global variables in this module is also deprecated; the
840 new functions have keyword arguments to provide the same
841 functionality. All Lib, Tools and Demo modules that used the unsafe
842 interfaces have been updated to use the safe replacements. Thanks
843 to Zack Weinberg!
844
Guido van Rossumd81a9832002-08-09 15:57:34 +0000845- When x is an object whose class implements __mul__ and __rmul__,
846 1.0*x would correctly invoke __rmul__, but 1*x would erroneously
847 invoke __mul__. This was due to the sequence-repeat code in the int
848 type. This has been fixed now.
849
Barry Warsawd79f6832002-08-06 17:01:51 +0000850- Previously, "str1 in str2" required str1 to be a string of length 1.
851 This restriction has been relaxed to allow str1 to be a string of
852 any length. Thus "'el' in 'hello world'" returns True now.
853
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +0000854- File objects are now their own iterators. For a file f, iter(f) now
855 returns f (unless f is closed), and f.next() is similar to
856 f.readline() when EOF is not reached; however, f.next() uses a
857 readahead buffer that messes up the file position, so mixing
858 f.next() and f.readline() (or other methods) doesn't work right.
859 Calling f.seek() drops the readahead buffer, but other operations
860 don't. It so happens that this gives a nice additional speed boost
861 to "for line in file:"; the xreadlines method and corresponding
Guido van Rossumbffb2ef2002-08-09 17:17:07 +0000862 module are now obsolete. Thanks to Oren Tirosh!
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +0000863
Guido van Rossumde392d32002-08-05 14:17:20 +0000864- Encoding declarations (PEP 263, phase 1) have been implemented. A
865 comment of the form "# -*- coding: <encodingname> -*-" in the first
866 or second line of a Python source file indicates the encoding.
Martin v. Löwis00f1e3f2002-08-04 17:29:52 +0000867
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +0000868- list.sort() has a new implementation. While cross-platform results
869 may vary, and in data-dependent ways, this is much faster on many
870 kinds of partially ordered lists than the previous implementation,
871 and reported to be just as fast on randomly ordered lists on
872 several major platforms. This sort is also stable (if A==B and A
873 precedes B in the list at the start, A precedes B after the sort too),
874 although the language definition does not guarantee stability. A
875 potential drawback is that list.sort() may require temp space of
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +0000876 len(list)*2 bytes (``*4`` on a 64-bit machine). It's therefore possible
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +0000877 for list.sort() to raise MemoryError now, even if a comparison function
878 does not. See <http://www.python.org/sf/587076> for full details.
879
Guido van Rossum2d5389c2002-07-23 03:44:35 +0000880- All standard iterators now ensure that, once StopIteration has been
881 raised, all future calls to next() on the same iterator will also
882 raise StopIteration. There used to be various counterexamples to
883 this behavior, which could caused confusion or subtle program
884 breakage, without any benefits. (Note that this is still an
885 iterator's responsibility; the iterator framework does not enforce
886 this.)
887
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +0000888- Ctrl+C handling on Windows has been made more consistent with
889 other platforms. KeyboardInterrupt can now reliably be caught,
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +0000890 and Ctrl+C at an interactive prompt no longer terminates the
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +0000891 process under NT/2k/XP (it never did under Win9x). Ctrl+C will
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +0000892 interrupt time.sleep() in the main thread, and any child processes
893 created via the popen family (on win2k; we can't make win9x work
Mark Hammond8f3afc72002-08-10 06:26:31 +0000894 reliably) are also interrupted (as generally happens on for Linux/Unix.)
895 [SF bugs 231273, 439992 and 581232]
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +0000896
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +0000897- sys.getwindowsversion() has been added on Windows. This
898 returns a tuple with information about the version of Windows
899 currently running.
900
Raymond Hettinger5a04aec2002-06-25 00:25:30 +0000901- Slices and repetitions of buffer objects now consistently return
902 a string. Formerly, strings would be returned most of the time,
903 but a buffer object would be returned when the repetition count
904 was one or when the slice range was all inclusive.
905
Walter Dörwald3430d702002-06-17 10:43:59 +0000906- Unicode objects in sys.path are no longer ignored but treated
907 as directory names.
908
Neal Norwitz1f68fc72002-06-14 00:50:42 +0000909- Fixed string.startswith and string.endswith builtin methods
910 so they accept negative indices. [SF bug 493951]
911
Guido van Rossumc5fe5eb2002-06-12 03:45:21 +0000912- Fixed a bug with a continue inside a try block and a yield in the
913 finally clause. [SF bug 567538]
914
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +0000915- Most builtin sequences now support "extended slices", i.e. slices
Guido van Rossum2e82e712002-06-13 11:41:07 +0000916 with a third "stride" parameter. For example, "hello world"[::-1]
917 gives "dlrow olleh".
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +0000918
Neal Norwitzd68f5172002-05-29 15:54:55 +0000919- A new warning PendingDeprecationWarning was added to provide
920 direction on features which are in the process of being deprecated.
921 The warning will not be printed by default. To see the pending
922 deprecations, use -Walways::PendingDeprecationWarning::
923 as a command line option or warnings.filterwarnings() in code.
924
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +0000925- Deprecated features of xrange objects have been removed as
926 promised. The start, stop, and step attributes and the tolist()
927 method no longer exist. xrange repetition and slicing have been
928 removed.
929
Guido van Rossum7dab2422002-04-26 19:40:56 +0000930- New builtin function enumerate(x), from PEP 279. Example:
931 enumerate("abc") is an iterator returning (0,"a"), (1,"b"), (2,"c").
932 The argument can be an arbitrary iterable object.
933
Neil Schemenauer89e3ee02002-04-26 01:58:53 +0000934- The assert statement no longer tests __debug__ at runtime. This means
935 that assert statements cannot be disabled by assigning a false value
936 to __debug__.
937
Walter Dörwald068325e2002-04-15 13:36:47 +0000938- A method zfill() was added to str and unicode, that fills a numeric
939 string to the left with zeros. For example,
940 "+123".zfill(6) -> "+00123".
941
Guido van Rossum862fe3c2002-04-15 12:36:47 +0000942- Complex numbers supported divmod() and the // and % operators, but
943 these make no sense. Since this was documented, they're being
944 deprecated now.
945
Guido van Rossum26dd8302002-04-26 20:11:29 +0000946- String and unicode methods lstrip(), rstrip() and strip() now take
947 an optional argument that specifies the characters to strip. For
948 example, "Foo!!!?!?!?".rstrip("?!") -> "Foo".
Guido van Rossum49042042002-04-13 00:59:05 +0000949
Guido van Rossumc0d3f4e2002-11-27 13:10:40 +0000950- There's a new dictionary constructor (a class method of the dict
951 class), dict.fromkeys(iterable, value=None). It constructs a
952 dictionary with keys taken from the iterable and all values set to a
953 single value. It can be used for building sets and for removing
954 duplicates from sequences.
Raymond Hettingere33d3df2002-11-27 07:29:33 +0000955
Guido van Rossumc69343b2002-04-12 19:22:48 +0000956- Added a new dict method pop(key). This removes and returns the
957 value corresponding to key. [SF patch #539949]
958
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +0000959- A new built-in type, bool, has been added, as well as built-in
960 names for its two values, True and False. Comparisons and sundry
961 other operations that return a truth value have been changed to
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +0000962 return a bool instead. Read PEP 285 for an explanation of why this
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +0000963 is backward compatible.
964
Guido van Rossum95b62a62002-03-29 01:07:24 +0000965- Fixed two bugs reported as SF #535905: under certain conditions,
966 deallocating a deeply nested structure could cause a segfault in the
967 garbage collector, due to interaction with the "trashcan" code;
968 access to the current frame during destruction of a local variable
969 could access a pointer to freed memory.
970
Guido van Rossumfe0ca4a2002-06-18 21:20:13 +0000971- The optional object allocator ("pymalloc") has been enabled by
972 default. The recommended practice for memory allocation and
973 deallocation has been streamlined. A header file is included,
974 Misc/pymemcompat.h, which can be bundled with 3rd party extensions
975 and lets them use the same API with Python versions from 1.5.2
976 onwards.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +0000977
Martin v. Löwiscfeb3b62002-03-03 21:30:27 +0000978- PyErr_Display will provide file and line information for all exceptions
979 that have an attribute print_file_and_line, not just SyntaxErrors.
980
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +0000981- The UTF-8 codec will now encode and decode Unicode surrogates
982 correctly and without raising exceptions for unpaired ones.
983
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +0000984- Universal newlines (PEP 278) is implemented. Briefly, using 'U'
985 instead of 'r' when opening a text file for reading changes the line
986 ending convention so that any of '\r', '\r\n', and '\n' is
987 recognized (even mixed in one file); all three are converted to
988 '\n', the standard Python line end character.
989
Neal Norwitz649b7592002-01-01 19:07:13 +0000990- file.xreadlines() now raises a ValueError if the file is closed:
991 Previously, an xreadlines object was returned which would raise
992 a ValueError when the xreadlines.next() method was called.
993
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +0000994- sys.exit() inadvertently allowed more than one argument.
Neal Norwitz0c766a02002-03-27 13:03:09 +0000995 An exception will now be raised if more than one argument is used.
996
Gustavo Niemeyer17c5a332002-12-16 14:09:22 +0000997- Changed evaluation order of dictionary literals to conform to the
998 general left to right evaluation order rule. Now {f1(): f2()} will
999 evaluate f1 first.
Gustavo Niemeyer78429a62002-12-16 13:54:02 +00001000
Gustavo Niemeyer786ddb22002-12-16 18:12:53 +00001001- Fixed bug #521782: when a file was in non-blocking mode, file.read()
1002 could silently lose data or wrongly throw an unknown error.
1003
Neil Schemenauerb983aa02002-12-30 20:22:23 +00001004- The sq_repeat, sq_inplace_repeat, sq_concat and sq_inplace_concat
1005 slots are now always tried after trying the corresponding nb_* slots.
1006 This fixes a number of minor bugs (see bug #624807).
1007
Neal Norwitz74a032e2003-01-10 23:29:48 +00001008- Fix problem with dynamic loading on 64-bit AIX (see bug #639945).
1009
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001010Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001011-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001012
Raymond Hettinger9543b342003-01-18 23:22:20 +00001013- Added three operators to the operator module:
1014 operator.pow(a,b) which is equivalent to: a**b.
1015 operator.is_(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is b.
1016 operator.is_not(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is not b.
1017
Martin v. Löwis24a880b2002-12-31 12:55:15 +00001018- posix.openpty now works on all systems that have /dev/ptmx.
1019
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00001020- A module zipimport exists to support importing code from zip
1021 archives.
1022
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00001023- The new datetime module supplies classes for manipulating dates and
1024 times. The basic design came from the Zope "fishbowl process", and
1025 favors practical commercial applications over calendar esoterica. See
1026
1027 http://www.zope.org/Members/fdrake/DateTimeWiki/FrontPage
1028
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00001029- _tkinter now returns Tcl objects, instead of strings. Objects which
1030 have Python equivalents are converted to Python objects, other objects
1031 are wrapped. This can be configured through the wantobjects method,
Martin v. Löwis8c8aa5d2002-11-26 21:39:48 +00001032 or Tkinter.wantobjects.
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00001033
Barry Warsawc27f4bd2002-12-30 21:03:26 +00001034- The PyBSDDB wrapper around the Sleepycat Berkeley DB library has
1035 been added as the package bsddb. The traditional bsddb module is
1036 still available in source code, but not built automatically anymore,
1037 and is now named bsddb185. This supports Berkeley DB versions from
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00001038 3.0 to 4.1. For help converting your databases from the old module (which
1039 probably used an obsolete version of Berkeley DB) to the new module, see
1040 the db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py scripts described in the Tools/Demos
1041 section above.
Martin v. Löwisef546b32002-11-19 08:12:57 +00001042
Martin v. Löwis677bde22002-11-23 22:08:15 +00001043- unicodedata was updated to Unicode 3.2. It supports normalization
1044 and names for Hangul syllables and CJK unified ideographs.
Martin v. Löwis7d41e292002-11-23 12:22:32 +00001045
Neal Norwitz94a83fd2002-11-02 17:46:24 +00001046- resource.getrlimit() now returns longs instead of ints.
1047
Martin v. Löwis080689c2002-10-26 14:42:02 +00001048- readline now dynamically adjusts its input/output stream if
1049 sys.stdin/stdout changes.
1050
Guido van Rossumba602972002-10-01 18:18:58 +00001051- The _tkinter module (and hence Tkinter) has dropped support for
1052 Tcl/Tk 8.0 and 8.1. Only Tcl/Tk versions 8.2, 8.3 and 8.4 are
1053 supported.
1054
Martin v. Löwis658009a2002-09-16 17:26:24 +00001055- cPickle.BadPickleGet is now a class.
1056
Martin v. Löwisa19bfe02002-10-16 18:28:36 +00001057- The time stamps in os.stat_result are floating point numbers
1058 after stat_float_times has been called.
Martin v. Löwis94717ed2002-09-09 14:24:16 +00001059
Neal Norwitzb5673922002-09-05 21:48:07 +00001060- If the size passed to mmap.mmap() is larger than the length of the
1061 file on non-Windows platforms, a ValueError is raised. [SF bug 585792]
1062
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00001063- The xreadlines module is slated for obsolescence.
1064
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00001065- The strptime function in the time module is now always available (a
1066 Python implementation is used when the C library doesn't define it).
1067
Guido van Rossum9562bcf2002-06-14 21:31:18 +00001068- The 'new' module is no longer an extension, but a Python module that
1069 only exists for backwards compatibility. Its contents are no longer
1070 functions but callable type objects.
1071
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00001072- The bsddb.*open functions can now take 'None' as a filename.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00001073 This will create a temporary in-memory bsddb that won't be
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00001074 written to disk.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00001075
Martin v. Löwisb96152c2002-12-31 13:20:15 +00001076- posix.getloadavg, posix.lchown, posix.killpg, posix.mknod, and
1077 posix.getpgid have been added where available.
Martin v. Löwis06a83e92002-04-14 10:19:44 +00001078
Martin v. Löwisf0a46682002-11-03 17:20:12 +00001079- The locale module now exposes the C library's gettext interface. It
1080 also has a new function getpreferredencoding.
Martin v. Löwis2e64c342002-03-27 18:49:02 +00001081
Tim Petersfbf74f22002-03-14 19:06:01 +00001082- A security hole ("double free") was found in zlib-1.1.3, a popular
1083 third party compression library used by some Python modules. The
1084 hole was quickly plugged in zlib-1.1.4, and the Windows build of
1085 Python now ships with zlib-1.1.4.
1086
Martin v. Löwis688357e2002-04-08 21:28:20 +00001087- pwd, grp, and resource return enhanced tuples now, with symbolic
1088 field names.
Martin v. Löwis29001ff2002-03-01 10:47:37 +00001089
Martin v. Löwis99866332002-03-01 10:27:01 +00001090- array.array is now a type object. A new format character
1091 'u' indicates Py_UNICODE arrays. For those, .tounicode and
1092 .fromunicode methods are available. Arrays now support __iadd__
1093 and __imul__.
1094
Neal Norwitze790eae2002-01-01 21:14:12 +00001095- dl now builds on every system that has dlfcn.h. Failure in case
Martin v. Löwis93227272002-01-01 20:18:30 +00001096 of sizeof(int)!=sizeof(long)!=sizeof(void*) is delayed until dl.open
1097 is called.
1098
Skip Montanaro8e790e72002-09-03 13:25:17 +00001099- The sys module acquired a new attribute, api_version, which evaluates
1100 to the value of the PYTHON_API_VERSION macro with which the
1101 interpreter was compiled.
1102
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00001103- Fixed bug #470582: sre module would return a tuple (None, 'a', 'ab')
1104 when applying the regular expression '^((a)c)?(ab)$' on 'ab'. It now
1105 returns (None, None, 'ab'), as expected. Also fixed handling of
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00001106 lastindex/lastgroup match attributes in similar cases. For example,
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00001107 when running the expression r'(a)(b)?b' over 'ab', lastindex must be
1108 1, not 2.
1109
Gustavo Niemeyerc523b042002-11-07 03:28:56 +00001110- Fixed bug #581080: sre scanner was not checking the buffer limit
1111 before increasing the current pointer. This was creating an infinite
1112 loop in the search function, once the pointer exceeded the buffer
1113 limit.
1114
Thomas Heller95cb7e42002-11-07 16:23:55 +00001115- The os.fdopen function now enforces a file mode starting with the
1116 letter 'r', 'w' or 'a', otherwise a ValueError is raised. This fixes
1117 bug #623464.
1118
Greg Ward6c58d462003-01-03 18:02:15 +00001119- The linuxaudiodev module is now deprecated; it is being replaced by
1120 ossaudiodev. The interface has been extended to cover a lot more of
1121 OSS (see www.opensound.com), including most DSP ioctls and the
1122 OSS mixer API. Documentation forthcoming in 2.3a2.
1123
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001124Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001125-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001126
Guido van Rossum747f8062003-01-03 16:33:49 +00001127- imaplib.py now supports SSL (Tino Lange and Piers Lauder).
1128
Just van Rossum5e156ad2002-12-31 16:38:01 +00001129- Freeze's modulefinder.py has been moved to the standard library;
1130 slightly improved so it will issue less false missing submodule
1131 reports (see sf path #643711 for details). Documentation will follow
1132 with Python 2.3a2.
1133
Martin v. Löwis96a60e42002-12-31 13:11:54 +00001134- os.path exposes getctime.
1135
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001136- unittest.py now has two additional methods called assertAlmostEqual()
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001137 and failIfAlmostEqual(). They implement an approximate comparison
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001138 by rounding the difference between the two arguments and comparing
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001139 the result to zero. Approximate comparison is essential for
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001140 unit tests of floating point results.
1141
Raymond Hettingere11b5102002-12-25 16:37:19 +00001142- calendar.py now depends on the new datetime module rather than
1143 the time module. As a result, the range of allowable dates
1144 has been increased.
1145
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00001146- pdb has a new 'j(ump)' command to select the next line to be
1147 executed.
1148
Thomas Heller1b3b49d2002-12-12 19:13:44 +00001149- The distutils created windows installers now can run a
1150 postinstallation script.
1151
Martin v. Löwis4581cfa2002-11-22 08:23:09 +00001152- doctest.testmod can now be called without argument, which means to
1153 test the current module.
1154
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001155- When canceling a server that implemented threading with a keyboard
Martin v. Löwisf86e8ef2002-11-22 08:08:44 +00001156 interrupt, the server would shut down but not terminate (waiting on
1157 client threads). A new member variable, daemon_threads, was added to
1158 the ThreadingMixIn class in SocketServer.py to make it explicit that
1159 this behavior needs to be controlled.
1160
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00001161- A new module, optparse, provides a fancy alternative to getopt for
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00001162 command line parsing. It is a slightly modified version of Greg
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00001163 Ward's Optik package.
1164
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00001165- UserDict.py now defines a DictMixin class which defines all dictionary
1166 methods for classes that already have a minimum mapping interface.
1167 This greatly simplifies writing classes that need to be substitutable
1168 for dictionaries (such as the shelve module).
1169
1170- shelve.py now subclasses from UserDict.DictMixin. Now shelve supports
1171 all dictionary methods. This eases the transition to persistent
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00001172 storage for scripts originally written with dictionaries in mind.
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00001173
Skip Montanaro3bf99e32002-12-08 18:36:24 +00001174- shelve.open and the various classes in shelve.py now accept an optional
1175 binary flag, which defaults to False. If True, the values stored in the
1176 shelf are binary pickles.
1177
Guido van Rossumfda06742002-11-13 16:29:18 +00001178- A new package, logging, implements the logging API defined by PEP
1179 282. The code is written by Vinay Sajip.
1180
Walter Dörwald4dbf1922002-11-06 16:53:44 +00001181- StreamReader, StreamReaderWriter and StreamRecoder in the codecs
1182 modules are iterators now.
1183
Tim Peters9288f952002-11-05 20:38:55 +00001184- gzip.py now handles files exceeding 2GB. Files over 4GB also work
1185 now (provided the OS supports it, and Python is configured with large
1186 file support), but in that case the underlying gzip file format can
1187 record only the least-significant 32 bits of the file size, so that
1188 some tools working with gzipped files may report an incorrect file
1189 size.
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00001190
Martin v. Löwis74b51ac2002-10-26 14:50:45 +00001191- xml.sax.saxutils.unescape has been added, to replace entity references
1192 with their entity value.
1193
Martin v. Löwis77ac4292002-10-15 15:11:13 +00001194- Queue.Queue.{put,get} now support an optional timeout argument.
1195
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00001196- Various features of Tk 8.4 are exposed in Tkinter.py. The multiple
1197 option of tkFileDialog is exposed as function askopenfile{,name}s.
Martin v. Löwis2ec36272002-10-13 10:22:08 +00001198
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00001199- Various configure methods of Tkinter have been stream-lined, so that
1200 tag_configure, image_configure, window_configure now return a
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00001201 dictionary when invoked with no argument.
Martin v. Löwis6ce13152002-10-10 14:36:13 +00001202
Guido van Rossum2b492b62002-10-09 21:40:48 +00001203- Importing the readline module now no longer has the side effect of
1204 calling setlocale(LC_CTYPE, ""). The initial "C" locale, or
1205 whatever locale is explicitly set by the user, is preserved. If you
1206 want repr() of 8-bit strings in your preferred encoding to preserve
1207 all printable characters of that encoding, you have to add the
1208 following code to your $PYTHONSTARTUP file or to your application's
1209 main():
1210
1211 import locale
1212 locale.setlocale(locale.LC_CTYPE, "")
1213
Martin v. Löwise9ce0b02002-10-07 13:23:24 +00001214- shutil.move was added. shutil.copytree now reports errors as an
1215 exception at the end, instead of printing error messages.
1216
Marc-André Lemburg97047e22002-10-04 11:55:21 +00001217- Encoding name normalization was generalized to not only
1218 replace hyphens with underscores, but also all other non-alphanumeric
1219 characters (with the exception of the dot which is used for Python
1220 package names during lookup). The aliases.py mapping was updated
1221 to the new standard.
1222
Walter Dörwald5ccaf8f2002-09-06 16:15:58 +00001223- mimetypes has two new functions: guess_all_extensions() which
1224 returns a list of all known extensions for a mime type, and
1225 add_type() which adds one mapping between a mime type and
1226 an extension to the database.
1227
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00001228- New module: sets, defines the class Set that implements a mutable
1229 set type using the keys of a dict to represent the set. There's
1230 also a class ImmutableSet which is useful when you need sets of sets
1231 or when you need to use sets as dict keys, and a class BaseSet which
Raymond Hettingeref8b9c62002-12-09 08:56:06 +00001232 is the base class of the two.
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00001233
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00001234- Added random.sample(population,k) for random sampling without replacement.
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00001235 Returns a k length list of unique elements chosen from the population.
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00001236
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00001237- random.randrange(-sys.maxint-1, sys.maxint) no longer raises
1238 OverflowError. That is, it now accepts any combination of 'start'
1239 and 'stop' arguments so long as each is in the range of Python's
1240 bounded integers.
1241
Raymond Hettinger40f62172002-12-29 23:03:38 +00001242- Thanks to Raymond Hettinger, random.random() now uses a new core
1243 generator. The Mersenne Twister algorithm is implemented in C,
1244 threadsafe, faster than the previous generator, has an astronomically
1245 large period (2**19937-1), creates random floats to full 53-bit
1246 precision, and may be the most widely tested random number generator
1247 in existence.
1248
1249 The random.jumpahead(n) method has different semantics for the new
1250 generator. Instead of jumping n steps ahead, it uses n and the
1251 existing state to create a new state. This means that jumpahead()
1252 continues to support multi-threaded code needing generators of
1253 non-overlapping sequences. However, it will break code which relies
1254 on jumpahead moving a specific number of steps forward.
1255
1256 The attributes random.whseed and random.__whseed have no meaning for
1257 the new generator. Code using these attributes should switch to a
1258 new class, random.WichmannHill which is provided for backward
1259 compatibility and to make an alternate generator available.
1260
Guido van Rossum4a57c332002-08-02 18:05:20 +00001261- New "algorithms" module: heapq, implements a heap queue. Thanks to
1262 Kevin O'Connor for the code and François Pinard for an entertaining
1263 write-up explaining the theory and practical uses of heaps.
1264
Marc-André Lemburg58e2ff22002-07-12 14:40:04 +00001265- New encoding for the Palm OS character set: palmos.
1266
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00001267- binascii.crc32() and the zipfile module had problems on some 64-bit
1268 platforms. These have been fixed. On a platform with 8-byte C longs,
1269 crc32() now returns a signed-extended 4-byte result, so that its value
1270 as a Python int is equal to the value computed a 32-bit platform.
1271
Martin v. Löwis7d650ca2002-06-30 15:05:00 +00001272- xml.dom.minidom.toxml and toprettyxml now take an optional encoding
1273 argument.
1274
Guido van Rossum9f7549b2002-06-10 21:39:42 +00001275- Some fixes in the copy module: when an object is copied through its
1276 __reduce__ method, there was no check for a __setstate__ method on
1277 the result [SF patch 565085]; deepcopy should treat instances of
1278 custom metaclasses the same way it treats instances of type 'type'
1279 [SF patch 560794].
1280
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00001281- Sockets now support timeout mode. After s.settimeout(T), where T is
1282 a float expressing seconds, subsequent operations raise an exception
1283 if they cannot be completed within T seconds. To disable timeout
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00001284 mode, use s.settimeout(None). There's also a module function,
1285 socket.setdefaulttimeout(T), which sets the default for all sockets
1286 created henceforth.
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00001287
1288- getopt.gnu_getopt was added. This supports GNU-style option
1289 processing, where options can be mixed with non-option arguments.
Martin v. Löwis446a25f2002-06-06 10:58:36 +00001290
Michael W. Hudsonb0dc1a32002-06-04 18:27:35 +00001291- Stop using strings for exceptions. String objects used for
1292 exceptions are now classes deriving from Exception. The objects
1293 changed were: Tkinter.TclError, bdb.BdbQuit, macpath.norm_error,
1294 tabnanny.NannyNag, and xdrlib.Error.
Neal Norwitzb5b5a262002-06-04 17:14:07 +00001295
Walter Dörwald474458d2002-06-04 15:16:29 +00001296- Constants BOM_UTF8, BOM_UTF16, BOM_UTF16_LE, BOM_UTF16_BE,
1297 BOM_UTF32, BOM_UTF32_LE and BOM_UTF32_BE that represent the Byte
1298 Order Mark in UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 encodings for little and
1299 big endian systems were added to the codecs module. The old names
1300 BOM32_* and BOM64_* were off by a factor of 2.
1301
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00001302- Added conversion functions math.degrees() and math.radians().
Raymond Hettinger87f59ee2002-05-13 04:17:32 +00001303
Raymond Hettinger866964c2002-12-14 19:51:34 +00001304- math.log() now takes an optional argument: math.log(x[, base]).
1305
Raymond Hettinger9b1df1d2002-05-12 06:07:21 +00001306- ftplib.retrlines() now tests for callback is None rather than testing
1307 for False. Was causing an error when given a callback object which
1308 was callable but also returned len() as zero. The change may
1309 create new breakage if the caller relied on the undocumented behavior
1310 and called with callback set to [] or some other False value not
1311 identical to None.
1312
Tim Peters46c04e12002-05-05 20:40:00 +00001313- random.gauss() uses a piece of hidden state used by nothing else,
1314 and the .seed() and .whseed() methods failed to reset it. In other
1315 words, setting the seed didn't completely determine the sequence of
1316 results produced by random.gauss(). It does now. Programs repeatedly
1317 mixing calls to a seed method with calls to gauss() may see different
1318 results now.
1319
Fred Drake7f781c92002-05-01 20:33:53 +00001320- The pickle.Pickler class grew a clear_memo() method to mimic that
1321 provided by cPickle.Pickler.
1322
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00001323- difflib's SequenceMatcher class now does a dynamic analysis of
1324 which elements are so frequent as to constitute noise. For
1325 comparing files as sequences of lines, this generally works better
1326 than the IS_LINE_JUNK function, and function ndiff's linejunk
1327 argument defaults to None now as a result. A happy benefit is
1328 that SequenceMatcher may run much faster now when applied
1329 to large files with many duplicate lines (for example, C program
1330 text with lots of repeated "}" and "return NULL;" lines).
1331
Guido van Rossum256705b2002-04-23 13:29:43 +00001332- New Text.dump() method in Tkinter module.
1333
Marc-André Lemburg1ec71ea2002-04-17 20:33:40 +00001334- New distutils commands for building packagers were added to
1335 support pkgtool on Solaris and swinstall on HP-UX.
1336
1337- distutils now has a new abstract binary packager base class
1338 command/bdist_packager, which simplifies writing packagers.
1339 This will hopefully provide the missing bits to encourage
1340 people to submit more packagers, e.g. for Debian, FreeBSD
1341 and other systems.
1342
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00001343- The UTF-16, -LE and -BE stream readers now raise a
1344 NotImplementedError for all calls to .readline(). Previously, they
1345 used to just produce garbage or fail with an encoding error --
1346 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 +00001347 work well with these.
1348
Martin v. Löwis5c137c22002-03-18 12:44:08 +00001349- compileall now supports quiet operation.
1350
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00001351- The BaseHTTPServer now implements optional HTTP/1.1 persistent
Martin v. Löwis587c98c2002-03-17 18:37:22 +00001352 connections.
1353
Marc-André Lemburga5d2b4c2002-02-16 18:23:30 +00001354- socket module: the SSL support was broken out of the main
1355 _socket module C helper and placed into a new _ssl helper
1356 which now gets imported by socket.py if available and working.
1357
Marc-André Lemburg37aa5802002-02-10 21:42:47 +00001358- encodings package: added aliases for all supported IANA character
1359 sets
1360
Guido van Rossum606fe4e2001-12-28 20:57:14 +00001361- ftplib: to safeguard the user's privacy, anonymous login will use
1362 "anonymous@" as default password, rather than the real user and host
1363 name.
1364
Fred Drake36736122002-01-10 13:50:31 +00001365- webbrowser: tightened up the command passed to os.system() so that
1366 arbitrary shell code can't be executed because a bogus URL was
1367 passed in.
1368
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00001369- gettext.translation has an optional fallback argument, and
Martin v. Löwisa55ffae2002-01-11 06:58:49 +00001370 gettext.find an optional all argument. Translations will now fallback
Martin v. Löwisd8996052002-11-21 21:45:32 +00001371 on a per-message basis. The module supports plural forms, by means
1372 of gettext.[d]ngettext and Translation.[u]ngettext.
Martin v. Löwis1be64192002-01-11 06:33:28 +00001373
Martin v. Löwis9668b932002-01-12 11:27:42 +00001374- distutils bdist commands now offer a --skip-build option.
1375
Walter Dörwaldb25c2b02002-03-21 10:38:40 +00001376- warnings.warn now accepts a Warning instance as first argument.
1377
Fred Drakefed7e852002-04-04 19:36:15 +00001378- The xml.sax.expatreader.ExpatParser class will no longer create
1379 circular references by using itself as the locator that gets passed
1380 to the content handler implementation. [SF bug #535474]
1381
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00001382- The email.Parser.Parser class now properly parses strings regardless
1383 of their line endings, which can be any of \r, \n, or \r\n (CR, LF,
1384 or CRLF). Also, the Header class's constructor default arguments
1385 has changed slightly so that an explicit maxlinelen value is always
Barry Warsaw497e5c42002-12-30 19:27:08 +00001386 honored, and so unicode conversion error handling can be specified.
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00001387
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001388- distutils' build_ext command now links C++ extensions with the C++
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00001389 compiler available in the Makefile or CXX environment variable, if
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001390 running under \*nix.
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00001391
1392- New module bz2: provides a comprehensive interface for the bz2 compression
1393 library. It implements a complete file interface, one-shot (de)compression
1394 functions, and types for sequential (de)compression.
1395
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001396- New pdb command 'pp' which is like 'p' except that it pretty-prints
Barry Warsaw5d8d6182002-11-05 22:41:33 +00001397 the value of its expression argument.
1398
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00001399- Now bdist_rpm distutils command understands a verify_script option in
1400 the config file, including the contents of the referred filename in
1401 the "%verifyscript" section of the rpm spec file.
1402
Gustavo Niemeyer1456fde2002-11-25 17:25:04 +00001403- Fixed bug #495695: webbrowser module would run graphic browsers in a
1404 unix environment even if DISPLAY was not set. Also, support for
1405 skipstone browser was included.
1406
Gustavo Niemeyerd5ae01a2002-12-16 13:11:57 +00001407- Fixed bug #636769: rexec would run unallowed code if subclasses of
1408 strings were used as parameters for certain functions.
1409
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001410Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001411-----------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001412
Martin v. Löwis0d1fdea2002-11-22 08:36:54 +00001413- pygettext.py now supports globbing on Windows, and accepts module
1414 names in addition to accepting file names.
1415
Guido van Rossum923e4ef2002-09-17 20:58:59 +00001416- The SGI demos (Demo/sgi) have been removed. Nobody thought they
1417 were interesting any more. (The SGI library modules and extensions
1418 are still there; it is believed that at least some of these are
1419 still used and useful.)
1420
Fred Drake40813b12002-08-05 15:24:19 +00001421- IDLE supports the new encoding declarations (PEP 263); it can also
1422 deal with legacy 8-bit files if they use the locale's encoding. It
1423 allows non-ASCII strings in the interactive shell and executes them
1424 in the locale's encoding.
Martin v. Löwis98ce7b72002-08-05 15:11:26 +00001425
Marc-André Lemburg46260092002-04-04 16:17:11 +00001426- freeze.py now produces binaries which can import shared modules,
1427 unlike before when this failed due to missing symbol exports in
1428 the generated binary.
1429
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001430Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001431-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001432
Martin v. Löwisdc461752002-11-06 21:59:33 +00001433- On Unix, IDLE is now installed automatically.
1434
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00001435- The fpectl module is not built by default; it's dangerous or useless
1436 except in the hands of experts.
1437
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00001438- The public Python C API will generally be declared using PyAPI_FUNC
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00001439 and PyAPI_DATA macros, while Python extension module init functions
1440 will be declared with PyMODINIT_FUNC. DL_EXPORT/DL_IMPORT macros
1441 are deprecated.
Neal Norwitz1389f3e2002-07-22 13:21:10 +00001442
Tim Petersc6a3ff62002-07-08 22:11:52 +00001443- A bug was fixed that could cause COUNT_ALLOCS builds to segfault, or
1444 get into infinite loops, when a new-style class got garbage-collected.
1445 Unfortunately, to avoid this, the way COUNT_ALLOCS works requires
1446 that new-style classes be immortal in COUNT_ALLOCS builds. Note that
1447 COUNT_ALLOCS is not enabled by default, in either release or debug
1448 builds, and that new-style classes are immortal only in COUNT_ALLOCS
1449 builds.
1450
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00001451- Compiling out the cyclic garbage collector is no longer an option.
1452 The old symbol WITH_CYCLE_GC is now ignored, and Python.h arranges
1453 that it's always defined (for the benefit of any extension modules
1454 that may be conditionalizing on it). A bonus is that any extension
1455 type participating in cyclic gc can choose to participate in the
1456 Py_TRASHCAN mechanism now too; in the absence of cyclic gc, this used
1457 to require editing the core to teach the trashcan mechanism about the
1458 new type.
1459
Martin v. Löwis0cec0ff2002-07-28 16:33:45 +00001460- According to Annex F of the current C standard,
Tim Peters1de41bf2002-07-03 03:31:20 +00001461
1462 The Standard C macro HUGE_VAL and its float and long double analogs,
1463 HUGE_VALF and HUGE_VALL, expand to expressions whose values are
1464 positive infinities.
1465
1466 Python only uses the double HUGE_VAL, and only to #define its own symbol
1467 Py_HUGE_VAL. Some platforms have incorrect definitions for HUGE_VAL.
1468 pyport.h used to try to worm around that, but the workarounds triggered
1469 other bugs on other platforms, so we gave up. If your platform defines
1470 HUGE_VAL incorrectly, you'll need to #define Py_HUGE_VAL to something
1471 that works on your platform. The only instance of this I'm sure about
1472 is on an unknown subset of Cray systems, described here:
1473
1474 http://www.cray.com/swpubs/manuals/SN-2194_2.0/html-SN-2194_2.0/x3138.htm
1475
1476 Presumably 2.3a1 breaks such systems. If anyone uses such a system, help!
1477
Martin v. Löwisa3fb4f72002-06-09 13:33:54 +00001478- The configure option --without-doc-strings can be used to remove the
1479 doc strings from the builtin functions and modules; this reduces the
1480 size of the executable.
1481
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00001482- The universal newlines option (PEP 278) is on by default. On Unix
1483 it can be disabled by passing --without-universal-newlines to the
1484 configure script. On other platforms, remove
1485 WITH_UNIVERSAL_NEWLINES from pyconfig.h.
Tim Peters639295f2002-04-21 07:30:30 +00001486
Martin v. Löwis1142de32002-03-29 16:28:31 +00001487- On Unix, a shared libpython2.3.so can be created with --enable-shared.
1488
Tim Peters8deda702002-03-30 10:06:07 +00001489- All uses of the CACHE_HASH, INTERN_STRINGS, and DONT_SHARE_SHORT_STRINGS
1490 preprocessor symbols were eliminated. The internal decisions they
1491 controlled stopped being experimental long ago.
Tim Peters1f7df352002-03-29 03:29:08 +00001492
Fred Drake7d28b732002-05-02 21:17:00 +00001493- The tools used to build the documentation now work under Cygwin as
1494 well as Unix.
1495
Skip Montanaro57454e52002-06-14 20:30:31 +00001496- The bsddb and dbm module builds have been changed to try and avoid version
1497 skew problems and disable linkage with Berkeley DB 1.85 unless the
1498 installer knows what s/he's doing. See the section on building these
1499 modules in the README file for details.
1500
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001501C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001502-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001503
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00001504- PyNumber_Check() now returns true for string and unicode objects.
1505 This is a result of these types having a partially defined
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00001506 tp_as_number slot. (This is not a feature, but an indication that
Walter Dörwalda1a61f92002-11-19 21:20:25 +00001507 PyNumber_Check() is not very useful to determine numeric behavior.
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00001508 It may be deprecated.)
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00001509
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00001510- The string object's layout has changed: the pointer member
1511 ob_sinterned has been replaced by an int member ob_sstate. On some
1512 platforms (e.g. most 64-bit systems) this may change the offset of
1513 the ob_sval member, so as a precaution the API_VERSION has been
1514 incremented. The apparently unused feature of "indirect interned
1515 strings", supported by the ob_sinterned member, is gone. Interned
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001516 strings are now usually mortal; there is a new API,
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00001517 PyString_InternImmortal() that creates immortal interned strings.
1518 (The ob_sstate member can only take three values; however, while
1519 making it a char saves a few bytes per string object on average, in
1520 it also slowed things down a bit because ob_sval was no longer
1521 aligned.)
1522
Guido van Rossumfdb86482002-08-14 21:20:32 +00001523- The Py_InitModule*() functions now accept NULL for the 'methods'
1524 argument. Modules without global functions are becoming more common
1525 now that factories can be types rather than functions.
1526
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00001527- New C API PyUnicode_FromOrdinal() which exposes unichr() at C
1528 level.
1529
Thomas Heller085358a2002-07-29 14:27:41 +00001530- New functions PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErr() and
1531 PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErrWithFilename(). Similar to
1532 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErrWithFilename() and
1533 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErr(), but they allow to specify
1534 the exception type to raise. Available on Windows.
1535
Tim Peters7c321a82002-07-09 02:57:01 +00001536- Py_FatalError() is now declared as taking a const char* argument. It
1537 was previously declared without const. This should not affect working
1538 code.
1539
Martin v. Löwis01f94bd2002-05-08 08:44:21 +00001540- Added new macro PySequence_ITEM(o, i) that directly calls
1541 sq_item without rechecking that o is a sequence and without
1542 adjusting for negative indices.
1543
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00001544- PyRange_New() now raises ValueError if the fourth argument is not 1.
1545 This is part of the removal of deprecated features of the xrange
1546 object.
1547
Guido van Rossum517c7d42002-04-26 02:49:14 +00001548- PyNumber_Coerce() and PyNumber_CoerceEx() now also invoke the type's
1549 coercion if both arguments have the same type but this type has the
1550 CHECKTYPES flag set. This is to better support proxies.
1551
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00001552- The type of tp_free has been changed from "``void (*)(PyObject *)``" to
1553 "``void (*)(void *)``".
Neil Schemenauer9344b142002-04-12 23:00:08 +00001554
1555- PyObject_Del, PyObject_GC_Del are now functions instead of macros.
1556
Guido van Rossum0986d822002-04-08 01:38:42 +00001557- A type can now inherit its metatype from its base type. Previously,
1558 when PyType_Ready() was called, if ob_type was found to be NULL, it
1559 was always set to &PyType_Type; now it is set to base->ob_type,
1560 where base is tp_base, defaulting to &PyObject_Type.
1561
1562- PyType_Ready() accidentally did not inherit tp_is_gc; now it does.
1563
Neil Schemenauerc9abc1d2002-05-08 14:14:41 +00001564- The PyCore_* family of APIs have been removed.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00001565
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00001566- The "u#" parser marker will now pass through Unicode objects as-is
Marc-André Lemburg3e3eacb2002-01-09 16:21:27 +00001567 without going through the buffer API.
1568
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001569- The enumerators of cmp_op have been renamed to use the prefix ``PyCmp_``.
Martin v. Löwis7198a522002-01-01 19:59:11 +00001570
Tim Peters10a3bb52001-12-25 19:07:38 +00001571- An old #define of ANY as void has been removed from pyport.h. This
1572 hasn't been used since Python's pre-ANSI days, and the #define has
1573 been marked as obsolete since then. SF bug 495548 says it created
1574 conflicts with other packages, so keeping it around wasn't harmless.
1575
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001576- Because Python's magic number scheme broke on January 1st, we decided
1577 to stop Python development. Thanks for all the fish!
1578
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00001579- Some of us don't like fish, so we changed Python's magic number
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00001580 scheme to a new one. See Python/import.c for details.
1581
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001582New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001583-------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001584
Martin v. Löwis79acb9e2002-12-06 12:48:53 +00001585- OpenVMS is now supported.
1586
Martin v. Löwisf90ae202002-06-11 06:22:31 +00001587- AtheOS is now supported.
1588
Andrew MacIntyre161ad0e2002-08-04 07:25:58 +00001589- the EMX runtime environment on OS/2 is now supported.
1590
Martin v. Löwisa6e97582002-01-01 18:41:33 +00001591- GNU/Hurd is now supported.
1592
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001593Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001594-----
1595
Fred Drake4dd0f7e2002-11-26 21:44:56 +00001596- The regrtest.py script's -u option now provides a way to say "allow
1597 all resources except this one." For example, to allow everything
1598 except bsddb, give the option '-uall,-bsddb'.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001599
1600Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001601-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001602
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00001603- The Windows distribution now ships with version 4.0.14 of the
1604 Sleepycat Berkeley database library. This should be a huge
1605 improvement over the previous Berkeley DB 1.85, which had many
1606 bugs.
1607 XXX What are the licensing issues here?
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001608 XXX If a user has a database created with a previous version of
Tim Peters84c7a3f2002-11-23 18:48:06 +00001609 XXX Python, what must they do to convert it?
1610 XXX I'm still not sure how to link this thing (see PCbuild/readme.txt).
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00001611 XXX The version # is likely to change before 2.3a1.
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00001612
1613- The Windows distribution now ships with a Secure Sockets Library (SLL)
Mark Hammondc3de0082002-12-03 06:16:08 +00001614 module (_ssl.pyd)
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00001615
Tim Peters857fb4c2002-11-14 23:31:58 +00001616- The Windows distribution now ships with Tcl/Tk version 8.4.1 (it
1617 previously shipped with Tcl/Tk 8.3.2).
1618
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00001619- When Python is built under a Microsoft compiler, sys.version now
1620 includes the compiler version number (_MSC_VER). For example, under
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001621 MSVC 6, sys.version contains the substring "MSC v.1200 ". 1200 is
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00001622 the value of _MSC_VER under MSVC 6.
1623
Tim Peters08e72952002-04-16 20:48:01 +00001624- Sometimes the uninstall executable (UNWISE.EXE) vanishes. One cause
1625 of that has been fixed in the installer (disabled Wise's "delete in-
1626 use files" uninstall option).
1627
Guido van Rossum181e41a2002-04-06 00:23:25 +00001628- Fixed a bug in urllib's proxy handling in Windows. [SF bug #503031]
1629
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00001630- The installer now installs Start menu shortcuts under (the local
1631 equivalent of) "All Users" when doing an Admin install.
1632
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00001633- file.truncate([newsize]) now works on Windows for all newsize values.
1634 It used to fail if newsize didn't fit in 32 bits, reflecting a
1635 limitation of MS _chsize (which is no longer used).
1636
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00001637- os.waitpid() is now implemented for Windows, and can be used to block
1638 until a specified process exits. This is similar to, but not exactly
1639 the same as, os.waitpid() on POSIX systems. If you're waiting for
1640 a specific process whose pid was obtained from one of the spawn()
1641 functions, the same Python os.waitpid() code works across platforms.
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00001642 See the docs for details. The docs were changed to clarify that
1643 spawn functions return, and waitpid requires, a process handle on
1644 Windows (not the same thing as a Windows process id).
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00001645
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00001646- New tempfile.TemporaryFile implementation for Windows: this doesn't
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00001647 need a TemporaryFileWrapper wrapper anymore, and should be immune
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00001648 to a nasty problem: before 2.3, if you got a temp file on Windows, it
1649 got wrapped in an object whose close() method first closed the
1650 underlying file, then deleted the file. This usually worked fine.
1651 However, the spawn family of functions on Windows create (at a low C
1652 level) the same set of open files in the spawned process Q as were
1653 open in the spawning process P. If a temp file f was among them, then
1654 doing f.close() in P first closed P's C-level file handle on f, but Q's
1655 C-level file handle on f remained open, so the attempt in P to delete f
1656 blew up with a "Permission denied" error (Windows doesn't allow
1657 deleting open files). This was surprising, subtle, and difficult to
1658 work around.
1659
1660- The os module now exports all the symbolic constants usable with the
1661 low-level os.open() on Windows: the new constants in 2.3 are
1662 O_NOINHERIT, O_SHORT_LIVED, O_TEMPORARY, O_RANDOM and O_SEQUENTIAL.
1663 The others were also available in 2.2: O_APPEND, O_BINARY, O_CREAT,
1664 O_EXCL, O_RDONLY, O_RDWR, O_TEXT, O_TRUNC and O_WRONLY. Contrary
1665 to Microsoft docs, O_SHORT_LIVED does not seem to imply O_TEMPORARY
1666 (so specify both if you want both; note that neither is useful unless
1667 specified with O_CREAT too).
1668
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001669Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001670----
1671
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001672- Mac/Relnotes is gone, the release notes are now here.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001673
Just van Rossume1ebd802003-02-10 10:06:18 +00001674- Python (the OSX-only, unix-based version, not the OS9-compatible CFM
1675 version) now fully supports unicode strings as arguments to various file
1676 system calls, eg. open(), file(), os.stat() and os.listdir().
1677
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001678- The current naming convention for Python on the Macintosh is that MacPython
1679 refers to the unix-based OSX-only version, and MacPython-OS9 refers to the
1680 CFM-based version that runs on both OS9 and OSX.
1681
1682- All MacPython-OS9 functionality is now available in an OSX unix build,
1683 including the Carbon modules, the IDE, OSA support, etc. A lot of this
1684 will only work correctly in a framework build, though, because you cannot
1685 talk to the window manager unless your application is run from a .app
1686 bundle. There is a command line tool "pythonw" that runs your script
1687 with an interpreter living in such a .app bundle, this interpreter should
1688 be used to run any Python script using the window manager (including
1689 Tkinter or wxPython scripts).
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00001690
Jack Jansen8bb80db2002-12-30 22:42:43 +00001691- Most of Mac/Lib has moved to Lib/plat-mac, which is again used both in
1692 MacPython-OSX and MacPython-OS9. The only modules remaining in Mac/Lib
1693 are specifically for MacPython-OS9 (CFM support, preference resources, etc).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001694
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001695- A new utility PythonLauncher will start a Python interpreter when a .py or
1696 .pyw script is double-clicked in the Finder. By default .py scripts are
1697 run with a normal Python interpreter in a Terminal window and .pyw
1698 files are run with a window-aware pythonw interpreter without a Terminal
1699 window, but all this can be customized.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001700
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001701- MacPython-OS9 is now Carbon-only, so it runs on Mac OS 9 or Mac OS X and
1702 possibly on Mac OS 8.6 with the right CarbonLib installed, but not on earlier
1703 releases.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001704
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001705- Many tools such as BuildApplet.py and gensuitemodule.py now support a command
1706 line interface too.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001707
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001708- All the Carbon classes are now PEP253 compliant, meaning that you can
1709 subclass them from Python. Most of the attributes have gone, you should
1710 now use the accessor function call API, which is also what Apple's
1711 documentation uses. Some attributes such as grafport.visRgn are still
1712 available for convenience.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001713
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001714- New Carbon modules File (implementing the APIs in Files.h and Aliases.h)
1715 and Folder (APIs from Folders.h). The old macfs builtin module is
1716 gone, and replaced by a Python wrapper around the new modules.
1717
1718- Pathname handling should now be fully consistent: MacPython-OSX always uses
1719 unix pathnames and MacPython-OS9 always uses colon-separated Mac pathnames
1720 (also when running on Mac OS X).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001721
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001722- New Carbon modules Help and AH give access to the Carbon Help Manager.
1723 There are hooks in the IDE to allow accessing the Python documentation
1724 (and Apple's Carbon and Cocoa documentation) through the Help Viewer.
1725 See Mac/OSX/README for converting the Python documentation to a
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001726 Help Viewer compatible form and installing it.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001727
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001728- OSA support has been redesigned and the generated Python classes now
1729 mirror the inheritance defined by the underlying OSA classes.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001730
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001731- MacPython no longer maps both \r and \n to \n on input for any text file.
1732 This feature has been replaced by universal newline support (PEP278).
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00001733
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00001734- The default encoding for Python sourcefiles in MacPython-OS9 is no longer
Guido van Rossum16c85172003-02-20 01:52:48 +00001735 mac-roman (or whatever your local Mac encoding was) but "ascii", like on
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00001736 other platforms. If you really need sourcefiles with Mac characters in them
1737 you can change this in site.py.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001738
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001739
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001740What's New in Python 2.2 final?
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001741===============================
1742
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001743*Release date: 21-Dec-2001*
1744
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001745Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001746--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001747
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00001748- pickle.py, cPickle: allow pickling instances of new-style classes
1749 with a custom metaclass.
1750
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001751Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001752-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001753
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00001754- weakref proxy object: when comparing, unwrap both arguments if both
1755 are proxies.
1756
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001757Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001758-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001759
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00001760- binascii.b2a_base64(): fix a potential buffer overrun when encoding
1761 very short strings.
1762
1763- cPickle: the obscure "fast" mode was suspected of causing stack
1764 overflows on the Mac. Hopefully fixed this by setting the recursion
1765 limit much smaller. If the limit is too low (it only affects
1766 performance), you can change it by defining PY_CPICKLE_FAST_LIMIT
1767 when compiling cPickle.c (or in pyconfig.h).
1768
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001769Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001770-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001771
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00001772- dumbdbm.py: fixed a dumb old bug (the file didn't get synched at
1773 close or delete time).
1774
1775- rfc822.py: fixed a bug where the address '<>' was converted to None
1776 instead of an empty string (also fixes the email.Utils module).
1777
1778- xmlrpclib.py: version 1.0.0; uses precision for doubles.
1779
1780- test suite: the pickle and cPickle tests were not executing any code
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00001781 when run from the standard regression test.
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00001782
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001783Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001784-----------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001785
1786Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001787-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001788
1789C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001790-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001791
1792New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001793-------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001794
1795Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001796-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001797
1798Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001799-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001800
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00001801- distutils package: fixed broken Windows installers (bdist_wininst).
1802
1803- tempfile.py: prevent mysterious warnings when TemporaryFileWrapper
1804 instances are deleted at process exit time.
1805
1806- socket.py: prevent mysterious warnings when socket instances are
1807 deleted at process exit time.
1808
1809- posixmodule.c: fix a Windows crash with stat() of a filename ending
1810 in backslash.
1811
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001812Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001813----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001814
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00001815- The Carbon toolbox modules have been upgraded to Universal Headers
1816 3.4, and experimental CoreGraphics and CarbonEvents modules have
1817 been added. All only for framework-enabled MacOSX.
1818
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001819
Tim Peters6272dfd2001-12-13 19:34:00 +00001820What's New in Python 2.2c1?
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001821===========================
1822
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001823*Release date: 14-Dec-2001*
1824
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001825Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001826--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001827
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00001828- Guido's tutorial introduction to the new type/class features has
1829 been extensively updated. See
1830
1831 http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html
1832
1833 That remains the primary documentation in this area.
1834
Guido van Rossum33bab012001-12-05 22:45:48 +00001835- Fixed a leak: instance variables declared with __slots__ were never
1836 deleted!
1837
Guido van Rossum4b800852001-12-03 00:54:52 +00001838- The "delete attribute" method of descriptor objects is called
1839 __delete__, not __del__. In previous releases, it was mistakenly
1840 called __del__, which created an unfortunate overloading condition
1841 with finalizers. (The "get attribute" and "set attribute" methods
1842 are still called __get__ and __set__, respectively.)
1843
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00001844- Some subtle issues with the super built-in were fixed:
1845
1846 (a) When super itself is subclassed, its __get__ method would still
1847 return an instance of the base class (i.e., of super).
1848
1849 (b) super(C, C()).__class__ would return C rather than super. This
1850 is confusing. To fix this, I decided to change the semantics of
1851 super so that it only applies to code attributes, not to data
1852 attributes. After all, overriding data attributes is not
1853 supported anyway.
1854
1855 (c) The __get__ method didn't check whether the argument was an
1856 instance of the type used in creation of the super instance.
1857
Guido van Rossumcd7b7d62001-12-04 21:02:07 +00001858- Previously, hash() of an instance of a subclass of a mutable type
1859 (list or dictionary) would return some value, rather than raising
1860 TypeError. This has been fixed. Also, directly calling
1861 dict.__hash__ and list.__hash__ now raises the same TypeError
1862 (previously, these were the same as object.__hash__).
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00001863
Guido van Rossumd331cb52001-12-05 19:46:42 +00001864- New-style objects now support deleting their __dict__. This is for
1865 all intents and purposes equivalent to assigning a brand new empty
1866 dictionary, but saves space if the object is not used further.
1867
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001868Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001869-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001870
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00001871- -Qnew now works as documented in PEP 238: when -Qnew is passed on
1872 the command line, all occurrences of "/" use true division instead
1873 of classic division. See the PEP for details. Note that "all"
1874 means all instances in library and 3rd-party modules, as well as in
1875 your own code. As the PEP says, -Qnew is intended for use only in
1876 educational environments with control over the libraries in use.
Tim Petersbf72fe22001-12-11 21:43:14 +00001877 Note that test_coercion.py in the standard Python test suite fails
1878 under -Qnew; this is expected, and won't be repaired until true
1879 division becomes the default (in the meantime, test_coercion is
1880 testing the current rules).
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00001881
Fred Drake6c01e252001-12-14 17:08:12 +00001882- complex() now only allows the first argument to be a string
1883 argument, and raises TypeError if either the second arg is a string
1884 or if the second arg is specified when the first is a string.
1885
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001886Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001887-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001888
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00001889- gc.get_referents was renamed to gc.get_referrers.
1890
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001891Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001892-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001893
Tim Peters25059d32001-12-07 20:35:43 +00001894- Functions in the os.spawn() family now release the global interpreter
1895 lock around calling the platform spawn. They should always have done
1896 this, but did not before 2.2c1. Multithreaded programs calling
1897 an os.spawn function with P_WAIT will no longer block all Python threads
1898 until the spawned program completes. It's possible that some programs
1899 relies on blocking, although more likely by accident than by design.
1900
Martin v. Löwis3a89b2b2001-11-25 14:35:58 +00001901- webbrowser defaults to netscape.exe on OS/2 now.
1902
Martin v. Löwis652e1912001-11-25 14:50:56 +00001903- Tix.ResizeHandle exposes detach_widget, hide, and show.
1904
Martin v. Löwis714d2e22001-12-02 12:26:03 +00001905- The charset alias windows_1252 has been added.
1906
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00001907- types.StringTypes is a tuple containing the defined string types;
1908 usually this will be (str, unicode), but if Python was compiled
1909 without Unicode support it will be just (str,).
1910
1911- The pulldom and minidom modules were synchronized to PyXML.
1912
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001913Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001914-----------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001915
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00001916- A new script called Tools/scripts/google.py was added, which fires
1917 off a search on Google.
1918
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001919Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001920-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001921
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00001922- Note that release builds of Python should arrange to define the
1923 preprocessor symbol NDEBUG on the command line (or equivalent).
1924 In the 2.2 pre-release series we tried to define this by magic in
1925 Python.h instead, but it proved to cause problems for extension
1926 authors. The Unix, Windows and Mac builds now all define NDEBUG in
1927 release builds via cmdline (or equivalent) instead. Ports to
1928 other platforms should do likewise.
1929
Jack Jansen1999ef42001-12-06 21:47:20 +00001930- It is no longer necessary to use --with-suffix when building on a
1931 case-insensitive file system (such as Mac OS X HFS+). In the build
1932 directory an extension is used, but not in the installed python.
1933
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001934C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001935-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001936
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00001937- New function PyDict_MergeFromSeq2() exposes the builtin dict
1938 constructor's logic for updating a dictionary from an iterable object
1939 producing key-value pairs.
1940
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00001941- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() requires that the number of entries in
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00001942 the keyword list equal the number of argument specifiers. This
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00001943 wasn't checked correctly, and PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords could even
1944 dump core in some bad cases. This has been repaired. As a result,
1945 PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords may raise RuntimeError in bad cases that
1946 previously went unchallenged.
1947
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001948New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001949-------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001950
1951Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001952-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001953
1954Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001955-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001956
1957Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001958----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001959
Jack Jansenffa260f2001-12-06 21:14:00 +00001960- In unix-Python on Mac OS X (and darwin) sys.platform is now "darwin",
1961 without any trailing digits.
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001962
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00001963- Changed logic for finding python home in Mac OS X framework Pythons.
1964 Now sys.executable points to the executable again, in stead of to
1965 the shared library. The latter is used only for locating the python
1966 home.
1967
1968
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001969What's New in Python 2.2b2?
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001970===========================
1971
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001972*Release date: 16-Nov-2001*
1973
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001974Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001975--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001976
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00001977- Multiple inheritance mixing new-style and classic classes in the
1978 list of base classes is now allowed, so this works now:
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00001979
1980 class Classic: pass
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00001981 class Mixed(Classic, object): pass
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00001982
1983 The MRO (method resolution order) for each base class is respected
1984 according to its kind, but the MRO for the derived class is computed
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00001985 using new-style MRO rules if any base class is a new-style class.
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00001986 This needs to be documented.
1987
Tim Petersa427a2b2001-10-29 22:25:45 +00001988- The new builtin dictionary() constructor, and dictionary type, have
1989 been renamed to dict. This reflects a decade of common usage.
1990
Guido van Rossum3fc08d22001-11-15 20:33:10 +00001991- dict() now accepts an iterable object producing 2-sequences. For
1992 example, dict(d.items()) == d for any dictionary d. The argument,
1993 and the elements of the argument, can be any iterable objects.
1994
Guido van Rossum7ad2d1e2001-10-29 22:11:00 +00001995- New-style classes can now have a __del__ method, which is called
1996 when the instance is deleted (just like for classic classes).
1997
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00001998- Assignment to object.__dict__ is now possible, for objects that are
1999 instances of new-style classes that have a __dict__ (unless the base
2000 class forbids it).
2001
Guido van Rossumc8e56452001-10-22 00:43:43 +00002002- Methods of built-in types now properly check for keyword arguments
2003 (formerly these were silently ignored). The only built-in methods
2004 that take keyword arguments are __call__, __init__ and __new__.
2005
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00002006- The socket function has been converted to a type; see below.
2007
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002008Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002009-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002010
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00002011- Assignment to __debug__ raises SyntaxError at compile-time. This
2012 was promised when 2.1c1 was released as "What's New in Python 2.1c1"
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00002013 (see below) says.
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00002014
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00002015- Clarified the error messages for unsupported operands to an operator
2016 (like 1 + '').
2017
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002018Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002019-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002020
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00002021- mmap has a new keyword argument, "access", allowing a uniform way for
2022 both Windows and Unix users to create read-only, write-through and
2023 copy-on-write memory mappings. This was previously possible only on
2024 Unix. A new keyword argument was required to support this in a
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002025 uniform way because the mmap() signatures had diverged across
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00002026 platforms. Thanks to Jay T Miller for repairing this!
2027
Tim Peters169ded02001-11-03 19:57:21 +00002028- By default, the gc.garbage list now contains only those instances in
2029 unreachable cycles that have __del__ methods; in 2.1 it contained all
2030 instances in unreachable cycles. "Instances" here has been generalized
2031 to include instances of both new-style and old-style classes.
2032
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00002033- The socket module defines a new method for socket objects,
2034 sendall(). This is like send() but may make multiple calls to
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00002035 send() until all data has been sent. Also, the socket function has
2036 been converted to a subclassable type, like list and tuple (etc.)
2037 before it; socket and SocketType are now the same thing.
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00002038
2039- Various bugfixes to the curses module. There is now a test suite
2040 for the curses module (you have to run it manually).
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00002041
Guido van Rossum692adf12001-10-30 03:03:03 +00002042- binascii.b2a_base64 no longer places an arbitrary restriction of 57
2043 bytes on its input.
2044
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002045Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002046-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002047
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00002048- tkFileDialog exposes a Directory class and askdirectory
Martin v. Löwis25ee87c2001-11-07 22:38:08 +00002049 convenience function.
2050
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00002051- Symbolic group names in regular expressions must be unique. For
2052 example, the regexp r'(?P<abc>)(?P<abc>)' is not allowed, because a
2053 single name can't mean both "group 1" and "group 2" simultaneously.
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00002054 Python 2.2 detects this error at regexp compilation time;
2055 previously, the error went undetected, and results were
2056 unpredictable. Also in sre, the pattern.split(), pattern.sub(), and
2057 pattern.subn() methods have been rewritten in C. Also, an
2058 experimental function/method finditer() has been added, which works
2059 like findall() but returns an iterator.
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00002060
Martin v. Löwisb7b32602001-11-02 23:48:20 +00002061- Tix exposes more commands through the classes DirSelectBox,
2062 DirSelectDialog, ListNoteBook, Meter, CheckList, and the
2063 methods tix_addbitmapdir, tix_cget, tix_configure, tix_filedialog,
2064 tix_getbitmap, tix_getimage, tix_option_get, and tix_resetoptions.
2065
Tim Peters98791af2001-10-23 01:59:54 +00002066- Traceback objects are now scanned by cyclic garbage collection, so
2067 cycles created by casual use of sys.exc_info() no longer cause
2068 permanent memory leaks (provided garbage collection is enabled).
2069
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00002070- os.extsep -- a new variable needed by the RISCOS support. It is the
2071 separator used by extensions, and is '.' on all platforms except
2072 RISCOS, where it is '/'. There is no need to use this variable
2073 unless you have a masochistic desire to port your code to RISCOS.
2074
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00002075- mimetypes.py has optional support for non-standard, but commonly
2076 found types. guess_type() and guess_extension() now accept an
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002077 optional 'strict' flag, defaulting to true, which controls whether
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00002078 recognize non-standard types or not. A few non-standard types we
2079 know about have been added. Also, when run as a script, there are
2080 new -l and -e options.
2081
2082- statcache is now deprecated.
2083
2084- email.Utils.formatdate() now produces the preferred RFC 2822 style
2085 dates with numeric timezones (it used to produce obsolete dates
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002086 hard coded to "GMT" timezone). An optional 'localtime' flag is
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00002087 added to produce dates in the local timezone, with daylight savings
2088 time properly taken into account.
2089
2090- In pickle and cPickle, instead of masking errors in load() by
2091 transforming them into SystemError, we let the original exception
2092 propagate out. Also, implement support for __safe_for_unpickling__
2093 in pickle, as it already was supported in cPickle.
2094
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002095Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002096-----------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002097
2098Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002099-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002100
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00002101- The dbm module is built using libdb1 if available. The bsddb module
2102 is built with libdb3 if available.
2103
2104- Misc/Makefile.pre.in has been removed by BDFL pronouncement.
2105
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002106C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002107-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002108
Tim Peters1fc240e2001-10-26 05:06:50 +00002109- New function PySequence_Fast_GET_SIZE() returns the size of a non-
2110 NULL result from PySequence_Fast(), more quickly than calling
2111 PySequence_Size().
2112
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00002113- New argument unpacking function PyArg_UnpackTuple() added.
2114
2115- New functions PyObject_CallFunctionObjArgs() and
2116 PyObject_CallMethodObjArgs() have been added to make it more
2117 convenient and efficient to call functions and methods from C.
2118
2119- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() no longer masks errors, so it's
2120 possible that this will propagate errors it didn't before.
2121
2122- New function PyObject_CheckReadBuffer(), which returns true if its
2123 argument supports the single-segment readable buffer interface.
2124
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002125New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002126-------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002127
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00002128- We've finally confirmed that this release builds on HP-UX 11.00,
2129 *with* threads, and passes the test suite.
2130
Tim Peters7a33d8b2001-11-05 02:51:07 +00002131- Thanks to a series of patches from Michael Muller, Python may build
2132 again under OS/2 Visual Age C++.
2133
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00002134- Updated RISCOS port by Dietmar Schwertberger.
2135
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002136Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002137-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002138
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00002139- Added a test script for the curses module. It isn't run automatically;
2140 regrtest.py must be run with '-u curses' to enable it.
2141
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002142Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002143-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002144
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00002145Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002146----
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00002147
2148- PythonScript has been moved to unsupported and is slated to be
2149 removed completely in the next release.
2150
2151- It should now be possible to build applets that work on both OS9 and
2152 OSX.
2153
2154- The core is now linked with CoreServices not Carbon; as a side
2155 result, default 8bit encoding on OSX is now ASCII.
2156
2157- Python should now build on OSX 10.1.1
2158
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002159
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002160What's New in Python 2.2b1?
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002161===========================
2162
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002163*Release date: 19-Oct-2001*
2164
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002165Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002166--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002167
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00002168- New-style classes are now always dynamic (except for built-in and
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00002169 extension types). There is no longer a performance penalty, and I
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00002170 no longer see another reason to keep this baggage around. One relic
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00002171 remains: the __dict__ of a new-style class is a read-only proxy; you
2172 must set the class's attribute to modify it. As a consequence, the
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00002173 __defined__ attribute of new-style types no longer exists, for lack
2174 of need: there is once again only one __dict__ (although in the
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00002175 future a __cache__ may be resurrected with a similar function, if I
2176 can prove that it actually speeds things up).
Guido van Rossum50fda3b2001-10-04 19:46:06 +00002177
Tim Peters1c9ca872001-10-04 06:43:12 +00002178- C.__doc__ now works as expected for new-style classes (in 2.2a4 it
2179 always returned None, even when there was a class docstring).
2180
2181- doctest now finds and runs docstrings attached to new-style classes,
2182 class methods, static methods, and properties.
2183
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00002184Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002185-----------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002186
Guido van Rossuma8bcf802001-10-15 15:53:58 +00002187- A very subtle syntactical pitfall in list comprehensions was fixed.
2188 For example: [a+b for a in 'abc', for b in 'def']. The comma in
2189 this example is a mistake. Previously, this would silently let 'a'
2190 iterate over the singleton tuple ('abc',), yielding ['abcd', 'abce',
2191 'abcf'] rather than the intended ['ad', 'ae', 'af', 'bd', 'be',
2192 'bf', 'cd', 'ce', 'cf']. Now, this is flagged as a syntax error.
2193 Note that [a for a in <singleton>] is a convoluted way to say
2194 [<singleton>] anyway, so it's not like any expressiveness is lost.
2195
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00002196- getattr(obj, name, default) now only catches AttributeError, as
2197 documented, rather than returning the default value for all
2198 exceptions (which could mask bugs in a __getattr__ hook, for
2199 example).
2200
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00002201- Weak reference objects are now part of the core and offer a C API.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00002202 A bug which could allow a core dump when binary operations involved
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00002203 proxy reference has been fixed. weakref.ReferenceError is now a
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00002204 built-in exception.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00002205
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00002206- unicode(obj) now behaves more like str(obj), accepting arbitrary
2207 objects, and calling a __unicode__ method if it exists.
2208 unicode(obj, encoding) and unicode(obj, encoding, errors) still
Marc-André Lemburgb5507ec2001-10-19 12:02:29 +00002209 require an 8-bit string or character buffer argument.
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00002210
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00002211- isinstance() now allows any object as the first argument and a
2212 class, a type or something with a __bases__ tuple attribute for the
2213 second argument. The second argument may also be a tuple of a
2214 class, type, or something with __bases__, in which case isinstance()
2215 will return true if the first argument is an instance of any of the
2216 things contained in the second argument tuple. E.g.
2217
2218 isinstance(x, (A, B))
2219
2220 returns true if x is an instance of A or B.
2221
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00002222Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002223-----------------
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00002224
2225- thread.start_new_thread() now returns the thread ID (previously None).
2226
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00002227- binascii has now two quopri support functions, a2b_qp and b2a_qp.
2228
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00002229- readline now supports setting the startup_hook and the
2230 pre_event_hook, and adds the add_history() function.
Martin v. Löwis0daad592001-09-30 21:09:59 +00002231
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00002232- os and posix supports chroot(), setgroups() and unsetenv() where
2233 available. The stat(), fstat(), statvfs() and fstatvfs() functions
2234 now return "pseudo-sequences" -- the various fields can now be
2235 accessed as attributes (e.g. os.stat("/").st_mtime) but for
2236 backwards compatibility they also behave as a fixed-length sequence.
2237 Some platform-specific fields (e.g. st_rdev) are only accessible as
Guido van Rossum98bf58f2001-10-18 20:34:25 +00002238 attributes.
2239
2240- time: localtime(), gmtime() and strptime() now return a
2241 pseudo-sequence similar to the os.stat() return value, with
2242 attributes like tm_year etc.
Martin v. Löwis16628c92001-10-04 22:46:41 +00002243
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00002244- Decompression objects in the zlib module now accept an optional
2245 second parameter to decompress() that specifies the maximum amount
2246 of memory to use for the uncompressed data.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002247
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00002248- optional SSL support in the socket module now exports OpenSSL
2249 functions RAND_add(), RAND_egd(), and RAND_status(). These calls
2250 are useful on platforms like Solaris where OpenSSL does not
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00002251 automatically seed its PRNG. Also, the keyfile and certfile
2252 arguments to socket.ssl() are now optional.
2253
2254- posixmodule (and by extension, the os module on POSIX platforms) now
2255 exports O_LARGEFILE, O_DIRECT, O_DIRECTORY, and O_NOFOLLOW.
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00002256
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00002257Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002258-------
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00002259
Tim Peters7402f792001-10-02 03:53:41 +00002260- doctest now excludes functions and classes not defined by the module
2261 being tested, thanks to Tim Hochberg.
2262
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00002263- HotShot, a new profiler implemented using a C-based callback, has
2264 been added. This substantially reduces the overhead of profiling,
2265 but it is still quite preliminary. Support modules and
2266 documentation will be added in upcoming releases (before 2.2 final).
2267
Guido van Rossumc4b09b42001-10-04 10:19:00 +00002268- profile now produces correct output in situations where an exception
2269 raised in Python is cleared by C code (e.g. hasattr()). This used
2270 to cause wrong output, including spurious claims of recursive
2271 functions and attribution of time spent to the wrong function.
2272
Tim Peters0a1fc4e2001-10-07 03:12:08 +00002273 The code and documentation for the derived OldProfile and HotProfile
2274 profiling classes was removed. The code hasn't worked for years (if
2275 you tried to use them, they raised exceptions). OldProfile
2276 intended to reproduce the behavior of the profiler Python used more
2277 than 7 years ago, and isn't interesting anymore. HotProfile intended
2278 to provide a faster profiler (but producing less information), and
2279 that's a worthy goal we intend to meet via a different approach (but
2280 without losing information).
2281
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00002282- Profile.calibrate() has a new implementation that should deliver
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00002283 a much better system-specific calibration constant. The constant can
2284 now be specified in an instance constructor, or as a Profile class or
2285 instance variable, instead of by editing profile.py's source code.
2286 Calibration must still be done manually (see the docs for the profile
2287 module).
2288
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002289 Note that Profile.calibrate() must be overridden by subclasses.
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00002290 Improving the accuracy required exploiting detailed knowledge of
2291 profiler internals; the earlier method abstracted away the details
2292 and measured a simplified model instead, but consequently computed
2293 a constant too small by a factor of 2 on some modern machines.
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00002294
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00002295- quopri's encode and decode methods take an optional header parameter,
Jeremy Hylton6f543b62001-10-16 20:42:52 +00002296 which indicates whether output is intended for the header 'Q'
2297 encoding.
2298
Guido van Rossuma5343cc2001-10-18 18:02:07 +00002299- The SocketServer.ThreadingMixIn class now closes the request after
2300 finish_request() returns. (Not when it errors out though.)
2301
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002302- The nntplib module's NNTP.body() method has grown a 'file' argument
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00002303 to allow saving the message body to a file.
2304
2305- The email package has added a class email.Parser.HeaderParser which
2306 only parses headers and does not recurse into the message's body.
2307 Also, the module/class MIMEAudio has been added for representing
2308 audio data (contributed by Anthony Baxter).
2309
2310- ftplib should be able to handle files > 2GB.
2311
2312- ConfigParser.getboolean() now also interprets TRUE, FALSE, YES, NO,
2313 ON, and OFF.
2314
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00002315- xml.dom.minidom NodeList objects now support the length attribute
2316 and item() method as required by the DOM specifications.
2317
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00002318Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002319-----------
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00002320
2321- Demo/dns was removed. It no longer serves any purpose; a package
2322 derived from it is now maintained by Anthony Baxter, see
2323 http://PyDNS.SourceForge.net.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002324
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00002325- The freeze tool has been made more robust, and two new options have
2326 been added: -X and -E.
2327
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002328Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002329-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002330
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00002331- configure will use CXX in LINKCC if CXX is used to build main() and
2332 the system requires to link a C++ main using the C++ compiler.
2333
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002334C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002335-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002336
Guido van Rossum6c4bce32001-10-18 19:20:25 +00002337- The documentation for the tp_compare slot is updated to require that
2338 the return value must be -1, 0, 1; an arbitrary number <0 or >0 is
2339 not correct. This is not yet enforced but will be enforced in
2340 Python 2.3; even later, we may use -2 to indicate errors and +2 for
2341 "NotImplemented". Right now, -1 should be used for an error return.
2342
Tim Petersd38b1c72001-09-30 05:09:37 +00002343- PyLong_AsLongLong() now accepts int (as well as long) arguments.
2344 Consequently, PyArg_ParseTuple's 'L' code also accepts int (as well
2345 as long) arguments.
2346
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00002347- PyThread_start_new_thread() now returns a long int giving the thread
2348 ID, if one can be calculated; it returns -1 for error, 0 if no
2349 thread ID is calculated (this is an incompatible change, but only
2350 the thread module used this API). This code has only really been
2351 tested on Linux and Windows; other platforms please beware (and
2352 report any bugs or strange behavior).
2353
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00002354- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() no longer accepts Unicode objects as
2355 input.
2356
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002357New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002358-------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002359
2360Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002361-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002362
2363Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002364-------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002365
Tim Peters04cf1d32001-10-09 22:39:40 +00002366- Installer: If you install IDLE, and don't disable file-extension
2367 registration, a new "Edit with IDLE" context (right-click) menu entry
2368 is created for .py and .pyw files.
2369
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00002370- The signal module now supports SIGBREAK on Windows, thanks to Steven
2371 Scott. Note that SIGBREAK is unique to Windows. The default SIGBREAK
2372 action remains to call Win32 ExitProcess(). This can be changed via
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00002373 signal.signal(). For example::
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00002374
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002375 # Make Ctrl+Break raise KeyboardInterrupt, like Python's default Ctrl+C
2376 # (SIGINT) behavior.
2377 import signal
2378 signal.signal(signal.SIGBREAK, signal.default_int_handler)
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00002379
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002380 try:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002381 while 1:
2382 pass
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002383 except KeyboardInterrupt:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002384 # We get here on Ctrl+C or Ctrl+Break now; if we had not changed
2385 # SIGBREAK, only on Ctrl+C (and Ctrl+Break would terminate the
2386 # program without the possibility for any Python-level cleanup).
2387 print "Clean exit"
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00002388
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002389
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002390What's New in Python 2.2a4?
2391===========================
2392
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002393*Release date: 28-Sep-2001*
2394
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00002395Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002396--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00002397
2398- pydoc and inspect are now aware of new-style classes;
2399 e.g. help(list) at the interactive prompt now shows proper
2400 documentation for all operations on list objects.
2401
2402- Applications using Jim Fulton's ExtensionClass module can now safely
2403 be used with Python 2.2. In particular, Zope 2.4.1 now works with
2404 Python 2.2 (as well as with Python 2.1.1). The Demo/metaclass
2405 examples also work again. It is hoped that Gtk and Boost also work
2406 with 2.2a4 and beyond. (If you can confirm this, please write
2407 webmaster@python.org; if there are still problems, please open a bug
2408 report on SourceForge.)
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002409
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00002410- property() now takes 4 keyword arguments: fget, fset, fdel and doc.
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002411 These map to read-only attributes 'fget', 'fset', 'fdel', and '__doc__'
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00002412 in the constructed property object. fget, fset and fdel weren't
2413 discoverable from Python in 2.2a3. __doc__ is new, and allows to
2414 associate a docstring with a property.
2415
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00002416- Comparison overloading is now more completely implemented. For
2417 example, a str subclass instance can properly be compared to a str
2418 instance, and it can properly overload comparison. Ditto for most
2419 other built-in object types.
2420
2421- The repr() of new-style classes has changed; instead of <type
2422 'M.Foo'> a new-style class is now rendered as <class 'M.Foo'>,
2423 *except* for built-in types, which are still rendered as <type
2424 'Foo'> (to avoid upsetting existing code that might parse or
2425 otherwise rely on repr() of certain type objects).
2426
2427- The repr() of new-style objects is now always <Foo object at XXX>;
2428 previously, it was sometimes <Foo instance at XXX>.
2429
2430- For new-style classes, what was previously called __getattr__ is now
2431 called __getattribute__. This method, if defined, is called for
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00002432 *every* attribute access. A new __getattr__ hook more similar to the
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00002433 one in classic classes is defined which is called only if regular
2434 attribute access raises AttributeError; to catch *all* attribute
2435 access, you can use __getattribute__ (for new-style classes). If
2436 both are defined, __getattribute__ is called first, and if it raises
2437 AttributeError, __getattr__ is called.
2438
2439- The __class__ attribute of new-style objects can be assigned to.
2440 The new class must have the same C-level object layout as the old
2441 class.
2442
2443- The builtin file type can be subclassed now. In the usual pattern,
2444 "file" is the name of the builtin type, and file() is a new builtin
2445 constructor, with the same signature as the builtin open() function.
2446 file() is now the preferred way to open a file.
2447
2448- Previously, __new__ would only see sequential arguments passed to
2449 the type in a constructor call; __init__ would see both sequential
2450 and keyword arguments. This made no sense whatsoever any more, so
2451 now both __new__ and __init__ see all arguments.
2452
2453- Previously, hash() applied to an instance of a subclass of str or
2454 unicode always returned 0. This has been repaired.
2455
2456- Previously, an operation on an instance of a subclass of an
2457 immutable type (int, long, float, complex, tuple, str, unicode),
2458 where the subtype didn't override the operation (and so the
2459 operation was handled by the builtin type), could return that
2460 instance instead a value of the base type. For example, if s was of
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002461 a str subclass type, s[:] returned s as-is. Now it returns a str
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00002462 with the same value as s.
2463
Barry Warsaw86fbaf82001-09-28 15:26:12 +00002464- Provisional support for pickling new-style objects has been added.
2465
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00002466Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002467----
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00002468
Tim Peters2c9aa5e2001-09-23 04:06:05 +00002469- file.writelines() now accepts any iterable object producing strings.
2470
Marc-André Lemburgaefd7662001-09-20 12:59:37 +00002471- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() now works very much like
2472 PyObject_Str(obj) in that it tries to use __str__/tp_str
2473 on the object if the object is not a string or buffer. This
2474 makes unicode() behave like str() when applied to non-string/buffer
2475 objects.
2476
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00002477- PyFile_WriteObject now passes Unicode objects to the file's write
2478 method. As a result, all file-like objects which may be the target
Martin v. Löwis2777c022001-09-19 13:47:32 +00002479 of a print statement must support Unicode objects, i.e. they must
2480 at least convert them into ASCII strings.
2481
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002482- Thread scheduling on Solaris should be improved; it is no longer
2483 necessary to insert a small sleep at the start of a thread in order
2484 to let other runnable threads be scheduled.
2485
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002486Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002487-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002488
Marc-André Lemburgbf990172001-09-27 14:17:33 +00002489- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
2490 read character buffer compatible objects for their .write() methods.
2491 These objects are converted to strings and then handled as such
2492 by the instances.
2493
Barry Warsaw2f600732001-09-24 04:28:10 +00002494- The "email" package has been added. This is basically a port of the
2495 mimelib package <http://sf.net/projects/mimelib> with API changes
2496 and some implementations updated to use iterators and generators.
2497
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00002498- difflib.ndiff() and difflib.Differ.compare() are generators now. This
2499 restores the ability of Tools/scripts/ndiff.py to start producing output
2500 before the entire comparison is complete.
2501
Barry Warsaw58b072d2001-09-22 04:44:21 +00002502- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
2503 iteration just like file objects (i.e. their .readline() method is
2504 called for each iteration until it returns an empty string).
2505
Marc-André Lemburg494f2ae2001-09-19 11:33:31 +00002506- The codecs module has grown four new helper APIs to access
2507 builtin codecs: getencoder(), getdecoder(), getreader(),
2508 getwriter().
2509
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002510- SimpleXMLRPCServer: a new module (based upon SimpleHTMLServer)
2511 simplifies writing XML RPC servers.
2512
Barry Warsaw647d5e82001-09-28 17:01:02 +00002513- os.path.realpath(): a new function that returns the absolute pathname
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002514 after interpretation of symbolic links. On non-Unix systems, this
2515 is an alias for os.path.abspath().
2516
Tim Peters16a77ad2001-09-08 04:00:12 +00002517- operator.indexOf() (PySequence_Index() in the C API) now works with any
2518 iterable object.
2519
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002520- smtplib now supports various authentication and security features of
2521 the SMTP protocol through the new login() and starttls() methods.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00002522
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002523- hmac: a new module implementing keyed hashing for message
2524 authentication.
2525
2526- mimetypes now recognizes more extensions and file types. At the
2527 same time, some mappings not sanctioned by IANA were removed.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00002528
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002529- The "compiler" package has been brought up to date to the state of
Guido van Rossumc9ed5dc2001-09-20 05:30:24 +00002530 Python 2.2 bytecode generation. It has also been promoted from a
2531 Tool to a standard library package. (Tools/compiler still exists as
2532 a sample driver.)
2533
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002534Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002535-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002536
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002537- Large file support (LFS) is now automatic when the platform supports
2538 it; no more manual configuration tweaks are needed. On Linux, at
2539 least, it's possible to have a system whose C library supports large
2540 files but whose kernel doesn't; in this case, large file support is
2541 still enabled but doesn't do you any good unless you upgrade your
2542 kernel or share your Python executable with another system whose
2543 kernel has large file support.
2544
2545- The configure script now supplies plausible defaults in a
2546 cross-compilation environment. This doesn't mean that the supplied
2547 values are always correct, or that cross-compilation now works
2548 flawlessly -- but it's a first step (and it shuts up most of
2549 autoconf's warnings about AC_TRY_RUN).
2550
2551- The Unix build is now a bit less chatty, courtesy of the parser
2552 generator. The build is completely silent (except for errors) when
2553 using "make -s", thanks to a -q option to setup.py.
2554
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002555C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002556-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002557
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002558- The "structmember" API now supports some new flag bits to deny read
2559 and/or write access to attributes in restricted execution mode.
2560
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002561New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002562-------------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002563
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002564- Compaq's iPAQ handheld, running the "familiar" Linux distribution
2565 (http://familiar.handhelds.org).
2566
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002567Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002568-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002569
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00002570- The "classic" standard tests, which work by comparing stdout to
2571 an expected-output file under Lib/test/output/, no longer stop at
2572 the first mismatch. Instead the test is run to completion, and a
2573 variant of ndiff-style comparison is used to report all differences.
2574 This is much easier to understand than the previous style of reporting.
2575
2576- The unittest-based standard tests now use regrtest's test_main()
2577 convention, instead of running as a side-effect of merely being
2578 imported. This allows these tests to be run in more natural and
2579 flexible ways as unittests, outside the regrtest framework.
2580
2581- regrtest.py is much better integrated with unittest and doctest now,
2582 especially in regard to reporting errors.
2583
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002584Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002585-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002586
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002587- Large file support now also works for files > 4GB, on filesystems
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00002588 that support it (NTFS under Windows 2000). See "What's New in
2589 Python 2.2a3" for more detail.
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002590
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002591
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002592What's New in Python 2.2a3?
2593===========================
2594
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002595*Release Date: 07-Sep-2001*
2596
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002597Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002598----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002599
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00002600- Conversion of long to float now raises OverflowError if the long is too
2601 big to represent as a C double.
2602
Tim Peters32f453e2001-09-03 08:35:41 +00002603- The 3-argument builtin pow() no longer allows a third non-None argument
2604 if either of the first two arguments is a float, or if both are of
2605 integer types and the second argument is negative (in which latter case
2606 the arguments are converted to float, so this is really the same
2607 restriction).
2608
Tim Peters5d2b77c2001-09-03 05:47:38 +00002609- The builtin dir() now returns more information, and sometimes much
2610 more, generally naming all attributes of an object, and all attributes
2611 reachable from the object via its class, and from its class's base
2612 classes, and so on from them too. Example: in 2.2a2, dir([]) returned
2613 an empty list. In 2.2a3,
2614
2615 >>> dir([])
2616 ['__add__', '__class__', '__contains__', '__delattr__', '__delitem__',
2617 '__eq__', '__ge__', '__getattr__', '__getitem__', '__getslice__',
2618 '__gt__', '__hash__', '__iadd__', '__imul__', '__init__', '__le__',
2619 '__len__', '__lt__', '__mul__', '__ne__', '__new__', '__repr__',
2620 '__rmul__', '__setattr__', '__setitem__', '__setslice__', '__str__',
2621 'append', 'count', 'extend', 'index', 'insert', 'pop', 'remove',
2622 'reverse', 'sort']
2623
2624 dir(module) continues to return only the module's attributes, though.
2625
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002626- Overflowing operations on plain ints now return a long int rather
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002627 than raising OverflowError. This is a partial implementation of PEP
2628 237. You can use -Wdefault::OverflowWarning to enable a warning for
2629 this situation, and -Werror::OverflowWarning to revert to the old
2630 OverflowError exception.
2631
Guido van Rossum61c345f2001-09-04 03:26:15 +00002632- A new command line option, -Q<arg>, is added to control run-time
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002633 warnings for the use of classic division. (See PEP 238.) Possible
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00002634 values are -Qold, -Qwarn, -Qwarnall, and -Qnew. The default is
2635 -Qold, meaning the / operator has its classic meaning and no
2636 warnings are issued. Using -Qwarn issues a run-time warning about
2637 all uses of classic division for int and long arguments; -Qwarnall
2638 also warns about classic division for float and complex arguments
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00002639 (for use with fixdiv.py).
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002640 [Note: the remainder of this item (preserved below) became
2641 obsolete in 2.2c1 -- -Qnew has global effect in 2.2] ::
2642
2643 Using -Qnew is questionable; it turns on new division by default, but
2644 only in the __main__ module. You can usefully combine -Qwarn or
2645 -Qwarnall and -Qnew: this gives the __main__ module new division, and
2646 warns about classic division everywhere else.
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002647
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002648- Many built-in types can now be subclassed. This applies to int,
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002649 long, float, str, unicode, and tuple. (The types complex, list and
2650 dictionary can also be subclassed; this was introduced earlier.)
2651 Note that restrictions apply when subclassing immutable built-in
2652 types: you can only affect the value of the instance by overloading
2653 __new__. You can add mutable attributes, and the subclass instances
2654 will have a __dict__ attribute, but you cannot change the "value"
2655 (as implemented by the base class) of an immutable subclass instance
2656 once it is created.
2657
Guido van Rossumaaf80c82001-09-02 13:44:35 +00002658- The dictionary constructor now takes an optional argument, a
2659 mapping-like object, and initializes the dictionary from its
2660 (key, value) pairs.
2661
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002662- A new built-in type, super, has been added. This facilitates making
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002663 "cooperative super calls" in a multiple inheritance setting. For an
2664 explanation, see http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#cooperation
2665
Guido van Rossum8d7234d2001-09-06 22:02:58 +00002666- A new built-in type, property, has been added. This enables the
2667 creation of "properties". These are attributes implemented by
2668 getter and setter functions (or only one of these for read-only or
2669 write-only attributes), without the need to override __getattr__.
2670 See http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#property
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002671
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002672- The syntax of floating-point and imaginary literals has been
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00002673 liberalized, to allow leading zeroes. Examples of literals now
2674 legal that were SyntaxErrors before:
2675
2676 00.0 0e3 0100j 07.5 00000000000000000008.
2677
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002678- An old tokenizer bug allowed floating point literals with an incomplete
Tim Petersc6d95812001-08-28 20:56:27 +00002679 exponent, such as 1e and 3.1e-. Such literals now raise SyntaxError.
2680
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002681Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002682-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002683
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00002684- telnetlib includes symbolic names for the options, and support for
Martin v. Löwis1da9c572002-11-04 09:56:00 +00002685 setting an option negotiation callback. It also supports processing
2686 of suboptions.
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00002687
Tim Petersa40c7932001-09-05 22:36:56 +00002688- The new C standard no longer requires that math libraries set errno to
2689 ERANGE on overflow. For platform libraries that exploit this new
2690 freedom, Python's overflow-checking was wholly broken. A new overflow-
2691 checking scheme attempts to repair that, but may not be reliable on all
2692 platforms (C doesn't seem to provide anything both useful and portable
2693 in this area anymore).
2694
Martin v. Löwis44f86962001-09-05 13:44:54 +00002695- Asynchronous timeout actions are available through the new class
2696 threading.Timer.
2697
Tim Peters78526162001-09-05 00:53:45 +00002698- math.log and math.log10 now return sensible results for even huge
2699 long arguments. For example, math.log10(10 ** 10000) ~= 10000.0.
2700
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002701- A new function, imp.lock_held(), returns 1 when the import lock is
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00002702 currently held. See the docs for the imp module.
2703
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002704- pickle, cPickle and marshal on 32-bit platforms can now correctly read
Tim Peters82112372001-08-29 02:28:42 +00002705 dumps containing ints written on platforms where Python ints are 8 bytes.
2706 When read on a box where Python ints are 4 bytes, such values are
2707 converted to Python longs.
2708
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002709- In restricted execution mode (using the rexec module), unmarshalling
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002710 code objects is no longer allowed. This plugs a security hole.
2711
Steve Purcell6091cd62001-09-06 16:05:17 +00002712- unittest.TestResult instances no longer store references to tracebacks
2713 generated by test failures. This prevents unexpected dangling references
2714 to objects that should be garbage collected between tests.
2715
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002716Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002717-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002718
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00002719- Tools/scripts/fixdiv.py has been added which can be used to fix
2720 division operators as per PEP 238.
2721
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002722Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002723-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002724
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00002725- If you are an adventurous person using Mac OS X you may want to look at
2726 Mac/OSX. There is a Makefile there that will build Python as a real Mac
2727 application, which can be used for experimenting with Carbon or Cocoa.
2728 Discussion of this on pythonmac-sig, please.
2729
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00002730C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002731-----
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00002732
2733- New function PyObject_Dir(obj), like Python __builtin__.dir(obj).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00002734
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00002735- Note that PyLong_AsDouble can fail! This has always been true, but no
2736 callers checked for it. It's more likely to fail now, because overflow
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00002737 errors are properly detected now. The proper way to check::
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00002738
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002739 double x = PyLong_AsDouble(some_long_object);
2740 if (x == -1.0 && PyErr_Occurred()) {
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002741 /* The conversion failed. */
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002742 }
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00002743
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002744- The GC API has been changed. Extensions that use the old API will still
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00002745 compile but will not participate in GC. To upgrade an extension
2746 module:
2747
2748 - rename Py_TPFLAGS_GC to PyTPFLAGS_HAVE_GC
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00002749
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00002750 - use PyObject_GC_New or PyObject_GC_NewVar to allocate objects and
2751 PyObject_GC_Del to deallocate them
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00002752
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00002753 - rename PyObject_GC_Init to PyObject_GC_Track and PyObject_GC_Fini
2754 to PyObject_GC_UnTrack
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00002755
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00002756 - remove PyGC_HEAD_SIZE from object size calculations
2757
2758 - remove calls to PyObject_AS_GC and PyObject_FROM_GC
2759
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002760- Two new functions: PyString_FromFormat() and PyString_FromFormatV().
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002761 These can be used safely to construct string objects from a
2762 sprintf-style format string (similar to the format string supported
2763 by PyErr_Format()).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00002764
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002765New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002766-------------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002767
Tim Petersb7da0902001-09-02 23:01:43 +00002768- Stephen Hansen contributed patches sufficient to get a clean compile
2769 under Borland C (Windows), but he reports problems running it and ran
2770 out of time to complete the port. Volunteers? Expect a MemoryError
2771 when importing the types module; this is probably shallow, and
2772 causing later failures too.
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002773
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002774Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002775-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002776
2777Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002778-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002779
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00002780- Large file support is now enabled on Win32 platforms as well as on
2781 Win64. This means that, for example, you can use f.tell() and f.seek()
2782 to manipulate files larger than 2 gigabytes (provided you have enough
2783 disk space, and are using a Windows filesystem that supports large
Tim Peters9a9471c2001-09-11 23:18:51 +00002784 partitions). Windows filesystem limits: FAT has a 2GB (gigabyte)
2785 filesize limit, and large file support makes no difference there.
2786 FAT32's limit is 4GB, and files >= 2GB are easier to use from Python now.
2787 NTFS has no practical limit on file size, and files of any size can be
2788 used from Python now.
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00002789
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002790- The w9xpopen hack is now used on Windows NT and 2000 too when COMPSPEC
Tim Peters402d5982001-08-27 06:37:48 +00002791 points to command.com (patch from Brian Quinlan).
2792
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002793
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00002794What's New in Python 2.2a2?
2795===========================
2796
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002797*Release Date: 22-Aug-2001*
2798
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00002799Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002800-----
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00002801
Barry Warsaw18b2ecf2001-08-22 20:26:56 +00002802- Tim Peters developed a brand new Windows installer using Wise 8.1,
2803 generously donated to us by Wise Solutions.
2804
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00002805- configure supports a new option --enable-unicode, with the values
2806 ucs2 and ucs4 (new in 2.2a1). With --disable-unicode, the Unicode
2807 type and supporting code is completely removed from the interpreter.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00002808
Jack Jansen32ce0cd2001-08-21 19:28:20 +00002809- A new configure option --enable-framework builds a Mac OS X framework,
2810 which "make frameworkinstall" will install. This provides a starting
2811 point for more mac-like functionality, join pythonmac-sig@python.org
2812 if you are interested in helping.
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00002813
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00002814- The NeXT platform is no longer supported.
2815
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002816- The 'new' module is now statically linked.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00002817
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00002818Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002819-----
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00002820
2821- The new Tools/scripts/cleanfuture.py can be used to automatically
Andrew M. Kuchlingb0532092001-08-15 15:54:56 +00002822 edit out obsolete future statements from Python source code. See
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00002823 the module docstring for details.
2824
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00002825Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002826-----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00002827
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00002828- regrtest.py now knows which tests are expected to be skipped on some
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00002829 platforms, allowing to give clearer test result output. regrtest
2830 also has optional --use/-u switch to run normally disabled tests
2831 which require network access or consume significant disk resources.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00002832
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00002833- Several new tests in the standard test suite, with special thanks to
2834 Nick Mathewson.
2835
2836Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002837----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00002838
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00002839- The floor division operator // has been added as outlined in PEP
2840 238. The / operator still provides classic division (and will until
2841 Python 3.0) unless "from __future__ import division" is included, in
2842 which case the / operator will provide true division. The operator
2843 module provides truediv() and floordiv() functions. Augmented
2844 assignment variants are included, as are the equivalent overloadable
2845 methods and C API methods. See the PEP for a full discussion:
2846 <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0238.html>
2847
Tim Peters6cd6a822001-08-17 22:11:27 +00002848- Future statements are now effective in simulated interactive shells
2849 (like IDLE). This should "just work" by magic, but read Michael
2850 Hudson's "Future statements in simulated shells" PEP 264 for full
2851 details: <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0264.html>.
2852
Guido van Rossumf86ddd22001-08-17 21:21:04 +00002853- The type/class unification (PEP 252-253) was integrated into the
2854 trunk and is not so tentative any more (the exact specification of
2855 some features is still tentative). A lot of work has done on fixing
2856 bugs and adding robustness and features (performance still has to
2857 come a long way).
2858
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00002859- Warnings about a mismatch in the Python API during extension import
2860 now use the Python warning framework (which makes it possible to
2861 write filters for these warnings).
2862
Barry Warsaw9b3be7f2001-08-14 18:35:02 +00002863- A function's __dict__ (aka func_dict) will now always be a
2864 dictionary. It used to be possible to delete it or set it to None,
2865 but now both actions raise TypeErrors. It is still legal to set it
2866 to a dictionary object. Getting func.__dict__ before any attributes
2867 have been assigned now returns an empty dictionary instead of None.
2868
Guido van Rossum32aa5d22001-09-05 18:43:35 +00002869- A new command line option, -E, was added which disables the use of
2870 all environment variables, or at least those that are specifically
2871 significant to Python. Usually those have a name starting with
2872 "PYTHON". This was used to fix a problem where the tests fail if
2873 the user happens to have PYTHONHOME or PYTHONPATH pointing to an
2874 older distribution.
2875
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00002876Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002877-------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00002878
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00002879- New class Differ and new functions ndiff() and restore() in difflib.py.
2880 These package the algorithms used by the popular Tools/scripts/ndiff.py,
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00002881 for programmatic reuse.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00002882
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00002883- New function xml.sax.saxutils.quoteattr(): Quote an XML attribute
2884 value using the minimal quoting required for the value; more
2885 reliable than using xml.sax.saxutils.escape() for attribute values.
2886
2887- Readline completion support for cmd.Cmd was added.
2888
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00002889- Calling os.tempnam() or os.tmpnam() generate RuntimeWarnings.
2890
2891- Added function threading.BoundedSemaphore()
2892
2893- Added Ka-Ping Yee's cgitb.py module.
2894
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002895- The 'new' module now exposes the CO_xxx flags.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00002896
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00002897- The gc module offers the get_referents function.
2898
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00002899New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002900-------------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00002901
2902C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002903-----
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00002904
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00002905- Two new APIs PyOS_snprintf() and PyOS_vsnprintf() were added
2906 which provide a cross-platform implementations for the
2907 relatively new snprintf()/vsnprintf() C lib APIs. In contrast to
2908 the standard sprintf() and vsprintf() C lib APIs, these versions
2909 apply bounds checking on the used buffer which enhances protection
2910 against buffer overruns.
2911
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00002912- Unicode APIs now use name mangling to assure that mixing interpreters
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00002913 and extensions using different Unicode widths is rendered next to
2914 impossible. Trying to import an incompatible Unicode-aware extension
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00002915 will result in an ImportError. Unicode extensions writers must make
2916 sure to check the Unicode width compatibility in their extensions by
2917 using at least one of the mangled Unicode APIs in the extension.
2918
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00002919- Two new flags METH_NOARGS and METH_O are available in method definition
2920 tables to simplify implementation of methods with no arguments and a
2921 single untyped argument. Calling such methods is more efficient than
2922 calling corresponding METH_VARARGS methods. METH_OLDARGS is now
2923 deprecated.
2924
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00002925Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002926-------
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00002927
2928- "import module" now compiles module.pyw if it exists and nothing else
2929 relevant is found.
2930
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00002931
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00002932What's New in Python 2.2a1?
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00002933===========================
2934
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002935*Release date: 18-Jul-2001*
2936
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00002937Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002938----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00002939
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00002940- TENTATIVELY, a large amount of code implementing much of what's
2941 described in PEP 252 (Making Types Look More Like Classes) and PEP
2942 253 (Subtyping Built-in Types) was added. This will be released
2943 with Python 2.2a1. Documentation will be provided separately
2944 through http://www.python.org/2.2/. The purpose of releasing this
2945 with Python 2.2a1 is to test backwards compatibility. It is
2946 possible, though not likely, that a decision is made not to release
2947 this code as part of 2.2 final, if any serious backwards
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00002948 incompatibilities are found during alpha testing that cannot be
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00002949 repaired.
2950
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00002951- Generators were added; this is a new way to create an iterator (see
Tim Peters11a0d102001-07-17 18:48:00 +00002952 below) using what looks like a simple function containing one or
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00002953 more 'yield' statements. See PEP 255. Since this adds a new
2954 keyword to the language, this feature must be enabled by including a
2955 future statement: "from __future__ import generators" (see PEP 236).
2956 Generators will become a standard feature in a future release
2957 (probably 2.3). Without this future statement, 'yield' remains an
2958 ordinary identifier, but a warning is issued each time it is used.
2959 (These warnings currently don't conform to the warnings framework of
2960 PEP 230; we intend to fix this in 2.2a2.)
2961
Marc-André Lemburg12e74b32001-05-22 08:58:23 +00002962- The UTF-16 codec was modified to be more RFC compliant. It will now
2963 only remove BOM characters at the start of the string and then
2964 only if running in native mode (UTF-16-LE and -BE won't remove a
2965 leading BMO character).
2966
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00002967- Strings now have a new method .decode() to complement the already
2968 existing .encode() method. These two methods provide direct access
2969 to the corresponding decoders and encoders of the registered codecs.
2970
2971 To enhance the usability of the .encode() method, the special
2972 casing of Unicode object return values was dropped (Unicode objects
2973 were auto-magically converted to string using the default encoding).
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00002974
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00002975 Both methods will now return whatever the codec in charge of the
2976 requested encoding returns as object, e.g. Unicode codecs will
2977 return Unicode objects when decoding is requested ("äöü".decode("latin-1")
2978 will return u"äöü"). This enables codec writer to create codecs
2979 for various simple to use conversions.
2980
2981 New codecs were added to demonstrate these new features (the .encode()
2982 and .decode() columns indicate the type of the returned objects):
2983
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002984 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
2985 |Name | .encode() | .decode() | Description |
2986 +=========+===========+===========+=============================+
2987 |uu | string | string | UU codec (e.g. for email) |
2988 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
2989 |base64 | string | string | base64 codec |
2990 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
2991 |quopri | string | string | quoted-printable codec |
2992 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
2993 |zlib | string | string | zlib compression |
2994 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
2995 |hex | string | string | 2-byte hex codec |
2996 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
2997 |rot-13 | string | Unicode | ROT-13 Unicode charmap codec|
2998 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00002999
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00003000- Some operating systems now support the concept of a default Unicode
3001 encoding for file system operations. Notably, Windows supports 'mbcs'
3002 as the default. The Macintosh will also adopt this concept in the medium
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00003003 term, although the default encoding for that platform will be other than
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00003004 'mbcs'.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00003005
3006 On operating system that support non-ASCII filenames, it is common for
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00003007 functions that return filenames (such as os.listdir()) to return Python
3008 string objects pre-encoded using the default file system encoding for
3009 the platform. As this encoding is likely to be different from Python's
3010 default encoding, converting this name to a Unicode object before passing
3011 it back to the Operating System would result in a Unicode error, as Python
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003012 would attempt to use its default encoding (generally ASCII) rather than
3013 the default encoding for the file system.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00003014
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003015 In general, this change simply removes surprises when working with
3016 Unicode and the file system, making these operations work as you expect,
3017 increasing the transparency of Unicode objects in this context.
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00003018 See [????] for more details, including examples.
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00003019
Tim Peters61dff2b2001-05-08 15:43:37 +00003020- Float (and complex) literals in source code were evaluated to full
3021 precision only when running from a .py file; the same code loaded from a
3022 .pyc (or .pyo) file could suffer numeric differences starting at about the
3023 12th significant decimal digit. For example, on a machine with IEEE-754
3024 floating arithmetic,
3025
3026 x = 9007199254740992.0
3027 print long(x)
3028
3029 printed 9007199254740992 if run directly from .py, but 9007199254740000
3030 if from a compiled (.pyc or .pyo) file. This was due to marshal using
3031 str(float) instead of repr(float) when building code objects. marshal
3032 now uses repr(float) instead, which should reproduce floats to full
3033 machine precision (assuming the platform C float<->string I/O conversion
3034 functions are of good quality).
3035
3036 This may cause floating-point results to change in some cases, and
3037 usually for the better, but may also cause numerically unstable
3038 algorithms to break.
3039
Tim Peters2f228e72001-05-13 00:19:31 +00003040- The implementation of dicts suffers fewer collisions, which has speed
3041 benefits. However, the order in which dict entries appear in dict.keys(),
3042 dict.values() and dict.items() may differ from previous releases for a
3043 given dict. Nothing is defined about this order, so no program should
3044 rely on it. Nevertheless, it's easy to write test cases that rely on the
3045 order by accident, typically because of printing the str() or repr() of a
3046 dict to an "expected results" file. See Lib/test/test_support.py's new
3047 sortdict(dict) function for a simple way to display a dict in sorted
3048 order.
3049
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00003050- Many other small changes to dicts were made, resulting in faster
3051 operation along the most common code paths.
3052
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00003053- Dictionary objects now support the "in" operator: "x in dict" means
3054 the same as dict.has_key(x).
3055
Barry Warsaw51acc8d2001-06-26 20:12:50 +00003056- The update() method of dictionaries now accepts generic mapping
3057 objects. Specifically the argument object must support the .keys()
3058 and __getitem__() methods. This allows you to say, for example,
3059 {}.update(UserDict())
3060
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00003061- Iterators were added; this is a generalized way of providing values
3062 to a for loop. See PEP 234. There's a new built-in function iter()
3063 to return an iterator. There's a new protocol to get the next value
3064 from an iterator using the next() method (in Python) or the
3065 tp_iternext slot (in C). There's a new protocol to get iterators
3066 using the __iter__() method (in Python) or the tp_iter slot (in C).
3067 Iterating (i.e. a for loop) over a dictionary generates its keys.
3068 Iterating over a file generates its lines.
3069
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00003070- The following functions were generalized to work nicely with iterator
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003071 arguments::
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003072
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00003073 map(), filter(), reduce(), zip()
Tim Peters8572b4f2001-05-06 01:05:02 +00003074 list(), tuple() (PySequence_Tuple() and PySequence_Fast() in C API)
3075 max(), min()
Tim Peters1af03e92001-05-26 19:37:54 +00003076 join() method of strings
3077 extend() method of lists
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00003078 'x in y' and 'x not in y' (PySequence_Contains() in C API)
3079 operator.countOf() (PySequence_Count() in C API)
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003080 right-hand side of assignment statements with multiple targets, such as ::
Tim Petersd6d010b2001-06-21 02:49:55 +00003081 x, y, z = some_iterable_object_returning_exactly_3_values
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00003082
Tim Petersd85e1022001-05-11 21:51:48 +00003083- Accessing module attributes is significantly faster (for example,
3084 random.random or os.path or yourPythonModule.yourAttribute).
3085
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00003086- Comparing dictionary objects via == and != is faster, and now works even
3087 if the keys and values don't support comparisons other than ==.
3088
Tim Peters95bf9392001-05-10 08:32:44 +00003089- Comparing dictionaries in ways other than == and != is slower: there were
3090 insecurities in the dict comparison implementation that could cause Python
3091 to crash if the element comparison routines for the dict keys and/or
3092 values mutated the dicts. Making the code bulletproof slowed it down.
3093
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00003094- Collisions in dicts are resolved via a new approach, which can help
3095 dramatically in bad cases. For example, looking up every key in a dict
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00003096 d with d.keys() == [i << 16 for i in range(20000)] is approximately 500x
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00003097 faster now. Thanks to Christian Tismer for pointing out the cause and
3098 the nature of an effective cure (last December! better late than never).
Tim Peters15d49292001-05-27 07:39:22 +00003099
Tim Peters52e155e2001-06-16 05:42:57 +00003100- repr() is much faster for large containers (dict, list, tuple).
3101
3102
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003103Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003104-------
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003105
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00003106- The constants ascii_letters, ascii_lowercase. and ascii_uppercase
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003107 were added to the string module. These a locale-independent
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00003108 constants, unlike letters, lowercase, and uppercase. These are now
3109 use in appropriate locations in the standard library.
3110
Martin v. Löwisf0473d52001-07-18 16:17:16 +00003111- The flags used in dlopen calls can now be configured using
3112 sys.setdlopenflags and queried using sys.getdlopenflags.
3113
Guido van Rossumc7e4aca2001-07-12 11:54:37 +00003114- Fredrik Lundh's xmlrpclib is now a standard library module. This
3115 provides full client-side XML-RPC support. In addition,
3116 Demo/xmlrpc/ contains two server frameworks (one SocketServer-based,
3117 one asyncore-based). Thanks to Eric Raymond for the documentation.
3118
Guido van Rossum643d3912001-07-05 14:46:25 +00003119- The xrange() object is simplified: it no longer supports slicing,
3120 repetition, comparisons, efficient 'in' checking, the tolist()
3121 method, or the start, stop and step attributes. See PEP 260.
3122
Martin v. Löwisebf94db2001-06-06 06:25:40 +00003123- A new function fnmatch.filter to filter lists of file names was added.
3124
Barry Warsawffd674d2001-05-22 16:00:10 +00003125- calendar.py uses month and day names based on the current locale.
3126
Guido van Rossum2e0a6542001-05-15 02:14:44 +00003127- strop is now *really* obsolete (this was announced before with 1.6),
3128 and issues DeprecationWarning when used (except for the four items
3129 that are still imported into string.py).
3130
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003131- Cookie.py now sorts key+value pairs by key in output strings.
3132
3133- pprint.isrecursive(object) didn't correctly identify recursive objects.
3134 Now it does.
3135
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00003136- pprint functions now much faster for large containers (tuple, list, dict).
3137
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00003138- New 'q' and 'Q' format codes in the struct module, corresponding to C
3139 types "long long" and "unsigned long long" (on Windows, __int64). In
3140 native mode, these can be used only when the platform C compiler supports
3141 these types (when HAVE_LONG_LONG is #define'd by the Python config
3142 process), and then they inherit the sizes and alignments of the C types.
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00003143 In standard mode, 'q' and 'Q' are supported on all platforms, and are
3144 8-byte integral types.
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00003145
Guido van Rossum83213cc2001-06-12 16:48:52 +00003146- The site module installs a new built-in function 'help' that invokes
3147 pydoc.help. It must be invoked as 'help()'; when invoked as 'help',
3148 it displays a message reminding the user to use 'help()' or
3149 'help(object)'.
3150
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003151Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003152-----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003153
3154- New test_mutants.py runs dict comparisons where the key and value
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003155 comparison operators mutate the dicts randomly during comparison. This
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003156 rapidly causes Python to crash under earlier releases (not for the faint
3157 of heart: it can also cause Win9x to freeze or reboot!).
3158
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003159- New test_pprint.py verifies that pprint.isrecursive() and
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00003160 pprint.isreadable() return sensible results. Also verifies that simple
3161 cases produce correct output.
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003162
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00003163C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003164-----
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00003165
3166- Removed the unused last_is_sticky argument from the internal
3167 _PyTuple_Resize(). If this affects you, you were cheating.
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003168
3169----
3170
3171**(For information about older versions, consult the HISTORY file.)**