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Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001+++++++++++
2Python News
3+++++++++++
4
Skip Montanaro4a385832002-09-20 17:08:52 +00005(editors: check NEWS.help for information about editing NEWS using ReST.)
6
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00007What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 3?
8=================================
9
10*Release date: XX-XXX-2004*
11
12Core and builtins
13-----------------
14
Brett Cannonadd33602004-08-15 07:21:25 +000015- Fix the order of application of decorators. The proper order is bottom-up;
16 the first decorator listed is the last one called.
17
Neal Norwitzf0769532004-08-13 03:18:29 +000018- SF patch #1005778. Fix a seg fault if the list size changed while
19 calling list.index(). This could happen if a rich comparison function
20 modified the list.
21
Michael W. Hudson5e897952004-08-12 18:12:44 +000022- The ``func_name`` (a.k.a. ``__name__``) attribute of user-defined
23 functions is now writable.
24
Michael W. Hudson5523c252004-08-12 18:09:00 +000025- code_new (a.k.a new.code()) now checks its arguments sufficiently
26 carefully that passing them on to PyCode_New() won't trigger calls
27 to Py_FatalError() or PyErr_BadInternalCall(). It is still the case
28 that the returned code object might be entirely insane.
29
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +000030- Subclasses of string can no longer be interned. The semantics of
31 interning were not clear here -- a subclass could be mutable, for
32 example -- and had bugs. Explicitly interning a subclass of string
33 via intern() will raise a TypeError. Internal operations that attempt
34 to intern a string subclass will have no effect.
Jeremy Hylton4c989dd2004-08-07 19:20:05 +000035
Tim Peters83b57352004-08-08 07:24:22 +000036- Bug 1003935: xrange() could report bogus OverflowErrors. Documented
37 what xrange() intends, and repaired tests accordingly.
38
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +000039Extension modules
40-----------------
41
Dave Cole331708b2004-08-09 04:51:41 +000042- Added socket.socketpair().
43
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +000044Library
45-------
46
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +000047- patch #675551: Add get_history_item and replace_history_item functions
48 to the readline module.
49
Johannes Gijsbers34c41202004-08-14 15:19:28 +000050- bug #989672: pdb.doc and the help messages for the help_d and help_u methods
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +000051 of the pdb.Pdb class gives have been corrected. d(own) goes to a newer
52 frame, u(p) to an older frame, not the other way around.
Johannes Gijsbers34c41202004-08-14 15:19:28 +000053
Johannes Gijsbers4ec40642004-08-14 15:01:53 +000054- bug #990669: os.path.realpath() will resolve symlinks before normalizing the
55 path, as normalizing the path may alter the meaning of the path if it
56 contains symlinks.
57
Johannes Gijsbers9d134b72004-08-14 14:03:03 +000058- bug #851123: shutil.copyfile will raise an exception when trying to copy a
59 file onto a link to itself. Thanks Gregory Ball.
60
Brett Cannonb3de2e12004-08-13 18:46:24 +000061- bug #570300: Fix inspect to resolve file locations using os.path.realpath()
62 so as to properly list all functions in a module when the module itself is
63 reached through a symlink. Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
64
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +000065- doctest refactoring continued. See the docs for details. As part of
66 this effort, some old and little- (never?) used features are now
67 deprecated: the Tester class, the module is_private() function, and the
68 isprivate argument to testmod(). The Tester class supplied a feeble
69 "by hand" way to combine multiple doctests, if you knew exactly what
70 you were doing. The newer doctest features for unittest integration
71 already did a better job of that, are stronger now than ever, and the
72 new DocTestRunner class is a saner foundation if you want to do it by
73 hand. The "private name" filtering gimmick was a mistake from the
74 start, and testmod() changed long ago to ignore it by default. If
75 you want to filter out tests, the new DocTestFinder class can be used
76 to return a list of all doctests, and you can filter that list by
77 any computable criteria before passing it to a DocTestRunner instance.
78
Matthias Klose2e829c02004-08-15 17:04:33 +000079- Bug #891637, patch #1005466: fix inspect.getargs() crash on def foo((bar)).
80
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +000081Tools/Demos
82-----------
83
Matthias Klose2443d4a2004-08-16 12:10:12 +000084- pygettext.py: Generate POT-Creation-Date header in ISO format.
85
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +000086Build
87-----
88
Michael W. Hudson800ba232004-08-12 18:19:17 +000089- The --with-tsc flag to configure to enable VM profiling with the
90 processor's timestamp counter now works on PPC platforms.
91
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +000092- patch #1006629: Define _XOPEN_SOURCE to 500 on Solaris 8/9 to match
93 GCC's definition and avoid redefinition warnings.
94
Matthias Klosea2542be2004-08-16 11:35:51 +000095- Detect pthreads support (provided by gnu pth pthread emulation) on
96 GNU/k*BSD systems.
97
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +000098C API
99-----
100
101Documentation
102-------------
103
Johannes Gijsbers4ec40642004-08-14 15:01:53 +0000104- bug #990669: os.path.normpath may alter the meaning of a path if it contains
Johannes Gijsbersb112d6e2004-08-14 14:41:32 +0000105symbolic links. This has been documented in a comment since 1992, but is now in
106the library reference as well.
107
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000108New platforms
109-------------
110
111Tests
112-----
113
114Windows
115-------
116
Tim Peters79b52b72004-08-12 18:37:10 +0000117- Boosted the stack reservation for python.exe and pythonw.exe from
118 the default 1MB to 2MB. Stack frames under VC 7.1 for 2.4 are enough
119 bigger than under VC 6.0 for 2.3.4 that deeply recursive progams
120 within the default sys.getrecursionlimit() default value of 1000 were
121 able to suffer undetected C stack overflows. The standard test program
122 test_compiler was one such program. If a Python process on Windows
123 "just vanishes" without a trace, and without an error message of any
124 kind, but with an exit code of 128, undetected stack overflow may be
125 the problem.
126
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000127Mac
128---
129
130
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000131What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 2?
132=================================
133
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +0000134*Release date: 05-AUG-2004*
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000135
136Core and builtins
137-----------------
138
Raymond Hettinger52a21b82004-08-06 18:43:09 +0000139- Patch #980695: Implements efficient string concatenation for statements
140 of the form s=s+t and s+=t. This will vary across implementations.
141 Accordingly, the str.join() method is strongly preferred for performance
142 sensitive code.
143
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +0000144- PEP-0318, Function Decorators have been added to the language. These are
145 implemented using the Java-style @decorator syntax, like so:
146 @staticmethod
147 def foo(bar):
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +0000148 (The PEP needs to be updated to reflect the current state)
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +0000149
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +0000150- When importing a module M raises an exception, Python no longer leaves M
151 in sys.modules. Before 2.4a2 it did, and a subsequent import of M would
152 succeed, picking up a module object from sys.modules reflecting as much
153 of the initialization of M as completed before the exception was raised.
154 Subsequent imports got no indication that M was in a partially-
155 initialized state, and the importers could get into arbitrarily bad
156 trouble as a result (the M they got was in an unintended state,
157 arbitrarily far removed from M's author's intent). Now subsequent
158 imports of M will continue raising exceptions (but if, for example, the
159 source code for M is edited between import attempts, then perhaps later
160 attempts will succeed, or raise a different exception).
161
162 This can break existing code, but in such cases the code was probably
163 working before by accident. In the Python source, the only case of
164 breakage discovered was in a test accidentally relying on a damaged
165 module remaining in sys.modules. Cases are also known where tests
166 deliberately provoking import errors remove damaged modules from
167 sys.modules themselves, and such tests will break now if they do an
168 unconditional del sys.modules[M].
169
Marc-André Lemburgb314ce92004-07-23 16:14:57 +0000170- u'%s' % obj will now try obj.__unicode__() first and fallback to
171 obj.__str__() if no __unicode__ method can be found.
172
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +0000173- Patch #550732: Add PyArg_VaParseTupleAndKeywords(). Analogous to
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000174 PyArg_VaParse(). Both are now documented. Thanks Greg Chapman.
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +0000175
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000176- Allow string and unicode return types from .encode()/.decode()
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000177 methods on string and unicode objects. Added unicode.decode()
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000178 which was missing for no apparent reason.
179
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000180- An attempt to fix the mess that is Python's behaviour with
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000181 signal handlers and threads, complicated by readline's behaviour.
182 It's quite possible that there are still bugs here.
183
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000184- Added C macros Py_CLEAR and Py_VISIT to ease the implementation of
185 types that support garbage collection.
186
Raymond Hettinger76d962d2004-07-16 12:16:48 +0000187- Compiler now treats None as a constant.
188
Neil Schemenauer3a313e32004-07-19 16:29:17 +0000189- The type of values returned by __int__, __float__, __long__,
190 __oct__, and __hex__ are now checked. Returning an invalid type
191 will cause a TypeError to be raised. This matches the behavior of
192 Jython.
193
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +0000194- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in locale module.
195
Hye-Shik Changb5047fd2004-08-04 06:33:51 +0000196- Added a workaround for proper string operations in BSDs. str.split
197 and str.is* methods can now work correctly with UTF-8 locales.
198
Hye-Shik Changc81c6952004-08-04 17:40:38 +0000199- Bug #989185: unicode.iswide() and unicode.width() is dropped and
200 the East Asian Width support is moved to unicodedata extension
201 module.
Hye-Shik Change9ddfbb2004-08-04 07:38:35 +0000202
Hye-Shik Chang7df44b32004-08-04 17:36:41 +0000203- Patch #941229: The source code encoding in interactive mode
204 now refers sys.stdin.encoding not just ISO-8859-1 anymore. This
205 allows for non-latin-1 users to write unicode strings directly.
206
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000207Extension modules
208-----------------
209
Martin v. Löwis544f1192004-07-27 05:22:33 +0000210- cpickle now supports the same keyword arguments as pickle.
211
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000212Library
213-------
214
Marc-André Lemburgc759f072004-08-05 12:43:30 +0000215- Added new codecs and aliases for ISO_8859-11, ISO_8859-16 and
216 TIS-620
217
Tim Peters8485b562004-08-04 18:46:34 +0000218- Thanks to Edward Loper, doctest has been massively refactored, and
219 many new features were added. Full docs will appear later. For now
220 the doctest module comments and new test cases give good coverage.
221 The refactoring provides many hook points for customizing behavior
222 (such as how to report errors, and how to compare expected to actual
223 output). New features include a <BLANKLINE> marker for expected
224 output containing blank lines, options to produce unified or context
225 diffs when actual output doesn't match expectations, an option to
226 normalize whitespace before comparing, and an option to use an
227 ellipsis to signify "don't care" regions of output.
228
Martin v. Löwis1fa649f2004-08-03 18:45:31 +0000229- Tkinter now supports the wish -sync and -use options.
230
Fred Drakef901abd2004-08-03 17:58:55 +0000231- The following methods in time support passing of None: ctime(), gmtime(),
232 and localtime(). If None is provided, the current time is used (the
233 same as when the argument is omitted).
234 [SF bug 658254, patch 663482]
235
Martin v. Löwis9513e342004-08-03 14:36:32 +0000236- nntplib does now allow to ignore a .netrc file.
237
Martin v. Löwis65a79752004-08-03 12:59:55 +0000238- urllib2 now recognizes Basic authentication even if other authentication
239 schemes are offered.
240
Neal Norwitz0e67fd42004-08-01 22:48:06 +0000241- Bug #1001053. wave.open() now accepts unicode filenames.
242
Tim Peters5cfb05e2004-07-27 21:02:02 +0000243- gzip.GzipFile has a new fileno() method, to retrieve the handle of the
244 underlying file object (provided it has a fileno() method). This is
245 needed if you want to use os.fsync() on a GzipFile.
246
Martin v. Löwis7b9190b2004-07-27 05:07:19 +0000247- imaplib has two new methods: deleteacl and myrights.
248
Martin v. Löwiscc0f9322004-07-26 12:40:50 +0000249- nntplib has two new methods: description and descriptions. They
250 use a more RFC-compliant way of getting a newsgroup description.
251
Brett Cannon8b3d92a2004-07-21 02:21:58 +0000252- Bug #993394. Fix a possible red herring of KeyError in 'threading' being
253 raised during interpreter shutdown from a registered function with atexit
254 when dummy_threading is being used.
255
Neal Norwitza4f651a2004-07-20 22:07:44 +0000256- Bug #857297/Patch #916874. Fix an error when extracting a hard link
257 from a tarfile.
258
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +0000259- Patch #846659. Fix an error in tarfile.py when using
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +0000260 GNU longname/longlink creation.
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +0000261
Tim Peters90ee7eb2004-07-18 23:58:17 +0000262- The obsolete FCNTL.py has been deleted. The builtin fcntl module
263 has been available (on platforms that support fcntl) since Python
264 1.5a3, and all FCNTL.py did is export fcntl's names, after generating
265 a deprecation warning telling you to use fcntl directly.
266
Hye-Shik Chang2bb146f2004-07-18 03:06:29 +0000267- Several new unicode codecs are added: big5hkscs, euc_jis_2004,
268 iso2022_jp_2004, shift_jis_2004.
269
Tim Peters5af0e412004-07-12 00:45:14 +0000270- Bug #788520. Queue.{get, get_nowait, put, put_nowait} have new
271 implementations, exploiting Conditions (which didn't exist at the time
272 Queue was introduced). A minor semantic change is that the Full and
273 Empty exceptions raised by non-blocking calls now occur only if the
274 queue truly was full or empty at the instant the queue was checked (of
275 course the Queue may no longer be full or empty by the time a calling
276 thread sees those exceptions, though). Before, the exceptions could
277 also be raised if it was "merely inconvenient" for the implementation
278 to determine the true state of the Queue (because the Queue was locked
279 by some other method in progress).
280
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000281- Bugs #979794 and #980117: difflib.get_grouped_opcodes() now handles the
282 case of comparing two empty lists. This affected both context_diff() and
283 unified_diff(),
Brett Cannond2c5b4b2004-07-10 23:54:07 +0000284
Brett Cannone6f8a892004-07-10 23:14:30 +0000285- Bug #980938: smtplib now prints debug output to sys.stderr.
286
Brett Cannonf50299c2004-07-10 22:55:15 +0000287- Bug #930024: posixpath.realpath() now handles infinite loops in symlinks by
288 returning the last point in the path that was not part of any loop. Thanks
289 AM Kuchling.
290
Brett Cannonbdc36272004-07-10 20:42:22 +0000291- Bug #980327: ntpath not handles compressing erroneous slashes between the
292 drive letter and the rest of the path. Also clearly handles UNC addresses now
293 as well. Thanks Paul Moore.
294
Brett Cannone6751182004-07-10 19:13:42 +0000295- bug #679953: zipfile.py should now work for files over 2 GB. The packed data
296 for file sizes (compressed and uncompressed) was being stored as signed
297 instead of unsigned.
298
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000299- decimal.py now only uses signals in the IBM spec. The other conditions are
Raymond Hettinger5aa478b2004-07-09 10:02:53 +0000300 no longer part of the public API.
301
Marc-André Lemburg88fcca62004-07-10 16:16:06 +0000302- codecs module now has two new generic APIs: encode() and decode()
303 which don't restrict the return types (unlike the unicode and
304 string methods of the same name).
305
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000306- Non-blocking SSL sockets work again; they were broken in Python 2.3.
Andrew M. Kuchling79d7e922004-07-10 21:21:55 +0000307 SF patch 945642.
308
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000309- doctest unittest integration improvements:
310
311 o Improved the unitest test output for doctest-based unit tests
312
313 o Can now pass setUp and tearDown functions when creating
314 DocTestSuites.
315
316- The threading module has a new class, local, for creating objects
317 that provide thread-local data.
318
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +0000319- Bug #990307: when keep_empty_values is True, cgi.parse_qsl()
320 no longer returns spurious empty fields.
321
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +0000322- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in gettext module.
323
324- Introduced in gettext module the l*gettext() family of functions,
325 which return translation strings encoded in the preferred encoding,
326 as informed by locale module's getpreferredencoding().
327
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +0000328- optparse module (and tests) upgraded to Optik 1.5a1. Changes:
329
330 - Add expansion of default values in help text: the string
331 "%default" in an option's help string is expanded to str() of
332 that option's default value, or "none" if no default value.
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +0000333
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +0000334 - Bug #955889: option default values that happen to be strings are
335 now processed in the same way as values from the command line; this
336 allows generation of nicer help when using custom types. Can
337 be disabled with parser.set_process_default_values(False).
338
339 - Bug #960515: don't crash when generating help for callback
340 options that specify 'type', but not 'dest' or 'metavar'.
341
342 - Feature #815264: change the default help format for short options
343 that take an argument from e.g. "-oARG" to "-o ARG"; add
344 set_short_opt_delimiter() and set_long_opt_delimiter() methods to
345 HelpFormatter to allow (slight) customization of the formatting.
346
347 - Patch #736940: internationalize Optik: all built-in user-
348 targeted literal strings are passed through gettext.gettext(). (If
349 you want translations (.po files), they're not included with Python
350 -- you'll find them in the Optik source distribution from
351 http://optik.sourceforge.net/ .)
352
353 - Bug #878453: respect $COLUMNS environment variable for
354 wrapping help output.
355
356 - Feature #988122: expand "%prog" in the 'description' passed
357 to OptionParser, just like in the 'usage' and 'version' strings.
358 (This is *not* done in the 'description' passed to OptionGroup.)
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +0000359
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000360C API
361-----
362
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +0000363- PyImport_ExecCodeModule() and PyImport_ExecCodeModuleEx(): if an
364 error occurs while loading the module, these now delete the module's
365 entry from sys.modules. All ways of loading modules eventually call
366 one of these, so this is an error-case change in semantics for all
367 ways of loading modules. In rare cases, a module loader may wish
368 to keep a module object in sys.modules despite that the module's
369 code cannot be executed. In such cases, the module loader must
370 arrange to reinsert the name and module object in sys.modules.
371 PyImport_ReloadModule() has been changed to reinsert the original
372 module object into sys.modules if the module reload fails, so that
373 its visible semantics have not changed.
374
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000375- A large pile of datetime field-extraction macros is now documented,
376 thanks to Anthony Tuininga (patch #986010).
377
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000378Documentation
379-------------
380
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +0000381- Improved the tutorial on creating types in C.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000382
383 - point out the importance of reassigning data members before
Andrew M. Kuchling78d375f2004-08-07 14:00:39 +0000384 assigning their values
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000385
Andrew M. Kuchling28025ec2004-08-07 13:59:22 +0000386 - correct my misconception about return values from visitprocs. Sigh.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000387
388 - mention the labor saving Py_VISIT and Py_CLEAR macros.
389
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +0000390- Major rewrite of the math module docs, to address common confusions.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000391
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000392Tests
393-----
394
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +0000395- The test data files for the decimal test suite are now installed on
Anthony Baxterfd4984d2004-07-12 09:33:39 +0000396 platforms that use the Makefile.
397
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +0000398- SF patch 995225: The test file testtar.tar accidentally contained
399 CVS keywords (like $Id$), which could cause spurious failures in
400 test_tarfile.py depending on how the test file was checked out.
401
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000402
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000403What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 1?
404=================================
405
Anthony Baxter3210b362004-07-08 05:59:43 +0000406*Release date: 08-JUL-2004*
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000407
408Core and builtins
409-----------------
410
Fred Drake0a4dd392004-07-02 18:57:45 +0000411- weakref.ref is now the type object also known as
412 weakref.ReferenceType; it can be subclassed like any other new-style
413 class. There's less per-entry overhead in WeakValueDictionary
414 objects now (one object instead of three).
415
Thomas Heller04c673b2004-07-02 08:56:20 +0000416- Bug #951851: Python crashed when reading import table of certain
417 Windows DLLs.
418
Raymond Hettinger66bd2332004-08-02 08:30:07 +0000419- Bug #215126. The locals argument to eval(), execfile(), and exec now
420 accept any mapping type.
Raymond Hettinger214b1c32004-07-02 06:41:07 +0000421
Martin v. Löwisef82d2f2004-06-27 16:51:46 +0000422- marshal now shares interned strings. This change introduces
423 a new .pyc magic.
424
Anthony Baxter3ecdb252004-06-11 14:41:18 +0000425- Bug #966623. classes created with type() in an exec(, {}) don't
426 have a __module__, but code in typeobject assumed it would always
427 be there.
428
Martin v. Löwis737ea822004-06-08 18:52:54 +0000429- Python no longer relies on the LC_NUMERIC locale setting to be
430 the "C" locale; as a result, it no longer tries to prevent changing
431 the LC_NUMERIC category.
432
Tim Peters604c0132004-06-07 23:04:33 +0000433- Bug #952807: Unpickling pickled instances of subclasses of
434 datetime.date, datetime.datetime and datetime.time could yield insane
435 objects. Thanks to Jiwon Seo for a fix.
436
Thomas Heller90a764c2004-06-07 15:12:44 +0000437- Bug #845802: Python crashes when __init__.py is a directory.
438
Hye-Shik Changbc555e32004-06-03 11:10:58 +0000439- Unicode objects received two new methods: iswide() and width().
440 These query East Asian width information, as specified in Unicode
441 TR11.
Hye-Shik Chang974ed7c2004-06-02 16:49:17 +0000442
Raymond Hettinger41bd0222004-06-01 06:36:24 +0000443- Improved the tuple hashing algorithm to give fewer collisions in
444 common cases. Fixes bug #942952.
445
Raymond Hettinger354433a2004-05-19 08:20:33 +0000446- Implemented generator expressions (PEP 289). Coded by Jiwon Seo.
447
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +0000448- Enabled the profiling of C extension functions (and builtins) - check
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000449 new documentation and modified profile and bdb modules for more details
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +0000450
Nicholas Bastinabce8a62004-03-21 20:24:07 +0000451- Set file.name to the object passed to open (instead of a new string)
452
Nicholas Bastina7604bf2004-03-21 18:37:23 +0000453- Moved tracebackobject into traceback.h and renamed to PyTracebackObject
454
Raymond Hettingerff5bc502004-03-21 15:12:00 +0000455- Optimized the byte coding for multiple assignments like "a,b=b,a" and
456 "a,b,c=1,2,3". Improves their speed by 25% to 30%.
457
Brett Cannon4f653312004-03-20 22:52:14 +0000458- Limit the nested depth of a tuple for the second argument to isinstance()
459 and issubclass() to the recursion limit of the interpreter.
460 Fixes bug #858016 .
461
Raymond Hettingerade08ea2004-03-18 09:48:12 +0000462- Optimized dict iterators, creating separate types for each
463 and having them reveal their length. Also optimized the
464 methods: keys(), values(), and items().
465
Raymond Hettingerdd80f762004-03-07 07:31:06 +0000466- Implemented a newcode opcode, LIST_APPEND, that simplifies
467 the generated bytecode for list comprehensions and further
468 improves their performance (about 35%).
469
Michael W. Hudsond3b33b52004-02-19 19:35:22 +0000470- Implemented rich comparisons for floats, which seems to make
471 comparisons involving NaNs somewhat less surprising when the
472 underlying C compiler actually implements C99 semantics.
473
Raymond Hettingerfa7b9d82004-02-15 04:06:39 +0000474- Optimized list.extend() to save memory and no longer create
475 intermediate sequences. Also, extend() now pre-allocates the
476 needed memory whenever the length of the iterable is known in
477 advance -- this halves the time to extend the list.
478
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +0000479- Optimized list resize operations to make fewer calls to the system
480 realloc(). Significantly speeds up list appends, list pops,
481 list comprehensions, and the list contructor (when the input iterable
482 length is not known).
483
484- Changed the internal list over-allocation scheme. For larger lists,
485 overallocation ranged between 3% and 25%. Now, it is a constant 12%.
Raymond Hettingerab517d22004-02-14 18:34:46 +0000486 For smaller lists (n<8), overallocation was upto eight elements. Now,
487 the overallocation is no more than three elements -- this improves space
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +0000488 utilization for applications that have large numbers of small lists.
489
Raymond Hettinger0468e412004-05-05 05:37:53 +0000490- Most list bodies now get re-used rather than freed. Speeds up list
491 instantiation and deletion by saving calls to malloc() and free().
492
Raymond Hettinger31017ae2004-03-04 08:25:44 +0000493- The dict.update() method now accepts all the same argument forms
494 as the dict() constructor. This now includes item lists and/or
495 keyword arguments.
496
Michael W. Hudsonecfeb7f2004-02-12 15:28:27 +0000497- Support for arbitrary objects supporting the read-only buffer
498 interface as the co_code field of code objects (something that was
499 only possible to create from C code) has been removed.
500
Fred Drake228765b2004-02-06 04:15:22 +0000501- Made omitted callback and None equivalent for weakref.ref() and
502 weakref.proxy(); the None case wasn't handled correctly in all
503 cases.
504
505- Fixed problem where PyWeakref_NewRef() and PyWeakref_NewProxy()
506 assumed that initial existing entries in an object's weakref list
507 would not be removed while allocating a new weakref object. Since
508 GC could be invoked at that time, however, that assumption was
509 invalid. In a truly obscure case of GC being triggered during
510 creation for a new weakref object for an referent which already
511 has a weakref without a callback which is only referenced from
512 cyclic trash, a memory error can occur. This consistently created a
513 segfault in a debug build, but provided less predictable behavior in
514 a release build.
515
Hye-Shik Changff83c2b2004-02-02 13:39:01 +0000516- input() builtin function now respects compiler flags such as
517 __future__ statements. SF patch 876178.
518
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +0000519- Removed PendingDeprecationWarning from apply(). apply() remains
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +0000520 deprecated, but the nuisance warning will not be issued.
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +0000521
Tim Peters1d7323e2003-12-01 21:35:27 +0000522- At Python shutdown time (Py_Finalize()), 2.3 called cyclic garbage
523 collection twice, both before and after tearing down modules. The
524 call after tearing down modules has been disabled, because too much
525 of Python has been torn down then for __del__ methods and weakref
526 callbacks to execute sanely. The most common symptom was a sequence
527 of uninformative messages on stderr when Python shut down, produced
528 by threads trying to raise exceptions, but unable to report the nature
529 of their problems because too much of the sys module had already been
530 destroyed.
531
Guido van Rossum6c9e1302003-11-29 23:52:13 +0000532- Removed FutureWarnings related to hex/oct literals and conversions
533 and left shifts. (Thanks to Kalle Svensson for SF patch 849227.)
534 This addresses most of the remaining semantic changes promised by
535 PEP 237, except for repr() of a long, which still shows the trailing
536 'L'. The PEP appears to promise warnings for operations that
537 changed semantics compared to Python 2.3, but this is not
538 implemented; we've suffered through enough warnings related to
539 hex/oct literals and I think it's best to be silent now.
540
Raymond Hettinger4f8f9762003-11-26 08:21:35 +0000541- For str and unicode objects, the ljust(), center(), and rjust()
542 methods now accept an optional argument specifying a fill
543 character other than a space.
544
Guido van Rossumbaf0f8f2003-11-22 23:55:50 +0000545- When method objects have an attribute that can be satisfied either
546 by the function object or by the method object, the function
547 object's attribute usually wins. Christian Tismer pointed out that
548 that this is really a mistake, because this only happens for special
549 methods (like __reduce__) where the method object's version is
550 really more appropriate than the function's attribute. So from now
551 on, all method attributes will have precedence over function
552 attributes with the same name.
553
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +0000554- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 839548: if a weakref with a callback,
555 its callback, and its weakly referenced object, all became part of
556 cyclic garbage during a single run of garbage collection, the order
557 in which they were torn down was unpredictable. It was possible for
558 the callback to see partially-torn-down objects, leading to immediate
559 segfaults, or, if the callback resurrected garbage objects, to
560 resurrect insane objects that caused segfaults (or other surprises)
561 later. In one sense this wasn't surprising, because Python's cyclic gc
562 had no knowledge of Python's weakref objects. It does now. When
563 weakrefs with callbacks become part of cyclic garbage now, those
564 weakrefs are cleared first. The callbacks don't trigger then,
565 preventing the problems. If you need callbacks to trigger, then just
566 as when cyclic gc is not involved, you need to write your code so
567 that weakref objects outlive the objects they weakly reference.
Raymond Hettingera690a992003-11-16 16:17:49 +0000568
Tim Petersadd09b42003-11-12 20:43:28 +0000569- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 840829: if cyclic garbage collection
570 happened to occur during a weakref callback for a new-style class
571 instance, subtle memory corruption was the result (in a release build;
572 in a debug build, a segfault occurred reliably very soon after).
573 This has been repaired.
574
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +0000575- Compiler flags set in PYTHONSTARTUP are now active in __main__.
576
577- Added two builtin types, set() and frozenset().
578
Raymond Hettinger85c20a42003-11-06 14:06:48 +0000579- Added a reversed() builtin function that returns a reverse iterator
580 over a sequence.
581
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +0000582- Added a sorted() builtin function that returns a new sorted list
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +0000583 from any iterable.
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +0000584
Martin v. Löwis01a74b22003-10-19 18:30:01 +0000585- CObjects are now mutable (on the C level) through PyCObject_SetVoidPtr.
586
Raymond Hettinger42b1ba32003-10-16 03:41:09 +0000587- list.sort() now supports three keyword arguments: cmp, key, and reverse.
588 The key argument can be a function of one argument that extracts a
589 comparison key from the original record: mylist.sort(key=str.lower).
590 The reverse argument is a boolean value and if True will change the
591 sort order as if the comparison arguments were reversed. In addition,
592 the documentation has been amended to provide a guarantee that all sorts
593 starting with Py2.3 are guaranteed to be stable (the relative order of
594 records with equal keys is unchanged).
595
Marc-André Lemburgd7160f82003-09-22 11:14:40 +0000596- Added test whether wchar_t is signed or not. A signed wchar_t is not
597 usable as internal unicode type base for Py_UNICODE since the
598 unicode implementation assumes an unsigned type.
599
Jeremy Hyltond8082792003-09-16 19:41:39 +0000600- Fixed a bug in the cache of length-one Unicode strings that could
601 lead to a seg fault. The specific problem occurred when an earlier,
602 non-fatal error left an uninitialized Unicode object in the
603 freelist.
604
Raymond Hettinger9bfe5332003-08-27 04:55:52 +0000605- The % formatting operator now supports '%F' which is equivalent to
606 '%f'. This has always been documented but never implemented.
607
Tim Peters465fa3d2003-08-15 01:16:37 +0000608- complex(obj) could leak a little memory if obj wasn't a string or
609 number.
610
Raymond Hettingereaef6152003-08-02 07:42:57 +0000611- zip() with no arguments now returns an empty list instead of raising
612 a TypeError exception.
613
Guido van Rossum02c58f82003-10-08 21:08:29 +0000614- obj.__contains__() now returns True/False instead of 1/0. SF patch
615 820195.
616
Armin Rigo2b3eb402003-10-28 12:05:48 +0000617- Python no longer tries to be smart about recursive comparisons.
618 When comparing containers with cyclic references to themselves it
619 will now just hit the recursion limit. See SF patch 825639.
620
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000621- str and unicode builtin types now have an rsplit() method that is
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +0000622 same as split() except that it scans the string from the end
623 working towards the beginning. See SF feature request 801847.
Hye-Shik Chang060ebed2003-12-15 18:51:19 +0000624
Jim Fulton8a1a5942004-02-08 04:21:26 +0000625- Fixed a bug in object.__reduce_ex__ when using protocol 2. Failure
626 to clear the error when attempts to get the __getstate__ attribute
627 fail caused intermittent errors and odd behavior.
628
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +0000629- buffer objects based on other objects no longer cache a pointer to
630 the data and the data length. Instead, the appropriate tp_as_buffer
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +0000631 method is called as necessary.
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +0000632
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +0000633- fixed: if a file is opened with an explicit buffer size >= 1, repeated
Andrew MacIntyre4e10ed32004-04-04 07:01:35 +0000634 close() calls would attempt to free() the buffer already free()ed on
635 the first call.
636
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +0000637
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000638Extension modules
639-----------------
640
Barry Warsaw11b91a02004-06-28 00:50:43 +0000641- Added socket.getservbyport(), and make the second argument in
642 getservbyname() and getservbyport() optional.
643
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +0000644- time module code that deals with input POSIX timestamps will now raise
645 ValueError if more than a second is lost in precision when the
646 timestamp is cast to the platform C time_t type. There's no chance
647 that the platform will do anything sensible with the result in such
648 cases. This includes ctime(), localtime() and gmtime(). Assorted
649 fromtimestamp() and utcfromtimestamp() methods in the datetime module
650 were also protected. Closes bugs #919012 and 975996.
Brett Cannonb46ed712004-06-19 20:50:47 +0000651
Martin v. Löwis77ca6c42004-06-03 12:47:26 +0000652- fcntl.ioctl now warns if the mutate flag is not specified.
653
Martin v. Löwisd8948722004-06-02 09:57:56 +0000654- nt now properly allows to refer to UNC roots, e.g. in nt.stat().
655
Raymond Hettinger027bb632004-05-31 03:09:25 +0000656- the weakref module now supports additional objects: array.array,
657 sre.pattern_objects, file objects, and sockets.
658
Raymond Hettingere2eda602004-04-04 08:51:41 +0000659- operator.isMappingType() and operator.isSequenceType() now give
660 fewer false positives.
661
Brett Cannon06c34792004-03-23 23:16:54 +0000662- socket.sslerror is now a subclass of socket.error . Also added
663 socket.error to the socket module's C API.
664
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000665- Bug #920575: A problem where the _locale module segfaults on
Hye-Shik Changc3a87b82004-03-21 19:34:30 +0000666 nl_langinfo(ERA) caused by GNU libc's illegal NULL return is fixed.
667
Raymond Hettinger6e2ee862004-03-14 04:37:50 +0000668- array objects now support the copy module. Also, their resizing
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000669 scheme has been updated to match that used for list objects. This improves
Raymond Hettinger49f9bd12004-03-14 05:43:59 +0000670 the performance (speed and memory usage) of append() operations.
671 Also, array.extend() now accepts any iterable argument for repeated
672 appends without needing to create another temporary array.
Raymond Hettinger3aa82c02004-03-13 18:18:51 +0000673
Raymond Hettinger3e47f652004-03-08 18:22:35 +0000674- cStringIO.writelines() now accepts any iterable argument and writes
675 the lines one at a time rather than joining them and writing once.
676 Made a parallel change to StringIO.writelines(). Saves memory and
677 makes suitable for use with generator expressions.
678
Brett Cannond1080a32004-03-02 04:38:10 +0000679- time.strftime() now checks that the values in its time tuple argument
680 are within the proper boundaries to prevent possible crashes from the
681 platform's C library implementation of strftime(). Can possibly
682 break code that uses values outside the range that didn't cause
683 problems previously (such as sitting day of year to 0). Fixes bug
684 #897625.
685
Martin v. Löwis12af0482004-01-31 12:34:17 +0000686- The socket module now supports Bluetooth sockets, if the
687 system has <bluetooth/bluetooth.h>
688
Raymond Hettinger756b3f32004-01-29 06:37:52 +0000689- Added a collections module containing a new datatype, deque(),
690 offering high-performance, thread-safe, memory friendly appends
691 and pops on either side of the deque.
692
693- Several modules now take advantage of collections.deque() for
694 improved performance: Queue, mutex, shlex, threading, and pydoc.
695
Raymond Hettinger166958b2003-12-01 13:18:39 +0000696- The operator module has two new functions, attrgetter() and
697 itemgetter() which are useful for creating fast data extractor
698 functions for map(), list.sort(), itertools.groupby(), and
699 other functions that expect a function argument.
700
Martin v. Löwis94681fc2003-11-27 19:40:22 +0000701- socket.SHUT_{RD,WR,RDWR} was added.
702
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +0000703- os.getsid was added.
704
Guido van Rossum16b9fa82003-10-23 23:54:57 +0000705- The pwd module incorrectly advertised its struct type as
706 struct_pwent; this has been renamed to struct_passwd. (The old name
707 is still supported for backwards compatibility.)
708
Fred Drakede050322003-10-21 15:41:59 +0000709- The xml.parsers.expat module now provides Expat 1.95.7.
710
Martin v. Löwis3bbd6542003-10-03 13:57:37 +0000711- socket.IPPROTO_IPV6 was added.
712
Martin v. Löwise7a97962003-09-20 16:08:33 +0000713- readline.clear_history was added.
714
Brett Cannon62dba4c2003-09-10 19:37:42 +0000715- select.select() now accepts sequences for its first three arguments.
716
Raymond Hettinger5475f232003-08-08 12:20:03 +0000717- cStringIO now supports the f.closed attribute.
718
Anthony Baxter83f52912003-08-05 06:33:56 +0000719- The signal module now exposes SIGRTMIN and SIGRTMAX (if available).
720
Andrew M. Kuchling69f31eb2003-08-13 23:11:04 +0000721- curses module now supports use_default_colors(). [patch #739124]
722
Anthony Baxter5c68ef02003-10-04 08:04:04 +0000723- Bug #811028: ncurses.h breakage on FreeBSD/MacOS X
724
725- Bug #814613: INET_ADDRSTRLEN fix needed for all compilers on SGI
726
Gustavo Niemeyerad3fc442003-10-17 22:13:16 +0000727- Implemented non-recursive SRE matching scheme (#757624).
728
729- Implemented (?(id/name)yes|no) support in SRE (#572936).
730
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +0000731- random.seed() with no arguments or None uses time.time() as a default
732 seed. Modified to match Py2.2 behavior and use fractional seconds so
733 that successive runs are more likely to produce different sequences.
734
735- random.Random has a new method, getrandbits(k), which returns an int
736 with k random bits. This method is now an optional part of the API
737 for user defined generators. Any generator that defines genrandbits()
738 can now use randrange() for ranges with a length >= 2**53. Formerly,
739 randrange would return only even numbers for ranges that large (see
740 SF bug #812202). Generators that do not define genrandbits() now
741 issue a warning when randrange() is called with a range that large.
742
Raymond Hettingerd25c1c62003-12-06 16:23:06 +0000743- itertools has a new function, groupby() for aggregating iterables
744 into groups sharing the same key (as determined by a key function).
745 It offers some of functionality of SQL's groupby keyword and of
746 the Unix uniq filter.
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +0000747
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000748- itertools now has a new tee() function which produces two independent
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +0000749 iterators from a single iterable.
750
751- itertools.izip() with no arguments now returns an empty iterator instead
752 of raising a TypeError exception.
753
Gustavo Niemeyera6e436e2004-02-14 00:02:45 +0000754- Fixed #853061: allow BZ2Compressor.compress() to receive an empty string
755 as parameter.
756
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000757Library
758-------
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000759
Guido van Rossum5124b4a2004-07-06 17:52:32 +0000760- Bug #981530: Fix UnboundLocalError in shutil.rmtree(). This affects
761 the documented behavior: the function passed to the onerror()
762 handler can now also be os.listdir.
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000763
Brett Cannon41d13f62004-07-03 03:54:54 +0000764- Bug #754449: threading.Thread objects no longer mask exceptions raised during
765 interpreter shutdown with another exception from attempting to handle the
766 original exception.
Brett Cannoncc4e9352004-07-03 03:52:35 +0000767
Raymond Hettinger21f9fce2004-07-10 16:11:03 +0000768- Added decimal.py per PEP 327.
Raymond Hettinger7c85fa42004-07-01 11:01:35 +0000769
Brett Cannon46d4ff22004-06-29 04:08:23 +0000770- Bug #981299: rsync is now a recognized protocol in urlparse that uses a
771 "netloc" portion of a URL.
Brett Cannonfbac2942004-06-29 04:02:40 +0000772
Brett Cannon1c3fa182004-06-19 21:11:35 +0000773- Bug #919012: shutil.move() will not try to move a directory into itself.
774 Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
775
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +0000776- Bug #934282: pydoc.stripid() is now case-insensitive. Thanks Robin Becker.
777
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +0000778- Bug #823209: cmath.log() now takes an optional base argument so that its
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +0000779 API matches math.log().
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +0000780
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +0000781- Bug #957381: distutils bdist_rpm no longer fails on recent RPM versions
782 that generate a *-debuginfo.rpm.
783
Martin v. Löwisbdec50f2004-06-08 08:29:33 +0000784- os.path.devnull has been added for all supported platforms.
785
Hye-Shik Chang2400e932004-06-05 18:37:53 +0000786- Fixed #877165: distutils now picks the right C++ compiler command
787 on cygwin and mingw32.
788
Hye-Shik Chang39aef792004-06-05 13:30:56 +0000789- urllib.urlopen().readline() now handles HTTP/0.9 correctly.
790
Brett Cannon0096e262004-06-05 01:12:51 +0000791- refactored site.py into functions. Also wrote regression tests for the
792 module.
793
Fred Drakeec6229e2004-06-25 23:02:59 +0000794- The distutils install command now supports the --home option and
795 installation scheme for all platforms.
796
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +0000797- asyncore.loop now has a repeat count parameter that defaults to
Michael W. Hudson7db865a2004-06-30 09:09:38 +0000798 looping forever.
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +0000799
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +0000800- The distutils sdist command now ignores all .svn directories, in
801 addition to CVS and RCS directories. .svn directories hold
802 administrative files for the Subversion source control system.
803
Martin v. Löwis2a6ba902004-05-31 18:22:40 +0000804- Added a new module: cookielib. Automatic cookie handling for HTTP
805 clients. Also, support for cookielib has been added to urllib2, so
806 urllib2.urlopen() can transparently handle cookies.
807
Raymond Hettinger059e1702004-05-19 19:56:44 +0000808- stringprep.py now uses built-in set() instead of sets.Set().
809
Thomas Heller2e7c8322004-05-11 15:10:59 +0000810- Bug #876278: Unbounded recursion in modulefinder
811
Martin v. Löwis456ab1d2004-05-06 01:54:36 +0000812- Bug #780300: Swap public and system ID in LexicalHandler.startDTD.
813 Applications relying on the wrong order need to be corrected.
814
Hye-Shik Chang0f5bf1e2004-04-20 21:11:11 +0000815- Bug #926075: Fixed a bug that returns a wrong pattern object
816 for a string or unicode object in sre.compile() when a different
817 type pattern with the same value exists.
818
Skip Montanarod0c0c412004-04-07 16:03:02 +0000819- Added countcallers arg to trace.Trace class (--trackcalls command line arg
820 when run from the command prompt).
821
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +0000822- Fixed a caching bug in platform.platform() where the argument of 'terse' was
823 not taken into consideration when caching value.
824
Nicholas Bastin824b1b22004-03-23 18:44:39 +0000825- Added two new command-line arguments for profile (output file and
826 default sort).
827
Nicholas Bastin1eb4bfc2004-03-22 20:12:56 +0000828- Added global runctx function to profile module
829
Martin v. Löwis347c30d2004-03-21 15:29:41 +0000830- Add hlist missing entryconfigure and entrycget methods.
831
Hye-Shik Chang4a7ad1a2004-03-19 08:11:56 +0000832- The ptcp154 codec was added for Kazakh character set support.
833
Martin v. Löwisa79449e2004-02-15 21:19:18 +0000834- Support non-anonymous ftp URLs in urllib2.
835
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000836- The encodings package will now apply codec name aliases
Marc-André Lemburg57cb68f2004-01-20 18:24:34 +0000837 first before starting to try the import of the codec module.
838 This simplifies overriding built-in codecs with external
839 packages, e.g. the included CJK codecs with the JapaneseCodecs
840 package, by adjusting the aliases dictionary in encodings.aliases
841 accordingly.
842
Barry Warsaw30ff12f2004-01-04 01:13:43 +0000843- base64 now supports RFC 3548 Base16, Base32, and Base64 encoding and
844 decoding standards.
845
Jeremy Hylton37c5f2a2003-12-14 05:29:45 +0000846- urllib2 now supports processors. A processor is a handler that
847 implements an xxx_request or xxx_response method. These methods are
848 called for all requests.
849
Thomas Hellerc7501d52003-12-05 20:28:07 +0000850- distutils compilers now compile source files in the same order as
851 they are passed to the compiler.
852
Walter Dörwaldc8de4582003-12-03 20:26:05 +0000853- pprint.pprint() and pprint.pformat() now have additional parameters
854 indent, width and depth.
855
Walter Dörwald7a7ede52003-12-03 20:15:28 +0000856- Patch #750542: pprint now will pretty print subclasses of list, tuple
857 and dict too, as long as they don't overwrite __repr__().
858
Thomas Hellerb3105912003-11-28 19:42:56 +0000859- Bug #848614: distutils' msvccompiler fails to find the MSVC6
860 compiler because of incomplete registry entries.
861
Martin v. Löwisaf7dc8d2003-11-19 19:51:55 +0000862- httplib.HTTP.putrequest now offers to omit the implicit Accept-Encoding.
863
Thomas Hellercf0005b2003-11-14 10:33:20 +0000864- Patch #841977: modulefinder didn't find extension modules in packages
865
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +0000866- imaplib.IMAP4.thread was added.
867
Guido van Rossum967b0632003-11-10 02:27:19 +0000868- Plugged a minor hole in tempfile.mktemp() due to the use of
869 os.path.exists(), switched to using os.lstat() directly if possible.
870
Raymond Hettinger0c410272004-01-05 10:13:35 +0000871- bisect.py and heapq.py now have underlying C implementations
Raymond Hettinger33ecffb2004-06-10 05:03:17 +0000872 for better performance.
873
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +0000874- heapq.py has two new functions, nsmallest() and nlargest().
Raymond Hettingerb3af1812003-11-08 10:24:38 +0000875
Neil Schemenauerf607fc52003-11-05 23:03:00 +0000876- traceback.format_exc has been added (similar to print_exc but it returns
877 a string).
878
Martin v. Löwis45394c22003-10-31 13:49:36 +0000879- xmlrpclib.MultiCall has been added.
880
Martin v. Löwis48440b72003-10-31 12:52:35 +0000881- poplib.POP3_SSL has been added.
882
Martin v. Löwisd6625482003-10-12 17:37:01 +0000883- tmpfile.mkstemp now returns an absolute path even if dir is relative.
884
Brett Cannon5d9ca4e2003-10-12 04:38:48 +0000885- urlparse is RFC 2396 compliant.
886
Skip Montanarodef99342003-10-03 14:07:07 +0000887- The fieldnames argument to the csv module's DictReader constructor is now
888 optional. If omitted, the first row of the file will be used as the
889 list of fieldnames.
890
Raymond Hettinger9a80c5d2003-09-23 20:21:01 +0000891- encodings.bz2_codec was added for access to bz2 compression
892 using "a long string".encode('bz2')
893
Guido van Rossum0e5a51d2003-09-22 15:03:11 +0000894- Various improvements to unittest.py, realigned with PyUnit CVS.
895
Martin v. Löwisc6bb6c02003-09-20 15:52:21 +0000896- dircache now passes exceptions to the caller, instead of returning
897 empty lists.
898
Raymond Hettingerdeadbf52003-09-12 06:33:37 +0000899- The bsddb module and dbhash module now support the iterator and
900 mapping protocols which make them more substitutable for dictionaries
901 and shelves.
902
Skip Montanaro3f7a9482003-09-06 19:52:12 +0000903- The csv module's DictReader and DictWriter classes now accept keyword
904 arguments. This was an omission in the initial implementation.
905
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +0000906- The email package handles some RFC 2231 parameters with missing
Barry Warsaw2f5bf172003-09-03 04:09:49 +0000907 CHARSET fields better. It also includes a patch to parameter
908 parsing when semicolons appear inside quotes.
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +0000909
Raymond Hettinger6a180122003-08-17 08:34:09 +0000910- sets.py now runs under Py2.2. In addition, the argument restrictions
911 for most set methods (but not the operators) have been relaxed to
Raymond Hettinger70b9f492003-11-19 15:52:14 +0000912 allow any iterable.
Raymond Hettingeree562fc2003-08-15 21:17:04 +0000913
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +0000914- _strptime.py now has a behind-the-scenes caching mechanism for the most
Brett Cannonb7150a22003-08-05 06:27:04 +0000915 recent TimeRE instance used along with the last five unique directive
916 patterns. The overall module was also made more thread-safe.
917
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +0000918- random.cunifvariate() and random.stdgamma() were deprecated in Py2.3
919 and removed in Py2.4.
920
Anthony Baxter92bee362003-11-04 14:35:49 +0000921- Bug #823328: urllib2.py's HTTP Digest Auth support works again.
922
Hye-Shik Chang84a99312004-01-17 14:59:36 +0000923- Patch #873597: CJK codecs are imported into rank of default codecs.
924
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000925Tools/Demos
926-----------
927
Skip Montanarod5a21fd2004-01-27 14:49:04 +0000928- A hotshotmain script was added to the Tools/scripts directory that
929 makes it easy to run a script under control of the hotshot profiler.
930
Skip Montanaro030f68a2003-10-28 16:24:00 +0000931- The db2pickle and pickle2db scripts can now dump/load gdbm files.
932
Skip Montanaroe2b61e02004-03-03 17:42:08 +0000933- The file order on the command line of the pickle2db script was reversed.
934 It is now [ picklefile ] dbfile. This provides better symmetry with
935 db2pickle. The file arguments to both scripts are now source followed by
936 destination in situations where both files are given.
937
Skip Montanarofd4fa882003-09-10 19:04:13 +0000938- The pydoc script will display a link to the module documentation for
939 modules determined to be part of the core distribution. The documentation
940 base directory defaults to http://www.python.org/doc/current/lib/ but can
941 be changed by setting the PYTHONDOCS environment variable.
942
Raymond Hettingere41d4c82003-08-25 04:39:55 +0000943- texcheck.py now detects double word errors.
944
Tim Peters1a3abcb2003-08-18 23:52:09 +0000945- md5sum.py mistakenly opened input files in text mode by default, a
946 silent and dangerous change from previous releases. It once again
947 opens input files in binary mode by default. The -t and -b flags
948 remain for compatibility with the 2.3 release, but -b is the default
949 now.
950
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000951- py-electric-colon now works when pending-delete/delete-selection mode is
952 in effect
953
954- py-help-at-point is no longer bound to the F1 key - it's still bound to
955 C-c C-h
956
Barry Warsaw6ec58ca2003-09-03 03:20:37 +0000957- Pynche was fixed to not crash when there is no ~/.pynche file and no
958 -d option was given.
959
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000960Build
961-----
962
Brett Cannonf6af76d2004-06-26 04:03:06 +0000963- Bug #978645: Modules/getpath.c now builds properly in --disable-framework
964 build under OS X.
965
Skip Montanaro56f6a4f2004-06-18 02:47:22 +0000966- Profiling using gprof is now available if Python is configured with
967 --enable-profiling.
968
Martin v. Löwisf30d60e2004-06-08 08:17:44 +0000969- Profiling the VM using the Pentium TSC is now possible if Python
970 is configured --with-tsc.
971
Martin v. Löwis642c8a12004-06-04 13:55:13 +0000972- In order to find libraries, setup.py now also looks in /lib64, for use
973 on AMD64.
974
Hye-Shik Chang54f94392004-04-14 07:55:31 +0000975- Bug #934635: Fixed a bug where the configure script couldn't detect
976 getaddrinfo() properly if the KAME stack had SCTP support.
977
Skip Montanaro7befb992004-02-10 16:50:21 +0000978- Support for missing ANSI C header files (limits.h, stddef.h, etc) was
979 removed.
980
Skip Montanarodb608052004-02-07 13:53:46 +0000981- Systems requiring the D4, D6 or D7 variants of pthreads are no longer
982 supported (see PEP 11).
983
984- Universal newline support can no longer be disabled (see PEP 11).
985
Skip Montanarocd1f7432004-01-17 14:22:44 +0000986- Support for DGUX, SunOS 4, IRIX 4 and Minix was removed (see PEP 11).
987
988- Support for systems requiring --with-dl-dld or --with-sgi-dl was removed
989 (see PEP 11).
990
991- Tests for sizeof(char) were removed since ANSI C mandates that
992 sizeof(char) must be 1.
993
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000994C API
995-----
996
Tim Peters9ddf40b2004-06-20 22:41:32 +0000997- Thanks to Anthony Tuininga, the datetime module now supplies a C API
998 containing type-check macros and constructors. See new docs in the
999 Python/C API Reference Manual for details.
1000
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +00001001- Private function _PyTime_DoubleToTimet added, to convert a Python
1002 timestamp (C double) to platform time_t with some out-of-bounds
1003 checking. Declared in new header file timefuncs.h. It would be
1004 good to expose some other internal timemodule.c functions there.
1005
Martin v. Löwise440e472004-06-01 15:22:42 +00001006- New public functions PyEval_EvaluateFrame and PyGen_New to expose
1007 generator objects.
1008
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +00001009- New public functions Py_IncRef() and Py_DecRef(), exposing the
1010 functionality of the Py_XINCREF() and Py_XDECREF macros. Useful for
Thomas Hellercc10a852004-04-22 17:28:25 +00001011 runtime dynamic embedding of Python. See patch #938302, by Bob
1012 Ippolito.
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +00001013
Raymond Hettingerc1e4f9d2004-03-12 08:04:00 +00001014- Added a new macro, PySequence_Fast_ITEMS, which retrieves a fast sequence's
1015 underlying array of PyObject pointers. Useful for high speed looping.
1016
Raymond Hettinger8f5cdaa2003-12-13 11:26:12 +00001017- Created a new method flag, METH_COEXIST, which causes a method to be loaded
1018 even if already defined by a slot wrapper. This allows a __contains__
1019 method, for example, to co-exist with a defined sq_contains slot. This
1020 is helpful because the PyCFunction can take advantage of optimized calls
1021 whenever METH_O or METH_NOARGS flags are defined.
1022
Raymond Hettingerbc0f2ab2003-11-25 21:12:14 +00001023- Added a new function, PyDict_Contains(d, k) which is like
1024 PySequence_Contains() but is specific to dictionaries and executes
1025 about 10% faster.
1026
Brett Cannon26b3a7b2003-10-19 21:31:43 +00001027- Added three new macros: Py_RETURN_NONE, Py_RETURN_TRUE, and Py_RETURN_FALSE.
1028 Each return the singleton they mention after Py_INCREF()ing them.
1029
Raymond Hettingercb2da432003-10-12 18:24:34 +00001030- Added a new function, PyTuple_Pack(n, ...) for constructing tuples from a
1031 variable length argument list of Python objects without having to invoke
1032 the more complex machinery of Py_BuildValue(). PyTuple_Pack(3, a, b, c)
1033 is equivalent to Py_BuildValue("(OOO)", a, b, c).
1034
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001035Windows
1036-------
1037
Guido van Rossumfd25aca2003-11-30 22:10:15 +00001038- The _winreg module could segfault when reading very large registry
1039 values, due to unchecked alloca() calls (SF bug 851056). The fix is
1040 uses either PyMem_Malloc(n) or PyString_FromStringAndSize(NULL, n),
1041 as appropriate, followed by a size check.
1042
Tim Petersf1827cf2003-09-07 03:30:18 +00001043- file.truncate() could misbehave if the file was open for update
1044 (modes r+, rb+, w+, wb+), and the most recent file operation before
1045 the truncate() call was an input operation. SF bug 801631.
1046
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001047
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001048What's New in Python 2.3 final?
1049===============================
1050
1051*Release date: 29-Jul-2003*
1052
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001053IDLE
1054----
1055
Tim Peters36c1afc2003-07-29 17:22:57 +00001056- Bug 778400: IDLE hangs when selecting "Edit with IDLE" from explorer.
1057 This was unique to Windows, and was fixed by adding an -n switch to
1058 the command the Windows installer creates to execute "Edit with IDLE"
1059 context-menu actions.
1060
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001061- IDLE displays a new message upon startup: some "personal firewall"
1062 kinds of programs (for example, ZoneAlarm) open a dialog of their
1063 own when any program opens a socket. IDLE does use sockets, talking
1064 on the computer's internal loopback interface. This connection is not
1065 visible on any external interface and no data is sent to or received
1066 from the Internet. So, if you get such a dialog when opening IDLE,
1067 asking whether to let pythonw.exe talk to address 127.0.0.1, say yes,
1068 and rest assured no communication external to your machine is taking
1069 place. If you don't allow it, IDLE won't be able to start.
1070
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001071
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001072What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 2?
1073=============================================
1074
Tim Peters6560a252003-07-24 00:15:46 +00001075*Release date: 24-Jul-2003*
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001076
1077Core and builtins
1078-----------------
1079
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00001080- It is now possible to import from zipfiles containing additional
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001081 data bytes before the zip compatible archive. Zipfiles containing a
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00001082 comment at the end are still unsupported.
1083
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001084Extension modules
1085-----------------
1086
1087- A longstanding bug in the parser module's initialization could cause
1088 fatal internal refcount confusion when the module got initialized more
1089 than once. This has been fixed.
1090
Fred Drake01a43122003-07-21 17:17:10 +00001091- Fixed memory leak in pyexpat; using the parser's ParseFile() method
1092 with open files that aren't instances of the standard file type
1093 caused an instance of the bound .read() method to be leaked on every
1094 call.
1095
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001096- Fixed some leaks in the locale module.
1097
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001098Library
1099-------
1100
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001101- Lib/encodings/rot_13.py when used as a script, now more properly
1102 uses the first Python interpreter on your path.
1103
1104- Removed caching of TimeRE (and thus LocaleTime) in _strptime.py to
1105 fix a locale related bug in the test suite. Although another patch
1106 was needed to actually fix the problem, the cache code was not
1107 restored.
1108
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00001109IDLE
1110----
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001111
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00001112- Calltips patches.
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001113
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001114Build
1115-----
1116
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001117- For MacOSX, added -mno-fused-madd to BASECFLAGS to fix test_coercion
1118 on Panther (OSX 10.3).
1119
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001120C API
1121-----
1122
1123Windows
1124-------
1125
Tim Peters291f14e2003-07-22 02:50:01 +00001126- The tempfile module could do insane imports on Windows if PYTHONCASEOK
1127 was set, making temp file creation impossible. Repaired.
1128
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001129- Add a patch to workaround pthread_sigmask() bugs in Cygwin.
1130
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001131Mac
1132---
1133
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001134- Various fixes to pimp.
1135
1136- Scripts runs with pythonw no longer had full window manager access.
1137
1138- Don't force boot-disk-only install, for reasons unknown it causes
1139 more problems than it solves.
1140
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001141
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001142What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 1?
1143=============================================
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001144
Jeremy Hylton0ed18c22003-07-18 20:10:02 +00001145*Release date: 18-Jul-2003*
1146
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001147Core and builtins
1148-----------------
1149
Tim Peterse5e065b2003-07-06 18:36:54 +00001150- The new function sys.getcheckinterval() returns the last value set
1151 by sys.setcheckinterval().
1152
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001153- Several bugs in the symbol table phase of the compiler have been
1154 fixed. Errors could be lost and compilation could fail without
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001155 reporting an error. SF patch 763201.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001156
1157- The interpreter is now more robust about importing the warnings
1158 module. In an executable generated by freeze or similar programs,
1159 earlier versions of 2.3 would fail if the warnings module could
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001160 not be found on the file system. Fixes SF bug 771097.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001161
1162- A warning about assignments to module attributes that shadow
1163 builtins, present in earlier releases of 2.3, has been removed.
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001164
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001165- It is not possible to create subclasses of builtin types like str
1166 and tuple that define an itemsize. Earlier releases of Python 2.3
1167 allowed this by mistake, leading to crashes and other problems.
1168
1169- The thread_id is now initialized to 0 in a non-thread build. SF bug
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001170 770247.
1171
1172- SF bug 762891: "del p[key]" on proxy object no longer raises SystemError.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001173
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001174Extension modules
1175-----------------
1176
1177- weakref.proxy() can now handle "del obj[i]" for proxy objects
1178 defining __delitem__. Formerly, it generated a SystemError.
1179
1180- SSL no longer crashes the interpreter when the remote side disconnects.
1181
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001182- On Unix the mmap module can again be used to map device files.
1183
Brett Cannon20def8b2003-07-01 05:16:08 +00001184- time.strptime now exclusively uses the Python implementation
1185 contained within the _strptime module.
1186
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001187- The print slot of weakref proxy objects was removed, because it was
1188 not consistent with the object's repr slot.
1189
1190- The mmap module only checks file size for regular files, not
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001191 character or block devices. SF patch 708374.
1192
1193- The cPickle Pickler garbage collection support was fixed to traverse
1194 the find_class attribute, if present.
1195
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001196- There are several fixes for the bsddb3 wrapper module.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001197
1198 bsddb3 no longer crashes if an environment is closed before a cursor
1199 (SF bug 763298).
1200
1201 The DB and DBEnv set_get_returns_none function was extended to take
Barry Warsawd71a5512003-07-20 18:00:54 +00001202 a level instead of a boolean flag. The new level 2 means that in
1203 addition, cursor.set()/.get() methods return None instead of raising
1204 an exception.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001205
1206 A typo was fixed in DBCursor.join_item(), preventing a crash.
1207
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001208Library
1209-------
1210
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001211- distutils now supports MSVC 7.1
1212
Raymond Hettinger71adf7e2003-07-16 19:25:22 +00001213- doctest now examines all docstrings by default. Previously, it would
1214 skip over functions with private names (as indicated by the underscore
1215 naming convention). The old default created too much of a risk that
1216 user tests were being skipped inadvertently. Note, this change could
1217 break code in the unlikely case that someone had intentionally put
1218 failing tests in the docstrings of private functions. The breakage
1219 is easily fixable by specifying the old behavior when calling testmod()
1220 or Tester().
1221
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001222- There were several fixes to the way dumbdbms are closed. It's vital
1223 that a dumbdbm database be closed properly, else the on-disk data
1224 and directory files can be left in mutually inconsistent states.
1225 dumbdbm.py's _Database.__del__() method attempted to close the
1226 database properly, but a shutdown race in _Database._commit() could
1227 prevent this from working, so that a program trusting __del__() to
1228 get the on-disk files in synch could be badly surprised. The race
1229 has been repaired. A sync() method was also added so that shelve
1230 can guarantee data is written to disk.
Tim Peters7a6c7332003-07-13 17:21:10 +00001231
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001232 The close() method can now be called more than once without complaint.
Tim Petersd7472ec2003-07-13 02:22:03 +00001233
Tim Peters59aba122003-07-01 20:01:55 +00001234- The classes in threading.py are now new-style classes. That they
1235 weren't before was an oversight.
1236
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001237- The urllib2 digest authentication handlers now define the correct
1238 auth_header. The earlier versions would fail at runtime.
1239
Neal Norwitze7dfe212003-07-01 14:59:46 +00001240- SF bug 763023: fix uncaught ZeroDivisionError in difflib ratio methods
1241 when there are no lines.
1242
Neal Norwitz3c0f2c92003-07-01 21:12:47 +00001243- SF bug 763637: fix exception in Tkinter with after_cancel
1244 which could occur with Tk 8.4
1245
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001246- SF bug 770601: CGIHTTPServer.py now passes the entire environment
1247 to child processes.
1248
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001249- SF bug 765238: add filter to fnmatch's __all__.
1250
1251- SF bug 748201: make time.strptime() error messages more helpful.
1252
1253- SF patch 764470: Do not dump the args attribute of a Fault object in
1254 xmlrpclib.
1255
1256- SF patch 549151: urllib and urllib2 now redirect POSTs on 301
1257 responses.
1258
1259- SF patch 766650: The whichdb module was fixed to recognize dbm files
1260 generated by gdbm on OS/2 EMX.
1261
1262- SF bugs 763047 and 763052: fixes bug of timezone value being left as
1263 -1 when ``time.tzname[0] == time.tzname[1] and not time.daylight``
1264 is true when it should only when time.daylight is true.
1265
1266- SF bug 764548: re now allows subclasses of str and unicode to be
1267 used as patterns.
1268
1269- SF bug 763637: In Tkinter, change after_cancel() to handle tuples
1270 of varying sizes. Tk 8.4 returns a different number of values
1271 than Tk 8.3.
1272
1273- SF bug 763023: difflib.ratio() did not catch zero division.
1274
1275- The Queue module now has an __all__ attribute.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001276
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001277Tools/Demos
1278-----------
1279
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001280- See Lib/idlelib/NEWS.txt for IDLE news.
1281
Neal Norwitz592c4cc2003-07-01 04:14:28 +00001282- SF bug 753592: webchecker/wsgui now handles user supplied directories.
1283
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001284- The trace.py script has been removed. It is now in the standard library.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001285
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001286Build
1287-----
1288
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001289- Python now compiles with -fno-strict-aliasing if possible (SF bug 766696).
1290
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001291- The socket module compiles on IRIX 6.5.10.
1292
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001293- An irix64 system is treated the same way as an irix6 system (SF
1294 patch 764560).
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001295
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001296- Several definitions were missing on FreeBSD 5.x unless the
1297 __BSD_VISIBLE symbol was defined. configure now defines it as
1298 needed.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001299
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001300C API
1301-----
1302
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001303- Unicode objects now support mbcs as a built-in encoding, so the C
1304 API can use it without deferring to the encodings package.
1305
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001306Windows
1307-------
1308
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001309- The Windows implementation of PyThread_start_new_thread() never
1310 checked error returns from Windows functions correctly. As a result,
1311 it could claim to start a new thread even when the Microsoft
1312 _beginthread() function failed (due to "too many threads" -- this is
1313 on the order of thousands when it happens). In these cases, the
1314 Python exception ::
1315
1316 thread.error: can't start new thread
1317
1318 is raised now.
1319
1320- SF bug 766669: Prevent a GPF on interpreter exit when sockets are in
1321 use. The interpreter now calls WSACleanup() from Py_Finalize()
1322 instead of from DLL teardown.
1323
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001324Mac
1325---
1326
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001327- Bundlebuilder now inherits default values in the right way. It was
Walter Dörwald73a8a4b2003-07-30 12:14:02 +00001328 previously possible for app bundles to get a type of "BNDL" instead
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001329 of "APPL." Other improvements include, a --build-id option to
1330 specify the CFBundleIdentifier and using the --python option to set
1331 the executable in the bundle.
1332
1333- Fixed two bugs in MacOSX framework handling.
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001334
Jack Jansene0040412003-07-23 22:17:28 +00001335- pythonw did not allow user interaction in 2.3rc1, this has been fixed.
1336
1337- Python is now compiled with -mno-fused-madd, making all tests pass
1338 on Panther.
1339
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001340What's New in Python 2.3 beta 2?
1341================================
1342
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00001343*Release date: 29-Jun-2003*
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001344
1345Core and builtins
1346-----------------
1347
Barry Warsaw883f2232003-06-29 17:10:11 +00001348- A program can now set the environment variable PYTHONINSPECT to some
1349 string value in Python, and cause the interpreter to enter the
1350 interactive prompt at program exit, as if Python had been invoked
1351 with the -i option.
1352
Raymond Hettingerd05abde2003-06-17 05:05:49 +00001353- list.index() now accepts optional start and stop arguments. Similar
1354 changes were made to UserList.index(). SF feature request 754014.
1355
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00001356- SF patch 751998 fixes an unwanted side effect of the previous fix
1357 for SF bug 742860 (the next item).
1358
Tim Peters50d8b8b2003-05-25 17:44:31 +00001359- SF bug 742860: "WeakKeyDictionary __delitem__ uses iterkeys". This
1360 wasn't threadsafe, was very inefficient (expected time O(len(dict))
1361 instead of O(1)), and could raise a spurious RuntimeError if another
1362 thread mutated the dict during __delitem__, or if a comparison function
1363 mutated it. It also neglected to raise KeyError when the key wasn't
1364 present; didn't raise TypeError when the key wasn't of a weakly
1365 referencable type; and broke various more-or-less obscure dict
1366 invariants by using a sequence of equality comparisons over the whole
1367 set of dict keys instead of computing the key's hash code to narrow
1368 the search to those keys with the same hash code. All of these are
1369 considered to be bugs. A new implementation of __delitem__ repairs all
1370 that, but note that fixing these bugs may change visible behavior in
1371 code relying (whether intentionally or accidentally) on old behavior.
Tim Peters886128f2003-05-25 01:45:11 +00001372
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001373- SF bug 734869: Fixed a compiler bug that caused a fatal error when
1374 compiling a list comprehension that contained another list comprehension
1375 embedded in a lambda expression.
1376
Tim Peterse87568d2003-05-24 20:18:24 +00001377- SF bug 705231: builtin pow() no longer lets the platform C pow()
1378 raise -1.0 to integer powers, because (at least) glibc gets it wrong
1379 in some cases. The result should be -1.0 if the power is odd and 1.0
1380 if the power is even, and any float with a sufficiently large exponent
1381 is (mathematically) an exact even integer.
1382
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001383- SF bug 759227: A new-style class that implements __nonzero__() must
1384 return a bool or int (but not an int subclass) from that method. This
1385 matches the restriction on classic classes.
1386
Martin v. Löwis5467d4c2003-05-10 07:10:12 +00001387- The encoding attribute has been added for file objects, and set to
1388 the terminal encoding on Unix and Windows.
1389
Tim Peters015dd822003-05-04 04:16:52 +00001390- The softspace attribute of file objects became read-only by oversight.
1391 It's writable again.
1392
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00001393- Reverted a 2.3 beta 1 change to iterators for subclasses of list and
1394 tuple. By default, the iterators now access data elements directly
1395 instead of going through __getitem__. If __getitem__ access is
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001396 preferred, then __iter__ can be overridden.
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00001397
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001398- SF bug 735247: The staticmethod and super types participate in
1399 garbage collection. Before this change, it was possible for leaks to
1400 occur in functions with non-global free variables that used these types.
1401
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001402Extension modules
1403-----------------
1404
Raymond Hettinger643bcec2003-06-29 03:29:42 +00001405- the socket module has a new exception, socket.timeout, to allow
1406 timeouts to be handled separately from other socket errors.
1407
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001408- SF bug 751276: cPickle has fixed to propagate exceptions raised in
1409 user code. In earlier versions, cPickle caught and ignored any
1410 exception when it performed operations that it expected to raise
1411 specific exceptions like AttributeError.
1412
1413- cPickle Pickler and Unpickler objects now participate in garbage
1414 collection.
1415
Tim Peterscda32b72003-06-15 23:13:35 +00001416- mimetools.choose_boundary() could return duplicate strings at times,
1417 especially likely on Windows. The strings returned are now guaranteed
1418 unique within a single program run.
1419
Brett Cannon4e64d782003-06-13 23:44:35 +00001420- thread.interrupt_main() raises KeyboardInterrupt in the main thread.
1421 dummy_thread has also been modified to try to simulate the behavior.
1422
Walter Dörwald9e46abe2003-05-18 03:15:10 +00001423- array.array.insert() now treats negative indices as being relative
1424 to the end of the array, just like list.insert() does. (SF bug #739313)
1425
Tim Petersb0c854d2003-05-17 15:57:00 +00001426- The datetime module classes datetime, time, and timedelta are now
1427 properly subclassable.
Tim Petersa98924a2003-05-17 05:55:19 +00001428
Martin v. Löwis28e9ce92003-05-09 08:19:48 +00001429- _tkinter.{get|set}busywaitinterval was added.
1430
Raymond Hettinger834f4632003-05-02 20:24:56 +00001431- itertools.islice() now accepts stop=None as documented.
1432 Fixes SF bug #730685.
1433
Skip Montanaro8c044d82003-05-06 20:42:37 +00001434- the bsddb185 module is built in one restricted instance -
1435 /usr/include/db.h exists and defines HASHVERSION to be 2. This is true
1436 for many BSD-derived systems.
1437
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001438
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001439Library
1440-------
1441
Tim Petersdb3756d2003-06-29 05:30:48 +00001442- Some happy doctest extensions from Jim Fulton have been added to
1443 doctest.py. These are already being used in Zope3. The two
1444 primary ones:
1445
1446 doctest.debug(module, name) extracts the doctests from the named object
1447 in the given module, puts them in a temp file, and starts pdb running
1448 on that file. This is great when a doctest fails.
1449
1450 doctest.DocTestSuite(module=None) returns a synthesized unittest
1451 TestSuite instance, to be run by the unittest framework, which
1452 runs all the doctests in the module. This allows writing tests in
1453 doctest style (which can be clearer and shorter than writing tests
1454 in unittest style), without losing unittest's powerful testing
1455 framework features (which doctest lacks).
1456
Tim Peters6ebe61f2003-06-27 20:48:05 +00001457- For compatibility with doctests created before 2.3, if an expected
1458 output block consists solely of "1" and the actual output block
1459 consists solely of "True", it's accepted as a match; similarly
1460 for "0" and "False". This is quite un-doctest-like, but is practical.
1461 The behavior can be disabled by passing the new doctest module
1462 constant DONT_ACCEPT_TRUE_FOR_1 to the new optionflags optional
1463 argument.
1464
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001465- ZipFile.testzip() now only traps BadZipfile exceptions. Previously,
1466 a bare except caught to much and reported all errors as a problem
1467 in the archive.
1468
1469- The logging module now has a new function, makeLogRecord() making
1470 LogHandler easier to interact with DatagramHandler and SocketHandler.
1471
Skip Montanaro364ca402003-06-17 12:58:31 +00001472- The cgitb module has been extended to support plain text display (SF patch
1473 569574).
1474
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00001475- A brand new version of IDLE (from the IDLEfork project at
1476 SourceForge) is now included as Lib/idlelib. The old Tools/idle is
1477 no more.
1478
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001479- Added a new module: trace (documentation missing). This module used
1480 to be distributed in Tools/scripts. It uses sys.settrace() to trace
1481 code execution -- either function calls or individual lines. It can
1482 generate tracing output during execution or a post-mortem report of
1483 code coverage.
1484
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00001485- The threading module has new functions settrace() and setprofile()
1486 that cooperate with the functions of the same name in the sys
1487 module. A function registered with the threading module will
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001488 be used for all threads it creates. The new trace module uses this
1489 to provide tracing for code running in threads.
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00001490
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00001491- copy.py: applied SF patch 707900, fixing bug 702858, by Steven
1492 Taschuk. Copying a new-style class that had a reference to itself
1493 didn't work. (The same thing worked fine for old-style classes.)
Martin v. Löwisba8f5ff2003-06-14 07:10:06 +00001494 Builtin functions are now treated as atomic, fixing bug #746304.
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00001495
Raymond Hettingerc24d7672003-06-08 19:42:33 +00001496- difflib.py has two new functions: context_diff() and unified_diff().
1497
Guido van Rossumfa19f7c2003-05-16 01:46:51 +00001498- More fixes to urllib (SF 549151): (a) When redirecting, always use
1499 GET. This is common practice and more-or-less sanctioned by the
1500 HTTP standard. (b) Add a handler for 307 redirection, which becomes
1501 an error for POST, but a regular redirect for GET and HEAD
1502
Guido van Rossumbf1bef82003-05-13 18:01:19 +00001503- Added optional 'onerror' argument to os.walk(), to control error
1504 handling.
1505
Martin v. Löwise59e2ba2003-05-03 09:09:02 +00001506- inspect.is{method|data}descriptor was added, to allow pydoc display
1507 __doc__ of data descriptors.
1508
Skip Montanaro4a7751c2003-04-29 21:07:16 +00001509- Fixed socket speed loss caused by use of the _socketobject wrapper class
1510 in socket.py.
1511
Raymond Hettinger22952a32003-05-20 04:59:56 +00001512- timeit.py now checks the current directory for imports.
1513
Gustavo Niemeyer9556fba2003-06-07 17:53:08 +00001514- urllib2.py now knows how to order proxy classes, so the user doesn't
1515 have to insert it in front of other classes, nor do dirty tricks like
1516 inserting a "dummy" HTTPHandler after a ProxyHandler when building an
1517 opener with proxy support.
1518
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00001519- Iterators have been added for dbm keys.
1520
1521- random.Random objects can now be pickled.
1522
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001523Tools/Demos
1524-----------
1525
Martin v. Löwisb8c084e2003-06-14 09:03:46 +00001526- pydoc now offers help on keywords and topics.
1527
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00001528- Tools/idle is gone; long live Lib/idlelib.
1529
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00001530- diff.py prints file diffs in context, unified, or ndiff formats,
1531 providing a command line interface to difflib.py.
Raymond Hettinger2f3c74a2003-06-08 23:10:15 +00001532
Raymond Hettinger71e00332003-05-10 03:30:13 +00001533- texcheck.py is a new script for making a rough validation of Python LaTeX
1534 files.
1535
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001536Build
1537-----
1538
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001539- Setting DESTDIR during 'make install' now allows specifying a
Martin v. Löwis3b8ee082003-05-11 20:25:35 +00001540 different root directory.
1541
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001542C API
1543-----
1544
Tim Peters3cfe7542003-05-21 21:29:48 +00001545- PyType_Ready(): If a type declares that it participates in gc
1546 (Py_TPFLAGS_HAVE_GC), and its base class does not, and its base class's
1547 tp_free slot is the default _PyObject_Del, and type does not define
1548 a tp_free slot itself, _PyObject_GC_Del is assigned to type->tp_free.
1549 Previously _PyObject_Del was inherited, which could at best lead to a
1550 segfault. In addition, if even after this magic the type's tp_free
1551 slot is _PyObject_Del or NULL, and the type is a base type
1552 (Py_TPFLAGS_BASETYPE), TypeError is raised: since the type is a base
1553 type, its dealloc function must call type->tp_free, and since the type
1554 is gc'able, tp_free must not be NULL or _PyObject_Del.
1555
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00001556- PyThreadState_SetAsyncExc(): A new API (deliberately accessible only
1557 from C) to interrupt a thread by sending it an exception. It is
1558 intentional that you have to write your own C extension to call it
1559 from Python.
1560
1561
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001562New platforms
1563-------------
1564
1565None this time.
1566
1567Tests
1568-----
1569
1570- test_imp rewritten so that it doesn't raise RuntimeError if run as a
1571 side effect of being imported ("import test.autotest").
1572
1573Windows
1574-------
1575
Tim Petersfaa697a2003-06-22 01:42:20 +00001576- The Windows installer ships with Tcl/Tk 8.4.3 (upgraded from 8.4.1).
1577
Tim Petersc4607da2003-05-08 18:13:59 +00001578- The installer always suggested that Python be installed on the C:
1579 drive, due to a hardcoded "C:" generated by the Wise installation
1580 wizard. People with machines where C: is not the system drive
1581 usually want Python installed on whichever drive is their system drive
1582 instead. We removed the hardcoded "C:", and two testers on machines
1583 where C: is not the system drive report that the installer now
1584 suggests their system drive. Note that you can always select the
1585 directory you want in the "Select Destination Directory" dialog --
1586 that's what it's for.
1587
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001588Mac
1589---
1590
Just van Rossum99bc1fc2003-05-09 15:01:25 +00001591- There's a new module called "autoGIL", which offers a mechanism to
1592 automatically release the Global Interpreter Lock when an event loop
1593 goes to sleep, allowing other threads to run. It's currently only
1594 supported on OSX, in the Mach-O version.
Jack Jansenf5e23ff2003-06-16 13:53:40 +00001595- The OSA modules now allow direct access to properties of the
1596 toplevel application class (in AppleScript terminology).
1597- The Package Manager can now update itself.
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001598
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00001599SourceForge Bugs and Patches Applied
1600------------------------------------
1601
1602430160, 471893, 501716, 542562, 549151, 569574, 595837, 596434,
1603598163, 604210, 604716, 610332, 612627, 614770, 620190, 621891,
1604622042, 639139, 640236, 644345, 649742, 649742, 658233, 660022,
1605661318, 661676, 662807, 662923, 666219, 672855, 678325, 682347,
1606683486, 684981, 685773, 686254, 692776, 692959, 693094, 696777,
1607697989, 700827, 703666, 708495, 708604, 708901, 710733, 711902,
1608713722, 715782, 718286, 719359, 719367, 723136, 723831, 723962,
1609724588, 724767, 724767, 725942, 726150, 726446, 726869, 727051,
1610727719, 727719, 727805, 728277, 728563, 728656, 729096, 729103,
1611729293, 729297, 729300, 729317, 729395, 729622, 729817, 730170,
1612730296, 730594, 730685, 730826, 730963, 731209, 731403, 731504,
1613731514, 731626, 731635, 731643, 731644, 731644, 731689, 732124,
1614732143, 732234, 732284, 732284, 732479, 732761, 732783, 732951,
1615733667, 733781, 734118, 734231, 734869, 735051, 735293, 735527,
1616735613, 735694, 736962, 736962, 737970, 738066, 739313, 740055,
1617740234, 740301, 741806, 742126, 742741, 742860, 742860, 742911,
1618744041, 744104, 744238, 744687, 744877, 745055, 745478, 745525,
1619745620, 746012, 746304, 746366, 746801, 746953, 747348, 747667,
1620747954, 748846, 748849, 748973, 748975, 749191, 749210, 749759,
1621749831, 749911, 750008, 750092, 750542, 750595, 751038, 751107,
1622751276, 751451, 751916, 751941, 751956, 751998, 752671, 753451,
1623753602, 753617, 753845, 753925, 754014, 754340, 754447, 755031,
1624755087, 755147, 755245, 755683, 755987, 756032, 756996, 757058,
1625757229, 757818, 757821, 757822, 758112, 758910, 759227, 759889,
1626760257, 760703, 760792, 761104, 761337, 761519, 761830, 762455
1627
1628
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001629What's New in Python 2.3 beta 1?
1630================================
1631
Guido van Rossumfa1eddf2003-04-25 19:19:52 +00001632*Release date: 25-Apr-2003*
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001633
1634Core and builtins
1635-----------------
1636
Thomas Heller5eccabc2003-04-23 19:35:25 +00001637- New format codes B, H, I, k and K have been implemented for
1638 PyArg_ParseTuple and PyBuild_Value.
1639
Alex Martellia70b1912003-04-22 08:12:33 +00001640- New builtin function sum(seq, start=0) returns the sum of all the
1641 items in iterable object seq, plus start (items are normally numbers,
1642 and cannot be strings).
1643
Guido van Rossumaa86e352003-04-19 18:15:10 +00001644- bool() called without arguments now returns False rather than
1645 raising an exception. This is consistent with calling the
1646 constructors for the other builtin types -- called without argument
1647 they all return the false value of that type. (SF patch #724135)
1648
Guido van Rossumcf8d2852003-04-17 16:53:26 +00001649- In support of PEP 269 (making the pgen parser generator accessible
1650 from Python), some changes to the pgen code structure were made; a
1651 few files that used to be linked only with pgen are now linked with
1652 Python itself.
1653
Guido van Rossumc1f6e8c2003-04-16 21:13:23 +00001654- The repr() of a weakref object now shows the __name__ attribute of
1655 the referenced object, if it has one.
1656
Guido van Rossum76ba09f2003-04-16 19:40:58 +00001657- super() no longer ignores data descriptors, except __class__. See
1658 the thread started at
1659 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2003-April/034338.html
1660
Guido van Rossum3a3cca52003-04-14 20:58:14 +00001661- list.insert(i, x) now interprets negative i as it would be
1662 interpreted by slicing, so negative values count from the end of the
1663 list. This was the only place where such an interpretation was not
1664 placed on a list index.
1665
Guido van Rossumefbbb1c2003-04-11 18:43:06 +00001666- range() now works even if the arguments are longs with magnitude
1667 larger than sys.maxint, as long as the total length of the sequence
1668 fits. E.g., range(2**100, 2**101, 2**100) is the following list:
1669 [1267650600228229401496703205376L]. (SF patch #707427.)
1670
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001671- Some horridly obscure problems were fixed involving interaction
1672 between garbage collection and old-style classes with "ambitious"
1673 getattr hooks. If an old-style instance didn't have a __del__ method,
1674 but did have a __getattr__ hook, and the instance became reachable
1675 only from an unreachable cycle, and the hook resurrected or deleted
1676 unreachable objects when asked to resolve "__del__", anything up to
1677 a segfault could happen. That's been repaired.
1678
Raymond Hettingera3e1e4c2003-03-06 23:54:28 +00001679- dict.pop now takes an optional argument specifying a default
1680 value to return if the key is not in the dict. If a default is not
1681 given and the key is not found, a KeyError will still be raised.
1682 Parallel changes were made to UserDict.UserDict and UserDict.DictMixin.
1683 [SF patch #693753] (contributed by Michael Stone.)
1684
Martin v. Löwis73d538b2003-03-05 15:13:47 +00001685- sys.getfilesystemencoding() was added to expose
1686 Py_FileSystemDefaultEncoding.
Guido van Rossum46d3dc32003-03-01 03:20:41 +00001687
1688- New function sys.exc_clear() clears the current exception. This is
1689 rarely needed, but can sometimes be useful to release objects
1690 referenced by the traceback held in sys.exc_info()[2]. (SF patch
1691 #693195.)
1692
Neal Norwitzd5a65a72003-02-23 23:11:41 +00001693- On 64-bit systems, a dictionary could contain duplicate long/int keys
1694 if the key value was larger than 2**32. See SF bug #689659.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001695
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00001696- Fixed SF bug #663074. The codec system was using global static
Walter Dörwaldfa86bf52003-03-31 16:15:13 +00001697 variables to store internal data. As a result, any attempts to use the
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00001698 unicode system with multiple active interpreters, or successive
1699 interpreter executions, would fail.
1700
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00001701- "%c" % u"a" now returns a unicode string instead of raising a
Walter Dörwald44f527f2003-04-02 16:37:24 +00001702 TypeError. u"%c" % 0xffffffff now raises a OverflowError instead
Walter Dörwald1e469c52003-04-02 16:57:59 +00001703 of a ValueError to be consistent with "%c" % 256. See SF patch #710127.
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00001704
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001705Extension modules
1706-----------------
1707
Guido van Rossume7adda92003-04-25 05:52:37 +00001708- The socket module now provides the functions inet_pton and inet_ntop
1709 for converting between string and packed representation of IP
1710 addresses. There is also a new module variable, has_ipv6, which is
1711 True iff the current Python has IPv6 support. See SF patch #658327.
1712
Martin v. Löwisbfe175c2003-04-16 19:42:51 +00001713- Tkinter wrappers around Tcl variables now pass objects directly
1714 to Tcl, instead of first converting them to strings.
1715
Guido van Rossum41c99e72003-04-14 17:59:34 +00001716- The .*? pattern in the re module is now special-cased to avoid the
1717 recursion limit. (SF patch #720991 -- many thanks to Gary Herron
1718 and Greg Chapman.)
1719
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00001720- New function sys.call_tracing() allows pdb to debug code
1721 recursively.
1722
Tim Peters730f5532003-04-08 17:17:17 +00001723- New function gc.get_referents(obj) returns a list of objects
Tim Peters0f81ab62003-04-08 16:39:48 +00001724 directly referenced by obj. In effect, it exposes what the object's
1725 tp_traverse slot does, and can be helpful when debugging memory
1726 leaks.
1727
Martin v. Löwis7fb697b2003-04-03 04:49:12 +00001728- The iconv module has been removed from this release.
1729
Tim Petersd50ade62003-03-20 18:32:13 +00001730- The platform-independent routines for packing floats in IEEE formats
1731 (struct.pack's <f, >f, <d, and >d codes; pickle and cPickle's protocol 1
1732 pickling of floats) ignored that rounding can cause a carry to
1733 propagate. The worst consequence was that, in rare cases, <f and >f
1734 could produce strings that, when unpacked again, were a factor of 2
1735 away from the original float. This has been fixed. See SF bug
1736 #705836.
1737
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001738- New function time.tzset() provides access to the C library tzset()
Guido van Rossumd11b62e2003-03-14 21:51:36 +00001739 function, if supported. (SF patch #675422.)
1740
Neal Norwitz12e22172003-03-03 21:16:39 +00001741- Using createfilehandler, deletefilehandler, createtimerhandler functions
1742 on Tkinter.tkinter (_tkinter module) no longer crashes the interpreter.
1743 See SF bug #692416.
1744
Michael W. Hudsonf0089982003-03-03 12:29:42 +00001745- Modified the fcntl.ioctl() function to allow modification of a passed
1746 mutable buffer (for details see the reference documentation).
1747
Raymond Hettinger61fe64d2003-02-23 04:40:07 +00001748- Made user requested changes to the itertools module.
1749 Subsumed the times() function into repeat().
1750 Added chain() and cycle().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001751
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00001752- The rotor module is now deprecated; the encryption algorithm it uses
Andrew M. Kuchlingfb5f4852003-04-24 13:19:56 +00001753 is not believed to be secure, and including crypto code with Python
1754 has implications for exporting and importing it in various countries.
1755
Skip Montanaro89feabc2003-03-30 04:54:24 +00001756- The socket module now always uses the _socketobject wrapper class, even on
1757 platforms which have dup(2). The makefile() method is built directly
1758 on top of the socket without duplicating the file descriptor, allowing
1759 timeouts to work properly.
1760
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001761Library
1762-------
1763
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00001764- New generator function os.walk() is an easy-to-use alternative to
1765 os.path.walk(). See os module docs for details. os.path.walk()
1766 isn't deprecated at this time, but may become deprecated in a
1767 future release.
1768
Marc-André Lemburg246d8472003-04-24 11:36:11 +00001769- Added new module "platform" which provides a wide range of tools
1770 for querying platform dependent features.
1771
Andrew M. Kuchling4e42b312003-04-24 16:45:05 +00001772- netrc now allows ASCII punctuation characters in passwords.
Raymond Hettinger1d877862003-04-23 19:06:08 +00001773
Martin v. Löwis153c9e42003-04-19 20:59:03 +00001774- shelve now supports the optional writeback argument, and exposes
1775 pickle protocol versions.
1776
Guido van Rossuma2685402003-04-19 18:04:57 +00001777- Several methods of nntplib.NNTP have grown an optional file argument
1778 which specifies a file where to divert the command's output
1779 (already supported by the body() method). (SF patch #720468)
1780
Martin v. Löwis281b2c62003-04-18 21:04:39 +00001781- The self-documenting XML server library DocXMLRPCServer was added.
1782
Martin v. Löwis2548c732003-04-18 10:39:54 +00001783- Support for internationalized domain names has been added through
1784 the 'idna' and 'punycode' encodings, the 'stringprep' module, the
1785 'mkstringprep' tool, and enhancements to the socket and httplib
1786 modules.
1787
Walter Dörwald5688b7a2003-04-16 09:46:13 +00001788- htmlentitydefs has two new dictionaries: name2codepoint maps
1789 HTML entity names to Unicode codepoints (as integers).
1790 codepoint2name is the reverse mapping. See SF patch #722017.
1791
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00001792- pdb has a new command, "debug", which lets you step through
1793 arbitrary code from the debugger's (pdb) prompt.
1794
Raymond Hettingerc377cbf2003-04-04 22:56:42 +00001795- unittest.failUnlessEqual and its equivalent unittest.assertEqual now
1796 return 'not a == b' rather than 'a != b'. This gives the desired
1797 result for classes that define __eq__ without defining __ne__.
1798
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001799- sgmllib now supports SGML marked sections, in particular the
Martin v. Löwis3163a3b2003-03-30 14:25:40 +00001800 MS Office extensions.
1801
Raymond Hettinger42182eb2003-03-09 05:33:33 +00001802- The urllib module now offers support for the iterator protocol.
1803 SF patch 698520 contributed by Brett Cannon.
1804
Guido van Rossum9589a252003-03-06 01:56:12 +00001805- New module timeit provides a simple framework for timing the
1806 execution speed of expressions and statements.
1807
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001808- sets.Set objects now support mixed-type __eq__ and __ne__, instead
1809 of raising TypeError. If x is a Set object and y is a non-Set object,
1810 x == y is False, and x != y is True. This is akin to the change made
1811 for mixed-type comparisons of datetime objects in 2.3a2; more info
1812 about the rationale is in the NEWS entry for that. See also SF bug
1813 report <http://www.python.org/sf/693121>.
1814
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00001815- On Unix platforms, if os.listdir() is called with a Unicode argument,
1816 it now returns Unicode strings. (This behavior was added earlier
1817 to the Windows NT/2k/XP version of os.listdir().)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001818
Andrew M. Kuchling6f177d42003-02-28 22:09:33 +00001819- Distutils: both 'py_modules' and 'packages' keywords can now be specified
1820 in core.setup(). Previously you could supply one or the other, but
1821 not both of them. (SF patch #695090 from Bernhard Herzog)
1822
Skip Montanaro64a839e2003-03-20 23:36:55 +00001823- New csv package makes it easy to read/write CSV files.
1824
Gustavo Niemeyer68d8cef2003-04-17 21:31:33 +00001825- Module shlex has been extended to allow posix-like shell parsings,
1826 including a split() function for easy spliting of quoted strings and
1827 commands. An iterator interface was also implemented.
1828
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001829Tools/Demos
1830-----------
1831
Tim Peters21d7d4d2003-04-18 00:45:59 +00001832- New script combinerefs.py helps analyze new PYTHONDUMPREFS output.
1833 See the module docstring for details.
1834
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001835Build
1836-----
1837
Neal Norwitz35892b92003-02-23 23:45:35 +00001838- Fix problem building on OSF1 because the compiler only accepted
1839 preprocessor directives that start in column 1. (SF bug #691793.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001840
1841C API
1842-----
1843
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00001844- Added PyGC_Collect(), equivalent to calling gc.collect().
1845
Guido van Rossum0fc8f002003-04-15 15:12:39 +00001846- PyThreadState_GetDict() was changed not to raise an exception or
1847 issue a fatal error when no current thread state is available. This
1848 makes it possible to print dictionaries when no thread is active.
1849
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00001850- LONG_LONG was renamed to PY_LONG_LONG. Extensions that use this and
1851 need compatibility with previous versions can use this:
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00001852
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00001853 #ifndef PY_LONG_LONG
1854 #define PY_LONG_LONG LONG_LONG
1855 #endif
Martin v. Löwisb9a0f912003-03-29 10:06:18 +00001856
Raymond Hettinger1da1dbf2003-03-17 19:46:11 +00001857- Added PyObject_SelfIter() to fill the tp_iter slot for the
Raymond Hettinger01538262003-03-17 08:24:35 +00001858 typical case where the method returns its self argument.
1859
Guido van Rossume5c691a2003-03-07 15:13:17 +00001860- The extended type structure used for heap types (new-style
1861 classes defined by Python code using a class statement) is now
1862 exported from object.h as PyHeapTypeObject. (SF patch #696193.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001863
1864New platforms
1865-------------
1866
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00001867None this time.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001868
1869Tests
1870-----
1871
Neal Norwitz55b61d22003-02-28 19:57:03 +00001872- test_timeout now requires -u network to be passed to regrtest to run.
1873 See SF bug #692988.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001874
1875Windows
1876-------
1877
Tim Peters11b23062003-04-23 02:39:17 +00001878- os.fsync() now exists on Windows, and calls the Microsoft _commit()
1879 function.
1880
Guido van Rossumf4050642003-04-09 19:39:06 +00001881- New function winsound.MessageBeep() wraps the Win32 API
1882 MessageBeep().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001883
1884Mac
1885---
1886
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00001887- os.listdir() now returns Unicode strings on MacOS X when called with
1888 a Unicode argument. See the general news item under "Library".
Just van Rossum46c97842003-02-25 21:42:15 +00001889
Jack Jansendeac2ac2003-02-24 11:04:17 +00001890- A new method MacOS.WMAvailable() returns true if it is safe to access
1891 the window manager, false otherwise.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001892
Jack Jansencf76be02003-03-24 12:13:54 +00001893- EasyDialogs dialogs are now movable-modal, and if the application is
1894 currently in the background they will ask to be moved to the foreground
1895 before displaying.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001896
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00001897- OSA Scripting support has improved a lot, and gensuitemodule.py can now
Jack Jansende354b72003-04-11 15:37:20 +00001898 be used by mere mortals. The documentation is now also more or less
1899 complete.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001900
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00001901- The IDE (in a framework build) now includes introductory documentation
1902 in Apple Help Viewer format.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001903
1904
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001905What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 2?
1906=================================
1907
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00001908*Release date: 19-Feb-2003*
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001909
1910Core and builtins
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00001911-----------------
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001912
Walter Dörwald2ffec022003-02-19 16:34:11 +00001913- Negative positions returned from PEP 293 error callbacks are now
1914 treated as being relative to the end of the input string. Positions
1915 that are out of bounds raise an IndexError.
1916
Guido van Rossum162e38c2003-02-19 15:25:10 +00001917- sys.path[0] (the directory from which the script is loaded) is now
1918 turned into an absolute pathname, unless it is the empty string.
1919 (SF patch #664376.)
1920
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00001921- Finally fixed the bug in compile() and exec where a string ending
1922 with an indented code block but no newline would raise SyntaxError.
1923 This would have been a four-line change in parsetok.c... Except
1924 codeop.py depends on this behavior, so a compilation flag had to be
1925 invented that causes the tokenizer to revert to the old behavior;
1926 this required extra changes to 2 .h files, 2 .c files, and 2 .py
Guido van Rossum1442dc12003-02-13 22:19:20 +00001927 files. (Fixes SF bug #501622.)
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00001928
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00001929- If a new-style class defines neither __new__ nor __init__, its
1930 constructor would ignore all arguments. This is changed now: the
1931 constructor refuses arguments in this case. This might break code
1932 that worked under Python 2.2. The simplest fix is to add a no-op
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001933 __init__: ``def __init__(self, *args, **kw): pass``.
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00001934
Guido van Rossum48035eb2003-02-12 17:05:26 +00001935- Through a bytecode optimizer bug (and I bet you didn't even know
1936 Python *had* a bytecode optimizer :-), "unsigned" hex/oct constants
1937 with a leading minus sign would come out with the wrong sign.
1938 ("Unsigned" hex/oct constants are those with a face value in the
1939 range sys.maxint+1 through sys.maxint*2+1, inclusive; these have
1940 always been interpreted as negative numbers through sign folding.)
1941 E.g. 0xffffffff is -1, and -(0xffffffff) is 1, but -0xffffffff would
1942 come out as -4294967295. This was the case in Python 2.2 through
1943 2.2.2 and 2.3a1, and in Python 2.4 it will once again have that
1944 value, but according to PEP 237 it really needs to be 1 now. This
1945 will be backported to Python 2.2.3 a well. (SF #660455)
1946
Guido van Rossum47710652003-02-12 20:48:22 +00001947- int(s, base) sometimes sign-folds hex and oct constants; it only
1948 does this when base is 0 and s.strip() starts with a '0'. When the
1949 sign is actually folded, as in int("0xffffffff", 0) on a 32-bit
1950 machine, which returns -1, a FutureWarning is now issued; in Python
1951 2.4, this will return 4294967295L, as do int("+0xffffffff", 0) and
1952 int("0xffffffff", 16) right now. (PEP 347)
1953
Guido van Rossuma89d10e2003-02-12 03:58:38 +00001954- super(X, x): x may now be a proxy for an X instance, i.e.
1955 issubclass(x.__class__, X) but not issubclass(type(x), X).
1956
Guido van Rossum03bc7d32003-02-12 03:32:58 +00001957- isinstance(x, X): if X is a new-style class, this is now equivalent
1958 to issubclass(type(x), X) or issubclass(x.__class__, X). Previously
1959 only type(x) was tested. (For classic classes this was already the
1960 case.)
1961
Just van Rossum73ffb4a2003-02-10 09:57:08 +00001962- compile(), eval() and the exec statement now fully support source code
1963 passed as unicode strings.
1964
Neal Norwitzde8b94c2003-02-10 02:12:43 +00001965- int subclasses can be initialized with longs if the value fits in an int.
1966 See SF bug #683467.
1967
Tim Petersbf2674b2003-02-02 07:51:32 +00001968- long(string, base) takes time linear in len(string) when base is a power
1969 of 2 now. It used to take time quadratic in len(string).
1970
Martin v. Löwis8afd7572003-01-25 22:46:11 +00001971- filter returns now Unicode results for Unicode arguments.
1972
Martin v. Löwisaf6a27a2003-01-03 19:16:14 +00001973- raw_input can now return Unicode objects.
1974
Skip Montanaro4abd5f02003-01-02 20:51:08 +00001975- List objects' sort() method now accepts None as the comparison function.
1976 Passing None is semantically identical to calling sort() with no
1977 arguments.
1978
Neal Norwitz1a997502003-01-13 20:13:12 +00001979- Fixed crash when printing a subclass of str and __str__ returned self.
1980 See SF bug #667147.
1981
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00001982- Fixed an invalid RuntimeWarning and an undetected error when trying
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00001983 to convert a long integer into a float which couldn't fit.
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00001984 See SF bug #676155.
1985
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00001986- Function objects now have a __module__ attribute that is bound to
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00001987 the name of the module in which the function was defined. This
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00001988 applies for C functions and methods as well as functions and methods
1989 defined in Python. This attribute is used by pickle.whichmodule(),
1990 which changes the behavior of whichmodule slightly. In Python 2.2
1991 whichmodule() returns "__main__" for functions that are not defined
1992 at the top-level of a module (examples: methods, nested functions).
1993 Now whichmodule() will return the proper module name.
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00001994
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001995Extension modules
1996-----------------
1997
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00001998- operator.isNumberType() now checks that the object has a nb_int or
1999 nb_float slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
2000 tp_as_number pointer.
2001
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00002002- The imp module now has ways to acquire and release the "import
2003 lock": imp.acquire_lock() and imp.release_lock(). Note: this is a
2004 reentrant lock, so releasing the lock only truly releases it when
2005 this is the last release_lock() call. You can check with
2006 imp.lock_held(). (SF bug #580952 and patch #683257.)
2007
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002008- Change to cPickle to match pickle.py (see below and PEP 307).
2009
Neal Norwitz9caf9c02003-02-10 01:54:06 +00002010- Fix some bugs in the parser module. SF bug #678518.
2011
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00002012- Thanks to Scott David Daniels, a subtle bug in how the zlib
Walter Dörwald28d81962003-02-03 20:53:14 +00002013 extension implemented flush() was fixed. Scott also rewrote the
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00002014 zlib test suite using the unittest module. (SF bug #640230 and
2015 patch #678531.)
2016
Raymond Hettinger96ef8112003-02-01 00:10:11 +00002017- Added an itertools module containing high speed, memory efficient
2018 looping constructs inspired by tools from Haskell and SML.
2019
Guido van Rossum99d4abf2003-01-27 22:22:50 +00002020- The SSL module now handles sockets with a timeout set correctly (SF
2021 patch #675750, fixing SF bug #675552).
2022
Barry Warsawf8ba39c2003-01-07 20:55:26 +00002023- os/posixmodule has grown the sysexits.h constants (EX_OK and friends).
2024
Guido van Rossum6d0d3652003-01-07 20:34:19 +00002025- Fixed broken threadstate swap in readline that could cause fatal
2026 errors when a readline hook was being invoked while a background
2027 thread was active. (SF bugs #660476 and #513033.)
2028
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002029- fcntl now exposes the strops.h I_* constants.
2030
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00002031- Fix a crash on Solaris that occurred when calling close() on
2032 an mmap'ed file which was already closed. (SF patch #665913)
2033
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002034- Fixed several serious bugs in the zipimport implementation.
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002035
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00002036- datetime changes:
2037
Guido van Rossum8b7a9a32003-04-14 22:01:58 +00002038 The date class is now properly subclassable. (SF bug #720908)
2039
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00002040 The datetime and datetimetz classes have been collapsed into a single
2041 datetime class, and likewise the time and timetz classes into a single
2042 time class. Previously, a datetimetz object with tzinfo=None acted
2043 exactly like a datetime object, and similarly for timetz. This wasn't
2044 enough of a difference to justify distinct classes, and life is simpler
2045 now.
2046
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00002047 today() and now() now round system timestamps to the closest
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002048 microsecond <http://www.python.org/sf/661086>. This repairs an
2049 irritation most likely seen on Windows systems.
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00002050
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00002051 In dt.astimezone(tz), if tz.utcoffset(dt) returns a duration,
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00002052 ValueError is raised if tz.dst(dt) returns None (2.3a1 treated it
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002053 as 0 instead, but a tzinfo subclass wishing to participate in
2054 time zone conversion has to take a stand on whether it supports
2055 DST; if you don't care about DST, then code dst() to return 0 minutes,
2056 meaning that DST is never in effect).
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00002057
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00002058 The tzinfo methods utcoffset() and dst() must return a timedelta object
2059 (or None) now. In 2.3a1 they could also return an int or long, but that
2060 was an unhelpfully redundant leftover from an earlier version wherein
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00002061 they couldn't return a timedelta. TOOWTDI.
2062
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00002063 The example tzinfo class for local time had a bug. It was replaced
2064 by a later example coded by Guido.
2065
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00002066 datetime.astimezone(tz) no longer raises an exception when the
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002067 input datetime has no UTC equivalent in tz. For typical "hybrid" time
2068 zones (a single tzinfo subclass modeling both standard and daylight
2069 time), this case can arise one hour per year, at the hour daylight time
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00002070 ends. See new docs for details. In short, the new behavior mimics
2071 the local wall clock's behavior of repeating an hour in local time.
2072
2073 dt.astimezone() can no longer be used to convert between naive and aware
2074 datetime objects. If you merely want to attach, or remove, a tzinfo
2075 object, without any conversion of date and time members, use
2076 dt.replace(tzinfo=whatever) instead, where "whatever" is None or a
2077 tzinfo subclass instance.
2078
2079 A new method tzinfo.fromutc(dt) can be overridden in tzinfo subclasses
2080 to give complete control over how a UTC time is to be converted to
2081 a local time. The default astimezone() implementation calls fromutc()
2082 as its last step, so a tzinfo subclass can affect that too by overriding
2083 fromutc(). It's expected that the default fromutc() implementation will
2084 be suitable as-is for "almost all" time zone subclasses, but the
2085 creativity of political time zone fiddling appears unbounded -- fromutc()
2086 allows the highly motivated to emulate any scheme expressible in Python.
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002087
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00002088 datetime.now(): The optional tzinfo argument was undocumented (that's
2089 repaired), and its name was changed to tz ("tzinfo" is overloaded enough
2090 already). With a tz argument, now(tz) used to return the local date
2091 and time, and attach tz to it, without any conversion of date and time
2092 members. This was less than useful. Now now(tz) returns the current
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002093 date and time as local time in tz's time zone, akin to ::
2094
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00002095 tz.fromutc(datetime.utcnow().replace(tzinfo=utc))
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002096
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00002097 where "utc" is an instance of a tzinfo subclass modeling UTC. Without
2098 a tz argument, now() continues to return the current local date and time,
2099 as a naive datetime object.
2100
Tim Peters2a44a8d2003-01-23 20:53:10 +00002101 datetime.fromtimestamp(): Like datetime.now() above, this had less than
2102 useful behavior when the optional tinzo argument was specified. See
2103 also SF bug report <http://www.python.org/sf/660872>.
2104
Tim Peters8d81a012003-01-24 22:36:34 +00002105 date and datetime comparison: In order to prevent comparison from
2106 falling back to the default compare-object-addresses strategy, these
2107 raised TypeError whenever they didn't understand the other object type.
2108 They still do, except when the other object has a "timetuple" attribute,
2109 in which case they return NotImplemented now. This gives other
2110 datetime objects (e.g., mxDateTime) a chance to intercept the
2111 comparison.
2112
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002113 date, time, datetime and timedelta comparison: When the exception
2114 for mixed-type comparisons in the last paragraph doesn't apply, if
2115 the comparison is == then False is returned, and if the comparison is
2116 != then True is returned. Because dict lookup and the "in" operator
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002117 only invoke __eq__, this allows, for example, ::
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002118
2119 if some_datetime in some_sequence:
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002120
2121 and ::
2122
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002123 some_dict[some_timedelta] = whatever
2124
2125 to work as expected, without raising TypeError just because the
2126 sequence is heterogeneous, or the dict has mixed-type keys. [This
2127 seems like a good idea to implement for all mixed-type comparisons
2128 that don't want to allow falling back to address comparison.]
2129
Tim Peters75a6e3b2003-01-04 18:17:36 +00002130 The constructors building a datetime from a timestamp could raise
2131 ValueError if the platform C localtime()/gmtime() inserted "leap
2132 seconds". Leap seconds are ignored now. On such platforms, it's
2133 possible to have timestamps that differ by a second, yet where
2134 datetimes constructed from them are equal.
2135
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00002136 The pickle format of date, time and datetime objects has changed
2137 completely. The undocumented pickler and unpickler functions no
Tim Petersb57f8f02003-02-01 02:54:15 +00002138 longer exist. The undocumented __setstate__() and __getstate__()
2139 methods no longer exist either.
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00002140
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002141Library
2142-------
2143
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002144- The logging module was updated slightly; the WARN level was renamed
2145 to WARNING, and the matching function/method warn() to warning().
2146
2147- The pickle and cPickle modules were updated with a new pickling
2148 protocol (documented by pickletools.py, see below) and several
2149 extensions to the pickle customization API (__reduce__, __setstate__
2150 etc.). The copy module now uses more of the pickle customization
2151 API to copy objects that don't implement __copy__ or __deepcopy__.
2152 See PEP 307 for details.
2153
2154- The distutils "register" command now uses http://www.python.org/pypi
2155 as the default repository. (See PEP 301.)
2156
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00002157- the platform dependent path related variables sep, altsep, extsep,
2158 pathsep, curdir, pardir and defpath are now defined in the platform
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00002159 dependent path modules (e.g. ntpath.py) rather than os.py, so these
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002160 variables are now available via os.path. They continue to be
2161 available from the os module.
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00002162 (see <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00002163
Tim Peters6ee04802003-02-05 18:29:34 +00002164- array.array was added to the types repr.py knows about (see
2165 <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
2166
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00002167- The new pickletools.py contains lots of documentation about pickle
2168 internals, and supplies some helpers for working with pickles, such as
2169 a symbolic pickle disassembler.
2170
Skip Montanaro9a7c96a2003-01-22 18:17:25 +00002171- Xmlrpclib.py now supports the builtin boolean type.
2172
Martin v. Löwis0c6774d2003-01-15 11:51:06 +00002173- py_compile has a new 'doraise' flag and a new PyCompileError
2174 exception.
2175
Martin v. Löwisd69663d2003-01-15 11:37:23 +00002176- SimpleXMLRPCServer now supports CGI through the CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler
2177 class.
2178
Guido van Rossum50e92232003-01-14 16:45:04 +00002179- The sets module now raises TypeError in __cmp__, to clarify that
2180 sets are not intended to be three-way-compared; the comparison
2181 operators are overloaded as subset/superset tests.
2182
Guido van Rossumcd0c0472003-01-07 23:03:05 +00002183- Bastion.py and rexec.py are disabled. These modules are not safe in
2184 Python 2.2. or 2.3.
2185
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002186- realpath is now exported when doing ``from poxixpath import *``.
Neal Norwitzbb0246a2003-01-03 18:12:28 +00002187 It is also exported for ntpath, macpath, and os2emxpath.
2188 See SF bug #659228.
2189
Neal Norwitzb9ef4ae2003-01-05 23:19:43 +00002190- New module tarfile from Lars Gustäbel provides a comprehensive interface
2191 to tar archive files with transparent gzip and bzip2 compression.
2192 See SF patch #651082.
2193
Neal Norwitz4f442372003-01-06 06:51:36 +00002194- urlparse can now parse imap:// URLs. See SF feature request #618024.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002195
Neal Norwitze931ed52003-01-10 23:24:32 +00002196- Tkinter.Canvas.scan_dragto() provides an optional parameter to support
2197 the gain value which is passed to Tk. SF bug# 602259.
2198
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00002199- Fix logging.handlers.SysLogHandler protocol when using UNIX domain sockets.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00002200 See SF patch #642974.
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00002201
Skip Montanaro12fe72e2003-02-25 17:46:20 +00002202- The dospath module was deleted. Use the ntpath module when manipulating
2203 DOS paths from other platforms.
2204
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002205Tools/Demos
2206-----------
2207
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00002208- Two new scripts (db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py) were added to the
2209 Tools/scripts directory to facilitate conversion from the old bsddb module
2210 to the new one. While the user-visible API of the new module is
2211 compatible with the old one, it's likely that the version of the
2212 underlying database library has changed. To convert from the old library,
2213 run the db2pickle.py script using the old version of Python to convert it
2214 to a pickle file. After upgrading Python, run the pickle2db.py script
2215 using the new version of Python to reconstitute your database. For
2216 example:
2217
Skip Montanaro621f0552003-02-03 15:48:10 +00002218 % python2.2 db2pickle.py -h some.db > some.pickle
2219 % python2.3 pickle2db.py -h some.db.new < some.pickle
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00002220
2221 Run the scripts without any args to get a usage message.
2222
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002223
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002224Build
2225-----
2226
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00002227- The audio driver tests (test_ossaudiodev.py and
2228 test_linuxaudiodev.py) are no longer run by default. This is
2229 because they don't always work, depending on your hardware and
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002230 software. To run these tests, you must use an invocation like ::
2231
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00002232 ./python Lib/test/regrtest.py -u audio test_ossaudiodev
2233
Skip Montanarodecc6a42003-01-01 20:07:49 +00002234- On systems which build using the configure script, compiler flags which
2235 used to be lumped together using the OPT flag have been split into two
2236 groups, OPT and BASECFLAGS. OPT is meant to carry just optimization- and
2237 debug-related flags like "-g" and "-O3". BASECFLAGS is meant to carry
2238 compiler flags that are required to get a clean compile. On some
2239 platforms (many Linux flavors in particular) BASECFLAGS will be empty by
2240 default. On others, such as Mac OS X and SCO, it will contain required
2241 flags. This change allows people building Python to override OPT without
2242 fear of clobbering compiler flags which are required to get a clean build.
2243
2244- On Darwin/Mac OS X platforms, /sw/lib and /sw/include are added to the
2245 relevant search lists in setup.py. This allows users building Python to
2246 take advantage of the many packages available from the fink project
2247 <http://fink.sf.net/>.
2248
2249- A new Makefile target, scriptsinstall, installs a number of useful scripts
2250 from the Tools/scripts directory.
2251
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002252C API
2253-----
2254
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002255- PyEval_GetFrame() is now declared to return a ``PyFrameObject *``
2256 instead of a plain ``PyObject *``. (SF patch #686601.)
Guido van Rossum6297a7a2003-02-19 15:53:17 +00002257
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00002258- PyNumber_Check() now checks that the object has a nb_int or nb_float
2259 slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
2260 tp_as_number pointer.
2261
Guido van Rossumeea47182003-02-11 20:39:59 +00002262- A C type that inherits from a base type that defines tp_as_buffer
2263 will now inherit the tp_as_buffer pointer if it doesn't define one.
2264 (SF #681367)
2265
Neil Schemenauer5042da62003-02-04 20:59:40 +00002266- The PyArg_Parse functions now issue a DeprecationWarning if a float
2267 argument is provided when an integer is specified (this affects the 'b',
2268 'B', 'h', 'H', 'i', and 'l' codes). Future versions of Python will
2269 raise a TypeError.
Neil Schemenauercd63e612003-01-24 22:15:53 +00002270
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002271Tests
2272-----
2273
Walter Dörwald11cfbd62003-03-26 16:03:16 +00002274- Several tests weren't being run from regrtest.py (test_timeout.py,
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002275 test_tarfile.py, test_netrc.py, test_multifile.py,
2276 test_importhooks.py and test_imp.py). Now they are. (Note to
2277 developers: please read Lib/test/README when creating a new test, to
2278 make sure to do it right! All tests need to use either unittest or
2279 pydoc.)
2280
2281- Added test_posix.py, a test suite for the posix module.
2282
2283- Added test_hexoct.py, a test suite for hex/oct constant folding.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002284
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002285Windows
2286-------
2287
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00002288- The timeout code for socket connect() didn't work right; this has
2289 now been fixed. test_timeout.py should pass (at least most of the
2290 time).
2291
Thomas Hellerdda583d2003-01-31 20:45:41 +00002292- distutils' msvccompiler class now passes the preprocessor options to
2293 the resource compiler. See SF patch #669198.
2294
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00002295- The bsddb module now ships with Sleepycat's 4.1.25.NC, the latest
2296 release without strong cryptography.
2297
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00002298- sys.path[0], if it contains a directory name, is now always an
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002299 absolute pathname. (SF patch #664376.)
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00002300
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00002301- The new logging package is now installed by the Windows installer. It
2302 wasn't in 2.3a1 due to oversight.
2303
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002304Mac
2305---
2306
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00002307- There are new dialogs EasyDialogs.AskFileForOpen, AskFileForSave
2308 and AskFolder. The old macfs.StandardGetFile and friends are deprecated.
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002309
Jack Jansenc9296362003-02-06 23:10:45 +00002310- Most of the standard library now uses pathnames or FSRefs in preference
2311 of FSSpecs, and use the underlying Carbon.File and Carbon.Folder modules
2312 in stead of macfs. macfs will probably be deprecated in the future.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00002313
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00002314- Type Carbon.File.FSCatalogInfo and supporting methods have been implemented.
2315 This also makes macfs.FSSpec.SetDates() work again.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002316
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00002317- There is a new module pimp, the package install manager for Python, and
2318 accompanying applet PackageManager. These allow you to easily download
2319 and install pretested extension packages either in source or binary
2320 form. Only in MacPython-OSX.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002321
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00002322- Applets are now built with bundlebuilder in MacPython-OSX, which should make
Jack Jansen5d44b342003-02-18 23:32:47 +00002323 them more robust and also provides a path towards BuildApplication. The
2324 downside of this change is that applets can no longer be run from the
2325 Terminal window, this will hopefully be fixed in the 2.3b1.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002326
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002327
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002328What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 1?
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002329=================================
2330
Guido van Rossumae548862002-12-31 15:47:36 +00002331*Release date: 31-Dec-2002*
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002332
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002333Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002334--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00002335
Michael W. Hudson96bc3b42002-11-26 14:48:23 +00002336- One can now assign to __bases__ and __name__ of new-style classes.
2337
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00002338- dict() now accepts keyword arguments so that dict(one=1, two=2)
2339 is the equivalent of {"one": 1, "two": 2}. Accordingly,
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00002340 the existing (but undocumented) 'items' keyword argument has
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00002341 been eliminated. This means that dict(items=someMapping) now has
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00002342 a different meaning than before.
2343
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00002344- int() now returns a long object if the argument is outside the
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002345 integer range, so int("4" * 1000), int(1e200) and int(1L<<1000) will
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00002346 all return long objects instead of raising an OverflowError.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002347
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00002348- Assignment to __class__ is disallowed if either the old or the new
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00002349 class is a statically allocated type object (such as defined by an
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00002350 extension module). This prevents anomalies like 2.__class__ = bool.
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00002351
2352- New-style object creation and deallocation have been sped up
2353 significantly; they are now faster than classic instance creation
2354 and deallocation.
2355
2356- The __slots__ variable can now mention "private" names, and the
2357 right thing will happen (e.g. __slots__ = ["__foo"]).
2358
2359- The built-ins slice() and buffer() are now callable types. The
2360 types classobj (formerly class), code, function, instance, and
2361 instancemethod (formerly instance-method), which have no built-in
2362 names but are accessible through the types module, are now also
2363 callable. The type dict-proxy is renamed to dictproxy.
2364
2365- Cycles going through the __class__ link of a new-style instance are
2366 now detected by the garbage collector.
2367
2368- Classes using __slots__ are now properly garbage collected.
2369 [SF bug 519621]
2370
2371- Tightened the __slots__ rules: a slot name must be a valid Python
2372 identifier.
2373
2374- The constructor for the module type now requires a name argument and
2375 takes an optional docstring argument. Previously, this constructor
2376 ignored its arguments. As a consequence, deriving a class from a
2377 module (not from the module type) is now illegal; previously this
2378 created an unnamed module, just like invoking the module type did.
2379 [SF bug 563060]
2380
2381- A new type object, 'basestring', is added. This is a common base type
2382 for 'str' and 'unicode', and can be used instead of
2383 types.StringTypes, e.g. to test whether something is "a string":
2384 isinstance(x, basestring) is True for Unicode and 8-bit strings. This
2385 is an abstract base class and cannot be instantiated directly.
2386
2387- Changed new-style class instantiation so that when C's __new__
2388 method returns something that's not a C instance, its __init__ is
2389 not called. [SF bug #537450]
2390
2391- Fixed super() to work correctly with class methods. [SF bug #535444]
2392
2393- If you try to pickle an instance of a class that has __slots__ but
2394 doesn't define or override __getstate__, a TypeError is now raised.
2395 This is done by adding a bozo __getstate__ to the class that always
2396 raises TypeError. (Before, this would appear to be pickled, but the
2397 state of the slots would be lost.)
2398
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002399Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002400-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002401
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00002402- Import from zipfiles is now supported. The name of a zipfile placed
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00002403 on sys.path causes the import statement to look for importable Python
2404 modules (with .py, pyc and .pyo extensions) and packages inside the
2405 zipfile. The zipfile import follows the specification (though not
2406 the sample implementation) of PEP 273. The semantics of __path__ are
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00002407 compatible with those that have been implemented in Jython since
2408 Jython 2.1.
2409
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002410- PEP 302 has been accepted. Although it was initially developed to
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00002411 support zipimport, it offers a new, general import hook mechanism.
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00002412 Several new variables have been added to the sys module:
2413 sys.meta_path, sys.path_hooks, and sys.path_importer_cache; these
2414 make extending the import statement much more convenient than
2415 overriding the __import__ built-in function. For a description of
2416 these, see PEP 302.
2417
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00002418- A frame object's f_lineno attribute can now be written to from a
2419 trace function to change which line will execute next. A command to
2420 exploit this from pdb has been added. [SF patch #643835]
2421
Marc-André Lemburg20b91352002-12-12 18:01:43 +00002422- The _codecs support module for codecs.py was turned into a builtin
2423 module to assure that at least the builtin codecs are available
2424 to the Python parser for source code decoding according to PEP 263.
2425
Walter Dörwaldd9a6ad32002-12-12 16:41:44 +00002426- issubclass now supports a tuple as the second argument, just like
2427 isinstance does. ``issubclass(X, (A, B))`` is equivalent to
2428 ``issubclass(X, A) or issubclass(X, B)``.
2429
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00002430- Thanks to Armin Rigo, the last known way to provoke a system crash
2431 by cleverly arranging for a comparison function to mutate a list
2432 during a list.sort() operation has been fixed. The effect of
2433 attempting to mutate a list, or even to inspect its contents or
2434 length, while a sort is in progress, is not defined by the language.
2435 The C implementation of Python 2.3 attempts to detect mutations,
2436 and raise ValueError if one occurs, but there's no guarantee that
2437 all mutations will be caught, or that any will be caught across
2438 releases or implementations.
2439
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00002440- Unicode file name processing for Windows (PEP 277) is implemented.
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00002441 All platforms now have an os.path.supports_unicode_filenames attribute,
2442 which is set to True on Windows NT/2000/XP, and False elsewhere.
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00002443
Walter Dörwald3aeb6322002-09-02 13:14:32 +00002444- Codec error handling callbacks (PEP 293) are implemented.
2445 Error handling in unicode.encode or str.decode can now be customized.
2446
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00002447- A subtle change to the semantics of the built-in function intern():
2448 interned strings are no longer immortal. You must keep a reference
2449 to the return value intern() around to get the benefit.
2450
Guido van Rossumf808b892002-08-16 03:38:10 +00002451- Use of 'None' as a variable, argument or attribute name now
2452 issues a SyntaxWarning. In the future, None may become a keyword.
2453
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00002454- SET_LINENO is gone. co_lnotab is now consulted to determine when to
2455 call the trace function. C code that accessed f_lineno should call
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00002456 PyCode_Addr2Line instead (f_lineno is still there, but only kept up
2457 to date when there is a trace function set).
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00002458
Guido van Rossum9be89462002-08-14 16:11:30 +00002459- There's a new warning category, FutureWarning. This is used to warn
2460 about a number of situations where the value or sign of an integer
2461 result will change in Python 2.4 as a result of PEP 237 (integer
2462 unification). The warnings implement stage B0 mentioned in that
2463 PEP. The warnings are about the following situations:
2464
2465 - Octal and hex literals without 'L' prefix in the inclusive range
2466 [0x80000000..0xffffffff]; these are currently negative ints, but
2467 in Python 2.4 they will be positive longs with the same bit
2468 pattern.
2469
2470 - Left shifts on integer values that cause the outcome to lose
2471 bits or have a different sign than the left operand. To be
2472 precise: x<<n where this currently doesn't yield the same value
2473 as long(x)<<n; in Python 2.4, the outcome will be long(x)<<n.
2474
2475 - Conversions from ints to string that show negative values as
2476 unsigned ints in the inclusive range [0x80000000..0xffffffff];
2477 this affects the functions hex() and oct(), and the string
2478 formatting codes %u, %o, %x, and %X. In Python 2.4, these will
2479 show signed values (e.g. hex(-1) currently returns "0xffffffff";
2480 in Python 2.4 it will return "-0x1").
2481
Guido van Rossum9a2eda52002-12-31 02:12:42 +00002482- The bits manipulated under the cover by sys.setcheckinterval() have
2483 been changed. Both the check interval and the ticker used to be
2484 per-thread values. They are now just a pair of global variables.
2485 In addition, the default check interval was boosted from 10 to 100
2486 bytecode instructions. This may have some effect on systems that
2487 relied on the old default value. In particular, in multi-threaded
2488 applications which try to be highly responsive, response time will
2489 increase by some (perhaps imperceptible) amount.
Skip Montanaro979c74b2002-09-03 21:25:14 +00002490
Tim Petersd64c1de2002-08-12 17:36:03 +00002491- When multiplying very large integers, a version of the so-called
2492 Karatsuba algorithm is now used. This is most effective if the
2493 inputs have roughly the same size. If they both have about N digits,
2494 Karatsuba multiplication has O(N**1.58) runtime (the exponent is
2495 log_base_2(3)) instead of the previous O(N**2). Measured results may
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00002496 be better or worse than that, depending on platform quirks. Besides
2497 the O() improvement in raw instruction count, the Karatsuba algorithm
2498 appears to have much better cache behavior on extremely large integers
2499 (starting in the ballpark of a million bits). Note that this is a
2500 simple implementation, and there's no intent here to compete with,
2501 e.g., GMP. It gives a very nice speedup when it applies, but a package
2502 devoted to fast large-integer arithmetic should run circles around it.
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00002503
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00002504- u'%c' will now raise a ValueError in case the argument is an
2505 integer outside the valid range of Unicode code point ordinals.
2506
Guido van Rossumdeb09362002-08-09 17:16:30 +00002507- The tempfile module has been overhauled for enhanced security. The
2508 mktemp() function is now deprecated; new, safe replacements are
2509 mkstemp() (for files) and mkdtemp() (for directories), and the
2510 higher-level functions NamedTemporaryFile() and TemporaryFile().
2511 Use of some global variables in this module is also deprecated; the
2512 new functions have keyword arguments to provide the same
2513 functionality. All Lib, Tools and Demo modules that used the unsafe
2514 interfaces have been updated to use the safe replacements. Thanks
2515 to Zack Weinberg!
2516
Guido van Rossumd81a9832002-08-09 15:57:34 +00002517- When x is an object whose class implements __mul__ and __rmul__,
2518 1.0*x would correctly invoke __rmul__, but 1*x would erroneously
2519 invoke __mul__. This was due to the sequence-repeat code in the int
2520 type. This has been fixed now.
2521
Barry Warsawd79f6832002-08-06 17:01:51 +00002522- Previously, "str1 in str2" required str1 to be a string of length 1.
2523 This restriction has been relaxed to allow str1 to be a string of
2524 any length. Thus "'el' in 'hello world'" returns True now.
2525
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00002526- File objects are now their own iterators. For a file f, iter(f) now
2527 returns f (unless f is closed), and f.next() is similar to
2528 f.readline() when EOF is not reached; however, f.next() uses a
2529 readahead buffer that messes up the file position, so mixing
2530 f.next() and f.readline() (or other methods) doesn't work right.
2531 Calling f.seek() drops the readahead buffer, but other operations
2532 don't. It so happens that this gives a nice additional speed boost
2533 to "for line in file:"; the xreadlines method and corresponding
Guido van Rossumbffb2ef2002-08-09 17:17:07 +00002534 module are now obsolete. Thanks to Oren Tirosh!
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00002535
Guido van Rossumde392d32002-08-05 14:17:20 +00002536- Encoding declarations (PEP 263, phase 1) have been implemented. A
2537 comment of the form "# -*- coding: <encodingname> -*-" in the first
2538 or second line of a Python source file indicates the encoding.
Martin v. Löwis00f1e3f2002-08-04 17:29:52 +00002539
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00002540- list.sort() has a new implementation. While cross-platform results
2541 may vary, and in data-dependent ways, this is much faster on many
2542 kinds of partially ordered lists than the previous implementation,
2543 and reported to be just as fast on randomly ordered lists on
2544 several major platforms. This sort is also stable (if A==B and A
2545 precedes B in the list at the start, A precedes B after the sort too),
2546 although the language definition does not guarantee stability. A
2547 potential drawback is that list.sort() may require temp space of
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00002548 len(list)*2 bytes (``*4`` on a 64-bit machine). It's therefore possible
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00002549 for list.sort() to raise MemoryError now, even if a comparison function
2550 does not. See <http://www.python.org/sf/587076> for full details.
2551
Guido van Rossum2d5389c2002-07-23 03:44:35 +00002552- All standard iterators now ensure that, once StopIteration has been
2553 raised, all future calls to next() on the same iterator will also
2554 raise StopIteration. There used to be various counterexamples to
2555 this behavior, which could caused confusion or subtle program
2556 breakage, without any benefits. (Note that this is still an
2557 iterator's responsibility; the iterator framework does not enforce
2558 this.)
2559
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00002560- Ctrl+C handling on Windows has been made more consistent with
2561 other platforms. KeyboardInterrupt can now reliably be caught,
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00002562 and Ctrl+C at an interactive prompt no longer terminates the
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00002563 process under NT/2k/XP (it never did under Win9x). Ctrl+C will
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00002564 interrupt time.sleep() in the main thread, and any child processes
2565 created via the popen family (on win2k; we can't make win9x work
Mark Hammond8f3afc72002-08-10 06:26:31 +00002566 reliably) are also interrupted (as generally happens on for Linux/Unix.)
2567 [SF bugs 231273, 439992 and 581232]
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00002568
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00002569- sys.getwindowsversion() has been added on Windows. This
2570 returns a tuple with information about the version of Windows
2571 currently running.
2572
Raymond Hettinger5a04aec2002-06-25 00:25:30 +00002573- Slices and repetitions of buffer objects now consistently return
2574 a string. Formerly, strings would be returned most of the time,
2575 but a buffer object would be returned when the repetition count
2576 was one or when the slice range was all inclusive.
2577
Walter Dörwald3430d702002-06-17 10:43:59 +00002578- Unicode objects in sys.path are no longer ignored but treated
2579 as directory names.
2580
Neal Norwitz1f68fc72002-06-14 00:50:42 +00002581- Fixed string.startswith and string.endswith builtin methods
2582 so they accept negative indices. [SF bug 493951]
2583
Guido van Rossumc5fe5eb2002-06-12 03:45:21 +00002584- Fixed a bug with a continue inside a try block and a yield in the
2585 finally clause. [SF bug 567538]
2586
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00002587- Most builtin sequences now support "extended slices", i.e. slices
Guido van Rossum2e82e712002-06-13 11:41:07 +00002588 with a third "stride" parameter. For example, "hello world"[::-1]
2589 gives "dlrow olleh".
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00002590
Neal Norwitzd68f5172002-05-29 15:54:55 +00002591- A new warning PendingDeprecationWarning was added to provide
2592 direction on features which are in the process of being deprecated.
2593 The warning will not be printed by default. To see the pending
2594 deprecations, use -Walways::PendingDeprecationWarning::
2595 as a command line option or warnings.filterwarnings() in code.
2596
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00002597- Deprecated features of xrange objects have been removed as
2598 promised. The start, stop, and step attributes and the tolist()
2599 method no longer exist. xrange repetition and slicing have been
2600 removed.
2601
Guido van Rossum7dab2422002-04-26 19:40:56 +00002602- New builtin function enumerate(x), from PEP 279. Example:
2603 enumerate("abc") is an iterator returning (0,"a"), (1,"b"), (2,"c").
2604 The argument can be an arbitrary iterable object.
2605
Neil Schemenauer89e3ee02002-04-26 01:58:53 +00002606- The assert statement no longer tests __debug__ at runtime. This means
2607 that assert statements cannot be disabled by assigning a false value
2608 to __debug__.
2609
Walter Dörwald068325e2002-04-15 13:36:47 +00002610- A method zfill() was added to str and unicode, that fills a numeric
2611 string to the left with zeros. For example,
2612 "+123".zfill(6) -> "+00123".
2613
Guido van Rossum862fe3c2002-04-15 12:36:47 +00002614- Complex numbers supported divmod() and the // and % operators, but
2615 these make no sense. Since this was documented, they're being
2616 deprecated now.
2617
Guido van Rossum26dd8302002-04-26 20:11:29 +00002618- String and unicode methods lstrip(), rstrip() and strip() now take
2619 an optional argument that specifies the characters to strip. For
2620 example, "Foo!!!?!?!?".rstrip("?!") -> "Foo".
Guido van Rossum49042042002-04-13 00:59:05 +00002621
Guido van Rossumc0d3f4e2002-11-27 13:10:40 +00002622- There's a new dictionary constructor (a class method of the dict
2623 class), dict.fromkeys(iterable, value=None). It constructs a
2624 dictionary with keys taken from the iterable and all values set to a
2625 single value. It can be used for building sets and for removing
2626 duplicates from sequences.
Raymond Hettingere33d3df2002-11-27 07:29:33 +00002627
Guido van Rossumc69343b2002-04-12 19:22:48 +00002628- Added a new dict method pop(key). This removes and returns the
2629 value corresponding to key. [SF patch #539949]
2630
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00002631- A new built-in type, bool, has been added, as well as built-in
2632 names for its two values, True and False. Comparisons and sundry
2633 other operations that return a truth value have been changed to
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002634 return a bool instead. Read PEP 285 for an explanation of why this
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00002635 is backward compatible.
2636
Guido van Rossum95b62a62002-03-29 01:07:24 +00002637- Fixed two bugs reported as SF #535905: under certain conditions,
2638 deallocating a deeply nested structure could cause a segfault in the
2639 garbage collector, due to interaction with the "trashcan" code;
2640 access to the current frame during destruction of a local variable
2641 could access a pointer to freed memory.
2642
Guido van Rossumfe0ca4a2002-06-18 21:20:13 +00002643- The optional object allocator ("pymalloc") has been enabled by
2644 default. The recommended practice for memory allocation and
2645 deallocation has been streamlined. A header file is included,
2646 Misc/pymemcompat.h, which can be bundled with 3rd party extensions
2647 and lets them use the same API with Python versions from 1.5.2
2648 onwards.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00002649
Martin v. Löwiscfeb3b62002-03-03 21:30:27 +00002650- PyErr_Display will provide file and line information for all exceptions
2651 that have an attribute print_file_and_line, not just SyntaxErrors.
2652
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00002653- The UTF-8 codec will now encode and decode Unicode surrogates
2654 correctly and without raising exceptions for unpaired ones.
2655
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00002656- Universal newlines (PEP 278) is implemented. Briefly, using 'U'
2657 instead of 'r' when opening a text file for reading changes the line
2658 ending convention so that any of '\r', '\r\n', and '\n' is
2659 recognized (even mixed in one file); all three are converted to
2660 '\n', the standard Python line end character.
2661
Neal Norwitz649b7592002-01-01 19:07:13 +00002662- file.xreadlines() now raises a ValueError if the file is closed:
2663 Previously, an xreadlines object was returned which would raise
2664 a ValueError when the xreadlines.next() method was called.
2665
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002666- sys.exit() inadvertently allowed more than one argument.
Neal Norwitz0c766a02002-03-27 13:03:09 +00002667 An exception will now be raised if more than one argument is used.
2668
Gustavo Niemeyer17c5a332002-12-16 14:09:22 +00002669- Changed evaluation order of dictionary literals to conform to the
2670 general left to right evaluation order rule. Now {f1(): f2()} will
2671 evaluate f1 first.
Gustavo Niemeyer78429a62002-12-16 13:54:02 +00002672
Gustavo Niemeyer786ddb22002-12-16 18:12:53 +00002673- Fixed bug #521782: when a file was in non-blocking mode, file.read()
2674 could silently lose data or wrongly throw an unknown error.
2675
Neil Schemenauerb983aa02002-12-30 20:22:23 +00002676- The sq_repeat, sq_inplace_repeat, sq_concat and sq_inplace_concat
2677 slots are now always tried after trying the corresponding nb_* slots.
2678 This fixes a number of minor bugs (see bug #624807).
2679
Neal Norwitz74a032e2003-01-10 23:29:48 +00002680- Fix problem with dynamic loading on 64-bit AIX (see bug #639945).
2681
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002682Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002683-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002684
Raymond Hettinger9543b342003-01-18 23:22:20 +00002685- Added three operators to the operator module:
2686 operator.pow(a,b) which is equivalent to: a**b.
2687 operator.is_(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is b.
2688 operator.is_not(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is not b.
2689
Martin v. Löwis24a880b2002-12-31 12:55:15 +00002690- posix.openpty now works on all systems that have /dev/ptmx.
2691
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00002692- A module zipimport exists to support importing code from zip
2693 archives.
2694
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00002695- The new datetime module supplies classes for manipulating dates and
2696 times. The basic design came from the Zope "fishbowl process", and
2697 favors practical commercial applications over calendar esoterica. See
2698
2699 http://www.zope.org/Members/fdrake/DateTimeWiki/FrontPage
2700
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00002701- _tkinter now returns Tcl objects, instead of strings. Objects which
2702 have Python equivalents are converted to Python objects, other objects
2703 are wrapped. This can be configured through the wantobjects method,
Martin v. Löwis8c8aa5d2002-11-26 21:39:48 +00002704 or Tkinter.wantobjects.
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00002705
Barry Warsawc27f4bd2002-12-30 21:03:26 +00002706- The PyBSDDB wrapper around the Sleepycat Berkeley DB library has
2707 been added as the package bsddb. The traditional bsddb module is
2708 still available in source code, but not built automatically anymore,
2709 and is now named bsddb185. This supports Berkeley DB versions from
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00002710 3.0 to 4.1. For help converting your databases from the old module (which
2711 probably used an obsolete version of Berkeley DB) to the new module, see
2712 the db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py scripts described in the Tools/Demos
2713 section above.
Martin v. Löwisef546b32002-11-19 08:12:57 +00002714
Martin v. Löwis677bde22002-11-23 22:08:15 +00002715- unicodedata was updated to Unicode 3.2. It supports normalization
2716 and names for Hangul syllables and CJK unified ideographs.
Martin v. Löwis7d41e292002-11-23 12:22:32 +00002717
Neal Norwitz94a83fd2002-11-02 17:46:24 +00002718- resource.getrlimit() now returns longs instead of ints.
2719
Martin v. Löwis080689c2002-10-26 14:42:02 +00002720- readline now dynamically adjusts its input/output stream if
2721 sys.stdin/stdout changes.
2722
Guido van Rossumba602972002-10-01 18:18:58 +00002723- The _tkinter module (and hence Tkinter) has dropped support for
2724 Tcl/Tk 8.0 and 8.1. Only Tcl/Tk versions 8.2, 8.3 and 8.4 are
2725 supported.
2726
Martin v. Löwis658009a2002-09-16 17:26:24 +00002727- cPickle.BadPickleGet is now a class.
2728
Martin v. Löwisa19bfe02002-10-16 18:28:36 +00002729- The time stamps in os.stat_result are floating point numbers
2730 after stat_float_times has been called.
Martin v. Löwis94717ed2002-09-09 14:24:16 +00002731
Neal Norwitzb5673922002-09-05 21:48:07 +00002732- If the size passed to mmap.mmap() is larger than the length of the
2733 file on non-Windows platforms, a ValueError is raised. [SF bug 585792]
2734
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00002735- The xreadlines module is slated for obsolescence.
2736
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00002737- The strptime function in the time module is now always available (a
2738 Python implementation is used when the C library doesn't define it).
2739
Guido van Rossum9562bcf2002-06-14 21:31:18 +00002740- The 'new' module is no longer an extension, but a Python module that
2741 only exists for backwards compatibility. Its contents are no longer
2742 functions but callable type objects.
2743
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00002744- The bsddb.*open functions can now take 'None' as a filename.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00002745 This will create a temporary in-memory bsddb that won't be
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00002746 written to disk.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00002747
Martin v. Löwisb96152c2002-12-31 13:20:15 +00002748- posix.getloadavg, posix.lchown, posix.killpg, posix.mknod, and
2749 posix.getpgid have been added where available.
Martin v. Löwis06a83e92002-04-14 10:19:44 +00002750
Martin v. Löwisf0a46682002-11-03 17:20:12 +00002751- The locale module now exposes the C library's gettext interface. It
2752 also has a new function getpreferredencoding.
Martin v. Löwis2e64c342002-03-27 18:49:02 +00002753
Tim Petersfbf74f22002-03-14 19:06:01 +00002754- A security hole ("double free") was found in zlib-1.1.3, a popular
2755 third party compression library used by some Python modules. The
2756 hole was quickly plugged in zlib-1.1.4, and the Windows build of
2757 Python now ships with zlib-1.1.4.
2758
Martin v. Löwis688357e2002-04-08 21:28:20 +00002759- pwd, grp, and resource return enhanced tuples now, with symbolic
2760 field names.
Martin v. Löwis29001ff2002-03-01 10:47:37 +00002761
Martin v. Löwis99866332002-03-01 10:27:01 +00002762- array.array is now a type object. A new format character
2763 'u' indicates Py_UNICODE arrays. For those, .tounicode and
2764 .fromunicode methods are available. Arrays now support __iadd__
2765 and __imul__.
2766
Neal Norwitze790eae2002-01-01 21:14:12 +00002767- dl now builds on every system that has dlfcn.h. Failure in case
Martin v. Löwis93227272002-01-01 20:18:30 +00002768 of sizeof(int)!=sizeof(long)!=sizeof(void*) is delayed until dl.open
2769 is called.
2770
Skip Montanaro8e790e72002-09-03 13:25:17 +00002771- The sys module acquired a new attribute, api_version, which evaluates
2772 to the value of the PYTHON_API_VERSION macro with which the
2773 interpreter was compiled.
2774
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00002775- Fixed bug #470582: sre module would return a tuple (None, 'a', 'ab')
2776 when applying the regular expression '^((a)c)?(ab)$' on 'ab'. It now
2777 returns (None, None, 'ab'), as expected. Also fixed handling of
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00002778 lastindex/lastgroup match attributes in similar cases. For example,
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00002779 when running the expression r'(a)(b)?b' over 'ab', lastindex must be
2780 1, not 2.
2781
Gustavo Niemeyerc523b042002-11-07 03:28:56 +00002782- Fixed bug #581080: sre scanner was not checking the buffer limit
2783 before increasing the current pointer. This was creating an infinite
2784 loop in the search function, once the pointer exceeded the buffer
2785 limit.
2786
Thomas Heller95cb7e42002-11-07 16:23:55 +00002787- The os.fdopen function now enforces a file mode starting with the
2788 letter 'r', 'w' or 'a', otherwise a ValueError is raised. This fixes
2789 bug #623464.
2790
Greg Ward6c58d462003-01-03 18:02:15 +00002791- The linuxaudiodev module is now deprecated; it is being replaced by
2792 ossaudiodev. The interface has been extended to cover a lot more of
2793 OSS (see www.opensound.com), including most DSP ioctls and the
2794 OSS mixer API. Documentation forthcoming in 2.3a2.
2795
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002796Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002797-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002798
Guido van Rossum747f8062003-01-03 16:33:49 +00002799- imaplib.py now supports SSL (Tino Lange and Piers Lauder).
2800
Just van Rossum5e156ad2002-12-31 16:38:01 +00002801- Freeze's modulefinder.py has been moved to the standard library;
2802 slightly improved so it will issue less false missing submodule
2803 reports (see sf path #643711 for details). Documentation will follow
2804 with Python 2.3a2.
2805
Martin v. Löwis96a60e42002-12-31 13:11:54 +00002806- os.path exposes getctime.
2807
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002808- unittest.py now has two additional methods called assertAlmostEqual()
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002809 and failIfAlmostEqual(). They implement an approximate comparison
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002810 by rounding the difference between the two arguments and comparing
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002811 the result to zero. Approximate comparison is essential for
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002812 unit tests of floating point results.
2813
Raymond Hettingere11b5102002-12-25 16:37:19 +00002814- calendar.py now depends on the new datetime module rather than
2815 the time module. As a result, the range of allowable dates
2816 has been increased.
2817
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00002818- pdb has a new 'j(ump)' command to select the next line to be
2819 executed.
2820
Thomas Heller1b3b49d2002-12-12 19:13:44 +00002821- The distutils created windows installers now can run a
2822 postinstallation script.
2823
Martin v. Löwis4581cfa2002-11-22 08:23:09 +00002824- doctest.testmod can now be called without argument, which means to
2825 test the current module.
2826
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002827- When canceling a server that implemented threading with a keyboard
Martin v. Löwisf86e8ef2002-11-22 08:08:44 +00002828 interrupt, the server would shut down but not terminate (waiting on
2829 client threads). A new member variable, daemon_threads, was added to
2830 the ThreadingMixIn class in SocketServer.py to make it explicit that
2831 this behavior needs to be controlled.
2832
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00002833- A new module, optparse, provides a fancy alternative to getopt for
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00002834 command line parsing. It is a slightly modified version of Greg
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00002835 Ward's Optik package.
2836
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00002837- UserDict.py now defines a DictMixin class which defines all dictionary
2838 methods for classes that already have a minimum mapping interface.
2839 This greatly simplifies writing classes that need to be substitutable
2840 for dictionaries (such as the shelve module).
2841
2842- shelve.py now subclasses from UserDict.DictMixin. Now shelve supports
2843 all dictionary methods. This eases the transition to persistent
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00002844 storage for scripts originally written with dictionaries in mind.
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00002845
Skip Montanaro3bf99e32002-12-08 18:36:24 +00002846- shelve.open and the various classes in shelve.py now accept an optional
2847 binary flag, which defaults to False. If True, the values stored in the
2848 shelf are binary pickles.
2849
Guido van Rossumfda06742002-11-13 16:29:18 +00002850- A new package, logging, implements the logging API defined by PEP
2851 282. The code is written by Vinay Sajip.
2852
Walter Dörwald4dbf1922002-11-06 16:53:44 +00002853- StreamReader, StreamReaderWriter and StreamRecoder in the codecs
2854 modules are iterators now.
2855
Tim Peters9288f952002-11-05 20:38:55 +00002856- gzip.py now handles files exceeding 2GB. Files over 4GB also work
2857 now (provided the OS supports it, and Python is configured with large
2858 file support), but in that case the underlying gzip file format can
2859 record only the least-significant 32 bits of the file size, so that
2860 some tools working with gzipped files may report an incorrect file
2861 size.
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00002862
Martin v. Löwis74b51ac2002-10-26 14:50:45 +00002863- xml.sax.saxutils.unescape has been added, to replace entity references
2864 with their entity value.
2865
Martin v. Löwis77ac4292002-10-15 15:11:13 +00002866- Queue.Queue.{put,get} now support an optional timeout argument.
2867
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00002868- Various features of Tk 8.4 are exposed in Tkinter.py. The multiple
2869 option of tkFileDialog is exposed as function askopenfile{,name}s.
Martin v. Löwis2ec36272002-10-13 10:22:08 +00002870
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00002871- Various configure methods of Tkinter have been stream-lined, so that
2872 tag_configure, image_configure, window_configure now return a
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00002873 dictionary when invoked with no argument.
Martin v. Löwis6ce13152002-10-10 14:36:13 +00002874
Guido van Rossum2b492b62002-10-09 21:40:48 +00002875- Importing the readline module now no longer has the side effect of
2876 calling setlocale(LC_CTYPE, ""). The initial "C" locale, or
2877 whatever locale is explicitly set by the user, is preserved. If you
2878 want repr() of 8-bit strings in your preferred encoding to preserve
2879 all printable characters of that encoding, you have to add the
2880 following code to your $PYTHONSTARTUP file or to your application's
2881 main():
2882
2883 import locale
2884 locale.setlocale(locale.LC_CTYPE, "")
2885
Martin v. Löwise9ce0b02002-10-07 13:23:24 +00002886- shutil.move was added. shutil.copytree now reports errors as an
2887 exception at the end, instead of printing error messages.
2888
Marc-André Lemburg97047e22002-10-04 11:55:21 +00002889- Encoding name normalization was generalized to not only
2890 replace hyphens with underscores, but also all other non-alphanumeric
2891 characters (with the exception of the dot which is used for Python
2892 package names during lookup). The aliases.py mapping was updated
2893 to the new standard.
2894
Walter Dörwald5ccaf8f2002-09-06 16:15:58 +00002895- mimetypes has two new functions: guess_all_extensions() which
2896 returns a list of all known extensions for a mime type, and
2897 add_type() which adds one mapping between a mime type and
2898 an extension to the database.
2899
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00002900- New module: sets, defines the class Set that implements a mutable
2901 set type using the keys of a dict to represent the set. There's
2902 also a class ImmutableSet which is useful when you need sets of sets
2903 or when you need to use sets as dict keys, and a class BaseSet which
Raymond Hettingeref8b9c62002-12-09 08:56:06 +00002904 is the base class of the two.
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00002905
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00002906- Added random.sample(population,k) for random sampling without replacement.
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00002907 Returns a k length list of unique elements chosen from the population.
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00002908
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00002909- random.randrange(-sys.maxint-1, sys.maxint) no longer raises
2910 OverflowError. That is, it now accepts any combination of 'start'
2911 and 'stop' arguments so long as each is in the range of Python's
2912 bounded integers.
2913
Raymond Hettinger40f62172002-12-29 23:03:38 +00002914- Thanks to Raymond Hettinger, random.random() now uses a new core
2915 generator. The Mersenne Twister algorithm is implemented in C,
2916 threadsafe, faster than the previous generator, has an astronomically
2917 large period (2**19937-1), creates random floats to full 53-bit
2918 precision, and may be the most widely tested random number generator
2919 in existence.
2920
2921 The random.jumpahead(n) method has different semantics for the new
2922 generator. Instead of jumping n steps ahead, it uses n and the
2923 existing state to create a new state. This means that jumpahead()
2924 continues to support multi-threaded code needing generators of
2925 non-overlapping sequences. However, it will break code which relies
2926 on jumpahead moving a specific number of steps forward.
2927
2928 The attributes random.whseed and random.__whseed have no meaning for
2929 the new generator. Code using these attributes should switch to a
2930 new class, random.WichmannHill which is provided for backward
2931 compatibility and to make an alternate generator available.
2932
Guido van Rossum4a57c332002-08-02 18:05:20 +00002933- New "algorithms" module: heapq, implements a heap queue. Thanks to
2934 Kevin O'Connor for the code and François Pinard for an entertaining
2935 write-up explaining the theory and practical uses of heaps.
2936
Marc-André Lemburg58e2ff22002-07-12 14:40:04 +00002937- New encoding for the Palm OS character set: palmos.
2938
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00002939- binascii.crc32() and the zipfile module had problems on some 64-bit
2940 platforms. These have been fixed. On a platform with 8-byte C longs,
2941 crc32() now returns a signed-extended 4-byte result, so that its value
2942 as a Python int is equal to the value computed a 32-bit platform.
2943
Martin v. Löwis7d650ca2002-06-30 15:05:00 +00002944- xml.dom.minidom.toxml and toprettyxml now take an optional encoding
2945 argument.
2946
Guido van Rossum9f7549b2002-06-10 21:39:42 +00002947- Some fixes in the copy module: when an object is copied through its
2948 __reduce__ method, there was no check for a __setstate__ method on
2949 the result [SF patch 565085]; deepcopy should treat instances of
2950 custom metaclasses the same way it treats instances of type 'type'
2951 [SF patch 560794].
2952
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00002953- Sockets now support timeout mode. After s.settimeout(T), where T is
2954 a float expressing seconds, subsequent operations raise an exception
2955 if they cannot be completed within T seconds. To disable timeout
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00002956 mode, use s.settimeout(None). There's also a module function,
2957 socket.setdefaulttimeout(T), which sets the default for all sockets
2958 created henceforth.
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00002959
2960- getopt.gnu_getopt was added. This supports GNU-style option
2961 processing, where options can be mixed with non-option arguments.
Martin v. Löwis446a25f2002-06-06 10:58:36 +00002962
Michael W. Hudsonb0dc1a32002-06-04 18:27:35 +00002963- Stop using strings for exceptions. String objects used for
2964 exceptions are now classes deriving from Exception. The objects
2965 changed were: Tkinter.TclError, bdb.BdbQuit, macpath.norm_error,
2966 tabnanny.NannyNag, and xdrlib.Error.
Neal Norwitzb5b5a262002-06-04 17:14:07 +00002967
Walter Dörwald474458d2002-06-04 15:16:29 +00002968- Constants BOM_UTF8, BOM_UTF16, BOM_UTF16_LE, BOM_UTF16_BE,
2969 BOM_UTF32, BOM_UTF32_LE and BOM_UTF32_BE that represent the Byte
2970 Order Mark in UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 encodings for little and
2971 big endian systems were added to the codecs module. The old names
2972 BOM32_* and BOM64_* were off by a factor of 2.
2973
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00002974- Added conversion functions math.degrees() and math.radians().
Raymond Hettinger87f59ee2002-05-13 04:17:32 +00002975
Raymond Hettinger866964c2002-12-14 19:51:34 +00002976- math.log() now takes an optional argument: math.log(x[, base]).
2977
Raymond Hettinger9b1df1d2002-05-12 06:07:21 +00002978- ftplib.retrlines() now tests for callback is None rather than testing
2979 for False. Was causing an error when given a callback object which
2980 was callable but also returned len() as zero. The change may
2981 create new breakage if the caller relied on the undocumented behavior
2982 and called with callback set to [] or some other False value not
2983 identical to None.
2984
Tim Peters46c04e12002-05-05 20:40:00 +00002985- random.gauss() uses a piece of hidden state used by nothing else,
2986 and the .seed() and .whseed() methods failed to reset it. In other
2987 words, setting the seed didn't completely determine the sequence of
2988 results produced by random.gauss(). It does now. Programs repeatedly
2989 mixing calls to a seed method with calls to gauss() may see different
2990 results now.
2991
Fred Drake7f781c92002-05-01 20:33:53 +00002992- The pickle.Pickler class grew a clear_memo() method to mimic that
2993 provided by cPickle.Pickler.
2994
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00002995- difflib's SequenceMatcher class now does a dynamic analysis of
2996 which elements are so frequent as to constitute noise. For
2997 comparing files as sequences of lines, this generally works better
2998 than the IS_LINE_JUNK function, and function ndiff's linejunk
2999 argument defaults to None now as a result. A happy benefit is
3000 that SequenceMatcher may run much faster now when applied
3001 to large files with many duplicate lines (for example, C program
3002 text with lots of repeated "}" and "return NULL;" lines).
3003
Guido van Rossum256705b2002-04-23 13:29:43 +00003004- New Text.dump() method in Tkinter module.
3005
Marc-André Lemburg1ec71ea2002-04-17 20:33:40 +00003006- New distutils commands for building packagers were added to
3007 support pkgtool on Solaris and swinstall on HP-UX.
3008
3009- distutils now has a new abstract binary packager base class
3010 command/bdist_packager, which simplifies writing packagers.
3011 This will hopefully provide the missing bits to encourage
3012 people to submit more packagers, e.g. for Debian, FreeBSD
3013 and other systems.
3014
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00003015- The UTF-16, -LE and -BE stream readers now raise a
3016 NotImplementedError for all calls to .readline(). Previously, they
3017 used to just produce garbage or fail with an encoding error --
3018 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 +00003019 work well with these.
3020
Martin v. Löwis5c137c22002-03-18 12:44:08 +00003021- compileall now supports quiet operation.
3022
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003023- The BaseHTTPServer now implements optional HTTP/1.1 persistent
Martin v. Löwis587c98c2002-03-17 18:37:22 +00003024 connections.
3025
Marc-André Lemburga5d2b4c2002-02-16 18:23:30 +00003026- socket module: the SSL support was broken out of the main
3027 _socket module C helper and placed into a new _ssl helper
3028 which now gets imported by socket.py if available and working.
3029
Marc-André Lemburg37aa5802002-02-10 21:42:47 +00003030- encodings package: added aliases for all supported IANA character
3031 sets
3032
Guido van Rossum606fe4e2001-12-28 20:57:14 +00003033- ftplib: to safeguard the user's privacy, anonymous login will use
3034 "anonymous@" as default password, rather than the real user and host
3035 name.
3036
Fred Drake36736122002-01-10 13:50:31 +00003037- webbrowser: tightened up the command passed to os.system() so that
3038 arbitrary shell code can't be executed because a bogus URL was
3039 passed in.
3040
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00003041- gettext.translation has an optional fallback argument, and
Martin v. Löwisa55ffae2002-01-11 06:58:49 +00003042 gettext.find an optional all argument. Translations will now fallback
Martin v. Löwisd8996052002-11-21 21:45:32 +00003043 on a per-message basis. The module supports plural forms, by means
3044 of gettext.[d]ngettext and Translation.[u]ngettext.
Martin v. Löwis1be64192002-01-11 06:33:28 +00003045
Martin v. Löwis9668b932002-01-12 11:27:42 +00003046- distutils bdist commands now offer a --skip-build option.
3047
Walter Dörwaldb25c2b02002-03-21 10:38:40 +00003048- warnings.warn now accepts a Warning instance as first argument.
3049
Fred Drakefed7e852002-04-04 19:36:15 +00003050- The xml.sax.expatreader.ExpatParser class will no longer create
3051 circular references by using itself as the locator that gets passed
3052 to the content handler implementation. [SF bug #535474]
3053
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00003054- The email.Parser.Parser class now properly parses strings regardless
3055 of their line endings, which can be any of \r, \n, or \r\n (CR, LF,
3056 or CRLF). Also, the Header class's constructor default arguments
3057 has changed slightly so that an explicit maxlinelen value is always
Barry Warsaw497e5c42002-12-30 19:27:08 +00003058 honored, and so unicode conversion error handling can be specified.
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00003059
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003060- distutils' build_ext command now links C++ extensions with the C++
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00003061 compiler available in the Makefile or CXX environment variable, if
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003062 running under \*nix.
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00003063
3064- New module bz2: provides a comprehensive interface for the bz2 compression
3065 library. It implements a complete file interface, one-shot (de)compression
3066 functions, and types for sequential (de)compression.
3067
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003068- New pdb command 'pp' which is like 'p' except that it pretty-prints
Barry Warsaw5d8d6182002-11-05 22:41:33 +00003069 the value of its expression argument.
3070
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00003071- Now bdist_rpm distutils command understands a verify_script option in
3072 the config file, including the contents of the referred filename in
3073 the "%verifyscript" section of the rpm spec file.
3074
Gustavo Niemeyer1456fde2002-11-25 17:25:04 +00003075- Fixed bug #495695: webbrowser module would run graphic browsers in a
3076 unix environment even if DISPLAY was not set. Also, support for
3077 skipstone browser was included.
3078
Gustavo Niemeyerd5ae01a2002-12-16 13:11:57 +00003079- Fixed bug #636769: rexec would run unallowed code if subclasses of
3080 strings were used as parameters for certain functions.
3081
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003082Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003083-----------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003084
Martin v. Löwis0d1fdea2002-11-22 08:36:54 +00003085- pygettext.py now supports globbing on Windows, and accepts module
3086 names in addition to accepting file names.
3087
Guido van Rossum923e4ef2002-09-17 20:58:59 +00003088- The SGI demos (Demo/sgi) have been removed. Nobody thought they
3089 were interesting any more. (The SGI library modules and extensions
3090 are still there; it is believed that at least some of these are
3091 still used and useful.)
3092
Fred Drake40813b12002-08-05 15:24:19 +00003093- IDLE supports the new encoding declarations (PEP 263); it can also
3094 deal with legacy 8-bit files if they use the locale's encoding. It
3095 allows non-ASCII strings in the interactive shell and executes them
3096 in the locale's encoding.
Martin v. Löwis98ce7b72002-08-05 15:11:26 +00003097
Marc-André Lemburg46260092002-04-04 16:17:11 +00003098- freeze.py now produces binaries which can import shared modules,
3099 unlike before when this failed due to missing symbol exports in
3100 the generated binary.
3101
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003102Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003103-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003104
Martin v. Löwisdc461752002-11-06 21:59:33 +00003105- On Unix, IDLE is now installed automatically.
3106
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00003107- The fpectl module is not built by default; it's dangerous or useless
3108 except in the hands of experts.
3109
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003110- The public Python C API will generally be declared using PyAPI_FUNC
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00003111 and PyAPI_DATA macros, while Python extension module init functions
3112 will be declared with PyMODINIT_FUNC. DL_EXPORT/DL_IMPORT macros
3113 are deprecated.
Neal Norwitz1389f3e2002-07-22 13:21:10 +00003114
Tim Petersc6a3ff62002-07-08 22:11:52 +00003115- A bug was fixed that could cause COUNT_ALLOCS builds to segfault, or
3116 get into infinite loops, when a new-style class got garbage-collected.
3117 Unfortunately, to avoid this, the way COUNT_ALLOCS works requires
3118 that new-style classes be immortal in COUNT_ALLOCS builds. Note that
3119 COUNT_ALLOCS is not enabled by default, in either release or debug
3120 builds, and that new-style classes are immortal only in COUNT_ALLOCS
3121 builds.
3122
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00003123- Compiling out the cyclic garbage collector is no longer an option.
3124 The old symbol WITH_CYCLE_GC is now ignored, and Python.h arranges
3125 that it's always defined (for the benefit of any extension modules
3126 that may be conditionalizing on it). A bonus is that any extension
3127 type participating in cyclic gc can choose to participate in the
3128 Py_TRASHCAN mechanism now too; in the absence of cyclic gc, this used
3129 to require editing the core to teach the trashcan mechanism about the
3130 new type.
3131
Martin v. Löwis0cec0ff2002-07-28 16:33:45 +00003132- According to Annex F of the current C standard,
Tim Peters1de41bf2002-07-03 03:31:20 +00003133
3134 The Standard C macro HUGE_VAL and its float and long double analogs,
3135 HUGE_VALF and HUGE_VALL, expand to expressions whose values are
3136 positive infinities.
3137
3138 Python only uses the double HUGE_VAL, and only to #define its own symbol
3139 Py_HUGE_VAL. Some platforms have incorrect definitions for HUGE_VAL.
3140 pyport.h used to try to worm around that, but the workarounds triggered
3141 other bugs on other platforms, so we gave up. If your platform defines
3142 HUGE_VAL incorrectly, you'll need to #define Py_HUGE_VAL to something
3143 that works on your platform. The only instance of this I'm sure about
3144 is on an unknown subset of Cray systems, described here:
3145
3146 http://www.cray.com/swpubs/manuals/SN-2194_2.0/html-SN-2194_2.0/x3138.htm
3147
3148 Presumably 2.3a1 breaks such systems. If anyone uses such a system, help!
3149
Martin v. Löwisa3fb4f72002-06-09 13:33:54 +00003150- The configure option --without-doc-strings can be used to remove the
3151 doc strings from the builtin functions and modules; this reduces the
3152 size of the executable.
3153
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00003154- The universal newlines option (PEP 278) is on by default. On Unix
3155 it can be disabled by passing --without-universal-newlines to the
3156 configure script. On other platforms, remove
3157 WITH_UNIVERSAL_NEWLINES from pyconfig.h.
Tim Peters639295f2002-04-21 07:30:30 +00003158
Martin v. Löwis1142de32002-03-29 16:28:31 +00003159- On Unix, a shared libpython2.3.so can be created with --enable-shared.
3160
Tim Peters8deda702002-03-30 10:06:07 +00003161- All uses of the CACHE_HASH, INTERN_STRINGS, and DONT_SHARE_SHORT_STRINGS
3162 preprocessor symbols were eliminated. The internal decisions they
3163 controlled stopped being experimental long ago.
Tim Peters1f7df352002-03-29 03:29:08 +00003164
Fred Drake7d28b732002-05-02 21:17:00 +00003165- The tools used to build the documentation now work under Cygwin as
3166 well as Unix.
3167
Skip Montanaro57454e52002-06-14 20:30:31 +00003168- The bsddb and dbm module builds have been changed to try and avoid version
3169 skew problems and disable linkage with Berkeley DB 1.85 unless the
3170 installer knows what s/he's doing. See the section on building these
3171 modules in the README file for details.
3172
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003173C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003174-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003175
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00003176- PyNumber_Check() now returns true for string and unicode objects.
3177 This is a result of these types having a partially defined
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00003178 tp_as_number slot. (This is not a feature, but an indication that
Walter Dörwalda1a61f92002-11-19 21:20:25 +00003179 PyNumber_Check() is not very useful to determine numeric behavior.
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00003180 It may be deprecated.)
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00003181
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00003182- The string object's layout has changed: the pointer member
3183 ob_sinterned has been replaced by an int member ob_sstate. On some
3184 platforms (e.g. most 64-bit systems) this may change the offset of
3185 the ob_sval member, so as a precaution the API_VERSION has been
3186 incremented. The apparently unused feature of "indirect interned
3187 strings", supported by the ob_sinterned member, is gone. Interned
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003188 strings are now usually mortal; there is a new API,
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00003189 PyString_InternImmortal() that creates immortal interned strings.
3190 (The ob_sstate member can only take three values; however, while
3191 making it a char saves a few bytes per string object on average, in
3192 it also slowed things down a bit because ob_sval was no longer
3193 aligned.)
3194
Guido van Rossumfdb86482002-08-14 21:20:32 +00003195- The Py_InitModule*() functions now accept NULL for the 'methods'
3196 argument. Modules without global functions are becoming more common
3197 now that factories can be types rather than functions.
3198
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00003199- New C API PyUnicode_FromOrdinal() which exposes unichr() at C
3200 level.
3201
Thomas Heller085358a2002-07-29 14:27:41 +00003202- New functions PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErr() and
3203 PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErrWithFilename(). Similar to
3204 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErrWithFilename() and
3205 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErr(), but they allow to specify
3206 the exception type to raise. Available on Windows.
3207
Tim Peters7c321a82002-07-09 02:57:01 +00003208- Py_FatalError() is now declared as taking a const char* argument. It
3209 was previously declared without const. This should not affect working
3210 code.
3211
Martin v. Löwis01f94bd2002-05-08 08:44:21 +00003212- Added new macro PySequence_ITEM(o, i) that directly calls
3213 sq_item without rechecking that o is a sequence and without
3214 adjusting for negative indices.
3215
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00003216- PyRange_New() now raises ValueError if the fourth argument is not 1.
3217 This is part of the removal of deprecated features of the xrange
3218 object.
3219
Guido van Rossum517c7d42002-04-26 02:49:14 +00003220- PyNumber_Coerce() and PyNumber_CoerceEx() now also invoke the type's
3221 coercion if both arguments have the same type but this type has the
3222 CHECKTYPES flag set. This is to better support proxies.
3223
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003224- The type of tp_free has been changed from "``void (*)(PyObject *)``" to
3225 "``void (*)(void *)``".
Neil Schemenauer9344b142002-04-12 23:00:08 +00003226
3227- PyObject_Del, PyObject_GC_Del are now functions instead of macros.
3228
Guido van Rossum0986d822002-04-08 01:38:42 +00003229- A type can now inherit its metatype from its base type. Previously,
3230 when PyType_Ready() was called, if ob_type was found to be NULL, it
3231 was always set to &PyType_Type; now it is set to base->ob_type,
3232 where base is tp_base, defaulting to &PyObject_Type.
3233
3234- PyType_Ready() accidentally did not inherit tp_is_gc; now it does.
3235
Neil Schemenauerc9abc1d2002-05-08 14:14:41 +00003236- The PyCore_* family of APIs have been removed.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00003237
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003238- The "u#" parser marker will now pass through Unicode objects as-is
Marc-André Lemburg3e3eacb2002-01-09 16:21:27 +00003239 without going through the buffer API.
3240
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003241- The enumerators of cmp_op have been renamed to use the prefix ``PyCmp_``.
Martin v. Löwis7198a522002-01-01 19:59:11 +00003242
Tim Peters10a3bb52001-12-25 19:07:38 +00003243- An old #define of ANY as void has been removed from pyport.h. This
3244 hasn't been used since Python's pre-ANSI days, and the #define has
3245 been marked as obsolete since then. SF bug 495548 says it created
3246 conflicts with other packages, so keeping it around wasn't harmless.
3247
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003248- Because Python's magic number scheme broke on January 1st, we decided
3249 to stop Python development. Thanks for all the fish!
3250
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00003251- Some of us don't like fish, so we changed Python's magic number
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00003252 scheme to a new one. See Python/import.c for details.
3253
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003254New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003255-------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003256
Martin v. Löwis79acb9e2002-12-06 12:48:53 +00003257- OpenVMS is now supported.
3258
Martin v. Löwisf90ae202002-06-11 06:22:31 +00003259- AtheOS is now supported.
3260
Andrew MacIntyre161ad0e2002-08-04 07:25:58 +00003261- the EMX runtime environment on OS/2 is now supported.
3262
Martin v. Löwisa6e97582002-01-01 18:41:33 +00003263- GNU/Hurd is now supported.
3264
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003265Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003266-----
3267
Fred Drake4dd0f7e2002-11-26 21:44:56 +00003268- The regrtest.py script's -u option now provides a way to say "allow
3269 all resources except this one." For example, to allow everything
3270 except bsddb, give the option '-uall,-bsddb'.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003271
3272Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003273-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003274
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00003275- The Windows distribution now ships with version 4.0.14 of the
3276 Sleepycat Berkeley database library. This should be a huge
3277 improvement over the previous Berkeley DB 1.85, which had many
3278 bugs.
3279 XXX What are the licensing issues here?
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003280 XXX If a user has a database created with a previous version of
Tim Peters84c7a3f2002-11-23 18:48:06 +00003281 XXX Python, what must they do to convert it?
3282 XXX I'm still not sure how to link this thing (see PCbuild/readme.txt).
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00003283 XXX The version # is likely to change before 2.3a1.
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00003284
3285- The Windows distribution now ships with a Secure Sockets Library (SLL)
Mark Hammondc3de0082002-12-03 06:16:08 +00003286 module (_ssl.pyd)
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00003287
Tim Peters857fb4c2002-11-14 23:31:58 +00003288- The Windows distribution now ships with Tcl/Tk version 8.4.1 (it
3289 previously shipped with Tcl/Tk 8.3.2).
3290
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00003291- When Python is built under a Microsoft compiler, sys.version now
3292 includes the compiler version number (_MSC_VER). For example, under
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003293 MSVC 6, sys.version contains the substring "MSC v.1200 ". 1200 is
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00003294 the value of _MSC_VER under MSVC 6.
3295
Tim Peters08e72952002-04-16 20:48:01 +00003296- Sometimes the uninstall executable (UNWISE.EXE) vanishes. One cause
3297 of that has been fixed in the installer (disabled Wise's "delete in-
3298 use files" uninstall option).
3299
Guido van Rossum181e41a2002-04-06 00:23:25 +00003300- Fixed a bug in urllib's proxy handling in Windows. [SF bug #503031]
3301
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00003302- The installer now installs Start menu shortcuts under (the local
3303 equivalent of) "All Users" when doing an Admin install.
3304
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00003305- file.truncate([newsize]) now works on Windows for all newsize values.
3306 It used to fail if newsize didn't fit in 32 bits, reflecting a
3307 limitation of MS _chsize (which is no longer used).
3308
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00003309- os.waitpid() is now implemented for Windows, and can be used to block
3310 until a specified process exits. This is similar to, but not exactly
3311 the same as, os.waitpid() on POSIX systems. If you're waiting for
3312 a specific process whose pid was obtained from one of the spawn()
3313 functions, the same Python os.waitpid() code works across platforms.
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00003314 See the docs for details. The docs were changed to clarify that
3315 spawn functions return, and waitpid requires, a process handle on
3316 Windows (not the same thing as a Windows process id).
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00003317
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00003318- New tempfile.TemporaryFile implementation for Windows: this doesn't
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003319 need a TemporaryFileWrapper wrapper anymore, and should be immune
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00003320 to a nasty problem: before 2.3, if you got a temp file on Windows, it
3321 got wrapped in an object whose close() method first closed the
3322 underlying file, then deleted the file. This usually worked fine.
3323 However, the spawn family of functions on Windows create (at a low C
3324 level) the same set of open files in the spawned process Q as were
3325 open in the spawning process P. If a temp file f was among them, then
3326 doing f.close() in P first closed P's C-level file handle on f, but Q's
3327 C-level file handle on f remained open, so the attempt in P to delete f
3328 blew up with a "Permission denied" error (Windows doesn't allow
3329 deleting open files). This was surprising, subtle, and difficult to
3330 work around.
3331
3332- The os module now exports all the symbolic constants usable with the
3333 low-level os.open() on Windows: the new constants in 2.3 are
3334 O_NOINHERIT, O_SHORT_LIVED, O_TEMPORARY, O_RANDOM and O_SEQUENTIAL.
3335 The others were also available in 2.2: O_APPEND, O_BINARY, O_CREAT,
3336 O_EXCL, O_RDONLY, O_RDWR, O_TEXT, O_TRUNC and O_WRONLY. Contrary
3337 to Microsoft docs, O_SHORT_LIVED does not seem to imply O_TEMPORARY
3338 (so specify both if you want both; note that neither is useful unless
3339 specified with O_CREAT too).
3340
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003341Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003342----
3343
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003344- Mac/Relnotes is gone, the release notes are now here.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003345
Just van Rossume1ebd802003-02-10 10:06:18 +00003346- Python (the OSX-only, unix-based version, not the OS9-compatible CFM
3347 version) now fully supports unicode strings as arguments to various file
3348 system calls, eg. open(), file(), os.stat() and os.listdir().
3349
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003350- The current naming convention for Python on the Macintosh is that MacPython
3351 refers to the unix-based OSX-only version, and MacPython-OS9 refers to the
3352 CFM-based version that runs on both OS9 and OSX.
3353
3354- All MacPython-OS9 functionality is now available in an OSX unix build,
3355 including the Carbon modules, the IDE, OSA support, etc. A lot of this
3356 will only work correctly in a framework build, though, because you cannot
3357 talk to the window manager unless your application is run from a .app
3358 bundle. There is a command line tool "pythonw" that runs your script
3359 with an interpreter living in such a .app bundle, this interpreter should
3360 be used to run any Python script using the window manager (including
3361 Tkinter or wxPython scripts).
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00003362
Jack Jansen8bb80db2002-12-30 22:42:43 +00003363- Most of Mac/Lib has moved to Lib/plat-mac, which is again used both in
3364 MacPython-OSX and MacPython-OS9. The only modules remaining in Mac/Lib
3365 are specifically for MacPython-OS9 (CFM support, preference resources, etc).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003366
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003367- A new utility PythonLauncher will start a Python interpreter when a .py or
3368 .pyw script is double-clicked in the Finder. By default .py scripts are
3369 run with a normal Python interpreter in a Terminal window and .pyw
3370 files are run with a window-aware pythonw interpreter without a Terminal
3371 window, but all this can be customized.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003372
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003373- MacPython-OS9 is now Carbon-only, so it runs on Mac OS 9 or Mac OS X and
3374 possibly on Mac OS 8.6 with the right CarbonLib installed, but not on earlier
3375 releases.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003376
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003377- Many tools such as BuildApplet.py and gensuitemodule.py now support a command
3378 line interface too.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003379
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003380- All the Carbon classes are now PEP253 compliant, meaning that you can
3381 subclass them from Python. Most of the attributes have gone, you should
3382 now use the accessor function call API, which is also what Apple's
3383 documentation uses. Some attributes such as grafport.visRgn are still
3384 available for convenience.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003385
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003386- New Carbon modules File (implementing the APIs in Files.h and Aliases.h)
3387 and Folder (APIs from Folders.h). The old macfs builtin module is
3388 gone, and replaced by a Python wrapper around the new modules.
3389
3390- Pathname handling should now be fully consistent: MacPython-OSX always uses
3391 unix pathnames and MacPython-OS9 always uses colon-separated Mac pathnames
3392 (also when running on Mac OS X).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003393
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003394- New Carbon modules Help and AH give access to the Carbon Help Manager.
3395 There are hooks in the IDE to allow accessing the Python documentation
3396 (and Apple's Carbon and Cocoa documentation) through the Help Viewer.
3397 See Mac/OSX/README for converting the Python documentation to a
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003398 Help Viewer compatible form and installing it.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003399
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003400- OSA support has been redesigned and the generated Python classes now
3401 mirror the inheritance defined by the underlying OSA classes.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003402
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003403- MacPython no longer maps both \r and \n to \n on input for any text file.
3404 This feature has been replaced by universal newline support (PEP278).
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00003405
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00003406- The default encoding for Python sourcefiles in MacPython-OS9 is no longer
Guido van Rossum16c85172003-02-20 01:52:48 +00003407 mac-roman (or whatever your local Mac encoding was) but "ascii", like on
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00003408 other platforms. If you really need sourcefiles with Mac characters in them
3409 you can change this in site.py.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003410
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003411
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003412What's New in Python 2.2 final?
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003413===============================
3414
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003415*Release date: 21-Dec-2001*
3416
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003417Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003418--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003419
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003420- pickle.py, cPickle: allow pickling instances of new-style classes
3421 with a custom metaclass.
3422
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003423Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003424-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003425
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003426- weakref proxy object: when comparing, unwrap both arguments if both
3427 are proxies.
3428
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003429Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003430-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003431
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003432- binascii.b2a_base64(): fix a potential buffer overrun when encoding
3433 very short strings.
3434
3435- cPickle: the obscure "fast" mode was suspected of causing stack
3436 overflows on the Mac. Hopefully fixed this by setting the recursion
3437 limit much smaller. If the limit is too low (it only affects
3438 performance), you can change it by defining PY_CPICKLE_FAST_LIMIT
3439 when compiling cPickle.c (or in pyconfig.h).
3440
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003441Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003442-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003443
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003444- dumbdbm.py: fixed a dumb old bug (the file didn't get synched at
3445 close or delete time).
3446
3447- rfc822.py: fixed a bug where the address '<>' was converted to None
3448 instead of an empty string (also fixes the email.Utils module).
3449
3450- xmlrpclib.py: version 1.0.0; uses precision for doubles.
3451
3452- test suite: the pickle and cPickle tests were not executing any code
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003453 when run from the standard regression test.
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003454
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003455Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003456-----------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003457
3458Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003459-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003460
3461C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003462-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003463
3464New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003465-------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003466
3467Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003468-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003469
3470Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003471-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003472
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003473- distutils package: fixed broken Windows installers (bdist_wininst).
3474
3475- tempfile.py: prevent mysterious warnings when TemporaryFileWrapper
3476 instances are deleted at process exit time.
3477
3478- socket.py: prevent mysterious warnings when socket instances are
3479 deleted at process exit time.
3480
3481- posixmodule.c: fix a Windows crash with stat() of a filename ending
3482 in backslash.
3483
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003484Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003485----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003486
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003487- The Carbon toolbox modules have been upgraded to Universal Headers
3488 3.4, and experimental CoreGraphics and CarbonEvents modules have
3489 been added. All only for framework-enabled MacOSX.
3490
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003491
Tim Peters6272dfd2001-12-13 19:34:00 +00003492What's New in Python 2.2c1?
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003493===========================
3494
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003495*Release date: 14-Dec-2001*
3496
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003497Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003498--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003499
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003500- Guido's tutorial introduction to the new type/class features has
3501 been extensively updated. See
3502
3503 http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html
3504
3505 That remains the primary documentation in this area.
3506
Guido van Rossum33bab012001-12-05 22:45:48 +00003507- Fixed a leak: instance variables declared with __slots__ were never
3508 deleted!
3509
Guido van Rossum4b800852001-12-03 00:54:52 +00003510- The "delete attribute" method of descriptor objects is called
3511 __delete__, not __del__. In previous releases, it was mistakenly
3512 called __del__, which created an unfortunate overloading condition
3513 with finalizers. (The "get attribute" and "set attribute" methods
3514 are still called __get__ and __set__, respectively.)
3515
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00003516- Some subtle issues with the super built-in were fixed:
3517
3518 (a) When super itself is subclassed, its __get__ method would still
3519 return an instance of the base class (i.e., of super).
3520
3521 (b) super(C, C()).__class__ would return C rather than super. This
3522 is confusing. To fix this, I decided to change the semantics of
3523 super so that it only applies to code attributes, not to data
3524 attributes. After all, overriding data attributes is not
3525 supported anyway.
3526
3527 (c) The __get__ method didn't check whether the argument was an
3528 instance of the type used in creation of the super instance.
3529
Guido van Rossumcd7b7d62001-12-04 21:02:07 +00003530- Previously, hash() of an instance of a subclass of a mutable type
3531 (list or dictionary) would return some value, rather than raising
3532 TypeError. This has been fixed. Also, directly calling
3533 dict.__hash__ and list.__hash__ now raises the same TypeError
3534 (previously, these were the same as object.__hash__).
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00003535
Guido van Rossumd331cb52001-12-05 19:46:42 +00003536- New-style objects now support deleting their __dict__. This is for
3537 all intents and purposes equivalent to assigning a brand new empty
3538 dictionary, but saves space if the object is not used further.
3539
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003540Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003541-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003542
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00003543- -Qnew now works as documented in PEP 238: when -Qnew is passed on
3544 the command line, all occurrences of "/" use true division instead
3545 of classic division. See the PEP for details. Note that "all"
3546 means all instances in library and 3rd-party modules, as well as in
3547 your own code. As the PEP says, -Qnew is intended for use only in
3548 educational environments with control over the libraries in use.
Tim Petersbf72fe22001-12-11 21:43:14 +00003549 Note that test_coercion.py in the standard Python test suite fails
3550 under -Qnew; this is expected, and won't be repaired until true
3551 division becomes the default (in the meantime, test_coercion is
3552 testing the current rules).
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00003553
Fred Drake6c01e252001-12-14 17:08:12 +00003554- complex() now only allows the first argument to be a string
3555 argument, and raises TypeError if either the second arg is a string
3556 or if the second arg is specified when the first is a string.
3557
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003558Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003559-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003560
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00003561- gc.get_referents was renamed to gc.get_referrers.
3562
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003563Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003564-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003565
Tim Peters25059d32001-12-07 20:35:43 +00003566- Functions in the os.spawn() family now release the global interpreter
3567 lock around calling the platform spawn. They should always have done
3568 this, but did not before 2.2c1. Multithreaded programs calling
3569 an os.spawn function with P_WAIT will no longer block all Python threads
3570 until the spawned program completes. It's possible that some programs
3571 relies on blocking, although more likely by accident than by design.
3572
Martin v. Löwis3a89b2b2001-11-25 14:35:58 +00003573- webbrowser defaults to netscape.exe on OS/2 now.
3574
Martin v. Löwis652e1912001-11-25 14:50:56 +00003575- Tix.ResizeHandle exposes detach_widget, hide, and show.
3576
Martin v. Löwis714d2e22001-12-02 12:26:03 +00003577- The charset alias windows_1252 has been added.
3578
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003579- types.StringTypes is a tuple containing the defined string types;
3580 usually this will be (str, unicode), but if Python was compiled
3581 without Unicode support it will be just (str,).
3582
3583- The pulldom and minidom modules were synchronized to PyXML.
3584
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003585Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003586-----------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003587
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003588- A new script called Tools/scripts/google.py was added, which fires
3589 off a search on Google.
3590
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003591Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003592-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003593
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003594- Note that release builds of Python should arrange to define the
3595 preprocessor symbol NDEBUG on the command line (or equivalent).
3596 In the 2.2 pre-release series we tried to define this by magic in
3597 Python.h instead, but it proved to cause problems for extension
3598 authors. The Unix, Windows and Mac builds now all define NDEBUG in
3599 release builds via cmdline (or equivalent) instead. Ports to
3600 other platforms should do likewise.
3601
Jack Jansen1999ef42001-12-06 21:47:20 +00003602- It is no longer necessary to use --with-suffix when building on a
3603 case-insensitive file system (such as Mac OS X HFS+). In the build
3604 directory an extension is used, but not in the installed python.
3605
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003606C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003607-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003608
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00003609- New function PyDict_MergeFromSeq2() exposes the builtin dict
3610 constructor's logic for updating a dictionary from an iterable object
3611 producing key-value pairs.
3612
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00003613- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() requires that the number of entries in
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00003614 the keyword list equal the number of argument specifiers. This
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00003615 wasn't checked correctly, and PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords could even
3616 dump core in some bad cases. This has been repaired. As a result,
3617 PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords may raise RuntimeError in bad cases that
3618 previously went unchallenged.
3619
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003620New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003621-------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003622
3623Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003624-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003625
3626Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003627-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003628
3629Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003630----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003631
Jack Jansenffa260f2001-12-06 21:14:00 +00003632- In unix-Python on Mac OS X (and darwin) sys.platform is now "darwin",
3633 without any trailing digits.
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003634
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003635- Changed logic for finding python home in Mac OS X framework Pythons.
3636 Now sys.executable points to the executable again, in stead of to
3637 the shared library. The latter is used only for locating the python
3638 home.
3639
3640
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003641What's New in Python 2.2b2?
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003642===========================
3643
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003644*Release date: 16-Nov-2001*
3645
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003646Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003647--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003648
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00003649- Multiple inheritance mixing new-style and classic classes in the
3650 list of base classes is now allowed, so this works now:
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00003651
3652 class Classic: pass
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00003653 class Mixed(Classic, object): pass
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00003654
3655 The MRO (method resolution order) for each base class is respected
3656 according to its kind, but the MRO for the derived class is computed
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003657 using new-style MRO rules if any base class is a new-style class.
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00003658 This needs to be documented.
3659
Tim Petersa427a2b2001-10-29 22:25:45 +00003660- The new builtin dictionary() constructor, and dictionary type, have
3661 been renamed to dict. This reflects a decade of common usage.
3662
Guido van Rossum3fc08d22001-11-15 20:33:10 +00003663- dict() now accepts an iterable object producing 2-sequences. For
3664 example, dict(d.items()) == d for any dictionary d. The argument,
3665 and the elements of the argument, can be any iterable objects.
3666
Guido van Rossum7ad2d1e2001-10-29 22:11:00 +00003667- New-style classes can now have a __del__ method, which is called
3668 when the instance is deleted (just like for classic classes).
3669
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003670- Assignment to object.__dict__ is now possible, for objects that are
3671 instances of new-style classes that have a __dict__ (unless the base
3672 class forbids it).
3673
Guido van Rossumc8e56452001-10-22 00:43:43 +00003674- Methods of built-in types now properly check for keyword arguments
3675 (formerly these were silently ignored). The only built-in methods
3676 that take keyword arguments are __call__, __init__ and __new__.
3677
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00003678- The socket function has been converted to a type; see below.
3679
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003680Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003681-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003682
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00003683- Assignment to __debug__ raises SyntaxError at compile-time. This
3684 was promised when 2.1c1 was released as "What's New in Python 2.1c1"
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003685 (see below) says.
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00003686
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003687- Clarified the error messages for unsupported operands to an operator
3688 (like 1 + '').
3689
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003690Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003691-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003692
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00003693- mmap has a new keyword argument, "access", allowing a uniform way for
3694 both Windows and Unix users to create read-only, write-through and
3695 copy-on-write memory mappings. This was previously possible only on
3696 Unix. A new keyword argument was required to support this in a
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003697 uniform way because the mmap() signatures had diverged across
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00003698 platforms. Thanks to Jay T Miller for repairing this!
3699
Tim Peters169ded02001-11-03 19:57:21 +00003700- By default, the gc.garbage list now contains only those instances in
3701 unreachable cycles that have __del__ methods; in 2.1 it contained all
3702 instances in unreachable cycles. "Instances" here has been generalized
3703 to include instances of both new-style and old-style classes.
3704
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003705- The socket module defines a new method for socket objects,
3706 sendall(). This is like send() but may make multiple calls to
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00003707 send() until all data has been sent. Also, the socket function has
3708 been converted to a subclassable type, like list and tuple (etc.)
3709 before it; socket and SocketType are now the same thing.
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003710
3711- Various bugfixes to the curses module. There is now a test suite
3712 for the curses module (you have to run it manually).
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00003713
Guido van Rossum692adf12001-10-30 03:03:03 +00003714- binascii.b2a_base64 no longer places an arbitrary restriction of 57
3715 bytes on its input.
3716
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003717Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003718-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003719
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00003720- tkFileDialog exposes a Directory class and askdirectory
Martin v. Löwis25ee87c2001-11-07 22:38:08 +00003721 convenience function.
3722
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00003723- Symbolic group names in regular expressions must be unique. For
3724 example, the regexp r'(?P<abc>)(?P<abc>)' is not allowed, because a
3725 single name can't mean both "group 1" and "group 2" simultaneously.
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003726 Python 2.2 detects this error at regexp compilation time;
3727 previously, the error went undetected, and results were
3728 unpredictable. Also in sre, the pattern.split(), pattern.sub(), and
3729 pattern.subn() methods have been rewritten in C. Also, an
3730 experimental function/method finditer() has been added, which works
3731 like findall() but returns an iterator.
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00003732
Martin v. Löwisb7b32602001-11-02 23:48:20 +00003733- Tix exposes more commands through the classes DirSelectBox,
3734 DirSelectDialog, ListNoteBook, Meter, CheckList, and the
3735 methods tix_addbitmapdir, tix_cget, tix_configure, tix_filedialog,
3736 tix_getbitmap, tix_getimage, tix_option_get, and tix_resetoptions.
3737
Tim Peters98791af2001-10-23 01:59:54 +00003738- Traceback objects are now scanned by cyclic garbage collection, so
3739 cycles created by casual use of sys.exc_info() no longer cause
3740 permanent memory leaks (provided garbage collection is enabled).
3741
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00003742- os.extsep -- a new variable needed by the RISCOS support. It is the
3743 separator used by extensions, and is '.' on all platforms except
3744 RISCOS, where it is '/'. There is no need to use this variable
3745 unless you have a masochistic desire to port your code to RISCOS.
3746
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003747- mimetypes.py has optional support for non-standard, but commonly
3748 found types. guess_type() and guess_extension() now accept an
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003749 optional 'strict' flag, defaulting to true, which controls whether
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003750 recognize non-standard types or not. A few non-standard types we
3751 know about have been added. Also, when run as a script, there are
3752 new -l and -e options.
3753
3754- statcache is now deprecated.
3755
3756- email.Utils.formatdate() now produces the preferred RFC 2822 style
3757 dates with numeric timezones (it used to produce obsolete dates
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003758 hard coded to "GMT" timezone). An optional 'localtime' flag is
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003759 added to produce dates in the local timezone, with daylight savings
3760 time properly taken into account.
3761
3762- In pickle and cPickle, instead of masking errors in load() by
3763 transforming them into SystemError, we let the original exception
3764 propagate out. Also, implement support for __safe_for_unpickling__
3765 in pickle, as it already was supported in cPickle.
3766
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003767Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003768-----------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003769
3770Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003771-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003772
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003773- The dbm module is built using libdb1 if available. The bsddb module
3774 is built with libdb3 if available.
3775
3776- Misc/Makefile.pre.in has been removed by BDFL pronouncement.
3777
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003778C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003779-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003780
Tim Peters1fc240e2001-10-26 05:06:50 +00003781- New function PySequence_Fast_GET_SIZE() returns the size of a non-
3782 NULL result from PySequence_Fast(), more quickly than calling
3783 PySequence_Size().
3784
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003785- New argument unpacking function PyArg_UnpackTuple() added.
3786
3787- New functions PyObject_CallFunctionObjArgs() and
3788 PyObject_CallMethodObjArgs() have been added to make it more
3789 convenient and efficient to call functions and methods from C.
3790
3791- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() no longer masks errors, so it's
3792 possible that this will propagate errors it didn't before.
3793
3794- New function PyObject_CheckReadBuffer(), which returns true if its
3795 argument supports the single-segment readable buffer interface.
3796
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003797New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003798-------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003799
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00003800- We've finally confirmed that this release builds on HP-UX 11.00,
3801 *with* threads, and passes the test suite.
3802
Tim Peters7a33d8b2001-11-05 02:51:07 +00003803- Thanks to a series of patches from Michael Muller, Python may build
3804 again under OS/2 Visual Age C++.
3805
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00003806- Updated RISCOS port by Dietmar Schwertberger.
3807
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003808Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003809-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003810
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00003811- Added a test script for the curses module. It isn't run automatically;
3812 regrtest.py must be run with '-u curses' to enable it.
3813
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003814Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003815-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003816
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003817Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003818----
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003819
3820- PythonScript has been moved to unsupported and is slated to be
3821 removed completely in the next release.
3822
3823- It should now be possible to build applets that work on both OS9 and
3824 OSX.
3825
3826- The core is now linked with CoreServices not Carbon; as a side
3827 result, default 8bit encoding on OSX is now ASCII.
3828
3829- Python should now build on OSX 10.1.1
3830
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003831
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003832What's New in Python 2.2b1?
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003833===========================
3834
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003835*Release date: 19-Oct-2001*
3836
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003837Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003838--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003839
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00003840- New-style classes are now always dynamic (except for built-in and
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00003841 extension types). There is no longer a performance penalty, and I
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00003842 no longer see another reason to keep this baggage around. One relic
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00003843 remains: the __dict__ of a new-style class is a read-only proxy; you
3844 must set the class's attribute to modify it. As a consequence, the
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00003845 __defined__ attribute of new-style types no longer exists, for lack
3846 of need: there is once again only one __dict__ (although in the
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00003847 future a __cache__ may be resurrected with a similar function, if I
3848 can prove that it actually speeds things up).
Guido van Rossum50fda3b2001-10-04 19:46:06 +00003849
Tim Peters1c9ca872001-10-04 06:43:12 +00003850- C.__doc__ now works as expected for new-style classes (in 2.2a4 it
3851 always returned None, even when there was a class docstring).
3852
3853- doctest now finds and runs docstrings attached to new-style classes,
3854 class methods, static methods, and properties.
3855
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003856Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003857-----------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003858
Guido van Rossuma8bcf802001-10-15 15:53:58 +00003859- A very subtle syntactical pitfall in list comprehensions was fixed.
3860 For example: [a+b for a in 'abc', for b in 'def']. The comma in
3861 this example is a mistake. Previously, this would silently let 'a'
3862 iterate over the singleton tuple ('abc',), yielding ['abcd', 'abce',
3863 'abcf'] rather than the intended ['ad', 'ae', 'af', 'bd', 'be',
3864 'bf', 'cd', 'ce', 'cf']. Now, this is flagged as a syntax error.
3865 Note that [a for a in <singleton>] is a convoluted way to say
3866 [<singleton>] anyway, so it's not like any expressiveness is lost.
3867
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003868- getattr(obj, name, default) now only catches AttributeError, as
3869 documented, rather than returning the default value for all
3870 exceptions (which could mask bugs in a __getattr__ hook, for
3871 example).
3872
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00003873- Weak reference objects are now part of the core and offer a C API.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00003874 A bug which could allow a core dump when binary operations involved
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00003875 proxy reference has been fixed. weakref.ReferenceError is now a
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003876 built-in exception.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00003877
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00003878- unicode(obj) now behaves more like str(obj), accepting arbitrary
3879 objects, and calling a __unicode__ method if it exists.
3880 unicode(obj, encoding) and unicode(obj, encoding, errors) still
Marc-André Lemburgb5507ec2001-10-19 12:02:29 +00003881 require an 8-bit string or character buffer argument.
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00003882
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003883- isinstance() now allows any object as the first argument and a
3884 class, a type or something with a __bases__ tuple attribute for the
3885 second argument. The second argument may also be a tuple of a
3886 class, type, or something with __bases__, in which case isinstance()
3887 will return true if the first argument is an instance of any of the
3888 things contained in the second argument tuple. E.g.
3889
3890 isinstance(x, (A, B))
3891
3892 returns true if x is an instance of A or B.
3893
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003894Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003895-----------------
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003896
3897- thread.start_new_thread() now returns the thread ID (previously None).
3898
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00003899- binascii has now two quopri support functions, a2b_qp and b2a_qp.
3900
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00003901- readline now supports setting the startup_hook and the
3902 pre_event_hook, and adds the add_history() function.
Martin v. Löwis0daad592001-09-30 21:09:59 +00003903
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00003904- os and posix supports chroot(), setgroups() and unsetenv() where
3905 available. The stat(), fstat(), statvfs() and fstatvfs() functions
3906 now return "pseudo-sequences" -- the various fields can now be
3907 accessed as attributes (e.g. os.stat("/").st_mtime) but for
3908 backwards compatibility they also behave as a fixed-length sequence.
3909 Some platform-specific fields (e.g. st_rdev) are only accessible as
Guido van Rossum98bf58f2001-10-18 20:34:25 +00003910 attributes.
3911
3912- time: localtime(), gmtime() and strptime() now return a
3913 pseudo-sequence similar to the os.stat() return value, with
3914 attributes like tm_year etc.
Martin v. Löwis16628c92001-10-04 22:46:41 +00003915
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003916- Decompression objects in the zlib module now accept an optional
3917 second parameter to decompress() that specifies the maximum amount
3918 of memory to use for the uncompressed data.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003919
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00003920- optional SSL support in the socket module now exports OpenSSL
3921 functions RAND_add(), RAND_egd(), and RAND_status(). These calls
3922 are useful on platforms like Solaris where OpenSSL does not
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003923 automatically seed its PRNG. Also, the keyfile and certfile
3924 arguments to socket.ssl() are now optional.
3925
3926- posixmodule (and by extension, the os module on POSIX platforms) now
3927 exports O_LARGEFILE, O_DIRECT, O_DIRECTORY, and O_NOFOLLOW.
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00003928
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003929Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003930-------
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00003931
Tim Peters7402f792001-10-02 03:53:41 +00003932- doctest now excludes functions and classes not defined by the module
3933 being tested, thanks to Tim Hochberg.
3934
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00003935- HotShot, a new profiler implemented using a C-based callback, has
3936 been added. This substantially reduces the overhead of profiling,
3937 but it is still quite preliminary. Support modules and
3938 documentation will be added in upcoming releases (before 2.2 final).
3939
Guido van Rossumc4b09b42001-10-04 10:19:00 +00003940- profile now produces correct output in situations where an exception
3941 raised in Python is cleared by C code (e.g. hasattr()). This used
3942 to cause wrong output, including spurious claims of recursive
3943 functions and attribution of time spent to the wrong function.
3944
Tim Peters0a1fc4e2001-10-07 03:12:08 +00003945 The code and documentation for the derived OldProfile and HotProfile
3946 profiling classes was removed. The code hasn't worked for years (if
3947 you tried to use them, they raised exceptions). OldProfile
3948 intended to reproduce the behavior of the profiler Python used more
3949 than 7 years ago, and isn't interesting anymore. HotProfile intended
3950 to provide a faster profiler (but producing less information), and
3951 that's a worthy goal we intend to meet via a different approach (but
3952 without losing information).
3953
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00003954- Profile.calibrate() has a new implementation that should deliver
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00003955 a much better system-specific calibration constant. The constant can
3956 now be specified in an instance constructor, or as a Profile class or
3957 instance variable, instead of by editing profile.py's source code.
3958 Calibration must still be done manually (see the docs for the profile
3959 module).
3960
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003961 Note that Profile.calibrate() must be overridden by subclasses.
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00003962 Improving the accuracy required exploiting detailed knowledge of
3963 profiler internals; the earlier method abstracted away the details
3964 and measured a simplified model instead, but consequently computed
3965 a constant too small by a factor of 2 on some modern machines.
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00003966
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00003967- quopri's encode and decode methods take an optional header parameter,
Jeremy Hylton6f543b62001-10-16 20:42:52 +00003968 which indicates whether output is intended for the header 'Q'
3969 encoding.
3970
Guido van Rossuma5343cc2001-10-18 18:02:07 +00003971- The SocketServer.ThreadingMixIn class now closes the request after
3972 finish_request() returns. (Not when it errors out though.)
3973
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003974- The nntplib module's NNTP.body() method has grown a 'file' argument
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003975 to allow saving the message body to a file.
3976
3977- The email package has added a class email.Parser.HeaderParser which
3978 only parses headers and does not recurse into the message's body.
3979 Also, the module/class MIMEAudio has been added for representing
3980 audio data (contributed by Anthony Baxter).
3981
3982- ftplib should be able to handle files > 2GB.
3983
3984- ConfigParser.getboolean() now also interprets TRUE, FALSE, YES, NO,
3985 ON, and OFF.
3986
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00003987- xml.dom.minidom NodeList objects now support the length attribute
3988 and item() method as required by the DOM specifications.
3989
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00003990Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003991-----------
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00003992
3993- Demo/dns was removed. It no longer serves any purpose; a package
3994 derived from it is now maintained by Anthony Baxter, see
3995 http://PyDNS.SourceForge.net.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003996
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003997- The freeze tool has been made more robust, and two new options have
3998 been added: -X and -E.
3999
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004000Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004001-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004002
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004003- configure will use CXX in LINKCC if CXX is used to build main() and
4004 the system requires to link a C++ main using the C++ compiler.
4005
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004006C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004007-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004008
Guido van Rossum6c4bce32001-10-18 19:20:25 +00004009- The documentation for the tp_compare slot is updated to require that
4010 the return value must be -1, 0, 1; an arbitrary number <0 or >0 is
4011 not correct. This is not yet enforced but will be enforced in
4012 Python 2.3; even later, we may use -2 to indicate errors and +2 for
4013 "NotImplemented". Right now, -1 should be used for an error return.
4014
Tim Petersd38b1c72001-09-30 05:09:37 +00004015- PyLong_AsLongLong() now accepts int (as well as long) arguments.
4016 Consequently, PyArg_ParseTuple's 'L' code also accepts int (as well
4017 as long) arguments.
4018
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00004019- PyThread_start_new_thread() now returns a long int giving the thread
4020 ID, if one can be calculated; it returns -1 for error, 0 if no
4021 thread ID is calculated (this is an incompatible change, but only
4022 the thread module used this API). This code has only really been
4023 tested on Linux and Windows; other platforms please beware (and
4024 report any bugs or strange behavior).
4025
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00004026- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() no longer accepts Unicode objects as
4027 input.
4028
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004029New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004030-------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004031
4032Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004033-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004034
4035Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004036-------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004037
Tim Peters04cf1d32001-10-09 22:39:40 +00004038- Installer: If you install IDLE, and don't disable file-extension
4039 registration, a new "Edit with IDLE" context (right-click) menu entry
4040 is created for .py and .pyw files.
4041
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004042- The signal module now supports SIGBREAK on Windows, thanks to Steven
4043 Scott. Note that SIGBREAK is unique to Windows. The default SIGBREAK
4044 action remains to call Win32 ExitProcess(). This can be changed via
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004045 signal.signal(). For example::
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004046
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004047 # Make Ctrl+Break raise KeyboardInterrupt, like Python's default Ctrl+C
4048 # (SIGINT) behavior.
4049 import signal
4050 signal.signal(signal.SIGBREAK, signal.default_int_handler)
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004051
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004052 try:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004053 while 1:
4054 pass
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004055 except KeyboardInterrupt:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004056 # We get here on Ctrl+C or Ctrl+Break now; if we had not changed
4057 # SIGBREAK, only on Ctrl+C (and Ctrl+Break would terminate the
4058 # program without the possibility for any Python-level cleanup).
4059 print "Clean exit"
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004060
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004061
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004062What's New in Python 2.2a4?
4063===========================
4064
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004065*Release date: 28-Sep-2001*
4066
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004067Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004068--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004069
4070- pydoc and inspect are now aware of new-style classes;
4071 e.g. help(list) at the interactive prompt now shows proper
4072 documentation for all operations on list objects.
4073
4074- Applications using Jim Fulton's ExtensionClass module can now safely
4075 be used with Python 2.2. In particular, Zope 2.4.1 now works with
4076 Python 2.2 (as well as with Python 2.1.1). The Demo/metaclass
4077 examples also work again. It is hoped that Gtk and Boost also work
4078 with 2.2a4 and beyond. (If you can confirm this, please write
4079 webmaster@python.org; if there are still problems, please open a bug
4080 report on SourceForge.)
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004081
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00004082- property() now takes 4 keyword arguments: fget, fset, fdel and doc.
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004083 These map to read-only attributes 'fget', 'fset', 'fdel', and '__doc__'
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00004084 in the constructed property object. fget, fset and fdel weren't
4085 discoverable from Python in 2.2a3. __doc__ is new, and allows to
4086 associate a docstring with a property.
4087
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004088- Comparison overloading is now more completely implemented. For
4089 example, a str subclass instance can properly be compared to a str
4090 instance, and it can properly overload comparison. Ditto for most
4091 other built-in object types.
4092
4093- The repr() of new-style classes has changed; instead of <type
4094 'M.Foo'> a new-style class is now rendered as <class 'M.Foo'>,
4095 *except* for built-in types, which are still rendered as <type
4096 'Foo'> (to avoid upsetting existing code that might parse or
4097 otherwise rely on repr() of certain type objects).
4098
4099- The repr() of new-style objects is now always <Foo object at XXX>;
4100 previously, it was sometimes <Foo instance at XXX>.
4101
4102- For new-style classes, what was previously called __getattr__ is now
4103 called __getattribute__. This method, if defined, is called for
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00004104 *every* attribute access. A new __getattr__ hook more similar to the
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004105 one in classic classes is defined which is called only if regular
4106 attribute access raises AttributeError; to catch *all* attribute
4107 access, you can use __getattribute__ (for new-style classes). If
4108 both are defined, __getattribute__ is called first, and if it raises
4109 AttributeError, __getattr__ is called.
4110
4111- The __class__ attribute of new-style objects can be assigned to.
4112 The new class must have the same C-level object layout as the old
4113 class.
4114
4115- The builtin file type can be subclassed now. In the usual pattern,
4116 "file" is the name of the builtin type, and file() is a new builtin
4117 constructor, with the same signature as the builtin open() function.
4118 file() is now the preferred way to open a file.
4119
4120- Previously, __new__ would only see sequential arguments passed to
4121 the type in a constructor call; __init__ would see both sequential
4122 and keyword arguments. This made no sense whatsoever any more, so
4123 now both __new__ and __init__ see all arguments.
4124
4125- Previously, hash() applied to an instance of a subclass of str or
4126 unicode always returned 0. This has been repaired.
4127
4128- Previously, an operation on an instance of a subclass of an
4129 immutable type (int, long, float, complex, tuple, str, unicode),
4130 where the subtype didn't override the operation (and so the
4131 operation was handled by the builtin type), could return that
4132 instance instead a value of the base type. For example, if s was of
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004133 a str subclass type, s[:] returned s as-is. Now it returns a str
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004134 with the same value as s.
4135
Barry Warsaw86fbaf82001-09-28 15:26:12 +00004136- Provisional support for pickling new-style objects has been added.
4137
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004138Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004139----
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004140
Tim Peters2c9aa5e2001-09-23 04:06:05 +00004141- file.writelines() now accepts any iterable object producing strings.
4142
Marc-André Lemburgaefd7662001-09-20 12:59:37 +00004143- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() now works very much like
4144 PyObject_Str(obj) in that it tries to use __str__/tp_str
4145 on the object if the object is not a string or buffer. This
4146 makes unicode() behave like str() when applied to non-string/buffer
4147 objects.
4148
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00004149- PyFile_WriteObject now passes Unicode objects to the file's write
4150 method. As a result, all file-like objects which may be the target
Martin v. Löwis2777c022001-09-19 13:47:32 +00004151 of a print statement must support Unicode objects, i.e. they must
4152 at least convert them into ASCII strings.
4153
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004154- Thread scheduling on Solaris should be improved; it is no longer
4155 necessary to insert a small sleep at the start of a thread in order
4156 to let other runnable threads be scheduled.
4157
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004158Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004159-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004160
Marc-André Lemburgbf990172001-09-27 14:17:33 +00004161- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
4162 read character buffer compatible objects for their .write() methods.
4163 These objects are converted to strings and then handled as such
4164 by the instances.
4165
Barry Warsaw2f600732001-09-24 04:28:10 +00004166- The "email" package has been added. This is basically a port of the
4167 mimelib package <http://sf.net/projects/mimelib> with API changes
4168 and some implementations updated to use iterators and generators.
4169
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00004170- difflib.ndiff() and difflib.Differ.compare() are generators now. This
4171 restores the ability of Tools/scripts/ndiff.py to start producing output
4172 before the entire comparison is complete.
4173
Barry Warsaw58b072d2001-09-22 04:44:21 +00004174- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
4175 iteration just like file objects (i.e. their .readline() method is
4176 called for each iteration until it returns an empty string).
4177
Marc-André Lemburg494f2ae2001-09-19 11:33:31 +00004178- The codecs module has grown four new helper APIs to access
4179 builtin codecs: getencoder(), getdecoder(), getreader(),
4180 getwriter().
4181
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004182- SimpleXMLRPCServer: a new module (based upon SimpleHTMLServer)
4183 simplifies writing XML RPC servers.
4184
Barry Warsaw647d5e82001-09-28 17:01:02 +00004185- os.path.realpath(): a new function that returns the absolute pathname
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004186 after interpretation of symbolic links. On non-Unix systems, this
4187 is an alias for os.path.abspath().
4188
Tim Peters16a77ad2001-09-08 04:00:12 +00004189- operator.indexOf() (PySequence_Index() in the C API) now works with any
4190 iterable object.
4191
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004192- smtplib now supports various authentication and security features of
4193 the SMTP protocol through the new login() and starttls() methods.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00004194
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004195- hmac: a new module implementing keyed hashing for message
4196 authentication.
4197
4198- mimetypes now recognizes more extensions and file types. At the
4199 same time, some mappings not sanctioned by IANA were removed.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00004200
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004201- The "compiler" package has been brought up to date to the state of
Guido van Rossumc9ed5dc2001-09-20 05:30:24 +00004202 Python 2.2 bytecode generation. It has also been promoted from a
4203 Tool to a standard library package. (Tools/compiler still exists as
4204 a sample driver.)
4205
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004206Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004207-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004208
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004209- Large file support (LFS) is now automatic when the platform supports
4210 it; no more manual configuration tweaks are needed. On Linux, at
4211 least, it's possible to have a system whose C library supports large
4212 files but whose kernel doesn't; in this case, large file support is
4213 still enabled but doesn't do you any good unless you upgrade your
4214 kernel or share your Python executable with another system whose
4215 kernel has large file support.
4216
4217- The configure script now supplies plausible defaults in a
4218 cross-compilation environment. This doesn't mean that the supplied
4219 values are always correct, or that cross-compilation now works
4220 flawlessly -- but it's a first step (and it shuts up most of
4221 autoconf's warnings about AC_TRY_RUN).
4222
4223- The Unix build is now a bit less chatty, courtesy of the parser
4224 generator. The build is completely silent (except for errors) when
4225 using "make -s", thanks to a -q option to setup.py.
4226
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004227C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004228-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004229
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004230- The "structmember" API now supports some new flag bits to deny read
4231 and/or write access to attributes in restricted execution mode.
4232
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004233New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004234-------------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004235
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004236- Compaq's iPAQ handheld, running the "familiar" Linux distribution
4237 (http://familiar.handhelds.org).
4238
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004239Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004240-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004241
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00004242- The "classic" standard tests, which work by comparing stdout to
4243 an expected-output file under Lib/test/output/, no longer stop at
4244 the first mismatch. Instead the test is run to completion, and a
4245 variant of ndiff-style comparison is used to report all differences.
4246 This is much easier to understand than the previous style of reporting.
4247
4248- The unittest-based standard tests now use regrtest's test_main()
4249 convention, instead of running as a side-effect of merely being
4250 imported. This allows these tests to be run in more natural and
4251 flexible ways as unittests, outside the regrtest framework.
4252
4253- regrtest.py is much better integrated with unittest and doctest now,
4254 especially in regard to reporting errors.
4255
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004256Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004257-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004258
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004259- Large file support now also works for files > 4GB, on filesystems
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00004260 that support it (NTFS under Windows 2000). See "What's New in
4261 Python 2.2a3" for more detail.
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004262
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004263
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004264What's New in Python 2.2a3?
4265===========================
4266
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004267*Release Date: 07-Sep-2001*
4268
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004269Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004270----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004271
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004272- Conversion of long to float now raises OverflowError if the long is too
4273 big to represent as a C double.
4274
Tim Peters32f453e2001-09-03 08:35:41 +00004275- The 3-argument builtin pow() no longer allows a third non-None argument
4276 if either of the first two arguments is a float, or if both are of
4277 integer types and the second argument is negative (in which latter case
4278 the arguments are converted to float, so this is really the same
4279 restriction).
4280
Tim Peters5d2b77c2001-09-03 05:47:38 +00004281- The builtin dir() now returns more information, and sometimes much
4282 more, generally naming all attributes of an object, and all attributes
4283 reachable from the object via its class, and from its class's base
4284 classes, and so on from them too. Example: in 2.2a2, dir([]) returned
4285 an empty list. In 2.2a3,
4286
4287 >>> dir([])
4288 ['__add__', '__class__', '__contains__', '__delattr__', '__delitem__',
4289 '__eq__', '__ge__', '__getattr__', '__getitem__', '__getslice__',
4290 '__gt__', '__hash__', '__iadd__', '__imul__', '__init__', '__le__',
4291 '__len__', '__lt__', '__mul__', '__ne__', '__new__', '__repr__',
4292 '__rmul__', '__setattr__', '__setitem__', '__setslice__', '__str__',
4293 'append', 'count', 'extend', 'index', 'insert', 'pop', 'remove',
4294 'reverse', 'sort']
4295
4296 dir(module) continues to return only the module's attributes, though.
4297
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004298- Overflowing operations on plain ints now return a long int rather
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004299 than raising OverflowError. This is a partial implementation of PEP
4300 237. You can use -Wdefault::OverflowWarning to enable a warning for
4301 this situation, and -Werror::OverflowWarning to revert to the old
4302 OverflowError exception.
4303
Guido van Rossum61c345f2001-09-04 03:26:15 +00004304- A new command line option, -Q<arg>, is added to control run-time
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004305 warnings for the use of classic division. (See PEP 238.) Possible
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00004306 values are -Qold, -Qwarn, -Qwarnall, and -Qnew. The default is
4307 -Qold, meaning the / operator has its classic meaning and no
4308 warnings are issued. Using -Qwarn issues a run-time warning about
4309 all uses of classic division for int and long arguments; -Qwarnall
4310 also warns about classic division for float and complex arguments
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004311 (for use with fixdiv.py).
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004312 [Note: the remainder of this item (preserved below) became
4313 obsolete in 2.2c1 -- -Qnew has global effect in 2.2] ::
4314
4315 Using -Qnew is questionable; it turns on new division by default, but
4316 only in the __main__ module. You can usefully combine -Qwarn or
4317 -Qwarnall and -Qnew: this gives the __main__ module new division, and
4318 warns about classic division everywhere else.
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004319
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004320- Many built-in types can now be subclassed. This applies to int,
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004321 long, float, str, unicode, and tuple. (The types complex, list and
4322 dictionary can also be subclassed; this was introduced earlier.)
4323 Note that restrictions apply when subclassing immutable built-in
4324 types: you can only affect the value of the instance by overloading
4325 __new__. You can add mutable attributes, and the subclass instances
4326 will have a __dict__ attribute, but you cannot change the "value"
4327 (as implemented by the base class) of an immutable subclass instance
4328 once it is created.
4329
Guido van Rossumaaf80c82001-09-02 13:44:35 +00004330- The dictionary constructor now takes an optional argument, a
4331 mapping-like object, and initializes the dictionary from its
4332 (key, value) pairs.
4333
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004334- A new built-in type, super, has been added. This facilitates making
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004335 "cooperative super calls" in a multiple inheritance setting. For an
4336 explanation, see http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#cooperation
4337
Guido van Rossum8d7234d2001-09-06 22:02:58 +00004338- A new built-in type, property, has been added. This enables the
4339 creation of "properties". These are attributes implemented by
4340 getter and setter functions (or only one of these for read-only or
4341 write-only attributes), without the need to override __getattr__.
4342 See http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#property
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004343
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004344- The syntax of floating-point and imaginary literals has been
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004345 liberalized, to allow leading zeroes. Examples of literals now
4346 legal that were SyntaxErrors before:
4347
4348 00.0 0e3 0100j 07.5 00000000000000000008.
4349
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004350- An old tokenizer bug allowed floating point literals with an incomplete
Tim Petersc6d95812001-08-28 20:56:27 +00004351 exponent, such as 1e and 3.1e-. Such literals now raise SyntaxError.
4352
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004353Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004354-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004355
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00004356- telnetlib includes symbolic names for the options, and support for
Martin v. Löwis1da9c572002-11-04 09:56:00 +00004357 setting an option negotiation callback. It also supports processing
4358 of suboptions.
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00004359
Tim Petersa40c7932001-09-05 22:36:56 +00004360- The new C standard no longer requires that math libraries set errno to
4361 ERANGE on overflow. For platform libraries that exploit this new
4362 freedom, Python's overflow-checking was wholly broken. A new overflow-
4363 checking scheme attempts to repair that, but may not be reliable on all
4364 platforms (C doesn't seem to provide anything both useful and portable
4365 in this area anymore).
4366
Martin v. Löwis44f86962001-09-05 13:44:54 +00004367- Asynchronous timeout actions are available through the new class
4368 threading.Timer.
4369
Tim Peters78526162001-09-05 00:53:45 +00004370- math.log and math.log10 now return sensible results for even huge
4371 long arguments. For example, math.log10(10 ** 10000) ~= 10000.0.
4372
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004373- A new function, imp.lock_held(), returns 1 when the import lock is
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00004374 currently held. See the docs for the imp module.
4375
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004376- pickle, cPickle and marshal on 32-bit platforms can now correctly read
Tim Peters82112372001-08-29 02:28:42 +00004377 dumps containing ints written on platforms where Python ints are 8 bytes.
4378 When read on a box where Python ints are 4 bytes, such values are
4379 converted to Python longs.
4380
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004381- In restricted execution mode (using the rexec module), unmarshalling
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004382 code objects is no longer allowed. This plugs a security hole.
4383
Steve Purcell6091cd62001-09-06 16:05:17 +00004384- unittest.TestResult instances no longer store references to tracebacks
4385 generated by test failures. This prevents unexpected dangling references
4386 to objects that should be garbage collected between tests.
4387
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004388Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004389-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004390
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00004391- Tools/scripts/fixdiv.py has been added which can be used to fix
4392 division operators as per PEP 238.
4393
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004394Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004395-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004396
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00004397- If you are an adventurous person using Mac OS X you may want to look at
4398 Mac/OSX. There is a Makefile there that will build Python as a real Mac
4399 application, which can be used for experimenting with Carbon or Cocoa.
4400 Discussion of this on pythonmac-sig, please.
4401
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00004402C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004403-----
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00004404
4405- New function PyObject_Dir(obj), like Python __builtin__.dir(obj).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00004406
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004407- Note that PyLong_AsDouble can fail! This has always been true, but no
4408 callers checked for it. It's more likely to fail now, because overflow
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004409 errors are properly detected now. The proper way to check::
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004410
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004411 double x = PyLong_AsDouble(some_long_object);
4412 if (x == -1.0 && PyErr_Occurred()) {
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004413 /* The conversion failed. */
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004414 }
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004415
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004416- The GC API has been changed. Extensions that use the old API will still
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004417 compile but will not participate in GC. To upgrade an extension
4418 module:
4419
4420 - rename Py_TPFLAGS_GC to PyTPFLAGS_HAVE_GC
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004421
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004422 - use PyObject_GC_New or PyObject_GC_NewVar to allocate objects and
4423 PyObject_GC_Del to deallocate them
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004424
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004425 - rename PyObject_GC_Init to PyObject_GC_Track and PyObject_GC_Fini
4426 to PyObject_GC_UnTrack
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004427
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004428 - remove PyGC_HEAD_SIZE from object size calculations
4429
4430 - remove calls to PyObject_AS_GC and PyObject_FROM_GC
4431
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004432- Two new functions: PyString_FromFormat() and PyString_FromFormatV().
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004433 These can be used safely to construct string objects from a
4434 sprintf-style format string (similar to the format string supported
4435 by PyErr_Format()).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00004436
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004437New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004438-------------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004439
Tim Petersb7da0902001-09-02 23:01:43 +00004440- Stephen Hansen contributed patches sufficient to get a clean compile
4441 under Borland C (Windows), but he reports problems running it and ran
4442 out of time to complete the port. Volunteers? Expect a MemoryError
4443 when importing the types module; this is probably shallow, and
4444 causing later failures too.
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004445
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004446Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004447-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004448
4449Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004450-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004451
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00004452- Large file support is now enabled on Win32 platforms as well as on
4453 Win64. This means that, for example, you can use f.tell() and f.seek()
4454 to manipulate files larger than 2 gigabytes (provided you have enough
4455 disk space, and are using a Windows filesystem that supports large
Tim Peters9a9471c2001-09-11 23:18:51 +00004456 partitions). Windows filesystem limits: FAT has a 2GB (gigabyte)
4457 filesize limit, and large file support makes no difference there.
4458 FAT32's limit is 4GB, and files >= 2GB are easier to use from Python now.
4459 NTFS has no practical limit on file size, and files of any size can be
4460 used from Python now.
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00004461
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004462- The w9xpopen hack is now used on Windows NT and 2000 too when COMPSPEC
Tim Peters402d5982001-08-27 06:37:48 +00004463 points to command.com (patch from Brian Quinlan).
4464
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004465
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004466What's New in Python 2.2a2?
4467===========================
4468
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004469*Release Date: 22-Aug-2001*
4470
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004471Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004472-----
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004473
Barry Warsaw18b2ecf2001-08-22 20:26:56 +00004474- Tim Peters developed a brand new Windows installer using Wise 8.1,
4475 generously donated to us by Wise Solutions.
4476
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004477- configure supports a new option --enable-unicode, with the values
4478 ucs2 and ucs4 (new in 2.2a1). With --disable-unicode, the Unicode
4479 type and supporting code is completely removed from the interpreter.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004480
Jack Jansen32ce0cd2001-08-21 19:28:20 +00004481- A new configure option --enable-framework builds a Mac OS X framework,
4482 which "make frameworkinstall" will install. This provides a starting
4483 point for more mac-like functionality, join pythonmac-sig@python.org
4484 if you are interested in helping.
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004485
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004486- The NeXT platform is no longer supported.
4487
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004488- The 'new' module is now statically linked.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004489
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004490Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004491-----
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004492
4493- The new Tools/scripts/cleanfuture.py can be used to automatically
Andrew M. Kuchlingb0532092001-08-15 15:54:56 +00004494 edit out obsolete future statements from Python source code. See
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004495 the module docstring for details.
4496
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004497Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004498-----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004499
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004500- regrtest.py now knows which tests are expected to be skipped on some
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004501 platforms, allowing to give clearer test result output. regrtest
4502 also has optional --use/-u switch to run normally disabled tests
4503 which require network access or consume significant disk resources.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004504
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004505- Several new tests in the standard test suite, with special thanks to
4506 Nick Mathewson.
4507
4508Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004509----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004510
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004511- The floor division operator // has been added as outlined in PEP
4512 238. The / operator still provides classic division (and will until
4513 Python 3.0) unless "from __future__ import division" is included, in
4514 which case the / operator will provide true division. The operator
4515 module provides truediv() and floordiv() functions. Augmented
4516 assignment variants are included, as are the equivalent overloadable
4517 methods and C API methods. See the PEP for a full discussion:
4518 <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0238.html>
4519
Tim Peters6cd6a822001-08-17 22:11:27 +00004520- Future statements are now effective in simulated interactive shells
4521 (like IDLE). This should "just work" by magic, but read Michael
4522 Hudson's "Future statements in simulated shells" PEP 264 for full
4523 details: <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0264.html>.
4524
Guido van Rossumf86ddd22001-08-17 21:21:04 +00004525- The type/class unification (PEP 252-253) was integrated into the
4526 trunk and is not so tentative any more (the exact specification of
4527 some features is still tentative). A lot of work has done on fixing
4528 bugs and adding robustness and features (performance still has to
4529 come a long way).
4530
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00004531- Warnings about a mismatch in the Python API during extension import
4532 now use the Python warning framework (which makes it possible to
4533 write filters for these warnings).
4534
Barry Warsaw9b3be7f2001-08-14 18:35:02 +00004535- A function's __dict__ (aka func_dict) will now always be a
4536 dictionary. It used to be possible to delete it or set it to None,
4537 but now both actions raise TypeErrors. It is still legal to set it
4538 to a dictionary object. Getting func.__dict__ before any attributes
4539 have been assigned now returns an empty dictionary instead of None.
4540
Guido van Rossum32aa5d22001-09-05 18:43:35 +00004541- A new command line option, -E, was added which disables the use of
4542 all environment variables, or at least those that are specifically
4543 significant to Python. Usually those have a name starting with
4544 "PYTHON". This was used to fix a problem where the tests fail if
4545 the user happens to have PYTHONHOME or PYTHONPATH pointing to an
4546 older distribution.
4547
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004548Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004549-------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004550
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004551- New class Differ and new functions ndiff() and restore() in difflib.py.
4552 These package the algorithms used by the popular Tools/scripts/ndiff.py,
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004553 for programmatic reuse.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004554
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004555- New function xml.sax.saxutils.quoteattr(): Quote an XML attribute
4556 value using the minimal quoting required for the value; more
4557 reliable than using xml.sax.saxutils.escape() for attribute values.
4558
4559- Readline completion support for cmd.Cmd was added.
4560
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004561- Calling os.tempnam() or os.tmpnam() generate RuntimeWarnings.
4562
4563- Added function threading.BoundedSemaphore()
4564
4565- Added Ka-Ping Yee's cgitb.py module.
4566
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004567- The 'new' module now exposes the CO_xxx flags.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004568
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00004569- The gc module offers the get_referents function.
4570
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004571New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004572-------------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004573
4574C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004575-----
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004576
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00004577- Two new APIs PyOS_snprintf() and PyOS_vsnprintf() were added
4578 which provide a cross-platform implementations for the
4579 relatively new snprintf()/vsnprintf() C lib APIs. In contrast to
4580 the standard sprintf() and vsprintf() C lib APIs, these versions
4581 apply bounds checking on the used buffer which enhances protection
4582 against buffer overruns.
4583
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00004584- Unicode APIs now use name mangling to assure that mixing interpreters
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00004585 and extensions using different Unicode widths is rendered next to
4586 impossible. Trying to import an incompatible Unicode-aware extension
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00004587 will result in an ImportError. Unicode extensions writers must make
4588 sure to check the Unicode width compatibility in their extensions by
4589 using at least one of the mangled Unicode APIs in the extension.
4590
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004591- Two new flags METH_NOARGS and METH_O are available in method definition
4592 tables to simplify implementation of methods with no arguments and a
4593 single untyped argument. Calling such methods is more efficient than
4594 calling corresponding METH_VARARGS methods. METH_OLDARGS is now
4595 deprecated.
4596
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00004597Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004598-------
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00004599
4600- "import module" now compiles module.pyw if it exists and nothing else
4601 relevant is found.
4602
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004603
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00004604What's New in Python 2.2a1?
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004605===========================
4606
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004607*Release date: 18-Jul-2001*
4608
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004609Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004610----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004611
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00004612- TENTATIVELY, a large amount of code implementing much of what's
4613 described in PEP 252 (Making Types Look More Like Classes) and PEP
4614 253 (Subtyping Built-in Types) was added. This will be released
4615 with Python 2.2a1. Documentation will be provided separately
4616 through http://www.python.org/2.2/. The purpose of releasing this
4617 with Python 2.2a1 is to test backwards compatibility. It is
4618 possible, though not likely, that a decision is made not to release
4619 this code as part of 2.2 final, if any serious backwards
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004620 incompatibilities are found during alpha testing that cannot be
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00004621 repaired.
4622
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00004623- Generators were added; this is a new way to create an iterator (see
Tim Peters11a0d102001-07-17 18:48:00 +00004624 below) using what looks like a simple function containing one or
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00004625 more 'yield' statements. See PEP 255. Since this adds a new
4626 keyword to the language, this feature must be enabled by including a
4627 future statement: "from __future__ import generators" (see PEP 236).
4628 Generators will become a standard feature in a future release
4629 (probably 2.3). Without this future statement, 'yield' remains an
4630 ordinary identifier, but a warning is issued each time it is used.
4631 (These warnings currently don't conform to the warnings framework of
4632 PEP 230; we intend to fix this in 2.2a2.)
4633
Marc-André Lemburg12e74b32001-05-22 08:58:23 +00004634- The UTF-16 codec was modified to be more RFC compliant. It will now
4635 only remove BOM characters at the start of the string and then
4636 only if running in native mode (UTF-16-LE and -BE won't remove a
4637 leading BMO character).
4638
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00004639- Strings now have a new method .decode() to complement the already
4640 existing .encode() method. These two methods provide direct access
4641 to the corresponding decoders and encoders of the registered codecs.
4642
4643 To enhance the usability of the .encode() method, the special
4644 casing of Unicode object return values was dropped (Unicode objects
4645 were auto-magically converted to string using the default encoding).
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00004646
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00004647 Both methods will now return whatever the codec in charge of the
4648 requested encoding returns as object, e.g. Unicode codecs will
4649 return Unicode objects when decoding is requested ("äöü".decode("latin-1")
4650 will return u"äöü"). This enables codec writer to create codecs
4651 for various simple to use conversions.
4652
4653 New codecs were added to demonstrate these new features (the .encode()
4654 and .decode() columns indicate the type of the returned objects):
4655
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004656 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4657 |Name | .encode() | .decode() | Description |
4658 +=========+===========+===========+=============================+
4659 |uu | string | string | UU codec (e.g. for email) |
4660 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4661 |base64 | string | string | base64 codec |
4662 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4663 |quopri | string | string | quoted-printable codec |
4664 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4665 |zlib | string | string | zlib compression |
4666 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4667 |hex | string | string | 2-byte hex codec |
4668 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4669 |rot-13 | string | Unicode | ROT-13 Unicode charmap codec|
4670 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00004671
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004672- Some operating systems now support the concept of a default Unicode
4673 encoding for file system operations. Notably, Windows supports 'mbcs'
4674 as the default. The Macintosh will also adopt this concept in the medium
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00004675 term, although the default encoding for that platform will be other than
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004676 'mbcs'.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00004677
4678 On operating system that support non-ASCII filenames, it is common for
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004679 functions that return filenames (such as os.listdir()) to return Python
4680 string objects pre-encoded using the default file system encoding for
4681 the platform. As this encoding is likely to be different from Python's
4682 default encoding, converting this name to a Unicode object before passing
4683 it back to the Operating System would result in a Unicode error, as Python
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004684 would attempt to use its default encoding (generally ASCII) rather than
4685 the default encoding for the file system.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00004686
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004687 In general, this change simply removes surprises when working with
4688 Unicode and the file system, making these operations work as you expect,
4689 increasing the transparency of Unicode objects in this context.
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004690 See [????] for more details, including examples.
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004691
Tim Peters61dff2b2001-05-08 15:43:37 +00004692- Float (and complex) literals in source code were evaluated to full
4693 precision only when running from a .py file; the same code loaded from a
4694 .pyc (or .pyo) file could suffer numeric differences starting at about the
4695 12th significant decimal digit. For example, on a machine with IEEE-754
4696 floating arithmetic,
4697
4698 x = 9007199254740992.0
4699 print long(x)
4700
4701 printed 9007199254740992 if run directly from .py, but 9007199254740000
4702 if from a compiled (.pyc or .pyo) file. This was due to marshal using
4703 str(float) instead of repr(float) when building code objects. marshal
4704 now uses repr(float) instead, which should reproduce floats to full
4705 machine precision (assuming the platform C float<->string I/O conversion
4706 functions are of good quality).
4707
4708 This may cause floating-point results to change in some cases, and
4709 usually for the better, but may also cause numerically unstable
4710 algorithms to break.
4711
Tim Peters2f228e72001-05-13 00:19:31 +00004712- The implementation of dicts suffers fewer collisions, which has speed
4713 benefits. However, the order in which dict entries appear in dict.keys(),
4714 dict.values() and dict.items() may differ from previous releases for a
4715 given dict. Nothing is defined about this order, so no program should
4716 rely on it. Nevertheless, it's easy to write test cases that rely on the
4717 order by accident, typically because of printing the str() or repr() of a
4718 dict to an "expected results" file. See Lib/test/test_support.py's new
4719 sortdict(dict) function for a simple way to display a dict in sorted
4720 order.
4721
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00004722- Many other small changes to dicts were made, resulting in faster
4723 operation along the most common code paths.
4724
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00004725- Dictionary objects now support the "in" operator: "x in dict" means
4726 the same as dict.has_key(x).
4727
Barry Warsaw51acc8d2001-06-26 20:12:50 +00004728- The update() method of dictionaries now accepts generic mapping
4729 objects. Specifically the argument object must support the .keys()
4730 and __getitem__() methods. This allows you to say, for example,
4731 {}.update(UserDict())
4732
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00004733- Iterators were added; this is a generalized way of providing values
4734 to a for loop. See PEP 234. There's a new built-in function iter()
4735 to return an iterator. There's a new protocol to get the next value
4736 from an iterator using the next() method (in Python) or the
4737 tp_iternext slot (in C). There's a new protocol to get iterators
4738 using the __iter__() method (in Python) or the tp_iter slot (in C).
4739 Iterating (i.e. a for loop) over a dictionary generates its keys.
4740 Iterating over a file generates its lines.
4741
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004742- The following functions were generalized to work nicely with iterator
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004743 arguments::
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004744
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00004745 map(), filter(), reduce(), zip()
Tim Peters8572b4f2001-05-06 01:05:02 +00004746 list(), tuple() (PySequence_Tuple() and PySequence_Fast() in C API)
4747 max(), min()
Tim Peters1af03e92001-05-26 19:37:54 +00004748 join() method of strings
4749 extend() method of lists
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00004750 'x in y' and 'x not in y' (PySequence_Contains() in C API)
4751 operator.countOf() (PySequence_Count() in C API)
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004752 right-hand side of assignment statements with multiple targets, such as ::
Tim Petersd6d010b2001-06-21 02:49:55 +00004753 x, y, z = some_iterable_object_returning_exactly_3_values
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00004754
Tim Petersd85e1022001-05-11 21:51:48 +00004755- Accessing module attributes is significantly faster (for example,
4756 random.random or os.path or yourPythonModule.yourAttribute).
4757
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00004758- Comparing dictionary objects via == and != is faster, and now works even
4759 if the keys and values don't support comparisons other than ==.
4760
Tim Peters95bf9392001-05-10 08:32:44 +00004761- Comparing dictionaries in ways other than == and != is slower: there were
4762 insecurities in the dict comparison implementation that could cause Python
4763 to crash if the element comparison routines for the dict keys and/or
4764 values mutated the dicts. Making the code bulletproof slowed it down.
4765
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00004766- Collisions in dicts are resolved via a new approach, which can help
4767 dramatically in bad cases. For example, looking up every key in a dict
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00004768 d with d.keys() == [i << 16 for i in range(20000)] is approximately 500x
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00004769 faster now. Thanks to Christian Tismer for pointing out the cause and
4770 the nature of an effective cure (last December! better late than never).
Tim Peters15d49292001-05-27 07:39:22 +00004771
Tim Peters52e155e2001-06-16 05:42:57 +00004772- repr() is much faster for large containers (dict, list, tuple).
4773
4774
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004775Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004776-------
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004777
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00004778- The constants ascii_letters, ascii_lowercase. and ascii_uppercase
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004779 were added to the string module. These a locale-independent
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00004780 constants, unlike letters, lowercase, and uppercase. These are now
4781 use in appropriate locations in the standard library.
4782
Martin v. Löwisf0473d52001-07-18 16:17:16 +00004783- The flags used in dlopen calls can now be configured using
4784 sys.setdlopenflags and queried using sys.getdlopenflags.
4785
Guido van Rossumc7e4aca2001-07-12 11:54:37 +00004786- Fredrik Lundh's xmlrpclib is now a standard library module. This
4787 provides full client-side XML-RPC support. In addition,
4788 Demo/xmlrpc/ contains two server frameworks (one SocketServer-based,
4789 one asyncore-based). Thanks to Eric Raymond for the documentation.
4790
Guido van Rossum643d3912001-07-05 14:46:25 +00004791- The xrange() object is simplified: it no longer supports slicing,
4792 repetition, comparisons, efficient 'in' checking, the tolist()
4793 method, or the start, stop and step attributes. See PEP 260.
4794
Martin v. Löwisebf94db2001-06-06 06:25:40 +00004795- A new function fnmatch.filter to filter lists of file names was added.
4796
Barry Warsawffd674d2001-05-22 16:00:10 +00004797- calendar.py uses month and day names based on the current locale.
4798
Guido van Rossum2e0a6542001-05-15 02:14:44 +00004799- strop is now *really* obsolete (this was announced before with 1.6),
4800 and issues DeprecationWarning when used (except for the four items
4801 that are still imported into string.py).
4802
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004803- Cookie.py now sorts key+value pairs by key in output strings.
4804
4805- pprint.isrecursive(object) didn't correctly identify recursive objects.
4806 Now it does.
4807
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00004808- pprint functions now much faster for large containers (tuple, list, dict).
4809
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00004810- New 'q' and 'Q' format codes in the struct module, corresponding to C
4811 types "long long" and "unsigned long long" (on Windows, __int64). In
4812 native mode, these can be used only when the platform C compiler supports
4813 these types (when HAVE_LONG_LONG is #define'd by the Python config
4814 process), and then they inherit the sizes and alignments of the C types.
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00004815 In standard mode, 'q' and 'Q' are supported on all platforms, and are
4816 8-byte integral types.
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00004817
Guido van Rossum83213cc2001-06-12 16:48:52 +00004818- The site module installs a new built-in function 'help' that invokes
4819 pydoc.help. It must be invoked as 'help()'; when invoked as 'help',
4820 it displays a message reminding the user to use 'help()' or
4821 'help(object)'.
4822
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004823Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004824-----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004825
4826- New test_mutants.py runs dict comparisons where the key and value
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004827 comparison operators mutate the dicts randomly during comparison. This
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004828 rapidly causes Python to crash under earlier releases (not for the faint
4829 of heart: it can also cause Win9x to freeze or reboot!).
4830
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004831- New test_pprint.py verifies that pprint.isrecursive() and
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00004832 pprint.isreadable() return sensible results. Also verifies that simple
4833 cases produce correct output.
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004834
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00004835C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004836-----
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00004837
4838- Removed the unused last_is_sticky argument from the internal
4839 _PyTuple_Resize(). If this affects you, you were cheating.
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004840
4841----
4842
4843**(For information about older versions, consult the HISTORY file.)**